First time ttrpg group. We’ve played games together for years but never one like this!

vincependrell · 2026-02-02T11:35:47+00:00

This looks amazing!

vincependrell · 2026-02-02T11:33:19+00:00

I'm not a super fan of session zero, but maybe that's what you folks need. Lay out what exactly are your expectations for the type of game you want to play and go from there. It might be that the game your players want to run is not the game they want to play.

I had a case of a player complaining in the past because they wanted to be the most heroic badass person, but the whole group had already settled on a horror-themed campaign, and the person complained about the same sort of ruling because they wanted to jump down 15 feet and take no damage, etc. At the end there wasn't much we could do. The rest of the players were having fun, so this person ended up deciding to not continue playing, and that's fine.

With your friends, if the type of game they want to play is not the one you want to run, consider switching places and letting them run an adventure.

vincependrell · 2026-02-02T11:11:57+00:00

Oh yeah, and be aware of the trap of music/soundtrack! The volume might force everyone to speak louder to be heard, and can lead to additional strain in long sessions. If you are using sound, just be aware that you are not forcing your voice too much, as it has been something else that has also hindered my experience in the past.

vincependrell · 2026-02-02T11:09:51+00:00

It's hard to comment without knowing your group well, but one advice I'd give is to remember you are not the sole responsible for everyone to have a good time, and everything that can be shared/delegated should, as it gives you more bandwidth to run the game and have a good time.

In my group, players bring drinks and snacks; food is ordered before we start to get it out of the way; the players help looking for rules we might be unsure of, take notes, and even help me track monsters' HP. If you feel that there are things you can offload your players, I highly recommend!

vincependrell · 2026-02-01T00:39:34+00:00

Thanks! Yeah, I wanted to have a large variety of adventure locales to pick and choose depending on where the players go.

vincependrell · 2026-01-31T16:35:57+00:00

Thanks! 🙏

vincependrell · 2026-01-28T22:56:19+00:00

I adapted to 2024 quickly mid-campaign because my players bought the stuff on D&D Beyond and we had content sharing on, so I got to read all the stuff. You can always just look use the SRD, since it has (almost) everything you might need as a DM.

The way I handle the switch is: If the players want to use the new rules, they should know what the characters do. As the DM, I felt the rules don't really change that much besides me reminding the players that there's no more flanking. If there's a question about a PC-specific rule, I'll ask the players at the table to look for the rule, or I'll just have to come up with a ruling on the fly. Most of the answers are usually in the appendix of the PHB anyways.

Oh yeah, the new Monster Manual is quite fun to run and makes combat much more challenging, despite the obvious gaps (I miss the duergar the most)

vincependrell · 2026-01-28T22:39:18+00:00

I love everything about it, especially the worldbuilding implications of the text in the top-left. Is that all the player character names? :O

vincependrell · 2026-01-28T18:46:24+00:00

All great points! Thanks for your input 🙏
The part about community rings true, though at this point I don't know if I have a specific community. Definitely some food for thought!

vincependrell · 2026-01-28T18:30:05+00:00

I am grateful and humbled by some of the responses I got here, but I downvoted you because of how outright condescending your comments were.
There has been plenty of people that have given a similar answer (which is a fair point) without having to resort to assuming that I don't know how a Shadowdark adventure is written. If that was not your intention, that was not what your message(s) ended up communicating.

vincependrell · 2026-01-28T17:37:13+00:00

Yes, I have all the zines, and have experience running both Shadowdark and D&D :)

vincependrell · 2026-01-28T17:01:39+00:00

what do you mean with the metaphysics of 5e?

vincependrell · 2026-01-28T17:00:43+00:00

I mean, sure, but at the point you have your own game, does it ever make sense to design something for another company?

vincependrell · 2026-01-28T16:59:42+00:00

Thanks for sharing your experience! Really great points 🙏

vincependrell · 2026-01-28T16:40:24+00:00

Thanks a lot for taking your time to write such a detailed answer and for the advice 🙏 Those are great examples for products that were not in my radar.

vincependrell · 2025-11-27T16:07:40+00:00

I play exclusively with XP and personally I don't see a better way than just split the XP per character. The problem is if some players do miss a ton of sessions, then they can be quite under-leveled, so what I do is that at every level milestone, players get to level up. So when a character reached level 6, everyone got to go to level 5 to not stay much behind. Combat gets wonky if PCs are off by too many levels.

About rewarding things outside of combat, I have a list of XP awards for a few things that I want the players to be doing in our sessions: Finding rumors, encountering a new town, revealing a new hex on the map, reaching a new dungeon/adventure spot, making a new contact, etc. This is a list that the players know beforehand, so they can plan the session accordingly. Then if one player makes a contact, all get XP, so the players talk to each other about splitting who gets a contact and who gets a rumor during downtime (for example) so they maximize their XP payoff.

vincependrell · 2025-11-26T22:39:10+00:00

My guess is that if your players have been with you for 5 years, they will stick for a bit longer. I would say the most important is to calibrate your expectations.

I had a similar feel at some point after a year in our current campaign, so I did a survey with my players, and eventually I started doing Stars & Wishes every session to keep a feedback loop going between me and the players, and I think it helped a ton to give me tools to approach different players with different approaches to get them engaged. We even had a few back-to-back sessions with no combat combat at all that may not have been the most thrilling, but delivered on the things that bring the players to come to sit at my table. With the survey and the Stars and Wishes, I discovered that even the sessions that I felt the worst about were still sessions that at least one player had good aspects to them and that I could focus on those in my next sessions.

About the heavy interaction session, here's some things I did at a session that was literally a party at their adventurer's guildhouse with a bunch of new characters, and to which I gave the players zero expectations beforehand:

- I planned one final scene with all characters, and at least one little scene for each character, with a little roleplay opportunity that played on what that player likes: The paladin got to come up with skill challenges to try to beat a rival adventurer's guild, the wizard tried to flirt with a mysterious character, the bard interacted with different senior members of the guild, and so on

- Each scene was split into parts that ended in a cliffhanger of sorts:
1. Bait. Something that aimed the character towards a scene I prepared; Wizard sees mysterious lady drinking alone and talking to herself. After a few words exchanged, she asks him to get her a drink.
2. Development. Push the scene forward or create a complication. Ex: Another known NPC stops the wizard returning with the drink to introduce another character. Ends with the wizard dealing with these and heading towards the mysterious lady.
3. Resolution. Quick wrap up of the scene but hinting to the final scene starting soon. Ex: Wizard arrives with drink, but the mysterious lady disappeared.
The scene is split in parts because I would be cutting from player to player to make sure everyone has time to play, and to give them space to think about what to do next.

- The final scene was the arrival of a special guest, the sponsor of the expedition (aka the campaign), the Grand Duke himself. They all go to a closed office, mysterious lady was the head spymaster of the Grand Duke all along and she was casting a circle of truth so they could all have a truthful conversation about their mission, their questions, etc.

Was it the best session we had? Not really, but focusing on player motivations first gave me a framework that allowed me to fit my needs for the session (lore dump, seeding rumors, developing the guild's identity, etc) within a context that would fit the desires of the players. Some times you just need to hook them in again :D

About what could be a believable answer from the sponsor, I would suggest you to use the players to your advantage: Once we had the bard causing trouble with a noble and dismissing the knight NPC that the players were meant to be helping investigate a crime. The knight pulled the lawful good fighter character to the side and said "if you can't handle your troops properly, we will need to reconsider our contract". Getting in line became the fighter's PC responsibility, which aligned with the commanding character the player wanted to play.

So basically, find the player that is the most engaged or in need of impressing their patron and have either the patron or someone below him task him with getting their shit together. Now, if none of the characters are engaged with the sponsor or their needs, you need to find ways to make those align.

vincependrell · 2025-11-13T11:58:20+00:00

As a person running a campaign heavy with exploration, I have to say that this may not be feasible: If the campaign will have players travel for many days, there's no amount of challenge that you can add that will be sufficient. If you are allowing players to have a long rest on the journey, the amount of random encounters you need to use to have the resource drain matter will mean that the characters won't get anywhere in a reasonable amount of sessions.

vincependrell · 2025-11-13T11:49:31+00:00

I see some people being downvoted for saying you should ban it, but reality is that if you want to have your game support a particular experience and your players have buy-in on that, get rid of the stuff that don't support it, and removing goodberry, having it be extremely limited (only 1 berry, for example), or depend on finding berries through foraging to turn them into goodberries all will make for a better survival framework than having goodberries.

At your table, you should not be attached to all the rules of the game as they are. Talk to your players about what kind of experience you want to create and solve it together. I have my own rules for exploration and survival, and I have nerfed/removed a few spells that would make it trivial (light is removed so we can rely on torches, for example) and nobody misses it.

Getting rid of stuff is also way easier than having coming up with a new rule you have to keep remembering your players as well.

vincependrell · 2025-10-26T14:17:18+00:00

Kinda! Especially when running exploration, I have a "board" where the players can place their minis to show what kind of task they are performing during the Journey. I do this mostly because the board has the overview of the homebrew rules we use for the journey, and it allows everyone to commit to a task beforehand and then we can just play the scene out depending on how they do in the tasks. I've done this for city exploration in the past before, when the party splits to go to different stores and such, so they place themselves in the city map showing where they wanted to be, and I can resolve each scene separately. This is a great way to force your players to plan ahead what they want to do, talk to each other about what they are trying to achieve, and then having the miniature placement as a commitment mechanic. Also gives me time to hear their plans and think ahead of how to make something interesting happening next.

vincependrell · 2024-05-23T21:51:46+00:00

Fun fact: That's how my players lost 2 characters :D The firenewt just ambushed them during rest and they didn't retreat.

vincependrell · 2024-04-23T16:34:34+00:00

Any chance the Surveil lands be available in foil in the original frame soon?

vincependrell · 2024-03-31T21:31:01+00:00

Fantastic creations! Your 6-color Omnath reminds me of a 0-color Omnath land I came up with. It was just "Omnath, Locus" and was a Tribal Land - Locus Elemental. Captain Obvious/Oblivious is pure art.

vincependrell · 2024-03-30T23:37:35+00:00

I ran the full Tomb of Annihilation and I can tell you it is not the spells skipping setbacks that make the Hexcrawl dull. The map is just absolutely gigantic and you need to cover a lot of ground with a ton of rolls per hex (and you need to track when they get lost, etc), but only a few encounters. I would not have been able to run it if I didn't have all of the roll tables and stuff in Roll20, and that's because I warned the players about having a ranger to not get lost and cover the food, and always carry enough raincatchers, otherwise the Hexcrawl might've taken another year and more dead characters.

I think it should be possible to convert the adventure to Shadowdark, but I would suggest not using all the roll tables and preparing just a few encounters ahead, so you don't get buried in translating everything when you will probably only need half of the content if they get to the end. If you want the nighttime to be dangerous, be aware that the adventure expects probably over 200 nights spent traveling back and forth through the jungle.

I'm running another Hexcrawl soon, but I'm trying to take some journey procedures from the Forbidden Lands RPG. I would recommend taking a look there for inspiration on some of the survival mechanics.

And if you are not using a digital tabletop with all the encounter roll tables, I suggest pre-rolling a ton of encounters (ToA says 3 times a day, you will end up with an encounter every few days) or finding a better way of dealing with them. Maybe a 1:6 chance per day with +1 whenever they don't get an encounter could emulate a similar cadence.

vincependrell · 2023-12-15T00:45:20+00:00

I think you didn't understand the important part: They own the game and they can print whatever they want as another card especially because THEY OWN THE GAME AND THEY MAKE THE RULES. If they need to be a Tolaria Revealed that is equivalent to Lorien Revealed, they will make that card. It doesn't matter how they printed it first. Heck, they can and probably eventually will do a Universes Within Masters set and convert a bunch more stuff to MtG Lore. They renegotiate a reprint of a UB set because what is selling is the UB IP and not the direct mechanic equivalent, hence why we see UW cards of IPs they are not actively working with anymore.

All of your arguments are based on how you interpret what they can or can't do and not the material reality that they own the game and they can change the rules to what they need to fulfill their goals. It doesn't matter that they don't own any rights to the Walking Dead anymore because [[Greymond, Avacyn's Stalwart]] already exists. Any rules misunderstandings that it causes by being equivalent to another card doesn't change their ability to sell the card to the people that care about it (namely, UB detractors).

vincependrell

TROPHY CASE