#trying to arrange dnd games with my work schedule is like trying to put a hundred snails in a bucket.

[roleslaying]

Man, between it being the off season for LARP and life stuff I haven't really been able to scratch that roleplay itch and it's starting to get to me. My little guys in my head, they're getting dusty, they need exercise... When will my silly little Role Play games come back from the war...

[starrypawz]

On the list of reasons I want to get out of my job one of them is also and this is probably the pettieist one

'Actually my job keeps fucking up my ability to play dnd and I'm tired of it'

When I first started working there it was when I was still volunteering at the zoo, which was on Saturdays and so I was able to play dnd Saturday evenings

Then after I stopped volunteering I still for the most part generally had my Saturdays free and work Sundays instead.

And if I did work Saturdays it was before we moved to the bigger store and I'd be scheduled in to 8.15 if I was closing so I could still play on a Saturday just about but like we'd run the game a bit later. But then we moved to the new shop and I have to work until 8.30 and so it's been a case where I sort of just join the games a bit later

Then once I got put on reduced duties I started getting scheduled in on Saturdays and the arrangement was meant to be an on/off thing but in short that just fell the wayside after a while. I tried to keep my Sunday working but nope Saturdays now.

And now becuase of the summer we're shifting to 9pm closes which means I have to be at work until 9.30 which yeah can't really play dnd since you know trying to find a time that actually works for us as a group is near impossible

Also not to mention often working Saturdays also just... makes it really hard to just... do shit in general.

[olivedunham]

how do you get into a dnd group?

this became longer than anyone expected so i think it goes under a read more (it’s been a while since i had to answer an ask, bear with me)

i think the first step is to be enthusiastically into dnd! i know i was for a while before i actually got to play. beyond that, it depends. i can’t honestly answer for an in-person group, though a friend i know in person says he met his group through work and through work-people’s friends. since i also play with at least a few people i was friends with before we started, making friends who are enthused about dnd is probably a good second step.

the hardest part, at least in my life, has been finding someone willing to DM a group instead of being a player. in our case, @saader was the one who reached out about putting together a game and needing players, so we didn’t have to work on that too much. but another group i was in before we started TPF had our DM legit just… ghost on us, which was awful. a couple of us have since stepped in to DM new games, but i’ve never been able to spot a DM as easily as someone who wants to play.

the easiest way is if you are interested in DMing. that makes reaching out to friends who maybe like some dnd streams and podcasts and saying, hey, do you want to play? a whole lot easier. playing is more accessible on the outside to people who aren’t very familiar with the actual process. if you are interested, matt colville has a pretty great series about how to start, and web dm is another series of videos i’ve enjoyed a lot. 

if you aren’t or maybe it seems like a big job, you can try and ask some friends if they’re interested in just a one-shot. try it out, see if you like it, and if you do, you can try a rotating DM style of play. where each week someone different dms, and that person’s PC takes a back-seat. that can be very fun and gives every person a chance to play different roles!

if DMing really doesn’t appeal to you, reach out to your friends. ask if anyone’s been interested. every group i’ve had grew organically. you don’t need to have a group where everyone knows each other, just one where everyone knew someone when they started is usually easiest.

it’s not the only way though. my earliest group, which i joined after they’d played for a while, started by people on reddit seeing if anyone was interested in a game. roll20 is also a great source for this; many, many people are looking to start groups there, and you can search by when you have free time and what edition of the game they’re playing. i’ve found great groups before this way!

ultimately, you have to commit yourself to a big social interaction, and that can be hard. in order to play with TPF crew, i’ve re-arranged my work schedule, difficult to do as a supervisor. but it’s a commitment that i’ve made to a creative endeavor, and that’s something to keep in mind. a long-form campaign is something you work at, so you want to find people who are in it as much as you are.

that’s all the advice i can think of, but please don’t hesitate to ask me about dnd or anything related! i love talking about it and it’s such an inspiring, creative, passionate adventure that has brought me closer to some very dear friends.

[nemossubmarine]

GM’s reflections on KoNS

So, my first solo-GM’d campaign, and my first DnD campaign is over. It took 9 months and ranked up to 21 sessions, which is quite a lot. It was definitely definitely far from perfect, but there were things that I liked, and things that I learned. I started putting this piece together around the time the third arc kicked off. It’s mostly comments on what I think I did wrong/did not work and what may have caused these issues, and what I can do differently. There’s a lot of comparisons to the DA game I play in / run, because that is my high standard, that is what I aspire to get to, which is of course not possible, since the system is different and players are different.

Anyway, I know my players follow me here, so a quick note to you, in case you’re planning on reading this (which I do not expect (recommend?) you to do). I just want to say that this is not me saying that any player played wrong, or was a cause of something that I didn’t like. At the end of the day I am the GM and the mistakes that led me being displeased with aspects of the game are my responsibility. These are my reflections on what I expect and want my games to be. It, of course, has to do with players, because there’s no game without players. Mostly players are mentioned in me thinking how I could encourage this and that sort of behavior etc. Anything said here is not meant to be a comment against you as a player or as an individual. I recommend not reading this, if you think you might take it personally. (not that I think there would be anything too upsetting in there, just covering all my bases)

Also if anyone who happens to read this (which I don’t expect anyone to do!), wants to discuss, I’d like to hear whether you agree/disagree/have had similar experiences. GM’ing is a lonely job, and I got more than my fair share of that with this adventure, so I might be too wrapped up in my own stuff to really know if something’s just a common GM-mishap.

The rest is under the cut, because, as usual for me it is long and rambly. As in almost 4k words. It’s more than a small essay, I could return this as a homework assignment, haha.

Maybe I should do some kind of sub-titles, to make this a bit more organized. Alright. Alright.

Session building In general, I am more used to writing story-lines in bulk, because I usually have several months in-between the adventures I run on the DA game. Compared, this was very fast-paced for the most part. I do think running KoNS made me better at improvising on the spot, because there was several sessions I had to run with the barest of outlines.

What I think would have been good to have was a bit more time to set up the world. I built it on the fly, and while I enjoyed the process immensely, I think it left the PCs detached from the world, because they didn’t know if stuff fell in line with the DnD norm or was I planning on something different entirely. I’ll talk a bit more about the fast and loose gamestyle’s effect on the plot in a future segment.

Anyway, one other thing that suffered was map making. I relied some on ready-made maps, but again, I get a mental image of a place, and no map really completely captures that. And it’s not like I made every single place I imagine into a map, because making maps on the computer by yourself is sloooow. I think that’s something I want to rectify for future games, having maps of most locations, so the players have something to look at. That will probably mean having to rely on maps other people made more, which, good, they’re better at it than I am, I should totally do that.

The very first adventure I ran had a thing that I’ve never used again, but I really think should pick back up. Those were short descriptive pieces of new locations I’d written beforehand. I have no trouble describing things off the top of my head, but if I want to go for a certain mood pre-written descriptions really help. So yeah, I definitely think some more attention could have been given to describing things.

I thought I would learn the books while I ran, because that’s how I learned to play/run DA game, but I kinda underestimated the fact that there’s a ton of books, and even when I tried to limit the books I allowed on the table, I still didn’t pick things up as fast as I hoped, which kinda lost me authority as a GM. It was difficult for me to find a comfort zone with the rules of the game in terms of what to throw out and what to keep. Running DA I’m usually very experimental, basically changing stuff every adventure. I never got there with DnD, perhaps because I didn’t have time to stop and think about the rules as the pace of the story was so quick.

There’s one more thing that fits under this section. We had some canceling trouble. Of course games have to be canceled for a lot of reasons, that happens, but by the end, every other (or even more) of the sessions planned were cancelled. It bummed me out, not gonna lie. It kinda pissed me off a lot too. I don’t ever want to be the kind of GM who people are afraid to tell that they can’t come and stuff like that, so I didn’t air it out on the players too much, but yeah. It blows. Trying to arrange six people’s schedules to match with you as the main organizer fucking sucks always, but there was other effects too. It made me feel that no one wanted to play my game, that people were losing interest. It broke the momentum of the plot. It cut off my thinking process; I don’t write everything down, because I like to toy around with ideas in my head that I’m not so sure about, but if there’s a 3 week gap between sessions? I can’t do that.

It was especially bad with the final session, where I had prepared for the final battle very extensively (going as far as to have another person test it with me) only to have the session cancelled last minute and moved 3 weeks. And in that time, school had started, I was knee-deep in exam books and my other game had started, which I was also GM’ing for, I had no time nor desire to spend a lot of time going over the things I had decided three weeks prior, so a lot slipped my mind. So yeah, the finale definitely suffered for that, and that bummed me out more than anything. I’m not blaming any of the people who had to cancel, it was just, super-unfortunate in general.

I think there’s a quick fix to it though: breaking down the story in chunks (similar to our DA adventures) with breaks in between might help, so no one has to be free 21 weeks in a row. Another one is to agree that if only one player is missing (which I think in all cases except handful happened here) and especially if it’s a last-minute cancel to play something. Not main plot (unless all players are fine with it), but a side mission. I’ve understood they’re really common among RP groups, and while I didn’t get why people did that before running KoNS, I definitely get it now; it keeps the people who can attend in their characters, helps to keep the story and feel of the game in mind and most importantly doesn’t make your GM sad.

Combat Haha, battles, oh god damn.

DnD’s battle system always felt too complicated for me, too many variables. I developed an early dislike for it, which I really didn’t actively try to work around, until it came time time to actually design Yadira. There were maybe like 8 battles in the whole of KoNS, bounties non-withstanding, so I wasn’t very prepared to make a boss battle. It doesn’t help that I’m like, do everything on your own, don’t take stuff from books ever, so it was not like I could reskin something relatively similar as her. In the end, I think Yadira worked just fine, mostly thanks to the fact that I got to test run her before actual game.

Next time, well, next time I’m probably not running DnD, but I’ll actually learn the damn craft, I did it for DA, I can do it again. I’ll also want to have a discussion with the players about how much battling the players want to do. But, yeah, I’d want to actually work on that from the beginning, and not let myself get too scared to learn. I’m more of a story GM, but there’s a lot of cool stuff to be done with battles, and I want to keep that craft up.

Plot Considering the fact that when I started the necklaces had like, map-pieces to an ancient weapon or something like that, I’m surprised how well the plot actually came together. There was some stuff that got dropped that could have used more time and probably more than a few inconsistencies, but in the end, I did ok.

Although, I have a real villain problem. I am not very interested in cults or dragons or pure evil tyrants, which leaves me with unfathomable forces that don’t care about your existence. Which, fair enough. They did need some building up. For the most part our heroes were concerned with Sweepers, the pan-dimensional clean-up crew, which I made way too gnarly-looking for their super-neutral outlook, because they didn’t know that the real “villain” was Ishran the sun god and Yadira, the former Raven Queen. I think Ishran-in-Adam  and Ishran-outside-Adam needed a lot more building up than the few sesisons they got, although, considering how short the story was, I guess I did ok. But yeah. Next time, I need to work on build-up of villains a bit more.

This might be more relevant to the NPC section, but as I’m mostly going to focus there on NPC-PC relations, I’m going to put it here. I was quite sad about the fact that by the time end game rolled around none of the female characters I had established had really big roles anymore. It had to do with the fact that I had introduced them really early (such as Mairin and Joan) and as they were working with the PCs, they couldn’t have information that could help solve the puzzle, as there was no reason why they wouldn’t have given it out. Now that I know that I hopefully have a bit easier time putting out a balanced end game crew. And maybe in general building NPCs who are relevant in the story throughout.

In general, I think the story might have been a bit too fast-paced and contained way way too many NPCs (or didn’t have a clear focus on only a few, leaving the rest as backdrop). As I said, I’m more used to writing pieces of stories that last about 4 to 7 sessions. In KoNS most plot points lasted only one. Some of my players commented that they liked the fast-pacedness, which is fair enough. I wonder if perhaps I would find it easier if there wasn’t as much changing scenery, or more returning to old scenery?

There were a moment where I think I started coddling the players a bit regarding the plot information. When they didn’t ask for information from an NPC, I just gave it to them, but that just re-enforces them not asking questions, and also, they’ll be much more interested in the answers, when they are the people who actually asked. And I was very hesitant for punishing PCs for lackluster information gathering, and I shouldn’t, because it shouldn’t be me hitting them with a stick, because they didn’t play the way I wanted to, it should be a plot point and a learning moment and natural consequences. Speaking of consequences, wow, those are way harder to set up when you’re writing on the run, and don’t have to wait a year between adventures.

There was one point where I kinda slipped with the plot. I wasn’t aware enough whether it could hold a new player added in the middle. And I don’t think it did. I felt bad for the new PC a lot of the time, because the story simply didn’t bend to give him a chance to get the same stuff the others did, and I struggled to include him naturally and let him have moments as a character. For example, the necklaces; from a quick glance it would make sense to add a fifth player, because there were five necklaces, but there was no good way for me to hand the necklace over, because I needed to get to the third act and I needed to give the necklace to Alexis for that to happen. Compare this to when for example Alf was added to our DA RP. I wrote that adventure, and it was rather easy to slip him in, give him a plot relevant (for that adventure) place and make PCs work with him, and later adopt him into the party. But the difference was that, though there are some themes that carry over from adventure to adventure and some honest to god plotline in our DA RP, a main plot only lasts for the adventure, and there’s not an end goal in mind.

And yeah, maybe that tells that I’m not good enough as a storyteller and as a GM, that I have way too much pride in the story that I don’t allow the characters really to change it (more on this later), but it wasn’t a free-roam campaign, it was a story-campaign, and that’s where the trouble ended and began. I think for future, I will not allow new players to enter once the story is on the move, unless I feel that an addition is necessary for a story reason (we can talk endlessly about how (un)balanced our party was,  but that’s not my concern, tbh). And that’s a call I want to reserve an only right to make as the GM. I don’t think it’s unreasonable, I would just need to be upfront about it to players before starting.

(slightly tangential: trying to make/making strict rules as a GM really makes me feel like an asshole. I’ve never had to make that kind of calls in DA RP, except for people using cell phones. I think it’s just a matter of, I know my DA RP group’s playstyle, because we evolved it together, so it is my playstyle as well. Setting rules shouldn’t make me feel like an asshole, because it’s simply clearing up expectations that might be different from player to player? Anyway, I’ll still feel like an ass :P)

Gameplay: PCs, NPCs, Playing and Roleplaying This is a huge topic but a lot of it sorta ties together, so I’m gonna work with this title. I’ll bring up few small points first, and then move on to bigger topics.

I felt I had a lot of problem giving people things to do, moments to shine in based on their class. For example, we had a paladin in our group. I have real trouble wrapping my mind around stuff like evil alignments (see above my discussion about the way I do villains), so spells like “Detect Good and Evil” found little use. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that in DnD class defines you much more than I ever think it did in my DA group. I don’t think Cahair as rogue of the group, and not only because he is one of three, he is defined as the Dalish elf of the group, and his storylines follow accordingly. I never did that to the players based on their class. I think that’s where I really misunderstood DnD.

Speaking of underutilized parts of PC: Animals. I admit, having animals has never really worked seamlessly in any game I’ve played in (Alf has animals in DA RP and Randy has a dog, and we kinda forget them half of the time :D). Ofc it’s player’s responsibility to remember to bring their animal, but I still think I could have given some places to use them. Namely our Paladin’s horse. A lot of stuff happened indoors, most traveling was skipped and when they did travel, it was places where horses really didn’t work. Woops. I did make the ranger’s animal a plot point, maybe 1/3rd of a plot point really. I explained his origins, but it never became really too relevant. More of a time question than anything, I think.

I suck at rewarding my peeps, no ifs no buts. I gave them money, but not really anything to use money on. I threw some magic items at them, bc idk I thought that was what you are supposed to do. I don’t know how much of this has to do with how I play Cahair. I actively work on him having as little money as I possibly can (sharing the extra amount of pay he gets from being an officer with the people he works with, for example), and we are not big on throwing magic items around. Everyone got something after the Nightmare campaign, and even then I didn’t get anything that actually helped, just something that explained in game stuff he could already mechanically do (I did get climbing gloves after the pirate campaign, but that’s about it). That said, I don’t know how much it actually bothered my players, I just know that you’re supposed to fling treasure at your players in DnD, or whatever. I did like the music box Adam gave to Jeff, but like, that was bc there was an actual connection there, so it was kinda meaningful.

Maybe it’s time to talk about connections. There were several NPCs given to me by the players relating to their character. Playing them was always super-stressful, and I think I sometimes read them wrong, started taking them to unexpected direction. Of course throwing players out of the loop about people their characters are supposed to know can be a lot of fun, but if it stops matching the picture players have in their head, well. It’s a thin line to walk on (most notably, Elpidios’ plotline was very stressful, bc I wasn’t sure if it could be resolved).

In my DA game, the PCs are incredibly close. We have a lot of discussion just among those characters, and I, when I GM, try to encourage that to the best of my ability. I never really felt that the PCs here made such a strong connection. There’s several reasons: the fast-paced story that didn’t allow them to stop and get to know each other that closely, the fact that they were sort of thrust together by the plot and they didn’t choose to go on an adventure together and the fact that they were all pretty good guys with similar opinions on things, so no conflict arose.

The lack of conflict among the PCs is a curious thing. It most definitely has to do with the unfocused world-building. In our DA group, we’ve had conflicts over Humbert wanting to put Elspet and Boshara back to the Circle for their own safety. Alf and Cahair bonded over people, both PCs and NPCs, being gross about elves. No such thing existed in my universe. I consciously avoided writing in racism/sexism/homophobia as huge issues in the world, but that left the world devoid of issues. There were the drow and the elven civil war, but it touched really only one of our heroes.

There also, of course, can be personality conflict, and that is an extremely thin line to walk on. I don’t want no asshole chaotic neutrals stealing from the group, or someone bullying the lawful good guy for being, well, good. But some conflicts might have brought people together. That’s definitely a much more touchy subject though, even in our DA group, where I feel frequently displeased that I cannot bring up Cahair’s boyfriend without having a PC who hates him comment on it, or me being worried that since we all tease Humbert, our templar, that the player might feel unwanted.

I definitely definitely do not want to insert conflict where there is none. It should be natural conflict or no conflict. That would have probably come more naturally if our heroes had time to get to know each other and chatter.

Another fact that made me think that I might not have been as encouraging with roleplaying as I want to be, is the PC’s relationships with NPCs. One note on NPCs in general, again, there was way way more of them than necessary, but yeah, relationships. There were some I really enjoyed, namely Adam’s and Jeff’s and Dophina’s and Prince Floyd’s, but again there was not much time to evolve PC-NPC relationships a lot. I did offer chances, which Jeff’s player took a lot in the third act, because the player knows me and my GM’ing style.

There was that first session of the 3rd arc, where I asked PCs to pick someone to talk to. I had done a similar session with the DA crew in Antiva, and it had worked marvelously. In KoNS it didn’t work out as well. I think the biggest problem was that the conversations were different. In the Antiva campaign, each scene we played had an end goal (Humbert wanted to ask Alf for more deciding power in the ship / Boshara wanted to know why Cahair was so upset with her), while a lot of the scenes in the KoNS version were chatting with no particular goal. This leaves a huge pressure of preparation on the player, and I should have been in those cases more attentive in asking the players what they wanted out of the conversations. I’m not saying it was all horrible, but a lot of the conversations kinda sizzled out. There were two conversations that worked out really well. One was between Lir and Lutharin, but that had been a conversation I had wanted to have, to set up Lutharin’s understanding of the differences between surface elves and the drow, I was prepared for the conversation. The other one was between Jeff and Adam, but that was where Jeff’s player had prepared well with what he wanted to discuss (again, he knows me, he was present in Antiva session as well).

I also think it might be unusual and for some a bit awkward, to have a one-on-one conversation between PC and NPC (or two PCs) in front of everyone else. I’ve certainly done those things in secret, because the things I’ve shared with the PC have been plot-relevant. But I think there’s a lot of merit to having non-plot-relevant conversations in front of others. For one, it’s interesting. Second thing, those kind of conversations are gold mines for character development, and if that development happens off-screen for the others, it might be difficult to bring to the table. But maybe that’s just me.

(And I’m not saying I wasn’t awkward playing NPCs at all, mind you. NPCs relating to PCs were always a bit awkward, as were most of the gods, and basically anyone else I hadn’t a clear picture on, which just goes to show I need to limit the number of NPCs)

Anyway, maybe I just didn’t give a clear enough permission to do this sort of thing? I remember feeling very awkward about playing Cahair in the first campaign of our DA game, bc it was a highly emotional story for him, and not for the others, so I felt a little over-the-top at times. And not even a little. But, I told the GM that it might be fun to bring back Harralan, the villain of the first adventure, and Cahair’s first love. Well, she did, on the third adventure, giving my character a chance to have a conversation with him he never got to have in the first adventure. I felt it was a sort of permission for me to roleplay to my heart’s content, and it definitely helped with the awkwardness. I guess we never had a moment like that?

It of course wouldn’t have worked for everyone, and not everyone has to enjoy this kind of stuff. But I enjoy it, and would have liked more. I think Adam’s and Jeff’s third act relationship-growth was really good. I just wished relationships like that were present for everyone throughout the story. Of course, the NPCs kept changing session to session, so that would have been difficult.

Closing thoughts There are a lot of complaining in this piece, because that’s what this piece is about. At the end of the day I still really loved running the game, loved my players and I am proud of the story we build together. I think this is a good place to start working towards better games and better stories. I will take a break from DnD, but when I eventually return to it, I’ll be smarter for having run KoNS.

And that’s it for the most part. I’m gonna go snooze now forever, since I’ve been doing more than enough GM’ing for a while. Except I’m still running an adventure in DA RP, ah well. But yeah, I’m planning on partaking in NaNo, so I don’t have plans on running another long game any time soon.