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I'm going to offer a public service announcement here. Finding people and getting them together to play remains the hardest part of this hobby. Scheduing a D&D game is its own meme. This video (which someone might already have mentioned) talks all about the science behind why it's so hard to...

I hear you and I'm a huge fan of open licenses for game systems but it doesn't bother me in this circumstance because we have the core SRDs already that we need to make just about anything (as Kelsey did with Shadowdark and Gavin Norman did with Old School Essentials). You don't need a...

I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to run big hordes of monsters. The rules in the 2024 DMG (which are very similar to the rules in the 2014 DMG) are very good but they do remove the stochastic elements (rolling dice) of combat. It's also not a rule you can keep in your head. It also...

This speaks to another gap we have and the only two solutions I know of are Reddit and StackExchange and who knows how representative those are. A better way than asking an LLM is to ask people. We do it here all the time. D&D's discord server is actually not a horrible place except its so...

Maybe read a single 2 minute article? https://slyflourish.com/top_advice.html

yeah, its probably a bit much but I think its ok.

Or you could, I don't know, get them from someone who spent 20 years diving into the best tips GMs have offered?

One thing to recognize is that spellcasting checks replace spell attacks and saving throws. Most of the time, when you succeed on a spell's check, it just does the thing. There's no saving throw on the monster's end (most of the time). So if you got rid of spellcasting checks, all spells would...

I have a handful of house rules right now: You can't stabilize at zero hit points. You either have one hit point or you're dying. This way you're not in the middle of a dungeon with a zero HP character you're dragging around and the player can't just roll up a new character. Every player...

I came much to the same conclusion. Better than dorking around with an LLM is reading books. There's a lot of awesome stuff in books that have been through the hands of designers, developers, writers, and editors before it reaches us in an actual refined format. Books and random tables (my own...

One other major thing to mention. Shadowdark's Quickstart set is absolutely free and packed with awesome stuff: https://www.thearcanelibrary.com/collections/shadowdark-rpg/products/shadowdark-rpg-quickstart-set-pdf You can pick up a physical copy on Arcane Library for $19 and it's my preferred...

Why is it one or the other? I've run one-shots using Cursed Scroll 3 and they were great. I don't think it's an either-or.

I haven't tried it but I expect Shadowdark can work fine with milestone-based progression. I might do so next time I run it.

I actually have a house rule that you can't stabilize at zero hit points. This way you're not dragging around a stable PC with no way to heal them. In my game, you have to get them to 1 hit point or they die. I also roll the rounds until death secretly so the players don't know how long they...

Oh, they can.

:sneaky: You say that like it's a bad thing...

The easiest way to increase the threat of a battle is by adding more monsters. Any encounter building guidelines you may be using don’t compare to your own experiences with your own players and their characters. All of the major crowd control abilities they have are relatively limited to a...

There's probably no magic forumla but you can make your own. Here's the one I recommend: AC / DC = 12 + 1/2 CR HP = 15 to 20 x CR Attack / Primary Ability Bonus: 4 + 1/2 CR Damage = 7 x CR I can keep it in my head and build just about any monster I can think of almost as easily as building a...

I think the reality is, it's up to us GMs to work with our groups to work through things like this and that's probably where it should be anyway. D&D 2024 alone has a bunch of problems home groups probably want to figure out before they hurt their game: Custom backgrounds instead of the goofy...

Whatever it is, I don’t want it.