I Forgot to Post This

I took pictures of this and meant to post it. But, of course, I didn't.

Yes. I know they've been done many many times but I wanted one. This isn't the original file I downloaded. I modified it to put a more secure bar across the 'back' and remove the printed dome in the lower left corner. By the time I got around to making the picture anonymous for posting the original file had been deleted. So I forgot about it again until a Twitter post reminded me.

I did get my second jab on schedule so obviously this was taken between the two. I'm responsible enough to get vaccinated even if I'm not so good on posting pictures of things.

The dome is a glass piece meant for some kind of jewelry. It makes the final result unwieldy enough that I wouldn't want to carry it around a lot but looks darn cool. The glass is clear. I put a piece of tinfoil under it then mixed yellow paint with white (PVA) glue to make the color. So it looks perfect from the top but can have different amounts of yellow based on the viewing angle.

The white and red are printed. The yellow bar is a piece of filament firmly glued into the piece (that was my mod since the original file had a very shallow indent) and looking at it I'm wondering if I should have used a more opaque yellow or if that's the most opaque pure yellow I have. Regardless I'm not printing another.

I cut a piece of clear plastic the same size as the vaccine card so not only does it fit tighter into the slot but it also protects the card from wear. This isn't my first rodeo in making badge/card protectors. I used a transparency sheet meant for inkjet printers for the plastic. That stuff is handy for far more than inkjet prints, in case you were wondering.

Funny thing. I showed this to my neighbor and they told their family about it. Later on they asked if I would make one for each member of their family but with their initials instead of the dome. Since I'd already remove it to a flat surface it wasn't difficult to make new bottom files with the initials. They chose the colors for each person and I went to work.

I know that the rectangles no longer conform to the prop standard but they do alternate so that they are aesthetically more pleasing to me. There are end clips that go with them but they don't add anything to the pictures. I cut more plastic and handed them all over to the neighbor. I was told the family is pleased.

As a total suckup I made one for my boss. I experimented with using yellow ink in the glue layer instead of yellow paint. It didn't work as expected. The ink mixed well with the glue but as it set it moved to the edges of the glass blob. I'm thinking that's because there's some space there and the glue rose up, along with the lighter ink. It didn't bother me enough to pull it out and try again. I don't like my boss that much.

I don't plan on making them for anyone else. They're all over Etsy for those who want to buy them. It's why I don't sell on Etsy. All the designs that have mass market appeal are where the mass market can buy them. It was fun to do for myself. It was a nice thing to do for the neighbors. It was a political move for me to do for my boss.

Update - The original design just moved platforms. I've published mine on all the ones where I have accounts.

Something Different - Printable Game Money

I belong to a Print and Play group on Facebook. It's exactly what it seems - printing games rather than buying the manufactured ones, if there are manufactured ones. There's plenty of games that are print and play only.

One of the members there made a very lovely set of game money for those who need it or want it. As much as I liked her work there was a problem for me. She made the bills so that they had rounded corners which meant work to cut them out and get those curves. Most of us have special punches to round card edges but I felt this wasn't quite .. quite. When you're printing game money you tend to need a decent amount.

Because I'm me I couldn't let this stand. If I was going to need game money (for whatever reason) I wanted files that would be efficient. Pretty, but also efficient.

This isn't something I'm good at doing. Graphic design is so not my forte. However I do have a friend who is good at it and likes projects. This wasn't a normal project for him as he tends to focus on model making but as I said he likes projects. We went back and forth and there was a lot of testing printing but eventually we got there. Well. He got there and I enjoyed the fruits of his labor.

As you can see from the picture at the top of this post the money is very colorful and we tried for bill colors that weren't going to be too similar. However there's only so many colors that work so we did our best.

Here's the fun part. There's four different kinds of files! The dollar sign is a bit limiting to modern games and possibly historical. I asked him to make a set with stars instead of that so they could be used for generic and/or futuristic games. Then after that was all set and tested I asked him for more. Since color printing isn't something everyone wants to do I asked for greyscale versions so they can be printed on colored paper. That's more like most game money anyway. That makes up the four versions!

To make this you need a printer (duh), a steel or steel edge ruler, a cutting knife, and some kind of cutting mat. The back of a legal pad works as a cutting mat. The instructions are included but the reason for this is cutting a single sheet of paper is a pain in the butt unless you plan for it.

Those of us who do this a lot tend to have either a slide blade cutter paper trimmer with guide wire (nice, buy it at your favorite craft store) and possibly a guillotine/chopper cutter (not an affiliate link or recommendation, just an example). Those work for most things but having tried the slide blade cutter for testing this I found that once you start cutting the paper flops all over the place. I can also see where it might be difficult to use the chopper. So those aren't recommended but hey, it's your choice.

These aren't currently up on his site.  They're so different from his normal categories that he chose to give them to me rather than put them there. That may change if he and I start making more printable game components but for now they reside here and in the files section of the Facebook group.

OK! On to the files!

I created a page to hold everything if we add more so they're easily found there. But hey, you're reading this so you should be able to download them from here too. It's only fair.

Colour Dollar Money Set

Greyscale Dollar Money Set

Colour Stars Money Set

Greyscale Stars Money Set

If you find these useful drop a comment on the blog. If there's other components you want to see us make drop a comment on the blog. Heck, drop a comment on the blog if you just want to say hi.

Enjoy being your own mint.

The Color Brown

The color brown is an interesting thing since it's not actually a color on its own. You won't find it on any color wheel and the art stores have the various shades in their own offset from the real colors. Brown is a muted orange. Yes, it's orange. Go figure.

Let that sink in for a bit. Brown isn't a color. Take a look at these two color range images and see if you can spot the overlaps. Once you see it you can't unsee it. You can thank me later.

I've been doing some color mixing and browns are part of that. You'd think it was easy - grab some form of raw and/or burnt umber, maybe add a color, done. Nope. It doesn't quite get that simple. Well, most of the time it is but only if you want a warm brown. Once you get into shades of brown it gets more complicated. Because brown doesn't exist on its own.

What brought about this post was me having made a mistake in my painting and needing to correct it without messing it up worse. In short I'd used an orange heavy brown where I shouldn't have done. The painting is too far along for me to want to strip and start over, especially since I've done that once before with these.

It turns out I hadn't actually mixed the type of brown I wanted. Or maybe I did and grabbed the wrong bottle. Of course I haven't labeled the bottles even now. The end result is a lot of places painted far more orange of a shade than I would like.

So the solution seems easy. Make a brown wash and fix it right up. Not so fast. That orange isn't going away. Putting a brown over it is a tricky business because then I'll have an orange undercoat and brown doing whatever it's doing on top of that. The wrong shade and tone of brown over that orange could easily make things worse instead of better.

I have a book on mixing colors for watercolor, acrylic, and oil paints. I've been referring to it as part of this overall project and I'm pleased to note that there haven't been many big surprises. I'm decent on my color theory. Maybe not great but for the projects so far I've had a handle on it.

But this one has been a stumper. I've continued painting while trying to figure out how best to fix this mistake I made with minimum effort. More will be made clear as to why the fix is slightly more difficult than it might seem. Bear with me.

Tonight I had a revelation. I was talking brown with someone else and it got me thinking of how easy and how difficult it is to make a brown using other colors. Pretty much take any three colors, mix them, and you'll get brown. It might not be a pretty brown but you'll get brown. More importantly you'll get shades of brown. Unless you've used a purple brown you really don't see what this means. Yes. I have purple brown paint. It's useful.

As I said earlier brown is just an orange kind of shade. I'm trying to take an orange heavy color and brown it down. The fog cleared a little and I realized what I need to do is take that same shade and add some color to it to make it more brown. It took far longer for me to reach that conclusion than it should have but I was sulking.

So what color do you add to orange to make it more brown? Orange is really just red and yellow so blue seems the obvious answer. Since it's the obvious answer I did some research in my handy book of color mixing to find out I was right in that it wasn't the answer. According to the book I need to add some mauve. Instead of blue I need a blue shading to red. In my mind that's going to make the end result rather red heavy (orange is red and yellow and I'm looking at adding blue and red) but it's worth a shot.

Tomorrow is the test. I'll use the same base color and add just a touch of blue. Blue is a very intense color and anything with a heavy yellow mix is not. Again, color theory. I won't get into yellows here but I will probably have a rant on them in the near future. Therefore anything I add needs to be done with a light touch. If the blue doesn't quite work out then a touch of red. I can play with this all I like since it only take a few drops to find out if it will work or not.

I don't have to make much note of what I'm doing here. I'll be mixing up a completely new brown to take the place of the mistake in the future. Of course I will take notes in case I really like the resulting brown so I can duplicate it, starting with the orange type color as the base. I always take notes now. So when I say I won't make much note of it I think I mean that I'm not going to make a chemistry experiment level kind of notetaking. More of a reference. I think. I don't know. I'll write something down at least.

I'm very curious to see if my knowledge of color theory will hold up in practice. It's easy to say that something should work and to see it in a book. It's quite another to look at it on the palette and then the mini to confirm it worked. I'll take the hit of painting these areas twice because it was my mistake in the first place.

And what happened in the first place? I used the color I had mixed up for rust as the brown. It's a lovely color for rust. It's not a lovely color for leather.

I'll end this on a more humorous note. 

Competition painters and people who are more into the whole color theory aspect of painting miniatures can get hung up on browns. Really hung up. One whole drawer of my paints are nothing but browns. Brown is a serious color, even if it isn't a color.

Way back when I got here I would hang out and paint at a local game store, which has sadly been closed for many years. Someone I considered a friend would be there painting as well. He was as into color theory as I am. He has to be. He competes. I just do it because I'm that picky. But we were on the same page when it came to picking colors.

Whenever we would start talking about browns the other people from the group would say "They're talking about brown again" and tune us out. They didn't have nearly the same level of interest as we did. That got shortened to "The brown discussion" when it would come up at the paint table. I remember those days fondly because we would spend a lot of time finding exactly the right brown for the color palette. Even then I was pretty good at picking the right family of browns for the project at hand, if I do say so myself.

How I Roll - My Traveling GM Bag

Another blog had a post asking what people kept in a traveling GM bag. Rather than comment there (burying the answer and giving that blog traffic instead of mine) I decided to do a post on the contents of my traveling GM bag.

I used it when the game went virtual as well because we were going with a camera on the battle mat so it was still a physical game and I needed all the same things. There was no point in having things scattered about more than they were so it stayed as-is.

My Traveling GM Bag

Here's my oh-so-glamorous GM bag

This is a rolling suitcase I bought at the thrift store on half price day. It probably cost me about $5 or less. I know there's all kinds of fancy cases out there but honestly I'm frugal and needed some way to transport all my stuff. A suitcase works just fine if you don't mind that it's not all fancy and things can get messy.

As I said, things can get messy. Everything moves to the bottom of the suitcase as it gets moved around. I don't mind that and pack with the idea that it's going to happen. Heavy stuff near the bottom, more fragile/lighter stuff near the top. Even then contents can shift during travel.

One of the most important things a GM needs - a way to take notes. At least that's what I consider most important. I've written on my feelings about taking notes before so this should be nothing new. I did try the Rocketbook and while it works for some people it didn't work for me. Printouts of the transcribed notes are in the green folder. I went back to my trusty spiral bound notebook for the last couple of sessions and found myself much happier. I never decided if I was going to put the pages from the spiral bound notebook into the folder or not before the game ended. Since I will be using written notes in future games it's not a consideration. But notes and the way to take them are extremely high on my list of things to have.

This is my GM screen. Isn't it fantastic? Isn't it perfectly in keeping with the theme of the game? Another thrift store buy it's wonderfully horrible. I thought about covering it with something more appropriate but decided to leave it in all its tacky glory. However this thing is perfect as a screen for me.

It's short enough I can see over it when I'm sitting down. It lets me put sticky notes for things like player-character names, special abilities, PC ability scores, etc. The center lets me put in notecards with more detailed information and I can add as many sleeves as I want. Hint - put some tape around the bottom of the sleeves or the cards fall out.

Even better if you run more than one game you can start from the other end and have a separate screen for the second game. It's pretty cool that way.

I use a screen to hide my dice rolls and keep my notes less visible. I don't need a lot of room for that and having a custom setup for my 'in my face' notes is perfect.

Pencils, pens, and the markers I use on the battle mat. Of course I'm going to have a pouch of pencils, pens, erasers, sticky notes, and other writing related materials. I'm a GM. The center box holds the special pens for the Rocketbook. That's a leftover I never bothered to remove. The markers are self explanatory and I don't know why I even keep the yellow marker since that color never shows up anyway. But they're all there, ready to be used.

Dice. Of course there's dice. What kind of GM doesn't have dice? I swear even in a fully virtual game I'll have dice on hand just for the tactile click clack they give. I tend to keep three full sets of poly dice and swap them out when I want a different look or I think they're not performing up to snuff. I also have:

• D24 (hours of the day)
• D30 (Forgotten Realms has a 30 day per month calendar)
• Weather dice (the set of 2 - one for current, one for forecast)
• Place value dice into the millions (because I bought them and would maybe have a use for them some day)
• Pink D20 (the D20 of Shame)
• Random dice (because dice)
• Red glass blob (makeshift campfire marker)
• Black cat eraser (something I've had with my dice for a very long time)
• Orange tricorder accessory from a ST:TNG Data figure (so I don't lose it)

The triangle you see with a note and a value is from a treasure notecard. I'll get into notecards next.

I love this. I keep this handy. I love 3 x 5 notecards. I absolutely love 3 x 5 notecards.

I use notecards to have item information I can hand off to players. I make trinket, treasure, and magic item cards as the need or inclination hits, then keep them here for when I give out loot. The top card is a low value magic item with the name, the information on what it does, how it works, and in the corner the actual value. When I hand out these I rip off the corner so they don't know what it's worth. I take a picture before I do so I have it available to me - I don't have second copies and if the player can't keep track of their own inventory (game and physical) I can get it back if I feel like it.

Up at the top is a fine tip black Sharpie. That's my writing instrument of choice for notecards since it's permanent and dark. It also means I throw out a lot of notecards when I make mistakes in writing them up.

The trinket and treasure cards are from various item generators. I have a big thing for item generators. All the links are affiliate links so if you buy them I'll get a few pennies, so I can buy more item generators. Inkwell Ideas  has my favorite ones in their Infinite Choices products. Rusted Iron Games has some smaller, more focused generators in their Roll With It! series. Dicegeeks has a great selection of random item generators along with other types of random lists.

These folders have non-campaign specific paperwork. The red one has blank characters sheets and other things that are useful when people need them or I'm working on something. The bigger one has the 'working' paperwork. Let's get into that.

I like combat tracking sheets. You can see one there. I don't require players use them but I offer them every time there's combat. It has places for the round, initiative (I reroll every round), character action, result. I find these help a lot in the combat details - like how many rounds an effect lasts, what damage was done, overall what the character did at the time. I have them in various sizes so they're not wasted. Short combat? Short sheet. I also have bits of scrap paper for notes, maps, blank treasure and XP tracking sheets, etc. There's nothing in these folders that is essential to the specific game. I just keep it together.

These folders, on the other hand, do contain campaign specific materials. Notice how much less there is in them than the non-specific materials. I try to keep these thinned out so I'm not hauling around maps from months previous that will never be used again or I have online and can look up if needed. I also try to build a nemesis party for every game I run and rarely get to use it. It's so fun to have when it works and is always a subplot to have handy.

The campaign paperwork generally has notes and printouts for the next session or two and what was done in the previous session. I thin it out when I'm reviewing my notes before the next game so it's an ongoing process. I keep some of it if I can use it in other games, like maps printed to scale or canned encounters I found useful. Others get tossed during the winnowing.

The characters! I ask the players to send me copies of their character sheets so I have them on hand. Whatever version I have is the one that will be used when that player isn't available so it's in their best interest to make sure I have the most current version. I also have their backstories and any other information I've given them or they don't know yet in their folder. If you're going to do this you'll find very quickly you can't write directly on the folders. Put down a piece of tape, write on it with a Sharpie, and put another piece of tape over that so it doesn't rub off. I put both player and character names on the folders.

I keep each version of the character sheet. Their entire character history is in their folder. I can look up numbers or abilities at the table and I find it even more useful when doing game prep when I can reference whatever I need. I can also put things I want to give the player into their folder and know where it is when I need it.

As much as I'd like to have a fully immersive game with appropriate minis for every encounter I just can't do it in a traveling game. Instead I found this workaround. Those are old Stratego game pieces with colored, numbered paper sleeves. Note I said they're the old version of the game. The old version has a smooth top edge. The newer versions have crenellations. Another thrift store find and if you can find them here's the sleeves you can print out for yourself. Print at full size and 1/2" tape fits perfectly around the bottom. You get 10 each of 6 colors.

They're not as sexy as the minis but it makes it so much easier to keep track of things in combat when someone says they're attacking Red 6. You can also make the different colors different monsters. They fit into the 1 inch squares and I didn't get around to making something that would fit more squares for bigger monsters. But these are a good start.

I could have bagged each color individually but that's a waste of bags and I generally needed 2 colors for each encounter so having them together helped. Kind of since they were all mixed up.

Hint - don't stress about having them in any kind of order. There's no need to pick through so you have 1, 2, and 3 unless you feel that need. 2, 5, 9 work just as well.

The position of the token also can be useful. My standard is upright is active, on their side is prone/unconscious, flat is dead/down. They still fit in the square and help the players determine their actions. They also continue to take up space on the mat if you leave them there, which makes for obstacles and other fun issues.

Books. Where would we be without books? These are the only ones I carry since they're the ones needed pretty much all the time. The DMG is pretty self explanatory and I don't use it as much as you might think. If I didn't bring it I would need it, of course. The setting book is a must. And the player's handbook as well. If there were other setting or game specific 'required' books I'd have them in the bunch. But books are heavy and I also don't like the abuse they take from being hauled around. So I keep them to a minimum.

My final tool - my tablet. I have the SRD apps for my games and use those for things like monsters so I'm not hauling around those books. I can also keep copies of splat books (or pages of splat books) on there so I've got them as needed. I have the PDF copies of most of the books in my Dropbox (no, I won't link that) so I can look them up in a pinch. I use this as a tool but it's not a central tool overall. It's an accessory. 

There's a lot of debate about electronics at the table. This isn't me being a hypocrite since I ban electronics at the table and I haven't gotten anyone saying anything to my face. Unless I need it for the game I don't play with it.

Not shown is my battle mat. I don't put it in the suitcase so it kind of doesn't fit in this post but it's something I always bring. I still have the plastic sleeve for it and I think the packing tape patches add character. I just added a wrapping paper core support so it won't sag when I stand it in the corner. Even if the game doesn't use squares it's a way to draw out the scenery at least.

Summary

I can carry a lot of stuff in a rolling carry on sized suitcase. I try to carry as little as I can since it makes the stupid thing heavy. Finding a place to put it during the game can also be a problem since space is always at a premium. Keeping the bag handy is much better than having the contents strewn about the table is my opinion. My preference is to have a chair within reach and have the suitcase across the arms so I can dig through it as needed.

I use a lot of different kinds of folders. I like thinking I know where things are when I need them. That doesn't always hold true. I put things in the wrong folders at times. But in general I prefer to have them as organized and protected as I can.

Hopefully this will spark ideas on how to make a traveling GM bag. We always have to carry the most stuff so finding a way to do it efficiently and effectively is a task. My way still needs that space to hold the bag where I can get at it quickly. I carry a lot of stuff now that I look at it. But I also use a lot of paper in my game so that adds up. I'm more old school in that I like pencil and paper at the table so I lead by example. Lay out what you always use, what you like to have, and what you keep around because of habit. Out of that you should be able to assemble a good set for games away from home.

Yeah. About that Secret

This is a quick note that the secret I promised is going to be even more delayed. Things didn't work out quite as I expected so it's taking longer.

Hopefully you'll find it worth the wait. Hopefully I will too.

Shhh... It's a Secret

There will be a decent size update here in the near-ish future and then it should kick off more regular posts.

But until I'm ready with that first reveal you'll just have to wait.

If you feel like having some fun leave guesses in the comments as to what the update will be. Or not.

Forgotten Realms Campaign - Start to Finish

This is probably going to be a long post. It's also the last post about this campaign so it will talk about the game itself and then have GM commentary at the end. If you've read the posts where I did my best to spin each session into a chapter of a story then some of this will be familiar to you. If not then you get the whole shebang here.

Campaign Summary

The campaign lasted for just over a year and 20 sessions. We were scheduled to play every other week and we kept pretty well to that. I'm surprised. I didn't do the math. However, in game we covered under 30 days.

Over the course of 10 days a wizard, a cleric, a rogue, and a ranger meet up, decide to become an adventuring party, and head out of town towards some ruins they heard were lootable. Traveling with a caravan they find out the road is dangerous even reasonably close to a city before turning off onto a lesser road toward the mountains with the ruins.

While staying over in what amounts to a fantasy world truck stop village (forever named TruckStopVille) they discover some stuff that seems to tie that village to the Underdark. They move on towards the mountains and meet up with another rogue along the way.

While exploring the mountains they find more things that not only imply an Underdark connection but a blocked passage that's supposed to go to the Underdark. They rescue and befriend a goblin tribe at this time. The cleric prevents the ranger from slaughtering them since he has a special hate-on for goblins.

Not finding much they move to a different place in the mountains and find access to the ruins they heard about. The ranger is carried off by a peryton (very crabby bird-stag combo) to an unknown fate. The smaller party explores the ruins, has some trouble with minor Underdark based beasts, and finds an abandoned but ancient hideaway. Maps and design lead them deeper into the mountains.

They find an underground river with boats. The map seemed to imply that upstream was a bad way to go and downstream would get them out. Being an adventuring party they start to go upstream but are turned away by the threat of death by undead. They grudgingly go downstream.

A stopover finds them releasing a demon that had been trapped there and driving the people in the area insane. After releasing the demon they take what they find and the no-longer-insane people help them leave the mountain. They're returning to the village that the party had just left, help them leave the mountain, and go on their way.

With the plan to go back to the big city to follow up on some other possible stuff to do they follow the no-longer-insane people and find the empty wagon. Following footprints they go into the woods next to the road to see what happened. After a spot of trouble they find the people again and a couple of rough campsites. Gathering up the people they head back. The wizard is starting to get a bit stingy on sharing information about stuff they found.

Once back in the big city they try to sell off some stuff, the original rogue is assumed to be part of the large thief's guild in the city due to stuff he had pickpocked before they left the first time, and the wizard is even more reclusive as he does wizard things. They all look for stuff they can do that will line their pockets.

They accept a job guarding a caravan to a nearby city. Along the way they notice some oddness with creatures that seem to be watching them. Once they're in the city they look for more work and settle on a job helping guard a ship making the passage across the big lake so they can get to that area. Abruptly the wizard says he's taking the job, they're not needed, and leaves. The party needs to find other work.

A barbarian attaches herself to the group and they go along with it. There's problems with bandits on the road between this city and the next one so they head out to see what's going on and what they can earn for clearing out a few of them. After a bit of a problem in the city they head out.

There's a bandit hideout back in the woods so they see if they can handle what's there. They can because after some fight the remaining bandits leave the hideout to them. It's a fortified place that has a LOT of loot for them to find, more than they can carry. Rather than leave in the morning they decide to investigate the stairs going down.

They do. They find unused quarters and caverns underneath. They follow the caverns to find some undead and their now deceased owner-cleric who has set up shop by a portal. Investigation shows the portal will take them to another city on the other side of the large lake. They take it an end up in an empty shop but not sure what city they're really in.

The original rogue finds what he was looking for in the form of a new guild to join and leaves them there. He does give them information about a potential bit of larceny on the road into the city in a few days. A young wizard has been trailing them since they got there and after introductions they accept him into the party.

Following the road they do find some excitement in what seems to be the place another ambush was being planned but don't have anyone alive left to question it. The spot is way too perfect for ambushes not to be used on a regular basis.

At this point the story ends. Of the original group only the cleric remains.

GM Commentary

I freely admit this was not my finest hour for being a GM. My pacing was entirely off. My story hooks weren't hooking the players. I didn't have a cohesive story arc for them to follow.

I will say that the group itself never seemed to gel. I gathered them from a MeetUp post and we lost two players after Session Zero which threw things off. We had a lot of discussion about what they wanted out of a game and I tried to give it to them - a mix of role play and combat. However I don't know that everyone was really on that page.

The location of the game moved around. At first we played in the event room of a local craft brewery because that was listed as a place we could play but it turns out they only let one group use it for free. After the uncertainty of that one player offered to let us play at his home. Then that player left and another one offered his place. We played there until for obvious reasons we moved the game online using Discord.

The first player that had to leave (the ranger) had to leave for real life reasons. I'm not sure how sorry people were to see him go since he wasn't really playing as part of the group. He had a character type he seemed locked into regardless of the situation plus he wanted to write a novel about the campaign so he spent a lot of time taking notes. The PCs skills were sorely missed and his character was referenced in future games by the players and by me ("A ranger would sure be handy right about now") which may have contributed to the next player leaving.

That player's spot was filled by a friend of the wizard's player and he chose a rogue as his character. I'm taking the bulk of the blame for his choice since my normal style is to let the player choose the character independent of who else is playing what. He wanted a rogue. He got to play a rogue. Two rogues makes for some challenging GM work.

I tend to have problems balancing treasure per encounter. I need to work on that. It seems to be feast or famine in my games. I do enjoy making magic items tailored to the players and in this case I was trying something new with random time duration items. I prefer to make more low level items that give the players options but they also have to decide if they should use it or not because it takes time to recharge itself. There was the new option of them not knowing how long an effect would last. I'm going to keep that in my pocket for later games if the group is right.

The second player to leave was the wizard. This was after we moved online and he suddenly said he was done in the middle of a session and left. I knew something was wrong and tried to talk to him before it happened but he seemed to have made up his mind and acted on it. The crappy thing is that the first player had to leave because of this guy (real life situation, not personality). It also left the group without any arcane magic.

I adjusted the house rules so that potions could be identified by various PCs based on experience. There was also a magic item they found early (and the wizard was kind enough to leave behind whether he wanted to or not) that let anyone perform the Identify spell. They weren't left in the lurch as much as they could have been.

I was frustrated because every time I tried to pull together a nemesis group to thwart them the group composition changed so I had to start over. The first one had a druid to mess with the ranger but then the ranger left. I was retooling that when things fell apart.

I tried putting together a larger story arc based on their actions and items that they had found along the way. That's when I found out that the group wasn't good at putting together the clues. I tried. Oh how I tried. Finally I realized that I had to spell things out for them if I wanted to get information across. That disappointed me as a GM and made me feel like I was railroading them since they would take the information as gospel and go with it rather than decide what to do on their own.

Another problem for me was the setting itself. Forgotten Realms is great if you're sticking to the Sword Coast where all the Driz'zt books happen. Outside of that it's a brief sketch without much more. Even the locale is mostly empty space. Trying to stick with the setting was more hindrance than help. I had decided to use the locations and make up stuff when it was getting to be more of a burden than I wanted to carry.

I wasn't enjoying this game after about the first half of it. When the wizard player left it was a real problem. One player had a decent back story and I started using it to drive the story forward. The rest boiled down to "out for the lulz" which is useless when it comes to trying to incorporate them into a larger story. I know my one page back story rule can be limiting but I expect more effort than that.

The extremely slow pace of the game also frustrated me and probably them. We couldn't get anywhere. Once we were in a city everyone scattered. Trying to run three different story lines meant that the players who weren't involved didn't have anything to do. They even admitted they knew it was a problem but kept doing it. The original rogue really wanted to do a lot of stuff on his own. I could have done that after the session but things he wanted to do would have in game impact.

That player said he would change to a caster and I accepted after making sure he was really good with leaving his other character behind. I think he was bored with having a second rogue around so a change was good for him. He didn't get much of a chance to show off his magic skills since the game ended soon after the switch.

I knew it was time to end the game when prep time was more of a burden to me than a pleasure. I was tired of having to present them with everything on a platter. I was tired of them splitting the group into splinters that had to be run during the sessions. I was just tired of the group because it never became a party.

Moving online didn't help. I couldn't read body language and people kept talking over each other. Trying to pass information to a player meant me having to stop everyone so I could focus on one thing rather than dashing off a quick note. We got into discussions rather than them accepting what they were given. That slowed things down even more in an already slow game.

What would I have done different? I've really thought about this. At some point I do want to run more games and I'll probably end up in the same situation of a group of strangers from a MeetUp or Facebook group. Here's some of the things I've been considering.

Have more toys in the sandbox. It's great to give the players full control but as someone said if you have a sandbox you need to provide the players with toys. If you don't then they don't know what to do. This game proved it very well.

Find out how much the group likes piecing together what may seem to be random events into a larger whole and then keep an eye on if they can really do it.

Talk about pacing. If they want to spend time in the cities doing role playing things that's great as long as they realize it's going to eat up sessions. I'm fine with as much role play as they want to do, as long as everyone wants to do it.

Talk quite seriously about splitting the party in role playing situations, especially when what they want to do has game impact. There's only one of me so taking a large portion of my time isn't fair to the rest of the players. I'm fine with setting up time outside of the game to take care of business, as long as it doesn't invalidate things that happened in the previous session.

Treasure. I need to get much better about the party finding the appropriate amount of treasure per encounter. I also need to stop making up magic items that can be easily abused to unbalance encounters. I had several of those in this game and it caused me headaches.

Party composition. I don't like forcing people to play characters they don't like but having two rogues showed me just how much of a problem it can be when there's a non-standard group. Losing the wizard was a real eye opener for everyone. I had to tailor encounters both to handle the extra rogue but also take out most magic from their opponents since they had no way to counter it. That brought high fantasy down to low fantasy.

I like the 3.5 rules. I really do. We could have moved the game to Fantasy Grounds and used the OSR except for the Forgotten Realms setting. That was never licensed out. Changing mid-game would have meant losing feats and equipment that the PCs already had. It wouldn't have been fair to expect them to lower their abilities when we had the other option of using a camera and Discord. It wasn't great on the whole but to me it was better than the alternative.

Online vs in-person. Had this game started out online it may have been different. Moving from one format to another was difficult for everyone. We did our best.

Did I fail as a GM? Yes. Did they fail as a group? Yes.

I think we had a decent start and then it began to fall apart when the first of the story arcs I tried to include came into being. That's when I found out the players weren't good or weren't interested in the long game. I started looking for modules I could adapt to run over a couple of sessions that were interesting to me and allowed for them to be challenged. Either I'm very choosy or there aren't many of those. I did find some publishers I like a lot for that kind of thing so that's good for the future.

Had the game continued it would have been a series of module adventures strung together with some of my own ideas to keep them into a cohesive story. I know I would have still had problems with the role play/combat balance just based on their reactions to events. Maybe not problems so much as adjustments to the balance.

I know real life had a big impact on everyone's mood. Abruptly losing a player was also a blow since I think I was the only one who saw it coming and that's because it's part of my job to monitor the player satisfaction. We wanted to escape the stuff in the real world but we also carried it with us. That made games more frenetic and more focused than prior. Losing the physical proximity didn't help keep the group together either.

I don't know when in person gaming will start up again. I also don't know where we can game. The local store where I used to try to game moved to another storefront and there's no good place to run role playing games. Other stores may have them but I think the setup is the same - they've got tables for playing MtG and some wargaming but nothing that will work well for RPGs. We'd have to take two of the tables and find a way to be heard over anything else going on in the store. Plus make sure there's space for us.

I've been debating the idea of running one shots with pre-gens online. I want to learn the system so I can run longer games there as well as find out if I can enjoy running online. For all that I'm antisocial I think I need the energy that comes from a gaming group. If I can get and give some of that online then it may work. Maybe having the program handle all the mechanics is the key there.

I don't miss this gaming group like I do the previous ones. I was friends with most of those groups. I didn't become friends with this group. That may be another problem I had with engaging them or at least wanting to engage with them. At least I know that there's far less chance of it happening with an online only group and can adjust my expectations accordingly.

Summary

This game was mostly a failure for a number of reasons. As the GM I can take on a lot of those reasons but not all of them. I'm not going to hang that around my neck. I've learned from it and will hopefully bring those lessons into the next games I run. I also know now that I can't force the necessary creativity to run good games. When that happens I need to talk it out with the group and see what can be done, if anything. That's another burden I can't take on myself.

I may have to give up on 3.5 Forgotten Realms as a setting. 5e is so prevalent now that I'm coming to terms with the fact that may be the version I have to run. I do have books and online books for it. I may find I enjoy it as I get used to it. Having cut my teeth on 3.5 it's a downgrade to go to 5e, especially with the latest changes to races or whatever they're calling them these days. Political correctness has been wiping a lot of the things I liked about the game and I know I can't tell people to ignore those changes, even though it's my prerogative as the GM to make those decisions. I'm not that stupid.

I wanted to give people reading this some kind of conclusion to the campaign since I started writing about it. I felt it was only fair. I didn't get the chance to do that with the group since after our last session and my email telling them I was ending the game I haven't heard from any of them. That was another tick mark in the "wasn't a tight group" column.

Finally, I never truly felt appreciated as a GM. I know that sounds petty. It's how I feel. They said all the right things at the right times, I'll give them that. Their actions showed me more. I'm not expecting banners and huge amounts of praise. It would have been nice to not have to chip in for the food I didn't get a chance to eat since I was running the game. And it would have been nice to get at least one token of appreciation from them for the work I did. Not knowing if that's petty or not doesn't help either.