Dungeon Masters Unite!!!

[Wake]

I guess this goes here. So, yeah. I'm the Dm for my friends, and i would like to have a thread to toss ideas around with other DMs who would like too. So yeah, get back to me and we can talk and... stuff.

Justification: this thread belongs here because Dungeons and Dragons is a game. Thanks.

Edited April 17, 2013 by Mason The Tactician

[Samias]

What edition are you playing? Right now me and my friends are playing Swords and Wizardry, a clone of the original DND rules, which is brutal but hilarious. We're able to hire followers to pad out our numbers but we killed 4 people and a dog and spent a month trekking through the first dungeon, assuring the townspeople that we were protecting them from the goblin threat.

There was a magically enhanced windy room that we overcame using a block and tackle, rope, iron spikes, and a lot of athletic ability, and we got a boatload of gold and silver from the chest on the other side of the room. There was also an enemy cleric who melted one of our poor followers but after about a week of recovery when we ran away the first time, we decided to molotov her instead. There was also a room with a giant spider and we molotoved that too. FIRE IS THE SOLUTION TO ALL OUR PROBLEMS.

Next Saturday is the first day our party leaves the town, for a 7-day journey on the road that we may or may not survive. After all, our wizard only rolled 3 HP, while our cleric and fighter have 7 and 8 HP, respectively.

[Wake]

Well, that's brutal. I'm on a strange mesh of DnD 4.0 and 3.5. I'm prepping a long, episodic campaign that is just a bit easier than that.

[Balcerzak]

I dungeon master a game every Tuesday. Well, more like whichever Tuesdays people end up being able to make it to. One of the guys keeps a Googledocs Quest Log, which updates after every session (typically fifteen minutes before the next session starts), and keeps a rather humourous spin on the events of previously. The goal is ostensibly "To aid in recollection for next time/to leave a permanent record". It usually makes for pretty great reading.

Last session was a lot of fun for me personally: The previous session had ended up with the party having killed a young adult green dragon in its lair in order to rescue a captured song dragon (who is actually a local baroness, and the mother of an npc the party warlock has a crush on/is trying to get with). There's more history than that, but whatever, summaries. So, next session starts off, and I pull out the battlemat and the guys are like 'Shit, he drew the cave back out, what's going to go down now?'

The meta alone was pretty amusing, but I didn't plan for an actual combat encounter (the thief/cleric had actually died during the fight, and would need to be raised from the dead), instead it was one of those "could be a fight, but you guys are probably smarter negotiating your way through this" bits. The main antagonist, which the players kind of have an idea who it is, but most of the characters are still in the dark about has a tendency to summon some devils to send along and antagonize them, and this time the Erinyes decided to weasel about through a loophole in the contract. I made it so that "if I feel my life is endanger, I'm only obligated to fight until I've stuck my sword in one of their corpses" because no way was she going to suffer death and a thousand years of agony or whatever before being reborn in the outer planes (I didn't actually do the research, but this is what one of my players mentioned the last time they killed a devil, so I ran with it). So, the party are busy digging through the dragon's hoard and identifying when they hear "One of them's already dead? Oh this is /too/ easy" and then they turn around to find her stabbing the corpse of the guy the dragon had killed. Tensions were running high, but diplomacy prevailed.

Then there was a bunch of other fun stuff that happened, but I'm rambling and this might not actually fit the proper purpose of this thread.

Edited April 19, 2013 by Balcerzak

[Samias]

I think a good DND/tabletop story is a fine read. Knowing what other groups are doing is pretty inspiration. For this particular campaign my group is actually drawing a map and we also have a balance sheet of our funds, because all our gold directly translates into exp. Money is VERY tight on our adventure.

[Wake]

There is no such thing as rambling where I'm concerned. I welcome all suggestions, and I shall give some of mine later. Demons stabbing corpses? That sounds about as legit as it gets.

Like Dungeons:I run 5 general types.

1) The outpost- A very small dungeon used as a random encounter during overland travel. I hae my players roll 1d20 each day, and if they roll a 1, 5, 10, 15, or 20; then they get a random encounter, whether it be a bandit camp or an old, abandoned tower, etc. The easiest type of dungeon.

2) The Crawl- The classic dungeon. One to Seven encounters per floor, usually no more than 2 floors. Can be av=boveground or below, and can be customized however you want, allowing for infinite possibilities. Monsters and locations are as numerous as you wish. Probably the one I run the most of.

3) The Minion's Dungeon- A shorter dungeon (3-5 rooms) composed of mainly minions. Minions are cannon fodder type enemies with 1 HP and a very high AC for their level. The encounters here can be massive (up to 20, heck even 30 enemies per encounter), but the boss encounter has a very powerful non minion monster in charge.

4) The Delve- A very fun dungeon. Each encounter or two is another floor, so it can get very deep (or high) very quickly. Depending on how many floors down it goes, you can have it connect to other things, like the Underdark or Drow cathedrals, etcetera. I generally make it possible to go down almost infinitely far, but the exits downward become harder and harder to find. The bottom floor is almost always 12+ floors down, and contains an insanely powerful megaboss.

5) The Extreme(or exotic)- One of my favorites. As the name suggests, it is located in an exotic location, like in the caldera of a volcano, built halfway into the side of a glacier, under the ocean, or in a celestial realm. Needless to say, these are the hardest dungeons, and can be a test from a god or a convenient way to dispose of a too powerful NPC.

Ok? Feedback please.

P.S.- Nice art, Samias.

Edited April 19, 2013 by Mason The Tactician

[Only My Unit]

Very nice setup. I suggest a high risk high reward dungeon full of chests and various consequences as a dungeon type too. Can make the weak stronger with rare items or can cause a powerful person to sacrifice themself for measly prizes. Or everyone dies due to having no luck whatsoever. Bwahahah.

[Wake]

I'm on a strange mesh of DnD 4.0 and 3.5.

Since none of you asked, i'll tell you anyway. The reason I'm meshing is that I'm running with the 4.0 Manuals, but I have a program called Pcgen that is on 3.5 rules. PCgen is a PC, NPC, and Character sheet generator. It's extremely useful. Here is an example of a PCgen character sheet and the link to the site where i downloaded it(under download PCgen). Don't worry, I have moderator permission to past this and it's completely legal.(it also does pathfinder, etc.)

Link:http://pcgen.sourceforge.net/01_overview.php

[Samias]

Well the char gen rules for 3.5 and 4.0 aren't hugely different as far as stat rolls go, though 4 condensed the skills into more general categories. The random generator looks exceedingly helpful for generating NPCs without succumbing to DM metagaming.

Me and my friends generated names and stats for our 4 new NPC companions. The names we chose outright, so our four followers are Doga (hee hee), Logan, Ingrid, and Quintus. We had a chart to assign stats and Ingrid and Logan have pretty bad strength rolls and moderate HP. Quintus is average. Doga is the most badass dude with 8 HP and outfitted with chainmail and a polearm and spear. We set out from the city after selling all our loot/buying supplies with detailed accounting list on an epic 30-day (at least) journey, but Ingrid and Quintus were ambushed on watch overnight and Ingrid barely survived. With my expertise I managed to stitch her up so she wouldn't bleed out. We're all still alive so we decided against returning to the city to recuperate and continue our wagon journey. With 410 exp so far my cleric is about 1/3rd of the way to a level up but everyone else has a lot longer to go.

Edit: by the way, thanks for the compliment Mason :D

Edited April 21, 2013 by Samias

[Wake]

No problem. Please tell me Doga is a heavy type person. Please.

For the record, I also made this person(see character sheet attached below) who is CLEARLY not a reference to anyone from any game whatsoever...

(for the record, she is for just in case my PCs get into some deep, deep, deep, deep, deep crap that I didn't mean for them to, and they need a savior.)

But yeah, I find PCgen to be incredibly useful, both in that I don't have to fill out the character sheets by hand(it takes forever) and the sheer easiness of having all of the tools there, instead of spread across eight manuals.

[Doga]

I'm not DMing anything, but a kid I know in school is organizing a Pathfinder game. I'm rolling a Dwarf Alchemist who throws fucking everything.