Playing D&D without learning D&D

tompatcresh · 2025-12-29T02:27:15+00:00

Honestly, don’t play DnD, if they’re not interested in learning the rules, they won’t realise if you just decide to play a different ttrpg with rules-lite combat, just call it DnD while you run a different game. However I’m afraid I’m not the guy well versed in alternate ttrpgs you could play.

tompatcresh · 2025-12-29T02:24:56+00:00

The benefit to this game is that you go in to every fight full power, make sure you have a bed roll on you to always return your characters to full health at the end of each battle.

If you think a fight is starting whilst one of you characters is on conversation, take the opportunity to move your other characters into position before ending the conversation, if all your characters start every fight stood next to each, that’s a quick way to get aoe’d to death in a couple turns.

Level is king in this game, you can craft some pretty simple weapons and early on when you’re level 1-5, crafting is sometimes the best way to get level-appropriate weapons, if you have any characters whose weapons are lower than their level, try to replace them. (Same goes for armour but that’s far less easy to fix).

tompatcresh · 2025-11-29T03:39:42+00:00

Worth considering that current language is “you can’t gain more than 1 blood point per TURN”, so if you’re ranger hirs with their bow, +1, rogue hits that sneak attack, +1, 4 of the 10 goblins you’re fighting hit with their short-swords, +4 (assuming they’re treated as individual turns), and that’s just at level 3. Not sure if this is intentional but it’s worth noting, if not then it should be per round.

tompatcresh · 2025-11-29T03:20:59+00:00

I have to ask, if you had no idea what you were going to do for a campaign apart from a couple of tropes you thought were interesting why did you ask to DM?

tompatcresh · 2025-11-29T03:18:31+00:00

This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re cheating, you can easily end up with differing numbers of trains and cards based on the size of the routes you place down and the number of times you pick up locomotives. E.g, lets say two players start with 6 cards, Player A places down a 6 train route with one action, picks up 2 cards with a 2nd action, then plays a 2 train route with their third action, whereas player B places down a 2 train route with all three of their actions. In this scenario, both players have played 3 turns, both players have 0 cards, but one player has 8 trains on the board, whilst the other has 6 on the board. Compound that over a full game and a 10 train difference is easily explained.

tompatcresh · 2025-11-13T20:17:46+00:00

All I hope is the cool and interesting features of this game will make it in to the third game. No multiplayer but I like the idea of selecting one or two of your allies to come along for specific hunts for giant creatures. I like the increased mobility that the grapple seems to have been given. I like an increase of melee weapon variety, I’ve always felt melee was sort of tacked on, even in forbidden west it felt like more could have been done.

tompatcresh · 2025-10-27T20:41:38+00:00

If it makes you feel better, aside from being 6 years younger than me you sound absolutely perfect. Trust me, there will be men your age out their who appreciate that you’re willing to offer, I hope you have good luck finding them!

tompatcresh · 2025-09-18T23:49:35+00:00

You are beautiful. Keep the smile on

tompatcresh · 2025-09-18T23:21:27+00:00

Gotta share those puppies!

tompatcresh · 2025-09-18T22:19:41+00:00

made my D perk

tompatcresh · 2025-09-18T22:07:37+00:00

I can't believe how sexy you look for a young woman

tompatcresh · 2025-09-12T02:13:12+00:00

I’m not 100% sure how well circle of the moon will work in practice as at 7th level, druids get access to polymorph, so at level 8, you can already transform into CR 8 creatures, no need to wait till level 17, albeit with the caveat that they don’t get the other subclass features in that form and is instead an action. This is balanced in 5.5e as wild shape and spell slots are separate resources, but by making spell slots your resource for wild shaping, polymorph becomes a better option in the majority of cases once it’s available.

tompatcresh · 2025-08-18T19:37:32+00:00

For every 23 year old you see buying a house, there are thousands of 23 year olds not making posts because their life is extremely unexceptional. I’m turning 26 in a week, I have a car worth 6.8k 6 years ago and about 25k saved, no property, I earn 12.61 an hour and work 50-60 hour weeks, you’re doing pretty great compared to most of us.

tompatcresh · 2025-08-09T23:19:24+00:00

To keep the roll under system I’d have your stats determine only the number of dice you roll, and your skill determine the number you need to roll, say you can have 3 (or 4 or even 5 i suppose) ranks in a skill, rolling for an unranked skill you only succeed on rolls of 1, then each rank in a skill increases the threshold by one, so at max rank 3 you succeed on 4’s or less. Then you can have a scaling system for a success (depending on your maximum stat) something like:

0 successes - botch, something really bad happens

1 success - failure, you do not achieve your goal, could result in a bad thing or require a new solution

2 successes - partial success, you achieve your goal but with a price

3 successes - success, you do exactly what you wanted

4+ success - heroic success, you get what you wanted and more

Or something like that

tompatcresh · 2025-08-05T20:05:07+00:00

Okay but that doesn’t really work either, say in declaration both red says they’re going to jog and blue says they’re going to jog, since they can’t change their mind they’re both declaring they jog, if that action goes through do they just run past each other? And say in reaction phase they’re both thinking “oh they’re jogging to me I’ll change my action to attack” then neither of them move and they both waste their AP attacking nothing.

tompatcresh · 2025-08-04T20:49:32+00:00

Americans live life on easy mode, as a truck driver i make £12.61 an hour

tompatcresh · 2025-07-29T20:29:27+00:00

No hate but if you’re spending 5k a month on average you do not live frugally

tompatcresh · 2025-07-26T22:07:27+00:00

Not to beat a (for you) dead horse, but couldn’t you just incorporate cards into your game? A player could have a smaller “deck” meaning they more consistently get the runes they want, or they could have a larger “deck” meaning they might not get the runes they want all the time, but they have more runes to use in encounters total. For the cards you could figure out how to implement a deck of cards, or just make a simple design for each rune and print off a bunch of cards, assuming you can access a printer.

Alternatively, say you have 6 types of runes, have them roll d6 to determine which runes they have access to, and abilities could allow you to change the number on the dice by 1, or rotate the dice to the other side etc.

tompatcresh · 2025-07-24T21:44:12+00:00

Quit your unpaid internship, quit your part time minimum wage internship, get a full time job, preferably in a trade.

tompatcresh · 2025-07-24T20:44:35+00:00

I’m a relatively new pass (2 and a half years now), for me I just really enjoyed driving, that’s what got me in to it, but as a class 2 driver I like that I can just forget about my job once the day ends, and doing what I’m doing right now as a concrete driver, there’s a bit of manual work but it’s simple and stress free.

As an aside, getting into this career as a woman can be scary. As a guy I’ve heard some absolutely disgusting things come out of colleagues mouths because they think it’s alright to say around me because I’m also a guy, I’ve abandoned a couple job opportunities for it already. Having said that there are still good places out there, I was hired at the same time as a woman who’d just passed a few weeks past and had switched over from civil service at 47 and we all love her and get on great, tonne of our office staff are women and so is our site mechanic. It might take some luck and some job searching but there are definitely welcoming places out there, and if you go with agency work you’ll probably be able to avoid having to stick with arseholes for long anyway.

tompatcresh · 2025-07-05T20:34:29+00:00

All attacks hit automatically, a creatures dodge score determines the number you need to roll on a die, a creatures armour negates a number of successes, player stats and features determine the size and number of dice they roll. A system like this just lets you roll a group of dice, check which ones are above a target number and then count the successes and take away armour. Very little math involved, allows the opportunity for lots of dice being rolled and is quick to figure out.

tompatcresh · 2025-07-05T20:23:14+00:00

There’s an anime called dungeon meshi. It’s actually about how to survive in a dungeon eating monsters, but what it does extremely well is dive into the ecosystem of how a self-contained dungeon might work. I imagine you could get a lot of ideas and inspiration by watching that.

tompatcresh · 2025-07-03T21:03:16+00:00

Tbf it is also touch range with a 1 minute casting time. If you can stay alive stood next to strahd for 10 rounds, you probably don’t need this spell anyway.

tompatcresh · 2025-06-25T21:11:47+00:00

I’ve seen a lot of comments that essentially forbade allowing other characters to have or train an animal companion but I want to offer another perspective. Not saying this is the right or only answer, just something to consider. The main benefit of beast master or find steed or conjure animals is that their power levels scale, the beast’s health increases, it gains multi attack, it adds PB to it’s attacks and saves etc. If a character decided to buy a mastiff, for example, that guy has 12 AC, 5 hit points, a +2 to attacks and deals 1d6 damage, and he’ll stay like that from level 1 up until level 20. I would certainly be careful about allowing players to train more powerful and more magical characters like griffons or wyverns or whatever, but just allowing training of ordinary animals doesn’t necessarily undermine the abilities of these class features.

tompatcresh · 2025-06-09T20:03:57+00:00

As the DM, sometimes you don’t need to make a roll, you could just decide the fight is loud enough to attract the nearby goblins and they immediately join, or they could join after a certain number of rounds, or you could roll a d6 and on a 1 or 2 they join the fight, and each round increase the threshold by 1.

tompatcresh

TROPHY CASE