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
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.
I admit I’ve only played D&D once. We spent half an hour working out how to go through a hole in the ceiling when there was an unlocked door in front of us. I thought that was just part of the fun.
Long discussion about the game: fine, acceptable, fun!
Long discussion about the meaning of a French word from hundreds of years ago after your bard said the wrong thing in a talking puzzle: might be fun, but is unrelated to the actual game and should be cut short before it drags on
The DMs job is to control the narrative, if you’re talking about the game at all then it’s part of the narrative and you should really only push them if they start going in circles or something at that point
We had 8 people in our last game. It really wasn’t something I’d advise.
8 at my last game (7 players + a very inexperienced dm). I will limit myself to a table of 5 players at most in the future. It was horrible.
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.
It always felt uncomfortable when they’d do it. I felt unsafe when they would do it. I bet if they saw me now they’d make those same jokes about me directly. Probably also mock me for pronouns. They weren’t good people, I don’t know why I hung out with them as much as I did. I guess I just wanted to feel like I fit in with others. Well I’m glad I never came out to them even when I found out, that would’ve been really bad for me, instead we just quietly went our separate ways.
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.
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.
