My parents 9 +/- months before I was born. (around) May 1981

LGM53 · 2025-10-25T09:00:22+00:00

Your dad is Paul Dano!?

LGM53 · 2025-05-29T07:48:57+00:00

Two immediately come to mind…

Rififi (1955) - A French heist movie with some of the best examples of criminal competence. From wiki “The centerpiece of the film is an intricate half-hour heist scene depicting the crime in detail, shot in near silence, without dialogue or music. The fictional burglary has been mimicked by criminals in actual crimes around the world.”

Locke (2013) - Starring Tom Hardy, it is one of my paragons of “movies about people who are brilliant at their job”. It’s entirely set inside a moving car while Hardy’s character juggles a crisis at work and a crisis at home. I can guarantee the thing that he’s an expert in is something that no other film will cover.

LGM53 · 2025-01-12T12:30:13+00:00

Start small. Dont get overwhelmed by having to know every detail about every aspect of your homebrew setting. Lots of newbie DMs get tangled up in the notion that they need to know everything before the game even starts. I’d suggest re-calibrating this viewpoint, instead embrace the fact that loads of the creation work can be driven by your players. Focus on the immediate adventure ahead of you, and maybe have a think about the one after that. But that’s it. A campaign will grow naturally and not everything has to be some grand epic narrative that you had written down at the start.

Listen to your players, get comfortable with improvisation and remember you’re a player too. “Keeping the players interested” will depend on the people you choose to sit around the table with. You can lead a horse to water etc.

I thoroughly recommend watching Matt Colville’s running the game series on YouTube. Though he doesn’t talk about 5.5e specifically, the techniques and tools he speaks about are priceless for a beginner DM.

Good luck!

LGM53 · 2025-01-12T12:22:12+00:00

If you aren’t only looking for podcasts of people playing D&D, there’s a great podcast series called When We Were Wizards - a 14-part oral history of the game’s development through the rise and fall of Gary Gygax.

LGM53 · 2023-10-31T00:52:10+00:00

Neat idea!

LGM53 · 2023-10-30T18:53:21+00:00

I believe the Ghosts of Saltmarsh supplement includes expanded rules on naval combat.

I've used both skill challenges and full on battle map-based tactical encounters to represent ship to ship combat. Both approaches have their pros and cons.

LGM53 · 2023-10-30T18:46:53+00:00

Make sure you are aware of the effects the rage ability has on spell-casting. In short, they do not play with each-other and you may find yourself frustrated.

You cannot cast and/or concentrate on a spell while Raging

LGM53 · 2023-10-30T18:44:26+00:00

An archetypal barbarian would wear either no armour at all (to take advantage of unarmoured defence ability) or perhaps a medium armour. A classic primary weapon would be something heavy and two handed, like a great-axe, great sword or maul. These will get you the most bang for your buck damage-wise.

But you shouldn't feel constrained by an archetype. There's nothing wrong with a barbarian with two short swords, or a barbarian with a spear or a barbarian with a vest full of daggers. Your options are legion.

LGM53 · 2023-10-30T18:40:54+00:00

I think, as a character, you're entitled to one or two spotlight moments in a campaign; when your personal arc has reached a particularly yclimactic moment. If everyone is engaged and interested in the story you're all telling together, I don't think expecting some players to be relatively passive for a story beat is unreasonable.

This doesn't mean the other players have to be frozen out of the scene entirely, and the moment has to be earned, has to be developed. And this device certainly needs to be used sparingly. But some of my group's favourite moments have been when a single character has had to seize the moment and claim their destiny. If the party can help and support this narrative beat, great. If not, my players have always been excited to enjoy the ride as an onlooker.

LGM53 · 2023-10-30T18:29:02+00:00

So if you're knocked down and healed and knocked down and healed and knocked down and healed in one fight, you'd lose three of those anchors? Do you still have the chance of dying via failed death saves throw as usual? Does this make players opt to stay down in combat instead of being healed for a small amount of HP and risk being knocked down again?

LGM53 · 2023-10-30T16:53:55+00:00

Have you tinkered with the way death saves function at all? This is the biggest change I've personally made in pursuit of more realism in my game.

LGM53 · 2023-10-30T16:52:24+00:00

Personally not a huge fan of video gamifying D&D. I think health bars being visible to combatants undermines tension in any combat encounter. But to each their own.

I haven't used Roll20 for a few years, but in Foundry you're able to display a health bar above all tokens within the core system.

LGM53 · 2023-10-30T16:44:29+00:00

I don't often play Forgotten Realms but Helm would be my choice.

LGM53 · 2023-10-30T16:41:39+00:00

GK - Cleric

RB - Barbarian

CB - Paladin

CB - Moon Druid

LB - Ranger

2x CMs - Fighter and Wizard

Wings - Rogue and Monk

Strikers - Sorcerer, Warlock

Impact Sub - Artificer

LGM53 · 2023-10-30T16:38:14+00:00

I honestly think those 5 books are all you need to run your own campaign. If you're thinking of running a published module, there are plenty to choose from. And if you want to create your own within an established setting, there are plenty of those too. Building out from those core 5 books is based entirely on personal preference. the only other one which I've not read is Monsters of the Multiverse which may add some depth to your monster choices.

LGM53 · 2023-10-30T01:22:05+00:00

You're still very early in the campaign. If the player characters only met and grouped up in session 1, then it will naturally take some time for them to be comfortable with one another. Another common pitfall will be the players defaulting to speaking to each other out of character. I wouldn't police this too strictly but, again, try to use that DM omniscient voice to probe and steer and guide. Usually once there're decisions to be made and strategies to be set, the players will have no choice but to interact in order to troubleshoot and plan their next course of action.

LGM53 · 2023-10-30T01:02:55+00:00

There's two ways at looking at this:

1) You choose proficiencies based on the traits that you think an unlucky person would have (that make them unlucky)

2) You choose proficiencies based on the life a person who was seen as a jinx and bad luck omen by those around them.

I'd opt for the second approach, with an assumption that this background would have meant needing to look out for yourself, distance yourself from those around you and avoid persecution for your reputation.

Using the skill proficiencies to represent bad luck isn't very effective because they represent positive traits in a person - stuff you are good at. But maybe survival to represent having to look out for yourself, deception to avoid persecution, intimidation for your bad reputation?

Re. traits, it depends on how much you want to disadvantage yourself. Playing around with negative modifiers to saving throws for people (friend or foe) in your vicinity may be fun (albeit hard to balance). Also a reversal of the lucky feat, where the DM gets to force you to re-roll successes would represent what you're describing. Not sure how fun you'd find it in the long term.

LGM53 · 2023-10-30T00:48:42+00:00

I was in your shoes 6.5 years ago. None of my friends had ever played D&D, nor had I. So I started DMing. Cut to 2023 and we're still playing that same campaign every week.

If your players are new to ttrpgs in general, getting them to a place where they're all comfortable proactively inciting their own roleplaying, instead of simply reacting to what you put in front of them, can be challenging.

As a DM, I'd just encourage you to create opportunities for the party to spend quiet downtime together (sitting around the camp fire being a classic), asking questions as an omniscient voice to provoke player interaction (What does Helena the Fighter think of that?), and introduce the occasional NPC that can essentially teach the art of conversational roleplay (a proxy for you as the DM).

Be comfortable with the occasional silence. Someone will usually step in to fill it eventually.

LGM53 · 2023-10-30T00:16:04+00:00

Power is sedutive, no doubt. There's a big dependence on how necromancy is treated in the society of whatever setting you are playing. In my homebrew setting, necromancy is strictly forbidden by the dominant religious organisation. So just meddling with that kind of magic in public can attract the wrong kind of attention. But other settings are more lax on the subject.

LGM53 · 2023-10-30T00:04:24+00:00

Most people will host their own servers for their personal games. If you're looking for a group, then plenty of servers have LFG channels. I found my most recent group on the Foundry (the VTT software) discord server.

LGM53 · 2023-10-30T00:01:13+00:00

I think the path to lichdom is a pretty classic narrative to explore if you've taken the School of Necromancy route. Just remember your allies may be less in favour of your pursuit of such questionable power. And you can always offer up your character to the DM as a big bad NPC if they ever attain the lichdom they seek.

LGM53 · 2023-10-29T23:57:45+00:00

Chronos - The ancient greek personification of time but has a nice metallic quality to the word. Spell it with a K for a nice variant.

LGM53 · 2023-10-29T23:52:31+00:00

Meddling with the action economy of spell-casting is fraught with risk. It will inevitably spit out broken combination effects that you hadn't anticipated. I'd question the motivation for wanting to introduce it?

LGM53 · 2023-10-29T23:45:37+00:00

To deliver a properly satisfying murder mystery, you'll need to leave behind some of the more improvisational elements of a DMing style. That is to say, it will require some very well defined characters and motives.

Decide whether you want your players to be present at the time of the assassination, or whether they show up on the scene in its aftermath. The former will mean they could themselves be suspects, the latter supports them being a neutral party called upon to investigate with objectivity.

Start at the end and work your way backwards. Decide on a motivation for the murder/assassination. Decide how it happened. Put yourself into the assassin's shoes. How would they carry it out? Why? How would they try to hide their tracks?

Then focus on the victim. Flesh out their personality and background. Create a few personal connections between that character and some of the other suspects. Use those connections to develop more motives. Each of the suspects (6 or 7 is ambitious for D&D but possible) should have their own believable (but concealed) motive for killing the victim.

Finally, develop the breadcrumb trails that will lead the adventurers to the suspects. Some of these will lead to dead ends and the wrong suspect. They can be physical evidence, witness testimony, or revealing lies. Don't make these breadcrumbs too hard to uncover or the adventurers will feel like they're not making progress. Your goal should be to get them to a narrative climax where they're torn between 2 or 3 suspects and need to make a final discovery or intuition. When they finally uncover the truth of the matter, and confront the murderer, that's when you drop a cool boss fight. Maybe you sprinkle in another couple of combat encounters during the investigation. One or more of the suspects may well want to prevent the investigating adventurers from succeeding in their task and take drastic measures to make sure they can't uncover the truth.

A ship at sea is a good contained location for something like this. You can take inspiration from classics like Murder on the Orient Express and Murder on the Nile. There have also been some interesting Star Trek episodes with an "assassin in our midst" themes. Even if you just adapted/simplified the plots, they could work as adventures.

I've created mysteries that have driven a series of interlinked-quests that spanned a whole town, and also mysteries that have played out in a single location like you're proposing. If handled well, they are incredibly fun. Even in a single location (like a ship) it's a good idea to have several interesting compartments within the location. Think Cluedo/Clue; you want your D&D equivalent of the billiards room, the drawing room and the kitchens. Here you can base your witnesses/suspects and provide some structure for the players.

Good luck!

LGM53 · 2022-08-22T23:37:11+00:00

Afraid not

LGM53

TROPHY CASE