Dungeons & Designers 9.18.2020

Notes from the D&D Celebration Panel featuring Rime of the Frostmaiden Lead Designer Chris Perkins and D&D Lead Rules Designer Jeremy Crawford (September 18, 2020).

Icewind Dale & Rime of the Frostmaiden

• Inspiration
  • John Carpenter’s The Thing
    • Fighting with a monster who can look like anything imparts dread
  • Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
  • H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness
    • Unknown horror in Antarctica
  • Contemporary Horror Tropes/Imagery
    • As Easter Eggs
    • As Story Devices
      
• Survival Horror
  • The environment is a foe itself
  • The deeper you get, the worse the weather/ecological effects get
  • Often the biggest monster is the environment
  • Tools for DM to make environment central part of experience
    
• Goals:
  • “Seductive” - make the DM want to run it
  • Easy to employ components at the table
  • Not so overwhelming or lengthy that it becomes a barrier
  • Balance between too little vs. too much information
    
• Segmented Adventure
  • Makes adventure prep easier than needing to ingest a 100 page story to run a session
  • Pace your prep to zero on the segment of the sandbox your group is going to deal with in the upcoming session (lesson from the Essentials Kit)
  • Mini quests as standalone adventures that can be woven into a broader campaign
  • Can zero in on specific town or quest
  • Can stack quests together to see a larger plot unfold (horror deepens)
    
• Secrets
  • Cooperative storytelling
  • Secrets that can be doled out during character creation
  • Characters start game with secrets
  • Player gets to decide whether to expose the secret
  • Playtesting shows that players don’t want to share secrets
  • When other players don’t share secrets, causes paranoia
  • Great reveal when secret comes out
  • Adventure may force character’s hand with respect to a secret
  • No way to tell which characters have what secret, all may be benign or one character may be a cannibal
  • Advanced Toolkit nature of adventure
  • Each group gets to decide how to engage with secrets
    • Keeping secrets hidden leads to more paranoia and horror style
    • Exposing secrets at beginning leaves more to a monster hunting style story
      
• Creatures
  • Only pick from 3 core rulebooks when doing adventure design
  • Decided to expand creatures available in frosty environment
  • “Mini Monster Manual” - 50+ page bestiary
  • Not all cold themed, some themed to other parts of adventure
  • Reasons why unique creatures would be in Icewind Dale
    • Seeking strange creatures
    • Sent to prison
      
• Design Process
  • Start with a setting
  • How do we make that setting interesting?
  • Throw out ideas and untangle them later
  • Writers give more ideas once they begin to develop the ideas
  • Whatever ends up in the book has to say something
    • About the world, humanity, or foibles we have to wrestle with
    • “If the adventure has a layer of truth to it, based on something we can experience in the real world, it’s going to resonate on a lever far greater than it would have absent that material.” -Perkins
      • Curse of Strahd is about a man’s fall into darkness
      • Icewind Dale has a core (the frost maiden) with events spiraling around it
    • Bad characters that engender sympathy give the story dimension; gives the story a more mythological heft.

Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything

• November 17, 2020 release date
• Working since early 2019
  
• Content
  • Group Patrons
  • Spells (UA)
  • Magic Items
  • Full Sidekick Rules
  • Magic Environments
  • Puzzles
  • Subclasses (UA)
  • Alternate Class Features (UA)
• Major player character content has been seen (UA)
  
• How do you decide when you’re ready for a huge rules expansion?
  • Began working 2 years ahead
  • Publish 3 years from Xanathar’s Guide
  • Follow-up to Xanathar’s Guide to Everything
    • Name signals that it’s a line of game expansions
  • Giving new twists
    • Set of new class features for every class
      
• New Subclasses/Class Features
  • New ways for your character to bring something to a group
  • Want fellow players happy to see your new option brought to the table
  • New bits in the classes that are mostly about their own power, but want to make sure there’s something to empower friends or injects fun into the play experience
  • e.g. Wild Magic Barbarian
    • Natural fit for wildness of Barbarian
    • Look to community through UA to see whether it’s worth exploring
      
• Full Sidekick Rules
  • Essentials Kit provided pre-built sidekicks using the “under the hood” Sidekick System
  • Get Sidekick System to build sidekicks of any sort
  • Consider them new classes. People loved sidekicks so much they could play them as their character (book also gives that option)
  • Use some features from class features, but mix and match them in new ways
  • Sidekick can round out a group, have one for whole party, have multiple for party
  • Sidekick doesn’t have to be a person, could be an animal (9 depicted in book, e.g. wolf)
    
• Group Patrons
  • Concept from Eberron
  • Patrons that can work in any D&D setting
  • Gives DM a powerful storytelling tool to address campaign design
    • Common purpose
    • Thematic throughline
      
• Session 0 Guidance
  • Creating characters
  • Setting ground rules for comfort
    
• Parleying with monsters
  • Tables for monster desires that players can meet to dispel conflict
  • Not a robust ruleset
    
• Magical Environments
  • Regions saturated with magic from far realm, mirror zone, haunted
    
• Puzzles
  • Puzzle designer Alyssa Teague
  • Different type of gameplay from roleplay, co
  • Puzzles are modular so you can drop them
  • Hint System
    • Each puzzle has hint checks so DM can help players overcome obstacle
    • Ability check tells what players learn if check succeeds
    • Each puzzle has a number of hints
    • Don’t want players to get lost in system
    • Play experience that tests player, not the character
      
• New Spells
  • For DMs
  • For Players
  • New Summoning Spells
    • Stat block in the spell
    • More elegant enjoyable way to engage with summoning
    • Made to coexist with existing spells
      
• New Items
  • New and classic items
  • Campaign Defining Artifacts
    • Baba Yaga’s Mortar & Pestle
    • Iggwilv’s Demonomicon
    • The Crook of Rao
    • The Mighty Servant of Leuk-O
  • Magic Tattoos (UA)