Below the notes to the best of my recollection from a wide-ranging 3.5hr discussion. Previous DM101 notes here.
Topics folk wanted to talk about, in order given:
- Encounter design and making it fair, coming from someone who has been of late running Dungeon of the Mad Mage.
- The balance of sandbox versus railroading.
- Realism versus expectations - what where the players do not want to engage with what is logically present in world
- How to end combats where the combat has stopped being fun, but the outcome is not in doubt.
- Social encounters. Should you play that in initiative? How to make sure that everybody gets their time in social encounters.
- What is enough prep and how do you make sure that you’re prepping just the important stuff?
- Advice on running prepared adventures, prepping pre-written adventures for taking to table and then similarly structuring notes and how to do that.
- Random encounters, how you come up with them, how you run them, how they basically fit into the whole thing.
- Pacing and just how to make sure a session ends on time.
- Not overdoing the amount of content you are covering in a game.
- Encounter lethality and what to do where people were proving hard to kill
As we talked through the combat side of things and encounter design our core theme was giving people enough information to make the choice to get into an unfair encounter, being aware that this is a risky business. On the one end it was if you give people a blank sandboxy map, then give them some rumours, give them some hints about which bits are dangerous, which bits are not, so they can decide where they want to go. The other end was consensus that if you enter, say, the dungeon of the mad mage and are not paranoia checking around every corner, the fact that you can turn a corner and run into a zombie beholder is to be expected. Dungeons are dangerous, that should be understood.
The actual lethality of an encounter is basically a function of what do people sign up for. If they came for combat grind, then, you know, lethal encounters are to be expected and what I would personally subscribe to is like, yeah, you want to have people getting killed or getting close to TPKs every now and then, just to show that it’s possible and to understand that the danger is real as opposed to paper tigers.
Tweaking up and down hit points within the min and max was definitely a range to play with for challenge management. My personal approach is to assign the hit points at roll of initiative as a view of how dangerous this monster they run into is and then let the combat play out as it plays out. Others were adjusting on the fly in the combat within the same range depending on if things were dragging or whatever.
On the flip side of that, where encounters are slogs where people are down early and just doing death saves, or they’ve been locked out by stun mechanisms, or for whatever plot specific reasons - where players have no decision or action to take on their turn, that is less fun and where possible something to be minimised.
On closing out of combat, we talked about how, once the risk is gone, once victory is assured, then just wrap it up. If there’s no longer a risk to the players, then stop rolling dice. If you’ve managed to run all of the skeletons into a pit trap, they have no chance of getting out and you’re just going to pelt rocks at them until they die, drop out of initiative and don’t do the boring grind just because.
The question of social encounters was an interesting one. We talked a bit about the reaction role and the hostile, indifferent, friendly range and how you can move people up and down through that range through social interaction and so on but to set the maximum that even a great roll can get you. This avoids the “persuasion is mind control” nonsense that sometimes happens. Even a natural 20 isn’t going to get the king to hand you his crown. He might think you’re hilarious and view you well but there is a limit to how much even the best of rolls can get you.
An interesting point was ‘social encounters under initiative’ to make sure everyone gets a chance to speak - or hand off their speaking time if they wished - to ensure fair share of the spotlight
Links to things mentioned:
Six Cultures of Play - a decent initial reference to playstyles
9 Types of Players
Overloaded Encounter Dice
Blorb/AntiBlorb framework for ‘in-world truth’
With thanks to @katnyx @Tea007 @Takanari @turtlene @Myrm @truecrawl @Dharaxas for coming along - if I have forgotten anything, please feel free to add below.
covers only basic magic items (a selection of common and uncommon items, that fit the setting)