The new Forgotten Realms books are a great product if you’re a longtime Faerûn fanatic like myself. However, they also bring to light symptoms of a new design philosophy that supports Dungeons & Dragons’ 2024 5e revamp — one that I’m not enjoying very much.
I got the first hint of that from Vecna: Eve of Ruin, the big adventure that was supposed to celebrate 50 years of D&D history and say farewell to 5e in its 2014 incarnation. I had high hopes for the book, and I ended up never opening it again after the first read. The plot is dull, setting players on a 200-plus page railroad romp that resembles a bad platformer video game rather than a great RPG.
I had hoped that at least some of the locations in Eve of Ruin could be salvaged, so I eagerly dove into the latest iteration of D&D’s most infamous dungeon, the Tomb of Horrors, presented in this book as the Tomb of Wayward Souls. The true horror, however, lay in the description of some of the most complex puzzles and traps: The book suggests that, if the players are having trouble with these obstacles, the DM should simply tell them what to do. I heard Gary Gygax’s ghost scream in anguish at that moment.
Not every book can be Curse of Strahd, however, so I still held faith for D&D 2024, until I got my hands on the trifecta of Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster’s Manual. After careful reading and playtesting, I came to the conclusion that I really don’t like this. For a long time, I couldn’t exactly point my finger at what was wrong, besides the game being even more unbalanced to the player’s side. A rules issue, and nothing that can’t be solved with some house rules — or so I thought.
After the core books, the first real big release for D&D 2025 landed in November 2025 with Forgotten Realms: Heroes of Faerûn and Forgotten Realms: Adventures in Faerûn. If you read D&D articles on this site regularly, you know how much of a Realms fan I am. I had very high expectations, and as you can read in my review of the books, in terms of lore and setting, these books were mostly a success. Like Eve of Ruin, however, they aim to streamline the D&D experience as a whole, but what do we lose for the sake of making the game more accessible? Is this going to plague the current incarnation of D&D for its entire run?
The early section of Adventures in Faerûn contains something called Epic Destinies. These are suggestions for the DM to set up a character arc with each player before the campaign starts, deciding on milestones said character will have to achieve to reach their “epic destiny.” The book is literally telling the DM that handholding players is good, and it should always be done.
I’m not one of those DMs who like making life hard for their table. I don’t abide by the idea that D&D is a competition between the Dungeon Master and the players; I see it as a collaborative storytelling game, where “collaboration” is the key to everything. However, I also think that players should feel constantly challenged. Stakes and risks are what make stories good and heartfelt. Players have to feel that their decisions matter, for better or worse. If they can’t figure out a puzzle, I’m not going to say: “It’s all right guys, you tried your best, here is the solution.”
In the same way, I’m not going to come out during session 0 with a player and say: “Hey, so where do you see this character going? You want to be a king? Sure, let’s map that out!” We play this game with random elements (dice rolls) because we like not knowing how things will turn out. The best campaigns are those that develop organically from players interacting with the world without knowing the outcome. There’s nothing wrong with shooting for a crown, but I’m not going to give you an exact roadmap at the start.
Now, these may look like marginal elements that are easy to get rid of, but I believe they are also symptoms of a design philosophy that wants to make this game as easy as possible. Further evidence comes from the adventures included in the new Forgotten Realms books. There’s a whopping 50 of them, but I would have a hard time calling these “adventures.” Each is one page or half-page-long, with half of the space taken by a map. They include a “situation,” a blurb to tell the DM what this is about, a “hook” to get the characters involved, and then a sequence of “encounters” that are almost always fights (with some skill-based tasks in between). They can all be summarized as: get the quest; go to this place; fight monsters repeatedly; win.
The idea behind this is to make playing the game easier and faster. A DM can pick one of these and with almost zero preparation sit at the table and have the players go through it like they would a level of a roguelike game. I’m aware that setting up a game of D&D isn’t easy, for the DM and players both. However, this attempt to speed up and simplify things reduces the game to a sequence of fights so that players can show off their cool class powers.
I thought this could be a specific feature of Adventures in Faerûn. 5e’s campaign settings always contained one or more introductory adventures, so perhaps the designers decided to try something different. However, I’m afraid that this is going to be the standard from now on.
I checked Netheril’s Fall, the digital adventure included in the Forgotten Realms Ultimate Bundle. I was excited about this chance to revisit one of my favorite “bad” adventures from the past and to witness Karsus’s Folly again. However, this book is not an “adventure” in the traditional D&D sense. It details some information about the setting, including two Netherese cities. It tells you how to run a game set in the distant, mythical past of Faerûn, with magic experiments going wild and a decadent magocracy on the verge of collapse. However, the “adventures” contained inside are exactly the same as those you find in Adventures in Faerûn: one-page-long lists of encounters.
Sure, the book gives you enough info to build your own adventures in Netheril, but that’s the job of a campaign setting. From a D&D “adventure,” I’d like to get a long-ish, detailed, and extensive, well, adventure, that I can run by the book if I want to. I don’t think that chaining any number of these mini-adventures over several sessions would make my players particularly satisfied.
Indeed, Wizards of the Coast has not been publishing a lot of adventures in the traditional sense for a long time. The standard for 5e has been big campaign books such as Curse of Strahd, Rime of the Frostmaiden, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, etc., which require a lot of time to be completed, but at the same time present a fully fleshed-out setting to use as you wish. I loved these, but I also wouldn’t mind more focused products in the style of 3e’s adventures. However, if Netheril’s Fall is an example of what we’re getting in D&D 2025, I’m not looking forward to that.
Looking back at the core books, I now realize the signs have always been there. Every class has been redesigned to make things easier for the players: fewer decisions to make, fewer risks. On the other side of the table, DMs are being encouraged to handhold their players at every stage, be it storytelling or dungeon crawling. From a design perspective, I get the impression that the goal is to make D&D more and more similar to a boardgame that you can pick up randomly and play over a gaming night.
I see the allure in this. Maybe you’re playing a long campaign with the goal of making your character, Sir Croak, the king of Frogtopia, but it’s hard to schedule a regular session. With milestones set up in advance, you can get the Scepter of Batrachia this week, and wait until everyone’s schedules align next to challenge the evil usurper, King Hopper. Or maybe the DM didn’t have time to prep, so he selects a mini-adventure and slots it into the campaign somehow.
However, this entire design direction doesn’t speak to my role-playing heart. I don’t think D&D should necessarily be fast or easy; there’s already plenty of RPG games on the market that successfully do these things. Complexity isn’t something to be shunned, in game design or in life.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
