When running a module don’t be afraid to tell the players that they should expect things to happen within the confines of the module. That’s not railroading, that is just playing a cohesive game. I find that many new DMs are so afraid of railroading that they overcompensate into the other extreme. Then that adventure becomes an incoherent mess which also isn’t fun.
As for Dragon Heist which I have run recently I got a few tips: You can run it as is which imo is absolutely fine and I did that. There is also the “Alexandrian Remix” which expands the module fairly short module to a huge campaign adventure. I personally don’t think you should do that as a first timer but it’s still useful to know it exists.
From here on very major spoilers. Players of the module don’t read further.
Before session 1 what I did was give all players the Waterdeep Enchiridion to use as player knowledge if they want to. 2/4 players red most of it. You as the GM should read chapters 1 to 3 and the Enchiridion fully, plus the major NPCs. Chapter 4 only makes sense once you figured out which villians to run. I selected 2 villians to have appear. Imo more is too much to keep track of for the players in this context and they already felt overwhelmed at times. I used the Casselanters as main villians and the Xanathar guild as further Antagonists. Then I had the Zhentarim and Jarlaxle only slightly involved in the background and as a faction in chapter 2.
Chapter 1 is fairly linear. Bar fight, troll comes up (I changed the troll to a devil to hint at infernal activities by the casselanters). Quest by volo to investigate. Absolutely use Old Xoblobs shop, it is very fun. Investigations in the Skewered, encounter in the streets. This is where I’d level up the party to level 2. The encounter in the warehouse with the Kenku is pretty deadly otherwise. And the Xanathar hideout even more so. This is the biggest balancing flaw in the whole adventure imo.
Capter 2 starts once they got the tavern. I leveled them up to 3 at this point for 2 reasons. First so I can run more faction missions in this chapter so the fireball chapter doesnt get diluted as much. Secondly because it felt like the correct timing. This chapter is the open sandbox part. Stay here as long as it is fun. Let them get to know the neighbors, decide weather you want the competitor guy interfere with the tavern, how far you want to take the management part, or if you let them higher a manager etc. The ghost can be fun too. There is a fantastic DMs guild resource with fully fledged out faction quests for chapter 2 which I used. This is where my players did a ton of cool shit. They made friends with the Zhents and Black Viper, Once this stops being fun throw the fireball.
Chapter 3 can be mostly run as is imo. You might need to hint less subtly at how to find the construct. I didnt like the part with the detection device so I had the group follow some other clues. Also I had Floxin in liege with the Casselanters because I removed Manshoon.
Chapter 4 against all advice I ran exactly as is with the chase rules from the DMG, it wasn’t even 2 sessions of 3h each long. But that was the most fun part of the adventure for me. The players got the stone but had no idea who the villian was yet. So they ended up handing the Stone to the Casselanters asking for 10% of the treasure which they did get (50k gold is nothing to sneeze at).
Chapter 5 the players Casselanters were invited to the Founders Day Festivities where the sacrifice was to take place. I took some inspiration from the book but mostly made up the exact events as it fit to what happened so far.
Dragon Heist is the most fun I had running a 5th edition module so far. So I hope you enjoy it as well and I was able to help a bit with your preparations.
Wow! Thank you so much! I really appreciate it. I actually bought the Alexandrian Remix and ended up getting more intimidated than I was before, so it’s comforting to know that it might be too much.
I’ve been on the fence between running Xanathar or the Casselanters as the villain and I think you might have pushed me towards the Casselanters. I really like the story flavor that you described. Also, the sheer amount of villains/factions have been bogging me down quite a bit and it’s nice to know that I don’t need to deal with all of them. That seemed way too cumbersome.
Either way, I really appreciate the advice. Thanks!
From the remix just grab what you like and leave what you don’t need. Same for the main adventure. Or any module you will ever DM. It’s your game and your player’s game, so you decide what happens and what it’s about.
As for the potential allied factions I did look at what my PCs were likely to flock to. Then I had those factions contact them. They ended up allied with the gauntlet and Savra Belebranta is a major recurring NPC. They Grey Hand and Force Grey with Meloon and the Blackstaff is another factions the players love. One of the shadier PCs is allied with Davil Starsong and the Zhents. But the others didn’t make sense for my party like the Emerald Enclave for example. So I left them out.
The Casselanters have the most interesting story. But it gets dark quickly and the moral dilemma might not be for every group.
The Xanathar is super iconic and a great straight up villian. We will end up fighting him soon now in Dungeon of the Mad Mage.
Jarlaxle is absolutely amazing and likely the most fun villian. Him being fun depends on using his cover identities in fun ways and good roleplay and planning from the GM. He is also vastly overpowered. So there is little chance in the PCs taking him head on.
I found Manshoon not very fleshed out or interesting. So Idk.
You can also switch villians later. If after chapter 2 for instance the player for some reason really have grown to hate the Xanathar even though you planned on using someone else, you can simply change the villian as nothing is set in stone at that time. Also the seasons don’t really matter too much. Don’t worry about those too much.
We had a guy in our group who would find any and every reason to bail or show up late or leave a session early. When he would show up, he would just goes rogue (usually playing a rogue) and do his best to ruin the game for everyone else. There was a campaign a while back where I was playing a changeling and he/his PC knew. We were sneaking through a dungeon, my character changed into a goblin or whatever the enemies were to do some recon. He knew what clothes I was wearing and we had agreed on a signal. Also, most dungeon goblins aren’t wearing cool sparkly robes. He proceeded to sneak and kill my character saying “There was no way of knowing which was which”. It brought the whole good down. The DM said I could just bring the same character back, bla bla bla, but it just soured the game for me. I never understood why he acted like that, because it never seemed like he was having fun and it’s not like the rest of us were.
The other “that guy” that I know has gotten better, but he had a really bad habit of taking advantage of homebrew material and hiding or fudging stats/rules. He’d always argue that he could do this or that and would fight with the DM over how much damage he could do. It was just weird, because I never got the mindset of cheating in dnd. We’re all supposed to be playing the same game, chill out my dude.
I’m just confused by what you are asking. Are you asking if this community is OK with you self promoting D&D related stuff you made and want to sell? If it were up to me, I would say yes within reason, no one wants this community to become one loud ad. But I’m not sure the moderator would agree and it is up to them. I don’t see a no self-promotion rule yet but maybe message them directly?
If you just want to share content you found and generally participate like normal then I am absolutely sure you are wanted here.
My question was about the community’s outlook on the presence of creators in this space - and yes, that means at least some of the stuff they’d post would be self-promotion.
I dont think that the platform should turn into just a wall of ads, all of the subreddits had sensible rules for that, like only posting once a week etc.
The instance that this community is on does not allow ads. I do not know whether self-promotions fall under that… I feel like it does? So that would mean none of us are welcome here, at least in professional capacity.
You should always follow the rules of the instance, of course. But if you want to do something that is not within the rules of the instance, you can always set up your own instance or find another instance where this is allowed. Even if a community (like a subreddit) on an instance thinks a certain, way, they can’t conflict with the instance rules.
Creators would probably have to try sharing things in a way that users would not consider it an add. But those lines would be quite blurry, without any clarification from the instance moderators.
I, myself, have very limited time availability, and I really doubt I would have enough technical knowledge to set up an instance myself. I am also already running 2 discord communities… so right now running an instance on top of that is just not an option. That leaves me I guess just to wait and see if someone else creates something like that. Risking blurring lines on instance rules, investing my time and energy into a community that will likely ban me isn’t particularly appealing either :(.
That makes a lot of sense, hosting an instance is definitely not for everyone. But from what @Stoneykins posted, it seems things like that would be allowed here. But it might be a good idea to bring this up in !lemmyworld That is the general lemmy.world community, there we can get input from the instance admins.
Well, based on the linked rules, I guess it should be fine here.
I spent a while looking for a “no ads” rule and then I figured it out.
Your home instance sh.itjust.works , where your account lives, has a rule of no ads. Lemmy.world, where this D&D community lives, does not appear to (yet) have a broad rule against advertisements.
I would still ask the mod before posting self promotion tho.
here are the only rules relevant lemmy.world I could find (from mastadon.world):
“Regarding Spam: We are not your free advertising platform. If you are here only to sell your products or services, you will be removed. Occasional posts of commercial links are OK, but when the vast majority of a user’s posts are commercial in nature, we regard the account as a Spam account. Moderators will evaluate reports of Spam on a case by case basis.”
so it seems just do it in a restrained way and don’t let it be the majority of your content and it should be ok?
I mean… thing is… On reddit i have 80k karma because of my content posts. 99% of my posts there are my content posts. That would be considered “spamming” here, even if I only post once a week.
I’d much rather spend time painting an extra battle map for the community than sit on lemmy to hit whatever quota of interaction to not be considered a spammer.
As far as I know, we don’t have user based karma here. Only posts and comments get a score. But we really should make sure that the community does not get over-run with a specific type of post. Unless the community is for that specific purpose, of course.
But I can imagine that not every instance would like to host a “share your Kickstarter project” community, as those posts will also show up for the users that like to read all local posts. Here on Lemmy.world that feed would already be a full of stuff you aren’t interested in though, but that’s my opinion and I also never used r/all or any of the other extremely broad subreddits.
One direction to take this conversation is to legitimize a formal ads platform and move the technology in that direction. It's not a concept that has had airtime in federated social(open source, anti-corporate and all) but it fits into the model of enthusiast communities to have a magazine that is "both articles and ads".
The YouTube channel Pointy Hat recently had their 100,000 sub special on the Feywild. They created a short adventure (1-2 sessions, obo 3-4 hours each) set in the Feywild. The video it's attached to is kind of long (~40 min) but is an excellent look at the Feywild. The actual portion covering the adventure gives tips on running it as well. I've read it over and it's pretty well put together.
... is anyone else seeing a thumbnail showing an anthro mouse giving a... I don't know what that is, but the mouse is giving the other person a rimjob.
This is so strange. The actual link you posted obviously doesn't contain that image, so I'm not sure where it's coming from. I don't know how thumbnails are generated or communicated by websites that are being linked to. I'm guessing someone acting maliciously found a way to change the thumbnail for this screenrant post and decided that furry porn would be the best choice.
Want to see: more moves in combat than just attack, cast spell, move or occasionally grapple/ shove (but those aren’t very viable so aren’t even used much) Don’t want to see: Pinkertons
I’d like to see combat become more dynamic. As designed, it’s easy for martials to run up to their target and bash them, while casters stay back. And that’s the fight, until everyone is dead.
It’d be nice if characters had an incentive to move. Attacks-of-opportunity are a disincentive to move at low levels.
Yeah, the DM can add stuff to combat to make it more dynamic (timers, alternate goals, etc), but it’d be nice if those were built in to the system.
What a a pointless, ad ridden mess of an article. The popularity of Forgotten Realms stems from the fact that it was aggresively market ed during the 2e era, since the creator of the setting was on board, unlike Gary and his Greyhawk. The author mentions the (terrible) tie in novels that were also a major factor in its omnipresence, but they also drove the metaplot which diluted the setting into its curent “generic fantasy kitchen sink”. Personally, if you’d put a gun to my head and told me to run a game in it, I’d probaby avoid the Sword Coast in favor of the east/southeast, Dalelands or The Sea od Fallen Stars being the most likely canidates.
I love this. I especially love the “play at level 1 until it’s not fun”. Progression is secondary to a good story. Back when I was playing 1st and 2nd editions, new players would start as zero level characters, where we roleplayed short adventures around them being apprentices for organizations such as a thieves guild, a church, a fighter’s guild or for some wizard or going to an academy. The characters might end up meeting each other by having similar quests given to them and they become friends who evolve into adventurers.
Hey, not sure if you’re aware but there’s a whole genre that harkens back to old school D&D styled gaming. It’s called the OSR and I’ve got a community here on Lemmy if you’re interested in checking it out: !osr!
The simplest explanation: roll to hit, then roll for damage. Or roll a save if it doesn’t need to hit. Or roll a skill check if you’re trying to attempt something out of combat.
That’s about it. You can find the details in the rulebooks.
Basically, you need a Dungeon Master who will be the story teller. This person is responsible for setting the stage for the story and guiding the adventurers through their quest. The DM also sets up the encounters with monsters. The DM must know each monster, the Hit Points, the Attack Power, special moves, etc for each monster.
The adventures will listen to the opening sequence of the story by the DM and then they will make decisions on what to do next. The DM will guide the players to what they “should” do, but the DM doesn’t “force” them to do anything.
The DM must be able to think on their toes, for players will always try to do something the DM didn’t think of…they must be able to quickly act on a situation. Speaking of quickly act, the DM can take their time to figure out what to say next, just don’t take like 10-15 minutes, or everyone will get bored.
For the players, try to stick to the story as much as you can, don’t go running off and trying to fuck chickens (yes I had a player who wanted to do that all the time).
The players must keep track of their health, inventory and skills. They must know how and when to use certain skills.
I could go on and on, but I see others are commenting now and probably discouraging based on your question, so I will keep this short and hope this is what you are looking for.
Oh, and HAVE FUN, that is the most important part!
Besides reading the Basic Rules, which someone else has already linked, I suggest you check out a game on Youtube. Note that usually these aren’t an accurate representation of how most games actually go- Critical Role for instance is comprised entirely of experienced voice actors- but it’ll give you an impression of how the game runs.
Just don’t base your expectations of your players/dm on them.
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