Tag: dungeons and dragons
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D&D 5e is not for everyone
Kai Koehler reminds us that D&D 5e is far from the only TTRPG, with a tight dissection of its specific characteristics so that they can be compared to other, perhaps more roleplay-heavy, games and systems. They include some suggested ideas for other games, too, a couple of which I'm strongly-inclined to try out!
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Y'all seemed to enjoy the "overworld" map I shared the other day, so here's another "feelie" from my kids' ongoing D&D campaign.
The party has just arranged for passage aboard a pioneering (and experimental) Elvish airship. Here's a deck plan (only needs a "you are here" dot!) to help them get their bearings.
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In the style of a passenger ferry, a floorplan for a dirigible, weighted down by polyhedral dice. Fantasy world quirks like bilingual text in Common and Elvish and the emergency exit sign depicting a fleeing witch complete the effect.
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In preparation for Family D&D Night (and with thanks to my earlier guide to splicing maps together!), I've finally completed an expanded "overworld" map for our game world. So far, the kids have mostly hung around on the North coast of the Central Sea, but they're picked up a hook that may take them all the way across to the other side... and beyond?
Banana for scale.
(If your GMing for kids, you probably already know this, but "feelies" go a long way. All the maps. All the scrolls. Maybe even some props. Go all in. They love it.)
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On a dining table lies a old-style map comprised of 12 sheets of A4 paper, sellotaped together. The map shows the 'Central Sea', an inlet from the 'Terminic Ocean', around which various settlements, forests, mountain ranges, and swamps can be found. An underripe banana sits in one corner of the map, weighing it down.
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I've just enumerated my personal domain names. There's a lot fewer of them than there used to be!1
Anyway: here's the list -
- danq.me and a variety of aliases (danq.uk, danq.dev, danq.link, danq.blog, scatmania.org); there's also like a billion subdomains in use of course, like things.danq.me and find.danq.me
- freedeedpoll.org.uk, which I really ought to update at some point but which still clearly helps many people
- dndle.app, a D&D-inspired Wordle-clone which I still get bug reports and pull requests for so clearly somebody's using it
- geohashing.site, the central hub of Geohashing activity worldwide
- egxchange.org, which hosts the most environmentally-friendly cryptocurrency wallet you'll ever see
- abnib.co.uk, a community of friends (also with about a billion subdomains)
- q-t-a.uk, my family website, which exists mostly to facilitate addressing for a stack of internal/selfhosted services
- rockmonkey.org.uk, which doesn't do much nowadays
- fleeblewidget.co.uk, my partner's blog, but I look after the domain registration
- textplain.blog, my plain-text blog
- levellers.blog, the blog of my D&D group
- theimprobable.blog, which I look after on behalf of my partner's brother after using it to GPS-track his adventures
I think that's all of them, but it's hard to be sure...
Footnotes
1 Maybe I've finally shaken off my habit of buying a domain name for everything. Or maybe it's just that I've embraced subdomains for more stuff. Probably the latter.
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Day #2 of my sabbatical had a morning in which I've mostly been roped into some charity-related digital forensics... until I got distracted by dndle.app, which apparently I accidentally broke yesterday! Move Fast and Fix Things!
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Dan, looking concerned, in front of Github and Dndle.app.
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Digital Dustbusting
I've been doing a bit of tidying-up of the mess that is my personal Internet hosting. I've made a lot of progress, but the rest is probably going to have to wait until later in the year.
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D20 with Advantage
D&D players spend a lot of time rolling D20s. Sometimes they 'roll with advantage' - that is, roll two dice and take the largest. Last night I dreamed I derived the probability matrix for such rolls, and it got me thinking... could you construct a single die that rolls 'D20 with Advantage'?
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Multi-Phase Maps in FoundryVTT
Using FoundryVTT's powerful API and a little bit of JavaScript code, we can easily produce a battlemap that changes through a series of phases as the adventure progresses. Here's how...
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Let Your Players Lead The Way
In gradually becoming a better RPG gamemaster, the toughest lesson for me has been how to surrender control to my players. Here's the story of the importance of that lesson, and some of the mistakes I've made along the way.
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[Bloganuary] Playtime
Do I get to "play" in my daily life? Absolutely. For this Bloganuary prompt, I'm looking at the ways in which I play.
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Bramble
Fresh D&D campaign! I'm playing a Harengon Barbarian.
I'm a fierce bunny rabbit! -
Easy FoundryVTT Cloud Hosting
People keep asking for a quick-and-easy guide to setting up a cloud hosted FoundryVTT server. So I wrote one.
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Have Fun with Missions, Visions, and Values
My team and I recently used a deck of Dixit cards to playfully work on refining our collective idea of our identity and our values. It turns out we're a D&D-like party of heroic adventurers!
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Nightmares & Noggins
I had a nightmare last night in which I was underprepared for an upcoming D&D session. Because I am underprepared, I guess, but mostly because I was ill and sleeping badly anyway!
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Hasbro Alignment Chart
Hasbro seem to be rolling up a new character. Maybe this'll help them.