No, like you’re part of some tech-bro cult. Which is worse, I will point out. Rejection of the current status quo doesn’t mean we want a WORSE status quo.
And we already have plenty of people in the current establishment who want to pay their employees with something other than actual money. We call those people scumbags. At least being paid in exposure isn’t bad for the environment.
This seems like pretty bad advice.
The poster seems to assume that just being near content is the same as engaging in it, even if they don’t know what to look for. They seem to think rumours aren’t hooks. They seem to think that everyone who goes to Waterdeep is equally likely to get involved in political schemes and a treasure hunt.
My suggestion? Tell the players what the hook is. Then, make sure the characters they make fit the hook. If the hook is a mutual friend, make sure they all know the guy. If the hook is a job posting, make sure they’re all looking for work.
Bonus points for having multiple hooks. Either you can move players towards the one that fits best, or you can give them options in which hook to focus on.
It’s part of the reason I love running heists: the players are the ones doing most of the planning.
So, like usual then?
If it’s a new game, I start off with a basic adventure I always have tucked away. A good starter adventure is a lifesaver sometimes.
If it’s an ongoing game, then we probably have stuff we were still doing? Just recycle the prep from last time wherever possible and play for time. “Oh, yes, you have the treasure from the depths of the dungeon, but now your rivals have seized the place and you need to fight your way back out! Totally not just doing this to reuse the dungeon map.”
If it’s an ongoing game and we just had a good cutoff point? Thank god that player just arrived. Ask them what they’re expecting will happen this session, nod sagely at their guesses and work from that. “Oh, you’re hoping you’ll fight that cult sometime soon? You never know, it might come up sooner than you think!”
Everything else is just good prep advice. Keep generic NPC templates and tokens you can use for anything. Use a whiteboard for any maps you need. Give your players control of the plot so you don’t have to come up with it.
If you’re going to reply to me, at least pay attention to what I said.
At no point did I demonise casual styles of play. Beer and pretzels is a legitimate way to play, and it can be a ton of fun. If the point of the game is just to have some fun with a bunch of friends, you don’t need them to deliver monologues. They can just be there, rolling dice and making puns.
The more you invest into a campaign, the less work on the DM. Conversely, the less you invest into a campaign, the more work on the DM. And if the DM is fine with that, no problem!
But don’t for a second think that the dungeon just formed itself. Don’t think that all the combat encounters are a fun challenge for your unbalanced party by pure luck. Don’t assume this world is full of fun hooks for your character by random chance. And don’t assume that, just because the work was fun, it wasn’t work.
Don’t assume that spilling food on the carpet isn’t causing more work for the cleaners. Don’t assume your mother, who cooks as a hobby, wouldn’t delight at you offering to help peel potatoes at thanksgiving.
Don’t assume that, just because the DM picked up the slack, there is no slack.
It’s not casual play I condemn. It’s people who don’t appreciate the DM for working hard to make casual play happen.
No, there absolutely IS slack to be picked up. It’s by the DM. You get to have that fun, relaxed dungeon crawl because the DM busted their ass making it happen. Any work you put into your character’s backstory is work the DM doesn’t have to do themselves.
And it’s not a resentment thing. It’s fun to work on an adventure and balance things. I know, I like doing it myself. But don’t assume that just because YOU aren’t doing the work, nobody’s doing any work.
Okay, but you can only do that stuff because other people are picking up your slack.
Technically, it’s not an overdone trope. Because it’s hardly done at all.
In most folktales with a dragon as a villain, they either hoard wealth or hold a woman captive before eating her, rarely both. And they don’t even need to kidnap her, because she’s offered to the dragon as a tribute to avoid its wrath. And this isn’t even mentioning worldwide variations on dragon mythology.
This article is dumb. It claims that diversity among dragonkind is reductionist? No, what’s reductionist is claiming all dragons should be Smaug.
What are the essential parts of a dragon? There are literally none. The terrasque of myth had a lion’s head, turtle’s shell, scorpion’s tail and no wings, but it was still called a dragon. Eastern dragons are commonly wise sages and protectors. Artwork of Saint George has the dragon barely bigger than his horse.
Saying “all dragons have to be this specific thing” is terrible worldbuilding advice.
I would say that, if a system focuses on combat, it will contain combat. It doesn’t have to focus on it, but it does have to contain it, or you’ve wasted most of the system.
I would not argue that it relieves the GM from combat simulation. The GM still has to think through how the enemies would act, and how the current environment would work in the system presented. The presence or absense of combat mechanics does not permit or dissuade focus on narrative elements.
D&D has really limited our ideas of what an RPG can be. If a fight breaks out, you need to roll initiative, right? An adventure will contain combat, so you need a system in place to deal with it, right?
I recently bought a game called Golden Sky Stories where it dedicates only a paragraph to combat. You make an Animal test, then take a reputation penalty for being violent. That’s it. You don’t need to simulate it any more than you need to simulate cooking.
(Sidenote: Can someone make a cooking-focused RPG? It could be pretty interesting.)
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I just ran a Dragon Heist campaign, but I used the Alexandrian remix of it because it seemed interesting. Even then, I added some stuff I thought it needed and removed some stuff my players wouldn’t have been interested in. The ghost in Trollskull was nothing but a piece of set-dressing, as I knew they didn’t want to make a tavern.
I have never used a campaign module as written. I don’t know that I could. I started with homebrew adventures, and that’s what my mind adapted to.
I get an idea of the adventure module in my head as I read it, and then I fill in the idea by myself. I often think over, adapt, expand and rewrite aspects of the idea, making it something I feel I could portray to my players. Then I use the original adventure as reference to fill in the gaps during gameplay. The end result is my version of the adventure, which is like the same image drawn by a different artist: recognisable, but different in obvious ways.
The problem with the fediverse is that not enough people get how it works, so they don’t use it, so there’s not enough content, so there’s less incentive to use it. The benefits of the fediverse are that you can’t exploit and ruin something for everyone if there’s an alternative readily available for them to use instead, and the fediverse is BUILT on those alternatives.
The problem with web3 is it does nothing practical enough to justify its existence. The only people who found a use case for it just used it like stock shares, being something worthless that might be valuable if enough time passes. Calling it an alternative to money is absurdly naive at best, manipulative at worst.
Imagine if you had a boss who told you they would only pay you in company stock, and tried to say that it’s better than being paid money. That’s what this is.