corcaroli

And again they are starting with 5e, ffs.

It feels like you’ve never run Blades or any kind of a similar game…

I was both a player and a GM in a lot of FitD games, and its downtime is not just a D&D shopping session, it’s another phase of the game covered by the rules.

D&D-like shopping sessions, in contrast, are just table talk.

A shopping trip can kill half a session if it’s been a while.

Do you really have fun running a session like that? Me and my players would die of boredom.

I can make one case for people like that: if it’s a paid game. I can tolerate people like that because if I don’t get their emotional investment in the game, at least I got paid. Not that I would invite them to play another session, of course, because there are a lot of better people out there.

Our Sorcerer knew Wish, but the player knew better than to try something like wishing to get to the lowest level of Hell, because on the meta level they wanted to play through this adventure, not to cheese.

The biggest challenge during Tier 4 is still resource attrition. Let them use their big spells, but don’t let them rest. The best challenge you can give them at this point is to make a multi-session-spanning dungeon-like structure.

An example from my previous campaign: heroes needed to get to the lowest level of Hell, but they needed to transit through every one of them in process. Enemies were everywhere, and places for rest were virtually nonexisting. I think they had like 1 long rest in four months of play during T4, and it actually was hard for them.

When I did play 5e IRL, I used Ard sheets, tweaking them in Photoshop or Illustrator whenever needed.

The worst thing is Bob doesn’t know he wants to play something other than D&D.

Where is this jail cell? What’s the city name, vibe, etc?

That’s a bad question, because it draws blanks, not leaves them. Better questions would be:

• «Fighter, how big is the city? Is it more like a village, or something closer to a big, prosperous metropolis?»
• «Rogue, which known criminal is doing his time in some other part of this jail?»
• «Barbarian, you’ve been there quite a lot for your drunken fights, did you? Name one guard who’s here now, you know each other a little too well!»
• «Wizard, for what breakthrough the local magical academy is known?»
• «Cleric, which religion do they preach here?», and, optionally, «Which part of it you would never agree with?»

Don’t just ask «what’s the city vibe», get them something to build from!