Recent content by Rabbitbait

My style of DMing has not really changed much since 1980. I set challenges and hope that the players come up with something to solve them. Sometimes I don't know the answer myself, but the players invariably come up with something. I don't do puzzles so much as problems.

I'm looking forward to starting this when I finish the Shattered Obelisk. I'd like to (if it is possible) to allow the players to choose any previous (still living) character from any previous campaign. I can do some backstory of them discovering secrets that then leads through to the main...

Why is D&D in the popular culture now? Because it is Gen X gamers who are the writers, directors, and developers of popular culture. Without the older demographic loving D&D, the potential players would never have even known that the game exists.

I ran a Boromir Clan campaign set in Sharn, in Eberron. So they were working for a crime syndicate based at a casino. It was surprising how easily DMs Guide modules fitted into that because the objectives of a crime syndicate are not far different than normal murder-hobo objectives.

I checked in with the group. They are loving it. There is one who is not enjoying the body horror, but the others are. So I have cut out the transformations for that player. Everyone is very much enjoying the campaign. They have just worked out that there may be mind flayers involved and that is...

A few more sessions have passed by now. The group have just finished Zorzula's rest. The fun part of that was the mine tracks where the group got some of the carts mechanisms operating and then broke them while fighting the auger. That led to the carts speeding through the mines and picking up...

Also agreed. I didn't manage to do it well. But I am not a game designer.

Yep. Heaps of work to put a system together. It's while since I wrote it, but actions took 6 segments. A 5' movement was 1 segment. A spell (action) was 6 segments, but higher level spells took longer by 1 segment per level. A dagger was 3 segments, a longsword was 6 segments and a two-handed...

We gave it a good crack - 3 sessions. I didn't want to scrap it because I'd put a lot of work into it. But it made the game less fun.

There were three places where it fell over. 1) Movement sucked. As everyone is jockeying into position, one square at a time it meant that everyone considering every segment. As a DM moving up to 6 NPCs it was tiresome. We had the action happen immediately but with a time cost. So if you were...

We tried something similar in a D&D game a while back. It slowed combat down to an absolute grind.

We also finished Dragon Heist if you count a TPK as finishing.

Just goes to show, different styles fit different people. I played in that one and my group loved it precisely for the reasons your group hated it.

I'm really excited by Vecna. I said on one of these threads many years ago that my ideal adventure would be one that traverses the many D&D worlds hunting for the rod of seven parts. And behold, here it is. I agree that the QA needs to be better than the shattered obelisk. I'm lazy as a DM and...

It's all about the hook for me. If the theme does not spark my imagination I just don't touch it. ToA was possibly the best D&D campaign I have ever run and I did that pretty much as written. It had so much room for flexibility. PoTA was pretty good, but a lot of that was me transferring it to...