Continuing my recent spate of posts documenting my evolving thoughts on TTRPGs as I learn more about the hobby, I wanted to share my thoughts on people playing older releases of TTRPGs. As I’ve mentioned this week (and previously) I started off with D&D 5e 2014. For the beginning of my time in fandom all I ever heard was that a lot of the greybeards thought that D&D 3.5e was the last good edition and either kept playing that or moved on to Pathfinder 1e (which was based on it and has been nicknamed D&D 3.75). Tainted by thinking about this in the same way as software, I thought this was like people who were still using Windows 95 or MS Office 2003 because they refused to learn the latest interface and hated dealing with change.

The classic TTRPGs like Pathfinder and D&D (along with 5e fork Tales of the Valiant) have at least 3 main sourcebooks. (See my previous post about expanding those options) Many newer systems like Daggerheart or Cosmere have only one book that contains both player and game master sections. On the one hand, it’s nice to just have to buy one book and have everything all together - there’s often a lot of overlap in what content is for the player and what is for the GM. That said, in a previous iteration, Pathfinder had all the information in one book and people complained that the book was too massive.

I love using FoundryVTT to play TTRPGs online and I have played many game systems. Which one has the best support in FoundryVTT? Click through to watch the video and find out.

As someone who is relatively new to TTRPGs (~3 years at this point, give or take), I first started with D&D 5e 2014. Before I could buy too many adventures or campaigns, D&D 5e 2024 came out. So, in my mind, a TTRPG should have 3 core books containing all the species (formerly races), classes, subclasses, monsters, and so on needed to play. Then, in 2024 I heard about the 5e fork Tales of the Valiant. If you’ve spent any time on my blog recently, you know that we’ve gone all-in on Tales of the Valiant, and haven’t really played D&D since. But I thought it was weird that Kobold Press started doing kickstarters for Monster Vault 2 and Player’s Guide 2 and were adding new species/ancestries in The Labyrinth Worldbook. “Well,” I told myself, “D&D has been around for 50 years. It’s had time to establish itself. Maybe KP needs to just put these books out now?”

I grew up in the days of Nintendo vs Sega. But that’s not the only rivalry I’ve been around. There was also Emacs vs Vi/Vim. And Windows vs Linux vs Mac. Basically, anywhere there’s a choice, a huge swath of humanity takes the stance that whatever they’ve chosen is the only good choice and every other choice is bad or dumb. But not everyone! Time and age have taught me that whenever there’s a bifurcated choice like that, it’s often because each is catering to a different need or way of thinking that appeals to enough people to sustain an alternative. With that in mind, as I’ve moved beyond my original TTRPG (D&D) and explored other options, I’ve seen that each publisher seems to have certain strengths. In the spirit of putting something positive out there in the world, here is what I think each publisher does best:

A while ago I wrote about the need to spend money for each publishing type of a TTRPG “book”. My opinion at the time was that the PDFs should come for free with the physical books and I was annoyed, but somewhat understanding of the need to charge extra for a VTT version of the book. My thoughts have evolved somewhat, so I wanted to write an updated post on the different ways a book could be published and what I thought about it.

If you’ve been reading my blog for the last few months, you know that I have fallen in love with the TTRPG publisher Kobold Press, creators of Tales of the Valiant. They recently held their second virtual convention, KoboldCon. I wanted to write up a quick review of what is effectively my first TTRPG convention.

First of all, the virtual aspect of the convention. During the COVID pandemic convention season (2020-2021), I attended quite a few virtual conventions - usually programming language conventions like PyCon. Many of those attempted to recreate the physical aspects of the convention like having virtual hallway tracks and profile areas where you can get to know your fellow attendees. Kobold Press went for a lower tech solution, but one that I think worked perfectly for what they were trying to do.

It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a blog post reflecting on being the family dungeon master for the past year. So I’m going to try and avoid repeating too much of what I wrote there. At the time that I wrote it, I wasn’t considering making tabletop gaming one of the topics I reflect on at the end of the year. However, it has become a pretty large part of my leisure and it may continue to grow in the amount of my free time that it takes up. I think, for this year, I will divide my post according to campaign. We’ll see what makes sense next year.

I can’t find the exact blog post, but some time in the last few months I had a throwaway line about how I was a little frustrated in how D&D’s digital assets were handled, particularly the fact that they are tied to platforms. That is to say, if I bought the 2024 Player’s Handbook on Roll20, I wouldn’t also have access to it on DnDBeyond. I think there are really 2 reasons this hasn’t blown up more: 1) many of the platforms only require the DM to purchase content (if it was required of all the players, I think there’d be a revolt) 2) D&D is still primarily an analog, pencil and paper game. That said, this issue has started to become a bit more relevant to me, so I wanted to get some ideas out there (and maybe vent a little).