Tomb of Annihilation: Still full of dungeony bullshit. Still a fun time.
Today's monk frustration: Lots of Fear effects hitting the party, and not being the subject of any of them, so I never got to use Stillness of Mind. This is much like the sad feeling any time archers shoot at anyone else but me.
MVP magic item of this adventure is really looking to be our sorcerer's Broom of Flying. But the Druid has a Wand of Wonder now, so it may be a tight race.
From the table:
A: So, what's the Wand of Wonder Do?
B: It says "That Bag of Beans didn't mess things up nearly badly enough, let's make it worse"
C: It's not *that* bad. I'm looking at what it does right now and Oh wait, no, oh God, it's worse.
Also, sometimes you get past a trap with a clever application of Shape Water and all feels right in the world. Viva utility cantrips!
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Doing a bit of pen cleanup, and made a weird discovery. I have a ton of pens, including fancy kickarter ones, but none of them have a clicking action that feels as robust as the million year old, super mundane parker jotter.
Do I have a category of pens described as "Too fancy to actually use?" - of course I do.
First things first, game-icons.net is an impossibly great resource for a huge range of simple, flexible illustrations that can be used for a HOST of things in any game design.
The following sites: creativemarket.com mightydeals.com designcuts.com
(and many more) are all purpose warehouses for things like fonts and design assets, and they frequently have deals on bundles which will get you a lot of really good stuff on the cheap.
serif.com sells a trio of *amazing* software products which are inexpensive and serve as alternatives to photoshop, illustrator and Indesign. For open source alternatives, check inkscape.org, scribus.net and gimp.org
I think one of the reasons I’ve always struggled in conversations about the problems with GM secrets is that I genuinely love, but they stab me like unopened gifts. Once I have one, my inner voice is all “OPEN IT OPEN IT”.
Intellectually, I get there are other approaches, including delighting in what players don’t know, but I don’t really *get* those on a guy level.
Gut level, even. Holding onto a secret is hard. I’ll do it for a good reason, but the reason better be worth me not making a PowerPoint presentation with diagrams to unpack it all.
I mean, I know nothing about this specific case, but it has me wondering more about the nature of these rewards, and if "And the prize goes to the police" is an outcome, how much things will bend towards that, to say nothing of "It's not a bribe, it's a reward!"
Gonna need to read up on this some, I think. I wager it's not a terribly transparent process, one with high emotions, loose money and limited accountability, and that sounds like a recipe for a very interesting rock to look under.
Ok, quick technique trick for GMs looking to use a mind map.
This is a very fiddly, inconsistent map, but it is a treasure trove for me as a GM because i follow one simple rule to building it, and that is this:
Nothing comes from nothing.
Such a map is very easy to start because the ONLY nodes on it are the PCs. If there is some sort of collective group (such as a Blades in the dark gang) you MIGHT, give it a node too, but that's optional.
From that point on, you use it to capture setting elements but follow one simple rule: You cannot add anything unless you can draw a line to something else.
Somebody messed up Jira today, but I'm not mad at them. The mistakes they made can all be traced to things that Jira makes hard and confusing, and the bad policy decisions around this particular project.
These problems are leading directly to specific actions we're going to take to make future problems less likely and more recoverable. I have a list, and will take care of most of them tomorrow.
I *absolutely* had a moment of strong emotional response to the problems. They were avoidable. They were rooted in mistakes that *I* would not have made. The traditional thing to do would have been to call the guy onto the carpet. That would have been *dumb*.