Morwen - The Bladesinger ☠️ Another Dungeons & Dragons commission completed! A very fun one too~ Feels good to be back to doing this stuff :3
$LAYYYTER
Cosmic Funnies

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Show & Tell
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

Kiana Khansmith

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

Janaina Medeiros
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NASA
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ojovivo

blake kathryn
dirt enthusiast
Stranger Things

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Sweet Seals For You, Always

Love Begins
styofa doing anything
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@gremlinvoidfish
Morwen - The Bladesinger ☠️ Another Dungeons & Dragons commission completed! A very fun one too~ Feels good to be back to doing this stuff :3
sorry to be a broken record every month but christ menstruation is a stupid concept. oooooh excuse me for not getting pregnant, why the fuck is there goo falling out of me about it? grow the fuck up and reabsorb that shit for nutrients.
at some point in your life you will be boiling fruit, water, sugar, and lemon juice in a pot to make a syrup or jam. the instructions will tell you to simmer for a certain amt of time. your timer will go off and you will look at the pot and go, "hm, this doesn't look thick enough. maybe i'll let it go for another 10 minutes." this is the devil speaking. it's only so liquid right now because it is at boiling point. it will thicken when it cools down. learn from the follies of my youth and do not let this happen to you
at some point in your life you will be making a sauce or a stew in which you need to add cornstarch to thicken it. and you will prepare a slurry of starch in cold water and think "this looks like way too little starch to thicken this amount of liquid." this is the devil speaking. cornstarch instantly polymerizes at 95°C and if you add too much it will turn into an impossibly thick goop.
at some point in your life you will be making some sort of cream based dessert that requires gelatin to thicken it. and you will soak some gelatin sheets in water and think "this is too few gelatin sheets for this amount of cream." this is the devil speaking. it will thicken in the fridge and if you add too much you will end up with milk jelly
at some point in your life you will be baking cookies. you will take the sheet out after twelve minutes as the recipe instructs and the cookies will still be glistening and soft. "these don't seem cooked enough," you will think to yourself, "i should place them back into the oven until their edges are nice and golden." this is the devil talking. this is how you get dry, overdone cookies. the cookies will continue to bake on the warm sheet for several more minutes and then harden up after sitting on a rack for a while. trust the process. trust the process.
at some point in your life you will be adding a small pasta to a soup and you will think "that is not enough small pasta." this is the devil talking. the pasta will absorb the stock and expand. this is how you end up with a soup that is a solid mass of soggy ditalini.
At some point in your life you will be adding garlic to a dish and you will think "that is not enough garlic." These are angels speaking. They are correct. Add more garlic.
So I've been DMing DND campaigns for several years now, and it's often interesting the conversations I'll have with players wanting to DM/the observation of discourse around Critical Role vs Dimension 20 and which is the "better" DND experience.
I will preface this by saying I don't actually watch either. I watched all of D20 Mentopolis, but I just couldn't get into any other season. Funnily enough, Mentopolis also doesn't even use DND as its system and I think that might have been part of why I enjoyed it? I'll get into it more later but listening to people having fun just isn't as appealing as being the one having fun. I don't think they're bad at DND or that you shouldn't enjoy it or whatever, I just can't sit through it.
Anyway. I just started a new campaign with some of the students I work with and figured I'd talk through the DM process I've been using and use this as a teaching tool for the broader internet (or as something you can read through if you like hearing DND war stories).
The first thing with DMing: so often I see students that come from Critical Role being like "oh here is all my expansive lore" and try to begin by dumping an encyclopedia on their players. Lore is good. But the joy of learning lore for many people is deep diving into episodes of the TV show/finding the secrets in the video game/watching behind the scenes footage. Not reading an encyclopedia. Have you lore and know your lore, but I would say the vast majority of people I've DMed for have just been overwhelmed at the prospect of needing to read an encyclopedia to be able to play a game, and so just decide they'll never play.
The solution to this is make a (at most) one-page document that functions as a glossary. One paragraph summary of factions that will be immediately relevant (core value, name of leader, geographical location), and then maybe key locations the party will unavoidable be at. Anything else should be learned through play. Then you still get to excitedly share your lore, but they're learning it at the rate they want to.
I played a campaign that to me felt like an encyclopedia opening, so I deliberately just said to my DM "I'm an eight year old orphan from a fairly isolated village, adopted by [another player], my character genuinely does not understand any of this, but as the story goes I will ask questions in-character to get explanations as they are relevant." This also meant that the players at the table who were overwhelmed now had someone who in-character could play catch-up and summarise the relevant lore in a way that was character growth (child learning about politics and the party trying to parent her) rather than pausing the game for exposition. I could play in a way I was comfortable with, but without derailing what the DM wanted to do.
The other thing though is some players play DND because they have this strong idea of a character. Some players really love coming up with a character that fits within the existing world you've made (they love encyclopedia dump DMs). Other players really hate it. They just want to be their Sparkle Dog OC. So although I have a strong sense of my lore, if it isn't in that one-page document or hasn't happened in-game yet, it's not canon.
I'm running a "monster of the week" style campaign where each session is designed to be self-contained due to players and availability being awkward (yay for adult life). The players got a map of the town with key locations, and then came up with their own characters. One of them wanted to be a cleric, and asked me how religion worked in the world. My response was "well what's going to work best for the character you want to play?" Because if I locked in an answer, and then the story ended up going in a direction where religion never came up at all outside of this character, then I could accidentally just ruin this player's experience because I got more attached to my world than to the game we're trying to play together.
And I say "if the story ended up going in a direction", because as a DM you can never be sure of what your players will do. As the DM, you're not (necessarily) making a story. You're making a world in which a story will take place. The other players are going to decide what is and isn't important. You can't tell your players how to have fun.
The other campaign I'm currently running did a "seven people from a small village that's never had any visitors leave to help the first visitor they've had in their living memory, only to learn that their village is cursed and everyone living there has their memory erased of anyone who steps foot outside the village." The idea being they'd help the merchant, the characters would make a wisdom saving throw to suddenly remember someone from their backstory (who they would get to make up), and then they'd return home and find out nobody remembers them and uncover this mystery. Or they could go to a nearby town to research why they're remembering people who they had forgotten about, but ultimately still end up going back to try and break the curse.
Instead they found an arena doing Fights to the Death, decided that these are morally wrong, and have come up with a scheme to become citizens of this nation to legally enter the Death Arena, challenge the head rulemaker to a battle, and legally kill him and take his place and end the Death Games. The amnesia "slowly adding to their backstory" premise has been completely dropped because the player's just don't care. They care about the goblin with a nasally voice that I just made up to make combat more fun (he was commentating on the conflict to help make the combat more engaging than just people rolling dice, the players found him really annoying, and then came up with the scheme).
Since they've decided "The Scraggler is bad", I thought about what the players had seen of this town. Which was very little. So... why not have the Scraggler actually be not just the Referee/Commentator of the Death Arena, but actually just... be a crime gang leader? They haven't seen his stat block yet. They've only seen him commentating. If the story they want to engage with is "Kill the Scraggler", my response is to make the Scraggler an interesting enough character to be killed and have it be narratively satisfying.
DMing isn't like video game narrative design where you can pretty heavily restrict the player's choices. So the ability to be flexible with lore help make a more compelling story overall as player choices now will always be meaningful. And as a DM I really like when players take things I've given them and build off of them. My two-year campaign started with an NPC who was supposed to exposit and then die, except instead he got saved by the cleric with Spare the Dying and the cowardly incompetent mercenary ended up becoming a key recurring NPC who would go on to have an off-screen heroic sacrifice to raise the stakes as the party found out that the noble they sent him off to plead with for help instead killed him, which they figured out later because they had become so attached to the character that when they met the noble and were told "Lambert ran away because the pressure of this war was too much", they were like "No... that's not like him. He is an awful fighter but he always insists on trying to help. What did you do to him?" and learned that this noble was plotting an evil scheme that Lambert was going to warn the party about. I couldn't have come up with that story arc of "incompetent but well-meaning mercenary ends up dying trying to send a message to the party", but he got it because the players gave it to him by constantly bringing him into their journey despite me trying to get rid of him. So his eventual death ended up meaning something instead of it just being an irrelevant plot death to kickstart the story.
The short of this is: if you want to DM but are afraid of the in-depth lore side of things... you actually don't need that. You can DM very capably with just an outline and an idea in your head, and then start locking in the canon as your players start exploring your world.
@hellsite-hall-of-fame @worldheritagepostorganization
is this the ORIGINAL?!???
oh holy shit i didn’t even know where this meme came from
OH MY ACTUAL GOD THE ORIGINAL
ORIGINALS ON THE ROLL
btw it's so fucking stupid you can be anxious physically in your body even after you've decided mentally you don't care. I'm supposed to be in charge here
[looking at people younger than me] you have your whole life ahead of you [looking at people older than me] you have your whole life ahead of you [looking at myself] its over
[looking at people younger than me] you have your whole life ahead of you [looking at people older than me] you have your whole life ahead of you [looking at myself] its over
boss makes a spider i make a slime. that's why i . thas why, tthats why i uhhh. t. thawhy
t.gats why i can't think up an end to the rhyme
GET BACK TO WORK
"we have to accept the fact that the r word is coming back" NO WE DONTTTT NO WE DONT
Don't forget Zevran!
Accidental dragon daddy
One of my favorite things about loving someone or developing a closeness or fondness towards someone is also loving and developing a fondness for the things they care about. When you learn to see the world in a new way, or you learn to appreciate the things you’ve previously overlooked, or they become your excuse to get into an interest you always thought was cool but thought you didn’t have time for. When a connection makes your world bigger and warmer and fuller and more beautiful.
A dwarf goes to a very famous and experienced blacksmith and shows him a diagram. "Can you build something like that?" "Sure, but what is it?" "A machine made by humans, called a Harley Davidson motorcycle."
One of my favorite things about loving someone or developing a closeness or fondness towards someone is also loving and developing a fondness for the things they care about. When you learn to see the world in a new way, or you learn to appreciate the things you’ve previously overlooked, or they become your excuse to get into an interest you always thought was cool but thought you didn’t have time for. When a connection makes your world bigger and warmer and fuller and more beautiful.
lets lay down with baby
lets lay down with mama
lets lay down with mama
lets lay down with mama
lets lay down with baby
lets lay down with mama
lets lay down with mama
lets lay down with mama