Monster Manual

And I also, with a group of people, play first edition D&D rules as written.

I'm literally standing next to a bookshelf with the Fiend Folio, the Monster Manual, the Unearthed Arcana, the Dungeon Master's Guide, all that stuff from the 70s and early 80s.

And Both of those systems and all the ones in between have a lot of surface complexity that drives a lot of people away.

And really, the secret to D&D is only one person in the group has to master the rules, right? And everybody else can just kind of play along and be told, this is what you can do here, and this is how it works, and here's the math, roll these dice.

Like, they do scale a lot with the CR of the monster, even between similar creatures.

So, like, a, a knight or a champion or whatever they could, they're like champion warrior, whatever they're called in the new Monster Manual, can have hit points that vary between 20 on the low end to, like, 85 hit points or higher on the high end, which starts to feel like, yeah, this mortal person is still standing after you've punished it with all the same things that killed this guard over here instantly.

So I'm curious, what are, what are your takes first on bounded accuracy?

So my gut reaction, and this might be wrong, but my gut reaction to that is that it's, it's just the same problem upside down.

Argyle has been a big part of the art for D&D for a long time.

He has done artwork for the Complete Champion... book from 2007, the fourth edition Dungeon Master's Guide in 2008, and Monster Manual from 2008.

From 2009, he did Primal Power, Player's Handbook 2, and The Master's Guide 2.

Back when he was playing 1E or 2E, he probably never thought that he'd be drawing for 4E.

Um, so where did you draw inspiration for their names, your characters' names?

Um, basically the character of Darina, I looked up dragon names, um, in the Monster Manual that we have here for D&D.

Okay.

And her name literally means gift.

It's the same system.

You know what? I'm not going to argue with you because, like, I've been on this whole trend with my own content where I'm, like, diving into the older editions to, like, do similar things to pointing out where, like, I'm someone who only played 5e and I'm, like, trying to figure out what is the lore of, like, all these characters that are the title people in these games and, like, how did we get to the point where golems are spread out across the entire new monster manual?

Yes, some of your golems... episode there yeah

thank you yeah thanks for watching

It's really weird to say that, but the fact that golems specifically are something that D&D put into fantasy media completely.

They exist in fantasy media because of Gary Gygax's choice to include them in Greyhawk.

And we've got to the point where they are so neglected that they're just spread out across the Monster Manual and they don't have any care or intention put into what they are.

how to make them or anything like that.

And I was like, yes, I'll take over, sure thing.

So I immediately bought the DMG and the Monster Manual and just jumped into it.

And that was five years ago.

I've been pretty much a forever DM ever since then.

And I can give you like behind the scenes knowledge of that sort of stuff.

Immediately after that, I go into a Robert Reads where I read through one of the D&D modules or D&D books.

I've read through the Monster Manual.

I've read through Xanathar's Guide to Everything.

haven't had a lot of us play cleric.

So in lieu of necessarily changing the stat block around, although I could change the stat block around, I don't know if there's something from the Monster Manual or the Faerun books, because I want to stick to using 5.5 edition.

If there's something I can use that I could replace her, which it's tricky because she's like a high-level cleric.

Well, let's see.

Saved! But yeah, the feature also lets us ignore resistance to cold damage on our attacks and spells, which is nice, potentially.

There is a lot of cold-resistant monsters in the 5.5 Monster Manual, especially.

Our spell list gives some damage bumps, too.

The Ice Knife spell isn't bad for a little AoE burst.