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My party is about to enter a post office that has been slightly pulled into the Feywild and I need some quick post office-related jokes, riddles, or puzzles to throw in their dumb faces while they traipse around fighting animated mailboxes.
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Oct 12, 2018 02:38
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Have you read the Discworld book 'Going Postal'?
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Oct 12, 2018 02:56
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Keeshhound posted:No, you do the opposite: take everything you HAD planned to go elsewhere, and move it into their path. So very much this. They hared off after a dragon, so now whatever you had planned is (at least a part of) a vital step towards defeating that dragon.
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Oct 12, 2018 03:29
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Imagined posted:Have you read the Discworld book 'Going Postal'? No but it sounds like I should cliff's notes it pronto. AlphaDog posted:So very much this. They hared off after a dragon, so now whatever you had planned is (at least a part of) a vital step towards defeating that dragon. Have them run across the charred remains of a level 3-4 party that was also chasing after the dragon. It did not go well for them, but your PCs can easily defeat the dragon if only they have macguffin from whatever you had planned for them to go to next
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Oct 12, 2018 05:15
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Imagined posted:OK, so I introduced some hints of a thing that I only meant to foreshadow something to come much later in the campaign. My players were heading back to town and are generally cautious, I didn't expect them to go, "Ooh what's that??!" and immediately drop everything they were doing to investigate the foreshadowing right that second. They're not really ready for it, even! As they follow in the dragon's wake and plow through the forest or some poo poo they come upon a clearing with a few natural stones poking up through the soil. A shed scale seems to have fallen as the dragon passed, and embedded itself in the largest rock. It looks to be completely unharmed. Nothing they do can even scratch it. So what were you planning to do with that dragon again? (Absolutely let them take the scale with them. If somebody wants to get it made into a shield or something, respect that. Eventually, when they have found things that are capable of harming the scale, they'll know that they're ready.)
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Oct 12, 2018 06:10
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Imagined posted:This isn't what happened, but imagine I have a party of level 3-4 players, and for foreshadowing and flavor I describe how a huge dragon sweeps across the sky above them while they're traveling somewhere else, and they watch as it heads miles to the east toward a mountain peak. Imagine my players then dropped everything and went trying to find that dragon right that second. 
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Oct 12, 2018 06:56
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My Lovely Horse posted:and this is why you always give the actual situation Dammit
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Oct 12, 2018 08:06
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Any suggestions for making combat feel more dynamic rather than a set of individual encounters - particular when in a house or dungeon where in the real world it's highly likely that brutal screams and loud noises you would expect to hear in combat would travel to other rooms. I'm findings its a weird balance between "you slaughter 3 of the thieves with massive explosions, broken tables and screams of pain...., loot the bodies, and open the door where you find 4 more members of the gang eating/sleeping/playing cards.." versus "the enemy screams in pain, and 10 more rush from other rooms in the house to kill the entire party".. There's a number of encounters in Lost Mines of Phandelvar (I'm a new DM running a new group of friends through LMoP) where each room has a carefully designed encounter and there is minimal interactions between the rooms (or if they did react the difficulty of the encounter would overwhelm the players).
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Oct 12, 2018 12:34
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That's classic D&D. The ogre who's scratching his balls in room 3a is always scratching his balls in room 3a even if you spend 10 minutes killing orcs in the next room. But obviously that's not what you're after, so I'm gonna ask you a question: If you're drinking and kicking back and playing boardgames and there's a crash and a scream from out the front (or was it the back?) how long before you start moving? How long before you figure out which way to go? How long before you get to the front yard? Hell, if you're really drinking and carrying on, will you even notice? If you're sleeping, how long to roll out of bed, find your sword, and start moving? How much longer to figure out where exactly the noise came from? How long to move? How far do you look before you go "gently caress it, bad dream"? If you regularly heard screams down the hall, would you even react? I lived for years across from a police training place, and police yelling POLICE DON'T MOVE IF YOU MOVE I WILL SHOOT YOU DON'T MOVE LIE DOWN ON THE GROUND LIE DOWN OR I WILL SHOOT YOU didn't even loving register to me after about 2 months, which is somewhat concerning but goes to show that you can tune out basically anything. Where am I going with this? Rounds in D&D are 6 seconds long. Not each turn, the whole round. Fights are often over in 5-6 rounds. 30 seconds. Half a minute. If you were taking a crap when one started outside the toilet door, it'd be over before you finished getting your pants back up. It's only a problem if the players want to take 15 minutes loving around between fights. You don't have to swarm them all at once with everything, but yeah. The guys from the next room will turn up, but not in 6 seconds or even 18 seconds. e: Sorry posted early. So yeah, the bad guys in the next room show up, not immediately, but they do. The bad guys from 3 rooms away might not show up at all, depending on what's going on. The bad guys from 5 rooms away have the "did you hear something" "yeah nah" talk. The bad guys on the next floor don't even notice. One of the problems with the whole thing is that current D&D makes players want to take an hour long rest after every loving fight, and that's dumb in nearly every possible way. My groups pace resting to the action - you get a short-rest refresh every 2 fights and a long-rest refresh at the end of the section. For a kick-the-doors-and-kill-'em-all scenario, short rests are like 10 second breathers and a (6+ encounter) section is over in 10 minutes. For an overland journey, short rests are every few days when you get a particularly comfortable campsite, and (6+ encounter) section is over in 3 weeks. Some groups will hate that, others will love it, but it's no "less realistic" than the idea that professional sword fighters have to have an hour's lie-down after sword fighting for literally 30 seconds. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 13:02 on Oct 12, 2018 |
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Oct 12, 2018 12:49
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Talking is, obviously, a free action, and exists in anime non-time.
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Oct 12, 2018 12:56
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sc0tty posted:Any suggestions for making combat feel more dynamic rather than a set of individual encounters - particular when in a house or dungeon where in the real world it's highly likely that brutal screams and loud noises you would expect to hear in combat would travel to other rooms. I'm findings its a weird balance between "you slaughter 3 of the thieves with massive explosions, broken tables and screams of pain...., loot the bodies, and open the door where you find 4 more members of the gang eating/sleeping/playing cards.." versus "the enemy screams in pain, and 10 more rush from other rooms in the house to kill the entire party".. Or: take inspiration from 4E's Lair Assault games where the whole dungeon is one big and hard encounter. As soon as you start a fight in one room, the whole house gets moving. Make this clear to the players and characters in advance, budget encounters accordingly, give them opportunities to turn the tables in their favour through preparation or let them take out two or three initial enemies through stealth (but not so many opportunities as to allow them to completely partition the assault into smaller encounters), and it makes for a nice change of pace.
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Oct 12, 2018 13:33
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Now that I'm not on my phone some more input on this:Imagined posted:OK, so I introduced some hints of a thing that I only meant to foreshadow something to come much later in the campaign. My players were heading back to town and are generally cautious, I didn't expect them to go, "Ooh what's that??!" and immediately drop everything they were doing to investigate the foreshadowing right that second. They're not really ready for it, even! But yeah: it's super cool when you can engineer these moments of foreshadowing, but sometimes it just doesn't work out. Be happy it didn't work out because your group zeroes in on the plot hook, and not because they fail to pick up on your subtle clues. They've got something they want to pursue now, and obviously they didn't feel it could wait until later.Other than that I'd go with the advice given: they can identify the task more or less clearly, but it turns out to be too difficult for them right now, or some other factor keeps them from handling things immediately. Going with your example, there also might be all manner of things on the way to a mountain miles away: mysterious ruins, villages that need help, chasms with broken bridges, the mountain itself... and while they're handling those, they keep catching glimpses of that dragon and clues what he's up to up there.
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Oct 12, 2018 13:43
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About to run a halloween-themed horror oneshot. PCs are going to have to search through a haunted mansion to find the macguffins needed to activate some plot device. Once the plot device is activated, the PCs are sent to the shadowfell version of the mansion, where they have to do the same thing in order to escape, except now it's much deadlier and they're being stalked by an unbeatable shadow monster. The monster stalking them is something I'm having difficulty figuring out. How do I decide when to move it from room to room? How do the PCs escape from it if it finds them?
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Oct 15, 2018 03:27
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Horror movie cliches, and Scooby-Doo running. Particularly panicked fleeing can result in rolling for the random room they end up in. Ooh, idea: the shadow monster isn't too friendly with the mansion's other inhabitants either, and the party frequently finds corpses killed horror movie style if they dawdle long enough.
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Oct 15, 2018 04:24
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Steal the titanfall/dishonored 2 mechanic and let them jump between worlds
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Oct 15, 2018 04:36
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There are extra macguffins in the shadowfell version, behind especially nasty traps/rooms. Trade a macguffin for an instant escape, or play silly games and risk a macguffin for a chance to escape. Have a round-robin of memorable experiences that flesh out the PCs at the start of the session. Have some symbolic item from each of these experiences get spread around the shadowfell mansion. If there was a stage three I would have a doppleganger show up for each character that lost/gave up their symbolic item. Or the shadow monster could start out tough but simple and gain complexity, like a signature move from every stolen item. The shadow monster should advance every time they want a short rest or take a long time futzing around with something. Make sure to have obstacles that can be overcome slowly but surely, and to make the monster scary enough that they almost never take this option.
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Oct 15, 2018 04:42
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Tetracube posted:About to run a halloween-themed horror oneshot. PCs are going to have to search through a haunted mansion to find the macguffins needed to activate some plot device. Maybe have it only move from outside the house? Or only a portion of it can fit through the windows? Some kind of shadow giant that can stick it's hands through the windows, and grab at the PC's, so they can dodge it or hide in cupboards and such? Would also allow it to threaten multiple rooms at once but only on one side of the house. Or have enough hallways and doors in the house to re-enact your average scooby doo chase. Maybe you could have doors that when opened from the hallway always lead to the same rooms, but when opened from the room itself they go to a random door in the halls?
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Oct 15, 2018 13:12
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Have them expect a big boss fight at the end of the Shadowfell version, but it turns out the haunt is hosting a monster mash there. So there's a ballroom filled with a ridiculous number of spooky monsters and the murderhobos, all blood-soaked from previous encounters and somehow able to jump between the real and shadow plane have to pass as some minor spooks. Gathering info in the shadow plane to manipulate the mansion in the real world in order to ruin the party, therefore getting the haunts to GTFO. Also, to provide both flavor and any limits necessary to make your enounters work, have them be able to traverse the two planes via mirrors in the mansion.
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Oct 15, 2018 13:27
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Have a maze of doors but once you've gone through a door it's locked for two rounds
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Oct 15, 2018 13:55
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BTW Against the Giants which is an extremely early set of 3 AD&D tournament modules (it introduces the Drow, that's how early we're talking here) does have specific callouts to which monsters from which areas will reinforce others if they hear fighting. The "dial a dungeon" monsters who sit around scratching their nuts until you kick the door down didn't become a thing until later OR if you rolled on a random table to generate the dungeon in real-time as the players traversed it.
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Oct 15, 2018 18:44
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Hey, we starting how gming a game, how can i make sure my players aren't breaking rules? (hate to be a rules lawyer but i don't want it to be unbalanced)
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Oct 16, 2018 19:51
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Every time someone does something stop and think to yourself “would this be less fun if it turned into a debate about rules?” And if the answer is yes then don’t have a debate about rules. Let the fun dictate the gameplay. The rules are a framework for the fun. Don’t let the rules get in the way of the fun.
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Oct 16, 2018 19:55
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:BTW Against the Giants which is an extremely early set of 3 AD&D tournament modules (it introduces the Drow, that's how early we're talking here) does have specific callouts to which monsters from which areas will reinforce others if they hear fighting. The "dial a dungeon" monsters who sit around scratching their nuts until you kick the door down didn't become a thing until later OR if you rolled on a random table to generate the dungeon in real-time as the players traversed it. That whole series was pretty great, kill some giants, go underground, fight lloth, what's not to love
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Oct 16, 2018 20:20
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You kinda have to trust your players not to break rules, kinda like how you have to trust them not to swipe your keys and joyride your car into a lamppost while you're in the can. If a player is cheating, it'll become obvious pretty quickly -- that's the point at which you have a talk with them like an adult.
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Oct 16, 2018 20:45
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Whybird posted:You kinda have to trust your players not to break rules, kinda like how you have to trust them not to swipe your keys and joyride your car into a lamppost while you're in the can. If a player is cheating, it'll become obvious pretty quickly -- that's the point at which you have a talk with them like an adult. Yeah, if you're all new to this maybe give everyone a quick reminder before you start that it's a cooperative game, not a competitive one, but otherwise it shouldn't be an issue. You're more likely to run into people who want to use the rules in unanticipated ways than actually try to directly violate them.
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Oct 16, 2018 20:51
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Also having a baseline understanding about rules arguments, it's better to make a call and change it later (with maybe a free goodie to a disadvantaged player) rather than let play get bogged down too much.
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Oct 16, 2018 23:36
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Fruity20 posted:Hey, we starting how gming a game, how can i make sure my players aren't breaking rules? (hate to be a rules lawyer but i don't want it to be unbalanced) If a rules question comes up in play, make a temporary ruling to keep things moving and not get bogged down, make a note of it, and check the actual rule later. If it doesn't work the way you thought it did, mention it to your players at the beginning of the next session (or after a break) and use the rule from then on. If something is actually strong enough to break the game, you'll notice because the other players (and if it's really bad, even the player using it) will start to get bored; if the broken thing isn't actually how the rules work, or if it takes a particularly strained interpretation, talk to the player about it and make a consistent ruling about how it's going to work in the future. If it is how the rules work -- well, broadly speaking, I'm against kneejerk bans or changes, but if it really and truly meets the above criteria (so good it makes the game boring for everyone) then you should probably houserule it away. Try to avoid games where this is necessary in the first place, and try to avoid nerfing things without seeing how they work at the table -- don't base decisions on vague sensibilities. In any case where you change how something works, let your players change their build if they're affected. (And honestly, very few games are actually disturbed or broken by generous respecs, period.) Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Oct 17, 2018 |
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Oct 17, 2018 00:12
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Basically whenever there is an issue talk to your players like adults who want to have a fun time with other adults.
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Oct 17, 2018 06:18
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that should really be the thread title.
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Oct 17, 2018 08:40
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dreadmojo posted:Basically whenever there is an issue talk to your players like adults who want to have a fun time with other adults. actually just kinda do that even if there isn't an explicit issue. after each session or maybe every other session ask your players how they're feeling about the game what they like and what they don't
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Oct 17, 2018 12:24
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I've been running Curse of Strahd in 5e, having a blast, but we're on a break right now while my other friend DMs a different game. I've got a scenario that's come up that I'd like some ideas for so that I'm prepared when it comes time for me to DM again. Vague spoilers for CoS follows: In Vallaki there is an individual who is running a cult. My party defeated the individual however they latched on to the idea that there are more cultists hiding about town. How do I make it fun for them to investigate and track down the rest of the cult? I don't want to spend more than a session on this as they are all ready to move on from Vallaki but feel obligated to follow this thread in their quest to make Vallaki a not terrible place to live. When they do find the cultists, what kind of encounter would you design for 4 level 5 characters? The fight with the original cult leader ended in like 2 or 3 turns after a good Shatter spell by the Warlock hosed up the whole room, which is awesome but it'd be nice to have a more exciting battle.
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Oct 18, 2018 17:32
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Epi Lepi posted:I've been running Curse of Strahd in 5e, having a blast, but we're on a break right now while my other friend DMs a different game. I've got a scenario that's come up that I'd like some ideas for so that I'm prepared when it comes time for me to DM again. Something to do with magical flyers around the town that gently caress up peoples heads, put them together and you can work out where they were made, go there and you find the cult?
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Oct 18, 2018 19:08
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dreadmojo posted:Something to do with magical flyers around the town that gently caress up peoples heads, put them together and you can work out where they were made, go there and you find the cult? Oohh I can work with that. Maybe magical flyers that read one way to the regular townsfolk and another to the cultists to try to set up a mass sacrifice or something. Maybe because the Warlock PC has a pact with a devil she can see the versions of the flyers the cultists can. The Warlock PC hasn't admitted to the party that she's a Warlock, she just calls herself a mage, but my player has been wanting to figure out a way to out the backstory and this could be it.
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Oct 18, 2018 20:47
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Can the PC's be wrong? I'm planning through a sort of low stakes session zero type thing to give the players some familiarity with the system before the big bad steps in, which will basically revolve around some short side quests in a forest. One if these encounters involves stumbling across an old spirit in a cave, that says it was sealed there by a cult. Tracking the cult down will lead to a small temple and group of acolytes that will explain its a sealed demon, and it regularly attempts to trick adventurers into coming to the temple to try to kill them, which they are quite sick of as it happens. (Players of Arcanum may notice sone similarities) The idea is the demon is significantly weakened after centuries of being sealed, still to powerful for a bunch of lowly acolytes but just to the point of being mildly challenging to a group of PC's just starting out. However, if the party misses the hints and goes straight to killing the acolytes, do I have to change things so that the acolytes are actually evil and the spirit isn't a demon at all, or am I allowed to go "That was some poor decision making" and put down some consequences for it?
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Oct 20, 2018 16:22
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That depends very strongly on your players and what kind of game they're expecting you to run (and what kind of game you want to run. That said, I'd lean towards having their screw-ups have consequences, but ones that they can fix once they realize them.
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Oct 20, 2018 16:42
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Personally I'd play up the consequences, now the party has to track down the demon, following the trail of devastation, cleaning up after all the damages.
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Oct 20, 2018 17:38
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OscarDiggs posted:Can the PC's be wrong? Uh, if the acolytes get people tricked by the demon coming in to kill them all the time, wouldn't they try to talk people down from killing them? Unless your PCs kill them all at one shot or by carefully isolating them, they should get the chance to say their piece. And then the PCs decide what they decide.
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Oct 20, 2018 18:19
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Glazius posted:Uh, if the acolytes get people tricked by the demon coming in to kill them all the time, wouldn't they try to talk people down from killing them? Unless your PCs kill them all at one shot or by carefully isolating them, they should get the chance to say their piece. And then the PCs decide what they decide. Yeah, that's the point. If the PCs kill the acolytes in one fell swoop without getting the chance to say "We're the goodies" do I change things so that they were actually the baddies all along, or should there be consequences for the PCs mistake. Hence asking, can the players be wrong. But for the most part it seems that, yes, they be wrong and as a GM I don't have to amend things so that they're always in the right.
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Oct 20, 2018 18:47
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You do have to provide a reasonable opportunity for the players to discover they’re wrong along the way, though. And being able to find out shouldn’t be gated behind rolls. Players are generally okay with consequences for their decisions; they balk when they feel like they’re being held accountable for things they could not have reasonably known or anticipated. That being said “reasonably known or anticipated” doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing to everyone, and at that’s the point you have to talk things over. Whether you then decide that the consequences need to played out, or back things up so the player can make a more informed decision, depends on how the disconnect came about, what sort of game you’re running, and who your players are.
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Oct 20, 2018 18:56
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 20:25 |
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I wanna talk soundtracks and background audio for a sec. I have a Sonos system set up in the room I play in, and I currently just put on some music that's something like the same genre as my game is, then turn the volume down so it's in the background. I'd like to up my game a bit - ideally I'd like to be able to do stuff like theme music for recurring villains, switch from non-combat to combat music tracks, maybe have specific background noise tracks for different locations. Is there an app or something I could get to make that easier? I GM on a laptop with my Android phone in my pocket, so either of those platforms are available. Ideally I'm thinking just a window with a bunch of buttons with labels like "Sauron", "The Blasted Heath", "Ship at Sea" and "Tavern" on it and I can just press one of those and get a looping track or set of tracks to play, with fade-out of the old track and fade-in for the new one.
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Oct 20, 2018 19:46
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