Ultimate Campaign

I got the Pathfinder book "Ultimate Campaign" as a Christmas present, and finally finished reading it yesterday. To be honest, it was a book I had always thought would be interesting enough, but didn't really have any burning desire to own, read, or use. (The problem is that I needed to pick out some Christmas presents for people to give me, and nothing leapt to mind.)

It turns out that this is one of the better RPG books I own, and one that's pretty widely applicable, beyond even Pathfinder - most of what it covers would work just as well with any system, and much of the rest would fit 3e, 4e, or probably 5e without too much hassle. It's certainly not a must-have, even for Pathfinder DMs, but like 3e's "Unearthed Arcana" it's certainly a nice-to-have.

The book opens with a chapter on character traits. This is something Pathfinder introduced early on - at the start of the campaign each PC can choose one or two background traits to customise his character, representing aspects of that character's background. (5e, of course, has exactly the same notion in "backgrounds", and it's also quite similar to 2nd Ed's notion of character kits.) It's a decent system, if a little power-creep-y, though I think it will probably work best if the traits are mostly campaign-specific - that is, when running "Kingmaker" everyone should select a Kingmaker-trait as at least one of their choices.

The second chapter is about Downtime, and gives several options for things PCs can do between adventures. Which is all well and good, but I doubt I would ever even consider using the material here. It's just too much effort for me to bother with.

The fourth, and final, chapter contains systems for kingdom building and mass-combat. These were pioneered in the Kingmaker adventure path, and are expanded and cleaned-up here. The systems are pretty good, provided the campaign is going down that route. (Frankly, the relative lack of mass combat rules in D&D is a bit of an oversight - the old Companion boxed set had some, but otherwise they've been largely omitted. A shame.)

But the real value of the book is in the third chapter, which contains lots of "Campaign Systems" - things like Honour, and Lineage, and Fame, and more detailed Alignment tracking, and Magic Item Creation, and built-up rules for Companions (be they animal companions, familiars, cohorts, or other).

This is all good stuff, representing a selection of side dishes for the DM to consider introducing to his campaign. (And, as I discussed ages ago, those side-dishes are really quite good. You don't need them, but it seems that a long-term campaign would significantly benefit from having something more than just "orc and pie".)

It's that third chapter that represents the real value of the book. Like the 3e "Unearthed Arcana", it's not something that will be used as a cohesive whole, but it's a toolkit of stuff that the DM can use to turn his campaign into something special. It's obviously not exhaustive, but it's good nonetheless.

So, this is a book I think I would recommend for DMs, be they DMs of Pathfinder, D&D, or indeed some other game entirely. It's not the top of that list ("The Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide" from 2nd Edition is still the best book about DMing I've read), but it's definitely in there.

The Lost Mine of Phandelver

It's still a terrible name. But...

I've now read through the adventure, and it's actually very, very good. Exceptionally so, in fact - in the years since WotC bought TSR they have produced only a very few adventures that I would consider to be 'good', and not too many that are even 'okay'; this is actually one of the very best. It blows both the 4e adventures I've read ("King of the Trollhaunt Warrens" and "Tomb of Horrors") out of the water, and it outclasses all of the 3e adventures back at least as far as "Red Hand of Doom". It's even a better adventure than the highly regarded "Sunless Citadel".

In short, although I can only recommend getting the Starter Set if you intend to use this adventure, if you do have use for a starter adventure, this one is worth the price of admission by itself.

So what's so good about it?

The adventure is split into four parts. The first part is very, very basic - there are some goblins, and a small dungeon. But this is good; for new players you want something immediately understandable, and for new players to the edition you want something to take them through the rules mechanics. Still, for people who know 5e already, I recommend just skipping this part; narrate some of the outcomes, advance them to 2nd level, and go on to part two.

Part two details a basic starter town, complete with several NPCs, competing agendas, and a few mini-quests. Which is rather nice. The confrontation at the end of the chapter is a bit obvious, but even that has its moments.

Part three then provides a sandbox-y wilderness area, again with several mini-quests and two mini-dungeons.

And then part four presents a larger dungeon, this one with a fairly clear objective.

So, that's already quite varied for an introductory adventure, and is suprisingly sandbox-y and non-linear. On top of that, the adventure does two other things that are worth noting:

- In each of the mini-dungeons, and also in the full dungeon in part four, there's no one clear way to go - there are several choices throughout. Granted, most of these choices come to "which will you do first, but that's still better than the extremely-linear nature of other adventures I could name.

- There's one encounter in part three that is almost certainly beyond the PCs, and very likely to get them killed... even if they do everything 'right'. This is something WotC has studiously avoided ever since "Forge of Fury" (the second 3.0e adventure published), which caused a massive backlash. It's also something I'm very glad to see - it seems the days of being sure you can just wade through everything are gone.

There's probably more I could say about the adventure, but I'd be heading into spoiler territory. But in terms of writing, of atmosphere, and of roleplaying opportunities, this one is way ahead of the curve.

Good work!

5e: Very, Very Impressed

I managed to find some time to go through the 5e Basic Rules, and then to look through the Starter Set. I haven't managed to read all of the latter, but have read enough to know what's in it, if not the detailed spoilers.

And, as the title above says, I'm very impressed indeed. Indeed, since I expected my response to be "meh", I've have a pleasant surprise.

5e, at least as presented in Basic, is a pretty simple game. It's vastly simpler than Pathfinder, it's simpler than 3.5e, and it's simpler than 4e. In fact, it's probably the simplest version of the game since I started with Red Box Basic, waaaay back in '88. And yet it's also built on a solid, consistent foundation, so that whereas reverting back to 2nd Ed or BECMI would very quickly drive me mental with its idiosyncrasies, 5e just feels... right.

I do also note that I got something completely wrong. I had assumed that making Basic free would basically kill sales of the PHB (because, you know, the core of the game is free, so why pay?). However, on reading through the rules I found that I would really need the 'full' PHB for proper use. Because while the game had enough to get started, it would very quickly get limiting.

And yet I also got the distinct sense that moving from Basic to the PHB would not represent any significant increase in complexity, because all it would mean was the addition of more options - as far as I can see, Basic includes almost, if not all, of the combat, interaction, and exploration rules. And, other than feats and multiclassing, there doesn't seem to be much else for characters - sure, there will be more backgrounds in the PHB, but the concept of a background itself is right there, and fully explained.

Which is all to the good.

(The one concern I do have concerns the longevity of the game. As I've mentioned before, I was surprised when running "The Eberron Code" that for one player the complexity of the magic item creation rules was actually a significant boon; he liked the complexity. For other players, I know the character-building mini-game is a sigificant draw, again probably due to complexity. But as far as I can see, that's largely gone.)

Obviously, it's hard to see exactly how a game is going to be prior to actually playing it - 4e played a whole lot better than it read, for example. Still, I'm extremely positive about this new edition, in a way I wasn't previously. It may just topple 3.5e as my D&D of choice.

The Starter Set

In addition to downloading Basic, I also picked up a copy of the Starter Set for the game, and I thought it would be worthwhile doing some sort of review of that also.

The Starter Set has a RRP of $20, which due to the cruelties of VAT and import duties works out to about £17, which is quite nasty. For that, you get a box the same size as the 4e Red Box, containing a set of dice, two booklets, five pregenerated characters, and a flyer advertising... something (with a blank character sheet on the other side). Oh, and a cardboard insert designed to make the box look fuller than it actually is.

In some more detail: The dice are just dice. As with the 4e set, you get a set of 6 dice (no "d10 percentile" die), and they're all the same colour. This is somewhat disappointing on both counts, but understandable. Besides, I have dice.

The five pregen characters are fine. They're just example characters: two Fighters, a Rogue, a Cleric, and a Wizard. What's quite nice is that they do each have some personalities, quirks, backgrounds, and such detailed - these aren't just the coldly mechanical characters of so many other editions. 5e tries to bake some of that into the game from the outset; I do hope WotC (and I) can make some it stick.

(What's a little unfortunate is that WotC didn't steal the idea from the Pathfinder Beginner Box of doing each character as a two-page spread, with lots of arrows pointing to and explaining the relevant bits of the sheet.)

The flyer is fine, I guess. The character sheet on the reverse side sucks, though - the glossy paper makes it poor for photocopying. But then, that should be irrelevant, as character sheets should be available for easy download. And I'm not going to say anything about the cardboard insert.

The first of the booklets is a 32-page rulebook. This takes a subset of the Basic rules, notably not including Character Creation, and gathers it into a printed form. It's fine, but there's nothing new here.

Thus far, everything in the set is either something you probably already have (dice), or something you don't really want (the flyer, the insert), or something that can be downloaded for free from the Wizards website (the rules, the characters, the character sheet).

The only thing that is exclusive to this set, and also of value, is the second booklet, a 64-page adventure book titled "Lost Mine of Phandelver". (Which is a terrible name, but never mind.)

This has a few pages giving the DM an ultra-rapid overview of the rules he needs for running the adventure. It then has a four-part adventure, a little section on what to do next (mostly comprising of "buy our books!"), and then an appendix giving the magic items and monsters used in the adventure.

There's basically nothing here about DMing in a wider sense - it tells you what you need for this adventure, and nothing more. (Note that part of that adventure is a starter town, so you might reuse that elsewhere.)

That's something of a surprise, or rather it would be, except that WotC did actually announce that as their strategy some time ago - the Starter Set is basically aimed at a new DM with the view to getting him running "My First Adventure". It's not a general-purpose tutorial for the game (like previous Starter Sets, including the Pathfinder Beginner Box and the old Red Box with which I started). Which is fair enough, I guess - they haven't pretended it's something it's not, and I can respect that.

(Note: the adventure is the bit that I haven't read in detail, so I can't comment on whether it's a good adventure or not. It seems to be well-received, but it's a published adventure, and indeed a published adventure from WotC, so I'm not getting my hopes up.)

What that means is that you should buy the 5e Starter Set if and only if you intend to run that adventure. (Or, I suppose, if you need some monster stats and really can't wait.) Everything else is available for free, so don't waste your money.

It's actually not a bad set, though. For people who want to try DMing, a pregen adventure probably is a decent way to get started. And for existing games, a pregen adventure isn't a bad offering (though this is a somewhat pricey one, especially in the UK). I'm actually happy with the purchase, despite warning others off it.

About Other Starter Sets

It seems the Edition Wars remain alive and active, because there's a significant thread on ENWorld caused by someone doing a negative comparitive review between the 5e set and the Pathfinder Beginner Box. Still, it's an interesting question - how does this new set stack up with other starter sets?

Well, firstly, it blows the 4e Red Box out of the water. That's not that hard, right enough - the best thing about the 4e set was, in fact, the box. (A bit more seriously - the 4e set has a not inconsiderable edge in terms of the extra "stuff" in the box; power cards and the like. However, it suffers from wasting far, far too much space on useless text and/or formatting, and it commits the cardinal sin of using rules that were not quite compatible with the 'real' game.)

I don't think the 5e set actually does compare with the Pathfinder set. The thing is that they're both good starter sets, but they're very different. Perhaps more importantly, though, whoever you are and wherever you're coming from, it's near-certain that at least one of them is simply the wrong tool. If you want to learn Pathfinder, why would you even consider the 5e set? (And vice versa.)

Even if you just want to learn a role-playing game and somehow don't care which, there's probably a clear winner: do you learn better with a "how to" guide but few pre-made examples (Pathfinder)? Or do you learn better with a single extended example (5e)?

In terms of 'stuff', the Pathfinder set wins... but this is explained by (and explains) the significant price difference (PF is $35, vs $20 for 5e). Besides, if one is just the wrong tool, what good is 'stuff'? What good is a lower price?

Bottom line: Prior to the Pathfinder Beginner Box coming out, we hadn't had a good starter kit for years (decades). Now we have two, or four if you include Dragon Age and Star Wars. Regardless of which is 'better', I'm claiming that as a win.

Now... I need to find time to actually play.