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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I think the rest of the table enjoyed themselves, but I do think part of it is that they weren’t as invested as the player in question. They would show up to the session, put themselves in danger, and don’t really seem to get the same anxiety about their character dying because I don’t think they would really care that much.

    Frankly I think that amplifies the issue because we only have one player that might want to spend time on a plan to try to guarantee success and the rest of the party is more “fuck it we ball” types. Furthermore the anxious player was the most frontliner of them all so the party’s lack of planning is most likely to bite him in the ass out of any of them.


  • Thanks for this, I’m interested in your take on what you do to make your games interesting for you as a DM. My issue isn’t so much that I can’t run a game my friend enjoys, it’s that I don’t really enjoy it because I feel like I know exactly what’s going to happen. I enjoy DMing with more complex and difficult encounters because I get unexpected situations out of it.

    It’s interesting that you mention Fate because I’ve actually run it before at a retreat, and that same friend recommended Fate as a more beginner friendly, easier to set-up TTRPG. And when I ran it I thought of him because the whole system seems to almost guarantee the players’ success, and the drama is in the “complications” or whatever the jargon for Fate is. D&D by comparison doesn’t seem to lend itself to that success-but-at-a-cost.


  • Yeah, absolutely. I don’t want to be the DM where everything is a deadly encounter.

    Maybe I could satisfy myself by upping the difficulty, but changing the consequences? Like the typical consequences to losing an encounter would be death, hostages taken, etc. But maybe it would be a good compromise to have encounters where the failure condition isn’t death. I’m thinking about Shaolin Showdown all of the sudden…