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Cyrai posted:For your first time GMing, simple is much better than complicated. If you're able, try running a few one shot pre-published campaigns to get a feel for how the game works. I'm going to have to agree with this whole-heartedly. I started running a 4th edition game lately, my first time running anything in a live setting. I've made my own general plot but for the time being I am working with stuff from Dungeon Delves and Dungeon magazine when it comes to encounters and the adventures. It's helping me to get inspired when it comes to designing my own unique, fun encounters. It's also helped to show me what is an appropriate level of preparedness. There's a thing in the 4th ed DMG that says something to the effect of being able to say yes. Build on what your players do, don't prohibit. It only took a little bit of practice for me to be capable of fielding most of the surprises the players have thrown at me, when I kept this in mind. quote:The party, which consists of a level 1 barbarian, bard, and sorcerer, busts into a condemned church full of orcs. ((6 in the immediate and more downstairs.)) In the center of the room there's a pile of debris, while along the sides of the room are some wooden statues of Gruumsh's heroes ((if the spot roll is good enough)) that are propped up fairly poorly. ((if asked)) the statues are big enough that they could at least impede the orcs. ((if asked)) Along the ceiling are a series of lanterns, supported by ropes and keeping the church at a dimly lit state. This sounds like a pretty cool encounter. You could also have the statues be made of stone, with a strength check to push them over onto someone. It could do damage and knock the target prone, while the debris from breaking them makes crossing that area more difficult. You might even make it possible so that the lanterns, depending on the kind of lanterns they are, could be knocked down and start a fire, by either the orcs or the party. Fiiiinally, I also agree with Tendrilsfor20 a lot. If you can talk them into giving 4th a shot, do it. It's much, much easier on everyone and making really cool encounters that are dynamic and unique without a whole lot of work are a real selling point on it.
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Jun 9, 2009 05:53
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My Pathfinder group has decided to take the current framework of our game and add in the idea of rotating DMs. I volunteered to run a few sessions in a few weeks, and started outlining my first session. This will be the first time I've DMed anything that wasn't a module, and even then my experience is pretty limited. I like the idea that I have to contribute, but between performance anxiety and a group that is both very well optimized and intelligent, I feel like I need to develop the adventure quite a bit more. To give some idea of the game, we're doing a "Good for Evil's Sake" campaign where the PCs are from a town that runs on the facade of having produced a number of legendary heroes, but is actually home to a massive and utterly secret criminal empire. The characters are part of the face of the city, supposed heroes who go out and do good deeds in order to cover up for the evil side of the city. My adventure in particular sends the PCs after a pair of smugglers who are late with a shipment of McGuffins. When the PCs set out, they'll come upon the site of an ambush. One of the pair will be dead on the scene along with one of the people who captured the other smuggler - a group of lawmen from another city some distance away. The players will have to track down the group and handle them, as well as figure out a way to handle the smuggler and his goods. Right now I have in mind that the lawmen are a group of inquisitors with some teamwork feats, but outside of the encounter with them, I'm not sure what I can add to the adventure. I was thinking that the party could eventually run into them at an inn along the road to the city, or in a jail in a smaller town... which would significantly complicate things for both them and me, and I'm not sure how I'd develop that part of it yet. Also, the levels for the character aren't known to me yet, mostly I want to nail down the outline before the mechanics. We just hit level 3, and I would like to place this either before or after a level 5 module I want to use... somewhere in a level range where a trio of inquisitors with teamwork feats would be an engaging and challenging fight.
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Jan 16, 2014 21:03
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Here's kind of a weird DMing question. I'm running Rise of the Runelords for my group, and one of the early areas (the Sandpoint Glassworks) is fairly large but doesn't have much going on on it's main floor, except for one large room. There's not much for the PCs to find or interact with, but the map is still large and detailed. It feels like it would be awkward and a waste of time to have them go from room to room without finding much, but at the same time, it'd be too handwave-y and railroady to just send the players directly to that room and encounter. Am I the only person who finds this an awkward situation, and how would you deal with it in your games?
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May 23, 2017 19:13
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admanb posted:Pushing the players past non-content and into content isn't railroading, it's pacing. I don't think it does much to do that - it's storerooms, employee bunks, preparation rooms, etc, so I think I'll handwave the additional rooms and draw their attention to the one room where the major encounter for the area takes place. If they want to search through the rest of the building I'll give them the basic information.
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May 23, 2017 20:54
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Harrow posted:For some reason my players really rebel against it when I try to sort of usher them past areas where there's nothing interesting. I think a few of them have this idea where things have to be realistic, meaning (in their minds) that it's unsatisfying to just skate past the boring parts for the sake of pacing, and they really want to search every single drawer on this abandoned office building floor one by one. A member of my old group would always be incredibly thorough in empty rooms, even if I tried to, without directly saying it, heavily imply there wasn't much important. He'd also have a tendency to completely ignore the things that I'd actually emphasize as well. One of the other players in that previous group would always make the same joke after every combat encounter: "I equip the ring." He'd do it for every game, so when I had a chance to run a D&D 5E game, he made the joke again after the very first encounter, so I said, "sure. The ring is made of two thin copper bands that have been intertwined. It fits perfectly on your finger as though it was made for you. It also feels faintly warm to the touch." It wasn't anything special, distinctly non-magical, but I figured it sounded like something you'd find on the trinket table in the equipment chapter and just threw it in there to gently caress with him.
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May 26, 2017 00:05
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I'm having a bit of a debate with myself about an upcoming game I'm supposed to run. My group wants to play Starfinder specifically, and I've been jonesing to run both it and something PbtA. I'd like to do PbtA but I don't have time to really learn Uncharted Worlds, and already have knowledge of Starfinder, so I think I'm going to run it with Starfinder and play in the spirit of a PbtA game - play to find out what happens. There's a particular part of the Starfinder setting that I'm interested in exploring though, the Halls of the Living. On the radioactive world of Eox, which is run by powerful and ancient necromancers, there's a subterranean city designed specifically for living creatures. From there are broadcast cruel reality shows and competitions which are viewed around the Pact Worlds - the primary worlds of the setting. My idea is to have the game start out in media res during the broadcast of one of these events, with the group having the spotlight. I was thinking about some kind of dungeon crawl, but I don't want it to be too large, since I've had games stall out in long dungeons before (namely Thistletop from Rise of the Runelords, which is fairly long and covers about two levels). That's also when we'd actually figure out why there were there and what's motivating them, and then they can figure out where they want to go if they get out. I kind of want to figure out why they were traveling together before starting the game, but I'm not sure. I know I would like to include Bonds as a thing, and use some kind of reward system to incentivize roleplaying and resolving bonds. I'm just not sure if this is too ambitious, and the idea of starting off potentially captive is generally a red flag. I'm a relatively inexperienced DM, too. I've run a bit of Curse of Strahd, a bit of Rise of the Runelords (which fell apart from the previously mentioned pacing, and real life schedules), and a bit of Iron Gods (which also fell apart due to real life) - this would be my first real attempt to just play something I created, while also creating it with the players. I feel like I may be over thinking things... 
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Oct 17, 2017 20:47
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kaffo posted:Once again I agree with Gorbash They're pretty into Starfinder specifically because they're nuts about Pathfinder, I'm the one who wants to move away from that. I'm just nervous that a full PbtA game won't be crunchy enough for them
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Oct 17, 2017 21:42
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Maybe split the difference and run it in a system a) is good but b) is still primarily about tactical combat? That's doable, I'll talk to them about Strike! instead. I was kind of baked when I came up with the idea and really excited, I had to write it down and make sure I was thinking through every part of it. Ilor posted:Jesus, WTF is wrong with people? Yeah, I.. 
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Oct 17, 2017 23:42
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So after some discussion my group and I decided not to go Starfinder after all. I ran a poll and they voted on Blades in the Dark. I'm very excited for this. I think it'll be an interesting change of pace, and I hope they enjoy it.
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Oct 27, 2017 22:20
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admanb posted:That is a fantastic swing. I have been dying to run something that isn't pathfinder for these guys for a long time. We did Phoenix Dawn Command for a bit and then a player had to drop, and you really need to have four people exactly for it. Comrade Gorbash posted:BitD is a lot of fun. Thanks! Ive played exactly one session of BitD at my FLGS on free RPG day and it was amazing. We didn't play exactly right, and the two random people my friend and I played with were lovely 14 year olds, but it was so exciting to play. These differences are exactly the reason why I want to play the game.
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Oct 28, 2017 02:24
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Running Blades in the Dark for my usually Pathfinder centric group for the first time tonight. Last week we made a crew of ambitious hawkers who managed to make a derivative of Spark once and got known to have The Good Stuff. I'm going to start from the starting scenario and see where it goes. Nobody has ever played or run a PbtA-based game except for me. Wish me luck!
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Nov 25, 2017 01:18
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Bad Munki posted:It's happening  Five months! Not bad.
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Jul 29, 2018 02:42
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I felt really concerned with that issue when I was running COS for the first time as well. Honestly CoS as written is ... Kind of bad. There's an entire community devoted to expanding it, fleshing out things that are only mentioned once or twice offhandedly, fixing plot holes, etc. The curseofstrahd subreddit in particular is a goldmine and I plan on using as much as I can to fill out the campaign some when I run it again.
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Mar 18, 2019 17:39
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Regarding Curse of Strahd: I'd put the patron in the Amber Temple. You can replace whatever in there that might seem appropriate. The Vistani are the only people capable of leaving barovia at will, so perhaps this particular collection decided to gently caress off for a while. Unless that's too dissatisfying/the characters have other business with them. Have your players been to Argynvostholt? If they've cleared that out, or any of the other dungeons, maybe they went there. Or the werewolf den.
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May 29, 2019 00:33
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Whiskey golem! Pigapult!
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Jun 9, 2019 22:02
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Going to run Lancer for a new group, soon.
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Aug 11, 2019 18:06
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Whybird posted:I remember playing a system where character declared their actions in reverse initiative order, then resolved them in initiative order. So if your initiative was high, you could respond to the actions of people with lower initiative and, if you succeeded at what you were trying to do, stop them from doing the thing they were trying to do. This was how combat worked in World of Darkness through revised edition. It is definitely a cool concept, but kind of a nightmare to play - especially if you reroll initiative every round, and have people using celerity and other poo poo to play around with initiative order.
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Dec 19, 2020 07:24
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Dienes posted:They will be in the basement of a tavern, so barrels of booze that can become molotov cocktails and crates of food the hydra can consume for a small heal are easy to do. There's also the threat of collapsing part of the ceiling in. The hydra is fey-themed, so occasionally creating mists or other weird poo poo would work well. Boozy, intoxicating mist?
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Jun 2, 2021 23:07
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 04:58 |
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Use clocks for sure. What about the option for cloning characters?
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Feb 11, 2022 17:22
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