Role-playing games

Well I'm at least half way through this life and only short sighted so far, Ill take the risk

Well back to it anyway. I only have 3 nights to go and I'm just now starting.

I'm going to type up my notes though and print them off. Makes for things to be a bit neater I think. And I can put my speech-note-format knowledge from my college Communications classes to good use!

It's going quite well! It's only been an hour and twenty minutes and I have the first two hours of the game nearly done. I have the ideas at least, and so that makes it easier.

Last game ended on a (rather pathetically executed) cliff-hanger. They had just spotted a pirate-ship bearing down on them from the Southwest. I have multiple options plotted out for the party (Run, Fight, Surrender) and am statting up the pirate crew. It's a galley, so I can have galley-slaves chained to the oars down below which will be perfect if they go for the surrender or run options, because a heavy coastal fog will overtake the ship. I'm hoping this will lead to the PCs sneaking aboard the pirate ship, which they may spot through the murk, and having slaves to talk to will be excellent for RP.

Oh and the pirate captain is a were-rat. I'm going to have him transform into his rat-form if things get hairy and hopefully bite one of the party. You get to roll a DC 11 Con save for that to see if you become infected with lycanthropy, but I'm going to do it in secret without telling the players.  
Maybe I should look up what it takes to cure Lycanthropy? Naah, I can do that later.

And I also have a large cage in the middle of the galley that can be accessed from the deck above via a large grate. In this the pirates have captured some sort of horrible beast to which they feed whole goats and sheep, or the weakest galley-slaves when they run out of the former. I haven't decided between something with tentacles like a giant octopus, or something more slashey-bitey with fur. Both are good options I feel. Either way I don't want it to be sentient, if I can help it.

Anyway, needless to say I've pulled out of the doldrums now that I'm in the midst of creativeness. 

Oh and I'm definitely liking typing out the game notes instead of writing them by hand. I'm considerably faster this way and I can read print better than my handwriting, which makes me just a bit faster when I'm checking my notes at the table.

The only things I'm worried about are whether or not I should let the PCs become overwhelmed when the pirates attack. I mean, it's not like they would be able to defeat an entire ship of pirates at only level 2, but if I have them all knocked out and chained below in the galley I feel like they might think I was screwing them over too far. Actually now that I think about it I like the idea of chaining them down below in the galley very much indeed. 

Any suggestions for the beast in the cage? Or perhaps something relating to crew politics? This will only be the first-half of the game session (I think). So I'd better not go too far in-depth. 

Actually, now that I think about it, I should probably extend the pirate-sequence out to the end of the session. It will be thematically and episodically satisfying, and I can have them arriving at their destination at the beginning of the next session. Yes, excellent. The only problem is creating enough content to keep them busy for 4-5 hours. 

P.S.
I think the power is going to my head! I just put an Aboleth secretly latched on to the underside of the pirate-galley. 
One of the group's characters speaks Deep Speech, so I couldn't resist!

I just got back from our second game together.

I rather surprised myself with voices: they weren't all that hard to pull off in the end! I had a nice set of Australian-ish accents (I mean, I'm no actor! But at least I hit the "oi"s in "right" and the "egg" sound you get in "pan" and "man" and "ran" and so on). 

There was a lull in the middle of the session again though. I had the PCs captured, but did it in such a way that I sort of stepped out of the game for a second and asked if everyone was okay with it. 
This felt odd and I may have done better to just play out the overwhelming odds knocking them all out and capturing them, but this was something suggested on various forums on the question of "how to capture your PCs without making them feel terrible about it".

Oh so anyway, it was a bit awkward after the break, I guess because they felt a bit betrayed and I didn't have much dialogue prepared for that part. Still, there was a nice climactic battle at the end, one of the PCs was taken down in one hit by the pirate-captain after a Crit-and-hit double-attack ( ), so that was nice. And I did pretty well pulling off the Aboleth scene too!
I tried out a whispery strange evil voice that they seemed to react to quite well. 

One thing I did that I found incredibly helpful, was to prepare dialogue before-hand. It's surprisingly easy to insert three- or four-sentence speaking bits without the players interrupting. This was especially good at the end for the Aboleth. It makes sense, it adds drama and immersion to the scene, and it gives me a chance to adjust my voice to the character. So if the players carry on the conversation afterwards I can respond with the right voice.

So yes, two weeks until our next game, wherein they will finally get off the blasted merchant ship and onto dry-land!

P.S.
The half-orc barbarian was bit by the were-rat captain. I secretly rolled his Con save like I was planning and he failed it; he's got the lycanthropy and only I know it! 

P.P.S.
I also tried out a new style of combat description, in which you provide a short transition sentence between each player, and when the next round begins you re-set the scene. It worked pretty well.

P.P.P.S.
Obviously there's a lot of stuff I need to work on, but I feel better about my performance next time.

How goes the DMing? I love hearing how new DMs encounter and deal with problems - no DM thinks the same way, so it's always good to learn for others, especially new ones as they may look at it from a completely different way than more seasoned DMs.

So never worry about asking us for input, even if it's just to get an opinion of something etc. We get to learn from you just as much if not more than you get from us. Selfish aren't I?

Terribly selfish! Typical Scotshobbit...



The DMing goes well. My group doesn't meet again until this Saturday. I've just sat down after work to get started on my prep. for the next session.

I have a ways to go, but most of the general flow of things are as follows:

-The party will finish the sea voyage. I figured they deserved a break from combat encounters, so although they may discover the goblin stowaway I don't think I'll throw any more fighting surprises at them. 

-I do have the lycanthropy thing going on with the Barbarian player. I think I'll have him roll Intelligence checks in the mornings, and if he passes the DC his character will have remembered the troubling dreams from the night before. I thought this was a neat way of randomizing the nature of dream-recollection, which in stories is sometimes remembered and sometimes not. 
As for where this is leading, I think the next full moon will be a week out or so, perhaps longer. The dreams can increase in severity. There is a cure in the game rules. However, I liked my idea of a cure better, as it involved the gathering of wolfsbane, a silver dagger, and a ceremony at a consecrated druidic circle. Otherwise I suppose if worst comes to worst and noone realizes what's going on the night of the full moon will arrive and the character will transform. I guess we'll see!

-They wanted to go shopping, they said, and so the port settlement will contain some opportunities for that. I like the idea of bartering with the merchants. And perhaps at least one of them trying to rip them off. If done tastefully of course, as the players themselves hardly know anything of the accurate prices for things. 

-I have a kind of flow-chart in my head for what will happen once the party reaches the port-town. I wanted to give the town some things going on in the background, like social strife between different communities. Just something minor that I can bring to the forefront if I want at some point.
Otherwise, I have an idea for the lord of the town, who will receive the party in a kind of court. At the court waiting to be heard will be a group of halflings (or gnomes?) who have traveled north from their university of magic to cast spells of protection against summoning over the arctic creatures. In particular whales, as that was where my idea had come from originally. This might be a silly idea, but I liked it. It introduces an element of conservationism in a humorous sort of way. You know, like, "Save the Whales! From the Wizards of Faerun!"

The local lord can direct the party to a nearby camp of nomadic goliaths (this is the D&D name for a race of distantly part-giant-part-humans). This all ties in to the question of where the southern Lord Castor's son has gone, and should give the party some direction moving forward from here. "Quest-hooks" and so on. 
Anyway, I need to get to all of that. I will update with how things are going come Saturday night.

Random suggestion for when you come to do towns and cities- bylaws. Always good to have some local laws just in that town or village- maybe you cant carry concealed weapons, or maybe you can only carry concealed weapons, maybe they are religious and alcohol is banned, maybe its banned on certain sacred days of the week, maybe on the last Thursday of every month everyone wears a silly hat in honour of some local legend or other- anything really (you'd be hard pressed to beat real life for weird bylaws!) but it can help make a place feel more alive, give it a sense of unique history.

I was sick last weekend, so tomorrow I will finally be playing the session I've had prepared for a whole week now.  
I've not been able to come up with any good by-laws Petty. I have a simple Hall of Meduseld sort of "no weapons allowed in the Governess' stockade" rule, but that's not very creative.
Oh and I'm going to have a raid of orcs attempt to assassinate a chieftan with whom the party will be staying for dinner. I'm excited because it will be my first experience with monsters that use magic. One of the orcs is an "Eye of Gruumsh" meaning, basically, that he is a 3rd level orc cleric.

Stripping the players of any weapons or magic items is one of the best tools you can use, it's not uncreative, but it shouldn't be over abused. The more places that do it and nothing untoward happens the more okay they players will be when they find themselves with only their wits. Petty did this on a few occasions in his saga, mainly coz a couple of them were materialistic stat whores. Others were much more open to the idea of thinking.

Now that you are using magic using NPCs, time to make sure you really know your spells especially anything that counters them - your players may well come up with something by design or accident that can work. Treat your NPcs using magic the same as you treat your PCs so that there isn't any bias. Although now that I think about it, is it natural magic ie it's gaze turns you to stone, breath fire, eat bullets, and shit ice cream or is it learned magic, like spells and scrolls? Even a stupid monster will know when to best use it's 'powers' for maximum effect, but a stupid monster/NPC casting magic spells could well mess up.. Something to think about, and if the players can work out these things so much the better...

Sorry, I'm rambling

No worries.
I didn't actually make it to the bit with the orc attack; the players sidetracked themselves rather notoriously with horse-rustling! The party's half-orc helped to capture and then paid for the release of a stow-a-way goblin. Both of those plot turns grew out of unplanned encounters, and so I felt like I did a good job of rolling with the punches there.

There was still a... lull? Like a slow-point. Twenty minutes where I wasn't sure what to do because the players were messing things up and where they themselves didn't seem like they knew what they wanted to do.
It seems to happen every time. I suppose it's just part of the natural flow of things: like being excited to begin at the start, or being satisfied at the end.

As to the particulars of your question:
The spell-casting monster in question is an "Eye of Gruumsh" Orc. This is a bit like an Orc cleric, or shaman, and the spells available to said orc are fairly simple buff spells, Command. I forget. I may give it a Healing Word and a damaging cantrip, just to buff up the difficulty of the encounter now that the characters are level 3.

Son of a...
I just deleted a bunch of writing that I was really happy with. 

Ugh....
...
..

Screw it.

I hate it when that happens - these days if I realise the post is getting a bit long I highlight the text and quickly copy it and keep doing that till the end so if I do lose it for some stupid reason I will have at least most of it ready to instantly paste back in.

mMm, good thinking Petty.

If I plan on writing something really long, I write it elsewhere first, then copy it over. But of course you sometimes don't know.

Well I just had a doozy of a D&D game. I actually have a slight head-ache, but that might just be from the terrible traffic I encountered on the drive home.

Overall I think I did poorly this session. I had plenty of material prepared, but I forgot to put in enough connective stuff to direct the players to the abandoned fortress I had prepared. It wouldn't have taken much because the dungeon did hold something that they needed badly. In the middle of all my prep-work I just forgot to make it clear that the dungeon contained said thing. 
So when the time came, half of the party wanted to explore the fortress, while the other half didn't see the point. I didn't press this because I was tired and past caring which direction they wished to go. Instead they waffled around for like 10 minutes arguing awkwardly about what they wanted to do before leaving the dungeon behind and continuing their journey. This effectively cut out half of what I had prepared and the only interesting bits of loot (a scroll containing a spell chosen specifically by me for one of them, and a magical saddle). 

So after that I had to scramble to bring about the curing of the one player's lycanthropy. This worked out pretty well, and ended the game on a good note. 


The players were also very, very cautious earlier in the session. I understand why players are like that, and perhaps its a reaction to my DMing style, but it's pretty tedious sometimes. What's the WORST thing that will happen? Oh NO we might have to go and fight something. If only there was an ENTIRE BOOK of rules concerning combat and our characters!! Oh man we sure would hate to have to go through fighting something!  
To be fair, I've been having combat start with them being surprised by something most of the time. This must be making them over-cautious.


I'm going to have to talk to one of them before next game. He has a habit of replying to questions the players direct towards me. And he'll often make out-of-character meme-worthy comments about my DMing, or what another player is choosing to do. Sometimes it's welcome, but sometimes it's not. If I'm scrambling to re-organize things in the midst of the game when a player does something unexpected I'd rather be able to scramble madly without the player in question saying something like: "That's the look of a DM who's players just messed up his encounter!"

Well hey know-it-all, here's the look of a DM who doesn't want to hear it, so stuff it!

Forest Shepherd wrote:Son of a...
I just deleted a bunch of writing that I was really happy with. 

Ugh....
...
..

Screw it.

Undelete.

I'm about to get started on pre-work for my 7th D&D session!
I think I'm noticeably getting better at running the game, and my group has begun to build up some trust between the members, which is great. My game last weekend was the best yet: I had fun the entire time, and felt like I really outdid myself with improvising entertaining things on the fly. 

I figure next game I will have the party finally reach their destination, and the game after that will be one long epic dungeon/lair/final-final-boss battle thingummy with a white dragon and an epic escape at the end from a volcano by riding on clouds with, appropriately enough, the same cloud giants that the party encountered in the second episode.

I'm quite excited to get to use Yetis in the next game, as well as, possibly, some sort of flying creature that will attack the party as they climb the face of the glacier (kind of like when they climb the Wall in GoT, but with Perytons or something thrown in!). Oh and I threw away the last pretenses of the seriousness of this campaign and will have a dwarven rap-dissing contest for the players. The contest will be, aherm, part of the culture of the dwarves that they encounter. 

So two more game sessions and one of two things will happen:

1. I will begin a new adventure for them, in whatever direction we agree would be most fun.
    A. Anyone who wishes will create a new character and retire their current one. Or they can continue of course. If everyone wants to remake than perhaps we'll start over again at level one, but I'm not sure about that.

2. Or I will play a character for a two or three session adventure and let one of the players DM for a bit. 

I would like to try playing a character again, as it is a lot of work handling all this DM stuff every week. But we'll see.

I'm nearly done prepping for tomorrow's game. The raps are all set, and I have three combat encounters to run with creatures all statted up and what-not. 

The first encounter for tomorrow is actually one that I just came up with yesterday. They had killed off the majority of a group of bandits, and I thought it would be interesting to have the father of the leader of the bandits come after the party for revenge. I went overboard on giving the father a kind  of miniature party of criminals (a cleric, a bard, a rogue, and two simple thuggish types), so I'm kind of worried about the balance of the encounter. 

Still, we'll see!

After that the party will be guests to some dwarves (queue the rapping), tackle some ice-climbing (while being attacked by Perytons) and discover the abandoned campsite of the adventuring party that preceded them (and Yetis!  ).

I included a scholarly bit at the beginning, some mid-journey haggling over hireling costs, a spot of roleplay opportunity for the Barbarian, and a little survival challenge set in the midst of a blizzard. So, should be a well-rounded out session!

Oh gosh, I'm going to have a Dalek in my next game. What am I doing!!  

Oooooookaaayyyy

To be fair, it's a one-shot that I'm running while one of our regular players is out of town. 

And then, to be more fair, the plot of the one-shot is that rogue Modrons have somehow broken through from the plane of Mechanus into the countryside near a farming village. They have taken to various seemingly-pointless tasks like counting the straws of hay in the farmer's barns, attempting to train various animals in various tasks, and generally being a terrible nuisance to everyone. 
They've also begun the construction of a gigantic revolving wheel to serve as a base of sorts. It is constructed of rough materials, but is shaping up quite nicely.

Modrons have an extraordinarily hierarchical society (they simply cannot understand anyone two levels higher or lower than themselves), and a certain mid-level post has been taken over by a lone Dalek (who has "hacked" or "corrupted" its way into the hierarchy) that intends to use the Modrons to advance some dastardly plan of something or other. It's a very difficult task, of course, as in their corrupted state the Modrons are exceptionally difficult to handle and the Dalek is having a heck of a time of it. 
But, of course, it must be stopped, as it has had several townsmembers captured for various nefarious purposes and it is, after all, a Dalek.

I don't think my players actually know Doctor Who, so I'm hoping they will simply be entertained, and I will be the one giggling to myself behind the screen. As to why I'm doing this instead of using a proper D&D monster: well, my sister came home with a miniature Dalek. I could not resist the idea of using it in my game and this seemed like a great opportunity to do something silly that won't have ramifications later on. 

So it's definitely more of a humorous thing, and the Dalek is far more like the ones from The Curse of Fatal Death (complete with stage-whispering if it wishes to keep anything from nearby Modrons when monologuing to the players) than any from the show proper.

{{{I knew if I mentioned something Doctor Who-related I would get a bite out of Petty. It's quiet as heck in here otherwise!  }}}

Is there a saving throw against toilet plungers?

Only if you have the Plumber background!

Or rather, kind of. I mean. Dex save to avoid being... plungered.

What are you using for the Dalek gun as equivalent? Id suggest magic rather than physical missile stats as its a laser of sorts so travels at the speed of light and there isn't a D&D armour would stop it. Its also one shot kills the damage would be off the D&D scale- worse than a direct blast of dragon breath!
And it armour class would be huge. You'd never scratch its casing.

Alright. Nitty-gritty details! This is what I like to discuss.  

I like the idea of necrotic damage for the gun, and for it to possibly have a weakening effect upon hit. So I took the Warlock's Eldritch Blast and Chill Touch and combined them into a single energy-ray attack that does necrotic damage and imposes disadvantage on physical attacks for one round (perhaps I should look into the Beholder's eye attacks). These are only level 2 PCs so I can't have it one-shot them or anything (unless the Dalek only has one charge left in its gun). But even then, effects that instantly reduce a PCs health to 0 (like the Banshee's scream) are kind of lame to play against.

As for armour class, it'll certainly be high, but this particular Dalek will be quite damaged already. It will be fully encased, but the casing will be cracked and melted with weak points in it. A similar AC to full plate armour I think, and, possibly, some resistance to magical attacks. Alternatively, I could simply give the Dalek's vehicle (what do they call it again?) AC and a pool of HP, and once that is defeated the suit breaks open, revealing the creature within.

Appropriately enough, the Modrons' have a feature called "Axiomatic Mind" which states that "the modron can't be compelled to act in a manner contrary to its nature or its instructions." I liked the idea of giving the Dalek something similar in case one of the PCs have some mind-altering spell available. Daleks and Modrons have that in common: that inability to act against their own nature (unless, of course, they are corrupted).

I also am giving the Dalek True-sight, so that it can see through illusions and darkness. Is there anything else particularly D&D appropriate that you remember Dalek's doing? Should I give it a short-range teleport?

If the players really aren't aware of what Daleks are I hope to gross them out with the description of what the actual Dalek inside looks like if they defeat it.