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This article really helped me with coming up with an organisational structure to allow us to game more often despite busy schedules:
https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1223/roleplaying-games/opening-your-game-table

Heartily recommend a read, changed how I game.

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

That is a great "hook" for a first session, and helps bond the heroes together. Love the set up!

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.

Thanks Da Boss!

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.

just leave this here :

https://geekandsundry.com/the-beauty-of-dd-artwork-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder-documentary-exclusive/?fbclid=IwAR2Gm7fOssNx0GP_aS2Vrjwr0hDiBpx_e2a4XVx5TMSaXgXNHPbgL8p6zyA

Which melee weapon deal more damage per turn? 3.5 ed

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.

Go for any 2 hander that does 2d6.

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.

https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/


nice little site for those of you who want to write official looking documents.

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.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/materialcomponents/herobook-gm-the-5e-game-master-notebook/faqs

less than 2 days left.

 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!).

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 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.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:


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.

----
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.'