#then I made a little battle map and dungeon goal for each terrain

[amtrak12]

Okay I now have a headache from wearing my contacts for a half the day and fighting for 30 minutes on html text formatting BUT!! today I had an Easter egg hunt with my dog and spouse, played a little D&D, and watched a full Lucifer episode even if the hyperfixation high got heavily dulled by Tumblr/HTML nonsense.

So, it was still a very good day. :)

[intergalactic-nimrod]

Finished Breath of the Wild today (Spoiler Free)

First off, I’m not much of a gamer. Mum never let me get a console when I was a kid, so I never got to get into them. I always knew though that eventually when I would get a console it would be a Nintendo one. Nintendo is the root of video games as they are today, and their main line IP’s have always really resonated with me. So, I preordered a Switch launch day, fully aware it would have problems and a limited selection of launch games, but I wanted to support a game company that still sought to innovate with how people play games, rather than pushing an ultimately futile graphics barrier. There’s only so high of a resolution that the human eye can see, and no matter how realistic you try to make a game it simply will not hold up in time, whereas games with more artistic styles have much greater life spans.

My expectations for Breath of the Wild were sky high. Again, I’m not much of a gamer, especially because of my restrictive budget, but it just looked exciting and fun. I had watched playthroughs of the other Zelda games and loved the general world and culture of the series, and gained a huge appreciation of its history. I loved seeing Breath of the Wild trying to break away from conventions and both defy and redefine what a Zelda game could be. I thought it would make an excellent introduction for me into console gaming, and I just fell for the emotional tone of the trailers.

So here I am, having finished the game 13 days after its release, and I have to say, it was good, but it was NOT a 10/10 game. In fact it was great, it was ambitious, it was almost as perfect as I could’ve asked for it to be in a lot of parts, but this is not the end of the Zelda franchise, with no place for it to go from here.

I enjoyed my Zelda experience immensely. I found myself smiling and giggling throughout parts of it, and I find it hard to feel emotions these days through art and entertainment after being exposed to it my whole life. I felt pure and honest joy through most of it. The game play was always fun and clean, and there were few things I would change mechanically.

The flaws with the game come not out of its mechanics, but out of its philosophy, which paradoxically is also the thing that is so amazing about it. The world is open, it’s free, and you can easily get lost in it, but it’s a happy feeling of being lost. At the same time though, there is the story and general motion/pace to the game that flows nicely and can guide the player, or let them break away from it. The problem with this though, is that at times it can be too much... and I know this is where I may lose some, but after I had finished the story (exempting final boss), about 100 of the shrines, found all the memories, beat all the dungeons, and completed my map of Hyrule, I suddenly found myself bored. VERY bored.

The greatest experience of BotW is that Hyrule itself is a character. Each tower was a checkpoint, but also a step forward as it opened up more of the world to explore. When I first left the Great Plateau and went out into the world, it was wild, open freedom and discovery. As I went on, I would find shrines to serve as mini checkpoints, and that’s the brilliance of the game. You can get lost, but you only get lost exploring. As you open up the map, you see things you didn’t see before, and the shrines serve as stations to teleport you around and get you closer to interesting things. They help you fill out the spaces in the world, and whereas at first I was just a kid named Link, running about, I slowly found myself literally conquering Hyrule. I was going about, enthralled by the story, and mastering shrines, becoming stronger, and facing the wild. It’s an excellent formula: the confusion and wonder of stepping into the unknown, the curve and quest to survive and thrive, pulling the content and rising above its challenges, and then besting it, becoming its master as you teleport around, filling in the gaps of your understanding of the area.

But when all was said and done, I had conquered Hyrule, and suddenly there was nothing to do. The last shrines I missed were a drag to find tucked away amidst the huge map that I had already conquered at 97%, and that last 3% felt like it wouldn’t have been worth it without story to keep my trajectory going forward. There was one last thing really worth doing: Ganon, the biggest, baddest, overhanging quest and priority. I ended up looking up walkthroughs to find and get the last shrines, just because I wanted the final reward and to max myself out for the final challenge.

I thought about finding all the Koroks, but after my entire time playing the game I only found 171 out of NINE HUNDRED. Definitely not worth it. I tried maxing out my armors, but soon found that to be boring, as it was mostly just trying to tediously gather hard to get materials.

I had conquered Hyrule, gone over it a ton of times, and there just wasn’t enough tucked into every percent and square inch of the game to drive me to go beyond the story too much. In fact, that’s another criticism: I love the story for what’s there, but I wish there was more for such a larger game, OR I wish the game and world was smaller to balance out the actual scope of what the story does. It’s very simple, and though it is perfectly done for what is there, the world is too big and its spirit gets stretched thin.

Hyrule is enormous, and that becomes a problem when you start seeing the same towers and art styles and patterns everywhere. I started noticing how geometric a lot of the terrain was, and the imperfections of the world and graphics as I constantly went back over. The world, for as big and fun as it is begins to lose some of its face that it desperately needs its story for. Some things just look and feel too samey, like certain parts were just copy-pasted about. Eventually a lot of shrines were just combat trials to fill in the gaps and most Korok puzzles felt the same. I lost the drive to look around for secrets because I knew they were always going to be the same thing, whether it be a chest with rupees or some weapon I’ve seen a hundred times.

The only mechanical problem with the game was the now infamous glass weapons, which is a criticism I agree with- to a limited extent. I was constantly having new and powerful weapons being thrown at me as I went around, so having plentiful weapons helped to easily balance how quickly they broke, but the constant fear of a weapon I liked or was saving breaking or having to be tossed out of my limited inventory lingered over every battle, and I just wished they would have higher durability so I could experiment more and find a style or set of weapons that worked and made combat situations like a puzzle in themselves, with me having a versatile strategy which I could employ to fit the context of the battle. It makes the player become more skilled and trained with the combat system, but instead I found myself stocking up on high powered weapons and just wailing on enemies until they broke, just to bring out the next disposable weapon and continue the same. It didn’t completely not work, but it felt counter intuitive to the brilliant and challenging philosophy the game had set up about choice, but also choice with the limits of strategy and thinking. You COULD run into a battle stupidly and just go swinging wildly, but it would be more EFFECTIVE and BENEFICIAL to the player to go about things carefully and with thought. Unfortunately, the brittle weapons undermine this idea, and throw a spike into the squeaky clean design of the battle system.

My favorite thing about this game by far though, was its philosophy. In every piece of media, there is the concept and then the execution. Breath of the Wild is an excellent idea, with just a few missteps in execution that I’ve already mentioned that undermine its philosophy. However, don’t let that take away from how brilliant most of it is conceptually and doesn’t belittle the player. It perfectly understands what Zelda games were, what they should be, and did an extremely admiral job of nearly getting there. It’s a game that’s clearly designed and aware of what it wanted to be, unlike lots of other modern games. You could execute the most perfectly polished and well put together turd in history, but it’s still a turd. Breath of the Wild is quite the opposite, though its imperfections in execution are not nearly so horrible as could be eluded from such an absolute analogy.

The best thing that Breath of the Wild could have done is perfect its philosophy, and that much is very clear. The name of the title is The Legend of ZELDA. This is not a game about Link. Zelda is made the most complex and likeable character in this game, and your quest is to go out and remember her, to regain the past that was her, and restore her future. I wish Link were a little less stilted, as in a little more expressive (in cut scenes I mean), but the game clearly understands what Zelda was about in its first inception. Zelda is your ultimate quest, your ultimate goal. SHE is the legend and the core of the game, and so long as I was going after saving her, the game was amazing.

[Very mild spoilers from here on out, but nothing major at all. I’m still keeping things very vague] The final boss fight of the game was good, but almost underwhelming, and it made me wish Ganon had been somewhat of a character, rather than just a force. It would rhyme well with Zelda, as the calamity was the source of her pains and her need to fulfill her duty (and her inability to do so). Making Ganon an actual character again would’ve embodied this force into something more human and relateable, giving part of her struggles a face to identify with. The only face the calamity has is the threatening image of the corrupted Hyrule Castle, always in the distance, always looming. That in itself is very effective, but I still can’t help wishing for more story. Again, it was amazing for what was there, I just wish there was more.

I was also partly disappointed by the ending, partly because I wished it were still harder (and it would’ve been more satisfying if Ganon were a character/individual rather than just a beast), but also I wish the ending would do more than just... end. I’m probably flawed in that I do have a specific image of what I’d like the end of a Zelda game to be, but at that point I’m probably better of making a Zelda movie. For as much as the game redefined the Zelda series and took itself back to its roots while also moving forward, I wish the ending would’ve also moved their world forward. I’ve always hated the Zelda timeline, where every game is essentially a reboot or re imagining (often with some gimmick or circumstantial them). It would’ve been amazing to see a very satisfying ending where it breaks all final conventions, and takes the future of the franchise in a new direction as well. That wouldn’t have just been amazing, that would’ve been REVOLUTIONARY (for the series at least). It’s not all bad, in fact not bad at all, and in a sense it does fulfill my desire be leaving things off in an open way. It really felt like this was just the first installment of a new series, like there was more to come... and thus that brings me to a conclusion.

This is not the epitome of exactly what a Zelda game should be. It’s not PERFECT, and it’s not the Zelda game to end all Zelda games that I hoped it would be. Instead, BotW presents itself as something completely different: a new beginning. From here on out, I want Zelda to continue what this game has started, not just rebooting itself over and over, but expanding and fixing the flaws that lay in the small cracks of its perfect foundation. I think I ultimately found this game a little unsatisfying because the world began to look and feel the same throughout a lot of it. Also, it felt like too much of Hyrule was destroyed and disjointed. I’d like to see the next installment be a restored Hyrule, at its near full glory, but without erasing the ruins of the past. I want the history implied in BotW to still show, like destroyed town and places, but I want to see a more flourishing and characterized Hyrule rising out of its ashes.

The next installment could be made even better by doing just a few simple things. Ultimately, the world was made bigger than the game could comfortably sustain. It lost some of its streamlined nature and its fat began to spill out of its inappropriately fitting clothing (which it could’ve fixed by scaling up, and finding something to wear that was more flattering and appropriate to its larger form, though this is where I end this analogy), and by just making the game less of an open world, it could actually FEEL like more an open world, only one far more interesting. This game can’t afford to look generic like the environments of Minecraft, because in that game the player directly manipulates their world. Here, the players relationship with the world is just a little more restricted, and that’s fine and good and perfect, but that also means implementing more design, environment specific things, and unique areas of interest.

I don’t like numerical grading systems, but I highly recommend this game. It’s a real blast and worth picking up as soon as you can. Seriously, this is not one to miss. My consensus can be most closely comparable to an 8.5 or 9 out of 10 (closer to 8.5 though).

[writera]

Becoming a Dungeon Master

I feel like a fairly new DM. And most of my RPG experience is as a DM. However at this point I have years of experience, so I'm not sure how long I get to hang on to that moniker.

Getting started as a DM is pretty intimidating, foremost because there is just so much you don't know about — if your players know more about the setting or the canonical character/spell/narrative tropes than you, its easy to let them push you to make calls you wouldn't otherwise make. Trying to adjudicate for very smart, rules lawyering [fill-in-the-game] buffs sounds like an uphill battle.

Briefly, I got my start with 3.5e in college, subsequently played 40k, World of Darkness, a homebrew system, and DM'd two 5e D&D games. I've been a part of four different groups. I had some trouble running good 5e games, and this has directly resulted in a lot of research. 

In my 40k game, the primary GM was tired of GMing, but whenever his apprentice GM ran a game, he was "corrected" on a number of things that the apprentice had pretty clearly thought out in advance. Having less experience in the setting, the corrections made no sense — "wow that's a cool idea! It doesn't even matter to the campaign, why is the regular GM nixing this?".

I toyed with the idea of running a few sessions, and studied the one rulebook I was planning on drawing from. 40k has shitty encounter-balancing tools, and I never managed to put something together before that game dissolved.

In the meantime, I was playing board games with a volatile and cliqueish meetup group. After D&D 5e came out, I thought I'd see if anyone in the meetup was interested in trying out 5e. I got a game together to play Hoard of the Dragon Queen. My first time DM-ing!

I had never played with a grid, and didn't want to. I'd forgotten most everything about 3.5, so I wasn't bothered by some of the major changes between 3.5 and 5e. Anyway 5e said all the things I wanted to hear — grid? Don't trouble yourself. Rules dispute? Make a decision, figure it out later. I tried to commit as much of the mechanics and guidelines to heart as possible — even waded most of the way through the spell list, trying to figure out each one — although I seem to have failed to pay attention to class progressions beyond a cursory glance (carefully read the class progressions your players choose, after they choose them! build the game to their abilities!).

I didn't realize that half my group were hardcore min-maxers. That half was there for the full RPG experience and the other half for a glorified tactical combat game. I was so focused on trying to memorize all the narrative and mechanical details that I didn't work on tactical scenarios. Not that I knew how to make combat interesting — for all my RTS computer games, I knew how to build tactics to the terrain, not terrain to tactics. Anyway, the group itself had some interpersonal problems that ultimately was its undoing, but we played for a while before that happened.

I was enthusiastically reading advice on hooking your players and running a good game. I put together an introductory email with some setting material, key terms and character concept ideas, and a map of Faerun (with a note that it was just for context, a character wouldn't know what Faerun looks like). One thing I stressed was creating bonds and flaws that you wanted to see happening in game.

So first session, after my little speech about bonds and flaws, including a half-thought one-liner about "not picking something really far away or irrelevant", one player — hereafter known as Bob — asks me — "can my bond be the grandfather tree?" — and talks a little about the grandfather tree. I thought — great! I was worried they might not go along with this. So I make a point of praising the idea. Meanwhile the players are ignoring me and laughing at me, passing around my map of Faerun pointing at a little dot labeled "Grandfather Tree", as far away from our starting point as the map allows. So I say — That map is just for context! I can put the forest where-ever I want! It can be next door.

Half the table stares at me incredulously ... "are you sure you don't want to look at the map?"

For Bob and his friend Byron, the game was completely about optimal positioning. Eventually it became pretty clear that the power gamers were unhappy, and I agreed to use a whiteboard to draw battlemaps. This time, HotDQ prescribed an ambush. As usual, the game ground to a halt during combat while Bob ran around sniping enemies — with no idea that eight covered leveled bad guys might be above their power-level. I tried to drop helpful hints, and the rest of the party eventually got it together and regrouped, but Bob's character continued kiting to the long drawn-out end, and finally! by fair tactical combat got chased down, knocked unconscious, and dragged off "to the rape dungeon!" as Bob energetically interjected.

It wasn't all bad, but it was a constant fight. Worse, while the B-men were most excited about gaming the system, they had no interest in making believable choices. HotDQ has a lot of leading questions (it's a railroad as written) — and I was ready to try to round-about recyle the chapters under different conditions to make the game flow, and I even said so when Byron commented something along the lines of "gee, I wonder where we're supposed to go next?". I wish they had tried at least *somewhat* to assert their will in the storyline. But those two didn't really care. And the other two bought the story hooks.

Those other two players (Bianca and Eadward) probably didn't get the game they deserved, either; in part because I was focused on dealing with the first two. Bob took the floor, but also completely ignored the will of the other players. During a hostage crisis, for example, he got all the hostages killed when the rest of the party could taste victory. But I had recently moved to a small town and didn't know anyone else who might play.

Anyway, to me, that first campaign (which we didn't finish) felt flat and the combats tedious. I doubled down on my efforts to figure out why. Some time passed, my two favorite players moved away, and I found another group of players: a DM, a soon-to-be-DM, a Pathfinder guy, and a newbie nerd who wanted to play a powerful necromancer.

I hear a lot of advice repeated over and over again. The internet is kind of an echo-chamber — maybe nobody knows what they're doing. So here's my thoughts on the systems, and process of becoming a DM —

The process of becoming a DM sucks. Maybe you've got a supportive group of players, or maybe you are working with what you have, trying to accommodate them. I had ideas and creativity, but I didn't know how to efficiently turn them into encounters, social situations, and adventures. For my second campaign, I homebrewed the world, a metropolis, the society, an underlying plot, the traditional world-building minutiae, and monsters, dungeons, ... almost everything. I put in so much work — almost every day, and a lot of my weekends I went down to the coffee shop, researched, wrote backstory, adjusted power levels or made up new challenges. And I still feel like it was easier than trying to learn all the details of an established setting I've never played, like Faerun.

Because Faerun doesn't make sense to me. I make up part of it, only to find when I look for a detail somewhere else, it's tightly coupled to the part I replaced! Without a model of how Faerun works in my head, I'm not sure how to move my chess pieces. I need someone to break it down at every stage into the simplest pieces possible — treating a nation as an NPC, identifying important NPCs and their relationships, NPC roles, propensities/motives, and power. And then breaking down organizations into some kind of organization-space, treating them as NPCs, building a web, and mapping organization-space onto a geographical map. And then breaking down cities into NPCs and organizations, and then districts, and then guilds, and then society. Because, otherwise, it's too vast for me to understand out of context, and it's too easy to break immersion, to give too much political power to the PCs (so that there's no point to strive for anything anymore).

So of course, I was excited when the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide came out. I figured — this is the ticket for me to understand the broad strokes of Faerun! But it most definitely isn't. I'm not going to hate on the book, if you have time and money, and it seems interesting, by all means why not peruse it? I appreciate WotC's intent — but the book is more like an encyclopedia and less like a novel. A novel?

When I started out my second campaign, I handed out a detailed questionnaire. I listed scifi & fantasy books, and asked players to order them by favorite theme. I had questions testing interest in various settings, playstyles, character goals, greyscale morality vs black-and-white, miscellaneous ideas I had, and possible responsibilities players might want to take on (food, side-quest DMing, writing, etc). After the first campaign, I wanted to gauge player interests. I had been doodling setting ideas for a while, and wanted to know if the players would care. I decided my setting was an important demiplane or whatever man, and that there were secret portals typically accessible by ship (a plot point) which I could use to plug it into another setting whenever I wanted (I planned to plug it into Faerun). Interestingly, I had more than enough material in my own world, and my players never got to Faerun.

What did those questionnaires get me? Absolutely nothing. One player nixed "Game of Thrones style" on his questionnaire, for all the good it did him (it just made me fret about my grand plans, I should never have asked — how is he supposed to know my world-building secrets anyway? Also, what is Game of Thrones style?). The rest of it was just idiosyncratic preferences, although it was interesting to look at. So while it's good to feel your group out, I don't think you need to go overboard here. "Will you bring the drinks?" "Do you have to get up early the next morning?" and "Do you like hack and slash?" "Do you like political power?" "Do you like experience points?" "Do you like dungeons and treasure?" or something similar will suffice.

A novel? The Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide (SCAG) isn't a novel? When I started out my second campaign, one player asked if the Elemental Evil supplement was allowed. I ended up with an elf, a half-elf, a drow (who I guided away from "drow, moon elf drow, because the elves can be subdivided up into sun and moon elves" — too bad I didn't think of half-drow half-moon-elf at the time), and a svirfneblin. Now, I had read the SCAG and PHB treatises on Drow. I was blissfully unaware of how crazily subjugated my Drow were, and how fanatically wrathful they must be feeling. Oh well, my world. But the EE supplement requester let something slip about the Legend of Drizzt books.

Obviously, I read the first 17 books in short order.

While these books helped fill out some understanding of Faerun, I only really feel like I understand the motivations of Icewind Dale. Possibly because it's a small setting, with easily identifiable factions, and a battle or two. It's also remote, and Drizzt didn't go adventuring to far off made-up dungeons while he was there every other day. And the underdark, which I now think is amazing! I'm going to keep reading these books, I am looking forward to learning about Neverwinter (the glosses I've read are so vague).

But I'm not sure reading those books are the right way to begin to understand Faerun.

One thing I've discovered recently is 1e and 2e settings books. The right settings books. Not even necessarily the Faerun settings books. Back when I was planning my homebrew campaign, I was researching mechanics for worlds which get very cold (and also seafaring). I did some research and bought some 2e and 3e pdfs from the DMsGuild which looked relevant. They were filled with irrelevant system-specific mechanics, outdated math, and segmented, wandering descriptions. It put me off reading anything published before 5e as labor-reducing material for my 5e campaign. And the adventures — I was building my own, I had no interest in those outdated railroads (HotDQ was the only published adventure I had tried to absorb).

But after continued research, I acquired 0e, 1e, Dark Sun, Planescape, and Spelljammer. These are amazing books, and I'm currently searching out the other best early books. It doesn't help that they're not compiled into a complete, chronological, and categorized list anywhere, and that it would cost a fortune to [legally] acquire the collected works (on pdf, no less). I'm going to come back to the fact that I bought 0e and 1e, but if I have to pick one of these books to recommend, it's the Planescape boxed set.

Planescape is the kind of thing I can pick up and read, and not fall asleep. It also is far superior to all of the DMG/PHB/wikipedia descriptions of the outer planes. I just had to remember to skip sections that didn't catch my interest. Basically, it's one man's account of the planes. He has a lot of colorful advice, much more narrative, to the point, and subjective than SCAG, which half-heartedly not-really adopted a subjective narrator. It's humorous, non-definitive!, and all-inclusive. It's also the source material which created the planes — everything else written is a revision. It's like a creative writing prompt.

Continuance

One source of DMing wisdom that has had a major impact on my thought patterns is The Angry GM. He might repeat himself and slowly elaborate on the same ideas he's been stewing on for years, but I only realized this after reading the majority of everything he has on his site. I could put together specific article recommendations if anyone cared. Also, support him on Patreon!

I like articles like Angry’s because he lays out his thought patterns while constructing the models you want to use. These are self-contained predictive (crassly, "generative") modules. How do you build a chase scene?

You deconstruct the idea of chase into its components parts, examine the theory of roleplaying, identify the important parts of roleplaying for various players, apply literature theory (I read a number of books on authoring fiction, I guess you could do that too), add tension, modularize, and reconstruct.

When you're done, you have either an encounter to play out with triggers and mechanics, or an encounter and encounter-mechanics building set of meta mechanics, or perhaps even meta-meta encounter-mechanics mechanics building mechanics, if you're applying yourself.

I really appreciate being able to read and understand an adventure or optional rule. By applying structure to some pile of text you hand me, I can start to compile your input into a useful program of sorts, that I can use to reason, and generate predictions for behaviors of various chess pieces.

After I read a lot of The Angry GM’s articles, I bought all the published 5e adventures, and set to analyzing them. There's a great variety. I wouldn't advise you to do this: maybe only one at a time.

I also watched youtube playthroughs of most of them (and some extras, on top of that).

In my opinion, Princes of the Apocalypse has the most interesting story structure, followed by Storm King's Thunder. Out of the Abyss turned into an amazing playthrough. And if I understood the Ravenloft better, Curse of Strahd might be my favorite of them all. But I don't understand it hardly at all yet. So I'd be more likely to run the other ones I mentioned.

The Angry GM mentions in passing a number of divides in the RPG gamer community, none of which should come as a shock to anyone who has used the internet to read about D&D or any other RPG ... storytellers vs tacticians, "improvisers vs railroaders" (a meaningless dichotomy, he explains), the choice of maintaining thematic integrity (think Dark Sun) vs allowing players any choice or capability they can articulate with their mouth-things (think Acquisitions Incorporated). I knew all the echo-chamber soundbytes about these divides before, but now they mean a lot more to me.

Most importantly. I watched a youtube video which talked about the evolution of D&D — and I was very surprised how 0e and 1e read. I had heard about the ebb and flow of mechanics vs DM intuition. But when I actually looked at the early D&D texts, they read like creative writing prompts, not rulesets or algebras. Eg, here is a system I made up. I wanted to do a thing, and so I hope you like it. Oh, and another thing might help you mitigate some problem — to the point.

I'm a scifi buff, and I thought it might be easier to run a science fiction RPG than a fantasy game like D&D. I tried to research the best scifi RPG, and the first time I searched, the jury cried out "Traveller"! I'm currently watching Babylon 5 for the second time (and honestly, I'm getting impatient writing this, I want to watch B5, but if I stop writing I likely won't continue later).

If you like Babylon5, you probably agree that Traveller has a pretty great premise. I unfortunately made a rookie mistake and bought Traveller5, which was supposed to be the ultimate be-all-and-end-all of Traveller RPGs. It's not, because it's an algebra book.

I can't stay awake reading Traveller5, no joke. It requires intense mental exertion to see and make sense of the unexplained patterns and arcane rules. It's very complete — with systems for social interaction (which I feel divided about), crafting, and detailed world-building. It doesn't provide a setting beyond a few pages (out of 700!), but instead tools to build a cohesive setting. It really is the distilled machinations of years of game design, but it's inaccessible to the layperson. And from some of the reviews I've read, that's not an uncommon opinion.

But the thing that really is the kicker — some people like Traveller5 style rules, and some people like 5e/1e style rules. And there's nothing you can do about it to change their minds. Some people like rules lawyering — this occurred to me while listening to Happy Jacks RPG — they like to sit down for their session, use their encylopediac knowledge of the rules to optimize and evolve their character and actions, sticking to every last convention — sitting down and debating the best course of action. Not quickly resolving actions and moving on with the action or story, not the excitement of battle, nor promise of immersion. Some people like tactically planning every move before execution, and won't hesitate to spend every moment of their time evaluating, debating. Because that is the fun part for them.

I've read flamewars on forums between these two camps — and anyone with a bone to pick will claim the buzzwords for themselves. My way is "immersive"! One bozo claimed that 5e was terrible because DMs weren't required to build NPCs using the same process PCs are built, so certain pregen NPC stat block abilities weren't accessible to his PC — because this inconsistency in *rules* breaks *immersion*. To me, this sounds like a bit of stretch — I think thematic (which heavily involves adjudication) inconsistencies break immersion, not rules inconsistencies. Or maybe he is immersed in something, and it's just not the story.

Anyway, this guy liked 3.5e better than 5e — not only, but he thought 5e was trash.

Is it? My final closing remarks here are going to be on 3.5e versus 5e, which is I think the question you have been waiting for — or maybe not, I don't know.

Most recently, I have been cross-referencing 3.5 with 5e. Some of it's coming back to me now, and some of the surprised questions my second group asked about rules are making more sense to me.

3.5e is better in some respects. It has more structure. It makes more sense, in a limited capacity. The rulebooks are much more poorly written. They are extremely repetitive. I appreciate the crafting system, because it unifies spells, magic items, and provides the ability to create new spells. In 5e, there's not really a difference between rods, wands, and staffs.

In my 5e games, I've been surprised at how useless the low level wizards have been. That statement is flamebait, and I've seen it in action

In 5e, magic users, and wizards in particular, have been nerfed hard. No matter how you phrase it (and I've seen people try), wizards are much much less powerful in 5e.  Yes ... they got ritual spells, disposed of Vancian magic, and got some silly cantrip pseudo archery attacks, sure;  but they have fewer slots, less spell selection, no ability to create magical items or bank spells, all the spells have been made less powerful, and no ability to create new spells.

As a DM, you can add all that back, but it will break 5e's balance. I've heard it said that in 5e, all classes are magic users. Well, I have to say, in 5e, all classes are fighters. Chew on that?

Full disclosure. I like 3.5e wizards.  I feel that unfair level of power is appropriate  —  when you read Order of the Stick or other D&D fantasy literature, the wizards are 3.5e style powerful. It feels wrong and disappointing to me for wizards not to hold Earth-shattering power. (But, my first character was a melee tank, who once dealt ~150 damage in one turn.)   Restricting a wizard to a supporting "role" instead of encouraging a supporting role seems like a loss to me. Who would want to play a wizard then? If you don't get earth shattering powers? Non-earth-shattering powers is mundane, and I'm playing a fantasy game.

Detractors will argue for the poor oppressed mundanes. As a DM, you have the power to make everybody cool. You can keep balance in check, allow wizards to be powerful in and of themselves, and keep fighters and the like out of their shadow. If a wizard is overshadowing a fighter, talk to the wizard, tell them to get off his toes.

And/or maybe beef up the fighter. In 3.5e you could add a prestige class. I'm sure you can figure something out in 5e.

Anyway, if you love balance and hate wizards and 3.5e, you're in good company with 5e. But if you love rules to the bone, you might like 3.5e better. Or if you somehow want to be involved in what I consider the DM's work, you might like 3.5e.

Regardless, 5e has easier to remember rules, is better balanced, easier to introduce new people to, is on the other side of the scales from the abstruse algebraic systems with idiosyncratic notations, and you can always modify it to make it imba. So I approve of 5e, but I have to say —

I had to do a lot of research to understand it. I feel like a 500 page, non-wandering, topical, focused essay on the art of DMing and RPG gaming would do wonders for a D&D 5e companion book. Because those missing rules — they are missing — it is good that they are not hard and fast, but it is bad that there are few well motivated optional functionality modules which you can pop into your game to improve it.

Long story short — make it up when you feel like something is missing, and find what inspires you — really inspires, not what you think inspires you or you think will improve your knowledge. Be fair, attentive, and pro-active.

PS On the topic of good combats — Angry wrote an article titled something "Running Combats like a M#@&*^## Dolphin". Having an efficient style, having a style at all, to running a combat, as he describes, speeds combats up and makes them seem more interesting. I mean, it only speeds it up a little bit, but come on.

Just as useful — building good combats — if they're dragging on, get them over with as soon as possible. If you're employing good tactics for your baddies, and/or providing useful tactical features, you might be prolonging the battle. You don't have to stop doing that, but do be aware of it. So, you can just throw falling lava into the battle, and KAPOW, both sides take damage faster! Fight end sooner! And adding interesting features is standard advice, but *active* features — if the PCs don't use them, let the NPCs use them. That way even "passive" features are active — and I prefer to deal side-neutral damage than provide cover or healthy unrelenting reinforcements. There's some other advice out there, read Angry's long diatribes.

Also, standard DMG advice — use objectives. So what you say? How will that speed combat? Make sure to change the situation enough to cause a re-evaluation of how best to achieve the objective, and BAM, a properly applied change might reduce battle time.

And, what? You are doing nothing now but just attacking over and over again? Just call it. Unless your players rebel. "They don't stand a chance." "You guys are heading for TPK ... "

I guess I have had trouble running combats in the past.