Recent content by talien

The Gateway to the Capital Despite being frequent con-goers on the East Coast, we'd never heard of Awesome Con. It's likely due to Awesome Con being primarily for celebrity autographs, with more focus on talent than fans. It also seems to move timeframes quite a bit -- this year it was in March...

I do try to make it fun in the sense that the "fast" character wants to feel fast. Sometimes they roll low. But then if they tie with a slower character/monster, the reroll makes it fun. It doesn't happen too often, but it does give the players a thrill of being "good at initiative" (which, for...

To be clear I don't mean the players don't know their initiative. I mean, keeping track of monster initiative plus the players when the table gets to 7+ size is challenging for me visually. Add in familiars (who for reasons I still don't entirely get, have their own initiative) and we're at 10+...

OMG yes. My tables crest 7+ players. Rolling initiative each round would be one more roll; the odds of me keeping track of everyone's initiative every round would be even more challenging. There isn't anything inherently wrong with tied initiative, but i'm not sure it adds anything to the game...

Becomes more important at 3rd level + in 2024 D&D because they've started making initiative matter in class-related ways. Two examples stand out. Alert Feat: Allows you to swap your initiative result with a willing ally, enabling a high-rolling character to put a lower-rolling character (like a...

Roll off, and then move whoever loses to one count lower (sometimes, this turns into a chain reaction so we have to make a judgement call). It's a good question though, no ties for anybody! This is where I got them from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F7X4J9JH

Managing a table of ten players is less like storytelling and more like air traffic control. In the heat of my weekly library sessions, the biggest threat to immersion isn't the monsters; it’s the dead air that creeps in when players lose track of the turn order. When a round takes twenty...

Thirteen...million...DOLLARS? I had to check three times.

Just to address this specifically: You are not doing ANYTHING wrong. My library has books, paper, pencil, dice, that is "theirs". I bring printout of character sheets and any other paraphernalia for new players, I bring miniatures for them, and initiative cards (for my own sanity). I cannot...

Thank you @aco175 for bringing this thread to my attention. The list of my articles is here: RPG Evolution I am blessed. My local library invests in and is commited to our weekly game. They buy the books (which are library reference material), dice, pencils, paper, and provide the room. We even...

Picture courtesy of Pixabay. In the world of public library gaming, overbooking is more than a strategy; it is a survival mechanism. Because I run a free weekly game at the library, I learned quickly the math of the "soft yes," where a forty to sixty percent no-show rate is the standard...

Yes, narrative fiction summarizing what happened. The die hard players absolutely do read them and comment on them, so I know some of them read it (I use Roll20 for this purpose to archive what went before). Good for me too!

It matters for the DM quite a bit.

That's how I run it, basically. It's a living world. People come and go. I adjust on the fly. There's not "hang out in the dungeon" and "oops Bob just disappeared or is on autopilot while we're still in the dungeon." It's very much "stuff happens in town, we go on adventure, we wrap it up by the...

It's a fascinating thing that's on the same spectrum of "Pay What You Want." It's why I get annoyed that PWYW is listed with "free" content on DTRPG. That simple fact (PWYW = on the spectrum of "free") shows a whole mindset around the "entitlement" of free. I have gotten much harsher...