Next you need player buy in

This is huge. I tried to do a horror game once and one of the players just wasn’t taking it seriously, and it ruined it completely.

I was fully prepared to be like “why on earth would you convert werewolf to D&D 5th edition”, but then I realized thankfully this is not that.

Some actual feedback: That font is real hard for me to read.

I imagine you’d either have no phone, or one of those prepaid with cash ones. You could also probably turn off the cell parts and only use wifi

I still want to play Fate. I just don’t have a group and don’t feel like doing the whole lfg+ interview people thing.

In my pandemic game, goblins were described as sort of perpetual teenagers. Some of them could be really smart, but a lot of them were impulsive, prone to going along with the group, and being kind of cruel.

They found a pack of goblins that had robbed some travelers… to steal their concert tickets. Most of them scattered, but they caught up with one. The monk decided not to punch this small humanoid in the face and instead asked “wtf are you all doing?”

The goblin told them they wanted to go to the show. the show! everyone’s going to the show! (The show turned out to be put on by an evil warlock, and the players had to intervene to stop the bands from summoning a lord of pandemonium into the world. Everyone loves a battle of the bands)

The players essentially adopted this goblin, Windy, for the rest of the campaign. Windy learned to play drums and flute, and I think they eventually got them enrolled in wizard school.

I think there can be some intra-group tension when half the group is going for “how can we win this fight cleanly with minimal resources spent?” and half is going for “what would my character do? What would be dramatic?”

It’s something to clear up in session 0, I think.

My personal fantasy right now is being part of a highly skilled and competent team. I’m tired of always being the three stooges.

Also bad: when part of the group wants to play for clean victory, and part of the group does but it really bad at it.

I don’t think DND or close relatives is as good a first system as people think it is. It’s very idiosyncratic. It wastes a lot of time with stuff like “8 is -1 and 14 is +2”. But mostly I don’t recommend it because at its core it is a resource management game, and that’s not what most people imagine roleplaying is about. It will teach people bad habits, or at least habits that don’t translate outside of DND + their group very well.

I like Fate. I think Fate is more intuitive and rewards creativity more consistently. You don’t need to read long lists of classes and spells. It does, however, ask for a lot more creative input than DND does. You can’t just be “Bob the fighter” and go. But it’s a lot more rewarding when it does sing, IMO.

I think people have radically different ideas about what “minimal background information” is.

Some people think the Silmarillion is a suitable primer for their setting.

Some people have like one paragraph for the big picture, and one paragraph for each major faction.

There are players that would say both is too much.

I think a couple short paragraphs should be enough for a quick start for a custom setting, but I’ve had players that just refuse to read anything at all. As someone else said, it’s makes it really hard to do some sort of stories if all the players are utter neophytes/amnesiacs/from-another-world/etc

I tried to do a game of Vampire once, but the players refused to read anything about the setting. All the political intrigue fell completely flat because they didn’t understand what the different factions were looking for, nor did they understand how vampires worked.

That group might have just been kind of bad players, but I feel like bad players are more common than good. By “bad” I mean “doesn’t think about the game very much, doesn’t retain anything about the story or rules”. They couldn’t really do anything more complex than a simple dungeon crawl.

Yes, you can make players pre-plan. You nudge them.

No amount of nudging will make some players do anything. Some players are obstinate and frankly not very good, but honestly the solution to “this player won’t stop looking at their phone and their turns take forever” may be to remove them from the group.

Why does it matter how much time everyone takes?

I don’t want to wait 5 minutes for someone to dither and dither and finally decide “I attack”

This was a weirdly aggressive comment.

The solution is the pre-planning, which does not need a timer, nor is it a guaranteed result of a timer.

You cannot make players pre-plan. The timer encourages pre-planning, or at least rapid decision making on the fly. Both have the desired result of the game moving at a quicker pace.

It also has the benefit of creating an impartial tool for measuring, instead of relying on subjective “You’re taking a long time.” It is harder to argue with a clock. This is an advantage.

There was a problem, and in trying to fix it, the DM created a second problem.

What is the second problem?

I don’t always run a timer, but it is a tool in my box.

Mostly it comes out when I feel like the players are spinning their wheels. Like, they know they need to get into the server room on the 10th floor. There’s a front door with security, a back door with an alarm, etc. The players are just going round and round with ideas but not doing anything.

I’ll say “I’m starting a five minute timer. If it hits zero, something interesting will happen”.

If it hits zero and they’re still stuck, then as foretold something interesting happens. A rival group rolls up and firebombs the entrance before heading inside. A security drone spots them and is calling the cops. Whatever. Something that forces them to act.

In combat rounds I sometimes do the same, but only if it feels like they’re not making progress. Maybe it’s a little rude sometimes, but I value keeping the scene moving forward. I don’t want to keep spending three minutes on “should I move? How far can I move again? Is there a range penalty? What if I use a spell first can I still shoot?” stuff. Especially if it’s rules minutia they should already know.

The amount of times I had to remind an old group’s bard that yes, in DND 5e you can move AND take an action was too high.

This is a good answer.

At my job, there was a desire to do a big rewrite of the system. It was a disaster. We spent like 8 months on this project where we delivered no value to customers. Then there was essentially a mutiny from the engineering team and we killed it.

We’ve since built on top of the original system and had, in the words of product leadership, “the most productive quarter in the history of the company”.

Now, why was it a disaster? The biggest reason was that people, especially people in leadership positions, did not understand the existing system very well. They would then make decisions based on falsehoods and mythology.

I don’t think 5e is an especially coherent game.

Cute idea, but I really don’t find this kind of ultra light 1d6 and two stats mechanic fun. I’d rather use Fate

One of the things I learned from being in a group that rotated DMs: Some DMs really expect more or different things from players tactically.

Like, when one guy was running you could pretty much just run into a room and fight, and you’d win. You’d have plenty of time to long rest, so you should just blow all your spells.

The other guy expected like some scouting and planning. Take out the outer patrols first without letting them get a message to the castle, then assault the warlord. Going directly in means you’ll be flanked by those patrols. The total size of what you’ll be dealing with is pretty well known, so you can ration your spells out with pretty good information.

And then there’s the “This dungeon is inhabited intelligent creatures that have spent years fortifying it against intrusion. You don’t know the layout or what forces you’ll face. Your enemies are advancing their goals, and every day you spend means more of your homeland is consumed by The Dirge”

I’m between #2 and #3 there. The wizard struggled a little going from “leveled spell every round” to “I should think about my resources.”

I still tend to run things a little too hard, but the group I ran for full time got into the groove and never wiped.

I’ve tried to run games (in a couple systems) that had complex NPC factions to engage with, and a lot of players just… don’t. I think sometimes they just don’t realize it’s an option.

My last game was kind of picking up speed, where there was a bad megacorp (within it two main factions) and a fractured array of resistance groups. I was hoping the players would do some alliance building. It was kind of working, but then real life sort of scuttled the game.

The other problem that happens to me a lot is I think about the game between sessions, and the players don’t. They don’t remember much detail. So I’ll be like, “And you discover he’s been working with the Seers the whole time!” And they’ll be like “the who? Is that bad?”. It’s hard to get factional stuff going if the players can’t keep straight who’s who.

One time I made a joke to the players, “Yeah watch out, the woods could be full of dangerous things. Like fire bears.”

The players were like “lol right”

And then there were fire bears. Bears made of fire. (Some industrialists had started a forest fire, killing a local druid and wildlife, and now they were haunting the place.)

I’ve tried this a couple times with limited success.

• Hacking something remotely was a default Very Hard challenge. Very difficult to do without spending fate points.
• Hacking something on the same network was hard. Could maybe hit it with a lucky roll, but still would probably require a fate point
• Hacking something with physical access was in the realm of “the PC who specializes in this can likely do it without trouble”

Those were then bumped up or down depending on if it was “budget”, “consumer grade”, or “corporate grade”. Hacking into some nobody chump’s security system from across the street is something the hacker PC get done for free with a little luck. Hacking into the ASI Corporate HQ maglock door subsystem from across town would be a feat of legend, not something someone can likely do just off the cuff.

I do like that Fate encourages players to do some preparation for hard tasks. Have someone use their talky skills to talk up some junior workers, and learn something about the network. That’s an advantage you can invoke. Have someone spend resources to bribe someone, that’s another advantage.

A problem that’s come up each time I’ve tried this kind of game is not having a shared understanding of what “hacking” can do. Fate kind of helps here because the actions are kind of agnostic about what skills are creating them. If you’re trying to remove someone from the scene, that’s likely an Attack whether you’re using “hacking” or “fight” or “intimidate”. The hacker might fake a text from the boss telling the bouncer he’s fired where the bruiser might just deck him, but they go down the same kind of mechanical funnel. The tactical considerations for the players comes from like “what looks like a softer target: his face or his phone? is anyone going to see?”

I accidentally made a rom-com subplot in one of my games… Twice… And the players loved it both times.

The first time there was a divorced smith lady who sort of had a death wish, and the timid tavern owner who had a massive crush on her. Of course the players wanted to set them up.

The second time, the players had to infiltrate a masquerade ball. Sadly I’m starting to forget the details. I think there was tension around meeting them while masked and, like a rom com, trying to figure out what they thought about the PC. And then they tried to get the NPC involved in their heist, because they just happened to have a skill they needed. And of course it wasn’t a clean heist, and the NPC had some trauma.

Sometimes I feel like I want to play a game that I’d run, but then I realize that’s the cliche “Go write a book”