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Thanks Nem!

Thanks for the preorder link! And yes, I have long suspected that publishers, television and movie studios lurk DreamLyrics. I hear ideas for games or characters, and poof... suddenly a few months later they arrive on the screen. Timing? Or.. is it espionage?

I did see the eversion is $29 a bit cheaper than the hardback version. However there is a discount if you buy both, $10 for the electronic version if you preorder both of them.

Preorder Link

The new Dungeons & Dragons 2024 Digital bundle is $89.97

I've got to look into what or whether being a D&D Beyond Master Tier subscriber gives me.

I've gotta wonder what is worth spending beer money on compared to the version I have already <weg>

No beer ever lasted 10 years for me.

Most of the beers I drink I have been drinking for more than 10 years. Every once in a while, I find a new one to add to the rotation <vbg>

Mike you rent beer, not buy it. It just doesn't stay long.

Tell that to the liquor store <weg>

Online shops are now showing the UK release dates for the books. 17 Sep for PHB, 12 Nov for DMG and 18 Feb 2025 for MM in the UK. I generally buy from the Magic Madhouse in Enfield as they're amongst the cheapest and they have each book listed for £28.99, cheaper than Amazon.

https://magicmadhouse.co.uk/tabletop-games/dungeon-dragons/dungeons-and-dragons-2024

On a tangent, still no sign of print versions of either Shadow of the Weird Wizard or 13th Age Second Edition, both being highly anticipated D&D knock-offs.

I backed the 13th Age Second edition Kickstarter. It is still in testing. I have the Gamma play test draft. They anticipate next year for actual printing, though it might be late this fall.

I also own the PDF of both The Secrets of the Weird Wizard and The player book. Reading slowly. It happens when your reading shelf looks like the Titanic going down!

Pande, do you know if you have the latest version of the Weird Wizard documents with the improved layouts and pro artwork?

I looked at the first version that was a bit shoddy in those regards.

They are a little bit better, but yes, they are still rough draftish. I am hoping by purchasing on Drivethru, that when things get to a more final layout, I will get the updated version. Though they are still better than most any White Wolf book I have ever owned.

Not difficult

Exactly!

After watching many of the promo videos and reviews of D&D 2024 I've become increasingly dissatisfied with the whole direction of 5th Edition tbh.

I don't feel like tactical complexity is being added to the game yet I don't feel like it's getting more streamlined either. It feels like it's just getting denser. More crud to fill up your character sheet and pick through at the table.

So I bought Five Torches Deep and I think I'll use that for my next mini-campaign. It's mechanical a lightened 5e with an OSR pitch, so less races, lower hit points all-round, etc. This should mesh nicely with the adventure I'm using, X1: The Isle of Dread.

The downside with Five Torches Deep is that it's so terse that the GM often needs familiarity with D&D to know what the designers are talking about at times. There is no "What is Role-Playing?" chapter, for example.

Another downside is the brand new book smells like old socks!

Do you ever feel like much of it is "change for the sake of change, OR how can we sell more of those expensive books?"

I'd say both <weg>

I agree with both of you guys. When I'm at the table, I already intentionally don't invoke a lot of rules to speed play or blur restrictive rules so as not to curtail creative ideas. Players look so downhearted sifting through the crud on their character sheets. It frustrates me.

I think one of the top goals of D&D's owners is to push players onto D&D Beyond, by making the rules so dense that it needs a character creator or digital tabletop to run. In essence, I think they see the future as the GM sitting at the table with a laptop and the players running characters off of their smartphones or tablets.

Not the future, Neil. That is the present. AFAIK those who play with paper, pencil, and real dice are a tiny, and shrinking, minority.

nem, this is very much what is happening. And there are analogue (but not analog) pursuits with other systems like Pathfinder 2e (using HeroLab or other tools). For "broadcast style" gaming and remote gaming, some people find this as a timesaver. I honestly like the tools for character creation for Pathfinder and D&D because it does all the hard stuff for you, when it works of course. And I am very much someone who is a bit OCD about the weeds of the rules and getting things "right" vs just kicking back. But if I'm sitting down to play, I just like pencil and paper.

I wanted to mention before when you were talking Five Torches Deep, that the "what is an RPG?" usual opening chapter I usually skip. But I read what they did with Pathfinder 2e and found it pretty thoughtfully done.

Aye, I concur. Sometimes you do get a good "What is Role-playing?" chapter but usually I start then quickly skip.

Five Torches Deep is a bit disingenuous though. It is an ultra-lite version of 5e with an OSR twist but only achieves its tiny word count by assuming you know 5e and OSR games already. So in fact, it's not really a standalone game.

That's fine for me; it's aimed squarely at me. A GM who wants to unburden their 5e games and play more in an OSR style. But I couldn't recommend it to someone instead of 5e.

I must admit, I do love a good character generator too! As long as it has a print feature.

I was very against signing up for the subscription for Hero Lab Online. I have a legacy version for my first edition Pathfinder campaign that's so absolutely invaluable, when I got this new computer built, that was the main thing I was making sure was still functional with the hardware guy.

BUT I did just take the plunge because I was getting frustrated with the other Pathfinder 2e stuff out there (and don't get me started on @&@@^!!# D&D Beyond) and the Hero Lab Online is pretty great. Good interface if you want to keep electronic, where you can trigger conditions etc and see the effects across the sheet immediately, but the pdfs generated are good too. I don't know if they have yet to have anyone test a PDF out of D&D Beyond. All the choices as to what gets how much space, etc, they make are garbage.

Vryx, I disagree with your blanket hatred of DnDBeyond. There is some crap but there's lots of good and I say this as someone that runs games through there.

What is going on with DnD2024 may irritate some but not me and I know, from the way my (much) younger players react to it, they are all bought in on the type of stuff that is pissing off many of my contemporaries (folks at or near retirement age). The loudest boos that I hear are about the potential to monetize the game in the new 3D VTT that will be part of DnDBeyond. I'm signed up for the Beta test and I'll report back.

Another thing, please elaborate by what you mean when you say "I don't know if they have yet to have anyone test a PDF out of D&D Beyond." No games are run, per se, from PDFs on DnDBeyond (yet). It's more of a resource library at this point. And when I run my FTF game, PCs are created in DnDBeyond. I create monsters, magic items, spells and such over there and import the data into the VTT that I use (Foundry hosted on Forge).

I do have a lot of questions about what the DnD landscape will look like in 2025 but for now I can say that DnDBeyond is not an issue for me.

BTW 1: my SKT game here (which I co-DM with Aquadyne now) uses DnDBeyond character sheets. You can find them along the masthead.

BTW 2: I am also signed up with a Master Tier subscription and I have the 2024 Player's handbook. Note that there's also a free SRD for those who want to play without paying a dime. How can you beat that?

I would not describe my feelings as "blanket hatred" to DnD Beyond. I get it. It's there as a revenue generator for Wizards more than broadening access to players. I've used it to make characters and then had to nickel and dime to pay extra to get what I needed from the players handbook basic options. Then, printing a PDF, it doesn't have any of the useful details of spells other than things that can fit in a columnar format like ranges. It has huge areas for things that aren't that necessary like a list of organizations or a physical description, that just dump text.

Compare that to something like HeroLab that has everything you need to know without opening another resource, specified to your character.

It used to be that you could join someone's campaign and be able to make a character for it with all the source material for the campaign but then they changed it so each player also needs to buy all the source material for the campaign.

Hey, I'm glad it works for you! Are you managing the players' characters yourself? That's what I do with HeroLab so they don't need to each buy it themselves.

You are wrong about the "used to". My players update their PCs on my campaign without paying a dime. So maybe something changed after you experienced some pain? Anyhow, with my subscription I had access to all the things you say you didn't have access to. I suppose you resisted paying anything ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm also not sure about the PDF thing. For instance, I just was granted access to the 2024 Player's Handbook online. It's not paper or PDF, it's a web page with links. I would be curious about how you were trying to use DnDBeyond. The one thing it didn't have was a VTT. But that's changing and it's something I'm more than curious about.

My experience with the current batch of VTTs is that the basic environment is "ok" but money gets you options. For instance, in Roll20, you needed to buy monster tokens. That pissed me off. I made my own with Token Maker. But then I needed to be a programmer (which I was before I retired) to do anything fancy. My brother decided to try the Foundry route (via Forge) and that's cool too - better IMO than Roll20. But there too, in order to get what I want, I needed to patronize module authors. These modules are bolt-on tools do cool things so I shelled out a buck or two. But as Foundry upgraded their systems, module authors fell behind and now every few months or so my brother and I need to do QA regression testing to make sure everything still works. We are way behind in upgrades. But now with DnDBeyond coming out with a (fully integrated) VTT it may make Foundry and Roll20 obsolete. And when will they pull the plug on those 3rd parties and try to monopolize the VTT market?

So this is an inflection point. The results of the Sigil beta and the rollout of Dnd2024 will likely impact my play for the next decade.