B4: The Lost City is a classic module for D&D. At one point it (in)famously stops giving full description of the rooms but instead lists monsters in each area and tells the DM to figure out why they’re here themselves. Once the reprint will show up in new anthology, I’m sure people who complain online whenever WotC uses “ruling not rules” or “DM decides” or “these parts were left for the DM to fill in” in their design (and then continues buying WotC books to keep bitching and doesn’t touch 3rd party or other games for some reason) is going to be normal about it. /s
Idk. I kinda of expect that when I buy something that all the information I would need would be present. But, I guess if you like having some of the information only, then it makes sense there’s no rules for sailing space ships in the space sailing book. Especially since they charge you the same for modules with half the information in them as modules that have all the information in them.
Really d&d 5e is a mid system from an increasingly mid company.
Then why are you still buying from them? It was well-known they do this before Spelljammer, why did you keep buying?
Oh I’m not. I don’t even play 5e anymore unless someone else is running it. I moved my setting and campaigns to Savage Worlds.
I did so because I don’t like that WotC sells me books that are half baked and claims it’s up to GM to write the content they paid for.
Also the entire debacle the other year with the OGL.
Spelljammer and the OGL were what drove me to GURPS.
I don’t need a book’s permission to use my imagination. I buy a book to have play tested and balanced content.
Yea this is 100% the issue here. If I wanted to make content, I would, if I purchase a book with content for a specific setting or scenario, then there had better be that content in it.
Honestly, if the campaign settings said “This is where you should make your own shit up” I’d be fine with it, but most of the time they’re just poorly thought out and that’s an excuse for when people ask questions.
I don’t buy WotC after OGL, but I do not think it’s necessairly bad to leave some things up for DM’s decision. maybe not sailing rules, but still
There is leaving space for the DM to inject some creativity, and then there’s deciding that you don’t need to actually produce a complete product because you know your customers will do it for you anyway.
I mean, it’s not like any of the published rules are mandatory. Just because they’re in a book doesn’t mean you need to use them. But them being in the book means you don’t need to come up with your own half-baked, undocumented, and inconsistent “rulings” if you don’t want to.
And, frankly, it’s not a symmetric situation. Published materials are suggestions that, ideally, are crafted by experts and well play-tested that may be ignored if chosen. Unpublished materials cannot be opted into.
Also if its from the developers of the system you also, hopefully, can assume that they are keeping with their own visions and intentions which should be healthy for the system. Even if its just “Story” content, it’d be really weird to see a room full of random sci-fi crap in what has up until that point been mostly a gritty fantasy dungeon. Also, people can rail against this all they want, but people tend towards authority. The developers and publishers saying X feat or edge or whatever is useable in X setting, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for inter-group bickering about it, but even then its opt-in.
To go one step further, it’s not just that their customers will fill in the gaps, they’ll also take the blame.
The DM struggles with a products that provides them with little to no support? “Skill issue. You just need a good DM.”
The DM works doggedly to fill in and paper over the gaps? Sure, they’ll appreciate the DM, but WotC gets some credit because “This module is so much fun!”
Why do you think everyone buys their shitty products? I’d bet most actual hobbyists haven’t played dnd in a decade or more, partly because of this crap.
Personally, I’m not. The last WotC product I bought was Fizban, I think. At that point they had already started disappointing with the quality of their content, and it only got worse and worse with even removing huge amounts of content from already-purchased books in digital form. I wasn’t playing much during the pandemic, but when I finally picked it up again last year, I decided to switch to Pathfinder 2e. Both a much better product and a much better company producing said product.
you know why gamefreak games suck (to use an unrelated example)? People that will just accept whatever garbage is given to them without complaint instead of having standards. If I’m buying an adventure path i expect it to be complete. Hell that applies to dnd broadly as well, awful, incomplete, overpriced game that it is.
I don’t see the problem with making my own story or filling into the blanks, but I’m not spending money on a product to do that. My imagination is free, I don’t need WotC’s permission to use it.
If you want me to pay for your overpriced books, at least make sure that those books are complete and ready to run. Running DnD modules is, for me, more exhausting than coming up with a homebrew setting. With my homebrew setting I’m in full control of my world and I know what’s where and why things are the way they are. With official modules I’m forced to read a (often poorly worded) world, trying to discern what the author’s intent was, and attempting to salvage as much of a broken product as possible while also making shit up to fill in the abysmal plot hooks and narrative progression full of plot holes and whatnot. At that point I’d much rather throw that shit in the garbage where it belongs and play my own setting.
Now, not all of the paid modules are disappointing, but most are. For example, I’d really want to buy and run the anthologies, as I find them a lot more interesting than full modules (I enjoy running my homebrew content, so I’d use anthologies as plot hooks and filler episodes in-between my own adventure), but I’m not paying for a book that has 20-ish adventures, of which only half are actually good. If there’s no quality control, or your bar is so low that fucking Book of Ravens got printed, then you clearly aren’t even trying.
I think it’s mostly cowardice, personally. People don’t want to risk putting their own choices into a game based entirely on choices, just in case they aren’t as good. It’s better to use someone else’s decisions than risk your own pride.
Then you have ignorance. A lot of people don’t know how to fill the gaps, and WotC has never bothered teaching them how. Any rules they did get are rules of thumb and aren’t something to use without thought (like CR), so people complain for reason 1 again.
I disagree. DM’s always have the ability to put in their own choices and, in this case, room descriptions, regardless of what a module says. But that is work, and one of the things you buy a module for.
To make an extreme example, imagine I sold a campaign module called Blank Slate, where every page just says “and then you decide what happens next” and “decide what rooms are in this dungeon and what monsters are there.”
Any rules they did get are rules of thumb and aren’t something to use without thought (like CR)
And combat encounter building is a core pillar of the game. It should not be a loosey goosey “rule of thumb”. If anything, it should be the most reliable set of instructions in the book.
But some monsters are strong against certain builds and weak against others. Some monsters are stronger in certain environment and entirely nullified by others. Some monsters are stronger given certain allies and weaker when alone.
If you could devise a system to assign monster complexity based on every scenario you can imagine that monster being part of, then either that’s an astonishingly small number of scenarios or an absurdly complex calculation to force on anyone.
Bullshit man. Pathfinder 2e had incredibly tight math behind it’s design and very simple ways for dms to use it, dnd could easily do the same. Especially since dnd’s direction seems to be about giving as little mechanical choice to the players as possible.
They could make a program where you give it the players’ character sheets and the encounter and it simulates a bunch of battles to see how they do. But failing that, you could make CR be a good average, where you could just look at that and adjust based on what the strengths and weaknesses are. I haven’t actually played 5e so I don’t know this from personal experience, but my impression is that they haven’t done that. Some creatures just don’t have a CR that matches them in general.
There’s also no system for figuring out the CR of an encounter with an arbitrary set of monsters and enemies with class levels.
But some monsters are strong against certain builds and weak against others.
That sounds like a party composition problem, then. Don’t everyone play ice mages and then walk into a volcano.
Some monsters are stronger in certain environment and entirely nullified by others.
Sounds like monster creation rules need to be figured out before publishing the books, then.
Some monsters are stronger given certain allies and weaker when alone.
Again, monster creation rules should be reliable. And they shouldn’t include context buffs that absolutely wreck the power curve.
I think it’s mostly cowardice, personally. People don’t want to risk putting their own choices into a game based entirely on choices, just in case they aren’t as good.
It’s work and effort. D&D seems to have evolved from a game of random tables and strategy that required constant improvisation from the DM, to a game of (open ended) story telling. Character death seems to be less of an option.
So now DMs think they need to build a complex story, while allowing players to make choices. They need to prepare challenging encounters that aren’t too challenging. And D&D combat tends to repetition, so they need to find ways to spice it up.
The handful of WotC modules that I’ve seen don’t support that. The module has a single path and a bunch of dull combat encounters.
A lot of people don’t know how to fill the gaps, and WotC has never bothered teaching them how.
This. I’m reading the Cyberpunk RED sourcebook now. I really appreciate the GM hints and suggestions. I don’t remember anything like that in the 5e DMG.
Any rules they did get are rules of thumb and aren’t something to use without thought (like CR), so people complain for reason 1 again.
Worse, some rules/features are holdovers from previous versions that don’t make sense in the current game.
For me, it’s not about risking my pride, it’s risking running a shitty game.
I’m not a good DM. I’m not creative, I don’t know how to balance shit, and I don’t have time to craft any sort of compelling story.
I’m only doing it so that our forever DM can have an opportunity to play the game. So if I drop 40 bucks on a module, I sure as shit want it to hold my hand through it so that I don’t ruin it.
I wasn’t a good DM either. But then I learned. I threw encounters at the players I thought might be fun, and I missed the mark almost every single time. But my players had fun, so I don’t see the problem in getting those encounters wrong. And every failure taught me so much more than every success.
If you fail, but you keep it fun and learn for the future, what have you lost? Only your pride.
