D&D 5E Anyone else feeling "meh" about recent 5e releases?

[MNblockhead]

Neither had I. The Ravnica book seems okay, except for those preposterous elephant men. The Acquisitions Inc. I'm a bit more suspicious of. The real clunkers, though, are the Stranger Things and, especially, the Rick and Morty box sets. They just seem like obviously avaricious cash ins which lower the tone of the entire franchise.

The avaricious cash ins are wonderful. It means that D&D is in Target and is one again a Christmas gift bought by and for non-hobbyists. The more new players they bring into the hobby the more likely it will thrive with future generations and the more money they will have to invest in new materials and take some risks.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

So you are familiar with the idea that virtually all modules/APs present some degree of story.

Er..the story elements woven into the adventure are much more...prominent? Yeah, they are more prominent in'newer' adventure style books (re: 3e+).

Just take one "old school" adventure; L1, The Secret of Bone Hill. Here's the story "There's a ruined castle of a sorcerer just out of town. Around it all the plants are dead or sickly, and skeletal animals run rampant! Lately, people have claimed to have seen and heard strange things...ghostly lights and eerie howls...coming from the ruins". That's pretty much it. There are some 'sub' or 'side' stories that may or may not be taken up by the DM and/or Players that involve other locations, but they don't have much at all to do in the way of being 'integrated' into very many NPC's at all. Easily ignored...either on purpose or by accident.

Compare that to "new school" adventure; Savage Tide. I don't have time to go into the story because it would take too much time. It basically involved certain "absolutes"...like the PC's WILL accept Lavinia as a patron, and the PC's WILL accept her ships, and they WILL accept her as Mayor, etc, etc. And that's just one NPC. At any point int he adventure, if Lavinia is killed or the PC's butt heads with her and rebuke her status...the rest of the adventure falls to pieces. The DM has to do a LOT of work to fix/modify soooo much of what is written that at that point, the DM is probably best in just ripping out the maps and writing his own adventure stuff. Which defeats the purpose of spending money on the adventure books.

I'm not saying this can't happen with the "older" style adventures. What I'm saying is that the tendrils of the "expected story line" for newer adventure design tend to be much harder and annoying to deal with.

All said, however, I'm finding Tomb of Annihilation to be...less "railroady" than I had imagined. I'm glad I was called out about it and forced to spend some time and money to look more into it. My bad! Even if it does have too much 'story tendrils', the nature of my ToA being in FGII format makes it a LOT easier for me to completely delete, replace, and/or modify sections without having to have an entirely separate book or have hundreds of sticky-notes plastered all over the pages!

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[Parmandur]

Hiya!



Er..the story elements woven into the adventure are much more...prominent? Yeah, they are more prominent in'newer' adventure style books (re: 3e+).

Just take one "old school" adventure; L1, The Secret of Bone Hill. Here's the story "There's a ruined castle of a sorcerer just out of town. Around it all the plants are dead or sickly, and skeletal animals run rampant! Lately, people have claimed to have seen and heard strange things...ghostly lights and eerie howls...coming from the ruins". That's pretty much it. There are some 'sub' or 'side' stories that may or may not be taken up by the DM and/or Players that involve other locations, but they don't have much at all to do in the way of being 'integrated' into very many NPC's at all. Easily ignored...either on purpose or by accident.

Compare that to "new school" adventure; Savage Tide. I don't have time to go into the story because it would take too much time. It basically involved certain "absolutes"...like the PC's WILL accept Lavinia as a patron, and the PC's WILL accept her ships, and they WILL accept her as Mayor, etc, etc. And that's just one NPC. At any point int he adventure, if Lavinia is killed or the PC's butt heads with her and rebuke her status...the rest of the adventure falls to pieces. The DM has to do a LOT of work to fix/modify soooo much of what is written that at that point, the DM is probably best in just ripping out the maps and writing his own adventure stuff. Which defeats the purpose of spending money on the adventure books.

I'm not saying this can't happen with the "older" style adventures. What I'm saying is that the tendrils of the "expected story line" for newer adventure design tend to be much harder and annoying to deal with.

All said, however, I'm finding Tomb of Annihilation to be...less "railroady" than I had imagined. I'm glad I was called out about it and forced to spend some time and money to look more into it. My bad! Even if it does have too much 'story tendrils', the nature of my ToA being in FGII format makes it a LOT easier for me to completely delete, replace, and/or modify sections without having to have an entirely separate book or have hundreds of sticky-notes plastered all over the pages!

^_^

Paul L. Ming

I hate to break it to you, but Savage Tide is kind of old fashioned now.

 

[darjr]

I hate to break it to you, but Savage Tide is kind of old fashioned now.

Wait, what? How?

 

[Parmandur]

Wait, what? How?

For one thing, it was published in a magazine of all things. It's over 12 years old, and while seminal is a long time ago on the game's history now, two editions old.

 

[darjr]

There was a hardback that collected them together. I was thinking of getting one and running it in 5e. Cause Greyhawk.

 

[Parmandur]

There was a hardback that collected them together. I was thinking of getting one and running it in 5e. Cause Greyhawk.

Nothing wrong with that: just wouldn't call it "new school" at this point. What's being put out these days is substantively different.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Anyone else experiencing this drought in interest? I'd be happy to purchase stuff that interests me, but I'm just not seeing it. I own most of the other adventures Wizards has put out, and have run them (some of them more than once).

One of the dangers of gloriously evoking the classic game is that a lotta folks already have the classic game. :|

Still, there's a huge difference between not getting that excited about what the current ed's doin', and wanting to burn the whole hobby to the ground rather than let it continue doing it. 5e's on the right side of that divide. So, we may not have "exciting" D&D, but we have D&D.
Can't complain, y'know?

 

[Green Onceler]

The avaricious cash ins are wonderful.

Ugh. I guess that is why I'm not the target market for Dungeons & Dragons in its current iteration.

 

[Shardstone]

Ugh. I guess that is why I'm not the target market for Dungeons & Dragons in its current iteration.

Yes. If you're not interested in spending money, they aren't interested in marketing to you, because you aren't interested in spending money.