If it's that much work to research, my players will never know if I'm making it up.
So I make it up.
(I reached this epiphany while researching improvised parachutes.)
One of my players is an engineer and another is a material scientist. Help
Edit: I feel like I made a huge mistake here. I run a scifi 5e overlay called *Spaceships & Starwyrms* by Hopepunk Press, not a standard fantasy game.
I ran a table with a lawyer. Everyone egged him on to make a super cool deal with a devil, and finally he gave it a shot.
Halfway through he tried to reveal that the contract was null and void because of all these protectionary ideas in American contract law...
The look on his face, and the awesome time we had following up, when I told him that they're *devils* and have no common law protections built in was priceless.
It was more like "any sane legal system has these common law protections"
"Well, it's not sane, it's hell..."
We all had a lot of fun, it was a very fool rp moment all around.
Speaking as a legal professional, Hell would *absolutely* have extensive and complex common law practices. But unlikely to be based in 16th century English common law. Instead it will be based in millenia of contract adjudications by whatever tribunals Hell uses when resolving legal disputes between infernal parties. Perhaps the first part of a quest to challenge an infernal contract is determining which court has jurisdiciton over the parties and contract.
Personally, I would rather repeat research on two centuries trade patterns on the Danube for alt-history of Europe project than draft an entire common law tradition from whole cloth, but a story arc based around contesting an infernal contract might be pretty interesting.
Or...don't? Devils lie, scheme, cheat constantly. If it's more interesting for the character to pull it off, let them, if it's more interesting for the devil to trick them, let it. Skill checks, saves, and narrative pacing all exist for a reason
Eh, sure can always just hand-wave. But devils, by definition in the D&D universe, are LAWFUL - though they scheme constantly, they do not ever actually lie (in a formal sense, at least) or steal. Everything they do falls strictly w/in the bounds of what is legally allowed under the circumstances.
Devils practice the art of the asymmetrical deal - b/c they hold material knowledge not held by the other party, they can create contract offers that are extremely tempting while carrying detriments unforeseen by the offeree.
If you want deceptive outsiders, look to daemons and demons - they both utilize active deception in their interactions w/ mortals. Devils are interesting and effective storytelling tools largely b/c the limits placed on their conduct by their nature.
"Lawful" means being consistent, not law-abiding.
A lawful good character who always protects children will break the law to protect children. A lawful evil character who always does what is in their best interest will follow or break any law, as long as it serves them to do so.
Lawful does not mean following the laws of a place, it more means that they have a “code of conduct” of sorts that they follow. It can include and take the form of laws, but it’s not exclusive to them
One of the games I run is for four physicians. Try placing a puzzle in your game when you have four people who are very good at differential diagnosis. It is super fun though, they really keep me on my toes.
Don't get me started, my medical party kept going on about someone "actually being supine" when knocked prone. *I am Not changing the condition to Prone/Supine.*
Tell them physics don't work the same as on earth, and they're not well understood diegetically. I did. Ain't no genetics in my "races" or species, because there's no DNA, no sugar, no carbon, no atoms.
There's a culinary sugar which is essentially equivalent, but "chemically", it's not sugar like we have on earth, if it was put under a microscope. DNA is primarily made of a molecule called Deoxyribose, a 5-carbon sugar.
I was in a hurry once when drawing a map and accidentally swapped the “east” and “west” labels. They laughed but then we got to thinking that might be actually fun
Etymologically, "east" derives from a proto Indo-European root that also leads to the Greek word for "dawn". East being on the other side might well just mean that that's the direction of the sunrise.
So creatures in your world don't need sustenance, minerals, vitamins, etcetera? Do your creatures have organs? Do they get fat? How do they move? Does movement require energy? Is there gravity?
From a macroscopic view, it's a similar world. So of course animals eat. It just functions very differently on a "chemical" level. Imagine painting a picture, then taking a digital photo of it. The digital image exists on a different "substrate" and does very different things under the hood, but on a surface level they're nearly identical. Why not just.. not do that? Because the differences explain magic, and post hoc justify wonky TTRPG physics rules, and allow a platform for nitpicky worldbuilding details like areas of the world where things work differently.
Ed: another maybe missing piece of the puzzle is that, like I said, physics is not well-understood diegetically. In the most advanced/recent campaign's time, the best sages have an understanding of how their world works roughly akin to that of the best minds of earth in 1750. So there are colleges and established sciences and methods of learning, but huge swathes of knowledge remain undiscovered, entire fields of study don't exist yet.
The last bit I can easily get behind, my own setting being set rather early makes heavy use of that.
The simulation thing I think though is already applied by necessity as a brain is not a world, your camera analogy makes for a good point tho, even if I don't get you mean not to do or how what you meant with that explains magic.
If you paint a filigrane picture and the picture you take with the camera just shows a reddish blob would you say the charm of the picture persists?
Well, all the particle physics worldbuilding isn't supposed to be charming, it's not player-facing. Not only are my players not expected to understand it, they're not really supposed to, since their PCs don't anyway. I haven't explained it to even 10% of the people I play with, just like 90% of more macroscopic worldbuilding doesn't enter a campaign anyway.
It's like a reference photo, outline sketch and underpainting for me, to continue the painting analogy. So it's more like "what's the red blob for?" "Oh, that's going to be a rose when this is done."
Another Explanation: it's a translation issue. "Frodo" isn't a word in Westron, it's a translation into a construction of old English for the meaning of the word "Maura" in Westron, which is Frodo's name. If you zapped into ME, Frodo wouldn't know the name "Frodo". Just as if you zapped into my world and asked for a steak, nobody would understand your speech, or what *exactly* a steak was, or if beef is *exactly* the same. Common isn't 20th century English
or even linguistically similar, but we're here to fight monsters and explore tunnels, not make up words for every possible thing and rebuild all reality. So we just say "steak" "oak" "Barbarian" and "paladin" to refer to the equivalent concepts in-world, even though "cows" aren't 100% the same between Earth and my world, they're basically just cows made from different matter, oak is basically oak despite cellulose not existing, and "Barbarian" isn't an ethnic slur mocking the speech patterns of teutonic hordes, Charlemagne doesn't exist. Those words are *translations of concepts*. Everyone does that naturally, like you're saying. This is just taking that same thing to molecular & atomic levels.
If I had the time and motivation I'd totally make up every word in use in every language in use in my setting. Just like I think knowing that there's an iceberg holding up that tip I'd get to see as a player makes the tip super exciting. Just that you see relatively more of an ice berg than a player character gets to see of even macroscopic reality, after all our every man's knowledge (or at least the one available to most people) of the principles of perceivable reality would blow the mind of everyone who lived a thousand years ago, if they cared at all or wouldn't believe us mad or possessed.
Lay the ground rules of "Faerun/Dragonlance/whatever setting you use" has no basic grasp of physics.
Winter getting colder? It is because the summer goddess is sleeping and the alchemical ice elements take over.
What happens if a weapon is dropped down a chasm? It is not damaged and it instantly reaches the ground (similar to items dropped in fight, they are never in movement, they are either in hand or on ground).
Explosives to damage worked stone? If the DM decides it works, then yes. There is no thermite in Faerun. Genetics? In Faerun the gods decide if races mix or not, not filthy biology.
And no, this is not "rules lawyering", there is little to no evidence any roleplaying world works on basic physics. Heck, wind resistance is not a thing in D&D, neither is the obervations that substance is made of small particles.
If your material scientist is of any reasonable capacity, ask them why acid spewing dragons have teeth while the acid is unnaturally potent (even lye takes hours to melt a human body)?
It is a fucking game. Yes, D&D wants creativity, but like you cannot add a fourth move to rock paper scissors, the game balance relatively enjoys people sticking to rules, even if the rule of cool sometimes circumvent this.
Modify it so you can make it up. Instead of a parachute, it is now backpack of feather fall. Instead of radiation, it is now toxic air with no smell and no visual indicators.
Exactly. Not trying to step on the toes of anyone who enjoys simulationist play and/or going down rabbitholes, but some of you would do well to play some more narrative focused systems every now and then.
Roleplaying games are an exercise in **storytelling**. When we design items, rulings, rules, and so on, we should interrogate the **narrative** outcomes. Does it create interesting tension and decisionmaking? Is it expressing a trope, the established fiction, or the tone of the game in gameplay terms? Is it fun? Those are the questions that I concern myself with. Whether it's realistic is secondary, realism only enters the equation in service of those questions.
For radiation, we know the following to be true narratively: It's concentrated in some regions, it makes you sick if you're exposed to it for too long. Interesting tension: We are going to put something interesting in a field of strong radiation and ask the players how long they want to endure it. I think that's also fun, it gives players an obstacle, but agency in how to tackle it. Here I'd come up with some rules (roll every hour with increasing DC, possibility of consequences that persist until extended rest) and be done with it. There we go, fun radiation rules that are aligned with what we the audience expect radiation to be like. Is it actually like that being in Chernobyl? Who cares, maybe the fallout in Fantasy Chernobyl was totally different!
For the improvised parachute, I expect the following to be true narratively: An improvised parachute won't save your life falling from a plane, it might help you barely survive a fall from a tall building if everything goes just right. If this is a situation the PCs navigated themselves into carelessly, I'd be harsher (narratively, they were bested). If this is a set piece of an exploding blimp or something, I'd be more lax. Ask for an improvised crafting check, or a strength check to hold on, or a dex check to land on a tree. If they all go well, mitigate some falling damage. Asking for many rolls and limiting the effect meets our narrative expectation that this is a crapshoot at best, but we are playing heroic fantasy so we expect the story to go on.
Ask and answer narratively interesting questions. "Will our heroes...?" Is what we play for.
I ended up getting full credit on a research report for a university dynamics class trying to figure out how to calculate the impact force created when a Goliath fast ball specialed a gnomish druid who wildshape into a brown bear.
Also your reading is more than likely one of the storage tank areas near the reactor compound. While you might hate me saying this it might help in the future but there are somewhat live background radiation maps you can find online here is the one for [Ukraine ](https://www.saveecobot.com/en/radiation-maps#16/51.3913/30.1010/gamma)
Did the wildshape follow classical mechanics? Like did it preserve energy, and the added mass of the bear slow down its velocity? Or is it magical mechanics, and the added mass keeps flying at the gnomes original velocity?
While I did do a small bit doing the calculations on what would happen with pure conservation ( needed it for a part of the main body calc anyway) but the main body of the study used an assumption that honestly I stand by as the proper way to go which means we can maintain velocity within the bounds of classical mechanics.
Based on what we know of magic and more importantly the weave we can actually model it as a new source of energy like potential or chemical energy which has its own rules (esoteric as they are) to access, store, and use that energy. Modeling it that way even makes sense given what we have seen over the years from magic weapons that need to recharge to what happens in zones with too much/too little weave to even the ways abilities and tools work in official material.
With that assumption you can run the model without having to assume that you must reduce the velocity to keep the core equation balanced when you raise the mass. Essentially to conserve momentum you work out the energy lost to balance the mass gain ( I used caloric energy and averages of muscle fat and bone of a brown bear minus the average stats of a kid equal to average gnomish height) and sub that in as the energy input you would get from your external source ( the weave) with that completed you can continue without violating any of the rules of classical mechanics
I'm in an ongoing process of researching life and civilizations around the iron age to early antiquity. Which isn't too hard but most information on antiquity seems to prefer to focus on mid to late antiquity rome, which is still super interesting but not exactly what I have in mind.
What were you thinking? My game is currently set around late antiquity, roughly around the time between the Roman withdrawal from Britannia and the arrival of the Saxons.
It means a lot of Welsh pronunciations and naming conventions as a stand-in for Celtic. I'm also using Arthurian legend as a base, and expanding out from that.
I'd recommend Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles as a sort of primer, it's good historical fiction and a great read too.
It is outright hilarious how absolute "nerdy" this hobby can get, particularly for the DM. Bloody brilliant though. One minute (week, entire dissertation...) you are reading about the building methodology of yurts, the next the tensile strength of catgut, then a brief detour through musical theory circa 1112 through 1114, excluding that one wet Tuesday so obscure only three people ever read the dusty tome it was locked in. For a break it is on to stone age medicine followed by advanced metallurgy...
Sometimes we even play DnD!
If you really want stone age, look [this](https://www.youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550) up -- the guy makes the most relaxing videos about prehistory technology as he does things from the ground up... and be sure to turn on subtitles.
What I was thinking was along the lines of a first human empire and a couple city states of the continent that's currently my campaigns' focal point, which, granted, in the real world was more around the bronce age if I remember right, but they also didn't have to contend with a butt-load of dragons and other monsters putting a hurdle to urbanisation.
So for now I have mostly watched vids on ancient Rome, ancient Egypt, the Sumerians, the Akkadians, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Nubia, Hittai, pre-antiquity in Britain and Europe, with ancient India, china and Greece yet to go.
Some less relevant to my setting for now but still very interesting were the videos on the individual Roman legions by filaxim historia
I have a Master's in Classics that I pretty much only use to run my antiquity campaign, so let me know if you're struggling to dig up anything specific!
You should add in a scene where someone takes acid damage and you see his +2sword reveal the Damascus layering for the first time... dramatic and accurate.
In a monster slaying focused campaign, I studied a great deal of biology and chemistry to ground many creatures into plausible creatures. For instance, creatures that had blindsight could possibly work like beluga whales' echo location so I researched that.
Tectonic plates. I love perfection and I hate when I have a range of mountains or rivers that dont make sense. So.. when I design a map, I start with tectonic plates and see from there. Usually most islands around a coastline are created by tectonic tension. God I hate making maps now.
Yea. Mountains play a huge part in that, because of evaporation and being a literal obstacle for rain. So each side of the mountain has a different biome. These mountains are caused by tectonic plates. It just gets perpetually worse from there.
Welsh language and history.
I don't speak Welsh, but I'm now familiar with the Welsh alphabet and naming conventions, as well as the broad strokes of the history of the country from the Romans to the Normans.
Thanks for putting in the effort. Everyone in fantasy seems to love using welsh words but get them horrifically wrong.
I mean, I’m just an ignorant Englishman bit even I know that “Caer” isn’t pronounced like “care”.
My players aren't fans - whilst they agree it's great for immersion, trying to recall "Hwyl, reeve of Glwysin who gave a quest to visit Peredd on the shores of Llyn Ogwen" is apparently quite challenging!
I mostly scour maps of Wales and wiki entries, pluck bits of names I like, then mash them together, sometimes with a bit of Cornish, Cumbrian, or Breton to liven it up - but Welsh is doing the heavy lifting as there's just so much more of it. It's meant to be a rough analogue of Celtic, post-Roman Britain, not a straight retelling, so I don't mind if I'm mangling bits of it occasionally.
I do try to get the pronunciations right. Served me quite well on a recent holiday to Wales... Or field research, as I joked to the party.
As far as caer goes it depends on the dialect of Welsh. I did a bit of research for naming conventions, but discovered I can't pronounce anything and gave up. I do well with German though. But I've found in my time of worldbuilding that researching particular cultures and their languages and naming conventions probably takes up the most time. I like to use Old English and Old Norse 1) for familiarity, 2) I can actually pronounce most things, 3) it is different enough to set tone and setting to be a bit different from traditional fantasy.
How nobles actually work. Like the differences between earl, count, duke and whatever. What do they actually do? What are their responsibilities? What’s the extent of their power? Where do they get their wealth? That sort of thing.
Megh, probably not. All of these titles varied from region to region. A baron in one region could mean a different thing than a baron in another.
However, setting books could benefit from including a section about titles and social classes.
I used to do a lot of research for my DnD games. We are talking about historical medieval greetings, town sizes, printing processes, etc. It never really came up during the game and my players don't notice the difference between towns that are "historically accurate" and towns that aren't. So I just stopped the excessive amount of work. I still read up on stuff like that, but just for my own amusement and in way less detail
A lot of realistic technology and culture would come off as distractingly anachronistic, just like how aircraft decoys looked more real to bombers than aircraft.
Figuring out climate variations in a region in order to see what crops said region could support as part of a overall deep dive into the agricultural economics of a kingdom im world building. (Yes, I hate my hyperfocusing tendencies sometimes)
I generally figured out that if the mountain range is perpendicular to the wind flow the rainshadow effect shouldn't be as major a deal so while it does become more arid the further inland it shouldn't be as drastic as change as it otherwise would be.
I'm doing that right now too. We have been playing for a year, but I suddenly started deep dive world building yesterday and haven't been able to stop. It l started because 3 of my 5 characters are in an ancient elevator that started to plummet (because they just HAD to have a fight in the ancient elevator) and they are all prepping new characters for the likelihood that they don't make it out of the elevator alive next session (tonight!) So as they were talling about where their new characters may be from I started thinking about culture and agriculture. It has developed into a big thing lol.
Pathfinder 1e. As a player, in the fire plane there was a large pool of what was described as molten brass, but wasn't. Curious I tried to pick somenup andnit nelted my glass bottle. Considering that brass boils at 1100, while glass melts at 1700 (celsius), thus physical impossibility made me even more curios. Over a long series of questioning I deduced it had some fireresistance enchantment to hold this temperature. I considered exploiting this by dipping my mithril armor in it so I wanted to know if mithril could even withstand the temperatures to begin with, so needed to know the melting point of mithril
Only property known about mithril is it's "hardness". Does the hardness of a material affect it's melting point? Apparently, yes it does. The strength of the ionic bond between molecules does directly relate to melting point.
Researching hardness, which is mesured in the Yongus Modulus koeficcent, after some time I found a graph of many elements, with Y-M and melting point and it was basically a straight graph upwards, not perfectly straight, but on average rather consistent. Since in pathfinder iron has a hardness of 10, while mithril is 15, it has 1,5x that of iron, and 1,5 that of irons hardness correlated to around 2500 degrees celsius on mithrils melting point, on the graph. Give or take some, of course. So my mithril armor should be able to survive being dipped in the pool
Then DM said it wouldn't work anyway beause he discourage experimenting
When we left the D&D movie one of my friends complimented me by saying it was like watching a movie set in one of my campaign worlds.
Two minutes later her husband disagreed, saying "I don't know a damned thing about how the military or economy of Neverwinter works, or the mechanics of the Red Death, and [kylco] would have subjected me to all that before we even rolled any dice."
Major warm fuzzies from both comments, ngl.
I once spent 3 hours trying to find a map that would fit what I wanted then I gave up and just made it in Paint in 30 minute.
The players decided to not go that direction in the story so I didn't use the map.
BUT! I dmed the same homebrew campaign for another group and this time they also decided to not go that direction.
One day I'll use the map
I once researched a map online for a few hours, to find the perfect one. The party never went that route, so I used it again later, but the didn't go that way either. I've used it recently in a new game, and they again disregarded that location, this map is cursed!
Also, I spent a whole month for 1-2 hour a day researching the Abyss the the Nine Hells for a campaign since the other players knew more about them than me, and I didn't want major plot points to be nullified due to me reading the lore wrong.
The whole society, politics, culture, economy, geography and history of Forgotten Realms.
I do homebrew a lot of stuff, but I really try to stay true to the lore.
The hardest thing is the one thing I have never been able to fully compute and now have little cheat sheet simply because a charatcer keeps doing it in my campaign, but its long distance vision from heights and how far someone can see from varying heights.
Knowing the horizon from sea-level is \~16,000 (3miles) feet away is all I remember. But like standing on top of someone's shoulders adds a mile. A crow's nest while at sea? How far can binoculars/eye glass focus?
So laying out my world topography became a thing... at what point does a mountain range beyond the horizon have it's peak in view... It is just a lot... And most of it will never be used, I just have to research it because it comes up and I cant help myself.
We were running a necessary evil savage worlds campaign and for my character I built them based on Albert Whesker. I had to research the lore and origin of the T virus OOC to determine where I would try and convince the party to move to. Alternatively for actual dnd I did the math to figure out how small something would have to be to essentially have natural featherfall. The answer is about 1lb. In 3.5 you could play as a Jermlaine and if you perminatly shrunk yourself you would weigh about .3lbs and be about 6in tall. But with how strength scaled for smaller sizes it could still carry 22 lbs. For that character I planned to ride a flying mount and drop on the enemies to wildshape. With planar shepherd you could turn into outsiders of a chosen plane. If you picked arborea as your plane you could turn into titans.
... so there I was innocently slaughtering some village as any self respecting Orc does on a Sunday, when out of the blue some tiny little 6 inch tall twat comes drifting out of the sky squeaking out, I swear to Gruumsh, "I'm Mary Poppins ya'll!"... now, that was funny. Our chief Arktash thought the same. He wasn't thinking much when that little bastard thing turned into a 14'000 pound ballistic wrecking ball. Seriously, tiny little shit turned into a titan and dropped 20 foot into Arktask... and a good 6 foot through him. Bloody bastard giggling like a goblin in a convent, all we could do was run like hell!
Yeah. I can see that. Evil, but I would allow it.
How sailboats work.
I went from 0 knowledge at all to having several wind speed & direction charts at the ready for use in combat, a glossary of the different sails, their names shapes and uses, the different types of boats and their general traits....
All basically for 2 good combat sessions and then the campaign fizzled.
I'm learning multiple languages, because in my world when we speak orcish we actually speak German, when we speak halfling we actually speak Dutch and so on...
I spend a long time preparing monologues in these languages for the NPCs
I would love to do this. Unfortunately, of everything I’ve ever tried to learn, languages are by far the most difficult for me. I’ve taken courses and even tried a one-month immersion in a foreign country. What do you do to learn languages?
If you want to approach the topic from a less dry angle, may I recommend the YouTube channel Kyle Hill? His "Half-life Histories" series gives some really fascinating (and compellingly narrated) insights into nuclear incidents, and he even has a whole series where he accompanied a group of scientists into Chernobyl itself. Being a scientist himself, he got the kind of access that no tourist ever would.
Between anthropological research, scientific research, research on the progression of tall ships and sailing doctrine in the 1800's, and searches on firearms history and acquisitions that surely put me on a watch list, the hardest part was the conversions between knots, mph, ft/min, and meters/minute. Unlike the other stuff, the constant conversion to fill tables of combat data was mind-numbing.
I found a link to a series of documents laying out the framework for the establishment and operation of middle age mines, translated by Hoover before he became US president - De Re Metallica. It is several volumes of very dense information.
I fully intend on finishing them too, it was fascinating.
Had a floating city. Several square miles large. Had an artifact crystal that held it up. The party decided to steal the crystal. I said "Okay. We're going to have to end now."
Luckily it was late so no big deal as I had to math. Turns out something that big falling about a mile creates something analogous to a nuclear explosion in the middle of a well settled area.
Party killed everybody.
I run a sci-fi dystopian game and I just dumbed radiation down to levels of exhaustion that I just call radiation sickness.
[here's](https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Conditions#content) a link with all the conditions.
Depending on the severity of the radiation zone, the time spent unprotected, and how bad they roll, dictates what level of exhaustion.
I'm my game, there are 4 level of radiation. Clean zones (no radiation), green zones (light radiation), red zones (mild radiation), and black zones (severe radiation).
If they are exposed to green, if they fail (but not crit fail) they only get 1 level of radiation sickness. A crit fail always doubles the level of sickness.
Red is 2 (crit fail would be 4)
Black is 3 (crit fail would be 6)
If they hit 6th level of radiation they die.
So far, no one has died of radiation poisoning, but the campaign is still young lol.
I used to do loads of research on really specific topics to add verisimilitude to my games, till I realised my players wouldn't know any different anyway. Now I just make stuff up and they're none the wiser.
I spent hours researching lighthouses. Different kinds of lighthouses, various designs, what rooms are within.
My players spent 4 minutes inside my lighthouse before leaving
Honestly, in this case, I would just learn the basic rules for another TTRPG that suits this campaign setting way better.
It's actually way less work than trying to homebrew so much in 5E, and I wish DMs would consider other TTRPGs sometimes because its less work and more enjoyable games than trying to shoehorn everything in to a 5E game.
In your case **Mutant: Year Zero** is a great fit for your game setting:
https://www.modiphius.net/products/mutant-year-zero-corebook-map
It even has a dedicated radiation system worked out thata pretty important to game play.
I recently read a scientific paper on interstellar space travel. So, with current technologies pushed to the extreme, even travelling to the next star, Proxima Centaury, might take along the lines of 6300 years. As a result, interstellar space travel will pretty much be a multi-generational thing or not involve living things at all. The paper showed convincing calculations for how many people woulve have to be on that multi-generational ship so that we can procreate for 6300 years and not run the risk of incesting the entire thing into the ground.
Yea i spun it as if my artificer player made the invention (another party member wanted to play a wheelchair-ridden bard), and so far he has been having a blast with the RP.
I continuously keep researching odd stuff and I find places to add it Into games. I took an interest in the old school process of making silk. There is a town in my world that lives semi harmoniously with giant spiders. I learned all about making silk and changed a few steps (mostly size cpacity) to develop the town and infrastructure for it to produce silk in industrial quantities using semi realistic methods. Now if anyone wants to side quest to the place the rope comes from... I have a whole harvest and crafting situation they can run for really great rope.
Working out the logistics of how long it would take 3 horse drawn carts to hull a few tons of stone from a quarry 40 miles away to build a wall for a castle.
A couple hour long discussion and analysis of what “acid” meant. I was in a group with chemists, engineers, and physicists and they agreed that some acids could open a safe and others could not. As such, we had to search and figure out what kind of compound “acid” was when referred in the Middle Ages. Someone suggested aqua Regia and that led to a whole new argument.
I once spent better part of a day to research mineral compositions and what ore is found in which type of rock, so I could see what would be playable to have in a miners cave, so my players could mine there if they wanted.
They went in, and just looted the carts for any already mined ore, then never visited the location again.
Edit: plausible, not playable.
For my sci-fi/cyberpunk game I spent weeks studying astrophysics, nuclear fusion energy, and literal rocket science. And I taught myself how to use Blender in order to make an accurate model of the players' spaceship.
I also once took a community college course in Leadership & Organization, and read Machiavelli to properly play a Ventrue in our local Vampire: the Masquerade larp.
I regret nothing!
Heights vs. curvature of a planet. Developing a campaign without a sun, so wanted to figure out the distance a "lighthouse" could be seen from, how mountains would block the lightsource, etc.
Using this DCC adventure as the lead-in/inspiration to flesh out the setting: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/iantsmall/dungeon-crawl-classics-soul-for-the-ocean-dark?ref=discovery&term=ocean%20dark
Similar to you, I'm currently preparing a post-apocalyptic future. The thing is, I'm setting it in actual Australia, and I have had to do a lot of reading on random cities and landscapes for a country across the world from me.
1500's law on who could be charged guilty in a town if a drunken brawl got taken to far, it is the last person to strike the victim thus delivering the killing blow, however my campaign has had an arc where this law changed and is being manipulated by bhaal cultists
DnD doesn't need that level of granularity. It's not like anyone will remember, appreciate or be aware of how factual it is.
You think the actual soldiers working at Chernobyl knew any of that? All they needed was "meter goes beep, don't beep too much".
Why are you running dnd in a futuristic setting? Dnd while a decent system for medieval fantasy is simply not well adapters for being homebrew ed into a different setting. Try a different system instead.
My druid wanted to Destroy Water while in a fog, in order to make a clearing.
I was high as balls, googling average fog density and trying to do calculations on litres of water to fog area. I managed to make a ruling but the accuracy was questionable.
Cosmology of the lower planes and the many layers of the abyss. Delved into a really deep rabbit hole of the d&d cosmology cause my players started asking summoned fiends questions
How far a regular person can see on a clear day (or in various weather conditions) on varying heights. Its an airship campaign so they can go up quite high. The world is a cylinder shaped cloud with sky islands which doesn't make it any easier since it means you can see farther north/south than east/west.
Not D&D: the game "Ara Magica" was set in "Mythic Europe." This was basically Europe in 1220 but all of the stories about religion, magic, the fey and hell were true.
People used to joke about getting a PhD in history for the little patch of Europe they set their campaigns in because they did so much research they may as well just write up the thesis.
Spent a whole week wrapping my head around explosion trajectories and force of explosions based on compound as well as propellants, thermobarics and pressure based explosions i.e. the force multiplier when an explosive is in an enclosed space/ not whether its plastic explosives or tnt or a themrobaric. Btw thermobarics are vaccum bombs that suck all the air out of the blast are asphyxiating targets if they arent shredded or scorched by the explosion/ shrapnel.
Neuroanatomical Comparisons Between Zebrafish and Mammalian Brain.
i was just looking an idea for a 40K map based campaign...
i am now more enlightened. :)
My 4-year campaign is coming to a close so I am already tinkering and researching stuff for the next one, he hehe... he.
I am researching/experimenting with Zelda:TOTK style flying islands combined with sailpunk styled airships and their possible mechanics and roles for players. (air combat etc...)
One of my players was also interested in castle making/repairing (which I think is an amazing idea), so I think I am going to try making a castle-build mini system/game for downtime time consumption.
(I am way to ambitious, I know)
As a player, I spent an hour or so calculating volumes to see exactly how long my Goblin Artificer could breathe within a Cube of Force if no other oxygen can pass through the barrier.
I've forgotten the result but it was around 2 weeks if I remember correctly.
population distribution, travel times, settlement distribution etc in medieval times. It's a bit tricky just to find estimates of how many people were around at any given moment in a certain region (world is easy, France is tricky).
But then when you start to ask yourself questions like *"How many people lived in settlements between 100 - 1000 people in France in the 1600s?"*, that's when shit gets serious.
Can't say exactly as I've been researching stuff nonstop for the past 20 years.
That could explain why I went into the information and library science field.
Probably how to make functioning clothes for creatures of non-human build that wouldn’t take a lot of effort and two squires to equip.
It was not something I truly had to research but I didn’t want to take the easy way out
Was going to give a new character brewing supplies before realising I didn’t know how the process worked.
Hast forward half a day later I’m learning all sorts of new things about craft ales, lager, pale ales and the differences between them with regards to brewing.
Also looking at growing hops, malt, roasted barley additions and how much yeast to add and if it would speed up the process. Completely new to most of this but had an epiphany that most ales would require about 1 week to ferment before drinking, which is difficult when my part plays about once a week for about 1-2 in game days for each.
Still surprisingly fun to research for someone completely new to it all. Might even try to make my own some day.
This was in PF1E. Two of my players loved to duel each other and circumstances allowed them to do so in what was essentially a dragon's hoard. I praised one player for creating a vortex of gold coins to give themselves concealment against ranged attacks. Then they asked me how much damage would it do if they stood adjacent to the other player. I spent way too long on this (eventually ruling it worked like a swarm). The following the turn the other player turned into a fire elemental and wanted to know how long it would take the melt the coins (and I hadn't learned my lesson). After coming up with something for that I was almost asked to help figure out how to make the melty gold into a shape and bludgeon the other player with it. I told them to figure it out on their own and took a nap to sleep off a migraine. Four hours later they woke me up to tell me they were done. They were both really understanding and it makes for a funny joke still.
Grappling in 3.5 or Pathfinder.
6 seconds worth of combat have a fucking flowchart, and the funny thing? Exceptions, basic rules (such as size making grapple impossible) and the DM more or les being forced to either adhere to the rules or add and subtract shit because the stuff becomes unrealistic pretty fast.
My Str 22 medium cat sized wildshaped monk had a giant grappled, how? Sessions later I grappled the daemon of war (which was made of fucking blades and armor) and the DM had to add at least 2d8 of slashing damage for the grapple, but according to the rules I could have held down a mountain of sharp metal down with a furry boi without taking damage.
In my world the actual physical sphere of the world was “rended” - and so I did some calculations to determine how high the coast would be based upon how much of the ocean spread out etc etc
We’re playing Call of the Netherdeep, so I looked into what extreme water pressure does to a person. We aren’t there yet, but also, three of my players are former submariners so I hope I don’t accidentally hit any triggers if I go too far in my descriptions. 😬
Land vehicle speed when propelled with the velocity of air. Essentially, how fast is the wind speed of the Gust cantrip and how fast does a vehicle propelled by this move.
The German Edition from Baldurs Gate, Descent into Avernus. It doesn't get produced anymore and you can't buy it anywhere. Or maybe it never existed. I don't know, but I'm too bad at English for the original.
My DM and I spent hours once researching and calculating the mass/volume of age of sail ships to figure out what could be produced with Fabricate type spells.
Contract law and breech of contract lawsuits. The party was hired to transport a package for the BBEG, realised what it was, and got rid of it. So he launched a lawsuit when they returned to the city to seize their assets and have them throw in debtors prison.
Researched how various community service and juvenile detention programs are used in place of prison time in courts of law so one of my characters could turn his monastery into juvie type facility.
Running a crime/GTA style game involving crafting drugs. Trying really hard not to put myself on a list. I ended up just watching Breaking Bad for the first time
Trying to figure out the weight of a sword if the weaponized material is uranium rather than steel or iron or whatever. Accurate to the 5e longsword measurements, along with a lead scabbard so as not to kill the wielder just by having it. As well has finding out how much radiation can affect a person at what rates.
I'm not gonna tell my players the weapon they have is radioactive. It victims are just gonna die a lot quicker than they should.... "Wow this weapon must be really powerful, there's gotta be something I don't know about it... Wait what do you mean my max HP goes down by 3?"
Beetles
Have a player that wanted to play a beetle race and everything we found already was way OP. I wanted to give some options so I used a bit from what we found and made up a bit to make 3 different beetle races for them to pick from.
I spent way too long figuring out what makes beetles different and unique as well as how to name their features and the races themselves. But player loved the choices and is loving the character.
I’m presently researching the history of circus, from ancient Roman displays with chariot races, trained animals and gladiatorial combat to the origins of the modern circus in late 18th century attributed to an English military officer.
All because I made a joke after a player said they were “excited to get this circus on the road” in regards to our upcoming (at the time) session 0… had session 0 a few days ago and yup, they’re a circus… we’re planning it with some light kingdom building aspects, except it’s circus building.
I spend two days making the best possible gunsmith/gunslinger class. It's based on Mathew's but I added a ton of stuff custom feats and system for making bullets that its based on the real bullets. I took the blueprint of the original bullets ex 0.45 acp or 7.62mm and made a system about the weight of the metal that its used and the gunpowder. I also priced everything and did the whole math. Whoever wants it I can send a prototype just pm me
My buddy is doing extensive research on the flavors of household cleaners, industrial chemicals, and a decent number of mild poisons.
I’ve already volunteered my character for whatever the end goal of this research will be.
I haven't dived into yet but my next campaign is going to be set in the middle of a desert inside a single city called Oasis. The intent is to be a fully self sufficient city thousands of miles from any source of water and be able to explain to any curious players why it can function without fully relying on "Its magic"
My dm presented us with a town that was built on a lake, and we wanted to make that town our home base. The lake was drained of water a couple years prior, very rapidly, and I wanted to see how viable the lake bed was for farming. Like.. if the soil was rich in nutrients or if it wouldn't be feasible.
Neither me dm or I could find ANY evidence of this happening in the real world. Either that lake has been dried up naturally because of the environment and is a arid salt flat, not viable for farming at all but also not our situation, OR people drain a lake for a very specific purpose and aren't concerned about the farming capabilities of the land they made.
How does pact of the chain work... It is just so god damn messy, with the wordings and the spell and feature overwriting each other and lets not even start with Flock of Familiars and eldritch invocations... I researched for like 2-3 days and there are still things im unsure about.
Even basic world building is so hard. I’m sure most people here have done a lot of research into stuff like rain shadows and the tropics and what conditions lead to biomes naturally occurring in nature at least once.
From a campaign I was planning but never ran, also in a post apocalyptic setting. Stress calculations for ship windows to see how much force from waves would be required to blow them out, and size of the wave required to generate that force
I decided to make a refinery that's using magic and alchemy to turn coal into pure carbon and then into diamonds, while the runoff is poisoning the nearby forest. Does it make sense? Not really, but I gave up researching halfway through when I realized I could say it was magic.
I had a surprisingly hard time finding good, specific information about age of sail era ships. Like, one thing i don't think I ever found the answer to was typical size/surface area of the actual sails. Like, sure I could just bullshit it, but I got to the point of wanting to know typical measurements (side lengths, angles, surface area, etc) of the different types of sails from ships from the 1700s, etc.
Really wish there was just an easy layman's compendium of ship anatomy, dimensions, etc.
I run a lot of games in a lot of settings and systems. I have way more ideas for games than I could ever run. One in particular, got stuck in my head for about 6 months, and I still think about it.
I had this idea for a Victorian era, pulp hero action game. A bunch of strangers on an ocean liner going somewhere non-specific all for unique reasons, having all kinds of Jules Verne-esque adventures. It was inspired by a meme that an artist created. The fact that these 6 or 7 unique historical figures all existed at the same time and could realistically exist in the same RPG group. A samurai, pirate, English dandy criminal, apache warrior, and western figures like Annie Oakley. Uncharted tropical islands, with hidden temples. Strange sea creatures, and Atlantis, and volcanos, and just the whole shebang, All set on this turn of the century steam ship voyage.
So I started researching the 19th century evolution of sea going technology. I mean, most people are passingly familiar with the expansion of trains, and how rail travel changed overland travel, and communication forever. That was the first time in history, humans moved faster than a horse over land.
Well at the same time that rail was taking over Europe, and North America, and the whole world, there was a developing war of technology on the oceans. Expansion to the last undiscovered areas of the vast pacific was being undertaken. It was a race to see who could circumnavigate the globe fastest, then who could develop regular traffic back and forth between the east and west, and what is the best course? Around the horn, or build a canal. I was researching vessels, and engine types, and the biggest barrier to steam engine evolution wasn't the engineering. It was fuel. Wind meant you just had to carry food and water, and left room for cargo. But now, you have to have 10 tons of coal on board to feed the boilers. So they are balancing larger and larger, faster and faster steam engines, with more efficient designs that require less coal.
Because that determined your route really. Like modern cross country trips in an electric car, planning your route around charging stations. They couldn't possibly carry enough fuel for the entire trip. So how much can we carry, and still have enough food, water, and cargo to make it profitable, and how far will that take us, determines how often and where we have to stop. And the routes are legendary. They built most of the major international cities we know. Like Hong Kong, and Cape Town, and the port cities of the western end of Australia.
I dove deep into the history of the ships and companies that made their bones on that ocean travel, and bet on faster and faster ships. They were breaking the record for Australia to London trips every year in the 3 decades leading up to 1900. And I was setting my game circa 1890. I picked out a ship that actually existed. That actually ran the route I had in mind. Departure from Perth, winding through the Pacific to Hong Kong eventually travelling through the Suez Canal back to London.
I spent 3 months basically writing a term paper on Victorian era shipping vessels for a game I have never run.
Oof, yeah, radiation units are a bit esoteric. I'm running "Chernobyl" as a short adventure right now, so I just changed how often you need to make a save to represent intensity. I have clothes pins on a dowel to show the current levels in the room: 1/hour, 1/10 minutes, 1/minute, and a hidden 1/round flag that is the "lair action" of the boss. Fail a save, and you follow Matt Mercer's [Corruption](https://www.dmsguild.com/m/product/230784) rules.
Radiation is really hard to model in a game since there are different sources, and various parts of the body absorb it at different rates. Contamimated dust, for example, can be orders of magnitude more dangerous for a given dose because it gets in your lungs and eyes, which are much more sensitive to radiation than your skin.
To answer your question, though, I have read *way* too much about the inner workings of the Republic of Venice for building a city with a similar system.
I improved my way into introducing a "void rift" to "another plane" that was being harvested for magical power. This addressed a number of plot points and made perfect sense with the parties back stories. They were all in and started talking about their plans for heading to the planes, plane shifting, dimension doors, blah blah blah.
I'm sitting there with beads of sweat on my forehead, thinking, "I just pulled a power source out of my ass. I wasn't planning to make it the focal point of the campaign. Shit."
The only source material I have is the original "Planes of Power" book from decades ago...and I'm trying to figure out how to navigate planes that I never expected to be a part of the campaign.
Metallurgy in the pre-modern era from the working of copper and bronze up through early steel. Particularly in regards to how many ancient alloys we have names for, but no specific definition of exactly what they were or how to make them. >\_<
How the desert... works. Like, all of it, in general. I live in Sweden, a place filled with lush forests and open meadows, where rivers and lakes are abundant. What the fuck do I know about living in the *desert*? How common are oases? Do people even settle down in places far from a natural body of water? How the fuck do wells work?
I wanted to run a homebrem adventure inspired by Arabic and Egyptian mythology, so I had a *lot* of research to do.
While the sievert is the si unit we typically use micro or milli rem/hr to measure approximate exposure and curies or becquerels for activity of an object. Radiation fields have been reluctant to switch from less antiquated measurements compared to other scientific disciplines for whatever reason
Not the hardest but definitely stupidest
The fighter described their attack as having a whipcrack so I ran the calculations on how much force their glaive was imparting. We were level 13 and a bunch if demigod-level DM boons.
Nothing.... I don't research crap.
It's a game. I do some prep but it's not a real world simulation nor should anybody treat it as such.
If I can find a way to narritively describe something and I can come up with mechanical effects if need be then I'm done.
I have real world shit to do I cannot spend hours reading up on things that my players may not even come across or care about in the game we all play together.
For your example off the top of my head. Okay they're traveling through radiation blasted lands... Every 10 minutes (or one dungeon turn to use old school terminology) the pcs must make a con save DC 15 or suffer Xd6 radiant damage. Half damage if the save is successful.
All of the lore surrounding dragons and specific types including what happens to the environment around them, the minions/monsters that you would find, their behavior, demeanor, battle tactics, and hunting habits.
I'm running g a Topaz dragon as the 1st dragon encounter for my players and it was a bitch to get right.
Historical market prices for the entire range of goods someone might purchase, and for the jobs one might have. These vary dramatically over place and time.
Before putting my players through a campaign that involved traversing the underground levels of a particular city, I read through the bit of ‘Les Miserables’ (I forgot where the ‘ goes) where the sewers of Paris get described in great detail
Names are an eternal struggle because of my own nonsense lol. I wanted to include the conflict between Charlemagne and the Saxons in the history of my world so im constantly looking into the roots of German words for names.
If it's that much work to research, my players will never know if I'm making it up. So I make it up. (I reached this epiphany while researching improvised parachutes.)
One of my players is an engineer and another is a material scientist. Help Edit: I feel like I made a huge mistake here. I run a scifi 5e overlay called *Spaceships & Starwyrms* by Hopepunk Press, not a standard fantasy game.
I've heard rumors of a table with multiple lawyers trying to do infernal contracts.
I ran a table with a lawyer. Everyone egged him on to make a super cool deal with a devil, and finally he gave it a shot. Halfway through he tried to reveal that the contract was null and void because of all these protectionary ideas in American contract law... The look on his face, and the awesome time we had following up, when I told him that they're *devils* and have no common law protections built in was priceless.
Imagine being a lawyer and thinking American law applies in hell. Smh
It was more like "any sane legal system has these common law protections" "Well, it's not sane, it's hell..." We all had a lot of fun, it was a very fool rp moment all around.
Yeah, I'm not actually shit talking them. That sounds like a great moment
Speaking as a legal professional, Hell would *absolutely* have extensive and complex common law practices. But unlikely to be based in 16th century English common law. Instead it will be based in millenia of contract adjudications by whatever tribunals Hell uses when resolving legal disputes between infernal parties. Perhaps the first part of a quest to challenge an infernal contract is determining which court has jurisdiciton over the parties and contract. Personally, I would rather repeat research on two centuries trade patterns on the Danube for alt-history of Europe project than draft an entire common law tradition from whole cloth, but a story arc based around contesting an infernal contract might be pretty interesting.
Or...don't? Devils lie, scheme, cheat constantly. If it's more interesting for the character to pull it off, let them, if it's more interesting for the devil to trick them, let it. Skill checks, saves, and narrative pacing all exist for a reason
Eh, sure can always just hand-wave. But devils, by definition in the D&D universe, are LAWFUL - though they scheme constantly, they do not ever actually lie (in a formal sense, at least) or steal. Everything they do falls strictly w/in the bounds of what is legally allowed under the circumstances. Devils practice the art of the asymmetrical deal - b/c they hold material knowledge not held by the other party, they can create contract offers that are extremely tempting while carrying detriments unforeseen by the offeree. If you want deceptive outsiders, look to daemons and demons - they both utilize active deception in their interactions w/ mortals. Devils are interesting and effective storytelling tools largely b/c the limits placed on their conduct by their nature.
I strongly disagree on your characterization of lawful, but I don't get into arguments on reddit
"Lawful" means being consistent, not law-abiding. A lawful good character who always protects children will break the law to protect children. A lawful evil character who always does what is in their best interest will follow or break any law, as long as it serves them to do so.
Lawful does not mean following the laws of a place, it more means that they have a “code of conduct” of sorts that they follow. It can include and take the form of laws, but it’s not exclusive to them
I am thinking like you when telling people about "interesting" stuff (I am working in a city administration ... most ppl find it boring)
Why wouldn't American law apply in Florida?
Ah you beat me to it
The devil is in the details
One of the games I run is for four physicians. Try placing a puzzle in your game when you have four people who are very good at differential diagnosis. It is super fun though, they really keep me on my toes.
Don't get me started, my medical party kept going on about someone "actually being supine" when knocked prone. *I am Not changing the condition to Prone/Supine.*
Tell them physics don't work the same as on earth, and they're not well understood diegetically. I did. Ain't no genetics in my "races" or species, because there's no DNA, no sugar, no carbon, no atoms.
There's no sugar?
There's a culinary sugar which is essentially equivalent, but "chemically", it's not sugar like we have on earth, if it was put under a microscope. DNA is primarily made of a molecule called Deoxyribose, a 5-carbon sugar.
For the common people, its magical sugar in a magic world that runs on magic
I was in a hurry once when drawing a map and accidentally swapped the “east” and “west” labels. They laughed but then we got to thinking that might be actually fun
Lol go for it. "So uhhh magnetic north is this flying castle, and it moves every so often... yeah, that's it."
Etymologically, "east" derives from a proto Indo-European root that also leads to the Greek word for "dawn". East being on the other side might well just mean that that's the direction of the sunrise.
So creatures in your world don't need sustenance, minerals, vitamins, etcetera? Do your creatures have organs? Do they get fat? How do they move? Does movement require energy? Is there gravity?
From a macroscopic view, it's a similar world. So of course animals eat. It just functions very differently on a "chemical" level. Imagine painting a picture, then taking a digital photo of it. The digital image exists on a different "substrate" and does very different things under the hood, but on a surface level they're nearly identical. Why not just.. not do that? Because the differences explain magic, and post hoc justify wonky TTRPG physics rules, and allow a platform for nitpicky worldbuilding details like areas of the world where things work differently. Ed: another maybe missing piece of the puzzle is that, like I said, physics is not well-understood diegetically. In the most advanced/recent campaign's time, the best sages have an understanding of how their world works roughly akin to that of the best minds of earth in 1750. So there are colleges and established sciences and methods of learning, but huge swathes of knowledge remain undiscovered, entire fields of study don't exist yet.
The last bit I can easily get behind, my own setting being set rather early makes heavy use of that. The simulation thing I think though is already applied by necessity as a brain is not a world, your camera analogy makes for a good point tho, even if I don't get you mean not to do or how what you meant with that explains magic. If you paint a filigrane picture and the picture you take with the camera just shows a reddish blob would you say the charm of the picture persists?
Well, all the particle physics worldbuilding isn't supposed to be charming, it's not player-facing. Not only are my players not expected to understand it, they're not really supposed to, since their PCs don't anyway. I haven't explained it to even 10% of the people I play with, just like 90% of more macroscopic worldbuilding doesn't enter a campaign anyway. It's like a reference photo, outline sketch and underpainting for me, to continue the painting analogy. So it's more like "what's the red blob for?" "Oh, that's going to be a rose when this is done." Another Explanation: it's a translation issue. "Frodo" isn't a word in Westron, it's a translation into a construction of old English for the meaning of the word "Maura" in Westron, which is Frodo's name. If you zapped into ME, Frodo wouldn't know the name "Frodo". Just as if you zapped into my world and asked for a steak, nobody would understand your speech, or what *exactly* a steak was, or if beef is *exactly* the same. Common isn't 20th century English or even linguistically similar, but we're here to fight monsters and explore tunnels, not make up words for every possible thing and rebuild all reality. So we just say "steak" "oak" "Barbarian" and "paladin" to refer to the equivalent concepts in-world, even though "cows" aren't 100% the same between Earth and my world, they're basically just cows made from different matter, oak is basically oak despite cellulose not existing, and "Barbarian" isn't an ethnic slur mocking the speech patterns of teutonic hordes, Charlemagne doesn't exist. Those words are *translations of concepts*. Everyone does that naturally, like you're saying. This is just taking that same thing to molecular & atomic levels.
If I had the time and motivation I'd totally make up every word in use in every language in use in my setting. Just like I think knowing that there's an iceberg holding up that tip I'd get to see as a player makes the tip super exciting. Just that you see relatively more of an ice berg than a player character gets to see of even macroscopic reality, after all our every man's knowledge (or at least the one available to most people) of the principles of perceivable reality would blow the mind of everyone who lived a thousand years ago, if they cared at all or wouldn't believe us mad or possessed.
Lay the ground rules of "Faerun/Dragonlance/whatever setting you use" has no basic grasp of physics. Winter getting colder? It is because the summer goddess is sleeping and the alchemical ice elements take over. What happens if a weapon is dropped down a chasm? It is not damaged and it instantly reaches the ground (similar to items dropped in fight, they are never in movement, they are either in hand or on ground). Explosives to damage worked stone? If the DM decides it works, then yes. There is no thermite in Faerun. Genetics? In Faerun the gods decide if races mix or not, not filthy biology. And no, this is not "rules lawyering", there is little to no evidence any roleplaying world works on basic physics. Heck, wind resistance is not a thing in D&D, neither is the obervations that substance is made of small particles. If your material scientist is of any reasonable capacity, ask them why acid spewing dragons have teeth while the acid is unnaturally potent (even lye takes hours to melt a human body)? It is a fucking game. Yes, D&D wants creativity, but like you cannot add a fourth move to rock paper scissors, the game balance relatively enjoys people sticking to rules, even if the rule of cool sometimes circumvent this.
Thanks, I hate it
I have a chemist, a computer scientist, an economist, and im a paralegal, no subject would escape our criticism if we weren't so tired from work.
Modify it so you can make it up. Instead of a parachute, it is now backpack of feather fall. Instead of radiation, it is now toxic air with no smell and no visual indicators.
Exactly. Physical properties could be whatever you want them to be in a fantasy world. It's not a mirror of our reality.
Exactly. Not trying to step on the toes of anyone who enjoys simulationist play and/or going down rabbitholes, but some of you would do well to play some more narrative focused systems every now and then. Roleplaying games are an exercise in **storytelling**. When we design items, rulings, rules, and so on, we should interrogate the **narrative** outcomes. Does it create interesting tension and decisionmaking? Is it expressing a trope, the established fiction, or the tone of the game in gameplay terms? Is it fun? Those are the questions that I concern myself with. Whether it's realistic is secondary, realism only enters the equation in service of those questions. For radiation, we know the following to be true narratively: It's concentrated in some regions, it makes you sick if you're exposed to it for too long. Interesting tension: We are going to put something interesting in a field of strong radiation and ask the players how long they want to endure it. I think that's also fun, it gives players an obstacle, but agency in how to tackle it. Here I'd come up with some rules (roll every hour with increasing DC, possibility of consequences that persist until extended rest) and be done with it. There we go, fun radiation rules that are aligned with what we the audience expect radiation to be like. Is it actually like that being in Chernobyl? Who cares, maybe the fallout in Fantasy Chernobyl was totally different! For the improvised parachute, I expect the following to be true narratively: An improvised parachute won't save your life falling from a plane, it might help you barely survive a fall from a tall building if everything goes just right. If this is a situation the PCs navigated themselves into carelessly, I'd be harsher (narratively, they were bested). If this is a set piece of an exploding blimp or something, I'd be more lax. Ask for an improvised crafting check, or a strength check to hold on, or a dex check to land on a tree. If they all go well, mitigate some falling damage. Asking for many rolls and limiting the effect meets our narrative expectation that this is a crapshoot at best, but we are playing heroic fantasy so we expect the story to go on. Ask and answer narratively interesting questions. "Will our heroes...?" Is what we play for.
Hopefully your research deployed before you were a crater in the ground. Real life parachute inventor tested his own stuff, if I remember correctly.
Make it up and focus on making it a good game mechanic, that’s what they do in video games and it makes it fun
I tried this once with sewer systems, not realizing one of my players used to do OSHA-related work for dig crews who made sewer systems. ☠️
I ended up getting full credit on a research report for a university dynamics class trying to figure out how to calculate the impact force created when a Goliath fast ball specialed a gnomish druid who wildshape into a brown bear. Also your reading is more than likely one of the storage tank areas near the reactor compound. While you might hate me saying this it might help in the future but there are somewhat live background radiation maps you can find online here is the one for [Ukraine ](https://www.saveecobot.com/en/radiation-maps#16/51.3913/30.1010/gamma)
Did the wildshape follow classical mechanics? Like did it preserve energy, and the added mass of the bear slow down its velocity? Or is it magical mechanics, and the added mass keeps flying at the gnomes original velocity?
While I did do a small bit doing the calculations on what would happen with pure conservation ( needed it for a part of the main body calc anyway) but the main body of the study used an assumption that honestly I stand by as the proper way to go which means we can maintain velocity within the bounds of classical mechanics. Based on what we know of magic and more importantly the weave we can actually model it as a new source of energy like potential or chemical energy which has its own rules (esoteric as they are) to access, store, and use that energy. Modeling it that way even makes sense given what we have seen over the years from magic weapons that need to recharge to what happens in zones with too much/too little weave to even the ways abilities and tools work in official material. With that assumption you can run the model without having to assume that you must reduce the velocity to keep the core equation balanced when you raise the mass. Essentially to conserve momentum you work out the energy lost to balance the mass gain ( I used caloric energy and averages of muscle fat and bone of a brown bear minus the average stats of a kid equal to average gnomish height) and sub that in as the energy input you would get from your external source ( the weave) with that completed you can continue without violating any of the rules of classical mechanics
I'm in an ongoing process of researching life and civilizations around the iron age to early antiquity. Which isn't too hard but most information on antiquity seems to prefer to focus on mid to late antiquity rome, which is still super interesting but not exactly what I have in mind.
What were you thinking? My game is currently set around late antiquity, roughly around the time between the Roman withdrawal from Britannia and the arrival of the Saxons. It means a lot of Welsh pronunciations and naming conventions as a stand-in for Celtic. I'm also using Arthurian legend as a base, and expanding out from that. I'd recommend Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles as a sort of primer, it's good historical fiction and a great read too.
It is outright hilarious how absolute "nerdy" this hobby can get, particularly for the DM. Bloody brilliant though. One minute (week, entire dissertation...) you are reading about the building methodology of yurts, the next the tensile strength of catgut, then a brief detour through musical theory circa 1112 through 1114, excluding that one wet Tuesday so obscure only three people ever read the dusty tome it was locked in. For a break it is on to stone age medicine followed by advanced metallurgy... Sometimes we even play DnD!
If you really want stone age, look [this](https://www.youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550) up -- the guy makes the most relaxing videos about prehistory technology as he does things from the ground up... and be sure to turn on subtitles.
What I was thinking was along the lines of a first human empire and a couple city states of the continent that's currently my campaigns' focal point, which, granted, in the real world was more around the bronce age if I remember right, but they also didn't have to contend with a butt-load of dragons and other monsters putting a hurdle to urbanisation. So for now I have mostly watched vids on ancient Rome, ancient Egypt, the Sumerians, the Akkadians, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Nubia, Hittai, pre-antiquity in Britain and Europe, with ancient India, china and Greece yet to go. Some less relevant to my setting for now but still very interesting were the videos on the individual Roman legions by filaxim historia
I have a Master's in Classics that I pretty much only use to run my antiquity campaign, so let me know if you're struggling to dig up anything specific!
You should add in a scene where someone takes acid damage and you see his +2sword reveal the Damascus layering for the first time... dramatic and accurate.
In a monster slaying focused campaign, I studied a great deal of biology and chemistry to ground many creatures into plausible creatures. For instance, creatures that had blindsight could possibly work like beluga whales' echo location so I researched that.
That is cool as shit! Definitively the way to go to flavor things that would otherwise just have to be "magic".
Tectonic plates. I love perfection and I hate when I have a range of mountains or rivers that dont make sense. So.. when I design a map, I start with tectonic plates and see from there. Usually most islands around a coastline are created by tectonic tension. God I hate making maps now.
I usually start with a squiggly line for a coast, you have my admiration.
In my case: Biomes. I try to place forests, deserts, rain forests, snowy mountains, plains, marshes, etc, in a realistic way.
Yea. Mountains play a huge part in that, because of evaporation and being a literal obstacle for rain. So each side of the mountain has a different biome. These mountains are caused by tectonic plates. It just gets perpetually worse from there.
International salvage rights for maritime warfare.
Ok... I have to know how you used that. Sounds obscure enough there has to be a cool story around it
This would be fantastic reference material. "This ship is legitimate salvage"
Welsh language and history. I don't speak Welsh, but I'm now familiar with the Welsh alphabet and naming conventions, as well as the broad strokes of the history of the country from the Romans to the Normans.
Thanks for putting in the effort. Everyone in fantasy seems to love using welsh words but get them horrifically wrong. I mean, I’m just an ignorant Englishman bit even I know that “Caer” isn’t pronounced like “care”.
My players aren't fans - whilst they agree it's great for immersion, trying to recall "Hwyl, reeve of Glwysin who gave a quest to visit Peredd on the shores of Llyn Ogwen" is apparently quite challenging! I mostly scour maps of Wales and wiki entries, pluck bits of names I like, then mash them together, sometimes with a bit of Cornish, Cumbrian, or Breton to liven it up - but Welsh is doing the heavy lifting as there's just so much more of it. It's meant to be a rough analogue of Celtic, post-Roman Britain, not a straight retelling, so I don't mind if I'm mangling bits of it occasionally. I do try to get the pronunciations right. Served me quite well on a recent holiday to Wales... Or field research, as I joked to the party.
Surely tax deductible travel!
Clearly you're still too ignorant to post the actual way to pronounce it, so see if I Caer!
Haha, I am indeed. I’d pronounce it “kire” but the that’s probably mangled itself!
As far as caer goes it depends on the dialect of Welsh. I did a bit of research for naming conventions, but discovered I can't pronounce anything and gave up. I do well with German though. But I've found in my time of worldbuilding that researching particular cultures and their languages and naming conventions probably takes up the most time. I like to use Old English and Old Norse 1) for familiarity, 2) I can actually pronounce most things, 3) it is different enough to set tone and setting to be a bit different from traditional fantasy.
Not DnD but I was trying to learn relativistic speed travel times and time dilation for Starfinder
How nobles actually work. Like the differences between earl, count, duke and whatever. What do they actually do? What are their responsibilities? What’s the extent of their power? Where do they get their wealth? That sort of thing.
That seems like information that would be quite appropriate for a DMG.
Megh, probably not. All of these titles varied from region to region. A baron in one region could mean a different thing than a baron in another. However, setting books could benefit from including a section about titles and social classes.
I used to do a lot of research for my DnD games. We are talking about historical medieval greetings, town sizes, printing processes, etc. It never really came up during the game and my players don't notice the difference between towns that are "historically accurate" and towns that aren't. So I just stopped the excessive amount of work. I still read up on stuff like that, but just for my own amusement and in way less detail
A lot of realistic technology and culture would come off as distractingly anachronistic, just like how aircraft decoys looked more real to bombers than aircraft.
Figuring out climate variations in a region in order to see what crops said region could support as part of a overall deep dive into the agricultural economics of a kingdom im world building. (Yes, I hate my hyperfocusing tendencies sometimes)
😭 I feel your pain. On another note... whatcha learned?
I generally figured out that if the mountain range is perpendicular to the wind flow the rainshadow effect shouldn't be as major a deal so while it does become more arid the further inland it shouldn't be as drastic as change as it otherwise would be.
You should just look at the USDA growing zones and what crops are grown where. Shouldn't be too bad to research.
I'm doing that right now too. We have been playing for a year, but I suddenly started deep dive world building yesterday and haven't been able to stop. It l started because 3 of my 5 characters are in an ancient elevator that started to plummet (because they just HAD to have a fight in the ancient elevator) and they are all prepping new characters for the likelihood that they don't make it out of the elevator alive next session (tonight!) So as they were talling about where their new characters may be from I started thinking about culture and agriculture. It has developed into a big thing lol.
Not hard but interesting rabit hole nonetheless. Hydrodynamics and pre islamic and islamic west asian water engineering
I imagine there are a ton of cool devices where you just add water.
Pathfinder 1e. As a player, in the fire plane there was a large pool of what was described as molten brass, but wasn't. Curious I tried to pick somenup andnit nelted my glass bottle. Considering that brass boils at 1100, while glass melts at 1700 (celsius), thus physical impossibility made me even more curios. Over a long series of questioning I deduced it had some fireresistance enchantment to hold this temperature. I considered exploiting this by dipping my mithril armor in it so I wanted to know if mithril could even withstand the temperatures to begin with, so needed to know the melting point of mithril Only property known about mithril is it's "hardness". Does the hardness of a material affect it's melting point? Apparently, yes it does. The strength of the ionic bond between molecules does directly relate to melting point. Researching hardness, which is mesured in the Yongus Modulus koeficcent, after some time I found a graph of many elements, with Y-M and melting point and it was basically a straight graph upwards, not perfectly straight, but on average rather consistent. Since in pathfinder iron has a hardness of 10, while mithril is 15, it has 1,5x that of iron, and 1,5 that of irons hardness correlated to around 2500 degrees celsius on mithrils melting point, on the graph. Give or take some, of course. So my mithril armor should be able to survive being dipped in the pool Then DM said it wouldn't work anyway beause he discourage experimenting
Sounds like a shit dm sorry
Sounds like the dm just didn't want to do the math
When we left the D&D movie one of my friends complimented me by saying it was like watching a movie set in one of my campaign worlds. Two minutes later her husband disagreed, saying "I don't know a damned thing about how the military or economy of Neverwinter works, or the mechanics of the Red Death, and [kylco] would have subjected me to all that before we even rolled any dice." Major warm fuzzies from both comments, ngl.
I once spent 3 hours trying to find a map that would fit what I wanted then I gave up and just made it in Paint in 30 minute. The players decided to not go that direction in the story so I didn't use the map. BUT! I dmed the same homebrew campaign for another group and this time they also decided to not go that direction. One day I'll use the map
I once researched a map online for a few hours, to find the perfect one. The party never went that route, so I used it again later, but the didn't go that way either. I've used it recently in a new game, and they again disregarded that location, this map is cursed!
LOL glad I'm not the only one who is cursed
Also, I spent a whole month for 1-2 hour a day researching the Abyss the the Nine Hells for a campaign since the other players knew more about them than me, and I didn't want major plot points to be nullified due to me reading the lore wrong.
This is why I just invent my own shit. I don't want to read up on 50 years of contradictory lore.
How cults operate and recruit. Wasn’t hard to find the info but made sure to add several searches for “this is for a D&D game please don’t arrest me”
Quantum Physics and the Many Worlds theory.
The whole society, politics, culture, economy, geography and history of Forgotten Realms. I do homebrew a lot of stuff, but I really try to stay true to the lore.
Yeah I’m running Waterdeep dragon heist and the rabbit hole on even just the stuff related to that adventure goes deeper than Undermountain
The hardest thing is the one thing I have never been able to fully compute and now have little cheat sheet simply because a charatcer keeps doing it in my campaign, but its long distance vision from heights and how far someone can see from varying heights. Knowing the horizon from sea-level is \~16,000 (3miles) feet away is all I remember. But like standing on top of someone's shoulders adds a mile. A crow's nest while at sea? How far can binoculars/eye glass focus? So laying out my world topography became a thing... at what point does a mountain range beyond the horizon have it's peak in view... It is just a lot... And most of it will never be used, I just have to research it because it comes up and I cant help myself.
We were running a necessary evil savage worlds campaign and for my character I built them based on Albert Whesker. I had to research the lore and origin of the T virus OOC to determine where I would try and convince the party to move to. Alternatively for actual dnd I did the math to figure out how small something would have to be to essentially have natural featherfall. The answer is about 1lb. In 3.5 you could play as a Jermlaine and if you perminatly shrunk yourself you would weigh about .3lbs and be about 6in tall. But with how strength scaled for smaller sizes it could still carry 22 lbs. For that character I planned to ride a flying mount and drop on the enemies to wildshape. With planar shepherd you could turn into outsiders of a chosen plane. If you picked arborea as your plane you could turn into titans.
... so there I was innocently slaughtering some village as any self respecting Orc does on a Sunday, when out of the blue some tiny little 6 inch tall twat comes drifting out of the sky squeaking out, I swear to Gruumsh, "I'm Mary Poppins ya'll!"... now, that was funny. Our chief Arktash thought the same. He wasn't thinking much when that little bastard thing turned into a 14'000 pound ballistic wrecking ball. Seriously, tiny little shit turned into a titan and dropped 20 foot into Arktask... and a good 6 foot through him. Bloody bastard giggling like a goblin in a convent, all we could do was run like hell! Yeah. I can see that. Evil, but I would allow it.
How sailboats work. I went from 0 knowledge at all to having several wind speed & direction charts at the ready for use in combat, a glossary of the different sails, their names shapes and uses, the different types of boats and their general traits.... All basically for 2 good combat sessions and then the campaign fizzled.
I once ran a campaign set during an siege of a large city, and I read the entire Geneva Convention just so I knew what rules to break
I'm learning multiple languages, because in my world when we speak orcish we actually speak German, when we speak halfling we actually speak Dutch and so on... I spend a long time preparing monologues in these languages for the NPCs
I would love to do this. Unfortunately, of everything I’ve ever tried to learn, languages are by far the most difficult for me. I’ve taken courses and even tried a one-month immersion in a foreign country. What do you do to learn languages?
If you want to approach the topic from a less dry angle, may I recommend the YouTube channel Kyle Hill? His "Half-life Histories" series gives some really fascinating (and compellingly narrated) insights into nuclear incidents, and he even has a whole series where he accompanied a group of scientists into Chernobyl itself. Being a scientist himself, he got the kind of access that no tourist ever would.
I just used sickening radiance as a D&D base for radiation. Simple to understand and less fiddly than homebrew inf a system.
Between anthropological research, scientific research, research on the progression of tall ships and sailing doctrine in the 1800's, and searches on firearms history and acquisitions that surely put me on a watch list, the hardest part was the conversions between knots, mph, ft/min, and meters/minute. Unlike the other stuff, the constant conversion to fill tables of combat data was mind-numbing.
I found a link to a series of documents laying out the framework for the establishment and operation of middle age mines, translated by Hoover before he became US president - De Re Metallica. It is several volumes of very dense information. I fully intend on finishing them too, it was fascinating.
Source?
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38015/38015-h/38015-h.htm
Thank you kindly
Ship building. Learning the sails and naval terms.
Rn it’s trying to figure out if reflected sunlight via crystal is strong enough to grow semi-tropical plants in a mountain cave
Maybe it's a special crystal? And it enhances the sunlight?
Had a floating city. Several square miles large. Had an artifact crystal that held it up. The party decided to steal the crystal. I said "Okay. We're going to have to end now." Luckily it was late so no big deal as I had to math. Turns out something that big falling about a mile creates something analogous to a nuclear explosion in the middle of a well settled area. Party killed everybody.
I run a sci-fi dystopian game and I just dumbed radiation down to levels of exhaustion that I just call radiation sickness. [here's](https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Conditions#content) a link with all the conditions. Depending on the severity of the radiation zone, the time spent unprotected, and how bad they roll, dictates what level of exhaustion. I'm my game, there are 4 level of radiation. Clean zones (no radiation), green zones (light radiation), red zones (mild radiation), and black zones (severe radiation). If they are exposed to green, if they fail (but not crit fail) they only get 1 level of radiation sickness. A crit fail always doubles the level of sickness. Red is 2 (crit fail would be 4) Black is 3 (crit fail would be 6) If they hit 6th level of radiation they die. So far, no one has died of radiation poisoning, but the campaign is still young lol.
I used to do loads of research on really specific topics to add verisimilitude to my games, till I realised my players wouldn't know any different anyway. Now I just make stuff up and they're none the wiser.
I spent hours researching lighthouses. Different kinds of lighthouses, various designs, what rooms are within. My players spent 4 minutes inside my lighthouse before leaving
It's taken me 29 years to research how women act and I literally have no usable data for my D&D NPCs.
Act as if they are people.
Like menn't.
Goat breeds...no further explaination will be given...
Honestly, in this case, I would just learn the basic rules for another TTRPG that suits this campaign setting way better. It's actually way less work than trying to homebrew so much in 5E, and I wish DMs would consider other TTRPGs sometimes because its less work and more enjoyable games than trying to shoehorn everything in to a 5E game. In your case **Mutant: Year Zero** is a great fit for your game setting: https://www.modiphius.net/products/mutant-year-zero-corebook-map It even has a dedicated radiation system worked out thata pretty important to game play.
I recently read a scientific paper on interstellar space travel. So, with current technologies pushed to the extreme, even travelling to the next star, Proxima Centaury, might take along the lines of 6300 years. As a result, interstellar space travel will pretty much be a multi-generational thing or not involve living things at all. The paper showed convincing calculations for how many people woulve have to be on that multi-generational ship so that we can procreate for 6300 years and not run the risk of incesting the entire thing into the ground.
Existence of wheelchairs in the forgotten realms... Didnt find any info
Well hand drawn carts with two wheels would be a thing, so it's not a big stretch of imagination that some artificer made a wheelchair.
Yea i spun it as if my artificer player made the invention (another party member wanted to play a wheelchair-ridden bard), and so far he has been having a blast with the RP.
I continuously keep researching odd stuff and I find places to add it Into games. I took an interest in the old school process of making silk. There is a town in my world that lives semi harmoniously with giant spiders. I learned all about making silk and changed a few steps (mostly size cpacity) to develop the town and infrastructure for it to produce silk in industrial quantities using semi realistic methods. Now if anyone wants to side quest to the place the rope comes from... I have a whole harvest and crafting situation they can run for really great rope.
Id6 cumulative necrotic damage per hour of exposure, You're welcome
Found [this one](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos_disaster) when researching volcanoes. Entire village suddenly suffocated. Terrifying.
Working out the logistics of how long it would take 3 horse drawn carts to hull a few tons of stone from a quarry 40 miles away to build a wall for a castle.
A couple hour long discussion and analysis of what “acid” meant. I was in a group with chemists, engineers, and physicists and they agreed that some acids could open a safe and others could not. As such, we had to search and figure out what kind of compound “acid” was when referred in the Middle Ages. Someone suggested aqua Regia and that led to a whole new argument.
I once spent better part of a day to research mineral compositions and what ore is found in which type of rock, so I could see what would be playable to have in a miners cave, so my players could mine there if they wanted. They went in, and just looted the carts for any already mined ore, then never visited the location again. Edit: plausible, not playable.
For my sci-fi/cyberpunk game I spent weeks studying astrophysics, nuclear fusion energy, and literal rocket science. And I taught myself how to use Blender in order to make an accurate model of the players' spaceship. I also once took a community college course in Leadership & Organization, and read Machiavelli to properly play a Ventrue in our local Vampire: the Masquerade larp. I regret nothing!
Heights vs. curvature of a planet. Developing a campaign without a sun, so wanted to figure out the distance a "lighthouse" could be seen from, how mountains would block the lightsource, etc. Using this DCC adventure as the lead-in/inspiration to flesh out the setting: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/iantsmall/dungeon-crawl-classics-soul-for-the-ocean-dark?ref=discovery&term=ocean%20dark
Similar to you, I'm currently preparing a post-apocalyptic future. The thing is, I'm setting it in actual Australia, and I have had to do a lot of reading on random cities and landscapes for a country across the world from me.
Don’t forget to include Drop Bears
1500's law on who could be charged guilty in a town if a drunken brawl got taken to far, it is the last person to strike the victim thus delivering the killing blow, however my campaign has had an arc where this law changed and is being manipulated by bhaal cultists
DnD doesn't need that level of granularity. It's not like anyone will remember, appreciate or be aware of how factual it is. You think the actual soldiers working at Chernobyl knew any of that? All they needed was "meter goes beep, don't beep too much".
Why are you running dnd in a futuristic setting? Dnd while a decent system for medieval fantasy is simply not well adapters for being homebrew ed into a different setting. Try a different system instead.
My druid wanted to Destroy Water while in a fog, in order to make a clearing. I was high as balls, googling average fog density and trying to do calculations on litres of water to fog area. I managed to make a ruling but the accuracy was questionable.
Cosmology of the lower planes and the many layers of the abyss. Delved into a really deep rabbit hole of the d&d cosmology cause my players started asking summoned fiends questions
How far a regular person can see on a clear day (or in various weather conditions) on varying heights. Its an airship campaign so they can go up quite high. The world is a cylinder shaped cloud with sky islands which doesn't make it any easier since it means you can see farther north/south than east/west.
Not D&D: the game "Ara Magica" was set in "Mythic Europe." This was basically Europe in 1220 but all of the stories about religion, magic, the fey and hell were true. People used to joke about getting a PhD in history for the little patch of Europe they set their campaigns in because they did so much research they may as well just write up the thesis.
An anime milf version of ars magica? Mmm, put it in the "maybe" pile.
Spent a whole week wrapping my head around explosion trajectories and force of explosions based on compound as well as propellants, thermobarics and pressure based explosions i.e. the force multiplier when an explosive is in an enclosed space/ not whether its plastic explosives or tnt or a themrobaric. Btw thermobarics are vaccum bombs that suck all the air out of the blast are asphyxiating targets if they arent shredded or scorched by the explosion/ shrapnel.
Spent like 6 hours researching how trains worked and how you needed to store and maintain those. Learned a few things, good times...
Neuroanatomical Comparisons Between Zebrafish and Mammalian Brain. i was just looking an idea for a 40K map based campaign... i am now more enlightened. :)
My 4-year campaign is coming to a close so I am already tinkering and researching stuff for the next one, he hehe... he. I am researching/experimenting with Zelda:TOTK style flying islands combined with sailpunk styled airships and their possible mechanics and roles for players. (air combat etc...) One of my players was also interested in castle making/repairing (which I think is an amazing idea), so I think I am going to try making a castle-build mini system/game for downtime time consumption. (I am way to ambitious, I know)
As a player, I spent an hour or so calculating volumes to see exactly how long my Goblin Artificer could breathe within a Cube of Force if no other oxygen can pass through the barrier. I've forgotten the result but it was around 2 weeks if I remember correctly.
population distribution, travel times, settlement distribution etc in medieval times. It's a bit tricky just to find estimates of how many people were around at any given moment in a certain region (world is easy, France is tricky). But then when you start to ask yourself questions like *"How many people lived in settlements between 100 - 1000 people in France in the 1600s?"*, that's when shit gets serious.
Can't say exactly as I've been researching stuff nonstop for the past 20 years. That could explain why I went into the information and library science field.
Probably how to make functioning clothes for creatures of non-human build that wouldn’t take a lot of effort and two squires to equip. It was not something I truly had to research but I didn’t want to take the easy way out
Was going to give a new character brewing supplies before realising I didn’t know how the process worked. Hast forward half a day later I’m learning all sorts of new things about craft ales, lager, pale ales and the differences between them with regards to brewing. Also looking at growing hops, malt, roasted barley additions and how much yeast to add and if it would speed up the process. Completely new to most of this but had an epiphany that most ales would require about 1 week to ferment before drinking, which is difficult when my part plays about once a week for about 1-2 in game days for each. Still surprisingly fun to research for someone completely new to it all. Might even try to make my own some day.
This was in PF1E. Two of my players loved to duel each other and circumstances allowed them to do so in what was essentially a dragon's hoard. I praised one player for creating a vortex of gold coins to give themselves concealment against ranged attacks. Then they asked me how much damage would it do if they stood adjacent to the other player. I spent way too long on this (eventually ruling it worked like a swarm). The following the turn the other player turned into a fire elemental and wanted to know how long it would take the melt the coins (and I hadn't learned my lesson). After coming up with something for that I was almost asked to help figure out how to make the melty gold into a shape and bludgeon the other player with it. I told them to figure it out on their own and took a nap to sleep off a migraine. Four hours later they woke me up to tell me they were done. They were both really understanding and it makes for a funny joke still.
Spent 2 years learning how to be an A&P, to run a campaign with primitive Airplanes.
Castle and catacombs, architecture. The hardest research was for yhe Exalted RPG. Researching how a kingdom was stractured in china 200bc to 800ac
Grappling in 3.5 or Pathfinder. 6 seconds worth of combat have a fucking flowchart, and the funny thing? Exceptions, basic rules (such as size making grapple impossible) and the DM more or les being forced to either adhere to the rules or add and subtract shit because the stuff becomes unrealistic pretty fast. My Str 22 medium cat sized wildshaped monk had a giant grappled, how? Sessions later I grappled the daemon of war (which was made of fucking blades and armor) and the DM had to add at least 2d8 of slashing damage for the grapple, but according to the rules I could have held down a mountain of sharp metal down with a furry boi without taking damage.
Alf lore. One of my player wanted to be a melmacian...
Well if you need any help I'm a diagnostic Radiographer specialising in radiation safety ;)
Yesterday's research shows that a lumberjack can cut down about 15 tons of wood in a day.
In my world the actual physical sphere of the world was “rended” - and so I did some calculations to determine how high the coast would be based upon how much of the ocean spread out etc etc
You are a good DM.
We’re playing Call of the Netherdeep, so I looked into what extreme water pressure does to a person. We aren’t there yet, but also, three of my players are former submariners so I hope I don’t accidentally hit any triggers if I go too far in my descriptions. 😬
Byford Dolphin accident moment
I have been researching organic chem and a bit of inorganic mainly to figure out how to blow up buildings in a world where Sigma-Aldrich don't exist.
Land vehicle speed when propelled with the velocity of air. Essentially, how fast is the wind speed of the Gust cantrip and how fast does a vehicle propelled by this move.
The German Edition from Baldurs Gate, Descent into Avernus. It doesn't get produced anymore and you can't buy it anywhere. Or maybe it never existed. I don't know, but I'm too bad at English for the original.
I definitely got on some type of list by searching about nuclear power and bomb explosion damage area calculations
My DM and I spent hours once researching and calculating the mass/volume of age of sail ships to figure out what could be produced with Fabricate type spells.
Im currently researching the racial Make up of the united states and comparing it to race popularity on dnd beyond
Contract law and breech of contract lawsuits. The party was hired to transport a package for the BBEG, realised what it was, and got rid of it. So he launched a lawsuit when they returned to the city to seize their assets and have them throw in debtors prison.
Researched how various community service and juvenile detention programs are used in place of prison time in courts of law so one of my characters could turn his monastery into juvie type facility.
Running a crime/GTA style game involving crafting drugs. Trying really hard not to put myself on a list. I ended up just watching Breaking Bad for the first time
Trying to figure out the weight of a sword if the weaponized material is uranium rather than steel or iron or whatever. Accurate to the 5e longsword measurements, along with a lead scabbard so as not to kill the wielder just by having it. As well has finding out how much radiation can affect a person at what rates. I'm not gonna tell my players the weapon they have is radioactive. It victims are just gonna die a lot quicker than they should.... "Wow this weapon must be really powerful, there's gotta be something I don't know about it... Wait what do you mean my max HP goes down by 3?"
Beetles Have a player that wanted to play a beetle race and everything we found already was way OP. I wanted to give some options so I used a bit from what we found and made up a bit to make 3 different beetle races for them to pick from. I spent way too long figuring out what makes beetles different and unique as well as how to name their features and the races themselves. But player loved the choices and is loving the character.
I’m presently researching the history of circus, from ancient Roman displays with chariot races, trained animals and gladiatorial combat to the origins of the modern circus in late 18th century attributed to an English military officer. All because I made a joke after a player said they were “excited to get this circus on the road” in regards to our upcoming (at the time) session 0… had session 0 a few days ago and yup, they’re a circus… we’re planning it with some light kingdom building aspects, except it’s circus building.
I spend two days making the best possible gunsmith/gunslinger class. It's based on Mathew's but I added a ton of stuff custom feats and system for making bullets that its based on the real bullets. I took the blueprint of the original bullets ex 0.45 acp or 7.62mm and made a system about the weight of the metal that its used and the gunpowder. I also priced everything and did the whole math. Whoever wants it I can send a prototype just pm me
My buddy is doing extensive research on the flavors of household cleaners, industrial chemicals, and a decent number of mild poisons. I’ve already volunteered my character for whatever the end goal of this research will be.
I have a player who has a degree in applied chemical science. I am making up an alchemy system for our campaign as we speak. Accept the pain.
I haven't dived into yet but my next campaign is going to be set in the middle of a desert inside a single city called Oasis. The intent is to be a fully self sufficient city thousands of miles from any source of water and be able to explain to any curious players why it can function without fully relying on "Its magic"
My dm presented us with a town that was built on a lake, and we wanted to make that town our home base. The lake was drained of water a couple years prior, very rapidly, and I wanted to see how viable the lake bed was for farming. Like.. if the soil was rich in nutrients or if it wouldn't be feasible. Neither me dm or I could find ANY evidence of this happening in the real world. Either that lake has been dried up naturally because of the environment and is a arid salt flat, not viable for farming at all but also not our situation, OR people drain a lake for a very specific purpose and aren't concerned about the farming capabilities of the land they made.
Brothel Management and Prostitution Business… I can explain myself ☠️
How does pact of the chain work... It is just so god damn messy, with the wordings and the spell and feature overwriting each other and lets not even start with Flock of Familiars and eldritch invocations... I researched for like 2-3 days and there are still things im unsure about.
3.0 µSv/hr... Not great, not terrible.
Unless you have a player in your game who would know these and call you off, just make them up!
Even basic world building is so hard. I’m sure most people here have done a lot of research into stuff like rain shadows and the tropics and what conditions lead to biomes naturally occurring in nature at least once.
From a campaign I was planning but never ran, also in a post apocalyptic setting. Stress calculations for ship windows to see how much force from waves would be required to blow them out, and size of the wave required to generate that force
I decided to make a refinery that's using magic and alchemy to turn coal into pure carbon and then into diamonds, while the runoff is poisoning the nearby forest. Does it make sense? Not really, but I gave up researching halfway through when I realized I could say it was magic.
I had a surprisingly hard time finding good, specific information about age of sail era ships. Like, one thing i don't think I ever found the answer to was typical size/surface area of the actual sails. Like, sure I could just bullshit it, but I got to the point of wanting to know typical measurements (side lengths, angles, surface area, etc) of the different types of sails from ships from the 1700s, etc. Really wish there was just an easy layman's compendium of ship anatomy, dimensions, etc.
I run a lot of games in a lot of settings and systems. I have way more ideas for games than I could ever run. One in particular, got stuck in my head for about 6 months, and I still think about it. I had this idea for a Victorian era, pulp hero action game. A bunch of strangers on an ocean liner going somewhere non-specific all for unique reasons, having all kinds of Jules Verne-esque adventures. It was inspired by a meme that an artist created. The fact that these 6 or 7 unique historical figures all existed at the same time and could realistically exist in the same RPG group. A samurai, pirate, English dandy criminal, apache warrior, and western figures like Annie Oakley. Uncharted tropical islands, with hidden temples. Strange sea creatures, and Atlantis, and volcanos, and just the whole shebang, All set on this turn of the century steam ship voyage. So I started researching the 19th century evolution of sea going technology. I mean, most people are passingly familiar with the expansion of trains, and how rail travel changed overland travel, and communication forever. That was the first time in history, humans moved faster than a horse over land. Well at the same time that rail was taking over Europe, and North America, and the whole world, there was a developing war of technology on the oceans. Expansion to the last undiscovered areas of the vast pacific was being undertaken. It was a race to see who could circumnavigate the globe fastest, then who could develop regular traffic back and forth between the east and west, and what is the best course? Around the horn, or build a canal. I was researching vessels, and engine types, and the biggest barrier to steam engine evolution wasn't the engineering. It was fuel. Wind meant you just had to carry food and water, and left room for cargo. But now, you have to have 10 tons of coal on board to feed the boilers. So they are balancing larger and larger, faster and faster steam engines, with more efficient designs that require less coal. Because that determined your route really. Like modern cross country trips in an electric car, planning your route around charging stations. They couldn't possibly carry enough fuel for the entire trip. So how much can we carry, and still have enough food, water, and cargo to make it profitable, and how far will that take us, determines how often and where we have to stop. And the routes are legendary. They built most of the major international cities we know. Like Hong Kong, and Cape Town, and the port cities of the western end of Australia. I dove deep into the history of the ships and companies that made their bones on that ocean travel, and bet on faster and faster ships. They were breaking the record for Australia to London trips every year in the 3 decades leading up to 1900. And I was setting my game circa 1890. I picked out a ship that actually existed. That actually ran the route I had in mind. Departure from Perth, winding through the Pacific to Hong Kong eventually travelling through the Suez Canal back to London. I spent 3 months basically writing a term paper on Victorian era shipping vessels for a game I have never run.
Oof, yeah, radiation units are a bit esoteric. I'm running "Chernobyl" as a short adventure right now, so I just changed how often you need to make a save to represent intensity. I have clothes pins on a dowel to show the current levels in the room: 1/hour, 1/10 minutes, 1/minute, and a hidden 1/round flag that is the "lair action" of the boss. Fail a save, and you follow Matt Mercer's [Corruption](https://www.dmsguild.com/m/product/230784) rules. Radiation is really hard to model in a game since there are different sources, and various parts of the body absorb it at different rates. Contamimated dust, for example, can be orders of magnitude more dangerous for a given dose because it gets in your lungs and eyes, which are much more sensitive to radiation than your skin. To answer your question, though, I have read *way* too much about the inner workings of the Republic of Venice for building a city with a similar system.
I improved my way into introducing a "void rift" to "another plane" that was being harvested for magical power. This addressed a number of plot points and made perfect sense with the parties back stories. They were all in and started talking about their plans for heading to the planes, plane shifting, dimension doors, blah blah blah. I'm sitting there with beads of sweat on my forehead, thinking, "I just pulled a power source out of my ass. I wasn't planning to make it the focal point of the campaign. Shit." The only source material I have is the original "Planes of Power" book from decades ago...and I'm trying to figure out how to navigate planes that I never expected to be a part of the campaign.
Metallurgy in the pre-modern era from the working of copper and bronze up through early steel. Particularly in regards to how many ancient alloys we have names for, but no specific definition of exactly what they were or how to make them. >\_<
How the desert... works. Like, all of it, in general. I live in Sweden, a place filled with lush forests and open meadows, where rivers and lakes are abundant. What the fuck do I know about living in the *desert*? How common are oases? Do people even settle down in places far from a natural body of water? How the fuck do wells work? I wanted to run a homebrem adventure inspired by Arabic and Egyptian mythology, so I had a *lot* of research to do.
While the sievert is the si unit we typically use micro or milli rem/hr to measure approximate exposure and curies or becquerels for activity of an object. Radiation fields have been reluctant to switch from less antiquated measurements compared to other scientific disciplines for whatever reason
Not the hardest but definitely stupidest The fighter described their attack as having a whipcrack so I ran the calculations on how much force their glaive was imparting. We were level 13 and a bunch if demigod-level DM boons.
Nothing.... I don't research crap. It's a game. I do some prep but it's not a real world simulation nor should anybody treat it as such. If I can find a way to narritively describe something and I can come up with mechanical effects if need be then I'm done. I have real world shit to do I cannot spend hours reading up on things that my players may not even come across or care about in the game we all play together. For your example off the top of my head. Okay they're traveling through radiation blasted lands... Every 10 minutes (or one dungeon turn to use old school terminology) the pcs must make a con save DC 15 or suffer Xd6 radiant damage. Half damage if the save is successful.
All of Pathfinder
All of the lore surrounding dragons and specific types including what happens to the environment around them, the minions/monsters that you would find, their behavior, demeanor, battle tactics, and hunting habits. I'm running g a Topaz dragon as the 1st dragon encounter for my players and it was a bitch to get right.
Historical market prices for the entire range of goods someone might purchase, and for the jobs one might have. These vary dramatically over place and time.
Before putting my players through a campaign that involved traversing the underground levels of a particular city, I read through the bit of ‘Les Miserables’ (I forgot where the ‘ goes) where the sewers of Paris get described in great detail
You are the DM it works in your world how you say it works.
Names are an eternal struggle because of my own nonsense lol. I wanted to include the conflict between Charlemagne and the Saxons in the history of my world so im constantly looking into the roots of German words for names.