For dungeons, I do pre-drawn maps on grid paper, glued to cardboard, cut into tiles, per room, that I can place down as my players explore. I think having something like that makes the game more exciting and dramatic. It also lets me build more complex puzzles. My last map had minecart tracks all throughout that the players needed to use to move a piece of mining equipment to a certain spot to unlock a secret area. If I hadn’t had it prepared in advance, describing it specifically, or drawing it on a whiteboard, would have made it too obvious, I think.
For more open stuff though, like exploring a large aboveground region, or minor standalone encounters, I think theatre of the mind works well, and saves prep time, which is important. For games that rely more on the battle map, like PTU, which is what I actually GM, something like a dry erase board with a grid works well in these cases.
Thanks! I prefer it to just covering the map with sheets of paper, because it doesn’t give an indication of which way the dungeon goes or how big it is. It also makes it easy to transport the whole dungeon if I need to, because all the pieces can just go in a folder
I use foundry and love it. I’ve switched to PF2E but ran 5e on there for about 2 years. It works great for doing a lot of automation for you and you can still throw up a background image for TotM scenes. Definitely my favorite method I’ve tried for our virtual group. Though when we have In-person sessions we still use foundry with eneryone on laptops because it’s so much easier.
Wow, that is an excellent article. I’ve been wanting to try and host an In-person game for a bit but the whole “8 laptops” thing is a bit cumbersome. I think there is definitely a viable solution there to let people play from the couch and just hot seat with a laptop while the game is up on the TV.
Foundry makes a great information hub, even locally. All your DM handouts, their character sheets and notes, bags of holding, etc can live inside it. No more “who has X thing?”
I usually have a couple of maps set up for global use. One is the world/region map and I move a toke on it to show where the party is. Journal entries are pinned to locations and I reveal them as the party learns info.
Then I’ll usually have a map set up as essentially their “planning table” with all the info relevant to the current events, images, etc.
It’s set up so that even if we are running a combat in another map, they can swap back and reference something themselves if they want. I can always draw their attention back to the combat encounter map on demand if needed.
Also, if you also run 5e-tools it makes life even easier. You can import all sorts of things from 5e-tools into foundry with no need to spend time re-creating spells and items and such
I do dry-erase markers on a battlemap, I use a laptop with vimwiki on it, I also hit tabletopaudio.com and play through a little bluetooth speaker. I don’t think I really have any other tools.
While I recognize it’s not for everyone, online D&D can be just as fun as in person. I’ve been playing twice a week with my group that I’ve been playing with for almost two years. Of course, not every group you get into is immediately the right fit, I think I got quite lucky as it was my third group I got into.
There are various websites to play. Personally, I use Roll20. While I recognize it has flaws, it is still pretty decent overall, and a free account gives you all the necessary functionality to play. Even GM’s can just use a free account if they manage their resources well.
Only if people looking at Pathfinder. It's more queer which is terrifying to right wingers. So I give it like 10% chance and up up 25% if paizo gets in on the game
$100 would cover a ton a basic supplies for a classroom and you clearly don’t have kids if you don’t think so. I buy supplies for teachers all the time and $100 covers plenty.
Yea, it’s also an attempt to drum up more business for them but they are a business. Why are we expecting pure benevolence from a corporation?
Do you also think rich white dudes who built libraries and universities in the 20th century did it benevolently? No. But we still appreciate the outcome.
Yes, that is a good topic to introduce. These things don’t just happen. Small powerful groups of people take it upon themselves to keep things the way they want them.
That’s not exactly how I read that article. Carnegie wasn’t some saint but he could have piled his money up and sat on it if he wanted to. Adjusted for inflation he donated almost $6 billion dollars to charities and argued with the powered wealthy elite in America that it was their moral obligation to give their money to charity. He directed his money definitely and it could be argued that his money could be spent more effectively in other ways but if the options are Carnegie sits on his money or he donates how he wants then I think the latter is the better option (or the least worse option). Government wasn’t interested in building libraries and Carnegie built over 2,500 of them in the US but also throughout Europe, South Africa, Barbados, Australia, and New Zealand. Carnegie was a bastard businessman, people died at the Homestead strike he’s a grade-A bastard. But he’s a bastard that built libraries that otherwise wouldn’t have been built. It would have been better if his workers were protected and his wealth taxed and spent responsibility but that wasn’t in the cards at that time. It feels like it isn’t in the cards today either. But I’d be happier, or less angry, if Bezos or Musk spent their money on charity rather than low orbit space tourism and Twitter.
I’m not going to lie I nearly didn’t write that word salad up ( I apologize for not making paragraphs) because I thought I was going to get. “Lol whatever bootlicker” as a reply. +1 hero point to you
Well my response was pretty glib and painted with a very broad brush. You used a finer brush to paint your picture.
Frankly, I think both views have merit. There were good results from patronage of the rich, but I hate seeing them used as justification for the continued deification of the rich.
There’s just too much hero worship in American society in general. We go ga-ga for the rich, the beautiful, athletes, actors, musicians, etc. It can be frustrating. Here’s to hoping it isn’t always like this. Who knows maybe someday large amounts of people will watch hours long lectures on ethical philosophy, historiography, physics, etc instead of baseball, football, and basketball. Most Americans can’t name their senators or their governor but can tell you the name of some obscure athlete from two decades ago.
Apple did the same thing with computers in schools and Google’s doing the same thing with Chromebooks right now. I honestly thought this is more of a PR thing to help their image. I don’t think 200 schools just is enough to actually move the needle. This could be a pilot program though. I have a hard time seeing how this could be used in the actual classroom. As an elective definitely but I don’t see history teachers using DND and having to write a lesson plan around it and all the accomodation paperwork for anyone with an IEP. Some teachers already find that stuff a pain in the butt for traditional lesson plans. Who knows though it could happen.
Sometimes it’s easier and cheaper to let someone with expertise do something rather than building the infrastructure inhouse and doing it yourself. The article says that the booksellers and game store owners aren’t looking forward to the change because penguin random house is really good about taking back outdated and overstocked books.
I got my party together through a Discord chat that someone made for anyone living in our city. You should see if they have one where you live. It’s a great way to meet people for gaming and otherwise
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.
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