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Dungeons & Designers 9.18.2020
🕑 Added 2020-09-19 14:47:22 +0000 UTCNotes from the D&D Celebration Panel featuring Rime of the Frostmaiden Lead Designer Chris Perkins and D&D Lead Rules Designer Jeremy Crawford (September 18, 2020).
Icewind Dale & Rime of the Frostmaiden
- Inspiration
- John Carpenter’s The Thing
- Fighting with a monster who can look like anything imparts dread
- Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
- H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness
- Unknown horror in Antarctica
- Contemporary Horror Tropes/Imagery
- As Easter Eggs
- As Story Devices
- John Carpenter’s The Thing
- Survival Horror
- The environment is a foe itself
- The deeper you get, the worse the weather/ecological effects get
- Often the biggest monster is the environment
- Tools for DM to make environment central part of experience
- Goals:
- “Seductive” - make the DM want to run it
- Easy to employ components at the table
- Not so overwhelming or lengthy that it becomes a barrier
- Balance between too little vs. too much information
- Segmented Adventure
- Makes adventure prep easier than needing to ingest a 100 page story to run a session
- Pace your prep to zero on the segment of the sandbox your group is going to deal with in the upcoming session (lesson from the Essentials Kit)
- Mini quests as standalone adventures that can be woven into a broader campaign
- Can zero in on specific town or quest
- Can stack quests together to see a larger plot unfold (horror deepens)
- Secrets
- Cooperative storytelling
- Secrets that can be doled out during character creation
- Characters start game with secrets
- Player gets to decide whether to expose the secret
- Playtesting shows that players don’t want to share secrets
- When other players don’t share secrets, causes paranoia
- Great reveal when secret comes out
- Adventure may force character’s hand with respect to a secret
- No way to tell which characters have what secret, all may be benign or one character may be a cannibal
- Advanced Toolkit nature of adventure
- Each group gets to decide how to engage with secrets
- Keeping secrets hidden leads to more paranoia and horror style
- Exposing secrets at beginning leaves more to a monster hunting style story
- Creatures
- Only pick from 3 core rulebooks when doing adventure design
- Decided to expand creatures available in frosty environment
- “Mini Monster Manual” - 50+ page bestiary
- Not all cold themed, some themed to other parts of adventure
- Reasons why unique creatures would be in Icewind Dale
- Seeking strange creatures
- Sent to prison
- Design Process
- Start with a setting
- How do we make that setting interesting?
- Throw out ideas and untangle them later
- Writers give more ideas once they begin to develop the ideas
- Whatever ends up in the book has to say something
- About the world, humanity, or foibles we have to wrestle with
- “If the adventure has a layer of truth to it, based on something we can experience in the real world, it’s going to resonate on a lever far greater than it would have absent that material.” -Perkins
- Curse of Strahd is about a man’s fall into darkness
- Icewind Dale has a core (the frost maiden) with events spiraling around it
- Bad characters that engender sympathy give the story dimension; gives the story a more mythological heft.
Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything
- November 17, 2020 release date
- Working since early 2019
- Content
- Group Patrons
- Spells (UA)
- Magic Items
- Full Sidekick Rules
- Magic Environments
- Puzzles
- Subclasses (UA)
- Alternate Class Features (UA)
- Major player character content has been seen (UA)
- How do you decide when you’re ready for a huge rules expansion?
- Began working 2 years ahead
- Publish 3 years from Xanathar’s Guide
- Follow-up to Xanathar’s Guide to Everything
- Name signals that it’s a line of game expansions
- Giving new twists
- Set of new class features for every class
- Set of new class features for every class
- New Subclasses/Class Features
- New ways for your character to bring something to a group
- Want fellow players happy to see your new option brought to the table
- New bits in the classes that are mostly about their own power, but want to make sure there’s something to empower friends or injects fun into the play experience
- e.g. Wild Magic Barbarian
- Natural fit for wildness of Barbarian
- Look to community through UA to see whether it’s worth exploring
- Full Sidekick Rules
- Essentials Kit provided pre-built sidekicks using the “under the hood” Sidekick System
- Get Sidekick System to build sidekicks of any sort
- Consider them new classes. People loved sidekicks so much they could play them as their character (book also gives that option)
- Use some features from class features, but mix and match them in new ways
- Sidekick can round out a group, have one for whole party, have multiple for party
- Sidekick doesn’t have to be a person, could be an animal (9 depicted in book, e.g. wolf)
- Group Patrons
- Concept from Eberron
- Patrons that can work in any D&D setting
- Gives DM a powerful storytelling tool to address campaign design
- Common purpose
- Thematic throughline
- Session 0 Guidance
- Creating characters
- Setting ground rules for comfort
- Parleying with monsters
- Tables for monster desires that players can meet to dispel conflict
- Not a robust ruleset
- Magical Environments
- Regions saturated with magic from far realm, mirror zone, haunted
- Regions saturated with magic from far realm, mirror zone, haunted
- Puzzles
- Puzzle designer Alyssa Teague
- Different type of gameplay from roleplay, co
- Puzzles are modular so you can drop them
- Hint System
- Each puzzle has hint checks so DM can help players overcome obstacle
- Ability check tells what players learn if check succeeds
- Each puzzle has a number of hints
- Don’t want players to get lost in system
- Play experience that tests player, not the character
- New Spells
- For DMs
- For Players
- New Summoning Spells
- Stat block in the spell
- More elegant enjoyable way to engage with summoning
- Made to coexist with existing spells
- New Items
- New and classic items
- Campaign Defining Artifacts
- Baba Yaga’s Mortar & Pestle
- Iggwilv’s Demonomicon
- The Crook of Rao
- The Mighty Servant of Leuk-O
- Magic Tattoos (UA)
