I had a guy try to justify the latter type of account as "I'm just not very active on reddit". My man, you made one post, commented on one other post a few weeks later, then complete radio silence for 9 years, just to pop up spreading anti-trans propaganda on post after post?

It's difficult to say with only a brief summary, but it sounds like you and your party all want different things from the game. I'm going to guess that you play with people who you were friends with before d&d, and not play d&d with people you have become friends with.

You clearly seem to have a murder hobo. You also have a player who sounds like he's more interested in hanging out with the group than he is playing d&d. There's a lot of advice on forums about how to deal with these types of players, and your threshold for what you'll put up with is entirely up to you.

I encourage and tolerate a lot of silly shit, but if one of my players handed the same character sheet of their character that had just died with a 2 after it, I would direct them to the nearest LFG post and be on my merry way. That's a dealbreaker for me.

The others don't necessarily sound like a problem, but i think they want a little more railroad and guidance, while you want them to take initiative and make decisions. Neither of these are wrong, but they aren't always compatible.

From our perspective as DMs, its easy to set the scene and say "what do you want to do", then react because we know the whole tavern, encounter, story, world, everything and when we don't, we'll make it up. For a lot of players though, leaving things open ended like that feels very limiting. They don't know what you are or aren't prepared for and don't want to be that guy. They like you, and if this murder is going to be important later they don't want to fuck up the crime scene until they have permission.

As a side note, when I wanted my party to participate in solving a murder, I framed one of them for it. Also, the Gumshoe advice is great for running mysteries. They get the clue that tells them what's next automatically and have to search for more information to gain context so the game doesn't stall on one bad roll.

Ultimately, if you're dissatisfied with the game, you should have a conversation with your players before preparing anything further. I would say something like this:

"Hey muderhobo, I know you like fighting tons of shit, so I promise I will give you challenging combat in the campaign, but I need you to exercise some common sense and let me bring it to you instead going off to find it on your own. You other guy, are you sure you want to play? You dont seem to be interested and we can just hang out sometimes without playing if you want to skip the sessions. The rest of you, I can be more direct in giving you options and plot hooks, what kinds of encounters would interest you most? I'm going to start preparing a new campaign, I'm thinking about (themes and flavor of next story) as being important, can you start preparing characters that would have a reason to engage with a story like that? While I begin preparing, would anyone like to run any one shots in between?"

I think this guy was just someone who's defunct account had been hacked and used to troll. All of his comments from that day featured a ton of both sides arguments and misrepresented statistics, which to me looked like someone who was given talking points and tried to fix any conversation he could into conforming to them.

It was obviously propaganda, and I guess previously I would have thought someone who ran something ad large as reddit wouldn't be so stupid and oblivious...but here I am on lemmy a few months later, so who knows. It's now apparent that spez is that stupid.

So I use a generator that I've built filled with prompts collected from books and community posts. I've got all of these broken down into categories. Theres a few for combat at varying levels of difficulty, and those include some where the combat is already over, and the parry can talk to the winners or aid the losers, or about to start and the party could possibly intervene to prevent it.

Other prompts include foliage, beautiful sights, landmarks, historical events, npcs, whatever your players are likely to be interested in. You got a druid? Plants and animals. Bards or other social characters? You need travelers to meet. It's all about knowing what hooks your party will bite on.

So let's say you have a list of 8 things that are happening between the two points of travel. You need a meaningful way for the party to choose what they want to interact with. You could draw a small hexmap of the area and put a reference for each interaction on it asking them to move a token as they decide to travel. Or you can consolidate to a few paths and group your prompts along each one. Here's an example:

"You stand at the top of a high hill and survey the area ahead of you. There appear to to be two paths forward, the one on the left has recent wheel tracks from a wagon that looks like it was weighed down with cargo (this signals that merchants or refugees came through here), it leads into a forest with a dense canopy that covers the valley ahead. It looks like there is a clearly as the earth slopes up the far side (maybe there's a lake, or a small village, just a cabin, the site of an ancient battle or a hill dwarf logging operation.

The other path heads towards the mountains, it looks like it's going to involve some climbing (now the parry knows there are skill challenges this way), you can see some sort of altar or shrine on one of the lower cliffs that glitters with precious metals (do they seek treasure, is there a cleric or paladin in the party?). There are footprints here, but they are faded, no one has gone this way in a while (this means I've grouped the harder combat encounters here too)".

The key here is not just asking them to choose arbitrarily, but to inform them of what's coming and give them a chance to chose what they want to do. Both paths will lead to the same place but have very different experiences on the road.

I've gotten pretty wordy already so I'll stop here, but if you want to go into more detail about building roadside encounters, I'd love to.

I started my current campaign with absolutely no plot in mind. I chose characters and players I liked and gave them a campaign long escort quest of an author that needed to travel and see remote places and customs to write about. So these kinds of encounters are a huge party of my game.

I just went and read that exchange, and the person who blocked you never said what you claimed.

You went to an article about someone who stabbed a child 26 times after killing his mother and told people to be more understanding of republicans and not blame them for all the hatred they promote. You're suprised people got mad at you?

Where do I fall if I kill them all, turn then into vampires and send them on a quest to uncurse themselves before they level and become vampires forever?

Easily my favorite and longest played character was a goliath' but a terribly nontraditional one.

With the whole "survival of the fittest" mentality that they have I made one of those left behind. He had fallen down the side of a mountain while training with his clan, and was left behind. He fell all the way down it though, skittering to a stop as he crashed through the roof of a barn in the halfling settlement at the base of the mountain. The halflings didn't abandon him like his people did they cared for him and took care of him while he healed. He stayed with them embracing their much more casual lifestyle, until a mudslide washed through the town. He was the only one tall and strong enough to help save the halflings that were stranded and threatened by it. He came to the conclusion that not being the fittest among the goliaths didn't mean he wasn't worthy of still being a hero.

I played him as a mix of Don Quixote and The Tick. The halflings had read him all kind of hero stories about knights and honor while he was recovering from his fall. So he had adopted that code of conduct and chivalry, kept a journal detailing his heroic deeds, and never shrank away from a good cause, even if it was foolishly dangerous.

5e ended with xanathar's guide for me. Everything I've found that i wanted after that was 3rd party creators on kickstarter. Hasbro just doesn't understand the game well enough to produce its content

But in typical fashion, hasbro understands nothing about d&d and will probably almost destroy their property, again.

This might help with him rolling poorly. I run a swarms AC differently than other creatures. I wanted to give some the peoper feel of being everywhere around the party and settled on this as how to simulate it. When it's at full HP the swarm has a much lower AC, I usually subtract 5 from its stat block. This is because you can barely swing a sword without hitting them, theres just so many. Once the swarm has lost half of its HP I add 5 to the AC on the stat block, because as they thin out they get harder to hit.

Obviously this doesn't work in every situation. To keep combat from grinding to a halt this works best when the swarms are part of an encounter with other creatures. I used it as a supplement to a higher creature’s fight and it kept them relevant as a distraction during the fight. If it's just the swarms and the party struggles to finish them off don't forget that they can retreat under such loses. You don't want them to just keep swinging and missing if they're really struggling.

I mean they'll still be relevant because we can still run 5e all tou want, but after the OGL debacle do you really believe them when they say they'll work with the new addition?

Yeah, but if you scale these questions down to regions/nations/cities it becomes very useful. Bookmarked these and I'll pick 4 or 5 to answer about each region as I flesh them out

So I'd like take some requests and draw some maps. The practice would be good for me and I've got a long weekend. I'm totally new here though, what's the best way of doing that? I thought I could make a request post here and post the finished maps on both? Is it preferred to post the image directly or host it on a different site and post the link to it? I'm not entirely sure how the instances work and wasn't sure about the etiquette.

Dungeondraft and worlddraft for most of them, but I do keep a worldographer map of my world so I can add notes to it.

Yes, I love it. That'll be fun

I keep exact dimensions on my battlemaps, but I tell my players that world and regional maps are not always drawn to a complete scale. Some places are actually further apart than they appear, some regions may be smaller or larger than actuality, but the general layout matches. I've also told them somethings are left off entirely.

It seems to give them a close enough idea of how to get places while still giving me the flexibility to make the trip interesting for them

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/717730f1-cad5-4a0f-88c5-d2a6c7dab294.jpeg

Here you go man, I hope you like it.

I'll buy that for a dollar!

Thanks man

I kind of expect them to fick it up so bad they sell it off and hopefully someone better acquires it then. But I doubt I'll learn any edition past 5th. What I have right now does everything I need it to when I run a fantasy adventure

You realize that no one complained that ai art would discourage people from drawing, right? It's because the ai scans other artists works and designs an imitation based on its prompt. It's stops artists from being able to profit from their work because it introduces a free alternative that stole their designs to learn.

I think the bigger concern than whether or not it's good will be what it learned from.