The Gaming Den

The Monster Manual will be presented as a "Volo's Guide"
I'm not quite sure how to feel about that.
In one hand I loved reading Volo and Elminster snark at each other in the 90s.

On the other hand, Fuck Mearls.

Pretty much my feeling. The idea is cool, but Mearls could easily fuck it all up.

codeGlaze wrote:I loved reading Volo and Elminster snark at each other in the 90s.

Mearls in that very article wrote:I don't want to duplicate any product that's come before. I think that if people have seen it, then it's not really new and it's not really exciting.

I don't know who Volo is or where he and Elminster snarked at each other, but I'm amused.

Volo
The same line of thought ran through my head, too, Momo. But I think he's referencing the blasé(sp?) approach to monster lists.

ADnD used Volo in a bunch of lore stuff. "Volo's Guide to..." books were set up sort of like shadowrun's weapon books with the in-world chatter on the sides throughout the book.

The manual for Baldur's gate utilized Volo and Elminster.

codeGlaze wrote:The Monster Manual will be presented as a "Volo's Guide"
I'm not quite sure how to feel about that.
In one hand I loved reading Volo and Elminster snark at each other in the 90s.

On the other hand, Fuck Mearls.

You'll buy it and feel bad, because the entire reason for the name change is to profit off the nostalgia of suckers long time fans like yourself.

momothefiddler wrote:

codeGlaze wrote:I loved reading Volo and Elminster snark at each other in the 90s.

Mearls in that very article wrote:I don't want to duplicate any product that's come before. I think that if people have seen it, then it's not really new and it's not really exciting.

I don't know who Volo is or where he and Elminster snarked at each other, but I'm amused.

In Volo's Guide to the Realms. Which, is basically what this is, the bastard child of that and apparently the Lords of Madness book.

Expect lots of shit filler and little content, exactly the opposite of what you want from a MM.

I'm really puzzled how referencing the book format you're copying is doing something that no one has seen before.

Shitty Article wrote:The first third of the book is a series of deep dives on specific species of monsters. How specific? Mearls and his team lavish nearly 14 full two-column pages on beholders alone, exploring every aspect of their nature both in and out of combat.

Yeah. 7 pages on beholders. Haven't seen that shit before. Hell, I'm going to be surprised if it isn't verbatim from all the prior entries on beholders and special sourcebooks that have included beholders, even shit from Spelljammer.

Mearls wrote:"I have this kind of personal philosophy for managing the product line," Mearls said last month in Renton, Washington. "I don't want to duplicate any product that's come before. I think that if people have seen it, then it's not really new and it's not really exciting."

I don't even... You're doing the 5th edition of a long running product line. The only viable products to date for this product line have been shit-poor copies of products that have come before.

To be fair, it's looking like this-


So you get stats, and then you get Volo and Elminster bullshitting about fluff like Beholder metabolism.

Yeah, except they aren't bullshitting on any of those pages. All those pages are just Lords of Madness 2.0

sure, but my point is that there is content.

At least each monster gets its own page, unlike in 3.X.

Prak wrote:sure, but my point is that there is content.

Was that your point? Out of 5 pages, there are exactly 2 stat blocks.
And the promise is explicitly that beholders will get _7_ pages.

Out of goddamn 224 page book on monsters, there are possibly 3 (and maybe only 2, since I suspect the beholder is already in the actual MM) stat blocks out of 12 pages. At that ratio, this book will be fucking 5% actual content.

This is the link to damn thing on WotC's website
http://dnd.wizards.com/products/tableto ... o-monsters

There are sample pages there too. Including the introduction with the Volo-El 'interaction' bullshit (which is purely word salad of no use, and does shitty things with fonts, including characters wandering in and out of superscript).
http://media.wizards.com/2016/dnd/downl ... reface.pdf

Chapter 1: Monster Lore takes several iconic D&D monsters and provides additional information about their origins, their dispositions and behaviors, and their lairs—above and beyond what is written in the Monster Manual. Dive deep into the story behind D&D’s most popular and iconic monsters, including beholders, mind flayers, and the yuan-ti, as well as classics like orcs, gnolls, and kobolds.

Chapter 2: Character Races presents character races that are some of the more distinctive race options in the D&D multiverse, including the goblin, the orc, and the firbolg.

Chapter 3: Bestiary provides game statistics and lore for nearly one hundred monsters suitable for any D&D campaign. Gain access to rules and story for dozens of monsters new to fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, such as the froghemoth, the neogi, and the vargouille.

Ah... the demand to play a firbolg.
http://media.wizards.com/2016/dnd/downl ... olg107.pdf
Not actually terrible for a 5e race, and can at least be some of the good classes (though wizard is subpar). Random grab bag of abilities though.

Random personality traits for giants:
http://media.wizards.com/2016/dnd/downl ... tsLore.pdf

Just... go fuck yourself with this book. I don't want another fucking 10 pages on the kobold fucking pantheon, nor could I possibly give a shit about which hag is mostly likely to steal shit. Stupid spelljammer slavers? Froghemoths? Just what the 5e needs to save it!


And unlike the 'best selling' PHB, it isn't 50% off on Amazon.

JonSetanta wrote:At least each monster gets its own page, unlike in 3.X.

Woohoo! Less content per page, on the rare page that has content. Awesome selling point you've seized on there. Takes me back to the heady days of 2nd edition.

A nice two column format would have room for a stat block and enough info to give each monster a little context. You don't need 7 fucking pages on beholders (which have had more than 100 pages written on them over the years) to fit them into your campaign/adventure/whatever. At that point you're paying for someone's fanfiction to be canon, and limit what players will accept in a beholder encounter (Beyond 'Oh, fuck, rocket tag again')

Mask_De_H wrote:

codeGlaze wrote:The Monster Manual will be presented as a "Volo's Guide"
I'm not quite sure how to feel about that.
In one hand I loved reading Volo and Elminster snark at each other in the 90s.

On the other hand, Fuck Mearls.

You'll buy it and feel bad, because the entire reason for the name change is to profit off the nostalgia of suckers long time fans like yourself.

Ha, I'll look through it if someone else buys it. But I'm not paying for a 5e book. :/

edit: I know a lot of dennizens freak the fuck out when there's too much fluff mixed with "books that are suppose to be crunch". But, to play devils advocate, Mearls has stumbled upon something a bunch of consumers DO like. People enjoy personality in their products. In that vein of thought though, I think a lot of problems really come down to the balance of quantity and quality.

I doubt the current team can pull off the balance well.

Eh. Digging up a failed comedy routine from the early 90s isn't the way to go to add fluff or personality to the product. Good fluff books are the setting books they're not doing for this edition.

And FR is certainly not the go-to setting for the 'post Game of Thrones world' or whatever gibberish that was.

Which is a big part of the baffling part. The identity of the product fails his design goals (never seen before! New for the new era of fantasy!) It is all recycled shit from the late 80s/early 90s.

Every single bit fails the premise he sets forward as his goal.
Volo and El? Nope. Volo's guide, BG manual
Neogi? Really, spelljammer of all fucking things?
The Ecology of the Beholder? Didn't see that every other year in Dragon.
The Lifecycle of the Mind Flayer? Really now. There were at least two books on this in 3rd.

Monster fluff has always been a fairly popular D&D production, and it is useful for GMs of a certain kind. It is also relatively cheap to produce, since it's easy to crank out (speaking as the guy who once wrote 20,000 words of fluff about Ethergaunts), and doubly so if a lot of it can be reproduced easily from earlier products. So producing a lot of monster fluff material is a good sort of support product to have to interest hardcore fans - obsessive players, world-building GMs, cosplayers, etc.

What it is not a good product for is to support a wide-ranging player base. The game is Dungeons & Dragons, and dungeons, by their very nature tend to take monster fluff and pulverize it when not ignoring it outright. The classic D&D experience, the dungeon crawl, is very much anti-world-building, which is why settings like FR resort to contrivances like 'mad archwizard' in order to justify their existence. The majority of D&D groups don't care about monster ecology and simply want new options to add to the menu of things to stab (and, not insignificantly, cool art of new things to stab, Pathfinder's later bestiaries contain largely redundant monsters, but they do look cool).

'Ecology of X' is a Dragon article or a web supplement, or maybe a PDF only product that you put out for chump change once you've expanded it to suitable length. You can do that by paying freelancers next to nothing and use it as a means to keep the hardcore fans interested and involved, but as a function of mass appeal it doesn't work. It has never worked. TSR went bankrupt trying to shovel a pile of increasing niche fluff-heavy (or even fluff-only) works at a finite pile of setting obsessives. That pool isn't large enough and it doesn't have enough money to support this kind of thing.

I like how WHFRP (the latest one?) did their bestiary with the opinions of "my grandpappy told me", "I fought one before" and "I am one" folks on various monsters so the idea of in setting explanations is fine with me.

I thought it was dumb that DnD5 dude said 'We live in a POST GAME OF THRONES WORLD' as a reason for the change in format. That just strikes me as a bad mentality to have, like someone thought it was super duper clever to namedrop a popular HBO show that in no way resembles DnD at any level to justify how eye tyrants are written up.

It is definitely really weird to attribute any part of this to living in a "post Game of Thrones world." I also hold in contempt the idea that GRR Martin's blatantly masturbatory sex scenes constitute fantasy "growing up." The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that Mearls likes the idea of fantasy being used to explore the impossible, hence ecology and etc., and name-dropped the most popular fantasy product for no other reason except that it makes a good sound byte for people who are thinking purely memetically. The least charitable interpretation is that Mearls is trying to inflate his own importance and pretension by talking about how grown up he and his industry are now.

The worst thing about the Game of Thrones reference is how moronic you have to be to associate Game of Thrones with D&D. The quality of Game of Thrones/ASOIAF aside, it's obviously low-powered low-magic fantasy to the point that there is simply no version of D&D that can reproduce anything like it (even something like E6 2e AD&D is super-high magic by comparison). If you were going to name drop a series that is super-popular and fits well with D&D you could have said 'post Wheel of Time world' or post-Shannara world (hey, that made it onto TV) or something, but referencing Game of Thrones totally misses the point.

Further, Game of Thrones, for all its extremely in-depth world-building, hasn't been especially good at explaining its impossible elements. The novels contain precious little on wtf the Children of the Forest are, where dragons come from, which of the various gods really exist and what sources the powers they provide, or how anyone built a 700 ft high wall (hilariously, the answer to the last one is apparently the GRR Martin can't do basic math), and other questions. It is not a source to reference when it comes to a fantasy with a well-defined and robust metaphysics system, which is a thing D&D aspires to possess.

High five for ethergaunts.

I wouldn't dismiss fluff for a monster book - it makes it a hell of a lot more fun to read. And without any fluff, many monsters leave you wondering "Why would I care about using this?"

Like for instance, the Esoteric Dragons in Pathfinder. They have almost no fluff at all. This is literally the entire background for Dream Dragons:
"These self-styled masters of the Dimension of Dreams hunt that strange plane's shifting expanse."

What the fuck is that? The "real" point of the Esoteric Dragons is "They're dragons ... but using the Psychic system!" Which I found boring for Gem Dragons too, so maybe I'm just not the target audience. But really, none of them give any indication what you'd use them for or why you would even care.

Ice9 wrote:What the fuck is that?

Purple Prose.

It's pretty hard NOT to reinvent the wheel, here. By and large, gamers don't want radically new monsters, they want the old stuff with an exciting new hat.

Mearls' job is to make new hats and put them on old monsters. That's *one* job, and it's being screwed up.

This is Occluded Sun's total lack of surprise.

Ice9 wrote: Which I found boring for Gem Dragons too, so maybe I'm just not the target audience. But really, none of them give any indication what you'd use them for or why you would even care.

Yeah but Sapphire Dragons teleport...

Third edition D&D was released the same year A Storm of Swords (ASOIAF book #3) was published. So we've been living in a post Game of Thrones world for three editions of D&D and change.

I can't in good faith pretend that Mearls isn't deliberately capitalizing on the popularity of the TV show, but there's no market where you can safely assume a higher baseline literacy in fantasy novels than in TTRPGs.

To create it, Mearls says his team has had to take a long hard look at Dungeons & Dragons’ oldest and most iconic creatures. Their goal was to explain them to a degree that’s never been canonically attempted before in one place.

Just checked, and Lords of Madness has a 14 page spread on Tsochar. Just Tsochar. So good luck.

There was a source book (and later three adventures for it), purely for Beholders, in second edition. "I, Tyrant". It's a 96 page book, about their mythology and ... well, mouthpicks. There's some large print and copious line art involved in making the page count. Naturally, all the Beholder-kin are discussed in ten pages at the end.

Also a set for Mind Flayers ("The Illithiad") and Sahaugin ("The Sea Devils").

But you know, marketing, so you can just say whatever.

We did Lords of Madness.

The thing about Marco Volo is that it was nominally an in-character document, which Elminster then annotated to "correct" Volo's mistakes, bullshit, and self-aggrandizement, even as he decried the secrets that Volo was revealing and probably going to get adventurers killed. From a game design perspective, this was back when there was NO clear line between "in character" and "out of character," and you could go from Elminster setting the record straight to mechanics in the same sentence. It wasn't like Creatures of Barsaive or the Old World Bestiary where fluff and crunch were duly separated. So if they're going back to that...