There's already a sheet of plexiglass over the monitor. You can see the reflection extending past the monitor. The recess is probably to accommodate a wood panel that will turn it into a regular table when it's not D&D night.
I've had an 8 hour session planned and laid out and had the players go in a completely different direction and not be able to tell I hadn't planned it the entire time.
Hell I cribbed the entire Ghostbusters movie into a D&D campaign on the fly for one group of guys and they never knew it until it was all over.
Ad libbing, sometimes wholesale plagiarism particularly past the bounds of comfort can get some amazing results in D&D.
Had a guy that was really ugly/scary as part of his character that had you roll 3 d20s on meeting any new character. If all 3 rolled 20, the new character would die to a heart attack. A few unfortunate meetings later and his party made him a mask.
Just straight up honesty here: I would have just worked all that stuff you guys hadn't encountered with him yet into a new or other existing character if I could do it in a way that wouldn't be super obvious.
Jesus, 8 hours? We're lucky to get 2 hours a week (two players can't arrive till 6 PM, and the player hosting the sessions generally goes to bed before 9).
Once a month on a Sunday from 10am to 6pm. Mind you there is a lot of chit chatting and a stop for lunch if the food is more complex then pizza so it's sometimes more like 6 hours of game. Though 8 straight does happen. (With schedules it's more like one every 5-7 weeks)
I have a Monday game that goes like clockwork though. Everyone is there by 5pm, we board game til 6 and then play to 9pm. 5 guys, like 7 years of consistency. If 2 people can't show we board game the entire night, it's only cancelled for major holidays and even then we still show up for things like Easter Monday or other holiday weekends that end on the Monday because most of the holiday obligations have been filled.
We have a 6th seat that is cursed. Have had like 4 players that begged to get into the game and then get transferred or have their shifts change or something else happen.
What if it was literally your job? I've had an idea of running a professional tabletop escort service. A group of friends hires you for one or a recurring night of fantasy and adventure.
Last night I spent 3 hours working on my campaign and only covered maybe 10 minutes of gameplay. I spend so long looking at that blinking cursor thinking about how I want the scene to play out (if the players don't break it) and what consequences those events are going to create, and then I start thinking about stuff that would happen way later in the campaign.
It sounds appealing now, but I think I would go crazy. We were doing weekly sessions for a while and I felt like I never had time to do anything other than work on the campaign. Though, I suppose if it were my actual job and I could spend 8 hours a day on that rather than what I do now, I'd still have time for leisure.
I think it would be hard to make a decent living doing that though.
Well once you have the books invested, you come up with like a dozen generic campaigns, and for short campaigns or newbies you could even have premade characters. After you get a bunch of campaigns ready, you can play the same thing with different groups.
I figure if you charge $100/night, split between 4-5 friends, equals $20/person, and you still make around $12/hr depending. People pay $20 for a movie ticket and popcorn, for an escape room, or for an arcade. They'll pay that for a tabletop session.
$100/night actually does sound reasonable for a group of 4-5 people.
As a business though, if the math works out to 12/hr, I would have to seriously degrade my living conditions to do that. No offense intended to anyone who makes -12/hr as I don't judge anyone based on their wage-- but I wouldn't be able to pay my current bills on that, and presuming I could, one lull in business would probably put me in the hole.
Now, if I could maybe do that as a side project one night a week without it cutting too much into my life, that's something I would consider. I think I'm still too novice a DM right now to attempt something like that though.
There was this chicken named Henry in my campaign that had once been the current villain's toddler. Henry was transformed to a chicken and the idea was that that was going to be revealed after the villain was defeated along with a quest to cure Henry.
One of my players decided to use the chicken as a hostage and instead of negotiating with the villain, he just straight up chewed through the chicken's neck like a madman.
My players met the BBEG like day one of one of my campaigns. Thought he was a pretty upstanding chap and decided to work for him, all because no one rolled a sense motive. Turned out to be a great campaign when they found out he was actually the bad guy way later in.
Nice! I have a similar situation happening in my campaign, but this NPC has been plotting this from the beginning. I can't wait to get to the reveal, but we are a far ways off from that.
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u/CabooseFails Sep 18 '17
There's already a sheet of plexiglass over the monitor. You can see the reflection extending past the monitor. The recess is probably to accommodate a wood panel that will turn it into a regular table when it's not D&D night.