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="Wraith Form" data-source="post: 3460585" data-attributes="member: 10789">Me too.  Here's a few of my observations:#19 (because #4 was done twice!) - You don't have to provide the names of the monsters the players are fighting.  There's always some smart-@ss in your group who's gone and memorized every page of every monster stat in the MM.  As soon as you announce that those gobbos start to charge the party in mass swarms, the smart-@ss smirks, kicks back, and loudly announces to everyone at the table, "Goblins have a max of 9 hit points and AC of about 14.  We should be able to sic Conak the Blade-Weilding Purée Machine at them with no prob."So don't tell the players, especially at low levels, what the beastie is.  In fact, I love to change the skin color ("mottled green-grey, like a rotting corpse") or add something a little different ("pointed, batlike ears") to clichéd monsters, or just flat-out use an NPC who has created a name for the critters in his own language (for ex, goblins in my world are aunadar, so named by an elvish explorer my players met).  It throws the players, especially that dang smart-@ss, and allows them to feel the wonder & amazement--and hopefully fear--that their characters should be feeling being up against those unknown opponents.#20 - From personal experience:  If you're not a professional game writer, please start with pre-written adventures as training wheels...until you can ride, or write, without them.  Those adventures are made for you, as a beginning DM--a balanced, playtested, usually well-written plot that is paced in such a way that they players feel threatened but have opportunities to rest & recover, and the opponents are generally appropriate for the player levels.  Dungeon Magazine is excellent for these kinds of adventures, and is cheap.If you start your 3rd game night ever as a n00b DM with stories you've written yourself, several things may happen:  If your players don't like the story, you might get offended; also, you have to scramble for an alternate adventure.  If you don't have a VERY clear idea where your story is going, you can get writer's block (my game went on hiatus for 2 months while I hammered through writer's block, and the adventure still sucked).  And finally, you might accidentally throw opponents that are severely overpowered against them (the same writer's block adventure ended up in a TPK, which is part of why it sucked).  Luckily my players stuck with me...and the TPK helped me springboard into another series of pre-written adventures that they've been more happy with...but man was I embarrassed.#21 - If the party splits up, don't panic.  Just deal with it by turning to the first group of players and asking what they're doing.  Also, don't give unequal time to one group--give roughly 5 minutes of time to each group, and end as close to a cliffhanger moment within that encounter as possible before turning to the next group and dealing with their encounters.  Cycle through each group until they get back together again.   ...Oh, and I like to 'politely remind' (since the expression 'enforce' sounds so negative <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ) the players that they shouldn't be relying on player knowledge regarding their decisions.</blockquote>

Verification