Sean Merwin

What really got me interested was then after I'd heard about it and said, oh, that's cool. We should definitely do that. is that Philippe Antoine Menard, Chatty DM, said that he had left, who makes Assassin's Creed? Ubisoft. He left Ubisoft to start or get in on this new project. And this is the project that he was working on. That's awesome.

So he announced that he had been or is either the main designer or one of the main designers on this experience. What else did you learn about as you read about this, Teos?

Yep, so here's the twofer that you need to do, folks. Are you ready for this? There is a D&D exhibit at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. I mean, it's a great museum on its own. It's got the Toy Hall of Fame, it's got the Video Game Hall of Fame, where you can play old video games, look at old toys, see this amazing collection, great for kids if you've got kids.

So Rochester's about an hour from Buffalo. Toronto is about an hour from Buffalo. So what you do is you plan a day of it, assuming you can cross the border, and just do both. Get your full D&D thing going. And that's what I hope to do over the next few weeks, because the D&D exhibit at the Strong Museum may close in like February or March. So you're running out of time a little bit on that.

And it's interesting because they use D&D, right? They use Dungeons & Dragons. They use that, which tells me that this is a licensed... Yeah, they use the Yawning Portal Tavern. They use Waterdeep Market. So this is a licensed thing that Wizards of the Coast is behind to a greater or lesser extent.

d and d and its relationship to wizards and its relationship to hasbro is that you know people groups companies may want to license it out for various reasons you may want to license d and d because you want to make d and d baloney and you likely don't need a great deal of work from wizards of the coast on that yeah uh however if you want to make something like this magazine

then it becomes a careful negotiation of, you're not just licensing our name and our IP, you are requiring us to do a lot of work on our end, both through the business side, the marketing side, the design side, right, like you said. And so sometimes, in my case once, Wizards reached out to me to work on a product that I thought was a product for them, but it was really a product for someone else.

And that was this book. Oh, yeah, yeah. The World Builder's Journal of Legendary Adventures. And so this was a third-party product that was licensed through Wizards, but Wizards also supplied the content, or at least some of the content for the book. So when you see these third-party products and go, that's not Wizards, why should I bother getting it? It's not official.

It might be more official than you think.

So just be aware of, and on the working side, there's opportunities out there if you are an expert in the rules, if you're an expert in a particular area, to find these opportunities where you're not doing the licensing yourself, but the licensee or the licensor needs some expertise to fulfill this product's goals. That's really cool.

Mike Merles has a Patreon where he discusses alternative D&D design approaches. His most recent Patreon output talks about death saves. He gives an example of a recent proposal for a new approach to death saves and exhaustion. How did Mike go about this one, Tejas?

Yeah, these these are great questions. And this is a great way to come up with your design. It's it's not.

let me start with what's there and sometimes when as a designer you go out and you start asking these questions people will use the current rules as as etched in stone and therefore their answers are always going to be well i like how it works now so the answer is whatever it is yeah and the the whole reason for asking these questions and the whole reason for designing

new rules is to put all of that aside and say, forget that there is a three death save and then you're dead. Forget right now that there are no penalties that come with a failed death save except getting closer to death. what could we do to make the experience more fun if we changed this and started asking questions? And I would go even further and say, do we even need death saves?

But Mike's already said, I like death saves. So I am going to keep that in there. So let's move forward from this point. And at some point in your design, you also need to do that. You need to start from a foundation and put down the bedrock that you're going to build the rest of this on.

Okay, so what did Mike come up with for some of his thoughts in this?

So, the first thing I'm going to say is... Are we going to critique this right now? Are we going to do this live?

I want to talk about it one step at a time. Yeah, go for it. Because... I like it. Without knowing the full set of rules that go with it.

I just... love mike appreciate all mike's work we're having a designer conversation oh yeah yeah yeah if it if you can no longer count as an enemy or an ally for any effects that requires a redesign of many many things in the system like healing spells maybe but you're still creature it depends

right like like powers that a paladin might have of right if you're right uh you can lay on hands on an ally right if i don't know that it says that right right sure there are things in the game right now that say that yeah i love this i played with this idea of ally for a transformation that we're doing for ghostfire gaming