Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

Palladium

Other (feel free to post about it)

[Telgin]

Yeah, honestly it just sounds like he plays too many video games and tried to model a boss fight like a modern video game would do it, and did a bad job of it on top of that.  D&D can definitely do that, but you have to play to its mechanics.

Anyway, if I want to play the games I'm interested in I usually have to GM them.  Not going to find many people who want to run Knockoff Star Fox in GURPS, for example.

Too bad I hate GMing.


(Stolen from The Oatmeal and edited appropriately.)

[Kagus]

I'm an idiot.

We wrapped up one arc of "Things a first-time DM shouldn't try to wrangle with no experience", and I've yeeted myself into another at full speed.

Now, "murder mystery" is more just ill-advised due to the system not supporting it at all and how you should probably prep stuff a bit beforehand to make sure it runs smoothly. But eh, it's still possible to kludge it, as proven.


...what I've done now, though, is promise myself a megadungeon. Which, naturally, I'm giving myself hangups about using random generators for. Not as a matter of pride per se, just that I'm having a hard time wrangling the random genned stuff into the thematic sense I want a ruined civilization to make.

So yeah. I'm predominantly hand-building a fuckload of rooms to try and make something resembling a megadungeon, having done nothing of the like before, and hopefully with at least a couple levels finished before the session they start cracking into it (most likely the one after next).

[Loud Whispers]

Murder mystery and 5e reminds me of one of my DM friends coming up with increasingly large numbers of reasons why the murder victims could provide no useful information whatsoever to our player that had speak with dead

Have you tried making just a big roll table for random rooms/encounters that would be thematically fitting for your mega dungeon?

[Kagus]

Murder mystery and 5e reminds me of one of my DM friends coming up with increasingly large numbers of reasons why the murder victims could provide no useful information whatsoever to our player that had speak with dead

Have you tried making just a big roll table for random rooms/encounters that would be thematically fitting for your mega dungeon?

My party didn't actually have Speak With Dead when they went into this debacle, but I'm only just realizing that it wouldn't actually have made that much of a difference anyway as there were never any (intact) bodies to be found...

They did spend most of a session interrogating and torturing a local school of fish though, and while the pitiful piscines naturally couldn't provide much help in the way of information about the land-village nearby, they did at least manage to point the players to a "human fin(ger)" that had fallen into the stream a while back, and the identifying wedding band thereon.


As far as encounters and theme goes, I'm mostly solid on that front... The issue comes in the form of the layout, and the layout is important because I'm specifically putting them into an old-school-inspired dungeon crawl, mapping and all.

And therein lies the issues I'm giving myself with random map generators: I feel that the collections of rooms are too chaotic and disorganized for being the ruins of a lived-in civilization of dwarves, and that there should be some more structure and intention behind the areas and interconnections... ...which of course means more doing stuff by hand, and planning out streets and districts in my head, which I'm historically absolute balls at.

Another issue is that... Well, nice and orderly districts aren't necessarily the most interesting to map and venture through. There, the more wild and interwoven randomly-generated dungeon rooms can be more compelling as they offer more varied and unpredictable environments. So I'm trying desperately to come to some sort of compromise between the two extremes, and by and large I've just been procrastinating instead of actually laying down rooms and tiles, because apparently I've just got some colossal mental block when it comes to actually doing things. Might potentially be related to my never having designed dungeons before.