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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Composer99" data-source="post: 9115161" data-attributes="member: 7030042">I mean, it might be very well and good for WotC to create content in its books that appeals to, say, a 5% niche of its player base if that niche is disproportionately buying those books, relative to the rest of the player base.At the same time, and keeping in mind that I have argued pretty strongly in favour of WotC making an effort to appeal to multiple player constituencies, I do think D&D would be a better game overall if its core rules were more tightly focused on its biggest, broadest player constituencies. That probably means cutting out the vestiges of the detailed equipment rules and the dungeon/wilderness exploration content that you have to patch together from the PHB and DMG and having an "adventuring kit" equipment item that basically covers all your mundane gear and something like a generic "challenge" framework (skill challenge/clock/whatever implementation WotC research discovers players want to use) for exploration/travel.For instance: "Can the player characters navigate the Jungles of Doom and reach the Temple of Doom in time to stop the Cult of Doom from conjuring the Demon of Doom?" is (hopefully) an interesting question in an adventure. (Do feel free to read that with a classic mid-Atlantic accent or 1960s Hanna-Barbera-superhero-cartoon voiceover narration.)If you just run that in "speed of plot action movie style", then the answer to that question is to dispense with the business of navigating the jungle and to just tell the players that their characters arrive in the nick of time and have to fight a combat with a "skill challenge/clock event" layered on top of it; if they fail the challenge then the Demon of Doom turns up to make the combat much more difficult (hope you didn't blow through your spell slots getting through the rest of the temple!). The goal here being that even if you couldn't be bothered to deal with the navigating through the Jungle of Doom, the climax of the quest still needs to rest on the player characters' own efforts and the choices the players make regarding how to conserve resources or what to prioritise doing during the final encounter.If you want a little more mechanical heft, then you run some kind of skill challenge/clock thing. Say, the party has to roll three Wisdom (Survival) checks to navigate the Jungle of Doom. (I'm just spitballing here; an actual challenge would probably be iterated a bit better.)<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Each time one of these checks fails, they lose a bit of time and there's some kind of complication - they get lost, or an obstacle bars their path, or they get attacked by robot zombie T-rexes, or whatever (maybe make up a random chart of possible complications); they might lose more time if they handle the complication badly, or at least not fall too far behind if they handle it well.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">In between each check, there could be a complication not related to the checks that can cause them to lose time if they handle it badly; this makes sure that even if they easily succeed all the checks, interesting stuff happens and interesting decisions have to be made and the tension is ratcheting up.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">If they lose too much time (by failing all the checks and handling too many of the complications badly), they get to the Temple of Doom worn out and the Demon of Doom is on the loose. Good luck!</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">For each check they succeed, the situation they face when they reach the Temple gets easier - the Cult has had less time to prepare for their arrival and the conjuring is further away from completion. Succeeding on all three checks and breezing through the Temple makes for a less dramatic finale but the PCs also get the endorphin rush of a "critical success", and get to feel awesome as they rotflolstomp through the Cult of Doom, so that's all good.</li> </ul>Those two approaches are the kind of thing I'd think would be the best fit for the modern player base, and in fact the game would be better designed if it did a better job of supporting just them in the core rules. (At least, that's the case if my guess about the player base is correct.)If the "we want a hexcrawl or pointcrawl or B/X style wilderness exploration!" player constituency is big enough, then you-as-WotC provide a module for them to run the Jungle of Doom quest in, say, the DMG; if it's not big enough for core rules but is big enough for WotC support, it goes into an adventure (à la Tomb of Annihilation) or an "of Everything" supplement. If that's just not a big enough player constituency for WotC support, you point them to a Trusted Partner™ on D&D Beyond or DM's Guild or what-have-you.</blockquote>

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