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A couple of friends who have never played want me to run their first game. I’m already running Phandelver with another group so I want to try something else. Any suggestions on a good adventure for someone who has never played 5e? So far I’ve only ran games with players who already had played before.
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Jul 4, 2022 18:58
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I just read City of Cats from Kobold Press and was massively struck by how great it would be as a starting adventure. There are three sections - recovering an artefact that’s been stolen, rescuing three girls who have been turned into pigs, and a classic dungeon delve at the end. All three missions can be played separately, but all together they go lvl 1-5 for 3-4 players. Not too long, not too complex, really good fun and a little bit of everything d&d. If someone who’d never heard of the game asked me what d&d was all about, I’d hand them City of Cats.
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Jul 4, 2022 20:27
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radlum posted:A couple of friends who have never played want me to run their first game. I’m already running Phandelver with another group so I want to try something else. Any suggestions on a good adventure for someone who has never played 5e? So far I’ve only ran games with players who already had played before. The saltmarsh haunted house is a classic, just get a read on what level of lethality they are ok with first as it can be harsh on level ones.
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Jul 4, 2022 21:14
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Sanford posted:I just read City of Cats from Kobold Press and was massively struck by how great it would be as a starting adventure. There are three sections - recovering an artefact that’s been stolen, rescuing three girls who have been turned into pigs, and a classic dungeon delve at the end. All three missions can be played separately, but all together they go lvl 1-5 for 3-4 players. Not too long, not too complex, really good fun and a little bit of everything d&d. If someone who’d never heard of the game asked me what d&d was all about, I’d hand them City of Cats. I’ve been thinking about running a family adventure for my kids (8, 10), and based on the title alone this sounds incredibly perfect.
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Jul 4, 2022 23:53
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Bad Munki posted:I’ve been thinking about running a family adventure for my kids (8, 10), and based on the title alone this sounds incredibly perfect. just bought this and i love this chart, it has DRUNK IN CHARGE OF A CAMEL as a named offence 
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Jul 5, 2022 00:15
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I'm designing a campaign setting, and I hit a snag. Fake e: Mostly talked myself through it, but I could use some input still. The campaign takes place in a single city and its environs, which has become the world's first pure city-state by virtue of having rebelled and driven out two entire armies who had been fighting over the city for several years. Basically the war had dragged on so long that everyone on both sides was exhausted, and a small force was able to suborn a significant amount of soldiers on both sides, overwhelm the remainder, and overthrow the baron of the city (Who had been staying in power through multiple times when the city was taken by one side or taken back by another, by dint of gladly accepting money from both sides). They then proceeded to establish the city itself and the immediate environs as its own political entity. So I'm all ready to start laying out the delicate social, political, and economic balances in the city, the kinds of concessions and deals they had to make with neighbors to gain legitimacy, the motives of powers within and without, all balanced into a careful souffle that my party of adventurers can galumph around and collapse into a marvelous mess. But the aforementioned snag: I don't know what the city is called. Oh, I have names for the city. I actually weaved an entire etymological history for this place. quote:Etymology: Original land owned by elves, river named Falenaeve (Earthen River). Conquered by gnomes, establish village named Farnevbragh (glottal GH, Farnev River). Humans settle village of Freehorn on opposite bank, human cartographers label river Farnevbra River. Ferry service begins, area becomes known as Farnbra Crossing. As town expands, Freehorn and Farnevbragh become districts. Later elven immigrants establish Falenaeve District (derogatorily called The Mud by racists). Thanks to poor handwriting, some documents refer to city as Fambra. After the first stone walls go up, the newly-minted baron tries to pretty up the name and refers to it in official communications as Fambre (Rhymes with amber). Opposing nations develop on either side of Farnevbra River, begin battling back and forth. City becomes battlefield and conquered several times, referred to as Farn by (Southern, Germanic nation) and Fambre by (Northern, Gallic nation). Nations fight to exhaustion on both sides, rebellion in city overthrows puppet baron (who had been puppeted by both sides and embezzled quite a lot from the city’s coffers before fleeing (successfully? Maybe, maybe not)) and installs triumvirate (Notably, including first half-orc leader in city history). Name is chaotic in next few months, some still referring to it as Farn or Fambre, some as Free Farn or Fambre, some as entirely new construction of (Freiburg), some as older names of Farnevbragh, Freehorn, or Farnbra. Eventually the triumvirate settles on (FILL IN), which holds to this day. I don't know how the people would vote on that. I know I can just decide how they'd have voted and that is automatically correct, but I can't simulate a population of several thousand war-weary people in my head to come to a decision. I also don't have a good way of rolling for it. I do know the split would be large enough that the outliers in a d% roll would be unbelievable. Maybe do 1d20+20 twice, which gives two thirds of the vote, leaving the remainder of 100 for the third. If Farn or Fambre wins, a d% roll will tell me whether it gets called New or not, but besides the older names, I don't know what else might appeal if Something Else wins, and if I was living in that situation, I'd be voting for Something Else because gently caress both these nations that fought over this place, I'm not calling it anything they want me to. ...I managed to talk my way through most of that snag just writing that post, but I could use some suggestions for the Something Else name. And yes, this is a weird as hell way to come up with a setting, but it's the ride my brain's taking me on, I'm just holding on and trying not to lose my hat.
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Jul 10, 2022 06:44
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I know that at the very least any construction that’s pronounced something like Farnbra or Farnevbragh would sound far too similar to the actual town of Farnborough for it not to immediately sound comedic to my ears (“I assume all these wars were to force the other country to have the city?”), but that’s probably not going to be a problem if none of your players are from the UK. Question though, would a vote actually settle this? If there’s multiple names for the city and the city is fairly evenly split between people of varying heritages who feel quite strongly that the city’s name is X or Y, holding a vote is not necessarily going to lead to them just agreeing to call it by the new name. So maybe, “Something Else” ends up winning the vote due to tactical voting or whatever, but since that ends up just pissing off everyone, they never get around to holding the run-off vote between all the other choices. The city is left to this day without a fixed name, so you hear both of the old names occasionally among the older more traditional folk. Radical types who dream of spreading the city’s revolution to the other kingdoms have some suitably revolutionary name for the city like, I dunno, “Fervidor”, but most people just call it “The City” (or “The Borough”, “The Town”, etc. Whichever construction you like most), just like how Constantinople’s common nickname in medieval Greek, “is tim bolin” just meant “the city” and eventually just became the actual name, Istanbul. Maybe this leads to people from the other countries giving the place some derogatory title like “The Nameless City”, referring to its citizens as “Nameless” or “Nobodies”. Reveilled fucked around with this message at 12:13 on Jul 10, 2022 |
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Jul 10, 2022 12:07
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Reveilled posted:I know that at the very least any construction that’s pronounced something like Farnbra or Farnevbragh would sound far too similar to the actual town of Farnborough for it not to immediately sound comedic to my ears (“I assume all these wars were to force the other country to have the city?”), but that’s probably not going to be a problem if none of your players are from the UK. Yeah, when I googled the name (Generated by first an Elven place name generator, then a Gnomish one, and smashed together) to make sure I hadn't accidentally copied something, I got Google asking me if I meant Farnborough. Which is far enough away for my comfort, at least. There will absolutely be people disputing the vote or refusing to abide by it, and there'll be opportunities for the PCs to discover that some of the baskets of stones were stolen to try and change the results (Not a very effective means of voter fraud, but a decent way to flag whoever's basement they find them in as a poo poo), but primarily it's just for the panicked and rushed triumvirate to look like they're engaging with the populace and get a name to put on maps and official correspondence. The campaign takes place a few years after the war ends, and the framing narration for the intro and timeskips takes the format of discussion in a history textbook, and historians refer to the establishment of the city-state as The Opening of the Eye, because on maps you suddenly have this circular territory with a single city smack dab in the middle because part of the concessions they got in the peace deal was however many miles of fields, forests, and whatnot in a radius around the city, so they can be at least slightly self-sufficient. Having newcomers just call it the Eye would make sense, even that close to the historical incident.
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Jul 10, 2022 13:50
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I didn't know dms like you still existed, wow. Farmborough is an intensely boring name,yoi could maybe flip the parts, Borrofarn. Brafarren. I do like that there were three options and the one with the most votes was undecided so that's what the city is called, that's hilarious.
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Jul 10, 2022 14:27
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Dareon posted:Yeah, when I googled the name (Generated by first an Elven place name generator, then a Gnomish one, and smashed together) to make sure I hadn't accidentally copied something, I got Google asking me if I meant Farnborough. Which is far enough away for my comfort, at least. Makes sense, though I'd maybe note that newcomers to the city would perhaps be the ones most likely to use the old names? If you're arriving from or via (Northern, Gallic nation), you'd probably be most likely to call it Fambre, since that's what it'll be on maps and milestones and in directions from individuals who live in (Northern, Gallic nation). Same but for the opposite name if you're arriving from (Southern, Germanic nation). Calling it "the Eye" might be something of a shibboleth where nobody necesarily says you're wrong for saying Fambre or Farn, but actual citizens do not use those names and just mentally note users of the old names as outsiders. Maybe it takes a bit for newcomers to realise that they're comitting a bit of a faux pas any time they say the old names. An idle thought: potentially the city may have a north and south gate, the northern gate labels the town Fambre while the southern gate labels the town Farn. While the residents might have no political loyalty to either of the old kingdoms, many still identify ethnically and linguistically with them, and since basically every single thing in the city has two names, there are laws saying that signs are to be left undisturbed, lest civil unrest be caused by disagreements over what to call this street or that street. Mostly people have settled on a single name for each thing (or maybe not? maybe every street, building, and person having two names is another shibboleth that confuses newcomers), but the signs still remain, and so despite nobody native to the city really using Fambre or Farn any more, the signs remain, confusing visitors to this day. I'm kind of thinking a bit here of the Status Quo at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where there's a ladder resting against a wall that nobody is allowed to move because it needs everyone's permission to be done and nobody is entirely sure why the ladder was placed there in the first place.
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Jul 10, 2022 14:35
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You could do what one Canadian city did, and have a vote split between two very similar options that are closely related to what everyone wanted (Lakehead vs The Lakehead) resulting in the option that fewer people want winning, and that's how we got Thunder Bay. If you ever think Canadians aren't lame, consider this: people were angry that their city got called 'Thunder bay.'
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Jul 10, 2022 17:47
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The baron agrees to step away as long as the town is named for him
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Jul 10, 2022 18:06
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Harold Fjord posted:The baron agrees to step away as long as the town is named for him I kinda love this idea The revolutionaries agreed because it was the safest and fastest way to end the conflict, and now everyone has to officially refer to the city as Baronopolis or whatever even though no one, and I mean no one, uses that name in casual conversation Even the herald who have to announce the name do so with a faint undercurrent of disdain Everyone knows that agreement will end before long and they'll go back to using the city's "real" name, it's just that a few dedicated activist groups have different names they refer to the city as (gnomish nationalists still call the place Farnevbragh while there's a group of anti-royalists that want to name the place Republica or Freedomville or something equally clunky and so on and so forth), so in the meantime in order to avoid fights most of the public just uses "the city" or "the free city" or the like if any of the PCs does something suitably heroic and attention-grabbing there will be a movement to name the city after them, which will of course be opposed by all the special interest groups who have their own names in mind, so the PC will have made enemies overnight basically by accident
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Jul 10, 2022 18:21
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sebmojo posted:I didn't know dms like you still existed, wow. My ADHD makes the random fragments of information I have about everything collide in interesting ways. The name(s) of the city was entirely because I had the Torpenhow Hill tumblr post in my mind (Translated: Hill Hill Hill Hill. Farnevbragh River, through the translation chain, is Earthen River River River).
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Jul 10, 2022 22:36
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Dareon posted:My ADHD makes the random fragments of information I have about everything collide in interesting ways. The name(s) of the city was entirely because I had the Torpenhow Hill tumblr post in my mind (Translated: Hill Hill Hill Hill. Farnevbragh River, through the translation chain, is Earthen River River River). It's very cool, dgmw. I am just too old and lazy these days, since i know i can get a fun campaign with way less effort.
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Jul 11, 2022 04:00
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Started running a new campaign for some friends just a few weeks ago. I used to prep a ton of material going into every session, but I decided that I was going to go into this campaign using dice rolls on tables for 90% of the events, maps and NPCs. It has been going SURPRISINGLY well. The party started off at level 4, on a boat, traveling to a relatively unknown continent on the other side of the world. Session Zero was a lot of 'what made you decide to chose this ship, crew, and captain?' , 'What happened to the fifth member of your party - why aren't they here with you now?' and other open-ended-but-leading-questions. We opened up a shared google doc and brainstormed the answers together while spitballing ideas and eating brunch. This very much was a creative and collaborative storytelling session. It turned out so much better than I had hoped! If you haven't tried this method yet, and your crew has even a slight bit of improv skills, or can "yes...and ....", it's very much worth giving it a shot. So, dice and tables make for interesting events. A lot of my tables are "Adjective | Thing | Verb | Adverb " so it's a lot of "fill in the blanks to tell a cohesive story". For example: One night, there was Lunar eclipse, and then a cluster of stars started winking out. A few days later, the party saw meteors streaking across the sky, some impacting the world they were on. Turns out it was a celestial prison break under the cover of the lunar eclipse. This has turned into an important story arc in the campaign which has (re)shaped large swathes of the world they are living on. Plus, with the Spelljammer supplemental material coming out soon from WOTC, this might end up being a spelljammer campaign! Anyway, TL;DR , they are now in a deku-tree-inspired-dungeon in an meteor-impacted-druid-grove because that's what the dice decided, or 'How I learned to stop worrying and trust the awesomeness'
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Jul 14, 2022 02:13
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LordAdakos posted:Started running a new campaign for some friends just a few weeks ago. The best part of this style is that you as DM don't know where the story is going, and you can be as surprised as the players.
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Jul 14, 2022 02:40
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Anyone have any good strategies for getting players out of the habit of declaring skill checks and into the habit of describing what they're doing narratively? Under normal circumstances I don't have a problem with a player just asking if they can make a skill check, but lately I've been running systems that are more mechanically geared away from players having control over when and how a skill roll comes into play. The biggest one is Free League's Alien game, which has potential stress accumulation and panic rolls every time a player makes a skill roll. I've explained the concept to my players but I'm still getting players defaulting to asking if they can roll a skill rather than narrating their actions and letting me decide when the roll is necessary and am wondering if there are any strategies I can use to encourage them away from this. Any advice?
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Jul 19, 2022 22:48
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KingKalamari posted:Anyone have any good strategies for getting players out of the habit of declaring skill checks and into the habit of describing what they're doing narratively? Under normal circumstances I don't have a problem with a player just asking if they can make a skill check, but lately I've been running systems that are more mechanically geared away from players having control over when and how a skill roll comes into play. The biggest one is Free League's Alien game, which has potential stress accumulation and panic rolls every time a player makes a skill roll. I've explained the concept to my players but I'm still getting players defaulting to asking if they can roll a skill rather than narrating their actions and letting me decide when the roll is necessary and am wondering if there are any strategies I can use to encourage them away from this. Any advice? The best technique I ever used was, ironically, enough, just saying "no." Well, to be more specific, saying "No, because this system doesn't necessarily work that way. Tell me what you do, and I'll let you know when - or if, 'cause you might succeed without taking the risk of a failed roll - you've gotta roll something." I had to say that kind of thing, patiently, over and over and over again for a while, but eventually it sinks in. Players calling on the rules for structuring their actions is just a habit, like any other; it takes time to break that habit and adopt a more narratively-oriented one. Just be calm and non-judgmental about it, and they'll do the rest.
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Jul 19, 2022 23:13
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KingKalamari posted:Anyone have any good strategies for getting players out of the habit of declaring skill checks and into the habit of describing what they're doing narratively? Under normal circumstances I don't have a problem with a player just asking if they can make a skill check, but lately I've been running systems that are more mechanically geared away from players having control over when and how a skill roll comes into play. The biggest one is Free League's Alien game, which has potential stress accumulation and panic rolls every time a player makes a skill roll. I've explained the concept to my players but I'm still getting players defaulting to asking if they can roll a skill rather than narrating their actions and letting me decide when the roll is necessary and am wondering if there are any strategies I can use to encourage them away from this. Any advice? Honestly, something that's worked for my group is telling players to stop looking at their character sheet and just say what their character is doing. This in context is mostly for PBTA games where character sheets have predefined moves (usually with funny names) and so people will say something like "Can I roll 'Eye on The Door' to escape?" and the response is '"No, you have to tell me how you're escaping. What's your way out?" and then asking for the roll once they're done narrating it.
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Jul 20, 2022 05:55
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You could simply reduce the give a bonus to the subsequent roll if they show some knowledge of what they are doing as opposed to just calling it out. "I roll lock picking for the door" as opposed to "I pull out my flexible thin metal sheet and use it to try and slip the latch". "I grab the door handle and attempt to pull it open with brute force" as opposed to "Strength check against door". "I pull out my herbalist supplies and carefully measure out my Magic Awesomeroot™ to create some healing poultices" as opposed to "I use my gear to make healing poultices". Maybe also do a secret roll on that one to see if they have enough for an extra due to specifying being careful if their roll was good? "I make a search the room" as opposed to "I search the room carefully, taking care to knock on walls, floors, and observe the ceiling". Hell, if you are feeling mean, you can simply assume that unless they specify otherwise, they don't examine the ceiling. Few people ever look up, and you can hide a camouflaged monster or two up there if you are feeling mean.
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Jul 20, 2022 06:43
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Pickled Tink posted:"I make a search the room" In my games a player that wants to comprehensively search everything takes minutes per 10' searched, and can easily run out a 10 minute or hour spell or buff duration, which I let them know in advance. Sometimes they want to do that search, and sometimes they get more specific. If they specify something specific they are looking for they can search a lot faster, but might miss stuff that's not what they're looking for (not automatically, it just changes the DC according to circumstance). I also use slow searches when they really want to find something and are willing to take time to do it right, effectively letting them take 20 if they are willing to run out the clock. Many times it doesn't matter but sometimes they lose a summon or buff or the monster that disappeared in the last fight comes back with friends. (Most of my group has played 3.X and 4 so stuff like bloodied and taking 20 has been informally houseruled in.)
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Jul 20, 2022 07:12
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KingKalamari posted:Anyone have any good strategies for getting players out of the habit of declaring skill checks and into the habit of describing what they're doing narratively? Under normal circumstances I don't have a problem with a player just asking if they can make a skill check, but lately I've been running systems that are more mechanically geared away from players having control over when and how a skill roll comes into play. The biggest one is Free League's Alien game, which has potential stress accumulation and panic rolls every time a player makes a skill roll. I've explained the concept to my players but I'm still getting players defaulting to asking if they can roll a skill rather than narrating their actions and letting me decide when the roll is necessary and am wondering if there are any strategies I can use to encourage them away from this. Any advice? Game mechanics are how you interact with the system. It's fine if they say "I'm going to do X" as long as they also give you some description of what they're doing and it doesn't need to be long or detailed. For this system, I'd point out that skills are for dangerous situations - just tell them "I'd say things aren't bad enough that you need to roll, you succeed." Ideally they'll start saying what they're doing and stop asking if they need to roll every time. Have you also shown them how the mechanics work? A lot of other players from D&D will assume you constantly have to roll, and seeing that's not the case here might help. In the end though...if they do, is it that bad? As long as they're making interesting decisions and telling a fun narrative everyone enjoys, you can accept that they start off by asking if they need to roll. Pickled Tink posted:You could simply reduce the give a bonus to the subsequent roll if they show some knowledge of what they are doing as opposed to just calling it out. Do not do this. This just punishes them for not using the right key phrases. What difference does "I want to roll lock picking" vs describing this action over and over again accomplish? Nothing - the interesting thing is why the door is locked, why they're breaking in, and what's behind it. If they want to describe it then cool, but don't punish them for not going into detail. If you need detail to figure out how things might go, ask them to elaborate instead of secretly penalizing rolls. Why can't you assume that someone who wants to use a Strength check to bust open a door is using brute force? What else are they doing? And the last two are real bad. If a player tries to simply describe what they're doing, treating their characters as if they're not competent because their players just got right to the point is an rear end in a top hat move. Unless you want every room search thereafter to consist of them taking out and reading a list of places to look in a room so you can't say they didn't actually look at it.
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Jul 20, 2022 08:07
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At the end of our last session my pcs indicated they wanted to follow a tangentially related thread. Luckily it was the end of the session so I can prep it for the next game!
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Jul 20, 2022 17:02
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My pf2e PC is a high CHA face. He is much more persuasive charming and funny than I am. One of his abilities is to insult people and give them a debuff also giving himself a temporary buff that can be spent for a big attack. I frequently just roll this or use something generic because I might apply this ability three or four times in a fight depending on how hard I'm spamming finishers. But sometimes I get to be really funny and get a hero point. The hero point mechanic for good roleplay is one I like a lot.
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Jul 20, 2022 17:09
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Harold Fjord posted:My pf2e PC is a high CHA face. Is your character the flap of skin from Doctor Who? Do you go around demanding to be moisturized?
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Jul 20, 2022 17:11
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Bad Munki posted:Is your character the flap of skin from Doctor Who? Do you go around demanding to be moisturized? This is definitely my next
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Jul 20, 2022 17:15
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The Slack Lagoon posted:At the end of our last session my pcs indicated they wanted to follow a tangentially related thread. Luckily it was the end of the session so I can prep it for the next game! How convienent that this tangent just so happens to look like hastily repainted already prepared but now would be unused content that they'd be none the wiser about.
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Jul 20, 2022 17:46
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A lot of my friends have been asking me to run a game (Many of who are DM's themselves who run games I play in) and I was just wondering what you guys would recommend being a good starting point for a seasoned player thinking of trying his hand at DMing? Any tips or advice? I will most likely be DMing for experienced players who I have preexisting personal friendships with.
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Jul 27, 2022 05:23
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trapstar posted:A lot of my friends have been asking me to run a game (Many of who are DM's themselves who run games I play in) and I was just wondering what you guys would recommend being a good starting point for a seasoned player thinking of trying his hand at DMing? Any tips or advice? I will most likely be DMing for experienced players who I have preexisting personal friendships with. Do you have a game/system in mind for what you want to run? That will dictate quite a bit of what advice will actually be useful since what makes a good D&D 5e GM is not always what makes a good VTM GM
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Jul 27, 2022 05:52
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ItohRespectArmy posted:Do you have a game/system in mind for what you want to run? That will dictate quite a bit of what advice will actually be useful since what makes a good D&D 5e GM is not always what makes a good VTM GM I'd probably be running Pathfinder 1st Edition.
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Jul 27, 2022 06:28
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trapstar posted:A lot of my friends have been asking me to run a game (Many of who are DM's themselves who run games I play in) and I was just wondering what you guys would recommend being a good starting point for a seasoned player thinking of trying his hand at DMing? Any tips or advice? I will most likely be DMing for experienced players who I have preexisting personal friendships with. I would run some kind of whimsical sandbox game, like the carnival from The Wild Beyond the Witchlight. But put some kind of twist on it, like a murder mystery. Don't make it obvious you have changed anything, run the carnival straight up and try to give the impression this is your best effort as a new DM. Make your friends take pity on you and lull them into a false sense of security, than *bam* 
Rutibex fucked around with this message at 09:39 on Jul 27, 2022 |
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Jul 27, 2022 09:22
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trapstar posted:A lot of my friends have been asking me to run a game (Many of who are DM's themselves who run games I play in) and I was just wondering what you guys would recommend being a good starting point for a seasoned player thinking of trying his hand at DMing? Any tips or advice? I will most likely be DMing for experienced players who I have preexisting personal friendships with. Something simple like being hired by the town to deal with some dire rats messing up a brewery. Some skill checks and talking with witnesses on site to determine that their nest is in the basement of a nearby building, then dealing with the recalcitrant owner who doesn't believe that they could be coming from his basement before moving onto the cleansing of the basement of rats.
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Jul 27, 2022 09:38
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Then it turns out the beer is turning people into were rats Ideally come up with arenas where people can have entertaining fights, knock each other off high things and set stuff on fire
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Jul 27, 2022 09:56
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trapstar posted:I'd probably be running Pathfinder 1st Edition. i recommend any other system. aside from being utterly horrible, pathfinder 1st edition is not friendly to new GMs at all as it requires an obscene amount of effort to create any sort of combat encounter and rules adjudications are very finicky. it took me about 3 years to be able to actually comfortably run the system. if you like more rules heavy play, dnd 4e or pf2e are better choices, but i would rather recommend a new DM do something rules light in my eyes. for fantasy play, a lot of OSR titles are great(i am partial to OSE, the black hack 2.0, and dungeon crawl classics), there are pbta systems like dungeon world(admittedly kind of mid) and fellowship 2e which are great. of course 5e is ubiquitous and also there is icon made by the creators of lancer which i have not tried yet but plutonis thinks is sick
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Jul 27, 2022 13:25
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Running a 1e module is actually hilarious good times, and takes very few rules, you need the combat and saving throw tables and the players handbook for spells. Shrine of tamochan, white plume and tomb of horrors are all vg
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Jul 27, 2022 13:34
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pog boyfriend posted:i recommend any other system. aside from being utterly horrible, pathfinder 1st edition is not friendly to new GMs at all as it requires an obscene amount of effort to create any sort of combat encounter and rules adjudications are very finicky. it took me about 3 years to be able to actually comfortably run the system. I kind of feel like anyone still playing pathfinder 1e is an expert, GM or player. Though if you want a much simpler OSR game than Basic Fantasy is almost identical to pathfinder 1e. It has positive AC and reflex/fortitude/will saves, so its basically OSR D20.
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Jul 27, 2022 13:40
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Rutibex posted:I kind of feel like anyone still playing pathfinder 1e is an expert, GM or player. Though if you want a much simpler OSR game than Basic Fantasy is almost identical to pathfinder 1e. It has positive AC and reflex/fortitude/will saves, so its basically OSR D20. eh, even player going to GM was really rough. one of my players tried this and found it absolutely miserable because of the amount of GM specific work for prep. basic fantasy is another good OSR title though, and mostly all OSR games can be used with 1e modules too
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Jul 27, 2022 13:42
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I recently tried Symbaroum which I'm really liking. It's light on rules, but has a lot of cool abilities and magic users have to balance their "corruption" or turn into horrible monsters
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Jul 27, 2022 13:47
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trapstar posted:A lot of my friends have been asking me to run a game (Many of who are DM's themselves who run games I play in) and I was just wondering what you guys would recommend being a good starting point for a seasoned player thinking of trying his hand at DMing? Any tips or advice? I will most likely be DMing for experienced players who I have preexisting personal friendships with. Run a good module you like. If your players aren't new and you know your system well, no need for it to be an introductory adventure or anything. Running a premade module will significantly reduce prep compared to homebrew, for most DMs (I know there are people who improv everything and my advice will not be pertinent to that style). You don't need to follow the story at all. I haven't read any Paizo material in ages, but I doubt their fantasy is any less generic than WotC, so you'll probably find that the module is basically just a convenient skeleton for whatever actual ideas you have to flesh out the narrative. I think that a really good example of someone overhauling an official campaign and putting it out for others to use is this remix of a D&D 5e adventure path, Dragon Heist. In general, I like the Alexandrian as a source of tips for dms, taking into account that he favors a more classic style so not everything may be applicable to your gaming table. He obviously presents everything in a very coherent and structured way that will almost certainly not resemble your prep in any way the first several times you play, but it can be a nice template. As far as the adventure itself, the most general tips I would feel comfortable suggesting to almost anyone: a) Don't prep your session as a linear story, think of encounters/scenes as vignettes that can be arranged in different sequences to reflect the possibilities of sandbox play. Some other soft suggestions to avoid blatantly railroading: let the story work for you sometimes - for example, develop an idea for your awesome tomb, then instead of sending your players to it, wait for there to be a reason for a tomb to show up. Alternatively, I think it's fine to occasionally prep a location or encounter and just insert it wherever the party decides to go, regardless of what path they end up choosing, but this is kind of just invisible railroading so use that resource judiciously. b) Key your dungeons: if you're in a dungeon with a map, label your rooms with numbers and describe what's in each. Make an "adversary roster," just a table that lists every enemy, their location, and anything noteworthy about their behavior or situation (4 Goblins, 2 Hobgoblins / Room 1 / fighting over leftover newt stew). This is just an organizational tip that has been very helpful for me in the past, and it used to be described in the core rulebooks but I started DMing in a vacuum and only stumbled into tips on how to actually run dungeons much later. c) Try to write summaries after your sessions to keep track of details that may have come up and which you might be prone to forget. I try to keep a 'party to-do list' with the group's goals, noting each individual character's goals if appropriate. Tosk fucked around with this message at 13:59 on Jul 27, 2022 |
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Jul 27, 2022 13:56
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