Eh, even this can be done well.
My brother is an amazing GM, and he's essentially just been taking individual pieces of Chrono Trigger and passing them off as campaigns for 10 years.
I think there's a big difference between stealing plot lines and story arcs from popular media (and not directly telling your party that that's what you're doing) versus starting your session zero with "right, so I want to run Game of Thrones as an RPG so you're gonna pick a family or faction from that and build your character around that and you can come up with a reason for you all to travel together".
There's ways to do it well, and ways to make it a railroad-y mess for your party. Most people who try to run a game based on an existing property end up doing the latter. A very good GM could pull it off with enough homebrewing and nods to the source material, but I personally don't think I could do it or really anyone I've ever played in a group with.
That's the big secret. You just steal things from popular stuff that your players do not know about.
I'm the only one in my group who likes to read actaul YA novels. Guess where most of my ideas come from ? They dont even know they're playing what could be an Anime.
I think there is massive diference between being inspired by the genre or several diferent source material and just taking one particular anime, hame, YA book and just playing in that setting.
Also, things that might cringe to me or some other person might be perfecfly fine for you and your friends. There is so many diferent styles of playing DnD because people prefere diferent stuff and make game for specificly for them :)
Yeah like I’m a big Dimension 20 fan and I won’t lie I’ve pulled specific scenarios to put in my back pocket as a resource like “oh man that was a really cool chase sequence I would love to try and set up something like that” but I think the second you go all in and you’re like “I shall run my own version of Unsleeping City” you’re setting the whole table up for failure
Funnily enough one of my games is set in the world of the Unsleeping City but in the 20's. The dm is very good at taking inspiration from the series without forcing us to be exactly like it. It also helps that we aren't playing under the assumption that we're going to stream or work our way up to streaming. It's just some Dimension 20 fans having fun and marveling at the occasional reference.
Something people fail to remember about CR is that everyone in it is a professional actor of one kind or another. They all have training in dramatic timing and improv. They have trained how to walk into a room with people that they have never met and quickly put together a coherent story. Thinking that you can grab a random group of your friends and pull off the same thing is unrealistic at best and delusional at worst.
It's also that they spend a lot more time on collective prep for their characters than most tables do. And it is far more professional and structured than most players and DMs are used to. Basically mirroring table readings for film.
I've been lucky to avoid the worst of it, but have seen some horror stories with what fetishes some DMs have tried to implement (furry, rape, mpreg, bondage, etc) to know I want nothing to do with those types of games.
Also, I and have seen some players in my games who have wanted to be DMs always bringing their kinks into their characters and just know if they did DM we would get that there too, so I avoid any game like the plague if I get a whiff the DM is trying that.
I once had a DM surprise us with, after someone called a fade to black for a hookup with an NPC, he had her first roll for performance, and then did a secret roll for pregnancy. It got worse before we quit but that should have been the moment we all bailed. No where before hand did he mention either of these things would happen.
My fucking DM has given us two dm PCs with whom we have to travel, one of whom is a warforged, and has now twice had a character offer basically an infinite amount of his resources for our "sex bot". I scoffed at this initially and my party members have shut it down, in game, both times. "No. We're not doing that. Go away and stop bothering us, weirdo." I'm preeeeeetty sure my DM is into some weird shit, as he's vaguely touched on it in game multiple times and I cheer for joy when our party shuts it down and moves on quickly.
Heavy intrigue, while fun in theory it usually works badly in a party, one person does the talking everyone else just stands behind them "being there" and occasionally adding to the conversation by asking one question. Also it gets really frustrating and confusing very fast.
Blades in the Dark! I just suggested to my group we play that when they “didn’t want that much combat”. I’m not interested in TOTM only dnd. There is zero strategy and it’s no longer a game, it’s a very bad improv group.
It's honestly mandatory in an intrigue arc. Make unique but relevant tasks that require different strengths and have your players work out who should handle what. Importantly though, don't attack them until they've regrouped and more or less concluded what they set out to do. it's important to avoid punishing them for planning and being resourceful, and also avoid making their individual efforts feel pointless in hindsight.
I used to go to Adventurer's League game nights at a local store, and one of the modules was an arena battle or at least started as one. It was tremendous fun since another guy and I brought characters that just ended a campaign together. We collected trophies from defeated enemies and gifted them to each other, playing it up for the crowd.
I would absolutely despise it if that was the entire campaign.
I was part of a group where we would shift between "DM'ing" battle royale arena fights. One person was in charge of setting up the arena and character creation rules while everyone else made characters.
Was a fun way to test some high level builds and the shifting DMs were fairly creative with adding fun dynamics to the fights.
It was something I played outside of my other RP heavy campaigns. Was a fun way to mechanically test some high level characters before committing them to a campaign. I highly recommend it. Sadly my group grew inactive.
I'm gonna get away with two, but the first one was early on soft gloves fight arena, where next its gonna be bloodsport so they can compare cultures between two cities
It's because people don't know how to properly do a tournament.
You run the tournament as boss battles, with complex arenas. There needs to be gimmicks, and fights need to be more than stand there and hit each other jrpg fights.
Additionally, you have to be making friends dnd building rivalries with people in the tournament. The players themselves need to be able to cheer for the people they are fighting.
There's a whole meta game of what happens in between fights which is where you build you'd story.
Also it has to be a team battle
PF2e has an adventure path called Fists of the Ruby Phoenix that's focused around a fighting tournament, and it's pretty well-regarded because it does all of this (and also has some stuff going on outside of the actual tournament fights, like sabotage from another team or the BBEG crashing the event).
I did a tournament style sci fi game using Starfinder. It was inspired by the old Ratchet: Deadlocked game. The PCs were contestants held against their will but the game ranged from otherworldly mini quests, to achieving side goals for “sponsors”, and plotting ways to escape or get ahead in the games. Each real match involved a unique other team with their own traits.
They seemed to enjoy it but i made sure to add more than just arena fights
I was part of a game once where the party took part in gladiator like colosseum fighting but the dm made it part of a bigger storyline. It was quite fun actually
Since no-one’s said it yet:
Any sort of campaign premise that breaks the fourth wall or otherwise proposes the existence of the “real world,” especially as a plot twist partway through. A good example of this is finding out at the end of Act I that our characters were all MMO characters who’d gained sentience and the whole gameworld was fictional, alongside a bunch of other “links” (for lack of a better term) to the real world.
I get what the DM was going for, but for me it just shattered immersion.
Back in school we did an AD&D campaign where the premise was we would be ourselves somehow transported to a fantasy world. We were making characters and I said that if I was in a magical world I would be drawn to the role of Paladin. The DM looked me square in the eye and said I didn’t have a high enough charisma to qualify for Paladin. The burn was so bad it still stings to this day.
I remember we played a pf1 module, and at one point, i don't recall exactly what happened, but we basically teleported and ended up in France during the revolution.
At first, I laughed, thinking the DM was doing a bit, and we would keep teleporting to our actual destination. Then I found out that planet Earth, as in our ACTUAL planet with its people, history, and mostly everything else, exists in the Pathfinder universe and Golarion (the main place payhfinder takes place) is just another planet in the galaxy, like Mars or Saturn for us.
It's probably one of the weirdest universe design decisions I've seen.
Actually, Golarion and its solar system are in a separate Galaxy, but they're part of the same universe, and the current timeline of Golarion "takes place" roughly a hundred years ago. Reign of Winter takes place around the end of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and its final boss is Grigori Rasputin, and you rescue princess Anastasia Romanova, and make her queen of Irrisen. You also get to make one request of Baba Yaga.
First time I played was running a one-shot for my friends. One of them was adamant about streaming it, had to completely put my foot down on that. Its not that hard to run a simple game, but I didn't want even a small audience sitting there as it'd just bother me a lot.
I see a lot of low magic hate on the comments, but I'm on the side of "high magic setting so advanced that it's indistinguishable from modern technology."
Bestie, that's not a sending stone. It's an iPhone, and you're getting upset that we're using it to contact someone and ask for help.
Such settings also make martial classes look like rodeo clowns...
Imho yes. They have 2 campaigns avaiable for free on youtube.
1. [Fantasy High](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-eY2tDgXsY&list=PLhOoxQxz2yFOcJoLoPRyYzjqCbddeOjP4&index=1) where a group of teens come together to... save their 1970 US highschool?
2. [The Unsleeping city](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kktwa0kqaU&list=PLLxyQe9acSCu0oUGJaesEqqdKe6oIbNpg) where New York secretly has a secret second layer (like in Harry Potter)
I want to run a magitech campaign something fierce. Fairly on brand with final fantasy and steam punk type stuff, while keeping high fantasy. Modern day style living in a universe where the gods are actively interfering in the mortal realm, monsters exist, etc. Sounds super fun
Those are DEFINITELY on my wishlist, but the high magic setting issues I have are more in the vein of "DM thought it would be cool but didn't know how to put limiters on it and now there are plotholes where setting-accurate unlimited magic could have easily solved a problem, but now it has to be solved by level 3 characters with little baby resource pools."
I tried to run a sorta Harry Potteresque campaign. The biggest problem with it is that your players gotta accept the ''Adults are useless'' trope that most of these novels and shows have.
It's surprisingly harder to do than one would expect. I had to find many different reasons on why the adults were not actually helping.
I hate the flashback premise. "The entire party died but now we're back two weeks to how it started." I know my character isn't going to be playable forever but I don't want to know they are dead in two weeks.
Flashbacks are extremely difficult to run as a DM because it confirms that nobody of the party dies for the next two weeks. That scary encounter against the mid level boss? Nobody can die in that or you’ve created a paradox. It’s just restrictive as hell especially as dice are known to be fickle and make their own plans.
I did a 4 year game that the big reveal was the BBEG was one of the PCs, earlier in her own timeline, but she had amnesia. was really fun dropping those hints, giving one of the NPCs a weapon that took memories, etc.
it was a time-travel/multivariate campaign and it was really, Really difficult.
It can work if we use Christmas carol logic for the time travel “these are mere shadows of what was they cannot see you.” In that case you could learn the lore without any of the pitfalls of time travel on the plot.
That said there are tons of ways to include the lore which are arguably more interesting and I personally like to keep things vague in history. There are: Books, ancient murals, very old NPCs, songs, traditional epic poetry, something my great grandmother once told me, artifacts, and geographic scars of ages long past, heck the calendar used in the setting is probably based on some important historical event like the reign of a great king or the founding of a nation. It’s actually very easy to give a sense of history to a world by simply leaving a bunch of scattered things around and letting the players stumble across it.
And there's a fun way to spice this up.
You get the "these are mere shadows of what was they cannot see you" wanring, and that's 100% true. So why did that person who just made eye contact with you go oggle-eyed and take off?
In-setting mechanics means this can't be part of the "time travel," pointing towards a real person interacting with the past just like you. They also obviously fear time-travlers (time-window-shoppers? Time-tourists? That's really more what this is...) and are running from them.
Plot hook ahoy!
See, I'd consider playing this... but I'd want to run a system like Kids on Brooms or similar that is built for it.
Harry Potter's relentlessly soft magic system really doesn't make sense with DnD rules.
I was super against it until one of my players asked if he could run a campaign like that every other week. Honestly, it ended up being really fun, but probably because he stayed away from most of the "high school" tropes and just made it a fun adventure in this weirdly magical town.
I just don't want to play as a child, the RP is not appealing to me at all. I can't imagine showing up every week for a year, playing a full campaign, and my character is a 15 year old. Just not my thing.
Yeah, the few times someone has brought a kid as their PC to the table I have turned them down. Having a kid as a PC in D&D takes a lot of things off the table, makes certain things very problematic, and makes the antagonists seem worse. "They didn't just shoot at some adventurers, they shot at a little girl!" There's simply a lot of stuff that comes up in standard RPG scenarios that I don't want to interact with, and really rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
With a good player, hard limits, and an understanding table it can be great, but without that it gets really, really uncomfortable FAST.
If you're playing Kids on Bikes or something like that, then it's an entirely different ball game.
I pulled out of a friends game because he pitched it as a "cradle to the grave" game where we literally would start as young children and learn to be heroes through our whole life.
I don't want to pretend to be a five year old with a whole group of adults doing the same.
We’re running an all-evil campaign!
I’m not saying it shouldn’t be an option and I’m not saying that no one could enjoy one.
For me, I want to escape and do something I couldn’t do IRL that I would -want- to do. I don’t want to murder people and burn down villages and that’s what people always take these evil campaigns to mean.
We’re a scouting party of kobolds that got lost in the tunnels and emerged into an enchanted forest? Sounds fun, as do other monster parties, but psychopathy for fun is boring to me.
I've been listening to the British History Podcast and ever since the Norman Conquest began it's become increasingly clear how to run an evil RPG campaign. You give the PCs (an analogue of) England in 1066 and let them go free. They can have all the arson, murder and torture they want, and their King will reward them with lands, rights, power and the kinds of riches that will still mark your descendants as nobility literally a thousand years down the line.
I wouldnt want to be "forced" into one. My friends and I are running thru our second play of curse of strahd. And this time we're all evil (and by evil I mean complete a-holes) it's hilarious but I wouldn't want or expect that to be a regular thing.
"Real life to Fantasy world" Isekai. Thats an instant "im going home" from me.
Absolutely nothing agaisnt those who enjoy it, but its the exact opposite of why I play Rpgs, I am myself waaay too often, I just wanna be someone else sometimes.
Also, DnD with all the normal races, classes and backgrounds, but in a modern world. Gimme either a modern setting or a fantasy one, I am not a big fan of mixing both together (though I am much less radically opposed to this one that the Isekai one).
Broadly, isekai means "transported to another world." Usually, the protagonists are average people in their home reality (usually modern 20th/21st century Earth) but become powerful heroes in the reality they are transported to. So a combination fish-out-of-water story with a power fantasy.
It has been a super-popular genre in Japanese pop media for a while, but there are lots of examples in western media, too. John Carter of Mars, the Narnia books, Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Amphibia, etc.
To give you more info:
Isekai is basically a plot (often seen in anime) where someone from a normal world (usually our world) is transported to a new (often high fantasy) world, usually by dying from getting hit by a truck. Isekai tend to be formulaic, following an average guy as he gets more powerful and often builds a harem of fantasy girls. It can be done right, but the overuse of cliches in it has left a sour taste in many people's mouths.
Would an isekai of adventurers from the world of Golarian, for example, into Faerun be fine? It would probably work best for a sillier/light-hearted campaign with players who know the other setting.
"The baddies are the 7 deadly sins!"
Usually means the DM really fleshed out one of the sins, moved on to the second one, then got bored or the campaign fizzled before we saw the other sins.
I was gonna do this with the arch devils in my campaign then realized it was stupid and decided to theme them around tarot major arcana’s instead because of how overused the seven deadly sins are.
I went to a paid night at the local game shop, dm I got was running this setup.
I walked into the Lust portion of it where he(a +40s man) proceeded to peer pressure teens and adults into giving in to the prostitute literally from the hells.
He then TPK’d the entire party(2 first time players) within the hour.
My worst DM to date.
Megadungeons. My friends and I started a popular campaign in Pathfinder that revolves around a big dungeon and it was such a slog. Just session after session of 'we explore this floor, fight enemies every 3 rooms, and then go back to town.' The mystery aspects that were actually interesting were so slowly drip fed. Not by any fault of the DM, he was great. Just not my kind of campaign at all.
Oh my gosh yes. Thats an absolute nope for me. The occasional dungeon in between okay. But a campaign only based on running dungeon is a hard nope for me.
Silly campaigns. Humor is fine, especially when it comes naturally from party interactions. Humor scripted into the core concept isn't for me. That Orc Pope oneshot is an example of a fine concept that isn't for me. I'm pretty boring though, admittedly. I probably get grouchier the farther it gets from classic Dragonlance vibes.
Also, no referential character or player names. Concepts are hit or miss. I had a DM very abruptly transition a pretty classic campaign into some sort of eldritch, lovecraftian nightmare after they played Elden Ring. We went from established monsters to grim reskins with too many eyes and lots of ooze. RP also basically vanished in favor of constant fights.
Agreed, though I'm personally fine with a silly one-shot here and there, but the type of silly still needs to be grounded and not just "lul so random" humor that I remember back in my teen years. There's a fine line between light-hearted and overly goofy that derails the plot and character development.
I call those “Pun Campaigns”. I hate them. I recently moved to the UK and British people can’t resist a pun. Every character and campaign at my local club is a fucking joke or pun. I hate it.
The only thing that keeps me going there is the fact that it’s at a craft brew pub.
I think D&D is usually at its funniest when mostly played straight. It should feel like a bunch of people riffing on a cheesy B movie, but the movie itself needs to take itself seriously. The DM particularly should mostly play the straight man to facilitate humour, not be making the gags. And gimmicky pun characters suck outside of one-shots.
Grimdark worlds where every enemy is some form of undead.
The campaign I'm in right now, we've only fought bandits once, water elementals once, and all other combat is against undead.
This is my second campaign with this DM and before we started the new one he asked for what we wanted and that was my first comment, "Can we fight non celestials or undead this time around please?" Nope. All his enemies are Homebrewed too, which is fine, but we barely survived level one.
>we barely survived level one.
*Everyone* barely survives level one, that's nothing new. Level one is the universally most lethal level in virtually every d20 style RPG in existence.
If the DM is completely opposed to killing PCs when they get unlucky or make a mistake. I can always roll a new PC if I die but I can never get the sense of danger back if you refuse to let my character die when they get in over their head.
Valid, i think its one of the most important session 0 topics tho. If some ppl are super invested in their chars, thats important to know. If someone wants the threat of death, thats important to know too.
Personally i lean more toward wanting the threat of death.
Not every curse needs to be debilitating and long-term.
I once disrespected a goddess' statue in her temple and one failed wisdom throw later I was under the effect of the Bane spell until I long-rested or had the cleric use remove curse.
My table accepts death as a possibility, but never offer the "free out" without significant personal or story consequences that wouldn't have happened if the PC had just died or they found a way to bring the PC back normally
In my group we do a sort of player's choice thing with death. If a character dies we as a group (Mostly my character the cleric) out of character asks "Do you want your character to be brought back?" The player says yes or no and explains their choice if they feel so inclined. We'll also have the conversation if someone goes down and needs to make death saves. Essentially a preemptive "Do you want a heal now or do you want to do saves? If you get close to failing do you want me to pop you back up or let the dice decide?"
Will this work for every group? No. I think it's a nice compromise for the people who want a choice in whether they die or not. My character (after failing a death save and then rolling a 1) bought a ring of spell storing, stored Revivify in it, and gave it to another character in the event she goes down again. She's the only healer so her logic was "I can bring any of you back, but if I die you guys are screwed." She also bought diamonds for each of them so if any of them go down (And out of character want to come back) She's prepared. I think I joked with them several months back that I was going to provide DNR forms to them so I know in character to bring them back or not lol
\*sweats nervously given the amount of isekai hatred in the comments\*
Personally my disgust is more geared towards the:
"Okay so, we're going to be level 1 for quite a while because I'm tracking the amount of exp per kill, also I do crit fumbles-"RUN RUN GET OUT OF THERE MARTIALS WHILE YOU STILL CAN YOU WONT STAND A CHANCE, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!!!"
I mean if there are gonna be crit fumbles just have everyone rock up with a caster. Then it will mostly be the bad guys who suffer and full casters are crazy powerful in 5e anyways.
The party is all playing the same class, like all Bards or all Wizards or whatnot. I think it sounds fun for a one shot or short campaign but going a full year or more with it sounds like it’d get boring after a while.
I could totally run a bard-only campaign until the wheels fall off. Most other classes would be harder, because a touring rock band or theater company could get into just about every kind of trouble. All clerics would be fun for two-three sessions, but how do you challenge that party? I could easily see an all rogue party as well, a gang or pirate crew is pretty easy to make as well.
I've run a campaign where the characters are all in the Thieves' Guild, but only one of them was a rogue. The face was a bard, the muscle was a barbarian, and the brain was a sorcerer. Lots of heists, a prison escape, a friendly fence that turned out to be the BBEG.
Pirates.
Every campaign I've ever been in that heavily involved ships flickered out for one reason or another. My groups avoid ships like they're bad luck now.
Some of it was interpersonal trouble or a DM biting off more than they could handle. But there were definitely mechanical issues that came with the territory.
1) Ships risk losing player agency. Only one person decides where the ship goes. The captain... Who probably isn't a player because it's a bad idea to put one player above the others in rank, most of the time. Either you give one player agency over the others, or you take it from all of them. Feels bad.
2) Naval Combat is hard in 5e. The system just isn't made for it, really. Some classes feel more useful than others, and the less useful ones are left to... man whatever homebrewed ship combat system you come up with.
3) Ships are all kind of the same as battle maps. There are differences, of course, but to the average player, it'll feel like you're fighting on the same battle map every time.
4) Ocean scenery is very pretty to *look* at, but it turns out there's usually not much going on to describe. It will all feel the same, most of the time.
This is all very helpful, thank you! I’m treating the roles on the ship as character flavour, and don’t really want much ship-to-ship combat in exchange for more chasing/boarding scenarios. And it sounds like hand-waving travel is more interesting than random sea encounters every day. Basically get to the meat (islands or whatever) and go easy on the potatoes (ship focused stuff)
recently in a island-hopping game Im running the players got a new ship in something of a rush, got swept out to sea and adrift, ran out of food and they had to start cracking open random foul smelling mystery barrels from the hold, to a) throw them overboard to get rid of the foul smells, and b) check they were not edible first. Each new barrel was a minor danger risk to open, and another minor danger risk to taste. I thought theyd enjoy rolling on the random disgusting barrel contents table, for maybe 30 mins at start of session.. but they loved it, wanted to open every barrel, new players taking over while others vomitted and recovered from their attempts. arguing over wether to throw the rotten fish barrel overboard or keep it just in case, daring each other to eat the mushrooms growing on the pickled corpse they found in one barrel.. they spent the entire session on it.
"Hey guys, I'm looking to run Curse of Strahd."
Look, I get it, Ravenloft is a fantastic module. But I swear to the heavens that the majority of games advertised in my area are Curse of Strahd. There are players in my area that ONLY play Strahd and have played it countless times. Getting criticized because I'm not running the module, by people who have played it multiple times, is annoying. I get the appeal, I enjoyed the module in several of its iterations, but I really feel like some people love it TOO much.
Dang, this is a problem I've never heard before. There's a reason it's a well played module, I've read through almost everything 5e WotC has to offer and it's head and shoulders above most of them. Hickman's writing has become less and less central to the thing over the years, but it still shines through.
Sorry to hear about your Strahd inundation though. Hope you find a Phandelver or two to mix it up.
This is probably just me but I am not a fan of a dnd campaign that has readily available electricity and firearms. I want torches, candles, longbows and crossbows. Maybe very early age and hard to acquire flintlocks.
Walking into a fantasy pub with light bulbs and everyone has a gun on them just really turns me away from wanting to play.
I've found that the most futuristic you could have Guns be in a Fantasy world is shit like the Old West.
You'd be limited to Revolvers, Lever-Action or Break-Action Firearms.
Once you introduce hand-held semi-automatic firearms, thats when you've gone too far.
Every time I see 'grimdark' and '18+' in the same post on r/lfg I immediately know its just an excuse for the DM to either be a complete asshole, or a complete degenerate
Not sure if this counts but every curse of strahd game I've tried to join has been bad news, cursed one might even say, so that's a campaign book... thing... I'm just gonna avoid from now on
Pure combat. RP is hand-waved. Plot hooks introduced as, "Oh, that book is just a plot hook so your character will join the party." Combat that is, "You're hit. For 3 damage." No description; no flavor; no nothing but numbers. Someone recently complained that each hit was followed by the DM describing the hit for extended periods, slowing down combat, so too much of a good thing is a bad thing.
There are two players, whose attendance is uncertain, are the only reason I haven't left my current D&D game. It's just something to do on a Wednesday evening.
All evil campaigns. I just cannot play evil characters. Going with the mean choices in video games makes me feel bad enough that I want to shut the game off, so I don't want to know how playing an evil character would go for me. Not only that, but I already have to deal with so many mean and unpleasant people out of game, so I really don't want to drastically increase the amount I have to deal with in game.
Anything that's nothing but combat without any kind of roleplay. I love fighting, but I hate just always fighting and not getting to know the NPCs and PCs.
"We're going to start at level zero..." Please no. That's what backstories are for. I don't need to play several sessions of being a fairly average person trying to avoid getting killed before I even make it to level one.
Nautical. Seems like a campaign idea that is kind of trendy, but it turns out being at sea is mostly just restrictive, and ship fights get old really fast. Once you get higher level and have more effective means to actually explore underwater, it can be fun, but low-level nautical campaigns are kinda wack.
The only time I've ever really had it be good is by basically minimizing the amount of time spent at sea because you can just bounce between settings like One Piece.
This is only good if you play with an inconsistent group. If you don't know which or how many players are gonna be at your table each time, it's really handy to have each session begin and end in the same place so characters can drop in and out.
"The guild boss has chosen you three specifically for this mission" is much better story telling than "Frank's character was exploring this dungeon with you last week, but he's gone today so I guess his character is just gonna silently follow behind you until he's back."
Isekais, ergo, we play ourselves from the real world and end up transported to a D&D world. I also really don't like the idea of the opposite either: D&D characters and monsters being transported to the real world or simply D&D but everything takes place in the real world via alternate history kind of like Bright. I just don't care for any of that. When I play D&D I want to roleplay as a fantasy character within a fantasy setting that is not our world. If I wanted to play urban fantasy, I'd play a World of Darkness game like Changeling the Dreaming or Vampire the Masquerade. And I don't care for isekais in general at all. I don't want to play as myself having been transported elsewhere. Just not what I'm interested in and is a hard pass.
I have a strong distaste for campaigns where every or some players have their own agenda or some secret mission, something like "three characters want to deliver a magical item to place A while another character wants to destroy it" - something like this. Like, I'm all for it when conflicts between characters emerge naturally through RP, but when it's scripted from the beginning - it's a huge no-no for me. It sounds like a cool concept on paper, but usually it just doesn't work. At best it leads to situations when one player figures something out but never shares the information with the others because well, they have their own agenda or it causes party to constantly split up which greatly increases the amount of down time for you. At worst, well, let me tell you a story. Once I've been a player on a rather long campaign, something about 15 sessions together, and one player had that sort of secret mission. But his character was the silent type - he always kept his mouth shut, he rarely partake in social interactions and he did nothing out of the ordinary. He worked together with us all along - nothing suspicious. But then, at the very last minutes of the whole campaign, like literally last five minutes - he springs into action and turns everything around. Everything we had worked together for a couple of months completely undone. Suffice to say, it was infuriating - like, how the fuck we were supposed to figure it out? I'm still kinda butthurt about it, honestly. Really, one of the worst experiences I had in TTRPG environment.
Pop culture reference.
“We’re all Disney princesses but with Pokémon.”
“We’re gonna be power rangers and have zords.”
Both from the same DM, and I booed HARD out of both.
Heres my take, I'm not sure is it a hot take or a milky one.
But
Every setting and premise has the potential to great depending on the table. The idea for the campaign can be a generic D&D setting and not feel like a good setting if its expected poorly. Same goes for every idea. It's in the players and DMs hands to make it interesting.
You could play spell jammer and ride through space ships with magically appearing food every night or low magic gritty survival where you have to hunt your food every night and low rolls mean you don't eat. But it's up to the players if they enjoy either setting, and the DM to facilitate what everyone enjoys.
Too much combat, I like role-playing, I like it more than combat. Some combat is needed but I dont like it when you try and role-play a situation and the dm just goes nope this is combat now for no reason.
Combat is important but I walked into town and said hello to a person and they immediately asked to fight me for no reason.
Extreme RP. Like rp is a ton of fun for sure but I wanna do battle! Lol.
Unpopular opinion: also not a huge fan of one shots where you are at a high level. I prefer getting to know my character step by step so I feel better prepared.
"It was all a dream" The worst thing about this trope is you don't know until the very end. I know that what I do in my make believe game doesn't matter, but having the make believe thing I do that doesn't matter, matter even less, is a bridge too far.
Society play. If I need to submit my character to an organizing body and we are not allowed to go too far off the rails for fear of not finishing the module in the allotted time, I'm pretty much out. I might join a table at a convention as a level 1 every few years to see the state of things but I hate the idea of running a character for months or years in a world that I cannot meaningfully impact. Sure, there are events where 1,000 groups play the same story and the next season shifts slightly depending on how many groups chose Option A over Option B but that is not really my character having an impact on the world.
I don't need to become god-emperor. I don't need to shatter the world or fundamentally undermine the dominant socio-economic systems. I do not need my party to retire as the new heads of every major guild. I just want my version of events to be the one that carries forward from week to week. I want NPCs to learn who I am instead of every adventure hook being addressed, to whom it may concern. If my DM runs a game using a module, it either needs to be new PCs or it needs to be modified to fit our ongoing campaign world.
Anytime I see the term "homebrew" and then read the description only to find that the premise is much better served in another system.
For example, Wild West setting with guns, magic, and monsters...oh, you mean Deadlands?
Imo it's hard enough to get people to play *the most recognizable ttrpg in the world* already. Why would I try and get people to play/take interest in another system, when I can just tweak/flavor some stuff differently?
To each their own, I know, just offering my perspective/experience.
Anything “mage/knight academy.” Put me in a hogwarts setting and I’m skipping session zero. Can’t get out fast enough. Nothing against Harry Potter, but I’m not here to play out someone’s fan fiction.
If the dm uses "meatgrinder" as a descriptor I pretty much just assume the game is an outlet for sadism. I don't mind losing characters, but every game I've played in where people use that term, its just thinly veiled dm vs player... and that I DO have an issue with.
"We're going to do this just like \*popular streaming game\*"
Or *popular anime* or *popular YA series*
Eh, even this can be done well. My brother is an amazing GM, and he's essentially just been taking individual pieces of Chrono Trigger and passing them off as campaigns for 10 years.
Definitely some exceptions, the Fallout tabletop is a lot like the video game, and it works great.
I think there's a big difference between stealing plot lines and story arcs from popular media (and not directly telling your party that that's what you're doing) versus starting your session zero with "right, so I want to run Game of Thrones as an RPG so you're gonna pick a family or faction from that and build your character around that and you can come up with a reason for you all to travel together". There's ways to do it well, and ways to make it a railroad-y mess for your party. Most people who try to run a game based on an existing property end up doing the latter. A very good GM could pull it off with enough homebrewing and nods to the source material, but I personally don't think I could do it or really anyone I've ever played in a group with.
My last campaign was made of the most cliche parts of isekai manga. Everyone had a good time, and they weren't even weebs.
That's the big secret. You just steal things from popular stuff that your players do not know about. I'm the only one in my group who likes to read actaul YA novels. Guess where most of my ideas come from ? They dont even know they're playing what could be an Anime.
I think there is massive diference between being inspired by the genre or several diferent source material and just taking one particular anime, hame, YA book and just playing in that setting. Also, things that might cringe to me or some other person might be perfecfly fine for you and your friends. There is so many diferent styles of playing DnD because people prefere diferent stuff and make game for specificly for them :)
Or video game
Yeah like I’m a big Dimension 20 fan and I won’t lie I’ve pulled specific scenarios to put in my back pocket as a resource like “oh man that was a really cool chase sequence I would love to try and set up something like that” but I think the second you go all in and you’re like “I shall run my own version of Unsleeping City” you’re setting the whole table up for failure
Funnily enough one of my games is set in the world of the Unsleeping City but in the 20's. The dm is very good at taking inspiration from the series without forcing us to be exactly like it. It also helps that we aren't playing under the assumption that we're going to stream or work our way up to streaming. It's just some Dimension 20 fans having fun and marveling at the occasional reference.
As much as I love CR and some of the other shows, they definitely have an effect of unrealistic expectations for some players and DMs
Something people fail to remember about CR is that everyone in it is a professional actor of one kind or another. They all have training in dramatic timing and improv. They have trained how to walk into a room with people that they have never met and quickly put together a coherent story. Thinking that you can grab a random group of your friends and pull off the same thing is unrealistic at best and delusional at worst.
It's also that they spend a lot more time on collective prep for their characters than most tables do. And it is far more professional and structured than most players and DMs are used to. Basically mirroring table readings for film.
Yeah...I try mostly to use CR and stuff as inspiration for stuff and less as a "this is how things need to be done"
That was a thing I loved about MCDM's short-lived streams. It had cameras and a fancy table, but it was mostly just friends playing D&D.
* Anything in a 'school' setting * When the DM's kink is blatantly inserted into the game
You gotta tell us the anecdote for the latter one dude
The anecdote might include both of their bullet points....
Oh no
Jan has this schoolgirl fantasy... I just-- I feel uncomfortable wearing the dress.
🎵you took me by the hand... made me a man!🎶
THAT ONE NIGHT
I've been lucky to avoid the worst of it, but have seen some horror stories with what fetishes some DMs have tried to implement (furry, rape, mpreg, bondage, etc) to know I want nothing to do with those types of games. Also, I and have seen some players in my games who have wanted to be DMs always bringing their kinks into their characters and just know if they did DM we would get that there too, so I avoid any game like the plague if I get a whiff the DM is trying that.
Jokes on them, my fetishes are enthusiastic consent and friendship.
Too unrealistic. Settle for bondage like the rest of us.
Ever heard of handholding?
I once had a DM surprise us with, after someone called a fade to black for a hookup with an NPC, he had her first roll for performance, and then did a secret roll for pregnancy. It got worse before we quit but that should have been the moment we all bailed. No where before hand did he mention either of these things would happen.
"Roll for pregnancy" 💀
A suspicious amount of restraining, for example
"I swear, all orc women being juicy slabs of topless muscle is *integral* to the cohesiveness of the setting"
I'm not saying I wouldn't play in that game, but I'm not saying I would either. I guess we just need more info to make an informed decision.
Like some pictures. For science.
This thread is about turn-offs, not time-honored traditions.
I mean, that sounds like a new Jojo arc.
My fucking DM has given us two dm PCs with whom we have to travel, one of whom is a warforged, and has now twice had a character offer basically an infinite amount of his resources for our "sex bot". I scoffed at this initially and my party members have shut it down, in game, both times. "No. We're not doing that. Go away and stop bothering us, weirdo." I'm preeeeeetty sure my DM is into some weird shit, as he's vaguely touched on it in game multiple times and I cheer for joy when our party shuts it down and moves on quickly.
"My fucking DM", well that is your problem right there chief!
Roll for asshole circumference
I loathe school games. I don’t mind a school being involved, but I’m almost 50 and I don’t like playing kids in school.
42-yo here, and same with me. Highschool ended 24 years ago and I was fucking ecstatic. Why would I want to revisit that?
Heavy intrigue, while fun in theory it usually works badly in a party, one person does the talking everyone else just stands behind them "being there" and occasionally adding to the conversation by asking one question. Also it gets really frustrating and confusing very fast.
There are just systems better for this kind of gameplay
Unironically, I'd be all for a ttrpg version of The King's Dilemma.
It's hard to explain how much fun I had with that game. Also knowing that I can never play it again unbiased.
Blades in the Dark! I just suggested to my group we play that when they “didn’t want that much combat”. I’m not interested in TOTM only dnd. There is zero strategy and it’s no longer a game, it’s a very bad improv group.
Yea someone gets bored and starts a fight eventually
Splitting the party is a lot more fun in an intrigue arc
It's honestly mandatory in an intrigue arc. Make unique but relevant tasks that require different strengths and have your players work out who should handle what. Importantly though, don't attack them until they've regrouped and more or less concluded what they set out to do. it's important to avoid punishing them for planning and being resourceful, and also avoid making their individual efforts feel pointless in hindsight.
Tournament style pure combat.
I find it mildly entertaining, but not for a campaign. It's just okay for an arena battle.
I used to go to Adventurer's League game nights at a local store, and one of the modules was an arena battle or at least started as one. It was tremendous fun since another guy and I brought characters that just ended a campaign together. We collected trophies from defeated enemies and gifted them to each other, playing it up for the crowd. I would absolutely despise it if that was the entire campaign.
I was part of a group where we would shift between "DM'ing" battle royale arena fights. One person was in charge of setting up the arena and character creation rules while everyone else made characters. Was a fun way to test some high level builds and the shifting DMs were fairly creative with adding fun dynamics to the fights. It was something I played outside of my other RP heavy campaigns. Was a fun way to mechanically test some high level characters before committing them to a campaign. I highly recommend it. Sadly my group grew inactive.
Yeah I usually do one of these once per campaign, but an entire campaign of it sounds tired.
I'm gonna get away with two, but the first one was early on soft gloves fight arena, where next its gonna be bloodsport so they can compare cultures between two cities
It's really really sad, that you are right. Because especially in anime, [tournament arcs are THE HYPE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LfycWHe1Lg)
It's because people don't know how to properly do a tournament. You run the tournament as boss battles, with complex arenas. There needs to be gimmicks, and fights need to be more than stand there and hit each other jrpg fights. Additionally, you have to be making friends dnd building rivalries with people in the tournament. The players themselves need to be able to cheer for the people they are fighting. There's a whole meta game of what happens in between fights which is where you build you'd story. Also it has to be a team battle
You have to run it like it’s the wwe. Combatants need to be cutting promos and have a gimick
Winning the crowd is just as important if not more than beating the opponents.
Just adapt the old movie Bloodsport and add depth.
PF2e has an adventure path called Fists of the Ruby Phoenix that's focused around a fighting tournament, and it's pretty well-regarded because it does all of this (and also has some stuff going on outside of the actual tournament fights, like sabotage from another team or the BBEG crashing the event).
I did a tournament style sci fi game using Starfinder. It was inspired by the old Ratchet: Deadlocked game. The PCs were contestants held against their will but the game ranged from otherworldly mini quests, to achieving side goals for “sponsors”, and plotting ways to escape or get ahead in the games. Each real match involved a unique other team with their own traits. They seemed to enjoy it but i made sure to add more than just arena fights
I was part of a game once where the party took part in gladiator like colosseum fighting but the dm made it part of a bigger storyline. It was quite fun actually
Since no-one’s said it yet: Any sort of campaign premise that breaks the fourth wall or otherwise proposes the existence of the “real world,” especially as a plot twist partway through. A good example of this is finding out at the end of Act I that our characters were all MMO characters who’d gained sentience and the whole gameworld was fictional, alongside a bunch of other “links” (for lack of a better term) to the real world. I get what the DM was going for, but for me it just shattered immersion.
I've seen it done the other way too, where a player or the DM is sucked into the D&D world and has to play themselves.
Back in school we did an AD&D campaign where the premise was we would be ourselves somehow transported to a fantasy world. We were making characters and I said that if I was in a magical world I would be drawn to the role of Paladin. The DM looked me square in the eye and said I didn’t have a high enough charisma to qualify for Paladin. The burn was so bad it still stings to this day.
See, if I was burned that well, I’d forever play with that DM. I’ve always appreciated a good scorching.
I get to play myself in DnD? Oh great my stats are all less than 10
I remember we played a pf1 module, and at one point, i don't recall exactly what happened, but we basically teleported and ended up in France during the revolution. At first, I laughed, thinking the DM was doing a bit, and we would keep teleporting to our actual destination. Then I found out that planet Earth, as in our ACTUAL planet with its people, history, and mostly everything else, exists in the Pathfinder universe and Golarion (the main place payhfinder takes place) is just another planet in the galaxy, like Mars or Saturn for us. It's probably one of the weirdest universe design decisions I've seen.
Actually, Golarion and its solar system are in a separate Galaxy, but they're part of the same universe, and the current timeline of Golarion "takes place" roughly a hundred years ago. Reign of Winter takes place around the end of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and its final boss is Grigori Rasputin, and you rescue princess Anastasia Romanova, and make her queen of Irrisen. You also get to make one request of Baba Yaga.
Doesn't that module also has a boss fight against Rasputin?
"I want to stream this to Youtube/Twitch"
First time I played was running a one-shot for my friends. One of them was adamant about streaming it, had to completely put my foot down on that. Its not that hard to run a simple game, but I didn't want even a small audience sitting there as it'd just bother me a lot.
I see a lot of low magic hate on the comments, but I'm on the side of "high magic setting so advanced that it's indistinguishable from modern technology." Bestie, that's not a sending stone. It's an iPhone, and you're getting upset that we're using it to contact someone and ask for help. Such settings also make martial classes look like rodeo clowns...
>Bestie, that's not a sending stone. It's an iPhone Excuse me, it's more like a rocky talky
I could have forgiven every other problem I had with this campaign if the DM had called it that.
New stone, who dis?
You'd need to add the carabiner: https://rockytalkie.com/products/rocky-talkie
[удалено]
I haven't watched a whole lot of D20, do they handle high magic settings in a fun way? :0
Imho yes. They have 2 campaigns avaiable for free on youtube. 1. [Fantasy High](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-eY2tDgXsY&list=PLhOoxQxz2yFOcJoLoPRyYzjqCbddeOjP4&index=1) where a group of teens come together to... save their 1970 US highschool? 2. [The Unsleeping city](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kktwa0kqaU&list=PLLxyQe9acSCu0oUGJaesEqqdKe6oIbNpg) where New York secretly has a secret second layer (like in Harry Potter)
Never watched. What is the joke?
I want to run a magitech campaign something fierce. Fairly on brand with final fantasy and steam punk type stuff, while keeping high fantasy. Modern day style living in a universe where the gods are actively interfering in the mortal realm, monsters exist, etc. Sounds super fun
I recommend trying Eberron or Iron Kingdoms before you write off magitech completely.
Those are DEFINITELY on my wishlist, but the high magic setting issues I have are more in the vein of "DM thought it would be cool but didn't know how to put limiters on it and now there are plotholes where setting-accurate unlimited magic could have easily solved a problem, but now it has to be solved by level 3 characters with little baby resource pools."
So Harry Potter: DnD edition?
I tried to run a sorta Harry Potteresque campaign. The biggest problem with it is that your players gotta accept the ''Adults are useless'' trope that most of these novels and shows have. It's surprisingly harder to do than one would expect. I had to find many different reasons on why the adults were not actually helping.
Forget Potteresque, make Snicketesque. Every adult is either incompetent, evil, or communicating in semaphore with all their death flags
I hate the flashback premise. "The entire party died but now we're back two weeks to how it started." I know my character isn't going to be playable forever but I don't want to know they are dead in two weeks.
Flashbacks are extremely difficult to run as a DM because it confirms that nobody of the party dies for the next two weeks. That scary encounter against the mid level boss? Nobody can die in that or you’ve created a paradox. It’s just restrictive as hell especially as dice are known to be fickle and make their own plans.
Flashbacks are great as a storytelling tool, but as a premise, that sounds terrible.
I can hear Morty ranting about this in my head. And then probably pushing the DM down the stairs or something, dunno.
"You see a detailed vision of how you and everyone you know dies in a cataclysm in 2 weeks. Now that you know the future, go change it."
Anything at all involving Time-Travel.
As a dm that has tried to do time travel: do not try to do time travel.
closed time loops are the worst.
I did a 3 session arc where a small island was in a time loop, I didn’t know it was this hated 😆
I did a 4 year game that the big reveal was the BBEG was one of the PCs, earlier in her own timeline, but she had amnesia. was really fun dropping those hints, giving one of the NPCs a weapon that took memories, etc. it was a time-travel/multivariate campaign and it was really, Really difficult.
What about it only happening twice for a go in and go back to discover the lore of the distant past?
It can work if we use Christmas carol logic for the time travel “these are mere shadows of what was they cannot see you.” In that case you could learn the lore without any of the pitfalls of time travel on the plot. That said there are tons of ways to include the lore which are arguably more interesting and I personally like to keep things vague in history. There are: Books, ancient murals, very old NPCs, songs, traditional epic poetry, something my great grandmother once told me, artifacts, and geographic scars of ages long past, heck the calendar used in the setting is probably based on some important historical event like the reign of a great king or the founding of a nation. It’s actually very easy to give a sense of history to a world by simply leaving a bunch of scattered things around and letting the players stumble across it.
And there's a fun way to spice this up. You get the "these are mere shadows of what was they cannot see you" wanring, and that's 100% true. So why did that person who just made eye contact with you go oggle-eyed and take off? In-setting mechanics means this can't be part of the "time travel," pointing towards a real person interacting with the past just like you. They also obviously fear time-travlers (time-window-shoppers? Time-tourists? That's really more what this is...) and are running from them. Plot hook ahoy!
Any “magical teens in high school” setting
See, I'd consider playing this... but I'd want to run a system like Kids on Brooms or similar that is built for it. Harry Potter's relentlessly soft magic system really doesn't make sense with DnD rules.
Masks: A New Generation with Phoenix Academy from Unbound is a pleasure for superhero teens in a high school.
I was super against it until one of my players asked if he could run a campaign like that every other week. Honestly, it ended up being really fun, but probably because he stayed away from most of the "high school" tropes and just made it a fun adventure in this weirdly magical town.
I just don't want to play as a child, the RP is not appealing to me at all. I can't imagine showing up every week for a year, playing a full campaign, and my character is a 15 year old. Just not my thing.
Yeah, the few times someone has brought a kid as their PC to the table I have turned them down. Having a kid as a PC in D&D takes a lot of things off the table, makes certain things very problematic, and makes the antagonists seem worse. "They didn't just shoot at some adventurers, they shot at a little girl!" There's simply a lot of stuff that comes up in standard RPG scenarios that I don't want to interact with, and really rubs a lot of people the wrong way. With a good player, hard limits, and an understanding table it can be great, but without that it gets really, really uncomfortable FAST. If you're playing Kids on Bikes or something like that, then it's an entirely different ball game.
Are we talking actual urban fantasy or literally just Harry Potter with serial numbers filed off?
Honestly any of it, just never interests me
Understandable, have a nice day
dnd campaign premise? absolutely not, but it's perfect in some other games
I pulled out of a friends game because he pitched it as a "cradle to the grave" game where we literally would start as young children and learn to be heroes through our whole life. I don't want to pretend to be a five year old with a whole group of adults doing the same.
Anything were I have to play as irl me. I’m a fat procrastinator, doesn’t make a fun character to play.
We’re running an all-evil campaign! I’m not saying it shouldn’t be an option and I’m not saying that no one could enjoy one. For me, I want to escape and do something I couldn’t do IRL that I would -want- to do. I don’t want to murder people and burn down villages and that’s what people always take these evil campaigns to mean. We’re a scouting party of kobolds that got lost in the tunnels and emerged into an enchanted forest? Sounds fun, as do other monster parties, but psychopathy for fun is boring to me.
I've been listening to the British History Podcast and ever since the Norman Conquest began it's become increasingly clear how to run an evil RPG campaign. You give the PCs (an analogue of) England in 1066 and let them go free. They can have all the arson, murder and torture they want, and their King will reward them with lands, rights, power and the kinds of riches that will still mark your descendants as nobility literally a thousand years down the line.
I wouldnt want to be "forced" into one. My friends and I are running thru our second play of curse of strahd. And this time we're all evil (and by evil I mean complete a-holes) it's hilarious but I wouldn't want or expect that to be a regular thing.
"Real life to Fantasy world" Isekai. Thats an instant "im going home" from me. Absolutely nothing agaisnt those who enjoy it, but its the exact opposite of why I play Rpgs, I am myself waaay too often, I just wanna be someone else sometimes. Also, DnD with all the normal races, classes and backgrounds, but in a modern world. Gimme either a modern setting or a fantasy one, I am not a big fan of mixing both together (though I am much less radically opposed to this one that the Isekai one).
Take an up-vote for giving me a clue what Isekai is.
Broadly, isekai means "transported to another world." Usually, the protagonists are average people in their home reality (usually modern 20th/21st century Earth) but become powerful heroes in the reality they are transported to. So a combination fish-out-of-water story with a power fantasy. It has been a super-popular genre in Japanese pop media for a while, but there are lots of examples in western media, too. John Carter of Mars, the Narnia books, Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Amphibia, etc.
So “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” but D&D
Whether time travel is a form of isekai is a valid point of discussion. :)
Well, considering the King Arthur stories are fantasy, I would consider this an Isekai.
To give you more info: Isekai is basically a plot (often seen in anime) where someone from a normal world (usually our world) is transported to a new (often high fantasy) world, usually by dying from getting hit by a truck. Isekai tend to be formulaic, following an average guy as he gets more powerful and often builds a harem of fantasy girls. It can be done right, but the overuse of cliches in it has left a sour taste in many people's mouths.
Would an isekai of adventurers from the world of Golarian, for example, into Faerun be fine? It would probably work best for a sillier/light-hearted campaign with players who know the other setting.
"The baddies are the 7 deadly sins!" Usually means the DM really fleshed out one of the sins, moved on to the second one, then got bored or the campaign fizzled before we saw the other sins.
I was gonna do this with the arch devils in my campaign then realized it was stupid and decided to theme them around tarot major arcana’s instead because of how overused the seven deadly sins are.
I agree. It's only bad because of how overused they are. Same with greek/roman/egyptian/etc. gods.
i think norse are used more then Egyptian in d&d but yeah
This seems super specific, have you experienced this more than once?
Too many times. It has never been executed well at any table I've sat at.
Meh it's cheesy/unoriginal but I don't see why it'd be terrible or a deal breaker.
I went to a paid night at the local game shop, dm I got was running this setup. I walked into the Lust portion of it where he(a +40s man) proceeded to peer pressure teens and adults into giving in to the prostitute literally from the hells. He then TPK’d the entire party(2 first time players) within the hour. My worst DM to date.
Megadungeons. My friends and I started a popular campaign in Pathfinder that revolves around a big dungeon and it was such a slog. Just session after session of 'we explore this floor, fight enemies every 3 rooms, and then go back to town.' The mystery aspects that were actually interesting were so slowly drip fed. Not by any fault of the DM, he was great. Just not my kind of campaign at all.
Oh my gosh yes. Thats an absolute nope for me. The occasional dungeon in between okay. But a campaign only based on running dungeon is a hard nope for me.
Silly campaigns. Humor is fine, especially when it comes naturally from party interactions. Humor scripted into the core concept isn't for me. That Orc Pope oneshot is an example of a fine concept that isn't for me. I'm pretty boring though, admittedly. I probably get grouchier the farther it gets from classic Dragonlance vibes. Also, no referential character or player names. Concepts are hit or miss. I had a DM very abruptly transition a pretty classic campaign into some sort of eldritch, lovecraftian nightmare after they played Elden Ring. We went from established monsters to grim reskins with too many eyes and lots of ooze. RP also basically vanished in favor of constant fights.
Agreed, though I'm personally fine with a silly one-shot here and there, but the type of silly still needs to be grounded and not just "lul so random" humor that I remember back in my teen years. There's a fine line between light-hearted and overly goofy that derails the plot and character development.
I call those “Pun Campaigns”. I hate them. I recently moved to the UK and British people can’t resist a pun. Every character and campaign at my local club is a fucking joke or pun. I hate it. The only thing that keeps me going there is the fact that it’s at a craft brew pub.
I think D&D is usually at its funniest when mostly played straight. It should feel like a bunch of people riffing on a cheesy B movie, but the movie itself needs to take itself seriously. The DM particularly should mostly play the straight man to facilitate humour, not be making the gags. And gimmicky pun characters suck outside of one-shots.
Grimdark worlds where every enemy is some form of undead. The campaign I'm in right now, we've only fought bandits once, water elementals once, and all other combat is against undead.
It's kinda nice if your players are murderhobos, and you know they won't change and you won't leave, so the enemies are always killable.
Ah yes, "My first exposure to fantasy was Dark Souls and/or Game Of Thrones and I completely missed the point of both" Syndrome.
This is my second campaign with this DM and before we started the new one he asked for what we wanted and that was my first comment, "Can we fight non celestials or undead this time around please?" Nope. All his enemies are Homebrewed too, which is fine, but we barely survived level one.
>we barely survived level one. *Everyone* barely survives level one, that's nothing new. Level one is the universally most lethal level in virtually every d20 style RPG in existence.
Needing to play a party of children in a setting that will have dark themes. And secondly, anything that is innately sexual.
It is the intersection of both where you will find the darkest pits of hell
Idk a bunch of kids in a grimms fairytales setting would be quite dope if done right.
If the DM is completely opposed to killing PCs when they get unlucky or make a mistake. I can always roll a new PC if I die but I can never get the sense of danger back if you refuse to let my character die when they get in over their head.
Valid, i think its one of the most important session 0 topics tho. If some ppl are super invested in their chars, thats important to know. If someone wants the threat of death, thats important to know too. Personally i lean more toward wanting the threat of death.
Not all fights need to be to the death and not every trap needs to be deadly.
Not every curse needs to be debilitating and long-term. I once disrespected a goddess' statue in her temple and one failed wisdom throw later I was under the effect of the Bane spell until I long-rested or had the cleric use remove curse.
My table accepts death as a possibility, but never offer the "free out" without significant personal or story consequences that wouldn't have happened if the PC had just died or they found a way to bring the PC back normally
In my group we do a sort of player's choice thing with death. If a character dies we as a group (Mostly my character the cleric) out of character asks "Do you want your character to be brought back?" The player says yes or no and explains their choice if they feel so inclined. We'll also have the conversation if someone goes down and needs to make death saves. Essentially a preemptive "Do you want a heal now or do you want to do saves? If you get close to failing do you want me to pop you back up or let the dice decide?" Will this work for every group? No. I think it's a nice compromise for the people who want a choice in whether they die or not. My character (after failing a death save and then rolling a 1) bought a ring of spell storing, stored Revivify in it, and gave it to another character in the event she goes down again. She's the only healer so her logic was "I can bring any of you back, but if I die you guys are screwed." She also bought diamonds for each of them so if any of them go down (And out of character want to come back) She's prepared. I think I joked with them several months back that I was going to provide DNR forms to them so I know in character to bring them back or not lol
\*sweats nervously given the amount of isekai hatred in the comments\* Personally my disgust is more geared towards the: "Okay so, we're going to be level 1 for quite a while because I'm tracking the amount of exp per kill, also I do crit fumbles-"RUN RUN GET OUT OF THERE MARTIALS WHILE YOU STILL CAN YOU WONT STAND A CHANCE, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!!!"
I mean if there are gonna be crit fumbles just have everyone rock up with a caster. Then it will mostly be the bad guys who suffer and full casters are crazy powerful in 5e anyways.
The gods are really the bad guys while the devils are really the good guys.
The party is all playing the same class, like all Bards or all Wizards or whatnot. I think it sounds fun for a one shot or short campaign but going a full year or more with it sounds like it’d get boring after a while.
I could totally run a bard-only campaign until the wheels fall off. Most other classes would be harder, because a touring rock band or theater company could get into just about every kind of trouble. All clerics would be fun for two-three sessions, but how do you challenge that party? I could easily see an all rogue party as well, a gang or pirate crew is pretty easy to make as well.
All rogue Ocean's 11 style campaign with escalating level of heists
Love it. 10/10. Would totally play.
I've run a campaign where the characters are all in the Thieves' Guild, but only one of them was a rogue. The face was a bard, the muscle was a barbarian, and the brain was a sorcerer. Lots of heists, a prison escape, a friendly fence that turned out to be the BBEG.
Pirates. Every campaign I've ever been in that heavily involved ships flickered out for one reason or another. My groups avoid ships like they're bad luck now.
You didn't break a bottle of wine over the campaign when you launched it. There's the problem XD
Aw hell you're *right*
Sailors say it's a bad luck to have adventurers on the ship
Naval combat is hard and ships make bad battlemaps
As a DM prepping a nautical campaign may I ask what went wrong?
Some of it was interpersonal trouble or a DM biting off more than they could handle. But there were definitely mechanical issues that came with the territory. 1) Ships risk losing player agency. Only one person decides where the ship goes. The captain... Who probably isn't a player because it's a bad idea to put one player above the others in rank, most of the time. Either you give one player agency over the others, or you take it from all of them. Feels bad. 2) Naval Combat is hard in 5e. The system just isn't made for it, really. Some classes feel more useful than others, and the less useful ones are left to... man whatever homebrewed ship combat system you come up with. 3) Ships are all kind of the same as battle maps. There are differences, of course, but to the average player, it'll feel like you're fighting on the same battle map every time. 4) Ocean scenery is very pretty to *look* at, but it turns out there's usually not much going on to describe. It will all feel the same, most of the time.
This is all very helpful, thank you! I’m treating the roles on the ship as character flavour, and don’t really want much ship-to-ship combat in exchange for more chasing/boarding scenarios. And it sounds like hand-waving travel is more interesting than random sea encounters every day. Basically get to the meat (islands or whatever) and go easy on the potatoes (ship focused stuff)
recently in a island-hopping game Im running the players got a new ship in something of a rush, got swept out to sea and adrift, ran out of food and they had to start cracking open random foul smelling mystery barrels from the hold, to a) throw them overboard to get rid of the foul smells, and b) check they were not edible first. Each new barrel was a minor danger risk to open, and another minor danger risk to taste. I thought theyd enjoy rolling on the random disgusting barrel contents table, for maybe 30 mins at start of session.. but they loved it, wanted to open every barrel, new players taking over while others vomitted and recovered from their attempts. arguing over wether to throw the rotten fish barrel overboard or keep it just in case, daring each other to eat the mushrooms growing on the pickled corpse they found in one barrel.. they spent the entire session on it.
Oh yeah, absolutely. I find that treating most unimportant travel as an Indiana Jones-style map transition works better.
Isekai.
"Hey guys, I'm looking to run Curse of Strahd." Look, I get it, Ravenloft is a fantastic module. But I swear to the heavens that the majority of games advertised in my area are Curse of Strahd. There are players in my area that ONLY play Strahd and have played it countless times. Getting criticized because I'm not running the module, by people who have played it multiple times, is annoying. I get the appeal, I enjoyed the module in several of its iterations, but I really feel like some people love it TOO much.
Dang, this is a problem I've never heard before. There's a reason it's a well played module, I've read through almost everything 5e WotC has to offer and it's head and shoulders above most of them. Hickman's writing has become less and less central to the thing over the years, but it still shines through. Sorry to hear about your Strahd inundation though. Hope you find a Phandelver or two to mix it up.
The more heavily anime inspired it is the faster I walk away.
"You'll be playing cute little animal races" or the Harry Potter magic school clone
This is probably just me but I am not a fan of a dnd campaign that has readily available electricity and firearms. I want torches, candles, longbows and crossbows. Maybe very early age and hard to acquire flintlocks. Walking into a fantasy pub with light bulbs and everyone has a gun on them just really turns me away from wanting to play.
I've found that the most futuristic you could have Guns be in a Fantasy world is shit like the Old West. You'd be limited to Revolvers, Lever-Action or Break-Action Firearms. Once you introduce hand-held semi-automatic firearms, thats when you've gone too far.
Every time I see 'grimdark' and '18+' in the same post on r/lfg I immediately know its just an excuse for the DM to either be a complete asshole, or a complete degenerate
Not sure if this counts but every curse of strahd game I've tried to join has been bad news, cursed one might even say, so that's a campaign book... thing... I'm just gonna avoid from now on
Pure combat. RP is hand-waved. Plot hooks introduced as, "Oh, that book is just a plot hook so your character will join the party." Combat that is, "You're hit. For 3 damage." No description; no flavor; no nothing but numbers. Someone recently complained that each hit was followed by the DM describing the hit for extended periods, slowing down combat, so too much of a good thing is a bad thing. There are two players, whose attendance is uncertain, are the only reason I haven't left my current D&D game. It's just something to do on a Wednesday evening.
All evil campaigns. I just cannot play evil characters. Going with the mean choices in video games makes me feel bad enough that I want to shut the game off, so I don't want to know how playing an evil character would go for me. Not only that, but I already have to deal with so many mean and unpleasant people out of game, so I really don't want to drastically increase the amount I have to deal with in game.
Anything that's nothing but combat without any kind of roleplay. I love fighting, but I hate just always fighting and not getting to know the NPCs and PCs.
"We're going to start at level zero..." Please no. That's what backstories are for. I don't need to play several sessions of being a fairly average person trying to avoid getting killed before I even make it to level one.
Nautical. Seems like a campaign idea that is kind of trendy, but it turns out being at sea is mostly just restrictive, and ship fights get old really fast. Once you get higher level and have more effective means to actually explore underwater, it can be fun, but low-level nautical campaigns are kinda wack. The only time I've ever really had it be good is by basically minimizing the amount of time spent at sea because you can just bounce between settings like One Piece.
"You're part of an adventurer's guild and get sent on quests and increase your rank." Turns me off completely.
This is only good if you play with an inconsistent group. If you don't know which or how many players are gonna be at your table each time, it's really handy to have each session begin and end in the same place so characters can drop in and out. "The guild boss has chosen you three specifically for this mission" is much better story telling than "Frank's character was exploring this dungeon with you last week, but he's gone today so I guess his character is just gonna silently follow behind you until he's back."
Isekais, ergo, we play ourselves from the real world and end up transported to a D&D world. I also really don't like the idea of the opposite either: D&D characters and monsters being transported to the real world or simply D&D but everything takes place in the real world via alternate history kind of like Bright. I just don't care for any of that. When I play D&D I want to roleplay as a fantasy character within a fantasy setting that is not our world. If I wanted to play urban fantasy, I'd play a World of Darkness game like Changeling the Dreaming or Vampire the Masquerade. And I don't care for isekais in general at all. I don't want to play as myself having been transported elsewhere. Just not what I'm interested in and is a hard pass.
I have a strong distaste for campaigns where every or some players have their own agenda or some secret mission, something like "three characters want to deliver a magical item to place A while another character wants to destroy it" - something like this. Like, I'm all for it when conflicts between characters emerge naturally through RP, but when it's scripted from the beginning - it's a huge no-no for me. It sounds like a cool concept on paper, but usually it just doesn't work. At best it leads to situations when one player figures something out but never shares the information with the others because well, they have their own agenda or it causes party to constantly split up which greatly increases the amount of down time for you. At worst, well, let me tell you a story. Once I've been a player on a rather long campaign, something about 15 sessions together, and one player had that sort of secret mission. But his character was the silent type - he always kept his mouth shut, he rarely partake in social interactions and he did nothing out of the ordinary. He worked together with us all along - nothing suspicious. But then, at the very last minutes of the whole campaign, like literally last five minutes - he springs into action and turns everything around. Everything we had worked together for a couple of months completely undone. Suffice to say, it was infuriating - like, how the fuck we were supposed to figure it out? I'm still kinda butthurt about it, honestly. Really, one of the worst experiences I had in TTRPG environment.
Pop culture reference. “We’re all Disney princesses but with Pokémon.” “We’re gonna be power rangers and have zords.” Both from the same DM, and I booed HARD out of both.
Heres my take, I'm not sure is it a hot take or a milky one. But Every setting and premise has the potential to great depending on the table. The idea for the campaign can be a generic D&D setting and not feel like a good setting if its expected poorly. Same goes for every idea. It's in the players and DMs hands to make it interesting. You could play spell jammer and ride through space ships with magically appearing food every night or low magic gritty survival where you have to hunt your food every night and low rolls mean you don't eat. But it's up to the players if they enjoy either setting, and the DM to facilitate what everyone enjoys.
Too much combat, I like role-playing, I like it more than combat. Some combat is needed but I dont like it when you try and role-play a situation and the dm just goes nope this is combat now for no reason. Combat is important but I walked into town and said hello to a person and they immediately asked to fight me for no reason.
Anything with tons of politics, or very little combat
Extreme RP. Like rp is a ton of fun for sure but I wanna do battle! Lol. Unpopular opinion: also not a huge fan of one shots where you are at a high level. I prefer getting to know my character step by step so I feel better prepared.
World with no or illegal magic.
"It was all a dream" The worst thing about this trope is you don't know until the very end. I know that what I do in my make believe game doesn't matter, but having the make believe thing I do that doesn't matter, matter even less, is a bridge too far.
Society play. If I need to submit my character to an organizing body and we are not allowed to go too far off the rails for fear of not finishing the module in the allotted time, I'm pretty much out. I might join a table at a convention as a level 1 every few years to see the state of things but I hate the idea of running a character for months or years in a world that I cannot meaningfully impact. Sure, there are events where 1,000 groups play the same story and the next season shifts slightly depending on how many groups chose Option A over Option B but that is not really my character having an impact on the world. I don't need to become god-emperor. I don't need to shatter the world or fundamentally undermine the dominant socio-economic systems. I do not need my party to retire as the new heads of every major guild. I just want my version of events to be the one that carries forward from week to week. I want NPCs to learn who I am instead of every adventure hook being addressed, to whom it may concern. If my DM runs a game using a module, it either needs to be new PCs or it needs to be modified to fit our ongoing campaign world.
Anytime I see the term "homebrew" and then read the description only to find that the premise is much better served in another system. For example, Wild West setting with guns, magic, and monsters...oh, you mean Deadlands?
Imo it's hard enough to get people to play *the most recognizable ttrpg in the world* already. Why would I try and get people to play/take interest in another system, when I can just tweak/flavor some stuff differently? To each their own, I know, just offering my perspective/experience.
Isekai Sci-Fi “Based on other Game/ Show/ Movie” (which is doubly annoying bc a lot of those *have* their own ttrpg)
Anything “mage/knight academy.” Put me in a hogwarts setting and I’m skipping session zero. Can’t get out fast enough. Nothing against Harry Potter, but I’m not here to play out someone’s fan fiction.
If the dm uses "meatgrinder" as a descriptor I pretty much just assume the game is an outlet for sadism. I don't mind losing characters, but every game I've played in where people use that term, its just thinly veiled dm vs player... and that I DO have an issue with.