Any other D&D / TRPG peeps out there?

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I'm a massive tabletop fan. Started with DnD 3rd Ed and graduated to things like White Wolf and Shadowrun later.

Sometimes I kind of wish we could've gotten into it when we were much younger, but I suppose we had enough other geeky things to keep us occupied back then, especially LARPing. I had a couple Fighting Fantasy books around middle school, but IIRC I didn't get to play an actual tabletop game until the summer before 9th grade. I finally got to play AD&D 2nd Edition not long afterwards, which was right before 3rd Edition would come and steal everyone away from it

When I was playing NeverWinter Nights, I usually played a Fighter, or turned it into a Weapon Master. I also liked to sometimes play Sorcs or Priests, but I wasn't very good with those.

I used to play 40k in my youth, and I've been painting miniatures on and off ever since.
I have played a little bit of Pathfinder, but that was with someone who knew the rules running it, and we can't manage to arrange a game anymore.

I have loads of rulebooks and I'm itching to play more, but I'm gonna have to GM so I'm in an infinite loop of needing to play it to learn the rules, and not knowing the rules well enough to have the confidence to run a game

Oh yeah, it's a lot of work to be a GM, but I've become addicted to it. Even when you think you know all the rules, I always manage to accidentally skip something major in the heat of a game...which usually means the players will mop the floor with a boss who maybe should've been a little more challenging... ¬_¬

What rulebooks do you have? I know Pathfinder has a pretty thick page-count. I'm starting to become more comfortable with AD&D 2nd Edition, but I find it's so much easier and faster to go with rules-light stuff like D&D Basic/Expert, and just use the thicker books as inspiration for house rules. At some point, even Gygax himself abandoned AD&D in favor of the original three "little brown books".

If a player asks me if they can swing on a chandelier and kick a monster in the face, it's much more fun for all involved to say "Hmm...yes! Roll under your dex on a d20" than to have everyone stop and flip through books and argue over "rules lawyering".

A friend and I bought the beginner box a few years ago and since then I have picked up the Core Rulebook, a few bestiary's and the GM handbook - I might have a couple more. It for the moment I'm probably gonna stick with the core rulebook and use the GM and beastiarys when needed.

So it's all Pathfinder?

It might help to use the SRD, BTW. The books are nice because they help explain things, but when you're past that and you just want the charts and the fast rules, it's a lot easier to find what you need in an SRD wiki, if electronics are allowed at the table.

I'm not sure if this is the right link, it doesn't look like the one we used when we played PF, but here's one link: http://www.d20pfsrd.com/

Here's the official SRD, but it's not quite as handy as the wiki versions, IMO: http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/core ... races.html

Pathfinder is very similar to D&D 3.x Edition, BTW, so anything that helps you learn to DM that game (videos, articles, etc.) should, in theory, also apply to PF.

I have been trying to brainstorm, so I thought that I could come here for others who might have an idea.

I have been working on a plan for a one shot set within the Feywild, where in a sort of meta twist, the characters that the players have will have been spirited away and forced into a game with all the trapping of D&D, but with the twists of there being a secret twisted side characteristic of a bored archfey (a strong fairy). I plan on giving the players very specific 3 path choices where they will be able to pick one of three challenges, for a total of 9 I need to write up (3 sets of three), and I am missing some ideas for a couple.

So far for the first choice I have an idea for an escort mission with an elderly gnome, who is actually a Redcap and will murder the innocent family the players will escort to. An ingredient gather quest, where the mushrooms which are one of the possible ingredients are homes of pixies that will attack the players if picked (turn each other into velociraptors). And a town helping quest where they will help protect the town from bandits, but all the people and bandits are random people being held hostage and made to play parts by Boggles.

On the second choice there would a dinner party at a hag's hut, where they are instructed to help her cook or kill her, the twist being that the old lady they meet is not the actual hag with killing her actually being the help cook the meal. A vague instruction to retrieve an item from a Darkling dungeon (a dungeon crawl), where taking the wrong things will needleslly get them attacked, the item more mundane than they might expect (any instrument). And them walking in on a Faun drunk off his ass rather than having actually planned any quest for them to do, instead offering to complete the challenge via a toast and playing a game of cards, but the drinks are spiked with various effects from delicious beverages, to magical potions to poisons, chosen at random, and the cards be a modified bizarre version of deck of many things (could gain the ability to turn into a chicken, or gain a type of madness).

The last challenges are where I am stuck, I want something that sounds like a cliché D&D or RPG like mission or scenario, but with zany twist, most likely with fey (fairy) or feywild creature involved. My only idea so far is after watching an episode of Critical Role, I got the idea that I have the players eat something before going on an even more insane adventure with battling dragons and other things, before revealing that they were tripping on mushrooms and toyed around by Faerie dragons (small trickster dragons).

I don't know, your six other scenarios already sound like cliché D&D missions. At least that's the way we've always played it, and that's how OGs (ODMs?) like Gary Gygax used to run it.

I know there are some areas of the D&D universe that are a lot more serious, though...Ravenloft is fairly serious, but probably not what you're looking for. I don't know much about Dragonlance.

My first instinct was to say Forgotten Realms, but then I remembered that in Waterdeep, there lives a Beholder who is a crime boss, and there's no way I can take something like that seriously =)


Hmm...thinking of clichés, I know one I've always hated was the "You are in a bar. What do you want to do?" scenario that a lot of DMs would start a game out with. We'd spend hours just trying to find some kind of reason why our characters would all decide to band together and find a mission to go on And then of course, maybe we'd find a notice that the mayor is offering a reward to anyone who can kill the nearby goblins, but we'd decide to have a drunken arm wrestling match instead.

If they do sound like standard cliché stories, I don't know what to say because the idea is that I am playing dick of an archfey (Dii'Em The Game Master) who got bored and forces a bunch of spirited away elves who have no idea who each other is, on a land forced into the game. It being the Feywild which can have all sorts of strange things happen.

The zany parts will probably play out more in the details. I have this idea of the Redcap trying to reach a relatively ordinary looking house, but they go to get there they go through a cave and then it opens up into a wide open field with night sky, as a family of innocent Shifters (like descendants of werewolves), to try and make the players feel terrible if they don't figure it out. The fake town will be like really fake with clearly wood painted to look like stone, with villagers repeating the same line over and over again like some sort of video game. And completing the Darkling quest will just summon a cow from the forest which is in a dress for some reason, with the treasure tied by a rope and dragging across the ground. Weird things Fey can do.

The idea really is I want to it to be like some demi-god wanted to play a game of real D&D within a game of D&D, somewhat haphazardly, with condescending signs as if making fun that there is a choice, while I will still be prepared if they even decide ignore that choice. I suppose maybe the random spot they started I could say there is like a half built parts of a bar as if he at first thought to use the cliché start, or leave evidence of a previous group stayed there the whole time and the Archfey destroyed it. When they finally get to the final "boss" he will be sitting at a table and rolling dice. The other quest givers really obvious it is a game.

A current extra idea I just thought of was playing with the cliché of three Goblins in a trenchcoat, making it really obvious, and or role reversal, and or revealing that it was just a really ugly cursed guy, something obvious to being bad, to something surprising. Like the Goblins actually are some horrid chimera where someone literally fused three goblins together to take it from being cute as expected to a horror story, such as that the mushroom trip will go from making them sound heroic, to revealing the chased donkey around a tent for an hour while thinking it was a dragon. Is that how a normal D&D game is supposed to be played?

Looking at my notes, the most likely contenders for the last quest would be either a Unicorn or a Fomorian, the first always characteristically good, and the second always being very evil, not something the party could win against, and would not play nice with any Fey. I guess then I would want something to make the party think the creature is in on the game, but has no idea.

Well there's not really any such thing as a "normal D&D game", or a way you're "supposed" to play; it can vary drastically depending on the DM. There are guidelines and suggestions, and the DM is free to discard any- and everything they choose...as long as everyone is enjoying themselves, you're playing correctly.

Definitely some zanyness in most games I've played. Gygax released two Alice in Wonderland themed pocket dimension adventures if you want an example of some real old-school zanyness.

Now that I think about it, D&D's Mystara universe was fairly sane, for the most part. Flying airships, sure, but fairly sane.

Finally got to give D&D a spin last Sunday. I can certainly see its charm - I enjoyed my experience with it thoroughly.

Have you tried a rules-light game like Numenera? A lot smaller workload to learn the rules that way.

I don't know if it is any good, but I have kind of been working on some homebrew for D&D 5e, playing on the stuff that Great Old One Warlocks have a bit of, and with the aberration Subgroup of monsters.

http://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/S1bDtDA67G
If you have any interest, please check it out.

I did years ago, with the first/second ed and third ed. The game they now call D&D I dont recognise as such. Its World of Warcraft on paper IMO.

That's 4th edition. 5th is supposed to be a lot more oldschool.

Personally, I'd rather just stick with the real oldschool rules. I don't have the desire to learn rules that are that thick and expensive.