The D&D thread

Yeah, FGU seems like exactly what I want, but its apparently been in development for years and years. If they had a firm release date, I would probably head right into learning that, but with no definite horizon, it seems like Roll20 is the way for me right now. (p.s. Apparently FGU is only an upgrade option if you have bought FG within 1 year of its release...., so you may need to buy a new ultimate package to get it. Nothing final, just something they have thrown out.).

I went through the Roll20 tutorial last night and jesus it seems simple. Don't get me wrong, I imagine I would be purchasing and switching to FGU as soon as its available, but I gots to have my dynamic lighting! haha

Since I'm DM'ing a couple of first time players and a couple of wives who have played for years but still ask "Which one is that, this one?" when you ask them to roll a d6..., I looked around for a simplified Character sheet. I found a screenshot of someones that I liked, but no editable files or anything. I went about recreating it in excel tonight, and after a couple of hours, and a whole lot of google searches on how to plug artwork into excel and things, it really seemed like I should have done in on Publisher. I've never used Publisher before, had to check my PC to see if I even had it. I did, so I loaded it up and threw this together. No clue if I used publisher correctly at all, I just used a ton of shapes and text boxes,, lol. I threw it together as a template, I'll need to plug in all the right numbers, skills, etc, but I'm hoping that it will help my players out. I've asked them all to send me a profile picture, and I'm going to get all of their character info this weekend. Tweak this for each character, and hopefully the art + a different color palette on each sheet will add something to the game. On top of all that I was hoping to dig through mini's and see if I can paint each character close to the profile pic they send, but I have a ton to do, so we'll see if that gets done.



Also, holy shit its 3 am... so I "threw this together" in the same way someone throws a Thanksgiving dinner together >_< I think I started at about 9:30. Gah, off to bed.

Ended up making these sheets for all 6 players. I REALLY hope this helps them, that being said, I won't ever be doing that again.

Yeah that is hours of work... Also 1d68 on the rangers attack.

Thanks, I was hoping someone would catch something like that. Fixed!

It's just incentive for me not to level them too quickly haha, each time I do it's more work for me!

Onoes said:

Thanks, I was hoping someone would catch something like that. Fixed!

It's just incentive for me not to level them too quickly haha, each time I do it's more work for me!

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May want to look into Herolab, can easily output stuff like attached.

Haha yeah, and for me, that would be 100% fine. My new players are... well, just not really natural with this stuff, at all. I have a 17 year old boy (drama kid, he could figure a char sheet out I'm sure), 20 year old girl (game shop - "I'm such a nerd" girl, who will have fun, but will skim her sheet at best) , 22 year old boy (jock guy, dating girl, I have no idea if he will be interested past session 1), 31 year old nerd girl (quiet, but a little spacey, will study her sheet but probably won't really remember anything without searching it every time), 45 year old man (he'll be on top of things, I'm least worried about him), and 54 year old woman (who will ask what 1d6 means every single time she is asked to roll, I'm 100% positive.

They all have the mindset to play and have fun, but none of them are going to give 2 fucks about rules. They want to play a pretend fantasy game. To be honest, I'm sure there is a super bear bones no character sheet option that would probably work better, but I know D&D, so that's what I'm trying.

I've put probably 70 hours into prep work so far over the last 3 weeks. Learning and setting up Roll20, the char sheet stuff, painting mini's for things. I'll have my end covered, and I'll let them do what they like and try to keep it fun for everyone. Our first game is about 40 hours away now, so I'll let you all know how it went.

On a side note, after spending the time with Roll20, I'm 100% confident I would enjoy a well DM'ed game online now. I hadn't really had any interest at all, as the last time I tried to do remote D&D was probably 15 years ago over a webcam... and it went terribly. Actually, scratch that, probably 7 years ago we tried again, still over a webcam, and once again it went terribly (it was all for one player who moved away, and he kept just muting his mike and doing other things. We would have to yell at him to get his attention and he would be like "Shit sorry, whats up, where are we? what do I need to do?"

I'm really hopeful I'll be able to snag a spot in Hates next game. Keep running these things!

Onoes said:

On a side note, after spending the time with Roll20, I'm 100% confident I would enjoy a well DM'ed game online now. I hadn't really had any interest at all, as the last time I tried to do remote D&D was probably 15 years ago over a webcam... and it went terribly. Actually, scratch that, probably 7 years ago we tried again, still over a webcam, and once again it went terribly (it was all for one player who moved away, and he kept just muting his mike and doing other things. We would have to yell at him to get his attention and he would be like "Shit sorry, whats up, where are we? what do I need to do?"

I'm really hopeful I'll be able to snag a spot in Hates next game. Keep running these things!

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Yeah that kills me when that happens, if I have to tell you its your turn over and over you aren't going to be part of the group anymore. I run one offs every once in a while as well, we just use discord and Fantasy grounds.

Holy fricking shit Onoes, you designed those char sheets yourself? Those are boss.

you sure you don't want to make some 3.5 ed ones? I mean it would be awesome practice for honing your skills.

Also I love that it is mid 2017 and new people are still playing DnD. Gives me hope for the future.

Thanks! But yeah, the char sheets are just done in Publisher, so they are basically posters. Like, you have to manually change every number and stuff. I had never used it before a couple of weeks ago, so its all just "Draw shape" and "Text box" on top of them. Looks good I think, but not convenient or super functional haha.

If you are interested in a character sheet that is more functional that yours (as far as updating), but less pretty, I cannot recommend this one enough. It is what I use for all my paper characters.

Not a tenth as visually pleasing as yours, but it does also have all the little helper text and spells will have the phb number

http://www.enworld.org/forum/rpgdownloads.php?do=download&downloadid=1234

Leaving a little love in this thread after a recent character creation for a game I played last week, here's a great automated character sheet; An example of the colorful version, most of my friends prefer the printer-friendly version though. Also, you can add books using these scripts. Acrobat only, unfortunately.

Another good find, the information and random gen that the guy at this link put together is pretty useful, especially for magic item reference.

Just doing my part and leaving a resource I found .

Omi43221 said:

Just doing my part and leaving a resource I found .

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Nice find and thank you for sharing!
I buy all the books (as I really want to support the creators) but having a PDF to print off stuff with is really helpful

Oh man I've been reading books at work all day now lol. Thanks dude

I've been doing a campaign with a group of friends for awhile now, and it's really starting to pick up a good head of steam. Probably been one of the best campaigns I've ever participated in, so far I'm on my third character, my Monk quit the group after dying in battle and being resurrected, and my Rogue was captured and replaced with a doppelganger which I then got to play as for several sessions. Unfortunately, my group went left instead of right, found an ambush, and alerted the boss (who was down the right tunnel with me) that killed me to prevent me from revealing the grand plan, I'd tricked her into revealing while I was being tortured. Now I'm a Bard, which really our group needed a face more than anything, our Ranger is so skill heavy, my Rogue was nearly useless. I love that our GM gave us all heritage items when we started the campaign that grow and add abilities with branching decision paths as we level. Our Fighter has a pair of boots that let him Haste x number of times per day, increases his Jump skill, and now after the most recent level up, give him advantage on any reactionary role he has to make, like Reflex saves etc. He had the option to pick between affecting himself or affecting others at his last item rank up, if he'd gone the alternate route he would have been able to Slow x times per day, and given everyone else in the group a Reflex bonus. My Bard is a level behind, so I've got to wait a couple of sessions before I get to see how my item evolves. Such a simple idea (which I'm pretty sure he poached from one of the old co-op dungeon crawling games) that has made our sessions a lot more interesting.

My one complaint is that our GM has a hard time balancing encounters. To be fair, we have a 6 person party, which other than being a little cumbersome and time consuming in combat, also leads to us facerolling a lot encounters because of how much damage we can stack. So he's taken to throwing monsters at us that swing trees for clubs in full plate, or things that are almost impossible for us to hit that octo-attack every turn with a super ability. You can tell he makes adjustments on the fly, he just knee jerks a little to hard when he does it, and it's led to a lot of one round KO's on party members.

That's one of the hardest parts of dming, especially a high level party. Magic items are cool but those heritage items probably trivialize a TON of encounters. The fighter didn't take slow, you said but that spell by itself is overpowered.

My current group just hit 14 and the dm said he's trying to make things difficult in a less binary way (just adding more hp and attacks to monsters). He's making social encounters much more deadly. We are 3 lvl 14's so we are pretty tough, but if we piss off the royalty, we aren't going to fight off the whole army and win. Stuff like that. We haven't had too much experience with his new playstyle, but we are currently raiding an Egyptian style tomb. One room had a very subtle clue that if we just straight up entered, we would have been turned to stone. Stuff like that has the same feeling of success as killing some boss level monster.