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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8871445" data-attributes="member: 18">So I could make a lot of claims about what would bring me back as a DM, but if I'm really honest it's going to come down solely to to two or three things:1) Make my life as a DM easier in terms of prep.5E is one of the prep-heaviest modern RPGs, because you've got encounters (which should be balanced), NPCs (who don't have a great shorthand method), situations (with a real lack of generic systems to support that), traps, treasure/loot, and any monsters that are novel require a lot of effort to put together (unlike, in say, 4E's DDI where I could slap together a novel monster in literally 5 minutes - and it would work, mathematically and tactically).There's an absolute ton that could be improved here. I'm happy to use digital tools for some of the improvement, but stuff like Beyond's tools are either very poorly designed, or intentionally mis-designed. Specifically Beyond has an encounter builder - good - but that encounter builder has absolutely no easy way to exclude monsters you don't own - extremely bad. Every time you use the builder, you have to click 20+ times to select the sources you want, in annoying drop that sometimes clears itself. Beyond knows what books you own. Beyond knows what monsters you have. But because they have a conflict of interest, in that they want to "advertise" other monsters so you'll either buy them via microtransactions or buy the books they're in, it's never been a priority to fix this.This is the sort of thing that should be a high priority for Beyond to fix if they're serious about making DM's lives easier. DMs finding a tool easy to use should be more important than extracting the the absolute max money from a few people who are impulsive enough to buy stuff that way.And that's one example of many.2) Do better on art. Much better.5E's original art is okay, but there are very few stunning pieces. This is not true for MtG, even though it's own by the same company, and it's always hilarious to see the massive quality disparity when they put MtG art in D&D products.I'd also like to see better writing, and more of it, but this is more variable. 5E has some good writing at least. A lot of RPGs do far better, especially these days, though.So I think those are the biggest two, but close behind:3) Settings I'm actually excited about/want to run.This doesn't have to be bringing back older settings. What it does have to be is settings that are exciting, have something to say, and are presented in a really cool way. It also means not bringing out setting books where the actual setting is, quite literally, 10-20% of what's in the book, and claiming those are settings. They're not. They're adventures/campaigns with a certain amount of setting attached. Give me an actual setting I can chew on, and get loads of cool ideas from, and that excites me about D&D again.When D&D lost me the first time, in the 1990s, that's how it got me back - Planescape - it was too exciting not to run it. When it lost me the second time, with 3.5E, it was mechanics that got me back because 4E was too interesting not to try, but from what we know of 1D&D that's already off the table, so settings are going to matter more.At this point, I'd rather see new settings than revived ones, I think.</blockquote>

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