on a related note, someday I want to play a game with a barbarian/bear warrior, a wizard-or-cleric/Sentinel of Bharrai, and a druid with a bear companion so we can be the Eight Fucking Bears party The druid and SoB can summon bears, and all three can turn into a bear. ETA: I haven't found a bear-themed rogue or other skill-based prestige class to round out the party but it's possible one exists
@Dist You want to minimize the dicking around that players tend to do in the 1st session. Make sure that when play starts, everyone already has a clear and compelling reason to work together. (Members of the same religious order, or a mercenary company, or sole survivors of a shipwreck.) Players usually don't mind railroading so much in a 1-shot because it's kind of expected. If possible, start the adventure assuming they have already accepted the plot hook. If your group would be cool with a straight-up linear dungeon crawl, that's often the easiest for a one-shot. If they're more RP or storytelling types, then it might be a good idea to give them a few roleplaying encounters that tangibly reward them or advance the plot. (Stop at an old woman's cottage in the woods on the way to the destination. She lets them stay the night in exchange for chopping firewood. If they're respectful and/or amusing, she offers to sell them a handful of potions and shows them a shortcut. If they're rude or violent towards her, she tips off the goblin leader to their presence in the woods and extra sentries are posted at the goblins' camp the next morning.)
Look at the One Page Dungeons. There's some good, usually system-agnostic or easily convertible, shit in there.
God damn, but do I want to get into a couple of one-shots. I've tried going to those DnD Encounters that comic book shops hold, but they're almost all pre-published encounters, and there's a big variety in how much the DMs know the scenarios before we get started.
Awkward realizations as a GM: You're intently watching and listening to your dogs demolish and squabble over 1/2 a goat so you can provide better combat description You're considering breaking out the pig's head you had saved for a treat during the game because there's going to be wolves and it provides good atmosphere You've been using your dogs as props for months, because the big one has flawless dramatic timing as to when he should crack rib bones in his teeth and the little one always knows when to scratch malevolently at the windows.
Are you a bard/druid? This seems like excellent tactical use of animal companions to enhance Perform checks.
Is there ever going to be a Kintsugi d&d? I've always wanted to try but there's nobody around here who does them.
Wiwaxia and I were working on a thing but then my IRL group kinda took over all my free time because "Let's meet multiple times a week! And tear through the adventures so fast that even though you've drawn maps for the next two sessions, we're going to push through THREE and you're going to be drawing a third map while you GM us through the second" :/
I have a campaign I want to run, but I'm kinda stuck in a spiral of 'I will never have enough done on the world setting to please myself' as I stare at a compressed world setting document dozens and dozens of pages long :P we'll see.
Seriously. I have this HUGE campaign to run, with ridiculous levels of detail and, most importantly, all the villains have copious amounts of information to give out at even the slightest attempt at interrogation so you assholes can maybe figure out what the shit is going on but nope they're going to massively over- and insta-kill fucking everything. As a result, everyone in this damn campaign has become insanely thorough about note-taking during battle planning, keeping a journal of their backstory and nefarious plans, and leaving those notes oh-so-conveniently scattered across every flat surface they encounter. Including the fucking goblins. There are several that developed surprising talent in cave-wall crayon art. Also: GMAvi "Here's this massive sweeping epic hedge maze, have fun getting lost for three hours!" Players: *find the exit path in 12 turns on pure "Uhm... Let's go... Left? Left." blind luck and skip 3/4 of the monsters*
@Aviari: Instead of altering the campaign to suit their bad planning, can you have someone kill off their favorite NPCs because they didn't know what they needed to do to stop it? Punishing bad play decisions is totally an option here. However, I know there's only a certain level of fuck-up-ery that published adventures like RotRL can support before the failure modes become irrecoverable ("Nah, we won't go check out that [SPOILERS], that sounds like work." "OK, you hang out in Sandpoint for ~2 months before a colossal army of [SPOILERS] immortal god-king [SPOILERS] your humiliating defeat ushers in a thousand-year reign of blood and terror.") and I don't mean to tell you your business.
I mean, after all, my current campaign storyline is the RESULT of a series of bad player decisions that I failed to punish.
Haha, I'm not TOO worried about the players disrupting the main storyline- I've been writing it with that in mind, in fact :P (I remember well the days when I was a player in my first campaign and we threw a huge wrench in the DM's plot because our fighter rolled a 20 on Sense Motive against the elfy guy who appeared to be our harmless, bookish, up-front employer, and then decided to follow up on her misgivings and rolled a 20 on the Gather Knowledge check around town and lo, our employer was the Big Bad, something we weren't supposed to know for a looooong friggin time :P Our DM was a pro though and rolled with it!) My concern is mostly that not only is my campaign planned to be RP-heavy, parts of it (not all, missions from Authority will occur from time to time to nudge them back on the rails) is intended to be sandbox-y- the group will have some freedom to travel and pursue sidequests or other ventures of their choosing - my reasoning being that dangit I have homebrewed a cool Material Plane even if it does still have a millions billions details that have to be worked out, it'd be a criminal shame if I shackled them to railroads. So the more I have written down, the less I have to make up on the spot when my players ask a question I wasn't prepared for :P
Oh sure, and I know well that no matter how much I write down, I still am gonna have those moments, and you're right that they can indeed become awesome :P but it's gonna get mentally exhausting (not to mention risk contradicting existing canon unless I take a long-ass time on my responses to fact-check my setting ducoment) if I have to make up 80% of my answers on the spot, so I just keep forging on x3;
My best moment of improvisation was when the players wanted to declare war. I gave them an ally, an ambitious warforged officer, who coldly used them for her own ends and then betrayed them. Their current terrible circumstances are a direct result of said betrayal. Second best was a guardinal trapped on the Material Plane giving the cleric a book of theology and teaching him to read. (long story.)
They haven't done anything irrevocably bad yet, besides nailing every female NPC in town and the journals were actually already written into canon in case that happened. I just didn't want to use them because I hate the Convenient Journal Of Exposition trope. Should they kill off (or more likely, bone) someone they shouldn't, there will be consequences. I am strongly in favor of punishing stupid decisions. I've so far held it down to things like "every time you open a door in the evil lair without checking the door it will have an explosive ward on it. Learn, damn you." ... Like how after a week off, Shit Happens Again, and they'll have to trek out into the woods to find their Healer again (who fucked off for some peace and quiet). She's going to march up to one or both of them and slap them across the face because her vacation kept getting interrupted. She's been made to brew literal dozens of childbane potions from all the tail they've been getting. When they laugh, she'll casually mention that she's had to make even more fertility potions because everyone wants Heroic babies/husbands.
Both players are men so straight you could use them to draw blueprints, so it's been just the women but on that note I'm pretty sure she's been brewing up plenty of gender-neutral love tonics too. Not sure if I'll play it out, I don't really feel like playing with knee-jerk internalized homophobia for laughs. (Both of them are Cool With Gays Just Don't Hit On Me)
