thethingaboutfantasy

[thethingaboutfantasy]

[thethingaboutfantasy]

I’m at my dog sitting job in a pretty old countryside farm and the lady who does the cleaning up here told me this morning that there are old tunnels (now closed up) running from the house to the church (1km) and I did not want to know that

[thethingaboutfantasy]

This is your regularly scheduled reminder that "Life finds a way" is about the dinosaurs becoming transgender

[thethingaboutfantasy]

Gosh I hate grind culture. My little sister just started medical school and all of her orientation leaders are like “you absolutely cannot have a life WHATsoever you WILL have to give up EVERYTHING besides this program say GOODBYE to your hobbies and relationships” and now she’s calling me feeling guilty for running and going to the grocery store and that’s just WRONG! And that is exactly what I was told starting law school as well, and rejecting that mentality was the best thing I ever did but it was so hard not to buy into. Anyway if any of you are in an intense academic program PLEASE take time to sleep and eat and exercise and maintain your relationships and keep up your hobbies! you are not a robot who exists solely to study and I promise that living a life and staying physically and mentally healthy is not going to make you fail

[thethingaboutfantasy]

I fear no one has been this cunty since

[thethingaboutfantasy]

somebody said ed feat. tony-hawk-syndrome and I very much agree

[thethingaboutfantasy]

I don’t think I can stress enough how many people on here need a hobby like 95% of what people refer to as jobless behavior is actually just hobbyless behavior. Take up watercolors or tabletop or join a hiking group or something you probably won’t feel as much of an incessant need to freak out on the internet every day

[thethingaboutfantasy]

Crazy how many people want characters in fiction to speak and act like they’ve had 20 hours of intensive therapy. Could NOT be me I want these bitches fucked up insane

[thethingaboutfantasy]

Has this been done before? 😅

[thethingaboutfantasy]

[thethingaboutfantasy]

being self aware suuuucks like yeah this thought pattern/behavior is stupid and pointless and a symptom. i know this. [does it anyways

[thethingaboutfantasy]

Tableskills: The Proactive DM Voice

One of the most fundamental lesions I learned over the course of becoming a great DM was that it was my job to push the story forward, not my players.  When I was younger I was terrified of taking any agency upon myself for fear of railroading my group, thinking that my job was merely to read out prepared text and design a playground for my players to explore as they saw fit. Needless to say, no matter how much planning i did or how big I made my campaign world it never made my party any more energized, instead bleeding out their attention until they became listless and the group/campaign dissolved. 

Once I made the change to DM driven play, things changed almost instantly. My once distracted players became excited collaborators, looking to steer the runaway engine that was my narrative. Where as before they were directionless, having infinite shallow options, they were now focused on the road ahead of them, trying to dodge upcoming hurdles while reacting to the unexpected ones.  

This change took some getting used to, but became most evident in how I narrated my games, cutting down on extraneous calls for rolls,  chaining together scenes until a big finale at the end of the session, using my infinite power as narrator to push receptive players into interesting situations that progressed both the story and their character arc. Over time I began to think of these changes and a bunch of others as “proactive DM voice”, a skill that I think players and dungeonmaters alike could benefit from learning. 

Lets look at an example, lifted from one of the very first modules I ever ran: The party stands at the edge of a tremendously large fissure, and has to lower themselves a hundred or more feet down to a ledge where they’ll be ambushed by direrats.  You could run this in a rules literal sense: reading out the prepared text then waiting for the party to come up with a solution, likely dallying as they ask questions. Have them make athletics checks to descend the ropes, risk the possibility of one of them dying before the adventure ever begins. Then you do it two or three more times as they leapfrog down the side of the canyon, wasting what was perhaps half an hour of session time before you even got to any of the fun stuff. 

Or you could get proactive about it: 

Securing your ropes as best you can, you belay over the side of the fissure, descending down in a measured, careful pace aiming for the most stable looking outcrop of rock, still a hundred or so feet above the canyon’s base. A few minutes and about two thirds of the way through your decent [least athletic PC] looks like they’re struggling, their hands are coated in sweat and they can feel unfamiliar muscles burning in complaint.  I need [PC] to make me an athletics check

Rather than waiting for the players and the dice to make a story for me, I took the extra step in my prep time to think of something interesting that might happen while they’re venturing through this section of the map. I specifically designed things so that happenstance wouldn’t kill off one of my heroes, but they might end up damaged and in a perilous situation should the fates not favour them that particular moment. 

Likewise, this planning has let me prepare a number of different angles that I could use to prepare the next scene: with an injured player ambushed by multiple rats while their allies dangle a few rounds away or with the party saving their friend and descending together, too much of a threat for the rats to tackle all at once, leading them to stalk the party through future encounters.

This is already getting a bit long, but for those interested in more ways you can adopt a proactive DM voice, I’ll give more examples under the cut

Keep reading

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Leonardo da Vinci - details of Head of Leda, ca. 1504-06, and A star-of-Bethlehem and other plants, ca. 1506-12, pen and ink

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spring whale shark 🌷

[thethingaboutfantasy]

Rebecca Sugar cooked with "Character whose entire existence is devoted to the service of another character who's now dead and now they have no idea what to do with themselves except live." I love that shit. I forged myself into a tool for you and now you're gone. I'm sniffing this like a bloodhound