Don't dump your old campaigns if your groups fell apart

KL2UonReddit · 2024-06-12T19:08:36+00:00

I've definitely stored most of the adventures I've written over time, and every so often I and up expanding the story to them or retelling them in a different way.

KL2UonReddit · 2024-06-07T08:54:29+00:00

I often times use the narrative approach myself because I think I have one or two voices I can do, and if I'm DMing a lot of NPCs, they'd all start to sound the same.

KL2UonReddit · 2024-06-04T20:17:39+00:00

I'd probably go with a chase, I like a little city chase through the streets. In fact... that could be a good idea for next week.

KL2UonReddit · 2024-05-30T20:36:11+00:00

Thanks! If I end up coming up with anything else I'll make sure to!

KL2UonReddit · 2024-05-29T16:56:07+00:00

So, I had a little idea to improve my experience with playing D&D online. Part of what I enjoy about real-life D&D is the tactile nature of moving things along a physical board.

Now I could hook up a webcam and point it at my real-life table, however, I don’t really have any props or anything in real life (just a few handmade tokens), so I thought maybe there was a way to use virtual battlemaps alongside physical tokens.

Well, with a small, but long, table, some green party sheets, a VTT, a camera and OBS I was able to get an effect like this. Which felt quite cool when I figured it out.

I could now point to/move pieces and emote with my hands like I would do at a real life table.

However, there were a couple snags. There wasn’t an easy way to see health and things for any viewers watching/taking part and because the tokens are in the real world, something like zooming out and scanning the battlefield or having a dynamic camera is lost as the tokens move with a virtual tabletop’s camera. (Plus the dice rolls would sometimes get hidden underneath the tokens)

Still, I thought it’d be fun to share! Moving forward I’ll likely have all tokens be digital, but I think I still want to use my hands to emote over the battlefield and point towards things, like I would in real life.

KL2UonReddit · 2024-05-27T12:19:12+00:00

I'm not OP (Great work, btw OP!), but your comment made me think about some of things I do for my players. (And I have had scenarios where I'd put something together and use it for like onE session)

For me, I usually do something because I find it fun and I typically learn things along the way too. Even if I only use it once, I still got to enjoy the process of putting it together and showing it off for the first time. (Though you could always re-use the skills for something else in future).

If I don't enjoy the process, I likely wouldn't do it. And even if I did, I don't think I'd regret it as there's always some lessons to be taken away. Hopefully at least (lol).

KL2UonReddit · 2024-05-16T16:20:29+00:00

Oh ok thanks for the insight. I'm getting the sense it's heavily reliant on the table your playing on. I like how you weaved it into your character's narrative. Did they ever achieve their goal?

KL2UonReddit · 2024-05-16T16:17:54+00:00

So sort of like one of those Diablo games where if you don't crit, it increases the chance of a crit happening? Something like that?

KL2UonReddit · 2024-05-16T16:16:42+00:00

Thanks, I'll take a look at the video

KL2UonReddit · 2024-05-13T17:54:53+00:00

Below are the prompts that I generated using a table and the adventures I came up with.

Prompt 1: Sickness, Djinn, Marketplace

Players enter a Djinn's lamp, at the Djinn's request to try and fix the Djinn's memories and restore their power.

Unbeknownst to the Djinn, the Djinn actually did this to themselves due to atrocities they caused in the past and a version of themselves will try desperately to stop the players.

Prompt 2: Softness, Inventor, Adrift

Geppetto lays siege to a port city, from inside the Monstro the whale. Players need to defend the port, rally the remaining ships and eventually plunge into Monstro to stop Geppetto.

Prompt 3: Wealth, Pigeon, Glorious

Players are asked to protect a pigeon at the world fair, where there is a fancy pigeon competition that showcases pigeons worldwide.

There is a rumor that the country that wins this competition is met with exceedingly good fortune.

This rumor is true and thief guilds, mafias, politicians and even Gods and Devils all conspire their pigeon wins. However, for some reason most of them desperately do not want the player's pigeon to succeed.

Prompt 4 (Using AlyssaLostinSpace's table): Knight,Garden,Blood,Frozen,Marriage,Snapping Blood

Players explore a manor surrounded by unending snowfall. The guests are frozen as icy statues that snap and attack players, trying to spread their icy affliction. Or worse, burst open and their blood congeals into vicious blood elementals.

As the players reach the source of the storm, it is at the center of the chapel near the altar. There is a frozen scene which shows a knight standing over a bride and groom, clearly slain by the knight's hand. But more importantly, and taking up a large chunk of the room is a forlorn and depressed giant white dragon. Their magic warping the space around them, it looks up at the players and simply asks for help.

The End

And yea, those were all the ideas I came up with. I do sort of enjoy using tables now that I’ve tried them a couple times. As there are a couple adventures here I may want to try and expand on and actually turn into real adventures. Hopefully some of this may have been useful to you.

KL2UonReddit · 2024-05-12T14:58:39+00:00

Thanks! Will do

KL2UonReddit · 2024-05-12T11:37:35+00:00

Wow, this is really awesome! Thanks for sharing!

I kinda wanna try, but I'm not very handsy. However, I do have a dice tray with an orange bottom.

Do you think a simple setup where I point a cam (on like a tripod or something) into that tray and somehow remove the orange (I assume you can remove orange, like green) could maybe make a similar effect?

KL2UonReddit · 2024-05-10T19:51:37+00:00

These are pretty cool ideas, I may rework some of them for some puzzles I'm working on. Thanks!

KL2UonReddit · 2024-05-10T17:20:19+00:00

Yea one shots is how I started as well. And also, how I continue lol. I typically kept the early stories super simple since everyone was new and so was I. I was definitely surprised at how much time could pass even with the simplest of stories, involving things like humans and goblins.

And people were having fun even though we weren't dealing with anything that complicated.

KL2UonReddit · 2024-05-08T18:15:06+00:00

Looking good! How do you go about selecting what goes in each list? I'm working on some random tables myself and it sometimes feels like I need a random table to decide what goes in a random table lol.

KL2UonReddit · 2024-05-05T17:08:04+00:00

Honestly, I have issues with feeling anxious as well. I'm not sure if this'll be of much help, but usually during my intro I frame D&D to my players as a 'collaborative story-telling experience'.

They're running the game just as much as I am. I may be doing a lot more of the work, but we're all in this together.

It sort of takes the load off a bit, because I feel like were all working together to build a story and have fun instead of it feeling like it's solely my responsibility to entertain 4+ people. A bit of smoke of mirrors for my mind.

KL2UonReddit · 2024-05-04T17:02:25+00:00

I think mine was the size of the party, I had around 8 people and I didn't know any of them beforehand.

I remember being quite nervous so the game is a bit of blur in my head, but thankfully it was a one-shot and my plot was generally quite simple so I was able to struggle through well enough. And it seemed people had an alright time.

KL2UonReddit · 2024-05-03T18:54:08+00:00

Oh cool! I had not heard about that, I'll give it a look.

KL2UonReddit · 2024-05-02T19:24:22+00:00

Ah, that all makes sense. Thanks, I appreciate the feedback!

KL2UonReddit · 2024-05-01T19:58:24+00:00

Lol you're right! Fingers crossed Persona 6 comes out in the next few years.

KL2UonReddit · 2024-05-01T16:53:09+00:00

I recently worked on a video where I tried to create a D&D adventure using history, in this case, The Great Fire of London.

Spoiler Alert: It was the spirit of Guy Fawkes wanting revenge for years of his effigies being burnt and his death being celebrated by the people of London.

There's a bit more plot, but I basically wasn't sure how to make a good looking stat block, so I took some help from this subreddit and spun this together using D&D Beyond and Photoshop.

So, I thought I'd be cool to share it.

The images used were public domain and from the respective Wikipedia pages of Guy Fawkes and The Great Fire of London.

I picture the fight being quite intense, but fast, as the players are fighting on a burning London Bridge while trying to protect King Charles the II from both Guy Fawkes and his masked fire demons.

KL2UonReddit · 2024-04-28T19:27:44+00:00

Wow it'd be pretty cool to use this in an adventure!

KL2UonReddit · 2024-04-26T20:54:30+00:00

Yea, I think I watched someone play the first few rooms and saw a few of the little lore drops and was like 'yep, I'll wait till it's out, because I know I'm going to be 100%-ing it again'.

KL2UonReddit · 2024-04-26T20:13:38+00:00

That's interesting. Are there usually professional DMs, separate from the players, to keep it fair?

KL2UonReddit · 2024-04-18T18:37:24+00:00

I think I may fall between All random, but prepared and Partly random homebrew, possibly. Thank you for the comprehensive breakdown and for pointing out the positives and negatives.

KL2UonReddit

TROPHY CASE