D&D and Tabletops RPGs V7: Yes you can talk about tabletops other than D&D - Games

Well don't just keep it to yourself, someone else might have the same problem

Who else is looking forward to the strongholds and followers supplement? It sounds like it could really add huge amounts of potential for someone like me, especially since there's fuck all in terms of vanilla support for managing establishments and castles.

There absolutely is in almost every single prior edition. Using what already exists is easy, you don't even have to change much. The stronghold builder's guide from 2 and 3e both are compatible with 5e with little to no changes needed whatsoever. Henchmen and Hirelings are another mess altogether, but should mostly be managed by the GM anyways. You can use their prices and requirements from 2e and be totally fine. The book will probably be a watered down rehash of the older editions' rules, like everything in 5e is, but if you want to use those rules they already exist in almost every edition prior to 5e, including Basic, Mentzer, and all the old stuff. It was central to the game back then, everyone became a 'lord' at level 9 and was expected to have had and managed groups of hirelings and henchmen well before that.

This is the site that was shared with me. Project: Rooftop A bunch of superhero artwork, mostly based on real heroes, but there's a fair bit of decently "different" stuff in there as well that when tweaked can work out alright.

I'll look into it, but I love the physical hardbacks and since the old books are out of print it's pretty hard getting my hands on a copy but I guess I can live without it.

When I'm out of stuff on pinterest, I troll ArtStation for stuff.

You might be surprised. A fair number of the old books have been reprinted, a few times in the last decade even. Stronghold Builder's Guide, AD&D 2e Dungeon Master's Guide, or the Rules Cyclopedia all have guidelines for that sort of thing. Followers have loyalty, modified by your charisma of course, as well as morale (a rule that is annoyingly missing since 2e, making bad GMs believe all enemies should fight to the death, no exceptions). Then each has suggested pay rates, and a list of potential basic 'hirelings' (which is to say, those that can't level. Hirelings might be basic soldiers, carpenters, alchemists, or what have you) and henchmen (which are sort of PCs, but they get 1/2 the rate of XP). A group of 3-4 PCs and at least that many henchmen was the assumed party size of most oldschool adventures, not to mention a horde of hirelings to serve as torchbearers, waterbearers, sherpas, guides, blacksmiths, camp followers, ect... A party was more a huge mercenary band than a tiny group of 3-5 nerds.

I hate pinterest but the image agglomeration that makes it an awful den of low-res references and stolen art is the same thing that makes it good for grabbing a large number of potential inspiration sources at once.

I am in love with D&D ever since I DM'd my first game of D&D 5e, Since then I've spent hundreds of hours making maps, plots, npcs, places, worlds, and most importantly, running games! Groups have varied, but it's always been online (little interest in D&D where I live it seems), with folk from all over the time-zones. Currently setting up a new urban campaign that I'm excited to get started in with a group on Roll20. Also, just for fun, but here's a map I made for my previous campaign that took place on the Southern coast of a large continent which was carved in two. http://i.imgur.com/gwPRUNv.jpg

Would you be willing to take a relative noob into your group for that? Depending on when you'd be doing sessions though. I've been trying to get a group locally for sessions on the weekend (Sat or Sun) but nothing has come to fruition.

Sorry to disappoint, but I got four players already! I'd love to run a few one-shots over time for completely random people though. It's a great way to get more experience as a DM, since every group is totally different, and makes for a wholly different game. I'm on GMT+1, and I typically run my games on Saturday from 6/7PM to 1-2AM, depending on how long it takes to clear the problem at hand. Also, I tend to run narrative-heavy games. I keep the rules in mind but hey, if a barbarian wants to grab a dude by the ankles and use them as a weapon, provided they roll a good strength check I'll give them that d8 damage to both their target and their 'weapon'. :v

Thats no hassle. Just figured I'd chance my arm.

If I do end up making a fun little one-shot to play with some folk, I'll advertise here, so come snag your spot if the chance comes up.

So in our group, we play through if one player can't show up and it's not likely to include a dangerous (read: boss) encounter that everyone could see coming because some of us have intensive jobs. In where we're at right now, one player has had to cancel ever since we had first arrived at a new city and kingdom and checked into an inn. So it was great when she came back and we recapped what she missed. -The inn now has several holes in it where an iron golem was Kool-Aid Manning his way through. -The lawful good forget his class Wyvaran and his posse got arrested for treason and was scheduled to be executed in a week -We gathered information on who we might be able to get assistance from in breaking them out -My character, a fast and jump as fuck boi Kineticist did some scouting of the prison and got shot two arrows in the back for his troubles after getting the external layout -We go together to talk to the most dangerous of the potential allies because the only reason why we actually came into the city was a missing persons case that this man is the primary suspect of, being the person a child was last seen with. That and he had his own clockwork constructions that can take out golems which is terrifying at our level. We successfully do negotiations with this man and work out a deal where 1) he'll assist us in distracting the golems that might come and reinforce the prison by threatening the main city's gold golems 2) he'll get the child back to his parents (there was a miscommunication between the parents and this man, who was training the child in his profession for longer than was expected) 3) we attempt to overthrow the royal family -We split up to talk to the remaining people and groups to save time because we got 3-4 days left until the transfer to the execution site and we couldn't handle the escorts if we let the transfer happen and attack midway But from her perspective we just went from going to take a nice nap in an inn to VIVA LA REVOLUTION

Recently got back into playing more RPG's again. Was GMing for a group that has ever played any RPG's before and I was super surprised. The narration and action descriptions were fantastic. Turns out when you get old enough you just don't give a shit what other people think of you, and you'll happily go all in even in the middle of a pub. It helps that Mouseguard 2e is a great game to introduce people to RPG's though. The character creator and mechanical rewards for playing to your characters flaws, ideals and personality combined with the "fail forward" obstacle system make it a fantastic choice for teaching people how to stop thinking about RPG's in terms of mechanics, stats and winning the "game" and start thinking about them in terms of story telling, improvisation and, well, roleplaying as a /character/ that isn't you while expressing their identity.

So, new dm with a new group here, weve been playing one offs and studying for a few weeks, and weve split the 7-8 man group (what a fuckin shitshow) into a casual group and a more serious group. Im gonna dm lost mine of phandalever or whatever (the adventure that came in the 5e starter pack) for the serious group, and i might stop in and play with the weekend group every once in a while. The weeekend dm bought the dmg, mm, ect on dndbeyond and shared them with me. Anyways, anybody here ever run through lost mine? Any tips?

Be careful with that first cave, it's a doozy to level 1 characters. Only real chance they'll ever die, at any point in their entire career, right there.

I really would like to give Dungeon Crawl Classics a shot, but there are no groups anywhere close to me nor have I the time or non-lazyness to GM it.

I've improved a list of magical junk that I've created And by improved, I mean added a buncha crap to it. Some of the crap is original, some of the crap is just a blatant rip-off of something I've seen, some less blatant rip-offs of something I've seen, and some of them are just magic items from the DM's guide that I minorly changed the name of to make it a different effect. I'm full of ideas, so more will come eventually. Probably later tonight.

I think the idea of magical trinkets that perform the impossible but are pretty much impossible to make any use of is a fun idea. shit like a childrens doll that is invisible to all but the owner, a magic 8 ball that always lies, or a useless object that you cant remove from your inventory no matter what you do.

My bi-weekly DnD game's player's love this kind of thing. We have a ton of useless or niche-use magical items like a log that magically sets on fire if you set it down (but can't light things on fire), or a broadsword made out of a giant's baculum that does nothing but glow, or a hip flask of endless alcohol.

My favourite item to give my players is the cloak of invisibility. You put it over your head and everything around you becomes invisible. (It's just a normal cloak/blanket)

God I'd love to play Mouseguard one day. If you get any good stories out of that game, you should share here! I've always been curious about that system.

I mean, the Magical 8 Ball can actually be sort of used to find out the things that AREN'T true. Would be incredibly useful for interrogations.

I was wondering if anyone here dabbled in map making for their games. The reason I ask is because I'm looking for some good resources aside from Cartographer's Guild. I've been streaming some games as well as campaign prep. I'm pretty new at this, so don't expect TOO much. But I've been trying my hand at different style to see what I like: https://i.imgur.com/TcNFbvc.png This is a sketch style: [Award Winner] Sketch Style World Mapping along with these pre-done brushes: https://starraven.deviantart.com/art/Sketchy-Cartography-Brushes-198264358 https://i.imgur.com/b3OpIOS.png Next up is a realistic satellite style. This is probably the >worst< in my opinion but that's because the time it requires to make it look good. I think this style looks fine but you HAVE to put an immense amount of time into make it all look good. I think I also made the buildings too big. I think this style REALLY needs teeny tiny buildings so the details are really lost and create the illusion of realistic buildings. I unfortunately couldn't put as much time into these as I wanted because sitting at my computer for too long led to some serious back pains. That's why the market stalls (those colorful squares) look bad and are the size of houses For the houses: https://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=28219 For the terrain: https://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=16688 For the forest: Create realistic Forests for regional Maps in Photoshop https://i.imgur.com/CtsK440.jpg Lastly, this is the most recent style I've tried. So the first one is for overworld where details aren't super duper important. Second is for a cool, visual representation of a village and the last is for battlemaps. This is the latest one I've tried and a style I'm liking a lot. The detail vs easiness is pretty good. Just so there's little confusion, the craters are supposed to be where houses once stood. They're not house placeholders or anything. I LOVE this style except for one thing I'm not sure how to do... I want to have buildings or do interior shots but the guy doesn't have tutorials for that. Everything I did in this image and more can be found here: http://www.between-worlds.com/tutorials/ I'm well aware I can improve in a thousand different ways in all 3 styles but I'm curious what you guys do/what your methods are! Also, a final question, do any of you have experience playing solely through text or playing by post? What are some good sites for that? I recently got a sort of Fantasy Grounds sponsorship for my stream and I'd love to try playing with some strangers solely through text. It seems like a good program for that. Aside from that, if anyone is interested in playing with a brand new DM, let me know. I'm trying to improve and would love an additional group. One game a week doesn't satisfy my cravings.

Text for RP, voice for OOC is the one true way to play online. Roll20 works fine for that, but if you have Fantasy Grounds I guess you can use Discord? I don't know if it has an in-game chat box. I know the feeling of one game not being enough, for sure. Sometimes I've run as many as 4 a week, but that's way too much, even with the prep work for the entire campaign being done ahead of time. It'd help if you specified a specific game/edition you were talking about, unless you don't care and want to try any new system suggested.

Text for RP, voice for OOC would be a pretty great thing for my group actually. That's a super good idea! We already use FG/Discord when we stream the games. I actually used to use Tabletop Simulator. It's AMAZING for that around the table feel, just sucks that everyone has to buy it unlike Roll20/FG if the DM owns it. I've fallen in love with 5e so that's what I'm focusing on right now. I have a *dream* 4e campaign I wanted to run but most people hate that idea haha. I've been thinking about trying Fate Accelerated because of how simple/flexible it is. Burning Wheel is rad to me too. I'm open to looking into any new system suggestions though. I mostly just want to play and flex my creativity. While I love the D&D system and setting, I'm pretty open minded.

I've actually been trying to get back into gaming and start in tabletops. I've been looking into actually drawing maps and have a book on it that I found a while back. It's called How to Draw Fantasy Art and RPG Maps. I also found a few sites recently while trying to see if there were any programs to help do it and found Inkarnate and Other World Mapper. I can't speak to their quality as I haven't really had any time to truly dive in, but they've seemed... alright. I've honestly been thinking of making my own damned program to map and run campaigns because I'm picky and particular. Also, depending on times, I'd be down for trying to join an online campaign. I used to have roughly 35 thousand posts here that were PBP roleplaying, but they got wiped when Garry nuked the custom forums. Met my current girlfriend way back when too. I'm hella interested in Fantasy Grounds too, mostly from a DM's perspective, because it's fuckin' expensive and there's no good way to demo it because their only free option is to join games run by people who've put the money into it. Hit me up, though, and if schedules work out, I'd love to join.

My friends and I have been running a homebrew RPG for the past 6-ish months and we've done inRP by Text and OOC by voice on roll20 and Tabletop Simulator (we swapped mid-campaign - I know this sounds extremely silly but we made it work, it's too complicated to explain in this post). It works, but it significantly slows down the experience and screws up a lot of pacing; we only do it because I live in an apartment complex with paper thin walls so I can't be expressive as I need as a GM. Tabletop Simulator presented another problem. On roll20, I used to be able to switch from character to character with its character registry system, but there's no such thing on TTS - hell, there were no roleplaying systems in general. Changing my Steam nickname for each character was completely unreasonable and using Discord's text chat could be detractive to the immersion, so one of our players was extremely kind and made up a solution that involves assigning numbers to characters in a Notecard and using commands in the chat to switch from one character to the other, alongside standard RP commands like !me, !em and !p (for OOC that, for some reason, can't be transmitted through voice). Oh yeah, the global script also ties player colours to PC names, so when the players chat normally, their character's name shows up in the chat and not their Steam nickname, assuming they are correctly seated. Of course, the character switching command is limited to the GM colour (Black, in our case). It has its limitations, for example the Notecard can't handle more than 15 lines at a time. I guess we could just hardcode the characters into LUA, but we want to make the script interactive for non-scripters as well. Either way, it works quite well for its purpose; if anyone wants it, I can ask him to publish the code.

I personally prefer typing for RP and voice for OOC because it allows for easier communication, but I'm also playing a mute warlock so me talking at all is out of character