-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Tabletop RPG |OT| I cast a spell
- Thread starter Nairume
- Start date
Freebie of premade adventures from Kobold Press:
koboldpress.com
Safer at Home Freebies: Prepared! - Kobold Press
Staying safe and sane at home? Playing lots of games? Us too! So this week, to ensure that you have plenty to play with, we’re giving away Prepared! A Dozen Adventures for 5th Edition, giving you 12 ready-to-go, one-shot adventures. Just add dice! Download yours now! All you have to do is use...
koboldpress.com
Oh way cool! Thanks!Freebie of premade adventures from Kobold Press:
Safer at Home Freebies: Prepared! - Kobold Press
Staying safe and sane at home? Playing lots of games? Us too! So this week, to ensure that you have plenty to play with, we’re giving away Prepared! A Dozen Adventures for 5th Edition, giving you 12 ready-to-go, one-shot adventures. Just add dice! Download yours now! All you have to do is use...
Drakar och Demoner for 5th!?
Not sure if Gloomhaven quite goes under the tabletop rpg umbrella, but we had such a frustratingly fun game on thursday in a similar manner that tabletop rpgs often are, that I figured why not share it.
So, if you haven't played it, Gloomhaven is a kind of a dungeon cralwing tabletop/board game with some fairly light RPG-lite mechanics (perhaps a bit more in line with turn-based video game RPGs). A vast majority (like, 98% of the time) is spent in dungeons fighting (or setting up the dungeon :S ). You have different objectives (kill all monsters, kill the boss, help some character escape etc.) and then you have city & road events where you have some quick description of the event and a A or B choice of how to handle the situation & then suffer the consequences. You can purchase some items/equipment in the city that can help with such things as recovering HP, cards or preventing critical hits (2x damage)
The way the combat works is that everyone has a set of 9-12(+) cards in their own deck (number of which varies by character class, our team has a max of 12 with one character but I'm not sure if some class has more). Each card has two actions on it, one on the top and one on the bottom, as well as an initiative number (you have a choice of initiatives based on the two cards you have to play on each turn, you can choose the lower or higher number, depending on strategy & if you want to be early or late). Actions range from stuff like "move 3 (spaces) and heal 2 (self)" to "attack 4, poison, push 3" (attack with 4 damage +/- whatever comes from the attack deck, poison the enemy & push them 3 spaces away from you)
In a turn, you HAVE to play two cards and you use the top action from one and bottom action from the other (can't use top and top or bottom and bottom actions). Then, either the card goes to a temporary discard pile or is lost until the end of that mission. Usually the more powerful actions (attack strenght 4 or up, or even weaker attacks if they have lots of other effects) usually throw the card immediately into the "lost" pile, while the average/weak cards go to the temporary discard pile.
Now, since you keep using cards that are lost/discarded, you run out of cards in 4-6 turns, unless you use stamina potions or someone has actions that help you recover cards. Once that happens (or you can do it earlier), you have to take either a long rest or a short rest. Every rest (no matter which type) restores all the cards from the discard pile except one. Each rest forces you to lose 1 card into the lost pile. A short rest gives your cards back immediately but you lose a card randomly into the lost pile, so you might lose some really good card (there's a way to circumvent losing some super good card, but you must spend HP for that, and still risk losing another good card randomly). A long rest means you can't do anything for a single turn, but you restore 2HP and you can choose which card to lose for the rest of the mission.
All of the above creates a game where you are more & more screwed the more turns go by if you don't keep a decent pace, don't take risks and/or waste the powerful cards/actions that force you to lose cards too early. You shouldn't be using those strong "one-use" actions/attacks too early because it creates a loop of a diminishing deck of usable cards. You are forced to rest whenever you don't have at least 2 cards at the beginning of a turn, so if you use cards that you lose early in the mission/quest, that means that for the rest of the game resting happens sooner and sooner, which means you lose cards faster & faster.
Now, attacking itself happens in a way that you have your attack action that specifies the base strenght & effects of that attack. Then there's a separate "attack card deck", which you draw each time you attack & for each enemy separately, if performing an AOE/multi-target attack that hits more than one enemy. These attack cards will give buff or debuff your attacks. They can give up to +2 to attack strength or -2 or even negate attacks completely, as well as put some debuffs on enemis later on once you get them from perks.
also, each party member has a secret objective during a mission they can't reveal to others. These are stuff like "be the first one to kill an enemy", "be the one to open at least one door & reveal what's inside during a mission" or "get a total of 10xp". Succeed in three of these and you can choose a perk.
Sooo, anyway, to our game. We were on mission four. Objective was to kill all enemies. Four rooms of enemies. First room had a few skeletons and bandit archers. Pretty effortless, didn't take more than a couple of turns to kill all but one enemy. I went to open the door to the next room (because I had the "open a door" secret objective). Almost get killed because I only have 6HP at lvl 1 (all enemies are part of the turn they are revealed during, even if their initiative-mandated turn has technically already gone). Some poor draws from enemies left me alive.
Second room was a long hallway that had 3 more bandit archers and four cultists. A pretty easy room if our luck hadn't sucked ass. The cultist could summon more skeletons (or living bones, as they are called in the game). We had the absolute worst luck because the cultists draw from their own deck (each enemy has an enemy specific deck) and they drew skeleton summoning cards on three subsequent turns. Luckily We did manage to kill one of the cultists before it also joined the summoning fun for the third time, but altogether they summoned 11 skeletons. -_-;
Oh well, little by little & with some usage of strong, one-use AOE attacks, we managed to dwindle down their numbers enough that we had the courage to exit the first room. The archers can be kinda iffy, especially when we had 11 skeletons blocking our way to them and no one really had much in the way of decent, not-card-losing-causing ranged attacks that would have reached the archers.
At that point we were bleeding cards pretty fast, so I kind of forced everyone to accept a plan of "we just need to fucking open these remaining doors and let come-what-may come to US." They were hesitating if that was a good idea, but I knew we just didn't have the cards left to do one room and then travel to the second one. We had to open both doors ASAP and just get all enemies to become a part of the battle. So my character has this nice action where I can move any of my allies four spaces. I moved one of us to the door further away and another one of our team opened the door closer to us. That one was a small room that had two Earth Demons in it. High HP, high damage, but slow & fairly straightforward (not much in the way of special skills). The further room had two Wind (or Air?) Demons and a couple more cultists.
So, this is where the desperation started kicking in. The Earth Demons had so much health that we had to use some strong attacks on them so that we wouldn't be overpowered by the other enemies once they got to us. And that meant losing cards that we were already starting to be quite low on. Luckily our tank had Shield 1 on him and the Earth Demons drew some -1 & -2 attack cards, so they didn't do too much damage. The Wind Demons don't have much HP but 1) they use ranged attacks so while they did come out of the room, saving us from having to waste 2-3 turns moving to them, they were still on the other side of the long hallway, 2) they had Shield 2 (so you'd have to do a minimum strength 3 attack to do 1 damage) and 3) as we noticed later, they can turn invisible.
So, we keep fighting. We divide our forces. Me and the tank stayed at the Earth Demon's side while the other two started making their way to the cultists & wind demons. We had some good luck in that the cultists didn't draw a single summoning card in the, like, 5 turns that they were alive. We focused on them first. We would have been screwed if there were any more enemies. We got rid of the Earth Demons surprisingly quickly. I summoned a rat swarm. It didn't have much luck in doing anything but the rats did act as an important damage sponge that allowed our rogue to survive the wind demons' first couple of barrage of attacks.
At this point each of us had, like, maybe 3 turns (plus one or two rests) left. I used the ally-moving card again to move our tank much closer to the enemies, our rogue-like turned invisible to add some extra oomph to his attack. Now, this is the point when our luck was horrible, to make things extra tense. The wind demons turned invisible so our tank wasted a card that makes it possible for him to move through enemies while damaging them as well. But you can't damage invisible enemies, so that move was wasted. Our rogue's strong attack of 4 strength was wasted once the wind demons appeared again because he drew a -2 attack card (so with the demons' Shield 2, that means zero damage). Our tank also drew a damage-negating attack card in these final turns, doing zero damage.
In the end, thanks to the low HP of the wind demons & the cultists not summoning a single skeleton, we ended the quest with one of us exhausted (as in, they don't have 2 cards at the start of the turn so they are essentially "dead"/not participating), me and another player on our last turn and only one of us still had one more turn if we had screwed up our attacks, and even then only because he was resting for that turn. Crazy tight fight. :S
Dear lawd this turned into a novel. 🙈
EDIT: oh, and I'm not proof-reading my wall of text, so sorry if there are some incomplete sentences & typos. :S
So, if you haven't played it, Gloomhaven is a kind of a dungeon cralwing tabletop/board game with some fairly light RPG-lite mechanics (perhaps a bit more in line with turn-based video game RPGs). A vast majority (like, 98% of the time) is spent in dungeons fighting (or setting up the dungeon :S ). You have different objectives (kill all monsters, kill the boss, help some character escape etc.) and then you have city & road events where you have some quick description of the event and a A or B choice of how to handle the situation & then suffer the consequences. You can purchase some items/equipment in the city that can help with such things as recovering HP, cards or preventing critical hits (2x damage)
The way the combat works is that everyone has a set of 9-12(+) cards in their own deck (number of which varies by character class, our team has a max of 12 with one character but I'm not sure if some class has more). Each card has two actions on it, one on the top and one on the bottom, as well as an initiative number (you have a choice of initiatives based on the two cards you have to play on each turn, you can choose the lower or higher number, depending on strategy & if you want to be early or late). Actions range from stuff like "move 3 (spaces) and heal 2 (self)" to "attack 4, poison, push 3" (attack with 4 damage +/- whatever comes from the attack deck, poison the enemy & push them 3 spaces away from you)
In a turn, you HAVE to play two cards and you use the top action from one and bottom action from the other (can't use top and top or bottom and bottom actions). Then, either the card goes to a temporary discard pile or is lost until the end of that mission. Usually the more powerful actions (attack strenght 4 or up, or even weaker attacks if they have lots of other effects) usually throw the card immediately into the "lost" pile, while the average/weak cards go to the temporary discard pile.
Now, since you keep using cards that are lost/discarded, you run out of cards in 4-6 turns, unless you use stamina potions or someone has actions that help you recover cards. Once that happens (or you can do it earlier), you have to take either a long rest or a short rest. Every rest (no matter which type) restores all the cards from the discard pile except one. Each rest forces you to lose 1 card into the lost pile. A short rest gives your cards back immediately but you lose a card randomly into the lost pile, so you might lose some really good card (there's a way to circumvent losing some super good card, but you must spend HP for that, and still risk losing another good card randomly). A long rest means you can't do anything for a single turn, but you restore 2HP and you can choose which card to lose for the rest of the mission.
All of the above creates a game where you are more & more screwed the more turns go by if you don't keep a decent pace, don't take risks and/or waste the powerful cards/actions that force you to lose cards too early. You shouldn't be using those strong "one-use" actions/attacks too early because it creates a loop of a diminishing deck of usable cards. You are forced to rest whenever you don't have at least 2 cards at the beginning of a turn, so if you use cards that you lose early in the mission/quest, that means that for the rest of the game resting happens sooner and sooner, which means you lose cards faster & faster.
Now, attacking itself happens in a way that you have your attack action that specifies the base strenght & effects of that attack. Then there's a separate "attack card deck", which you draw each time you attack & for each enemy separately, if performing an AOE/multi-target attack that hits more than one enemy. These attack cards will give buff or debuff your attacks. They can give up to +2 to attack strength or -2 or even negate attacks completely, as well as put some debuffs on enemis later on once you get them from perks.
also, each party member has a secret objective during a mission they can't reveal to others. These are stuff like "be the first one to kill an enemy", "be the one to open at least one door & reveal what's inside during a mission" or "get a total of 10xp". Succeed in three of these and you can choose a perk.
Sooo, anyway, to our game. We were on mission four. Objective was to kill all enemies. Four rooms of enemies. First room had a few skeletons and bandit archers. Pretty effortless, didn't take more than a couple of turns to kill all but one enemy. I went to open the door to the next room (because I had the "open a door" secret objective). Almost get killed because I only have 6HP at lvl 1 (all enemies are part of the turn they are revealed during, even if their initiative-mandated turn has technically already gone). Some poor draws from enemies left me alive.
Second room was a long hallway that had 3 more bandit archers and four cultists. A pretty easy room if our luck hadn't sucked ass. The cultist could summon more skeletons (or living bones, as they are called in the game). We had the absolute worst luck because the cultists draw from their own deck (each enemy has an enemy specific deck) and they drew skeleton summoning cards on three subsequent turns. Luckily We did manage to kill one of the cultists before it also joined the summoning fun for the third time, but altogether they summoned 11 skeletons. -_-;
Oh well, little by little & with some usage of strong, one-use AOE attacks, we managed to dwindle down their numbers enough that we had the courage to exit the first room. The archers can be kinda iffy, especially when we had 11 skeletons blocking our way to them and no one really had much in the way of decent, not-card-losing-causing ranged attacks that would have reached the archers.
At that point we were bleeding cards pretty fast, so I kind of forced everyone to accept a plan of "we just need to fucking open these remaining doors and let come-what-may come to US." They were hesitating if that was a good idea, but I knew we just didn't have the cards left to do one room and then travel to the second one. We had to open both doors ASAP and just get all enemies to become a part of the battle. So my character has this nice action where I can move any of my allies four spaces. I moved one of us to the door further away and another one of our team opened the door closer to us. That one was a small room that had two Earth Demons in it. High HP, high damage, but slow & fairly straightforward (not much in the way of special skills). The further room had two Wind (or Air?) Demons and a couple more cultists.
So, this is where the desperation started kicking in. The Earth Demons had so much health that we had to use some strong attacks on them so that we wouldn't be overpowered by the other enemies once they got to us. And that meant losing cards that we were already starting to be quite low on. Luckily our tank had Shield 1 on him and the Earth Demons drew some -1 & -2 attack cards, so they didn't do too much damage. The Wind Demons don't have much HP but 1) they use ranged attacks so while they did come out of the room, saving us from having to waste 2-3 turns moving to them, they were still on the other side of the long hallway, 2) they had Shield 2 (so you'd have to do a minimum strength 3 attack to do 1 damage) and 3) as we noticed later, they can turn invisible.
So, we keep fighting. We divide our forces. Me and the tank stayed at the Earth Demon's side while the other two started making their way to the cultists & wind demons. We had some good luck in that the cultists didn't draw a single summoning card in the, like, 5 turns that they were alive. We focused on them first. We would have been screwed if there were any more enemies. We got rid of the Earth Demons surprisingly quickly. I summoned a rat swarm. It didn't have much luck in doing anything but the rats did act as an important damage sponge that allowed our rogue to survive the wind demons' first couple of barrage of attacks.
At this point each of us had, like, maybe 3 turns (plus one or two rests) left. I used the ally-moving card again to move our tank much closer to the enemies, our rogue-like turned invisible to add some extra oomph to his attack. Now, this is the point when our luck was horrible, to make things extra tense. The wind demons turned invisible so our tank wasted a card that makes it possible for him to move through enemies while damaging them as well. But you can't damage invisible enemies, so that move was wasted. Our rogue's strong attack of 4 strength was wasted once the wind demons appeared again because he drew a -2 attack card (so with the demons' Shield 2, that means zero damage). Our tank also drew a damage-negating attack card in these final turns, doing zero damage.
In the end, thanks to the low HP of the wind demons & the cultists not summoning a single skeleton, we ended the quest with one of us exhausted (as in, they don't have 2 cards at the start of the turn so they are essentially "dead"/not participating), me and another player on our last turn and only one of us still had one more turn if we had screwed up our attacks, and even then only because he was resting for that turn. Crazy tight fight. :S
Dear lawd this turned into a novel. 🙈
EDIT: oh, and I'm not proof-reading my wall of text, so sorry if there are some incomplete sentences & typos. :S
I love Gloomhaven. I'm nearly about to retire my Mindthief though I'd post this in the board game OT since Gloomhaven isn't well, anywhere close to having the freedom of a ttrpg.
Gloomhaven is D&D Adventure Game system, which is like a slimed down 4e dnd. My brother has a couple, Ravenloft etc. They are great fun for a quick 1 hour game night thing. I'd actually like to run a slimmed down version of 4e on the PC side. I find my guys get overwelmed with fiddley options and bored if there are no options. B/X and 5e too little, 4e and especially 3e/pathfinder, too much.
Speaking of 4e DND, I'm close to starting my 4e hexcrawl. We're finishing up my version of Cairn of the Winter King. Its an open ending, they will probably defeat the Winter King, but there is a ice zombie hoard curse thing they have temporarily contained in the dungeon. They will have to deal with it again as an epilgoue. Then the 4e Hexcrawl starts as they are stranded far away from Fallcrest on top of a mountain with little in the way of supplies.
This might be of interest here:
soundcloud.com
Its a COC game pulling the piss out of Alt-right conspiracy theories. Its very well done.
Speaking of 4e DND, I'm close to starting my 4e hexcrawl. We're finishing up my version of Cairn of the Winter King. Its an open ending, they will probably defeat the Winter King, but there is a ice zombie hoard curse thing they have temporarily contained in the dungeon. They will have to deal with it again as an epilgoue. Then the 4e Hexcrawl starts as they are stranded far away from Fallcrest on top of a mountain with little in the way of supplies.
This might be of interest here:
UNLOCKED: Episode 74 - Tabletop Game Theory Pt. I (1/18/17)
NOTE: Ahead of this week's premium episode, we are unlocking our first 2-part gaming episode, "The Pizza In The Gate." This is the first of a two-part radio play/tabletop game run by Virgil, who lock
soundcloud.com
Its a COC game pulling the piss out of Alt-right conspiracy theories. Its very well done.
So just got an amazing metal dice set from Die Hard Dice and they give the best freebies! They tossed in a free extra d20 that matched my set as well as a full acrylic set that matched the color scheme!
And today my Humblewood box set that my BF ordered for my birthday comes in!
And today my Humblewood box set that my BF ordered for my birthday comes in!
I've been playing TTRPG's for a while now, but only sort of passively and casually - every week (lol) with my group, but it's nothing fancy and we usually just chill and joke around.
However, with the quarantine and furlough I've realized I need a new hobby outside video games, which I've become really burnt out on. Think I'm going to start doubling down on this instead, and so far it's been a blast.
I've never considered DMing before due to poor attention to detail, ADHD and lacking improv skills... but putting together a few oneshots has just been so much fun. I love the actual work of putting together maps and places, characters etc etc...
As a bonus, Foundry VTT launched this week and it's been a ton of fun to play around with. Every time I find a cool new feature or module I get the biggest grin on my face. Looking forward to running my first one shot. Normally I would be the type who is worried it might go horribly and I'll vow to never try again, but this has been so much fun that I think my joy is overriding my worry.
However, with the quarantine and furlough I've realized I need a new hobby outside video games, which I've become really burnt out on. Think I'm going to start doubling down on this instead, and so far it's been a blast.
I've never considered DMing before due to poor attention to detail, ADHD and lacking improv skills... but putting together a few oneshots has just been so much fun. I love the actual work of putting together maps and places, characters etc etc...
As a bonus, Foundry VTT launched this week and it's been a ton of fun to play around with. Every time I find a cool new feature or module I get the biggest grin on my face. Looking forward to running my first one shot. Normally I would be the type who is worried it might go horribly and I'll vow to never try again, but this has been so much fun that I think my joy is overriding my worry.
I have the stirrings of an idea for a game. I'm doing some initial World building for a mage the Ascension game. I don't know if I'm going to run it when or through what medium. I'm still reading the book. And it's a mammoth book.
A few hours drive South from Chicago, down backroads off the highway is a small town called Grimoire. The town has what you would expect of a small town, it has a downtown area with a hardware store, a police station, a city hall, a Jewel Osco grocery store, fast food places. Despite being off the highway, among wheat fields and windfarms the town's economy has done well.
In addition to a single elementary, middle, and high school, there is also a private school for the gifted. Football games are well attended in the fall, and baseball and basketball in the spring. There's a small community radio station, a public library, and a curious abundance of occult bookstores for such a small town. Grimoire was an early adopter of high speed internet despite its remoteness. While there is not much other nightlife in Grimoire, there are occasional illegal raves and mushroom hunts.
In the backwoods are a curious number of caves and local eccentrics claim to spot cryptids like bigfoot and other, stranger figures. Bob Schwartz is the mayor and Bob Wiess is the local sheriff and have been for decades. People call the two figures "The Bobs." They aren't related but they look very similar, but for their tendency to part their hair on opposite sides of their heads. Schwartz on the left, and Weiss on the right. The caves are officially off limits but for people authorized by the Bobs. There had previously been disappearances and animal maulings.
What is not so public knowledge is that the caves are a place where the walls between worlds are thin to non-existent and lead to a long lost pathway through the umbra that eventually leads to the ruins of Horizon which since becoming accessible again after the avatar storm has been changed into a world of both monsters and sellswords. New settlements dot the landscape of the small planetoid, of people who've forgotten the strange high-tech world of our Earth. It wasn't long before someone from that world accidentally crossed over.
Grimoire is a sanctuary for tradition mages, a place out of the way from the technocracy that they haven't discovered yet. I plan to fill it with quirky individuals, some of whom are sleepers and some of whom are awakened.I still got a lot of reading to do about the traditions, not to mention the core game mechanics but this is what I've got so far. I'm still learning the setting and the rules. I'm more familiar with Chronicles of darkness but I like classic world of darkness better
Anyway my methods so far has been to read through the descriptions of the different traditions and populate my small town setting with NPCs that are aligned with that tradition. I'll add some normies later. It's going to be set and a small town in Illinois called grimoire which has an abundance of mages because it's a secret haven for the traditions.
I don't actually have any players yet, I want to wait for the plague to be over before I invite anyone to my house.
None of these NPCs have stats and most don't even have names yet oh, I'm just transcribing a few stereotypes to learn the setting. I figure the town has a midwife that is a member of verbena for instance or that there is a fortune teller and a funeral director that's with the Euthanatos.
In addition to their affiliation and their names I need to come up with a nice little quirky things about the characters. Trying to think of nice character text for me to play with.
A few hours drive South from Chicago, down backroads off the highway is a small town called Grimoire. The town has what you would expect of a small town, it has a downtown area with a hardware store, a police station, a city hall, a Jewel Osco grocery store, fast food places. Despite being off the highway, among wheat fields and windfarms the town's economy has done well.
In addition to a single elementary, middle, and high school, there is also a private school for the gifted. Football games are well attended in the fall, and baseball and basketball in the spring. There's a small community radio station, a public library, and a curious abundance of occult bookstores for such a small town. Grimoire was an early adopter of high speed internet despite its remoteness. While there is not much other nightlife in Grimoire, there are occasional illegal raves and mushroom hunts.
In the backwoods are a curious number of caves and local eccentrics claim to spot cryptids like bigfoot and other, stranger figures. Bob Schwartz is the mayor and Bob Wiess is the local sheriff and have been for decades. People call the two figures "The Bobs." They aren't related but they look very similar, but for their tendency to part their hair on opposite sides of their heads. Schwartz on the left, and Weiss on the right. The caves are officially off limits but for people authorized by the Bobs. There had previously been disappearances and animal maulings.
What is not so public knowledge is that the caves are a place where the walls between worlds are thin to non-existent and lead to a long lost pathway through the umbra that eventually leads to the ruins of Horizon which since becoming accessible again after the avatar storm has been changed into a world of both monsters and sellswords. New settlements dot the landscape of the small planetoid, of people who've forgotten the strange high-tech world of our Earth. It wasn't long before someone from that world accidentally crossed over.
Grimoire is a sanctuary for tradition mages, a place out of the way from the technocracy that they haven't discovered yet. I plan to fill it with quirky individuals, some of whom are sleepers and some of whom are awakened.I still got a lot of reading to do about the traditions, not to mention the core game mechanics but this is what I've got so far. I'm still learning the setting and the rules. I'm more familiar with Chronicles of darkness but I like classic world of darkness better
Anyway my methods so far has been to read through the descriptions of the different traditions and populate my small town setting with NPCs that are aligned with that tradition. I'll add some normies later. It's going to be set and a small town in Illinois called grimoire which has an abundance of mages because it's a secret haven for the traditions.
I don't actually have any players yet, I want to wait for the plague to be over before I invite anyone to my house.
None of these NPCs have stats and most don't even have names yet oh, I'm just transcribing a few stereotypes to learn the setting. I figure the town has a midwife that is a member of verbena for instance or that there is a fortune teller and a funeral director that's with the Euthanatos.
In addition to their affiliation and their names I need to come up with a nice little quirky things about the characters. Trying to think of nice character text for me to play with.
So this is awesome.
D&D Beyond has recently started working on adding digital dice. They added a set of dice for $15 and while hefty, they will be donating 50% of it to BLM.
www.dndbeyond.com
D&D Beyond has recently started working on adding digital dice. They added a set of dice for $15 and while hefty, they will be donating 50% of it to BLM.
Unlock Dice Sets and Fund Racial Justice
Unlocktwo brand-new sets of digital dice for your collection: the colorful Pigment Pack and the fully-animated Mythic Set.As recent events have highligh...
www.dndbeyond.com
Decided to try something different with my kids group (10-12) and went with DCC and a funnel adventure (Sailors of the Starless Sea). The adventure is a bit dark but seems fun. The kids all rolled up 3 0th level PCs for the game and they enjoyed the occupations. DCC seems a little rough around the edges but the first enemy in the adventure are 2 vine horrors, there was a lot of missing for the kids which was a little crap. There are limited combat options and the 0th level character get very few bonuses, so it seems by design. Its a little disappointing, as Ive heard good things about DCC and the funnels.
Great cause but you have to pay for virtual dice now??
So this is awesome.
D&D Beyond has recently started working on adding digital dice. They added a set of dice for $15 and while hefty, they will be donating 50% of it to BLM.
Unlock Dice Sets and Fund Racial Justice
Unlocktwo brand-new sets of digital dice for your collection: the colorful Pigment Pack and the fully-animated Mythic Set.As recent events have highligh...
Great cause but you have to pay for virtual dice now??
No, just skins. You can use the free dice. They're purely cosmetic.
No, just skins. You can use the free dice. They're purely cosmetic.
lol thats okay I suppose. fair enough. I still dont understand virtual stuff. My kid buys shit on roblocks and it drives me nuts..
The only way I can excuse the digital dice is that it will eventually be part of the business model for their VTT
This is where I think DnD Beyond is going, though they MAY pull back JUST a bit and be a service that's everything except the tabletop to give some room to roll20 and the like, becoming the digital platform for "theater of the mind" play.
Either way, they offer digital skins for dice because people absolutely will buy them and it's as simple as that.
I love experimental TTRPGs and this one sounds pretty great.
www.kickstarter.com
Alice is Missing: A Silent Role Playing Game
An immersive RPG played entirely via text message.
Hey buds. Itch.io is doing a Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality right now. $5 bucks for over 700 games, most of which are video games, but some of which are TTRPGs like the excellent Blades in the Dark. Best of all, your $5 (or whatever you want to pay over that) goes to the NAACP and the Community Bail Fund.
https://itch.io/b/520/bundle-for-racial-justice-and-equality
https://itch.io/b/520/bundle-for-racial-justice-and-equality
Agreed! I pledged more, but I know not everyone is realistically able to. Even so, every dollar helps right now, and this is an insane value lol. Win/win.
Blades in the Dark is a truly excellent and influential game... grab it, if you can. I've never found a system that lets you do dynamic, faction-driven intrigue with such ease. It's a bit of work to set up but after that it's a breeze to run and just as surprising to the GM as it is to the players.
Thanks for the heads-up on the bundle and a worthy cause to support.
Thanks for the heads-up on the bundle and a worthy cause to support.
As to the bundle:
Yo, I would take a look at Troika! Numinous Edition if you haven't alteady, y'all. Part of the bundle and really unique. It puts a lot (creatively) on the GM but is really great at capturing an OSR feel with a weird, modern, sci-fantasy approach. Has an in-depth page-by-page first look from Adam Koebel that breaks down the game very well.
(Page 12 of 25 on the bundle list, btw.)
Yo, I would take a look at Troika! Numinous Edition if you haven't alteady, y'all. Part of the bundle and really unique. It puts a lot (creatively) on the GM but is really great at capturing an OSR feel with a weird, modern, sci-fantasy approach. Has an in-depth page-by-page first look from Adam Koebel that breaks down the game very well.
(Page 12 of 25 on the bundle list, btw.)
My 5e group has been running the Baldur's Gate Descent to Avernus campaign since it released last year over Roll20. Roll20 works ok but it's none of us have ever really liked it. This week we are switching to Foundry VTT and after doing a off schedule test session to get used to the controls make sure our info imported correctly I am so blown away by it. It's like suddenly being given a brand new BMW after driving some used 15 year old barely works car all your life. Everything about it is so insanely polished.
Would anyone have any recommendations for software to display maps and battles in person?
our group moved to Roll20 and plan on going back to in person sessions within the next month, and my DM wants to continue to run battles and such digitally.
our group moved to Roll20 and plan on going back to in person sessions within the next month, and my DM wants to continue to run battles and such digitally.
Honestly, I've found continuing to use Roll20 for maps in person works pretty well. If you are motivated and have some money to spend, some folks have gone all in with making tables that you can put a screen inside of to mimic a more traditional battle map setup, and they can just use normal minis on glass in front of the digital map:
But even without that, putting the map up on a TV for the party to see could work.
Foundry VTT is fantastic. One of the devs joined a D&D community discord that I'm a mod on, and he sat down for an evening with a few of us to run through a lot of the features, run a quick battle, and chat about future things to come. There's definitely still some things missing compared to roll20, like a compendium and class features, but the amount of polish and presentation is such a step up.
Yes one time fee of 50 dollars for the GM then players don't pay anything. The players just connect via a normal web browser. The rub is you need to provide your own hosting or go through a cloud hosting partner of theirs. It's not like roll20 where everything just lives on their website. Our DM is just running it off his local computer.
I played with it some more today because I had decided to finally turn the party notes our bard was taking into some central coherent record keeping everyone could reference. So to start off there is a journal that the whole party can access and I cleaned up the bard's notes a bit from the bare few names and such they were and tried to add some quick detail. They also had a list of all the party treasure and I figured there was a better way to that than just having text descriptions. I remembered you could link things from the compendium and started to link the actual items themselves instead of just having text names. So when you see that there is a wand of the war mage +1 in the party treasure you can click the link and get a popup with it's full stats. After doing all this I decided to clean up my personal inventory as well. Text names of a potion of healing became an imported from the compendium potion of healing that clicking on the icon will cause it to roll the stats for how much is healed.
I play a wizard and had a bunch of looted spellbooks that I always just had some really badly formatted text listing's of the spells inside them. These became specially named spellbook's based on their appearance such as rune covered spellbook which have links to every spell inside them listed by level. I can click a button that sends description of whatever item I wish to the main chat and in the case of these spellbooks it includes the links to the spell. This way everyone can see every spell in my spellbook and what it does if they need to. I got back to working on the journal after and and started laying down detailed notes and history starting from what the characters were doing in the leadup to before the game actually began and what our very early adventures were like. I figured out I could go to the Forgotten Realms wiki or whatever other source I wished and insert hyperlinks to the thing I am talking about. So when I first mention Baldur's Gate I include a link to the city of Baldur's Gate on the Forgotten Realms wiki. Important people or gods get a link to their page. I noticed I could embed pictures as well and embedded a picture of my character's full body portrait into my character sheet in a section about physical appearance. It was just hosted on imgur and didn't even need the DM to host it or add it.
I also noticed there is a macro bar that looks like an MMO hotkey bar at the bottom left hand corner I dragged the icon for my most used spells into it and clicking them just cast the spell properly. Saves me the time of looking at my larger spell list when I know I just want to cast my attack cantrip or whatever. It even includes multiple pages of hotbars you can scroll through like some MMO's have.
Cannot stop being overwhelmed by how good it is.
I played with it some more today because I had decided to finally turn the party notes our bard was taking into some central coherent record keeping everyone could reference. So to start off there is a journal that the whole party can access and I cleaned up the bard's notes a bit from the bare few names and such they were and tried to add some quick detail. They also had a list of all the party treasure and I figured there was a better way to that than just having text descriptions. I remembered you could link things from the compendium and started to link the actual items themselves instead of just having text names. So when you see that there is a wand of the war mage +1 in the party treasure you can click the link and get a popup with it's full stats. After doing all this I decided to clean up my personal inventory as well. Text names of a potion of healing became an imported from the compendium potion of healing that clicking on the icon will cause it to roll the stats for how much is healed.
I play a wizard and had a bunch of looted spellbooks that I always just had some really badly formatted text listing's of the spells inside them. These became specially named spellbook's based on their appearance such as rune covered spellbook which have links to every spell inside them listed by level. I can click a button that sends description of whatever item I wish to the main chat and in the case of these spellbooks it includes the links to the spell. This way everyone can see every spell in my spellbook and what it does if they need to. I got back to working on the journal after and and started laying down detailed notes and history starting from what the characters were doing in the leadup to before the game actually began and what our very early adventures were like. I figured out I could go to the Forgotten Realms wiki or whatever other source I wished and insert hyperlinks to the thing I am talking about. So when I first mention Baldur's Gate I include a link to the city of Baldur's Gate on the Forgotten Realms wiki. Important people or gods get a link to their page. I noticed I could embed pictures as well and embedded a picture of my character's full body portrait into my character sheet in a section about physical appearance. It was just hosted on imgur and didn't even need the DM to host it or add it.
I also noticed there is a macro bar that looks like an MMO hotkey bar at the bottom left hand corner I dragged the icon for my most used spells into it and clicking them just cast the spell properly. Saves me the time of looking at my larger spell list when I know I just want to cast my attack cantrip or whatever. It even includes multiple pages of hotbars you can scroll through like some MMO's have.
Cannot stop being overwhelmed by how good it is.
What system are you playing? Is it easy to import content? I own my D&D content through D&D Beyond which is why I haven't really bothered with any VTT. I know about Beyond 20 but still.
I haven't been able to fight the nagging feeling that a vtt would make me far less agile, spontaneous, and a result interesting as a DM.
Though I'm generally happy to hand draw maps and also draw them on the fly.
Doesn't it kind of kill the narration and imagination?
Though I'm generally happy to hand draw maps and also draw them on the fly.
Doesn't it kind of kill the narration and imagination?
I've been theater of the mind myself just using avrae and groovy for music on discord. I think it helps improve my own skills as a DM, describing whatever and improv and such. But I feel my players are more engaged as well. I do like the idea of maps and using tools like lighting and hiding rooms ahead and such. Eventually I'd love a digital table top but...yeah, I've come to really like theater of the mind.
I think it does depend on the players. Some prefer tactical combat and methodically searching dungeons, which really sings with digital or detailed maps. Some prefer spontaneity and craziness which to me suggests fuzzy prep and being agile.
Don't get me wrong, when I've bust out a really impressive map for boss fights and climactic encounters I think it works really well and wows the players. In my experience though, detailed dungeon crawl maps tend to really kill the pace as players creep round corners and are very careful.
At least so far in my relatively brief experience.
Once we get back to irl games I'll get back to drawing stuff out again on a more regular basis for sure. That's because I enjoy it more than anything. Though 2 minute tabletop has been really good for me working with Photoshop and knocking out maps nice and quick
Yeah, both my groups are really just new players but neither have been super tactical, which is fine with me. I do want to learn how to use a VTT properly especially since I bought wonderdraft and dungeondraft and have backed Dungeon Fog at the platinum level, which I'm very excited to use.
We are playing 5e. There is a 5e addon by default but it only has the SRD content. Anything else you need to add on your own. If you look around you can find resources on helping you get that setup.
Anyone have any suggestions or reading material for adding cooking to D&D? My players have been interested in cooking and alchemy. Alchemy wise, I'm good. I've always wanted to use it and I finally have the chance to but cooking? No idea. Would like to reward them with food buffs that last for however long and make cooking more than just a+b=c food.
I would probably just look to computer games for that, Monster Hunter, Final Fantasy, etc
I had a list of items you can harvest from monsters which has some interesting components but you'd have to make up the uses. I'm waiting on AngryGMs crafting list which should be dropping this month (hopefully)
There's some decent stuff on DMs Guild if you search for cooking. Goodbarrel's guide isn't bad, though it isn't chock full of recipes. Probably enough to give you some ideas, though.
I got this D&D 5e cookbook in one of the DMsGuild charity bundles a while back, I haven't had a chance to use it but it's laid out very thematically and provides some good examples for you to come up with your own recipes and effects for other situations or settings ($2, contains 18 recipes, new tools, and a background): https://www.dmsguild.com/product/243504/Joy-of-Monster-Cooking
In a similar vein, if anyone is ever interested in harvesting monsters and using parts to craft items, potions, etc., I will always recommend Hamund's Harvesting Handbook: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/27...ete-Guide-to-Harvesting-and-Crafting-in-DD-5e
$10 , with a harvesting table for every single monster in the monster manual, covering harvesting DCs, tools, gold value of the parts, weight, and over 200 craftable items using specific parts. Then, if you like it, there's a volume 2, which contains all monsters from Volo's guide to monsters in the same depth! Sorry if this sounds like a shill, but I just really like these books haha
Has anyone played Alien RPG? A player might not make it next session so we're thinking of doing a one-shot and if they can make it they can just hop in. With having to learn a new system and create characters fresh it'll probably run into next session but I was wondering if anyone has any pointers for a first-time GM coming from 5E? The rolling system seems relatively easy to understand but are there any pitfalls I might miss just from skimming the rulebook?
Thanks a bunch. I have the harvesting handbooks already! They're awesome. I won't go to overboard with my players but I'm excited they want to do crafting.
I'll check these out. Interested in AngryGM's take too.
September Setting Sale Week 4: Cyberpunk RPGs - Roll20 - Black Lives Matter Charity Event - The Largest RPG Download Store!
Your one-stop online shop for new and vintage RPG products from the top publishers, delivered fresh to your desktop in electronic format.
This is awesome. Several bundles for BLM/NAACP on drivethrurpg.
Some finality on the Adam Koebel situation if anyone is interested:
As a result Rollplay, a popular TTRPG livestream run by Itmejp is shutting down and D&D/Roll20 has restarted their livestreams with Indoor Recess (featuring the cast of Jace Beleren Must Die with a new cast member and TK DMing) and Roll20 Presents (Minus Bluejay and Adam and 2 new cast members with Dave DMing).
Not a very satisfying post on his end and sad to see the entirety of Rollplay closing as a result, but it's good to see Roll20 has restarted their streams fairly quickly.
As a result Rollplay, a popular TTRPG livestream run by Itmejp is shutting down and D&D/Roll20 has restarted their livestreams with Indoor Recess (featuring the cast of Jace Beleren Must Die with a new cast member and TK DMing) and Roll20 Presents (Minus Bluejay and Adam and 2 new cast members with Dave DMing).
Not a very satisfying post on his end and sad to see the entirety of Rollplay closing as a result, but it's good to see Roll20 has restarted their streams fairly quickly.
Now that Theros is out, I wonder when Wizards will announce their next big book for the year.
They have a stream event happening sometime this month where the next adventure will be announced, then expect another book around November-ish that could have player options.
Yeah I was mostly speaking book wise. I feel like we've been expecting a Xanthar's sized book ever since the class variant features. Hell, DnDBeyond had to do a ton of work on their character sheets just to accommodate for this future change.
Right, unfortunately there's no guarantee it'll drop even this year, but here's hoping!