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What…is D&D…for?what if anything is Dungeons and Dragons about and how is it about it I don’t mean what do you do you fight monsters I mean more why why are these rules like this let me ask that question a different way if you’re a new player this question won’t make a lot of sense to you but if you’ve played fifth edition long enough to get a character from say first level to fifth then this question is for you you know the list of equipment right this thing let me ask you a question what is this doing in here there’s over a hundred items on this list how many have you ever used I mean how many times have you even used this list at all let me make it easier after you made your character did you ever use this list again do you know why there’s a a mirror on this list or why there’s a 10-foot pole on here do you know what you’re supposed to do with those things and why it’s 10 feet long and not 12 or 6. there are answers to these questions maybe your table relies on this list more than others and I’m sure a lot of people right now are thinking well that’s not the point the point is you could use it a lot if that’s a fair answer but I don’t think it’s accurate I think the reason this list of gear is in here is because it’s always been in d d this list almost exactly the same list has been in every edition of the game with maybe one exception since at least 1979 I know when I checked and my God it’s basically the same list they had in 1974. since the first edition in addition so old no one calls it first if they call the second edition first edition do you think we’re playing the same game as those folks back in 1974 do you think you’re playing the same way they played do we need the same list of gear or is this something they put in because Gen X freaks out if d d doesn’t have this list in there somewhere you know putting this list in here makes it look and feel like d d to those of us from the 80s and that has value to the people who bought this brand even if we never or almost never really use this list what about Dungeons what are they for how often do you use them the game is called Dungeons and Dragons this list of gear was created because they are all tools for exploring and surviving a dungeon is that how you play DND do you spend most of your time in a dungeon solving problems with nothing but a single spell this list of equipment and your wits hey everybody Matt Colville here we’re talking about styles of play and for the purpose of this video a style of play is the manner in which the rules of a game reinforce a certain theme tone or genre that’s your style of play you have rules designed to evoke a genre and that combination rules plus genre is your style of play what is the game about genre and how is it about it rules the meme I think of when it comes to this idea is the it really makes you feel like Spider-Man meme we see this all the time in licensed video games it’s really it’s the bar of quality for a licensed game do you actually feel like you’re playing superhero and the way you achieve that is by designing game mechanics that are unique to that hero and that genre if you take a generic third person action arm and just put the player in a Spider-Man costume is the player going to feel like they’re playing Spider-Man if you took Counter-Strike and just replaced all the models with Marvel Superheroes would it feel like a superhero game nope because a style of play is more than just the Cosmetic coat of paint you put over something it’s about the design of the game the actual rules better example for d d Players let’s say you’re running an adventure set in a haunted house with ghosts and whatnot so it has all the trappings of a horror game it seems like horror sure absolutely the DM can absolutely create a mood a tone and evoke a genre without any rules you can do this just telling a story around a campfire you can create that tone in any RPG any rule set just by the choices you make when you made the adventure and things like your tone of voice the language you use all of that can make your adventure seem like horror but do the rules think they’re the rules for a horror game fifth edition has a lot of rules for fighting monsters is that what horror is about killing monsters with swords and spells another way of looking at the same question is how much work do you have to do versus how much work are the rules doing I think in a well-designed RPG the rules can do most of the work and if you find you have to do most of the work then there’s a problem somewhere so how much work is fifth edition doing and what genre is it trying to evoke is it heroic fantasy Lord of the Rings is maybe the best example we have in the culture for Heroic fantasy how much time do those characters actually spend fighting monsters that seems to be mostly what d d concerns itself with do bormir or Aragorn ever argue about taking a short rest versus a long rest does Gandalf ever talk about spell slots does Legolas ever talk about Armor class so me I don’t really see anything about heroic fantasy and fifth edition maybe it’s high fantasy well I’ve run several campaigns I thought of as high fantasy the chain of acheron maybe qualifies but a fifth edition is high fantasy what are those first five levels doing in there if you’re going to make a high Fantasy game shouldn’t the character start as Heroes like servanizor in dusk metal Driscoll definitely felt like a high fantasy hero when he was only first level and he said so a lot of new players come to the game expecting a DM and therefore a campaign to be like this DM they saw on YouTube or that DM they saw on Twitch is that as close as we get to talking about styles of Play Just which DM inspires you they release a new adventure about once a year and these Adventures definitely have a theme and a tone like curse of straw is gothic horror but apart from the look and the feel and and the topic is there anything about the rules of fifth edition that make it Gothic horror let’s imagine I had one character sheet from a curse of straw player and another from a dungeon of the Mad Mage player right Gothic horror Dungeon Crawler would you be able to tell just looking at their character sheets which was from which game I mean apart from like the notes the players take are there any game mechanics referenced on their sheets that indicate which genre the characters are in are people even aware that the design of an RPG can create a style of play my friend Phil runs DND in his own setting called valengard we streamed some of it it is intended to be a very low Magic game and indeed the dungeon Masters Guide acknowledges that this style of play exists there’s a chart for how to run a low magic standard or high Magic game this is it this is all the advice literally the only difference is starting gear that’s it Phil and I had a very informal discussion about what it might take to turn valengarde into a product and I said well for me the fun of something like that would be creating new classes you’d need at least six of them that allow the players to do heroic and cool stuff but have very limited access to Magic because in his world there is basically no magic no spells no potions no Scrolls anywhere except for the PCS your hero represents some kind of Awakening the magic is returning that kind of thing but even then the magic is very limited and I said to me that’s the fun accepting that design challenge taking 5th edition and reimagining it in a low magic sense now that would be a lot of work you’re basically designing a new RPG at that point using the bones of fifth edition what kind of monsters would you have goblins sure but are there Goblin shamans maybe but they’d be closer to herbalists and Alchemists than Dr Strange and then there probably aren’t creatures like overbinds or voiceless talkers everything in valengarde is more grounded and much less Fantastical so making valengard as a fifth edition product for real would mean rebuilding most of the game from the ground up but if you ask most people playing 5D if you could use it to run a low Magic game a sword and sorcery game or survival horror they’d probably say sure but I don’t think that they would mean what Phil or even I mean by low magic they’re probably imagining just using the gritty healing rules or limiting classes only Fighters Rangers barbarians and maybe Rogues but then you’d also have to limit subclasses Rangers paladins and bards would be out but you could probably concludes it and just remove their spell casting trade but even then the classes and monsters you’d be left with weren’t designed to be used in a low Magic game so yeah you can do it but do folks imagine 5th edition was designed for that so it’s a little weird for me that folks just assume that 5e is equally well adapted to any style of fantasy game but really why would you think differently I suspect most people playing d d right now not only is 5th edition the only edition of d d they’ve ever played I think most players d d is the only TT RPG they’ve ever played what style of play is 5e it’s the 5e style of play circular reasoning what’s that it’s weird because most RPGs I think it’s fair to say are about something they’re trying to capture a certain tone or emulate some genre of fiction or deliver on a style of play but d d and I mean specifically fifth edition doesn’t seem like it’s trying to support any style of play it just sort of sits back and says you’re on your own I wonder how many people watch my videos and they think well I don’t want to run a game starting in a medieval European village with a blacksmith and goblins kidnapping people so I guess I don’t want to play D D and they have no idea that they only saw a tiny tiny slice of what can be done because fifth edition doesn’t really have meaningful dials in the design to let you easily run a sword and sorcery game or a high Fantasy game or a survival horror game you can’t detect the existence of these options in the player’s handbook the DM’s guy just has a couple of paragraphs for each style saying yeah that exists awesome thanks compare this with a game like let’s pick a classic Call of Cthulhu Call of Cthulhu is a tabletop RPG designed to support a very specific style of play Cosmic horror and if you’ve only ever played D you might think well I can do cosmic Horror in 5e okay sure it’s an RPG you can run it however you like but it wasn’t designed for Cosmic horror Call of Cthulhu presents a whole sold approach to the idea of cosmic horror everything in the game all the rules character creation the official Adventures are all designed to reinforce the style of play for instance your character is a normal person living in what seems like the real world you can’t cast spells or turn into a bear you’re a teacher or a taxi driver or a librarian the adventures are all about normal people not Heroes who get drawn into some small innocuous local problem and they become investigators Often by necessity and Circumstance then they discover that this local disappearance is tied into some deep Grand conspiracy and as they get closer to the truth they start experiencing some very weird things there are monsters in Call of Cthulhu but if you ever encounter one it is very likely you’re going to die because you are a normal person and if you ever get close to the truth the real truth which is that the universe is governed by these Elder alien Gods who are so inhuman their existence violates basic laws of geometry well just seeing one of these things can instantly drive you mad those are the only outcomes by the way for the classic Call of Cthulhu PC you either die fighting an unspeakable horror or your mind is shattered because you saw something so alien to your experience that your tiny ape brain just turns into applesauce in fact there is a stat in Call of Cthulhu explicitly designed to track this called sanity it’s all right that that’s in every contract that’s that’s what they call a sanity Clause you can’t fool me there ain’t no sanity Clause wow it’s uh it’s it’s been a little while since we’ve seen the machine neat anyway your sanity starts at some nice robust number but it only ever goes down eventually inevitably you run out and that’s it for your character hope you enjoy Arkham Asylum which by the way is not original to Batman it’s something they lifted from the Lovecraft Mythos there are lots of horror genres but this is what makes Call of Cthulhu Cosmic horror you are not a hero you can’t solve the fact that humans don’t matter and we live at the whim of alien Gods you can’t win I had a lot of friends in the 90s who didn’t really care for d d being a heroic monster fighter wasn’t a fantasy that appealed to them but they loved Cthulhu they loved that conceit that you’re eventually going to die or go insane and they would enthusiastically roll sanity checks anytime something weird happened without the G I’m even asking for it they were looking forward to losing their character and the only question was when and how now compare this to fifth edition there is actually an optional rule for sanity in the dungeon Masters Guide it gets a few paragraphs but do you think that just running normal DND and throwing salmon in makes it Cosmic horror does the player’s handbook even admit the possibility that you might want to run a normal person as a PC are there any official Adventures that assume that finding a single Monster is a life or death scenario and your best hope is to run away this is what I mean by styles of play a style of play is not just a theme or an attitude it is about how the rules work to create a certain feeling or tone or attitude it is not by accident that your character in Call of Cthulhu is a normal person you don’t play a hero because Heroes Have agency heroes are important and we expect the hero to win the Call of Cthulhu isn’t heroic if a hero is ever afraid that’s because their story their character Arc is about overcoming fear but in Cosmic horror fear cannot be overcome that’s what makes it horror you are not powerful you cannot affect the outcome you do not matter the universe is vast and incomprehensible and the only reason you can go about your job at the library is because you have no idea what’s really going on if you did it would break your brain that powerlessness in the face of a hostile uncaring inhuman universe is what makes it Cosmic horror and not some other kind of horror it’s the movie Alien if everyone died or it’s John Carpenter’s The Thing no one wins no one gets out two characters survive to the end which means they get to freeze to death why don’t we just wait here a little while see what happens paranoia is a great example very different style of play we played paranoia live on stream you can watch it here and the one thing I screwed up was character creation because I had never run paranoia before and this was a new addition to me and character creation was a little weird because paranoia is a comedy RPG and not just any style of Comedy it is explicitly about life in a bureaucratic science fiction dystopia it’s a lot like a cross between The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil and character creation is all about well screwing with the other players you are not actually in control of making your character because if you were you might be tempted to make a hero well paranoia makes sure that won’t happen as other players at the table give you flaws and silly traits and change your stats and you’re doing the same thing to their character so the characters you all end up with are a mess the whole party ends up a team of complete idiots and that is part of the fun and there may be some people watching this video who say I don’t like the idea that my character will inevitably go insane I don’t like the idea that other players are going to turn my character cool guy 420 underscore 69 into a blithering idiot but the reason some people have this very strong negative reaction to these ideas is the same reason other people love these games because they are actually about something Call of Cthulhu is about Cosmic horror paranoia is about the absurdity of bureaucracy and when a work is about something that means some people will like what it’s about and some won’t if you are primarily interested in increasing shareholder value this is a bad thing because it means you just lost some customers so you make a product that isn’t about anything so no one thinks anything about it it’s not even about not offending anyone it’s about avoiding your audience having any reaction at all the only thing that doesn’t offend anyone is oatmeal I mean I like oatmeal but not very exciting not offensive just oatmeal now your experience might be different from mine but to me fifth edition isn’t really about anything in fact I think it’s trying to avoid being about anything because if it supported any one style of play then it would turn off everyone who wants something else so it sort of does everything a little remember the toward better rewards video the one about having like Quest cards and rewarding players for completing quests well I think folks sort of focused on the idea of quests and Quest cards but really the point I was making was just this the behavior the game rewards is the behavior it encourages and I was sort of hoping folks would stop and think about the game they are currently playing and ask themselves what Behavior does 5e reward what is 5e about what is 5V well I I don’t know what it is but I know what it’s not and it’s not a Dungeon Crawler this is why I asked what are dungeons for why have them is d d actually about Dungeons well it used to be D used to be 100 a Dungeon Crawler and really the reason I wanted to make this video is because I realized a lot of people don’t know that dungeon crawling is a style of play it is a kind of RPG just having a dungeon in your adventure I submit does not make it a Dungeon Crawler and now we get back to this list of equipment because this is about dungeon crawling that’s why this list is in here or really I think it’s an homage to that time when d d was a Dungeon Crawler they keep it in so folks like me who remember those days see it sigh with fond memories of the 80s and what d d meant to us back then and then we move on and basically forget the whole thing and play a modern narrative game with no real style of Play We like that this equipment is in here but it doesn’t really have anything to do with how we play now A Dungeon Crawler is and this may surprise some folks a kind of survival horror game yeah back in the 70s d d was a Dungeon Crawler it was really only a Dungeon Crawler there was the implication of politics and high fantasy later but the game assumed that that was after your character retired in a classic Dungeon Crawler your character is spectacularly unequipped to deal with what’s in the dungeon your class gives you almost no tools for Success if you want to win you need this list and some wits some clever thinking outside the box thinking dungeon crawler’s challenge of the players not just their character sheets going into a dungeon in this style of play is terrifying you are pretty close to a normal person at first and if you don’t find loot then that’s not going to change this is the gameplay Loop of a Dungeon Crawler risk life and certain death to get enough magic items and gear to allow you to explore deeper which means nastier monsters so you need better magic to fight them and that means going deeper into the you get it in a Dungeon Crawler you worry about light a lot light is a precious resource the creatures who live down here don’t really need it but you do because you’re only a little better than a normal person you need to track how many torches you have it’s important running out of light means well depending on how far down you are it could mean certain death you don’t just need enough light to explore you need enough light to escape to retreat to find your way out in a Dungeon Crawler you always know the radius of light your torches shed because it is important once you’ve found a few gold pieces you rush back to town and you get a bullseye Lantern it is way more expensive and it doesn’t really shed more light but you can close it it’s got a little sliding panel on it that lets the light out when it’s open and when you close it it stops letting light out which in a classic Dungeon Crawler is a big deal being able to quickly almost instantly extinguish your light if you’re afraid you’ve attracted attention is huge food is just as important you need to eat running low on supplies is dramatic it ratchets up the tension we’re running low well we have to go back to town can we survive the wilderness of course ammunition is important you need to track every arrow and if this if this sounds tedious you’re missing the point it a game annoyed you have to track every arrow your terrified you’re going to run out the ability to attack a creature safely at range is a big deal in a Dungeon Crawler and so you’re constantly making this tactical decision about is it worth risking an arrow I get to fire at range but I might lose the arrow different tables had different house rules about recovering arrows melee means I get to keep my arrows but I am putting myself at much greater risk how confident am I we can kill this thing let me put that another way I have a Max of seven hit points and I’m second level how confident are we that we can kill this thing before it kills me remember the mirror mirrors let you discreetly look around corners without worrying about getting an arrow in your eye that is why there is a small mirror on this list did you know that it’s cool right and if the thing around the corner is a basilisk or a cockatrice or a Medusa well that mirror might save more than your eye that 10-foot pole is 10 feet long because the grid they played on back then used 10 foot squares and a long pole let you tap the floor and the ceiling and see if there are any traps you can trigger I remember someone saying the gelatinous cube was the only creature evolutionarily adapted to survive on graph paper the dungeon is dark and hostile and alien some dungeons had no Monsters Just traps and puzzles some were so complex you could explore them for years the ancient ruins of some mighty Empire now long dead and forgotten who knows what’s down here could be literally anything I think this is the main reason why d d monsters got so weird because they’re about scaring you the main job of a monster in classic d d was to scare you because it could kill you go back and check out that first Monster manual they weren’t trying to make monsters fun to run or fight hello they were trying to make them scary the thing that made goblins scary was they could kill you actually the thing that made them scary was that one could kill you at low level and there are usually a lot of goblins eventually obviously that’s not enough and that’s when you start to get Nightmare monsters mind flares and beholders check out the fiend folio it’s a horror book now this may all seem old and unfashionable but I think lots of people would still love this style of play if the game were designed for it because it is really fun and creative a majority of a Dungeon Crawl is trying to solve the dungeon not fight it I wasn’t kidding when I said your only tools are this list a single spell and your wits that’s a great book by the way with a single spell no idea if it holds up probably but your wits were probably the most important part of that equation Dungeon Crawlers aren’t like Diablo where you just click your mouse enough and eventually you will kill everything they used to call that kind of game masturbation DMS spent their time imagining these environments complexly and how deadly they were and some DMS leaned more on Vera similitude and making the dungeons really plausible or at least self-consistent and some DMS liked more wacky fun house Dungeons and there was a whole Spectrum your dungeon was Uniquely Yours hopefully you can see now how an entire Adventure could happen in a single dungeon in fact the entire game for about 10 years was just about building and exploring Dungeons and people loved it now me I like that kind of game I loved darkest dungeon for instance and it is pretty close to that feel if not that literal gameplay but I also like narrative Adventures I like it all it’s all fun it’s just down to taste and you can play a Dungeon Crawler for a few months and then play something else now is that what 5th edition is about I mean I would say no that is not what it’s for a dungeon absolutely the five room dungeon is very popular but that’s not what I just described I just described a whole sold approach to a survival horror game is that fifth edition light is important food is important ammunition is important healing is incredibly precious you are basically a normal person with a little more experience than your average peasant if you’re a wizard you know one spell if you’re a warrior you know how to swing a sword want more spells better weapons they lie below because they want these things to be important because these ideas are the point of the game and they are what makes exploring dungeons scary just getting back to town is a huge challenge the Wilderness between here and there is deadly and if you survive spending the weeks it takes to get back well by the time you finally make it back to the dungeon the denizens will be ready more traps allies reinforcements so you have this great tension where you don’t want to leave the dungeon you don’t want to give the things that live down here the chance to prepare and the Wilderness is deadly maybe maybe if we just keep exploring we’ll find stuff that makes us nastier than the forest and you don’t want a rival party stealing the loot that you’re trying to steal so you gotta stay down here but it’s too dangerous you can’t stay down here there are tons of great tensions that arise out of this style of play as long as you have a rules set that supports it now if I’ve done a good job then some of you are like damn that is cool how how do we do that well I don’t know actually I certainly wouldn’t recommend trying to play any edition of d d before Third Edition Third Edition was pretty good for a low-level dungeon crawling as I remember but it wasn’t really survival horror the way the original game was but it was closer than fourth or fifth edition and look I’m not stupid I know people are going to say 5e is great for this I just uh I disagree if you think fifth edition is a survival horror game then I just think we disagree about what that means nor am I advocating that anybody stopped playing fifth edition if you are having fun why would you stop or switch systems but if you watch this video and the survival horror themes of the Dungeon Crawler sound cool to you and you don’t just want like Dungeon Crawler wallpaper you want actual design that supports this style well there are lots of other modern RPGs that will give you that probably you can find examples in the comments probably hopefully we’ll see a lot of people will recommend games produced in the last 10 years that are more about replicating the actual 1970s rules so make sure you know what you want do you want that retro Vibe lots of modern games will give you that or do you want a more modern streamlined design there are Dungeon Crawlers for that too don’t just assume that the game someone is recommending is the one you’d like because they’re probably recommending it because they like it and they don’t know you or why you like this idea so you’re gonna need to do a little research you know I bet there are videos on YouTube comparing different dungeon crawling RPGs I just don’t know what they are I already wrote this whole script do I have to do everything I’ve been working on this script off and on for months maybe longer and that’s not unusual I got lots of ideas for scripts and some of them spend literally years as just a bunch of notes but I’ve been thinking about system design as it’s called recently and so it seemed like a good time for this video but at the same time and honestly by coincidence there’s a huge debate in certain corners of the internet right now about playing other games there are people on one side advocating for people trying different systems people on the other side saying stop telling people what to do and I think it is inevitable that this video will be seen in that context but honestly the only reason I made this video was because I saw people referring to 5th edition As a Dungeon Crawler because lots of DnD Adventures include a dungeon and I was like hang on fifth edition is not a Dungeon Crawler that was the 70s and part of the 80s I don’t think playing other systems is a virtue I don’t think it makes you a better or more moral person I don’t think not playing other systems makes you narrow-minded if you’re having fun with 5th edition good I’ve had fun with it lots of people have I said this before to me the rules of an RPG are like a language I did a whole video on this I don’t think speaking different languages makes you a better human being I don’t think only speaking one language is any kind of moral failing however I do respect someone who speaks multiple languages I think that’s cool good for you and I mean it and I often wish I spoke different languages that does not seem like a contradiction to me respecting someone for their accomplishments does not mean I think less of someone who hasn’t accomplished those things but I also think and I’ve said this a million times that every style of play is fun if properly implemented people in the 70s play D D As a Dungeon Crawler and they had a ton of fun we’re better designers now but I don’t think fun has changed we just have way more kinds of fun available to us so Dungeon Crawlers are no longer fashionable but I never cared about fashion except you know maybe for six months in like 1987. I think a well-designed modern Dungeon Crawler would still be tons of fun and millions of people would like it I don’t have any particular desire to design such a thing right now but I don’t need to there are plenty out there already the dungeon has a setting for survival horror is still a cool idea unfashionable maybe but still fun I played a lot of different RPGs I just started playing in a Star Finder game and I will say this I don’t think playing lots of different games makes you a better person or a better player or a better DM but it absolutely makes you a better designer I think every game I’ve ever played even games I didn’t like had something cool in them some brilliant little solution to a problem or an implementation of an idea and really I think a game designer is just somebody who’s played a lot of games and thinks about them critically Someone Who develops a language for thinking about game design so do you want to be a better designer yeah play lots of different games otherwise play what you like but maybe keep an open mind about other games that does seem virtuous to me thanks for watching folks hopefully people don’t think this is some kind of Slam against 5e I still like 5th edition quite a lot and as a designer and the owner of this company I have tons of ideas about cool stuff you could add to this game to make it more fun give it some style you know add some flavor to the oatmeal if you would like some delicious flavor for your oatmeal I strongly recommend you come by our patreon where for only 10 bucks a month you get Arcadia three articles look at that cover three articles every month Each of which is actually usable stuff for your game we got stuff for players and DMS in here we just released our Halloween issue featuring a very spooky cover from Nick to Spain one of our staff artists inside you get stats for some famous Cryptid monsters from The Real World like the Mothman or the gray aliens from various alien abduction stories rules for NPCs you might meet in a lighthearted horror game doesn’t all have to be serious humor is important and a whole Adventure called puzzling Out the Devil which is actually horror themed for real and has some very cool puzzles in it all of it is fully Illustrated full color throughout and your 10 bucks gets you all the back issues which at this point is like it’s like over 60 articles at this point Madness thanks for watching folks next video I think is going to be another excerpt from a twitch stream in which somebody asked me a very interesting question about what I would do with the Lord of the Rings and I suspect you’re going to get a kick out of that answer until next time peace out https://t.co/e1ARYkSh3Z

— Matt Colville? (@mattcolville) November 9, 2022