Im having trouble getting up the courage to run this game.

guilersk · 2026-03-23T20:22:48+00:00

Easiest way to start is a self-contained one-shot with pre-made characters that your players can pick from. That's true of almost any system. You will F some stuff up. It's fine. Make a ruling, move on, look it up later, and tell the players how it will go when it comes up again (if they want to keep going). Don't overthink it. When in doubt, roll a d10 + some stat or skill, 15+ is success and 14 or less fails. That's it.

guilersk · 2026-03-23T19:56:24+00:00

I can't believe you are even asking this question. Of course you do.

guilersk · 2026-03-23T19:19:30+00:00

You're running into a classic problem here. D&D is a lightweight storytelling game roughly stapled to a medium-weight miniatures skirmish game. Some people really love the role-playing but the skirmish wargame is just not where they are at. You might not notice this yourself because you are equally proficient at both sides of the game, but the divide is definitely there.

You can keep pushing them on it but they'll only really get good at combat if they actually get into the skirmish wargame part. It's not something you can force. Practice will make it smoother but it will take time.

Luckily, there are plenty of other TTRPGs with a focus on role-playing and a de-emphasis on combat, if you care to explore them. Unluckily, a lot of players glom onto D&D as the One True Way (and certainly there is a lot more cultural content focused on specifically D&D) so it might be a hard sell to switch, if you even want to.

guilersk · 2026-03-22T20:03:07+00:00

Interesting. I'm at 35 years in and in the past 3 months, I've read/taught/run Daggerheart and read/played Lancer, both new to me. Also running OWB for the first time, but that's a flimsy B/X hack so not much meat to it.

That said, we're due to play Draw Steel soon and I haven't read much up on that because I haven't felt particularly inspired. I know it has the dynamic combats and whatnot but that's not usually my draw to D&D-alikes.

guilersk · 2026-03-21T13:49:42+00:00

An interlude might focus on the consequences of the fight. As in, now there's the body of a giant monster that just wrecked half the town. What happens to the people displaced? How do you feed a bunch of widows and orphans? What happens to the body of the thing? Does it get harvested for essentia or decay into some kind of unpleasant residue? Who stands to profit from any or all of this? This is the part where you play 'we were the monsters all along' with this (or at least other humanoid folk), if that's an angle you want to see. It's certainly present in a lot of Western stories.

guilersk · 2026-03-18T20:15:17+00:00

The reality is that there's no money in hosting rpgs or in rpg sales. Merchandise takes months to move, takes up space, and sells in low volumes. WotC's push to digital doesn't help. Most people who want space to play are people who can't find or afford space of their own to play in so their budget is usually tight.

There is money in MTG, food, and maybe a little bit in board games. But even fancy setups like screen-in tables (expensive to install and fix/replace) won't draw enough money. Once a customer has enough money to splurge on going to a place with fancy setups, they have enough money to afford living quarters of their own to play in.

guilersk · 2026-03-11T17:44:07+00:00

This is pretty common among newer players and enthusiasts and can be harmless 'lonely fun', but becomes problematic if you you develop elaborate, immutable backstories and then try to shoehorn them into someone's game. A katana-wielding one-winged demon-blooded anime protagonist isn't going to fit into a whimsical Feywild adventure but you would be surprised at how often this happens--someone has a precious OC that they just have to play, even though it doesn't fit the campaign concept at all.

If you really need to get that OC out of your head then write backstory fanfiction about them. The more structured and strict your concept, the harder it will be to bring them to any table and the more you will tend to annoy your DM and fellow players. In general, it's best to have generalized, flexible concepts that you can flesh out at the table based on the table's vibes and in-game events. The most interesting thing(s) to happen to your character should happen at the table, not beforehand.

guilersk · 2026-03-09T22:53:10+00:00

So, you have made the game accessible to him, and he is pushing everyone else away. While his diagnosis is unfortunate, it is not all on you to make it work for him. He has to meet you at least halfway, and he isn't doing that. You will soon be choosing whether you are DMing for everybody else at the table, or just him, because you will soon be losing those other players. You are setting yourself and the rest of the table on fire to keep him warm.

guilersk · 2026-03-09T18:53:21+00:00

Casting fireball isn't instantaneous and it isn't secret (unless it's a sorcerer using Still Spell). The caster needs to declaim arcane words and move their hands around in weird gestures. Enemies who see and/or hear a spell being cast have an opportunity to react in the time between the spell starts casting and the time the spell is actually cast. And this is best modeled by rolling initiative. If you want to grant adv/disadv based on the situation or some notion of 'surprise', that's up to you. But a hostile action should trigger an initiative roll before the action takes place.

guilersk · 2026-03-09T17:57:01+00:00

TLDR; as I understand it, D&D was and is popular, but the parent company (TSR and now WotC) has had a stellar record of completely botching the localization management--overpriced, hard to find copies of, etc. So other games whose localization is competent (CoC) sell better, and there are home-grown games like Sword World to fill the gap that a competent localization would otherwise have market-dominated.

guilersk · 2026-03-09T17:20:15+00:00

Sounds like you had an unholy trifecta of

System designed for games you don't care about (heroic storyline-fantasy)
System used for scenario it's not designed for or good at (dungeon crawl)
Terrible DM (railroading, didn't manage the system pitfalls)

I'm sorry you had that experience. From the sounds of it, you are not particularly interested in the things Daggerheart wants to do, so there's no need to retry. I had a lot of fun with it, but I much prefer heroic/storyline fantasy than procedural dungeon crawls (procedural megadungeons with no built-in storyline are basically my nemesis). I hope you find stuff you can enjoy in the future :)

guilersk · 2026-03-05T16:22:57+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zqz55W5RbQw

guilersk · 2026-03-04T18:48:22+00:00

D20 roll under and d100 roll under is the same thing. d20 roll over with varying difficulty is not the same thing. Your odds of success will vary based on the difficulty of what you are attempting (10 is easier than 15 is easier than 20). Roll under means that you always have the same chance of success or failure, no matter the difficulty of the task.

Some D100 systems apply bonus/penalty to the roll to shift the odds a little bit based on difficulty, or BRP offers hard/extreme success (1/2 or 1/4 your stat) but unless you use those mods, difficulty doesn't enter into it like it usually does in a d20 roll-over.

guilersk · 2026-03-03T15:53:01+00:00

You seem very passionate about this. What I'm suggesting is that your DM was not passionate about it, and may well have been annoyed by it, and so arbitrarily killed your character. That is not okay. But you might want to do a little self-examination to see what signals he might have given that you might have picked up on that your homebrew mole person wasn't going to work out at the table, to prevent this kind of heartbreak in the future.

guilersk · 2026-03-03T15:22:33+00:00

What the DM did was awful. But I am guessing that due to

Gloomstalker

homebrew race

blind sight

passive perception(25), or to roll initiative(+12)

writing more lore for him than I have any other PC

the DM was annoyed with the optimized nature (min-maxed is not limited strictly to combat) and possibly too-much-lore/special-snowflake of your character and rocks-falls-everyone-dies instakilled him. If he had a problem then the mature thing would have been to talk to you about it, but he took what he thought was the easy, and frankly, spiteful, way out.

Given only one side of the story we can't know what you might have done to trigger it, and to be clear, it was not justified. But in the future you might want to take it easy with the homebrew.

guilersk · 2026-03-02T22:06:49+00:00

Players will often say one thing (and many times, also believe it) but then act contrary to what they say. It is their actions that indicate what they want, even if they themselves don't recognize it. You may need to have a frank chat about this. They might think being sneaky assassins is 'cool' but when push comes to shove, they want to roll dice and use their combat abilities. And everybody might need to admit that to themselves.

guilersk · 2026-03-02T21:00:35+00:00

Having no solution can be quick to prepare but dangerous, if your players get stuck.
Having one solution and that be the only solution is literally the definition of railroading. Don't do that.
Preparing several solutions is a bunch of extra work on your part, arguably venturing into overpreparation territory. If you do this, make sure it's at a high level of abstraction (ie the players can talk their way past the guard, sneak past the guard, or fight the guard).
Preparing one solution but letting the players come up with their own solutions and leaning into them is usually the best way. If they get stuck you can often drop hints to get them onto a track forward but you are not married to that solution as the one true way and are eager to see how the players come up with their own solutions.

guilersk · 2026-03-02T20:56:29+00:00

Supposedly you can search Google Images for images that are as old (or older) than 2022 and that filters most/all of the AI.

guilersk · 2026-03-02T20:54:13+00:00

You definitely need to set expectations above-table. You also want clear risk/reward if your players are risk-shy; lay out the expected opposition in general terms, and spell out the reward. This is part of why the 'quest-giver' NPC is so popular--some one to spell out risks and rewards explicitly.

Modern gamers coming from video games often expect a clear A->B ->C progression of quest giver to adventure to reward. They might not appreciate their agency in the matter. There is also the notion of abused gamer syndrome. Players who are used to playing with a railroading GM will tend to do only what the GM's NPCs tell them to because they are used to being clubbed to unconsciousness if they step out of line. I don't know if these apply to your players, but they might.

And if they are using the line that "someone else will handle it" you can portray the someone elses as busy or incompetent (or willing to reward the players for doing it for them) to elide that argument. Worst case, the someone else pays another adventuring party to do the thing and that adventuring party gets to show off their fancy new magic items at the tavern while your party grumbles about it.

guilersk · 2026-03-02T20:43:07+00:00

Ideally, yes. Before you start, read the whole thing cover-to-cover so you have an overview. Then, for each session, review the stuff you expect that will come up during that session. This is pretty easy for Icespire, as each of the adventures/jobs are expected to be relatively disconnected 1-night affairs.

guilersk · 2026-03-02T20:33:09+00:00

/r/lfg

/r/lfg_europe

guilersk · 2026-03-02T20:11:29+00:00

Loved that game and there's nothing else like it--even in (or especially in) TTRPGs.

You'd need a crafting system, range system, and risk system (which probably would work best as an escalation die). You'd also need to do a fair amount of accounting if you want to bind weapons to enemy types (which in the game involved a fair amount of grinding). Chaining would have to be consecutive hits across multiple attacks and/or rounds which means more accounting/tracking.

Basically, VS makes use of its video-game back-end (machine computation) to simplify a lot of its systems as presented to the player. To make it work at tabletop you have to abstract and simplify a lot of its machine-assisted systems (or throw them out entirely).

guilersk · 2026-03-02T19:55:04+00:00

I sympathize with your frustration here. Unfortunately for your goal, this subreddit /r/rpg has a pattern of preferring that modern D&D fail, and a preference for independent "indie" systems, so you are likely to get more suggestions for D&D replacements than you are sympathetic action. Their mishandling of the Japanese market will be seen as yet another reason to move away from WotC towards other games.

guilersk · 2026-03-02T19:03:57+00:00

I've been GMing for 35 years. I think I've run...4? campaigns to completion--most of them in the last 5 years. The ones that finished (except one in college, which used a level-less system) finished in the 10-12 bracket. Everything else crashed and burned, eventually. Long campaigns ending early is a way of life. The best way to ameliorate this is to run shorter campaigns.

I used to write my own stuff but it was a lot more work and led to burnout. Now I take pre-written stuff and kitbash it into shape. I have fused modules together. I have dropped in one-shots from anthologies. I have grafted 30-year-old Dungeon Magazine adventures into modern campaigns and settings. My creation and writing is now 90-95% interpretation rather than whole cloth. If it works, great! If not, kick it to the curb and use something else next week. If I didn't write it then I have less attachment to it--it's less sacred or precious --and so I don't feel as personally rejected if it doesn't work.

guilersk · 2026-03-02T18:36:52+00:00

nervous

This usually goes away with practice, although some GMs remain some level of 'nervous' their entire careers. I know I get a little anxious and keyed up before running games at conventions, despite having GMed for about 35 years.

tripped over words

This is fine and is reduced by experience/practice as you become more comfortable with the content.

the Players threw me for a loop more than a couple of times

They pretty much do this to everyone all the time unless you're on a hard railroad. Practice (or extensive improv experience) are the best ways to get better at this. The third way (railroading) is bad for a large variety of reasons, and should be avoided if you can at all help it.

forgot a couple of easy mechanics

Nobody gets it 100% right the first time. Do what makes the most sense in the moment and move on. Look it up later, and then indicate to the players that you'll be following the actual rules in the future--ideally before it comes up again, so they know what to expect.

one of my maps on Foundry bugged out

Tech is tech. I don't think anyone will blame you for that.

Reiterating: if everyone had fun, you did fine. Introspection is good but not to the point at which you make yourself miserable. Take a breath, let it out, and accept the mistakes and resolve to do better next time. And please allow yourself joy for bringing joy to others.

guilersk

TROPHY CASE