One of the game I'm in is "all humans" as a core premise, with even basic nonhuman races like dwarves and elves being just short of mythical creatures. My character is a Fantasy British noble paladin (longbow), with the others being a Fantasy Italian Divine Soul sorc (fire, healing) who runs a street clinic, a Fantasy German knight-alchemist Fighter (greatsword, potions/bombs), and a Fantasy Scottish soldier Rune Knight (polearms, grappling whenever the opportunity to throw a monster off a tall building arises) that has recently discovered a talent for crafting.
In our Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil game I'm 'the worst wizard,' a human necromancer with all the worst wizard spells b/c all my spells are sources from the dumpster of the local magic school. The rest of the party are students of the school, and gestalt: a human fight/wizard (battlemaster/war wizard), and two wizard/clerics-- half elf tempest/scribe and tiefling chronurgist/twilight.
In my other game, where we are all chickens, I am a War Wizard focused on hand magic. The others are a Rune Knight fighter (polearms), Astral Self monk, Great Old One warlock (pseudodragon), and an Arcana Cleric.
Unless there's a reason for a rigid layout, you're free to piece the rooms together as you see fit. Say rooms ABCDEFGH are in that order, but only A D and H have to happen in that order, you can always do AGBDFCEH, for example.
Just read enough so you know how to react on the fly.
Errr, I don't get this question, same way you've been keeping track of events in your own adventures?
I guess I just want to avoid making the whole thing a continuity spaghetti when improvising.
Yeah, I think it will be less reading ahead and more reading the current and immediately adjacent rooms description summaries. I like knowing all the puzzle pieces, but Tegel Manor has 240 rooms, that is just a little much.
Like I said just now, the Manor has 240 rooms. It is less "What was that NPC's name and what is his shop called?" and more of "In this giant web of interconnecting spaces, exactly which route did the players take, how long ago did they clear each room, and what secrets in each did they find/not find?" @ftl suggested I keep a copy of my own DM map that I can draw and take notes on, which I really like.
As GM, you have the power to run it as you see fit, this includes modifying the adventure to have less rooms, more rooms, rooms in different order, etc. I think mostly if you're worried about staying "true" to the adventure as written, well, don't. What's important is that the group is having fun.
On point 3 I'd say every GM should have some method of keeping notes, whether the campaign is small or large. Find a system that works for you.
I am going to make character tokens and use sticky poster tack to keep everything vertical, with the map on the wall. Someone else over in dnd @ lemmy.world suggested using cotton balls for the fog of war, which I will use the stucky tack for as well.
Even in a dungeon crawl, you can improvise a lot. The contents of the rooms, spells and secrete doors, treasures. I don't know that specific dungeon, but I've never had a D&D game, including a dungeon crawl, where everything went as the module planned.
It's useful to read ahead if you can, the you can seed hints of things elsewhere in the dungeon.
A DM-only copy of the map is really useful, so you can make any notes you want on it. Paired with the list of rooms and what's in them - that's where I'd note down for myself what the players did in each room, if there was anything interesting not note down besides "cleared".
Thank you, I will definitely have to make sure I have my own map printout haha. I am so used to just remembering the broad strokes and jotting down a few npc names and locations in my game that the thought of a whole 240 room labyrinth was a bit much.
When I was running prewritten modules, I was playing online using Foundry, so I could just make all the dungeons by hand and the fog of war would take care of the exploration, plus the dungeons were way less complicated.
OK Yeah, I'd probably keep that map as a digital file, and put big Xs on it when the PCs have cleared a room. I'd probably keep a separate doc with the rooms the PCs have visited, listed out with any notes about what happened there.
Since there's a detailed map, I'd probably never change around the layout of the rooms, that would just be annoying to keep track of. However, I'd feel free to change what's in them in terms of treasure and enemies, depending on what made sense at the time. Note that in the doc as you go.
If you're feeling ambitious or are familiar with an image editing program, you could have a PC version of the map, which you send them after each session, removing the fog of war from the parts they haven't explored yet. They probably need to see the map that they've already explored, to stay oriented.
I probably would read ahead for the ring of rooms nearest where the PCs are. They can always take a totally different tack, but might as well be prepared for the most likely one.
Okay, yeah, I think that is gonna be the way to go. Maybe I could also process the map as an adobe pdf and add comments on each room about when they cleared it, what they found in it, etc. I also have some experience with photoshop, though I might have to pick up some illustrator skills to best do the fog of war edits.
Depending on how much work I am willing to put in, I actually have access to a massive plotter printer for posters/banners through my work, so I am kind of inclined to make a big poster that we can stick to the wall and I can add removable covers with poster tack to each room that they haven't visited to show their progression in real time. My friend who is hosting the games actually asked about putting my homebrew worldmap up on the wall as a poster, so this might be a better, more artistic piece to put up instead (the map I shared is the old one, the 5e conversion map is actually quite nice looking, I just didn't share it for non-pirating reasons).
I also have tried to make a game progress tracker using chat gpt, but I run up against the token limit pretty quickly, so a living google doc might be the way to go to keep track of things. Thanks for your suggestions!
All the many times that I as DM gave the PCs an encounter, and they found a way around it without fighting. Those are always fun to watch and see what players come up with!
I ran a l20 one shot. The party struggled EXTREMELY against a group of frost giants with regeneration, because they didn't bring any fire. I thought I had overturned the adventur as they struggled to light torches and throw them into the giants eyes a and stuff
Then half an hour later, the extremely min maxed rogue tried to be eaten by the boss on purpose and proceeded to gut it from the inside out in two turns.
Rpg in general the eye opening experience of playing a game that's not dnd for the first time. We played wicked ones and it was so much fun slowly learning the rules. I remember when I understood that there is no spell list and I can just do whatever, in accordance with the dm - that was so liberating and exhilarating
Love the general non-DND RPG epiphany moment, I definitely relate to that. I asked the DND question just cause of this particular mag but I 100% agree with that sentiment. My first non-DND rpg was Call of Cthulhu, and similarly we had the same feeling of "no spells? guess I gotta figure out something else creative...".
I think that dabbling in other ttrpg's has actually improved our DND games. Bringing in new flavours and ways of thinking that don't occur until opening your mind to other systems.
I still love DND but it's certainly an eye-opener to mix it up once in a while.
My current campaign has Me: Halfling Divination Wizard who is really wanted to be a Necromancer, a Human Paladin who is staunchly anti-religion, a Human Rogue(Homebrew Alchemist subclass)/Wizard whose alignment is Chaotic/Asshole and who has a tendency to be receptive of Devil deals, a Half-Orc Barbarian/Druid who has a phobia of Orcs, and a Kalashtar Eldritch Knight.
We just hit level 14, and my Wizard has started looking into how to make himself immortal.
Haven't got the diamonds yet to start the clones, but I've got a nice set up so far and I should be able to get the clones started at the end of the next session.
I've got multiple vessels set up on a Demiplane for extra insurance, a homunculus to monitor them and help me wake up, as well as Drawmij's Instant Summons cast on my spell book with the sapphire next to my clone case so I can retrieve my spell book if I do die, and a stockpile of preserved, dry food and extra clothes to keep me for a few days while I reorient.
I'm playing a dwarf artificer armorer, the basis of which was trying to make Danny DeVito in iron man armor.
The rest of the party is: elf ranger, half elf warlock, elf wizard. The 2 GMs switch off with one playing a dragonborn fighter and the other playing a human fighter. There was a great realization when we found out the only characters without darkvision were both of the GM's characters.
I've been listening to a lot of Dungeons and Daddies over the past year. I just recently finished the first season and I highly recommend it. They also have a lot of mini side campaigns that I'd recommend listening to if you wanna get a sense of their chemistry and style.
Find the Path Podcast is the best I've found, full stop. There are still laughs, but they aren't the cheap one liners so nauseatingly prevalent in so many other actual play podcasts I've tried. Instead the focus is on the story, characters, and world around them.
Truly a unique and wonderful experience.
It's Pathfinder 1e and 2e. Production value is very high generally. Audiophile quality these days, though even in the first few episodes the audio is done well.
It's great that kbin added this feature! It ameliorates some of Fedi's groups problems.
I've been using a script that mashes together several RSS feeds into one to sorta simulate this.
(I'm not really sure how this new approach is implemented or what a multireddit is.)
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