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!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIKxk96ZFwg

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.

I have a list of setpieces I want to put in front of the players (an island that’s actually a giant turtle, a treasure hunt, being lost in the ocean in a rowboat, etc) and around the halfway point of the campaign I try to figure out a climactic finale to build to. But beyond that, I don’t plan beyond the next session. I just plan my sessions by recapping what happened last session, putting forward any consequences of that, and a little light prep for a couple of the most likely courses of action my players might take next. Maybe dropping in one of those setpieces if it seems to fit.

They can’t destroy the oil rig, because that would just release a ton of oil. And if they disable it, it will be relatively easy to repair. What real terrorists would do is cause an accident or a malfunction, then murder or kidnap the responders.

(I went to EMT school and it’s something they told us to be careful about, I swear I’m not a terrorist mister NSA man please don’t gitmo me)

Honestly, it’s a niche service for an already niche hobby. Why would I leave my house, where all my snacks, drinks, prepared game materials, minis, computers, and audio devices are, to come play at a noisy expensive card table somewhere else? It’s only really going to appeal to people who, for whatever reason, can’t play in anyone’s home, or aren’t welcome at the tables of anyone they actually know.

Keep it on-topic. This is not the place for flamewars about exactly how bad China’s human rights abuses are.

I used this, btw. It was great, they killed one of my players and he came back as a Shade, he’s a ghost pirate now.

Of course, if you know you have a seer in your party, you can plan ahead and come up with some prepared scenes. They don’t neccesarily have to be predicated on what’s going on near the players either; they could, for example, foresee the bbeg tormenting his captives - get some flavor about how evil he is, maybe some plot-relevant information to use later, but it doesn’t actually depend on which level of the dungeon they’re on or whatever. Obviously, this depends on the details of exactly what spells they’re using and in what system.

Crazy characters in general. It turns out mental illness makes it really hard to work collaboratively on stuff, who knew :/

People like to subvert tropes but don’t always understand those tropes and why the purpose they serve, so their subversions don’t necessarily serve a counterpurpose.