Theater Of The Mind D&D

 

 

Good day, my fellow D&D player. Welcome, welcome. Today, I want to talk about theater of the mind. I would like to tell you what it is and how it is used in DnD, also the pros and cons, Let's start with the beginning. What is it? theater of the mind is storytelling. Think of the radio, that's the best example. Somebody tells you a story and in your mind, you create the images, a quick example, you are walking around in a forest it is nighttime. The wind is howling past trees a full moon is above you, lighting your path and you hear a sound. Sounds like a wolf howling towards your left-hand side. The picture I just painted for you, it's different for everybody. Everybody will see a different Forest. The moon will be different, The wind will sound different for everybody, But in general, everybody has the same picture. So how is it used in D&D? Look at the example I just gave you, you create a scene, you create a combat scenario, you described an NPC or villain or even a fellow player. All of these things are awesome to use theater of the mind during a DnD session. What are the pros? It's fast.

For the DM, there's almost zero to no prep time, and as I already mentioned it lets people create their own world. Let me give you another quick example. You walk around the corner and there you see a knight dressed in black armor. Every single person will see a different kind of armor and that is a beautiful thing. It lets you use your imagination. These are the biggest Pros. What are the cons, combat, combat with multiple people is very confusing, even though you have the best, DM, the best Storyteller. It's impossible to track where everybody is during battle, and I mean, your allies and the enemies.

What else, thinks of cover, flanking and distance, again it is not possible to keep track of any of these things. Or see if you can take cover, all of these things, you are at the mercy of the DM. He decides on the spot. Yes, there is a place you can take cover, or no he is too far away. Or yeah. Yeah. Easy. No worries you can flank him. The DM has to stop combat and explain these things to you and this slows down combat a lot. In the end theater of the mind has its place and it is an awesome tool. Personally, I like to have a battle map during combat. What do you guys think? Let me know in the comments. What is your opinion is and Stay tuned for my next video/blog.

DnD Character Creation (D&D Beyond)

 How to create a character in D&D Beyond

 

 This video will help you create a complete D&D character

Hello there, my fellow DND player. 

This is Leavo and I am going to help you create a character. 

So first of all, go to D&D Beyond 

When you are there. In the top left corner, you see collections, hover over that one. 

Go to my characters. And click on that. 

Then in the top right corner, you see create a character. You've already guessed it. Click on that one.

For all of my character Creations I use standard. So, please click on that. 

Alright, now we see Home, 1 race, 2 class, 3 abilities 4 description, 5 equipment. And we are going to start with the race. 

So, click on that one. 

For this character build, we are creating a human, click on human, and you will get two options, normal human or variant human. For this build. We are picking normal human 

Click on choose race. 

All right. Now then we get An extra language. You can pick anything that you like I chose undercommon for this build because it's a very well-spoken language depending on the setting.

Alright, now we move over to class. When you are just starting a fighter is an easy class to begin with. 

So we're going to select a fighter and click on ADD class. 

Now now we're going to jump a little bit back and forth bear with me here. 

We are going to move to 4 description. 

And give me a second. It will make sense in a little bit. 

Click on the description. Go to backgrounds. I chose the background folk hero because it's fun to play. 

You see skill proficiencies that I get by choosing the folk hero background, I get animal handling And survival. I also get a skill proficiency Vehicles land plus I get to choose one. 

I'm gonna pick Carpenters tools. 

They were a lot more options over here but like I said, we're going to go back and forth a little bit. 

We're moving back now to class. 

Now, if I select proficiencies, 

It will highlight the two that I already got from my background so that I will not choose that one twice. 

All right, I chose perception over here. Perception is always a good thing to have. You will be more aware of your surrounding. 

The other one is acrobatics. This will be more of a DEX Build than the strength built and then acrobatics is the way to go. 

Moving on to fighting style. Tons of options. It is always good to have a plus one for your armor class. You will be a bit harder to hit and that's always good. So I chose that one. Defense. While you were wearing armor, you gain a plus one bonus to your armor class. 

Yes, please!!

We are moving on to number. 3 abilities. 

All my characters are standard array builds. 

I already mentioned this will be a DEX Build so my highest score will go to DEX. 

Constitution is a good thing to have, so we're making that one, one of my highest scores and wisdom because that one is linked to my perception. And my animal handling, Further on it is a fighter, so it needs a bit of strength. This leaves me with Intelligence and Charisma, intelligence will be 10 and Charisma 8. This is my dump stat. 

You see a bunch of numbers. Let me quickly explain how this works. If we look at dexterity, we see a total score of 16. That means that we have a plus 3 modifier. Now how did we get that plus 3, the base score that I gave dexterity is 15. The race bonus is plus 1 which makes it a total of 16. 16, you can find all of this in the player handbook.

Let's go into the equipment. You have two options, you choose, your starting equipment or gold. 

Almost always, it's better to choose starting equipment. 

So, that is what I'm going to pick. I'm going to select leather armor, along with a bow and 20 arrows. 

I am picking a weapon and a shield and a Rapier is the ideal weapon for this build. That's why I selected that one. 

Now then the light crossbow is a bit of overkill, but it's more useful than two-hand axes for me. As soon as I will play this character I’ll probably be selling the light crossbow and 20 bolts but hey I get it for free. So thank you. 

Dungeoneer’s or an Explorer's pack? It's a matter of preference and I like the Explorers back. 

Now then we can pick a toolset. We have chosen that we would be proficient with Carpenter tools. So it only makes sense to pick the carpenter Tools. 

Add starting equipment, click on that one. Over here. Do you see how our inventory is 19? Active items zero? So what does this mean? It is up to us to select what we want to activate. 

In this case, we are going to activate everything we can start with arrows, you see that? We have 20 of them but the square that says use is white. If I click on it I will select it and it will turn green and will tell you that this is in use, we're going to do the same with the crossbow bolts. And then we see the crossbow. It will not be in use. We will wield this as for the letter armor, we will wear that one. All of these things you have to manually select them, / activate them 

So, let's finish it up. Number 4 description select a picture. You can upload a custom one, for this build I'm just going to select one here. This guy looks good enough. Name. Do I feel creative today? No. No, I do not. So it will be this one. Let's call it the one. Yeah. 

All right, moving right along. 

Let scroll down a little bit and go for the character details. 

Alignment neutral. Why not? 

Faith pick one. I chose wildmother. 

The lifestyle. Here we go.

The physical characteristics. 

Up to you. I just looked at the picture and that's what I made. 

Hundred and thirty pounds. Yeah, you know what, let's make it 140. 

Personality traits. This is how your character will be reacting in certain situations. Same for ideals, this gives you A little bit of help of how to play your character. Bonds, the same thing. Flaws, This one is a lot of fun. If you look at it, the one I chose for example. This is so much fun. This means that I have to go into every Tavern and start drinking over there, get drunk, get into a fight. Get into an argument, it's a lot of fun role-playing it out like that. All right, all set now, right next to the one that says, what's next, you see another icon? Click on that. 

Beyond 20 is a great add-on. It's the one you see now on the screen, 

I will make a video of that one for now. Please just ignore it. Here we go. our character is all set. This is a fun character to play. You see a lot of digits. 

I'm going to go over the basics right now. You see walking speed, you see an armor class, what does it all mean? Let's start with the armor class. It's 17. How do we get to that number? 

You can see that the level of armor that we are wearing gives us an 11, we get a plus 3 because of our dexterity bonus. We get an armored bonus of plus 1 because of our fighting style and we have a plus 2 because we are using a shield. So, the total is an armor class of 17. I hope that makes sense. 

Hitpoints. Do you see that? We have 12 hit points and we have 12 of 12. Now 

You can see that, I am proficient in acrobatics and animal handling. But not in Arcana. What does that mean? I have a proficiency bonus of plus 2 right now. So, whatever my normal score would be. Plus 2 again, I'm going to go into details in another blog post, another video 

Now then let's move into the money, The currency. If you check equipment and you click on the gold, you get a menu that is designed to keep track of how much gold you have. 

I personally always use gold silver and copper. 

1 gold is 10 silver. 1 silver is 10 copper. 

Let's say that I get 12 silver. Now I have 10 gold 12, silver, If you look at the total currency, it's in gold pieces. So it will tell me, I have 11 gold pieces. 

Even though I have a little bit more, 

If I do -2 silver pieces, it's spot-on. Now, if I again do -2. You see that, I would have 10.8 gold pieces but it runs it down to 10. That's how this one works. 

The weight carried. If you click on that, you see, you're carrying capacity. You can see the amount that you can push drag or lift, and you can see how much you are carrying at the moment. Also, the amount of weight in coins is what you see here. So my coins in total weigh, zero point 2 lbs, 

Features and traits. This is what makes your character unique. 

Again, I will make another video\blog post about how all of this stuff works. 

Background folk hero. Again, the feature rustic hospitality 

A lot of fun to play around with that one. 

And the characteristics. And the personality traits are over here as well. 

Let's go back into the Builder and level up! At the moment we are human male fighter level 1 

We are going to advance to level 2. Go into class, the drop-down menu next to level select level 2. Not many changes here. Now, if we go back to our character sheet, you will see that our hit point total changed. It now became 20 and it used to be 12 So, 

Without going into a lot of details, it is, Our average role on the hit dice, which is a D10 for fighter plus 2 (Con modifier). So they will take 6 is the avarage, plus 2 = 8, 12 plus 8 makes it a total of 20 

And yes, you guessed it, right? I'm going to go into more detail on that one in another post. 

Let's see if we can start hitting things, we can try to hit ourselves. Well, if I say that what I mean is I'm going to see if I can make a role higher than the Armor class of this character. First, rolled a 6 on the dice plus 5 because I use my longbow 

My armor class is 17, so I miss try that again. A 9 plus 5=14. Does not hit 14 still lower than the 17. Yeah. The next role, we just going to ignore finally a 19, natural 19. Plus 5 =24 and 24 is higher than 17. So that's a hit. 

Right now, we can roll for damage. That will be 1 D8 + 3. 

A 2 on the dice plus 3. For the damage roll on my longbow makes a total of 5. So what would I do now? 

I would go to my hit points. Type in 5 points of damage and D&D Beyond calculates it for me. 

Let’s set the value back to the original number. 

Same thing here. Let's make a perception check, the DM will ask you to roll a perception check. 

Or give me a perception roll. If you say, I want to look around for Clues. Looking around is perception. So I go to this place for on that. I'm hovering over the plus 4 and click on it. I rolled a natural 14, plus 4 = 18. Now, then I would tell the dungeon master. I have an 18 on my perception check or are rolled 18 for my perception check and he will give me the information according to that.

This works the same for saving throws. I am trying to climb up something and I'm losing grip. My dungeon master asked me to make a strength saving throw, I go into saving throws and I click on strength which is a plus 3. for example, I rolled 8 on the dice + 3 make a total of 11. If I click on strength, saving throws I get a pop-up menu and it will tell me everything. I need to know about strength saving throws. 

For now, I would just tell the dungeon master. I got an 11 on my strength saving throw. 

Okay, then I hope you enjoyed this video. If you have any questions or comments, let me know. And Remember always keep rolling.