sirblastalot

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
rpg
[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Absolutely. I like talking about design with people perhaps too much!

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 3 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Hey, sorry for the delayed response, I have been traveling.

That rule originally came from when we were a much busier subreddit. I recognize it's harder to really be "active" now, with so few threads. If they want to try to be a part of the community, I have no objection to them making a post about their game. No specific definition of what "active" means in terms of number of comments or anything, we'd just like to avoid the kind of drive-by spam of "buy my game kthnxbai"

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

After awhile, Poseiden comes and kicks your ass until you stop. Live by the magic sword, die by the magic sword.

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I like the mental image of a dwarf ship that's 6 ft tall and got 47 masts to make up for it.

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 3 points 1 month ago

Imagine the emotional and physical damage of taking your first shit in thousands of years.

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

DMing has helped practice a lot of business skills...communication, organization, running a meeting. Making pretty documents in google docs :P

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Can't recall things you never knew.

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 2 points 1 month ago

Hm. Well, don't feel obliged to hew to existing genre definitions.

Also, I'd still urge you to sit down and make a list of design goals, eg what you like about the experience of playing war games or ttrpgs, and then make rules to match, rather than starting with making the rules or choosing which ones to duplicate from existing games.

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 1 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Your character doesn't know that information.

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 5 points 1 month ago (8 children)

I think it's a false dichotomy. You want to decide what your design goals are, the kind of vibe you're trying to generate, and then create systems that support that vibe.

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 6 points 2 months ago (5 children)

A wizard did it.

[–] sirblastalot@ttrpg.network 5 points 2 months ago

No one actually plays dnd like that though...

 

Perhaps obvious to everyone else, but I've hit upon a little trick for better coordinating game time. Instead of announcing "Game will be at 1 o'clock" I've been doing something like "Doors open at Noon, Game starts at 1." This way, the people that want to hang out, level their characters, decide what they like on their pizza, etc all show up at noon, and the people that are running late or decide to come at 1 arrive with the expectation that they're going to walk in the door and immediately start playing. It also provides a natural transition point from the arriving/hanging out mode to game time, which otherwise makes me feel kind of uncomfortably teacher-y, calling the whole class together and whatnot. Try it out, maybe it will help you too.

 

I recently started a new campaign. Two players (one who has played in my games before and their SO, who has been begging me for a spot for years) unexpectedly dropped out, moments before our first session. Their reason was somewhat baffling; they said they didn't want to spend "all day" on this, despite the game only going from noon to 3PM. They seemed to think this was a totally unreasonable expectation on my part, despite them previously having stated they were available during that time. This puzzled me.

I've been musing on this, and the strange paradox of people that say they want to play D&D but don't actually want to play D&D, and I've had an epiphany.

A lot of people blame Critical Role or other popular D&D shows for giving prospective players misplaced perceptions, often related to things like your DM's voice acting ability or prop budget, but I don't think that's what's going on here. My realization is that, encoded in the medium of podcasts and play videos, is another expectation: New players unconsciously expect to receive D&D the way they receive D&D shows: on-demand, at their house, able to be paused and restarted at their whim, and possibly on a second-screen while they focus on something else!

I don't know as this suggests anything we as DMs could do differently to set expectations, but it did go a long ways to helping me understand my friends, and I thought it might help someone here to share.

view more: next ›