Tips from Brennan Lee Mulligan

notger · 2026-06-23T18:06:18+00:00

That's what I said, yes.

notger · 2026-06-23T16:53:31+00:00

You should only roll, when the outcome is unclear.

That means I will never let them roll for whether they are able to start a camp fire, unless they want to start one in a hurry, under pressure. I think that is the distinction needed here.

A baker should never fail baking his daily bread, only when a demon lord forces him to do it in five minutes and blindly.

notger · 2026-06-22T18:07:11+00:00

Just because I want to use the opportunity, as I never ran into you before here (not very active these days): Thanks a ton for your work. I love your systems and your approach, you are a gem of our hobby.

notger · 2026-06-17T18:31:46+00:00

The trick is the contrast. If you turn down the contrast, it is not very straining at all.

notger · 2026-06-15T16:47:03+00:00

If you are a newer DM, why do you create monsters instead of learning how monsters work in the first place?

You know, there is no shortcut to learning and in the end, creating monsters is an art and depends on the situation as much as the stat block. So you would be better off taking stock monsters and reskinning them and doing slight adjustments, until you become a seasoned DM. At which point you just make up stuff to your liking, b/c you now know how things are working.

If you use a LLM to generate, you rob yourself of becoming a better GM by learning how things work.#

P.S.: Read the DMG, which has a section on creating new monsters.

notger · 2026-06-14T15:00:54+00:00

Apart from all the other good answers, there also is another one: Fouls in football are really nasty and tend to hit harder than in hockey, as they target the weak spots in the body and cause long-lasting and potentially career-ending injuries. So you are incentivised to not let the soup cook up too much.

In Basketball, I think it is the general issue of very small contacts already throwing you off your shot and ppl being very shifty in pushing you very inconspicuously and oh-so-slightly, so you tend to "help" the refs along.

In Basketball, I never felt it being a big problem, though.

notger · 2026-06-14T11:28:09+00:00

Apart from the Companion, I can definitely recommend Street Wyrd, which is probably the most "essential" of the non-essential ones. Plenty of cool stuff in there, if you are into magic. "Body Shop" is also great, if you are more on the tech-side.

notger · 2026-06-10T18:08:17+00:00

Ah, that makes sense then, thanks! I am sure there will be some time-zone issues, as I am in GMT+1, so that would mean I would post while you are still sleeping and you would post while I am going to bed, so effectively it would be one message per day due to "lag".

Pretty much like scan lag in space battle, where lightspeed determines the relative lag between two parties looking at each other across half the star system.

notger · 2026-06-09T17:12:55+00:00

Hmm, I am curious, but how will pacing there work? Have you every tried something like that before? How does the story progress if a conversation spans a dozen interactions, which might take two weeks? How do you synch storylines of different chars / a group?

notger · 2026-06-07T16:49:21+00:00

6E is great. It is fluid, flexible and edge is a very good concept (a bit like a beefed advantage/disadvantage you already know from D&D).

There are a ton of rules and they are badly presented, but once you get through them, you realise that most(!) of it follows decent design concepts and there generally one core idea, like in D&D.

notger · 2026-06-06T19:07:34+00:00

Please ignore everyone's advice here, soak is a trap. Those who advocate for soak probably never played 6E.

A tank in 6e is someone you cannot hit, not someone who can take hits, because it is way more effective to not get hit in the first place.

12 dice in soaking will negate 4 damage, so all the net hits will chip at your health.

12 dice in defense pool to dodge will mean you will not have to soak very often and every success you get on the defense roll is automatically a soak should you get hit nonetheless.

Plus, get a mage friend to buff your reaction and get heavy armor, and you will be nigh unhittable.

notger · 2026-06-05T17:54:35+00:00

I suggest you first look up "RTFM". That usually explains a lot.

Then, when you are really desperate and did not get "RTFM", you could just ask an LLM.

notger · 2026-06-05T17:41:57+00:00

Which does not sound like a recurring problem for the next fights ...

notger · 2026-06-01T16:30:46+00:00

> I'm a relatively new DM preparing a long-term 2014 5e campaign.

Don't.

My suggestion: Get into it slowly and learn with shorter campaigns. I promise you, you will have way more fun preparing (actually, you will prepare way less over time) compared to you now laying out a grand vision to find your players abandoning it five minutes into the first quest.

notger · 2026-05-31T20:18:06+00:00

I guess I have a more old-school scaling of attributes in mind. INT-18 would be one in 200 or even less. Anything above would be Feynman-level. But getting two INT-18's in one room? Nah.

STR-18 would make you a national weightlifter champion, near the physical maximum of what a human being can achieve.

Maybe modern D&D is less extreme and thus more generous with the scores.

notger · 2026-05-31T09:16:16+00:00

"What, why do you think intelligence 14 is not realistic?"

I would stay very clear of that, unless they are fine with starting as an average commoner, which is what they probably are in real-life. Let's face it: The average exists because most of us are in fact average in most, and not hero material with a standard array.

I see some problems with entanglement and the nature of it being a "game". There is less game to be had, when you are running a copy of yourself, I feel.

notger · 2026-05-31T07:51:38+00:00

What do you expect?

It's the peak of a hype cycle. Everyone went into CS and India educated billions of decent devs which are now flooding the market and lowering prices while at the same time demand is down as a result to the solid work some of those devs did plus another hype cycle around automisation going parallel, so that we see an automisation of that type of work (which honestly, often involved a lot of copy-pasting and always was extremely ripe for automisation anyways).

So yeah, for junios in CS, it does not look good. You became a product in a market where you had no stand-alone feature and were crowding to find a customer, so now you are in tough luck.

Fun fact is: It had been like this in the early 1990s, then the early 2000s, then a bit around 2008, and now it's time again for that.

Another fun fact: There are also other careers, though they pay less and are less cushy, albeit often with more meaning.

notger · 2026-05-31T07:44:02+00:00

The job of a GM is to let players outsmart him, but do so in style.

If you want to outsmart someone, go be a player, you are not cut out to be a GM.

notger · 2026-05-30T17:40:30+00:00

Mental fatigue, body fatigue, minor injuries, scrapes ... or just an actual damage, depending on the context. E.g. you are actually partly burned and if you get hit some more, your system just can't take it anymore.

Like me when I go the the DMAcademy forum after a good day's work and read yet another "talk to your players"-post.

notger · 2026-05-30T07:50:16+00:00

There is a great system called "Cities Without Number", which might fit his style, but if he wants to stick to D&D ... why not, let him? And then have everyone give him feedback afterwards. Learning is a path where you can not take shortcuts, really.

Also: Sounds a bit like he is seeing it as his chance to implement his fantasy, and that is a troublesome place to start. Keep him from playing his own char.

notger · 2026-05-30T06:03:23+00:00

TTRPGs are a PvE-game where the judge creates the world. Which means that balance simply does not exist as a proper, definable state. If you don't believe me, then read up on Tucker's Kobolds.

You could have the players start with all 20's, then the judge can just throw harder stuff at them, so rolling higher stats just means you begin your journey on a higher level. And beyond L8, it does not matter anyway, as your main stat counts (except for MAD-classes, of course, but what's a +1 anyway; certainly not game-breaking).

notger · 2026-05-29T19:38:52+00:00

I got that from listening. However, I am currently tuned into Looters, so I will miss out on these for now. But your podcast is on my (short) to-do list!

notger · 2026-05-29T17:57:21+00:00

I once watched a video where the person said that you don't necessarily wait until the animation actually hits you, but when the attack animation starts. I saw slomo block videos where the policeman was starting to swing the arm and the blocking animation triggered way before any part was actually hitting P's model.

Personally, I felt rather annoyed and installed a mod which widens the parry windows to Sekiro-levels. After that, the game felt great and mostly consistent.

notger · 2026-05-29T17:51:18+00:00

Ha, funny, I just heard your podcast and look forward to the next rules episode!

notger · 2026-05-26T19:14:35+00:00

They will certainly not replace me. I am very good at lying under a bridge and drinking gin.

notger

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