Morrus
Frazzled

That looks like great fun Morrus. Cool beans. Just as a thought though, would it not be easier to make the map mostly the full size of the page and then include the text of the encounters right in the rooms? Would seem like a more efficient use of space. And, just a nitpick, you forgot to label area 1 - the Entrance.

Hi Morrus, is this experiment still going on? I'd like to post something about an imminent kickstarter for Low Fantasy Gaming Deluxe Edition if so... :)

Morrus- the third one seems much too big in scope for a one page adventure IMHO, this is getting to the point where the DM is going to either have to do a lot of planning (to flesh out the city in their mind enough to be comfortable running the adventure) or have to be really quick on their feet. Either way this looks really intimidating, and, while there are stat blocks, it reminds me of the encounter book (I mentioned earlier) that I had hopes for but couldn’t use because the barrier to running was too high. Going back to my earlier post, I think these 1 pagers should have a focus on either social interaction (the balance has been upset, a murder, a disappearance, etc) or an exploration with combats providing challenge where necessary. The third adventure lacks this focus and is too big in scope IMHO.

Morrus, if I can offer a suggestion: please indicate (where applicable) what challenge level each encounter is expected to present. Easy, Medium, Hard or Deadly. This really helps people who need to recalibrate to suit their groups (and means it doesn't have to be reverse engineered!) It can just be a single character at the end of the encounter title.

Hunh. Turns out there is a toggle switch at the bottom of the page that I didn't see previously that switches to desktop mode via the site itself rather than via Chrome's toggle. Problem solved! (Do note, Morrus, that the interface is slightly different depending on how desktop mode is applied.)

Morrus, that’s good and certainly runnable as is. If we think about this in terms of the pillars then the best format is determined by whether exploration or social interaction is the leading pillar (combat always being involved in some form or other). Your distillation is perfectly good for a social interaction driven adventure. Some NPC has upset the general order and the PCs have to put things right. The were-rat adventure described earlier would also fall into this category. For an exploration driven adventure, such as a dungeon, castle, cave system, a map has to lead the way and then the interesting locations within the structure are called out in labels around the map. Here treasure is commonly the motivator. Just choose the right format for your 1-page adventure and you’re set.

@Sadras I’d call that an encounter rather than adventure. For these kind of things you’ve really got to empower the DM to fill in the blanks rather than provide the full details. So for your Wererat adventure you should provide the motivation and situation for the were-rat girl. And let the DM fill in the blanks. So I’d say: The girl has fallen in love with the son of the inn-keeper and taken a position there despite really being betrothed to the son of the chief of the were-rat tribe nearby. A search party has been hunting for her and tracks her down to the inn. If the PCs choose to intervene then adventure is helping her to resolve her conflict. I don’t think it needs much more than that. Names and relationships of the primary NPCs, some ancillary monster references (some guardians to the lair, perhaps some mutant “boss rat”, the location (and numbers) of the were-rat lair etc, etc). As noted above, go for more theater of mind. It’s more A-Team adventure of the week stuff... @Morrus I imagine you’ve seen this? Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters, EGP42001 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0615321860/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_U51.BbHA9A5PW While I found it disappointing because the adventures were too vague/big, I think that something similar (but more tightly focused) would be good.

It’s open Tomorrow Nov 20th! Morrus https://twitter.com/dms_guild/status/1064688359258423296?s=21

...en if the game has been at a standstill for twenty excruciating minutes. Be gentle about it, and be encouraging, but you gotta be firm. You have to drive the point home that learning (and using) the rules is non-negotiable, for all players. I hope it doesn't come to that, because when people get frustrated their tempers get short, and things can get heated quickly. Be ready to calm people down, remind them it's a game and everyone is there to have fun, maybe call a break every now and then. The last thing you can do is adapt your game. Maybe those four players aren't looking for a strict, by-the-rules style of game. Perhaps they are more interested in a looser, storytelling kind of experience. The rules should support the framework of the story, not the other way around, so if all the focus and detail on the rules is tripping up two-thirds of your players, maybe you should get rid of some of the rules. EDIT: I was a little more short than I should have been earlier. Morrus is right: people play this game for any number of reasons, and there is no "wrong" way to play it. The point is to have fun, always.

First, please allow me to say "Awesome job with WotBS". I recently learned about this adventure when a group of players approached me to be their DM for the series. I'm planning on running 5e, BTW. I read the Player's Guide and the Campaign Guide, and the first adventure. Top Notch! I was mildly surprised to see/learn the 3.5e and 4e versions. Our first session will be 9 Dec. I went ahead and purchased all the 5e content from DriveThruRPG. My question: What's the best way to keep abreast of latest releases? Welcome! I am happy to hear that you are enjoying my adaptation of this amazing campaign saga to 5e. The 5e version primarily adapts the 3.5 version while incorporating some of the 4e content where it builds on the core story while doing things in as "5e a way as possible". I am wrapping up the finishing touches on the fourth adventure, and it should be out in the next day or so. :) Each adventure's release will be announced on this website as well as @ancrisit and Morrus on twitter. You can also go to one of the book's pages and click the "follow your favorites" link on the left which will send you an email whenever anything is released. https://www.rpgnow.com/product/242808/War-of-the-Burning-Sky-5E-1-The-Scouring-of-Gate-Pass If you are enjoying it, please consider leaving a rating or review for the adventures and guides. Thanks!

Morrus: *Ahem* Does this adventure actually have stats for Kwalish?It just says to use the evoker statblock, which doesn't make much sense to me.

Morrus The 2nd and 8th bullet points are the exact same article.

Morrus Who is this vampire Strand you speak of? ;)

Morrus Cthulhu Dark - thematically and trope-wise it's CoC, but with a much better (and lighter - the name is a play on words) system. There's also a free PDF version available. The whole system in 3 columns of text.

Morrus No Slasher Flick by Spectrum Games? http://www.spectrum-games.com/slasher-flick.html

...nd awhile ago. What percentage of that is going to spend time watching someone else roll dice and pencil in numbers on a piece of paper? Keep in mind, this is the same thing as asking what percentage of people would be interested in watching a Magic the Gathering game. Which based on their more recent tournament (Worlds I think?) was 19,000 people* (Out of a player base of reportedly 20-30 million). So we can theorize that what we're looking at is a viewer rate of about what? 6,500 to 9,000? I don't think I'd call that either a draw or an audience. Going into other RPG's, Pathfinder ends up a percentage of D&D, and everything else is going to number in the hundreds of people at best since their market penetration is really small. I suspect we'll find that its popularity is embarrassingly small, and after 2-3 events we never hear about it again. In addition to Nathan Stewart, Brand Director for D&D, updating that figure to 12 to 15 million in North America alone, as Morrus mentions, keep in mind that Critical Role, where people are "rolling dice and recording numbers on a character sheet," pull in somewhere between 55,000 and 65,000 viewers a week regularly, and fill halls with 3000 to 5000 people per appearance. Even half that will still make an audience to garner a following, and more likely to follow if it's something you don't have to devote 4 or 5 hours to, as you would Critical Role. Ignoring just D&D for a moment, others like Glass Cannon Podcast have audiences probably closer to 10 to 12,000, with at least 4,000 solid Patreon members donating enough for them to make a regular business of it as a self-sustaining model. There's a long tail of different RPG viewing audiences out there, not all of which overlap, simply because there wouldn't be enough hours in the day for them to (since so many are 3 to 5 hours long to consume) Again, is it an audience of millions? Nope, and no one claimed it was - but all they need is that 20,000 or 30,000 str...

Morrus you are right, we do not know details about this thing, probably I'm just speculating. what I know for sure is that dnd did not have a new campaign setting in the last 15 years, that 5E Eberron has been published in beta and is disclosed for free piece-by-piece in "UA", etc. and this esport thing not wizards-driven (but announced by their CEO!) does not help the brand in that direction.

Knightfall I don't see why not Morrus?

I wouldn't have thought at initiative roll would be needed. Attacks would be simultaneous. I'd say simultaneous attacks, but you use your riding skill as your attack skill. That makes sense. Simultaneous attacks create the possibility of both riders being unseated on the same run. If this is a contest similar in style to medieval jousting I'd include opportunities for modifiers based on 'smack talking' and bike damages since bikes obviously Spin Out if the driver is knocked from the seat. Some maintenance would have to take place between runs. Maybe use a table like below when the driver is unseated? 2d6 EFFECT 2Tire is punctured, all checks -1d6 3-5Swingarm damaged, reduce SPEED by 1d6 6-8Busted Fairing, no additional effect 9-10Fork Tubes are bent, reduce HANDLING by 1 class 11Engine is damaged, reduce ACCEL by half (round up) 12Fuel Tank ruptured, bike inoperable until replaced/repaired

“State of the art tabletop design” is high praise indeed. Somewhere north of mediocre, certainly.

Of course, it only takes a generation for the universe's population to double again. Thanos has only set it back by a few years. I'm not sure about that. Many species grow based on available food - but having killed half the life in the universe that means that anything that consumes life (plants, animals, etc.) will find their food supplies similarly shrunk. (Predators also are a big factor, but the ratio of predators to prey has remained the same.) Sentients can decided to breed quickly, and to change their environment (plant more, etc.). They can impact the speed.

But... that’s the exact opposite of a surprise. Not entirely. It was a surprise going into the movie. But once the movie started heading slightly in that direction, I was genuinely excited at what they might do. Instead, as stated above, they were just yanking our chains a bit. And that's exactly my problem with all this. It is very easy to "yank the audience's chains", and to have people mistake that for being an unexpected twist. But it takes effort to actually write a satisfying plot. It felt like the movie went out of its way to constantly yank those chains, and then have no satisfying resolution to it. So, informally, just about everyone I know that dislikes this movie has been a fan of the pre-Disney EU. I wasn't, and I like TLJ. I wonder how widespread this is, given that the movie was pretty well received outside of a smallish and loud core of die-hard SW fandom. I consider myself a pretty big Starwars fan. I loved the original trilogy, hated the prequels, loved TFA, and hated ...

I have never even heard of that error message.... this is so far above my pay grade. Not a clue. It's probably a wordier version of the reported ERR_RESPONSE_HEADERS_MULTIPLE_LOCATION. That error says there are multiple HTML headers in the document which is a big no-no so as to prevent a type of injection attack. Originally, I thought Kiraya_TiDrekan's set up was probably to blame because it was a single user complaining. It may be the showwiki.php is missing an exit() after the redirect, it may be the formatting is slightly off -- the browsers are getting more strict with their parsing.

Huh? It would have surprised you if they did the thing you were expecting? It would have surprised me if they had done what I were hoping they would do at that moment. Instead they kind of flirt with a cool premise, and abandon it. Subverting audience expectations isn't always a good thing, if the turn sucks.

Jeez, guys, what’s with all the hostility? It’s nearly Christmas! It’s a thread about aliens! It started to go downhill when people started declaring absolutes around FTL travel. Came across as hostile as in "you're wrong nya nya nya" IMHO.

Jeez, guys, what’s with all the hostility? It’s nearly Christmas! It’s a thread about aliens! Wizard aliens.

Sorry to break it to you, but it’s fine on the app. The problems you are experiencing are due to the very large number of people who have blocked you, and the resultant thread ID changes. As a fix, I suggest you stop getting blocked. That came out of nowhere. Why the hostile response? :confused: I volunteered a reply to the OP - and yourself - in the belief I was helpful. If you don't want regular forum users to reply to meta questions, maybe then not solicit the input? Plus, no posts are blocked when using the app, so your testy reply not only feels unprovoked but also hard to understand. :(

You are confusing media sound bytes and analogies with physics and wondering why it doesn’t work in your head. Physicists use equations and stuff. If you want to point out the flaws in physics, you need to show where the equations are wrong. Not where you heard some “ironic claim” about something. I mean, yeah, sure go up to a particle physicist and tell them how “ironic” you find their “claims”. But be prepared to explain their “claims” (read: their life’s work) first. But that is not true though. What is Dark Matter and Dark Energy? Do you have a particle physicist prepared to put their "lifes work" up as a scientific Theory. No, I think I will stick to what real particle physicists say which is, forgive my paraphrasing, that they dont know.

As I said earlier, this is just a conversation/ending nothing statement. Sure. By definition, we can’t know anything for certain ever. So what? We talk using what we know, or we all just stop talking about anything ever. What’s the fun in that? It's fine to talk using what we know, but when we are using it to stop reasonable speculation about the future tech in a thread that's about speculation about future tech, that's not very fun, either. :)

Man, tough crowd! Hah! Indeed. I think the desert scenes part of that "Croaking Sirroco" mockup were well put together. I like how there's a sense of flow, narrative progression, and unveiling secrets there. That part works well. I do feel conflicted about listing ability/skill checks and DCs and damage amounts when your space is so limited, however. If it's meant to be adaptable for a wider level range, that seems like something you can trust the DM to handle. Might free up a little space for you to work with.

This is kinda how it looks with little coloured icons showing the challenge level of each encounter, but I feel it now starts to look quite messy. 103400 For me personally, it feels busy, angled text is harder to read, and would murder printer ink, echoing what 77IM was saying. It could be the low-res, but the bolded text could be even bolder to differentiate it; it feels like a semi-bold, and I'm having to look carefully/squint to recognize it as different...actually I think the color backgrounds are contributing to making that differentiation harder. I think the skeleton of something workable is there, however. It also reads like an site-in-which-adventure-could-happen rather than an adventure, in that there's no hook for the players. I get the aesthetic "let the DM fill in the blanks", but having a starting point, having a clearly framed start scene, saves the DM a lot of work.

I was talking to Zardnaar about the phrase “only a theory”. Calm down. I also did not reference the theory of relativity. I meant things that turn up in sci fi/quantum physics. Zero point energy, anti matter, fusion power, tachyon whatever things like that.

I was talking to Zardnaar about the phrase “only a theory”. Calm down.Yeah, my bad. I followed a quote and it opened that post, didn't double check the name.

It’s not “only” theory. We use relativity in all sorts of things. Your GPS depends on it; GPS satellites are subject to relativistic effects due to the speed they move and their altitude in Earth’s gravity well. The word “theory” in science doesn’t mean “hypothesis”. I know but say 150 year ago science as it understood it probably could not conceive of an atomic weapon. In 100 years who knows, there are quantum physics theories that might pan out, someone might invent a fusion reactor (not that it will produce enough energy for FTL). There is anti matter and tachyons and things like that and some combination of genetic engineering, AI, generations ships, gene seed ships, and a new power source could enable something. It might take years to get there but interstellar travel might be possible one day (slowly barring some sort of massive breakthrough). The could invent a fusion reactor, stick it in a problem send said probes towards some close stars, they broadcast back any habitable planets,...

It’s not “only” theory. We use relativity in all sorts of things. Your GPS depends on it; GPS satellites are subject to relativistic effects due to the speed they move and their altitude in Earth’s gravity well. The word “theory” in science doesn’t mean “hypothesis”.Yes, please tell the electrical engineer 5hat actually does GPS systems how important relativity is to technology. I'm not ignorant of how useful relativity is, or what it's theoretical underpinnings are. But, Newtonian mechanics were absolutely critical to a lot of technological advancements and we now know them to be wrong but useful. Assuming we're at the end of science is wrong -- we do not know.

The crash was in 2013. You’re off by over a decade! :) But yeah, the site ran for a year or two back around/before the turn of the century as just a news page with no forums. They were a later addition. There was a data loss around 2002, because I had to recreate my account, and was miffed that it said 02 instead of whatever it was previously. I think its why no one really has a join date before Jan 02?. I was moving around in the military and didnt rejoing until Sep 02. But I'm afraid I remember no other details, as of why. Thanks for the info.

The site didn’t even have a forum back when it started. We had forums for a while before the, what was it? 2002 crash/data loss?. But yeah, I barely remember it just being the new edition's coming web page. It was a unique time, before the explosion of social media.

"Slippery Slope" is also a logical fallacy, just like the God of the Gaps. :) Sigh. It's an informal fallacy, which means it's not automatically wrong, but is instead an argument that doesn't support the conclusion. A true fallacy is an argument that invalidates the conclusion while an informal fallacy doesn't say whether or not the conclusion is wrong, just that the argument used doesn't support it. And slippery slope is one of those 'maybe' informal fallacies. It really depends on the form of the argument. If I say that if A happens, and then explore a solid causal chain that leads to B possibly happening, that's not an informal fallacy. If I instead say that if A happens then this tangentially related and more extreme event B will happen, that's a slippery slope fallacy (informal). I really do wish people would stop name checking the informal fallacies as if doing so was actually an argument. If you can't articulate the weakness of another's argument without reference to a n...