Yeah, I really hated how he challenged Matt Mercer on just about everything. Matt already allows his players to try anything they want and he kept pushing peoples buttons. Scanlan is my favorite character thus far.
scanlan is the second best character on either season and I could see an argument for #1. Sam is just an amazing player
Meta gaming is the worst and he refuses to do it, even if it puts the group in danger. He knows his abilities relatively well and his groups abilities. All around a great player.
Online platform for running a RPG. It's surprisingly powerful. Had battlefield maps and everything ready for tonight.
From personal experience I can tell you the most frustrating thing about DMing is people that challenge a DMs calls in real time. The time and place for that is AFTER the session. The second most frustrating thing is to plan a night's game and have the players completely sidestep everything you've prepared for and turn the session into a four hour improv for you.
The one good thing about DMing for two children is I kind of guide them so the story follows pretty much as I anticipate.
The real magic can happen when you're ad libbing though. Me floundering with no plan is when my best NPCs have historically been created
I’m gonna have to check this Roll20 thing out. I’ve always wanted to play DnD, but never could find anyone that was interested.
If my wife is ever cool with me running a game on Saturday nights again (which apparently she wanted to use as quality time instead), I’ll tag you.
9 PM to midnight Thursday game, with one player in EST, and 2 more in Abu Dhabi so the game started at 6 AM for them. We're gonna end up having a completely alcohol free game at some point because everyone will be too busy drinking coffee
How did you get 2 people in Abu Dhabi? I can only assume they are rich oil sheikhs that pay you to DM
That's my college roommate (half elf life cleric) and his wife (mountain dwarf champion fighter), he's a petroleum engineer and he signed up for a 2 year commitment in the UAE last November.
So some of my friends are thinking about starting up a DND game. Me and one other have played a couple sessions worth, but nothing too crazy. I have been tasked with being the DM, so I was curious if there are any particular DM books you more experienced guys would recommend?
The Lazy Dungeon Master. Also watch some videos of experienced DMs on tips and tricks. Matt Colville and Matt Mercer have some good videos.
I steal plot material from everywhere, but as far as the actual mechanics of DMing, Dungeon Masters Guide and just paying attention to what good DMs do on live play pods have been the most important thing for me.
Hardest thing for me about being a DM is getting the combat right. You want it to be hard but you don’t want to kill your party. That sweet spot is tough to find
You either have to fudge stat blocks mid combat or just accept that you're not going to hit the sweet spot. I do the latter
I just made mine up and used kobold fight club website to get a feel for what should be medium/hard encounters and then home brewed the enemies to fight the scene. The only thing you guys fought that was by the book were bandits. Everything else I just reskinned and changed a little bit to make sense. like the first night was just reskinned 1/8 CR enemies and the “boss” was CR 1 that I gave a ranged/cone spray. the things they fought the night you couldn’t come were similar stat blocks to goblins. Just reskinned and slightly tweaked damage to hit (Higher) and damage outputs (lower) and HP (lower) to make it fresh. one of the reasons I asked all you guys to rate how into each DnD element everyone was into was because I had a bunch of heavy RP/political scheme/spy shit planned but when most of you were like “gimme dungeons crawls and monster quests” I just adapted my strategy on what plots to prepare and what options to think about. I also have a whopping 5 sessions of DM experience so don’t let me be your expert
I hesitate to say “just use kobold fight club” because i tried to think about the fact I should maybe plan to have some enemies with AoE/saving throw based damage because you had a paladin with a high AC and a (sometimes) raging barb who could tank most melee hits. We didn’t get into most of the encounters I planned out but I tried to think of encounters with mixed damage types so Paladin and Barb could tank and still be “in danger” while still tanking a lot of shit
I was fucking waiting on you to do that. Oh so the Paladin has a huge AC and can stand next to a barbarian and impose disadvantage on people trying to hit him. Ok, level 5 fireball. Kobold fight club is a good resource but I don't think it takes economy of action into account when telling you how tough an encounter can be. If the bad guys are getting 7 attacks and your players are getting 3, it adds up real fast even if they seem like low level enemies. All it takes is a couple of bad rolls on the one end and a couple of good rolls on the other and the bad guys have 12 hits on your party and your players have 1 in a round and a half.
Yeah I’ve played in one game where a DM intentionally made an enemy do psychic damage because I was a bear totem barb, so I intentionally never try to be a dick directly. I would have made no sense for lizard people to be able to do anything other than shoot arrows and stab and the bandits weren’t gonna do magical shit. my point is, as a dm, I think your character should shine and be completely awesome in situations where your build makes sense. Some fights should be easy for some characters if they build that way. Eventually it would make sense to have a mage do fireball, but in a fun home game, makes no sense just to intentionally be a dick.
Thats a pet peeve of mine too. So often you hear players admonished for meta gaming but you rarely see DM's get called out for doing it.
I think dropping in enemies that are designed to be bad matchups for your party is fine. What's bad is that lizardfolk with psychic damage thing where you're clearly just trying to fuck someone over and not even bothering to hide it
I see it where the DM uses a spell/ability he knows you have a bad saving throw for. Somehow the monster immediately knows the weakness of each party member and attacks accordingly
I really wish Keyleth left with Tiberius. Spoiler Briarwood story: After Grog has taken 20 cross bow bolts, Scanlan has no spells, she just got done disentigrating a person who was in the middle of giving up while in the mix of HEAVY metagaming and the party needs to rest, she decides to finally play her alignment to save the townsfolk from zombie Giants during a rebellion... "I'm gonna randomly climb this tree and cast an ice storm on a horde of skeletons..." JFC I'm irrationally triggered
I should add in that r/DMAcademy and r/DNDBehindTheScreen are both outstanding resources for DMs. I've pulled a lot of material from behind the screen
I like Beau. Marisha is just never going to be Sam, Liam, Travis, or Laura but I don't think Beau takes things off the table like Kieleth did.
Not entirely fair to Yasha, as she's missed half the campaign. Although i do personally find Yasha more compelling and better performed than Beau.
I think Ashley hasn't figured out how to play Yasha yet or at least if shes figured it out thats happened very recently.
yeah her being gone half the campaign makes her character super awkward. It's felt and has obviously been a forced dynamic with the rest of the regulars. But, I mean, she seems to not understand how her character should even act or fight. Just weird to me. Hopefully improves with the rest of the campaign. Also, Marisha is like 1/100 the actress of Ashley and Laura, so she's always going to be inferior in most scenes. Molly was just a dumpster fire of a character and class and situation. Cad is infinitely better. It's also a good example of why having 2 people playing the same class really doesn't matter. I once played a one shot as a monk in a party with 2 other monks and it was completely fine. I don't understand the issue people have with (not) duplicating classes.