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#dm stuff
keplercryptids · 1 year
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i just. so strongly believe that if someone isn't vibing with everyone else in a ttrpg group, or if they're not vibing with you the gm, the best and most correct thing to do is to tell them, "hey i don't think this is the game for you. no hard feelings!" you don't have to play ttrpgs with everyone on the planet. you can still be friends outside a ttrpg context. like. liberate yourself, dude!
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shinobicyrus · 28 days
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Was really tickled by Small Saga's spin on making loot chests more dangerous. Instead of a shapeshifting mimic, it's a big spider! Like a trap-door spider that uses the chest like a protective shell and uses money as projectiles.
As we also saw in the game, they're intelligent and can be reasoned with! Offer them a bit of food and not only will they not attack, they'll make it rain.
So, like the nerd that I am, I decided to try and translate it into D&D 5e. Gonna surprise the heck out of my little level 2 players. Sure, everyone expects a mimic, but no one expects a spider in a box!
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These unusually intelligent arachnids nest in chests or other containers. They wait patiently for prey to surprise, paralyze with their bite, and drag into their little lairs, adding to their collection of treasures. Clever nobles and minor crime lords bribe avarice spiders to be guards for valuables, with careful instructions about who – and who not – to devour.
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thetragicallynerdy · 3 months
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Doing DnD prep and making more hilarious hand drawn tokens and
Rust monster #1 vs Rust monster #12
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[ID: My hand holding up two handmade DnD combat tokens. They are cardboard squares with rough drawings of DnD rust monsters on them. The one on the left is more detailed with a bug like face and large plate scales, while the one on the right is smaller and very simple and cute, and has a small smiley face instead of a bug like face. End ID.]
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chandri · 2 months
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I LOVE D&D
After our four-year campaign ended a few months back, I asked my nerds what they'd like to play next. I was their second DM; they'd played together a little while in another campaign before me, but it had ended prematurely after the DM had to bow out, and they'd been worried, at the time, that they'd have to stop playing together. DMs, as you all likely know, are rare. DMing - or GMing - is hard! It's a lot of work. You do the most "work" of anybody in the game (ymmv on which bits you consider "work"). And honestly, not everybody is good at it. And that's fine! Not everybody, as I often say at work-work when absolutely no one can shut the fuck up about LLMs ruining essays as an instrument of torture academic assessment tool, needs to be good at everything. But I digress. GMing is hard! And all that aside, most people would rather just... play the game. I have, in the past, loved to play the game (though I haven't done so in some time). There is nothing quite as freeing as TTRPGs with a good group, where everybody is just really, really into it.
(I... hope, that I am good at it? I have been told that I am good at it. I am a good writer. I am reasonably good at improv. I genuinely enjoy worldbuilding. I'm getting better at accents. That there is an entire hobby where people want to sit around, listen to you ramble without interruption about the fantasy novel in your head, and then, if you can believe it, talk in sometimes-silly voices about the characters they have made up to play pretend in your fantasy novel, is and will continue to be a thing that would have absolutely blown my little child mind, back when I was inflicting similar behaviours on my friends.) Anyway, I got recruited for this group because I was GM for one of the players in another campaign, so I must have been doing something right.
Right enough that we played! Consistently (more or less)!! For four years!!! With the same group! Without anyone ghosting or ruining everything with (out-of-game) drama or (in-game) dying! I took them from level one to seventeen!!! We got to have a sweeping adventure together and they fell in love with NPCs (in some cases literally fell in love with NPCs) and made a found family and settled each other's demons and fought a god and saved the world and didn't die, and in the epilogue I made every single one of them cry, after they voluntarily described their characters' families and the children they had and how they spent the next ten and twenty years of their lives. I was so proud. Of myself, and of them. I had gone into this fully intending to trick each and every one of them into getting as invested as possible, and though I tend to attract players who are big into the RP aspect of the game, there's always a little while at the beginning where they're level one babies and everyone is just... idiots, and then something happens and suddenly it's like... oh. This is serious. Whoops.
And when it gets serious, or at least when you all understand, at the same level, that oh, what we do matters, and it's going to continue to matter, because yes, the GM is perfectly happy to encourage fifteen straight minutes of dick jokes, that's delightful. But then the world you've signed on to save is still waiting for you to save it, and by god, make all the dick jokes you want, keep on murdering cultists in their nighties, the story will still be here for you, patiently waiting. For me, I think that's the important part of the balance between a party and the GM. You need to be comfortable with your story, that they're going to like the story and care about the story, that it doesn't matter what the ratio of dick jokes to inspiring speeches is. It'll still be here when you're ready.
Anyway. By the end of the campaign, they were all in. The best part, for me, is when they get into the world enough to start theorizing about it. Sometimes there were 30 or 40 minute blocks that were just me sitting, chin in hands, listening to them spin wild conspiracy theories about the world and its lore and history, or sometimes, hit directly, accidentally, on a genuine secret that they wouldn't have confirmed for ages yet. That's when D&D is on a level playing field. I know what's going to happen, regardless of what they do, but I have no idea what they're going to do (often, neither do they, but, y'know). That's when it gets exciting.
Anyway. I asked them what they'd like to play next. We had started planning another long-term campaign, but in the interim I asked if they'd like to play a shorter one. They'd asked more than once about certain events in the history and prehistory of the world, things they'd learned about during the campaign, some of which were known historical events and some that were lost secrets. I suggested, among other ideas, a story about a city where the outcome was known, but not the why or the how. I hadn't actually ever written the details of this story. They'd learned, from an NPC in the last campaign, that the public story of this period was mostly untrue - whitewashed to a depressing degree, in a way that in the moment was resonant with the politics happening in their present day - and that the truth, while known to be more sinister than the public version, was also, mostly, unknown. It had taken place nearly two millennia ago. No one knew the truth. Not even me!
We spent a bunch of time coming up with characters, while I plotted. We're writing this one together, I told them. I made the city, and some NPCs, and gave them the few guidelines I'd be holding for this story: a few specific things that don't happen, a lone NPC in a city full of people who definitely survives. They all came up with such interesting people, each of them incredibly specific, each of them deeply integrated into the lore of the world as they knew it. They had remembered things about the culture of the country we were going to that they had learned from the same country 1,700 years in the future. They hardly needed to ask me any questions about background stuff - what this army was called, how the government probably worked. They remembered it! Or remembered most of it. All the questions I was answering were about recent events. Filling out their own backstories. Figuring out possible motivations for things. They were starting at level 14, because this game will be short and have no levelling, and that made their builds complicated, too, especially for a first session. They figured out which of them knew each other, and how. I had meetings with the sub-groups who were particularly close.
I picked out some new, extremely spooky music. I made a couple of maps they probably wouldn't use, because I'll be inventing a lot of stuff each session that was prompted way more directly by the actions of the previous session than usual.
Today, we played the first game. And guys. It was incredible.
Zero first-session fuckery, zero character-voice fumbling, hardly any "remind me, what was this thing?" or "what was my wife's name again?" or "what the hell job do I do anyway?" They were on it. No dick jokes (okay, less dick jokes). Everyone was all in, 500% invested, RPing their asses off, from minute one. Most of the first session was introductions, going from person to person, meeting some key NPCs, conveying the Vibe of the city, explaining the situation they were in, dropping some hints about the things that will be happening regardless of their actions and choices. And they picked up every single hint and had five theories about each of them. Two separate NPC interactions provoked declarations that if they died the person in question would burn the city to the ground (note: at this time I have no guarantee about either of them!). Two players dropped absolutely banger lines within a minute of one another. I have never seen players sync so fast and hard into character. I was awestruck. They're all so fucked up. They're all trying so hard. They're doomed. They want so badly not to be doomed. It was amazing.
And then they went to investigate something spooky two of them had seen on their own earlier in the day, and I spooked them so hard with the fact that the spooky thing was no longer where they'd left it that they started screaming about eldritch horror.
(It probably didn't help that five minutes later we ended the session with them being surrounded by shadow monsters.)
Anyway, what an incredibly satisfying session. We played for almost six hours. That was not the plan. But listen: forty-five minutes in a city council meeting, and none of them could shut up about their theories about this NPC pushing around that NPC, or this NPC's completely theoretical revenge quest against yet another NPC, long enough for me to end it.
They were supposed to meet the shadow monsters significantly earlier.
I had a map and everything.
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behaemoth · 5 months
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The word doc for my curse of strahd ravenloft dinner prep just passed 10 pages 😌 I am going to terrorize these players
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lc20-official · 11 months
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tehjleck · 6 months
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New npc who dis?
Ask any DM, and they will always need new antagonists for their stories. I just came up with a really cool one, and he is really nasty.
Imagine, an Ursoi (a humanoid bear race from Dragonlance) standing just over 9ft tall, weighing close to 1200lbs - looking every bit the large grizzly, except he's wearing the skull and upper jaw of a Kirre as a shoulder piece and its pelt as a cloak. (Kirre pictured below)
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Oh, and you see that tail? Yeah, he's had that preserved and made into a *really* nasty mace - his 'trophies'. He worships the "Blue Bear" which (in Forgotten Realms lore) is another name for the Beastlord, Malar. The Beastlord likes it when his worshippers kill things with their bear hands (see what I did there?).
I just plotted out his travels to bring him into the area where my pcs are doing their thing - completely oblivious to how very real and close the danger is. They've got about a month of in-game time... and then Kubaarad comes to town.
I won't present him as an enemy. Just a highly competent npc that's there to join the fight against an enemy that threatens all of them. I won't share too much about him or his background because "it isn't about him". Then when I'll slowly have him do more morally bankrupt shit and force the pcs to question him, leading to one of my favorite moments as a dm...
"Oh, you thought we were allies... it was merely our interests that had aligned, but now..."
I can't wait.
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me: so for my new character I'm thinking of making her an amazon warrior paladin.
dm: sounds good! any name ideas?
me: alek'sa.
dm:
dm: get out
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javaaddiction · 8 months
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I was complimented once on my storytelling and now I'm crying send help
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twopoint99 · 1 month
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I am late to the NADDPOD party, on episode 5. There is so much joy in this, but my absolute favorite is when Murph sighs before saying, “Roll for initiative.”
As a DM, I feel that sigh in my very bones.
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reckless-glitch · 3 months
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I think I want to run a session where the dungeon is a power point presentation
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keplercryptids · 2 years
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one of the things I've been thinking about recently is that it takes effort and practice to become a good ttrrpg player.
as a forever dm, i obviously knew this was true for dming. like. dming is clearly a skill that takes work and effort and practice. and it's a skill I've worked hard at!
but being a good player is also a skill that takes work and effort and practice. arguably less than what being a dm requires, but not nothing! and it's not something i knew about until i got more opportunities to be a player. (the thing is, I'm at a point where i do think I'm a good dm. i am NOT at that point as a player lmao. so I'm working on it.)
anyway. i don't know if Forever Players view being a player this way, but i think it's worth considering, especially given how much work dming is. what can you do to be a better player? in what ways can you support the other players and the dm? these are good questions to periodically ask yourself imo.
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occultgrimoiree · 5 months
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Going insane at 1 am and starting to build an entire merchant ship to use as a battle map in my dnd game
This is what DMing is all about. I love crafting
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thetragicallynerdy · 2 years
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DnD gods please bestow upon me your inspiration, for I DM a session tomorrow and I do not want to prep
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kichiquax-draws · 1 year
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I run a very serious D&D campaign 
Left to Right: 
Aezo, Tiefling Barbarian (he/they) Harry B, Half-Elf Wizard (he/him) Thea, Human? Druid (she/her)
Those are 3 of my player characters. Guy in the speech bubble is an NPC of mine, Iniko Freyr, a rival, presumed ex/rival of Harry from ye olde wizard university days
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abybweisse · 2 years
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What the heck is this about?
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@usroute666 came into my messages just to randomly say this... then blocked me from responding. Wtf, man? Idk know what post or whatever this is about. Who cares that much if I say soda or pop? 🤦🏻‍♀️
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