Mellowgoth
he/him
5.0
(8)
Timezone
Language
About Mellowgoth
Mellowgoth, aka Doc, aka Dan, here. I've been sitting around tables and rolling dice for more than four decades, and it's never enough... I love telling stories with a group of friends (with those pesky dice dictating terms sometimes) and stepping outside the bounds of everyday reality. I'm committed to a kind, inclusive game table for anyone 10-100. Well, kind to the players. Characters DO occasionally have misfortunes befall them, after all. I'm comfortable with homebrew and pre-published adventures and settings, and welcome - insist on, really - robust player feedback to get a game everyone enjoys.
At a glance
Less than a year on StartPlaying
Highly rated for: Creativity, Knows the Rules, Inclusive
Featured Prompts
My favorite books are
Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Amber, Mary Stewart's Arthurian series, Hitchhiker's Guide increasingly misnamed trilogy, Illuminatus! trilogy, Dune, Startide Rising, The Discword series.
How Mellowgoth runs games
My goal for every session is to make it fun and memorable for the players. I've been playing and GMing for over forty years. I like intricate stories, long story arcs, and developing character background and actions into changes in a dynamic setting. I'm not much of crunch-versus fluff GM - Ideally, mechanics should enhance and enable the plot and tone of a game. I do my best to make all sorts of encounters memorable, but not every combat is going to be a narrow margin of kill or be killed - as characters progress, I do like my players to feel that achievement, so there will be occasional encounters where the characters can feel powerful. I do my best to craft a setting and tone that can feel immersive, and give the players a chance to really inhabit the characters and world. I know that not everyone is an actor or theater kid, so I don't insist on voices, accents, or even first person engagement. "My paladin tells him about the corrupted shrine" is a perfectly fine participation. I discourage direct PVP, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all of the characters have to get along (as long as the players are civil with each other). Characters that bicker or have a rivalry can be fun to play at the table. I do expect players to make characters that have a reason to adventure - or at least no active reasons to reject plot hooks - and that fit into the game and setting to which we all agree in our session zero/ pregame workups.
Featured Prompts
I prep by
-following the old saw "Plans are useless, planning is essential". Not knowing what my players are going to do with the situations I provide is one of the great joys of GMing. Its my job to know the setting, plot, and situation well enough to help the players tell their stories, not limit them.
Mellowgoth's ideal table
Featured Prompts
I think it's a red flag when players...
...take an adversarial attitude toward the DM or the other players. I am very much in the business of crafting epic tales WITH my players, which does include challenging them, but I am not competing against my players, nor are players competing with each other, even if their characters are.
I think metagaming...
A little metagaming is inevitable, and the more experienced the characters, the more leeway I tend to give. I value when players try to avoid it, and, if unsure, I encourage players to ask "Would my character know that?"
I think min/maxing...
is fine when it flows from and flows into the story. A combat monster is reasonable if the character was captured young, and sold off to a gladiatorial arena, from which they just escaped. Be aware that I WILL let you glory in the max occasionally, but you WILL face the min, too.
Mellowgoth's Preferences
Platforms