The DM's Guide to DMing

muttonchop wrote:

So my players have made the brilliant decision to trap not one, but TWO hostile Flameskulls in an empty bag of holding. I could just have the skulls burn their way out, or launch a couple fireballs at the next person who opens the bag, but that seems a bit predictable and I want to reward this poorly-thought-out bit of player creativity.

I thought I might give them a chance to negotiate with their new captives, but I'm having a heck of a time coming up with things they might have to offer. What would a nigh-immortal flaming magic skull actually want?

The description says they’re created to fulfill a task. Perhaps the trip into the bag of holding has left them confused, so they start thinking their task is to protect whatever’s inside the bag. Every time someone tries to take something out, they contest it, and wacky hijinks ensue (e.g., you take the item out, and then they mage hand it back inside). Sort of like a bag of weasels with less weasels.

Motivation-wise, flameskulls are created for a purpose (like guarding a treasure), but if that task is no longer necessary they can become autonomous and have their own motivations. If it was me the first thing I'd do is retcon up a reason why they were created and what they were originally tasked with doing.

Action-wise, I don't know if it jives with rules-as-written for cross-planar behavior, but you could have the flameskulls start sending their Mage Hands outside the bag and just generally messing with everything. Grabbing small items, untying things, knocking over candles and starting fires..

Similarly, if a person can look into a bag of holding enough to rummage around for an item, I don't see why someone inside couldn't see out well enough to, say, target a fireball...

fenomas wrote:

Motivation-wise, flameskulls are created for a purpose (like guarding a treasure), but if that task is no longer necessary they can become autonomous and have their own motivations. If it was me the first thing I'd do is retcon up a reason why they were created and what they were originally tasked with doing.

That part's already handled, the skulls were created by a hag to guard the pathway leading to her lair. The party's on their way to confront the hag now, depending on how that plays out they'll probably either end up fighting her or striking a bargain to get her to leave, either way the skulls will be out of a job.

I've been RPing them as more mercenary than outright evil -- for balance reasons I couldn't have the party fight both at once so I decided they guard the path in shifts, one of the skulls was "on break" and refused to get involved. He was first to get stuffed in the bag so he's particularly miffed at the moment.

The mage hand idea's fun, I think they'll start off with a bit of magical mischief and only escalate to fireballs if needed.

If you tear a Bag of Holding, everything spills into the Astral Plane, so why couldn't a couple of intelligent magical creatures figure out how to make a portal of sorts, drag something in from there, and, when players open the bag, something "fun" comes out? At that point, the Flameskulls have built a gateway to whatever intraplanar plot hook sounds fun.

So one skull was on break when it got stuffed into the bag of holding? Sounds to me like overtime that wasn’t in the contract. If the PC’s try to bargain with the hag, have the flameskulls try to jump in and try to renegotiate their employment at the same time.

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

If you tear a Bag of Holding, everything spills into the Astral Plane, so why couldn't a couple of intelligent magical creatures figure out how to make a portal of sorts, drag something in from there, and, when players open the bag, something "fun" comes out? At that point, the Flameskulls have built a gateway to whatever intraplanar plot hook sounds fun.

That's a fun idea too! That sort of magic might take a while so maybe they'll be working on that secret while they're trapped.

misplacedbravado wrote:

So one skull was on break when it got stuffed into the bag of holding? Sounds to me like overtime that wasn’t in the contract. If the PC’s try to bargain with the hag, have the flameskulls try to jump in and try to renegotiate their employment at the same time.

That definitely seems like something they'd do.

Oh hello! Please consider taking a look at this:

Not only do they have some amazing writing talent involved but they (might) also have me! Since i'm stretch goal no 1 to polish up all their maps

Dreadful Realms: Caverns of the Wise Minister

Welp, I just pitched switching systems again to my group. I’ve been running a PF2 sandbox *crawl for over a year now, and the system is just weighing down on me. I need to change it before it burns me out. I want to run OSE (a B/X retroclone), but my players have some concerns about lethality (due to memories of AD&D). The thing is: B/X is not AD&D (it’s just D&D).

The plan is finish up this one-shot of an OSE adventure converted to PF2 and then do another one-shot in OSE. After that, we can have a conversation about what’s next. My hope is by not tuning the adventure for PF2 then doing one in OSE, my players with concerns about lethality will find they’re unfounded. If that doesn’t work, there’s 5e, but I’m not super enthusiastic about that.

We started out as a PF1 group before transitioning to various systems then 5e then back to PF(2). My GMing style started out quasi-old-school but has just gotten more so over the years. Are games are best when we’re just improvising zany stuff, and I want a system that embraces that. I hate that amount of switching we’ve done (because it’s disruptive), but I feel like this is for the best.

Not exactly relevant, but {url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_582... has a lengthy video up on the illusion of choice in PF2, and how he's grown to not care for the system.[/url] It's quite long, but it's just been background noise as I've been working, and it does break down in astoundingly nerdy fashion what he doesn't much care for in terms of how you're effectively either forced into optimal play, or into consciously choosing to be heavily sub-optimal. Interesting to, well, I'm not really watching, but as somebody who just in general enjoys systems analysis, it's kind of cool.

And, while I'm very much a hardcore 5e fanboi, I really, really want to break out some OSR stuff at some point in the future and just go back to the old B/X days for something incredibly simple to go with. I do feel like every version of D&D has heavily improved on the prior version (yes, I thought 4e was way better than 3.5), but I'd like something very simple, and I'm really just in a fantasy mode lately. I did a bunch of sci-fi, superhero, cyberpunk, and other genres when younger, but I'm very much in a headspace of just wanting to bang some fantasy miniatures around in gaming.

Actually, it’s a pretty good follow up to my post. The reasons he articulates are fairly similar to why I’m looking to move away from PF2. The problem actually isn’t the combat. What he describes is endemic to D&D-like systems. If you give players an obvious thing to do, then they’ll do that obvious thing (because it’s obvious). PF2 seems to punish you more for deviating from that than other systems, but he doesn’t hold it against the system.

The actual problem he cites is if combat really isn’t any different than other editions, then what you’re left with is a system with a lot of heft to it. He specifically mentions skill actions and how they get in the way of how he wants to run. Paizo took all the little modifiers from PF1 and turned them into actions with different degrees of success. They interact with character customization, and the assumption is that you are using them to adjudicate situations.

It’s been a source of displeasure for me because I don’t like that even after running PF2 for over a year I still haven’t internalized all of them. I feel like I ought to have a higher level of system mastery than that at this point. For him, it gets in the way of how he wants to run the game (and there’s some of that for me too).

The obvious response is: just ignore them. I actually considered a revised skill action rule (see below). Cody’s reasoning is he could do that, or he could just run a system that doesn’t have the stuff he doesn’t want. That’s a pretty fair take, and that’s why I ultimately decided to pitch OSE to my group. My game was already heavily influenced by OSE, and rather than continue to try to make it work, I’d rather just use the game that does the thing I want without the hassle.

Spoiler: Alternate degrees of success for skill uses

Replace all of the various skill actions with the following. You’ll need to apply judgement when feats or other options and effects interact with a skill action.

Critical Success: Like success but with an additional benefit. This can be something in the fiction, or it could be a hero point. The GM decides.
Success: You accomplish what you were trying to do.
Failure: Like success but with a complication, or you fail forward.
Critical Failure: You fail at your task. This could be straight failure, or it could be an especially bad situation that results from your lack of success. The GM decides.

kenada wrote:

but my players have some concerns about lethality (due to memories of AD&D). The thing is: B/X is not AD&D (it’s just D&D).

B/X is actually MORE lethal than AD&D. Lower HP for the classes and Rules as Written have instant death at 0 hp.

Personally, I just house rule, because I absolutely adore B/X (OSE specifically) and really, there's a few tweaks it needs anyway. (Battle Axes doing 1d8 damage but still being two handed? UGH.)

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

And, while I'm very much a hardcore 5e fanboi, I really, really want to break out some OSR stuff at some point in the future and just go back to the old B/X days for something incredibly simple to go with.

Aside from B/X (OSE and Basic Fantasy fall into this) I would heartily recommend the White Hack and "White Box Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game".

There are a lot of things that I think are worth pulling from OSR stuff (having a LOT of random tables for generating stuff on the fly is probably the best example, that and the inventiveness of the worldbuilding in a lot of books) but the gygaxian lethality and 'hardcore' side of things is really not my thing.

But then i'm the sort of person who ignores encumbrance and 'common' ammunition limits, and just assumes players always have enough arrows and provisions on hand, and copper to pay for inn rooms, drinks, etc. I HATE micromanagement in ttrpgs.

Valmorian wrote:
kenada wrote:

but my players have some concerns about lethality (due to memories of AD&D). The thing is: B/X is not AD&D (it’s just D&D).

B/X is actually MORE lethal than AD&D. Lower HP for the classes and Rules as Written have instant death at 0 hp.

Personally, I just house rule, because I absolutely adore B/X (OSE specifically) and really, there's a few tweaks it needs anyway. (Battle Axes doing 1d8 damage but still being two handed? UGH.)

Even with an encounter procedure that provides for retreats?

Also, my current thinking for the one-shot is card method* in order with max HP at 1st level. I’ll also be using some of the stuff from the advanced fantasy genre book like separate races and some of the class and combat options. I want to see how things go in the one shot before instituting any changes to death at 0 hp. I don’t want my PCs to be charging in looking for a fight. I’d much rather they avoid combat and take a combat-as-war approach.

--
* Shuffle a set of cards (445566778899) and deal out six stacks of two cards. Assign the totals of each stack in order they were dealt as your ability scores (#1 = Str, #2 = Int, #3 = Dex, #4 = Wis, #5 = Con, #6 = Cha). There’s another set (445566777889) that is a little closer on average to 4d6 drop lowest, but it can’t generate 18s.

Edit: Actually, 344556677899 is very close to 4d6 drop lowest, and it can generate 18s. Hmm.

Actually, I really like 334455677899 for OSE. It’s somewhere between 4d6 drop lowest and 3d6, can generate an 18, and it has a reasonably triangular distribution of possible values.

I have seen this done before if you want to still have them roll dice:

Stat 1 - 3d6
Stat 2 - 18-Stat 1
Stat 3 - 3d6 reroll 1s
Stat 4 - 24 - Stat 3
Stat 5 - 3d6 reroll 1s and 2s
Stat 6 - 27 - Stat 5

And on another note, I finally got my Pathfinder 2E rulebook.[1] Am (slowly) reading it and am looking forward to finding a PbP to join somewhere in the future.

[1] - Holy crap, this thing weighs a ton.

Related, I'm currently reading Jon Peterson's "The Elusive Shift," which is about the formation of the concepts of roleplaying in the early years of the hobby. I just got through a section on exactly these issues with stat generation, as people were dealing with it in the mid 1970s.

MikeSands wrote:

Related, I'm currently reading Jon Peterson's "The Elusive Shift," which is about the formation of the concepts of roleplaying in the early years of the hobby. I just got through a section on exactly these issues with stat generation, as people were dealing with it in the mid 1970s.

I really enjoyed "Playing at the World", especially the sections in which Peterson used fanzines to get at how people were playing and thinking about D&D. Is "The Elusive Shift" more of that kind of thing?

misplacedbravado wrote:

I really enjoyed "Playing at the World", especially the sections in which Peterson used fanzines to get at how people were playing and thinking about D&D. Is "The Elusive Shift" more of that kind of thing?

Pretty much. It's just a lot more focused, on the initial development of role playing specific ideas.

That’s why I normally like the card method. It’s random, but it yields characters that are roughly equivalent. You can tune the card distribution to vary how powerful the resulting characters are.

With that said, I’m leaning towards doing: roll 3d6 in order seven times, dropping the lowest. It mostly guarantees nothing less than a 6 without injecting a lot of complexity in the process. I’d feel more comfortable using the card method in OSE if I had experience with the system, but I don’t.

mudbunny wrote:

And on another note, I finally got my Pathfinder 2E rulebook.[1] Am (slowly) reading it and am looking forward to finding a PbP to join somewhere in the future.

PF2 is a game I should like, and I want to like. I like the way it’s structured, but running it leaves me feeling very unhappy. It’s far too wordy in many places, and I really dislike skill actions. (And not the game’s fault, but I dislike the community’s attitude towards balanced encounters.)

I haven't paid all that much attention to Pathfinder in ages - have they fallen into "step on the players' necks GMing" or is it more "everything must be exactly balanced to this actuarial table or you're playing wrong?"

(Both of those are annoying, IMHO.)

Timespike wrote:

I haven't paid all that much attention to Pathfinder in ages - have they fallen into "step on the players' necks GMing" or is it more "everything must be exactly balanced to this actuarial table or you're playing wrong?"

(Both of those are annoying, IMHO.)

My limited experience with Pathfinder was that everything had a formula which was too deep for me to keep the game flowing. I love DMing 5e and saturating player decisions with advantage/disadvantage rolls instead of figuring out how many +/- to deal with. Keep the pace up like we're all building a novel we read together.

mrwynd wrote:
Timespike wrote:

I haven't paid all that much attention to Pathfinder in ages - have they fallen into "step on the players' necks GMing" or is it more "everything must be exactly balanced to this actuarial table or you're playing wrong?"

(Both of those are annoying, IMHO.)

My limited experience with Pathfinder was that everything had a formula which was too deep for me to keep the game flowing. I love DMing 5e and saturating player decisions with advantage/disadvantage rolls instead of figuring out how many +/- to deal with. Keep the pace up like we're all building a novel we read together.

Same here; I picked up the PF 2e book at a game store fully intending to buy it when it came out, and started flipping through and reading it, and then I put it back. I don't need that many tables to have fun. Taking20's followup video to the one I linked upthread (which had lots of math showing his point, and was geekily entertaining in that way) had a great line about why I've shied away from PF. "You never have to make it up; you just have to look it up."

I feel like every single time I've taught somebody 5e's advantage/disadvantage rules they think it's overly simple and kind of dumb, and then they play it and immediately forget that because it just works. It's good enough, it gives us all an easily-comprehensible starting point with the rules, and we can just go from there.

That ranger example was really bad. I don’t think it really distracts from the point (that PF2 is too crunchy for what Cody wants from a D&D, but I would not use it to conclude anything about how the game actually plays.

He made a bow ranger, but he dumped Strength. That makes no sense. PF2 is extremely generous with boosts. It’s easy to start with both an 18 in Dexterity at least a 14 in Strength if not a 16 (if you pick a background that provides a Strength or Dexterity boost). Even as a bow ranger, you want Strength for two reasons: composite bows have the propulsive trait, which allows you to add ½ of your Strength modifier to damage, and for when you need to go into melee. Cody talks about players just making obvious choices, and I feel like this should be an obvious one. There is no other way to add an ability modifier to your ranged damage, and these bows are literally on the list of equipment in the equipment chapter (so not even magic items or anything special).

From a play perspective, there are other problems. If you’re a bow ranger, you took the precision Hunter’s Edge. It’s not only for bows. It works with any weapons. If my player who tends to play extremely conservatively (if not sub-optimally) picks up on this and does it, then I’d expect the average ranger player to also do that. Cody’s ranger doesn’t. He moves then Quick Draws his weapon and then attacks again. It makes more sense to Hunt Prey, Stride, Quick Draw because you set yourself up for subsequent rounds. Additionally, having the ranger Trip before trying to Grapple makes no sense. PF2 is not 5e. The grabbed condition does more than just immobilize an enemy. Additionally, you don’t gain the prone condition for grabbing a prone foe. I’m aware of no edition of D&D where that’s the case even when trying to pin (and I went back to 3e to look).

Additionally, the video completely ignored the effect that non-class customization can have on your character. There are a number of skill feats that let you do cool stuff. A basic ranger with Assurance (Athletics) could trip wights uncontested. Assurance lets you ignore all bonuses and penalties. You could walk up and trip all the wights if you wanted to do that. If the creatures didn’t have such high Fortitude DCs, you could also Grapple them too. Bon Mot is another one I’ve seen put forth as a really solid option (especially for something like a swashbuckler).

I’ve also seen criticisms from a 5e perspective of how the 5e example was played, but I’m not particularly well-versed in 5e to comment on that.

Anyway, I don’t think the specifics of the system were really the point. PF2 is a crunch-heavy system, and that’s not for everyone. Getting to the question ….

Timespike wrote:

I haven't paid all that much attention to Pathfinder in ages - have they fallen into "step on the players' necks GMing" or is it more "everything must be exactly balanced to this actuarial table or you're playing wrong?"

The math in PF2 is fairly solid. As a player, you’re good as long as you’re not making intentionally bad choices. Even the ranger in the Taking20 video was fine at shooting things. It just wasn’t able to do other things as well as it probably should. (And PF2 is a D&D, so D&D classes do D&D things, meaning that you’re going to have a core schtick.)

As a GM, it only matters to the extent you want it to matter. When I adapted Winter’s Daughter for my group, I ignored balance completely. If you want to roll that way, you can totally do that in PF2. You’ll probably get a lot of flak from the balance über alles folks (that attitude I said I don’t like), but the system doesn’t break down. If you run like that in other systems, then whatever techniques you have for dealing with unbalanced encounters should still work. Additionally, PF2 actually has an exploration procedure. It’s not great, but it’s an old-school element brought into a modern game.

If you want to run balanced encounters and make that your primary narrative unit, then PF2 also works well for that. It does make a hard assumption that the party works together effectively in a fight, so you may have to adjust the baseline up or down, but the math works. If you want to throw a boss creature at the party, a level+3 creature will be a really hard fight. The system actually pulls off having creatures function as bosses without requiring any kind of boss-specific rules or augmentation.

With all that said, the system is needlessly verbose. I find it hard to internalize, and some people may see the list of skill actions as a constraint on their creativity. Skill feats further muddy the waters by making it feel safe to let people “go off script” so to speak. If you let someone climb with a weapon in their hand, have you invalidated a possible customization choice? Technically yes if you let them just do it without a check, but I expect most people who wanted to try something extraordinary would ask for a roll (assuming we’re in a situation where that even matters).


As an aside, since we aren’t set on switching yet — I still need to do that OSE one-shot, I’ve been working on a skill action cheat sheet. I’m pretty sure by the time I’m finished I’ll have reduced the skills chapter page count by 40~60%. The book is just so needlessly verbose in a lot of ways, which makes everything a lot harder to read and understand than it needs to be. I also think it pushed the devs towards enumerating a lot of actions even when those actions don’t do anything.

Perform does literally nothing. Yes, it has outcomes, but those are things a GM can decide easily. However, if they listed the Performance skill without an action, then it would look weird. I don’t think giving it a worthless one was the right remedy. They should have taken a step back and provided a general mechanism for dealing with skills and moved the exploration and combat maneuver stuff to the corresponding sections of the book.

To continue to harp on the skill action stuff, PF2 also adds a VP subsystem in the GMG. VP is basically just clocks, but your skill checks don’t use any of the system’s skill actions. This bifurcates skills into two domains. One has all the fiddly bits, and the other one aligns better with skills most likely used in practice (a situation comes up that suggests a check, so you make one to see how it goes). Speaking VP, there’s a thread over on EN World where someone is using it to do neat stuff with raids and infiltrations.


Anyway, that ended up way longer than I originally expected. Like I said a few posts up, there are things I like about PF2. There’s also a lot that makes me unhappy as a GM. I don’t know if I can fix skill actions, or if I’ll even finish off my cheat sheet. Create Forgery is the first action I’ve hit that seems fiddly for absolutely no purpose. It’s a DC 20, but you can get a bonus, and sometimes the DC might change, and people also get to roll against your DC sometimes, but only if you fail, and that’s a different failure from what’s enumerated (which is the success/failure results for the people rolling against you). ಠ_ಠ

Update for Context: I’ve been running PF2 for over a year now in a homebrew, sandbox *crawl. I’ve borrowed a few bits of OSE for my exploration procedure, but PF2 out of the box works fairly well for what I’m doing. Except for the parts that don’t, obviously. In terms of GMing style, I tend pretty heavily towards improvisation (hence why OSE seems like it ought to be a better fit). The two biggest things (besides my group’s just really sucking at tactics and teamworks) are friction with the creature/hazard creation guidelines and discontent at not having internalized all the skill actions in spite of running it for a while. Related to the first, I’m also just sort of tired of progression treadmills baked into the core math (which pretty much all modern D&Ds have).

Edit: To elaborate on progression treadmills, that’s when a system’s math balances out target numbers such that tests always end up in a certain range. 5e is probably the least affected by this due to bounded accuracy and doing “what makes sense”. If you provide PCs with commensurately more difficult challenges (lock → high quality lock → ancient dwarven lock → etc), then you’ve put yourself back on the treadmill. There is a Proficiency Without Level variant in PF2, which I use, but I haven’t explored just ignoring the guidelines when creating hazards and just setting everything to DC 15 like I am inclined.

Hoo boy. After hearing all that, I think my choice to stick with 5e for my D&D-style game needs was the right one. Thanks for taking the time to spell that all out, though - 'twas an enlightening read.

Sure! You’re welcome. One of the things I found irksome while running PF2 is that there were a lot of hot takes but not a lot of commentary from people who had been running the game. Of course, we now have a couple of videos from someone who was, and it seems they may not have been running it correctly. It’s sort of a pro and con that PF2 needs to be run according to its assumptions, and anyone who tries to do it like a previous edition will get into trouble.

For example, if you just kick in the door and charge the monsters, you could get murdered. It’s much better to force them to come to you and use space and movement to your advantage to drain their action economy. On the GM side, if you’re not engaging both encounter and exploration mode (because you are running said kick-in-the-door campaign), then the game is going to feel weird because everyone will want to rest after every encounter, and monsters will murder PCs.

My understanding of the early APs (particularly Age of Ashes since I’m even less familiar with Extinction Curse and Agents of Edgewatch) is that the adventures provide ways for PCs to get advantages in certain hard encounters, and some of them benefit from a careful approach. If you’re just charging in and fighting through the plot, it’ll be much more difficult than if you weren’t. Now, caveat is I don’t run official adventures, so I’m others’ accounts.


Anyway, I finished my PF2 action cheat sheet if anyone is interested. It dropped the page count by about 40% compared to the CRB, and everything has been rewritten for clarity. I ended up creating a few new actions/activities to help clarify things. I actually think you could drop the entire first section, provide the GM with a handful of tools for running skill checks (principles, a refined VP subsystem or progress clocks), and the game would be much better for it.

I’m basically at a point where I could do a bunch of work effecting that, cleaning up exploration activities, and possibly refactoring the classes. I think martial stuff should start from the combat style archetypes, and then it would work a bit like in 5e where martial classes pick a fighting style, but you still have all the customization that follows after that. However, at that point I am doing a ton of work that I’m not sure is really worth it. The game would remain mathematically and largely compatible, and trying to streamline the system while preserving it is kind of fun, but it also feels kind of pointless.

so just for fun and practice I've been working on tokens for NPCs and creatures from Curse of Strahd over the last few days of holiday break. Since i like how they turned out, i figured I'd pop them up on the DMs Guild in case anyone is interested?

Just covering the 14 creatures and NPCs from Death House for now (with a couple of variations for two of the characters (spoilers) but I'm of a mind to maybe work my way through the rest of the book chapter by chapter too if they garner any interest.

Have a peek if you're interested. They'll also work find as horror-themed tokens for any campaign really.

(You can also grab them from my patron if you are a backer, as all of them are available there, too)

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/342225/Tokens-of-Horror-Volume-1--Curse-of-Strahd--Death-House

IMAGE(https://smackfolio.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/cover-lowres.jpg)

tokens included: (warning - visual spoilers)

Spoiler:

IMAGE(https://smackfolio.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/token-sheet.jpg)

Hi, has anyone hereabouts DMed Tomb of Annihilation?

If so, any thoughts/advice/etc? I'm running the first session of it this weekend.

I have not DMed it, but it is one I am very interested in. Most published adventures have subreddits dedicated to them, and I have found them to be extremely helpful. It looks like there is one for ToA.

There are some good videos on YouTube on running the module/book that I watched many months ago. You'll see some good ideas on where the change things up to make it flow better and engage the players more, etc.

I don't remember exactly which ones I watched. Search YouTube for "running tomb of annihilation 5e".

-BEP