There are some rpg communities I’d love to see more activity but I haven’t even been pushing as much as usual recently, let alone posting our moderating. Maybe one day.

It’s a good idea to spread PSA’s like this though so pretty people can.

I didn’t know this was by the people who did Barbarian. Maybe I will see it.

Ya I think he’s said something about replacing that advice with node-based adventure design or something, but this article by itself has helped me improve tons of mystery scenarios by itself that I think the advice works as is.

That’s a food idea to include it on a session 0. For a long time I didn’t realize how lucky I was to have such creative players until I started DMing with players new to rpg’s who aren’t used to that “I can do anything?!” mindset.

Good idea!

Best one yet!

Yup. We’re in an extra normal time and people are still clutching to decorum and civility as if it matters anymore.

On the other hand, I always see people who use the term tankies calling everyone who the US propaganda says is an oppressor an oppressor. It’s so weird how that works out that way, that the colonized countries trying to get self-determination are the oppressors, and the western colonial and imperialist countries are the only ones with “freedom”. They eat the propaganda right up.

Well at least here we can pretty easily see where the money goes by looking at the billions of dollars given to Israel and the military.

I’m so used to hearing that this technology is 10 years away, or whatever the old adage was, that i can’t believe we’ve been seeing actual progress on this front in the last few years. Maybe it will actually happen eventually!

How so? I heard their protocol was better than Activity Pub, but I don’t really know the details or what the difference is.

As someone who’s only seen the first Alien and part of Alien 2, I really enjoyed it.

I’ll try to add to the conversation with 5e rather than suggest another game like everyone else (although I will say I’ve gotten into 4e recently and it’s surprisingly fun with very tactical, engaging combats lol). I agree with a lot of what you said about sprinkling in descriptions and dialogue throughout the combat. I also think better designed enemies can help a lot. I highly recommend the Flee Mortals book by MCDM. I used it a lot in 5e campaigns now. More interesting enemies can make comabt more interesting.

I also think more interesting environments can also help. Put in lots of cover, spots of difficult terrain, maybe a trap, things like that.

Uninteresting combats should be fast, and one thing that helps that out is low health, high damage enemies, which for me means every now and then I lower enemy health if they already got a few good hits in or an enemy blew a spell slot to take care of them, since the point of this combat is to make players lose resources, not really for the story. This is less of a problem for low level combat, but more for higher level combat when health totals increase. Also, for these don’t be afraid to make them some run to warn other allies, or run in fear if they get low health (unless they’re mindless undead or constructs), or some run when their boss dies, things like that.

On the other hand, interesting or story important combats I’m okay with being long as long as they’re also compelling and fun to play. After all, D&D has a lot of fun combat options in classes and players want to use them. That’s where I recommend things like villain actions in that Flee Mortals book or the other stuff I recommend above.

Oh and the last thing I did is I am very liberal with consumable magic items or temporary buffs as awards for quests and stuff. I like the latter because players aren’t encouraged to hoard it and it in fact encourages pushing ahead more to take advantage of the buff while they have it so the opposite mentality of hoarding, but the former has the nice advantage of being an additional option for a player to use in combat, which can make it more interesting, especially for those without spells. But to prevent hoarding, you have to make combat harder and have the kinds of players that look at everything on their sheet, as well as give enough rewards they know they’ll get more in the future.

This is a great idea for a patreon or a blog. What other one-shots have you done? I’ve heard of Wood Sheep Chase so wondering if you’ve covered others I’ve heard of.

Great idea!

All of these sound intriguing to me but I’m very much in the wrong timezone. Good luck!

Everyone either seems angry or like a bot. Before I couldn’t pull myself anyway, now I get bored a couple posts into the front page and then I just check it a few hobby subs that I hope can move here someday (mostly TTRPG ones lol).

Lol same

I feel like I’m going to have to play in a Blades in the Dark game before I run one, but not sure how. But that would definitely be on my list.

I got the Avatar rpg forever ago and haven’t had a chance to play it yet, either.

And Pathfinder 2E is definitely on the list.

Not sure if DnD 5e 2024 is different enough to count but if I can’t get a game of that going in the new year, I probably have no chance of any of these other ones happening either, so I’ll also say that one. Haven’t even delved into the differences between that and the 2014 version yet, though.

Sounds like it’s mostly just an education issue.