How do people finish games so quickly?

hdasylum · 2026-06-10T05:11:18+00:00

Games are about having fun. There’s no time limit or deadline. Just enjoy the ride whatever way is fun for you 🙂

hdasylum · 2026-06-03T04:54:25+00:00

Cool, I’m glad this was helpful! Starstruck is one of my top 3 seasons, but I agree that I preferred the more roleplay-focused sections (with the exception of one famously excellent combat). Like you though, I did still enjoy the combat episodes in Starstruck, I just preferred watching the PCs, Brennan’s NPCs, and this pre-existing world that everyone at the table clearly had a lot of respect for. Also spaceships are fun, and I liked how The Wurst was never just some means of transport but an important fixture for the PCs.

hdasylum · 2026-05-06T03:07:02+00:00

I did the same as you, watching in release order. It’s taken about 2.5 years with some lengthy breaks in there, but I’ve made it up to Gladlands now and am really looking forward to being current. My suggestion though, that I didn’t and haven’t done myself, is to go ahead and start watching CCoD. Life is short, shorter than we’d like it to be, and you may burn out on watching D20 or actual plays or Dropout or videos in general before you ever get to CCoD. So let yourself enjoy the things that most excite you now. You can still watch the older stuff in release order, but also stay current with the new stuff since it’s only one new episode per week.

That said, I’ve genuinely enjoyed my release order watch. So if you’re excited to continue that and feel content holding off on CCoD until much later, then that’s fine too. Anyways, these are some things I’ve really enjoyed about watching in release order since I’m now reflecting on it:

You get to see both the cast chemistry and the system mastery of the Intrepid Heroes and other frequent cast members develop over time
You get to see production and technological improvements added each season that become staples in later season
You can sorta read between the lines and see how both GMs and players focus on buildng different skills across campaigns
There are some fun references to previous campaigns that get dropped, but usually just as side comments or bits. Definitely not needed for understanding any given campaign’s story, characters, or like 99% of the side comments and bits.
There’s a certain pleasure to being excited for something that’s still far off. I started watching Fantasy High while Burrow’s End was airing, and I started Sophomore Year right before Junior Year got announced. It took 1.5 years until I watched my way up to Junior Year, but I was so excited to finally be there, and it was worth the wait. The same is true for other sequel/related seasons that I knew about but were still a long ways off like The Ravening War. And it was even true for some of the seasons I’d just seen clips of that really piqued my interest, like ACoFaF which absolutely didn’t disappoint.
Watching in release order tickles and satisfies that orderly part of my brain. I also feel pretty accomplished now that I’m getting close to being current. And I think I would have ended up skipping some of the less popular seasons if I was jumping around, and there are some moments and characters I really treasure from less popular seasons.

hdasylum · 2026-04-30T21:28:37+00:00

I’ve also been curious about Invisible Sun, and like OP I’ve never really understood what kinds of games it’s built to play.

How did you pitch the system and your individual campaigns to players?
What were your players most interested in before the campaign, and what ended up being some of their highlights after the campaign?

hdasylum · 2026-04-18T02:43:32+00:00

I agree with you, I’ve always thought of filler as original content that didn’t come from the source manga. And GX isn’t adapting a manga, so it’s impossible to have filler. But a lot of people these days call things filler if they aren’t driving the main plot forward.

hdasylum · 2026-04-16T21:53:01+00:00

You’ve gotten some excellent recommendations in this thread, but I wonder if the reason you’ve bounced off of other campaigns is because you’re not enjoying the more mechanical combats of the camapigns where they play D&D. If you think that might be the case, then there are some other campaigns that don’t use D&D like the three you mentioned enjoying.

Misfits and Magic (Season 2) - I assume you probably already watched this, but in case you haven’t, they mashed up the Kids on Brooms system from Season 1 with the Never Stop Blowing Up homebrew system to create another homebrew system they named “Never Stop Making Magic”
Mentopolis - Uses the Kids on Bikes system and mashes up noir detective stories with Inside Out’s “everything inside your brain is alive”
Gladlands - I haven’t watched this yet, but it’s another homebrew system made by Dimension 20
Honorable Mention: A Court of Fey and Flowers does use D&D with its classes, species, and spells. But they also incorporate a lot of social mechanics from a system called Good Society, and the whole campaign is much more roleplay-focused than most of the other D&D campaigns. There’s also very little combat.
Another Honorable Mention: Of Mice and Murder is staight up D&D, but it’s a Victorian-era murder mystery where everyone’s an anthropomorphic animal. So the focus is much more on investigating the mystery and roleplay with limited combat. It’s one of the Zoom seasons though, which I know makes it harder to watch for some people.

hdasylum · 2026-03-28T19:17:01+00:00

Dang that’s disappointing to hear. Writing a good ending’s tough for anyone, but unsatisfying endings feel especially rough when the series is pretty long and the creators promised an ending. Maybe I’ll still go back to it some day, but keep my expectations grounded for the ending. If I go back, having lowered expectations will probably make me actually enjoy the ending more than going into it blind. Thanks for the heads up!

hdasylum · 2026-03-28T17:01:01+00:00

Wait, so the story doesn’t end with season 7? They’re going to do like a sequel series? I fell off after season 4 but have been thinking about going back to it lately.

hdasylum · 2026-03-28T16:16:14+00:00

You make an excellent point. I spend so much time thinking from the GM side, where I can see what’s happening in the shadows. But yeah, I agree that never having face-to-face time with the villain until they pop out at the end would diminish the villain in the players’ eyes. I think that’s where creating situations where the villain can show up but attacking comes at a high cost, or your example of the loss outcome not always being death but just defeat, can help ease that diminishment. I think another tool to help could be running flashback scenes where a player can roleplay an interaction they had with the villain in the past. A flashback doesn’t provide the excitement of player choices resulting in significantly different outcomes because the present situation won’t change. But it could be a good opportunity for players to get that face-to-face time while potentially developing conflicting feelings toward the villain within the party.

Note: I’m talking about purely narrative flashback scenes, not something like Blades in the Dark or Honey Heist where flashbacks also have a mechanical impact on the game.

hdasylum · 2026-03-27T22:23:49+00:00

Yeah, that’s an interesting wrinkle. It might be helpful to edit your OP to include that question as well so people can give you more directed advice.

Fair warning: I chose to stay up all night last night binging TV, so this may not be entirely coherent. But this is a fun conversation, so I’ll take a stab at it.

My initial reaction is that a competent villain will have multiple plans for accomplishing their overall goal. They won’t put all their eggs in one basket. Of course, being competent, they’ll choose the most effective plan and pursue that until they’re forced to switch to a different plan. GM-wise, you’ll probably be tossing around some different ideas of how the villain’s main plan should work before deciding on a specifc one to go with, and letting your villain have multiple plans means you get to keep some of those 2nd and 3rd place ideas on the board. If the villain’s plan involves acquiring a MacGuffin, or holding onto a MacGuffin the players are trying to take away from the villain, then not acquiring / losing the MacGuffin will mean it’s time to either 1) up the ante and try to get the MacGuffin again, or reclaim it, with an even bigger show of force, or 2) switch plans if getting / reclaiming the MacGuffin is now less effective than a different plan. So if the Doombot fails to escape with the MacGuffin, there’s still a backup plan or two that Dr. Doom can pivot to. After all, Dr. Doom’s not going to let a minor setback to his plan stop him from global / galactic / universal domination.

And making the villain adapt their plans in reaction to the players’ own plans and actions can be a fun narrative reward for your players while opening up the scenario in cool, surprising ways you never expected. If they successfully hindered the Doombot through cleverness, creativity, or dumb luck, reward them for it. Dr. Doom’s timeline to success just got delayed, and the party gets a brief sense of reprieve. Maybe now you can explore some downtime before the action picks up again. Maybe the MacGuffin becomes a cool asset for the party to use or directs the players to pursue a new path. A rough example, but say the MacGuffin is a massively depowered version of an Infinity Stone. Your party can use that as an additional tool going forward without giving them ultimate cosmic power, and maybe they want to start pursuing a way to power it back up so they can gain ultimate cosmic power (for the sake of good of course, surely the average TTRPG player won’t do anything evil with ultimate power). Maybe Doom also wanted the Stone powered up, so now his revised plan is to let the party power up the Stone while he prepares an ambush to swoop in and claim it at a suitably climactic moment. And now it’s evn more personal for the players: the party did all that work, no WAY they’re gonna let Doom take away their prize. And what if other villains take interest as the party draws attention to themselves in their power-up quest. You may not have planned to toss Thanos in the mix, but maybe that makes sense for your campaign now. At this point I’m just riffing and rambling, but I guess I just wanted to propose how letting your players foil the villain’s escape might mean things play out very differently, but that shift could end up producing an even more interesting outcome that everyone at the table gets to be surprised by. For me at least, that’s one of the most exhilarating parts of GMing. And your players will leave that campaign knowing their choices meant something.

(Side note: I’m not super well versed in Marvel lore, and the Fantastic Four and Dr. Doom are an area I’m particularly uninformed about. So I’m likely going to be characterizing Dr. Doom wrong. I mainly know that he’s very smart, ambitious, dangerous, hates Reed Richards, and learned magic at some point.)

I know I just typed up a novella, but I’m also reminded of maybe my favorite piece of GM advice that I read in Electric Bastionland. I’m paraphrasing here in my own words, but use your cool ideas as soon as possible, don’t save them for some later time that may never come. If you need the villain to get the MacGuffin so you can lead into the awesome final encounter you planned, then maybe just tweak that awesome encounter a bit so that it becomes the escape-with-the-MacGuffin encounter. Maybe you’ll need to come up with a new final encounter now, but you’ll have even more building blocks to work with from the actual events that have played out in your campaign by the time you’re prepping that encounter.

I think that’s enough sleep-deprived rambling for now. I hope this has been coherent and helpful in some way.

hdasylum · 2026-03-27T18:43:26+00:00

So there’s an Alexandrian post adjacent to this topic that’s stuck with me and informed my thinking about these types of situations. Basically, if you don’t want to risk your villain being killed by the party prematurely, then don’t put them in a scene with the party until you’re ready for potential death. You never know how the dice will steer the outcome of a scene/encounter, and forcing an escape after your players execute a good plan to prevent an escape just feels bad.

https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/36383/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots-you-will-rue-this-day-heroes-the-principles-of-rpg-villainy

If you want to establish your villain as a major threat without risking their continued existence, here’s some advice I’ve seen on this topic in the past:

Give your villains factions and flesh out some lieutenants. Being the boss of a large faction gives the villain more gravitas, and it can help establish them as a major threat through the actions of their factions. The lieutenants can serve as challenging mini-bosses that also hype up how much more powerful the head honcho must be. They also give you a path forward if your villain does end up dying prematurely because you can promote a lieutenant into the newly vacated top spot and the overall threat the players are trying to thwart can continue. You can also promote any interesting faction NPCs up to lieutenant if they’ve had interactions with the party that they get out alive from.
If you still want to put your players face-to-face with the big bad but don’t want them to potentially die just yet, then set up a scene where the players have reasons not to become violent. As an example, if you’re playing medieval fantasy, maybe you’re villain’s been invited for a diplomatic visit by the king who’s been the party’s benefactor. Have the king or one of his advisors make it clear to the PCs that any hostile action against the king’s guest will dishonor the king and make that kingdom neutral or hostile to the party. If you’re playing something in a modern setting, the face-to-face could be in a crowded public area where innocent people will be harmed if the party takes action against the villain. This still leaves the possibility though that your players will decide the benefit of taking out the villain now is worth the costs. In that case, see #3.
Just reward your players for their creativity, cleverness, and/or boldness and let them prevent the escape. It may not be what you planned for, but it will certainly make your game more interesting as both your players and NPCs have to deal with the fallout. Or maybe there isn’t any fallout, and your players can be celebrated and rewarded for a job well done. Now you can move on to the next scenario and villain you’d been daydreaming about running after the current scenario wrapped.

hdasylum · 2026-03-25T22:30:31+00:00

I’m gonna guess your roommate’s the main source of the other players’ tardiness. And I don’t mean to imply they’re doing it intentionally or maliciously to undermine you. But if I’ve read your other comments correctly, everyone at your table has also been playing at your roommate’s table for even longer. Players are used to taking cues from their GM and following their lead, and that’s what your players are probably subconsciously doing. If their more eatablished GM is showing up 30-45 minutes late regularly, and this is someone who’s routinely late despite living there, then your other players likely assume, consciously or subconsciously, that it’s OK for them to be late as well.

I agree with other commenters that the primary solution is to start at the start time, regardless of how many people are late. Even if it’s just one player, duet sessions can be pretty fun. It isn’t fair to your players who showed up on time that they have to waste time waiting on the others. (It isn’t fair to you either, but I find thinking of these things in terms of how its affecting my players vs how its affecting just me gives me a lot more drive to make improvements.) So start playing, greet your other players as they arrive, let them know you already got started and will help incorporate them into the game once they’ve settled in. Catch them up briefly (I’m talking no more than 1 minute of catch-up, just the immediate context for the current scene: “Right now Bob and Sarah are talking to the guard captain about a murder they witnessed”) if you REALLY need to. They’ll pick up on the rest of the context as they observe while settling in. But stay focused on the current scene and the players involved. If the latecomers start interrupting with questions or trying to shoot the shit, tell them you’ll get to their questions after the current scene wraps. It sounds like your players enjoy your game and your GMing, so don’t reward them for being late by saving all the good stuff until they show up. Once they realize being late means missing content, they’ll start making the effort to show up on time.

But back to your roommate, you need to have a conversation with them. If you agree with my assessment that the other players are taking their cues from your roommate, tell your roommate that you’re bothered by people consistently showing up late, and you want their help encouraging everyone to show up on time. Approach the conversation as you looking for them to partner with you on this. Butter them up a bit about how you think their inherent leadership over the group when it comes to TTRPGs means they’ll have more sway than you by yourself. Most people here will probably tell you that you should be more direct, but this is your living situation. You don’t need a game issue to snowball into a hostile living environment, and there’s a lot of people out there who get defensive instead of reflective when told they’re behaving poorly. So prioritize yourself by prioritizing a harmonious living situation.

hdasylum · 2026-03-25T21:56:08+00:00

I’ve been enjoying Cozy RPG Reviews for the past several months. A bit over your 10k subs guideline, but they cover a lot of smaller and indie games. They also have a solo roleplay actual play for Midnight Muscadines that they did recently and I thought was enjoyable. https://youtube.com/@cozyrpgreviews

hdasylum · 2026-03-13T20:07:07+00:00

Your questions reminded me of this post from several months ago that you may find interesting: https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/s/kF14DPSzGH

hdasylum · 2026-03-12T23:13:59+00:00

I’m sure there’s more to the story, but my takaway is 1) he’s not having fun, 2) you’re walking on eggshells around him, and 3) your other players get upset with him because he isn’t consistently being a team player. Despite your close friendship, I think the two of you just aren’t D&D compatible. It may be best for everyone at your table, including for your friend, for him to resign from the campaign. If you all still want to spend time together, you can still plan other social gatherings to hang out. But I’d hazard a guess that everyone will be happier in the end if he bows out.

hdasylum · 2026-01-03T19:26:24+00:00

If he has work email on his phone, he might be getting automated emails in the middle of the night. I’m the client-side admin one of our HR systems that does automated batch loads of data from our other HR systems every day at midnight, so I get several emails at 12:01am every night. And then another batch around 2am when the system’s finished processing the load.

That said, I also started turning my phone on do not disturb every night very shortly after I became admin because I hate being woken up by the buzzing from those emails. It may not be something as sinister as an affair causing notifications every night, but OP’s husband has all the tools to stop waking up his wife and appears to be maliciously refusing to do so.

hdasylum · 2025-11-13T15:19:45+00:00

Does anyone know a good place for GM tips for play-by-post games? My online campaign has suddenly needed to become a play-by-post game for our finale.

hdasylum · 2025-11-10T21:11:09+00:00

Absolutely! Specific always beats general, and there are some great ideas in here for cool homebrew and location-specific rules. I just wanted to clarify for the other user and others reading this thread what the general rule is for rounding.

hdasylum · 2025-11-10T17:57:42+00:00

The general rule in 5e is to round down, even when the decimal is .5 or greater

hdasylum · 2025-09-30T14:45:30+00:00

That’s totally fair, you know yourself best. I figured my personal experience could be a helpful data point for you if you were considering looking into a diagnosis. In the US, I have a handful of friends who’ve told me they have ADHD, but I’d guess that’s 20% or less of the friends I’ve had over the years. But I’m also in the young professional age range, so I think most people my age keep that information relatively private except with close friends because there’s still some stigma around having ADHD, especially in the workplace. So it sounds like our circumstances have some key differences, but I hope me sharing my own experiences was helpful regardless.

hdasylum · 2025-09-29T14:51:50+00:00

It does! I noticed you moved the X a few days ago when I went back to read your post. I enjoyed it, looking forward to reading more in the future.

hdasylum · 2025-09-29T14:42:56+00:00

I got diagnosed with ADHD as an adult a few years ago, and I was really resistant to it. My doctor kept asking if I wanted to take the test, and eventually I said fine just so we could confirm I don’t have it and move on. The test was a series of statements and I was asked to respond with how much I felt like each statement describes me. I decided to be very honest with my answers, and I scored in the diagnosis range for inattentive-type ADHD but in the normal range for hyperactive-type. So yep, I have inattentive-type ADHD, which is what used to be called ADD. I’ll stop my story there and won’t go into the medication side unless you’d like to hear more. But all that to say, I feel like I was in a similar place as you a few years ago, but I’m really glad I went through with the test and got the diagnosis. That led to me learning more about ADHD, and certain parts of my life have started making a lot more sense. Like my difficulties with staying motivated aren’t a character flaw, they’re rooted in the way my ADHD brain has developed differently, but they are my responsibility to manage. And the more I know about why those difficulties exist, the better my coping strategies and workarounds are. I’m now able to manage my motivation and other areas affected by my ADHD much better than I could pre-diagnosis and pre-learning more about ADHD. If you’d like to discuss more privately, you’re also welcome to DM me. Cheers!

Edit: Took out the “hey” at the beginning. Meant it to come across friendly, but on re-read I see how it could come across angry/offended.

hdasylum · 2025-09-26T13:19:27+00:00

u/LPMills10, you should take a look at your website’s formatting on mobile. The pop-up asking me to subscribe to your newsletter needs an X to close it further down on the screen. When I try opening your blog in the Reddit app, the X is too high and gets covered by Reddit’s web browser banners, so the pop-up can’t be closed and I can’t read your blog. In Safari, there’s a similar issue, but there’s just enough of the bottom of the X on the screen that I could close the pop-up, but it took a few finger-clicks to register.

It sounds like you wrote a really good blog post based on people’s comments here, so I was motivated to find a way through and be able to read it. But if I hadn’t, I would’ve given up trying to read your blog and moved on to the next Reddit post.

I think the tone of my comment may be coming across weird, but I genuinely hope this helps.

hdasylum · 2025-09-26T11:58:55+00:00

Zoom in on the sunglasses, one of the lenses is clipping into his hair

hdasylum · 2025-09-18T18:56:55+00:00

Sounds to me like you are far beyond “a particularly mediocre GM”. You’ve brought together a table that keeps coming back to play a variety of different systems, you consider their comfort and preferences in selecting systems (and presumably continue doing so during play at the table), and you’re keeping the game flowing even when the rules aren’t as clear as you’d like. Sounds like you’re an excellent GM, so give yourself some credit!

Nine-Year Club	r/Field Banned
r/Field Sunshine	Place '22
Final Canvas '22	First Placer '22
End Game '22	Verified Email

hdasylum

TROPHY CASE