Guys! One of my BFFs and her Pathfinder group are going to be running a 24 hour campaign, starting at 9pm (BST+1), streaming live on Twitch, to raise money for charity! I'm part of another group with her and her boyfriend and it's genuinely one of the best things in my life. They're hilarious people, and brilliant gamers. Once it's live, please drop by Twitch and say hello! I'll be hanging out for as long as I can. https://www.twitch.tv/ageofessence
The background: My character Hanni the dragonborn bard started this adventure at level 1 chasing a thief who stole a magical divination artifact from her nomadic desert tribe. She finally ran him to ground in the city of Vornheim, but he'd already sold the artifact to a witch. (She bit off his ear and ate it. It was cathartic.) We were gearing up to fight the witch to get it back, but she saw our plans (of course) and wanted to talk instead. Turns out she was using the artifact to find a way out of a series of bad deals she'd made and she was totally willing to give it back...after she got out of the deals. Long story short, she's paying us and she's taken a binding blood oath to return the artifact after we take down the dragon who was her first patron. Now we're off to get a dragon-slaying weapon for our paladin. (Just as well...we managed to piss off a lot of people in Vornheim and it's probably a good idea to be elsewhere for a while.)
https://roachpatrol.tumblr.com/post/153337375157 This is some Zak S. shit and i want it in a game yesterday.
I'm nominally (been too busy to attend games so I mostly just pine) part of a 5e group that started up recently. I fuckin love tabletop roleplaying. Most of my experience is with Pathfinder, though, and making the transition continues to be Weird. It's an original setting. Civilization is clustered in walled communities in a world overrun with monsters. The party works for a recently founded human organization called The Royal Archive of Taxonomy that wants to study all kinds of monsters. So we've got: Blossom, the willowy human Druid whose village was destroyed when a tenuous peace between them and the local monsters broke. Blossom is shaping up to be the leader of the group. Tabitha, the cheery, kind, heart-of-the-party human Cleric of a Luck goddess whose name escapes me. Short, stout, buff as heck and carries a big hammer. Seirath, the shy tiefling Ranger. Is a quiet badass. Loves doggos. And my character, Aaliyah, the half-elf Warlock who is seeking a mysterious fey. Aaliyah is out to learn the identity of the fey who danced with them one time and they did unspecified things together, the fey left behind a magic collar that gave Aaliyah magic power, and now Aaliyah wants to find the fey and ask them out again. Only, beyond that, Aaliyah is just a bundle of kinks wrapped up in a belly dancer aesthetic! I really want to flesh out their backstory and such, but I am usually really bad at that, and in this case I am exceptionally bad at that! So far the best I've got is "They learned to dance and it turned out they liked dancing so they kept doing it" and that is dreadfully boring Anybody got any advice on how to build an interesting backstory?
@Socratease my best advice, especially if you are new to doing it, is to blatantly rip off the back stories of existing characters you find interesting. Shave off the serial numbers to make setting-specific things more generic (and invite the DM to change some of these generic things into setting-specific things for this campaign). If you combine two different characters and just figure out how their backstories could merge, you've got an interesting new story. (exercise: imagine a wizard whose background and personality are marked from Gandalf and Magneto.) The other players probably won't ever hear all the details so they probably won't make the connection, and if anyone does comment on the similarity, you can just smile and say, "yeah, kinda like that," and everybody will just think that's kind of cool.
There can certainly be circumstantial exceptions to this principle, but in general If you are asking a player to make an attack roll against another PC for any purpose other than attempting to do them harm, you are probably on the verge of making a shitty rules adjucation. In all probability you are either choosing a poor mechanic to model the action or you have failed in some way to sufficiently explain the situation/the mechanics/the obvious potential consequences to the player. Before you call for that attack roll - or at the moment the player says "What? Why?" STOP and review what is going on. Figure out what it is they actually want to do, because the vast majority of the time, if you think making an attack roll on another PC is a logical part of the process, you are misunderstanding their intent; which may be because they misunderstand the situation or how the mechanics work. For example "I'm going to run around the corner and push the cleric out of the way so i can take position where she's standing" should probably not be met by "Okay, roll your attack" but by making sure the player knows that the Cleric can't move in response, but that he can move through her space to stand on the other side of her, and that if he wants to push her there is a risk he might hurt her or knock her down instead of just adjusting positions. (and if he's okay with that, the attack roll is a crappy mechanic to use because her armor and his fighting skills are not in question; her ability to respond is, so maybe a Dex Save to keep on her feet makes sense)
I think we can blame Arnold K of GoblinPunch for the fact that I'm now writing up an eldritch starmetal radiation poisoning table
Does anyone have a way to include experience gains for roleplaying in an objective way. I have players who want to be more incentivized to roleplay, but also this is the most argumentative group of players ever and if it is implemented in a way that can seem even the tiniest bit unfair it sparks an argument. I thought I was doing well with "people who roleplay gain access to more allies and information than otherwise" but appearently not? Nobody is listening to each other, one person basically refuses to talk to the other characters while getting annoyed when they call her stand offish or distant, one player talks over everyone else all the time, and another is far smarter than me and I can just barely deal
My first suggestion is the wise ass one of "play something like FATE or Burning Wheel instead, since those have game mechanics that reinforce and encourage role-playing"
I think your system of giving people more info/allies is good. This sounds like more of a group dynamic issue. Unfortunately my only advice is "find a new group if they keep being assholes," which is unhelpful if they're the only group around
I'm using wiwaxia's SBURB system, which is faairly specialized to the setting? And R, the one who's smarter than me, knows every system better than me too and probably knows how to break them because he's a total min-maxer. He's also the normal DM for the group, and basically everyone in our group has said that they like my DM style more than his, even if I'm still super inexperienced. We're still all super salty over one of the last games we played, where we spent twenty minutes looking for any sign of which way to go and eventually headed straight inland and found a city, which he got pissy at us about because everybody knows that you're supposed to "follow the shoreline"??? Where he had a village that was supposed to be our starting area. That he gave no indication of. He is obsessed with open world games to the max, but there's often this sense of "the only way to do this is the exact way he thought of." Which is frustrating and makes me feel like an idiot. Yeaaah unfortunately one of the most trouble players is one of my longest friends. I love her! Except her unfailing sense of justice and righteous indignation gets a bit...disproportionate in tabletops, and for some reason she never expects actions to have consequences???? Just. I love them all and they are my only irl friends but they get so frustrating. Part of me just wants to go ok, y'all can just do whatever but don't throw a hissyfit at me if you lose the game- but that feels mean, and also they would all blame each other. I don't know how to be fair in this scenario.
Trouble player sounds like the sort to ask to make wisdom checks so you can give "your character realizes that doing this stupid thing would likely lead to this bad result" tips.
I'd say skip the wisdom checks and just tell them some possible consequences outright -- you want them to be making informed decisions based on consequences, after all. If you're worried about giving away information that they don't have access to, offer several possible consequences as a matter of habit, so you can easily throw in red herring "potential" consequences when you need to.
Hmmm.. While DM'ing AD&D I always give out experience points at the end of a session. I also give out Role-Playing Experience points as well, but I am arbitrary and capricious. I give out points based on how "I" think the player role-played their character. There is a bit of leeway here, if the other players think an action of a given character is super "in character" I might give more experience for that, but the choice is mine. I do however automatically give out a fixed amount of experience for making me laugh out loud during a session, and another fixed amount if a character dies and is resurrected, ya gotta learn something from that ordeal. Most mature players seem to be okay with this method.
I got a magic sword! I need to name it! I got it from an undead minion that was guarding the master of a necromantic cult called the Crimson. In the hands of an undead creature it's a magic +1 weapon. I can activate it for 1 minute (ten rounds) by spending a ki point. (in this campaign, ki represents the void between the four elements.) I need help with names!
@Xitaqa Terminus Est if you don't mind the Gene Wolfe reference. If you want something more original, how about Asphyxis? From Greek for "without heartbeat," root term of "asphyxiation." Breathless, if you want something that sounds good in Common.
