Make your VTT games better!

 

My group and I have been playing online RPG tabletop games now for several years now following a few of the members moving out of state. At first, I hated it, I missed the in person interaction, having the attention of the players while I DM'd, being able to see their expressions and reactions fueled some incredible roleplay and drama in our games. We moved our games to Roll20, so much of the below will apply to that specific application, but honestly this advice will help with any system you are using for your games.

The move to virtual tabletop was clunky at first, but over time, I've worked to refine and become much more proficient in the use of the virtual tabletop to make our games just as good as they were in person. Here are few tips to help your games:

1) Practice and learn the system you're using. Much like the DM should know the rules of the RPG system, so should they also know the workings of the virtual tabletop application. I cannot count how many times we've had games break or pause with questions on how to make rolls or use tokens or fix the visibility. Even knowing the application well won't prevent these issues, but it will hasten the correction to get back to the game.

2) Visuals Visuals Visuals!: I can't stress this enough. Art and imagery is an important part of the game. DM's can describe items until they are blue in the face, but a simple piece of art showing the object or character says more than anything I could describe in most cases. It helps with the immersion and setting of the game you are trying to portray to players. Google is your friend here, even when comes to tokens, maps and general handouts. There are many talented individuals in our hobby who have done the hard work to illustrate, use them!

3) To piggyback on imagery for your game, sound is just as important to set the mood. My group uses Discord for our audio and I've been lucky to find several Discord apps that let you play music / sound through the voice channel. Set the mood with a dark ambience as they venture into the dungeon or play that epic battle track from Conan the Barbarian when a fight erupts. It keeps the players engaged and immersed which can be a struggle at times online.

4) Fix the player tokens. Just like in person when the players would bring a miniature to the table, make their online tokens fancy with the image they want to use along with any system settings: such as vision, aura's, quick reference information like hit points and armor class. For Roll20, all of this can be preset by the DM and saved, so once established, you never have to touch it again. Make their life easier and it will makes yours easy too.

5)  Lastly, use the available resources and prebuilt modules / rules tomes. WoTC not including digital content with the purchase of the physical book is a whole other issue and a big one at that, but having the content preloaded from maps, tokens, handout, dynamic lighting; all of the heavy lifting work done for you is priceless when using a VTT. Save your prep time for what matters as a DM: making your players lives difficult haha, knowing the encounters and NPC's, not for drawing lighting on a map or custom loading monster sheets. Both Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds (especially Fantasy Grounds) have a plethora of modules and system rule books right at your fingers for purchase. Many will balk at essentially buying the book twice, if you own the physical book, but what you're really paying for is the labor to put all of that into a VTT for use, trust me it is worth it.

The Wild Beyond the Witchlight (Thoughts, is it good?)

 

So let me preface this before I even dive in. I don't like to review modules that I have not run. Reading them is great, but you don't know how they play until you play it. Also, I give WoTC a lot of crap...most of it pretty justified, plus most of the employees there would toss me into a gulag based on my political views if given the chance...but is a totally impartial impression of my first quick read through on "The Wild Beyond the Witchlight".

There will be some minor spoilers here, so proceed with caution.....this is your warning players....seriously.....don't read this if you intend to play in this adventure, your DM will thank you and some of the spoilers are worth finding through play.

OK....all clear....here we go. This is a level 1-8 adventure for 5th edition D&D, published by Wizards of the Coast, this is their annual marquee adventure release. The book is available in both a standard and collectors edition copy with alternate art. The guts of the book remain the same through both copies. The setting is agnostic and can be placed in any game setting with little difficulty, this is a welcome change and I'm glad to see it. The Sword Coast has been beaten to death at this point.

Two new character races are presented: the fairy and the harengon. The summaries are brief, no real background or roleplay nuggets. The fairy starts with flying...yikes....and the harengon is anthropomorphic rabbit person. A few character background and trinket options specific to the adventure are presented and then it is onto the adventure itself. There the standard appendix goodies of new monster stats, NPC stats, magical items along with a NPC card section which is a new feature highlighting the personality and ambitions of many of the notable NPC's found throughout the adventure. I wish this on the same page as of the adventure where said NPC was encountered as opposed to a appendix area, but step in the right direction. Lastly there a few organizational charts provided to jot down the interactions of the players throughout the adventure as choices as consequences and possible rewards, I really freaking love this despite it being a lot of DM work....just note, please for the love god, don't write in your actual book....just photo copy or print this out haha.

To start the adventure there are a couple of lead hooks presented for use. One is magical man can't magic, hires players to go fix....blah....the other is more interesting, the players having previously encountered / visited the carnival lost something of note and have returned to seek it back. Go this route, there are fun roleplay criteria addons applied with having lost this "thing" and is certainly a more unique approach to kick things. The Witchlight carnival is detailed fully in chapter 1 of the adventure, presenting games, encounters, timeline of events and mood meter that the players impact by their choices and play. Really great stuff here, the games are unique and fun and I can imagine the players venturing every which way to try their hands in all that is presented here. I'll make a quick note that the maps in the adventure are beautifully illustrated, but it is definitely a tone shift from the standard grid/hex maps of previous adventures. Be ready to do lots of theatre of the mind as you run this module.

As things unfold and are revealed at the carnival, the players are presented the option to venture into the Feywild to further their search for their missing items. Chapters 2,3 and 4 detail the area of the Feywild called Presmire which is been broken up into three sections, each ruled by a different NPC, the areas are Hither, Thither, and Yon. I'll really keep the spoilers here low, but each section is unique in atmosphere and environment, presenting the journey through the realm to the eventual encounter with that realms lord. For the players to set things right, they must venture to all three domains and encounter the said lord. The domains themselves are very sandboxy in presentation, but there is still the driving plot which the players can follow as needed, encountering numerous flavorful NPC's and monsters throughout. There is an enchanted and fairy tale vibe in many of these which I adore....a bullywug kingdom ripe with political intrigue, a "lost boy" settlement living atop their treehouse on a roaming treant, and a heroic dandelion chasing his beautiful bee lover...flavorful, intriguing and memorable. Side quests can derail the players as they seek allies and items to aid their quest, but all funnel back to the end goal of seeking the lord of the domain. 

The last chapter of the book covers what I could call the more dungeon crawling part of the adventure: The Palace of Heart's Desire. Here the players must venture to finally free the true queen of the realm and return the Feywild to its "normal" state. Break out your 80's action figures because the League of Malevolence is back, albeit randomly. Warduke and Kelek are up to no good as usual...the players must venture through the enchanted gardens and castle, tackling difficult puzzles and avoiding a legit scary for a 7th level character Jabberwock that haunts the castle. With luck and some careful planning the characters may even get a great Easter Egg reveal of who the queen of Presmire actually is.

Overall, wow, I'm a huge fan of this one. This may be the best 5E adventure to date and I'm shocked honestly, I has such low expectations here, but I seriously want to run this one. It has been noted by many others, that the book presents alternative means to success outside of "hitting it with the axe" on every encounter and this is true. You could in theory do a full passive play through here with good roleplay and wits....to me, this seems unlikely, but I bet a number of groups will go this route or try....I would note that you certainly want to do a session 0 with the players to go over the feel and style of adventure you will be undertaking here, this isn't your standard heroes of violence scenario. As noted before, DM's will need to be heavy note takers as actions early on affect many as the adventure progresses all the way up to the end. 

I will eat my words here, great work WoTC for a change, more of this please...at least before they push the new edition changes onto us haha!!!

Rappan Athuk: The end of things

The group I recently finished up our campaign of Rappan Athuk, albeit a condensed version. In total the campaign spanned nearly two years of monthly games, each session about 5 hours in length. That is a lot of content regardless of how you look at it.

So how did it finish up....well quite easy for players, surprisingly err....maybe not that surprising given the 5E system. When we left off from the last session, the group faced a choice: live with the fact that the land was tainted with evil or open the portal to the abyss and face Orcus at the peril of their souls. Of course the heroes faced danger like they should! 

The characters decided to take the three keys back down the well to the portal that was discovered and discussed with the ancient wraith wizard Zelkor. Opening the portal they were drawn as if by gravity into far layers of the abyss, the layer of Orcus! The level is somewhat of a let down for the culmination of such a massive megadungeon and book, essentially a huge maze with the chance for random encounters. My group and I are playing through Roll20 and I really did not want to subject them to picking their way through a maze, so I set up a skill challenge with high DC's where failure prompted an encounter or bad event. This actually worked out pretty well, meeting the success push them closer to the exit while the failures gradually weakened them.

Ok before I go on let touch on where my players were at from a level perspective. All five of the characters had just reached level 12, this level of the dungeon as written assumes the players to be 18+. A long time ago in this campaign I had tossed out any notion trying to balance, because the players had a number of magical items at this point, including some of the custom / quested magic items I had created for them to pursue in their travels through Rappan Athuk. Let me be blunt here: magic items break 5E in a sense that players, which are already extremely powerful in 5E, become virtually invincible.

Exiting the maze, the group encountered a pair of CR 16 maralith demons sent to test the group. These were dispatched of without much fuss, onto the big guy himself. The final layer of Orcus is filled with undead (no CR undead sadly as written by FGG....this is something they do a lot...A LOT). Orcus greets and offers the group to join him like any other evil deity would do, sadly no takers and the fight was on. This was a crazy, many combat, very worth of a final boss fight, but I really don't feel as if the players were really challenged that badly, they were just so powerful at this point and this further reassured me of the need to go ahead and wrap up the campaign.

There were a lot of moving pieces and much fun was had (see above picture from the game that night), I really can't thank the group of guys I have as players enough, they are just amazing and I'm blessed to run games and play games with them. In the end Orcus was defeated, the portal out of the Abyss started to lose it's power but I presented one last moral decision before the group, the aspect of Death appeared and advised that one of them must now sit upon the throne of bone or all the dead in the world would revolt. The halfling druid Remus, thinking quickly took the Rod of Orcus, ran back towards the maze and in one final act of sacrifice he ignited his flaming heart (custom magic item) into a massive explosion blowing the rod apart, the group escaped just in time as he did. The final scene of the campaign though, was the dead hand of Remus twitching...perhaps the new Orcus!

In the end, I'm happy to be done with Rappan Athuk, the more we played through it, the more I wish we had not started on it (see my review in another blog post), but the group had a blast, so I must of been doing something right in the end. So onto something new: I kicked around a few ideas as to what to run for the next campaign, but I opted to take a break from 5E for a bit....so.....we just ran our first session of Age of Worms, converted for Pathfinder (1E) last week. Look for a review of that epic adventure and session highlights to come on the blog soon!