Introductions

[Leadaddict]

Those D30s are a rare beast these days... not many games that use them!

It is. I use the d30 DM Companion and d30 Sandbox Companion while playing. Soooo many tables

I‘ve always liked the fact that when creating a table a d30 table lets you get a few more options in Than just a d20, but not as many as d%. I use a d30 for all my random tables.

Of course I kinda always liked a d66 Table in that it’s just weird.

 

[Leadaddict]

@Leadaddict I've always been curious about this:

So do you have tokens for the players, as well? And do the players tell you where they go and you move the tokens for them?

I've always been worried this approach would slow me down.

Player: I move to the door.

GM: Which door?

Player: The left one.

Player 2: I move to beside the fountain and ready with my bow.

GM: Which side of the fountain, or does it matter?

Player 2: Top side.

GM: <moves token> There?

Player 2: Down a little.

GM: There?

Player 2: To the left one spot.

GM: There?

etc.

Great question. I don’t use tokens, just a colored dot for each player. I have a picked palette that is them and a palette for everything else. So from session 1 the thief knows he is the red dot. The priest is light blue, etc. Layers are the key To manipulate them on the map.

I would love to use tokens and it would be super simple because of the functionality of photoshop. I have a huge collection from Alex Drummonds Isometric Dungeons. Just haven’t implemented it. I also think tokens kinda take away from what they imagine themselves to be so I don’t mind dots.

You can get some of the “where?” “Here?”stuff going on. But since we aren’t wargaming, exact positioning isn’t that important to the way we play. If we played AD&D 1st Ed that’s would be a different story. We play much less “on the grid”. We have wilderness/overland sessions where the only map is the sub region map with major features. No hexes. We talk in terms of meals times, or times of day (early/mid/late afternoon etc) or number of days of riding to get places, basically flow charting it. I do place everyone in combat if we are using a map, but often times they just describe what they want to do and the dots never move in an encounter unless it’s important from a decision making standpoint. They also know to be specific in describing their actions. They are all tabletop wargamers so they know how important specifics can be.

As far as speed goes, they describe and I move. Goes pretty fast.

 

[attorneydc]

Thanks for the welcome Johnn! My name is Jeff. I'm currently running Pathfinder first edition. I've been DMing since 1979 or 1980. Details lost to the mists of time. I was circa 12 then.

 

[Gordon Johansen]

Gordon Johansen from Calgary, Alberta. I own and still run The Sentry Box which as far as I know is the world's largest game store with 19,000 sq.ft.. I've been doing it for 40 years now and still love games and my job. Basically, I sell the stuff I enjoy; RPGs, wargames, fantasy, SF, & historical miniatures, Eurogames, history books, SF&F novels. and dice. (So many dice)

Started with D&D in Jan of 74 and still have one of the brown wood-grain boxes and the books I used to play with back then. I mostly signed up here as a show of support for Johnn and to payback something for all the great newsletters he sends out.

Currently running a 5e game with my family and a friend's who I used to play with back in the day. We're using the Nentir Vale from 4e as the world as I had most of the information for it already in Realm Works and don't have time to move it.

 

[JochenL]

The Sentry Box which as far as I know is the world's largest game store with 19,000 sq.ft.

And another reason to visit Canada!

Welcome!

 

[zumHeuriger]

Tom Vickery from East Windsor, NJ, USA. I've been doing RPG's since the three thin brown book days of D&D. I mostly GM GURPS via group chat. I found the Dangers/Discoveries/Impressions email /planning to be a godsend since there tend to be lots of little side encounters during our adventures and this helps me take a reasonable about of time to see how its going to go.

As for favorite dice: A nice set of blue and gold D6's. Rolling them all for an explosion's damage can be fun...

Tom

 

[Kza]

Hi! Kent M. Beeson, currently living outside Madison, WI. Been playing D&D and other rpgs, off and on, since... 1981? 1982? (I'm 48.) I also have a lot of experience with Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer FRP, both of which I consider formative for me.

We moved to WI about five years ago, and not long after made friends with my daughter's Girl Scout Troop leader. She had played D&D briefly when younger, and when she learned I had experience, she pestered me for about a year to get me to run it for her. I finally did, with 5e, starting with The Lost Mine of Phandelver. That was about two years ago! Our group consists of her, her teenage son, her two preteen daughters, *my* daughter, and the husband of the *other* Girl Scout Troop leader.

We are currently going through Storm King's Thunder in a weird sideways fashion (long story). After that, I plan on using more homebrewed stuff. I feel like I know enough and am experienced enough to create this stuff myself... but I'm very slow at writing it. I'm looking forward to learning as much as I can here, particularly ways to speed up adventure creation.

 

[ThePencilNeck]

Hola! My name is Watson Davis. I'm originally from Houston, TX, but now I live on the Costa Blanca in Spain.

I got the D&D Basic Set in '77 and was hooked. I couldn't find a lot of people to play with back then. So when I started off, I would play solo and create stories for myself. When I finally gathered up friends to play with, I created my own adventures and mostly ran games in Runequest and Traveller. I loved the worldbuilding.

I have not run a game in a very long time. And. It's time for my big confession. I'm not here to improve my GM chops. I'm an author. I write fantasy and science fiction novels. I've been incorporating more and more game elements into my writing over the years. My past few novels have been loosely based on Modiphius' Hyborean Age rules, twisted and tweaked as needed. So I'm here to learn to build adventures people will love to read. I've been working to incorporate your tips and suggestions already.

 

[Shadows over Scotland]

I have not run a game in a very long time. And. It's time for my big confession. I'm not here to improve my GM chops. I'm an author. I write fantasy and science fiction novels...

Nice.. Hopefully you find some good overlaps in the creativity processes, love to see how different views on a process work out

 

[Yorrakas Wood]

Kia Ora from New Zealand.
My name is Leon and I come from our capital city. Wellington. I love the shared game experience but I have never been brave enough to run a game myself... yet. I restarted my love affair with D&D 5E and a bunch of friends recently.... and as we are playing westmarch style I have the safety of a short story to cut my teeth as a GM... I just want it to be a killer debut.
I love all my polyhedra, please don't make me decide between them.

 

[PiecesOfEden]

Hi everyone!

I'm Imke, from Bremen in Northern Germany. I've started GMing for 5 of my friends last year (we just had our 1-year-anniversary session last weekend!) but have been ... "in touch" with TTRPG for quite a while. My first experiences were the DSA books where you mostly read and than made decisions leading to new chapters and so on ... . Since then I've wanted to play a proper campaign for quite a while but somehow it never happened. Among my friends we've tried GURPS, we've tried DnD, we've tried Vampire ... nothing ever stuck somehow until I got fed up and decided, naively so probably, to start my own campaign in a homebrew world of all things ... but somehow ... it worked. From the get-go we decided that every other Friday would be reserved for DnD and that worked out great! Covid was a bit of a bummer but through Roll20 and such we managed to squeeze in a few online sessions. Recently we've started meeting in person again and it was astounding to see what a difference that made in energy and inspiration! Nothing beats it!

As you can tell ... I ramble ... in life as well as at the table but so far, none of my players have complained so that seems to work out!

As for my favorite dice ... uhm ... if I had to choose it would be either the d20 or the d8 ... diamonds are a girl's best friend after all
Looking forward to learning and growing as a GM!
Cheers!

 

[TJM]

Hello, All. I'm TJ from the Midwestern US. I GM mostly D&D 5e but also some Powered by the Apocalypse on the side (Monster of the Week & a mish-mash homebrew of Uncharted Worlds, Impulse Drive, and Infinite Galaxies). Only been GMing for a little over a year. d20 for life!

 

[Scotsie]

Greetings!

• Scott from slightly North of Atlanta, Georgia in the United States.
• I am currently GMing a DnD 5E homebrew campaign for some remote users via Roll20 and Discord and playing in a sporadic Mutants and Masterminds 3E game.
• Following the general theme, began playing in 1978 when a friend brough the D&D (Blue Box) in to school. We sat in the back of the classroom when the teacher realized we had no musical talent. GM'd shortly after the first few sessions so everyone got a chance to play. After that I was hooked on the stories.
• My favorite die is the reliable D6. The most prolific building blocks of many systems, managing stats, piloting YT1300s and in a pinch a when down a few players, a rousing game yahtzee. My favorite set would be my brass set the kiddos got me in 2008 with edges shiny from use and TLC.

Thankfully my parents didn't subscribe to the satanic panic or Mazes and Monsters hype. Over the decades in all my moves, travels and career changes, I've kept gaming as a carefully protected and cultivated hobby. I stumbled across John's RPT email chain in early 2012 and have enjoyed reading them as much as many issues of Dungeon or Dragon magazine.

 

[ObiJanKenobi]

Ahoi, I'm Jan, currently living in Munich, Germany. Kind of curious to scan through the forums.

I've been doing roleplaying games since ~1995 with more and less intense periods. Right now, I'm going through some kind of renaissance, trying out a lot of new systems (Modern AGE, Fantasy Age, Fate). Before that we had a very long running game of Fading Suns.
Since I grew up with the most popular german system Das Schwarze Auge, the d20 for me represents role-playing, so that's my favourite dice.

Noch ein Jan aus Deutschland, huhu

 

[Zantan]

Hi, I'm Chris from North Carolina. It looks like I'm a little unusual here due to my age (mid 30s) and focus on narrative RPGs. I started out with D&D in ~95 and moved to more open-ended/narrative systems over time (GURPS to White Wolf to Nobilis and now PbtA). I've always loved worldbuilding and understanding the mechanics of games, but consistently failed as a GM because I would freeze up when things didn't go up as planned.

I tried again recently and have been doing much better - I'm now several months into a game of Fellowship (PbtA) and while I have made some horrendous mistakes along the way I have managed to keep the players engaged and now I feel comfortable enough running sessions that I can start to really focus on having a well constructed campaign.

As for my favorite die it would be the d6 - nothing compares to the feeling of throwing a giant handful of them onto the table in a dice-pool system like Shadowrun.

 

[Shea001]

Hi. My name is also John, but my parents didn't have enough money for the second "n." I'm in Alabama, USA, and I've been DMing 5e for my four kids and their cousins for about five years. My favorite sided-die is the d100, but as daddy always said, "If you can't afford that second n, you probably can't afford a d100 either."

 

[Beldar1215]

Hi I'm Chris from Denver. I have been gaming since the late 90's. Started with 2 edition D&D. I now run and play mostly Savage Worlds. I do also play 5th edition. I have a couple adventures that I need to write in the near future and hope this will help me get them done.

My favorite die is the d6 because they can explode!!!

 

[Gatestone]

Jeremy Henson in the New Orleans metro area. I own and operate +1 Gaming, a tabletop and video game store in Metairie.

I've been a GM since about 1994. I've run ... Mutants & Masterminds (all three editions) ...

Hey Jeremy,
Maybe I can pick your brain about M&M 3rd ed? Trying to figure out how to generate powers, but the example in the DC Adventures book doesn't help me at all.

 

[Ronaldo Lima]

Hello everyone,

My name is Ronaldo, I live in Winnipeg, MB. I've been GMing since I stumbled upon a Dragon Quest box somewhere in the 90's.
I moved to Canada five years ago, but I am from Sao Paulo, Brazil (born and raised), so Brazilian Portuguese is my first language, which explains why my English will sound odd or just wrong sometimes.

I am passioned about stories/storytelling in general, and RPG is my #1 hobby. I've been in contact with several games, but D&D is what I have played most in all these years of "adventuring".

I am here, because I really want to go deeper in the "art of GMing"; I am always pondering about "the secrets" to create amazing stories for my players and trying to understand how the storytelling in RPGs compares and differs to other medias, like books or movies.

Favourite die is my red D20, which my players insist it's loaded.

 

[Beebs]

Brendan from Portland, OR. The d20 is pretty magical. Currently on a hiatus in the middle of GMing a Shadow of the Demon Lord campaign. I'm pretty in love with both the system and the setting. Played a little 2nd edition as a kid. Then 3rd, 3.5, Pathfinder, then a long break with no RPGs, then a little Fantasy Flight SWRPG, a little 5e, and now SotDL! It's been fun to branch out a little beyond the core D&D experience. I generally prefer playing to GMing, but hopefully with some more practice and preparation GMing won't be so stressful!