I know, right? And I’ve had that group since 2014 and our most recent campaign was 254 sessions and if even players accustomed to that kind of brutality wasn’t into the “weeklong healing” rule, that’s saying something about how beyond brutal that rule is!

@smeg @dndnext

It usually happens because a character died and that player started over with a new level-one character.

@smeg @dndnext

If D&D had only been a series of fights, it would’ve been the same thing, but the revolt happened when one char was doing fun fun village stuff and exploring and social interaction while the other char was healing up from bloody wounds in an inn bed for a week. I think they were only like three or four levels apart.

Now we use https://idiomdrottning.org/oh-injury instead for our HP realism purps. (Basically HP is fatigue/hope/destiny.)

@smeg @dndnext

I’ve tried it! The players revolted because I was running mixed-level parties and this system exacerbated the issues inherent in that (low-level chars need to rest more often than high-level chars in the same environment).

@smeg @dndnext

It was such a awesome storyline though! Def made me interested in the game (but probably gonna skip it after all since I don’t think I like these kinds of games).

It’s good that it’s a concluded S1 storyline since a lot of us still have a lot of catching up left to do of Discovery. I just started S02E08.

@RootBeerGuy @startrek

Icons of the realm: $4.50 per (it’s $19 for one big & three reg)
Campaign case Creatures: $0.40 if dividing per cling, or $1.01 per disk
Pathfinder pawns: $0.20 (it’s $40 for “more than two hundred”)

A dollar per seems a li’l high esp since some parts of these are unfinished. But maybe some people are into that 🤷🏻‍♀️

@mo_ztt @dndnext

@Phantaminum @dndn

We’re still discovering new things after almost ten years and around 500 sessions 🤷🏻‍♀️

In 3.5 fighters are OK in a fight. The imbalance was for the rest of the game thanks to wizards’ utility spells.

Also CoDzilla since buffs stacked, which 5e’s concentration solved.

5e is at a good spot, we usually play lower levels and it feels good,

@sirblastalot @Phantaminum

@Di4mond4rr3l

Also, read the Forge of Foes book by @Alphastream and @scottfgray and @slyflourish for some good actual math tips including for spellcasting monsters.

Brennan Lee Mulligan does it by fudging, if I understand things correctly. He improvises very much, too. His group seems to really enjoy it but it’s a very different playstyle from the more “gamist” styles where players put care into their character’s stats and such. If you sit down to make a character for a Brennan table, never ever think “Ooh, I wanna take lunging attack, that seems like an effective maneuver”. That’d be meaningless. Instead, only think about what you would think would be fun or cool to do, like “oh, Rakish Audacity seems like it’d be a fun play pattern”.

Colville’s approach is similar to Brennan’s.

Mercer’s official statement, on the other hand, is that he only fudges for new players. He is generous with revivify which solves a lot of problems, too. That said, he rolls secretly and there’s no behind-the-screen cam that can tell whether he pads HP or whatever. But as far as how he officially describes his game, he plays to find out. He preps situations, the players play them out, anything can happen. In that kind of game, your choices for your character matter a lot more. It’s more akin to my own jam than the Dimension 20 stuff because of that.

Me, who doesn’t fudge, I just have made peace with how sometimes the monsters steamroll the PCs and sometimes it’s the other way around. That was my “solution”. + when making custom monsters, or converting monsters from other games, I’ve started using the Forge of Foes approach of lower AC and higher HP. Often makes the fights feel a li’l more interactive.

I’m also scared of falling into “MPE”—“my precious encounter” syndrome, where you put so much care into creating an encounter that you end up railroading the characters into it because you don’t have the heart to see it go to waste.

@Phantaminum

We had a couple campaings that were 12, 13 sessions with the occasional 25-ish campaign, but then we had a 100 session campaign (we ended it on 100 exactly) and after that I set up a “never-ending” style campaign (or at least as long as we want to continue it) and that’s the one that’s currently 250. The day after tomorrow we’ve scheduled sesh 251. We play twice a week unless our Dragonbane-DM can make if (which is a few times per month), in which case we do his campaign instead.

Edit: so that’s not just 250 total. It’s 250 only counting after we restarted the numbering. So maybe… 450 total? IDK

We had our 250th session of this particular campaign!

They liberated two guards from the enemy team—the party has been showing considerably more mercy now that they’re in control of the Set cult’s former quarters as opposed to when they were waging guerilla from the shadows—but one of the two liberated guards got her leg eaten by cephalopods as they were making their way to Gosterwick. In the end the entire party went there with them, escorting them, and then they were too exhausted to take the four-hour trek back to Arden Vul. So they were spending some time buying diamond dust and making silver dust, for spells.