The D&D thread

Kovaks said:

So last night in tomb of hours

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Accidentally great typo

Fool on noob her!.
First time playing DnD, playing with a a group of 5 + DM, we're all pretty busy people so we only get a chance to play once a month or so. I'm loving it! Wish I would have jumped on this sooner.

Anyway, for you experienced ones... what are some simple/fun things that I can do to help the session, involve the group more, and help my DM as a player? Any personal things you do to make the game more immersive? (For example, I loved the idea of bringing drinkable vials for when we use potions and such).

Also, which podcasts should I start getting into?

Really any advice is welcome.

there are a lot of "meta" things you can do, like you said, bringing drinkable vials, but probably the best advice i can give someone starting is to read up on your class. the dm has a TON of stuff they have to know on the fly and knowing what a 7th level battlemaster has available for maneuvers and what they do can be a bit much. so knowing what YOU do and what your skills do can really take some pressure off the dm as well as speed things up.

there's a channel, XP to level 3... they guy and his humor really annoy me, but this video is pretty great for understanding what can make a great player.


as far as podcasts and streams go, there's really a lot of them so it depends on what you are more into. the video above is from Critical Role which is PROBABLY the most popular due to the career choice of the players. they are all actors so they REALLY get into the RP of it all. if that's not your thing, matt colville runs a game called "The Chain." i haven't watched all of them but there are 12 episodes. i don't know if the campaign ended or they just stopped filming them or what, but his games are very RP-lite, and tend to be more focused on rules and tactics.

matt mercer (critical role) and matt colville (the chain) are amazing dm's and have two very different styles so you can get a good feel for how different games are run and still really enjoyable. Deborah Ann Woll also ran a short series called Relics and Rarities. i don't really like the players in that show much, but it's really great for how immersive she is. she brings all kinds of stuff into the show for the players, like hand made puzzles and stuff. i really like her as a DM, even though she's not very rules savvy, she is extremely creative with her puzzles and encounters. every year wizards of the coast have a couple different streaming events and a few years ago she dm'd a one shot called the witch of briarcleft. it was pretty amazing. there's a puzzle right about mid-game where you can tell would have been a good puzzle if they weren't so crunched for time but it ended up being kind of a bust... but otherwise i was really happy with it.


oh, i also wanted to mention... since you're having games that are so spread out... it MIGHT help to have a place where you guys can talk about stuff inbetween sessions. currently all my games are happening cross state, so we use discord. we have a few channels specifically set up for certain topics. it can be nice for people to just pop in, make a comment or ask a question and people can respond when they have time. also our DM tends to make good use of it, having a lot of the more boring or tedious things happening over discord (shopping, house management, some story backdrops of the world at large)

Feien said:

Anyway, for you experienced ones... what are some simple/fun things that I can do to help the session, involve the group more, and help my DM as a player? Any personal things you do to make the game more immersive?

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My wife enjoys taking session notes which she then converts into an in character journal of her characters adventures. Not only do her notes help out the group when they need to recall certain names and information but the players get a kick out of reading the journal itself.

Ome said:

My wife enjoys taking session notes which she then converts into an in character journal of her characters adventures. Not only do her notes help out the group when they need to recall certain names and information but the players get a kick out of reading the journal itself.

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NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERD

(I've done this)

Super recommend "The Adventure Zone" podcast. First arc is 69 episodes (if I remember right), typically a little under 1 hour each. Takes a few episodes for them to find their stride, but by the end, fuuuuuuck it's good.

Feien said:

Fool on noob her!.
First time playing DnD, playing with a a group of 5 + DM, we're all pretty busy people so we only get a chance to play once a month or so. I'm loving it! Wish I would have jumped on this sooner.

Anyway, for you experienced ones... what are some simple/fun things that I can do to help the session, involve the group more, and help my DM as a player? Any personal things you do to make the game more immersive? (For example, I loved the idea of bringing drinkable vials for when we use potions and such).

Also, which podcasts should I start getting into?

Really any advice is welcome.

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Know your character! Then learn other players class mechanics, as a DM you learn quickly who you can trust to play by the rules and who you have to watch.

Anything physical you can bring to the table can help, but it depends on style of the table.

Put the phone away, pay attention, think about what your character would be doing in the moment.

Have a plan or idea of what your character will do before your turn, indecision can really bring combat to a crawl. Worst players are both indecisive and don't know their class/character.

Feien said:

Anyway, for you experienced ones... what are some simple/fun things that I can do to help the session, involve the group more, and help my DM as a player? Any personal things you do to make the game more immersive? (For example, I loved the idea of bringing drinkable vials for when we use potions and such).

Really any advice is welcome.

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Immersive? As a player, the best thing to do is stay true to your character and what motivates them. Try to anchor your characters backstory into the world with details picked from source material. Then look for situations where those details might influence your choices. Talk to your dm about who your character is to give then a better sense of how they might incorporate those elements into the campaign. Be flexible though. It's a hard thing to pull off, but when done right it can really draw you into the game world.

The other good thing to do is to "take turns" being the hero. I often step back a bit as a player in order to let other players help solve problems or even prompt reticent players into speaking their thoughts. It can be easy to overshadow others without a sense of proportion on the spotlight.

Last night my girlfriend got drunk enough to let me convince her to play her first ever D&D game. My first time as DM too.

She killed 3 gnolls, and got mauled to death by an Owlbear. She loved it!

Kovaks said:

So last night in tomb of hours the DMs bippolar probably autistic 12 year old son got teleported and lost everything on him which included 3 bags of holding including the party treasure 4 years hording and his flying broom and wand of wonders, the meltdown was epic and oh so entertaining. After the outburst he kept begging me to use the wish stone to wish everything back to which I kept telling him "your character doesn't know I have a wish stone" which drove his mettagaming ass insane. He is the 4th character this has happened to including mine but this was the best result.

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Damn that is rough. Isn't Tomb of Horrors a long and difficult campaign?

It was originally a competition module. I honestly wouldn't recommend it to anyone running a campaign where story was in the front seat and player character deaths were rare. I can't see ever running a first edition campaign but should something really unlikely occur I'd want to run it as some sort of "your minds are invaded by memories not your own" as the party falls unconscious and then goes through the terrible history of another adventuring group that sought fame and glory in the tomb.

Sorta like that Roy game in Rick and Morty. Exp to be awarded for how well the players do (to encourage them taking it seriously) but no real chance of their regular characters dying.

pharmakos said:

okay, i have a handful of people interested in D&D, but none of us have actually played the P&P game. most of us have gained enough familiarity over the years from various non-P&P D&D stuff that we should be able to pick things up pretty quick...

but none of us want to DM

how crazy would it be if we took turns DMing? probably just going to run modules and whatnot so won't need a whole lot of creative cooperation

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I know this response is two months late, however, this is exactly what my current group does. We run bi-weekly games and each dm runs for a month or two or three running their campaign. Then we switch campaigns, dms and characters. It's been a mix of homebrew and modules.

I am about to jump back into the DM chair with a homebrew to give the other two dms a break.

We try to end on good stopping points, and there is some slight lag for the first game when picking up an old campaign however this group has been going since the release of 5E and I believe this rotating dm strategy has been key to that longevity. Also playing on roll20. Meeting up in person would have ended things a long time ago.

i have a question for you dnd veterans out there...

so i created a kensei monk and my group is running through chult and we just entered the tomb of annihilation (we are lvl 10). so some backstory... when i created my monk, i decided to create a minor story and let the dm decide how it all panned out. i told him that my master had an ornate katana that was basically decorative, but my character believes it to be magical. i told him that my character rolled an arcana check and he either rolled a natural 1 or a natural 20 but i don't know what it was. my character is CONVINCED that it's magical and that everyone else who's checked it and say it's mundane don't know what they're talking about.

so fast foward to a month ago where i died and due to the death curse... well, death means dead. i was getting ready to put my new character together but when i died, my body just got sucked up into the sword and it turns out that it's actually the sword of kas and it used it's powers to bring me back as a revenant. the super interesting thing about this. is in my last campaign where we went from lvl 1-20, we found the hand and eye of vecna and our mage actively used it. after we were finished with that campaign our dm did a fast forward 40 years. we played as newbies and basically witnessed our characters last adventure where they died to some super powerful necromancer (turns out the necromancer was the kid that was kidnapped and that we failed to rescue back as our original characters when we were like lvl 17 or something). so the dm tells me that the sword of kas has made me a revenant and my job is to hunt down the hand and eye of vecna (that currently would belong to a lvl 20 wizard that just saved the world saved the world from... well... all kinds of crazy powerful dieties and elder gods).

okay, so i was my monk was loosely inspired by akuma, so he's overly arrogant. now... for those of you who have stuck around, here's my question. currently myself and the sword of kas are working in tandem so there's no issues in butting heads with each other... but my character just... cannot abide being told what to do. there's going to come a day, probably pretty quickly where the sword tries to dominate me or forces me into a situation i don't want to be in... so ultimately i want to dominate the sword. i want it to stop being the sword of kas, and force it to be my sword. what's even the precedence for that? how would i pull that off beyond just waiting for the inevitable charisma check (that, as a monk, was my dump stat)

tl:dr how does a monk permanently dominate a sentient weapon?

j00t GM will need to follow the rule of fun in that one. You could also go monkeys paw on the sword and technically do what it says. Asks for a beer, you bring it a warm one and go from there.