The D&D thread

Finally started Curse of Strahd again. This is the 5th attempt. The campaign itself is cursed.

But all the players get along, there's no family drama (fuck playing with married people again), and everyone has a stable job. I have hope for this one.

Talos said:

Finally started Curse of Strahd again. This is the 5th attempt. The campaign itself is cursed.

But all the players get along, there's no family drama (fuck playing with married people again), and everyone has a stable job. I have hope for this one.

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You've encountered the most powerful boss in the game.

I genuinely wish you good luck.

My last campaign concluded a few months ago after running for a little over 3 years. It started out rocky and I had to replace 4 or 5 players, but the last two years were rock solid.

I'm taking a break because DM'ing takes a lot out of me, but I plan on running another lengthy campaign in 6 months or so.

Always remember when DMing. Less is more. The less you plan, the more of that plan the players will do. And the more you plan, the less of that players will do.

But if you want to keep them "on the rails" make up choices and options that are fake. So they end where you want.

Ex: The hallway splits left and right. Which way do you go? Doesn't matter! Which ever way they go they get the same outcome. But they don't know that.

I love adding in tons of that so they think they are doing so much more. Mixed in with a fair amount of real choices.

Schrodinger's Gun, also known as Railshroding.

Good. Let them burn

Both Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford are leaving WotC. Those two were really the last bastion that D&D had going for it and that isn't saying much, at all.

The IP is going down in roaring flames and all they have left is turbo-woke, mentally-ill idiots like Makenzie De Armas and she doesn't have a single creative cell in her body.

Here's to hoping that the IP gets put up for auction and someone who cares about the brand scoops it up and does it justice.

Dr.Retarded said:

No goddamn reason you can't play the old versions because you've got probably all of them in hard copy.

I'm in an all honesty what the hell do you need to keep rewriting or revising the rules. I thought fifth edition was pretty goddamn slick, that's something you can tailor it for your own campaign. Three and a half was kind of clunky, but still fun. We never played four.

Fuck em though. Let it burn to the ground. It's also not as if there aren't a ton of other wonderful tabletop RPGs out there like RIFTS.

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Yep. 5th has been out for over 10 years now and it works great. It's easy to tweak things to fit your table.

With AI, in a single afternoon you can develop any one-shot or outline a long campaign. Even create NPC and location art to share with the players.

A DM can organize all their stuff in OneNote or something similar. No need for D&D beyond. I see no reason for WotC to exist.

Dr.Retarded said:

No goddamn reason you can't play the old versions because you've got probably all of them in hard copy.

I'm in an all honesty what the hell do you need to keep rewriting or revising the rules. I thought fifth edition was pretty goddamn slick, that's something you can tailor it for your own campaign. Three and a half was kind of clunky, but still fun. We never played four.

Fuck em though. Let it burn to the ground. It's also not as if there aren't a ton of other wonderful tabletop RPGs out there like RIFTS.

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The official rules haven't influenced my games for 5+ years, but the symbolic destruction of what D&D was isn't just about the rules. D&D is an IP that I have a very deep love for and seeing it wither is extremely painful. Furthermore, I'm not just a player -- I'm also an avid collector, but I sincerely doubt that the future products are going to be compelling enough to buy.

Also, the departure of Perkins and Crawford (mostly just Perkins) doesn't bold well for future movies, PC games, etc.

Perkins was a pretty extreme Liberal, but he did understand that he needed to avoid some of the mistakes that Leftists push. Now, unfortunately, the game is completely controlled by those Leftist ideologs.

Way I see it, if the rules worked just do tweaks and updates and add more to them. I love aide content. I would love to see years of side stories. New coming and going in different lands.

Not more rebooting for the sake of selling the main 3 core books.

I mean personally I never liked 5e rules. The combat is bland and melee is one note like 3.0 was in my eyes.

But use tons of thr aide content stuff for my 4e games for every edition and many other games as well.
Like for instance. My group right now is on month 12 of 5e Tomb of annihilation. And if I had to guess. I'd say another 2 to 4 months before it's done. But yeah I just convert everything to 4e.

imready2go said:

What sort of prompts are you using to get AI to create a dungeon for you? (Asking sincerely, not fucking with ya)
If I do manage to get these friends to play, they're going to need a dungeon or two to get used to playing again, especially since the last time we played together was 1st edition! lol
It would make my job as DM easier if I can get an assist from AI to make some quick and easy one-offs.

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The one-shot I made recently didn't have any exploration or traditional dungeons. It was more of a social encounter + combat thing where they had to do side quests to weaken the BBEG before the final fight.

I framed it for 3 hours and it went something like this:

45 mins for intro hook + short combat
45 mins for side quest A
45 mins for side quest B
45 mins for boss fight

I had a rough vision of what I was looking for and I shared that with the AI (theme, NPCs, encounters, party level, allotted time for each section) and then went back and forth with the AI to expand it.

I haven't tried using it to make maps or sprawling dungeons so I'm not sure how that would work. I would probably start with a rough sketch then upload the image to give it an idea of what I'm looking for. Then ask it to describe each hallway, room, encounter, etc one step at a time while I used something like dungeonscrawl.com to really flesh it out.

So for the past year I've been running Tomb of Annihilation with my crew. But I've rewritten the entire book down into a 55 page word document that fits our play style. And is gear towards players over lvl 20 in 4e.

Do any of you guys rewrite stuff from modules/adventures when using so.thing form a different setting or edition?

bigmark268 said:

So for the past year I've been running Tomb of Annihilation with my crew. But I've rewritten the entire book down into a 55 page word document that fits our play style. And is gear towards players over lvl 20 in 4e.

Do any of you guys rewrite stuff from modules/adventures when using so.thing form a different setting or edition?

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Despite having nearly 100 pre-written hardback adventures, I have never run a single one. Though a couple of the 3rd party campaigns are absolutely fantastic and significantly better than anything I could have ever come up with. That said, I have read many of them and mine them for ideas to add to my games.

My last campaign was heavily based off of a 3rd party book, but I changed so much that even if the players read the hardback they probably wouldn't have realized it was the inspiration for the game.

I think it's completely normal (common, even) for DMs to change/tinker with campaigns. In fact, I'd be concerned if the DM didn't because published campaigns are -- A. Almost always ridiculously unbalanced (usually too easy, but there are some situations where they're TPKs if run as-written). And B. Usually far too generic and don't have enough flavor to interest any one group of players, but that's a consequence of trying to write an adventure for hundreds of thousands of players with a near-infinite number of group compositions and preferences.

As an example -- I absolutey loathe the anthology adventure books. I mean I absolutely hate them, but there are a lot of people who love them. I've never really examined why I hate them so much, but I think it's because of the fundamental way I view D&D. Some people view the game as just some characters going into a dungeon killing monsters and getting loot. Almost a videogame-like experience that's just more open-ended. And adventure anthologies line up with that style of play. However, D&D, for me, needs to be much more 'epic'. I have a hard time enjoying D&D unless the group/party are working together towards crafting their own saga/legend over the course of a long campaign.

One-shots and games of 'popcorn' D&D do almost nothing for me. I'm way too much of a whore for the drama, loss, sacrifice, revenge, and triumph that a group of players who really love the game can create.

Tl;dr

You're doing it right.