The Yawning Portal and other Tales

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Foundry VTT

Dungeons & Dragons 5e

High Fantasy

Comedy

Dark Fantasy

After the game ends, check-in with the group and talk about how you all feel. Have an open way for the group to decompress and encourage each other to practice self-care.

Aftercare

Intense games can cause feelings to bleed over into life outside of the game. Being open and honest of where the game ends, what feelings are the players versus bleed, and having discussions can lessen the stress of bleed.

Bleed

For long games or stressful content, having built-in breaks allows the group to stay focused and process content. This time can be used for bio breaks, conversation, or any other necessities.

Breaks

With this technique, when triggering content comes into play, they can discuss with the group, take a break, and express their needs or wants for how play should continue. After the discussion ends, play should continue to account for the requests.

Luxton Technique

The Luxton Technique Discussion involves having an open conversation about triggers at the table. It is not possible to identify every trigger, but this provides a good-base for the GM. In addition, there must be no pressure to go into detail or justify a trauma trigger.

Luxton Technique Discussion

Open-Door is an assurance that anyone in the group can take a break from the game for their own safety and well-being without judgement. This should be made clear to the group.

Open Door

Session 0s are used to start the game, opening up with communication, setting expectations, and discussing any safety tools that will be used at the table.

Session 0

X, N, and O Cards are check-in tools. X-Cards are used to indicate that a participant is uncomfortable with the current content, often resulting in a change, rewind, or skip of the aforementioned content. N-Cards can be used by participants if they feel content is heading towards an X card, often resulting in a change or a “fade to back”. O-Cards are used to check-in on the group and ensure that everyone is comfortable continuing with the content.

X, N, and O Cards

Foundry VTT is a highly customizable virtual tabletop platform with loads of features, an active community of creators, and tons of officially supported systems.

Tales from the Yawning Portal

Hi! I am GM Dargov, also known as Rob.

Like a lot of GMs on the site, I have had an enormous passion for role-playing games and D&D in particular for... a very long time! My first experience of D&D was picking up the Rules Cyclopedia in a small bookstore in rural Canada- I don't even know what edition that was!

As a GM, I run my game very much straight down the middle. They remain challenging without become too deadly, and while my rule calling is fairly generous, this applies to both players and monsters. I allow a free feat at character creation of 5e and use free archetype in Pathfinder 2e.
This gives me the freedom to run some extra "deadly" battles, but gives the players that little bit of extra omph.

I am very hot on game balance- on my Discord server you'll find a few tweaks to classes and subclasses that I feel slipped through the net, such as Twlight Clerics, Moon Druids(early game) and Echo Knights.

I am venturing into the world of publishing my own adventures, and my Monday night game is the playtest for my soon to be released adventure module, Wrath of the Elements!

I started GMing on SPG just over a year ago now, and I run 4 games each weekand have run over 300 paid games! That's a lot of dice rolls!