+1 Thread of Tabletop Roleplaying

I've never really had a particularly intense session, but that's mostly because none of the games I've played in have gone long enough to warrant it. In our current game, two of the players are on the more casual end of the spectrum (so far) and need the game to end pretty sharpish at 10pm, so there's not much of a post-game debriefing in any case.

(I don't know that I want to build a game that's particularly high-drama, though – at least three of our group have anxiety diagnoses, so the more cavalier end of the spectrum is fine by me.)

I would like to have a wind-down chat, though - there's one player (who also happens to be a seasoned DM) usually willing to offer feedback, but I'd like to know more from the casual players – if for no other reason than to get a better idea of what they want to see more of.

We do a lot of feedback over WhatsApp too.

A couple of good freebies for Free RPG day:

Troika is a bizarre plane hopping game inspired by Planescape and using the Fighting Fantasy gamebook rules: https://itch.io/s/18329/free-rpg-day-but-better?c=freerpgday

Maze Rats is an ultra light dungeon bashing game with some of the best random tables around: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/197158/Maze-Rats

6 hour game of Vampire last night.

This might actually be the best group I've ever run games for and it might actually be the best stuff I've ever done as a ST/GM. We took two ten minute breaks for after-care after some pretty challenging sequences; one of the things about the game being set more-or-less in the real world is that you have more-or-less real world consequences for decisions that are made.

It's great. The lead line developer on V5 and V20 replied on a tweet of mine which about it, I think, is hopefully a good thing? Either way, I kind of want to start dumping write ups somewhere.

Right, so I've got my first (ever?) puzzle coming up in a session tomorrow and I have an important question: how do you know if it's the right difficulty?

I'm worried that what I've got is far too difficult, but adding in additional clues feels like it'll completely give the game away.

I don't want too many moving parts to keep track of, so it's basically just a riddle that explains how to combine some stuff to open a door: three components, each with a rune on it to indicate which line in the riddle applies to it.

But if they know the runes, that seems too easy (and defeats the point of the riddle to keep people out?), but not knowing the runes makes it feel like a guessing game…

Could they know one of the runes? I saw your post on Instagram about this, but couldn't work out what the hell it meant.

Could they know one of the runes?

This is the rough plan – they're old dwarven runes, so it'll take an Int check to figure out what all of 'em mean, but some are still in relatively common use.

I saw your post on Instagram about this, but couldn't work out what the hell it meant.

It's very deliberately missing any of the decoding information, because at least one of my players follows me on there and I didn't want to give them more than 24 hours' notice to figure it out.

If you spend twenty minutes trying to get through the first part of a puzzle then let the wizard make an intelligence roll (assuming you're talking about 13a or another DNDclone) for a clue. A wiz with 18-20 intelligence is like… orders of magnitude smarter than your player. If they can use a strength roll to lift something they can't lift in reality, let them use an int roll to work out something they can't work out. That can be a really big clue if you've got a bad feeling about the rest of the session, or it can be a 'maybe try this?' to point them in the right direction.

If it's been 40 minutes and they're still in the weeds, just use a skill challenge to abort.

Also, remember that puzzles are wildly overrated and there's at least one person at the table that is there for social stuff and combat, someone that's there for combat and resource management, and someone that's there for social stuff and puzzles.

Know when to abort. You are immensely proud of this puzzle and rightly so because it looks very cool, but your players sense of pride in this puzzle comes from if they can actually solve it. I try real hard to avoid puzzles in games.

Then again I hated Grim Fandango, so-

I mean, yeah – there's the door with the puzzle, but I've made sure there's also a partly collapsed tunnel they can clear out with a couple of STR checks.

I normally stay away from puzzles but it makes sense in this context and I kinda want to see how the players react to it since I've not done any before.

Most of our D&D session this evening was one giant combat, as an army of dwarves and drow faced off against each other. The DM managed to keep things moving fairly briskly, though, and despite some really brutal rolls, we all managed to survive (though the same cannot be said of our dwarven allies). On the down side, the kobold cleric ended up separated from the rest of the group, and is - for now - being kept as a pet by one of the drow.

We're going to attempt a rescue, of course, but first order of business next time will be to kill the hydra that took over the tunnel we're using to get around the drow encampment. If we survive that that, though, rescue time for sure - and we might even finally reach level 5.

They solved the puzzle! On the second attempt, with one additional Int check required to assist. There was some good conversation around the logic of it, with competing theories, and only two people took damage when their first attempt backfired.

Past that blockage, they did some light RP with someone who'd been trapped in the caves, the bard finally getting to Charm Person on someone in a useful way, and he led them through some exploration/skill check stuff. They fought a couple of bulettes, in a fight that's maybe the best-balanced I've created, using environmental stuff and random items found earlier in the adventure in creative and exciting ways – mostly successfully!

Then a young green dragon showed up and the Bard tried to soothe it, but failed pretty badly and ended up getting poisoned a couple of times before she decided that climbing onto its back would improve her chances of making friends. (The Cleric, Fighter and Rogue had other ideas, and killed it. Bard and Cleric have a grudge now.)

They'd only been hired to clear out the wildlife, but the trapped guy they found earlier had said some intriguing things about what was really at the bottom of the mine – not just the iron vein that they'd been told about – so more exploration was in order, and the session ended as the Cleric opened a magic door in some kind of polished stone wall that had been partially excavated by the miners.

I had to end it there because I've not actually written anything about what's inside this door yet; in fact, the idea of having something related to the main plotline only occurred to me the morning of the session. I'm trying to figure out the structure of it, but I think more combat's pretty much off the table. They've had a couple of challenging fights and are running low on dailies, and I don't want to have three combat-heavy sessions in a row because at least one of the players isn't so interested in that stuff (hence, attempting to befriend the dragon).

I've got a Rogue who's not really been so engaged with things, so I'm thinking about throwing some traps and acrobatics-y stuff at them. The Bard has fire resistance so I'd like to do something with that as well.

I probably will have one more fight before they get back to civilisation, though – the guy they rescued was pretty adamant that whatever is in the mine is his, so I expect he'll be waiting for them when they come out – or he'll follow them in and trigger some kind of self-destruct sequence in an "if I can't have it, no-one can!" moment.

Out of interest, when you guys are running a campaign, what level do you start characters off at?

Most of my experience as a player in 5e has been starting at level 3 (when you actually get subclass abilities), with one game starting at 2.

Basically, up until a couple of weeks ago - my first session of a Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign - I'd never actually played a level 1 character, and it was a weirdly brutal experience. I mean, maybe I could have optimised my stats a bit more, but as a Paladin, my starting 11 hp and 18 AC put me ahead of the others in the group, and I was still knocked unconscious 3 times.

I'm toying with the idea of running something again if I can get the players - including one who's never played D&D before - and I feel like there's a risk of either overwhelming them with multiple levels' worth of stuff all at once, or having them suffer a first-session character death because they have 7 hp as a wizard and a rat gets a lucky crit, or something.

I started this campaign at level 2, I think two of the PCs started with less than 5HP. That's Whitehack rather than 5e though so it's a fair bit more lethal.

I recommend starting 5e games at level 1 and just letting players know that they are going to be vulnerable for a bit. Suggest that they don't put too much effort into backstory before they his level 3.

Back to my Whitehack game tonight after a four week break. I'm pretty excited. We left the last session just as one of my players triggered a fight with a demigod wereshark and his mysterious companion. It's going to be a big one I think.

After that stuff is very much coming to a head. Three factions are converging on the group and some big decisions need to be made. There is not a lot of world left. The Underdark is collapsing and it's inhabitants are either escaping to other worlds or breaking through to the surface to survive a little longer.

How are your games going?

Session 3 of Ghosts of Saltmarsh tomorrow, so I'm looking forward to that. We've been asked to attend a council meeting (presumably related to the smugglers we've been slapping about?), and I have a plan for a ridiculously dramatic speech formally introducing myself to the locals. I missed session 1, and a couple of other guys were absent for session 2, so this will be the first time we're all together. Should be fun.

My other campaign ended the last game with most of us at the outskirts of the drow camp in the underdark, about to launch our daring rescue of our captive cleric.

My 13th Age game is on a bit of a hiatus for the next few weeks, due to scheduling conflicts. I'm going to need that time to plan, though - it's not clear at the moment what the party members' priorities are, so I've got a few bases to cover.

I'll be playing in an online, streamed game of the new Alien RPG from Free League (who did Tales From the Loop) being run by one of my 13A players at the start of August, which is planned to run for up to four weeks, depending on our survivability. Looking forward to being a player, especially since I'm taking the role of the sleazy Company stooge.

Having cleared out the land-side smuggling operation, the council of Saltmarsh have asked us to tackle the seaborne part.

After a bit of downtime carousing, the smugglers' ship arrived offshore near the "haunted" house; we lucked out remembering a couple of details from previous sessions, and were able to get on board before they realised anything was amiss - though not long before.

So far, we've managed to take out three pirates, plus their wizard and - in a hilariously over-the-top 47-damage crit - the captain. We fully expect there are a lot more on board, but the session ended as we stumbled on a room full of lizardfolk.

And I didn't even get knocked unconscious this week!

Last week's wereshark battle went well. I was using the Boss Fight rules so after they had done a significant amount of damage to the boss wereshark his second form triggered and he basically hulked out. The PCs all get an adrenaline boost, recovering HP, Fatigue and maybe a one-shot ability. The fight ended up being one of the longest in the campaign and I am fairly sure we all thought they were all going to die. Two lucky rolls with the Spear of Chaos finished him off though.

Now I have to be ready for anything. They have about six rooms of a tower to clear out to find the last artefact they need and then it's all about how the impending four-way discussion/alliance/fight goes.

I need a dialogue box which pops up saying "If you trigger this mission you will not be able to explore any further or complete any of your ongoing side quests. Do you wish to proceed?"

I just managed to pull off the big D&D event that I've been wanting to do since I was about 14.

Over the last two sessions of my game the PCs aquired the last of the items which were required to end the world. Their mentor claimed he wanted them to stop anyone ending the world, but the players were dubious and challenged him with a half hearted fight. He nearly killed them, took the items and headed North to the location where the world could be ended.

The PCs convinced a minor God to try and stop him, knowing that the God would probably die and then used some magic I had forgotten they had to get to the City at the End before their mentor.

They then had a fight on the bridge which lead to the City and the next world. Their ancient god-killer Mentor vs the PCs, The God of Broken Glass, The God of Procreation (best not to ask) and their mentor's also ancient but almost dead daughter.

It was awesome and ended with one dead God, two dead PCs and the world being destroyed.

And now we start the second half of the campaign, set in the rocks floating in the sky after the end of the world. If you've played Bastion, it's that.

tldr; Players thought tonight was the finale and they had lost. Actually they are only halfway and everyone thought it was awesome.

That sounds awesome.

I have been doing a lot of reading of RPG books recently. Partly this has been caused by my Whitehack game shifting into its second half as explained above, so I've had a fair bit of prep to do on that. Also though I've bought a bunch of RPG books second hand at a con I went to in Glasgow and I've been reading through those.

Monster of the Week - I've been wanting to learn more about the Apocalypse World family of games but I bounced of off Apocalypse World itself and Dungeon World, when I tried reading them. Aniki's enthusiasm and a never ending stream of Supernatural on the TV convinced me to give this one a try before giving up on PbtA and moving on. This I like. I read half the book in a day and am eager to see how it plays. I want to see these characters in action, and I like the look of the monster and episode creation.

Blades in the Dark - I kept on getting this recommended to me. If you don't know, it the RPG of running team heists in Thief or Dishonoured. It's really interesting, although as yet I don't quite get how all the systems work with each other.Again, I need to see it in action. It look like play is very structured though, I'm not sure I'll enjoy that so much. Still, it's got my imagination going so now I'm wondering if I could set a campaign in Mega City One. Or, just to fuck with the miserysmog atmosphere of the thing, maybe I use it to run a Sly Raccoon game.

I am also reading through The Lost Mines of Phandelver, which is a solid sandboxish starter adventure for 5e. I'll be running it fortnightly for my son and his friends.

The new edition of Blue Planet is on the way and I was looking at their PWYW quickstart PDF. It looks good. Recommended if cyberpunk on a water world sound fun.

Finally, I just dug out my Everway books, because someone on Twitter was looking for a system for running a Dr Strange game and now I can't get the idea of an Everway urban fantasy game out of my head.

Monster of the Week

Sarah and I only played two sessions of this with aniki a couple of Christmases ago(?), but I loved it. I played the Monstrous, as an average-looking guy in an excellent suit who could summon a spectral bear form around himself in combat and view the past using his fingers as a viewfinder. He's one of my favorite characters I've ever played in any RPG, and I still think about him regularly.

Monster of the Week is also incredibly easy to run, for reasons I'm pretty sure I've gone into before in these hallowed halls. It's given me a whole lot of confidence in my own ability to improvise mid-session, thanks mostly to it's entire "don't prepare anything" approach.

I've just bought the core rulebook for Green Ronin's The Expanse RPG, which is based on their Age system - it looks great, and I'm pretty desperate to get it to the table for a one-shot when our 13th Age game reaches a suitable point for a break.

Finished my vampire game this week. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and one person getting too close to an anxiety attack for me to be okay carrying on. It was an incredible game and I think everyone had fun, even when they didn't so… that's good. Like, incredible to the extent that I think I probably won't run Vampire again because I doubt I'll ever be able to top it.

That sounds pretty much perfect Luscan. Well done!

As for the Expanse RPG, I don't see the AGE system being a great fit for the setting, it seems a bit combat and HP focused. Maybe they've changed it for this game though.

I've been running D&D for my seven year old daughter and her friend. They've both been having fun but we realised today that what they actually want to be playing is a Mario TTRPG.

Which is fine, they are happy enough with the D&D rules that I can just reskin D&D for Mario. Mario is a fighter, Peach is a Cleric or a Mage. They can unlock different attacks as they play.

At some point I could have one of the party get kidnapped and have Bowser join the party in their place. I think I'm going to enjoy this.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/exaltedfuneral/the-ultraviolet-grasslands?ref=user_menu

This is well worth throwing some money at if you like weird psychedelic fantasy adventures with gorgeous art. The author/artist is a friend of mine but I've signed up for $60 and I can't wait to get the full book.

If you want a sample there is a free into here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/241606/The-Ultraviolet-Grasslands–Free-Introduction

I received the final PDF of this book this evening and it's absolutely fantastic. Even weirder than I expected and so much art!

Last night I ran session 50 of my fantasy campaign. It is the longest campaign I've run in my life and I'm quite pleased that I've managed to keep it going and interesting all that time.

Achievement Unlocked I guess.

Hi. Some advice please.

Our 5e DnD group is made up of an experienced DM 3 inexperienced players and 3 people more familiar with Role Playing.

I’m one of the last three, and the other two are brothers, the younger brother being the last one to join.

Turns out the younger brother is a real pain in the neck, and when not being a pain in the ass Kenku, spends all his time reminiscing with his brother about the great games they used to play.

It’s put off the three new comers and as the host it’s fell to me to break the news.

I feel I’m going to have to lose both brothers.

Can someone here send them an anonymous text saying they’re not wanted?

I've seen a bunch of similar posts on the D&D subreddits, and the advice is always the same: sit down and talk to them about it. If they're not enjoying it enough to be enagged, if they're looking for a different experience from the game than the DM (and other party members) are, then they are free to find – or run – another game more to their liking. But as it stands, it's ruining the experience for other people, and they can either get with it or not.

Yeah - I think I’ll call one more session and raise it at the end.

And ask the DM to kill off the two brothers. 😀

Usually it would be up to the DM to try and sort it, so definitely discuss it with the DM first. Then maybe the two of you could talk to the brothers.

im running lancer, best giant robot game maybe can be evangellion or gundam or titanfall it's real good A+ would recommend if you like giant bot

Glad to hear it's good. It looked like it would be.

I'm going to be running an Expanse game on Tuesday for the two members of my 13th Age party who aren't busy this week. Not entirely confident about all the rules, but I've got a fairly solid one-shot outline ready to go, and a bunch of pre-gen character sheets rolled up. 🤞

I also hope they appreciate the playlist of weird music I've put together as a Belter radio station, because it has ruined my recommendations for God knows how long.

…are you gonna share this radio station, or what?

So the Expanse RPG is pretty good. Maybe too many stunts, but hopefully there'd be fewer interruptions to combat after a couple of sessions and people start finding favourites.

In hindsight, trying to cover all the main encounter types in a single 3-hour session (while learning the system and trying to teach two players) was probably biting off more than I could chew. I've also got a lot of work to do to figure out tooling before I'd try to run a longer campaign; tracking combat in particular wasn't the easiest.

We made it through most of what I'd prepared, though I had to drop a couple of encounters – one was optional anyway, and they managed to talk their way around it, but we just didn't have time to start the ship combat. There was enough rules checking going on as it was, without adding another bunch of things to remember.

I managed to end it on the cliffhanger/reveal I'd planned to, though, so I'm very happy about that.

I'm really enjoying running 5e. It is combat heavy but sometimes that's ok. Two sessions ago my players took on a dragon which they shouldn't have been able to kill, and through luck and desperate improvisation they won. Last session they had a tense fight against nothing more than five hobgoblins with bows. Today they cleared out most of a ruined castle in one increasingly risky running battle as the fight kept on something more denizens to their presence.

I will admit though, they are only level 4, I am well aware I might enjoy the game less at higher levels.

I asked them what they want me to run when Phandelver finishes. I suggested that we could continue with these characters, using either the classic Isle of Dread adventure, or Ultraviolet Grasslands. We could try Monster of the Week, or Blue Planet or Coriolis.

They all decided they want to play Star Wars. You might have noticed that I didn't offer Star Wars, but never mind, Edge of the Empire it is!

In last night's 13th Age game, I had so many plates spinning.

In addition to just running the session – which involved partial overlap of three different subquests, with three different split-party configurations – I had three other objectives that I had to try to accomplish as subtly as possible to fuel upcoming subplots.

1. Get the Rogue to confirm to the rest of the group that her character's magic hat is common knowledge among the party;
2. Get the party to agree that the Rogue is holding a particular object in said hat; and
3. Remind the Cleric of the Wizard's familiar's name, so that a reference to it in a letter prop would be as significant as I needed it to be.

Meanwhile delivering quite a lot of heavy background exposition, giving them clear but not obvious leads in an investigation, and allowing the Bard to run off on some secret stuff "in plain sight" of the other players, without them catching on to precisely what she's up to.

As near as I can tell, it all went off smoothly, but it's going to be another long fortnight before I can put any of these plots into action.

Bloomin heck. You are so much more organised than me.

I mean, I say "plot"…

I just planned out the last dozen sessions of my campaign. It was one A5 sheet of bullet points listing three places to go and three things some NPCs might do.

I'll get three sessions in and wonder why I don't know what's going on.

I've reached a point with my Vampire Campaign where - with the new characters - I've realised that the only real way to make them glom together as a group is to throw a proper 'live together, die alone' threat at them.

Any advice on options before this?

I would need more details, I'm not sure exactly why you mean. In general, although you've probably already tried this stuff:

Give them something to care about that they all want to help. A badass NPC, some kids in trouble, a pub, baby Yoda. They might work together for a common goal.

A common threat sometimes works, but less reliably.

If the problem isn't them working together so much as them being interesting together, give them challenges which will cause friction in the group. If half of them want to help the mad scientist and the other half want to destroy his lab, good game should happen.

If I'm missing the point just ignore me.

It's okay I solved it I just wrote a few sermons and then threw vampire Deathstroke at them.

If in doubt, ninjas.

Two of my 13th Age players have coronavirus symptoms and are self-isolating, so we're going to move the game online for the next few sessions.

I think it'll be okay, but apparently Roll20 has seen some performance issues over the last week or so, as more and more groups avoid in-person games.

Also I've never used Roll20 in anger before, so I'm a little terrified by its unfriendly UI and awkward navigation. But I've spent a few hours over the last couple of days getting character sheets and encounters set up, so I reckon I'll be able to get by.

I've DM'd a bunch on Roll20 - probably more than in meatspace - and while the virtual tabletop is fine, it's also pretty slow once you start throwing a lot of assets at it (and even arbitrarily deleted half my environment on more than one occasion). I ultimately ended up just using it to track monster HP and status on one page, while the players looked at some pretty art as background to their character sheets on another, and just ran the actual game as theatre of the mind. But I'm not a big tactical/grid guy, generally.

I'll be trying out Roll 20 tomorrow night for my regular monday game.