ITT Ideas that seemed good but turned out to be more trouble than they're worth in practice
>Every recurring NPC or setting has a leitmotif
>Use props to represent special items
>It's a small town, I could easily give each NPC at least a full name and sparse character sheet!
>Modular terrain
>Entire Rival party
>Sure I can run an 8 player game.
>Sense I have a complicated homebrew setting, why don't I make a custom wiki for it! That will make it easier to keep track of!
>Letting my players do whatever they want in character and just applying the logical consequences to their actions.
I prefer to run 5, since that way I can still run even if we lose two players to other commitments. 7 is the max I'd ever tolerate running, and I accidentally got myself into running a 7 player game just recently. Luckily, one had to drop out due to work, so scheduling isn't nearly as much of a nightmare.
>literally did this for my current setting
>Doing little side stories on skype for players
>Anything goes on chargen
>Let's put this little town on the map, just so it looks more real
And the crown jewel goes to my former Storyteller:
>Sure I can run a 18 player game.
... 3.5e on pingpong tables in the top of a garage?
Because that's what I did with my 18 player group.
Grotesque.
It wasn't too bad. I built my maps out of cardboard I got from work that were about 4'x4'. I just broke them down into 1 inch squares and drew on them using a square ruler and some guides I rigged up.
Miniatures, environments, and other things were placed on there at game night and left until the next one.
Everyone loved it, basically just a huge dungeon crawl for most of it. I might redo that one day with Tomb of Horrors.
>18 players
>3.5
>eight
>teen
>players
I can't comprehend how it's even possible, is each session one combat or one social encounter? Do 18 lvl 1s trash things up to CR 10? Even if every player is a veteran 3.5 player how do 18 people even make a decision?
Can confirm, participated in a 9-player game.
It was 3.5e, so it got to the point where it took 30 whole minutes between my turns. Thank RNGesus that I know about better games now.
>Setting has multiple moons
>Lycanthropes have different transformations tied to the different lunar cycles
I don't know what I was thinking.
Hey man that sounds pretty cool desu
It's more trouble than it's worth.
Is it though? What was hard about it?
I'm running 7 players at the moment
Christ I wish two would leave. I know EXACTLY who I want gone too
Not him, but tracking multiple lunar cycles sounds very easy to lose track of.
>Uhh so you guys were resting in town for three days, plus four days travel to the dungeon... fuck, was Lunaris waxing gibbous at the end of the last adventure? Or was that Rolanus?
>Hey GM, don't forget that we also spent a day exploring the haunted wine cellar!
>Fuuuuuck this.
I'd honestly just roll at the beginning of each adventure to determine lunar positions; characters with Astronomy or similar skill could roll to "lock" a moon if it's important (e.g. "it's best if we start this adventure with Lunaris full and Pletreus waning gibbous. *rolls* By my calculations, that'll be in two days.").
Quantum game reality changing based on player rolls best reality
That seems to be a very neat way of handling it. Any time you are time limited, you can simply plan out a week or so of the moons based on random starting conditions and advancing as necessary.
>Setting has no moons
>Lycanthropy still exists but never manifests
I don't know why I bothered working it out anyway
Doing this right now, seems to be working so far. I haven't started long ago, though.
Why do you think it's a bad idea? I could use a warning before I'm neck deep in this.
Yeeeaaaah setting wiki bros.
>Freestyle Scientific Magic
In all honesty I'm still trying to make this work. I think it will be amazing if I can just quantify the game breakers.
The idea is that you cast magic by just saying what happens. But each word must be translated into magic and takes 2 seconds to pronounce (and furthermore must be already derived and written down in a spell book reference manual you make yourself). Anything longer than 3 words takes multiple turns to cast. Anything goes provided it follows these rules:
1) Range is level meters. Duration is INT modifier.
2) Anything lethal gets a save. 10+INT modifier. Can never get higher. If anyone in range makes the save, your spell is undone and everyone lives.
3) Transmutations are never permanent. When the spell range or duration times out (and you haven't renewed it) it transforms back. [this is necessary to prevent post scarcity economics]
In theory, WMD's should be excluded by the save and range restrictions. The result I want is no WMDs, no post-scarcity infinite gold generation, and no caster supremacy. Low save DC cap and long casting time means wizards are primarily utility and have limited combat potential.
But problematic situations still arise. Frankly, I'm still taking suggestions if any user wants to break it.
Thankfully "orgasm" is just one word.
yes, but without designating who or what orgasms, it gramatically becomes a non-valanced verb like "rain", and affects everyone including the caster. For INT rounds.
No saves against non-lethal incapacitating effects? Those could still easily dominate combat. I suppose if the forces of magic are intelligence they can see the guy who is going to fall asleep midcombat will probably get a stab in the throat before waking and tag the spell as lethal.
Living
Bump for this. I'm currently considering a Wiki myself...
Because when a moon mysteriously appears in orbit, seemingly random people begin to transform into monstrosities and the players need to find out why. Bonus points if one of the players volunteers to be one of the lycanthrope sleeper agents.
Ach, sorry I should have clarified. Harmful effects offer a save- so anything damaging. Incapacitation is questionable if it doesn't actually harm them though. The real issue I've been running up against is invulnerability. I want there to be defensive options but in free form I'm not sure how to draw the line between "you're better protected" and "you're protected to the logical extreme".
Possibly, I might allow anyone to make a save to dispel anything you do if they're withing your radius. But that might be very sucky. Alternately, give them +10 to save against DC's that are non-harmful in anyway?
not that guy but it's a lot of work and I'm too lazy to translate most of the momentary inspiration in my notebook to a wiki
Give 'em the boot.
It's not easy, but sometimes you've gotta pony up and explain why you want them gone.
If your other players aren't against it, shouldn't be too difficult.
I can probably sum it up pretty easily:
>Implying your players will ever read it
I use Zim wiki, and I just do all my quick notes and actual session notes in there.
Then when I'm actually writing the session notes during the session I can do stuff like:
"The party met CityName:People:WeaponSeller (this becomes a link to the page of the NPC) and he did not like the warrior because he was a participant in ImportantEvents:SomeWar"
and then I can quickly reference back to whatever I need.
Very convenient.
Sounds like a great party trick.
>implying a setting wiki is for the players
I'd never let players have access to my wiki because there's tons of details they're not supposed to know.
Can the players see Zim wiki, because that's what my wiki is for, it's basically the very surface level setting information that most PCs of whatever class would know
No, it's a locally hosted personal wiki that stores everything in plain text files.
Very convenient for backing up with git.
I guess I can give them parts of it if I need to, but my main use for the wiki is personal, as in:
yeah I'll probably just stick to good old pen and paper for GM only stuff. I don't always have a computer ready for live sessoins
My main gripe with pen and paper is that searching very quickly becomes hard, and also the players can see when you're searching for something.
that's true but for the most part I can remember stuff for my setting so I don't have to search unless I'm working on stuff oustide of sessions. The notebook is mainly for just writing how the players have affected the setting
As long as it works for you, that's what matters, I guess.
I do remember most important stuff, but I tend to forget details, like semi-important NPC names, price lists in certain towns, currency conversion tables, stuff like that. I imagine not all GMs keep track of stuff like that, but my players like detail, and so do I.
Also to contribute to this thread:
>I'll just write up every couple of sessions what happened in the world in places where the PCs weren't present
Boy did that grow out of control quickly.
Jesus Christ, why would you use D&D for that? Holy shit that's the epitome of either masochism or stupidity
>We're all adults and some of us have even been GM:s before. Surely I can just trust you guys to make balanced GURPS characters without me needing to oversee every single step of the process
>every NPC has a small percentage chance of dying offscreen
>this includes the BBEG
>I'm sick of googling character art on Pinterest
>I'm going to use entirely 16 bit/8 bit sprite art for my Roll20 game
Pros:
Art looks uniform
The JRPG style is incredibly cool
Cons:
Roll20 uses a stupid ass 70x70 tile size which adheres to no uniform tile size, so you'll have to either let it blur the fuck out of everything or use imperfect scaling
Good fucking luck finding art for monsters and shit unless you feel like digging deep into sprite art, or ripping sprites yourself, or even having to create your own art
You'll have to create every single fucking map by hand. All of it.
I only want them gone because I want less players and those two mildly annoy me
>Extermination 8.1
>It's a small town, I could easily give each NPC at least a full name and sparse character sheet!
I've gotten away with this before.
The rest of your post, and indeed everything in this thread, did not work out so well.
>I can run a campaign
>Sandbox campaign
>it's fine for everyone to start the first session in different places, I'll just herd them together so they can go adventuring
In retrospect, it was pretty obviously a bad idea
>I can run a game based entirely around letting lv1 players running a colony that will hopefully one day become a massive kingdom
I'm bullshitting my way through this so hard, Its not that bad honestly, but its hard to make any social encounters when the entire continent is a wasteland and when you haven't fully gone through the kingdom builder rules.
>implying its DnD
It's not the only game in the world that uses INT dude.
Haha, the last campaign I played as a player was like that, only we also made our characters separately and with no idea what kind of campaign it would be.
So we all ended up making wildly different characters that, if roleplayed straight, would more likely end up on opposite sides of the battle, so the DM had to keep coming up with reasons for why we'd work together, and a lot of the time he ran like 3 simultaneous campaigns because we inevitably went different ways.
We died quickly, though, so that was a saving grace.
Anyway when it was my turn to GM I made sure to start everyone one off on a tiny river ferry so they'd have no choice but to interact.
I have tried that so many times. Classic newbie DM/GM mistake.
It's really fun when you have the dipshit who decides to roleplay as the "cool" edgy loner who doesn't care about others' lives, and then there's a guy playing a goody two shoes save the orphans paladin. Which then begins the intricate roleplaying dance, where two players must now make two characters that would, logically, never ever EVER work together, work together.
So now I just skip all of that shit and have them start in the middle of a fight. During and after they can tell the rest of party/me why they're there, and if they can't come up with a good reason, I give them one.
Makes the game start a lot quicker. And it's just genuinely more fun. If Star Wars started with Leia meeting C3PO and R2D2, and them trying to figure out why they should work together, it would be pretty fucking lame, right? So don't start there, start at the Star Destroyer chasing and shooting at the Blockade Runner and go from there.
Freestyle magic sounds amazing.
Could you make a new thread, just to brainstorm and bugfix this?
Also, you could tell us more about it.
I don't have any specific advise concerning your case, but I'm working on a magic system of my own and what has really helped me move along was working from physical principles.
Instead of trying to define how I want magic to work in game terms or what effects can be achieved by magic, I started thinking about how magic would work, what fundamental laws of physics (fantasy world magic physics) it would need to obey, what mechanism do humans use to manipulate it and why does that mechanism work, where does the energy for magical effects come from, and so on and so forth, and from there I translate it into game terms.
The point is, define several base rules and operating principles for your magic and work from them. Don't show any of your work to the players, just show them the results.
>It's really fun when you have the dipshit who decides to roleplay as the "cool" edgy loner who doesn't care about others' lives,
I fucking hate these guys. Yeah sure, just go ahead and shoot yourself in the foot. It's real fun for the rest of us to watch you do your intricate one-legged pain dance for the rest of the campaign because you just had to be a fucking idiot in chargen and now no fun is allowed since it might disrupt the dance of your people.
>I'll have both sides of this conflict be wrong in some ways, but unwilling to compromise with the other
Oh boy, would you look at that. The players just killed both of them!
Well, they split up into three groups in the dungeon. They were all level 3.
Balancing the encounters was difficult, you have to keep in mind action economy. For every one turn of the creature, the players get multiple. So instead of going for really big CR creatures, I went for things that had multi attack, groups of enemies, and rooms filled with traps that helped the enemies.
i.e. the floor is covered in traps for Burning Hands and the enemies all have 10 resistance to fire.
Sessions usually went of for around 6-8 hours. and thankfully everyone paid attention. They'd talk when it wasn't their turn, but I only had one player that would lose track of his place.
Spreadsheets, though.
>Had to bail from the oneshot because our party killed an oracle of a CE lowly bull god and that made Cult of Asmodeus snowball into controlling entire village overnight.
>mfw GM explained to us what we lost the session because we killed a guy who nearly trashed our party member as soon as he appeared and thus destroyed one side of a conflict between two evil cults.
>create a 50 room megadungeon where each room was a different "challenge"
It literally killed that campaign. By like 4 sessions into it I was so bored I was trying to kill off the group in any way possible. I did learn a lot though and got to test out a lot of cool traps, puzzles, enemy types, and encounter setups.
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