How do you use the passive abilities in D&D: passive perception, passive investigation and passive insight? I know passive perception are things that a character automatically (or passively) notices whenever they enter a situation/encounter with no roll needed e.g. a player with a passive perception 13 will notice that an NPC appears to be out of breath, has some welts that haven't yet turned into bruises, is in shock, and is missing the purse that usually hangs from his belt. Ok that's all well and good. Other examples could be perceiving things in a room that look out of place, seeing signs of travel through a location. But how do you use the other passive abilities. A quick look in the PBH and DMG didn't really come up with a great answer. So this is what I came up with. Passive investigation is what a character automatically notices about what is happened in the past. With the NPC example I gave before a player with the requisite passive investigation will take that information and deduce that the NPC was probably just beaten and robbed and managed to escape and depending on what the players know about the NPC and the characters passive investigation the player might even know who did it. The point is they can take what they see and already know and deduce what has happened in the PAST. Some other uses could be finding hidden doors and traps, determining if anyone had been this way before and how many. Passive insight on the other hand focuses on the future. A character with a high enough passive insight will know that the NPC is likely to do next whether it be to run, hide, get his own weapons and rob someone else, find his own gang and take revenge or call the city guard. Passive insight is the ability to deduce what is going to happen NEXT. Other examples could be knowing that if a trap door is opened a firebolt will shoot out or that the group that came this way before left things behind so they will probably be coming back or vice. There are some strengths if this approach that springs to mind

The latest session of my long term campaign was yesterday. Two of the players were trying to infiltrate the rich side of town and quickly realized they would need to procure a change of clothes sp they would blend in. I had to improvise a merchant NPC on the spot. Being an avid fan of STP and his discworld series, my mind reached for the only character that fit the bill - Cut-me-own-throat Dibbler 😄. I played the character up just as he was in the books. On of the advantages of being older (I'm in my 50's, most of my players are 20s/early 30s) and from another country (I'm from NZ but live in Utah) is that I have been exposed to cultural influences that my players haven't. Not a single one of them has read Discworld, so Cut-me-own-throat Diibbler is completely new to them, and I could shamelessly use (rip off) the character without them knowing. I hope that one day at least one of them reads the books and smiles knowingly.

So for Christmas I got my first 3D printers, a FDM and a resin one. I've since been printing up a storm. I found the file for the dragon on the right and thought "this is my BBEG!" Then I found the dragon on the left....and now THIS IS MY BBEG!! I'm undecided if the smaller one will be the bigger one's lieutenant or if the smaller one will turn into the bigger one when the crap really hits the fan in my final boss fight. Either way I love how these turned out. 🤩

I use AI a lot for RPGs, in my case DnD 5e. I’m confident some of you hate AI and for good reasons. Some may be unaware. We may know people who let it replace their own creativity. I brainstorm with it. For example, we had Session -1 last week. It my first time facilitating it and I’m sure it needs inprovement. We developed factions. Well…we developed a ton of ideas for factions. I will use one as an example. The players feel done, so I want to organize their faction ideas into something cohesive and then ask them to edit it (we need one more short Session -1) So I said to AI, “Now let’s create factions. I’ll give you the notes from Session -1 and then let’s discuss the faction. Discuss! I don’t need you to create a faction for me.” Then I gave it these notes: The world is a little bit like Harry Potter, with some people that know about magic and most people do not. - This faction wants everyone to know about magic, wants to expose magic and make it public. They want power and to control it - They are hunting the party. Opposed to the magic group and the cleric group that dislikes use of magic not sanctioned by the gods. They are working behind the scenes — working with the assassin’s guild. It’s a network of cells, not centralized AI asked about their motivation, what they thought was wrong with the world, and what their methods were. Also, why are they hunting the party? Finally, it asked how united or decentralize the cells are. I used voice-to-text to give it a long answer in response to everything it provided. 1. It clearly didn’t understand my notes because my notes are out of context. So I explained them. 2. It asked a lot of really good questions and made some suggestion suggestions. 3. I disagreed with a lot of the suggestions, liked some of them, but the best part was that it launched my own creativity. I know all the other background for this world and the probing questions and ideas allowed me to really think about what the players wanted.

I've been enjoying reading "So You Want To Be A Gamemaster" for the last month or so. Even though his discussion of Rumor Tables focused on hexcrawls, I am excited for its potential in my new city-based proactive game. The basic concept for hexcrawls is that the rumor table is populated with nuggets of information PCs can pick up that will direct them to hexes (get the story moving). Characters might pick them up chatting with a merchant or tavern keep, as 'treasure' in a foe's things, a mysterious note passed to them, as the result of some divination magic, or just shared between sessions as stuff characters heard going around town. Fundamentally, the Rumor Table is a mechanism to get enough world information to players that they can make meaningful (informed) choices. And it solves a problem I often struggle with and was anxious about for the proactive game. In my city campaign they will be a mechanism to share faction goals, progress on those goals, and introduce NPCs they might look for to connect with those goals. I can probably work in some city crawl type clues as well, particularly if getting to the location can start them on one of their goals. Alexandrian Article: Hexcrawl Tool: Rumor Tables