Role-playing games

Anyone else tried playing 5th Edition yet?- Forest

Not yet, next month. I am curious however how you are playing 5th edition when only the player handbook has even released- how can your DM run the game without a DM's guide for 5th edition?

As a DM I hate it when the party is too spell castery, slows the game right down. Ideally a party of four should only need 1 magic user, and a party of 6 two and so on.
Most classes have some magical abilities even if they arent technically spells. Rangers had pass without trace for example among other abilities that border on the magical, and most classes are like that.

Well the DM has been running games on and off since the early 90s, so she has enough experience and general DnD know-how to back up anything she's not sure about.
And like I said, we're running this pre-made campaign, and she does have the Monster Manual, so it's not like she has to do too much guesswork.

Strangely enough, your bringing up of that point answers a question I was going to ask. Or rather, not a question, but a complaint, that your point counters. I was going to say that I didn't enjoy feeling like there was nowhere I could take the story apart from where the campaign goes. But without the DMG, it would be kind of tricky for the DM to set up a solid 5th edition campaign of her own.

Then again, I think we could wing it, but the lack of magic items and weird rules and other cool stuff would be annoying.


I quite agree about all the spell-casting stuff. It takes a terribly long time to look up spells and choose which to use and when and where. I really wish I didn't choose Bard now, simply so I could play a less complicated character. The less time spent looking up magic-state effects could mean more time playing the darn game!

The Hoard of the Dragon Queen is basically about this cult that attempts to revive Tiamat, or someone. It's a fine goal in life, to defeat an evil cult, but it doesn't personally stoke my imagination. Most of the time, when we're interrogating some prisoner or something, I find myself asking, "what are we trying to find out again?" I simply don't care (at all) whether or not we are able to stop this cult's meddlings.

"Oh, we got a tip that someone went somewhere and now we're going there? OK."

Enjoy the little things I guess, and be thankful that I'm getting to play DnD in the flesh. Eventually, though, I'm going to kidnap the other members of the party and bring them with me on board a ship at night. Once we're several days out from shore I will bring them out of their drugged slumber and convince them to help me take over the ship and become pirates. Then we can ignore the stupid Dragon-cult and all their mental issues.

I have not played 5E yet, and tbh I probably won't any time soon since I've been out of the game for a while, but it sounds like Wizards of the Coast is admitting that they fucked up with 4E. I wonder how much ground they can win back from Pathfinder.

Well the DM has been running games on and off since the early 90s, so she has enough experience- Forest

You know Ive never met a female DM, a few players, but never a DM.

'The Hoard of the Dragon Queen is basically about this cult that attempts to revive Tiamat'

I cant believe they are still mining the Tiamat seam, that vein has been plundered to death in official campaigns. One of the first modules I bought (when I was about 15) was a Tiamat based story. And it wasnt very good then. But then for me a very large part of the fun of being a DM is creating the world, the characters and the plot then having the players mess it all up by interacting with it! Its the writers equivalent of musicians jamming. You have o be able to improvise around events, and the planned plot getting shoved in all sorts of unexpected directions (players always do stuff you dont expect- in one campaign I had a set up where the person they had to contact in a marsh village had been replaced by a doppelganger. There were some clues and stuff, and I reckoned it would take them most of the first game to work out the deception, if they worked it out at all. Turned out one of my players had a hunch and slipped out at night when everyone was sleeping and checked out the village, worked out where the most convenient place to dump a body quickly over the side into the marsh would be and did some dredging. Now as a DM you have a choice here- lie and say they havent found anything to keep your plot on track, which is cheating, or acknowledge its good playing and thinking and let them find the body, even though it blows the planned plot wide apart. I always go for the latter, players should be rewarded and encouraged for good thinking. But I then had to improvise everything in the plot that happened from then on in that session, and make it all still fit the overall plot and what had gone before, pretty much 'live' and out of thin air. But I love it when that happens. Its why I DM).
Incidentally, and just t um advertise my own work!- did you ever give the story I wrote based on that campaign a read?

but it sounds like Wizards of the Coast is admitting that they fucked up with 4E.- Eldo

The rot started to set in 3rd edition in my view and just kept getting worse. The 'new rules' increasingly became thinly veiled excuses to get you to buy stuff.
Some players, a DM with an imagination, a few bits of paper and a pen and a six sided die and you can run a game.

I played a lot of AD&D (both editions) and 3/3.5, and while I preferred AD&D, I thought the third edition rules were fine. They certainly started churning out an absurd number of books at that point (something like one a month at one point), but my group was able to get by fine with little more than the core rulebooks.

I think you'd be pleased with the 5th edition so far Eldo. I mean, it's still new, so they haven't had time to get greedy for non-PHB purchases yet and befoul the market with endless expenditure items, but the focus of the game is away from the combat of 4e. I've never played the earlier versions, but those who have that I've spoken to say that 5th edition takes many of the best things from older versions and combines them very well.

So Petty, Eldo, all you other fellow D&D types, greetings.

It's December now! Are you going to be trying out 5e now Petty?
Like I said already, I'm sure it can win back plenty of ground from Pathfinder. It's really quite a lovely system so far to hear more experienced people talk about it.


As far as my own game is going, we're tramping further through the Hoard of the Dragon Queen pre-made story.
We were missing two members this last weekend (we meet every weekend, it's great) so we played some other board games, but the week before that I had an absolute blast.
I had gotten really fed up with our continued boring pursuit of the Tiamat Cult people, and got up to all kinds of hijinks.

Among them were:
-Persuading the other players to blow the cover off of the disguised cultists we were following North. Their leader turned out to be a dragon in human form, who metamorphed back into his ginormous self and froze the entire caravan with a single fly-by of his icy breath weapon before flying off with the cart of loot clutched in his claws. Needless to say, we kind of screwed up the intended pace of the pre-made story, and got a bunch of people killed too.
-we passed by the High Moor on the Sword Coast of Faerun. I heard the description of the place, thought "Barrow-downs," and rode my horse up the steep hill from the road to see if there were any ruins around. Unfortunately there were none to be seen, but for fun I rolled a large rock down the hillside to see what would happen. Fortunately the party members down below were mostly able to avoid the small avalanche of stones I started.

-My finest moment was when I used my Bardic skills to get past the guards of a young bride-to-be noblewoman encamped on the main road (I offered to entertain her with music). I attempted to convince the other players to kidnap her so we could ransom her, but they talked me down so I magically put her guards to sleep and took off with an expensive trinket of hers.
I sent a rabbit messenger (it's a weird spell) to let her know that I would return the music box once we both arrived in Waterdeep (I have no idea what I was thinking, maybe that it was somehow a romantic gesture??).  
Anyway, the stupid Drow snitch rogue stole back the music box in the night and returned it, so that story didn't go anywhere.

That same player has taken over as DM now, and I'm kind of worried that they might be a rather dour DM that is opposed to my idea of fun for the sake of serious roleplay. (Read: Boring roleplay in my opinion).

I had this whole elaborate plan set up where, once we arrived in the city of Waterdeep, we would visit my former Bard mentor. She and I would arrange a trick on the party where we would enter her dimly lit mansion and she would pretend to ambush us in the guise of a vampire. I would pretend to be surprised along with the rest of the group, so that when she resumed her normal appearance they would feel collective relief that our low-level characters did not yet have to face a full-on vampire. I figured it would be an entertaining ice-breaker, but when I told the DM my idea they told me that it would end up with somebody dying or a lot of bloodshed and scrapped the plan.  

So much for creative roleplay!

Whoa Nelly, I'm getting myself into some real trouble here. I don't know that there's much interest in these things in Forumshire, but my D&D group had the new DM take over last Saturday and there's been some discomfort with the transition.
Mostly it relates to my previous post, but there was a similar thing that went on during Saturday's game, and I've sent two emails now to the group going way in-depth on how I feel about how the last session went. I don't actually want to go into great detail about it right now, but it's a little stressful and makes me nervous.
Anyone else had similar problems with DMs in the past?

Well speaking as a DM I would say its not the DM's place to tell a player what they can and cannot do, merely to apply the rules to what they do and how the game world reacts to what they do.

The only time when a DM should restrict a players choice of actions is if the player is doing something against the rules.

To be clear, the DM did not say, "I will not run this idea."
Rather, they had me roll a wisdom check. I got a 15 and they said that if we ran the idea I had it would probably result in bloodshed or death (meaning that his rogue character would certainly try to stab my former mentor because "it's how the rules of the world work").

I understand that you can't have your players bending the believability of a game willy-nilly, but is it really so hard to believe that we could have a trick like this on the party without someone going crazy and trying to stab someone else?
There are DM mechanics for this kind of thing! Heck, we're such a reactionary group of players (as in, we often need to be led along in order to accomplish anything; we're not all that confident playing our characters yet) that the DM would have a breeze keeping the other players from trying to kill the "vampire."
We've consistently gone with a, "Is it combat? OK bring out some grids" (which I know you don't particularly like Petty, but oh well) so that all the DM would have had to do to steer the players from combat initiative would have been to not lay out a combat grid.

The real problem is, as we discuss this further, that my DM is a stick in the mud who likes to roleplay as a stick in the mud. (Think of the music box that his character stole back secretly in the night via notes to the DM). Having him be the current DM means that everything we do must function inside of this limited, boring worldview.

I guess I just really dislike his style.
In terms of priorities it's like this is his DM checklist. As long as 1 or 2 is checked off we can say screw the rest:
1. Is this realistic for the characters to be doing in the game-world?
2. Are the NPCs being realistic in light of the game-world.
3. Are the players (and myself) all having fun?

Number three should ALWAYS be number one! ALWAYS!!!

Well I think we were able to talk through it!
Our former DM finally spoke up and shared her opinion, which helped set things in a better light.

On a new note independent of all this, here's a relevant post I found on Reddit concerning 5th edition and roleplaying that I think might interest you Petty.
Just an opinion piece, but I liked the wording:
http://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/2ook5t/the_benefit_of_role_play_in_the_new_dnd_5e/

I think I am missing something here Forest.

'She and I would arrange a trick on the party where we would enter her dimly lit mansion and she would pretend to ambush us in the guise of a vampire. I would pretend to be surprised along with the rest of the group, so that when she resumed her normal appearance they would feel collective relief that our low-level characters did not yet have to face a full-on vampire. I figured it would be an entertaining ice-breaker'

'they had me roll a wisdom check. I got a 15 and they said that if we ran the idea I had it would probably result in bloodshed or death (meaning that his rogue character would certainly try to stab my former mentor because "it's how the rules of the world work").'


So does the DM have an NPC inside your party?
This does happen. I DM'd a NPC inside a party in the last campaign we played (the character of Canthiss for those who have read my book) but the purpose of that as a DM is to have a gentle touch, a guiding hand if is needed within the party.

It rather sounds to me that your DM didn't like the idea and used the rogue character as the excuse to veto it.

I am also uncertain why you had to make a wisdom check and why that would determine the outcome by another party member.
That doesn't make sense to me.

The other problem is if you have such a character in your party not run by a player, someone who will attack and try to kill instantly without giving it much thought you might want to kick them out your party. If your DM is big on realism just point out that realistically your character would not go about with this person (this can be bolstered if your alignment is suitably different from theirs).

Sorry for the confusion!

1. Our current DM just started. For the first several sessions we had the female DM (Deb is her name, she's nice), and now the new DM (Jo) has taken over.

2. Yes, the DM has a character in-game: a "DMPC" if you like.
As I understand it, there are opponents and proponents of this idea. I like this guy's opinion as an opponent of the DMPC. D&D Blog post
Of course, for our purposes, the reason that Deb ran a DMPC was because we were planning on switching over half-way through the campaign. Now that we have switched, perhaps it would be best for the new DM to retire his PC. It's just that we've gotten to know the character a bit, and having her leave would be strange.

3. DMing an NPC is what all DMs do. I assume you mean that you played all the NPCs of the game, in addition to your own Player Character as well.
Honestly, I accept the idea that the DMPC can be a voice through which the DM can speak to help guide people, but that's not really a necessary tool. There are a plethora of other resources that a DM can draw from to help influence the party that don't include anything so blatant as an ever-present character who speaks to them in moments of indecision. I, at least, cannot imagine myself having my own character while DMing.

4. The Heart of the Matter!
Apparently there was a miscommunication between myself and the DM. I emailed him my idea for the faux-ambush, and he responded by asking me to roll a "wisdom" check. He then told me once I rolled well that the idea sounded dangerous to him as I had explained it, and that it might lead to some accidental violence.
He meant it kindly, or so he claims. But I assumed he was saying that if I went through with this idea he would try and "punish" me by using his DM abilities to lead the group towards violence against the fake vampire. I assumed that this included him having his PC attack the vampire as soon as possible. He'll have us roll initiative and jump straight into combat, I thought.
Apparently that was not his intentions at all, but I assumed it was, and came to our last session with a very negative view of his DMing style, which of course led to more unpleasantness when a similar thing happened with another plan my character put into motion in-game.

In conclusion, we smoothed out the miscommunication, and next session I'm going to try and communicate better what I'm trying to do, and not take offense if his view of cause-and-effect leads him to warn that something I want to do will go badly. It's not that he wants to try and ruin all my fun at the table because he thinks I'm stupid or silly; he just wants to warn me if something my character is doing could be dangerous.

I assume you mean that you played all the NPCs of the game, in addition to your own Player Character as well.
Honestly, I accept the idea that the DMPC can be a voice through which the DM can speak to help guide people, but that's not really a necessary tool. There are a plethora of other resources that a DM can draw from to help influence the party that don't include anything so blatant- Forest

It depends on how it is done. Its not so much you have a character that jut drops important info, or guides the party when things get tricky or they aren't sure what to do next, it just the DM a voice they can use as part of the narrative.
You would have to read my book of that game to maybe get exactly what I mean. But the DM controlled NPC is in the party should in general have a secondary and background position not a leading role.

That does seem to be the opinion of the consenting majority. I just read through about 6 pages of forum discussions and two different blogs concerning the DMPC and there was actually a wide spectrum of opinions and flavours and types of DMPC, but that was the most common statement.

I think I need to spend less time worrying about how next session will go with the new DM. This was the guy who, when he was just a PC, had his rogue stab the gnome-wizard of the party through the neck after warning him to not try and kill the prisoner that my character had sworn we would release. His character motivations may have been justified, but you can see why I think of him as a serious-minded player, and not someone who is simply in it for fun and is willing to accommodate the other players.
No matter how many considerations I take into account for the difficulty of the DM role and how things will be alright if I'm patient and kind, the nagging thought that our goals for the game are incompatible keeps creeping back up.


P.S.
Here's a robustly negative view of the DMPC that I liked. (From the Giant in the Playground forums):

Myth wrote:
DMPCs are Bad Mojo unless they're a bandaid solution to some hole you plopped the PCs in with your crude DMish hands or something weird happens that you didn't foresee and the PCs didn't know about or expect.

Other than that, make sure the DMPC leaves as soon as it is practical, or even before that. Do not steal the spotlight from the party - they are the heroes of this story. Sure, there may be other NPC heroes about, but this is not a story about them.

Kill the ones that the party becomes too fond of. It shows that your world is real and the dangers in it are real. Depending on the level of the campaign, you may or may not bring them back, but make the death count - a change of perspective and some on-the-side character development for your DMPC is good flavour for an immersive story.

Repeat after me:

"I shall not steal the spotlight from my players. I shall not make them watch cutenesses of DMPCs fighting NPCs. Even though I think my DMPC is awesome, I shall remember that I am a DM and not a player. I vow to kill or remove any Mary Sue/God Sue DMPCs if the party expects them to be ever present as a Deus Ex Machina or simply if they start growing too comfortable with them."

And so you are pledged.

I have only used the technique twice in all the games Ive DM'd.
The last time I felt was particularly necessary as one of the players was playing as an important Baron in a kingdom and they had a bodyguard basically who went everywhere with them.
I took over the running of that character early on as a means to prevent the player just using the character as an extension of their own and to keep him somewhat independent of the player.

Sounds fun, and reasonable. Having an NPC join the party pretty much requires having the DM nudge it in the right directions if the players get too nonchalant about its point of view (using it as dragon-bait or something).

Well, things aren't getting better very quickly.
My group met again this last Sunday with all five members again, which was nice. However, the session didn't go all that great. It was just kind of boring a lot of the time. It's frustrating to watch the DM just completely miss opportunities for making things more interesting. There's just not enough interesting description. It's like bare-bones D&D:

1. We have combat, but it's the kind of combat where the DM takes out miniatures and has them spread around a room. Initiatives are rolled before anything else, and the form the combat takes is generally that the combatants cluster together and hit whatever is in front of them until someone dies or tries to run away (which almost never happens).

2. We have roleplay interaction between our heroes and NPCs, but it usually takes the form of an awkward conversation completely devoid of physicality or description. No "he swells up with rage" when my character mocks the Bollywog for hiding in a hole while his minions were slaughtered, no "the lizard-folk eye the bright scabbards of your weapons greedily".
It's often unimaginative and never feels very rewarding.

3. We hear what our surroundings look like... briefly. This last session the DM mostly just read passages from the Tyranny of Dragons campaign book in a recitative manner. We certainly don't have all five senses engaged, as it is often suggested writers should provide their readers with occasionally. At certain points I literally asked, "what does the battle that is raging in the courtyard below sound like?" or "what does the cavern air feel like?" to be answered by responses like "You know, like combat, but with more of a... amphibian sound to it" (these were lizard-folk and Bollywogs fighting) and "cold".


I know not everyone has a flair for exciting descriptions on-the-fly, and running a D&D game for four other people is hard work, but these stale and boring settings need to be given life or else it is nearly impossible to engage with them in a rewarding way.
Apparently the campaign guide thing is quite badly organized (this seems to be a universal opinion amongst the sources I've read online as well), but our DM spent a large amount of time looking up details in the book and picking his laptop off of the floor--typing in a few lines or numbers--and putting it back on the floor again. The map of the castle he had not drawn before-hand, and so we had to wait 10 minutes while that was illustrated.
All these little things slow down the session, just like combat in 4th edition, so that by the end of the nine hours or so of our game it felt as though much of it was spent waiting for things to happen.
We are a small group! It shouldn't be that hard to keep things moving along! But when one room sounds exactly like the last five rooms except that it's represented by a different squiggle of shapes on a battle-grid than the last one was, you lose your interest in even trying anymore.

I mean, the highlight of the afternoon and evening was probably attempting to convince the cultists that the Bollywogs were fomenting some kind of unrest. This itself only consisted of a few lines of dialogue and several persuasion checks. No flavour, no packaging the bare details of the story inside of a colourful and intriguing outward appearance. If someone were watching our game, they would think that the world we were exploring in our game was tasteless, odourless, visually repetitive, and nearly silent. As for the tactile feel of the crumbling stone walls or the sucking mud? HA! No mention of anything, at all.

Even the castle itself was not described at any point by the DM. He picked up the campaign book and showed us a picture. Later he picked up the campaign book and told us how the lizard-folk we had persuaded to lead us inside "would have told you where things were." The rooms of he castle had bloody letters on them. Room D, room H, etc.

And when we explored the caves underneath the castle:
"The walls of the chamber are natural rock."

And then about five chambers later:
"The room is dimly lit."
"Look at this battle-grid. That is where your enemies are standing."

Wow I'm just blown away by that kind of creative storytelling. I guess my main challenge as a D&D player is to calculate spell radii.



P.S.
On the plus side, we didn't have any confrontations this time around.

P.P.S.
On the down side, it was really boring. Like, mind-muddlingly boring. Like watching Vampire Diaries boring.
At one point, the DM read off a list of gemstones and their worth (!!!) in full.
He said, "I don't want to go through telling you what all of them are, but basically there are: 5 worth 30 gold, 4 worth 35 gold, 3 worth 50 gold, 6 worth 60 gold, 3 worth 100 gold..." etc. for X, X, X, X, X, X more items. Sweet holy mother of all that is mind-numbing!
Why not simply: "Inside the bottom drawer of the cabinet you find a heavy sack of clinking gems. There are dozens in total, ranging from rubies to sapphires to purple amythists."

I guess the point is that our current DM has his strengths as a player and is welcome when he is in that position. But as far as I'm concerned he is an awfully tedious DM and should be removed ASAP.

There are 2 more chapters left in the book we're working our way through, so I guess I might just have to wait until that's over.

(The most irksome thing is that noone else seems as frustrated by all this. I can see the other people at the table showing signs of boredom, but none of them give voice to their concerns as I do on the personal forum that our first DM was kind enough to set up.)

Every Dm is going to be different. I dont use any miniatures or grids or table top maps or any of that stuff- this means the players rely on me describing the scene which allows for a bit of flavour to things that you just don't get moving some miniatures about- besides it snot a board game (or bored game!).
And in fact I dont favour too much combat in a game- I have Dm'd entire sessions where there isnt a single fight because its all plot and character interaction.
Other Dm's like to keep a regular flow of fights going. But I always think all fights really offer players is the chance to roll dice- and there are lots of reasons to do that which are more interesting than fight after fight.
A good fight has its place, but it should be serving the narrative so it has meaning, not just for the sake of having another fight.


ps did you ever get round to taking a look at the story I wrote based on the campaign I Dm'd?

http://www.hobbitmovieforum.com/t535-circle-of-stone-reprieve?highlight=circle+oof+stone

Oh no I did not. Is that set in a particular setting I should know about first?

By the by, I found this the other day while browsing stuff; I thought it pretty funny.
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/23

That sounds pretty good Petty, your method of DMing. I do think that even with grid usage there absolutely needs to be lively descriptions to go along with the miniatures. And of course the combat was only a part of it; nothing received the love and attention to detail that it merited. If the battle-grid can't keep up with the pace of our exciting combats with us having to move pieces around and so on, then it should be scrapped I say!

No its an entirely created world and campaign- I dont use modules or preprepared Dm stuff- thats just cheating, and they are usually not very good and too limiting.

Loved the comic - Immanuel Kant looks like the 1st Doctor!

Indeed he does!
My favourite part is when Sartre has his "chaotic good" warrior stab himself through the heart to demonstrate his character's freedom.  

Edit:
Ooh, one for Monopoly!
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/19

Ascertain your D&D alignement. Just put in your beliefs and most likely actions, instead of your characters.

http://easydamus.com/alignmenttest.html

True neutral. How dull.