D&D 5E MCDM Kingdoms and Warfare is out!

[Shardstone]

I may be biased, but I prefer that games come with lore. IP is important to develop, and it expands the Fantasy genre quite a bit.

Does it take work to fit into a pre-made game world? Yes, it does, but I find that a fun narrative exercise and a challenge worth my time, not something frustrating and pointless, since it involves me modifying world elements and doing worldbuilding, which I fund to be one of the most enjoyable parts of DMing.

I think a lot of products, especially Kobold Press's heaviest lore products, would be greatly diminished were they just generic mechanics without much lore momentum behind them.

 

[Morrus]

Plus of course, lore is stuff you can own. Mechanics you can't. And you want to be making stuff you own.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I'm not sure why I would ever want to use these rules for a heist, to be honest. But this review is pretty good! Thanks!

NP

I don't think I would use them for a heist per se, but I could see using them to make the organization, then as part of play having a heist come up. I can definitely think of ways to alter the RAW rules to make it work, like instead of having the checks affecting army positions, have them affect the security systems or something like that.

It just doesn't work well as written for being used in a variety of situations.

 

[Chaosmancer]

As someone who likes a lot of examples in his RPG books (and who loves examples of play), I think lore has its role in that framework (rather than some generic thing). This way we can see what a creator has in mind in action and we can make use of, re-skin, or ignore that lore without throwing the crunch away with it.

Sure, I just find it frustrating when I need to do such heavy lifting for concepts that are in the book. Not every sorcerer is going to make sense to be handing out wands of fire, while not every cleric would be handing out wands of healing. Not every ranger is an archer.

It is the crunch that is sometimes biased, leaning into one set of archetypes while ignoring others.

 

[Chaosmancer]

So, thoughts after a quick skim:

• There is no reason to have more codices in this book, but there they are.

If I remember correctly, fans on the dischord and reddit were really pushing for more Codices. It came up a few times in videos I saw that people loved them and kept pushing for more and more of them.

 

[dave2008]

I may be biased, but I prefer that games come with lore. IP is important to develop, and it expands the Fantasy genre quite a bit.

Does it take work to fit into a pre-made game world? Yes, it does, but I find that a fun narrative exercise and a challenge worth my time, not something frustrating and pointless, since it involves me modifying world elements and doing worldbuilding, which I fund to be one of the most enjoyable parts of DMing.

I think a lot of products, especially Kobold Press's heaviest lore products, would be greatly diminished were they just generic mechanics without much lore momentum behind them.

I personally don't like RPG products heavily tied to setting lore. It is why I don't buy a lot of Pathfinder products. It also something that is now making me hesitant to buy this product. It was going to be a instant buy for me, but now I may wait a bit and see if my local shop gets a copy when it comes out in print. I can't really imagine how this book would be too tied to setting lore, but I would like to wait and see now.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Soooo. Tell me if the book is better and there are better ways of running what I presume were battles. I saw a bit of those video clips posted, but without any real prior knowledge of the product, it just looked like two spreadsheets fighting.

The warfare system is AMAZING. Full props on that. It does an incredible job of being fast and easy to pick up. It has a lot of stats, but it runs much closer to just having character sheets and stat blocks.

The one thing I remember from Strongholds that is still the case in Warfare is that there is no benefit to not being a super-heavy unit. At least nothing I could find. In theory, lightly armored troops should have advantages in mobility or stealth, but that doesn't reflect anywhere in the actual rules. Which is a shame. But probably sacrificed to keep things simple

 

[Zaukrie]

If I remember correctly, fans on the dischord and reddit were really pushing for more Codices. It came up a few times in videos I saw that people loved them and kept pushing for more and more of them.

They did. They don't belong here. We need much more for domains to do. Oh well

 

[cbwjm]

I've flipped through the book, I'm really liking it, though much of it might be used as inspiration rather than using the rules presented. The organisation rules are pretty cool, roll some dice and then later use those dice to activate abilities.

Different domains and realms and how they interact, while cool, might be more work than I really want to use in a game, same with the warfare rules to be honest. I like them, I just think I prefer a simpler system for warfare; the last I used had simple attack rolls vs. The enemy armies DC, things happened and the roll was influenced by the players taking down enemy commanders.

Don't really get the lore comments, easy enough to use the stuff in this book, no real work in decoupling lore from things which have been presented.

 

[akr71]

Don't really get the lore comments, easy enough to use the stuff in this book, no real work in decoupling lore from things which have been presented.

Nor do I. Yes there is 'lore' in the book, but from my brief skim through it is in examples and such.

I bought the book mostly for the organizations (the Kingdoms part). I don't see the Warfare part being used by our group any time in the near future. We might trot it out just to give it a spin.