The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
The Ghost Walkers – Dragon Empire Session 1 – Lazy GM Prep
Fri, 08 Nov 2024
Mike prepares the next session of his Tales of the Valiant Dragon Empire campaign. Visit the Sly Flourish Blog Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Podcast Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books: Midgard Worldbook Tales of the Valiant Obsidian for TTRPGs
Full Episode
Hey friends, it's your pal Mike Shea from Sly Flourish, here with another episode of Sly Flourish's Lazy GM Prep. In this show, I go through steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master while preparing for my Sunday role-playing game. This is session one of our Dragon Empire campaign, taking place in the world of Midgard using the tales of the Valiant 5e rules.
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To the patrons of Sly Flourish, thank you so much for your support. So last week, I had a bunch of my friends over for my Sunday game, and we did character prep. So it actually took most of the session. I had a very little bit of story that took place, but of the three-hour session... Probably more than two hours of it was building characters, talking to each other and doing that kind of stuff.
And I don't think that it was a long time, but I don't think anyone was particularly frustrated by how long that took. For this campaign, I did offer that we have so, you know, because so, you know, we live in a non D&D beyond world for this kind of thing. So what I did is we had multiple copies of the Tales of the Valiant core books around. I think three of my players had their books.
One even had two copies. So we had multiple physical players handbooks around. I also did my Tales of the Valiant sharing it through Google Drive so that they could view the document online if they needed to. And what else did I use? Oh, we have it available on Shard. So I shared the campaign in our Shard tabletop version.
and that way if anybody wanted to build a character in shard they could and i think one player used shard just to kind of work the math out but their plan was i'm going to build it in shard and then i'm going to copy the material over to a tales of the valiant character sheet and so i think everybody is using physical character sheets for it i think the only real complaint that i had heard was like a lot of backtracking for things like skill so everybody liked that ability scores were done all together they thought that that was a big improvement
And I think there was still a bit of like, well, which background do I want to select? Because there's an overlap of potential skills. And also I want to, even though Tales of the Valiant has what I think is a much improved over D&D 2024 approach for talents. So talents are Tales of the Valiant's equivalent of feats.
is when you select a background you have a choice of three different talents for that background so you're a lot less likely to have to like fish around to find the background that has the feet that you want and also has the ability score adjustment modifiers that you want in in 2024 dnd which i think is a you know that's like immediately after it came out that was like a huge complaint that a lot of people had and that i had and like my wife had and lots of people had that i talked to that played or like oh my god
you know like trying to figure out which background they need to select in order to get the proper ability score bumps and also the proper feet that i want is a real pain in the ass and everyone's like oh i guess i'm a farmer right like everybody's picking farmer because farmers got got that one so and there's the custom background feature in dnd 2024 which i have a feeling is going to become the default which is like you get to pick your background and you get to pick your skills and you get to pick your feet and
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