D&D Sage Advice

okay and welcome back to Dragon plus I’m always looking off in the wrong way it’s that camera oh I do the same thing where I was wondering what are they looking at we have no idea what we’re looking at somebody I don’t know if it was you or somebody else mentioned this had been my most tense hour of the week and now it’s the most relaxing hour of the week because I’m not I can step away from my desk for the next hour yeah yeah we get to just chat about D&D yes it doesn’t get much better than that so uh boy where to begin obviously we have back Jeremy Crawford I’ve got a new bio for you because I just put it up today oh wow Jeremy Crawford is the league rules designer of Dungeons & Dragons in addition to being the game’s managing editor he led the design of The Player’s Handbook and co-lead design of a variety of other DMV books including it the Dungeon Master’s guide XANA Thor’s guide to everything and Morden cannons Thoma foes which I even brought with me because today’s the wide release so of course it’s like I have to carry it everywhere I go today now this part this is new information for me before coming to Wizards of the coast he wrote for the games Blue Rose Warhammer Fantasy roleplay and mutants in master life you learned something every day and I did not know any of that so I know I might have suspected that you had other industry but but I’ve now been a wizard for almost 11 years working on D&D so I mean at this point it’s just he has made many many Dungeons & Dragons books yeah well welcome back for folks that were with us two weeks ago we sat down with Jeremy and to speak about minotaurs and Centaurs released in the latest unearth Arkana we wanted to continue that conversation we do have some news and announcements leading up to the stream of many eyes taking place boy this weekend which little frazzled because it’s taking place this weekend June 1st through 3rd in Los Angeles California we hope that folks in the area might be able to attend there are still tickets for these Sunday games but please jump on those quickly as they are getting snatched up and you can always stream the entirety of it on our dandy twitch channel which you are watching right now and if you’re there and you see me make sure to say hi I will be there for the whole thing and bind earth of alphabetical order you are now our number one special guest oh look at me well I like spotlight yes this was the we were gonna do some new headshots so we’re gonna schedule you for an updated although this is quite well well thank you but just outside my house so Before we jump into talk we covered in the minute our last time we were gonna talk a bit more about the centaur other side yes but before we jump into the Centaur we did have some questions as mentioned we get great questions in the chat we don’t always have a chance to be able to to respond to them so we look back through the chat logs and compile many of the questions you did not ask you did not like my question I created what chiropractic care does is sent our request maybe if there’s time at the end of the stream I’ll get into chiropractic care for centaurs and other hybrid bodied beings is this personal question because I’m in physical therapy now for sciatica oh no oh man what what does a centaur have to do this is my other question true or false the organization of evil centaurs is known as the centaur ouch you came at me right with the pun dagur wow man it just it’s just so obviously but you were so subtle I was not able to cast the shield spell fast enough to make it so that my my ears would not hear it yeah there’s a reason dad jokes and bad jokes are sounds and you are a dad where he issued a book a book of dad jokes yes yes I think I think so my my stepdad in particular is amazing at dad jokes and also at puns and I think he was so amazing that it like it fried out in my teenage years all of my tolerance for it because it’s like I got the best but I got so much of it I can’t take it anymore I had a university professor that if the conversation stalled out like if she had a question nobody was right she would just start giving out puns until people I stopped and they started participating Wow well I worked well but that’s sort of like a store cranking the music up yes well in that case they’re trying to get you to get get you out of the store so we asked you last time what are you reading watching playing do you have any new or different answers for us as a lead-in yes reading cuz I’ve I’ve been kind of a voracious reader lately so this past week I read this charming fantasy novel called the witch’s boy it’s by Kelly Barnhill it’s I think written for children but it’s a great read for adults too about the son of this witch who ends up having to bear her magic and it is very perilous magic good story I recommend it all right which is what was the the Irish legend Oh so yeah last year last time I recommended that if people are interested in learning more about Irish mythology a fun place to start is Lady Augusta Gregory’s book gods and fighting men and that gives you a great survey of different Irish myths including the bit I talked about last time where you you basically get a description of a bunch of different types of spellcasters you’ll also see different inspirations for certain magic item and whatnot that appear in D&D in addition to just getting exposed to a great myth tradition this is why I have this live stream just so I can ask questions as as far as playing Saturday we played my dandy home game big treat because normally we’re we’re usually only able to schedule maybe one session a month because of our schedules but this month we got to play two Saturdays in a row so that was a great way to kick off the Memorial Day weekend spent good part of Saturday with yet another crazy session in what has turned out to be a totally bonkers whore campaign and this is UDM this camp yes yep this is the campaign idea and you weave in things that you would like to play test as well so I guess I probably haven’t told you before told all of you listening on the stream that one of my rules in my home game is that for that game this is as opposed to games that I play here at work because we also play D&D here in my home game no play test material though because I want my home game to truly be a home game not only so I can relax playing this game I I’ve loved my entire life but also there is actually an important work reason for me it’s so that as the game’s lead rules designer I never lose touch with what it’s like to play the game using the material that everyone out and out in public has to use because not everyone listening has access to all of the stuff that you know we’re constantly developing I’m because we’re working on things that won’t be out for several years and if I had too much of that stuff in my home game I would really quickly there would be the risk of me quickly losing sight of the current state of the game as it exists out in the world outside of the walls of Wizards of the coast so I like to play it in it sort of its store-bought version although the campaign itself is entirely homemade and then that also means we get to relax because you know several of my players work here at Wizards you know Chris Perkins is one of my players James Wyatt is one of my players it means we can sit down we’re not play testing anything we’re just enjoying Dungeons & Dragons all right so we did have some questions that folks had submitted as well that we did want to cover again before we get into a bit of a discussion on the Descent time we had a couple of questions come in luna pine and ghost tack 159 i guess there were 158 goes tax before but it was kind of a broad question about sort of Magic the Gathering tends to look at a lot of different real world cultures mythology’s areas to weave into their various card sets on the on the D&D team is there a similar approach are there other cultural areas that are being considered that have been considered how does that work so DnB going back to its inception in the 70s is filled with inspiration from different myth traditions in our world so you know going back to first edition the game pulled in material from Norse mythology Celtic mythology Greek mythology Egyptian mythology and more I mean Arthurian legend even the Cthulhu Mythos you know was a big part of it there was inspiration from the the cosmos in Michael Moorcock’s Elric novels and you know and on and on and on and on and so those influences have always been a part of deities DNA and then as we’ve developed the game we definitely continue to dip into not only those myth traditions but into others as well rarely to bring them over wholesale in 5th edition we’ve maintained in the players handbook the list of Norse gods Celtic gods Egyptian gods and what have you partly because it’s traditional for the game we’re unlikely to do that with the gods of other real world Pantheon’s but we’re certainly open to being inspired by them there there are elements speaking of other myth traditions in Morden Kanan stoma foes and some of our cosmic storytelling that are influenced by Adam Lee and my own reading of various stories in certain Eastern religions Adam and I have both studied Hinduism in fact when I got my master’s degree in religious studies the focus was on ancient Christianity but also I spent a fair amount of time studying vaishnav Hinduism and so that actually influences some of the the cosmic storytelling that I do and I know that Adam has some of those influences and there are other members of the department that also like to dig into you know the ancient stories of our own world so that we can build resonant fantasies stories in the worlds of Dungeons and Dragons right I mean as a separate world of Dungeons and Dragons is still hard to completely divorce it from the players the creators having a grounding in real world pathology and not wanting to influence it or or being inspired by it I imagine yeah and and it’s often found that fantasy is the most powerful for us when you can kind of trace a thread that goes back to something in the real world and that can be something cultural in the case of myths as we’re talking about but then something I loved that j.r.r tolkien talked about is it also means including everyday things fantasy often is best when you know people are drinking ale and in simple bread and walking in a beautiful forest and near the mountains like unlike science fiction which is often filled with the alien fantasy is often filled with the familiar but then that familiar thing suffused with magic and so it to me really successful fantasy does a good job of balancing these ancient familiar things you know rocks and bread and wine and mountains and gods and mixes those in with with magic and monsters and adventure and it turns into this kind of this very special alchemy that has inspired humans for thousands of years I know we’ve talked about this before I mean that that point in the force awakens with raised bread you know mmm magic element again it’s my story but as we’ve discussed Star Wars certainly arguably as strong fantasy at least in the original trilogy is as anything else yeah yeah electrum electric um alright sorry however it’s pronounced there is a question any ideas for campaign this is coming from a user that was starting off dungeon mastering mmm-hmm and wants to know about where to get started what advice for kicking off a campaign whether it’s running one creating one what what might you recommend for that wow I could do a whole series of these talks just on campaign design maybe we should work that in in the future once so the really short answer I’ll give which again could be instead a multi how her answer is when possible start small what you want to do is don’t design don’t spend months and months and months designing this math massive story only to find in the first session that your players are going to go off in a totally different directions as they will because they will what’s important is always just have your next session designed and and have a broad framework of material that can lead to later sessions and when I say a broad framework of material I mean have some interesting places for your player characters to go to have a few fun NPCs for them to talk to and have a juicy villain or two whose motivations will help drive the story because often I find that if you have even just one really good villain who has ambitions that could drive multiple sessions of play you will often get weeks and weeks and weeks of D&D play out of just that villain and that villains minions and then you’ll start coming up with other villains who oppose that villain and then often your prep well you’re as a DM we’ll just turn into deciding before each session all right what’s villainy doing what’s villain be doing about it what are the the three MPC groups doing about it and then you basically just set them all running and then in the session you just watch what the player characters do in response to all of these NPCs and villains crashing into each other or you know going to some interesting location like a dungeon or a castle or a haunted temple or whatever that location is that you’re focused on in a particular session I have very suspicious players I have never started off an adventure where the patron hiring them for the quest or whatever MacGuffin they’re trying to get after they are not immediately convinced that he or she is developed somehow they’re sure that’s that’s the one trying to get in my way so I speaking of that I have to be careful with some of my long-standing players not to at the beginning of any game have what a person I know to be a benevolent NPC yes not to sound too much like a hag and because I use so many hags in my campaign that if it’s just like kindly old woman they meet it’s a hag so sometimes sometimes if you use certain tropes enough you’re it can it can cause your players to just they start they start thinking something is hiding in every bush that was the question I wrote down and because that’s kind of the trope which is whatever half you think you’re gonna set for your players go this way they’re gonna go that way mm-hmm do you ever intentionally design sort of quote-unquote false doors where it’s clearly meant to be this way and you because you know they’re gonna take a left turn so you’ve planned that left turn all along and and and that false door never really led anywhere in the start do you do you design your adventures anticipating players to go off the rails almost immediately oh yeah I and that’s why my prep tends to be pretty light I make sure I have enough material to improvise with for each session but I do not fix in advance you know what I’m expecting them to do I’ll have kind of broad story beats and this is again why I focus on here’s what like the villains are gonna do here’s the danger they’re gonna put the player characters in and then I see what what do the player characters do in response and that makes it really fun for me as the DM because then in a way I get a show you know I even though I’m running the show at the same time I get to watch the show because the players are the ones deciding what their characters are doing and they will often come up with things that I didn’t expect great example of this from my game on Saturday the group spent a good deal of the session in the Faye wild keep in mind I never planned in this campaign that they would go to the Faye watt this is a gothic horror campaign but they decided for various reasons I won’t get into right now because I could gobble up the Hat you know the half an hour going into the ins and outs of the story but they decided to go to the Faye wild and that ended up essentially being a session that designed itself and all I really had to come up with was the place that they were gonna spend time in and the main NPC they were going to be talking to and their the the session unfolded and it did end up having a hag in it I can’t resist them so much and we and we kind of talked about in the past when you guys you when you design when when the D&D team designs elements there’s there’s no you know killed darlings they’re just set aside mm-hmm do you do the same thing for your own campaign in a similar way oh you guys want to go to the FEI wild I happen to have a file of other and encounters that I’ve had in my mind I didn’t know where to plug it in but now I can just pull that one absolutely I save things constantly so I might design something that the players decide never to go visit and so I just hang on to it and when I have a chance to use it later I use it or I also going back to my session on Saturday I had some important story information that I needed the player characters to get so that they would know what the heck was ahead of them at the story because I don’t like my my player characters to be wandering around not knowing like what are we supposed to do but they actually missed entirely the NPC I thought was going to be the information givers so I just took that information and gave it to another NPC and they ended up getting getting that information from a sage in the Fae wild in Saturday session not at all what I had planned but I liked it better because I didn’t plan it because then it that’s real the real magic of this game that again I as the DM got to watch the story unfold in ways that I had not planned in any way so if you’re prepped enough and you’re giving your characters your players agency enough then it’s it’s sort of you get to sit back and just interact with them in a fun and meaningful way as opposed to I don’t know force things along artificially right right and that’s that’s why anytime I give people prep advice I go again and again back to this idea of prepare a framework don’t prepare exactly what they’re going to do create a set of dangers but they’ll have to reply to create a set of NPCs that they can interact with and create a set of villains whom they can oppose or they might decide to help them like I don’t even assume that there there are some vampires in my current campaign that I was ready for the group to oppose a year and a half ago when they first met them they have yet to get into a meaningful fight with them and I keep kind of unwittingly helping the vampires so again I I tried to assume as little as possible going into a campaign about how they will react and then by doing that it means I can respond very nimble II to what the players have decided to have their characters do because I’m not blocked by my preconception of how something is supposed to end up now what that does mean though is I also keep having my villains do their thing on the side and so what that means is if the players just decide never to really try to stop them yeah the villains can win so in a way my is this has happened this has happened yep so in a way Mike and my campaigns are Lu’s abaut even though of course you never win or lose in D&D you’re always winning if you’re having a good time but but I have more than once over the years have had essentially the player characters lose a campaign in terms of the big story because they just didn’t they didn’t go after the villains aggressively enough and I just like players you can do whatever you want I’m not gonna railroad you but the villains are gonna keep going I would find that a more satisfying campaign as much as I find that a satisfying Movies ripped as well yeah right don’t once again I’ve said this a hundred times to you once I know what the heroes are meant to do then they’re gonna do it and I’ve lost a great percentage of interest well and what’s also interesting is not only is that important to kind of constantly have them hungry for what what are we gonna do next what’s next what are we supposed to do but then if they lose you know yours later my players who are in those campaigns we’re basically the villains one they still talk about those campaigns so it actually can be thrilling when the villains win yeah because partly because then the players really see our choices really mattered that we weren’t on we were not on Rails the choices we made led to this outcome and that is really powerful because then there really makes it feel like you were in a living breathing world where what you do really matters on the flip side that means when my players win when they are victorious they know they earned it that you know they made the choices that led to this great victory and my campaigns tend to have very epic finales so if they are victorious they have usually accomplished something that you know will be remembered for the ages nice well so electrum I hope that gave you some thoughts and ideas for starting up your own campaign I definitely concur it would be great to do at least a session dedicated to campaign design we did have a question about adventure design and adventure and we’ll get to down yeah there is a great deal of even online resources that I would like to pull together especially for new players new dungeon masters where do I start what tools are available and there’s great tools that are available between the downloadable rules D&D beyond the starter set obviously has lost mine a fan delvar in it too to be able to run it anytime so yeah so why don’t we uh why don’t we jump into the the Centaurs Jeremy behind the screen we’ve got – sorry – Jeremy’s in the studio why don’t we put up the Centaurs stat sheet and then folks viewing from home so these are the the Centaur traits these recently appeared in unearthed Arkana which is available now on the DND website of course also I believe it is available on DD beyond yes it’s now and Indian beyond so for playtesting purposes last time we kind of walked through in particular minotaurs that they had recently well not recently but minotaurs had appear a while back in on Arthur canna and then made a reappearance and in this most recent one centaurs have they appeared in uh north or Canada previously nope this is their first time to show up as a playable option in fifth edition it’s worth reminding everybody that nothing in unearthed Arcana is official these are all play test elements that we’re trying out sometimes these elements do end up in one of our books as you saw with many of the options that were in zennith ARS guide to everything so once we put the surveys out for any of these things do please give us your feedback we’ve read all of it and your feedback can help shape the future of these options as well as the game as a whole sometimes the options because of the feedback they go away forever other options we dig in because of your feedback we make changes and they’ll show up in a product later and become an official option so sent our Minotaur that you see right now again this is a draft and we’ll see what you think I’ve been reading feedback already on reddit Horace that’s right that’s right a draft horse the puns I’ve been reading feedback are on reddit on Twitter and elsewhere already but the surveys are especially helpful because we end up getting feedback usually from so many of you all right so the Centaur first off I should point out because the Centaur size was a big topic of interest when we first released this I should point out that D&D for many years going back at least goodness gracious at least twenty eight so it’s been twenty eight years at least if not longer the D&D has actually had centaurs of different sizes the classic monstrous centaur that appears in the Monster Manual is large and that’s been true going all the way back to the first edition Monster Manual but D&D Dragonlance as well as in alka deem introduced other centaurs who are medium and in our art over the years we have shown centaurs of both sizes we have also when it comes to centaurs backgrounds talked about them being monstrosity zazz they are in the current Monster Manual but there have been also times in the game’s history when they’ve been strongly associated with the Fae in fact even in the fifth edition Monster Manual where their creature type is monstrosity we still talk about them actually interacting a lot with elves they know the Sylvan language which is the language of many fake creatures so they have long had this association with the Fae and again there have long been different sizes of centaurs so I wanted to bring that up because some people thought whoa this is crazy centaurs have always been large and so it’s important to bring out this little history which honestly would have been a great thing for us to put in the unearthed Arcana article to say hey there are both types of centaurs in the D&D multiverse this playable version of the centaur is focusing on the medium type and in our last video when talking about the Minotaur I also mentioned that there are also game design reasons for us to push player character options toward the medium size as opposed to the large size if there’s time later on in today’s stream I can drill into that a little more if people want to ask about it in the stream but first I want to talk about some other things specific to the Centaur absolutely so yes again if you have a question please press your comment in the chat with a question all caps is easy way to catch our I will try and catch them as they come otherwise we’ll definitely save them for for a follow-up also I want to say in terms of sort of different types of centaurs it’s important to remember that in the DND multiverse we have long had this notion of there being different types of the same creature you see it actually in some of the playable races where elves have many different varieties and we get into the story of that in Morden Canaan stoma foes dwarves have different varieties and sometimes the varieties get dramatic enough that even their creature types can be different we like in Morden Canaan stoma foes we say they’re even there are some Aladdin who have been in the mortal world long enough that their creature type is humanoid and there are other elad rune whose creature type is Fae we also have creatures that are the same type of creature but have different sizes and so yes in fact yes yes hag’s we have many different sizes and whatnot so I just want it it’s important to have that broader context also to address another fun thing about the speed and this this one amused me a bit because one bit of feedback I saw a number of times was well son tars the playable ones should be large because the horse is large this is a funny bit of feedback to me because there is no stat Block in D&D called the horse in the Monster Manual we have three horses there is the pony that is medium there is the warhorse that’s large and there’s the writing horse that’s large so even in our horses we have we have a variety and one is medium and to our large also it was funny too to see when the centaur came up that people were kind of needing to learn a little bit about horses because some people I saw thought ponies were baby horses they’re not so that ponies are ponies are just a type of horse that would be my immediate assumption for respond right you’re telling me that’s not that’s not correct a pony is not a baby horse a pony is is is a type of horse that is just has a smaller body than say a Clydesdale or another very large horse what would a baby horse they’re like what are they folds or is that am i mixing up animal types but yeah not a pony Nicole’s the Colt thank you thank you I’ve even watched Colts be born no personal fact my mother was a she was on she was an administrator at Cal Poly and San Luis Obispo in California in the animal science department and one of the things I what I got to enjoy growing up is going out and looking at the horse unit and even that includes getting to see them be born I’m realizing now than the Indianapolis Colts the football team their mascot then would be it’s a baby horse the Chicago Cubs I you know baby bears so I erase that right it’s not so far afield all right so let’s so let’s dig in so the Centaur is strong we see strength score increasing by two and then the wisdom score increases by one this edition of wisdom was something I actually did fairly late and I did it to really dig into the fact that particularly the medium-sized scent arts that have appeared in dnb’s past like in Dragonlance and Alka deme have been very associated with nature having sort of perceptiveness you could see them being effective druids and Rangers so this is one of the reasons why I gave them this increased a wisdom in addition to the increase to strength because of their their mighty builds and it’s a good to point out that often would we make these abilities score adjustment decisions in fact almost all of the time it’s being driven by the DND story of the particular species and we look at that story and we see what would be appropriate and also because we we lead and this is appropriate talking about a a people who are part horse we like to lead with a carrot rather than a stick and in terms of guiding people toward particular class options we don’t mandate that any race option be aligned with a particular class option but traditionally the ability score increases sort of not positively nudge you in particular directions but of course you could ignore it even though these bonuses are to strength and wisdom you could make a centaur wizard and we have we that’s why we don’t handicap you from going against type do you have a chart anywhere like a heat chart of here are the ability score bonuses that certain races have and seeing okay there’s quite a few races that are hot here and we don’t have any race that gives you a bonus say with I’m trying to think of it a charisma and strength so you know you know so we all of that stuff is in spreadsheets suspicious especially for the official races but it’s really good for everyone listening to no we don’t do what I call we don’t do fill-in-the-blank design that’s where I was so so often fans will point out well hey we don’t we don’t have many races that sort of favor intelligence for example so Wizards you should do that well that isn’t art design ëthis our design athos is we design things to reflect the story of the material that we’re modeling in our story based game we’re not going in and filling in a matrix and say well we don’t have enough intelligence races so that’s what we’re going to do so you like the nooks and crannies of the of the game system where there are certain gaps that could exist and there’s some strengths that exist right not a need to fill it all up absolutely not we have not designed the game for it to need all of those little spaces to be filled up in the same way one of one of the one of the design approaches that I would bring up to the team when we were designing fifth edition and that to this day in fact just last week I reminded one of our designers of this that to always avoid needless symmetry it’s really tempting for us as designers as nerds too we want to fill in all the blanks and that can lead to some really odd design and we’ve done it before in our department and so we very consciously avoid that kind of you know I’ve made a spreadsheet and I’m gonna design something just because it fills that spot it needs to be resonant it needs to be grounded in a story it needs to sing with the other parts of the game that people already have this is peaks and valleys I think what I was going for instead of nooks and crannies but but going back I used to play a game called asteroids call mm-hmm and there are different weapons that had different damage types and there was always hey there’s a lot of swords but none of them do the blunt damage type and you know as their swords right there never will be a baseball bat right right I mean similarly I get asked sometimes you know is it intentional that some abilities get used for saving throws more often than others yes that’s intentional there there are never going to be as many things in the game that make you make an intelligent saving throw as there are that make you have to do a dexterity saving throw for example and and we’re very aware of how the different abilities are used and you know what what things in the game push you toward different things and in in we are almost never going for symmetry when we make those design decisions we want a balanced experience not a filled-in matrix if that makes sense all right let’s let’s keep going the centaur has a base walking speed of 40 feet this is a juicy ability and actually frankly this is where a lot of the Centaurs juiciness is a for some reason I’m liking juicy today maybe I want some eye candy or something it this is aware a lot of the appeal of the center is that and you and where you’d expect because this this these people have horse like legs that a traveling type of race yeah and so forty feet is is fantastic now associated with that influenced by the centaur in the Monster Manual we have this charge ability and by the way whenever we are designing a playable version of a species and are taking inspiration from a monster stat block will often try to echo something in that stat block it doesn’t always pan out we will often find in play testing will end up flushing the thing that came from the Monster Manual and designed something else because frankly we design things and monsters to work for monsters and that’s it actually another great example of how the game does not designed with a bunch of symmetry in mind player characters for instance are intentionally different in how they function in many ways from monsters and so that means there are some things we design on the player-character side where they’re awesome as options for a player character but kind of junk in a monster just last week I was reviewing a stat block for a book we haven’t announced yet and the monster had in it abilities that were mimicking some of the rogues abilities in the players handbook and I ended up cutting the abilities and telling the writer of that particular stat block the ability or mimicking is great if you’re a player with just one character to control and you can deal with some of this fiddle enos that’s the same set of abilities that you put in a stat block unless it’s a legendary creature and the DM is just focused in an encounter on running that one stat block that DM might have three or four different stat blocks there you in a particular encounter so that ability that was great in the player-character you suddenly put it in a snap lock and the dm’s eyes are gonna glaze over and say I don’t want to use this in my game so that’s why sometimes when we take inspiration from a stat block for a player character option the same kind of thing can happen where it just doesn’t feel as natural on sort of the other side of the DM screen so we’ll see where charge goes I already know and I knew this when we sent it out into the world that some people would bulk at this being an ability that recharges on a short or a long rest because what we have found and here I again I was like to pull back the curtain when I’m on talking with everybody what we have found ever since the D&D next play test is that if it’s a magical ability and we say once you use it you can’t use it again until you take a shorter or a long rest no one blinks I mean most people don’t blink I say no one but though you know we always get feedback of all sorts yeah but by and large D&D players will say yeah that’s fine mm-hmm if it’s a non magical ability and we say the thing recharges on a shorter or long rest often that will be pushed back because this is this feels like an innate ability of Who I am and I should be able to do this or not it it’s interesting that when we’re in the realm of magic we have found that players are often able to easily suspend their disbelief about how often things work because it’s magic so it’s already you know not following the rules of our world if you’re shooting lightning bolts out of your hands or you know transforming into a pixie people are able to accept the the rules of magic being mysterious right but as soon as it’s about how your body functions people can get uncomfortable about well why and that’s that is always the question I want people to ask is why because again it’s a story game it needs to feel natural so often what we’ll do and it never surprises me when I see people on reddit on Twitter and elsewhere suggesting this as an alternative is we will instead tie the number of uses to an ability score modifier or we will redesign the things so it can be used in an unlimited fashion now this chargeability we’re unlikely to let you use in an unlimited fashion it’s it’s a little – to use today’s word of the day juicy for you to be able to use it an unlimited number of times per day but we could certainly tie it to you can use it a number of times equal to like your constitutional modifier or something like that and what we have found it’s funny as soon as we do that people are usually okay with it because as well if they can see kind of a narrative connection yes to your care to your character and that’s also can be satisfying because then people feel like it’s something they can grow into that as that ability goes up I get to use it more times and one of the satisfying things in D&D is that sense of growth so there is a good chance that if the Centaur keeps this chargeability at all and if I wanted to keep it as juicy as it currently is or make it even juicier I will probably tie number of uses to an ability modifier I’m thinking in my life there’s not many activities I can do without a short rest I think I think often when we are doing initial drafts we we will use just the short rest on long rest as the recharge mechanism partly because it actually gives us the number of times per day maximum that we are comfortable with but you know it also could be the fact that many of us who work on the game or middle aged and maybe we we get tuckered out faster than our younger players in da again yes I could do this charge once and then I’m gonna read for an hour and then I can do it again all right let’s go on to hooves the hooves these are a natural melee weapon pretty straightforward similar to the Minotaur which you you because again this is Jeremy do we have audio on when we lose audio oh did we hit we have no sound alright are we back are we back we’re back alright yay okay so powerful build it we’re gonna take this back for the last 20 minutes you know everyone gets to hear it all over again and I’m gonna say completely different things alright so far it’s tiny yes yes the center is now tiny and has wings which that is a thing from DN DS past weird that next time when we delve into misstara we will get those delightful creatures and I’m not being sarcastic because I I have a I have a high tolerance and enjoyment of cute things so we are we lost from hooves alright so hooves all I said about hooves is that they’re like the minotaurs horns and that you can what people with them it’s essentially a weapon you have with you all the time and so I wanted to go on to echoing build which is this really three tweets three traits in one so the first trait inside equine build is basically a modified version of powerful build that goliaths have the main difference between this and powerful build is powerful build in addition to increasing your push drat you’re pushing and dragging capability it also makes it so that you can lift things easier echoing build doesn’t do that it instead just makes it easier for you to push and drag things using your your horse half now the next part of a coin build is honestly something that we could have done in the monster centaur but didn’t bother because the monster centaur is controlled by the dungeon master but as soon as we take some things that work just fine in the DMS hands and put them into player’s hands they will sometimes need a few extra rules and so we realized we needed to account the fact that a player character who has four horse-like legs with hooves on the end is going to have a hard time climbing ladders and other things that are designed to work with human-like hands and feet yes that was my question kind of sent our climb a ladder so we we had an earlier version of this that basically just said your DM will decide that you can’t climb certain things but we decided we wanted to try out this approach of a simple rule where it just it costs you more feet to move on certain surfaces which is really just us tinkering with an R in the existing rule which I often like us to do because that way you feel like the game is sort of evolving naturally within itself it’s building on itself it’s not becoming too complex and it was also too juicy for to resist having it cost you four extra feet because of your 4 extra feet oh yes I’m not kidding James James why James Wyatt and I did that I beg all of your forgiveness I sent our organization oh so I am also guilty of many dead gems all right so finally the last bit of echoing build this this this multi-part trait is that a that the Centaur can serve as a mount for another medium creature yes and we put this in here at the last minute because we thought oh it’s so iconic for people to ride on Centaurs of various sizes you know there and so we thought well let’s put this in now I’ve gotten some wonderfully hilarious tweets about centaur stacks and what not about centaurs all climbing up on top of each other as I said by Twitter if that is your bliss please do it D&D is your game oh because our medium creatures they are medium creatures yes and so let’s take a look at the rule here because this is actually a great example for me to talk about rules design so it says a medium or smaller creature can ride on your equine back if you allow it in such a situation you continue to act independently not as a controlled mount okay one of the things that this rule is not doing well and I will critique this rule that I wrote which I often like to do because as I’ve off as I’ve often said one of the keys to being a game designer is be ready to critique your own stuff and kill your own stuff so one of my critiques of this rule is it is not obvious enough to the reader that this is tweaking the mounted combat rules in the combat chapter of The Player’s Handbook it just sort of assumes hey you have the rules in your head reader and here’s a tweak to it so one thing that would immediately help people comprehend the purpose of this a little bit about mounting is to say hey there are mounted combat rules go take a look at them now read this and this will hopefully make sense because the mounted combat rules say that for a creature to be a mount it must be one size larger than you it must have an Anatomy that is suitable for you to write on it and then once you’re writing on it that creature then either acts independently or it is entirely under your control okay so what this rule is doing is it’s saying very indirectly that when you use the mounted combat rules you’re still going to use those rules but with the two exceptions that are in this role which is you can be a mount for somebody who’s your size or smaller because normally the rule is they must be smaller than you and once they’re writing you you are always an independent mount it is not an option for you to be controlled by your writer what this does not do is get rid of the general rule about anatomy being appropriate and so that’s why we didn’t feel it was necessary to say tarz can’t write each other because they’re the general rule already covers anatomy and that if the DM decides that horses riding horses or horse you know a person with a horse like anatomy riding another person with horse like anatomy is appropriate anatomy that is that DMS prerogative and again follow your bliss but it’s important to know the intent here is that this is making two exceptions to the mounted combat rules which otherwise stand and that’s how exceptions to the rules always work whenever we make an exception to a rule we are only overwriting the parts that we explicitly overwrite otherwise the other rule stands now that all said this rule could be written better so that it actually tips you off as a reader of oh hey I need to go over and read the mounted combat rules now that all said there is a good chance that in the next round we would just cut this this bit about medium creatures writing these medium centaurs unless people are jazzed for it and then we’ll keep it alright we are almost done with the Centaur and I mean even how about we shall we be naughty and go a little pest we’re good let me let me shoehorn in a couple of quick announcements before we finish up with the Centaur we are in route to the stream of many eyes many of us are there already Pelham is already there Greg Tito is already there Chris Perkins might or might not be traveling so there is no DNG news today and dice camera action will be postponed until the Friday dice camera action game so I think Chris Chris is actually taking today off to prepare for well partly what he said this morning as having a day off yesterday he got a little too addicted to having a day off it might also have been there was too much insanity and my D&D game on Saturday no I think I think Chris is unbreakable yes so uh so this will be until we get to maze our can of this evening so no Dean dnews no dice camera action today we are so so we’re gonna go let’s go a little past three oh yeah no we’re fine going a little a little all right all right especially since we’ve lost sound there for a bit and we can we can wrap up the Centaur and then maybe answer a couple questions so maybe we’ll go toward like maybe 310 315 sure all right unless unless the stream says no and hits the gong and so it gets us out of here all right next up survivor this is this is a what I call a ribbon for those of you who haven’t heard this term before this is a term I came up with when we were designing fifth edition to refer to any feature in a character class or other element of the game that’s really there as a piece of character building a part of the world it is almost never meant to increase the character’s power if you’re wondering why I call it a ribbon it it it it is because actually I talked about it’s us tying ribbons in the character’s hair so you can imagine because they’re all so often things we add late in the design so it’s sort of like we have this fully formed design and then often I will come in at the end and tie these ribbons in the designs hair and then send them out the door I was thinking of a participation that that you can also you can also imagine it that way but so that said survivor is a ribbon this is not increasing the Centaurs power in any way this is a power neutral ad but again is tying in to the sort of reign jury and druid eel or that we were modeling when looking at the sort of medium centaurs of our of Dandy’s past for inspiration now we get to the hybrid nature trait which I talked about in our last stream about the Minotaur this is me experimenting with the creature having more than one type right quite honestly since and here again you get to see game development happening alive sin releasing this I’m already over hyper hybrid because because I have convinced me last time I know I want to try and see if there’s interaction so so I am demonstrating live on camera killing killing my own darlings it partly because I did a number of studies looking at our different creature types looking at other ways of achieving the design that I want us to achieve you know and realized I can achieve what I’m going for without walking down this potential crazy train of giving people more than one creature type for instance there’s a very good chance that if we take this centaur to the next step that its creature type would become Fae particularly because these medium centaurs are based on our most fail ike centaurs I had mentioned concerns about having nonhumanoid player characters particularly because of some hidden sort of immunities you get like suddenly a spell you know that targets only humanoids doesn’t work on you but since then I’ve I have analyzed all of the options in the game that do do that and actually the benefit you’re gaining from that immunity is pretty low because and also the number of monsters you’re going to meet who rely on casting hold person on you or something like that they’re actually are actually quite low so it’s a bit of complexity without a lot of utility and so that and that’s why the hybrid nature thing it it I am often eager to kill design including my own that ends up posing more questions than it answers so a good rule serves the DMS and the players in a straightforward way as possible the danger with this hybrid nature is it just starts posing all sorts of questions and we designed our game assuming everyone has one creature type that said we could make this work but also a decision I often have to make as the lead rules designer is what is worthwhile for us to make work because making these things work and have them not disrupt the game as a whole is an investment of time for us and I always have to decide what’s worth it because we want to make sure everything else is working well and I don’t want us to have to do a bunch of infrastructural work to make what’s ultimately a niche option functional when we can do it in a more straightforward way okay finally the these centaurs can speak common in Sylvan very appropriate especially for their they’re sort of Fae like origin so that’s that’s a little a fly through the centaur we had let’s see if we out gosh lots of questions yes can I kind of sent our write a broom a flying but that might just be for that that the DM can so in many of these many of these questions like what is an appropriate Anatomy for one thing to ride another these questions actually already exist in the game if you’re playing with just the players handbook because of the ability for people to change shape you know you already there’s the possibility that because of different body altering spells in the game and different magic items you can end up with an unusual Anatomy and anytime unusual and ahead of me meets some other object in the game if the rules don’t say how it interacts it’s it’s really up to the DM and in this and there’s no real wrong answer when it comes to crazy corner cases I say DMS follow your gut go for what’s the most fun for your group if you make a decision that you regret just let your group know and make another decision another time there is no change in evolving how you run your home game always in the pursuit of what’s fun for you and for your players let’s see some more questions we’ve had a quick one about you had mentioned in passing about a book and development when will new books be announced we will be making announcements at the stream in many eyes on the uprise weekend mm-hmm yes so look for that at 4:00 p.m. on Friday 4:00 p.m. Pacific time I don’t think in that particular case but as far as the the next books coming out do MMX yes I guess there are other centaur races that the let’s see honey things from dnews past oh let’s see what’s this one this is from raving ROG Jeremy what PC race would you want to add to 5e if you could add any from the Indies past that is a good question I so I love kind of all things faith so I would just keep bringing back certain Fae options that have appeared in the past satyrs we’ve had in the past yep we had Pixies in the past all of those I think would be fun to bring back at some point I forgot to ask you the Oxford comma yea or nay Oh the Oxford comma we use the Oxford comma in our books partly that’s because our publishing relies on the Chicago Manual of style and Chicago is all about the the Oxford comma I also like the Oxford comma because it’s hard to go wrong with it doing ap style where you don’t use the Oxford comma it can be very easy to end up with with goofy constructions where you eat shoots and leaves yes yeah you can you have the funny thing of like you know the valedictorian thanked her parents Nietzsche and God and if you’re missing the second comma then suddenly her parents are Nietzsche and God so yet where we are in an Oxford comma house any potential for playable races that it would include perhaps the gif or an Uzi or something along an outlander let’s say outliers on those lines possible that’s possible yeah like the gif which are in one Canaan’s Toma foes again our baby that came out today yeah if enough people want the gift let us know and it’s possible that it would be playable in in the future especially if we did something in the future that was focused on spell jammer then there’s a really really good chance that in a product like that the gift would be playable hey you know we did portals last year for extra life maybe there’s a case to be made for something like that as well yep oh I see someone saying the manual manual of style discussion is the nerdiest part of this so watch out I could do an entire talk on a Chicago mobster let’s see oh dude there was one about playable content beyond level 20 if beyond 20 yeah so oh here we go is there a possum Jake for 13 question is there a possibility of adding prestige classes or levels 21 through 30 or will we stay capped at 20 the the level cap is unlikely to go above 20 part of that is we find and this has been true throughout the Indies history except for in 4th edition when the game’s cap was 30 that very little play occurs anywhere near level 20 and in fact even in an Edition like 4th edition where the levels went up to 30 it was rare for play to go beyond level 20 so we’re we’re far more interested in just giving new stories for people to play in levels 1 through 20 and for anyone who hasn’t seen these options because I discovered actually quite a few people haven’t seen them there is a section in the Dungeon Master’s guide that gives a set of epic boons for 20th level characters and we designed those is essentially a way for you to keep advancing at the level cap and the boons are really neat because they give you a set of almost superpowers where you become this being capable of things well beyond what a regular adventurer could do if we find in you know the next few years that there’s huge demand for love for play at the level cap or beyond we would explore options but right now again and we’ve seen this not just in 5th edition but in first edition second edition third edition fourth edition like even when when pick options have been provided that go beyond level 20 very few people use those options no matter how they’re designed no matter how straightforward they are most people tend to want to play between about levels 1 and 10 or 12 or so and so that’s that that is where we tend to focus our efforts but we we do as we did in Morton Canaan’s Tama foes make sure that we do you know each year have something for DMS to use it at higher levels there’s a good chance you may or may not hear about something soon that also has some higher level stuff in it so but yeah keep talking to us we we listen we it is rare for us to say we will never do something because one of our our main things is listening to all of you and play we play DMD constantly so we’re also always have our eyes out for things that pop up in our own dandy play and and see ha there’s a new direction for us to go in we’ll see maybe one more we’re getting close to 3:15 so again thank you so much for everyone tuning in thank you to our followers and subscribers as always it’s all greatly appreciated we will be seeing many of you hopefully during the stream of many eyes taking place in June 1st through 3rd on the DD twitch channel look for us 4 p.m. Pacific on Friday – to kick things off and yeah there are still a few tickets available for the sunday games so if you are in the los angeles area please consider a ticket and you’d be able to get get your feet into the set and watch a live game and get a cool bag of dean d swag which I believe includes a copy of Morton Kamen’s nice yes yeah and come so you can talk to me yes so take a look at the DMV website we’ve got the list of special guests that will be appearing we continue to add to that as the the days go by so we got one more one more question and that will go on yes yeah yeah up one here rebooting settings there’s I’ve seen dark Sun pop up multiple times so more than once I see here is dark Sona when not and if so in the core books we have direct and indirect references to almost all of Dee Dee’s classic settings and so we consider all of them possibilities and we we are fans of many of those settings like I often say on Twitter how much I love dragon lands I love Ravenloft there are things I love in gray Hawk and misstara and dark Sun and you know many people in the department have different settings that are you know their favorites and all of those things are are definitely in the realm of possibility okay that that we as we did with cursive straud you know we we like thinking about going on journeys to different places in the multiverse and really it’s just about you know when is a good time for us to do it and you know how best can it slot in to the other stories we’re telling because we also we really kind of like this organic field that we’ve started to develop of feeling like the products tie in with each other in various ways so I’m hearing a firm non-committal but the doors are always open well and I think I think you can look at even a book like Morden Kanan stoma phos which is filled with with references to many different D&D worlds that you can see that in product after product that those pot those doors have possibility remain open right it’s it’s a different approach right I mean if not a book maybe there are pieces that have already appeared and books and continued will continue to appear folks moving forward yeah yeah cuz we at the end of the day whenever I get asked like what is what is DS official setting and the answer I always give is the official setting of D&D is the D&D multiverse which includes all of the classic worlds and it also includes your home campaign settings that there’s this idea that all of these worlds somehow tie together in in the grand D&D cosmos you know with these cosmic villains trying to worm their way into different worlds where you can go on you know grand planer adventures and visit these different places so that ultimately is the DND setting and that’s why we focus on the multiverse in the players handbook because you’ll notice then The Player’s Handbook no particular world is focused on as like the world of D&D we mentioned you know we mentioned Dragonlance we mentioned Grayhawk we mentioned the Forgotten Realms we mentioned misstara and more ever on and and so on and that’s because again the setting it’s at all of them and we’ll just see where where the journey and that great multiverse takes us all right and we’ll be finding out more of that journey on on Friday that’s my Segway yes again thank you for tuning in today and we’ll see you on Friday again for folks tuning in a little bit later here there’s no dandy news there’s no dice camera action today folks are getting ready for the stream of many eyes in Los Angeles on Friday through Sunday and and we hope to see you then so thanks as always if we did not get you a question we will be going back through and collecting them so please do not feel that it was sent out into the ether we do read all questions even if we don’t have an opportunity to to address them all all right well it was a pleasure as always Jeremy thanks Barton we’ll we’ll do it again real soon great bye everyone [Music]

D&D Sage Advice

Questions on Dungeons & Dragons answered by game designers

Widgets

Is the Celestial warlock designed to be a main healer for a group or damage dealer?

Jeremy Crawford on UA Minotaurs & Centaurs

Passive scores turn the game into just the DM spilling narrative

Ed’s executioner

Problem Players, Running the Game

If I’m standing directly in front of an NPC, looking them in the eyes. What should happen?

Tiefling judge in Waterdeep, where can I find out more?

Are Giff playable in Mordenkainen?

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