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Subjunctive posted:Why would the players need to agree about inter-party stuff? They’re only playing one party I presume, so they can react to inter-party stuff however they’d like, including not at all. It’s inter-player/PC (intra-party) that needs to have metagame agreement IMO. Inter-player is what I meant there and I'm going to blame it on a lack of coffee this morning. Intra-party, inter-player. Pre-arranging something like "hey my character is going to be antagonistic to your character" is fine generally because both players know what is going on and are going to make concessions within the greater narrative to work together. Problems arise when one player takes it upon him or herself to "make the game interesting" by antagonizing the rest of the party. There are games and tables where that kind of thing is expected and accepted, but that kind of expectation is a tacit acknowledgement of it. When it's just one player going "actually I think it would be more interesting if I didn't cooperate with the party at all" it leads to bad places. I think we're agreeing and my inter-intra confusion there got it all hosed up so if that's the case, sorry about that.
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Jun 4, 2018 15:39
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We’re totally in agreement.
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Jun 4, 2018 15:41
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Inter-party tension should be worked out between players ahead of time. Par exemple, me and our group's sorceror decided that my old-fogey dwarf will be habitually misgendering our aasimar moon-sorceror. This creates pre-approved party conflict that gives them an opportunity to role play a bit and teach Bolf about the gender spectrum (and how it ties to phases of the moon for them in particular)
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Jun 4, 2018 15:47
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Ignite Memories posted:Inter-party tension should be worked out between players ahead of time. We just sorted this out!
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Jun 4, 2018 15:48
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Sorry, I had already intered the text when I saw your post. It'll take some time to get this new information intra my head
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Jun 4, 2018 15:50
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Subjunctive posted:We just sorted this out! If we'd worked out in advance that we were going to antagonize the thread like this, though, it would be fine.
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Jun 4, 2018 18:35
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Any good survival* mechanics that aren't just insufferable tedious bookkeeping? Planning on running a D&D5e game exploring a lost (supposedly)uninhabited region after the game I'm currently running wraps up soon. Its still in the early planning stages, since I'm only just nearing the end of my current game. But the premise is the players will be exploring and rediscovering the ruins of the ancient human empire that was destroyed after some mysterious cataclysm released plagues, blights, natural disaster, fiends and monsters that destroyed said empire, forcing the surviving humans to migrate to the the region they now occupy. The ancient lost empire is rather isolated due to natural geographic features. So the game itself will probably focus a lot on rediscovering lost history, excavating ancient ruins, and longterm goal try to resettle and reclaim the region as well as dealing with the all the problems that originally drove the ancient humans from the region in the first place. It is actually part of the same homebrew setting I am using for the current game, so some of the information is actually already known to the players as background setting details. *The style of game, not the skill
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Jun 5, 2018 14:37
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I often struggle with survival mechanics because they are difficult to keep compelling in such a way as also not to be obviously something I'm not going to act on. It has to be either interesting and have consequences, or not-interesting with no real consequences, and if it becomes the latter it's something I'd rather not have on the table. If it's not interesting and does have consequences, then that's an even greater sin. Survival stuff is the kind of bookkeeping that as a player I find compelling at the start of a campaign (i.e., if we're doing a siege on a dungeon and have to make sure we have enough food for ourselves plus the hired staff for n number of days and so on) but that once the campaign is underway becomes a tedious exercise in saying the magic words ("yes, I eat today. I didn't forget to eat. What a stupid thing I have to say this after every long rest."). That said it can be used to introduce time or urgency-sensitive side-quests. "Your hired guys let water get in with the grains and it's all beer now. You have lots of beer, but not a lot of cereal. What do you do?" can work, for example, because you are giving the players something to react to that is fairly time sensitive and works as an excuse to get them to do a thing. Of course that thing could well be "we send some people back to get some grains" and if that's the case, okay. They are expending resources (available help) and so the game is happening. Basically it's hard to do survival in such a way as to make players make resource decisions without seeming arbitrary and lovely if there's not a bunch of NPCs in the mix outside the players' care, because making "is there enough lunch to eat" is pretty hard to make compelling narratively, at least for me. Used to introduce other things, or as a scarcity mechanic to make sure your players stay on the move, it works great ("you've got 3 days of food left and it's gonna take you 2 and a half days to reach this other town soooo not a lot of time to gently caress around here"), but if it's the primary focus it's hard to prevent the game from becoming "fight some creatures to get the food" at which point it's just a pretense. I'm interested to hear what other people do with this too though because I think it has potential as a tool for the DM but that the bookkeeping can be terrible for players who don't obviously want to do that.
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Jun 5, 2018 15:22
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I don't do it in my current campaign (it's incompatible with 5e as far as I'm concerned) but a mix of things attacking players' food resources forcing them to eat the weird monsters they kill sounds like a lot of fun. I'd personally relish in the improv exercise that is "what happens when I eat lindwurm/goblin/remmorhaz flesh?" but I don't know if that'd be your thing. I'd want it to be in the context of a dungeon that's hard to just leave, I don't think it'd work that well outside of that.
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Jun 5, 2018 15:47
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If I was going to run a campaign in which this sort of thing figured strongly, I'd take a page from the gang advancement/downtime mechanics from Blades in the Dark. For those unfamiliar with it, in BitD, your gang (the organization to which all of the characters belong) is in and of itself a character. It has a character sheet, it gets advancements, tracks Heat, can have resources, and so on. One of the central tensions of BitD is that you only have a limited amount of time when not actively "adventuring" (i.e. pulling scores) to focus on stuff. Between long-term projects, reducing Heat, maintaining your character's physical/mental health, and advancing your own character goals, there's a lot of stuff to do. Inevitably, something slips through the cracks, and that's where the fun starts. Trouble starts finding you rather than vice versa. So to put the BitD rules explicitly in the context of an exploration campaign, I'd do the actual exploration of the region itself as scores (i.e. adventures where the characters are doing stuff and rolling dice). Instead of "coin" I'd track knowledge or discovery or familiarity with the area. I'd have strain on expedition resources be tracked like Heat - so long is it's low, you have enough food/water/whatever to keep everyone more or less functioning. And for resettlement purposes, I'd do that exactly like the "claim" mechanics; where in BitD you are adding to your gang, in this you'd be growing your colony or bringing in new folks to add capabilities to your expedition. Downtime activities would represent the "management" aspect of keeping your expedition provisioned, healthy, and functioning. The Entanglement roll represents bad things that start to happen to you when your expedition's resources get too strained. As I think about it more, I think it would work really well, actually.
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Jun 5, 2018 15:48
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I would try doing it as a Blades in the Dark style clock representing your supplies. Say it starts filled, and each time unit (day, hour, whatever) the clock ticks and a segment is erased. Players can take survival actions to fill segments back up by locating more supplies, but extra segments can be erased as a consequence for failures, and the players can decide whether to use extra segments for beneficial effects, or take penalties to slow the tick rate. To make it even more something the players are making hard choices about, I would have multiple clocks. One for consumables (rations, water, oxygen in a space game, whatever), another for using up equipment/gear that doesn't erode automatically. In this case, you spend carrying capacity to buy segments on each clock, with the consumables segments being lighter than the gear segments, maybe 4:1. The players would have to balance their choices there. Mounts would allow faster movement, but increase the consumables tick rate. You can also make it more of a balancing act with multiple consumables clocks. I wouldn't break it down to the point of consumable type, but rather separate by who can draw on which reserve - food & water versus fuel & parts, for example. Additionally, actions that refill the segments would require moving more slowly or may not be possible in every location. Once the clock empties, the players would have a short window before they suffer really intense consequences. I would probably do this like a PbtA style harm clock that starts filling after they run the survival clock to zero. Abstracting it up one level this way buys you a couple of things. One is that you can drop these clocks into the middle of the table, so to speak, so everyone can see them. This makes it into a looming countdown over everyone, and puts it in front of the whole group rather than relegating it to individual pointless bookkeeping. Making it into survival units rather than rations also gives you some flexibility in describing what it represents. And it makes it easier to just establish a baseline - if you get back into town, you automatically refill those clocks to a certain point (or pay to do so). Also instead of something each player has to remember as a chore before they can actually play the game, the clocks are ticking on their own. Manipulating them becomes a game system itself. This opens up the option to give characters abilities that do that - auto-filling survival segments at certain times, providing an extra initial segment at no cost, slowing the tick rate on a clock, etc.
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Jun 5, 2018 15:49
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:I don't do it in my current campaign (it's incompatible with 5e as far as I'm concerned) but a mix of things attacking players' food resources forcing them to eat the weird monsters they kill sounds like a lot of fun. I'd personally relish in the improv exercise that is "what happens when I eat lindwurm/goblin/remmorhaz flesh?" but I don't know if that'd be your thing. I'd want it to be in the context of a dungeon that's hard to just leave, I don't think it'd work that well outside of that. Honestly doing that where you roll against a poison effect table that ranges from sick to balls high sounds like a fun campaign if you're focused on something like Big Game Hunters that travels the world's biomes.
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Jun 5, 2018 15:56
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Dameius posted:Honestly doing that where you roll against a poison effect table that ranges from sick to balls high sounds like a fun campaign if you're focused on something like Big Game Hunters that travels the world's biomes. What's the dnd version of a go pro, and what kind of stupid poo poo do adventurers do to try to get more views? "Alright, since you guys hit our donation goal, Bulgrim the Invincible is going to eat this beholder eye raw for your viewing pleasure. Bulgrim?" Keeshhound fucked around with this message at 16:04 on Jun 5, 2018 |
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Jun 5, 2018 16:00
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Being limited by food and water doesn't really work that well in 5E if you have a Druid or Ranger with goodberry in the party. Plus I think a couple of class features and/or backgrounds also state that the character can spend so much time a day foraging to supply X amount of people for a day. While goodberry is still a pain in the rear end to deal with if you want survival to be ration limited the foraging stuff I think can be worked in pretty well by keeping things time limited (You need to get somewhere before X happens) and taking into account the amount of time they need to forage for food, reducing their distance traveled accordingly since time spent gathering isn't time spent traveling, albeit if they're an elf they could do the gathering in the 4 spare hours they have when non-meditating races are still sleeping. The problem with any survival mechanic is that once sufficiently skilled or set up the act of surviving is just rote. It's the same whether it's a video game or tabletop game, once you've gotten over the initial challenge it's just the daily tedium of going through your survival routine. While you could make things temporarily more interesting by having complications of monsters attack, provisions going bad etc. it still has the same issue of just becoming another thing you add to your daily routine. I think, at least for your setting, it might be best to focus the survival mechanics on specifically where they set up camp, it sounds like it's not known what traps are left in buildings, what's haunted or where monsters particularly hang around. Maybe describe the tracks of monsters and fiends rather than have a skill roll to see if they recognize them and have the players have to find out what makes them if these monsters and fiends are generally isolated to this area. If the campaigns about rediscovery have the players actually discover things for themselves rather than just rolling for the information.
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Jun 5, 2018 16:16
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hangedman1984 posted:Any good survival* mechanics that aren't just insufferable tedious bookkeeping? I intended to reply to your earlier post but I had a really busy weekend. You’re getting better answers here anyway. Basically I would use a single resource track called supplies to keep exploration tethered to certain oasis locations, and encourage players to generate/find additional oasis locations. Players can extend the supply resource track in appropriate places by preforming survival actions (mostly hunting/gathering food). Basically what Comrade Gorbash already suggested. Then introduce side quests based on resource limitations. If you want to do this regularly I recommend creating a resource table to roll on and rolling once every 1d6+2 long rests. You’re out of lamp oil, or you need to find a place that has wood for making arrows.
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Jun 5, 2018 16:21
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Keeshhound posted:What's the dnd version of a go pro, and what kind of stupid poo poo do adventurers do to try to get more views? So Jackass on Twitch as viewed through DnD. I think we are on to something here.
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Jun 5, 2018 16:23
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Luminaflare posted:The problem with any survival mechanic is that once sufficiently skilled or set up the act of surviving is just rote. It's the same whether it's a video game or tabletop game, once you've gotten over the initial challenge it's just the daily tedium of going through your survival routine. While you could make things temporarily more interesting by having complications of monsters attack, provisions going bad etc. it still has the same issue of just becoming another thing you add to your daily routine. Or, better to say, they could be self-sufficient in the wilds but they can't also be adventurers. At that point it's different kind of game about setting up and managing a self-sufficient community, which is also interesting but has different feedback loops.
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Jun 5, 2018 16:24
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Yeah - maybe you're in a place where time moves strangely and any sort of (non-living) food spoils within an hour.
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Jun 5, 2018 16:33
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Yeah - maybe you're in a place where time moves strangely and any sort of (non-living) food spoils within an hour. To be honest I meant more that you just can’t refill your survival clock or track faster than you consume it. Not if you’re doing more than just trying to keep the survival track filled. Think of it this way - hunting & gathering takes time. If you do it every day, you’re really slowing your pace, to the point you will run out of something else, unless you spend the rest of your day replacing that thing. If you only do it every few days, then you have to figure out a way to preserve the resources you gathered... which also takes time, and you have to haul these new supplies as well. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Jun 5, 2018 |
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Jun 5, 2018 16:39
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Keeshhound posted:What's the dnd version of a go pro, and what kind of stupid poo poo do adventurers do to try to get more views?
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Jun 5, 2018 16:50
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:you're on an adventurer reality show for fey and if you bore them they'll gently caress with you ala worshipping Xom in crawl Podcast idea! 
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Jun 5, 2018 17:45
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Anyone have any quick ideas for puzzles in a very small dungeony encounter tonight? The players moving up a snowy path on a mountain that is littered with draconic ruins and entering a large hall in the mountainside where a white dragon lives.
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Jun 5, 2018 18:45
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The 4e condition track mechanic works well for survival stuff.
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Jun 5, 2018 21:54
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When people write their own home brew campaigns, how do you go about doing it? Just jot down the basics of the plot and fill in the gaps from there? Or do you find it helpful to write things such as “players spot thing with a perception 15 check” I’m writing up my first campaign for friends and am trying to decide how I want to do things. I have no problem making things up on the fly. I have several major plot points and set pieces planned, with a good amount of wiggle room/open world gently caress around time. I have been DMing less than a year at this point.
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Jun 7, 2018 13:47
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Yeah basically. Break the campain down into arcs and seasons like you would a TV show, with a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. Have a major setpiece for each of those checkpoints, and then do the same for individual character arcs. For things like "15+ spot check > hidden room" that's fine, but remember that anything you plan that the players don't interact with is labor you should recycle into a future episode.
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Jun 7, 2018 13:55
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Are you looking to plan a story out, or just jot down the state of the world and the forces acting within it? I think the latter is easier to do up front and is ultimately more flexible, but requires more improv and on-the-spot thinking. No matter what you do, though, don’t forget to take into account what your players want out of the campaign.
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Jun 7, 2018 14:02
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Nash posted:When people write their own home brew campaigns, how do you go about doing it? Just jot down the basics of the plot and fill in the gaps from there? Or do you find it helpful to write things such as “players spot thing with a perception 15 check” I try very hard not to think about it in terms of "plot." If you're running a combat-centric game like D&D, you want to think about encounters (and connecting scenes between them), and if you're running a more narrative game you want to think about scenes with stuff for the players to do. My notes for a campaign usually take the form of a branching tree or sometimes just a timeline. I set up a situation, I figure out if the players have to pass any rolls or other mechanical checks to reach it in the first place, plan for what to do if they fail (which generally means going to another scene set up the same way), set up NPC stats / loot / whatever for the encounter itself, and then write down my two or three best guesses of how the players will resolve the situation. The last part is usually the vaguest because you never know what players will actually do. And then I have some notes about what other scenes this might cause or connect to. Then in the background, you note down goals for major NPCs or events that will eventually happen if they're not stopped or interfered with, and you use this to guide what kinds of scenes you're going to use for the next session. Ramp it up slowly, always drop lots of hints that something is going to happen before it actually does. If your players a) notice it and b) care about it, then emphasize it more. If they don't, you can either let it wither away (if you think it would bore them / you) or hold onto it, continue dropping hints, and spring it on them when they get too comfortable or finish resolving some other problem.
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Jun 7, 2018 14:14
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Quick question about Maximilian's Earthen Grasp. "Choose an unoccupied space on the ground that you can see. A hand rises there and reaches for one creature you can see within 5 feet of it." Like ok, it has to be within the casters direct line of sight because the spell travels from caster to that point to take effect first. This all makes sense so far. "As an action, you can cause the hand to reach for a different creature or to move to a different unoccupied space within range." Does the caster need direct line of sight to this or could he make it move to somewhere as long as it's it range and he can see where he's moving it to? For example using a familiar's sight.
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Jun 7, 2018 14:57
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Setting -> Story -> Encounters Have your setting and know what's going on in the world. This is not specifics at all, this is "we're in Dark Sun, and specifically in Urik (or wherever), which is like this..." Informational stuff that largely informs the story you'll tell. The story is the actual narrative. This is the "plot" but it should be broadly flexible. I do not like homebrews that write out the entire story because most people who homebrew are either doing so for their own tables with a knowledge of their players and so they develop what the players are likely to do (the right way to do it), or they are written by people who are more interested in telling a story than running a game and so don't tend to acknowledge the fact that players will get fixated on their own things and not want to let it go. This kind of homebrew can be really obnoxious both to run and to sit at because they're about stroking the DM's ego and not providing a fun game. Instead, the story should be loose and flexible and focused on broad things that the players can engage with. The actual game is played at the encounter level. Encounters are things that players make decisions within. This is where knowing your players helps a lot in prep. I like to do branching path prep where the paths that aren't chosen can get recycled into another dungeon. I do write down prompts for "DC 15 perception reveals..." for myself because that helps me design things that let players roll dice and also because writing these things out helps avoid the DM's temptation to do things "versus" the players. But basically the main advice up above to make sure you recycle things is the key to not burning out or going full sperglord. If you want to write a full campaign style book like WotC knock yourself out, but for the most part if you know the types of encounters and the way your players tend to resolve them you can just write a bunch of those and slot them in as appropriate based on the setting and the progression of the story. Write everything to be modular and reusable. At worst you should be able to just swap out monsters or other threats in the encounter to scale it to the CR where you actually use it, and the prep is done. Never waste your time on things people will never see.
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Jun 7, 2018 15:05
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My Godbound players conquered a city that is under threat of barbarian invasion, so to simultaneously cement their hold on it and defend it against attack, they used their divine might to create a massive gold dragon and each imbue it with something of their powers: they gave it vast knowledge, magical power, insatiable greed, and the burning resplendence of the sun. Our immortal God-King player named him Aurus, First Prince of the Sun, and appointed him ruler and defender of the conquered city. When I gave them the choice, they explicitly chose to make him more powerful than he is loyal, so he is also fiercely independent and will remain aligned with them only so long as it is in his interests. So they appealed to his pride and said "you are the ruler of these people, they are weak and need your protection, you must show them your beneficence", which I decided would work - for now. They also realised that he is incredibly greedy and very intelligent, so decided it was inevitable that rather than sitting on a pile of gold, he would become a banking magnate and expand the city's economy by wisely investing in commodities while raising property taxes and skimming off the top, or something. Oh, and the barbarians invading them are dragon-worshippers but believe all the dragons died centuries ago, which is even better. This is obviously awesome, but I'd be letting them down if I didn't use this to make some loving amazing drama and complications down the line. So how is this avaricious genius dragon going to gently caress over his empire-building parent-demigods in a fun and interesting way?
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Jun 7, 2018 16:30
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Boing posted:This is obviously awesome, but I'd be letting them down if I didn't use this to make some loving amazing drama and complications down the line. So how is this avaricious genius dragon going to gently caress over his empire-building parent-demigods in a fun and interesting way? Crippling debt? edit: Actually would the dragon guy be able to take part of their powers as debt repayment or something?
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Jun 7, 2018 16:48
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What's a resource that they need that he can monopolize? Even better if it's something everyone needs so he can be using his control over it to expand his influence (specifically over their nominal allies), too.
Keeshhound fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Jun 7, 2018 |
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Jun 7, 2018 16:48
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He's smart enough to know that gold is scrub tier - he wants power. Have him try to persuade the PCs to give him more of their god powers, for entirely legit reasons that he totally isn't engineering. Ideally, have him turn into a respectable adversary that they created
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Jun 7, 2018 19:50
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This is fairly obvious, but as that kind of dragon, I'd love to have my own religiously loyal barbarian army. I might even let them run the city.
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Jun 7, 2018 20:02
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My Lovely Horse posted:This is fairly obvious, but as that kind of dragon, I'd love to have my own religiously loyal barbarian army. I might even let them run the city. Actually, how does godhood work in this setting? Could a particularly ambitious dragon, already imbued with the spark of divinity from several protogods use the belief and devotion of enough followers to bootstrap themselves into proper deity? Keeshhound fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Jun 7, 2018 |
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Jun 7, 2018 20:40
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I was about to bring that up as an idea. It'd be a spectacular backfire/massive thorn in their fans if they'd think it would be cool.
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Jun 7, 2018 21:35
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My Lovely Horse posted:This is fairly obvious, but as that kind of dragon, I'd love to have my own religiously loyal barbarian army. I might even let them run the city. awwww yiss Definitely make a good rep of the Barbarians who the players like, so when the dragon (inevitably) tells him to act against the players it stings a bit.
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Jun 7, 2018 22:33
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The ultimate evil... capitalism.
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Jun 7, 2018 22:40
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sebmojo posted:awwww yiss You don't even need to do that. It's going to sting like hell when they come back to discover that the dragon saved the city from the barbarian hordes by inviting them in and putting them in charge.
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Jun 8, 2018 17:18
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Anyone have any ideas for sensibly realistic puzzle scenarios? Stuff like stepping on the right floor tiles to cross a room or solving a puzzle-box to open a door always raises the question of why someone would go to such elaborate measures for their security system rather than just slapping a locked door or a simple password system in front of things, and you can only use the "designed by a madman" or "challenge to test worthiness" excuses so many times. Off the top of my head, the only thing I immediately think of that would seem sensibly reasonable is using a password recovery feature to justify an effective riddle/hint scenario.
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Jun 9, 2018 08:14
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