Continuing my recent spate of posts documenting my evolving thoughts on TTRPGs as I learn more about the hobby, I wanted to share my thoughts on people playing older releases of TTRPGs. As I’ve mentioned this week (and previously) I started off with D&D 5e 2014. For the beginning of my time in fandom all I ever heard was that a lot of the greybeards thought that D&D 3.5e was the last good edition and either kept playing that or moved on to Pathfinder 1e (which was based on it and has been nicknamed D&D 3.75). Tainted by thinking about this in the same way as software, I thought this was like people who were still using Windows 95 or MS Office 2003 because they refused to learn the latest interface and hated dealing with change.

The classic TTRPGs like Pathfinder and D&D (along with 5e fork Tales of the Valiant) have at least 3 main sourcebooks. (See my previous post about expanding those options) Many newer systems like Daggerheart or Cosmere have only one book that contains both player and game master sections. On the one hand, it’s nice to just have to buy one book and have everything all together - there’s often a lot of overlap in what content is for the player and what is for the GM. That said, in a previous iteration, Pathfinder had all the information in one book and people complained that the book was too massive.

Gamemaster Month Lessons

January flew by and it was time to read the last two lessons before running the game as the capstone project for this class. Tuesday’s generic lesson was about gathering what you need to run the game. I didn’t really learn anything with that lesson, although I did like the acknowledgement that VTTs can offer some benefits over in-person play. The Tales of the Valiant part of the lesson included links to the character sheets as well as their ToV extra Lineages and Heritages PDFs for free (normally ~$3-$5 each).

New Gamemaster Month continued this week by building on the idea of the encounter. Tuesday’s blog post defined an encounter and the homework was to read Homework to read Encounter and Spell Casting pages from Tales of the Valiant (pp221-245). Also read ch 1 of Guide to Labyrinth. (This gave me many new ideas for my Midgard campaign). Thursday’s blog post and homework were to think about the atmospherics of the encounters.

As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class.

On Tuesday our homework was to learn the rules of Tales of the Valiant and watch the creators of Tov play the game. I learned a lot from watching the video, especially with how the GM often invited the players to contribute to their shared history rather than dictating it. I also enjoyed how the players would play along (“yes and”) if the players had their characters forget the name of their nemesis.

As part of New Gamemaster month, I continued my prep work within FoundryVTT to be ready to host my game in February as the capstone project for class. Whether you’re on the main page of the blog or reading through an RSS reader, click through to see the YouTube videos of my session prep. (Walls & Lighting, Character Creator, and vanilla combat)

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’m participating in New Gamemaster Month. The homework for the first class was to choose a game system to learn and run. I chose Tales of the Valiant because I like it and I will be running a huge ToV campaign for my kids in the coming months.

The organizers recommended practicing what you’ve learned by the end of the month by running a game. The second class was about selecting an adventure and finding players. Kobold Press recommended The Impregnable Fortress of Dibs as it’s short, fun, and is a great level one introductory adventure. For finding players they had a few recommendations, including the #LFG channel on their Discord server. (LFG stands for lookign for group) Finally, potential new GMs were supposed to read the introduction to the Players Guide. I’d read it before, but I re-read it to get it fresh in my mind.

Whenever I get the chance, I like to watch the Kobold Press YT series Kobold Chats. Kendo, the community manager for Kobold Press, goes over various tabletop RPG topics - usually revolving around Kobold press releases or blog posts from that week. Occasionally they do interviews with Kobold Press employees or with others in the TTRPG space (like someone from Roll20). Kendo has a very fun personality on the chats and it’s hard not to find myself grinning at his antics. This last week’s video (linked earlier) mentioned something I wish I’d known about last year - New Gamemaster Month, an annual event to increase the number of game masters (also sometimes called dungeon masters) by providing a month-long tutorial on the process. Last January I would have been about 6 months into my GM journey and could definitely have made use of the month. However, that doesn’t mean all is lost for me. Whenever I teach myself a new skill - programming, photography, TTRPGs, etc - I will usually eventually seek out a class if it interests me enough. I’m not sure how unique I am, but I find that whenever I’m self-taught I end up with gaps in my knowledge compared to learning in a class. ALSO, I’ve always found that if I’m learning any skill that isn’t TOO basic, I learn it much better the second time through. (Obviously, if it’s too basic, it would just be boring the second time through) So I’ll be participating in New Gamemaster Month this month. If I’ve piqued your interest, follow the prior link. There are a bunch of game companies participating and you can use one of their games to learn how to GM. As is often the case, most of the companies are small-to-midsize (ie Wizards of the Coast is not represented). The games represented are: