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Running 4th edition for my players and I'm loving it. I'm running them through a modified version of Keep on the Shadowfell, modified after realizing a lot of the fights were mostly tedious and unnecessary, and the plot needed some more interest. It's so much fun right now. It feels very odd that I get to enjoy combat mechanically rather than vicariously through my players. I also really enjoy the character customization options, skill challenges and the general flow of the game compared to 5e. I'm using Foundry and while it helps with some of the automation it does leave a lot to be desired. We have a runesmith player and I wish we could better automate his auras, but it's just not doable in the current Foundry environment. Still, we're having a good time. I'm slowly making it less about combat and more about RP with fun combat encounters, and I'm mad at myself for not trying 4e sooner.
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Feb 24, 2022 19:23
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dwarf74 posted:Oh good. I'm glad you were able to rescue Keep on the Shadowfell. I'm using a modification called the H1-H3 Orcus Conversion as well as some other suggestions and some homebrew stuff. My players are a bit tired of dealing with cults and stuff, so I didn't want to make a cult hidden in Winterhaven. Instead I'm making the bad poo poo that happens around the town get worse and worse as the players take time to return to town and rest for the evening. First it began to rain, the general mood of the town became worried and withdrawn. Now the Invoker is suffering bad dreams that will clue them towards ways to interact with the final encounter's skill challenge. I pushed back the Ninaran encounter and I'm going to change it with something else that puts the town into more of a jeopardized situation, with the goal of showing the players that time is running out. I'm definitely getting rid of a bunch of different encounters that don't add anything. They fought the slimes which were fine, but I removed the kruthiks since they're just animals in the dungeon and their rewards aren't that interesting anyway. Instead I put that treasure into a different room that they've since found, closed off the kruthik portion of the map and called it a tunnel that leads to a separate entrance/exit to the dungeon. I actually don't mind XP, but I can see why players would want to do milestone instead. I do like that my players get excited to level up, and since they know they're close they can take the time to look at their next level powers without me having to ruin the potential surprise of a milestone level.
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Feb 24, 2022 21:19
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St0rmD posted:Yeah those mods are pretty good, I ran them myself like 10 years ago and I have fond memories. The main strength of them is how well they tie together the flagship series of modules from 4e into a very thematic campaign all leading to a dramatic confrontation against Orcus himself in the Epic tier. Great advice!! I've switched my map up to support this extra staircase. I'm glad to see we're on the same page about the kruthik lair too! I made that into another nature entrance for our last session once I realized I didn't want to run the kruthik fight, it would've been a bit too exhausting!
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Feb 25, 2022 01:45
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How do you all run skill challenges? I've been letting my players know that they're in a skill challenge and ask them to contribute in their own unique ways with their chosen skills, giving unrelated skills a higher DC than normal. So far this has proven to be successful, but I'm curious how other people run them. Do you obfuscate a lot of information from the players? Are you upfront about a lot of information? An example of a skill challenge would be very useful as well! I know the book has a couple examples, but I'd like to hear about real world uses.
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Mar 7, 2022 16:25
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dwarf74 posted:I really only use them when it's necessary mid-battle. It's great to give players a thing to skill-check at while also fighting. I'm gonna have to get a feel for this, since the final boss fight in Keep on the Shadowfell is essentially a big combat + a skill challenge. Thanks for the different perspectives everyone! I'm gonna read into the Obsidian skill challenges and see how things go. So far my players like skill challenges, but they've been for very immediate, time-sensitive situations. One of them was for forging a magic hammer (basically I let my runepriest player transform a cleric implement no one could use into a weapon for himself) and talking down a powerful NPC who was about to fight them.
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Mar 7, 2022 19:45
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Just finished running Keep on the Shadowfell and had a blast. The individual sessions were fairly well-paced, with 2-3 encounters per session including roleplaying and skill challenge sections. My players went into the final fight with very few resources, having used most of their daily powers during the encounter with the hobgoblins on the third to last floor. They crushed the skill challenge to close the portal though, with 8 successes and only 1 failure (I threw in another failure caused by a creature to increase the tension, so they were on their last failure and last success). I'm looking forward to running the next leg of the campaign (Thunderspire Labyrinth) with the Orcus conversion, it really opens up and becomes more world spanning which I think my players will appreciate. Verisimilidude fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Mar 24, 2022 |
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Mar 24, 2022 20:29
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I def removed a couple unnecessary fights only to realize the H1 conversion was suggesting to do the same. Stuff like the kruthiks in shadowfell keep seemed tedious and unnecessary, so I removed that section of map entirely and made it a second exit to the surface. I should’ve also removed the gelatinous cube, which was another tedious fight. For H2 I’m planning to remove all not story related fights, or doubles of fights, and award that experience elsewhere along with whatever treasure they may contain.
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Mar 25, 2022 14:29
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My Lovely Horse posted:There's something to be said for running it on a laptop with a second screen facing the players. I used to do it on Roll20 with two accounts, or if you can track down a copy of Masterplan that can do the same thing completely offline and helps a ton with turn and condition tracking too. If you're willing to shell out the money, you could also pick up Fantasy Grounds which handles 4e very well, you just have to go digging for the right :files: Since you're showing it on one screen, you'd only need the one copy. I used to do something similar by hooking my laptop to my TV and having players sit on the couch.
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Apr 12, 2022 15:48
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If you can get your hands on them, the plastic rings from opened bottle caps make excellent condition markers. That's a solid budget option. Alternatively, they sell condition markers online that can be fairly expensive but are worth it if D&D is a hobby you spend a lot of time engaging in. Actually, looking online it seems a bunch of people have come out with knock-offs of those acrylic rings for relatively cheap (96 markers for $24 USD). https://www.amazon.com/Tidyboss-Min...2xpY2s9dHJ1ZQ== https://www.amazon.com/ALIZERO-Tabl...aps%2C54&sr=8-6
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Apr 14, 2022 17:31
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Running a dnd 4e campaign, specifically the h1-e3 orcus conversion. My players recently finished Keep on the Shadowfell and are moving onto the next leg of the campaign. They are level 4 (a fighter, runepriest and invoker).The tone is lighthearted, medium roleplaying, medium-high combat, investigation and exploration. Looking for two more players! New players welcome! We play biweekly on Fridays, 7pm-10pm EST. We play on Foundry, and use Discord for voice. Feel free to message me on Discord at buttcheeksio#2062 if you’re interested!
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Apr 23, 2022 05:22
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Heard two new points against 4e that have really blown my mind and I’m still processing them: 1. “Encounter powers are bad, because it doesn’t make sense to have a power you can only use once per fight.” 2. “At-will powers don’t make sense because where are the characters getting the energy to produce the effects? An infinite energy source?” There were a bunch of other negative points but they’re your more run of the mill stuff. Video game, healing surges bad, powers bad, etc. Just glad to be hearing fresh bad takes so many years later!
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May 1, 2022 03:44
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Are there any good dark Sun modules available in 4e? Thinking of starting a dark sun campaign and I’m shopping around for ideas and content.
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Aug 8, 2022 21:40
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Thinking of adding this item to my 4e game, though I wanted to run it by some more experienced players to make sure I'm not screwing myself in the long run. One of my players is deeply interested in crafting as a means of item progression (they are playing a Dwarven Runepriest) and I wanted to give them something that would help with that in our long-running campaign. The idea is they will find different types of these hammers that will allow them to craft items of new types, similar to how embers in Dark Souls work. The Enchant Items/Transform Items ritual is something they don't yet know about, and will eventually get access to much further down the line, and items like this are meant to bridge the gap between now and then.  They are currently level 5. I apologize for verboseness on things like item cost, but it's a situation where I know what my players will ask if I'm not particularly clear, and I wanted to get around that.
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Aug 22, 2022 17:59
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Klungar posted:Is there an in-universe reason to hide the existence of the ritual from the players? Yes
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Aug 22, 2022 21:04
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My Lovely Horse posted:For the upgrade option you could just say it takes 5 hours. I don't think any enhancement bonuses are ever anything other than 5 levels apart. Matter of fact, I'd just say "you can increase an item's level by 5" to head off any potential misinterpretations. So like: Hmm, I appreciate your post and it has given me some things to think through and questions to ask. Thanks!
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Aug 25, 2022 19:32
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My Lovely Horse posted:I think it's okay to enable the hammer to upgrade any weapon or armor into a higher level Flaming Weapon or Resistance (Fire) Armor, at the cost of the difference as specified. But not downgrade, and not turn a fire item back into something else. In terms of the party's wealth, you're keeping things balanced with the cost requirement. With the armor, crafty players might realize they don't have to pay the full cost of upgrading, say, a level 5 +1 armor to a level 10 +2 armor if they can just make a level 7 +2 armor at a fraction of the cost, but the fact that it'll specifically have to be Resistance (Fire) Armor probably makes up for it. If someone's in it purely for the AC bonus it becomes a little more worth it to them, but it only works once per item - next time you have to upgrade from level 7 to 12. I think after a lot of thinking I decided to keep it simple and just give them enchant item. I think my original reasoning behind not letting them do it was primarily marred in old hangups from 5e and other systems, but seeing how 4e operates and speaking more to my players, I feel like it's a ritual I'm comfortable just letting them have and ret-conning the world reasons why they wouldn't have it to begin with. Also, my crafty player keeps sending me items he really wants, and this would get him out of my hair in terms of placing all these items in the world for him and instead giving him the satisfaction of crafting things himself. The hammer of thunderbolts he linked to me, however, will definitely be some kind of epic quest he'll go on at a much later level.
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Aug 25, 2022 20:37
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Klungar posted:It’s an interesting concept, you could do something like a Mega Man boss system where they unlock a hammer that’s related to the dungeon boss and it could be used to give them an elemental advantage in future dungeons. I was thinking that! But then I figured if a boss is using a particular element, then the dungeon might be themed around that element, and thus protection from that element might not be worth as much after the fact. As fun as it could be if I made this interconnected web of encounters that rewarded things that could be used to improve the party's chances in the next encounter, I figure enchant item is something that gives them a lot of control immediately. So now they can say "we're gonna go to the plane of fire, why don't we take these side missions to fund the runepriest so he can make us some fire resistant armor?" Speaking of which, is there a compendium of premade encounters somewhere? Verisimilidude fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Aug 25, 2022 |
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Aug 25, 2022 21:03
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I've been working on automating as much as I can on Foundry and have made pretty big strides. So long as players are properly targeting characters who receive effects, spells and abilities will add an effect to a token that expires appropriately, and most of the time applies its numerical effect to the token so we don't have to futz with bonuses or penalties. Also recently learned that animations do in fact work with the 4e module so I've been adding animations to everyone's powers! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi68LJN9g4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqTUM5UZTWA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbQdtQcBe_o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oRxqueAIWw
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Oct 7, 2022 21:44
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One Legged Ninja posted:You're doing the Lord's work. When can we expect your module to release? I am a software engineer but I will never develop for foundry. This is just automated animations with the paid version of jb2a animations.
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Oct 8, 2022 15:26
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For those interested, I started making really rambly, stream-of-consciousness videos for running Dnd4e in Foundry VTT. The topics I cover are effects, conditions and auras, animations, and using character tokens to make things easier on the DM. You can see the playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEAlvzLhF2-iQsjepsdz1Ww I highly recommend watching them at 1.5/2x speed.
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Nov 2, 2022 02:28
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Jack B Nimble posted:Right, I was specifically going to tie short rests and long rests to "small sites of grace" and "big sites of grace" (working titles), and the 4th edition mechanic of healing dice (wasn't that a thing??) was going to explicitly exist as some item that diminishes, like maybe a flask, or maybe a prayer bead where the beads dim out one by one. The whole framing device of "you're in a dark souls" lets me get a lot more explicit with the gamey aspect. That's one reason I'm going with fourth, it gives you a very granular hack and slash. Characters get a number of healing surges based on their class and other features. These are spent to allow a character to heal. Very few items allow them to heal without a healing surge (the potion of cure light wounds for example, which lets them not spend a healing surge if they're already out of healing surges).
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Jan 24, 2023 18:31
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The only way I've found to manage long rests is to have the players on some sort of timer, or to give a restriction on where they can perform the rest. Having sites where players can perform long rests actually is a great idea, especially if they're well placed. The nice thing about TTRPGs is that you can simply say "oh yeah the site is right here!!" when things are looking dire and your PCs are sufficiently exhausted and worried. I also would not restrict short rests. Encounter powers are expected to be done per encounter, and short rests allow your players to actually tap into their healing surges. I saw earlier someone mentioned spending healing surges to replenish daily powers and that's actually also a great idea. I'd make it 1 HS + 1 HS for every level of the power being replenished. edit: also consider that rules as written long rests can only occur once every 24 hours of game time. This way you'd prevent your players from fighting a bit, retreating to long rest, fighting some more, retreating, etc. Elden Ring prevents this by respawning enemies, but that can get fairly tedious in a 4e game where even small combats can take a bit of time. Verisimilidude fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Jan 25, 2023 |
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Jan 25, 2023 15:19
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Arrrthritis posted:I mean, if they're going full dark souls/elden ring with it they could just reflavor healing surges to be their estus flask. I think it makes more sense to replace the name Second Wind with Drink Estus Flask or whatever. Changing healing surges to estus flask can run into confusion considering the word "healing surge" appears hundreds of times among hundreds of items, powers, feats and abilities. You could also give each character a non-transferrable, once-per-encounter potion called an Estus Flask that refills on a short rest. Not sure how much it'd heal, but maybe it gives flat HP like a potion of healing does, and improves when an Estus Flask Shard is found.
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Jan 25, 2023 15:36
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Given this, would anything get broken by just giving all weapons a +3 proficiency bonus? I know the original idea was to balance damage or special abilities of weapons vs the extra +1 to hit, but given how valuable any sources of attack bonuses are in 4e it seems much less relevant than intended. Giving all weapons +3 proficiency bonus would also necessitate modifying damage rolls to be equal as well, making all weapons essentially the same within a particular group. Which could totally work. Looking into feats and things that grant additional benefits to specific weapon types, maybe there's some kind of balance issue when you get really deep into min-maxing, but honestly I don't think an extra +1 to hit would cause that many headaches. Even now, my player group has two hammer users who perform fairly well at level 8. Ultimately +1 to hit amounts to a 5% additional chance to hit something, which of course is far more optimal than not having an extra 5% chance to hit, but I don't think it breaks the game in any way for them. Verisimilidude fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Jan 25, 2023 |
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Jan 25, 2023 15:48
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Dr Pepper posted:Weapon dice literally do not matter past like, level 4. The type of weapon, any properties is may have, and the feats you take for the weapon are far more impactful. A difference of 2 max damage isn't a big deal, but if it means dealing 1d10 damage vs 1d8 damage, all other things being equal, everyone will just take the 1d10 damage option. Then you're back at square one, which is balancing the weapons. If you're already going through the trouble of standardizing all proficiency bonuses on attack rolls you might as well go the extra mile and change all of the affected weapons damage dice.
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Jan 27, 2023 18:23
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Dr Pepper posted:Except that the point of my houserule is to make spending a feat for a weapon you think is cool isn't worth less than the guy just using a weapon everybody can use. I think you misread which post I was responding to. I'm not talking about giving superior weapons +3 proficiency bonus, I was responding to a post suggesting giving all weapons +3 proficiency bonus, making the choice less obvious between using a sword vs using an axe or whatever.
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Jan 27, 2023 18:48
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Ferrinus posted:Going from a +3, 1d10 greatsword to a +3, 1d12 fullblade for one feat is the 4e status quo. The problem with giving all weapons the same proficiency bonus but making no other changes is that, in fact, no one would ever buy a +3 1d12 fullblade when they could instead buy a +3 2d6 brutal 1 (or something like that, I forget the exact numbers) mordenkrad at the same price. 100% this.
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Jan 27, 2023 18:52
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Dr Pepper posted:Yes. Especially at higher levels. How many feats do you need to take before the dagger starts dealing more damage than a weapon with literally twice the damage range? I'm not saying you're wrong.
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Jan 27, 2023 19:12
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lightrook posted:So yes, that +1 to hit is pretty much always worth more than +1 damage per [W], and daggers are really at +2 to hit over their competition if you're actually using one as a weapon. Each little marginal edge might not look like a lot, but when you stack them all up, it eventually does make the difference between hitting on a 7 and hitting on a 2. And besides, turns in 4e are too long to spend 10 entire minutes accomplishing nothing at all. I never disagreed that +1 to hit is a great bonus to have and much stronger than an extra 1-2 damage per die roll.
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Jan 27, 2023 23:29
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I won't say that I've never cheated on dice rolls, but I think it always represents a failure of game design that the GM is compensating for in play, at least in tactics-RPGs like 4E. There's nothing wrong with a game that seeks to produce particular outcomes in order to satisfy the players' expectations, and nothing wrong with a game that tests the players on some skill and makes outcomes contingent on that, but they can't both be priority #1 at the same time and the mechanical scaffolding that enables each is, at best, wasted on the other, and at worst outright counterproductive. I feel like failure of game design is a bit harsh here. The issue lies more in the hands of the GM than the ruleset. There are so many variables to consider in a game like 4e that the designers can't always properly account for every scenario, and if the GM miscalculates an encounter or rolls hot, the system can't be blamed for those issues. Most of the time dice are terrible at telling stories, and it's up to the GM to make mechanical decisions on the fly when something doesn't work out as planned. This isn't to say the system is perfect, it clearly has problems, but expectations for any system need to be realistic in the sense that we can't reasonably expect any system to account for any possible scenario given the near infinite options afforded to players.
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Feb 16, 2023 19:06
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Ferrinus posted:We can expect honesty and regard from our fellow players, though. If you're going to ignore a dice roll because you think executing on it would hurt the game, that's fine, but don't pretend otherwise. That's true and fair, but that will always occur in the realm of TTRPGs where one person is the DM and the rest are players, but even that specific issue can be rectified by the GM rolling openly (which is what I do). There is no such thing as a perfectly balanced game (even in chess white wins more often than black).
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Feb 16, 2023 19:45
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Leperflesh posted:In the past as a pre-game session zero thing, I've told players something like "this game can have harsh consequences, including your character dying. However, I don't think characters should die randomly - you need to have made choices that led to it, such as by choosing to take big risks. So, I almost always go by the dice but I will occasionally put my thumb on the scale if I think a bad outcome is coming due to my own error (like I designed an encounter badly) or just an absurdly long sequence of bad luck (an enemy just rolls 20s the whole encounter). I feel the same way. A player death should be possible but as a result of the player's actions. Experienced DMs can sniff out when an encounter is going poorly for players, and it's up to them to make the decision to run things as is, or make some kind of change. I've gone as far as to make a character's sword suddenly something much more powerful. I think there was an encounter between the players and some undead, and the players were having a real bad time of it. Rolling poorly, and on top of that the encounter was way overpowered for their level, two things they could not possible account for. They had found a magic sword previously and hadn't identified it yet, so I made it into a +1 sword of undead slaying or something, and the players went from being really frustrated and scared to excited when the player's weapon began to glow and undead started dying in one swing. It was cinematic and memorable, and my players bring it up to me often as a great moment in their games.
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Feb 16, 2023 19:51
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Ferrinus posted:While I have to point out that gesturing at the impossibility of "perfect balance" is 100% of the time a tell that you're about to be hit with some bad game design, balance (between one player and another or between players and NPC antagonists) doesn't really figure into this at all. It's a question of whether the DM understands that they're playing a game with the other participants or if the DM just sees generating the illusion that a game is being played as one of their several responsibilities. I think good GMing is a mix of both of these qualities. I like the Seth Skorkowsky example of an epic fight between the BBEG and the last standing PC. In one scenario, they roll initiative, the BBEG goes first, rolls a crit, insta-kills the PC and the game ends. In the other scenario, they roll initiative, the BBEG goes first, rolls a crit but the DM just says "he hits you for 11 points of damage", the player gets his licks in before ultimately dying and the game ends. In the first scenario the outcome is the PCs lose, the campaign ends and the players are disappointed and frustrated. In the second scenario you end up with ultimately the same outcome, but the players are excited and thrilled to have almost beaten the BBEG in single combat. The second scenario is essentially an illusion, but the players don't know that. All they see is the epic fight they almost won. In my 20+ years of playing and running D&D and other RPGs, most players would prefer the second scenario to the first, assuming of course the GM doesn't ruin the magic for them by saying it was fake from the start. GMing is a mixture of illusion and mechanics. Being a good GM is knowing when to say "this mechanic is getting in the way of my players having fun" and throwing it out or making some kind of change on the fly. The best GMs can do this without the players ever knowing the difference.
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Feb 16, 2023 19:57
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Jack B Nimble posted:I'd rather have the first, personally but I also play every video game on "iron man" almost any time they let me. I like being forced to accept bad results and take my narrative, my personal story, in unexpected ways. I think that's fair, but in a scenario where you can't witness the GM's rolls, you wouldn't know the difference anyway. An example of a bad GM would be one who rolls openly, the dice determine some kind of outcome, and the GM says "actually, this happens instead" and all of the players know it's GM interference. That takes players out of the magic of the system and breaks the illusion. If you're going to roll openly, you have to live with the outcome of the dice, and unfortunately dice don't always tell good stories.
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Feb 16, 2023 20:10
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:a good GM might occasionally choose preserving the illusion over everyone being miserable that they lost, but a good game should never put them in that position in the first place Most if not all scenarios/encounters, except of course pre-written modules which I think are much closer to the point of your argument, are granted to players via the GM, not the rules as written. Rules can only provide guidelines for a GM designing scenarios and encounters, and if those are causing a lot of the issues you're speaking about, then I concede to your point, but in my experience the encounter building in 4e is very good.
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Feb 16, 2023 20:18
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Ferrinus posted:Most players would prefer a third scenario in which their PC actually, factually put up a good fight. If their DM is sneaky enough, they might confuse your second scenario with that third scenario, but would they prefer, consciously, to be fooled? If they would they've made a series of very strange choices to end up in their position, because the choice to play D&D at all is now being seriously called into question. I thought it was weird too, but I asked my current group of players if they preferred me fudging rolls from time to time, or if they preferred following the outcome of dice results 100% of the time. All of them said the first option, because my players trust me to not abuse that power and to only use it for the benefit of their enjoyment. It's unfortunately something I've gotten away from with the move to VTTs, as it's often easier to run the system following the result of dice rolls rather than fudging them occasionally. I've had to shift to other methods, such as tweaking hit point levels, modifying to hit numbers, and reducing damage dice on the fly.
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Feb 16, 2023 20:27
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I actually don't agree at all about engagement with the rules only happening through the GM as a medium. Players can read the rulebook on their own, and if they use what they read there to inform their decisions, that's still direct engagement with the rules even if the GM is the final adjudicator of rules disputes -- and also, separately from this (and probably departing from D&D RAW, admittedly), there isn't actually any particular reason that the GM should be the final adjudicator of rules disputes. This is a question of GMing theory, but the way I run my games is "player tells me what they want to do, I tell them what they need to roll". This is of course done much easier in less mechanical, more fluid systems than 4e, but it works perfectly fine as a method. My more experienced players know the rules as well, and speed up their turns appropriately by jumping right into using powers and abilities on their character sheets, and I never tweak anything that has to do with the players and their characters (unless I discuss it with them first), but anything outside of the player's immediate control is fluid and subject to change at my discretion. Guided by the rules, but ultimately up to me to adjudicate the application or the outcome. This doesn't mean I'm simply choosing when to do anything. I follow the stats of monsters, their abilities, and I even roll my dice openly on our VTT so the players know those specific outcomes. But every now and then I nudge something in a direction that is more in-tune with expectations of the scenario itself. It's why I believe the best time to be a player in a game and the best players to have in your group are new players, exactly because they don't know the rules. The game is a mystery to them, and the magic of the illusion of the game and the story that unfolds is its most potent.
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Feb 16, 2023 20:42
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Ferrinus posted:I would also prefer that the DM be willing to ignore the rules when they aren't serving the group. The question is, do your players expressly want not to know? The cat's out of the bag unfortunately, but they don't know the extent of the illusion. And unless I tell them, they'll never know. Again, I'll reiterate that I'm not making up all results whole-cloth. I'm gently nudging things from time to time, maybe once every couple sessions. Verisimilidude fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Feb 16, 2023 |
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Feb 16, 2023 20:44
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Yeah, this is unthinkable to me, both in general but especially in the context of a game that takes this much time and effort to learn. Why would I ever bother with a game that gets worse the longer you play and the better you understand it? It's all but telling you that it isn't worth your time! The best players I've ever had in my groups were brand new players who have never played a TTRPG in their lives. Conversely, the worst players I've ever had in my groups are players who knew the rules inside and out. I'd also say the players in my groups who have the most fun are the ones who don't have mastery of the rules. I'm not saying players who know the rules can't enjoy the game or get less out of it. I'm saying, as a DM, it's easier to run a game for new and open-minded players than rules experts with years of expectations.
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Feb 16, 2023 20:53
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Ferrinus posted:If you think about it, isn't the best thing you can do for your players to loudly forswear all roll-fudging henceforth, pledge to just let the dice fall where they may from here on out, but then continue to put your thumb on the scales in secret? I've done this a couple times with different groups. I've implicitly done it with my main group by switching to rolling out in the open (with the VTT, my rolls appear just like there's do). What they don't know is that sometimes I switch up the bonuses, damage dice, powers, and other things on the monster NPC sheets on the fly. They can't see these values, they can only see the dice results. Unless they know monster stat blocks by heart or are looking them up, they don't know they're being tweaked. Even then, I've established that I don't run creatures as written in the monster manual 100% of the time. So long as the creatures are acting realistically and to their own benefit, the players don't notice they're being tweaked on the backend.
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Feb 16, 2023 22:05
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