The group I DM for is heterosexual dudes only, in and out of character -- though they're generally too busy fighting and/or running to bother having sex with anyone, so that's not set in stone, but the atmosphere is much like Aviari's table. Not really worth bringing up the issue, even for laughs. The group I play in is a little more diverse. Something like two bi women and three straight men, though I'm not sure -- I'm not close enough to everybody to know about their love lives or gender identities. Our current DM is a cishet dude as far as I know, but his last couple of player characters have been agender or genderfluid. There have been the typical shenanigans with barmaids and ladies of the evening in our campaigns.
Yeah my guys are Capt. Kirk-ing it. There's been barroom bragging/teasing about offscreen encounters with: -Teiflings -Gnomes -Sirens -Selkies -Human twins -Elves -A werecat ("In human form, I swear!") -A goat And... -An Amazonesque half-orc prostitute named Lucinda who started as a joke, but I've become incredibly fond of her. She's ruined other women for the Fighter. It's just not the same. He says this jokingly, laughing uproariously, but a DC55 Perception check reveals a faint hint of wistfulness.
@Aviari I predict they survive the first four modules and TPK in Sins of the Saviors. Spoiler One word: succubi. @Dist etc. None of us have experimented outside the 5e player races yet (though there was one memorable human/tiefling/dragonborn threeway). @The Mutant I've never really tried a sandbox-y campaign, mostly because it's hard to give the players compelling reasons to keep working together unless there's SOME railroading. In the same 5e campaign as above, which is more of a sandbox, the DM has had us run away from well-planned adventures twice, the second time because my character, who accepted the plot hook, turned his back on a "beggar" and got hisself assassinated. The rest of them went "our contact's gone, fuck this shit, I'm out."
@The Frood Abides Oh yes, that is definitely happening and already written for a ~~completely innocent~~ side encounter/quest even before SoS. The boys will either kill each other or the entire town or both. It'll be glorious. If they beg enough I might let them retcon or "It was all a dream!" it but ohhh will it be fun.
Hey, um, so: I'm running my first campaign and I am having a lot of fun, and my group is having a lot of fun (I think? This is what they have indicated with their mouthwords), and seeing as the rest of my group doesn't really like gming I want to gm again- problem is I am still super inexperienced and also just as a person bad at organization and prioritization, so does anybody have a list or blog of advice or resources or other such things? System wise I probably want to stick to a d20 system, and I would definitely be customizing basically all of the lore and quite possibly rules for magic and such too.
heh ahaha AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA *ahem* now if you'll just give me a moment to get all my dnd blogs in order... [detailed list incoming]
Got into an argument with my players because apparently... "Incredibly famous tavern singer/cancan dancer pops up out of nowhere in the bar she is most famous in to introduce herself and mack on literally every male in the party simultaneously just because they're new in town up to and including plopping into the lap of the nearly-politically-married guy despite finding out he's nearly-politically-married." ...isn't enough warning that she might be slightly sketchy in any way. And then they got mad at me when two players went off with her for a "good time" and came back inexplicably exhausted, almost like part of their souls got sucked out because she's a succubus. I'm sorry, guys but that's what happens when you stick your dick in literally anything with tits and that's precisely how a smart succubus would do business. Pick the guys that are sexy-and-I-know-it and would assume she's just a gold-digging bar slut and use that against them! Now they're butthurt and I'll probably have to retcon and redo it with more ~warning~ (Luckily for me, all her DCs are like, 30 so they probably won't be able to see through her ruse anyway muahahaha)
Their argument was that it wasn't suspicious because they've been getting tail left and right and they're Heroes. Of course they'll get hit on by the famous dancer! Newsflash, kiddo, you're small town Heroes. This is the Big City. And this is precisely how that particular succubus has come have just about everyone in that bar and a good portion of the surrounding block under her control. Seriously, her opening lines were to sling an arm around each of the two main PCs and drawl "Well now, who might you handsome fellas be? We haven't seen you around these parts! Oh, you're from Sandpoint? Did you come all the way down to Magnimar just to see lil' ol' me? Well ain't you just the sweetest things!" And plants a big ol' Willpower Sapping smooch on each of them in turn, with the last one, the Cleric, getting hauled over for his smooch by the collar because "We can't leave you out, now can we, sugar?" /facepalm
"The slaughter will continue until play improves." You've taught them a perfectly valid lesson. It's not your fault they refuse to learn from it. I mean, all the PCs even survived! I'm pleased to note my prediction about succubi came true.
Attn: Pathfinder fans: There are like $350 worth of PDFs available on the Humble Bundle right now for $18-25. Core rulebooks, Inner Sea World Guide, supplements, and a shitton of premade adventure modules. And some of your money goes to a charity of your choice! https://www.humblebundle.com/books/paizo-pathfinder-bundle
*bangs a tin pan raucously* Perhaps foolishly, I have agreed to try and DM my planned campaign with two of my nerd trash coworkers. However, two PCs makes for a pretty weenie player group, so I'm looking to perhaps recruit 1-2 people and thought I'd see if any 'jin were interested! Essential details: Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 edition with a few Pathfinder elements wrestled in. DM is not newbie but not an expert so please be patient. :B Game is roleplay heavy. There will be combat of course, but also skill challenges and just general RP yakkery. Games will mostly likely largely be in the evenings in PST, so please make sure you're likely to have decent availability around those hours before you respond, whatever your time zone. Will most likely be run in roll20. Somewhat unorthodox campaign concept (at least, not exactly your typical 'bunch of weirdos meet in a bar for Adventures'). Material Plane is homebrew and so are some other features; the rest of the DnD cosmology is more or less intact. Familiarity with D&D 3.5e is preferred but not required; I'm happy to work with enthusiastic newbies who at least have the roleplaying part down solid. :> Sound interesting? PM or Skype me (skype UN is mutefaith. I think? I'm in the general 'jin Skype chat, anyways) for more details/answers to whatever questions you might have!
Ooh D&D stories! So one time one of our PCs bedded an orc barman, which was the cause of my chaotic neutral cleric instigating a "stupidity tax" where she'd only heal people from something dumb and out of combat if they paid her. Anyway, after this and while still in the same tavern, that character's PC boasted about his conquest and how he told the barman he'd take him with us when we left the area but was of course not going to really. In the tavern. Where he worked. So, the next morning we wake up all together in darkness. One quick light spell later and we work out we're in a dungeon under the tavern. There's a ladder near us that leads to a trapdoor, but there's something on the trapdoor that's too heavy for us to lift. We spend... a lot of time trying to get up through the trapdoor (and our neutral-leaning-to-evil companion dimension doored themselves out then just sat there smugly for the rest of the session) before actually exploring the dungeon. The first creature we encountered was a displacer beast, so after a few attempts to attack it we hightailed it back to the ladder, not realising that such a cat-like creature would be able to climb said ladder. My character was last up the ladder so, out of desperation, she pulled out her bag of caltrops and emptied them onto the displacer beast. And they all hit. The displacer beast fell off the ladder and we sawed off the lower part, sitting up on the ladder until we heard a loud yowl and a load of sounds like stones moving together. Next step, of course, was working out how to get down off of the upper stump of the ladder without injury. It was a good 20 feet down, and none of us had a rope. However, some quick calculation on my part revealed that if we all gave up an item of clothing, we'd have enough to get down to the ground. As an example to the pathetic lot I called my friends, I removed my cleric robe and tied it to the bottom of the ladder stump, encouraging them all to join in. When we reached the ground, only my robe was unrecoverable, and at the end of that adventure I had to use a cure minor wounds on myself as a result of wearing armour on bare skin.
I'm looking to start a D&D campaign! Of some sort. Um. I'm a complete newbie 'I wanna do this thing' is really as far as I've gotten with the planning part of things, and technically I think I'd like playing better than GM-ing, but out of the friends I have who are interested in playing with me, I'm the only one even vaguely willing and able to GM so there I go, I suppose :I I've only ever played 2 sessions and that's from the Dragon Age rpg (we're having fun so far! Our Gm seems to be enjoying himself too, though he did look rather exasperated that time we failed a perception check so hard we got ourselves caught and nearly executed when the adventure had barely even started....) but one of the guys in the group, who has played D&D, says that it's a lot more fun. Or at least gives the players a lot more possibility to do whatever. So... I'm thinking 5th ed D&D, or Pathfinder (bc of the HumbleBundle someone's already linked here, hh), but I don't really know much about Pathfinder, other than it's fairly popular. So, um. Tips&Tricks for new and terrified GMs? (someone else has already asked. but i am asking again. hi, now there's two of us.) Opinions on Pathfinder vs D&D 5th ed? Alternatively, with either system, where are you supposed to start? There's so much of everything. There's so many books of everything. Being a player was so much less intimidating because there we just learned things while creating our characters, and then while playing. If I'm gonna GM I need to be prepared. Bluh.
I'm Pathfinder and it is FUN AS HELL being a GM. I did a murder mystery and made my players chase their tails with red herrings for four sessions. I took advantage of their cheerfully (slightly misogynistic) promiscuous ways and got them all trapped in a bar run by a famous succubus simply because they were all thinking with their dicks. I made a player nearly off himself with a haunted dagger and gave him night terrors. I got one chased out of his girlfriend's house by her father. I'm more-or-less liveblogging my current group over in Fan Town, if you want to have a read. Biggest tips: 1) PLAN FOR EVERYTHING "I'm going to climb up on the roof, are there any guards up there?" "UHHHH YEAH, SURE, THERE'S UHHHH, THREE. YEP." *sweats*2) Be ready to improvise. Your players will take things off on tangents you'll never think off, and be so incredibly dense about other things that you have to gently nudge them (with a baseball bat) to the right answers, or any progress at all.
@Erica This youtube series has been really inspiring to me personally, as I've been stumbling my way through starting to plan a 5e game for some friends. It updates every Wednesday with more tips!
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: For exploration, searching, or whatever, you can nearly always get away with "what you search for twice exists". EXAMPLE: So I'd say "you don't see any guards." If they stop and look more carefully for guards, of course there are guards. Otherwise, there's probably not.
The Pathfinder learning curve is a lot steeper than 5e and it's a lot more fiddly and complicated to run. On the other hand, the Pathfinder rules are mostly available online for free, legitimately, at the PFSRD, and you'd still have to shell out ~$90 for the full core rulebooks of 5e (Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual). So it really depends on your priorities.
The core rulebooks of 5e are definitely available online for free too, just rather less legitimately. Not that I'd ever do such a thing.
