I have been running a pirate campaign for quite awhile and some that I would add are:
Be careful how evil you let the players get. Too much evil is difficult to run especially in civilized port cities.
I have allowed my players to learn new tool or skill proficiencies using downtime on the boat, there’s a lot of traveling and this helps give them incentive to use the boat more.
Don’t take away their boat more than once or twice during the campaign for narrative reasons, it gets old and they invest a lot of money and resources into it. If they mess up and lose or sink their boat, that’s on them.
Make sure there’s enough quests that need a boat, otherwise they might revert to old habits of traveling across land.
How do you manage this? Isn’t pirating kind of inherently evil? Do you need to set up an evil empire with the party playing Robin Hood on the high seas?
This is something I don’t get about lemmy. Here’s a platform that really struggles to build communities that are active and alive yet everyone seems hellbent on fracturing the user base into the most specific and niche subdivisions.
I mean this is just my personal opinion but I’d much rather have one community that’s lively but includes elements I don’t particularly care for than 6 communities that each get one post a week.
I am very much avoiding breaking off communities from dnd, BUT in this case I know many people hate AI art in general so I’d rather just siphon that off to its own area
Thanks for that BigFig! You’re doing such a great job with thes3 communities! I appreciate you keeping the art separate from the discussion and the memes 🙂
I can only speak for myself but I wouldn’t mind some ai generated pictures on my normal feed. But not the way you’re currently posting them on the other slice.
Individual images only fill up the feed without adding much to discuss. There’s not much to say beyond a “nice” in the comments. I’d much prefer it being an album with some context what you did with it.
Personally, my perfect solution would be for Lemmy to implement post tags similar to hashtagging and then the ability for users to filter via those tags. This would allow us to have ONE community in !dnd and then just filter what you want to see, but until and if they implement something like that, for the sake of sating those that do like the organization, this is the solution for now. I hope it makes sense
Ok but chase that concept through capitalism. Control of the sword falls into the wrong hands, and that person becomes immeasurably powerful. Inevitably you end us with a dystopian nightmare where the ruling class trades youth to the rich and connected, while creating a market for poor sacrificial children.
Agreed. Those stipulations are what I was used to on Reddit and seemed to work for those communities there. Every post has something for free but there's a link to more that's paid. It's exactly how I found most of the content I've bought and subscribed to over the years.
My system starts similar, but I prefer categorising by type of resource over publisher, when I have a lot of files. The publisher doesn’t hold much value to me and simply dumping everything into a single folder, even under system can become messy quickly. I sort by system, rules, adventures and sometimes by supplements or additional material like cheat sheets, when there are too many. For some things I also keep a table (or plan to create one some day, haha), because adventures and random tables might work for different systems and I’d like to remember them.
I’m running an Anything goes campaign soon and one of the recurring enemies will be a variation of a steel golem but one of the incarnations is 5 or 6 mimics forming up Voltron style into one enemy.
I don’t think it’s hyped up. You just need context.
The OGL stuff was a tipping point but WotC prioritizing profit at the expense of the player is hardly new. I think the last truly lauded release in D&D proper was the shift to 5th edition, which was nine years ago and was a correction after 4th. Before that it was probably Eberron, almost twenty years ago. Other changes have largely been to increase profit with little consideration on improving the game. 4th edition, while not actually a bad game, was a mistargeted attempt to cash in on MMOs as well as the first attempt to kill the OGL. More recently you will not find many active DMs who love the 5e splatbooks, or who think the game values how they spend their time preparing for a session, or thinks the game does a great job helping them design custom content, or who really loves how WotC is locking down the virtual tabletop space.
Tabletop game design, as well as how designers interact with their player bases, has completely changed for the rest of the TTRPG space.
You missed the rise of Paizo, where former D&D writers found a home to write pre-generated content that is legitimately good and saves GMs hundreds of hours of work, called Adventure Paths, and who later filled the niche of 3.5 when WotC forced closure in favor of something more easily monetized. You missed Apocalypse World/Dungeon World/Blades in the Dark and Cypher, systems where cutting down on prep time was a serious priority rather than a tertiary afterthought, making games much more fun for the GM. You missed the OSR, the return to D&D’s roots. You missed Savage Worlds, Fate, FFG’s Star Wars, Free League, Honey Heist, Gumshoe, Lancer, tons of innovative ideas.
The other old companies like White Wolf and Chaosium have reacted at every step, re-writing their games to reflect modern design principles unprompted and working to improve distribution of their content. Those have also been attempts to make money, but by making the product better, not by squeezing the player base. The one time WotC was forced to turn to its designers they got 5th and they’ve been milking it since.
A lot of people don’t care about any of that, they just buckle down and play D&D. But DMs and most of the people who talk online are power users who know what they’re missing.
Thank you very much for the insightful response, looks like I have a lot of reading ahead of me. This was exactly the type of answer that I was looking for. Thank you.
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