Rascal NewsDungeons & Dragons 2024 is now officially D&D 5.5e, still isn’t a new edition
Wizards of the Coast set to rebuild D&D Beyond, add more features
PowerUpsYa disponible el nuevo starter set de Dungeons & Dragons, Heroes of the Borderlands
#Noticias #DDBeyond #DnD #DungeonsDragons #HeroesOfTheBorderlands
What Do I Know?D&D Beyond 3rd Party Spotlight: The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying
Continuing my look at D&D Beyond 3rd party implementation, I’m going to look at one that is potentially even more extensive than the Illrigger class, which is meant to work with standard D&D campaigns. Specifically, I’m looking at Lord of the Rings Roleplaying from Free League and how it translates to D&D Beyond.
While the Lord of the Rings Roleplaying rules utilize the 5e SRD, there are some deviations from the core assumptions of Dungeons & Dragons. Many familiar elements of 5e SRD exist in some form, but they are remixed in different places. The product includes the following:
- Seven heroic cultures instead of species
- Six callings instead of classes
- New weapons and tools
- Over forty Virtues instead of Feats
- Twenty NPC and monster stat blocks
This package includes the entire text of the Lord of the Rings Roleplaying book in electronic form and all of the product’s artwork. We’ll look at a few other site sections and how this source is implemented there.
Character Creation
The standard process for character creation in The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying is in this order:
- Culture
- Calling
- Ability Scores
- Gear
D&D Beyond goes in this direction:
- Calling
- Background
- Culture
- Ability Scores
- Equipment
It’s worth noting that the backgrounds from the LOTR RPG book do not appear as part of the Background section of the character creator. Because the backgrounds are all specific to a particular Heroic Culture, they are implemented essentially as Species traits. But Backgrounds aren’t removed from the process, so you still choose a standard D&D Background, and you’ll need to ensure that anyone making a character doesn’t add a Background at that step.
You may also want to shut off all of the optional material except for Free League because, with all the options enabled, you have to scroll far to find the Callings and Heroic Cultures on those pages.
One thing that becomes apparent early on is that the Character Creation process doesn’t accommodate the changes to skills in LOTR RPG. Arcana, Religion, and Survival aren’t skills in LOTR RPG, and Old Lore takes the place of History. Riddle, Explore, Hunting, and Travel are all added to the skill list. But not in the character creation process. None of the specific skills for this product are present. That means when you’re creating characters, you see things like this:
- Captain–missing one skill, they should be able to choose
- Champion–missing one skill they should be able to choose
- Messenger–missing five skills; they should be able to choose
- Scholar–missing three skills they should be able to choose
- Treasure Hunter–missing three skills they should be able to choose
- Warden–Missing three skills, they should be able to choose
Among the Heroic Cultures that get skills, the following happens:
- Rangers of the North–five of the seven skills they can choose from aren’t present, and of their two options, they can only choose from two options
- Lindon Elf gets a choice of three skills; Only two show up as choices
You can add custom skills to the character sheet once you finish making the character, but to have the proper number of skills, you need to leave some of the skills you can choose during character creation unchosen.
The entire list of languages is present whenever you can choose a language, but a section says Free League. So it will help to know what company makes the 3rd party game material you’re using, which probably isn’t a problem if you’re reading this, but it may be for your players that you want to be able to build characters in D&D Beyond.
Unlike languages, there isn’t a list of tools or musical instruments available in the setting. Sometimes, you’ll only have a limited list of tools, but musical instruments are usually wide open, and some tool proficiencies are also.
Some character options give you Expertise on skills if you select the skill twice. The drop-down will say something like “add skill” and “already have skill,” but it doesn’t know if you have picked that skill in the other part of the process. Additionally, if you take the option to gain Expertise, it doesn’t show up in the skills list; it shows up as one of your character traits, just showing what double your proficiency bonus is.
Each Heroic Culture has a standard of living that provides base gear. That base gear is not added to your character sheet when you take your Culture, presumably because nothing in the “Species” section allows the character builder to add gear.
When you level up, the character builder works fine for adding in virtues, which serve the same function as feats, but you also get Rewards at various levels. If you take a reward that gives you a Grevious Weapon, for example, you’ll have a section in your traits that explains what a Grevious Weapon does, but it doesn’t add one to your equipment. Those items do not exist as items for D&D Beyond, meaning you’ll need to either remember the trait and add it yourself or make a custom item to represent it.
Because the character sheet uses the default D&D character sheet, things like Fellowship and Shadow Points must be typed into the sheet under notes. Nothing stops you from making a character from 11th to 20th level, but this is a smaller problem than some of these issues since the DM will be involved when the PCs level up.
Equipment
The following equipment shows up as items from the LOTR RPG filter in D&D Beyond:
- Axe (Simple Melee Weapon)
- Battle Axe (Martial Melee Weapon)
- Bowls (Tool)
- Clarinet (Tool)
- Darts (Tool, not as weapons)
- Fiddle (Tool)
- Hammer (Simple Melee Weapon)
- Harp (Tool)
- Heavy Hammer (Martial Melee Weapon)
- Leather Corslet (Light Armor)
- Leather Shirt (Light Armor)
- Long Sword (Martial Melee Weapon)
- Mattock (Martial Melee Weapons)
- Pipe (Tool)
- Pocket-Handkerchief (Adventuring Gear)
- Quoits (Tool)
- Rations, Cram (Adventuring Gear)
- Ring-Mail (Heavy Armor)
- Scale Armor (Medium Armor)
- Staff (Simple Melee Weapon)
- Sword (Martial Melee Weapon)
- Trumpet (Tool)
One problem that arises is that when character creation lets you pick from multiple weapons, there is a section that says Free League, but if the item is the same as its base D&D version, it doesn’t appear in the Free League section.
Monsters
There are 32 stat blocks that come up if you filter Monsters for LOTR RPG, including NPCs and monsters. The stat blocks look just like standard monster stat blocks in the monster section of the site, and it seems like everything from the books made it into the monster section.
Final Thoughts
Because The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying is so specialized in some areas, I wondered how well D&D Beyond would manage the system. I was reasonably sure we wouldn’t see custom skills. Still, I appreciate that they added backgrounds into Cultures to implement them since backgrounds in the game are tied explicitly to a given Culture. But that leaves a whole section to skip with Backgrounds, and I suspect that LOTR Backgrounds being a Species trait is what keeps characters from getting the gear they need to get.
You can do the following and make a character:
- Ignore Background
- Don’t assign skills if you want to use a skill from the LOTR RPG
- Look up what gear is native to the setting in the source to make sure you don’t take out of setting gear
- Look up what gear you should get for your standard of living from the source
- Add the custom skills that you wanted to take when you didn’t assign skills in character creation
- Manually assign any of your skills with Expertise
- You can probably track your Fellowship and your Patron under Allies
- Once you get Shadow Points, you can add that under Other
- If you want to use your Rewards, you can create a custom item with the traits it should have, or you can create a custom action to represent using it
Many people use character creators to ensure they don’t lose track of some step of the process. Brand new players may want a character builder that only shows them what they are meant to use. This isn’t going to help on either of those fronts. While it’s good to know what the actual rules say and not just trust that the character builder will guide you, especially for new players who haven’t looked at the rules yet, this process could be confusing.
I know WotC wanted to be able to say they had a Lord of the Rings option for D&D on D&D Beyond and that this is part of their “Worlds Beyond” for D&D. If you primarily use D&D Beyond for reference, this should work fine for you. If you want this to provide you with the same character-building and electronic character sheet experience you have for a standard D&D game, this doesn’t probably won’t satisfy you. I honestly wish they had held off on releasing this when they had a solution for more of the issues here. Once they get the initial sales hit from this product, I feel it may not get additional development.
If you would like to help support the site and encourage my reckless RPG spending, you can use the affiliate links below. Thanks!
#008000 #993300 #DD #DD5e #DDBeyond #DungeonDragons #FreeLeague #LOTR #TheLordOfTheRings #TheLordOfTheRingsRoleplaying #WizardsOfTheCoast #WOTC
D&D Beyond 3rd Party Spotlight: The Illrigger
With all the new 3rd party content appearing on D&D Beyond and knowing some of the site’s quirks, I wanted to look at some of that content to see how well it’s been implemented. The first 3rd party product I’m looking at is the Illrigger. Because some companies have sold piecemeal items on the site, I wanted to clarify this is the whole Illrigger supplement produced by MCDM. That includes the following:
- The Illrigger class
- Five subclasses
- Six Combat Masteries (basically alternate Fighting Styles)
- Eight new spells
- Five NPC stat blocks for Retainer characters
- Two Magic Items
The Illrigger supplement, including the introduction and the accompanying fiction, appears in D&D Beyond. All the material above is covered precisely as it was in the supplement but formatted for electronic display. That’s how the material in the Illrigger works in the Sources section of the site. Let’s look at the other integrations.
Character Creation
Illrigger appears in the character builder options as long as Partnered Content and MCDM are checked. I created an Illrigger with all 18 stats at 20th level to see how the class abilities and the subclasses were implemented.
The base features all display correctly. There are boxes to check the number of seals you have and a counter to track for your Infernal Conduit Dice once you have that feature. The features set up to reset on a short rest reset on a short rest, and the ones that reset on a long rest reset on a long rest.
Only two of your Combat Mastery abilities would reflect as passive boosts on your character sheet. Bravado changes your unarmed armor class as expected when it is chosen. Lies allows you to pick one type of weapon and use your Charisma bonus to attack instead of Strength or Dexterity. There is no option to select that weapon or a way to display what your Charisma-based attack will look like.
If you multiclass into Illrigger, D&D Beyond shows the proper proficiencies granted by taking a level of the class. The subclasses have varying degrees of implementation. None of the subclasses with a once-per-long or short rest ability get the single check box that other rules and elements that function similarly have. The Architect of Ruin’s spellcasting works fine, similar to the Eldritch Knight or the Arcane Trickster. Other than its once-per-rest abilities, the Hellspeaker gets checkboxes for its two abilities with multiple uses. Neither the Painkiller nor the Sanguine Knight have check boxes for their multiple-use abilities. All subclasses have text on the character sheet indicating the correct number of uses; there is just nothing to track it with.
Spells
Other classes can also use several of the Illrigger spells. The spells will appear if you search for them in the Spells section of the Game Rules. Unfortunately, the spells only show up in the spell lists for the 2024 version of the classes that gain those spells. If you’re using a 2014 class, the spells aren’t available.
Magic Items
There are two magic items included in the supplement. One magic item is a “template” magic item that can be applied to any weapon, and D&D Beyond treats this like it does any other special weapon property. The potion will also appear if you search for it under Magic Items.
Monsters
Each of the five retainers has a stat block in the Source section of D&D Beyond, but there are no entries for them in the Monsters section if you search for them. This is the same issue that Flee Mortals! has, where none of the Retainers or Companion Creatures appear in the Monsters section, only in the Source section of the complete book.
Final Thoughts
I picked this up mainly to see how D&D Beyond would handle some of the third-party content that WotC seems eager to offer through the service. I know that D&D Beyond can be a little rigid in how it expects rules to work, and even the 2024 rules seemed to be a challenge for the site in some areas.
I usually don’t bring price up except in extreme circumstances, but I think it’s fair to point out that the Illrigger costs $14.99 on both D&D Beyond and Roll20. Although Roll20 has implemented the Retainers from Flee Mortals!, the Retainers from the Illrigger are not available to use from the monster section of the site, either. Roll20 only has the Illrigger spells in the Illrigger’s spell list, although you could drag and drop the spell into a character sheet to make it available, but that’s not an ideal solution. The lesson here is that no electronic solution has fully implemented the content in the book.
Given that they cost the same amount, I don’t want to cut Roll20 more slack than D&D Beyond, but it does feel like part of the appeal of D&D Beyond is that it’s the official source for all things D&D, but in reaching out for 3rd party content, D&D Beyond may not be flexible enough to meet the demands of the material they are presenting. The Illrigger isn’t that strange compared to other classes. It has no twists and turns that deviate from the 5e SRD norm. But it still has some bumps in the road for its implementation. We’ll be looking at something else that does stretch D&D Beyond’s assumptions a bit more soon.
If you want to help support me doing silly things like buying products just so I can analyze them for articles like this, you can feed my habit by using the affiliate links below. Thanks!
#3rdParty #DD #DD2024 #DDBeyond #d20 #DungeonsDragons #Illrigger #MCDM #rpgs #ttrpgs
