this is episode 14 of my RPG blog podcast that was that was weirdly put it’s an it’s my RPG podcast also known as my RPG cast and it is November 4th the day before Election Day here in the good old US of A and I am sitting in my car in North Texas where it is overcast and cool and we’ve had rain and everything is fine and I just remind myself that really no matter what happens with this election there’s a good chance me and my family are gonna be fine so anyway on to RPG stuff we played D&D 5e in my campaign on Halloween evening and we also played yesterday November 3rd and brought up a couple of things I wanted to talk about on the podcast today one is I think a lot of a struggle with having enough energy to do the things we want to do outside of work and this hobby while it is not a physical hobby like skateboarding or playing golf or you know something like that or running it requires a lot of energy to do you have to have enough energy to create scenarios to work on your game world and then to actually run the games and so Halloween night I was tired from work and I managed to find the energy to do a good job DMing the game but it was not easy and I had a lot more ready for them to do and I really wanted to play late because I was off the next day but I just decided you know let’s stop I was running out of juice and I didn’t want to not do justice to the game so we stopped and we came back yesterday and continued it and it was super fun and I had a lot of energy yesterday I made sure that I you know was well rested and all of that on Sunday so it was good but I think a lot of people struggle with that as you get older you know you need I don’t know I need more sleep I find so anyway one of the things that may drain us of the energy I think is how much we think about the games and we think about our campaigns of what we want to do and I know I’ve talked a lot about this before but I think it’s probably a good idea if you can manage to just turn off the part of your brain that’s thinking about RPGs all day every day because you’ve always if you’ve always got that kind of background program running you’re using energy that you may not really have and then when you come around to actually working on something you you might be a little bit depleted I think that’s what happens to me so in the game that I ran the sessions I ran over the last couple of days I am giving experience points for dealing with monsters successfully even if they don’t kill the monsters and I do this because I want to encourage smart play and so I think the players actually appreciate it and I think it opens up a lot of different possibilities for what they do so here’s an example in yesterday’s game they were on a little raft in an on an underground river and they encountered a water elemental that was guarding a chamber with a garden in it and the elemental was pretty tough it was actually a water weird an elemental creature but not quite as powerful as a full-on water elemental but still a pretty tough foe for four third-level characters and especially if you’re on a raft basically in its element and they certainly could have fought it but they wisely chose not to and they wisely chose to use some of their skills like persuasion to talk their way through the encounter and convince it to let them through so I think that’s actually a lot cooler than maybe fighting the elemental and so I gave them full experience points for that why not if you want to encourage good play you have to bloody encourage it right you can’t just go oh well you know there’s this elemental but it was worth 700 experience points if you killed it but you just talked your way past it so you’re only getting 50 like that is no good that’s encouraging players to do the stupid thing so there you go I so that’s kind of like combat encounters without combat right and I enjoy doing that a lot other things I wanted to talk about we did a couple of things yesterday using contests in 5e so it reminded me a lot of the kind of contest that you have in GURPS where it’s kind of skill versus skill and I liked this a lot so the contest in 5e pits a skill or an ability versus an adversary’s skill or ability so here’s one way that I used it yesterday when they encountered the water weird I could have had for instance the bard just make a persuasion roll and I could have said it’s moderate difficulty or hard or easier whatever and if she’d made the the persuasion roll then you know I do insist that they actually do the role playing they talk their way through it and I speak on behalf of the elemental and we do role play the thing we don’t just do like oh see if you make your role oh you’re through that’s kind of bullshit I don’t like it but that’s one way you could do it but what I did instead was we had them do the encounter and they talked to the elemental and the bard tried her sweet talk and stories and all of that on the elemental and finally after they had done all of this I had her roll a persuasion check and of course she’s a very high charisma so her person and she’s proficient with persuasion she’s very good at persuading people so she rolled that and so you you roll a d20 and you add her persuasion modifier to that and then I had her roll that against the elemental and the elemental used wisdom that seemed like an appropriate ability to compete against so it was that versus the elementals wisdom so it was the elemental rolling a d20 and adding its wisdom bonus which in this case was zero it had a like a ten a ten wisdom and so after doing all the fun role-playing and trying to talk their way through it we made the role and she succeeded in the role and the water weird begrudgingly allowed them through with some threats of retribution if they had lied to it and stuff like that but I thought that was a fun way to resolve a social interaction and it made a lot more sense to me than just make the role like yeah there’s sometimes when maybe making the role is appropriate but I think the contest makes a lot more sense to me because you’re using the skill on a specific intelligent entity and what if that entity has a very high wisdom to me this is a better way of doing it than just making persuasion check that’s easy or moderate or high difficulty or whatever so anyway we tried this and we did we did contest in a couple of different instances and and it was fun so their contest and we’re gonna play again this Sunday looking forward to it I’ve got to get some new stuff ready but that’s always a pleasure to work on things and a reminder if you want to talk about any of these things drop some comments whatever go to the speak pipe link that is associated with this post and leave me a message okay I hope everyone’s well everyone here in the US regardless of who you vote for what your opinions are about the affairs of the day ultimately I only ask that you try to be a kind person who considers the weakest and most vulnerable of us when you’re voting for people and their policies all right have a good one y’all