u/Icy_Sector3183

S10E10: Vala pulling a hair-dryer out of her kit bag hit the spot. It is without a doubt the most surprising joke in the season!

I even got some Spaceballs vibes going.

We've just collected our first Soul in this campaign where the mysterious BBEG NPC exists in a dark blue spiritual realm that he needs to bling up with Souls, or maybe he's banking them like crypto (hodl gang! hodl!) and at this point the very actual real map that we got from the GM was marked with "???" that started glowing (in game) and was marked as being a blue room.

Well, we obv needed to go there straight away, but hodl (ha!) on, that room isn't the blue room we need to find? We checked the entire dungeon three times, but the blue room we are suppoed to find isn't there, the room that's, like, marked out on the map IN BLUE isn't blue at all, there's just that NPC in there insisting we come and talk to him, which we'll get to when we find the blue room.

We all realized that we were being maybe too literal, so we've expanded our search to anything that is related to blue, not just the real colors, but also the things that are named blue, or feels blue, or has that blues sound or vibe. We've not found any in our dungeon, tho. Can we come check yours? We have our own swords and test color palette, and Mark has a car and can drive us there.

A while ago I mentioned on another RPG community and social media a method I sometimes use to discourage opening doors, especially when it comes to doors.

Some GMs and Players told me it was unfair, that I was tricking my droogs, or even "lying" to them. That surprised me, because I've never really seen it that way.

First, some context:

This is not how I run my games by default. It's a tool I only use if I notice my droogs are relying heavily on metagaming. Usually, I only need it for a couple of sessions before everyone gets the message, and then I stop using it.

I also ask to my droogs to avoid metagaming. Everyone slips up once in a while, and accidental metagaming is completely different from intentionally using out-of-character knowledge

The basic idea is simple: I sometimes change the qualities of otherwise simple doorways.

For example, imagine a door, instead of being straight-forward to open, maybe this one is slightly stuck.

There are two important rules, though

1. I never change doors in the middle of a campaign. This just surprises the droogs. If I decide my world's doors are a bit difficult to open. I'm not changing things on the fly to counter whatever strategy the players came up with.
2. The information is written on a note next to the doors. I could leave clues, rumors, books, witnesses, monster hunters, or simply allow Knowledge checks. If my droogs asks, "What does my himbo know about doors?", and there's a very good chance they'll learn the correct information. In many cases, a himbo who should reasonably know about doors doesn't even need to roll

So, in this example, the only CHUDs who are actually punished are my droogs who try interacting with the world immediately, acting from a basic understanding of how real-world doors work in real life.

If someone immediately says, "I try and turn the handle," without ever asking what their CHUD knows or trying to research the door, they might discover that, in this setting, doors don't have handles at all!

I don't want to punish my droogs for being using human common sense, but to reward my droogs for wiping their minds clear of every assumption, like, and instead seek to learn everything anew: "Do I need food?" or "What is this liquid coming out of my body?" or "Why can't I see if I close my eyelids?" This is information their CHUDs don't have unless they learn in-game from books, rumors, or experimentation.

Nowadays, I actually use a "good" version of this idea much more often.

Once my droogs have learned to separate droog knowledge from CHUD knowledge, or if they've learned basic words, I usually stop changing doors entirely

Instead, I add extra information that rewards investigation

For example:

• Doors swing either inwards and outwards, and very rarely both ways.
• Sometimes there are two doors working together.
• A specific key will open their "locks".
• A particular species of troll can't regenerate from acid, only from fire

I want my droogs to think, investigate, ask questions, and interact with the world instead of treating every door like they already know how they work.

Do you consider this unfair, or is it a reasonable way to encourage my droogs to rely on their CHUD's knowledge instead of their own?

Back in 2023 I was running a game in Arkansas with 30 other GMs for two players, and they managed to beat the boss with a lot of hard work, luck and excellent RP. We decided to award them 4,400 xp, to split between them. Each of us generously contributed over 100xp. And that's when the trouble started.

Another player, running a Barbarian, suddenly piped up (he'd been there on the phone, ignoring the session completely) and said that he and the other players (they were playing at other tables, or just hanging out in the kitchen making snacks) should get their share of the xp award.

I told him I we'd already checked the xp policy for the group, and got confirmation that, no, there was no policy of sharing the xp. So, we took back the xp and instead waited until the game was over and then got one of the players (F20+, playing a Rogue, that's the point), and told her to take the 4,400 xp and share with the other player (F20+, also Rogue). She was so happy, this was just the amount they needed to level up and get an UA feat!

I didn't think anything more about it, but this apparently started a real shitstorm in their gaming group, with the other players calling her out for not sharing, for "going behind their backs" and "selling out" and "being fat & ugly". Intimidated, she nevertheless proudly stood her ground: What was hers was hers! The Barbarian player finally kicked her out of the party.

Heartbroken she took to the internet, where I heard her side of the story, and a LevelMeUp! campaign earned her a whopping 10,000 xp! The story had a happy ending after all!

This is a small dispute at our table. When it comes to playing, our DM will ask which player will attend and only let that player into his house, instead of having all the players meet up and have multiple people play at the same time.

For example, in a session an NPC mentions some lore that hasn't been brought up yet, the DM asks the player that is present to make a history check to see if they have insight on the topic. The one player who was allowed to play this week then fails, so now no one knows any of the history on this subject.

Or during the rare instance we all could attend, like when the session is about making a perception check, he will still only invite one person at a time. But he who rolled the highest succeeds and the others get a text message that they failed, with the modifiers being the tiebreaker.

This was brought up because myself and another player both got 17 for a perception roll, I on Tuesday and the other player on the following Monday. I got a letter in the mail asking about our modifier bonuses and because my teammate had a +3 and I had a +2, my teammate perceived something and I didn't.

This annoyed me and I wrote in my blog and asked why our characters couldn't just both see the thing?? What's the value of just having one player at a time? I've played for what feels like 170 years and I've never seen the game played this way at any other table, and these guys were acting like I was the crazy one lol.

Am I crazy? Is this actually how everyone is playing? This isn't THAT big of a thing, I just wanted some validation lol.

Sauce: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/1twp0ne/my_dm_only_lets_one_player_succeed_a_check_at_a/

So I've been DM'ing for this group for the last 30 years, advancing from a 2nd ed home-brew of pre-Pokemon isekai to full Dragon Ball 5e steam-roll. We're running a furry-themed Curse of Strahd (he's a fox) and it's been a blast!

We had an encounter in the town square where we talked the mayor into resolving a dispute with a dance-off and the (get this!) Wizard cast Prestidigitation to make everone amazed (we are level 4 now). His mule's name is not important to the story.

What followed was a long RP exchange with the local brewers (an association of witches) where the players were able to convince them that they should give up on child sacrifices and instead use hops, thus making the town less Evil in alignment and shifting them towards Neutral, a big step in their long-term plan to overturn Strahd (a duck furry in this session because I forgot he was a cat) by means of an upset in the socio-economic power base and expanding the townspeople's purchasing power with an emphasis on credit.

The Paladin was initially opposed, but when given the option to rent-to-own a Holy Avenger was completely on-board and changed his Oath of the Game Keeper (custom, he follows the tenets of the DM but isn't actually the DM LOL!) for the Oath of Repossessioning (downloaded custom, thank u/kivasfajonowrong). He decided to design his own quest and dungeon (wtf!) where he tracks down late payers and smites them for 1d8 extra damage instead of undead and fiends. It's all good.

In this dungeon they find a dog, and this dog is in fact a polymorphed kobold that attacks them. The dungon has modified their classes, but they are still level 4 and the same somehow (I have so many questions!) and the fight is going pretty well, except the kobold's twig blight familiar gets his turn and uses it's Dark Pact Tactics to advantage roll double 20s and when I roll my 2d4s one of them was damaged.

"All skills are good!" is a saying around here. But some skills are better than others: Block is going to see a lot more use than Fumblerooskie. Dump Off lets you do something completely new!

But how good is Steady Footing, guys? How is to to play, or play against?