Xanathar's 18 Pages of What??

[DMLady]

Okay, is it just me, or could Xanathar's 18 pages of names been better spent elaborating on magic item creation? The rules for item creation in the DM guide are vague, and basically forces a DM (especially us busy DMs) to house rule a lot of it. I hope I'm not speaking out of turn, but if you don't have enough imagination to create a cool character name, then maybe RPGs are not the games for you.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Magic Item creation in 5e is deliberately vague to avoid the magic item economy problems of 3rd edition/Pathfinder, where everything is balanced around characters having certain magic items by certain levels.

 

[iserith]

It does seem odd to include name lists given the fact the internet is jam packed with random name generators as is.

Whether they should have augmented the magic item creation rules, well, that's another story. I've never found much use for such things myself. I would have enjoyed more traps and hazards instead.

 

[CapnZapp]

It's not just you.

This edition is full of what is essentially filler; weightless fluff any intern can come up with as opposed to delicious crunch only experienced game designers can create.

 

[Tanin Wulf]

Let's be honest... most of the experience game designers in prior editions wrote pretty awful crunch, occasionally sprinkled with delicious crunch.

(There's more than once I can think of that I was hired by a company to write a 3.5 version of 3.0 crunch some designer more experienced than I wrote, and the only design note I had was, "For the love of god, make this not suck like it did last time!")

 

[jgsugden]

While there are several things I would have preferred over this content, it isn't worth worrying about them including it. They think it would help enough people to include it, so they included it.

 

[DEFCON 1]

It's not just you.

This edition is full of what is essentially filler; weightless fluff any intern can come up with as opposed to delicious crunch only experienced game designers can create.

I don't agree, I think you are giving experienced game designers too much credit. If we look at things like races, or sub-classes or whatever other mechanical formulas the game has... there's nothing that has come out that couldn't (or hasn't) been accomplished by regular folks on DMs Guild or Reddit. And in fact, I go through all kinds of stuff on the Unearthed Arcana Reddit and don't see any massive drop-offs between what the normies are creating and what the WotC folks put out. So to put the WotC folks on this pedestal that only they can produce quality game mechanics is to sell a lot of other creators short... plus it greatly restricts what a person can have available at their disposal to use in their games because they're beholding themselves to WotC stuff unnecessarily.

Yes, for our AL players they have to use the "official" WotC products, and there are some other players so paranoid about "game balance" that they don't trust the community who design their own stuff, *OR* their own personal vision to be able to distinguish balanced from unbalanced material that the community produces. So I certainly can understand the desire to ONLY have official WotC products on the table and to then be annoyed when a book that could have extra space for more mechanical material doesn't end up using it.

But then again... we've known for the last four years of the game's existence that WotC is doing their level best NOT to produce too much mechanical chaff and only make smaller stalks of wheat. And thus, we are mistaken in thinking that Xanathar's is wasting available pages by putting in all the proper names and/or re-printing sub-classes and spells from elsewhere (which could have been filled by all-new material)... because in point of fact, they always only intended to include a certain amount of new mechanical material and probably would have just made a smaller book had they not included all that other stuff.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

While there are several things I would have preferred over this content, it isn't worth worrying about them including it. They think it would help enough people to include it, so they included it.

I agree. For example, I don't like having electronics at our table - XGtE has been helpful for a quick, random NPC name on the fly.

 

[Warmaster Horus]

Well, Wizards tells us that non-variant Humans are all the rage and barely anyone uses Feats. In such a world I can imagine that detailed rules for assembling magical doohickeys is a pretty high hanging fruit.

 

[Zardnaar]

I'm running an Egyptian game with not Romans and not Greeks.

The name lists are the thing I have used the most from Xanathars.

Sebni, Neferu and Attius say hi.