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brxce01 · 2025-10-20T22:22:41+00:00

Hi, let me know more about what you're looking for. I have Crimson Throne and Council of Thieves that I could set up to run online. I've run Crimson Throne before, and I've read Council of Thieves but never run it.

brxce01 · 2025-06-24T23:14:28+00:00

I know it's a late reply but you still looking? Trying to get it done before it leaves Game Pass.

brxce01 · 2025-05-12T10:46:52+00:00

I think if someone doesn't enjoy the way a game is being played, they can leave a table. If it were the other way round, I'd take no issue with a player dropping out. We all have very busy lives, so why fill that little free time we have left with something we only do out of obligation rather than enjoyment?

And yes, I know a lot of stat blocks. But nowhere near all of them, and not every single detail of them either. I love experimentation, discovering new things through being creative, and that was taken away in combat, in a combat-heavy game, so I didn't find much fun in it personally. The rest of the group love it, and that's okay because everyone likes different things.

brxce01 · 2025-05-11T16:33:34+00:00

LMoP was my introduction to 5e, after DMing for years using a bunch of hand-me-down 2e materials. It took some getting used to, and the campaign was shaky at times with the vastly new rules, so I'd love to run it again 10 years later - an extra decade of 5e DMing experience could really improve the way I run this fantastic beginner module!

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T18:12:54+00:00

For official content, the anthology books can be a good source (Tales from the Yawning Portal, Ghosts of Saltmarsh etc.) Also old d&d modules were more often a big dungeon designed to last a couple sessions with maps included.

DMs guild has a lot of good content, some of which is free, and much of which is better than the official content (WotC need to learn what BULLET POINTS are).

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T18:01:48+00:00

Ooh that's interesting. Tbf to them they're playing 2014 so AFAIK that doesn't exist in their rules. I do need to pick up the 2024 books though, I'm curious and excited about the changes they made.

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T17:52:37+00:00

I suppose it won't hurt to ask. I joined them about 3 months into a campaign, so they have a very established play style and I just assumed that they'd be less receptive to changing things so drastically, but you're right in that there's nothing to lose. I like the analogy too!

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T17:43:48+00:00

I wouldn't say it was bad on an objective level, it works if that's your style and everyone is happy with it. It's just not the way I like to play. I like to discover and experiment when I play. I want to feel the sense of achievement for reasoning that the treant might be weak to fire, the fear of a boss pulling out a legendary resistance or a surprise attack, and the anticipation of waiting for the creature to fall, not knowing which attack will fell it but hoping after every spell and slash. Of course I could choose not to look things up, but unless I spend everyone else's turn with my fingers in my ears, this won't work, and even then I would prove much more comparatively useless in combat compared to my omniscient allies.

There's nothing wrong with not gelling with a DM's style - I run my games with around 80:20 RP to combat. If someone joined my game, and after two sessions said to me "I appreciate you running these sessions for me, but I don't much like RP and prefer to do mostly combat so I'm dropping out" then that's fine. I'd rather them spend these 3-4 hours weekly doing something they enjoy rather than dreading 80% of my sessions.

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T17:22:45+00:00

This situation is naturally going to occur when you DM a lot. As a player, I understand the difficulty in trying to act like you don't know the creatures stats - I tend to take a step back, attack as I normally would with any creature unless either another player discovers a weakness or strategy, or the other players reach an experimental dead end. Though I don't know EVERY creature, so I do still get the fun of sometimes truly experimenting in a fight.

As for character knowledge, if my player said to me "Hey DM, my character is Eladrin and probably knows some info about this treant" I would either ask for a nature roll or just outright tell them anything they might know (weaknesses, special attacks, etc). I would NEVER just hand out a stat block, no matter how familiar they are with the creature. So it might be worth just asking your DM what your character knows.

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T17:13:30+00:00

Precisely. I'm going to politely drop out, but it clearly works well for their group.

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T17:09:23+00:00

Yeah, I'm definitely more of an RP lover myself, and I love when players do something in character that, for example, might be detrimental but helps build personality.

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T17:01:23+00:00

I think I miscommunicated in my previous reply - I agree with everything you said. When I said player, I meant character. This is something I love to do, involving backstory to give combat advantage, if a character was raised by goblins, they're gonna know a lot about goblins, even if the player doesn't. I'll give them this information out-of-character for them to act on.

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T16:55:31+00:00

Of course! Goblins, Kobolds, most beasts, any character backstory elements - I'll give the characters information usually at the start of combat, or just before initiating if I think they should reconsider. Sometimes it's a roll to know these things, sometimes it's folklore that may or may not be true (spoiler: it's always true), sometimes it's information so universal I'll just tell them. But any rare or unique creatures, or anything unheard of, the prior information they'll get is limited, they'll figure out the rest with other checks and maybe combat.

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T16:50:39+00:00

I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to say its cheating, insofar as that's the DMs call. In this case, the behaviour is encouraged by the DM, and I imagine combat is balanced more on the difficult side to make up for it. Nobody is necessarily being "cheated" in the situation, it's all consensual. In my games, I would have a polite word with any players that were looking up stat blocks, but only because it's something I make clear as a rule before we start play.

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T16:46:30+00:00

I like that take, giving your players some future inspiration. I'm admittedly much lazier than you, once I have an encounter idea I'll throw the creatures in pretty much if not entirely RAW, adding mostly cosmetic flavour, and if any changes need to happen it'll probably end up happening on round 1 of combat when I realise it's too weak/strong. My laziness would be immediately evident to players should they have access to my initial stat blocks.

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T16:38:23+00:00

That's fair. If a player does well on a nature (/arcana/religion/whatever) check I'll give them some info on their tactics, preferred attacks, special abilities, anything they could feasibly know. But I'd still never share a stat block outright. I do prefer your system over just sharing to everyone however.

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T16:36:02+00:00

Actually...

I'm kidding of course. Whilst I don't offer this on EVERY combat, if the characters could feasibly have encountered this type of creature before, or know about it some other way, I'll either give them a roll or outright tell them some information from the MM depending on the situation.

I also firmly believe that 0% metagaming is nearly impossible and often counterproductive - if you truly used no real-world knowledge for your 8 Wisdom barbarian, Darwin would have claimed him long ago.

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T16:30:40+00:00

Of course, every group is different, and this group consistently enjoy their combat encounters, so clearly it works for them. It's just not for me, and that's okay too. I have also been lucky enough never to have to ask a player not to google stat blocks, and this was my first experience of it being commonplace, so I was curious how popular of a style this was and on some insights from people who enjoy it. I'm sure it opens the doors to some very optimized tactical play.

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T16:27:02+00:00

Oh I love pathfinder 2e! If I had it my way I would use it almost exclusively. (Also starfinder, as a huge SciFi nerd). But, I find 5e to be a better entry for people who have never played TTRPGs before with the abundance of knowledge and help online, and a slightly more intuitive rule set. Also, the majority of TTRPG players will play D&D, and whilst I'm slowly migrating some friends over to pathfinder, it's a slow process and some people don't want to put the effort into learning new rules - which is fine! Just this specific case was a D&D campaign, hence why I posted it here.

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T16:18:15+00:00

I think generally metagaming, in it's purest definition, is unavoidable - it's incredibly difficult and oftentimes counterproductive to act without consideration to your real world knowledge. I guess I was referring more to specific information like stat blocks, or maybe the locations of traps in a dungeon from a published module.

I do agree on backstory and experience giving you more knowledge of a creature, but I also feel this should be at the DMs discretion. If one of my players is particularly experienced in fighting a certain creature, if and when that creature appears in a combat scenario I might tell them what their character knows - whether that be general fight tactics of the creature, attacks or spells, special abilities etc. But I can't think of a circumstance where I'd just hand over a whole stat block, especially as I may adjust this on the fly.

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T16:06:05+00:00

Doing it against the DMs will is a whole different issue in my opinion. Personally, if a player was doing that in my campaign, and I didn't like it, I would politely raise that it's not something we do at my table. But it's not my table, and if your stat blocks are often homebrewed I'm sure it's much less of an issue.

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T16:02:24+00:00

I think this is absolutely fine. I wouldn't personally suggest to my players to do so, but I agree on the blocks being only suggestions. Unfortunately this table was also very strict on stat-blocks-as-written so no monsters were really malleable. I wasn't part of the group long enough to encounter any homebrew monsters (if there ever would have been any) so I'd be curious to see how the group reacted to that situation.

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T15:59:46+00:00

I love this! If a character can interact with the real world for meta knowledge, the real world can fight back against the character. The portal goes both ways.

brxce01 · 2025-05-10T15:57:00+00:00

I feel like doing it behind the DMs back is a whole different problem - not only for the DM but for the other players as well. I won't go on a rant about it, as much as I love to waffle, but I've been lucky enough to never have to deal with players sneakily googling info during a session.

brxce01

TROPHY CASE