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Thread: New DM questions
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2013-09-17, 07:43 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2013
New DM questions
I am likely going to wind up running my first campaign in the next few weeks, and I am looking forward to it immensely. However, I have a few questions that I am wrestling with, and I would appreciate the independent counsel of the forum on them.
1.) What should I tell them about the setting?
I am setting the game in Planescape, and my intent at this stage is for the PCs to start off in a relatively mundane setting on the Prime, only for them to somehow stumble through a portal into the Cage (likely the Hive ), forcing them to learn how to learn how to make their way in the city by experience in order to achieve their goals. In order to get make the characters feel as much like fish out of the proverbial water, I was planning on not telling them about where the campaign will be set, leading them to think it will be set somewhere on the Prime (albeit with the possible warning that they will quickly leave their starting location behind), but I'm not sure if the players would react favorably or just get annoyed that I misled them (especially if it impacts their character build). That said, I am definitely not giving them info from the Player's guide to the Planes since it contains information that only planars would know off the bat (barring someone convincing me that they want to play a planar who the other PCs bump into relatively quickly, but that would require letting them know what races are available, which I am cautious about for the above reasons).
2.) Material components: how do people react to them?
I currently want to play with material components, albeit without requiring the player to spend ungodly amounts of time buying and keeping track of exactly how much chalk dust they have. The rule I plan on working with is to assume that spellcasters have enough expertise to buy what they need along with a few backups provided that the shop has what they want (so that they still need to know what spell uses what), only requiring the PC mention buying/gathering materials that are either rare or expensive. The exception to the rule would be in cases where the party is stranded somewhere or otherwise away from society for far longer than anticipated; if Gandalf has been throwing fireballs every chance he gets for the last week on a trip supposed to take two days at maximum without a chance to restock at an apothecary, I will let him know that he is running low on bat guano at that he needs to start scavenging in order to not run out (possibly using it as a plot hook to get them into the cave where a clue to the McGuffin they were looking for is present). I also plan on asking how they store large or otherwise, ah, tempremental components (how exactly are those live spiders being stored; they can and will find a way out of that pouch!). I personally like this approach because it seems to add flavor but keeps the game from being bogged down by endless accounting for magic tchotchkes, but I can understand how requiring keeping track of components at all isn't something they are interested in. Does this ruleset seem like something that most people would be ok with, or should I reconsider it, and if so, should I ditch it entirely or merely alter some aspects of it?
I anticipate that some people might find it odd I don't have more questions, but in my current state, these are all I can think of right now; given that more questions might be sparked by any potential replies, don't worry, this list is far from exhaustive :)
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2013-09-17, 07:49 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: New DM questions
1. Everything that their characters might know.
Everything they need to know.
Most things they ask about.
2. Personally, I like it.
I don't think players new to a system should play complex characters like spell casters, they should first know how the system works.
3. http://www.giantitp.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=59 <-- posts about D&D 3.xe goes here
4. It is not too much to expect them to learn about the setting on their own time provided they are able to.Last edited by Mastikator; 2013-09-17 at 07:51 AM.
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2013-09-17, 07:53 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: New DM questions
I think telling them that the adventure involves travel is enough. Then look over their character sheets to make sure no one made a build that (for some reason) is highly tied to the Prime.
You didn't ask about this, and maybe you've already thought about it, but I'll mention it anyway. Decide what power level you want and splat will be allowed, then tell the players. The last thing you want is for your players to come in with a Barbarian, a Warmage, a Rogue, and a Batman Wizard.Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.
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2013-09-17, 08:14 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: New DM questions
Actually, I'm honestly not sure what system to run it under. I have a copy of the official setting material, which was written for AD&D 2E; I am flirting with the idea of trying to convert it to something more modern, but I'm honestly not sure where to start, or if the end result would be balanced.
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2013-09-17, 08:30 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: New DM questions
1 - Players should know what their character would know about the setting. I like to give my players a detailed 'setting guide' upon starting a new campaign.
The setting guide includes:
* A map of the world as they would know it. This could be anything from the village they live in and the immediate surrounding area to a full world map, depending on the setting.
* A description of the major powers in the world depicted on their map.The leaders of the players' country or kingdom, mayor of the city they are from, noble houses in power, whatever. If applicable, who are at war, who are allies, who has goblin horde problems. Again, whatever would be common knowledge to the characters.
* A list of the races, classes, and alignments allowed in the setting, as well as a list of the house rules you are using.
2 - I am okay with material components, most people I have played with are too, as long as it doesn't involve massive amounts of bookkeeping.
Both 3ed and 4th editions of D&D have their own versions of The Manual of the Planes. I haven't used either, as Planescape isn't my thing, so I have no idea how they stack up against the original.
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2013-09-17, 08:37 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: New DM questions
I would tell them their characters are in X town where they are battling orc hordes or whatever the prime plane is about. I would let them build their characters around that, however I would allow retraining of some sort during the leveling process. You want them to be fish out of water, but once those fish learn to breathe you shouldn't gimp them anymore.
I think it is appropriate to have the wizard make a gather information check, or whatever skill is similar to determine the time and money spent to get the materials. It is a good limitation on spellcasters and those few hours can make a big decision. It also makes multi-day dungeon crawls very interesting.I am what lurks under your bridge, I am the troll...
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2013-09-17, 09:04 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: New DM questions
1.) A simple instruction that location shouldn't be a big part of the character design should work out well enough.
2.) Sigh, just...don't do this. Non-valuable material components are a stupid holdover from early D&D that needs to die. Read up on them and you notice something strange, they're basically all bad jokes. The joke being "look, its the material component used cleverly that makes it happen, not really magic". Bat guano being an element in explosives, and so on. They add a bit of flavor, but 3.x was wise to remove the book keeping by means of the spell component pouch. The pouch is a perfect tool, use it. If you wanna add some bookkeeping, make the pouch 100 uses, and every time they use a component thats in it, it depletes a use. Make them track focuses, because they aren't consumed. But, "Do I have 6 balls of guano or 5?" is one of the stupidest parts of early D&D, don't bring it back.
Other than that, Sigil is a great setting, and works perfectly fine in 3.5. Great a faction list and summary paragraphs, and have it available to give to players who make knowledge checks.
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2013-09-17, 09:39 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: New DM questions
I have to agree with Roguenwb on the material components. Unless they cost money, assume the caster has an ample supply of them. If they are imprisoned, you can assume that any mages are stripped of their components, and will need to reacquire them somehow. But otherwise, they're just kind of a pain to track.
As far as retraining goes, if you run it in 2nd Edition, little to no retraining of NWPs will be needed. Maybe you could give the option that they don't need to spend their 'bonus' NWP (from high intelligence) at character creation, but can save those until after they go through the "gate."Warhammer 40,000 Campaign Skirmish Game: Warpstrike
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2013-09-17, 09:45 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: New DM questions
I'm not a fan of keeping things from the players (as opposed to making them use the knowledge skill before their characters know what they do). I understand that the purpose of keeping things quiet is to minimize metagaming, but my experience is that the players who want to metagame will do so regardless of whatever restrictions you place on them. More, limiting the players' info harms their ability to feel in control of their character's growth and keeps them from being able to come to you with neat ideas.
2.) Material components: how do people react to them?
One thing I want to stress about this, though, is that you should not handwave any material components not covered by the pouch under RAW. Some components are weird or expensive for higher level spells and the component is a purposeful limiting factor on the spell itself (as are the spells with longer casting times).[CENTER]So You Wanna Be A DM? A Potentially Helpful Guide
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2013-09-17, 12:03 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: New DM questions
The point of the component pouch is "just pay this and never speak of this again"
Because some components are just weird...Grease requires a chunk of butter (and Grease is a popular spell, that butter will get heavy), the "classic" living spiders need to be ingested and then he has to have an actual plan on how to keep living spiders around.
And there are some kind of "questionable use" spells that require things like the heart of a dwarf child or a good aligned cleric's hand.
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2013-09-17, 12:18 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: New DM questions
The arrangement for components you and a lot of other people have been mentioning as actually way closer to the kind of balance I had intended to create initially and a marked improvement over what I had intended to communicate in my post (note to self, wait until you have a few hours of sleep under your belt before posting a mechanics question on the forum); thank you so much.
As for the issue of metagaming, I'm not too concerned with that from the people I have lined up thus far. Rather, my goal is to fully convey just how disorienting the shift from adventuring in a relatively familiar setting before having them suddenly appear in a bad corner of the Hive is, to see how they react to an attempted mugging by some nutter who keeps saying things like "jink jink" and "dead book", and to watch how they adapt to life in the Planes over time. At the same time, I do understand that this might limit what they can do in character creation, and I appreciate you bringing it up; whatever winds up happening, I don't want to overlook any significant factor in doing so.Last edited by Jonesy89CPFD; 2013-09-17 at 12:42 PM.
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2013-09-17, 02:03 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: New DM questions
Who is the they here? Is is the players, or the PCs? Pronoun ambiguity is getting to me a bit and I think my point might ha been obscured a little as a result. Just so I'm being totally clear, I think it's a bad idea to keep setting information from players in part so they have the fun of deciding how their characters react to the new situation. I wasn't talking just about options at character creation, but the player's available informed choices of RP options throughout the campaign.
There is a second thing I feel like I should also mention. Are your players on board with potentially playing a different setting than the one they may be expecting at the moment? The choice of setting can be important to a player's decision of whether or not to play in a particular game. I, for example, would be pretty unhappy if I created a character expecting it to be running around in a Forgotten Realms type setting only to discover I was actually playing in a Tippyverse type setting.Last edited by AKA_Bait; 2013-09-17 at 02:05 PM.
[CENTER]So You Wanna Be A DM? A Potentially Helpful Guide
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2013-09-17, 02:44 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: New DM questions
... That is an amazingly good point with a solution so simple I can't believe I hadn't thought of it. The players I had talked to have said they are on board with pretty much anything, but that doesn't always necessarily wind up being the case once things get started, if interpersonal interaction has taught me anything. I'll confer with them specifically about whether they are on board with playing in a setting outside of the starting location with limited data (to both ensure they are ok with the setting and make sure they don't do something to piss the Lady of Pain off by attacking the first Dabus they see); if not, I guess my my dilemma has resolved itself.
As to your first point, my intent was for the players to be just as confused as their characters, in order to make them convey that attitude in their RP as much as possible. When it comes to limiting their ability to make informed decisions about RP roles in the setting, I concur that it is a rather considerable problem; I suppose it could be argued that providing some general idea of what roles are possible *might* alleviate some of that, but it would keep the players from doing something innovative with their character that is appropriate for the campaign (which I am all for).Last edited by Jonesy89CPFD; 2013-09-17 at 02:49 PM.
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2013-09-19, 02:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: New DM questions
I think you should explicitly tell your players that the campaign is about their characters being suddenly sucked out of their placid homeland and having to adapt to an alien world. (You don't have to specify the details of their destination, just let them know it's very different from the traditional fantasy setting they'll start in.)
If your players are down with this concept, then telling them ahead of time won't negatively affect the roleplay at all. And if they aren't, telling them just saved everyone involved a world of grief.
So, tell them. The absolute worst thing you could do is not tell them, then ruin the day of someone who got excited about something your campaign was never going to be.
Edit: I just realized that you pretty much said you were going to tell them in your last post!
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2013-09-19, 05:21 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: New DM questions
It's very, very hard to run Planescape with people who are not familiar with the setting, even if they are all running clueless primes. My advice? Let them look over the 2e Planescape Box Set Player's Guide and see what they all want to play--rather than requiring them to all play clueless primes. As strange as it sounds, it's really very hard to run a Planescape game if no one has any clue what's going on in the party. The confusion is fun for a session or two but gets old fast because it makes driving a broader story very difficult.
Consider this; if no one knows much about the setting and the character they're playing has no proficiencies to support you feeding them OOC exposition... how are they supposed to decide what to do next? Planescape, after all, is an immense and very loosely defined setting. If there isn't a fair amount of player knowledge, you end up having to railroad the party very hard. I love planescape, but it is a setting that absolutely requires the players to know a lot about the setting to really drive a story in it.
In order to get make the characters feel as much like fish out of the proverbial water, I was planning on not telling them about where the campaign will be set, leading them to think it will be set somewhere on the Prime (albeit with the possible warning that they will quickly leave their starting location behind)
A simple way to do that is to start them in a setting where planar travel is established to be difficult in setting. Krynn is an example of such a setting--the gods of Krynn are established as being harsh on planar travelers. A more complex reason is to run an adventure before their transit to Sigil that ends up leaving the party "cursed" in a way that sets their planar home to be somewhere on the planes--making them outsiders on the Prime and banish-able. There's lots of other ways to do it, but you need to establish one that will work with the characters you have on hand.
If I may also suggest; "To Baator and Back" from The Well of Worlds is a good point of entry into the planes for starting prime characters who get sent through a portal. It exposes them to some of the dangers and oddities of planar travel without actually requiring them to fight anything too high level. It also exposes them to the unusual adventuring style of planar adventures, which are often a lot more abstract and cerebral than traditional adventures.
but I'm not sure if the players would react favorably or just get annoyed that I misled them (especially if it impacts their character build).
That said, I am definitely not giving them info from the Player's guide to the Planes since it contains information that only planars would know off the bat (barring someone convincing me that they want to play a planar who the other PCs bump into relatively quickly, but that would require letting them know what races are available, which I am cautious about for the above reasons).
I currently want to play with material components, albeit without requiring the player to spend ungodly amounts of time buying and keeping track of exactly how much chalk dust they have.
Though I do happen to think that it's a lot of bother in general and tend to just run without spell components. But if you really want material components, then it is almost certainly best to handle them precisely.
if Gandalf has been throwing fireballs every chance he gets for the last week on a trip supposed to take two days at maximum without a chance to restock at an apothecary, I will let him know that he is running low on bat guano at that he needs to start scavenging in order to not run out (possibly using it as a plot hook to get them into the cave where a clue to the McGuffin they were looking for is present).
To be honest, I don't personally see material components adding much to the experience of the game. It doesn't really limit wizards unless you force them to make a stock of their equipment and keep track of the weight--and that's a lot of tedious bookkeeping that you'll probably end up wanting to handwave anyway. In other words, if you're not going to do it in a detailed manner, why bother with the components at all? Especially in 2nd edition where you can strictly control a wizard's spell arsenal anyway.
I also plan on asking how they store large or otherwise, ah, tempremental components (how exactly are those live spiders being stored; they can and will find a way out of that pouch!). I personally like this approach because it seems to add flavor but keeps the game from being bogged down by endless accounting for magic tchotchkes, but I can understand how requiring keeping track of components at all isn't something they are interested in. Does this ruleset seem like something that most people would be ok with, or should I reconsider it, and if so, should I ditch it entirely or merely alter some aspects of it?
I anticipate that some people might find it odd I don't have more questions, but in my current state, these are all I can think of right now; given that more questions might be sparked by any potential replies, don't worry, this list is far from exhaustive :)