#dnd talk

[royalsea-art]

posted a banger tweet and thought that tumblr deserved to see it too

[keplercryptids]

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.

[venusmage]

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

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

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

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

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

[sephiramy]

I want to share a fun thing I used to do when DMing that I haven't thought about in a minute

so, when the PCs went to sleep, they would occasionally be dealing with visions from their gods/patrons/enemies, experiencing terrifying dream flashbacks, or being sent arcane clues etc etc and I had a different music theme for each one, which the group picked up on after a bit, so if [x] god was showing up in a dream sequence, their theme came on and everyone went "OH MY GOD IT'S [x]!"

the thing is, most nights there would be no cryptic messages at all, and I would just use the Final Fantasy "going to sleep" jingle to signify a long rest

using music as a cue, it became very fun to leave a few hanging seconds when the characters settled in for their long rest, and I could hear the players going "oh no what's it gonna be what's gonna play..." and their palpable relief when it was just the Final Fantasy jingle, versus the outburst of "OH NO IT'S [x]" if I played a theme

it was extra rewarding on the very rare nights where more than one character had a vision, so the first sequence would end, everyone relaxed for what they were sure would be the jingle, and then "OH NO IT'S [y]!!??"

I'm a strong proponent of the fact not every group is a good group for music, but it worked out really well here and this is a particular thing I remember fondly

[tsubaki94]

Currently playing a Bard in a DnD Homebrew with some awesome guys. I'm the team's bard, half-orc who shifts the battle to our advantage by using Shatter very efficiently.

He was assassinated not so long ago but survived, had the same assassin hit him with an arrow and nearly killed him which led to the only logical conclusion to ask the assassin out on a date. She said Yes, Told the party that she turned me down and they believed him.

After that near-death experience, Gell got himself some armor and is now ready to face off against a dragon XD

[weirdozjunkary]

I think it really shows something about me when making my character for my first DND campaign in a while, I made a mad scientist—AroAce—Teifling (who may or may not be autistic as well).

[catboy-outlaw]

I love DnD because you will be sitting with your party and your character has just experienced the most gutwrenching, soul destroying trauma, but then you here the doorbell ring and you all just collectively pause the on going trauma because Pizza.

[dungeonsanddragonsfifthedition]

have been stuck on this character design for a while now and i think i finally figured it out after like 10 face studies (not pictured) and the memory that capes exist and are fun

[ninamodaffari]

GUYS tonight’s dnd was so fucking amazing. Yuri faced and killed his abuser, almost completely solo’ing him by himself. Yuri went from a scared child, afraid of fighting back to literally charging him with his axe and killing him like the coward he was. HE FOUGHT BACK AND WON!

then after Ismo was dead, a fucking Hydroloth crawled out of his corpse and they managed to kill that too. Yuri then witnessed a vision of Ismo being sent directly to the Abyss and reincarnated as a worm, where he’ll writhe forever.

AND AND -- he saved his gnoll-mama and reunited her with his gnoll-papa.

for the first time in a while...yuri lets out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.

[safehouse-if]

Had to take this week off from writing/editing/coding. Sorry about that, no real reason.

Just been playing too much DnD lately and it has consumed my mind. And trying to get my half-elf paladin in to a spicy sandwich with a dragon and a vampire takes a lot more effort than I first thought...

[zellkabellk]

Thinking back to DnD Qalaari (it's been a while since we've been able to play but !!! maybe next week !!!!) and... I've decided early on that, while she knows how to speak 3 languages, it wouldn't make any sense that she'd now how to write / read (her culture is very oral, and she personally never was in a position that necessitated her to interact with written aspects of it) and it's been ???? really fun ??? My whole table collectively often forgets that she can't read so it always leads to funny situations : "Maybe Qalaari could go climb up and read [thing] aloud to us ?" "Ah... hm... I'm sorry but... hm..." "Ah, right." It also makes everything more complicated but for now never in a way that was just frustrating 🙏 (Though I think I'm the only one at the table that knows draconic so.... rip to ever reading THAT shit... Qalaa is slowly deciphering a cookbook thanks to her groupmates but for now she mostly goes with the pictures and the numbers (she knows numbers) mkfdsjhks

[keplercryptids]

a mindset that has honestly helped me so much re: planning and worldbuilding as a DM is pretty simple:

nothing is canon until it’s established at the table.

sure, i have ideas about what’s going on in the rest of the world, or what happened in the past, or what may happen in the future. and the world has some rules that are set before the players enter the scene. but in order to avoid getting too precious about the world, and to foster a living, breathing setting that the players can truly interact with and affect, nothing is 100% true until it’s made canon by the players.

this is also why i never prep more than a session in advance, because i truly don’t know the shape a session will take until i know what the players did in the one before it. what they do matters in that way.

i’m not gonna lie, i wince a little bit when i hear other GMs talk about “writing a campaign” or “coming up with a plot” before a game has even begun, because, well. i personally don’t understand creating a campaign in a vacuum, without player interaction and feedback. that’s not a ttrpg campaign, that’s a novel! which is super valid, but if you want to create a ttrpg campaign, you need the interaction. you need the cooperation. you need players. the story is a group story and that means you cannot and do not decide every little detail about it.

[planeswalker-aurora]

ran my first dnd session in like 4 years last night and it went way better than I expected. My players all fit together well, and I think my homebrew world has really started to flesh itself out even more after session 1. After all, who doesn't want a world with a corrupt holy church that has indoctrinated most of the country and managed to piss off the fey to a frightening degree?

[quaxorascal]

On the one hand, I do think that Taber deserves the chance to yell at her mother if she ever happens to run into Astrid before the endgame, and it might be fun to make that happen

On the other hand, I do think it would be fairly satisfying for her to no longer have to engage in her family’s bullshit outside of Judoc being in her periphery

[divinestrikes]

thinking about how I’ll be getting to play in a horror campaign with saga and I’m so excited 🤭🫶🏼

[dungeonsanddragonsfifthedition]

guy for a crunchy combat vecna mini campaign… her name is aelwyd and she is a serial arsonist :)