After four years and 143 sessions, meeting on a near-weekly basis for three hours at a time, we finished the campaign recently. This was my first time as a DM and was the first time playing for most of the party.
For the first five levels, we played out Lost Mines of Phandelver as I got my feet under me as a DM, and thereafter we went into a homebrew campaign.
Party
Half-Elf Whispers Bard (1-5), Aarakocra Mercy Monk (6-20): u/mangobyebye
Drow Underdark Land Druid (1-20): u/Tazeka
Undead-ish Human Life Cleric 17/Raven Queen Warlock 3 (1-20): u/Azdregath
Deep Gnome Assassin Rogue 17/Gloomstalker Ranger 3 (1-20)
Half Elf Wild Magic Sorcerer 19/Artificer 1 (1-20)
Wood Elf Moon Druid (2-3), Shadar-Kai Elven Accuracy Samurai Fighter (16-20)
DM (1-20): u/TheOwlMarble (me)
Below, you'll find a few of the key lessons I've learned about DMing. I'm happy to answer additional questions, as are the tagged players.
Scheduling
We all have full-time jobs and lives, so scheduling has been a challenge. We ultimately settled on the app Doodle to take availability polls. I know some GMs prefer to have a fixed session time, but we found floating 3-hour sessions were far more reliable. It did require me to be more flexible, but it was worth it.
Yes I agree with the peace part. But does this effectively make Iran and Saudi Arabia allies with China? If so, that may not be a good thing.
No. If you broker a deal, all that really means is that your relationship with the two parties is perceived as roughly equal. If you were suspected of playing favorites, they wouldn't trust you as an intermediary.
The exception is when the broker is holding overwhelming power over the heads of the belligerents and forcing them to the table, but that's obviously not the case here.
Why do you care about the total? You already have the per capita of 6.5 per 100k.
I got a dog today, and am taking today off at the urging of my boss, provided I come back on Monday with lots of cute puppy photos.
That is to say, we go in, do our work, get our salary, and go home. We want to make good products, but there's no pressure to work long hours. We get four weeks of vacation a year.
I work in tech.
Probably a year or so ago? They're not rare, but I also don't seek them out or anything. I'm probably no more than 10 minutes away from the nearest chicken if I really wanted to go see one.
Ah yes, I remember the manager's face when two senior engineers had spent a collective four days adding an exclamation mark.
The fact that they're switching to templates is good. These particular templates and lack of support for Moon Druid is bad.
Ac and saves will be dramatically better
Are we pretending 15 AC for your entire career is good now?
I don't think anyone is saying that. Wild Shape AC was never spectacular without multiclassing, but Moon can now cast Abjuration in it. I didn't see a stipulation that it had to be a Druid spell anywhere either, so if you get your hands on Shield, it'll help quite a bit.
That said, the removal of other features from Wild Shape hits the durability pretty hard. No rage, no unarmored defense, etc.
I don't think anyone is saying that. Wild Shape AC was never spectacular without multiclassing, but Moon can now cast Abjuration in it. I didn't see a stipulation that it had to be a Druid spell anywhere either, so if you get your hands on Shield, it'll help quite a bit.
So we’re nerfing druid to the level you need to pick up stuff from other classes to make it viable?
The original commenter even noted how ”AC and saves are going to be dramatically improved” so: 13 AC until level 4, 14 AC until level 8, 15 AC max.
With d8 hit die. In melee. I swear I don’t understand why so many people vehemently demand the least played class to be also the least viable.
So we’re nerfing druid to the level you need to pick up stuff from other classes to make it viable?
When did I say that? Moon Druid was never great. It always had terrible scaling issues. That's why multiclassing in was already required to keep up, and even then, it only went so far.
The fact is, a large number of beasts have trash AC, and this will address that. I'm not saying this AC is good, just that in many cases, it is dramatically better than what was available prior.
Also, to be clear, Druid is still a full caster, and it's still good at that. Wild Shape needed dramatic changes. This misses the mark mind you, but changes are needed.
It's not disrespectful. It's certainly odd, and as others have mentioned, "sir" would fit better there, but really all it'll do is remind the interviewer that English is not your native language. It wasn't a bad word choice, just an unconventional one.
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