T w e n t y S i d e d
Hah, one post after I pose Diablo as a good example for a mechanic he poses it as a bad one. there’s some irony for you.
Laughs aside, he was right. There’s a certain place for war games, and if that’s what you and your players want then power to you. But metagaming really saps the fun out of anything other than pure strategy. Whether it’s one person or the whole party. Of course balancing mechanics and roleplay to encourage a good table is easier said than done. As is making interesting NPCs.
My first instinct has always been to say that you just have to learn these things as you go, but that’s not really fair. I remember that’s always been a pretty discouraging mantra to me. Looking for new DM advice and just seeing ‘You’re going to suck and people won’t have as much fun until you get better’ is a bit of a rough way to start your game. And it’s not really true, either. There’s a lot of ways to start off on the right foot. Like starting small, for one thing. A few little quests to figure out how you and your friends like to play, and then work on the bigger stuff. Admittedly that’s a lot easier said than done. It feels frustrating to be trying to confine yourself to the kiddie pool, especially when you can see so many people having fun in the deep end. I know when I first tried to DM I did one small game, and then tried to skip right to the big stuff. And almost immediately got overwhelmed by trying to track balance and mechanics alongside the epic story I was trying to tell. It fell apart in a few months, and I had a miserable time doing it.
In the end i’ve learned that the real key is to start small with a purpose. Whatever it is you want to work on. Testing worldbuilding, a cool homebrew mechanic you saw online, pre-establishing pc relationships. Something that feels like it’s taking you towards whatever you want to do in the end. What really got me comfortable DMing was a oneshot I did several years after the disaster that was my first attempt to run a game. My main goal was to test a homebrew character creation idea i’d been playing with (based on a culture and species alternative ruleset i’d seen online. I couldn’t afford the book, so I made my own system. Which has been going really well actually) and to try and mess with the worldbuilding I had set up to go with it. I knew neither were full-game ready, but I wanted to see what needed changed. Me and my friends had fun, I got a confidence boost, and the system was much better prepared for for when I actually started a more ambitious game another year or so afterwards. I’m definitely not perfect by any means, but I have a much easier time managing a group.
Npcs are a different beast of course. Everyone has a different idea of what constitutes interesting and likeable. But a very solid piece of advice my beloved sibling has given me on how to make an interesting NPC is to give them a collection. Nothing makes a little weirdo stand out like a collection. Buttons, stamps, names, teeth. Doesn’t matter. It’s a good way to flesh out what kind of character they are in figuring out why they like the items they collect, and what they do with them. While also giving the players more opportunity to engage with the character through either talking about the items or collecting them for the NPC. Additionally it creates an association to the NPC with the item they collect. They see a giants tooth or a novelty marble set and go ‘ah, that reminds me of that weird guy who collects teeth and marbles’. And from there you can build around the traits your players seem to like best to make a character they can be invested in interacting with.
The Witch Watch
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
This is Why We Can’t Have Short Criticism
Here's how this site grew from short essays to novel-length quasi-analytical retrospectives.
A Star is Born
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
Black Desert Online
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
Juvenile and Proud
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
D&D is FULL of anti story rules, which is why I think it’s a shame that RP heavy tables rely on it. For example the fact that with the hit points system a player knows 100% that a lower level goblin can’t kill them in one arrow, since apparently PCs don’t have vital organs. The fact that with a lightsaber that cuts through anything it’s easier to hit a nimble acrobat than a guy in clanky armor that wouldn’t even slow down the blade.
D&D is great for crunch but it’s not amazing for fluff.
Also don’t forget that as long as you have even one hitpoint you’re a fully functional combatant capable of all imaginable feats of athleticism! Then you stub your toe and drop unconscious/dead.
On a more serious note I was pretty surprised to learn for how many people DnD specifically really is the only system. For the longest time I assumed that when people were talking about “playing DnD” it was kind of a shorthand for “playing a tabletop RPG”, and I’m sure for a bunch of people it is, but it was only around the licensing changes mess last year that I’ve heard a lot of people were literally just learning there were alternatives.
And I get parts of it, the system is ubiquitous, in part due to being widely adopted early, in part due to the d20 licensing of old resulting in only needing to learn it once and having access to multiple settings, in part due to becoming the de facto term used in mainstream media. It’s also a complicated system and learning something completely new can be daunting, also it’s a big investment if you’re trying to keep up with new sourcebooks and expansions so the prospect of buying another set of books that you may not like is unappealing… but still, to be just plain unaware of the whole ecosystem of tabletop…
Ah, the nebulous definition of hit points; are they representing physical damage, or more metaphysical concepts like luck, stamina, etc.? People often treat them as the former, but the mechanics of being fully combat-ready until you hit 0 HP make it seem more like the latter, where you’re still fine and healthy but your luck just finally ran out and you got stabbed in the jugular or something equally lethal. But then spells like “Heal Wounds” restore HP, taking it back to physical damage again. The eternal question.
Ah, the creative’s paradox; you get into a creative field because you have a passion for it, but you have to learn through your own mistakes so if you’re leading with a passion project you’ve doomed yourself to heartbreak.
For the comic itself; if you kill a bunch of NPCs in a forced march, do you get XP for them? I mean it wouldn’t be much per peasant, but there’s a lot of them here, you know.
Technically you get full XP for getting the entire peasant mob to the safe location, and loose percentage of the XP proportional to amount of peasants lost.
But it was a valiant attempt.
They’re wrong, arriving faster won’t diminish the number of random encounters: as superbly explained by Vaarsuvius in Order of the stick #145 ( https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0145.html ), you only get one random encounter per trip before everyone gets bored.
That is, unless your dm is the kind of person to prioritize the rules over having fun but nobody does that, right?
Panel 7: BRING OUT YOUR DEAD!
Okay, that joke is a bit of a dead horse. On a more serious note, does anybody else find it weird that in the land of the Horse-Lords they have to transport the infirm cross-country by hand-cart? Maybe their horse is dead too.