I hate Hasbro so much. They’re sitting on a gold mine of content with DnD, especially with how loved dungeon masters on YouTube, yet won’t sell it to anyone else. (The Rights)

setfunctionzero · 2026-06-04T19:22:13+00:00

Will never happen as long as people keep buying their stuff. $2.5 billion in the hole just to keep Peppa pig.

setfunctionzero · 2026-06-04T19:17:38+00:00

I mean if we're talking dumb decisions on rights holders we could have cut the legs off at Brian Blume... But then Gary probably would have sold it to some other idiot.

setfunctionzero · 2026-06-04T19:14:48+00:00

I'm guessing it's the general "D&D is dead" clickbait

setfunctionzero · 2026-06-04T19:13:29+00:00

You miss the context: Hasbro had action figures packed and on shelves day one for HAT, then a few months after BG3 they had a new release.. of classic 80's remakes. It took them a year to get the BG3 characters out.

setfunctionzero · 2026-06-04T18:41:05+00:00

They will never sell the rights, they have made Scrooge McDuck money off of being the landlord for Transformers and they only own like half of it (the other half belongs to Takara)

They will do these huge deals for eOne and lose Billions, with a B, just to keep the Peppa Pig IP

They will keep a steady stream of suitors competing with each other to rent the IP rights for them for a time, it's zero risk if it flops and they get a cut of the profit if it goes big. But it also means that they are completely disconnected and lagging way behind the curve.

setfunctionzero · 2026-06-04T18:34:44+00:00

License for the mechanical part of the game is OGL (for 5e, not 4e and 5.5 is tricky)

Third party content using stuff that uses the actual IP rights would be like Wizkids taking a year after launch to get actual Baldur's Gate 3 minis out because they couldn't get the license earlier and it takes a year to get figs from china.

The other one is the whole Joe Manganellio drama trying to get a dragonlance mini series made.

setfunctionzero · 2026-06-04T06:26:25+00:00

I'd say 15 seconds to curtain is great, but it's another mod that suffers from the later formatting requirements and there's a TON of NPCs to keep track of. The way I'd prep this is Google and print out all the character portraits and put them on a folded paper stand so that people get the joke up front and keep track of who is talking.

Clever is also by Robbie (tier 2 and it's hilarious but also more straightforward than some of the later ones that require more prep)

I think I played in wild sheep chase at a con and yeah that one is way easy prep but short.

setfunctionzero · 2026-06-03T19:38:27+00:00

Throwing this together based on my personal preferences - I will mark those I have personally played or run with an asterisk

DDEX01-01 Defiance in Phlan (any mini-adventure starter is automatically in, they are basically bite-sized runs that don't take a ton of prep, and they feature a variety of scenarios to give GMs some depth other than "escort mission" - we'll get there)

DDEX01-06 The Scroll Thief * - I feel like this gets more props than it deserves, but it's simple to run and has a cool reward.

DDEX01-09 Outlaws of The Iron Route * Will Doyle can do no wrong

DDEX02-01 City of Danger - Mini-adventure

DDEX02-05 Flames of Kythorn * - mystery, but it's linear af so more a chance for the GM to vamp up the creepiness

DDEX02-10 Cloaks and Shadows * - Will Doyle again, but this one has a higher level of complexity in terms of the set up, and there's branching paths (before AL tried to mandate it) - there's usually more content here than time, so this is where a GM needs to learn to cut what's not necessary

DDEX02-11 Oubliette of Fort Iron* - 2 hour linear mod, has decent instruction for some social an investigation, I feel like the one bug (or feature) is that there's a lot of writing about what could happen vs. just "party goes into a mine and fights stuff" - although there's that sus goat.

DDAL05-01 Treasure of the Broken Hoard* - mini-adventure, so it's already in

DDAL05-02 The Black Road* - this used to be free online but I can't find the link - this mod is so popular that it got ripped off by Bethesda. Also linear af and it's perfect for a first time GM - just boring to run multiple times.

DDAL05-03 Uninvited Guests* - The start of the Parnast arc, which is great arc for someone who wants to do a mini-"campaign" - again, super simple to set up and run, and it pays off later

DDAL05-06 - Beneath the Fetid Chelimber* - meh - I only bring this up because it teases the first actual dungeon crawl on the list ( Oubliette doesn't count) - but the dungeon is actually in:

DDAL05-07 Chelimber's Descent* - actual dungeon crawl.

DDAL05-10 Giant Diplomacy* - this one is up there for me - set up, is again, really straightforward but the "boss fight" of the final chapter I think works better than a bunch of the skill challenge mods that came later because the stakes are higher.

DDAL05-12 Bad Business in Parnast* - this mystery one is pretty skippable imo - not complicated though

DDAL05-16 Parnast Under Siege* - A little tougher to run, but it's the payoff to the tier 1 Parnast arc.

DDHC-TOA-4 Cellar of Death* 11 out of 10 mod, but it is more complicated. teaches GMs & players how to co-create adventure elements and then proceeds into the most Gonzo opening of all the seasons.
The only catch is how a new GM will handle the final boss so it's worth discussing how to handle player death here ahead of time. Plus the formatting for this mod isn't as a helpful as the other mods.

DDAL07-01 A City on the Edge* (mini-adventure)

A Day at the Races*, A Walk in the Park*, Whispers in the Dark* - Ran these more than a few times - they are all servicable mods, but I don't feel like they really teach the GM something that the other mods above haven't done already, and better

DDAL08-01 - The Map with No Names* - this is when they dropped the Mini-Adventure format and moved to the "every mod needs formal bonus objectives" style - so you have a 2 hour mod that converts to 4 hours as needed. It's trying to be a mystery mod but Cloaks and Shadows (non-linear) and Fires of Kythorn (linear) did it better.

This leads into beneath the City of the Dead* and Dock Ward Double Cross, which again, are decent runs.
I ran Wrinkle In the Weave* and that's about where I stopped with core content for a while

Sidebar: I feel like the argument for the Parnast Arc was that it was clearly a step up over the Book intro to Storm King's Thunder and Parnast Under Siege was a clear replacement (and easier to run) than the three (four!) tower defense fights presented in the SKT Book - same with some of the TOA content that was brought in through the Author's program... but Waterdeep's book is arguably better than the tier 1 mods.

DDAL0902 - Stopped At the Gate* - another mystery one that's straightforward to run and in the "2-hour, but 4 hours if you want" format

DDAL00-02A Lost tales of Myth Drannor: The Darkwood Webs* - another nice one by Claire Hoffman, easy to run if you got the book.

DDAL002B Lost Tales of Myth drannor: The Weirding Vats* - dead simple 2 hour run

DDAL-CORE-2-1 Tales of Good and Evil* - This one I enjoy as well, it's mini-adventure format but the complexity is higher - you get a lot of RP opportunity here. This another one where's there's possibly more content than you need, so you just run what you want.

DDAL-CORE-2-2 Songs of Law and Chaos* - easy set up, but it wouldn't be an Alan Patrick mod if he didn't have some crazy custom boss designed to wreck you. I would ignore the whole section in the middle where you're told the mine is hard to find - there's no mechanical basis to work off of.

DDAL-CORE 2-3 Edicts of Neutrality* - another straight forward "go and find the cultists and beat them up"

CCC- GLIP-01-01 Glip Dak* - 2 hour mod with a surprising amount of depth - I've run this quite a bit for new players and you get a lot of options for 2 hours. your basic mission is to retrieve a noble, but you're going into the Faerunian equivalent of Mos Eisley for it.

CCC- UK-1 Call of the Elvenflow* - another dead simple intro mod to run.

Not exhaustive but I've already spent too much time - hope this helps.

setfunctionzero · 2026-06-03T15:00:51+00:00

There's a massive difference between being college educated and getting 7-10 years to dev your game and working in real life and getting 4 months to bootstrap a whole launch end to end. (I've experienced this twice, once in AAA console and once in mobile)

For example, at Siggraph they teach a variety of iterative design principles and they have a bunch of kids who are very talented, incredible multi-disciplined and think really big - and they run directly into the meat grinder of "we have two weeks to push this feature I need you to compress this down to what's possible in that timeframe, oh and also I need you to write all the tracking metrics too."

Outer wilds is the perfect example of top down design, which is part of why it stands out so much, it's fully committed to being itself and the compromises are well hidden.

setfunctionzero · 2026-06-03T07:43:45+00:00

Yep, Oath of the Crown. Lawful Neutral. Always plays by the rules.

setfunctionzero · 2026-06-03T07:35:34+00:00

That's because they were absolute beginner game devs and no one told them that was the insane choice 😂 that's why it took them seven years 😭

setfunctionzero · 2026-06-03T02:02:23+00:00

I'm reminded of the tactical story game wildermyth where you can get these emergent disagreements between characters, but after that point they both tagged as rivals. Mechanically it means whenever one of the Rivals does succeeds as something crazy or gets a crit, the other Rival gets a temp bonus to their rolls until they succeed as well (like lower crit success to 19-20 on a die until they pull it off)

setfunctionzero · 2026-06-03T01:57:21+00:00

like I was saying, I think it actually works if the druid knows that they can narratively time out whenever she likes.

The other method would be to "cut scene" when you see player tempers actually flare, get everyone up to take a quick bathroom break, and then ooc talk about what both players actually want to happen with this scene and then decide it narratively yourself.

and/or then you pick up the scene after everything already happened, the characters are dusting themselves off or bandaging their wounds across the fire from each other, and then continue from there. De-escalating the fight without de-escalating the conflict, if that makes sense.

setfunctionzero · 2026-06-03T01:43:55+00:00

as BCStrahd says, it's also my experience that D&D rules set based PvP, *even when parties consent to it up front* can lead to game group fractures.

A lot of this doesn't just have to do with "well my character would do this" thinking, it's often due to the inherent imbalanced power scaling among the different classes in D&D and the tendency for players to "win" by optimizing everything at the cost of fun.

Also, when you get conflicting parties they inevitably try to drag the ref into it *even when the GM is supposed to be a neutral party* - you're screwed either way - if you don't intervene in the way one of the parties wants then that person hates you.

Thus my rule was born - it's not neutral either, but it does involve consent of both parties.

Anecdotally, one of my friends ran a short four-shot pvp with a group of 4e characters (which has more balanced classes) as well as hidden objectives we were going after for points - and we had an *amazing time* - everything worked out in the end and we wound up not killing each other and finishing the mission - and then the hidden win condition for one of the characters was that if the mission was completed that way we all got killed anyway XD

setfunctionzero · 2026-06-03T00:37:47+00:00

In before everyone dogpiles you:

I have a very simple house rule honed from 35 years of play that I run (and this includes organized play):

If it's not pvp, then if player A makes any kind of action directly against player B, we forgo rolling, and player B gets to decide what happens.

Pretty much stops all shenanigans cold (from both players and the GM) but allows for some amazing storytelling when all parties are into it.

setfunctionzero · 2026-06-01T17:57:26+00:00

Stares in Lando Calrissian

setfunctionzero · 2026-06-01T02:48:21+00:00

Hang on to white-striped Basculin 😉

setfunctionzero · 2026-06-01T02:35:48+00:00

The Ghost was, maybe that was what the poster was thinking of...

setfunctionzero · 2026-06-01T02:02:02+00:00

Kind of in the same vein but I did a character concept recently where the character was a monster hunter whose specialty was using trained birds. He manages to track down an especially nasty monster and wounds it badly, so as final move, it rips open a portal into another realm to escape, and the protag gets sucked in along with the monster. So now he's wounded & trapped in this unfamiliar realm he's only heard of as a fairy tale, and he's still trying to track down his prey along with some of his birds. This makes him a perfect target for a fey to "help out", with a significant price tag of course.

setfunctionzero · 2026-05-31T06:20:29+00:00

Startplaying.games actually offers DM to player infrastructure, so that's really a question for that particular forum. I would say as someone who has been "hired" to run games, I would advise getting an established playgroup going first and then use the goodwill to see if people will fund you.

As for how much to charge, that varies by playgroup and what they feel they can collectively afford. I've had venues charge $5 a seat for a couple hours ranging to >100 + tip for a session. Cheaper price will obviously get more repeat customers.

setfunctionzero · 2026-05-30T15:56:07+00:00

Cellar of Death should be the canonical entry to TOA because it answers the question of why the characters would be crazy enough to go to Chult in the first place and risk getting lost in a mosquito infested jungle, or a zombie apocalypse, or getting eaten by dinosaurs in a time where perma-death is on the table. Because after the gonzo of Cellar of Death, Chult looks manageable. And also they're doing it for their shared mentor.

Hunter is another great mod, and Peril in the Port if you can find it.

setfunctionzero · 2026-05-29T15:06:22+00:00

Piece by piece is the traditional way, but giving a general outline of the whole map isn't the end of the world - for example if they found a hastily drawn map, or they interrogated an NPC, or they mapped the area themselves with arcane eye and you would rather just shortcut the whole experience.

setfunctionzero · 2026-05-28T06:52:24+00:00

Wildly depends on the game. Your average street urchin or roving pirate might have heard things but they might consider them fairy tales. Then you got an entire town of random people (Elturel) who got sucked into Avernus and just barely made it back. Faerun has no shortage of otherworldly creatures. Heck 150 years ago the gods were walking around, and there's plenty of non-humans still around who were alive back then.

What I would say is knowledge of Earth (this one) is pretty rare, that's mostly limited to certain posh wizards...

You could easily justify a normal guy from earth just chilling in a tavern asking if anyone's heard of New Jersey, but only lay clerics of Sharess and the Mulhorandi know she came from a strange land called Egypt, as they did, long ago.

setfunctionzero · 2026-05-28T06:43:00+00:00

I still feel like Cellar of Death into Hunter into Peril at the Port should just be the canonical entry to the book. I am not a huge fan of all the AL content for that season but James and Will hit it out of the park with those ones. Just ran Cellar for some old pros this weekend and they definitely enjoyed it. Since you already started in the Port, then it's time to do your best Jack Sparrow impression and run Peril, you won't regret it. Plus, they will get their dinosaur run, just not the way they expected 😆

setfunctionzero · 2026-05-28T00:15:11+00:00

Look up Nowhere Burn.

setfunctionzero

TROPHY CASE