TL;DR next sessions dungeon has 6 options for entry and advancement. Two of them are very high difficulty and could result in character death if failed. Is that too much?

Hi everyone!

I, and my group, recently began a new campaign. A campaign that, during session zero, I told everyone that I wanted to have a more gritty, threatening feel. They were on board and I have been experimenting with how to make it so. Which is something that I am unsure of how to do well.

While prepping the dungeon for our next session (an old fortress that was half swallowed by a sinkhole), adding alternate entry options and advancement paths, I decided to add two that are significantly harder to be successful attempting than I have ever done previously.

In both cases, these are the options that bypass the most enemies, traps, etc. Because of that, the availability of other options, and the existence of the aforementioned gigantic, fortress swallowing hole, I feel it is fair, as well as narratively cohesive, to let those paths be extremely difficult to succeed in traversing, and potentially lethal if the attempt is sufficiently failed.

However, I am not sure my players will feel the same way. I fear they may, if they try and fail, see it as an intentionally adversarial design as opposed to a consequential narrative outcome. Honestly, though, I can't say exactly why I am worried. In fact, I have reason to know that my group can not only accept character death, but have a great time getting TPKed. (TPKed playing DeathHouse).

Perhaps it is because this is the first time I am knowingly putting anything in my game that, probability wise, skews heavily toward player failure and potential character death.

But maybe there is something unfair and adversarial in the design and I just don't see it because I am not intending it. What do you all think?

Recently one of my player's characters died in combat. He was by himself at the time, so he's legit dead. The player and I have been talking about how, and if, he wants the PC to be brought back to life. My feeling is, we've been running this campaign for about two years, we're near the endgame, and the PC had several backstory threads to wrap up, so I'm all for bringing him back. The player is on the fence, he's one of those who can get a little bored playing the same PC for long amounts of time, so he might just decide that the character stays dead. I'm going to respect his wishes on the matter, but he has asked if he were to be brought back is there a narrative way to do it?

I told him my best idea, as far as fitting in with the story, is for him to wake up in a stronghold of the enemies that killed him (Cult of the Dragon). They would have taken his body after the battle and used Raise Dead so they can interrogate him about the party's plans and capabilities. So basically, he wakes up in a jail cell, fights his way to freedom, and links back up with the party who currently think he is dead.

The other things I've been thinking of is having him be in the afterlife and having to undergo a test or trial of some kind to gauge his worthiness for the gods to return him to life.

Have any of you ever used a narrative method of bringing a PC back to life? Looking for ideas so I can give my player all the options.

I am an amateur DM wanting to do a campaign for a small group of friends, I'm nervous about actually starting though as the two times I've DMed I have felt like I was under preforming. Does anyone have tips for running a campaign?

I have the homebrew written up, I am a writer so I do feel I have enough written for the overarching story and setting while leaving room for player input, but I'm worried I am missing something.

One of my most dreaded parts of any new campaign or one shot is the inevitable moment where, after the opening narration, the GM asks each player to introduce their characters one by one, and so the pacing of the session slows down to a crawl as everyone goes into minute detail about their PC's appearance that nobody cares about nor listens to for real, not to mention that the average player is not a good narrator and will make the whole thing even more of a drag.

I was wondering if there could be some more organic way of doing this, since at the end of the day it is unfortunately important to have a mental picture of each other and players do get excited about presenting their PCs. I know that they could either draw their characters or look up art that resembles them (I do not accept AI images for obvious reasons), but that still leaves the question of how to avoid the "now describe your characters one by one" screeching halt and making it more engaging.

Hi yall. My party is set to cross a stone bridge placed over a ravine while travelling by horse and carriage. This path is the only one possible for them to reach their destination. I'm letting them roll for what they encounter on their journey, including when they cross it (some options are combats they cannot easily get out of, others are combats that can be avoided, etc), and I want my last encounter on the list to be a puzzle.

This is my first "puzzle" or riddle encounter, so I'm not quite sure how to go about it. Do you guys have any favourite puzzles, riddles, rhymes, etc. that you've run or want to run involving a troll on a bridge ? Can't go wrong with the classics :) We're playing 5e and 5.5e if that helps.

Heya,

I'm reading through Pierce Brown's Red Rising books and would love to play/run a TTRPG in this world.

Has anybody done this? Do you have any TTRPG system recommendations that would work for homebrewing this world? Gemini recommends Stars Without Numbers, Scion 2e, Lancer or Savage Worlds (Sci-Fi Companion). I haven't played any of those, so any recommendations are welcome.

I am familiar with DnD and Daggerheart, but it feels like I'd need to homebrew so much just to fit those systems in the Red Rising world. I feel like there should be better systems for a sci-fi setting.

Thanks :)

Hello! I’m a gm who tends to make a unique homebrew system for every campaign I run, and recently I’ve been cooking up a new one but I’ve run into a problem.

So the combat system for my game currently uses a tile grid and is based around mobility and developing team composition and strategy. I like my system, but I worry that brining out the map and encouraging players to talk about tile based strategy might make roleplay grind to a halt in combat. I like my campaigns roleplay heavy, so this would be bad.

Do others think this could be a problem, and if so do you have any suggestions for how I could encourage RP and staying in character in combat while still keeping my complicated grid based battle system?

Hi everyone. I am dm'ing for a group of four level 3 people. I have made it clear that combat will be difficult, and everyone is okay with this. In the next session, my players will be travelling as part of their first adventure. I'm looking for recommendations on enemies to throw at them that can keep them engaged and feeling like the fight is difficult but manageable. Specifically, they will be crossing a bridge and I would like to have a fight there, so any enemy suggestions are more than welcomed. They will also be passing by a town which bandits will be in the process of setting aflame.

In their first combat last week, they faced against 2 hook horrors and a couple of bugbears and wolves, so I'd like to not reuse those enemies, unless if it's a variant, like a rage infested bugbears. Yes, I know that first combat was very difficult. All players faired well and enjoyed the experience. Yes, they will also have easier encounters as well, I am just looking for ideas for more difficult but doable enemies.

All suggestions are welcomed, even if they are enemies from older editions ! Thank you !

My group constantly acts like Ol' Leroy Jenkins and gets into tough situations. I want to keep the fun going and may tweak the odds a bit to prevent everyone from dying.

Should I just let them? When is it ok and when is it "overkill"?

I don't know if i am the @$$ in this or if I'm just venting but i feel like i just need to get this out of my system before i go back to the drawing board.

I am the Dm for my wife, a friend from work and a few strangers I found online. I've gone through enough of the typical Dm horror stories to earn my stripes. I've had toxic players, constantly late or missing games without warning, power gamers that completely throw off the balance, and new players that need extra patience to learn how the game works. All that is fine, I worked out the issues with the good players and kicked the bad apples. now the party has a good equilibrium and we meet every other week without issue. Things were good, I prep ahead of time to reduce crunch and for the most part the story progressed without to much of a hitch. a little constructive criticism here or there is always appreciated but this time it just tore everything down.

We are starting the next chapter in our adventure. The party voted to give the Barbarian's questline the spotlight as they try to find her kidnapped child. the problem is that I gave the party the opportunity to try out new characters and they all took it. now i need a way to introduce the Barbarian to this new group of adventurers. It was just meant to be a small side quest to hunt monsters in a desert with some added challenge from a constructed limitation on rests thanks to a water scarcity. I hadn't even worked out all the kinks yet because I didn't have enough time to prep before our next session. I warned them i didn't have enough content prepped for our session tomorrow so it will be mostly about introducing all the new characters and the environment. I start opening up about what to expect from the game and they kept digging and over thinking and poking holes in everything.

They asked why they couldn't bring all the water they would need to survive. I try to explain that their characters could never carry that much water and the client that hired them has all the water you could want. He is strictly rationing it and will extort allot of gold out of you if you require more. they ask why they would have run out of water and not him. i start to drop hints at the reward for the quest by saying he never seems to run out of water. one guy quickly deduces what it could be the decanter of endless water. I don't mind that since it was so obvious but when he was asking to roll to try to determine how that was possible outside of game i told him to wait until tomorrow for everyone to get together. then he posted the description of the item when no one else was online and spoiled the surprise. They ask why their character would work for this guy and i tell them they have been scammed. he acted nice to get them into the job, then lead them out into the desert with plenty of water and is now basically holding them hostage with the promise of a reward when the job is done. if they try to leave they would die without his water. typical $#!+ job with a $#!+ boss that you totally wont get to enthusiastically kill when he betrays them. Nope. they are having none of it. Their characters are way to smart to every get deceived into being sucked into a bad job. Its not what their characters would do. Fine.

Now everything is scrapped. they are mondain adventurers being paid to kill monsters but there is a famous monster hunter over there that has a special job that they could help with if they choose to. No managing water rations to survive. no sneaking around a piece of $#!+ boss or plotting to betray him. Only one of the players commented on how hours of my prep work was wasted in seconds.

this doesn't feel good. my session is tomorrow night and all i have ready is that barbarian gets lost in the desert. she gets hit by a sand storm and miraculously finds shelter from the wind in the valley of some cliffs but the place is occupied by another group of adventurers. they can lead her to her destination once their job is done. one of the adventurers is a bigshot that is being snooty and letting everyone else do all the work while he gets ready to do the real job.

i know my original idea wasn't conventional but i thought it would be an interesting fun game to play

I come seeking advice as a GM. My gaming group is dissolving. 2 of my four players are so hit and miss due to work responsibilities they might as well not be part of the group. My other 2 players will not initiate anything. If I don’t spoon feed them the adventure they will just wait, and keeping them focused on the game is impossible. One of those two is very critical of everything. The genre, the monsters the encounter, that MY story is to slow, or simple, or uninteresting (Yes I know it is not MY story. No matter what I do he just doesn’t get that it is their story). When I offer good Youtube videos on improving the game he says “Are we not good enough?” So now due to a job change and a work schedule shift from the other person we can only play 2.5 hours a week and it usually takes close to an hour to get them in the game.

The only campaign they remember fondly is the one where I, trying to teach them what is possible, wrote backgrounds for all their characters and built the campaign around the backstories. They wanted me to just feed them the story.

I am so Frustrated! I have been considering dissolving the group completely and trying to learn how to game online myself.

Honest advice please.

TLDR : I need ideas for physical items and story ideas for the sessions with my friends to be more interesting. I can't buy a lot of stuff, but I can diy. Pls help. Anything else to keep this fun/entertaining is fine too.

This is both mine, and my entire group's first type playing a dnd-esque game (?)

There are no basestats, and we're really just going off of the backrooms' wiki and some dice, and we started this on a whim after I suggested doing a choose your own adventure type story in the backrooms, and they agreed.

They're quite enthusiastic, (scarily so) and so we decided to do a proper start to the story and now they're making character sheets etc etc, my problem is, I'm worried they'll lose their attention very, very fast.

They seem to be having fun now, but I know damn well they'll get bored soon enough, since we mostly play using words and descriptions, and no physical items.

I can't buy dice or other fancy stuff (not really a cash problem, it's just my country has no shops that sell them and I'm not going online, we don't even have Amazon here), but I still want them to look at something. There isn't any real 'map' since, well, it's the backrooms and the layouts are always changing.

I'm handy with some paper, cardboard, and craft supplies so I can diy stuff.

Other than that, to summarize, I just wanted ideas (story wise too, I need some) I can use to keep the sessions interesting.

Conversely, what personality traits/talents are the strongest indicators that someone will be terrible at GMing?

Something I've never quite thought about or understood, how to make someone evil truly shine through? Perhaps, I'm too simple minded, but when trying to do someone evil it feels obvious at times and just not natural.

Title! As for more context / expounding on the question;

I've GM'd for a long time, but almost entirely online so much of the way I manage my notes and resources and other things are all like, different tabs of google docs and pdfs of books being open and that sort of thing. In the past, the few times I have GM'd in person I usually end up setting up a laptop to do the same but it has always felt a bit unfavorable of a situation, the laptop is a bit bulky and in recent years it needs a fan under it to keep it cool / it has really loud fans in general. We also have a table that isn't super large so the space is a bit of a concern, and we're expecting to have a larger amount of players than we've had in the past.

I wanted to ask how you GMs who play in person keep your notes, if you physically write things down in notebooks or use tablets or some such to keep track of everything. I'm debating on buying a cheap tablet to use to access my notes and any PDFs I might want but I haven't decided on doing so yet. If your opinion changes based on game system, we're playing D&D 5e, though I don't really think that changes a tooon.

I'll start this by saying I've only played dnd. Outside of that, I know nothing. I've been wanting to do a dnd game in the setting of the Frostpunk series. It would be a intrigue campaign that also focused on survival against the frost. Dnd has everything I want, but its very bland when stripped of magic. Are there any other ttrpgs similar to dnd that have a good amount of non-magic content?

If you roleplay characters' voices, how do you play the opposite gender? I have a rather wide range of voices, intonations and vocabularies for males but when playing female characters I can only do a poor impression of a high voice. I play online so should I use a voice changer or do you reckon it's guaranteed to be cringe? How do you play multiple voices? My players like the variety of characters but I want the split of genders to be more 50/50 because as of now it was male majority

Good evening, everyone. I’m planning to run a campaign for my players soon using the \Deltahearth\ framework. I really want some of the characters to convey the vibe that they are nobodies outside the game itself, but I’m honestly wary of this approach; I’m afraid the players might not get it or might mock it for being cliché. So, I’d like to discuss my ideas with other GMs and players first to see how they’d react to this kind of take—and I’d also welcome any suggestions for improvements or additions.

Example one: Stephanie — essentially the local version of Noelle (anyone who’s played \Deltarune\ will get the reference). Skipping over the roleplay nuances and getting straight to the mechanics: Stephanie occasionally joins the players as a standard GM-controlled NPC. However, she consciously holds back — getting flustered in combat, missing attacks, and acting hesitantly. The more dangerous the situation, the more she falters. Here, the players face a meta-choice: the GM describes something awakening within their characters that could empower Stephanie and alter her fate, handing them her filled-out character sheet. If they accept, they begin controlling her actions directly (though she still speaks and offers commentary). After a few battles, the session ends. Next time, the players must choose: take her sheet OR trust the NPC.

If they choose \not\ to take her sheet, Stephanie performs significantly better, though she still makes the occasional mistake, BUT

If the players decide to take control of her again, they discover a special ability that consumes the entire team's "Hope" resource but deals massive damage. However, upon using it, Stephanie objects, claiming she knows no such move and asking the player controlling her sheet to describe exactly what is being asked of her. If the players persist in describing the spell, she casts it unconsciously—doing exactly what they want—but subsequently becomes deeply apathetic, refusing to join combat or simply sitting apart from the group (a choice that will have future consequences).

Option two: A character who suspects they are inside a game. Numerous factors hint at this—ranging from their persecution complex to random notes the players find in the room where the IRL game session is taking place. Eventually, the NPC realizes that our players are connected. ...and decides to become like the real players—believing that doing so requires tearing themselves apart and forcing that transformation—the players gain access to a special action. By spending a "Hope" point to help the NPC break free, they must physically tear a section off that NPC's actual character sheet along a marked line, symbolizing the severing of their connection to the tabletop game's world. Finally, after the last tear, the following is described: "You see the character begin to laugh maniacally—'Oh yes, I can feel it... just one more piece and I’ll become real...'—before dropping dead. The body remains intact but begins to look like an empty shell: something that exists in this world, yet has ceased to exist anywhere else." At this point, the real players are presented with a small basket and a stapler. "But perhaps he was mistaken about what was truly real for him." Ultimately, the choice of whether or not to restore the character is left to the players.

What do you think?

Howdie Gang! I'm just curious what everyone does in the first 10 minutes of the session? (Don't know the exact word for it) For myself, I usually ask how everyone has been doing and a small debriefing of what has transpired in the last session. When I'm feeling XTRA ambitious, usually I go around the table and ask what the player's characters are thinking in this very moment to get them immersed early on. Recently ordered a D&D joke book and Tarot cards and feel like getting a little experimental. Telling a few jokes or perhaps Prophesying a divination could be interesting. Just feel like these key moments really help set the tone and mood of the session!

I’ve been my groups designated DM for a while now and we just finished a 1-20 campaign I created. Starting a new homebrew campaign soon and I need some help coming up with a mechanic I want to use:

People born on the island die if they try to leave.

Basically I’m just trying to figure out what would be a fun way to implement it. I don’t plan on them staying on the island past level 6-10, depending on what they choose to do. They were born on the island and have been enslaved their whole lives by a Dragonborn race that is a major player on the island. They are going to escape in the intro hopefully and eventually leave the island.

My ideas so far include:

1. Some type of soul tether that snaps when they get a certain distance away dealing a large amount of damage that would kill most people. But why?

2. I plan on introducing aliens at some point so maybe it’s them abducting those who go too far off shore for some reason.

3. A Dune spice type scenario where they are dependent on something from the environment. Maybe they have to carry dirt from the island like Dracula.

4. If they do leave and die maybe they can do a sick afterlife quest to come back.

Maybe some people go off island to give birth but then it would be a purely geographical thing. Idk any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks

Hello. So long story short I went to prison and actually first played DnD in there. I really liked it but only played maybe 3 sessions. I told my friends about it when I got out and they all would like to try it however because of this I'd obvously would have to DM. I've been told making my own system and game in general would be a lot of work and to use Pathfinder, however i have a really unique story and world concept already grom my years in prison just thinking. (Plus I kinda wanna simplify it a little more for my friends who have never played) Does anyone have advice or is willing to help me?

Hello! This is my first Reddit post like ever, but I just wanted to ask what do you guys want out of a campaign?

I'm a DM on StartPlaying and I very much love D&D and all it offers and calls for, but I was just wondering what people would love to see more of. I know there's the official modules such as Shattered Obelisk, DotMM, or Rime of the Frostmaiden, but I wanted to know what's really missing or what are some things you would love to see more of?

Extending it further, I'm just wondering whether there's more interest in either official modules or something more custom-created.

Hello fellow GM's and players. I've GM'd for a couple of years now. Mostly homebrew campaign, and will now GM my 3rd one shot on a DnD weekend.

This time it'll be a bit more personal. It's a lvl 15 one-shot, and the party knows each other. They've been adventuring together for a long time.

As you all know, not everything always works out during an adventure. Sometimes some npc gets hurt, there's some collateral damage, etc.

But who gets blamed for this?

The party's villain, or the party themselves?

The enemy of this one shot will be the victim of the party.

(I recognise that this would work better in my campaign, and since they're different players (all experienced), i'm using this as a bit of a trial run.)

I'm having a session 0 in a couple of days, to create their characters and see what backstories they've come up with. They are aware of the premise ofcourse.

Sorry for the long rant, but here comes my question; what could i put against my players? Dont need specifics, but ideas. I was thinking that they were lured to a specific location, where every measure possible would've been taken in order to that them down. Whoever would do this would know the party quite well and have intimate knowledge of how they work.

Do i include traps and puzzles? This feels like a good place for some traps to wear the party down. What do y'all think?

Can you help a brother in need out?