MrSargent posted:

I don't think there is anything specific I am nervous about, I just really want the players to have a good time since for most of them this will be their first time playing a tabletop rpg. I think I have done a decent job of setting expectations so everyone understands the first few sessions might be a little slow as we are all learning. My biggest worry is probably the pacing of the session since I suspect that I will need to look up rules often.

Good to know! My plan was to write out at least a brief background for important NPCs they will come across so that I give myself something to work with if I need to improv additional interactions / dialogue.

Thanks a lot for sharing these vids. I will definitely check them out!

Bobby Deluxe posted:

My wife was recommended Foundry VTT, and has watched a few videos saying it's great, but they did seem a little bit promoted to me.

It's her first time DMing for a new group and I'm trying not to be annoying and ask if she's doing a session zero, if she's prepared this, if she's done that etc.

Madmarker posted:

Glasses were at least invented as early as the 1290's in Italy.....just having magical glasses makes perfect sense in a DND world.

Braking Gnus posted:

Can you have it be looking through specific smoky quartz lets you see reality, and then they can mine enough of it out and fashion it into badass shades?

Toshimo posted:

Toshimo posted:

Cthulu Carl posted:

Can I visit Flavortown?

Government Handjob posted:

Mild spoilers for LMoP and Hoard of the Dragon Queen, I guess:

My group wrapped up Lost Mines of Phandelver in early December and have been on a hiatus since thanks to the holidays. Now that the new year is upon us I'm getting ready for the next leg of their journey, and I'm thinking of adapting Hoard of the Dragon Queen to fit into the storyline from LMoP.
There's already a few things set up that will make the transition go a bit smoother:

*As a sign of appreciation the town of Phandalin granted the party Tresendar Manor, and they're rebuilding it using the funds from the Rockseeker Bros. mining operation. I'm thinking this takes place about a year or so after the end of the last campaign so the Manor will be mostly complete when we pick things back up.
* Sildar Hallwinter replaced Harbin Wester as mayor of Phandalin with Sister Garaele acting as his advisor, so the party already has friends within the Lord's Alliance and Harpers.
* The party defeated the Red Wizard necromancer at Old Owl Well, and though what he was doing there remains a mystery they've been introduced to the fact that there are mages with tattoos on their forehead and a very lax view on the morality of wielding magic.
* The party never visited the ruins of Thundertree, which I'm thinking will be a good place to introduce them to the dragon cultists since I'll have to shuffle some locations around rather than sending them all the way to Greenest.

I'll basically be nixing Greenest and starting the adventure with an attack on Phandalin, possibly while the party is investigating Thundertree, then letting them take chase after the cultist raiding party with the aim being to get them to Castle Naerytar as soon as possible (hopefully without any hamfisted railroading). From there the adventure can go pretty much as written, with some tweaking of encounters to adjust for the fact that the PCs are level 6 after finishing LMoP until they catch up with the source books.
While I'm getting all this stuff sorted I figured I'd run a one-shot for the group, letting them play as the four goblins they rescued didn't unceremoniously slaughter and sent to work for the tax collector's office in Neverwinter

Anyway, tips on sowing together the two story lines or on the Tyranny of Dragons modules in general would be appreciated since I'm still pretty new at the whole DM-schtick and I feel like I missed a lot of good opportunities for fleshing things out or making poo poo more coherent by going too much by the guidelines as written for LMoP.

Lastly I'd like to share a brief summary of the showdown with Nezznar at the end of Wave Echo Cave because of how ridiculous a turn the dungeon crawl took towards the end.

My party absolutely wiped the floor with Nezznar, he got one turn (which he completely whiffed) before eating poo poo. I would have been upset if their plan hadn't been so funny.
After defeating the Flame Skull they put it in their Bag of Holding that I gave them after rescuing Gundren from Cragmaw Castle. Once the skull reactivated the bag started vibrating and giving off small puffs of purple smoke.
The wizard peeked into it and was greeted by some mad howling before quickly closing the bag again and conferring with her party members about what to do. They decided they'd try to find a way to release the skull near the Black Spider and spared the life of one of the bugbears in the encounter outside the last room. Charging the poor bloodied mook with the simple task of "please give your master this gift, tell him you found it. We'll let you live and he'll probably reward you."

Standing in the hallway around the corner from Nezznar's chamber the party overheard the following conversation:

Bugbear: My Lord, sorry to disturb you but -

Nezznar: What is it now? I told you I wanted no interruptions, it's bad enough the racket you're making is giving me a headach- you look like poo poo! What the hells happened?

BB: I uh- There was a minor accident but we found this... bag?

Nezznar: Accident? You look like you've been fi- is that what I think it is? Give me that! Yes, yes this certainly has a powerful air of magic about it. There's a trick to these vessels that not many people know about, let's see what this bag is hiding from us.

Me narrating: You hear some fumbling as Nezznar inverts the bag. Nezznar's enthusiastic outcries at the treasures spilling out on the floor are suddenly cut short as you hear an all too familiar sound.

Flameskull: [CACKLES MADLY]

Nezznar: What the FU-

[FIREBALL]

The party then stormed the room and made short work of The Black Spider before taking out his spider minions. I thought I had tweaked Nezznar enough that he'd be challenging, but failing his save against a fireball and then rolling absolute poo poo for initiative made the encounter a walk in the park. I was holding back laughter as I let this all play out, however and the group had a blast so in the end I'm happy with the results.

Other highlights from Wave Echo Cave include:
The party initially being non-hostile to the guardian wraith, hearing him out until he revealed himself to have been a libertarian in life and holding those convictions still. His comments upon learning that the wizard worked for the Neverwinter tax collector set in motion a chain of events that lead to the party violating the NAP.
The party meeting a clearly confused Observer and convincing him that they were the next shift of guards, just arrived to watch the Forge of Spells and that he was free to go home and take some much deserved time off.

Celebrity Ghost posted:

I'm coming up on my one-year anniversary of DMing my first campaign, and we just finished last week (well, technically this week but it's going to be more of an epilogue RP session). In my experience, especially if they're new, they'll just be happy someone was willing to take on the burden of running the drat game for them. Just let them explore and have fun and if you need to say "no" to something, explain why. My players never gave me grief for saying "I need a minute to account for those actions" or "I don't have anything prepared if you take that path".

Slowness was my concern too, and I think the most useful thing (already suggested) was having some browser tabs or documents of common situations to reference. I still keep this reference open every single session because I'll be damned if I can remember exactly what each negative Condition entails. In some situations, I've just made up a rule on the fly with the caveat "I'll look it up before next session, so don't expect this ruling to stick".

I'm also terrible at improv so I did a similar thing as your NPC list. I also had the name of a character from some other property next to it so I had a character to emulate. When it came to minor NPCs I just did a similar thing; I think 90% of my cast were Venture Brothers characters.

Syrinxx posted:

New book being teased, will be revealed 12 JAN

Please be Dragonlance or Planescape

Syrinxx posted:

New book being teased, will be revealed 12 JAN

Please be Dragonlance or Planescape

GreenMetalSun posted:

Would kill for Planescape, though Dark Sun and Spelljammer are runners up.

GreenMetalSun posted:

Would kill for Planescape, though Dark Sun and Spelljammer are runners up.

theironjef posted:

It's gonna be Otiluke's Ponderance of Everything and it'll have a bunch of new subclasses and spells.

Lazy like a Fox posted:

Something happened that I wsn't expecting last night in the silly home brew game I'm currently running, and I'm not 100% sure if I should do anything about it- input welcome.

Backstory: The players have arrived at a Giant (literally) Cathedral dedicated to Memnor, the Giant God of Pride and Control. They're there on a mission from some goblins, trying to save some goblin villagers that have been kidnapped by the giants. The goblin who gave them the mission specifically asked them to look after his wife, and told them how to recognize her. Rescuing the goblins will net the players the macguffin, a key to a magical tower that they want to enter.

After doing a little reconnaissance and finding the cathedral to have a small but still imposing selection of Ogres and Giants inside, the players decide to take the comical dipolomatic approach and use their Goliath Barbarian who is fluent in Giant to lead the party in, claiming to be a worshipper of Memnor, there on a pilgrimage, with the other three his loyal servants. After some surprisingly great roleplaying with the Giant who watches over the cathedral's alter, the barbarian is invited to make an "offering" at the altar, by asserting his giant dominance over a creature, and told that if he does so, he'll be blessed by Memnor himself. Naturally this creature is the specific goblin they've been asked to bring back.

After a few minutes of thinking about it, the Barbarian's player surprises me by going for it, and he one hits the goblin and kills her. I wasn't expecting hit from him but I maybe should have been, the character has never been a murder hobo but there have been multiple times in the campaign where he's made a short term risk for power. But now I've got to figure out a boon- I went with allowing him to enlarge once a day as a bonus action. Now I'm wondering if there should be a mild negative consequence too? I'm thinking something like he gets visited by the god on his next long rest and gets asked to do more and more heinous things but I'm happy to hear anyone else's suggestions, mechanical or otherwise.

Syrinxx posted:

New book being teased, will be revealed 12 JAN

Please be Dragonlance or Planescape

Base Emitter posted:

I struggle with settings because any time there's a character option that doesn't make sense for a specific setting for some lore reason, one of the players in my group absolutely must play that type of character right now, so the setting is always "homebrew planet of all the things."

Base Emitter posted:

I struggle with settings because any time there's a character option that doesn't make sense for a specific setting for some lore reason, one of the players in my group absolutely must play that type of character right now, so the setting is always "homebrew planet of all the things."

Base Emitter posted:

I struggle with settings because any time there's a character option that doesn't make sense for a specific setting for some lore reason, one of the players in my group absolutely must play that type of character right now, so the setting is always "homebrew planet of all the things."

Bogan Krkic posted:

Lore should be malleable enough to allow players to play what they want, but tonality is a completely different thing. If 4 of 5 are playing brooding PCs whose families were brutally slaughtered by orcs and are out for revenge, Kevin McGimmickson the clumsy wizard who shouts "wahoo" like Mario every time he casts a spell probably isn't gonna fit in

MrSargent posted:

I was also looking at using DungeonFog to build maps for encounters and wanted to see if it was easy to import maps to Roll20 and/or Foundry from there. If there is a better map tool, definitely let me know since that was just one I saw recommended.

Trivia posted:

Hey everyone, asking for some ideas if anyone has any.

My group is most likely going to finish LMoP on Sunday. As a segue to the next adventure, I want to have the group gather at the Stonehill Tavern as a town celebration for re-opening the mine and breathing life into the town once more, as well as a proper send off to those that died and a recap of the adventure as a whole (told to the NPCs who only know bits and pieces).

The premise is to have the PCs drink, eat, and be merry with the locals before A BIG EVENT HAPPENS THAT VERY NIGHT and they're swept off to the next adventure (and also dynamically switch DMs). Does anyone have any fun interactions / skill checks / games that the PCs could play in the tavern with others? I thought of having my PCs take shots of beer as they do these skills to add to the fun, as well as make them intoxicated (poisoned) as they enter the next adventure.

tl;dr I need in-game drinking games for NPCs and PCs to play.

Trivia posted:

Hey everyone, asking for some ideas if anyone has any.

My group is most likely going to finish LMoP on Sunday. As a segue to the next adventure, I want to have the group gather at the Stonehill Tavern as a town celebration for re-opening the mine and breathing life into the town once more, as well as a proper send off to those that died and a recap of the adventure as a whole (told to the NPCs who only know bits and pieces).

The premise is to have the PCs drink, eat, and be merry with the locals before A BIG EVENT HAPPENS THAT VERY NIGHT and they're swept off to the next adventure (and also dynamically switch DMs). Does anyone have any fun interactions / skill checks / games that the PCs could play in the tavern with others? I thought of having my PCs take shots of beer as they do these skills to add to the fun, as well as make them intoxicated (poisoned) as they enter the next adventure.

tl;dr I need in-game drinking games for NPCs and PCs to play.

Base Emitter posted:

I struggle with settings because any time there's a character option that doesn't make sense for a specific setting for some lore reason, one of the players in my group absolutely must play that type of character right now, so the setting is always "homebrew planet of all the things."

Base Emitter posted:

I struggle with settings because any time there's a character option that doesn't make sense for a specific setting for some lore reason, one of the players in my group absolutely must play that type of character right now, so the setting is always "homebrew planet of all the things."