Sandra

There’s also cook’s utensil rules in XGE.

@dogsoahC@lemm.ee @dnd@lemmy.world

Cherries!

This is great, makes me happy to hear!

@flumph @dnd

It was such a awesome storyline though! Def made me interested in the game (but probably gonna skip it after all since I don’t think I like these kinds of games).

It’s good that it’s a concluded S1 storyline since a lot of us still have a lot of catching up left to do of Discovery. I just started S02E08.

@RootBeerGuy @startrek

You’ve already gotten an overwhelming amount of tips but here are my standard tips.

@Oszilloraptor@feddit.de @dnd@lemmy.world

Not that Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is bad but I like Lost Mine of Phandelver a lot better. You don’t have to play to a particlar ending either, just start playing and explore. 💁🏻‍♀️

It’s one of the best adventures of all time. ♥

@TransplantedSconie@lemm.ee @Brunbrun6766@lemmy.world

Even outside of home if someone is curious I sometimes just say a scene and ask what they’d do or where they’d go 🤷🏻‍♀️

You’re at the edge of a misty, dewey forest at the break of dawn. In front of you is a castle, and there’s the forest behind you all glittering from dewdrops on the cobwebs. The nearest village is six miles away; you could get there in two hours or so. There’s a well outside the castle a couple of hundred feet to the left of the entrance, which is right in front of you. Whaddayado?

It wouldn’t be as blorby as I prefer but it’d be an intro to the main gameplay loop.

Yes, I’m ready for that situation since this is a common daydream 👍🏻 I can drop 'em right into my ongoing campaign, plenty of stuff for them to do and explore there, and I have many ways of making characters that are all compatible up with the big 5e game down the line. From pregens or the Essentials Kit to something in the middle like Dungeonesque and if they’re really non-nerdy and just wanna dip their toes, I have my own searcher. I don’t use it if I think they are serious about getting into full D&D but it’s nice because it only has two stats and those are both derived straight up from level. (So in short, if I think they’re future nerds I’ll use the Essentials Kit and if I think they’re pretty set in their non-nerd ways I’ll use my searcher class, and it’s no big deal if I guess wrong because it’s easy to switch over.)

I run theatre-of-the-mind so we’re ready to go. If they are looking for more of a dice&minis type thing I have that Castle Ravenloft board game that came out in 2010. Easy to learn and plays in an hour and teaches basic attack rolls & hitpoints stuff and is still called “D&D”.

Although I wouldn’t hesitate to refer to Shadowdark, Svärd & Svartkonst, or any other OSR game as “D&D” either. There’s no trademark lawyer in my living room. 💁🏻‍♀️

Generosity. Unyielding unflinching generosity. Giving the other NPCs and PCs the attention they need.

You can also look for ideas in books like Hillfolk (has ideas on how a “dramatic pole” can help, i.e. being torn between two conflicting values like home life vs work) or Play Unsafe (such as playing with status, being a noble or a servant). Play Unsafe also has the wonderful tip to not be afraid to be boring or obvious when improvising, to say the first thing that comes to mind as opposed to trying to force a creative or unique idea, because what you think is gonna be boring may well be super interesting to the other players (and when it’s not, it’s at least something basic and fundamental they can easily build on).

You can also collaborate with another player for a type of relationship with their character like being their body guard, religious follower, sibling, servant, spouse, teacher, or student. (Only if they’re into it, of course!) Some storytellers over the years have used extremely shallow and two-dimensional characters to great effect over the years simply by having a cast of characters collide with each other—people meeting other people is great story fuel.

Create Food and Water.

That red one squeezed into the misc row looks painful 🤕

I’m also an artist, for whatever that’s worth, 🤷🏻‍♀️

Copyright is artificial scarcity which is ultimately designed for publishers, not workers.

One of the many, many bugs in market capitalism is that it can’t handle when something is difficult to initially create but when copies are cheap. Like a song. It’s tricky to write it but once you have it you can copy it endlessly. Markets based on supply and demand can’t handle that so they cooked up copyright as kind of a brutal patch, originally for book publishers in an era where normal readers couldn’t easily copy books anyway, only other publishers could.

It’s a patch that doesn’t work very well since many artist still work super hard and still have to get by on scraps. Ultimately we need to re-think a lot of economics. Not only because digital threw everything on its ear and what could’ve been a cornucopia is now a tug of war for pennies, but also because of climate change (which is caused by fossil fuel transaction externalities being under-accounted for—if I sell you a can of gas, the full environmental impact of that is not going to be factored in properly. Sort of like how a memory leak works in a computer program).

I definitively sympathize with your artist friends and I’ve been speaking out against AI art, at least some aspects of it (including, but not limited to, the environmental impact of new models, and the increasing wealth&power concentration for big data capital).

The copyright argument is a bad argument against AI art. But there are also good arguments against it.

no more Brave

So there’s a silver lining. But the WEI project is still overall a complete disaster that needs to rot on the vine. It’ll wreck not just browser diversity but overall hackability, adblocks, mashups, and above all: accessibility.

Right.

Instead, the worry is that devs will write other server backend code that won’t respect browser back-holds, that will demand compliance.

These bookburnings are a Nazi project. The guy who started them is a Nazi leader who wants Sweden and Denmark to be ethnically cleansed. And sickeningly, the entire Swedish justice system from cops through judges to politicians backed him up (and now that there are repercussions they have cold feet).

People who are like “lol muslims can’t handle a li’l free speech? It’s only paper” have been deceived. They’ve fallen right into the trap as designed by the fachos. The classic tactic: do something that the target group understands as a hate-fueled threat but that onlookers misperceive as not that big of a deal.

Free speech is vital to an open and just society. The exceptions need to be few and clearly defined. (Counterfeits and frauds being a pretty commonly understood one.) I hold that inciting hatred against the outgroup should be such an exception.

Karl Popper put it perfectly:

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

Doing a great job so far! Keep it up, no need to rush things or force growth.

One of my regrets as a player ( @reverse was DM-ing this one) was when we only had one or two (we ended up only having one, IIRC) session to do Forge of Fury and one guy wanted our characters to spend so much time in the bar before the party set out and I was thinking “at this rate, we’re not going to get to explore the dungeon” and kept pushing us forwards. Which was dumb because it took away from that player’s fun. You can’t really “do” a module anyway, it’s just a location; what really matters is our play there, and that bar talk was part of the play for that player. I was stressed since it wasn’t a normal campaign, only a few limited sessions, but I was ultimately misguided there. When I myself prep for one-shot con games I bring a much bigger sandbox than we can ever hope to explore at the con. The important thing is what the players and their characters choose to do, not them finding or seeing everything,

But I’m of two minds. One of the two big beginner mistakes is not letting time pass. I’ve seen groups—not this one, where my fear was unfounded, but other groups—that just didn’t know how to advance the diegetic clock. Their characters are stuck in a cage? Well, then nothing happens for three real-time hours until a guard comes and talks to them. They’re wandering through a forest? Well, that’s gonna be real-time, too, with every meal accounted for.

That’s not great. The fix is to let time move as slow or as fast as it needs to to answer any salient or relevant questions the players or the DM have about a situation. “It’s a six day journey there. On the fourth day as you’re deep into the forest, you here a rustling in the undergrowth. What do you do?”

I try to make this feel more like fast forwarding or time-being-told-quickly than “cutting”; some people get really uncomfy with cuts forcing them to take their eyes off their characters.

Once you’ve learned the knack for that kind of zooming in and out of time scales, you can start finding out what part of the game and the game’s world you all find most interesting. If, for your group, that means zooming over the domning & doffing & praying, that’s fine. And other groups can make different choices and that’s also great.

I’m so scared they’ll mess it up. The original box set was amazing, but they’ve gotten worse at making adventures over the past decade.

Ignoring or handwaving components is 100% legit. DMs and groups should not use so many rules that they get overwhelmed.

We do use a lot of component related stuff in our campaign because we’re such hopeless tryhards. A list of magic words for the verbal components, and costs added to the material components low-level food-and-light–giving spells such as Light and Dancing Lights. And the special ink that wizards use in their spellbook.

It’s a part of the game I really love 🤷🏻‍♀️
The idea is that when we’re counting torches or trying to buy a pearl or incense, our concerns are the same as the character’s concern. We are doing what they are doing. There’s something magical in that.

That’s not to sell anyone else on this philosophy. I love it so we do it—don’t do it if you don’t love it. Keep it simple and keep the parts of the game that you love.

And we absolutely do use focus or component pouch for all non-costed components so we don’t have to track basic eyelashes and guano. We also use the rule from Tasha’s Cauldron that even rangers and paladins can use a focus. (That might’ve just been an oversight in the PHB.)