Good news and bad news! The bad news is, Happy Hour Wednesday will be going on hiatus for a bit---I've shifted my work schedule around and I'll have to stop running on Wednesdays. I've made a community poll to see what other times might work here! Since we have Coffee Hour with Jonah, I may hold off on this for now and just making that, but we'll see! If you can't make coffee hour but want to join the chats, definitely let me know and I'll try to prioritize getting this back up sooner. To soften the blow, there are new prep videos in the classroom! We're trying to show proactive prep more in action, so if you want to check them out, you can find some concrete examples in the classroom or at this link: https://www.skool.com/game-masters-laboratory/classroom/b10da8af?md=23cd1876a2ae43f9b5e571db4ba8d69a

Hi! I'm Michelle. I've been playing TTRPGS for over 10 years at least. In my first DnD group, we would swap turns being the DM. I love worldbuilding and collaborative storytelling. I have some ideas but not really anyone to implement them with. I'm not looking for a group though, lol. I'm in too many already. I am curious to learn from other DMs. Nice to meet you all!

GenCon is upon us! This thread is for organizing social and gaming meetups for everyone who will be in Indy for GenCon this year. If you'll be attending this year, post in this thread! Let us know what you're playing, what you WANT to play, and connect with other forum members who will be there this year. See you all there!

Sort of a gushing post, in case anyone wanted to try Draw Steel. I've used a lot of VTTs. More than I should have haha, I struggled through Roll20's free tier for many years, messed around with Owlbear Rodeo, and spent many hours tinkering with Foundry modules. I even attempted running sessions in tabletop simulator (which I strongly encourage most people to never do! We lost a lot to an accidental tableflip) I got a free copy of Draw Steel's Codex, made specifically for that system, because I backed the game when it crowdfunded. I finally got around to using it, and man, I wish every VTT was like this haha, so much useful stuff. The game tracking things are nice, but it also has extremely good music management, UIs, rolling features, and built-in mapmaking that has just always made me dread using other options. AND it has community modules that are free and plug into anything. The mapmaking in particular---I love my story RPGs, but a big reason I shifted away from more tactical ones was because I ran many of my games online, and maps were just such a miserable chore, especially a few years ago. It's very easy in this one, it tracks verticality, and it tracks game rules! If you lay down brush on the map, the VTT knows it's difficult terrain. It's a little gamified for a lot of my RPG games, but when I'm in the mood for something tactical, I really like it. Just thought I'd throw this out there in case anyone was looking into it/finds it interesting. Anyone have their favored VTTs, or games to play online? I'm returning to primarily online games now that I'm out of college, so I'm brushing up on my virtual RPG skills haha

So I recently finished reading through Jonah and Tristan’s role playing book as well as Return of the Lazy DM. Both excellent reads by the way and you should check them out as a game master, but does anyone suggest other books on running games?