D&D (2024) Deborah Ann Woll and Matt Mercer consulted on the 2024 DMG.

WotC consulted with celebrities including True Blood's Deborah Ann Woll and Critical Role's Matt Mercer when revising the upcoming 2024 edition of the Dungeon Master's Guide. Apparently another (unnamed) consultant provided advice on running game for kids.

That's it; that's the news.

 

[DEFCON 1]

KEEP YOUR INFERNAL DRY ERASE MARKERS AWAY FROM MY CHESSEX BATTLEMAT YOU YOUNG HOOLIGAN!

Who on God's green earth is still using WET-ERASE CHESSEX MAPS?!? ONE USE OF THE COLOR RED AND THE VINYL IS F*ED!!!

Go to Home Depot, drop $80 on a clear plexiglass acrylic sheet you can then lay ON TOP of your Chessex gridded map... and then you can use Dry-Erase markers OF ALL THE COLORS you could possibly want! And clean-up doesn't involve a water sprayer and an entire roll of paper towels!!! For all that is Holy...

-- now awaiting the Gen Alpha gamer to show up and tell us both that flat-screen tvs are now so cheap we should both get with the times and lay the screen flat on the table in order to plug our laptops into it and thus be able to use actual pre-rendered artistic maps on-screen rather than hand-draw everything like the Gen Xers we are.

 

[Oofta]

Who on God's green earth is still using WET-ERASE CHESSEX MAPS?!? ONE USE OF THE COLOR RED AND THE VINYL IS F*ED!!!

Go to Home Depot, drop $80 on a clear plexiglass acrylic sheet you can then lay ON TOP of your Chessex gridded map... and then you can use Dry-Erase markers OF ALL THE COLORS you could possibly want! And clean-up doesn't involve a water sprayer and an entire roll of paper towels!!! For all that is Holy...

-- now awaiting the Gen Alpha gamer to show up and tell us both that flat-screen tvs are now so cheap we should both get with the times and lay the screen flat on the table in order to plug our laptops into it and thus be able to use actual pre-rendered artistic maps on-screen rather than hand-draw everything like the Gen Xers we are.

But you can't roll up a sheet of plexiglass! Get with the program, man!

 

[billd91]

But you can't roll up a sheet of plexiglass! Get with the program, man!

Yeah, I'm running at a friend's house so I tote my vinyl map along when I need it.
I went back to the vinyl map after using the dry erase puzzle pieces. The corners and joins on those just don't stand up to use as well as a Chessex mat.

 

[Reynard]

Us Tac-Tiles people.

 

[Oofta]

I prefer hex mats, and slightly larger size than any mat I could find that better fits the minis. So I found a website that lets you create your own graph paper, stitched together several pages and then had Kinkos print and laminate a big sheet. Works great with either dry erase or wet. So that's what I use when we're home, when not in use I don't even roll it up I just put it behind our bedroom dresser.

For a map I can go places with I used to use Paizo's fold up grids, which work okay even if they do eventually show wear and tear. I recently purchase an EverGame game board. Similar to Paizo's fold up grids but on a sturdy hardboard. I haven't used it enough to know it's durability.

 

[Thomas Shey]

From what I've read, it was the college crowd that really made the game go viral. Also, keep in mind that many of the original creators created the games and know each other through college clubs. Gary was an old guy playing mostly with guys much younger than him. Many of his old crowd of wargamers were not thrilled about D&D.

Yeah. I mean, don't get me wrong, I had people I wargamed with in high school that probably could have got on board D&D when it arrived, but its extremely unlikely we'd have encountered it (even our wargaming was limited to Avalon Hill stuff). I'm not sure how long it'd have been before I'd hit it if I didn't go to an SF convention not too long after my 18th birthday.

 

[DEFCON 1]

But you can't roll up a sheet of plexiglass! Get with the program, man!

Of course! But you still have the wet-erase Chessex map to use as a last resort if you need to tote it around. But if you are at home for your home game most of the time... plexi on top of the Chessex means you can draw easier, use more colors, clean up is a breeze, and more importantly... if you can draw your map on the plexi in reverse, you can then flip the plexi over and realign to the grid so all the map markings are on the underside of the plexi and you never have to worry about the map getting rubbed off!

I AM THE MODERN MAN!!! (Tee hee!)

 

[Thomas Shey]

Who on God's green earth is still using WET-ERASE CHESSEX MAPS?!? ONE USE OF THE COLOR RED AND THE VINYL IS F*ED!!!

Go to Home Depot, drop $80 on a clear plexiglass acrylic sheet you can then lay ON TOP of your Chessex gridded map... and then you can use Dry-Erase markers OF ALL THE COLORS you could possibly want! And clean-up doesn't involve a water sprayer and an entire roll of paper towels!!! For all that is Holy...

-- now awaiting the Gen Alpha gamer to show up and tell us both that flat-screen tvs are now so cheap we should both get with the times and lay the screen flat on the table in order to plug our laptops into it and thus be able to use actual pre-rendered artistic maps on-screen rather than hand-draw everything like the Gen Xers we are.

We did that at one point back in the day but there were some portability issues.

 

[Myrdin Potter]

Yeah. I mean, don't get me wrong, I had people I wargamed with in high school that probably could have got on board D&D when it arrived, but its extremely unlikely we'd have encountered it (even our wargaming was limited to Avalon Hill stuff). I'm not sure how long it'd have been before I'd hit it if I didn't go to an SF convention not too long after my 18th birthday.

I ran into D&D while in my high school wargaming club. My cousin’s best friend’s brother was playing (0e, about 1981 but Montreal area so took a while to get there). I was in a session or two (before the older college aged players said no to high school kids in the game) and then I bought Holmes basic and actually read the rules. At that point all I knew was roll some dice and the guy running the game said what would happen.

Maybe it was from enough time reading Avalon Hill and SPI and other rules, but I was able to teach myself the game from Holmes Basic and then the AD&D books by just reading them. All the other DM I knew in my area had done the same. Years later some of the players in my games started running games, but I learned it from the rulebooks. I did not find the AD&D rules that hard to grasp to run a game. My first game was rolling random monsters and treasure from the DMG, but I quickly got the hang of writing and running adventures.

A few years later I went to a GenCon in Kenosha (where I met Gary Gagax for the first and only time when I ducked out to smoke a cigarette and he had as well) and that was my first real exposure to the advanced way of running games.

After AD&D I taught myself Runequest and then Champions from the rulebooks and ran years long games in each. I think a lot of early DM learned that way as there just were not that many games to find and play in to learn otherwise.

Funny enough, the other hobby I joined around the time I went to GenCon (SCA) also spread through SF conventions when it first started.

 

[Myrdin Potter]

As for the announcement of the consultants, I generally avoid watching other people play D&D as entertainment but I have watched both Mercer and Woll and they both seem like excellent game masters. Mercer has contributed to several gaming books (hard to know how much he wrote himself as there is a team in the credits). Does not bother me that they were “consulted” on the game. At worse, they can contribute like many of the posters here as experienced GM that know what they like when they run games.