Let's keep this ball rolling.
26. How could I go about acquiring a gryphon mount?
Either raise one from an egg (not easy) or impress one with a feat of valor (also not easy, but typically faster) - the latter will usually involve killing a specific griffin's enemy or rival (often a manticore, as they fill similar predatory niches)
27. How difficult is it to be brought back from the dead? Is such a thing even possible?
Impossible: attempts to maintain the soul’s cohesion after bodily death is the territory of mad wizards. Shades can be summoned up pretty easily, but that’s because they’re one component of the soul and aren’t conscious entities.
28. How do you deal with any jitters or nerves before running a game?
I’m usually chomping at the bit before a game, rather than jittery. The difficulty is getting me into the starting position.
29. How do you determine if a character can successfully swim in your games?
I just presume that they can, unless given reason to believe otherwise (they’re a dwarf, they’re made of stone, they’re from a desert, the player arbitrarily decides their character can’t swim), in which case I will ask the player.
30. How do you determine the weather for the day or season in your game?
I have never actually done this, so probably with a hex flower or random table or just like, a Farmer’s Almanac from the 1800s or something.
31. How do you feel about writing directly in RPG books? Forbidden or useful?
I don’t do it for the same reason I don’t write in the margins of normal books - I rewrite or correct things often enough that it will just turn into a mess of crossouts and eraser burns.
32. How do you handle a shy/quiet player? What about a spotlight hungry one?
Both of these are tied up in the same general idea, which is making sure to cycle through my players with some leading questions re: what their character is doing or feeling.
33. How do you make particularly efficient weapons stand out from inefficient ones?
Low-quality weapons have a higher chance of breaking & doing less damage; high quality ones will have a higher minimum damage or better chance to hit.
34. How do you roll dice? In the open, behind a screen, let the players roll?
In the open, players make their own rolls. I do a lot of DMing while standing so a screen is usually of limited use to me.
35. How do your players deal with losing a character? How do you get ’em back in play?
If they die early enough in the game that they’d be sitting around for a while, I’ll hand them a hireling, already-introduced NPC, or just a rando who would make even a bit of sense for the party to run into. They can then decide if they want to keep playing as that character or roll up a new one for the next session. If I really need to keep them in, they can be the ghost of their PC.
36. How has access to magic influenced technology in your setting?
I tend to say that the existence of magic allows for anachronistic jumps forward in scientific fields, with sanitation, medicine, food production and astronomy being the big ticket items. Like instead of turning magic into a sub-field of science, magic is a tool to help you do science. An advantage to this is that I can keep exactly what the magic is vague for ease-of-use and narrative convenience while still keeping the societal effects. Some examples:
- Field-specific craft-magic means that everything's just a bit higher quality than it would be in reality. Items last longer and work better, and craftsmen are able to do more with less.
- Ex. If I give glassmakers are bit of vaguely-defined trade magic, I can say that made the development of lenses just a touch easier which allows me to say that microscopes and telescopes show up earlier (in-universe equivalent of the Classical period, for ease of player reference) and I can skip right over geocentrism and humorism.
- If demons exist, people will have to develop a reliable means of diagnosing possessions, which I can lead to a earlier conceptualization of mental illness.
This is, if I think about it for any time at all, a very idiosyncratic approach to magic (or at least one I don't recall seeing anywhere besides like, the occasional tumblr post) and I don’t actually think it’s based on any specific influence. I just think real-life space science is cool and want to have characters know about it.
37. How have video games/other media influenced the way you approach these games?
Fear and Hunger’s tightly woven and multiple-solution dungeon/world design is a thing of beauty and very worth emulating, especially how open-ended and complex it manages to be without bogging down the player in verbs and tools. It’s something I had tried to do in Unicorn Meat, but of course I wrote that before I knew about or played Fear and Hunger.
38. How long does it take to have a custom set of armor made? A weapon?
1-4 downtimes, depending on what you’re asking for.
39. How long is your average session? Have they ever gone longer than expected? Why?
Usually 2-3 hours. If they go longer it’s usually because there’s only a little left and it’s less hassle than scheduling a second session.
40. How much are lifestyle expenses for your PCs "between adventures?"
I’ve never considered this a particularly interesting thing to track; I greatly prefer Delta Green’s downtime actions.
41 How much time do you spend preparing between games? What's that look like?
A lot of bullet points and boxes connected with arrows, doesn’t matter if it’s a premade module or something I made. Time spent is dependent on how much text I need to compile and how much compiling I need to do to make it usable.
42. How were you Introduced to these games? Share your history with them!
I saw some 3e books at Borders in ye olden days, but didn’t really play them until I got to college and took up an offer from someone in the fantasy/sci-fi book club. I know I had been collecting the odd free pdf before then, but I didn’t get around to playing until later.
43. How would a player go about brewing their own potion or making a scroll?
They’d need the recipe / magical formula they want to use, and then downtime action(s) to do it.
44. How would you describe a 60' x 60' square room with 4 cardinal doors to the players?
Material, temperature, smell, contents, art on walls / ceiling / floor, sound (in-room and from adjacent rooms).
45. How would you handle a party wanting to start a business or enterprise?
I background it to one of two rolls made during downtime: how is the business doing, and has anything noteworthy happened?
46. Is it possible to play as something unusual in your setting? A dragon, balrog, minotaur?
I love me a Star Wars cantina, but I try to be cognizant of the fact that it’s extremely easy to make a setting dull and samey by going for quantity over quality. Part of my method for avoiding this is just saying “there’s a lot of variety you can get from ‘humans only’ if you interpret monopods as humans”; the other part is to try and keep the special options rooted in place and context, instead of treating them like another variety of human.
Example: if you want to play a minotaur, cool! You’re going to be one of the White Bull’s thousand sons. You’re immortal, everyone in the world knows what happened to your mother, all your brothers hate you (feeling’s mutual), and your father is an eldritch abomination locked inside a maze at the bottom of some Atlantean ruins.
D&D has a habit of genericizing and sterilizing mythic monsters and that’s a large part of why using them as the quote unquote exotic player options always strikes me as a failure of imagination. Like you’re stripping out the core of the monster, there goes your main avenue of reinterpretation.
47. Is magic innate or something that can be learned by anyone? Why?
I roll with “learned by anyone” as the default, with innate magic generally caused by external influences (you got too close to a Powerful Magical Thing, usually). It’s never going to be a strictly heritable feature, because I fucking hate the fantasy genre’s obsession with magic eugenics. Fuck right off the edge of my dick with that shit, how about you try ripping off someone who isn’t Queen Terf of Wet Island for a change, Jesus Christ. (Yes I know the trope is older than that but most modern fantasy authors aren't ripping off particularly far back sources, you know?)
48. Is there a particular system or game that you are excited to run or play? Tell me about it!
Before life got in the way, there were plans for Layla to run Mythic Bastionland for myself and a couple other friends. Was really looking forward to that; was the first time Into the Odd mechanics really clicked for me - amazing what changing the wording from “hit points” to “guard” can do. I was going to be the Emerald Knight, the most normal of the band,
49. Is there some kind of banking system/safe storage of treasure in your setting?
If you’re friends with the moldywarps (and you should be, they’re cute little mole-people), they’ll gladly hold on to your valuables for you. It’s not really a bank, though, more just a favor for a friend: you aren’t insured, you accrue no interest, and sometimes the moldywarps will exchange your item for something “just as good” (according to their own non- monetary standards)
50. Let me hear about your fave character/NPC from a game! What made 'em special?
Gotta be Ayo my drunken BEEFSTRONK tiefling monk. Longest-running character I’ve ever had.
