Well Minnesota has a good job market so start looking over here.
The welcome wagon may contain hotdish....
dumples
joined 2 years ago
If you are LGBTQ+ come on over to Minnesota. You can get over the cold but we will welcome you with open arms.
Interesting. Would be fun to have it added to a traditional DnD campaign.
What's so exciting about the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth? Must be cool if you want to base a campaign on it
I have a few campaign ideas that I have been kicking around in my head for a while. They were all options that I gave my players before we started our 3 year campaign. We ended up doing a classic DnD 5e adventure using the Acquisition Inc. rulesets for them to run a business / do downtime activity which has been very fun so far. It was set in the world they did their previous campaign 50 years later which they loved
The Revolution
Vaguely based on the mythology around American Revolutionary war as shown in Hamilton, The Patriot etc. Basically a remote colony that is breaking away from a larger empire that is on the edge of a new "unexplored" and "empty" territory. The players could be revolutionaries, empire loyalties or hired guns.
The Hunt For the 12 Talismans
This is a straight up rip-off of Jackie Chan adventures where the players try to find the 12 magical talisman in a vaguely Asian inspired campaign world. This I really liked because its a limited campaign since we can have 12 adventures to get the 12 main magic items.
Wildspace and Wild West
Aliens and cowboys. Classic western feel with a mix of space travel and advanced alien technology within there. I originally planned it to be set in a Spacejammer type world with that being the mode of space travel with their classic baddies as the BBEG.
I would like to DM one of all of them some day. They are all system agnostic and am focused mostly on the feel and general vibe.
Dnd 5e. It was my first system I played and then got the PhB. Then did a bunch of 3.5 and pathfinder 1e before moving back to dnd 5e. I have done most of my time in 5e but read a lot of different ttrpg that I haven't gotten to play yet.
I’ve found that when the players hit an outright failure, a lot of the time they just draw blanks or zero in on this one specific solution. It’s a weird tunnel vision.
I think this is definitely video game logic where there is one solution to the problem. Doing a session 0 to talk about how to get around options is a great idea. I try to do the same as well as give a variety of different options when asking what they want to do next which includes some bad ones. (So you didn't talk your way past the guards what do you want to do next? Go clubbing? Go look to see the rest of the building? Get a haircut? What do you want to do next?). It helps if it incentive by the DM in game. I played with one DM who never let us fail (basically infinite inspiration which you could reroll as often as needed) which wasn't as fun as it seems. If the players have fun with a failure that is incentive to try even if you don't succeed.
It helps that a lot of my players have been doing TTRPGs for years so they have the out of the box thinking down. They come up with wacky good and bad suggestions. It sometimes hard to see the difference between the two until it happens.
For my skill checks I set multiple DCs for a roll including automatic information. So depending on how high they roll the more information they get but they always get something. This is especially true for information gathering spells. Things like getting based doors or guards they can fail. But these kind of failures just drive them to other options for getting based the barrier such as breaking down the door or getting the guard drunk.
Be careful with red herrings and other false clues and leads. Most parties will make their own false leads and other conclusions without any prompting based on something completely random or unnecessary. So limit this as much as possible and make it obvious when investigating why someone is innocent if they are. The investigation is part of the fun.
Also try to make sure there are multiple ways to get an important piece of information with the general recommendation to be three different ways. These should involve the players special skills / spells /etc. to encourage and not penalize people who doing what they do best. These channels should be flexible as well because the party may do something you didn't expect such as interviewing the mice in the castle to see what they heard that night. So if they do anything they should get some information even if its a duplicate of something they already found out.
When I was doing my most recent adventure there was a ballroom scene where the party was trying to find out something suspicious. There was two mysteries going on: a secret fey run raucous boozed filled Mirror Ball and some extradimensional horrors had body snatched people to eat their brains. So I had some set DCs for various secrets they could learn from automatic to DC 35. So when they did something that might get some information I picked one and they learned it. Some of these secrets were given multiple times from multiple sources. They ended up getting all of them except who is the extradimensional horrors by befriending and raising the social standing of the busty redhead wallflower who was secretly the queen of gossip by some massive performance and persuasions checks. So be flexible about how they end up learning the secrets because they can and should all be given as information to the party even if it makes the killer obvious.
I love Mississippi Market. A great place and I feel good about their donation systems. More expensive for some things but totally worth it overall
I have a random NPC generator tables I made. I have a 1d8 for gender (1 is androgynous female and 8 is androgynous Male, the rest are male and female). I tend to have certain races more androgynous and gender bending than others. I also have height, clothes, hair, eyes and body. Similar tables with some personality traits.
For race I have a 1d100 table for my major regions. The 1d100 let's me get small percentages of rarer species and allows me to create groups. So for the current area 70% are from the region with 60% being the top three races and the remaining 10% being atypical. The remaining 30% are broken down by nearby regions and foreigners. This lets me customize each section and roll on subsections of the table if I have to.
I always race, mostly roll gender and everything else is optional. The gender, appearance, and personality tables are universal and I have made few race tables for the campaign. They are useful tools to have created and to use
So I have been DMing a DnD campaign from level 3 to level 15 at this point. At this point my players have killed ~900 "monsters" at in around 40 different adventures. This doesn't even count the numbers that were in an adventure they didn't kill because they ran away, avoided or were NPCs with monster stats. They have killed at least 10 in all categories except plants, fey and celestials so having lots of categories helps as well.
So we need a lot of different options to keep everything fresh and interesting for the players and myself. Some of these are nuanced adventures with complex interactions and moral dilemmas while some are basic hack and slash. So I need a lot of different monsters to use that fit different flavors, use different mechanics and cover different difficulties. I have created some from scratch but it helps to have templates to start with. I won't use everything in the monster manual but I have used a lot of it so far.
I think it helps to think of each adventure as its own little novel. So in one we are exploring the culture and cruelty of the Yuan-ti in a vaguely Mesoamerican inspired setting while the next they are exploring Bridgerton inspired high culture and dance that was infiltrated by both a rowdy fey and cosmic horror beyond the stars. It helps to have lots of inspirations to draw on since every adventure can be different.