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Introductions

RobertFV

Member
Gold WoA
Wizard of Combat
Hello everyone! I'm late to the party, but hey, I brought whiskey.

I'm Robert and have been gaming since 8th grade in the early 80s. I began with the Basic Set, AD&D, Marvel's FASERIP, and a bunch of other supers games. I've been following Johnn since the early days of RPT...I even have his first newsletter collection on CD-ROM!! These days, I run Savage Worlds...first discovered it after D&D 3.5 and it falls right into my playstyle. Occasionally I'll talk my group into playing something else. We once had a Dungeon World 'one shot' that lasted over six months. I live outside of Charlottesville, VA and am fortunate enough to have a group dedicated enough to play weekly. And even more fortunate that that group includes my two 20+ year old sons.

My favorite dice used to be percentage dice, but in recent years under Savage Worlds, it's become the d4. With exploding dice, I've nearly TPK'd my party with a pair of goblin archers more than once. They implemented a house rule that every time one of my d4's explode, I have to throw it out and substitute in a fresh die!
 

RobertFV

Member
Gold WoA
Wizard of Combat
I am all ears, err, tongues! Which one do you bring?
For daily mixing, I prefer Jim Beam or Benchmark. For sipping, Blanton's, Old Forester, or a good Irish. If we're sitting around a campfire, then a nice peaty Scotch is the way to go. But my favorite is the one that YOU bring! :)
 

Brentolomew

Member
Wizard of Story
Hello everyone!

I've been playing D&D for a long time but had a long hiatus through the 90s and early 00s. Now we live in a small community and I have a couple of folks that like role-play, so I have become the default DM and am looking for ways to improve my game.

I would love to hear peoples' take on running VTT games and how they either help or challenge your DMing skills.
 

BardMorgan

New member
Greetings, fellow humans!

I am a human-type being doing human type things.

Ok, seriously.. My name is Morgan, and I've been a gamer since waaaay back in 1978. Started off with a brief foray into "The Fantasy Trip" and moved to 1st ed AD&D. I got to be the DM since I worked at a game store (anyone remember "The Game Player" in Houston?), so I got a discount on the books. Over the years I've played sooo many games...
  • Champions
  • Traveler
  • World of Darkness (Mage, Changeling)
  • GURPS (various incarnations, including Black Ops, and others in the genre)
  • 13th Age
  • Shadow of the Demon Lord
  • D&D 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th editions.
  • Pathfinder 1st edition
  • Pugmire/Monarchies of Mau
  • Numenera
Probably a few more I can't recall off the top of my head. I'm currently running two games, one 5th Ed game, playing through Mummy's Mask (yeah, using Pathfinder stuff in 5e is a fun challenge), and one Monarchies of Mau game using 5e.

It's been a wild ride, and there's no end in sight yet!
 

Stephan Hornick

Community Goblin & Master of the Archive
Platinum WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Borderland Explorer
Hi all. Long-time RPG player, living in the Washington DC area, Alexandria, VA, to be precise. Started playing D&D when I was 12 or so, hung up RPGs in my 20s for a decade or so, returned to my senses, and have been throwing down some D&D, some DCC RPG, and am now about to embark on some Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay goodness. Not sure where this new WFRP "campaign" is going, but there is a whole wide world and not a ton of published material, so it's time to roll up my sleeves!
Happy birthday, @Grimwater! What are you up to these days? Have you already used some of the stratagems I presented in the other thread?
 

Nekraen

New member
Silver WoA
Hello everyone!

I'm Kris, I started playing TTRPGs on and off in high school but never really got into a game until a few years ago. Currently I'm running a Ghosts of Saltmarsh/Homebrew game that's been going for about 6 months now. It's definitely been a learning experience but it's been a fun ride so far.
 

Kizumu

New member
Gold WoA
Hi all! My name is Christine, I´m from Germany and just started DMing in December 2021, so brand new :D The game I´m running is Monster of the Week, purely online (as we´re living all over Germany and Austria) and I´m always searching for ways to make Arc-Building, World/Lore Building more easy :)
Happy to be here!
 

Stephan Hornick

Community Goblin & Master of the Archive
Platinum WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Borderland Explorer
Welcome to the team, Christine!

I am also playing and GMing purely online at the moment. It is not so bad if you keep to some basic joint rules and reduce the group size, I found.
It begins with video during sessions and a video and sound check at the beginning, unobtrusive backgrounds and no eating with microphone on etc., also, for me a strong focus lies on interactions and less on maps (although my maps happen to become very intricate and detailed). And finally, rolling actual dice can be much more fun than clicking a button, but in case of some systems on foundry it is much easier to just click a button, so it depends on your players and style and system. There are several more rules in our group, but let's say these are the most important for us.

Johnn suggested a while ago to "dig deeper" when creating your world lore. By focusing on the characters first, you will definitely create a world centered around the PCs that will be much more appealing to players and will prevent you from focusing on aspects of the world that the PCs will never happen upon: RPT Newsletter #499 | Turning Coal into Diamonds - How to Mine Backstories to Create Killer Campaigns

Regarding Story-Arcs, Johnn created some very nice courses on how to create adventures and campaigns in which he also talks about story arcs.
@JohnnFour, would you please post a link here again to these courses, in case Chrstine is interested?

Regarding Character-Arcs, I usually begin with surveying the characters and players and ask some questions.
  • How do the PCs usually solve problems?
  • What are the PC's goals?
  • What are the player's goals?
  • What could be an interesting twist and change of personality (hero story)?
  • What could this lead to? And
  • How can I create situations that put the PC into such moral dilemmas?
Combined, this can look like this (in my Expanded Treasure Table):


Screenshot 2022-02-22 15.00.04.png
Screenshot 2022-02-22 15.00.15.png
Screenshot 2022-02-22 15.00.25.png

I hope this is immediately helpful to you. In case it is not or in case you have any other questions, please don't hesitate to post them. There are a lot of good GMs here that have many, many years of experience and each represent a very different kind of GMing. But that is the fun in it, I think.
 

Stephan Hornick

Community Goblin & Master of the Archive
Platinum WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Borderland Explorer
Happy Birthday, @Kza ! I hope you are doing well.
I haven't heard from you since December. Are you alright? What happened with your campaign? Were you able to GM it?
If you did, how did it go?
 

Kizumu

New member
Gold WoA
Hey Stephan, thank you for the nice welcome and for the thoughts you put in your answer! The online part is working out very well at the moment; although we´ve known each other between 5 and 20ish years we had to rely on the interwebs for the most part so are used to being virtual. But I´m SO looking forward to a real life game night ASAP.

I like you approach to very strict rules on "meeting hygiene", so to say. Fortunately for us, we adhere to those rules already, although we did not actually talked about them. With another group I would make sure to have a conversation about those, though.

I really like your file! Gives me some stuff to think (and ask) about, especially for the one character I´m currently drawing a blank for :D The other 3 have been very easy to come up with ideas for their story.
Thank you for the Newsletter, I will definitely read through that. The nice thing with MotW is, that you can build most of the lore as you play. I have some ideas on how some stuff will work, some things come from the players and can be intertwined and the rest is real world fortunately, so mostly I´m trying to find a way to make structured notes to not loose ideas and stuff. But I would really be interested in those courses. Anything can help improvement and growth :)
 

Stephan Hornick

Community Goblin & Master of the Archive
Platinum WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Borderland Explorer
I´m trying to find a way to make structured notes to not loose ideas and stuff.
This sounds like not just quick notetaking you are speaking of, but efficient structuring of the whole prepping business also.
RPT Newsletter #1,185 | How Can You Take Fast Notes During Sessions?

There are of course many different ways to organize yourself for GMing. This is my way and it works for me quite nicely:
How to make the best use of different media
Content structuring within Onenote
 

Stephan Hornick

Community Goblin & Master of the Archive
Platinum WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Borderland Explorer
Hello everyone! I'm Emma, I have been DMing since mid 2017 so I'm still new to this whole wonderful world of RPGs. I'm running a homebrew game set in Exandria (of Critical Role fame) on my own continent that I created called Ser'Adel. This is my second party to explore the continent and it's been a blast.
Sorry for my late reply. This sounds great! Welcome, Emma!
Would you mind telling us about Ser'Adel? I love to hear about new worlds, see maps and be inspired by it.
 

Mablir Dorlig

New member
Shwmae Pawb! (Hello Everyone) John from Wales here - I've been DMing approx 40 years (D&D, 1e, et seq, Runequest, Warhammer - I think I've tried most things but nothing beats 2e for me) - things are a bit quiet on the RP front at the moment but hopefully things will pick up when the weather improves.
 

Broeder_Nick

New member
Hi all! Or as we say in the Netherlands (where I'm from): Goedendag!
My name is Nick and I started playing TTRPG's since begin 2000 when I was around 18. I started with DnD 3.5 and played that a lot. Played 4e a short while and then swtiched to pathfinder 1e and now 2e and played that ever since.
I'm a bit of the forever GM for almost 10 years now and that's why I like a system like Campaign Logger (I'm terrible with paper logs).
I use CL longer but I forgot to sign up for the forum :D
My favorite die would be the d20. I like it because of the variety it brings and that sometimes 1 number can make the difference when the tension is high!
 
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