New answers tagged gm-techniques
0
Can't they buy this stuff?
It sounds like some of your players actually like the process of finding materials and crafting items, but some of them just put up with crafting in order to get the stuff. For the latter players, you just need to provide them with other ways to get the stuff that isn't crafting - typically, from merchants or shops. You can tilt ...
2
About the Barbarian and Sorcerer, it seems like an easily explainable "spotlight" problem: everyone gets roughly equal real-world time, and players should understand that. If the crafters get 20 minutes of solo time, then so do the non-crafters. Maybe the guards ask them for help, or if they want to do the adventure, let them start the less ...
1
It seems that there is no mechanical downside for them to farm the various resources.
But just because they found a bit of ore on a mountain, does not mean that ore re-spawns every 10 days to be collected. Some ore bodies are extremely limited with high quality ore, and after picking that up, it requires full mining and smelting to be useful. Also, mining ...
3
Structure Downtime
Provide a explicit "downtime" and "adventuring time" periods to your game. During "adventuring time", table and world time devoted to harvesting resources should be kept to a minimum. Get buy-in from your players on this.
The point is to not get bogged down in detail during adventuring time. Whenever that ...
4
Trips to other places
Remove the players from their known surroundings for a while. By having them go on a somewhat time sensitive mission to an unmapped territory, they will temporarily lose access to their favourite gathering spots and won't be able to look for new ones while simultaneously doing their quest. Or if the location is suitably remote and thus ...
18
If the players are enjoying this it may not be an issue, but some advice.
The key part to every game is to have fun. It seems, or sounds like, your players are having fun but that you are not. Perhaps one of the possible solutions to this issue is for you to somehow, work your own interests and things you enjoy doing as a DM into what the players are doing?
...
17
1. Apply time pressure
One way to handle this is to give them quests that explicitly have timelines. If they go resource harvesting, they lose the quest.
This is similar to what you described with the demon attack but somewhat different. At least as I understand your description, you used a living world and the players suffered consequences for not being ...
0
While There Are No Other Supernatural Boons, There are Other Forms of Supernatural Gifts
There are several systems, actually, which provide effects similar to the Supernatural Gifts found in the DMG under various conditions. A good starting point, though, would be the Chwinga creature found on page 216 of Tomb of Annihilation (as well as in CM and IDRotFM), ...
4
I have done this several times. I have a favorite one-shot adventure, and I run it periodically for strangers, sometimes at a game store and sometimes on meetup.com. If I like a player, I get their email address and add it to my list. Once I have enough players, I send out an email saying "I want to run a game at X location and Y time, here is the ...
3
Make combat harder when it happens; XPs for social success
My brother does this. This experience-based answer is from an RP-heavy campaign that's been going on for over two years. We spend a lot more time traveling, exploring, and interacting with his NPCs than we do in combat.
We do a lot of role playing, not a great deal of dice rolling, as we go about ...
-2
Each class has useful non combat applications to their abilities that can come up if you add in time pressure and difficult situations.
Fighter
Second wind lets you disarm traps and heal, leap from high places and heal, and generally do lots of cool things that taking more damage lets you do.
You can enable this with situations that value being able to tank ...
6
Pull from Their Backgrounds
There's already some great answers here but there's one section of the character sheet I don't see mentioned: the background.
A Character's Class Is Not Their Background
Fifth edition is written where class doesn't tell you much about the character. Is the monk inspired by a Japanese samurai or an Irish dragon slayer? Is the ...
5
Adjust your perceptions
For sessions that are focused on investigation, exploration, NPC interaction, etc., it feels like the majority of a character sheet becomes useless, with the exception of skills. It almost doesn't even matter that one character is a monk or another is fighter.
While this will heavily depend on what class and subclass choices the ...
9
5e if very combat centric and attrition centric. A less intense social or investigation game tend to just not be what 5e is focussed on. While I'd personally suggest you switch system, I can describe what I did in my game for dealing with those kind of situation.
For context, in my latest game, I've switched to using the standard 5e rules for "dungeons&...
19
This is intended as a compliment to the other answers, to address avenues they don't explore at all...
My background: I was part of the ~7 people co-running a college level club with a coordinated-across-tables campaign of oneshots. Different DMs had different styles, but had to be ready for characters with any stat setup (for the group level) to be present. ...
59
Tal's answer has lots of great advice, but specifically addressing your hardly scratching resources + combat balancing issue...
Rest Variant: Gritty Realism
The DMG specifically recommends using the "Gritty Realism" variant resting rule (p. 267) in adventures focusing on "intrigue, politics, and interactions":
This variant uses a short ...
69
This isn't an uncommon problem, and there are techniques for dealing with it.
I could've written this post, a couple years ago. I learned at session 0 that everyone wanted less combat and more intrigue, and had to make that style fit for 5e D&D. As such, everything I suggest below are techniques that I've discovered through long-term play of a combat-...
9
There's an easy way and a hard way out of this.
They're both the same way, mostly. The easy way is to understand enough about Dungeon World to get out of the jam you're in right now. The hard way is to understand enough about Dungeon World to see how you might have avoided the jam in the first place.
So let's start with the easy way.
"You can't use ...
1
The Sorceress can investigate.
It is possible and probable that the bard is not capable of commanding ghosts like you described. The bard might not have the proper spells, and only Alice is mentioned as being able to talk to spirits. Assuming that the bard doesn't also have those abilities a cursory investigation will reveal that the bard is not the most ...
0
Seems like the perfect opportunity to launch a new adventure because the other players have to go to her tower and negotiate his release. Maybe pay a big fee or go on a mission for her. Whatever you choose. They smooth things over with her but it will cost them.
Maybe the offender has to give up something magical in exchange for their release.
Work it ...
0
For now, I have come up with the following arguments why the sword providing +2 AC is overpowered:
AC doesn't scale the same, and 21 is already the maximum you should expect to be. A venerable red dragon AC is 22.
AC increase is extremely costly, with non-magical means; there are only two ways: combat style and feats (heavier armour type or the Medium Armor ...
Top 50 recent answers are included
