D&D 5E What should be in a 5E Game Prep generator? [Poll]

OTher. Note to bring your bat to beat your problem players with. Bonus if it includes a rusty nail.

PieAndDragon said:

Also a good question, and it may be that you're not the target if you already make heavy use of lots of different generator sites (do you ever use fantasynamegenerators.com?)

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I very well may not be your target. But having gone through lots of generators, I may have observations that could be valuable for you.

Yes, I think fantasynamegenerators.com is decent, but typically I go right to name lists for the culture I have in mind – that saves me from having to sort through lots of generated "chaff" to find the actual good names.

What I'm hoping will be useful is

• A generator that unites the most useful content in one place and with one click. It will provide enough to run a session with nothing prepared or provide enough to improv when players go on random tangents.
• Generators focused on content for 5E. I'd use O.G.R.E and reuse (or repurpose) several of the generators already available on the EN World
• Description-based summaries, giving content as a passage of text instead of a list of separate parts for an item. This Random Room generator shows best what I mean, where there is both the description and those bits split out into component parts.

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That's an ambitious goal. I suspect you'll run up against some built-in paradoxes...

(1) Randomly generated adventures (typically this means dungeons) are meant to spare a time-harried DM from prep / use in the moment when players go "off the beaten path"...however my experience has been that such random adventures take more prep work than adapting actual published adventures...I suspect this is because no generator I've seen makes connections between elements to the extent that a human being can.

(2) Focusing on 5e content means what? Focusing on 5e crunch (e.g. writing up traps "5e style" with 5e DCs/damage and using monsters in the 5e MM)? However, the strength of a generator has to do with the ideas it generates. No one can fully flesh out everything in a generator.

(3) While that's an ambitious format, all generators I've seen attempt this invariably end up with several entries that read like...well, they read really poorly and sometimes border on nonsensical. That example of the Random Room Generator avoids this by virtue of its simplicity; the more complex a generator gets, however, the greater the likelihood for entries that don't conform to flowing speech / English grammar.

I've just seen you're the author of Haunting of Calrow Ruins! Running that at the moment for my group on Roll20!

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Cheers! Hope you guys have a blast with it It's a twisted little adventure.

I've been meaning to try some of the EN5ider adventures, but wrangling my face-to-face group is hard these days.

I want a way to drop a few hooks in front of the players and see which one they bite. Somehow or other, all the plot threads lead you to the same map (which may not be called the same place - the original blueprints for a building could belong to an architect who was hired separately by two noble families).

I voted for:
- Some NPCs
- Simple dungeon
- A Villain
- Local rumors
- Simple quests
so I'm sort of asking for something like the Goldenfields / Bryn Shandar / Triboar scenarios that start off Storm King's Thunder.

May be what I really want is material I can use to make the world seem alive even when the PCs' backs are turned.

Quickleaf said:

That's an ambitious goal. I suspect you'll run up against some built-in paradoxes...

(1) Randomly generated adventures (typically this means dungeons) are meant to spare a time-harried DM from prep / use in the moment when players go "off the beaten path"...however my experience has been that such random adventures take more prep work than adapting actual published adventures...I suspect this is because no generator I've seen makes connections between elements to the extent that a human being can.

(2) Focusing on 5e content means what? Focusing on 5e crunch (e.g. writing up traps "5e style" with 5e DCs/damage and using monsters in the 5e MM)? However, the strength of a generator has to do with the ideas it generates. No one can fully flesh out everything in a generator.

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So the aim here isn't to provide anything unified, but to provide a list of small elements that the DM can use as needed. An NPC, an encounter on the road, a couple of possible quests when they ask around in town, some treasure on a monster they unexpectedly killed.

Having recently run a campaign using just generators I'm currently going by what I would have found useful.

For 5E specific I might add filters for terrain type (for encounters, dungeons etc), level range or anything else that seems sensible. For actual details things like the Names would be ones from the DnD books, encounters would be D&D monsters, treasure would be as from the DMG, and anything else specific to 5E where appropriate.

PieAndDragon said:

If there was a single one-click generator to help out 5E DMs with game/session prep, what should it include?

This would most likely for a time when you have nothing/little prepared, have players who go off on random tangents or have an idea and just want to run with it....

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If I'm reading your original post correctly, you want to be able to generate the bones of an adventure with a single click. For that, you'd need...

A setting (dungeon, village, forest area, mountain side, etc.)

A plot/hook/reason to engage.

An enemy.

Maybe allies and/or friendly NPC's, preferably named.

Ideally you'd be able to enter party level, or maybe CR of the adventure, plus choose the setting.

Maybe it would figure out XP for you.

I can think of lots of things I'd love to see in a DM organizational tool kit, but that doesn't sound like what you're making.

cthulhu42 said:

If I'm reading your original post correctly, you want to be able to generate the bones of an adventure with a single click. For that, you'd need...

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Not really, that could be another generator though.
I want to give some elements which GMs often need during a game session which would be useful to have in many situations and can create easily in one place.
They might need something to fill a gap in an adventure, use a few things to spice up a journey, describe part of a city or have enough to run a short ad-hoc adventure for that game day.

I'm not focusing on trying to build an adventure.

PieAndDragon said:

Not really, that could be another generator though.
I want to give some elements which GMs often need during a game session which would be useful to have in many situations and can create easily in one place.
They might need something to fill a gap in an adventure, use a few things to spice up a journey, describe part of a city or have enough to run a short ad-hoc adventure for that game day.

I'm not focusing on trying to build an adventure.

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I see. I misunderstood then.

I DM from a laptop behind a DM's screen. It would be nice to have all the info from the screen on my laptop, in addition to weapon/armor tables, magic items lists, etc.

Other things I'd love to have quick access to...

A calendar that's customization. You could enter the number of months in a year, the number or days in a month, and a place to name each month and add notes.

A place to enter the PC stats into quick blocks so you could keep track of them easier.

A way to generate monster stats with the option of customizing them, i.e, bumping their AC or too hit/damage, etc. It would also be nice to have a max hit point option. And then, of course, treasure generator and xp calculator.

A good dice roller.

A spot to take general notes.

A place to input NPC's with stat blocks.

A name generator for NPC's, towns, regions.

An initiative roller and tracker.

I think those are the main things I use at the table, although, as I said, they are split up between DM screen, word processor, and several tabs open to online generators and dice roller, as well as map folders and sometimes a pdf file of a module I might be running.

I don't know if that's any closer to what you have in mind. Hope it helps.

https://donjon.bin.sh
A lot of tools there. Multi editions.

cthulhu42 said:

I DM from a laptop behind a DM's screen. It would be nice to have all the info from the screen on my laptop, in addition to weapon/armor tables, magic items lists, etc.

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I've tried to run with a laptop only when I have a pdf adventure (or on Roll20!) but I wonder if any research has been done on what proportion of people use a tablet or laptop when running a game at the table...

I've used this calendar tool at http://e2ogame.net/homepages/antti/rpg/gmtool.html before which has several things you can customise

PieAndDragon said:

I've tried to run with a laptop only when I have a pdf adventure (or on Roll20!) but I wonder if any research has been done on what proportion of people use a tablet or laptop when running a game at the table...

I've used this calendar tool at http://e2ogame.net/homepages/antti/rpg/gmtool.html before which has several things you can customise

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I can tell you that DMing with a laptop has revolutionized my gaming. I'm so much more organized, so much more prepared now. Even just the ease and neatness of a word processor was a huge leap forward. Add to that the ability to use donjon generators, dice rollers, and access to the internet for quick rules clarifications and it made the whole process so much smoother, quicker, and best of all, enjoyable. I used to dread prep time, but now I kind of look forward to it.

I will definitely check out the calendar. Thanks!