JCC Amph Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies - The Tabletop RPG Discussion Thread

When I say back in the day, I mean the late 70s and early 80s. I'm old.
I saw Star Wars in the theater in 1977 at age 5 and played D&D for the first time in 1978 at age 6. I was definitely born at the right time.

 

I applaud the dedication...but the thing looks like a level from Zelda...so linear.

Good Luck finding a laminator big enough to protect that thing.

Maybe some plexiglass panels.

Expensive.

Hope they have fun playing it.

 

I don't like overly detailed maps, especially if they're marked with grids or hexes. That changes the game from a role-playing experience to a chess game, IMO. Nothing against chess, but that's not RPing.

 

Concur.

It becomes a boardgame.

If your GM can't adequately describe it to allow players to visualize, a simple mock up on dry erase board should suffice from instance to instance.

Maps, beyond the grandest of kingdom scale, or the vaguest of treasure seeking, tend to narrow one's imagination.

And when I have 1 hp, I want to run in ANY direction.

 

A few things:
For one, it's a sort of legacy of roleplaying games' origin in wargaming.
By tradition, outdoor maps tend to use hexagons (as that was a wargaming standard). Dungeons tend to use squares, because one used graph paper to design them (or map them as players).
The size of dungeons tended to follow the size of the graph paper. It was a running joke - and often true - that if you mapped out a dungeon level and there was a corner that was blank, there was probably a secret door or something that you missed.
The 1st edition D&D Dungeon Master's Guide had a 'random dungeon generator' that was probably used by 90% of the DMs back in the early days at one time or another.

It does sometimes seem intimidating, but I feel it's something that everyone can do.
First, it does require practice and trial and error.
Don't be afraid to run published adventures! Most systems have a 'tutorial adventure' that includes many of the game's concepts to help new GMs.
When you make your adventures - borrow, borrow, borrow! Take pieces from published adventures, take inspiration from movies, TV shows, etc.
As I mentioned before, as the Game Master, keep the game flowing; make a call when the rules are vague or can't be found.
Players will always go off the rail. Expect the unexpected.
Having said that, don't feel you shouldn't occasionally 'cheat' - it's not really 'cheating', but you should only do it occasionally. For example, if something happens where a player would just be outright killed at the beginning of an adventure, fudge it so it doesn't happen. Just don't rely on it.
The most important rule is - have fun! You and your players should be enjoying themselves.

 

@blackmyron
I guess DM can be done at different levels of difficulty, depending on how open ended the game is. It seems to me that the fewer the options for the players, the easier it gets to be a DM? (but the players might dislike having little agency, so yes finding the right balance is likely where the DM experience comes into play).

 

You honestly don’t need to limit your players so much, they’ll usually do what their characters are good at to try and advance the story. If they come up with a really out of the box solution for something it’s usually not too hard to figure out a quick check and move along (or if you think it’s especially clever, maybe just give it to them).

 

Yeah, exactly this. Rule of Cool generally rules most of our session -- such as finally encountering a water elemental of some sort and me lightbulbing "Hey, uh, anyone still have that Dust of Dryness?" -- but also it's sort of what Inspiration is there for.

 

Dice add randomness. Rules add structure.

But as a GM...you craft your world...and together with your players...you all craft the story.

The best moments in gaming are not the natural crits (hits or fails, depending on your evil GM index).

It is the moments when the players are amazed by the scene you reveal to them...and then they react to the scene in a way that BLOWS your mind!

Play for those moments.

 

Fun how things have changed, right?

 

Ha!

It's funny what's changed and hasn't changed.
The cliche of only guys playing in games? There was almost always at least one female in the groups I played in, then and now. Usually steering towards 50%, although still leaning male.
Having to deal with awful players? Yeah, well... at the time, it felt like you had to play with the people you had available. The times I played with strangers back then was mostly a bust. Refusing to play with players that I didn't like caused me to pretty much not run or play in RPGs from about 1993 to 2000.
Munchkin players? You always had doofuses who claimed their character killed Thor and took his hammer, and junk like that. That steered me more towards running games like Call of Cthulhu or Paranoia, where there were no 'munchkins'. That really doesn't seem to be much of a problem nowadays.

But I've been in the same group (with various member changes over the years) for about 20 years at this point.

 

TTRPGing has become very inclusive (WotC's latest survey had 49% of their userbase being women!) and that's something to be celebrated. The last time I ran DarkStryder I was doing it for four women. I'm happy that everyone is discovering a hobby that has given me so much enjoyment for more than 30 years.

It also tends towards the, let's say, Theater Kid side of the spectrum, thanks to the popularity of shows like Critical Role that are as much about the improv comedy side as they are about the storytelling and the gaming. It's probably a phase, but it makes running games for zoomers and younger millennials a risky proposition

 

Oddly enough, my SO, who is a nerd with a big Theater background (and primarily does acting in her work, on one level or another), has never had much interest in playing in RPGs - although she had a copy of the 2nd Ed. D&D PHB and some V:TM splatbooks when I first met her.

 

Probably close to half the people I gamed with regularly fought with replica swords as well as doing TTRPGs, and some of us were pretty serious about it. That's me on the right.

 

I wholly disagree. I'm in a tabletop gaming club at a medium-sized university (total enrollment around 11,000). The club covers all kinds of board games, card games, etc., but there is a heavy focus on D&D and other RPG systems. We currently have nearly a dozen active campaigns within the club (despite COVID restrictions) and usually a few one-shots in the planning stages at any given time. Most of the club is traditional students in their late teens and early 20s, and we're one of the largest non-Greek student organizations on campus, so the interest is definitely there among Generation Z.

The club also runs a learn-to-play campaign each fall semester called DND 1010 (like an academic course number) that teaches character creation (at 1st level) and gradually introduces the mechanics, starting with skill/ability checks in the first session and then introducing combat later. The last time we were able to have a full, unrestricted go at DND 1010 was 2019, when nearly 30 players (including me) signed up for it and the club officers had to recruit seven DMs to handle them all.

That said, the current club president is a theater studies major, sooooooo.......

 

So how do you exactly disagree?

 

It looks like it's hard to die in D&D, at least this recent edition.

After you get below zero hit points you can still survive for 3 turns if nobody attacks while unconscious.
Maybe in practice it happens more often than I'd expect.

 

Which is probably where RP kicks back in on the GM's side. Not every NPC should go for an execution when a PC is unconscious, but some would for pragmatic purposes, and some would make a show of it.

 

There was a move in 3rd ed. on D&D called coup de grace that allows you to instantly kill an incapacitated target.

 

It actually didn’t, IIRC, it just did so much damage that almost everything you could conceivably use it on would die.

Because 3E.

 

A wasteful one in negative HP territory, too, since it took a full-round action

... but if you wanted to make life hard on your PCs and an NPC happened to have the ability to incapacitate targets...

If memory serves, automatic critical hit on an attack, and Fort save DC 10 + damage inflicted (which tended to be non-trivial )

Hello, scythe

 

I haven't played or run D&D in 10 years, so I'm a little rusty...

 

Goddammit it’s even more 3E than I thought.