I think it does come down to style, because a lot of your qualms make it sound like it's perfect for me. But I also only ever follow the book in a pre-written about 50 percent of the the time anyways (which I will say is way more closely than I follow my own notes for my homebrew campaigns), so the sandboxy nature, the fact that the outline is done but the nitty gritty is left up to you, and the fact that it's organized by factions rather than location are big draws for me (although page numbers would have been nice) I'm not saying your qualms aren't legitimate or that you are wrong in them, just that the appeal is to different DMing styles (or at least different styles of approaching a pre-written module)
As others have posted, this is an awesome role playing and character development opportunity…the arrogant know it all wizards is stumped but Lothgar the big dumb brute somehow can read them…lol
our game uses 1D6 each round for initiative. 1-3 PCs attack, 4-6 PCs defend. this is basically determining advantage as well, but we use situational advantage occasionally if a party or monster is surprised, nothing too complicated. using the initiative each round increases the chance of death to PCs and monsters as there is no guarantee they will be on the attack each turn.
They literally recommend the players at the end of the session tell you where they are planning to go next so you can plan ahead. Im running this at the moment and its my favourite campaign. Alot of the issues sound like they arent with the book just your dming, the whole point of strike teams being where they are is so they arent just stuck in the stronghold
What is the large insect crawling on the right-hand wing of the dragon mini on the bookshelf? It looks like a beetle, or possibly a large silverfish. You have an infested house. Really gross, really filthy.
As someone who has recently bought and started running DoD I've found the structure and organisation of the material excellent. The chapters occur in the order you need to read and understand them. This isn't old school DnD where you list the monsters beside the location; the chapters focus on laying out the key material you need to run the campaign and the detail is pushed to where it belongs in the Appendices. Spending half a review nit picking says much more about you than the book...
I'm a DM with a party currently at level 10, and have been running Drakkenheim for over a year. I've found the book to work extremely well as a foundation as is, but I do not believe it should be expected to be a blind pick up and play book, because you're going to need to adjust based on why your characters go where they go, how their interactions with various factions go, and what their personal quests are. The game is designed to be open on these subjects, and as such, that is probably why you feel it's incomplete - but the material is there to help you shape the existing locations around the events of your game. I disagree with the criticism of the layouts. The faction vs stronghold issue is a matter of taste and DMing style. The faction members and leaders can be encountered and found outside their strongholds, and often should be. Every faction has a presence in Emberwood Village. Having access to that material at all times is ideal. Strike Teams can also be present at various locations in the city, not just at the strongholds, and as such, having the access to the information early is useful, otherwise you'd need to cut to the stronghold every time the faction shows up. So, this is really a matter of perspective and DMing style. As far as the locations of the seals - it's not hard to track them down. There's only one place called 'Cistern' in the book, and that seal is the most hidden of them. An interesting DM can also mix up the locations of the seals. As for the table of contents... I do actually agree that the subsections with same page numbers are a bit needless. Seeing him flip to 'castle drakken, then the back of castle drakken' just tells me he doesn't pick up on the fact that the 'developments section' is always the last section, and it's not really hard to learn the layout of a book like this. It's not hard to look this up. Yes, a Page Number would be 'faster', but what's here isn't unusable and acting like it is is kind of just a personal gripe IMO. The difference between a page number and a reference like so is all of 5 seconds, and you're not going to be unexpectedly surprised by needing the ritual mid-session or anything. The naming gripes I get... but they all mean the same thing. It's not hard to comprehend. That said... the 1 hr/2hr is a minor issue that can be addressed, it's not make or break. Throwing out half the setting conflict and lore throws out major issues that spark factional conflict and is a DM issue. Letting yourself be blindsided about 'where do you want to go? isn't really the way to run this book. Find out where your players want to go at the end of a session, that gives you time to prepare. Additionally, each section has a set of reasons or concepts for why your players or someone else may need your party to go to a location. The book is actually very well written for building a campaign around your player interacting with factions and NPCs, but I would agree it's not designed for 'we randomly decide to go check out this place' . because there's structure here for intentionally going to particular locations. As a DM who is also not the best at improvisation, I feel you. I need prep time, which is why I structure my sessions to get that preparation time. And there are sections in the book that I've built a lot of my own material for, both for working in player backstories as well as making sections that weren't as interesting more interesting, by changing what's going on when the players visit, etc. One of my favorite changes was having the Queen of Thieves doing something at a location while the players were also there and pursuing a goal of their own - and they even became briefly aligned. Any game that's being run straight out of a book with no adjustment is going to be potentially dull. I've found that this book creates a fantastic toolkit to enhance the locations as suited for your players, party comp, and characters' stories. But it does require some effort, so if you're looking for an out-of-the-box no-thought DM experience, this isn't it. (and that sounds incredibly boring)
I have found this campaign to be less work, and more intuitive than most WOTC published campaigns. I own the PDF version (which is what I think was the originally intended format). The "unfinished" feel I think arises from the sandbox nature of the campaign and a lot of the expectation is that a lot of it can change or be implemented in the moment. There are many tools in the book to help the DM to quickly determine how the sandbox reacts to the players actions. As you said, the factions are the heart of this campaign and they are a DM's dream. They keep the players moving, keep the players engaged, and provide easy to implement and understand NPC actions in response to the chaos that is the player-party.
All the faction information being in one place early in the book is much more useful than splitting that info up between all the strongholds. This reflects the fact that this is a living, breathing campaign and faction leaders and members can be found in many different locations. It's not like a first edition dungeon where the monsters sit in their one room and only become real once the characters kick open the door.
You have perfectly encapsulated essenially all of my issues with this campaign, my players are currently level 10 and I am at the very end of the entire campaign, and getting there has forced me to change and adapt a lot of things from the book in order for things to make sense
You can build tables that determines every aspect of each room in a dungeon. It will take time for creating lists, and a good proximity for opportunities that await adventures. However, this enables you to make thematic dungeons relatively quickly. The logic for its layout may be nonsensical. Yet, the variety of combinations found in each room is great. This shall keep players guessing, while have some idea for what to expect. This is achieved by placing more dice rolled values associated with common occurrences, and less with rare occurrences.
Easier to just think about advantage as the combine probability of failure so 55% change of success on 1 dice is 1-combined change of failure 1- (.45)*(.45) = 1-(~.20) ~80% For disadvantage multiply the change of success, not failure, so it is just (.55)*(.55) ~30%
I am really enjoying your video. At 6:20 the music is super loud compared to your voice, at least with good headphones. For a future video you might be able to try auto-ducking to duck the music down when you speak. Very good content. Keep it up!
I have also seen that definition. The through-line appears to be that both would be used to hold prisoners. I guess underground for criminals and up in a tower for hostages.
@@AndrewStobbIt's important to remember that it was also the most fortified tower. And before they started building separate keeps (or those too small to have separate keeps), the Lord and his family would be housed in it, in addition to having lookouts.
Great video! Really helpful tips, and I love how you actually walk the audience through the process of making the dungeon unlike others who give some good advice and no help in applying it. Lots of neat ideas here in the example for individual bits even if it's not the kind of dungeon I'd normally run. Next time I'd consider taking the music down a bit so it doesn't interfere with the commentary, like it sometimes does here. I've also never heard someone pronounce Bulette like you do; I've always assumed that it would rhyme with words like cigarette, baguette, and gazette.
4e has the best monster manual...but felt too much like an MMO for me, so we never got into it. Skill challenges are a great way to do a montage, keep the pace up and still feel like you are playing a game.
Quite a goodf video surprised you don't have that many subscribers...yet...it will come...your "to roll or not to roll advice" is excellent, I wish I had known when I started DMing, however something I definitely use all the time...even roll of 5 or just a backstory important thing can give you permission to tell your players stuff...also if it is backstory stuff and you say the magic words" "I'm not even gonna make you roll, you would know this" than I tell the important things...and it makes them feel special...
I often use an English to Shakespearean translator when my characters converse with cultures that have been cut off from the current world, for example, interactions with Drow. Reinforces the differences much easier than with my lousy accents. I'll try things like slang from Scotland for Dwarves (who doesn't.) I also like to describe in greater detail things that are put in place as distractions to reinforce the distraction. Being descriptive like this isn't easy, but helps sell your story and theatre of the mind. Thanks for this. Well done.
The High Flamkeepers Phylactery is ter Phylactery of St vitrovrio...it is both a seal of Drakenheim AND a relic of St vitruivo, hence 2 names..if you really think DoD is poorly orginized, dont ever play Cyberpunk Red or Modiphis Star Trek.
The Angry GM blog has a mechanic i like called the tension pool or time pool. When a exploration turn (10 in-game minutes in a duneon) passes, put a d6 in the pool. When you get to 1 hour, roll the pool. An encounter occurs if any 1s are rolled. There's a few other uses of this mechanic, like tracking time or punishing reckless behavior. Look up the article for more.
That's great -- I remember reading some Angry GM articles before (probably around 2017), but they hit different now that I've had a lot more time to think about game design and GMing
@@tomc.5704 I stopped reading his stuff since I stopped taking the bus, but last year he started a series about GM Class or something and he intended to write one article about the subject per month (I think). I usually find value in stuff like that and in his stuff, but he's also very verbose.
I know MC gets accused fairly regularly of being a filthy 4e loving [insert pejorative]* but I think the 'every class has a (different) heroic resource' thing maps much more closely to the widely lauded Tome of Battle - the last hurrah of 3.5 where they replaced the boring old martial classes with exciting new martial classes which could do cool things. And each one had its own ... way of recharging. (Sound familiar yet?). :D *I think it's actually more like - 'here's some cool stuff you can/should steal from 4e and add to your game to make your game better', but heroes of the edition wars don't tend to make fine distinctions very well.
In original 4e, all the skills you can use where predefined by the challenge. Which i think was a huge mistake. But just saying "here's the DC, you need X successes, come up with things you can do and convince me they will work" is a great idea. (Our GM in one case used the sum of all our rolls instead of whether they overcame a DC. Not sure if it's a good idea or not.)
I’d say so. That’d be even simpler to run, which I think is a win. It doesn’t really give the opportunity to use abilities to cancel out failures, but my players don’t do that very much anyways.
this is my first video of yours. I like that you get to the points. you outro is fine, but dated. I play solo and duo games. How can skill challenges be a benefit to these experiences?
I might enjoy skill challenges if my players were creative enough to really get into it, but they aren't, so it just felt awkward every time I've tried using a skill challenge. Especially with the arbitrary rules that are often suggested such as a character can only use a skill once and whatnot.
In that case I'd recommend giving them a bit more specific setup. Like "Rogue you notice a slight breeze coming from a nearby wall as you run by." You've then setup a check for the rogue, to use perception or maybe investigation to realize there's a false wall, which will buy the party some time as they try to escape the collapsing dungeon.
Part of the reason the skill challenge failed in 4e was the adventures told you what skills to use. Not "Here are some options your players might use" but "Here are all of the options".
When I ran 4e, I always allowed skill checks that made sense, even if they were not in the page. i didn't realize that was not the norm until much later.
@@richiecastle460 It was partly a DM issue and mostly a presentation issue. 4e attracted a lot of new players and the books didn't give the best guidance to the new DMs. Other people just read the skill challenges, declared they were bad because they needed fixing, and never actually ran them, so skill challenges got a bad rap online.
Yeah the original version in 4th definitely could have used some more refinement, but I think they should have iterated on the design and not thrown it out.
As someone who played 4e all the way through its life span, it is bonkers to see the opinion of skill challenge do a 180. If you said the word "skill challenge" in the middle of a session, people would literally leave the table.
I think some people at the time thought they replaced literally everything outside combat, and that this is why the "4E doesn't do RP" lie came from. They're great for travel, chase scenes, long negotiation sequences and lots of other things, but I feel like they were a bit over used at the time. They're a great tool, but imho should just be another tool in the toolbox
Completely agree. I also think they would not be treated with the same care you would treat a combat encounter, or too focused on the mechanics, and not allowing creative solutions to the skill challenges.
@@Crushanator1im pretty specific about it existing for a reason. Its there to be used. He bans it cuz he doesnt want me to succeed. Shit rule made by chromosomally gifted. We r well-prepared and u wont be taking it away from us
Since skill checks are an altered phase of play, I would take a bit of liberties with use of Guidance. It too becomes a skill check! Either a flat d20, or modified by their Spellcasting Ability Mod, perhaps. But essentially, it would follow the same structure as the overall skill check.
