Hi everyone!
How are you doing? Hope everything's good.
Today, I wanted to write something about what I feel recently, about running Dungeons & Dragons sessions.
First of all, I have to say that I don't like D&D much. There are different reasons for it. I think the rules are mostly restrictive and complicated, because sometimes some occasions occur and you can't decide what to do is more legit regarding D&D environment, and that happens to me all the time. Another reason is, I'm surrounded by rookies, and I cannot be in a gaming group where players know how to roleplay, not meta-gaming, and interpretate rules mostly clear and understandable. And there's another reason, which is the feel of slow game mechanics. But still, D&D is part of my life and I have to live with that truth.
I'm kinda half serious about this, because I started everything and improved myself because of D&D, and now, tabletop RPG is my job. And my customers/players mostly like D&D, so it's also a tool for making new friendships.
I generally use ready-made game scenarios for online games, because Fantasy Grounds automates everything, and all I have to do is reading my PDF book while I'm laying down, or before I fall asleep, and at the meeting time I sit before my PC and put game server online, check images I will share and maps I will use, check encounters I'm planning to use while others are gathered on Discord. Spontaneous scenes are really pain in the ass; because, creatures have to be ready on the server, maps have to be ready for line of sight, and when you need these spontaneously, it takes more than 15 minutes. And I don't like random long breaks.
If you don't know, I'm running three D&D sessions (and lots of others) in a week. One of them has advertisement purposes and it's kind of a fluffy game, while other two are paid game sessions with one-year-old group and a three-years-old group. I will call them younglings and oldies.
Younglings are playing Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden scenario. They had lots of random in-game troubles, and scenario lines don't make sense to get party into the story. The book isn't enough. So, I started to change the descriptions, add interesting custom encounters, raised Challenge Rating a little, put some stuff into the game which they couldn't resolve just by their D&D knowledge and spells. They liked it more.
Oldies are playing a 3rd party scenario called Call from the Deep. It's a better approach to mindflayers and giths. This group always wants to try different things. Like they loot items with no description in the books, they want to go anywhere where has an interesting name but doesn't have any information. Like, they looted a sword from a Githyanki. If you don't know them, let me say that they use a special greatsword, which is +3 and has the ability of dealing extra d6s as psychic damage. But only a Githyanki could use such a sword with its full potential, and fighter character spent all of his free time to achieve anything more on it. Ended up as an honourable ally of Githyankis. Great Old One Warlock had dream-travels to Innsmouth. Dream Druid had learned how to enter other people's dreams. None of these were belonged into any official (or non-official) books. I had to re-create recent encounters, because they were complaining about how their combats are extremely easy. Now when they get into a combat, they hardly save their asses from a TPK. And they like this new encounters more.
These two examples are currently encouraging me more on tweaking on ready-made scenarios. Actually they pushed me into write my own campaign again. I wrote and published a scenario before, but it was a one-shot game for people who are extremely new to the hobby and people who don't know English enough to read and fully understand a one-shot scenario. We still have 3 chapters to complete Frostmaiden, and after that, younglings want to play a game in my own setting. And I decided to prepare quizes about game mechanics and concept info for them to make them ready for a more serious game, and also I started to push them into a hard-roleplay, like they should prepare magic-words and prayers when they cast a spell, only occasionally out-of-game talk is allowed, and stuff like that.
The point is, at first, I thought that people thought I was a cruel dungeon master, so I softened up everything for my paid games. But apparently, every dungeon master is (or should) a little bit of sadist, and players are a little bit of masochist :)
There is no any review this time, maybe a review of a slice of me. See you again in another post.
Hi Shatargat - really thought provoking post - thank you :)
It's interesting to see how other people play, especially as so much of our gaming has had to be done through virtual tabletops for now.
Our group uses Roll20, but because we predominantly play D&D 3.5 (which makes 5th Ed look rules-light....) it's more a case of just using it to keep track of who is where on the map and for the DM to keep score of monster HP. I tend to also use the "GM notes" section of the monster pull-up screen to copy & paste in their stat block just to save time looking them up in the books.
But Roll20 doesn't have the 3.5 rulebooks programmed in, which I think works for us because the VTT isn't doing calculations or enforcing any rules. It also helps that 99% of what I run is homebrewed rather than pre-written modules.
Part of my prep is to create a few tokens using https://tacticaltokens.com/token-creator/ for anything I think the party might meet. Over time I've built up quite a library, although Summoner types always seem to pull something out of their backsides that I hadn't planned for ! If in doubt, I drop down a bear or wolf token, give them control of it and tell them to do their own record-keeping :)
As for being a cruel dungeon master, it sounds like you've got a handle on it. You have to convince your players that you are a cruel but impartial god and that death could wait around every corner, while secretly giving them every chance to have a great experience. I wind mine up by telling them to beware, all my experience has made me a 35th Level Chaotic Evil DM.....
Hello there, Alonicus! Thank you for this lovely reply!
Roll20 is stressful for me. You have to do lots of stuff, like put maps on different scenes, you have to configure all layers for maps, tokens are not system-specific and I don't like to use that three circle things, because I don't know which one should be HP, or AC. I don't know how to automate attacks and damages, probably I have to calculate everything by hand. Lots of work for a little bit of game session. Fantasy Grounds automates attacks, critical successes, conditions, and lots of other stuff. FG also has D&D2e and D&D 3.xe compatibility for custom games, but I guess there's no any pre-built-in official books.
Lots of details on game mechanics is a flaw, when you don't have an inner circle. Because you have to teach people everything all over again. And people don't read. It's exhausting. But I learned lots of inspirational stuff from previous editions of D&D. Examplars of Evil taught me how to create rival-but-not-villain NPCs, while Book of Vile Darkness and Book of Exalted Deeds taught me how could I use good and evil as a game content. 2E rules taught me the roleplay values of a character class. Also 2e had beautiful setting variety. I really appreciate that (mostly Dark Sun and Planescape ofc)
I don't know if you need it anymore, but I've found this: https://paragondashboard.com/ It's an online GM Screen tool which you can share (or save), it may be helpful.
Also.... I really should write response posts when my comments get this detailed, lol. I'd get more HIVE that way maybe, although I'll probably stick to commenting because it's better for the flow of conversation :)
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You are the Master but I like to point my opinions. I personally do not like soft GM's that pity the players ^^ IMO fantasy world is full of wonders and danger. Every action should be taken seriously like as if you are really there. Players should feel real fear in those situations. My gf cried when her character died in a battle. Adding personel stuff to the pre-made stories is a good idea to me. Every group is different and every player has different play style. Its up to group to tweak it to have more fun. Why do we play these game? to have fun right? We shouldn't forget the ultimate goal ^^ having a good time together.
Actually it's not like that, at least, not around me. Because, people love to make things with a short way. They like to do stuff "easily"; so, when things getting tighter, they start to think like "GM is punishing us", or "GM didn't let us do that", or "meeeh, this is useless" or something like that. Probably this thought of players kept me away from showing my actual potential on my recent games. And that's another thing I don't like in D&D. You have to tweak stuff to make it good. There are lots of other games you don't need to tweak to make it good. Anyways...