D&D (2024) Greyhawk Confirmed. Tell Me Why.

[Chaosmancer]

The response I got was that "we don't need new ideas", "refluff old ideas", and "new education practices that guide people into creating their own material is a waste of book space".

It's not just a Plane of Dinosaurs. It's a Plane of Prehistoric Power. The beasts are big and stupid. The people wild and rugged. The earth and waters untamed and untamable. And the magic is raw and before words and gestures were attached to them. And the riches pure and untapped. It's the Plane of Beasts much like the Feywild is the Plane of Fey.

It's less about being hostile to my ideas. It seems people are hostile any new ideas unless it's a remake to their favorite nostalgia product.

Sure, the DMG COULD decide to create entirely new things, whole cloth, with no prior references or reasons... but why would they? And why would I want them to? They haven't expanded enough on their old ideas, I don't even WANT all of their old ideas. I'd love to reduce the 16 Outer Planes down to about four, combine the elemental planes back into the Elemental Chaos, and flip the Ethereal plane into the Dream plane. Because as it stands, we don't DO anything with the VAST VAST majority of the planes.

And, on top of that, your suggestions are not being rejected because we hate new ideas. You want a Plane of Beasts, where the beasts are big and the people are wild and rugged, the land is untamed.... We have a places called "The Beast Lands" in the Outer Planes right now. And reading the description in the 2014 DMG... it sounds like EXACTLY what you want. From Page 60 "The Beastlands is a plane of nature unbound, of forests ranging from moss-hung mangroves to snow-laden pines, of thick jungles where the branches are woven so tight that no light penetrates, of vast plains where grains and wildflowers wave in the wind with vibrant life. The plane embodies nature's wildness and beauty, but it also speaks to the animal within all living things." Okay, sure, it doesn't say that the magic there is "raw and before words and gestures" or that the beasts are particularly stupid... but if THOSE are the only differences, why in the world would we want to make an entirely new plane of existence for this?

This isn't me saying "all new ideas are terrible! We should never have new ideas!" it is me saying "Hey, that sounds cool, we have almost that exact same thing over there. Why don't we take this opportunity to take this old idea that almost no uses, and focus more effort into making it cool, and incorporating that stuff you said, instead of making something new that we will ALSO new use or explore?"

And sure, I get you may hate the Great Wheel. Good news, I do as well! But I also don't imagine WotC is going to spend a whole lot of time making an entirely seperate set of things that don't appear in the Great Wheel, they barely gave Eberron its unique cosmology, they aren't going to make three or four entire new SETS of multiverses.

Like I said at the start, creating a new setting from scratch would help and inspire new DMs than reprinting a multiple decades old setting. This is nostalgia bait and IP spotlighting.

Gosh, maybe for their next 50 year anniversary they won't indulge in things like supporting their old IP and referencing the nostalgia of the past. I mean, I always appreciate an anniversary that says "old stuff is stupid and only bait for fools, new stuff is the way to go!" Really feels like a celebration of their history when they do that.

 

[pemerton]

Tolkien specifically says the Sheriffs are the ONLY law enforcement in the Shire, and they spend most of their time rounding up stray animals. There are no JPs.

Not literally. My point was that they would serve a function similar to a JP or lay law officer.

 

[pemerton]

That made me go google. It looks like in the UK they are mostly for authenticating things for use abroad. They're apparently the oldest branch of the legal profession in England & Wales (and so apparently not the kind of person you'd find at a copy shop or pack-and-send store, for example).

I don't see much point, in this thread, in getting into the minutiae of UK law. But (just as a handful of examples) it's not true that any old person can grant probate on a will, bail a criminal on their own recognisance, authorise a warrant, witness an affidavit, etc.

The broader point I'm making is that The Shire has a system of property, a rather marked class hierarchy that goes with it, inheritance and adoption, etc. It seems unlikely that there is no system for subdivision of land, or assignment of title to land. So it no doubt has legal officials to facilitate all this, just as English villages have had for many centuries. We are not told who they are, but given we are told that there are Shirriffs and a Mayor, I would conjecture that they play some role. Shirriffs, in particular, seem broadly comparable to Justices of the Peace, that is, lay folk who nevertheless are able to perform official acts within the legal system.

 

[pemerton]

Not for wills, contracts etc. whilst a solicitor will often be involved in drawing up the document, pretty much anyone can witness it. It’s the solution to Agatha Christie’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? Why wasn’t the housekeeper asked to witness the will?

Not anyone can grant probate on a will. Not anyone can witness an affidavit. I'm not sure what the practices were around deeds of assignment of title to land in 17th century England, but I would not be surprised if they were typically witnessed by an official of some sort.

The general point is that the absence of serious crime does not mean there is no legal system. The Shire clearly has a relatively complex system of private law, but JRRT does not tell us about its details. If, in a Middle Earth game, for some reason it came up that some transaction had to be performed (assignment of title to a Hobbit hole, adoption of a nephew, sub-division of a barely field, whatever it might be) I would be quite comfortable deciding that the witness can be a Shirriff, the Mayor, the Thain, or the Master of Buckland.

This sort of thing did not need to be spelled out by JRRT, and in my vie does not need to be spelled out as part of world-building. Given how local and ad hoc legal systems were prior to nineteenth century rationalisations, it will be more realistic if the GM just makes something up on the spot that seems to fit the established fiction.

 

[pemerton]

Endless caverns is already the Elemental Plane of Earth. Instead of making a second plane that is just endless cavern with no light, what if we got a detailed Dao city, maybe something that gave them a bit more heft like the City of Brass does in the plane of fire?

Isn't that The Great Dismal Delve? (I only know it from MMII. Presumably someone did something with it in Planescape.)

 

[Maxperson]

And some of us just flat out think the 5e DMG wasn't very good at all. What good bits there might be are buried in the book and very difficult to find. Additionally, the 5e DMG, as @Minigiant rightly points out, is meant for experienced DM's who are already steeped in DnD. There's an entire 26 page chapter on Creating a Multiverse (Chapter TWO?!?!?) that could be cut out. It certainly should NEVER have been the second chapter of the book. There's a couple of pages on how to develop a multiverse, then 20 some pages of Planescape Light describing the various planes in D&D.

This was a very bad idea. Number one, it shouldn't be in the DMG at all. This is something that doesn't need to be there. It should be in setting guides or a Planescape book. Additionally, it adds a bunch of mechanics - Color Pools! Psychic Wind! Ethereal Curtains! - that are 100% pointless to anyone who isn't already deep diving into planar stuff in D&D. It certainly is of zero use to anyone who is trying to learn how to DM.

Good grief, you're 70 pages into the book before they even start talking about writing adventures. Y'know, that thing that ALL DM's MUST DO. That FIRST THING that all DM's must do? That thing? Yeah, we're going to bury it nearly a quarter of the way into the book. Because it's vitally important that a new DM (or any DM for that matter) knows what happens if you travel on the Ethereal Plane before we teach you how to write an adventure.

Oh, and then we're going to spend over ONE HUNDRED PAGES detailing treasure and magic items. Then, finally, we get to Chapter 8- actually how to run a game. That thing that is probably the most important lesson for DM's after how to write an adventure? Yeah, we're going to bury that 2/3rds of the way into the back of the book. But, don't worry, it's vitally important. You know it's vitally important because we're going to spend just about the same page count that we used to describe the planes back in chapter 2.

And because placing something at the end of a book is a great way to highlight how important we consider it to be to the game, we're going to give you about 30 pages of half baked house rules that are mostly just suggestions. When adventures come out that actually need rules like these, we'll just ignore the DMG and write new rules.

Room for improvement is very much an understatement.

So I agree with almost everything you say here. The organization is atrocious. I would have opened up with the introduction, then went into teaching the DM how to run the game. After that the optional rules and how to create classes, feats, subclasses, races, etc. Then magic items would be appropriate. THEN world building.

The only part I disagree with you on is that the planes and cosmology should absolutely be in the core books. DMs, even new ones, will reach high level and going out into the planes is where many, if not most high level games end up or at least partially happen in. Combine that with WotC's allergy to releasing books that aren't settings, adventures or monster books. You can't rely on a Manual of the Planes ever coming, or at least not any time soon enough for those new DMs to use when they need knowledge on what to do with the planes.

 

[Maxperson]

I expect this will be gone, along with all the planar stuff, which could reasonably be relocated to a new Manual of the Planes down the line.

It's a good example of how the old DMG failed to teach though.

I don't think they will remove the planar stuff due to the reasons I gave in my post above this one. They may cut down a bit on detail, but I think the planes have to be detailed to some degree in either the PHB or DMG.

 

[Hussar]

True but there you are talking about small enclaves in particular locations. You can, of course splat remote villages anywhere, in mountains, virgin forest or swamp, for any reason, but you aren't going to evoke the concept of a noble, cultured race. You are better off looking beyond Eastern Oerik for that sort of thing.

“Noble, cultured race”?

That’s not a thing anymore. You have races. Some members of the race might be noble and some might not. I thought we were moving away from the idea of monolithic monoculture races.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

The planes and cosmology are one of D&D’s unique things throwing them away would be dumb.

And the DMG is still the place they should be talked about just later in the book.

 

[Demetrios1453]

The planes and cosmology are one of D&D’s unique things throwing them away would be dumb.

And the DMG is still the place they should be talked about just later in the book.

I definitely agree with that. It was far too early in the book for a new DM.