Training wheels are useful tool for beginner cyclists, but not useful for advanced cyclists. Likewise, quantum ogres are a useful tool for beginner DMs, but not for seasoned DMs.
Quantum ogres are a white lie to your players with a result that, at best, doesn’t actually do anything. At worst, the players figure it out and call you out on it.
The reason they can be helpful for a beginner DM is because they help people who want their players think their choices matter, but are afraid to actually give them that choice: “I want my players to do X but I don’t want them to think they were forced to do X, so I’m going to give them a false choice and then do X anyway.”
Let’s say the players are walking and see a sign for Town A and Town B. Whichever they choose, the DM is just going to sub in the same town they prepped. So why put the fork in the road? We pause the game, have the players deliberate, and ask them to make a choice: we’re investing time and effort into a decision, but why? To make our players feel like they matter? In reality, the scenario is much cleaner if we just have a single road to Town A with no fork.
Adding just a little bit of information actually makes the decision matter: “Town A, population 3000. Town B, population 36.” Now they have some information to make a meaningful decision. Add some foreknowledge that Town A is a major port city and Town B is a small farming hamlet, and suddenly the choice becomes interesting. Now we can see why the quantum ogre is actually a hindrance for a seasoned DM, much like training wheels are a hindrance for an expert cyclist: by giving players more information, players can make a meaningful choice that has an impact on the world.
This remains true even without the context. For example, having multiple paths in a dungeon let the players experience the content at their own pace and in the order they choose, even though they typically don’t know what content to expect. Letting the players choose which order to visit Rooms A, B, and C makes the scenario richer than just quantum rigging it so the players must always experience A, B, and C in that order no matter which room they pick. Pushing yourself to do this when the choices are more arbitrary will help you get off the training wheels faster and help you develop richer, modular content when creating a true open world, like above where our players can freely choose between two very different towns.
In short, using a quantum ogre once or twice while learning won’t make you a terrible DM. But petting your players freely choose whether to go through troll territory or ogre territory and tailoring your encounters accordingly will make you a much better DM than simply teleporting the ogre.
Training wheels are useful tool for beginner cyclists, but not useful for advanced cyclists. Likewise, quantum ogres are a useful tool for beginner DMs, but not for seasoned DMs.
I hard disagree. Quantum baddies are useful no matter how seasoned a DM you are.
Quantum enemies are a technique you can use to help preserve the prep work you do as DM, and doubling the prep you do isn’t a mark of experience. Use it when appropriate, and avoid using when the story says you must.
I think it’s a matter of in what context the quantum ogre is used as well.
Combat is complex to balance in 5e, so encounter design takes up significant prep time. It makes sense the user a quantum ogre where the players are arbitrarily picking between rooms A and B in a dungeon. They have a fight, then the DM has time to prep a puzzle or another combat in the unused room for next week.
The poster you’re replying to shows when quantum ogres are bad. World building at a basic level isn’t a heavy lift, so limited prep work is wasted by fleshing out both locations. And your players won’t out level a city or NPC like they will a combat. So you can always come back to that unused location later with minimal additional work.
Quantum ogre is more about the intent and removing actual choice from players. Good prep does away with making player choice irrelevant.
I’m assuming in your question, the first situation would have the “preplanned” fight be wherever the players decide to go since we’re discussing the QO. The difference between your two methods is in the latter, you’re making up the creature or combat on the spot by reacting to what the players have done. In the first, it didn’t matter what the players did. You were going to do it anyway, so why even give them a choice?
I just cant see how eithet takes away choice. If the players can go north or west to get to the next mcguffin. I would put an encounter on their road either rolled or desined. After all it is common in d&d to have road battles. The battle will be on what road they chose. I would make the encounter make sense and based on the pc.
If we down scale this to a dungeon so it 3 rooms not roads. What changes?
Think about it this way: what’s the purpose of the players choosing between North and West if the outcome is exactly the same, whether they know this or not? Are they just arbitrarily choosing between the two paths, or do they have information that gives positives and negatives to either path? Doing the former is just a choice for the sake of it. It serves no purpose. In the latter, it’s now less of something to fill and waste time, and it’s now a decision on the players’ part on whether they want to travel safely or dangerously, or whatever the differences are between the routes.
Well they need to collect more then mcguffin so they can go north to the ice dungeon/town and look for the rings of plot importance. Or they can go west for the crown of plot importance and deal with the jungle dungeon are first. So they would be given information about what town and hazards, and what they pick does change where the battle takes place. So there are consequences to what they pick. They don’t have perfect knowledge
In the small scale it is there because unless they split the party they can only go one way at a time. They can only explore one room at a time. that why the the choice is there.
so thanks for the long post I enjoy the feed back. Here is something in the video that I agree that so far one has talked about. Why QO bad but not rolling an encouter? Are they not equally false choice?
Do you mean rolling random encounters while traveling or Rolling encounters randomly within a dungeon?
Random encounters were originally put in to add spice to long travel and make it feel like actual long time to travel and dangerous. Nowadays with modern story telling you can continue using it if you want but if you have a story base campaign they mostly just interrupt the flow.
If you want to use them for Additional XP and gold from time to time to adjust your players level gently and/or because you havent quite prepped the next area and you want to stall til next week then go nuts but see them for what they are, a purposeful time filler and making your players scared to go throught the forest.
If you mean within a dungeon then go nuts if you arent planning your dungeon fight by fight and you like the challenge of your monsters being random so your players have a more even chance, go nuts.
I’d say random rolling an encounter is the opposite of choice. It’s representing the variance of the fantasy world: if there’s a 1% chance of someone traveling through a given region encountering a dragon, rolling a 100 on a d100 table emulates that.
Imagine that a DM decided to prescript combat so that every player gets down low HP before the enemy dies in the fourth round. The DM doesn’t give the enemy HP, they pretend to roll behind the screen, and they mete out damage at predetermined intervals. This happens regardless of whether:
The rogue decides to use their inspiration after a miss to try for sneak attack
The wizard uses Fireball for damage, tries to break concentration with Magic Missile, tried to Hold Person the enemy, or just cast Firebolt
The Eldritch knight uses Shield to absorb a hit
The cleric buffs and heals the party vs. focuses on damage
The barbarian uses rage or saves it forever
Which wild shape the druid chooses
Regardless of any of these decisions, the DM has already planned the entire thing out. Attacks hit when the DM wants them to hit, the DM makes up that the enemy is “starting to look bad” when they’re not tracking HP at all, the enemy suddenly saves against things that would be encounter-ending, etc. This is basically the quantum ogre.
Rolling in the open, letting hits hit and misses miss, suddenly makes those decisions important, because the DM can’t just lie to meet a predetermined outcome. Rollable tables are a similar sort of randomness that discourage a DM from just forcing a predetermined outcome at the player. A random generator is not even a choice at all: other than choosing when to roll it, the DM has no influence over the result.
I see the QO as a stepping stone to using random encounters, and to prepping enemy stats but not setting the encounter itself in stone.
Use a die to determine whose action the godling listens to. 1-4 could each be a player, the remaining numbers are a random action. Pick whichever die gives the right balance you want. A d6 sounds right to me so there's a 1/3 chance of random shenanigans
I would add that perhaps OP should have the players jot down their plans in secret, call it listening to their heart or some such, because it will minimise metagaming.
Alternatively, think of it a bit like Q’s Son in voyager. Basically a god but also a pugnacious wee shite who you have to sorta trick into doing the right thing.
Ask your friends/coworkers if they want to join you. Personally knowing people goes a long way. Even if you guys are just acquaintances, it’s better than joining a group of strangers. Generally 5 is an ideal number (counting yourself), with 3 being a “minimum” for a good game. You can get away with 2 if an adventure is specifically designed for it, but generally the best experiences will be when you have 5-6 people total.
My last campaign I asked a group of co-workers if they wanted to play, and we wound up with a group of 4 that played every 2 weeks. I’m also in a campaign with my fiance’s friend where it’s 5 of us every week (my fiance was invited and she asked if I could come along, even though I didn’t know the organizer originally). There’s a third campaign where my stepdad asked me if I wanted to join him; we’re a group of 7 meeting every 2 weeks.
But you still totally can join a group of strangers, if you want! As others have suggested, start by asking your local comic book/games shop. Places that sell Warhammer figurines are also good spots to start; there’s a lot of overlap in the communities and typically they’ll have DnD nerds too.
Once you have a group, the next hardest part is figuring out who will be the Dungeon Master. The Dungeon Master is the referee; they call the shots, decide what happens, and act as “the bad guy”. The Dungeon Master is a player, too; they just have different responsibilities than the other players. It’s a lot of work to be a DM, but it’s very rewarding.
My first-ever campaign I became the Dungeon Master, because nobody else wanted to do it and I really wanted to play DnD. I didn’t have a firm grasp of the rules, but I tried my best and worked with my players as much as I could. You want to make sure that they’re having fun, and you want to facilitate communication as much as possible. Players will have lots of questions - “is it okay if I do XYZ?” “What gods should I worship?” etc. It’s the DM’s job to handle this sort of stuff and make sure everyone is on the same page.
This also applies to other things, as well. Typically the first session with a group is “Session 0”, where everyone tests that everything is working and people are put on the same page. It’s not expected that people play in session 0; the goal is to establish boundaries.
What themes are going to be in this campaign? Does the campaign allow guns, or is it strictly fantasy weaponry? What level do players start at? Are there any homebrew rules? How are player stats generated? Are people okay with descriptions of slavery? Sexual assault? Is it okay for players to romance other players? Where do people draw the line? You make these decisions in session 0 so everyone is onboard and comfortable - make sure everyone is heard and everyone has collectively agreed on where that line is.
A great example - a player I had in a campaign had arachnophobia, so I reskinned my spiders into something else for her (without telling her they were really spiders - I described them as giant rats).
Certain campaigns may have other rules. For example, some campaigns may exist in a world where magic is outlawed or rare - this means that spellcasters aren’t common, and being able to do magic is an oddity or a crime. Other times there may be restrictions like “this takes place in a tropical jungle, so if you wear heavy armor your character will always be hot and may have issues.”
It’s up to the DM what rules exist in the world (or not). Even if it’s an established setting/world, they may put restrictions on things they don’t want to deal with. Some DMs will allow “oddball” races like Aarakocra (Jarnathan from the DnD movie is an Aarakocra). Other DMs ban them because they can fly, and flying creatures break puzzles - or they don’t think a race like Warforged is a fit for their setting. Some DMs really care about your backstory so they can use it against you later; others are sticking to a script where you are a blank slate and your backstory doesn’t matter.
If you suggest the campaign, it’s very likely that you will wind up as the DM, unless you can con someone else into it. Some groups even rotate the DM, where 3-4 people serve as the DM with their own campaigns and each week it’s a different person running things.
Only once the DM has been sorted and you’ve had your session 0 can you really think about character creation. Your DM can even help you come up with characters during session 0, if you’d like (that’s part of the reason why session 0 exists).
Every campaign will be different. The rules on what kinds of characters will be good fits will always change. Some DMs are very combat-heavy; others will go weeks without a combat encounter and rely heavily on roleplaying and intrigue. You can’t really come up with a “best” character because you will always have strengths and weaknesses; you might be good at combat but bad at puzzles.
Either way, you should strive to have a balanced party. Generally you want a “Striker” (max single-target DPS), a “Scout” (stealth), a “Face” (high Charisma, good at deception), a “Blaster” (max AoE), a “Controller” (control where people can or can’t go), a “Defender” (tank, draw aggro, protect your squishies), a “Healer” (take a wild guess), a “Librarian” (high knowledge/investigation), a “Support” (apply buffs), and a “Utility” (out of combat magic).
Of course… you don’t have that many characters! So you pick and choose which roles your party is lacking, doubling or tripling up on some roles. For example, the Healer is frequently dropped entirely because combat healing isn’t very good in DnD. The Blaster is often also the Librarian or Face, the Striker can be the Scout, the Controller can be Utility, etc. You need to look at what everyone wants to play and figure out where the party is lacking, then create a character to fit that gap.
The “standard” party is generally “Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, Wizard”. Each character is usually covering multiple roles (although classes will handle some roles better than others). Note that in Baldur’s Gate you run into all those exact classes within 5 minutes after the tutorial… almost like the devs did that on purpose!
You don’t have to run that exact party, but it’s a good guideline for how you should build a party. Druids can substitute for Clerics or Wizards, Barbarians or Paladins can substitute for Fighters, Monks or Rangers can substitute for Rogues, Sorcerers/Warlocks can substitute for Wizards, heck even Warlock/Wizard can substitute for Fighter with the right build.
A lot of builds you see online will be “minmaxed” builds. They’ll do things like multiclassing and bending the mechanics of the game until they break. Your DM may not allow this. Get a vibe for what’s okay or not before just grabbing builds online just because they seem powerful.
A helpful resource is DnD Beyond. They have guided character creation and interactive character sheets. Game mechanics are turned into easy buttons and stuff is calculated automatically instead of making you do math.
If your campaign is on DnD Beyond and someone has bought books through them, they can opt to share those books with everyone in that campaign. This lets you have access to content you’d usually need to buy just because your friend has it - very handy! IRL you’d just share the book, but DnD Beyond makes it very easy.
I hope that helps!
DnD is a lot of fun, but the challenge is always in keeping the group going. It’s very easy to miss a session and have the whole thing fall apart. Make sure that standards are set and that attendance is expected (with exceptions, of course). Most campaigns will never be completed; they die to schedule conflicts after a year or so. That’ll be your eternal enemy, so do your part in trying to fight it.
Try these tricks (providing they are applicable!):
Lower down the number of enemies under your control, but make them stronger. This way, you won’t have to deal with so many pawns.
Don’t force your NPCs to fight to death. Assume that once, say 25% of your pawns are wiped out, their leader halts the fight and asks to parlay, or that if 75% of them/their leader go to the ground, the rest escapes.
Tucker’s Kobolds.
If a combat action leads to multiple dice rolls one after another, roll all of the dice at once - this speeds up the game.
Use combat managers/helpers - Excel file, dedicated software, whatever helps you in math, use it.
If the combat becomes too overwhelming, introduce some unsuspected elements. Sudden earthquake, volcano eruption, castle falling down, incoming of a truly powerful enemy, etc. Have some good in-game explanation for such an event!
To add to that last point, I always like to have a few quest-specific Deus Ex Machinas that I’ve got up my sleeve, in case I really badly miscalculated a battle.
Once I realize things are going badly for the PCs, I switch to playing as if they were supposed to lose this battle the whole time, so I can introduce this cool new thing. I try to make it seem like I planned it, but really, I’m just pulling a Deus Ex to save my party from my own dumb ass.
It’s the cleric equivalent of fireball. An almost overly strong spell that is basically a must-take and must-use as soon as it becomes available. It’s almost always the best thing a cleric can concentrate on.
@RGB3x3@TheTango it makes it easier but think of all the talented people who draw and actually create art. Their skills go unused and also the fact ai art uses other peoples art without their permission to learn and create. It’s not a simple answer and there are multiple reasons why ai art is frowned upon and disliked.
Did you people even read the article? This is about an official artist creating official artwork using AI.
And expecting DMs to pay for artists to create fanworks of characters or other campaign backgrounds and whatnot is really outlandish, sorry.
You think people, including poor ones, are going to pay hundreds of bucks for some artworks for their D&D sessions? And you think I need the reality check? lol
Maybe just stop the whole bad faith trolling entirely because this is just cringe.
The linked article doesn’t provide any details, it merely states that an artist used AI to “create” or “generate” artwork. However in a different article about the same incident the artist claims that he only used an AI as a tool to enhance his own drawings, and provides before and after images. Assuming he isn’t lying to cover his ass, IMO the AI contributed very little to the artwork.
AI very provably does use other peoples’ art more than any other artist. It needs huge amounts of media that’s used as a basis for training material — far, far more than your average artist will consume. You can teach a person how to draw, sculpt, paint, model, etc. without ever showing them another artist’s work. You really can’t do that with ML tools we have currently. It’s not completely impossible, but you would be relying on getting a lot of training data in another way and it would probably require a lot of input from humans on the output end to make a model that can come up with something reasonably comprehensible. A
We don’t have much in terms of laws about this kind of usage because it’s not like in the past a company like DC comics has decided that they want to make Jim Lee’s style to become the “official” style of DC comics, but they don’t want to pay Jim Lee, so they hire a Chinese art factory to mimic his style and cut him out. Something like that wouldn’t be illegal in the sense of current laws, but probably would have been substantially more expensive than simply hiring Lee himself. However, it definitely would have been unethical. It also would likely have caused a legal challenge that might have affected how our laws deal with replication of a “style”. Even in cases where a company establishes their own style guide based on an art style of a specific artist as is common in animation (where it’s understood that the usage of that style is part of the concept art), there is typically an evolution in how that style as it standardizes- See “Steamboat Mickey” versus current versions of Mickey Mouse, or the changes from the first season to the current season of the Simpsons for example.
This isn’t about using AI tools for your average DM to make art resources for their home campaign. That’s a perfectly reasonable use-case. It isn’t as though your average DM is likely to be commissioning custom art every time there’s a new character in the campaign - they’ll do what we’ve always done: Find reference material that’s “close enough” from copyrighted works and say “something like this.” But if a company is going to start digging into AI, then we as the audience have the right to say, “No, I’m not going to support that and won’t buy a product produced in that way. I assign value to art made the ‘traditional’ way” The obsolescence of industries due to technology is not an inevitability - by all rights it’s entirely possible that an automated process to make perfect, nutritionally balanced food bars that are both cheaper and healthier than a McDonald’s burger could have been produced by now - but no one wants that. Very few people have a diet that consists entirely of Soylent. Just as there’s more to food than nutrition and value, there’s more to art than pictures. The so-called “free hand of the market” goes both ways.
I’m a digital artist. I’m in an interesting position in this debate, because I see the value and the power of tools like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion and the like. The prospect of training an AI tool on my own work and giving it to the public to be able to make their own art using my style is exactly the kind of artsy-fartsy “concept” thing I dig. I use things like “content-aware fill” tools and special brushes in my work that are basically cousins to these systems and they help me immensely. But also I think that artists should have the right to choose whether their work is used in this way and that if a company is profiting from the usage of an AI model that’s been trained from mass scraping of the internet there should be some legal consideration for that.
In particular, only human- created content is currently eligible for copyright protection.
About a decade ago, there was a case over who owned the copyright of a bunch of selfies taken by macaques with a camera left lying out by a wildlife photographer. The US Copyright Office ultimately decided the images were public domain since they weren’t created by a human.
Because of that, AI art isn’t eligible for copyright protections.
If you make a picture book using stable diffusion and chatgpt, the only thing you can protect is the layout you did by hand of the public domain text and images on the page. Someone could sell a competing derivative work with their own original layout.
@RGB3x3@TheTango
I think for the common person its fine, like making character art or some custom monster/place/whatevs for your own campaign but when you pay for it from a big, known publisher i think its reasonable and ethical to employ talanted artists.
This is particularly due to an artist using AI art for a source book they’re publishing.
That’s a problem for them because only human- created work is eligible for copyright protection; both animal-created art and AI art is inherently public domain. They want to control the IP in the source books, so they think it’s a problem if people can legally just copy the images out of them.
If they want to pretend they’re not doing it, sure, I’ll pretend I don’t see it. If I think they’re fudging the dice too much, and it bothers me, I might bring it up with them privately, or I might suggest a group discussion, or I might just leave.
In general, I try to evaluate a GM as the whole package, rather than just the individual choices they make. If I like their campaigns, there’s no point in picking on individual decisions (beyond obligatory mild grumbling, of course, lol). Sometimes, they’re going to get results using techniques I wouldn’t choose, which is fine. If I don’t like their campaigns, there’s still no point in picking on individual decisions. I would rather drop out as soon as I realize something isn’t working out than stick around, lose my temper, and say something I will regret.
It kind of barely touches on FoundryVTT which is pretty much the best of the bunch if you are ok with running your own server:
-you own it -you own the content -lots of modules and very active development and support. Both official and fan based -great to use for a number of systems from DND to Warhammer and too many to list on mobile -very slick to use and macros allow you to do many cool things easily
Foundry really is amazing. The mod community for it is fantastic; you can find ones to do pretty much anything you’d want to do in game, and the UI is super slick. But the zero subscription part is what really sells it for me.
This is something I don’t get about lemmy. Here’s a platform that really struggles to build communities that are active and alive yet everyone seems hellbent on fracturing the user base into the most specific and niche subdivisions.
I mean this is just my personal opinion but I’d much rather have one community that’s lively but includes elements I don’t particularly care for than 6 communities that each get one post a week.
I am very much avoiding breaking off communities from dnd, BUT in this case I know many people hate AI art in general so I’d rather just siphon that off to its own area
Thanks for that BigFig! You’re doing such a great job with thes3 communities! I appreciate you keeping the art separate from the discussion and the memes 🙂
I can only speak for myself but I wouldn’t mind some ai generated pictures on my normal feed. But not the way you’re currently posting them on the other slice.
Individual images only fill up the feed without adding much to discuss. There’s not much to say beyond a “nice” in the comments. I’d much prefer it being an album with some context what you did with it.
Personally, my perfect solution would be for Lemmy to implement post tags similar to hashtagging and then the ability for users to filter via those tags. This would allow us to have ONE community in !dnd and then just filter what you want to see, but until and if they implement something like that, for the sake of sating those that do like the organization, this is the solution for now. I hope it makes sense
It’s pretty decent. On top of the grappling bonus action, it gives you proficiency with improvised weapons. This helps when you’re using your shield as an improvised weapon because your other hand is holding someone.
I just found my next feat I think. “Fey Touched”. I know it’s only once per long rest but get this: You get Misty Step AND another 1st level spell from School of Divination or School of Enchantment. School of Enchantment has “Hex” as a first level spell. Imma hex them, choose either STR or DEX, depending on the description of the enemy from the DM. Since I can’t cast two spells in one round, I’m gonna use Misty Step the next round and do a teleports behind you nothing personnel, kid - move, then use Action Surge to do the shove / grapple combo. Fuck, I already look forward to the next level up.
dnd
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.