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Pollyanna posted:I thought up a weird situation where the PCs would be approaching an area where the GM all of a sudden starts getting nervous and then they encounter an NPC who the GM suddenly speaks for in the first person and it gets all meta and poo poo. I wonder if that’s ever been pulled off well before, but I suspect the answer is no. Would be funny but risky. Do you mean like some Holodeck Professor Moriarty thing where the NPC starts addressing the players directly instead of the PCs, e.g. "Hello Arathin, or should I say...Steve Jacobson"? I think you'd need to have a very particular sort of group for that to have any hope of being other than terrible.
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Feb 5, 2019 20:44
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Sanford posted:They got a handful appraised and have been really careful not to let anyone know they have more than maybe 250gp worth at any time. Through some weird rolls and even weirder decisions on their part the crime boss that owned the gems is dead, and so is the only member of the city guard who knew the players swiped the bag. They rolled two nat 20s in a row when the guard captain asked if they’d taken anything else from the mansion, and then two more in the following conversation. When fully 50% of your rolls in a social encounter are 20s you can pretty much do what you want. My usual go-to when I've hosed up and given the players an obscene amount of money by accident is a castle, guildhall or manor. In my experience almost everyone wants a house, and a base of operations works well for plot hooks.
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Feb 5, 2019 20:53
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One thing that I think has helped me run Phandelver is writing out cue cards with the quests ahead of time. The first time I did phandelver as a player, I had no idea really what we were doing, it was difficult to keep names and places separate, especially because the game can overload you a bit at the start; you get Gundren's name in the intro, and then you meet Sildar, and you might assume Sildar is Gundren but he's not, and he's been kidnapped but also Gundren has been kidnapped and he's been taken away by the leader of the goblins, but not the leader of the goblins who's in this cave, and not the leader of the goblins who's in the other part of this cave, but the even bigger leader who's in the castle which has the same name as this cave, and ultimately you want to find Wave Echo Cave, which isn't this cave with the big wave trap in it, it's a different cave which is the location of the Forge of Spells, which is also the mine owned by the Phandelver Pact, which isn't the same thing as Phandalin etc etc. Then on top of all those names and places, you reach Phandalin and depending on how thorough the group is, you then get blasted with six or seven side quests. So when the time came to run it as a DM, I made quest cards as references for my players, here are the ones I started them with: code:code:
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Feb 9, 2019 03:16
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Live Free posted:I'm planning an existential crisis campaign for D&D. Any ideas on how I can get the characters to question their reality? So far I'm leaning into blurring the lines between dreaming and the waking world, using a few different layers of twins/doppelgangers for important NPCs, and generally making their environment as mysterious as possible. At the start of the session, ask the players to tell you their perception modifier. Then ask them to tell you their wisdom saving throw modifier. Make a show of writing them down. Now whenever they need to make either of these, just ask them to roll a d20, and when they inevitably ask if they should add anything say "no, don't worry, I the stats here". Also start requesting them at random times and have them see weird but innocuous things, like a ball bouncing down a corridor ahead into another room. Is the weird thing because they passed a perception check or failed a wisdom saving throw? Spooooky Also pass players contradictory notes: Note to player 1: "You hear a voice in the distance, like someone calling for help" Note to player 2: "You briefly see player 1's eyes glaze over, turning milky white before returning to normal" Note to player 3: "You see player 2 close his eyes tightly and pinch the bridge of his nose. His eyes then snap open, straight at player 1." Reveilled fucked around with this message at 00:26 on Feb 17, 2019 |
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Feb 17, 2019 00:16
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EDIT: double post weirdness
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Feb 17, 2019 00:22
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Regarding maps and travel, one of the interesting things about historical travel is that ancient maps shared more in common with modern subway maps than physical ones. A Roman map for a traveller was called an Itinerarium and one of the surviving ones shows the known world from Britain all the way to Sri Lanka, with the towns connected by straight lines representing the roads, and basically no other features except major rivers and major mountain ranges. Even simple things like curves in the road are literally not relevant to someone travelling, just distance in miles and distance in days. Supposedly it took about 80 days to travel from Britain to Syria (mostly by ship), about 2,300 miles, but about 30 days to travel from Belgium to Milan (over land), about 500 miles. I think that generally, a world map similar to an itinerarium is better than a modern-style map for campaigns set in any sort of civilisation with a road network; if the players need a map from Dunsburgh to Bitterroot, write both towns names, circle them, draw a line between the two and write “five days” above it. The best thing about it is it encourages you the setting designer to put multiple towns along the same road, so the players travelling to a big city at level 14 get to pass through the village they saved when they were level 3 again and see what’s going on.
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Feb 25, 2019 19:12
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:yessssssssssssssss I might steal it too, with my players being in their 50s I don't even think I'd need to make up jargon to stop metagaming, "this is a dps race but you need to CC the adds so they won't drop a hot on the boss" or "you'll need an aggro reset for this fight" will be equally incomprehensible to both players and characters.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:59
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My go-to when I don't have an appropriate mini is d6s in a variety of colours, I find it much easier to keep track of which monster is which if I can mark them as "red,3" in my notes behind the screen.
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Apr 14, 2019 10:48
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kidkissinger posted:I know this isn't QUITE the right thread, but I'm looking for some character concepts, and you're the baddest dudes I know for the job. How about in addition to being a craftsperson (could be anything, but let's say florist for now), you had an additional honorary role as [hometown]'s town crier, a position of great respect in [occupied country]'s culture, signifying you as one of the most well regarded and trustworthy people in the town. Of course, when [country] got occupied, one of the first things the new rulers did was kick out the old town criers along with the people in charge, and replaced them with toadies willing to say whatever the new regime wanted. And wouldn't you know it, they picked that loving scumbag Victor Quisling, the guy who was always undercutting you by buying up old roses and pulling off dead petals and giving good florists like you a bad name and oh gods it makes your blood boil-- And yeah, sure, there's lots of people in the resistance, from the prince who wants his kingdom back to the girl out for revenge because her parents were murdered. Lots of good, noble reasons to fight the oppression, which you support. But really, deep down, deep deep down, you just want your hat and bell back so you can ring it in Victor's stupid face and scream "HEAR YE HEAR YE, VICTOR IS A LYING SCUMMY PIECE OF poo poo"
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Apr 21, 2019 20:53
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I think you do have to be careful if your have a very adversarial cult who seems like they could be anyone, because sometimes players who get burned once by that sort of thing become paranoid wrecks that are painful to RP with because they adopt a policy of telling literally nobody anything ever. Some players are very good in that environment as fake names and cover stories just roll off their tongues, others just freeze up because they're worried if they say anything it will get used against them.
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Jun 13, 2019 18:15
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Baller Ina posted:I want to have an upcoming magic item curse the user with a degree of paranoia, but nothing too punishing. Any off-the-cuff ideas for something mild enough to offset a Weapon of Warning, thread? Perhaps the item lets you cast detect thoughts twice per day, but the item's curse is that it always reports stuff like the following as the target's thoughts: 1) The target seems to have no thoughts at all, as if they're a construct or an illusion 2) The target is mentally repeating "don't think about it. don't think about it. They can read your thoughts, don't think about it." 3) The target is mentally repeating "if you can hear this, don't react. We're being watched." 4) The target is idly pondering rumours they've heard about the item's owner 5) The target is casually fantasising about violently murdering the item's owner and their companions. Delving deeper into the target's mind reveals details of a shadowy and elaborate plot against the item's owner. Maybe even give the weapon some sort of semi-cryptic warning it comes with, that you might not like what you learn about other people if you read their minds. The downside to something like this, I guess, is that it might lead to the players going off on massive wild goose chases to try to stop the conspiracy their weapon-weilding companion has convinced them is actually real. But then again, maybe it's not paranoia after all, and people really are out to get the PCs.
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Jul 28, 2019 13:05
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Question for anyone who ran the Autumn version of Dragon Heist. In the conclusion, Jarlaxle is supposed to show up and deliver a "give me the gold" ultimatum. Does that actually feel like a decent conclusion? My current run through the adventure is almost certainly at this point going to end up with the Harpers showing up in similar circumstances and demanding the money be handed over to the city, and I'm a bit worried it might be a little bit of a letdown to have defeat be snatched from the jaws of victory for the players who want to keep the money but have made absolutely no effort to find friends and allies and rebuffed all such offers. Still a victory for the two PCs who blab everything to their harper boss (promotions!), but I do want everyone to have fun, even if the more mercenary PCs have to face the consequences of being fiercely independent Jimmy Nae Pals.
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Aug 13, 2019 01:43
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Tea Bone posted:it’s an ancient prophecy about the end of the world”? It’s a very recent prophecy about the end of the world, the prophet is probably still alive. Maybe it’s even a letter with a return address Reveilled fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Sep 19, 2019 |
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Sep 19, 2019 16:40
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Speaking of greek gods I could use some ideas for a greek-themed campaign I'm planning, very loosely based upon the Canterbury Tales. I've wanted for a long time to run a campaign themed around the idea of a pilgrimage. Pilgrimages were a huge part of medieval literature and fiction and even travelogues, but they're almost entirely absent from modern fantasy, which I think is a real shame. So my general idea is this: long long ago, a group of heroes went on an epic journey across the lands of the kingdom of Megalopolis, to save it from a curse laid down by Hermes after the king executed a messenger from an invading army. They visited the shrines of the twelve gods, and through their labours won a reprieve for the city, sparing it from Hermes' wrath. Now, around a thousand years later, citizens of the Megalopean Empire make the pilgrimage for their own reasons, for absolution, spiritual need, or simple career advancement. The main campaign will actually be the heroes' story of how they saved Megalopolis, but the way we'll be telling it is through the framing narrative of the pilgrims as they retrace the steps of those heroes many years later. Each shrine the pilgrims visit is the site of some heroic deed by the heroes where they convinced one of the gods to oppose Hermes. But so the pilgrims aren't just a mere framing story, I do want to have the players also each be one of the pilgrims, and as a sort of break between the heroic adventures we'll be covering the much more mundane adventures of the pilgrims on the journey. So where the heroes might gain Aphrodite's favour by cleansing one of her shrines of vampires masquerading as her priests, the pilgrims have to arrange a wedding in the same (now purified) temple. What I'm looking for help on are some ideas for one-shots that are low-level mundane-ish things which could make for fun one session adventures. Some of them might be explicit trials the pilgrims do as part of the pilgrimage, or they might be unexpected complications on the journey, or just coincidental events which happen to take place while they are present. At the moment I've got: [start] Ares - ??? Athena - A murder mystery due to the wisdom angle, maybe? Hestia - ??? Hermes - ??? Artemis - Hunting, obviously. Maybe something or someone is hunting the pilgrims and they turn the tables. Poseidon - Pirates Aphrodite - A Wedding Hades - A Funeral Hephaestus - ??? Demeter - Planning to have this be more about an arduous mountain climb to pray for rain Apollo - ??? Hera - Pilgrims save the city and become heroes in their own right [end] Though I'm eager to change the ideas if people have better ones. I have the general plot beats of the heroic side of the story planned out, so I don't need as many ideas on that side, though I wouldn't mind an idea for what the cool adventure on the moon would be for Apollo's quest.
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Apr 12, 2020 16:42
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How about this for the plane: LuxAir flight 451 takes off in the early hours of the morning from Kennedy Airport, bound for London. 15 minutes into the flight, an electrical fault causes total power loss to one of the left engines. Continuing electrical issues cause the plane to turn around and head back to Kennedy. A few minutes into the return, hijackers seize the plane. They claim there is a bomb on board, and demand the authorities provide a replacement electrical system, which they intend to install themselves and fly the plane to another country. If their demands are not met, they will detonate the bomb. The "hijackers" here are actually a criminal team that takes shady jobs from corps (I don't know what Cyberpunk 2020 calls Shadowrunners). They were sold this job as being simple, a rival corp wants to tank LuxAir's image, so they're planning a sabotage campaign of minor faults and such to suggest their planes are not safe. All the crew has to do is get onboard the plane, sabotage the electrical system to make the plane turn around. Then they disembark with everyone else, and nobody ever knows it was foul play. Except. When the team's electro-tech sabotages the electrical system, her jury-rigged kit picks up the initiation of a timing circuit in the cargo hold of the plane...this isn't a simple campaign of minor faults, the rival corp intends to blow up the plane as it comes into land, in the morning sky over a major city. The criminal team quickly determine a few things: one, there's no way to survive if the bomb goes off; two, there's no way to disable the bomb without getting access to the cargo hold; and three, Even if disarmed, the rival corp will almost certainly pin the whole thing on them, and if somehow that doesn't work, kill them for knowing too much. So they decide to hijack the plane. They disarm the bomb, and demand the replacement parts they need to fix their sabotage and get away. Obviously, the players can't let some random hijackers self-install an electrical system and let a plane full of passengers fly off with them. Possibly the players might have a way to determine that the bomb is not active, making it clear the hijackers threats are empty, though I imagine until they get a look at the bomb directly they will assume it is either fake or hasn't functioned correctly. If the hijackers are taken alive, they'll spill what they know, but failing that the major clues that all is not as it seems are that the bomb shows clear signs of having been directly disarmed after its initial activation (suggesting someone on the plane disarmed it), and that the bomb is expertly made to create the appearance of an electrical spark igniting the fuel reserves, which would make it look exactly like an accident had it gone off (hijackers wouldn't care about that, and terrorists would want the exact opposite). Ultimately this would transition into working out the background info, leading to a particular corp. The players need to determine how the bomb got on the plane in the first place, backtrack through the hijackers criminal connections, etc.
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May 31, 2020 09:42
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If I ever convince my group to try something other than 5e, I might give it a go! 
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Jun 1, 2020 13:44
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Foolster41 posted:There's some good stuff there, I like the idea of it being a rival airline company trying to discredit a new line of planes from an allied areotech corp. - It's the difference between "did you hear about the plane crash" and "did you see the explosion?" If everyone gets to see the fireball in the sky as they're having breakfast, it's more memorable. Plus there will be reporters on the scene immediately, the burning wreckage will be on the news for days. Heck, maybe people on the ground will die too for maximum tragedy! That's more dramatic than just a plane which vanishes over the sea. I'm imagining an exec in a meeting room with his corp's Black Hat Team telling his underlings that he wants LuxAir's jet to become "another loving Hindenberg". - Eh, that's a good question, but to be clear, the corp weren't hiring hijackers, the expectation the corp has was that the hired crew would get blown up along with everyone else without ever realising they were in danger. So the question I guess is more, "if the plan is to blow the plane up, why hire someone to sabotage the electrics?", and maybe the answer to that is something like "if the state-of-the-art electrical system hadn't been sabotaged, the sensors on the plane would have detected the bomb". Or some other reason. - I'd argue that should be one of the central questions of the scenario. Maybe a maintainence crew are routinely smuggling goods in the cargo spaces and were paid off or blackmailed by the corp. Or maybe in order to get their gear on board, the hired crew had to create a security hole which the corp then exploited to get the bomb on. Or some other method.
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Jun 2, 2020 15:53
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Foolster41 posted:So, part of the sabotage accidentally also caused the engine to fail, and have them come back? Interesting. Well, it could be if you want, but no, the opposite was what I was meaning with the original suggestion. The saboteurs initially think their only job is to break the electrical system, forcing the plane to turn around. In the scenario described, the nature of the fault is that the saboteurs short the electrics to cut power to one of the engines. The plan that’s sold to them is that they’re a small part of a larger campaign against the airline, so it’s just “get on as a passenger -> sabotage and force return to airport -> get off as a passenger”. Simple job, easy money, nobody even gets hurt. But the real plan is “get suckers into plane -> have them short the electrics, forcing a return to the airport and disabling the sensors that would detect a bomb -> explode competitor’s plane in sky over a major city” The saboteurs, however, realise they are being set up when their own equipment detects the bomb after disabling the electrics.
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Jun 3, 2020 08:24
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The train makes its way north. It's been a few days, the countryside rolls by. There's a wizard tower, up on a hill in the middle distance. As the train nears, the sky turns a strange shade of purple. The clouds begin to swirl, the rain starts up, but it's strange, not water, some sort of...oil? As it runs down the windows, the droplets make strange noises, clear pure tones, like perfect sine waves. The clouds swril faster and faster, lavender lighting begins to pulse through the clouds. Something is happening up at that old tower, and then *CRACK* a bolt strikes the roof of the tower, and now a coud is descending directly onto the land, rushing out from the tower. The train engineer stumbles backward out of the engine, mouth foaming, raving about circles. Circles. The cloud is getting closer, but there's a tunnel up ahead, the conductor suggests maybe the train could get there in time. Just as the train reaches the tunnel, the lights go out. Darkness. Then, the lights come back up, in that comforting, familiar lavender glow. Outside the windows of the train, there is nothing. Not darkness, nothing. If characters attempt to leave, to place their arms outside the carriage, you express confusion about what they mean by "outside". Once the players get their bearings, a new problem: the engine is gone. The front carriage now connects to the rear carriage, a perfect loop. --- No idea where to go from there. The players have to find the engine? Perhaps the train is now somehow connected to the tower (it could be the tower from that A Wizard game mentioned in the 5e thread, or just something else). EDIT: If you want true horror, have the train encounter the worst nightmare of every train user: Leaves on the Line. Rebuff all attempts by the party to solve the problem, as Leaves on the Line is an eldritch god which no man or machine can hope to triumph against. In his presence, All Must Stop. Reveilled fucked around with this message at 12:47 on Jun 30, 2020 |
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Jun 30, 2020 12:43
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Sanford posted:Thanks for the ideas everyone. I went with another passenger being another disguised noble, and let the players overhear some bounty hunters talking about taking him prisoner. They obviously assumed the bounty hunters were talking about them. Then I let them overhear the head of the guard on the train (faction they have a nominal truce with) talking about how the companions should be killed but the target should be allowed to believe he is entering the city under his own free will. This conversation was actually about the head of the bounty hunters but again they assumed it was about them. They ended up pitching in on the side of their enemy to defeat the bounty hunters, and then immediately decided they'd picked the wrong side. Next session, train heiest with one of the targets being the bounty hunter who's now held captive in the guard car. If you can get access to a 3D printer, maybe a Heroforge mini of his character?
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Jul 1, 2020 13:02
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Sanford posted:Got myself tangled up in a bit of in-game lore and could do with some help. I asked a player to describe his city and then his sister and now I’m stuck! "Does it bother me? Of course it bothers me. But you need to see the bigger picture here. Suppose the truth was known to everyone. What happens? All the other settlements stop paying tribute. The food we need to live stops arriving at our gates. What will the people of Vultan's Wall do? Just curl up and starve, next to an empty bowl and a loaded crossbow? I'll tell you what they'll do, they'll march right out of their gates and start taking the tribute. You think all the soft southern cities are going to be able to stop them? It'd be civil war, a bloodbath, and could easily end in Vultan's Wall just sitting back on top with slaves instead of tributaries. How many lives is the truth worth brother? How many would you condemn to die in the name of honesty? It's not pleasant, but the status quo is the best we can do right now. Maybe, if I can become commander, we can start scaling back, reduce the tribute, gradually, over time. Give Vultan's Wall time to develop into something more than a frozen city sustained by others. I don't like the lie, but the truth is worse."
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Jul 21, 2020 13:57
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I was imagining she might support selling off the defences on the basis that it would make it easier to then reduce the tribute at a later date due to lower maintainence costs, maybe believing that the money coul dbe used to fuel Vultam's development toward self-sufficiency, but that's harder to justify if she knows the population only has like 5% of its claimed population. At that point the city won't be doing poo poo either way and I'd struggle to see a need to keep up the charade if they're actually lawful good. Maybe she's part of, or even leading, a conspiracy to overthrow Commander McBear? Possibly Commander McBear knows full well about the extent and nature of the plot, but doesn't actually give much of a poo poo because worst case scenario, he's overthrown, Sister dismantles the tribute system and completes the draw down of the defences, and then Oops, All Giants. Now Sister goes down in history as the person who let the giants win! Or maybe, and stay with me here, maybe PC's Sister has actually been kidnapped/imprisoned and the person claiming to be PC's Sister is actually a secret Bear. Nobody believes PC that Sister is a Bear.
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Jul 21, 2020 15:02
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:My players are about to lie their way into a fancy, inbred half-elf aristocrat’s party to try and figure out who stole his giant gem and why (maybe the drow? Idk) and I have no idea what to prepare and what to prepare for. Just have some NPCs ready to go? Probably a map of his mansion? I think parties do benefit from a bit of extra prep if you want them to really feel like a party. Unless you think there's going to be actual combat, I'd actually recommend against preparing a map, and if you do think there'll be combat, don't show the party the map until someone wants to start a fight. At most, a rough seating plan for the dining table (if it's a dinner party), or if there are discrete groups at the party, a diagram of the main room showing that Lady Chatterley's clique is over in this corner, while Lord Darnley's and his friends are over here by the fireplace. Instead, I'd recommend finding pictures of the various rooms the party is taking place in, and show these to the players as they move from room to room, basically the same way a visual novel would. It's easier to convey the feeling of an opulent space through that sort of imagery than a floorplan, and players will focus on the social aspects of a party more when they're not doing the "have a plan to kill everyone you meet" thing that bringing out the miniatures can do. At any party, there's always more than one thing taking place. There's the party in the main room, and there's the "party" in the side room where some of the people who don't really like parties have congregated to argue about politics or anime or D&D or whatever. For these things, I'd make a list of 10 people I expect to be at the party. Hopefully you have about 10 local nobles or notables who could be in attendance, if not, make some up! Then have topics of conversation and events which happen at the party. If the players are planning to participate in the party, these topics of conversation can be used to give the NPCs something to talk about. If the players are fish out of water, it can be banal gossip about people they're expected to know, or stuff about some politics bullshit that the nobles care a lot about, this also means you can kind of make it up on the spot (e.g. Lord Darnley tells the players "The main reason I'm really here is to see if Lady Chatterley and Countess Sophia get into a fistfight again like at the ball last week. Highly entertaining, a shame you missed it." ) You also want to prep a few events, the sort of things people who went to the party will tell people about the next day. Maybe Lord Darnley gets so drunk he does sexy dancing on a table. Maybe Lady Chatterley and Countess Sophia do get into another fistfight. There's also the cooking and serving and washing dishes taking place in the back (and possibly an afterparty for the servants once the nobles are done). You don't need to do any prep for this unless it will be relevant, but if the servants' side of the party is going to be part of the group's infiltration, you want to prep some of the servants (you can prep fewer main partygoers). And then there's the actually interesting thing you want to prep, which is whatever's secretly happening at the party that you want the group to catch on to. Make sure you think up some private areas for the party. That might be the Noble's art gallery, or some bedrooms, a study, an entire abandoned wing, or a hidden area. At almost every fictional party, the real drama happens in the private area. Some of your partygoers should be in these areas from time to time. Maybe they're drunkenly making out, or a teenager dragged along by her parents goes off to explore the abandoned wing, or the host and a guest go off to discuss some shady "business", but if the players see people going off to private rooms, they know those rooms exist, and can then use them to their advantage. You get different sorts of drama depending on if the players see the NPCs going to those rooms vs leaving those rooms vs being themselves invited to those rooms. This is where the events at the public party come in, they command the attention of the guests, giving your players or the NPCs the opportunity to slip away unnoticed. That might seem a bit overkill, I'm not sure, but at an absolute minimum here's what I do: Obtain at least two pictures, one of the main party room, one of the private space relevant to the PCs interests. Have these visible when PCs are in them. Make a list of at least 10 NPCs, usually attendees but possibly some servants. If you need to make people up, this can just be name and profession/title, but I'd recommend at least one relationship (e.g. "Wife of Lady Chatterley") Make a list of 5 topics of conversation. Make a list of at least 2 memorable events that steal the party-goers' attention. Make sure at least some of the attendees move off to one of the private spaces at some point during proceedings to make clear those spaces exist and can be visited. Reveilled fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Jul 30, 2020 |
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Jul 30, 2020 16:54
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Soup Inspector posted:I'll have to try out the 7-3-1 technique some time, it sounds pretty useful! #1: wait a while before doing the imperials’ escape. If the players have time to find out there’s a spy in their midst, through clues and such it’s less likely to be bullshit. Maybe have the captain “catch” and execute a spy. That might prompt the players to trust the captain more, or it might plant the idea of spies in their head. Make sure that when the escape takes place, the PCs are in a position to attempt to stop it. Maybe it’s a running battle through a spaceport as the players face a countdown until their ship launches, so it’s a race against time. #2: if the ship has been feeding the empire info, then it’s escape at least helps the party go to ground and be hidden again. The blueprints of the ship could be very valuable in terms of a monetary reward. A Holocron or something might be loot on the ship. #3: if the ship needs a large crew, that comes with challenges. If they’re working with the rebellion, is there going to be disagreement over who controls the ship? If they’re working alone, how do they pay for its upkeep? #4: the easy but maybe not genre appropriate answer is to have the imperials just act like human beings. Have them cry, have them beg for their lives, show pictures of their children. When they’re in the airlock, have them hug one another.
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Aug 27, 2020 20:24
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:But then they find ?????? A dusty old book titled "How to cook forty children"? If you feel like getting Shakespearean, fenny snake fillets and hell-broth (which could just be a spicy soup). You could go all the way to dessert without actually doing cannibalism, and then the dessert could be something very simple like strawberry jelly/jello with vanilla ice cream, and then have the hags idly comment to each other that the gelatin they got from little Timmy's bones seems particularly high quality compared to some of the other kids. Or if your players don't know where gelatin comes from, suggest one of them Google it after dinner.
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Aug 30, 2020 23:48
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Declan MacManus posted:in the planning phases of running curse of strahd and i can't help but notice that the vistani are incredibly racist depictions of the roma people! what's the standard fix for this? i'd rather not cut them out of the campaign entirely if i can help it I've seen this post make the rounds as one way to rework the vistani: https://www.reddit.com/r/CurseofStrahd/comments/8ymg7y/fleshing_out_curse_of_strahd_tser_pool_the/
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Sep 18, 2020 00:49
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Could someone who has Rime of the Frostmaiden spoil the deal with the buried netherese city for me? I've got a rough trilogy campaign planned out covering Dragon Heist, Descent into Avernus and Rime of the Frostmaiden, and I want to do some foreshadowing of the events in Rime when we kick off Descent in a few months. My understanding of the broad story arc in Rime is (huge spoilers if what I've been told is true) You kill Auril the goddess of Winter, or her avatar maybe? And then something something buried netherese city. Broad strokes that I'm hoping can slot in well here: In my campaign's version of FR, Mephistopheles lord of the Eighth was destroyed during his invasion of Waterdeep back in around 1372DR and replaced by the mortal who defeated him. She split Mephisopheles soul into three gems, and her long term plan is to swallow Auril and become Faerun's god of Winter. Rime of the Frostmaiden, from what I've heard, sounds like it will work perfectly for this, but it kind of depends what happens in that city at the end of the adventure.
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Sep 27, 2020 15:42
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MonsterEnvy posted:I am about to work, so I don't have time to go over it now. But I will do a run down in a few hours later. Much appreciated, thanks
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Sep 28, 2020 15:13
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Ahh, that's perfect, thank you. That's going to work perfectly with only a few minor adjustments.
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Sep 28, 2020 18:11
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If this is a particularly long climb, one possible challenge they might face is needing to spend a night on the glacier. How do they deal with the cold? What precautions do they take to allow them to sleep without falling?
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Oct 5, 2020 01:08
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Sanford posted:Got a bit of a weird one, because the correct advice should be "let the players die". In the game I'm running for kids one of them has very little subtelty. He gets very excited and his response to, say, a crowded temple filled with hostile cultists would be to leap off the balcony and shout "FBI! EVERYBODY FREEZE!". This means I have to repeatedly introduce deus ex machina solutions, fudge dice, or just trickle out enemies a few at a time for no good reason. It turns it from a game we're all playing to a story me and his dad are telling the boys, which is much less engaging and he's said it's boring when it's just waves of enemies. Any ideas for ways to break up a fight in a natural seeming way, after a player has (loudly) revealed his presence? I'm not looking for the solution, just anything I might throw in. I have done "aha hero you have revealed yourself, now you must face me/my champion in single combat" to death, and "does it look like we could pull the ceiling down?" has become a cliché. If the problem is that the players are charging into huge groups of enemies, or into large complexes loudly enough that it pulls every combatant in the building, could you put them in different situations instead? Like, if I'm designing a story for my PCs and I know I'm going to massively fudge things in the crowded temple if the party just charge in (and the party enjoys charging in), I'm going to have a long think about whether that temple needs to be crowded. As the DM, you can decide that the PCs are arriving during a smaller service, or while there is no service taking place, making the encounter small enough that the player leaping over the balcony is a reasonable decision, rather than a reckless one. It sounds like you want to know how to stop your party getting TPKd when they charge into your combat encounter which was designed with caution and restraint in mind, when I'd say the solution (especially in a game for kids) is "stop designing combat encounters which need caution and restraint". For players who like kicking in the door and leaping straight to combat, single encounter locations work well. If the players are raiding the houses and small shrines of a cult, "FBI! EVERYBODY FREEZE!" works well because there's only going to be four or five combatants in the building. Once that fight is over, it's over. You can drop in clues then to other locations, and they can decide which location's door to go kick in next. A traditional old-school dungeon is another good environment for this sort of gameplay, where territorial monsters are unlikely to come to each others' aid. Reveilled fucked around with this message at 10:04 on Oct 7, 2020 |
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Oct 7, 2020 09:59
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I do the pause for thought a fair bit and if you handle it right I think it enhances the experience rather than detracting. When you as the GM say you need to think for a minute about what the consequences will be of something the players have just done, it tells the players their actions actually matter in your game world. If you have to think for a moment to answer a question about what someone is doing or where they are, it emphasises that the world goes on and time passes even when the players aren't directly observing events.
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Oct 26, 2020 11:04
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I feel like Microscope loses some of its magic if the players don't individually have god-like agency over the world. It might work if you're up for one player just deciding that The Explosion of the Moon happens two weeks into the timeskip. If it's "Microscope, but you only decide what the players can do" I think that's better handled differently. Damned if I know what would be a good system though. What I'd be inclined to do is just lay out the major events of that year in sequence, and then do the timeskip between sessions on something like WhatsApp or Discord simply as pure narrative. Literally just "In January, [event] happens. What does the group do? What do you do between that and the next event?" I'd tend to assume the players achieve anything they set their minds to--they perform truly heroic feats on a daily basis after all--and at the end of the year just work out where things stand and where to pick up the campaign. Some sort of messenger based gameplay lets you move that time skip off-table completely (resolving the issue of glacial pace) while still allowing the players agency in what they do. The slower nature of written comms might help some players actually structure their long-term goals and actions in a way they can't at the table. Breaking it into chunks of months at a time impart some idea that there's a "turn" structure but with only a small number of turns before it gets to next week and we're back at the table.
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Nov 10, 2020 02:02
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In terms of communicating the threat, my recommendation would be to define a "point of no return", the point at which the group cannot reasonably leave without fighting their way out, and then gradually escalate the inherent danger of the situation until they actually go into the council chamber. This gives them ample opportunity to decide, "plan's off, we're fighting". Step 1 is getting inside the council building, make sure to narrate the defences that might make it hard to escape. Then the weapon search, the removal of focuses and so on. Then a chance meeting with a member of the council in the hallway as they're being escorted, seems very friendly but then...gets a sending spell or something, makes exuses to leave, looks worried. Then the meeting is in the underground section of the hall; they explain it's to protect against magical scrying, but uh, seems a tad worrisome. etc. In terms of blocking spellcasting once captured, here's how I'd restrain a spellcaster (assuming put them in heavy armor won't work due to proficiency or availability). First up, blindfold them or force them into darkness. Lots of spells rely on seeing a target, no sight rules those spells out even if there's a subtle spell caster to get past literally everything else. A gag will stop verbal components, but since spellcasting requires extremely precise magic words, you don't necessarily need to block speech to block spellcasting; a partial obstruction of the mouth, or a local anasthetic that numbs the tongue, or something which forces the jaw open could all allow communication without allowing verbal spells. For somantic components it's the fingers you really need to worry about, gloves with the fingers stitched together that are cursed to be removable only when a command word is spoken prevent somatic components without preventing players from using their hands relatively freely. That might sound like overkill in terms of specifics, but the advantage of doing this over anti-magical manacles is it lets your PCs once captured actually move their arms and speak to each other, and come up with a plan. They have two problems to solve; get back verbal components, or get back somantic components, the the other, then an ambush of the guards when the magical darkness is briefly smothered to allow a transfer or something. Whereas anti-magic manacles positively scream "Wait around until the DM cutscenes you in an opportunity".
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Dec 2, 2020 02:31
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Zodack posted:I've got a question about Find Familiar (we all saw this coming): I go with generalities like "your familiar sends you flashes of danger, three goblins". I play online so if a wizard wants to see through the familiar's eyes, I just give them sight through the familiar's token, but since I used a battlemat in real life games I'd pretty much do the same; it's describing the environment in basic terms vs actually drawing it on the mat. I've only had one campaign with a player who had a familiar so far, though, but that worked fine for me. Once the familiar had a circlet of intellect, that let me be as descriptive as I possibly could so the vagueness of description went out the window.
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Jan 18, 2021 11:28
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Morpheus posted:By jove I do say shall we ready the blast rockets? Mm, tally ho and waarg and what not *adjusts monocles* Ready the blood axes, chaps. The Orcish East India Company
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Apr 7, 2021 14:54
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One thing I always like to have for investigations are props. Written notes are among the most helpful, but for a game set during WWI, I'd probably want to include a photograph and maybe something like dogtags, leave papers, a forged passport. The idea being that since in principle for the investigation the players need to piece together the clues and say the magic words "we are going to [location/person/action that solves the mystery]", you want physical clues that the players can look at if their notes were not sufficient, to rebuild the minimum info. To that end, possible additonal actions which could count as "successes": People in the inn can point the group to Remi, an old communist who previously handled defectors as well as deserters. He's slow to trust, since he's an enemy of both sides in the conflict, but he does have letters from the defector that contain clues to his whereabouts. Can the players convince the old man that the defector is safer with them? The defector had a sweetheart in Belgium, who fled south with the advancing front and now lives here (maybe the people at the inn mention the group's not the only people who've asked about this defector, foreshadowing the doppleganger). She has a photograph of the defector which will help them identify the real man. And maybe she mentions that she didn't ask anybody at the inn about him. A traumatised deserter is hiding in a farmhouse, he mumbles about having seen a creature eat his friend's brain, how he saw his friend's life flash before his eyes, how he felt the torment and anguish of his friend's death as the psychic torment of his friend's identity being devoured leaked out from the creature's mouth. He touches one of the players, and they see the same thing, the friend's life, the friend's death. The deserter has the friend's dogtags still, but they have become blank, as if he never existed. Another thing I'd consider is whether to scrap the inn and replace it with a pub. Villages don't really have inns, and unless the town was a tourist attraction pre-war it probably doesn't have any sort of rentable accomodation. If the group needs to stay overnight during their investigation, that means either camping out (good opportunity for a scary occult encounter), or getting the villagers to agree to let them stay the night in their homes (good opportunities for social encounters). Alternatively, if we're a little behind the lines, perhaps there's a manor which has been commandeered by a senior French officer for his use while away from the front itself. He's been gone a few weeks, so the manor is empty...isn't it?
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Apr 14, 2021 13:25
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The pirates have some sort of artifact on their ship from a far off place [insert location for a hook to your high seas adventure here]. They don't know what it does, but while visiting the pirates, Clayborn fiddled with it and activated it. Its strange magic now keeps everyone on the island. Perhaps it is from a ruin which was used by an ancient empire as a prison, and it is massaging the minds of the island's inhabitants to remove their desire to leave. Because Clayborn activated it, the relic has designated him "Warden" and so he's the only one who really knows what's going on. The relic determined that the town's inhabitants were the "prisoners" and the pirates were the "guards", but when the pirates immediately began discussing how they could rule over the island as a personal fiefdom using the relic's power, Clayborn meddled further and tried to swap the relationship, making the town "guards" and the pirates "prisoners". This hosed everything up, and now both the pirates and the town are simultaneously prisoners and guards, both groups unable to leave the island and unable to articulate why, linked by a mental connection, but otherwise in posession of their full free will.
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May 2, 2021 01:51
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If you're really passionate about a piece of your own lore, a good way to get players invested in that is to make it part of a quest, directly, rather than letting it sit in the background. If you love the idea of the players striking out into Deadspace, give them a concrete reason to go that aligns with their own interests. e.g. The rebels are running short on funds, and you run a mission or two around robbing banks or whatever, and then they report back to one of the rebel commanders, and she's in the middle of a meeting with the head of the rebellion advocating strongly for going after the Buried Fortune of Space Pirate Russel, which rumour has it is on Discordia V, deep in Deadspace. Then she suggests they look into it unofficially when the rebel leader shuts her down. Then you build clues and mysteries around Space Pirate Russel, Discordia V, a safe route through Deadspace, etc. The reward for learning your lore, now, is threefold: it serves their player directed aim of helping the rebellion, it gives them a cool adventure that's a bit different from the current jobs, and it probably also gives them a shitton of money. Nothing wrong with a lore document, in principle, but if I were making one, I think what I'd do maybe is have each piece of lore include a bunch of keywords, to make it easily searchable, since chances are nobody but you is actually gonna read it. The best you can really hope for is that players find a new piece of lore, and cross check it against their lore database (your document). but I'd strongly prefer introducing lore in discreet chunks that have concrete relevance to the situation, meaning the players have to only keep maybe 4 or 5 lore facts in their head at a time. If they remember them after you're done with that chunk of lore, just treat that as a happy accident.
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May 4, 2021 16:26
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It's not a dumb idea, but I would say it's kind of like DMing on hard mode if you leap straight into a fully homebrewed campaign, because you have to do basically everything yourself. Good on you for jumping in, though! A few thoughts on your idea: I'd recommend being upfront with your players that the adventure is going to start with them in captivity, since you're going to take away their starting gear at first. If you don't tell them this, then one of their first experiences with you as DM is going to be finding out you've taken the toys they're supposed to start with away, which can feel quite unfair. Make it clear they'll get their starting gear back by the end of the first session. Starting a campaign with a get to know each other RP chat can be kind of awkward, so I'd recommend giving a conversation starter to them; work with each one before the game to establish exactly how and where they were captured, and then your NPC can ask the group about that, giving them all a useful piece of information to share other than their name. More broadly, be prepared for the NPC to do most of the talking as the PCs may sit in awkward silence waiting for something to happen, since there's nothing they can actually do for the first few minutes to influence things. What happens if a PC says they're staying close to your NPC? Or if the players ask where the NPC is in the first round or so of combat? After escape into the city, what's the motivation for the party to stick together rather than just go their separate ways? How I personally would be inclined to run this as an opening is to have each player introduce their character to the group out of character, including you and the NPC, and, rather than have the whole arena combat be disorienting, establish in the opening narration that the party have been in the arena for about a week. I'd be inclined to have the party know about the NPC's escape plan, and craft an opening scenario where the PCs goal is to be as distracting and entertaining as possible while the NPC gets the door open. The reason I'd do this is that it lets me start the game with the action directly, my opening narration can conclude with the door to the arena floor sliding open which feels more "punchy" to me as a campaign opener. This also helps establish trust in the NPC I want the PCs to befriend; if they were part of his or her scheme to begin with, the first in game interaction they have is right after the NPC has followed through on their promise to bust them all out. It also lets me have the NPC allude to things which happened "off stage" that build trust and cameraderie, like if the party finds some rations in the escape, the NPC can give one player half to say thanks for saving them during some previous combat we didn't see. If the engine of the campaign turns on the PCs caring about the NPC who is murdered, I'd consider it really important to make as sure as possible that every player and every player character likes the NPC. None of that is to say you should do it that way! Just some ideas on how to get the players to care about the NPC, because it sounds like the worst thing that could happen for your campaign is for the NPC to get murdered and someone to pipe up "I didn't really trust the guy anyway". As to whether this is enough activity for 2 x 3hr sessions, I'd say both yes and no. Yes, in the sense that I'd estimate the arena + escape to take 2 sessions because you've predicted it will take 1 and in my experience groups always move slower than the DM predicts. But no in the sense that you're expecting the players to reach the end of that by the end of session 1, and so session 2 should be the post-escape portion, but all you've noted for that is "things open up in terms of how they proceed, but the NPC who has helped them (and who they hopefully build some trust and loyalty to) will be murdered", which is very vague for a whole session. Obviously you might have just as much prepped for that as for the arena+escape and just didn't mention it.
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May 26, 2021 09:12
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