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practical_romantic  2yr ago (text post)   3450 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 21, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I'm running the fourth session in my online D&D campaign today. So far it's gone well, though I've had to onboard a few new players to replace ones who proved to not be able to commit. Right now I have 5 great players and have brought on 2 more that I'll have to test out, and would like to have 8 total. It's a West Marches style game, so 4 players from the wider group do a session at a time (I hate running for/playing with 5+ players). Each player is allowed to have 2 characters and it's given the campaign a really cool sense of scale and continuity having a large circle of players and characters that rotate in and out of missions.

Since we're all living in different locations and have different work schedules, this is just about the only way we could have gotten a group together, but I've been dying to try the format for years. It's a lot of work for me, but very fun.

I spent ages developing systems to give 5e actual exploration and interaction mechanics. I created an in-depth system for downtime that lets players use their character skills to gain different kinds of resources. Each IRL week they can choose what activity they do, though often a player will do a few weeks at a time because of scheduling. There are different downtime activities that use different skills and a lot of goals they can pursue. They can do downtime for both characters they run, so they've had fun trying to optimize the system towards their ends.

I'm very pressed for time, since the session is at 7 and I still have a lot to get ready... along with the rest of the workday. Running a game online lets me make the production values very slick, but requires more input time to do so. It's worth it in my book, but taking the time to write this up may not have been, given the situation...

I just started playing a new session, it’s a great hobby. Thank you for your service being a dungeon master.

I spent ages developing systems to give 5e actual exploration and interaction mechanics…

As the saying goes: Have you tried not playing D&D? GURPS Wilderness Adventures seems to cover exactly what you're doing.

The problem with "why not gurps?" is that no one plays anything but DnD.

I considered trying other systems, but my tabletop friends have all played a lot of 5e. It came down to teaching 8+ people how to play a brand new system vs adding (a lot of) homebrew to a system we were all already familiar with. I went with the latter option. Maybe if I was running for 3 dedicated players it'd be different, but this campaign is designed for players to be able to jump in and out. Onboarding each new player with a new system was... not appealing.

5e has many issues, but ease of use and range of adoption make it hard to pass up.

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