I’m a big fan of a small app called UpNote. It’s clean and simple with a few power features you can use if you really dig into it. It largely has the same baseline set of features as Obsidian, but it supports syncing across devices out of the box and has a one-time purchase of a lifetime membership.

I highly respect this bit of advice. It’s a classic. But I have also found it can assume a certain kind of player, and that there do exist players which seemingly desire a storyline they can just follow. They still want to have agency and make interesting and consequential decisions, but I still find them a bit aimless and lost when I drop them in a sandbox.

In fairness to this received wisdom, I think the phrase interesting situation is doing more work than I have historically given it credit for. It’s not just about it being interesting in the abstract, but (at least with some players and parties) presenting a status quo and then introducing (or threatening) the prospect of changing that status quo. I suppose my tl;dr is that with interesting situations inaction should feel like a meaningful choice. The orphanage will burn down, the criminal will escape, the freedom fighter will be caught. (Ideally, you leave the determination of whether they’re a criminal or a freedom fighter up to the players.)

I feel (rightly & legitimately) called out 😭 I literally got two months into my renaissance political intrigue campaign before I discovered Court of Blades. It’s a perfect fit for my interests, but now my campaign is lousy with so many d&d tropes (Tieflings! Dhampirs! Changelings! Dragons!) that I more than likely couldn’t switch systems without home brewing everything out the wazoo 😓

I’m a big fan of @[email protected]’s trick of preparing secrets, clues, or general plot point revelations in advance and without anticipating the context of where or how they will be revealed. That is, you just prepare a list of ten facts or details that will engage the players if and when they learn them, and you improvise how they learn them at the table. It’s great for when a player character unexpectedly goes to the library to aimlessly look for clues, or the PCs start talking with an NPC and you need to drop some nugget of info to make the conversation feel worthwhile.

https://slyflourish.com/sharing_secrets.html

I found my two groups (both online, play vis VTT) through the /r/lfg community on Reddit. Not sure where I would look now.

The two I would recommend are both centered around GM prep:

• The Lazy Dungeon Master by Mike Shea (@[email protected] , @[email protected] )
• Never Unprepared by Phil Vecchione (@[email protected])

I don’t think either of these are perfect, but they both offer really good, actionable advice. The philosophies/systems described in these two don’t naturally mesh, and I think that’s a plus. Every GM needs to figure out for themselves how to prepare to run a game, because the things each GM needs are unique. I think having two books outline pretty drastically different approaches can help you triangulate your own needs and methods

I was a bit bummed to see that Mike didn’t mention any of the Fediverse options but honestly Lemmy and kbin are still cooking as technologies so I don’t exactly fault him. I was surprised to hear him skeptical of Patreon—the same incentives are there, surely, but I wasn’t aware of any recent actions they had taken.

Replacing Discord will definitely be painful if/when it comes.