ob-werm

So the new Monster Manual is out and about, and one of the big talking points is how orcs have been removed from it completely. I'm in two minds on the whole thing.

First and foremost, its a good thing that orcs are being treated less like brutal savages that are just predisposed to evil and more like a culture with its own practices, social norms, and economic factors. People much smarter than me have done extensive writing on the biological essentialism that underpinned a lot of DND's early monster design, so I won't poorly rehash all that, but what's important here is that now, a DM (and WOTC's adventure writers) have to think a little bit more when they drop a green skin brigade into their hex crawl. You can't handwave an orc raid on a mining camp by going "They're evil, its what they do." You gotta think a little more, think about motivations, social pressures, ECONOMICS! Horrific, I know. It will be more challenging for newer DM's, but it will make them better in the process.

With that in mind, I am still negative on the deletion as a whole because I am usually against the removal of rules to solve a problem when the addition of rules would have solved it just as much, if not more. The problem is that the removal of orcs solves none of the problems it set out to do, reinforces the bad stereotypes it sought to combat, and along the way, limits new DMs on the types of monsters they can throw out. If orcs are being removed because they aren't monsters anymore, then why are goblins, githyanki, all these creatures who are clearly just as sapient as orcs, still considered monsters and are seen as acceptable fodder for a party of adventurers? I understand that Orcs have achieved full PC ancestry status, but in the fiction of the game, that doesn't really exist.

Now, imagine this alternative; a new monster manual that has stat blocks for orcs, yes, but also stat blocks for fighting humans, dwarves, elves, gnomes, etc. If its a player race, there are stats for fighting them. Not only does this combat the idea that orcs and goblins are monsters that are okay to kill, but it also gives the DM more tools to use, not less.

Now, I'm not (horribly) stupid, I understand these books have a limited page count and WOTC doesn't have infinite money to expend on creature design. They gotta save some funds for designing their AI Dungeon Masters. So, here's an idea straight from one of my favorite games, Lancer. Instead of dedicating multiple pages to every single sapient race, you have NPC monsters (bandits, druids, archmages, etc.) that you then modify with ancestry templates. Want to run a group of goblin bandits. They all can disengage as a bonus action. Want to take those same low level bandits but use them in a campaign set on the astral sea? They're now all Gith and they have limited Psionics. Want to then start a campaign where the main enemy is a group of wood-elf eco-terrorists? Same bandits, but with limited druidic spellcasting and some magical resistances. I can't think of a way this system wouldn't solve anyone's problems.

I get it, some people are bad at running the game, some people are bad players, and some people use these games as an excuse to let their worst behaviors express themselves. That last group especially deserves a little social ostracization, just to humble them. But I can imagine a scenario where a new DM turns to youtube for advice, only to be met with a wall of videos titled "The DM from Hell (Their Ideas Sucked Dick)."

Criticism against any artist is healthy and good criticism is the greatest way to spur growth, but I can't imagine this huge focus on negativity being good for attracting new people to the hobby. And I get it, not every video from an RPG youtuber can be a deep dive on how to run/play the game. Sometimes, you just need a paycheck. But there's gotta be another way, another line of easy content you can follow that doesn't rely on the mistakes one person made at a table of five being redistributed to tens of thousands of people.

But this morning, a perfect example of this fell into my lap. A Screen Rant article detailing how there will be no monster creation rules included within the the 2025 Monster Manual, and, based off the language they use, there is no plan to release these rules in the near future.

In an interview with Chris Perkins and James Wyatt, lead designers for the new half-edition/remaster, both said that there were no plans for a monster creation guide, with the closest bit of advice being how to reskin other monsters for your needs. The logic behind this, according to Perkins, was that "we wanted to give the DM creature-building that was quick, that was easy, and that wouldn't cause them to create a monster that was off-CR and potentially wreck their encounter."

I'll be honest, that logic is hilarious to me because, as someone who ran the game for eight years and was very plugged into the community, everyone knows that the easiest way to wreck an encounter is to FOLLOW THE CR SYSTEM.

This whole section of the interview comes across as very condescending. Wyatt claims that the math they use to balance encounters in-house is just "too complicated to print in a book." So, instead of taking responsibility for their system, they've given the GM literally nothing to go off of if they want to design a monster. If you TPK your party, that's on you, not us. We told you it was above your paygrade.

It's getting to the point where some of the design choices are so baffling that I can't help but put a tin-foil hat on. Do they not want to print their monster making rules because there are no in-house guidelines and they just eye-ball CR? Is there an exec at WOTC that struck down putting out monster creation rules for fear that it would cut into the sale of monster books further down the line? Like, I know these ideas are conspiracy bait, and I know they have no grounding, but when the game about fighting monsters has no good reason for why they would cut monster creation rules, how can I not fall into conspiracy thought?

Alright, quick conditionals: I have not been a player character in a Pathfinder Second Edition game (yet), I have only ran the game and have only ran up to level 6. I have been GMing it for close to two years now, and my latest foray into a long-term campaign has been running consistently for the last ten months.

My current stance is that I have no interest in going back to running D&D Fifth Edition. If one of my friends wants to run it, I'll play, but my go to Fantasy Bullshit game is going to be PF2E for the foreseeable future. And the reason is simple: PF2E and Paizo respects the GMs time. D&D 5e and WOTC do not.

I ran 5e for close to a decade, and I remember how, anytime I prepped a session, over half of that prep was spent on homebrew. Homebrewing subsystems to make things like travel interesting. Homebrewing magic item prices because players like buying magic items. HOMEBREWING A MONSTER THAT IS INTERESTING TO FIGHT IN THE GAME ABOUT FIGHTING INTERESTING MONSTERS.

This ambivalence towards the needs of the GM grew more apparent as new releases came out, with WOTC focusing more on player facing options and less on creating rulesets the game obviously needed (see the release of Spelljammer lacking any ship-to-ship combat rules).

For a younger man, this was fine, and I learned some good game design lessons from this arrangement. But as I get older, and my free time diminishes, I have come to a realization on my relationship with Prepping the Game and Running the Game.

Good prep is needed to run a good game, but Prepping the Game will always be less fun than Running the Game.

I want to minimize my prep time as much as possible, and I want to use that time to not only prep cool encounters, but also prep the NPCs, the locations, the plot beats, and the world history.

Pathfinder handles all of that system work so that I can focus on the story. Almost every monster has an ability other than a punch. I can pull out a couple monsters, build a severe encounter, and know that it will not only be challenging, but will present a puzzle that my players have to solve. And if I want to change things up, add in a subsystem like Hex Crawling, I'm confident that, two thirds of the time, Paizo has already crafted a ruleset that will satisfy me. And if the rules they have made are not to my liking, I can use them as a baseline for my own homebrew, rather than designing something from the ground up.

Also, it's important to mention that, while WOTC figures out new methods to nickel and dime its user base, Paizo puts all of their rules, including classes, monsters, magic items, and subsystems, online for free. The only thing that is not freely available is their adventures.

There's a lot of other things to love, but that's the big picture. I'll leave you with one of my favorite pieces of art from the game. A piece by Halil Ural, depicting the magus Seltyiel mulling over an agreement presented by a Contract Devil.

In Mouthwashing, we see a flavor of retro-futurism that is explicitly hostile. Ship navigational screens that are monochrome. Passwords for essential functions hidden behind UV scanners. Food dispensers require flipping through a recipe book to use. When you have to cut back some of the fire foam, you don't get some high tech laser or saw, you get a classic fireman's axe. The message that the crew is being laid off is delivered by fax machine. There's not even any tech that allows you to communicate with someone on the other side of the ship, all the conversations have to happen person to person. There is next to no technology that eases the burden of the crew. It is a future where innovation is nakedly obsessed with serving corporate interests at the expense of all others.

Imagine if Harry was black, and the knock-on effect it would have on many of your interactions with Revachol. Imagine how differently the lorry driver or Gary would treat you. Imagine the tonal shift your interactions with Measurehead would take. Imagine what Cuno would call you!

Representation is good, and representation does not need to justify itself, but valuing vapid representation over a deliberate artistic choice that asks and answers interesting questions, just because it does not represent your experiences, is bad, and leads to boring, unoriginal art rising to the surface because it has a rainbow-colored buoy attached to it.

There's definitely a joke that could be made out of the op criticizing the race of Harry, and then advocating for a game whose premise is so white it shows up under a UV light, but I'm tired of thinking about it. Pic unrelated.