I feel like Glory of Giants is just too light on content to justify a purchase.
One subclass, two backgrounds, a bunch of feats. Is that really it? I know they are most busy with 1DnD, but considering how that’s shaping out to be, I’m not really confident about the future of DnD.
WOTC has been phoning it in since Tasha’s. I’m so glad I switched to PF2e at the beginning of this year. Paizo treats their community well and releases tons of really good content, not these massive fluff books with only one or two new bits of crunch. They also don’t shy away from bigger content releases like entirely new classes.
I bought the big PF2 bundle during the OGL controversy and I really liked what I was looking at. Unfortunately my party isn’t really thrilled about changing system, so I’m stuck with dnd for the foreseeable future :/
You could start dropping hints about cool stuff in PF2 into your DnD game as house rules. Things like hero points, combat skill actions (demoralize, feint, etc.), and the 4 degrees of success (with differentials of 10 or more and nat 20/1) are fairly easy to incorporate into 5e. Then, once they are in love with all the cool house rules you’ve introduced you can be like “oh BTW those are just the tip of the iceberg of cool stuff in PF2”
If you’re using cameras, you could just use a prop to visually separate you from your character. Glasses/monocle, cigarette/pipe, an eyepatch you can flip up or down, etc.
The act of deploying the prop would also help as a reminder to use whatever affectations you might want to when speaking too. When you want to go back to speaking OOC, you can just put the prop down.
As others have mentioned, those Spirit Guardians are phenomenal.
My personal honorable mentions are Silence to mess with enemy spellcasters, Beacon of Hope if you're in a tough fight and keep losing your front liners, and Spirit Shroud, if you are a melee Cleric
My friends and I started playing DnD during COVID. We’re all at least normal intelligence, college educated people (I even work in a job where I regularly research federal regulations, so I’m used to navigating complex rules). Our biggest complaint was how obtuse and difficult to pin down some of the rules in this game are.
Six of us spent a half hour trying to figure out how darkvision works, and the answers we found online didn’t seem to match up with what we were reading in the handbook. You would find something mentioning darkvision, but it wouldn’t explain how it worked. Then somewhere else would say something different about darkvision. It seemed like you needed to go to multiple different sections of the handbook to piece everything together. We encountered multiple instances of this.
Our one friend defended it all saying it’s deliberately obtuse to allow for DM flexibility, but most of us disagree with that approach. The rules should be explicitly stated, and then a caveat added that all rules are flexible if the DM wants them to be. There should not be a debatable way to play the game, as far as official rules are concerned. How you bend the rules is entirely up to you.
While it’s true that 5e places a lot of the work on the DM, I think in that case your group just failed to read the rules properly. Darkvision is one of the more well-defined abilities in the game.
When six newbies struggle to figure it out, then it isn’t well-defined. Or at the very least isn’t well structured to find the definition quickly. I will die on this hill.
I think what you’re actually alluding to is that the books are poorly organized, which is indeed a common complaint. Darkvision is very clearly explained, but the explanation is “treat dim light as bright light and darkness as dim light”. In order to understand what that means mechanically, you then have to go find the section on light levels and obscurement (and then the rules on obscurement require you to read the blinded and invisible conditions). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing and is actually how most TTRPGs handle nested mechanics, but D&D notoriously has a really bad index in the PHB, which means it’s very hard to actually find the nested mechanics you need. Lots of other TTRPGs will give you a page reference or something when they reference rules found in other parts of the book. 5e doesn’t.
I love how they start with “it sits between official and homebrew”. As though WOTC designers had anything to do with the gunslinger. It was a homebrew Matt Mercer made for Talisin before they had really even played 5e, since he wanted to port over everything from their home game which had been Pathfinder 1e. It has very little connection to the 5e design philosophy and Mercer has a history of being really bad at homebrewing crunch that can be used at other tables besides his own.
FWIW I ran a wild west campaign in 5e for a couple of years and my “guns” were just reflavoured crossbows with easier reloading. I had a player who went hard into it and played a sharpshooter using a rogue/fighter multiclass.
As with everything produced and brought to market by a (huge) company: the will ruin their product in the end (and might have done so already).
But that’s not so terrible. 5e is pretty much an open game with a free license and there is a bunch of Indie RPGs out there and people are still playing (clones of) older editions of DND (I woupd advise anyone who hasn’t heard about that to find out about it).
My only concern really is their IP. I love the Realms, Eberron, etc. They’ve been ruining pretty much everything lately I mean Just look at spelljammer.
But they didn’t produce a lot of content for Eberron and Spelljammer for quiet some time, did they? One could say, that that part of their IP has been shitty for some time already.
I just hope the hobby as whole grows and at the same time more people learn about other ttrpg stuff out there. That new Eberrons and new Spelljammers come to be.
Could start with the Anasi’s Tapestry of Lives free preview.
I bought it after reading through the preview. Definitely helps to have really well fleshed out NPCs every once in a while to make up for the eh NPCs I have.
If you don't mind dying, tell them and tell them they needn't save you. I would tell tree and ask them not to do that, at least with me. I'd prefer if they wholly didn't but meh
These days I play more 13A and it explicitly discourages such behavior too
The reason I did it was because the group wanted a world map poster of my homebrew setting to put up on the wall, but I am not a skilled enough artist to make it look nice enough. Professional, pre made maps ARE withing my skillset to make a massive poster from.
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