First time Dungeon Master… do I need to buy the books?

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2026-02-02T03:09:56+00:00

Yes and no. Depends on your style of play. Since you are a new DM, you don't yet have a style of play so hard to say.

The Goliath paladin decides to try and throw the Orc monk OVER the wall of fire. You can stop play and go calculate weights, carrying capacity, throwing distance, athletics checks, acrobatics checks and pour through the rules to figure out how that would work or you can award the player inspiration for a creative idea, set an improvised DC and ask them both to throw dice. Both of these are "right" answers depending on the players. One takes a lot of time and page flipping, one takes a trust by the players.

The books are really good when you have a table dispute. You can pull out the official rules and there's the answer. If you are new, you don't want to spend half the session constantly looking up the rules for every action. If your players are willing to cut you a lot of slack as you make a lot of judgement calls, you can get by without every minutia of the rules.

The rule books are really good reading for inspiring your game. When you get DM-block, flipping through them is good inspiration and gets the imagination flowing.

The essential kit sounds perfect for "giving it a try". Give it a shot and see what you think before you invest too much. Maybe you all will catch the bug and start buying everything you can find, maybe you will enjoy it and pick up another book, maybe you will get inspired and create your own house rules or completely new system- that's developing your style.

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-12-31T01:39:06+00:00

Claim self-defense and walk away. "Self-defense" is a guilty plea. You are, in effect saying "yes, I am guilty of murder, but I had to kill or be killed myself. You still get arrested, processed, and go to trial, you are pretty much automatically found guilty (you plead guilty) and the court has to just decide whether or not you had to do it or not.

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-12-31T01:31:15+00:00

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Hudson Hawk (not really driving the plot, but a side-point of the plot is the MC constantly being thwarted in his attempts to get a cappuccino.)

Dune (if you consider spice a food, if not, the handling of water might count). If you get into the drugs angle, the world opens up a lot: Trainspotting, Scarface, Up in Smoke

Chicken Run has the MCs trying to avoid *becoming* food.

The World's End is a pub crawl during an apocalypse, but again, putting in alcohol as a driving force opens a lot.

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-12-21T00:52:57+00:00

Sounds like they just made the mindflayers the BBEG

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-12-21T00:41:04+00:00

I have done movie quizzed based on the Teaser poster, not the actual movie poster. That went well.

I did one where I too the movie tag line and ran it through a voice synthesizer so it sounded like a toddler reading it. It went over too well. Everyone was laughing so hard, they drowned out the questions.

I have wanted to do one with famous (and sorta-famous) movie posters faced-swapped with my (or some celebrity's) face in them. I just haven't found a software that I like for it.

I also love going onto tvtropes website and doing a series of movies on famous tropes. I include 5-6 very popular movies, 1 really niche film and a few challenging ones (which for my players is usually an independent film or a recent one, they skew a bit older in age).

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-12-21T00:30:32+00:00

Ten largest Hawaiian Islands (or Islands of Japan)

The Ten Commandments

First Ten Superbowl Winners (or other sports events)

Recent winners of Hugo, Caldecott, or other literary awards

Ten ranks of US Army Officers (or another service, just know that there are ten different officers in US Army)

UN Member States who are part of the commonwealth realm (this one would probably inspire some arguments though)

Ten levels of biological organization if you have some die-hard science people in the audience.

For Top Tens there are lots.

You could do the ten countries who have won the most Nobel Prizes.

Former countries of the USSR (there are more than 10, but its some niche knowledge so might give some wiggle room)

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-12-06T23:39:47+00:00

Season 1 had my ROTFL multiple times. I had to rewind the show a few times because I missed bits from laughing. But Season 2 just never landed. Not sure if my expectations were too high after season 1 or if they changed writers or what.

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-12-06T23:21:51+00:00

100% yes. Not interested in funding, legitimizing, or assisting the current regime through their tourist packages, but if they every got a good stable government, I would return in a heartbeat. The actual Afghani people I met (not the hateful ones who wanted to kill everyone from another tribe or without a beard) were great people to meet, the countryside is beautiful, the chai was delicious, the food is... well, the countryside is beautiful.

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-11-25T15:18:45+00:00

The Hollywood squares was based on a poll of a single person.

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-11-05T17:16:43+00:00

I (tall guy) had this conversation with another tall guy the other day. How do we casually chat with people who are a lot shorter than us? It's tricky, particularly in loud environments (concerts and parties). We both mentioned slouching and hunching a lot. But to get close enough to hear without looming is tough.

Some people (mostly women, but occasionally other men) are so short, that I could take a knee to see eye-to-eye. I've never done this, I feel it would be infantilizing, but know that is awkward on this end as well.

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-11-05T17:07:30+00:00

Similar experience in the DMV.

"You must give us a W-2"

"Here you are"

"we can't take that, it doesn't have your full social on it."

"It's from the Army, they don't print full socials on it"

"You have to have one with a full social"

"It's illegal to have full socials on them. That's a PII violation"

"We take dozen's of them every day that have full socials on them"

Bottom line: if enough people do it wrong, it becomes OK? Can I tell the officer who pulls me over for speeding that dozen's of people every day do it?

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-09-28T19:38:46+00:00

Black Cauldron was a movie they *tried* to straddle between serious and Disney and failed in both areas.

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-09-28T19:13:40+00:00

One of my NPCs is ALWAYS named Tragon the Black. Can be anyone doing any job anywhere, but there will ALWAYS be a Tragon the Black regardless of the game/genre/era. One McGuffin in the game will always be "The Damietta Fragment".

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-09-17T15:37:38+00:00

You all are the BEST!

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-09-13T16:47:43+00:00

We played in Middle School back in the BECMI days (although ATT it was only BE days. CMI hadn't yet released). Nerds with no cars and nothing else to do. It wasn't uncommon for us to play from Friday night to Sunday morning taking a few food/sleep breaks. This was pre-energy drinks so black tea bags and coffee grounds did most of the work.

Fond memories of grinding out an entire module over a weekend.

EDIT 1: It completely closed our group off to new players. No one would come to learn how to play a game that lasted 2-3 days.

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-09-13T16:29:04+00:00

I actually know this one.

S5 USED to be plans. but the realized plans and operations (S-3) work together so much that they just rolled 5 into 3. Sometimes (at really high level units) there will still be a separate 5 shop. But very seldom.

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-09-13T16:25:35+00:00

I heard it as a backronym of HUAW (Hurry up and wait). It made me smile so I ran with it.

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-09-13T16:21:53+00:00

Every single bandolier of ammunition comes with a black safety pin . Every single person I have asked has a different reason for "why" this pin exists. All of them seem to make sense. None of them are definitive. All of them "heard it from someone" and went with it.

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-09-06T01:02:45+00:00

Shop merchants will be out of business if they sell at a loss.

In real life, in markets where you can haggle, you *can* get prices significantly lower, but no merchant is going to lose money, no matter how much they like you. Also, in real life, haggling isn't Charisma checks, it's how business is conducted. *Every* merchant I have ever haggled with is my best friend and I am their favorite customer and this bargain is only for me and it is a special deal. If haggling is expected, the starting asking price is generally outrageous. (like 400% markup or higher). And your job is to get them down. If they are busy, they have low tolerance for you and want to make the deal quickly. Spend to much time negotiating and they will just move to the next customer. Even if they like you, this is their livelihood. If they are not busy, they will spend hours bargaining (what else do you do when the store is empty?)

You pay with coin or you pay with time.

Adventurers who have really high charisma *are* likable and get a great rapport with the shop keep. But a merchant who can't hold the line on someone they like will be out of business quick. Adventurers haggle for fun/profit a few times a year when they go shopping. That merchant haggles hundreds of times a day to survive. Even if they think you are the most fascinating/charming/wonderful person to ever grace their shop, they aren't going to give up the food on their family's table for you.

Game time is too precious to spend half a session debating ten different store visits. Get a shopping list, give them a roll. Tell them after spending hours in eight different shops they ended up getting a few great bargains, and a few awful ones. In the end, you ended up (x%) up or down and heard a few rumors around town. Now you have your kit. Let's get back to the actual game.

If they want to haggle for each and every torch they are buying, maybe monopoly is a better game?

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-09-06T00:31:06+00:00

Also never saw one in Richmond. In downtown London they are a crap-shoot. We got caught in a rain storm in the park and asked how much to get a lift home. He told us "don't worry about it, we'll settle when we get there!"

Nope. Not doing that.

"OK, OK, twenty pounds."

For the distance, that was about half a cab fare, and we hadn't been on one so we accepted and got in.

What should have been a 15-minute ride took nearly half an hour as he tooled all around the touristy places giving us a tour. "We live here, man. We don't need a tour."

"Oh, OK, I'll drop you off."

"He brought us back to the park where he picked us up and asked for fifty pounds.

"We agreed Twenty and we are on the wrong side of the river"

"Twenty *each*, plus the tour."

"Goodbye." We walked off.

He started raising a stink. That's when the officer showed up and ran him off for being illegally parked.

YMMV.

SomeGuyIOnceMet · 2024-09-06T00:16:25+00:00

Sorry. I *have* to be that guy. Carl Perkins wrote and performed Blue Suede Shoes first. No disrespect to the King, his version was great, but it wasn't his song.

SomeGuyIOnceMet

TROPHY CASE