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@godsdand
I’ve been drawing battle maps for over five years now, and it’s time that I shared what I’ve learnt. Well, the first part to that guide is now up on my blog!
In this first part, I explain how to design a exciting battle map from nothing but a blank page and an idea…
How to design and draft a battle map
Keep reading
My Fellow Dungeons & Dragons 5e Players...
Recently I have had a conversation with one of my long-LONG friends about D&D. This person in particular started playing in my group the same fateful day as myself 17 years ago and we still play today, spanning AD&D 2e all the way to 5e. This conversation was about a homebrew rule we wanted to try but were worried about balance in many ways (though, our games tend to be nothing less than over-powered heroics). though, we haven’t tried implementing it yet due to current circumstances we think it can work at our personal tables. This rule of which I speak friends, involves Two-Weapon Fighting. in past editions, TWF has been a staple in my player’s characters, but lately it seems like you see it less and less with the strength of Bonus Actions. While I often enjoy seeing a fighter take advantage of the great-weapon fighting style at my table, those players who remember the old ways and want to use two weapons feel as though its lack luster. Though, we know that the way its set up encourages the use of other weapons, We think we can bring TWF fun (but less balanced) in our OP campaigns. The rule in question. When you take the Attack action and attack with a light melee weapon that you’re holding in one hand, that attack gains one additional Extra Attack to attack with a different light melee weapon that you’re holding in your other hand.
Basically, instead of using a bonus action, a player may just make 1 additional attack (but only with the off-hand weapon). Now, we know this is over-powered. We know this will effect the balance of weapons that cant be duel wielded. what we do not know, is if this is on par with our campaigns, and we don’t have the ability to try it out. I would love to hear the community’s opinions on this alternate rule though, and hopefully when we try it it will be on par with our players* *our players are gestalt (2 classes at once, picking all the skills and taking the highest HP roll every level). already have artifacts, and are generally able to get away with a LOT more than other players.
Doesn't seem like an issue to me for the most part. I think this works bump it above sword and board but less damage then GWM. The main thing this does is open up bonus actions. So as long as your okay with more bonus actions being used then go for it. (And with being high powered gestalt I don't think you'll have an issue)
It would be a needed buff to twf rangers because hunters mark then 2 attacks that get it. Low level barbarians would love it. Rogues would be using their cunning action more.
I think my only balance concern would be that this makes monks weaker so it might be worth changing martial arts and flurry of blows so they don't feel weakened.
Because I was having a discussion with @love-to-dre4m about this earlier, I just wanted to remind my fellow black girls:
WE CAN BE WARRIORS, ANGELS, WITCHES, FAIRIES, ELVES, OR WHATEVER THE FUCK WE WANNA BE IN FANFICTION OR ANY FICTION! DO NOT LET ANYONE LIMIT YOU!!!
Note: all images were found on Pinterest. I do not own anything
"i’ve never been in a community that didn’t have a way higher number of subs" is a _wild_ thing to hear someone say. every dipshit dudebro wants to _think_ he's a dom, whether he's actually even into kink or not, and they all seem to say so. i've never been in a community that wasn't flooded with would-be dom men. what communities are these where there's a dom shortage because i want in
i don't know if other subs do this (maybe we're all doing this and that's why we're overrepresented lmfao) but i don't actually participate in kink-centric communities for the same reason i don't go on dating apps: that seems like a good way to get a lot of dick pics and no good action. also even if i do just want a dom to fuck me up i don't just wanna come out and say that. where's the seduction.
so instead i just end up in weird kink-adjacent communities like tabletop roleplay and freeform roleplay and the sca and whatever other horseshit gives me an excuse to wear a corset and pretend i'm a vampire or whatever the hell. like yeah if you wanna wear a corset for kink reasons you'd think it would make sense to do so in the kink community, but if you do it at the ren faire there's stuff to do even if you turn out to be unfuckable and the guy in the tight pants is probably capable of holding even a single conversation that isn't about kink. which is basically the bare minimum that i'm looking for. but so are the ten other chicks in corsets, including the two who came with me, so now we're all just loitering outside the fencing arena trying to figure out if tight pants guy is wearing that whip Because Reasons and also if he's single. later it will turn out he's into femdom and he's married to the woman who runs the leather booth. she will politely invite us to a local club and we say we'll stop in and then won't. instead we'll go to the local game store to buy dice as an excuse to interact with the long-haired cashier with the knee-high leather boots. maybe someday if we keep buying dice he will somehow intuit that we want him to step on us without us actually having to do anything.
the number of subs finding this relatable suggests that there are irl dungeons out there full of doms wondering where all the subs are and the answer is that they’re looking for someone to run their DnD game because none of them want to do it
As a domme who left the kink community entirely after getting burnt out by predatory behavior from these exact cis/straight doms both towards subs, and then, in the absence of femme subs, towards femme dommes, I am here to tell you any Dom(me) worth their salt does not even think twice about why you're not in the scene, and we know reasonably where to seek you out because that's generally where we go to unwind too.
Can definitely confirm all the subs are playing D&D.
So I’m fitting a carpet and look outside and theres a really cool stick in the garden, so I take a picture and send it to the discord, my DM proceeds to make gold from it.
I regularly share some of your DnD bits on a discord server, and today someone responded with "swear, anytime I see a tumblr post, I feel a portion of joy that I'd otherwise feel whisk away from my soul." and I thought you'd like to know :p
My Dungeons & Dragons posts are meant only to bring joy.
To whom?
#bringing joy to modrons seems like a Sisyphean task but ok (via @lateralfire)
I feel obliged to point out that the greater part of the D&D campaign premises I’ve posted on this blog are about a. courtroom drama, b. tax evasion, or c. courtroom drama stemming from tax evasion.
My players recently adopted a rogue modron, i think I'll name it after you if they ask its name.
A day aboard
A daily overview of the process on a man o'war.
My entire dming style summed up in one picture.
@criticalrole
Since you have finally said that you are going to stop your programming and step away to educate yourselves instead of giving vague statements of "doing better" or remaining silent, I'm taking this opportunity to hope you are finally willing to listen to what I, many other BIPoC, and some white allies have been trying to tell you for years.
I have tried to educate you in private. I have tried to educate you in public. I have tried to educate your fanbase. But apparently it took yet more murders and riots across the country for you to finally acknowledge how woefully inadequate you have been as white allies, and how your white-led company has catered to liberal white supremacy.
It is good that you are pausing programming to keep focus on B/L/M. It is good that your entire staff is educating yourselves. Forgive me if I don't trust you to have all your shit together even still, because as I have said, you have been direct participants in racism, despite me and many other people repeatedly telling you how you could not do that. You have laughed at and dismissed our concerns. You have dismissed those of us who are angry at your racism as "hostile." You have asked us to look into your "heart" as if your moral fiber is what we give a shit about. I don't care if you go to liberal heaven. I care that your actions do not reflect the subtle ideals of white supremacy. I care that you do not create a safe space for racists. And your actions have reflected the subtle ideals of white supremacy, and you have created a space that is unsafe for BIPoC who have issues with where you fall short, and a place where nazi-sympathesizers feel supported.
Activism, standing for what's right, politics - these aren't about Moral Points. Doing good somewhere does not cancel out the ways to enforce white supremacy in your work. Throwing money at charities doesn't buy you 'forgiveness' for being a tool of racism elsewhere. There is no replacement for active study, active work, actively pushing against oppressive forces, actively unlearning the racism embedded into our culture, actively pushing against your own privilege. And those among you in your company who are worse than others do not get a pass because there are a few individuals who do good work as advocates. Those of you who are good advocates do not get a pass for what racism you allow around you or that you engage in.
"Don't forget to love each other," has become a cry for tone-policing and practically a white-supremacist dogwhistle in a new package. Neo-Nazis rely on this concept of "love" as meaning politeness and civility, that to meet their calls for genocide with defensive anger is to be "unloving." Your love is meaningless without action, it's a concept used to "love" people into silence, calling for justly frustrated people to repackage their anger into something to make your white sensibilities more comfortable. It has been used to victim-blame marginalized people for their own oppression, suggesting if only they were kind to their oppressors, then they would not have been oppressed. Your culture of toxic positivity has created a fanatic viewerbase that paints anyone critiquing you as dangerous, and they respond to some of your fair critics with racism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, and ableism. You have created a culture that values civility over justice or social responsibility. You have created a culture that believes you can do no wrong and that anything you do is right because you did it.
Your words of "I ignore anyone who says Hot Take," your words of "people on both sides go too far" have contributed to this culture of shaming BIPoC who are angry at the injustices they face, at the things you contribute to in your white ignorance.
Your show of "just a bunch of (white) friends who are also voice actors playing D&D" has perpetuated racist and white supremacist narratives and tropes. You have had fun pretending to be slave owners and slave traders and slaves, like that's just some fun outlandish thing, and not a present reality, not a bloody legacy white people's privilege is built on, and Neo-Confederates love. Your quirky, stylish slaveowner gags and characters betray the joy white people find in putting themselves above others, in dehumanizing others, in treating people like property. This humor appeals to Neo-Nazis and Neo-Confederates and makes them feel normal. When fans express anger and discomfort with this gag, you minimized their feelings and wrote them off. You laughed at art portraying your brown player character as fucking furniture. You have portrayed human trafficking as a forgivable offense, so long as the person who does it is someone you like. You have minimized the horrors of slavery into something funny to laugh at.
You are white people who play characters of color like "wearing another skin" and joking about turning those characters of color into animals and furniture. You have had characters treat characters of color like test subjects or scientific curiosities. You have worn us like costumes for shallow 'diversity' and meaningless representation. You have fed into the white supremacist ideal that white people are better at portraying BIPoC than we are of portraying ourselves. You have portrayed and profited off of our cultures, our skin, without supporting or consulting with any of us in any meaningful, respectful way. You have received praise for your white-lens on our appearance and cultures. You have accepted praise of your meaningless diversity while ignoring BIPoC and allies asking you to do the bare fucking minimum of not supporting racist art that depicts your characters of color in caricatures and in whitewashed ways. You have featured and supported racist artists, and artists affiliated with you have blocked people who called out those racist artists. You have been informed repeatedly through multiple means of communication that whitewashing and colorism is an insidious vehicle of white supremacy, and you have ignored it when it was polite and private, and you ignored it when it was loud.
You continue to support racist caricatures of fantasy humanoids who have been coded in racist ways that BIPoC in the fantasy genre have talked about for decades, such as the anti-Semitic caricatures of goblins. You continue to perpetuate coded racism through jokes that reflect the actions of real-life liberal microaggressions such as the fetishistic "Tusk Love" book and the "Tusktooth" caricature tattoo. I once tried to give you the benefit of the doubt in believing that were your half-orc player character actually a man of color and not a half-orc, you would know better than to treat him the way you do, but seeing later how you treat real BIPoC and Beau, I have no faith left to give you. If you ever joke that one of your friends of color is like the love interest in a book titled "(racial feature) Love" or make a googly-eyed cartoon face with a racial feature they're insecure about: Fuck you.
You have called Beau, a brown character of color angry, dumb, ugly, aggressive. Some of you have primarily praised her for her strength and martial arts. If you don't know what's wrong with that, you have so goddamn much to learn. You have exaggerated her anger to the point that your characters do not seem to know her at all, or recognize how many times she's apologized (hint: more than the rest of you). This is all complicated by the fact that while Beau is brown, she is played by a white person, and the bizarre meta racism you have put this fictional brown character you pretend to be is not met with appropriate pushback. You might say "well human racism doesn't exist on Exandria" (and good, it shouldn't, because you white people have fucked up allegories of racism and playing BIPoC, and it would be egregiously inappropriate for white people to play tourist in Real Racism), but BIPoC still have to watch you subject this supposed representation of us to tropes and stereotypes.
Your dismissal of the repeated concerns of BIPoC and our allies and silence on these topics has contributed to the white supremacist narrative of BIPoC's concerns being minor, unimportant, and inherently aggressive. You have made us feel like we were bothersome for asking you to stop supporting racists and to stop being racist. You have prioritized your white comfort and convenience over doing the bare minimum to be responsible in the portrayal of characters of color that you profit from.
I have given you resources for combating whitewashing before. I have offered you easy methods for how you could combat the problem you are a willing machine for. You said you'd take it under consideration, and then did nothing. Why should I have believed you were ever willing to work on your numerous other issues when you did nothing for this simple one? The only thing that ever worked with you in regards to whitewashing was public callouts for whitewashed merch, which you sometimes did, sometimes did not, fix. But still, you kept uplifting racist art in your art reel and your gallery.
It is good that you are taking this time with your regular programming down to educate yourselves. It is all I have ever wanted you to do. You will study and you will learn about how deeply ingrained white supremacy is in this rotten nation. You will learn how anti-Blackness and Indigenous genocide are the foundations upon which this evil country is built. You are going to stop looking away from reality because it makes you uncomfortable to think of what your dreams and accomplishments are built on. When your company which is built around the dreams and creativity of 8 white people passively moves through this industry and gathers success, you are just another beacon of white supremacy, the idea that the stories you tell are the most important. You do not get to tell the stories of BIPoC if you cannot meet the bare minimum fucking standard of not further perpetuating white supremacist ideals against us. If you are going to tell allegories about racism, you should fucking understand what it is and how it works beyond the basic, "it's mean to call people slurs."
I don't trust that you know where to look for your research because you have proved again and again to be painfully ignorant, so here is some advice:
Find Black authors on:
systemic, emphasis on SYSTEMIC, racism and the anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous forces that built this evil fucking country
the anti-Blackness of white abolitionists who only wanted to abolish slavery because they thought it made white people look bad
the deliberate sabotage of Reconstruction, and the subsequent Jim Crow era
slavery through the prison-industrial complex, the school-to-prison pipeline, slave patrols
modern human trafficking
bias against Black patients in the medical field, and Black folx being used as test subjects for medical experimentation
the true activist strategies, tactics, lives, and histories of MLK, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers, not the white supremacist propaganda garbage you learned in high school and college
the fetishization of BIPoC, and especially mixed folx
the harm of "positive" racism like praising Black women for being "strong"
respectability politics and how it has been used to blame Black folx for what white people do to them
whitewashing in Hollywood and black/red/yellow/brownface
cultural appropriation such as non-Black people using AAVE to sound 'funny'
how to create spaces that are actually safe for BIPoC creatives and fans, and that exclude people who mean to harm us
white supremacist propaganda baked into Dungeons & Dragons, especially Gygax
eugenics theory and how that false, disgusting misunderstanding of race still permeates mainstream culture and the fantasy race lore of D&D and other fantasy works. Pay a-fucking-ttention to how they levy mixed-race people as "superior" to Black folx, but "inferior" to whites, and therein create a racial hierarchy they use to enforce white supremacy and anti-Blackness, with other PoC as tools in the middle.
Critical Race Theory
Black Feminist works
how to be anti-racism, not just a "well-meaning" white person
Do not read white authors. You've got enough whitewashed ideas in your heads.
When you get back to your regular programming and your ongoing campaign, you need to consider what to do about the harm you've already done. What should you do about all of the racism baked into your backlogs of content? What will happen to the people who watch your content in the future? Are they going to track down a twitter post or fireside chat where you apologize? What does that apology do other than represent you recognizing a moral failing? What about the viewers who are run through your content, passively consuming racism? Are you going to be transparent about how you are going to do better, in specifics, instead of offering vagueness that could mean anything or nothing, and forces BIPoC to have to "wait and see" if you're ever going to get your act together, and meanwhile your fanbase will call anyone critiquing you "hateful" and scold anyone for not believing you're one of "the good ones."
Some of your fanatic viewership has bombarded and harassed critics of your racism with further racism, misogynoir, and other forms of bigotry. Fans who even mildly criticize or comment in not-perfectly flattering ways on your business decisions or other issues with your portrayals of identities and sensitive subjects have also been harassed by bigots, all in the name of defending you as "one of the good ones." You have never stepped in to defend anyone experiencing harassment from your fandom, but you have repeatedly talked about how "caring" your fandom is. And you have gone out of your way to uplift and support racist and sexist artists. And you have gone out of your way to tell fans their harmless headcanons are wrong.
To combat your backlog of racist content, you could consider adding addendums to said backlogs where you explain clearly what is wrong with what you did and where others could educate themselves on the issues, rather than vague promises to just "do better in the future." To combat your other serious issues, you have been told multiple times by multiple people to hire sensitivity and cultural consultants.
Now, I would say I hope you learn something and do better, but I am done wasting my hope on your company.
Just fucking do it.
[image ID: @krutoon replied: "This is a huge post. Does anyone know what OP is referring to about the slaveowner gag or the furniture art? The slavery bit *could* be when they were in Hell or wherever in C1, but I know it's come up in C2 as well. And it appears I totally missed the chair thing.
Marisha playing a PoC was......a risk, let's just say that. Idk if I consider fantasy orcs as PoC, so I think Beau is primary subject of this post." /ens ID]
There were at least 2 slave jokes in C2: Fjord pretending Caleb was his slave to get rid of the orcs harassing him in Asorius, and Fjord and Jester pretending to be Beau and Caleb's slaveowners and fitting them in saddles meant for animals.
I never said orcs are PoC. I specifically said they are not. However, orcs, goblins, and drow have a history in D&D and related fantasy genre subject matter of being written the way white supremacists view PoC and Jewish people, and there are allegories of experience for "fantasy racism" that such characters often experience, or if not intentional allegory, ring very similarly to the experience of PoC in the real world, even though we aren't the same.
There was a larger discussion among BIPoC in ttrpg circles on Twitter recently, and I don't feel like rehashing all of that. But the long and short of it is that the bioessentialist lore of D&D and sometimes the way players treat PCs/NPCs based on fantasy race is uncomfortably close to how BIPoC are treated in real life, and it sucks.
There is a lot to unpack here, I'll be coming back to this post to check myself on my own games.
Shaman King Volume 35 (2018), Hiroyuki Takei
Its not a fucking dream, I thought I made this show up jesus fucking hell.
More inadvisable secret societies for your Dungeons & Dragons game:
The Brotherhood of the Crimson Star, an apocalypse cult with a decentralised cell structure. Approximately half of the Brotherhood’s cells are working to accelerate the prophesied apocalypse, while the other half are working to prevent it. Owing to tight information control and erratic communication between cells, most members are completely in the dark about the schism, believing that all of their peers share their goals and and merely disagree in their methods.
The Golden Owlbear Society, a philosophical collective of like-minded wizards and warriors dedicated to the improvement of mortal civilisation. In practice, they’re a social club for retired high-level adventurers who like to get high on pipeweed and debate political theory, and they almost never accomplish anything of note, but they’re treated as an existential threat by many nations owing to the absurdly high concentration of power they in theory represent.
The Thousand Scales, a sorcerous cabal united by the fact that they’re all the illegitimate offspring of a single incredibly randy dragon. The half-human members serve as the organisation’s public face, while the greater part of its roster keep out of the public eye owing to their… eclectic parentage. The cabal’s leader appears to be half dragon, half horse, but guests should under no circumstances remark on this – it’s something of a touchy subject!
The Vitalist League, ostensibly a band of freedom fighters against the reign of a terrible lich-king. In truth, nearly all of the League’s members are disguised undead infiltrators of various sorts. Most of the infiltrators are aware of this fact, but their superiors generally are not; due to the lich-king’s habit of regularly purging the upper ranks of his secret police, the infiltration’s operational history has been lost, and it’s unclear whether the “original” human-led League ever existed in the first place.
The Honourable Guild of Shoemakers, a trade organisation that wields immense political power due to its deep connections and numerous highly trained operatives. Their secret is that they really are just a bunch of shoemakers, and have no ambitions or concerns beyond protecting the exclusivity of their contracts and ensuring that their members are allowed to ply their trades unimpeded by state interference. The trouble is, they’ll go to literally any lengths to achieve those goals!
fucking losing it over this thumbnail
why are tree-related terms/words so satisfying… orchard.. grove.. thicket…
forgot the best one………………. wood
kidding lads… we all know the best one is arboretum
sylvan
Brush
coniferous
the lyrics are very hostile architecture warning message from a nucleear site
get lost go away there’s nothing down here turn back evacuate your life’s in danger air down here still smells like a corpse people came down here and they all died before
get lost go away there’s nothing down here turn back evacuate your life’s in danger air down here still smells like a corpse people came down here and they all died before THERE’S NOTHING HERE WORTH DYING FOR NOTHING THEY AIN’T TRIED BEFORE THERE’S NOTHING HERE WORTH DYING FOR NOTHING THEY AIN’T TRIED BEFORE this is not a place of honor you don’t belong here nothing here is sacred turn back before you die here this is a system of warnings don’t ignore it get the fuck away you arent ready for this…. NOTHING HERE IS YOURS NOT WORTH DYING FOR NOTHING HERE IS YOURS NOT WORTH DYING FOR THERE’S NOTHING HERE WORTH DYING FOR nothing NOTHING THEY AIN’T TRIED BEFORE before… THERE’S NOTHING HERE WORTH DYING FOR NOTHING THEY AIN’T TRIED BEFORE fuck off go away THERE’S NOTHING HERE WORTH DYING FOR while you still can NOTHING THEY AIN’T TRIED BEFORE
this is a warning THERE’S NOTHING HERE WORTH DYING FOR this is your last chance TURN BACK DOWN NOW!!! nothing here is sacred you don’t belong here nothing here is sacred you’re gonna die here nothing here is sacred you don’t belong here nothing here is sacred this place was beautiful once upon a time this place was something you can’t recognize this place was beautiful once upon a time this place was something you can’t recognize THERE’S NOTHING HERE WORTH DYING FOR NOTHING THEY AIN’T TRIED BEFORE THERE’S NOTHING HERE WORTH DYING FOR NOTHING
It is not the prettiest but here is a little chart I made of skin tones.
The idea is to eye-drop anywhere on the chart to get a unique skin tone instead of getting stuck in the loop of “white, tan, dark”.
Concept: a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting where the First Empire was brought low by their own hubris and annihilated utterly, except for their comprehensive – and apparently indestructible – automated public transit network, whose trains still run perfectly on schedule when everything else the Empire built has crumbled to dust. Nobody knows what (if anything) is controlling the network, but there always seems to be a train coming along in just a few minutes whenever you need one, even if anticipating that need would have required some sort of prescience, and the civilisations that rose from the First Empire’s ashes are built around the sites of the network’s former stations.
Further random thoughts:
The trains are capable of incredible top speeds and punch right through nearly any obstacle placed on the tracks, so efforts to block or redirect them generally fail,
They also take their role as public transit seriously, and seem to actively resist attempts to control access to them; if a station is secured against public access, the trains will simply pick a new stretch of track nearby and begin to stop there instead.
The trains will forcibly eject anyone who attempts violence against another passenger, so the interior of the cars is an enforced neutral zone. Creatures that would ordinarily be wholly inimical to humanity can be encountered safely while riding the rails – though the trains won’t stop them from following you off when you disembark!
The attendant difficulty of forcibly removing passengers from the trains renders them something of a sanctuary. Fugitives sometimes end up living on the trains full-time as a result, bartering with regular passengers for their daily needs; it’s whispered that even those who’ve offended the gods may find safety on the trains.
Owing to the trains’ apparently prescient ability to anticipate public demand, efforts have been made to predict the future – or at least the flow of commerce – from the patterns of the trains’ schedules; this typically meets with limited success.
Reports of the trains showing up in times of great need even where there are no tracks to run on are unsubstantiated, and are generally dismissed as superstitious folk-tales.
(Of course, it’s not all sunshine and roses; the trains are entirely amoral outside of their mandate, and will happily show up in the nick of time to provide a murderer with a convenient escape, or transport an invading army straight to your doorstep, provided that army doesn’t try to prevent others from boarding, and refrains from harming anyone while they’re actually on board!)
I fucking love this premise.
straight up do not understand DMs complaining about their players ‘totally ignoring the plot and going to do something else’ for a lot of reasons but the one on my mind right now is, like
you can just talk to your players about what they want to do next. like it’s not hard. you can just say “hey guys you get to decide as a party what investigative arc you want to take on next, you have something like five real options, all of which represent 5-10 sessions of content, it’s totally up to you, follow your hearts, just let me know in advance so I can prepare the right material for yall. DMing is a lot of work so I appreciate the heads up about what major endeavor you want to take on next. talk amongst yourselves and let me know your decision. make good choices, I love you.”
it’s not a sign of weakness to be like “yeah the entire world isn’t 100% built out to the minutest detail, I’m not going to design Andrei’s vacation home until I know you’re going to it.” my players assume that I know all of the big picture stuff, they trust me to keep all the details that are made up session by session consistent, and they know that the more they telegraph their intentions to me, the better the game will be. If they want to do something wild, like steal a car and drive 50 miles to go to a house they haven’t seen in 5 sessions, they message me during the week to be like, “Hey, I think Dunya wants to do this.” and I’m like, great, thanks for letting me know. Now something cool will happen when you do.
I think a lot of inexperienced DMs have the wrong idea about what ‘DM omniscience’ is supposed to look like. if I introduce something to them - say if a PC has a strange note slipped to them that says Do we find in you a friend of the Old Believers? - the players need to believe that they can interact with this note in any way possible, and the world will respond consistently. They need to believe that the Old Believers are a real group of people that they can deal with in any way they can think of. They need to believe that whoever sent this note had a logical reason for doing so. They need to believe that if they ask, “hey, wait a minute, what about X?” in any respect in regards to the note, I will have an immediate answer, and that the answer will be consistent with the rest of the world as they have experienced it.
DM omniscience does not mean that if they all just randomly get on a plane to Singapore, they should reasonably expect me to have a session’s worth of content waiting for them there. They can go to Singapore. They absolutely can go to Singapore. The rest of our time this evening is now us having a conversation about why you went to Singapore, and what you hope to achieve while you are there, and then you all go home and I get a week to create that content.
If my players walk into a bar, I describe a couple of likelies for them to talk to, and they go “who else is here?” - wanting to talk to a person I haven’t created yet - I turn it back around on them. What kind of person are you looking for? It’s a crowded bar, there are like 200 people here. Are you looking for a man, a woman, someone young or old, someone playing cards, what are you hoping to achieve? I don’t have 200 people locked and loaded. My players know that. They don’t believe that they could line up everyone in this bar and talk to each and every one of them and get their life story. And they know it would be incredibly antagonistic of them to try. They know that what they CAN do is tell me what they want, and why, and then they can talk to that person.
like, this whole exercise is collaborative. if your players want maximum choice, that means they need to give you guidance. you’re not a mind reader, and you’ve got a life to live outside of the game.
it’s not a big deal to tell your players that they can do anything they want, so long as they tell you what that is.
All of this! This is wonderful knowledge.
