Strixhaven is the worst 5E adventure (for a Dungeon Master)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ม.ค. 2022
- They didn't even include a classroom map, only a small lecture room inside of a library.
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Dead Language Club gets Athletic proficiency to make sure that they're strong enough to ensure that the language stays dead.
This is the correct response.
people saying "source books are never that good"
it'd be nice to have one that is though no?
Now you know how to write a good source book! You're welcome!
I don't want to undermine your point but also want to give shout put to 3rd paty setting, Midgard
It's not a source book it's an adventure
Rime of the Frostmaiden is actually pretty good... until the final optional area, which has dozens of locations with no maps, several of which have tough fights.
The mediocrity of 5e designers is overwhelming tho
“I didn’t buy an adventure to remedy it, I bought it to run it.”
Descent into Avernus; (whistles nonchalantly)
Dude, that module is just as much of a mistake as the birth of Thomas Edison
My group tryed to love it. But it's so empty. You are not giving any reason to do any thing and because you can't really know where you are going you just feel railroad
@@yuvalgabay1023 my dm seems to have balanced it really well using the book as a base but for the most part actually giving us stuff to do inbetween book plot points we have just left to head on to candlekeep to do puzzle box
My DM ran Descent into Avernus and we loved it
He only used like, 5% of the actual book. The plot, setting, and characters were entirely homebrewed.
Avernus itself is fun (It's fucking Mad Max in hell, of course it's fun). The opening adventure, however, is boring as balls and lacks incentive.
50% of Wizards' advice to GMs is "do it yourself dummy."
Yeah notice how player races has gone from two pages in PHB Volos and Ravnica to bare game mechanics in the latest books. What are Owlin? What is this exciting new race? Stealth + Fly. No RP notes, nothing to build from or subvert. Nothing but pretty art. And the art is pretty but we deserve some writing too for our money. Witchlight was a fantastic adventure multiple factions well developed locations.
@@nicka3697 Because someone on Twitter might claim the sneaky owls are actually a racist depiction of some real-world race, and we all know that WOTC takes their design directions from Twitter.
Basically the design philosophy of 5e. Why bother making a game when people will shell out money for brand recognition alone?
@@HeavyTopspin I have no objection to anyone who tries to not be offensive and listens to the way their work is interpreted and tries to address concerns. That is an issue that they addressed by writing more lore for the drow and by a few cosmetic changes such as removing alignment from stat blocks here and there. It doesn't affect the quality of the game. Rushing out half baked adventures like Strixhaven in badly defined setting worlds is a quite separate issue and a shame after the excellent Wild beyond the witchlight where the poorly defined races was pretty much my only nitpick.
@@nicka3697 But that's my point: instead of reworking a long-popular race with likely more established lore then any other fictional race in the entire fantasy genre, or selectively removing established lore from iconic monsters like mind flayers and beholders, that effort could have been put into fleshing out other projects such as this one. You'd think somewhere along the line there'd be someone on the project that would point out the exact things that Davvy did. Not to mention: less than half a decade ago, you'd buy an adventure to let your players go up against Tiamat, Demogorgon, Acererak, or Jarlaxle. Now you buy it so your players can visit the circus or go to magic prom. WOTC has turned into a dumpster fire.
"Why does dead languages use Athletics?"
I just imagined the group consists of a group of Wild Magic Barbarians who somehow got themselves stuck inside the Academy, and the activity is just a ruse to cover all the facepunching and wrestling they do.
Nono! It's because you have to physically pull the words from the language afterlife (being non-sentient concepts, they can neither accept nor refuse a Raise Dead or Resurrection spell) and then run away from the Inevitables that come to retrieve them once you have done so.
*This joke brought to you by Eberron Campaign Setting Lore.
All the running from magic jocks you do I guess?
The dead language was always POSING WITH MUSCLES WHILE FLEXING ON THE WEAK .
And tbh ... thats kinda true.
I know why. One of the five major colleges of Strixhaven is Lorehold, and they are the archaeology, anthropology and history majors. They're also the stereotypical "jock" college, so they do a lot of exercise.
@@GacLosen6556 They need to be athletic to lift all the heavy cultural artifacts they have in their pockets at all times.
Seeing how different people have reacted to Strixhaven is fascinating. Jacob Lv 3 seems to love it. Always cool to see different opinions.
Jim Davis (Web DM) was also disappointed. Tl;dw too much scripted adventuring, not enough actual setting material.
Mr Lv 3
That is why it is best to watch different reviews of something
TBH, that guy does not have a strong history for providing high quality opinions.
Jacob is wrong
Okay, but is no one gonna talk about the whole ball chapter? The book spends the entire chapter setting up things about this awesome ball. There are fancy magical clothes, magical fireworks, guardian robots watching over everything and even a platform that makes everyone fly. And to top it all off we have the main villain being specially shady thought the entire event. I was totally expecting for the ball to become the battlefield for the "final battle", with all the characters floating above the dance floor and having to fight the villain while dodging the fireworks. But nope. Nothing of importance actually happens in the ball, you are supposed to just follow the villain to her house and go through a dungeon crawl before facing off against her in a bland normal room.
There are no words to express the amount of wasted potential in there.
Gotcha, running the boss battle at the ball.
.....then why don't you just do that then?
@@dren5810 who's to say they didn't?
@@dren5810 the point of runnung a published adventure is so the DM doesn't have to do tons of work to make a good story, only small changes to make it better fit their group
@@CJWproductions I don't know, hence the question mark..
Yeah… that’s a big issue with it. There are some good, inexpensive supplementals on the DMs guild by Alex Crews. They add a bunch of staff, professors, classes, downtime, and other stuff. It’s pretty cool. I’d say this supplement, or others like it are kinda necessary for strixhaven. They just didn’t put enough in the base book.
Also adds new creatures based off MTG cards
I immediately bought all four supplements. They're a blessing, especially the book on courses.
@@DavvyChappy oh absolutely, plus there is a slam poetry class so that’s fun
Can you link one of them?
I love when Wizards sells me books that I need to buy other books made by other DnD players to make a complete package!
To me, the point of running a prewritten adventure is that I don't want to make a bunch of stuff up myself. If I wanted that, I'd just run a homebrew campaign.
The problem with this book is it’s trying to have its cake and eat it too. The book should have completely skipped on the adventure modules and instead crocuses completely and entirely as a setting guide with fully fleshed out mechanics to help you run that setting to make it as fun and smooth a ride as possible!
THEN they should have published digital (free or otherwise) adventures that have fully fleshed out storylines and have multiple different ones based on the kind of campaign. One focused far more on social roleplay and navigating school as a totally normal class and one focused on a HP overarching plot that takes place over multiple school years. Then by having the more fleshed out mechanics gated to the books they get to make sales anyway and even have guides for cutting or simplifying rules for those who don’t have the book!
I like your style and would like to subscribe to your newsletter, goodsir
In a medium that's given us the likes of Kids On Brooms and Breakfast Cult, seeing 5e drop the ball on the wizarding school plot framework this hard is baffling.
WoTC don’t know what they’re doing with 5E. They’re so busy trying to be THE ttrpg, instead of A ttrpg, that they’ve made a pool of content a mile wide and half an inch deep.
Let's not forget that MtG had an entire expansion dedicated solely to Strixhaven and it's colleges which already established their identities/themes and teachers/deans.
@@Ellebeeby If they didn't know what they are doing with 5ed they wouldn't have made gazillions of dollars from it
@@Ellebeeby this is poetry
@@staticcharm3808 In a world where Disney Star Wars and Game of Thrones exist, never underestimate people’s ability to take something good and fuck it into þe ground.
This is a problem I've seen a lot on 5e, on major or minor degree. Even my favorite campaign, Dragon Heist, there are a few problems of underutilized mechanics and things that the book makes you think about it, especially on Chapter 2. I still enjoy the campaign books, but they don't feel... completed. I do enjoy complementing stuff from my own, and the books serve as a pretty good basis, but sometimes you need to come up with so many things that it just doesn't make sense to buy a book only to change 50% of it or more to make it enjoyable like the Tyranny of Dragons duology.
Perhaps you should check out Strength of Thousands. It's a Pathfinder 2e adventure about a magical school. I don't know a lot about it, I'll start playing late January, but from what I've heard, it takes the whole magical school motive and mixes it with an actual adventure, with risks and personal problems.
I think the issue is the campaigns are written very detailed and railroady with specific scenes, and then opens up to downtime with very little guidance on the downtime.
It's funny, because it basically does what so many d&d youtube channels say don't do.
Seconding Strength of Thousands. It is... phenomenal, and has none of the issues of this crap. Though that's par for the course comparing P2e to 5e.
SoT is fantastic
We are literally about to start that one, and i was dreading playing it because i thought it might end up like this. good to hear that others have heard good things about it, its gonna be my first pathfinder game
I'm running Strength of Thousands and it's possibly one of my favorite published adventures to date
Yeah, im going to have to agree with everything dav said. Im about to run the game myself and ive been filling in alot of the blanks the book decided to leave out. Had to make a dorm for them, made a campus quest board so they could make money in a fun way, and sprinkled in clues for a over arching storyline to keep them from getting bored. Im still looking forward to it but im putting alot of work i didnt think id have to. Just glad i didn't pay for a physical copy of the book.
But I think that was kind of the point, it's not so much an adventure as it is an overall outline for an adventure. Somewhere between a full module and a campaign setting.
@@ssfbob456 I think that is a bit rough though, it's a module more or less, a DM will grab it cause modules are easier to run than making your own shit up, here you're spending a full video game, basically just for a setting book with nothing but a bit of lore behind it and a story with nothing in it, again for the price of a full game, while the guildmaster's guide to ravnica is more or less quarter of that price (depending where you go and what you get) and has more than that and then some, from new backgrounds, new spells to add for your casters, new ways to play some races that are normally played one way, then there is an actual guide to "how to get your party together" type of campaign. If you ask me ravnica seems like a better buy than strixhaven if you're a DM that just wants to run a story out of the box and not have to do too much work with what you're given. (when I say module, I mean the story part, which can be seen as a module.
@@ssfbob456 I didn't pay 60 dollars for the majority of my sourcebook to be a glorified brainstorming session for a bad campaign.
What if you ran the game as a flashback? All the students have graduated and our either at the graduation party, a reunion party, or just got together for drinks years down the line?
Maybe that'd be a fun way to play with the scatter-shot timing of events.
This is a very good idea.
This book feels a little…. rushed. Like, it feels like the writers were forced to push it out the door months early to meet a deadline. This is the bones of something good and while the writers were working on the muscle and brains, the higher ups just rolled the skeleton out the door.
I wouldn't be surprised if they really rushed it because they didn't want to wait 6 months to a year extra after the MtG set came out. Big shame
I REALLY enjoyed the Mtg set, and would have happily waited a year for a quality book that brought Strixhaven to D&D.
However, given that MTG seems to have a new major product constantly coming out, I can see why they didn’t want the book to come out a year later. I just wish it had.
@@_somerandomguyontheinternet_ I'm fairly certain a year after when the book came out would have actually seen Strixhaven rotate out of standard. A point where it's literally out of relevance for most Mtg players
@@dannybeane2069 yes, I know how rotation works.
@@_somerandomguyontheinternet_ Apologizes, I wasn't trying to talk down to you.
I do wonder if part of the problem was starting a d&d setting book for a mtg setting before the mtg set was even out. The other crossover books are for planes that have been around a long time and we're already well-loved. In this case, instead of adapting a setting like that, they tried to make a setting for both games at the same time, and I think that made it messier.
Yeah not only that but it seems to be two VERY different takes on the magical school setting between the MTG version of Strixhaven (which is fucking LETHAL, students regularly just murder each other in wizard duels and it isn't uncommon for students to die on the various different tests or field trips) and the D&D version of Strixhaven which is Animal House meets Harry Potter.
@@luketfer IMO that’s pretty true for Theros and Ravnica as well.
MtG Selesnya: “Preachers of freedom forget that conformity can be beautiful”
DnD Selesnya: “Neutral Good :)”
MtG Boros: “They wish to bring peace to Ravnica, and don’t care if they have to leave a trail of bodies in their wake to achieve it”
DnD Boros: “Play this if you love knights in shining armour and want to be a righteous Paladin of justice.”
Gods of Theros in MtG: *Horrifyingly narcissistic, murder their own followers just to prove a point or to protect their egos*
Gods of Theros in DnD: “haha Alignment chart go BRR. Heliod is lawful good.”
@@nicapp984dnd: heliod is lawful good :)
Mtg: this man is in jail for LIFE
I'll be honest, 5e's complete phobia of depth is one of the things that's driving me to pf2e. It is astonishing to me that 5e has been here for years, yet there is *nothiing* to help dms run the non combat parts of the game. If everything is a single skill check, or if you are lucky TWO skill checks, players will feel absolutely no substance.
To add to your point, PF2e also has an actually good wizardry school campaign with an amazing storyline and actual magic school related mechanics!
@@pedrocastrioto5744 God I love Paizo, those people put so much work into the stuff they put out that I know I'll have no issue finding what I need for just about anything.
The dungeon masters guide actually has more complex rules for social interactions in the “running the game” section in which an NPC’s disposition effects how hard it is to convince them to do what things, with certain things being impossible if their disposition is too hostile, so that trying to persuade an NPC could actually become a mini-game of sorts where you can choose between going for the persuasion roll, trying to improve their disposition, or rolling insight to see if you can figure out things such as their ideal or bond that you can exploit for advantage in one of the above checks.
Unfortunately, this was not in the PHB, and was buried in an extremely wordy section of the DMG where no one is expecting to find rules for core mechanics, so no one knows it exists and no one uses it.
@@nicapp984 You mean in 5E or PF2E?
I like the idea of PF2E, but you have to be kind of a masochist to want to narrate it yourself.
Our boy woke up, chose violence and we stan
I watched XP Level 3 say that it was good. I tried it. I hated it. The only thing good about the adventure is that it made me go back rewatch Dimension 20s Misfits and Magic... which led me to buying Kids on Brooms.
It's wild that Dimension 20 has two different examples of magical/fantasy schools that are so far ahead of this book. WotC could've easily used Fantasy High for inspiration. The final boss is at prom, instead of Strixhaven's boss sneaking out of the big ball at the end to fight the PCs somewhere boring instead.
Nwver trust XP to level 3 whenever he says something is good
Ever since he said he liked The Last of us 2.
XP to level 3 is only good for the occasional comedy, like his Lord of the Rings videos. His actual takes on how good or bad anything in D&D is are completely whack and a waste of time.
What I got from XP to level 3 is that Strixhaven is a bad book for weak and lazy DMs. This video proves it.
I used to listen to him as well but... when i got down to experience, all i learned was: this man can't make a hot take to save his fucking life. At this point... i feel like his opinions are mostly just to pander to an audience and that's about it.
I think strixhaven does really well in a group that plays together for a looong time and is very familiar playing off each other and improving their own story. I can definitely see how it’s so terribly hard if you aren’t all best friends and the dm wasn’t used to improving and the players weren’t used to making up their own things
I mean, at that point, it's still the players and DM doing all the work. That's just a night with the blokes. $60 to be told "idk make it up yourself" isn't acceptable
If you dislike strixhaven, you may like Strength of Thousands, which is a pathfinder 2e adventure path that goes from 1-20 set in a school
The "lack of agency and direction" I think applies to any D&D adventure built around a strict institution (like a school). It was part of the reason also why I really disliked TAZ Graduation
Lets be honest there were OTHER reasons to not like TAZ graduation as well...even the plot itself was, as best, non-coherent. Yes I understand that it was that particular brothers first time DMing but he didn't seem to understand that suddenly changing from a 'slice of life adventurer school' to 'grand sweeping cosmic threatening narrative' in the space of one episode was a bad idea.
Seems built in to the concept of most schools.
@@jojodelacroix I mean it'd be like having a D&D adventure set at an office desk job. It COULD be fun and a playground for weird and blue collar comedy but the problem is how much agency and direction you steal from something that is meant to be as open ended as TTRPGs are.
Forever DM here: this book seems more like something for players to do between adventures or something like that. Something to insert into the world as oppose to being the world. I don't think it should have been an labeled as an adventure module, however, I like this style of books. I enjoying bring given ideas than an entire campaign that the players have to follow (cause we all know it's going off rails anyways lol)
That's an interesting perspective actually. I like that a lot!
It's why Ravenloft is my favorite sourcebook. Just a collection of ideas I can use anyway I want with just enough details for me to sink my teeth into.
Thing is: It's not labeled as an adventure module. It's labeled as a source book.
@@RvEijndhoven the description of the book says "adventures than can be run individually or as a campaign"
Tasha's cauldron of everything is a source book. While there may be sources in the book to pull from, it's advertised as a adventure (or even multiple) adventure modules
@@cjcwalker1 I mean... Yeah, if you want to cut off half the description so that it implies something different than what it actually says, it sure does say that.
"Strixhaven™: A Curriculum of Chaos introduces the fantastical setting of Strixhaven University, drawn from the multiverse of MAGIC: THE GATHERING, and provides rules for creating characters who are students in one of its five colleges." is the text you conveniently failed to copy+paste there.
The book is explicitly not advertised as an adventure book, it's advertised as a setting source book that *contains* adventures.
Strixhaven is a setting source book. It is sold on the WotC-affiliated D&D Beyond store as a sourcebook.
It is not labeled as 'Adventure (for levels x-x)' on the official WotC webshop the way all actual Adventure books are.
If you bought Strixhaven as an Adventure book because it mentions adventures in its store blurb just like (I checked) pretty much every other source book does, that's on you.
The adventures in the Strixhaven book intentionally leave blank spots so that DMs are free to fill those blanks in as they wish. If the adventure sections *were* as full and detailed as Davvy expected in this video, other DMs would be complaining that the years are too bloated and rigid and there's no room for DMs to put their own plots and side stories in.
I think the problem with Strixhaven is it is trying to be two things at the same time. A setting book and an adventure book at the same time. Rather than introducing mechanics and fleshing out how to do school life it instead offers a few isolated encounters. I could image the mage sport being a fun combat-goal oriented encounter. This book splits itself way too much instead of leaning into one or another (or making two books like Curse of Strahd and Ravenloft).
Yeah... I got the book. I'm taking snippets of the adventures and putting them into my own homebrew campaign
"... so barebones that it *REQUIRES* me to fill in the blanks."
That's my issue with 5e in general.
From missing monster abilities to boring martial combat. It's the double-edged sword. On the one hand it's more accessible and is a perfectly functioning skeleton, on the other hand it's a skeleton and the designers pretty much said "Homebrew the rest, we already got your money. Add in the things we removed if you want them so bad."
This kind of shit is why I prefer Crunchier systems like *Last Arc: Tactics Analogue* over 5e.
@@theatheistbear3117 I only sorta agree. I like crunch as much as the next guy and prefer managing all my stats and how they combo together when I'm playing, but over time I've realized I enjoy making and designing homebrew and modules more than actually running sessions or playing. It's really a mixed bag for me, I shouldn't HAVE to devote hours to modifying statblocks or making things using the 5e systems to fill in gaps just to be able to play "properly", but I like to and the watered down nature makes 5e a good canvas to work with. It's like a blob of clay, mediocre junk until I put the time and effort in of sculpting it into my own custom game style using the basic rules with new flavor and bonus mechanics.
One ttrpg I started recently that I'm really enjoying is Shadows of Esteren. I recommend checking it out if you can, I shill for it whenever possible. It manages to both be wide open for roleplay and is less restrictive in terms of things like character creation (in that the process is more open than picking a handful of starting options presented in 5e), but it is super crunchy when it comes to the system and requires you to be invested in every step of adventuring to make your character effective. Has a lot of Lovecraftian/Cosmic horror elements too, mixed in with dark fantasy and some steampunk. Characters don't tend to last long and situations going tits up because you didn't invest enough into a certain skill are common.
Setting is great and gameplay is a blast.
@@zombiemanjosh All the things you described regarding Shadows of Esteren sounds right up my alley. Definitely going to check it out!
@@theatheistbear3117 For some examples, in the first game I played I was a survivalist woodsman type with a few addictions (during character creation you can give yourself addictions, enemies, disabilities, phobias, etc. to gain extra points to spend) and some decent gear. We were investigating some kind of Mi-Go style nonsense with an underground lab and brain in a jar as well as some magical science (literally "magience" in the game) devices. Had an NPC start going crazy, smacked him to try and make him come to, but I crit and fucking caved his skull in, the commotion woke some kind of horrible sentry monstrosity, killed it, tossed both bodies down the hole and caused the underground lab to cave in, case closed(?).
In the game we're currently playing I'm a spellcaster this time (all druids and runestones), a destitute hermit called to accompany his nephew and keep watch over him as he goes to prove his strength. The magic system is open-ended: the rune stones you come across have generic effects and you can combine them to apply them as you see fit, the difficulty comes in the scaling because you have to make a check for each casting according to a chart and each tier has set die, number of targets, duration, etc. Killed a venomous slime/jelly monster by evaporating all the water out of it disguised as a puddle by using the mist rune, for example.
Reminder 5 e is literally just 3.5 with less content. They keep adding the old removed content as splash books and charge 60 bucks each.
"I'm doing the job of my $60 (book)." Is how I feel about most of 5e.
People compare 5e to Skyrim a lot for the similar price point and modding scene, but truthfully the more I learn about 5e the more I start to realize that Skyrim might actually have the better base experience. At least Skyrim has a plot. Several, even!
You review of Strixhaven puts me in mind of a type of roleplaying I cannot get my head around, "the I don't have to talk in character ever, mysteries are solved with investigation checks not actual investigation, limiting you actions to what is listed in the book, abstract everything to just be dice rolls type game." I have never been able to understand that type of play.
It's a result of the rules just giving you the framework, and players thinking the framework is the whole game. Like, you don't necessarily need to book to tell you how to RP, but you need it to tell you how to set a DC. So it does, and then all you have is DCs, because you decided what's written is all there is.
@@CJWproductions That is a fantastically made point. Do you mind if I steal it?
@@worthasandwich i am powerless to stop you
@@CJWproductions If you said no i would respect that
@@worthasandwich you have my blessing lol
What I like about this book is that it's like 90% world building and NPC building which as a dm is always something I struggle with. Having this book and the bond boon/bane system helped me so much that from now on I'm gonna use that as a template for that to build my own npcs hell I'm even going to do that for the teachers (I do feel robbed about not getting the teachers in this book).
True the adventure is really bad and feels like they should've had some kinda way to make your own campaign (like what they did in Theros). This could be a really fun book by just asking the question "Why would something want to take over a wizard school?" or just watch fantasy high by dimension 20 for inspiration.
Fantasy High is _always_ a good inspiration for your High Fantasy School needs lol
You are the kind of person that it is designed for.
I actually got to the end of this video and thought that the rules of Strixhaven would be great to port over to running my players through an adventure at Aguefort!
The fact that there are no stat blocks for teachers blows my mind. Just like how they didn’t give any for the dark lords in VGTR, seems to be a troubling trend in just pure laziness.
@@rossrodgers6627 Out of curiosity does it spoil the plot point in the actual Strixhaven novel that was produced? That may be why they didn't stat any of the teachers because it's a pretty big reveal who one of the teachers actually turns out to be (if she's mentioned in the book).
Thank you! Thank you!
When I first started reading the book, I really loved where it was going. Then about half way through the book I was like, "wait, did I skip a chapter?"
It's like they got 1/3 of the way through a source book and then ran out of ideas. Then they made a rough draft of a campaign book based on those ideas and said "just stitch that sh*t together."
I now have made a whole new campaign premise to drop this stuff into, so it actually works. I'm going to be running the session 0 soon and I think I'm going to have to warn my players that the book is not a full campaign and therefore what we're playing is going to be different from what other people are... cause it has to be.
Pf2 did a better job with a magic school campaign
Wizards of the Coast fucking infuriate me with their treatment of DMs, which has only gotten worse over the course of 5th edition. They refuse to do any of the legwork needed to support them, provide fuck all tools, fuck all help, fuck all attention... And then they act like they're doing us all a favour by giving DMs the opportunity to do everything solo.
They've bought into their own bullshit hype about the rules being 'guidelines,' and DMing is only becoming less and less accessible, especially for new players.
They give players ten thousand racial options. Sweet. But where's the lore for their cultures? Their biology? Their history? Because all those things are required for a character of that race to actually interact with the world, and if you're not even going to provide a coherent template, you're just thrusting more work onto the DM.
And when they do decide to add actual, applicable content for DMs? It's usually fucking TERRIBLE and clearly out of touch with the needs of players, like the puzzles in Tasha's.
I agree. WOTC is all about limiting the DM and abstracting the rules. It’s like Skyrim where you have to mod the game to hell and back to make it work.
Exactly. We do all the work, WotC gets all the credit, and for twice the money of most companies.
Wow... well put
I'll give you the cynical answer why WotC give players bazillion race options and no accompanying lore: it is so that players can (re)create their 'perfect' special snowflake OC with the DM unable to rain on their parade.
5e players have made me despise Tieflings, a race I was rather fond of since the AD&D days.
I left D&D with 4E and I don't care about new editions anymore no matter the game system. If the sourcebooks don't give me the material I need, I see no reason to buy them anymore. The only thing I'm paying as a Player or GM is if they give me what I need to play.
If they can't be bothered to do that, I can just as well sit down and write everything myself.
While Ptolus was a bit much, it was one of the best sourcebooks ever with material for several campaigns of every level and type. So, a smaller city or town with a detailed sourcebook would be nice.
I mean it's understandable why they don't. The research, the web of NPC's and everyting just costs time and money.
Hey, I hope you don't worry too much about backlash. I find your channel to be useful since you have a history of providing your honest perspective, and not creating inflammatory videos just for the sake of clicks.
I appreciate you.
The funny thing is, his view of it being barebones and lackluster seems to be the GENERAL opinion on Strixhaven. Most people on the D&D reddit regard it as a 'bad book' because it's not got enough background lore and new mechanics to be a good sourcebook and the adventure is so bare bones that the DM could probably do a better job just homebrewing it without paying the pricetag.
@@luketfer I haven´t read Strixhaven, but by the looks of it, you´d be probably better off spending that money on Harry Potter books and homebrewing your own wizarding school
I can see a magical school adventure being great if the players are sent on quests for an active study mission. In a generation where most D&D players have read, or at least seen Harry Potter, it's kind of shame they dropped the ball here. Perhaps you use the school as the adventure's central node to connect quests from different modules.
This book is the pinnacle of a great idea executed poorly. I bought a about 6 different little PDF's off of the DM'S Guild to give this substance, tossed it in Waterdeep and decided to make it the background for Waterdeep: Dragonheist. It takes a lot of work on my end, but I'm already doing a bunch of work for Strixhaven anyways.
This is exactly what I did for my group. They meet at this school then they move on to Waterdeep
Literally just read it, it’s like post-modern harry potter setting for children. I don’t think it would work as written but there were lots of fun ideas
“for children” implying harry potter isn’t? those first three books are very much children’s novels (though the series as a whole is more of a middle school reading level than anything)
Ah sounds like a similar issue to Out of the Abyss. I having fun but I feel bad for our DM that they seem to have provided no maps for "underdark" random in counters and the one map we ran had 3 different sizes for the the grid on a single image.
Not that it helps after the fact, but Roll20 has some generic underground maps that work wonders.
I know the map you're talking about, and it can burn.
Personally I feel like this book has the same problems that Strixhaven had as a Magic block as well. The story feels slapdash and the setting feels like it's missing major chunks of content. I was hoping this book would flesh out what the MtG block story left vague, but it seems the well is totally dry. Alas, perhaps the Guild will do awesome things with the setting now that all of Arcavios is on the table, but it's really disappointing to see the MtG settings drop in quality from Ravnica to this.
I felt like Strixhaven was pretty half-baked as a Magic setting, too. I was surprised when they announced this considering how little source material there was compared to Theros and Ravnica.
I've seen people refer to them as "theme park planes" which is a really fitting term for planes like Strixhaven, Kaldheim and Eldraine. A single set is not big enough to both establish a plane and tell a story there. Kaldheim has a whole realm of giants but you'd be forgiven for not knowing that since there's not even five cards showing it.
I love 5e. **Alot.** Some of my most fond memories are playing the game with my friends, having epic adventures and whatnot. But, the more I play it and run it, the more I find myself growing tired with it, mainly because the problems you address in this video apply to the entirety of 5e. What you said at 4:00 basically sums up my thoughts of the game in a super elegant way. "Why am I fixing the game I paid 60 dollars for. Why does every other addition have well thought-out supplemental rules that the 5e books barely skim over. Why do I feel like I have to modify every monster to make it interesting and challenging for the party." Gosh I hope 5.5e fixes some of this.
It won't. WotC has no interest in fixing anything, just bringing out shiny new bandaids for issues, because they know brand recognition will carry them for years. You're better off putting your time and money in a better system.
@@pizza725 Poor nerd
One of my issues, on top of everything your said is the levels this covers. For me it would have made sense for it to be Level 0 to 3 (or 1 to 4) over 4 years.
Not sure a Wizard School would really want it's students casting Animate Dead and Fiteball all around the campus.
I'm someone who mostly ran my own stories for decades and only started to delve into published stuff due to lack of prep time. And wow, it feels like some of these 5e modules fit that demographic so poorly. If you already have lots of ideas but lack of prep time, these books of ideas that demand prep time to bring them together are such a low value proposition. I've had some success cherrypicking the anthology books (yawning portal, saltmarsh, candlekeep mysteries), but otherwise have been turning to modules from older editions, OSR or other games. It's not exactly flattering when running a module from a completely different system proves less work than running an official one.
Honestly, just hearing that it was $60 was all I needed to go “Man, I’m glad I didn’t give a shit about this book.” That on top of the other issues said here.
Davvy's humour is so subtle sometimes that I can't tell if 7:55 was on purpose or not, and it's great
Great vid, love that you subbed the dog barks very good stuff
Even as a player, I find Strixhaven frustrating. Granted, I am playing three side characters as well, as my character's siblings also attend the school, so I am privy to a bit more of the problems, but even without that...
From simple things, like the fact that there's NO GODDAMN CALENDER OF THE SCHOOL YEAR, HOLY SHIT, to more... tertiary items, like the dismal affair that is sports at Strixhaven (it's not entirely clear to me how Mage Tower plays outside a mechanical level, not that it matters because there seems to be only one opportunity to engage with it... and the description of Silkball is a whole sentence; I genuinely can't tell whether it's meant to be rugby, soccer, or American football, or something else entirely), to say nothing of the fact that most of the extant sports seem to be basically just club-level. It really doesn't seem like there's much room for an RP segment of cheering on your friend or fiance at one of their sporting events... let alone playing in one if your own character is an athlete.
There are also some frankly bizarre omissions, like the lack of a choir when there's an entire college devoted to the arts, or the fact that there's a LARP club but seemingly no tabletop (although I suppose the LARP club could be easily fluffed to include tabletop). It's not a huge gripe, but combined with all the other areas where Strix is missing things... it's a bit of a mess, really.
And this is just a brief list of what I've found lacking by session #2.
Between this and dragon heist, I’m baffled at how wizards gets away with packaging the most barebones scaffolded plots as full on “adventures.” It’s completely turned me off of official adventures, I just use old edition adventures or online content and it works WAYYYY better.
I feel this way about every book in the edition, the fact that theirs not a single example skill check in the entire phb is maddening
What are some old adventures that you like running?
I actually like Dragon Heist. It's a level 1-5 with a bunch of add on stuff that you don't need to use but can if the players go off the rails.
Strixhaven is nothing but add on stuff. And then it's supposed to be level 1 - 10.
People don't say Tabletop games they say D&D. They can power on with pure name value
Welcome to D&D, before adventures we had modules. Even adventures with the same author were wildly different in quality.
Got it, so playing Wild Beyond the Witchlight then.
It's really funny how radically different to XP to level 3 their opinions on the same concepts are. Coming to the same conclusions but having opposite reactions to those conclusions.
I feel like this might work if you combine it with Pathfinder 2e's adventure Strength of Thousands, which also takes place in a magic school. Might be fun to mix and match ideas and npcs
I've never used an adventure module. I am curious, like...what is a good one? And what makes one good? Might be hard to give an answer in a TH-cam comment, and you do touch on what you would have liked to see in this some,, but yeah I'd be really interested in a breakdown of what makes a good module.
I’d also like to know this.
Curse of Strahd is generally considered a very good module because it does a very good job of introducing and explaining the setting, better-than-basic explanations of characters, their motivations and behaviours. It also provides several beautiful maps, props, rules and creatures that are written perfectly in flavor with the setting and the adventure but could easily be used elsewhere on their own merit, like the Dark Powers and their pacts.
Having tried to run it myself, it's a bit of a handful as there's a pretty good number of NPCs, (not as many as Out of the Abyss, thankfully) but it goes out of its way to tell you that not every NPC has to be used and are somewhat flexible in their usability. It's a good example of a freeform adventure that's not too sandboxy, like what I've heard of Storm King's Thunder, since it has a number of areas that *can* be visited but don't *have* to be, and there's not particular order they must be visited. In fact, the adventure slightly randomizes itself each time you run it so that these places can be visited.
Additionally, there's a pretty decent amount of "secret" feeling stuff in the adventure to feed into player creativity.
I think it really depends on what you're after.
I have frankly no interest or time for adventure, enemy or encounter design, so I like pre-made adventures. I'm also happy to hve adventures and encounters that threaten the PCs.
However, I like a bit of flexibility with how I string the plot and world together, and like a evocative setting with some good plot hooks which doesn't tell me what to do.
For these reasons Ghosts of Saltmarsh is perfect for me. It has an interesting town as a central location and the adventures are a bit of an anthology with three only adventures tying together closely. It has a section at the back for running naval adventures, including some neat sidequests and I can add what I want whereever I want it.
I'd say it's not a perfect campaign book, but it's perfect for my purposes and the work I need to do to make it a worthwhile campaign is the stuff I enjoy doing anyway.
A good module is one where you, as the DM, have to do the least amount of work to make it playable. Like, the idea of buying a module is that they did the worldbuilding and balancing for you.
Good examples are Lost Mine of Phandelver and Curse of Strahd, for different reasons.
LMoP is good because it's simple and designed for you to play it like a videogame. It was a campaign made for beginners, and it has a complete rundown of not only how the environments work, but it even "guides you" through DMing up until the last chapter, where it literally takes the training wheels away.
However, Curse of Strahd is awesome cause it has EVERYTHING in it. Every important NPC has a page dedicated to their stats, picture, background, personality, etc. Every place, every culture, every group has been detailed and explained so you have NO EXTRA WORK unless you CHOOSE to.
>the amount of filling in the gaps I had to do...should have given me a writing credit
As an Exalted 3e DM I feel this in my BONES
My DM must be an absolute GOD because truthfully and unironically Strixhaven has been the absolute most JOY I've EVER had in a D&D Campaign. I havn't read the sourcebook as I'm still a player, we're wrapping up the final year and ending the campaign next month, but truthfully our immersion, social connections and bonds, and creative solutions we've come up to deal w/ the hijinx have been a blast. If anything it hearing your issues with the module just make me all teh more impressed with our GM because we'd NEVER know any of those problems existed..... thanks for the video though!
as a magic lore fan, I really think this book could have been written more like the Guildmasters' Guide to Ravnica, I think even beginner DMs could handle constructing a narrative set in a wizard school all on their own, this book spent too many pages space on its mediocre campaigns when it could have been better spent building up Strixhaven and Acavios.
This is our own issue as we're trying to start our campaign in a little while: there's basically no information whatsoever about Arcavios. If you want to set Strixhaven in the actual plane proper and not have everyone flying in from God knows where, good friggin luck, because there's such a dearth of knowledge as to how the school impacts the plane's population, what kind of society exists (are mages prolific enough to basically make it a post-scarcity society? Is everywhere else basically akin to the Realms?) to the point where I'm ready to ask if we can put this on the Realms, just so we have some sense of gravitas. It's mind numbing.
Also none of the "climatic" events work, and it's frustrating how the writers avoid even the most simple set up-pay off chances. Like if they are constantly building up tension about something, and then, at the last moment they go 'oh, plot twist, the conflict wouldn't be about that one, but it's gonna be set in an outdoor toilet against a poopoo elemental, and Madam Pomrey is there hiding in the bushes, waiting for all the characters to go unconcious just to give them free healing potions.
Nevertheless, I refuse to disappoint my players.
I wanna thank you for this info. I'm going to be running this campaign soon so now that I know that there will be extra work for me, I'm going to start planning out all the gaps in the adventure a head of time.
I have been plaining out a adventures school style campaign, and thank you for giving me examples of bad ideas to avoid or make better.
So, I'd love the book if it cost half as much, and gave a bunch of side quests to do. What I would end up doing with this is getting every coupon code you can imagine to bring the price down lower than what should be possible because I refuse to completely support half finished work being passed of as complete, and then using it to promote a long term campaign where they actually go to classes doing things like interacting with other students and professors whilst having plenty of down time activities to do so. I'd also expand the college to include religious, martial studies, and even an unofficially recognized criminal studies which takes place underneath the school. I would riddle the campaign with side quests, and down time activities like aiding a professors in their research or preforming a heist.
Call me crazy but the moment I heard, “Wizard prom in D&D” I knew this adventure was going to tank.
Your right Davvy ANY adventure can be made or broken by how good the DM is, but when someone spends $50/60 on a “Adventure” book they expect there to be an already made adventure. Not the rough draft for an adventure with a note plastered everywhere saying “just make up the rest of the shit yourself Dumb dumb.”
I’m only halfway through CH 1 for my players and I already had to change small things… and I changed the BBEG at the end of the adventure, but my players are still having fun and who am I to take that away from them.
Here’s hoping that I can still use MOST of what is in this book.
Good luck, man.
If you can't, I reccomend making the jump to PF2E and running Strength of Thousands instead: the magic school adventure with more than IOUs for mechanics and narrative.
I'm currently DMing a strixhaven campaign and both me and my players are having a blast! You are correct in that there are many blanks for me to fill in to make it engaging, but i am having tons of fun with it.
Thank You, thank You, and thank You once more!
This is by far THE best description on what to expect, and what not.
At first, I thought to connect this to Candlekeep Mysteries, but I am not so sure it is worth a buy (and now I have info on what is missing)...
I was actually thinking of doing the exact same thing. If it goes well, you'll see it in a video.
It calls itself a source book, but the actual "source book" part of it is really *really* barebones. Owlin, 2* feats, backgrounds that no DM will let you use in any other game, poor exam mechanics, and a simple dating sim that boils down to "here's 18 characters, go date them"
Isn't Strixhaven classified as a "source book"? This even though there's barely any new options in it since the UA subclasses intended for this book got scrapped due to overwhelmingly bad feedback. The "adventure" was supposed to be extra on top of the new source material
Edit: Nvm, you got to it at the end of the video.
Haven't finished the video yet.
But this games seems half a source book and half an adventure.
But not content of the book.
It's actually just 50% of the book is 50% of a sourcebook.
I feel like I need so much more content for adventure and sourcebook.
I still remember the subclasses, they were so freaking bad.
Loving all my fellow pf 2e fans that use this opportunity to gush about strengths of throusands.
I like the idea of Strixhaven as a downtime activity itself to flesh out your own Campaign or other module.
yea. I gave up on 5e published content.
"You can come up with it! I KNOW THAT"
Yeah thats my biggest issue of the "post tasha" books. Ever since tasha the "The DM can figure it out ^^ you are free to do whatever :))" has been getting more and more pervasive and degrading the content quality.
Custom race? Use variant human and call it whatever race you want.
Horror themes? Describe things scarily, uh, change a monsters abilities between encounters to make it interesting maybe, idk.
Magic school? Well friendly buddy pal dm, have you heard of roleplaying and being creative? You can do that. Just thought Id remind you. "You can do it!" Should be enough.
By next book I think the content will be reduced to nothing except a price tag and a 3 page essay about why being confident in your roleplay skills will help with roleplaying.
Here's the issue with the dating sim in my group, no one has any incentive to make rivals or friends when running the adventure as usual, in fact I've had to make up a whole NOTHER cast of npcs, lovingly named "Nameless student 3 - 5" and "The Band Kids"
The nameless student's are there for all of the wacky "Hey Fellow Kids" introductions that no self respecting person would ever say unironically, and the band kids fulfill the place of rivals since if you go by the mechanics as we did theres literally no reason for them to make enemies with anyone
The single relationship thats been formed more meaningfully then "Oh yeah you guys are friends I guess" has been one player dating Javenesh and even thats been completely unfulfilling since I don't particularly want to roleplay kinky bird romance.
When the DM says we're running Strixhaven, and you show up with a Lizardfolk Fighter.
"Why are you even here?"
"Dead languages"
As beautiful as they all are, my excitement for the arrival of crossover MtG/DnD books is squished more and more with every entry.
Magic itself doesn’t work the same in these two universes and everyone is acting like they don’t even know this already. There is nothing in there to actually make it feel like anything more involved than basically having your PCs cosplay as multiverse citizens
So much this. I absolutely loathe merging MtG with D&D; makes absolutely no sense and nobody should even pretend that it is NOT an attempt to milk two cash cows at the same time that was probably pushed by the suits from the ivory towers of their incompetence
They keep fucking up their own lore, too: no way Heliod is anything remotely good *and yet*
I’ve had to add a LOT of stuff when running my Tomb of Annihilation game because the main aspect of actually exploring feels really lackluster to run. The only real good thing is when they actually go to a location. So at this point I thought if I’m adding all this stuff into the game anyways I’ll make my own campaign, and so I have
might be just me but I really like the idea of filling in a lot of the details myself
i feel like the fun of dnd is telling your own story and i think it's cool it gives the dm and players ways to express that without bogging down the dm or making it feel super railroaded
Thank you very much. I've seen quite a few people seething over this module without providing any good points as to why it's bad, it was quite confusing
It sounds like the big problem here is that they were trying to heavily draw on Hogwarts as inspiration, the marketing of this adventure very much was basically 'hey, want to run a Wizarding World campaign?' The issue being that Rowling's descriptions of school life at Hogwarts are basically a series of low-stakes vignettes until you get to the 'real' plot of the book, which didn't really require the school setting.
Lazy cash grab playing on our dying Harry Potter ridden minds.
They aren't selling you content, they are selling your players new powers.
That was me! I'm the dreaded tusk guy!!! :D I SHALL shut up, thanks for the call out, Davvy! :D
Maybe I’m weird, but honestly I kind of like the more disconnected style of the adventure, gives me more room to add rp and custom content between the events of the adventure. Though I will admit that mainly comes down to me usually preferring to run homebrew games anyways. Overall it is not a super good book to run as written, but I think it lends itself well to modification and homebrewing.
All its rp is just relationship soap opera stuff. Wheres the 20 different classes, random events, several campaign villains you can make a story from?
@@orionar2461 yeah honestly that is kind of a problem cause I literally just have to make those all up lol. I'm fine with it because I enjoy being able to do that, but I understand why it's annoying for others.
These problems make it seem like the team was lacking either time, pagespace or they simply couldn't be arsed to make something substantial.
The whole idea of releasing a book about a school setting makes sense, the number of potterheads within the Ttrpg community is substantial and even if the setting itself does not seem attractive, it encompasses incredibly many social situations that could pop up in other games and would be nice to have a framework for.
To fail on giving actual filling to this setting seems like they missed a very big opportunity, especially seeing how much they hyped up this book.
Started running the game with my family and yeeaah I'm already finding myself short handed when it comes to content from the story. I had to do my own research to see if the campuses even had dorms. That being said we've already had some fun encounters and roleplay so I'm motivated to give this skeleton of a campaign book a chance
thank you for this video, i have been complaining on several dnd books for expecting the dm to basically complete the book for the creators, so it feels good to know im not the only one that see this types of issues, can be tuff to feel like the only one that give a damn about this type of problems,
This sounds like such a disappointment and highlights how frankly incompetent WOTC is at d&d. It's Ethier hit or miss.
I don't need a 50$ reminder that I can just create my own world and campaign (Which I will certainly do now after hearing this)
It is amazing how most dragon magazines came with 3-12 page adventures that had more depth than this book.
I love this kind of video perspective of a module being hard for a DM. I felt bamboozled by Waterdeep Dragon Heist-everywhere I looked said it was the perfect adventure for beginner players, but as a DM I really struggled. I was going to get this book since me and my friends are chemist PhDs…glad I dodged a bullet, since it sounds a lot like the struggles I have in WDH
I love the fact that there was not ONE mention of the crazy spell!
How you feel about this book is how I feel about all of 5e
The fact that apparently (I haven't read the book myself so just based off the video and other news) the most competent thing about a "modern fantasy high school setting" is the romance and prom mechanics makes far too much sense to me. That said I would already not be someone buying this book because I am more of the sword and sorcery Conan type fantasy myself so maybe I am just not the audience.
That just ticks me off. But unfortunately not surprising, especially when _everything_ nowadays apparently nEeDs something to do with friggin' Prom. Seriously, why are all of these show and book writers deeply obsessed with Prom?
@@maxxor-overworldhero6730 I guess they never went to one themselves, and they think that it is the most fantastic event you could ever experience in your life time.
in my own experience it is rather boring.
I did not expect the Magicians reference. But I do expect to find unexpected references to the Magicians at any time so I was not surprised.
So this is basically WotC going "dude I don't care! Thanks for the money!"
I can’t even imagine running a Wotc adventure without having to make some changes, they are absurd in their linearity and insistence on being cryptic. I heard nothing but good things about Dragon Heist only to discover that its a complete nonsensical mess with multiple completely unfinished chapters. These are big books of suggestions. And what really sucks is that SETTING GUIDES ARE BETTER AT PROVIDING INSPIRATION FOR GAMES OF YOUR OWN DESIGN THAN ADVENTURE MODULES. Like you said, the whole point of adventure modules is to pick up and play. Wotc has no clue how to design that.
I mean there is also the painful broken spell that just will ruin any attempt by the DM to create suspense so long as someone has it.
Silvery barbs is bad in the way players don't really understand. It makes you an unwilling villain as either have to build everything around that mechanic to the detriment of the players, target the players using it which promotes that player v DM nonsense, or change the mechanic, or ban it.
Average player who wanted to use something and you do any of the above is not happy, but you have to worry about the whole table and the experience, not one persons feelings on a spell or class feature.
I was already running my own adventuring wizard school campaign but using the Candlekeep Mysteries as the framework. Then this book got announced and I was excited that I'd have something to supplement and save me time. Then I read the book and realized it was essentially a list of ideas that required me to do MORE work to implement them. I bought the book hoping it would help me with preparation, not to cause more preparation!
My group is using it as a setting but not as an adventure. The DM also added a lot more NPCs and things for us to do.
it definitely feel emblematic of a problem D&D has right now: the roleplayers are taking the majority from the wargamers. D&D started as a wargame with some personality. That's still evident in how every class revolves around combat. But players want to explore different genres/play styles. While there are systems better suited for those genres; since D&D is so popular DMs (and now developers) are trying to retrofit the game to fit. Either Wizards needs to revamp the game to ACTUALLY be balanced in all three tiers or more games need the spotlight.
I don't think that's entirely on the money. I think the problem is that the perception is that roleplayers with little mechanical interest or literacy are seen as the majority, when what's closer to reality is that the casual audience is (naturally) getting larger. 5e fell into the trap of thinking simplicity = less stuff, when you can have a very mechanically sophisticated game while still having mathematically simple mechanics. Systems like L5R, anything that runs on Powered by the Apocalypse, and even older games like Cyberpunk2020 (if you streamline the overly lengthy healing rules) are very mechanically fulfilling while also not needing a maths degree to play them well, while 5e has stripped out so many things in the name of streamlining that it sometimes feels like there's more holes than substance.
My group is filled with roleplayers more than wargamers. We all pretty much agree we want more mechanics and better designed adventures.
Invest 150k into my new combined ttrpg / tcg and I'll replace both d&d and mtg to make wotc obsolete.
Factionalizism won't solve this problem, I'm afraid. Roleplayers also want substantial content as hooks for roleplay, and even stuff like complex combat encounters can lead to RP as players plan together and character a react to clutch moments or clever strategies.
5e has just nothing for anybody.
@@jeffbrownstainan official pf2e/eternal card game crossover...such a tragedy we'll never get to see it
Oh darn I was really hopeful for this adventure. I'll just reread the Harry Potter series lol.
I'm glad to know that all of the missing gaps in the book are things that I have been fantasizing and writing for months now waiting for the book to come out
I'm even more excited now that there's more room for me to use my own ideas
Strixhaven: "No Downtime activities? Bro the whole book IS the downtime activity..."
Sounds like they focused production time on out of genre dating sims for a game mainly about delving into dungeons and slaying dragons. Sadly Wotc has been off their game lately, trying to morph D&D into something that it isn't.
And as a bonus you get Silvery Barbs, a spell that breaks your game!
The problem with this book is that it's not enough of a campaign setting and not enough of an adventure. But with a great DM able to fill a few gaps, it can be one of the funniest one to play. We are 2 sessions in with my regular group and we are having a blast. It's very refreshing and different from other "epic" adventures.
I loved how it was hyped about all this stuff about forming relationships and all that stuff and it's just ,"if you want you can use this as a Relationship Event if you want" Like, there's only the barest hint of actual mechanics for it.