ITT DJP plays Dungeons and Dragons for the first time EVER

Here's the character I created:

https://www.dndbeyond.com/characters/15228358/ML2hR8

The first time I play any game like this, the first character I create is a human male who looks as much like me as possible. Thanks to my WoW days, I now also default to a healer named or nicknamed "Grinz". My dude is a morose bastard who worships the moon goddess Selune; he is haunted by grisly visions and spends his life attempting to atone for an unspecified tragedy that he refuses to discuss. I look forward to making him as emo as possible.

In all seriousness, your dad sounds like a mensch.

Oh he is! My dad rules

I really want to try a game but the only friends who would be interested are similarly inexperienced, and being a rules-reading control freak I'd probably end up being made to be the DM, and I'd prefer to be a player (I have been GM for a couple of different story-building RPGs and it's fun, but D&D is much more involved).

Hope you have fun with it!

The current party is:

Human wizard (newbie player)
Human cleric (ayo)
Dragonborn bard (experienced player)
Gnome rogue (experienced player)
Human barbarian (experienced player)
Human monk (experienced player)
Dragonborn paladin (experienced player)
one as-yet-uncreated character who will NOT be human (experienced player who missed the creation session)

emil.y I am so looking forward to this, it's ridiculous

I want to play a Tiefling Rogue but I don't know if that would be too tough for a total n00b? I'm definitely most attracted to RPing a roguish character.

Also if I was DM and someone played a bard I would 100% force them to do everything in song. Another reason for me not to be the DM.

Hm, or maybe I should pioneer Noize Bard as a thing? All my spells are power electronics.

I strongly considered a tiefling but bailed at the last minute; if I'd know how many other humans would be in the party, I'd have made the switch.

Noize Bard sounds awesome

i just had to look up 'tiefling'; guess some things have changed since 1984

Thanks to my WoW days, I now also default to a healer named or nicknamed "Grinz". My dude is a morose bastard who worships the moon goddess Selune; he is haunted by grisly visions and spends his life attempting to atone for an unspecified tragedy that he refuses to discuss. I look forward to making him as emo as possible.

― brigadier pudding (DJP), Monday, August 19, 2019

<3

I have questions:
• does Grinz drink?
• does Grinz enjoy healing or is he kind of grumpy about it like jeez dude yeah the herbs are fkn bitter maybe if you didn't antagonize the owlbear...
• is Grinz secretly a werewolf?

jealous af, i would love to get into the d&d

is Grinz secretly a werewolf?

― Larry Elleison (rogermexico.), Monday, 19 August 2019 23:03 (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

or is he ooOOOOOWWwwwtttt

awesome thread obv

• does Grinz drink?

Grinz does not drink to excess, at least not in the company of others. It is common to see him at the end of the table, deep within his own thoughts as he stares morosely into a half-filled cup of wine.

• does Grinz enjoy healing or is he kind of grumpy about it like jeez dude yeah the herbs are fkn bitter maybe if you didn't antagonize the owlbear...

Grinz believes healing is the only path to redemption for himself; as such, he does it quickly and without complaint but it is difficult to say he loves anything, so burdened he is by the darkness of his secrets. And yeah, sometimes the people who leap willy-nilly into traps should lose an arm or two before he intervenes and patches them back up; he can't heal stupid.

• is Grinz secretly a werewolf?

Grinz narrows his eyes. "A werewolf?" he asks. "Do you think my will is so weak that mere lycanthropy could reduce me to... to THIS? Your prying insults me." He turns away, not quickly enough to mask the tear rolling down his face. "I think you should leave me alone now," he mutters before stalking away from the fire.

oh dammit

(no one saw that)

crocodile tears in wolfs clothing

DJP you were born ready for this! I am excite.

maybe I should pioneer Noize Bard as a thing? All my spells are power electronics.

This is a great idea

Dan, do you know what the deep dark secret burden is yet, or is this something you think you'll find out about Grinz as play goes on? Or indeed, do you think it will remain hidden forever?

I only played D&D for the first time several years back, and not for very long. My character was a Dragonborn something something who was basically Whoopi Goldberg with scales.

So... Whoopi Goldberg

Dan, do you know what the deep dark secret burden is yet, or is this something you think you'll find out about Grinz as play goes on? Or indeed, do you think it will remain hidden forever?

tbh I am looking for something in the campaign I can tie it to. Right now I have no idea what is other than "something horrible that haunts him endlessly". I'm expecting it's going to have to do with a gruesome murder and it's up in the air whether he was the murderer or his actions allowed the murders to happen but that's about all I've got; I'm hoping the events of the campaign allow me to slot that into its framework because it will surprise the hell out of the DM and she will likely give me Inspiration for it.

i've only played one campaign, but my most important piece of advice is to keep a crystal in your irl freezer. you can take this crystal out of the freezer at important moments in the campaign, and steam will be flowing off of it. what you choose to do with this moment is up to you, but people will definitely expect you to do something

omg

I've had a huge blast the past couple of years playing my William Burroughs-based warlock. (The Great Old One who pulls his strings is Mark Zuckerberg.)

Nice! This year I started playing again for the first time in 30 years. Glad I came back to it.

This is a great thread DJP!!!!

And: I am actually exactly in the same boat as you, I have played exactly two games of D&D in my life. (My first one I was 6, and I was killed within five minutes by a kobold. My second I was 13, trying to DM for my older brother; we lasted an hour before his girlfriend said "I'm really fucking bored" and we quit). I have the Monster Manual etc. and I read it, like, for fun.

I have such a fondness for gelatinous cubes from reading the Monster Manual

The only D&D game I have ever played involved a gelatinous cube.

i already covered the freezer/steam angle itt

spends his life attempting to atone for an unspecified tragedy that he refuses to discuss.

he stole Zristmas?

Nice. I've always wanted to play this but the opportunity hasn't come up.

late to this thread but HELLLLL YESSSSS

join me in playing MTG also it fuckin shreds

I’m currently at an urgent care with a 102.1 fever and PISSED because I refuse to miss tomorrow even if (as I suspect) I have strep

feel better, grinz

You'll just have to Grinz and bear it.

now is the time to fervently supplicate Selune

I did not anticipate this strep turn in Grinz's story. Grinz, heal thyself.

Update: I felt well enough to come into work AND I don't have strep, so IT IS ON TONIGHT

A mysterious crystal begins to glow in the freezer...

As much as I try I never got into D&D... I have immense fun making the characters, but then I just want to tell stories about them doing some Carlos Castaneda voyage of self-discovery shit (usually for some inexplicable reason involving gender dysphoria) instead of spending three hours rolling dice to simulate a 30 second fight with an orc and solving Mensa logic puzzles, which is what the actual gameplay of D&D seems to boil down to.

That would probably make a good comedy sketch.

We are gathered for the first session! The people who made it to this go-round are:

Cleric
Rogue
Barbarian
Paladin
Bard

We are walking along a road, hired by a woman Siobhan "Chevy" Dopplebock, who runs the Dopplebock Trading and Mail. It's usually just deliveries but this one is more personal. Her family's house is haunted/cursed or something and one of her fathers disappeared, so rest of the family left; her father wants to move back and we need to go check out the house to make sure it's safe. It's about 4-5 days away from our starting point; we're a couple of days out. We get 50 gold each if we clear the house out before she arrives with her father.

what could possibly go worng? 🤔

We investigated a guard tower outside the estate and were swarmed by bats and rats. I saved the paladin's life! We then met a gatekeeper who gave us a key into the manor (after the rogue raided his garden, oops). We kept missing skill rolls around perception and sleight of hand so every other interaction with him ended with a party member slapping him.

We got into the house and I was immediately possessed by a ghost who made me totally apathetic and want to leave, which hilariously matched my character's personality so no one actually noticed for a while

lol

love it

Did the DM slip you a note informing you of the possession and you were required to play-act?

(Also.. can one exorcise oneself?)

I forgot to mention that the poor bear's last words were "my life has been a meaningless sham" before he poofed out of existence in a cloud of honey and was replaced by an angry bee, that promptly stung the barbarian in the face.

That’s one of the first things they teach you about in Barbarian school, they should have blocked that

Last night's session was an epic battle against the suits of armor, who all had a ridiculous AC because, well, they're armor. I was the only person in a room that didn't have a suit of armor in it initially; I did find a large terrarium with a mirror floating in it that I wanted to investigate over the crashing and banging I heard in the rooms around me. The other interesting thing is that all of the suits of armor were linked to each other; when one party member damaged the suit they were fighting, the damage was reflected on the others, plus all of their movements mirrored each other. Meanwhile, various employees of the house (Branson the cook, Kalem the assistant mage, M'Lair the butler) kept popping in and out of existence mid-fight. I did learn from M'Lair that the mirror I found was a gateway to the main mage's study; it was currently closed and she didn't know how to open it. There was also a rug missing from in front of it.

We also had a new party member join; a female dwarf warrior named Miranda who kept missing all of her attack rolls and covered her obviously whiffed swings by pretending to fix the furniture the rampaging suits of armor were breaking in her room. She came through in the end though and crushed the armor menacing her and the warlock, which made the other suits of armor vanish. I joined up with the warlock and fighter; the gnome rogue and our barbarian scholar were in another room down the hall and we hadn't brought the entire party back together yet.

Grinz did get in some good one-liners in the character interactions with the warlock; the best was when the warlock asked "Have you seen Malm (our gnome rogue who is still suffering from a curse that makes clothing disappear off of her body)?" and Grinz replied, "I think we've seen a little too much of Malm."

Time for the next campaign update:

After the armor fight, everyone collapsed in exhaustion in their rooms. Two previous campaigners popped back into existence from The Grey; the dragonborn bard from the original party and the birdman monk we met in one of our fights. The DM gave them the option to level up to 3 with the rest of us in exchange for taking on a curse; the bard declined and the monk accepted. This formed the backbone of how hilarious this session ended up being.

The monk introduced himself to the bard as Steven (note: his name is actually Blane) and he said he'd been in the house for months and was its original architect (uh... waht). As the rest of us began to wake up, we welcomed back our long-lost bard and then got extremely confused when he said "I met Steven" and the monk said "no, my name is David". It quickly became obvious that the monk couldn't tell the truth anymore, and he knew he couldn't tell the truth, which led to him frustratedly saying opposite of whatever he meant in an attempt to communicate.

There was a puzzle around the mirror we found and a missing rug that was the key to unlocking it. Malm, our IKEA rogue, could have found the rug, but she instead found a music-playing crystal and decided to ignore everyone and have a dance party. Bransen blinked back into existence, to the extreme delight of our novice barbarian Bloodrage, who also had gained an animal affinity that gave him the additional strength, language, and characteristics of... a badger. We futzed around with the rug until we realized that the cutoff reflection in the mirror spelled "I AM CLOSED" (or "I AM A LOSER", I don't remember which we settled on. Regardless, the portal opened and we all went through it into a completely empty study. (Bransen also blipped back out of existence while this was happening.)

We noticed that the furniture had all been moved to another room with a blocked door, so we broke it down to investigate. Kalem appeared and asked us what we were doing; we repeated that we were trying to clear the magic so the husband of the house's former master could retire there and Kalem responded with "Why would you do that? This magic is amazing." This led to a conversation about how the master and Kalem created a new school of stasis magic that tries to leave things as unchanged as possible, which is why the food was neverending and why people were getting swapped into a different dimension periodically (it was the house attempting to reset its baseline). We also discovered Kalem is a giant dick who put a couple of our party members to sleep and attacked the rest of us when we tried to open another door out of the study. This led to a great scenario where our monk decided to wake up one of the stricken party members by whipping him and then flying away. Meanwhile, Kalem kept throwing spells at Grinz, who shrugged them all off because really who has time for all that, then charmed our barbarian and had him steamroll through a couple of people. Our new dwarf fighter friend stepped up to Kalem and just pancaked him, reducing him to a purple smear. (Oh btw, Kalem didn't bleed but appeared to be a solid block of sentient purple material shaped like a Prince cosplayer.) We began to celebrate and turned to open the last remaining locked door but the purple smear suddenly moved to the center of the room and turned into a portal, out of which came... a Beholder.

Kalem is a fucking Beholder. He manipulated the master into turning the house into this weird magical prison and now he is trying to stop us from reversing the effects riddling the house. We are 100% fucked.

Also because I'm tired, I keep typing "Beyonder" and then saying "fuck" and editing

i think i have a crush on your DM

We all do, she rules.

I wish you were filming these sessions

This sounds like the most fun

i will suggest this sounds like a good netflix series but you need a wacky neighbor to play

Could totally stream on Twitch

yeah, live DnD is some of the best twitch to be found

obv it sounds like DJP has a fantastic group to play with, but this might be a useful reference for others:

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-kick-someone-out-of-your-d-d-group-1838880820

If you keep it discreet, you can sidestep a lot of hurt feelings by “disbanding” the group and “forming” a new one with all but one player. (I should make clear, this is my suggestion, not Hunter’s.) Instead of changing the group, claim you have a schedule conflict, and that the group needs to “take a break.” (As in so many awkward social situations, blaming some outside force takes a lot of social pressure off, and saves face for everyone.) Then quietly reconvene the group without certain players.

omg, i gotta stop linking to things before i read them in full. this sounds like something i would try to do, which is to say it sounds like AWFUL advice

There’s also the risk that the group will dissolve. If you’re in a group of adults who already have a hard time meeting regularly, even a fake disband gives other players a chance to admit they wanted to quit anyway. The stress of the whole situation might feel like too much to them. Be ready to accept this gracefully. That’s the point: You can’t force people to play games with you.

yeah, not with that attitude you can't. ok, please mentally delete this post and the last couple, thanks

If you keep it discreet, you can sidestep a lot of hurt feelings by “disbanding” the group and “forming” a new one with all but one player.

this is how Lou Barlow originally got kicked out of Dinosaur iirc

All of us in my gaming group in high school were terrible but we put up with it and stuck together, because we were OUR assholes. If you couldn’t deal with it you could just stop coming every Friday.

I forgot to tell everyone that we successfully repelled the beholder without anyone dying. We also found the original owner of the house encased in an elaborate machine that was sucking the magical energy out of him and powering the stasis field that enveloped the manor. Good times!

We had so much fun that we decided to do a small bridge campaign based on Monster of the Week while our DM builds an adventure that can tie into our characters' backstories and relationships. I chose The Expert archetype and created a street tough-turned-monster hunter named Paco Bel-Canon.

Some of us started to make playlists for our characters; this is mine: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4S6XeuylBhjoEl1w2Oen2q?si=ckODDpY4RYWk8-HGSw3cpw

I forgot to tell everyone that we successfully repelled the beholder without anyone dying.

I call bullshit

The beholder cursed my intelligence to subverbal levels; I could distinguish friend from foe but that was it. This meant, in practical terms, that I went from being "healing cleric keeping all the other fighters alive" to "incredibly stupid cleric who still has a big fuckoff mace and is a lot stronger than he looks" and I just kept chasing the beholder around and smashing it in the face until it ran away, lol.

tangential
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/13/books/dungeons-dragons.html

I played D&D for the first time last night! I don't want to step on DJP's thread but despite a rather unwieldy party (we had 6 or 7, I think), I had a lot of fun.

Ooh step away!

i can't remember the d&d thread recently where i got some good advice to try DUNGEON WORLD with my kids.

ftr, i haven't played any role-playing game since i was a teenager. i always loved the idea of them, though. but i never really committed to any of it, i never had a solid crew.

ANYWAY i have been devouring information about dungeon world and it feels like just the right kind of loosey-goosey for me. run and gun. the fiction is paramount. HOWEVER.

i am getting extremely ANXIOUS to GM (DM?) this game with my kids. i have no idea wtf i'm doing. i'm supposed make up villages on the spot and give them tags? if i make up a monster to battle my kids i need to create special moves for them on the fly?? how do i dispense with this anxiety??

https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/diversity-and-dnd

I kinda want to try this if I can get a party together

https://blog.roll20.net/post/621100826549682176/announcing-burn-bryte

Olaxis is the last galaxy in the universe. A bright orange existence-consuming phenomenon, dubbed the Burn, surrounds and slowly closes in on Olaxis, wiping out entire solar systems as it makes its slow, inevitable advance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g5cdpe1it8

but yeah, that looks really cool! i'm in the middle of a cyberpunk campaign now but i'm curious to hear if this is fun or not. the only thing about roll20 is that the video chat, in the experience of all 5 people on my campaign, is catastrophically awful and unreliable. it will make you lose your mind. last time we finally decided to chat on hangouts instead. but other than that it's got kind of a janky interface but in general things work!

some of the core mechanics seem interesting, too. i like this way of determining the success (or failure, actually) of skill rolls:

Each skill has a die size associated with it: d4, d6, d8, d10, or d12. The larger the die size, the better you are with the skill. Burn Bryte assumes characters are competent heroes, so rather than rolling to see if a character succeeds, the game asks you to roll to see if you fail. How does that work?

When you make a skill roll to perform a task, the skill roll has a complexity, which determines how difficult the task is to overcome. The higher a roll’s complexity, the harder it is to perform. The GM determines a roll’s complexity, which can be as low as 2 (easy) or as high as 7 (ridiculous). Outside of combat most skill rolls have a complexity of 2 (easy), 3 (moderate), or 4 (hard). The skill roll’s complexity determines the number of dice you roll.

When you make a skill roll, you roll number of dice of the skill’s die size equal to the roll’s complexity. If you roll the same number twice or more, known as rolling doubles, the skill roll fails.

For example, Luwe the glean (an alien species in Burn Bryte) wants to attempt to leap across a chasm. She tells the GM she wants to use her d8 Athletics to leap across the pit, and the GM tells her that skill roll has a complexity of 3. Luwe rolls 3d8 and rolls a 5, a 3, and a 7, so she succeeds. If Luwe had rolled a 5, a 5, and a 7 or a 6, a 6, and a 6, she would fail the roll because she rolled multiples (or doubles) of the same number.

if i did the probability/spreadsheeting correctly, i think this is the % chance of failure for various combos of dice thrown vs dice size:

https://i.imgur.com/88jooGt.png

as you level up your skills, i'm assuming you'll level up the dice size (d4 to d6, d6 to d8, etc), which would have the effect of making it more difficult to roll doubles/failures

pretty neat

it is a world where you have a 18% chance to successfully do something ridiculous in space

narrator: the probability/spreadsheeting was not correct. sorry.

june 28 is the day of the do-over. i think this is right, now:

https://i.imgur.com/WmlaBJq.png

earlier, i wasn't taking into account that if the goal is to avoid doubles, then the probability of each successive roll needs to take into account the additional, unique number that was rolled just previously.

this makes some skill checks are impossible. for example, a difficulty 5 roll (in combat) with a skill that only has a d4 ability wouldn't be successful, since you're required to roll 5 d4 and not roll doubles.

with that corrected, you have somewhere between a 0% and 50% of doing something ridiculous in space, depending on how much you've leveled up your dice size for that skill

Has anybody tried using zoom and roll20 together?

no but it's been under discussion in the game I'm playing, seems like it might work better for the audio end of things.

sleeve do you have the same issues with video/audio?

we don't use the video, just audio, but we're getting some glitches like where everyone can hear everyone else except one person can't hear me. so far we've been able to reset with a minimum of hassle, but we were saying "hmm how about trying Zoom" last week after the GM lost connection.

so basically we'd use Roll20 for the dice, character sheets, and maps.

Update on my Dungeon World game with my kids. My 8-y-o loves it. Our first game he played a Ranger, second a Wizard. My 11-y-o played a thief both times and finds it extremely hard to concentrate. I think the presence of paper and pencils and sitting in a chair basically makes him feel like he's at school. He gets into it, but after about an hour his distraction circuits are on overload. The 'be naughty at school' instinct kicks in and he tries to poison his brother, etc. So we stop. It's hard to really build momentum and play through a whole adventure because an hour is practically nothing.

Which leads me onto something that I've felt many times listening to RPG podcasts or watching streams etc - which is that most campaigns are AGONIZINGLY SLOW. Part of that is GMing style, but even with a tremendous GM the amount of 'story' you get through - as opposed to minute breakdowns of physical actions in a battle - in, say, three hours, is small. So many questions and answers and restatements of the scenario and where everyone is in relation to each other. Dungeon World helps, with its run and gun mentality, but I feel like there could be some even newer innovation that allows the story to really move.

I found GMing less daunting than I thought. I barely looked at any of my moves or notes. Once it starts flowing you really do just have things magically occur to you, at least often enough. As long as you're aware of when moves get triggered that's enough.

We had a lot of fun drawing a map. I used some of the guidance from Perilous Wilds there. Everybody noted their homeland, etc. The 8-year-old's country is called 'Potato Shack'. I can't wait to find out what that place is like.

I still find incorporating NPCs a little difficult. When and where the characters should meet them, how long they should hang around for, how to distinguish them from hirelings. I mean, it's just like any other aspect, I guess, you make it up and just roll with it.

This is my most favourite recent-ish thread, so I was wondering where is everyone at with their own experiences?

Has rona slowed everything to a crawl?

I think I may have found some nice local folks to game with who don't seem to mind a newbie participating, I'm excited.

My wife and daughter and my wife's cousin are playing every week, and they've got a clever way to prevent DM burnout -- they worked up a shared world that has a somewhat vague overarching plot, and take turns DMing smaller campaigns that run 4-6 sessions. Each of them is running 1-2 characters at a time and the DM du jour provides NPCs as needed.

I've been running an rpg via Discord (video streaming) for a couple of months and it works pretty well. None of my players are local, so Discord is not due to the pandemic.

As a now-48yo GM, I'm learning to be better than when I was a shitty, dictatorial 14-21yo GM. One technique I like is just asking the players lots of questions and letting them provide the details. Like introducing an NPC from one of the PC's past - I will tell them the name of the character and one fact about the NPC, then ask the PC about their relationship with NPC. This spreads the creative burden around, helps the players buy-in, and can lead to cool moments you wouldn't have come up with on your own.

Yeah I remember GMing something when I was that age, very much a shitty dictatorial GM insisting that players took a specific course or did certain actions. Later, I was fortunate enough to play RPGs with someone who was an incredible GM talent in my eyes: really capable of spouting out compelling stories. Unfortunately, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia a decade later.

But more recently I really enjoyed watching my daughter GM a family game recently, where she did not fall into any of the traps I did at her age! Unfortunately, her cohort seem to have put D&D on the back burner recently even though they are all on Discord.

Got my first game (since I was in my early teens a looong time ago) this Saturday, opted for a badass 'Oath of Vengeance' Half-Elf Paladin, the numbers fell pretty good too and the DM is starting us all on L2 so imma be misty-stepping all over the place (okay, once a day)

It’s Not Just You: NYC Has a Serious Dungeon Master Shortage

https://hellgatenyc.com/no-on-wants-to-dungeon-master-any-more

Bumping this to note that I’m joining a project where the teams are all named after mythical creatures and I successfully got our team to name itself Gelatinous Cube

Ahaha, that's amazing.

excellent