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THE AMA IS NOW LIVE

We at /r/DnD are excited to host Mike Shea of SlyFlourish.com! He'll be discussing his upcoming Kickstarter, his vast history as a freelancer in the TTRPG space, and anything else! Save all your questions and join us on Tuesday, July 7!

From Mike:

Hello!

I'm Mike Shea, writer for SlyFlourish.com and author of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and other books. A few years back I also released the Lazy GM's Resource Document into the Creative Commons to share what I've learned and gathered from other GMs into the world.

I've been playing RPGs since the mid-80s and writing about RPGs since 2008. I've been freelancing for various RPG companies for the past 15 years or so including Wizards of the Coast, Kobold Press, MCDM, Arcane Library, Pelgrane Press, and many others.

The Kickstarter for my latest book, Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster, is going on now! This is the latest of the Lazy GM books, expanding each of the eight steps of Lazy GM prep and taking a new focus on campaign planning, adventure types, and an expansive lazy GM toolkit. I hope you'll check it out.

I'm excited to be here to talk to you all about RPGs!

Feel free to join this giveaway and celebrate the closing days of our Outer Gods Dice Pt.2 campaign on Kickstarter! The rules are simple:

1. Leave a comment under this post to participate
2. There will be three winners, the first place gets 3 dice sets, the second place gets 2 sets and the third place gets one set. You can choose from any three sets we've already made (Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and King in Yellow), even duplicates. Each set comes with a matching bag!
3. Winners will be determined via Reddit Raffler at 15 July 16:00 CEST (UTC+2). We will edit our first comment to mention the winners and message them about delivery info.

If you want to participate in the current campaign and help us reach a streatch goal, feel free to check the link below: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yanshulman/outer-gods-dice-collection-part-two/rewards

So I've been playing DnD for around 15 years, and I've had this same issue once before and it didn't end well.

I've recently joined a new group, all level 1 characters, homebrew campaign. The DM and all the players are great and the characters are really cool... Well except for 1. Our DMs one and only ground rule for creating a character was to not make a character who's the suspicious loner type who doesn't work well with the other characters. Seems one of the players decided he didn't want to listen to that and made a heavily suspicious loner character who refuses to help or be helped. Last game he basically stole 200 gold that was meant to be shared between the party. He rolled high on his deception and the DM had no choice but to let him keep it all. My character is the only one who rolled a high enough insight to know he was lying.

Here's my issue. I've played with someone like this before (well, a few times, but only once was I sort of forced into doing something about it), and ended up in the same situation. The guy stole gold from the party and I was the only one who knew. When I confronted him in-game, he attacked and killed my character (I was a squishy lvl 2 warlocks and he was a barb, it wasn't even a fight, it was a slaughter). The DM told me I could make a new character, but I said no, gathered my things and left.

I like this group I'm playing with, but I don't want to deal with another character like this again. I just wanted to play with cool people and have fun, not have internal in-game conflicts with the shady loner pc. We've had 3 games already and are just starting to get into the story, but now I'm finding myself not wanting to play, because I know the next game I'm going to have to confront the PC about the stolen gold. So now I'm really considering explaining my thoughts to the DM and then leaving. I can't be bothered dealing with this type of player anymore.

So my fellow Redditors, would I be in the wrong if I left the table? I feel bad but I'm not even excited to play anymore.

Hi friends!

I'm Mike Shea, the author of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and several other D&D and RPG books. Over the years I've freelanced with Wizards of the Coast, MCDM, Arcane Library, Pelgrane Press, Kobold Press, and several other publishers. I've also written GM-focused advice on https://slyflourish.com for 18 years and released the Lazy GM's Resouce Document — a big document of useful GM aids and tips released under a Creative Commons license.

I just launched the Kickstarter for Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster – a book expanding on each of the eight steps described in Return based on eight years of experience. *Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster* also offers a new focus on campaign planning, prepping and running common adventure types, a huge lazy GM's toolbox, and more.

A little bit of trivia — I wrote a bunch of material on Everquest back in the early 2000s and my father wrote the cult classic novels Illuminatus! with his co-author Robert Anton Wilson.

Here's some verification.

The kind moderators of r/DnD agreed to host me for an "Ask Me Anything" today! I'll be answering all day today so please — Ask Me Anything!!

Hey everyone, thought I’d share this full-body party illustration I finished recently for a client. Hope you like it! Here’s some basic character info:

Half-Elf Ranger — Hunter, wields a beautiful longbow carved from antlers, has a loyal hawk that scouts from above.
Elf Bard — College of Lore musician whose enchanted flute supports allies with powerful magic that flows through her hair.
Tiefling Rogue — Swashbuckler duelist, quick with a curved blade and even quicker on his feet.
Human Monk — Way of Mercy master, fights barehanded, smokes to channel ki with calm precision.

Had our first session be a dungeon crawl, of course.

The party got information about a murderer in town. The only thing they knew was that the killer targeted children and used Vampiric Touch to kill them in their sleep, stealing the years of life they could’ve had to prolong his own.

Eventually, they gathered enough clues to narrow the suspect list down to:
- The old necromancer living in an abandoned wizarding academy (which had been shut down after an incident that killed a bunch of students).
- Their informant, the wizard’s former assistant, who was an unreliable narrator. He gave them a letter addressed to the wizard, claiming that it said the assistant knew he was the murderer and would do everything in his power to stop him.

Along the way, I planted little inconsistencies, as well as enough reasonable doubt, to keep the party from fully trusting the assistant. For one, the letter had actually been given to the assistant by the wizard. There were also other details, like the academy incident having happened decades ago, yet the former assistant appeared to be in his mid-20s.

However, like a lot of first-time players, the party marched into the wizard’s tower with their weapons drawn and killed him without questioning him or trying to reason with him.

Afterward, they searched the room and noticed a couple of things:

Research notes written by the wizard in the same handwriting as the letter.

A photo of the wizard and his assistant, taken decades ago when they first opened the academy together.

By the time they got back to town, an NPC’s daughter had already been murdered. When they returned to the tower with the town guards to show them the evidence, they discovered that the real murderer had already set the tower on fire and fled.

Ever since then, the party has been extremely careful about starting fights. They also make a point of knocking enemies unconscious instead of killing them, even if it’s just a group of bandits on the road.

TL;DR: First session had an unreliable narrator, the party killed the wrong person and now avoids kill first, ask questions later mentality

2 years, 3 campaigns and a couple oneshots in with my dnd group and we realised TODAY that the Invisibility spell does not give you advantage on stealth... Our DMs have been ruling it as such, thinking that was what the spell does. And the worst part? We have read the spell description MULTIPLE TIMES while playing but somehow never realised that until today.

So anyways, we as a group collectively decided that it's weird that becoming invisible/hard to see does not make you better at stealth, so our lovely DM has kept our way of ruling it.

First you accept the fact your partner is a long time player and serious DM; then you’re begrudgingly talked into one shots; then you somehow find yourself in a two year campaign, and the next thing you know you are helping build a dungeon loft in your own front yard. 🍻

Edit: I can’t make this into 400 words without writing out the lyrics to one of my Bard songs, which no one wants to hear - including my own party.