It’s fortunate that Wizards of the Coast can’t keep it in their metaphorical pants and keeps trying to go for all of the money in the most obnoxiously predatory ways and has done so since at least 4th edition and its attempt at a virtual tabletop monopoly and “blind bag” miniature peddling.
I need to train myself to stop saying “D&D” for tabletop fantasy games because I am not going back again. I left before, and this time it’s permanent. Fuck WOTC. 
Bought Shadowdark and Mothership instead, wish me luck as a first-time GM 🫡
I do truly wish you luck! Remember, the greatest victory is making sure everyone has fun!
Thanks comrade! Picked em specifically for being fairly forgiving to run, compared to DnD or something so rules-light I have to come up with everything myself.
A little secret trick to help you get started, from someone with three decades of experience:
If you give out clues to something the group needs to figure out, and the group comes up with ideas that are actually very clever, especially while working together, those are now the correct answers, even if they weren’t before. The party will be happy, you’ll move on to the next set piece, and no one has to be the wiser.
Similarly, if you’re lazy or low on resources and you have a “go left or right” option in something like a maze, wherever they go is the next room you wanted to take them.
My party convinced themselves during an arson investigaon that the culprit was a werebeaver, and now the culprit is a werebeaver
I adhere strongly to rule of cool, and werebeaver sounds cool.
Ohhh, thanks! Beneficial gaslighting, haha. Will keep those in mind!
Sortof, but I think of it more as a part of the cooperative storytelling element. Players figuring out puzzles or locations or how things make sense can offer a better idea than you had originally - and even if not “better” they’re their ideas and therefore automatically more engaging. Them not being overtly made aware that they’re shaping the story in that way is, I think, good for immersion. Though there are some popular games that make that kind of interaction an acknowledged part of the game mechanics, I just haven’t really explored those myself.
All adventures and plots and whatnot could be drawn out as a vast and total map of every possible option (megadungeons be crazy), but any particular group will only ever take one of those possible paths (well, megadungeons be crazy). It’s an immense saving in mental energy to not have to juggle a dozen different options, and put some of that saving into making fewer, better, events.
Going “left” or “right” and them leading to the same event isn’t really deceptive, it’s part of a relationship where the GM manages narrative flow to enable players to play around with an interesting subset of that vast and intimidating space where “you can do anything” - and it isn’t really a railroad unless they’re then prevented from going back and choosing the other direction. I’ve had my group get ten minutes into a dungeon, find a few neat bits of loot and then just… lose interest in it and go track down the flying city that made the items because I was a fool and gave them a more interesting origin - ended up pretty neat.
Though this is all informed by my style of mostly winging it and how my group plays. I make a small network of elements in play and how they interact and then adjust things on-the-fly. I ignore things that my group aren’t interested in (random encounters, encumbrance, various rules), no longer expect them to slog through twenty rooms in a crypt, and I make quiet notes of any random comments that indicate a desire for something to happen later so that I can include an opportunity for it.
Is it gaslighting if if makes them happy and moves the pacing along?
Technically? But it’s for everyone’s fun and nobody needs to see behind the Warden’s screen 😈
Oh yeah, one more thing: fudging dice is your right and even your responsibility at times (yes, that includes in the players’ favor). Use it wisely, especially if a result that could determine how the rest of the session goes hangs in the balance.
Similarly, if you’re lazy or low on resources and you have a “go left or right” option in something like a maze,
My take on that is that if the narrative space is fuzzy enough to allow that, it shouldn’t be granular enough that the players are blindly deciding left or right in the first place. Like I learned from experience that it’s better to let someone roll a skill check to get clearer options like “find a lower level” or “track their quarry” or “opportunistically loot” and just do some PbtA style complications in the background, instead of trying to make a real map of a narrative space and letting the players flounder about trying to guess where I intended them to go.
Of course I swung pretty hard towards “let the player character’s skills and dice decide what opportunities they have” in general, alongside just collaboratively riffing on plot points with them to decide what the macguffin they’re chasing that week is and what their opposition is when I didn’t have a good idea otherwise. Especially because that tended to make things funny and lighthearted, while my own ideas veered into psychological and body horror entirely by chance, like whenever I was writing the stories they’d just get real dark and real fucked up really fast instead of being shitposts where my shadowrun players decided the genetailored pet they’ve been hired to steal is a pikachu and they start calling themselves Team Rocket and quoting old pokemon episodes.
Everyone is obsessed with Mothership these days but I can’t stand it personally. The whole game revolving around “your characters are going to die all the time yay!” is a strange way to run a game. It’s so hard for players to get invested in roleplaying when they don’t have time to learn who their character is. The system is good (because d100 is superior) and the universe is cool but as a player how am I supposed to care when I know my character isn’t going to live more than a couple of sessions.
I think that’s more of a warden/player choice than a system issue. According to the Warden manual, rolling should be pretty rare, as opposed to DnD where you roll for near everything. I’m sure you can lean harder into killing the players if you want, or the opposite direction, managing stakes seems to be where the real skill in a Warden comes from.
Maybe, but the fact that the top of the sheet has a score which is “number of sessions survived” and basically all the interactions the players have with the world are “try not to die”, it’s not really set up for a long campaign with the same characters. It certainly could be run that way though. It’s just not my cup of tea.
Ey, to each their own! A lot of that comes from tone setting, and you absolutely can run it as a meat grinder if you want to. I like it because it can be easy to drop in or out of, personally, as a new GM it’s nice.
Plus, I bought a sandbox module that seems to be more focused on political intrigue and revolution than outright horror, so I can swing it in another direction if I want.
Starfinder cRPG when? I watched a playthrough of Pathfinder: Kingmaker and it’s good. I’m hoping that Owlcat would make Starfinder also.
I’d play the hell out of that.
Closest we got is WH40k Rogue Trader. Ain’t half bad, but I wouldn’t mind Starfinder at all.
Yeah, might as well wait for Starfinder.
Unfortunately Owlcat said they wont be revisiting Pathfinder/Paizo IPs for at least 3 years, which is likely due to the OGL fiasco and not wanting to touch OGL with a 10 foot long pole. They mentioned they would like to make a PF2e/Sf2e game at some point then, and potentially some remasters of Kingmaker and WOTR in the pf2e system.
I figure they’re waiting for these systems to mature more. 3.5e games are untouchable now, and tbh is probably why Larian is no longer interested in 5e either.
Hasbro is mainly owned by several large investment firms.
Their board wants money now and Hasbro as a whole is incapable of long term thinking. Wizards of the Coast is struggling to make decisions that a long term money maker.
Hasbro would burn Magic and DnD down today for $1 billion rather than make $10 billion over the next decade.
It’s why they can never make the virtual tabletop work… they just… can’t think that long term.
I don’t think long-term thinking digs them out of the hole they’re in with D&D. It’s a huge well-recognized brand, but pen and paper RPGs are a teeny tiny niche. A wildly successful iteration of D&D would still pull in “I forgot how to count that low” money at a Hasbro board meeting. They’re stuck between “do as little as possible without killing the brand so we can license movies” and “try to find a new way to squeeze money out of our customers.”
I honestly flit back and forth on this take as DnD does have something important that Hasbro kinda doesn’t have and that’s more adult consumers (with money) that also love buying merch as long as the IP itself is successful and with DnD being handed a boon via stranger things and web streaming of DnD playgroups there’s been a revival of tabletop RPGs within the last decade. Overall annual earnings for Habsro last year were around 4.6 billion with WoTc making roughly a billion (split between MtG and DnD), toy sales are anticipated to continue being stagnant or overall declining with the recession (around an estimated 10-12% percent this year compared to last year), you have an IP that can generate a wild amount of profit if handled well. Sadly I don’t think it’ll be handled well and DnD will likely decline back to the post 2010 profits.
kinda glad i just switched to occasionally dming call of cthulhu. maybe one day i’ll even get to play
I’ve only played 3/3.5e and earlier. Other systems of course but i never liked the changes after 3.5 and we had all the books already
IMO DnD peaked at 4e. I liked how many options there were.
Have you tried not playing D&D?
But yeah I really wish WotC would hurry up and die. The reserve list and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. I think the only reason they haven’t gotten rid of it (even though they flirted with $300 proxy boosters lmao) is because a bunch of employees have retirement funds set up in Magic cards. They’ll all cash out together at the same time because there aren’t any laws against insider trading when it’s children’s toys.
Have you tried not playing D&D?
In case this is a good faith question and not
posting, yes. I don’t play it anymore and haven’t in years. I play Paizo games instead.It is absolutely not a good faith and is a shit talking question in TTRPG groups lol (like how former smokers can be). I’m just meme’ing you.
Srsly tho D&D is kinda mid when it comes to RPGs. I never got into it because it always felt too generic. Part of that is because D&D is where a lot of fantasy tropes originated, part of it is because it is just generic not-Tolkien high fantasy. Actual game mechanics are handled by other systems a lot better. D&D requires so much home brewing by the DM it’s like why I am paying WotC for these rules?
Unfortunately popularity means more accessibility when it comes to learning how to play. There’s hundreds of channels dedicated to D&D tutorials, not to mention the more professional improv stuff. Trying to find content on Trudvang Chronicles as a counter example can be a real pain in the ass, especially if you’re trying to get friends to try something new.
It’s like how Warhammer is synonymous with tabletop wargames and people think it’s the entire hobby. There’s better and cheaper miniature manufacturers making better games, but they don’t have the same presence on YouTube or Instagram. D&D is that for RPGs or Magic for card games.
Srsly tho D&D is kinda mid when it comes to RPGs.
The main reason D&D was even a thing in my tabletop groups was brand recognition. It was very hard to get them to try, let alone consistently play, anything else. One time I miraculously got them to play the Heavy Gear RPG version that even Dream Pod 9 basically abandoned in favor of “clix” plastic trash.
D&D requires so much home brewing by the DM it’s like why I am paying WotC for these rules?
Very true. The resurrection system alone is such an unexamined society-breaking plot hole (why would anyone even worry about some king getting assassinated if the royal coffers could easily resurrect them in pretty much any reasonable circumstances, over and over and over?) that I tend to have to house-rule limitations on it or just abolish it altogether for death (and life) to have any reasonable tension in the setting. Left as-is, funerals are like a mockery of how poor a dead person is that can’t afford the rez toll and I could imagine some grieving friends and family sometimes threatening the clergy for their pay-to-play miracles.
I still have to call Pathfinder “D&D” around my group.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
