The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
Challenge Rating Deep Dive – Lazy RPG Talk Show
03 Mar 2025
D&D and RPG news and commentary by Mike Shea of https://slyflourish.com Contents 00:00 Show Start 01:11 Sly Flourish News: City of Arches in Markdown and EPUB 17:55 D&D & RPG News: Blog of Holding Monster Manual 2024 Stats in the Creative Commons 22:34 DM Tip: Challenge Rating Deep Dive 54:19 Patreon Question: Fantastic Locations in Contemporary Worlds Links Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books: City of Arches Blog of Holding 2025 Monster Manual on a Business Card What Does Challenge Rating Mean in D&D 5e? The Lazy Encounter Benchmark
Full Episode
Today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show, we have a big status update on where things stand with the City of Arches. Paul Hughes has a new revision to his Monster Manual 2024 on a business card, which he has released under a Creative Commons license. I'm going to also show my easy alternative for quick stats for monsters. We are going to do a deep dive on the question of what is challenge rating.
When we talk about a monster's challenge rating, what is that exactly? And how does it matter? And what can we do with it? That is also going to dive deep into taking another look at the Lazy Encounter benchmark. And we're going to dive into more questions from the Patreon Q&A all today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show.
I'm Mike Shea, your pal from Sly Flourish, here to talk about all things in tabletop role-playing games. The Lazy RPG Talk Show is brought to you by the patrons of Sly Flourish. Patrons get access to all kinds of tips, tricks, tools, adventures, scenarios, all kinds of things to help them run their fantasy role-playing games.
They get access to the awesome Sly Flourish Discord server where we talk about all things all throughout the week for role-playing games. And you get to help me put on shows like this. To the patrons of Sly Flourish, thank you so much for your outstanding support.
So a couple of months ago, we released the PDF for the City of Arches and we let it stay out there for a while to get any kind of typos or any problems that people saw or anything like that. We let it go out for, I think, about six weeks, maybe even longer than six weeks. And it's even been up for sale. The PDF has been up for sale on the Sly Flourish bookstore.
So you can actually buy it if you did not get it through the Kickstarter. The PDF is now available on it. And we have since updated it based on all the feedback we got. We have a new version, version 1.3.4, which is going to be released to patrons, I think probably Monday, but actually there's a bunch of things happening Monday. So we're going to talk all about it.
Mostly it was tiny, tiny little typos. content wise, there was no real change in the City of Arches book. So I don't even know if we have a change log of the specifics, but it was really like very, very minor typo-y kind of things, except in one circumstance. And that was taking a look at the three stat blocks. It's actually only the two stat blocks that we have in this book.
So I didn't want to put a giant pile of monster stat blocks in this book. We have three stat blocks in it. I didn't want to have a giant monster book in here. I really feel like we have lots of monster books and we should be using those other monster books for this kind of stuff. So but there was one area that we had tried an idea. I tried an idea and and and then changed my mind on it.
And that was with legendary monsters on whether they should use reactions or legendary actions. And given that Wizards of the Coast started with legendary actions, then tried reactions and then seemed to go back again. I said, you know what? I don't want to be the only one out there publishing a book that has reactions for legendary monsters.
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