#5e compatible

[smiteworks]

🎄 New Release: Figgy Puddin' Steals Christmas on Fantasy Grounds VTT!

Stop the holiday heist in this festive adventure. Ready to save the season? 🎅

[martianmuckraker]

Black Flag Playtest: Initial Reaction

Building A Black Flag Character The first PDF playtest of project Black Flag provides the basic rules of Character Creation. Classes aren’t released yet so you need to import one from a compatible system. If you are familiar with making RPG characters this will be familiar territory for you. Key Differences Talent’s are more integrated into the main ruleset than Feats are in 5e. Different…

[shesaramblingrose]

Mildly going feral over Witchcraft smp. Guys lemme know what you would be the witch of in the tags or comments

[derpyfelicia]

I made a plant and a monkey for the eco system in my table ttrpg I am developing!

I am really enjoying how the eco system is starting to evolve and create a form of web, As well as what materials are offered for players!

[miraclemaya]

id rather kill myself if i had to make a splatbook that was 5e compatible

[galemasters]

Wonder what Joseph Manno's response was to the OGL debacle

[prokopetz]

With DND 5e being set up to cause DM burnout, can you give examples of tabletop systems that facilitate easy DMing? I love running a tabletop game but don't have the time to deal with 5e or homebrew anymore.

(With reference to this post here.)

This is an area where you're going to get a lot of bad advice, because there's no such thing as a tabletop RPG that's "easy to GM" in the abstract. Some systems make greater or lesser demands of the GM's time and skill, but the reason that Dungeons & Dragons has a massive GM burnout problem is a bit more subtle than that – indeed, D&D's GM burnout problem is considerably worse than that of many games whose procedures of play place much greater demands on the GM!

It boils down to the fact that games are opinionated. Even a very simple set of rules contains a vast number of baked-in assumptions about how the game ought to be played; in the case of tabletop RPGs, those baked-in assumptions include assumptions about what kinds of stories the game ought to be used to tell. The players of any given group, of course, also have assumptions – some explicit, many unexamined – about how the game's story ought to go. It's rare that these two sets of assumptions will perfectly agree.

Fortunately, perfect agreement isn't necessary, because tabletop RPGs aren't computer games, and it's always possible to tweak the outputs of the rules on the fly to better suit the desired narrative experience. In conventional one-GM-many-players games like D&D, this responsibility for monitoring and adjusting the outputs of the rules so that they're compatible with the narrative space the group wishes to explore falls principally on the GM.

Now, here's where the trouble starts: the larger the disconnect between the story the rules want to produce and the narrative space the group wants to explore, the more work the GM in a conventional one-GM-many-players context needs to do in order to close that gap. If the disconnect is large enough, the GM ends up spending practically all of their time babysitting the outputs of the rules, at the expense of literally every other facet of their responsibilities.

(Conversely, if that gap is large and isn't successfully closed, you can end up with a situation where engaging with the rules and engaging with the narrative become mutually exclusive activities. This is where we get daft ideas like "combat" and "roleplaying" being opposites – which is nonsense, of course, but it's persuasive nonsense if you've never experienced a game where the rules agree with you about what kind of story you should be telling.)

And here's where the problem with Dungeons & Dragons in particular arises. The rules of D&D aren't especially more opinionated than those of your average tabletop RPG; however, the game has developed a culture of play that's allergic to actually acknowledging this. There are several legs to this, including:

a text which makes claims about the game's supported modes of play that are far broader than what the rules in fact support;

a body of received wisdom about GMing best practices which consists mostly of advice on how to close the gap between the rules' assumptions and the players' expectations (but refuses to admit that this is what it's doing);

a player culture which has become increasingly hostile to players learning or knowing the rules, and positions any expectation that players should learn the rules as a form of "gatekeeping"; and

a propensity to treat a very high level of GMing skill as an entry-level expectation.

Taken together, all this produces a situation where, when the rules and the group disagree about how the game's story ought to go, the players don't experience it as a problem with the rules: they experience it as a problem with the GM. A lot of GMs even buy into this perception themselves, which is how you end up with GM advice forums overflowing with people telling novice GMs that they're morally bad people for being unprepared to tackle very advanced GMing challenges right from the jump.

(At this point, one may wonder: why on Earth would a game develop this sort of culture of play in the first place? Who benefits? Well, what we're looking at in practice is a culture of play which treats novice and casual GMs as a disposal resource whose purpose is to maximise the number of people playing Dungeons & Dragons. Follow the money!)

So, after all of that, the short answer is that there isn't a specific magic-bullet solution to avoiding D&D's GM burnout problem – or, at least, not one that operates at the level of the rules, because there's no particular thing that D&D as a system is doing "wrong" that produces this outcome; the problem operates almost entirely at the play culture level.

In practice, two things need to happen:

Placing a greater expectation on the players to learn and understand the game's rules; and

Selecting a system where the gap between the story the rules want to produce and the narrative space the group wants to explore is small.

It's that second one that's the real trick. In order to minimise that gap, we need to know what kind of narrative space your group wants to explore, and that might not be something you have a good answer to if you don't have good lines of communication with your players.

(As an aside, there's a good chance that we're going to see dipsticks cropping up in the notes insisting that their favourite system short-circuits this problem by being perfectly universal and having no baked-in narrative assumptions. These people are lying to you, and lending credence to the idea that there's any such thing as a universal RPG is a big part of how we got into this mess in the first place!)

[hifi-walkman]

huh, must have misread the price-listing and thought print on demand was the digital price. Yeah definitely just get the B/X rules.

And I would guess the 5e person based it on Marcille's available spells and spell power and its equivalent in 5e. But aside from just the base Idea of race as class from B/X as justification for it being more like those rules in terms of the structure of its world: Chillichuk uses a bow, and specifies that being a half-foot makes him naturally better at it, Senshi is a vaguely competent fighter who's most useful trait is navigation, trap detection, and general comfort underground and in the dungeon, and even through Marcille is all in on using magic, they explicityl call out falin as the group's "Magic User" (literally namedropping the class name), with marcille just being "an elf". Though, it's got a bit of OD&D nonsense going on with some NPCs clearly being of race/class combos, but none of the main cast (including like, Kabru's party) who would represent "player characters" have anything like that. lots of "There are Dwarf Clerics, but only NPCs" happening.

"it's a DM issue" is a very silly defence of the limitations of D&D when it comes to genre, not only because it puts a lot of extra pressure on the DM to bend the game into a format that the players will find more acceptable (with little consideration made as to whether the experience provided by the game as written might actually have merit), but also because "choosing to run a conventional heroic fantasy narrative in the dungeon crawler engine" is also very much a DM issue

[imsobadatnicknames2]

I think your RPG takes are really good :) I enjoy D&D 5e to some extent (like, it's fine), but I feel D&D's market dominance isn't great. But what gets me the most is how incurious many people who play D&D 5e to the exclusion of other games are. No interest in seeing anything that deviates from how D&D does things.

Yeah! This is a point I've tried to make clear too, like... ultimately if someone WANTS to stick to 5e that's not my problem. If they want to use heavily homebrewed 5e for a Doctor Who or Cyberpunk or Homestuck campaign or whatever and their table has fun with it like. Okay, I personally wouldn't do that but I also have no right to tell anyone to NOT do that.

But the moment they get so entrenched in that idea of "You can use 5e to do ANYTHING" that they start acting like someone else wanting to use anything other than heavily homebrewed 5e for anything is some ridiculous or preposterous idea that's when I have a problem with them. Especially when the people who think like that are a statistically significant enough portion of the tabletop public to affect business decisions in the hobby.

Like. One of the saddest cases I've seen in recent memory, the upcoming Adventure Time ttrpg from Cryptozoic was initially pitched as having its own system, only to later end up being switched to 5e. And considering that the initial Dicebreaker article that came out months before this announcement featured quotes from one of the developers about why they decided to use their own system and why they thought D&D wouldn't work well with the narrative flow they wanted for the game, and also that the reason given for the switch to 5e was "feedback from fans", it's clear that this is not a decision they made because they WANTED to make a 5e hack, but because they NEEDED to make it a 5e hack in order for it to be profitable because there's just such a huge portion of the tabletop public that got pulled into the hobby with 5e and is so fundamentally incurious that they won't touch a book with a 10-foot pole unless it some form of "5e compatible" logo on the cover.

[adventure-time-news]

Overview of all upcoming Adventure Time media

It can be hard to keep track so here's a concise guide.

ANIMATED STUFF

Fionna and Cake Season 2, which will continue where Season 1 left off and be ten episodes long.

An untitled Adventure Time movie, with involvement from Adam Muto, Rebecca Sugar, and Pat McHale.

Side Quests, a new episodic-focused series set around the time of season 1 of the original show, with Nate Cash probably serving as showrunner, making this the first Adventure Time media since season five to not be produced by Adam Muto.

Heyo BMO, a preschool show with involvement from Adam Muto and Obsidian storyboard artist and children's writer Ashlyn Anstee.

None of these have a release date yet, but I expect none of them to come out until 2025 at the earliest, and they may be further delayed if there is a TAG strike later this year.

COMICS STUFF

Adventure Time Compendium Vol. 1, an Oni Press publication that will collect issues #1-#35 of the 2012 Adventure Time series; those written by Ryan North. It will be released on the 15th of October 2024.

The Fionna and Cake Compendium, which will collect various Fionna and Cake stories, including the 2013 comic miniseries and Fionna & Cake: Card Wars. It will be released on the 12th of November 2024.

Adventure Time Compendium Vol. 2, which will collect issues #36-#61 of the 2012 Adventure Time series, which is all the issues written by Christopher Hastings. It will be released on the 25th of March 2025.

Oni Press have promised some new original comics coming in 2025, but these are yet to be announced.

OTHER STUFF

Journey to Ooo, a young readers' Screen Comix adaptation of the episodes Dungeon and Fionna and Cake, published by Penguin Random House and releasing on the 3rd of September 2024.

Adventure Time: The Roleplaying Game, a 5e-compatible TTRPG developed by Cryptozoic Entertainment, currently aiming for a March 2025 release.

The Smash-like fighting game Multiversus is already out, but future updates are set to introduce new Adventure Time characters, including Marceline, and new story cutscenes featuring those characters.

[psychhound]

hey yall!!! new bundle :D

this is my 14 for 14 ttrpg bundle to pay off some of the debt from my top surgery!! you get 14 games and homebrew for 14 bucks, which is gonna run until june 14th (my birthday!!)

my top surgery was absolutely life changing and has made me so much more comfortable, confident, and happy. i dont regret it in the least. i also got hit with some surprise bills afterward that have me pretty heftily in debt because of it

some very kind souls have donated their games to help me pay some of this off, which was just so incredibly generous. which means its not just my games in here!! lots and lots of cool stuff, please check it out!!

in the bundle:

ttrpgs:

[BXLLET> : a game about systems of violence and power in the weird west apocalypse

disparateum: a dream-like reality-bending game where you hop worlds and tell strange stories

little celestial fieldwork guide: a city exploration photography game where you divine hidden spirits and take photos of them

beach day!: a system agnostic party bonding minigame where characters swap gifts and secrets

what they once feared: a solo journaling game where you play a folkloric monster forced to choose your path

the narrator paradox: a one page solo game where you play a storybook narrator whos protagonist has gained agency and is trying to change the story

the fool who got married (extended): a duet epistolary game of female hardship and connection in 1848

explorers of the forever city: a rules-light, fantasy role-playing game about ordinary people making extraordinary discoveries

homebrew:

riders: a pact for moth-light by justin ford, a fitd game. tame, bond with, and ride the terrifying predator moths

witch: a class for d&d 5e. be a con-based half-caster with curses, familiars, and a whole new way of doing spell slots

harmony with the wind: a ghibli-inspired d&d 5e pack with 5 feats, 4 backgrounds, 4 races, 6 monsters, and 3 subclasses

fairytale/feywild: a pack for d&d 5e with 1 background, 2 races, 1 subclass, and unique timekeeping mechanics for the feywild

burger wizard: a d&d 5e compatible narrative rpg about working as magical kitchen staff in a fantasy restaurant

argyth's arcane companion: 4 wizard subclasses, 3 feats, and 17 new spells for d&d 5e

you can get all of this for 14 bucks until june 14th!! it would really mean a lot to me for yall to check it out and also spread the word :D

check it out on itch!!

[smiteworks]

💥New Release! Prepare for The End of Everything on Fantasy Grounds VTT.

A thrilling adventure awaits your party—save the world!

[thechekhov]

thoughts on the huge OGL debacle around DnD at the moment?

mmmmmMMMMMM BOI

I was going to be holding off on commenting until something was confirmed by WotC because I hoped to get more info but. I think we basically got what we need. 

For those who don’t know - the CONTEXT:

Earlier last month there was a leak that made the DnD community peek up out of their little holes like a bunch of meerkats hearing a stampede. Y’see, currently, Wizards of the Coast (a company owned by Hasbro, a corporate giant in board-games) is working on a new DnD version that is meant to replace 5e (5th edition of DnD, the most current one). They’re calling it One DnD, and it’s in play-test right now. But there’s a problem. Along with new stuff, they were apparently planning to revise the OGL - the Open Gaming License which had been a staple of the DnD Era since 2000.

The OGL 1.0 was essentially an open world ticket for third-party creators to use DnD game mechanics to build worlds, create monsters, and expand upon the creative base that was DnD. In 2008 they attempted to publish 4th edition DnD under a different, less open gaming license, which ended up severely hurting their overall standing with the community. When they published 5e, they returned to the OGL and DnD has gained traction with the public thanks to various gaming groups (such as Critical Role) rising to fame. Because of the OGL, many people have made adventures for 5e DnD, making monster manuals compatible with the game, and basically expanding on a huge, growing world. There have been kickstarters for new adventures, new compendiums, etc, which were an incredible creative sandbox for just about anyone who wanted to try their hand at creating.

And now it seems like they fucked it up. 

A leak made it clear that WotC is working on OGL 1.1 - which is basically a giant middle finger to everything the original was. They are now demanding royalties from anyone creating new content if they make over 50kᶜᵒʳʳᵉᶜᵗᵉᵈ 750k a year from their creations - which in and of itself isn’t super unreasonable.... except for the fact that they can lower this number at any point. 

ALSO with the new OGL (1.1) WotC would OWN the rights to anything made using any of their content (including homebrew made by creators - yes, they would own settings/character just because those adventures use their system) indefinitely, demand they receive financial reports from anyone making 50k or more.

What’s more, they reserve the right to change their own license at any point, with only 30 days notice. (Which basically means that if at any point they decide to demand recompense from people making more than, say, 20k from their little homebrewed setting in 5e, they can do that with nary a month’s warning.) 

“...according to attorneys consulted for this article, the new language may indicate that Wizards of the Coast is rendering any future use of the original OGL void, and asserting that if anyone wants to continue to use Open Game Content of any kind, they will need to abide by the terms of the updated OGL, which is a far more restrictive agreement than the original OGL..." (source)

So as you can imagine, for the past few weeks, the entire DnD community and the ttrpg community at large have been gearing up for either a fight, a mass exodus, or both. It would not be the first time. 

And then, just recently, we had another comment, this time from inside. An email was sent out, which has been evidently confirmed by one of the recipients as true, describing what is happening inside of WotC. 

[I'm an employee at WotC currently working on and with business leaders on the health of the product line. If you want I can provide proof of this.I'm sending this message because I fear for the health of a community I love, and I know what the leaders at WOTC are looking at:

They are briefly delaying rollout of OGL changes due to the backlash.

Their decision making is based entirely on the provable impact to their bottom line

Specifically they are looking at DDB subscriptions and cancellations as it is the quickest financial data they currently have.

They are still hoping the community forgets, moves on, and they can still push this through

I have decided to reach out because at my time in WotC I have never once heard management refer to customers in a positive manner, their communication gives me the impression they see customers as obstacles between them and their money, the DDB team was first told to prepare to support the new OGL changes and online portal when they got back from the holidays, and leadership doesn’t take any responsibility for the pain and stress they cause others. Leadership's first communication to the rank and file on the OGL was 30 minutes on 1/11/23, This was the first time they even tried to communicate their intentions about the OGL to employees, and even in this meeting they blamed the community for over-reacting.I will repeat, the main thing this leadership is looking at is DDB subscription cancellations.Hope your day goes well,PS will be copying and pasting this message to other community leaders]

(source)

As for my comment in all of this? 

I won’t pretend to be a local expert in legal terminology. Others can probably parse the full leak far better, and I don’t think there is anything to be gained by running around in a panic and screaming...

However. 

The fact of the matter is, Hasbro/WotC are shooting themselves in the foot. I don’t believe they have the right to destroy the original license. Make a new one for OneDnD? Sure, knock yourself out. Try it, see how popular it’ll be. But destroying the community-driven 5e will do only that - destroy it. They will not be gaining any money from the fans which are already plenty used to supporting small-level creators first and large companies second. It’s a supremely counter-culture move which will eat them from the inside out. 

The only ones that I feel for are Critical Role - who originally played in Pathfinder and then switched to 5e and paired up with DnD Beyond.............and are now being screwed over because they’re likely locked in a contract with WotC and are contractually obligated to not speak out negatively against the changes. 

In my heart of hearts, I kinda hope that their tablets all mysteriously ‘break’ for the next few games and they go back to pen and paper instead of barking out DnD Beyond ads as they’re expected to do. But I don’t know if that’s something they can afford to risk. 

(.....though hell, I hope they try to afford it. They have a community that will stand behind them, and that community has MONEY. We won’t know until we know, though, and I know that there are legal repercussions that may go beyond a simple income slap on the wrist.)

Personally, here’s my two cents: 

I think people should cast a vote with their money.

 Cancel your DnD Beyond subscription.

Don’t give any more money to Hasbro or Wizards. Keep playing whatever 5e games you want, but do it using third-party digital character sheets, OR just go old school and do pen and paper. Let me know if you need sources for it. 

Don’t buy the Players Handbook, leave DnD Beyond behind, don’t engage with One DnD. There are resources out there that let you play the game that also don’t require you giving money to corporations that are only here to fuck around and find out. You want an adventure module but don’t want to bow down to the dragon sitting on its hoard? Hit me up. I’ll give you some alternatives. 

Hell, I myself will be looking into Pathfinder 2e because I’ve heard good things, and if I need to switch any future games to a different system because Fountry VTT or Roll20 will stop offering the 5e presents, it’ll be a very good alternative. Paizo just came out with a statement that they will write their own version of the OGL which will keep the spirit of the open game alive, and Kobold Press is gearing up with their own stuff. 

I won’t be throwing out my own games, and I don’t feel there’s a need to stop playing 5e. I have a Curse of Strahd game to finish, and that game belongs to me and my group now. We don’t need the module - it needs us. 

... all that is simply to say - Wizards may soon be realizing that when you live on the Coast... pirates are never far. 

(edited thanks to corrections from @magpiesarefluffy )

[bugmeyer]

Angelic resin miniatures for tabletop gaming that come complete with 5E compatible rules for epic-level boss encounters.

It's been a long time coming! I hope you enjoy these :)

[thelenroman]

I’ve illustrated a whole tabletop adventure Zine and launched it on Kickstarter! If you like Cryptids and High Strangeness and retro inspired art, consider supporting it! It’s 5E and Old School Essentials compatible 👽🔦

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mdntwvlf/the-village-of-bray?ref=1rzo3q

[umbraastaff]

what's pokeymanz? I'm only really familiar with a very simplistic pokemon system made by the GM for the Unexpectables campaign (it ain't bad, but I'm down for something with potentially more to it), also like, kinda surprised kinda not at people trying to contort 5e to fit pokemon, feels like folks try to cram everything into D&D 5e

yeah! so!! pokeymanz is a very cool system which aims (and IMO succeeds) to capture the feel of the pokémon anime in a game system. it's compatible with basically any generation or concept you can think of in pokémon bc it's such an open-ended while still giving plenty of guidelines for how to handle different kinds of things that appear across the games/shows/etc. there's even rules for playing as a pokémon à la PMD or meowth.

you can download the rulebook HERE, and honestly i'd recommend checking it out if you enjoy pokémon even if you have no interest in the game - it's very funny and enjoyable to read lol. it is based on Savage Worlds and GURPS, but I am not very familiar with either system so I can't speak much on that.

also, silliness aside, of course people can do whatever they want wrt game systems - you should be aiming to do what makes you happy first and foremost. but in my personal opinion, D&D 5e has pretty in-depth mechanics that reflect the goals and even the setting they were built for on a pretty deeply fundamental level, and trying to hack a completely different system into that just seems like... such a pain...

I am pretty sure I have also seen crunchier systems for pokémon made wholesale, which imo seems preferable to hacking it into 5e, even if it might require more work. but even then, I feel like... if I wanted a really robust pokémon battle system with specific rules and complicated math for how everything works, i would simply play the video game pokémon.

i know there are other ones - like whatever they're using on "unbeatable: a kanto journey"? i only just started listening to it and i haven't been able to find any info on what system they're using, but it seems kind of similar to kids on bikes (in that stats are represented by a d4 thru d20 and they explode), but it also seems to have more specific sub-skill checks and a lot of specific rules for how moves work...? so i am not sure what's going on there. been fun so far though.

anyway, check out pokeymanz. it's great timing bc it actually just recently had its final content update and is soon to be out of beta! every so often i get really excited about it and have pipe dreams again of running a campaign lol