The single worst gloopy article I’ve ever read (a summary of my problem with my summary of my problem with Wild Beyond the Witchlight)
I’m not very intelligent, creatures.
I’m blowing the whistle. I’m calling myself out. This article fucking sucks.
Alright, maybe that’s a little harsh. It does suck though. There are two main problems:
First: The author is a dick head, and the article is written like crap. That’s normal though, you get that with every gloopy 💖
Second: The article fundamentally misunderstands the exploration pillar of RPGs, presenting a half-baked ideology as fact, dragging 5e through the mud as it goes.
Okay real talk, when I wrote this article I was in the middle of figuring out hexcrawls. Really the entirety of old-school exploration based play in general. There always seemed to be a piece missing, and I didn’t realize what it was until I read this article about adventure as intrinsic reward by Monsters and Manuals that it all clicked together.
Actually, I came here to post about the solo play I’ve been doing recently, and the generative jungle hex crawl I’ve been moving through. That’s what really made it all click together. However, I wanted to check out the old witch light article, just a bit of light reading. I realize now, with the benefit of hindsight, that that article tries to present a method of exploration based play (under the guise of advice to fix witchlight) that doesn’t really understand what it wants. It still has a piece missing.
So, to try to clarify my own points, I want to dismantle my old ones.
Sub-point: Shut the Fuck Up
Pretentious Quote
Dude, shut up. What is the phrase “I am not immune to ego” doing in this article. You outed yourself as a back seat gamer by trying to avert suspicions you’re a back seat gamer. Look, the entire point of the gloopy is that I’m unfiltered on here. That’s why the writing sucks. But man, if I type shit like this again please call me out on my shit.
Alright, couldn’t resist. On to the RPG stuff.
The author not understand exploration
The author misunderstanding exploration
The unwritten point here is that there is a difference between exploring a place and traveling to a place. Now, I actually believe this, aimless wandering is different to knowing where you want to be, but the idea that knowing where you want to go makes random encounters pointless is erroneous.
Random encounters, when handled properly, are a generative game mechanic. You can learn things about the world based on the things you encounter, and so every encounter can be an interesting experience, no matter when it happens.
Where this idea has gotten lost in modern RPGs is that random encounters are combat. Indeed, combat is always on the table, it’s a monster fighting game. Reaction tables and common sense on the part of the DM can reduce the chances a fight breaks out, and some of the encounters in the book are not combat oriented at all, like the abandoned raft.
Is this copyright infringement?
So, I stand by the point that having random fights while you’re going somewhere is annoying and pointless, especially in 5th edition where there is no tension to your combat encounters because you’re always going to win. (YES I know that some people like knowing they’re going to win, but this is an old school blog.)
Random Encounters should be random
Bad suggestion
Dude, stop. You should have the foresight to realise having encounters be random or fixed in place are fundamentally different.
Look, having the encounters be random means every time you play is different. You’re playing to find out what happens, not just in a “where did my players choose to go” sense but also “what found them in the fairy tale woods” sense. I feel this makes the adventure more magical, more on theme.
I do stand by the point that a wilderness exploration procedure is required to make this adventure shine. Actually, I’m not so sure procedure is right word. I think what it really needs is bounds - how long can the characters travel before checking for a random encounter? What are the chances an encounter occurs?
Having random encounters can bring the world alive. There are things moving around in Hither that aren’t the PCs. Interesting things they can interact with. Things that can interfere with their plans, even if they’re just traveling from point A to point B, and change the course of the whole campaign. They should provide the players with nice actionable information, give them something fun to interact with.
This kind of chaos that comes from random encounters is what keeps exploration and travelling fun and fresh, instead of annoying bumps in the road.
Maps aren’t so bad
I like drawing my own maps. In my Saltmarsh game at the moment I have my own crappy little map of saltmarsh I’m tracking our progress in. I like figuring out where we are and what’s where, it’s part of hte fun for me.
That’s why I reacted so harshly to the map when we first received it. I felt like it stripped away all my wonderlust, and closed the whole forest down. To be fair, I think having the names of all the locations isn’t great, because that’s out of character information.
I think having a map can actually enhance exploration, and I should have known this when I wrote the witchlight article. In my Descent into Avernus game, the map of Avernus was the backbone of the whole game. We would look at a point on the map and think “that looks cool! I wonder what the hell that thing is!”
The map is like a trailer. It shows a hint of what’s to come, enough to get your imagination going. It does not, as my previous article seems to think, automatically boil the adventure down into a mundane checklist. The map can only do that if you let it. That’s not witchlights problem, that’s mine.
At least your heart’s in the right place, you asshole.
Saving face
Agency, Piecing together information, and discovery. I made that line up as I wrote it (as I do most of my points actually) but I think it holds up. Those are pretty good tenets to aim for when you’re writing an adventure I think.
The actual core of witchlights problem, similar to the problem of my article, is a misunderstanding of what it’s aiming for. Yes, teleporting locations in front of PCs who are exploring renders the whole point of exploration (at least as defined above) as moot. Why, then, was it included in this exploration based adventure?
5th edition is about as competent as The Gloopy RPG blog. It kinda has a grasp on its own material, but is just missing so much that it can’t help but be a bit shit. At least the gloopy is just one random guy on the internet and not the biggest RPG company on the planet.
5th edition adventures have a history of doing this weird “go to an NPC, get pointed to another NPC, repeat” structure. The Alexandrian talks about this way more astutely than I ever could (find the heading “Cargo Cult.”) Thus, the adventure includes a little section about how to make sure your party gets to the next NPC.
No! What you need is a paradigm shift. Let go! Give the players freedom to express their agency. Set up hither as a situation, not a plot, at let your random encounters supplement their exploration.
THAT is my problem with The Wild Beyond the Witchlight. It hasn’t let go, and the entire adventure is suffocating because of it.
I think that sums it up better than “5e bad!”