Strixhaven is better than you think

I'm too old for Harry Potter and I saw the "prom" thing, which is an exclusively American thing (which I am not) and I...I just don't think my group is the target audience.

I asked my players and they found the concept of magic university ridiculous so...

Really the biggest problem with playing over a VTT in my experience is that it is hard for people to know when someone else is trying to or starting to talk because of the audiolag associated with discord and roll20 itself. Playing in person you have visual ques as to when someone is about to say something online you do not, the DM has to be pretty ontop of their game and the players need to make a point of saying when they are trying to talk. That being said I have been using roll20 for YEARS now and due to health issues and being immunocompromised I would probably have to give up my hobby of tabletop without the ability to play via VTT's.

I adore Strixhaven. Not only is the slice of life great in general, but it gives your characters reasons to have close bonds and things to brag or talk about in future adventures. If you start from 3rd 4th or 5th level in like... Waterdeep Heist, the motivation to DO the thing is there, but the motivation to do the thing TOGETHER can be lacking. But in Strixhaven you're just in the same classes. You have to find a way to get along over your time at school. And it gives organic ways to pick up proficiencies, too. My character is a Goolock noble who ran away after her pact went sideways and turned her into an aberrant horror (Grimhollow FTW). But despite being a bookworm, shes super flexible and athletic cause she was forced into the Cheerleading squad her first year. Hel, our DM doesn't even use whats in the strixhaven book! All our teachers and professors are anime characters. Example: The Professor of Magical Anatomies? Fucking ALL MIGHT. its amazing. The perfect way to start a years-long homebrew campaign, IMO.

Reminder that while Strixhaven is the school, you're really just exploring the plane of Arcavios.

Only magic school I find interesting

My friend started his homebrew game with Strixhaven and basically slapped the college in his own world. It works perfectly because it gives him the liberty to add his own lore and world events into the campaign while still having a good hook to get us in on. Sometimes we do Strixhaven stuff, sometimes we do his homebrew stuff, either way its always a good time.
Also its a blast just roleplaying a student on a magic campus, shits just fun.

I feel like if you really wanted to have a "down time" section, you could include a holiday weekend or spring break. I can imagine it would be really fun to just hang around Strixhaven and explore, if you have players that enjoy that type of thing. I personally have memories of just hanging out with friends on campus of my college during holiday breaks.

Our Strixhaven is diferent from your Strixhaven....

Remember in HP movies when the FKNG shool changes everything from movie to movie..... that should be confusing, now hear me out. The whole FKNG castle is magic and it may change as it fits the year students needs just as the Room of Requirement is fking huge in the last 2 books/ 3 movies. why wouldnt a freaking magic academy city wouldn´t change if everything can be magical?

X = (-b +- square root of (FIREBALL))/2a

Cool points, still a $50 "premium" product that's basically just a skeleton.
But it does sound neat and could be fun to run.. just not $50 neat.

Wtf is with d&d and evil frogs?

Honestly i wish i had a similar set up for dnd that you have. The screen in the table, everyone on tablets... it gives you the ability to use both physical minis on the table with the maps being able to change in the fly while also still being able to have that secretive dungeon delving aspect using just digital maps and stuff.

My problem with Strixhaven is that there's no room for players to make any decisions that actually matter.

That sports minigame you love doesn't impact anything. The designers' prewritten plot will happen just the same whether the players' team wins or loses. Same for your exams, or your date to the ball, and so on.

The PC's can't even lose combats. With one exception at the very end, there is always an NPC who will show up in case of a TPK, rez the party, and then shower them with free healing potions. Which makes the few combats also a meaningless waste of time.

No matter what, you'll have your showdown with that Bullywug at exactly the right time at exactly the right place. Your not the player of a game, you're an actor in a play but no-one has shown you the script.

I would much rather the adventure (which takes up more than half the book) be left out entirely and more space devoted to making this an actual setting book, and then we could write our own actually-good adventures for it.

You can't sandbox in Strixhaven without great difficulty. If the PC's want to explore the library outside the context of the railroad plot, the DM has to find the scene in the adventure where the PC's are required to visit the library, and figure out which stuff he has to leave out to avoid the PC's breaking the plot. So you can't just ignore the adventure.

I hope you don't get too much crap! You make amazing content, dont listen to the haters.

Thank you for this video Jacob, I'm reading out of the abyss to start DMing a campaign for my friends (read 1/3 already) but this video made me just change my mind and I'll start reading strixhaven instead because I think the setting is a mixture of wholesome with chad roleplaying moments

its interesting because I'm currently running Curse of Strahd which feels, in structure, very similiar to Strixhaven. And that's a well-beloved module to run because both the DM AND the players turn it into "our version" of the world

Prefer the unearthed arcana pdf

Its a great outline for a magic school in any world

I appreciate making the world your own, but at the same time, I like knowing how WOTC "thinks" it should work since they made the setting.

3D soccer? Isn't football ("soccer") already 3 dimensional, or are most players breaking the rules bringing the ball off the ground so that movements don't have to be made or predicted on only 2 axes and no one ever bothered to tell me that's actually a rule?

I hear you but as a dm myself what I need is both a setting’s general vibe, which I think you explained perfectly, and the vibe of characters in that setting so when I go to voice them I know who they are and can act appropriately. Interestingly enough a the warhammer 40k deathwatch book’s included adventure module does an excellent job of flying me into who they are so I can come up with my own stuff still fitting that character.

I did Mage Tower allowing combat, capturing the ball is 10 points, killing an enemy is 1 point, 10 points is a win. Just one goal. If you're KO'd you respawn in one round. I made my own field for it, it's smaller, just 120 feet, you can't teleport past the mid point. Yeah this makes the game take longer, but my players enjoy it.

very here for this

one thing i love about magic schools is making them not make logical sense. because when you put a bunch of magic people discovering their potential in one place, there will be secret passages that bring you up three floors into a bathroom or storage closet, there will be doors that lead to nowhere and windows that show a different view from what’s actually outside and the staff won‘t be able to keep up with cleaning up so they focus on the stuff that‘s actively bad. magic schools should be vague and everchanging and you can just throw the laws of physics out the window.

I ran water deep drsgonheist and made so many changes we mostly threw out the moduals details. One player got a qrtr staff of acid that was actualy a mimic. The stupid thing was eating their stock for the tavern which the other player was obsessed with running optimally and the missing liquor drove him nuts. He was later very frustrated with the drunken mimic pet that his partner kept around. Mimic weapons rock

I definitely thought this was about the strixhaven mtg set

Two words

SILVERY BARBS

Jacob: "skill challenges are awesome"
4th Edition D&D: "Really n*gga?"

Wither and Bloom is my go-to 2nd-level spell on several classes and I don't care.

As someone more new to D&D i dont really have much to say on strixhaven the book. Now the original magic the gathering set its based on, oh boy I could go on for hours about how mid that set is.

It's D&D Harry Potter.

"Bad DM Advice" is kind of wild seeing how DND is a game that can be played in MANY different ways. I could see "not for everyone" because there was a time I didn't care for your advice either but the more and more I watch the more I notice that I do actually like your advice.

Strixhaven is the only d&d official module I’ve ever completed running and it was specifically because of its playground type structure.

Dammit, jaccob. Now i want to play Strxhaven

The problem I had was its marketing (“Hogwarts without the TERFs”) setting it up to be disappointing. Hogwarts had genuine menace and danger: feuding houses, invulnerable specters that tormented lost students, lethal plant-life in greenhouses, dangerously nonsensical high-flying sports, dueling clubs, constantly moving stairways and secret passages, and a forest full of multiple dangerous beasts and sylvan beings… and that’s not getting into the canonical adventures that added worse escalating threats! The third-floor corridors that promised painful death, a gauntlet of magical obstacles, a secret chamber housing high level monsters, an escaped criminal, tyrannical professors seizing power, a tournament between other schools~!

Strixhaven has prom mechanics and a cafe you can have a part-time job at.

If you talk shit, come at the king, at least back it up. Where are the academic rivals who’ll do anything to keep their spot at the top? Where’s the professor who is secretly evil planning to steal the research you do for them? Strixhaven is a great executed poorly, and can serve as a template for better magical academy settings, but criticism is warranted for what we got.

Recently finished my first campaign, it was Curse of Strahd, which my dm made really personal to the party, specially my character who was Strahd's daughter and in the end took his place to make things better. Now we're going to play Strixhaven as something a bit more lighthearted, and I'm looking forward to it. When there's no context for things, we'll just make it up like before.

My friend asked me to set up DnD so his 13yr old daughter could play and learn the game.

I decided that Strixhaven was the best choice. I billed it as Harry Potter DnD. The idea was so well received we ended up with a 6 player pod that included both her parents, her aunt and uncle and my wife.

We're still on year one and we're having a blast with the openness of the world. One of the things they really wanted to do was explore all of the colleges before they joined them so I wrote in a separate adventure for each college with several encounters in each and with all the professors and other students littered throughout them. We do one of those adventures in between the pre written book adventures and I highly recommend doing this. Even though it's a time sync it gives the players a chance to choose which adventure to do next and gives them real agency in how their campaign goes

I quit running modules because they weren't like this. Hated having to rewrite chunks of Strahd because something I had to decide in the moment fucked up other things down the line. Might have to give Strixhaven a go.

I run a d&d club at the high school I teach at. I can’t wait to apply this campaign next year (I am however going to make it Harry Potter themed - I wasn’t big on the different colleges of strixhaven) and I’m going to use the exam system to teach new players how spells and spell slots work 😊

I got Strixhaven because: 1) Potterhead, 2) would love to run a character who started at Strixhaven and then went on to use them in other adventures, and 3) could be an opportunity to roleplay classes where the players learn (in a fun way of course) about various monsters, magic, and lore. I'm pretty excited to run it eventually.

My group ended up getting really high level, played mage tower, and one of them used polymorph to turn the other team into the mascot, and easily won.

Man I love mage tower

In this is super late but for the strixhaven I run we run 1 more special class called world of adventure where basically we have magic warp portals that lets me take the players to any other game or setting ( they have been to taldoré , they have been to wintercrest, they have been to the tomb, they have been to other wild worlds it’s super funnn they are awesome

Doesn't the "solid base for you to creatively come up with what's in the middle" argument also apply to Storm King's Thunder?

Your advice is great to look at! Thanks to the inspiration:)

Bit late to the party here, but my 2 cents.

When i starywd out dming i wanted, and needed to know absolutley everything. As ive gotten more experienced, i find a strong skeleton is the best for me. Both styles have merits, and i think different people need both and sometimes the same person needs both depending on the game theyre running.

Strxhaven in particular isnt one that needs more than a skeleton because of harry potter. EVERYONE at the table has no issue picturing it and filling it in. Icewind dale needs more meat on the bones because players dont know what to expect