Dragon Delves, Dungeons and Dragons‘ first adventure book since the major rules overhaul, marks a new era for fifth edition. Wizards of the Coast has wasted no time in establishing its design philosophy. Many things about Dragon Delves feel familiar, but plenty of experimentation has emerged, too. Curious about the future of D&D, we sat down with two of the RPG’s top designers to talk about all things Dragon Delves.
In case you’re not familiar with the latest book from this year’s DnD release schedule, Dragon Delves is an anthology of one-shot adventures, each focusing on a different-colored dragon. It contains more gorgeous art than your average DnD book, and every dragon gets a unique art style to convey their character.
The anthology also introduces novel rules for two-player games, as well as clear and concise summary pages at the start of each adventure. You can learn about it in more detail in our full Dragon Delves review.
Principal game designer James Wyatt says that, inside Dragon Delves, “any D&D fan will find material in here to delight them”. However, the book was primarily designed to address common barriers to entry that budding DMs face. That means “helping busy DMs, first-time DMs, and DMs with only a single player”.
Those first two targets are standard for Wizards of the Coast. It’s no surprise that, after the growth spurt D&D has seen in the past five years, the publisher would want to target its rapidly expanding audience of newcomers.
Plus, when I played D&D with ex game director Jeremy Crawford last year, he made it clear that saving the busy DM time was a key design goal for the revised fifth edition rules. Though Crawford has now left Wizards to work on Darrington Press’ Daggerheart, this philosophy still shines through.
“We paid particular attention to helping the DM get ready to play with a minimum of preparation, and making the adventures easy to reference during play”, managing game designer Justice Arman tells Wargamer. “I’m especially excited about the single page that starts off each adventure, giving the DM a handy reference to the key things they need to remember or look up in play.”
The last market segment listed by Wyatt is a little more unique. Dragon Delves introduced brief new rules to help DM games for a single player. These could be boiled down to “more hit points and Heroic Inspiration”, and the design of the adventures themselves seemed to do most of the heavy lifting when protecting a lone adventurer.
“The rules are meant to provide a little extra support, but they don’t take the place of a full party of adventurers”, Wyatt tells Wargamer. “The adventures where we bring those rules into play are adventures that are particularly suitable for a different style of play: they allow a single character to avoid a lot of combat; they rely heavily on interaction and exploration, so there’s a lot to do without leaning on the Temporary Hit Points we give you—which are really more like a backup plan than anything else.”
While Wizards seems pretty content with their ‘solo mode’ design choices, it doesn’t sound like they’ll be repeating the experiment again soon. When asked if we’d see these alternative rules again (for example, in the upcoming September starter set), Justice Arman was non-committal.
“D&D is a living, breathing game, and player feedback—such as the surveys we receive from fans as part of our Unearthed Arcana playtests—shapes it in real time”, he tells Wargamer. “I doubt we’ve seen the last of one-on-one play, especially if it’s something fans let us know they enjoy and want to see more of. We will also continue to innovate; we are all little gnome tinkerers at heart.”
Heroes of the Borderlands, the upcoming starter set, will apparently follow the same design ideals as Dragon Delves, even if the exact methods of attack differ. “With the upcoming Starter Set: Heroes of the Borderlands, we set out to address common barriers to play gleaned from a decade of feedback as well as rigorous playtesting with groups of all experience levels, many of which included first-time Dungeon Masters!” “The end result is the starter set we on the D&D team all wish we had when we first started playing years ago”, Arman adds.
One thing that we’ll likely see again in future D&D products is a heavy focus on visuals. “Longtime fans might have noticed the uptick in art within our books over the years”, Arman tells Wargamer. “We understand that every great adventure requires great art and cartography, and Dragon Delves has both in spades.” “We hope to continue that trend in future products”, he says.
Heroes of the Borderlands is D&D’s next release, arriving on September 16. After that, we’re getting another starter set in October, this time themed around Stranger Things’ Eddie Munson. With all products until November focused on onboarding new players, it won’t be long before we can see Wizards’ proposed design trends in action.
For more on 5e, here’s all you need to know about DnD classes and DnD races. You can also tell us what you think of the latest sourcebooks over in the Wargamer Discord.