If you've been reading this blog from the beginning, and you've done any 5th edition DM-ing of your own, you may have noticed that as of the last Scribe Notes post, we had transitioned from the Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure in the starter set box, and into my personal version of Faerûn. So I thought now would be a nice time to stop and do a general blog post about my thoughts on Forgotten Realms and D&D 5th Edition in general (especially after just having experienced it from a DM's perspective for the first time).
Side note: I'll probably do these little general thoughts blog posts from time to time. They're mostly just a space for me to ramble, so if you're not into them, but want to follow the story of our campaign, these are safe to skip.
Anyway, I have to say, I was really impressed with the content in the starter box. I remember the 2nd edition starter box from decades ago, and it was basically a map of one dungeon, some tiny cardboard tent figures, and a thin rule book with some pre-generated characters. It was fun, but you'd play through it in an afternoon or two, and then you were done with it. There were additional adventures you could buy ("Rage of the Rakshasa" comes to mind), but they were much the same concept.
The 5th edition start set is a full campaign setting in a box, complete with towns, several dungeons (with maps), lots of NPCs (though some of them could use a bit more fleshing out), and enough adventures and side quests to get the party from level 1 to level 5, nicely packaged and ready to go. You could conceivably read the upcoming adventure the night before a game session and thoroughly entertain your players. A practiced DM could even cold read it. For $13 bucks on Amazon, it's an astonishing value, and by my count kept us playing for well over 80 hours of gameplay (granted, we play at a pretty leisurely pace). That's a lot of time to spend with a few friends, being thoroughly entertained, for relatively little money.
The story is fairly original, and the world setting is rich. Plus Forgotten Realms has so much existing content from the previous editions, that things like geography, history, and basic details are fairly easy to find online.
But the starter set isn't without it's flaws. They give you pre-made character sheets to choose from, and don't include rules on making your own character. Since the players didn't have a hand in making their character, I think some of them may have had a harder time growing to understand them, and therefore the player characters are a bit two-dimensional for the first few game sessions. I understand why they do it - in the full Player's Handbook, the complete rules for character creation cover 156 pages. If people who had never played D&D before found out they had to read that prior to their first game, they'd never start. Still, though, if I were playing Phandelver from the start, I'd do at least an hour or two pre-game session with each player, one on one, to give them time to decide who their character is. It would make playing through the stuff in the book a good bit more enjoyable.
My other beef was that they gave certain characters information on their sheet's background that was specific to the campaign setting, yet gave the DM no information on how to deal with this. For example, my party's halfing thief had a note on her sheet that said she used to be a member of the Redbrands, until they betrayed her. So of course, when the PCs are tasked with finding information about the Redbrands, my thief player says "Well, I used to work for them. Don't I already know where their hideout is, and what it's secrets are?" She had a good point, and there was nothing about it in any of the DM materials. So that was an annoying bit of improv to have to come up with on the fly.
But to DMs who have played 1st or 2nd edition, and been frustrated by the bizarre turn D&D took after WotC bought TSR, the simple act of playing D&D and having it be really fun again is enough to carry you through any tribulations in learning it. The rules are so elegant. Everything (with the one frustrating exception of spellcasting), is logical, easy to learn, and effortless enough to avoid interfering with the story, yet still structured enough to provide a rational framework for just about any situation the party finds itself in.
While we're talking about D&D products, let me just take a brief aside for a few thoughts on the Player's Handbook. Above all else, the actual content - the rules themselves - are excellent; they are the reason that 5th Edition may just be my favorite edition of D&D ever. But the way that content is organized is maddeningly frustrating. The creators seemed to favor readability over quick reference in (what I can only guess is) an attempt at making the rules volume less imposing for new players. The problem is, the function of the core handbooks is not to be read once, cover to cover, but to act as a reference book that players can turn to in game in order to quickly answer questions. Yet reference tables are kept to a bare minimum, and more often than not, the answer to a question is buried in unemphasized text in the middle of a paragraph of flowery descriptive language. Making matters worse, information is frequently cross-referenced (lots and lots of "See chapter X"). The end result of all this is that if a question about the mechanics of how something works comes up in game, and I don't know the answer off the top of my head, I have to grind play to a screeching halt while I spend upwards of five minutes digging through the book. Check the index, find the page, speed read the whole page to look for the one sentence I need, find out it's a cross-reference to another section, flip to that section, skim for the area that looks like it might be relevant, speed read that whole thing, find nothing, read it again more slowly, find another cross-reference, jump to that, read three paragraphs very carefully, and finally look up to give my PCs an answer, only to discover that half of them have gotten up to go to the bathroom, or get a snack while I searched.
As a method of workaround, I've downloaded and printed Reddit user Ozuro's excellent DM Screen cheat sheet, which contains ~75% of the useful play mechanics rules in the game in a quickly referencable format (fair warning, though: it's HUGE for a DM screen - six letter size pages). The newly released D&D 5th edition SRD compendium in Roll20 (and occasionally, Google) are also great ways to get information quickly. But if something comes up in game that I can't find an answer to in under a minute, my go to solution has become just making a ruling based on what makes sense, and frankly telling the PCs that I might have to change the way it works later, once I've had a chance to find the official rule after the game session is over. My players who have played D&D in the past are OK with this, but I have one new player for whom this game is their first real experience with tabletop RPGs, and she finds it frustrating to try to learn how the game works when the "rules" appear to keep changing on her. I suppose the wise thing to do would be to read my entire Player's Handbook, cover to cover with a highlighter in hand, and mark any passages of critical importance that might come up in game. But even if I wanted to write all over my nice new, hardcover PHB, who has that kind of time? And I don't feel like I should have to do that. In the D&D Rules 'Cyclopedia or 2nd edition PHB, I could find anything I needed in a matter of seconds (granted, I had the benefit of greater familiarity with those books). The books were definitely more intimidating to new players, but once you got used to them, quickly finding the information you needed was a breeze. It's almost as if WotC needs to release a companion Rules Encyclopedia for 5th edition, that just contains all the core mechanics information you need during actual game play.
It's not by any means a deal breaker for me with 5th edition, but it has been by far the most frustrating aspect of trying to run a 5th edition game.
Anyway, the players getting to 5th level and graduating from the Starter Set was so exciting for me, because it gave me the opportunity to take a more active role in my favorite aspects of DM-ing: world building and storytelling. Parts of the Wave Echo Cave dungeon delve intentionally left spaces for you to put hooks in to your own adventures, allowing for a smooth transition out of the box and into the game. Our last Scribe Notes post covers the players' experience of that transition, and I thought it went very well.
My plan was to get one solid adventure under their belt that involved more role playing, mystery, and problem solving than combat (as the Lost Mine of Phandelver is a bit heavy on hack and slash), before moving them into the main story line of my campaign. The thought here is to get them role playing so they can really round out their characters' personalities before unfolding the big plot hook.
That big plot hook, by the way, is called "The Eyes of Ocmalus", and I'll do a separate post about it soon. But it's designed to be an overarching story line that takes the characters from level 5 to 15 over about 18 months of short weekly game play sessions. I only bring it up here because I just yesterday learned about Princes of the Apocalypse - a 256 page off the shelf play supplement book that happens to be pretty much exactly what I've been writing for the last two months with the Eyes of Ocmalus. The story is completely different, but the concept is exactly the same - a rich set of adventures, NPCs, lore, and puzzles that provide enough content to allow a DM to run an entire campaign from start to finish. Unfortunately, I learned about it after I already sent players down my own custom rabbit hole, and the information in PofA directly conflicts with information I've already given them, so I can't use it (though I desperately wish I could, as just casually flipping through the book in a store gave me direct answers to several extremely specific questions that I'd been unable to find elsewhere). And even if I had known about it in time, I don't know that I would have gone that route for the full campaign, as it cuts out the world creation and writing piece of DM-ing that I enjoy so much. But the trade off is that I spend a LOT of time preparing for game sessions. For every hour we spend in play, I probably invest four hours in design and preparation. Running the PotA campaign instead would save me literally thousands of hours over the course of our campaign, as one can run it much like Phandelver - just read the adventure details over a few days before the game, and you're ready to go. My intent is to have this blog serve that same function for DMs who don't want to run the canned Adventurer's League games, but also don't want to invest all their free time into designing something of their own (or just need some quick filler for a game session). But for $50 MSRP (or $30 on Amazon), you could bypass a tremendous amount of effort and still create a very, very rich and enjoyable campaign for your players. So if you haven't played out of the Starter Set yet, or even if you're looking to tie in a longer running campaign story, I'd strongly recommend looking into it. They even make a special introductory edition of the adventure available online, for free, which contains some very useful information about Red Larch and the Dessarin Valley. Coincidentally, the first adventure in Eyes of Ocmalus takes place in this exact area, so that information alone is going to be a huge time saver for me (my players happen to be in the middle of the first dungeon in that series right now, and Red Larch is their next stop).
So, there you have it: that's my review of the Starter Set, 5th edition in general, and the things I wish I'd have done a little differently with the benefit of hindsight. Moving forward, my intention is for this blog to become a lot more structured. After each adventure the players finish, I'll post the source materials for the adventure that I created (look for post titles prefixed with "Campaign", "Adventure", or "Side Quest") followed by the Scribe Notes on the adventure for the players' perspective, and finally my DM Notes on how things went and what I would have done differently. It generally takes us 2-4 sessions to get through a single adventure, so don't be surprised if you see posting frequency on this blog drop to once or twice per month; it doesn't mean I've stopped posting, only that I'm waiting on the game to advance. But I'd love to hear your questions, comments, and thoughts along the way, so please feel free to make use of the comments section of each blog post.
Happy Adventuring,
Talis
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