D&D General What are the “boring bits” to you?

[deganawida]

Oh, yeah, “building” characters. Years ago, it was fun. Now, though? I don’t want to spend the time, picking optimal classes or feats or backgrounds or talents or whatever term du jour, and come up with some chimera of a character who would never appear in any fiction and only makes since in a modern RPG. Just give me the basics, and let me play with imagination and some dice.

 

[Lanefan]

1. When role-play becomes amateur dramatics. Not my PF group, thankfully, but when I see and hear other D&D5 groups at our FLGS going full Shakespearian all session, it just makes me roll my eyes. Too much of that in games just leaves me cold. I'd rather get on with the game and story. This also covers when shopping turns into a full blown session because either some players or the GM want to get their role-play quota.

2. Mapping. Thankfully this hasn't been an issue for years but sometimes you get a GM that wants the party to map the dungeon themselves. Yawn. Just draw anything relevant on a battle map and let's get going.

3. Encumbrance and resource tracking. Why is this even a thing? Can we not just say you can carry anything within reason. Same thing applies with treasure. I've lost count of the number of games where the party slay the evil dragon and are faced with explaining how they cart 10,000 gold pieces and all the silver out of the dungeon. Aargh!!!

4. Dead and Waiting. I get it, there are only so many defeated adventurers you can find chained up in the same dungeon, but waiting around after your character has died to get back into the game is tedious. I've been on both sides of the fence here, and I know sometimes it cannot be helped, but it's a waste of good gaming time. Usually when this happens in a game I am running, I ask the waiting player to help me run encounters, be the monsters or track the initiatives for me, and at least that is something.

I know that #1 makes me sound like a right grump but I've enjoyed that level of role-playing. For me, role-playing is about the adventure, the story, and the game, not all the in character conversations. Sorry.

I both want and expect 1, 2, and 3 to be in the game, so probably a good thing we're at different tables.

As for 4, I've long since come to accept it as an almost unavoidable fact of life. Sometimes characters die or get captured or lose their minds or are otherwise rendered unplayable for a stretch of time, if not forever; and while there's often quite plausible ways and means of getting a replacement into play fairly soon, sometimes there just aren't.

This came up in last night's session, in fact: as DM I meta-warned the players that the next adventure (to which they've already kind of committed) would have at best extremely limited - and, most likely, no - avenues for introducing replacement characters should such be needed and so they'd be best off bringing two characters each. Of course, now I've done that they'll sail through without a scratch on any of 'em, but better that than having someone sit out maybe several sessions because their single character died* early and there's no replacement available.

* - they don't yet have field-usable revival capabilities.

 

[MNblockhead]

1. When role-play becomes amateur dramatics. Not my PF group, thankfully, but when I see and hear other D&D5 groups at our FLGS going full Shakespearian all session, it just makes me roll my eyes. Too much of that in games just leaves me cold. I'd rather get on with the game and story. This also covers when shopping turns into a full blown session because either some players or the GM want to get their role-play quota.

Same here as a DM, but it blame myself more than my players. I'm just not that skilled at improving RP with minor NPCs. I also fee compelled to take notes on responses NPCs background information, local rumors, and other information that comes out of the RP. I start to get a little resentful of having to do this extra note keeping about an inconsequential NPC. The solution, for me, has been to develop NPCs the players have taken an interest in and making them more significant. But that can increase exponentially the load on the DM. I know that I should lean into this and be happy that I've made an NPC interesting to the PCs, but sometimes I'm just not as interested in the interaction as the players.

2. Mapping. Thankfully this hasn't been an issue for years but sometimes you get a GM that wants the party to map the dungeon themselves. Yawn. Just draw anything relevant on a battle map and let's get going.

Yes. That and use the PC's, rather than the player's, skills in cartography. When I run games in Foundry, having a PC with cartography skill in the party means I turn on Fog of War Exploration, where the areas already explored remain revealed when the party moves past an area.

3. Encumbrance and resource tracking. Why is this even a thing? Can we not just say you can carry anything within reason. Same thing applies with treasure. I've lost count of the number of games where the party slay the evil dragon and are faced with explaining how they cart 10,000 gold pieces and all the silver out of the dungeon. Aargh!!!

In a VTT or with digital character sheets like DDB, it tracking encumbrance and resources is trivial. But if playing with paper character sheets, I agree. But I disagree with solving the problem on how the party is going to move a treasure hoard. But I generally do not pull out a calculator in game. If the players give a reasonable plan on how they will deal with it, I'm happy to just treat it like a quick cut scene and say it was done. Where I feel that the challenge is important to the story, I think using 4e-inspired skill changes make sense. Each player explains how their character is contributing to the effort. No two PCs can use the same skill (though I am not a stickler here--I'll let one PC help another giving that PC advantage on single roll for the pairs contribution), and they must make reach a number of successes before the challenge is overcome. If it takes them too long, complications arise.

4. Dead and Waiting. I get it, there are only so many defeated adventurers you can find chained up in the same dungeon, but waiting around after your character has died to get back into the game is tedious. I've been on both sides of the fence here, and I know sometimes it cannot be helped, but it's a waste of good gaming time. Usually when this happens in a game I am running, I ask the waiting player to help me run encounters, be the monsters or track the initiatives for me, and at least that is something.

Love the idea of letting the player with the dead PC help run monsters, etc. Though, this will depend on the group. Some players really don't like having to play a character against other players' PCs.

I know that #1 makes me sound like a right grump but I've enjoyed that level of role-playing. For me, role-playing is about the adventure, the story, and the game, not all the in character conversations. Sorry.

No need to apologize. We like what we like and don't what we don't.

 

[overgeeked]

Same here as a DM, but it blame myself more than my players. I'm just not that skilled at improving RP with minor NPCs. I also fee compelled to take notes on responses NPCs background information, local rumors, and other information that comes out of the RP. I start to get a little resentful of having to do this extra note keeping about an inconsequential NPC. The solution, for me, has been to develop NPCs the players have taken an interest in and making them more significant. But that can increase exponentially the load on the DM. I know that I should lean into this and be happy that I've made an NPC interesting to the PCs, but sometimes I'm just not as interested in the interaction as the players.

Another solution is to randomly generate a list of names, background details, etc and mark them off as you use them. Separately generate clues and rumors and when the PCs go digging roll or pick, then mark it off. Saves a lot of time in game if you’ve generated this stuff ahead of time. If you haven’t already, check out Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. Especially secrets and clues. It sounds like that would help you a lot with this.

 

[Oofta]

Another solution is to randomly generate a list of names, background details, etc and mark them off as you use them. Separately generate clues and rumors and when the PCs go digging roll or pick, then mark it off. Saves a lot of time in game if you’ve generated this stuff ahead of time. If you haven’t already, check out Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. Especially secrets and clues. It sounds like that would help you a lot with this.

There's also a lot of NPC generators out there. As you said, keep a list handy and just mark them off. My only issue is remembering to write down which ones I used for later when they want to talk to them again.

 

[Maxperson]

Oh, yeah, “building” characters. Years ago, it was fun. Now, though? I don’t want to spend the time, picking optimal classes or feats or backgrounds or talents or whatever term du jour, and come up with some chimera of a character who would never appear in any fiction and only makes since in a modern RPG. Just give me the basics, and let me play with imagination and some dice.

See, I still absolute enjoy building characters like that. Not to make some chimera who wouldn't appear in fiction, but rather because I could look at the dozens of classes, thousands of feats, dozens of skills and hundreds of prestige classes and accurately build pretty much any character concept that I could envision. With 5e I generally can't do that without kludging together a class and subclass that only kinda sorta get me to my concept.

I wasn't a power gamer, but I did pore over the books coming up with cool concepts and character ideas to play. Some were strong. Some were weak. The vast majority were just average. All were tons of fun.