Wandering Adventure Party

Welcome to the Black Briar Orphanage, a solemn home for lost and unwanted children. It features a two-story manor surrounded by tall pine trees and briars. To visitors, however, something seems off about this place-- the light never reached the corners of the rooms, dolls moved, toys disappeared. Let your players uncover the mysteries of this orphanage. This map includes two floors. The first floor features a large dining hall, classroom, library, an office, and much more. The second floor includes bedrooms, play rooms, a large classroom and more! This pack also features nighttime, ruined, winter, city, and drow variations. Download the map for free here.

it sounds like the opposite to outsourcing - they want everything done in house so they get 100% creative control and 100% profit.

At the end of the day, it’s just more 5e. If 5e was your thing, chances are you’ll find the new edition appealing, especially if you didn’t dabble in the (much more polished) homebrew content that existed and has improved on the game since day1. For example, my brother only plays official 5e, oftentimes limiting the ruleset to core PHB (and maybe Xanatar and Tasha). To him, 5e2024 will be an exciting addition. Some of the ‘new’ rules (read: rules that everybody has been using for the past 10 years without their explicit consent, like bonus action potions) are nice additions, and some of their reworked classes/subclasses are fine - most are an improvement on the original, at least. Outside of some specific tidbits, however, the game is as much of a rushed and poorly balanced ruleset as 2014 was ten years before. I also find it more annoying to play because of how finicky and clunky everything has become. It has this ‘designed by committee’ flair to it, where you know that every feature exists not because they wanted it to be, but because they needed people to upvote their UAs so that they could reach the magical 90% threshold and send it to the press.

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I’m out of the D&D world these days, but it is hilarious to see them still trying to find a way to make psionics work in a way that doesn’t suck. The first D&D character that I built was a 4e psion, and I loved it. But for some reason they crashed and burned with their attempts in 5.0e I liked the idea that instead of spell slots you gained a number of cantrip-like abilities that can be strengthened by spending power points. To me, something like that is the best way to do it. It gives the greater flexibility compared to spell slots that people want out of psionics, without the insane power level that made the mystic so unpopular. I also intensely disliked a bunch of the names for things they used, at least in some of the old psionics UAs. I don’t remember what it ended up looking like, but I recall Mind Thrust at one point being changed from your basic “attack their mind” into having a physical knockback effect, and other similar ideas I really didn’t like.

Oh, I believe you that it could have worked. Many people seem happy to go with easy even if it’s worse in many ways. Sometimes that’s fine and the trade-off is worth it. I don’t compile all my software from source. Making DND more like a video game seems really sad to me, and I wouldn’t want to take the poison pill. But I guess that’s like looking at the Internet and longing for when it was free hobby stuff while most people just want Facebook. I like to think people would be like “wait, this sucks, we can’t go off the rails?” but I think most people’s expectations are lower. They’d be happy with DND as board game.