Mine was a battle against a rival gang (we are working with them for backstory reasons), they had a manticore and we are level 3 so it was intense. Most of us finished with 2 or so hp! But looking forward to finally be level 4 after a year.
You guys must play rarely for being level 4 after a year ?
To give you an idea, I play every week and my players are around level 13 after 2 years. But they started level 3 true.
We play lucky once a month, our party is of 6 so scheduling is hard!
Honestly I think I’m done with DND. The whole session was nominally a fight, but almost all of it was the bad guys running away and us dashing to keep up. And then setting off like 5 lightning bolt traps in a row with no way to detect them really in a narrow hallway. (Apparently I should have tried dispel magic on the glyph, but how was I supposed to know it was a non-standard glyph of warding that keeps firing??)
And our wizard… mixed bag. He’d split off from the party and, to his credit, figured out an alternate route that put him ahead of the baddies. But he wasn’t able to stop them. Couple rounds of action and they got past him and escaped.
Though to the wizard’s credit the main baddie happened to have legendary resistance so the wizard’s portent + polymorph did nothing. Which sucks. Legendary resistance sucks.
So it wasn’t great. Two hours of “I dash” and the baddies got away.
But even aside from that I’ve reached a point where like every piece of DND has something that annoys me. Time to find a new system. One that’s not a close relative. If I never see another d20 or traditional six stats in a game, I might be okay with that.
@jjjalljs @Phantaminum that mostly to me sounds like you’re done with that GM? Which is very reasonable…
Have you considered running?
Yeah I’m currently running a game of Mage and have run plenty of DND. I think this guy doesn’t usually do this bad a job. We all have off days, you know? He said something about how he didn’t expect us to chase the baddies. He thought they’d make a clean escape and we’d explore the trapped area more slowly. Which. Ok fine. It still sucked. Being able to improvise fun is an important skill and he kind of dropped the ball here.
Sometimes it seems like DMs think tabletop roleplaying is a competition with the players.
Like, this sounds really frustrating and boring, wouldn’t most people hate it?
The other three players didn’t seem too upset, but hard to say if they were being more polite. I tend to be the most critical player, but I think the fighter and bard both made some concerned noises.
Like I said in my other comment, this guy is usually pretty good. Maybe it was just an off week.
Wow, your DM should learn some design best practices. I have started to look for a new system a while ago, my main problem has been that my party is not as deep as me in RPGs. Im a fate guy and them are dnd because its their first game
Are you me? Fate is my big game crush and it’s hard to get people to play it. And then hard to break them out of the DND mindset.
At least I finally got some people to play Mage. Been wanting to do that for years.
Perhaps, well, i didn’t think you will find it this easy…
Is hard to invite people to fate beside some oneshot.
Mage could fry some of my friends mind, is too much hahaha but some of them are willing to try Lvl up advanced 5e. I have some really good hopes on that game.
@Phantaminum @jjjalljs I enjoyed Fate more in concept and rules book than as played. My GM was a firm believer in giving me as many opportunities to earn fate points as possible, and “constantly failing” didn’t feel good
Why were you constantly failing? The few times I’ve been able to play Fate I felt like I succeeded on all the stuff I wanted to, and picked my poisons on troubles.
It was really satisfying for my Space Nazi Hunter to invoke like four aspects at once to really make sure the space Nazi leader got his head blown clean off. Also satisfying to get fate points by starting nonsense with my “faked own death to escape corporate espionage charges” trouble.
Might’ve just been lucky with a good gm
@jjjalljs kinda exactly? “Hero” a-la Snow Crash obviously had a “best swordsman in the meta verse” aspect. But did he have to spend a fate point to win the swordfight when he was challenged in a bar early on?
In my game, my character was supposed to be talky-McTalk face, and I failed to talk my way into a bar because I wasn’t willing to spend a fate point to do so. I shouldnt have had to.
I made a mistake when I tried to run it for one group of setting the difficulties too high, which can give results like you experienced.
I also found that when it went well, the players pushed for more “this aspect gives me permission without even having to roll”. So if someone was playing “smooth talker” and the gm said to roll to get past a bouncer, the player might push back.
The time it went worst I think the players didn’t really offer any creative input. Failures just turned into “I give up” instead of like “what if I convince him to let us in by lying that I’m someone famous, and then the real person shows up?” or whatever. I think it’s hard for some players to zoom out from just their character and get more into the writer room space.
@jjjalljs I was focused more on the direct role-playing and less on the writers-room aspect… So by the time I was going “wait what?, I shouldnt need to roll?”, the RP had already gone off the rails because the GM declared the bouncer pulled out a magical face id thingy and declared some trivial lie of mine was false
I.e.: failure always unless I spent fate points
That sounds like your GM wasn’t one I’d enjoy, and wasn’t following the “the table should buy in to whatever’s happening” premise. Sorry your game wasn’t good!
Assuming you’re being hyperbolic at the end there - the samey, no-actual-options feeling of DND is what drove me to Pathfinder 2e. And all the rules are officially free here.
But if you weren’t being hyperbolic and want something in the same fantasy-action genre: Genesys is pretty awesome.
If you want something really real off-the-wall and different, try the one-shot friendly slapstick-comedy The Sorcerer Supreme (also free).
I’ve thought about Pathfinder 2e. I really intensely disliked pathfinder 1e so I didn’t even consider it for a long time. It sounds like they changed a lot though.
If I go back to a fantasy dnd-like it might have to be Pathfinder, but I worry about how so many players can barely learn a simple game trying a complicated one. And unleashing my inner power gamer I tried to banish after college.
I really want to try Fate, but finding non DND players is hard.
Went pretty damn good, I think.
It was the first session of a new campaign where I needed to rely on my world building and prep work and just improvise to get the party where they wanted to go.
They had just been given their Big Epic Quest, and had no idea where to start. 45 minutes of rp-talk between themselves and sharing bits and pieces of their characters and they figured out their next 3 places to go to learn more about the World Ending Threat.
It couldn’t have gone better honestly. Super glad that my prep work payed off. After my last campaign I took a lonf break to kinda reflect on what went wrong and how I could change my thought processes and approach to create a better experience, and so far it’s working!
Side game. Got paid and a new job to bust a smuggling ring. Bought some scrolls of AoE spells to B.L.A.S.T. Artived at smugglers, botched assassination of sentry so had to go in guns (spells) blazing. Used one scroll then remembered I have a indestructible horn of blasting. 120g wasted. But then we are so rich my Bard cannot carry her 40lbs of gold…
Damn, thats a lot!
2k give or take. Going to exchange most of it into gems.
Edit: Gems - the paper money of fantasy age
Great! Though currently i’m playing Call of Cthulhu instead of D&D. We’re playing through masks of Nyarlathotep using pulp cthulhu rules, and its been a blast so far. I’m playing a wealthy gentleman thief (secretly a thief, of course)
wealthy gentleman thief (secretly a thief)
Are you sure that is so secret, being wealthy and all
(insert image of marx with red eyes and the text “COMMUNISM INTENSIFIES”)
I never played Call of Cthulhu, one of my pals wants to be DM (or the name used in the game) but her lif is consuming. Perhaps when my opportunity arrive I will be a secret thief as well.
We are clearing a temple, and are fighting mutated gargoyle-like creatures that lay eggs in you if they hit and you fail a roll. We saved some survivors, healed one of the eggs, and found our objective on the bottom level of the temple. There was a mutated guy next to it and we ended on a cliffhanger as my moon Druid in spider form leapt at him from behind.
I’m back. I ran my weekly session of mage and it didn’t go well. I am mildly cursed.
The players encountered a magical murder and theft at the end of the previous session. Someone had walked in to an apartment tremendously accelerated, shot a dude, stole his magic book, and left.
The players had dealt with the spirit of murder that had manifested at the crime scene, though they got pretty banged up by it. The other room mate came home and was like what the fuck, my room mate is dead , who are you, get out.
So the players left. Most of the clues and leads in there largely unexamined.
They didn’t ask any questions after the initial introduction. Which was made by the NPC. They didn’t ask the room mate “do you know what your friend was working on? Why did he have a map of our friend’s house?”
The next morning they tried to brute force teleport to another group that’s gone missing. They tried before and failed because there’s a high withstand rating and clash of wills involved. They know this. They tried anyway. The dice were not in their favor. They could have been. It was 5 dice versus 8. One of the players was very cranky about this.
So they went to talk to another member of their order. She told them explicitly to go investigate the murder. The players decided not to.
They went back to the library to do more research on the haunted house at the center of the story. But they don’t really have any new information from the last time they did this, so I couldn’t think of much more to give them.
It doesn’t help that one of the players has rather low system mastery. One of the other players gently pointed it out. She said she wasn’t offended. But it’s a little annoying. It’s been 12 weeks. That’s a lot of time to read the book.
She also seems to have like anxiety about there being too many plot threads open. That might just be an incompatible preference thing because I do tend to have games where there’s a lot of stuff going on, and it’s up to the players what they want to focus on. Some of it might be connected. Some might not be. Maybe the new street drug is related to the ghosts. Maybe it’s not. That’s for you to find out!
So it kind of sucked. I think one of the players had an good time, one okay, and the low mastery one a bad time.
Is really hard to make everyone happy, in my group there are 7 people. 3 of us are 24 and the oldest is 47, we are like very different but it helps that our dm is 32 so he is between all of us in age. I really like how diverse is everything, but combat tends to be chaotic because there is some of us that know the rules of the game and there is some of us that dont.
Perhaps you have to talk about or try to gess what may interest to all of you (like a ben diagram). Or perhaps you could go for an adventure of the week where you explore a individual interest of the player that week (includig DM obviously). Also, is hard to make a mistery game if note everyone is involved, except if the soultion to that mistery is whatever players think is the correct answer. Like i know that guy died and we have this clue, but as a dm you don’t have any idea of what is happening and you write the next clue using past game as a reference.
I wish you a nice next game!
We had our 250th session of this particular campaign!
They liberated two guards from the enemy team—the party has been showing considerably more mercy now that they’re in control of the Set cult’s former quarters as opposed to when they were waging guerilla from the shadows—but one of the two liberated guards got her leg eaten by cephalopods as they were making their way to Gosterwick. In the end the entire party went there with them, escorting them, and then they were too exhausted to take the four-hour trek back to Arden Vul. So they were spending some time buying diamond dust and making silver dust, for spells.
250th thats my wet dream, I haven’t been in such prolific campaign in my life. Longest one has been like 25(?
We had a couple campaings that were 12, 13 sessions with the occasional 25-ish campaign, but then we had a 100 session campaign (we ended it on 100 exactly) and after that I set up a “never-ending” style campaign (or at least as long as we want to continue it) and that’s the one that’s currently 250. The day after tomorrow we’ve scheduled sesh 251. We play twice a week unless our Dragonbane-DM can make if (which is a few times per month), in which case we do his campaign instead.
Edit: so that’s not just 250 total. It’s 250 only counting after we restarted the numbering. So maybe… 450 total? IDK
