D&D 5E Justin Alexander's review of Shattered Obelisk is pretty scathing

[Micah Sweet]

I've bolded the half of my sentence applying to myself and other experienced players, which you somehow ignored in your rush to take umbrage.

What the heck, man? I write a post explicitly saying that I like when some rules and rules changes are explained, in which I also take a stab at explaining how it can be taken too far and why it can be a downside, and you ignore the entire thing except the last five words, to totally distort my point?

Heck, half the point of my post was correcting Shardstone's apparently having misread Gradine in the same way!

Fair enough. I apologize.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

This is my point. I don’t assume/claim the books that aren’t to my tastes are bad books. Other folks do.

The motive assigned to experienced writers and editors who don’t write the way they want is that either they don’t think enough, or they’re lazy, or they don’t understand the game properly.

It’s the main reason I take issue with JA’s style.

You have a good point, and it goes a long way to explaining why JA didn't fit in with the moderation on this board. Rather than just state what he doesn't like about a product itself, he often condemns the motivations of those who made the product.

I like criticism, because at its best it can make for better future products (when it's listened to). But no one likes to listen to criticism that insults them - which makes that kind of criticism counter-productive.

Reading JA's review, I find that I agree that the book is flawed (possibly even deeply so, even if I don't agree with each individual remark). However, it doesn't make me think that the book's writers are lazy, incompetent, or necessarily bad at their jobs. In spite of his claims that they are.

 

[ReshiIRE]

being usable by a large spectrum is great doublespeak and doesn't actually argue with anything i said. I'll even expand my original opinion. All Pathfinder development is driven mostly by pathfinder society needs and feedback and anyone outside that bubble is not generally considered. Because anything usable by Pathfinder Society is " Usable by a broad spectrum of possible play groups".

Could you elaborate on this and provide proof or explanation? Especially on how this can be demonstrated?

 

[darjr]

Seems Justin may have got the whole obelisk thing wrong too.

Jorohdan on his Vecna and obelisk vibe. This time he points to things in the new Planescape adventure.

Interesting that he brings up “The Endless Staircase” too.


Also note that the Phandelver adventure I don’t think was supposed to tell us the whole secret of the obelisks.
Quoted from below Chris said Phandelver would explore more not that it would answer it.

 

[darjr]

I will say one thing, it’s hard to find quotes about the secrets of the obelisk and this book when obelisk is in the title.

Does anyone have another quote or reference?

Is it in the book itself?

 

[occam]

Did you see/hear the times when the developers actively mocked 4e stuff? Beyond the Warlord thing, there was also the time a developer spent a whole post allegedly tongue-in-cheek mocking dragonborn fans because he didn't understand their preferences.

Had it been a post on this forum, it would have been infracted for personal attacks. I'm not even joking. I don't remember which designer it was now, but he straight-up acted like it was crazy, irrational, beyond human understanding that someone could prefer playing dragonborn instead of humans or elves or other allegedly normal races.

I'd have to see who said it and how before judging my reaction to it in context. Do you have a source?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'd have to see who said it and how before judging my reaction to it in context. Do you have a source?

As I said above, no, because the Wizards website has been completely deleted and replaced at least twice since then. It has, after all, been more than a decade.

I gave the transcription above. Mearls explicitly referred to Warlords as making hands "grow back" by "shouting" at people--and his immediate "now I'm being ridiculous" comment did not actually fix the problem. He was, openly, using edition-war screeds as reasons why 4e options should be excluded from 5e. Was he being the worst he possibly could? No. He was clearly trying to joke around. It's just a crappy thing to joke about given how gleeful so many people are about crapping on 4e, putting it down, dismissing anything good it ever did, or (worst of all, because it is entirely innocent) erasing it because they think awesome stuff 4e did was brand-new to 5e.

Sadly, I don't remember who on the dev team wrote the post about dragonborn, I can only tell you that it was really tone-deaf, cracking some rather weak jokes that basically boiled down to a stand-up comedian saying, "Dragonborn fans, am I right? What weirdos!" From context, it was clear he was trying to sound tongue-in-cheek, as in, making intentionally hyperbolic statements when he actually doesn't personally care that much, but I've endured more than enough of people telling me I don't deserve to have my preferences represented in D&D. Joking about it isn't funny--it's a very real experience I've had.

Wizards has deleted many things from the playtest period. More than a few of them were rather inconvenient things, like the poll that showed Warlord quite a bit more popular than Druid (which was in last place, and by a significant margin.)

 

[SteveC]

I'd argue that Paizo's problem with modules is they are all made with the Pathfinder Society in mind and this limits them in many ways. Pathfinder has built a great thing with the Pathfinder Society but it has become the bubble that everything gets developed in. They are really developing for the pathfinder society not all Pathfinder gamers.

Having played a fair number of Pathfinder Society adventures, as well as playing and running their APs, they are not similar at all.

An adventure for Pathfinder Society is intended to be self contained and resolved in about three hours. They have a pretty standard mix of skill challenges and combats. They are highly focused on giving a variety of challenges and getting finished in that three hour time period.

Having played and run APs, they are not focused on the same type of situation at all. I'm running Abomination Vault at the moment and we have about two and a half hours to play in. I have to figure out how much of the adventure I'm intending to run and pace the session accordingly to not have combats run over and to finish on an exciting cliff hanger for next session. For PF Society adventures, there's no next session: you finish the entire thing up in one evening. With my group, that means I'd have trouble running them due to time constraints.

 

[Lanefan]

But having a single main passage is more efficient with regards to tunnelling if you are building underground. It's also very common in schools in my experience (even though two corridors and a one-way system would produce fewer collisions).

My junior high school (long-since demolished, sadly) would beg to differ. That thing was designed as a big loop, with various branches and at least one sub-loop coming off it; and of course about 8 or 10 entrances. I've been meaning for ages to use its floorplan for a dungeon but I'm not sure I quite remember just how everything connected together.

However you do it, in real life buildings are rarely "interesting". Nor are mines for that matter (single main shaft with lots of short dead-end branches).

Indeed, mines are usually dendritic in design. But take something like a big museum. There's usually only one public entrance, but once you're inside there's often numerous ways you can go through it (or could if all the corridors were two-way). If you include the staff entrances, emergency exits, staff-only stairways, and other bits the public doesn't see then boom: you've got a pretty good foundational design for a dungeon.

And it rarely matters. "Turn left or turn right" is not a real choice unless you have some basis to distinguish between them.

It's still more choice than just "go forward, go back, or stay put", which is all a linear dungeon gives you.

 

[Lanefan]

There is a difference between art being a stylistic choice vs just being very well done. It’s also not just the quality it’s the volume of art. I like to be able to show evocative features of a site or person to my players not just have art in a book to break up the text.

Fair enough; though if I really want somehting I'll look online for it (as per your point below about tech!). In the book, I just want the bare-bones stuff I need to run the adventure.

To be honest I don’t really see the difference between the compilations and three or four copies of Dungeon Magazine. Similar price adjusted for inflation with a very minor mark up for something that will last a lot longer and have much better production values.

I rarely if ever bought Dungeon magazines either, mostly because even if there was one good adventure in there I'd still be paying for several I didn't want; and even then the bloody maps weren't detachable.

The tabletop question goes back to my point about barriers to entry.

That's just it: to me VTT is a barrier to entry for those who either don't have tech (of which there's still a surprising number) or - like me - refuse to get on the treadmill of replacing tech every year or two "to keep up" even if the old tech still works fine.

If I play VTT (as millions do) quality battlemaps and NPC images make a huge difference to the game. Huge difference. Nothing about having a full colour illustrated map stops you being able to play as you like. Unlike my earlier comment about redundant text - if it’s redundant artwork you can ignore it at a glance without it masking and hiding all the information.

Which when doing everything homebrew makes for much more prep work for the DM. It also, I find, doesn't work at all well for non-static and-or unforeseen/unplanned situations e.g. where the PCs are wandering around in a sandbox situation and the DM has no idea where they'll go next or what they might meet and-or do there. With a chalkboard or dry-erase on a table you can just draw the map in a minute or two when it's needed; on a VTT (from what I've seen) it ain't that easy.

This isn’t just about face to face or VTT either anymore. We use some computerized elements in face to face sessions too. Handouts projected onto the TV, Maps explored on the TV, or home printed battle maps for with the mini collection. Technology is progress I’m afraid.

On this we agree. I've put a fair bit of my game rules online (supplanting the printed versions) along with nearly all the setting lore, my random item generator is computerized, and so forth. Haven't figured out (and probably don't have the tech anyway) to project handouts on to the TV (never mind you can't really see our TV from the games table) but it's a cool idea.