This post is certainly not intended to make people angry or start some sort of online war. I will go out of my way to say that I'm not a "strict" DM by any means and I have in the past found D&D a bit restrictive both as a player and a DM so I tend to run games loosely. Right now I'm running a game for 4 players using 2024 rules and they are currently all level 4. The players are just about to open a tomb which has a warning on it about it containing a "warrior" which is basically me hinting that there is an encounter in the tomb. I want the encounter to be challenging because the tomb holds a vital piece of information to the story The last encounter I built for them was according to the builder "deadly" but they cleared it with ease. I find the whole challenge rating thing incredibly confusing, even more so because we are not using XP. Any encounter builder that I have used has said "this might TPK the party" and it just does not have that effect. I'm not trying to TPK the party, but I do want them to feel challenged and feel potential danger. It's incredibly frustrating and something I really dislike about D&D. Rant over.... Advice welcome

Hey everyone, we had a great chat today at the coffee hour. People shared a lot of great resources, and I wanted to collate them here for everyone interested. * Game Recs* - Goblin Quest: rowanrookanddecard.com/product/goblin-quest/?v=0b3b97fa6688 - Goblins with a Fat Asshttps://tombloom.itch.io/gwafa - The Ultimate Micro-Rpg Book has 40 tear out games. All kinds of themes and ways to playing: https://worldbuildersmarket.com/products/ultimate-micro-rpg-book - The Quiet Year: buriedwithoutceremony.com/the-quiet-year *Adventure Recs* - Granny's Apple Pie: https://media.wizards.com/2018/dnd/dragon/21/DRA21_GrammysCountryApplePie.pdf *GM Resources* - Inspiration for characters - whothefuckismydndcharacter.com - A great ai tool for transcribing notes: GMassistant.ai - An example of the previous tool in action: gmassistant.app/sessions/0839a366-f4d0-4a80-a830-e819f1454974/public/d98c7c5b-1e0c-4c66-857f-bd7f0f7e5207 @Richard Mills , @Eric Person , @Phil Hollecker , @Chris Lock , @Sara Gly , @Mark Petersen , @Chuck Theobald

I tend to do some of my game prep on Friday mornings, so I'll be hosting an informal coffee hour on Fridays at 11am ET. It's a little late for coffee, sure, but I'm hoping this helps some of our non-US members join us (and it won't be too early for members on the West Coast). Go to the Calendar page to see the event in your own time zone. Come hang out, drink your beverage of choice, and talk about your ongoing and planned games. See you there!

I ran a one shot of Blades in the Dark, and it's shaping up into a longer game! I'm very excited about it, since it's definitely one of my favorites. The group made some characters, went into the tunnels, and performed some pretty vicious gang fights, and ran away from a big trapped demon and its amped up dog corpse zombie horror things. They had a great time, so we ran another game! Same characters (but I let them revise some choices they made in character creation now that they had a handle on the system) and we fleshed out the factions and setting a little. This group REALLY was not interested at all in a Session -1; I'll probably make a full post about it another time, but I think in part it's because during the one shot, we'd already set up cool stuff they were anxious to pursue, and because they liked the setting and didn't really wanna touch it. So I ended up skipping most of Session -1, just setting up the main factions and conflicts, and then we played again! In the moment to moment play, especially setting up a heist, they feel much more empowered to collaboratively worldbuild. "What's this piece of turf in the Deathlands?" It's a caged demon, for energy. "Who caged it, and why?" It's uhhh a circus, an old abandoned circus. Stuff like that was fantastic! We made a little crude map of the area together so it was easy to keep a sense of what was going on, and then we played. Great time, super funny group, and lots of people's first time playing, ever. Next session, we'll set up goals (Blades has a "Claims" system that substitutes for goals in some ways, but I still like to have players make their own) but right now, most of them seem really fixated on fixing their boat. I'll update in the comments as we play---we may skip this week while we celebrate a friend's birthday.

So I saw this community thing I think on Instagram and decided to sign up for it. I live in the UK so probably won't be able to attend many US based events due to timescales and my pretty hectic work schedule. I'm currently running a homebrew D&D 2024 game with some friends where we started to create the world using The Quiet Year, we didn't get through the entirety of the creation process as a few people were not quite gelling with it but I took what we created and went ahead with it. I want to run a Pirate Borg game pretty soon for my friends YouTube channel (Explorers of Elsewhere), I've run some one shots for him in the past and it was great fun. In my spare time I act, do improv and run a comic (as in comic books) art festival.