I just keep a list of NPC names on the side so that I can pull one off the list in case I forgot to name somebody or if the party wants to talk somebody I didn't expect.

Quote from Thorrison >>

Quote from Nothic2SeeHere_ >>

Page 2? Disappointing.

QotD: When you DM, how do you spend your pre-session prep time?

"Ok, I have everyone's sheets open, the combat tracker ready, the encounter is here, my plan docs are there... what did I forget... oh what dice should I use? I wonder if they'll talk to this npc. I hope this combat encounter isn't too hard. The map is working on roll20, right? Ok good."

"I FORGOT TO GIVE THE SHOPKEEPER A NAME"

 
It's difficult to always be ready, too - with names.

Last session the party rolled back into a town they'd been working out of - when one of the players asked, "Can I see if there's a tattoo shop here?"

I could have said there wasn't one. Instead, I said, "You know what. Give me a perception check to see if you find a tattoo shop."

As they gathered their dice and rolled - the result wouldn't have mattered.

I used that time to come up with an NPC name and the result just ended up how long it took them to find the shop.

So never forget to improvise as needed.

Improvisation is my world's motto!

It has to be. I don't have any towns or cities or villages mapped out out. I don't have any shopkeepers named. All of it has to come u as we play, lol. Which is why I have to check on NPCs from last session -- hellifiknow what I named the stall merchant or the Cartwright in that last session, lol.

I created the world as a start -- from that point, everything else comes along as we play.

Quote from AEDorsay >>

Improvisation is my world's motto!

It has to be. I don't have any towns or cities or villages mapped out out. I don't have any shopkeepers named. All of it has to come u as we play, lol. Which is why I have to check on NPCs from last session -- hellifiknow what I named the stall merchant or the Cartwright in that last session, lol.

I created the world as a start -- from that point, everything else comes along as we play.

 I improvise a lot too. But I’m really impressed at how detailed your Wyrlde is. You’ve clearly spent a lot of time designing it. I just use the basic Forgotten Realms and change a few things.

Oh I always have a list or name generator on hand but sometimes I completely forget to flesh out someone important because I did it all in my head but never wrote anything down. Love my brain!

Quote from Thorrison >>

Oh I always have a list or name generator on hand but sometimes I completely forget to flesh out someone important because I did it all in my head but never wrote anything down. Love my brain!

 I do this a lot too.

Quote from WoodsGirl0402 >>

Quote from AEDorsay >>

Improvisation is my world's motto!

It has to be. I don't have any towns or cities or villages mapped out out. I don't have any shopkeepers named. All of it has to come u as we play, lol. Which is why I have to check on NPCs from last session -- hellifiknow what I named the stall merchant or the Cartwright in that last session, lol.

I created the world as a start -- from that point, everything else comes along as we play.

 I improvise a lot too. But I’m really impressed at how detailed your Wyrlde is. You’ve clearly spent a lot of time designing it. I just use the basic Forgotten Realms and change a few things.

There is nothing wrong with using an existing setting and changing a few things. You're homebrewing - and if you keep DMing - you will keep homebrewing - and in time, when you look back - it won't resemble Forgotten Realms anymore. It will be your own world. Forgotten Realms was just the spark to ignite the fire of creativity.

Quote from WoodsGirl0402 >>

Quote from AEDorsay >>

Improvisation is my world's motto!

It has to be. I don't have any towns or cities or villages mapped out out. I don't have any shopkeepers named. All of it has to come u as we play, lol. Which is why I have to check on NPCs from last session -- hellifiknow what I named the stall merchant or the Cartwright in that last session, lol.

I created the world as a start -- from that point, everything else comes along as we play.

 I improvise a lot too. But I’m really impressed at how detailed your Wyrlde is. You’ve clearly spent a lot of time designing it. I just use the basic Forgotten Realms and change a few things.

 
I shall squee a moment, first...

squee

Then I shall say thank you very much for the compliment.

Thank you very much for the compliment on Wyrlde.

and then i will go thus:

FR is a world that was intentionally designed to work with D&D.  It's whole purpose is to be as easy as possible to use so that folks can do exactly that, and it is totally and utterly fine to do exactly that (and a LOT easier, lol).

If I wasn't such a dang nabbit contrarian, I'd likely do that myself.

But that said, one of the benefits to all that work I did on Wyrlde is that I can improvise a lot more readily and still maintain a high degree of cohesiveness and consistency. I know Towns exist (but would have to look up their names), but I literally make up villages off the top of my head (and don't even have a list of all of the ones I describe in the lore itself). It is very much designed so that one can do exactly that kind of improvisation -- the stuff I answered is all the stuff I've learned to answer over the years, so that there is a sense of consistency -- and from this point, about half the new stuff (or more) will come from players making crap up.

Hence the website -- it gives me a way to add the lore they invent to the website, and so they can see the impact of it on the whole (because I will ripple that shit out, lol).

It remains true that one of the most important features of a good TTRPG setting is blank spaces.

The Forgotten Realms still has more than you'd think, after all this time, but the 5e version also left out some areas that had previously been detailed. Did they do it to save pages? Maybe. But either way, it works.

I did get "internet yelled at" by some young pup who was in charge of a D&D worldbuilding group or forum or something once because I never did any real "creation" work smaller than towns -- that was when I learned that bottom up types are really cranky about it, lol.

For me, it is important that a world feel lived in and feel real -- that as you walk along the markets and alleys of it in your mind, you can get a taste for what is there. It is why I try to add in stuff about clothing and architecture. But D&D is a collaborative game -- the moment I start that campaign, the world is no longer mine and mine alone -- it is a shared space, and it changes and grows and develops, and so I create that "blank space" there below the town level -- where actual play happens -- so that it can do so without feeling like a straight jacket overly much..

But it also means having some limits at times, lol -- I really don't think I could handle the 60 races currently available that I can see in the race listing here. I can maybe go for a dozen. My ideas of fantasy are not the same as a lot of other folks (especially given how many games I see are based entirely around some anime or tv show or a specific single video game or the like). That's why I collect ideas first, and get a feel for things, and then make them work together.

On the other hand, I did a stat block for the Ikon of the Sisters last night, so Imma feeling pretty good today, lol.

Quote from Nothic2SeeHere_ >>

QotD: When you DM, how do you spend your pre-session prep time?

Set up stuff, read through my notes, and order the pizza.

So, we had a lot of conversation about iit, but decided that Sorcerers need to be reworked (the Wyrlde version) as it doesn't quite work properly and is too difficult for us to really work out, since we shifted a lot of the abilities they had out.

I considered giving them the parton part, but for now, with the collapse of the archetype we were planning on using, we opted to not use them. So there will only be 18 classes to start, and I have the joy of coming up with a whole new basis.

Sigh

Also, nope. Not 2nd.

Quote from Nothic2SeeHere_ >>

Page 2? Disappointing.

QotD: When you DM, how do you spend your pre-session prep time?

If I'm running a module, usually by procrastinating if it's online and sweating if it's IRL. But I'm not in any active game now outside of the PBP one here and I'm not DM there at the moment so I'm really not doing much prep at the moment lol.

Quote from AEDorsay >>

So, we had a lot of conversation about it, but decided that Sorcerers need to be reworked (the Wyrlde version) as it doesn't quite work properly and is too difficult for us to really work out, since we shifted a lot of the abilities they had out.

I considered giving them the parton part, but for now, with the collapse of the archetype we were planning on using, we opted to not use them. So there will only be 18 classes to start, and I have the joy of coming up with a whole new basis.

Sigh 

Also, nope. Not 2nd.

It happens. If there's anyone who I'd trust to quickly or effectively remodel a class - nonetheless one that was your heavily modified version of a sorcerer - it'd be you.

For players here: do you ever look up monsters after a battle out of curiosity? I'll sometimes check out a statblock after (NEVER during the fight, don't worry) facing a monster I haven't seen before (assuming it isn't entirely a homebrew creation). Sometimes it adds a little extra spice of "oh man, I'm sure glad I passed that one saving throw."

For DMs: how often would you say you use monsters straight from sourcebooks vs tweaking them or homebrewing your own? I'm still early in my DM journey and mostly been using things out of the box but have made a few of my own monsters.

Quote from Thorrison >>

For DMs: how often would you say you use monsters straight from sourcebooks vs tweaking them or homebrewing your own? I'm still early in my DM journey and mostly been using things out of the box but have made a few of my own monsters.

I usually use them straight out of the sourcebook, although I’ll often reflavor things without changing base statistics. For example, the undead captain of a ship in a campaign/tavern I’m running has vampire statistics with a different set of weakness, and his Call of the Night summons seabirds instead of bats. His Shapechange is also tweaked. This way, I can trust that the hit points and attack damage are still balanced, but it feels like an entirely different creature to face in battle.

Quote from Thorrison >>

For DMs: how often would you say you use monsters straight from sourcebooks vs tweaking them or homebrewing your own? I'm still early in my DM journey and mostly been using things out of the box but have made a few of my own monsters.

 I use modified stats a lot. I don’t actually play D&d very much but I do have some characters on taverns. An example of a modified statblock is my character Sylvi.

Sylvi’s stats were originally a keeper of hounds from the book of Ebon Tides, but I wanted her to be a bit more melee focused, and since she’s a witch I decided to make her have an unrealistically high strength score of 26. I then replaced her Rapier with an axe and increased her wisdom a bit. For her companion Tily the wolf, Tily is just a dire wolf for now.

Quote from Thorrison >>

For players here: do you ever look up monsters after a battle out of curiosity? I'll sometimes check out a statblock after (NEVER during the fight, don't worry) facing a monster I haven't seen before (assuming it isn't entirely a homebrew creation). Sometimes it adds a little extra spice of "oh man, I'm sure glad I passed that one saving throw."

Almost never. Why spoil it for myself? That is, unless I think I might want to use it when I’m DMing for another group. But even then, it might be homebrew anyway, so I can’t without asking for it and then we’re back to spoilers.

For DMs: how often would you say you use monsters straight from sourcebooks vs tweaking them or homebrewing your own? I'm still early in my DM journey and mostly been using things out of the box but have made a few of my own monsters.

 
For run of the mill, mooks & minions I run them straight outta the books a lot of the time. For lieutenant level villains they get some customizations. For BBE (or equivalent) level NPCs I usually create them as custom jobbers for myself.

Quote from Thorrison>>

For players here: do you ever look up monsters after a battle out of curiosity? I'll sometimes check out a statblock after (NEVER during the fight, don't worry) facing a monster I haven't seen before (assuming it isn't entirely a homebrew creation). Sometimes it adds a little extra spice of "oh man, I'm sure glad I passed that one saving throw."

Not really. I have almost always read about the monster and so I don't need to look them up afterwards. If I haven't read about the monster, I don't own it so I can't.

For DMs: how often would you say you use monsters straight from sourcebooks vs tweaking them or homebrewing your own? I'm still early in my DM journey and mostly been using things out of the box but have made a few of my own monsters.

 I like to use official monsters and homebrew my own. Sometimes I completely homebrew something new, sometimes I adjust the statblock to make it more interesting, sometimes I use the same stats but reskin the monster so the players don't recognize their opponents. 

Quote from Thorrison >

For DMs: how often would you say you use monsters straight from sourcebooks vs tweaking them or homebrewing your own? I'm still early in my DM journey and mostly been using things out of the box but have made a few of my own monsters.

 Haven't used any homebrew in games yet. Mainly if I want to tweak monster sttackst I just change the damage type and the name. For example, say I want to change the zombies slam attack to a bite attack. I just rename it to 'bite' and change the damage type to piercing. (Still lackluster, since most likely it should inflict some condition or diseases or something if we want to make it more interesting, but just throwing out examples)

Quote from Thorrison >>

For DMs: how often would you say you use monsters straight from sourcebooks vs tweaking them or homebrewing your own? I'm still early in my DM journey and mostly been using things out of the box but have made a few of my own monsters.

So, the scary, sad, horrible truth is that I often use them straight of the source book. But it also depends on how "common" the monster is. THe more common a monster is, the less likely I am to use them as they are presented in the books.

It also depends on the flow of the game, though -- I might set up a scene and think "hmmm. A gelatinous cube would be great here, but they need to be much smaller, and more extrudy." Or in a warehouse scene I might have a pile of lumber be a mimic that has decided to strike out for new territory and has been very cautiously preying on the unwary.

However, there is also the whole thing in the near future where I can't use certain styles of monster, so a lot of them will be major tweaked. Zombies are much harder to deal with, for example. Demons feed on emotion, devils feed on flesh, hags feed on magic.

Wyrlde has a lot of focus on encroachments from from other dimensions, and different dimensions have their own main kind of bad guy, so those all have assorted variants that go with them -- phantasms from the Astral, Specters from the ethereal, fell and fey from feywilde, bothersome little green and red bastards called Kauns -- the first famous one of which was named Lepre Stiltskin (his brother was far nastier).

given that, I suppose I should also note the "played straight" humor thing is a big part of my monsters. I mean, if players ever do encounter the bonacon, they are so not going to be plussed by the acidic poop thing.