Fwiw all the last few ranger designs (starting way back with Tasha’s, not even the 2024 rules) have dumped the favored enemy (and favored environment) mechanics, presumably both for being too colonialist but also for being overspecific and annoying to use. They always doublesucked in this narrative + mechanical way.
Now the ranger’s problem is that they didn’t replace that identity with anything else, so the fantasy the class is designed to service is ??? and it kind of flounders around in the design space as a result.
Weirdly that dude has his own d&d knock off that he was plugging via pateron or something like that and it seemed like it carried over uncoupling the stat bonuses from species from the recent official books.
then we will have plenty of time to pick up rocks off the ground and rotting leavings from behind a restaurant so that we have more barter material of comparable value next time so you don’t just give him all the gold on the donkey.
After our last session I decided (or reaffirmed something long-understood but recently disregarded) that using a pre-made adventure can be pretty boring, especially if you try to cleave closely to the text. Obvious mistake. My bad. I just don’t know how to give life to the necessarily neutral vibe of any adventure module that intends to be usable (see, the lavishly produced WotC modules seem impossible to actually run by comparison). So I will just try to get back to the inventive space that is sort of freewheeling off really sparse prep or towards a basic pre-planned direction. I’ve done that before for years and I am capable of it. But for some reason I became scared of doing it that way while trying to run B/X. Lack of familiarity I guess. Overt trust, perhaps, placed upon the air of authority of bullshit youtube videos I was watching or the awful reddit advice you get by googling… never trust a nerd online to tell you anything true (unless you saw it here on SB, of course).
I am about to start running what I intend to be a highly modular campaign where I run adventures I buy for 3 bucks on DM Guild or whatever. I’ll let you know how it goes
I like the idea of it. There’s a designer appeal in seeing how others do it. Like, don’t mess too much with the recipe so you can see what the dish is like before you add salt or whatever. But that’s assuming these designers want you to run it as written. Maybe they are. But I know if I was writing adventures for people to run that I would apply a variable highlight to things, rendering the shit that is really central to the adventure with a heavy hand and the less important stuff in a lighter one that keeps things faint enough to fill in.
But it’s also nice to just have a stack of adventures to pass through on your way here or there.
I guess based on extremely little data that I just assume I’m good enough to chunk out story stuff and replace it with something more relevant to my PCs on the fly. Mostly I’m looking for dungeon layouts, level appropriate battles, tricks & traps & puzzles, dungeon design (the writer has already thought about why there’s gnolls over here and bugbears over there so I don’t have to), etc. If someone else has done all that I can spend 100% of my brainpower on quest hooks and actually listening to the players & responding to what they do.
I’ve been able to inject life in B/X modules by treating wandering monster rolls as an opportunity to introduce little bits of character interaction rather than pure combat. Orcs having a drinking contest, gnome engineers doing the high fantasy equivalent of tearing the copper wire out of the walls. Then if the players pass them by without murder, make a note to have them reappear elsewhere and doing something else. The nonlinearity of these early dungeon designs is a real boon in this case. But having these little characterful vignettes does a lot to give texture to the module that is otherwise absent
But yeah I prefer using my own work over anything in a module directly
yeah that ended up being the best part of the rules cyclopedia hexcrawl game i ran a few years ago, emergent storytelling through natural repercussions of nonviolent random encounters
