#dungeon master things

[themistboundtable]

Thinking about that time I ran an in-person Ravenloft game, and I told everyone that next session they had to come up with a gift for Mother Night, if they wanted to be able to reach out to her. This was a part of their big plan, so I was interested to hear what they'd come up with.

Next session a player came in lugging a barrel of utz cheeseballs and set it down in front of me and yelled "I BESEECH THEE MOTHER NIGHT" then went and sat down.

^ one of these

I said that one of the other plans had been the thing to do it, but this was the equivalent of rolling a 19 so

[pearlofthepitt]

I'm a DM and my players give each session a title at the end of the evening. In the last 2 hours or so (in game time) this is how the mood has shifted:

Session #2: 4/20: Kobold Diplomacy: Friends, Not Food

Session #3: 5/4: "I don't like Kobolds. They're coarse, and rough, and irritating, and they get everywhere."

Session #6: 6/15 Kobold Genocide Part 1

[sapphic-tadp01e]

hear me out. instead of god's blood being gold or some magic color. what if it contained no iron, since gods technically do not require oxygen like mortals do. what if it smelled like peat or rotting earth.

[stick-or-treat]

kind of honest pro tip for becoming a better dungeon master: run a one-on-one campaign for a good friend or your partner or your sibling or something.

you'll learn

how to prepare a lot of content very quickly - having only one player means there isn't a ton of interparty chatter or debating how to storm the castle, so content goes by faster.

how to cater content to fit your PCs - with only one PC, they're essentially a Main Character, and it feels weird to send them through content that doesn't tie into their goals or backstory.

how to balance encounters - it is so unbelievably easy to kill a single PC so you get the hang of action economy real quick, especially if you start at a low level.

how to play and run lots of NPCs - not only do you run side characters and monsters, but you may also play a few complex NPCs to help simulate an adventuring party.

how to run combat quickly - again if you are both the monsters AND most of an adventuring party, you have to go fast otherwise it's just you playing against yourself for like 30 minutes at a time.

how to delegate tasks - giving your player some NPC stat blocks to run for you in combat, asking your player for details about the world, working together to decide what "shared" NPCs would do.

how to roleplay real good - you're the ONLY person your player has to interact with, so you'll get a lot of practice driving the plot through NPCs and setting details in a way they'll latch on to.

and if you want to go to DM boot camp like I did, find a player who:

loves combat but also wants to play a fancy noble who avoids combat by rolling Persuasion when at all possible - you will get very good at coming up with non-traditional encounters like stage play combat, fights with heavy social elements, and how to move them into situations where talking just isn't going to help.

loves all monsters, is tired of human-centric stories, and hates the trope of "this entire species is evil therefore you are justified in killing them on sight" - you get really good at quickly modifying modules and encounters to have less humans and way more complex depictions of monsters and monster races.

thinks you're cool and likes watching you create stuff - ok this one is just nice, it's very heartwarming when you apologize for taking so long for your NPCs to take their turns and your player is like "no I love it!! I'm just watching the drama like (⚆ᗝ⚆)"

anyway thank you for attending my Ted Talk

[thetinyscald-blog]

Ran a Pathfinder Scenario recently for which I drew most of the maps and sprites, just to try few new things. Mostly isometric perspective as well as those visual-novel esque dialogues you see here. The later was very handy for me to show which NPCs is currently talking.

[deryn-the-goblin]

On the subject of Castle Avernus

The architect should be fired.

Into the sun.

Like, I found an actual map of the place from one of the AD&D? 3.5? dunno but the quality was Not Great? adventures and I am having a devil of a time getting my head around how the weird central round towers work. Not helped by the isometric view of the original poster map.

I may have to draw the dang thing on tracing paper, layer by layer, to turn it into something moderately useful.

Since I am insane enough to think that might actually be a Good Idea despite it being objectively not since we may not even need a comprehensive battle map...

would any other DMs be interested in a, like, good quality map of Castle Avernus if I manage to create one?

[castawavy]

ur looking at one of the top 0.05% of The Japanese House listeners 

[nixotinix]

tell me the dnd stories

Hoo ok this was the last thing I expected to get in my inbox but ty!

There was that one time our rogue was hiding behind a tree but she talked out of turn. I had her roll a persuasion check to convince the bad guy that she was a tree. Nat 20. So the bad guy just went "yeah ok" and kept fighting the cleric. That's the only Nat 20 my players have got so far in the campaign, and it was on the tree check.

Then there was that time where both PCs (the players are brother and sister, btw) lied and said that they were on their honeymoon since our rogue was in a wedding dress. They still need to return that dress and pay the damage fee.

And then our rogue, who is the source of all chaos in this campaign, tried to convince a king that she was his long lost first cousin twice removed. Didn't work, obviously. She was wearing a burnt and stained wedding dress.

Then, in a puzzle room to get the second check, the players (plus the npc that was helping) were in a room full of mirrors that they needed to look into to find where to put specific items. The cleric saw a few pressure plates on the bookshelves, but didn't know what to do. So he turns to me, the DM, and says "I break the mirrors." And, if you remember, they needed those mirrors to progress. So I looked at the player with the most dumbfounded look I've ever made in my life and just said "you. You needed those mirrors."

Oh and there was that one time that the rogue failed all her death saves so she died but some random adventurer came along and looted her corpse so we just changed the name and used the same character sheet

Oh also. Our rogue's last name is Quesadilla.

We've only had 2 sessions so far but we're meeting back up in a week or so so look forward to more of those lol