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#gm tips
saja-star · 11 months
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I am obsessed with this idea
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sashasienna · 9 months
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I don't often talk about MacGuffin stuff on here (not sure why) but Jonny and I have been running these masterclass streams for our patrons and I'm really proud of them! This week's is about running your first game (ever or of a new campaign) and we'll talk a lot about the principles of structuring a session and engaging players, but also a bit about practicalities and figuring out your own GMing style. I think these streams (and accompanying VODs) are really good, so maybe check out our patreon if they seem like your kind of thing.
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cloaksandcapes · 9 months
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DM\GM Tip on Roleplaying Stuff
🎲 GMs, there’s always a way to say yes to what the player wants to do.
🎭 Roleplay isn’t always about getting what you want but being given the chance to try and it doesn’t mean success is always possible. 💪 I once had a Barbarian whose whole purpose was to fight the biggest things he could find.
🌋 The first time he saw a Volcano, he wanted to fight it. Both me and the player knew that wasn't possible. But I gave him the chance to play this out.
He attempted to scale the side while his party looked on, dumbfounded. He eventually fell...multiple times. Until he swore, he would return when he was stronger to exact revenge. Sometimes players will want to do things and not understand that it's not possible yet -- could be due to power levels, influence, ect.
🧙‍♀️ Don't just deny them the opportunity. Talk, communicate expectations and give them chances to work towards those goals.
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galilleon · 5 months
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Hey all, This is my first Tumblr post ever! I'm pretty new here, but I'm hoping to share some DM techniques, tools and tips and to make some new friends as well! Feel free to send a chat request (an ask[?]) if you're interested!
With that aside, on with the post!
Better and More Meaningful Random Encounters!
Random encounters are a staple of DnD, they are expected to be there during exploration as a way to make the world feel alive, to have it have an aura of adventure and danger, to eat up party resources and put pressure on the PCs to make interesting and important choices, and also as a way for a DM to reasonably 'stall' the party with a quick and easy situation.
Usually, it ends up something like this:
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There's just one problem with most random encounter tables though, it's so easy for them to be GOSHDARN BORING! Especially for a newer DM.
Making them interesting becomes gambled improv on the DM's part if they're not used to it, and it's hard to keep track of the important factors that need to be kept in mind
Luckily, I ended up finding a great source for random encounters from 'Dungeon Masterpiece' on YouTube, and I integrated it into my own DMing. I figured that I'd share it here for any that want to work it into their own sessions as well!
After adjustment, a single table can account for multiple entire sessions of in-depth worldbuilding and fun without getting dull!
Sources:
Source 1 (Creating interesting Random Encounter Tables):
youtube
Source 2 (Making Random Encounters reflect your Worldbuilding):
youtube
There's 4 major methods we can use to improve the Random Encounter table
1. Make the table a straight 1dx roll.
2. Adding 'depth'.
3. Adding meaningful encounters.
4. Prerolling and/or Multirolling.
You can also check out the "Where to Start?" section for some direction to make getting it down and prepped all easy peasy!
1. Straight Roll:
Its enticing to go for 2d6 or the such in order to add non-linearity to the rolls, but these sorts of adjustments only end up making one or two encounters extremely likely and leave all others in the dust, it often ends up defeating it's own purpose of interesting randomness.
In the previous example, it was extremely likely to only get Wolves, Barbarians, Orcs, or Spiders, from a table of 12! A straight roll would serve us much better. The rare rolls are already rare enough as is!
Simply enough, adjusting the original example by replacing the 2d6 with 1d12, it'd become something more like this:
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#2. Adding Depth:
We can add more columns in the encounter tables. These columns will represent different aspects about the encounters that we can roll on separately!
Usually it can be difficult as a DM to naturally come up with motives for the encounters, showcase the worldbuilding and have it all come together.
This setup can give you a solid guideline on how the creatures/people think (if any), and also sets up the overall area so that you get an idea of what events tend to occur there as a result of its occupants. 
We want to add 3 more columns to the tables to convey different aspects of the encounter. Fill in these new columns corresponding to the expectations of each encounter.
We'll roll each of these and combine them, then we'll interpret them to make a robust, in-depth random encounter with truly unexpected results!
I recommend rolling alot of complete encounters at once and interpreting the context to the vast general area the party is travelling in.
i. Behaviour: How the creatures act. Are they friendly, scared, aggressive, curious, mischievous?
ii. Complication: Something behind the scenes in the encounter. Do they have sick young? Broken equipment? Are they starving?
iii. Significant Impact: This is a tick box, and will only be present under ONE of the rows. It will be rolled like the other columns, but ONLY once. It signifies which encounter is the Significant Encounter
The Significant Encounter will have its encounter's presence prominent amongst all the other random encounters in the area. There could be burn marks and carcasses from a rampant dragon, or a goblin raid leaving tracks moving through the area. Which is the most impactful of the different encounters?
Adding this to our previous example would expand it to:
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Rolling this would give us things like:
Significant encounter: Owlbears
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Note that the significant impact shows that the Owlbears are a massive problem in the area. Perhaps the Owlbears are agitated for an unknown reason, and are unnecessarily aggressive.
The significance of Owlbears gives us context to the second one as well! Perhaps the hunters raided an Owlbear den, and adopted an Owlbear cub from there as well.
There could be uneaten carcasses, ravaged trees, less wildlife, etc around these parts.
Note how much sheer CONTEXT these columns add to our encounters. It's invaluable!
3. Adding Meaningful Encounters
Usually random encounters tend to be rather mundane and very one-note.
There's usually some general wildlife and monsters, different disparate factions without any rhyme or reason, and maybe a general non-combat encounter or two, but these don't really tell us about the area or its surroundings at all by themselves.
Instead, we can add in wildlife and monster encounters specific to the biome, non-combat encounters, and encounters of nearby factions and/or settlements to the table, and we can even add environmental encounters in there as well.
Note that we're not tied down to 12 encounters, and can expand it ad infinitum according to our need of diversity in our encounters.
Just add in specification and connection, and suddenly the dominos all fall into place.
Lastly, we'll also be adding in 'DOUBLE TIME' which will let us roll on everything twice, and make it so it's a double encounter!
Thus, the table can instead be adjusted to:
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Note how each and everything has its relation in one way or another, but through the sheer variance, they remain truly random and novel.
4. Prerolling and/or Multirolling
Lastly and this is just something that I do, but that I found gamechanging. Be sure to pre-roll 5-7 encounters for each session, for the general area the players are going to be headed in.
Note that you don't need to really prep anything at all, just interpret all of them on a surface level as a buffer.
Also note that you don't need to use all of them if they're not needed. The foreshadowing and signs are worldbuilding and having secrets that the players don't unravel is just as useful as the ones that they do, perhaps even moreso. It adds depth and detail beyond the scope of what the party will encounter
It simply let's you get an idea of the connections between encounters, allows for foreshadowing, and acts as a deterrent to getting caught off guard.
Even if you roll mid-session, I recommend calling for a 5 minute break, rolling 5-7 encounters at the same time and interpreting them and their connections before resuming the session.
It WILL make a difference, trust me
Where to start?
It can be difficult getting inspiration or direction to get started in creating these random encounters, and sometimes you don't want to go through the hassle of thinking them up from nothing
For some great conceptual headstarts and examples for these tables, you can check out 'Worlds Without Number' and it's:
- Page 205 (Great general templates for encounters differentiated by broad creature types such as Beasts and Monsters, Sapient Monsters, and Humans)
- Pages 206-219 (For inspired locations to occasionally run rare encounters or groups of encounters in. This works best with flexible/discovered worldbuilding given the significance of some of these, and you also want to add these in sparingly to keep them significant)
- Pages 246-247 (These pages have great templates for the kinds of encounters and situation to be included in the tables, and it can be expanded vastly, and certain options can be selectively and repeatedly chosen to meet our needs. Mood works well as a complication.)
There might be other pages that are useful as well for these sorts of random encounters in the wilderness that I haven't come across yet. If so, give them a shout out and I'll be sure to add them in. It's worth checking it out in its entirety for some great tips!
Conclusion
Again, credit goes to Dungeon Masterpiece and Worlds Without Number for excellent adjustments. This has been quite long, but I hope you stuck around till the end.
Many a session have been made easy but complex ever since this was introduced and I hope that this helps you out as much as it helped me in my prep and improv!
Feel free to give any advice in formatting on Tumblr, or any feedback on the post itself. It really means a lot to me, thanks!
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mystical-cinnamoon · 5 months
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I'm gonna be dming my first dnd campaign soon! Does anyone have any tips or recommendations? btw it's a premade strixahven campaign
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pongpongpong · 3 months
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People talk about "poker face" and whatnot, but what about the "GM face"? When the NPC you're currently controlling fucking crits and are about to steal a kill from one of your players and you have to draw the strength of a thousand suns to act like nothing happened and fake fumble your rolls so they can have their moment of glory...
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nosferslotu · 1 year
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I think one of the most important things you can do as a GM is make sure that when your players accomplish something amazing in your game that you make sure they feel celebrated and accomplished both in and out of character.
In my current VTM campaign the coterie just finished an arc they have been working on since July. It has been six real life months that translated into less than a week of in game time but they managed to kill an important enemy and to rescue someone who by all means I had been open about the fact that he would not be easy to save and maybe couldn’t be.
And you better believe they when they pulled it off i was cheering louder than any of them about it. Your players give you months of their real time and hours of genuine thought and care to the plot points and struggles that they are facing in game. They are willing to invest genuine emotional stake into the game. And when it pays off it should be rewarded and it should be celebrated.
My players haven’t saved the world. Hell, they haven’t even saved the city. But they did something that they have spent months working up to that meant so much to them. And I want them to know in the game and out of it that what they’ve done is damn impressive and makes me as their GM so fucking proud.
Celebrate your players. Give them silly achievements in a discord server. Give them downtime. Cheer for them.
(Also totally reblog this and add on about your players)
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madfishmonger · 1 month
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Character Death in TTRPGs
Before you begin a new game session with a group, discuss how you plan to handle character death before you begin play. Waiting until a character dies is a bad time to bring it up as some people get attached to their characters and can get emotional. But before you discuss death, it helps to discuss the intended tone of the game. Are the players expecting a drama? Epic adventure? Comedy? Horror? A combination of two or more themes? Discuss this with the group first, as it will set the stage for choosing a theme-appropriate way to manage character death. A wacky cartoon with permadeath might be off-putting, or an epic adventure game might be less challenging without killing off characters, so knowing the intended tone gives you a good start. Sometimes the theme can shift as the game develops, but it's good to start in the same general mindset.
Here's a list of options for character death management to present to your group. You can choose one or several which can apply depending on the situation.
This list can also be used by a GM to consider alternatives to permadeath when the scenario presents itself.
When a character gains the dead condition as per the rules of the game...
the character dies, player creates a new one (permadeath)
the character dies, but with effort the party can resurrect them*
the character isn’t dead, but badly injured and needs time to recover before being playable*
the character goes out in a blaze of glory, dying in a way that helps the party and/or plot, the player makes a new character
no characters die, they are knocked out and can wake after a set time has passed (such as overnight)
no characters die, they are knocked out and pop back up at 1 HP after combat
the character loses a body part or ability due to the injury, but it is replaced with an alternative (e.g. a cybernetic leg or magical vision)
the remaining party band together in a dramatic and novel way to save the downed character
*The player gets to play some NPCs while they wait for their character to recover so they still get to participate.
The group/GM may occasionally want to revisit the rules under certain circumstances and allow for (consensual) exceptions.
For example, your game is a no-permadeath game but this particular boss fight sets a character up for a perfect blaze-of-glory death and the player is fine with it (the player may even initiate it), the GM can allow a permadeath for that scene, then go back to no-permadeath for the rest.
In another example, a new player joins a game with permadeath, but is killed in their first battle. The player put a lot of effort into this brand-new character and is very unhappy. The GM can choose to allow the character to survive so the player has a chance to actually play the character they worked on and continue the game.
I hope this helps, and if there are any other options for character death that you've played with, let me know! Edit: Just added two thanks to some feedback.
Obviously this doesn't apply to games like Die Laughing where your character is supposed to be killed off, but I think having this discussion (about the theme if nothing else) when you start a game can help prevent some issues later on.
Happy gaming!
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sephiramy · 1 year
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Any tips on drawing TTRPG maps? <:)
I don't have many but I do have a few!
sketch out the whole map first, just anything to visualize the entire thing, and it does NOT need to be to scale - you can do it on graph paper if you want, but if you're like me and not uhhh geometrically minded, lol, it's best to just work out where everything goes and what needs to be included and sort out the sizing later
tokens are gonna be moving around on here, so there isn't a need to do any supremely detailed texture where things can get easily lost, gentle gradients or flat colors are your best pals on maps
reuse ANYTHING and EVERYTHING - textures, tokens, entire chunks of buildings, copy/paste the same tree, same door, you know... make it easier for yourself wherever possible, cuz good players will be pleased w/any map, so don't wring yourself out over details! at the end of the day all you really need is a good enough idea of "there's a wall, here"
and then this one isn't so much a drawing tip, but a planning tip: I got into the habit of making sure there were a few interesting elevation features on a map. like, are there stairs, platforms, roofs, hilltops or rocks? if I go in thinking of it as a vertical playing field I always wind up w/ some interesting elements to play with.
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craigofinspiration · 11 months
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Makes it easy, especially at higher levels.
Let me know what you think!
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illunispress · 1 year
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There are no hit points on the high seas
Nothing fills me with more dread than seeing a statblock for a sailing ship in a game, overflowing with hundreds of hit points. And then a smaller but still pretty big number dictating a damage threshold. (I'm looking at you D&D and Pathfinder.)
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As a GM, I don't want to deal with running a ship encounter where I roll a bunch of dice and subtract them from a really big number. Treating ships like glorified HP sacks feels a like a huge design mistake.
Here's how I approached a naval encounter recently in a D&D 5e session. I wanted the battle around the characters to be fast-paced and dangerous, without it turning into a slog if the players decided they wanted to try and sink the enemy ship.
Save vs Sinking
Whenever a *significant* attack hits a ship, instead of taking damage, it has to roll a saving throw (1d20 and roll higher than the target number) or begin sinking.
For our game, a significant attack meant ship-to-ship weapons, powerful magic, and ramming. The saving throw starts at 1, and it goes up after each successful save.
Bolts +1
Cannons +2
Ramming +1d6
Fireball +2d4
It's on fire +1 (each round)
Those values are arbitrary and are informed by my own personal taste. Tweak them as you like, but there's no exact science to it. Just know that if those numbers are too high, one ship will sink the other very quickly.
Roll these saving throws in front of the table - never behind the screen. The ever increasing number represents the ship getting closer to springing the leak that will sink it. Your players will feel the suspense in the air.
This mechanic also gives you an at-a-glance marker of how damaged a ship is. If the DC is left at 7 at the end of a fight, it has 13/20 hull integrity remaining, or 65%. (hmmm looks like I reinvented Hit Points again)
Side note: This could be done using a d100 instead of a d20 to match neatly onto percentages. You’d have to use higher numbers.
For simplicity's sake, a ship doesn't add anything to the saving throw. If a ship is particularly sturdy, roll the save with advantage. If it’s a weaker noncombat vessel, roll with disadvantage.
We're Sinking!
Okay so a ship is going down. The hull cracks in half after a successful ramming. Fire spreads across the mast and wooden splinters rain from above after a fireball lands. Multiple ballista and cannon ball holes rapidly fill the cargo hold and lower decks with water. Now the encounter becomes a mad-dash to flee overboard or take the enemy ship.
Throw realism out the window - ships should sink FAST for the sake of drama. Keep the target number from the ship's failed saving throw and add 1d6 to it each round. And keep increasing the number after successful attacks. When that number reaches 20 or higher, the ship is sunk beyond repair. with most of its hull cracked beneath the waves.
Why Saves?
Using these saving throws adds a level of unpredictability to ship combat that makes encounters tense and deadly. And I think it ratchets up suspense and dread nicely. Your ship will go from a background character to a vital set-piece.
I do think hit points can work for scenes that center on ships by themselves, without zooming into individual characters. If each person at the table is roleplaying as a ship and their whole crew, giving a ship hit points seems more sensible. But if every crew member also has their own block of hit points on the same scale, the logic of the scene really begins to break down for me.
Would 10 player characters combined like Voltron have the same hit points as a sailing ship? (Wait, don’t answer that... there’s an absurd game idea there...)
Tldr; nothing fills me with more dread than a big block of hit points - nothing fills my players with more dread than a number they need to roll above, slowly ticking upwards.
Misc thoughts:
If you’re looking for unpredictable danger, you could port this to characters too, using different dice to make the saving throw to represent different levels of sturdiness between characters. 
Writing this reminded me of Star Wars Saga Edition, a nightmare system with some space ships having thousands of hit points to compensate for player characters and smaller ships that have a hundred or more.
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seriously-mike · 8 months
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So You Want To: Make A RPG Character Portrait
And, Unfortunately, Lack Art Skills
Introduction
Like I said, I'm against commercial use of diffusion-based image generation, so please take notice and don't use the advice below in the process of creating commercial role-playing game supplements.
Let's start with the necessary tools: like I said, LAION's datasets are beyond useless - with the exception of the new SDXL, which is pretty much the only one first-party dataset for Stable Diffusion that works. So, in order to save time, you want a serviceable dataset: Dreamshaper, ICBINP, RPG, SDXL as a last resort. Most sites that host them tend to shake you down for money, so here are some recommendations:
Leonardo.AI: their free account grants you 150 points daily (non-cumulative) and allows you to use a lot of third-party datasets (including Dreamshaper, RPG and SDXL). The generator has some special sauce plugins running under the hood, meaning that your results will be noticeably better than if run on any other site or a local setup.
Playground AI: their free account allows you to use some interesting third-party datasets, but there's a lot of fine print of the shifty-as-fuck kind when it comes to quality of generated images.
Nightcafe: unfortunately, it only supports SDXL when it comes to worthwhile datasets, but a free account gives you 5 points every day if you log in and you start with 150, so it should be enough.
Of course, it's best to run a local setup, so if you have a gaming PC built in the last four or five years, and with a Nvidia video card, do so.
Writing Prompts
Two things you need to know about prompts in StableDiffusion: try not to go over 75 words and put the most important things you want first. I don't want to go into the technicalities, even if that's your kink, but that's how the thing works.
Of course monkeys on the internet tend to suffer from bouts of logorrhea while trying to describe what they want, and I warned about that before, so get to the point and don't be too specific. Stable Diffusion has problems with small details anyway.
For my artist imitation tests, I started by setting the style, like:
((fantasy art by Frank Frazetta)) of ((illustration by JC Leyendecker)) of ((portrait by Rembrandt)) of ((anime art by Akira Toriyama)) of
Double parentheses mean that Stable Diffusion has to pay extra attention to the phrase: every set of parentheses increases the weight of phrase by 1.1, so double parentheses means that the phrase is weighed at 1.1×1.1, and that's 1.21 if you don't have a calculator handy. Don't go above that because otherwise the results get spectacularly fucky (I canned the image with a hellishly distorted Maine Coon that showed up due to unfortunate wording, so I'll spare you that story - it's easy to guess what I asked for, though).
You can also try more generic descriptions of the style, like:
((woodcut portrait)) of ((renaissance portrait)) of ((vintage prison mugshot)) of ((kodachrome 400 photo)) of ((promotional movie still)) of
They still work and go off the rails less often than invoking a particular artist's style (for example, asking for Vermeer drives the generator bonkers).
Then, you follow with the base description of the character. Please keep in mind that some datasets are overly literal and if you ask for a "girl" you will most probably get a child as a result - try a "young woman" instead.
overweight 50 year old man with brown hair and large mustache teen girl with long ((red hair)) asian woman with bob cut hair muscular (bald) African man with goatee man with shoulder length dark hair
Notice that in two cases, I put more emphasis on the hair style and color - just in case, but as I learned lately, this is often necessary. For example, when asking for "bald" without emphasis along with "portrait by leonardo da vinci" for the portrait of Sir Baldy Bald, I got eight different stages of receding hairline, two portraits of Matthew Mercer and two portraits of definitely bald guys. Not that I haven't repeatedly warned that diffusion-based image generation is a trainwreck most of the time.
Asking for a celebrity likeness at this stage is hella iffy, particularly when it comes to recently famous people. Like, you might not get a likeness of Jenna Ortega. Even asking for "young" version of old actors might get problematic when the generator starts to artificially de-age a more recent photo or doesn't find any reference at all.
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For example: on the left, we have a genuine photo of Madonna from the 1980s. In the middle, I asked Leonardo.AI for "young Madonna" and it went off the rails. On the right, I changed the prompt to "1980s Madonna" and got something more realistic but still not entirely on the mark. It's typical - unless you're running an embedding or a LORA of a celebrity likeness on a local setup, it's gonna turn out genericized and/or distorted. Another example I can refer you to is Henry Cavill getting mashed together with Michał Żebrowski for a barely comprehensible reason.
Also, as I mentioned earlier, Stable Diffusion doesn't do little details well. Eye color usually parses, particularly if the face has a high enough resolution (meaning, it's more sure to work on close-ups in default 512px images and in high-res fixes). Scars, facial piercings and the like usually don't work, when they do it's a small miracle requiring very specific conditions (usually a resolution high enough to consider them a distinct object), and you might be better off omitting them entirely. Larger things like tattoos work, but in a very general way. Meaning, a general location and theme of tattoos should parse, but anything more specific will often send the entire thing off the rails and put stuff from the description as items elsewhere in the photo. Meaning, you'll ask for a "flames tattoo" and everything will be on fire. Oops.
Now, we should get the character dressed. My go-to syntax for that relies on the word "wearing":
wearing a red qipao dress wearing black and silver scifi combat armor wearing medieval noble's clothes wearing round sunglasses and (black suit) with red shirt wearing white tanktop and beige prison trousers
However, asking for two different clothing items in different colors often goes off the rails. Like I said in an earlier post, the generators often confuse the description, switching and omitting colors even if you put emphasis on the specific phrase. If you asked for a specific artist's style, you'll often have to put emphasis on the color anyway, because the default tends to go right over it. An example can be seen in the example of Vermeer's style going off the rails - despite the dress being very emphatically described as red, "painting by vermeer" overwrote it as blue anyway.
There's also the matter of the generator having weird concepts of things. For example, "armor" by itself defaults to a typical simple plate armor, and not even "leather armor" is going to convince it otherwise. Even "scifi armor" is not going to parse correctly 100% of the time, but a "combat armor" or, better "tactical combat armor" will usually swerve it into a modern plate carrier. Curiously, though, asking for a "space marine armor" will go for a Starcraft/Warhammer 40000 armored spacesuit, and a "mech suit" will most often go for a weird, angular robot suit (add "armor" to that if it doesn't but you want it to).
A generator is not supposed to draw anything it doesn't have info on. This means two things: omitting a part of clothing, like trousers or boots, will limit the framing to only what's described. In case of dresses, robes and similar long outfits, it will often frame the character tightly enough to draw only a part of it - particularly if you defined the style as "portrait", as that keyword tends to focus on the character's face. Another thing, if you haven't described the background yet, and you don't need to, the background will be left as some kind of blank - usually a nondescript splash of color. If you asked for a historical-styled portrait, the generator will infer a muted, neutral color from that, based on actual examples. Asking for "illustration" or "concept art" should default to white. With "photography" and similar keywords, all bets are off. For example, "prison mugshot" left to its own devices either went with a nondescript dark background or prison-related things like bars and wire mesh fences. Asking for a "cook" filled the background with a generic kitchen. "Bottle of beer" gravitated towards tables, pubs and dining rooms. "Anime art" with a "medieval" subject either left the background blank or went for stone walls, castles and the like.
If you want a specific background, though, keep it simple. Even one word can be enough, particularly if the generator infers the rest from the character description. For example "garden" background for an "asian woman wearing a qipao" will add stone lanterns, torii gates and pagoda-roofed pavilions as needed. "City ruins" background for a "scifi soldier" will be full of damaged skyscrapers. What you can specify is weather and time of day - for example, the young Madonna example above specifies "alleyway at night" as a background.
And finally, lighting and stuff. With everything I mentioned already, this just adds an extra polish, but has to be applied with caution. "For example, "Dramatic" or "cinematic" lighting is good if you're going for chiaroscuro in paintings or a cinematic look in photos (it tends to infer a bit of movie-like haze) - for example, it works fine if you're asking for Rembrandt or Caravaggio, but it's gonna ruin the prompt if you're going for da Vinci, for whom "soft lighting" is more appropriate. You can also describe the lighting more directly, like "bright sunlight", "sunset", "torchlight", "candlelight" and the like (as long as it doesn't logically contradict the soft/dramatic/cinematic description). You can also add general quality keywords here, like "worn" (to get a bit of distressing on vintage photos, for example), "detailed" (it's a bit of magical thinking, but it might influence the look of armor and interiors), "black and white", "desaturated", "faded" or "vivid colors" etc. "bokeh" will also work for photographic styles, as a shorthand for low depth of field with background light sources.
Also, do not copy negative prompts from the internet. Stable Diffusion can't parse the concept of correct or incorrect anatomy or any other common fuckups it makes. Instead, one overly-specific keyword can wreck an entire concept of anime-style drawing or heavy makeup. Start with a blank negative prompt and correct from there. Your perp in the mugshot has a hat you don't want? Add "hat" to the negative prompt. Explorer in the savannah is sitting on a gimpy pony? Add "horse" to the negative prompt. You can also rule out a specific eye color, hair color and general use of color that popped up ass outta nowhere (if you can't trace where the use of color blue comes from despite being absent from the positive prompt, you can add "blue" to negative prompt and the problem should go away).
The Numbers Game
I explained this one before: diffusion-based generators can have drastically different results depending on the number of steps in a generation process and the guidance factor that defines how closely the generator follows the prompt. Web-based generators, if they allow tinkering with that, often obscure the exact values with wording like "short", "medium" and "long" rendering time. No matter what, don't go below "medium" with anything.
Then, there's the matter of image proportions and resolution. Proportions, if you can tweak them, are usually typical: 3:2, 4:3, 16:9 and their vertical equivalents. If not, you get a square by default. From my experience, going for 2:3 or 3:4 proportions for portraits with the shorter size as close to default 512px as possible yields the best results, as a lot of input images that were portraits before being pounded into mathemagical fairy dust also had those proportions. Also, some web-based generators tend to obscure resolution as well, maybe with a tooltip specifying the rough dimensions (like Nightcafe's "medium" size being about 400px on the shorter side).
Practical Magic
Okay, so now you know what the knobs and levers do. You got the dictionary, the grammar, etcetera. Time to talk the talk.
Google searches for "fantasy art" and "sci fi art" are going to give you listicles naming some hotshots like Anato Finnstark, Simon Stalenhag and Bayard Wu, and my tests contain a who's who of the classics I first learned of in the Upper Triassic of mid-1990s.
If you're going for something a bit more down to Earth and classy, like creating a who's who of your dark fantasy local nobility, classical portraits are a good idea. Be advised, however, that if you go for a specific artist's look, you'll be wrestling with peculiarities too numerous to list. For example, Sir Baldy Bald as painted by da Vinci refused to lose his hair in most attempts, and women in armor as painted by Rembrandt tended to look much older and more masculine than intended - meaning all that had to be included in the negative prompt. Rembrandt, however, is good if you intend to create portraits of commoners, burghers and nobles in the same style.
Early 20th century or its analogue can swing two ways: either vintage photos or pulp artwork. For the latter, I need to run more extensive tests, but if you know who Norman Rockwell, J.C. Leyendecker or Earl Norem are, you know where to start.
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hexiflexi · 8 months
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ok so I'm a fairly new gm/dm (I started around April) and I had one finished campaign and one ongoing campaign as of last week. However, the players of the finished campaign wanted a sequel, and I was happy to oblige. I asked if they wanted more or less structure and whether they wanted story-based or battle-based play. They unanimously voted on story-based, so I spent the past few weeks constructing what I think is a pretty complicated storyline for what I'm calling "season two" of the campaign. I set it up so it appears to the players as a series of small plot lines, but they are all actually part of one larger plot. So far they're thrilled, but I'm realizing that as I introduce characters, it's becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of what's going on with other parts on the plots, specifically with the npcs. Any advice on how to keep the story straight in my own head for the sake of my players? Thank you in advance!
tl,dr: too many npcs, not enough space in brain
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wewerebeachdwarves · 10 months
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dice-generated supervillains
I have made 2 tables to roll on to randomly generate supervillains, based on my observations of trends in the Deck of Villainy book for Masks: A New Generation. I've bolded every other one for easy readability. here they are!
motive (roll 1d10):
family/creator(/s)/home (protect or ruin)
gaining power/wealth/influence
maintaining power/wealth/influence
returning to/maintaining "normality"
hedonism
keeping something alive/functional (self, treasured item, etc.)
destruction (reality, humanity, government, etc.)
targeted revenge
entering a desired world (ours, a future, an alien planet, etc.)
love (romantic interest/partner, an audience, etc.)
powers/abilities (roll 1d20 up to three times):
elemental (water, air, electricity, etc.)
summoning (human underlings, demons, animals)
superhuman toughness/strength/durability
life-stealing/supernatural healing/poison
mind-control/hypnosis/illusion
tech/gadgets/machinery
shapeshifting (partial, full, or extreme)
monstrous/nonhuman form (robot, alien, undead, etc.)
great wealth
charm/social control
intelligence/smarts/information
teleportation/incorporeality
giant size/tiny size/size shifting
possession
immobilisation (freezing, paralysing, trapping)
invisibility
reality control/gravity control/wormholes
superhuman speed/agility/acrobatics
clones/doubles
weapons
go nuts on the interpretations, and if you want to share what you've generated in the tags/replies/comments of this post then go for it! also, if you want to make your own posts with art/stories of villains generated with this table, feel free to @ me!
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how do u prep for dnd i feel like i should be doing that before sessions
That's a great question! And it varies from GM to GM. If you're new to prep, it can be a little overwhelming - start with ONE thing you want to focus on (materials, scenery, voices, combat, lore) and play around with that; figure out your own preferences. I'll try to be comprehensive [aka i tend to ramble - I'll also try to format it so it's not just a wall of text.] If you already are confident about some of this stuff, great! But I hope some of it helps.
In my opinion, prep is as much about feeling prepared and confident as it is about having materials ready. Both are important! TL:DR; it's mostly about PRACTICE and ORGANIZATION.
I'm a person who tends to run a bit of a sandbox world, and trust that I'm prepared to improv a little when the players inevitably go 'off course'. But I have a lot of GM friends who are much further towards the "I like to have everything prepared, with a set map and a set understanding of IF you do this, THEN this will happen."
It can be a good idea to be honest with your players about what to expect - especially if you have new players, making sure they are prepared may be part of the process. Letting them know whether there will be combat, and whether there will be time in-game to prepare for it, can help a game run smoother. (I'll come back to that.)
Know how to use whatever resource you are using. If you are running a game, whether physically or digitally, figure out how you like to set up your area so that you know everything you need is within reach. If it is in person, make sure things like books and maps are all in once place ahead of time. If you are calling with Discord, you could make sure the server has a dice bot, or make sure any music bot you are using works properly. If you use roll20, google drive, or another site, you can upload maps, make sure they are aligned to the grid if they need to be, and play around with any other features it might have! There are some useful tools out there for GMs, and even just finding something to help you organize your notes can be huge. That could be a whole separate post.
If you're running a game from a module/pre-written materials, you want to spend the time reading through those materials. It's honestly a bit like studying in a class! Make sure you know some of the information, and know where to find the rest of it.
For familiarizing - whether I'm using a guide or writing it myself - I try to prioritize visual and narrative descriptions - practice narrating what your players 'see' when they enter an area, for example, so that you are prepared for any potentially unfamiliar or confusing words (I'm a pretty confident reader and I still stumble over things like "minute" [pronounced min-it] as in 60 seconds of time being spelled the same as "minute" [pronounced my-noot] as in tiny.
This goes for NPC voices too. If important plot information is being delivered via dialogue, say your line a couple times! If you are giving your characters specific voices, practice how you want their speech to sound! (I like to take notes for that too - this guy sounds "comfortable and friendly, like a dad at a barbecue". This woman sounds "like a librarian - pursed lips!" It can help to find a key phrase, gesture, or posture that helps you get into character. I really enjoy doing NPCs, so I tend to start with that, but not every campaign has a heavy focus on them.
Keywords can help you give 'character' to your environments, too. This foggy coast might be ominous, so I want to narrate it in an ominous voice. This tavern may be comforting - it's warm, so I'll narrate it in a warmer tone. Listening to your own voice ahead of time can help you set the mood you want a scene to have.
You may also want to try to anticipate player questions. This gets easier with experience. If you have a wizard who likes to look for spell components, expect "could I find a sprig of mistletoe?" when the narrative takes them to the forest. If you have a rogue who really leaned into the thief archetype, expect "is anything on the table small enough to fit in my pocket?" If they encounter a dog, no matter how menacing, expect that someone is probably going to ask if they can try to befriend it. Knowing what your players enjoy, and what their goals are, can give you a better sense of how to anticipate their responses to what you throw at them.
If there is going to be combat, puzzles, or obstacles, have stat blocks you may need available. If they are in a book/ on a web page, BOOKMARK THEM. If not, write them down!
I have found it very useful to get note cards, and write a 'cheat-sheet' with some basic stats down from my players' character sheets. My current version (for D&D - other systems have other stats) includes their max HP, AC, passive Perception, base stats, languages, and their main weapon - anything I might otherwise have to ask them about, I like to have in front of me. It's not uncommon for a GM to say "What's your AC?" when they roll an attack against a PC, but I often have newer players, and I like being able to say "You're using a short sword - that's 1d6 of damage, plus your strength is +2" right away.
Even if your players are experienced, knowing what they are capable of as their GM helps you write challenges that they are appropriately equipped to solve. If your party has a lot of spell casters, maybe give them a puzzle about solving runes to get into a locked chamber. If there are a lot of fighters and barbarians, maybe the barrier is clearing a rock slide, or scaling a wall, or fighting a guard. Give the players chances to show off the things their characters are good at!
I also make note cards for any monsters in combat, and use my note cards to keep track of initiative order in combat, by putting them in an ordered pile - that way I have the stats for whoever's turn it is right in front of me when their turn comes up. But that's just my personal preference, and many GMs I know will use an online initiative tracker (roll20 has one built in!)
Having stats ready and accessible is so helpful. For some GMs, (and some players!) being familiar with the combat they have planned IS what prep is all about! Even if you're a more narrative-focused GM, read through monster stats in advance - I've run some combats that were harder than I realized because I went "ooh, fire mephits sound cool! I could put some fire enemies in an abandoned forge" and didn't consider the fact that they also explode when they die and damage anything within 5ft of them...
and that most of my players were melee fighters.
Oops! Lesson learned. Which brings me back to working with your players and their abilities.
One of the simplest things you can do to prep is to remind your players that the game is coming up, and to make sure they've done anything they need to do. Just a "Hey, we're playing tomorrow. Do you have any questions for me?" Being approachable to your players helps you get to know them, and in turn helps you anticipate what they will respond to. Plus, asking "Would you like any help leveling up your character? If not, may I see what new things you chose when you leveled up?" when relevant gives you an opportunity to get more familiar with their character sheets.
I hope that helps! If you have any other questions, if I can elaborate on anything here, or if there is another GM-ing related topic you would like my thoughts about, let me know!
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luuma-makes-games · 2 years
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A very hot tip for rpg nerds trying to make professional looking battlemaps quickly - use Tiled, a pwyw, versatile map editor for pixel graphics that lets you quickly upload any image you've downloaded from the internet, convert it into a big list of clickable tiles, and then draw with those tiles to create maps.
If you just google "pokemon tileset" or search itch.io for "game assets" you'll find a whole bunch of beautiful tilesets (like this ninja one by pixelboy I used for the maps above). And whatever you find, you can use it to make maps. This tool is so good!
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