Something that is talked about a lot but rarely accompanied by practical advice on how to is the very crucial point of remembering:
The story you are co-creating as a DM is the story of the characters.
Want to lore dump? Tie it to one or more of your characters backgrounds. Maybe they are from the bloodline of that ancient king you want them to know about.
Not sure how to fill in the details like what does the place smell like? Ask a player “You smell something odd, describe the smell”
I am currently in the process of making some guide like posts and videos on certain topics aimed at both players and videos. Some are meant to be shared with players that are new, like the basics of tactical combat to help reduce your workload, especially with new players.
A sidebar under the World Tree Barbarian specifies that the 2024 PHB will clarify that you can voluntarily fail a saving throw. The 2014 rules never so much as implied that you could do this, so it’s not so much “clarifying” as “introducing the idea in the first place.”
Huh. I personally allow most saving throws to be failed except for CON saves, as long as it's physically possible to do so. DEX and STR saves being the easiest to understand how to intentionally fail (don't resist, don't dodge).
I thought you just counted as a willing creature for INT, CHA, and WIS saves if you decided to fail the saving throw. I feel like the only Attribute it intuitively doesn’t make sense for is CON like in the house rule you described.
Make them submit their choice to you in private, don’t let them communicate with each other.
Otherwise you’re breaking immersion, almost like its asking their characters or something, which would be silly. Almost impossible to avoid meta gaming, you’d just change your pick to the majority pick, even for a disciplined and experienced player trying to role play well.
Instead, pretend its pulling the information from their subconscious or something. So you can’t ask the players publicly, they can’t know what the other players said. Or just roll for it.
Definitely! We play through Roll20, so I’ll get them to whisper the attack to me. Or tell everyone to hit “enter” in the chat message at once, so they can see each others’ results and second guess themselves at the next round.
“Say my name and you break me. What am I?” “A child named ‘nobody loves you’!”
The answer to this riddle is “silence”, because saying the word “silence” will also break the silence. Obviously the less clever/funny version is about emotional harm to children.
Honestly it sounds like the riddles may be clever, but the creature simply thinks the correct answer is wrong. Like “what has four legs in the morning, 2 legs in the afternoon, and 3 at night?” The answer is a person, but maybe the creature says it is another creature that operates literally on this premise. Or it presents the riddle about the head that lies and the head that speaks truth, and has a totally different idea on how the riddle is actually solved, much to the chagrin of your players who are, hopefully, smarter.
Solasta is a pretty fun story light DND game. I enjoyed it, but I never finished anything other than the original campaign. It’s pretty generous with long rests and short rests, which kind of ruins dnd’s precarious balance.
Personally I’m super tired of DND specifically. I’d love something like solasta but with a different system .
Whenever someone suggests Pathfinder over DND I’m reminded of that blues brothers joke “we’ve got both kinds of music here. Country and western”
Anyway it depends on if you mean for tabletop or computer.
For tabletop I’d want something that takes advantage of human creativity like Fate. Or Mage: The Awakening (2e). People will say that DND let’s you be creative because “you can do whatever you want” and that’s technically true, DND doesn’t really help you out. You can make your own spells, but there’s not much guidance (pun intended). Same with classes. Aside from that, stuff like “spend a fate point to declare a story detail” isn’t something computers can handle yet.
For computerized, something written from the ground up to take advantage of that. Tabletop games need to have simple math that players can do in their head. You couldn’t practically do like “randomly pick 100 numbers from 1-100, and count how many match.” at the table. The computer can do whatever weird math you want to get whatever outcome shape you want.
For either, there’s like a three page scried in me about all the dnd’isms I don’t like. I should probably just write it once so I can repost it when it comes up. I’ll spare you unless you really want to know what some rando online dislikes about DND specifically.
We would like to start playing some tabletop with a few friends, none of us played any game of the genre, what would you advice us to do? Is DnD a good choice for beginners given that it doesn’t have as much customisation as others, as I understand?
You are correct that DND doesn’t have as much customization. A lot of character choices are kind of eclipsed by the big 1d20 random factor, too. Like, it doesn’t matter a lot if you have +2 or +5 if you’re adding 1-20 to it and looking for a result of 13. You’re going to hit it a lot either way.
As to what you should play instead, that’s really hard to answer from here. What is your group like? What do they want out of the game? Is it really a bunch of people who have never played anything before?
Personally, I really like Fate and think it’s more intuitive. But it requires your players to be a little more bold and creative than DND. If you have a bunch of timid wallflowers it’s not going to be great. But if you have a bunch of fun storytellers it can really sing. Also it’s free and only uses standard d6 dice. But if no one’s played anything before you might struggle, and might want to look into sourcebooks for sale.
Powered by the apocalypse games are also really popular. Some of them are meh, but that’s sturgeon’s law. They tend to be a lot more narrative and less concerned with “you can move exactly 15 feet”.
Blades in the dark is also really popular. It’s about heists. Pretty easy to pick up. Probably I’d recommend this one if the theme is interesting. It’s a decent system and doesn’t have any dndisms.
There’s also a whole universe of dnd-likes, but to my knowledge most of them aren’t different enough to be worth it. Most of them bring a lot of dnd-isms with a handful of tweaks. I don’t see the point.
I personally really like the Chronicles of Darkness games. They can be a little crunchy, but I started them many years ago so they have a soft spot in my memories. If you wanted to play a game about being a vampire or werewolf or mage in modern day, they have you covered. They do require more reading and investment though.
Which goes back to not knowing your group. Most groups have at least one person who’s not going to read or learn shit. Some have more. How many do you have?
Tldr: fate is awesome. Pbta is worth checking out. Blades in the dark is good.
We are all beginners in the world of tabletop, as for what we want out of the game, I think we don’t have enough knowledge of what the different games out there entail to really know what we may want. I think everyone in the group is willing to learn how to play, but most won’t be going as deep as me, but that’s OK.
Yeah I didn’t like how they limited short rests in bg3. It’s pretty hard on warlocks. But letting people long rest as much as they want means you can solve most fights with three fireballs, which isn’t how the game is really designed. (Bg3 sort of limits it based on supplies, but supplies are plentiful and you can always cast good berry)
On the other hand, I’ve seen polling that shows most real life tables do like one or maybe two fights per long rest, which is insane.
On the other hand, I’ve seen polling that shows most real life tables do like one or maybe two fights per long rest, which is insane.
I always hated that fact, since when I was playing 5e, the tables I played at actually made liberal use of short rests. It meant that classes like Monk and Fighter were solid choices. People complain about 5e and then don’t play it the way the designers intended. I feel like most people just ignore maybe the most important bit of text in the PHB, which says that you can’t benefit from a long rest more than once in a 24-hour period.
I think a large chunk of people have simply never read the rules. They watch a podcast and “learn by playing” with their friends. A large chunk of that subset don’t retain rules very well, so no matter how many times you tell them “you have to roll to hit before you roll damage” they might not remember.
I don’t want to say they’re idiots because that’s mean, and they’re usually having fun, but as someone who’s extremely rules oriented it grinds my gears.
I agree, but then you get DMs complaining “my game isn’t fun, players are too strong and chew through encounters and I can’t challenge them” or players complaining “The warlock and monk are the worst classes in the game”, or people who convince themselves that “every party needs a dedicated healer” and then you find out they are doing a single encounter with a single monster every day with nothing else that drains resources and then long-resting. It’s like, no wonder your game is unbalanced, you’ve thrown the thing the entire system was balanced on out the window.
The adventuring day is a very specific kind of game and I don’t think it’s how most people actually want to play. I think most people would enjoy a game that wasn’t built around it more. There are countless other ways to balance a game.
But DND is so mega popular it sucks all the air out of the hobby. People don’t even imagine a game that’s not based on per-rest powers.
I have a wizard in my DND game who “just wants to do cool stuff”. He blows spell slots on silly or suboptimal stuff all the time. But if I’m like “do you want to play a game where that’s expected?” he’s like no I just want to play DND.
Make a bard with rock bottom charisma, but he doesn’t know it. You could play it for laughs or tragically. Sound like it would be a fun concept to play either way.
I would recommend buying a Player’s Handbook if you want to be a player and add on the Monster Manual and Dungeon Master’s Guide if you want to DM.
roll20.net is a good site for online play. I believe you can also find games on there.
My biggest tip on character creation is to read through the stat blocks and think a couple levels ahead. Generally, you want to allocate stats:
Your best stat should go to the main stat for the class
Second best stat generally goes to Constitution.
Third best stat goes to second stat for the class (example: Charisma for paladin) or planned subclass (example: intelligence for Eldritch Knight.) If neither of these apply, put it in Wisdom.
The rest of your stats can go wherever, it doesn’t really matter.
Do that and your character will at least be decent.
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