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Does anyone have any particular advice, or favorite suggestions for sources to read, on how to design dungeons? My dungeon-crawls have always been narrative driven and I'm interested in at least attempting to run something a little more like the dungeons included in modules. Tosk fucked around with this message at 03:57 on Jun 5, 2022 |
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Jun 5, 2022 03:02
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:for what game, because good answers to this question won't even necessarily involve the same subject matter I usually GM 5e nowadays. Hieronymous Alloy posted:For a short, quick first principle, remember the dungeon was built for a reason, which probably is different from how its being used today. Moving through an exhausted mine will tell a different story from a ruined temple or an abandoned city block ("dungeons" can be open air!). Make sure that the pieces are there to tell that story if the players look for it. Right, what I meant is that the conceptual design of a dungeon isn't my issue. I've just never run a mechanically intensive dungeon - walk in, describe a room, engage with whatever's there (encounter/combat/trap/whatever), continue through a mapped out area that I've pre-designed with set encounters in each room. As far as materials, for example, I usually use a Go or chess board with pieces as a battlemap and pretty much just supplement that with a lot of concept art that I harvest online to convey whatever I'm describing visually. The first few posters to respond to me suggested running some classic, more dungeoncrawly modules, and Tomb of Annihilation for 5e looks interesting. I'm going to have a couple complete newbies in my group this time around though and I think I'd rather throw that at them after they've learned to play and I'm not as rusty. (I haven't played since the very early days of the pandemic) How common is the use of actual battlemaps and miniatures? What kind of props do you all use? I need to read through this thread at some point, I'm sure there's been a lot of discussion about stuff like this throughout it. Tosk fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Jun 14, 2022 |
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Jun 14, 2022 23:43
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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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So I'm running a campaign that had 5 players, but one couldn't continue and we decided not to look for a replacement at the moment. He was, unfortunately, the group's healer and their party now consist of a level 2 Warlock, Wizard, Rogue and Barbarian. We've been thinking of introducing an NPC hireling. In your experience what's the best way to handle it without becoming a DM PC? Do you just let a player use a second sheet and roleplay them to the degree they want, whether that's 2nd PC or minor NPC background character that assists in fights and exploration? Tosk fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Sep 1, 2022 |
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Sep 1, 2022 01:06
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Thanks guys, great stuff. I think I will use the Sidekick rules from Tasha, tweaked here or there. Insight from other GMs is always helpful, so thanks for that.Rutibex posted:You can find actual rules for this system in OSRIC, or just wing it! Really enjoying this book! Thanks for the link. I'm going for a sort of blend between the theater of mind 5e style I'm used to and introducing a lot more classic, dungeoncrawly elements into the campaign (tension dice, more structured timekeeping and resource tracking and the like) and it has a lot of very helpful mechanics and tables to draw from for that without losing the DnD vibe.
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Sep 1, 2022 12:49
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Nehru the Damaja posted:I have a setting I made for a D&D game and my growing disenchantment with D&D has made me realize certain ways that game operates aren't ideal for the kind of experience I would want to run. Any suggestions for a good fantasy RPG that hits these buttons? Check out Mythras, it's a low fantasy d100 game system. Brings everything down to a more "Game of Thrones" scope in terms of realism but has the potential to be high magic if you want it to be. The magic systems in general are very interesting.
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Jan 17, 2023 23:04
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ok so a bit of a spiel here, maybe someone will find it interesting. I recently finished a reread of the manga Jujutsu Kaisen and it changed my view on magic items. I've always been reticent to give my players any kind of magic loot at low levels because I like to preserve the gritty realistic feel for as long as D&D can sustain low fantasy, but for this campaign I'd rather give them interesting and potentially dangerous artifacts to use. Currently my group are ingratiating themselves to an elf sage important to their community and high-ranking in the Neverwinter Guild of Adventurers, with more than a little political clout in the city. For their first mission this sage sent them to the Sunless Citadel to rescue a lost group of more neophyte adventurers from the village of Oakhurst (just the hook from Tales from the Yawning Portal). The sage (I think a wizard of the Divination School), however, is actually privy to the true nature of the citadel and to its history as a cultic site to the dragon god Ashardalon, and of the situation regarding his vampire lieutenant Gulthias, who has been staked to a tree in the grove beneath the citadel and rather than die has corrupted the tree into a perversion of itself. This is mostly just expanding on the lore I've looked up about the original Sunless Citadel module and these plot elements. The sage's goal is actually a magical artifact the party will come across in purging the dungeon, I think maybe the stake itself, which I might describe as some kind of heavenly lance or a nail from heaven or something because one of my players is an Aasimar warlock that is deathly afraid of anything Celestial because they sold their soul to an outer god. My group is just about to enter the grove area in the last section after dealing with the kobold and goblin factions in the fortress itself. I haven't really worked out the sage's ultimate goal with these artifacts yet but I'm leaning towards some ancient grudge they bear regarding the slow decline of elven culture/species and wanting to right it in some fantastically misguided way. Anyway, I've elaborated on this just to give an idea of how I'm wanting cursed objects in general to become an important concept in the campaign, but I'd also like to extend this to items the group finds and can use. However: a) I'm having a little more trouble coming up with a good mechanical solution to the idea because "cursed items" that lower your stats and raise others or something might work in a limited sense but I feel like they kind of defeat the purpose of the D&D power fantasy. I was thinking that maybe they could permanently occupy attunement spots until a condition is met instead, and not fulfilling that condition would imply some negative effect - maybe worse death saves? the possibility of being cursed and resurrection magic failing or otherwise going awry? I can come up with a thousand effects for "flavor" but it would be nice to think of at least one mechanical concept to tie into the idea that a lot of these objects are unholy relics brought into the world in weird and awful ways. b) I've never really used a lot of magic items before, so if anyone has any particularly good sources for them they'd like to share, that would be cool. I've worked out a concept for one such item that can maybe give an idea of the vibe I'm going for. one of my characters is a druid whose gimmick is that they've had Avatar-ish dreams about their predecessors and they want to communicate with them directly. if anyone is familiar with the module I'm running, my last session stopped right outside the door to the goblin chieftain's room that also leads to the grove level. I've planned that the druid tending the Gulthias tree offered this chieftain an artifact to buy his loyalty: a circlet that allows the chieftain to commune with his ancestors and the past kings of his tribe, however the circlet is cursed and "other voices" (demons? outer gods/entities?) also speak to the mind of whoever wears it and have driven the goblin chieftain mad. I think my druid will be drooling over getting their hands on the item and I'm pretty sure I'll be able to lean heavily into its "curse" and milk it for future plot developments.
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Mar 22, 2023 12:51
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Rosalind posted:I have a specific need for some software and was wondering if anyone knew of anything along these lines. I am running a Strixhaven campaign focused on social intrigue. My players want lots of social intrigue so much so that I am basically running it more like a Vampire 5E campaign than a D&D 5E campaign. Obsidian is a more customizable piece of software that might do what you're looking for, if you're willing to put time into it. It's what I found when I was fed up with Notion. This video is not this person's most up to date version but it's a good place to get started. She has a lot of videos on all kinds of stuff about Obsidian. Depending on how deep you want to go with it you can essentially do anything. It doesn't natively do relational databases, but there are plugins that give it the ability to do so. that youtuber talks about it at some point in her obsidian tutorials
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Apr 22, 2023 03:31
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Tosk posted:What do people think of as "well-written" campaigns? Regardless of system. I think the two I hear most about are Masks of Nyarlathotep and Griffin Mountain, the latter I think for pioneering the idea of a sandbox setting splatbook (I could be wrong, I haven't run it). I haven't read Masks. I posted this in the chat thread but it probably fits better here so I'm quoting myself
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Mar 25, 2024 17:50
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weekly font posted:Not entirely sure I understand what your question is but as a fellow permaDM and a call of cthulhu main I dig “famous” campaigns. Sorry, my post might not have been that clear. I usually run premade campaigns and just go wild using the material as a base, but I don't think D&D premade campaigns are very well put together and running them raw would be terrible, I agree with you there. I'm not used to planning out more than a few sessions, so I'm basically looking for examples of how people approach structuring a campaign to see if it helps me give my plans more structure when I'm not using a prewritten module as a foundation. Thanks for the examples everyone!
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Mar 25, 2024 19:39
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