I’m with you. Don’t get me wrong, I have a tv and use arkenforge for maps. But 2d is enough of a time sink (epically when the map is only one part of the whole session)…
I own it. It’s fun to play with but ultimately suffers from the same problem that almost every tool in this style does. The resources you get to use are limited to the ones that they’ve thought to include. If you want to make a jail, that’s fine, you can make it work. A tavern? Easy. An ancient Greek temple? Eh, you can get there with a bit of imagination. A bathroom? Sorry, bud, you’re on your own.
I’ve traditionally used Dungeon Painter Studio for my maps, and while it has similar limitations, it has the benefit of being able to import other art, and you get a whole dimension to hide your crimes in. That vaguely bookshelf- looking rectangular thing on the map? It’s an armory cabinet in the barracks. Now in the bathroom it’s a medicine cabinet. In the bedroom? A wardrobe. You can’t see what’s in it, can’t see how tall it is or how high it’s mounted on the wall, so you get to fill in the details with my description. 3d limits your ability to do that because everything looks like what it is. So if you don’t have a model of what you’re looking for, it’s more obvious when you’re making do.
That’s been my biggest struggle as well. I can spend way too much time finding the right map for an encounter, only to never actually use it.
The other option is building the encounters around the map, but a lot of the maps I find don’t ‘inspire’ me a whole lot, or aren’t thematically relevant to what I want to run (this dwarf king’s tomb looks cool, but I’d want at least a few other rooms in this dungeon, with other encounters. And my players are on a quest to kill a dragon, not a dwarf king)
I almost prefer a minimalistic tool; just a basic map that I can draw up quickly, basic tokens for enemies, and just flesh out my descriptions more.
This is precisely why I love Owlbear Rodeo. Just what I need, no unnecessary fluff or mechanics, super easy importing, website with no installs. I’m interested in the new version, but I’m not DMing an online game right now so no subscription from me yet.
i’d you’re gonna do a 3d map, dungeon alchemist is the way to go. that’s what i’ve been using. it’s pretty versatile and gets frequent content updates. nice looking maps in 2 or 3 dimensions.
That’s such a tough call I don’t envy having to make. Some of the content created while he was ok is one of a kind. I’m picturing the interview he had with Quyen Tran where she shared her and Sam’s 9/11 story. We’re missing that verbal history for people to hear, now. Balancing that with not giving him air time, or worse, having to pay out to him must have been an extremely hard decision.
As a player, I make a point of telling my GMs that I dislike fudged rolls and I’d rather roll a new character than claim a false victory.
As a GM, I will always at session 0 tell my players that I don’t fudge rolls and often prefer to make my GM rolls out in the open whenever there’s a chance they could kill someone or end an encounter. My attitude is that when the players can see my rolls and I tell them in advance “if this is higher than X it’ll hit so-and-so”, we’re all on the same side as we watch the roll play out.
IMO it’s not the job of the GM to tilt the game system itself towards the players, but rather to balance encounters and challenges to be beatable, and then see what happens right alongside the players.
To answer your question, tell him if it affects your experience of the game. Don’t let it ruin your fun in silence, no GM wants players to do that.
Sure, and you can even improv a reason why that might be the case. “Normally he has a +9 to hit but he was distracted by how the barbarian just decapitated his minion in a single strike on a nat 20”
@MrMusAddict@entropicdrift during our campaign for big rolls our DM rolls on the table I'm sure he BS'S some of the DC's but like hey it does help with the suspense
Sometimes I’ve made a fight too easy so I need to provide the goblins with some backup.
Sometimes the backup was always planned after round 2 but maybe it’s a little less than I planned because they’re already near death. Maybe it’s a little more because they’ve killed most already. Maybe the party was stealthy so less backup. Maybe the party was overly loud so there is more.
Also sometimes the pause to “save” a character comes from determining/calculating if the action is “fair”. Why did they just take that “stupid” action. Maybe I undersold just how powerful this NPC was. But maybe I did describe them as having an otherworldly glowing set of armor and you watched them wrestle a bar full of orcs and slice off one their heads in a single blow.
Perhaps you’ve reached a point between player and DM where this isn’t necessary anymore, but I don’t fault anyone who might fudge a roll to keep the game fun.
I just personally try to balance things without ever taking away from the results on the dice themselves. The changes of plan you listed are all fair game in my mind for balancing encounters. There’s nothing wrong with balancing on the fly, I just think if you’re at the point of lying about the results of individual die rolls, at that point you’re disrespecting both the players and the game system. There’s risk embedded in the system by design. If you don’t want that, play a different system where you can handwave risk away and railroad events without cheating.
That said, this is all just my personal philosophy about GMing and games in general.
IMO it’s not the job of the GM to tilt the game system itself towards the players, but rather to balance encounters and challenges to be beatable, and then see what happens right alongside the players.
IMHO, the GM’s role is a lot fuzzier than that and is wholly dependent on your specific party’s (and their own!) preferences. I’d say this is simply what you prefer to do as a GM, rather than what a GM should be doing.
Right. I was just expressing my personal philosophy in my previous comment, not prescribing how everyone should play every game. At least, that was the intent.
Yes, because all my players have PCs with 3d acceleration and are wiling to install a multi-gigabyte client /s
Roll20 has basically supplanted all other VTTs simply by the virtue of being accessible though the browser. All you need for a session is a way to illustrate the scene, roll some dice, maybe have a character sheet upload feature, and that’s it. This seems like a way to shove microtransactions down the user’s throat and a whale milking machine. No thanks.
I'm fine with it just in general. If they can make an AI that does a good job dungeon mastering it's going to open up the hobby tremendously. New players can jump right in even if they don't know an existing experienced player to hold their hands, the "forever DMs" can be free to play too, groups that just don't have any DM can play.
If it's bad at DMing then nobody will use it. Oh well. If human DMs want to DM, they can do that too. It's just the same as with the art AIs, the existence of these things doesn't stop people from still doing things "by hand" if they want to.
I suppose it could go wrong if WOTC keeps throwing money down an AI money pit for a system that never works quite right, and then they end up losing market share to a system created by a scrappy startup that does but it’s built on a different fantasy TTRPG system.
You realize that no one complained that ai art would discourage people from drawing, right? It’s because the ai scans other artists works and designs an imitation based on its prompt. It’s stops artists from being able to profit from their work because it introduces a free alternative that stole their designs to learn.
I think the bigger concern than whether or not it’s good will be what it learned from.
I’m pretty sure about it. No one who suggested that deserves to be taken seriously. But intellectual property theft is a legitimate concern and comparing them as equal concerns is disingenuous.
Lots of people produce content and make a living off of 5e, and not just 3rd party producers, plenty of people use patreon as a means to distributetheir work. Will the ai be trained exclusively on WOTC playtesting or will it be able to scour the internet for plot hooks and npcs and loot and whatever else it needs? It’s inevitable, and well known that some of that content has been reposted and copied in various places across the internet. The damages they suffer from user piracy wouldn’t be comparable to an ai running multiple games on an online platform owned by the ‘world’s most popular rpg’ not to mention that they would be charging for at least a onednd or dnd beyond or whatever they’re calling it this week, subscription.
It’s not as simple as “oh cool, more people could play”. It’s just their next attempt at eliminating the third party market.
It’s just their next attempt at eliminating the third party market.
Since third parties can make AIs too I don't see how this would do that. It's just an innovative new product they might be first to market with, others can also join the market with their own versions of it.
I get the feeling their system will just take all the worst parts of video gaming - micro transactions, walled content, and bugs - and make D&D worse. I'm betting it will be a corporate profit first, community second approach.
What would be awesome is something that makes the table top experience easier and blends the best elements of VTT with in-person gaming. I'd love to a hybrid system in which physical tokens can interact with a digital table top.
“Community second”? That’s very optimistic. Personally, I can’t recall the last time WotC considered their community anything more than a source of backlash (and rightfully so, with their history).
Jesus, I remember when they announced he wouldn’t be back for Talks at the start of C3, but I had no idea about any of the reasoning behind it.
Tough decision for sure, but definitely one that speaks to their integrity as creators and as a company. Best wishes to them moving forward, and hope Ashley is doing well of course.
While there is speculation that him leaving was related to this, there's no confirmation, and chances are it was a different reason. Personally I suspect it was related to his substance abuse issues and his frequency of lashing out at trolls online. The breakup and restraining order were both this year, and DV is VERY often hidden in plain sight. Most people who interact with DV victims are completely unaware, because most people who commit DV are very good at being charming when they want to be and the victims are usually too afraid to let the people around them know.
Yeah, I don’t think it was directly because of a restraining order either. That sounds more a symptom (along with his trolling) of his substance abuse problems. CR is very careful about how it engages it’s fanbase and he is a major liability to that.
For those who like old school campaigns, I'm happy to report that there's an active community supporting his original campaign, Greyhawk. Stranger Things fans, this is where Vecna got his start.
I tried virtual tabletops in 2020 but I just didn't enjoy it the same way. Little things that don't matter while you're sitting round a physical table with your friends, like waiting while other players take their turns in combat encounters, suddenly play out very differently when you're sitting at home on your own and can easily get distracted by your phone or TV without appearing rude. The players all just felt a lot less connected to what was going on in the game.
My group meets infrequently anyway and will often fill a whole day with the equivalent of multiple sessions when we do meet up, but when we played online during Covid we found it hard-going just getting through a two hour session.
Like... we switched to meeting on discord and I scribbled out updates to the 'table' in paint. none of the VTT's were flexible enough for the homebrews I was cooking up, though.
The more featured the vtt the more pain in the ass it was. In the end I first used a PowerPoint and had "shapes" that were like tokens. Then found a vtt that was basically that. Just literally a background, very simple tokens (circle with space for 2 letters) and a freehand pen.
We’re all spread out across our city and getting together for in-person games was always a pain. Pre-pandemic we played maybe once a month on average, though our games usually ended up being at least 4-8 hours at a time. Since the pandemic when we switched over to online, we’re playing weekly in a consistently 2hr game. I actually prefer how it is now, I like the smaller chunks of time and I like not having to always drive over to others’ houses. It does take a bit more prep work for whomever is GMing, since alot of us tend towards battlemaps, but we’ve also done a bit of theatre of the mind as well.
I honestly don’t care to go back to live games, maybe it’d be fine for one-off substitutions of our normal weekly games, but with kids it’s a huge hassle to organize for those long games and honestly, I just don’t know that I have the patience to hang around that long for games anymore. The other people I game with tend to be horrible about timing and will setup ridiculously long combat encounters, such that we’re spending a full 6 hours on a combat session because they thought us going up against like 30 guys would be a quick fight. And of course the enemies NEVER run away, they will always fight to the last man for the vaguest of reasons.
Our group uses Roll20 character sheets on tablets around the table, they’re really handy for managing all the buffs and math (Pathfinder 1e). Still rolling dice and using minis. That’s the right level of digital stuff for me.
I’ve been Dming since 1st Edition and my #1 rule is to not over prepare. This requires an ability to improve a bit, and be comfortable with the fact that mistakes will happen, and be sure your players understand that. Also, for your first outing, don’t do anything homebrew, it’s fun and one of my favorite parts of the game, but it can also easily break the game if you don’t know exactly what you are doing. The main thing is to have fun.
I definitely agree not to over prepare, but I find it helpful for me to think a little on the different paths they might take and have some stuff constructed so that when they inevitably do something you don’t expect, you have something close enough that you can repurpose or guide them back to a prepared path. It depends on what you’re good at. If I had to completely improv a session, I’m positive it would be rough. Others could improv entire campaigns without their players noticing.
They are getting phenomenal vtt support for free right now just by working with the FOSS developers for their foundry system. There’s no reason for them to try and compete with that.
Using your example, I meant it in the sense that the DM could have just as easily said 30 minutes of following as a cat instead of 40 and you would have 25% more wildshape resources, an entire box extra.
Things like Ki points can’t be fudged. You either use it or you don’t. This solution, while I enjoy the discourse, is going to end with the druid at my table saying that they’re only turning into a mouse for a few seconds while they scurry under the door. How do we handle that occurring 10+ times a session? At what point do we need too many house rules to govern this one rule change?
In the interest of discussion, I’ll offer an alternative. What if you had Wildshape Charges instead of Wildshape Minutes? Feel free to change the numbers, but let’s say you have 8 charges at level 5, and gain 1 or 2 charges per level. It takes 4 charges to transform into a CR2 animal, 2 charges for a CR 1, and a flat 1 charge for anything below CR 1. The amount of time you can Wildshape stays the same, or is a flat hourly amount. This will allow you to strategically plan out your Wildshape Charges while adding no additional rules for the DM or table. Thoughts?
I like the idea of “charges”. Rather than time directly, my numbers wouldn’t change but the concept would, be 1 charge is worth up to 15 min of wildshape time. It is used when it is used, they can be chained together so no need to re-transform to stay as a bear or a cat etc…
So the transformation cost would be 4xCR, min of 1. CR1 still is worth 1hr of “charge” time to transform then using charges up after that, dependant on how long you are transformed for…
As for the DM saying different time, that is a given in any situation, the DM could have as easily said that you followed for an hour, using 4 boxes.
And yes, the GM can just arbitrarily change whatever depending on how they’re feeling about it. Like is there 1 guard or 10 in the next room? Same thing. They can drain your resources in a thousand different ways, this time issue is no different. If you don’t trust your GM with that then it’s a bad play dynamic anyway.
Another way to solve the time issue could be to count the time when you’re in combat but not out of combat. You could justify it by the stress of combat putting strain on your abilities or something. I know I’d prefer that because having to count 15min intervals constantly would be worse for me than worrying about using up my abilities.
Agreed, the charges idea was a great suggestion by Toaster. It should help prevent the “but I was only wildshaped for 20 seconds” type of complaints.
Either way time is weird in D&D.
Assume that you are involved in a “long” combat at 10 rounds. Wildshape lasts hours, so yes I wildshape into a dire wolf and finish the battle in 1 minute of in game time; but being a wolf is not that useful out of combat…so I “waste” 59 minutes of wildshape time at Lvl 2 and 119 minutes at Lvl 4 etc…you could use some of the time saying that I was scouting the area around the battle for a few minutes…but still, the point stands.
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