let dice make decisions, and don’t try to explain them. Quickly number reasonable targets in a standard way (I do left to right, top to bottom), roll a die and move on. Get it down to less than five seconds.
it’s better to be quick than to be optimal. Get the attack out and move on.
enemy spell casters have three or four rounds to live. Mostly they fire their biggest blast in the first round or two, and then they’re trying to escape. Maybe they buff an ally or two, but that’s advanced strategy.
You handle a combat one step at a time. Work your way down the list, and each time its the same simple decision: which attack? which target? what result?
Sometimes combat in D&D is a grind. Go easy on yourself. Keep calling out the results, and the players will understand.
Six players is a lot. Delegate work to them, especially when they cause it (e.g. bane, or damage that ticks after their turn. ) it will keep them engaged.
There’s probably a gaming shop in your neighbourhood which will either host games or have a message board for GMs looking for players. The best way to learn is to jump in with both feet. Most experienced players will be happy to help a newcomer get to grips with it.
I’m not sure how BG3 handles this but to my understanding they are pretty close to actual 5e rules.
In that case the scribing feature is from the wizard class and only lets you add wizard spells to your book. These spells would use INT as their spell casting ability.
What other orientation could he possibly put it in? The dude rolled a nat 20. If he can’t get it to fit after a roll like that, then there’s really no hope.
While I’ve come to appreciate and prefer the crunchier PF2e, I’ve gotta say I agree with this. I bounced off of D&D multiple times as a kid, and only when I was first exposed to 5e did I actually stick with it long enough to really discover the beautiful world of TTRPGs. D&D may not be the best system, but it’s the gateway drug.
Just so long as WOTC continues to fuck up and do something despicable once every few months which encourages all of their players to branch out and try other systems, all will be right with the world.
I’m not sure yet where I stand on using AI to enhance images you made. I think if it’s for commercial purposes, it shouldn’t be ok since it would essentially be profiting off others work.
But in this case, my big issue is they did this without telling their team or bosses. This is essentially no different from hiring a third party to enhance your work so you don’t have to do as much and pocketing the difference. Sounds like they’re updating their guidelines though and I hope this person is fired or won’t be contracted again. They should probably switch the art to the earlier versions in D&D Beyond and future printings too. Which is another thing, the “enhanced” one doesn’t seem better enough to have warranted this type of risk. I’m not sure what that person was thinking.
Kinda disappointed by the article (Waterdeep, but no Myth Drannor, or Icewind Dale, or Thay? No Underdark?!!?!), so in protest I'm gonna post the OG D&D world - Greyhawk - the origin of Vecna and the late, great Gary Gygax's personal campaign setting.
I always wanted to play a Malconvoker, but my group would not have been comfortable with it. It's a class whose core conceit is that they summon demons and make pacts with them that trick the demons into serving good causes. The demons are convinced that the Malconvoker is a traditional evil cultist or self-serving wizard, but it turns out all the favours they grant them are twisted to good ends and all the prices they demand get paid in unexpected ways that turn out to be not as costly as intended.
The key stat is charisma and bluff is the most vital of skills, of course.
The point is to tell an exciting story - there’s no right or wrong definition of what that means for you.
The dice’s purpose is to take you down paths you might not have chosen deliberately but the goal is still to have an exciting story. If the DM wants to be like “I recognize the dice have made a decision but given that it’s a stupid ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore it” then he has my full support.
Maybe a cleaner way would be to decide up front: which outcomes am I ok with? and simply cap the roll at that. You know the paladin only has 17 HP left and you don’t want the paladin to go down so the maximum roll you want is 16. So if you have roll 4d6 damage. You do: roll 3 roll 8 roll 12 roll 18 16.
Fudged dice ruin the mood for me. If I'm playing, I'm there to figure out how to make crazy things work in spite of the risks. If I can't have that, I'd rather just read a book.
I don't usually talk about it in the middle though - I believe arguments at the table should be reserved for serious conflicts (rudeness between players and so on), not personal preferences. This is more a reason I'd check out of a campaign gracefully, and it's also one of a hundred reasons I really prefer to GM instead of play.
Not necessarily true as there are entirely different reasons for doing each. Only a bad GM would fudge a hit that actually penalized you. A good GM might fudge a hit to take the story in an interesting direction. Fudging rolls is just another tool in the box.
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