Tactical gameplay is already something I very much encourage. One nice thing about playing with the same group for a long time is that I know they’ll respond when I put things on the map - opportunities to flank, drop or collapse things, and so on.
Thanks for that link! I’ll toss that at my group and see what they think.
Out of all the ideas here, this is one that interest me the most. I’ve seen a lot of things, but not something that does better when you’re low…
Oh, my rolls as DM are private (and of course I’m fudging them as needed). But their rolls are public still!
Well, I’d like to fix the frustration (for both me and my players). Whether that means fixing the rolls or fixing the encounters to account for bad rolls, something needs to be altered.
After I noticed this, to confirm it wasn’t just imagination I just started logging the roll results (d20s, at least) into an Excel sheet as we played. And yeah, they’re actually rolling that badly.
Oh, trust me. I’m already working in that kind of thing.
Actually it was a sign of how incredibly frustrated my group is with this situation that they - who normally will pull out every stop to ensure not a single foe escapes - looked at the fleeing NPCs and said “Nah, forget that. We’re not dealing with more of that.”
Don’t know if you caught it in the OP, but this is already a digital platform. I will look into the idea of a “trinket of luck” or something (non-attuned, because punishing them for their bad luck seems like a bad move).
I really think you were one of the few people who actually read that bit of the original post… thank you!
Civilizations are big, and people are resilient - so we rarely find things like, “This plague/volcanic eruption/extinction of a species 100% wiped out this civilization and their culture”. People tended to move away rather than just die, and their cultures tended to assimilate and combine rather than just vanish.
But there are placed where we reasonably believe that natural consequences resulted in the decline of civilizations:
The decline of the Sumerian nations is associated with increasing salinity of the fields in southern Sumeria, shifting populations north towards Akkad. I believe there’s still uncertainty over whether this was driven by Sumerian irrigation practices or some other cause, but the fact that it happened is undeniable.
The Hittite Empire was a vast prehistoric empire which collapsed as part of a period of upheaval known as the Late Bronze Age collapse. The cause of the collapse is still disputed, but it is clear that there was some environmental shift involved. Warfare, plague, and economic changes may also have contributed.
In both these cases, we have only very fragmentary remnants of the surviving culture, often filtered through the lens of subsequent civilizations’ recordings. The Hittites even were arguably “lost” for a time - until the mid-1800s, they were only known through Biblical references, rather than any relics or ruins.
For reference, the first generation of IPhone actually preceded the IPod Touch, but the Touch reached my friend group first. Thus my reaction when I first heard of the IPhone was more or less,
“The IPod Touch is a gimmick, and now they want to make it your phone? Why the hell would anyone want a touchscreen phone in your pocket? Touchscreens are finnicky at the best of times, break at the slightest provocation, and a whole computer in your pocket would cost an absolute fortune. There’s nothing wrong about just carrying an Mp3 player and phone separate in your pocket; this is just Apple selling an overpriced toy to their fanboys. Touch-screen computer-phones will never take off.”
Boy do I feel like an idiot now.
Ah well, fair enough.
Waterdeep Dragon Heist is, I believe, intended to have a conflict between the Xanathar’s Thieves Guild and Zhentarim. I know when we ran it, the DM noted that we had actually managed to avoid some campaign material by resisting getting associated with either guild. But I’ve only seen it from a player’s perspective, so I’m not sure how deep or detailed it goes.
And this infuriates me because the market for those suites is so oppressively terrible.
Like, hell, I don’t even need the full suite of simulation and modeling tools that they come with. Just give me a rock-solid parametric CAD engine, a decent rendering suite tacked on to it, and I’d really love it if anyone in this market could start investigating Linux compatibility! Hell, I’d even pay for that - just not the awful licensing regimes the current offerings operate under.
Yes, unfortunately. Or at least seems to.
This person was an eye-opener for me in terms of how deep political groupthink and unquestioning belief can go. He’s an intelligent person in a highly technical position that requires plenty of reasoning and thought, but if the right political commentator says something, it is absolute truth.
The overwhelming thing I remember is a sense of “Huh, I guess this is it.”
There was a possum in the middle of a busy road, acting oddly. Walking in slow circles, pausing to stare, wandering back and forth… just generally acting odd. I was concerned it might be rabid, and nobody else had called 911 yet, so I did. Gave them the info, they connected me with the local dispatcher, and that was that. Didn’t stick around to see what happened.
When I got home I found out that Possums are almost never rabid. Poor thing had probably been hit by a car. Animal control probably would’ve been a better option, but when I’d called I was actually worried for anyone else who stumbled into it.
Bonus points if it’s, “He’s childish because he’s so emotional.”
And then we wonder why men are closed off emotionally.
Huh. Today I learned. Neat!
Depends on the magnitude of what is being warned of.
“Warning, graphic gore”? Absolutely appreciated. “Contains scenes of actual combat, those with PTSD may wish to leave the room”? Yeah totally reasonable. “This book contains vivid descriptions of sexual abuse”? I can see why people would be squicked out by that.
But then we get into the absurd side of it. A film about the Holocaust, needing to warn its viewers that some contents may be distressing? Wow. You don’t say. A memoir about a tragic death, needing to put a warning that… someone dies? “This politics discussion may discuss slavery, racism, and oppression”? Oh no, we have to think about upsetting things that happened!
And before someone suggests those are unrealistic hyperbole, those are all things I’ve seen. I don’t feel those are helpful.
This. It says, “I acknowledge you are upset, and accept blame.”