Hi everyone!
How are you doing? Hope everything's good.
Today, I wanted to write something about what I feel recently, about running Dungeons & Dragons sessions.
First of all, I have to say that I don't like D&D much. There are different reasons for it. I think the rules are mostly restrictive and complicated, because sometimes some occasions occur and you can't decide what to do is more legit regarding D&D environment, and that happens to me all the time. Another reason is, I'm surrounded by rookies, and I cannot be in a gaming group where players know how to roleplay, not meta-gaming, and interpretate rules mostly clear and understandable. And there's another reason, which is the feel of slow game mechanics. But still, D&D is part of my life and I have to live with that truth.
I'm kinda half serious about this, because I started everything and improved myself because of D&D, and now, tabletop RPG is my job. And my customers/players mostly like D&D, so it's also a tool for making new friendships.
I generally use ready-made game scenarios for online games, because Fantasy Grounds automates everything, and all I have to do is reading my PDF book while I'm laying down, or before I fall asleep, and at the meeting time I sit before my PC and put game server online, check images I will share and maps I will use, check encounters I'm planning to use while others are gathered on Discord. Spontaneous scenes are really pain in the ass; because, creatures have to be ready on the server, maps have to be ready for line of sight, and when you need these spontaneously, it takes more than 15 minutes. And I don't like random long breaks.
If you don't know, I'm running three D&D sessions (and lots of others) in a week. One of them has advertisement purposes and it's kind of a fluffy game, while other two are paid game sessions with one-year-old group and a three-years-old group. I will call them younglings and oldies.
Younglings are playing Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden scenario. They had lots of random in-game troubles, and scenario lines don't make sense to get party into the story. The book isn't enough. So, I started to change the descriptions, add interesting custom encounters, raised Challenge Rating a little, put some stuff into the game which they couldn't resolve just by their D&D knowledge and spells. They liked it more.
Oldies are playing a 3rd party scenario called Call from the Deep. It's a better approach to mindflayers and giths. This group always wants to try different things. Like they loot items with no description in the books, they want to go anywhere where has an interesting name but doesn't have any information. Like, they looted a sword from a Githyanki. If you don't know them, let me say that they use a special greatsword, which is +3 and has the ability of dealing extra d6s as psychic damage. But only a Githyanki could use such a sword with its full potential, and fighter character spent all of his free time to achieve anything more on it. Ended up as an honourable ally of Githyankis. Great Old One Warlock had dream-travels to Innsmouth. Dream Druid had learned how to enter other people's dreams. None of these were belonged into any official (or non-official) books. I had to re-create recent encounters, because they were complaining about how their combats are extremely easy. Now when they get into a combat, they hardly save their asses from a TPK. And they like this new encounters more.
These two examples are currently encouraging me more on tweaking on ready-made scenarios. Actually they pushed me into write my own campaign again. I wrote and published a scenario before, but it was a one-shot game for people who are extremely new to the hobby and people who don't know English enough to read and fully understand a one-shot scenario. We still have 3 chapters to complete Frostmaiden, and after that, younglings want to play a game in my own setting. And I decided to prepare quizes about game mechanics and concept info for them to make them ready for a more serious game, and also I started to push them into a hard-roleplay, like they should prepare magic-words and prayers when they cast a spell, only occasionally out-of-game talk is allowed, and stuff like that.
The point is, at first, I thought that people thought I was a cruel dungeon master, so I softened up everything for my paid games. But apparently, every dungeon master is (or should) a little bit of sadist, and players are a little bit of masochist :)
There is no any review this time, maybe a review of a slice of me. See you again in another post.
