Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos - First Party Review

[Parmandur]

I'm generally fine with the idea that PCs and NPCs function differently from one another in 5E. (I had to make way too many custom spells in 3E in order to "justify" giving an NPC an ability.) But the bullywug wizard feels a bit off.

Why not make the wizard either be a previously published PC race or put Bullywug into Strixhaven as a playable race and make a lot of people happy? This feels very much like the adventure writer wasn't talking to the product developer or vice-versa.

One of the major flaws of the product is that Strixhaven has a huge variety of races present in the faculty and student body that don't have PC write-uos in 5E (though the Bullywug is secretly in the DMG in the Humanoids chart).

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I don't actually think they were drawing on Potter, for reasons I explain below.

This is just so obviously wrong. I will explain why the ages where raised, since it seems to have passed over your head: There are people who will react negatively about the idea of children in deadly situations, or killing. There are people who will react negatively to the idea of children in "romantic" situations. So the age of students was raised to 18+ to avoid controversy. But the school works just the same if the students are 14 as 18.

The relationships can't be stakes because they both 1) never change as a result of the adventure events

Firstly, it's NOT an adventure (you might call it a social sandbox). And secondly, relationships, and threats to them, have to be role-played by the players. How PC1 feels about NPC2 is not something you can write into an adventure, it's something that PC1's player has to decide. And then it's up to the DM to decide on the complications. Likewise if PC2 is a rival of PC1, and decides to sabotage the relationship, that's something PC2's player needs to decide.

 

[Parmandur]

This is just so obviously wrong. I will explain why the ages where raised, since it seems to have passed over your head: There are people who will react negatively about the idea of children in deadly situations, or killing. There are people who will react negatively to the idea of children in "romantic" situations. So the age of students was raised to 18+ to avoid controversy. But the school works just the same if the students are 14 as 18.

Firstly, it's NOT an adventure. And secondly, relationships, and threats to them, have to be role-played by the players. How PC1 feels about NPC2 is not something you can write into an adventure, it's something that PC1's player has to decide. And then it's up to the DM to decide on the complications. Likewise if PC2 is a rival of PC1, and decides to sabotage the relationship, that's something PC2's player needs to decide.

Just one read through, the status tracker and academic/personal history sheet should help original roleplaying elements to emerge in play...theoretically, YMMV, etc.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Just one read through, the status tracker and academic/personal history sheet should help original roleplaying elements to emerge in play...theoretically, YMMV, etc.

I think YMMV is important here. For this aspect to work your players really need to be into social role-playing (improv theatre as it is often dismissively called by old school D&D players).

 

[Parmandur]

I think YMMV is important here. For this aspect to work your players really need to be into social role-playing (improv theatre as it is often dismissively called by old school D&D players).

Yeah, that's very much the target audience here.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

One of the major flaws of the product is that Strixhaven has a huge variety of races present in the faculty and student body that don't have PC write-uos in 5E (though the Bullywug is secretly in the DMG in the Humanoids chart).

This is a side effect of building it off a MtG setting. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight it would have been better to locate the magic school in an established, and more grounded D&D setting. That way you are not trying to introduce quite so many new ideas at once.

I don't think anyone would pretend Stryxhaven is perfect, but first attempts to do something new and different never are. And heaping criticism on it just has the effect of making WotC even more reluctant to innovate. If you must criticise it, you should at least try and understand what it was aiming for, rather than criticising it for not being something it was never intended to be.

And this is correct, Bullywug PCs are easy should a player want one.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I was doing a bit of research, and I came across this article on the covers of Mallory Towers through the years. Clearly, it has had a lot, reflecting the fashions of the time, but what struck me is just how old the girls look on the original covers - easily the same age as the students on the Stryxhaven cover.

For comparison:

 

[M_Natas]

I think one of the biggest problems with Strixhaven is, that it uses pure D&D 5e. Outside of spells and invocations, 5e doesn’t have mechanics for learning things.
The whole Skillsystem with a unified Proficiency-Bonus is also not really useful if you want to simulate Students to learn something.

Like any magic school setting/adventure would ne a complete new subsystem about Learning stuff.

And I don't know if that could be done with 5e without twisting it into something completely different.
I bought the strixhaven book and thr lack of any "how to run a class" and "how to have students actually learn" things was just painful.

Like, for a Wizard (and maybe Warcraft for non-Casterz) academy/school to work, we perhaps need to start at a level 0.
We would need to start with a lower standard array (13, 12, 11, 10, 8, 6) and have Students actually do classes and training and studying to improve the attributes over the next 4 years while they also gain class levels.
We would need a system to track training/learning progress. We need a system for training and learning.
Like (just a simple system I just made up) a school semester has 20 weeks (+Holidays) and you pick every week where you will focus your training on am attribute and one skill. If you train an attribute for a number of weeks equal to the attribute score (like if your Strength score is 6, you need to train 6 weeks) to have a good chance to increase it to 7. The same with skills. Maybe we need to introduce more granular Proficiency steps, to simulate the learning experience. Like 0,5 (half Proficiency), 1 (normal Proficiency), 1,5x profiency and 2x (expertise) and you need to train and study to increase your skills. The same with weapon and armor proficencies and spell casting.
So let's say per semester you will gain a level. You start at level 0. You have 20 weeks per semester. Every week you can focus on up to 3 things - study, friends, student job, extra curricular activities...
And now you have to make decisions. You can go full on studying and training in one attribute or skill or ability, but than you have no friends and no money ... you can go to parties to increase train your charisma, but you could get hangover and study worse and so on.
You are know making decisions on how to gradually build your character.

That is something you would need for a magical school setting. Like, if you don't have rules for learning, studying and getting better, what is the point of a magical school setting?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Like any magic school setting/adventure would ne a complete new subsystem about Learning stuff.

The school story genre isn't about the academic side of education. The only lessons that matter are "life lessons" and they don't need rules. Which tends to be the case with social roleplaying - it is usually free-form, often ignoring rules even when they do exist. The difficulty is, it's not something you can explain how to do in an introductory paragraph. It tends to be something groups either do, or do not. I remember the first time I encountered social roleplaying back in the 90s. I bounced right off: "enough yacking, I just want to go and kill some monsters already!"

 

[TwoSix]

This is just so obviously wrong. I will explain why the ages where raised, since it seems to have passed over your head: There are people who will react negatively about the idea of children in deadly situations, or killing. There are people who will react negatively to the idea of children in "romantic" situations. So the age of students was raised to 18+ to avoid controversy. But the school works just the same if the students are 14 as 18.

But that's kinda the core problem....school doesn't work the same when you're 18 as when you're 14. An 18 year old starting at a new school makes it a university, not a boarding school, which is an entirely different set of tropes and expectations.

And we also have a stronger familiarity with the idea that a 14 year old's life is going to be more structured and regimented, like the adventure plot assumes, than an 18 year old university student.

There's a reason for the stereotype of teen-oriented shows always starting to decline when the characters graduate high school; it's because adolescence and high school is such a unique experience. Muddling up high school and university into just "school" is one of the primary fails in this book.