I've been browsing older Forgotten Realms sourcebooks and the love that the authors put into those is amazing. It hurts to see D&D and the worlds I grew up loving destroyed by a soulless entity that cares only about profit.
If it’s at all of interest to you, there are a bunch of good novels set in the Forgotten Realms, too.
There’s a pretty great thread from just a few years ago on the Candlekeep forums where someone read through every single book and gave a brief review of them. I can’t remember their opinion in great detail, but the biggest authors (Ed Greenwood and Bob Salvatore) were relatively lowly rated, while Elaine Cunningham and Erin M. Evans consistently rated much more highly.
I’ve never read Cunningham myself, but I’ve read all of Evans’ FR novels and am a huge fan. Plan to read her non-FR novels once I’m finished with what I’m currently working through, if I can find a copy that’s not from the rainforest company.
Was trickier to find than I thought because of the unorthodox title. But here it is.
It’s a 35 page thread with others chiming in with their thoughts as the original author makes his way through the list, and some summing up on pages 33 & 34. And technically still ongoing as new books slowly trickle out, though most of it was finished in 2020.
Unfortunately it looks like the author never fully finished his wrap-up either. He said he was gonna do favourite series, fav individual books, fav authors, and misc comments, but only ended up doing the first two of those as far as I could see.
Personally I mostly read through the reviews of Evans’ books back when I first saw the thread, and my vague recollection was that he/others liked them and mentioned also liking Cunningham, but I could be misremembering.
Happy to provide my own review of Evans’ work if interested.
I’m in a rare slump of not knowing what to read. I’ve been meaning to dig in to forgotten realms for a while, and wanted to start out with Drizt, but heard mixed things.
No worries! If you didn’t already see it, I wrote a fairly lengthy review of the Evans novels in response to another user a few comments down in this thread.
Regarding Drizzt, my understanding is that “mixed things” is basically right. Some of the books are very well-liked, and others are not so much. My own personal experience is only that I’ve tried listening to the audiobook of The Companions, the Drizzt novel which is the first of The Sundering series. But I’ve ended up bouncing off of it twice, just not really caring about the characters.
I’ve been searching all around for Cunningham books and I can’t find any. Not any libraries around here, virtual or physical. Not any used book stores. No where!
I’ve really struggled with the first of Evans’ Brimstone Angels series for a long time, too. The rest of the series was easy to come by, but the first one goes for over $100 second hand.
My local library had it for a while, but seems to have gotten rid of it. Thankfully, all Evans’ books are excellently narrated in audiobook, and are also available in ebook (including easily pirated, which I don’t feel too bad about considering I’ve bought the physical copy of all but the first, as well as the audiobooks of all of them).
I would guess the same should be true of Cunningham’s works, though I haven’t looked. (And the quality of the audio narration may not be as excellent. I know the narrator of the small number of Greenwood books I read was less than stellar.)
Audiobook unfortunately isn’t much of an option for me due to attention issues. All I know is it’s been impossible for me to find the Starlight & Shadows series.
If you have any recommendations for Evans’ books I’d love to see if I can check those out, as well.
Evans only has one standalone novel and one 6-book series.
The standalone: The God Catcher is set in Waterdeep, and is about the daughter of a minor noble who flunks out of wizard school and becomes a rogue, getting caught up in the scheme of some dragons who have found a way to bypass Waterdeep’s mythal and get into the city. It’s a fun ride.
The series is the Brimstone Angels series, about two twin tieflings abandoned at birth and adopted by a curmudgeonly single dad dragonborn. The prologue shows one of the twins accidentally forming a warlock pact with a devil. The biggest ongoing appeals of this series are:
the nature of an infernal warlock pact and the relation between the warlock and patron
the experience of a race that internally is absolutely no different to humans (unlike, say, half-orcs, which are canonically actually more likely to be aggressive) but which are perceived as evil
the politics of the Nine Hells (her patron becomes, especially as the series goes on, a sort of deuteragonist of the series, and we see a lot of internal political dealings, schemes, etc. between different devils of different ranks)
If you’ve read the 5e Player’s Handbook, the quotes that are at the start of the tiefling and dragonborn racial entries both come from this series. The tiefling one is part of the prologue of book 1 (Brimstone Angels) and the dragonborn one is—from memory—from book 5 (Ashes of the Tyrant). The last two books are especially good if you’re interested in dragonborn, or if you like creative fantasy world building in general, because Evans’ background before she got into writing was in anthropology, and the dragonborn culture was not very heavily fleshed out previously, so she had a lot of leeway to do some really cool unique work with them. She’s got a number of articles on her blog about draconic language and dragonborn culture as sort of fun supplemental material. Here’s part 1 of “playing a Dragonborn in the Forgotten Realms”. There are also parts 2 and 3 of that series, plus 2 posts of the draconic language.
Book 4 is set in Cormyr, and deals a lot with Cormyrian politics. The closest parallel to which in more popular fantasy that I can think of is Wheel of Time’s Andoran succession crisis
Book 3 was explicitly part of WotC’s The Sundering, a series of books set around the time of the Second Sundering, the in-world explanation for the rule and setting changes between 4th and 5th edition. But Evans was allowed to set all of her remaining books 3–6 during the intermediary period, so book 6 climaxes basically right as the Sundering itself is hitting the world, which plays into her story threads in a major way.
There’s stuff about how Asmodeus came to be a god, how tieflings came to look like they do in 4th and 5th edition, how Azuth returned to life after being presumed dead, and a brief excursion to Toril’s twin plane of Abeir, the magic-less land ruled by dragon tyrants from which the dragonborn escaped.
There’s one other of her blog posts that I’d like to recommend, but I’m putting it down here because it’s a little different. It’s less a lore thing and more something interesting in the writing. Good if you want interesting ideas for narrating at a table, maybe, but mostly interesting if you’re interested in hearing about the writing process. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys seeing the “behind-the-scenes” of movies and the like. It’s this one where she’s talking about how she weaves in a game mechanic into the narrative in a seamless but necessary way. Specifically, how she used a 4e “healing surge” in the first book, a mechanic that was often derided by people who didn’t like 4e because of how unrealistic it was, but which she utilised in a way that was both flawless and entirely necessary (because the character doing it had used an ability that required they be below half health, and then later in the same scene used one that required they be above half health, to be faithful to the game rules).
But yeah, it’s safe to say that I’m a huge fan, and highly recommend her. Unfortunately if audiobook is not an option, book is the only way to get the first Brimstone Angels book, unless you’re lucky enough to have a library with it. But at least when I was buying 6 or so years ago, all the other books in the series were easy to get a hold of.
Oh, I’ll just also add that she’s got two other books set in her own world that I know of. I think at least a third is planned. And next year the classic MMORPG RuneScape is releasing a book set in its world’s past written by her. I’ve not read any of these, but plan to.
Larian pls make a new series based on the Pathfinder ruleset. I think the success of BG3 has helped the mainstream to get used to DnD ruleset. Although Pathfinder is more complex, I think they have the chops to make it more accessible to the masses.
Forgotten realms is basically the IP for standard fantasy. This is an enormous strength for an IP. Divinity doesn’t have this strength, it doesn’t speak naturally to everyone like this.
Frankly I was really excited for the Divinity project they dropped for BG3, precisely because I like the “high middle age/early modern” feel of, eg. Pillars of Eternity that FR kinda lacks.
Pathfinder was created as an updated version of D&D 3.5, which was very complex. PF food streamline parts of it, but ended up just as complex at some point, mostly due to the massive variety of options available through splat books.
Meanwhile, D&D 5e was released to be much less complex by getting rid of stacking bonuses and the vast majority of math.
Parhfinder 2 (which I have not actually played yet) did not do that. They opted for streamlining the existing system by combining several similar subsystems into one (i.e. everything is a feat now). But the math is still there.
Parhfinder 2 (which I have not actually played yet) did not do that. They opted for streamlining the existing system by combining several similar subsystems into one (i.e. everything is a feat now). But the math is still there.
I disagree. I’ve played 5E and GM PF2E (so I’m biased, but informed). In PF2E there’s no stacking bonuses of the same type, and there’s only 3 bonus types now.
Also, while there’s a ton of feats, Paizo didn’t just toss everything into feats.
PF2E is built off of a few frameworks for subsystems, one of which being character creation. There’s also the monster creation framework which allows homebrewing creatures and encounters that follow challenge rating suggestions. There’s even guidelines for building your own subsystems for thibgs like investigation, chases, research, etc. That are easy to learn get you fairly close to what Paizo would design themselves.
Meanwhile, the streamlining of 5E that you’re hinting at is WotC stripping out almost all character options. I always got tired of D&D campaigns by level 5 because your biggest meaningful choices are at 1st and 3rd level unless you start making multiclass abominations. And there’s also little support for GM’s, requiring each one to come up with their own rules for things like how ships work or designing magic items.
I’d rather have a system like PF2E that provides options, because you can always choose to ignore them and build your own thing. If you’re playing 5E, you don’t have that choice
Pathfinder 1e was pretty much just straight-up continuing D&D 3.5e, but with some tweaks. Pathfinder 2e overhauled a lot of stuff, often simplifying things, but still pretty complex.
Compared to D&D 5e, Pathfinder has more rules, but those rules often make things easier, or (IMO) get you more return for the effort. So, for example: The feat list is bigger and more complicated, but in practice, it means you only need to look at a handful of them when you level up, which is easier (and the rules give you guidelines for swapping things out if you don’t like them). The monk has more decisions to make with stances and attack types, but that’s… kind of what you want with a monk to make combat interesting. There are rules for boats, and holy shit how does 5e not have rules for boats.
The last example might sound silly, but it’s part of what convinced me to switch. It’s an annoying omission in and of itself, but also speaks to a broader pattern of 5e just not supporting Dungeon Masters, letting them fix the either broken or incomplete rules, or else take the blame for them. Pathfinder actually supports Dungeon Game Masters, as though their time, effort, and fun were just as valuable as anyone else’s. /rant
Pathfinder 2e is what I’d play if I wanted something like 5e, but runs differently. If I wanted something similar, I’d pick something else, but that’s a longer, even more off topic discussion to go into unprompted. :P
That sounds cool. My only exposure to Pathfinder was the Pathfinder: Kingmaker game, which felt a lot like the predecessor to Baldur’s Gate 3. I haven’t played it on Table Top. I’d definitely try it if someone had the books though. I already have a lot of D&D books, which makes it my go-to game.
They just launched some new Pathfinder books that are effectively pathfinder 2.x, with a lot of small (and some larger) tweaks, but technically the previous 2e books are still able to be used interchangeably.
To that end, there’s a Humble Bundle going on where you can pick up a TON of that legacy 2e content in official PDF form, so if you’re interested you should check it out! I believe most tiers include the Beginner Box, which has an intro adventure for new players and includes some sort of single player content that would give you a glimpse into how the game runs :)
Yeah, it’s definitely in the same wheelhouse as modern D&D, so if you like that general experience but want to try something new, it’s worth checking out. It’s my pick when I want high adventure, superheroic fantasy, with engaging set piece encounters, which is the vibe both games are going for.
@machinaeZERO is also right on the money. There’s going to be a revision coming up, but the old stuff is still compatible and in Humble Bundle right now. (Pathfinder does that periodically, and they’re pretty sweet deals!) One more thing is that all the rules are free, legitimately. There’s a wiki called The Archives of Nethys, which has ALL the rules content from ALL the books. Paizo allows it, and explicitly gave the site the green light to do that. The books are still nice to have, and you still need them if you want adventures or lore, but you never have to buy a book just to get some rules in it, like a class or feat or whatever.
Yes it is. Pathfinder made for builders who want to create a character with hundreds of options to choose from. It is rule heavy in the tradition of dnd 3rd edition. Pathfinder 2e is much more refined, but I doubt they went away from this philosophy. It’s still very rule heavy.
Pathfinder was to get around WotC dropping D&D 3.5. Paizo was started by veteran D&D writers to sell adventures, which they still do as adventure paths, rather than a system. When WotC updated to 4e, meaning no more print books that Paizo could reference in their adventures, Pathfinder was a way to print new 3.5e PHBs and Monster Manuals.
Paizo didn’t initially change much in PF1e. There were a few balance tweaks. The books were better laid out than 3.5. The players did the math on things like combat maneuvers in advance. In practice the game played pretty much the same, my groups jumped over seamlessly.
Having run and played both, I do think Pathfinder 2e is counterintuitively simpler in play than 5e D&D. 5e plays fluidly almost immediately, move and act. PF2e is pretty demanding for the first hour or three, the three action economy and Conditions ™ are an armful, and many players need to unlearn some D&D habits. Once a player has below average system mastery PF2e is as fluid as 5e. Beyond that PF2e shines. The rules scale better to complex scenarios, giving players more clear options of how they could act and giving the GM a better framework to figure out exactly what someone needs to roll. I also think it’s easier for players to go from average to good system mastery in Pathfinder, it’s mostly just learning how to optimize their character and learning more conditions and spells that work in the framework the player already understands.
For new players in session 1 D&D is simpler, in session 5 Pathfinder pulls even or maybe ahead, and in session 50 Pathfinder still sort of works where D&D falls apart.
PF2e character customization, though, is much more complicated, which some people like and others do not.
Personally I would love if they made something based on FATE. I would have absolutely no clue how to do it in a CRPG, but I love the system for actual pen&paper.
I don’t really think it is possible. FATE rules do not contain a game in a traditional sense and the game itself is created during play via Aspects. A computer game that attempts to do FATE right would just end up with a FUDGE adaptation. Maybe when the LLMs are much better…
I was impressed by how good Larian made BG3 in spite of using tabletop mechanics, but the Divinity games still had much better game play. I hope they start a new IP and add more of the roleplay options that made BG3 great, but with their own mechanics (hopefully without a charisma stat)
I hated the magical + physical armor parts in the D:OS mechanic. I think using a DnD ruleset instead of their own helps BG3 mainstream success. This is anecdotal evidence but I have a friend that is unable to play D:OS2 but loves BG3 very much.
I can understand why people familiar with DnD mechanics and setting would find it easier to get into BG3, but they’re certainly not easier to learn. You have 4 separate tabs of actions, loaded with different icons (half of which you probably won’t use). I’ve played 5e for years and even I found it pretty cumbersome, especially when 90% of the time your best option is just to press attack. Now that I say it though, maybe that’s why it’s easier. Divinity’s armour made sure you engaged with a variety of different classes and abilities whereas you can go through BG3 just whacking everything on the head and ignoring all your abilities. I’m glad they reached so many people with BG3 but I hope they go back to great tactical combat in the future
PF2e is a lot more approachable than 1e. It’s a lot harder to truly botch a character in 2e, while preserving variety of options. The 3 action system is also much more intuitive than action types.
This would be my absolute dream. I loved BG3 but the weakest part of me was being based on D&D 5e. PF2 is just a better system in pretty much every way imo.
If they could make a PF2 CRPG, that would be incredible.
Any chance you might be able to give some highlights of what you consider significant differences between 5e and PF1/2 (your choice)? My only experience is 5e tabletop and BG3.
PF2 quick highlights:
Action economy. You get three actions and can spend them however you want. Attack three times? Sure! (Note: there’s a -5 penalty for the second attack and a -10 penalty for the third attack on the same turn (note: some feats can mitigate this eg. one that drops them to -3 and -6 respectively)). Move three times? Yeah! Move attack move? Attack move attack? Cast a spell (typically consumes two actions) and then attack? Sweet. Got a feature on your spell where you can funnel more actions into it for a bigger effect? Very cool.
Degrees of Success: Roll more than ten below the DC? Oof, that’s not just a miss, that’s a miss where you also fall on your ass. Ten or more over? That’s a critical! You get sweet (and clearly defined) bonus effects. Roll a natural 20 or 1? That bumps you up or down a success tier instead of being an automatic failure or success. You might just be turning a critical miss into a regular miss on a 20 (given extreme DCs) or even a regular miss into a hail mary shot, like Bard hitting that gap between Smaug’s scales.
Counteract as a broad mechanic: Counterspell is now just one implementation of a greater and robust counter mechanic, wherein you make a bid and possibly get a better result. The counterspell example is that you can counter a spell of up to three spell slot levels higher than the one you spent just by rolling high (see degrees of success above). This is also how you disarm traps and dispel auras.
Counterspell itself gets way more granular. It is very different depending on which class you’re pulling it from, which means it feels way more satisfying, not having been smashed into a one-size-fits-all shape. You can build it up with feats, playing with the resource economy and requirements. My personal favorite is a feat which allows you (GM’s discretion) to counter spells with thematically relevant spells, like fizzling a fireball with create water. It’s intricate, it’s interesting, you get way more control over your kit, and you get to feel really cool when you do cool stuff. Which applies to the system on the whole.
There are consistent rules that are written out pretty verbosely. This can be scary at first but also ‘generally’ prevents a lot of table discussion. There are tons of characters choice and it is pretty hard to make a low power/high power character; also encounter/monster building rules actually work. Price of this is that there are a lot of options that were balanced out of their fun. Thankfully they have been getting better at this.
Personally I think 5e sits at a weird point. There are games like PF2, 13th Age, etc. that deliver better gaming frameworks with depth and there are better ‘simple’ games like WWN and numerous retroclones that provide the bare minimum and empower GM to improvise. Where as 5e has had an approach more like the former to the rules interpretation and character complexity, with tons of unofficial official rules clarifications and specific character, while having the actual rules written out more like the latter group providing very little guidance to how to use them. It awes with fun abilities yet provides little on how they interact. It is not a bad game if the GM knows what they want out of it, but most games I have been in was a disparate mix of ‘things others do’. A lot of the blame lies with the DMG.
I played em both and even did a secret ending run. Love both but it’s based on PF1e and it’s still built with RTWP by default. I love the various origin characters that Larian made for BG3 and D:OS2 that made your party members feel like real characters that have their own motivations unlike other RPGs that have your companion to be more like henchmen.
For the likely large overlap this audience might have with dnd, it didn’t make 100mil a year so it gets to eat shit. It doesn’t help that the video game license isn’t counted in that total. Other Hasbro brands do make 100mil a year.
I thought magic was one. It is surprising to see layoffs there.
Anyway, of course a corporation does evil shit. The only moral is the line going up.
Yeah, card crack is real. They’ve been whaling and getting kids into gambling since the 90s. Don’t know why lay offs there. Line go up just a little more probably.
It’s not that. It’s that the fewer people they have to pay the more money they get to keep. It’s incredibly short sighted and self destructive. But they don’t care at this point.
They’ve been caring less about artists and the community in recent years.
At cons, they used to pay for artists hotels and give them free booths to set up, now artists get nothing and have to pay something like $750 for a booth.
I think that’s more about WotC giving up on cons and tourneys than giving up on artists. If they’re having events at all, they’re not putting as much money into them as they used to.
You mean using AI to design the card’s mechanics? I’d like to think we are still a ways away from that, specially since they’d have to train their on model that adjusts not only for the text generated but what the actual card would do in a game. they could use it for french vanilla cards I suppose, but it’s not like those take a human that long to make anyway.
I didn’t say they needed to be quality or anything, they just need to appear quality to corporate, as all the corps are starting to cannibalize staff at the idea of using LLMs. Corporate doesn’t play the game and doesn’t care about long term, just the short term gains.
MTG used to have 2 or 3 releases a year. Enough to keep things fresh, but not an instance amount.
When I was working in a Game Store in the Early 2020’s, there as more than one release a week, and a major release about once a month. They set the milking machine to maximum.
Please do not tell me that anyone is surprised that a triple A game studio laid off most of their employees as a reward for a job well done.
Please. Please tell me everyone has figured out that nearly all large game dev companies are pure fucking evil.
EDIT: Welp, thats what I get for making an ill informed post after 36 hours on the road before passing out in my motel, yep, I probably should have read the article.
The headline here on lemmy is unreadable gibberish with BG3 in the title. It could as well be
Layoff 5blagagasjjee Swen shgrwaaahahaaaa Baldurs Gate 3 dacghgfrtf gone. Click here for ads.
So i get where he’s coming from. On the other hand, once you start reading the ads with some content in between it becomes clear immediately that this is about the IP holder, not the game studio.
‘There’s almost nobody left’: CEO of Baldur’s Gate 3 dev Swen Vincke says the D&D team he initially worked with is gone, due to Hasbro layoffs
Same Lemmy title as the article. You know exactly who’s talking (“CEO of Baldur’s Gate 3 dev Swen Vincke”), about whom (“the D&D team he initially worked with”), what happened to them (“is gone”) and who is to blame (“due to Hasbro layoffs”).
As far as titles go, it’s pretty good at telling you exactly what the actual article is about. Sure, you may need basic knowledge about how a licenced product works, and that BG3 is under the D&D licence. It would be rather hard to fit all that in a title.
Off-topic, but when I mentioned this in a different thread, an actual answer I got is basically the fediverse is really similar to reddit - how can the culture be any different?
Anyways, if the fediverse starts to become Reddit 2.0 I think it would be high time to go.
You…You might want to consider reading the article.
Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast, who own DnD. Larian, a completely separate company, got the rights to make BG3 from Hasbro. Hasbro laid off nearly everyone Larian Studios worked with at Wizards of the Coast.
What? No. They’re saying that Larian, a completely independent company, worked with a team from Wizards of the Coast. Wizards of the Coast is owned by Hasbro. Hasbro laid off 1100 employees from Wizards of the Coast. Many of those employees were on the team that worked with Larian to make BG3.
Larian Studios had literally nothing to do with this. Larian did nothing wrong.
But it’s dangerous to incentivize it, because you get short-term gains by firing anyone, whether or not it’s the right long-term call.
It’s also just difficult to identify bad performers. Fundamental attribution error is a bitch. And because we’re really bad at seeing the entire system surrounding someone’s productivity, we tend to blame operator error only to find that the next operator we hire has the exact same problem.
Exactly. It’s just goosing the numbers. The company made this much in profit, and the cost-cutting from firing people will save money immediately, so it looks great… on paper… for a little while. It doesn’t matter if the company is gutted, because the CEO and most of the investors will dip before things get too bad, and go onto the next thing. The employees will suffer and the customers will be upset, but CEOs don’t answer to them, they answer to shareholders, and shareholders just want the line to go up this quarter.
The Link’s Awakening remake on Switch is worth your time. I loved the original, and I loved the remake. I hope they continue bringing their old games forward like this (LA, Mario RPG, etc.)
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