I'm sorry about your D&D game. Can I ask what made your players and yourself decide to restart the campaign?

(Continued from another message: "I meant in terms of just stopping the game versus continuing without the kicked player versus restarting. It's not a judgement thing I'm curious on your thought process. I think a lot of groups have gone through this.")

Oh, absolutely groups go through this all the time! Two of my players are also DMs that have had games fall through or stop due to people leaving or getting kicked. It's always a huge bummer for everyone involved. Our game's been running since mid 2021 - so that's a lot of (almost) weekly sessions. We were on session 67 I believe. I've got 900 hours logged into roll20 and a good 750+ of them are just the one game I've been running. As a DM it hurts because you put sooo much time and effort into setting it all up; having it just suddenly end totally sucks. It sucks for the other players, too, who just wanted to get together and play.

It's not the first time for us - two players at the very start of the campaign didn't vibe with the table and ended up leaving, which is totally fine! It's the first game I've ever grabbed people together to run for, so it wasn't an already established group that all had experience together yet, if that makes sense. Once they left we kept playing for nearly two more years until just recently.

When it happened I basically asked my players what THEY wanted to do. The PC of the kicked player was integral to the plot of the campaign, so do we find some way to write them out? Do I turn them into an NPC? Or did we want to restart the whole game, giving myself and the players an opportunity to try some new things? I'm not as inexperienced of a DM as I was in 2021 and felt like I could make a more cohesive game for my table. The players were excited at the idea of taking their PCs in slightly new directions to make it fresh, especially since we've been playing together consistently for a while now and the awkwardness that comes from roleplaying with new folks is gone. They've been having a blast changing builds, designs, and backstories around and we're all super stoked for Waterdeep 2.0!

do you have any advice on capturing a person's likeness?

HOO BOY well first off, the unfortunate main answer is just,,,,,,lots of practice. The more you draw from references, do studies, the better you eye-to-hand connection will be. So. Yeah. Sorry.

OTHER THAN THAT one thing i like to do is do a really simple rough sketch first, not worrying at all about correctness, but just getting down the way shapes interact with each other, like if you squinted your eyes at the reference image to make it all blurry, what would the shapes be.

here, i like to exaggerate proportion, make the hair one big block, and work almost entirely with long, curved strokes. it also really helps me in particular by not having a totally blank canvas when im starting actually trying to get the likeness right.

if i were to try to actually make his nose right with just a circle for the head down on the paper, i would erase it so so many times.

then, with my clean sketch, I focus a lot on like, relativity? Where does the top of his eye line up with the bridge of his nose? if i draw a straight line up from the corner of his mouth, where would that intersect with his eye?

i like doing that to make sure that everything is placed in roughly the correct spot, and as a way to zoom in on details without getting lost in them

RANDOM OTHER THINGS

I think noses are my favorite to draw, especially for capturing likenesses. They have a lot of personality, and a lot more variety than you see in other places of the face

i know hockey doesn't have like, the widest range of hairstyle ever, but man if you're starting out, please use no-bucket photos as reference. anime was right that hair is such a useful defining feature

if youre drawing digitally, the liquify tool is GOD. if something looks funky it is so nice to be able to just kinda push it into the right spot without having to redraw anything

LOWER YOUR STANDARDS!!!! 95% of the time you're gonna finish a study and be like 'well this is not right' and then when you post it and caption it with who it is, people will see what you're getting at anyways! close enough IS, in fact, good enough

hope something in this helps at least a bit! thank you for the ask!

i turn to tumblr whenever i must post art but have already posted on instagram… life is beautiful…

been learning to play ironsworn (gritty fantasy ttrpg which you can play with a gm but is mostly suited for solo or small group co-op gmless play) after having the rulebook pdf for several years (stars finally aligned to remove invisible thing blocking me from reading it idk) because i'm on another solo ttrpg kick & i don't know what took me so long to get around to this game because it genuinely is exactly what i was looking for. years ago when i was playing through solo 5e modules i should have just been playing ironsworn (believe it or not, 5e isn't very suited to solo play and is extremely clunky when you try lol).

also though i have dabbled in some other solo ttrpgs, a considerable amount of them are journaling games which is fun but imo considerably more work (usually by the time i'm a quarter of the way through the journal entry, i know how to entire scene played out and i want to move on to the next gameplay thing, so i get frustrated and bored quickly. it feels like when you solve a level in a video game but don't have the coordination to pull off the necessary move so you have to spend 20 extra minutes doing something you already figured out), so i really appreciate like not needing to write something for the game to progress (ive been taking notes for my own record since im playing solo and thus am not really out loud roleplaying the way you do in a group, but i definitely could do that instead and not take notes and the game would still function perfectly)

& ive been playing by myself but also in the past ive played a lot of ttrpgs in very small groups which has been other games but is mostly dnd and like. we also should have been playing ironsworn so that having a gm was not necessary. have definitely played games where we had to adapt the rules soooo much to do something that is just base game included in ironsworn. plus it's rules-light enough to do pretty complex moves that pose difficulties in bulkier games (ever introduced someone to dnd and they tell you they want to do a sick backflip and catch something and then attack and you have to tell them that will require several different consecutive rolls and some creative liberties with how the rules are 'supposed' to let you move? you can just Do That in ironsworn. use the strike move and describe it. done!)

the one thing is that although it's rules-light enough to theoretically play any setting or genre (some with more difficulty than others), ive found so far that like... the grittiness and sense of threat is very built into the mechanics so that would be sort of difficult to work around or change (but i think it's great from a game design perspective). what i mean is like, okay: you start with 5 max hp. there isn't really a way to raise this max hp, you just slowly gain abilities (assets) that make you less likely to have to lose the hp in the first place, or that make it easier to recover. when you encounter foes, you rank them on a scale of 1 -5, and enemies on the lowest side of this scale do one harm to you, while enemies on the highest side do five harm to you. so even though encountering an epic enemy won't always be deadly due to the assets you have, they are ALWAYS capable of taking you down to 0 hp with one good hit. so the feeling of threat is much more present compared to games where your character starts to be able to just tank and push through a failure or huge threat.

admittedly also i'm playing solo, im still learning how to balance combat, and also i built a character who has NO combat talents and iron (the close quarters fighting stat) is one of my lowest stats so i personally am under much more threat than if you built a character who knew how to fight or who could do deadly harm. but also the other thing about combat is it's extremely difficult to maintain control of the fight; you have to score a strong hit to do it on basically all moves, and there's a really limited pool of moves available when you don't have the initiative, and obviously none of them really favour you. i don't know that this makes combat genuinely more difficult, but it does make you feel like the fight is always about to spiral out of your control. every second you let it drag without decisive action feels like it brings you closer to dying. like i said, this is a feature of the game design and not a problem in any way. just thinking about it because when i was initially learning i was going to try to supplant it into a homebrew fantasy world of my own but the tone just wouldn't be right. and that it is somewhat difficult to replicate the kind of worlds that i typically play or run for dnd, which tend to lean somewhat sillier and definitely much higher fantasy

but i like to try new things and tbh especially in dnd i find that i very rarely feel that sense of threat and when i do feel it, it has nothing at all to do with the actual mechanics and reality of the combat and everything to do with how well the dm sells it to me and makes it sound and feel scary and dangerous. which is a testament to what a good gm can do for you but i do appreciate the threat feeling more built-in and also being actually real.

Lazy quick doodles I did for my dnd campaign based on my little pony. These are from like months ago, campaign fell apart horribly. Everyone liked the actual game though :))

I just remembered my favorite detail about Vyrian as a dnd character. Which is she spoke 7-10 languages (depending on whether they had the linguist feat yet). I don’t have the sheet I made for her so I can’t verify how many, but I can look at the build they had and see the languages they would have had.

She was a homebrew race that gave them Common, Infernal, and Orc.

Then their background gave them 2 languages, (I think I played her with the Anthropologist background)

And on top of that, she was a cleric of the knowledge domain, which granted 2 languages.

Plus, once she gains a feat, she would take the linguist feat which grants 3 languages.

Not only is that just in part reflective of her interests and what she wants to do with her life, but I also think that it like, made sense because she more or less stopped aging in any noticeable way 100 years ago and has spent that century traveling.

(Yes this is the 7+ ft tall academic that has like a dozen knives on their person)

I've had Elyss for eight years today and I'm feeling very normal about it

57 sessions in, our party had their very first group hug :)

playing dnd rn :) it feels like it's been forever and it's been under a week lol

don't wanna work, don't wanna go to school, just wanna lay in bed and rotate fiver in my brain

some of my ttrpg boys <3

A sketch of another NPC from my zelda campaign! This is Talia, aspiring captain of the guard... she’s working on it!

Don’t use or repost my art without permission.

just had the biggest lore drop session in our campaign so far and im absolutely so normal about this world i've built

because i just remebered but I've been listening to a lot CR vods again during project work and man it's so funny going from one Campaign to the other because with C2 I always forget how horny they all are, even more so than the others

To be fair nothing will be as funny and horny as EXU but you know spin off

If you like Critical Role please watch the vods for Exandria Unlimited, those fuckers are so fucking funny, Matt really went "I'm finally a player so I'm playing the stupidest character because I will NOT explain anything" and Aimee, oh Aimee <3 I love new players because they are always SO CREATIVE and aimee just... the whole Aimee and Arthur bit really made me love her

Plus Aimee calling Orym Nancy as Opal and acting like he is her toddler and somehow getting a nat20 on the roll even though he is a grown man (even if he is a hafling) and people around rlly went "yes that is a 4 year old child called nancy with totally not weapons on his back"

Just god, EXU is so good

I actually cannot believe how fucking powerfully baldur's gate has gripped me

🪄 i feel like i had a dream where i got sent like 20 of these all by presumablyt the same anonymous person

that was me sorry <33 [Thumbnail - Louie Zong & Brian David Gilbert] To summarize seems incomplete How novel is a novel that can fit on one sheet? -- Chip stones from the boulder Suddenly, my vulnerability shows Oh, you can crop and trim, 'till all that's left Is the essence of a presence that is feeling bereft

(Bonus bc it's like basically a sequel song and also I listened to it again recently and it hasn't left my mind:)

(I know you know I’d come running At the slightest hint, you feel real blue Don’t you dare exclude A brighter color from your mood -Breezy Slide by BDG & LZ)