Age is measured from the moment of birth rather than the moment of conception, so fetuses have negative age. I suppose if you killed enough negative-age fetuses, you could live forever.
I mean, it does raise some obvious ethical issues, but...
#2 because it's gonna be a sword on 70% of the planet. Especially since you live in a magical world with fish people and spells that make you breathe underwater and protect you from pressure,etc, etc. Meanwhile the first sword lets your enemies know you are hungry, which a really smart enemy could take advantage of.
I love creating the bones of a world or a situation, then seeing how the party interpret, contribute, and react to it, then reacting to their decisions for the next session.
Also sometimes, making traps and BBEG plans for them then being able to pull it off (and watching like a proud parent as they successfully get out of the situation)
Yes exactly. For me, the most rewarding part is including the breadcrumbs to the real story while allowing them to explore the world we're building together.
I’ve just been throwing breadcrumbs in front of my party for years now and taking them where ever they go. Its been so much more fun than just ‘telling my story’ for me. I would always have the start of a story I wanted to tell, but could never sort out the middle and the end, so I just let the players do it now and enjoy the show.
Ben Milton’s take on traps is, I think, the best way to handle them.
Don’t use traps as a hidden thing. Make the trap itself obvious to the players, and describe it’s positioning. The trick should be for the players to figure out how to either avoid or safely disarm the trap.
One example he uses is a pit trap with a narrow board serving as a bridge over the top of it. The smell of volatiles indicates that there may be some kind of fuel at the bottom of it. The board is on a rotating mechanism, and if anyone tries to stand on or otherwise move the board, it ignites the fuel below with flint inside the mechanism, like a lighter. Since the pit is too large to jump across, players will need to find another way across.
In my own game, I recently pointed out a section of floor filled with skeletons whose legs were partially sunken into the tiles up to the knee. Since the sections of the floor were too long to jump across, they tested what was wrong by throwing objects onto the tiles and seeing what happened. Once it was clear that only objects that had been stationary for a few seconds sank in, they sprinted through the hallway and made it to the other side fine (one character lost a boot). They had fun, nobody felt it was unfair, and I would call that a win.
Unfortunately for them, the floor on the other side of this trap was greased, so they went sliding down a chute to the fourth floor of the dungeon, and had to look for a way back up, which came in the form of a previously inactive elevator that was a shortcut back to the first floor.
Sen’s Fortress in Dark Souls 1 is a good example of how traps like these can be utilized. They’re all obvious and easy to avoid, and serve more as positioning puzzles than as gotcha mechanics.
Make up some requirements to be able to create a guild (maybe there is a guilds-guild where you need to register). Requirements could be:
A fee to register your guild. This could be very expensive. Maybe they can find an investor but need to do a favour for them first.
You need a location inside Waterdeep. Also expensive, maybe they can get one via a quest. Or if they have Trollskull Manor, they could make some changes to the building to make it suitable as a guild house.
You need at least 15 members. They need to try to recruit people.
…
Also, maybe some other guilds are not happy with this (they think there are already too many guilds, or the guild is too similar to their guild) and they try to sabotage the players.
As a DM, my favourite part is the worldbuilding. I love figuring out how the setting works, what its history is and who the prominent people are. I do worldbuilding as a solitary activity sometimes, but having an audience makes it better and having a participatory audience is best. I ran a year-long campaign I called the "zero-prep campaign" where I didn't do much or any preparation ahead of each session, letting the party's decisions guide things and frantically filling in the universe around them as they went, and I managed to produce one of my most cohesive and fun settings yet.
As a player, it's similar but much smaller scale - I focus on building my character. I try to settle in to his or her skin, get to know them, figure out what they think about and how they'd react to various situations. The character is on a road I don't know the ultimate destination for and I am keen to find out.
I like the term “zero-prep campaign”. I think I want to use that now. I’ve also had the most fun with those, although planning ahead can be very rewarding in its own right.
I also love the world building, but I think I approach it from a different direction. Rather than prepping sessions, I like to build mechanics and details into the world. These are often informed by the actions of my players, but in the game it allows me to run a similar “zero-prep” style because the world already exists. Especially after several campaigns in the same world, when so much has been generated over hours of play.
The experience of seeing my world unfold before me, and seeing the wonder and emotion on my player’s faces, brings me so much genuine joy. I feel like I did when I was a kid.
As a DM, I love when my players absolutely love or gravitate towards an NPC I made. So many times my players latch onto an NPC and it becomes their mascot. It also works really well as a tool for plot hooks or to give players engaging side quests to chase.
I enjoy helping others experience the first time wonder of discovery, even after years of playing. It’s why I play in a custom setting and regularly create new monsters, spells, subclasses, and magic items. So many people crave that moment of first contact, and I love to help them find it.
On the DM side of that, when there are new things for the players to find, I get to stretch the creative muscles that I thought I had lost for years. I get to challenge myself to create new, interesting, and balanced experience to offer up for my table.
Make it up! It's your world, so put your own spin on it. If someone complains, BS a reason behind it and connect it to some lore about a hero that changed or fucked something up and since then they've always done it that way.
Some things to consider:
operating funds. Should they have a minimum of gp to set up? Should their be a minimum per month operating cost for admin staff? Taxes by city?
location. Should they need a guild hall? Do they have to buy the property or rent?
buyin from residents. Do they need support from residents to do it? Do they need to take care of some sidequests to get support of a few cantankerous councilman?
make up a weird third category. Do they need to throw a feast? Do they need to decorate their hall with the heads of monsters they killed? Does the local temple offer a blessing (with benefits for members) if they do some task?
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