I live how there are comments both saying this show os terrible for not having a go at Paizo and also complaining at the show for having too much of a go at Paizo. XD

Shawn has all the time to spread hate of WotC, but when people start pulling the same tricks and fearmongering about Paizo, he "doesn't care." Consistency would have been too much to hope for, I guess.

Paizo can pound sand, they know that rules can't be claimed. Their fan licence is a trap and illegal.

Gees guys. The Piazo licence change was in no way like the OGL. Please get your facts straight before dragging a company. Or maybe get any facts? I don't think it is too much to ask for you to check out what the changes actually are before you make assumptions and cast aspersions.

iPhone users should never subscribe for anything through their phone. They are charged more than folks who purchase through browser or android

I LOVE ALL Ghostfire Podcasts videos!

Let's not preorder, at the end all you get are D&D books, which I recently discovered, after an offer, that I don't want even free.

The discussion on structure, expression, rules and gameplay in this episode is just lovely. I need more of it.

Big fan of Transparency

Should you have to make a check to know what you already know? Probably not! But for me, the emergence of the world and my character are some of the best parts of the game. Jon, as a player, didn’t know anything about owlbears, so there will be some discovery there regardless. Even for experienced players, making a check and succeeding or failing says something about their character and the world. If everyone in this world knows about owlbears, then it makes sense that I would too. But if I don’t, what does that say about me and my background? Jon could have made an argument for why he knows about them if he understood the game better, but would that be as fun as figuring out why you know-or don’t? And all that fun is provided by that tiny bit of randomness injected by the check.

The other part is that the Patreon guys took VC money when they probably never needed to, and that has pushed them into a MONETIZE AND PUMP SHARE VALUE mindset.

I’m at the Event/Location based adventure section of the podcast and it sparked a thought. Is it really as simple as Event = Time, Location = Space? Time is measured by a timeline or the multiple choice version of a flowchart. Space is measured by the map, the physical location. I only spent 2 minutes on the thought, but I thought I’d throw it to the KZbin fishies to see what they make of it.

I really liked Ben's discussion about Self-Expression Through Game-Play. I hadn't thought of some of those choices like he illustrated, but yeah - I get it. :) Also, James' phrasing "Moments of Jank" - I just love that!

I like how no one does their own research. They read a headline, bring it up, and hope someone else did the research and could speak on it. No sources cited in video description, just misinformation or no information. Real podcast bro vibes.

Shoutout to Dante!

Can we take a moment to appreciate the hair at the center squares and how they mirrored each other? Also having some envy.

Of course that guy is like um actually.

25:10 * Ben brags about how good he is in Among Us * No popups from Dante Imma call sus on that, chief.

I'm very surprised at "most people use iOS app to pay for Patreon", is this an American thing? In Europe Android phones still account for 40-60% of the market depending on the country, and (at least in my circle) people HATE getting an app for every little thing and especially for in-app purchases. Like, why wouldn't you use a web browser, I thought Kids These Days™ hated single-function devices?

RE: Roleplay and RPG: My takeaway from this is in RPGs, like in real life, we can't just say something and it automatically becomes true, or do something and an 'irrational' outcome happens. Game Rules exist to define 'realism' in the 'world' or 'campaign', be it vibes, atmosphere or similar or some other criteria.

Jfc, the "Does System Matter?" debate has been coming up in the community every few months for decades. At the start of the episode you guys sound like you've never seen any of it, which is surprising given the collective experience in this group...

Today on the show: people who use Patreon are unable to formulate a coherent explanation on what critical services Patreon actually provides. A discussion on a license that no one has read that boils down to “its really bad guize!”…

It’s a shame that Deborah’s DnD show went down with Alpha. It had real heart ❤️

WOTC and Paizo making me more and more happy to be switching to DC20.

Wow, last time I was this early I was on Aussie Time. Hoo-ray!

Tashas cauldron of everything has rules on checks for monster knowledge.

I think I’d contest the idea that Shadowdark creates its experience just by having light rules that get out of the way. What about the torch rule? You’re supposed to set a timer and time a real-world hour and then your torch burns out. When that alarm goes off I’d say that’s the opposite of the rules getting out of the way, that’s the rules deliberately getting up in your face. And there are other design choices common to many OSR games, like characters being very fragile, that aren’t exactly rules but are aspects of the game system that contribute to the intended experience. A game that really just aims to be rules-lite for maximum flexibility would be something like Risus, which I think most people would struggle to get an old-school dungeon-crawling experience out of. System matters and all that.

So i've actually playtested Ranger in the final version, And I think a lot of people are getting confused, Because Looking at the class alone is an unimpressive, Until you take into account the totality of the changes the spell casting and Other rule changes in the 2024 book And I can't speak to all out power because i've only played up to level 11 But this ranger is far Less clunky to play.

The background change makes less sense than the species being tied to ability modifiers. Now we have a tropes tied to the backgrounds instead and the species are all more variants of humans instead of different SPECIES altogether.

Ranger is even worse than they were. Oof Shit... ranger wss my favorite class.

And then James Haeck opened Pandora's handbook 2024. Envy, hatred, disease, hunger, spoilers, lawsuits, and copyright strikes flowed out. James closed the book, but by then the only thing left inside of it was hope.

I agree with the frustration. It seems that Wizards has some kind of math formula that they use to balance their classes, and it was the reason why Stunning Strike kept the Monk so weak. But they have such a love frenzy for spellcasters that they keep abandoning the martials in favor of giving spellcasters new fun spells. That Tasha's Brew spell that gives you any common potion should have been given to Rangers, but flavored as them foraging for ingredients, and concocting an herbal brew. But no, give it as a spell to the wizard

in re: Cosmere RPG, it not only serves as a way to play in the world created by Brandon Sanderson but as canon expanding lore and official art books. So its hitting ttrpg fans and Cosmere fans.

The drop is so real. I work at music festivals over summer and getting "back to reality" is never easy

My thoughts when watching the WotC live play /VTT advertisement, was that it was very clever to gather this cast... But that all creativity drained away when the animations started. The players were staring at the toy figures walking around the screen, and stopped using their imaginations.

Both for Jorphdan and WotC - Hanlon's Razor applies. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." It's apparently not self-evident that you don't show full page spreads, page by page, over 3 hours, in 4k, of ANY copywritten work. There's a vast gulf of difference between reviewing a product and showing off a few pages or snippets or whatever, and what was done by him. That was a dumb move and I'm going to assume that he wasn't using his video as a passive-aggressive way to protest the lack of official D&D PDFs by providing a source that others could use for their generation. On the WotC side, lawyers and professionals in brand protection working for multi-billion dollar companies PAID to not care about creators. They care about legalities. Community relations is someone else's department and responsibility. It's not animosity, as Dale feels. I would bet money that however he got the strike, it was through some process already in place, which had not been adjusted to account for the release of the 2024 PHB.

Very good episode, y'all. I'm really glad to hear Dael's perspective as a creator, as it's not a side of the matter I'd heard yet (specifically the claim vs STRIKE :-S) Not sure if any of you are big Brandy-Sandy fans, but I would hazard a guess a lot of that 7+ (and counting) million dollars are coming from people that will never play the game. There's a culture of curiousity, lore-guessing, mystery, and theorizing that comes with that community (which isn't a bad thing!), but I imagine many people are supporting in hopes of learning more about the Cosmere, and glean any hints they can (which the core books _absolutely_ will have ;-}). Not that it won't get played plenty! I just think it's a particularily interesting and different phenomenon to come to the TTRPG space, especially right now.

I dont know what is happening with WOTC but I feel that leadership in WOTC and Design team just stand up to the heads and say STOP IT YOU ARE RUINING THE GAME AND OUR REPUTATION . and be ready to stand up and frankly have a huge risk to save the brand . DND and Magic are being dragged through the mud by Hasbro someone need to stand up for the game. from the inside

You also can't sell a seat for a game if you don't have GMs and support... so to run a comparison specifically with Dagger Heart is a bit hard since it is still in play test and development. They might not have had enough GMs familiar with the game, or might not have had enough money to support getting GMs to the convention... now for Avatar it could be how Magpie choose to spend their resources or it could be the popularity... but 2000 compared to 15000 actually seems like it was more popular than the market share would lead us to believe, so that speaks well if you ask me.

I rarely agree with Dael, but I think she is spot on in her position of WOTC chipping away at the community. Shawn is consistent in being a WOTC apologist in all things. Nice to have a Vodcast with such a spectrum of opinions.

Shadowdark's win was well deserved for a number of reasons, even though the game is not for me. I typically love OSR games and OSR styles of play, but the always-on initiative is something that really really bothers me and is unfortunately not something I think can really be taken out of the game as its such a core mechanic. As a player the always-on initiative made me feel so limited in exploration and social encounters in the dungeon, and it frequently ended up with me missing out on loot because I was in another room and my turn wasn't up, or not being able to negotiate with an intelligent monster how I'd like because I can't have a full conversation in initiative, and it made my group not act as a group but as a bunch of individuals who happened to be stumbling around together. Maybe that was just the game I played, maybe the always-on initiative works for some tables, but I couldn't stand it and it frankly ruined the game for me. Very well deserved win especially for layout but it's not my thing.

As a counterargument to James' final point in the WotC copyright strike discussion, that you would think/hope WotC would bring in lawyers who DO care about D&D & Magic The Gathering, etc., there's a lot of value in having a legal team that *IS* disconnected from the product, because they can bring a perspective to the conversation that you wouldn't otherwise get. Especially in a large corporate setting, you WANT to have disconnected, dispassionate lawyers who can objectively hold to the letter of the law without themselves trying to work out the different shades of gray. What's missing - and the three of you all hit upon this point - was communication from inside the D&D team to the lawyers. THEY'RE supposed to be the ones bringing the nuance to the lawyers, balancing out the objective legal perspective with the subjective D&D perspective. Bridging the gap between the creative team's asperations and the legal team's aggressiveness is the role of corporate management (my field of study). It's the responsibility of management to take input from their different teams and communicate a cohesive strategy directive to all of them that keeps things like this from happening. Dael talked about the difference between a copyright strike and a copyright claim, and mentioned that the lawyers probably don't know or care about the difference, but that the D&D creative team working with content creators do know and understand. That's precisely the kind of information that should be communicated up the chain so that management can use that to instruct the legal team on how they should execute on issues. Somewhere along the way, that communication broke down, and if WotC wants to be a highly competent corporation, that breakdown is something they need to investigate and address.

Man, that live play VTT thing sounds like a real missed opportunity to do a Mechanical Turk kinda situation. Keep the professional actors playing like normal, and just have an offstage tech or team of techs adjusting the VTT that's being shown on the big screen in real-time. I haven't looked too much into it, but Shadowdark sounds like my jam and exactly no one else in either of my game groups' jams. Also, black and white pen and ink art is always gonna be a plus for me, and what I've seen of Shadowdark did it fantastically. What if only the "p" *or* the "h", not both were silent? "This week, on the Dael Getting Into the Weeds All Over Everything-cast...."

Dael, I love your comment about needing to know where you can put your trust. Our listeners may be numbers for them, but they are people to us. and there trust in us is very important.

I've back a few Kickstarters. I'm looking forward to seeing them made, and on my shelf. And I sincerely hope to play them... But the reality is, I play a ttrpg now once a month, if I'm lucky. So it does make it less realistic to convince the various groups to try a new system. I suppose the flip side to that, is for some of these groups, they are so new to playing ttrps, that any system is fine, it doesn't really make a difference to them (as long as that system is fun and allows them to roleplay and hangout)

It is NOT rocket science that if you accept payment and make a profit by displaying someone else's copyrighted work that you've violated the law. Nobody is talking about how these KZbinrs are unaware of or don't care about copyright laws. If they were doing videos as a hobby that might have sympathy for the influencers. All these people are making money from KZbin, and charging advertisers for seeing someone else's copyrighted content (one creator actually had a D&D competitor sponsoring his D&D video). No one made the influencers violate copyright, they chose not to understand the laws for the medium they work in

This is my prediction: Cosmere will be the kind of game "everyone" owns, but nobody plays at home - but it will ALWAYS be sold out at conventions. It will also struggle hard to get enough GMs at said conventions.

Look, wotc have, at absolute best, a dodgey track record when it comes to their IP. However copyright striking someone because they showed the whole new book isnt the hill to die on, that guy was dumb and wrong to do it. Again, wotc are awful, but pick your battles

Great podcast this week, even down one honorable man. Hope Ben recovers soon. The future of DnD is certainly not All Digital. Case in point, over the weekend we had a Session Zero for our Tales of the Valiant game and even the teenagers in our group wanted to look at the book during character creation, despite having PDF copies on their phones and tablets. I echo the sentiment to play “smaller games”. The new DnD core books look great, but Dragonbane, Shadowdark, Break!!, Pathfinder, Shadow of the Weird Wizard, Tales of the Valiant and the Daggerheart playtest all offer their own unique takes on what fantasy roleplaying can be that are just as enjoyable. I’m hoping Cody Pondsmith’s Shadowscar from R. Talisorian can also find its audience. It’s true that few of these games may ever even approach the ubiquity of DnD, but fortunately they don’t have to and we have so many options to dig into at our tables. Cheers and thank you Lorecasters for making a hectic Wednesday a little better.

The way to deal with con-crud: when you are not yet born and rolling your stats, build a character with really high con. This helps with a lot of other things too. Unfortunately, most of us didn't know this at the time and dang it, beaing really good at remembering geeky trivia seemed like a fantastic build option.