Sandra

There’s also cook’s utensil rules in XGE.

@dogsoahC@lemm.ee @dnd@lemmy.world

Cherries!

This is great, makes me happy to hear!

@flumph @dnd

Elves are of a culture that’s long familiar with magic yet respects magic and its ways.

@Shkshkshk @dnd

Climate change has the same “going through it in real life” trait as Pandemic has.

@boardgames

My own reason for staying DM so long was that I had such a hard time trusting that the other DMs wouldn’t “cheat” (YMMV what “cheating” means as a DM). Finally I found some ways to talk about that in a clearer and less misunderstandy way.

Awesome map, btw! I have the dungeon cards from them.

@Jtmoriartywriter @dnd

You’ve already gotten an overwhelming amount of tips but here are my standard tips.

@Oszilloraptor@feddit.de @dnd@lemmy.world

Not that Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is bad but I like Lost Mine of Phandelver a lot better. You don’t have to play to a particlar ending either, just start playing and explore. 💁🏻‍♀️

It’s one of the best adventures of all time. ♥

@TransplantedSconie@lemm.ee @Brunbrun6766@lemmy.world

Even outside of home if someone is curious I sometimes just say a scene and ask what they’d do or where they’d go 🤷🏻‍♀️

You’re at the edge of a misty, dewey forest at the break of dawn. In front of you is a castle, and there’s the forest behind you all glittering from dewdrops on the cobwebs. The nearest village is six miles away; you could get there in two hours or so. There’s a well outside the castle a couple of hundred feet to the left of the entrance, which is right in front of you. Whaddayado?

It wouldn’t be as blorby as I prefer but it’d be an intro to the main gameplay loop.

Yes, I’m ready for that situation since this is a common daydream 👍🏻 I can drop 'em right into my ongoing campaign, plenty of stuff for them to do and explore there, and I have many ways of making characters that are all compatible up with the big 5e game down the line. From pregens or the Essentials Kit to something in the middle like Dungeonesque and if they’re really non-nerdy and just wanna dip their toes, I have my own searcher. I don’t use it if I think they are serious about getting into full D&D but it’s nice because it only has two stats and those are both derived straight up from level. (So in short, if I think they’re future nerds I’ll use the Essentials Kit and if I think they’re pretty set in their non-nerd ways I’ll use my searcher class, and it’s no big deal if I guess wrong because it’s easy to switch over.)

I run theatre-of-the-mind so we’re ready to go. If they are looking for more of a dice&minis type thing I have that Castle Ravenloft board game that came out in 2010. Easy to learn and plays in an hour and teaches basic attack rolls & hitpoints stuff and is still called “D&D”.

Although I wouldn’t hesitate to refer to Shadowdark, Svärd & Svartkonst, or any other OSR game as “D&D” either. There’s no trademark lawyer in my living room. 💁🏻‍♀️

What are some of your fave campaigns with him?

Correct, and that’s exactly why it does not work for group things.

If fedi is like email, and it is similar in many ways, a Lemmy community is like a mailing list. People can send to the list and the threads on the list from different servers. And there can be separate communities about the same topics just as there can be separate mailing lists about the same topics.

But hashtags in email wouldn’t work as a replacement for mailing lists. Hashtags in email can still have some use, within a mailing list or in a specific conversation, but it’s something very different from a mailing list.

On kbin, if people think that “Oh, here is where the posts about cycling will show up” but the magazine is just based around a hashtag, there’s no way for people to participate deliberately. It’s misleading.

Using hashtags as if it were tumblr or twitter is anti-decentralization and drives people into using the biggest instances only. Groups a la gup.pe and Lemmy and Friendica is a solution to that. It’s only a partially decentralized solution, since each group itself is centrally hosted (exactly like mailing lists were), but it’s at least a solution, whereas misusing hashtags that way isn’t.

@ada @meteorswarm

Yes, it works poorly everywhere on the fediverse, is exactly what I’m saying.

Hashtags on Fedi can be good for organizing stuff within a single account or instance, or it can be used for other things like trigger specific bots, but they can not (as you know) work like an IRC channel like they did on Twitter.

That’s why I’m not happy about kbin elevating that misfeature and legitimizing its misuse as if it were as robust as the other federated group protocols are. It’s not the end of the world or the worst feature on the planet, I’m not that worked up about it, it’s just not good, is all.

(Again, not blaming you for that ofc, you only reported on it, and that was awesome, thanks.)

@ada @meteorswarm

Yes, keyword search works poorly on fedi is what I’m saying 💁🏻‍♀️
Using that as a basis for group talk can end up being super unreliable in some situations.

@ada @meteorswarm

(Not shooting the messenger, just as info for other readers.)
Using hashtags for this seems like an idea with some severe limitations because it can only see the posts it has happened to come across otherwise. (Unlike the other group formats.)

@ada @meteorswarm

Yes, this is great, rogue for sure but the background that @The_Mike_Drop came up with is so awesome that it makes me wanna think to not stick too closely to Folk Hero. After all, backgrounds were meant to be mix-and-match, make-up-your-own etc. But folk hero is def the one to snarf stuff from! Charlatan can also have some cool stuff perhaps!

Are you working from modules or from your own homebrew?

Since you have so many players maybe one of them can help you with these fights 💁🏻‍♀️

Welcome to D&D! Here are my own recommendations, TL;DR: if you can find the original 5e starter set with the green dragon, start there!

We use the house rule where players make all the rolls so when they roll a 1 when defending, that’s like a crit.

I feel all sorts of ways—sometimes when they’re on a roll I can start hoping for some adversity, sometimes when they have a string of bad luck I can root against them, and sometimes when I’m feeling one way I’m playing it up as the other—if you’ve read Knights of the Dinner Table, that’s sorta the vibe—and all of that’s fine.

Because when I was prepping the game, I did that as a super fan of the characters. But now once the game is started I can’t control it. I can’t control how many monsters they meet, or what the stats of those monsters are, because that’s all been set. Nor can I control whether or not those monsters crit. I play them hard and to the best of my ability and I don’t pull punches 🤷🏻‍♀️

Generosity. Unyielding unflinching generosity. Giving the other NPCs and PCs the attention they need.

You can also look for ideas in books like Hillfolk (has ideas on how a “dramatic pole” can help, i.e. being torn between two conflicting values like home life vs work) or Play Unsafe (such as playing with status, being a noble or a servant). Play Unsafe also has the wonderful tip to not be afraid to be boring or obvious when improvising, to say the first thing that comes to mind as opposed to trying to force a creative or unique idea, because what you think is gonna be boring may well be super interesting to the other players (and when it’s not, it’s at least something basic and fundamental they can easily build on).

You can also collaborate with another player for a type of relationship with their character like being their body guard, religious follower, sibling, servant, spouse, teacher, or student. (Only if they’re into it, of course!) Some storytellers over the years have used extremely shallow and two-dimensional characters to great effect over the years simply by having a cast of characters collide with each other—people meeting other people is great story fuel.