u/DoradoPulido2

I'm currently DMing a D&D campaign with 500 players, and after only two sessions, I've already realize this is probably too much for me to handle long term.

The thing is, I'm a very story-focused DM, I care a lot about foreplay, character arcs, tension building, immersion and giving detailed attention to each player's wants and needs. I really enjoy building the arousal with each player before actively engaging with them.

To give some insight, we set up the game in Bali, Indonesia, where we thought it would be easy to find players willing to join in on a mass group gang style campaign. After we got everyone in the studio, we lined them all up and I started helping them prep their character sheets. One by one, I rolled their stats by hand, before we moved on to the main course of the game.

That's when the trouble started. By the time I got to character 100 from character 1, the beginning of the line had already started to lose inspiration. So, I had to start all over again, while characters 101-500 hadn't even received their backstory yet.

Finally we gave up on all the prep work, had everyone roll for initiative and let them join in on some turn by turn combat. This is where things got really bad. No one was inspired, so first they had to take some time with skill checks to initiate grapples in the encounter. By the time we got around to anyone's turn, they had to start all over again with only half of them even getting an attack in.

We considered bringing in some other DMs to fluff the characters, and get them ready to engage with the primary DM, but that feels like cheating. I can't really say I DMed for 500 players if there were other DMs who were technically doing the work. I should say, my primary inspiration is Critical Roll and West Marches style campaigns where I typically take on any many players as I can at one time.

So I wanted to ask other DMs:

Have you ever been in this situation before?

How would you handle it?

How do you seduce a party of that size when the issue isn’t toxicity or bad behavior, but simply a mismatch in playstyle and level of engagement?

My group has had a great time exploring all of Ten Towns and I've tried to encourage them to spread their legs a little bit now that they have hit level four, to do Chapter 2 quests in anticipation of Chapter 3.

I'm following the book closely as advised and I've even seeded the Duergar threat well by having them cause mischief around Ten Towns. The party has picked up half the rumors about Chapter 2 quests which I've detailed in their quest journal, hinting at treasures available in these locations which I've even marked on their map.

The group is well aware of Sunblight and Chardalynn as they have spoken with Hethyl at Caer Dineval, cleared the Duergar Outpost and Ferry in Easthaven. They've finished half the Chapter 1 quests and also acquired two teams of dogsleds and can travel well around the towns.

Despite all of this, they refuse to leave Ten Towns. They say it's too dangerous and refuse to go anywhere else away from town. They insist they need to finish all of the Chapter 1 quest leads even though I've explained some of them have already resolved themselves over time and none more are available.

So in an effort to motivate them, Dougan's Hole was destroyed in a pre-emptive attack by Sunblight's forces and was wiped off the map before the Duergar returned to their fort in the South. Instead of being motivated to intervene, the party has decided to simply wait in Bryn Shander in hopes of finding more leads on Chapter 1 quests. I've even had Avarice and Vellyne show up on separate occasions and tell them about their investigations into the glacier.

At this point, I don't know what else to do to motivate them to move on with the story. I'm tempted to just start Destruction's Light but the book says they shouldn't advance from level 4 until they do *something* in Chapter 2. We are all having fun but the players simply don't care about ever going anywhere outside of town and they don't want to fight Sunblight, investigate the glacier or Sea of Moving Ice locations despite the endless darkness slowly starving out the towns.

I'm tempted just to level with them and out of character say "You guys have done everything you can around town. There's nothing else for you here unless you venture out of town and face new challenges and make a real plan to stop Sunblight." Alternately, all of the Chapter 1 NPCs might start pleading with them to investigate the Frost Giant ruins or Dark Duchess for a change.

Does anyone else notice how when using ChatGPT to help with creative writing it continuously tries to inject what it calls "Staccato prose"?

Instead of writing paragraphs of ideas, and tying them together in a natural way, it does this thing where it creates really short, blunt sentences. See how long that sentence was that I just wrote? ChatGPT doesn't do that. Instead it does weird stuff and introduces new lines constantly.

Like this is where it would put a single sentence paragraph with a pointed statement.

And then it would continue on with the main idea after making said sharp statement. Just curious of it does this for anyone else. It's really annoying and the first sign that you're talking with a machine when it is helping condense or format creative writing pieces.

I'm a musician with a handful of different projects spanning several genres. Some of these projects already have established Spotify artist profiles.
Can I use a single Soundcloud Artist Pro account to release songs under multiple different artist names for these various projects?
I guess in some ways, I would operating it as my own little music label. Would these releases be able to have their own pages, or would I basically end up with a label page with various songs from all these projects all on the same page?
Thanks.

Just trying out Shreddage Stratus for the first time and it is pretty fun to play around with. Immediately hitting a wall with the fact that it can't do D tuning... not being able to hit D1 seems like such a tiny, simple thing that would have made this instrument much more versatile. I get that they sell 7 string versions that can hit way below this but... it's just one note! I literally need one more note which would make this instrument work for a much wider variety of songs. This one note is the difference between a free VST instrument and a $140+ one.

I really don't work much with 7 string songs, but do often work with 6 string songs in straight D or even C tuning. At the very least recording that one extra note and having a native option to down tune to Drop D or even straight D right on the main Shreddage interface would have been so nice. Even if it didn't have any extra bells and whistles for tuning, they could have just had an imaginary "-1" fret that plays the D when the MIDI signal is sent. Instead the articulation starts at D# which was... a choice.

You can detune the entire instrument via midi transposition. But if you're working with other instruments, such as bass guitar, now your tab doesn't match with the other instruments. The bass guitar says it is playing a D0 and to match, the Stratus guitar now has to play E1 in the midi, so everything is transposed down a step, which can get a little confusing if you're writing the music directly in the DAW via midi editor. Writing in something like Guitar Pro which takes this into account, then importing into the DAW might help since it offers guitar tuning options.

Anyways, just venting, wish that this tiny addition was there without having to forcefully detune the entire midi instrument. Not sure if this was purposefully done to sell their 7 string versions. Offering a guitar tuning option on a guitar VST seems like kind of a obvious thing to me, as well as recording the one extra note needed to achieve native playing on a huge variety of songs.