DawnSomewhere

Dungeon Men, Part 2

During this episode, I forgot that Lawry couldn't read. I'm pretty sure that the character he's based on wasn't able to read either, but it was common for the player to forget, so the character went back and forth between reading fluently and refusing to read anything. All in all, it wound up feeling very appropriate for the theme of the contrarian philosopher who refuses to accept anything.

In the real game, there was a sort of introductory dungeon exam, where the players were walked t...

Dungeon Men, Part 1

So after a month of inactivity, let's just hit it and start moving with all the content I had time to figure out!

I've been excited to get started on Dungeon Men, because the game wound up with some really fun character dynamics. In fact, every single session involved some kind of horrific shouting match between the characters, on top of actually moving forward and accomplishing the objectives they set out to do. The fighting was so frequent and so accusatory, that at one point, one pla...

Chosen Ones, Part 21

Well I almost didn't get anything done this month at all, but here is the finale for Chosen Ones! It turns out, it was COVID making me so exhausted, and then once the respiratory symptoms set in, they lingered. In fact, if you listen very carefully, you might still be able to hear a bit of rasp in my voice, because this episode has only been made possible with cough suppressants and NSAIDs.

But still, there we are! I do regret, I kind of forgot about Potato Soup at the end, the...

Forecast: Sick?

Hey, guys!

So my family is sick, and I have been fatigued to the point of blistering oppression for like two weeks. It might be because I'm sick as well, but I'm not sure. When it turns out you're allergic to everything and your immune system is in a constant state of hyper-drive, you'd assume it would be on high alert for germs and other ne'er do-wells in the system, but it is not. It's on the prowl for my own bodily tissues, like a corrupt regiment of city guard armed with tr...

Chosen Ones, Part 20

The best way to approach horror is to be a little ambiguous about the details, and I think in this case I've got the idea pretty on the nose. But while ambiguity is good to make an atmosphere scary, it can also be nice with creating tension over how exactly the ending is going to look like. Maybe there is a paradise of darkness? Maybe something good will happen!

Chosen Ones, Part 19

All the heroes need to do now is return home! It's as simple as that, if anything were ever simple.

I enjoy setting a weird or unsettling atmosphere, but it's tricky, especially in a roleplaying game. The players have to cooperate with it a little, for one thing, especially when the deal is open-ended. I've been in a good few horror games where an arson put a swift stop to any weird occult goings-on before they escalated to the really bad stuff.

Chosen Ones, Part 18

We'll get one more in before the year is up!

Often, in a game like this, I find players can occasionally get too wrapped up in something an NPC said, to the point where if they're given contradictory signals or misinformation, they wind up taking bizarre turns or run aground on the whole event. Part of this, I think, stems from losing sight of the objective and having social challenges become more complicated. If an NPC told you to move a mountain three inches, most players would know t...

Chosen Ones, Part 17

This one is just a minute or so shorter than usual, but the name reveal for Zubo's father felt like a good place to stop it! At least, if you get the reference - if you didn't, then it's a dramatic note that probably doesn't ring that clearly. The bottom line is that Zubo's father is insane, and we'll be getting into exactly how insane in the next episode!

Chosen Ones, Part 16

Hey! An early one! Finally!

Even in good roleplaying groups, player characters are hilariously sociopathic. They never stop to really consider their body count unless you ask them to, and realistically, for most people if you'd killed three men that would be a lot. To PCs it's just an afternoon. Bad groups ignore this and pretend they're still good people, but fun groups add it to the character and acknowledge there's something deeply flawed about the whole team.

Chosen Ones, Part 15

Elvis goes insane, and truth to be told, like most good actors, he's probably just putting a lot of himself in his character.

With this episode, I originally planned on doing a bit of a spoof on the episode where Katara wasn't allowed to water bend. Her scheme was to provoke Pakku into dueling her, on the insistence that if she beat him, he'd be obligated to train her. If I recall, he agreed to smear her across the ice, but refused to agree to the terms - and they were silly anyway, bec...

Chosen Ones, Part 14

Sometimes a GM is a little bit adversarial towards the players, but getting that correct is an extremely fine line. If they get defeated too many times, they become discouraged and may even give up, basically waiting until the GM gives them a clear way forward. It takes a rare kind of player to be able to look at an actually unwinnable scenario and still find ways to make it fun, because the player has to be able to really lean into character flaws and comedic self-deprecation. I think it doe...

Chosen Ones, Part 13

Our real game group actually quit playing "Chosen Ones" just a little before departing to the Earth Nation, so most of this material has been made up from the whole cloth. However, the "wait a minute, how did we get here" segment of this episode did occur in the campaign we're playing now. It was especially amusing then, because a second player rattled off every misstep that has caused them to be in the terrible situation they were in. In this case, I didn't think it would be the best use of ...

Motivating Passive Players: Bumbling Bosses

This bit of roleplaying advice isn't as broadly useful. It has to do more with getting passive and risk-averse players to take some initiative and get involved more with the plot, but these things are so individual that I don't know if this idea would ultimately work for other groups.

The group that I ran Torg for would probably contend they weren't looking for me to lead on the avenue of more interactive gaming, but they often talked positively about the idea and did expect me to creat...

Chosen Ones, Part 12

This is now roughly twice the length of any past arcs! And we've still got some ways to go because we have two more nations to see!

What I like about this episode is that, because I play Hero most of the time and it relies on the 3d6 bell curve, it's typical that you can depend on the dice to do what you expect. And if you can't rely on them, you can build abilities that don't need to roll to hit at all - though the extra cost drags you for it. However, the most reliable abilities of al...

Chosen Ones, Part 11

The day of the Earth Fighting Championship is here! And Lawry doesn't play things straight.

I think it's fun when you can come up with an excuse for an enemy to lose that's unconventional, and in particular social. When it fits and the NPC can come back, such as in a sandbox game, it's great way to form long-lasting rivalries.

Roleplaying Rules: Empathy and Sympathy

I've been reminded again I can put these on Patreon early!

This episode is more in the vein of writing and playing actual characters. It's about empathy, what it is, and how it helps shape all your character interactions, and how it differs from sympathy.

Chosen Ones, Part 10

The group is one step closer to pounding Bingle! Party plans are often unusual, but I like it when they work out and the group feels encouraged to come up with things that are a mix of unlikely and insane. Partly because, as a GM, I really enjoy playing the NPCs reacting to those plans. A kid like Bingle is fine for that, but my favorite is when the party is trying to beat some sort of genius mastermind, who is following the "every step is a potential point of failure" rule, only to learn the...

Chosen Ones, Part 9

To the Earth Nation our heroes go! 

I've done arena competitions with players in the past, and the lesson I've taken away from it is that those even tests of power can be a tad boring and one-sided unless the characters have a lot of ways to thwart or neutralize each other. Although it's tempting to try to drag it out and make it last longer, in most cases, it's enough to do maybe two or three actions, and after that it's fairly clear who the winner will be. There's just not enough...

Why Do We Play DnD? They're the Mechanics You Know

Most of you who play DnD know that we play DnD because it's something everyone is already familiar with. We don't have to drag out friends over to a new system or teach them anything new. This much, is not too insightful. But why are these mechanics the way they are, and why, with so many people saying they don't like a lot of things about the system, do we not freely make more changes to it?

Chosen Ones, Part 8

In "The Last Airbender", one funny element of Air Bender society they bring up is that the women and the men live separate from one another, on separate mountains. They're depicted like serene Buddhist monks, but I feel that the only way you could enforce a society like that is with an insane sort of autocracy that executes anyone who gets lazy and decides they just don't want to fly back to the other mountain.

Battle for the Table's Soul: The Golden Girls War

I plan to do a video a little more about mechanics, but winding up to that, I'm going to do some stuff related to why the mechanics work differently for narrativist and gamist groups. Specifically, the "3d6" blog got the usual pushback of "we need the flat distribution to be fun."

It's a popular explanation as to why the d20 should be kept - because its random results demand often outlandish explanations for why certain things happen or don't happen. Without which, some groups would fal...

Chosen Ones, Part 7

I think the "shipping wars" are my favorite part of the Avatar fandom. Not to be a part of them, but just at how seriously some people at the time took a relationship between kids who, if we were being realistic, might break up before they turned twenty. However, full disclosure, I totally think Zuko and Katara had more chemistry. They were closer in age, and Zuko never had an episode where he horrifically dropped the ball with Katara, unless you count the time he betrayed Katara completely, ...

Chosen Ones, Part 6

These are winding up being pretty long! No episodes of the past were based on actual campaigns rather than one-shots, and I have to be honest, the set up for this bit took a whole roleplaying day just because we had to ask all those essential questions like "how?"

Why is completely unnecessary. Because it's a funny idea, is why. A player suggested it, and of course we simply had to have a carnival episode before we moved on! I'm expecting, or at least hoping, for a fairly quick...

Antagonize Your DnD Table: Insist on 3d6

Artisan asked if I would post the upcoming week's rant to Patreon early so that he and others can hear it, and honestly I probably should! I'll start a new tag for "Roleplaying Blog" and be more diligent about sharing these here.

Not everybody is going to agree with THIS blog's topic and assertions, but I personally believe in it.

A blog!

Hey guys! This is just an update to assure you I am not dead. I am merely dying from this obscene heat recently. The way I do my recording is I throw a blanket over my work space to damp out echo, but I live in the Midwest where this oppressive heat is humid on top of everything else. I've been recording and the next episode of Not DnD will be online soon. I just can't record for as much time all at once, because I need to take breaks away from the blanket.

However, pe...

Chosen Ones, Part 5

It's a long one! I can't recall if the actual game took more than one session, but it's got a lot going on.

In the actual game, the party got less into the... unexplained elements of the mines, mostly because the guy Paul represents had a lot to say in the direction of the enemy and the enemy didn't get a chance to monologue, but such is the fate of roleplaying NPCs. There's a lot of games where the big bad starts talking about the justification for his plans, and the players just shoot...

Chosen Ones, Part 4

By this point in the game, we picked up a new player and the real game is now a bit on the large side, with five total players when everyone can make it. Bingle's survival is a bit difficult, as a result, but the group has had some fun ideas. In particular, they've named the Dark Nation currency "dark o's", because they're circular and come from the dark nation. The Water Nation currency is, of course, called "currents". This section of the game involved a lot more discussion of currency exch...

Chosen Ones, Part 3

A complicated drawback to having the premise of "this kid must escape the party" is that your players aren't always thinking like human beings. There's often one who's played enough DnD to assume any time the party is in "initiative", it means no holds are barred and if people die, they die. DnD offers a way around this in that any time a player declares a mace to the head to be "nonlethal", it magically is and the person you're hitting is perfectly fine.

The Hero System, on the other ...

Chosen Ones, Part 2

Insomnia has been striking again, unfortunately, though the symptoms are a lot more mild than they have been. I think I grew complacent and slacked off too much on the house cleaning regiments.

Good news is that this podcast arc is now once again based on real roleplaying games! The players walked into this particular scene with just a toooouch of sociopathy. It really only takes one to decide murder is an okay solution to a problem and it's like a gasket blowing.

Additionally, th...

Chosen Ones, Part 1

This arc has not been playtested by a live group! Though that may not remain the case indefinitely. Part of the reason is because it involves more working pieces and specific abilities, and the whole concept is still being workshopped. Starting this story is like putting words on a blank page, and whatever happens as it unfolds is what happens, but sometimes a pen and paper RPG cares about the specifics. Like, for example, exactly how far the guy with magic air powers can throw you - stuff li...