I personally feel the biggest issue with D&D it’s it’s Binarity. I’ve adopted a “fail forward” approach for my own table. If you are between 1-5 away from your DC, yeah you don’t fail but a complication is introduced.
I also use passive investigation / perception a lot, Since it just expedites the discovery of clues.
It’s absolutely not supported by the rest of the rules but apparently there is some text hidden in DnD 5e that essentially says " … and also the GM might sometimes rule a failure as a complicated success."
I’d really like to hear from some GMs who run with that permission and see what happens.
It’s a variant listed in the DMG that adds “success at a cost” and “degrees of failure.” I was going to copy/paste the text but it’s a lot and I don’t feel great about copying over several paragraphs of copyrighted material. I will however share a couple of the examples offered for success at a cost. First, “a character manages to get her sword past a hobgoblin’s defenses and turn a near miss into a hit, but the hobgoblin twists its shield and disarms her.” Another is “a character fails to intimidate a kobold prisoner, but the kobold reveals its secrets anyway while shrieking at the top of its lungs, alerting other nearby monsters.”
I’ve used these variant rules in play in my last D&D campaign that I ran (note I said “last” and not “most recent”) and … it was fine? But honestly, at the end of the day, trying to run D&D in that way did largely feel in tension with the rest of the game, and I came to the realization that I would just rather be running Dungeon World. And I haven’t shaken that feeling since; I’ll still play D&D as a player and have a great time, but I don’t think I’ll ever run it again. It really felt like I was trying to make the game do something it wasn’t meant to do, and I realized that thing is something I need in a game.
That’s kind of what I expected the result would be. I know there are a few other nods to indie games hidden in the rules of 5e. I’m curious if a 6th edition will take that any further.
I really think they will. That and have integration for online play from the get go due to the popularity of D&D streams nowadays.
Yeah, it sounds like the early discussions they’ve had about any potential 6E really focus on taking online/streamed play into account. I’m not sure how much they’ll incorporate from the indie world, or even how much they’ll change the rules (seems like they’ve kind of hit a good sweet spot between accessibility and complexity), but I have no doubt that the biggest lessons WOTC are learning are about online play. I’d love to see more integration with something like DnD Beyond from the get-go. It’s a pretty great tool, but it’s obviously an afterthought in many ways. If they build the system from the ground-up with online play in mind, the tools will be hopefully great from the start as well.
My own unwanted two cents about dragon heist.
I arathoned Waterdeep: Dragon Heist in two days leading up to pax unplugged last year. Did the whole thing in about 20ish hours of play with 9 players.
I’m a pretty good dm and can handle so many players and all that and thank the gods I am because you will be doing so much heavy lifting to make sense out of that adventure. I’ve been running pre-written adventures since the Savage tide in dungeon magazine. I’m no stranger here to the format.
It feels like this adventure was mismatched or mismanaged and the final product has a hydra like design goal. like if the scope was a little honed in it’d be better. Right now it feels like 5 cool ideas but the best parts of them were left on the cutting room floor. I would not recommend that adventure to anyone old or new. It’s an anemic adventure to say the least.
Beware: there is no heist as written for the PCs, the game feels more like the ready player one of forgotten realms, full of winks and references to cool things and people but of little substance. There’s a lot of “hey look at this cool thing or person. It’s cool right?! wink” but the players don’t have a lot of fictional flexibility in the game. no touching. Only look at how cool this was, PCs!
If you’re like me and like priming players and setting expectations, be aware that nowhere in that adventure does it declare a critical part of that adventure being you must be cool with owning a tavern and dealing with the classic FR factions. Those are a must to get any mileage out of this one.
Hmmm…
About 10 years ago, I started prepping the 3.5 mega-adventure Expedition to Castle Ravenloft.
My initial read-through was very positive. I’d successfully run the original 1983 AD&D module I6: Ravenloft a few times over the years, (a 3.5 conversion of the original was central to the revision), and thought that the build-out from there looked like a lot of fun!
But then I started reading it closely to prep for running it, I realized there were a LOT of glaring problems with it. First of all, it seemed to be a hodgepodge of various incompatible horror tropes thrown together, rather than an extended rumination on Gothic horror that I wanted to run. I spent a good month re-tooling it, and eventually gave up. I ran Paizo’s “Rise of the Runelords” adventure path instead.
From what you say, it sounds like Waterdeep: Dragon Heist might have the same issues of too many writers not pulling off a coherent whole!
Oh… and if I’d known ahead of time that becomming owners of a tavern was an integral part of the adventure, I would have brought in a very different character.
That said… I am still having fun!
Oh… and on Ravenloft… I have a copy of the 5e Curse of Strahd, and I think it’s a much better expansion of the original than was the 3.5 Expedition to Castle Ravenloft.
Have you seen The Alexandrian’s remix of Dragon Heist? It is so extensive as to be its own book (as it abandons the whole seasonal enemy/plot thing and just makes it about an actual heist with multiple factions vying) but it’s very good reading.
Yeah I saw it. the first post of it came out literally on day 2 of my marathon lol. I utilized it as best I could, like the changes for how to include Jarlaxle more and nimblewrights.
link for others who haven’t seen it.
Thanks for the link! I hadn’t seen that!
I very much plan on running Ghosts of Saltmarsh. It is written as separate adventures that you can string into a longer campaign and easily fit some of your own stuff into it. It is also a pretty evocative pirate setting which appeals to me. In addition, the book gives a large bunch of ways to tie the stories together and the characters to the locations. Finally, it was build off at least partly on 1e adventures so presumably there is some OSR style built into the adventures.
As far as an official book of adventures (not a pure campaign - of which the Curse of Strahd is generally considered the best railroady campaign), this is generally considered the strongest 5e entry.