(Don't know how I missed this.)
Any tips or recommendations?
I'm going to catch some negative ratings for this, but fuck it.
My number one bit of advice is to ignore most of the advice on the internet.
Look back in this thread for the freakshit vs pigfarmer argument. There is something known as desirability bias. This is the tendency for people to give opinions that are socially desirable, instead of their true feelings. We see this a lot in MMOs. All the community talks about is epic tier raids, but in practice it's filler grind content that most people enjoy, but it doesn't sound good to say you just want to veg out for a couple of hours with friends or a podcast.
When asked, most people will want an open world, grim and gritty sandbox full of inter-faction politics where the players direct the game. In practice, most people want a somewhat linear dungeon crawl adventure with an obvious goal. On the internet, most will claim to want to play by the letter of rules, and let the dice fall where they may. In practice, players get bored and frustrated when everyone keeps rolling crap against that last goblin, or the big bad wins initiative crits them on the first round before they can react.
My second bit of advice is don't worry to much. You don't have to know every rule, but you have to know the game well enough to make a judgement call. You don't have to do elaborate voices and have in depth backstories for every villager, but enough so that players can ask basic questions of major NPCs and you can have an answer.
My third bit of advice. Don't do homebrew for your first game. Most homebrew is poorly designed and shit. You can easily turn into a tangled mess. This applies to balance as well. Like my first tip, the internet is full of claims that this class or that race or whatever skill is worthless, but then I play and it works fine. Play a game or two, then do homebrew as you feel it's needed.
Disagree strongly with this but not going to autistically meanrate in this thread full of kings, so lmao doublepost
I don't count "disagree" as a negative rating.
Like I said, it depends on what you want. I mostly play Savage Worlds these days since it does the things I care about. If you want realism, then design dungeons on logic, but be ready to fuck your players over with a too hard battle if they make a lot of noise, etc. If you want to play out fights to the last HP, go for it. I'm just saying that you have to choose what you value and focus on that. Hence the Farrari quote that's been doing the rounds since that Asmondgold Eldan Ring video.
