Sometimes that can be fun, but only if everyone at the table is onboard for a wild tangent. If the other players are bored as shit while the special snowflake starts a unicorn breeding operation, it’s time to use that No. And you, the DM, are included in that too; if your players want to drag you off to write every book in the library and that’s not fun for you, you have the right to say “hey maybe you should play the game I made for you instead.”
You decide that if an when the players make it a priority with their choices.
Addendum to the “Are you sure you want to do that” bullet: if a player ever does something that seems nonsensical to you, ask them what they expect to achieve by doing that. Understanding their motivation is often what resolves the miscommunication and/or allows you to steer them towards a better way to do what they’re trying to do.
There are a couple ways to get auto-generated transcripts from youtube (eg https://www.howtogeek.com/793947/how-to-get-the-transcript-of-a-youtube-video/ ), but there are enough errors and bad UI that I find reading them to be more miserable than just watching the video.
I like to fully improvise games in Digital Shades
Hi. I’m sorry, this looks like a legitimately great book, but we only allow self promotion from active users. I am removing your post, but if you are interested in becoming a member of our community, you would be welcome to post 1 self-promo per week in the future.
Not a very high quality article. Makes constant reference to “faction and domain play” without adequately defining the terms for someone that didn’t grow up with them. (Presumably, the target of the article.) And a lot of typos.
I like to use the weird spells that players rarely take due to being less than optimal. That way they still get to use them situationally, without having to “waste” a slot.
The exception is when there’s a particular story reason for a certain type of item to crop up; for instance, a group of assassins hunting a powerful mage might have a lot of dispel and antimagic type things.
I didn’t overlook it, I specifically used the term “plagued” in reference to that.
And America wasn’t actually empty frontier, either. It was full of the native people that had been living there since time imemorial, and the ex-europeans slaughtered and plagued their way through.
I don’t know who Shelyn is but I love their lil gay bird
Battlemaps are good if you’re going for a swashbuckling or strongly tactical feel. I like to say ‘your players can’t swing from the chandelier if they don’t know there’s a chandelier.’
Battlemaps are great for a certain aesthetic (in the the game design sense of the word) because they allow you to add things for players to improv with without explicitly enumerating a static set of options. If you draw the inside of a tavern, when the tavern brawl breaks out they may do something that surprises you; “Can I throw the bottles at him/flip over the table/dive behind the houseplant/throw him out the window/etc” Whereas theatre of the mind requires your player to either intuit that there would be a bottle on the table that they could throw, or you to explicitly say “and there’s a bottle on the table in front of you.” And if you tell them there’s something in front of them, they will laser focus on it and never even think to flip the table/dive behind the houseplant/etc.
Theatre of the mind is good for games that put the emphasis elsewhere. If the focus of your game is on entrigue, or courtly drama, or in a setting that’s highly improvised, that’s when theatre of the mind shines.
What was the game
Ooh, I will have to check that out for my own game, thanks!
Pointy Hat had a great video on this subject!
3 weeks to do real life shit, 4 days to procrastinate, and 3 days to hurriedly slap everything together :P
I don’t schedule a game if I’m not going to be prepared
I like to start with some kind of action that also gives the group a reason to work together. Eg the inquisition drags you all out of your beds in the night and chains you together, or (in the game where everyone was a werewolf) you’re out in the woods hunting and this deer can run faster than you, how do you work together to take it down, or you’ve all been pressganged to work on some evil bastard’s ship, what do you do about it. That kind of thing.
I vaguely aim for 1 combat encounter and one social or puzzle per session, but it mostly comes down to what the players decide to do.
Mhhh…I believe in the right tool for the right job. So there isn’t really an ideal system, for instance, just the best system for what I’m trying to accomplish in a given game.