Your group of five was falling for 30 minutes because they couldn’t get through initiative
My group of five was falling for 30 minutes because they kept trying to rush up a greased ladder
We are not the same.
Sounds like the DM needs to put their damn foot down
I’m awkward and quite bad at that normally but if my players have gone off topic for more than a minute I’ll soft remind them to get back on track, another minute or so and I’ll bring it up again, and if we’ve wasted 5 minutes I activate my autist mode and just straight up mention were way off topic once a spot opens, and refocus the game
That’s part of the damn job, I can run a table with up to 10 people without too much of an issue as long as everyone actually comes with their GODDAMN CHARACTERS FINISHED, DAVE
I often do “I am starting a timer. When it goes off, something interesting will happen”
If the players are still fucking around, then the fire bears show up (or whatever).
Unless you’re willing to do a TPK, this feels like an ultimately hollow threat.
There’s a wide range between tpk and something interesting happening.
Like, the players are dicking around and can’t decide how to ask the bartender if they can have access to the secret occult library in the basement. Just really spinning their wheels and being total PCs. Fine. Timer runs out. Their rival shows up, doesn’t acknowledge them, says something quietly to the bartender and is being lead to the basement.
Sorry, my mind was adding an implicit idea that this was about ‘during combat’. Yeah, during RP you have more wiggle room.
Ah, yeah. During combat there’s the related “if you can’t decide what you’re doing in a minute, you dodge and we go to the next person” rule you can bring out.
I used to have a group I’d play DnD with, it was fun. We don’t talk anymore though because they are right-wing assholes and would never accept me as a trans girl, since they openly made fun of transgender people. There was an NPC character in one of our campaigns which was a “man dressed as a woman” who would always get mocked for it.
It’s absolutely mental to create a character to just act as a punching bag for your beliefs. Even if the roles were reversed, I doubt I’d enjoy playing with people like that.
I think the problem is that it’s something not actually bad. Making a BBEG that’s just a punching bag for your believe that murder is wrong is perfectly okay.
Having the BBEG be a bigot and having their bigotry be integrated into the plot is fine. I’m talking about having an irrelevant NPC just exist as the butt of jokes for the players. I feel like I would just get tired of hearing those interactions repeated for hours.
Wasn’t even a BBEG, was just a random NPC in the party that party members would make fun of for being “a man pretending to be a woman”. The character remained in the party through the whole campaign and only served the purpose of being the butt of transphobic humor. I don’t even think they had good stats or abilities.
Roberts rules for DND.
There was a fair deal of “rules of order” style rules in early D&D.
Ever hear of a “caller”? That was the special player in early D&D rules who got the privilege of telling the DM what the party would do. It did kind of help with big groups, actually.
Better that than being stuck as the “mapper.”
Cool. I’m mostly ignorant to D&D other than listening to podcasts. Why is a mapper bad? Maps are super cool, imo.
Mappers had to look listen to the description of the DM and try to draw a “good enough” map. Very easy to get things mixed up or one square off, and have to erase and redraw. “A doorway to the left” can be confusing when you’re are heading south and it on the right of your map. Or maybe the DM means the left of the map?
Bear in mind, there was often treasure hidden in secret rooms, so knowing where the unexplored space was could be pretty important.
Once in a blue moon there was a player who got a thrill from that, but most folks hated the hassle.
This would be my thing.
