DnD and ADHD

Hey Tumblr,

I know there’s a million donation posts you’ve seen across your dash already, and I hate to add to them, but I need to ask a favor.

A couple days ago my partner’s mother found a small stray dog running around in traffic. By the time she had turned around to catch it, it’d been hit by a car. She rushed him to the vet, where they discovered multiple fractures in two legs, as well as several small fractures in his hip.

She’s already paid more than she can afford to keep him alive this long. I want to adopt him. But we need help paying the minimum of $8,000 for his surgeries. I am a small blog, I don’t have many followers, but I’m hopeful we can do this. Here’s the gofundme page for his surgeries: https://www.gofundme.com/vdvqwj-help-for-hoagie

You can also donate via PayPal to: paypal.me/melaniethehalibut  

Donations can also be made directly to the Horizon vet specialists animal hospital, 805-856-0290 under the dogs for now name “Hoagie” on the account under Lee.  

Every dollar counts, but if you can’t donate, please reblog this! Spreading the word is the most important thing right now!

It’s been one day of the gofundme page being up, and we’ve already raised $505! We have a long way to go, but I’m extremely thankful to everyone who’s re-blogged this so far.

Hoagie is off his oxygen tank, ate a little bit yesterday/took his oral meds, and was sent home with my partner’s mom for the night! She slept on the couch next to his cage so he wouldn’t be alone.

I’ve determined that he’s probably a chiweenie (chihuahua x dachshund mix), and the vets say he’s seven months old! He’s basically a puppy, so he has a lot of growing to do, and has a lot of life left in him. If we can pay for his surgeries there’s a good chance he’ll bounce right back and grow into a healthy happy dog! 

Thank you to everyone who’s donated or shared this. If you’re willing to share it on other sites, that’ll help even more. 

Here’s a video from earlier this morning! (04/12/19)

Hey Tumblr,

I know there’s a million donation posts you’ve seen across your dash already, and I hate to add to them, but I need to ask a favor.

A couple days ago my partner’s mother found a small stray dog running around in traffic. By the time she had turned around to catch it, it’d been hit by a car. She rushed him to the vet, where they discovered multiple fractures in two legs, as well as several small fractures in his hip.

She’s already paid more than she can afford to keep him alive this long. I want to adopt him. But we need help paying the minimum of $8,000 for his surgeries. I am a small blog, I don’t have many followers, but I’m hopeful we can do this. Here’s the gofundme page for his surgeries: https://www.gofundme.com/vdvqwj-help-for-hoagie

You can also donate via PayPal to: paypal.me/melaniethehalibut  

Donations can also be made directly to the Horizon vet specialists animal hospital, 805-856-0290 under the dogs for now name “Hoagie” on the account under Lee.  

Every dollar counts, but if you can’t donate, please reblog this! Spreading the word is the most important thing right now!

Then please take a minute to help me with my final essay and fill out this quick poll!

So our party stumbled into a town celebrating a weeklong festival, right? The circus was there and everything! And the main attraction - a ferris wheel combo with a merry-go-round. Like, each little gondola or seat on the ferris wheel? Replaced by a horse, rotating around a pole. So you imagine this huge flippin’ thing - no seatbelts, no safety precautions, rotating on all sixteen axes, and people flying off of it in all directions, with one rather cheerful guy just manning this death machine with a carnival mask slapped on. And what does half of our party do?

Well, hop on it, obviously. Where’s your sense of adventure?

So after failing several strength saving throws, all three of us are thrown off - our bard, our cleric, and me, the fighter. Our druid is like, “aw shit, better do something,” and levitates up to try and catch our cleric. He fails his strength check, and instead of catching him, they both go crashing towards the ground, resulting in BOTH of them taking enough damage to get knocked out. Bear in mind that our warlock is just sitting there watching this all unfold, powerless to help. The bard manages to land safely enough, but fails his constitution saving throw and nearly pukes out his intestines. Nice.

As for me? Instead of trying harder to stay on the death machine, I went into t-pose formation and angled myself towards the poor guy running the whole situation.

So now most of our party has broken legs, arms, or ribs, and we haven’t been in the town for more than a day.

(I also accidentally blinded the entire party earlier but that’s not as interesting in my opinion; needless to say our sessions are trainwrecks because we’re all impulsive dumbasses)

[MOD RESPONSE:]

I am re-opening my D&D/RPG rp server to the public again! However, to prevent unwanted drama, I will be screening applicants via a questionnaire.

But First!

You must read the rules and info that are under the cut! 

RULES:

Like I run a D&D blog. I understand that D&D is the most well-known and popular RPG in the world. But a lot of the time I see people going like “Hey I want to run a D&D campaign and throw out all the D&Disms and here’s all the notes I have for running a campaign about courtly romance and chivalry in a historical setting” and I’m just like STOP YOU DON’T NEED TO RUN THIS USING D&D

There’s a sort of a mistaken assumption that because D&D is the biggest game on the market and that it’s fantasy that it should be the go-to fantasy game but look it’s not D&D isn’t a generic fantasy game it’s a very specific kind of fantasy all of its own, one that steals liberally from swords & sorcery and high fantasy and adds fucking extradimensional cube robots for good measure

So next time you’re thinking about a fantasy campaign in a decidedly non-D&Dish setting consider instead of jamming the square peg that is D&D into a round hole trying to find a system that actually supports what you’re trying to do

All right then. I’ve been meaning to dust off my own D&D sideblog for a while, so here we go with providing some examples. I’m limiting this specifically to other types of fantasy outside of the standard high fantasy and sword & sorcery millieu.

Courtly Romance and Chivalry

There are a number of options for this, and they range from standard secondary world fantasy to more historical and mythological settings. My list here shouldn’t be treated as fully extensive.

Blue Rose - based on the romantic fantasy subgenre, specifically as seen in the works of Tamora Pierce and Mercedes Lackey. A lot of courtly drama and intrigue and swashbuckling, based in a fictional world.

Pendragon - naturally based off of Arthurian mythology, and having a lot of stuff given over to the court of Camelot and the chivalric adventures of the various knights. The same company also has a kickstarter for a spin-off called Paladin: Warriors of Charlemagne that might be worth checking out.

Historical Fantasy

This one’s a bit more prominent as historical settings serve as an inspiration for a variety of fantasy worlds and games, and this of course invariably extends to settings that actually use historical settings with a degree of fantasy elements thrown in. Note that I’m going to emphasise Europe here simply due to greater familiarity with games in that millieu, and as a European myself I’m ill-equipped to judge how accurate or respectful games using other settings actually are.

Because of this, feel free to add other examples in reblogs

Chivalry & Sorcery - one of the early tabletop games inspired by D&D, taking a more pseudo-historical approach. It’s based on 12th century France and strives for a degree of historical accuracy and medieval politics.

World of Darkness, Dark Ages (including Vampire and Mage) - while the World of Darkness has earned some negative attention lately (and for good reason), the dark ages RPGs are still an old favourite of mine. Also worth checking out is Mage: The Sorcerer’s Crusade, set during the Renaissance. The Mage stuff has a really cool open-ended magic system worth checking out.

13th Age RPG

A Song of Ice and Fire RPG

AEG (A Legend of the Five Rings)

Anima; Beyond Fantasy 

Apocalypse World 

Basic Fantasy System

Blades in the Dark

Burn Bryte

Burning Wheel  

Call of Cthulhu

Castles & Crusaders 

Chroniques Oubliées

City of Mist

Cortex 

Cyberpunk 2020

Cypher System

D&D (All Editions)

Das Schwarze Auge

Dragon Age RPG 

Dungeon Crawl Classics 

Dungeon World 

Exalted

FATE System

Fallout

Fantasy AGE 

Fiasco 

GUMSHOE

GURPS 

Gamma World

Hero Games (Champions) 

Hackmaster 

Hârn

Iron Kingdoms 

King Arthur Pendragon

Labyrinth Lord 

Le Donjon de Naheulbeuk

Maid RPG 

Marvel Heroic RPG

Mouse Guard RPG

Munchkin

Mutants and Masterminds

Open Legend

Palladium Games 

Paranoia 

Pathfinder

Pokemon Tabletop

Rolemaster

Runequest

Savage Worlds

Shadowrun 

Star Trek Adventures 

Star Wars 

Starfinder 

Stars Without Number

Swords and Wizardry 

Tavern Tales

The One Ring

The Quiet Year

Tormenta

Traveller RPG

Unisystem

Warhammer

World of Darkness

So this story takes place during the first Dnd campaign I joined, which is being run by my s/o. It’s still ongoing and in fact we’ve actually decided to go back in time a bit and insert extra story, so hopefully all of these tales I tell you will still remain canon, because they’re some of my favorites.

Also, prepare for a long and badly worded post…..Anyway:

So the basic plot so far of this campaign is that the players have to find and stop a former chaos deity (who’s now lost all sense of self) from wrecking the world while also trying to find a way to stop the inky black voidness that was its prison from spreading all over the world and killing everyone. Pretty straight forwards.

Except its dnd.

So this story happens still pretty early on in the campaign, I didn’t (and still don’t) know what to do ever, and my characters never actually did anything useful.

The way the dm decided to fix that?

Well first, he decided that there was going to be an incentive to go to an island. Okay cool. We get to go on a ship!

My characters are both cervitaurs. They’re deer centaur who have never seen the ocean much less been on it. So this was very very new to them, but luckily we found a nice but unusual captain to take us out to the island. (Despite the fact we all knew there was something destroying ships out there but hey, ‘consequences’ isnt in my character’s vocab)

So we head out on the ocean, and everything is fine.

Until its not.

The dm informs us that we hear a commotion above deck, that the sea suddenly gets rougher, and that stuff has gone to shit. So we go up on deck just in time to see tentacles shoot up through the bottom of the ship and thrash around.

Okay, not good. But hey maybe its just a giant squi-

Nope, nope it pulls itself up onto the deck, and shapeshifts itself into an ursula-looking-motherfucker.

Okay, we have a lady kraken onboard. This is fine. Everything is fine. Until she starts pounding on the crew and various npcs. Okay, not fine. Well obviously my characters are halfway convinced they’re about to die, but the brother suddenly has a bright idea.

He runs up to the kraken.

And he uses poison spray. In her face. Point blank.

My awkward plant son just used a cantrip against a kraken.

So the kraken blinks, and looks at him.

And she is Offended.

So she bitch slaps him and brings him down to like 2 hit points.

His spine is cracked by the slap and we all hear it correct itself as he runs back over to his sister. The poor sister can only look at him like “Brother why have you done this?”    

The Kracken decides to just kill them, so she just walks over (again ursula style) aaand-

Lightning-

Cut to black.

Ah, I find that tricky as well, and it is sorta one of the things I need help with as well, so I’m not an expert. If anyone else has better/more advice than me, please add on if you can.

Okay so it differs if you’re playing in person or not, and what’s distracting you.

If you’re playing in person, and you have a buddy in the group who won’t mind reminding you to listen up occasionally, that can help. But try not to rely on that to much. You can also have a reminder on your phone (on silent or vibrate) that goes off every ten minutes or so to remind you to listen up, if you get distracted by your phone and absolutely need it on you at all times. You can also put any distraction items away before starting. If you need to fiddle with something, I find that fiddling with dice, a stim toy, putty, etc can work well to let my hands have something to do while I pay attention to the game, as long as it isn’t distracting to me or others. If its simply a matter of zoning out, then try and find something you’re interested in that’s in the game, or may happen in it. Maybe you really like someone else’s character and so you pay attention to them to try and stay in the game. Maybe you’re expecting to run into the big bad.

If its over discord or skype or the like, then a lot of the above still applies, just now try to make sure everything open on your phone/tablet/laptop/whatever is only for the game. Close any tabs that you know you may be sucked into (tumblr, youtube, etc) and avoid opening blank tabs (for me at least, a blank tab quickly becomes not-blank). And make sure you can hear people clearly! If you can’t hear whats going on, you might find it harder to pay attention (this goes for in-person games too).

Now, all this time I’ve been assuming its a matter of distraction via stimuli, but if you find yourself going off-topic in conversations (ie; talking about a show you watched, memes, etc) then try and make sure you joke around off-topic with people before the campaign is supposed to start, and after it ends. Read the room, try not to go full ham if everyone else is being serious, or the dm wants to get started.

As for maintaining interest across sessions, this depends on the reason you’re disinterested. Is the story not engaging? Are there not enough interesting encounters? Do you not like the group you’re playing with? Is the Dm a new dm who hasn’t quite gotten their footing? Are you just too distracted and miss too much of whats happening?

There’s a lot of factors that go into that, but generally I’ll say, if you find yourself really bored, like truly are really bored by the campaign/sessions you’re playing, and you can’t seem to find any reason it’s caused by your own action/inaction, then honestly? It might not be the right campaign/group/dm for you. But if you really want to keep playing until you’re sure, then I’d say try and do the advice from above, and any advice you can find in other blogs who are willing to help, and if you manage to focus more on the story or events of the campaign, then you might find yourself enjoying it a lot more.

If you have any more specific info you can give, that might help me and others get to what might be the root of the problem, but if not, then that’s what I got for now!