2097's page

I'm not aware of any official rulings. Our table's house rule is that you can't do it.

The other core books are called Xanathar's Guide to Everything and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. (The additional monster manuals (Volo's Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes) have some additional playable lineages.)

There are also setting specific core books (a lot of their crunch was reprinted in Tasha's or Xanathar's, but the lore could be interesting).

I don't think you need all these five (or three, or seven, depending on how you count) core books to start.

I'll paste in the text from one of my blog posts.

(It was for someone coming into D&D from no RPG experience at all rather than from someone switching from 3e or PF.)

Getting started with D&D

Basic rules for level one to twenty is a PDF that's available to complement any of the stuff I'm going to recommend here, and if you are on a super tight budget, you can start and end there for zero dollars.

Starter Set

First of all, get the D&D Starter Set.

That has a good set of dice, a short and easy rulebook (32 pages), a shortened spell list, and for the DM a wonderful, small region with monsters, treasure and interesting people and some missions and stuff to do in that world.

You also get five ready-made characters and their backgrounds. They don't have a set appearance or name so the players can choose how they look, what they are called and so on.

If those characters die and you need to make new ones, you can use the PDF linked above.

Essentials Kit

The Essentials Kit is not necessary to have (the name is kind of a misnomer) but if you can afford it, the time to get it is now. As in, starting with a combination of both the Starter Set and the Essentials Kit is great.

This rule booklet is 64 pages and does cover making characters! I still recommend starting with the pregens from the Starter Set, but if they die and you wanna make new ones, now you can!

You get another set of dice (these red dice are my treasured favorite.)

You get a budget DM screen (better art than, but much flimsier than, the real one they sell separately—same rules content, though, so if you can make do with this flimsy you are set for life!) You get some honestly kinda useless cards.

The selling point is the dice and the character-making booklet and… more quests to add to the village of Phandalin in the Starter Set! It's presented as, and can be used as, a standalone adventure ("The Dragon of Icespire Peak") but it's better used mashed up together with the Starter Set.

It's not a sequel; you can run the two adventures separately (i.e. having only one of the two boxes is absolutely fine!) but they are also designed to be braided together, with stuff from the Essentials Kit being added into the Starter Set.

You can start with either box—the Starter Set for those who want ready-made characters (which I do recommend) and the Essentials Kit for when you want to make your own. Having both from the start is ♥♥♥.

Next Steps

One of the following two is going to be my recommendation once you have played several sessions out of the starter boxes. They are third-party adventures, since D&D is open source and other publishers can publish stuff for it.

• Neverland (a Peter Pan style adventure, very well organized book with a dynamic setup, anything can happen, it's not a "preset story")
• The Lost City (a pyramid in the desert. Really well set up to teach you how to run traps and exploration. If you're a new DM but you are running for players who have already done the starter boxes, this is what to get)

There is a small zine publication called Willow that's a little hard to find, but I love it, and it works great as an extension to the stuff in the starter boxes.

You can also go online and there is this fantastic site that rolls up random adventures and dungeons endlessly!

donjon.bin.sh

You can also use your imagination and remix the monsters from the starter boxes and place them on maps you make. Maybe the same rules data (called a "stat block") from a Skeleton can double as an unruly robot, or whatever you want.

What Not to Get

Hold off on getting the Player's Handbook for at least a few weeks, or even months, until you're more comfortable with the game.

I am not trying to gatekeep people from getting in to that level of play; it's a fun book with lots of options and you might be ready for it sooner than not. But the spell list is going to be twenty times longer and it's going to take time to look things up and it can bog down play.

If you do get that book, then hold off on chapter six. Multiclassing and feats are completely optional and they make the game a lot more complex. We do use them (and we use some of the extra books you can get beyond the Player's Handbook) but we waited for a long time before bringing them in.

The publishers of D&D have made some hardback adventure books but the leap in complexity from the starter boxes to these adventures is way too high. It's also… hello upsell! These adventure books "require" the Player's Handbook, the Monster Manual and the Dungeon Master's Guide. Three very expensive books.

Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Rise of Tiamat (published together as the Tyranny of Dragons), Dragon Heist, and Descent into Avernus are especially bad. Princes of the Apocalypse is a fun adventure but horribly organized and very difficult to use. Also, there are many routes but they all lead into the same conclusion, which some people like but I don't, I'm more into more open-ended play.

As far as first party stuff goes, if you absolutely want the official stamp of official, Curse of Strahd, Tomb of Annihilation, and Rime of the Frostmaiden are all fine if you can handle the horror themes in each and the weirdly colonial perspectives in some of them.

They also have a fantastic anthology book out, Tales from the Yawning Portal. Seven absolutely classic dungeons. It also requires those three expensive books (PHB/MM/DMG) unfortunately.

Miniatures

Also you definitely do not need a bunch of miniatures. Collecting, painting and constructing miniatures and their landscape is almost like a separate hobby from D&D.

My group doesn't use any miniatures at all, we just say what we do. "I run from the goblins!" To me miniatures make the game feel, well, smaller.

Some groups like to have beautiful miniatures for the player characters and then just use chess pieces or whatever for the monsters. (But what if the characters die? What happens with that beautiful miniature that they invested in?)

Here is something that I haven't tried or seen in real life, but I saw them on a video blog and I like the idea. There are six sets.

The PocketDM set

One problem with miniatures is that you can get into "my precious encounter"–behavior. You have built a fantastic landscape of some lava crystal forest and carefully painted the wonderful miniatures and then the player characters don't even go there! It's easy to get tempted into fudging play into certain situation and making it so that you get to show your precious encounter.

Good luck my friends♥

The first couple of years of 5e didn't have magic item creation rules.

The default assumption is that you can buy potions of healing easily (for around 50 gp). Some DMs remove that, while others add in potions of climbing, and some add in a lot more.

In 3e, 4e and PF1, a steady flow of magic items is inherent in the game to an extent that just isn't true in 5e. I'm running an adventure (Dyson's Delve) right now converted from B/X and my players are floored by the high amount of magic items they're getting.

In 5e's default assumptions, finding a magic sword is a true treasure.

In one of the books that came out later (Xanathar's Guide to Everything), there are optional rules that a DM might use to provide magic item crafting. Some DMs use these, some use 3pp rules instead, and some don't have any magic item crafting available.

XGE's system requires players to go on quests to fight dangerous monsters in order to get ingredients and then spend many weeks and a lot of gold crafting them.

In even later books there is a new class, the Artificier, which isn't allowed by default in every setting. That class can create some items inherently from its class abilities.

So the answer is just… it depends.

Specifically compared to 3e, 4e and Pathfinder 1 then, yeah, there is a LOT less magic in the default assumptions.

This can be tweaked for different settings to be even lower, or a lot higher.

My players in this current campaign (our ninth 5e campaign overall, and our sixth on this particular planet (al-Toril)) have more magic items than they've had in any previous campaign but that's still a lot less than a PF1 or 4e campaign would have as after this many sessions (we're thirty-six sessions in). And over half of them came from this particular B/X delve, which they've been in for (so far) four sessions out of those thirty-six.

Here is what the WotC other editions to 5e conversion document says:

Treasure. In a careful conversion of treasure, you need to create or roll treasure as if creating it from scratch for the adventure. Use the Individual Treasure and Treasure Hoard tables in chapter 7 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide to create new assortments of treasure, using what’s in the original adventure as a guideline. Be sure to read the “Treasure Tables” section of that chapter to decide how you’ll use the tables in recreating the treasure. See also the “Treasure Conversions” section later in this document.

Treasure. Adventures in previous editions often contain more treasure than is common in fifth edition. In third edition, NPCs were especially rich sources of magic items. When improvising, give out only the treasure you’re happy with the characters acquiring

In fifth edition, treasure isn’t as abundant and magic items aren’t as necessary to character performance as in previous editions. As the Dungeon Master’s Guide says, you can hand out as much or as little treasure as you want. Instead of painstakingly recreating treasure to fifth edition parameters, you can use the tables in that book as guidelines for intuitively reconstructing an adventure’s treasure. Alternatively, you can hand out whatever is in the adventure, modified to account for fifth edition constraints. One such constraint is that the highest bonus in fifth edition is usually +3, although a particularly mighty legendary item could confer a +4 bonus. A +6 weapon might have been essential for a particular fourth edition character to function, but even a +1 weapon makes a similar fifth edition character better. Although a character might have had a weapon with a high bonus in a previous edition, maintaining a correspondingly high bonus in fifth edition is unnecessary. Further, the functions of a magic weapon or armor, unrelated to its bonus, are often the most interesting aspects of the item.

Another constraint, although one that is less strict, is the amount of money and salable goods that characters can acquire. The Treasure Hoard tables in the Dungeon Master’s Guide show appropriate amounts for accumulated treasure. At each level, a party of adventurers has access to two or three hoards from the appropriate hoard tables.

I definitely messed up in that regard for this particular expedition!

I guess this is why I favor RAW. See, there will always be corner cases but it's nice to have a baseline written down. I myself am not always consistent because of declining mental faculties, poor memory skills, etc, but if I start to rule on a scene and one of my players reminds me "no, Concentration doesn't work like that" or whatever, I can reign it in and get that consistency back on track.

This DM is the third in a row for me now who uses some permutation of "I know that's how it worked before, but this is how it works now" for anything from movement rules, Reactions in combat, gathering info during Downtime, and so on.

This inconsistency in turn helps maintain a distance between DM and players. We, as players, are always waiting to see, can we move through Difficult Terrain THIS time? Will we have to give a fancy monologue this time, or can we use a Persuasion roll to get the info? Will I get to use the Reaction with the lightning rider in this combat, or won't I?

Here is an area where we agree with each other, Mark.

I've written down a lot of house rules for our players, some things that are changes from the books and some that are just clarifications. Where the RAW is vague or says "enh the DM can decide", I've written down something (often drawn from other editions or 3pp, sometimes of my own devising). And a couple of my players are very much on top of things and love to rules-lawyer from what I write down which makes it feel rewarding for me to do so.

Brother? I'm not a boy :)
I'm an old lady.

Yeah, I'm OK at puzzles (not as good as some of my players are — they are brilliant!) but I'm not running a linear game where the way "forward" is blocked behind a puzzle. There is no forward, it's just a wild & woolly world to explore.

Generally things on the multi-day level (such as forest survival) I do leave to the rules to cover instead of playing it out. That's more for moment-to-moment level stuff.

Your DM messed up by both having those "background skills" in the game and then not actually using them. I've only put skills in the game that we are gonna refer to.

Not all stories go that well though, and not every player is that bright or puzzle-minded. Some of us get their characters killed or put the entire party in danger when we don't understand what the "wrinkle" in the carpet means and end up 30' down in a spiked pit, or we don't know what a treant is so we stab it in the eye when it's trying to cradle us to sleep, or we don't know that a "weird smell" in a gave plus a torch means an explosion, or dozens of other calamities I've caused my fellow players by just being dumb.

So now, when my character is lost in the woods but I remembered to drop a rank in Survival, I describe what my character WANTS to do - find water, make a shelter, find a landmark, or whatever, but then I have a MECHANIC to make up for the fact that I have NO IDEA how to actually do any of those things.

And that's fine and there are many, many, many groups out there, including the most popular TV show groups (like CR) that play that way, and I hope and wish you find a group that plays the way you want to. Whether it's Pathfinder or some other game.

Being faced with a carpet wrinkle or a weird smell or an unknown tree-being or a checkered floor or a weird system of levers are things that I love as a player. I live for those moments.

The idea of the mechanics stepping in and solving the interaction for me is even more frustrating than mechanics stepping in and preventing me from solving the interaction.

"I look under the bed."
"Sorry, roll Investigation. Otherwise your character wouldn't know to look under the bed."

That's bad. But it's even worse when the character jumps in and prevents me from failing.

"There's a carpet here"
"OK, I go to the next room"
"Hold on, you see that there's a wrinkle in the carpet."
"OK, that's fine. I am careful not to trip on the wrinkle as I step on the carpet and go to the next room."
"Sorry, your high WIS character would understand that the wrinkle in the carpet means that there's a 30′ pit trap under it. You don't step on the carpet after all."
I don't want the character to play itself!

That's why we have saving throws. Here is how I would've wanted it to play out:

"There's a carpet here"
"OK, boring, I just go on to the next room beyond"
"Whooosh! You step on a pit hidden under the carpet and you fall in, bringing the carpet with you"
"Aaaah! I'm trying to grab hold of the ledge!"
"OK, make a saving throw to do that"

In this style, dice are involved after we step in it, by not examining carpets and such, and allows us to (maybe) survive a situation that would've killed us.

In the skill&dice heavy style, the dice and rules are the thick glass wall between us and the world, the clunky robot arms that we use in order to do things. In my style instead, we say and do things more directly. The dice and rules are like loaded guns on the table. We want them to work and we want them to work well, but we are just as happy when they are never used. I can play carefully and examine the map and not be limited by "Sorry, your character has too low WIS to see anything special about the map. You step on it."

Your current DM seems like he is mixing both paradigms in a way that just plain doesn't work for you. Find a group that plays the way you want, or, take over as DM yourself. Good luck♥

However, what I hate is being forced to describe in exact detail what I am doing, and then having to make the skill roll afterwards. Pick one method or the other - don't make me suffer the worst of both worlds!

Agreed for sure!

Mark, I'm not trying to defend any of the other many problems with the game you're in which definitely sounds like a very frustrating and experience.

I'm a HUGE fan of letting characters do what they're trained to do instead of relying on the players to interpret things with their real life brains. I'm not super witty or clever, but my bard is; I'm not trained to pick up on "weird" noises and interpret them as traps, but my thief is; I'm not knowledgeable of a jaguar with multiple tails coming out of their back, but my WIZARD might be.

I feel the exact 180° opposite; *I* wanna play the game, I don't want to watch as my character plays it, as she succeeds or fails at puzzles based on her Int rolls.

To people with the "low-walled maze" story or the "undetected but obvious waterfall" story or the in "you forgot to check the boots" story, thank you. Caveats to keep in mind when running this style, for sure♥

The point isn't to get stuck or let them be completely dependent on the one correctly found "pixel". It works best with an open game world where you can take all kinds of routes and do all kinds of things; some routes fail and some succeed.

One thing we do to make things a lot smoother is to set up "standard routines"; "Anytime we enter a room, we look up. You got that, DM?" "Anytime we search a body, we are checking their helm, armor, and boots too. You got that, DM?" "Anytime we search a room, we go counter-clockwise. You got that, DM?"

We had two such routines in a campaign I played; always look up and always hit every floor tile hard with our tenfoot before stepping on it. We discovered many traps buuuut we also attracted a lot of enemies with noise.

I have a story of my own. The story of how I fell in love with D&D. The "mirror story"!

We were playing in what is now my fave style, no skill checks, player skill over character skill and it was one of my first sessions. I had played hundreds of other RPGs and story games but never D&D.

Walking in the dungeon we came up to this weird hanging cloth, seemed like it was covering something. The textile was oooold.

Walked up to it… IIRC we had to saw through some metal bars to get there. And I carefully stuck my hand under the cloth and felt… glass? Or at least something smooth.

"It's probably a cursed mirror!" we players said to each other. We tied it to our cart and kept the cloth on.

Hours (and a couple of adventures) later, on our way home from the dungeon, we were attacked by giant toads!

And the first thing I do is "I yank off the cloth and show the toads the mirror or whatever it is!"

And, it _was_ a mirror and as the toad looked in it, it went… ⚞pop!⚟ and was gone!

Then and there I knew that I had found my favorite game♥

5e is so flexible and malleable and is set up to be "all things to all people" which makes it really easy to find material—dungeons, monsters, classes, spells—and really, really, really hard to find a group that all wants to play it the same way.

The way I like to play and run the game is in the minority (it's an option in the DMG). There is this popular TV show where they play D&D (there are several, actually, but I'm thinking of Critical Role) and it's wonderful but they come from the 3e/4E/Pathfinder tradition of skill checks so it's all Investigation checks, Insight checks, Persuation checks etc.

There's nothing weird about the way you wanna play the game—and there are many, many groups out there that play your way, and I hope you find one!

I don't understand DM's who run their scenes or setting by mini-games of 20 Questions. If I search the area for secret doors, I mean I'm taking the time to search THE ENTIRE AREA for secret doors. I don't feel it's appropriate to call out that I'm searching the floor, then the west wall, then the east wall, then the ceiling the best I can with my 10' pole, THEN advancing 10' and continuing with this process... and so on until the area is searched.

That's exactly how I run my game, like 20 Questions that is.

Since each 10′×10′×10′ area takes ten minutes to search I wanna know what order you go through them so we know how much light to scratch.

And since some of the things are well hidden I wanna know how you look. Opening the drawers, or even looking under them to see if anything is stuck under there?

If you say "I walk around the room hitting the walls with my tenfoot, listening if anything sounds weird" I'll go "Clockwise or counter-clockwise around the room?"

I love love love this style of gaming so much♥

Like when I was new to game completely I had fun in first few campaigns, but after a while I realized that if I make character of same class, they play exactly the same, and lot of times there are level ups where i barely nothing if I'm not playing a caster.

So 5e is more similar to OSR games than PF and 4E are. PF has more of a "Roll Diplomacy to talk" vibe going on and you need to spend one of your actions to move etc. A lot of things that you have to earn through your character's mechanics in PF is just part of adventurer basics in 5e, which makes the characters a lot more samey.

On GM side I'm frustrated by ambigious rules which sometimes are freeform and sometimes have super specific rules for scenario, encounter design guidelines are confusing, monster design seems arbitrary(quickling is good example of overpowered for their cr monster...) and lot of monsters have been quite bland in monster manual compared to their older incarnations in previous editions.

It works better for sandbox games where CR and encounter budgets aren't as much as an issue.

sometimes have super specific rules for scenario

I actually love this♥

I'd rather have a scenario be a set of mechanics so that the story can be emergent.

How did the dinner go?
This game does seem awful.

My feeling is that… I don't wanna gatekeep and say that only great DMs are allowed to DM. Somehow there's gotta be an onramp to DMing so that people are allowed to learn and grow.

One of the frustrating things about this guy is that he doesn't seem willing to listen.

I miss those old Sierra 80's PC games. I dont miss having to guess the correct syntax to make something happen and progress the game...

Exactly! My GMing style is very influenced by those games (and text games like Zork and Spider&Web)—it's not so much about the rolling and the stats, and more about you saying what you do, where you look, what you say—but I am a human and I can understand synonyms and natural language. So you don't have to find exactly the right word.

Thank you for writing up your experiences.

As I mentioned in the linked reply on SE, I don't like using skills at all so in a way my game is a li'l bit "mother, may I" too. I mean, they look in the rotten hay bale and I tell them what's in the rotten hay bale. No skill needed♥

I hope your DM will improve or that you can find a game that you enjoy, whether that game is 5e or PF.

Still, in the 5e system I don't so much tell my DM "I use Survival" so much as I say "I'll check for tracks" and the DM then decides what ability/skill combo that might fall under.

Please note that on the revised 5e DM screen there is a little box for what ability/skill combo there is for checking for tracks, and what the DC is for it.

However, our group doesn't use those rules. I would instead ask you what you were looking for—fur, footprints etc—and tell you if there were any. I wrote more about that approach here, on Stack Exchange.

I asked about the ruins we were passing through at first, specifically asking for cover but my DM said there was none... only to have a skeleton appear unexpectedly from behind the remains of an overturned cart on the ground that I must've missed (it was 20' in front of me at the time).

Oh, that is awful. :( I'm sorry that your DM is being so frustrating :(

We spent several minutes inquiring about the rotten hay bale there but really got no really descriptive info until the DM said to us "do you maybe want to... INVESTIGATE the hay?"

Unfortunately, this roll-heavy play of asking for skill rolls instead of having a natural language dialog about the hay is common. :( The fact that he expects you to say the exact skill name is not good. :(

What a heartbreaking report so far. I'm not saying you would love 5e if things were different, but I can definitely sympathize with struggling with this game so far. I hope you can talk to your DM about how you and your friends want to play it.

5e is my favorite game buuuut it's so heavily house ruled that it's not recognizable as 5e, so I can't really argue in defense of 5e as is.

It's completely fine to prefer other versions of the game, like Pathfinder or OSR. 4e's "cancel all other editions" attitude was a huge misstep, regardless of what you think of 4e.

As dirtypool mentioned, there's a new crunch book coming out in a few weeks, Tasha's Cauldron of Everything that'll allow you to customize your characters a bit more. I'm not tryna say it'll fix everything or that 3pp crunch books could be an option: 5e just is a simpler game when it comes to making characters. That's what I love about it and what others might hate about it. (At our table, we are instead putting a lot of the crunch into gear, inventory, and domain-level play.)

And backgrounds, of course. You can mix and match backgrounds and also write in your own traits and bonds. That can be a really rewarding part of the game. You and your co-player can try to make each other's traits, flaws and such be as big of a part of the game as possible, that could be a fun challenge for the two of you. (It's always much easier to get good roleplaying happen at the table by lifting up the other players than trying to shine on your own.)

As for your DM, yes, that doesn't sound great.
I'm gonna try to shine some silver lining on the play as reported so far, but that's not to say you're not right to be disatisfied.

Railroading: generally, my principle is that there is one and only one place for it: to set up the initial situation for a campaign. "You find yourself in the ruins of a town that used to be called Crystal Falls, yesterday elder sick water etc etc"

Lack of description: I can really like that. A quicker back and forth between players and DM instead of a longer story time from the DM about every room. If he doesn't answer your questions if you ask them ("what are the walls here made of?", "how does it smell?") then yeah, that's bad. Ask him to do so.

Forcing you to fight the kobold: yes, that was bad.

we have no threatening industrial complexes or outrageous engines per se

Huh, wow, in my view that's like a somewhat common theme? Howl's Moving Castle, the mountain in Spirited Away, all of Nausicaä…

Man, I feel like a prick disassembling the engine of such a charming book, but while the intent may be admirably, the design of these aspects is uneven; 5e is not a narrativist game; it is a rather precise system, and the rules here, well, they aren’t as precise as they should be. I’d usually give this some leeway, but as presented above, the verbiage unintentionally creates realities within the game that run contrary to the spirit of the book.

Endzeitgeist, I appreciate your reviews very much. Thank you for disassembling the engine, that's just the kind of stuff I want to see in good reviews.

This does look like an interesting book that I want to check out further. If there ever is a follow up edition hopefully they can have a developer look over the mechanics.

This does seem like an appealing product but this thread title was heartstoppingly misleading. I'm not ready for WotC to make a new edition!
I kinda already see the PHB/MM/DMG/XGE set as "Advanced" and the Starter Set, Essentials Kit and the free online stuff as "Basic".

Best of luck to you and your friends♥

"Ancestry" isn't good;

1. it ties family to biology too much, and
2. how in the heckfire is a Warforged an ancestry?

Or how is half-elf a (singular) ancestry?

"Stock", which Burning Wheel uses, also bring biology to mind too much. We are people not race horses.

Unless it was the basics (skeletons, trolls, etc.) Which should be easy enough regardless of edition. At least at low levels.

OK, that's good to hear.

From my perspective, this is what 2E is (well, part of what it is). I don't think you can just add these things to 5E without also changing other core aspects of the game.

Remember how Iron Heroes was "an alternative PHB" for 3.5? You could've made it so that you could swap out the PHB but still keeping the same modules, and/or vice versa. Then of course if you ran PF2e characters with PF2e modules you'd unlock the whole experience♥

Ruzza, what you said was really hurtful. I know you can't know what's going on in my life recently but I've been having a rough time.

What system was labyrinth lord that made it easy to switch to 5e? I'm having trouble imagining any ttrpg or version of dnd being a simple no work switch.

It was a clone of B/X D&D.

The ease of monster creation and encounter design in PF2 is what has me even considering converting anything to it. Where in the past I wouldn't have even converted something from 3.5 to PF1.

That sounds fantastic♥

You're right it is! Generally APs have stuck to one or two Bestiaries in the past. Unless I'm mistaken, that's the rule. If we broke up the Bestiaries and subdivided them, we would be carrying around a lot more books.

"By AP" would've been a fantastic way to do it. Like, each AP could use two bestiaries and they could behind-the-scenes map it out so that these could be combined for a variety of wonderful AP.

What about the current Bestiary is not thought out, neat, or beautiful? This isn't about fitting everything into little boxes, it's a game that's meant to be played.

As I've said a couple of times, the first book is fine and this issue is not with the first book. It's with the rest of the books.

What exactly makes you think that RPGs have to be compatible with all other RPGs?

That was the idea that made PF1 a hit.

4e came around was incompatible and PF1 said don't worry we gotchu fam and was compatible.

As DM, being able to mix and match stuff is great. I run an AD&D2e campaign setting with some OSR modules placed around a village from a 5e book. I've mixed in house rules from Apocalypse World, Dramasystem, Stars Without Number, Burning Wheel, it's a big beautiful mess.

If 5e was only compatible with 5e I would not have been into it. I was playing a Labyrinth Lord game when 5e came out and the fact that I could just pick up and keep running the same stuff straight up was fantastic.

I don't want to hop into a walled garden that is only compatible with itself.

I love how fantasy roleplaying is a world of ends. How it's fueled by "rough consensus and running code".

Is Hasbro some kind of charity organization? No! They suck! The 5e OGL is limited, more limited than Pathfinder's OGL, but it's not as bad as 3e's OGL which at the time was good enough for PF1 to interface with.

That isntbtrue. With the current style regardless of what you want for your current campaign you are likely to get something usuable for it with each release. With a categorized system, whichever way you cut it, that isnt true.

What is the current style?

That is what I'm asking. And I'd be satisfied with pretty much any answers except "haphazardly here are some more monsters we thought of so we could sell a Bestiary 5"…?

If there is a "current style" that is some sort of thought-through plan then I'm satisfied. Then that is all I'm asking for.

Do it by type? Well the people waiting on Fey have no extra content till we get to the Fey book. Now there are going to be at least some Fey in each book.

So if "the style" is: "we are going to take all of our 800 monsters, sort them in piles such as Fey, Mwangi, high-level, and then ensure that for as many piles as possible people are getting something good in each book. This sells more books which is great for our bottom line $$$ and also means that the player base no matter who they are and what kinda monsters they want they get something good early and in every book.", then that would be thought-through and that would be satisfying.

Like, let's say that there are, uh, 80 fey type creatures, 12 Mwangi region creatures, 200 high-level monsters (just guessing on the numbers here) and you'd calculate on the overlap of these categories (because there are some creatures that are fey and high-level and Mwangi-region) but make sure there were around 16 fey type creatures per book, 2 Mwangi region creatures per book, 40 high-level monsters per book etc.

It's hard af for DMs to find monsters and those lugging around physical books would have to schlep a lot of unused pages but it's thought-through.

I can't speak for everyone, but I don't feel like Paizo has done that in the past.

When making new version they have a unique opportunity to create something very planned and thought-ahead and neat and beautiful.

ways to get around organizational problems if you have them.

To use digital i.e. not even use the bestiary books? That's not really a good look for the books :/

But this is all stemming from an idea that I feel like you're off the mark on.

You may be right.

As always I find myself being alone with an idea or position that everyone else thinks is just dumb. "Of course random and haphazard monster book releasing is better, more organic, more natural, more intuitive, 2097, why can't you get that?"

IDK, I guess I'm not the sharpest tool in the proverbial. :(

You have yet to justify why this is a good idea.

I don't want Bestiary 4, Bestiary 5 etc to feel like the D-list monsters. Or if that's the organization they are going with (second-most used monsters second etc) then if they have a thought-ahead plan about that then that's fine.

I've stated many times in the thread that I get that B1 → the best of the best, the classics, the every-table-needs-these. For B2 through B9, if they're coming, I want them to have a plan for them is all I'm saying.

Converting anything but PCs to PF2 is one of the single easiest things I can imagine doing. You just rebuild them at the right level using the rules in the GMG, and monster building with those rules is a breeze.

Thank you for this important clarification.

Let's say you are converting the rock baboon's from B4 The Lost City. Page 8 in that book. It's on dungeon level 2.

It says that six appear.

AC 6, HD2, hp 9, #at 2, damage 1d6/1d3.

So for 5e I'd get AC 13 by subtracting the old AC from 19, I'd get attack bonus by adding half HD to two, and the rest of the stats I can just use straight up.

For PF2e, I'd want, uh, is this the mook squad from GMG p 48? Or can I go up to 15 xp per creature and make it party level minus three?

That means +0 on ability mods and perception. AC, uh, 12 maybe? 5 hp per. +4 to attack for 1d4.

I'm not super used to this kind of budget building (I couldn't get the hang of it with 4e either). I'm not trying to put the game down, I'm trying to understand it.

It took me a bit longer and it feels super weird to me that it's scaled to character level instead of to a specific location that the players could discover at any time, but it does seem to work.

I don't want to misrepresent PF2e, ever. I haven't switched over to it but I want to look at it in the best possible light. So thank you again Deadmanwalking for bringing this up.

It's a solution similar to 4e when the "MM3 on a business card" came out. It's a little look-up heavy but it works.

5e is it's own game and one that many people here have played, know about, or have interacted with in some way. That we're here means that we want something different. Making a game to duplicate another isn't what many in the community wanted, and -I assume- not was the designers wanted either.

What I hear from a lot of people is what they want specifically different from 5e is a game that is more buildy, more precise, and less loosey-goosey. That could be a very different niche from 5e attracting a different crowd, while still picking up things from 5e that are good or using some concepts from 5e to ease transition from 5e to PF2e. Even OSR games are using things like advantage.

It could also mean that 5e itself could double-down on being a less buildy and less precise game so you wouldn't be cannibalizing each other, just appealing to different kinds of groups and players.

See the issue with your entire post (and one that Ruzza has picked up on already) is that you mention 5E far too many times in it

Is 5e so taboo that you can't even look at it or mention it? It's OGL, just like 3.5 was. (More so because you get the character classes etc which you didn't get in 3.x's SRD.)

This game is not 5E and is not trying to be. What would be the point? It tries hard to not look like 5E because it doesn’t want to

One of the big mistakes of the 4e eras was to try to draw a land in the sand saying "this is how D&D is now, if you don't like it, tough", cutting off PDF sales of older material etc, trying to undo the OGL with the weird "GSL". And making a game that was radically different and incompatible from all the material out there.

With 5e it's been one big kumbaya of re-releasing the older editions, older material etc and making everything compatible.

A big selling point of RPGs compared to something like Magic or PACG is that it's open source, you can mix and match. Sort of like the www itself, everyone can toss some HTML up there and it becomes part of this big old messy web. Walling yourself in like 4e did is frustrating to me regardless of which side of the wall I'm on.

You mention wanting to play with exactly the same bounded accuracy as 5E and play 5E modules. So why not play 5E? I am quite confused ? What is drawing you to this enough that you want to use this material but fairly fundamentally steer it back to 5E rules?

I want Paizo to survive and thrive. They didn't chose the direction I would've bet on, so all my second-guessing and backseat-driving is too late. Hopefully they'll survive&thrive with the direction they did go in.

For PF2e there is the Fall of Plaguestone, the two adventure paths, some PFS stuff. And Trailseeker but not much other 3pp. This is so weird to me that they're betting the farm to this extreme extent on this tiny amount of content. When people were asking for a follow up to the PF1 beginner box, the message was that they didn't want to split the player base and keep building on the slightly incompatible version of Pathfinder that was in that first BB. So this is such a 180° from that. That's all I'm saying.

PF1 was "4e is incompatible with our stuff so let's build on the worlds most played game ever and make a hot rod version of it that's back-compatible but has cooler stuff so people switch to it".
That is what I'd propose for PF2 too.
Instead we got… a game that's incompatible with everyone elses stuff and their old stuff.

Your thinking isn’t the only thinking, nor is it necessarily the best thinking.

Not married to the A–F thing. Just asking for any thinking ahead. Any rhyme or reason what monster goes in what book.

The developers thought through which monsters and creatures they felt were core to the game - the monsters most used at the table - and released them.

Which is fine for the first release as I've said many times in this thread.

But if you stick with that philosophy, you're going to get less and less "core to the game" i.e. further and further towards the bottom of the barrel with each release.

The sort of backhanded implication that their design process was haphazard when compared with your alphabetize them and wait 8 years to get them all out there is a.) a little insulting to the designers and b.) shows that you haven’t “thought through” this concept with the needs of a business model in mind.

You're saying "wait 8 years to get them all out there". I didn't set any schedule or timeframe. If it's 8 years, 2 years, 2 months, even 16 years, I didn't specify.

Whatever the time frame is, you have to wait X time to get them all out there regardless of how they are organized.

I have two probs with PF2e. One (bounded accuracy) was addressed in the GMG as an option, but even with those rules a creature scales like from +0 to +9 over just the first ten levels so it's still twice the stepping of 5e.

The other is that as much problems as 5e has, its a fantastic Rosetta stone of editions. I've ran 2e, 3e, PF1, B/X, OSR, third party 5e stuff all mixed up with 5e as the framework, it's so easy to convert. Yes, part of that is due to 5e's loosey-goosey and sloppy nature but it works at the table.

PF2e is pretty much only compatible with PF2e. It's even easier to bring the PF1e stuff over to 5e.

PF2e such a tight clockwork of a game, a perfect crystal of matching puzzle pieces. 4e had the same problem, it was also incompatible with everything else.

What I would've thought would've been a perfect opportunity for Paizo would've been:

• We're going to make characters that can play 5e modules,
• and we're going to make adventure paths that 5e characters can play,
• but they're going to be very different from 5e by having the unique selling point that it's much more detailed mechanically.

A PF2e character has tons of build options, the three action econ instead of 5e's hacky "bonus actions" system, the boost system, so many more feats, so many more choices at every level. People would've loved to take that up against Acererak.

Paizo's adventure paths are already world-renowned and people are already running PF1 adventure paths with 5e. Create monsters that are more varied and unique and have more actions and more griddy tactics that can still be a good match for 5e characters.

So you could've sold the character books to groups running 5e adventures and you could've sold the adventure paths to groups running 5e characters. And if it was good, people would see "wow, these characters are super good, I want to check out their adventures" and vice versa. And ofc you could've still just used the new character books with the new adventure paths straight up and not have to touch a WotC book.

5e's SRD and OGL were much more generous this time around than in the 3e era (not to mention the practically non-existant 4e era).
It's just so weird how this game tries so hard to not even look at 5e. It's fine to want to do things differently, where you think you've got a better idea.

I do challenge the notion that “organized the way you would like” and “more thought through” are the same thing

Just organized any way. Which implies thought-through.

They have the benefit of hindsight (just like the hackmaster example) of knowing what they did for PF1e.

The "greatest hit" volume has already been released — it's PF2e's Bestiary.

there still is no discussion on random generation of ability scores.

It's discussed on p182.

The default method of generating ability scores in the Core Rulebook can help you learn your character’s story along the way, while the alternative method, rolling scores, is a nod to tradition.

If you are being sarcastic I apologize. It's not clear from your post.

If you are being serious:
People can have daggers. People can have wands.
This guy's unique weapon idea, the dagger wand, is only saving on one "L" bulk slot. If that's what you're worried about, say "you can have it but I'll give you one fewer "L" bulk slot.

Being able to spend a few actions screwing it onto a staff, which would suck in combat where action econ is everything, saves 1 bulk slot. Again which you could deduct from the character otherwise.

Remember way back in 2nd ED when we got the Monster manual binder and could just add in the expansions as we got them, put them in any "order" you wanted or take out a few monsters for an encounter.... Of course then you got the holes ripped on frequently used pages or the rings of the binder got messed up after frank stepped on it.....

Yes, I still have that problem because I run an AD&D2e campaign rn and it sucks, the pages fall out. That's exactly what I wanted to avoid with a more thought through Bestiary release.

Maybe if the alphabet isn't the best, it could be geographical region or it could be monster level. Idk the order of the PF1e bestiaries (and the WotC MM/VGM/MoFo trio) just bug me.

Now there are zombies gnolls goblins etc so the next one can be all A-F

I get that you'd want the first bestiary to be awesome but then the later bestiaries are kinda scraping the bottom of the proverbial is what I'm thinking.

Like "Bestiary 4, Lovecraft edition". OK great but what if I'm not running a Lovecraft campaign? But "Bestiary 4: G-K" that sounds great, I have have goblins, kings, harpies etc.

It's the kind of thing that would make for a cool reprint of the bestiaries. Wouldn't work well for the first run. Only problem is I don't think it'd sell too well.

But that's why I think the 2e would've been the perfect time to do it♥

They could've been like "Angels & Aardvarks adventure path"

Otherwise you'll soon be handing out 2h-great-axe-long-pole-bucklers with reach, throwing range, an AC bonus and the agile trait.

The 1991 Rules Cyclopedia has rules for these kinds of items♥

Since they have made many volumes of the bestiary for PF1, for PF2 I kinda expected them to make the first volume have monsters A–F, the second to have G–K etc etc. Like an encyclopedia. Since they already know all the monsters (from making them for PF1) I mean.

This is 100% fine as is. To change the grip to switch between casting and stabbing just use "Interact" actions as per core rulebook 272. That's not a real advantage compared to having two separate actions. Having one item is actually kind of a risk because you might lose both items at once later.

Let NPCs who hear of the idea follow suit. "Why doesn't everyone…" well maybe this could be a great mark on the campaign that your player was patient zero for the dagger wand. Ankh-Morpork style.

On p198 optional rules for bounded accuracy♥♥♥
thanx Paizo

Yes, this wonderful document.

Maybe there is a way to get stats that are good enough to fight against, talk to, interact with etc without them being full buildable NPCs?

It's easy enough to run PF1E stuff with 5e (if you're like me and dgaf and are ok with just using the WotC advice of "AC = average of touch AC and normal, max 22, and to-hit bonus is ability modifier +3") but does something similar hold true for PF2E adventures?

It's generally easy enough to run 3.X stuff with 5e almost straight up.

For AC, average touch AC & "regular" AC (just add them together and divide by two) but max 22.
For to hit bonus, add three to the ability modifier.

Good luck♥

What part of flatter maths makes you think +hit scaling is going happen? It seems highly unlikely. There may be a + to hit, but it seems likely that it will be small and flat.

What do you mean? I thought Pathfinder would not have flatter maths? +¼ level or similar?

The idea in ACKS is that you build a dungeon to lure monsters in and then harvest them for parts

Example:

A Potion of Flying allows you to fly once. It is listed as 'Very Rare'.
The Broom of Flying is 'Uncommon'. It allows you to fly all the time.
The suggested price of Very Rare items is 50,000gp.
The suggested price of Uncommon items is 500gp.

We use the rules from ACKS to brew potions and each attempt to make a fly potion is a six week process that costs 3000 GP and also costs monster parts worth 3000 xp. The monsters have to have a flight speed.

Finding an item, that can survive being used by several people, seems to me to be more likely than finding an undrunk potion.

Attempting to create a broom of flying with ACKS' rules costs 75000 GP, 300 days, and monster parts from flying monsters worth 75000 xp.

This isn't meant as an argument for 5e I guess.

Yes, they're different. My point is that I think the latter would've worked better. Apologies for any confusion. Mind, this is based on the assumption that 5e was going for an OSR-type experience. It may be that it's more a mimicking of that as aesthetic choice, however.

As in all things, Form follows Function.

Oh, I see. I'm sorry for misunderstanding you. But, in OSR hp/hd also goes up.

I've never liked 5e's implementation of BA.

I understand the appeal of trying to keep the numbers flatter, but it always seemed to me that you'd get the same effect more easily by simply paring the game down to Levels 1-6 and increasing the amount of XP required to advance.

It's not Bounded Leveling, it's Bounded Accuracy — your HP and damage output goes up. You can fight hordes of enemies

what doesn't change is the ability to interact with them at all. The "chance to hit", hence "accuracy". Same for skills.

However, a better medium might be something like a minimum ability gain for someone with a stat below a threshold, and for anyone with a stat already at that level, it adds a + bonus.

That isn't a medium between the two poles ("it sets your strength to X" vs "it adds +Y to strength"), it's a further extreme to the adding pole. The medium, which would be a bad compromise, would be ("it adds +Y to strength, but capped at a strength X"). No one would want that though.

In essence that would be "add +Y to strength but at least bring it up to X", i.e. "add at least +2 to strength, if that would bring it up to less than 18, then bring it up even more".

(Again, I like the "it becomes at least 18" as it is, without the "or then add even more". I love the lack of stacking generally. Stacking leads to CoDzilla. Like when Merlin and Madame Mim fight, they don't go "I'm the size of a dragon PLUS a rhino".)

When I saw the new mechanics for the Belt of Giant Strength I was really happy. In general 5e cuts waaaay down on things stacking, and I like that.

In order to buy magic items, there are optional rules in XGE page 126. DMs who love low magic might want to skip these.

I always heard the original monk was based on David Caridines character from Kung Fu. I think the characters name was Kwai Chang Caine.

It was also based on the Destroyer novel series