foamflower

That is, don't base your character choice around how cool their level 20 abilities sound. If you want to multi-class but the idea of losing a level 20 perk is holding you back, do it anyway. Most campaigns hit their stride around level four and will exist till level 10 or so (for games I've played, this is how far I usually get after one year of playing every other week for six hours). At that point, generally someone has a major life event that causes them to drop, or characters die, or enough changes to the point where your original dream for your current character is no longer relevant.

By privileging the first ten levels of your character over the last ten, you'll have a ton more fun in the present, and by the time you get near level ten, you'll have a much better idea about what you want to do with your character moving forward.

• Adds to immersion, shows players that their actions have consequences

• Adds fun new mechanics that are often unexplored

  • can your player fit through a hallway or door?
  • would the sound of metal on metal (sword on shield) temporarily deafen a player or enemy?
  • could players blind monsters in dark dungeons by shining tons of bright light?
  • do players get claustrophobic, agoraphobic, are they afraid of heights?
  • take inspiration from sanity system in call of cthulhu
  • take inspiration from darkest dungeon

• Could easily become cumbersome

• Systems should stay out of the way when they're not adding to the experience

• Weight restrictions suck normally

When a DM sits down and designs the layout of a world, it usually occurs top-down and in the form of maps. This encourages DMs to process (and explain) every moment from overhead. And it makes the players view things from the same angle. Thus, the DM misses out on details that real people in the players' situations would notice.

When something wounds a monster or player, other players would be able to smell the blood. When a goblin fires an arrow at a player in the dark and nicks their ear, they won't know that it was an arrow until a few moments after they got hit. The first thing they'll notice is a sharp hot pain on their ear. They'll wince, and as they put their hand up to their ear and hear the arrow land behind them, they'll piece it all together.

As a DM, you have the most knowledge of your world.  You're free to choose your perspective. You're not constrained to the perspective of an omniscient. Instead, consider imagining yourself as an invisible body walking alongside the party. Imagining the moment, look around you. Seeing only the things that the players would see, notice the situation as only someone would while standing where you are. A few examples:

What does the floor feel like to the players walking over it? Is the room they're in echoey? If they're in a dungeon hallway, is it narrow and claustrophobic? Do players take psychic damage for that or do they attack at a disadvantage? When a player encounters an enemy, are they looking up at the enemy? Or are they looking down? Does the enemy stink, does it slur its words, can you hear or see or feel its breath? When a PC blocks an enemy sword strike with a metal shield in a dungeon, does the ring hurt the ears of everyone nearby? What does a potion smell or taste like? It's impractical to address all these sensory experiences all the time when playing. But it's valuable to remember that these experiences can help immerse the player, as well as the DM.

By injecting life and personality into encounters, goblins and orcs suddenly stop being interchangeable to the players. Every fight is a different sensory experience, against enemies with different personalities, presences, and bodies, all which make for a more satisfying experience.

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#dnd

In D&D, humans don't have their own language. Instead, they only speak Common. This is also true in Lord of the Rings, and to a lesser extent, World of Warcraft.

It seems safe to assume that this is because the “human” race in these media properties is modeled after Brits and/or Americans, whose language (English) has become the global lingua franca. This tracks with our understanding of racially coded fantasy races: Tolkein's elves are Scandinavian, WoW's trolls are Rastafarian, dwarves tend to be a combination of Nordic and German, and humans tend to be predominantly white and eastern European.

In an effort to step away from a fantasy universe where humans are merely a default, I propose that humans know a language of their own as well. Suggestions:

• Common is a simplified and constructed language designed to facilitate communication between races for trading and political purposes. It would probably use the script of the most powerful race from when the language was invented, or the script of the language's inventors, or maybe it can be written in any script, phonetically.
• The depths of some ideas get lost in Common, since it's rather matter-of-fact, giving players a reason to resort to or learn other languages.
• In addition to Common, just like elves speak Elvish, and dwarves speak Dwarvish, humans speak Human.
• Alternatively, Common could be a primarily culture-sharing language, designed to share art, the spoken word, and poetry. Maybe it's richer than every other language in the world and most other languages have died out. Maybe only older dwarves know dwarvish.

#dnd #worldbuilding

We are increasingly moving in a direction that values personal branding, 'personal brand' meaning a simplified and highly communicative way of being understood by others.

We implicitly and subconsciously associate ourselves with ideas and symbols, with brands and teams, with philosophical movements and political ideologies. I vote that we make the implicit explicit.

My recommendation for this exercise is to imagine the enamel pins you'd put on a denim jacket or backpack to represent yourself fully. You don't need to share this iconography with anyone else, but understanding how you view yourself seems incredibly useful in developing and maintaining a sense of identity.

Personal example:

• blind king
• empty beach at night
• gin and tonic
• d20
• bouquet
• effective altruism logo
• pile of books
• grass minecraft block
• sleeping figure

The Problem

Leaderboards are fundamentally broken. Most popular games have at least 10,000 players, and that number is usually closer to a hundred thousand or a million. These games usually have leaderboards. And by law of large numbers, you're probably not playing competitively to the point where you're in the top X players, whether X is 100 or 1,000 (or even 10,000). There's not much joy in moving from 13,653rd to 13,642nd place. What caused leaderboards to be a source of joy and excitement in the past for casual gamers?

The answer is usually “smaller cohorts”. The amount of players who had access to any given leaderboard was usually constrained by physical location, with arcade cabinets being the primary source of leaderboards. When there are only ten or a twenty hobbyist players of a game (read: above casual but below competitive), the leaderboards mean something. They're dynamic. They're personal. They're intimate.

In most modern games, you're presented with two options: a global leaderboard, and a friends-only leaderboard. If I and my friends are any indication, most console players don't have more than 10 friends, of which maybe five play the game you're playing, and two of which are playing at the same level you are.

The Solution

We have an opportunity to build a better system, and make leaderboards enjoyable for everyone. Following are some suggestions:

–> Put players in randomly selected subgroups by skill level. This is their current league. If they do well in it they move to a higher league. If they do poorly, they stay still or are demoted. Each subgroup/league contains, at maximum, 50 people.

–> Offer hyper-local leaderboards. City leaderboards, state leaderboards, country leaderboards, etc. If you don't collect location information, let players opt in by choosing their city/state/what-have-you.

–> Offer competitions with one other person (especially people on your friends list) as a feature of your leaderboards. Lots of self-improvement services already do this, where you compete for a high score over a set period of time.

Conclusion

We can make a more accessible, more interesting, and more dynamic leaderboard that encourages participation and which isn't only interesting to the top hundred players in a million-player game.

#games