As you may know, I write "guides" to the 5e D&D adventures. When working on a guide, I sit there, go through the new book page-by-page, and try to boil down the basic things a DM needs to know to run it.
My main goal is to tell the DM, in as few words as possible, everything they need to know to run the adventure for their group.
Usually this involves writing a summary, identifying the parts of the adventure that could cause the DM to stumble, answering questions that aren't immediately clear in the text, and page numbers - lots and lots of page numbers.
I put in the page numbers because, if you're using actual physical books, you're going to need to be looking up lots of monsters, magic items, and little rules. Some of the monsters will be in the adventure book, many will not.
Page Flipping
So I imagine you sitting at the table with the adventure, the PH, the DMG, and the Monster Manual (also possibly Volo's and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes), immediately I feel this sense that you're going to be overwhelmed with all that flipping, while trying to create a seamless experience for the players.
A good chunk of being a good DM is preventing boredom, right? I end up writing these giant guides trying to help cover you as best I can. But it still doesn't feel like enough.
My guide to Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden is 100 pages long. One hundred pages! The adventure itself, minus the stuff in the back of the book, is 250 pages. My guide is a lot of extra reading to do!
When that guide was done, I sat for a while and thought about whether there was a better way to write these things. Should I include less information? What is really essential? Do you need all those page numbers?
The Mad Mage Was Too Much For Me
I thought back to Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage. I tried to write a guide to that one, but gave up by level 3. It was too dense. The wall of text killed me. How do I help you run that one? What do you need to know? Are massive piles of page numbers really helpful? How do I condense this thing?
I shelved that guide. I'd go back to it every few months, try to work on it, and then get overwhelmed again. Heck, I ran it online for a short time, until dungeon fatigue set it.
Exploring D&D Beyond
Then, a few weeks back, I went to D&D Beyond to look at the Essentials Kit stuff. There's a code in the box that gives you the D&D Beyond version of the adventure, Dragon of Icespire Peak, for free. There are also sequels to that adventure available as well.
I sat there, shocked. Why haven't I been using this site more? There are LINKS to all that stuff I've been providing page numbers for, right there. I went and looked at Dungeon of the Mad Mage, the adventure that killed me mentally, on the site. Check it out.
First off... It has very clean versions of the artwork. As a big fan of D&D art, this is good for me.
Second, I find the text much more readable. I can scroll down and see how concise it is. In book form, it feels more like a wall of text where I keep checking, "how many more pages do I have to get through?" On this site, it's just a clean scroll, frequently broken up by links, charts, and side stuff.
Hover over the knock spell:
Look in the knock entry - there's a link to the arcane lock entry!
Later in the same paragraph, there's a bandit. Hover over it:
Then there are links to other areas of the dungeon that these bandits might run to. Click on it and we jump right to that section.
Next paragraph, a character might get frightened. The conditions are one of the things I have to look up the most (PH pg 291, am I right?). Here... just hover over it:
Boom. Frightened. All of it.
Now there is one major, obvious, hurdle to all this. But before we get to it, I want to show you one more thing.
You get every map - both a DM version AND a player version. Yes, you can save them to your computer.
One Problem
So I'm sitting here, kicking myself for not using this site more, but also in a bit of a quandary. Instead of writing all those page numbers in my guides, should I just tell people to buy the D&D Beyond version of the adventure?
This is the hurdle: You have to buy the digital versions of the books on D&D Beyond.
Each book is $29.99. You could buy smaller chunks - items, classes, whatever, for $1.99.
So if you buy just Dungeon of the Mad Mage on D&D Beyond, a lot of those links aren't going to work until you actually buy the D&D Beyond versions of the core rulebooks.
In some cases, you can buy a physical book on Amazon for less than the D&D Beyond price.
What the heck do we do with this? Do you have the money to buy the D&D Beyond versions? Because honestly, it's worth it, to me. In fact, if everyone had access to them, it would completely change my approach to writing a guide. It would make all of our lives a million times easier.
Work Resumes
I can say that, because I now have access to Mad Mage on this site, I've actually resumed work on the guide. No idea when it'll be done... not any time soon. But I don't feel overwhelmed by it any more.
I also figured out a new approach to making the guide, which I think will be more helpful and drop the page count by a bit.
If I wrote the Guide to the Mad Mage in the same style that I used with the others, it would probably be 150 pages long. To me, that's almost useless as a guide. I want you to be able to flip through it in no time and understand everything you need to know.
Other Content
D&D Beyond has more stuff worth talking about - particularly the character builder, the Twitch add-on (which is amazing), and the articles by James Haeck (from what I can tell, he is pumping out like 3-4 huge genuinely useful articles a week all by himself). I feel like I should do an article on Haeck's work. That guy is a machine.
For today, I just wanted to know where I'm at and to give you an alert, in case maybe you don't even know that D&D Beyond is an option.
Quick Note
I am a bit amused by this. Last week I wrote a review of the D&D Essentials Kit. I and others online pointed out that you could buy the Essentials Kit on Amazon for $8, which is a ridiculously good price and perfect to buy for the holidays. I just checked to see the current price:
They're sold out! Price is up to $15.
Also, if you are thinking about buying a book on D&D Beyond, they are running a 15% off sale through December 6th. Coupon Code: DDB15.
Thanks for reading!