Quote from: Haffrung;1018373* The published adventures have been bloated sacks of shit, full of the kind of writerly background fluff that turned me off Paizo adventure paths. And their presentation is awful - blocks of text in tiny fonts with essential information buried. They're basically useless at the table without extensive home-made notes.

Yet again, which of the published adventures have you actually read or played? Because this is bullshit. The fonts are not tiny, there is little 'writerly background fluff' and essential information is not buried.

Quote from: Haffrung;1018373* Combat can get really draggy at higher levels, when PCs and monsters can feel like little more than huge backs of hit points.

Yeah, I've been wondering about that.
I've only run 5e for up to about level 7 characters.
I've been tempted to run some special sessions where the characters start at level 5 and level every session through to about level 15.. I want to see how 5e plays out at higher levels.

Quote from: Haffrung;1018373* The support material for DMs is completely lacking. As noted, the exploration rules are weaksauce. There are no books of lairs, NPCs, plug and play towns, maps, etc. And all the supplementary systems WotC promised during the Next playtests - naval rules, winter or desert setting environments, etc. have clearly been abandoned.

I don't really mind this as there's a LOT of 3rd party support material, much of it free.

Quote from: Haffrung;1018373* The published adventures have been bloated sacks of shit, full of the kind of writerly background fluff that turned me off Paizo adventure paths. And their presentation is awful - blocks of text in tiny fonts with essential information buried. They're basically useless at the table without extensive home-made notes.

Yes, the 5e official campaign books are often quite overblown and often not organised very well.  
You really have to read through the entire campaign book, then find the various errors/omissions (in particular Princes of the Apocalypse), go online to get some very useful guides by fans (I downloaded a very nice PDF made by a 5e fan ) , then remove stuff that is just stupid (some of the names of NPCs are just dumb for example) .  
I have also changed the content/scenarios in PotA quite a bit to fit my tastes.

Quote from: Voros;1018376Yet again, which of the published adventures have you actually read or played? Because this is bullshit. The fonts are not tiny, there is little 'writerly background fluff' and essential information is not buried.

I have most of the campaign books for 5e.

Not particularly because I'll use them as they are. It's mostly I as I like to mine them for information and content to use that I strip out.
I AM running the "Princes of the apocalypse" campaign though ATM.

I have found in particular, the earlier campaign books are organised badly.  Hell, even PotA got the scale of the MAIN map wrong, which they admitted themselves.  
The Phandelver lead on campaign book (the Dragon one) needs serious work to make it useable.

I didn't get the Giant's book yet, but I did get the Undead one (a more recent book) which looks pretty good.

I think WotC are getting better at making these campaign books, but still, they're very verbose and not easy to keep track of things or know where to look next for information in the books.

I don't think I've really noticed draggy combat in 5e, short of crazy stuff like 24 Vrock demons attacking the party. High level PCs can put out tons of damage. BBEGs all seem to drop pretty fast. I guess hordes of CR5s can be sloggy, but my high level (15+) Varisia group took out around 15 CR 4-5 ettins & hill giants in a big battle which played pretty fast I think; much faster than 3e or 4e.

Anything that fits even vaguely within 5e encounter guidelines generally plays out ok.

Quote from: Voros;1018376Yet again, which of the published adventures have you actually read or played? Because this is bullshit. The fonts are not tiny, there is little 'writerly background fluff' and essential information is not buried.

I played in a PotA campaign and my DM complained about all the work he had to do between sessions.

I've sat down with the Storm King's Thunder and read through it extensively. I've also spent time reading through borrowed copies of Out of the Abyss and Curse of Strahd. I simply can't deal with that much content - dozens of NPCs and plot points and background information and events - delivered in walls of text. When I was seriously considering buying CoS, I spent a lot of time on forums getting a feel for how the campaign was to run, and again and again I came across home-made aids that DMs felt they required to run the campaign. I don't have time for that shit. If I'm going to spend hours reading an adventure and taking notes, and then hours writing up play aids, and then hours preparing between sessions, I may as well use my own material (which is what I've done with 5e).

WotC isn't any worse than Paizo in this regard. But these publishers have the same problems:

A) They're trying to both present a setting and tell an epic story, so they awkwardly mash the two goals together in one book.

B) They know half of the audience for adventure paths aren't actively playing and just buy them for reading material, and so they write them to be entertaining to read rather than useful at the table in play.

C) The insufficient use of table, graphics, sequenced lists, call-outs, sidebars, flowcharts, etc. demonstrates that they don't have competent document design / technical writers on staff. Or if they do understand the principles of effective information design, they choose not to employ them because of A) and B) above.

I found the 4E Essentials adventures much easier to use at the table. 5E has been a big step back in usability.

PoTA is probably one of their weakest books I have to agree. But I have to disagree with the claim of 'walls of text' in Out of the Abyss or Curse of Strahd, approx. 5-10 pages of background material at the beginning, including NPCs, etc and then 200-500 words of text per location doesn't equate to walls of text to me. I found the locations easy to reference as each location layouts out the relevant monsters, location, traps, etc in a few hundred words. That there are a lot of NPCs is true and I think one of the strongest parts of those books. I ran most of CoS and didn't need any of these DM guides on DMGuild and I'm hardly a superstar DM. I don't find the layout problematic, I could see the advantage of an NPC relationship flowchart though.

Quote from: Voros;1018385I don't find the layout problematic, I could see the advantage of an NPC relationship flowchart though.

From a DM aid perspective, I think a fold-out relationship map of all NPCs in a campaign along with page references to their entries in the book, would be a godsend. These campaigns-in-a-book present an enormous amount of complex information. I just think the users of the book would be better served if the writers innovated beyond the traditional block of text narrative approach to presenting that information. And as I said, it isn't just WotC campaigns that suffer from this. I was flipping through the WFRP 3E Enemy Within campaign recently, and I realized I would never run it because it's just not worth my time to re-write all that content in a user-friendly format.

Quote from: Voros;1018385PoTA is probably one of their weakest books I have to agree. But I have to disagree with the claim of 'walls of text' in Out of the Abyss or Curse of Strahd...

I played a few sessions of Out of the Abyss, the GM definitely struggled with the presentation and eventually gave up (whereas she had run her homebrew fantasy Japan setting without problems). Also played a couple sessions of Tomb of Annihilation recently, it seemed a bit better as far as I could tell but again the campaign died pretty fast.

AFAICT the WotC books are a bit better than Paizo, but that's certainly damning with faint praise. I think having everything in a single hardback makes integration easier and they definitely seem less linear than Paizo APs. But they still suffer from overly verbose presentation that fails to call out vital info. TSR modules ca 1983 had vastly superior layout.

Well for whatever it's worth - 3-years later and I'm pretty much out on D&D. The ground of the game and system has shifted below my feet and has become in the modern context "something else". And that's cool.

When I go back to D&D I'm going to hack 2e into a 10-lvl spread with optional rules for going 10+ being God-mode rules or something. It'll be my fantasy heartbreaker.

Quote from: tenbones;1018514Well for whatever it's worth - 3-years later and I'm pretty much out on D&D. The ground of the game and system has shifted below my feet and has become in the modern context "something else". And that's cool.

Do you mind elaborating?  Curious minds want to know...

Quote from: S'mon;1018425I pllayed a few sessions of Out of the Abyss, the GM definitely struggled with the presentation and eventually gave up (whereas she had run her homebrew fantasy Japan setting without problems). Also played a couple sessions of Tomb of Annihilation recently, it seemed a bit better as far as I could tell but again the campaign died pretty fast.

AFAICT the WotC books are a bit better than Paizo, but that's certainly damning with faint praise. I think having everything in a single hardback makes integration easier and they definitely seem less linear than Paizo APs. But they still suffer from overly verbose presentation that fails to call out vital info. TSR modules ca 1983 had vastly superior layout.

Hard to say what happened to your DM but I think we all know moving from homebrew to written can be challenging as some think the adventure is some Bible they have to memorize instead of a guide they can improvise from.

When I'm reviewing CoS or OotA I'm not seeing anything in the prose that qualifies as 'verbose.' The average key description is around 200-250 words, I can't find one in excess of 500-600 words for the largest locations, the text is about the relevant details and monsters in simple language, no endless rambling about irelevant backgrounds or histories.

Funny that you bring up TSR ca. 1983. I never found there was a 'house-style' at TSR. Cook and to a lesser degree Moldvay were clear and concise, Hickman despite his reputation as some heretic had very clear and simply written modules, Douglas Niles to me is the weakest writer in the period which is no surprise as he was just starting yet I see his (to me, overrated) modules praised all the time. And of course the late 70s Gygax modules are massively overwritten, yet this overload of imaginative detail is a large part of what makes them so great, a little remarked upon element that challenges OSR orthodoxy.

Quote from: Voros;1018578And of course the late 70s Gygax modules are massively overwritten, yet this overload of imaginative detail is a large part of what makes them so great, a little remarked upon element that challenges OSR orthodoxy.

Yeah, I find a lot of Gygax stuff over written, though not universally - Keep on the Borderlands is fine, so is Yggsburgh, and I thought Fane of the Drow merited it, whereas I found the Against the Giants modules over written despite their brevity. But most of the 32 page late 70s/early 80s modules are very clear and easy to read, surpassed only by the best OSR stuff.

Quote from: KingCheops;1018536Do you mind elaborating?  Curious minds want to know...

Since you asked... (and I'll stipulate these are strictly just my opinions)

My tastes have changed and those tastes didn't change with the way the D&D editions evolved. I did a lot of design stuff for the 3e era, waged edition-wars with the best (i.e. worst) nerdzerkers. And I came to realize how over-wrought the whole thing had become and how bad the math was and ultimately the game had mutated into something else.

Like a prodigal child I didn't realize how much St. Gary and his crew of scalawags *really* understood about their system that jackass upstarts like myself didn't realize going into 3e and beyond. Well with the surge in new players, D&D has transformed into a freak-show of sorts by implication, an oddity that isn't generally as informed by fantasy as much as become trapped in its own conceits as it's own "thing". Each edition wandered a little bit further into solidifying this emergent D&D-as-its-own genre, to the point that a casual pass at 3.x/4e doesn't really comport with the assumptions of any particular setting without implied weirdness. The emergence of MMO's has done a lot to impact this trajectory of design and its myriad of bad ideas. But that's another topic.
 
Ultimately I became less interested in trying to reconcile with the hottest flavor of D&D (or Pathfinder) and simply looked elsewhere for other systemic options for fantasy, and ultimately non-fantasy RPGs.

5e has done a *lot* to alleviate this... but enough time and distance has created opportunities to explore other options of what I want mechanically. And like that prodigal child - I'm a little wiser, a hell of a lot older, less "orthodox" in my approach to gaming in general. Lesson's learned and all that.

And so - I've "let" go of D&D as *my D&D*. I'm less interested in system-fidelity as I am in good mechanics that give me the gameplay I want. I've found other systems that let me approximate many of the various fantasy sub-genres, including D&D's settings, *better* than the current 5e ruleset at my table. I like to have rules that enhance my gameplay not *be* the game.

I'm not knocking D&D at all, mind you. I'm just saying as a GM, were I to come back to the House of Gygax, I would do so with humility, hat in hand, like a good prodigal son. I would pick up 1e/2e and start there and tweak, and the only major differences would be 10/10+ split in game assumptions. But I'd try to cleave closer to Gary and Dave's ideas at a lower scale that what is assumed today rather than trying to get as far away from them as possible. But that pretty much means by that definition - I'm out on 5e (and anything else post 2e.)

In the meantime - I'm perfectly happy with the systems I'm indulging in now.

Fair enough.

Welcome back, tenbones! :cool: Maiden 'AD&D 2e' has been waiting for you in the Sacred Unicorn Grove this whole time. Here, have a blesséd box set, and let's traipse back to La La Land!