That’s awesome! My friend group tried out DND in a similar way, none of us had ever played before so one stepped up to DM. I’ve become a DM myself since then, almost begrudgingly at first but I’ve really come to enjoy it. But if I may ask, what got you to set up a DND community before playing yourself? Were you inspired by communities on other sites, or by following campaigns (Critical Role et. al)?
I have been immersed in the D&D community for over a decade of my life. I’ve owned most of the books of the last 10 years, and I have listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts, consumed every comic there is to consume, ready days of articles, etc.
But my friend group has always been either uncoordinated, in different parts of the world, or just different places in life that things have never lined up for us to actually play the game. FINALLY things have lined up just right and I am DMing not one but TWO groups!
There was a campaign a long time back where I gave the party something called the "Infinite Tapestry." It was kind of a low-grade portable hole, a 10'x10' tapestry that depicted an image of an empty stone masonry chamber with bare walls. If the tapestry was hanging vertically and you touched it while speaking a command word, you would appear inside the tapestry where there was another similar tapestry on the fourth wall of the chamber showing the outside world. Both tapestries had to be hanging flat and vertical for the connection to work, otherwise the other tapestry turned black and temporarily inert.
Basically, it was a portable clubhouse. They furnished it, went on a minor quest to get ahold of a magical hot tub to put in there, used it to store all the unwieldy things that parties liked to lug around. Since the connection was relatively "fragile" and could be disrupted easily, trapping whoever was in there until the tapestry could be hung from suitable supports again, they were always careful about using it as a literal camp - they slept outside of it whenever possible and took care not to all be inside at the same time. Which was a bit frustrating because there was a secret to the tapestry that I really wanted to force them to discover.
It wasn't a portable hole, the chamber wasn't an extradimensional space. The tapestry was actually a two-way portal to the Feywild, specifically to a chamber in the basement of an ancient abandoned castle that was the ancestral home of the secret Big Bad of the campaign. But they never examined the masonry inside to discover that the "back wall" was slightly different from the rest (it was a bricked-up corridor leading to the rest of the basement) and circumstances never arose where they'd be able to determine that they were on a different plane of existence in there rather than an extradimensional space.
Eventually, though, an opportunity arose. Through sheer happenstance a minor enemy of theirs discovered the secret of their tapestry, including the command word. He went into the tapestry to search through the party's stuff, but the party spotted him entering it so they took down the tapestry to trap him in there. They spent a day prepping to fight the guy, and then when they were all good and ready they put the tapestry back up... and saw that during the day the guy had spent trapped in there he'd figured out the thing I had wanted the party to eventually figure out, breaching the back wall and escaping into the castle in the Feywild.
So now the party had to dungeon-crawl the ancient castle chasing the trail of this guy, discovering a bunch of stuff about the real Big Bad of the campaign in the process, and once that whole multi-session extraveganza was finished they had graduated from having a simple "clubhouse" to having a whole castle in their pocket. It became their major base of operations and many future adventure seeds focused around it.
It was a lot of fun, but if you're a DM that likes a well-organized storyline it might be troublesome. I had no idea when exactly they were going to discover that whole new branch of the campaign they were carrying around with them.
This is such a great idea! I guess your party already knew about portable holes from previous campaigns and were just assuming that’s what it was? A tricky instance of characters acting according to player experience! Sounds like it worked out really well though.
Yeah, most of my players over the years have been veteran enough that the standard stuff can usually be assumed background knowledge. I think I even gave them a bag of holding so that they'd eventually have a clue from the fact that it didn't blow up from being taken into the tapestry, but as soon as they realized what it was they got rid of it to be "safe" and never took it in there. In hindsight perhaps I should have had a bag of holding be already inside the tapestry chamber when they discovered it, left over in there as loot from the previous occupants. Though that may have clued them in too quickly. Always a balancing act. :)
I once decided to give all my players a single minor magical item at lvl 1 just to help their characters settle into their roles.
The Ranger got a quiver of elven kind (guaranteed 20 non-magical arrows per day)
The wizard got an indestructible spellbook (no need to worry about losing spells)
The monk/rogue a cloak that made it easier to conceal his identity
And the hobbit-like bard... a dagger of warning.
I thought they'd appreciate the LotR nod. Except I made a campaign of intrigue, where the baddies were hiding in plain sight. I dreaded that damn dagger. Somehow, through sheer luck, the bard immediately forgot about it after their first encounter. It never came up again.
I gave my party this Bag of Wonderus Randomization and reflavored it as magical D100 die that they were given and it spits out the results. Tons of fun to be had from it
I ran a wild west game of 5e called Spellslinger for three years from 3rd to 15th. You can actually adapt most DnD monsters and races quite easily to a wild west them.
Dwarves - gold and mithril prospectors
Wood elves - dessert nomads
Aaracocra - native Americans although you need to be respectful obviously
Tielflings - always played piano in bars for some reason
Giants - desert giants work really naturally
It also turns out they’re is an absolute ton of fantasy wild west art which serves for great inspiration.
Interesting concept! I can’t comment too much on the balance, but I still have come criticisms.
Charisma doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for a saving throw proficiency. I would probably replace it with Intelligence.
The weapon proficiencies are also a bit odd. The player starts with melee weapons, gets access to fighting styles that benefit their usage, but isn’t proficient in them? They should at least get proficiency with all simple weapons maybe a list like: “simple weapons, blowgun, hand crossbow, heavy crossbow, longbow” would be good.
No abilities at second level? I guess that might be because that’s when the ranger gets spells and you removed that. It’s super disappointing to level up, especially after the first level-up of the game, and get literally no new abilities. Out of all the base classes in the game, only spellcasters get “dead levels” (levels without any features), and that’s because they get access to the next spell level on those levels (exception: the warlock’s level 18 is dead, but to be fair that’s after they can cast 9th level spells, plus they at least get a new Invocation). Maybe give them Action Surge or something?
The whole class feels very loaded towards the subclasses doing things while the “chassis” of the class doesn’t do a whole lot. I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing or not, but that definitely stuck out to me.
I feel like it would make more sense for the Spellshot to be a ⅓-caster (like eldritch knight or arcane trickster instead of getting spells up to 7th level. That’s how other subclass casters do it. Subclass casters also usually get their own spell lists.
Magic Arrows is super confusing, relies too much on randomness, and doesn’t scale well.
I know I’m being mostly negative here, but I really love the concept behind the Jagged Arrow archer. It’s a very flavourful concept and I feel like we need more subclasses like that.
I have been running a pirate campaign for quite awhile and some that I would add are:
Be careful how evil you let the players get. Too much evil is difficult to run especially in civilized port cities.
I have allowed my players to learn new tool or skill proficiencies using downtime on the boat, there’s a lot of traveling and this helps give them incentive to use the boat more.
Don’t take away their boat more than once or twice during the campaign for narrative reasons, it gets old and they invest a lot of money and resources into it. If they mess up and lose or sink their boat, that’s on them.
Make sure there’s enough quests that need a boat, otherwise they might revert to old habits of traveling across land.
How do you manage this? Isn’t pirating kind of inherently evil? Do you need to set up an evil empire with the party playing Robin Hood on the high seas?
Agreed. Those stipulations are what I was used to on Reddit and seemed to work for those communities there. Every post has something for free but there's a link to more that's paid. It's exactly how I found most of the content I've bought and subscribed to over the years.
dnd
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.