After a few months on hiatus my D&D 5e group started out into the uncharted territory of Tier 3 play (levels beyond 10). They’re traveling to a cave that will allow them passage through the mountains to a desert land beyond. For context I prepare travel portions of the game by doing two things:
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I've been playing / running a fair amount of D&D 5e oneshots at the local games cafe recently (the owner says they often get RPG curious people asking about D&D and has persuaded some of the regular RPG evening attendees to run it more often). As a result of this I have been thinking about the inspiration mechanic.
Briefly inspiration works like this -
The editing beast is slain at last, and I get 1500 XP for defeating a 7th level Solo Brute, meaning the editing task. The truth is that I need those XP to improve my play skills, because this four-hour online session displays my limits at least as well as anything about people enjoying a single convention session of play.
I am pretty confident these days regarding the strength and utility of my/our ideas expressed at this site, so my Lab notions are shifting from organized curriculum and into "let's see where we can gte." In this case, we began with "tell me about your character" and moved on from there. For those who follow play accounts here, you'll spot my Shining Star and Helma's Skava.
Here's the follow-up to Conversation: Introducing role-playing, in which Ken Oswald presents an intensive and interactive summary of the hobby as activity. It's hefty, at just under three hours, but full of titles (not summarized here in tags yet) and open doors for further discussion.
Sean Hillman and I discuss some confusing things about situations in play, specifically, what does preparation have to do with them. Seems easy, right? You prep it, then the group plays it - hey, the real (digital, video) games do it all the time, so we should just do that, right?
Zac has not retreated from his call that IIEE (intent, initiation, execution, effect) is the "beating heart of the activity," and Manu - the very soul who prompted this discussion at the Forge fifteen years ago - is still on task. Armed with these stalwarts, we embark upon another Monday Lab to investigate best practices.
Zac began it with this message:
Here’s one of the two workshops I presented at Lucca. It was prompted by two short videos I posted here in the past few months: The role of the roll and Emergent plot techniques, which have led me to a generally larger argument.
My latest consult with Tor brings us his working title, "Belitsunnu's Manticore," and extensive discussion of winning/losing, procedures for player input into preparation, and improvised tactical play.
Please add the collective intelligence to this one. We raised tons of questions and I tried not to drive toward answers - help me round out and deepen the questions so Tor's muse and/or subconscious can surprise him with the right answers for his game.
I’m spacing out the discussion of Tor’s project post by post, because it’s in such an early stage that each chat we have turns into a big block, or stage, of the process. If I’m not mistaken, this one is pretty much the turning point from “playing D&D 5th edition on purpose” to “his own actual game using the 5th edition OGL.”