Search results

  1. Lanefan

    D&D General AI Art for D&D: Experiments

    Same here.
  2. Lanefan

    D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

    And now your rulings are inconsistent - it worked that way the first time and this way the second time - which is widely seen as very poor DM form. If I'm the player of the thief and you asked me that out of character, I'd tell you to deal with it in character. And if I'm the DM in that...
  3. Lanefan

    D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

    Just because someone is a friend doesn't necessarily mean you have to go along with whatever they suggest. If I'm the DM and intend to keep my campaign going, and someone wants to run something else*, then that someone can propose a different night to run and we each get to make our own...
  4. Lanefan

    D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

    What if the rest of the group isn't interested in learning and-or playing it?
  5. Lanefan

    D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

    Correcting it later means one of two things has to happen: 1 - The erroneous action needs to be retconned to its correct version, which potentially invalidates every second of play that happened after it due to the one-thing-leads-to-another effect; or 2 - The erroneous action is allowed to...
  6. Lanefan

    D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

    Here, the onset of M:tG almost completely sank our D&D community. Some of our previously-hardcore D&D players became hardcore Magic players (including me for a while), which is fine. What wasn't fine was the scheduling headaches this created, and by 1997-98 our collective D&D hobby was hanging...
  7. Lanefan

    D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

    For me it wouldn't be a couple of weeks, were such to happen. If I'm going to go through all the headaches of learning a new system to any great depth it would only be because I'm looking to permanently change to that system.
  8. Lanefan

    D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

    I love coming up with the concepts and ideas for adventures and the key pieces within them - new items, cool villains, funky traps, etc. - but indeed the scut work (as you call it) required to tie it all together can certainly become tedious. I'm in that position right now, in fact: I have what...
  9. Lanefan

    D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

    A good - and IME quite manageable - mix can be using canned standalone modules for the adventures themselves, but self-authoring the backstory/ies that tie those modules together. For example, you could run G1-2-3 stock but have your own in-fiction reasons for why the PCs needed to engage with...
  10. Lanefan

    D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

    I'll look things up then and there if I have to, as will the player(s). Problem there is that the "mistake" has in fact happened in the fiction, and a player has an ironclad can't lose argument to have that same thing work the same way next time. As the campaign goes on and these things get...
  11. Lanefan

    D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

    Thing is, one group's disruption could be another group's bread and butter. I say let 'em fight, as long as it stays in character. One of the PCs in my current game has a well-known history of murder in her past (including of both someone else's PC and a valued NPC party member), and she'll...
  12. Lanefan

    D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

    In the mid-late 1990s I very much suspect most of the people still playing were hard-core nutballers i.e. the opposite of casual. Most casuals had long since drifted off, many of them to M:tG
  13. Lanefan

    D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

    The only case I can present is anecdotal, which I know you'll dismiss out of hand. Of such few people who were still playing D&D in the late 1990s, I have to assume our crew was at least somewhat representative or at least somewhat common: that being, people who started in college/university...
  14. Lanefan

    D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

    There's also the hosting piece, which in home games IME also falls on the DM 99% of the time. For common stuff, the DM ideally should have it nailed. For anything else, the trick is not to know it but to know where to quickly look it up. Have the rulebooks close to hand (or in pre-opened tabs...
  15. Lanefan

    D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

    And in so doing you're dredging up faulty data - data that IMO was manipulated to help WotC make the exact point you're making - to help prove your point. Irrelevant.
  16. Lanefan

    D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

    There are self-driving cars and all sorts of other types of cars as well. Trucks and vans are not cars; they're trucks, and vans. So reading, discussing, and listening about other systems isn't enough to give perspective? To turn the hose of hyperbole around, that's like saying only those who...
  17. Lanefan

    D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

    We found 3e fairly similar to 1e: it works OK till about level 9 or 10, then starts to wobble, and by the low-mid teens the wheels come off. The biggest difference between 3e and 1e in that way is that 1e is vastly more tolerant of different party sizes and variances than 3e, which almost...
  18. Lanefan

    D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

    And I see the same with most TTRPGs - they do essentially the same things as any other TTRPG. Hey, that about sums up how we built the game system I use; and though it still ain't perfect (probably never will be) it does me more than well enough. :) For the person who did all that work on it...
  19. Lanefan

    D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

    For me it's a mix. Some parts of prep* I really enjoy, other parts are a serious slog. Running at the table has a higher "really enjoy" ratio but there's times when it too can be a serious slog. * - including post-game logging, recordkeeping, etc. as well as pre-game prep.
  20. Lanefan

    D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

    There's about a gajillion different makes and models of cars out there. I've owned the same car since 2009 and it's more than good enough for what I need it to do, 99% of the time (the other 1% usually involves things I want to haul not fitting in it). And yet I think I'm still allowed to hold...
Top