Mercurius
Legend
Of course everyone will have a different answer to the question of "What 5E most needs," from "Just about everything" to "Absolutely nothing" to "Meh" and all sorts of variations in-between. But as I try to get a campaign going in an otherwise very busy adult person's life, with work, spouse, children, graduate school (thankfully ending), other hobbies and passions, etc, I've been struggling with preparation time and found that what is most lacking for me are...usable parts. Or perhaps places is more accurate, but "part" is a bit more abstract and thus more customizable to different individuals.
Let me explain what I mean. First of all, I love 5E - best edition yet, in my opinion. I also love homebrewing; for me a major aspect of the enjoyment of playing D&D is making up a world, stories within that world, and bringing it to life in a session. Yet what I don't enjoy as much, and what tends to take up the most time, is designing specific adventures. I never seem to like any story arc or adventure path enough to run one in its entirety, nor do I have the time or perhaps mental wherewithal to take an overall excellent mega-campaign like, say, Rise of the Runelords, and adapt it to my world. What I'd like to do is spend my preparation time on world building, and then insert "parts" into it for game-play.
Here's what I mean by Usable Parts:
- Adventure modules
- Short scenarios
- Detailed encounters
- Site locations (including maps)
- Factions/guilds/orders
- NPCs
- Etc
While we're at it, why not an online generator that allows you to enter in various parameters and randomly generates an adventure/scenario/encounter/site? I couldn't create such a program but I don't know why someone can't do it, or hasn't done it.
In other words, everything in-between what we actually have and are seemingly getting from WotC for the foreseeable future. What we've gotten so far is an amazing core rule set and a couple of mega-campaigns, aka story arcs. But what we're not getting is the in-between - the modular pieces to insert into a campaign world, that anyone can use.
So my hope is that we see either WotC giving us more parts, or a gaming license that opens the doors for other publishers to create these usable parts. It seems so obviously useful to a wide number of DMs that I'm not really sure why this isn't a major aspect of the product line-up for WotC. It seems that WotC is catering to the two extremes of the market: Those DMs that simply want to run whatever the story arc du jour is, and those that want to do everything on their own. Aren't the majority of us somewhere in-between or am I completely off-base about this?
What are your thoughts? On this subject, preferably.
Let me explain what I mean. First of all, I love 5E - best edition yet, in my opinion. I also love homebrewing; for me a major aspect of the enjoyment of playing D&D is making up a world, stories within that world, and bringing it to life in a session. Yet what I don't enjoy as much, and what tends to take up the most time, is designing specific adventures. I never seem to like any story arc or adventure path enough to run one in its entirety, nor do I have the time or perhaps mental wherewithal to take an overall excellent mega-campaign like, say, Rise of the Runelords, and adapt it to my world. What I'd like to do is spend my preparation time on world building, and then insert "parts" into it for game-play.
Here's what I mean by Usable Parts:
- Adventure modules
- Short scenarios
- Detailed encounters
- Site locations (including maps)
- Factions/guilds/orders
- NPCs
- Etc
While we're at it, why not an online generator that allows you to enter in various parameters and randomly generates an adventure/scenario/encounter/site? I couldn't create such a program but I don't know why someone can't do it, or hasn't done it.
In other words, everything in-between what we actually have and are seemingly getting from WotC for the foreseeable future. What we've gotten so far is an amazing core rule set and a couple of mega-campaigns, aka story arcs. But what we're not getting is the in-between - the modular pieces to insert into a campaign world, that anyone can use.
So my hope is that we see either WotC giving us more parts, or a gaming license that opens the doors for other publishers to create these usable parts. It seems so obviously useful to a wide number of DMs that I'm not really sure why this isn't a major aspect of the product line-up for WotC. It seems that WotC is catering to the two extremes of the market: Those DMs that simply want to run whatever the story arc du jour is, and those that want to do everything on their own. Aren't the majority of us somewhere in-between or am I completely off-base about this?
What are your thoughts? On this subject, preferably.
