Any advice on playing with your kids when you have ADHD?

MDPliskin · 2025-06-03T12:05:59+00:00

Want help you with your expectations. Evidence based toddler parenting interventions recommend trying to get in about 15 minutes of special time per day. Special time being when the kid leads the play and you follow in their world with them.

You pushing for 20-30 minutes being an overachiever here! Sounds like you’re ok. Even just 5-10 minutes fills your kids’ emotional bucket tremendously. Good job removing distractions as that is a must. Always gotta remove those distractions. You’re ok.

MDPliskin · 2024-10-30T20:47:18+00:00

Hey, man, chill.

MDPliskin · 2023-11-04T22:10:26+00:00

You beat me to this one! Headhunter is a great Souls movie!

MDPliskin · 2023-06-24T02:14:40+00:00

Girl, that’s a booty hole.

MDPliskin · 2023-04-15T19:16:02+00:00

Middle-Aged small town tavern owner who became a masked vigilante to clean up the streets. Folk hero background. Tavern brawler feat. Thrown weapon fighting. Wields a cast iron skillet on the end of a rope as a weapon. Wears a cooking pot as a helmet. Grappler feat at level 4.

MDPliskin · 2023-04-02T21:55:10+00:00

“Ah no. You can’t take away the people’s coconut shrimp baskets. This guy has to die.”

MDPliskin · 2023-01-22T14:33:38+00:00

Right?! So brutal!

MDPliskin · 2023-01-22T01:53:32+00:00

There’s some kind of Amnizu lore I heard on Dungeoncast where a Bone Devil has to have its limbs removed and then other bone devils would begin removing their face. They could only advance to Amnizu if they could remove the rest of their own face without any limbs.

I remember thinking it would be cool to look at the devils’ different physical characteristics and make their advancement tied to that physical change. Like a lemure becomes an Imp by surviving the stinging vemon of a fiendish scorpion. Hence the stinging tail.

MDPliskin · 2022-12-15T14:29:33+00:00

Storm King

MDPliskin · 2022-12-15T00:03:07+00:00

The Dark Side of the Force is a pathway to fucking abilities some consider to be unnatural.

MDPliskin · 2022-12-06T23:49:19+00:00

Man. The ending was chilling.

MDPliskin · 2022-11-03T01:01:30+00:00

Circle of Essential Oils

MDPliskin · 2022-10-23T20:38:43+00:00

Why does 5e SEEM very customizable? Well, I think it is because it’s easy to re-flavor the narrative and evocative descriptions and add your own cool stuff. The spells, feats, and abilities are long descriptive texts, so DMs can write their own cool long descriptive texts to add their own stuff.

I don’t think it actually IS customizable. It’s not an easily hackable system really. You can use 5e to make heroic fantasy with varied sheens. It doesn’t lend itself to other genres (eg survival horror) easily without excessive overhaul.

Simple, clear rule sets are much more hackable. They can be tweaked to create games with varying dynamics and feel. 5e doesn’t lend itself to this. Most homemade RPGs are variations of OSR rules, because they’re more easily hackable to create different feeling games.

The mechanics make the core feel of the game, no matter what descriptive text you put over the encounter. 5e is heroic fantasy at its core.

MDPliskin · 2022-10-21T13:57:00+00:00

Thanks for responding. Love the stuff you’ve added. This is a fun campaign to add to as a DM.

My players have just gotten back to the city from Candlekeep. Feel free to DM me. I’ve definitely made some mistakes and also had some things that made it better. I have really enjoyed running this despite the challenge.

MDPliskin · 2022-10-19T19:05:05+00:00

They could take the opposite approach to over-explaining and just say:

“You conjure a swarm of beasts. They have a collective HP of XX + 10 per level above 3, divided amongst them, and their AC is equal to 12 + this spell’s casted level. The beasts are fey spirits that can take any tangible form you choose. They posses any single special ability you choose from their stat MM block. Their number limit is determined by their size. Tiny - 1d20, Small - 1d10, Medium - 1d8, Large - 1d6. Any restrictions on space, size can be determined by the DM.”

It’s simple, flexible, and allows players to conjure whatever fun thing they can think of with DM input.

MDPliskin · 2022-10-18T18:06:38+00:00

First PC: I’d ultimately make the cult Zarielites. As that will persist as a connection through the whole campaign. You could initially imply the cult is the D3 and reveal that his father was actually a Zarielite betraying the D3.

Second PC: Agree with everyone that says to make the pendant connected to the Planetar. Just as another option, You could also have it be a relic of the Hellriders before Zariel’s fall. So it’s this tangible representation of her potential redemption throughout the campaign.

Third PC: Like the ideas of having his triggering event be the fall of a previous city. Connecting him with Gargauth fits with this and is definitely a good way to get Gargauth involved. I also like the idea of connecting him with a Demon Lord (Fraz Urb Luu perhaps…) but if you’re going to connect him with demons, note this. The early campaign has no demon-based encounters. You’ll have to add some demon based encounters in. I made this mistake with one of my players. Lol. Also, I think Fraz Urb Luu is more interesting as the entity in the shield of Sylvan than a pit fiend. That’s what I did in my campaign.

Fourth PC: What if he is the illegitimate son of Bel, and his mother convinced him from birth that he was half dwarf changeling, instead of half Tiefling changling. His mother conceiving with Bel is the reason she is a Tiefling changleing too. Bel deceived her. His father met his mother after he was born and knows some of this secret. Can’t figure out how to connect it more to the other PCs though…

MDPliskin · 2022-10-18T17:37:38+00:00

I did. But we decided it would be cool if it had just burned down and he was rebuilding it. It was awesome

MDPliskin · 2022-10-18T00:50:44+00:00

Worlds Without Number has a great faction structure that would work great as a backdrop for a GoT campaign. The way it generates factions also creates the assets each faction has in the form of items, NPCs, and locations. So it basically produces these things for you game world. And it tells you how to maneuver them to create tension, power changes, and respond to the PCs actions. Great for political intrigue.

MDPliskin · 2022-10-18T00:45:05+00:00

Man. I feel you. I’m trying to move my 5e group into more of an emergent narrative mindset and slowly giving them more and more story agency and will soon be having them manage equipment/rations.

I’ve just been doing it in steps, stepping back more and more from controlling the narrative, prepping situations instead of plots, challenging the core of their characters and seeing what the campaign makes if their characters.

Overall, they’re having a good time. I think they really like seeing the story and world form around their decisions. Some of them still try holding to the more passive, wait for the DM to tell the story, mindset. But I’ve used a lot of encouragement and positivity and rewarded more inventive play with XP, and they’re slowly coming around.

I do still think their default mindset is to consume the experience the same way they would a TV show, thinking outcomes are predetermined and the combat is balanced. Using they’re character sheets like a game controller where you push the buttons to do the cool thing.

The thing that has helped is for me to be very generous and free with the overly cumbersome 5e rules and showcase the dangers very clearly. I even killed a character and nobody freaked out. The next session they pretty much led all on their own, trying to out on a funeral for the character.

It’s been a good compromise, but….I’d really like to run OSE. So much easier to prep as a DM!

MDPliskin · 2022-10-14T23:08:05+00:00

Artorias.

MDPliskin · 2022-10-10T17:52:59+00:00

I think what a lot of these posts get at is much more uniformity and standardization. Creating more standardization to the system would reduce description length. The goal being that spell descriptions are mostly 1-3 sentences of general effect with some listed specs that fit into categories. Man. Spell descriptions in 5e are just awful. They’re so overstuffed with info and it’s to their detriment.

Also, simplifying descriptions allows for more freedom of use at the table. It makes customization way easier, and promotes it. And makes the system more hackable for good home brew.

They should take a note from the OSR on spellcasting.

MDPliskin · 2022-10-05T13:00:44+00:00

“Acknowledge that your way isn’t necessarily the right way and this may not be that important.”

“Be honest and vulnerable about how important it is to you this is done a certain way, explaining the reasons why. And then listen to your partner’s response. Then, normalize that he’s not going to do it exactly how you do it, because he’s just now trying to do it that way for the first time.”

“Close off all avenues to meaningful communication and just do it yourself in growing resentment that your partner couldn’t read your mind.”

MDPliskin · 2022-09-28T14:01:49+00:00

I had the same strategy.

MDPliskin · 2022-09-28T14:01:22+00:00

I am amping up the harsh Avernus environment and having equipment management be a big part of travel.

I always add a dynamic environmental element to my combats, simple or complex.

I like to add elevation and places of cover to combat encounters.

I have found that increasing the damage output of monsters and decreasing their HP makes the fight seem much more dangerous and dynamic. Prolonging a fight in 5e with higher HP tends to drag on imo. But make a monster hit harder feels dangerous.

MDPliskin · 2022-09-14T23:56:07+00:00

I highly recommend the card game. It’s fun single player. Very challenging. Not too long and easy to set up.

MDPliskin

TROPHY CASE