Time Frame (and Patience)

This is one of several thoughts/suggestions regarding the upcoming fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons (5e). Relevant news items: nytimes and wizards.

Specifically regarding the Forgotten Realms…

Resurrect the Arcane Age product line.
With a new name. Something less specific. Use this avenue for visiting the societies of both the past and future Realms. Develop this product line to include Imaskar, Aryvandaar, the Sarrukh empires, etc. Develop the post-spellplague Realms as a setting in this product line, so that those who enjoy it can continue to play there and have a framework for developing the Realms in that timeline.

For the main product line…

Rewind to 1357 DR. Freeze.
In ten years, it will be 2022 on Earth but the year will still be 1357 in the Realms. Why? Because once you started telling us about 1367, you never went back to fill in the rest of the Realms. Instead, you started over with the so-called Heartlands in 1367. On this subject, lose the term “Heartlands.” It’s a stupid term, because every place is the heart of the land to those who live there. Calling Cormyr and the Dales the Heartlands is not only arbitrary, it’s exclusionist. You want the Realms to be inclusionist, because that’s what will make products sell. Drop “the Heartlands” like a plague-ridden hot potato. Anyway, it was the same again in 1372, and again in 1479. Stop doing that. Seriously. Stop.

There’s been a continuous push to move along the timeline, but ironically it’s made the Realms stagnant because you kept giving us books about the same places over and over again. You’ve still never really developed Lapaliiya, or Narfell, or hundreds of other places. But we have all kinds of info about Cormyr (and the Dales, and Waterdeep). Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those places, but I get really sick of seeing Cormyr in every campaign setting when the other major continents haven’t been touched in one yet.

You really think you’ll run out of things to write about? Then you are doin it wrong, and you should move over and let someone else take the helm. I could give you a list of products that would take you 100 years to publish, all without advancing the timeline. Ed could probably multiply that by 100.

Tell us about the Realms. Develop the whole planet, and do it pretty much equally. Go ahead and tell us more about Cormyr every once in a while, but stop “quitting early” with regards to the rest of the Realms just so that you can start over with the part you know a lot about. Quit updating stat blocks… instead, give us all-new stuff in every single product. Just stop the timeline, for the main product line, and use the revamped Arcane Age line to talk about future and past civilizations… that’s what the line was made for.

So it’s 1357, period. The Time of Troubles may happen next year, or it may not, depending on who’s DMing. There is no return of Netheril, or Myth Drannor, or Imaskar, or Miyeritar, yet. Those places live in the past, and perhaps the future, along with post-spellplague Abeir-Toril. Tell us about Now, and tell us something about the past and future, but leave the decisions up to individual gaming groups.

On a related note… patience.

You have to quit killing great product lines.
I’m referring to Arcane Age, but not just Arcane Age. I don’t claim to have all the answers regarding why many people didn’t buy into Al-Qadim and Maztica and Kara-Tur and the Hordelands, but they were good ideas. Maybe you should have tested the waters with a sourcebook (and maybe a few short stories in some of the Realms anthologies) before betting the farm on them as full campaign settings. I dunno.

But that way, if there wasn’t a huge deluge of interest immediately, you’re not so deeply invested. You can periodically dip a toe in the water with some short stories and maybe an adventure here and there, and — speaking for Al-Qadim at least, interest would surely have developed.

But you pounced on it, despaired at the lack of immediate overwhelming enthusiasm from the customers, and made a full retreat to pretend it never happened, and thus came out of it with gum in your hair and a toilet paper tail on your shoe. Seriously, though… I have to think you just weren’t looking at the Al-Qadim sales figures in the right light. The product was great. Therefore something else was to blame for any lack of success. Spelljammer and Ravenloft, too, most especially Masque of the Red Death… so much potential there. You kept Planescape going for a while, which was great, but you eventually ditched that too. Neat ideas… somebody just decided that the ball should be dropped. Get rid of that person; they’re the problem… the ideas are not the problem.

In the meantime, since you’re not using them, how about you give those old copyrights to me. I need to pay off student loans and I’m pretty sure any one of your “failed” settings could be an answer. Or give me the green light to reboot the Arcane Age line, and I’ll be set with a steady income and plenty of writing to do for the rest of my life.

The Edition Wars

This is one of several thoughts/suggestions regarding the upcoming fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons (5e). Relevant news items: nytimes and wizards.

Debates over which edition of the game are “better” are going to hound each new version of any game, and it’s going to get worse not better over time. This is because, logically, whenever you change the rules, some people are going to like the old rules better, or just act out their inner instinct to be a stick in the mud. The more systems you have, the more division (and confusion) there is.

Personally, I think complaining about changes in rules is an unconscious drift from role-playing toward roll-playing. If both get the job done, why does it matter what dice you roll or what the modifiers are? But fine. This is an issue. Here’s how you solve it.

Support all versions of the rules.

1e, 2e, 3e, 3.5e, 4e, 5e… all need to be valid. With each new ruleset, you’ve lost customers. Some of them eventually come back, some don’t. Do you want them back, or not?

There are no wrong ways to play. This is role-playing, not roll-playing. So stop emphasizing the switch from old to new. Review the old versions of the game, purely from a balance/fairness angle, and don’t change them but put up a free .pdf for each ruleset with a few suggested alternations to improve play for everyone.

One of the things this accomplishes is justifying your decision to make each new ruleset in the first place. Give us some reasons to believe that it wasn’t just greed, and it wasn’t just someone pulling rank and changing the rules to match his/her style.

Most importantly, make it clear to DMs and players that they can play any version of your game; you appreciate their loyalty regardless of their choice.

The Crunch-Fluff Debate

This is one of several thoughts/suggestions regarding the upcoming fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons (5e). Relevant news items: nytimes and wizards.

You’ve been screwing this up since (at least) 2e. Stat blocks are a waste of space, and they create the need to put updated stat blocks in future products. This increases the amount of wasted space… or, rather, it decreases the amount of creative output you have to pay the author for, which gets the conspiracy theorists among us thinking that you’re doing it on purpose. Things which make us suspicious of you are obviously bad policy. Here’s how you solve it.

Stop putting ruleset-specific stuff in the setting material.

No more stat blocks in campaign setting books or regional sourcebooks. Yes, they can be in adventures, but only when they’re not simply reprints of stuff that’s in other sources.

NPC stat blocks should go in pdf documents which are setting-specific and ruleset-specific and available to everyone from the wizards website. So the “5e FR NPCs” document will have 5e stat blocks for notable Realms NPCs, while the “2e FR NPCs” document will have all the same people with 2e stat blocks.

Why pdf documents online? Because they can be updated there without the expense (your production and our purchase) of new books. Furthermore, if they’re alphabetized, DMs can print out the ones they need instead of having to carry yet another book to their gaming table.

Why go to all the trouble of making separate documents for NPCs? Well, there is a precedent; you’ve already done it: the Hall of Heroes. This would be more concise than that book, though, because I’m talking about nothing but stat blocks. And if you do it right, you should be able to generate these stat blocks with a computer both quickly and neatly. So don’t bother whining about the expense… I will not believe you.

Furthermore, an NPC document gathers all the stat blocks in one place. No more having to look each person up in the indices of multiple books —and then cursing you (WotC) for your inability to produce indices— and having to pause the game while we flip through books looking for stat blocks. Just open up the pdf and there they are in alphabetical order.

Realmslore goes in the FR books, Eberron-lore or whatever you want to call it goes in Eberron books. Stat blocks, however, have nothing to do with lore, and add nothing to the setting. They’re just crunch, and they should go in a different place… the alternative is 5-6 versions of each stat block in each book, and I don’t think any DM or player wants that.

Cheap Moves

This is one of several thoughts/suggestions regarding the upcoming fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons (5e). Relevant news items: nytimes and wizards.

Using the last page of the book (or, like in City of Splendors, a whopping 3 pages) for advertisements is a cheap move. So is using a big font, or wide margins. So is putting watermarks and/or edge-art on the paper (in a completely transparent effort to justify wide margins) …and then complaining about costs, so that you can jack up the price of the books while simultaneously giving us less campaign material.

Stop being a cheap whiny jerk.

We want inexpensive books which are filled with useful campaign stuff. You want to maximize profits. Both of these are logical, and neither of them is going away, so you need to find a combination that works for both of us. Because —duh— your bottom line is not our responsibility.

My suggestions: cheap paper, cheap printing, no watermarks, and no interior artwork. Spend the budget for each book on the text of the book. Be nice to your authors and they’ll keep writing for you… kinda weird how that works out, isn’t it. Do not jerk us around with a 12 point font or 1”+ margins. Don’t blow your budget on crappy art. That painting may be beautiful, in person, but reducing it to 8.25×10.8 and xeroxing it onto a page kinda kills it, and more to the point… it takes away from the verbiage without adding anything to my game. And that’s why, no matter how good the art is (and much of it isn’t) it becomes an annoyance when it’s inside a sourcebook.

Expensive books cut down on your profits… fewer people buy them, because it’s far more economical to borrow our friends’ books. Even those who do buy the books often wait a month or three after the book is released, so that they can see what everybody who bought it thinks about it before spending their own hard-earned dollars.

You want to attract young players? Even half a second of half-drunk thought while half-awake would tell you that charging 30-40 dollars per book is not the way to do it. 12 yr olds don’t have jobs, and most of them aren’t living in Hollywood with rich parents who encourage them to play D&D. Kids are buying your books with their freakin’ allowance. I know, because I did. That means they’ll only be able to get a book every couplefew months, if they can save up that much before blowing it on the movies or ice cream. The story doesn’t change much in high school or college, although cigarette and coffee habits are too-often added to the expense list and college textbooks are pure insanity. Over 600 bucks for one semester; true story. And after college, folks with kids are pretty much doomed to a tight budget.

Summary… do I spend this 40 bucks on the new D&D book, or do I keep my WoW subscription for the next 3 months and just borrow my friend’s book when I need to make a new character? Or *gulp* do I ask out that pretty girl in math class? You are hewing, assembling, and nailing your own coffin. Reduce the cost of playing the game, while increasing the quality of your product, or go the way of the dinosaurs.

Art

This is one of several thoughts/suggestions regarding the upcoming fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons (5e). Relevant news items: nytimes and wizards.

I don’t know anything about the history between TSR/WotC/Hasbro and artists, but judging by what I’m seeing in a lot of D&D products I have to conclude that you’ve driven the good artists to hate you. So the first piece of advice is that you should stop doing that. Also:

No more interior art.

Keep the maps; those are good, but other interior art does not help anything.

It’s not that art is bad, per se. Certain types of art, in particular, would be great. Portraits of (in)famous NPCs and locations, renderings of certain spell effects, historically significant battle scenes, and so forth. They should not, however, be in the campaign setting book or regional sourcebooks, and especially not in adventures.

Instead, art should be on a dvd, sold alongside but not bundled with the printed material. In the name of whatever you hold sacred, don’t bundle it. Why? Because you obviously won’t have a whole dvd’s-worth of images to go with each sourcebook… and I will not pay $10 on top of the base product cost for 5 digitized watercolors that look like a 5-year old might have just tossed a couple buckets of colored water at the wall. And because —if it’s good— some people who don’t even play D&D will be interested in the art. You’ll make up the cost of producing these dvds by charging no more than $20 and making sure we’re getting more than our money’s worth. Rule of thumb: if it looks like fingerpainting, I’m not going to buy it… ‘cuz I can do fingerpainting, myself.

As far as watercolor that a 5-year old couldn’t do, very little of what I’ve seen in D&D books, since the beginning of D&D, has been as good as http://bcduncan.deviantart.com/gallery/. And no; I’ve never even met her, but she’s an amazing artist. Your art director(s) should spend a couple lunches every week, if they don’t already, browsing deviantart and other art communities. I’m sure many of the artists would be willing, or even eager, to be featured in a collection of art and role-playing materials in exchange for a fair price.

Maps

This is one of several thoughts/suggestions regarding the upcoming fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons (5e). Relevant news items: nytimes and wizards.

This is one of my pet peeves. Hey… these are my suggestions, so you get to hear about my pet peeves. Everybody else can tell you about theirs.

Stop changing the maps.

I’m looking at you, people-who-did-the-3e-FR-map. Expand and improve, but don’t move things around just so it will fit better on the page. I’m not a cartographer, so I can’t tell you in technical terms what a huge screwup that is, but I can tell you as a gamer… and based on what I saw on the forums, I wasn’t alone in my reaction.

You pissed me off, by giving me a map which is superficially appealing but which forces me to decide which version of the Realms I want to play in and renders either the earlier or later maps completely useless. This was compounded by 4e, when you changed the map again. I sense a pattern developing, and I don’t like it.

If you released updates of the 1e/2e maps with each new edition, the ship of my objection would lose a lot of the wind in its sails. However, you did not, which means avast, ye scurvy knave! Walk the plank!

RSE

This is one of several thoughts/suggestions regarding the upcoming fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons (5e). Relevant news items: nytimes and wizards.

Do I really even need to address this? Is this really something that needs to be explained?

Apparently so, since as of 4e you’re still relying on them.

Stop.

Just stop. %#&$!*&^%$ing stop! It damages the setting, while contributing nothing positive. Nothing. I would try to google this, to see “your version of the story” but the thing is… it doesn’t matter what you think. You’re wrong. Quit explaining new rulesets with catastrophic events. No, it doesn’t explain anything. It does not create a context for the changes. It’s not creative, no matter how many geniuses worked on trying to explain it.

If you need a spellplague or a mass-ungodding to explain why you’re changing something, that’s a huge blatantly obvious indication that you shouldn’t change that thing. DMs and players see these indications, given how huge and blatantly obvious they are, even if you don’t see them.

This really translates to the biggest thing you should change in 5e:

Stop being freegin idiots.

Dear WotC: You have some smart people there. Quit making us think they’re all single-digit-IQ morons because their names are attached to ridiculously stupid decisions that are your fault.

Somewhere around age 12, when school counselors started asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I got this idea in my head that working for TSR would be the coolest job ever. Roll dice and play games all day! Write adventures and sourcebooks! Go to cons! Be a nerd and be proud of it!

Today, I would rather drive a garbage truck for a living than work for WotC. I think I could be the Dirty Jobs guy on tv before I would take a job at WotC that didn’t include total ownership of the company and freedom to fire everybody above the rank of Chambermaid. (I’m pretty sure that while that’s probably not an actual job title at WotC, the job duties are roughly the same)

So here’s an IQ test: what does that tell you? All of us are sitting out here sighing and nodding in understanding. You, in the suit, sitting at the cherry wood desk in an office with a view… what does it mean to you when someone realizes, without ever meeting you in person, that scraping sewage out of a cesspit would be less crappy than working for you?

It may seem that I’ve veered off the original topic of RSE, but the real topic here is intelligence. If the right people had it, none of us would be in this mess.

Retconning

This is one of several thoughts/suggestions regarding the upcoming fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons (5e). Relevant news items: nytimes and wizards.

Don’t retcon. When you royally screw up, don’t screw up again by attacking it with a giant magic marker. Doing that just makes you look childish… or like the government. Here’s how you fix it.

When you screw up, acknowledge it and talk to us.

It’s the DM’s right (and I would argue responsibility) to remove stupid things from the game. However, DMs are people too, and we don’t always see things from your point of view. In fact, since you know what you’re going to be releasing in the next year or so, and we don’t… you should assume that we never see things from your point of view. We are completely in the dark about your intentions. We do, however, remember your screwups in the past. This is not a positive situation for either side.

So when you get a bunch of negative feedback on something, you should make a tactful “press release” —to DMs and players, not to the Wall Street Journal— acknowledging that you’re seeing that some folks dislike this particular event in this particular setting. Give us some creative suggestions about how we can (A) put a spin on the event to minimize the negative impact on play and create some interesting opportunities out of it, or (B) eliminate that specific event while still using the other material in that sourcebook. This allows us to (1) see that you’re sensitive to our reactions, and (2) get as much value as possible out of each sourcebook without trashing the book or the entire edition in frustration because it seems like everything that comes after that depends on this wacko event that we have no intention of including in our game.

If you need a practical example, consider the players that you flat-out repulsed with the Time of Troubles. Not only were you changing the rules of the game they had enjoyed up until that point, but you were also trashing the Realms at the same time with this bizarre the-gods-are-duking-it-out-on-faerun-and-every-mage-is-a-wild-mage-now plotline. That was a big deal. 4e was even worse.

This ties in with RSEs, addressed elsewhere… ideally, you’ll stop making these stupid mistakes, but when they sneak in at least respect the setting and your customers enough to help us work around them.

Murghyr

This information is intended for use with the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game.

At a Glance

The capital and westernmost city of Murghôm.

Notable Residents

Source

Disclaimer

Wizards of the Coast, Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, Forgotten Realms, and their logos are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC in the United States and other countries. This blog is not affiliated with, endorsed, sponsored, or specifically approved by Wizards of the Coast LLC.