Gathering the Magic

I see that the Stone of Destiny has started its move from Edinburgh down to England for the coronation. Meanwhile, the Pope has apparently sent splinters of the True Cross, likewise for use in the coronation.

I'm sure there's a D&D plotline there: a new monarch is to be crowned, but this requires that suitable magical regalia be gathered from around the kingdom. But some of the items have fallen into the hands of those seeking advantage. Who is responsible, and what nefarious agenda are they pursuing?

D&D: Honour Among Thieves

I had a window of opportunity on Monday, and so made my way out to see the new D&D movie. I was lucky to catch it - it had already left our local cinema, and none of the other nearby ones had shows I could catch. Luckily the one near my parents' had a couple of showings, which meant I stepped back in time. That said, they've refitted their screens with reclining chairs for all customers, which was a pleasant surprise. And so, I sat down in an almost deserted cinema to watch the film.

And it's okay. It's a perfectly fine film, a diverting way to spend a couple of hours, with the same blend of action and comedy one might expect from a "Guardians of the Galaxy" or recent "Thor" film. The cast were all pretty good, the pacing was good. It was all good.

And almost completely unmemorable. Indeed, almost all of the best bits of the film had already been released, in the form of the trailers, TV spots, and other promotions. What was left was the connecting tissue, which was all fine but was mostly just... there.

Ultimately, my view is... yeah, it's okay.

On the plus side, it isn't the cinematic abomination that was the previous films, so that's a positive. On the other hand, that's not exactly a high bar to reach. And I'm struggling to find a reason to watch this one over, say, watching "Guardians of the Galaxy" again (which is funnier, more action packed, and just generally a bit better on every metric).

Make of that what you will, I guess.

Filling the Gaps

As I've said over on Part Five, I very much enjoyed the final season of "Picard". However, I didn't find it as game-friendly as the first season, so don't have a huge amount to say here, except to note that this now leaves me with three premises for Star Trek campaigns that I might be interested to follow up. Although I should probably note that they're all essentially the same premise...

• I've mentioned my concept for the campaign where the party are the crew of the Enterprise B, in the time between "Generations" and the eventual replacement of the ship with the Enterprise C seen in "Yesterday's Enterprise".
• There's scope for an almost identical campaign featuring the Enterprise F, in the time between the eventual end of the Enterprise E and the start of "Picard".
• And, of course, there is scope for another, almost identical, campaign set after the end of "Picard", with the party being the crew of some other Federation ship as they deal with the aftermath of that one. Though I wouldn't set that one on the Enterprise, as I daresay we're liable to see that again.

All that said, my inclination would be to stick with the Enterprise B concept, largely because your first idea is generally your best. But it's nice to think that there are always possibilities.

Cards

D&D has an awful lot of spells and magic items, but a good character sheet should run to no more than a handful of pages (the fewer the better - a single side would be ideal). But there are various areas where more information would be useful, giving the player a handy reference to what their spells, magic items, and indeed class powers can do - ideally, this should not be the PHB, but rather an extract that shows only the specific items that are relevant to that character.

To that end, I've found spell cards in their various forms extremely useful for 5e. I haven't, as yet, found an equivalently good set of magic item cards - too many of the sets contain far too few of some very common items in favour of showing all the most obscure items in the book. And while cards for class powers do exist, these are even less useful, since so many class powers are adjusted by the character's capabilities. In many ways, the ideal would be the equivalent of the old 4e Character Builder, which generated the appropriate cards, and customised them for the individual character.

Hopefully OneD&D will include this functionality (if D&D Beyond doesn't already!). The downside of that, of course, being that it means buying in to the whole OneD&D ecosystem, which I'm less that keen to do!

Bigger <> Better

A few years ago I read through the rereleased 1st edition of the WEG Star Wars RPG, and was struck by how light and breezy it is. I'm currently running through the final edition of the same game, which pulls together the results of many years of development and expansion, and while it is the same game, and while many of the improvements are nice, as a whole the thing just falls flat.

I found exactly the same thing with Shadowrun, which had an excellent 1st edition, a 2nd edition that made several improvements but also added more 'stuff', then a 3rd edition that became massively complex, and then a 4th edition that changed the underlying ruleset and became, in my opinion, almost entirely unplayable (at least for a newcomer).

The upshot: bigger is not the same as better, and especially in the case of RPG rules it may well be the opposite.

Of course, that mostly restates one of my long-held beliefs: if you cannot present the core of your entire ruleset in a single 250ish-page hardback book, you're doing something wrong.

Completed: Desolation Island

After a break of several weeks for vacation, "Isles of Dread" resumed today with a big showdown with the Survivalist faction. After a hard-fought battle the party emerged victorious, defeating and capturing the Survivalists and driving off the traitor Kellen Son of Kærn. However, in the battle the Survivalists' stores were destroyed, including almost all of the gunpowder supplies.

The party now embark on an exploration of the rest of the Isles in Part Three of the campaign. What mysteries may lie beyond their temporary home? And will Kellen re-emerge to threaten them again?

2023 is not D&D's Year

There is still a long way to go, but right now it is looking like 2023 is not to be D&D's year. The year started with comments from within Hasbro that the brand was under-monetized (meaning they wanted more money for no more investment), coupled with other statements that they were "betting big" on the brand.

WotC then promptly declared war on their own consumer base with the OGL fiasco, leading to an humiliating defeat, a complete reversal, and indeed the release of key parts of their IP under a Creative Commons license.

The second part of their big bets was the D&D movie which, despite positive reviews, appears to have made a fairly sizeable loss. So that's not looking too healthy. (Still, at least it's not the toxic bin fire that was the older movies!)

The upcoming slate of products for 2023 is, frankly, anemic and unimpressive. There's only one that is of even marginal interest... and that interest drops with every etail they reveal.

Meanwhile, the final strand of their big bets are the development of "One D&D" - a massive investment into a Virtual Tabletop just as the end of the pandemic removes the demand for such a thing, and a new version of the game that is looking more and more like "D&D 5e 2nd Edition" - a version of the game that changes a load of mechanics that people were mostly happy with, fails to tackle the underlying issues in a creaking system, and makes a whole bunch of lore changes to pacify people who largely don't play the game, will be mostly oblivious to them, and anyway have no real intention of being appeased.

Frankly, at this point if I were a Hasbro exec, I would be taking a really close look at it, with a view to trying to cut my losses. Because 2023 isn't likely to be a success for the brand, and 2024 ain't looking too hot either.

Character Building and the Three Pillars

Following on from my previous post, one other big change I would make to character creation in D&D (that they definitely won't be making, worse luck) would be to have the character's class determine how they interface with the Combat pillar of the game and everything else about the character (ancestry, feats, proficiencies, even sub-class) determine how the character interface with the Exploration and Social pillars.

The key consequences here are that every character will be useful in combat (which is, frankly, the core experience of D&D) and every character will also be useful outside of combat. Furthermore, this means that you don't ever have to choose between eking out every possible combat bonus or being useful in the social or exploration arenas.

But, as I said, that's definitely not the way they'll be going. Having cleverly identified the three pillars of the game (albeit not actually knowing what one of those is), they've made sure to focus just about everything on one of them.

No More Half-elves?

Apparently, with the move to One D&D, WotC have decided to remove half-elves and half-orcs as 'species' options in their own right - players will be advised to choose whichever of human and elf/orc makes for the closer match for their character, and go with that. (This does have the advantage that it makes half-dwarves, half-halflings, elf-dwarves, or whatever trivially easy to handle.)

On the one hand, I'm not keen on this approach - for all that it's probably driven by their drive to remove problematic material, it feels like they're doing it by erasure of mixed-race folk, which seems rather counter-productive. Plus, of course, every edition of the game that has removed half-orcs has failed abysmally. (And I would prefer not to have orcs as a PC race. But that ship has long since sailed.)

On the other hand, I'm inclined to think that a better approach to mixed species in general would be to introduce "elf heritage" traits alongside each species description, allowing people to mix and match species as they go (and even allow those to be selected later to handle "discovered heritages" during play).

But, actually, I'm now coming to the view that the thing to do with species is to remove it from the mechanical expression of a character entirely. Instead, transfer all the various racial traits (darkvision and the like) into feats/advantages/traits/whatever, and then allow the player to choose from the wider list as they want. The character can then be described as belonging to any of the species (or a mix of any of the species) that exist in the setting.

(Ultimately, I don't think it matters if Gimli has darkvision because of his dwarven heritage, Geralt has darkvision because of his mutations, or Arya has darkvision because of her mystical training - it's the same trait, and all justifications work. And, likewise, one could easily argue that a dwarf who has lived his whole life on the surface may lack darkvision entirely, as it has atrophied with time.)