ITT DJP plays Dungeons and Dragons for the first time EVER

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