#and only the dm and myself have any pathfinder experience
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My Magus Sidra for the pathfinder game I got coming up.
Might still change her colors round, but I'm pretty happy with the scar she got for backstory reasons
#pathfinder#pathfinder 1e#my art#pathfinder OC#not the videy games#though Sidra is based off of my commander from WoTR#i made a thing#the outfit is based off of the base magus#no one in the group has played with eachother#myself and another havent play tabletops proper#and only the dm and myself have any pathfinder experience#so we're all new#and rogue has already asked for a slave and suggested torture before we even started so im a little cautious#but I think we just need to get used to each other#dm has chatted with him#worse case i get my very first rpg horror story but he seems otherwise cool so who knows
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As much as I value a lot of your opinions, I can’t really agree on saying the OGL won’t be a big deal. Yes it primarily affects big publishers but it’s actively intended to cut the legs out from WOTC’s main competitors like paizo and Green Ronin. 20-25% of revenue is absolute robbery, most TTRPG companies make paper thin profits and this would take it all from them. What’s more, this is clearly an attempt to go after the VTT market which has been pretty popular since the pandemic. If they can ensure 5e package aren’t provided on Foundry and Roll20, that will push customers to their own VTT Wizards is trying to develop. The problem with the new OGL is not that it goes after big name creators bc honestly they’ll probably have enough clout to cut a custom deal. This is WOTC trying to monopolize the digital market and a huge portion of the physical TTRPG market with it.
I mean...yes it is intended to cut the legs out of their main competitors like Paizo. They outright say that. I do not actually think that is necessarily a problem; Paizo is benefiting from the D&D game engine, and has since positioned themselves as a major competitor. This is business. (Also, there seems to be an inherent contradiction in your argument here because if Paizo isn't a big name creator with enough clout to cut a custom deal, I am unsure who is; are their legs getting cut out or are they cutting a custom deal.)
As for VTTs...I mean, again. Is the expectation that a company just give shit to competitors? Because look, I am no fan of capitalism but I'm not deluding myself regarding how it works, and that is not how it works. But also...I've not had great experiences with Foundry nor Roll20 (and have had good ones with D&D Beyond, though only as a player - as a DM I don't use VTTs so admittedly I have little skin in the game because I'm pretty sure Hasbro will not break in to my apartment and steal physical books) but those are also pretty significant companies who could, theoretically, also cut a deal. I mean, since the argument from the people freaking out about OGL 1.1 is "so you should switch to Pathfinder" (and D&D has very much seen people switch to Pathfinder when they've done unpopular things such as 4e), it's not unreasonable to think they may decide to split the difference and come to agreements with these tools in order to retain those players. Better to have someone shunning D&D Beyond for Foundry or Roll20 who will still buy new WoTC publications for those platforms than have that person leave entirely because their loyalty to the VTT outstrips their loyalty to D&D. I can't say if that's what will happen, but it's just as plausible as any of the gloom and doom scenarios being floated, and probably smarter from a business perspective.
Basically: this is a draft, and I think most people talking about it are jumping to conclusions, catastrophizing, and contradicting themselves, and should just...chill the fuck out and talk to a copyright lawyer if they are personally affected.
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The Healer: Critical Role
[ warning: here follows a long rambling story of feelings about losing a fandom and finding new love and happiness in an unexpected way ]
Here’s a little personal story about how some fandoms hurt and some heal. It goes from Fillory to Exandria. (It feels really right when I say it that way.)
I wasn’t ready for the healing that I got, but it’s here now. Thank Sarenrae.
Everyone loves that thunderstruck feeling when you fall in love with a fandom. It’s literally like all the tropes about falling in love. You meet and sometimes there’s just a spark.
That was me with The Magicians. I spent a year immersed in a welcoming fandom in a show that made me feel seen and whole. I had friends in the fandom as well as the friends irl who were into the show. I got to dive into it when I really needed a fandom to help carry me a little through a hard time.
It was heaven. Until it wasn’t.
In April of 2019, The Magicians broke my heart. Again, just like all the tropes about love. Just like a bad breakup, there’s things about it that I really enjoyed, but at the end of the day, I can’t go back to the way things were with that fandom. No matter how welcoming the fandom remained, I couldn’t go back because the show had cut me so deeply.
Then through 2019 and into 2020, I drifted through some new loves and lived in my love of some of my oldest fandoms. Lots of Star Wars. New excitement from Good Omens, The Dragon Prince, and The Old Guard. It’s not to say that I don’t love these things, but at least two of my new favs are, for the time being anyway, done. And, though Star Wars (and in the same breath my other love Marvel) are never really done, I like loving them in a bubble because as anyone in those fandoms knows it can be a complicated relationship.
Also in late 2019, my buddy @wittynamehere1443 decided she wanted to try and run a D&D campaign for our family of misfits. I hadn’t played since high school (D&D 3.5) and was super excited to get back into it. I picked up quite a bit while prepping to play from a mix of reading, remembering old things, and watching some tutorials and stuff on ye ol’ YouTube. I had dabbled in tabletop, but never thought I’d go charging back in, but once I started I couldn’t stop.
I immersed myself in as much as I could, but I’m really a visual & kinesthetic learner, so eventually I was going to have to supplement my book-learning with some real-play to really understand. I played as much as I could as I delved deeper, but even as I dove, I realized I wanted to do more. I started to write my own campaign setting and adventures. I suddenly found myself needing to just know how D&D worked without having to always have the books open.
Now, I had been lightly introduced to some real-play before I really understood what it was. A buddy of mine had shown me a clip of Critical Role out of context quite some time ago and I really didn’t understand how so many people I knew and shared a lot of crossover interests with could be so obsessed with watching 8 people play D&D.
My buddy who was now my DM had consumed all of The Adventure Zone and had very lovely things to say about it and I had the lingering curiosity about Critical Role form the many people who had recommended it to me as well as the complete mystery attached to why people loved it so. And me, being a big lover of visuals and being at home because of COVID, dipped my toe into real-play with the first episode of Critical Role back in late June.
I did it completely on my own at first, which is rare given that most things I watch, I watch them with my best friend and roommate, @hawkeyekate.
( Also, as a weird note, I’ve managed to deftly avoid most spoilers about Critical Role up to this point and I’m not completely sure how. I know one big one in Campaign 2, but until yesterday (when I watched the first episode of Campaign 2) I didn’t even know the classes of 1/2 of the Mighty Nein. I didn’t even know Sam played Nott until about three weeks ago. That bubble has come in very handy. )
I immediately began to get out of it what I was originally there for: great real-play with explanations of rules (especially vs. house rules and the whys of everything). Watching the cast fumble through transitioning from Pathfinder to D&D 5e was very helpful to me because I had some similar questions from the figments of memory I had from 3.5 as well as my other random tabletop experience. I was completely inspired and found myself cranking through pages upon pages of my own world and campaigns as well as delving deeper into my characters that I’d been honing already.
I quickly noticed that I was worrying less about the rules when I played and was getting to enjoy my character for who he is. I was starting to craft interesting mechanics and not just story in my adventures I was writing.
Lightning had struck and suddenly I was in love in a way I hadn’t been in a long time.
As I was watching Critical Role, I definitely wasn’t just learning to be a stronger DM and a better player. I found myself able to tell the twins apart. I was invested in the mysteries as they unraveled in Exandria. I hung on Mercer’s every word.
Then without warning, when the party said goodbye to Pike in Vasselheim, I found myself in tears. I don’t know why but I remember being so struck by that moment. I knew it was partly because Ashley was leaving for New York, but the story for Vox Machina hit a soft spot for me. I was no longer just watching 9 people play D&D. I was invested in the story, the characters, and the world.
I was suddenly a Critter.
I think notoriously at this point, when I fall for a fandom, its often connected to a character. I saw in Vax’ildan a lot of things that really sucked me in from the beginning. He is at the same time like many of my favorite characters of my youth and like many of my favorite characters as an adult. I feel like he’s my heartstrings manifest in a lot of ways, complete with many of the flaws in that.
Then what was a slow crawl accelerated. I would occasionally ramble to @hawkeyekate about the adventures of Vox Machina and it would be on when she was around, but she wasn’t exactly watching it with me. Then at some point during “The Trial of the Take”, she was suddenly sitting with me to watch. She was asking me to pause when she had to go do something - and wait for her.
We were watching together.
We were acutely aware of how the twins echoed things in us and that often we are referred to in the same sentence in the same way. I had my Vex’ahlia.
Only a little over a month later, we’ve battled Briarwoods and now we’re hunting Vestiges and gathering allies. It is a rare day that we don’t watch a little Critical Role. I sport my “Gilmore’s Glorious Goods” shirt. I’ve read Vox Machina: Origins and am making plans for two cosplays already.
I’ve also DM’d six sessions of my first adventure-turned-campaign in my own world I’ve built, Perlen. I play tabletop two-to-three days a week with my friends via the internet. I hoard dice.
I’ve fallen in love again and this time it feels safe.
I know good and bad things will come for Vox Machina ahead. I know the same can be said for The Mighty Nein in my future as well, but the Critters in my life have been so welcoming and it’s been so nice to have something new to talk to my friends about. And I trust the cast of Critical Role not to destroy things just because they made them like The Magicians creators did, a trust I didn’t think I would grow back any time soon. I know that some of the pains in Critical Role aren’t just scripted but are actually to chance, which gives me comfort, too. People live and die by the dice in tabletop and I can abide that. It doesn’t mean I won’t cry and ache every time something bad happens to them because I love them all.
So I will go running through Tal’dorei and look forward to Wildemount while I carve out the mountains and seas of my world of Perlen. I’ll cry when they hurt and smile every time Pike and Grog talk. I’ll be healed the way that stories can in ways I didn’t expect, which has now happened much more than once.
I’m here now and I love it.
[ special shout-out to the Critters in my life that have been so welcoming. Especially my super-enabler, @oniumbra. ]
#critical role#thoughts#personal#d&d#posts like this make me miss livejournal#because i'm also fandom old yall#the magicians
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Looking for D&D Players Again
Game: D&D 5e
Current Level: 3-4
Language: English
Group Type: Online [we use Roll20 and Discord]
My Role: DM
Roles Sought: Players [2-3 for a long term, pre-established campaign]
Timezone: Eastern/Centeral Standard Time
Times Available: Our next game is not currently scheduled as we’re taking a break, but I’m eager to bring in new players anyways even if we won’t start up again in a month or two :D
How Often: Weekly
About Me: Hello, my name is Rocky [he/him or fae/faer]! I’m looking for committed players for a long term campaign! We’re already deep in the midst of one and are looking for two or three more players as most of the ogs have left. We will be using Discord [voice chat only] for communication and Roll20 as our online gaming platform. I am a relatively new DM looking for people passionate about roleplaying! I have seven years of roleplaying experience with Pathfinder, a year with D&D 5e, and six months of DMing for this campaign. Players of all sorts of experience are welcome, but our party is primarily made of new players so we are very open to having you come learn the rules with us. We’re LGBT+ friendly and expect anyone interested in joining to be as well!
Character Creation: A lot of time and effort has been put into the Tales of the Planewalkers campaign, both on my end as the DM creating this universe and from the players who have each created wonderful characters. We look forward to whoever wishes to join us! You have to understand that I would like a similar level of effort to be put back into the game. I don’t want uncommitted players here so if you could create a synopsis for a character idea that would be great! It doesn’t have to be incredibly detailed, just say your race, class, and at least five sentences of background story. You’re welcome to make changes before game play, especially once I reveal more things about the lore to you if you join the party.
World Setting:
You come from a world you call Estrya. Estrya is home to a number of races who belong to a number of kingdoms that worship a number of Deities. Depending on which pantheon you belong to, you believe in differing legends about the creation of your world. All pantheons have agreed however that there are realms beyond the world of Estrya where the Deities reside, these magical worlds unique to the Deities residing within them. Contact with these realms is unique but not rare. A young Tiefling can connect with their Archdevil parentage through a simple spell, a seasoned wizard can astral project himself into the Beastlands when he sleeps, a powerful sorceress can even create portals and venture to and from these realms, and on the rarest of occasions a god can even be summoned to the Material Plane through their highest ranking cleric. Rumors prevail the lands of angels and devils walking among you, whispering words of advice or trickery into your ears. There are histories of Demigods becoming rulers of mighty empires that lasted for centuries. These are the reasons why religion is a core value in Estrya, because it is an undoubted truth that such beings of unfathomable power exist. It is seen as incredibly odd in your world if you do not belong to some pantheon or another and actively worship the gods. Atheistic or agnostic people are treated with an air of suspicion or idiocy by the people who know of their skepticism. Because the world of Estrya is so rich in the influence of the realms outside of the material plane, beings like Tieflings and Dragonborn are not put under the same scrutiny they would be on other worlds. Each race treats other races differently in their own ways, like the incessant rivalry between Elves and Dwarves, or the embracing acceptance Humans have for most other races, or the respect all races seem to have for the Dragonborn as they are seen as the oldest of the humanoid races on Estrya, though the Dragonborn might not return such respect. All in all though the races generally get along. That does not mean that Estrya is a peaceful utopia however. Wars are often fought between kingdoms over land and resources, and between religious sects over the definition of good and evil or the claimant of a holy land. Today the land is relatively peaceful, though whispers of an uprising of evil is being spread amongst the faiths of good.
Current Location:
Our players have found themselves lost in the Astral Plane with no certain way home. The Astral Plane is a realm of myth and mystery, a place where dreams are reality. The eternal silver sea wraps around you in an opaque fog as you float by with the sheer will power of your mind. Most simply pass through the plane, but there are some strange creatures that live here, most of which feast on the thoughts of others. Why have you come to the Astral Plane? What brings you to join this band of home seekers?
If that setting sounds interesting to you and you’re excited to get started then this is the campaign for you! I would just like to reiterate that this is a long term campaign that’s already fostered six months of play time with previous players, so we are looking for a certain level of commitment here. I hope you find our future adventures a lot of fun and build some meaningful relationships from it in the future as I have so far!
The Current Party:
Ivan - Pakari (homebrew humanoid Wolf race) Fighter
Liliana - Kitsune (homebrew humanoid fox race) Rogue
Setyr - Pakari (homebrew humanoid wolf race) Sorcerer
For Applications: You can message me on tumblr PMs with the application filled out
Name: [doesn’t have to be your full or real name, just whatever you’d like myself and the other players to call you]
Age: [this game will not be accepting anyone under the age of 17 or over the age of 25]
Pronouns:
Timezone:
Availability: [just a rough estimate on what days of the week you can play]
Experience: [please have at least read the first chapter of the Player’s Handbook, even if you’ve never played before]
Discord Tag:
Gaming Style: [we are a roleplay heavy group so keep this in mind and be ready for it!]
Fun Fact about yourself:
Character Race/Class:
Character Backstory:
Any Questions, Comments, Concerns:
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Hi, a new to D&D player who wanted to know if you had advice on actually getting more... roleplay happening. It often feels more like we are playing an RPG video game and not really roleplaying. There's some character development and talking in towns after each quest but for the most part it's "fight -> objective -> fight -> return back -> maybe chat?" and we are about halfway through but know little about one anothers characters. Half the party seems more into that character development while
the other half seems focused on the big bad or current fight and that's it even citing the others as having too much 'emotional baggage'. it just feels like 2 different sets of players and it makes the game really awkward at times. It is not even a thing like "the character isn't the open type" (in fact, that fits 2 of the characters that are more into the development part), they just do not care or make any effort to really connect.
I wish I had a magical cure-all answer for you, anon. Well, I actually kind of do, but it’s bitter medicine to take. The answer to your problem may very well end up finding or creating a new group, but we’ll get to that.
Your problem isn’t as unusual as I wish it was. As I mentioned in my last post, balance within the players at the table can be a tricky thing to achieve. It sounds like you have players who want different things out of the game. For some, D&D/Pathfinder/etc. are games meant to simulate the video game style environment (which is ironic since D&D’s creation predates any video game RPG.) They want bloody combat and victory, to crush their enemies, see them driven before them, and hear the lamentations of their women. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool video gamer, and even I’ve always found this a bit puzzling myself since you can get all of that very easily in hundreds if not thousands of solo game opportunities. There’s no wrong way in my opinion to come together and consentually play with friends, but I can pass my own judgement and say there are missed opportunities if you come together just to do something you could do alone.
You sound like you’re more interested in character development, interaction and the more social aspect of role-playing. I share that view, but you can’t make others share it with you, and if you have players who refer to your desire to interact like human beings (or elves, dwarves, or tabaxi or whatever) as “emotional baggage,” then I’m inclined to say they are a lost cause for what you want to get out of the game. They may come from a wargaming background or just want to relive the action scenes from movies. So be it.
Ultimately, it is your GM/DM’s show, and their job is never an easy one; they have the onerous task of trying to make sure everyone at the table is having fun. If you’re not enjoying the time you spend, if you’re not getting what you need out of the experience, you should talk to the GM. They may share your view (probably not since it sounds like they have orchestrated the fetch-kill-quest motif of the campaign already, but try!) If not, then not only does your desire not mesh with some of your fellow players, but the person in control of the world itself.
(If your GM agrees with you that the game could use more interaction, then it is mostly on them to change the nature of the game, to have an adult conversation with everyone at the table about what they want everyone to get out of it. This will likely fracture your table based on your earlier statements, but from destruction often arises something better.)
But assuming you have no GM support for your desires, your choice is pretty clear--find another table. You’re clearly not alone in your view here. You hopefully have a decent chance of picking up with another group in your local area (and for sure, there are many online groups that do everything from e-mail games to live chat.) You can also take the bold step of making your own table. Put on the GM hat and run a campaign the way you feel it ought to be run. It’s a challenging but highly rewarding experience. And it doesn’t have to be D&D or Pathfinder. There are a myriad of games out there with different settings and varying levels of mechanical involvement. Some, such as 7th Sea or White Wolf games (Vampire the Masquerade, Werewolf the Apocalypse, etc.) have an intrinsic emphasis on storytelling and interaction instead of just mechanical combat. In this age of the internet, there are almost limitless game choices available as well as resources online to help you find a group or learn the ropes of being a GM yourself. I wish you good luck!
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So this past weekend I went to GenCon for the second time.
GenCon is the largest gaming convention in the world with about 70k individual attendees every year, held in Indianapolis, Indiana. The first time I went was in 2009, with a friend from the internet, and it was a blast. This time I went with a bunch of my everyday friends, some of my favoritest people in the world, and it was even more fun.
Part one of my long recap, including lots of pictures, below.
SOME PRE-GENCON NOTES
Our group does love boardgames, but we do RPGs (like D&D) together even more. D&D actually doesn't have a very big presence at GenCon. There was some D&D going on, but it isn't a main focus of the con and my friends aren't super into 5e anyway. (We're actually doing a 4e game right now since it's one friend's favorite system.)
So when we signed up for events, we were trying hard to get into a bunch of Pathfinder stuff, especially Pathfinder 2, which was releasing the first day of GenCon. We got into two events, but ended up filling more slots with Starfinder. None of us were particularly interested in Starfinder, which is a Sci-Fi setting also put out by Paizio... it was always like "Eh, we might check Starfinder out sometime maybe." but we weren't that excited about it. But since we had gotten into two games to fill up some timeslots, we decided to go ahead and at least learn the system ahead of time for those of us who'd be playing in the SF games.
That would be Marcus, who is our DM most of the time when we play RPGs, Jeremy, and Brian, who is Marcus' oldest daughter's fiancee. We created characters the week before GenCon and got together twice to knock out some beginning level adventures.
What we didn't expect, at all, was to fall head over heels into Starfinder. Three of us ended up picking the same race (Lashunta, who are basically Mantis from GotG) and decided our characters were siblings, then decided so was Brian's character, even though he was a Vesk... a lizard-man race. Jeremy's Operative (Space Rogue/Pilot/smuggler)Zafo is the oldest, my Envoy (space bard/doctor/xenobiologist/archeologist) Vikiri, and Marcus' Technomancer (Space Wizard/Computer whiz/K-pop rockstar) Alissia are twin sisters, and Brian's Soldier Kronk (Space Meatshield/Master Chef) is our baby brother.
We fucking LOVE these characters and the whole world of Starfinder, and also our dear Father and Mother, who we always strive to make proud of us. Starfinder is really so much fun and we're running official modules as we're a part of the Organized Play Starfinder Society and they're... so good? Anyway, here we are, playing Starfinder for like six hours the Thursday night before Gencon because that's the only day we could physically be in the same room. (the other time we played via Discord.)
WEDNESDAY
So anyway, then we actually went to Gencon! Jeremy and I got flights together and rooms (separate) at the same hotel to make travel more convenient. Everyone else, which was Marcus, wife Laura, daughters Gwen and Kirstyn and Kirstyn friend Ally, and Gwen's fiancee Brian, drove. 14 hours from Dallas to Indy... Jeremy and I have talked about it for next year, we'll see.
I took Wednesday off to finish packing and relax, and then just before Jeremy came to pick me up, our flight got delayed two hours. We decided we'd then have time for a leisurely lunch instead of fast food, and so we went to one of my favorite places to eat, a Canadian cafe. The service was slower than expected, but we were still tracking to be at the airport about an hour before our original takeoff time, three before our “new” takeoff time.
And then... while we were driving to the airport... our flight got UN-DELAYED. What. The. Fuck.
Our leisurely afternoon turned hectic as we got to the airport as fast as possible then, I checked in our bags while Jeremy parked the car, got in line in Security, and oh nooo the line was long. I started to get nervous about making the flight. Apparently, we weren't the only people who had done the same thing.
We hoofed it through the airport, though and made it to the gate with like 5 minutes to spare until boarding, just enough time to take a bathroom break and get a bottle of water. We got on the flight though! And sat there. And sat there. And... sat there. And then got kicked off the plane for an electrical issue. Then sat in the gate for an hour or so until another airplane arrived. Turns out, our flight ended up being delayed... about two hours.
ANYWAY. We made it, de-planed at Indy, collected our bags, taxied to the hotel. We were staying at a Red Roof Inn outside of the airport area, we were trying to do this cheap and with each of us paying for a hotel room, staying near downtown wasn't an option. $65/night for a hotel is a lot better than $200+/night for being closer, especially when you can split Lyft fares. (Could have rented a car but we did the math... especially factoring in parking at $20-30 a day plus the hotel charging for parking... much cheaper to Lyft everywhere.)
After settling into the hotel we had to go to the convention center and get our tickets. I had my badge mailed to me, but all events require tickets and Marcus had ordered all our tickets... and you have to pick up your tickets yourself. The Will Call line at 10pm on Wednesday night was... an hour and fifteen minutes long. So we waited in that. Nothing particularly cool or terrible happened, but it's just one of those GenCon experiences. This year apparently 15% of the events had electronic tickets. Next year that's supposed to go up to 75%. Let's hope so. The GenCon provided Wifi was actually pretty good.
We headed back to the hotel afterwards and were both hungry again at this point, so we ate at the only available option... Waffle House... at like 12:30 at night. Seemed like a good way to end our first night, as long as we didn't get food poisoning.
...which we did not. :p
THURSDAY
So another fun thing about GenCon this year that we found out a day or two earlier is that the entire freeway from the Airport to downtown was going to be closed all weekend. Adding lots of time to our commute (and thus $ to our Lyft fares, but we still saved money.) So we got up extra early, discovered how terrible our hotel's free breakfast was (very... most days I had a cold bagel with a scraping of cream cheese and if I was lucky, a banana) and got a Lyft into town. Except it took 30 minutes to get a Lyft. From then on, we scheduled them ahead of time.
But HEY! Eventually, we were there! We found the room for our first game and met Brian and eventually Marcus outside. Our first scheduled game was Star Wars, the Fantasy Flight Games system (which is now known as Genesys). This is a system that Marcus ran Jeremy and I and other friends a 2+ year campaign in, so the three of us were very familiar with the rules. Kirstyn and Ally also joined us, and Kirstyn had played it once before.
So I've mentioned before that Jeremy, Marcus and I go to a local con called GamerNation Con every year. Two years ago the guest of honor was a guy named Sterling Hershey who is a well-known loremaster for Star Wars and helped write the SWFFG system. We played in a game he ran that year. Hilariously, Sterling was our GM for this game, as well. It was a good way to kick off the weekend.
Jeremy played a Jedi and I was his Padawan, Ally and Brian played Clone soldiers ( the game took place in the Clone Wars era) Kirstyn played a shark-race diplomat and Marcus was her "get it done" operative type.
Ally, Marcus and Brian.
The Table setup
Brian, Jeremy and Kirstyn
And of course, our DM.
Our next game was a 13th Age, with Marcus, Jeremy, Brian and I, plus two "new friends" and a DM who was very good at and familiar with the system. We've been doing a 13th Age game as our "Main Game" for about a year, since our SWFFG game ended and like Starfinder, it's a system that we were all very skeptical about at first and have found ourselves LOVING.
I really enjoyed this DM. He did a lot to challenge us to roleplay, I think the only time we spend game time making up backgrounds for our characters and making any character creation choices. (They were basically premades but he had us choose names and do some history stuff which only makes sense if you know 13th Age.)
He did some really cool mechanics as well, like one that made travel interesting... one person would say something bad that happened in our journey and the next would say "But it was all okay, because..." and use that as a way to bring depth to the adventure. Like one person said "It was bad when the owlbears attacked us..." and then I answered, "But it was all okay, because our supplies had been running low, and now we had plenty of meat to eat on the journey!" Then I said "It was bad when we came across a village that had been wiped out by disease." and the next person said "But it was okay, because we learned a vital clue, and kept the disease from spreading!" and the DM gave us a clue about what was coming up.
I played a Bard in this game.... okay the thing is, I love playing bards. Support classes in general, but I always have to pull myself away from the urge to play a bard. But there were only a couple of character sheets left when they came around and Marcus wanted to play a wizard so I did bard. Apparently, Bard is one of most complex classes in the game, and the DM said I did great. We were 5th level (out of 10) so they were already pretty in-depth characters. We're only level 3 in our campaign at home, so it was fun to see how powerful we'd become.
Also what I love about 13th Age is that the world is just... weird. You think that Anything Can Happen in D&D but honestly, the world of 13th Age is just so much broader and weirder and it was fun to see this DM's interpretation of it. One of my favorite games of the con.
Our fighter, Jeremy the Monk and Brian the Barbarian.
Marcus, our rogue, and the DM.
So that night, we had had a 3-hour break scheduled then were supposed to go to Lucas Oil to play the Call of Cthulu board game that night. But then Jeremy and I had been talking the night before and were thinking... maybe we could play more Starfinder.
We'd been planning on going to the Nerd Night (which is a thing where you go and play games plus support a charity with donations) to fill in those hours, so we asked Marcus if he'd mind skipping the board game so we could spend those hours doing Starfinder at NN instead. He gave in.
So we stopped and got some dinner at a food truck (had a pretty good burger and fries, we were starving since we'd just had whatever snacks we had brought with us for lunch) and then it took a little bit of time but we found Nerd Night, which was held in a hotel that had turned an old train station into a ballroom. It was very cool. After eating, resting, drinking lots of water, and doing some Starfinder Society paperwork, we got to work on Starfinder, finding a quiet table in the corner away from everyone to play at. And the module was SO FUN, our characters were on a reality-competition game show in order to bring glory to the Starfinder Society (and our family). And then a loud group of people decided to pick the table RIGHT NEXT TO US in an empty side- room to play their loud game at (seriously... wtf? THERE WERE AT LEAST A DOZEN OTHER TAbLES NOT NEXT TO US TO PICK!) so we packed up and moved to another corner, that was actually quieter and not as cold.
Then they kicked us out of Nerd Night at around 12:30, after it had closed. So we walked back to the ICC (Indiana Convention Center) and found a near-empty food court, pushed some tables together... and kept gaming. Until like, after 2AM.
We didn't officially finish the module yet but we were kicking so much ass that we had basically won it already anyway.
So yeah... back to the hotel... asleep by um... three?
The actual quiet corner table.
The Empty Food Court setup
FRIDAY, PART ONE
So the next morning everyone but me did True Dungeon, meeting at 10am. I bowed out because my back was too fucked up to stand for that long. It was a hard decision, but the right one for me. Instead, I spent a little bit of time shopping in the dealer hall, taking sit-down breaks against the wall when needed, and decided on what I'd want to buy later. Mostly I just went to three booths and peeked at a few more.
After a short hangout break, I went to a lecture I'd had my eye on anyway, all about Eberron (one of the "official" D&D worlds) by the actual creator of Eberron, Keith Baker. This was definitely my hidden gem of the weekend. He took a bunch of questions BEFORE the panel started that he jotted down and answered in his talk, which I thought was a great way of doing it, and still had time for more questions at the end. All the questions were also great, I thought, in contrast to a lot of con panels. I really enjoyed what he had to say, not only about Eberron, which is probably my favorite of all the official D&D worlds, but about worldbuilding in general. It was only an hour, but it was an hour well spent. There were only about 100 people there but I hope he enjoyed the panel as much as I enjoyed attending.
Afterwards, it was time to meet back up with the guys for my first of four games in the Paizo room. First up: STARFINDER!
We'd tried valiantly, but had only barely made it to level two with our SFS characters, so we each picked a premade "iconic" character who was the same class as our own, and re-skinned them to just say they were our characters. The module was pretty cool, dealing with a world that was a simulation that the inhabitants believed was real. I was a little frustrated with the DM at one point but otherwise had a very fun game.
This is the only pic I took of that game, damnit. And this was because my mom texted and said to tell the guys hi, so I sent this back to her.
And after that game... I parted ways with my friends once again. Because I had tickets... to Critical Role.
Okay this post is already really long, I'll finish up in a second post! Which I've already gotten a good chunk of written, so look for that later tonight or tomorrow night!
#gencon#gencon 2019#starfinder#star wars rpg#13th age#keith baker#tabletop games#annakie's misc stuff
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Hmmm...how about 1-30? :-P ["I don't know" is a perfectly valid answer to ones you may not have an answer for yet, and so is guessing.]
Hi @prionailurus!! :D
1. What’s the first game system ( __ Edition D&D, Rifts, GURPS, Shadowrun, etc.) you ever played?
5th edition D&D! I sat in on a Pathfinder campaign once but didn’t actually get to play.
2. What’s the most recent one you’ve played?
Also 5e!
3. What’s your favorite system?
5eeeeeee
4. Is there a system you’d like to play but haven’t?
I’d like to play Pathfinder so I can try the Oracle class out. I’m also interested in another RPG called In Nomine.
5. Are there any systems you’ve tried and did NOT like?
Haven’t had the chance to try any unsuccessfully!
6. Do you have any house rules for the system(s) you play?
Not really? Mostly we have house-handwaves of certain aspects we’re too nooby to enforce, like spell components and rations, and spell prep. That Pathfinder session I watched left me with a house rule I’d love to implement though, that Barbarians can redo a bad roll by punching the table to “pop” the dice.
7. Do you DM/GM for your group?
Occasionally! In my group, I and two others take turns being the DM. Comparing notes without spoilers is a real thorn in the side.
8. Do you say DM or GM?
DM for D&D. I imagine that GM is more fitting for other systems.
9. Do you have a go-to setting?
If I understand the question right, my group’s running campaign is in an ever-expanding homebrewed world of no name, which canonically has an Austria and a New Orleans. There’s a LOT of misty coastal towns, because that’s in the aesthetic of all three DMs.
10. Have you ever run a game, or do you prefer to just play?
I’ve run three campaigns, and there’s a special magic to running, but I do really like playing and being able to get into character. DMing carries a lot of pressure, too.
11. Do you play with game mats and/or minis?
We have a wet-erase mat we keep forgetting to erase and a small set of minis for the party. NPCs and small monsters are played by Monopoly pieces, big bads are amiibos and other kitsch owned by the DM who hosts at his house.
12. How old were you when you first started gaming?
25 c: I’m new
13. How often does your current gaming group meet up?
Weekly, usually, but sometimes we skip a week or two because of scheduling conflicts.
14. How often would you LIKE to meet up for gaming?
Ideally weekly as a minimum. Twice a week would be rad. A week can be a long time to wait!
15. How long do your gaming sessions tend to be?
4 hours min to 6 max. Anything past 5 and people start to disengage and get sleepy because we start in the evening, because scheduling.
16. How long would you LIKE your gaming sessions to be?
I would love to have all-day games, at least for Big Plot Occurrence sessions. With snacks.
17. Have you tried/had any luck with Roll20?
I’ve been trying to connect with a group on there with no luck thus far. I want to use it to playtest some other characters I’ve brewed up.
18. What’s your preferred gaming beverage?
Whatever beer the host is willing to part with, hehe.
19. What are your preferred gaming snacks?
I don’t really snack, we get dinner during our game sessions. Usually sandwiches or pizza.
20. What are your superstitions or rituals regarding dice?
I named a few of my d20s (Rocky, Misfit, Elf One), and I switch between d20s depending on the task at hand. (Rocky is for strength, Elf one is for charisma, Misfit is for attack rolls, etc) I also have a REALLY SHARP d4 from a high-quality set I bought on sale, which I’ve dubbed the 𝕯4 𝖔𝖋 𝕯𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍 and keep it out for poking people when they have bad gaming etiquette.
Other than that, I mostly just put misbehaving d20s away and switch to my first d20, which rarely lets me down.
21. Do you know anyone with really good/bad/weird dice luck?
Yes! My good friend has NEVER rolled well on initiative in all the times we’ve played. He always rolls 8 or lower.
22. What would you say is your alignment?
Chaotic good, I’d like to think.
23. What is the class you’d like to be?
I’d love to be a bard. Magic and music and charm out the wazoo.
24. What class do you think you’d actually be?
Probably a fighter. I’m good at music, but charming I’m not. Brute strength is where I excel irl. (I do play rugby, after all.)
25. What weapons would you wield? [@thewhiteboardofkanjisan] (It me!)
Sword! I would love to wield any kind of sword.
26. If you could cast one spell, what would it be? [@thewhiteboardofkanjisan]
Probably Fly, or maybe Polymorph.
27. What school of magic would you specialize in?
Either Divination or Evocation!
28. If you could have any creature - real or fictional - as a familiar, what would it be? [@thewhiteboardofkanjisan]
Gonna agree with you, pseudodragon is the WAY TO GO! For a real animal, though, I’d pick a klipspringer antelope or a Honduran white fruit bat.
29. What was your favorite character to play? [@thewhiteboardofkanjisan]
My currently-only character, Mariya, a CG half-elf ex-acolyte bard loosely based on Maria from The Sound of Music. Over time she’s grown away from the source material in a lot of ways. Depending on what the DM does with Mariya’s backstory, I might give her an alignment shift to LN and heavily multiclass in warlock for the second half of the levels.
30. Do you tend/prefer to play characters of your own gender/orientation?
I’ll shake it up with gender, but my group’s world tends to operate under the rule that Everyone Is Bi Always. One time a plot-hook NPC swapped genders mid-session with no in-world explanation just to make it a little gayer (Landon the lighthouse widower. Poor fellow. That’s a story for another day.)
31(Which I’m adding because I think you sent me the ask before this one got added). What do you, primarily, get out of roleplaying? That is, is it for fun with your friends, to experiment with being people who you are not, or something else? [@aetherspoon]
For me, D&D is both freeing and gives me validation I can sometimes miss in real life. I can be things the real world doesn’t allow, but I can also remind myself that Real World Daisy is talented, a good team member, has ideas worth sharing. D&D helped me make it through my final semester of grad school when a really bad semester-long group project was giving me hella anxiety. (I actually wrote an article for the student newspaper about why business students should play D&D. I’ll share it if anyone wants, though my name’s attached to it, but I’ve totes shared that info on here before so it’s nbd!)
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4, 7, 10 and 12
4. Your current campaign.
I’m currently in three, all online.
Ascension 2.0 is a 5e campaign–one of the central plot points is that there has suddenly been a mass increase in people ascending to godhood. People are trying to discover the reason why, and possibly what it means for the universe at large. Our party is a mishmash of people from incredibly different walks of life, I’m super engaged in all their personal plots and the DM does a great job of encouraging that.
I’m in a nameless Pathfinder game that’s just listed on Roll20 as “Two Assholes” because that’s what the party is–a human barbarian who acts out every impulsive thought he has and a giant mantis lady who thinks the entire world fucking revolves around her. Our DM’s been building this setting for a long-ass time, and it really shows, the world is so alive and I find myself pondering all the mysteries he’s setting up for us in down-time.
My other 5e game I just refer to as “the gobbos” because the party is just 3 goblins. It started as a one-shot and everyone got so attached to our characters that we kept it going. Right now the overarching plot is just these nerds traveling away from their home and having various misadventures. I think my favorite thing about this one is that our DM really has a lot of fun creating atmosphere, you can always tell he spent time preparing all the music and game props with care.
7. Your favorite downtime activity.
So I’m actually not sure if this question means “between games” or “downtime in-game” so I’ll answer both.
In-game I tend to try to come up with flavor things for my character to be doing. They often have hobbies or want to progress their own quest in little ways. The most fun one so far has been my Aasimar, who receives direct telepathic messages of what he should be doing at any given moment–and often just does them without questioning. So I’ll have him do stuff like buy a stuffed boar from a shop and place it under a tree in a park and leave, not giving any follow-up at all.
Between games, I really like to create and listen to character-themed playlists. Sometime I would love to refine them and show them off, music is a huge inspiration for my writing and listening to them before a game really helps me snap in-character.
10. Your favorite enemy and the enemy you hate the most.
So I actually have been trying to avoid reading the monster manual during my D&D experience. I figure I only get to experience the surprise of a new enemy once in my life, and since I’ve never DMed I try to keep myself as spoiler-free as possible.
So my answer right now, for both of them, is kobolds. I love kobold-lair dungeons at low levels. Every single one I’ve encountered, the party vastly underestimates these little lizard nerds and get stuck in loony-tunes style shenanigans when the traps start springing. This is also the exact reason why I hate them. Also because slicing up little scaly dudes just makes me sad.
12. Your in game inside jokes/memes/catchphrases and where they came from.
I can’t tell you where most of these came from, and a few are just better without context. I feel like I’m missing so many.
Just saying or writing “bepis” ad nauseam
the phrase “Low to the ground” sending the entire group into fits of hysterical laughter
Endless references to Rupaul’s Drag Race, brought about mostly from Gloria Meteora
“Does a 22 beat your AC?” “No.” “15 damage.” “Fair.”
[Party member] standing an inch away from the doorway when the door is opened.
Someone makes a pun. “Take 3 psychic damage.”
Referring to a bunch of reptiles as “OUR BABIES”
“Literally seduced a riot away.”
“Murder-take.”
“Wow. You can learn things from books.” With not a hint of sarcasm.
“I’m just an ox.”
“Is he gonna fuck a bug?” / “He’s probably gonna fuck a bug.” / the no-chitin rule
“I just watched a kid explode into a cloud of locusts, I think this place is weird!!”
The “zero to Mulaney” timer, in which one of us times the amount of time from the start of the session to the first John Mulaney reference.
Road salad
“See, the thing is…” -makes Escape Artist check-
Armor of Agathys re-skinned into a magical girl transformation.
Getting a dog, and then forgetting about it immediately
“motherfucker”
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I'm so jealous of your gay elf murder bachelorette campaign that I now desperately want my own. Any recommendations on how to find people to play D&D with? I have several friends who are interested, but none of us have any questions experience (between my secondhand experience of reading about your adventures) so we don't know how to get started
oh gods so apparently I have A Lot Of Opinions and it got really long, so under the cut, also thank you for reminding me that I should probably properly type up the finale of Gay Murder Elf Bachelorette Campaign Book 1 because it was freaking epic and this is the one campaign that I can properly rant about on tumblr without worrying about spoilers
(I’m in three campaigns right now) (by complete accident) (on the one hand it’s a bad life decision in that I have zero free time anyways with grad school, but on the other hand it has become my sole social interaction with anyone ever and also coping mechanism for the stress and one good thing I do for me and, like, they’re not all weekly campaigns, so hours-per-week I’m devoting isn’t ridiculous) (and I miss my friends and it’s re-connected me with them and also has introduced me to upperclassmen in the department) (but sometimes there are character secrets and people who potentially follow me on tumblr so I can’t post the super long dramatic things about a character that I really want to)
OKAY SO HOW TO GET INTO PLAYING
I will be real, the three campaigns that I am in right now are the first time I’ve played DnD for anything that lasted longer than a week and a half at a summer camp type deal, like, arguably, this is my real first time playing DnD….ever. That being said, I’ve worked at gay theater camp for….six years now? And they do super intense super in-character LARPing that is far more roleplaying-heavy than mechanics heavy and has trained me to both have very good story instincts of, like, “this is how you make decisions that both fit with your character and support the narrative instead of oppose it, and either do not tear the party apart, or tear the party apart but for a very good and fitting narrative reason (i.e. if there’s going to be strife, make it mean something)” and in my opinion it is when you bring those sorts of instincts to a DnD game that you get the most satisfying story out of it. Character creation, team cohesion, and story and world development are all things that I do feel super comfortable speaking about because that is my literal jam outside of my math jam which is paying for me to be alive and stuff. So here we go.
There are a couple of questions that you need to immediately answer, the first being, “do you want to play Dungeons and Dragons, or do you want to start with a mechanically less complicated system?” Because there are a lot of pretty good systems out there that are high fantasy even (i.e. Dungeon World) that are a lot more streamlined in terms of “you don’t need to be as familiar with a set of rules in order to play.” That being said, Dungeons and Dragons is classic and is fantastic and I freaking adore it. (I will be completely honest, the only other two systems I know right now are Dungeon World, which is fantasy, and Mech Noir, which holy shit you are playing noir style detectives except in a SCI FI SETTING WHERE YOU PILOT MECHAS and the entire game system is around applying “adjectives” to people like, if you successfully roll against an enemy, you get to pick any adjective you can think of ever from “grappled” to “trusting” to “confused” to “located” and it just makes for such interesting storytelling)
which vaguely brings me to my first piece of real advice: you learn how to play best by witnessing playing happening. if you are a podcast person, I highly recommend either The Adventure Zone or Friends At The Table (or, honestly, if you have the time, both). The Adventure Zone plays DnD, 5th Edition, and it is a super quality family who are goofing off and having fun together and then the plot that arises is like “oh shit I am crying about a wizard named Taako, pronounced taco, how did this happen to me” and it’s great. The Adventure Zone is 100% the reason why I reached out to friends and was like “yoooo is anyone starting a campaign because TAZ has made me want to play again.” Friends at the Table starts with Dungeon World and it is some of the best storytelling and worldbuilding I’ve ever heard? And you will learn so much about how to set things up and go with the flow and the DM talks a lot about his process as offhand comments and you will learn so much. I’ve heard good things about Critical Role, but haven’t listened myself. But get out there, listen, and then don’t be afraid of copying things that you admire. Best way to learn.
If you’re going with Dungeons and Dragons, start with 5th Edition. 0th, 1st, and 2nd are all ridiculously unbalanced, 3 is “actually everyone uses 3.5,” or a combo 3.5/Pathfinder. While 3.5/Pathfinder is a great system and is what we’re playing both in gay murder elf bachelorette campaign and in the math grad departmental campaign, and was the game that I learned on, 5e is a lot more streamlined and they’re aren’t super picky exact rules for every tiny thing you could think of doing, which means you don’t need to be familiar with a vast system full of loopholes and counters and counter-counters to know how to effectively play the game. we don’t talk about 4th edition
Decide who is going to be the DM. There are sometimes comic stores that’ll run weekly or biweekly or monthly games of DnD, but those are almost definitely going to be less story-based and usually are one-shots? And if you’ve got a good group of friends, I recommend just playing with them and not trying to find an external group that you don’t know. I’m vaguely assuming that you’re volunteering to be DM because you’re asking? But if there’s someone in your group of friends who likes writing things or likes managing things or is interested, or if people want to take turns trying stuff out, go for that. The department group rotates DMs (and rotates games) just based on who has something written that they’re excited to try out.
You also might want to ask around to see if there are any people that you vaguely know, or that are friends of friends, who play. You’d be surprised how many people do. I’ve also seen blogs on tumblr sometimes going “hey, I’m running a Skype campaign and I need two or three more players, if people are interested fill out this survey and then depending mostly on times people are free but also what you say about what you’re looking for from a game I’ll pick the players?” or if y’all are in college there is almost always a DnD club somewhere, hidden semi-secret on campus, on the register to get club funding but under the radar because nerds. But you and your friends who are semi-interested will work just fine, as long as semi-interested means they’re actually willing to commit for a bit. So how do you get started?
Get the Player’s Handbook, and the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and read them cover to cover. If you’re playing and not DMing, eh, skip this step, and have the DM do it instead, but the Dungeon Master’s Guide especially will walk you through how to set up things mechanically very well and if you’re going in blind it will be good to have gone through and read it all once. I’ve read the 3.5 DMG cover to cover several times, haven’t read 5e yet, I know that I didn’t like their storytelling tips, but read through it once to get an idea of what mechanics might look like, it gives very good starting mechanical advice.
1. Speed and smoothness of playing are important, which means that sometimes, if you don’t know a rule, you want to make something up on the fly and deliver it with a completely straight face. Everybody does homebrew. Rules are great because they keep things from devolving into chaos and they can settle disputes, but also, sometimes you’ve just got to make a call, and if you make it while looking like you know what you’re doing, everyone will believe you. Similarly, don’t make the same rolls, or the same number of rolls, for NPC characters as you would for PCs. For example, in gay murder elf bachelorette campaign, when Iria was both directing a full assault on a hobgoblin fortress as well as had put herself on the special strike team that was going to sneak in and open the portcullis, the DM made ~one or two rolls~ to see how successful the Caedic units were at each of the points of Iria’s plan, instead of rolling a full battle between ~40 hobgoblins and ~80 elves. screentime is important; if you’re spending too much time on not-the-players, it gets boring for the players, so roll enough dice to decide what’s going on with a tad bit of luck and so it seems like other characters have rules that they have to follow, but you don’t have to let the rules dictate every single thing that happens in-world. you dictate that.
2. Character creation is how you set yourself up for success. Do not underestimate the importance of party dynamics. You don’t all have to be playing best friends or even people who get along–in Spelljammer, Marian and Djin had the character backstory of “ten years ago we were captain and co-captain of a vessel and for Reasons got into a huge fight over nothing and split and Marian took half the ship with her and she thought she’d never see him again but now oops they’ve both ended up jobless on the same station and Marian was already pooling as many resources as she could to try to put together a new ship and Djin arrived a couple months into this and needed the work so joined this ragtag democratic crew, but there’s a shit ton of tension.” This worked because we were snippy to each other in dialogue, when push came to shove, Marian is professional enough such that her whole deal is putting personal feelings aside always no matter what, and Djin takes the passive in passive-aggressive super seriously, so it never meant that the party was sitting around arguing for hours or refusing to cooperate. Meanwhile, I’ve seen and heard of campaigns falling apart because “there are two thieves and one really wants to get to do all the sneaking so they argue all the time over who gets to do cool stuff” or “the evil fighter literally just wants to murder everyone which means everyone else can’t get stuff done.” You can have intra-party strife and have it be interesting, but only if players are doing it cooperatively instead of being at each other’s throats irl. Rule of thumb: if the party dynamics are frustrating the other players, you are doing something wrong.
2.5 That being said, if a party starts to develop into bad dynamics, it is fixable without betraying character! For example, in the department campaign, I’ve been playing a super sheltered youngest child elf wizard from a super established Elvin wizard family (of, like, oh the arcanic postlines that let mail be sent around the continent? Grandpa came up with that theory. Schools of magic identified and classified originally? That was the Maewels) so Seraph is a tad bit privileged and a tad bit sheltered and is uppity sometimes. There was a fighter in the party who liked his alcohol, once missed a huge battle that the rest of us had to cover for him because he’d seduced two women at the inn we were hanging out at before the town was attacked, and typically did things like walk around in the morning with no pants on. And he proceeded to interpret Seraph’s increasing shock and disdain for him (or rather specifically, how upset she was the first time she saw him pantless) as “yeah all women go for me.” The party was vaguely splitting into “Seraph’s side and Silas’s side” so I decided to aggressively interpret one of the battles we went through together as a bonding experience and lo and behold Seraph’s feelings started to change over the next couple of weeks to “you might be an inconsiderate asshole but you’re OUR inconsiderate asshole so only we are allowed to rag on you” and she became one of his biggest supporters esp when they got to his hometown. All you really need is one super solid, proactive player in a party to make sure that things are resolved in a solid manner, so if you’re not the one DMing? Be that player.
2.75 Okay but if you’re DMing, have the conversation with your players as they’re designing their characters about point (2) because good party dynamics are easiest when you get it from the start.
3. Design encounters around the party. You don’t need a traditional setup of “a tank, a mage, a healer, and a thief” to have an effective and fun party. Maybe everyone wants to play a thief, great, design the scenario to be “you have all been contracted by the thieves’ guild to sneak into this party and assassinate this noble, you have three days to prepare and these resources, make a plan” instead of “this is a traditional dungeon crawl where you are fighting big scary monsters despite the fact that none of you are melee fighters.” Similarly, figure out what sort of stories and settings and aesthetics your players are interested in, and then play that game.
4. Make it personal. Ask people about their backstory and then incorporate stuff in. Notice what they become invested in and adjust your plans to include more of that. Give characters individual arcs that fit vaguely into the overall story, but also that they are the semi-protagonist of. Right now in Spelljammer, we’re all dealing with “so there are weird tears in the universe that Password, this Extinct AI we found and befriended, says are reminiscent of literally the entire universe ripping apart at the seams and are possibly why the Extinct went extinct, oh and some random lady gave us this artifact called the Eye and told us to hide it from the Blind King? And now his servants are hunting us? We are literally scav elves this is so above our pay grade.” Except going on as subplots, Algol is being hunted down by this evil overseer of whatever place in Echoside he originally escaped from, Leif got a stone that gives her prophetic dreams, Kimi has been super close to Password and Leif dreamed about them stitching the universe together, and Marian is dealing with an "oh shit I’ve accidentally adopted these three kids even though I don’t do personal” along with “oh god have I literally become the captain of this ship because I AM THE ONLY ADULT LEFT” along with some old friends from her past trying to reconnect just after we got a prophecy about how the last thing the Blind King would send to steal the Eye was someone we loved turned against us. So yeah, sure, there are big Adventure Plotlines going down that involve the entire party, but we’re not doing things just to do them, everyone is personally invested in this for their own reasons. So when you plan a big adventure, both plan places where individual party members get to start both for who they are and what they can do, as well as along the way keep an eye out for things that you can tie in for them.
5. Consequences matter. And not just stuff like “Iria got stabbed really bad first session and nearly died, now every time she goes into rage at the end needs to roll a fortitude save to not fall unconscious, and whenever she rolls a one same deal.” But also consequences like “you were really rude to this person and now they don’t like you and they are friends with the owner of the apothecary, who now also doesn’t like you and marks up prices behind your back” or "you let one of the patrol escape and now the whole army knows that you’re coming” or “you saved this kid’s life even though you were in enemy territory and now five years later he recognizes you even though you’ve been captured and is making sure that the party is taken prisoner instead of killed.” Make NPCs (non-player characters, ie characters the DM controls) recurring characters instead of people that you meet once, and have the way that the NPCs feel and then interact with the players change based on how prior interactions go. Have them care about things and have them remember. It makes the world feel a lot more real.
6. Preparing for a session goes petty much "how much do you like improv”. If you’re chill improvising, you want written down the stats of the monsters/enemies your players are potentially going to encounter, and probably a vague idea of goals, and then just play it by ear. Jeremy (the person running gay murder elf bachelorette and spelljammer) has I think at this point 13 “Books” written for gay murder elf bachelorette campaign, will write long descriptions of characters, settings, has maps drawn, has customized his own random encounter tables, has made his own homebrew system for how spaceship mechanics works specifically so that we could better piece together our spaceship with fantasy duct tape during the Death Races, and overplans every last detail all the way down to “has different musical themes that he’ll swap out and play at different times.” like, Iria has a Trauma theme that is played every time her wound starts acting up. He has collected music for books in advance. He has multiple different theme songs for each of the players in spelljammer. He writes notes about what NPCs are thinking so that he can reference it later. But that’s because he knows that he prefers the things he comes up with when he has time to plan things out, instead of when he’s surprised. He knows his own storytelling style. “eh, an outline and some monster stats” would not work for him the same way that I’ve seen it work for other people. You don’t have to put a ridiculous amount of prep work and writing time into being a DM, you need to figure out how much prepared material you need to run something comfortably, and then prepare that much.
6.5 Understand no matter what you plan, bits and pieces will probably be derailed, and be okay with that. Nothing is more upsetting than when a DM does not respect player autonomy and invalidates the clever things they think of, because it goes against their own plans. I think being a DM/running a story is sort of halfway “you’re writing a novel” and halfway “oh shit except this time the characters ACTUALLY have minds of their own” and striking a balance instead of dominating the narrative makes it fun. Also, it means you can throw in problems that you have no solutions for. During the Death Races in spelljammer, our battery started running out of plasma, which meant that the pressurization was getting all wonky, Leif immediately goes over and says “I have a spell called Reduce Object, can I cast it on the internal casing to try to up the pressure of what little plasma we have left” and Jeremy goes “uummmm sure if Kimi is over there to help you rewire the rest of the battery on the fly because you are SHRINKING HALF OF ITS PARTS” and then that held for three minutes until oh shit it was still low on plasma and Marian ran over and went “wait a second guys I have a Flaming Sphere spell except Jeremy, Jeeeeremy, I’m technically a plasma variety of Light Cleric, my ~god~ that ~gives me my divine magic~ is the collective of star dryads which live in balls of plasma, we’ve established prior in this setting that some of my fire spells are actually plasma spells, not fire, Jeeeeeremly can shove my hand into the empty battery casing and cast a flaming, 10-foot in diameter ball of plasma to try to give us a fuel boost” and Jeremy went “okay fuck it, stick your hand in the battery and cast a flaming sphere of plasma to give the ship a fuel boost, Leif, make another concentration check to hold the pressure.” and it did and we won the race the end we’re the coolest space elves ever. moral of the story: your players will come up with clever things. Sometimes clever things that mess up your plans. Let it happen, it’s more fun that way.
(Iris has come up with a truly heinous but potentially really effective military tactic that gay murder elf bachelorette campaign is actually a bit more delicate because it’s set in a larger world that Jeremy is running multiple other campaigns in and I’m still not sure if Iria is legit going to be a villain that I face off as a good PC one day, or if she’s a historical figure, or even whether or not this campaign is set in the past, but either way the history of this world matters? and the idea that I came up with has the potential to re-shape history? and I told it to Jeremy and he was quiet for a very long time and then thanked me for telling him and so Iria told Talvus in-character and we’re going to see whether or not in a couple of books this ends up changing the entire history of the world that he runs multiple campaigns in or something drastic like that, but hey, player wants to do something you haven’t thought of, “I didn’t think of that” is not a good enough reason to not let them do it.)
7. Decide if you want to write your own adventure, buy/find online a pre-written one, or vaguely do something in the middle. If you’re going for something pre-written, edits bits and pieces as you go to personalize it to your characters. I have a friend who just wrote and published something for DnD 2nd Edition? And it looks great? http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/229248/War-Wizards-of-the-Wasteland Even if you don’t play a pre-written adventure, reading a bunch of them will give you an idea of what preparing for sessions is like and what sort of information you should have on hand.
8. Don’t be afraid to make up home-brew mechanics, either for the whole party or for an individual player. Jeremy ran a vignette session called “Flight of the Kalla Tukal” in which we were playing a trio of orcs that had fallen through a tear in space and had just managed to get back and were searching for our tribe, which left without us. Except in his setting, orcs are a super psionic almost hivemind race? You meet orcs outside of radiation space sometimes, but they’re usually Not Coping Very Well with the fact that they’ve been cut off from their community. But the Kalla Tukal were still all linked together so we weren’t all going mad. then the other part of being psychic orcs meant that we could at any point attempt to do telekinesis or mind-control something, and the way that it was determined whether or not that worked is roll a d20, except we’re not trying to get 20, we’re trying to roll as close to each other in number as possible. There was one dramatic moment when two of us rolled 4’s or something and it was a critical success. but it was so cool to have that weird drift-comparability mechanic, and, like, the more people in our group that wanted to contribute, the more likely two people were to roll the same number. it was just?????? so cool??????? so if you want your party to all be psychically connected and be able to throw stuff with their minds I totally recommend that.
on a more personal/one-player level, in the department campaign, it has developed that Seraph really wants to be a research wizard like her family before her, and so the DM and I had a long conversation about the topics that she would want to research and a particular narrative impetus for her to start researching, and he came up with five or six new spells that Seraph will be able to invent over the course of the campaign, except because it’s experimental magic it’s going to start out with a 40% partial-to-total failure rate that will go down the more she tries to cast the spells, because hey, she’s working out the kinks. to me, it’s more than “oh this is a cool new mechanic,” it’s the DM cared enough to take the time to work with me and put what I thought was interesting into the campaign. and you have a lot of room to do that by adding your own rules and conventions and what-not. don’t be afraid to experiment, see what works, and then keep those mechanics around.
9. Start small. Don’t try to start with a whole huge epic campaign, you want to start by running a bunch of mini-arcs in different settings so that you get a feel for how to play and how to run things. This also gives you a chance to figure out how your group of friends plays, who is going to be the person that gives you the most scheduling problems, some of them might like the fighting parts more than the “come up with clever plans” or “interact with NPCs” parts, and this will give you an idea of who you actually want in a long-term campaign. Because long-term campaigns go on for years. Like, gay murder elf bachelorette is probably going to be a year and a half if Jeremy and I keep going at this pace? and that’s vaguely on the short side for something that Jeremy runs. A proper full epic campaign can be a huge time commitment, so start out with mini-arcs just to have fun and get used to stuff and because that is something that people will actually be able to commit time to.
I interrupt this long list of advice for another list of advice of potential ideas for miniature campaigns you could run for your friends. or one of your friends could run, if they’re interested in DMing:
COOL IDEAS FOR ONE-TO-FOUR SESSION MINI-CAMPAIGNS THAT I CAME UP WITH RIGHT NOW OR STOLE FROM FRIENDS WHO CAME UP WITH SUPER COOL THINGS
—as mentioned in a previous bullet point, “you’re a group of thieves planning an assassination. this is how much money you have. each of your characters has one character connection in the city who can help you get items or forge a document etc etc. this is what the castle looks like. this is what you’ve figured out about guard shifts and security for the party. you have a week to plan. go” and then, like. somebody wants to try to pretend to be a noble to get in? fantastic. someone wants to try to seduce a guard? fantastic. sneaking in the traditional way? fantastic. all three at the same time. faaaantastic. it’s fun, it’s short, the way that you would prepare this is you would think about guards, defenses, patrols, maybe some of the nobles at the party are trained in magic or have weird special teams of guards and maybe have agendas of their own, and then what the actual ball itself would look like and maybe make a castle map, but the fun part of this scenario is the players get to be as creative as possible and I guarantee they will think of the coolest things and then you get to figure out how to react to those things in interesting ways to figure out whether or not they work.
—okay this is a one-shot I have only heard legends about but everyone was playing a rock band of monsters who were about to give a super huge concert in monster city and I think someone had stolen a drum set or a guitar or something and they were trying to dodge paparazzi and get their instruments back but it was also ridiculous sex drugs rock & roll culture and a comedy one-shot that apparently was the coolest thing in the world, but you can’t go wrong if you start with “crazy monster rock band superstars”. during the sequel they went on tour to the human lands and I think wrecked a couple of cities.
—this one is stolen from TAZ but fantasy WWE, the intro plot setup that is exposition in the first 10 minutes was “a friend of yours who is a famous wrestler just had her partner assassinated before the biggest match of the year, one of you has been asked to fill in for the match, another as the manager, and then the rest of you are trying to solve this murder mystery super quick because your friend is worried she’s the next target”
—honestly any sort of “huge gladiator/fighting tournament but there’s drama and foul play going down behind the scenes” makes for a really good short arc. there’s a game that actually Jeremy invented that is played irl at gay theater camp called “bloodrush” which is such a ridiculous game, it’s….vaguely fantasy football except everyone also has daggers and swords and stuff and you are allowed to stab members of the other team but only when they’re holding the ball, although cheating is basically a requirement when the refs’ backs are turned, oh, by the way, the refs are vampires. there have been cases at camp where teams waiting in the bleachers for the next match enemy teams have crept up behind them and slit all their throats with foam daggers while the refs were watching the game, or poisonings, or just. anything you can think of, it’s gone down. my little brother once jumped on the biggest baddest counselor’s back, stabbed him in the shoulder, snatched the ball from him, did a front roll, and ran off, and scored a goal and that is one of his proudest moments of his life to this day, basically what I’m saying is you can’t go wrong with “bloodrush tournament” or whatever your own crazy fantasy sportsball game you want to make up and play.
—“we are a bunch of archeologists who have a little bit of combat or magic training but not too much because mostly we’re archeologists and someone poked a button in a pyramid and oh god we’ve accidentally summoned an ancient race on monsters that feed on human souls, which also apparently there’s a secret military conspiracy that has been watching this site to try to stop these monsters and have come here to contain them but oops also are ready to murder ALL OF US because WE have human souls, now we’re trying to run and hide from both groups and figure out if we can find anything to banish the monsters again” (this is 100% stolen from a LARP written by a friend of mine) (I’m pretty sure same one who wrote the monster band one-shot, actually) (they’re a really good writer, okay)
—PRISON ESCAPE. Think Guardians of the Galaxy 1. You can’t go wrong with a prison break game. character design will be so fun. I swear I thought of stuff like this separate from Jeremy. Jeremy’s writing a prison break game and has promised that I get to play Captain Jennijack, a genderfluid space pirate who totally woke up in this prison a week or so ago and doesn’t for the life of them know why they are here, there are, like, eight or ten possible things they could think of but they’re not sure which one they’ve technically been convicted of, and I am holding him to that.
—Honestly, you have a book that you like? A movie? A TV show? One that you haven’t convinced your friends to watch yet? (or one that you have and they will recognize halfway through.) STEAL THAT, write and run a fanfiction game, it’ll be fun.
ADVICE PART 2: PREPARING FOR A LONGER CAMPAIGN ONCE YOU’RE COMFORTABLE DMING AND HAVE FIGURED OUT THE GROUP OF PEOPLE THAT HAVE GOOD CHEMISTRY AND DYNAMICS AND WANT TO STICK AROUND. I’m assuming you want advice for getting something vaguely like gay murder elf bachelorette to run, so I’m going to talk about broad story-based things that I think are important for setting up good stories?
10. Scheduling is key and what is most likely to mess you up. Pick your players carefully, pick people who are invested and who will turn up. If there are people who didn’t get along during your mini arcs, or who just had very different expectations of what the game should be like re fighting/mechanics and roleplaying balance, don’t put them in the same party. Picking a party isn’t about picking your friends, it’s about picking people who work well together as players, and whose playing style matches your storytelling style. You’re better off with less people but who are super quality players and share a vision with you and get along, than letting someone into the game that’s going to mess stuff up for everyone because of outside-of-game social politics. It’s just not worth it. Not when this might go on for years.
11. There’s something really powerful about a story that isn’t about the Chosen Ones, but instead you’re just a group of people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time and now oh shit it’s on you to save the world. Epic campaigns generally become epic, like, you invest that much time and energy into something and by the finale you usually are saving the universe, but be willing to start out not special. Let specialness develop.
11.5 There is also something really powerful about there sometimes being problems that magic can’t fix. Or that just aren’t fixable. If you haven’t read the Young Wizards series go read it and cry.
12. Write in arcs. This goes along very well with starting small, but have there be different parts of the campaign that are semi self-contained as you slowly build up to something bigger, this is also where you start dropping in personal arcs. Arcs also allow you to change up the feel of the game and keep things interesting and keep people on their toes. The Adventure Zone does maybe the best example of how to have self-contained plot-driven arcs that build to something eventually cohesive, all arcs with their own unique setup and flavor. (The Adventure Zone: Balance is a really great game and I really do advise you listen to it, it’s ~70 episodes but it will get you used to the mechanics of 5e, and holy fuck is it a story.)
13. Don’t be afraid to steal plot points from your favorite things. Hell, don’t be afraid to steal the entire plots of your favorite things. Especially if you’re worried about your own writing skills or creativity or whatever? Fanfiction is freaking great, and it’s fun; some of the best games I’ve ever played have been fanfiction of super obscure things that the writer has afterwards told me what it was fanfiction of and it was so freaking fun to go read/watch the original after I’d already played an even cooler version???? It’s also pretty easy to start out fanfiction and then through developing personal arcs and following party interest, ending up with a story by the end that is entirely original and you. So write fanfiction if you don’t have any ideas, or honestly, if your fanfiction ideas excite you more than when you sit down and try to write with a blank slate.
14. You’re not limited to a high fantasy setting. Honestly, standard high fantasy/dungeon crawl stuff has gotten pretty boring for me? (although the department campaign is pretty cool, but that’s only because it’s high fantasy but we slip in jokes like “Seraph marches downstairs in her pajamas and channels her mother to start yelling at the innkeeper about the utterly terrible customer service of getting poisoned, non-consensually, and that she would like to speak to the manager of the local thieves’ guild to lodge a complaint” because even though it’s high fantasy, it’s funny. TAZ does really good high fantasy too because of how they weave a whole bunch of other stuff in.) but, like, YOU CAN DO DND IN SPACE. you can do modern urban fantasy. you can go post-apocalypse. you can go post-high-fantasy-apocalypse. you can play a supernatural style game. it’s your world, make it whatever you want.
14.5 It is possible to play things that are mechanically the class in the book, but have a different interpretation in the setting. Or just to works differently in the setting. in spelljammer, elves don’t have gods, and I vaguely developed over the course of a couple of months an old belief system that was pretty old even when Marian was a kid that she just pseudo-learned and didn’t quite believe but is now revisiting, and the difference between divine casters and arcane casters is actually just “magic is vaguely a part of physics and most arcane casters are tinkerers who are doing it via weird cool gadgets or are pseudo-scientists/engineers in their training and approach to magic, while for divine casters it’s more of an internal, feelings-based thing.” I’m also very very excited because I have developed a super intense and specific lore that is canonically what elves used to believe and what Marian believes, but might not actually be how the world and death specifically works at all, so I’m bouncing up and down on my feet waiting to discover what’s going down behind the scenes with gods in that campaign, instead of it just being “oh yeah choose your gods from the gods in the book.” in the department campaign, Seraph is from a family of wizards and thinks that she is a wizard even though she is actually an arcanist, because the world doesn’t have words different types of casters esp niche types of casters yet. the DM and I are planning for it to be a huuuuge surprise now that she’s leveled up enough to have access to “arcanic exploits” which are at-will abilities that wizards don’t have, and it is going to be an in-character process of her discovering that she can do something that according to the known laws of magic she shouldn’t be able to do, and now oh shit she has to research it. even though mechanically, we’re going pretty much entirely by the book, the book doesn’t exist in the world! characters don’t know what players know! make it interesting to discover things that you as a player might otherwise take for granted!
14.75 make magic and fighting sound cool, and design how you describe it to be specific to the setting or the culture. in gay murder elf bachelorette campaign, the way that Caedic casting works is you first have to draw a rune in the air that then hovers there all glowy, and then you “thread the needle” which is projecting power through it in a very specific manner, I’m pretty sure that Surrians cast differently, magic works different in different parts of the world. having a melee fight scene? describe how people exchange blows back and forth or let them choose how their killing blows will look or just make them feel like badasses whenever they try to do a cool thing because it’s cool. I am used to playing magic/caster characters just because I generally am more familiar with magical mechanics than fighting mechanics and magic has always been more interesting to me but holy crud I have never had a fight scene so fun as the one when Iria had led a researcher from the Black Lotus Labs to a fae font that she’d found scouting in the woods and this seaweed creature eventually attacked them and she did a badass holding it off with her scimitar an then Vennikus, the researcher, tried to throw a cold iron knife at it but missed, and so Iria, who had been training in two-weapon fighting, saw the knife, did a front roll underneath the monster’s next swing, picked up the knife, exchanged a flurry of blows with the thing now two-handed fighting which eventually ended with her doing this super badass throwing both weapons in the air and catching them to switch hands, leaping on the things back, slashing so deep with her scimitar that it finally got through all of the seaweed and cleared it before it could get back to a weird, pulsating green heart, which then she drove the cold iron blade into all the way up to its hilt. which was so much cooler than “oh shit I rolled a crit on my scimitar hand and confirmed it and I guess that deals enough damage for this thing to die,” nah, I drove a cold iron knife into that thing’s pulsating heart and so that’ll be a scene that I never forget. Even when I miss Jeremy makes me sound cool because then when the enemies miss he talks about how good my footwork is or how well I’ve drilled to block these exact kinds of blows so the Surrian had no chance because my training kicked in type deal. it makes fight scenes more than just rolling dice, and thus easier to get engaged in.
14.8725 I swear I didn’t start out this essay as an “I’m going to sing the praises of Jeremy for several thousand words”
15. It’s always interesting when you have mechanical reasons for players leveling up. Or for what their classes are. That’s always a tricky one to balance, and it’s one that I’ve been doing aggressively as a player? And to be fair, if your players start out with young and fairly inexperienced characters, “I am gaining experience at doing a thing” is a perfectly good narrative reason to level up. You want to play an older character? One of my friends is playing a 150-year-old orc who was a Great Adventurer back in the day and retired to take care of great-great grandkids and is back in an adventuring party now but wheeee is starting at level 1 because they’re out of practice oh, and they have bad knees. There’s also always the option of “I hurt myself real bad and I’ve been recovering,” leveling up isn’t ~gaining new experience~, it’s slowly getting better through whatever your injury is. or just you can write this off as an unavoidable mechanical aspect of the game, eh, not that important, I just love it when tiny details match up. This isn’t actually an important point, I’ve kind of moved on to the “picky details that I care about” second of this advice rant.
16. Make the unexpected important. JEREMY GAVE ME THE MOST ADORABLE PET SPACE OCTOPUS AS A FAMILIAR AND I HAVE BEEN ASSUMING THAT VELO IS JUST VELO AND THEN JEREMY MADE SOME SORT OF A SIDE COMMENT ABOUT “YEAH VELO IS NOTHING LIKE YOU’D EVER HEARD OF BEFORE” AND YEAH DUH BECAUSE THE LIL’ BUDDY WAS SUMMONED THROUGH A MYSTERY SPELL IN A MYSTERY PIECE OF EXTINCT TECH BUT NOW I’M FREAKING PARANOID OUT OF CHARACTER THAT VELO IS SECRETLY AN EMISSARY OF RAT JESUS OR SOMETHING. but also just, like, nothing is cooler than “oh that tiny thing that happened when you were level 1 that you didn’t really think much of and it’s just been vaguely a thing you’ve carried with you for the adventure? turns out it was the most important thing in the world!!!!!” just. good foreshadowing. unexpected foreshadowing. it’s great.
17. Your players will invent stuff, either as a part of their backstory or as something that they’re interested in. Let them, especially if you don’t have a previously established canon opinion on the thing. This is 100% a self-serving thing of what I wants DMs to do when I’m a player of, like. I really love getting to write stuff into the setting, but also it’s because good improv means go with the flow. Someone says something? Work it in, oops, it’s canon now. This can be both on-purpose or accident; in the department campaign, I wanted to write in-character letters to an NPC in my backstory from the beginning, except goddamnit I didn’t want to have to deal with “and it’ll take a couple of months for the mail to travel across the country to get to them,” so I made an offhand reference in the email that I was sending the DM the letters of “can we say I just threw them in the arcanic postlines,” which then, like. After doing this about five times I sat down and wrote out the exact magical theory about how arcanic postlines should work considering how we’d said that they function in-game and the DM went “okay, sounds great, that’s consistent with how we’ve been dealing with these letters for the last two months” and that is why the fantasy world of the departmental campaign has a highly functional postage system. On the improv end of things, there is a beautiful moment in The Adventure Zone where the wizard just, in-character, teases another wizard about “ooooh, don’t want to burn your spell slots,” and the DM just went with it and suddenly it became canon that instead of spell slots being a behind-the-scenes mechanical thing that doesn’t exist in-world, it was a legitimate way that wizards referred to how much magic they could cast a day. Which I love so much, that’s so interesting for a high fantasy setting. Letting players add to the setting will bring in cool new things that you didn’t think of, and you should be open to it.
18. First priority is everyone should be having fun, and communication is key for that to work. Debrief sometimes after sessions. Ask people what their favorite parts are. listen to them chat about their theories. follow up on actively developing framework for the things that people think are fun. ultimately DnD is as much about friends getting together and having a good time as it is about telling a huge, epic, intricate, interconnected story, and the huge epic stories are a lot more fun if you’ve been having fun the whole way along.
All that all being said.
Don’t expect your campaign to look like gay elf murder bachelorette campaign, the way that I am playing in gay murder elf campaign is…..a bad way to play in a party? Being a conscientious player means being aware that the overall story arc isn’t just about you, it’s weaving together about everyone and there is always a part of me that is thinking about “is everyone getting equal screentime” and going “I AM IN LOVE WITH THIS NPC JEREMY SHE’S SO GOOD AT FIGHTING OH MY GODS THAT MURDEROUS LOOK SHE GETS WHEN SHE’S FACING OFF AGAINST SURRIANS AND SHE DOESN’T THINK ANYONE IS WATCHING JEREMY I AM IN LOVE” and, like, actively going over to try to talk with her any time I had the chance to ever and insisting on sparring with her any time we had free time and insisting on having a bunch of scenes with Talvus of “oh my god Talvus help she said three whole words to me what does it mean” which made all this the gay mess that it was would have been something that I wouldn’t have done if there were other people in the party with other agendas; gay elf murder bachelorette campaign gets to be gay elf murder bachelorette campaign specifically because Jeremy and I realized “….wait, there are only the two of us, we can get as ridiculous with this as we want” and have decided to commit. Fully. But that’s not the sort of shit you want to pull if there’s a whole other group of people who just kind of have to sit and watch every time you want to go over and flirt with your murder-rival-who-will-maybe-one-day-be-your-murder-girlfriend before they can do the stuff they want to do.
(As a secondary warning note if you’re doing any sort of roleplaying and are playing a fictional character in love with another fictional character being played by a friend of yours, you better be on the same page as your friend as, like, one of you not having a secret crush on the other in real life because shit gets messy and then real life and character stuff starts to blend and it’s just. I have been there and done that when I was a 17-year-old Gay Mess and I feel like it is my responsibility as a 22-year-old Slightly More Responsible Gay Mess to warn you against that. Jeremy and I know each other very well and have for years and know each other’s boundaries and talked about triggers and boundaries before starting this campaign, which to be fair was more because as a villain campaign dark stuff is probs going to happen but we have talked about fictional romance too , but I would not play this intimately with someone I didn’t trust intimately. So keep that in mind when designing things?)
ALSO THAT BEING SAID
if you want a gay elf murder bachelorette campaign, there is a game called Monsterhearts that I have never played but heard about friends playing and they all freaking love it and there are a lot of undertones about dealing with mental illness and being queer and in the closet and the entire setup of the game is y’all are monsters in high school having love life drama and everything I have heard about this game is how remarkable it is combined with stories about the most ridiculous teenage drama, sooooo possibly after I have ranted for 8000 words about how to set up a functional Dungeons and Dragons campaign which the party and DMing advice still I think applies to any game Monsterhearts might be the game that you want to start with.
BONUS: ADVICE FROM JEREMY.
#jeremy believes in you#so do I#wheeee that got long#dungeons and dragons#storytelling advice#gay murder elf bachelorette#if you stuck around through this whole thing wow congratulations I hope I wasn't too boring#I have a lot of friends who are very good at mechanics and who can speak a lot about good game design#this is what I can offer though
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hi I'm the anon from dave asking about DnD! I'm just looking for like, tips about the game in general? I'm sorry if that's so broad. things like: how do i play a certain alignment, what actions can i roll for/ how long can the actions be, what are traits and stats (and isn't there like a +/- system for them?). things like that. if there's a site for the rules that'd be good enough for me. sorry if this is long, I'm getting the handbook soon so maybe things will be cleared up for me
aww, it’s cool! i’m kind of a beginner myself, but i’ve played enough sessions that i can get you started! note: i play dnd 5e, which is theee most recent? edition? and the one that the mcelroy brothers use in The Adventure Zone, if you’re familiar with that. i’ve found it to be the most relaxed and character-focused. pathfinder is another big alternative, but it’s a little more complicated.second off, here’s some online versions of the handbook. i know some people prefer physical copies, but these can be nice too. i’ve never owned the physical thing in my life, and only one of my friends does. (PDF) (non official site) there’s also apps, which i can recommend if you have android. not sure abt ios.
so the DMs ive been under have all been pretty lax about alignments, some like to be huge sticklers about it and want to make sure your characters every action follows it and stuff, but real people don’t fit into a category perfectly so like, if your DM’s cool with it, don’t sweat it too much. that said, think of it as a guidance for your moral compass. here’s some basic explainers on each alignment:(right here) and (right here)actions you roll for is preeeetty much everything, unless it’s like, just talking. d20s are by far the die you use the most: you’ll use it to land an attack (attack rolls), or do any check based actions. (like perception, for when you’re trying to notice something, or charisma, for when you’re trying to convince someone). you’ll use other die almost exclusively during combat, specifically when deciding damage. i almost never play magic classes, but there’s bonuses involved and it’s pretty thoroughly explained in the handbook. each round in combat last 6 seconds, technically, but if you want to chat up a storm in one round, as long as your DM is okay with it, seriously go for it. banter is fun. every spell has a time placed on how long it lasts (if it doesnt, assume it lasts until the spellcaster ends it.)traits/stats are divided into categories, and the +/- are decided on the base stats you make when you create your character. there’s a process for rolling for them, which you can find on the above site (the process i use, don’t worry, you still get to decide which stats are better), or you can go for the default stats which are also there, or if your dm’s cool with it and mayybe if at least someone knows what they’re doing, you can just eyeball it. i’ve never done this or heard of people doing it before, because it’s easy to end up with an imbalanced/overpowered/underpowered character, especially in relation to your party, but dude, number one rule of DND is do anything as long as the DM says its okay.honestly, when i started, it was with a group that mostly had no idea what we were doing. we’d had two sessions of pathfinder with another DM that had been kind of over our heads, and when we actually sat down for a session, only the DM had any prior experience at all. dnd isn’t all that intimidating, especially if you have someone to help you, and i’ve met plenty of cool people online willing to talk and share info and play together! if you ever need anything else, or need something clarified, or even need help finding people/creating a character/ an yt hing, feel free to drop by!
#davanswers#davspeaks#anon#dnd#this ended up really long if you need a shortened TLDR version just lemme know#Anonymous
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