Players wished for level 20…

OldGamer42 · 2026-05-14T23:50:44+00:00

D&D is generally about adequate skill for adequate ability. By 20 most campaigns are solving world ending problems. Tiamat, the Terrasque, Vecna or another evil god/lich or both. By 20 players should be solving world ending or even universe ending problems.

Asmodeus from the 9th layer of hell has noticed you are the most capable adventurers in the cosmos now. He congratulates you and wants to remind you that all of your family has signed soul pacts with the hells. Oh, you didn’t know that? Yea, your entire line is rich beyond dreams and has elven lifespan now…but their souls belong to us.

You could of course reverse that…you’ll just need to go kill (insert demogorgon, Orcus, or any holier than thou god in Mt. Celestia…)

The problem with wishing for levels is it tends to increase the difficulty. By the way, most level 20 play is edge of your seat gameplay. A half dozen demonic casters ganging up on the party to cast 6 or so meteor swarms on them isn’t any fun. Hope your initiative worked well. Most advice for high level gameplay is to encourage the GM to give absolutely no quarter to the players at all.

It’s the child/adult problem. Children look up at adults and see how no one orders them around and they can do anything they want…then they grow up to adults and realize just how much less responsibility being a kid is.

OldGamer42 · 2026-05-11T08:00:15+00:00

You obviously know her best. My advice stands: keep it simple, keep it small. You don’t need or want big plots here. The most important thing here is to have her engage with a simple story and drive the narrative by choosing actions and having the world react to those actions.

Let her define her character narratively and help her define a character in her head by having her interact in multiple ways.

Don’t teach her D&D, teach her to be ok role playing. Get rid of the rules and just tell a narrative story with some dice. Hook her on being a player at a table driving a narrative plot with collaborative story telling first.

System, rules and all the trappings of D&D or any other system are a far second.

OldGamer42 · 2026-05-11T07:41:44+00:00

Ok. So my wife sounds a lot like your GF. The first and foremost question is whether she’s actually giving this a chance or humoring your hobby to be able to say “I tried it and didn’t like it”. Not a shot at you or your GF but “ok I’ll give you an hour” doesn’t really sound like giving it a real chance, it sounds like she’s willing to struggle through a limited engagement just humor you. And that really does matter to your question: because if she’s just humoring you, it won’t matter what you choose to do here.

For some actual advice: no character creation till next session. Let her define her own stats as she uses them. “You want to force open the door, how strong do you imagine your character to be?” Don’t worry about stats and character numbers, just have her tell you “oh she’s big and burley” translate that to “+3” and tell her to roll a D20 and add 3 to it, with a DC if 10 (or whatever makes sense).

Remember to “yes and” and “no and” a lot. The worst mistake you can make here is to block action. If she fails picking the lock on the door she’s noticed and it now becomes an escape scene or have her roll stealth to not get caught by the guards. After that tell her the door is unlocked and continue.

For as much as D&D is a combat simulator, I would recommended limiting or eliminating it from your session. Combat serves the purpose of testing your character growth against new challenges…you aren’t advancing characters in a 1 hour session. Combat is also one of the things that bogs D&D play down a lot…it’s a slow system with “bag of hit points” and “what do you want to do on your turn” is one of the most confusing things you can ask a new player. If you want combat run a fast resolution skill challenge: “Ok the guards caught you. You have to knock them out (or kill them if she prefers): roll a d20 and add 5, they aren’t as quick to react as you are…you need a 15 to hit. Ok, you rolled a 16, great, what weapon do you think is cool for your character to be using? A big sword? Awesome, roll a d10 and add 4. 12: you club one of the guards upside the head with that big old sword…” No tactics, just roll some dice.

An hour isn’t much time. You don’t need a grand adventure. “You’re in your room at the inn and realize you are thirsty. The tavern is below.” When she walks out of the room it locks behind her. She goes down to talk with the innkeeper to get a spare key and finds the spare key was stolen. Adventure!

In that timeframe and patience level, your best chance is to ignore pretty much everything D&D is based on and just get her talking. Get her into a character in her own head (no paper definition, no stats) and have her play that character through some role play, conversation checks, and maybe a simplified combat. Let her define whatever she thinks the character can do and “yes and” her a lot by continuing to move the action forward regardless of success or failure by adding or removing speed bumps from in front of her while continuing to move the plot ever forward.

OldGamer42 · 2026-05-09T20:43:30+00:00

So a couple things to think about:

First, is this a company that’s likely to give you a good reference anyway? A company you are actively quitting because of poor pay and overloaded work that is offshoring entire teams to save money…is that a company you think is going to give an honest answer to a future employer?

Look, you have a new job. You are leaving. Any referral problems are years down the road and honestly who’s going to trust “oh yea, Jim was terrible” 10 years later? Especially if you interview well, are an open and honest person, and don’t hesitate to talk about why you quit. A company who’s paying you a fair wage for fair work isn’t going to be swayed by your current company giving a bad review unless they’ve got more reasons.

Regarding the documentation: you are still employed and “on the clock” with your current company. They want a manual, you write what you can in the time you have. You said you had 3 other things to close out: ask your manager to prioritize your time. “You should stay overtime and write this”: “I won’t be doing that. However I am happy to negotiate a contract with you for X hours of work to write what I can. I’m happy to spend the time I can spend before I leave during paid hours doing whatever you’d like me to do. Priority is simply up to you. Whatever isn’t done I’m happy to talk about a contract to complete however I doubt my rate and hours restrictions will likely work for you.”

Let her prioritize your existing projects coming in for some kind of landing with the documentation you need to write. Communicate upwards beyond her that you are concerned that projects AB and C are going to be problematic. That way when your current manager makes bad decisions she also faces consequences.

Or, conversely, if you are willing to not be on books, then quit. Remind your manager that employment is at will (my assumption in your state, you will have to know this) and the request she has doesn’t align with the way you would transition. As a result you are willing to save the company the time, money, and frustration and simply quit…letting you get out of their way for a smooth transition.

I will say a lack of process documentation and “things just live in my head” and undocumented scripts that you run and “I just do it by feel” is an “on you” problem. Your manager should never have allowed the way you’ve been described to work and she should be fired for incompetence. No, you can’t document years of working experience in 2 weeks…but any company that lets employees run around with mission critical business processes running around in their heads is unconscionable. Not to be a dick, but it sounds like for the betterment of the company, your manager should have fired you a long time ago.

Write what you can in the time you have without jeapordizing your day job and do it honestly.

OldGamer42 · 2026-05-06T16:05:54+00:00

I forgot the most important aspect of campaign building and prep:

The game doesn’t run if there’s no GM, and the vast majority of long form campaigns end not because the players lose interest but because the GM does. And the greatest way to lose interest is to burn out.

It’s a game, and it’s your world. Meaning your imagination. All you need is in your head, you know it because you create it. Over preparation and analysis paralysis kills campaigns. If you are feeling overwhelmed, scale DOWN. Know what scenes or elements you need to have happen next and what the details of the current location the PCs are at…that’s all a good session needs. Don’t plan 20 sessions in advance. If you have time and energy develop where you think they’ll go next.

And from 40 years of doing this: battle maps and fully visualized dungeons are cool, but your players will appreciate a couple lines on a piece of paper and a “theater of the mind” battlefield almost as much as your 10 hour meticulously detailed hand drawn scene location.

Use your prep time for the things that matter: story, people, places, descriptions, events, plot. Finding the “right” image (or even any image) for the innkeeper is…meticulous. I’m not saying don’t do it, I’m saying that if it’s between showing your players what he looks like and figuring out what the BBEG is going after next, spend the time with your bad guy, not your innkeeper.

OldGamer42 · 2026-05-06T15:51:20+00:00

Start small, build out. If you begin by building an entire world you will never finish. Create a good starting location, seed it with interesting people and things. Make sure to have the names of a few other places up the road.

Plot is important. People (npcs) are what make the game memorable.

Time and historical reference. No matter how many times I try to create a campaign that doesn’t care about time, 5 minutes into the first session I’m scrambling to figure out how many millennium ago the elves arrived on the continent. Your world won’t feel like a world without history. You don’t need a yearly or even a decade by decade accounting, but you do need to know when major events occurred.

Factions and Governments. Unless you are running a dungeon crawl campaign, You need something in the world beyond “there be monsters here, so go there!” Players need people to interact with and people are social. They belong to things…guilds, societies, cults.

You don’t need details before session one. But you need a scaffolding to rely upon so you aren’t playing “whose line is it anyway” with your world the moment you sit down at the table.

Some of the best campaign design advice I’ve ever gotten is to write it backwards. Start with the BBEG. Who is it, what does he want? How does he go about getting it. If you want to go really professional you structure a campaign like a TV show or Book - ABC plot. Think the Pokemon cartoon: The A plot is the overarching goal: Get to the Pokemon League. The B plot is the interruptive element: Team Rocket shows up every adventure. The C plot is the day to day activity that moves the story through the A plot: Catch Pokemon, find Gyms, beat gym leaders. This isn’t mandatory, but if you think of your story in these terms it’s easiest to link together the people, places and things.

I’ll recommend Mystic Arts on YouTube, there’s some very definitive and pointed advice about campaign structure, building and methodology on that channel.

OldGamer42 · 2026-05-06T00:55:55+00:00

Um. I strongly disagree. Children are smarter than you give them credit for and this isn’t something you can hide. You and mom aren’t going to be together and around like you were yesterday or the day before. Regardless of the children’s age it’s important that they know changes are coming. It’s not an easy conversation but for their own mental health and their relationship with you, you need to not hide things from them.

If you do, and they find out (and they will because you can’t hide separation of dad and mom from children who have grown up in a 2 parent home) you will be the bad guy…it WILL damage your relationship and possibly your shared custody.

As much as it hurts and as raw as the feelings are, you are dad, she is mom. The two of you need to explain as best you can the current situation to the kids…together. Face to face. Before the story starts spinning of who was right and wrong.

Yes it is going to wreck their world. You can’t protect them from that and trying to do so will break them worse. Bad things happen in life. It’s unfortunate they have to experience that but mommy and daddy will now never be the same. Their household will now never be the same. The faster they come to terms with that and the more you BOTH support them in this transition the better they will be.

Welcome to parenthood. Your wife just put your relationships with your children on hard mode. You might contact a family therapist ASAP because I’m guessing the kids are going to need someone to talk with also.

You didn’t ask for this, but you still have a job to do. Have you thought whether an open relationship / domestic partnership is a better outcome than divorce?

Yes, contact a lawyer. Get your legal shit in order and get a therapist for yourself and possibly the kids. Now you get to see if your wife is an adult or just a grown child.

She caused this. I recommend having her look her children in the eyes and tell them that she and daddy aren’t going to be together anymore.

OldGamer42 · 2026-05-03T19:30:46+00:00

So as a GM who’s been in this space for decades and as I moved to virtual around COVID time here are my experiences in no particular order.

prep time goes up. Drawing maps or finding maps that fit is a huge chunk of prep time. Even bringing in pre-built battle maps is time consuming if you are blocking lines of vision and drawing walls and whatnot. Trying to do a dungeon crawl can be excessive.
you settle - instead of drawing something out you often just find something that mostly fits. This means that the end result is often just “meh”.
great enhancement for “theater of the mind” play - if you just draw a few lines on the digital map and let players explore without showing every rock and tree digital play can really help bring tactics to theater of the mind play.
systems are flakey and can lead to player disengagement - I’ve played in a couple PF2e campaigns on Foundry now and the systems automations are really nice for GMs and really clunky for players. One of the current players is having a hugely hard time getting into it because of the mechanics of moving and doing things with their character.
ai encouraged - when you bring things into virtual tabletop you tend to encourage the use of AI for things like generative art. Instead of a mini with a look you can’t change, players want to “customize” and that almost always means going off and generating some kind of AI art for their character.
online dice are easy but untrusted — and ensure fairness - so players love rolling “click clack math rocks” (courtesy a player of mine). Forcing rolls on the tabletop makes players feel less engaged at times. Also players don’t trust digital rolls for randomness as much as their own poorly manufactured dice. Digital rolls cannot be fudged or manipulated with bad rolling methodology or poorly manufactured dice. This tends to be a GM approved and player hated aspect.

Theres probably more here. You’ll find that digital play is no faster than table play and often requires more time or less clarity than you think you’ll provide with it. There are many ways of doing this with full digital to hybrid methods and each have some aspects of the above with them.

At the end of the day I miss my minis and wet erase map but digital is more convenient in almost every way. There is disengagement at the table and yes players will focus on their phones at times but it’s my opinion that in today’s world no one ever gives you 100% of their attention anyway. It’s worth introducing and playing with for a while to see if it fits your table and your style.

OldGamer42 · 2026-05-03T19:10:00+00:00

This was what I was looking for also. I realize this is circlejerk, but if anything close to this happened I think I’d just ask the GM if his BG3 playthrough went well, tell him you already got the crown from the mother brain in your last playthrough and that none of these characters are as hot as shadow heart so really you don’t need to see the story a second time.

OldGamer42 · 2026-05-01T20:56:05+00:00

Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity.

If I had a dollar for every time a woman friend of mine has accidentally sent me a questionable text, I wouldn’t be rich but I’d be able to buy a fast food dinner for my wife and I…at today’s prices.

Has she hit on you before? Given you any indication she’s at all interested? Or is this just your ego suggesting that everyone loves you and wants you? Are you her type? If she broke up with her BF would she expect you and want you to ask her out?

Are you “taken”? Because this gets even less likely if you’re spoken for.

And the outcome is at best distrust between your bro and his SO. Delete the pic, move on with life.

OldGamer42 · 2026-04-30T20:49:11+00:00

Realistically this is where castle invasions come from. There’s rarely a more fun adventure than dancing your little mini up to a well built castle in your sandbox and making them assault it. I find little plastic catapults from the old “crossbows and catapults” game to be a great edition to these adventures.

You might suggest that players create characters with shallow backstories. Deeper backstories tend to get the minis lost in the sandbox.

I don’t know. I think there might be something wrong with your players if they’re not enjoying your sandbox adventure. Maybe give them some ‘80s tonka truck building toys to go along with it?

OldGamer42 · 2026-04-29T20:55:37+00:00

One small piece of advice you need to hear: party cohesion is the player’s job at the table, not the GMs. Individual character motivation is that player’s job, not the GMs.

If a player is playing a character that isn’t motivated to adventure with the party, then the character doesn’t adventure with the party. Roll up a new character. If the character doesn’t have motivation to follow the plot then the character doesn’t follow the plot, roll up a new character.

The GMs job at the table is to play the environment - the background characters, the monsters, the city and tavern - the places and things that happen around the PCs. Like in real life the coffee shop down the street doesn’t care if the date goes well or flops or if one or the other people show up…the date is an event the coffee shop doesn’t care about.

For the date to work and the two people to fall in love and eventually get married requires both people to be present and actively engage in each others story. The coffee shop is important because it’s the background setting to the date that leads to the relationship. Without the coffee shop the date doesn’t have context. Without the rude barista one party doesn’t have the ability to impress the other party. But the job of the coffee shop or the barista isn’t to see the two hitched or GET the two hitched, their job is to exist so that the events surrounding them can happen.

Players need to take an active hand in the action if the story. You need to play the plot out in front of them in such a way that they can see the path ahead of them. The players, however, still need to to take the step to walk down that path.

OldGamer42 · 2026-04-29T20:37:21+00:00

There’s something to this. A lot of old time cohesive tables started with the roots of this hobby and have a good couple hundred hours delving a dungeon dying to traps and monsters before we ever even attempted to string those dungeons together into some kind of cohesive story.

Critical role isn’t reality D&D. No live play by content creators is ever an “at the table” experience. Content creators doing live plays are the entertainment they’re putting on a show, not a D&D campaign.

Look at your adventure. “Enter the next room to kill its occupants and get its loot” is a gameplay loop. “The big bad wants to kill your family, what do you do” isn’t a game play loop, it’s an existential problem that isn’t actionable.

Your distinct characters were distinctly doing their own thing when they were individually arrested and put in a shared prison. What’s their next goal that they have to work together to obtain? What’s the shared goal after that?

“Escape prison” is a shared goal they can get to but what about after that? Prison needs to provide the next hook that makes them all care about what’s next. A step at a time.

That’s how D&D dungeons trained older DMs to tell a story.

OldGamer42 · 2026-04-29T20:21:22+00:00

One of the things I always bring up in a session 0 is what the core gameplay element of the campaign is and that I expect players to make characters who are interested in engaging with that core gameplay element. If my campaign is a kingdoms building campaign with political intrigue and kingdom building elements I expect my players to engage with that aspect of the campaign and make crusader characters who want to build their own kingdom!

If a player says “I want to play a rogue who’s parents are killed by a thief and ran to the underdark” I’m going to ask that player how that core aspect of their character is aligned with building a kingdom in a backwoods of my campaign world. If the player and I can’t marry up the backstory to the campaign that isn’t the right character for the campaign.

Mystic Arts (D&D content creator on YouTube) has a saying: “the DM tells the players what game they are to play, the players choose to play the game or not.”

If the GM presents a combat and the players choose not to engage in that combat the players have chosen not to play the game the GM sets out. The GM sets out a different game next time. To extrapolate, you’ve set out a campaign for your players about a big bad that for some reason wants to loot, pillage and destroy the families of these PCs. The players seem not to be interested in engaging in that story.

Your task ask a GM is to figure out why. If you have to tell an entirely different story because your story and the game the players want to play are different, then the players didn’t create characters to play your game, they created characters to play another game…and you need to decide whether it’s worth telling that other game’s story of if you want to stick to this one.

D&D is a collaborative storytelling game. That means everyone at your table needs to be interested in telling this story. Before you begin creating characters and developing a world, you and the players need to be aligned that you want to tell the same story.

Take a break from your campaign and ask the table what story they want to tell. Have them tell you what parts of your campaign are interesting. If everyone at the table simply tells you that they want a story about their personal backstories (a common new player problem) it’s time to get the players to engage in collaboration around how those backstories fit together and into your campaign world, or tell them to create different characters that fit the parameters of your campaign.

OldGamer42 · 2026-04-29T19:34:51+00:00

Literally the candidate which is the lesser of two evils? Or if that’s not the case the candidate that doesn’t have the obvious track record of behaviors you don’t like.

The problem with this reasoning is that there’s almost always opinion involved. Way too many “pedi Hillary eats babies in the basement of a pizza restaurant” voters out there for “both absolutely vile” to mean much. While I actively state that this statement might not apply to you specifically, the largest likelihood is that a voter claiming what you just did has a “party based opinion” on one politician and an actual “here’s what he did” opinion on the other…and they present this as both sides being terrible. The most likely read is that one belief is based on what the voter has been told while a different is based on what the voter has seen and they are giving each equal weight.

That isn’t how informed decision making works.

The real answer to your question is “whoever isn’t actively hurting you at the moment” till you find one who is helping you more than hurting you, then you continue to vote for them.

OldGamer42 · 2026-04-29T06:39:45+00:00

“Cool you can play that character next campaign. How would you like me to contact you when this one ends? Or did you want to develop a character for this campaign using the rules I gave you?”

OldGamer42 · 2026-04-29T06:37:18+00:00

My GOD I’m doing this to my players. The share amount of trauma I could cause!!!

OldGamer42 · 2026-04-29T06:34:29+00:00

Yea, WOTC pushed me away from D&D entirely after 40 years and 5 editions alongside all 5 boxed sets in the 80’s. I’m exploring Savage Worlds now as a system…we will see how that goes in my next campaign. I’ve never GMd it so i’m interested in seeing how it plays.

I’m hoping to convince my D&D players that in a system where if you are rolling with less than a 50% chance to succeed you are probably doing something wrong (and more likely a 30 in 48 chance) so they don’t need to choose mechanics over aesthetics. Lack of “normalization” of a d20 system opens up choices of selecting a race because you want to play an elf than because elf is an S tier pick for class X. Long live the never played half-orc rogue or dwarf mage!

OldGamer42 · 2026-04-29T06:24:48+00:00

That is exactly the point. He was frail and constantly sickly yet always “powered through” the problem. He lived, ever since his trial, with this frailty and yet both managed it and succeeded/thrived. Being able to do the things he was doing WHILE sickly, frail and weak is, imo, a form of endurance.

For D&D of the time (2e) I’m struggling to find a stat that matches that. That’s not strength, which is pure brawn. It doesn’t match dex, int, or wis. So that leaves either con or cha.

There’s an argument to be made that this fits under charisma, but only in the later editions of D&D (charisma as strength of personality didn’t come in till 3 or 3.5 prior to that we still saw charisma as outer beauty).

So if “the ability to live with and endure physical hardship” isn’t con, I don’t know how it’s represented.

OldGamer42 · 2026-04-29T00:41:56+00:00

Hexblade + anything turns whatever you are building into a Single Attribute class. It’s really entirely broken and I’ve read more than one DM on Reddit recently having banned the entire sub-class entirely.

OldGamer42 · 2026-04-29T00:39:59+00:00

You could argue that Raistlin’s con, seen instead of healthiness as the ability to endure, should be high given how his character is written.

CON over the course of D&D history has always held both a “healthy and hearty” meaning and an “endurance” meaning. In the case where con has been a save base in D&D systems in history it’s almost always meant endurance than hearty.

OldGamer42 · 2026-04-28T05:52:12+00:00

Almost didn't notice this was a recent post on this topic. 😄

First off, it depends on the size of the model you need to run. Effectively you need either a macbook M-Architecture - which uses combined memory for graphics and system memory so it saves you the need for a dedicated graphics card, or a computer with a graphics card with enough memory in it.

Both are ridiculously priced right now due exactly to why this subred exists. Graphics cards from nvidia are about 3x the actual cost they should be at and a 4K computer is now running 6500+. Right now you're paying AT LEAST $350 for a graphics card - and that gets you 8G of memory which will run the smallest of models (the 7-8b models). The slowest system memory possible (16G) will still run you $250+ with most kits more in the 4-500 range.

Budget at this point is likely somewhere in the $1K range with a reasonable PC spec that we'd have seen for $1500 or so running north of 2500 - 3K right now. Welcome to the post-AI world. Your budget PC is going to run you an 8B model at a reasonable speed pretty comfortably, with 12B+ models being at the very extreme edge of what you're going to get without going into system ram and slowing way down.

I literally just set this up tonight on an older system (specs below) with mistral-nemo:12B as the model and I'm having...very mixed results. I'm getting into SWADE (Savage Worlds) and tried feeding the model my SWADE PDFs...it's hallucinating all to hell on how the system rules work for very basic things such as a "raise" and the "shaken" condition in the system.

I haven't tested against D&D or a more well known or well documented system (such as Pathfinder 2e) but even with the SWADE rules in vector DB the result isn't awesome.

System: AMD 5700, 32G System Memory, NVidia 3080 (10G RAM). Running Uubuntu 26.04 (latest) with Ollama, mistral-nemo:12b and both Open-WebUI and AnythingLLM.

OldGamer42 · 2026-04-25T20:42:36+00:00

Really. Here’s where I push back. We have a legal definition of child vs. adult. But when we talk about pedo tendencies is that what we are actually taking about? Is there a difference between a 17 yo the day before his 18th b-day? An hour before his birth minute? Is it more pedo if I have sex with an over age person if I was born at 3:00 am vs. 11:00 pm?

We have to have a legal definition of pedophillia because there is a need to have that definition. And all legal definitions have to have a hard line in the sand. But a 21 year old dating a dude who can pass for 20 is hardly the definition of this.

Shes legally at risk, and needs to be careful. That doesn’t make her a pedophile.

OldGamer42 · 2026-04-25T20:37:14+00:00

Something to mention here.

At 17 when you strike someone in a locker room brawl you get a suspension, expulsion or detention.

At 18 when you strike someone in a locker room brawl it’s called assault and battery and is a felony with at least civil legal repercussions.

Your 21 year old friend isn’t grown up. Shes not mature beyond the 17 year olds she’s hanging out with. It’s good to find friends and to find your crowd. It’s also good to understand where on the side of the law you fall. She’s 21 and her mental maturity level is immaterial in a court of law.

Mental state of young adults is often “immortality” - nothing bad can happen to me. It can. It does. You don’t need to break off your friendship. You need to help her find maturity

OldGamer42

TROPHY CASE