I'm winding down this two-year campaign I've been running and then ditching 5e for some other system. I made that decision back when the whole OGL shitstorm happened. I just don't trust them to not screw around with things anymore, and, anyway, every time they come out with another UA for One D&D, I read it and get pissed off again.
So they can bundle deez nuts. I'm moving to (probably) FATE or Blades in the Dark.
I've run a few sessions in Blades on occasions where a member of the group has been away for an extended period of time. It's definitely a different mindset to DM than 5e, and I don't feel like I've really gotten the hang of it yet, but everyone's had fun and they all unanimously agree that they'd enjoy moving over to that system once this campaign is done.
The biggest learning curve is getting a handle on the players having so much more story agency. It's hard to explain; a lot of the time, Blades puts the DM into the reactive role, whereas 5e very much has the players in the reactive role in a lot of situations (even though it doesn't feel like it in the moment). So there are times in Blades when the players are supposed to be telling me what happens next, but they're waiting for me to tell them what happens next. It's hard to get over some of 5e's deeper training.
For example, in Blades, the players tell me what action they're attempting and what stat they'd like to roll for it, and I set the difficulty based on that; however, it's difficult for them to not ask me what stat they should be using to roll for an action. So if a player wants to get through a door, they would say "I want to break down this door using Wreck" or "Tinker" or "Finesse" or "Attune" or whatever stat their character is good with, and describe what that looks like, then I'm supposed to tell them "Ok, that will be a Risky action with a Standard effect" or "That's not going to be the best way to do this; it going to be a Desperate action with a Limited effect" or whatever, and then they either roll for it or choose another approach. But what typically happens in game is the player will say "I want to break down this door. What do you want me to roll for that? Is that Wreck? Oh, I don't have any points in Wreck. Is anyone else good at Wreck?"
There are a lot of things like that, where 5e has trained my players to look to me when the Blades systems puts it in their hands to choose. And I'm not much better about it; for example, it's super hard for me to remember that I'm supposed to tell them how difficult and how effective their proposed action will be before they roll. The 5e convention of "Roll Dex for that. Oh, so close, you didn't hit the DC" has a strong grip on me, even though I'm supposed to say "You want to roll Finesse? Ok, if you roll finesse, that's going to be [difficulty] and have [rating] effect; do you want to go with that?" and they can say "Yes, I want to do that" or "No, I want to try something else instead" or "How can I make my odds better?". I LIKE that change, it's just hard to incorporate after so many years of 5e.
We switched from Fate to D&D 5e in 2014 when the Starter Set came out. Over the years we've added lots of rules from B/X, 2e, and RC, and homemade rules too. I want to give the "Fate Condensed" rule set a serious try but my group just doesn't like Fate. It's too much "make up your own stuff" (especially the aspects) and too little "select among cool existing crunch" for their taste. If I made a long list of aspect suggestions they might be into that. IDK.
Gonna keep using the CC-BY version which thankfully exists ♥
By releasing that, they made their own retroclone and it's perfect.
I can't complain about D&D anymore now that it's free forever.
I am not gonna jump onboard with this Beyond version 🤷🏻♀️
@Sandra@TheOneWithTheHair I can totally see why they're doing it though. a) drives D&D Beyond subscriptions b) no PDFs... just web access that they control and can turn off at any time.
We have the best of both worlds unlike the 4E launch when they got rid of 3e. We now live in an timeline where all versions are widely available and some versions are even under CC-BY.
It sucks that they jacked up the price of books and are trying to funnel people into the very bad site that is D&D beyond. I think they’re making a mistake there, for themselves maybe and for the fans definitively, but thanks to the CC release they’ve set it up so that I’m immune from their further mistakes, such as this one. I can just keep on hacking & slashing 💁🏻♀️
I don't think the prices increased for the core book bundle or the PHB/DMG but I haven't kept a close eye on those.
It's also worth noting that this shop is run via scalefast and I had some issues when I did the dragonlance preorder of getting my product on time due to scalefast.
But they aren't giving you the pdf with it either. They're giving you access to a digitized book that they can cut off access to whenever they want to push the next edition. It's just another example of Hasbro missing the entire point of the community's complaint.
The move comes not long after an increase in price for D&D books across the board. Physical copies run $59.95 normally, and the digital + physical bundles are $10 more, putting them around the same price as most newly released video games. The digital + physical bundles work exclusively with D&D Beyond. Meaning other platforms like Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds have their own separate content they do not sell bundled together.
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