Posts Tagged "dnd" from 2019

After my last D&D game folded, in June of 2018, I felt like I didn't want anything to do with D&D for a while. Only after another year or so did I resume reading and commenting in the blogosphere, and only now am I thinking about next steps for serious work on my game.

The month after the game folded, I wrote a brief post-mortem analysis for the five or six sessions of the 2018 game. Here is a rewritten and distilled version: the key points as I see them today, with the benefit of longer hindsight.

Good luck!

Yeeeeeah! (Almost) every profession getting its own sage skill - that's the good stuff! As you made the progenitor list you must have been quite proud/satisfied to be able to link together so many pieces of the sage system.

Looking at other people's toy "worlds" based on nothing more than a few hours of "wouldn't it be kewl if...", with not a whiff of understanding politics, religion, economics, manufactures, geography or much else... I can't express how glad I am that you're out there setting the bar five miles up.

"Comrade" replaces the old concept of "combat-trained," correct?

Lothar, if I understand correctly, what you're saying is that the limitations of a spell as it's currently known (i.e. its description in the established roster of spells), are implied by Alexis's post to have been arrived at over time. Through this process of research.

Perhaps when the collection of effects now called fireball was first discovered in Alexis's world, the blast radius was smaller, the damage was weaker, it took longer to cast, and so on. Over time the spell was refined and improved into what the mages of 1650 are familiar with.

This would be consistent with spells as "technology" and not a science themselves. The principle that causes fireball to be possible has always existed; human discovery (harnessing those principles as a tool) took a while, and didn't come all at once.

Imagine a player going about the final phase of spell research, i.e. in your example, the step where they've gotten the people, the location, the lab, and the ingredients they judge important, and now they're mixing things together and trying to get successful combinations or pull of rituals. How would you as DM indicate that they are on the right track? What does "smart" play look like here for the player?

Thanks.

I second Danielle Osterman's "statues of Bashag's followers". It expands on the statue and orcish themes, and has a lot of features for the player to ponder: should we smash more of them? do the statues contain anything? were they made by the same sculptor(s) that made the larger statue? will they come to life or otherwise present unusual features if triggered? is one of them special with the rest inert? is there any linkage between the statues and the doors (whether mechanical, magical, or just conceptual)?

The link to Beachcomber is broken: it points to the old wikispaces wiki.

Your examples of the highest position to which a character with X Charisma might ascend, seem like the perfect complement to your existing Charisma-based generator for father's profession. By translating from profession to these Cha categories, the players could at once understand how the PC and their family are treated by society. Tons of roleplay potential in that.

There are other benefits to nailing down these guidelines. For example, someone rolling a new PC who sees that Cha 12 is enough to be "an important resident to the community" knows they'll be able to rely on their reputation with local NPCs as an in-game resource. That's enticing enough, to me at least, to consider putting 12 in Cha rather than a true "survival" stat... As these rules evolve your players will have yet another hard choice to make in char creation. So, mission accomplished!