Grand DM

How to spot a Dragon using an illusion spell. #dnd #rpg #tabletop

@YoDanno I'm sorry brother. Please accept my condolences.

Dad passed away last night. Thankfully he’s longer suffering, and was with family. Thank you all for the prayers and reaching out. Cancer sucks.

Or sit in traffic!

@StarWarsDaily_ "Only a Sith deals in absolutes"

Yes, going there at level 2 may have been a mistake. The game world makes no apologies... well hopefully.

@stephenRB4 Only if it helped to curate what I see in my feed.

If a dislike button was introduced on Twitter, would you use it?

@Steel_Accord91 You’re describing a table with consistency. I’m talking about the trend where “rule of cool” becomes the answer to everything and rulings shift constantly. Those aren’t the same.

Disagree. My DM says, “fun trumps story, trumps rules.” Albeit I’m one of the players so obviously I’m biased. Yet none of us at the table feel like our decisions don’t matter. They make internal narrative sense, make the moment feel real. As long as the dice and rules lead us there.

“Rule of cool > rules” got big with influencers acting like they cracked the code of the RPG universe. Yes...I know it favors the players. But when every other ruling shifts for the moment, there’s no consistency. And without that, decisions stop mattering.

@WhittersRichard When the conversation turns to balance in RPGs, the real question to me isn’t mechanical, it’s philosophical: Are you playing the world, or expecting the world to play along?

Ok, it’s been a while since I’ve posted a thread on my personal Game Master musings, and I’ve been pushing our crowdfunder for the past few days (link in bio), so I thought I’d take a wee break and ponder… Balanced vs. Unbalanced Encounters. Thread below.

@vyderac Hey, I have that one too!

@Grand_DM The Swordfish Islands maybe?

What's your favorite RPG that has elves that don’t feel Tolkienesque at all? Not just “different culture,” I mean actually weird, alien, or reimagined.

You know, looking back, the intro to "The Making of Original D&D" felt like a breaking point. A book meant to preserve the game’s origins instead framed the people who made it as a problem to be corrected. WotC choosing to publish it that way has stuck with a lot of fans. By proxy, it can feel like people who still value those roots are something to be fixed too.

@Lordmatteus2312 Very cool. Not an absolute for me. Just a response to the story first vibe from CR style play, which can set the wrong expectations.

Exactly. I have a player who is planning on betraying his current thieves guild, betraying the party (I think), and betraying the Yaga Sahn to become the next Kingpin of Valkengaard. He knows nothing is certain, but he's going to try anyway... It helps that he was a player in my Lamentations of Elemental Evil campaign for 3 years! 😅

Everyone's talking about DM's who were poisoned by Critical Role, but what about players who expect the railroad story experience? I have 2. One left the game because he didn't like not having plot armor. The other seems to think rules lawyering is player agency (Not kidding). I suspect he won't last much longer...

@Lordmatteus2312 Sure, as long as they understand protagonist vibe does not come with extra plot armor.

@Grand_DM I don't mind that per se, as it can help a new player to the type of game some incentive to engage with the world. However, there must be an understanding that the campaign is center stage, not them.

@Blackmoor_Film Session zero stopped being a practical tool and turned into a trend, with some influencers using it to signal how enlightened they are.

I never understood the Session 0 concept. Me calling my friends, "Hey, wanna play some D&D?" Wanna play some D&D is code for: we're going to do some kind of RPG thing that may not even be D&D, it could be traveller, or Gamma World, or whatever. Everyone shows up to play and we roll up characters as fast as possible so we can actually get to playing. If there is a distraction, like wasting a session not playing, I am not coming.

@KeilHubert For me zero was always about this old tweet, to avoid the we "Met in a tavern" thing

@Grand_DM True. To its credit, a good session 0 *does* prevent the common "Oops! All Batmans!" headache.

“Session 0 solves everything” became the mythologized takeaway from years of bad influencer advice… Sure, it helps with tone and expectations. But you can’t frontload table culture in one conversation. It’s built through actual play.

@newbiedm I don’t mind decoupling alignment in the flavor. DMs have already been doing that forever... I do object to losing unique stat blocks or sanding down 50 year old monsters for corpo moral posturing and ridiculous allegories.

I don't wanna litigate the whole thing about orcs being inherently evil or not, or the drow. But I will say this, I am fine with that choice as a part of flavor text. Absolutely 100% But, flavor text and stat blocks are not the same thing and losing stat blocks was a crime

@fandompulse I'm sure the imaginary new audience will love it.

Alex Kurtzman on what to expect from Season 2 of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy: "The balance between standalones and serialization feels like it’s been maintained in Season 2. I would say that really what it means is it’s emotional serialization, but individual stories that get closed-ended by the end of each episode, more or less. ... New characters will introduce new problems in Season 2, and those problems are going to ripple through our cadets, and it’s going to shake things up a bit. You might find romances between characters that you could never have expected. And let’s see, what else can I say? You’ll get to learn more about Nahla, a lot more about Nahla, actually." Who is interested in a second season?

@Nobleshield I've had players paralyze the table in laughter and also ruin a big moment doing that. Learning to read the room is not something only GMs need to do.

One thing that bugs me in RPGs is how people make things too goofy, almost like slapstick cartoon bullshit. I like serious games with serious characters, maybe once in a blue moon something funny, but not like a 10-year-old and friends just found the game and are playing.