Sean Merwin

So they would find ways to boost that passive perception to the point where they could no longer fail or it would be very infrequently that they would fail. And then they would want to use passive perception all the time. And what passive perception was meant to do was when you have no reason to search, and look around, here's the chance that you will spot something.

So they want to, while they are actively looking around, want to use their passive perception. And again, that's not what it was there for. So we could talk about the difference between active searching and passively observing, or just passively moving. I'll stop there for a second, Teos, and let you get into it.

And then if all of this question, if this question comes from our conversation about the need to spend actions, the search action, the study action, when also doing other things in combat, you don't remove the problem of doing any of the other things that we talked about. And in fact, you almost make it worse because now you're giving

you're giving this thing a free pass, but you're still making everything else spend some resource to do it. And so you funnel everyone toward the mindset of, okay, if there's a shortcut here, there must be a shortcut elsewhere. And they will either search for that shortcut or demand that shortcut. So yeah, the question still comes back to, fixing a system that needs to account for,

making play engaging without making it punishing.

Very true. So thank you for those questions, Thomas and Snaggy13. Now let's get into our news and commentary section, starting with D&D Direct. Either on the show or at some point we were discussing, oh, they haven't done any sort of D&D Live or D&D anything. And not long after that, D&D Direct was announced. Due to the- Because of us. Because of us, I'm sure.

Due to the magic of temporal podcast, D&D Direct will have already happened when you listen to this, but has not happened yet. It will happen August 27th at 9 a.m. Pacific on YouTube. Wizards will have launched D&D Direct. So we'll talk about it in detail next week. What events are going to be covered? Another peek at the 2024 Player's Handbook. A look at the future of D&D, upcoming products.

More information on Project Sigil. A closed beta coming, and you can still sign up for that closed beta at dndbeyond.com slash project dash sigil. And a talk about the collaboration they're doing with Magic the Gathering to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons.

Next in news, D&D Beyond outlined what would happen between 2014 and 2024, and then they clarified their position, and then they re-clarified their position, and then they slightly changed their position. So I'm going to hand this one over to Teos.

Yeah. As somebody who was a project manager for a software company for a while, we had user groups. If we were planning a big revision, if we were planning on even small changes, We would go to our user group and say, hi, valued users, thank you for being in our user group. Here are the things that we plan on doing.

Please give us your feedback and then we will make our final decisions based on what you have to say, because you are the ones that need to use the software. And it's different for this as opposed to what I was doing, but in some ways it's not. And you call it the summit, I call it a user group. It really helps to get feedback from people who are using this and have been super engaged, right?

You're super users. and your super fans can give you this valuable feedback so you don't put something out, which then kicks in the, you know, the Pinkertons killed two people. Someone thought that the Pinkertons had killed someone. Yeah, I was dealing with that. So that's how this works. And then, rather than solving the problem, you are dealing with these wild, unfounded rumors

and you spend all your energy there and you never get to solve the problem.

It's true. Hey, speaking of staff. Yeah, speaking of staff, D&D is hiring a game designer. And at first you might think, okay, cool, they're hiring a game designer. And then you think, wait a minute, didn't they just lay game designers off like eight months ago and now they're hiring back? So the answer to that is yes.

Some people have justified it by saying, well, they've promoted game designers like Justice Arman, and so they need to refill his position. But also, they didn't need to lay off game designers back then because of the lack of work. We know that they laid these people off because of what the toy division was going through.

And everybody had to lay people off to assuage the shareholders and the board of directors. To get the stock price stabilized or even going back up when you lay off people, we know your stock price goes up. And so, hey, there's a game designer position If you want to be a game designer, you can make $86.7 to $145.8 thousand dollars. So hey, great for you.

Always keep in mind what has happened, not just in the last eight months, but over the last 20 years or however long that Hasbro has owned Wizards of the Coast. If you uproot a family, if you leave a great situation hoping to do this, there is always the chance in less than a year your position will not be there.

Very true. What is also part of the landscape is Tiamat coming to Amazon Prime? Hmm? Amazon has announced an anthology series called Secret Level with each of 15 episodes featuring a different game, and it looks like D&D is one of those games. The trailer showed Tiamat breathing her breath weapons.

Another scene showed a dragon lurking in the shadows, a dwarf and epic landscapes going across the screen. If you saw the show Love, Death and Robots, then this is the same studio and the show will premiere on December 10th.

So tell me about Paizo. We had mentioned before about its community use policy. Could a big company or even a small company reverse its course on a decision?