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Olesh posted:A hag requesting children is always a classic and can be adjusted to varying levels of horror or long-term evil plans as required.
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Jan 10, 2022 21:41
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Squidster posted:Maybe she already has a bunch of orphan children that's she's been raising as junior hags, but needs someone to chaperone them to Hag Prom. She needs a babysitter so she can see a goddamned play by herself for the first time in 30 years
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Jan 10, 2022 21:45
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Not comedy Hag option would be bargaining for an intangible. Like a paladin's innocence which could play into them getting too moral realist or something on that line. Works better if you have a table more into the RP than the G in RPG.
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Jan 11, 2022 01:39
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I quite like character intangibles like a single perfect moment, the memory it which will then be gone forever
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Jan 11, 2022 01:44
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A high powered bargain could be an artificer or wizard's artistic expression. It would still leave them as competent practitioners of their crafts but never able to invent something uniquely them ever again. Depending on their moral code, that wouldn't stop them from filing the serials off someone's work and marketing it as their own though.
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Jan 11, 2022 05:27
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How do y'all feel about having gm rolls in the open vs hidden?
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Jan 11, 2022 05:42
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The Slack Lagoon posted:How do y'all feel about having gm rolls in the open vs hidden? I always roll in the open because it's funnier but don't really care either way
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Jan 11, 2022 05:49
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The Slack Lagoon posted:How do y'all feel about having gm rolls in the open vs hidden? i feel like this is a small subset or application of a larger "are players your audience or your co-authors" type of question, and i've found that my players almost always have stronger opinions on that front than i do. i lean slightly towards co-authors (and thus rolls in the open) because it's less work for me but really i just want to do encounter design and make fantasy-themed dad jokes and don't care that much otherwise e: my players also lean hard in the opposite direction, i've practically had people go "no spoilers!" because i polled them for what direction to take a campaign in lol Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 05:56 on Jan 11, 2022 |
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Jan 11, 2022 05:54
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The Slack Lagoon posted:How do y'all feel about having gm rolls in the open vs hidden? I ran a thing once where I was having a massive string of absolutely atrocious rolls, and it meant that the entire encounter was being utterly trivialised and not carrying any weight whatsoever. Because I was rolling secretly I was able to fudge some of the rolls. Not many, but enough, to return that element of danger to an encounter that was beginning to seem like an utter farce. They were 5th level characters escaping a town in the process of being overrun with wights, ogres, and orcs with a dragon overhead, and I think I only managed one roll higher than 10 in the entire sequence, and that was a 13.
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Jan 11, 2022 11:07
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If the players can detect what is causing the rolls, I'm doing them publicly. The result of an orc trying to hit one of them is going to be readily apparent as soon as I open my mouth, no point in secrecy. Hidden rolls are for things like spot checks against upcoming ambushes.
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Jan 11, 2022 11:27
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I hide all my rolls, and I fudge some of them (don't tell my players that). Sometimes it's fun when an ogre smashes a player in the middle of a heated back and forth battle because of the dice. It's not as fun when the players haven't been able to roll higher than a 10 on a climactic battle and the big bad just sort of pastes them without even having to try.
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Jan 11, 2022 14:30
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sebmojo posted:I quite like character intangibles like a single perfect moment, the memory it which will then be gone forever I dig these as well, but I like to 'gamify' them a bit by making them something the PCs have to work to achieve, give them some work to do. like, say the hag wants a One Perfect Memory. She's not going to get it from the PCs. They're gross smelly adventuring types. No, what she wants them to do is to go into town where the young stable boy is about to have his first date with the blacksmith's daughter. Their job is to make the night perfect for the two young villagers. Make sure the food is good, the weather is right, there's good background music, the whole deal. Really set up a picture-perfect date, the kind from which young love will almost certainly blossom. Then they can get the macguffin. When they come back through town later, make sure to point out to them the young couple is, apparently, no longer a couple. That, in fact, they don't even seem to like each other much. Because the hag swept into town in the night and took the perfect memory - the one the PCs worked so very hard to make perfect - as her payment.
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Jan 11, 2022 14:50
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The Slack Lagoon posted:How do y'all feel about having gm rolls in the open vs hidden? If the system is made for player death, and the players are ok with it, do it in the open. I've always done them in private in Shadowrun. A part of the setting is "things aren't as they seem", which means telegraphing threat can be difficult to do. The rules allow such a wide curve that you can make really dangerous threats seem harmless if the first one or two rolls just go the players way.
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Jan 11, 2022 15:06
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I roll in the open, but I also don't roll dice if one of the possible results of the roll stops the game being fun.
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Jan 11, 2022 15:49
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:I dig these as well, but I like to 'gamify' them a bit by making them something the PCs have to work to achieve, give them some work to do. This is great. Taking a memory from a PC doesn’t necessarily mean much- your character can’t remember the color of their mother’s eyes? Big deal, you probably haven’t thought of that either. But making the players see the negative effects of their actions- that’s golden.
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Jan 11, 2022 18:15
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Zombie Dachshund posted:This is great. Taking a memory from a PC doesn’t necessarily mean much- your character can’t remember the color of their mother’s eyes? Big deal, you probably haven’t thought of that either. But making the players see the negative effects of their actions- that’s golden. When my party was in a similar position (having to find a hag coven and negotiate with them for info on where a warlord was hiding), all they wanted was for the group to throw one little seed down the well in the town square. Now obviously this would destroy the town, but because everyone had been hostile to the group (they had been facing nightly attacks by monsters and were wary of outsiders), they went ahead and did it and continue to show no remorse at all. So whatever you choose, if it hurts someone else, don't make that person too much of a dick or the party will come back around to not caring. change my name fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Jan 11, 2022 |
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Jan 11, 2022 18:33
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I used the memory thing in a mage game and was surprised how hard my pcs found it (since you have to invent them memory them discard it), but its more lightly trippy than super evil, yeah.
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Jan 11, 2022 19:01
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Anyone have experience running Savage Worlds? Skimming the rules it seems very GM-needs-system-mastery what with all the situational rules, wound mechanics with different cases based on shaken status, not to mention fiddly edges and powers. Is a deep reading vital to run it in practice or can you run it with just a close reading of the core mechanic and a few cheat sheets?
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Jan 11, 2022 23:49
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change my name posted:When my party was in a similar position (having to find a hag coven and negotiate with them for info on where a warlord was hiding), all they wanted was for the group to throw one little seed down the well in the town square. Just wanted to say that I stole this idea for the session last night- it had the virtue of being quick and self-evidently sketchy enough to make the party pause. Their solution to the request (put the seed in the well) was to put it in a bucket of well water that they lowered into the well, then removed. Which technically fulfilled their end of the deal: clever solution, one I hadn’t thought of, good job guys! It’s always fun when the party comes up with a good solution to a problem.
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Jan 13, 2022 16:05
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Zombie Dachshund posted:Just wanted to say that I stole this idea for the session last night- it had the virtue of being quick and self-evidently sketchy enough to make the party pause. Their solution to the request (put the seed in the well) was to put it in a bucket of well water that they lowered into the well, then removed. Which technically fulfilled their end of the deal: clever solution, one I hadn’t thought of, good job guys! It’s always fun when the party comes up with a good solution to a problem. And now they have a hag who is pissed at them that you can bring back whenever you need some filler.
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Jan 13, 2022 16:13
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Cross posting from the WOD thread - My long hiatus'd Promethean campaign is going to start back up for about 7 sessions on Saturday and I wanted to get some ST tips for having a big shadowy org running in the background. My campaigns have pretty much always had more personal, local antagonists, and I was thinking of having a character from one of the PC's backstory be involved in a big SV style alchemy startup. I know that typically in *OD is kind of intended to run those kind of broad, impersonal orgs, but I've never done it so far and I was wondering like, what's the session to session pace of introducing that sort of thing as a threat, how intrusive do you make it, is it better to make their motivations kind of obvious or to slow roll it, etc.
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Jan 13, 2022 19:47
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Hello friends. A quick ask for some inspiration from you RP geniuses. I'm about to run a Delta Green where the antagonist is a paranormal entity that manifests as a traveling circus. When it manifests, it selects an outcast from the town it manifests near (drunk, hobo, homeless, etc) and gives them a poster to advertise the circus and a reward for doing its bidding. The poster is a powerful cognitohazard that essentially puts a geas on whoever receives it to go out to evangelize for the circus. The infection spreads by voice only, and there is no electronic record of the circus at all, no pictures on social media, no online presence, nothing. Anyone who sees the poster is unknowingly compelled, seemingly due to their own interests, to attend the circus, which stays for three nights, with the "events" taking place within the circus becoming more and more extreme until at midnight on the third day it just... vanishes. Those who attended the circus and escape will have hazy memories of animals, and people, and... I was on my phone most of the time, I don't really remember. In the upcoming session, the poster has been given to the town drunk, an old man named Ivan Istvan who lives in grinding poverty in a shack behind a gas station. He still has the poster in his possession and the cognitohazard is working on him day and night. His payment for infecting the town was 10 bottles of "fine wine," which are actually almost priceless as they are from the reign and private winery of Louis XVI. He has drained one bottle but has been saving the others because "they're mighty nice bottles." Ivan Istvan has no idea what he has done, doesn't understand the cognitohazard, and just thinks he got paid for doing a good job given to him by a man in the woods. Admittedly, the man did look a lot like a goat. Ivan did attend the circus all three nights it was nearby, but the Ringmaster made certain he only saw the wonders of the circus and not the terrors, so he would be even more enthusiastic of a pitchman the next day. For all my DG important NPCs, I write out a good and bad ending for them, and while I'm very happy with the good ending, I'm not 100% satisifed with the bad one. Ivan's good ending is if the agents engage with him enough to end up in his miserable shack and find the valuable wine bottles and recognize their value and tell him about it (as opposed to buying them from him for a $100, which they might...). My bad ending is if they don't engage with him, he vanishes on the third day of their investigation (the circus is already gone when the adventure starts) and the next time they encounter the circus they find him there in a carny uniform mindlessly selling beer or something similar, but that just isn't awful enough for Delta Green. So... what happens to Ivan Istvan if he keeps sleeping on top of the poster? BTW the theme of this particular incarnation of the circus was sweets and candy, and DG gets involved when people start getting found dead with 100 year-old black sugar syrup suffused throughout their bodies, even to the point of filling their vascular systems and replacing the fluid in their eyes. Oh hey look at that, I can give some advice too. The thing Tulip is about to do (introduce a long-term powerful-but-secretive enemy) is exactly what I'm about to do with the circus. The way I'm going to go about it is to start off with them dealing entirely with the aftermath of the circus being there, and every few adventures they will brush up against it in a more and more direct way. Eventually, these DG agents are going to become a thorn in its side, or at least an annoyance, and then it will be go time. The circus is an elephant, and the agents are fleas at best. The elephant is going about its life, consuming whatever it wishes, and the fleas are running around on its back going, "Why is the earth colored gray here?" Eventually, though, one of those fleas will see the elephant's eye and realize, and the elephant will see that curious flea and realize what's been making it itch... and then the elephant will find a river and drown them. I've written up 20 "Visions of the Circus," some short, some much more involved. As agents themselves begin to be affected by the cognitohazard, they will receive these visions to read and then, if they wish, to share them with the other agents. There will be (very obscure) hints and clues within these visions that may help them in the end. My hope is to start with this session where they each get 1-2 cards and then maybe a session or two down the line when SAN starts to get thin to start handing them out again after the circus is in the past and they're done with it... surely? But why am I still thinking about it... and dreaming about it... why am I seeing clowns everywhere I go... is that cotton candy I smell, all the way out here in the woods? Here's the third vision they will get: Scattered across the circus you see… things. There are rides where people are moved in ways they cannot go. Animals with too many eyes, too many joints. A tent advertises entry into “THE SPHERE OF THOUGHTLESS AND ETERNAL CONTEMPLATION.” Two laughing dwarves in jester costumes pantomime a sword fight with sticks for a laughing group that ends when one of them slashes the other across the abdomen, spilling his glistening guts onto the ground where the weeping, chained spectators watch the victorious hoglike abomination begin to gorge itself on its foe’s steaming innards while the dying meal looks on in helpless horror- -and everyone laughs and laughs as the two costumed midgets roll around in the dirt, laughing together. It looks like such fun! The ring of bells, the laughter of children, the smell of the popcorn are all intoxicating. It’s the scent that’s so enticing, that scent of copper, of your palm after you clutch a handful of old pennies for a long time and smell it. That rich, thick metallic smell, so thick you can almost feel it dripping. That salty smell. That taste. That texture. The raw texture. The one you can only get by- -having a funnel cake, or a deep-fried candy bar, or some other trash carnival food! And it looks like there are plenty of different delicious foods from all sorts of exotic vendors scattered all throughout the midway. How delicious must all those treats be! And all you have to do is find it! And you can go in! You can get a ticket and go in! You can be a part of the circus, you can see the sights and ride the rides and see the nightly performance at the Big Top! All you have to do is find the Gate!
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Jan 16, 2022 17:42
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Supernatural sobriety is a hell of a thing to give someone, especially when it doesn't prevent any of the drawbacks as they desperately try to get their fix in to keep from having to confront their lives.
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Jan 17, 2022 04:05
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My party is on an extended mission for the local lord in a nearby dungeon, and they return to town regularly. The next time they do, I'd like to have them deal with a very small sidequest, but not quite sure what exactly would be fun. What the players know as unconnected facts: - the shopkeeper in town has it in for them and calls them frauds at every turn, out of sheer paranoia and malice - they met and fought a band of mercenaries in the dungeon, leaving only one alive, a dark elf. They let him escape without questioning. - once in the tavern they saw a mysterious hooded figureTM, but left them alone and they didn't seem to do much - on the same occasion, the party's rogue came very close to drawing a blade on the shopkeeper with lethal intent, pretty much the whole town saw what happened The party are good guys and truth be told the town probably likes them a lot more than the shopkeeper. That includes the lord, but obviously he couldn't have tolerated murder. DM background knowledge: The shopkeeper secretly worships an evil god of greed and had hired the mercenaries to loot valuables from the dungeon. The dark elf knows he has no chance against the party, and in any event is more angry at the shopkeeper for misrepresenting the dangers involved in the mission; no one said there would be adventurers. For getting his friends killed, he intends to murder the shopkeeper and move on. Naturally he's the hooded figure, who was watching the shopkeeper and will have noticed the altercation. Meanwhile, the lord has ambitions to extend his rule and is considering hiring the party as permanent advisors, but would take any opportunity to assure himself of their morality. Situations I'm considering: - The dark elf is about to kill the shopkeeper. Somehow the party gets wind of it. They now have to choose if they let things play out or intervene and save the man who's been nothing but rude to them. - The dark elf has killed the shopkeeper, been taken into custody, and the lord wants the party's input on judgment. - The dark elf has killed the shopkeeper and is framing the rogue. - The dark elf tries to hire the rogue to kill the shopkeeper. - The dark elf has already hired the rogue and he's killed the shopkeeper. I've not gone any deeper than that on any of these ideas and I'm not sure how to play it, just that I want a brief roleplaying sequence out of it with no need for combat or complex investigation. None of the background info needs to hold true. As always, appreciate any ... anput?
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Jan 17, 2022 13:18
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Crikey, that’s some updates. I’ll throw mine into the mix, then walk the dog and sit in a tree and see if I can answer the previous posts at all. My questions are (hopefully) quite simple by comparison. In my kids game, the players have taken a quest to deal with an issue in the old ruins beneath a dwarf settlement that “dwarfs can’t deal with.” An expedition discovered something, they all went mad. Anyone sent down to find out what happened went mad, except a couple of non-dwarf assistants. At the far end of the cavern the players can see the leader of the original expedition sitting serenely in a pool of lamplight, with various mad dwarfs rampaging about in between him and them. My questions are: 1) What has he discovered down there that sends the dwarfs mad? Why hasn’t it affected him? (Working theory from the players is he’s sitting quietly because he’s the most mad of them all.) 2) What are fun and interesting things to find behind the doors of a dwarf settlement that’s been in a sealed cavern for hundreds if not thousands of years? There’s about a dozen buildings that front onto the map we’re using. Kids game, remember!
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Jan 17, 2022 13:31
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Have you considered myconids e: The leader has gone beyond the raving madness stage, is fully tapped into the myconid hivemind and could serve as the Mushroom Speaker if someone figures out what's going on. My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 13:41 on Jan 17, 2022 |
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Jan 17, 2022 13:39
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My Lovely Horse posted:My party is on an extended mission for the local lord in a nearby dungeon, and they return to town regularly. The next time they do, I'd like to have them deal with a very small sidequest, but not quite sure what exactly would be fun. The dark elf has killed the shopkeeper and is in custody, and in fact the trial has already started. The dark elf knows the shopkeeper was a devotee of the evil greed-god, and says so at trial, claiming that the murder was in self-defense ("he got my friends killed, and I only survived through sheer luck, after all"). He turns out to be quite charismatic, and is getting a lot of sympathy from the townsfolk, who view him as a fundamentally good dude who was duped by a menace. Sure, vigilante justice is bad, okay, but a lot of townspeople are muttering "yeah, but he had cause..." The lord is dragging the trial out until the party returns, because the revelation of the shopkeeper's cult membership - combined with all the business the adventurers have been doing at their shop - has actually cast the party in a bad light with the town; after all, they were the group that killed the dark elf's friends. No one is accusing them of being in league with the shopkeeper, but a lot of people are wondering. As it has come out that the lord was starting to think about hiring the party as advisors, this then makes the lord look a little shifty. In essence, the party gets dropped into a Fantasy Bernie Goetz Trial. If they emphasize how they didn't like the shopkeeper either - "remember when our rogue almost drew down on the bastard?" - they will reassure everyone and make sure that their reputation stays untarnished... at the cost of ensuring that the dark elf will be freed and feted as a hero by the masses. If they publicly badmouth the dark elf's actions - "Murder is murder and it's never okay" - they can swing public opinion back against the dark elf but also some of the public will be mad at them, because after all an adventurer is just a hired killer who usually kills monsters; this will make the lord think twice about hiring them on. Basically, give them the choice between saying "we are good guys" or "we believe in the law."
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Jan 17, 2022 13:56
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Sanford posted:Crikey, that’s some updates. I’ll throw mine into the mix, then walk the dog and sit in a tree and see if I can answer the previous posts at all. My questions are (hopefully) quite simple by comparison. Basically a texture swap on my last suggestion but the kids are right, he is the most mad of them all. But driven so insane he's come back round to sane but his brain no longer has all the little tricks it plays on itself to interpret reality. So while insane he knows he is safe from the other dwarfs if he just chills so just chill he will. As they are kids you can lean into the insanity bit by being both obtuse and hyper literal in communication if they try and talk to him.
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Jan 17, 2022 14:57
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Sanford posted:In my kids game, the players have taken a quest to deal with an issue in the old ruins beneath a dwarf settlement that “dwarfs can’t deal with.” An expedition discovered something, they all went mad. Anyone sent down to find out what happened went mad, except a couple of non-dwarf assistants. At the far end of the cavern the players can see the leader of the original expedition sitting serenely in a pool of lamplight, with various mad dwarfs rampaging about in between him and them. The ancient dwarves preserved their greatest heroes by turning them into living, still-conscious statues. They acted as wise, impartial judges and advisors. When their civilisation fell, they were left behind. Most of them chose to pass on to the next world, but King Athar was determined to remain until he was unearthed again. The visibly mad dwarves are the ones who he tried to possess and scrambled the brains of, the one sitting still is the one he was successful on. Athar isn't evil but he does believe that dwarf society was better in the good old days and thinks that the modern weak, corrupt dwarf society needs a good shouting at. Modern dwarves revere him as a hero from the past, but will quickly realise, if he ends up being crowned king again, that serving a hero from the past is a totally miserable experience.
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Jan 17, 2022 16:03
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Went for a walk and came back with some NPCs to sit in a tavern and be background color. Here ya go. A pair of men, one human, one dwarven, both wearing common laborer's clothes, sit across from each other at a table, discussing various everyday topics. Each has a mug of ale, and a large savory pie sits mostly-eaten between them. The two are clearly comfortable, and enjoying the chat enough to nurse their drinks and food to prolong it. Each is beginning to recede and go gray in the hair, indicating they're in the same stage of life, even if the dwarf is three times older than the human. A woman, clad in the loose pantaloons and linen shirt of a low-ranking sailor, sits at the bar with a glass of wine and the bottle beside her. An empty scabbard swings at her hip, implying she came in armed and surrendered her blade to the barkeep. A young man, dressed in modest silks and leathers, sprawls in a chair at a table. He surveys the rest of the room with an imperious air, but whatever disdain he might have for the furnishings and company does not extend to the fare, as three mugs and a nearly-clean plate are arrayed before him. A dark cloak is folded neatly on the seat of the other chair at the table, likely his, due to the lack of anything else on that side of the table. A priest wearing the symbol of (a neutral-to-chaotic, neutral-to-evil deity) sits at a table with a small figure you at first take to be a gnome, but reveals itself as a goblin as it fumbles for one of the five mugs scattered in front of it. The priest himself has only a bowl of soup. The goblin occasionally breaks into shuddering sobs, prompting the priest, clearly out of his element, to pat them on the shoulder and offer them some soup.
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Jan 30, 2022 02:47
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Apologies if this has already been asked/answered in this thread, but: I'm looking to DM a game of D&D5e here in the near future. I haven't DM'ed an RPG in years, or even played one in years, but back in the AD&D 1e days I did DM quite a bit, so I feel OK with giving it a shot again. During this time of covid we're looking to play over the Internet, so which tabletop RPG software is the best/easiest for a DM to get into in terms of prep work that has the least hassle to it: Roll20, Foundry VTT, or Fantasy Grounds? I've read various things online so I figured I'd ask my fellow goons for their thoughts. Thanks in advance 
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Jan 30, 2022 15:54
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I love Fantasy Grounds but definitely had some problems with the initial learning curve. Stuff makes sense now and my non-techie players don't have any trouble with it, but it was a bit of a learning curve for me. The trick with it is to basically look for tutorials on YouTube specifically, since for whatever reason there's not a lot on the web but there's a bunch of dedicated people there who cover everything.
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Jan 30, 2022 16:00
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Sydney Bottocks posted:Apologies if this has already been asked/answered in this thread, but: I'm looking to DM a game of D&D5e here in the near future. I haven't DM'ed an RPG in years, or even played one in years, but back in the AD&D 1e days I did DM quite a bit, so I feel OK with giving it a shot again. During this time of covid we're looking to play over the Internet, so which tabletop RPG software is the best/easiest for a DM to get into in terms of prep work that has the least hassle to it: Roll20, Foundry VTT, or Fantasy Grounds? I've read various things online so I figured I'd ask my fellow goons for their thoughts. Thanks in advance I've used roll20 and foundry to run games. Roll20 with a bought module from the marketplace is really easy on the setup time. Foundry is great but (and this depends on how many non-core mods you want to use) can take a lot of time to prep until you get the hang of it. Though I'm the reverse of you, I'm new to dmming
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Jan 30, 2022 16:03
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Azathoth posted:I love Fantasy Grounds but definitely had some problems with the initial learning curve. Stuff makes sense now and my non-techie players don't have any trouble with it, but it was a bit of a learning curve for me. I'd read a reddit post from like 4 years ago that said FG was way easier on setup time for a DM, but the replies were a lot of grumbling about the UI. Granted, that was 4 years ago, so I'm guessing at least some of those gripes have been addressed. The Slack Lagoon posted:I've used roll20 and foundry to run games. Roll20 with a bought module from the marketplace is really easy on the setup time. Foundry is great but (and this depends on how many non-core mods you want to use) can take a lot of time to prep until you get the hang of it. Though I'm the reverse of you, I'm new to dmming That's definitely the route I plan to go for now, just get a premade module or two and go from there until I get comfortable enough to start doing my own stuff. I used to wing it a lot in my 1e days, but I was also playing with fellow teens and so there wasn't as much adherence to the rules as there might have been 
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Jan 30, 2022 16:33
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Sydney Bottocks posted:I'd read a reddit post from like 4 years ago that said FG was way easier on setup time for a DM, but the replies were a lot of grumbling about the UI. Granted, that was 4 years ago, so I'm guessing at least some of those gripes have been addressed. If you have a well constructed module, there's very little set up per se, but finding the appropriate options and deploying them to your players, and answering player questions about how they can set up their spells, what they click on, etc. is an issue until everyone learns it. I was considering that learning process to be "set up" for your purposes. Now though, I don't actually do all that much prep for my sessions. I know I can use Kobold Fight Club to generate and customize a random encounter then slap it into FG in like 30 seconds. If I want a map, a minute on Pinterest will produce something good I can upload. Sometimes I gotta fiddle with the grid settings, but that's another few minutes tops. Honestly, it's quicker to throw random poo poo together on FG than it is in person drawing up a grid or placing minis in person, but yeah the UI for it is ... an acquired taste.
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Jan 30, 2022 16:41
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Fantasy Grounds UI is pretty bad by modern standards and IMO is a distant third and I can't recommend it. If you're buying modules, roll20 because everything's done for you. If you're willing to input and customize all maps and tokens and also buy the software, Foundry VTT. What are you using to track character sheets? You didn't mention, but if it's 5e you really can't beat dndbeyond for the ease of leveling, management, and low barrier to entry for players who are comfortable using virtual dice over real ones. Unfortunately, this also means buying into their ecosystem as you don't get access to book spells/abilities without (re)buying them in their system or finding someone's homebrew who has done the work. Roll20 and Foundry both require manual management of character sheets though so my groups use Beyond20 which lets you click-roll on the character sheet which is compatible with both.
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Jan 30, 2022 17:08
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i tried fantasy grounds and it sucked. the UI is crap and it takes way too long to figure out how to do things. if you take the time to learn its probably fine but the experience for the first 3 sessions trying to get everyone to use this program was too miserable. foundry is good if you can set it up but roll20 is the most convenient
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Jan 30, 2022 17:32
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Regarding getting a game set up in one of the clients, do I (as the DM) need to purchase a bunch of the books within the client, like the DMG etc., or is that optional and only the module is needed to play the game? Not opposed to getting them, but was just curious what the bare minimum needed would be to run D&D or Pathfinder/Starfinder or whatever. E: like I have access to my brother's physical copies of the books, but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't necessarily make running a game in Roll20 or whatever easier. Sydney Bottocks fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Jan 30, 2022 |
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Jan 30, 2022 18:04
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I'm running a Call of Cthulhu campaign, and we're six adventures into it - mostly premade modules with a couple of homebrewed scenarios. This deep into the campaign, the overall complexity and danger level has increased. However, my players have gotten used to just going to a location, usually the 'spookiest' one and investigating and looking for clues right off the bat. But I want to encourage them to do more research and investigation before jumping right in. How do I do that without just explicitly saying "Are you sure you want to go in without doing some research first?"
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Feb 3, 2022 02:02
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| # ? Jun 8, 2024 20:50 |
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Have you tried almost killing them?
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Feb 3, 2022 02:19
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