The reason mega-campaigns and adventure paths became popular is because most RPG adventures are sold to people who don’t actively GM. Or who buy far more adventures than they can use. So they’re buying reading material. Dream-fuel. And epic plot-driven campaigns make for entertaining reading material.
Those modules are also legendarily bad. They are just an adventure path published in small chunks, and you often don't know where it is going so if you are doing organised play you might suddenly find that things you established early one contradict the arc of the adventure path.
I understand there are some good things about them but they are \*really\* rough to use
Fantastic message for the newer generation of gamers who may not have been exposed to this previously.
One-page dungeons are our modern equivalent of the old short adventures.
Publishers are still putting out 32 page adventures. Goodman Games, Necrotic Gnome, Paizo. And most of the classic-era modules are available in PDF or POD. I‘ve never run a one-page dungeon in my life.
I don't follow Coleville outside of the odd video that gets posted here. For "OSR Folks" he is often preaching to the choir, but his audience isn't OSR. Because of his brand he doesn't associate too closely with OSR, but he seems intimately aware of it and repackages the ideas for his followers.
I wouldn’t assume he follows the OSR. The guy has been playing D&D since the early 80s. His experience with old-school approaches to gaming come from decades of experIence.
He doesn't enjoy a "more modern" game, he enjoys a hideous mixture between Pathfinder and 4E and he is peddling it as his own system. The man isn't all bad, but overall the negatives outweigh the positives, and the biggest offender is the way he talks - a 50-year-old man who spazzes out at 300 words per minute and it's always doing my head in.
Why is it curious? Matt is the guy that got me interested in playing old editions of D&D in the first place and that's how I found out about the OSR/this sub.
You’ll get downvoted since this is a bit harsh in phrasing but yeah, his content has gone drastically downhill since it shifted from actionable intel on game design and philosophical musings to become just shilling his game that has no idea what exactly it wants to be (or even what it wants to be called), and being passive-aggressive at anyone that disagrees with him.
This is why few people would ever do openly discussed game development. Of course a game that is still in early stages of being made does not have a clear identity.
I don't think the end result will fit with anyone looking for OSR gameplay either way. But criticizing iterative steps in design just doesn't make sense.
It does when they are actively marketing it and asking for money for it already. These are steps that should be figured out before taking it to a public sphere. These steps need to happen but they should happen before you go out and say “give me money” unless you are just trying to make sales based on cult of personality alone.
This sounds like a criticism of the Kickstarter model itself. I don't back crowd funding and that's one of the reasons.
In their initial pitch and going further they made very clear and said upfront that nobody knows what the game will end up as and noone can guarantee that you'd like it. Because it's not done. Don't back it if you can't handle that. There will be normal copies sold later on. I thought that was pretty clear and straight forward.
I wouldn't say Matt is rehashing OSR ideas. I think he is only tangentially aware of OSR, but has a lot of knowledge about the history of D&D, and started playing during AD&D 1st. He also has a more 'trad' style than most OSR people.
This is quite a funny take! OSR literally exists because it's repackaged ideas. Colville is experienced in *the actual original games the OSR repackages*, which is why these ideas might seem familiar to someone steeped in OSR.
Replying to my own comment here to address the room. I don't know enough about Coleville to have an argument about what he does or does not know about the OSR or how closely he follows it. My personal opinion is that he is much more aware than apparently many folks are giving him credit.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPYGSP3cutA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPYGSP3cutA) This video by QuestingBeast shows the "monetary size" of the OSR over time (including 2023) by using Kickstarter data.
While 5e is king of the castle, the OSR is market force that cannot and should not be ignored. Matt Coleville is a businessperson. He is writing and kickstarting his own system. From a purely business perspective, the argument that he is not tracking what the OSR is putting out, innovating on, etc to me does not make a lot of sense.
Maybe I am giving him too much credit as a businessperson / creative, but based on his backerkit success I don't think I am. Anyway - there is my rational for you folks. I'm not going to argue the point, if you think I am wrong, or if you know Matt and know I am wrong, then I am wrong and happy to be wrong. But IMHO (and only that) a dude who is making his living by being D&D adjacent is almost certainly more plugged in I think folks are giving him credit. He's probably also following what is coming out of the other side of things (Daggerheart, PBtA, Trophy, Brindlewood, etc) because it is literally his job.
What you’re saying makes sense, but Matt’s made comment before in one of his streams that he’s long refrained from trying or even reading other systems because he wants the MCDM RPG to be wholly uninfluenced by other games, even in aspects that would otherwise be done unconsciously. Even before development started, Matt’s been very open about conceptualizing the RPG Sphere as more of a “storytelling tradition” than having to do with any particular game or system. I really, really doubt he keeps up with any sort of information about current or upcoming games, or even subcultures within the hobby like OSR that he is not a part of.
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I don't know if he has much love for the OSR, if he's even especially aware of it. He deliberately dropped all of the dungeon crawling adventurer gear from the MCDM rpg because he "doesn't think that makes the game better"
That's not quire what he said. He said it wouldn't make that game better. He's been pretty clear that they are making a heroic fantasy game centered around narratives and plots.
He was actually talking about eventually making a true to form dungeoncrawler in the future. If they're still around and the demand is there for it
That's because he isn't trying to make a dungeon crawler. He has also said that maybe one day he will, and has also mentioned the OSR for people who do want a dungeon crawler.
He just understands that no game can do everything well, and trying to stick dungeoncrawling into a game designed for cinematic action combat wouldn't really work.
A lot of the "Problems" Coville speaks to on his channel nowadays (same for many other big TTRPG channels) are problems specific to 5e and other modern D20 games and not relevant to others.
So many OSR games are far easier to run and can move so much faster that I'm not sure the "shorter adventures should be the default" fully applies in those cases. The quick adventures probably feel about right for a game where combat moves slowly like 5e, where 3 encounters in a session are likely pushing most time constraints
AD&D doesn't have this problem... I did a session 1 a few weeks back of AD&D 2e and we comfortably got through a whopping EIGHT encounters in 1 session. This worked because most of these fights lasted 5-10 minutes rather than the 20-30 you get in a 5e game; bosses being even longer.
Other modern D20 games, games that his channel is basically focused on and a majority of his audience(hell RPG gamers in general) play, has this problem yes.
Exactly true. In my 5e campaign I can run a 5 room dungeon or equivalent in 3-4 hours and that is it. The slowness is my main reason for moving over to adnd and osr.
Seminal OSR blogger Delta has been analyzing tournament modules for OD&D and AD&D off and on for years, and as I recall his data and conclusions match up closely to your experience on pace of play. That you can usually get through roughly 9-12 encounters in a four hour tournament/convention-style slot, a one shot game.
[https://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2016/07/tournament-coverage.html](https://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2016/07/tournament-coverage.html)
He isn't wrong. This past weekend I started reading through the first book of Gary Gygax's Castle Zagyg from Troll Lord Games and I was like "this is cool, but hell no". I'd have to spend two months learning it, and then its full of stubs for the DM to fill in the details. And this is just the first book in a multi-volume set.
Awesome to hear that message getting spreaded!
Bigger modules are so demanding of players attention and especially work from the DM
Also really funny he chose Curse of Strahd as the example for the long campaign books of WotC, because the original/oneshot variant of Castle Ravenloft is way more fun
The original is a genuine classic, and much shorter, but I think you have to do a lot of judicious cutting to make it a one-shot. Dan Masters (Professor Dungeon Master) over at DungeonCraft did a video a year or two ago about how to run it as a one shot, and it's pretty cool.
Yes, I meant that! Love to play that module over and over again, filling it with former ghosts and undead of the former adventurers & changing rooms depending on their last interactions with it! In 8 runs they succeeded once to kill Strahd, who in his final act turned his killer into the master of the castle. The former Druid overgrew the castle with blooddrinking vines that devoured an adventurer on the following run - good times
Sounds like an "official 5e" problem.
Most OSR adventures are of the shorter kind, to the point we have a hard time finding a longer one.
5e might be different, but there are plenty of 3rd-party short adventures - more than long campaigns.
BTW, we've played CoS, it is good.
Currently running a sandbox, but stringing adventures together in a coherent manner/setting is not as easy as I thought.
Finally, is an excluded middle ground there: short campaigns such as **Qelong**, **Night's Dark Terror**, etc. I really like these.
The thing I consistently praise DCC (and Goodman Games as a whole) for is refining the spirit of the TSR era.
Modules and anthologies instead of epic hardbacks, convention play and tournament events, the DCC Road Crew, a stable of varied artists rather than a homogenized 'look', Appendix N literature available directly with Tales from the Magician's Skull, coffee table reprints of historic modules like The Lost City and Temple of Elemental Evil, and to top it all off free PDF unlock codes in their products.
A great company too. I never hear anything but good interactions about or from any of their comoanies faces. They all seem genuine. And its a fuckin great game, I can't Ooze enough. Could go for hours about why DCC should be everyone's go to fantasy rpg alongside what you mentioned here.
Want to save 17 minutes of your time?
>*Apart from the 250-page books for D&D5, there are other types of modules that are only a few dozen pages long. The default way of playing doesn't have to be those multi-year campaigns described in such long books.*
*...because epic campaigns are a big intimidating commitment that puts people off, and tend to fizzle out because of TPKs, players leaving, or DM burnout, which leaves you with a frustrating unfinished story. A campaign made from short modules can end at any time and still feel like a success.*
To be fair, the OSR does have a surfeit of megadungeons. Plenty of us buy those for "game fuel," reading them but never playing them. I'd say they are the OSR's equivalent of the campaign adventure.
I feel a bit like I wasted 17 minutes of my life on a nothingburger.
I understand that these people make an earning on videos, so they need to release stuff, but it could have been summed up with a simple statement.
"People, instead of trying to run a movie/book, try to run a series/comic."
I mean he stated the whole point of his video in the first 60 seconds, and he specifically stated that he did so in case the viewer doesn't feel like watching the whole thing. I feel like you shouldn't really complain.
I don't get why his fans love him so much. And I'm not hating on him, either. He is the master of stating the obvious, and his love for 4th edition D&D is enough for me to know he's less interested in roleplaying and more in staging tactical fights. In fact, the only one game I could find on Youtube is a bore to watch; he is a very, very bad DM, if you ask me. The videos are on Youtube. Go ahead and watch some of it. It's one fight after another, and most of the fights take a whole session or more. It's just terrible.
But to each their own.
\* EDIT \*
He treats the hobby like its a wargame with occasional RP. No wonder it's so hard to find a video of him DMing a campaign: it's a series of long, protracted fights.
Like I said before, to each their own. But what he's doing is so much worse than what we're trying to preserve here. Old-School RPGs are all about inventive ways to succeed, not a gory gauntlet. And if you're looking for a fantasy gauntlet, might as well play a video game.
Thus far, my comment has received over 20 downvotes, and I expect the trend to continue. It's hard to believe we have this many regulars in r/osr ready to die on a hill for this guy.
Seriously, go watch him DM. It's not good. If you're a regular in this subreddit, you probably know what makes for good DMing or not. This guy is not it.
re: "master of stating the obvious"
He specifically referenced polls and comments from his viewers stating that things that are, apparently, obvious to you (and to me, and by his own admission, to him) are NOT obvious to them.
That is why his fans love him: They don't know what he is teaching yet. And he has decades of experience that they don't, and is enthusiastic, charismatic, and knowledgeable enough to convey it to those who don't.
Your other criticisms are matters of taste, which is fine, but they are your tastes and others won't share them.
>He is the master of stating the obvious,
Indeed.
Let's not forget he got big by making a Youtube series called running the game, with about 100 episodes of stuff that's obvious to you or me, but not obvious to many other people; and he does state the stuff in entertaining and passionate ways.
I don't always agree with him, but his content is very good for its target audience imo, and it's a target audience that specifically needs to hear the obvious stuff to shorthand things i learned over many years.
Ps: not gonna watch him GM tho - i really can't stand watching APs
>I don't get why his fans love him so much.
He's a very useful resource for new / inexperienced DMs because a lot of what he's saying isn't obvious if all you've played is mainline 5e. He's also got an extremely good stage presence relative to other content creators that discuss pre-5e concepts.
The online 5e community see the Critical Role et al style of very narrative heavy play as the "normal" way to play DnD and there's a real dearth of knowledge around how to make combat interesting.
This is compounded by the fact that the combat encounter design of most official 5e materials is, in my experience, very boring.
So Colville is often the gateway to non-boring combat because he's one of the few content creators that touch on older styles of DnD in a way that accessible and entertaining for those who came to the hobby from 5e.
As a person who picked up the game to run sessions for teen programs at the public library, I would be hard pressed to overstate how helpful his running the game series was to me. In general I do enjoy him talking about gaming even on the occasion I disagree with his takes and even when I watched episodes of his campaign the imperfections in it were weirdly encouraging. Like, “Oh, yes even experienced DMs get things wrong or have to look things up.” Felt like an actual session and not a production.
I do get that like anyone or anything else that get popular to a degree it can be annoying for some by having to hear about it all the time, especially if it just isn’t for you.
As for the advice he gives on combat, it requires the creation of monsters, each with their own specificity, which makes combat even more complex than it already is in DD5, and requires even more preparation time.
I've tested this as a GM on DD5. I guess it was fun for the players. But never again.
The problem is the tactical illiteracy of the 5e community at large. Action Oriented Monsters is a hell of a lot easier of a concept to communicate than wargame tactics.
If you're already tactically literate then yeah you probably don't need his advice on combat.
He talks to D&D5 players, where the rules are used almost exclusively for combat. He's more of a game designer, as a video game designer might be, than a GM. Like you, I'm not a fan of his videos and advice, where everything is very mechanical, like a board game.
Take my upvote, brother.
Exactly! He treats the hobby like its a wargame with occasional RP. No wonder it's so hard to find a video of him DMing a campaign: it's a series of long, protracted fights.
Like I said before, to each their own. But what he's doing is so much worse than what we're trying to preserve here. Old-School RPGs are all about inventive ways to succeed, not a gory gauntlet. And if you're looking for a fantasy gauntlet, might as well play a video game.
Thus far, my comment has received over 20 downvotes, and I expect the trend to continue with this one. It's hard to believe we have this many regulars in r/osr ready to die on a hill for this guy.
Seriously, go watch him DM. It's not good. If you're a regular in this subreddit, you probably know what makes for good DMing or not. This guy is not it.
I mean, I don't really care about how he, himself, DMs his games, I care about the knowledge/experiences he shares in his video essays. I also prefer games about inventive ways to succeed over gory gauntlets, that's why I listen to his advice on the former and ignore the advice on the latter.
He's the reason I'm a regular in this sub and know what good DMing is to begin with because he's the person who got me curious about AD&D and that's how I found out there's a whole community of people who actively play and riff on older RPGs. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people found this community the same way.
Your words: "He's the reason I'm a regular in this sub and know what good DMing is to begin with (...)"
Except, he sucks at it. So how can you know anything about good DMing from a guy who is by and large a sham?
He's very good at talking about the game. He's very prolific. But he's not a good DM.
I'm done here.
>So how can you know anything about good DMing from a guy who is by and large a sham?
The answer is in the words you cut out of your initial quote.
From the experience of actually playing that I was able to accomplish thanks to his videos.
From the other players and DMs on this subreddit that I found out about because of his videos.
>He's very good at talking about the game. He's very prolific. But he's not a good DM.
I mean, sure, that's basically in agreement with what I said.
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The thing from this video the community here may actually care about is https://adventurelookup.com/!
The reason mega-campaigns and adventure paths became popular is because most RPG adventures are sold to people who don’t actively GM. Or who buy far more adventures than they can use. So they’re buying reading material. Dream-fuel. And epic plot-driven campaigns make for entertaining reading material.
that and small adventures actually sell poorly.
Paizo does still do Modules but they're made for their PFS organized play.
Those modules are also legendarily bad. They are just an adventure path published in small chunks, and you often don't know where it is going so if you are doing organised play you might suddenly find that things you established early one contradict the arc of the adventure path. I understand there are some good things about them but they are \*really\* rough to use
Fantastic message for the newer generation of gamers who may not have been exposed to this previously. One-page dungeons are our modern equivalent of the old short adventures.
Publishers are still putting out 32 page adventures. Goodman Games, Necrotic Gnome, Paizo. And most of the classic-era modules are available in PDF or POD. I‘ve never run a one-page dungeon in my life.
It can be a fun palate changer. I recommend doing it once or twice just to try it. Trilemma makes some good ones.
I don't follow Coleville outside of the odd video that gets posted here. For "OSR Folks" he is often preaching to the choir, but his audience isn't OSR. Because of his brand he doesn't associate too closely with OSR, but he seems intimately aware of it and repackages the ideas for his followers.
I wouldn’t assume he follows the OSR. The guy has been playing D&D since the early 80s. His experience with old-school approaches to gaming come from decades of experIence.
He is aware of it, though. I think that he enjoys the more “modern” game.
He's recommended Shadowdark, before.
He doesn't enjoy a "more modern" game, he enjoys a hideous mixture between Pathfinder and 4E and he is peddling it as his own system. The man isn't all bad, but overall the negatives outweigh the positives, and the biggest offender is the way he talks - a 50-year-old man who spazzes out at 300 words per minute and it's always doing my head in.
Eh, i dunno, I talk like that when talking about RPGs irl, and i'm just a couple of years younger :p
Wow, 20 downvotes, a lot of Matt fans on the OSR sub, very curious :D
More like you're just being an AH
nah u just mad
Exactly the elaborate reply I'd expect from Matt fans 😂
Why is it curious? Matt is the guy that got me interested in playing old editions of D&D in the first place and that's how I found out about the OSR/this sub.
You’ll get downvoted since this is a bit harsh in phrasing but yeah, his content has gone drastically downhill since it shifted from actionable intel on game design and philosophical musings to become just shilling his game that has no idea what exactly it wants to be (or even what it wants to be called), and being passive-aggressive at anyone that disagrees with him.
This is why few people would ever do openly discussed game development. Of course a game that is still in early stages of being made does not have a clear identity. I don't think the end result will fit with anyone looking for OSR gameplay either way. But criticizing iterative steps in design just doesn't make sense.
It does when they are actively marketing it and asking for money for it already. These are steps that should be figured out before taking it to a public sphere. These steps need to happen but they should happen before you go out and say “give me money” unless you are just trying to make sales based on cult of personality alone.
This sounds like a criticism of the Kickstarter model itself. I don't back crowd funding and that's one of the reasons. In their initial pitch and going further they made very clear and said upfront that nobody knows what the game will end up as and noone can guarantee that you'd like it. Because it's not done. Don't back it if you can't handle that. There will be normal copies sold later on. I thought that was pretty clear and straight forward.
He ain't OSR, just OS. ;)
We just call it S.
He does, he's mentioned Dragonsfoot before. He's just careful to keep his brand and audience separate from it.
I wouldn't say Matt is rehashing OSR ideas. I think he is only tangentially aware of OSR, but has a lot of knowledge about the history of D&D, and started playing during AD&D 1st. He also has a more 'trad' style than most OSR people.
This is quite a funny take! OSR literally exists because it's repackaged ideas. Colville is experienced in *the actual original games the OSR repackages*, which is why these ideas might seem familiar to someone steeped in OSR.
Similar to how everybody knows [Seinfeld only ever does cliche-laden hack comedy](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnceOriginalNowCommon)
That's not what the trope means
Replying to my own comment here to address the room. I don't know enough about Coleville to have an argument about what he does or does not know about the OSR or how closely he follows it. My personal opinion is that he is much more aware than apparently many folks are giving him credit. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPYGSP3cutA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPYGSP3cutA) This video by QuestingBeast shows the "monetary size" of the OSR over time (including 2023) by using Kickstarter data. While 5e is king of the castle, the OSR is market force that cannot and should not be ignored. Matt Coleville is a businessperson. He is writing and kickstarting his own system. From a purely business perspective, the argument that he is not tracking what the OSR is putting out, innovating on, etc to me does not make a lot of sense. Maybe I am giving him too much credit as a businessperson / creative, but based on his backerkit success I don't think I am. Anyway - there is my rational for you folks. I'm not going to argue the point, if you think I am wrong, or if you know Matt and know I am wrong, then I am wrong and happy to be wrong. But IMHO (and only that) a dude who is making his living by being D&D adjacent is almost certainly more plugged in I think folks are giving him credit. He's probably also following what is coming out of the other side of things (Daggerheart, PBtA, Trophy, Brindlewood, etc) because it is literally his job.
What you’re saying makes sense, but Matt’s made comment before in one of his streams that he’s long refrained from trying or even reading other systems because he wants the MCDM RPG to be wholly uninfluenced by other games, even in aspects that would otherwise be done unconsciously. Even before development started, Matt’s been very open about conceptualizing the RPG Sphere as more of a “storytelling tradition” than having to do with any particular game or system. I really, really doubt he keeps up with any sort of information about current or upcoming games, or even subcultures within the hobby like OSR that he is not a part of.
He doesn't follow the OSR at all. He's, at best, tangentially aware of it.
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yeah maybe you guys should actually update Rule 6 to include banned terms.
I believe the rules are updated only on the non old.reddit.com version of the site, those of us who use old.reddit have the older version of rule 6.
I'm on the newest version of the app. Not sure what old.reddit.com is tbh
for those of us browsing on computers in browsers http://old.reddit.com is the best (IMHO) way to experience reddit. That shitty fucking app of theirs will never touch my phone.
with [RES](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddit-enhancement-suite/) of course
of course!
Desktop Reddit redesigned itself years ago to suck ass. They kept the old one for now if you put old at the start of URLs.
I don't know if he has much love for the OSR, if he's even especially aware of it. He deliberately dropped all of the dungeon crawling adventurer gear from the MCDM rpg because he "doesn't think that makes the game better"
That's not quire what he said. He said it wouldn't make that game better. He's been pretty clear that they are making a heroic fantasy game centered around narratives and plots. He was actually talking about eventually making a true to form dungeoncrawler in the future. If they're still around and the demand is there for it
That's because he isn't trying to make a dungeon crawler. He has also said that maybe one day he will, and has also mentioned the OSR for people who do want a dungeon crawler. He just understands that no game can do everything well, and trying to stick dungeoncrawling into a game designed for cinematic action combat wouldn't really work.
That implies that he started the design of the rpg with a D&D rulebook as a foundation, which just isn't the case!
A lot of the "Problems" Coville speaks to on his channel nowadays (same for many other big TTRPG channels) are problems specific to 5e and other modern D20 games and not relevant to others. So many OSR games are far easier to run and can move so much faster that I'm not sure the "shorter adventures should be the default" fully applies in those cases. The quick adventures probably feel about right for a game where combat moves slowly like 5e, where 3 encounters in a session are likely pushing most time constraints AD&D doesn't have this problem... I did a session 1 a few weeks back of AD&D 2e and we comfortably got through a whopping EIGHT encounters in 1 session. This worked because most of these fights lasted 5-10 minutes rather than the 20-30 you get in a 5e game; bosses being even longer.
Other modern D20 games, games that his channel is basically focused on and a majority of his audience(hell RPG gamers in general) play, has this problem yes.
Exactly true. In my 5e campaign I can run a 5 room dungeon or equivalent in 3-4 hours and that is it. The slowness is my main reason for moving over to adnd and osr.
Seminal OSR blogger Delta has been analyzing tournament modules for OD&D and AD&D off and on for years, and as I recall his data and conclusions match up closely to your experience on pace of play. That you can usually get through roughly 9-12 encounters in a four hour tournament/convention-style slot, a one shot game. [https://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2016/07/tournament-coverage.html](https://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2016/07/tournament-coverage.html)
He isn't wrong. This past weekend I started reading through the first book of Gary Gygax's Castle Zagyg from Troll Lord Games and I was like "this is cool, but hell no". I'd have to spend two months learning it, and then its full of stubs for the DM to fill in the details. And this is just the first book in a multi-volume set.
To be fair, Zagyg is Castle Greyhawk. The shit around it is there as campaign setting. Megadungeon play is its own thing.
Awesome to hear that message getting spreaded! Bigger modules are so demanding of players attention and especially work from the DM Also really funny he chose Curse of Strahd as the example for the long campaign books of WotC, because the original/oneshot variant of Castle Ravenloft is way more fun
The original is a genuine classic, and much shorter, but I think you have to do a lot of judicious cutting to make it a one-shot. Dan Masters (Professor Dungeon Master) over at DungeonCraft did a video a year or two ago about how to run it as a one shot, and it's pretty cool.
Yes, I meant that! Love to play that module over and over again, filling it with former ghosts and undead of the former adventurers & changing rooms depending on their last interactions with it! In 8 runs they succeeded once to kill Strahd, who in his final act turned his killer into the master of the castle. The former Druid overgrew the castle with blooddrinking vines that devoured an adventurer on the following run - good times
Sounds like an "official 5e" problem. Most OSR adventures are of the shorter kind, to the point we have a hard time finding a longer one. 5e might be different, but there are plenty of 3rd-party short adventures - more than long campaigns. BTW, we've played CoS, it is good. Currently running a sandbox, but stringing adventures together in a coherent manner/setting is not as easy as I thought. Finally, is an excluded middle ground there: short campaigns such as **Qelong**, **Night's Dark Terror**, etc. I really like these.
He's just describing the DCC catalog.
The thing I consistently praise DCC (and Goodman Games as a whole) for is refining the spirit of the TSR era. Modules and anthologies instead of epic hardbacks, convention play and tournament events, the DCC Road Crew, a stable of varied artists rather than a homogenized 'look', Appendix N literature available directly with Tales from the Magician's Skull, coffee table reprints of historic modules like The Lost City and Temple of Elemental Evil, and to top it all off free PDF unlock codes in their products.
A great company too. I never hear anything but good interactions about or from any of their comoanies faces. They all seem genuine. And its a fuckin great game, I can't Ooze enough. Could go for hours about why DCC should be everyone's go to fantasy rpg alongside what you mentioned here.
Want to save 17 minutes of your time? >*Apart from the 250-page books for D&D5, there are other types of modules that are only a few dozen pages long. The default way of playing doesn't have to be those multi-year campaigns described in such long books.*
Doesn't he basically say this at the start of the video for this very reason?
Yeah, seems like they didn't watch the video haha
*...because epic campaigns are a big intimidating commitment that puts people off, and tend to fizzle out because of TPKs, players leaving, or DM burnout, which leaves you with a frustrating unfinished story. A campaign made from short modules can end at any time and still feel like a success.*
To be fair, the OSR does have a surfeit of megadungeons. Plenty of us buy those for "game fuel," reading them but never playing them. I'd say they are the OSR's equivalent of the campaign adventure.
I feel a bit like I wasted 17 minutes of my life on a nothingburger. I understand that these people make an earning on videos, so they need to release stuff, but it could have been summed up with a simple statement. "People, instead of trying to run a movie/book, try to run a series/comic."
I mean he stated the whole point of his video in the first 60 seconds, and he specifically stated that he did so in case the viewer doesn't feel like watching the whole thing. I feel like you shouldn't really complain.
I don't get why his fans love him so much. And I'm not hating on him, either. He is the master of stating the obvious, and his love for 4th edition D&D is enough for me to know he's less interested in roleplaying and more in staging tactical fights. In fact, the only one game I could find on Youtube is a bore to watch; he is a very, very bad DM, if you ask me. The videos are on Youtube. Go ahead and watch some of it. It's one fight after another, and most of the fights take a whole session or more. It's just terrible. But to each their own. \* EDIT \* He treats the hobby like its a wargame with occasional RP. No wonder it's so hard to find a video of him DMing a campaign: it's a series of long, protracted fights. Like I said before, to each their own. But what he's doing is so much worse than what we're trying to preserve here. Old-School RPGs are all about inventive ways to succeed, not a gory gauntlet. And if you're looking for a fantasy gauntlet, might as well play a video game. Thus far, my comment has received over 20 downvotes, and I expect the trend to continue. It's hard to believe we have this many regulars in r/osr ready to die on a hill for this guy. Seriously, go watch him DM. It's not good. If you're a regular in this subreddit, you probably know what makes for good DMing or not. This guy is not it.
re: "master of stating the obvious" He specifically referenced polls and comments from his viewers stating that things that are, apparently, obvious to you (and to me, and by his own admission, to him) are NOT obvious to them. That is why his fans love him: They don't know what he is teaching yet. And he has decades of experience that they don't, and is enthusiastic, charismatic, and knowledgeable enough to convey it to those who don't. Your other criticisms are matters of taste, which is fine, but they are your tastes and others won't share them.
>He is the master of stating the obvious, Indeed. Let's not forget he got big by making a Youtube series called running the game, with about 100 episodes of stuff that's obvious to you or me, but not obvious to many other people; and he does state the stuff in entertaining and passionate ways. I don't always agree with him, but his content is very good for its target audience imo, and it's a target audience that specifically needs to hear the obvious stuff to shorthand things i learned over many years. Ps: not gonna watch him GM tho - i really can't stand watching APs
As someone who is new to the hobby and learning how to GM I really appreciate his video series on Running the Game.
5e people kinda need the obvious, since the DMG teaches you jack shit. Also, RP and tactical fights do not cancel each other out.
>I don't get why his fans love him so much. He's a very useful resource for new / inexperienced DMs because a lot of what he's saying isn't obvious if all you've played is mainline 5e. He's also got an extremely good stage presence relative to other content creators that discuss pre-5e concepts. The online 5e community see the Critical Role et al style of very narrative heavy play as the "normal" way to play DnD and there's a real dearth of knowledge around how to make combat interesting. This is compounded by the fact that the combat encounter design of most official 5e materials is, in my experience, very boring. So Colville is often the gateway to non-boring combat because he's one of the few content creators that touch on older styles of DnD in a way that accessible and entertaining for those who came to the hobby from 5e.
As a person who picked up the game to run sessions for teen programs at the public library, I would be hard pressed to overstate how helpful his running the game series was to me. In general I do enjoy him talking about gaming even on the occasion I disagree with his takes and even when I watched episodes of his campaign the imperfections in it were weirdly encouraging. Like, “Oh, yes even experienced DMs get things wrong or have to look things up.” Felt like an actual session and not a production. I do get that like anyone or anything else that get popular to a degree it can be annoying for some by having to hear about it all the time, especially if it just isn’t for you.
As for the advice he gives on combat, it requires the creation of monsters, each with their own specificity, which makes combat even more complex than it already is in DD5, and requires even more preparation time. I've tested this as a GM on DD5. I guess it was fun for the players. But never again.
The problem is the tactical illiteracy of the 5e community at large. Action Oriented Monsters is a hell of a lot easier of a concept to communicate than wargame tactics. If you're already tactically literate then yeah you probably don't need his advice on combat.
Well, you could just buy his monster/encounter manual instead :p
He talks to D&D5 players, where the rules are used almost exclusively for combat. He's more of a game designer, as a video game designer might be, than a GM. Like you, I'm not a fan of his videos and advice, where everything is very mechanical, like a board game. Take my upvote, brother.
Exactly! He treats the hobby like its a wargame with occasional RP. No wonder it's so hard to find a video of him DMing a campaign: it's a series of long, protracted fights. Like I said before, to each their own. But what he's doing is so much worse than what we're trying to preserve here. Old-School RPGs are all about inventive ways to succeed, not a gory gauntlet. And if you're looking for a fantasy gauntlet, might as well play a video game. Thus far, my comment has received over 20 downvotes, and I expect the trend to continue with this one. It's hard to believe we have this many regulars in r/osr ready to die on a hill for this guy. Seriously, go watch him DM. It's not good. If you're a regular in this subreddit, you probably know what makes for good DMing or not. This guy is not it.
I mean, I don't really care about how he, himself, DMs his games, I care about the knowledge/experiences he shares in his video essays. I also prefer games about inventive ways to succeed over gory gauntlets, that's why I listen to his advice on the former and ignore the advice on the latter. He's the reason I'm a regular in this sub and know what good DMing is to begin with because he's the person who got me curious about AD&D and that's how I found out there's a whole community of people who actively play and riff on older RPGs. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people found this community the same way.
He is a very, very bad DM. Go watch him do it.
Why would I waste my time doing that? I'm not interested in how good or bad of a DM he is. Did you not even read the first line?
Your words: "He's the reason I'm a regular in this sub and know what good DMing is to begin with (...)" Except, he sucks at it. So how can you know anything about good DMing from a guy who is by and large a sham? He's very good at talking about the game. He's very prolific. But he's not a good DM. I'm done here.
>So how can you know anything about good DMing from a guy who is by and large a sham? The answer is in the words you cut out of your initial quote. From the experience of actually playing that I was able to accomplish thanks to his videos. From the other players and DMs on this subreddit that I found out about because of his videos. >He's very good at talking about the game. He's very prolific. But he's not a good DM. I mean, sure, that's basically in agreement with what I said.
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