A Great Time to Play TTRPGS

EricMesa

- 3 minutes read - 597 words

Spend enough time on the internet, (especially /r/dnd or /r/dndbeyond) and you’ll come away feeling like TTRGPs are over, Wizards of the Coast is ruining your childhood, and a million other negative thoughts. But as I was watching the latest promotional video from Wizards of the Coast for the “2024” Monster Manual, I realized that the hobby is in the midst of a creative spurt. So I wanted to write this short post to share some joy as we start 2025.

  • The new D&D Monster Manual has a bunch of new tweaks to make it more fun to read and more useful to DMs. The monsters now have illustrations that show more about where the monster might be found and how it might attack. They have lots of new levels of baddies so that you can have weaker and stronger versions. They provide typical loot you might find on any given monster. Lots of other new, exciting features!
  • Staying on the monster front, Kobold Press is currently running a kickstarter for their Monster Vault 2. Why do they need another monster vault/manual for a game that “just” came out? Because the first Monster Vault was mostly about doing a ToV conversion of monsters from the SRD (meaning D&D’s open source monsters). Now they’re getting creative and adding their own. The creature on their site telling you to back it kind of looks like Krampus (which I find exciting! After all, Baba Yaga is cannonically in D&D and ToV - so why not Krampus?). Also, I love that they took a page from The Witcher (and, I’m sure many other sources) and are adding a supplement for what you can harvest from creatures. This makes the combat more than just killing a monster that got in your way. In a bit of convergent evolution, both the D&D 2024 Monster Manual and the Monster Vault 2 are also focusing on which creatures tend to pair together. From the D&D video, it seems they are focusing on communicating that via the images for the monsters. For the Monster Vault 2 they have the concept of “monster bundles”
  • Speaking of Kobold Press, I love Tales of the Valiant, their take on 5e because of the OGL license scandal of 2 or so years ago. It’s a very creative take on 5e that I like a bit more than 2024 D&D (5.5e?)
  • Also, the Canadians at Hit Point Press have tons of neat campaing settings for 5e like Humblewood, Heckna, or Fool’s Gold.
  • The folks at Paizo aren’t sitting on their laurels. They also did a revamp of Pathfinder 2e this year and are working on Starfinder 2e.
  • As a big Sanderson Fan, I can’t wait for the Cosmere TTRPG to come out later this year. His books already have an RPG quality, so it’ll be fun to see how they make it work. I’m especially excited that there’s a focus on solving conflict outside of combat.
  • Finally, returning to D&D - their update of the maps product on dndbeyond finally is starting to make it into a product that doesn’t require having a bunch of tabs open to use it.

There are also lots of new , exiting games coming out in 2025 that I haven’t even mentioned and can’t wait to watch that video to learn about. So when the Internet has you down about the state of TTRPGs, remember that we’re in a time of high creativity right now. (Also, all the old versions still exist, so if you don’t like 5.5e, you can play 5e, 4e, 3.5e, etc)