I can't think of any real-world references that wouldn't already be expected in a fantasy RPG setting, but I did once weave in an appearance by the Doctor, making them cannon in my game world.
That’s cool. Which Doctor?
Twelve (my fave from New Who). I ran the PCs through Curse of Strahd, and one of them found an old pocket watch in the mud on the road (randomly rolled). When they eventually returned to Faerun and we played Storm King's Thunder, I had a posting on a notice board asking for anyone who found a pocket watch to meet under a bridge to return it for a reward. When the PCs showed up they found the TARDIS, and the Doctor retrieved his pocket watch and thanked them.
I had hoped to have the Doctor show up again, but my players didn't seem as excited about the scene as I was, so I let it go.
"Orcs are savage raiders and pillagers with stooped postures, low foreheads, and piggish faces with prominent lower canines that resemble tusks." MM p245 (original printing) You don't OWN your books on DDB: WotC can change them any time. What do you think will happen when OneD&D comes out?
Question for the day, somewhat related to yesterday's: how much do you enjoy having real-world references creep into your D&D, and in what ways?
I think it is a play it by ear kind of thing - each campaign is going to be a bit different and, even within the same campaign different points might have different thresholds that should be met.
I think my favourite recent real-world reference came when someone cast the (already kind of silly) spell Speak with Plants. Naturally their first question was “what is your name?” to which I responded “Robert.” It took them a couple seconds before someone audibly groaned at the “Robert Plant” joke. Naturally that meant the next plants they spoke to were a Jimmy and two Johns.
Question for the day, somewhat related to yesterday's: how much do you enjoy having real-world references creep into your D&D, and in what ways?
I think it is a play it by ear kind of thing - each campaign is going to be a bit different and, even within the same campaign different points might have different thresholds that should be met.
I think my favourite recent real-world reference came when someone cast the (already kind of silly) spell Speak with Plants. Naturally their first question was “what is your name?” to which I responded “Robert.” It took them a couple seconds before someone audibly groaned at the “Robert Plant” joke. Naturally that meant the next plants they spoke to were a Jimmy and two Johns.
These are best kinds of jokes.
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"Orcs are savage raiders and pillagers with stooped postures, low foreheads, and piggish faces with prominent lower canines that resemble tusks." MM p245 (original printing) You don't OWN your books on DDB: WotC can change them any time. What do you think will happen when OneD&D comes out?
I can't think of any real-world references that wouldn't already be expected in a fantasy RPG setting, but I did once weave in an appearance by the Doctor, making them cannon in my game world.
That’s cool. Which Doctor?
Twelve (my fave from New Who). I ran the PCs through Curse of Strahd, and one of them found an old pocket watch in the mud on the road (randomly rolled). When they eventually returned to Faerun and we played Storm King's Thunder, I had a posting on a notice board asking for anyone who found a pocket watch to meet under a bridge to return it for a reward. When the PCs showed up they found the TARDIS, and the Doctor retrieved his pocket watch and thanked them.
I had hoped to have the Doctor show up again, but my players didn't seem as excited about the scene as I was, so I let it go.
I love this. Might have the PCs notice a tiny spinning blue box in the distance of the Astral Plane if I ever do any Spelljammer stuff.
Question for the day, somewhat related to yesterday's: how much do you enjoy having real-world references creep into your D&D, and in what ways?
I ask because in another thread I mentioned the homebrew magic item my party seems to love the most -- the Rod of Cake, which turns ordinary objects into delicious cake. It's a gag item based on this trend which I gave to a character on her player's birthday
I tend to avoid pop culture references appearing in games I run, though that doesn't stop the players from somehow finding them anyway. Most of the references that are brought up, though, are in-jokes. Just yesterday, the party found a shrivelled, mummified heart in Undermountain and (through a Suggestion spell) convinced the half-orc who had hired them to find magic items, to buy the heart. This was, of course, after the entire party spent half the session trying to get the Yuan-ti fighter (player) to EAT the heart.
But if a tangent, but yeah. I plan to have some sort of reference to the whole fiasco somewhere down the line. Maybe some street chef in Skullport selling dubiously-harvested grilled hearts.
Question for the day, somewhat related to yesterday's: how much do you enjoy having real-world references creep into your D&D, and in what ways?
I ask because in another thread I mentioned the homebrew magic item my party seems to love the most -- the Rod of Cake, which turns ordinary objects into delicious cake. It's a gag item based on this trend which I gave to a character on her player's birthday
When I ran Frozen Sick deep in the pandemic, I referred to the townsfolk starting to don masks as the Frigid Woe became to start showing up and people arguing whether they should wear masks at the tavern because everyone knew everyone there. It was an off the cuff flavor item, and I actually paused and asked the group "too soon?" They were good with it.
My game's Feywild based Goblin King is named Jareth, but sometimes introduces himself as David Bow- and then catches himself. When he meets new goblinoids (I always wind up with some goblin kind in my parties) he'll call them a muppet, as in "My aren't you a well put together muppet," or "I see this frayed muppet has seen better days." Nobody knows what he's talking about.
Main game's party's patron is Burney, a Copper Dragon, the one in Descent into Avernus fleshed out significantly ... basically a spy master who's also a key figure in a metallic dragon heretical school of thinking about dragonkind. She has a demiplane that's basically an extended white room, with black curtains, near some sort of interplanar transit hub. She has an extensive art collection, including Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Rambrandt's only seascape, still at large after being stolen as part of one of the largest art heists of the late 20th century. Rambrandt's actually in the painting, the only face not looking at Christ, instead looking out to the viewer. Burney learned Dutch over a weekend to talk to him. Burney kept it, using the rest of the heist as bartering pieces, she totally does not get or intentional misunderstands the Bible, gets it confused with sports history and other Earth culture, but likes the powerful message of trust and faith is something bigger than you in the painting.
Burney has a human sorta consort, maybe, it's unclear but they go way back. This guy is an self-exiled leader, his realm now being a broken world, Abandominium that sort of travels comet style (months before Path of the Plainbreaker, thank you, but that's been a helpful resource), his former seat of power is this black pyramid with a rectangular structure adjacent, the Luxor casino, surrounded by sand dunes. Occasionally when his loyal remnant that sort of keep vigil over the pyramid dig fortifications, it's clear they're set up in the parking lot. There's booths to reach this world from other worlds, if you know the chant, and the chant's ELO's "Telephone Line."
Other than that I keep the anachronisms and pop cultural references to a minimum.
Oh wait, duh, Fraz urb'luu is one of the games real big bads. I basically do an extended impression of Jesse Ventura's appearance in the X Files to characterize him, but the reference is largely lost on most players other than the restrained pro wrestler tone.
The only time I put a real-world reference in a game was when I homebrewed a Candyland one-shot wherein the players had to defeat a villain after surviving the perils of the nougat cave, chocolate geysers, peanut boulders and caramel swamp..****y for them to realize that the detritus of their journey, when in contact with the villain through their melee attacks, made him lose his inexplicable anger. Because he wasn't himself when he was hungry.
Yes, I wrote a one-shot so I could make a Snickers joke.
I gave my players a little extra leeway to add some additional lore to my current homebrew world, and long story short, Miss Frizzle is now canon in my game.😐
I gave my players a little extra leeway to add some additional lore to my current homebrew world, and long story short, Miss Frizzle is now canon in my game.😐
The bus too? Like, I'm a little ambivalent on the subject by I know they say vehicles are not 5e's strong suit.
I could see Miss Frizzle maybe becoming a sort of Artificer equivalent of Baba Yaga, with the bus being like her hut.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I gave my players a little extra leeway to add some additional lore to my current homebrew world, and long story short, Miss Frizzle is now canon in my game.😐
The bus too? Like, I'm a little ambivalent on the subject by I know they say vehicles are not 5e's strong suit.
I could see Miss Frizzle maybe becoming a sort of Artificer equivalent of Baba Yaga, with the bus being like her hut.
I gave my players a little extra leeway to add some additional lore to my current homebrew world, and long story short, Miss Frizzle is now canon in my game.😐
The bus too? Like, I'm a little ambivalent on the subject by I know they say vehicles are not 5e's strong suit.
I could see Miss Frizzle maybe becoming a sort of Artificer equivalent of Baba Yaga, with the bus being like her hut.
Miss Frizzle, the bus, and quite possibly Carlos before I realized what was happening...
My table doesn’t use minis because we don’t find them necessary, don’t find it really adds anything to the game, don’t have room for a giant table for them, and don’t want to spend the money on them. Plus we find dots on a whiteboard just as useful, and generally think our imaginations provide better cinematics for us. Now, I know that doesn’t hold true for everyone out there, but it works for us.
Yes. Personally, I think they add some fun flavour to combat and maps by adding a physical representation of what the party is facing. Additionally, for things like furniture and terrain, they give the party a clear visual they can interact with. Seeing a square drawn on a map is one thing - seeing a table that the strong person could flip over to make a barricade is another.
Additionally I just find them fun to collect and paint. Plus, the evil DM in me likes having dozens of pieces of furniture with corresponding mimic minis. It is the DM’s job, after all, to make the players constantly afraid the step stool might bite them.
Thank you for the question!! I’m also in the TotM camp. It’s like how movies often ruin books, I find minis often ruin D&D. My imagination can always do a better job showing me what the DM describes than the minis could ever represent. Besides, they so ‘spensive!!!
Thank you for the question!! I’m also in the TotM camp. It’s like how movies often ruin books, I find minis often ruin D&D. My imagination can always do a better job showing me what the DM describes than the minis could ever represent. Besides, they so ‘spensive!!!
I think I can honestly say I have never played with a party where the players were sober enough to do TotM in combat or any puzzle or other situation involving physical positioning (beyond simple marching order)!
My table doesn’t use minis because we don’t find them necessary, don’t find it really adds anything to the game, don’t have room for a giant table for them, and don’t want to spend the money on them. Plus we find dots on a whiteboard just as useful, and generally think our imaginations provide better cinematics for us. Now, I know that doesn’t hold true for everyone out there, but it works for us.
My one in-person table did TotM with occasional quick drawings by the DM when more complex stuff needed to be visualized. With my online groups we use Roll20 for grid battlemaps, it's just easier in that format.
Minis: I don't mind them, but I prefer much simpler tokens if I really need to spatially orient a game beyond marking a map. There's a lot of material/resources expended in building up TTRPG library ... and minis are just to me a whole other hobby with a not negligible overhead. TotM is a lot more transportable, requires less space.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I prefer minis, because in TotM I have no idea where the monsters are, which is a problem when I'm the DM XD Funnily enough I always know where the PCs are, but the monsters always fall through the cracks in my attention span, especially if there is a lot of monsters with the same stats.
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DM for life by choice, biggest fan of D&D specifically.
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Twelve (my fave from New Who). I ran the PCs through Curse of Strahd, and one of them found an old pocket watch in the mud on the road (randomly rolled). When they eventually returned to Faerun and we played Storm King's Thunder, I had a posting on a notice board asking for anyone who found a pocket watch to meet under a bridge to return it for a reward. When the PCs showed up they found the TARDIS, and the Doctor retrieved his pocket watch and thanked them.
I had hoped to have the Doctor show up again, but my players didn't seem as excited about the scene as I was, so I let it go.
"Orcs are savage raiders and pillagers with stooped postures, low foreheads, and piggish faces with prominent lower canines that resemble tusks." MM p245 (original printing)
You don't OWN your books on DDB: WotC can change them any time. What do you think will happen when OneD&D comes out?
I think it is a play it by ear kind of thing - each campaign is going to be a bit different and, even within the same campaign different points might have different thresholds that should be met.
I think my favourite recent real-world reference came when someone cast the (already kind of silly) spell Speak with Plants. Naturally their first question was “what is your name?” to which I responded “Robert.” It took them a couple seconds before someone audibly groaned at the “Robert Plant” joke. Naturally that meant the next plants they spoke to were a Jimmy and two Johns.
These are best kinds of jokes.
"Orcs are savage raiders and pillagers with stooped postures, low foreheads, and piggish faces with prominent lower canines that resemble tusks." MM p245 (original printing)
You don't OWN your books on DDB: WotC can change them any time. What do you think will happen when OneD&D comes out?
I love this. Might have the PCs notice a tiny spinning blue box in the distance of the Astral Plane if I ever do any Spelljammer stuff.
[REDACTED]
I tend to avoid pop culture references appearing in games I run, though that doesn't stop the players from somehow finding them anyway. Most of the references that are brought up, though, are in-jokes. Just yesterday, the party found a shrivelled, mummified heart in Undermountain and (through a Suggestion spell) convinced the half-orc who had hired them to find magic items, to buy the heart. This was, of course, after the entire party spent half the session trying to get the Yuan-ti fighter (player) to EAT the heart.
But if a tangent, but yeah. I plan to have some sort of reference to the whole fiasco somewhere down the line. Maybe some street chef in Skullport selling dubiously-harvested grilled hearts.
[REDACTED]
When I ran Frozen Sick deep in the pandemic, I referred to the townsfolk starting to don masks as the Frigid Woe became to start showing up and people arguing whether they should wear masks at the tavern because everyone knew everyone there. It was an off the cuff flavor item, and I actually paused and asked the group "too soon?" They were good with it.
My game's Feywild based Goblin King is named Jareth, but sometimes introduces himself as David Bow- and then catches himself. When he meets new goblinoids (I always wind up with some goblin kind in my parties) he'll call them a muppet, as in "My aren't you a well put together muppet," or "I see this frayed muppet has seen better days." Nobody knows what he's talking about.
Main game's party's patron is Burney, a Copper Dragon, the one in Descent into Avernus fleshed out significantly ... basically a spy master who's also a key figure in a metallic dragon heretical school of thinking about dragonkind. She has a demiplane that's basically an extended white room, with black curtains, near some sort of interplanar transit hub. She has an extensive art collection, including Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Rambrandt's only seascape, still at large after being stolen as part of one of the largest art heists of the late 20th century. Rambrandt's actually in the painting, the only face not looking at Christ, instead looking out to the viewer. Burney learned Dutch over a weekend to talk to him. Burney kept it, using the rest of the heist as bartering pieces, she totally does not get or intentional misunderstands the Bible, gets it confused with sports history and other Earth culture, but likes the powerful message of trust and faith is something bigger than you in the painting.
Burney has a human sorta consort, maybe, it's unclear but they go way back. This guy is an self-exiled leader, his realm now being a broken world, Abandominium that sort of travels comet style (months before Path of the Plainbreaker, thank you, but that's been a helpful resource), his former seat of power is this black pyramid with a rectangular structure adjacent, the Luxor casino, surrounded by sand dunes. Occasionally when his loyal remnant that sort of keep vigil over the pyramid dig fortifications, it's clear they're set up in the parking lot. There's booths to reach this world from other worlds, if you know the chant, and the chant's ELO's "Telephone Line."
Other than that I keep the anachronisms and pop cultural references to a minimum.
Oh wait, duh, Fraz urb'luu is one of the games real big bads. I basically do an extended impression of Jesse Ventura's appearance in the X Files to characterize him, but the reference is largely lost on most players other than the restrained pro wrestler tone.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
The only time I put a real-world reference in a game was when I homebrewed a Candyland one-shot wherein the players had to defeat a villain after surviving the perils of the nougat cave, chocolate geysers, peanut boulders and caramel swamp..****y for them to realize that the detritus of their journey, when in contact with the villain through their melee attacks, made him lose his inexplicable anger. Because he wasn't himself when he was hungry.
Yes, I wrote a one-shot so I could make a Snickers joke.
I gave my players a little extra leeway to add some additional lore to my current homebrew world, and long story short, Miss Frizzle is now canon in my game.😐
The bus too? Like, I'm a little ambivalent on the subject by I know they say vehicles are not 5e's strong suit.
I could see Miss Frizzle maybe becoming a sort of Artificer equivalent of Baba Yaga, with the bus being like her hut.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
The bus really can go anywhere….
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
Miss Frizzle, the bus, and quite possibly Carlos before I realized what was happening...
It is a magic school bus...
Today’s question: Minis or not, and why?
My table doesn’t use minis because we don’t find them necessary, don’t find it really adds anything to the game, don’t have room for a giant table for them, and don’t want to spend the money on them. Plus we find dots on a whiteboard just as useful, and generally think our imaginations provide better cinematics for us. Now, I know that doesn’t hold true for everyone out there, but it works for us.
Yes. Personally, I think they add some fun flavour to combat and maps by adding a physical representation of what the party is facing. Additionally, for things like furniture and terrain, they give the party a clear visual they can interact with. Seeing a square drawn on a map is one thing - seeing a table that the strong person could flip over to make a barricade is another.
Additionally I just find them fun to collect and paint. Plus, the evil DM in me likes having dozens of pieces of furniture with corresponding mimic minis. It is the DM’s job, after all, to make the players constantly afraid the step stool might bite them.
My tables like playing with toys. One of these days I'll get em to use a map with no grid on it. That'd be neat.
Thank you for the question!! I’m also in the TotM camp. It’s like how movies often ruin books, I find minis often ruin D&D. My imagination can always do a better job showing me what the DM describes than the minis could ever represent. Besides, they so ‘spensive!!!
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
I think I can honestly say I have never played with a party where the players were sober enough to do TotM in combat or any puzzle or other situation involving physical positioning (beyond simple marching order)!
My one in-person table did TotM with occasional quick drawings by the DM when more complex stuff needed to be visualized. With my online groups we use Roll20 for grid battlemaps, it's just easier in that format.
Minis: I don't mind them, but I prefer much simpler tokens if I really need to spatially orient a game beyond marking a map. There's a lot of material/resources expended in building up TTRPG library ... and minis are just to me a whole other hobby with a not negligible overhead. TotM is a lot more transportable, requires less space.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I prefer minis, because in TotM I have no idea where the monsters are, which is a problem when I'm the DM XD Funnily enough I always know where the PCs are, but the monsters always fall through the cracks in my attention span, especially if there is a lot of monsters with the same stats.
DM for life by choice, biggest fan of D&D specifically.