New DM, just had my first session yesterday. Questions: How

>>49518200
Encounters included:
>Brownies sneaking into camp in the wee hours of the morning to cook a hot breakfast for the party by the time they woke up
>Brief rains of various odd substances, such as wine, muffins, and dresses.
>Various "fearsome critters" from American tall tales, like the hugag and fur-bearing trout
>An animate rock that followed the party around like a puppy dog (one of the players adopted it as a pet)

To name but a few.

There was also a "bargain bin" in the artificer's shop they did most of their shopping at, where he sold minor trinkets and failed experiments. Rather than presenting the players a list of the contents, I had them roll to rummage through it and told them what they found. They absolutely loved it. The one who adopted the rock ended up getting a flying handkerchief (like a tiny flying carpet) for her pet rock to fly around on, and a little top hat that displays emoticons indicating the wearers emotion on the band so she could communicate somewhat with it. Another player dug out a dozen different minor novelty items and asked to combine their effects into a single ridiculous toy, a rod that sprayed bubbles that glowed in various colors, shouted profanities, and gave joy-buzzer shocks to those they touched.

>>49518200
2:
Every game, every system, no matter who GMs (or DMs), our group has a consistent NPC, the wandering mushroom salesman. And every single time we get challenged to come up with a new and never used mushroom to spark another adventure or plot hook. Notable examples include:
>Floating mushrooms that reduced the user's ability to be affected by gravity ended up getting the party involved with local black markets after someone "accidentally" firebombed a random warehouse.
>Glowing mushrooms when eaten copied exactly half of the person's body to the Astral Plane, thus getting the party involved with a cove of unsual Druids.
>Striped mushrooms gave temporary invulnerability at the cost of being temporarily mind-swapped with the last person who ate a striped mushroom. Party tricked a dragon into eating one and shenanigans ensued after we lost track of who was swapped with who.


3:
and an undead who is cursed never to die again when he's had more than enough of all the bullshit in the world.

>>49518229

5:
>Half blind shopkeeper who's stockboy is the only competent thing keeping the store afloat
>Minor NPCs having embarassing shennanigans going on in the background if the PCs ever notice
>NPC romantic comedies going on in the background
>Had a shopkeeper that was literally a cock merchant
>One store in the poor part of a city was called "acceptable meats"
>PC made a perception check on a group of training city guards and overheard that the lesson of the day was how to detect criminal scum
>NPC trying to hire people for a fishing vessel shouting "We made lots of money catching crabs and so can you!"
>Quest board had a picture showing someone and underneath their picture stated "Talked too loud during the play"

>>49518200
>How do I avoid railroading my PC's in a dungeon?

The dungeon design should allow them more roads to the same goal, both figuratively speaking and from an architecture point of view.

At the most basic level, you can have more than one exit for each dungeon room, and that already offers some choice to your PCs. Then, you can design each room content ("encounter" or "scene") to be resolved in more than one way: the PCs can take the ogre head on and slay it, or try to bargain with it to leave them alone, or even join them.
When you understand this, you can even have a linear dungeon with rooms linked by one straight corridor (room C is mandatorily after room B, which is absolutely between room A and C), the freedom of choice is in the encounters themselves.
Also, I noticed that having combat encounters in the linear dungeons usually helps, given that PCs tend to have a lot of freedom during combat. Any other non-combat encounters that still allows players to have freedom of choice and meaningful consequences over the rest of the adventure helps, though.

>>49518220
Damn great

>>49518767
taking notes

Look for "five room dungeon" advice pdf

>>49518985
did one of those, fun, but railroaded it too much I think..

>>49518200
>>49518220
Are you're players having fun? Seems like it so you're doing fine.

To the fumbling dice specifically, its fine to insure the climax is sufficiently climactic, but I try to avoid overusing it. Keeping most rolls as they are insures you have those interesting times when the PCs absolutely crush something or suffer temporary defeat, moments that can be very memorable.

>>49518943
That's more or less all of it. The whole point of RPGs is having fun making meaningful choices, that is
> having choices to do in the first place
> having the consequences of those choices have some impact on the game world

As long as you give your players time and chance to have different interactions with each encounter, railroad shouldn't be an issue. Even with a very linear dungeon structure.
Moral dilemmas are good too, if your group is not made entirely of amoebas that should keep them occupied for at least half an hour.

> Is it okay to fumble the dice and the hp of creatures to make the fight feel more organic and cooler?
Touching creatures stat blocks is ok as long as it's done to provide an adequate (ie fun and engaging) challenge to your players, and for some reason you can't do it with another creature. Keeping some sort of geographic consistency in your world is ok in my book (eg orcs are the only creature that live in this specific area, so build encounters on that and differentiate stat blocks). I'd also say that pumping up the stats is more ok than dumbing them down, but that has to do with PC progression mainly.

I'm not really a fan of fudging dices, since it takes away both the immersion and the agency of the players and transfers them to the DM. So, if you really have to do it make sure it's behind the screen and with the goal to create a more organic/cooler scene/story.

>>49518200
> Hilariously fun encounters, yes or no?

It all depends on the setting and the feeling you want to create. Do you want your setting to be somewhat lighthearted? Do it. Do you want your setting to be gritty and dark? Keep them to a minimum or just don't do them.

>>49518200

>Is it okay to fumble the dice and the hp of creatures to make the fight feel more organic and cooler?


No it's never okay to fudge dice. It destroys player agency, is borderline cheating and ruins the entire game experience for the intelligent adults you are playing with who deserve respect. You control a lot in the game but you don't control probability and you don't get to arbitrarily control if somebody hits or missed on an attack or fails a save. I'd honestly make all your rolls in the open . To stop this game destroying bad habit. Especially considering you're new you have no idea how things are meant to play out anyway so even if you could make an argument that there were edge cases where fudging was okay you wouldn't know them without a lot of experiencing playing the game without fudging.

For that same reason I wouldn't mess around with monster HP either, especially on the fly.

>>49518200
>Questions: How do I avoid railroading my PC's in a dungeon?
You don't really need to avoid railroading like the plague. A bit is acceptable, especially if you wave "guys, I'm a new DM, I'm learning this shit with you and this is all I got so far, please go do it?" card.

>Is it okay to fumble the dice and the hp of creatures to make the fight feel more organic and cooler?
Occasionally, but do not too often. Players can be more observant than you think and realisation that every encounter is going to go down in about the save amount of time and "dramatic" hits is going to kill all the tension and all attempts to engage with the combat beyond "I stab him generically"
(realising that you fucked up the balance of the encounter and have to redo it is a special case)

>Hilariously fun encounters, yes or no?
That depends on your sense of humor and whether it fits with the party's. Also don't make it just an endless stream of jokes unless you bill the game like that rightaway.

I'd find the troll mother bad.

>>49518220
Is that you OP continuing or another anon chiming in? In the case of the former:

Brownies are entertaining and I would engage them more but with caution; would try to investigate the reasons behind weird rains (also that would fuck up agriculture if it was constant); urban myth critters would be ok; animate rock is cute.

Bargain bin is fun and creative.

>>49519358
I will take this to heart, cheers!

That was me, just copy pasting ideas I thought would be nice though.

>>49519358
> "guys, I'm a new DM"
That's a good strategy to start with, but can't be the only one, especially when he grows up as a DM whitout really learning how to do it apart from "please do what I prepared".
Not even trying to argue here, genuinely interested in your solution to that case.

>>49518200
> railroading
Read Caverns of Thracia or Paul Jacques' other stuff, do the same to your dungeons (multiple paths up and down, new paths open up later back up or down or sideways). Dark Souls did the same shit and is loved for the same reason.

I haven't read CoT in months and OTOH there are two paths down from the surface to level 1 and a chasm that drops you down to level 2. From Level 1 you have a pit that drops you down to level 3 (fatal fall), an open cave where you can drop to level 2 and a staircase guarded by the resident death cult down to level 2 as well. There's also a secret rope ladder down to level 2 that can only be dropped from a hidden room in a bonus area and a simple staircase right at the 'beginning' (depending what entrance you used ofc) that goes down as well, though the final path has exactly no loot besides what you might pull off of a few giant centipedes (I had to check the book for the last one, no one's ever used it and not come right back)

So yeah, read his stuff it's good shit. I didn't even go into the level design itself, which is just as fantastic.

>>49521958
check