Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="RodneyThompson" data-source="post: 1933758" data-attributes="member: 3594">I'm probably going to offend someone with this one (i.e. a fellow writer), but I have to say it anyways.My biggest regret of 2004 is as a DM. I've been running the Shackled City adventure path from Dungeon (which seems to be all I ever talk about anymore, oh well). My biggest regret is running The Demonskar Legacy unmodified. Spoilers for The Demonskar Legacy, ho!My players are among the most pop-culture attuned people in the world. Every gaming session is like a Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino movie -- Simpsons quotes, old commercial references, you name it. Everyone in the group is a pop culture junkie. We're geeks, it's what we do. So when my players are told of a giant, circular planar portal called the Starry Mirror, immediately the Stargate references begin. Since most of my players know I write for the Stargate RPG, things quickly degenerate into a good-natured ribbing about my adventure design skills (since I intersperse my own sidequests with the adventures in the path, they never know what is mine and what is written by someone else). OK, so, my players give me a hard time about that, and this pulls them out of the game world. It breaks the spell, so to speak, of having everyone thinking and speaking and acting in character, which disrupts the flow of the game. Twenty minutes later, I introduce another group that is part of the module. The Chisel is an underground association of merchants with extensive connections and secret society-like rituals. Sound familiar? Stonemasons. Chisel. Stonemasons. Chisel. It's too much for my players, and we had to stop the session for almost 20 minutes while they made jokes and groaned at the poor coverup of a bogarted concept.I mean no disrespect to the author of the module. Any other group probably wouldn't have thought anything of it. But my group...well, it just goes to show you that the DM must know his players as well as he knows the rules. From now on I'm scouring each adventure to be sure and keep everything believable and keep from breaking the fourth wall.</blockquote>

Verification