Has anyone homebrewed anything interesting g lately?
I'm working on a pretty classic dungeon crawl, inspired by some maps made available for personal and commercial use by Dyson. It's a tomb complex which houses the crypt and remains of a long-dead frost giant shaman-king. The complex was created by dwarven and duergar enslaved by the frost giants....but they built in a bunch of traps and tricks as revenge for their taller overlords. Many of the dungeon's features and monsters do some kind of cold damage or related effects, as might be expected in a place designed to honor frost giants....but the dwarves and duergar also created a bunch of fire-related features as revenge on their enslavers, so that if any frost giants came looking for the tomb and went through it, they'd be in for some nasty surprises.
Of course, that's conveniently also true for any delvers/adventurers who come looking for the tomb. They're sure to load up on cold resistant gear and magic...****y to find out it's not enough. (Evil laughter)
(This will be the culmination of a storyline in which the PCs stopped a frost giant shaman from using an ancient artifact to bring destructive blizzards and cold on the civilized lands. In order to actually destroy the artifact [which is cursed for any non-frost giant using it], they have to find the remains of the original frost giant shaman-king and destroy/sanctify them.)
That sounds cool, I’ll bet your players are really enjoying it. Any clues yet on how they plan on dealing with the remains?
No! I haven't written that part yet. Still cogitating on what might be both challenging and fun for everyone at the table.
As a related tangent, we're now at the highest level any of us have been in 5E, either as players or as a DM running a campaign. The PCs just hit 9th level, and the last session, which was intended to be a battle royale, wasn't all that. Despite using three homebrew creatures that were significantly above the recommended CR (yeah, yeah, CR is broken), the battle never really felt all that close or harrowing, as it was meant to be.
But it was a good lab for running combat for higher level characters and seeing what they could. They faced foes with about 620 hit points, collectively; combat took 5 or 6 rounds, and only 1 PC (out of 7) was brought to zero hit points (but bounced right back).
I'm doing the #Dungeon23 thing (megadungeon, one room a day for the year) where you're supposed to make one room a day), though it's sorta system agnostic and more a set up to use dungeon building procedures as a way of journaling IRL stuff. The dungeon is actually a proverbial "thing floating in space" so more geared to sci-fi or spell jammer of "expedition to the barrier peaks" style D&D. One of the core mechanics is the safety of the room based on my IRL local weather. If the day's IRL weather is stormy I grant the delvers "shelter from the storm" and make the room "safe" (no traps, O2 leakage, or excited security systems). If it's a nice day then "it's a good day to die" so the room will be hazardous per factors I'm still working out a procedural generation for. This was sort of intentional as I live in a part of the U.S. that's usually mild to nice weather, so lots of adversity in the dungeon, but I also knew the year would be starting with a major rain event so I could build lots of places for the party to encamp and maybe loot vital resources like med kits and oxygen in the dungeon's preliminary rooms.
More D&D specific, I'm making more time to revisit adapting my favorite section of the 2e Planescape module Tales from the Infinite Staircase, "Reflections (The Library of Hated Lore)*." The library is basically a Demiplane predicated on "mirror magic" build by a paranoid/xenophobic species, the Kameral. Their story is fascinating, and I'm trying to adapt them to 5E both as "monsters" as well as a playable race, and maybe flesh out "mirror magic" as a set of feats and maybe a Sorcerer bloodline and mirror based metamagic options. I don't know if any of my games will ever go to the Library of Hated Lore, though I have a few hooks for parties to discover it. I have in my default game world's head canon determined that Changelings are excommunicated Kameral, and as part of the excommunication, whatever plane of existence they land on they start their lives amnesiac, with no memory of the Kameral, but they'll have some mirror magic options available to them during feat acquisition windows. Excommunication is usually because their pre-amnesiac self expressed too much curiosity for "others" outside the Kameral, sympathy for those outside would be a death sentence.
*The Library of Hated Lore is one of those cool super library locations, the xenophobic Kameral maintained or established a surveillance system of observing through other places mirrors, reflecting pools etc. They created a system where any book or writing found during this surveillance was mirrored in the Kameral's library, so they literally have a copy of any book that's ever been in the sight of a mirror or reflective surface. It's "hated" lore because the Kameral's xenophobia is absolute ... it's sort of this weird species wide cultural narcissism that has progressed so far over millennia. Basically anything that didn't validate their supremacy or simply noted difference was retreated from, so that the entire civilization could only function by seeing its reflection, and eventually retreated into mirrors. Now they can only see through reflections and hate all they see because it is not them.
The whole thing got me back to some magic items based on mirrors I played with a while ago. Like a pocket mirror of daily affirmation, where if you say "I'm good enough, and smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me" to it, you have resistance to psychic damage for a day and the like. Within this I'm also trying to figure out ways I can produce effects based on funhouse mirrors either as magic items or spell effects.
Kameral would make cool echo knights, but I might do separate martial subclasses for them for the heck of it.
I am playing a good fighter/rogue half-elf who through the roll of the dice(aka bad rolls) has become a Champion of an Evil God but it has in many ways become a blessing for my character
Has anyone homebrewed anything interesting g lately?
I've been making my own TTRPG, based on 5e but the systems will probably change at some point. It's intended to be a sort of middle-ground between 5e and something like Basic Fantasy.
Aside from that, I've been writing out some homebrew lineages, such as the Mind Flayer and Modron, as well as some non-D&D lineages like the Dralox and the Sergal (one of my players likes furry/scaly stuff) and my own lineage, the Gastrosapien, which is like a slug/snail/worm person. I'll see if I can post it to D&D Beyond at some point.
That must be taking a long time. How long so far and how much do you have left to write?
I’m unfamiliar with those non-D&D names. What IP are they from?
All of the lineages are technically written out in their entireties, I just need to playtest them. I haven't been making them simultaneously, they're all seperate projects.
I don't actually know the exact origins or any lore of either the Dralox or the Sergal; I think they're just fictional species people made for OCs and stuff. They aren't from the same universe as far as I can tell.
The Dralox are like these weird 14-foot tall lizard(?) people with huge tendrils on their heads. I've made some changes to make them better suit a D&D character, such as making them much smaller.
Sergals are effectively bipedal wolf/canine things with a low intelligence and a very war-focused society. The Sergal lineage is actually adapted from someone else's Pathfinder homebrew.
Gastrosapiens are my own creation, and look like giant, human-sized snail/slugs/worms with limbs. The name is taken from a homebrew DanDWiki article but everything else is mine (original article here (not mine)):
Has anyone homebrewed anything interesting g lately?
In the game I DM, there's a running subplot/gag involving the party stumbling across magic items created by hags, so I'm constantly homebrewing new ones
Some are more useful than others, but using them always comes with a price. This is one an NPC had, but the gang only briefly interacted with them and never discovered that it even existed:
Awesome! I love cursed items that shift a user’s personality. Like this one:
I'm pretty sure the Homebrewers Code of Conduct requires you to add the ability to cast Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Mansion with the item when you typo "manor" for "manner". Though in this case, Sposta's Spectacular Ship may be a appropriate substitution.
Lol. Spelling… it will forever be my downfall. But now you’ve given me a great idea for a new homebrew!!
It did get me wondering why there aren't more "summon a big object" spells going around. Making a house or tower is nice, but what about a boat, ship, carriage, bridge, waystation, stables, whatever. Even just a decent outhouse, which would apparently be a service highly in demand given the general lack of bathrooms on the published adventure maps.
Has anyone homebrewed anything interesting g lately?
In the game I DM, there's a running subplot/gag involving the party stumbling across magic items created by hags, so I'm constantly homebrewing new ones
Some are more useful than others, but using them always comes with a price. This is one an NPC had, but the gang only briefly interacted with them and never discovered that it even existed:
Awesome! I love cursed items that shift a user’s personality. Like this one:
I'm pretty sure the Homebrewers Code of Conduct requires you to add the ability to cast Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Mansion with the item when you typo "manor" for "manner". Though in this case, Sposta's Spectacular Ship may be a appropriate substitution.
Lol. Spelling… it will forever be my downfall. But now you’ve given me a great idea for a new homebrew!!
It did get me wondering why there aren't more "summon a big object" spells going around. Making a house or tower is nice, but what about a boat, ship, carriage, bridge, waystation, stables, whatever. Even just a decent outhouse, which would apparently be a service highly in demand given the general lack of bathrooms on the published adventure maps.
Anyways, fabricate is good for a fairly wide range of decently-sized things. Couple it with creation if you don't have materials. It would make sense if it could be upcast to allow for bigger things, though.
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Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny. Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
How I'm posting based on text formatting: Mod Hat Off - Mod Hat Also Off (I'm not a mod)
This is getting dangerously close to "Hogwarts didn't need plumbing because wizards magic away their poop" talk...
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Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
All righty, questions of the day to get the ball rolling: How do you find players and/or groups to play with, and what do you look for in your players and/or DM?
For my in-person games, I start with a core group of players whom I have been playing with for years. Then, from there, we put out feelers to friends, family, and other contacts who seem like they would be a good fit for our group and assemble a party from there. That usually works out pretty well. I think we have only ever had one “miss” where someone who should not have been in the group (alignment police, “if you don’t play lawful good, I don’t want to deal with you IRL either” kind of person) ended up in the group, and, even then, his wife was the one recruited, so the recruitment process itself did not really fail.
My online group was one I joined because a friend invited me and I hadn’t been a player in over half a decade so I said yes. It was an abject disaster - As written Icewind Dale, without anything to flesh out the incredibly poorly written adventure. It also did not help that the DM was very much one of those “this is my story, if you do anything wrong I’ll punish you” types and his wife had main character syndrome that went unaddressed. I stuck in it for my friend (would have left if it was a group of strangers), but me and my friend formed our own online group after, recruiting one of my in person players and mutual friend and their fiancé to flesh out the group, following the same “if you just ask cool people if they want to play D&D, regardless of if they have played before, you can usually build a good party” plan as I do in person.
I have never actively looked for a DM—I have either always done it myself or been recruited to join a campaign, so I have no data on how I would handle that.
This is getting dangerously close to "Hogwarts didn't need plumbing because wizards magic away their poop" talk...
Which actually is a great lesson for DM’s—fleshing our your world and adding more detail is great, but be careful in how you do that. After all, the second Harry Potter book is literally based on the foundational idea that Hogwarts had magical indoor plumbing from its very existence - Rowlings’ fired from the hip bit of “lore” is undermined by foundational lore important to a major set of plot events.
All righty, questions of the day to get the ball rolling: How do you find players and/or groups to play with, and what do you look for in your players and/or DM?
Mostly through friends. My main group was formed when me and my sibling wanted to show a friend D&D, and then that friend's friend joined, and one of my other friends joined more recently.
I've only ever had 1 group fizzle out, back in 2018, and it was solely because everyone lost their character sheets. Granted, the group was comprised of a me, a friend (who is part of my main group), their sibling, and their dad, so it didn't exactly fall apart. We just stopped playing LMoP.
I have a group of friends I started gaming with for the first time in 2014 and we still play. There were attempts to recruit more players but we had really bad luck, with only one being a player who meshes with us and wants to play for as long as we like (there were others who meshed, but had busier lives). I also met a cool group via D&D Adventurers League. I haven't really looked any further than that, my main group fills out most of my needs, as I don't really like being a player (I sometimes feel like I could do a better job and my PCs all end up like caricatures).
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DM for life by choice, biggest fan of D&D specifically.
My D&D circle existed long before any of us played D&D together. We shared video games and freeform, systemless text roleplay games together and had done so for 'bout two decades or so. D&D is the thing we do now, though trialing new folks can be a bit tricky with such an old, established circle. We've done it, friends of friends and such, but we've also had some bad false starts that caused a lot of harm before we got back on top of it.
Speaking to the question though, if I were looking for players for a new group or looking to join a new group as a player? Superficial as it seems, I'm looking for presentation. I don't want "hey im running a game would like more players send me a dm with your character if you want to play". I want to see a detailed campaign pitch written in evocative language, or I want to see character snippets written similarly. Not "hi can i play i have a half orc fighter i wanna try", but a paragraph or two that gives me a sense of who the character is and why I should let them in. I want effort, put into an appealing and inviting presentation, because if somebody's not willing to put that effort into one or two forum posts to try and catch people's attention they're not going to put that effort into playing/running their game.
Put yourself out there and make your game/character seem like something really special that everybody else will be sorry they missed out on.
Speaking to the question though, if I were looking for players for a new group or looking to join a new group as a player? Superficial as it seems, I'm looking for presentation. I don't want "hey im running a game would like more players send me a dm with your character if you want to play". I want to see a detailed campaign pitch written in evocative language, or I want to see character snippets written similarly. Not "hi can i play i have a half orc fighter i wanna try", but a paragraph or two that gives me a sense of who the character is and why I should let them in. I want effort, put into an appealing and inviting presentation, because if somebody's not willing to put that effort into one or two forum posts to try and catch people's attention they're not going to put that effort into playing/running their game.
I don’t see that as superficial - D&D is a pretty big time commitment and, especially when dealing with strangers, I think you need more than just the fact they want to play D&D. That’s not to say there are not great players out there who put no effort into their characters (one of my core players is the same ‘chaotic stupid’ my backstory is I don’t have one, I just want to roll some dice and cause some trouble every time we play—and it works for him and he’s able to play it in a way that makes everyone have fun), but those who can pull it off are probably the exception, not the norm.
I wouldn’t want to gamble on that kind of person either—not if I did not personally know them or have someone I trust vouch for them.
The group I’m in now I found on meetup, the D&D meetup is pretty active in Seattle. I joined this group about 6-7 years ago. When we recruit, similar to others, we look to friends of current players first, if we don’t, the DM hops back on meetup.
My D&D circle existed long before any of us played D&D together. We shared video games and freeform, systemless text roleplay games together and had done so for 'bout two decades or so. D&D is the thing we do now, though trialing new folks can be a bit tricky with such an old, established circle. We've done it, friends of friends and such, but we've also had some bad false starts that caused a lot of harm before we got back on top of it.
Speaking to the question though, if I were looking for players for a new group or looking to join a new group as a player? Superficial as it seems, I'm looking for presentation. I don't want "hey im running a game would like more players send me a dm with your character if you want to play". I want to see a detailed campaign pitch written in evocative language, or I want to see character snippets written similarly. Not "hi can i play i have a half orc fighter i wanna try", but a paragraph or two that gives me a sense of who the character is and why I should let them in. I want effort, put into an appealing and inviting presentation, because if somebody's not willing to put that effort into one or two forum posts to try and catch people's attention they're not going to put that effort into playing/running their game.
Put yourself out there and make your game/character seem like something really special that everybody else will be sorry they missed out on.
I haven’t heard the term freeform in ages. 😅 That takes me back.
This is getting dangerously close to "Hogwarts didn't need plumbing because wizards magic away their poop" talk...
Which actually is a great lesson for DM’s—fleshing our your world and adding more detail is great, but be careful in how you do that. After all, the second Harry Potter book is literally based on the foundational idea that Hogwarts had magical indoor plumbing from its very existence - Rowlings’ fired from the hip bit of “lore” is undermined by foundational lore important to a major set of plot events.
The group that's not people I knew from a long time ago, I met at an LGS, after asking the employees there if anyone was running D&D. They put me in contact with a DM who was recruiting soon, and I got incredibly lucky because there were already a few other players, we all got along really well, and we proceeded to have games weekly for the next three-ish years.
There was another group who played the same night as ours, and we ended up talking to each other and eventually intermingling. Both groups lost a couple of players over time, and picked up some, but yeah.
The LGS is a wonderful resource and if you have one, you should go there. But I'm not sure my story is going to be super helpful because it just went so smoothly. It'll probably not be quite as simple for everyone.
(Though, it does mirror my PbP experience. I just posted in a couple of recruiting threads and the one that gave me a response, everyone was great and we just started playing and it's been going great. I consider myself very lucky.)
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Awesome!! I’ll add it to the list when I update the rest of it.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
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No! I haven't written that part yet. Still cogitating on what might be both challenging and fun for everyone at the table.
As a related tangent, we're now at the highest level any of us have been in 5E, either as players or as a DM running a campaign. The PCs just hit 9th level, and the last session, which was intended to be a battle royale, wasn't all that. Despite using three homebrew creatures that were significantly above the recommended CR (yeah, yeah, CR is broken), the battle never really felt all that close or harrowing, as it was meant to be.
But it was a good lab for running combat for higher level characters and seeing what they could. They faced foes with about 620 hit points, collectively; combat took 5 or 6 rounds, and only 1 PC (out of 7) was brought to zero hit points (but bounced right back).
I'm doing the #Dungeon23 thing (megadungeon, one room a day for the year) where you're supposed to make one room a day), though it's sorta system agnostic and more a set up to use dungeon building procedures as a way of journaling IRL stuff. The dungeon is actually a proverbial "thing floating in space" so more geared to sci-fi or spell jammer of "expedition to the barrier peaks" style D&D. One of the core mechanics is the safety of the room based on my IRL local weather. If the day's IRL weather is stormy I grant the delvers "shelter from the storm" and make the room "safe" (no traps, O2 leakage, or excited security systems). If it's a nice day then "it's a good day to die" so the room will be hazardous per factors I'm still working out a procedural generation for. This was sort of intentional as I live in a part of the U.S. that's usually mild to nice weather, so lots of adversity in the dungeon, but I also knew the year would be starting with a major rain event so I could build lots of places for the party to encamp and maybe loot vital resources like med kits and oxygen in the dungeon's preliminary rooms.
More D&D specific, I'm making more time to revisit adapting my favorite section of the 2e Planescape module Tales from the Infinite Staircase, "Reflections (The Library of Hated Lore)*." The library is basically a Demiplane predicated on "mirror magic" build by a paranoid/xenophobic species, the Kameral. Their story is fascinating, and I'm trying to adapt them to 5E both as "monsters" as well as a playable race, and maybe flesh out "mirror magic" as a set of feats and maybe a Sorcerer bloodline and mirror based metamagic options. I don't know if any of my games will ever go to the Library of Hated Lore, though I have a few hooks for parties to discover it. I have in my default game world's head canon determined that Changelings are excommunicated Kameral, and as part of the excommunication, whatever plane of existence they land on they start their lives amnesiac, with no memory of the Kameral, but they'll have some mirror magic options available to them during feat acquisition windows. Excommunication is usually because their pre-amnesiac self expressed too much curiosity for "others" outside the Kameral, sympathy for those outside would be a death sentence.
*The Library of Hated Lore is one of those cool super library locations, the xenophobic Kameral maintained or established a surveillance system of observing through other places mirrors, reflecting pools etc. They created a system where any book or writing found during this surveillance was mirrored in the Kameral's library, so they literally have a copy of any book that's ever been in the sight of a mirror or reflective surface. It's "hated" lore because the Kameral's xenophobia is absolute ... it's sort of this weird species wide cultural narcissism that has progressed so far over millennia. Basically anything that didn't validate their supremacy or simply noted difference was retreated from, so that the entire civilization could only function by seeing its reflection, and eventually retreated into mirrors. Now they can only see through reflections and hate all they see because it is not them.
The whole thing got me back to some magic items based on mirrors I played with a while ago. Like a pocket mirror of daily affirmation, where if you say "I'm good enough, and smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me" to it, you have resistance to psychic damage for a day and the like. Within this I'm also trying to figure out ways I can produce effects based on funhouse mirrors either as magic items or spell effects.
Kameral would make cool echo knights, but I might do separate martial subclasses for them for the heck of it.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I am playing a good fighter/rogue half-elf who through the roll of the dice(aka bad rolls) has become a Champion of an Evil God but it has in many ways become a blessing for my character
All of the lineages are technically written out in their entireties, I just need to playtest them. I haven't been making them simultaneously, they're all seperate projects.
I don't actually know the exact origins or any lore of either the Dralox or the Sergal; I think they're just fictional species people made for OCs and stuff. They aren't from the same universe as far as I can tell.
The Dralox are like these weird 14-foot tall lizard(?) people with huge tendrils on their heads. I've made some changes to make them better suit a D&D character, such as making them much smaller.
Sergals are effectively bipedal wolf/canine things with a low intelligence and a very war-focused society. The Sergal lineage is actually adapted from someone else's Pathfinder homebrew.
Gastrosapiens are my own creation, and look like giant, human-sized snail/slugs/worms with limbs. The name is taken from a homebrew DanDWiki article but everything else is mine (original article here (not mine)):
https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Gastrosapien_(5e_Race)
Edit: link's broken. Oh well, it's easy enough to find on Google.
[REDACTED]
It did get me wondering why there aren't more "summon a big object" spells going around. Making a house or tower is nice, but what about a boat, ship, carriage, bridge, waystation, stables, whatever. Even just a decent outhouse, which would apparently be a service highly in demand given the general lack of bathrooms on the published adventure maps.
Oh, sure, make the casters even more OP.
;)
Why have an outhouse when you could have disintegrate (or, indeed, catapult)?
Anyways, fabricate is good for a fairly wide range of decently-sized things. Couple it with creation if you don't have materials. It would make sense if it could be upcast to allow for bigger things, though.
Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny.
Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
How I'm posting based on text formatting: Mod Hat Off - Mod Hat Also Off (I'm not a mod)
This is getting dangerously close to "Hogwarts didn't need plumbing because wizards magic away their poop" talk...
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
All righty, questions of the day to get the ball rolling: How do you find players and/or groups to play with, and what do you look for in your players and/or DM?
For my in-person games, I start with a core group of players whom I have been playing with for years. Then, from there, we put out feelers to friends, family, and other contacts who seem like they would be a good fit for our group and assemble a party from there. That usually works out pretty well. I think we have only ever had one “miss” where someone who should not have been in the group (alignment police, “if you don’t play lawful good, I don’t want to deal with you IRL either” kind of person) ended up in the group, and, even then, his wife was the one recruited, so the recruitment process itself did not really fail.
My online group was one I joined because a friend invited me and I hadn’t been a player in over half a decade so I said yes. It was an abject disaster - As written Icewind Dale, without anything to flesh out the incredibly poorly written adventure. It also did not help that the DM was very much one of those “this is my story, if you do anything wrong I’ll punish you” types and his wife had main character syndrome that went unaddressed. I stuck in it for my friend (would have left if it was a group of strangers), but me and my friend formed our own online group after, recruiting one of my in person players and mutual friend and their fiancé to flesh out the group, following the same “if you just ask cool people if they want to play D&D, regardless of if they have played before, you can usually build a good party” plan as I do in person.
I have never actively looked for a DM—I have either always done it myself or been recruited to join a campaign, so I have no data on how I would handle that.
Which actually is a great lesson for DM’s—fleshing our your world and adding more detail is great, but be careful in how you do that. After all, the second Harry Potter book is literally based on the foundational idea that Hogwarts had magical indoor plumbing from its very existence - Rowlings’ fired from the hip bit of “lore” is undermined by foundational lore important to a major set of plot events.
Mostly through friends. My main group was formed when me and my sibling wanted to show a friend D&D, and then that friend's friend joined, and one of my other friends joined more recently.
I've only ever had 1 group fizzle out, back in 2018, and it was solely because everyone lost their character sheets. Granted, the group was comprised of a me, a friend (who is part of my main group), their sibling, and their dad, so it didn't exactly fall apart. We just stopped playing LMoP.
[REDACTED]
I have a group of friends I started gaming with for the first time in 2014 and we still play. There were attempts to recruit more players but we had really bad luck, with only one being a player who meshes with us and wants to play for as long as we like (there were others who meshed, but had busier lives). I also met a cool group via D&D Adventurers League. I haven't really looked any further than that, my main group fills out most of my needs, as I don't really like being a player (I sometimes feel like I could do a better job and my PCs all end up like caricatures).
DM for life by choice, biggest fan of D&D specifically.
My D&D circle existed long before any of us played D&D together. We shared video games and freeform, systemless text roleplay games together and had done so for 'bout two decades or so. D&D is the thing we do now, though trialing new folks can be a bit tricky with such an old, established circle. We've done it, friends of friends and such, but we've also had some bad false starts that caused a lot of harm before we got back on top of it.
Speaking to the question though, if I were looking for players for a new group or looking to join a new group as a player? Superficial as it seems, I'm looking for presentation. I don't want "hey im running a game would like more players send me a dm with your character if you want to play". I want to see a detailed campaign pitch written in evocative language, or I want to see character snippets written similarly. Not "hi can i play i have a half orc fighter i wanna try", but a paragraph or two that gives me a sense of who the character is and why I should let them in. I want effort, put into an appealing and inviting presentation, because if somebody's not willing to put that effort into one or two forum posts to try and catch people's attention they're not going to put that effort into playing/running their game.
Put yourself out there and make your game/character seem like something really special that everybody else will be sorry they missed out on.
Please do not contact or message me.
I don’t see that as superficial - D&D is a pretty big time commitment and, especially when dealing with strangers, I think you need more than just the fact they want to play D&D. That’s not to say there are not great players out there who put no effort into their characters (one of my core players is the same ‘chaotic stupid’ my backstory is I don’t have one, I just want to roll some dice and cause some trouble every time we play—and it works for him and he’s able to play it in a way that makes everyone have fun), but those who can pull it off are probably the exception, not the norm.
I wouldn’t want to gamble on that kind of person either—not if I did not personally know them or have someone I trust vouch for them.
The group I’m in now I found on meetup, the D&D meetup is pretty active in Seattle. I joined this group about 6-7 years ago. When we recruit, similar to others, we look to friends of current players first, if we don’t, the DM hops back on meetup.
I haven’t heard the term freeform in ages. 😅 That takes me back.
The Romans had indoor plumbing.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
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I’m currently in 2 groups, 1 is with actual personal friends, the other is a PbP group of people I met here on DDB.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
The group that's not people I knew from a long time ago, I met at an LGS, after asking the employees there if anyone was running D&D. They put me in contact with a DM who was recruiting soon, and I got incredibly lucky because there were already a few other players, we all got along really well, and we proceeded to have games weekly for the next three-ish years.
There was another group who played the same night as ours, and we ended up talking to each other and eventually intermingling. Both groups lost a couple of players over time, and picked up some, but yeah.
The LGS is a wonderful resource and if you have one, you should go there. But I'm not sure my story is going to be super helpful because it just went so smoothly. It'll probably not be quite as simple for everyone.
(Though, it does mirror my PbP experience. I just posted in a couple of recruiting threads and the one that gave me a response, everyone was great and we just started playing and it's been going great. I consider myself very lucky.)