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Shadowrun

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[Great Order]

My idea for the worlds-of-space-in-an-acre is more along the lines of space being scrunched up in funky ways. Enter the area in one direction, you wind up in one place, enter in another and you can wind up in another. Both in the same location, just like I said, all scrunched up. Can expand on it, have to do certain things to enter the right way. Hell, maybe have it so that some people have turned them into vaults with specific actions, or things, needed to enter them acting as a combination lock. Only they can be a lot bigger and a lot more hidden than an actual vault.

[Great Order]

Having got into Cyberpunk 2077, anyone got any recommendations for which Cyberpunk (Gotta avoid shortening that) edition's best?

[Kagus]

So the party got a hot tip and ended up confronting the killer, thereby confirming it was indeed him when his eyes turned black and large obsidian claws sprouted from his fingers.

He was built primarily using a PC multiclass, one I'd always wanted to try out as a player, and figured that with a couple tweaks it'd probably be tuned enough to be pretty dangerous, but I could pull some punches and have him run away so they could track him for the big exposition later.

...yeah, of course that didn't happen. He managed to almost knock the tank over, absolutely no one else took damage. Then as he was fleeing, the sorceress managed to zip around the other corner of the building and pop him mid-air with a light crossbow at disadvantage due to long range, with her +0 to DEX, and hit exactly his 17 AC to deal his final HP of damage.

I felt kinda awful, not gonna lie... The whole fight was sort of a shitshow with everyone wondering about when we got into and out of initiative, I massively choked on the banter/taunts/threats I wanted him to give during the fight, and of course for the first fight we've had in several sessions he was a pushover who definitely never would've been able to take on the party.

Not only that, but he was also supposed to be the key to unlocking an important piece of story! They were supposed to catch him in the final ritual where they could meet the BBEG that he was using the rituals, and the sacrifices, to contact. How would I fix that?

...well at least that part is covered. The players found his ritual book and decided "Hey, this sacrificial rite looks neat, we should try that out and see what happens", so I guess they're gonna be the ones summoning the BBEG instead


But yeah, definitely feeling a bit demoralized... Everyone says they're having a good time and that it was a fun session, but you know how it is. I can't help but feel like I've failed them.

Hopefully I've learned some things from all this. This is also the first part of tying off this particular arc, and while I'm glad I did make the attempt to try out a murder mystery type thing, I do feel like it has been a bit of a clusterfuck from start to end. Next arc I'm planning to focus much more on active, regular combat, and just hop that I can start refining my battle skills. Maybe even do a proper OSR-esque dungeon delve a little further along.


EDIT: Completely forgot half the reason I wrote a post here... Being on this side of the screen, I'm developing more and more concerns with how 5e handles... Well, a lot of things in general, but combat in particular. For being the "It's impossible to die" edition, I'm still feeling like I need to hold back a bit if I don't want the battle to accidentally swing just a bit too hard and suddenly someone's down and will have to hope someone spends their turn reviving them or else they've gotta write up a whole new character.

For all the business of death saves and such, there's still surprisingly little distance between "100% combat capability" and "dead and gone forever"... Not really much in the way of downed/injured/out-of-the-running states, so you have to either risk permanently annihilating a character, or you leave them up to leverage the entirety of their arsenal at you. ...unless you're a spellcaster, I guess.

That said, I did give them a medic NPC for precisely the purpose of keeping them from just randomly dying thanks to no one being able or willing to do a thing that picks them back up again that turn, but... Yeah. I've of course forgotten to actually involve her half the time. Which has led to one of the players griping about how she's "not getting her money's worth" out of the medic

[Egan_BW]

confirming it was indeed him when his eyes turned black and large obsidian claws sprouted from his fingers.

That's discrimination! >:0

[Kagus]

confirming it was indeed him when his eyes turned black and large obsidian claws sprouted from his fingers.

That's discrimination! >:0

With this party, that's possibly the least discriminatory assumption that's been made this campaign xD

They're still absolutely convinced that the snarky elderly healer woman they've hired on is definitely a hag, to the extent of referring to her as such even when she's within earshot.

[Maximum Spin]

[long]

You know, I've never actually managed to DM a game for longer than about five minutes so I probably shouldn't be giving advice, but I have been accused of being a good writer and I feel like the principles are the same, so I'm gonna go ahead and give you my thoughts anyway.

First of all, as you seem to acknowledge, everything basically seems to have turned out fine. But since you feel that it wasn't what it should have been, it's still worth reflecting on it.
So, my impression is that you're suffering a kind of mismatch between the roles of writer and manager. You wrote out your idea of what you wanted to happen as if it were a story, and were then unable to manage the execution of that story in the game context. Both of those are independently problems. Your problem starts with the first part - your plan for what was supposed to happen was too much of a story and not enough of a game, so your players ended up completely breaking it. You can't expect to write a cutscene in a tabletop game unless you already have buy-in from your players to treat it as a cutscene, basically. If your ideas of how a scene is going to go are too rigid, your players are going to ruin them, trust me on this. It would have done you a lot of good to have had a few alternate plans in mind for what might happen in different scenarios, since it seems like you're not a fan of improvising; and regardless, even for a single plan, you really need to think very thoroughly about what your players might do at each moment. It's imperative to have a good understanding of what they're like.

Second, there's the management part. Remember that you're in charge of the story. There's definitely something to be said for giving the players flexibility, but at the end of the day, if you really want the bad guy to get away for a later return, he gets away. Your players never need to know exactly how much HP something has left or what AC it has, anyway, since that's just bad writing in the first place - they just need to know whether they're doing well (or will die embarrassed). So with that in mind, if you need the guy to get away but someone shoots off his last HP, you, uh, lie. Give the players the satisfaction of knowing they definitely hurt the guy and ruined his day, but if you need him to get away, he gets away. Of course, it's better if you don't need him to get away in the first place, or if you decide you do, to have some way of guaranteeing it (like having an ally with magic waiting in the wings with a prepared teleport or similar), but if you've messed up the storytelling part, you can always salvage it by fiat. And the fact that this scenario of yours ended up working out okay is a good reason to keep in mind that you don't usually need to do that too much, but it should still be in your arsenal. The rules aren't God, and a boss fight where all you do is weaken the boss until he gives up is not only a proud and accepted tradition, it's also a good way to make it even better when you finally get to murder the guy later.

A lot of people have an insecurity about that management aspect because they feel like it's cheating and they have to follow the rules exactly, but this is stupid. The point of being a DM is not to be a weird calculator made of meat, it is to produce a fun game experience. The entire benefit of having a human in that role and not just playing that D&D computer game I can't remember the name of is that the human can make decisions. Don't just dick your players around for no reason unless they're into that, but you always have the right to make a decision that you expect will improve the game.

Relatedly, this is also why the swinginess of combat is all up to you. You always have the option to make an enemy stronger if the fight seems to be ending too anticlimactically. You always have the option to let a character slide on a death save no matter what the dice say (you ARE rolling those yourself, right?). You also always have the option to make a character make a con save to not be knocked unconscious after taking a blow to the head. Knowing when to use these options and when to let the players suffer the consequences of their own choices is part of the skill set. But yes, you should make an effort to actually remember to involve that medic. Put her in the initiative list, it'll help. (You DO have an initiative list visible to everyone at all times, right?) Then again, that said, since your players think she's a hag, you can just decide that she actually is one and is intentionally slow-rolling the healing for her own amusement as an evil man-eating fey. Never be afraid to use your players' ideas. On the other hand, never be afraid to subvert your players' ideas either, so you could make her some OTHER horrible thing entirely. But even if she is, she must have some reason to be doing this, so she'll have to step things up at some point so the players don't just fire her.

And practice your banter ahead of time. You can even write a list of quips for particular times or particular triggering events and read off it. Then you can let your players read the quips they didn't manage to proc afterward so they can imagine all the ways the battle could've gone.

ETA: By the way, speaking of initiative order, which I was a little bit ago, since it seems like your players are pretty easy-going and probably aren't rigid rules lawyers, you may want to try introducing a new rule that certain battle events can knock people up or down an initiative slot at your discretion. It gives you another lever of control while making the flow of battle more organic and interesting, and it lets you give players a nice reward for doing something clever to gain tempo.

[Kagus]

Most of the game has been improvisational; to the extent where I've unfortunately gotten into the mental routine of "Meh, I probably don't need to prep [X], I can bullshit something workable anyway" even when there are things I would've benefitted greatly from prepping for (such as quips/banter). This was one instance wherein the way the story was playing out ended up lending itself to something that would've tied a lot of ends together neatly, so I decided to lean on that potential.

Normally I would just fluff/bullshit/tweak the stats (and indeed, he grew an extra 40hp in increments during the course of the fight), but unfortunately during what I thought was the "he's getting away and vanishing into the distance" segment I let slip that he had managed to get away with a single hitpoint left to his name, as a means to put some more gravitas on how narrow the escape was. Hopefully this is one of the lessons I've learned: Never tell the players anything.

Additionally they'd already managed to mostly suss out his AC during the fight, so him suddenly becoming harder to hit than before or pulling out a heretofore unused defensive capability that magically would've saved his bacon would've seemed like DM cheating for the sake of railroading, and I definitely didn't want to give the impression of that. I'd rather take the L and figure out something else while maintaining the internal consistency than have them think their actions don't have meaning.

And that kinda leads into the other point regarding death saves/combat as a whole. Only a couple of the players are particularly familiar with the 5e ruleset and would be aware of and comfortable with minor deviations on the fly. It's still mostly a newbie group, and as such I feel the need to clearly and openly communicate how combat works and how its rules are handled, so that they can plan their actions and their choices accordingly. So in the event of fiddling with some of the core precepts of combat, I feel like I need to come up with a consistent rule first that I can then announce/communicate and then maintain.

...but on the flip side of that, I still have to remind the rogue of how I rule stealth, and that was a public and detailed announcement with a fixed post so everyone can reference it, plus a TL;DR... So maybe nobody actually notices what the rules are at any given time and I really should just be making it up as I go

[Maximum Spin]

Only a couple of the players are particularly familiar with the 5e ruleset and would be aware of and comfortable with minor deviations on the fly. It's still mostly a newbie group, and as such I feel the need to clearly and openly communicate how combat works and how its rules are handled, so that they can plan their actions and their choices accordingly. So in the event of fiddling with some of the core precepts of combat, I feel like I need to come up with a consistent rule first that I can then announce/communicate and then maintain.

...but on the flip side of that, I still have to remind the rogue of how I rule stealth, and that was a public and detailed announcement with a fixed post so everyone can reference it, plus a TL;DR... So maybe nobody actually notices what the rules are at any given time and I really should just be making it up as I go

Yeah, that sounds to me like you can do it MORE, not less! What do they care what some weird book says about how it works?

[Kagus]

So, I just gotta gush a bit...

Campaign's been continuing on since then, players have been getting up to tomfoolery, taught an old dog new cantrips etc. etc.... That's not really the important bit.


The important bit is that a couple of my players hosted a "Heroes' Feast" party yesterday, where people were encouraged to bring "D&D-themed dishes", among other things. There were about 6 people there who weren't specifically me or my players, and of those six 1-2 of them had ever played a TTRPG before.

And I cannot adequately express the emotions that washed over me when I sat there listening to my players letting the intrusive thoughts win and crashing each conversation with these poor innocent bystanders directly into excited chattering about their characters, the campaign, and recent experiences. One player lamented how sad it was that they weren't going to hear the healer NPC snarkily quip about something anymore, since she's now left the party due to a conflict of morals. Another talked about the description I gave of a particular tea in-game that she hasn't been able to get out of her head, and how she's been trying to find a real-life analog ever since. Everyone reminisced about how sad it was when the dog got sad because he'd learned that his master had died.


That by itself is already amazing; feeling that I've been able to form a convincing enough narrative that they're drawn that far into the story that they actually feel loss when the random NPC helper goes away... But there's an extra special little aspect to it in that two of my players have never experienced a TTRPG before now, and have become probably the most enthusiastic of the whole bunch. Knowing that I've managed to inspire that kind of a passion in fresh players and open their hearts and minds to the world of these games is just... Why, it darn near brings a tear to the eye, it does.



And as far as next session is concerned... Well...

They've split the party by their own initiative, estranged their dedicated healer, sparked some potentially very serious tensions in-group, gained the direct (and unimpressed) attention of an ancient evil, and are about to get ambushed by a pair of higher-level wizards tasked with bringing them in for questioning.

And then they congratulate me on putting these things together, as if it wasn't all just them bringing it upon themselves

[Great Order]

I've gone and got CPRED, had a read through it and the only other systems I've run are Cortex, which was once, and 5e. The health rules look pretty brutal compared to 5e, mounting penalties after you hit half health, one failed death saving throw with mounting penalties, and the game advocates for having NPCs attack dying PCs. The maximum health is 75, and you can easily get a hold of weapons that do 4d6 damage, and rolling two sixes on any attack role causes you to roll for a critical injury, up to and including loss of limbs.

Also healing is 5+Body/day so no sleeping off being disembowelled.

Apparently one of the benefits of this is that players are more likely to try and find non-combat methods of dealing with problems since there's a real risk of death or at least having to spend your Eddies on replacement body parts.

[Loud Whispers]

So way back in August I got invited to an ambitious game of DnD. It was being run by a friend of mine who complained about DnD 5e sucking for about two years straight. It raised eyebrows from me when he announced then that we would be running... 5e. Some of us suggested GURPs or LFG but he settled definitively on 5e with some homebrewed rules. Nevertheless, we had talked all the common pitfalls of 5e to death, so I was certain he would be going into this well armed with experience.

3/7 players left before the end. I was the last to leave. After about three and a half hours I had made one action and had spent the rest of the time having my barbarian perpetually mind controlled or stun locked. Whole thing was a railroaded sequence of invincible bosses that you were "supposed to figure out they could crash into the pillars" to kill them. He did everything he complained about for years, in one night. It was like a checklist of sins. Utterly incredible

Lessons learned from this catastrophe, he apologised to everyone individually and as a group, saying all the lessons he had learned and has announced a new one shot.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

He's running DnD 5e

[Telgin]

D&D instead of GURPS?  He'd have lost me there.  I've only played a little D&D and I've had enough for a lifetime compared to the endless other options.

Anyway, as incredible as that sounds, it sounds like he'd have probably bungled any game system.  GURPS might have been worse if he munchkinned a boss with crazy innate attacks and afflictions, "balanced" by Weakness (Pillar Collisions).  If it's an option in the book, that means it's officially sanctioned, right?

Some people really aren't cut out to be GMs.

[Loud Whispers]

D&D instead of GURPS?  He'd have lost me there.  I've only played a little D&D and I've had enough for a lifetime compared to the endless other options.

Anyway, as incredible as that sounds, it sounds like he'd have probably bungled any game system.  GURPS might have been worse if he munchkinned a boss with crazy innate attacks and afflictions, "balanced" by Weakness (Pillar Collisions).  If it's an option in the book, that means it's officially sanctioned, right?

Some people really aren't cut out to be GMs.

I have faith that anyone can make a good GM if they understand that it's not what is planned, but what is played that counts. It's possible he would've bungled another system, but at the very least, I would've been able to make actions instead of just autofailing every save every single round :d

Maybe I have too much faith in the powers of nurture. But we as people must believe anyone can be a good GM, otherwise that means some individuals are cursed to be... Forever GM

[NullForceOmega]

Hi, Forever GM here, some people are NOT built for DMing sadly.

[Persus13]

DMs who do the exact same things they complain about as a player and vice versa is a tale as old as time.