#have they ever played a single session of D&D with a decent DM?

[spaceofentropy]

I've rewatched season 4 of Stranger Things not that long ago and it still drives me up a wall how the Duffers and their writers' room managed to write Eddie as (almost) the perfect prototype of a shitty, toxic DM. I've been roleplaying and occasionally GameMastering for the past 22 years (give or take). I've played with good GMs, mediocre GMs, terrible GMs, stellar GMs. And Eddie Munson, for how he's written in the show, is a shitty GM, holy fuck, folks!

1 He scares his younger players into doing what he wants. The first time I saw season 4, my brain went "Feels like they're setting him up as the new human baddie of the season, feels like they're gonna pull a Billy-with-switched-plates on us..." because Eddie is introduced as seen through Dustin and Mike's eyes, and those are scared eyes. Not scared as in "he's gonna hurt me", but scared as in "he's volatile, unpredictable, and he's gonna make my life literal hell". Like a bully. Like he's not a hero or a good presence for those two kids. And then...

2 Eddie refuses to move that fucking D&D session. Which... WTF, man, what the fuck! You don't want to know the number of times my groups and I had to postpone a session because too many people couldn't be there because life! The way we played with one or two players less, knowing that M. would use his brother's character for combat, that while E. was away his character would conveniently get bonked in the head and pass out for the duration of that session! But it's an important day, I hear you say. It's the end of the campagin, you say. Then... dude! Since you've built to that session for months, it's the culmination of your whole campaign, you want YOUR PLAYERS to be there! It's a big day for the whole group, not just for the DM! What's the fun in having one of the main characters in the story being absent?! Which leads us to the fact...

3 Eddie demands that Dustin and Mike find him a replacement player. On your big fucking day when your campaign ends you DON'T want a random player to sit at the table and risk to have to decide the fate of the whole story (which, coincidentally, is exactly what ends up happening, how fun...)! You want YOUR players to be there for the grand finale! How can a rando appreciate the way you bring all the storylines to their conclusion? How can a rando know why that tiny detail that ties back to the second or third session is important? A rando can't! Bringing in a rando is just bringing in an arm to swing dice, at this point in a campaign. You've built to this session for months, then it won't kill you to wait for a week or two longer to play it! (And this ever-important session happens just before spring break, there are weeks and weeks left before school ends. They can fucking wait for Mike to come back from California and Lucas to not have basketball games! Which, oh, look at that...)

4 Eddie knows he's forcing two of his younger players to ditch their friend's big game, and he doesn't give a single fuck. D&D is clearly the best, superior past time ever, in Eddie's eyes, and fuck anyone who thinks differently. Fuck anyone who dares put anything above D&D. Sadly, Dustin and Mike are not old enough or emotionally strong enough to ditch a bad GM, not when he has painted himself in their eyes as their saviour from being high school loners and pariahs, so fuck their great friend Lucas, I guess?

5 Eddie's an elitist piece of crap to Erica. Saying "Oh, you play D&D? What level is your character?" is not only inherently stupid in D&D terms (you can create a 17th level character from scratch, tailored to the sole purpose of playing with a high level group, it's... it's a ttrpg, not a fucking videogame where you have to grind all the levels! Ghaaaaaaaaa!), but also the equivalent of going "You're wearing a Metallica t-shirt? List 5 of their songs!" on her. The kind of thing where you look at the tool in front of you, flip him the bird, and leave with a "Go get fucked by balrog, dickwad!"

In all of that, the problem is the shitty writing. I know that thematically and symbolically it's so juicy to have Lucas, who's been torn between the jocks and the nerd, stay with the jocks while he his nerd friends LITERALLY replace him with his sister. Oh, it's so tasty to have the Sinclair siblings throw the deciding ball/die in their respective games and win everything for their teams. I can almost hear the Duffers orgasm (sorry for the horrid image!) at the idea of it all, typing it down and then going to their editor asking for the alternating cuts, the parallels, and then, oh, the stark difference between Lucas' face falling because none of his friends is present on his big day and Erica being cheered on by these older guys she just met! And that shot when the basketball team leaves the gym and Lucas sees Erica so seamlessly incorporated in his other group of friends, so angsty, right? Right? You get it, audience, right? He's sad! So sad! *nudge nudge wink wink*

It's such lazy writing. It feels like paint by number and also unfaithful to the characters, and to Erica in particular. She may not love her brother to pieces, may not have been enthusiastic at the idea of watching a boring basketball game, but I can't see her having a single reason to go play one D&D session to close a campagin she knows nothing about with a group of older strangers (who treat her like crap), when up until this point she's been a closeted nerd.

And we all know that the D&D session must be there because we can build up Lucas' dilemma and introduce an audience who knows nothing about D&D to the concept of Vecna. (As one of my friends said when Vecna came up in the show, "Vecna? Again!? Haven't we already killed that squirrelly third-rate spellcaster at least once a decade for the past 40 years?!")

And you know what? It's double shitty writing. Because if it weren't for Joseph Quinn good performance, I probably would have ended hating Eddie all the way to the end of the series and not given much of a fuck about his death! Because, as I said, I actually disliked him for a good chunk of episode one. My first gut reaction to Eddie Munson was "Nope! Stay away! Bad guy! Shoo, shoo!"

You've written this guy as an asshole who can't be arsed to postpone a fucking D&D session; who thinks he's better than everyone else; who walks on the tables where other people are eating (EWWW!); who scares his youngest minions and forces them to do his biddings; who doesn't give a fuck if he's forcing said minions into ditching their friend; who treats a middle schooler like pure crap... And no, I don't think it's a matter of "oh, the guy has so many nuances", just... Fuck that guy! The guy the Duffers wrote is a shitty GM that I wouldn't want to play a single session with. I don't give a single fuck about the fate of the guy who leads the Hellfire Club. He's selfish and crappy to everyone. The guy who interacted with Chrissy, on the other hand? Yeah, I give many fucks about him. Just... keep him away from young, impressionable players that might learn from him how to become toxic GMs in the future! 😬

[thessalian]

Thess vs Thanks

I just want to say thank you to @hyperewok1, @miaaoi, @sfwarlock, @fauxfire76 and @true0neutral. They’re my D&D group, as you know. As to why I’m thanking them? Well ... a lot of reasons, but mostly it’s because they don’t treat me like a lot of women gamers get treated, and the thought of doing so wouldn’t even cross their minds.

Look, a group of assholes, of the same asshole type who started Gamergate, have been trying to start a D&DGate, or whatever you call it when incels and misogynists decide that women aren’t allowed in the RP community they consider ‘their space’. These are guys who don’t respect women. They insist that women can’t be good at their things because Reasons, usually involving ‘they’re not good enough at maths and critical thinking!’ or, ‘they just want to do that angst bullshit!’. When they play women - IF they play women - they play hypersexualised lesbians so they can spank it to OC/Bar Wench porn in their imaginations. Women are talked over at the table, and made to feel unwelcome, whether it’s by skeevy comments IC, skeevy comments OOC or both. These assholes are a very vocal minority, but they exist, and they continue because so many people just shrug and go, “That’s what the people who do this hobby are like sometimes”.

My guys? They subvert the trope in thought, word and deed. Two of my guys play girls, and neither is hypersexualised: one’s a gawky late teen with hair like a furze bush, the other’s just a shade over five foot and built solid, and is almost never seen out of her good sensible ‘avoiding death is gender-neutral’ heavy plate. And yeah, one’s a lesbian and one’s bi, but they have way more fun with the “I am the most awkward flirt on the face of the planet” than anything to do with the sex. They’re people; one’s a goofball, one’s a salty pile of sarcasm and eye-rolling. They’re not just ‘guuuuuuurls’; they’re people. They prove that guys can play girls perfectly well, and thus write girls perfectly well, and it’s amazing. The guys? Well, let’s just say my party’s made of at least 80% queer. We have ace representation. We have I’m-Here-I’m-Queer-Now-Drink-Your-F’n-Beer bi representation. And nobody is a womanising shithead, IC or OOC.

And none of my guys, not a single one of them, has ever given me shit. It’s not that they don’t question my calls now and then, but they’re always respectful those few times they do flag things up, and they wait until quiet moments, or after the session. Most of the time, though, they respect “The DM’s word is law”, and I’m beginning to understand how rare that is. I mean, hell, not even freakin’ Marisha Ray can get respect in the studio that she runs. The fact that my guys give me respect when there’s a judgement call to be made is a big deal. I imagine a fair few people would look sideways at my guys for having their DM be ‘a female’.

So thank you. Thank you for respecting me, for working with me, for trusting me, for getting involved, for just being you and having fun. Maybe I shouldn’t have to say these things - maybe it’s a sad world where someone has to actively thank people for being decent human beings - but I am grateful every time the topic of running D&D comes up in my head, and you deserve to know it. I hope I keep doing right by you, and running the game you deserve ... not because you’re guys and I’m not and I’m worried about judgement, but because you’re you and you’re awesome players and I want to do your RPing, and your characters, justice in the storyline we’re creating together.

[syrune]

Avalarian Post Mortem

Wow... I can't believe it's over. Before I hurt myself patting my own back I just want to thank all of you. I literally could not have done it without the dedication of my players. You all rock.  You stood by me and my story through the best and worst of it all.  We broke many D&D conventions with this story, episodic plots, mid-game rework, sci-fi themes peppered with eldritch horror and world building That Reshaped The Very Core Of The Races Chosen.

WHAT WENT RIGHT. Well, I had to be doing something right to earn the loyalty I got. These are the beats that I think were hit well over the last year plus of work.

• Episodic story telling ○ Lots Of DMs Like To Cover everything in their story.  Multiple sessions of just ocean would bore us all to tears. Every moment counts when you are on a time limit and worrying about if Gromgar ate before raging would have done nothing to serve the goal of making this fun. It also means that I got to fill time with a lot of fun and engaging subplots that did nothing to further your goals, but still turned out fun. That being said, expect to see this point again. • Boss hooks ○ Boss mechanisms and power have so much that could have been improved with proper management, but I am proud of the fact that all the major bosses had at least one player wanting to kill them. Your desire to kill these fuckers made playing them so fun. • NPCs ○ There were a lot of them! One of the problems story tellers of all kinds have is character voice, how they talk and what about their mannerisms is them. Lots of novice writers make amazing characters, but they are often hard to distinguish because they behave the same. My voices may have sounded the same at times, but I was sooooo happy when players could still guess them based on how they used that same voice. • The story ○ This will show up a LOT. This story was the biggest I ever tackled and it's only half done. I feel like the blight was the Brest thing I did, it had the most time dedicated to it (5 years) and I think it's safe to say that it did a good job keeping you all invested in the plot. • The ships ○ The look on your faces when you lost the shooting star was to kill for. The fact that Jacqueline bitched about it for a week is a testament to the connection you all had. The same could be said every time the Nivastus returned • The Subplots ○ Watching You All Grow As Characters Was A Treat. I don't think a single character ended that game without some major growth. You all owned this world and its stories so well. It would not be wrong to Say you all wrote At least half the story. WHAT WENT WRONG. Short answer, a lot. A lot of great ideas went discarded, a lot of poor ideas were put in. I feel a lot of these things got fixed later on, but it is still important to point those things out, especially those things. The last thing Starfinder needs is a repeat of these mistakes. • Episodic story telling ○ If there is one thing I wish I had done more of, it's fun pirate adventures. I gave you a ship, a captain, and very little government oversight and never once gave you a fucking treasure map to gold and jewels. The point of doing the game this way was to ensure that I could provide creature-of-the-week stories where you get to do little side gigs. I hope to provide more of those in the future, and making them something you stumble onto. • The Trade Guild ○ God that was a good concept… This would have been the perfect way to spur on that idea of little adventures, there were a lot of things that lead to the Trade Guild failing in action, but I think the quest givers were the big thing. All of them felt like just busy work and you never interfaced with the actual citizens for these quests. Moving forward, the trade guild will be just that. Trade, Banking, occasional drop-off job. • Granting levels ○ While it is easier to just say "level up" at the end of a session rather than manage EXP distribution, EXP distribution is soooo much more rewarding. Characters growing based on their individual efforts and being rewarded for creativity with faster leveling could have made gold something of ACTUAL VALUE. 50 XP for doing something impressive is a much easier reward to dish out than another 400 gold that you won't spend because you are loaded down with gold and bling already. • "Hub" settings ○ This is the concept that just about sunk this ship in the harbor.  Moving forward, returning home will be more of a reward and an opportunity for down time rather than the first part of every session, mucking up the time allotments and hindering the exploration. • The Story ○ The journey home, arguably the driving force of the campaign, really fell to the wayside like three sessions in. Voyager did a good job of reminding the characters and the audience that, as cool as the settings are, home was always the goal, and I did a poor job of conveying that. • The rules ○ Let's make this short and sweet, I sucked at the rules, there were lots of things I shot down that I could have tried to work on. Time management is literally the next bullet point so I will kick myself more there. Know that in Starfinder, I will try to understand the rules better sooner. • Time management ○ With everything I wanted to do, so much could never get done. There were a lot of plots that I just cut down or discarded because of time (there was a gang of murderers following you THIS ENTIRE TIME that I never got around to) I think if this was an ordered list, this would be the first bullet point. Hands down. In and out of game, I managed my time poorly. I gave myself little time to write the sessions, I gave myself little time to run the sessions, and the time I spent I could have spent better. Part of this plays into the problems of episodic story telling, it's easier to say "we can finish later" than "this has to get done tonight". • Bosses ○ I could write a decent villain, but I could not build a difficult encounter to save my life. Moving forward, I will try to just kill you all, rather than just "make it a challenge". Killing everything is fun, but I feel there was a lack of stakes when the bosses are stupid easy. • Dungeons ○ Next time, I will just make a fucking dungeon. Even if it's just one, I gotta just make the fucking dungeon and make it make sense. Generators are cool and save so much time, but the things that engaged you most seemed to be the places with logical floor plans and rooms that made sense. Moving forward I will try to do as much as I can by hand, and generate the small stuff. Obviously, there is a LOT I missed as far as good and bad things. These were just the points I felt needed to be addressed before I begin writing "Terrok: Next Generation". Before this finishes, I have a few things I want to point out as stories I never got to tell, either time was wasted, ideas were abandoned part way through thinking them, and some ideas make better television than small-time story telling.

The riptide gang -At one point, the party decided not to deliver weapons to a place and instead sold them to a gripli nation. The gang that you stole from was going to attack you. Idea was scrapped due to time

The ancient treasure -The party finds a treasure map to find a piece of the old world! They follow the map and discover a curious prize, an ancient battery that seems semi functional. Content was thought of AFTER I had already clumsily added the warp core to the campaign.

What is love? This one I went back and forth on. I really wanted to do this story, but I knew you guys were not the ones I wanted to tell it to. -Bravo finds an algorithm that emulates the experience of falling in love. Bravo tests it on Echo, and after it is successful, Echo does the same for Bravo, but in a moment of weakness, erases Bravo's knowledge of Enforcer class warforged, making him oblivious to the fact that he is physically different from Echo. This is a story that, with a larger audience, could have been thought provoking, but ultimately was unnecessary. We all get it, messing with someone's head is wrong and the elimination of gender does not fix gender nothing would have been added with this story

Drow war -The drow was meant from the get-go to be the sworn enemy of Avalar. The war would have made the eventual team up to attack the blight even more entertaining. Cut due to rewrites

The Shadow invasion -The shadow plane was going to be a more constant and oppressive foe. forcing Avalar to fight two different wars at once. Cut due to rewrites

Stranded

-Mellorea falls into a portal that lands her in Avalar at the beginning of a war between Avalar and the Drow Empire. Mellorea needs to find a way back home as the party looks for ways to bring her back. Cut because obvious issues, 1) if you find a way to get her back, you can just use that way to go home, 2) convince Gromgar to try and help her 3) a uniform "I jump in after her" from the party 4) this idea later became the rebellion session

The Death Of Ignis I hated that character, he was a one off joke that only stuck around because I said him instead of Gaarda on accident. That’s my secret folks, you could have had Captian Gaarda if I had not fucked up on Ignis. Anyway, I was going to have the engine blow up and kill him, forcing Meero to use what Lelvi taught her to build a new one. On that note… WHAT WENT WRONG: PART 2 • Ignis ○ Fuck Ignis  So there you have it, folks. The Post Mortem of my campaign. All my thoughts since last night about what we made.

[maverickz3r0]

Good Omens as a D&D 3.5 Campaign

Okay, while I could present a case for alignment headcanons easily enough, I'd rather have a different kind of fun and present Class/Stats headcanons. Note that the last time I played D&D was 3.5, so I'm basing this off my memories of that. Main Characters Crowley and Aziraphale are slightly confused Sorcerers. High INT, low WIS. Crowley has also invested a fair amount into Charisma and encouraged Aziraphale to do so too, though Aziraphale still puts most of his points into INT and sometimes STR and CON because Crowley seriously I don't care how many spells per day you have, you need to be able to take a hit or two. He maybe also attempts a divine spellcasting class for a bit out of some sort of token effort for Heaven but gives up on it. They also outlevel everyone in Heaven and Hell for the sheer fact that they are always off getting into sidequests and other bullshit and as a result have tons of EXP. Probably they both LARP too. They are definitely the RPers of the group and only have as much interest in the main plot as it fuels their own sidequests and plots. Have been in a party together since halfway through the first session but somehow no one notices this until the last one. Heaven No one in Heaven understands what the INT stat is for. They all think they're Paladins but really they're largely Fighters with some of them having a few levels in Cleric on the side. Only enough CHA to be pretty but none of it invested in interpersonal relations. Their skill sheets look very confused because they all have acceptable CHA but not one of them has invested anything into Bluff. Sandalphon doesn't even have the token amount of CHA; he's all STR and CON all the time. Did two levels as Cleric but sucked at it and everyone begged him to stop. He and Gabriel both have negative INT modifiers. Gabriel for his part thinks he has high CHA so that makes everything okay but he also doesn't have Bluff or anything else fun invested and his WIS is so low he's constantly failing Sense Motive checks against Aziraphale, who does have ranks in Bluff. Hell Hell understands CHA about as much as Heaven understands INT. They don't see the point in it and every demon but Crowley has it as a dump stat. Most of them are also Fighters and Barbarians with a few Sorcerers who are bad at their jobs but not so terrible they get begged to reclass. Beelzebub, Dagon, and Ligur are probably Sorcerers like this; Hastur tried for like one level before he just grabbed the fire spells and switched back to Barbarian. Oh, Eric/Legion, the one Hastur kills like three of over the course of the series, is probably a Sorcerer too. Crowley's Bluff skill is off the charts due to his heavy CHA investment and Hell has no real WIS to go around either so it's ridiculously easy for him to pass even fumbled Bluff checks. The other demons have to both already be suspicious and use spells of their own to get past his Bluff which Hastur does once entirely by fluke. Earth Finally some class variety! Anathema is a Druid. No question about it. All she's missing is the animal companion and shapeshifting, but she's got everything else down pat. (Agnes might have been a Druid too but was more likely a Sorcerer.) May or may not have a level or two of Rogue in there somewhere; she isn't telling. But she's all about the nature magic and the vibe it gives off. Another high INT middling to low WIS character, but one who understands what DEX and CON are for. Newt is probably a really basic Rogue with nothing special going on there who doesn't entirely understand what stats he's supposed to have since he just kinda tagged along for his first session and then kept showing up. Not that it much matters; he rolled his starting stats really, really low and is always rolling badly on all his checks. He also forgot to buy lockpicks or thief's tools. Shadwell is a very confused Ranger who sometimes forgets he can't cast any spells but frequently tries to anyway. He also thinks he has favoured enemies when he forgot to actually assign any. Madam Tracy is a Bard, and one who has actually invested correctly. She has decent INT and WIS too so she just Bluffs people all day everyday and does really, really well at it, especially since none of it's actually mean-spirited. Adam is a tough call. He's definitely got the Half-Infernal template on him without any real visible signs, and he has an Animal Companion (Hellhound). High CHA and WIS and decent INT and everything else because the dice love him. I think he would pretty much have to be a divine spellcaster but the idea of Adam as a Cleric or Paladin doesn't sound right. ...Y'all, I think the Antichrist might be a Bard. He certainly has the CHA to pull it off plus Bards properly specced can do some wild stuff. Pepper is a Fighter, Brian is a Barbarian, Wensleydale is a Rogue. They're all decently specced for their classes and definitely know what they're doing more than any of Heaven or Hell. Definitely all did a bit of power-leveling and used a few combos to take out the Horsemen. Other God is the DM whose house they're at who gets tired of the mess Heaven and Hell are making of her main campaign. She just leaves them to their crap and goes off to run sidequests for Aziraphale and Crowley, even if they are weird LARPers who sometimes get a little caught up in it and guys, you can absolutely put your characters into a romance, there is literally no way anyone is paying enough attention IC or OOC to notice. Satan is an NPC, but only because he threw a fit about the location and the company an hour into the first session. He stormed out and left his character sheet, which gets passed between God and Beelzebub as what is left of the plot demands. The Horsemen are not technically NPCs but they only show up every few sessions to hang out because God is cool, cause some random chaos, and leave. Death is always there, but then Death is God's housemate and typically also in charge of the snacks and thus allowed to be whatever they damn well please. The game lasts for literal years until the point where Adam OHKOs Satan, the campaign's final boss, with a single overpowered combo no one else ever discovered before. Almost everyone else flips their collective shit because they were promised PvP except the humans, who were aiming for the campaign boss as the goal, and Aziraphale and Crowley, who weren't really power-leveling intentionally and are just there for the RP. God says 'fuck it' and gives everyone epilogues and lets Aziraphale and Crowley bullshit away their executions even though statistically they could fight their way out easily without all that. Heaven and Hell go even more bonkers but then Death brings in drinks and everyone calms down and decides to never, ever do this again. God then calls everyone cabs home and when Crowley refuses to leave his car, she lets him and Aziraphale crash in the spare room.