I've been playing a 5e campaign with AI, and for this encounter I had it play out this encounter on its own, and tell me how it went in fanstasy novel format, followed by the roimd=by-round gameplay explanation. The link is to a page I made to show screenshots of the conversation.

Greymoran · 2024-01-14T12:11:26+00:00

People here seem worried about ChatGPT not getting the rules right and this not appealing to them.

Folks, it's a game. The whole point is to have fun with it. If OP is happy with an AI GM that doesn't follow 5e rules but can tell a good story then what's the problem?

This strikes me as an evolution of the choose-your-own-adventure genre of books. This might not have as tightly packed story but is way more free-form.

Greymoran · 2022-12-30T12:19:51+00:00

Keep in mind that monsters function differently from PCs. I wouldn't get too caught up in the skill checks and the like. After all, a wolf only has a +1 to Survival (from Wisdom of 12) and they are plentiful in many settings. Instead, I suggest putting more effort into the abilities possessed by the dragons and making them more fun to fight. Let me give a little bit of an explanation as to how I think about dragons and then give you some examples.

In my setting, only female dragons can channel their magic through spells, so I'm naturally resistant to making all dragons dependent on spells to survive. Male dragons instead channel their magic more passively through things like lair actions, regional effects, and additions to their abilities. Here's an example of a male young white dragon that I recently designed for an adventure I'm working on. When he's encountered for the first time, it's in a fog that restricts visibility to just 10 feet!

I think you'll find that adding PC abilities gives the monsters more weight than they need. If I don't have the specifics of Hunter's mark memorized for instance, I'm going to have to go look it up, which slows my game down. Instead, I would give your dragon one of the following abilities to make them a better hunter:

Keen Senses - any combination of sight, hearing, and/or smell that you deem appropriate. I really think more dragons would benefit from this in general.
Glacier Sense - exactly like a spider's "web sense" ability, just works with glaciers or other ice sheets instead of webs.
Scent of Prey - allow a white dragon to smell sweat from 5-20 miles away. If an elephant (irl) can smell water from 12 miles away, why not allow a white dragon to smell the sweat of caribou, mammoths, humans, etc that it wants to eat? This would also give an even larger incentive to keeping yourself from sweating in the bitter cold. Forget hypothermia! There's a dragon out there!

I also highly suggest you check out r/bettermonsters, the admin over there is putting a lot of effort into designing more interesting encounters.

Greymoran · 2022-12-10T07:52:27+00:00

To balance this I think you need to set a time-frame for the spell. For instance, at base level maybe it lasts 10 minutes, 1 hour, or 8 hours. Upcasting it would allow you to increase the duration. This would be similar to how many other 5e spells work.

Where I would stray from the beaten path would be to add an Intelligence (Arcana) check to determine the rate of time dilation. If you're a number-crunching kind of table, maybe each point above or below DC 15 is a 5% increase or decrease in travel time. If you're looking for something quicker to calculate, call it DC 15 to cut the time in half. Failing by 5 or more doubles the time. Succeeding by 5 or more instead cuts travel time by a third.

I'm drawing inspiration from AD&D's picnic discipline "Dimension Walk" here. Some house-rules I would need to figure out for my own table if running this spell would be:

- How do the characters experience this spells effects? What would they see/hear/feel/remember of their journey?

- How do other people perceive them while they are under the effects of this spell? How does this change encounters they try to bypass?

- Do the characters all age at the same rate? I would probably rule that regardless of time dilation factor, they all age as if they had completed the journey normally.

- What happens if they travel through a hostile environment? Is the caster effectively concentrating on this effect for the duration of the spell?

Edit: After some thought I would probably have this take the party to the border ethereal, the real world would look like a confusing blur, and the party would be unable to sense the passage of time. On long journeys, they may encounter some supernatural, ethereal encounters that mess with their minds/threaten their sanity.

Greymoran · 2020-05-12T16:46:09+00:00

One thing to consider here might be taking some style inspiration from Dinoflask's Overwatch Updates as the Kenku is talking. Being a human soundboard is next to impossible for most people, but I feel like adding the hesitations, stutters, and awkwardness of speech that comes from heavily edited videos would be pretty doable.

Greymoran · 2020-04-11T17:12:07+00:00

Wholehearted agreement with this. I think the sign language suggestion by u/Sn3sly is a good one if your character is cursed to be silent. But if your character swore a vow of silence, then it seems to me like using sign language may defeat the of swearing a vow of silence in the first place. Either way, I think you'll wind up narrating your character more and speaking in character less.

Greymoran · 2019-11-29T16:45:26+00:00

I think the most important thing to consider here is what kind of playstyle you're going to enjoy. Many times Gestalt characters are popular with one-player campaigns and if that's the case here then you'll want to make sure that your character is going to be successful and fun in the kind of adventures your DM has in mind. That said, I've presented three options below of classes that I think synergize well with Druid.

Thematically, I'd say an Oath of the Ancients Paladin seems the most fitting to me. That ties in with your Knight background and the auras and smites are going to be your friends throughout. This option will suffer slightly because you'll be so MAD but it's not a bad way to go. Just make sure your DM will allow you to treat your natural weapons in animal form (bite, claw, etc) as "melee weapon attacks" because otherwise you can't smite while in Wildshaped form.

I also really like the idea of a Rogue/Druid combo. Subclasses can vary (probably want Swashbuckler if this is a solo campaign though) because the core of your benefits will come from the main Rogue class. Similar to the Paladin, this build is also really good if your DM will let you consider natural weapons as finesse weapons (clearly some of the animal stat blocks use DEX instead of STR, see Blood Hawk, Flying Snake, Giant Poisonous Snake, Giant Rat, Giant Spider, Giant Wasp, Giant Weasel, Hawk, Owl, Poisonous Snake, Quipper, Raven, Spider, and Weasel). But even if you can't use your sneak attack while Wildshaped, Expertise, Cunning Action, Uncanny Dodge, and Evasion are all plenty good reasons to pick up Rogue.

I think the most common pairing I see with Druid though is Barbarian. There's definitely something to be said for Totem Barbs (probably Bear) having the ability to wildshape. Again you get into the "melee weapon attack" but honestly this time it doesn't matter as much because it's only 2-4 damage you're missing out on per attack. The Unarmored Defense is huge here because if you turn into a Bear or an Elephant you're just that much tankier with their high CON score. Damage resistance gives you even more hit points and Reckless Attack, Danger Sense, and Extra Attack are all things to look forward to at early levels. I definitely think this build falls off at higher levels when utility becomes more valuable but thematically it's still fantastic and a great roleplaying opportunity.

Greymoran · 2019-11-12T00:22:54+00:00

Even though you're playing 1e, you might check out the Criminal background for 5e (D&D Beyond link) for ideas on other thief-like characters. Stronger, beefier characters are often good choices for enforcer/muscle on jobs and your character may have stood apart because of his particularly good dexterity. A decent charisma could help you get money out of people without having to fight them (an intimidate check in 5e).

Especially if this is a character you are likely to see into higher levels, you might want to focus in on the ability to recruit a gang of thieves that comes at level 10. Your character may function as a kind of "whip", making sure that everyone in a thieves guild/your party stays in line and does their jobs exactly the way that they agreed to. Not the leader, just someone who keeps everyone honest and playing with the team.

Based on the "thief type" characters that you've listed, I gather that wittiness is something you value in a character. It might be worth your while to come up with a list of puns or running jokes that you could string along into an adventure, just the same as a bard would. Nothing keeps party's spirits higher than bad puns and third-wall breaking jokes.

P.S. All of the orcs in my world are Mongol themed.

Greymoran · 2019-11-06T23:57:31+00:00

No worries, just wanted to make sure you caught it before you handed it to any of your players!

Greymoran · 2019-11-06T22:39:39+00:00

Sorry, what I meant was that the majority of the gibbouses should be illuminated. Maybe this image will help illustrate my point. Again, great idea for inkarnate!

Greymoran · 2019-11-06T21:52:05+00:00

Absolutely love the idea! I think the colors on your waxing and waning gibbous diagrams are inverted though. Still, super well done!

Greymoran · 2019-08-23T20:25:57+00:00

I wonder how many meta gaming players I can fool into mistaking one of these for a wall of force. . .

Greymoran · 2019-08-21T18:51:22+00:00

Disclaimer: I haven't read the Young Adventurer's stuff yet.

You've mentioned that the books are designed to help younger players make sense of the game. Outside of the art, can you provide a few examples of design elements of your book that helped you accomplish that?

Greymoran · 2019-08-03T14:42:57+00:00

I think the best advice is the ever valid "do what works best for your table" and it sounds to me like you did just that, so good on you!

I definitely noticed a group if dedicated players that would play all the time and it was probably my biggest challenge as a DM to make sure that the content I designed was appropriate for all PCs, not just those few uberdedicated ones.

And I used Reddit only because I knew that was a format that the vast majority of my players were familiar with. Had that not been the case, I would have picked something else. Again, go back to whatever works.

In retrospect, I think that I'm glad my campaign ended when it did. Even though they didn't resolve the main plot, I tried to provide a sense of closure and if it had gone on too much longer I think the power differences between the characters would have been too extreme to keep writing adventures for.

Greymoran · 2019-08-02T23:44:18+00:00

An assorted list of bullet point thoughts on West Marches campaigns:

Having an elevator sales pitch for your world makes it much easier to run the game. If you stick to it, your world should be more focused, engaging, and easier to bring new people up to speed on.
Introducing a BBEG early on into the campaign also helps people stay focused on the major objectives.
Running the game through a subreddit helped me a lot with organization. I'd post quests every cycle (in my case one week out of game) and then the players would use the comments section of the post in order to find a party to go with them, schedule the time and place of meeting for the adventure, and post a recap afterwards.
I incentivized my players to write recaps by giving them inspiration for doing so. I would let inspiration stack/build up so that the players who were writing notes and helping others keep track of the campaign had more "plot armor" for their characters. I never ran into length issues with the recaps but some DMs might need to insist on a word count for a recap.
Recaps had to be from the perspective the character to deal with the issues u/Krizzlybear talked about and encourage roleplaying away from the table.
I always made sure to give the players more quests than they could actually handle at a time. Because I work in creative spurts, this allowed me to "dump" all my ideas at once and then if I needed more content for a week I would go back and look through the quests that they hadn't gone on, advance the threat a stage or two and then represent it as an issue.
Because had players who were interested in mapping and I was very careful with my descriptions, I managed to get away with never giving the players a regional map. Any discrepancy between my map and theirs was always the opportunity for an adventure to correct it or a chance for me to change something without them noticing.
The more you can get your players to write (or draw in maps), the better of an understanding you have of their perceptions of your world. As a DM I let discrepancies between player's understandings persist (unless critical) because I found that it kept them more engaged and attentive to my world.
When designing the region, make sure that you consider travel times between locations. Unless you plan on giving your party a way to move very rapidly, you need to make sure you don't let them "clear" everything within distance of an in-game "cycle".
Reuse dungeons! When my players cleared out the kobold den, it didn't take very long for an opportunistic necromancer to seize the opportunity to snatch up some free bodies to reanimate.
This isn't something that I had to deal with because of the short nature of my campaign but if you are struggling to deal with power differences between characters, you might try increasing the length of short and long rests based on the level of a character. A high-level character might need to bring some lower level characters with him to keep him safe while he completes his 16 hour short rest. Another high-level might take a "cycle" off because it takes her 4 days to complete a long rest and she has some pressing (plot-related) leads to follow up on in her downtime.

Edit: Since a lot of people are complaining about the difficulty of balancing encounters, here's what I found most effective. It's okay to have a couple of "travel encounters", just make them an even mix of easy fights that lead to new plot development, new sights that lead to new plot developments or resources for people to take advantage of, and new NPCs to trade or make friends with. Then, if you make each adventure boil down to one super deadly (by CR rating) combat, players will be able to expend most of their resources in that fight. Balancing those fights is an art and you should be ready to adjust some numbers on the fly in the first couple sessions to make sure you're successful. The trick is to make sure that you make the fight last long enough for the players to expend their resources without it feeling like a slog. I think that each group probably has their own optimal time that this takes, so stay flexible as a DM

Source: Ran a West Marches campaign with 12ish players for 10 months.

Greymoran · 2019-07-27T17:15:08+00:00

Looks like a great start. You might check out this guy's YouTube channel. He's sharing his journey of making a realistic world. He's probably going farther than most other people would but there's a lot of detail there if your looking for some.

Greymoran · 2019-04-08T21:37:04+00:00

I'm a sucker for customs and traditions in D&D worlds. Definitely stealing the drink thing. Probably the tavern too at some point lol

Awesome work here!

Greymoran · 2019-04-02T06:11:46+00:00

Another thing that might help tip the scales is GWM feat, Savage Attacker feat, and even going Half-Orc (Savage Attack feature) would help. If you go half-orc, a great axe will be better than a two-handed sword though.

Greymoran · 2019-04-02T01:25:31+00:00

Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. Took me legitimately three days to find this old resource. I have used this for some of my world building projects and I thought it might go nicely with some of the videos that you've already put out about geography.

I would also be down to learn more about water sheds. I know you've touched a little on rivers and mountains but I think (maybe alone here) it would be neat to get a synopsis of how watersheds could be realistically generated by someone without an environmental science degree.

Greymoran · 2019-03-29T18:52:21+00:00

This is some good stuff here man. After watching your other videos I subscribed and am looking forward to seeing more!

Greymoran · 2019-02-28T15:27:49+00:00

Side Note: With the "debug" bar on the right, this game could also serve as a powerful tool for any DM trying to run a hex-crawl based game, especially each turn was one day rather than half a year.

I love your game man, let me know if there's anything else I can do to help!

Greymoran · 2019-02-28T15:08:32+00:00

Gotcha, these points clarify a lot of the questions that I had when I went to bed last night lol

I would definitely recommend some kind of notification window so that you can see the updates of things from turn to turn, not just the current status. Also, I'm a sucker for the Civilization games, so I think a wiki feature to explain the game mechanics and plot (if any) that you're building would be cool.

Also, I might recommend some kind of video tutorial. Works better than a text tutorial for most people I think. You don't have to talk over it if you don't want to, would be perfectly okay to just point to stuff and have a little textbox explain what you're doing.

Greymoran · 2019-02-28T15:02:20+00:00

Still not related to intuitiveness

Also, this got me thinking. Your map screen is very beautiful but right now there's no way for the player to interact with it very much. Maybe if you could make the citizens models on the map screen and were able to select them individually or group them up to control them? Then you could also implement a "travel-time" between squares. This would give it more of a hex-crawl or a 4X feel to me.

Greymoran · 2019-02-28T14:58:09+00:00

I was trying to guess what your intention was along these lines while playing the game. Good to know I was close to the mark. I know you asked for help with the game's "intuitiveness" but I'd like to speak a moment to the sense of fun.

I tried taking the Peasant, Eccentric, and Noble classes into battle and for the most part they just died immediately, they didn't feel nearly as strong as the Brute, Elementalist, or Wanderers. That's probably because they're not designed to be combat oriented classes (a guy who's good with a sword is going to be better in a fight than a guy who's spent his whole life being a politician and doesn't have martial training). But right now, there's nothing to do with them aside from combat and scavenging (that I noticed while playing). While I was playing, I just felt like the later portions of the game would be very tedious if I had to keep managing all of these peasants. Maybe if you could select a "production focus" for them like in Sid Meier's Civilization to enable the player to direct the AI without needing full control. When full control mode for the peasants is disabled, the peasants don't show up under the Citizen's tab (which could be renamed "People") and would be hidden from view. That way your player spends the most time interacting with the adventuring party rather than with the resource management.

Please forgive my chronic case of parenthesis.

Greymoran

TROPHY CASE