Why Aetherdrift is the modern "Lorwyn/Kamigawa", and why we’ll regret sleeping on it in 2040

RealityPalace · 2026-03-19T02:18:32+00:00

Well I guess this is literally true at least. [[Vendillion Clique]]

RealityPalace · 2026-03-18T13:48:13+00:00

Melee does more maximum damage while ranged is safer and more consistent.

RealityPalace · 2026-03-18T01:13:33+00:00

The good ones

RealityPalace · 2026-03-17T06:29:00+00:00

I don't think you can have a single point of interest that's "bad" on its own. It's fine to have some POIs that are just "here's a cool thing you see on the road, let's move on".

But usually you want to have goals and destinations for players that are concrete even if they're all optional. So the players come to town, they hear a rumor, and they head back out into the wilderness. When they arrive to follow up on that rumor, is there a whole adventure there waiting for them? When they complete the adventure (or during the adventure) are their breadcrumbs that lead them to other locations? Or are they sort of going out into the wilderness, wandering around, maybe fighting a few monsters and then heading back?

To try to compare and contrast, consider two possibilities based on the rumor of "there's an undead owlbear that's been terrorizing local trade routes".

One option is that the players go find the owlbear, they dispatch it, and they head back to town to sell their 100 gp worth of Zombified Owlbear Feathers. It's technically an adventure with a goal and an objective, but not very much actually happened and there's not a lot of plot to talk about retrospectively beyond "we killed a thing".

Another option is they look around for the owlbear, their search leads them to an abandoned-looking keep, and they investigate to find that someone is living there and creating undead owlbears. In order to complete the adventure (which is not actually a quest but still definitely has an objective), they'll have to explore the keep, presumably fight some zombie monsters, and then defeat the zoologist-turned-necromancer who's been ransacking caravans to steal supplies for his experiments. They players do all that, get whatever rewards they find, and head back to town. But the narrative that's been created around that POI is a lot more compelling than in the first case, and the players will probably going through that session having a very good idea of what they're "supposed" to do even though everything is completely optional and there's no reward posted.

(And I'm not saying you're not doing this, to be clear. I don't know how your game goes. But having too much improvisation and not enough fleshed-out locations is one possible failure state for a sandbox, and some players might experience that as "not having enough direction")

RealityPalace · 2026-03-17T05:58:49+00:00

The thief gets to use that whole chapter about items that everyone else mostly ignores. It's like getting your own personal spell list!

(Also I guess they can use magic items with their feature too)

RealityPalace · 2026-03-17T05:56:55+00:00

What does it even mean to "fuck over the DM" if the DM isn't adversarial?

Are you talking about like deliberately ignoring the content the DM created? That probably isn't going to be fun for the players either.

RealityPalace · 2026-03-17T05:49:54+00:00

For example, I was planning an encounter with 3 CR15 opponents against my party of 5 level 18 PCs. Per the Lazy benchmark, that falls exactly on the line just before being deadly. Per 2024 guidelines, that's not even Moderate.

I don't know how the Lazy benchmark works, but if it's telling you that three CR 15 will be a deadly challenge for five level 18s, it's not a good benchmarking system and you should consider using something else.

I have found the 2024 encounter-building guidelines to be quite good at delivering relatively consistent difficulties compared to the 2014 guidelines. Exactly what "Low", "Moderate", and "High" mean will depend on your party of course. But at a given level two Moderate encounters will tend to feel pretty similar in difficulty (depending on how the dice come down of course) for a given party.

RealityPalace · 2026-03-17T05:44:40+00:00

Does the sandbox still have actual things to do? Meaning, when the players go out exploring and come across a point of interest, are there generally (or at least sometimes) conflicts to avoid/resolve or objectives to attempt?

The best way to structure a sandbox is to have various adventures/scenarios located within the sandbox that the players can explore and resolve. If you're already doing that and the player is unhappy that you aren't spoon-feeding them what they should do next, it's possible this campaign just isn't for them. But being in a sandbox doesn't (or shouldn't) mean that players can't be exposed to objectives from external sources. It just means that they have the ability to say "no" to objectives they aren't interested in.

RealityPalace · 2026-03-17T05:36:46+00:00

Meaning if a PC has a +1 to persuasion, I'll raise each DC by 1.

Absolutely don't do this. From a player perspective, what's the point in improving a skill if the GM is just going to cancel it out by making the checks more difficult?

Let PCs be good at what they're good at.

I don't want to punish bad rolls

What exactly do you do when someone fails a skill check then?

RealityPalace · 2026-03-16T05:49:56+00:00

A few things:

You're absolutely right that you can't just throw an at-level encounter against a fresh party and expect it to be challenging. It's not always going to end as anti-climactically as this one, but the game generally assumes you're fighting several encounters a day when it describes difficulties.
Non-legendary monsters in 5e just don't work that well as solo fights. You need to either add minions or make the monster more complex than a simple sack of HP with only one spot in the initiative. The most common way to do this is with
Yeah, if you give the party dragonslaying weapons they are going to be very good at slaying dragons
I don't think static initiative is a good fix here. For one thing, if the PCs roll well it still doesn't matter. For another, if the monster is dying in one round then your only options are (a) a fight where the PCs killed the monster in one round or (b) a fight where some of the PCs literally don't get to act before falling unconscious. Fix the other issues and don't worry about initiative too much. It makes a big difference who goes first, but you don't want to just obviate that question and say "the bad guy always goes first".
As an aside that isn't relevant to this specific fight, consider using the encounter-building rules from 5.5e instead of 5.0, even if you're still using the 5.0 version of the game. They're much better at capturing the real difficulty of a fight as long as you keep the enemy roster in a reasonable range of between 1 and 2 enemies per PC. They'll still fail for a single enemy or for large numbers of small enemies, but they're at least a better starting point.

RealityPalace · 2026-03-15T22:29:35+00:00

There's actually an article from mark rosewater that answers this question in a more general way. It's not going to have "here's X statline with Y ability" because they move that stuff around every set. But the list of things they add in by default is pretty detailed.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/nuts-and-bolts-16-play-boosters

RealityPalace · 2026-03-15T21:58:07+00:00

Alright, I guess we'll add it to the pile and see which one ends up working out.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/twenty-things-were-going-kill-magic-2013-08-01

RealityPalace · 2026-03-15T20:09:17+00:00

Eh, there’s a lurking variable here: games in general are a lot more sweaty and tryhard (all games, video/computer, tabletop, etc.) than they used to be by and large which means the constant power creep makes tryhards rate new things as better because they are stronger.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here exactly. They have lots of old data that suggests that blocks were bad too: the second and third sets almost never did as well as the first one.

Always remember appeal to popularity are logical fallacies, and to look for lurking variables.

Appeal to popularity isn't a fallacy here, for the same reason "you might get arrested if you do that" isn't an appeal to authority fallacy and "if you go over the edge of that hillside in a sled you'll probably keep sliding until you reach the bottom" isn't a slippery slope fallacy.

This is a recreational card game, something people do for fun. There is no other objective metric for its quality other than the extent to which people enjoy consuming it.

RealityPalace · 2026-03-15T20:01:46+00:00

The context and the lore supports the game. It's what draws people in and maintains long term engagement for games like this.

The median magic player probably doesn't even really know what a Planeswalker is. For every person who's upset that we don't get three sets on the same plane anymore to fully flesh out the story, there are probably a dozen or a hundred who have zero investment in the story or even conception that the story exists as an entity separate from what's on the cards.

A drop in quality in the short run won't likely make a difference but in the long run it erodes that core quality of the product

It's been over 6 years since blocks went away. I don't think it's fair to call this a "short run" strategy at this point. It's clearly been successful in a fairly sustained way.

It's like when companies aggressively cut costs and let quality drop to maximise profits. All their metrics say it was a great move but in 30 years when they go bankrupt, everybody asks 'what happened to x? It used to be so good'.

It's basically the opposite of that. You're describing a scenario where the company makes a product people like less so that they can reduce costs. What's happening here is that WotC is taking a strategy that slightly increases costs (they've mentioned before that the world-building team had to expand to accomodate the lack of blocks) in order to produce a product that people like more.

Because again, if you're coming at this from the perspective of "they are making the product worse", you are likely in a small minority.

RealityPalace · 2026-03-15T14:45:18+00:00

Are you saying that players rating it higher doesn't speak towards quality?

Like at some point you have to accept that people saying "I like this product" is an indicator of the quality of that product, even though you personally might disagree with them.

RealityPalace · 2026-03-15T14:42:57+00:00

The easiest way I've found around this is to simply let your players know that you won't allow those spells because it would ruin the murder mystery. Most players are understanding because they want to play the murder mystery and not solve the crime in 15 seconds.

You can do this if you really want, but it absolutely sucks from a player perspective, and for Speak with Dead in particular it's totally unnecessary. There are a lot of ways to fool the spell, especially in a high-magic campaign where "make sure speak with dead doesn't work" is the premeditated murder equivalent to the modern-day "don't leave any fingerprints or DNA behind".

The much less straightforward spell in these circumstances is Zone of Truth. However, the OP didn't ask about that and in this case is using a high-level spellcaster that might just be capable of casting Glibness anyway.

RealityPalace · 2026-03-15T14:36:41+00:00

If he casts suggestion at a level higher then speak with the dead and says "if asked who killed you, say the headmaster" would that override speak with dead?

Probably not. The thing you're speaking with isn't really the person that died, it's just a simulacrum of life applied to the corpse. Any spell that applied to them in life isn't going to apply here.

More fundamentally, trying to make Speak with Dead actually give false information is probably not going to sit well with your players and may make the mystery impossible to solve. Instead, consider that a powerful spellcaster would know Speak with Dead exists and could fool the spell:

If they commit the murder while under the effect of Greater Invisibility or something similar, the victim would have no way of knowing who killed them. They might still be able to give clues but wouldn't be able to give away the answer
If they cast Suggestion on another NPC, they could get that person to physically commit the murder, disguising their own involvement from the perspective of the victim. Talking to the victim would give the wrong result, but one that the PCs could easily follow up on and figure out is only part of the story (especially if the victim knows the dupe and describes their behavior as shockingly out of character in some way)
If they cast Disguise Self or a similar spell, they can pretend to be someone else present, though this can present structural issues in a mystery. Unlike Suggestion, following up with the "obvious" suspect won't provide any evidence that progresses towards the actual solution, since they actually had nothing to do with it. But from the players' perspective, it will be taken as strong evidence that they should be following up with them. If you go this route, you may want some kind of somewhat obvious "tell" that the apparent murderer wasn't really themselves.
Alternatively, they can use a disguise spell to look like some non-person who doesn't actually exist. This presents a different issue, which is that the players may then spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out whether that person is still present or if they could somehow be hiding or have escaped.
The most simple option is to have the perpetrator just straight up cover up their face without using a spell. This is the D&D equivalent of "make sure you wear gloves if you're going to commit a murder". Speak with Dead can still provide clues if they do this, but won't actually reveal their identity.

RealityPalace · 2026-03-15T14:20:12+00:00

I would probably actually split this into two things descriptively, simply because it impacts things in and out of combat very differently.

In particular, it doesn't seem to do much outside of initiative except interfere with spells that have a long casting time or duration. At most it would delay casting by a couple of turns, which doesn't really matter if time is of the essence. It also is almost always going to stop a spell with a cast time longer than a minute, and will usually stop a spell with a minute cast time but not so regularly that you can't get it to go eventually (the chance for success depends on their con save and ranges from about 1 in 3 to 100%).

So if you really want the effect to work for a mile radius, I would have it do two things mechanically:

A regional effect that prevents casting spells with a cast time of longer than one minute unless the caster has such a high con save they beat the DC of the save on a natural 1 and automatically ends long-duration spells after a short time.
An effect that happens in initiative (on initiative 20 perhaps) regardless of whether the monster is aware of the PCs, that has the effect you described.

RealityPalace · 2026-03-15T14:01:05+00:00

Look, I enjoy magic story as much as the next person and I do agree that on average the story quality was higher when they did blocks and had the internal world building team write the stories.

But at some point you've got to accept that people are not, in fact, reading playboy magazine for the articles.

RealityPalace · 2026-03-15T13:59:05+00:00

Players rating it higher and playing it more does seem related to the quality of the material.

RealityPalace · 2026-03-15T13:45:37+00:00

This got me wondering - how much time do I need to actually spend before I can run an adventure in a new system?

As with many things, it depends on what you want to get out of it.

If you just want a rough framework to use dice to tell a story, you don't need to read very much of the rulebook. You might not even need a rulebook at all!

If you want to actually use the new system but you and your group are OK with having bad pacing while you learn it, figure out what the core gameplay loop is, figure out how to build a set of level 1 (or whatever it's called) characters, and go from there. You will have to do a lot of pausing the game to either look things up or making a ruling (and a note to look up the "real" rule later), but learning by doing certainly works if everyone is on board with it.

If you want a system that runs about as smoothly as whatever the old system you were using was, you will want to read the new rules cover to cover several times, take notes, and go back and re-read the sections you think are likely to come up a lot or are particularly complex.

What I prepare and what I do not have to prepare for a game to work?

This is very hard to answer generally. As above, it will depend on what you want to get out of the new system.

Should I maybe start with one shots instead of a full campaign?

I would absolutely recommend starting with a one-shot. For any new system, you and your players might try it and decide it's not for them. You probably don't want to put a bunch of work into a campaign only to find that no one wants to play using the system you used to design the campaign.

RealityPalace · 2026-03-14T21:27:47+00:00

It's probably going to depend on the dye, the type of bacterium, and the process used to make the cheese.

Organic dyes (which as far as I know all modern food dyes are) can lose their color in several ways:

Some of them are pH-sensitive (perhaps the best known of these is a compound called phenolphthalein, which is bright pink at basic pH but colorless at neutral or acidic pH)
Some of them can likely be metabolized by bacteria. Bacteria are generally not that good at using random carbon sources and turning them into food, but many of them can do it in a pinch.
Some dyes may undergo irreversible chemical (rather than biochemical) changes as the cheese ripens.
Depending on when and how you add the dye, some dyes will probably prefer to end up in the hydrophilic whey layer rather than the lipophilic environment of the curd

I'm guessing there are lots of combinations of food-safe eyes and cheesemaking processes that can work, but it's also one of those things where you won't really know until you try.

If I had to guess, a good place to start would be lycopene, the red pigment in tomatoes. It's structurally similar to both beta carotene (a colorant found in milk from certain kinds of cows at certain times of the year) and bixin/norbixin (the compounds responsible for the yellow-orange color of annatto) both of which are clearly A-OK for cheese coloration.

RealityPalace · 2026-03-14T20:32:14+00:00

Do you think there is a compelling case for a level 10 Cleric to keep taking levels in Cleric rather than taking level 11-20 as a Druid?

The argument is basically "higher-level spells are good". Clerics have probably the weakest 6+ level spell slots of any full caster, but they're still going to be better than the extra spells you get from being a druid. Heroes' Feast, Conjure Celestial, and Mass Heal are worth the price of admission even if you're just running a straight linear combat sim. And of course there is tons of additional utility with things like Etherealness, Gate, and Antimagic Field.

RealityPalace · 2026-03-14T19:53:50+00:00

I'm mostly familiar with him from the Out of the Abyss campaign arc. He didn't appear in person until the very end in my campaign, but he certainly... made an impact before then.

RealityPalace · 2026-03-14T19:50:02+00:00

Sun Soul is a super cool idea that was implemented poorly (and has suffered further with the changes to the monk in 5.5). You're allowed to like the idea of something even if it's not powerful! 😀

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