u/rr3_amrosa

I just had a thought while looking at the new Sallowlands map for CR Age of Umbra. It reminded me of how much wonder and possibility a map could hold, and then I thought "Did GPS kill the the Exploration Pillar of D&D?"

As a child I remember the wonder and magic that maps held for me, even before I was introduced to D&D. I remember drawing treasure maps for toys I had buried in the backyard. If a book had a map in it, I would spend as much time with the map as the text. I would pour over AAA maps, World Atlases, and Hagstrom maps, track routes, imagining journeys of exploration, or imagining military tactics. When I played AD&D I was the party mapper.

And then came GPS, and we all have seemed to get away from thinking about anything other than entering point A to point B. We just listen for it to tell us where to turn.

And we do it now in D&D too. We hand-wave travel and exploration to points of light. We almost never bother with maps unless they are battlemaps for combat. We don't explore anymore, and players don't even expect it, but worst of all they don't seem to miss it or even realize that it should be there in the first place.

It feels like GPS has conditioned us out of the desire to explore. "Tell me the fastest way to get to the place to do the thing." In our games it is "something, something, next combat," or "we go from here to there to consult someone." It feels like we resolve an encounter and enter the next destination into DM GPS, and we end up there. To me, I am starting to realize that it is taking a lot of the wonder and amazement out of the game that I used to have when maps held sway over our lives.

If a Paladin breaks their Oath, but the act is completely selfless and is objectively good, what should happen to them?

The Oathbreaker subclass is completely coded as having given over to an evil or dark act, but there are situations where a Paladin could make a right and just choice, but still be breaking the oath that they made. Oathbreaker doesn't seem to fit that. Should the "punishment" be that the character is converted to a Fighter instead?

The following example will contain spoilers for Critical Role Campaign 4.

>!Ashley Johnson's character, Vaelus (Elf), is an Oath of Vengeance Paladin, a Sister of Sylandri. It would seem that her Oath would be to seek vengeance against those that destroyed her goddess and to defend the artifacts of her dead goddess. However, in Episode 30, Vaelus makes a clear choice to destroy one of Sylandri's artifacts for the good of stabilizing the ritual to anchor a bridge to the Rungjani (Orc) afterlife, allowing the trapped souls of the Orcs to escape the Underworld, where there is a great potential that they could be harnessed for truly evil causes, and proceed to their Afterlife, while also preventing undead from flooding into the Material Plane, possibly at the expense of Elves losing their ability to reach their afterlife.!<

>!While this was objectively a good and selfless act, it is also objectively a complete violation of Vaelus' Oath. Vaelus even declares in the moment of sundering the Artifact and choosing that it should be used for the Rungjani ritual that "Sylandri was wrong!" (Orcs in the world of Aramán are heroic, noble, and have a well established civilization).!<

>!Based on the situation, it would feel wrong to let Vaelus continue as Oath of Vengence without some consequences for her actions. But it would also feel wrong if the consequences were that she became an Oathbreaker, as what she did was not evil, it was just not aligned to her factional Oath. !<

Given that there is a backlog of Adventure maps that need to be converted to QuickPlay, is that a process that could, in some way, be crowdsourced?

I am guessing there is more to it than placing Tokens on the existing maps and adding Fog of War, but, if you could get the community to volunteer to work through the back catalog of Campaigns and Adventures, add to the maps the tokens that need to be added based on the letter of the text, and then save them, this could potentially cut down the time it would take for you to get all of the back catalog of adventures up and running as QuickPlay assets.

I was looking to run a game of The Sunless Citadel from Tales from the Yawning Portal, and when I went to start prepping in Maps VTT, I didn't see the TftYP or maps from the Adventure listed.

u/WOTC_Zac is there a plan to bring TftYP to Maps VTT, and if so, is there an estimate on when we might be seeing that?

For the average campaign setting in 5E and 5.5E, how difficult should it be for player characters to be able to acquire consumed material components for spells, presuming that the party or the player has enough funds to cover the component costs?

The DMGs don't really give any clear guidance for this; I suppose they are assuming that the Gold Piece costs will be the limiting factor. But from a campaign perspective, how rare should components be? In Forgotten Realms terms, would you expect to be able to find 1,500GP of Ruby Dust for Force Cage or 250GP of Incense for Legend Lore in a town like Phandelin, is that something that you could only acquire in a city like Luskan or Neverwinter, is it only available in a large city like Waterdeep, or are they things so rare that they could only be obtained by questing for them?