And again they are starting with 5e, ffs.

Hiding rolls is an outdated concept. Rolling in the open builds trust between every participant.

It’s just a… DM’s Guild filter and a list of Reddit suggestions. Whatever people do to invite some more traffic to their blogs.

Non-D&D fantasy games will always be welcome. Can’t wait to see the results.

Our Sorcerer knew Wish, but the player knew better than to try something like wishing to get to the lowest level of Hell, because on the meta level they wanted to play through this adventure, not to cheese.

The biggest challenge during Tier 4 is still resource attrition. Let them use their big spells, but don’t let them rest. The best challenge you can give them at this point is to make a multi-session-spanning dungeon-like structure.

An example from my previous campaign: heroes needed to get to the lowest level of Hell, but they needed to transit through every one of them in process. Enemies were everywhere, and places for rest were virtually nonexisting. I think they had like 1 long rest in four months of play during T4, and it actually was hard for them.

When I did play 5e IRL, I used Ard sheets, tweaking them in Photoshop or Illustrator whenever needed.

Where is this jail cell? What’s the city name, vibe, etc?

That’s a bad question, because it draws blanks, not leaves them. Better questions would be:

• «Fighter, how big is the city? Is it more like a village, or something closer to a big, prosperous metropolis?»
• «Rogue, which known criminal is doing his time in some other part of this jail?»
• «Barbarian, you’ve been there quite a lot for your drunken fights, did you? Name one guard who’s here now, you know each other a little too well!»
• «Wizard, for what breakthrough the local magical academy is known?»
• «Cleric, which religion do they preach here?», and, optionally, «Which part of it you would never agree with?»

Don’t just ask «what’s the city vibe», get them something to build from!

Obvious for someone like me, but useful for newer DMs out here, especially the parts about stopping long planning and cutting filler parts, however fun would they be.

Can’t say I believe them

d12? Try d100! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HYJ5sD5GRMEAp8VZOhhK1jF5UN48QXAyDiBXtnMtGtQ

I don’t know this guy, but he just took my thoughts and layed them in a beautiful written form. Especially parts about bed time stories and trolls – I tell it to my players exactly like that. If we establish their characters are at least somewhat experienced, we can agree they were told these stories one way or another.

Most people just want to do cool shit.

There are THOUSANDS of other games, and most of them let you do cool shit instead of tracking resources. Just, you know, stop playing D&D.

As a DM, I cringed at this. Alright, you broke the game, overshadowed your martials and blew past the encounter your DM spent so much time carefully crafting. And your game session ended two hours earlier. Thanks everyone, see you next week I guess.

Shame about removed monsters. I personally used all these Arch-Devils, and Boreas basically became a father figure to a lot of PCs at my table.