Hey, at least Satan comes to sessions on time. Last time we played, jesus was 3 days late!
At least he actually turned up for you! He came the first time and it was great, but I’ve been waiting years for him to come again and nothing. I guess he just doesn’t want to hang.
Jesus saves! Everyone else takes full damage
thank you
Fun fact
I roll in front of my players during combat
It adds to the tension
I can always fudge enemy HP though, and often I do
Oh, that’s good. Thank you. I’ll use that
The real life pro tip is always in the comments.
I’m just starting to DM, do you disclose how much HP creatures have to your players? Just did a combat sim with my guys last week to see if we understood the combat system and that probably affected how they played.
A common way to get around explicitly giving the HP of a monster and telling them nothing is the "They look… " rule. When they ask how many HP the baddie has left, tell them “They look injured, but not enough to hinder them” or “they look bloody and totally messed up” etc. As a rule of thumb, you can decide their health into quarters and come up with a common phrase for each, or come up with them on the fly depending on the situation: “Grog’s hammer has left some of its ribs broken, but it looks healthy enough to keep fighting for a while.”
Huh, interesting. Thanks! How do you keep track of health? I was using Owlbear’s character text window but, well, I think I’ll adopt that system you mentioned.
I haven’t really touched Owlbear before, but I booted it up and had a play. It has a reputation for being “very lightweight” and boy, it lives up to that. This is great if you don’t want a lot of complicated options - but I don’t see a way in it to “secretly” track a token’s health.
I made this goblin as the GM and the “player” can see the character notes, I don’t really see a way to turn it off (maybe there’s an extension for it.) - If I were running on this, I’d use pen and paper to track health.
If all you need is a quick visualisation to move tokens around, Owlbear is pretty good for that, it’s quick and lightweight and easy to use.
If you’re looking for something with a little more oomph that’s also free, “Roll20” is a very popular free app for running DnD games, it has quite a lot of good tools, can handle full character sheets, and it’s compatable with Beyond20 (Beyond20 is an extension for DnD Beyond that lets you roll dice out of the DnD beyond website into an open vtt.)
If you’re looking for something with a lot of power and flexibility behind it “Foundryvtt” is a system that does everything Roll20 does, usually better, but sometimes a little clunkier (for me, it’s often a bit laggy, and the drawing tools suck - even the “good” modules) - Foundry is really for power users, as you can run independent servers, code your own modules, or install all sorts of mods from the library of modules other people have coded.
If you’re looking to spend a huge number of hours building incredibly pretty 3d environments for your players to explore, “talespire” is available, and seems to be pretty comprehensive… but… oh boy it’s a lot
Adding in to the way of “tracking health secretly”, there’s a way, but you gotta think in reverse:
Track damage, not health. Just jot down quickly on paper how much HP an enemy has and track damage dealt, which can be a public info anyway
If you figure HP needs changing, change it on the fly on the paper and adjust your description of the scene
This is an excellent suggestion that I completely forgot to mention, simply because I don’t use it myself. (Online, I use Foundry and keep the total secret, in meatspace I use pen and paper behind a screen.)
Many tables really like this approach, because nobody needs to remember anything and everyone has the info to hand. If you have forgetful players, or players who don’t pay attention 100% of the time, or if you need to put your information tracking in a public space (e.g. because you run on owlbear, or play on a small table with no DM screen) this lets you track monster HP while not writing down anything the players don’t know.
DM’s: Definitely consider this approach if your players are constantly asking you questions like “how much damage did this ogre take again?” or “which of those two minotaurs has taken the most damage?” - it can really help you out.
Yup. This covers “forgetful players”, but it also helps me: a DM with ADHD that can get very lost in “meatspace” (“which of these four monsters that look exactly the same took 40 damage, again?” or “I am sure I had that monster token here somewhere…”)
So I make tokens with pictures for the creatures on the top and space on the bottom to scribble the damage with dry-erase marker. Really helps.
Also: adding up is much faster than subtracting damage
Really recommend that method for anybody that wants to try and speed up combat
Oh man… I’ve DMed once and only once. I fudged a LOT of stuff in the spirit of making the game as fun as possible for my friends. All of the bad never played DnD before. I used only Excel spreadsheets for combat. I tracked health secretly and would sometime allow something weaker to die in one hit if a char rolled high and really excitedly said their damage number. I tried to be as descriptive as POSSIBLE about what their sword/mace/arrow did to the inside of the gobbo’s guts/skull.
We played verrrrry loose with rules. I wanted to run full TotM. My partner was the cartographer… they did STELLAR, and told me I described stuff really well.
It was some of the most fun I’ve had. I spent like 60 hours prepping the campaign, and let them know it’ll be kinda railroad-y at first. They made a decision to go off course near the beginning and I made up some convenient reason they couldn’t… then I began writing the next part of the story because one char was VERY intent on going that way. I just needed some time to figure it out cuz I’m new.
It was wonderful. The last thing that happened in our campaign was our friend accidentally killing our other friend with some bad rolls (we agreed critical misses should have consequences cuz it’s funny)
…before we could play again, the friend who was downed died in real life. I love you, ******.
Anyway thanks for reading my rant.
Thanks for the info! I had seen those before. This is the second time we try to get into dnd (it’d be our first game), and I tried to use Roll20 before. It was a little overwhelming, between not knowing the first thing about dnd and a poor UI (to me). We chose owlbear because of its simplicity, if my guys don’t feel like dnd is for them, we didn’t spend too much time or any money on software.
Next campaign though, I’d like to try roll20. If I end up rolling lowest and get stuck with DMing again.
I think owl ear would be good for a first campaign for sure- a feature-rich cry has a lot to learn, and that’s a lot to do when also learning the game.
Just a quick update. We had our first session yesterday. It was a little rough at first, everyone talking over each other but ae rolled for initiative for interactions out of combat, and everything after went without a hitch. Except the boss fight, I had some real bad rolls and my players put the aberrations down without taking a single hit. Still, they had fun, and I had fun. Owlbear was fine, it did the job. Wish it communicated heights better but, eh, making the maps in rimworld probably didn’t help.
Thanks for the help! I quite like being a DM.
Pen and paper for the real number, use descriptions with the players. I even modified how fast the enemies would walk/run and how hard they hit based on how rough of a shape they were in…
Don’t over think it!
Hm, alright, thanks! Think I’ll use a spreadsheet. If I use notes I’ll end up making a huge mess.
4e had a specific status called “bloodied” that creatures gained when they dropped below half HP, this represented that one of the attacks on them has been a telling enough blow that they’re showing signs of injury. I brought this with me to 5e, because it’s a useful contextualizer for players to get a feel for how well they’re doing.
One advantage of this system (especially for new DMs) is that if you massively overspec an encounter and the players are in trouble, you have some time to realize it’s going badly, and can drop the monster’s HP pool a little to compensate.
One advantage of this system (especially for experienced groups) is that if the party are doing badly, and haven’t realized it - the moment you say “right, the enemy is bloodied” they realize that they’ve “only” done half the dragon’s HP, and are reminded that retreat is an option they can take. Remember that if the whole party decides to retreat, it can be good to drop out of combat, and make the attempted retreat a skill-based challenge, rather than trying to run the retreat on the combat grid. 5e makes it very very difficult for creatures to “outrun” other creatures that are trying to kill them, and the combat system doesn’t handle retreating well.
If you want a mechanic for it, ask the player who wants to know to make a medicine check - this can add value to the medicine skill (which doesn’t see a lot of play):
If they beat 10, you give them a very rough idea, like “they’ve been hit a couple of times but they look like they’re going strong”
If they beat 15, give them a loose fraction to the closest 1/4 or so “they’ve lost about 1/4 of their HP” etc
If they beat 20, give them a number to the nearest 5 or 10 (depending on if you’re low or high level.)
Increase these DCs by 5 if the monster is something that they’d be unfamiliar with the biology of - how easy is it to tell how hurt an air elemental is? not very.
An important thing to always remember is, every table is different, if one thing works for your group - do that, don’t think that you have to follow any piece of advice just because it came from someone who sounded authoritative, or gave you a lot of numbers.
This is all extremely useful info, thanks! I want to implement something like this, because I feel like it would help my guys roleplay. It’s the first time we ever do ttrpg, and I’d like to give them every help I can get.
4e had a specific status called “bloodied” that creatures gained when they dropped below half HP
This is in 5e, below half health an enemy or NPC is described as showing injury, below 25% is described as seriously injured, and below 10% is described as near death.
Usually not until they’re below half or unless a player asks, I never give them the actual numbers though as I feel that would detract from the experience.
For me the players having a fun experienceb and building a character’s story is more important than explicitly wargaming
I fudge enemy stats all the time, or at least I used to. These days I play blades in the dark, and before that I no longer needed to fudge much after years of practice.
The argument about fudging usually presumes some sort of pity for injured players and creates a strawman out of that. I don’t fudge hits or misses to save people, I fudge to keep the fight moving along. Six rounds of “your sword clatters against its scales but it seems to be holding up okay” gets old really fast. If the fight is taking too long I whip out some kind of tension ramping effect and drop the enemy hp. “Oh no, it dumps over a cauldron of acid! (But it only has 20 hp left not 60 because this is getting slow)”
Do whatever you want but the Dungeon Master’s guide encourages DM’s to (sparingly) fudge rolls to avoid your players getting screwed over by bad luck. It’s not against the rules at all.
Source: DnD 5e DMG page 235 and 237
Funny, my Hackmaster book p. 113 says fudging dice is cheating. But you are free to roll dice with the devil.
That’s a player guide lol. Only the DM should fudge.
“Finally, this rule absolutely eliminates the need for anyone, be he player or, so help me gods, GameMaster, to fudge a roll. Fudging, also known as CHEATING has no place in a game that already has a mechanic designed to eliminate freak occurrences.”
I guess you are right, DMs can fudge all they want. GMs keep their honor and don’t roll dice with Satan.
Isn’t HackMaster very explicitly written to be funny? I’m avoiding the term ‘satire’ because HM 5th Edition is not really satire (HmB page 2)
Crawford 235:237
Based and THEONETRUEBIBLE pilled.
I fudge die rolls all the time. Both ways. Satan is more than welcome at my table.
As long as your table has fun, who cares? 🤘👹🤘
At least for my table, fun is the only goal. Some people do have fun being rules lawyers…though not at my table!
I mean, what kind of adventure would it be without a deal with at least one devil? Satan knows how to party.
Needing to fudge dice usually means the rules have failed.
A common trope is “I don’t want my PC to die!”. Fine. Reasonable. You can have rules about that. Look at how Fate handles “concede” and getting taken out. Look at how DND does jack shit.
Many games also have a fail forward mechanic. You don’t need to fudge their check if the rules have mechanics for “if you really want to succeed but luck isn’t on your side, here’s what you can pay to succeed”
DND kind of sucks.
Youre right. Its not like death was part of the mechanics from the start, they also could be ignored.
Also, there totally isnt like 5 different ways for the players to rez a pc.
And lets forget about habing NPCs do the rezing as a sidequest.
I say all that, but I love death. I WANT my PC to die if he dies. Thats how you get thrills. Suspense. Tension. Playing with cheats on is fun, but gets boring fast.
Played a control/support wizard for almost two years. Died to a power word kill and BBG used his soul as a bargaining chip. Party was too full of themselves and newer players, they called his bluff, my wizard was perma dead. The rest of the session was them as players and characters coming to terms with his death. It was god damn beautiful and one of my favorite memories in gaming.
Please DMs, kill your
playersplayer’s characters. For the character development.Edit: being neurodivergent I sometimes forget that people can have personal feelings that I find illogical, so as the comment under mine says; please make sure your player or players are not going to be traumatized if you kill their characters. As a DM I have always done this, because even if they are killed off I want the players input on how it goes, but that is for narrative reasons and I had not considered how badly it could have gone if I hadn’t been asking. I have never been asked by a DM, it just doesn’t bother me because to me it is a part of the fun and magic of TTRPGs.
I’ve also seen players devastated by character death. The correct advice is to check in with your players about what they want to do with possible character death. Don’t just spring it on players who don’t want it.
I had two player characters foolishly break into a vampire wizard’s office to try to steal something. It was a series of incredibly foolish decisions, starting with “let’s split the party”, and it escalated to violence. When it was looking especially grim, I asked them if they would be okay with character death. They said yes. The two characters died.
The in-game funeral for them was fantastic. Real tears. But the important thing is they consented to this. If they had wanted these characters to live, it would’ve been a dick move to be like “nah they dead”. There’s no reason to make the players real-life extra upset. I don’t have the hubris to think I know better what kind of story they want.
You are absolutely right, and I have always got buy in from players, I just never thought about how badly things could have gone if I hadn’t been doing that so I have edited my comment. For narrative reasons I always think players should have a say in their characters death, it helps me as a DM and can lead to fantastic world building opportunities. Thankfully I’ve never killed a PC without consent for that reason.
I read the second paragraph first and interpreted it as “kill the person playing the character and make someone else play them so that the character will have a different personality.”
I play versions of myself in a fantasy setting. I emphasize a particular part of my personality and give them funny voices, so no one has caught on. Thankfully people tend to like me for some reason, and therefore my characters, but that is why I always forget to make the player versus player character distinction.
Also, there totally isnt like 5 different ways for the players to rez a pc.
Depends on character level, setting, game tone. Not a universal solution to a universal problem.
And lets forget about habing NPCs do the rezing as a sidequest.
Not every game lends itself well to an unexpected sidequest. Also what is the dead PC’s owner to do in the interim? This introduces a lot of questions and is also not a universal solution.
Did you read how defeat works in Fate? You can have death.
https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/conceding-conflict . If you don’t want to go look it up, I’ll summarize here:
In a conflict, before a roll is made, you can Concede. This is a Player action, not a character action. It means that you give up the conflict, but you get a say in what happens. You don’t get whatever you were fighting over, but so long as the group agrees it’s reasonable you can get something like “taken prisoner” or “left for dead.” You also get a Fate point, which is nice. (D&D also has an extremely lackluster meta currency system, but that’s a separate discussion). Note that it’s not the DM just deciding what happens to you. That’s for getting Taken Out.
If you instead let the roll happen, and you take more stress (damage) than you can hold, you instead get Taken Out. When that happens, you have no say. Barring normal social contract stuff, whoever was coming at you has free rein to just be like “And the spell explodes your head.”
This is in the rules. To me that’s much better than D&D’s wishy-washy “maybe the DM will do this or that” standard. I don’t want to hash this out at every single table I join from first principles.
D&D kind of sucks because it leaves a lot of important things up to the DM, so you get wildly different experiences depending on whatever half-baked whims this table has. And you have to have these conversations over and over again. And some people never will know there’s other ways things could be, and leave the hobby or just be unhappy.
Some people might say “leaving more up to the DM is better” but that’s wrong. Clearly going maximum calvinball “whatever the DM says in this moment” is not the platonic ideal of a game. At least not for me or anyone I know. Some rules are important. D&D is missing some important ones. And has too many rules in other places.
No system is perfect, has every rules and isn’t relying on the master to some degree. But then, if you dont like death as being part of the game, why play dnd at all then ?
It would be like not liking horror and picking CoC.
If you want your PC to always survive no matter what, either play a system with it in the rules or make a deal with the DM. But blasting dnd because its not part of the core rules (besides all the ways to bring a PC back from the dead that are already there) isnt fair.
This is aggravated by DND being mega popular. Many people who would enjoy some other kind of games don’t get to play them . Or don’t even know there are options. Or the alternatives they find are close relatives of dnd that don’t change much of the fundamentals.
Many new players may not even know that you can have a “hey I don’t want my character to die unless I consent in that scene” conversation. If that was in the rules, they would likely know!
But DND simply doesn’t address this. At least not in the phb. It’s very cut and dry “if you drop to 0 hit points and fail your saves, you die.”
That’s a very specific style of play that’s not appropriate for the most popular game.
Of course any popular produce in any medium will show their strenghts and weaknesses to the world. But better to try a defective product than none at all.
It’s fine so long as everyone’s on board with PC death, but this is just an example of D&D struggling to hold onto a giant audience with conflicting views. If they get rid of death, the people who actually play D&D the way it’s meant to be played get pissed off. If they don’t, the more narrative-focused players (who really shouldn’t be playing D&D in the first place) will get pissed off. So they just ignore it.
In video game design there is the MDA framework. Where mechanics (rules) create dynamics (gameplay flow) that express aesthetics (genre and emotional expression). Thus in d&d the rules change the actions players take and these actions determine the tone and feel of the game. This is why Silvery Barbs is miserable, the dynamic it creates diminishes the roleplaying aesthetic by breaking suspension of disbelief.
When looking at 5e the fact most players don’t just homebrew a few rules, but gut large mechanics (light, encumbrance, gold, travel) of the game. This has completed removed WotC’s control of D&D’s dynamics. This breaks the aesthetics of the system. 5e in it’s current state is not a heroic fantasy game, but everyone thinks it is. Which is why so many tables fail and new DMs burn out.
Rules don’t have to fail to fudge dice. You do it to curate the experience - the dice give us the illlusion of fairness but that’s about it. Just because we expect them to roll somewhere in the averages doesn’t mean a common bandit won’t roll four crits in a single encounter or one of your playera won’t have a session where they cannot roll above 6.
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Dave looks so fucking done
He’s obviously been DMing for at least those 2 years.
Welp, there’s my WTF for the day
Not a single HAW HAW HAW in that entire Chick Tract edit?
There’s some legendary reverse psychology being performed by Satan here.
Classic Satan
I’ve been collecting Chick Tracts I find laying around, and my Holy Grail is finding a copy of the one about the satanic game of dungeons and dragons, titled Dark Dungeons. Unfortunately it’s a niche subject and not included in their variety packs, you have to order it specifically, which means unless I find a very specific crank still caught up in the satanic panic there’s a very low chance of ever finding it in the wild
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I roll dice because it makes a nice noise and enhances the experience for the players: they think I’m rolling secret stuff that’ll result in an ogre attack!
Couldn’t his character just be resurrected anyway?
You mean like Jesus? That seems a little heretical, this isn’t Warhammer Fantasy RP.
BURN THE HERETIC!
This image is fried to hell. Is there not a better version of it?
