#jd&d

[keplercryptids]

scum and villainy is a great game. just gave a pc a level 1 harm "bad haircut."

[keplercryptids]

the thing about running my silly little d&d game is that it has fundamentally changed me and my life forever, for the better.

[keplercryptids]

related to my last post, but a bit snarkier: i think a lot of ttrpg players confuse "my character has a lot of secrets" with "my character is interesting." and it often plays out in an opposite way. keeping secrets means that your character is only interesting to you. other people can't be interested in your character if they don't know anything about them! furthermore, your character is only as interesting as what plays out at the table, and way more can play out if the players aren't keeping narrative secrets from one another.

[keplercryptids]

i hate when i come up with a dope idea for a ttrpg session at 10pm the day before the game, bleeegghhh

[keplercryptids]

running a ttrpg session tonight that i've literally been thinking about for two years. nbd!!!!!

[keplercryptids]

scum & villainy (and blades in the dark, its ttrpg dad) are intended to be played with one job per session. the books even say "you can do more than one job per session once you get the hang of it!" and i have even, in the past, ran blades this way. but IMO for a longer, more character-driven campaign, that would honestly feel like a breakneck pace, with very little room for character development or roleplay. and so i have no intention of running my new campaign (choir) with a job every single session.

both games have three distinct parts: free play (where PCs can freely explore, roleplay with other characters, etc - the bulk of how many people play ttrpgs), the job/score (specific mechanics for pulling off a heist), and downtime (again, mechanically significant: where the PCs heal, recover from stress, work on long-term projects, etc).

and i like this delineation between free play, jobs, and downtime, but i want to implement more roleplay into all three parts, and i want most of the campaign to take place in free play. that's just more my style. again, i don't think this is necessarily what the system intends for a gm to do, but! too bad!

so far, the pace of choir is shaping up to be more like: free play, job, free play, downtime, free play, job over the course of 4 sessions or so, and i think it's a pace i'll keep going for the remainder of our time with scum & villainy.

[keplercryptids]

listen, sometimes the pcs have been casting divination for weeks with regard to an upcoming attack on the city and they started getting cryptic answers to their questions and meanwhile they have to attend a noble's party and they're all very suspicious about something going down there, even though you know that nothing of note is actually going to happen at the party, so you serve smoked herring to the guests (because when you smoke herring......it turns red) and none of the players pick up on it because sometimes the little joke in-game is just for you the dm lmao

[keplercryptids]

i remain plagued and haunted by the fact that all the detailed, custom, esoteric bullshit i prep for my ttrpg campaigns will live and die within my small group, simply because it would need far too much explanation to share widely. thus, my genius will only be truly known to a select few. please know that i run really cool campaigns, okay. i just can't tell you much about them because we'd have to be here all day.