Dnd 5.5e. To try to make a long story short, we are about 2 sessions into a collaborative campaign that was an offshoot of a prewritten mod. 5 player characters who were enticed into going a hundred years into the future. Got most of my ideas about how to run this from you all here, thank you ! If you’d like a lot of detail you can probably read my past posts. The Paladin is motivated to find his missing grandfather who had been assumed dead but got clues he might be in this time period, was further found to have a natural time traveling ability. I have two relevant factions to this scenario–the Revenant Occupation who are eco fascists/racists who want to eliminate dwarves and elves and purify the area of time travel and the Temporal Authority who regulates time travel. I set up the clues so the grandfather had previously been arrested by the Temporal Authority in their massive compound but then the Revenant Occupation kidnapped him and took him to their subterranean dungeon and that they want to sacrifice him at a big gathering they’re having. They are set on wanting to talk to someone at the Temporal Authority to get more info about this, the organization itself, the kidnapping, and the revenant occupation. Naturally I had thought the Temporal Authority would just be an afterthought of a faction for now, the players have been told they’re a bureaucracy, not evil but there’s lots of agents, a big fortified compound with lots of weapons & monsters, but of course this is what they’re focused on ha ha. People avoid the Temporal Authority because if you draw attention to yourself or ask too many questions they start following you and harassing your friends and family. The players are aware the Temporal Authority recruits a lot so they’re focused on attending a recruitment event and talking to people on the inside. They feel something isn’t adding up with the grandfather being kidnapped from there. Any suggestions about potential routes to take with that? I didn’t give that much thought, I don’t have a secret reason this doesn’t make sense to them. Any suggestions about what attending a recruitment event might be like or possible options for paths they could take that would tie this together? I do have a local tavern owner who is going to meet up with them in a few days to connect them with someone who deals in magical goods and to connect them with a disgruntled Temporal Authority employee if that helps with any suggestions. Thanks if you've read this far!

Heya! Been taking a long break from tabletop DMing but some of my coworkers have expressed wanting to follow through on the idea of playing D&D so I want to give it another shot. Only thing is, 2/4 people interested have never played before, and the other two have done maybe 2 sessions so they're very new. As a newer DM without a *ton* of experience, I'm a bit worried about making the campaign accessible for them and teaching them when I honestly don't understand everything myself haha. With all that said, anyone have any good tips for helping new players get their bearings? Are there certain things you do with veterans as opposed to newbies? Any advice is greatly appreciated!

(N.B.: I'm not asking for a debate on the utility or necessity of Safety Tools in RPGs) A question for RPG players and GMs: I'm building a new Safety Tool similar to the X-Card but with a wider range of message. (The X card is a clean, direct, non-verbal way of communicating a single, important piece of information. In the case of the X Card, it's "Stop everything right now") There are some other similar safety tools out ther. The X-Card was expanded to include "N" ('please fade to black'), and "O" ('everyone OK?'). What sort of things might you want to communicate to a GM (or have communicated to you) in a way which doesn't necessarily interrupt a scene? And -- I can't believe I have to say this -- but they don't necessarily need to be bad things. Here are some examples: - "Can we take a break after this?" - "Proceed with Caution" - "I enthusiastically consent to this, even though my character seems to be hating this" - "I have a rules question"- - "More of this, please!" - Think of it like a semaphore or an ideaogram. It's a way to communicate a potentially complex idea in a single moment. What sorts of things do you want to be able to communicate to your GMs?

Ask your players, above table, to help by signalling or providing cues for when their RP moments are ready to move to the next scene. The last Stars and Wishes (feedback) discussion in my Beyond the Wall campaign was all positive and I specifically asked for negative or things I can work on. One player commented that once or twice I cut short RP a little bit to move scenes. We play online and I generally use the second pause/lull (4-5 seconds wait time) to move dicussion but in these cases it was a pause due to intensity that I did not correctly recognize. The player understood my motivation to move scenes and make sure everyone was involved. After some talks we settled in on cues being the problem and decided I should just ask for help. In the next session when the cue came up to change scenes I queitly asked "ready to move on?" and the player in a relieved voice said yes. I then mentioned that I sometimes struggle with recognizing and told the players they could help me with some form of verbal cue like "I look up to see if Snixx is back" or just breaking character voice and saying "ok". We then moved on to the next scene. It made an immediate difference and shared the table with the players in another way. I suspect that this is particularly important in our online games as so many of our societal norms for this are non-verbal. I suspect I will refine this with this group and then figure out how to write it out as one of our table norms. An aside on "Wait Time", for the non-teachers, we are really bad at this. If a teacher asks a question the students need some time to formulate the answer before responding (particularly if they couldn't anticipate the question such as what they do on their turn in combat). In general, this is a minimum of 3-5 seconds. This is a excrutiatingly long time for the teacher sitting there knowing the answer. To train teachers to leave the uncomfortable silence I have a simple exercise. Have someone with a stopwatch ask you what your name is and time how long it takes you to answer. You try to wait silently five seconds before answering without counting in your head. Most semesters in teacher training people manage to last about 2 seconds. Learning to be comfortable with the silence is really hard.

In my 5e game I have 4 different types of note takers, the traditional minutes taker, the a bag full of memos note taker, a journalist (mix of sketching and writing) and a scrapbooker. I want to add in things that are relevant for each style of notes. The writen note takers are easy to accommodate for as I'm used to the minetes and memo styles. It's the more creative notes I have ideas for. My ideas are: picture puzzle clue rewards for my scrapbooker Symbols and marks for the journalist to sketch down Is there any idea you guys have?