Hi everyone. I'm happy to say that I got to play an actual game of D&D on Thursday, with the plan to continue every Thursday after school, for the rest of the school year. The group voted to restart the starter campaign (Lost Mines of Phandelver) for the new players, since we didn't get too far. To keep it interesting, I'll be mixing up the stuff they already did a little bit from the original. I also wanted to surprise them, so instead of the normal adventure hook, I realized I could use a one-shot as a very good adventure hook. So over the 3-day weekend I tried to throw together the entire new adventure. I didn't get nearly as far or as much painted as I would have liked, but it was enough to play. We played "Dib's Wagon of Doom" from "Prepared 2!: a dozen 5th edition on shot adventures". In this adventure a goblin "tank" assaults a market square.
Most of the crafting time was spent on the tank.
Here is the picture to keep track of where we left off.
The players acted exactly as I hoped, all leaping into action once their unrelated actions that brought them to the market square were interrupted by the goblin attack. The NPC who asked them to guard the wagon of supplies for the start of Lost Mines of Phandelver is also there. His wagon is damaged in the attack, which I decided is a good explanation of his decision to ask the heroes to guard the wagon during the trip while he goes on ahead (now the wagon needs to wait on repairs before leaving). Seeing the PCs' heroism against the goblin tank is also why he asks this group of people who don't know each other to guard it. In the original "Dib's Wagon of Doom" a suggested reward for the PCs is a few days free food and lodging, which works perfectly with them waiting on the wagon's repairs. I really like how well these two adventure match up, and my players are really enjoying the first adventure and especially the goblin tank model I made
Olthannon wrote:I've been playing dnd for a couple of years now and I'd love to play more but managing to get everyone together for a night is just a nightmare. The stars have to align etc.
I'd really like to DM a Warhammer fantasy game and I'm sure there's campaigns online but has anyone had any experience of running one or playing in the universe?
I've toyed with DnD rules for years for various writing projects and as someone who recently started looking to play the actual game I've had the same problem.
You'd think with the advent of the internet and tools like DnD Beyond and Roll20 it would be a lot easier to get into a group than it is, but I've had really bad luck in trying the past few weeks. Even games that advertise as welcoming to new players seem to be averse to them. I've only found one DM who seemed willing to call me on Discord and have a talk to see if I would fit in with their game, and that one's struggled with constant scheduling conflicts.
I think for my particular group we all forget how much stuff we have to do. It's not just oh yeah we can do this night but you might be utterly knackered after work or you've got to cook food and sort out the rest of the week. At one point we were managing to do stuff at least once a month but even that has gone by the wayside recently.
As for the other topic being discussed, I find it hard to find a join groups too. The only successes I've had are friends I already have inviting me to join the campaign they're running, and more recently several times I do all the leg work and DM to get groups to start up.
Yeah most of my games are friend driven. Tough the campaign I mentioned earlier in the thread wasn't. That one kept going because we just ignored it a bit when people were absent. As long as the DM and 4 players could make it we'd play.
In 3.5 most people went with two handed melee weapons of some sort. A Greatsword is the most reliable damage output, and the best strategy is to power attack and also to cast Enlarge Person on the wielder to up their damage dice.
2d6 is mathmatically superior to d12. Not only does you minimum damage increase to 2 but statistically you are more likely to consistently roll 7 with less likely to get either extreme.
With a d12 you have an equal chance to roll any number.
One of my players had herself permanently Enlarged once she could afford it, and it really improved her damage output for only minor inconvenience in some fights in tight spaces.
That's really neat, will have to have a play with that when I more properly draft some of my homebrew stuff.
In the mean time, if you'll allow me a little shameless self-promotion, I'd just like to leave a link to a new D&D blog I'm running, where I'll be posting all sorts of ramblings about the nature of the game, with a focus on its storytelling and roleplaying potential. Might be of interest to some folks here.
https://roleforinitiative.home.blog/
Currently got an article up about tying together stats and character backstory/personality, which I feel the PHB kind of skips over despite how useful it can be.
I've had the opposite problem from some of you, there're three role playing groups where I live (not bad for a small rural town).
I started playing as a complete newbie about a year ago with one group. However, the DM was a bit obnoxious, so I joined another as it formed late last year.
Everyone has been great there and the new DM has run a really fun homebrew campaign.
It has been a little delicate trying to move away from the first group without offence, but then the DM started smoking at the table which was the perfect excuse to leave!
One thing I do struggle with sometimes is the sense that magic spoils the fun a bit. I don't enjoy it when an interesting challenge is circumvented by simply casting a spell, instead of thinking and roleplay.
That is a problem I also suffer from in my games, it does make me feel lame when people just magic problems away. Two ways to alleviate it: Spend prep time taking spells into account that make problems that at least require clever uses of spells to solve, but this is prep heavy and not every GM has the time or inclination. Or, another way, make use of antimagic (sparingly!). In my setting i had a town where magic did not work because of something called the "Warlock's Bane". It was up to the players to interact with it or not, but when they did decide to investigate it made for a very entertaining three sessions with them remembering how to solve problems without magic.
Definitely would not over use that option though!
I think the balance to be had is in making sure it's not as simple as 'cast spell, next room', but that what the characters can actually do is integral to the solution.
For me, the worst kind of puzzle is the one that only tests the players, not their characters, so I like to build my puzzles (on the rare occasions I use them, I'm not the biggest fan) based around the capabilies and features of the PCs. Whether that's requiring a certain spell or type of magic, a language only one of them has, or some other unique feature that relies on the players knowing their character's capabilities, rather than testing their own mental abilities.
I tend to find more traditional puzzles just descend into however many minutes of everyone coming out of character and trying to solve it as themselves, which just stalls the narrative and doesn't actually reflect the characters they're playing.
Well I'm not the DM so those options are not available to me, maybe I should just cut off our Warlock's hands? (That would make a cool character actually!)
Interestingly in last week's session the DM introduced these wild magic rules before every spell to make casting magic a bit more risky!
Admittedly, things like 'Alert' and 'Favourite Terrain' can spoil the fun as well by adding effects like can't be surprised and can't become lost etc.
Favoured terrain is quite powerful, but as long as you have varied terrains in your world it is okay. I make travel quite difficult so the Ranger really feels cool about having the ability to automatically get the group through.
Paradigm: Yeah, I think making puzzles you know will interest the characters is important. That said, a few of my players really like puzzles, so I do put the odd purely logical puzzle in for them, obviously with appropriate flavour.
An example of magic taking the fun out of things is that I have a few players who are language teachers and whose characters knows many languages and likes to learn new ones. I make an effort ot have somewhat "realistic" languages in my game, and sometimes I give them puzzles that require some linguistic skill to solve. If a player casts "Comprehend Languages" that feeling of being a cool linguist figuring out ancient languages (which is both intellectually stimulating AND immersive) is lost, and it becomes a pure resource management issue (do I have enough spell slots to use one getting this information?).
Recently I had my players find a barrow mound that was sealed with rusted iron stakes, and with a huge rusty iron spike through the centre of it. On the entrance was inscribed:
"Na Deichnúir Ríthe Thógtha" This translates from Gaelic as "The Ten Kings Who Were Taken", but because Irish grammar is weird if you try Google Translate on it, it will give you only fragments and not really the correct translation. For example, Deich is the number 10, but Deichnúir is 10 people, and Rí is king but Ríthe is kings. The word for Taken can also be translated as "Built" (So an alternate translation could be "The Ten Kings who Were Built"). Google translate does not know these word endings and alterations because they are irregular and contextual. So the players who spoke the Old Tongue could use Translate to simulate their knowledge of the language but had to work through the ambiguities to try and find out what it might mean (it is a barrow of a King who was one of ten corrupted by demons long ago, opening the barrow would be Bad News!).
Another example is this map I made of my setting with Irish placenames, where I used some slightly older or more obscure words:
For example, "Olc Anord" which is on there translates as "Evil Chaos", and those are areas still effected by the aforementioned demonic invasion. I did this because I do not like my players to have perfect information about the world, I prefer it to be somewhat mysterious to keep a sense of immersion - people in ancient times did not have accurate maps of the world or the information on them may have been inaccurate. This allows me to give my players the information, reward players who are interested in speaking different languages, and still keep an air of uncertainty and mystery around my world.
In some ways these puzzles are purely because my players enjoy the intellectual exercise of solving them, but I also think they help to immerse the player in the "role" of being a scholar of ancient and mysterious civilisations.
Sorry for a bit of TL,DR, heh heh. I like talking about this stuff.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of the 'ancient language' trick to make things a bit more interesting.
Because sure, you can read Draconic, but can you read Draconic written when now-Ancient Dragons were simply wyrmlings? I liken it to how real-world language has changed in comparatively short timespans; knowing French fluently means you can probably look at a bit of Latin and get a rough idea of what it says, but you're going to struggle over more archaic words and things like tense are handled differently. Likewise, modern English and Chaucer's English, separated by just a few hundred years, are similar but very different written languages.
That way, you equip the players to solve the puzzle with their languages or language spells, but they still have to think about it a bit.
Not that this is anything new. After all, 'Gandalf, what's the Elvish word for friend?'
So in product news, I find myself really hoping the Acquisitions Inc. D&D sourcebook is an April Fools joke.
I can see why people might find it funny to watch in someone else's YouTube videos, but as a serious addition to an established D&D D&D setting or campaign, it's horribly anachronistic, uninteresting and immersion wrecking.
You know, I've seen that opinion quite a bit on the internet. I have the opposite take on it- being employed in a corporation run by a veteran adventurer makes a lot more sense for a group of new heroes than 6 random guys who meet in a tavern and decide to stick together and go face mortal peril. You'll stick it out to improve your odds of surviving.
Of course, independently that's where one of our earlier campaigns went when there was a near TPK with one survivor, who became the leader of said company. For the DM, it provides a good reason for no player vs player action, and a constant source of hooks.
High level it wouldn't make sense, of course. At that point the players would be 'employees' the same way that rock stars or famous actors are.
None of that invents the original DMs obsessions with corporations, and all the weird job slots that are nonsense magic versions of real modern things. Ie, the anachronistic and immersion wrecking parts.
What you've described is the mercenary company from Battle Brothers, and several other games and novels.
I'm not ovely familiar with Acq. Inc, but I really don't see the issue. Organisations do make a good basis for a campaign, and more options are never a bad thing. As with everything D&D, it's a scale on which you find your comfort zone.
On one end, you have something like Matt Colville's Chain of Acheron, which is organised in a very professional, military way to fit into a very 'realistic' fantasy setting, on the other you have Acq. Inc. which seems to be a bit more light-hearted, less serious, even a little silly. Somewhere in the middle, you probably have a typical Fighter's Guild such as Tal'Dorei's 'Slayer's Take', which is a bunch of adventurers who hang out and kill monsters together.
It might not be to your taste, and I probably wouldn't use it in my setting, but there's clearly an audience for it. D&D can be Game of Thrones or LotR, but it can also be Discworld. Anachronism in a fantasy setting that is literally infinite is a rather arbitrary distinction. I mean, there are settings like Ebberon where the whole premise of the world is 'nonsense magical version of modern things', so I don't really see how this is any different.
Besides, unless we're all making our players speak in Medieval language and forbidding them from using any kind of cliche or reference that originated after around 1500, the good ship 'Anachronism'' has probably well and truly sailed already.
I feel a bit curmudgeonly about "Celebrity D&D" but that is just because I am a curmudgeon. Plenty of silly stuff has been released for Dungeons and Dragons in the past, and I think it is fine to have some silly stuff in the game.
Hell, Starjammer is basically all that, right? Giant Space Hamsters and all that. I have run "adventuring companies" before as a conciet and I don't think it requires anything other than saying "You are members of this adventuring company". We did not have hierarchies or anything, just a bit of an idea of the "standing" of the Company based on how it had been doing in adventures and upholding contracts and stuff. It was mostly a simplifying device to get a diverse group of people together to crawl some dungeons. If Acquisitions Inc.does that plus a bunch of other stuff, that is fine. The game is not my bag anyway, it is just not my style of D&D so I will happily give the book a miss.
Yeah, Acq Inc is just a playful jest at corporate structures and methods and adventuring itself rolled into one.
So you have this incredible magical world and your band of adventurers are sent off on quests and face monsters and recover ancient artifacts and when they get back they have to fill out the paperwork in triplicate.
It is absurd but it is meant to be. That sharp divide between the banality of the corporate structure (and this is not immersion breaking in itself, this could equally apply to a guild of merchants or lawyers, for example) and the fantastical reality of the work that corporation does is the core of the Acquisition Inc. hook. It is absurd, but is it really any more absurd than anything else in the setting?
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Voss wrote: None of that invents the original DMs obsessions with corporations, and all the weird job slots that are nonsense magic versions of real modern things. Ie, the anachronistic and immersion wrecking parts.
Any adventuring guild that wants to grow and be capable of operating in multiple locations will require some form of internal structure. You will need people to report back on what they have been doing, ways to assign jobs to the correct groups etc.
Is documancy really that immersion breaking? Would you also find a guild of wizard lawyers who write up contracts which are magically binding immersion breaking?
My best experiences with corporate adventuring organizations is to start the players in one or quickly get them to form one. Build it up. Make it a central piece of their lively hood. Have them rely o the NPCs who get them their gear and generally really like or care about the fact that the organization exists.
Then have them make enemies and have those enemies wipe that organization from the map. It gets them into the traditional role of adventurers being a band of people patrolling around on their own, with a hook of revenge or at least looking for answers but also smooths out a lot of the starting wrinkles of the game and getting the party together.
"Kill your darlings" as the writing adage goes. Creating a lovable cast of supportive NPCs and then eliminating them in one fell swoop gets the players every time.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Also, you guys might be interested in this.
Lance845 wrote: My best experiences with corporate adventuring organizations is to start the players in one or quickly get them to form one. Build it up. Make it a central piece of their lively hood. Have them rely o the NPCs who get them their gear and generally really like or care about the fact that the organization exists.
Then have them make enemies and have those enemies wipe that organization from the map. It gets them into the traditional role of adventurers being a band of people patrolling around on their own, with a hook of revenge or at least looking for answers but also smooths out a lot of the starting wrinkles of the game and getting the party together.
"Kill your darlings" as the writing adage goes. Creating a lovable cast of supportive NPCs and then eliminating them in one fell swoop gets the players every time.
An alternative can also be that the PCs discover something about the organisation that results in the organisation going after them to keep the secret hidden. So then the PCs have not only lost their support network, but that network is now actively working against them. You can then have NPCs that they became friends with still inside the organisation feeding them information and undermining the hunt for the PCs (or are they? DUN-DUN-DUUUUN!).
Lance845 wrote: My best experiences with corporate adventuring organizations is to start the players in one or quickly get them to form one. Build it up. Make it a central piece of their lively hood. Have them rely o the NPCs who get them their gear and generally really like or care about the fact that the organization exists.
Then have them make enemies and have those enemies wipe that organization from the map. It gets them into the traditional role of adventurers being a band of people patrolling around on their own, with a hook of revenge or at least looking for answers but also smooths out a lot of the starting wrinkles of the game and getting the party together.
"Kill your darlings" as the writing adage goes. Creating a lovable cast of supportive NPCs and then eliminating them in one fell swoop gets the players every time.
An alternative can also be that the PCs discover something about the organisation that results in the organisation going after them to keep the secret hidden. So then the PCs have not only lost their support network, but that network is now actively working against them. You can then have NPCs that they became friends with still inside the organisation feeding them information and undermining the hunt for the PCs (or are they? DUN-DUN-DUUUUN!).
Agree!
Either way, it's great to give the players a support network to start even if it's not the most crazy powerful thing in the world. But just something to bring them together, get them working and delivering plot hooks easy peasy for the DM. Then, tear it all out from under them. What the players decide to do from there and how they survive when that support network has been taken is the most interesting. It's a great plot hook and makes it personal.
If you keep playing with the same few people though you are going to have to subvert it at some point and have the organization survive. But if they expect you to kill them off or have them turn traitor how good would it be when you keep setting up them all about to be wiped out but never actually pull the trigger haha. Keep them waiting for the hammer to fall when it never does.
Is documancy really that immersion breaking? Would you also find a guild of wizard lawyers who write up contracts which are magically binding immersion breaking?
For the setting? yes.
If it were a homebrew, home game setting? No. Well, at least assuming DM did the work in having the setting justify it in some fashion.
But this is dropped wholesale into the Forgotten realms, which has been around for decades now, and none of this fits.
Wizard lawyers doesn't work either. In FR, high-level wizards mostly fulfill the role of nuclear deterrents, with whole regions going nuts when one vanishes for a time, with various evil organizations going on rampage then adventuring parties on counter-rampages [this actually happens when the Big E goes missing, in some Ed Greenwood novel whose title I forget]. The expectations are different.
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But honestly, for me the biggest thing is the opportunity cost. WotC releases 1, maybe 2 books for 5e a year (plus maybe a hardback adventure module). There's a lot of the basics and inherently D&D concepts that they haven't even back-filled yet, and the previous book (Ravnica) was fairly junky with little crunch or player options AND was too thin on detail for a proper setting book, so worst of both worlds. And the ones before that were half (or more) monster books, which while that area also needed filling out, 5e still feels like it lacks content, five years on. So a 'joke book' doesn't do much for me, and at this point actively contributes to me being less interested in the game and future products. Basically its a signpost for 'go check our competitors, they might have products you're interested in buying.'
The opportunity cost point is a fair one, Voss. I am absolutely not interested in buying books based on whatever celebrity D&D nonsense is going on out there, but if it is taking time from the official release schedule just to pander, yeah, I am not a huge fan of that.
There again, the lack of mechanical bloat is one of the things I like about 5e. I am already irritable with my players trying to source things from Xanathar's Guide to Everything without buying the book themselves.
It doesn't matter if the book is a weird dark comedy. The fluff around the crunch never actually matters. The only thing that matters is if any of it is useful to you and your group.
If they release a resource book that has all the things you need to build and run organizations either as a DM that is employing the players or as players starting a business then that can be a very valuable tool.
That being said, dnd releases books that are not especially great resources of tools for DMs so good luck getting the book it should be.
On the other hand it's not wizards thats making it so maybe the PA guys will actually be able to fill it with useful crunch.
Fair point. I think the danger with releasing too much crunch and additional systems is that it makes it harder for novice GMs to cope with stuff that their players bring to the table. I like that 5e has a pretty slow release schedule in that regard, but it puts off a lot of the veteran players in my old group who want something to sink their teeth into, mechanically.
I think I mentioned this in the Pathfinder thread but the books they releases are utter garbage for how the vast majority of DMs actually run their games and use the books.
The players never follow the plan laid out by the adventure books and the DM needs to adjust on the fly anyway. Not only that, they present every adventure in this strict nuanced preparation heavy way that gives every NPC motivations and personalities that the players just may never interact with. All the best DM tips involve less preparation about things that may never come up and more sets of little tools to quickly adjust when the players make choices you could never have planned for anyway. Most experienced DMs want to tell their story, not the books and just pick and choose pieces they like to socket into their game anyway.
What I really want is a series of books that offers tool boxes for DMs.
Make a book for each terrain type on earth. "Forest" for example.
Chapter 1) give 3 examples of the types of communities that would crop up in forests. Be they nomadic, tree dwelling, whatever. Go over resources they might specialize in gather and the things they tend to lack and need to trade for. Explain maybe food stuffs. Basically a culture builder that is race and setting neutral so if you need to create a settlement you can and make it believable. Throw in some tables at the end for randomly generating culture features.
Chapter 2) Go over how some older civilizations that are now long gone might have left remnants in this type of terrain. What ruins can we expect to survive and in what state. Again, tables for generation.
Chapter 3) The creatures that inhabit that type of terrain. Go from mundane animals to some exotic crazy things. Toss in some big stuff. Mention rarity. Provide 2 or 3 or 5 random encounter tables that specify different abundances of different things for if the party are lost/exploring that type of terrain.
Chapter 4) How to use the book. Here you provide some example plot hooks, you mention how some of those more exotic creatures could come into play, you mention some treasures that might be hidden and you provide traps, poisons, and diseases that might be found in such a climate or used by those cultures. If it's a desert or arctic book you provide rules for extreme heat and/or extreme cold and describe what happens to people as they go through heat stroke/frostbite and die from exposure. In the jungle talk about monsoons and flooding rivers. In the plains talk about tornadoes. In the coastal book mention hurricanes.
Get them all as a series and the DM has a collection of resources to build a world and run it instead of a linear path telling somebody elses stories in somebody elses world.
That sounds like an awesome book, I would definitely buy such a sourcebook!
When I think of crunch I dislike it tends to be the "player facing" stuff that bloats the game out with too many options to keep track of. This is probably because I often have players who refuse to learn the rules, but still want to use the system to their advantage, so I have to invest a lot of time into auditing their characters, which is tedious. In 5e it is relatively easy because of the limited number of ways to build your character and the general lack of crazy synergies. The broken stuff tends to be pretty obvious and straightforward. Compare to PF where a lot of the fun for players is making a certain "build" with feats and abilities from as many sourcebooks as you will let them use.
I see this even in 5e, with my student group always pushing for as much mechanical advantage as possible by trying to take stuff from XGTE or DNDwiki.com (cuse that wretched hive of OP homebrew).
@Lance845: I agree with Da Boss, that idea for source books does sound great. When you were talking about communities based on the terrain type, it reminded me of a book a read where there was a village in a forest where the main occupation was lumber production, the villages name was "Cutter's Hollow". It would be nice for these books to go into common architecture styles for each area too.
Yup. Thats the kind of thing I want. If a community lives in the forest they obviously have to use the resources available. How big can they get on that? What does that end up looking like?
We as DMs can then break the rules and add in our own quirks but it would be awesome to have a series of tool box books to lay a foundation on.
Wizards, Pazio, and basically every other game company out there release all their supplements wrong. It's crap that they make these prebuilt adventure paths instead of these tool boxes. I mean... sure, outline an adventure in the back of the tool box as an example of putting it all together. But give me the damn tools up front instead of me having to sift through YOUR adventure for pieces I like.
I do think Wizards (or an enterprising third party) would do well at some point to release a book that has basically no rules content, but is packed full of advice on the creative side of things. How to build a world that makes sense and is engaging, how to roleplay a character in a way that lines up with your stats and the game's setting, how to write stories that make use of what's in the world and aren't linear, that sort of thing.
Honestly, I think the biggest issue with 5e in general is that there's so much 'assumed' knowledge they omit from the books. There's basically nothing on roleplaying or worldbuilding beyond some tables to roll on if you're lazy or don't care that much, and I think that's because they work on the assumption that a lot of this is still that will be passed down from older players to newer ones simply by dint of the audience growing.
But the success of Matt Colville's Running The Game series, for instance, which often doesn't even touch on rules but covers history, politics, characters, worldbuilding, shows that there's clearly an audience for something like that. I can see why Wizards wouldn't necessarily publish it as once you strip away the rules there's nothing inherently on-brand about it, but surely there's a third party publisher out there who has the inclination to put something like this out there.
I wonder how people find the time to follow a 'celebrity' group, DnD is already a time vampire. As a player I have to spend 4.5 hours a week playing the campaign, along with extra time writing about my character and painting up models for him. The last thing I want after all that is more DnD, and I can only imagine what it would be like if you're a DM!
Gitzbitah wrote: You know, I've seen that opinion quite a bit on the internet. I have the opposite take on it- being employed in a corporation run by a veteran adventurer makes a lot more sense for a group of new heroes than 6 random guys who meet in a tavern and decide to stick together and go face mortal peril. You'll stick it out to improve your odds of surviving.
Kroem wrote: I wonder how people find the time to follow a 'celebrity' group, DnD is already a time vampire. As a player I have to spend 4.5 hours a week playing the campaign, along with extra time writing about my character and painting up models for him. The last thing I want after all that is more DnD, and I can only imagine what it would be like if you're a DM!
I tried watching some streams and podcasts to get a feel for roleplaying, but I do have to say, DnD is a game that is utterly boring to watch. If you're not actively involved in it, then it's just watching people talk in funny voices about things with no visual reference and no action.
And I definitely think something like "Source Book: Forgotten Realms" that contained mostly background info and stuff would be a lot of help. It's really hard building a character backstory when you don't have any reference material to really help you. DnD wikis are amazingly sparse for such an old game with such a big community, and they have more on rules than world building. My first character literally lived under a rock just to explain how I didn't know jack gak about anything in-universe.
Strokes for folks, I guess. I'd take a few hours of Critical Role over most stuff on TV.
It's almost certainly a uniquely slow form of narrative compared to books or shows or movies, with 5 or 6 hours between action sequences and then 3 hours to resolve a 60-second fight, but it's the stuff that fills that time that makes it great. A show or movie is usually one thing, a D&D game (played or watched) can be by turns an action fantasy epic, a detective story, a political intrigue, a sitcom, a family drama, an improv comedy show... Rarely does it sit on one thing long enough to get boring, for me at least. And when you're a dozen episodes in and you've already spent upwards for 40 hours with these character, you'll kind of watch them do anything.
It certainly does take some imagination, and thus more investment than something where all the visuals, locations, music ect is there for you, but that's part of the fun. There's a reason so many of these shows' communities have a huge fanart output, which in turn feeds into the imagination process of what follows.
It's not for everyone, and if you've tried it and bounced off that's definitely a fair response, but I'll always find time for it. And that's on top of an average 2 games a week of my own. On the other hand, I can't watch sport on TV for more than about 30 seconds without feeling my brain switch off, so I totally get where you're coming from.
And I definitely think something like "Source Book: Forgotten Realms" that contained mostly background info and stuff would be a lot of help. It's really hard building a character backstory when you don't have any reference material to really help you. DnD wikis are amazingly sparse for such an old game with such a big community, and they have more on rules than world building. My first character literally lived under a rock just to explain how I didn't know jack gak about anything in-universe.
I do think one of the best arguments for homebrew settings, providing you've got a DM willing to put the effort in (and it is a lot of effort, to be fair), is that you can kind of get around this as you have a direct channel to the person who can give you this info. You don't need to buy 4 different books to learn about the culture of Elves in the setting, or get the details on a war that's just ended, or ask why the Dragons don't exist any more. It's a lot of work on the DM side, but a fantastic resource for the players.
The Acquisition Inc. podcasts are what got me into DnD. The first podcast they did with Wil Wheaton, the joking and banter among the party which slowly dies down over the course of the fight against the necromancer and his dogs (including Rudy the Undead Hound) as party member goes down. Jerry Holkins repeated critical failures, including that critical failure, and the day being saved by the redshirt made for a great climax. That hush after Jerry rolls the die is wonderful, you can just tell from it that it is yet another 1 (or, as Scott and Mike put it "It wasn't even a one! It was the goddamn symbol dice!" "They had run out of numbers!"). And then he uses Wil's encounter power to re-roll...
There are some games that I don't mind listening to as a podcast, but I definitely don't really have time to watch stuff. I tried, but I couldn't. I bounced off Critical Role because it didn't feel like a "real" game to me. I watched Matt Colville's stream and I liked it, but not enough to keep watching (I think my style is pretty similar to his these days, and not really like the Mercer style any more.)
My issue with celebrity D&D is that it makes people think they have to play the game one way or whatever. We have enough one true wayism in our hobby, and I am a bit put off by it.
I am also not particularly likely to like someone's design just because they are a charismatic person who runs a well produced podcast or stream, the two skill sets are pretty different.
The only 2 I have been able to really get into is DnD is for Nerds and Harmond Quest.
Harmond quest has animated bits and has one of the main dudes behind rick and morty.
DnD is for nerds has the dm making all the rolls so there is no time spent asking about numbers for all the various stuff. Also, the first 2 "seasons" focus on the same cast of characters, but afterwards they just start telling smaller stories with new characters every time and it keeps it all very lively and interesting with different tones and themes.
Yeah, I agree that it's hard to watch D&D streams and such, but I really enjoy them for playing while I'm painting minis or crafting (Though recently I have been doing audio books). It's hard to keep up with them, even though I devote a lot of time to the hobby, I can't seem to keep up with how much is streamed. I watched Team Four Star's "At the Table" as my main D&D stream. I also watched all of the short lived Dungeons and Cosmonauts. It didn't have as high production value as many D&D streams, but I liked it. I've also watched some of Matt Colville's games, but was never able to get into Critical Role, I think because it was an overwhelming amount to catch up on (then I stopped watching D&D streams for a while, right when they started the new campaign).
Kroem wrote: I wonder how people find the time to follow a 'celebrity' group, DnD is already a time vampire. As a player I have to spend 4.5 hours a week playing the campaign, along with extra time writing about my character and painting up models for him. The last thing I want after all that is more DnD, and I can only imagine what it would be like if you're a DM!
From my experience, you follow a "celebrity" group when your own group has fizzled or you are not actively playing.
A couple of people in my group watch Critical Role. They enjoy it. They also play, obviously. Me, I'd rather go through various rpg material for inspiration for campaigns and characters, etc.
My one concern about all of this would be some sort of "One-True-Way-To-Play-ism" that these programs may engender.
I recall getting this issue in the mail, BITD when I had a subscription. However, A real D&D tax man carried a trident. In some earlier issue there was a tax-man NPC, IIRC. The April 1980 April Fool's edition (issue #36)
Lance845 wrote: That depends on how the crunch is presented.
I think I mentioned this in the Pathfinder thread but the books they releases are utter garbage for how the vast majority of DMs actually run their games and use the books.
The players never follow the plan laid out by the adventure books and the DM needs to adjust on the fly anyway. Not only that, they present every adventure in this strict nuanced preparation heavy way that gives every NPC motivations and personalities that the players just may never interact with. All the best DM tips involve less preparation about things that may never come up and more sets of little tools to quickly adjust when the players make choices you could never have planned for anyway. Most experienced DMs want to tell their story, not the books and just pick and choose pieces they like to socket into their game anyway.
What I really want is a series of books that offers tool boxes for DMs.
Make a book for each terrain type on earth. "Forest" for example.
Chapter 1) give 3 examples of the types of communities that would crop up in forests. Be they nomadic, tree dwelling, whatever. Go over resources they might specialize in gather and the things they tend to lack and need to trade for. Explain maybe food stuffs. Basically a culture builder that is race and setting neutral so if you need to create a settlement you can and make it believable. Throw in some tables at the end for randomly generating culture features.
Chapter 2) Go over how some older civilizations that are now long gone might have left remnants in this type of terrain. What ruins can we expect to survive and in what state. Again, tables for generation.
Chapter 3) The creatures that inhabit that type of terrain. Go from mundane animals to some exotic crazy things. Toss in some big stuff. Mention rarity. Provide 2 or 3 or 5 random encounter tables that specify different abundances of different things for if the party are lost/exploring that type of terrain.
Chapter 4) How to use the book. Here you provide some example plot hooks, you mention how some of those more exotic creatures could come into play, you mention some treasures that might be hidden and you provide traps, poisons, and diseases that might be found in such a climate or used by those cultures. If it's a desert or arctic book you provide rules for extreme heat and/or extreme cold and describe what happens to people as they go through heat stroke/frostbite and die from exposure. In the jungle talk about monsoons and flooding rivers. In the plains talk about tornadoes. In the coastal book mention hurricanes.
Get them all as a series and the DM has a collection of resources to build a world and run it instead of a linear path telling somebody elses stories in somebody elses world.
Uh, pass. WotC made those books for 3rd edition: It's Hot Outside, It's Cold Outside, It's Wet Outside and It's Not Outside. (Sandstorm, Frostburn, Stormwrack and Dungeonscape) They were terrible and sold poorly.
TSR also did the Wilderness and Dungeoneers Survival Guides at the end of 1st edition. They were raided for the non-weapon proficiencies for 2nd edition and not much else.
On the other hand, people do buy the Paizo books, even the tiny overpriced and overspecialized ones. I'm not really convinced that the 'vast majority' don't use them or find them utter garbage.
I very much doubt that anything WotC published is anything like the thing I suggested. I doubly doubt that TSR did it either.
The books I was suggesting don't have anything at a surface level for players because I am not looking for anything that is necessarily for any particular game system. I am looking for world building books which comes with seeds for plot hooks and ways to introduce or run content within the world.
These are DM tools. Not a players guide for more feats spells and weapon options.
Maybe it's different in your part of the world, but I have never been a part of, ran, or seen anyone run, a campaign that the DM didn't make up themselves. I have, not once, seen anyone get any of the books with campaigns in them, and use them for anything but picking out the bits they liked for their own games.
Sounds like you are talking more about a world Atlas than anything else. From the wikipedia, the books Voss ided do look like what you're talking about- and if they were historically bad sellers I could see WoTC dismissing the concept.
5e is very much aimed at a broad demographic, and WoTC are actively working to expand that market. You can see evidence for that in most every book appealing to DMs and players. Volo's contains lots of monster PC classes, along with detailed cultural write ups of monsters. Then, they're actively courting new players- last year they tried to grab Magic players, this year they're going after Stranger Things fans and fans of gaming streaming. If this does well, you know they'll release something based on Matt Mercer next year.
At the same time, they're doing stuff for grognards- Ghosts of Saltmarsh looks to be pure nautical nostalgia.
If environmental supplements were created, I'd imagine they'd be presented with an attached campaign and 2 new races, at which point it would be difficult to determine the difference from a campaign book.
Now that's a really fascinating experience, Lance. I almost always start from a campaign straight from the book. And, inevitably, it ends up being mostly my own creation, because no campaign survives contact with the players. But they're lovely jumping off points.
Less an Atlas. I have owned those. The GreyHawk Gazeteer was a 3rd ed map of the Flanaese region of Oerth with a guide to the regions, nations, and cities.
That was basically an Atlas of the Greyhawk setting.
As to the books Voss mentions. Here is a quote from Sandstorm.
This beautifully illustrated supplement continues a series of releases that focus on how the environment can affect D&D gameplay in every capacity. Sandstorm™ contains rules on how to adapt to hazardous hot and arid weather conditions, such as navigating desert terrain and surviving in fierce heat or harsh weather. There are expanded rules for environmental hazards and manipulation of hot weather elements, as well as new spells, feats, magic items, and prestige classes. New monsters associated with deserts and wastelands are included, as well as variants on current monsters. Sandstorm provides enough adventure material included for months of gameplay.
So I would assume that roughly 1/3rd to 1/2 of this books content involves prestiege classes (that are overly specialized for specific environments and thus basically useless), equipment, spells (again overly specialized and basically useless), feats, (same again), and monsters which are mostly going to "an ork, but this time hot!".
There are probably 2-3 pages on hot weather rules and how it can impact players in probably overly complex ways. And then a bunch of fluff. This and the others like it that sold poorly, are typical WotC overly specialized books that were basically boxes of player options not DM tools. None of this helps a DM build a world and run a game. It's just some more monster manual entries and character options.
Heres what it doesn't have that I want.
1) Civilizations that live in those environments and how.
2) ruins that would be left in those environments and what impact those environments have on those ruins over time.
3) tables not just for super special monster variants but general wildlife encounters and their place in the ecosystem.
4) Diseases, Poisons, and Traps indexes for a DM to use to build their own dungeons, encounters, trials, and tribulations.
5) A sections for bringing all those bits together and how best to build something fun out of it.
What I am talking about is a general guideline of an environment, with examples to get your ideas flowing (or to use) and tables for generating content to populate your own world or help run it.
A DMG for example might have a random encounter table for different environments. But it will be a single table for each environment.
When the whole book is about "forests" in general the section of the types of creatures that inhabit a Forest can include 5 tables for encounters while trekking through the woods with different mixes and/or probabilities based on the type of forest you want it to be along with some guide lines for building your own random encounter tables or adjusting the ones you have. Some tips for including 2 tables and rolling on 1 the first 2 times you do so and the 2nd the 3rd time just to add more mix to what can be happening in this environment in the world.
Something about the ease of foraging in a forest vs the difficulty of foraging in a desert (in their respective books).
What I am talking about is very content dense with guidelines, tips, and tricks for the dm to work with.
Wizards has never released that book. And the books they did release were overly specialized dross for the players.
Automatically Appended Next Post: As another, potentially better, example of my problems with the current product line and my wants, I was just at my local comic/game store and came across pathfinders Ultimate Intrigue book.
This book is roughly 250 pages. Only 50ish of which are about rules or whatever for a dm to run a game about intrigue. None of those pages talk much about potential pitfalls when planning out games about intrigue, social encounters, or plots that amount to mysteries. So little of it is tips for how to build a plot based on intrigue. What is there is mostly amounts to foot notes.
What it does provide is some sub system frame works for how the players can make a dc x check to convince npcs to help or hinder or whatever. How "influence" can be a kind of currency for them and how that can be used to get them access to magic or items or helpers. So basically 50 pages of rules for a dm to learn so the players have more tools in their tool box, but NOTHING that provides better tools for building the adventure to begin with. Nothing to streamline preparation, or help keep something as complex as intrigue managable despite the players unwitting actions. How is a topic as potentially complex as running intrigue in a game relegated to less than 1/5th the page count?
The other 200 pages are more class options, spells, feats, equipment, etc etc... That you would expect from all these books.
For a DM to find tools to help improve the way they run their games they either need to look for small publications like the lazy dms guide book, forums for dm advice, or blogs like the alexandrian. Literally the only book in the entire line up with anything actually truely helpful for the dm is the dmg. One of the 3 best selling books btw and the only one wholly set up to help the dm run the game.
Paradigm wrote: I do think Wizards (or an enterprising third party) would do well at some point to release a book that has basically no rules content, but is packed full of advice on the creative side of things. How to build a world that makes sense and is engaging, how to roleplay a character in a way that lines up with your stats and the game's setting, how to write stories that make use of what's in the world and aren't linear, that sort of thing.
Honestly, I think the biggest issue with 5e in general is that there's so much 'assumed' knowledge they omit from the books. There's basically nothing on roleplaying or worldbuilding beyond some tables to roll on if you're lazy or don't care that much, and I think that's because they work on the assumption that a lot of this is still that will be passed down from older players to newer ones simply by dint of the audience growing.
But the success of Matt Colville's Running The Game series, for instance, which often doesn't even touch on rules but covers history, politics, characters, worldbuilding, shows that there's clearly an audience for something like that. I can see why Wizards wouldn't necessarily publish it as once you strip away the rules there's nothing inherently on-brand about it, but surely there's a third party publisher out there who has the inclination to put something like this out there.
True there is an audience for such things but it is more general. There are some very good books on worldbuilding out there. A particualar favourite of mine is Hello Future me, Tough he talks from a novel writing point of view His on Worlbuilding series is great.
@Lance: I think you're missing the point of adventure modules: the idea is that DM's can take that book and run the story. No immediate writing required. Guiding your players in what they do isn't that hard. And if they do go of track. That's where all the stuff you called useless a few posts back comes in handy.
Most beginning (and even veteran platers) don't want big lore, just the current ongoings and the current story/ events.
@Earth127 As Gitzbitah said, no plot survive contact with the players. They make plans you didn't think of, they ask for going to places that re not in the module. Events unfold differently because it's not a premade plot, it's a story you are all telling together.
I don't have a problem with adventure modules in general, but they way they are written is the exact opposite of how any veteran DM is preparing their games.
I didn't say I wanted big lore. I said I wanted information and tools to help build and run things quickly so it's easier to make up on the go and do preparation light work on DMing.
I think adventure modules probably work well for people like me, who are fairly new to tabletop role playing and are still trying to wrap their heads around exactly how much freedom you actually have in these systems.
Then they become kind of an annoyance, because you reach that point where you come up with a fun sounding plan/solution to the problem at hand, but the DM follows the book and shoehorns you right into the next plot point because they didn't have anything to make that plan work.
So kinda mixed feelings on it. I works really well when I'm uncertain what I'm doing, but then when the group comes up with some off the walls idea, the DM either has to think fast or steer the car back onto the road.
LordofHats wrote: I think adventure modules probably work well for people like me, who are fairly new to tabletop role playing and are still trying to wrap their heads around exactly how much freedom you actually have in these systems.
Then they become kind of an annoyance, because you reach that point where you come up with a fun sounding plan/solution to the problem at hand, but the DM follows the book and shoehorns you right into the next plot point because they didn't have anything to make that plan work.
So kinda mixed feelings on it. I works really well when I'm uncertain what I'm doing, but then when the group comes up with some off the walls idea, the DM either has to think fast or steer the car back onto the road.
The thing is if you are a new player how much freedom you have is nigh infinite. You might be learning that, but it's the DM who leaves it all open for you to make your choices and discover the consequences. What the adventure modules have or don't have is of little consequence because a special DM trick is that a lot of what happens behind the screen could be as simple as having you guys suggest a solution and the DM saying "Yup! That works!". It makes you guys feel clever and like you "won" when there really was a secret panel inside the drawer even if there never was one to begin with. Part of preparation light DMing is knowing that the players are going to come up with stuff you never thought of and instead of spending all your time telling players no and forcing them onto a path you planned out meticulously (or the adventure module was written meticulously to be), you instead just let the players participate more in the story telling.
The players don't know that you never planned for there to be the secret compartment that houses clue Y to the plot. You just knew that you had Clue Y and the players needed to find it somewhere. You had some rough ideas of how you could get it into their hands, but when the players came up with the idea of checking the drawer for compartments they gave the answer to you. And because they don't know how much or little work you actually do preparing they both feel like they figured out your little game AND you got away with not wasting your time creating a lot of stuff they were never going to think of.
If you are a new DM however the adventure modules do not prepare you well for the level of freedom the players have or for being prepared to take on the creative solutions the players are going to throw at you. Each NPC comes with almost a script. But it's a limited script for the information they need to give to move the plot and nothing for the crap the players are going to actually say to them. It says this item is in this room and requires DC whatever search to find. Well.... what if the players don't decide to go into that room? What if they fail that search? Adventure modules could be presented in much better ways to help a DM actually run the game in the way these games always go, but they are not. New players have every tool at their disposal. New DMs have the DMG and the accumulated general advice they can find on forums and in magazines. Adventure modules need to be written better.
The thing is if you are a new player how much freedom you have is nigh infinite.
I'm more referring to realizing that's true, than whether or not it is true. People coming into Tabletop RPGS from other kinds of entertainment I think take awhile to realize how off the rails they can go. It's not something you really appreciate on your first few sessions and adventures. Especially not if you're accustomed to video game RPGS, where you at most have a handful of options and are accustomed to the game itself kind of guiding you through what to do next.
Then comes the issue that some players seem to have little interest in getting creative and are okay with following the rails cause that's how they enjoy the game.
I'm relatively new to DM'ing, so I don't claim to be an expert - but it seems like adventure modules make a better "jumping off point" than the stated purpose of actually running them by the book, especially if you have a group who are inclined to ignore obvious hooks, or are more self-motivated to go and find their own story to follow.
I've not used any modules myself, but I would consider it if I had less free time to prep sessions, just to have something to improvise from.
I think there is no inherent problem with written adventures, but I think the only one Wizards has released that is really appropriate for new GMs is the one in the Starter Set. The others are huge big hardbacked books with loads of info in them, it really is a lot to process for a new GM. And there is a feeling that "we have to get through the book!" that probably comes from that too. In dungeons and dragons the story is what happens at the table, not whatever was planned out ahead of time by the DM. It is totally okay to drop a thread if it is not proving satisfying. I think these big books give a sense of security, like if I follow this I will have a fairly epic campaign of good quality, but it is not actually much easier than stringing together a series of smaller adventures, and that will often be just as fun for you and your players, and less stress. When I started I had a lot more free time than money so I used to make all my stuff from scratch. Now I buy those books as collectors items and to loot for locations as Lance says. It saves me time. Then I just drop the locations into my world and they are ready to go once I want them.
In that sense I wish Wizards would release more bite size simple content designed to be played independent of any greater plot (perhaps with some recurring themes to make it easier to thread into a plot if you like). I would prefer a small adventure in a single location over these globe trotting things. That is what most people actually play.
I do like megadungeons too, but mostly as a design geek, I like looking at how people make them and the imaginary geography of them. I have a fair collection of megadungeons at this point and have run a lot of them, and I think it is my favourite style of play these days, despite not having done a lot of it when I started out.
I've not tried a megadungeon as yet, but there's an underdark plot hook that I'm planning to dangle in front of my players soon, which I guess is megadungeon-adjacent at the very least.
I do like the idea of having content that comes without having a strongly baked-in plot, that would make me much more likely to invest.
As a new-ish DM, there's a lot of stuff I want to spend money on, and huge, self-contained Modules are near to the bottom of the list, but a compendium of easy to drop-in content would be near the top.
Ooo, have fun in the underdark! I think the Underdark is more like a "flowchart wilderness", ie. a wilderness adventure that follows along a flowchart rather than being totally open. But I love me some caving adventures.
Megadungeons are fun with the right group, but can quickly become overwhelming if not everyone likes dungeon crawling. I like having them in my setting as a sort of "default action" - players don't know what to do? go delve in the dungeon for a session and see what you turn up!
It baffles me that Wizards have not released something like Dungeon Delve from 4e which was basically a whole bunch of locations with bad guys in them from level 1 to 30. That would get a lot of use, I think.
I don't think it is that fair to the DM to be willfully obtuse though. In our session yesterday we were on our way to a city to warn it about an undead army approaching, and before the session the DM's girlfriend was joking about all the preparation he had done for this session.
Now we conceivably could have turned around, not gone to that city and wasted all his work, but in the story we were telling and the characters that we were playing it would not have made much sense.
Oh hell yeah, I totally agree. That is the contract. My players had decided to investigate a demon infested ruined city, and I had done a huge amount of work to prepare it including fully keying the city, adapting a map, painting about 50 or so minis for the encounters, the whole shebang. We had a small hiatus, and when we came back the players just decided they did not want to do it any more. I was gutted, and called a brief halt to the campaign while I worked out what was next. I did not get too annoyed, since open world sandbox is the premise of my game, but I did feel a bit betrayed. The way I look at it is, the prep is done, I can re-use it in future.
I completely avoid miniatures and grid maps to the point that some players wanted to buy minis for their guys and i told them "do it if you want but we will not be using them in the game".
I try to keep the theater of the mind going as much as possible and i do not want to invest time and money into stuff that may be used for 10 minutes one game every couple years.
Lance845 wrote: I completely avoid miniatures and grid maps to the point that some players wanted to buy minis for their guys and i told them "do it if you want but we will not be using them in the game".
I try to keep the theater of the mind going as much as possible and i do not want to invest time and money into stuff that may be used for 10 minutes one game every couple years.
Similar experience here. In my games at university we were playing in rooms with whiteboards so we could draw up an easy map on that but other than that the usage of maps has been pretty minimal.
Da Boss wrote: Oh hell yeah, I totally agree. That is the contract. My players had decided to investigate a demon infested ruined city, and I had done a huge amount of work to prepare it including fully keying the city, adapting a map, painting about 50 or so minis for the encounters, the whole shebang. We had a small hiatus, and when we came back the players just decided they did not want to do it any more. I was gutted, and called a brief halt to the campaign while I worked out what was next. I did not get too annoyed, since open world sandbox is the premise of my game, but I did feel a bit betrayed. The way I look at it is, the prep is done, I can re-use it in future.
Yikes that sucks! Fair play for taking it all in your stride! Like you said no prep is ever really lost.
The session itself sounds amazing though. I would love to play something like that, maybe I'll suggest to my group we go explore some ruined cities
You can have my notes if you like, they are on my plog along with the map. Someone may as well get some use out of it!
As to minis, it is a new thing for me. When we started it was all theatre of the mind, and stayed that way for what...13 years? I also started in university rooms, with chalk blackboards, and we would sketch quick maps on there for complicated fights, that was all. I love minis and wargaming (hence me being on Dakka so long) but I had no opponents, only people interested in playing Dungeons and Dragons, so I started painting up minis and using them when running for kids because the visual aids helped with play, and then gradually kept increasing the number of minis I had available, sorted out an organised storage method and generally got more into it. I have loads of minis done now and it has been great for my painting motivation, but it is a pain in the arse when you paint stuff and then the players skip it. But hey, a painted mini, and I plan on playing Dungeons and Dragons til I am old as feth, so I will get use out of them, I am sure!
Would totally recommend to new players to go theatre of the mind though.
I think there's a healthy balance between the two. I started out purely with TotM combat, but these days use a lot more maps and minis (or at least tokens, much cheaper). Both have their advantages.
I do find people are far more creative without the constraints of a grid, I tend to get far more 'can I do this cool thing ?' questions with TotM, whereas on a grid 9/10 times people are going to do 'normal' actions based on what's depicted. Rarely do I get questions about swinging on a rope or parkouring over terrain or otherwise interacting with the environment when it's all broken down into gridded maps.
On the other hand, the grid definitely has a value. Bigger combats can get real messy without one, especially as we tend to play online and communication isn't always 100% clear. Likewise, when you have more powerful features (on both sides of the DM screen), and especially AoE effects, it's handy to avoid those edge cases of who gets hit (not normally a problem, if your players will accept your rulings, but every so often you get the ones that quibble everything).
There's also just the cool factor of having minis. I recently bought and painted a set for my group's party (without telling them ahead of time) and they were really excited when I unveiled and used them for the first time. Likewise, throwing down a LotR Troll mini gave them quite the fright that I'm not sure a token or simple description would have done.
These days, I tend to go for maps for anything with multiple creatures on each side, or something that's going to last more than a few rounds. On the other hand, if a couple of PCs are going to run into a room full of CR1/4 guards and cut them down with a single attack, that's not worth getting it out for. Likewise, a 1v1 duel (whether between players and NPCs or PvP sparring), I leave that to the imagination and in general play a little more fast and loose with the combat mechanics.
I do find that when I'm playing with hardcore tacticians/powergamers (people I don't tend to enjoy running for anyway) I avoid maps. It's a temptation to go into wargaming mode for them, and start fussing over positioning, lines of sight and ranges rather than just going with 'close enough' rulings. But for others, that's just part of the fun.
I agree, I think there are lots of situations where breaking out the minis just slows down play, say if players are fighting a wight or something in a small, tightly enclosed crypt, that can be resolved usually very quickly.
I enjoy the tactical side of things though, and I would not get any use from my miniatures any other way at the moment.
Yea that is how we do it as well. We have cool models for the spectacle and drawn maps for the spacial awareness but don't go too overboard.
Would you believe I was so inspired I composed some poetry following the siege of that city! I'm getting so nerdy that I'm going to have to start flushing my own head down the loo soon What do you chaps get your players to contribute between sessions? Do you ask for after action reports and character background stories?
I give an inspiration point per "write up" of the session from their characters perspectrive. I used to award bonus XP but we don't currently use XP, we use milestone experience.
Some of my players have written songs or had pieces of art commissioned, and one of them got us all mugs themed around our characters. I have a lovely group, which is why it is easier to forgive them mugging me off on the ruined city plot!
I don't consider myself particularly good at the story telling side, or knowing the rules very well (hopefully both are because I'm pretty new), but my players are crazy about my miniatures and dungeon set-ups so I go pretty over-board with them. Unless they're in town, in transit, or shopping, I probable have stuff set up on the table.
As for cool stuff my players have done (They're kids btw), they've asked me advice on how to start a miniature collection, advice on DMing and writing their own adventures. One of the youngest has been regularly painting D&D monsters, and wrote a few hand written pages of an adventure story staring the characters in the party
As for contributions, I just ask them to recap at the beginning of each session, we're just starting to see if they can take care of their own character sheets and bring them back each game, they still haven't managed to remember to bring their own set of dice yet, even tho every one of them has a set
As they're new also, I do the inspiration rewards for good roleplaying suggested in one of the books.
I don't trust my adult players to take care of their character sheets lol. I have a hard backed buisness portfolio thing that we put everyones character sheets/notes into at the end of every game and I keep with my books/DM screen.
Ive been watching TT's cast of players and would love to do a campaign so much. Gte minins, grid the whole shabang! Because I like minis.
I dont have many firnds that are into minatures/tabletops but D&D has been thrown around once or twice as an idea. I realise its a huge commitement perosnaly and im am happy with that but not sure how to go about finding likeminded people.
Out of curiosity just how much of the story and character developement is pre-agreed in advance?
Does everyone do a background write up on their dude and the DM then sets the story accordingly? Do you guys discuss the plot(at leats broadly) in advance ?
Any tips on getting started? And how I could look for groups ?
Im in hampshire area of the UK and dont mind driving.
Argive wrote: Ive been watching TT's cast of players and would love to do a campaign so much. Gte minins, grid the whole shabang! Because I like minis.
I dont have many firnds that are into minatures/tabletops but D&D has been thrown around once or twice as an idea. I realise its a huge commitement perosnaly and im am happy with that but not sure how to go about finding likeminded people.
Out of curiosity just how much of the story and character developement is pre-agreed in advance?
This depends largely on the DM. The general single guideline that I have had my past DMs tell me is "Any non evil characters are okay.", but I have also heard of people who give a basic set up "You will all be part of a mercenary company that is currently involved in a turf war between these nations." or whatever. It's usually left up to the players to determine if they know each other ahead of time or not. I did find some neat random tables to roll on that are inter character relationships. So I had my most recent players roll on it for the person to their left and right to pre establish how they each knew at least some of the people there. It helps get past the akward first sessions character introductions.
Does everyone do a background write up on their dude and the DM then sets the story accordingly?
Not everyone goes super in depth on their characters backgrounds. What I have found often is that I end up learning a lot about the character as I play and the DM puts them into situations. So I don't try to plan out too much about them.
Do you guys discuss the plot(at leats broadly) in advance ?
I have never once been given any information on the plot from my DMs and as a DM I would never ruin any facet of the plot by telling my players.
Any tips on getting started? And how I could look for groups ?
Im in hampshire area of the UK and dont mind driving.
College campuses are great for finding groups as are local game stores.
I wonder if Dakka should set up a bi-weekly online game using tabletop or some other program?
I do think is worthwhile discussing what type of campaign you want to run with your players beforehand so everyone is on the same page.
We had a great 'one shot' run by one of our players who said up front it would be a low magic and human only so you could avoid it if you didn't like that!
As for knowing mechanics, I've deliberately not learnt the mechanics other than what my character does. Knowing what happens backstage isn't going to increase my fun and, just like in Rugby, DM is God so what he says goes anyway!
I think Lance pretty much covered it with the nature of pre-campaign interaction/'planning', but to add my 2p...
The first step for me as a DM is to give the players a 2-3 page handout on the setting, a map (mainly for fun, or to spark imagination), and let them know where in the world we're starting just so they can figure out why/how their character has ended up there. I do encourage a dialogue at this stage, being a homebrew setting that I've been working on for 2 years, I'm able to answer any questions people have about race, locations, cultures ect. My aim is to make sure that every character fits the world as best they can, rather than just being a generic adventurer that could show up anywhere.
I do ask that everyone shows up with a 'backstory', partly so I have some story hooks to throw in down the line (though rarely in the form the players expect), but mainly for their own benefit. Your character is a product of their experience up to that point, so knowing your character's history and how it's shaped them immediately gives you an insight into their personality. Of course, this'll change as you move through the game, in response to what happens therein, but an understanding of your character's background equips you to know them better and stay in character.
I won't give away any elements of the plot ahead of time (apart from oneshots, where I'll give the players a basic premise to get started quickly), but I do usually give them an introductory paragraph or two that explains why they are where they are, just so they have at least some idea what's going on (especially when you're bringing in new players to an existing game). Elaborating a little on the type of campaign is certainly essential, even if it's just in broad tonal terms. Helps avoid the situation where you're running an urban intrigue game, and someone turns up wanting to slay monsters, or vice versa.
Rarely is anything agreed ahead of time. As a DM, I'll often immediately have ideas of twists, reveals or arcs I want to employ with each PC, but I'll very rarely share that. Other times, I'll play for months before hitting on an idea for them. I do try and give everyone something personal to them as part of the central narrative.
This'll vary greatly from game to game, of course. Mine is big on narrative, so turning up with a character you know well and are comfortable roleplaying is essential. Other DMs will just ask that you turn up with a PC to kill their way through a dungeon, or will hand out specific roles they ask you to fill amongst yourselves. For a first game though, try and strike a balance. You'll quickly find what you like and don't like, so starting off with a nice, well-rounded game gives you the ability to pivot into whatever genre or style you like.
If you're looking to start out as DM though, the best advice I can give is just to go for it. Everyone's first few sessions will be messy, ugly, broken and in a year's time you'll look back on your notes in horror, but if everyone has a good time, that's really all you need!
Yeah I would like to be a dm on day and do all the prep etc. As it obviously brings joy to people and help them have a good time. But I would like to play a couple campaigns first I think for experiance.
The reason for my asking is that narrative and setting is extremely important for me. (I dont know how many days i spent playing the neverwinternights games back in the day).
Im concerned about plot contradictions etc. I would imagine the best way around this would be to pre-agree some things in case somenes backround clashes directly with someone elses.
A good DM is i think the most important part of the experiance.
The important thing is that you, the dm, are not telling a story. Your whole group is telling the story. The players contributions are just as, if not more important than the DMs.
The player will say something like "i want to come from like a viking barbarian tribe where i did blah blah blah" and then you can go, oh, well the skolish tribes inhabit this area. They tend to worship these things and they are in near constant war with these people. Why do you think your character has left the tribe lands to adventure off on their own?"
It works best as a conversation. Figure it out together.
Also the world is a big place and it takes all kinds. Expect the players to be odd balls in your world. They will be anyway.
Im concerned about plot contradictions etc. I would imagine the best way around this would be to pre-agree some things in case somenes backround clashes directly with someone elses.
A good DM is i think the most important part of the experiance.
Yeah, that's really something you kind of have to trust the DM on. Pre-agreeing anything that'll actually happen during the game really shouldn't be necessary, but talking to them during character creation progress can help work out any kinks. That dialogue should help get rid of any contradictions between, for example, how/where your Dragonborn PC is in the world and how the Dragonborn as a culture exist in their setting. There's almost always a compromise to be found that allows you to play the character you want while respecting what the DM has created.
In terms of various PC backstories having some accidental overlap or crossover, that can kind of be a gift to the DM if they're willing to run with it. If player A had a brother who left to become a bandit, and player B had a family home raided by bandits at around the same time, both bandits can conceivably be the same person and boom, instant drama when it comes up.
When it comes to writing backstory, my advice is always to keep it strictly to what your character is aware of. That way, you leave some blank space for the DM to work in, avoid any accidental metagaming by not having knowledge your character doesn't, and leave plenty of surprises for yourself down the line rather than just playing through a story you've already written.
Hmm Yes. I see. I need to have a lookie to see how much a D&D rule-set is these days. I want to avoid meta gaming as much as possible.
In terms of character leveling up etc. Do you guys tend to read through whats available to characters in the long run or pick a starting class and go from there?(rather than plan a skill tree progression in advance). I like surprises but I wouldn't want to be useless and die all the time lol.
To be honest all I really need is to find a good DM. And then some dudes really and go from there.
The Player's Handbook should probably run you about £25-30, depending on where you get it. However, the Basic Rules are available online for free, and cover all the basic mechanics as well as giving you a few class and race options to have a play with. Everything you need to learn to play is in there, pretty much.
http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/basicrules
You can also find all this stuff at DNDBeyond, which also features an online character creator that gives you access to all the core races and classes (though not subclasses) and takes you through the somewhat daunting process of creating a character in a very intuitive way. I'd strongly recommend starting out here, as trying to create a character using the rulebooks when you're new can be a very lengthy, confusing process compared to doing it via this site.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/
Regarding picking classes, at this point I have a good enough working knowledge of the game that I can in general know what a character is going to be capable of when I create them. However, I tend to start with a concept I want to play and pick a class that fits, rather than planning ahead too much. Much of the progression in 5e is fairly linear anyway, the big choices being your Subclass pick at level 2 or 3 (the archetype that'll define a lot of your future progression) and whether or not to multiclass down the line.
If you're learning the game, I'd not look ahead too far as a lot of the high-end stuff won't come up for ages, but do have a read of the first few levels' worth of features for the classes you're interested in, as it can be frustrating to want to do a certain thing only to find the class doesn't give you quite the right options to do so. For instance, if you want to play a tanky character in heavy armour, Barbarian might seem ideal, but a lot of their features don't work with Heavy Armour so you'd want to go for a Fighter variation instead. Likewise, if you want to play a holy warrior, knowing whether you want Paladin (Charisma-based, fewer spells, awesome in melee combat) or Cleric (Wisdom-based, less good in close combat, more spells, healing and variety) is important.
I would argue that you can get into the game quite easily with the Basic Rules, and particularly the Starter Set which also comes with dice and an adventure for a reasonable price. The starter rules are free, but they do not offer a lot of advice for a new DM. But you can find advice online easily, Matt Colville's youtube series Running the Game, especially the first 4 or so episodes, is full of excellent advice to get you started.
If you find you really like it, definitely worth getting the big three, and as a new DM the Dungeon Masters Guide actually has tonnes of good advice for you. They are very nicely produced books, and the Monster Manual in particular is packed with lovely art and interesting stuff to read.
With regard to how to run a campaign, there are lots of different ways to do it and it is a good idea to try stuff out and see what you like. Some people like plot heavy stuff where the DM is telling a story, others like a more open and sandboxy type thing where the story is what happens in game and the DM mostly sets up the world and acts as the logical response generator. (That is my preferred set up, with a little sprinkling of character specific hooks). Others like to just kick down dungeon doors, kill orcs and solve puzzles. All are totally valid and awesome ways to play.
If you are thinking about it, I would say depending on budget pick up the Basic Rules or the Starter Set and get cracking after making a small town and a basic dungeon.
To be honest all I really need is to find a good DM. And then some dudes really and go from there.
I think this is very true, that's all you need to play!
The advice above is very much in the "I am the DM, this is my world, you will play in it nicely" mold.
My first DM was different in that you created the world collaboratively as you went along which was really cool!
Lance845 wrote: I completely avoid miniatures and grid maps to the point that some players wanted to buy minis for their guys and i told them "do it if you want but we will not be using them in the game".
I try to keep the theater of the mind going as much as possible and i do not want to invest time and money into stuff that may be used for 10 minutes one game every couple years.
Similar experience here. In my games at university we were playing in rooms with whiteboards so we could draw up an easy map on that but other than that the usage of maps has been pretty minimal.
I've not RPGed for a while, but when we were playing (a variety of games; Dark Heresy 2, MERP, FFG's Star Wars, a homebrew weird WW2 game), we never used miniatures because we had nowhere to put them. We were playing in living rooms, so we were all in chairs and sofas around the edges of the room, not gathered round a dining table.
I ran the Star Wars RPG. What brought that to an end was me running out of ideas. I would have liked a campaign book not so much to follow slavishly, but so I at least had an idea of what the players would start off doing each session. It worked for Raymond Chandler, but there's only so many times you can start off with another Stormtrooper attack.
As for knowing the rules, I can see both arguments. Our method is that whoever's GMing has the rules, and the rest of us pick it up as we go along (usually, it's along the lines of "OK, I want to run up behind that tree, aim at that orc and shoot it in the head with my crossbow" and the GM will work out what actions and die rolls that involves, then I roll the dice). On the other hand, I quite like knowing the basic rules. not all the skills, spells, feats, etc, but knowing the basic numbers so I can judge how likely it is for me to jump a gap, punch someone in the face, etc.
Lance845 wrote:
I don't trust my adult players to take care of their character sheets lol. I have a hard backed buisness portfolio thing that we put everyones character sheets/notes into at the end of every game and I keep with my books/DM screen.
Turns out you're right to do it that way. All but one of the kids that are players in my group lost their character sheet since last week. The two brothers' father spent a long time searching the house and delivering it in time for D&D because of how important it was to the kids. The other missed D&D this session, because their parents felt it was a waste of time for him to stay without his character sheet.
For advice for starting as a DM, I have to fully repeat what Da Boss said. Start small unless you already know you're into D&D. I started with just the starter set, and that's mostly all I have DMed so far (twice). It's a good story for beginners, especially if you plan to stay in The Forgotten Realms. I expect once you get started it will be hard to resist buying the big three core books, but you don't need to feel obligated to have them when first starting. Like Da Boss said, there's enough free stuff available to get started and try it out.
I also encourage watching Matt Colville's Running the Game videos. Also if you have time, some D&D streams, and how to play videos can get you used to game play and the flow of the game.
If you're looking to get into a game without being a DM, I don't have much advice as I haven't had much luck with it. I'd personally suggest seeing if the friends you already have are interested in trying it out together with you.
On an unrelated topic, I'm happy to say, my D&D group just finished the first dungeon in the starter campaign earlier today, and hit level 2. They're psyched.
Lance845 wrote:
I don't trust my adult players to take care of their character sheets lol. I have a hard backed buisness portfolio thing that we put everyones character sheets/notes into at the end of every game and I keep with my books/DM screen.
Turns out you're right to do it that way. All but one of the kids that are players in my group lost their character sheet since last week. The two brothers' father spent a long time searching the house and delivering it in time for D&D because of how important it was to the kids. The other missed D&D this session, because their parents felt it was a waste of time for him to stay without his character sheet.
Yikes poor little lad, I feel like I could roughly recreate my character sheet on the fly if necessary!
I'l add my 2 copper pieces to the starting D&D discussion - I'm about 15 or so 5-hour sessions into a campaign, and I only have the free-access rules, D&D Beyond, and the DM's guide. And to be honest, the DM guide is not something I've got much use out of. You really can do a lot with the freely available rules.
I will second (third? fourth?) the advice to check out Matt Colville, his advice helped me a lot. Watching a stream can be useful to learn the broad strokes of the rules (I watch critical role, but there are others available).
I'd say the biggest thing about D&D, and especially for a DM, is not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good - It's ok not to be putting out expert-level content straight away! If you're starting with a group completely new to D&D, it's a shared learning experience, and it can be a lot of fun working it out as a group.
But definitely, the best way to learn it, is by doing it!
Hi dakka, really glad I found my way over here. I've been introducing my boys (7 and 5 years old) to the concept of role playing and they've taken to it well enough. I just grabbed a little whiteboard and some dice and made up some nonsense about treasure hunting in a goblin cave. At this stage I'm just making up stuff on the fly and they're happy to go along with it.
I've also done a bit of tabletop wargaming with the older one in a similar way. A promising start.
I also downloaded and played the Wizards of the coast kids intro games Heroes of Hesiod which were a hit with the older lad but I'm hoping to take it a bit further. I want to get into character creation and tell our own stories and bring in a little more game structure as things go on without blowing the kid's mind (and mine) and ruining the fun.
Does anyone have any advice on the very most basics I can get away with that will be a solid foundation to build on?
If you're looking at eventually going into D&D specifically, I'd start with the very basics of that, the D20+Stat resolution mechanics. Let them assign 5 pre-picked numbers (I'd go -1, 0, +1, +1, +2, +4 for a good range) to each of the six Ability Scores as a form of character creation, and play a session or two with just that. No classes, no spells, maybe not even that much combat, just to get them used to rolling Dexterity to be agile or Wisdom to detect things ect. Let them learn what a good or bad stat does for their potential and how they can make the best use of those to roleplay.
After that, rather than introduce the full array of skills, show them the chart and let them pick 3 they like the sound of for their character. Give them a +2 bonus to these rolls, introducing the idea of Proficiency and the next step of complexity (you could also let them pick a weapon instead if they want to be a better fighter). The full array of Skills could be daunting on the sheet, but aside from those you're Proficient in, they're all derived from your Ability Scores anyway so it's what you've already been doing.
Once they're comfortable with that, introduce a more combat-heavy session where you go over the basics of Initiative, hit points, Actions and Bonus Actions, in-combat movement. Nothing too complex, just have them bash some goblins or kobolds and learn the ropes.
With that under their belt, you can probably then introduce classes and the extra features that come with them. Class features are daunting at first and there's a lot of them even at first level for some, but if you already have a solid grip on the core mechanics, it will be much less of a leap and more a natural progression. Perhaps assign them a class based on what they've been doing up to this point, so if one's been really fighty and the other sneaky, give them Fighter and Rogue respectively. That gets around the idea of them wanting to pick something fiddly like a Warlock or Monk when they're not necessarily ready for it.
Hope that's of some use. Obviously, you may find they take really well to one element but struggle on another, but this should give you a decent framework. On the other hand, if you want to introduce them to roleplaying more generally, maybe look up a bunch of one-page RPGs that are all over the place online, they're often really simple so a great compromise between going straight to D&D and making it up as you go.
Thanks Paradigm. I'be still to have a good look at the rules and see what makes sense.
I maybe forgot to say I'm more or less a total noob at this myself. Had a brief into to DnD when I was 13 (the DM was also 13) That was in the 90s! Then I played maybe two sessions of Eberon some 12 years ago and some very patchy RPG experiences since. I'm going to have to learn the ropes myself before I can DM for the kids. That said I can see the boy wanting to DM his own stories.
That said I'm not married to DnD here I could get into a starwars based RPG if the boy was into it but we're reading LOtR these days and he's diggin' the idea of being a Hobbit burgler (Halfling Rogue?) raiding an evil mummy's pyramid (it's all a bit Indiana Jones actually.) anyway... More story less rules is deffinately the way to go so thanks for the pointers.
Any pointers to a good quality source of one page RPGs?
If you want a system that is heavily favoured towards story and less to rules/crunch, then you should check out the FATE systems (FATE core and accelerated). The main rules are available for free from the Evil Hat website
There's multiple licensed properties which use the system (such as Dresden Files and the Atomic Robo webcomic) along with some fun little unique settings, like The Secrets of Cats, which basically has you playing as a cat in our world, but where cats are secretly protecting us, their "burdens", from supernatural threats.
Fate is also really simple on a mechanical level (a test in the system literally boils down to pick which skill is being used for the test, roll 4 D6 where 1-2 is a minus, 3-4 is blank and 5-6 is a plus, each plus improves your skill value by one, each minus reduces it by one, compare resultant skill value to the target value), so making your own setting using its rules is a piece of cake compared to trying to port other rulesets. Just come up with some stunts and powers (you don't even need to make that many as you can make some up during character creation with your players), what skills your world will have and off you go.
Honestly, if I was GMing kids (which I do) make sure to focus on Role-play and not roll-play.
Many times, I don't even give them stats. Just some background about their characters, a map, and some adventure hooks and see what happens. The mechanics are only there to facilitate story-telling.
That's a good point, the kids I play with keep wanting to roll for everything, especially if someone else is trying to accomplish something.
Also to the poster right above me, I have a strange question. Are you the same "Easy E" who was a big part of making all that amazing and in depth Warhammer 40k campaign "Battle for Ammoriss". And all those Aeronautica Imperialis campaigns too? (War Over Zephyrus, Investigation of Bin Mazar, Feud of the Red Clouds, and Cleansing of Grex Silex). Those were really great, I wish I had found them when the global campaign was actually happening.
Yes, I did enjoy it. Good reads, and creatively done. It's cool to meet you, Easy E, I didn't know you were a part of Dakka.
Edit: It's weird not knowing you were on Dakka seeing how many threads you've started. Maybe because I've only been a member for about a year and a half and stay almost exclusively in the painting and modeling section.
Honestly, the only issue with Ranger as a class is the Beastmaster subclass, which is ironically less useful that being any other class and controlling a pet creature. There's a really easy fix to it as well, change 2 things and you've done a great deal for the subclass:
- Rather than have the Beastmaster swap one of their attacks for their beast's, just let the beast roll its own initiative and act independently, still controlled by the Beastmaster player but without them having to sacrifice part of their turn to get it to do anything.
- Let the beast roll some variation on Hit Dice so that it levels alongside you. I know they get HP equal to the Ranger Level x4 if that's higher than their base HP, but that means at level 10 they have 40HP, and against the sort of stuff a level 10 party might be fighting, that's potentially a total life expectancy of one spell or one big hit.
Favoured Enemy, Favoured Terrain, all the other subclasses, they're all really rather fun and useful if you pick the right ones for your campaign. We have a Gloomstalker in my campaign that does feature a lot of extended travel, and he's very often the MVP when it comes to avoiding some of the nastier denizens of the world. Favoured Terrain, when it does come into play, can be really, really helpful for a game with a lot of travel.
I don't really thing things like favoured terrain or alert are fun as they block out cool storytelling opportunities for the DM (like getting lost or ambushed).
Luckily I'm a hunter ranger so I like killing animals rather than petting them :-p
I think it just means you have to be clever about those things. Sure, the Ranger can't get lost, but find a way to split up the party and suddenly, the rest are vulnerable. The Ranger player can feel cool as they lead the party through dangerous lands, right up until the fog or sandstorm or blizzard rolls in and the paladin and wizard get turned around and wander off, leaving the Ranger equipped to track them down, but creating a great deal of tension as the others get more and more lost and stray closer to danger.
I used this a couple of times recently. The way I see it, it's not so much about foiling the DM but more about creating an opportunity for a Ranger to really feel like they're having a cool moment. In the same way that a magic-based puzzle is a chance for the Sorcerer or Wizard to shine, a big duel or melee is the Fighter or Paladin's showcase, leading the party through dangerous, hostile terrain they've explicitly chosen a feature to be able to overcome is that chance in the spotlight for a Ranger. In a brawl they're outclassed by the straight combat classes, as casters they're outclassed by most, but when it comes to navigating the wilderness and avoiding its dangers, they're in their element.
Sure, you lose out on the opportunity to pull a sudden ambush or whatever, but the tradeoff is that you get to reward the Ranger player with something only they can do. And if you have a plot point that desperately requires an ambush, you can just hang onto it until the terrain changes! Unless your campaign has only two biomes, there's going to be plenty of times where it's not in play.
Though I admit Alert can be a pain in the backside. I had a real powergamer in an old campaign that took his Passive Perception up to 28 at level 5 through Alert, Sentinel Shield and Wis20. That was obnoxious, but it was really a player issue rather than a rules one.
The issue with the Ranger's class features is that they're completely hit or miss. IF you are in your favored terrain, for example, great, you're awesome. But the rest of the time your class feature does absolutely nothing. It's the same for favored enemies. That's great if your campaign is centered around fighting a particular race, but then all the other times, that level might as well be blank. The player also tends to have basically no control over those elements also; those things are in the hands of the DM.
I mean, imagine trying to play something like Waterdeep: Dragon Heist as a ranger. The whole thing takes place in an urban environment, where favored terrain will NEVER apply. (Dungeon of the Mad Mage at least would have Underdark apply, but it perfectly highlights the "all-or-none" issue of the class feature.)
Some fair points, I didn't think about it that way.
One of my companions seems to think that when I'm in favoured terrain I will immediately know the way to a place I've never been before. That's not correct right? I've certainly been resisting that being the case as it doesn't make sense to me and isn't covered by the 'doesn't get lost' clause imo.
Kroem wrote:Some fair points, I didn't think about it that way.
One of my companions seems to think that when I'm in favoured terrain I will immediately know the way to a place I've never been before. That's not correct right? I've certainly been resisting that being the case as it doesn't make sense to me and isn't covered by the 'doesn't get lost' clause imo.
Yeah, it's not a GPS or sat-nav. If you're trying to reach the other side of the forest, it means you won't get turned around and end up coming out the same side you went in. f you're trying to reach a location you're not familiar with, I'd say this part of the rule is most relevant:
'When you make an Intelligence or Wisdom check related to your favored terrain, your proficiency bonus is doubled if you are using a skill that you’re proficient in.'
So the Survival check to navigate and follow your map or the directions you were given will receive a fairly significant boost, but it doesn't mean you just magically find your way there. The part about difficult terrain not slowing your travel also means you'll reach it faster than otherwise, and you'll be far more precise in tracking other creatures in that terrain. I concede it's somewhat situational, but it can still be very powerful.
streamdragon wrote:The issue with the Ranger's class features is that they're completely hit or miss. IF you are in your favored terrain, for example, great, you're awesome. But the rest of the time your class feature does absolutely nothing. It's the same for favored enemies. That's great if your campaign is centered around fighting a particular race, but then all the other times, that level might as well be blank. The player also tends to have basically no control over those elements also; those things are in the hands of the DM.
I mean, imagine trying to play something like Waterdeep: Dragon Heist as a ranger. The whole thing takes place in an urban environment, where favored terrain will NEVER apply. (Dungeon of the Mad Mage at least would have Underdark apply, but it perfectly highlights the "all-or-none" issue of the class feature.)
I do think it's kind of on the DM to provide some information to a Ranger player when making these picks. Oftentimes, it'll be obvious if a certain type of enemy or terrain is going to feature heavily or not just based on the way the world is set up, so I don't think there's anything wrong with the DM nudging the player towards, say, picking Undead if they represent a major force in the world. or showing them the map and what terrain types are going to come up a lot. I guess a lot of that depends to some extent on the nature of the campaign. If it's a big old sandbox featuring everything somewhere then obviously it's going to be harder to keep it useful, but in a smaller or more focused campaign or world I think it can be fairly easy, between player and DM, to make sure the choices mean something.
If I was running an all-urban campaign, I would certainly offer Urban as a Favoured Terrain option.
I do think it's kind of on the DM to provide some information to a Ranger player when making these picks. Oftentimes, it'll be obvious if a certain type of enemy or terrain is going to feature heavily or not just based on the way the world is set up, so I don't think there's anything wrong with the DM nudging the player towards, say, picking Undead if they represent a major force in the world. or showing them the map and what terrain types are going to come up a lot. I guess a lot of that depends to some extent on the nature of the campaign. If it's a big old sandbox featuring everything somewhere then obviously it's going to be harder to keep it useful, but in a smaller or more focused campaign or world I think it can be fairly easy, between player and DM, to make sure the choices mean something.
If I was running an all-urban campaign, I would certainly offer Urban as a Favoured Terrain option.
I agree that a session 0 can alleviate some of the issues of selecting favored enemies or terrain, but it doesn't solve the underlying issues of those features: their all or nothing nature. Similarly House-Ruling something generally means that thing is broken in the first place; it's one thing to house-rule something for flavor or to make it better fit your world. It's another thing to House-Rule something just to make it work. I'm not saying you shouldn't allow Urban as a terrain type, if anything I'm saying that it probably should have been in the list the whole time. Or even better, redesign or replace the rule instead of holding onto something that didn't really work in it's original edition either.
I would say Ranger is definitely the most poorly designed class. Beastmaster is obviously borked, I do not know why the design is so inconsistent between beastmaster and a familiar for example. Allowing the beast to act separately with some boosts to HP and attacks I think works out fine and it is no longer a lame subclass.
The other stuff I am in two minds about. On the one hand, exploration and survival are two of my favourite things in Dungeons and Dragons, and I dislike anything that just removes those elements from gameplay. But if you work to make your terrain pretty varied, then it will not be a problem. Like my Ranger PC has Underground and Hills as his favoured terrains. Underground has been super useful (I run a house rule that says if you do not get a comfortable night's sleep you do not recover Hit Dice, and Favoured Terrain allows the Ranger to make everyone comfortable). Hills is useful in a few regions that they have passed through a couple of times. The rest of the time, the Ranger is pretty useless at navigation because the PC did not take Survival as one of his proficiencies.
But I think favoured terrain is poor design. Something like Advantage on all survival checks, or doubled proficiency in Survival or some other "always on but not automatic success" feature would be better design in my view.
My Ranger PC is the most disatisfied with his character of all of my players. Part of that is personality, but a big part is that he is kinda at the whims of the group with regard to his special abilities. Definitely the worst designed of the 5e classes, and most of them are pretty awesome.
Ranger is probably just a stupid idea for a class. A fighter with high wisdom and proficiency in survival would be able to fill the same "fictional" role.
I've had two rangers in groups so far, and both seemed to suffer from their class perks being useless at times. I'm not sure why favored terrain, or enemy, needs to be so limited. Why not let the Ranger spend a rest "researching" their terrain, or an enemy to get better knowledge of them and get stacking bonuses as the adventure goes on that increases their value and flexibility to the group, rather than a limited bonus that's great "when it matters" but is useless at all other times?
I saw this when first reading through the rules and avoided Ranger because of it. I avoided Wild Magic sorcerer for the same reason, cause I saw "when the DM calls for it" on mechanics and thought why? I do have a Wild Sorcerer in one of my games, and the DM has been remembering to call on him to make use of his mechanics, but it seems like a hassle compared to simply building the mechanic to function without the DM remembering to call for it.
You see, Wild Magic Sorcerer, there's your competition for the worst designed class in the game!
I do think gearing the Ranger more towards a 'know your enemy' sort of thing with a focus on research, finding weaknesses, that sort of thing might be a cool idea. Give them an almost Witcher-esque ability to study and track creatures, craft antidotes and healing stuff, focus their abilities around preparedness rather than specialisation on a handful of things. It'd need a complete rework of the class, but it could be interesting.
Hell, maybe even something like a 'floating proficiency' where over a rest you can choose to focus on Nature, Survival or Medicine, for instance. Freeing up a proficiency slot for something else at character creation and allowing you to specialise on the fly, and if you choose something you're already proficient in, you get Expertise instead.
It's probably going into subjective territory, but Ranger as a class fantasy, as to me always been about being that one person in the party who is ready. The person whose been out in the wilderness and had to adapt to survive.
Specialization itself seems antithetical to this image for me.
Ranger is riding a bunch of horses. You are Aragorn, leading the party through the wilderness and performing almost supernatural feats of tracking.
You are Jon Snow or Fitzchivallry Farseer, with a wolf at your side that you have a supernatural bond with.
You are Drizzt or Legolas, a two weapon or archery specialist.
You are the Nature Paladin to Druid's Natjure Cleric.
You are Van Helsing, the monster hunting specialist who targets one hated foe above all others.
It is pretty incoherant, and does not really do any of the fantasies justice because of this. And I am pretty sure the designers know that, and have known it for years.
Wild Magic sorcerer is pretty weaksauce, but to me it is obviously supposed to be "wacky" rather than powerful. I just assign the responsibility to a dice roll after every spellcast to take my judgement out of it, but it is definitely poor from a design point of view. A shame, because 5e managed to make Sorcerer feel different to Wizard much better than previous editions.
Da Boss wrote: I would say Ranger is definitely the most poorly designed class. Beastmaster is obviously borked, I do not know why the design is so inconsistent between beastmaster and a familiar for example. Allowing the beast to act separately with some boosts to HP and attacks I think works out fine and it is no longer a lame subclass.
The other stuff I am in two minds about. On the one hand, exploration and survival are two of my favourite things in Dungeons and Dragons, and I dislike anything that just removes those elements from gameplay. But if you work to make your terrain pretty varied, then it will not be a problem. Like my Ranger PC has Underground and Hills as his favoured terrains. Underground has been super useful (I run a house rule that says if you do not get a comfortable night's sleep you do not recover Hit Dice, and Favoured Terrain allows the Ranger to make everyone comfortable). Hills is useful in a few regions that they have passed through a couple of times. The rest of the time, the Ranger is pretty useless at navigation because the PC did not take Survival as one of his proficiencies.
But I think favoured terrain is poor design. Something like Advantage on all survival checks, or doubled proficiency in Survival or some other "always on but not automatic success" feature would be better design in my view.
My Ranger PC is the most disatisfied with his character of all of my players. Part of that is personality, but a big part is that he is kinda at the whims of the group with regard to his special abilities. Definitely the worst designed of the 5e classes, and most of them are pretty awesome.
Ranger is probably just a stupid idea for a class. A fighter with high wisdom and proficiency in survival would be able to fill the same "fictional" role.
I definitely agree about it being the worst designed class. In a game with the actually well designed Warlock and even a pretty good Fighter, how the Ranger made it through playtest and QC remains a mystery to me.
Beast Master is an interesting conundrum to me. I think at least part of the disconnect is designer intent and player expectations (mine included). I see Beast Master ranger and think something along the lines of Rexxar from World of Warcraft or at the very least Dar from The Beastmaster; the designers, it seems, did not. They thought "guy who takes his dog hunting", because that's about all the Beast Master archetype does. I can see why they would split from the Familiar rules, because Familiars cannot attack and I assume an Animal Companion should be doing that. I can also understand not allowing an Animal Companion to deliver touch-spells like a Familiar, since the bond isn't arcane as with a Familiar. But none of that makes the Animal Companion rules good. The 7th level feature of "bonus action to command" should have been baseline, but even then it runs into the issue of forcing a Beast Master Ranger away from Two Weapon Fighting (which requires your Bonus Action for your off-hand attack). It's absolutely mind numbingly dumb that you can command an Animal Companion where to move for no action, but cannot command it to do so safely (i.e., take the Disengage or Dodge actions) without spending an entire Action on it.
"Move over there"? No time at all.
"Move over there and don't get hit"? "Move WAY over there"? (i.e. Dash) Your whole turn? It's so bad I would have fired the designer almost on the spot.
Help as a bonus action? Sure. It's an action for most PCs, but why not let the Animal Companion do it for a Bonus instead. Sacrificing an Animal Companion's (almost certainly lackluster) attack to make sure the actual PC hits? Sounds great. Sounds like what an Animal Companion should be doing at the VERY least.
I get that the designers wanted to make sure that the Animal Companion didn't completely overshadow the actual Player Character. That makes sense. I can also see the argument on making sure that the Beast Master Ranger doesn't essentially become two characters. Although in a game where casters are still summoning demons and devils and angels and celestial badgers, is it really an issue? Probably not.
As to favored terrain, keep in mind that it does basically work the way you suggest in that it gives double proficiency with all INT and WIS based skills (including Survival, Perception, Nature, Arcana, etc.) when in your favored terrain. So if your player had taken Survival they would still be better than a Fighter with Survival and an equal Wisdom modifier. And it does give the Ranger some utility over the Fighter in various bullet point forms (not slowed by Difficult Terrain, bonus tracking information, etc.) but it still has that all or nothing issue. I can't think of another class feature that basically just "turns on and off" like that. Favored Enemy, at the VERY least, gives the Ranger a language spoken by the target (if any). Sure, if you Beasts, Oozes, or Plants you're probably not getting much, but it's at least usable outside of your actual Favored Enemy.
I've honestly lost where I was going with most of this post beyond, "yeah, the Ranger just seems really poorly designed in general". I think one of the issues is the designers trying desperately to hold onto a template that didn't really work in its original format, and tacking on features that didn't work either. They should have started fresh from the ground up. I can honestly understand why they kept the Ranger in the PHB. If they had cut the Ranger or turned it into a Fighter archetype people would have crapped their pants in rage. I honestly think it would have been fine as a Fighter archetype, sort of like a Divine version of the Eldritch Knight, but I have 0 issues with them keeping it as a full class. Well, I guess I have 1 issue, which is their actual implementation of said class.
Yeah, that's true, Ranger is trying to be a lot of different things. On the other hand though, stuff like Fighter or Cleric are amazingly versatile classes that can support a whole bunch of different archetypes, so it's clearly not impossible. Honestly, the Ranger subclasses (Beastmaster aside) do a decent job of catering to those roles, it's just the core class features that can be a little bit lacklustre in the wrong circumstances.
On the other hand though, I remember the Revised Ranger Unearthed Arcana being just as far the other way, it was ridiculously good as I remember it (I didn't actually allow it in my game, just reading through it was enough to set the alarm bells off). I wonder if the trick isn't so much about power level as it is about how well it represents the ideal of the class. The core class features need to represent what's iconic, and as you point out, the sheer variety in what people think when they see Ranger means the subclasses do so much of the heavy lifting. Any type of Fighter is going to get use out of Second Wind and Action Surge, any kind of Sorcerer will make use of Metamagic, but I'm not sure specialisation on specific terrain/enemy types does the same for Rangers...
My issue with Wild Magic isn't it's power level, it is the 'wackiness' of it. I try and run very serious games, and that just seems incompatible with the subclass. I've only ever played with one once, and it ended a very dark and heavy oneshot on a completely mistimed comedic note as, on killing the last monster, all the Sorcerer's hair fell out... Now you could just say 'don't use the Wild Magic table at dramatic moments', but then you end up taking features away from the class and inherently disadvantaging that player. I'm honestly fine with the idea of generating unpredictable effects based on magic use, but I just wish it wasn't all such stupid effects that sit completely at odds with a non-comedy game.
Aye, I saw that, was that the one with the stack of bonuses if they attacked first?
I think the 5e designers overall did a great job, and stuff like Bard, Rogue and Paladin are in their best ever version in any Dungeons and Dragons game, as well as stuff like Fighter. That they did this while keeping the game mechanically simple and accessible is a great achievement. At the same time they got a reasonable balance between casters and non casters. That one of the classes is a bit lacklustre is not a big issue to me - in 3e, Bard and Rogue and Ranger were all three pretty cruddy, and Fighter and Paladin pretty quickly fell behind the full caster classes (Cleric or Druidzilla was a common complaint!).
Good point on the inherent comedy in Wild Mage. It is a shame they did not give a third archetype for Sorc in the PHB. You can be a dragon or a weirdo, that is all it seems.
Yeah, it basically made them better assassins than actual Assassin Rogues, plus a whole bunch of other stuff. Initiative bonuses, major buffs to attacking stuff that hadn't gone yet, a version of Favoured Enemy that was really quite ludicrous in the bonuses it handed out. There's a reason it's not resurfaced since (though I believe there was mention recently of a second attempt in UA, much like the Artificer just had).
Sorcerers really do benefit from Xanathar's, more than most other classes. Divine Soul, Storm Sorcery and Shadow Magic are really flavourful, interesting subclasses. I'm playing a Divine Soul Sorcerer at the minute, and it's really rather neat to have access to a whole bunch of Cleric spells and be a really rather decent healer in a pinch (especially in a party lacking a Cleric and getting most of their healing from a Druid when I'm not there).
Sorcerers in general I find so much more fun in game than Wizards, even though conceptually Wizards are much more my cup of tea. I find the Wizard subclasses really lacklustre for the most part, they're fine power-wise but they're just not that interesting beyond making you better at a specific kind of magic.
I've played Druid, Warlock, and Sorcerer and I have to say Sorcerer is truly so much freaking fun.
Divine Soul seems more than a little overpowered to me mechanically. I mean, let's take the Sorcerer, who is foremost balanced by a limited spell list, and give them Cleric spells... Well at least it's fething fun! My favorite character right now is an insane Tiefling who thinks everyone else is a figment of her imagination and all she does and buff and debuff her "meat shields" while laughing manically and coming up with ways to try and abuse the persuasion mechanic.
Balance I suppose is kind of secondary to fun factor for me here, and sorcerer just has so much flavor. I think its my favorite class and I haven't even played most of the classes yet. It's just too attractive to me, it's hard to think about breaking out and trying the others.
I DM waaaay more than I play, so balance is important to me. 5e is mostly my favourite edition, with out of the PHB 3.5 being my second favourite (just don't add too much splat!).
I have never played 1e though. But I feel like I am not missing too much with that.
For me as DM, the key thing with balance is that it's relative among the people playing. So it's not so much about classes as it is about the whole melting pot of classes, stats, magic items and such and whether that leaves everyone able to do their thing.
I have no problem running for with powerful PCs so long as no one's lagging behind and thus feeling left out. All 3 PCs in the game I'm currently running can punch way above their weight (for reference, they're a Fighter, Paladin/Fighter and Ranger), and that's not an issue for me at all because I can just hit them harder. If a PC ends up falling behind or there's a big imbalance and I sense it's annoying the player, that's when I start tweaking stuff. That tends to be a scale of meddling from 'give them a new magic item' to 'fiddle with a class feature' to 'would you just like some stat boosts' depending on how severe the issue seems to be.
Da Boss wrote:Aye, I saw that, was that the one with the stack of bonuses if they attacked first?
I think the 5e designers overall did a great job, and stuff like Bard, Rogue and Paladin are in their best ever version in any Dungeons and Dragons game, as well as stuff like Fighter. That they did this while keeping the game mechanically simple and accessible is a great achievement. At the same time they got a reasonable balance between casters and non casters. That one of the classes is a bit lacklustre is not a big issue to me - in 3e, Bard and Rogue and Ranger were all three pretty cruddy, and Fighter and Paladin pretty quickly fell behind the full caster classes (Cleric or Druidzilla was a common complaint!).
Good point on the inherent comedy in Wild Mage. It is a shame they did not give a third archetype for Sorc in the PHB. You can be a dragon or a weirdo, that is all it seems.
3e class balance was complete dog crap, and that extended into its child editions, imo. Part of why I'm such a 4e stan is that the balance for that edition actually made a sword fighter viable beyond 3rd level. 5e has kept non-caster classes at least fun, if not balanced against their full caster counterparts. My only real issue with 5e is how little choice there is in character advancement past archetype selection. Make a first level character, a third level character and a tenth level character. There is way more choices between first and third than there are between third and tenth, despite the latter covering a larger level band. 5e is still a great edition, don't get me wrong, and I'm cooking up a Ravnica campaign to run for some friends. I just miss non-casters actually getting the same sort of fun advancement choices than a caster does. LFQW is and has always been a dumb design space.
Paradigm wrote:Sorcerers really do benefit from Xanathar's, more than most other classes. Divine Soul, Storm Sorcery and Shadow Magic are really flavourful, interesting subclasses. I'm playing a Divine Soul Sorcerer at the minute, and it's really rather neat to have access to a whole bunch of Cleric spells and be a really rather decent healer in a pinch (especially in a party lacking a Cleric and getting most of their healing from a Druid when I'm not there).
Sorcerers in general I find so much more fun in game than Wizards, even though conceptually Wizards are much more my cup of tea. I find the Wizard subclasses really lacklustre for the most part, they're fine power-wise but they're just not that interesting beyond making you better at a specific kind of magic.
LordofHats wrote:I've played Druid, Warlock, and Sorcerer and I have to say Sorcerer is truly so much freaking fun.
Divine Soul seems more than a little overpowered to me mechanically. I mean, let's take the Sorcerer, who is foremost balanced by a limited spell list, and give them Cleric spells... Well at least it's fething fun! My favorite character right now is an insane Tiefling who thinks everyone else is a figment of her imagination and all she does and buff and debuff her "meat shields" while laughing manically and coming up with ways to try and abuse the persuasion mechanic.
Balance I suppose is kind of secondary to fun factor for me here, and sorcerer just has so much flavor. I think its my favorite class and I haven't even played most of the classes yet. It's just too attractive to me, it's hard to think about breaking out and trying the others.
Of all the caster classes, Sorcerer is my favorite. I was running a dragonborn divine soul sorcerer in an Adventurer's League before it fell apart, and I had an absolute blast running the character. I don't think Divine Soul is much more powerful than the other Sorcerer archetypes though. Sure, you can select from a wider range of spells, but you're still really limited by spells known. You get the free spell known, which is nice don't get me wrong, but that's really about it. Spending precious sorcery points to reroll healing dice is situational, wings are neat but fly is available, etc. Divine Soul isn't bad, I loved it, but I don't think it really moves into OP.
Re: balance: I agree fun > balance. I just find that without balance, there often isn't fun. More than one player in various 3e games decided to remake their characters after a few levels because they just weren't having fun. Largely, they simply couldn't keep up with their non caster counterparts. (We did have a fighter who stuck with his character simply because he didn't care, but he's the sort of player whose an exception to every rule.) Other times it was because some players hyper-optimized while others just wanted to play something cool. So even when a rule set is horrifically balanced, you can still have a balanced party if people are willing to hamstring themselves (or just reign it in). But I feel like players shouldn't have to worry about that sort of thing. Shooting yourself in the foot during character creation by wanting to play something non-optimized shouldn't be a thing.
I mean, imagine trying to play something like Waterdeep: Dragon Heist as a ranger. The whole thing takes place in an urban environment, where favored terrain will NEVER apply. (Dungeon of the Mad Mage at least would have Underdark apply, but it perfectly highlights the "all-or-none" issue of the class feature.)
is urban not an option favoured wise in 5th edition ?
Here's a question for y'all: what's the furthest you've deviated from classic, Western High Fantasy in your D&D games?
I've been thinking a lot about the literary/pop culture inspirations behind my games recently. I'm planning a mini-campaign at the minute that's more Neil Gaiman/Jack Kirby/Steve Ditko than Tolkien in terms of its content and tone, very cosmic and very meta, and it got me thinking about what other authors/artists/media in general could serve as a the touchstone for a more unusual game that goes beyond the more traditional concepts.
Obviously, in a lot of cases there are other systems that might better cater to these ideas, but sticking with D&D itself, anyone got any experience of pushing the game into new genres/areas or having campaigns with more unusual influences? Let's hear some stories!
The farthest ive gone is ebberon doing an alt history all warforged game. There was a new story for why the wf existed and the current state of several disparate factions of wf trying to find their place in the world.
Ebberon is magic steam punk and the lost nature of the race fed into that punk setting and storytelling. People sinking in a world full of what should be wonders but are instead oppressive.
I suppose one of the nice things about DnD is that even though it assumes a certain Tolkien-like setting, there's nothing that really stops it from being reimagined for other fantasy settings. Actually, I've always found Monks to be confusing/out of place thematically with most of DnD because they're very martial artsy/eastern in style, while all the other classes are very western European.
A Samurai themed DnD campaign/setting could be a lot of fun. I've been looking and loving the lore of Legend of the Five Rings. I've seen a few gothic horror/age of exploration conversions and ideas that looked really cool too.
LordofHats wrote:I suppose one of the nice things about DnD is that even though it assumes a certain Tolkien-like setting, there's nothing that really stops it from being reimagined for other fantasy settings. Actually, I've always found Monks to be confusing/out of place thematically with most of DnD because they're very martial artsy/eastern in style, while all the other classes are very western European.
A Samurai themed DnD campaign/setting could be a lot of fun. I've been looking and loving the lore of Legend of the Five Rings. I've seen a few gothic horror/age of exploration conversions and ideas that looked really cool too.
I've toyed with the idea of a game in that vein, perhaps leaning towards Chinese aesthetics and tone with something analogous to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms as a starting point and bringing in a lot of Asian folklore in place of your typical orcs and zombies and vampires. I also love the idea of using dragons that are more Chinese than European in inspiration and aesthetic, I think that'd be a very fun idea to make what can be a somewhat overplayed creature very original again. Extend it to Dragonborn and you have some amazing visual inspiration for PCs and NPCs as well.
I haven't strayed at all yet with the games, but I have been writing a campaign that will. I'm exploring a more stone age inspiration where all humans are hunter-gatherer barbarian tribes. I'll be majorly cutting back the weapons and armor available, and creating a lot of weakened non-metal versions. Even though it's not at all scientific, probably lots of dinosaurs, rather than just in Chult.
Syro_ wrote: I haven't strayed at all yet with the games, but I have been writing a campaign that will. I'm exploring a more stone age inspiration where all humans are hunter-gatherer barbarian tribes. I'll be majorly cutting back the weapons and armor available, and creating a lot of weakened non-metal versions. Even though it's not at all scientific, probably lots of dinosaurs, rather than just in Chult.
You could give it a pre-columbian twist and use totally metal weapons like the Macuahuitl. You know, for when a "big stick" just isn't murdery enough for our pre-metalworking civilizations
Though technically the Central American civilizations did have "metal working" knowledge," but they really weren't that into it for some reason. They only used it to make jewelry and art, and adopted the smelting and casting methods widely in use by Southern American civilizations very late in the game. It's actually really baffling from the Western-Eurasian perspective since most civilizations of Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East all readily adopted metal tools and weapons as soon as they became available. Central Mexico in particular, and the Aztecs, were extremely late, only adopting bronze working in the century preceding the arrival of the Spanish on their shores and they still didn't use it to make weapons or armor.
Actually now that my brain is on it, one of the things I really liked about Rokka: Braves of the Six Flowers (a light novel/anime) was its mixing of western European and pre-columbian aesthetics. It actually looked really cool in the light novels, and while the Anime butchered it a bit it did remind me that pre-columbian aesthetics are heavily underused in modern fiction. It's one of the things that really made me like the Lizardmen in Fantasy, and you see bits of it in Lizardmen in other fantasy series' too. There's something I'd go for. Something with a pre-Columbian bent. Step pyramids. Obsidian weaponry. Colorful outfits
I have a continent with a heavy Mayan/Aztec theme built into my current campaign setting, though with its current trajectory and what amounts if an impending World War it's unlikely they'll ever get there, at least in this particular campaign.
Which to some extent I'm glad about, as I'm not sure quite what too do with it yet. Obviously the Yuan-ti are heavily inspied by those aesthetics, and from WHF you can bring in Lizardmen as well and have plenty of good references there (not to mention minis being available!), but I feel like I want to do something more with it. I saw someone one talk about Dragonborn themed around a Quetzalcoatal/Feathered Serpent aesthetic, which is awesome, but the DB in this setting have such a specific and detailed history to them that that'd be a hard one to pull off.
I guess just taking existing stuff and applying a Mesoamerican theme could have at least some good results, a fusion of your traditional Wood Elf aesthetics with more of a rainforest/jungle lean than the typical forest themes could be really cool...
The idea of a pre-metal game is an interesting one regardless. I imagine it'd be a lot of work to compensate for the fact that so many basic weapons and armour pieces can't be used, but definitely worthwhile if you can really evoke that kind of setting.
I have done a Planescape game that was much more Interdimensional Reality Pirates than traditional high fantasy.
My first Ravenloft game was set in a victorian london analogue and was much more of a gothic horror story than a high fantasy game, there were no non humans in the entire city.
I ran an Eberron game where the theming was very 20s New York, aftermath of WW1 kinda stuff. Lots of inspiration from mafia movies and the roaring 20s. Generally increased the tech level and included pistols and so on.
Did a Darksun game as well which is pretty much a post apocalyptic game, but I think it is still pretty standard for all that.
I would say I have done more "not traditional western fantasy" than I have done the traditional stuff, but I really love traditional fantasy too.
My fantasy world has a Mayan-Aztec analogue too but it is not very developed at present. I want to do some work on it to make it as believable as the stuff I am more familiar with, but I am excited to run a game in that setting to give me a reason to develop it.
The most "non-high fantasy" game I ever ran. Was a series of one-shots I called "the Oregon trail" where I would create a small town with various small quests, then the players would arrive, do whatever they wanted (one game completely ignored the quests and just RP'd their night in the tavern for a couple of hours), then they moved onto the next town. No one was a big powerful hero. they were all just dumb idiots at level 1 trying to move west.
@LordofHats: Going for more of a pre-columbian twist would make a lot of sense in my world's case. Sense I'm going for a dawn of time feel, a race of sun worshiping lizardfolk are the dominant and most widespread race, with step-pyramid temples. It makes sense that the barbarian humans would be stealing technology and absorbing their culture. Thanks for the suggestion, I like the idea of having the humans most in contact with them having that aesthetic
@Paradigm: That continent sounds cool, and I totally understand wanting to make sure it's fully fleshed out. And yes, I expect balance to be pretty difficult, I'm planning on scaling back the magic system also, though I'm thinking a more heavy emphasis on on ranger, druid, and holy-magic users with the whole primeval early civilization feel. I'm also thinking a quest for the group could be brought about by a metallic meteor hitting and the nearby civilizations rushing to lay claim to it because of the almost magical properties of the weapons that can be crafted from it.
@Da Boss: Those different settings sound like a lot of fun, and I'm not surprised that you've tried a lot of cool and non-typical fantasy campaigns. Talking about Darksun, reminds me how it would be tempting to play Fallout in D&D (even though there's its own tabletop game). I've never gotten aorund to trying to work something out for it.
@balmong7: Oregon Trail sounds cool, I like how it has a very interesting balance of railroading (always moving west, never staying long in one place), and sandbox (do whatever you want during your time in this area).
Syro: My original gaming group were really into all the wacky second edition settings.
As to Fallout D&D, that was basically my inspiration. I was playing Fallout 3 and the 4th Edition Darksun books came out. I had played in a Darksun game before that, but with this one I really wanted to emphasise the post apocalyptic aspects to it.
I definitely think a post-apoc angle works nicely, on account of the fact that so much of D&D assumes that every setting has had an apocalypse at some point... I mean, someone had to have built all those ancient temples and ruins and tombs and there's presumably a reason they're not around any more...
A campaign leaning even more into that definitely has a lot to work with. The one I'm about to run basically takes that to an extreme, the world it takes place in is one which was destroyed by an End Times sort of thing, a big 4-way war between Fey, Undead, Gods and Devils that all but destroyed the world; the beings that survived it all realised that their 'victory' basically meant nothing without a world to rule, and, being god-level entities, universally agreed to restore it to what it was and not meddle with it again in case this happened a second time.
On the surface you have a fairly typical fantasy world, but under that there's all these scars of an extinction-via-deity... the final complication being that (unbeknown to the players) the PCs are all gods cast from the Heavens, and if they don't get off the material world fast they're going to trigger Apocalypse 2.0..
@Da Boss: Must admit, Ravenloft via Victorian London sounds amazing.
It was my first ever game as a DM and I think to be honest I have never topped it since!
Players were all watchmen (a bit Terry Pratchett inspired, Night Watch had just come out) and they were dealing with various supernatural crimes while trying not to let the populace know to keep them from panicking.
It is one of the "Islands of Dread" called Paridon, a sort of mish mash of London and Paris, but it was not extremely developed so I got to fill in a lot of the details myself.
For the past few days the ancient walls of Northumberland’s Langley Castle have resounded to the clang of clashing broadswords and the battle cries of angry goblins.
A band of mercenaries emancipated a caravan of slaves, a princess captured a corrupt warlock, and then there was that unfortunate business with the insane dark elf sorcerer.
The entire castle was taken over by a party of 42 gamers – mostly American – who had each paid a king’s ransom of $4,000 (£3,200) to play Dungeons & Dragons for four days in a genuine medieval stronghold turned luxury hotel.
That article was peak guardian for me. I hate all this patronizing "This lame thing, it is cool now!" gak.
Edit: and on price, Dungeons and Dragons can be played for free if you use a dice roller app on your phone or computer or just the cost of the dice these days. Despite that, I spend a lot on it. I generally feel the money spent is worth it, because it is my favourite pastime.
I edited the wrong post, I meant to put that in the beginning D&D thread. But yeah I agree. I hate screens at my table, I try to run without them as much as possible.
Da Boss wrote: I edited the wrong post, I meant to put that in the beginning D&D thread. But yeah I agree. I hate screens at my table, I try to run without them as much as possible.
I'm a hypocrite. I hate when my players have screens. But I like to have mine. Of course as the DM I can't really just flip over to facebook like they can.
I'd struggle to limit screens at my table. My players (and I) all use DnD Beyond, so laptops, tablets and phones are pretty much required.
I personally also have my laptop open when I DM because it means I can have my notes without needing to print or write them out. (though I do use pen and paper for tracking initiative, monster HP, and so forth).
An advantage to us all using DnD Beyond is that I can get quick access to the Players character sheets, and also spell rules.
That's becoming very helpful now they're getting to higher levels, so I can quickly refer to spells and so on that they're trying to cast.
It's handy to be able to check, especially when their interpretation of those spell effects can be... Generous, shall we say?
Yeah, it is just my preference. I spend too much time on screens, I like my D&D time to be screen free as much as possible. I used to play online and all the resources hyperlinked are super useful.
I tend to have all screens at my games, the players all use DNDB and I keep all my prep in massive Onenote documents so I need my laptop there to actually run the game. I've honestly found it to be far more help than hindrance, my players don't tend to get distracted and the ease at which stuff can be looked up is a huge boon.
That said, in an online game of the Dragon Age RPG I ran, I had one player who would routinely play Dark Souls at the same time as the game... Which on one hand was annoying and more than a little impolite, but on the other... well, I can't even manage a boss in Dark Souls when it has my full attention, so I've got to give him a little credit for managing to multitask that well!
I would boot a player who played another game while we were playing Dungeons and Dragons. You wanna play Dark Souls, go do that. I have no patience for that kind of rudeness any more.
Good for you that you are tolerant enough to allow it though. I am a grumpy git
I find screens take people out of the experience too much, myself included. Too much time clicking around and waiting for things to load. It does mean I have to print stuff out beforehand which I guess is wasteful, but I prefer physical books and props to scrolling through stuff in any case.
To be fair, at that point it was less tolerance and more just desperation to actually have a gaming group, I had to accept a couple of less-than-ideal players so that there was a game for myself and the couple that were genuinely into it. These days, I'm a lot more fortunate, luckily.
That's super rude to be playing a computer game at the table! But I can understand being desperate for players.
We did a 'one-shot' with a guest DM yesterday which was really fun. Although the poor DM got a bit of a baptism of fire!
We started with three of us as an existing company; The intellectual Arnaut (Drow Wizard), the thuggish Dendra (Human Barbarian) and the soulful Raffa (Halfling Paladin).
• First I got in a shouting match with a shopkeep after failing to intimidate him.
• Then we all got in an argument with an obnoxious gnome who was trying to get us to split the gold with a random Dragonborn who turned up (another player) but in the end we decided she could be the canary.
• Then a Drow Rogue tried to sneak in the mine (another player, splitting the party) and set up an ambush for us only to get bitten to shreds by bats.
• Then the Drow Rogue tried to attack Arnaut (some sort of drow business) so I had to give him a little squeeze!
• The we met some terrified miners who the drow rogue proceeded to kill as soon as we were out of earshot (let's split the party again!).
After all that roleplay we had to rush the ending a bit, but we did somehow kill the bad guys and seal off the mine from the underdark despite forgetting to take any rests and all ending with barely any health
It was very different from our usual sessions, where we are all nice and heroic, but was really fun to play!
@Kroem: I'm glad to har you ahd a good time. That does sound like fun, but also pretty crazy.
As for the screen discussion, I have no electronics at the table when I DM, even tho having a laptop for music and stuff would be nice. One gaming group I'm a part of, has a member who takes long shopping trips in game, and tends to take the leadership role a lot. Some of the other players end up messing around on their computers because they're bored. I think this is a shame, not only because I think it's rude, but because it disconnects them from the game even more when they stop paying attention and participating. This is a really fun game, when we let it get going.
Some of you already know, I love the feel of having the real books, and physical printouts. I really like being there in person, with just paper and dice. It adds to the immersion for me. I've played some games through online programs. I think it was called "Tabletop RPG"? But it jsut wasn't as fun for me even though it was much more convenient. Now that I DM, I'm a crafting DM so I especially want to meet in person without distractions so I can show off my models
Syro_ wrote: @Kroem: I'm glad to har you ahd a good time. That does sound like fun, but also pretty crazy.
As for the screen discussion, I have no electronics at the table when I DM, even tho having a laptop for music and stuff would be nice. One gaming group I'm a part of, has a member who takes long shopping trips in game, and tends to take the leadership role a lot. Some of the other players end up messing around on their computers because they're bored. I think this is a shame, not only because I think it's rude, but because it disconnects them from the game even more when they stop paying attention and participating. This is a really fun game, when we let it get going.
Some of you already know, I love the feel of having the real books, and physical printouts. I really like being there in person, with just paper and dice. It adds to the immersion for me. I've played some games through online programs. I think it was called "Tabletop RPG"? But it jsut wasn't as fun for me even though it was much more convenient. Now that I DM, I'm a crafting DM so I especially want to meet in person without distractions so I can show off my models
I am the same as you. No screens allowed at the table. I hate when people get bored and disconnect because some player wants to take control with minutia. I am also a crafting DM but it's never models. I do hand drawn in setting maps. I bought a 3.00 paper mache ball at a craft store and made a globe map of my world. Those are the hand outs I give to players.
I use a tablet at the table just for my character (via D&D Beyond), but that's it (no printer). Most of my games are online, so in the rare instance where I get to play in person there is 0% chance of my getting distracted.
Re: Minis. Even in games where we're not using a grid I tend to have a mini just for a visual aid to my character.
Yea people do tend to get bored when one player goes off the deep end with minutia! As it is impossible to prevent, what we've started doing is getting bored in character. So whilst one of us is doing one on one with the shopkeep the rest of us can be getting to know each others characters a little betting, planning the next quest or complaining about our companion being a slow shopper! I find these slow bit a lot more fun than just having constant constant breakneck combat and exploration
I'm a big fan of models, but what we did for the 'one shot' game last week we all selected an image from the internet that represented our characters and then the DM printed little tokens for us which was pretty cool.
I've been running with a group all summer, and our DM has been a rockstar since day one. He does a ton of preparation for each session, hand writes secret documents, uses wax seals and custom made "gold pieces" and the like. His stories are also really well done, with a lot of background lore available should we start asking questions during our sessions.
Lately I've been rather bored playing my character though, so I told him I was ready to switch it out. He asked what I wanted to play next and I told him I really wanted to play a knight of some kind. Sword and Board it all the way.
A couple of months ago our group went on a long session "heist" style questline, it took about 4 weeks of work to complete.
Basically we had goals:
There is a Barony that lies between a vast empire and a large Kingdom, sort of like a sliver type border state. An unknown benefactor contacted us through one of our Rouges and offered a bounty of 500 gold per party member if we could hatch a plan to embarrass the Baron of this kingdom. We hatched a plan to spike his favorite wine at a celebration held in our honor for the defense of this town during an orc raid. We spiked it with a rather potent orc aphrodisiac, the intention being for him to accost the daughter of a prominent member of the kings guard.
At the same time another group contacted us and put out a hit on the baron, insisting we'd each be paid a bounty of 1500 gold if we were to murder him and plant a kukri and blue cloth, the symbol of an assassin of the empire.
We decided not to delve too deep into why someone wanted to try and start a war, and the gold was too tempting to pass up.
Long story short, the plan went off without a hitch, and we accomplished both goals, without getting caught. Our party rolled an absurd amount of 20's for checks that night. It was incredible.
So anyways, back to the new character. I came up with the idea that I'd like to play into that story. I rolled up a knight, who secretly is a bastard son of the baron, cast out of the house for an unknown reason, he knows his bloodline, but little more. It's possible he was cast out because he was a product of a union between the baron and another high class family in the town who are enemies. Anyways, he's returned specifically looking for this party to try and figure out what had happened. He doesn't know the party did the deed, but he figured this would be a good place to start and I'm really excited to get this going during our weekend session tomorrow!
Our party up until this point has been a series of murder hobos and a mage trying to keep them from being murder hobos. The DM expressed that he wants someone to help drive the story and everyone else is new to role playing except me, so I'm going to try and be the voice of reason going forward. A couple of the other party members are switching characters too now that they've got some play under their belts.
Party Comp before this was:
1 Dwarven Fighter 4 Rouge Assassins 1 Ranger Monster Hunter 1 Sorcerer of lightning douchery (this was me)
Yea I'm not sold on DnD being cool... I think part of the point is that you know its a little weird, but can trust your friends/ fellow adventurers not to laugh at your flamboyant acting or for getting over invested!
balmong7 wrote: Next, you are going to tell me to "just not walk directly into the traps".
Whoa whoa whoa... let's not get crazy now. Those traps take a lot of work, it would be rude to NOT walk into them.
One of my players felt this way yesterday. Thankfully, the dungeon builder was just trying to scare people away. So now his skin is died magically green for the next 4 months unless he finds someone to cast dispel magic.
balmong7 wrote: Next, you are going to tell me to "just not walk directly into the traps".
Whoa whoa whoa... let's not get crazy now. Those traps take a lot of work, it would be rude to NOT walk into them.
One of my players felt this way yesterday. Thankfully, the dungeon builder was just trying to scare people away. So now his skin is died magically green for the next 4 months unless he finds someone to cast dispel magic.
Ha! Reminds me of a gag from one of the Discworld books (Sourcery). Rincewind, Conina, Nijel the Destroyer and Sultan Creosote are travelling along a corridor towards the treasury. The encounter several ineffectual traps, including an extending hand that sticks a label saying "Kick me" to Rincewinds back followed by a boot on the end of an extending pole wobbling at them in an attempt to kick him. The next trap is a bucket of whitewash balanced on a door.
They reach the final trap at the end of the corridor in which a massive block of stone falls down from the ceiling. Upon inspection they find a message engraved in it: "Laugh this one off"
Ha! Reminds me of a gag from one of the Discworld books (Sourcery). Rincewind, Conina, Nijel the Destroyer and Sultan Creosote are travelling along a corridor towards the treasury. The encounter several ineffectual traps, including an extending hand that sticks a label saying "Kick me" to Rincewinds back followed by a boot on the end of an extending pole wobbling at them in an attempt to kick him. The next trap is a bucket of whitewash balanced on a door.
They reach the final trap at the end of the corridor in which a massive block of stone falls down from the ceiling. Upon inspection they find a message engraved in it: "Laugh this one off"
My favorite thing about this dungeon is that all the damaging traps can be spotted with perception checks, but all the gimmicky traps are investigation checks. So the party keeps walking into rooms, seeing the dangerous stuff, then walking directly into the harmless ones.
There was a puzzle earlier that one guy took the time to solve while the others tried to pick the lock on the door. He managed to recover the key at the same time they picked the lock. Currently, he feels stupid but when the rest of the party gets attacked by the guardian at the end of the dungeon and he is ignored for "passing the trials" he won't feel quite as stupid.
For those of you who are constantly looking for townsfolk minis for your games, I just ordered a set of 5 minis made by WizKids as an expansion for a board game called "Agricola". The minis look nice: There's a man carrying two pumpkins, a man carrying a barrel, a woman carrying a baby & basket, an old woman feeding ducks, and a man splitting wood. The figures look great in the thumbnail, I'll share what the actual minis look like when I open them.
Syro_ wrote: For those of you who are constantly looking for townsfolk minis for your games, I just ordered a set of 5 minis made by WizKids as an expansion for a board game called "Agricola". The minis look nice: There's a man carrying two pumpkins, a man carrying a barrel, a woman carrying a baby & basket, an old woman feeding ducks, and a man splitting wood. The figures look great in the thumbnail, I'll share what the actual minis look like when I open them.
Thanks for reminding me balmong, I just got home 3 days ago, so I did finally get to open them, but I forgot to post here about them. Minis aren't painted nearly as well as in the promotional thumbnail of course, but I still like them.
Sorry, the pic isn't that clear
And here's a size comparison shot with official D&D mins and some Reaper minis.
Recently played some 5th Edition D&D, and I forgot how mechanics heavy the game is.
I have found that as I have gotten older, I have drifted away from this style of game and to a much more abstracted model with minimal dice rolling or modifiers. It was a bit of a surprise to me about myself!
Despite that, my hats is off to the designers for making a fun version of the game that appeals to a lot of players. I look forward to playing more.
I have a problem and I'm hoping someone here can help.
I recently started running a game, and I've made a mistake that has set the players out on the wrong quest-line. I need to correct this so that I can get them to where they need to go to start out the Ghosts of Saltmarsh Mission #2.
Does anyone have any ideas for how to steer a party back on track?
The specific issue is that I introduced an NPC without reading ahead, and the book has a very detailed NPC already doing the job mine was set up to do. It turns out the other NPC is hugely important to the flow of the narrative.
@Togusa: I haven't read any of the "Ghosts of Saltmarsh" stuff, so I apologize if this advice isn't helpful.
-For starters, how important is it for them to quickly get back on track? Would it be feasible to work a one-shot adventure into the story line where they are going? With the completion of the one-shot introduce a hook back to the main adventure?
-How dependent is this campaign on the map and geography? Is it possible to just move the place that they are supposed to be going to, and place it where they are heading?
-I agree with Da Boss, it's no big deal to replace or merge NPCs as long as you can keep track of it. I made a mistake running "Lost Mines of Phandelver" and had the players deliver the goods on the wagon they were protecting to the wrong NPC and wrongs store. I was kicking myself, but they couldn't tell the difference, still had fun, and don't even know that I made that mistake and wrote a store out of the game.
Good luck
"Assuming a situation where a Life Cleric with 18 Wisdom (+4) and a Wild Soul Barbarian are in the same party, you can use Magic Reserves to permanently keep the Barbarian at max HP after every fight by trading spell slots for cure wounds.
Barb rolls 1 on 1d4, takes 5 damage, cleric Cure Wounds averages at 12
Barb rolls 2 on 1d4, takes 10 damage, cleric Cure Wounds averages at 17
Barb rolls 3 on 1d4, takes 15 damage, cleric Cure Wounds averages at 22
Barb rolls 4 on 1d4, takes 20 damage, cleric Cure Wounds averages at 28
This is straight broken hahaha. It should at least have a limit such as Constitution Mod in uses per long rest otherwise it's so hilariously easy to exploit. You don't even need to have a Life Cleric, it just helps tip things in the Barbarians favour.
Not to mention the fact that the Barbarian gets this at level 6 and can grant level 4 spell slots even though no class has level 4 spell slots at level 6."
Hypothetically, if one were a multiclassed Wild magic/Sorceror Wild Magic Barbarian- (henceforth known as a Double Wild) could one choose which Wild Surge table one used? I realize it is an unlikely thing, but it would be pretty cool to be able to have the potential to get 2 effects for the duration of your rage. Or, you know, to rage so hard a fireball detonates on you.
Gitzbitah wrote: Hypothetically, if one were a multiclassed Wild magic/Sorceror Wild Magic Barbarian- (henceforth known as a Double Wild) could one choose which Wild Surge table one used? I realize it is an unlikely thing, but it would be pretty cool to be able to have the potential to get 2 effects for the duration of your rage. Or, you know, to rage so hard a fireball detonates on you.
Good idea, but RAW (Rules-as-Written) I think that is a No-go. I love the explosive randomosity the wild classes add to the game, and I am glad to see Wizards add to the wild flavor of characters!
Syro_ wrote: @Togusa: I haven't read any of the "Ghosts of Saltmarsh" stuff, so I apologize if this advice isn't helpful.
-For starters, how important is it for them to quickly get back on track? Would it be feasible to work a one-shot adventure into the story line where they are going? With the completion of the one-shot introduce a hook back to the main adventure?
-How dependent is this campaign on the map and geography? Is it possible to just move the place that they are supposed to be going to, and place it where they are heading?
-I agree with Da Boss, it's no big deal to replace or merge NPCs as long as you can keep track of it. I made a mistake running "Lost Mines of Phandelver" and had the players deliver the goods on the wagon they were protecting to the wrong NPC and wrongs store. I was kicking myself, but they couldn't tell the difference, still had fun, and don't even know that I made that mistake and wrote a store out of the game.
Good luck
Thanks! It has worked out, have an 11 hour session yesterday and they're quite on track now.
One thing I have noticed, my group is painfully not good at role playing sometimes. I follow the adventure, but they typically ignore half of the stuff I give them. For example, they found a room in this old house they were searching. In the room, there was a scroll case. One player picked it up and said "I'll put it in my pack." Turns out they needed to look inside it to progress, and because this player didn't, it took them an extra hour to figure out what to do next. Things like this happened several times during that session, and it seemed to me as though the players were super nervous and terrified. They were treating everything as if it was a trap intended to kill them. I didn't understand what was up with that.
I had another PC who seemed to be lost and unsure of what to do, so he kept passing on all his turns just having his character keep watch. When I asked him if he wanted to do anything, he just said no every time. I get that you cannot force someone to do something, but, seriously?
On a side note. The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh is billed as an adventure for 1st level players. My players are all third level, and they struggled hard during the combat in that section later on. Two party members were nearly killed and a third was paralyzed for over an hour. I was quite shocked!
Thanks! It has worked out, have an 11 hour session yesterday and they're quite on track now.
One thing I have noticed, my group is painfully not good at role playing sometimes. I follow the adventure, but they typically ignore half of the stuff I give them. For example, they found a room in this old house they were searching. In the room, there was a scroll case. One player picked it up and said "I'll put it in my pack." Turns out they needed to look inside it to progress, and because this player didn't, it took them an extra hour to figure out what to do next. Things like this happened several times during that session, and it seemed to me as though the players were super nervous and terrified. They were treating everything as if it was a trap intended to kill them. I didn't understand what was up with that.
I had another PC who seemed to be lost and unsure of what to do, so he kept passing on all his turns just having his character keep watch. When I asked him if he wanted to do anything, he just said no every time. I get that you cannot force someone to do something, but, seriously?
On a side note. The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh is billed as an adventure for 1st level players. My players are all third level, and they struggled hard during the combat in that section later on. Two party members were nearly killed and a third was paralyzed for over an hour. I was quite shocked!
It sounds like you are having some issues with the level of railroading that many pre-written require to function properly. I suggest prompting your players more often. For example, when the player picked up the scroll case and put it in his pack. just ask "Did you open or read it first?" this gives you an idea of their headspace if he responds "No I'm going to wait til we camp." then start thinking of how you are going to force them to set up camp for the night.
Don't be concerned with the lethality of the encounters at level 1. That's just what level 1 is like. It's why DM's roll dice behind a screen. For mind games, and so we can turn that lethal hit into a non-lethal hit.
My wife is like your player who doesn't know what to do. Just let him not do things for now. As long as it seems like he having fun. If there are organic ways to draw him into the story, then go for it. But if he is content just watching, then let him watch.
Syro_ wrote: @Togusa: I'm glad to hear things worked out
Most definitely. These pre-written adventures are amazing, I'm really impressed with the quality and effort that the WoTC RPG team put into them. I've been asked by my group to incorporate more of them into our future game sessions, so if anyone has any recommendations, please let me know!
I currently own;
Tales from the Yawning Portal
Ghosts of Saltmarsh
Tomb of Annihilation
Waterdeep Dragon Heist
Dungeon of the Mad Mage
Thanks! It has worked out, have an 11 hour session yesterday and they're quite on track now.
One thing I have noticed, my group is painfully not good at role playing sometimes. I follow the adventure, but they typically ignore half of the stuff I give them. For example, they found a room in this old house they were searching. In the room, there was a scroll case. One player picked it up and said "I'll put it in my pack." Turns out they needed to look inside it to progress, and because this player didn't, it took them an extra hour to figure out what to do next. Things like this happened several times during that session, and it seemed to me as though the players were super nervous and terrified. They were treating everything as if it was a trap intended to kill them. I didn't understand what was up with that.
I had another PC who seemed to be lost and unsure of what to do, so he kept passing on all his turns just having his character keep watch. When I asked him if he wanted to do anything, he just said no every time. I get that you cannot force someone to do something, but, seriously?
On a side note. The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh is billed as an adventure for 1st level players. My players are all third level, and they struggled hard during the combat in that section later on. Two party members were nearly killed and a third was paralyzed for over an hour. I was quite shocked!
It sounds like you are having some issues with the level of railroading that many pre-written require to function properly. I suggest prompting your players more often. For example, when the player picked up the scroll case and put it in his pack. just ask "Did you open or read it first?" this gives you an idea of their headspace if he responds "No I'm going to wait til we camp." then start thinking of how you are going to force them to set up camp for the night.
Don't be concerned with the lethality of the encounters at level 1. That's just what level 1 is like. It's why DM's roll dice behind a screen. For mind games, and so we can turn that lethal hit into a non-lethal hit.
My wife is like your player who doesn't know what to do. Just let him not do things for now. As long as it seems like he having fun. If there are organic ways to draw him into the story, then go for it. But if he is content just watching, then let him watch.
Another alternative could be that as the player picks up the case, describe the lid slipping off and the scroll falling out. Draws the attention to the scroll, rather than the case and means the players have to interact with the scroll directly, whether that be to put it back or to read it etc. Curiosity would usually mean that the players will want to see what is on it if the GM has gone to theeffort of having it fall out. Usually
This story makes the whole lot of them sound like petulant children fighting over who gets credit for what tiny idea. If anything, I'm sad that they all seem so bitter over each other after creating something so great. That said, this version of events makes Gary Gynax sound like an absolute ass.
The author of this story has a long standing history of animosity to Gary Gygax, and to D&D, at least the original game. I would not trust a word she wrote. She very much has an agenda.
She's also not much for fact checking. Kuntz published his book already, late last year, IIRC. He has a tell-all book planned too. I'd bet there are plenty of other errors in this article. It makes for an amusing read, if nothing else.
I had heard about that, the widow article. I decided to stay out of it all because I do not need drama in my hobby. I am sure Gygax was like a lot of us, an ass some of the time, a nice guy some of the rest of the time.
The way I hear it, there was "TSR Gary" who was a jerk, and "Gamer Gary" who was a pleasant fellow, and fun to game with. Success can have a corrosive effect on some people.
Has anyone else seen the sidekicks rules in the D&D Essentials box? They seem incomplete to me. I was hoping for something akin to Henchmen from OD&D and AD&D. Overall, it's not a bad offering.
There is some useful material in it. The DM screen is useful, as are the dice. Dice are always useful. There are fair amounts of punch out cards for conditions, initiative order, magic items, and the sidekicks. The only thing not so useful is the Essentials rulebook.
I got it because I was curious about how WotC puts together 5e adventures, and for the dice. And the cards.
It would have been nice if there had been a very large map included, one of the nice fold out kind like TSR used to do, way back in the day, instead of the small map which is included. I'm thinking of the awesome Greyhawk map.
My Adventurer's League group just completed Sunless Citadel, and the Staff of the Woodlands dropped from one of the enemies. No one in the group is a Druid, so our initial thought was to sell it for gold. One player however suggested I take it. My character is a Lizardfolk, who have Druidic traditions in the lore. But my Lizard is a Forge Cleric with a base AC of 21, and as I understood it Druids don't wear metal armor.
The DM then jumps in, saying "the rules never say Druids can't wear metal armor, just that they 'will not.' Since your character started as a Forge Cleric, he's clearly on board with wearing hard steel for protection. He is also clearly able by the rules to Multi-class to Druid if he wants, and he already has Heavy Armor proficiency. If you want, you can think up a reason why your Cleric would suddenly be interested in Druidic arts, and multiclass Druid and still wear your heavy armor."
And that's how Qru the Lizardman ended up a Cleric 3/Druid 1 with a base AC of 21 and a Staff of the Woodlands as a heavy weapon and an ardent desire to achieve a balance between civilization and nature.
I'm on board with it cause I never would have thought of it, and it seems like a full on RP opportunity that'll rarely, if ever, come up again.
But I'm wondering what others think about that, cause the proficiencies do say "will not" but I have a gut feeling most people would say "no" to that interpretation of the rule.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me, and frankly sounds awesome. I also think that in terms of storytelling like that, it's more than possible that Class isn't really a thing that's recognised in-world a lot of the time, so having a suitable cultural background would be all that'd be necessary to prompt the shift into Druid. It's not like they wake up one morning and hand in their Cleric resignation then apply for Druid 101 classes.
I've always been a bit iffy on the Druid armour thing... if they wanted to enforce it as an actual rule rather than flavour text then they should just limit the Proficiency to Leather/Hide armour rather than just Light/Medium. As such, I've always taken it as a potential RP hook and a bit of flavour text, but would never actively disallow a Druid I was running for to use armour they're otherwise proficient in. It might be distasteful to them, but that's for them to decide as a character.
Case in point, in a previous campaign I ran, one of the PCs played a druid who was essentially a Dumbledore type to a Druid Hogwarts, and was setting off into a kingdom of undead and vampires and all sorts to rescue some missing students. The player asked if he could have half-plate as this character was smart enough to take any protection they could get their hands on for this very dangerous solo mission, and that seems entirely fair to me.
First, I think if your DM is fine with it and you are fine with it, and it fits your idea of your character in their game, go for it, it is fine.
In my game, I would not allow you to keep wearing metal armour and get the benefits of druidic abilities. I might restrict it to ONLY Iron based armour, since I have ideas about how Iron interacts with fey and nature spirits in my world's background.
I have three reasons for saying no:
1. I think restrictions make things interesting and maintain some of the integrity of the classes.
2. I think the restriction is "story" based and I try to make my world broadly fit with the standard "story" of Dungeons and Dragons, and then I like to have consistency within my world as far as possible or it is not satisfying for me, as dungeon master. My fun is equally important to anyone elses.
3. I think giving people stuff that makes them more powerful than the basic rules is fine, but you need to think about it carefully and make sure you are not letting one player outshine others for whom mechanical power is important. This will vary from group to group but I think it is easy to end up with one or two butthurt players because of a choice like that and I know the general advice would be ignore the butthurt, but I think it can be somewhat valid if you enjoy mechanical power as a goal in the game and work hard to achieve it and see someone else being rewarded outside the rules for something you "worked" for. It would not bother me, personally, but I think keeping everyone in mind is a good idea.
YMMV, all tables are different and it is not a big deal, but my personal approach to these things is to take the world seriously and therefore I take the proscription on metal armour as meaning something about how Druidic magic works, and that links in my head to folklore about Iron protecting you from fairies which is also something that I make a big deal about in my world. If the player went through effort and expense to get some bronze armour, or Dragonscale, I might allow it.
We’re definitely in a magic item heavy group. The characters who have been in the game since we started are all at three attuned items already and some of them are pretty nasty.
Out Ranger has giant gauntlets for example and a plus 2 longbow, and our arcane trickster, I’m actually not sure what he has. His character might just be heavily optimized. His got some +6s and +8s and he’s only level 5.
Our Grave Cleric has a mountain of utility items.
And then I showed up and started upgrading armor and weapons with my channel divinity and lizard man habits. The GM has been having fun with my RP accurate “what can I make out of this corpse” at the end of most fights.
I am thinking of taking up “let’s make a set of bone plate” as a personal quest fitting for my character. Gonna have to find some biggies to kill
I do not know about your group, but since I have been playing D&D with our actual group, I think the limitation to non-metal armor for druids is fair.
I am DM for a group of dwarves, all LVL 6 on the brink of LVL 7 in 3.5 ruleset. The group consist of a fighter, a mage, a ranger, a rogue and a druid.
Of all these characters, the druid is the one who seems to me the most versatile. He has almost as many hit points as the fighter, has an animal companion useful to flank or trip (Wolf),
and has a wider range of spells than the mage, (I know the mage has the potential to acquire a way vaster selection of spells, but so far he has made a better cut with the spells up to Level 3 they can legally use), which are almost as powerful. He can also work as a healer, if he chooses to memorize healing spells. In addition, he can switch these healing spells for conjuration spells.
Over all, this character outshines the other characters sometimes. The disadvantages in "not fitting into social structures" so much are totally made up by the rest of the group. So, taking away this disadvantage would make the situation even more un-even in our group. But it seems it is not in yours, and if everybody gets along with it well, do so.
I think 3.5 does have a hard rule on it though. 5e has ambiguous wording, and no stated consequence for wearing metal armor anyway. Apparently an FAQ from Wizards says it’s a character choice and it’s up to the DM and the group your with (this stikes me as similar to older editions having a rule against Clerics using sharp weapons, which was completely dropped in 5e though some of the players and DMs I've played with still adhere to it).
I can see it in 3.5. They had a lot more going for them, not that they’re bad in 5e but for a lot of things, Druids seem like worse Clerics (a side effect of clerics being so damn good). They don’t have animal companions anymore. I can’t remember the number of times I’ve heard multiclassing into Druid to get Goodberry thrown out as a joke because their spell list isn't as immediately awesome as a Wizard, Cleric, or Warlock.
Clerics are undoubtedly more versatile, and one of my favourite classes as a result, but I'd put Druid fairly high up the list and certainly no worse off than Clerics in general utility. They might lack hitting power in some cases compared to, say, a War or Forge Cleric, but they get some amazing spells at pretty much all levels* and some of their subclasses are straight-up amazing. Circle of Dreams gives you some of the most potent Bonus Action healing in the game, and without using Spell Slots to boot, while from experience of playing with one Moon Druids can be insanely tanky (Earth Elemental Wildshape is crazy for that).
*Incidentally, I'd say Goodberry is pretty great for non-combat healing. Basically you want to burn any remaining spell slots on it before a Long Rest (especially if you're safe over that rest so won't need the spells during the night) and for the next day you can easily have 30+ points of basically free healing on hand, which could save a Short Rest for a character or two in a pinch at early-mid levels. As for other early Druid spells, Moonbeam is a great hard-to-escape damage dealer, Flaming Sphere likewise, Spike Growth can just be a meatgrinder under certain circumstances and once you've got the 3rd Levels coming in, you've got stuff like Call Lightning, Tidal Wave, and plenty of great utility stuff. They're not going to match Rogues, Warlocks or Paladins damage-wise, they can throw round some amazing AoE and have great non-combat options that can otherwise be pretty hard to come by.
@LordOfHats: This is mostly just repeating what has already been said, but my opinion follows three of the things that have been said about: fun, the DM, and and your vision for the character.
We ultimately play to have fun, if multi-classing to druid and having the staff is a fun direction for you to go & it would not stop the game from being fun for anyone else then why not do it. A challenge is usually a lot more fun to overcome than a cake walk, but your whole party sounds pretty buffed so would the staff be that out of place paired with your sweet AC? It will be up to your DM to make sure the adventure is scaled to an appropriate level of difficulty. While mentioning DMs, I think most of us agree it's ultimately the DM's choice. If I read correctly your DM suggested this in the first place, so no worries there. My only worry is, since it's adventure league, will you be shuffled around between different groups and DMs?
That has been a concern. Our league has 6 active groups, each with 6-8 regular players so they're always looking for new DMs to shift people too.
I think though my plan is to talk with my DM about making a quest of my character building a set of bone plate or something. That way if he ever gets shuffled I can legit say his armor isn't "metal" but some other kind of plate mail. I think it'll work out well cause one of the hardest things to do in AL is get good RP going (so many people involved and groups are formed ad hoc) and this gives us a reason to have some RP in the group as my character works towards his goal and the party helps out while we go through adventures.
Bone plate will make people think the PC is a necromancer of some sort. What you want is Dragon Scale Mail. You make the armor from the scales of whatever dragon you kill. It should have the same base AC as plate.
Red Harvest wrote: Bone plate will make people think the PC is a necromancer of some sort. What you want is Dragon Scale Mail. You make the armor from the scales of whatever dragon you kill. It should have the same base AC as plate.
For a human or something, I'd agree.
But the character is Lizardfolk. The motif works for them since it's just what they do. They have a racial skill for making gear out of their enemy's corpses, I'm just going to need to find some big corpses XD
Red Harvest wrote: Bone plate will make people think the PC is a necromancer of some sort. What you want is Dragon Scale Mail. You make the armor from the scales of whatever dragon you kill. It should have the same base AC as plate.
For a human or something, I'd agree.
But the character is Lizardfolk. The motif works for them since it's just what they do. They have a racial skill for making gear out of their enemy's corpses, I'm just going to need to find some big corpses XD
NPCs mistaking you for a necromancer would be an interesting angle though. especially since you are a paladin/druid. ( Am I remembering that right?)
That would be interesting. I feel like I already get that reaction though. Every time we finish a fight, when I say "I want to scavenge the bodies for anything useful" and the DM says "those femurs are pretty flexible, you could probably make a short bow out of them" *que mix of laughter and weird looks for the other players*
Another thing I thought of was replacing my armor with bone/leather/whatever I scavenge up, but maybe keeping a few pieces of metal here or there as a reflection the dual nature of his skillset. Then whenever we run into a more traditional Druid, maybe they do a double-take "what the feth are you wearing"
Point your DM at this. Made from common, low level badguys, you could probably treat it as scale mail- once you upgrade to bones from inherently magical creatures, it could 'scale' up from there!
Red Harvest wrote: The author of this story has a long standing history of animosity to Gary Gygax, and to D&D, at least the original game. I would not trust a word she wrote. She very much has an agenda.
She's also not much for fact checking. Kuntz published his book already, late last year, IIRC. He has a tell-all book planned too. I'd bet there are plenty of other errors in this article. It makes for an amusing read, if nothing else.
Why anyone would trust anything written on Kotaku, let alone from Cecelia who has a long history of just harping on Gary. Not that I think Gary doesn't deserve some of it. But, yeah.
Anyways,
So my group has requested a one off session on Halloween, and I am considering trying to run a survival game with all kinds of nasty monsters, skeletons and ghosts. The idea is that a medium sized village has been overrun by the servants of a trio of necromancers, long though defeated by an ancient order of knights. Every year, for one night the town gets overrun by the horros of this trio as they attempt to retake what was once theirs. The players will have to successfully defend the town and will have 24 hours to prepare for the onslaught. Encounters will come in waves, along with some fun triggered events!
If the players can survive all 10 waves, they get the chance to end forever the necromancers and their plans. If they fail, however, their characters are consumed into the armies of the necromancers. They will have to wait until Halloween 2020 to try again!
I think it's a cool idea, especially if the players can make use of terrain, traps, and maybe some hirelings. I'd enjoy playing around with that kind of one shot idea.
And if they lose, then their characters become the 10th wave next year
LordofHats wrote: I think it's a cool idea, especially if the players can make use of terrain, traps, and maybe some hirelings. I'd enjoy playing around with that kind of one shot idea.
And if they lose, then their characters become the 10th wave next year
I rolled 8 Characters at level 1 and then made character sheets for each one from level 1 to level 7 and gave each one a unique activated or passive ability. The game will consist of 8 waves, with the 8th wave being a ginormous boss fight.
Between each wave they get a short rest, and all abilities that say 1/day or long rest are changed to 1/wave and short rest.
The characters will be able to collect blood gems from monsters among other treasure during the waves, which they can spent at a wizards table in the inn they are defending between the round. The Mad Wizard will conjure random items off a table that includes awesome and crappy items at random.
This is a little similar to Togusa's question from two pages ago, but..
I'm curious if everyone would like to share how they handle when the party manages to (or is about to) bypass a part of the campaign. This is probably more applicable to those of us who run the premade modules than the homebrew DMs.
When my party found a way to bypass a large section of "Lost Mines of Phandelver" I was tempted to railroad them as they were skipping the part I was prepared for and had spent weeks making the models and terrain for. It didn't seem right though, and I felt they should get to skip the stuff since they were clever enough. They spent a lot of time exploring, and the session ran out of time during a random encounter. To get them some XP, and fill the void in the adventure module for the direction they were taking, I added some oneshots to encounter along the new route.
Would anyone like to share when this kind of thing happened to them when DMing, how they handled it, and/or advice to other DMs on what you find best for this kinds of situations?
I think for a terrain making DM this is very hard to deal with. Before I painted minis and made terrain, I was pretty unconcerned if players skipped something I had planned. Now, epsecially if it is a large chunk of content, it might be many hours of work and I will be disappointed that I do not get to show off my stuff. An example from my campaign- when the players finished the first arc of the campaign they were discussing what to do next and decided to explore the ruined city nearby. I spent weeks painting minis and writing up the city ruins in detail, drawing maps by hand and all that. We came back after the holiday and they just changed their minds and went north into the mountains instead. I had to paint a pile of stuff on short notice. Or more recently we were running a dungeon and they said they would just leave the dungeon and go elsewhere (this was a short, dungeon focused "break" from the main campaign). I said fine, but the campaign ends then and I will be taking an extended break to work on the main campaign.
It really sucks. In every case, I have just rolled with the punches. I do have some ideas about how to make it suck less though. - Resolve to re-use the content later. I will run that ruined city, all the work is done for it now, so it is not going anywhere. Sometime in the next year or two I will run it. - Make your terrain and so on in a way that means it can be used in multiple scenarios. I know that you craft a lot of set pieces and I think the stuff you make is fantastic. But those set pieces might be able to be used in other scenarios too, and then you would not feel that it was "wasted" work. That is why I put a lot of effort into making things modular or dual use at least. - When reading adventures, try to identify points where players can skip, and focus your prep elsewhere. Do not make an elaborate set up for something the players are likely to skip.
The last thing I can say is, if the players do not have a good mental picture of your world you could potentially move an encounter so that they run into it anyway. I think this is unsatisfying and risky because if the players catch on they will feel very annoyed that their clever planning is for naught. But there might be cases where it is possible to do that without causing that reaction.
Syro_ wrote: This is a little similar to Togusa's question from two pages ago, but..
I'm curious if everyone would like to share how they handle when the party manages to (or is about to) bypass a part of the campaign. This is probably more applicable to those of us who run the premade modules than the homebrew DMs.
When my party found a way to bypass a large section of "Lost Mines of Phandelver" I was tempted to railroad them as they were skipping the part I was prepared for and had spent weeks making the models and terrain for. It didn't seem right though, and I felt they should get to skip the stuff since they were clever enough. They spent a lot of time exploring, and the session ran out of time during a random encounter. To get them some XP, and fill the void in the adventure module for the direction they were taking, I added some oneshots to encounter along the new route.
Would anyone like to share when this kind of thing happened to them when DMing, how they handled it, and/or advice to other DMs on what you find best for this kinds of situations?
Mine wasn't this extreme, but I had used the 4th ed City Tiles box to create a big layout of a city for a large chase scene/combat encounter and my players were like "We already got paid. If the guy that hired us gets mugged. its not our problem" So they didn't chase after the people.
I was running an original campaign. So it wasn't difficult to just readapt. Flip over the tiles and use the sewer side for a "where did the bad guys go?" mission.
Thanks for sharing Da Boss and balmong. It is a real pain when players annouce their intentions and then change their minds next session after you spend so much time preparing. Thanks for the advice D Boss, and balmong, I'm glad what your players did was minor and that you were able to role wit it so well.
Syro_, you need to be prepared for the unexpected player decisions. This means planning to improvise. Exploration is one of the pillars of 5e, no? Pre-made adventures are starting points. You do not need to follow them exactly. Take notes about the session, especially things you improvise, and make adjustments to the campaign. Things that they were supposed to encounter may move on to other areas, for example.
Bear in mind, I started playing in '78 -- The blue book and then the 3 LBBs -- so my ideas about how to play, and Dm'ing are very much of the Old School.
Best advise for improv skills: read a lot of Fantasy and Sci-Fi to get ideas and just keep them in your head, or note them. The 5e DMG has a whole list of books worth reading, and some crap too.
My DM has a box of pretty generico miniatures rather than getting specials for each encounter, if those little goblin minatures happen to be kobalds or boglings that day then no problem!
I think there is a pretty strong argument for avoiding tiles and minis for that reason, yeah. I played for years without, and only started in recent years from a desire to get some use out of my minis since I had stopped wargaming.
I think it is important to be able to just roll with theatre of the mind when needs be, and not to sweat it too much. The players quickly adjust in any case.
Now that I have the set up to just display digital maps on the table. I just have a big library of generic maps that I can use for any unplanned combat encounters. So the payers messing with my plans doesn't matter too much.
Red Harvest wrote: Syro_, you need to be prepared for the unexpected player decisions. This means planning to improvise. Exploration is one of the pillars of 5e, no?
It isn't, no. The 'Pillars' thing was going to be a series of modular rules (and rulebooks) that they talked about producing during the playtest for 5e. It never actually materialized, and exploration and the like have some handwaved 'rules' covered vaguely by skill and ability checks.
The sum total of exploration rules for 5e cover not quite 2 pages in the DMG (there is a half page picture) and cover travel pace (mostly in hexes and squares, with two brief asides for miles, one of which is only for flight and magical movement), opposed stealth vs perception checks (for groups trying to sneak up on each other) and tracking DCs for snow/mud, dirt and bare stone. That's it.
Ah. One Mearls' unfinished back-of-a-napkin playtest articles. Which... just gives XP based on how much money happens to be in the location? That's not at all helpful.
And similar XP for rolling high when roll-playing social interactions. Huzzah.
The former is a vague callback to the old GP brought home = XP of old editions, but it doesn't give you any rules at all for actually running exploration of any kind.
Voss wrote: but it doesn't give you any rules at all for actually running exploration of any kind.
What sort of rules are you actually looking for, though?
Between Survival, Perception, Investigation and History you have the necessary skillset for exploring, and with tool proficiency, physical skills and the players' own nous, they're equipped to overcome the challenges of a location or region. You can do this as off-the-cuff checks or a more structured Skill Challenge a la 4e, but either way, you've got what you need to cover the act of exploration and discovery. The DMG gives info on travel speeds and dangers in various environments, to set up random or prepared encounters. The monster books are full of lore to tie monsters into various locations as more than combat encounters.
I honestly don't see what part of exploration isn't covered by the tools the game already gives you. I know I favour going as mechanics-light as possible and others do prefer more robust systems, but even then in this instance I really don't see what more explicit rules could actually add.
Voss wrote: but it doesn't give you any rules at all for actually running exploration of any kind.
What sort of rules are you actually looking for, though?
Between Survival, Perception, Investigation and History you have the necessary skillset for exploring, and with tool proficiency, physical skills and the players' own nous, they're equipped to overcome the challenges of a location or region. You can do this as off-the-cuff checks or a more structured Skill Challenge a la 4e, but either way, you've got what you need to cover the act of exploration and discovery. The DMG gives info on travel speeds and dangers in various environments, to set up random or prepared encounters. The monster books are full of lore to tie monsters into various locations as more than combat encounters.
I honestly don't see what part of exploration isn't covered by the tools the game already gives you. I know I favour going as mechanics-light as possible and others do prefer more robust systems, but even then in this instance I really don't see what more explicit rules could actually add.
You could have regional event tables that are more than combat encounters. You can have wear and tear on the players for pushing too hard and adding levels of exhaustion. You can rules for those skill checks resulting in slow downs, getting lost, turns of good luck, etc etc...
Lots of things can be done with exploration. Mainly whats lacking is the not combat things.
I shan't go on too much as you and I have had this discussion before and I don't think we're changing each other's minds , but is that not already catered for or obvious? Penalties for failing skill checks is surely no different to the usual implementation of such checks? Exhaustion kicking in after extended or harsh travel is exactly what that rule is for.
More specific random tables I'll grant you could be useful if you like such things, but for me at least it's just as easy to prepare specific themed events and encounters for a session in that particular environment based on the lore from monster/setting books or whatever.
More information and guidance is always good, but specific rules for this just strikes me as largely redundant.
Wasn't a problem for past editions- there were quite a few rules (and entire books) centered around exploration rules.
Not sure what you mean by penalties for failing skill checks. Beyond not succeeding, does 5e even have penalties for failure?
If so, shouldn't there be guidelines somewhere?
Off the cuff and rules light is, basically, my problem with it. I want consistency in my games and if I'm paying for a rule set, I expect them to do the work. If they're not, I don't need anything they produce.
And 5e still has the 4e problem- if it isn't combat, there is very little (or no) meat on the bones.
Paradigm wrote: I shan't go on too much as you and I have had this discussion before and I don't think we're changing each other's minds
I see that you are familiar with the internet
5e, at least the core books were intended as rules light, so AD&D levels of hand-holding were never going to happen. Although, quite a bit of the AD&D rules were there to set up for domain play. I speak of 1e AD&D. I don't know much about 2e, other than I disliked quite a bit about 30 years ago.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least to learn that WotC plans a splatbook for exploration, or expects a 3rd party publisher like Kobold Press to publish something. However,it's coming on 5 years since release, so maybe there never will be such a splatbook.
Now what 5e really needs:
1. Good morale rules
2. Good henchman/hireling rules. -- the sidekick rules in The Essentials box are Meh.
3. Good rules for running away from combats, evasions and pursuits. What is there now is piss poor. It's due in no small part to the really " basic" movement rates, among other things.
Not sure what you mean by penalties for failing skill checks. Beyond not succeeding, does 5e even have penalties for failure?
If so, shouldn't there be guidelines somewhere?
I mean, the narrative moves forward and there are (presumably) consequences for the failures. If you're trying to find Location X and you totally mess up the Survival check* then you're either going to take longer to get there, or not get there at all. That in turn means other individuals you might be racing to that location get there first and begin to achieve their goals. It might mean you're forced to camp in a less safe or harsher area, at greater risk of exhaustion or coming under attack while you rest. It might mean nothing at all, if there aren't any particular stakes to that specific check, though that's unlikely.
The point is that while the rules might not say 'you lose 5xp and take a point of Exhaustion if you fail to navigate using Survival', the simple nature of trying do achieve something (ie. making a check) means that if you don't achieve that, there will be some consequence. It is the job of the DM to determine what those consequences are, as is relevant to the situation, narrative and factors in play. On the most basic level, adjudicating the effects of success and failure is what the DM is for, and I don't see how a rule that says 'failing X check in Y terrain results in Z effect' actually helps there.
Out of curiosity though, could you suggest the kind of rule you think would actually make exploration more interesting?
*incidentally, I do think Geography or Navigation should be parted out from Survival as a separate skill.
3. Good rules for running away from combats, evasions and pursuits. What is there now is piss poor. It's due in no small part to the really " basic" movement rates, among other things.
Perhaps the one actual mechanic I'd like to see added to 5e is an update/reintroduction of Skill Challenges for exactly this sort of thing (whilst also having far wider utility for anything from pitched battles to social stealth). They're the perfect midpoint betweem the structure and tension of initiative-based combat and the freedom of non-combat interactions that makes those sorts of chases/action sequences much more interesting and compelling.
This is an interesting article that explains how the rules for certain kinds of play have atrophied from the game over the years. I think it helps explain why some older gamers are at times a little let down with 5e, even though it is a great system and probably my favourite overall.
Not sure what you mean by penalties for failing skill checks. Beyond not succeeding, does 5e even have penalties for failure?
If so, shouldn't there be guidelines somewhere?
I mean, the narrative moves forward and there are (presumably) consequences for the failures. If you're trying to find Location X and you totally mess up the Survival check* then you're either going to take longer to get there, or not get there at all. That in turn means other individuals you might be racing to that location get there first and begin to achieve their goals. It might mean you're forced to camp in a less safe or harsher area, at greater risk of exhaustion or coming under attack while you rest. It might mean nothing at all, if there aren't any particular stakes to that specific check, though that's unlikely.
The point is that while the rules might not say 'you lose 5xp and take a point of Exhaustion if you fail to navigate using Survival', the simple nature of trying do achieve something (ie. making a check) means that if you don't achieve that, there will be some consequence. It is the job of the DM to determine what those consequences are, as is relevant to the situation, narrative and factors in play. On the most basic level, adjudicating the effects of success and failure is what the DM is for, and I don't see how a rule that says 'failing X check in Y terrain results in Z effect' actually helps there.
Out of curiosity though, could you suggest the kind of rule you think would actually make exploration more interesting?
*incidentally, I do think Geography or Navigation should be parted out from Survival as a separate skill.
3. Good rules for running away from combats, evasions and pursuits. What is there now is piss poor. It's due in no small part to the really " basic" movement rates, among other things.
Perhaps the one actual mechanic I'd like to see added to 5e is an update/reintroduction of Skill Challenges for exactly this sort of thing (whilst also having far wider utility for anything from pitched battles to social stealth). They're the perfect midpoint betweem the structure and tension of initiative-based combat and the freedom of non-combat interactions that makes those sorts of chases/action sequences much more interesting and compelling.
The issue is those skill checks are binary. You succeed at DC x skill check and gain y amount of ground or fail and don't move at all. There are no degrees of success or rules to implement degrees of success. You should be able to make ground but gain exhaustion. Or loose ground because you got lost and have to reestablish you heading. Or succeed so well you made it farther then you thought you would in the day.
You succeed at DC x skill check and gain y amount of ground or fail and don't move at all.
Only if the DM decides that failure means you all stand there looking at a map for 6 hours of would-be travel... It's just as likely that the DM decides that the failure means you take twice as long to reach your destination, or reach a different destination, or loop round in a circle. The rules tell you how to determine whether something succeeds or fails, but it's the DM that has total control over how those successes or failures are reflected.
As for degrees of success/failure, it's a fair point, if we're talking letter of the rules. My counterpoint would be that you've put forward an alternative and more interesting way of doing things in the space of a couple of sentences, so is that not problem solved?
I imagine a lot of DMs do that sort of thing subconsciously anyway, using checks not just as a binary pass/fail state and taking the roll as a measure of how well a thing is done or not done. It might not be there in the letter of the rules, but it makes perfect sense that, say, a player who rolls a 25 to recall information in, say, a History check, gets more than the player who rolled a 15. Both pass the check, but there's absolutely no barrier to the DM giving the former player more information than the latter. To me, at least, that all comes into the adjudication of success and failure.
There is perhaps a pertinent point here about how that's essentially received wisdom/common sense/meta-level interpretation of the mechanics which is different from the game itself on paper. As the article Da Boss linked says, the rules as presented and as they exist in the heads of players and DMs are entirely different things, though I don't really see that as a bad thing. If, for instance, attributing degrees of success or failure to RAW binary checks isn't in the text, but is often employed by DMs anyway (because they see other people do it, or it's common sense to them), that's not really a problem to my mind. That's just people taking the game into their own hands, which is something 5e especially is constantly encouraging its users to do.
Some might take the 'license' to hack and alter the rules as a cop-out, but I take it as more of a statement of intent. WotC expect people to mess with this stuff to play the version of the game they want to play, and the fewer prescriptive rules exist the easier this is to do. It's far easier to add stuff to a ruleset yourself than it is to work around omitting parts of it.
It's not unlike GWs '"3 ways to play" and all the many various optional rules for matched play.
While yes, everyone is free to pick and choose all the pieces they want to do what they want there is a vast majority who are playing with a core set of the matched play rules enabled. Because at the end of the day what most players want is a consistent core set of rules they don't have to work to make functional.
Having options is great. Having officially published and spelled out options is best. And if the players want to remove or change pieces of them they are always free to do that regardless. That consistent baseline is still wanted.
Need some advice as I'm struggling to get into my current campaign. I like a strong narrative but when I talked to DM he said he wants this campaign to be more freeform and make your own fun style.
Any tips on how I can get the best out of this sort of campaign? Without a central conflict to resolve or sense of urgency I don't know what to do haha!
Need some advice as I'm struggling to get into my current campaign. I like a strong narrative but when I talked to DM he said he wants this campaign to be more freeform and make your own fun style.
Any tips on how I can get the best out of this sort of campaign? Without a central conflict to resolve or sense of urgency I don't know what to do haha!
Cheers Kroem
Make a character with strong motivations for what they do and make sure these motivations have the potential for conflict with each other.
Your characters motivations and morals will create conflict, which will drive the story. The narrative is how your character will have to change and grow in response to the situations they find themselves in rather than a predetermined set of events that will occur.
As an example, lets say you're playing a lawful good paladin whose motivation is to uphold the law and protect the people. What will happen when they encounter a society where the law is actively oppressing the people? How will they resolve this conflict between their motivations? Will they decide that the law is not worth upholding or that without the law there would be anarchy? Either decision has the potential to drastically affect your character. If they decide to cast aside the law as a principle to be bound to, then only their personal view of right and wrong is what guides their actions. How is that different from any vigilante? If they decide that the law is absolute, despite its consequences on the people, then how will having to abandon people the law will not protect affect them?
I think there's both an in-game and out of game solution to that.
The in game solution, if you are being given absolutely no direction, is to figure out what your character cares about in the absence of an immediate threat or task, and be proactive in making that the narrative that the campaign follows. Talk in character with the other PCs about what they want to achieve, and try and draw out some common goals. If a few of you have been wronged by a local baron, for instance, you can decide that you're going to take that baron down and boom, there's your narrative; if the DM is true to their conviction that this is a truly freeform game, they should then be happy to cater for your party following this objective and design their content accordingly. Proactive players, rather than the DM become the driving force in this sort of game, so it's essentially on you to pick a direction then trust in the DM to develop that direction and provide opportunity for you to resolve the task you set yourself.
The potential problem you'll run into here is if the others in the group are happy to just Skyrim about, fighting monsters and robbing dungeons and all that adventurer jazz. At that point, you probably want to look at the off-table path, the key to that is communication. Talk to the DM and to the other players, and try and work out what the group as a whole (DM very much included) wants. The worst case scenario there is unfortunately that the group splits, I've had this happen in the past when there's two halves of the group wanting two very different games and as DM I wanted to run one kind far more than the other. More likely though is that you can settle on some sort of compromise, or even something as radical as a change of DM if that means everyone gets a game they're more happy with. Not every game is going to be for everyone, and there's no point forcing it or going for a compromise that leaves no one as happy as they could be, but you may well find there is a solution to be had by talking it over and seeing if everyone's on the same page.
Cool thanks for the advice, I think I do have some hooks for personal goals;
• Being a cleric in a faithless world.
• Being an orphan left at the sacred grove when young.
• Being a half-elf in a word where Elves have disappeared.
I'll have a think on how I can turn these conflicts into goals and then see if I can get the party on board!
Go with the classic cleric motivation, to get some land in order to build the best temple possible to your diety and of course to bring faith to the faithless world.
Da Boss wrote: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/43568/roleplaying-games/game-structures-addendum-system-matters
This is an interesting article that explains how the rules for certain kinds of play have atrophied from the game over the years. I think it helps explain why some older gamers are at times a little let down with 5e, even though it is a great system and probably my favourite overall.
An interesting article for sure......
That being said, as a rules-lite, theatre of the mind type player I think he is mostly wrong. Systems do not matter. The players only need to believe that a "system" exists and the GM needs only reward the behaviors he wants in his game for an RPG to work.
However, it is absolutely right in that players choose systems to fit the style of game they want to play. Most systems simply "railroad" players and DMs into a "way to play the game" as opposed to allowing them create the game they want to play. For example, D&D is a heavily combat oriented game, and therefore many players simply play as murder-hobos. That is the way the rewards mechanisms in D&D are structured. Meanwhile, a game like L5R has combat be very lethal and the rewards system is focused more upon social interactions and therefore, the game features far less combat and much less polite conversation. If a group of players has a strong idea of what they are trying to accomplish, then the system barely matters.
That being said, he makes an excellent point that new players and groups will inevitably fall into playing the structures that the system they are using tends to support. Then, when other games try to do things differently, they will get very confused and may or may not wish to continue or even know how to frame the experience.
I think system matters, but I think the issue is more that people are conservative about which systems they try. Dungeons and Dragons is evolved from a skirmish wargame with some stuff bolted onto it, and I really enjoy the skirmish wargame aspects to it more and more as I get older.
Playing it as a heavily narrative style game is possible, but you are going to be doing more heavy lifting as a GM and not getting much use out of the work the system designers did to make the game in the first place.
You would probably be happier playing a game which is structured around narratives, and even better, around the kind of narratives you enjoy. There are games like this, games that structure the mechanics around story moments and narrative arcs rather than tactical movement and so on. They can be really awesome games to play, but not for people who want tactical combat and a simulationist approach to the game.
But because Dungeons and Dragons is the grandaddy game with the biggest brand and the most cultural impact, people tend to stick with it rather than going looking for their ideal game. Indeed, it takes a long time to figure out what your ideal game actually is, so you probably just kludge D&D until it fits what you want and then you figure "This is how Dungeons and Dragons is" since you by nature play it with a small group of people.
System matters, but not too much. People are having a great time without worrying about it. But sometimes people could have an even better time if they found a system that suited their desires a little more.
That being said, as a rules-lite, theatre of the mind type player I think he is mostly wrong. Systems do not matter. The players only need to believe that a "system" exists and the GM needs only reward the behaviors he wants in his game for an RPG to work.
If a group of players has a strong idea of what they are trying to accomplish, then the system barely matters.
I think this is probably the explanation for my experience with the game and why I don't necessarily understand the 'D&D is a combat game' argument. When I started playing, it was off the back of a) not having time to write much creative stuff due to the demands of uni work and b) discovering the likes of Critical Role. So with the people I started playing with, we took the approach that we were using the game to facilitate storytelling and creative narratives, rather than as a tactical exercise, and with that outlook from the start we were able to, as Da Boss puts it, 'kludged; the game into that specific shape.
Which isn't to say that we weren't given the tools for that; we very quickly abandoned XP and switched to milestone levelling, made a big deal of backgrounds as more than just a way to get some extra Proficiency, that sort of thing. Maybe 5e doesn't give you the most to work with in that regard, but it is enough that with the mindset of the game as a narrative framework, it never felt like a struggle. I've never had to deal with murder-hobos chasing XP because I've used the tools that disincentive that and put aside the ones that do, and that's why I'm firmly in the camp that it's the players (GM included), not the rules, that shape how I approach a game.
I think this is why I basically like game systems that stick to accessibility/simplicity and resolution mechanics, rather than telling you specifically how to go about playing, because with what I'm looking for in RPGs, I'll run them all broadly the same anyway using the resources provided. While I'd undoubtedly vary the tone and content for, say, a Call of Cthulhu game, my process from planning to preparation to running the game at the table would be exactly the same as it would be for 5e, Edge of the Empire, Blades in the Dark or whatever, really.
So really, what I'm looking for is a) mechanics that are fun for players on a meta level, which for my group generally means fairly simple stuff that stays unobtrusive, and b) the resources that make my job easier (which is why after I switched from Dragon Age to 5e I never went back, because there's just so much more support for 5e, from official to 3rd party to easily accessible homebrew to just the knowledge base of the various communities around the game). If, hypothetically, there was a system that was as simple/accessible and well-supported as 5e, there's every chance I'd switch to that, but I'd run it in exactly the same way.
I like simple resolution mechanics too, but I also find it helpful if the game provides some mechanics for simulation of stuff I want to simulate, because I find it more satisfying than purely making stuff up as I go along - it helps me and my players to "believe" in the world.
D&D 5th is a very good game because it is fairly simple and modular and so it can be easily adapted to a wide range of uses. I really like it.
By comparison, the Fantasy Flight 40K roleplaying games were a mess of mechanics and useless rules, high level simulation in some areas and then basically nothing to help with other stuff (the mechanics given in Rogue Trader for running a giant spaceship with a crew of hundreds if not thousands were piss poor given that is what players are actually doing in game, instead focusing rules and advancement on the ships officers advancing in combat skills and so on, even though they hardly ever had a face to face fight. It is a terrible system in a great setting.)
I am planning a Sci Fi game and I intend on using a version of 5e to run it because it does what I want in terms of tactical play, it is simple to adapt, my players already understand how it works, and if I am gonna have to make a system for starship combat and crewing myself it may as well be with a system I am already very familiar with and understand.
Da Boss wrote: I like simple resolution mechanics too, but I also find it helpful if the game provides some mechanics for simulation of stuff I want to simulate, because I find it more satisfying than purely making stuff up as I go along - it helps me and my players to "believe" in the world.
D&D 5th is a very good game because it is fairly simple and modular and so it can be easily adapted to a wide range of uses. I really like it.
By comparison, the Fantasy Flight 40K roleplaying games were a mess of mechanics and useless rules, high level simulation in some areas and then basically nothing to help with other stuff (the mechanics given in Rogue Trader for running a giant spaceship with a crew of hundreds if not thousands were piss poor given that is what players are actually doing in game, instead focusing rules and advancement on the ships officers advancing in combat skills and so on, even though they hardly ever had a face to face fight. It is a terrible system in a great setting.)
I am planning a Sci Fi game and I intend on using a version of 5e to run it because it does what I want in terms of tactical play, it is simple to adapt, my players already understand how it works, and if I am gonna have to make a system for starship combat and crewing myself it may as well be with a system I am already very familiar with and understand.
If I can make a recomendation... look up Coriolis. Great sci fi rpg with ship rules. Free sample rules from their website and it's not hard to google a pdf if you want a free preview before you buy. Uses only d6s. easy peasy to play and run.
Does anyone know if WoTC has an official repository of maps from their own campaign settings in a digital format?
I'm running a lot of the official game campaigns, and a lot of their dungeons are very, very complex and difficult to reproduce on my wet-erase mat. I was hoping I could get jet the digital versions and blow them up to print out at work. Securing them to whiteboard is easy-peasy and then I can keep them for recurrent uses.
Togusa wrote: Does anyone know if WoTC has an official repository of maps from their own campaign settings in a digital format?
I'm running a lot of the official game campaigns, and a lot of their dungeons are very, very complex and difficult to reproduce on my wet-erase mat. I was hoping I could get jet the digital versions and blow them up to print out at work. Securing them to whiteboard is easy-peasy and then I can keep them for recurrent uses.
If you purchase the adventures on DnD beyond you get high res versions of every image. One of the guys that do that official artwork also sells the images by themselves on his website. but I couldn't find it just now when I was looking. I'll update this comment if/when I find it.
Togusa wrote: Does anyone know if WoTC has an official repository of maps from their own campaign settings in a digital format?
I'm running a lot of the official game campaigns, and a lot of their dungeons are very, very complex and difficult to reproduce on my wet-erase mat. I was hoping I could get jet the digital versions and blow them up to print out at work. Securing them to whiteboard is easy-peasy and then I can keep them for recurrent uses.
If you purchase the adventures on DnD beyond you get high res versions of every image. One of the guys that do that official artwork also sells the images by themselves on his website. but I couldn't find it just now when I was looking. I'll update this comment if/when I find it.
I was hoping for physical, not digital maps and things. My group and I have a strict "No Phones, No Laptop" policy during sessions to cut down on distractions.
Togusa wrote: Does anyone know if WoTC has an official repository of maps from their own campaign settings in a digital format?
I'm running a lot of the official game campaigns, and a lot of their dungeons are very, very complex and difficult to reproduce on my wet-erase mat. I was hoping I could get jet the digital versions and blow them up to print out at work. Securing them to whiteboard is easy-peasy and then I can keep them for recurrent uses.
If you purchase the adventures on DnD beyond you get high res versions of every image. One of the guys that do that official artwork also sells the images by themselves on his website. but I couldn't find it just now when I was looking. I'll update this comment if/when I find it.
I was hoping for physical, not digital maps and things. My group and I have a strict "No Phones, No Laptop" policy during sessions to cut down on distractions.
Basically, my character is now at the mercy of a lich, trapped in a room with a fighter who has 5 hit points and played by someone who cannot do basic math. And I have no spell slots. So I'm completely at the mercy of whatever the lich wants and if that's my corpse he is gonna get it.
Bright side, new character ideas. I'm thinking of a topical character for the current campaign and how to make it work, which has resulted in my idea for a Black Draconic Origin Sorcerer who uses lots of trickery rather than direct damage spells. Stuff like Blink, Misty Step, Mirror Image and the very fun looking Greater Invisibility. The idea is to make the character mostly melee oriented, using spells for support/self buffing rather than direct damage.
I've been looking at melee classes to pair this with, and while Paladin is a really obvious choice (Bladelok too), both those choices seem kind of... cheesy. Which is how I narrowed my eyes toward Rogue.
I like the theme. A sneaky rogue like hobgoblin angry at his dragon grand-daddy who didn't love him enough, joins the party, and proceeds to massacre things with sneak attacks from invisibility and debilitating spells like confusion and hypnotic circle. Throw in Vitrolic Sphere as the only good acid damage spell I actually get for some AoE damage, mirror image and blink for defense in bad situations and then lots of area and crowd control. Maybe Haste, but Haste also seems really cheesy.
My question is, can this work and if so, how should I distribute stats to make the most of the narrative framework for the character? Hobgoblin is not the ideal race for this combo, and the ability scores are looking like some sacrifices will need to be made.
A good thing to bear in mind is that a lot of the more tricksy spells don't really care about your Casting stat much. While you should probably still put your second best into Charisma, things like Invisibility, Blink, Haste (powerful, but not necessarily cheesy, and you can always cast it on someone else if you want, so you're helping rather then overshadowing party members) don't really get affected by your Spell DC/Mod. So if you want to largely leave the spells for buffing yourself and allies, and leave the damage dealing to your Sneak Attacks or buffed party members, I'd go Dex first, Cha second.
Get an odd number in Int if you can to make use of the racial boost to that (and depending on how far you take Rogue, some of their subclasses use Int), treat the +2 Con as free HP each level and probably stick your lowest into Str or Wis, unless you have a narrative desire for this character to be particularly good at either of those.
Only other suggestion, but if you like this playstyle, an alternate way to do it might be Trickery Domain Cleric, who also go very nicely into Rogue and get all the fun trick spells. The dragon ancestry thing might be too cool thematically to pass up though!
Basically, my character is now at the mercy of a lich, trapped in a room with a fighter who has 5 hit points and played by someone who cannot do basic math. And I have no spell slots. So I'm completely at the mercy of whatever the lich wants and if that's my corpse he is gonna get it.
Bright side, new character ideas. I'm thinking of a topical character for the current campaign and how to make it work, which has resulted in my idea for a Black Draconic Origin Sorcerer who uses lots of trickery rather than direct damage spells. Stuff like Blink, Misty Step, Mirror Image and the very fun looking Greater Invisibility. The idea is to make the character mostly melee oriented, using spells for support/self buffing rather than direct damage.
I've been looking at melee classes to pair this with, and while Paladin is a really obvious choice (Bladelok too), both those choices seem kind of... cheesy. Which is how I narrowed my eyes toward Rogue.
I like the theme. A sneaky rogue like hobgoblin angry at his dragon grand-daddy who didn't love him enough, joins the party, and proceeds to massacre things with sneak attacks from invisibility and debilitating spells like confusion and hypnotic circle. Throw in Vitrolic Sphere as the only good acid damage spell I actually get for some AoE damage, mirror image and blink for defense in bad situations and then lots of area and crowd control. Maybe Haste, but Haste also seems really cheesy.
My question is, can this work and if so, how should I distribute stats to make the most of the narrative framework for the character? Hobgoblin is not the ideal race for this combo, and the ability scores are looking like some sacrifices will need to be made.
I'm not the most familiar with rogues or multiclassing, but the arcane trickster subtype is probably a good way to go for some added spell utility. otherwise, the only rogue stat that really matters is dex.
Da Boss wrote: That is a cool character concept. Are you gonna be playing Red Hand of Doom? Lich and Dragon tainted Hobgoblins sounds familiar. If so, JEALOUS!
We're currently playing Forge of Fury from Tales of the Yawning Portal. It's mostly about Orcs and a Black Dragon, but we've already encountered some Goblins and Hobs in the Orc army, and Orc is even less suited for this and I just don't want to be a tiny goblin XD
Instead, the fighter got 3 crits on an action surge turn after going down and rolling a 20 on a death save. Then went down again.
My character bashed the proto lich with two crits over three turns before going down himself, rolled a 20 on a death save, got right back up and got another freaking crit to kill the proto lich with 1 hit point remaining XD
Because feth the game apparently wanted it to be epic I guess?
Da Boss wrote: That is a cool character concept. Are you gonna be playing Red Hand of Doom? Lich and Dragon tainted Hobgoblins sounds familiar. If so, JEALOUS!
We're currently playing Forge of Fury from Tales of the Yawning Portal. It's mostly about Orcs and a Black Dragon, but we've already encountered some Goblins and Hobs in the Orc army, and Orc is even less suited for this and I just don't want to be a tiny goblin XD
Ah, forge of fury, we played through this too recently. Orcs, Troglodytes, an Ogre, Deep Dwarves, a Succubus, and a Black Dragon!
But I can't remember a lich to be around! Did you adapt the storyline for your group?
The DM might be. Pretty sure we encountered a succubus right after I killed the lice. She was bound in a side room and managed to get free by charming most of the party.
Because once you’ve encountered a succubus once the entire thing is spoiled for all subsequent encounters xD
Da Boss wrote: That is a cool character concept. Are you gonna be playing Red Hand of Doom? Lich and Dragon tainted Hobgoblins sounds familiar. If so, JEALOUS!
We're currently playing Forge of Fury from Tales of the Yawning Portal. It's mostly about Orcs and a Black Dragon, but we've already encountered some Goblins and Hobs in the Orc army, and Orc is even less suited for this and I just don't want to be a tiny goblin XD
Ah, forge of fury, we played through this too recently. Orcs, Troglodytes, an Ogre, Deep Dwarves, a Succubus, and a Black Dragon!
But I can't remember a lich to be around! Did you adapt the storyline for your group?
Ah the Forge of Fury, probably my all time favorite adventure. I remember running it back in 3rd edition...christ almost 20 years ago.
Our Rogue was crushed to death by an animated table...good times.
I get that there are so-called "Culture Wars" going on right now, but Jesus this video is slowed.
You have a woman claiming that D&D, a game where you can literally be anything you want, from a giant dragon to a minuscule roach person as not "inclusive" enough. And, in the same video, said lady goes on to talk about how she met most of her inclusive friends THROUGH the hobby.
What is with people these days when it comes to this stuff? It's as if they are incapable of critical thought.
What more do they want from the hobby? Is this about getting people to play with each other, or are they just obsessed with quotas?
You have to be pretty much looking for something to be angry about to get worked up about that video in which, as you do point out, she spends the vast majority of it singing its praises as an activity which is basically built to be inclusive.
However, since it relies on other people to play with, and there are some people who do hold some very toxic views, there can be issues. Like a creep taking their sexism and rape fantasies into a game of D&D where the other players want to be a happy travelling band of halfling bards just looking for the best gastropub in the multiverse. Or the old stories/jokes of the DM trying to use the players to live their sexual fetishes ("Dare you enter my magical realm?"). Or FATAL. Or Racial Holy War.
So, basically she is saying that RPGs are great and amazing and can be really inclusive but you do still need to be careful as there are still people out there who are toxic, like in any fandom. What part of that do you actually disagree with?
A Town Called Malus wrote: You have to be pretty much looking for something to be angry about to get worked up about that video in which, as you do point out, she spends the vast majority of it singing its praises as an activity which is basically built to be inclusive.
However, since it relies on other people to play with, and there are some people who do hold some very toxic views, there can be issues. Like a creep taking their sexism and rape fantasies into a game of D&D where the other players want to be a happy travelling band of halfling bards just looking for the best gastropub in the multiverse. Or the old stories/jokes of the DM trying to use the players to live their sexual fetishes ("Dare you enter my magical realm?"). Or FATAL. Or Racial Holy War.
So, basically she is saying that RPGs are great and amazing and can be really inclusive but you do still need to be careful as there are still people out there who are toxic, like in any fandom. What part of that do you actually disagree with?
My issue with the video is that it is so condescending and literally uses outdated and incorrect stereotypes to harass a group of people. The very thing these people commonly advocate against. When it is done to them. I feel like a lot of those examples are the extreme examples. I've been Role Playing for 23 years and I have played with hundreds of groups, probably close to a thousand people. In all that time I've never heard any real world examples of those kinds of behaviors, and I certainly haven't experienced them myself. The worst I've ever had to deal with was extreme levels of metagaming, which while annoying, is to be somewhat expected.
Also I wouldn't say that I'm angry about the video. Annoyed definitely, but that is because as a person who likes a lot of this stuff, there is a phenomenal amount of abuse that gets hurtled our way from the media and the normies out there. Her tone is condescending and this video definitely tries to push the narrative that we're all neck beards in the basement (it literally uses that offensive stereotype) thus planting the seeds in the viewers mind that we're all anti-social not well adjusted nerds who do nothing by sexualize women and reee about pronouns all day long.
Gaming has for a long time been the target of attack campaigns, some of them justified and some of them not. But you ever notice how rarely anyone in these groups ever call out the sexism in rap music? Which in my opinion is far, FAR worse than anything I've personally seen in the gaming community.
As for toxic groups, we all pick the people we run with in life. I don't think the games we play foster the behavior, I think we need to be more careful about who we befriend (when we can).
I would say that in my short time in TTRPGs, I've found that it's pretty steep on these things. A lot of groups seem to go really out of their way (like really out of their way) to be as accommodating and open as possible.
D&D is probably the first time I've ever seen the words "trigger warning" used unironically when a DM gave an upfront description of the campaign's premise so people would know it mildly mentioned rape in a character's backstory. Up until that point, the only times I'd ever seen that phrase used were unlikeable people doing their damndest to bitch about nothing.
At the same time, D&D is also the first time I'd ever seen anyone say the phrase "I want to play a chaotic good character who rapes people." Because... Wow. Okay. Obviously the DM did not accept that person's request to join the game, because even as a joke it's not really funny and who is going to take that gamble?
Anyway, point is that I've seen extremes of these issues far more frequently in D&D than I have in other places and it seems to be part of the landscape. I don't find the video that off base. It might hinge on where you are in things, but I've only been at this for like, 9 months and I've seen a lot of what she's talking about either in person or in passing.
So, basically she is saying that RPGs are great and amazing and can be really inclusive but you do still need to be careful as there are still people out there who are toxic, like in any fandom. What part of that do you actually disagree with?
Anti-SJW's gonna anti-SJW.
And yeah, there are some...weirdos in the hobby. Rare, but they cast a long shadow. There was one player I gamed with in an online group who...in hindsight, was really goddamn creepy, and clearly using the games to indulge some stuff that I really shouldn't have let him get away with (or kept him in the group after trying. Nasty stuff under spoiler.
Spoiler:
In a Mage game that I ran when I was 19, he had his character transform another player's character into a woman, and mind controlled him and another PC into having sex. Oh, and his character was a 12-year-old girl. In a different game, he had his (also an underage girl) throw herself at another PC, was clearly wildly enthusiastic about it OOC and very nearly used more mind control to force the other PC to have sex with her.
In hindsight, I should have instantly kicked him, but I was a socially withdrawn geek and too easily cowed (he was a manipulative little turd as well, an expert at "negotiating" by just sulking and guilt-tripping) and scared of causing OOC drama. He was one player out of hundreds I've gamed with and none of the others (even on sites designed for explicit adult RP's) came close, but creeps like that do exist, and do much more to damage the reputation of RPG's than videos that call out this behaviour. Someone unambiguously saying "that stuff ain't right, nobody should be expected to have that sort of player in their games" would have been very useful for me back then.
BTW, feminists do complain about mysogynistic imagery in music videos. Stop the whataboutisms, Togusa, you're not fooling anyone.
So, basically she is saying that RPGs are great and amazing and can be really inclusive but you do still need to be careful as there are still people out there who are toxic, like in any fandom. What part of that do you actually disagree with?
Anti-SJW's gonna anti-SJW.
And yeah, there are some...weirdos in the hobby. Rare, but they cast a long shadow. There was one player I gamed with in an online group who...in hindsight, was really goddamn creepy, and clearly using the games to indulge some stuff that I really shouldn't have let him get away with (or kept him in the group after trying. Nasty stuff under spoiler.
[spoiler]In a Mage game that I ran when I was 19, he had his character transform another player's character into a woman, and mind controlled him and another PC into having sex. Oh, and his character was a 12-year-old girl. In a different game, he had his (also an underage girl) throw herself at another PC, was clearly wildly enthusiastic about it OOC and very nearly used more mind control to force the other PC to have sex with her.
In hindsight, I should have instantly kicked him, but I was a socially withdrawn geek and too easily cowed (he was a manipulative little turd as well, an expert at "negotiating" by just sulking and guilt-tripping) and scared of causing OOC drama. He was one player out of hundreds I've gamed with and none of the others (even on sites designed for explicit adult RP's) came close, but creeps like that do exist, and do much more to damage the reputation of RPG's than videos that call out this behaviour. Someone unambiguously saying "that stuff ain't right, nobody should be expected to have that sort of player in their games" would have been very useful for me back then.
BTW, feminists do complain about mysogynistic imagery in music videos. Stop the whataboutisms, Togusa, you're not fooling anyone.
[/spoiler]
I'm sure some have, some where. But they do not go as hard on that group as they do on the gamers. I don't really care if that statement gets me labled either as "anti-sjw" or "antifeminist." I'll stand by it, modern media throws a ton of crap at gamers, and I garuntee you half of it is nonsense.
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LordofHats wrote: I would say that in my short time in TTRPGs, I've found that it's pretty steep on these things. A lot of groups seem to go really out of their way (like really out of their way) to be as accommodating and open as possible.
D&D is probably the first time I've ever seen the words "trigger warning" used unironically when a DM gave an upfront description of the campaign's premise so people would know it mildly mentioned rape in a character's backstory. Up until that point, the only times I'd ever seen that phrase used were unlikeable people doing their damndest to bitch about nothing.
At the same time, D&D is also the first time I'd ever seen anyone say the phrase "I want to play a chaotic good character who rapes people." Because... Wow. Okay. Obviously the DM did not accept that person's request to join the game, because even as a joke it's not really funny and who is going to take that gamble?
Anyway, point is that I've seen extremes of these issues far more frequently in D&D than I have in other places and it seems to be part of the landscape. I don't find the video that off base. It might hinge on where you are in things, but I've only been at this for like, 9 months and I've seen a lot of what she's talking about either in person or in passing.
Strange people you've encountered. As I said, in nearly 23 years of role playing, I've never even had a session that had any sex in it. Most people I know are too awkward to handle such things anyways and would probably go out of their way to avoid it.
My personal feeling about sex in games is the same as sex in movies, unless we're talking about porn, then why? Why is it there?
Also, "Chaotic Good" and "Rape." What kind of slow was that? Hopefully you or your DM booted him from the group.
He never joined the group. That was his written request to join, which included an answer to the question "what kind of character do you want to play?"
Part of it might be that I don't have an established network to play with. I got started looking for games on the internet (r/LFG, Roll20, Discord), which is what I assume a lot of people do when they either a) haven't played long enough to have people to reliably play the game with or b) have played long enough to have no people to reliably play the game with because no one wants to play with them.
I haven't seen sex in game either, though I have seen a fair bit of debate on how to handle it and whether or not it has any place in the game(s). Reminds me a lot of debate over sex in film and novels, which generally tends to be "why? Oh but that time was tastefully handled so it was okay." I find it hard to see that ever happening in a group of people who aren't really familiar/comfortable with each other though.
LordofHats wrote: He never joined the group. That was his written request to join, which included an answer to the question "what kind of character do you want to play?"
Part of it might be that I don't have an established network to play with. I got started looking for games on the internet (r/LFG, Roll20, Discord), which is what I assume a lot of people do when they either a) haven't played long enough to have people to reliably play the game with or b) have played long enough to have no people to reliably play the game with because no one wants to play with them.
I haven't seen sex in game either, though I have seen a fair bit of debate on how to handle it and whether or not it has any place in the game(s). Reminds me a lot of debate over sex in film and novels, which generally tends to be "why? Oh but that time was tastefully handled so it was okay." I find it hard to see that ever happening in a group of people who aren't really familiar/comfortable with each other though.
I am always amazed when I listen to podcasts and read blogs about RPG and they make it seem like picking up new members, creating a group of games, or getting into a new groups is really easy to do. If you are looking for in-person RPG it is NOT easy to do. First, there is finding the local community and second it is getting to know them well enough to be invited, and then actually being comfortable RPing with them.
This is simply NOT easy to do unless you have a pretty well-established network of fellow local gamers. I find it is much easier to go an grab a pick-up game of any current GW game than getting into a half-decent RPG group.
LordofHats wrote: He never joined the group. That was his written request to join, which included an answer to the question "what kind of character do you want to play?"
Part of it might be that I don't have an established network to play with. I got started looking for games on the internet (r/LFG, Roll20, Discord), which is what I assume a lot of people do when they either a) haven't played long enough to have people to reliably play the game with or b) have played long enough to have no people to reliably play the game with because no one wants to play with them.
I haven't seen sex in game either, though I have seen a fair bit of debate on how to handle it and whether or not it has any place in the game(s). Reminds me a lot of debate over sex in film and novels, which generally tends to be "why? Oh but that time was tastefully handled so it was okay." I find it hard to see that ever happening in a group of people who aren't really familiar/comfortable with each other though.
You really lucked out on that one.
Yeah, I've met most of the people I've played with through places like Gencon & Dragoncon, or through High School and College. I guess I've just been lucky not to get any perverts in that regard.
Now, on the other side of this topic, I have had my fair share of murder hobos. So much so that I've started to have "the talk" with my players about not just trying to murder/kill/steal every thing in sight. I tend to run low power games, so I get a lot of push back from players who want their vorpal sword asap. It sorta ruins the mood sometimes.
LordofHats wrote: He never joined the group. That was his written request to join, which included an answer to the question "what kind of character do you want to play?"
Part of it might be that I don't have an established network to play with. I got started looking for games on the internet (r/LFG, Roll20, Discord), which is what I assume a lot of people do when they either a) haven't played long enough to have people to reliably play the game with or b) have played long enough to have no people to reliably play the game with because no one wants to play with them.
I haven't seen sex in game either, though I have seen a fair bit of debate on how to handle it and whether or not it has any place in the game(s). Reminds me a lot of debate over sex in film and novels, which generally tends to be "why? Oh but that time was tastefully handled so it was okay." I find it hard to see that ever happening in a group of people who aren't really familiar/comfortable with each other though.
I am always amazed when I listen to podcasts and read blogs about RPG and they make it seem like picking up new members, creating a group of games, or getting into a new groups is really easy to do. If you are looking for in-person RPG it is NOT easy to do. First, there is finding the local community and second it is getting to know them well enough to be invited, and then actually being comfortable RPing with them.
This is simply NOT easy to do unless you have a pretty well-established network of fellow local gamers. I find it is much easier to go an grab a pick-up game of any current GW game than getting into a half-decent RPG group.
I think that depends on how introverted or extroverted a player is. As I've said, for me it's simple. I go looking for a group and join. Because I'm pretty social and easy to get along with most of the time, I never have trouble finding a group. Finding a good group, however, is another story.
I think 5e is more welcoming to non-stereotypical nerds than any other version of the game I have seen. The playerbase is also changing to reflect that, though a little slowly, because it has always been heavily male, middle class and white (in countries where that is relevant, of course).
The stuff I see happening to female players is mostly what I call Quarterbacking, which is the guy in the group dictating what to do to the other players each round (and then being really annoyed when they don't do as he says). It was really noticeable in my last group because I had all women except for one guy. The balance has shifted a bit now and it is slightly less of a problem because the women have sort of stood up for themselves about it.
I have also been guilty of some tropey plot devices with female players when I was younger, which I am embarassed about now. And my minis were mostly white people (to be fair, I am from Ireland and that is just how it is there). Now that I have a bunch of indian kids in the game I run for the school club I am making sure my hero minis have a bit more diversity in how they look.
My biggest issue with Dungeons and Dragons is the use of the word "Race" rather than "Species" but that is mostly the legacy of the fantasy literature the game is inspired by. I just would rather it was not used since race is just a social construct invented by racists to justify discrimination. I see Pathfinder is moving to "Ancestry" which is a bit better I suppose. But the concept of "evil races" is pretty dodgey no matter how you slice it.
I've heard people say that Stranger Things has exploded popular interest in DnD. At least in my AL group that's true, cause half the players say they got interested in the game because of Stranger Things. Kind of the game breaking out of its traditional audience and drawing in other people. Which is probably not a wholly bad thing given the often insular nature of gaming communities.
Da Boss wrote: I think 5e is more welcoming to non-stereotypical nerds than any other version of the game I have seen. The playerbase is also changing to reflect that, though a little slowly, because it has always been heavily male, middle class and white (in countries where that is relevant, of course).
The stuff I see happening to female players is mostly what I call Quarterbacking, which is the guy in the group dictating what to do to the other players each round (and then being really annoyed when they don't do as he says). It was really noticeable in my last group because I had all women except for one guy. The balance has shifted a bit now and it is slightly less of a problem because the women have sort of stood up for themselves about it.
I have also been guilty of some tropey plot devices with female players when I was younger, which I am embarassed about now. And my minis were mostly white people (to be fair, I am from Ireland and that is just how it is there). Now that I have a bunch of indian kids in the game I run for the school club I am making sure my hero minis have a bit more diversity in how they look.
My biggest issue with Dungeons and Dragons is the use of the word "Race" rather than "Species" but that is mostly the legacy of the fantasy literature the game is inspired by. I just would rather it was not used since race is just a social construct invented by racists to justify discrimination. I see Pathfinder is moving to "Ancestry" which is a bit better I suppose. But the concept of "evil races" is pretty dodgey no matter how you slice it.
I don't know, people trying to tell the rest of the party what to do isn't new. I've experienced that many times over the years. I think in most cases that is more an issue of min/max waac people vs people who just want to role play.
So far this year I've lost 8 characters to death in a single campaign, two of our fellow players have become very upset about that, saying that because I won't listen to their advice, I'm dying a lot. Whereas I look at it that I'm just role playing my characters and letting the dice fall where they will.
Also, I do not see Race as a dirty word. Context matters a lot, and D&D is the one game where I've encountered the fewest amount of racist people, out of all my hobbies.
I don't really care if that statement gets me labled either as "anti-sjw" or "antifeminist." I'll stand by it, modern media throws a ton of crap at gamers, and I garuntee you half of it is nonsense.
Even if that's true, half of what's been reported being true would still be unacceptable. We have unpleasant and under-socialised people in our hobby (remember the guy who thought running a con game centered around rape was a-ok?). Any group closing ranks, saying "they're making it all up to make us look bad!" and denying anything's wrong so as not to give a bad impression just makes the problem worse in the long term--the best disinfectant is sunlight.
(I will certainly label you as someone who thinks that using a term for people with mental disabilities to mean "stupid" is ok. Poor form.)
I have tended to see (and it has been the reported experience of my female friends and wife) that women get quarterbacked more than men in nerdy hobbies. A lot of it comes from a place of helpfulness but it can be pretty annoying.
As to race, probably a discussion for another time. I think the word and concept are a problem because they are a made up construction for the purpose of denigrating certain groups of people over others. Dungeons and Dragons is fundamentally American, and so is constructed in that social context, and I think stuff like having racial penalties to intelligence is pretty uncomfortable. That said, Tolkien, Howard and Lovecraft were also all pretty steeped in the racism of their time, and that is the literature the game draws on, so it is not surprising that it uses that word to denote the different people in the game. It would probably read weirdly to a lot of fantasy fans if any other word was used.
Da Boss wrote: I have tended to see (and it has been the reported experience of my female friends and wife) that women get quarterbacked more than men in nerdy hobbies. A lot of it comes from a place of helpfulness but it can be pretty annoying.
As to race, probably a discussion for another time. I think the word and concept are a problem because they are a made up construction for the purpose of denigrating certain groups of people over others. Dungeons and Dragons is fundamentally American, and so is constructed in that social context, and I think stuff like having racial penalties to intelligence is pretty uncomfortable. That said, Tolkien, Howard and Lovecraft were also all pretty steeped in the racism of their time, and that is the literature the game draws on, so it is not surprising that it uses that word to denote the different people in the game. It would probably read weirdly to a lot of fantasy fans if any other word was used.
That, and the "races" of D&D aren't different ethnic and cultural groups (exceptions for half-elves, etc), they are actual different life-forms with no common ancestry. And that's something we don't have a real-world equivalent for at all. "Species" would be more accurate, but the term maybe sounds a bit incongruous to a fantasy setting. Sci-fi settings seem to get more of a pass on having alien species who are Broadly All Like This.
And settings that...well, "humanise" all their nonhuman groups tend to feel a bit bland to me, and make me wonder "what are these elves doing that you couldn't do with a culture of humans who live in the forests and are really snooty?"
I don't really care if that statement gets me labled either as "anti-sjw" or "antifeminist." I'll stand by it, modern media throws a ton of crap at gamers, and I garuntee you half of it is nonsense.
Even if that's true, half of what's been reported being true would still be unacceptable. We have unpleasant and under-socialised people in our hobby (remember the guy who thought running a con game centered around rape was a-ok?). Any group closing ranks, saying "they're making it all up to make us look bad!" and denying anything's wrong so as not to give a bad impression just makes the problem worse in the long term--the best disinfectant is sunlight.
No, I don't remember that. I tend to not pay attention to things morons do or say with regards to rape and murder. Life on the internet is a lot different from real life. Out there in the world, I never, EVER encounter this stuff. But, online? The stories are told as if they're the only stories going on at the time. It's getting harder and hard to even determine what is a real story about something happening in the world, vs what might be a click-bait troll topic made up out of thin air to illicit an emotional response so that someone can get a laugh.
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Da Boss wrote: I have tended to see (and it has been the reported experience of my female friends and wife) that women get quarterbacked more than men in nerdy hobbies. A lot of it comes from a place of helpfulness but it can be pretty annoying.
As to race, probably a discussion for another time. I think the word and concept are a problem because they are a made up construction for the purpose of denigrating certain groups of people over others. Dungeons and Dragons is fundamentally American, and so is constructed in that social context, and I think stuff like having racial penalties to intelligence is pretty uncomfortable. That said, Tolkien, Howard and Lovecraft were also all pretty steeped in the racism of their time, and that is the literature the game draws on, so it is not surprising that it uses that word to denote the different people in the game. It would probably read weirdly to a lot of fantasy fans if any other word was used.
That might be, it's hard to tell sometimes what a person's motives might be. With that being said, it's also of note to point out that many times, especially with new players who haven't experienced the game before, someone trying to help (especially if it is a single male) will draw ire, good intentions or not. Unfortunately, this is just the reality of the world that we live in.
Well, I don't think we should drag up the race debate. But I will say, given how social justicy WoTC has been recently, I wouldn't be surprised if Race gets replaced in 6e with Species. If it does, I'm sure some people will pitch a fit, but I'm personally not likely to care one way or the other.
I encountered people who did weird gak at the dnd table in my late teens over a decade ago. 2 years ago I played with a group whos DM laid down the law that everyone has to play their own gender. Because it get REAL uncomfortable when people start cross dressing and doing bizarre gak at the table.
It's not that players shouldn't be able to play anything. It's that too many people who do feth it up for everyone else and it's easier to just not allow it.
Weirdos exist. They exist everywhere. That includes Roleplaying games where they are literally encouraged to act out their fantasies.
Lance845 wrote: I encountered people who did weird gak at the dnd table in my late teens over a decade ago. 2 years ago I played with a group whos DM laid down the law that everyone has to play their own gender. Because it get REAL uncomfortable when people start cross-dressing and doing bizarre gak at the table.
That is kind of odd. I'm playing a female character in a game, but I don't put on a dress when I do it :/
Lance845 wrote: I encountered people who did weird gak at the dnd table in my late teens over a decade ago. 2 years ago I played with a group whos DM laid down the law that everyone has to play their own gender. Because it get REAL uncomfortable when people start cross-dressing and doing bizarre gak at the table.
That is kind of odd. I'm playing a female character in a game, but I don't put on a dress when I do it :/
Hardy Har Har.
It's called "cross dressing" as a general term for players playing other gendered characters. The DM has to do it out of necessity and is in direct control of where and how every interaction goes with those NPCs. But players who do it sometimes do it just to act out whatever weird thing they have going on in their head. Nothing like a beardy dude playing a promiscuous lady who turns every town arrival into a prostitution racket (yes I have personally seen this happen).
Lance845 wrote: Nothing like a beardy dude playing a promiscuous lady who turns every town arrival into a prostitution racket (yes I have personally seen this happen).
That sounds less weird than creepy. That's actually less weird than the image in my head was (I thought you were talking about beardy dudes playing promiscuous ladies while wearing dresses and makeup, which is Silence of the Lambs level creepy).
Lance845 wrote: Nothing like a beardy dude playing a promiscuous lady who turns every town arrival into a prostitution racket (yes I have personally seen this happen).
That sounds less weird than creepy. That's actually less weird than the image in my head was (I thought you were talking about beardy dudes playing promiscuous ladies while wearing dresses and makeup, which is Silence of the Lambs level creepy).
Yeah i have never played with anyone who got in costume for their dnd games.
The point is its a community activity even if that community is 5 people. You should never gain your fun at the cost of everyone elses comfort. For some reason there are peoplewho dont get that and then rules have to be made.
Lance845 wrote: Nothing like a beardy dude playing a promiscuous lady who turns every town arrival into a prostitution racket (yes I have personally seen this happen).
That sounds less weird than creepy. That's actually less weird than the image in my head was (I thought you were talking about beardy dudes playing promiscuous ladies while wearing dresses and makeup, which is Silence of the Lambs level creepy).
Yeah i have never played with anyone who got in costume for their dnd games.
The point is its a community activity even if that community is 5 people. You should never gain your fun at the cost of everyone elses comfort. For some reason there are peoplewho dont get that and then rules have to be made.
You could just remove those problem players without needing to make a blanket rule about what gender characters the players can play as. Someone who wants to make the game their personal orgy-fantasy-generator is usually gonna try and do that no matter what gender their character is and they are probably going to have other toxic behaviours which affect others enjoyment.
Reading this stuff does make me realise how fortunate I am to have the group I do, where none of this has ever come up. I guess it's the advantage of playing with people who are, at the very least, friends-of-friends if not direct friends, so our table had never really had strangers at it and everyone has been comfortable with the group as a whole from the start. (I honestly can't imagine playing an RPG with people I didn't at least vaguely know beforehand, that's a huge leap of faith that I just wouldn't want to take).
Perhaps related, we've never even thought twice about playing across gender, and I think pretty much all our players have done it at some point, often long term (my current characters include both a sorcerer cowboy and an elven princess ) and no one has ever got weird with it.
I honestly find the idea of a DM limiting it kind of odd, strikes me you'd be better off kicking the weirdos that want to turn their game into something creepy rather than limiting everyone else's options. I admit, that's easier said when you've never lived any of those horror stories, but even so, in general I'd lean towards ditching the problem players rather than trying to limit their problematic presence (as I imagine anyone who would make something dodgy out of playing another gender is probably bringing a generally unhealthy attitude to the game anyway).
On the wider issue though, the hobby does still have strides to make in getting rid of these sorts of individuals; as much as on the whole it is more open, accessible and inclusive than ever, people are still missing out because they (rightly or wrongly) fear that they're going to run into that tiny minority of horror story gamers.
I never ran across "Cross-dressing" as a term either. I also like to play female characters, older characters, or less than optimal characters just to spice things up and challenge myself a bit.
I haven't run across that term either. One person in my group usually plays as the opposite gender, but has never done it in a weird way either. I think it's weird for anyone to criticize that if they're aren't being innapropriate with it. Especially DMs shouldn't be too bothered, as we play all the NPCs so we constantly play both genders...
I agree that it's all good and fine when everyone is being cool about it. I personally don't take issue with it. But clearly that DM had seen enough bad that he just decided to steer clear of it all together.
I feel like in retrospect, my DM has been purposefully trying to initiate a full party kill (or lacking that a unceremonious end to the campaign) for the past 3 sessions.
The first encounter, a fight with 2 CR5 monsters and a 4 man lv. 5 party was kind of the party's own fault. I ran in, made a bad assumption and the situation gets worse. Okay, consequences.
The second time felt like an inevitable boss fight. A Simulcrum with 150 hp, an Earth Elemental, and an apprentice. We only won that fight with lucky crits and that Tasha's Hidious Laughter apparently works on Elementals. It really felt like a tough fight and we barely survived.
I was fine with all of this up until this point. Nothing felt out of place. We lost one party member and came close to losing 3 others over the course of these two sessions.
Now enter session 3, where we are immediately (after that boss fight) met with 2 player strength monk NPCs who almost kill two of us again. We short rest to get back hull HP with hit dice, and then immediately find an assassin who 1 shots 2 characters, "you lose two death saves surprise round over roll death save." I failed and died right there. The next guy passed and then died immediately after when the assassin hit him.
The last two members of the party somehow win that fight, and use revivify with the last spell slot in the party on me and we try to long rest. Then the level 10 boss (we're level 5 here) comes down and just dicks with us for like 5 minutes before giving us one fething lifeline that is "kill Xanathar" and at this point I'm feeling like I'm just done and the DM has seemingly purposefully chosen to run the party into the ground.
His excuse for what in retrospect is a series of poorly balanced encounters (which feels like purposefully trying to kill us and has killed one player's characters twice) is "you guys fooled around too much and didn't make the right choices" which feels like a bs excuse to me for "choices you made 2 months ago made this scenario unwinnable and I'm just dicking you around at this point." EDIT: He follows this up by saying "all you had to do is turn invisible and steal the objective from the powerful wizard" but at this point I feel like the DM just isn't reading the room to notice the entire group is so disgruntled with events that they don't feel like trying anymore and that comment just feels like rubbing salt in the wound.
EDIT: Anyway, anger anger anger, am I being unreasonable here? I feel like I've just had my time wasted by a DM who decided we can't win and has instead of just telling us that, wasted months of our time watching us lose.
Yes. You should suffer the consequences of your actions.
But the DM should be tailoring the encounters to be more or less difficult but always still winable and at least tossing you guys circumstantial or environmental life lines to turn a otherwise un-winable situation to your favor.
Side note: This is a big part of the reason I hate levels. They are bull gak for things like this.
Having had an hour to calm down and reflect, yeah I still feel like I was cheated.
The party wasn't perfect (nor was I). We definitely got kind of murder hobo toward the end, but it felt like the situation we were in was "kill the evil guys to get the prize" and maybe that itself was a bad assumption to make but that's how it seemed to be going and the encounters were tense and really life threatening but always felt like we had a chance to come out on top.
This last session just feels like he was done and rather than close out the campaign that we're at the end of anyway. A combat that starts with "assassin surprise round" *two players down* "initiative order you two roll death saves" could on its own just be the result of excellent rolling by the assassin and a very unfortunate initiative order, but with those last two encounters it just doesn't feel that way. Maybe we still could have won at that point, we have 2 characters who can go invisible, but after a constant run of "omg we're going to die omg we're dead without having a chance to even act" I didn't feel motivated to try anymore and no one else seemed to be stepping up. Maybe my disgruntled silence didn't help.
He's talking about what campaign to run next, and I'm sitting here trying to decide if I'm the donkey-cave or not for thinking "why would I want to run another campaign and risk it ending like this?"
Yeah, honestly that sounds like a DM who has no idea what he's doing, or one that does and is deliberately being a bit of a dick.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with 'impossible' encounters, but they should be rare, and should serve to illustrate something to the party. That this isn't a fight they can win without help, or that this particular villain is now the most imminent threat and they should be preparing for round 2, so on and so forth. And as a DM I often play with always says, half the time your 'impossible' battles are the ones that the players will win anyway, because if there's is thing players excel at, it's surprising the DM. Nonetheless, it's important that these battles do have a way out if they go south, and that there is at least some potential to achieve something, even if it's not what you came for (the last game of one of my campaigns springs to mind, Vecna may have got what he wanted, but we e took out his enslaved Balor, which is a major win going forward). A parade of genuinely worthless defeats can be a complete slog, if not an outright campaign breaker.
But it sounds like none of that consideration went in here, it's just a DM who's either naive enough to think that it's his job to 'win', or one who's genuinely out for blood and happy to defy all reason, realism and fun to get it. You're absolutely right to be questioning whether you want to keep playing with this DM, and if you're having those thoughts, you probably know the answer as well.
You're probably not the only person having them, so the best thing to do would be to have a word and see if anyone else is disgruntled, and if they are, take that to the DM long before he starts his next game. Best case, it's just inexperience and the wrong idea of what their role is, and they can change going forward, worst case they throw their toys out of the pram at the criticism and you probably have to find a new DM, which I'd argue is still a better situation than stuck with a bad one.
He's talking about what campaign to run next, and I'm sitting here trying to decide if I'm the donkey-cave or not for thinking "why would I want to run another campaign and risk it ending like this?"
Maybe. I’d need a new group cause this one’s broken. This morning one guy said he’s not coming back. Another guy has only stuck around to help us finish an apparently lost cause. His character died 2 sessions ago and he’s played characters left behind by other players when they quit (and I’m now rethinking why they quit, like dis they see something I didn’t?) so I’m expecting him to quit to cause his commitment was already low and the DM basically pissed on him for trying to be a good guy and finish out the campaign.
That just leaves me and the cleric and The DM is currently complaining that we give up too easily in Discord and I’m just feeling ‘feth you’ about that.
So yeah, maybe try my hand at something. I’ve wanted to do Ghosts of Saltmarsh and have failed to find a DM for it that isn’t already well into the experience.
(That would make a cool character actually!)
.. teenage me would never believe this. 
