The D&D thread

Talos said:

I'm going to try to DM Curse of Strahd for a bunch of new players. I'm pretty new myself. I have played about 6 sessions total of D&D my entire life, all 5e.

Do you experienced DMs do a session 0? I was planning to just follow this guy's guide.


Not using any software or anything like that, except maybe some sound effects from this website.

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Any advice for a new DM? What rules should I focus on memorizing so I don't slow things down looking stuff up?

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any updates? i'm interested to hear out it goes for you

j00t said:

any updates? i'm interested to hear out it goes for you

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We're playing every two weeks so next Saturday will be session 1. I'm having fun planning stuff. Figured out a way to combine three of the hooks into Barovia. Also going to take all their items when they wake up on Old Svalich Road.

Then following this guys advice for tweaking Death House.

Talos said:

We're playing every two weeks so next Saturday will be session 1. I'm having fun planning stuff. Figured out a way to combine three of the hooks into Barovia. Also going to take all their items when they wake up on Old Svalich Road.

Then following this guys advice for tweaking Death House.

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we ran curse of strahd for our first campaign with my weekly group about 7 years ago, so i'm a bit fuzzy on a lot of the details. our dm also almost always runs his own story, but he really liked the curse of strahd campaign so he ended up mixing his own stuff into it. some of the sessions he'd change like 90% of it all, other sessions it was 90% by the book. i've never gone and looked through the campaign to see what he changed and what he didn't so it's real hard to know how different our experience was from a normal run through.

anyway with that said, that's how we started the campaign, with all of our stuff gone. we woke up in cages being carted through the mists by a group of like... knight cultists? i can't quite remember what they all looked like, with the exception of 2 of them because they ended up being mid-bosses that kind of harried us through our lower levels. one of them ended up being revealed as the antagonist in our vengeance paladin's backstory.

anyway, point is we went through all the time to properly gear ourselves in character creation, then boom! you were all made unconscious through varying ways and as you wake up your range of motion is limited from the shackles around your nearly naked body.

it made those first few sessions really tense. and to answer one of your earlier questions about keeping track of food and inventory, moments like that are really the only time i think worrying about eating and resting is fun. it's part of the story, none of us had the skills, equipment or spells to just make food through a spell or skill check. resting was a big deal because we had nothing and had to seriously prepare our camp to survive the night from some wandering creature.

the death house was also pretty intense. again, i don't know how it's supposed to go, but if i remember correctly we only had 1 combat at the end, the shambling mound i think is what it was? our dm was like, i really should have changed that. i changed a lot of the death house, except that thing and i feel like it was really the only thing that SHOULD have been changed because it's too high a CR for what the book assumes the party level is.

anyway, our death house was a lot of skill checks and a bit of a psychological horror. my character had some elder god stuff happen in his background, so the dm catered the death house to that, so it was a lot of lovecraft type horror where you never SEE anything, really. stuff started kind of normal with sort of an odd after taste and then just gradually (and then more and more quickly) started getting more and more odd and weird where we really just wanted to get out of that place.

TL;DR...

i just sort of mentioned it, but you should absolutely think of tweaking that shambling mound encounter somehow. it's like a cr5 creature for a party that is most likely lvl 2. i know a lot of newcomers who were just completely turned off of dnd altogether because of that fight.

A Paladin. Where Charisma is a primary stat.

Urlithani said:

D&D Introduces Its First Canonically Autistic Character in The Book of Many Things

Dungeons & Dragons' upcoming release, The Book of Many Things, includes the TTRPG's first canonically autistic character.

www.superherohype.com

A Paladin. Where Charisma is a primary stat.

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That articles title is a lie. Have they never heard of any of the Harpells? All of them are nuts

bigmark268 said:

That articles title is a lie. Have they never heard of any of the Harpells? All of them are nuts

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Harper Harpell is a saint goddamnit.

Szeth said:

Harper Harpell is a saint goddamnit.

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Fair enough lol

Also what are we diagnosing Pickel Bouldershoulder with?

Szeth said:

Also what are we diagnosing Pickel Bouldershoulder with?

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Oh shit. How could I forget one of my favorite dwarves. Yeah seriously.

Urlithani said:

D&D Introduces Its First Canonically Autistic Character in The Book of Many Things

Dungeons & Dragons' upcoming release, The Book of Many Things, includes the TTRPG's first canonically autistic character.

www.superherohype.com

A Paladin. Where Charisma is a primary stat.

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for what it's worth, i actually know a couple people with autism who are pretty dang likeable. i had no idea one of them was autistic until he told me one day how big of a struggle it is. i was like, no way... no WAY you are autistic. you CAN'T be. you're funny! his wife and daughter heard me and just sighed heavily and said, "do you have ANY idea how often he practices his jokes on us? he just talks into a mirror all day and then has to make us sit down while he runs through his jokes like an act from a bad comedian. then we have to intricately tell him what was funny, what wasn't and why. it is exceedingly draining." dude just shrugged while his wife and daughter were ragging on him lol. i was like, yeah okay you convinced me

j00t said:

any updates? i'm interested to hear out it goes for you

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It went very well for the players. They had fun. I, on the other hand, was not as prepared as I should have been.

The hook into Barovia went waaaay faster than I expected. I had a bunch of elaborate shit planned out and things set up in case they went off-track. But they pretty much rushed into Barovia.

I tried to stall them somewhat but they eventually made it into Death House which I was not really prepared for. The 3 hour session ended while they were still exploring the first floor which was good timing. I'm somewhat familiar with the other floors and catacombs but not as much as I should be.

Next session in two weeks. I have a LOT of reading to do. I am pretty sure they're going to breeze through Death House. So I need to have the rest of Barovia figured out.

Talos said:

It went very well for the players. They had fun. I, on the other hand, was not as prepared as I should have been.

The hook into Barovia went waaaay faster than I expected. I had a bunch of elaborate shit planned out and things set up in case they went off-track. But they pretty much rushed into Barovia.

I tried to stall them somewhat but they eventually made it into Death House which I was not really prepared for. The 3 hour session ended while they were still exploring the first floor which was good timing. I'm somewhat familiar with the other floors and catacombs but not as much as I should be.

Next session in two weeks. I have a LOT of reading to do. I am pretty sure they're going to breeze through Death House. So I need to have the rest of Barovia figured out.

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haha man, that is DM'ing in a nutshell. no matter what you plan for, the players will invariably do the opposite. you plan for them to get distracted like 12 year olds with adhd, and they become hyper focused and stay on the rails for the main quest.

do you know the players well? if not you'll learn what their triggers are to make them slow down sooner or later. could be something just as simple as putting a door in their way and watch them completely fall apart trying to check for traps, trying to unlock it, trying to find a window to go through instead. all you gotta do is make ONE door a mimic and they will never treat doors casually again.

you can also make a hallway or pathway or whatever full of the REMNANTS of traps. have an open doorway with the door in a bunch of pieces with soot and ash all over the ground, and maybe a couple of decayed bones here and there. then passed the doorway is a hallway with another door or two closed and innocent looking. don't put a trap there so that when the rogue detects traps he won't find anything. that'll scare them more. "i rolled a 23 on my detect traps" "you don't see anything, there does not APPEAR to be any traps." add emphasis to certain words and it'll absolutely make them more nervous even though they rolled high enough to be confident that there aren't any traps.

this is a question for experienced DM's... i've often thought about outright lying to players in certain circumstances... it would have to be done with players where everyone is very comfortable with each other and adult enough to be able to separate in game stuff with real life, and i think it would have to be brought up in a session 0 so that the players are aware of the possibility of it.

so let me explain... we play dnd with a virtual tabletop since we are all irl friends that live all over the country. we use fantasy grounds, i don't know if other vtt's have this option, but players can roll their dice "in the tower" which makes the result only visible to the DM. we've messed around with how much we've used the tower in several campaigns, but we've kind of settled on only using the tower for high stakes dramatic moments. the kind of moments where you're all tense about what the results will be. maybe counterspelling the lich right as he's about to cast disintegrate on the cleric with 20 hp left.

i've gone back and forth multiple times on the idea of lying to the players if they roll a nat 1 on an insight check or something similar. normally, if that kind of thing happens, the player knows to ignore any response they get because they know they just rolled a 1. even if they are good at not metagaming, it's hard to take the response the dm gives you seriously. so now, let's say in conjunction with rolling insight checks in the tower, the cleric (who is normally very good at insight checks with their high wisdom stat) rolls a nat 1 but can't see the result, they just have to trust their own proficiency.

they are being told some information by the quest giver, and they are kind of unsure if they are being set up or if the person is just uncomfortable asking outsiders for help. the cleric does an insight check (in the tower) and rolls a 1. the DM then says, "you look at his posture, the way he's fidgeting, his eyes that dart here and there... it's EXTREMELY subtle, and if it weren't for how insightful that you KNOW you are, you would have missed it... but you know a liar when you see one."

in reality, you, as the dm, know that he was nervous because he didn't want his neighbors or guards to see him conversing with the group of hardened mercenaries. they live in a simple town and don't want to invite "those kind of people" in because the only consistent thing adventurers bring is dead bodies.

so it's not that you just outright make things up (though failing a perception check with a nat 1 could result in this?) but the character's nat 1 resulted in a completely failed interpretation of the events.

alright... i've gone back and forth on this because while i like the idea of it in theory, it'd have to be done very carefully because it could easily come across as biased or antagonistic... like i said at the beginning, it could only really be done with friends that have known each other for a long time and are comfortable with it

thoughts?

Well as for people rolling 1s on stuff like that. It depends how you play. One way to look at it is there's no critical failure.

Or you just have someone else roll for what they failed.

Sometimes what I aso do is. While we are playing and someone rolls terrible to do somrhinf cool. I just look at them and I'm like dis you roll yet cause I didn't see that.

The big thing is, if the players aren't having fun. You aren't doing your job. So adhear to the rules till it's not fun. Then break them a bit to make it fun.

Exactly. I forget what DM guide I read this in one time. But it started off with "These rules are just basic guidelines. They are meant to be broken." It really resonated.

yes, i'm aware that crit fails and successes aren't rules as written. they ARE variant rules though. but regardless that's not the point i'm contemplating. it's specifically the lying to your players part. so let's assume that at my table, we do have crit fails and successes on skill checks. let's not discuss that part because it's not what i'm wanting feedback on.

Lying to your players in character is fine.
As the DM it is a really bad idea. But I have stone faced looked over the shield and rolled dice while locking eye contact, and said things like you failed/succeeded. Not once looking at the dice.

You are there to have fun. Both for you and the players. So have fun. If you think railroading them is going to be more fun, do it. But be honest with them as the DM.

Srathor said:

Lying to your players in character is fine.
As the DM it is a really bad idea. But I have stone faced looked over the shield and rolled dice while locking eye contact, and said things like you failed/succeeded. Not once looking at the dice.

You are there to have fun. Both for you and the players. So have fun. If you think railroading them is going to be more fun, do it. But be honest with them as the DM.

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yeah, i don't disagree. but again, the caveat would be that they would know that getting misinformation from me would be a possibility. it would HAVE to be discussed in session zero

i think it's just coming from the reality that sometimes, in real life, we have all the information in front of us and still draw the wrong conclusion. i mean how many times as a dm have you set up a plot only for the players to just completely miss the clues or put them together in the wrong way?

though, now that i'm thinking about it in those terms... that sucks as a dm when you have to correct the players because they just flat out got the wrong answer.