writing a new campaign (I'm a new DM). Session 0 is character creation/introduction to the hub city. I've been developing a plan for session 1 but it just occurred to me it might actually suck/be unworkable
The players are aware that right at the outset of the campaign, their characters will die at the hands of the oppressive government (they're members of a philanthropic NGO-volunteering as teachers in an impoverished city)
they will of course be resurrected
I've been mapping out how that desperate battle will happen
and what I landed on was informing the players that in four real time hours, something dreadful would happen to the city and the result will be their deaths. The stakes for those four hours will be trying to control the endgame as much as possible, including either saving as many people as possible or focusing on giving the insurrectionn its best possible advantage
From their vantage point, they will have their 'first day at work' experience, but encounter a number of 'hooks' they can either follow up on or not.
there will be a surface level question
at 3 hours in, a swarm of revenants raised from a secret mass grave march into the city-each revenant is a missing relative (mother, father, sister, brother, husband etc) of someone in the city who'd mysteriously vanished-but were actually victims of a secret purge
this is one of the 'fixed' events-the outrage caused by this touches off a revolt in the city and the government's response is ruthless and total.
before that 3 hour mark, if the players follow up on every 'hook' they will be presented with two options that will give them some heavy advantage if they choose to either help the insurrection or help people flee
but if they just screw around, the swarm shows up regardless and the revolt happens
in the following hour, they will fight to the last man or woman trying to accomplish one of three possible goals
their success or failure will impact what the world will be like when their program coordinator resurrects them
including how many of up to 7 possible faction leaders become radicalized by the trauma and start their own revolutionary groups with their own agendas, class specialties and endgames
(and i'm also considering allowing them too influence which of the factions end up getting activated)
that's my session 1 outline-my questions are: -have you seen similar session ideas -is this practical-or am I biting off moroe than I can chew/more than the format can handle -is this reasonable to throw at the players in the first session
-should the time limit be real time or 'in-game time'
The question I have is: before planning all of this out, do you have any idea whether your players like the idea of playing such a session? It seems like one good thing is that the decisions they make during that outcome-predestined session will have repercussions on the players' later play. But I'd be worried about (a) whether or not they know how much what they're doing matters, and (b) whether the players are enthused to play narratively-sacrificial lambs.
Also, from both personal mistakes and collective wisdom osmosed from the interwebs, I recommend against scheduling a long sequence of story-critical events into one session. It's bad pacing, it rushes the players, and it can complicate the campaign structure if things don't go according to plan.
@MikeQ Yeah, but do they like the idea? In the sort of situation @Regress.arg has described I'd much rather approach the players with "I'd like us to play out a sort of prologue to the campaign, how much would you want it to be determined through play vs. discussion vs. chance vs. me?" &c.
So the consensus is I should split up the prologue into more than one session, and use an in-game timer
what about the notion of a timed scenario where even if the players simply explore the world I made for them, history catches up with them regardless
sort of along the lines of-it doesn't matter whether you meant to be a revolutionary or not, if you're in Paris in 1789, the Bastille will fall and France will lose its shit
i could use any and all advice, even directed at the whole idea of the prologue itself. Even if your advice boils down to "no matter how you swing it, DND wasn't made for situations like this" or whatever, I'll be receptive.
also as of yesterday, two people joined who ARE familiar with TTRPGs
@Regress.arg I think you need to be really careful and clear about the "history catches up to you" thing, because very often it turns into the GM forcing players to play the game the GM wants to play when the players have been very clear they're interested in some other kind of game.
is it worth it for me to just start after the TPK would happen so session 1 is me explaining the events of the prologue and just jumping into the main plot?
This greentext is a commonly shared example, but it really boils down to "you ignored the plot I wanted in favour of one you liked, your victory is meaningless and everyone dies."
Ah, sorry, I'm responding to the "a timed scenario where even if the players simply explore the world I made for them, history catches up with them regardless" element you were asking about.
This was discussed a few weeks ago, I think, about DMs who don't clarify the win/lose condition of the campaign and then surprise the players with a sudden "game over" event
I imagine you're used to DMs that are far more militant about their chosen 'plot' getting executed that they'll do everything they can to force players to do things their way
If your notes say that the win/lose condition is X, but the players think it's Y, then adhering to your notes means you're effectively playing a different campaign than your players.
I will say that something I've learned the hard way is, introductory scenes tend to be a boring way to start a game. I like to start games by throwing them into a tense situation, we can worry about background "how we got here" stuff later. Start with an immediate situation with an immediate threat, and let complexity build; rather than starting with a ton of expositionary stuff to remember and process.
among the changes to the world, the insurrection becomes fragmented between the 7 faction leaders, the landscape is bitterly anti-government, and the players themselves are unknowns to the world
wouldn't that recommend the prologue then, as a playable part of the game where the overall environment becomes more and more threatening and requires increasingly drastic action on the players' part to stay alive?
Hm. If you're interested in a game that focuses on escalating challenges in an increasingly hostile environment, D&D may not be the best system for the game.
D&D could work if that's the high-level plot stuff, and the players primarily interact with the plot via stuff that D&D specializes at (e.g. small-scale battles, dungeon exploration, etc)
D&D doesn't have the tools for faction-based storytelling, that part would be entirely free-form RP. Your ability to represent hostility through system mechanics would be limited to physical conflict, which in D&D is based on assumptions of lethal outcomes weighted in favor of the PCs. And while your narrative sounds like the more the party does the harder things will get, D&D works the other way around: the more the party does the more awesome they are and the easier obstacles are to overcome.
The difficulty scaling isn't necessarily true. Generally, as the party gains power, the DM will need to throw bigger, badder, and more magical threats at them in order to maintain an engaging level of challenge.
The game is supposed to metamorphose from "adventurers struggling to survive in an anarchic civil war" to "powerful wildcards try to engineer their idea of the best outcome of the civil war and potentially create a greater clusterfuck"
an illustration of the limits of physical force in peacekeeping
@MikeQ Maybe 5e is radically different at higher levels, I don't have personal experience with it; but from what I've seen it's no different from 3.5 or 4e in that PC capacity outscales NPC capacity unless the GM is really pulling strings to keep up.
@Regress.arg Ahah, then that's why not to use D&D: it's a game about physical force.
@Regress.arg Sure, in D&D it is because D&D doesn't have any mechanics to use. But there are a TON of games out there which use their mechanics to center intrigue, mystery, drama, etc.
@Regress.arg Intrigue games usually thrive in systems in which players can contribute to the intrigue. In D&D, intrigue is either the plot style (and entirely the DM's job), or a secondary means of interaction (aside from force/combat).
so if they want, they can play up the wildcard aspect so it's them against the combined forces of everyone and everything, attempting to overthrow everyone and start their own empire
D&D can support "intrigue" in the sense of villainous plots and such. As long as those plots can be resolved by force. But less so if you want the players to consistently take diplomatic approaches, manipulate popular opinions, or have mechanically complex dialogues
@Regress.arg Both Gumshoe and Fate are setting-neutral. They have a lot of different pre-made settings available, like House of Bards, but are designed to tell certain kinds of stories rather than telling stories in certain worlds.
Fate's all about collaborative storytelling @Regress.arg Mechanically there's very easy ways to break it in play, mostly by absurdly overusing the numbers you are good at to a ludicrous degree
@GeoffreyLim Which isn't really breaking it, because the numbers are all tied to story elements so stacking up numbers is just telling a really cool story.
@Regress.arg how many of your players are porting a PC/Video Game mind to your TTRPG? Don't answer that now, find out by interacting with your players. you need to know what they are bringing.
@Regress.arg If you want gameplay where the players are politicians or nonviolent types, then D&D isn't a good fit. If you want gameplay where the players are warfighters, and the overarching background plot is intrigue-flavored, then D&D can work fine.
Wargamey is like... complex chess? Very tactical, quantitative, with comprehensive battle mechanics. Anything non-combat related is either absent or has less robust mechanics.
e.g. D&D's social mechanics don't incorporate stuff like representing relationships between people or factions, or gauging the state of a conversation. The social mechanics were designed for stuff like convincing monsters to not attack.
@Regress.arg I think Fate Core probably has the best tools and guidance on customizing a geopolitical setting that interacts dynamically with the characters.
If you do decide to use D&D for combat, you can integrate Fate pretty easily for the sociopolitical elements.
Fate is more of a toolbox than a system, and its foundational principle is that mechanics derive from narrative. So it's easy to take an existing narrative and tie Fate mechanics into it.
@GeoffreyLim No, 5e has simpler mechanics and the numbers are kept smaller. There's fewer character build options and much fewer hidden rules, which means gameplay tends to move quicker and combat is not as explosive.
Huh? I think we're talking over each other's heads here
I meant how from my experience, combat in general for the older editions felt like a burst of violence and fighting past the second or third round tended to be cleanup.
5e has a lot of concentration spells, and disallows casters from concentrating on simultaneous spells, which means you don't have characters walking around with like 5+ buffs on them
@Regress.arg FATE is good for new players because the mechanics are lightweight, and it doesn't require system mastery. It can be tough for D&D veterans because it involves a very different approach to gameplay.
@GeoffreyLim It is sometimes, but it can also drag on a fair bit - in 5e the length of a fight is mostly determined by the quantity of resources the players are willing to commit to it.
in corporate-speak: "Establish community best practices for Dungeons & Dragons brand. Cultivate a D&D community that is open, inviting and positive. Engage the community daily in discussion of products and lifestyle around the game. Identify and mitigate community concerns as they emerge. Be the champion for the players and keep the company honest to its player needs. Take consumer insights and forge then into actions and strategies. Track effectiveness of community engagement and express them in ongoing reports."
tl;dr interact with the community, serve as a bridge between the community and the company, identify problem areas, etc.
I'm actually not too sure on what WOTC considers their main avenues of community interaction. I'm assuming facebook, though I'm not on that one. I don't know how much they use the brand's twitter compared to people tweeting individual team members. I know they have twitch mods. I think I heard they have people on the D&D reddits, though I don't think they post.
I don't doubt that you couldn't hand them well, of course. It's just taxing on the inside, at least for me --- I'm a consultant employed in the aviation biz despite, uh, having some opinions on the amount of aviation this planet can sustain divergent from my employer...
@CTWind I assume Twitter, maybe Facebook (though I don't use it as often so I don't know how much they post there), definitely Twitch. They have a YouTube but comments are always disabled.
@nitsua60 Nah, but these are the parliamentary elections so they're pretty important
Just counted, a total of 19 parties to choose from. (although only eleven of those have any seats now, and even of those some are results of party splits)
@kviiri What's this election's method? Is it a ranked-choice, or winner-take-all? (Living in the US, I'm pretty interested in any other method of picking representation!)
@CTWind I, personally, would be perfectly happy to have him post. I've got no doubt that if not constrained to 140 characters he can articulate things sensibly.
@V2Blast There's a lot of facebook interaction I've seen from D&D Community Managers. I don't know if that's their main mode, but it's certainly where I've seen them most.
Basically, each vote goes to the party/block of the indicated candidate. The most voted candidate in a party/block gets a score equal to their party's total vote count, the second-most voted half, the third-most votes a third, and so on. Seats are allocated by this score
> The axiomatic properties of the D’Hondt method were studied and they proved that the D’Hondt method is the unique consistent, monotone, stable, and balanced method that encourages coalitions.
Interesting.
@kviiri So (forgive my slowness) you're voting in some region that has multiple seats to allocate?
Okay, interesting. So if I can verify my understanding... I live in a state in the US. My state has *N* representatives in Congress. My state has partitioned itself into *N* congressional districts, and when I vote it's to determine who the representative is for my district. If your system were in effect here I (and every other resident of my state) would all vote on the same slate of candidates (rather than *N* slates as we do now) and the *N* representatives would be selected by descending "effective" votes per D'Hondt?
The only problem I really have with it is that it's a bit difficult to understand. I mean, they teach it at school, but still every election there's someone loudly whining about their candidate receiving more votes than someone else but still not being elected
(because a single popular candidate in a party can drag on several less-known politicians along from their party)
I mean, suppose you like the Social Democratic Party's rising star Mrs. A, but she's relatively little-known while the party's top ranks have famous names like Mr. X
Let's say Alice, Bob, and Charlene are all Bluocrats, and Dexter and Edith are Redpublicans. Vote totals for a 3-seat election are A: 1500, B: 300, C: 200, D: 500, E: 100. Bluocrats have 2000 total votes, Redpublicans have 600. So effective votes are A: 2000, B: 1000, C: 667, D: 600, E: 300. A, B, C are elected even though D had more "natural" votes than C.
If each vote'd go to the exact candidate only, you might be tempted to not vote for Mrs. A, because she might not get in, wasting your vote. And if you preferred Mr. X, you might be tempted not to vote for them, because if they have a huge margin it's all wasted votes that could've helped similar-minded candidates.
@trogdor I would like preference voting or such, but they can be a real mess too (I mean, our system isn't that complex but people still fail to understand it all too often)
@kviiri yeah, here (guam specifically not in the US as a whole cause we can't vote for stuff there) we get one vote for Governor and then votes for each individual Senator and who we want as a Congressional representative
@nitsua60 Yep. And quite commonly minor parties form blocks where they share the same vote pool --- major parties don't do that often except in municipal politics where the "major-minor" distinction is far more regional :)
I mean, I can think of several "not-totally-bonkers" reasons to deny people their constitutional rights and "living on a particular island" is not one of them!
@nitsua60 Our politics have changed a lot in the last decade or so. Previously, we had three big parties: the agrarian Centre Party, the centre-left SDP and the market-liberal National Coalition (also markedly pro-European). They'd form a coalition of two big parties in the cabinet, with some minor parties brought in to get a majority in the Parliament. Things changed quite fast when the "True Finns", riding on a platform of anti-immigration and Euroskepticism, rose into the "big three"
I mean,..... they got #$#$#@ all for aid just from that storm,... what they did get was late, and now the #@$#%#$ #$@$$@ @#$$#@ is saying they got too much
I don't know of anything like that happening here but here? the US government took like, somewhere around 30% of the island for millitary bases (paid the families who owned the land nothing or next to nothing, also didn't ask any kind of permission first) , had an admirality appointed Governor for a long time that the people of the island had no say in, and don't count our votes in the main elections or give our Congressperson an actually counting vote either
we also just don't have senators except within our own system
none that go vote for Federal laws or any of that anyway
also, if the island did get together for a referendum idea to vote for independence and it went through, I doubt it would be something the US would actually do
lucky for them people here are actually pretty patriotic despite all this #@$#@#$
@kviiri there is also,... some stuff about US companies coming in and exploiting Puerto Rico too, stuff that there should be laws against in any US territory that just isn't being looked into by actual law enforcement
it's in some ways eerily\ similar to what happened in Hawaii before they became a state actually
if more of a "modern version" of it
not to mention the whole thing about not only allowing but pretty much forcing them to receive no aid for a ridiculous amount of time after that storm hit them
something close to 3000 people may very well have died as a result of that
they had an independant government that the US overthrew
maaaybe Statehood was better than territory but they also have a problem with the State government of Hawaii selling familie's land to rich white guys
like Mark Zuckerberg
because they pass their land to family without paperwork basically
so that's taken by the State government as "no one owns this because not on paper"
and this is just the stuff I know
you would have to ask a Hawaiian person and likely you would get soooo many different answers
I could even have some details wrong but basically,.... I don't think they got more out of it than they paid
Same for Guam, as a US territory everyone born here has citizenship, but not only did land here get taken, but the US has made deals on behalf of the island that no one here was consulted on, and Guam has also given more young recruits per capita to the milliatary than any state
and in return no one here has a vote that counts in the US
for President or in Congress or anything
and it took a while for the US to even let Guam have it's own elected Governor, and it's own Senate
like I said, we had an Admirality appointed Governor for a while
even for a little while after WWII
certainly for all the time it was a territory before that
The Defense fighting style says:
While you are wearing armor, you gain a +1 bonus to AC.
Can use still use this if your mage armor AC is overriding your armor's AC because you are still wearing the armor?
With this, a bladesinger could easily have an AC of 20 at level three:
10
+3 Dex
+3 ...
@nitsua60 I agree, I just know there's some divisive opinions on Crawford rulings. I do appreciate the few instances we have of questions answered by the actual designers.
@Regress.arg I think they're ok, if the conventions relating to the time limit are clearly communicated (including out-of-universe terms)
I'll get right back to it :)
need to run a little errand
Ok so
If you've ever been in a busy as heck situation in real life, you know things don't wait. If you've ever been in a busy as heck situation in a JRPG, you know there's still time to do as much backtracking and level-grinding as you please.
Fiction of all kinds --- films, games, novels, comics --- tends to assume only one thing of time: there's always just enough.
If your heroes are going to stop a bad guy from summoning a dark god trapped inside a can, they'll invariably arrive at the scene just as the ritual is about to start (or maybe it's already on the way)
What if (and this has been communicated to the players) the time-limit was till something that was going to hit the whole region, and the players' actions were highly unlikely to save themselves (resurrection later), but they could impact the aftermath through either quests to rescue as many civilians as possible, or hurt the regime as much as possible
The moral of the story this far is that time isn't exactly a constant when it comes to fiction. Your players may, knowingly or otherwise, have a different expectation on how time works in your game, unless you explicitly set the expectations to them
@Regress.arg I've never seen a real use for them, but I guess they could work in some circumstances. Do note though, that in DnD, the amount of real time per in-game time is not really constant
I mean, a minute of combat can easily take over an hour
Actually now that you reminded me, we did use real time tracking in a single one-shot scenario that was emulating a Battle Royale video game. It wasn't bad, but didn't really add much IMO
@Regress.arg One way to look at it might be to consider 8 kinds of fun and ask which kind(s) of fun are you trying to create with the clock. And then reverse it: considering those engagements, is a clock the best way to encourage them?
In Unearthed Arcana, there is a set of optional rules for Spontaneous Divine Casters. Under the assumption that these rules are used and that any Favored Soul fluff is ignored, is there any mechanical reason to play a Favored Soul instead of a Spontaneous Divine Caster Cleric? After all, the Favo...
Real time tracking (and limits) are also awful if your players are new, because they will sometimes need time to figure out things, and punishing that time-taking is not fun
@Quentin got my DW campaign off the ground with ACM and Glazius, but it's on hiatus for now until some scheduling things can be figured out (as is typical :P)
@Regress.arg If you're using D&D 5e, another possibility for countdown clock is to measure by the players' in-game actions. Combats, short rests, conversations, etc.
No, it's just a subtle way of signaling to the players that something ugly is on the horizon. I'm deciding against imposing a time constraint on them (as much as I like the idea of structuring the prologue as a crazy thriller-that's the stuff of stories, no gameplay)
If it's just in-world time restriction you're on quite safe ground really; the classic "the ritual must be stopped before they summon X" etc. It a choice between the Realistic
"it happens by T", or the Heroic/Gamelike "it happens just when you get there"
Either is valid (and up to preference; so talk with your players)
The Defense fighting style says:
While you are wearing armor, you gain a +1 bonus to AC.
Can use still use this if your mage armor AC is overriding your armor's AC because you are still wearing the armor?
With this, a bladesinger could easily have an AC of 20 at level three:
10
+3 Dex
+3 ...
