jack

A few times I've noticed I seem to have a problem playing with inexperienced GMs. It feels like I shouldn't, I usually feel excited to engage with the bits they're good at, and happy to handwave rules away.

I think part of it is just, an inexperienced GM is just always going to have a bumpier game, and even less smooth with a bunch of players they're not already familiar with. But it feels like I get on worse than other people, and I wasn't sure why, so I did some introspecting.

I think my problem is, I'm happy to play with different rules, when they're something someone consciously knows, and can explain or be asked about. But I'm not good at situations where I don't know what I can do and what I can't. I'm the same with board games, or buying things in shops: I'm happy with any particular set of rules if I can work out what they are in advance and go along with them. But if I have a fireball spell, and the GM's never adjudicated one of those before, even if I have the spell description and a variety of "how people usually treat this in practice" at my fingertips, I still don't know, will the GM want to follow the rules literally, or go by GM's intuition for how many enemies it affects, etc, even before you get into edge cases like "do you target a square or a point". And I don't want to provide too much info and overwhelm the GM or make them feel like I'm rules-lawyering.

Or to put it another way, I'd be happy to play a game where we've explicitly said either "lets follow the move-attack-act-move rules exactly" or "lets not overthink it, don't complicate a turn basically do one attack and we'll handwave how much movement you get", but if we haven't said, I find it hard to "fit in" with what we've converged on.

Basically the right model is, "take simple actions, try to follow the more complicated rules once, if it gets bogged down, don't do it again". But my brain doesn't cope with that. It feels like, I shouldn't have got it "wrong" even once, even if "wrong" isn't against any agreement, just going too much by the book when no-one else was and it didn't really matter. And it feels wrong avoiding things which are "allowed" by the official rules, if we haven't explicitly agreed not to.

I have a similar problem with board games with people from different board game cultures: I'm happy to agree any variation to the printed rules, but I'm slow at picking up, "we never explicitly said so, but we just don't do that, it feels too mean" (even if I agree with it).

And now I SAY that, I don't know why I hesitate so much. I think I usually have a fair idea what someone else is going to think is reasonable. So I can go with that, and what happens is a little better or worse than I expect, that's fine, and sometimes I guess wrong what they considered reasonable and they think my proposed fireball isn't reasonable or is suicidal, I can say, "oh, ok, can I do something else, then".

I think the problem was, my head pretends like, I'm "entitled" to any amount of asking for clarification, but "oh, can I take that back" feels like asking for a favour I'm not entitled to. And I don't know why, because it's probably a lot more accurate to say, you're entitled to 1/N of the GM's time, whatever that ends up being taken up with, so get the most fun/effectiveness/whatever you can with that time. Which involves guessing "what interpretation is ok" and then rolling with whatever the GM says, and proposing differences only if it seems to really matter.

Basically, treating a social situation the way I (eventually) learned to treat any other uncertain situation, of accepting that I needed to take best guesses factoring in how much time I spent thinking, the way I (eventually) did with board games where the best strategy wasn't obvious from the start, or life where you have to guess as best you can what's most important when you can't ever have the time to know for sure.

Or in other words, I know the DnD social protocols ok, but I was missing a lot of "normal" social protocols...

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1109596.html

It's such a classic of exploration and adventure narratives, that the characters encounter some kind of puzzle or riddle as a break from combat. People actively want puzzles.

But it's hard to do satisfyingly in a roleplaying game. Or in a novel, for that matter, though that's a different question.

We know roughly what a bad puzzle looks like. The GM reads it out. The players discuss it a bit. The player best as puzzles talks it over with a GM and eventually proposes an answer. No-one is in character. The other players don't really do anything.

I talked about this before, but a few more puzzle rooms have come up in my Labyrinth campaign so I wanted to talk more about what worked and what didn't.

What makes a puzzle that works well?

Like other encounters, the session should move forward whether the party succeeds or fails. That means the puzzle either needs to be something they can get past even if they don't solve it. Or sometimes, not essential to the main quest so they can just leave, but even then, that's rather a letdown, it's more exciting if it's too risky to stay, not too boring. The puzzle should come to some sort of resolution. Ideally, even if they fail, they'll find out what they should have done in a natural way, so they feel like they tried and failed, rather than it just always being a mystery.

Ideally failure should look like, "oh no, they had a fight the golem" or "oh no, they lost the gold they had to wager" not "they didn't find out what the prize was, they just go away never knowing". The players going away without finding what's there is ok sometimes, but you need to build sufficient trust that their decisions about what's too dangerous actually matter for them to care and not just feel like it's completely random.

The party should interact with it, in character. Always with roleplaying situations, provide things for the party to do. Ideally there'll be an NPC there they can TALK to and find out more. Or they can get relevant information history rolls, or detect magic spells. Or the whole puzzle is in the middle of a fight, and they have to multitask. Or there's some other risk of taking damage, so there's always a cost.

And just, there should be a bunch of stuff there. Not just a big empty space and a riddle carved somewhere. But decoration. A bunch of levers to pull. Some sort of emotional stakes. The more the party interact with it, the more they'll care. Ideally the party are invested in each step. If bad things come directly from the party's actions, they can feel like, "at least where figuring it out", whereas if they occur randomly the party can just be confused.

But also, while Character abilities should help, make sure they don't usually instantly solve the puzzle. Like other encounters, it's good that they can sometimes completely bypass it with one good use of a spell or ability -- that rewards them for having it. But ideally it will let them find the answer, not just ignore the puzzle.

If you have players who enjoy puzzles, they probably want to understand it. That means, not just get past it, but understand why/how a solution is correct. Make sure that you have answers. Likewise ask "why is this there" because your players might ask. "A mad wizard did it", is fine, but have in mind what sort of thing. What sort of mistakes might they have made? What would they care about? Understand how it works, mechanically, or magically, and if it's been triggered before or not, and the story behind it. The players might surprise you with a way of finding out, and then you'll have something helpful ready-made to give them.

An ideal puzzle might:

* Have a lot of interesting parts
* Tie into the lore of the world somehow
* Have a clear reason for being there (either set up as a puzzle on purpose, or that the players need to figure out an unlabelled device)
* It's clear how it works. The characters don't HAVE to play by the puzzle's rules if they can bypass it somehow
* But they shouldn't be able to do so routinely
* Clever approaches can solve part or all of the puzzle, but "finding out the answer through cleverness" is more satisfying than "not needing to find the answer"
* There should be tactical trade offs affected by the character's abilities and personalities, e.g. who's going to take the risky position? Which position is most risky?
* As much as possible, have something where the players can experiment, but there's a cost, and smart players will get the answer quickly and slower or unlucky players will get there a little later, but not never. E.g. less "if you get it wrong, you fail forever", more "you can have as many tries as you like, but each wrong answer you get zapped/have to fight something".

It's also good to allow a safety-valve, i.e. if the players get frustrated or confused, have some "official" way of letting them get hints, maybe at a cost. Or just to go away and research and come back. Some positive course of action other than "we don't know".

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1108550.html

Some spoilers for both groups of players (telling you stuff the other group found out, and confirming which of your guesses were right.) If you're interested in what went on behind the scenes, please ask me and I can talk through a non-spoiler version (or if you read this by accident, let me know, it's not a big deal as long as I know).

I talked about the puzzle rooms before, but I'm going to go through in more detail, to compare the amount of type of prep I did to that of other GMs reading.

What I wrote down

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I don't usually write up in this level of detail because obviously, it takes a lot longer than it did to write the planning! But it's interesting to do sometimes, so I can consciously notice what I was doing explicitly, and what I was implicitly doing in the background.

When I was less experienced, I would have needed to write down a lot of the specific things that here I just kept in my mind. Or if I was writing an adventure for someone else to run, I would have to spell out the extra detail I only verbalised now, because a lot of the good things about the encounter were the general idea of how it should play out, not the specifics.

Although even then, a lot of what went well was because I knew the players and know how to slot appropriate connections in as I went along. A published adventure can't easily do that. The best you could do is list the treasure as what was definitely there, and then offer the GM to fill in whatever felt appropriate, with some specific examples for them to use if they didn't have a better idea. Things like, here's some prompts (for things connected with the room, for things with an interesting backstory, for things that are of particular interest to the players somehow)

In terms of "puzzles" I think the most important thing is to give the players some experience of "trying different approaches and seeing what works", but make sure that the encounter being satisfying doesn't rely on them being able to figure it out logically. And single-answer puzzles are usually bad for this, unless you build an adventure about them with going asking different NPCs what they think the answer might be, etc. In this case, because I wanted a like-Labyrinth-film feel, I went as close to "single answer puzzle" as I could.

I think I learned how to do it better in future. Partly by using puzzles sparingly, but mostly, how to do it well when it comes up. Now I think of it, some of it is sleight of hand: it's giving the *experience* of solving a puzzle, but actually, having a fallback so it matters less whether you SUCCEED or not, as long as you give it a fair try.

Of course, that's for *most* DnD games where the PCs are supposed to be reasonably successful. Sometimes you want to play a gritty deadly tomb of horrors dark souls game, in which case you can go for "they may never solve it and that's ok, it's up to them if they want to push their luck or not" approach.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1101966.html

Both of my parties found the location of one of the MacGuffins, each hidden in a "challenge" room, i.e. a chamber in the dungeon designed in-character and out-of-character to present an interesting challenge and reward to the players.

One was a not-library filled with wooden boxes, which shocked you when you opened one, and a guide who partially answered questions about them, with the aim of finding the MacGuffin in one.

The other was a set of altars, bowls, and knives, with instructions to let a drop of blood into the cup on the altar, which produced various magical effects, and the aim of figuring out what was the "right" way to do that.

I'd really wanted to include things like this, as it's very appropriate to the underlabyrinth setting -- I was partly inspired by things like the Labyrinth film -- and a big DnD tradition.

I knew I was taking a risk because both the first two challenges were at the puzzle end of the spectrum, and this sort of puzzle is actually really hard to do well in a roleplaying game.

The problem is, if it relies on figuring something out, it's not really a roleplaying game, it reduces to the players pausing the game and figuring it out.

I think it works well when the puzzle connects to things in the world, where there's a puzzle to be solved, but the individual steps involve small relevant in-world decisions, like combat, or needing to successfully use a skill, or losing or gaining health.

I sketched these particular rooms out ages ago and then just pulled them out when the party found them, and was very pleasantly surprised how my off-the-cuff details worked out.

Both parties successfully navigated most of the puzzle. Gp 1 retreated when they were running low on health, but paid attention to the specifics and know exactly what they're trying next time. I really loved that they had a little chart correctly reconstructing most of my notes. Gp 2 got rather frustrated when it kept seeming they were getting closer but still not getting there.

I think there were some things I sort of did but could still have done better. I should have explicitly thought, "If they get stuck, what options are open to them? Is there an in-world way of getting hints for a sufficient cost? Or will going away and returning help?" And I deliberately tried to allow many indirect approaches to get useful information, but not instantly bypass the puzzle, but I could have been more explicit about what sort of things they might find out, so more of the things they tried I could have a helpful-but-not-insta-win answer ready.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1101400.html

Lots of roleplaying isn't about making characters with powerful abilities, but some parts are.

And there's a stereotype that a player who has a character with a lot of abilities from expansion books is going to be much more powerful. Why is that? The expansion book choices aren't inherently more powerful. But firstly, because of normal variation, some of them will be more powerful than average and some less so, a player looking to make a character effective will be drawn to the powerful one. And secondly, there'll be something that has exactly the right combination of abilities that are worth the most to this character, a lot more than they would be worth to an average character.

This is also what I observe about the human variant race. In theory "+1 to any two ability scores" might not be worth more than "+1 to str and cha". But it IS, because there's only so many races in the core book, and they won't necessarily be a race that excels in the abilities that a particular character benefits from the most. So "+1 to any two" is worth more than "+1 to these particular two", because it lets you mix and match the parts worth the most to you.

I struggled for a while with how to cope with this with players with a range of optimisation options. If all the players play "My character uses a dagger because it's in character, I know a sword would be better in every way" or all the players play "not the MOST powerful character, but I took all the obvious improvements I could" then it's fine, but how do I cope when there's some of each?

If the game's not combat focused it doesn't matter, but if it is, it's usually not satisfying to have some characters be just better than others. I eventually realised, I could mentally chart HOW optimised characters were, on a scale from "just picked options that sounded in character with no care for effectiveness at all" to "picked options that make sense together, but didn't try to optimise" to "made the obvious choices of choosing the most useful weapon and armour available and focusing on the stats most useful to my character" to "seeking out specific options which work well with my build". And I could recognise, given the player preferences, where on the scale made the most sense. And guide people to that point, either by giving them bonuses or suggesting tweaks, if they were less optimised. And suggesting they deliberately forgo some more effective choices in exchange for some more fun but less effective ones if they were more optimised than that. And that *should* work.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1099548.html

There's a joke about a GM preparing an ogre lair, and asking the party which way they want to go, but whatever they go, the GM decides the ogre lair is that way.

I think that's an expected part of planning to a greater or lesser extent. It's only a problem when the GM treats everything like that

But what I wondered was, is there an advantage is preparing something approximating a single reality at all? Or should the GM default to winging it, to adjusting reality and difficulty on the fly to create the desired impression?

Well, there should be a lot of adjusting on the fly. Or, indeed, just improvising when you deliberately didn't prep the specifics, you wrote "pit trap", and decided to improv how difficult it was when it came up.

But I also think, there should be things you DO plan in advance and DO stick to more often than not.

The most obvious example is, a combat where the GM repeatedly fudges the dice rolls. Obviously, it's possible that the monsters happen to roll badly just when it saves the party from being totally wiped out. But if it happens even once, with several rolls involved, the players get the idea it's likely that the GM fudged the results. And then, they assume that they're never really in danger, because the GM will fudge things so it turns out ok. That's good for some styles of game, but bad for others. In fact, GMs commonly aim to avoid it because it's too obvious, whether or not they think it's ok in principle, and find some other adjustment instead.

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Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1099347.html

Admin

We ended up adding two new players, Liv and someone from the interested group, when a couple of players weren't sure if they could come. This ended up pretty well, and we had a really good session. I was really glad I'd been able to play with Liv, because I'd been hoping I would be able to and I wasn't sure.

The week leading up to the session I'd ended up a bit stressed by the logistics. I'd tried to structure things so it was fine if I didn't know exactly who would be there and I didn't need to worry about it until Monday, but it didn't work out that way. I kept wanting to do prep to make sure I was ready for any of the players, and to make sure I didn't have too many players if I invited more, but that meant players vanishing into various crises affected the planning more than I'd hoped.

What Went Well

I did too much prep, but I think it was the right sort of things that helped build the campaign.

We started off with a little war council of the players and a couple of NPCs. This took a little long, but everyone got a good sense of what mission they were planning, what the alternatives were, what they hoped to achieve, etc, and I don't think I could have cut it much shorter. Everyone had good intel on possible alternate missions.

Several characters brought up possible clues which they'd had in session 1 and I'd been prepared to remind them of if needed, and several characters followed up on things I'd expected to come up like "did we get a more full translation of that inscription"?

They chose the mission I expected, and weren't as on board as I hoped, but I think they were reasonably happy with it. This was, "collect bounties for track down fungus creature who'd invaded the mines and killed miners, and the traitors who'd let them in". I'd only imperfectly managed a balance between establishing a status quo and keeping events moving, so the mission didn't feel as important to them as I'd hoped, but I think it at least had reasonably clear rewards, both tangible and intangible.

They also had several other quests they were quite eager to work on, exploring the river, looking for most lost civilisation, looking for the remains of the navigation device, plus a few private ones, so I hope that might come up next.

The new navigation rules didn't come up much, but seemed to work well. I hope as people get more familiar with them, they'll make the players feel more able to make sensible trade-offs about which routes to take.

Several things I'd been trying to bring up came up, like J's character Lucke getting to use his spellthief ability. The party revisited the square where they were first ambushed by rock bears, and were attacked by a lone rock bear who was totally outclassed. They're getting used to always looking up, I'll need to give them some more competence moments, and then maybe some curveballs :)

C's character Sammy did several awesome combat stunts, using his amazing dexterity to drop from the ceiling impaling the rock bear, and leaping onto the back of a fungus-zombie ogre. And using his parrot to scout.

And AGAIN he used thunderwave to completely take out a small squad of kobolds, because it's area of effect, and guarantee of doing a small amount of damage to everyone in a group, is perfect for taking them out. I loved this so much: I couldn't have arranged it better, and it's really satisfying.

( What I could have planned better )

ETA

Talking it over with Liv, I realised two important things. One was, there was an awful lot that went well that I'd started to take for granted as part of running a session at all, but that's still quite good, even if I feel like I want to consistently do better.

The other was, when I was offering warnings, my voice is often a bit tongue in cheek, and this came across as sarcastic, like I was telling the players, "not this" or "something like this, but not". That's a shame, but it's actually really good: it's nice and specific so it's hopefully easy to avoid.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1098077.html

I started the campaign with the second group.

Despite being more people I hadn't known previously, they were also really nice, and also had really nice character ideas. We had more tiny machiavellian mastermind pcs, and more stabby stabby PCs, and more giant nerd PCs, and was generally fun :)

The session benefited from all the hooks I'd been strewing about in keeping up with group 1, and in bringing in the backstories from group 2 into the world, so other than the immediate goal of "delve for treasure", they had some reasonable suggestions for the them to actively choose between, following the bounties issued for the fungus creatures who invaded the mines, or following up more clues to a lost civilisation suggested by things group 1 found, or several other possible hooks.

And I managed to bring their characters together, first them, and then a couple of recurring NPCs, to have a chance to chat and get familiar with their characters, so stuff started off with more momentum than group 1 had.

Over-prep

But I'm still suffering from ending up with much too much prep. Partly because I'm figuring out the system, not the rules, but the way I want to run the campaign, so lots of notes about "this PC ties into this detail" etc, get muddled together, until I found a sensible way of organising everything. And partly because I just get over-invested in doing all the cool things I've thought of.

I *hope* that this does in fact help produce a cool campaign. I think it will, but now the PCs have caught up where I hoped in terms of interacting with the world, I need to step back and relax a bit more, and let stuff I've already thought of play out without constantly rejigging things.

The Labyrinth concept

I still really love the idea of the "undeground labyrinth", and after some false starts I really like the exploring mechanic I have for having the PCs able to explore unknown parts, map locations and follow routes, without physically mapping an actual world-wide labyrinth, but feeling like it varies from "reasonably straightforward" in the routes they're familiar with, to "dangerous" exploring unknown areas where you might legitimately get lost.

And I love that it lets me mix together two different groups in the same world, and rely on its magical weirdness to cover over "hey, wouldn't we have been here BEFORE group 2" moments, if things get out of sync.

And I love a lot of the worldbuilding I've come up with, and the players reactions when they uncover it.

But I think, it hasn't worked as well as I'd hoped as an old-school dungeon delve. Partly because the character and worldbuilding stuff was just more grabbing so that got a lot more focus, and partly because it's hard to balance encounters for a good learning experience where the PCs get to know what they can handle and not, when you don't want to hand-wave away accidental deaths. I think that will come more into focus as we play a little more, it's just that third level characters are already quite complicated!

But I think, I am much more excited by games with lots of npcs, plots, worldbuilding, etc, so if I do another big setting it will probably be a city.

I would still enjoy a small proportion of mechanics focused games -- basically the feeling of excitement when everything goes right and you win a fight. But I think they need to be structured slightly differently. You need more, "you fight a goblin, you fight some more goblins, you cross a chasm, you fight a goblin on a bridge across a chasm", where you experience elements which are easy individually but interesting in combination. That was how this campaign was SUPPOSED to work, but we ended up without enough of the easy stuff.

And the idea that "I wouldn't have to do much prep" hasn't been true, as I've been sucked into expanding... almost everything :) I hope it's a lot quieter from now on, now I'm familiar with all the characters. The plan was, most of the planning would be done once, and each session would be PCs just thrown into it and told "here's a top three hooks, go and explore", where everything already tied in interesting ways. But I ended up doing a lot to tie ongoing PC plots into events, and what I'd originally envisaged as a fairly slow growing background plot got more so, so keeping it all straight might have been easier if I'd just planned each session separately as "what are you doing this session" and not tried to maintain all the worldbuilding up to date so much.

But I am really enjoying it, I hope the games with these groups go well, and I hope I do run more variety of games in future.

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1097789.html

Nothing specifically spectacular happened, but this session was really satisfying!

The players brought the rescued miners the rest of the way back to the main mines, on the way discovering a small Myconid outpost near the mines, and discovering the myconids had made a big attack on the mines, sadly wreaking quite a massacre. Further patient investigation discovered a contingent of guards had let the Myconids in, and absconded with some of the most valuable resources mined.

What worked out

I tried several things to make the session feel more satisfying, and I think they all worked:

* I looked at the overall arc of the campaign, which so far had mostly been "rescue trapped miners" and a few other hooks which we hadn't had time to explore, and worked out what would be natural next things to happen, and then made sure they happened *now*, not waiting on the players to "get there", even if I needed to jump a little to get there
* I worked out what the players were most likely to encounter and let my imagination run free fleshing it out, updating my overall notes accordingly. Some of that showed up in ways I expected and ways I didn't, so the prep is showing worthwhile even when it doesn't come up as expected
* I made an effort, in advance and during the session, to flesh out the NPCs the players meet. Even a little bit made the world feel a lot more alive, and began to snowball as I got used to the NPCs and more fell into place, even if I'd just got the players to make up a name and single personality trait to start with.
* Some "joining-the-dots", or just having stuff that the players would see during the session, but making sure it's uncovered successively by specific player action; even if it's only "ask the obvious questions in any order", it adds a lot more feeling that the players/characters are driving what happens, and it's easy to adjust (e.g. if I know what they're likely to discover, I can on the fly judge what actions might uncover what easily or only after some challenge they encounter)

In the end, I spent some time introspecting about *how* to plan this, which I'm pretty pleased with, and the actual prep ended up not taking long, mostly plugging a few ideas I had for what was likely to come up into the existing worldbuilding I already had, and some brainstorming. So hopefully I can keep doing that without a big investment of time.

It does mean, I can't yet quite do what I'd originally hoped of running a zero-prep session on the spot whenever I'd like. But if I work in some mini-plots into the worldbuilding/scenario/locations, I probably could start to do that just by picking up one of the ones I'd prepared. After a few sessions I should start to have a surplus of stuff like that anyway.

Also

We had enough time to revisit some things which had come up before, and discovering more about them made everyone feel like things had happened, and me feel like they were worthwhile including.

There wasn't that much combat, and that felt about right as we'd spent a fair bit of time on combat before and people are now reasonably familiar with what their characters can do, so being low on hit points was tense even when they didn't encounter significant opposition. It took a while to get to that point, when people don't initially have a good instinct for how much healing is available.

That also sped things up, but I don't think it needs to stay like that, the pendulum can also swing back. I think the important thing is to include the things that made the session feel like it made progress, but the "in between" bits that get to them can either be investigation, or combat, or navigation, or other character activity.

In future

Think this plan worked and I want to follow a similar model in future. In particular, I hope to recapture the "each session feels worthwhile individually" I'd originally intended. Despite connecting quite tightly to the previous session (starting in the middle of the labyrinth with trapped miners to escort home) and following session (following up on the events of this session), this session felt reasonably like it was satisfying by itself, with events established and resolved.

I also should continue to trust my gut on what the players are feeling reasonably on top of (basic combat, navigation checks), and keep them present but only touching on them briefly can be enough, and on what the players haven't enough chance for (agency, finding things out, progressing plot) and trying to make sure it has a chance to happen.

Ideally every session will be fun in different ways, but none will be the "mustn't miss" session.

I am also starting up a second group on alternate Mondays, so I will try to follow the same model and see how it goes. I'm excited to see how they interact in the same world.

I'm hoping that if I keep this up, I can get away from my completionism and come up with cool new ideas and do prep with only a small investment of time each week, and make more time for other things. We'll see how that goes :)

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1097512.html

There are some fairly sensible rules of thumb for "how challenging is this monster". Things like "this amount of hit points and armour class are roughly equivalent to this amount of hit points and armour class" and "if it has good saves, treat the effective hp as this much higher". And the same for attacks, and, how to use monsters with attacks stronger than defences and vice versa, and how not to depart too far from equivalence or you get monsters that are really boring (if they odn't do much damage but take forever to kill) or really swingy (if they do lots of damage but are very fragile).

But it seems like Dungeon Master's Guide always makes a dog's breakfast of explaining these. It presents a bunch of rules as a rigid algorithm and says "you can tweak it", whereas I feel like someone who understands the rules of thumb could have provided a template beginners could use. I may try to write that up, but in practice GMs usually use a lot of intuition to tune monsters and I may not have enough experience with 5e yet.

( Read more... )

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1093462.html

Most new editions of DnD come with ideas where I think "oh, that's a good idea" at the time, but it's hard to see more clearly whether they actually made things good or not.

5e introduced Advantage and Disadvantage. Basically, if you're attacking or attempting something similar in any advantageous situation, from hiding, or attacking someone impaired, or a long list of other scenarios, you get advantage -- you get to roll two d20 instead of one and choose the better. It also "turns on" some special abilities like the rogue's backstab. Disadvantage is the same but you have to choose the worse.

( Read more... )

Balance for what timescale

I struggled to put this into words, but it seems like old editions of DnD were balanced for a campaign. There are all sorts of rules that only make a difference if you expect to play the same character through all the levels, classes that are weaker early on but stronger later or vice versa. More like roguelikes than most modern roleplaying sessions.

( Read more... )

Crossposts: https://cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com/1091489.html

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Entries tagged with dnd

Playing with inexperienced GMs

Making Puzzles in DnD/RPG actually fun

Detailed analysis of a dnd puzzle room

Roleplaying: Puzzle Rooms

Rpg, why having more choices makes more powerful characters

Rpg thoughts: non-schrodinger prep

Underlabyrinth DnD Group 1 Session 5

Labyrinth Roleplaying: Group 2, Session 1

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