#gm notes

[gorillastraylight]

I get that most people exclusively play 5e and 5e’s design makes it pretty hard to get your character killed after like, level 4, but more ppl should give at least opening your table to the threat of character death a try. I myself was once a nonbeliever! I spent several years running games on the assumption that character death was such an important storytelling beat that it should only be done with some preplanning and everyone’s consent. Then I ran a Delta Green campaign, and a beloved officer of M-Epic got his skull crushed to a pulp by a Gnoph-Keh in the Manitoba wilderness. It was fucking awesome.

The hush in the discord call as everyone saw the result of the lethality roll. The way death went from something we had all been warned about and made jokes around to a real, tangible, possible consequence.

Later on, the player made his next character that character’s mother, who became another beloved party member. They had visions of his death in the endgame mythos dimension, it was excellent.

Sure, if you’re playing a game that allows for such things, talk to the player (or your GM, depending on who you are) afterwards to see if they want to make a new character or to look at a way for the character to come back. If so, discuss the implications. I get the sense that lots of groups are pretty averse to having death be on the table, and if that’s you I encourage you to test your comfort zone in this area. You’ll always remember it if it happens.

[gorillastraylight]

I love lancer a lot, but running it has started to slowly make me anti-hexes. They work great in Battletech because there's almost no insaneo AoE devilry occurring during any given round, but Lancer can get complex with it pretty fast. Maybe Foundry's modules and stuff for it just suck. This is an awesome resource tho, keeping in my back pocket for later

made this earlier based on what was in the core book because i couldn't find anything more extensive/all in one place (hexes are confusing ~-~) (someone said the weird cones go 1-1-3-3-5-5-7 etc. so i went with that)

(aoes from the book)

[zephyreon4-art]

"The fatefields would not allow it"

[Lancer oc]

[whirlpool-blogs]

SC: Your boy, Gabe Perreault, the other BC star freshman on your line […], was it surprising to see that he wasn’t picked a little sooner? Because he looks phenomenal.

Will Smith: Yeah, for me, definitely. I mean, I told teams at every interview in the combine, Take this guy, he’s gonna be a stud.

[gorillastraylight]

I've thought about this quite a bit, like obviously the troll problem has been discussed to death (the answer, of course, is that if you want to have a puzzle monster you have to actually make up a puzzle monster), and I think I've decided that it should basically be up to the player - in most systems, there's tons of in-game compatible reasons for a character to know stuff! Likewise, if the player is happier with the idea that Gertrude the INT 8 Fighter has never heard of the Hand of Vecna, such is their right.

I think the "hunch" is most useful in games like Delta Green or whatever, where there really isn't a good explanation for why John Fed should know that Hounds of Tindalos are susceptible to imagining balls. To their credit, usually games like DG are good about making up new shit for their adventures, but I like this take overall. Trying to reckon meta knowledge with character knowledge *could* be a fun dynamic, but only if it's voluntary. Being obligated to do so is complicated and tiresome.

It occurs to me that in fiction, our protagonists often have act on instinct, hunches and guesswork, and turn out to have been correct all along. It's incredibly common for the protagonist of an adventure story to 'follow their gut' and for that to work out in their favour. Our heroes make lucky assumptions that move the plot along all the time.

In tabletop rpgs, you can in fact do the same thing. It is, in fact, entirely reasonable for a player character to make a lucky guess about what's going on or what they need to do, and for that to be right.

You hear the question "but how would they know that?" come up all the time, often with the implicit "if you can't justify knowing that, you're metagaming, which is always bad". This is a stupid line of discussion. When you know what you want to do, because of your own out-of-game knowledge, you can simply have your PC make a lucky guess. Their hunch turned out to be correct.

A character like (say) Leuitenant Columbo, Monkey D Luffy, Doctor Van Helsing or Bilbo Baggins does this sort of thing - following a hunch with little hard evidence, that turns out to be correct - all the time. There's no reason why your ttrpg character shouldn't do the same thing.

[normal-about-charcters]

Im starting my first Lancer game (im the gm) next week with a session 0, basically just getting my players the resources they need (comp/con and the lcp for Solstice Rain) and i have some immediate thoughts

1. Im using Foundry VTT hexes, and its a nightmare trying to get them to fit and work, especially since i dont know the math needed for it

2. Comp/con is a godsend even if just for organization (also being able to import PCs tho not npcs TT-TT)

3. The Lancer system in Foundry is really nice and simple to use when you actually learn how to set it up

4. Im gonna need to set up a tutorial map so that my players can learn how to use it on their end, and so that i can know how to actually set up the maps (i dont want them to see my reinforcements before its too late)

5. Im not sure how long its going to take, but i think 3hrs (or the end of mission 1) until i decide whether to end it for the night or not is reasonable

Im pretty anxious, but i can definitely do this. or at least follow the script

[randomnameless]

@fantasyinvader I fell on some of your posts about Supreme PR and what is Claude's endgame in GW, that is, basically removing her casus belli since her war officially started against Rhea and the CoS :

While it could be a watsonian point for Fraud to have, even if, judging how she immediately started antagonising Leicester borders when it was Faerghus who welcomed the CoS refugees, it can be easily debunked.

But Doylist wise? Those NPCs are in SB and don't show a shred of awareness :

Seriously ?

Apparently the Western Church sucks because they kept on antagonising Rhea, but, uh, bro, your in the camp of the army who declared war against her?

So unless this NPC is expressing self-doubts at the course of actions of his army, I wonder what the actual crap he is supposed to say here, Western Church BaD bcs they don't like Rhea, but Imperial Army GoOd bcs they don't like Rhea??

Adding to that how the Southern Church's practices are apparently completely at odds with what Rhea and her Central Church were preaching... This just feels like this NPC needed an excuse to diss on the Western Church, or worse, he isn't even aware the Imperial Army declared war on Rhea!

Bro ????

This NPC believes the CoS should protect the people of Adrestia even if Adrestia started a war against the CoS :S

Back to Fraud, while Supreme Leader relies a lot on PR to bend people to her cause, her own people are completely, uh, unaware about what the War is about or worse, believe the world should polish their shoes even when they're busy destroying it.

AKA there's no need to convince them with through PR, given how disconnected from the events they are, unless we're supposed to understand they ended like that after reading too much prop- information campaign.

Tl;Dr : Fraud's fucked post GW.

[blueaerin]

Guess we know why there were 11 episodes now, huh?

[heybiji]

hi!!! i just wanted to say i really love all of your MASKS stuff. i'm something of a newbie when it comes to the TTRPG community, but MASKS seems to be not very well-known and i think that's a real shame. i'm a huge fan of old-school superhero-adjacent stuff, especially the silver- and bronze-age ones!

by the way, i was wondering if you'd be willing to share some tips for a first-time GM? you don't have to if you'd rather not! i just figured i'd try asking since i was planning on GMing a MASKS campaign for some of my friends later, but despite my decade's worth of roleplaying experience i've never been in a TTRPG campaign nor a GM (or similar) role before

Thank you so much!! I was just lamenting about how I felt bad for the MASKS tag because it is now flooded with all my npc nonsense hahah so this is really nice to hear.

It's awesome you're planning on running a MASKS game for your friends!! There is an indispensable post on twitter I saw that has a LOT of great tips for running MASKS that I recommend checking out. But for my own personal tips that are just me things, here's what I got. Sorry it's gonna be extremely long-winded, it may take a few months to read through it.

(Note: I am also hugely into RP and probably put more into it than what is necessary, especially with MASKS which is meant to be able to be played out of the box. It was definitely not played out of the box in our case because I require a lot out of myself and everyone else to feel good about running something. if anyone else wants to continue seeing me as a normal human being please don't click the Keep Reading)

Since you're running it, make the world interesting to you. If the world runs around themes you're personally interested in then you'll have a much easier time coming up with answers on the fly. For me, themes I'm interested in that lend themselves well to a superhero world: money, power, family, celebrity, media, the 24 hour news cycle and the desensitization of violence. Because I'm interested in this stuff anyway, wrapping a world around them makes it much simpler for me to figure out how the world ticks and thus how the characters fit into it and how the world reacts to them, and I am DESPERATE to find out how the characters react to all the questions and expectations the world is imposing upon them.

Make sure your players have a good grasp of the tone of story so they can make characters that gel well within it. For me the tone is a lil more adult because I'm not personally into younger morality tale stories in tone, it's pretty grounded, and I think comedy and tragedy work hand in hand so I lean into them.

Talk. A lot. Talk about the characters, talk about the world. MASKS is fun because it's a LOT of talking and figuring out the narrative together. It's not a lot of crunchy mechanics, it's all around seeing how the characters react to the world narratively, all hurt and comfort and emotions which (for me) requires people to have a good grasp on their characters and the world. I like to give my players "homework" where I ask them a question involving their characters in some way like "what hero did your character look up to as a child?" so they get to come up with past heroes, or "How does your character feel about _____?" etc etc. The only fans are gonna be your table and fans love to talk so be the biggest fans of the PCs!!

Figure out your framing. I know in MASKS they suggest framing it like a comic book, and basically talking about the frames on screen. For me, because I'm more into movies and tv than comics, I frame it like that. So I have an active "camera" in play during sessions and will ask things like "would anyone like to grab the camera?" to encourage the players to put the character into a scene or "what does the audience see as the camera focuses in on your character in this emotional moment?" There is a LOT of playing up to the camera and framing the sessions as episodes of a show, so it's like, okay, you have several options but what is going to be interesting for the audience to see? I find this encourages the players to have their characters take bigger swings and feel comfortable letting us into how their character is feeling because it all looks GREAT on camera. The camera loves it. The PCs are the story after all.

Because I frame it a show, I also like to play individual ending songs over the "credits" at the end of each episode. So I asked my players to make playlists for their characters so if I feel an episode had a lot of emotional focus on one character in particular, I can play one of their songs at the end of the episode! I also made a general MASKS playlist with a bunch of songs from the era we set it in (2004) to pull from. It's a fun little addition that I really enjoy and that I hope makes it all feel more special.

The Dino Donut Effect: create landmarks in your world. (OK THIS IS GONNA BE LONG BUT WORK WITH ME HERE) They don't have to be locations, more solid landmarks of the story that the characters can refer back to and lean on to make the world feel more "real." I call it the Dino Donut Effect because in our world the thing that made everything click into place was talking out the backstory of one of the PC's figuring out they had the power negation ability. We were talking one night trying to figure it out; we wanted the character to fall out of a building and be caught by a flying superhero and accidentally turn off their powers, so they toss the kid to another flying supe whose powers also get turned off. But we were like... holy shit what is the height of a building needed that can handle this much action in the air without them hitting the ground in 3 seconds. So after a long night of talking about terminal velocity and looking at Splat Calculators we figured out the height of the building, and we needed them to crash into something that wouldn't fuckin kill them. The first suggestion was a truck full of bananas. Nah. We landed on a giant balloon that could take the impact. And the balloon became a giant T-Rex holding a donut that was the mascot of the city's beloved decades old donut shop Dino Donut. And so we decided that one of the two flying supes grabbed onto the kid and the other and flew into the giant balloon to try and keep them all alive, which destroyed the balloon, which was a city institution, and there was a crowd of children there that day that saw their friend Dino Donut die. Killed by a superhero. The balloon deflated loudly so it sounded like Dino Donut was screaming in agony. All the kids were traumatized (screaming crying throwing up), the city was furious because everyone loved Dino Donut, it was constantly in the news cycle, and it ruined the career of the supe that "killed Dino Donut." AND THEN THEY REPLACED THE DINO DONUT BALLOON WITH A LAME "UPDATED DESIGN" DINO DONUT STATUE which everyone hates and people consider to be a memorial to the old Dino Donut. ANYWAY, the Dino Donut effect is that now all the PCs have one single incident to refer back to that they all have feelings about. A couple of them were there that day and heard Dino Donut scream, one is now the protege of the disgraced superhero that killed Dino Donut so she feels uncomfortable talking about it, there's the kid that was saved that day but was sworn to secrecy by the supe so no one would find out about his power negation ability, and then there's the kid that wasn't there because she's an alien that just arrived to earth and now the kids have to explain the incident to her with all their varying opinions. Now the PCs' meeting spot is at a Dino Donut. Having this one solid incident that is both funny and kind of goes into the themes of the world has been an absolute treat. Creating "landmarks" like that in the world has done so much and now I'm like okay I'm gonna try to do this moving forward with any other thing I run.

anyway these are my extremely specific to me tips. my RP standards are kind of high which makes me a bit of a terror but also when the flowers bloom from it it feels GREAT. i'm not sure if this will help but hopefully there is something there that can be useful!

MASKS is fun and simple once you get the hang of it, though, so I'm sure whatever you do you and your players will have a lot of fun! especially if you're someone who is into RP which is the background I'm coming from too; MASKS is extremely narrative! i'll be looking in the tag for your game hehe

(The Day Dino Donut Died art by JD)

[gorillastraylight]

Thoughts and a project log on D&D 4e

A non-battletech post for once, crazy crazy. I've been running a Lancer ttrpg campaign with a small group for over a year now, and as we've passed my hypothetical halfway point for the game's storyline, I've started thinking about what kind of game I want to run next. I've settled on Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition. 4e has been kind of a white whale for me for a long time - while I had played D&D before (I started with my dad's old AD&D books), what really got me interested in the game and in GMing was the very early actual play podcast "Critical Hit" (it predates CR by like 5 years before anyone says anything), which used 4e. I tried to run 4e as a young teen for friends during lunch periods at school, but 30 minutes is not a great amount of time to run an rpg (esp 4e) for a bunch of 13 year olds in a noisy ass cafeteria - and it's played on my mind ever since. So, as my group and I continue to enjoy our lance campaign, I'm slowly working on converting a prominent 3.5e prewritten campaign into 4th - I also ran a little of 3.5 back in the day, but it's my least favourite version of the game so I'm interested to revisit that as well. I'm gonna periodically post some updates and musings on both the project and 4e as a whole, probably also some observations on D&D and TTRPGs overall as well, mostly for my own reference but also sometimes to get input or thoughts from various internet weirdos. This post also serves as an official warning to any of my players: filter this tag! You know who you are. The tag for this project is #gorilla straylight's 4e garbage

[ambagel]

I remember about a year ago when people were sad that Malleus had so little event SSR cards, and now everyone is suffering trying to scrounge enough gems for his boatload of cards

[anextravagantliar]

[ APPROVAL ] + hawke filled a bunch of chairs in the hanged man with fantasy whoopee cushions. no one knows how many she's hidden around the building. fart noises erupt every other minute. lives have been ruined.

Send [ APPROVAL ] + (a decision that your muse is making) || accepting

+100 friendship with varric.

[jjungkookislife]

this book idea better come soon bc the work drama is too much

[vomitlover-art]

Part 3 - Character Art + Tileset

Tileset

I also have a long list of GM Notes, Items, and a Soundtrack list, but Tumblr won't let me add those- so if people are interested I'll reblog with an added link to all those files.

"Sorry, This Line Has Been Disconnected" Masterpost

Part 1

Earlier this year, I tried running a tabletop campaign. For various reasons, I've decided that I don't want to run it anymore. Anxiety and my own stubborness as a gm got in the way, but I have a shitload of art and stuff that I made for it, and I'd like to make a single large post to gather it all. Feel free to use any of these sprites, character art, etc... in your own games. =w=

Art under the Keep Reading

[justalittlebluetiefling]

Just a 30 year old father tucking in his 97 year old son.