And America wasn't actually empty frontier, either. It was full of the native people that had been living there since time imemorial, and the ex-europeans slaughtered and plagued their way through.
If I wanted to do that part of the story for you, I wouldn't have asked you to do it.
I'm done with self care, it's time for others harm.
People just don't like homework. (Which is perfectly understandable) And for most people most of the time, learning a new system is homework.
I was going to say no, dwarves drink beer, but then I realized that elves would absolutely be Insufferable IPA Guy.
Then the US flag will become Jeffrey Combs.
Not like, a picture of Jeffrey Combs. Just a spare one, clinging to a flag pole.
Elves just get really into coffee for a couple centuries. Their covid bread-making phase lasts until at least 2400.
"You go to ask your Grandpa about it. He tries to explain but is so fucking racist you can't even tell if he's still speaking common. In between gibberish that's probably old-timey slurs, you pick out something like 'follow the quest hook' and 'the dm already told you where to go'"
"Yeah, I had to spend 50 doing your mom. And 50 before that for her mom, and her mom..."
Mom and dad have 900 years of savings in the college fund.
Management wanted to double-dip. It's why they released when they did, they thought if it was any later, no one would buy ps4 copies. Lextorias did a good video on it, if you like long form essay content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPYYmyhf3ns
Battlemaps are good if you're going for a swashbuckling or strongly tactical feel. I like to say 'your players can't swing from the chandelier if they don't know there's a chandelier.'
Battlemaps are great for a certain aesthetic (in the the game design sense of the word) because they allow you to add things for players to improv with without explicitly enumerating a static set of options. If you draw the inside of a tavern, when the tavern brawl breaks out they may do something that surprises you; "Can I throw the bottles at him/flip over the table/dive behind the houseplant/throw him out the window/etc" Whereas theatre of the mind requires your player to either intuit that there would be a bottle on the table that they could throw, or you to explicitly say "and there's a bottle on the table in front of you." And if you tell them there's something in front of them, they will laser focus on it and never even think to flip the table/dive behind the houseplant/etc.
Theatre of the mind is good for games that put the emphasis elsewhere. If the focus of your game is on entrigue, or courtly drama, or in a setting that's highly improvised, that's when theatre of the mind shines.
I'm baffled by both the fighting in these comments and the overall vehemence. If you want to put a cool cursed item in your game, just drop it when the players are still too low level to have remove curse...or make it subtle enough that they don't initially realize it's cursed.
EDIT: NVM I just realized you're all trying to ape the critical roll thing and didn't plan for getting player buy-in or homebrew
Sisko and Kirk have already had a crossover episode, so I have to assume the entire journey would just be Sisko pitching tribbles at Kirk.
Ooh, I will have to check that out for my own game, thanks!
Pointy Hat had a great video on this subject!
I recently started a new campaign. Two players (one who has played in my games before and their SO, who has been begging me for a spot for years) unexpectedly dropped out, moments before our first session. Their reason was somewhat baffling; they said they didn't want to spend "all day" on this, despite the game only going from noon to 3PM. They seemed to think this was a totally unreasonable expectation on my part, despite them previously having stated they were available during that time. This puzzled me.
I've been musing on this, and the strange paradox of people that say they want to play D&D but don't actually want to play D&D, and I've had an epiphany.
A lot of people blame Critical Role or other popular D&D shows for giving prospective players misplaced perceptions, often related to things like your DM's voice acting ability or prop budget, but I don't think that's what's going on here. My realization is that, encoded in the medium of podcasts and play videos, is another expectation: New players unconsciously expect to receive D&D the way they receive D&D shows: on-demand, at their house, able to be paused and restarted at their whim, and possibly on a second-screen while they focus on something else!
I don't know as this suggests anything we as DMs could do differently to set expectations, but it did go a long ways to helping me understand my friends, and I thought it might help someone here to share.
I've got an unholy-water fountain, a human chessboard, and an evil hedge maze. I need 1 more thing to put in the last corner of the square courtyard/garden thing. Any suggestions?