Probably best to get out of that. DM is sounding really petty with that Discord. It's not the players fault that he's completely crushed their desire to carry on.
That leads me to a question, How do you guys go about forming and finding new groups.
I have run into this problem for the following reasons:
1, I prefer F2F PNP TT experience
2. Rural area without FLGS action
3. Local players I have run across leave me cold (Probably because I am an elitist)
4. Mostly encounter newbies with a casual interest to try
How do you go about forming or reforming a strong, solid group?
I'll echo that, if you can pull in friends (or even co-workers of friends-of-friends) then that's the way to go. The more familiarity the better, as you want to be playing with people around whom you're comfortable to both make a complete fool of yourself and be openly emotional. It also helps with tailoring the experience, if you're playing with people you know at least moderately well you can make sure their interests feed into the game (so you're not running a campaign that's more Game of Thrones for a group that would rather play something closer to The Princess Bride, for example).
I find newbies are honestly the best people to run for, it's a joy introducing new folks to the game as they have no preconceptions or hangups carried over from other DMs or gaming groups (I've had way more trouble with people who have come from another group and not gelled with our style of play than I have with people new to the hobby altogether) and often, you get feats of imagination from a first-timer that a long-term veteran RPGer would never go for because their more detailed knowledge of the rules tells them it's not the ideal or practical solution to a problem.
And it's just great to take something you enjoy and share that with more people, then watch them share it in turn; the 'extended family' of my gaming group started with me as a DM and 3 players, now across a few different campaigns we have 7 players, 5 of whom DM on the regular less than a year after starting. Of course, not every group is going to grow like that and not everyone is going to take to it that well, but opening yourself up to that happening can lead to great things.
It's all in the pitch, I think. I genuinely believe that just about anyone can have fun with tabletop roleplaying, the trick is pitching it in such a way that it appeals to the person you're trying to recruit. Do what you can to cut through the stereotypes and myths around the hobby, and if you can convince someone to try one session then make that session a good one, tailored to their interest, that's often enough. If they're big into a certain franchise, that can be a good gateway, but more generally than that, ask what they want and build the game around that. If they say they want drama and intrigue, don't run a dungeon crawl. If they say they want hack and slash, don't plan an hour-long debate with a politician.
But whatever you do, lead with the experience, not the rules. Telling someone how they can slay dragons or fight gods or rule kingdoms is inherently more appealing than giving them a 300 page hardback as homework. For that first session, try and take as much of the complexity away as you can; have pre-generated characters ready to hand out, and dice on hand for everyone organised by type (to us, telling a d10 from a d12 at a glance is easy, but for the newcomer, it won't necessarily be). Print out spells or feats on cards rather than passing round the rulebooks, and be prepared to handwave any discrepancies or issues that you might ponder longer in a more developed game. Try and avoid saying 'no' as much as possible, let people try all sorts of stuff even if it's futile as that's the best way to help them understand exactly what the TTRPG experience is.
And if at the end of that they've had fun, boom, you got yourself a campaign!
Probably best to get out of that. DM is sounding really petty with that Discord. It's not the players fault that he's completely crushed their desire to carry on.
And the Cleric just backed out, though he doesn't seem salty like I am.
So yeah... Maybe just go do something myself is sounding a lot more appealing.
Easy E wrote: That leads me to a question, How do you guys go about forming and finding new groups.
I have run into this problem for the following reasons:
1, I prefer F2F PNP TT experience
2. Rural area without FLGS action
3. Local players I have run across leave me cold (Probably because I am an elitist)
4. Mostly encounter newbies with a casual interest to try
How do you go about forming or reforming a strong, solid group?
Most of my groups have been a result of happy accidents. After I moved to Atlanta I posted on an Atlanta subreddit looking for people and got a response from 1 guy. As he and I started hashing out thoughts on a small campaign with him, me, and my wife; his wife found an FLGS and ran into another couple looking for a group. So suddenly we had five people and the game proceded from there. The new people from the FLGS slowly introduced us to more people both from the store and other online LFG sources until eventually Me and my wife were actually playing in a couple different games (and none of them with each other lol). Once I got to Dayton I discovered a Board Games Bar and they held a DnD Mixer for people looking for groups. I ended up meeting a dude that had just recruited a bunch of people online through a discord for a ravnica dnd game and he invited me and my wife along. That group now meets in person every week rather than discord because we all were local.
I have yet to actually play an online only game despite almost all my groups discovering people online.
Easy E wrote: That leads me to a question, How do you guys go about forming and finding new groups.
I have run into this problem for the following reasons:
1, I prefer F2F PNP TT experience
2. Rural area without FLGS action
3. Local players I have run across leave me cold (Probably because I am an elitist)
4. Mostly encounter newbies with a casual interest to try
How do you go about forming or reforming a strong, solid group?
What does elitist even mean? Competition in games is normal, but D&D is the one game I've never encountered that in before.
When i have seen elitist used for things like this and board games it tends to mean no patience for people not on your level. Noobs beware. Build your characters correctly and tactically handle your conflicts regardless of "what your character would do". Different play styles or motivations for being at the table are not welcome.
Lance845 wrote: When i have seen elitist used for things like this and board games it tends to mean no patience for people not on your level. Noobs beware. Build your characters correctly and tactically handle your conflicts regardless of "what your character would do". Different play styles or motivations for being at the table are not welcome.
Maybe he means something else?
Nah, I love Noobs. They are still open to the magic of it all and not dug deep into min-maxxing and optimization yet. I love different styles of play than mine!
When I say Elitist, I mean I don't tolerate the socially awkward very well. When I go to recruit, I have certain standards. Things like:
1. Don't openly eyeball my wife or female friends
2. Don't be greasy and smelly
3. Be able to string two or more words together in a sentence
4. Be a mature, semi-well adjusted person
5. Don't be a dickish A-hole
Like I said before, sometimes the hardest thing about being a nerd is dealing with other nerds. I know as a Nerd I should be accepting of all and accept differences and not judge and all that.... but I can't always be a charitable and saintly person. I judge and I judge my fellow nerds harshest. It is a weakness of mine. :(
When I think of elitist, I think of snobby veterans who not only play the game better, but rub it in your face at every opportunity and mock you for looking at the game in anyway different from how they look at it.
I thankfully have yet to encounter this in D&D but I'm sure I will eventually.
LordofHats wrote: When I think of elitist, I think of snobby veterans who not only play the game better, but rub it in your face at every opportunity and mock you for looking at the game in anyway different from how they look at it.
I thankfully have yet to encounter this in D&D but I'm sure I will eventually.
They were fairly common online once upon a time, especially various Character Optimization boards.
In person, there tend to be tales of them out in the the wild places, but they've largely been driven out of their habitats by the great herds of CCG players that don't care about their old stories.
Mostly they have their established groups or they don't actually play anymore. Just complain in some of the less pleasant places of the internet.
My RL groups fell apart as people moved away for various reasons and became online only groups. I really, really wanted that same face to face gaming, since even knowing the people involved for decades I find online gaming just not as satisfying (generally speaking).
I've found a couple pretty solid groups through Meetup. They can be hit or miss, because I also found a group that sat in complete silence for about 10-15 minutes before I started introducing myself (I was not the host, who apparently also sat in silence).
One the DM just stopped showing up. They log into discord all the time, so we know they're not dead, they just don't answer any messages or say anything. The rest of us are still gaming together, and they're a truly wonderful group of people. My second group was an AL group that lost our play spot, which sucks, but such is life.
One group I'm loving is an online group I met through a coworker.
So... try Meetup maybe? I met a bunch of people through it and so far only a small few have been the "no showering, socially awkward, no decency types".
Da Boss wrote:My biggest issue with Dungeons and Dragons is the use of the word "Race" rather than "Species" but that is mostly the legacy of the fantasy literature the game is inspired by. I just would rather it was not used since race is just a social construct invented by racists to justify discrimination. I see Pathfinder is moving to "Ancestry" which is a bit better I suppose. But the concept of "evil races" is pretty dodgey no matter how you slice it.
No word of a lie here. I've been worldbuilding my own D&D setting, working out how everything fits together in my personal world, and as soon as I reach Drow, I was like "oh no, I don't like the implications of this at all". Completely rewrite them in my universe to be more akin to Elder Scrolls Dunmer (aka, the first elves who would become Drow committed a horrible act of betrayal against their fellow Elves, got cursed by the gods, and all those descended from them bear the mark - many Drow see this as a mark of shame and seek to live lives of compassion and servitude to atone for their forbear's sins, and many do not), at least allowing for genuinely Good Drow to be more accessible.
The idea of a playable race that can only be "evil" just throws me all the wrong ways.
This is honestly why I find Drow really boring. Taking them as written a) comes with the aforementioned problems (from a worldbuilding perspective as much as a sociological one), and b) cliche as hell and not in a good way. 'Elves But Spikey And Evil' is, aside from being problematic, also dull as dirt.
On the other hand, it's also something you often have to work so hard to subvert that it becomes it's own cliche or just equally boring. I do enjoy subverting the classic stereotype of wise, benevolent if aloof (aka Tolkieny) High/Wood Elves by making them more neutral, violent and arrogant in their wisdom, but I find Drow hard to fit into that.
I tend to have something of a scale that goes Eladrin at the top as almost primal forces of nature, totally removed from the concerns of the mortal world, High and Wood Elves, in the middle with the former being more arrogant and vain and the latter being more violent and insular, and then Half-Elves as the most 'mortal' variety. Throughout that, there's the duality that Elves tend to be peerless at what they do due to their lifespans, so one that turns to heroism will do great things, but one that falls to darkness will be truly monstrous indeed.
I struggle to find a place for Drow in there because it's literally baked into their conceptual DNA that they are the opposite of whatever the traditionally 'good' Elves are, and pitching those High/Wood Elf cultures as very ambiguous and neutral means there isn't really an opposite. Duergar I can work with as the dark mirror of Dwarves, Kobolds as the same for Dragonborn, but the mirror of Elves the way I usually portray them is... basically how they already are, as I cast them with a particular duality already.
I actually tend to leave Drow out of my world lore for just that reason. You can play them in my game, sure, but they're about the only race I don't have a developed or thematically consistent culture, background or history thought out for (I have more Triton lore than Drow lore! ) I ought to do something about that, but I'm just completely stuck for interesting ideas, and no one is playing one so they might as well not exist for the time being.
In my world the elves have their origins in the Fey wild thousand upon thousands of years ago. There was an invasion from the feywild when it was more closely linked to the material plain.
The elves that would become the Drow did a major act of betrayal against the other elves and Fey that resulted in the shunting off and sealing away of the Fey Wild from the material plain and made crossing between them significantly more difficult saving the Material plain and stranding a bunch of elves here (resulting in the race/s as we have them today). The drow were cursed and exiled and are treated as evil and now it's been so long that nobody has any recollection or records of what the betrayal was.
Poor Drow, they saved the world and paid for it with their current state. Being hunted and hated by the elves who eventually found acceptance but where the mortal enemies of all the world.
Paradigm wrote: This is honestly why I find Drow really boring. Taking them as written a) comes with the aforementioned problems (from a worldbuilding perspective as much as a sociological one), and b) cliche as hell and not in a good way. 'Elves But Spikey And Evil' is, aside from being problematic, also dull as dirt.
On the other hand, it's also something you often have to work so hard to subvert that it becomes it's own cliche or just equally boring. I do enjoy subverting the classic stereotype of wise, benevolent if aloof (aka Tolkieny) High/Wood Elves by making them more neutral, violent and arrogant in their wisdom, but I find Drow hard to fit into that.
I tend to have something of a scale that goes Eladrin at the top as almost primal forces of nature, totally removed from the concerns of the mortal world, High and Wood Elves, in the middle with the former being more arrogant and vain and the latter being more violent and insular, and then Half-Elves as the most 'mortal' variety. Throughout that, there's the duality that Elves tend to be peerless at what they do due to their lifespans, so one that turns to heroism will do great things, but one that falls to darkness will be truly monstrous indeed.
I struggle to find a place for Drow in there because it's literally baked into their conceptual DNA that they are the opposite of whatever the traditionally 'good' Elves are, and pitching those High/Wood Elf cultures as very ambiguous and neutral means there isn't really an opposite. Duergar I can work with as the dark mirror of Dwarves, Kobolds as the same for Dragonborn, but the mirror of Elves the way I usually portray them is... basically how they already are, as I cast them with a particular duality already.
I actually tend to leave Drow out of my world lore for just that reason. You can play them in my game, sure, but they're about the only race I don't have a developed or thematically consistent culture, background or history thought out for (I have more Triton lore than Drow lore! ) I ought to do something about that, but I'm just completely stuck for interesting ideas, and no one is playing one so they might as well not exist for the time being.
You could always pull from the old Nordic lore abit where the primary distinction between light-elves and dark-elves is where they lived. Light-elves lived in Alfheim in the heavens while dark-elves lived underground. It makes the distinctions mostly ethnic, and leaves room still for wood-elves as a third distinct ethnic group.
There's also the Moriquendi from The Silmarillion, who were a group of elves who didn't want to leave for Valinor and desired to stay in Middle-Earth. The term was a sort of backhanded insult as the implication was that these elves were okay with what Melkor was doing in Middle Earth at the time of this debate, which they obviously weren't, but you could easily work that into the origins of a elven schism. One group wanted to just up and leave somewhere to avoid some problem, and another group chose to stay and both sides accuse the other of various evils without really understanding each other's reasonings.
Da Boss wrote:My biggest issue with Dungeons and Dragons is the use of the word "Race" rather than "Species" but that is mostly the legacy of the fantasy literature the game is inspired by. I just would rather it was not used since race is just a social construct invented by racists to justify discrimination. I see Pathfinder is moving to "Ancestry" which is a bit better I suppose. But the concept of "evil races" is pretty dodgey no matter how you slice it.
No word of a lie here. I've been worldbuilding my own D&D setting, working out how everything fits together in my personal world, and as soon as I reach Drow, I was like "oh no, I don't like the implications of this at all". Completely rewrite them in my universe to be more akin to Elder Scrolls Dunmer (aka, the first elves who would become Drow committed a horrible act of betrayal against their fellow Elves, got cursed by the gods, and all those descended from them bear the mark - many Drow see this as a mark of shame and seek to live lives of compassion and servitude to atone for their forbear's sins, and many do not), at least allowing for genuinely Good Drow to be more accessible.
The idea of a playable race that can only be "evil" just throws me all the wrong ways.
Who says they can only be evil? This is an RPG, you can literally play or do anything you want...
I'm currently playing a Drow Rouge that is Chaotic Good, it's been a blast of a campaign so far too. No problems...
Paradigm wrote: This is honestly why I find Drow really boring. Taking them as written a) comes with the aforementioned problems (from a worldbuilding perspective as much as a sociological one), and b) cliche as hell and not in a good way. 'Elves But Spikey And Evil' is, aside from being problematic, also dull as dirt.
On the other hand, it's also something you often have to work so hard to subvert that it becomes it's own cliche or just equally boring. I do enjoy subverting the classic stereotype of wise, benevolent if aloof (aka Tolkieny) High/Wood Elves by making them more neutral, violent and arrogant in their wisdom, but I find Drow hard to fit into that.
I tend to have something of a scale that goes Eladrin at the top as almost primal forces of nature, totally removed from the concerns of the mortal world, High and Wood Elves, in the middle with the former being more arrogant and vain and the latter being more violent and insular, and then Half-Elves as the most 'mortal' variety. Throughout that, there's the duality that Elves tend to be peerless at what they do due to their lifespans, so one that turns to heroism will do great things, but one that falls to darkness will be truly monstrous indeed.
I struggle to find a place for Drow in there because it's literally baked into their conceptual DNA that they are the opposite of whatever the traditionally 'good' Elves are, and pitching those High/Wood Elf cultures as very ambiguous and neutral means there isn't really an opposite. Duergar I can work with as the dark mirror of Dwarves, Kobolds as the same for Dragonborn, but the mirror of Elves the way I usually portray them is... basically how they already are, as I cast them with a particular duality already.
I actually tend to leave Drow out of my world lore for just that reason. You can play them in my game, sure, but they're about the only race I don't have a developed or thematically consistent culture, background or history thought out for (I have more Triton lore than Drow lore! ) I ought to do something about that, but I'm just completely stuck for interesting ideas, and no one is playing one so they might as well not exist for the time being.
You could always pull from the old Nordic lore abit where the primary distinction between light-elves and dark-elves is where they lived. Light-elves lived in Alfheim in the heavens while dark-elves lived underground. It makes the distinctions mostly ethnic, and leaves room still for wood-elves as a third distinct ethnic group.
There's also the Moriquendi from The Silmarillion, who were a group of elves who didn't want to leave for Valinor and desired to stay in Middle-Earth. The term was a sort of backhanded insult as the implication was that these elves were okay with what Melkor was doing in Middle Earth at the time of this debate, which they obviously weren't, but you could easily work that into the origins of a elven schism. One group wanted to just up and leave somewhere to avoid some problem, and another group chose to stay and both sides accuse the other of various evils without really understanding each other's reasonings.
True, there are certainly approaches I could take working from scratch and binning everything about their existing 'canon' lore and nature, it's just not something I have room for in my current setting and alongside the structure for elves that I've already established. As I say, my hangup is that there has to be a reason they're so different from High/Wood/Fey elves as a culture, and 'cos they're evil' is such a naff one; that's an effect rather than a cause. The ancient betrayal angle works in theory, though I've already done that with both Dragonborn/Kobolds and Dwarves/Duergar in my current world, so it'd be a stretch to throw the Drow in with a similar origin (especially as Elves did not exist when that betrayal went down so it would have to be multiple civilisations suffering the same fate millennia apart).
One angle I might play with in a future setting is making the schism recent rather than ancient history. Have them as a portion of Elven society that is cast out, 'disfigured' in Elven eyes by the changes in their appearance as a deliberate punishment or censure by the High or Fey Elves, and left to form their own very young society. Plays into my love of High Elves as the most potentially dickish race going, makes the Drow interesting via them being very sympathetic, and keeping those events inside a generation (albeit an elven one, so a century or three ) makes those themes very fresh and able to inform a whole raft of cultures and societies across the setting.
How do other nations or civilisations deal with the fact there are now a whole other society of Elves to deal with, do they risk jeopardising alliances with the High Elves by sheltering the Drow, do they fear the influence of a brand new civilisation, how do the original Elves spin the schism to not appear outright evil?
Dragonborn were my big rework with my current setting, I did throw out pretty much all the standard lore for them (including things like their lifespan, why would things descended directly from dragons not live centuries like their ancestors?), so maybe Drow are my next big rework... I've been meaning to start on a new campaign setting soon, this could work nicely as the central tension for it. I tend to reserve major changes for only one race in my games so that if you don't like my out-there ideas, you do have everything else to choose from, so I think Drow might be the next to get that treatment.
Personally I am not a big fan of the Dragonborn as a race. There are already SO many kinds of dragons and so many variations of things with dragon heritage including people with draconic bloodlines (sorcerers) why does this entire race need to exist beyond the 13 yr old power fantasy of "I want to play a dragon!"
The "slave race" of dragon kin from dragon lance already existed and were basically man sized kobolds with wings. Going the extra mile to make full on dragon people is just silly imo.
The original write-up for dragonborn was a little more interesting than the current one. Instead of a dragon race of humanoids that acts like other humanoids and randomly has breasts, the dragonborn are individuals of other races that have undergone a ritual rebirth into a new form.
Unfortunately, they were specifically servants of Bahamut, the LG god of good dragons, and specifically devoted to him, so that severely limited the stories you could tell, but it was an interesting reason for yet another kitchen sink fantasy race to exist. Easily fixed by letting other dragon gods (or arcane magic) do the same thing, however. This version was in 3e's Races of the Dragon and I believe one or two other books. This version got wiped by 4e.
An (unsurprisingly) similar concept popped up in Monte Cook's Arcana Unearth/Evolved The mojh (which seem randomly named) But they individually transformed themselves into draconic entities for longer life and magical power. Can't breed, have no 'society' as such, but I'm a sucker for transhuman characters that actually seek out that kind of thing.
Bah! Every schoolboy knows that dragons will have sex with anything -- except maybe dwarves and orcs. Dragonborn are the spawn of polymorphed dragons and humans, possibly elves.
Anyone have $300.00 USD burning a hole in their wallet? WotC is offering these Sapphire DIce
Red Harvest wrote: Bah! Every schoolboy knows that dragons will have sex with anything -- except maybe dwarves and orcs. Dragonborn are the spawn of polymorphed dragons and humans, possibly elves.
Anyone have $300.00 USD burning a hole in their wallet? WotC is offering these Sapphire DIce
Togusa wrote: Who says they can only be evil? This is an RPG, you can literally play or do anything you want...
I'm currently playing a Drow Rouge that is Chaotic Good, it's been a blast of a campaign so far too. No problems...
This is true, but literally on the PHB entry for Drow, it makes it quite clear that the vast majority of Drow are "evil", which is a connotation I really don't appreciate. It doesn't claim they can "only be evil", but very much implies they sway a certain way, and just the implication of "most of this race are 'evil'" just feels uncomfortable.
However, in all fairness, that's also a side effect of the alignment system saying that something is "good" and something is "evil".
Togusa wrote: Who says they can only be evil? This is an RPG, you can literally play or do anything you want...
I'm currently playing a Drow Rouge that is Chaotic Good, it's been a blast of a campaign so far too. No problems...
This is true, but literally on the PHB entry for Drow, it makes it quite clear that the vast majority of Drow are "evil", which is a connotation I really don't appreciate. It doesn't claim they can "only be evil", but very much implies they sway a certain way, and just the implication of "most of this race are 'evil'" just feels uncomfortable.
However, in all fairness, that's also a side effect of the alignment system saying that something is "good" and something is "evil".
One thing I like about the background for 5e is that for "usually evil" races, it's often because they have a god actively interfering in their affairs and keeping them on a narrow cultural path.
If we were playing a game that took place during the height of the roman empire the "race" "romans" would almost always be lawful. It doesnt mean that there are not romans who are othérwise.
Then consider that drow society is centered around the worship of a spider goddess who encourages slavery, murder, betrayal, and all kinds of other nasty gak.
If you want drow to be evil less often lolth needs to be less prominant a figure in their societal structure. Its not the drows nature that makes them evil. Its their nurture.
I agree that good and evil can be terms that are a little too strong, and it's something that's bothered me about the alignment system in D&D, but I also think it's a good idea to have just renamed more accurately. I don't remember where I read it recently and I haven't been able to find it again but it was a summarized version of more indepth alignment descriptions from somewhere else. It boiled down to:
lawful: value the laws of society and promote them over the needs of the individual
chaotic: value individuals over society at large
good: place value and safety of others above yourself
evil: self centered and self interested, placing your needs and wants above others
The term "evil" feels like all evil races and characters are psychopaths and sadists. I like the above summery for that reason. Anyone know the source? Thanks
Originally it was just Law, Neutrality and Chaos, which worked just fine.
I guarantee y'all that Lawful and Good as imagined by Gygax are not at all what y'all think they are. He was very much thinking about things in a medieval mindset.
Anyway, I started a short campaign for my group. They are getting to play some Holme's Blue Book D&D. So far, so good. Three elves out of 8 PCs in the party.
Artificer is being added to the list of classes for 5e.
I never really liked the class, though if playing in the Eberron campaign setting it makes more sense to be there. The ones I have played with though were not in Eberron.
Syro_ wrote: I agree that good and evil can be terms that are a little too strong, and it's something that's bothered me about the alignment system in D&D, but I also think it's a good idea to have just renamed more accurately. I don't remember where I read it recently and I haven't been able to find it again but it was a summarized version of more indepth alignment descriptions from somewhere else. It boiled down to:
lawful: value the laws of society and promote them over the needs of the individual
chaotic: value individuals over society at large
good: place value and safety of others above yourself
evil: self centered and self interested, placing your needs and wants above others
The term "evil" feels like all evil races and characters are psychopaths and sadists. I like the above summery for that reason. Anyone know the source? Thanks
I read an alternate system for naming alignments on Giant in the Playground, which I really like.
Good becomes "Righteous"
Evil becomes "Wicked"
Lawful becomes "Legit"
Chaotic becomes "Radical"
True Neutral becomes "Chill"
If someone is partly neutral, they are "Totally (non-neutral part of their alignment)"
I've been playing D&D for just over a month now, and we've had some very amusing scenarios.
My character is called Thoruk the Distracted, a half-orc barbarian who has a vendetta against ducks (his family was killed by a duck, his backstory revealed).
In his first mission, he found a lovely dress in a cupboard in a castle. It didn't fit, but he wears it anyway - Thoruk likes pretty clothes.
In his second mission, he chained 3 natural 20's together when sneaking to disappear from the party as they started to discuss their plan for too long, and managed to slam a cooking pot over the bosses head to blind him. Sneaking away has become his party trick - somehow, he always rolls 20's or 1's.
He's rolled a 1 when attacking a monster emerging from a cave, and then had to run into the cave to retrieve his greataxe.
In his next mission, he hurled a druid at the enemy, who turned into a giant octopus mid-flight. Someone was already riding the enemy (giant spider-creature, the name escapes me) when the octopus landed. they were not impressed.
In the most recent encounter (which had to be left on a cliffhanger over Christmas) a water elemental monster has risen from a canal, and Thoruk was in a boat with the same character who was riding the spider-monster. he jumped to the front, yelled a warcry to get it's attention, then "hup!"ed to the back of the boat, just long enough for Xamphia (the other character) to say "I hate you..." before the elemental slammed down on the boat, launching thoruk into an epic midair attack like a catapult (and launching xamphia into the canal).
fun times... I love being chaotic neutral, AKA comic relief
Sounds like you and your group have gotten into a lot of fun shenanigans. I'm glad your enjoying it so much, it makes me want get moving on some D&D games happening with my new group.
some bloke wrote: I've been playing D&D for just over a month now, and we've had some very amusing scenarios.
My character is called Thoruk the Distracted, a half-orc barbarian who has a vendetta against ducks (his family was killed by a duck, his backstory revealed).
In his first mission, he found a lovely dress in a cupboard in a castle. It didn't fit, but he wears it anyway - Thoruk likes pretty clothes.
In his second mission, he chained 3 natural 20's together when sneaking to disappear from the party as they started to discuss their plan for too long, and managed to slam a cooking pot over the bosses head to blind him. Sneaking away has become his party trick - somehow, he always rolls 20's or 1's.
He's rolled a 1 when attacking a monster emerging from a cave, and then had to run into the cave to retrieve his greataxe.
In his next mission, he hurled a druid at the enemy, who turned into a giant octopus mid-flight. Someone was already riding the enemy (giant spider-creature, the name escapes me) when the octopus landed. they were not impressed.
In the most recent encounter (which had to be left on a cliffhanger over Christmas) a water elemental monster has risen from a canal, and Thoruk was in a boat with the same character who was riding the spider-monster. he jumped to the front, yelled a warcry to get it's attention, then "hup!"ed to the back of the boat, just long enough for Xamphia (the other character) to say "I hate you..." before the elemental slammed down on the boat, launching thoruk into an epic midair attack like a catapult (and launching xamphia into the canal).
fun times... I love being chaotic neutral, AKA comic relief
From my 25 years of playing D&D I gotta say, for a Noob you seems to have a firm grasp on how to play. I approve!
Commodus Leitdorf wrote: From my 25 years of playing D&D I gotta say, for a Noob you seems to have a firm grasp on how to play. I approve!
Thanks! We joined a group at a "try D&D" event, had a great & patient DM, and picked it up pretty swiftly. I still need telling what to do a lot of the time, but so far as making plans and trying to simultaneously ruin & succeed at a plan, I think I'm nailing it
Another one I forgot was, once the boss had been blinded with the pan, he fell in a patch of grease made by a wizard, which then got set fire to, and I decided the best thing was to throw a waterskin at it - like a chip-pan fire. Then the druid thought "create water" would be a good idea for a bigger explosion. Only 2 of 5 adventurers were still conscious after the explosions (thoruk, naturally, somehow dodged it) but the boss was dead!
Commodus Leitdorf wrote: From my 25 years of playing D&D I gotta say, for a Noob you seems to have a firm grasp on how to play. I approve!
Thanks! We joined a group at a "try D&D" event, had a great & patient DM, and picked it up pretty swiftly. I still need telling what to do a lot of the time, but so far as making plans and trying to simultaneously ruin & succeed at a plan, I think I'm nailing it
Another one I forgot was, once the boss had been blinded with the pan, he fell in a patch of grease made by a wizard, which then got set fire to, and I decided the best thing was to throw a waterskin at it - like a chip-pan fire. Then the druid thought "create water" would be a good idea for a bigger explosion. Only 2 of 5 adventurers were still conscious after the explosions (thoruk, naturally, somehow dodged it) but the boss was dead!
Stories like this reminds me of a friend Half-Orc Barbarian he played during 3rd edition. Although I'll admit the results from my group were hardly as successful. Although the time he swam naked across and underground lake to help setup a makeshift bridge to get the rest of the PC's across led to him being attacked by a young Black Dragon. He then proceeded to string a bunch of crits together and killed the dragon almost single-handedly all while being completely naked.
Session 0 yesterday; not so smooth. lessons learned
1. i need to start a scene description with the time, weather, ambient light levels and then start describing what can be seen by the players.
2. i found it quite tricky doing NPC stats on the fly
3. the simple questions from the players are the ones that caught me out
4. 'time' becomes unstable and fluctuates around a D&D session
Session 0 yesterday; not so smooth. lessons learned
1. i need to start a scene description with the time, weather, ambient light levels and then start describing what can be seen by the players.
2. i found it quite tricky doing NPC stats on the fly
3. the simple questions from the players are the ones that caught me out
4. 'time' becomes unstable and fluctuates around a D&D session
1) I saw a thing a long while ago that suggeted to start each "scene" with the five sense.
When you wake the next day you can feel the contrast of the cool dew in the air and the warmth of the sun as shafts of sunlight breach the canopy of the forest. (feel and sight) The air is filled with the smell of the woods surrounding you. (smell) You can hear the chirps of birds waking with the day. (hearing) Despite the long rest the cool refreshing air adds a refreshing taste to your mouth as you start your day. (taste).
You give the players a lot to work with when you give them a simple single element to each sense to build their reactions from.
2) Don't. Get some note cards. Write out generic NPC stats to use. I try to make generic NPC stats and equipment for each of the classes and then add or remove equipment in my head as the situation calls for it. A Bard makes for a excellent merchant. A fighter a town guard. It doesn't matter that you use the same bard stats for 100 different innkeepers, the players will never know that. You just need the numbers to work off of.
3) Improvisation is just something you need to learn with practice. And the more you do it the less you need to plan.
We did a murder mystery 'one-shot' in my group before Christmas and tbh I was a bit disappointed;
1. With three murders we had three murder scenes to go over and multiple suspects to question which meant that we had to go at a breakneck pace to get through the content. As a group that can spend 4 hours roleplaying doing a bit of shopping and finding an inn for the night, this was a bit of a tall order!
2. Spells like 'zone of truth' and 'friendship' meant that using 'the little grey cells' to catch the killer out was not really necessary, you just zapped the right people with the spells and viola!
2) yeah. Dnd sucks for that reason without heavy house rules. Part of the reason i dislike dnd. Detect spells and spells that force things like the truth strip away interesting game play and turn them into toggles. You have the ability and you win or you dont and then you go get the ability.
I think it makes sense if spells like that are not admissable though. Like how is a non-mage to know whether a mage casting some spell on someone isn't just dominating them or something? Can't trust magic, gotta have proper evidence. Magically compelled confessions are worthless.
It does remove the "whodunnit" part of the plot, for sure, but there remains a need for investigation unless the players want to take the law into their own hands (and if they do, fine, let them deal with any consequences).
I also make it illegal to cast spells on people in public in civilised places, it is basically like attacking someone with a sword even if the spell does no damage, because of the danger of mind control or otherwise subtle magic. So players need to be circumspect before they go casting spells like Zone of Truth in a public place.
And I make high level NPC cleric rare, and give them a more limited spell set so they can't just go and ask the local priest to do it (which is the closest I get to "house rules" rather than "logical setting stuff").
But it is true, 5e is full of stuff that can basically be "adventure cancellation". Ranger has the baseline ability to never get lost, which to me takes an entire subsystem out of the game for exploration. That is pretty crazy!
Da Boss wrote: I think it makes sense if spells like that are not admissable though. Like how is a non-mage to know whether a mage casting some spell on someone isn't just dominating them or something? Can't trust magic, gotta have proper evidence. Magically compelled confessions are worthless.
1) It's uninteresting to have have the players themselves have a definitive answer because it means the players themselves are impossible to dupe. The point of the players investigating is for them to have something to solve. When the players can just cast a spell and know that that person did it there is nothing left to solve.
2) It's unfun for the players to have access to a power that basically does nothing.
3) If you can magically compell a person to tell the truth you can magically compel them to lead you to the evidence you need. It's all bad.
It does remove the "whodunnit" part of the plot, for sure, but there remains a need for investigation unless the players want to take the law into their own hands (and if they do, fine, let them deal with any consequences).
I also make it illegal to cast spells on people in public in civilised places, it is basically like attacking someone with a sword even if the spell does no damage, because of the danger of mind control or otherwise subtle magic. So players need to be circumspect before they go casting spells like Zone of Truth in a public place.
Which is all well and good but that just means they do it behind closed doors.
And I make high level NPC cleric rare, and give them a more limited spell set so they can't just go and ask the local priest to do it (which is the closest I get to "house rules" rather than "logical setting stuff").
But it is true, 5e is full of stuff that can basically be "adventure cancellation". Ranger has the baseline ability to never get lost, which to me takes an entire subsystem out of the game for exploration. That is pretty crazy!
Yup. And thats the problem. Special abilities shouldn't shut down or solve entire themes of games. Anything that does is inherently bad for the game.
I'm fairly sure Zone of Truth does state that the target knows they are compelled to tell the truth, and they have the option to simply not speak, so it's not so cut and dried. It also explicitly states that they can offer cryptic truths if they wish, and they are not Charmed so may still try and escape or offer up lies until they fail the save (and being a CHA save, the people you're trying to get the truth from are probably fairly deceptive by nature and thus boast a higher CHA than most). Likewise, they can simply move out of the area, unless the PCs have a way to keep them in place which is an extra hurdle potentially.
That's before you even get into the kind of prep you can do to make it more of a challenge. Have the person with the information hard to even get to in the first place, with anything from a castle wall and a flip-ton of guards to a decoy to some magical means of getaway. Plant leads and red herrings that lead players to g on chasing people who don't have the information they need, or have the opposition tying up loose ends so it becomes a race against time. Hell, if you want to get really fiendish, start playing with things like Modify Memory and Dominate Person so while Suspect A thinks they did the murder and thus will say as much under ZoT, it's actually Suspect B under the charm of Not-Even-A-Suspect X, who is now free to go about their nefarious business while the pesky do-gooders go chasing dead ends and unwitting accomplices. Make your antagonists smart: they likely know these spells exist, and will thus move to counter them in the same way real-world criminals try to foil mundane law enforcement.
And at the end of the day, you still want your players to figure it out. You just want to make it enjoyable and challenging to get there, and I think even with things like ZoT (which requires a cleric in the party, and for them to have it prepared, and to have the spell slots for it which at lower levels isn't guaranteed if they've been in a fight that day) you can set that up. in the same way that your fighters and barbarians can probably take down your boss in a straight-up fight without ruining the entire adventure, the ability for a certain player to determine truth instantly doesn't mean you can't still set up a compelling and intriguing mystery.
Kroem wrote: We did a murder mystery 'one-shot' in my group before Christmas and tbh I was a bit disappointed; 1. With three murders we had three murder scenes to go over and multiple suspects to question which meant that we had to go at a breakneck pace to get through the content. As a group that can spend 4 hours roleplaying doing a bit of shopping and finding an inn for the night, this was a bit of a tall order!
The trick with oneshots is to keep things moving before they really stagnate. In a campaign session, I like nothing more than taking an hour out for everyone to sit and chat round a campfire or figure out where they're going next or learn more about the world (shopping sessions are still something I despise though! ), but when you have limited time to get to an end point, you always need to be ready to throw in the next plot element even if the players are getting bogged down. Say in your big manor house you have an Upstairs Murder and a Downstairs murder, if the players have spent an two hours of your three-hour session meticulously going over every single (largely irrelevant) detail of the former, there's nothing wrong with having one of the kitchen staff pop upstairs and tell them they found a clue in a servant's passage that they ought to come and look at. Not only is this telling the characters something, but it's also sending a hint to the players that the information they need is elsewhere, and that as the time-conscious DM you're wanting to draw their attention to the next area.
Incidentally, that goes for whatever system you're running. I'd posit that DnD may not necessarily be ideal for a murder mystery (though it can work and if it's what people are familiar with, fair enough), so you might have a smoother experience trying another system that places less emphasis on classes/stats as those tend not to be so relevant to the genre. Personally, I have a homebrew system that I use instead of 5e for anything more adventure/investigation than fantasy/questing (that's incredibly rules-light really, as this sort of thing generally ends up being more about player intelligence than character setup anyway), but something like Call of Cthulhu sans the eldritch horror parts might be a good basis to work from as that places a lot more emphasis on mental/technical skillsets than it does physical abilities. There's probably a specific murder mystery RPG out there somewhere, though I can't think of a specific one off the too of my head.
I think it's a problem when you have to write elements of the story around the abilities of the players.
Questions like "What if the guy is hard to get to because he is in a castle and surrounded by guards" is potentially changing the story to negate the players. Saying things like... "well he has an amulet that hides his alignment" is the same. It's a problem that shouldn't need to be addressed to begin with.
It's not changing the story so much as allowing the antagonists a level of agency and intelligence that makes them worthy adversaries. They might not know this specific party is coming for them, but if they're at all intelligent or aware, they know these spells and abilities exist. They know they're going to be opposed. They're going to try and do something about that, whether that's mundane or magical, blatant or subtle. They don't want to be defeated, and they're going to take actions both before and during the events being played out to try and make sure they aren't. The DM has both the right and the responsibility to give them the capacity to be active, intelligent and prepared if it suits them as characters (master criminal is probably better prepared than crazed cult leader, for instance). NPCs, even moreso antagonists, should not be static or immutable. Players shouldn't be the only characters that get to be proactive in achieving their goals.
I am also a big believer that content in any game should, at least to some extent, be tailored to your players, both in terms of specifically challenging them where appropriate and the inverse, giving them the opportunity to make good use of their particular abilities. I feel a game should be set up to give characters (and by extension players) a challenge to engage with, whether that's combat tailored to their prowess, a puzzle or task that makes use of the abilities they have at their disposal or NPCs that are going to come into conflict with their ideals or beliefs. I appreciate that's a lot of work for the DM at times, but personally I can't imagine running identical games for different sets of characters in terms of both challenge and opportunity.
Paradigm wrote: It's not changing the story so much as allowing the antagonists a level of agency and intelligence that makes them worthy adversaries. They might not know this specific party is coming for them, but if they're at all intelligent or aware, they know these spells and abilities exist. They know they're going to be opposed. They're going to try and do something about that, whether that's mundane or magical, blatant or subtle. They don't want to be defeated, and they're going to take actions both before and during the events being played out to try and make sure they aren't. The DM has both the right and the responsibility to give them the capacity to be active, intelligent and prepared if it suits them as characters (master criminal is probably better prepared than crazed cult leader, for instance). NPCs, even moreso antagonists, should not be static or immutable. Players shouldn't be the only characters that get to be proactive in achieving their goals.
Which in turn places a barrier to entry on the world and raises some questions.
How does a evil king get control of a kingdom when people can detect evil? How do you ever get a jafar when you paladins are around? In order for those people to get into positions of power they first have to find items/abilities of power which requires them to have some measure of power to begin with. Nobody in the world can win by virtue of their own ability. It's all magical items and special powers. Once the world runs on the availability of those specific powers you now have a world that has to run on the idea that those specific powers exist. Which in turn eliminates most of the "mundane" stuff that should make up the majority of the world.
Which wouldn't be a problem if those abilities were hyper rare or extremely costly. What if Zone of truth required some incredible sacrifice? Not money. Like.... someone has to give up their sight? THEN the ability exists but it makes sense why it isn't always used. What if in order to detect evil it only worked on individuals, took hours to cast, and required a blood sample of the person you were detecting on? Even then you would imagine that a Kingdom would have every person anywhere near the leader undergoing the ritual by policy.
I am also a big believer that content in any game should, at least to some extent, be tailored to your players, both in terms of specifically challenging them where appropriate and the inverse, giving them the opportunity to make good use of their particular abilities. I feel a game should be set up to give characters (and by extension players) a challenge to engage with, whether that's combat tailored to their prowess, a puzzle or task that makes use of the abilities they have at their disposal or NPCs that are going to come into conflict with their ideals or beliefs. I appreciate that's a lot of work for the DM at times, but personally I can't imagine running identical games for different sets of characters in terms of both challenge and opportunity.
I agree. I just think the existence of THOSE powers inherently shifts the nature of the game in a way that cannot be taken back and ultimately limits the whole scope of the game all so a single player can go "oh cool.".
Oh, yeah, it undoubtedly comes with a ton of baggage in terms of in-world politics and sociology, I just don't think that baggage is necessarily a bad thing. I prefer to think of it as an integral part of the nature of fantasy, dealing with real-world concepts but under a set of rules that operate entirely differently to reality. The way in which a tyrant comes to power, for instance, can still be the same: wealth, guile, populism, the hubris of the establishment, the exploitation of outside events for their own gain. But where in reality one might alter documents or spread propaganda to present a false narrative about the previous power, in fantasy they might instead enlist the help of a powerful wizard to perform a ritual that alters the memory of the entire populace to believe their new tyrant is a benevolent king. Where one might bribe an accomplice, they could instead take complete control of them for weeks at a time. Where one might lead a coup from within the military, they instead strike a bargain with a dragon or a lich or a demon to overpower and dominate those who would resist. The cause and effect remains largely the same, it's simply the means themselves that are more fantastical.
Not to mention that just as in reality, crime, evil and injustice still happens because people invent ways to circumvent the systems that exist to prevent those things, in a fantasy world where spells can read your mind, of course there's a healthy black market in talismans that are going to put false thoughts into your head if anyone tries. The mightiest warriors wield magic swords, so naturally there are alchemists and enchanters trying to make armour that is immune to magic, rendering them glorified baseball bats. Every action has its equal opposite reaction, and that's true whatever universe you're in.
I also think this inherent skewing of the scales lends important context to the arc of would-be heroes over the course of a campaign. You go from the people completely subservient to these principles and realities to people that hold power over them, earning the right to reshape the world and overcome the evil that, when you began, was so immensely overpowering and impossible. While, you might say, such a power curve is inherently abstract and unrealistic (not untrue), it's also a superb basis for the kind of heroic narrative that D&D does best.
Not saying that Zone of Truth is the greatest spell of all time or that I'd sorely miss it if it were gone, but I do think the effects of such things on a fantasy 'reality' is a feature, not a bug.
That healthy black market is directly counter to a world of normal crime. If the barrier to entry for the mafia is they have to buy amulets for every single person in their organization then they go bankrupt before they move any product. Even if they make them in house. .. using dnd rules. 1) make it masterwork (+100 gp in the making of it) + spell cost for protection from detection. What is that 3rd or 4th level spell? What % of the world even has access to those spells? Lets say the organization is 20 people.. thats at least a month of a wizard working non stop producing what is probably tens of thousands of gold worth of amulets just so some paladin doesn't kick down your door and kill everyone because somebody pinged on his detect evil radar.
In 3rd where creating magic items cost exp... well... now that wizard is fethed for doing his job.
DnD should have a heroic narrative. But that narrative carries over better when it's done on the back of the characters hard work and good decisions. Not because they gained an ability that they can use several times a day to fix all problems for them.
I think anyone thinking Zone of Truth is some sort of truth serum might need to reread the spell. It doesn't force you to answer, nor does it force you to tell 100% of the truth. Turning Zone of Truth on its head with half truths and misdirection is the easiest way to make players (or world systems) that rely on it fall prey to their own spell. The spell even says that lies of omission, probably the strongest type of lie, are perfectly within the bounds of anyone under the spell's influence.
Also in 5e, detect evil doesn't actually detect "Evil" alignments. It detects "an aberration, celestial, elemental, few, fiend, or undead" or "a place or object" that "has been magically consecrated or desecrated". So a power hungry money grubbing a-hole of a duke is perfectly immune to the spell. BUT it will detect all sorts of (possibly "good" aligned) creatures, like an angel or even a powerful fey creature.
5e made alignment an optional system. It removed almost all of the functions of the alignment system from powers and abilities available to the players, and shifted those to creature types that would be common foils to the player. Even then, the game put basic counters within the spells themselves in the form of either materials that block them (often awkward) or through either magical or innate counters (such as numerous creatures who are immune to magical scrying entirely).
I won't excuse 3.pf. I am glad that system is behind me, and would be hesitant to play it ever again. I have already told my group I will never run it ever again.
Lance845 also raises what I feel is a world design question: how often do people with those powers show up in the world in general? In my worlds? Very, very rarely outside of player characters. And since player characters can't be everywhere at once, it makes it easy for a warlord with an army to show up and claim territory simply because he has the might to do it. Even for those few that do have those powers, there are a plethora of reason they may not be willing and/or able to use them. As an example, the Forgotten Realms are a huge place, and Elminster is just one (admittedly absurdly powerful) man. Even with the other absurdly powerful characters in the Forgotten Realms, remember that for every absurdly powerful hero, there is a countering absurdly powerful villain just waiting for a single moment of weakness or distraction. "Why isn't Elminster helping us protect this city?" "Because he's busy keeping Orcus/Xanathar/Ashardalon/whatever from doing something even worse somewhere else."
As to system issues, I've yet to see a rule set with a magic system that doesn't suffer from this general issue. Magic usually breaks the laws of the world, and that can range from "we can't ever threaten this wizard because of all his permanent contingencies" of 3.pf, to "Mages are almost literally gods" from Mage the Awakening. Conversely, it might be something so minor it's basically "we just don't want healing to take actual in-game months every time".
Yes. 5th changed the detacts to work on a more focused scale that still has the same problems.
A Doppleganger is found out immediately by detect. As would be a Vampire. And any other thing that would be manipulating and using subterfuge. Even the spell detect magic means if anyone had a "amulet" to protect them from detection they would just end up with a glowing bit around their neck.
Hard counters like creatures that are immune goes back to a world where the DM crafts an encounter to counter the players abilities.
See, I am glad you mentioned Mage the Awakening and it's related titles. Magic in that can litterally do anything. But it has the biggest draw back of all. You literally might just be written out of existence for throwing a fireball. Paradox is a very real problem.
Either 1) Magic has to have incredible penalties to prevent it's careless use or 2) what it's inherently capable of must be limited in scope.
What if a cure poison/disease doesn't automatically cure poisons and diseases but instead fortifies the player for their next save to fight it off? Not a flat out "I cast and so it's gone" but I cast and we hope for the best. Particularly strong aliments are still strong in those cases and magic to help is ONLY magic to help.
Detects shouldn't give you information. They should allow notice/search/whatever checks to be used to potentially find information.
A spell slot expended for the opportunity to do more than you normally could is better than a spell slot expended that just toggles the answer on because it allows not just for failure but degrees of success.
Add in restrictive material components or the like and you have a very functional system where magic is a advantageous tool while not stripping the world of it's mysteries and problems.
Lance845 wrote: Yes. 5th changed the detacts to work on a more focused scale that still has the same problems.
A Doppleganger is found out immediately by detect. As would be a Vampire. And any other thing that would be manipulating and using subterfuge. Even the spell detect magic means if anyone had a "amulet" to protect them from detection they would just end up with a glowing bit around their neck.
Hard counters like creatures that are immune goes back to a world where the DM crafts an encounter to counter the players abilities.
See, I am glad you mentioned Mage the Awakening and it's related titles. Magic in that can litterally do anything. But it has the biggest draw back of all. You literally might just be written out of existence for throwing a fireball. Paradox is a very real problem.
Either 1) Magic has to have incredible penalties to prevent it's careless use or 2) what it's inherently capable of must be limited in scope.
What if a cure poison/disease doesn't automatically cure poisons and diseases but instead fortifies the player for their next save to fight it off? Not a flat out "I cast and so it's gone" but I cast and we hope for the best. Particularly strong aliments are still strong in those cases and magic to help is ONLY magic to help.
Detects shouldn't give you information. They should allow notice/search/whatever checks to be used to potentially find information.
A spell slot expended for the opportunity to do more than you normally could is better than a spell slot expended that just toggles the answer on because it allows not just for failure but degrees of success.
Add in restrictive material components or the like and you have a very functional system where magic is a advantageous tool while not stripping the world of it's mysteries and problems.
A Doppleganger is fine, it's not a fiend, fey, undead, etc. It's just a monstrosity, which isn't on the list. If your vampire is directly manipulating things instead of just charming someone or whatever, then that's on you the GM for putting them there in the first place. Any creature smart enough to manipulate an entire nation should be reasonably smart enough to do it from actual shadows or whatever. You're looking at problems that basically don't have to exist in actual game play and saying they're system breaking. They're not. I have a game set in Ravnica, where magic is super prevalent, and Detect spells and abilities have yet to be an actual in game issue. Even in a low magic setting, so you can see the king has an amulet around his neck. Good for you, so what? There's a ton of reasons for a powerful ruler to have powerful magics protecting him, the first and foremost being that he's a king.
"What if cure poison doesn't automatically work?" So.. what? You prefer players have a chance to simply waste resources for no actual gain? I mean, there are plenty of gritty realism rule sets, and even gritty realism optional rules for 5e. Go wild. I'd never play them, but you do you. Not having them doesn't make a system bad. "Detect shouldn't give you information", I really think your overestimating what they do, and underestimating the limitations on those spells and abilities. There are four, FOUR whole "detect" spells in 5e: Detect Evil and Good (which should really be "Detect Outsiders" or something), Detect Magic, Detect Poison and Disease and Detect Thoughts (mind reading). There are only a handful of other Detect abilities, the chief among them being a Paladin's Divine Sense (a weaker version of Detect Evil and Good) and the Grave Cleric's Death Sense (again, a weaker version of Detect Evil and Good).
Detect Magic: presence of magic within 30', spend an action to get its school. That's it. It doesn't tell you what the spell is (you would seem to be in favor of an Arcana check or something to determine that?), doesn't tell you the effect, the source [caster I mean, obviously a magic item would show itself], doesn't tell you anything else. It's countered by two separate spells (not including Anti-Magic Aura or anything blanket countering magic): Magical Aura and Nondetection.
Detect Evil and Good: we've been over this one. Presence of certain creatures (most extra planar and undead), again within 30'. Same material blocks as Detect Magic. Doesn't tell you who specifically, or what type they are, just that they are one of those things. Again, countered by Nondetection, as well as plenty of clever opponents. Did you know familiars are Fey?
Detect Poison and Disease: Funnily enough, the most specific of the Detect spells, since it specifically tells you the kind of poison, poisonous creature or disease (again, within 30' and the same material blockages). I have, as far as I can recall, never seen this spell cast because of how specific its target is. Again, Nondetection would block this spell.
Detect Thoughts: The most insidious of the Detect Spells. If used for more than just surface thoughts, it specifically lets the person know they are being targeted. Most people don't realize it lets you search for a thinking mind (again, within 30' and slightly reduced material blockages). Also blocked by Nondetection, Mind Blank, and a collection of other monster abilities and spells. There's also some monkeys in the details of use, including your caster pulling out spell components, and performing specific verbal and somatic components: remember that these are usually noticeable and may even be seen as offensive to the target. Sure, you can read their surface thoughts: they're all about telling you to copulate with yourself. Edit: also worth noting that unlike the previous three, the duration on this spell is 1 minute. You can get a lot of pointless small talk done in one minute.
I dunno, again, I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill here. I realize the issue extends to more than just Detect spells (since you mention Cure Poison/Disease which is just ... okay?). I'm a huge fan of the "regular dude with a sword" archetype so magic isn't even really my thing in D&D, which made 3.pf a very, very painful era indeed. I mean, my favorite archetype was basically nonviable by level 5.
Dopplegangers constantly change what they are classified as. They have been Fey and Aberrants before.
Either way, it's more of a general game design philosophy point I am making. As you say, the issue is more than detect spells. It's anything that toggles on and off situations like that. It's inherently more interesting to not be able to do that and so it's bad design to create abilities and powers that close off interesting possibilities instead of opening them up.
Poison and disease serve no mechanical purpose except to eat up spell slots (if the party has access to those spells) when the spell instantly does what it says on the tin. But as I pointed out, if instead it provided a bonus to the save for a person to over come it then poison still has impact in the short term and disease can still have an impact in the long term which makes those more interesting tools for the game.
It was fun, my old D&D group had a reunion while I'm back states side and we tried to pickup with the "Impregnable Fortress of Dib" Where we left off back in May/June. It was a lot of fun seeing them. They burned the fortress to the ground with flaming arrows, then carefully approached through the underground tunnel avoiding the trap.
Hey everyone, cheers for the suggestions Lance845.
i continued to wing it for NPC stats; i'm comfortable doing it now and it's nice not caring so much about the throw-away characters.
The 'every stat at 10' approach is fine but giving each npc two stats below 8 (1D8) so the players got the feeling that average folk are a little bit useless, which seemed to go down well.
I made an NPC with 1 INT and 1 WIS. He doesn't 'get' much, can't tell halflings from human children and tends to give away his lunch money to the less fortunate.
The 5 senses thing was quite useful - it was a great way of getting out of a boring description "i check the corridor" "you look down the stone corridor; it smells of musk and damp - the roof is dripping occasionally and the floor is slightly slippy from the slime that lives off the moisture"
Best advice i heard so far about dealing with player questions is "learn your players, not the rules"
I'd like to report considerable success on dealing with players character sheets - tell them they are wholly responsible for their own sheets and the upkeep thereof; you just print off a copy at the start of each session to work with - nobody complained so far and it lets you think exclusively about the setting and plot.
How has everybody else found soundscape programs?
i ask because i have been using 'tabletopaudio's 'soundpad' html extension but i'd like to see what programs others have found and use to provide background noise and other sound effects.
I have never used any audio aids besides putting on a speaker with a generic playlist. Maybe something like celtic folk or some gak. But even that i jave done rarely.
I've never used any music or sound effects. I've been tempted, but there is already so much to set up and prepare beforehand that I don't prepare any, and during the game there is way too much going on to be the dungeon DJ as far as I'm concerned. My players are typically riveted the whole session without any music so I'd say don't feel obligated to do any, but if it's something you enjoy and think adds to the game then go for it.
We actually have a player run all the music and sound effects in our group, another does minis, and another does hand-outs/accessories once the DM reveals stuff.
One of the guys who used to DM for us is brilliant at putting together soundtracks and themes for his villains. I am not into enough different music to do as good a job as him.
I had a chat with my group about music and i showed them this thread (they liked your reuinion session board Syro_!)
They didn't object to a player fixing the audio but i got the feel they wanted to focus on charaters, inventory and plot so i'm going to persevere and try to work something out with this soundboard thing. Maybe some generic audio files for generic interior spaces like caves?
I don't think doing dedicated sound effects (doors opening and closing, footsteps, weapon clashes) is really do-able as a lone DM from a 'number of things i have to remember' perspective and it's starting to feel a little like 'setting the scene' with the audio is effectively introducing a loading screen into D&D
My biggest issue is probably the loading screen you mention coupled with the fluid nature of the game. In order for the music to work 1) you have to kind of prepare a playlist for the tone of the things you want to happen. 2) Then the players have to actually do all those things while having the tone you want to fit the music you picked.
Yeah the music might help keep them on track tonally. But i have rarely not had the plays go off and do things incredibly unexpected. At which point i would have no music qued up for what they are doing. It seems a logistical nightmare, which at this point im philisophically opposed to doing in my dm prep.
It's pretty worthwhile and simple enough to set up generic playlists that can really be used to cover 90% of what's likely to come up in any given session, rather than prepping specific music for each game. It helps to think in terms of escalation; if you gave something for ambience, tension, action then either despair or victory, you've covered the typical course of a session with music that will suit the descent into a dungeon and the resulting glorious return but can also cover the sudden attack on a city that ends with a beloved character falling in the escape.
From there, you can build more specific stuff at your leisure, if you want, say, tavern music or for a city or villain to have their own 'themes', but by creating the basic pool of tracks and playlists, you don't need to worry about soundtracking everything, every game, and to my mind at least it s more than worth it for the difference it makes at the table. And in game, it's no more complex than clicking from one playlist to another as the tone changes.
As for sound effects... I mean, I'm not DMing to not make fireball/sword/screaming/monster noises...
Lance845 wrote: But i have rarely not had the plays go off and do things incredibly unexpected. At which point i would have no music qued up for what they are doing.
Yeah, i think you put your finger on the crux of the problem there - and it's not like the phrase "expect the unexpected" can really help!
Paradigm wrote:It's pretty worthwhile and simple enough to set up generic playlists that can really be used to cover 90% of what's likely to come up in any given session, rather than prepping specific music for each game. It helps to think in terms of escalation; if you gave something for ambience, tension, action then either despair or victory, you've covered the typical course of a session with music that will suit the descent into a dungeon and the resulting glorious return but can also cover the sudden attack on a city that ends with a beloved character falling in the escape.
From there, you can build more specific stuff at your leisure, if you want, say, tavern music or for a city or villain to have their own 'themes', but by creating the basic pool of tracks and playlists, you don't need to worry about soundtracking everything, every game, and to my mind at least it
s more than worth it for the difference it makes at the table. And in game, it's no more complex than clicking from one playlist to another as the tone changes.
As for sound effects... I mean, I'm not DMing to not make fireball/sword/screaming/monster noises...
Okay, i'm trying to get a list going of all the types of places a player might visit in a d&d game that would have a distinct aural difference - suggestions welcome!
Tavern
market
blacksmith
barracks
countryside
wet cave
dry cave
rainy street
pitched battle
skirmish encounter
large monster combat
church/cathedral/temple
I feel like a really shoddy emulator - even when running 'properly' the audio drivers cause the game to lag and interrupt the dialogue; i suppose i should be grateful the system doesn't just crash..
I sometimes use a sound effects app I have on my phone if I remember to use it (Which can be a problem). Or if a scene is going to be n a place for awhile.
Background noise in a busy tavern, or water dripping in a cave can help ambiance, but not something that is strictly necessary.
I don't know how far people have gone before in derailing a plot, but I think that Thoruk the barbarian went as far as could possibly be gone...
We were charged with clearing kobolds out of a dwarfs home, and set about it with gusto. Thoruk went into a rage, and as I was quite thickly roleplaying, I paid no attention to the map, nor to where I was going - Thoruk picked doors at random, kicked them down and flew in swinging his dragonsword at anything that moved. It worked well for the first couple of rooms, and lots of kobolds got deaded. Then he kicked in a door, and the DM said "You find yourself in an empty room". I said "I attack whatever happens to be closest". Raging barbarian on the rampage, and all that. He then says (and everyone in the group starts to get concerned at this point) that I walk up to what appears to be an alter, and swing my sword down onto it. I roll a 19, totalling 25 to hit - and people start to panic more. the DM then asks me to make a strength saving throw - to see if I get thrown across the room, ALA Gimli in LOTR. I roll a nat 20. The DM wasn't expecting that, and Thoruk "Out-stubborns" the alter, and it cracks in half. At this point, Thoruk is subjected to a deluge of "What have you done???"'s from the rest of the group. He replies simply that he killed it. The wizards in the group are detecting a great swirl of magic coming from the broken alter, and just be fore Thoruks next turn, the ghostly apparation of an elderly dwarven matron appears by the alter. Thoruk continues his rampage, but by now the kobolds are fleeing, he doesn't attack, and his rage wears off. All the other players are running out of the place now, turning invisible and trying very hard to not be killed by a dwarven goddess - who had been identified as the dwarven goddess of healing and homely protection by one of the religeous-types in the group. She walks up to thoruk, and thoruk turns to her, sees she has a beard, and says "Stay back, sir, there could be more of them!" before raging again, and kicking down another door. Kobolds flee before him (or possible the goddess, following him), and one of the few players who stayed inside cast a restraint spell so he can't move out of 30ft of her. The goddess asks "Are you quite finished". The DM is putting on a "I am so angry, I have to talk very softly to not scream at you" Kind of voice. The table is hushed. She asks "Would you like to explain to me why you decided to come into this house and destroy my alter?".
I reply, in character as thoruk, simply acting confused about the question:
"We were... paid to come in here and kill everything. And I did come in here, and I killed everything. I went into that room, and there was this thing, so I killed it, like the dwarves asked me to."
DM: Make a deception roll.
Me: But I believe that's the truth!
DM: Make a persuasion roll.
Dice: 20.
So at this point,. I have convinced the goddess of protection that the dwarves had paid me to smash her alter. She decides to stop talking to thoruk and talk to someone else, who explains that thoruk is very stupid and doesn't represent them. She asks thoruk to come through and have a look at her alter. A close look. Thoruk leans in, and comments that it looks like someone broke it. The goddess grabs him by the hair and slams his head repeatedly into the alter, which it transpires is an alter of healing, so thoruks nose breaks and heals with every blow. His blood flows into the cracks, and the alter repairs with it. He staggers back, has a look at it, and declares that he has fixed it. Then the goddess casts sleep on him, and he obligingly falls over. Then the goddess tells the 2 PC's who were left inside that they should keep an eye on him.
Thoruks backstory is that he is an accidental dimension-hopper, turning up almost anywhere, at any time, not noticing that he has travelled at all, and trying to help. He is my go-to drop-in character, so this suits him well. We also had my Partners character, xanphia, who we decided was bound to follow thoruk and try to keep him from getting hurt.
Essentially, Thoruk derailed a side-quest so badly that he awakened a goddess and turned the whole plot into his own backstory, of how Xanphia (and a guard) were magically bound to watch over and protect people from Thoruk.
It was supposed to be a simple, go in and kill things, then get paid, kinda job. A side mission on the way to the main one. Then Thoruk happened.
Contemplating renaming Thoruk the Distracted Duck-Slayer to Thoruk the Derailer.
Wow, that's quite a chain of events At least from your recap, I feel liek your DM did a surprisingly good job of rolling with everything.
Also, I like the idea of renaming him "the derailer"
Brian D. Goldner, Chairman of the Board and CEO at Hasbro took part in the company's Quarter 4 2019 earnings call. This included several references to D&D.
D&D grew again for the sixth year in a row.
Streaming D&D content was up nearly 50% on last year.
Substantial new (digital) gaming plans for D&D will be revealed on February 21st at Hasbro's Analyst Day
Total games category grew by 6%, as D&D, MtG, and Monopoly bolstered declines elsewhere.
Profit declined due to digital D&D and M:tG digital games investment.
"Well, good morning, and we did see very strong growth for Magic: The Gathering and increased growth for Dungeons & Dragons. "
"Magic: The Gathering revenues increased more than 30% in the year, behind double-digit growth in tabletop play and a strong first year for Magic: The Gathering Arena. Dungeons & Dragons revenues grew for the sixth straight year, and we are meaningfully investing in both brands to drive engaging storytelling, while developing new digital games with high margin profitable growth longer term. We look forward to sharing our 2020 new gaming plans for Magic and D&D on February 21. MONOPOLY had double-digit revenue growth and grew in each region with new themes and relevant entertainment tie-ins. We advanced our consumer products licensing business growing revenues double digits and expanding operating profit margin. We've broadened our licensed brand portfolio and expanded our reach with original live events that drive consumer engagement."
"In addition, for D&D, we did see our sixth straight year of growth. We are seeing about 150 million hours of content viewed on Twitch and YouTube, which is up nearly 50% year-on-year. In the first half of 2020, we are seeing a lot of new initiatives coming for the brand, but again I'm going to let Chris walk us through at at our Analyst Day, our plans for digital gaming, which are again substantial for D&D that begins in 2020."
"You'll also see great digital game development for D&D. And we will see you on February 21 to outline that."
"Our total games category grew 6% for the year, fueled by growth in Magic: The Gathering and MONOPOLY. Higher revenues from Dungeons & Dragons and several classic games titles did not offset declines in our Hasbro Gaming portfolio"
"Adjusted operating profit and profit margin declined as we invest in digital gaming initiatives including Magic: The Gathering Arena and future Magic and Dungeons & Dragons digital games."
"We delivered compelling gaming experiences, led by the work of our teams at Wizards of the Coast. Our positive results to date have us on plan to double Wizards of the Coast coast revenues over five years from 2018 to 2023."
You can read the full transcript at The Motley Fool.
WotC acquired Tuque, a video games company last year which is working on a brand new D&D video game called D&D: Dark Alliance.
There is also, of course, Baldur's Gate 3 coming soon.
Archetype Entertainment is WotC own new video game studio headed by ex-Bioware staff.
Restarted my student campaign at level 1 to let some newbies join.
Running Ptolus with Dungeon of the Mad Mage standing in for Ghul's Labyrinth. Players went down the Yawning Portal entrance, and snuck around the first entrance.
First game, first combat, first attack, player death.
Bard steps forward to cast dissonant whispers. Hurts bugbear. Bugbear moves forward, hits, rolls max damage of 18. Player HP 8.
The group then went on to find the teleporter down to level 10. I have taken the level restrictions off the level connectors, because I want them to be able to get in over their heads. They promptly did.
I'm now starting to arrange my own campaign, and have a plethora of different plots lined up for use in no particular order.
One of the missions I have planned is an ever-changing labyrinth (I know, unique or what?) in which there are traps and monsters and the like.
I plan on running it like so:
1: The players meet a friendly artificer, who is working on a safe way through the labyrinth. He gives you a sending stone, so he can talk to you, and shows you a map he has made. It is blank, except for the perimeter of the maze and 2 ink blots. He explains that one of those blots is the sending stone he gave you, and the other is the goal in the maze (the maze is like a gateway, and he's managed to get a stone to the other side). He explains that he can guide you through the maze, and make sure you're still going in the right direction.
The maze itself will be a set of mini cards, drawn each time they find a new section by opening a door or turning a corner, and slotted together behind the DM screen. anything more than 5 rooms away is reshuffled into the deck. The cards will detail any challenges in these rooms. If a room had a challenge which was cleared, I will have a random table to roll on to stop it from being repetitive.
I, as the DM, will play the artificer and advise on their direction. I will have a map on graph paper, showing their start, end and current location. They might get lucky, and their first cards will take them directly to the exit, but I doubt it!
I thought this a good way to avoid the mindless blundering of a maze, and to keep a feeling of progress without a certainty of success. What do you guys think?
I reckon that could work well, though I would be sure to give the Artificer some sort of flaw that made them seem less reliable, to make them less of the "voice of god" and more the voice of a flawed person in the game world, so the players still have to filter what they hear through what they understand as the Artificers perspective and make decisions.
I like the idea of a "maze deck" with encounters and traps on it. I might give it a go!
Millenials have it easy these days becoming great heros. Back in the day, I'm talking D&D BECMI, you had to put your time in. There was none of this reaching 100th level computer game stuff after a few months. They used to talk about kids suiciding from D&D back then. In Becmi system the greater risk was dying of old age between levels. So you killed 6 liches and 10 undead dragons in the campaign and got all their gold ? Nice work son, that means you progress.........1/50th the way to next level.
BECMI? LMFAO! BECMI was for the brain damaged sorts who couldn't figure out how to open a ziploc bag. Try the 3 LBBs. Now that was real D&D.
Git on my level, bro.
------------------------------
I started DMing a Holmes basic campaign of all things. Running the party through "In Search of the Unknown." Highly entertaining. The party finally found the fabled room of pools, and didn't do anything foolish. I was impressed. Previous session they decided to stand their ground against some slowly, emphasize slowly, approaching Zombies -- wandering monsters. The Zombies outnumbered them too. Yet they stood. Only lost one party member before they realized they needed to not do dumb things like fight wandering monsters, especially in melee, if they can get away instead.
I think you are describing American players there. We didn't have ziploc bags back then, and BECMI for the record, had it used ziploc bags, would have required killing at least 10 nuckalavee, 3 displacer beasts, the great dragon and 6 elementals before reaching the level to open said ziploc bag. Its possible you are missing the parody in both my posts btw ;D
Oh yeah? Well, I started in 4th ed. where even a combat encounter against 2 goblins would last 3 hours. So we were the real brain-damaged sorts who couldn't open Ziploc bags!
Has anyone had any experience running futuristic D&D campaigns?
I have a plan for a campaign series in which the party will move to a place where time was accelerated, but there is no magic. They will be able to cast their own spells, but no-one else has magic. The isolation of this place meant that the magic became a finite resource, which at this point has been converted to technology.
The main enemy will be a military organisation, with futuristic weapons. I want to give them a different flavour, rather than re-skinning a crossbow.
found this cool site:
https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Category:Futuristic which has a huge list of weapons. Just looking for any advice people have on this twist of d&d.
Sci Fi in Dungeons and Dragons has been a part of the setting since very near the beginning - stuff like robots are in the game from almost the very start. Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is the classic adventure in this style.
Your idea sounds interesting. Different from how most of these classic incorporations of sci fi into Dungeons and Dragons were done though. The usual trope is that the sci fi elements were part of the distant past, and some great apocalypse happened to wipe the knowledge from history. Civilisation has risen again, but only to the point of medieval technology.
In this idea, some magic items are actually just ancient technology. The Wilderlands of High Fantasy is arguably the first setting produced for dungeons and dragons and this is the basic premise of that setting, you can find things like antigrav vehicles and so on that are described as magic items.
Da Boss wrote: Sci Fi in Dungeons and Dragons has been a part of the setting since very near the beginning - stuff like robots are in the game from almost the very start. Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is the classic adventure in this style.
Your idea sounds interesting. Different from how most of these classic incorporations of sci fi into Dungeons and Dragons were done though. The usual trope is that the sci fi elements were part of the distant past, and some great apocalypse happened to wipe the knowledge from history. Civilisation has risen again, but only to the point of medieval technology.
In this idea, some magic items are actually just ancient technology. The Wilderlands of High Fantasy is arguably the first setting produced for dungeons and dragons and this is the basic premise of that setting, you can find things like antigrav vehicles and so on that are described as magic items.
I recently had a backwards-idea for the whole "A lost civilization of great power" thing. Rough summary, some people from the modern era seek atlantis, for it has lost technology of great power. They find atlantis, and the atlantian scientists show them their "superweapons"; "Behold; a musket!".
Back on topic; Don't read this if you think you'll be playing in my campaign!
Spoiler:
the gist of my tale is that there is a kingdom which has been shrunk, and in doing so the time of the kingdom sped up. This was 2000 years or so previous, meaning the kingdom has experienced 20,000 years of development. So the players go there (and are shrunk en route) to find that they are in a magic-free land where people just use guns, IE our reality, but futuristic. Their arrival might be deemed the returning of the gods, as they will wield god-like powers (behold, a floating light!), and the current powers will see them as champions to an oppressed populace and seek to destroy them, causing them to have to perform raids and such to overthrow the powers and escape the tiny kingdom. Or, they might decide to become super villains. It's kind of up to them, really. Either way, the only way out of the kingdom is through a ate controlled by these corrupt powers, so they will have to find a way through.
Magic will have been mined there to make the weapons - as a result, any magic-users who get hold of a gun will find it overcharges and is good for a few, very powerful shots before burning out. Long rests will restore half their spell slots, as there is little magic around to draw upon. These two should balance out - a barbarian is unaffected and can fire a gun normally, whilst a wizard might run out of spell slots but the guns will work really well for him.
Their primary goal in going to this kingdom was to deliver a load of crystals which contain the magic of the land from outside. The crystals are to restore magic so the people can fight back against the powers. These crystals will allow them to get all their slots back if they rest back at the "safe house" where they are being stored. I'm still fleshing out the exact plot-lines for it, but that's the gist of it. I don't want to try and plan too far ahead in case it all derails too much.
"The talented performers from Critical Role, virtual tabletop platform Roll20, and Dungeons & Dragons publishers Wizards of the Coast have released a free pen-and-paper adventure online. The excerpt from Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount is available now for those stuck at home during the coronavirus outbreak.
“Roll20’s mission has always been to unite gamers across any distance, and we’re working hard at continuing that pursuit as we see the world’s need to move their gaming gatherings online,” said Nolan T. Jones, managing partner of Roll20. “Critical Role has united and created millions of Dungeons & Dragons fans around the world, and we’re excited to offer their new playable adventures so gamers can continue expanding their hobby.”"
Lance845 wrote: But i have rarely not had the plays go off and do things incredibly unexpected. At which point i would have no music qued up for what they are doing.
Yeah, i think you put your finger on the crux of the problem there - and it's not like the phrase "expect the unexpected" can really help!
Paradigm wrote:It's pretty worthwhile and simple enough to set up generic playlists that can really be used to cover 90% of what's likely to come up in any given session, rather than prepping specific music for each game. It helps to think in terms of escalation; if you gave something for ambience, tension, action then either despair or victory, you've covered the typical course of a session with music that will suit the descent into a dungeon and the resulting glorious return but can also cover the sudden attack on a city that ends with a beloved character falling in the escape.
From there, you can build more specific stuff at your leisure, if you want, say, tavern music or for a city or villain to have their own 'themes', but by creating the basic pool of tracks and playlists, you don't need to worry about soundtracking everything, every game, and to my mind at least it
s more than worth it for the difference it makes at the table. And in game, it's no more complex than clicking from one playlist to another as the tone changes.
As for sound effects... I mean, I'm not DMing to not make fireball/sword/screaming/monster noises...
Okay, i'm trying to get a list going of all the types of places a player might visit in a d&d game that would have a distinct aural difference - suggestions welcome!
Tavern
market
blacksmith
barracks
countryside
wet cave
dry cave
rainy street
pitched battle
skirmish encounter
large monster combat
church/cathedral/temple
I feel like a really shoddy emulator - even when running 'properly' the audio drivers cause the game to lag and interrupt the dialogue; i suppose i should be grateful the system doesn't just crash..
We tend to just cue it to the emotion of the scene. I've got solid 10-15 minute tracks (generally lifted from movie soundtracks) for
tension
light combat
intense combat
cooldown (calm music, often with rain or ambient sounds, for when combat is over or the party takes a rest)
sadness
If there's really nothing much going on, you don't need music. I've always been annoyed by when the DM queues up "Tavern Murmuring" or "Loud bustling market" sounds for a long session. And oh god save me from 1 hour of Cultists Chanting.
@balmng7: Yeah the DnD Beyond stuff is not useful. Enjoy the PDFs I finally signed up for the DMsGuild because of this event, and along with the Free WotC stuff, i ended up spending 3 days finding and downloading around 600 free adventures from DMsGuild
We tend to just cue it to the emotion of the scene. I've got solid 10-15 minute tracks (generally lifted from movie soundtracks) for
tension
light combat
intense combat
cooldown (calm music, often with rain or ambient sounds, for when combat is over or the party takes a rest)
sadness
If there's really nothing much going on, you don't need music. I've always been annoyed by when the DM queues up "Tavern Murmuring" or "Loud bustling market" sounds for a long session. And oh god save me from 1 hour of Cultists Chanting.
The lockdown/remote play thing has killed audio a bit for my group.
i think you hit the nail on the head with your last comment - too much soundstage is audio noise at a certain point. less is more i suppose?
It's a shame; i liked creating an ambience with quiet music when doing IRL sessions.
Syro_ wrote: @balmng7: Yeah the DnD Beyond stuff is not useful. Enjoy the PDFs I finally signed up for the DMsGuild because of this event, and along with the Free WotC stuff, i ended up spending 3 days finding and downloading around 600 free adventures from DMsGuild
Sorry, 600?!? Is this a temporary thing, or have they always been free?
We tend to just cue it to the emotion of the scene. I've got solid 10-15 minute tracks (generally lifted from movie soundtracks) for
tension
light combat
intense combat
cooldown (calm music, often with rain or ambient sounds, for when combat is over or the party takes a rest)
sadness
If there's really nothing much going on, you don't need music. I've always been annoyed by when the DM queues up "Tavern Murmuring" or "Loud bustling market" sounds for a long session. And oh god save me from 1 hour of Cultists Chanting.
The lockdown/remote play thing has killed audio a bit for my group.
i think you hit the nail on the head with your last comment - too much soundstage is audio noise at a certain point. less is more i suppose?
It's a shame; i liked creating an ambience with quiet music when doing IRL sessions.
roll20 has a handy audio integration thing I like. When you go to a certain map, you can have it play a certain track on loop automatically. Very handy for me
Sorry, 600?!? Is this a temporary thing, or have they always been free?
It might be a little less, I just selected how many files I had downloaded from DMsGuild, and some are just maps going to other adventures. But if you do a search for all the free and pay what you want adventures, they should all still be there. I don't think it's temporary like the free Wizards of the Coast stuff.
Hey everyone!
It's been doom and gloom IRL but i wanted to brag a little about my last session - i presume thats okay in limited quantity... ....?
I brought a new player into the sessions at the request of one of the other players; and it worked out good!
New player had fun as a trickster cleric stealing a boat with the party rogue, the other two party members had a half-ogre encounter on a beach and they all met back up after casting a fireball upwards at night and then sailing off into the dark in search of adventure...
One of the players told me afterwards that it was the best session he'd had this campain and i'm well pleased i managed to do that it in an online session.
[/bragging]
I also found out that 'Xanathars Guide to Everything' uses 'Volos Guide to Monsters' in its encounter tables, not just the Monster Manual so thats one to watch out for if any other dakkanaughts are grabbing a copy of XGtE
Just had it pointed out to me that i have that wrong and the 'half-ogre' profile is listed within the 'ogre' entry in the Monster manual and isn't listed on the contents page.
In a fit of shame i went through Xanathars Guide to Everything with the Monster Manual and would like to correct the bit of the record i messed up - Xanathars Guide to Everything only uses the Monster Manual for its random encounter tables.
i was so used to the mixed-race character creation giving a separate entry for half-elf and half-orc that i did't clock the mixed-race monsters getting subheadings within main monster profiles
In my defense, the demi-lich and lich have separate profiles
I've got a quick question for everyone: I'm about to run another little campaign and I'm looking for a monster. It's going to be very gothic horror and what I want is some kind of creature that will creep into their room in the Inn and cut a PC for 1HP. And thus have their blood. I'd then like them to have an encounter later on when they are travelling where they come across someone covered in these cuts who has gone insane and runs off and is audibly killed. I'll run it so that either if they go after it they can try to kill it while it's feasting or it will hunt them down again later on.
I've been steadily trawling through the monster manual to find something but I was wondering if someone here knew of something that would fit the bill?
Edit: sorry for a bit of threadnomancy I had thought this was ongoing.
I think you are looking for a monster the dm made up him/herself.
I would say a form of undead or demon are your best bet. Or a demon possessing a corpse.
A type of vampire or ghoul is generally a good bet for the blood letting. You will need to come up with the motivations for this thing and why it might have singled out the players to be followed.
Alternatively, if they're fairly low level, a Redcap might be a good shout if you want something a bit more obscure and unpredictable. They are a perfect example of how Fey can be just as horrific as your more overtly evil types of entity. Pretty nasty fight for a low level party too, especially with the environment on its side and some expanded action options. https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Redcap
The very creepy need to keep their red hats soaked in blood to even exist gives you a tie to the small and persistent cuts, and while they're described as murderers with little restraint, this one could easily take its victims as long-term investments rather than quickly sating a bloodlust, Perhaps in a more desolate area such kills would quickly leave it with no prey at all, or perhaps it's sharing with other Redcaps, each of them agreeing not to kill outright to preserve the 'cattle'.
This is an ongoing thread. I suspect the lulls are due to the current situation. I know I haven't had a game since March.
It's a Warlock that needs the blood of strangers for its rituals. Of course the strangers are eventually overtaken by madness as the Warlock's patron gradually gets to know them better via their blood.
Red Harvest wrote: This is an ongoing thread. I suspect the lulls are due to the current situation. I know I haven't had a game since March.
It's a Warlock that needs the blood of strangers for its rituals. Of course the strangers are eventually overtaken by madness as the Warlock's patron gradually gets to know them better via their blood.
If one of the characters is a sorcerer their lineage could be the reason they group is followed. The warlocks ritual/patron needs blood of the descendant of fey/dragon/outsider/wild magic.
Yeah I was thinking of using a spectre or ghoul as a baseline. They're low level characters but I'm going to drag the whole encounter out for a while. Spook them for a bit.
The idea of a redcap is very interesting, but I plan on using something undead. I might use one later on as a double bluff though! Where I grew up redcaps were a big deal, I got told about them and their big iron boots stomping around at night. Scared the pants off me when I was wee!
Hi folks,
First time D&D player here looking for some help.
I'm playing a half-elf-Rogue and I just hit 3rd level. I'm trying to decide betwen the Thief and Swashbuckler archetypes. Anyone care to comment on their various strengths and weeknesses and what playstyle each is best suited for?
I'm not trying to power-game (I picked Half-Elf Rogue because it sounded cool before I read the rules and realized what a nice combo it is) but it would be nice to know more about these two options before I commit to one or the other.
Any advice you all have to offer would be apprecaited!
Others are likely to be able to give you more mechanical advice about the subclasses, but I would always tell everyone to play the character.
Worry less about what the mechanics do and more about who your person is and then do whatever best represents that. Is your half-elf rogue more about subterfuge, picking locks, sleight of hand? Or is he more about being big personality, showy, in every ones face acrobatic and dexterous fighting?
Once you decide that you probably have your answer.
Thanks,
I decided on Swashbuckler. It was a very tough choice because I was equally attracted to the character archetypes of the high-climbing thief and the rapier-wielding-scoundrel.
I think what might have tipped the balance was when my wife (who is playing a Barbarian) said "the party needs more fighters". Maybe not the best way to decide, but certainly not the worst and I don't think I'll regret it.
Total 5e noob here looking at the rules for the first time. What's considered a good AC in 5e for a lowish level melee character like a fighter (3rd-4th levels for example)? There are alot of changes in this edition (no complaints here!) compared with 4th but it seems like my understanding of various stats needs a paradigm shift. It seems like the overall total numbers on rolls you should expect have gone down since lots of lots of bonuses have been factored into the advantage/disadvantage system combined with no more 1-20 BAB (replaced by 2-6 proficiency bonus?). Am I getting this wrong on my first skim through?
Nope, you have it right. AC tends to range from 9 to 21 ish, depending on armor. Obviously there are things outside that range, and I think the actual most common AC is around 13-14 or so.
No more BAB, and AC bonuses tend to be pretty rare outside of armor and/or dex and shields. There are things that add, but they're more rare.
Attack rolls are
1d20 + Proficiency Bonus + Appropriate Stat
Thanks! Do monsters follow the same rules roughly? I'm just curious as they don't in the 3.x based Starfinder (my most recent experience) when it comes to certain stats. As you go up in CR, do the AC's go up relatively linearly like in older D&D or is it more gradual to account for the more gradual increase in attack bonuses?
Since I'm completely new, I figured I'd take a look at the Adventurer's League stuff. Is that basically the modern day RPGA? Do you have to start at 1st level and work your way up in a logged way or can you just make up a higher level character according to their rules/limitations to play in a game that happens to be higher level?
I obviously don't have the new/upcoming Tasha's Cauldron book but from the League free pdfs the new origins stuff looks to be standard (i.e. not optional in the sense that a GM shouldn't simply say no) and highly min-maxable since you can just mix and match attribute bonuses and swap out redundant proficiences as you see fit.
warboss wrote: Thanks! Do monsters follow the same rules roughly? I'm just curious as they don't in the 3.x based Starfinder (my most recent experience) when it comes to certain stats. As you go up in CR, do the AC's go up relatively linearly like in older D&D or is it more gradual to account for the more gradual increase in attack bonuses?
Its mostly neither. Monsters have ACs that their designer 'felt about right'
A Pit Fiend at level 20 has an AC of 19
An Ancient Red dragon is level 24, and has AC 22.
The Tarrasque, the 'ultimate monster' (unless you can fly, and then its a math problem) is AC 25 and level 30.
Various named demon lords in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes have AC from 18 to 20. Assorted 'elder elementals' are AC 17-21. Most of these are level 20-26
A basic goblin (level 1/4) has a 15, a level 1 goblin boss a 17.
A flesh golem is level 5 and has an AC 9.
A level 2 Ogre is AC 11. Its half ogre kin is AC 12 at level 1. But roughly half the HP (30 rather than 59).
As Da Boss says, its mostly about HP bloat.
Monsters with 20+ AC feel really bad to fight with 5e's math, so they didn't do it much, but higher level monsters are such bullet sponges that it gets boring anyway.
----
On the PC side of things, it gets weirder. You can, in theory, start with an AC of 9 (don't do this, some monsters hit like absolute trucks), or a level 1 fighter with entirely mundane gear can wander around at AC21 (though not a starter character, as plate mail is pricey). Buffs and magic items can get it pretty high (you can hit 25 or so at relatively low levels), but you have to build for it. At various points, monster attack bonuses are such that you either go all in and still take some hits (on a 15+), or just accept that they're going to smack you around on the regular.
Once you've really started min/maxing AC, ways to apply disadvantage (like the 2nd level spell, blur) are worth WAY more than another +1 AC.
So Tasha's has dropped and there's a gak ton in it. Thoughts anyone? Any new subclasses people want to play?
I want to try and Artificer/Fighter multiclass with Armorer as primary. I could actually maybe use my Techmarine model for it! I like the lore of the WIldfire Druid but am disappointed in its actual toys. Swarm Ranger actually looks super cool.
I actually like the new origin rules? My characters tend to be oddballs (Hobgoblin sorcerers, Tiefling Druids, etc) so the normal racial bonuses don't always let me maximize a character's potential like I'd like. The new rules look like they're perfect for a lot of the characters I actually play.
Voss wrote: Its mostly neither. Monsters have ACs that their designer 'felt about right'
A Pit Fiend at level 20 has an AC of 19
An Ancient Red dragon is level 24, and has AC 22.
The Tarrasque, the 'ultimate monster' (unless you can fly, and then its a math problem) is AC 25 and level 30.
Various named demon lords in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes have AC from 18 to 20. Assorted 'elder elementals' are AC 17-21. Most of these are level 20-26
A basic goblin (level 1/4) has a 15, a level 1 goblin boss a 17.
A flesh golem is level 5 and has an AC 9.
A level 2 Ogre is AC 11. Its half ogre kin is AC 12 at level 1. But roughly half the HP (30 rather than 59).
As Da Boss says, its mostly about HP bloat.
Monsters with 20+ AC feel really bad to fight with 5e's math, so they didn't do it much, but higher level monsters are such bullet sponges that it gets boring anyway.
----
On the PC side of things, it gets weirder. You can, in theory, start with an AC of 9 (don't do this, some monsters hit like absolute trucks), or a level 1 fighter with entirely mundane gear can wander around at AC21 (though not a starter character, as plate mail is pricey). Buffs and magic items can get it pretty high (you can hit 25 or so at relatively low levels), but you have to build for it. At various points, monster attack bonuses are such that you either go all in and still take some hits (on a 15+), or just accept that they're going to smack you around on the regular.
Once you've really started min/maxing AC, ways to apply disadvantage (like the 2nd level spell, blur) are worth WAY more than another +1 AC.
Thanks. Those are definitely some unexpected numbers especially at super high CR's and in a way it's good to know that a pc can at least hit them (but I assume they've got some mega damage resistances that need to be overcome on top of that). I'm not sure I like the bullet sponge route either at least from my experiences in Starfinder but at least the monsters don't seem to have bonkers to hit bonuses on top of that like in that game. Yeah, I've been doing some initial notes on characters using online wikis at the moment and I don't see myself increasing the AC's too much at least for the first few levels beyond whatever gear I may find. It helps though that one of the top contenders is a tortle that starts at 19 with his shield.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Da Boss wrote: ACs don't tend to go up as quickly for monsters, instead they have loads of HP.
I'll have to look that up. HP bloat for monsters was one of my least favorite features of 4e iirc. :(
Automatically Appended Next Post:
LordofHats wrote: So Tasha's has dropped and there's a gak ton in it. Thoughts anyone? Any new subclasses people want to play?
I want to try and Artificer/Fighter multiclass with Armorer as primary. I could actually maybe use my Techmarine model for it! I like the lore of the WIldfire Druid but am disappointed in its actual toys. Swarm Ranger actually looks super cool.
I actually like the new origin rules? My characters tend to be oddballs (Hobgoblin sorcerers, Tiefling Druids, etc) so the normal racial bonuses don't always let me maximize a character's potential like I'd like. The new rules look like they're perfect for a lot of the characters I actually play.
Bladesinger wizard or the Wild Magic barbarian for me and I tend to favor oddballs myself as well. I have a steampunk ironman mk 1 fig from heroclix that would make for a good warforged arficer in full plate. I'm a bit torn on the variant origins though as I think they're a min-maxers dream and will likely be used by those types as well. At least in the past, a min maxer had to deal with the attribute bonuses as written to get the desired racial abilities but now they can just have both. Plus there is the iconic factor in that they've been around for so long.
I'll have to look that up. HP bloat for monsters was one of my least favorite features of 4e iirc. :(
Like AC, HP isn't on any real metric.
The ancient red dragon has 546 hp up near the top end.
At more reasonable levels...
A werewolf is level 3, AC 11/12 depending on form and 58 hp A manticore is also level 3, but has AC 14 and 68 hp.
Minotaur, level 3, AC 14 and 76 hp. (yeah, nearly a 20 point variation among level 3 monsters)
A weretiger is level 4, has AC 12 and jumps to 120 HP. (yep. A level 4 were-critter has twice the HP of the level 3 one. Who knows why? That'd be at least 6 levels of HP for a PC with a good Con)
Hill giant is level 5, but drops in HP to 105. Its damage curve is a lot higher though, two attacks a +8 for ~18 each rather than two at +5 for ~7 each. [5e is disturbingly hard to plan for. Juggling the difference between TPK and utterly dull is not obvious]
A medusa is level 6, a 15 AC, and 127 HP.
Because... um, reasons.
Of course, by level 6, the martial characters have an extra attack, a proficiency increase and more will likely have magic weapons and spellcasters have more and better spells and abilities, so the medusa is actually a fair bit squishier than the weretiger is to characters of its level. The weretiger fight is an early slog, but a pointless one because its basically attacking with nerf bats.
We had it in my campaign recently, it wasted about 3 sessions to expunge the curse from our party and completely derailed the story! It's not even a fun creature to fight as it is immune to most damage it seems.
One of the signs that I've played D&D too long is I always expect people to pick up at least back-up weapons of silver (and cold iron from 3rd edition onwards), and I find the game frustrating if the DM isn't handing out at least some magic items on schedule. It really is required and its frustrating that 5e kind of pretends it isn't. But the game fails hard when the party runs into something like this.*
It doesn't have to be the full Christmas Tree by any means, but the main fighting folks need magic swords or whatever, and the spellcasters can use some additional utility or defensive options (especially defensive).
*on the other hand, the setting needs monsters like this. Way too many of the major threats in 5e D&D-land are simply solved by a guard company of archers, all the way up to dragons. It'll be slow, but the math will obliterate most threats to the point that towns aren't capable of being threatened (other than by armies, and 5e doesn't deal with large fights well at all). 'Adventurers' are a frankly bizarre concept, and need some reason to exist.
LordofHats wrote: So Tasha's has dropped and there's a gak ton in it. Thoughts anyone? Any new subclasses people want to play?
I want to try and Artificer/Fighter multiclass with Armorer as primary. I could actually maybe use my Techmarine model for it! I like the lore of the WIldfire Druid but am disappointed in its actual toys. Swarm Ranger actually looks super cool.
I actually like the new origin rules? My characters tend to be oddballs (Hobgoblin sorcerers, Tiefling Druids, etc) so the normal racial bonuses don't always let me maximize a character's potential like I'd like. The new rules look like they're perfect for a lot of the characters I actually play.
I was playing a Rune Knight Fighter / Armorer Artificer using the UA, and Tasha's frellin KILLED me. The changes to Armorer feel like typos, honestly. Like, they took away Shield but added Thunderwave? How does Thunderwave even fit? Artillerist gets Thunderwave, and it's a 180 on concept from the Armorer. The THP from Guardian armor nerf hurts, especially when Moon Druid infinite HP is still a thing, and Artillerist gives out more THP to more people from a DPS focused subclass. Wut? They even nerfed the stealth access of Infiltrator mode, since you can get Advantage to Stealth so many places that doing that instead of just removing the Disadv. of other heavy armors means you'll never have advantage anymore by RAW. It's baffling.
Rune Knight? It's now the worst fighter subclass there is. Bar none. Giant Might is now a fething joke, and doesn't mesh with the base abilities of the Fighter class. +1d6 damage once per turn, from the class whose literal WHOLE SCHTICK is attacking a lot. *finger twirl* wooooo Apparently you get real big and then shrink your weapon once you hit something. Runes? Instead of fixing the bad runes they just level locked the good runes and inexplicably nerfed Frost into near uselessness. They didn't add any options either, so when you take the class you get to pick 2 out of 4 runes, so there's not even variety really. Defensive Runes instead of boosting AC forces a reroll, so rather than being able to reliably turn a hit into a miss, you risk turning a hit into a crit, or burning your reaction to do nothing at all. And as a more minor nitpick, I feel like switching the class from Str/Int to Str/Con loses out on some of the flavor. That's a really minor nitpick though, compared to them just shredding literally every feature of the archetype.
I also have a straight Wildfire Druid, and while the lore IS pretty fun to play to, the actual class is now garbage. Even the small nerf to the HP of the Wildfire Spirit hurts since ALL your other features depend on it being out. We were in an inside fight last night and I couldn't summon the Wildfire spirit without hurting my friends (and we were already kind of beat up). All my subclass features essentially ceased to exist, and with the nerf you're not even getting a free cantrip out of it. They nerfed the summon damage from 2d10 to 2d6, sure it was high before but it didn't scale. Now it's low and it still doesn't scale, so eventually your spirit just becomes a power source for your other features, assuming that it doesn't die to AoE (which it will). You don't really get any important spell access that all druids don't already get, Flaming Sphere conflicts with using your Wildfire spirit, and of course the kick in the nuts that is losing Fireball. (but hey, they gave you burning hands to compensate, that's something, right? RIGHT?! no, it's not.)
Those complaints aside, there are some other classes I'm interested in. The Stars Druid is really good, College of Eloquence continues to be the Bardiest Bard, Peace and Twilight Domains are both solid and Spores got a small but important boost moving the bonus damage from Poison to Necrotic so less things resist or are immune to you. I also like the Phantom Rogue better than the Revived Rogue that it was based on for some inexplicable reason.
Honestly the biggest disappointment is the obvious lack of care that went into the noncaster sections of the book. A couple of the Fighter Sample Builds they wasted a page on, include taking the Weapon Mastery feat, which does LITERAL nothing for fighters at all. Of the 41 non-artifact magic items, 11 are Wizard exclusive; none are for noncasters. Linear Fighter Quadratic Wizard may not be a rule anymore, but it's clearly still a focus of the developers. It's like fething Stockholm Syndrome at this point.
Yeah, what you say about Wildfire sounds how I'd expect it to play, which is what bums me out. A class completely dependent on a fragile pet to do any subclass things sounds like a bad subclass.
Good thing I liked the original Spore Druid, so the improved version should be fun for all my wacky druidy business.
I think Sorcerer continues to be the most underappreciated class in the game. Most people just call them worse Wizards cause they have less spell flexibility, but honestly that criticism has never clicked with me. Sorcerers have all the 'good' spells they need and have crazy strong subclasses. The two new ones they get I think as OP as Divine Soul, so I'm baffled everyone is talking about Wizards when Sorcerers remain game breaking with even the smallest amount of min-maxing.
I'm unsuprised they removed Shield from armorer. It was OP as feth that they had it in the first place imo and Wizards seems to agree. They've religiously (pun) taken Shield away from any classe that natively has heavy armor. Forge Cleric also lost it when it went from UA to Xanathar's. They seem to want to avoid anything that in one go lets your AC break 20, and as someone who played a 'let me max out my AC' Forge Cleric for over a year, it is absolutely broken.
Nothing can kill you when you're boating AC 23 at level 3 (not in typical module play). You're effectively immortal till level 8 or 9, still mostly immortal till level 11 or 12. Anything a DM can come up with that can break your AC and actually hurt you will likely slaughter the rest of the party. At least the Forge Cleric does little real damage to compensate for being neigh unkillable.
EDIT: I'm also finding myself looking at Patrons and all the cool things that can be homebrewed with them. Maybe I'll take this as a chance to get my first self-made campaign off the ground and see what happens. I like the idea of using the Patron rules to create factions and then importing the faction rules from Fate Core to get a different kind of campaign going than you normally see in DnD.
Yup. That's the one mechanic 4e introduced that our group genuinely liked. We stopped playing/got disgusted by iirc 4th level though so we didn't encounter them too much.
One of the signs that I've played D&D too long is I always expect people to pick up at least back-up weapons of silver (and cold iron from 3rd edition onwards), and I find the game frustrating if the DM isn't handing out at least some magic items on schedule. It really is required and its frustrating that 5e kind of pretends it isn't. But the game fails hard when the party runs into something like this.*
It doesn't have to be the full Christmas Tree by any means, but the main fighting folks need magic swords or whatever, and the spellcasters can use some additional utility or defensive options (especially defensive).
*on the other hand, the setting needs monsters like this. Way too many of the major threats in 5e D&D-land are simply solved by a guard company of archers, all the way up to dragons. It'll be slow, but the math will obliterate most threats to the point that towns aren't capable of being threatened (other than by armies, and 5e doesn't deal with large fights well at all). 'Adventurers' are a frankly bizarre concept, and need some reason to exist.
Well we were all scrupulously avoiding 'meta-ing' and failed any intelligence checks for clues about silver hurting them so things did get rather painful... We're only level 4 characters so don't have any fancy gear yet, we are still in the journeyman adventurer stage
It was actually a good challenge, I was enjoying the main plot though so it was a shame to get derailed.
Personally, I think monsters are the kinda boring side of DnD, so I don't mind them taking a back seat in 5ed.
Role playing with sentient creatures is the unique part of a tabletop RPG that can't be replicated in a computer game very well. My group tends to focus on that side of things, with the odd monster popping in for a challenge.
Actually we worked out in this campaign we are doing so much roleplay that we're actually playing in real time... each 4 hour session is covering about half a day of game time!
LordofHats wrote:
I think Sorcerer continues to be the most underappreciated class in the game. Most people just call them worse Wizards cause they have less spell flexibility, but honestly that criticism has never clicked with me. Sorcerers have all the 'good' spells they need and have crazy strong subclasses. The two new ones they get I think as OP as Divine Soul, so I'm baffled everyone is talking about Wizards when Sorcerers remain game breaking with even the smallest amount of min-maxing.
I'm unsuprised they removed Shield from armorer. It was OP as feth that they had it in the first place imo and Wizards seems to agree. They've religiously (pun) taken Shield away from any classe that natively has heavy armor. Forge Cleric also lost it when it went from UA to Xanathar's. They seem to want to avoid anything that in one go lets your AC break 20, and as someone who played a 'let me max out my AC' Forge Cleric for over a year, it is absolutely broken.
Nothing can kill you when you're boating AC 23 at level 3 (not in typical module play). You're effectively immortal till level 8 or 9, still mostly immortal till level 11 or 12. Anything a DM can come up with that can break your AC and actually hurt you will likely slaughter the rest of the party. At least the Forge Cleric does little real damage to compensate for being neigh unkillable.
Oh the Armorer artificer does terrible damage, they make up for it by being a disadvantage tank via Thunder Gauntlets. They're just squishier now than they were before, with no real boost to compensate. It's not terrible, but compared to Battle Smith or Artillerist, you go into this knowing your main job is to punch tank things and if you're not in a position to do that, you're dead weight.
warboss wrote:
Yup. That's the one mechanic 4e introduced that our group genuinely liked. We stopped playing/got disgusted by iirc 4th level though so we didn't encounter them too much.
I played in a campaign from first to about 17th or 18th level. We only stopped because people started moving away and it made it hard to game at the time. That remains one of my favorite campaigns of any edition.
My group also liked healing surges, the short/long rest split, Bloodied as a condition, and a few other things. I genuinely loved 4e, I fully admit it had its flaws (when you ended the game rolling 1d20 + 30 or whatever to hit, there should have been a bit better of a squish), but it was nice that a balanced party stayed a balanced party, and the cross player synergy made a party feel like an actual party. Instead of getting to level 7 and suddenly "save or die" was all that mattered.
My biggest gripe with tashas is that the more custom aspects of character creation are just done in a kinda boring way. I think that Ancestry and Culture from the homebrew supplement I found a while back is what my group is going to keep using for customized races.
In essence, Ancestry and Culture has you split the abilities that racial features give you into Ancestry (things that come from your character's physical body) and Culture (things that they learned from their upbringing.)
Darkvision, size, speed, natural weapons, etc are based on Ancestry, and core stat bonuses, weapon and tool proficiencies, spells, etc that the character would have picked up being raised within a culture are based on Culture.
So a hill dwarf who was raised within wood elf culture would have a speed of 25, resistance to poison, speed wouldn't be reduced by heavy armor, +1HP per level, and Darkvision, but he would have +2 Dex +1 Wis, Longbow Shortbow Shortsword and Longsword proficiency, Proficiency in Perception, would speak Common and Elvish, and would have Mask of the Wild.
Obviously, certain ambiguous abilities you need to think critically about and slot into either race or culture to make things a little bit more balanced, and certain combos are self-evidently better than others (kinda like how the race system currently works...) but in general it just allows for a nice, easy, out of the box way to customize races that feels more organic than just 'if you're making a wizard, give him +2Int +1Dex"
It also gives you a super easy plug in for WHY your, whatever, gnome is a raging barbarian with +2S and +1Con - he grew up among the Goliaths in the frosty wastes! He cares not for tinker's tools, they would not even fit in his MUSCULAR FINGERS, he has resistance to cold damage instead! Also nobody among the goliaths has heard of razors, so he is a four foot tall guy with six feet of beard.
At this point I am a bit tired of D&D 5e. Like most editions of Dungeons and Dragons it has it's good points and it's bad points, but it suffers heavily from the only properly finished system in the rules being spellcasting, and the rest of it being lazily half baked.
It is clear the designers don't really take their jobs particularly seriously and the expectation is for DMs to shell out for premium priced books but then do a lot of work themselves to make certain parts of the game actually functional.
Thinking about moving to something a bit more stripped down like Worlds Without Number or Knave for future games, saving me money and time spent "homebrewing" solutions to obviously half baked rules.
Didn't it have a public playtest for years as D&D Next? I was out of the loop but even I heard of that when it started though I didn't participate. Were your issues brought up during that time?
warboss wrote: Didn't it have a public playtest for years as D&D Next? I was out of the loop but even I heard of that when it started though I didn't participate. Were your issues brought up during that time?
Yeah, but that's been much maligned for how many features people liked from the play test that never made it into the final game.
One of the standout examples I see mentioned all the time is that Battle Maneuvers (from the Battlemaster fighter subclass) were utilized by all the Martial classes. They were called other things, but Fighters, Rogues, and Barbarians had them. People apparently really liked that cause it gave melee and non-magic characters options in combat besides rolling to attack. I've even played a few one-shots that let every martial class automatically have the Martial Adept feat at no cost, and it's actually super fun and didn't seem badly balanced. With some of the new maneuvers coming out, it also gives them something to toy with out of combat, which is where I think the real problems between magic users and non-magic users become apparent (magic can do anything if you know the right spell, leaving any character who just has skill bonuses in the dust).
This feature never made it into the final game with no explanation from Wizards as to why. This is true of a lot of their "balance" changes that aren't "balance changes." Wizards very poorly communicate the reasons behind their decisions. They'll reference balance in one statement, and then act like it isn't important in another. I think it's accurate to say they assume GM's will fix what they don't like, so they are kind of lazy about some things.
Some of these things are super weird too, like Rapiers not being light weapons even though rapier + dagger is a classic fighting style (most DM's I play with let you wield a Rapier with a Dagger anyway, but the rules still RAW don't allow it). Why is the Trident materially exactly the same as spear even though its supposedly martial vs simple? Can Booming Blade and Greenflame Blade be used with Reach weapons? As of Tasha's the answer is apparently no, even though that doesn't make sense and most people I played with before didn't play it that way.
Part of the issue I think is that Wizards has a pinpoint target on the kind of audience they want; a broad one. They want the game to appeal to as many people as possible. It's worked great from a financial stand point and I think very casual players like me who are mostly there to see stuff happen and chat with other players (I guess I'd say the game is primarily a social experience and an RPG second?) are well suited for the kind of game 5E is, which is a game predominantly focused on level 1-14 module play. I think it leaves more dedicated and experienced players though noticing the holes the system, particularly how badly suited the game is for dedicated RP.
The game's entire feature economy completely breaks if you don't do the recommended 2-4 encounters per adventuring day for example. Having an adventuring day that is nothing but conversation leaves half the classes with nothing to do with any of their class features (which only support combat). Those same classes are also dependent on short rests being a thing, but because spell casters get everything back on a long rest, most groups just take a long rest unless the DM is super stingy about it so Fighters, Monks, and Warlocks never even use their feature economy the way it is intended to be used.
LordofHats wrote: One of the standout examples I see mentioned all the time is that Battle Maneuvers (from the Battlemaster fighter subclass) were utilized by all the Martial classes. They were called other things, but Fighters, Rogues, and Barbarians had them. People apparently really liked that cause it gave melee and non-magic characters options in combat besides rolling to attack. I've even played a few one-shots that let every martial class automatically have the Martial Adept feat at no cost, and it's actually super fun and didn't seem badly balanced. With some of the new maneuvers coming out, it also gives them something to toy with out of combat, which is where I think the real problems between magic users and non-magic users become apparent (magic can do anything if you know the right spell, leaving any character who just has skill bonuses in the dust).
I haven't played (first game will actually be tomorrow virtually unless something messes up that plan) so I can only comment broadly in theory about mechanics and specifically about the thematic impact. That said... I'm glad they didn't give battle maneuvers to every martal class standard. I was already surprised enough that fighting styles seemed to have made it in but was ok with that. Frankly, I think the maneuvers should have been a core feature to the fighter just like rage is to the barbarian to distinguish them thematically and mechanically from the other martial classes but obviously that didn't happen. That said, I wouldn't have been opposed to the PHB having the (new released in Tasha?) martial adept feat either to let them dip their toes into that style a bit without resorting to multiclassing. YMMV and I think what ultimately came out was somewhere in the middle... not optimal but not horrible either. That's admittedly faint praise though...
Part of the issue I think is that Wizards has a pinpoint target on the kind of audience they want; a broad one. They want the game to appeal to as many people as possible. It's worked great from a financial stand point and I think very casual players like me who are mostly there to see stuff happen and chat with other players (I guess I'd say the game is primarily a social experience and an RPG second?) are well suited for the kind of game 5E is, which is a game predominantly focused on level 1-14 module play. I think it leaves more dedicated and experienced players though noticing the holes the system, particularly how badly suited the game is for dedicated RP.
I used to be as hardcore as you could get back in 3/3.5. I was DMing one campaign and playing in another resulting in effectively a D&D game every week for years. At the same time, I was also active in the local D&D minis league (not the same thing but still thematically D&D) and posting on their wizards forum daily. Obviously my interest nosedived with 4th edition of the RPG (and the accompanying 2nd edition of the minis game that initially wiped out 90% of my minis collection in one swoop) and over the 13 years I've been effectively a non-fan. No video games, no tabletop games, no merch... nothing that was official D&D since my group unanimously gave up on 4e after a few months. That said... I'm ok with the casualization of the game at this point. My view might be skewed by my non-fan status for over a decade and may admittedly change if/when I get more experience under my belt. At least right now, I'm ok with the baseline being a broader approach to the RPG after the mega-crunch of 3.x (I'm including Pathfinder 1e in there) and the tactical-minis-game-in-all-but-name of 4e. The way I see it is that it's easier to start broad to appeal to that casual audience (as long as it's not too extreme to the point that there is no room for customization/depth) and then build on that for the hardcore crowd eventually with an entirely optional "advanced" PHB sized book (but not a series of books as that would indicate too shallow of an initial approach!) that focuses on adding crunch/options as well as focus on high level play. YMMV.
The game's entire feature economy completely breaks if you don't do the recommended 2-4 encounters per adventuring day for example. Having an adventuring day that is nothing but conversation leaves half the classes with nothing to do with any of their class features (which only support combat). Those same classes are also dependent on short rests being a thing, but because spell casters get everything back on a long rest, most groups just take a long rest unless the DM is super stingy about it so Fighters, Monks, and Warlocks never even use their feature economy the way it is intended to be used.
I'd argue that is an issue with the individual group/GM moreso than the mechanics. The rules are there and I think the intent has been explictly stated in the years since (whether through social media, faq's, subsequent books, etc) but you can only lead a player horse to water. I saw a bit of that in 3rd as a GM but I put the stop to it with an out of character post game conversation following a particularly brutal midday "random" encounter when the party just stopped to rest for the whole day at lunchtime while in enemy territory.
warboss wrote: I'd argue that is an issue with the individual group/GM moreso than the mechanics.
I agree. I think it's only an issue at all because of how few classes (only 3 out of 13) actually use a short rest for class features. You wouldn't even notice the issue if your group lacks one and I think it's simply produced a habit in players and GMs that then gets annoying for anyone playing one of those three classes.
warboss wrote: I'm ok with the casualization of the game at this point.
Same. When I was younger and had more time on my hands, I'd probably have liked a crunchier game but these days I like how all the work of getting DnD going is mostly at character creation. Once you have the character it's extremely easy to just drop in and play and all the rules you need are straightforward and easy to remember because they follow a streamlined format.
I started in 3rd edition but I have played a wide variety of RPGs over the years. I am a big fan of the pulp adventure style that D&D springs from, though a lot of it these days is more like "heroic soap opera" (which is fine, just not my cup of tea).
5e is fine, it has some improvements over 3e for sure and learned some lessons of 4e quite well, without throwing out EVERYTHING that was good from that edition.
But the longer I play it the lazier it seems to me. Stuff like subclasses being blatantly not internally balanced (Totem Barbarian vs. Frenzied Berserker) within the PHB, or stuff like potion and poison crafting being referenced, and part of the abilities of Assassin for example, but then with REALLY half baked rules that basically shrug and say "DMs sort it out".
Cool thanks, so glad I paid 50 euro for this book where you said the rules would be. Same sort of crap with making rules "optional" so you don't have to balance any of them, etc etc.
Like you say, fine for casual play where you don't actually explore the system, and not something I cannot deal with as a DM, but I am not really in the mood to homebrew, I bought dungeons and dragons as sort of the premium, complete game where I could plug and play because I am pretty tired and don't have the energy for it anymore, and instead got a pretty weak indie dev game with high production values.
Edit: I should say, I am not really looking for crunch, but just that if you put crunch in the game I shouldn't have to fix it or balance it after the fact. Just leave it out entirely, I would be happy with a 4 class game with no subclasses, unfortunately players tend to see all the stuff in the book and think that it is gonna work and be fun (not an unreasonable expectation).
warboss wrote: I'd argue that is an issue with the individual group/GM moreso than the mechanics.
I agree. I think it's only an issue at all because of how few classes (only 3 out of 13) actually use a short rest for class features. You wouldn't even notice the issue if your group lacks one and I think it's simply produced a habit in players and GMs that then gets annoying for anyone playing one of those three classes.
I fully admit that I've done a deep dive only on a few classes in detail (cleric, wizard, barbarian, and fighter) and even then only for rougly levels 1-7. For every long rest limited ability like rage or bladesinging (in Tasha's) there is a short rest limited one like channel divinity or action surge/second wind. Plus isn't the dice based natural healing linked to short rest? I'm not trying to be contrary but rather genuinely asking as it seemed like there was a good mix at least in the limited slice that I took a look at.
Generally I've found that the short rest issue is mostly resolved by allowing short rests to occur without the party necessarily having to stop doing what they're doing and declare one. If a party member has an ability they want to refresh or they're low on HP and want to take a short rest, they can opt to be taking a breather during the next social or puzzle scene (they don't have to necessarily stop roleplaying, but they can't contribute mechanically as their character is taking a rest.)
It is also relatively easy to make the short rest recharge abilities for those three classes just 3 per long rest instead.
I would limit it to just the Short Rest classes and remove it from any multiclassed characters just to prevent any weird interactions with that half baked system.
Eilif wrote: Thanks,
I decided on Swashbuckler. It was a very tough choice because I was equally attracted to the character archetypes of the high-climbing thief and the rapier-wielding-scoundrel.
I think what might have tipped the balance was when my wife (who is playing a Barbarian) said "the party needs more fighters". Maybe not the best way to decide, but certainly not the worst and I don't think I'll regret it.
Just wanted to check in.
We're now 10 sessions in of weekly play. I did go with Swashbuckler and it has turned out well. We have a Paladin, ranger and Barbarian, but the Swashbucker is still a formidable and useful fighter. My wife has really taken to it as well (possibly more than I_) and it's been a great weekly activity to do together.
Likewise, most of the other players are really getting into it as well and figuring out who the characters really are.
Da Boss wrote: At this point I am a bit tired of D&D 5e. Like most editions of Dungeons and Dragons it has it's good points and it's bad points, but it suffers heavily from the only properly finished system in the rules being spellcasting, and the rest of it being lazily half baked. It is clear the designers don't really take their jobs particularly seriously and the expectation is for DMs to shell out for premium priced books but then do a lot of work themselves to make certain parts of the game actually functional.
Thinking about moving to something a bit more stripped down like Worlds Without Number or Knave for future games, saving me money and time spent "homebrewing" solutions to obviously half baked rules.
Might I suggest Forbidden Lands? A fantastic game that has a lot of value in it's initial box (2 faux leather hardcovers with ribbon book marks, a pamphlet with character generators, story generators, and monster generators, a map of the setting all for a 50.00 price tag). The rules are simple and light but the world has stakes and it's built from the ground up to be run as home brewed settings as well. It has some of the best GM tools I have ever seen in a game for generating content when you need to including NPCs, Monsters, Story hooks, and adventure sites.
And it's considered an OSR for that pulpy old school adventuring while having a lot of the quality of life mechanics of modern games.
Da Boss wrote: It is also relatively easy to make the short rest recharge abilities for those three classes just 3 per long rest instead.
I would limit it to just the Short Rest classes and remove it from any multiclassed characters just to prevent any weird interactions with that half baked system.
The only definition for what a sort rest is in the rulebook is "A short rest is a period of downtime, at least 1 hour long, during which a character does nothing more strenuous than eating, drinking, reading, and tending to wounds."
The reason people don't do short rests is because generally, it requires the game to just stop for a moment so that every member of the party sits down and takes an hour long rest. Often, many members of the party get next to nothing out of that, and you run into a realism issue of 'could you REALLY stop and chill for an hour in the middle of this dungeon?' If everybody else is still progressing, working on a puzzle or exploring some rooms, and the other person is taking a rest and just roleplaying for a while, then that allows them to use their short rest mechanic while applying a trade-off to the party of not having their mechanical advantages for the next room.
I don't recall what 4e healing surges entailed but the equivalent in Starfinder is a 10 minute rest to regain "stamina" (basically their first layer of HP). I think that's a bit more reasonable thematically than a full hour.
warboss wrote: I don't recall what 4e healing surges entailed but the equivalent in Starfinder is a 10 minute rest to regain "stamina" (basically their first layer of HP). I think that's a bit more reasonable thematically than a full hour.
The only limits on healing surges were that you could only use one by yourself during a combat scene (second breath action or something like that, IIRC), but you could use as many as needed during a short rest, and that a character had a limit of healing surges until taking a long rest, which resetted them.
Usually, healing spells allowed a character to spend a healing surge and had an additional riding effect.
Other than that, short rests were 5 minutes, as Da Boss stated.
Short rests are anywhere from 5-30 minutes, unless someone is doing an RP heavy campaign. Then they use the variant rule from the DMG where a short rest is a good nights sleep and a long rest is a week's vacation. One group I played with switched between rest lengths as was thematically appropriate (shorter in dungeon delving with eating more rations accounting for the shorter time).
That is my preference - gritty realism for wilderness adventures, rules as written or maybe even 5 min short rests for Dungeons. I justify it by having a distinction between places in the Weird which have a lot of magic for whatever reason and the rest of the world - healing and spell recovery is faster due to the background magic in dungeon areas, and that is also why you get so many dangerous monsters there.
I prefer the "gritty"ness to exist throughout the game. Not that I want a lot of rules bloat or anything, but I want injury to exist and mater. I want combats to be dangerous and the PCs to do more strategizing then "I swing my sword" or a chipping away at HP slog. For that matter the PCs should never be a HP slog for the NPCs to chip away at either. Danger is important for consequence.
I think in theory I'd agree with you Lance, in practice though I've found the opposite to be true!
In my experience, you build up a group dynamic between your characters when roleplaying, and that becomes really important for sustaining the campaign.
Frequent or multiple character deaths can quick destroy this group dynamic and lead to the campaign fizzling out.
In a RP heavy campaign the combat is there to add context and gravitas to the RP, but if the combat is too deadly then it can have a damaging effect on the RP.
I think there is an effect on player focus too. If the combat is very hard, people have to spend a lot of time focusing on character builds and combat rules.
In a RP heavy campaign, ideally you want people focused on their character's personality right? What they feel, what their goals are etc.
So I think easy combat helps, as character builds can be treated as background noise and safely ignored.
Kroem wrote: I think in theory I'd agree with you Lance, in practice though I've found the opposite to be true!
In my experience, you build up a group dynamic between your characters when roleplaying, and that becomes really important for sustaining the campaign. Frequent or multiple character deaths can quick destroy this group dynamic and lead to the campaign fizzling out. In a RP heavy campaign the combat is there to add context and gravitas to the RP, but if the combat is too deadly then it can have a damaging effect on the RP.
I think there is an effect on player focus too. If the combat is very hard, people have to spend a lot of time focusing on character builds and combat rules. In a RP heavy campaign, ideally you want people focused on their character's personality right? What they feel, what their goals are etc. So I think easy combat helps, as character builds can be treated as background noise and safely ignored.
I agree that several systems have done a bad job of it. BUT, easy injury does not need to mean easy death. Fantasy Flights Starwars games have a small HP pool and hitting 0 doesn't kill you it causes you a critical injury and puts you out of the fight. Some critical injuries CAN lead to death (either by not getting medical treatment or because they ARE death) but that is rare. The game I mentioned, Forbidden Lands does a similar thing. Your Strength is a number from 1-6. That is your HP. When you fight in melee you add your CURRENT strength to your melee roll. So injuries impact the fight as it's happening. When you hit 0 you are "Broken" and can no longer make any skill rolls, can only crawl on the ground, and if conscious/able to talk have to keep it very brief. Being broken also sees you roll on the critical injury table, which could be a cut forehead with no real il effect or something like punctured guts which gives you a disease and needs to be treated quickly or you are at real risk of death. About half the critical injury results CAN be lethal but only the worst result is flat out lethal (decapitation and such).
The end result isn't that combat is feared for it's lethality, it's feared for it's consequence. And instead of the players charging into every room drawing swords, they are more likely to talk it out or look for a second way out or to avoid a fight or to set an ambush to stack that combats effects into their favor.
As to combat builds, DnD gives players almost nothing BUT combat builds. Leveling up in dnd almost universally means improvement in anything but RP tools. A smooth talking character in a game with higher combat consequence is often more powerful then a beat stick. The beat stick puts everyone at risk. The smooth talker keeps everyone safe.
Sometimes, it is fun to have characters rail through a ton of disposables, but that doesn't mean there are no stakes to the combat.
Just because the enemies are weak, does not mean they are dumb. They can still thwart a heroes goals by delaying them long enough to escape with the McGuffin, distracting them from other threats, or hurting those they care about DESPITE the heroes blasting through them.
Not all stakes are death, as Lance points out. I think of it as the Superman Dilemma. Superman is a very tough and resilient opponent. So, how do you raise the stakes for Superman? You threaten what he values instead of him personally.
When I think of Combat has consequences, I think what makes the stakes of this combat important? If the combat has no value, then I do not have it.
As you can tell, I am not a fan of "random encounters" at all.
Edit: I also find that relatively "lethal" combat makes players take other avenues to approach problems rather than simply fight. Even if the party itself has never experienced a player death. They have experienced being taken out of a fight, scrambling to rescue a comrade, or being next to useless due to injury. If they know that fighting is not always the most effective path, they will try to take other paths.
I am a big fan of random encounters, but I use them as scenario seeds rather than "now there is a fight with D6 vipers" or something.
Playing lethal systems can be interesting, but I do find the more "action hero" fights in dungeons and dragons a relaxing diversion. Sometimes I am in the mood for grit, and a hardcore system with injuries and degrading abilities is good, but I think mostly I am comfortable with something less lethal and a fair amount of combat.
The main thing I don't like about DnD combat is how slow it feels as characters level up. The game really just doesn't scale well past 10th level in my opinion.
I actually like the lower levels, where combat can feel a bit more swingy and one bad hit can down a character. I kind of wish a few classes were more front loaded on some aspects. Monks, wizards, and rogues especially don't feel like they get to enjoy their classes until the later half of the level range, at least in terms of class features. Not like Warlocks, Paladins, Barbarians, well every other class. Most of them come online by level 5 and are fully functional. Enough so that I find them engaging and fun across a play through.
Artificers are slow to really click too, but they've got their core stuff by 7, when most module campaigns are entering their last stretch. Monks don't really click to me until like, level 14 or something and by then combat is very slogy and I think Wizards very much did little to no play testing past that level. They've said as such and it shows when you get there how the system just isn't as smooth once you're there.
LordofHats wrote: The main thing I don't like about DnD combat is how slow it feels as characters level up. The game really just doesn't scale well past 10th level in my opinion.
I actually like the lower levels, where combat can feel a bit more swingy and one bad hit can down a character. I kind of wish a few classes were more front loaded on some aspects. Monks, wizards, and rogues especially don't feel like they get to enjoy their classes until the later half of the level range, at least in terms of class features. Not like Warlocks, Paladins, Barbarians, well every other class. Most of them come online by level 5 and are fully functional. Enough so that I find them engaging and fun across a play through.
Artificers are slow to really click too, but they've got their core stuff by 7, when most module campaigns are entering their last stretch. Monks don't really click to me until like, level 14 or something and by then combat is very slogy and I think Wizards very much did little to no play testing past that level. They've said as such and it shows when you get there how the system just isn't as smooth once you're there.
Thats actually one of the bigger issues I have with levels in general. A goblin or an ork or a mindflayer isn't REALLY a goblin, ork, or mindflayer. They are an x level threat. And before the players reach them they are these insurmountable monsters that the player cannot hope to deal with and when the players surpass them they fade into fodder to be chewed through. A typical human versus a typical ork is not really a thing because levels can set a individual well beyond any realistic benchmark for ability to dole out punishment and taking it. Equipment does the same thing. A sword isn't REALLY a sword. At level 1 it can kill in a blow or 2 and at level 20 even humans can eat dozens of hits. A creature made purely of flesh and blood with take more sword slashes simply because it's "higher level". That kind of crap pulls me out of the world so fast.
Lance845 wrote: A sword isn't REALLY a sword. At level 1 it can kill in a blow or 2 and at level 20 even humans can eat dozens of hits. A creature made purely of flesh and blood with take more sword slashes simply because it's "higher level". That kind of crap pulls me out of the world so fast.
That's one of the things I've found a struggle with. I get that increasing HP is far better and smoother than making players more difficult to hit, but it's always a little odd when a bloody great ogre gets a critical hit and the player is still standing afterwards, with not even half their HP removed.
Lance845 wrote: A sword isn't REALLY a sword. At level 1 it can kill in a blow or 2 and at level 20 even humans can eat dozens of hits. A creature made purely of flesh and blood with take more sword slashes simply because it's "higher level". That kind of crap pulls me out of the world so fast.
That's one of the things I've found a struggle with. I get that increasing HP is far better and smoother than making players more difficult to hit, but it's always a little odd when a bloody great ogre gets a critical hit and the player is still standing afterwards, with not even half their HP removed.
Yeah. A dragon the size of a building just breathed fire all over you and your friends bathing you in heat and flame for maybe a dozen dice of damage that can melt metal and destroy stone. Do you still have more than 1 HP? Don't even worry about it! You suffer no negative impacts and if you take a nap it will be like it never happened!
Lance845 wrote: A sword isn't REALLY a sword. At level 1 it can kill in a blow or 2 and at level 20 even humans can eat dozens of hits. A creature made purely of flesh and blood with take more sword slashes simply because it's "higher level". That kind of crap pulls me out of the world so fast.
That's one of the things I've found a struggle with. I get that increasing HP is far better and smoother than making players more difficult to hit, but it's always a little odd when a bloody great ogre gets a critical hit and the player is still standing afterwards, with not even half their HP removed.
It's just part and parcel of D&D and I don't think it'll ever change. Similar to AC and the main stats, it's iconic to the system and putting in something grittier with survivability that doesn't linearly scale with level will at best be an optional rule added in a skills and powers type book shortly before the edition ends.
I think part of the issue is that HP's name doesn't track with what Wizard's says it is supposed to represent.
They say it's supposed to represent everything from stamina, endurance, health, and so on and so forth. In that context, how HP works in game makes sense. But then I don't know why they don't just call it Fortitude or Endurance or Stamina or any number of other names that better represents what that number is supposed to mean. Maybe they're afraid that would be too abstract for casual players but if a player is so casual they can't track something like that I don't think they'll care.
It certainly makes the fantasy make more sense when you think of it that way. That said, I still think the game runs better if you cut all HP numbers after level 5 or so in half. Things become much less of a slog when there's less health on the board.
I suppose it can also represent your ability to just dodge out of the way, but you expend energy and tire out as you go. So it's not that you got stabbed for D8 damage, it's that they tried to stab you and you just squirmed out of the way, getting a superficial cut and taking D8 of your "squirminess" off, which means when it runs out the last hit actually connects.
Not sure if this is of interest to anyone here but there's a cool new anthology of short stories that were the inspiration for DnD out now and I'm very much enjoying it. Some of it is directly from Gygax's original Appendix N (hence the name) of fiction he suggests to get into the mood (for DnD) and some are additions by the editor from either later editions or obvious omissions by Gygax (like Clark Ashton Smith).
some bloke wrote: I suppose it can also represent your ability to just dodge out of the way, but you expend energy and tire out as you go. So it's not that you got stabbed for D8 damage, it's that they tried to stab you and you just squirmed out of the way, getting a superficial cut and taking D8 of your "squirminess" off, which means when it runs out the last hit actually connects.
This made more sense back in earlier editions where poison/burns could be saving throws along with a ton of other stuff. But these day... fire and poison and acid deal damage each turn. It's literal damage.
LordofHats wrote: The main thing I don't like about DnD combat is how slow it feels as characters level up. The game really just doesn't scale well past 10th level in my opinion.
I actually like the lower levels, where combat can feel a bit more swingy and one bad hit can down a character. I kind of wish a few classes were more front loaded on some aspects. Monks, wizards, and rogues especially don't feel like they get to enjoy their classes until the later half of the level range, at least in terms of class features. Not like Warlocks, Paladins, Barbarians, well every other class. Most of them come online by level 5 and are fully functional. Enough so that I find them engaging and fun across a play through.
Artificers are slow to really click too, but they've got their core stuff by 7, when most module campaigns are entering their last stretch. Monks don't really click to me until like, level 14 or something and by then combat is very slogy and I think Wizards very much did little to no play testing past that level. They've said as such and it shows when you get there how the system just isn't as smooth once you're there.
You know, it's funny, in our ongoing DnD campaign we had a running joke of the party collecting teenaged NPCs and we wound up making them heavily customized/homebrewed level 2 sheets to play them in goofy one offs, and it is far and away more interesting to play combat as the kids than as our level 5 characters.
mostly to increase variety among the classes that don't get to choose their subclass until level 3, we removed some of the level 1/level 2 class features and added in the first subclass feature.
some bloke wrote: I suppose it can also represent your ability to just dodge out of the way, but you expend energy and tire out as you go. So it's not that you got stabbed for D8 damage, it's that they tried to stab you and you just squirmed out of the way, getting a superficial cut and taking D8 of your "squirminess" off, which means when it runs out the last hit actually connects.
This made more sense back in earlier editions where poison/burns could be saving throws along with a ton of other stuff. But these day... fire and poison and acid deal damage each turn. It's literal damage.
Eh, poison still works with the stamina/dodginess/etc. interpretation. As the poison works its way through you are being debilitated. The pain and swelling around the entry point is affecting your movement, the neurotoxin attacking your nervous system is making you spasm and so on. Then if the poison takes off your final HP, it is you succumbing to it as it reaches your heart and causes cardiac arrest, or shuts down your nervous system etc.
Burns and acid can work similarly, with the pain affecting your concentration, necrosis/swelling of the burn limiting movement etc.
some bloke wrote: I suppose it can also represent your ability to just dodge out of the way, but you expend energy and tire out as you go. So it's not that you got stabbed for D8 damage, it's that they tried to stab you and you just squirmed out of the way, getting a superficial cut and taking D8 of your "squirminess" off, which means when it runs out the last hit actually connects.
This made more sense back in earlier editions where poison/burns could be saving throws along with a ton of other stuff. But these day... fire and poison and acid deal damage each turn. It's literal damage.
Eh, poison still works with the stamina/dodginess/etc. interpretation. As the poison works its way through you are being debilitated. The pain and swelling around the entry point is affecting your movement, the neurotoxin attacking your nervous system is making you spasm and so on. Then if the poison takes off your final HP, it is you succumbing to it as it reaches your heart and causes cardiac arrest, or shuts down your nervous system etc.
Burns and acid can work similarly, with the pain affecting your concentration, necrosis/swelling of the burn limiting movement etc.
Right. And then you take a nap and it all goes away.
some bloke wrote: I suppose it can also represent your ability to just dodge out of the way, but you expend energy and tire out as you go. So it's not that you got stabbed for D8 damage, it's that they tried to stab you and you just squirmed out of the way, getting a superficial cut and taking D8 of your "squirminess" off, which means when it runs out the last hit actually connects.
This made more sense back in earlier editions where poison/burns could be saving throws along with a ton of other stuff. But these day... fire and poison and acid deal damage each turn. It's literal damage.
Eh, poison still works with the stamina/dodginess/etc. interpretation. As the poison works its way through you are being debilitated. The pain and swelling around the entry point is affecting your movement, the neurotoxin attacking your nervous system is making you spasm and so on. Then if the poison takes off your final HP, it is you succumbing to it as it reaches your heart and causes cardiac arrest, or shuts down your nervous system etc.
Burns and acid can work similarly, with the pain affecting your concentration, necrosis/swelling of the burn limiting movement etc.
Right. And then you take a nap and it all goes away.
Yeah that bit doesn't quite work.
This is why I like the FATE system. You have your Stress boxes which are your HP equivalent in that when they are all used up you are taken out and which are easier to heal. On top of that you have the Conditions system, which you can use to soak damage in exchange for an aspect being applied to you which can be used by the GM (or indeed other players) to cause bad stuff. And the more extreme a condition (starting from minor then going up to extreme, in steps of increasing soak possibilities), the longer it takes to get rid of. And that top most Extreme condition is permanent and replaces one of your existing aspects.
As an example of this in practice, John Silver is a Swashbuckling Pirate. During a combat scene, he has taken some wounds from gunfire, leaving him with pretty badly damaged. He is caught in a blast of splinters when a cannonball rips through the hull near him. In order to avoid being taken out by this attack, he uses his Extreme condition to absorb 8 points of damage and takes the rest in one of his remaining stress boxes, allowing him to stay up in the fight but at great cost. John Silver chooses to take the condition Mangled Pulp of a Leg to represent this horrific injury. On his turn he manages to crawl to one of the cannons and light the fuse, sending a cannonball crashing into the enemy ship and hitting the magazine, destroying it utterly in a massive blast. He is then seen to by the ships surgeon who amputates the remains of his ruined leg below the knee. This begins the process of healing and the Mangled Pulp of a Leg aspect is changed to Freshly Amputated Leg. It will take until the end of the scenario (basically the leg of a campaign, reaching a major milestone) for the condition to clear, and he cannot take another Extreme consequence until he has cleared the previous one so until that happens he doesn't have that high-cost damage soak option to use, meaning his character is potentially much more fragile, especially as the aspect created by the condition can be invoked by the GM. He also changes his Swashbuckling Pirate aspect to One-Legged Quartermaster to represent the change to his character that this injury has had.
I think my problem with Fate is that the storytelling mechanics break my immersion way more than the hit point mechanics do in a more traditional RPG.
Hit points are pretty flawed, but they are part of a push for simple mechanics that evoke a feel of pulp adventure.
I have used "wound level" mechanics before and they definitely increase immersion, but the style of game they promote is much more survival horror than two fist pulp. And that is fine! But I think it would not work well in Dungeons and Dragons, which has always been about killing monsters and stealing their stuff. Might work well in a more grim and horror focused fantasy game though, and definitely more simulationist for those of us who value immersion heavily (And I count myself in that group, despite not minding HP).
It depends on the kind of pulpy fantasy. You got to remember that the pulpiest of the pulp fantasy is Howard Conan and Fritz Lieber's Lankhmar. I don't think HP does a very good job of representing either of those things. What DnD and HP do best isn't pulp at all imo. It's a zoomed in view of a war game (as it was designed to be) so what it represents best is actually just that. A game. It's Gauntlet and DIablo.
Lance845 wrote: It depends on the kind of pulpy fantasy. You got to remember that the pulpiest of the pulp fantasy is Howard Conan and Fritz Lieber's Lankhmar. I don't think HP does a very good job of representing either of those things. What DnD and HP do best isn't pulp at all imo. It's a zoomed in view of a war game (as it was designed to be) so what it represents best is actually just that. A game. It's Gauntlet and DIablo.
Honestly, I'm of two minds on this, and I'm of two minds because DnD is essentially multiple games.
At low levels, HP is completely functional for what DnD's combat is: A fun, simple, fairly quick resolution of combat mechanics that's pretty easy for new players to comprehend and that you can build a narrative around if you want to.
You don't have to constantly answer questions like "what kinds of injuries can magic heal? What kinds of injuries, therefore, do you need to assign to each consequence?" you can just describe the injuries as it feels appropriate, and it just comes down to "about how many small attacks or big attacks should this thing take to bring down?"
Healing is so plentiful in dnd that I don't think it can ever really approach "survival horror game" level, even at level 1 where a weak character goes down in 1 hit and a tough one in 2-3. When your HP is 20, fighting the same at 5hp as you do at 20...eh, it's not so bad. When your HP is 100....it starts getting a bit silly.
DnD combat is like one of those games where the enemy's health and stats just increase along with yours, but you have to manually roll all the dice and track all the numbers so it quickly becomes tedious. After about 9 months of playing, my group has basically lost any and all interest in continuing to level up our characters. We're staying at the level we're at in perpetuity, and changing up and tweaking our abilities and skills if we get bored, because combat resolution outside of the dedicated level 2 one-shot characters has become something of a slog, and usually with our main characters we play extremely unconvential combat encounters anyway.
See, thats just it. All the ways you describe dnd combat rolls back around to a video games. I think DnD works great as a video game. Mechanically it's already doing it.
Lance845 wrote: See, thats just it. All the ways you describe dnd combat rolls back around to a video games. I think DnD works great as a video game. Mechanically it's already doing it.
....I mean, it works great as a video game that's based off of a D20 system, like Knights of the Old Republic or Baldur's Gate, which is what I was describing.
But sure. Let's say "DnD is like a video game." I know that when you say that, what you mean is "DnD bad." But on the other hand, video game style mechanics is something people are intimately familiar with. Your character having 'hit points' is something your basic everyday person is absolutely going to immediately understand.
If your goal is a situation where you hit combat and then for 30-ish minutes every player starts playing an intensely tactical, decision-rich skirmish level miniature wargame, or if your goal is a situation where there's no separation between the combat section and the roleplay section and you resolve both in essentially the same way, nope, DnD ain't it.
But I play with a bunch of folks who are phenomenal roleplayers, somewhat into 'general nerd culture' but who are NOT wargamers in any sense of the word. But they do play a ton of video games, and specifically got drawn into roleplaying by the IDEA of dnd. They want to roll the funny dice, they want to have the stat numbers, they want to have the classes and the races to help them construct a cool character concept they enjoy. Would the game probably run slightly smoother if I could convince everyone to abandon that thing they're all comfortable with and come over here and do a game where your character sheet is six sentences and 10 numbers and you only roll square dice with plusses and minuses?
Yeah, probably. But in my experience that is one of the best ways to reliably nuke a gaming group - "this (edition, game, system, whatever) that we all play has problems, guys! Everybody come over HERE, throw out all the stuff you've invested into, and play MY thing instead!"
Lance845 wrote: See, thats just it. All the ways you describe dnd combat rolls back around to a video games. I think DnD works great as a video game. Mechanically it's already doing it.
....I mean, it works great as a video game that's based off of a D20 system, like Knights of the Old Republic or Baldur's Gate, which is what I was describing.
But sure. Let's say "DnD is like a video game." I know that when you say that, what you mean is "DnD bad."
It's not really what I am saying though. DnD Bad is a blanket statement that I don't agree with. DnD is GOOD as a video game. It's BAD as a TTRPG that has any kind of focus on story telling instead of that Munchkin style kick down the door, kill the monsters, take the loot. It's GREAT as a loose dungeon crawl. Set up some kind of mega dungeon and have the players explore it? DnD excels. None of that is great for immersion. And arguably because videogames just do all the math for you they are the correct medium for it. But DnD does THAT pretty great even at the table. Daggerfall and the rest of the Elder Scrolls games are basically DnD doing what it does best. Explore some gak. Kill some gak. Take their gak.
But on the other hand, video game style mechanics is something people are intimately familiar with. Your character having 'hit points' is something your basic everyday person is absolutely going to immediately understand.
If your goal is a situation where you hit combat and then for 30-ish minutes every player starts playing an intensely tactical, decision-rich skirmish level miniature wargame, or if your goal is a situation where there's no separation between the combat section and the roleplay section and you resolve both in essentially the same way, nope, DnD ain't it.
I would argue that DnD IS that tactical wargame. The game is built from the ground up to incorporate battle maps and miniatures. The rules are written so that theater of the mind CAN happen but it's more cumbersome because of the 5ft square grid that everything is written around. It's easier to just have the grid on the table.
There can be separation between combat mechanics and other parts of the game. That is not what is being said. DnD is built as a combat engine first and foremost. DnDs principle player rewards are exp and loot. And the principle ways to get that is combat. And when you advance 9 out of 10 rewards for doing so is being better at combat. It just is.
But I play with a bunch of folks who are phenomenal roleplayers, somewhat into 'general nerd culture' but who are NOT wargamers in any sense of the word. But they do play a ton of video games, and specifically got drawn into roleplaying by the IDEA of dnd. They want to roll the funny dice, they want to have the stat numbers, they want to have the classes and the races to help them construct a cool character concept they enjoy. Would the game probably run slightly smoother if I could convince everyone to abandon that thing they're all comfortable with and come over here and do a game where your character sheet is six sentences and 10 numbers and you only roll square dice with plusses and minuses?
Yeah, probably. But in my experience that is one of the best ways to reliably nuke a gaming group - "this (edition, game, system, whatever) that we all play has problems, guys! Everybody come over HERE, throw out all the stuff you've invested into, and play MY thing instead!"
I am glad you have a group that is having a good time. I just don't know what relevance it has when discussing that DnDs mechanics can be immersion breaking and/or where they actually thrive.
Although you can say that many of dnd's mechanics can be immersion-breaking from a roleplaying standpoint because they are video-gamey, the fact that they are video-gamey can also be a point of comfort for people less familiar with TTRPGs and more familiar with video game mechanics.
In a theoretical world where everyone is familiar and comfortable with RPGs I would pick many systems before DnD. In the real world, where the people I actually want to sit down at a table with and interact with for multiple hours on end are usually NOT the people familiar and comfortable with RPGs, DnD works great.
I'd much rather play a flawed game with socially functional adults than a mechanically perfect game with people with zero social understanding.
the_scotsman wrote: T
I'd much rather play a flawed game with socially functional adults than a mechanically perfect game with people with zero social understanding.
Why is that the 2 options? lol. You are seriously implying (or flat out stating) that socially functional adults cannot play a RPG without it being dumbed down for them?
I accept that D&D has some gamey elements and it is to me definitely close to it's wargame roots. I like that about it. I think Conan is pretty OTT in the books, often shrugging off damage like a mighty superman in a very unrealistic way. But I think yeah, hit points come from wargames (from naval wargames, I believe) and have transfered from RPGs into video games and now from video games back into RPGs in a kind of continual exchange.
Like I said, no problem with more realistic damage systems, but they do alter the tone a bit and I quite like that kick down the door and kick some ass style of megadungeon play, I guess it is probably my favourite style of play. Sometimes I want something grittier, and then I think certainly wound levels work better. Really not a fan of Fate though, which is the most popular game using that sort of system because I like the narrative element to be played down in favour of simulation in my games (I don't like having narrative control as a player and as a DM I prefer to focus on simulation rather than putting a narrative in front of my players as I think it actually produces a more unique experience that you can only get from a game with a human DM).
the_scotsman wrote: T
I'd much rather play a flawed game with socially functional adults than a mechanically perfect game with people with zero social understanding.
Why is that the 2 options? lol. You are seriously implying (or flat out stating) that socially functional adults cannot play a RPG without it being dumbed down for them?
I have had absolutely miserable luck over the years finding anyone already into RPGs that I could stand being in the same room with for four hours in an RPG setting. I tried all the different tricks to get around constant metagaming, murder-hoboing, antisocial BS and for a while just gave up and decided RPGs weren't all they were cracked up to be. It's truly amazing just how much the common "DM advice" and "help with a problem player!" forums and posts are filled with behavior from presumably grown ass adults that makes you amazed they were able to make it out of 5th grade.
It's only when I took a group of people who were my friends first, a couple of whom were interested in trying out an RPG, that I actually realized what a good time RPGs could be.
And yeah, I'm guessing if I took this group and tried to cram the more intense wargame mechanics of 4th edition down their throats it'd probably overwhelm them and the campaign would have just petered out.
I agree with playing with your friends. It's not just TTRPGs. People suck. I don't play games on XBox with a mic and headphones either. I don't want to hear from "those people".
That being said, there are lots of different games out there for TTRPGs and they don't need to be mechanically dense or video game like to ease people into it.
Forbidden Lands is my go to game and I am introducing 2 friends who have never played TTRPGs to it as their first game this weekend.
It's not the mechanics they are questioning. It's getting around the idea that they can do anything. They will work their way through that problem after about 10 minutes.
Lance845 wrote: I agree with playing with your friends. It's not just TTRPGs. People suck. I don't play games on XBox with a mic and headphones either. I don't want to hear from "those people".
That being said, there are lots of different games out there for TTRPGs and they don't need to be mechanically dense or video game like to ease people into it.
Forbidden Lands is my go to game and I am introducing 2 friends who have never played TTRPGs to it as their first game this weekend.
It's not the mechanics they are questioning. It's getting around the idea that they can do anything. They will work their way through that problem after about 10 minutes.
True, but you know what helps with that problem is a system where what you can do is written out for them and fairly limited in the situations where it's awkward to pause and think for a while (i.e., when everyone is taking turns in combat) and where the resolution mechanism is pretty simplistic out of combat where people are just roleplaying freely and have more time to think about their actions.
It's also nice to have different classes with different degrees of complexity when it comes to combat. We have one player who really gets into the mechanics on a druid which gives them a huge array of different action options each round - do you cast a spell, throw a cantrip, do a weapon attack, use a special ability, or turn into one of a dozen odd animal forms - and then another player who loves roleplaying but just wants to play a safe archer and shoot their bow in combat.
I have had much more success getting non-RPG folks to play a rules-lite system than D&D because all the layers of D&D is too much for what they are actually looking for.
They want to sit around the table and tell stories with each other and occasionally roll a dice or two. Rules-lite has been infinitely better at this.... for me.
Lance845 wrote: I agree with playing with your friends. It's not just TTRPGs. People suck. I don't play games on XBox with a mic and headphones either. I don't want to hear from "those people".
That being said, there are lots of different games out there for TTRPGs and they don't need to be mechanically dense or video game like to ease people into it.
Forbidden Lands is my go to game and I am introducing 2 friends who have never played TTRPGs to it as their first game this weekend.
It's not the mechanics they are questioning. It's getting around the idea that they can do anything. They will work their way through that problem after about 10 minutes.
True, but you know what helps with that problem is a system where what you can do is written out for them and fairly limited in the situations where it's awkward to pause and think for a while (i.e., when everyone is taking turns in combat) and where the resolution mechanism is pretty simplistic out of combat where people are just roleplaying freely and have more time to think about their actions.
It's also nice to have different classes with different degrees of complexity when it comes to combat. We have one player who really gets into the mechanics on a druid which gives them a huge array of different action options each round - do you cast a spell, throw a cantrip, do a weapon attack, use a special ability, or turn into one of a dozen odd animal forms - and then another player who loves roleplaying but just wants to play a safe archer and shoot their bow in combat.
Again, I am glad you enjoy that, but I don't see those as good things. Classes are not representations of people. They are a thing I pick in Diablo to give me a build I work on.
As for combat, maybe I need to not be vague and open ended about it so that you have something to actually compare it to?
In the Uni System by Eden studios you perform an action by rolling 1d10 and add stat plus skill. A total of 9-10 is 1 success. 11-12 is 2. 13-14 is 3. So on and so forth. Character sheets have a little box for combat maneuvers with your totals on it so the math is already done for you and you have a little chart showing successes. Everyone gets 1 defensive and 1 offensive action for free. Each additional action is a cumulative -2 penalty. The opposing player can try to defend and ties go to the defender.
So I want to shoot a bow. Dex+bow+1d10. I want to dodge, dex+dodge or acrobatics+d10. What if I want to take my time and aim? Perception+Bow and you add the successes to your attack but you have lost your place in initiative and you now act last in the round. It's intuitive and easy and you always add the appropriate skill and stat with the players even being able to say "I want to use x stat with y attribute because" and the DM can approve. The players can do anything. It's far easier for the players, especially new players to conceptualize than DnD because they don't need to memorize minutia for rules and they can get as creative as they want. "I want to run and cut the rope holding the chandelier up and then swing from the rope to kick the guy in the face. "Okay. Thats going to be 2 actions with a test. Give me a Dex+Sword to cut the rope. You only need 1 success. Give me a simple strength test to hold on to the rope as it pulls you up (str doubled+d10). Then give me a Brawl+Dex for the kick. It's -2 because it's your 2rd offensive action in the round but I will give you a +1 Str modifier to your damage for the extra umph from the swing."
Thats far easier and far more immersive for everyone involved. DM and players.
In Forbidden Lands you have a table of fast and slow actions. Every turn you can take 2 fast actions or 1 fast and 1 slow action. Move, Parry dodge. Fast actions. Attacking is a slow action. Same as before, ties go to the defender. Moving around the battlefield is simple and abstracted into zones. So in a in the open table area is a zone. Behind the bar is another zone. Being in the same zone is "Near". Getting into melee range is "Arms Length" So If I want to get behind the Bar by jumping it it's a move action (Agility+Move and has to be rolled because it's rough terrain to jump the bar). Then I can save my second action to defend. So on and so forth.
Not being DnD and placing players into level/class boxes doesn't mean getting infinitely more complex or so abstract as to be meaningless. There is a full spectrum of systems out there that are capable of both strategic crunch and open ended narrative driven action at the same time while keeping it simple and easy to digest.
I never heard of it so looked it up. It looks interesting and I'll have to check out hopefully some youtube reviews of it tonight if they exist. Apparently it started out as a crowdfunding project and now Modiphius is involved?
warboss wrote: I never heard of it so looked it up. It looks interesting and I'll have to check out hopefully some youtube reviews of it tonight if they exist. Apparently it started out as a crowdfunding project and now Modiphius is involved?
Modiphius is international distribution for Free League (A Swedish company). Free League is the company that makes it and a number of other games using their Year Zero game system. Mutant: Year Zero would be the game the engine is named after. Free League is a faction from another one of their games Coriolis. They have been doing crowd funding for a number of their projects (but not all).
Their games include.
Alien* (as in the movie franchise)
Coriolis* (A sci fi game described as 1001 arabian nights in space with firefly and dashes of alien/lovecraft for good measure)
Forbidden Lands* (Rogues and Raiders in a cursed world - Their fantasy game)
Tales From the Loop/Things From the Flood (based on a art books about a sci fi 1980s/90s that never was. Amazon Prime made a show based on the RPG)
Mutant Year Zero (post apoc wasteland survival. Think Fallout. Is actually several games that can all be mixed and matched. Genetically engineered anthropomorphic animals. Sentient robots. Mutant survivors. Decadent humans surviving in an ark for generations).
Vassen (Victorian myth and monster hunters)
Symbaroum (A very Dark Fantasy game that takes place in a single massive dark forest. This is the one game with huge mechanical divergence from the others.)
Twilight 2000 (A post world war survivalist game)
warboss wrote: I never heard of it so looked it up. It looks interesting and I'll have to check out hopefully some youtube reviews of it tonight if they exist. Apparently it started out as a crowdfunding project and now Modiphius is involved?
Modiphius is international distribution for Free League (A Swedish company). Free League is the company that makes it and a number of other games using their Year Zero game system. Mutant: Year Zero would be the game the engine is named after. Free League is a faction from another one of their games Coriolis. They have been doing crowd funding for a number of their projects (but not all).
Their games include.
Alien* (as in the movie franchise)
Coriolis* (A sci fi game described as 1001 arabian nights in space with firefly and dashes of alien/lovecraft for good measure)
Forbidden Lands* (Rogues and Raiders in a cursed world - Their fantasy game)
Tales From the Loop/Things From the Flood (based on a art books about a sci fi 1980s/90s that never was. Amazon Prime made a show based on the RPG)
Mutant Year Zero (post apoc wasteland survival. Think Fallout. Is actually several games that can all be mixed and matched. Genetically engineered anthropomorphic animals. Sentient robots. Mutant survivors. Decadent humans surviving in an ark for generations).
Vassen (Victorian myth and monster hunters)
Symbaroum (A very Dark Fantasy game that takes place in a single massive dark forest. This is the one game with huge mechanical divergence from the others.)
Twilight 2000 (A post world war survivalist game)
* These are the ones I own.
How is the Alien RPG? I really like the idea of it but I’m afraid it could be a bit one-dimensional.
warboss wrote: I never heard of it so looked it up. It looks interesting and I'll have to check out hopefully some youtube reviews of it tonight if they exist. Apparently it started out as a crowdfunding project and now Modiphius is involved?
Modiphius is international distribution for Free League (A Swedish company). Free League is the company that makes it and a number of other games using their Year Zero game system. Mutant: Year Zero would be the game the engine is named after. Free League is a faction from another one of their games Coriolis. They have been doing crowd funding for a number of their projects (but not all).
Their games include.
Alien* (as in the movie franchise)
Coriolis* (A sci fi game described as 1001 arabian nights in space with firefly and dashes of alien/lovecraft for good measure)
Forbidden Lands* (Rogues and Raiders in a cursed world - Their fantasy game)
Tales From the Loop/Things From the Flood (based on a art books about a sci fi 1980s/90s that never was. Amazon Prime made a show based on the RPG)
Mutant Year Zero (post apoc wasteland survival. Think Fallout. Is actually several games that can all be mixed and matched. Genetically engineered anthropomorphic animals. Sentient robots. Mutant survivors. Decadent humans surviving in an ark for generations).
Vassen (Victorian myth and monster hunters)
Symbaroum (A very Dark Fantasy game that takes place in a single massive dark forest. This is the one game with huge mechanical divergence from the others.)
Twilight 2000 (A post world war survivalist game)
* These are the ones I own.
How is the Alien RPG? I really like the idea of it but I’m afraid it could be a bit one-dimensional.
Yeah, I don't know about an entire Alien RPG but I ran Alien as a Monster of the Week one-off a while back and it was absolutely stellar. Redesigned the alien's physiological characteristics somewhat so people couldn't metagame using their knowledge from the movie, set up a big sprawling ship map and followed the Monster of the Week "what would happen if the heroes did nothing" track, making sure to set up scenarios where characters were split up, isolated, or multiple things went wrong at once so players could either let one thing fail or split the party. I tracked the player's 'near-miss points' myself (though I explained how all the mechanics would work to the players beforehand) and every encounter would end, outwardly, with a player getting away from the alien and receiving a note that said either, basically "you escaped successfully" or "you were injected by something from the creature, and now you know that you are a part of it. Soon, you will change and ascend your human form, but you must continue to play along until you can find a time and place to do that safely. If you survive the scenario, you will win and the other players will lose."
The final scene was basically the paranoia scene from The Thing where the alien is defeated, the players start to celebrate, and one of the remaining NPCs starts screaming "NOT NOW, NO ITS TOO SOON" and explodes out some extra limbs to let the players know that some of their crewmates may no longer be on their side.
How is the Alien RPG? I really like the idea of it but I’m afraid it could be a bit one-dimensional.
It's set up to be played in two ways.
1) Cinematically. Basically as a series of contained 1-2 shots. Characters are not generally meant to survive for ongoing campaigns. Adventures are set up in 3 acts. Characters are given agendas that they hide from the others. It sort of meant to hide a Burke or Ash on your crew. All the premade adventures for the game so far are Cinematic.
2) Ongoing. Full character creation and ship building rules. World generation tables. Big history of the universe and background on lots of things.
Mechanically it's great, but I agree with you that it's really probably best used as a series of one shots. Go full theatrics. Play in the dark by giving your players glow sticks to look at their sheets/dice. Face their couch/table against a wall. Do your DMing behind them so you can throw books on the floor behind them for jump scares, tap them on their shoulders. flick water off your finger tips onto the back of their necks. Buy a cheap red strobe light if they try to blow the ship up and then start a real counter for how much time they have left. Thats how I intend to use it. I am currently working on the idea of making maybe 5-6 cinematic one shots that show different characters in different areas seeing different angles on a singular over all story and ending it with a final session that ties the events of all of them together.
That actually sounds pretty fun, I could see the group I’m in going for a couple of “seasons” of Alien between D&D campaigns. We play online though so hard to immerse them with props and jump scares though - hopefully post-apocalypse we can do that. Thanks for the perspectives!
Running an Alien campaign would be tricky for multi-session play on, say, the Nostromo where you have a very limited cast and no way to replace a dead PC. If you set it on a Space Station like Sevastopol from Alien Isolation or a colony then a player can take over control of an NPC, such as a colonial marshal, engineer etc. to carry on playing in the campaign after their original character's death. Also allows for more threats than just the Alien, such as synths, other survivors etc. to break up the flow of the game so it isn't 100% Alien fighting 100% of the time.
I think a combination of multi-session mini campaigns and one shots would work well. You could even follow the events of the films pretty nicely:
1) One shot on Nostromo or other non-military spacecraft, survivors will carry on into part 2. 1.5) One shot or small multi-session campaign on colony who go to investigate wreck encountered in part 1 (either they stumble onto it or, if a survivor from part 1 gave information to a company, maybe they are told to investigate). Make this a pure survival game. The players just need to get a distress call out, gather whatever supplies they can, find a secure space to hold up and survive if possible. They cannot escape and lack the firepower necessary to kill the aliens, though they can fashion equipment (flamethrowers jury rigged from blowtorches, molotov cocktails, pipe bombs etc.) to repel them in small numbers and for short amounts of time. Survivors will be encountered in part 2. 2) Survivors from Part 1 who choose to go are attached to a detachment of marines to investigate reported issues at colony from part 1.5. So the players can choose to carry on with their character from part 1 (if they survived), their character from 1.5 (if any survived) or a new character in the form of a marine or company man. This would be another mini campaign, involving the marines arriving, attempting to locate and rescue the colonists, gak going south, needing to hold up and defend themselves, call down a new dropship/get to an LZ, get systems such as power, communications, maybe even life support depending on how far along the terraforming process is etc. 3) I'd set this on a Space station with survivors from part 2 rerouted to dock for repairs to their ship or some other reason. Alien had somehow got on board (or perhaps have a supply ship leave the colony in part 1.5 with an alien on board). They are made to undergo quarantine and sealed off in a part of the station (or perhaps the ship docks automatically but fails to awaken them from hypersleep until several weeks later) and when they come out, all hell has broken loose. People are missing, order has broken down, the AI seems to be malfunctioning, large parts of the station are locked down etc.
Yeah, the only complaint I'd have with any of that is the amount that the horror of Alien (or thing, or cthulhu, or any established horror canon property) is the amount metagaming is absolutely going to ruin the experience.
People know about Xenomorphs, they know the various cthulhu monsters, they know about how The Thing works. You have to make your own thing if you want 'figuring out how the rules of the creature works' to be any part of the experience. Otherwise you'll be relying on all your players to feign ignorance the whole time.
I find that you can't achieve real horror in a TTRPG. The closest you can get is thriller/action-horror, mostly via close call combat where death is likely and by setting a disturbing atmosphere.
I have played with a GM who managed it, mostly through Silent Hill style psychological stuff and body horror or cosmic horror.
But he is a really talented GM, I have rarely seen anyone else pull it off, or pulled it off myself (I had a successful gothic horror campaign but I would say it was more of an adventure or mystery campaign with horror themes, I don't think the players felt scared often).
LordofHats wrote: I find that you can't achieve real horror in a TTRPG. The closest you can get is thriller/action-horror, mostly via close call combat where death is likely and by setting a disturbing atmosphere.
You can't create real horror, that's true. But I think when people want to play in a horror game, what they really want to do is take on the PREMISE of a horror movie, but in their own perfectly rational, not at all afraid because they're not in real danger mindset, and see if they could "do better" than the characters in whatever most recent movie they saw.
The problem is that any established canonical universe that everyone is familiar with will basically result in the "figuring out if you could do better" being a total moot point. If you set up a horror scenario and the villain is a Vampire, every player either has to spend the whole game pretending their characters don't know about vampires, or they are just going to metagame and easily defeat the vampire because they know about garlic and stakes and crosses etc.
strangely, it does seem like a lot of people are really interested in the play-acting aspect, which I have really never understood in the context of an rpg. the players going in with extensive metaknowledge is practically a selling point of 99% of RPGs by now - "hey its Thing You Know the RPG! Don't play an RPG, just sit around a table and find a way to work in quotes and references to the source material you're familiar with!"
I think it's kind of a balancing act. There's knowing you know what you know, and knowing what your character probably knows and playing with that constraint. 'It's what my character would do' is kind of a dirty phrase these days often invoked by chaotic-stupid trolls, but it's also a good thing to remembering in RP.
There are times where I've known exactly what the best course of action was and chosen not to take it because the context would suggest superhuman foreknowledge on the part of the character. I know that door is a mimic, but this is also a creepy house with body part looking things everywhere, so my character actually has no reason to think a tongue handle doorknob is out of place in this environment where we've yet to meet any mimics.
I think it'll vary heavily by group and premise. The vampire thing for example I think would be most exciting if the group didn't know who the vampire was and had to investigate suspects, all while NPCs are dropping after each long rest. That would build a suitably horrific atmosphere, but the characters themselves would not feasibly be the ones who are in danger.
Since Alien has kind of been the subject. They just put up for preorder their first campaign expansion book that focuses on the Marines (my understanding is they intend another book that deals with blue collar workers ala alien (space truckers) and another that focuses more on colonists).
LordofHats wrote: I think it's kind of a balancing act. There's knowing you know what you know, and knowing what your character probably knows and playing with that constraint. 'It's what my character would do' is kind of a dirty phrase these days often invoked by chaotic-stupid trolls, but it's also a good thing to remembering in RP.
There are times where I've known exactly what the best course of action was and chosen not to take it because the context would suggest superhuman foreknowledge on the part of the character. I know that door is a mimic, but this is also a creepy house with body part looking things everywhere, so my character actually has no reason to think a tongue handle doorknob is out of place in this environment where we've yet to meet any mimics.
I think it'll vary heavily by group and premise. The vampire thing for example I think would be most exciting if the group didn't know who the vampire was and had to investigate suspects, all while NPCs are dropping after each long rest. That would build a suitably horrific atmosphere, but the characters themselves would not feasibly be the ones who are in danger.
I did a game similar to this where all the "clues" pointed to a Vampire, but it was really a semi-gelatinous, large, blood sucking slug.
However, it was great seeing the players accuse the various NPCs, and even a point where some party members were starting to suspect a different party member had been "turned".
They ended up eventually fleeing and never finding out what was really going on. Good fun!
Horror in DnD is hard, but I think doable if you go more of a action-horror style where you know that ultimately there's going to be a big ol' scrap with abig ol' Terrible Beasty, but where you have the chance to add in sufficiently creepy/unsettling/ content along the way so yhat final encounter is the release of built-up tension, paranoia and fear. Aside from low,levels, combat is rarely lethal enough to have an instant grisly death be a looming threat, but all the other tropes of horror storytelling can still be made to work. Only partial glimpses of the monster, sowing doubt and discord until the heroes turn on each other and, lazy as it might be, just leaning into the gore/body horror a bit to make something mechanically mundane still very unpleasant (though obviously, never beyond the tolerance of the people you're playing with).
The advantage you have is that just by virtue or playing a horror game. they're signing up for the genre. and something that might be innocuous in a classic high fantasy becomes suddenly noteworthy as part of a horror game, and the players will latch onto that if they're doing it right. Undead are a good example. In a fantasy game, they're a low level trash mob to be cut to bits with ease, and interchangable with goblins ir pixies or wolves. No one has ever been scared fighting a basic skeleton warrior... But in a horror game, the fact that dead body just got up and is groaning at you with airless lungs while the still-feeding maggots drip from its loosely hanging jaw, and chunks of flesh slough away as it begins to lurch with unknowable intent... That *should* be scary if you've built up the right atmosphere. and if your players are suitably willing to buy into the tone the game is going for
You can then mechanically augment that if you want. Make it immune to physical damage perhaps. Let it use shards of its own shattered bones as weapons that deal poison or necrotic damage as the curse spreads to its targets. Let it bite a victim who then has a day to find a cure or suffer the same fate. Now that zombie, who's still maybe doing sod all in the way of actual damage. is one good roll away from setting a time bomb ticking, and it can't be just cut down, and now suddenly it's a threat. Apply that formula to a gnoll (already scary if you ask me. because hyenas, man...) or a giant or a hell, a kraken, and you've got yourself a bona fide horror beastie This is an extreme example, and possibly still not the most interesting, but it gets the point across. Setting the tone is 80% of the work, and the players are actively helping with that, and the rest can be just a few mechanical tweaks to raise the stakes or change the familiar into the unknown.
And that's before you get into Star Spawn and Oblex and Dbyuuk and Mind Flayers where even more of the heavy lifting is done in psychological or body horror long before they even catch sight of the monster. Yes, you can kind of only pull it off once with a given creature, and the more knowledgeable your players the harder you have to work, but it's not impossible and can be very rewarding. And when your players know the monster manuals inside out. you've still got an ace in the whole, which is that a guy in a mask with a creepy voice is a scarier monster than any statblock you'll ever find...
All that said, if you want to go all in on the horror in gaming and really eke out every drop of suspense and trepidation, Dread is to my mind the best game to do it with. Needs to be done in person. as it uses a Jenga tower for resolving its actions, but when that's a thing that can happen again, I highly recommend it
the_scotsman wrote: ...or they are just going to metagame and easily defeat the vampire because they know about garlic and stakes and crosses etc.
That is where you can twist that around a bit. Have garlic do nothing, crosses only work when used by those with a conviction in their faith, running water might weaken the vampire but not stop it completely, same with thresholds, does the vampire need to sleep on its home soil or can it wander freely? Then mix in some different vampire lore from different regions so you have your vampire by way of Stoker in Dracula, throw in some Slavic Strzyga etc.
But have all that folklore such as garlic repelling vampires exist within the game world, maybe it is also believed that silver works, or salt. It isn't like false remedies and protections wouldn't exist.
Now the players try garlic and it doesn't work. Is that because garlic doesn't work on vampires? Or maybe it isn't a vampire? This cross the anti-religious edgelord is waving isn't doing anything either, how come? We've managed to stake it in the heart and buried it again but the next night the grave had been disturbed and the body was gone.
Get the players really guessing and questioning all the assumptions they brought with them from outside the game on how vampires work. Have them grasping at whatever clues they can gather in game on weaknesses of the vampire, some of them true, others just superstition.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
LordofHats wrote: I find that you can't achieve real horror in a TTRPG. The closest you can get is thriller/action-horror, mostly via close call combat where death is likely and by setting a disturbing atmosphere.
I think I have referenced it somewhere else on the Forum recently, but Horror in an RPG (like D7D especially) is like trying to write a good Superman story.
Superman is immune to most attacks, can't really be killed, and has few weaknesses. Really, a straight combat solution will NOT work against Superman. You can not outright endanger him, so how do you make a compelling story with Superman? The trick is you do no physically threaten Superman at all, instead you threat his values OR things around him that he values.
Horror RPGs are the same, they shouldn't threaten the PCs physically that often. Instead, they have to threaten what PCs think of the world, each other, and the NPCs around them.
Well I think thats more true with a game like DnD where everyone has piles of HP and combat amounts to chipping away at them. But games where HP pools are small, damage has impact, and there is a potential psychological impact as well can be good for horror games.
I once played a game where the players had a separate stamina pool. When they got down to 10 Sta they would take a -2 to all actions. at 5 it was -5. At 0 they had to start making rolls to not pass out from exhaustion.
Even without the mechanical effect players started having their characters acting tired and needing to rest when they got down to 15-20 because they had some kind of gauge to show them how tired they were and a mechanical impact around the corner.
Horror can be done, and mechanics can consciously and subconsciously influence RP. You just need the right systems.
...the players going in with extensive metaknowledge is practically a selling point of 99% of RPGs by now - "hey its Thing You Know the RPG! Don't play an RPG, just sit around a table and find a way to work in quotes and references to the source material you're familiar with!"
That sounds like my nightmare! I've deliberately kept myself ignorant of most DnD monsters just so I can have the fun of discovering them through the game, but I only started playing about a year ago. It was a bit tiresome recently though to roll play for three sessions about not knowing silver hurt werewolves, but only because it was impossible to hurt it without that knowledge!
We did also have a situation where we encountered some medusa things, but everyone was really good about not metagaming and going in with a mirror or hiding around the corner!.
Lance845 wrote: Well I think thats more true with a game like DnD where everyone has piles of HP and combat amounts to chipping away at them. But games where HP pools are small, damage has impact, and there is a potential psychological impact as well can be good for horror games.
Yes, I was specifically referencing D&D Horror games more than something with a bit higher lethality.
The question is always what makes a good horror game.....
Had our first real encounters last night at a newly minted 2nd level and almost TPK'ed thanks to a Leroy Jenkins by a party member... Wow... yeah... those BBEG are damage sponges.
Kind of excited. My artificer has succeeded in building a Linear Combustion Bow (musket) in my Strahd game after several weeks of planning. I've never used a gun in a DnD game before but it felt appropriate for a character I'm playing as a mad scientist tinkering with weapons and armor. Then I gave it the Repeating Shot infusion, so I literally have a machine gun, which is visually pretty impressive in my head.
Been running my campaign through discord and roll20 now for a few weeks, characters are all still level 1. Chased them around with my homebrew wraith I posted about earlier called a Bloodwraith. Was lots of fun, made the cleric wee himself in fear at one point.
I'm trying to make online dnd as fun as possible and as enthralling as it is in person but it's pretty difficult. I'd like a way to produce sound effects that every player can hear straight away, roll20 appears to have a music function but I cannot get it to work for the life of me, any ideas?
warboss wrote: How many hours of play have they had that they're still level 1 after a few weeks?
Not that long because we've only been managing a couple of hours play time on a sunday. It's maybe 6-7 hours play time at this point so I'm going to level them up in the next session
That's reasonable. I figured I'd ask as the Adventure League rules recommend leveling up from 1 to 2 after 8 hours of play. Obviously, it's just a recommendation but it seemed reasonable.
I've been pining for D&D for the last 6 months, can't get a group together because lurgy and can't do online because I live in the middle of nowhere with a terrible internet connection!
I have instead been scratching the itch by making my own world ready for my first go DMing, it's growing somewhere beyond control...
some bloke wrote: I've been pining for D&D for the last 6 months, can't get a group together because lurgy and can't do online because I live in the middle of nowhere with a terrible internet connection!
I have instead been scratching the itch by making my own world ready for my first go DMing, it's growing somewhere beyond control...
Congratz on your first go at DMing (or prepping to). If you want any pointers for DMing or world building just let us know. I am sure everyone would be glad to give advice.
Olthannon wrote: I'd like a way to produce sound effects that every player can hear straight away, roll20 appears to have a music function but I cannot get it to work for the life of me, any ideas?
I play in a game using Roll 20 and Discord, and the GM uses a discord bot called Groovybot to play sound effects (eg an hour long loop of snowstorm sounds - we're up in the Sea of Moving Ice in FR) or dramatically appropriate music from Youtube.
Discord is indeed the answer. There's Groovybot but there's also a host of soundboard apps and bots you can link into a discord server. I have a DM and fellow players who use them to do 'epic narrator voice' and or to give themselves lower/higher pitches to better reflect the character their playing.
some bloke wrote: I've been pining for D&D for the last 6 months, can't get a group together because lurgy and can't do online because I live in the middle of nowhere with a terrible internet connection!
I have instead been scratching the itch by making my own world ready for my first go DMing, it's growing somewhere beyond control...
How terrible out of curiosity? Dial up? You don't generally need much bandwith to operate a virtual table via discord and/or the other programs as long as you're just doing audio. As long as you can stream youtube at some sort of viable resolution 360p+ then you should be ok.
Olthannon wrote: I'd like a way to produce sound effects that every player can hear straight away, roll20 appears to have a music function but I cannot get it to work for the life of me, any ideas?
I play in a game using Roll 20 and Discord, and the GM uses a discord bot called Groovybot to play sound effects (eg an hour long loop of snowstorm sounds - we're up in the Sea of Moving Ice in FR) or dramatically appropriate music from Youtube.
That's excellent cheers to you and LordofHats! Is it already on discord or do you download it separately?
Da Boss wrote: Yeah. It is somewhat important to reskin things to keep the unknown as part of what is going on.
Just wanted to comment on this as I (engaged in my first ever D&D campaign) have found this to be very true. I'd never played D&D, but I read the books as a kid, was tangentially versed in the lore, etc. I kind of figured I knew what I was getting into
However our DM is not dropping us into a traditional D&D setting or -I think- any of the current settings. I'm not totally sure, but -even though it's got many elements of classic fantasy- I think we already discovered a spaceship and possibly met some individuals who fight demons across various planets. I've deliberately not looked into Spelljammer just in case that's what he's drawing from but suffice to say it's fantastic to be surprised. Even the players who have experience in D&D seem to not know what's coming.
The module Expedition to the Barrier Peaks involved a crashed space ship, and the OD&D supplement Blackmoor had an 'adventure' --Temple of the Frog -- in it with space/dimension travellers. Sounds like the DM is very much going with the traditional D&D setting. Gonzo D&D.
some bloke wrote: I've been pining for D&D for the last 6 months, can't get a group together because lurgy and can't do online because I live in the middle of nowhere with a terrible internet connection!
I have instead been scratching the itch by making my own world ready for my first go DMing, it's growing somewhere beyond control...
How terrible out of curiosity? Dial up? You don't generally need much bandwith to operate a virtual table via discord and/or the other programs as long as you're just doing audio. As long as you can stream youtube at some sort of viable resolution 360p+ then you should be ok.
oh it's quick enough, for a few moments, then it turns off, then it's back on, then it's reconnecting...makes for very frustrating audio where I'm constantly asking for people to repeat themselves..
some bloke wrote: I've been pining for D&D for the last 6 months, can't get a group together because lurgy and can't do online because I live in the middle of nowhere with a terrible internet connection!
I have instead been scratching the itch by making my own world ready for my first go DMing, it's growing somewhere beyond control...
Maybe try message board games? There are sites like rpol.net designed for it, or places like ENWorld or Giant in the Playground have dedicated forums for recruiting for and playing RPG's via message boards.
oh it's quick enough, for a few moments, then it turns off, then it's back on, then it's reconnecting...makes for very frustrating audio where I'm constantly asking for people to repeat themselves..
Yeah, that sucks. I don't have a quick fix for that unfortunately. :(
What programs does your group use? Is it possible to use the audio via a cellphone app over 3G-5G wireless while the computer uses your normal connection for the other stuff that isn't latency dependent? Unless your primary internet is cell based...
oh it's quick enough, for a few moments, then it turns off, then it's back on, then it's reconnecting...makes for very frustrating audio where I'm constantly asking for people to repeat themselves..
Yeah, that sucks. I don't have a quick fix for that unfortunately. :(
What programs does your group use? Is it possible to use the audio via a cellphone app over 3G-5G wireless while the computer uses your normal connection for the other stuff that isn't latency dependent? Unless your primary internet is cell based...
regrettably my phone has no signal at home!
have had engineers on the line recently though, so I may be trying out an online game! fingers crossed!
Back in early 3rd edition, there was a crude short (maybe 2-3 minutes) web cartoon (probably flash cartoon since it was years before youtube) about an RPG (I think D&D) session using various hand drawn characters mixed in with blocky polygonal PS1 or 2 era video game characters playing a tabletop game. I've been unsuccessful in trying to find it now decades later so figured I'd ask. I don't remember many details other than maybe some jokes about sneak attacking and one of the characters (a video game model) going to the kitchen shouting about not finding something in the fridge (mountain dew?). Does anyone remember this or have an idea of where to find it?
edit: Lol, apparently it was magic missile against the darkness but at least I got the mountain dew part right! I have to admit that I don't find it as funny as I did before but it's still enjoyable. It was one of my favorite old school D&D webtoons along with this one that WOTC did in the roll up to 4e. I love the gnome!
warboss wrote: That's the one! Thanks! Was it hard to find?
Hah! I have it on speed dial. I just remembered it was the Dead Ale Wives skit. There were at least two of them. Full audio:
First:
Second:
Also really enjoyed this one by Knights of the Dinner Table:
Automatically Appended Next Post: As I think about it, I wonder if anyone else on the planet is still running AD&D 2.0 with Skills and Powers / Spells and Magic (sometimes called 2.5). I suppose I mostly run it because I have all the books from 1st through 2.5, and my associates and I weren't about to pitch it all for the 3.0 reboot. I'm going to guess a poll would turn out mostly 5e with a bit of 1st or 1-offs like Dungeon Crawl Classics etc. for the old school flavor.
warboss wrote: That's the one! Thanks! Was it hard to find?
edit: Lol, apparently it was magic missile against the darkness but at least I got the mountain dew part right! I have to admit that I don't find it as funny as I did before but it's still enjoyable. It was one of my favorite old school D&D webtoons along with this one that WOTC did in the roll up to 4e. I love the gnome!
I'm twitching a bit at that being called 'old school.'
But that video is fun, simply because it _really_ kicked off the edition war. The nerd rage was real, and WotC was really starting to double down on the idea that anyone who liked D&D was going to have to adjust to the new reality or get out.
Then they started scrambling as the sales data starting showing a lot of their customers were going for 'option B'
Red Harvest wrote: The module Expedition to the Barrier Peaks involved a crashed space ship, and the OD&D supplement Blackmoor had an 'adventure' --Temple of the Frog -- in it with space/dimension travellers. Sounds like the DM is very much going with the traditional D&D setting. Gonzo D&D.
Original/Gonzo D&D would definitely fit his interests as they have been revealed through our years of miniature wargaming. This is the guy who has put together SBH warbands like Tharks or Mushroom men.
Just shows my lack of D&D knowledge that I assumed it was mostly homebrew.
Da Boss wrote: Yeah. It is somewhat important to reskin things to keep the unknown as part of what is going on.
Just wanted to comment on this as I (engaged in my first ever D&D campaign) have found this to be very true. I'd never played D&D, but I read the books as a kid, was tangentially versed in the lore, etc. I kind of figured I knew what I was getting into
However our DM is not dropping us into a traditional D&D setting or -I think- any of the current settings. I'm not totally sure, but -even though it's got many elements of classic fantasy- I think we already discovered a spaceship and possibly met some individuals who fight demons across various planets. I've deliberately not looked into Spelljammer just in case that's what he's drawing from but suffice to say it's fantastic to be surprised. Even the players who have experience in D&D seem to not know what's coming.
The bolded part can be the point. So many of the old school modules and settings are so well known now, that a DM may want to change it up to keep it from being too predictable. I'm running a post "Thundarr the Barbarian" type campaign, where the battle to overthrow the techno wizards that enslave humanity is long over, and things have settled down into something that seems like normal D&D on the surface, but deep in forgotten places, horrors of superscience and sorcery still lurk. For Barrier Peaks I converted all the weapons and power armor into 40k type equipment (chain swords, bolters) so we could use the 40k minis
I'm twitching a bit at that being called 'old school.'
In regards to video content, I'd argue that it is on the trailing end of "old school" as is everything youtube. In regards to web content in general, definitely not. My first web browser was text based on a VAX system and I've used graphical browsers since netscape was in beta (iirc verson 0.9) so admittedly there is older content but video pickings were slim in the days of pre-youtube.
I'm twitching a bit at that being called 'old school.'
In regards to video content, I'd argue that it is on the trailing end of "old school" as is everything youtube. In regards to web content in general, definitely not. My first web browser was text based on a VAX system and I've used graphical browsers since netscape was in beta (iirc verson 0.9) so admittedly there is older content but video pickings were slim in the days of pre-youtube.
Not following you on that? If Youtube were a person, it wouldn't even be old enough to drink or vote. 'Old school' is generational.
Now if you were talking about some sort of image for 2nd edition off an early gen FTP site, I might agree.
But the lol videos for fourth edition a bit over a decade back... nope.
Not following you on that? If Youtube were a person, it wouldn't even be old enough to drink or vote. 'Old school' is generational.
Now if you were talking about some sort of image for 2nd edition off an early gen FTP site, I might agree.
But the lol videos for fourth edition a bit over a decade back... nope.
It's not about the age necessarily but about the effect. Prior to youtube, videos had to be hosted on individual websites and sucked up valuable paid for bandwith like crazy. Did I watch videos in the 1990's and early 2000's on the internet? Yes, I did even in my dialup days but it was a pain in the ass to download or stream the 240p six part Cops Star Wars fan film in 30-60 second chunks. Youtube's introduction was a sea change in terms of the availability/proliferation of internet video (including its proliferation off of PCs) onto other media capable devices like TVs, consoles, and smart phones. For example, the D&D video I referenced was available on WOTC's website and typically only there due to bandwith limitations for the average web user/host. If you hosted it elsewhere, you either paid big bucks that were largely wasted on your site or you used up your monthly bandwith allowance in days or weeks on free sites. The average person (the filfthy casual internet browser) isn't aware of let alone proficient in FTP use so that really was the only source until youtube (and the subsequent other video sharing sites that came up since). So, in terms of internet video, broadly speaking there is before youtube and after. Hence "old school".
Hello everyone! I have made a riddle for my campaign, and I'd like to get a feel for whether it's too cryptic or too easy. The riddle opens a door which is bonus to the plot, so it can be abandoned and the story will still progress. Can you guys have a go at cracking it and let me know how you found it?
DM Spiel:
After making your way through the cave, you find a side chamber which appears to be a washroom. there is a small stone basin into which a trickle of water flows, and on one wall is a circular carved stone door which features an upside down, hollow goblet held by an upside down dwarf on its surface. To either side of the door are lit torches in sconces. The floor is flat, rough stone slabs and the ceiling arches up with brick arches at either end, with the curved plaster ceiling being 10ft high. Above the door is carved the words:
"One change of mates would be reversed
the last of teams should come in first
to fill my cup and quench my thirst."
The door doesn't move if forced.
Please put your responses to this riddle in a spoiler so that others can have a go! And if you saw my thread on makign the riddle on dndbeyond, no cheating!
warboss wrote: That's the one! Thanks! Was it hard to find?
edit: Lol, apparently it was magic missile against the darkness but at least I got the mountain dew part right! I have to admit that I don't find it as funny as I did before but it's still enjoyable. It was one of my favorite old school D&D webtoons along with this one that WOTC did in the roll up to 4e. I love the gnome!
That mouth, those twitching eyes... that's animated by the Brackenwood guy!
After making your way through the cave, you find a side chamber which appears to be a washroom. there is a small stone basin into which a trickle of water flows, and on one wall is a circular carved stone door which features an upside down, hollow goblet held by an upside down dwarf on its surface. To either side of the door are lit torches in sconces. The floor is flat, rough stone slabs and the ceiling arches up with brick arches at either end, with the curved plaster ceiling being 10ft high. Above the door is carved the words:
"One change of mates would be reversed
the last of teams should come in first
to fill my cup and quench my thirst."
I'd start trying to mess with the sconces to see if they move/rotate, and try to see if one turns upside down.
That mouth, those twitching eyes... that's animated by the Brackenwood guy!
Apparently. I took a look at the website shown in the credits of the D&D short and the first post is about whatever Brackenwood is. I'm not familiar with it personally.
Someone posted this over in the chat for my new D&D 5e group... I think it captures the spirit of the typical fantasy adventure game. And is probably the reason some here were raving about a grittier post-apocalyptic game last page as well.
some bloke wrote: Hello everyone! I have made a riddle for my campaign, and I'd like to get a feel for whether it's too cryptic or too easy. The riddle opens a door which is bonus to the plot, so it can be abandoned and the story will still progress. Can you guys have a go at cracking it and let me know how you found it?
DM Spiel:
After making your way through the cave, you find a side chamber which appears to be a washroom. there is a small stone basin into which a trickle of water flows, and on one wall is a circular carved stone door which features an upside down, hollow goblet held by an upside down dwarf on its surface. To either side of the door are lit torches in sconces. The floor is flat, rough stone slabs and the ceiling arches up with brick arches at either end, with the curved plaster ceiling being 10ft high. Above the door is carved the words:
"One change of mates would be reversed
the last of teams should come in first
to fill my cup and quench my thirst."
The door doesn't move if forced.
Please put your responses to this riddle in a spoiler so that others can have a go! And if you saw my thread on makign the riddle on dndbeyond, no cheating!
Spoiler:
Can the torches and water in the basin be used to generate steam underneath the goblet? I think if anyone in the party is used to crosswords or puzzles they'll get 'steam' from the first couple of lines. How they fill the goblet is another matter!
Can the torches and water in the basin be used to generate steam underneath the goblet? I think if anyone in the party is used to crosswords or puzzles they'll get 'steam' from the first couple of lines. How they fill the goblet is another matter!
Unless your group has gotten used to how you do riddles, i don't think they are going to get that.
1. Circular door with inverted details infers it can be rotated
2. i don't think i'm hot gak, but i'm not getting a hint from either of the first lines, let alone come close to how you specified it to open.
A bard or a wizard could use 'identify' and force you to tell them how to use it at level 1 though so no biggie - and like you said, it won't halt the plot so no worries.
A little anecdote for your consideration:
Spoiler:
my group went to skullport and while going through level 3 of undermountain they found one of halasters doorway thingies (picture of halaster with staff and cliche wizard robes in three places on the door arch) which requires tapping the arch three times with a staff (literally any staff, non-magical, doesn't matter) and my group spent the best part of an hour in real time trying to work out what was gwanin. They didn't work it out.
I ended up just straight telling them that this doorway did not go where they wanted to go just so they didn't spend an entire session standing by an inactive doorway trying to guess the method and i fear what you're planning is a carbon copy of that.
It was the last time i use a pre-written dungeon. never again.
Really hoping this helps because i feel i'm being a little blunt here..
That reminds me of a time when my adventurers came across a stream, and took 2-3 hours figuring out how to cross it.
I just let it play out, as everyone was laughing and having a good time. That days session was focused on one encounter, a normal, run o-of-the-mill, stream.
Yeah, puzzle experiences too-often degenerate into players taking ranks in the 'Mindreading the DM' skill (or not). Age, experience and education matter a lot (unless its a puzzle that rehashes something in pop culture, in which case, if someone hasn't it seen/heard it, their contribution effectively goes to zero)
I can remember one frustrating session, where I found a player's notes afterwards. He'd confused 'Runes' for 'Ruins,' and I have no idea if it was an accent issue or a literacy issue. But suddenly the previous three hours made a lot more sense.
---
My biggest pet peeve will always be the 'one lies/one tells the truth' puzzle. It does not work if the duo (be it doors/skulls/faeries/whatever) recite the lines:
If each take a part, they're BOTH telling the truth at that point, which renders the 'always lies' false.
If only one says both parts, if its true, that one has to be the truth-teller, because if the liar gives the set-up, the whole puzzle is abrogated since you can't trust any aspect of it (he could be lying about any part- which leads to safety, that the doors work, that they're obligated to tell you anything, etc.)
There has to be a third party present (or a sign). And I've seen people screw this up way too many times.
That reminds me of a time when my adventurers came across a stream, and took 2-3 hours figuring out how to cross it.
I just let it play out, as everyone was laughing and having a good time. That days session was focused on one encounter, a normal, run o-of-the-mill, stream.
Sounds nearly as dangerous as the dreaded gazebo It's great you just rolled with it since they were still having a good time.
Puzzles and even traps are often a really bad thing to use in a TTRPG. The problem is they don't challenge the characters, they challenge the players. The PLAYERS start trying to solve a riddle. The PLAYERS start searching every nook and crannie for traps. Because it's the PLAYERS intellect that is used to solve those things, not the characters. And there are very few ways that you can shift that to the characters and not have it feel super gamey.
I would be incredibly wary of every puzzle you place in front of the players and I would foreshadow potential solutions earlier in the dungeon if you do decide to use them. It's not fun for anyone to have the game grind to a halt because they interpret your clues differently then you intended. And if they do that they will feel cheated when the solution they were sure would work doesn't.
Lance845 wrote: Puzzles and even traps are often a really bad thing to use in a TTRPG. The problem is they don't challenge the characters, they challenge the players. The PLAYERS start trying to solve a riddle. The PLAYERS start searching every nook and crannie for traps. Because it's the PLAYERS intellect that is used to solve those things, not the characters. And there are very few ways that you can shift that to the characters and not have it feel super gamey.
I would be incredibly wary of every puzzle you place in front of the players and I would foreshadow potential solutions earlier in the dungeon if you do decide to use them. It's not fun for anyone to have the game grind to a halt because they interpret your clues differently then you intended. And if they do that they will feel cheated when the solution they were sure would work doesn't.
...Which is why I often create puzzles for my games without a set-in-stone solution that will not allow the players to pass unless they do or say a certain thing. If I put a puzzle in a game, it's because I think it'd be fun to have the players roleplay how their character would approach a puzzle, and then I tailor the resolution of that puzzle scene to be based on the way that the character chooses to approach it.
That definitely depends on your group though. With the people I play with there's essentially no motivation on the players' part to try and "win" every proposed scenario, and it's usually fairly obvious to me when a player is taking the piss and would be perfectly happy to have their character fail to solve the puzzle or disarm the trap in a funny way.
And that can also result in some of the funniest situations. We once came up to a puzzle that involved a character the players were trying to rescue at the top of a stone tower with a spiral staircase rigged with a trap that caused gelatinous cubes to spawn when you touched the stairs.
one character turned into a bug to get up the stairs, fly through the keyhole and then turn into human form, thinking (for some reason) the prisoner had the password to disarm the trap and would just tell him...unfortunately they didn't even have the key to the room. The monk started trying to run up the stairs as fast as possible, with the idea of just dodging all the cubes as they appeared, and he passed seven consecutive acrobatics checks in a row to triumphantly arrive at the top of the stairs with a huge number of cubes slowly climbing up behind him. The warforged paladin had initially tested the trap with a finger and had a growing cube on his arm that he tried to conceal from his comrades so they would'nt get mad at him for triggering it, so he wound up just trying to make stealth and deception checks to hide an expanding cube, and it turned into an extremely fun Shrek "you didn't kill the dragon?" situation that culminated in the party using the following cubes to make the nobles' mercenaries unable to follow them out.
For those who have played 5e outside of the relatively new Rime of the Frostmaiden adventure, is this nugget of info from the DMG accurate to 5e encounter design?
The Adventuring Day
Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer.
In the same way you figure out the difficulty of an encounter, you can use the XP values of monsters and other opponents in an adventure as a guideline for how far the party is likely to progress.
For each character in the party, use the Adventuring Day XP table to estimate how much XP that character is expected to earn in a day. Add together the values of all party members to get a total for the party’s adventuring day. This provides a rough estimate of the adjusted XP value for encounters the party can handle before the characters will need to take a long rest.
That seems pretty ambitious to have an average of 6-8 encounters per adventuring day and I don't think I've ever come close to that average in any edition I've played (mainly 3.x but also a smattering of 2nd and 4e). A frequent comment/complaint about Rime of the Frostmaiden is the punishing difficulty (and at least at early levels I'd definitely agree) so I definitely don't have enough personal experience to gauge whether this is a case of game designers deluding themselves or if in typical Adventure League settings people actually play that many encounters without a long rest.
Realistically, I find most groups don't abide that guidance. A typical session in my experience has 2-3 light combats and 1 big combat, but mileage will vary by group and DM style and campaign. Some more RP heavy campaigns (Strahd comes to mind) can have entire sessions with no encounters. Generally, easy combats are far too easy. Most DMs I've played with pump combats to be more deadly and they compensate by having fewer combats overall.
Rime of the Frostmaiden might be a bit harder in response to some of the modules that came before it. I know some of the players in my local league complained Descent into Avernus and Ghosts of Saltmarsh were too easy.
Pretty much entirely no. And unlike 3e or before, it actually gets worse as you go up in level, because PCs get fewer resources and enemies get a lot more bloat in terms of HP and damage (so the PCs have to pull out more crap)
6-8 encounters per day is pretty crazy in 5e, especially if they're leaning medium to hard. I'd honestly cut that in half without hesitation. Especially if the party leans hard on casters (or doesn't have a lot of healing).
There's some leeway if the party knows how to optimize, but some classes have a hard time with defensive optimization and some monsters just have broken math for their level (hobgoblins for example, can butcher a party if played like they're supposed to, just by teamwork bonuses).
5e constrained the range of numbers for attack and AC that really works against the party in a way that wasn't true for earlier editions. Encounters per day is basically an attrition war, and each successive one is more pressure to lose.
Thanks. Yeah, I saw that for casters that cantrips are a viable backup somewhat scalable damage source in combat once you run out of leveled spells but not as something you should depend on entirely for multiple encounters which you would have to if you're doing 6-8 multiround combat encounters per day on average. Obviously not everything considered an encounter should result in combat (like social interaction, puzzles, and traps) and not every combat encounter needs to be resolved as such but six to eight felt like way too much when I read it based on my experience with prior editions.
That is the worst neighborhood ever. How can a village survive anywhere if it could be attacked 6-8 times PER DAY by some wandering monsters! Villagers and outlining farmers wouldn't stand a chance of ever getting in a crop, they would be too busy fighting off giant rats, Green slimes, and goblin bands.
There must be some terrible property values in these worlds. Are people fighting against their local NIMBY's all the time too?
It isn't saying you should throw 6-8 encounters per day, it is saying that on average 6-8 encounters can be beaten by an adventuring party before they have to take a long rest.
This can be useful in planning out extended scenarios which will feature combat, such as defending a settlement during a siege. You know that by the end of that 6-8th encounter, the party is going to be pretty ragged. They've used up a lot of their spell slots, their healing is depleted, their abilities are used up. They haven't slept properly in days as the drums, horns and chanting of the great host keep them awake and they keep having to rush to defend key points from attack, or fight fires caused by flaming ammunition, or launch daring night raids to destroy the siege weapons etc. And then the warlord uses his wizards to detonate the wall with a massive blast of wild, uncontrollable magic and charges in with his elite guard, looking for a final decisive blow against the defenders.
Not every day of adventuring should be taxing the characters that much, but having a rough guide as to how much they can take to push them right to the edge in an extreme situation is quite helpful, especially for newer GMs.
A Town Called Malus wrote: It isn't saying you should throw 6-8 encounters per day, it is saying that on average 6-8 encounters can be beaten by an adventuring party before they have to take a long rest.
For all intents and purposes, that's the same thing. A long rest is... 8 hours of sleep with a little light activity for no more than 2 hours, that can't be done more than once every 24 hours.
Denying the party long rests is basically saying 'don't you dare play spellcasters at my table.'
This can be useful in planning out extended scenarios which will feature combat, such as defending a settlement during a siege. You know that by the end of that 6-8th encounter, the party is going to be pretty ragged. They've used up a lot of their spell slots, their healing is depleted, their abilities are used up. They haven't slept properly in days as the drums, horns and chanting of the great host keep them awake and they keep having to rush to defend key points from attack, or fight fires caused by flaming ammunition, or launch daring night raids to destroy the siege weapons etc. And then the warlord uses his wizards to detonate the wall with a massive blast of wild, uncontrollable magic and charges in with his elite guard, looking for a final decisive blow against the defenders.
Once you've gotten to this point in 5e, the players have pretty much lost. If all their abilities and resources are gone, used up in earlier encounters (no matter if its been 1 hour or 3 days), the warlord and his elite guard are just going to roll over the party like a steamroller.
That's utterly _awful_ advice for a new DM. Attrition wars like this don't work in 5e. The players have a finite pool of resources, and each monster group shows up fresh and can expend everything they have. So effectively, the attrition is only on the player end.
Not every day of adventuring should be taxing the characters that much, but having a rough guide as to how much they can take to push them right to the edge in an extreme situation is quite helpful, especially for newer GMs.
But as a rough guide, its wrong. Its several encounters _past_ the edge in an extreme situation.
That is the worst neighborhood ever. How can a village survive anywhere if it could be attacked 6-8 times PER DAY by some wandering monsters! Villagers and outlining farmers wouldn't stand a chance of ever getting in a crop, they would be too busy fighting off giant rats, Green slimes, and goblin bands.
There must be some terrible property values in these worlds. Are people fighting against their local NIMBY's all the time too?
Yeah, in a dungeon complex it is alright, but out in the wilderness it is crazy. I like to use the rules for rests as they are for dungeons and then use 1 Week for Long Rest, 8 Hours for Short Rest in the wilderness to keep the encounter scaling sane. I justify it by saying the dungeons exist in the Weird, where there is higher background magic or whatever and that speeds up healing/allows access to healing cantrips/allows mages to recharge their powers more quickly.
It is also why there are so many monsters in dungeons but the rest of the world is like dark ages europe with the odd chimera.
Voss wrote: The players have a finite pool of resources, and each monster group shows up fresh and can expend everything they have. So effectively, the attrition is only on the player end.
Very true. It's rare for an enemy to show up wounded or at half resources/abilities unless it's a part of downgrading an existing enemy for CR or plot reasons.
That seems pretty ambitious to have an average of 6-8 encounters per adventuring day and I don't think I've ever come close to that average in any edition I've played (mainly 3.x but also a smattering of 2nd and 4e). A frequent comment/complaint about Rime of the Frostmaiden is the punishing difficulty (and at least at early levels I'd definitely agree) so I definitely don't have enough personal experience to gauge whether this is a case of game designers deluding themselves or if in typical Adventure League settings people actually play that many encounters without a long rest.
The key word there is "MEDIUM or HARD ENCOUNTERS". It says in the very next sentence that parties can typically handle fewer tougher ones or more easier ones.
But for some reason, a lot of people mentally skip over that bit and assume it reads "six encounters minimum or you're DOING IT WRONG!". And then at some point, it seems to have become an article of faith that that's what the DMG says when in the very next sentence it says how you can adjust that. It's becoming a serious pet peeve of mine.
Things to bear in mind--
--Anything that consumes resources (hitpoints, spells) is an "encounter" for this purpose--traps, environmental navigation, etc.
--Two encounters can be merged together and disguised as one--yes, you defeat the demon cultists, but as you're mopping up, that big evil circle flickers and a Nalfeshnee turns up to see if there's a party here.
--"Deadly" encounters aren't very deadly at all, barring terrible luck or the deck really being stacked in favour of the monsters.
In actual play, I've found the only real no-no is to have one big encounter per day, because that just encourages "alpha strike then rest" behaviour. Something else I houserule is to say that short rests only need 5-10 minutes, but you can only benefit from two of them between long rests.
My approach to combat these days tends to run on the principle that a fight with no real chance of failure (NOT just PC death, but failure to achieve the objective for which you're fighting) is usually utterly pointless. There are no stakes, it just slows down the game and in the end, if you're just trying to draw out resources to the players go into the next fight down some spells, features and HP, a narrative combat/skill challenge scenario works just as well. When you're fighting the undead horde to get to the lich or death knight, a skill challenge for the first part flows better, gives the players more freedom and feels more exciting than six hours flailing at zombies and skeletons turn by turn.
In my experience CR is utter whack as well, maybe the easy-deadly scale works if you are hitting that high encounters per day rate, but the way I run things, there are genera''y just one or two big combats between rests, and CR just doesn't apply there. The flipside is that the players have the freedom to go all-out and use their resources rather than having to eke them out over a full day, or half a dozen fights. As DM, you get to use the powerful, interesting monsters and enemies, throw around high level spells or drop in things with crazy high AC and HP for the 'normal' way of playing. Make sure these fights are tied in with the narrative stakes, and every initiative roll becomes an epic action sequence, rather than an hour of pointless goblin-bashing where you're in no danger and you've got to make a handful of spells or features last.
It takes some courage to make the leap and start doing things this way, but I've found it so liberating compared to the more conservative, linear and ultimately boring traditional approach I used to take. I honestly used to dread prepping combat as I would fret over balancing and resources and constantly veering between top easy and too hard. Now, I work on the basis that the most fun to be hand by everyone is putting the PCs in a battle the maths/rules say they should not win, and watching and enabling them as they find a way to. I trust my players to find the win, rather than relying on the game to set one up.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Easy E wrote: Wow, I have gone whole sessions (2-6 hours depending) with only 0-1 encounter.
I guess I maybe doing it wrong......
Seems right to me! I've only had 2 battles in my past three games, and that's in a campaign reaching its conclusion and set in the middle of a 3-way war...
Though last time despite the lack of combat, someone did get hit with Feeblemind and Dominate Person and made to throw themselves out a fourth-storey window... You don't need combat to make a mess of PCs...
Well, we had an interesting random encounter in Rime last night. During a blizzard that affected our visibility, we were ambushed by a CR 20 ancient white dragon hidden under snow laying in wait for us. No negotiating prior or chance to avoid it other than running away just because we see a corpse in a snow bank during a blizzard. I rolled a 19 on my con save (14 con for a total of 21)... and still failed vs the breath weapon. This is a random encounter for 1st - 4th level characters as written (we were 3rd).
Don't remind me, we're about to fight an icy dragon in our campaign! I don't like to know creature stats as a player, but we're all anticipating a tough fight...
I forget what level I am, but it's either 3 or 4 too :-)
Hopefully your dragon will appropriately leveled/aged instead of the top version! Random encounter balance is nonexistent in Rime. Unless you metagame with forehand knowledge of encounters by sneaking peaks into the module as a player, you can really be screwed by random encounters through no fault of your own. Our GM when setting up the campaign specifically said he wanted to play it as written and warned us of the insane difficulty spikes and we all agreed to it so I don't blame him. But, eriously, screw you WOTC. If the goal is to make bands of adventuring heroes play like classless level zero npc townsfolk who instinctively run from relatively innocuous things they encounter then MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! Lol.
I got no problem with high level beasts living in the wilderness, but a CR20 dragon should be a legendary beast. It's range should be well known. Everyone should know where it is and how bad it would be to go bother the dragon.
Having a CR20 dragon just randomly hiding in the snow when you didn't have a chance to know you were in it's territory is super poor world building imo, never mind encounter balance.
In my homebrew the only White Wyrm lives on a gigantic glacier and has an entire tribe of frost giants in it's thrall, and everyone knows that going out on the Great Glacier is a terrible idea. All of the Wyrms in my campaign are well known and the borders of their territory are something any yokel could tell you.
Da Boss wrote: I got no problem with high level beasts living in the wilderness, but a CR20 dragon should be a legendary beast. It's range should be well known. Everyone should know where it is and how bad it would be to go bother the dragon.
Having a CR20 dragon just randomly hiding in the snow when you didn't have a chance to know you were in it's territory is super poor world building imo, never mind encounter balance.
In my homebrew the only White Wyrm lives on a gigantic glacier and has an entire tribe of frost giants in it's thrall, and everyone knows that going out on the Great Glacier is a terrible idea. All of the Wyrms in my campaign are well known and the borders of their territory are something any yokel could tell you.
It's a legendary CR20 beast known throughout the region so we knew exactly what we were facing once it revealed itself. This particular encounter was gakky game design in that you face a CR20 if you roll a 10 on a d20 during an equally randomly rolled blizzard. When that happens, you come upon the dragon while it's hidden under snow during a blizzard (it has blindsight so knows you're there from the get go). We actually had a ranger spec'ed out for max perception (passive 17) but that wasn't enough due to the stealth bonus the gargantuan dragon has plus the disadvantage from the blizzard. The only "indication" is a frozen corpse sticking out of the snow that we approached carefully 30ft away to investigate. The person who obviously peaked at the adventure recommended running away but in character we had literally no reason to so he stayed back along with the squishy folks and us tough guys went up a bit closer to investigate. Then surprise round breath weapon with no chance of avoiding it. And you can technically encounter this at 1st level as it's the same random roll as long as you venture beyond the safety of the towns (which 2/3 of the quests IN THE TOWNS force you to do).
Da Boss wrote: So 5% chance every roll that you encounter that? That's crazy.
Yup. Basically, it's recommended that if you're outside of the urban areas the DM roll once each day on the random encounter timing table that determines the number of encounters that day and the timing of them. Then there is some separate roll to see if there is a blizzard (special campaign rule involving a central plot endless and extra harsh winter). Then you roll a d20 on the actual selection of types of encounters that range from harmless playful fey spirits that throw snowballs at you and a wild fox that hunts a rabbit off in the distance to being ambushed by a CR20 dragon. If it's "normal" weather, you see the dragon flying off in the distance with a whale or walrus in its mouth as a snack and it ignores you as long as you try to hide or at a minimum not try and get its attention. If you happened to roll a blizzard in the second of three rolls, the dragon ambushes you if you investigate the frozen corpse sticking out of the snow (that is on her back as her former master/rider but obviously you don't know that). Basically, if you actually roleplay as an adventurer that just approach close enough to investigate the frozen body (or god forbid a "hero" who might try to help/potentially save the unlucky person caught in the blizzard!) then you get whalloped with no chance realistically at avoiding/negotiating/begging your way out of it as written. And this is potentially a first level encounter.
Can a DM who is willing to wave their DMeus ex machina wand change it? Of course... but that doesn't excuse the horrible design as written. Our DM was clear that he was purposefully running it as written before starting the campaign and we agreed to it so I don't blame him (and he did admittedly partly try to go easy on us without breaking his rule or immersion completely FWIW by splitting up the attacks between us as well as not hitting everyone with the breath weapon like he could have). Unavoidable CR20 vs 1st level characters should NEVER be an option on a random chart. There are other encounters similarly unbalanced albeit not to that extent (like the CR8 band of barbarian berserkers we encountered in another random encounter while we were 2nd level) but this one was definitely the ultimate FU to players on the chart.
Also, this is the default setting for current Adventure League players getting possibly their first introduction to D&D through organized play. Lol.
The actual adventure is rough but not THAT ridiculous. It's still also overly harsh (for example with 1st level characters start one of the two first adventures hunting down potentially two CR3 baddies with a half dozen CR 1/2 minions for maybe a CR5 encounter if you don't purposefully try to split them up) but the actual plot so far has been good. It's supposed to be based on which of the ten towns you start in but, if I were GM, I'd choose the other actually true starting adventure that is much easier and introduces you to the area instead of a deadly level encounter potentially for players completely new to the game. It's hard to go into specific details without spoilers.
In a nutshell, I've never seen a mega-adventure that starts at level 1 which requires so much balance/encounter tweaking to just work as intended out of the box.
This is me speaking as a not-even-novice DM, more of a hypothetical assumption on my part but I imagine for a seasoned DM who has been around the block a few times and tried all his theories, run all his best ideas and narratives an element of randomness would allow that DM to vamp a bit, roll with the punches and maybe even help a group avoid the pitfalls of railroad in themselves into the same old tracks.
This is purely a guess. I honestly have little to no experience beyond a hunch that that might be the case.
That is absolutely the point of a random encounter. To provide a seed of random inspiration to prevent you from falling into predictable patterns and help to simulate a living world.
But the scenario described here is a weird version of a random encounter. It isn't providing a random seed to generate ideas, it is plonking a fully developed scenario on the DM complete with very specific rules about the dragon's position, tactics, and the rules required to perceive it. That is no longer a random adventure seed, but rather a random chance of a particular fixed scenario happening. Obviously, you can fiddle with it, but I would wager that the majority of DMs when they fiddle with it will try to keep the encounter somewhat as described, leading to unrealistic behaviour on the part of the dragon so as to prevent a party wipe.
A weird decision from an adventure design standpoint. Putting a CR 20 dragon in your random encounter table is not bad - you can see it flying overhead, but you are beneath it's notice. It gives the players the feeling of a real world full of danger. And if the dragon does decide to attack they might have a round or two to come up with a way to flee. The presented scenario is just a deathtrap that will wipe out parties below a certain level as punishment for engaging with the game world.
As a DM, I NEVER use a random encounter. To me, encounters flow naturally from the actions of the players and the world they live in.
It is a personal preference for me as the whole idea makes no sense to me. Random encounters do happen in real life, but not in cinema/literary/make believe life!
IT's like WOTC doesn't believe its own hype that the game is NOT DM vs Players.
Its more that they're bad at encounter design.
The original module for 4e (Keep on the Shadowfell) had all sorts of problems with party vs encounter balance. Not the least because several setups allowed for reinforcements that 4e's system just couldn't cope with.
The first encounter in the module was a 'waterfall cave' with a group of kobolds outside the waterfall, an (3rd level?) elite boss inside and a second room of kobolds. There was nothing to prevent a kobold running for reinforcements and getting 3 encounters worth of enemies in one big fight (at first level, when the PCs have one 'encounter' power each, and just 'at will' powers otherwise). Unless its softballed and all the enemies fight to death, never go for help and never call for help, its almost mathematically unwinnable.
Its not the only fight like that either, but because the designers developed the character classes, monsters and 1st module simultaneously and separately, they had no real gauge of what a party was capable of, and it was a complete cluster...bomb.
A year or so later, they had to adjust the formulas for monster stats and add some math fixes in the form of feats for PCs. The game just wasn't designed with the correct math, and the expectation that the classes they made would be fighting the monsters they made.
5e is a bit better, but has the same sort of problems, especially in the modules they produce.
Earlier editions had basically the opposite problem, where encounters were designed for assumed 'average party,' but it was possible that any given group would punch way above or way below the designers expectations. 4e and 5e and the principle of 'bounded accuracy' just doesn't allow for that (barring intentionally terrible decisions about putting low scores in your attack stat)
Easy E wrote: As a DM, I NEVER use a random encounter. To me, encounters flow naturally from the actions of the players and the world they live in.
It is a personal preference for me as the whole idea makes no sense to me. Random encounters do happen in real life, but not in cinema/literary/make believe life!
I think that speaks to a big and often under discussed division inside roleplaying games. Some people run the game as a narrative, a story with arcs analogous to TV or movies or novels or comic books. I think this is by far the most common and popular way to run games. I used to run games like that myself. And in a game like that Random Encounters don't make sense because they will disrupt the planned story and pace.
I have moved away from that (totally valid) way of running the game to an attempt to just simulate a fantasy world. So players have much more agency, as there is no narrative planned out ahead of time. The world still has people with goals going about achieving them, but who the players decide to interact with and how is totally open. Similarly, the wilderness is full of interesting locations for them to go and explore if they prefer. In that sort of game, random encounters are useful as part of the simulation, to give seeds to the DM to help give the idea of a bigger world with things going on in it, and to prevent the DM from falling into predictable patterns when they are forced to improvise a lot (because giving a lot of choice to the players means you will have to improvise a fair bit). Well designed tables and a good sense of how to use them are really useful in that scenario.
So they don't make sense to me in an adventure with a pre-planned set of outcomes and a pre-planned plot, like what WOTC sells. You should just pre-plan the encounters and make them as cool as possible rather than relying on rolls. If you build an adventure setting, which has no plot but is just a location to interact with, then I can see having random encounter tables. Funnily enough, the only 5e product like that, Dungeon of the Mad Mage only has suggest pre-scripted encounters and no encounter tables, which I found pretty funny!
I agree with Voss though. The designers for D&D are mostly pretty bad in my view. Just look at how many of the subclasses in the PHB are absolute garbage out of the box.
Easy E wrote: Wow, I have gone whole sessions (2-6 hours depending) with only 0-1 encounter.
I guess I maybe doing it wrong......
If the players are all having fun, you're doing it right.
Just be aware that "one big encounter" can mess up the balance between classes. Especially at higher levels, the "get spells back on a long rest" classes become a lot more powerful, especially if they know they don't need to hold back, since they can unload their big spells, while short-rest classes like the warlock or monk or classes that don't depend on rests like the melee beaters suffer by comparison. Of course, depending on the party and players, this might not even be an issue for you.
I agree with Voss though. The designers for D&D are mostly pretty bad in my view. Just look at how many of the subclasses in the PHB are absolute garbage out of the box.
My first D&D was 3.0 edition, where the Wizard, Druid and Cleric were on a different planet to the Fighter, Paladin and Monk from about level 5 onwards (and from level 15-ish, in a different galaxy). Compared to that, 5e is superbly balanced. I won't deny that some subclasses are weaker than others, but I find the balance issues get wildly overstated online (where apparently every encounter is a white-room race to see who can do the most DPR, where everyone stands toe to toe and races to 0 hp, and the classes never ever help each other) and most of the issues can be sorted with a bit of DM attention.
Da Boss, I actually approach the game more like you. I just set adventure hooks and then see where the PCs lead the way.
However, you are right. Since I do not do random encounters I am doing a LOT of improvising. I actually find this easier than prepping because after playing for years, I find players ALWAYS bypass what is prepared and I am Improvising anyway. I just decided to embrace it. I usually come to the table having done almost no prep work.
Random encounters have their place in some games (especially long running campaigns IMO) and I do use them with pre-approval/pruning ahead of time. They should be challenging but not potentially or especially reliably a blowout for the PCs. Save the blowouts for scripted memorable climatic encounters. The reason I specified long running campaigns above is because I do like that they add an element of surprise specifically for the GM rather than the players who are technically surprised by every encounter (unless they're reading ahead in a written module).
YMMV but I don't feel they're inherently bad; it's just that the ones in Rime are.
If there are good random tables (especially multiple tables that work well together) I will pre roll on those tables about 20ish times and put all the needed details/features of those encounters onto note cards (1 card for each thing). They a just keep a little shuffled deck of random encounters next to me and when something triggers I just draw the note card and go.
This has both the advantage of being quick without having to reference tables and familiarizing myself with the results as I record them.
I agree with Voss though. The designers for D&D are mostly pretty bad in my view. Just look at how many of the subclasses in the PHB are absolute garbage out of the box.
My first D&D was 3.0 edition, where the Wizard, Druid and Cleric were on a different planet to the Fighter, Paladin and Monk from about level 5 onwards (and from level 15-ish, in a different galaxy). Compared to that, 5e is superbly balanced. I won't deny that some subclasses are weaker than others, but I find the balance issues get wildly overstated online (where apparently every encounter is a white-room race to see who can do the most DPR, where everyone stands toe to toe and races to 0 hp, and the classes never ever help each other) and most of the issues can be sorted with a bit of DM attention.
I don't think that's what Da Boss is referring to when he mentions garbage subclasses. Some are way too specific (ranger in general has a lot of these problems, as do some of the mount based subclasses). Samurai is bizarrely awful. 5 temp hp, 3/times a day, and it moves to 10 at 10th level? No level appropriate enemy will ever care about that past level 1 (and you don't get it until 3rd). At _15th_ level you can forgo advantage for an extra attack? That's a terrible trade. The best thing the whole subclass gets is proficiency with wisdom saves, which is basically half a feat, and fighters are the best class to just do that naturally.
Though there are still a lot of issues where non-spellcasters might as well go play Xbox games when it comes to contributing. Want to go to a Cloud Giant Fortress, raid the City of Brass, or scout for Aboleth hunting parties in the deep places underwater? Spellcasters have a half-dozen solutions for each, and non-casters have none. They can't even get there, let alone interact with some of those environments, or potentially deal with even non-hostile natives in those areas.
Way of the Four Elements Monk, or whatever it's called, is up there too. I've often seen the subclass openly derided for how laughably bad it is. And it's already a Monk, oft considered one of the weakest of 5e's classes.
Yeah. Frenzied Berserker can kill itself with it's main ability. Not great really!
Beastmaster Ranger just plain doesn't work for what it is supposed to do.
Assassin is almost completely DM dependent and has a poisoners kit that has no proper rules in the PHB (and the rules added in later supplements make it fairly pointless)
Wild Magic Sorcerer is DM dependent and terrible.
Way of Elements Monk does not work well at all.
These are all options in the core book, and it is pretty crazy that some of them made it in to be honest. Just shows that the designers don't give a gak.
As for Spellcasters vs. Martial, that has been a part of D&D for so long that I think it will never go away. It is like Space Marines being the stars of 40K.
Beastmaster at least got fixed a bit and became somewhat function as of Tasha's, though it's original incarnation was so busted I'm not sure Wizard's deserves credit for fixing it. The original state of the Beastmaster is such that it's baffling it made it through QA or play testing. But then I think some people would accuse Wizards of not doing QA or play testing, and I think they have a solid basis to think that sometimes.
I will just say, QA and Playtesting is NOT easy. 25 people working feverishly to deadline at work are no match for Thousands of recreationalists with all the time in the world.
I have never seen a "flawless" product or an "unbreakable" system, the closest is air traffic control and even they have some BIG mistakes.
I'm deeply unimpressed by people who say (and I realise you were not saying this!) "Beastmaster is fine because it was fixed in Tasha's!"
Like, super cool that I need to buy another 50 euro book because WOTC didn't care enough to write even basically passable rules for their first 50 euro book. It's like the homebrew solution people always give - yeah, but I really don't want to open negotiations on class features with all my players, I play D&D in the expectation that that stuff works reasonably well out of the box.
Genuinely though I think Frenzied Berserker is even worse than Beastmaster.
LordofHats wrote: Beastmaster at least got fixed a bit and became somewhat function as of Tasha's, though it's original incarnation was so busted I'm not sure Wizard's deserves credit for fixing it. The original state of the Beastmaster is such that it's baffling it made it through QA or play testing. But then I think some people would accuse Wizards of not doing QA or play testing, and I think they have a solid basis to think that sometimes.
I just started playing D&D recently right around the time Tasha's was released so I obviously didn't have any experience with the OG Beastmaster but, just from reading the rules, it really did seem lackluster. You'd end up with a trail of animal corpses behind you longer than the most successful taxidermist in the Forgotten Realms. The Tasha's alternative rules are a big improvement but also an inconsistent one. Given how badly the original version of both the base class and specifically this subclass were perceived, I'm surprised they deviated from the "lets give every ranger subclass three unique rules/benefits to start with" plan. It seems like most (if not all?) Ranger subclasses since the PHB have gotten three benefits upon entering the subclass at level 3. I suppose since this was technically a revision to the PHB where they only had one they kept that instead?
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Da Boss wrote: I'm deeply unimpressed by people who say (and I realise you were not saying this!) "Beastmaster is fine because it was fixed in Tasha's!"
Like, super cool that I need to buy another 50 euro book because WOTC didn't care enough to write even basically passable rules for their first 50 euro book. It's like the homebrew solution people always give - yeah, but I really don't want to open negotiations on class features with all my players, I play D&D in the expectation that that stuff works reasonably well out of the box.
Genuinely though I think Frenzied Berserker is even worse than Beastmaster.
Did they do the whole FAQ/errata free fix for the optional rules in Tashas that apply to PHB subclasses/base classes ? I honestly don't know but that would have been customer friendly.
They've generally left it to players to homebrew solutions. I think there's a bit of laziness in it. The philosophy seems to be 'players will homebrew what they don't like so don't bother getting it right.'
Easy E wrote: I will just say, QA and Playtesting is NOT easy. 25 people working feverishly to deadline at work are no match for Thousands of recreationalists with all the time in the world.
I have never seen a "flawless" product or an "unbreakable" system, the closest is air traffic control and even they have some BIG mistakes.
Sure, but Wizards has had some pretty notorious blunders that don't even hit functional, let alone flawless or unbreakable.
The 4e 'skill challenge' system is probably the biggest. In concept, its really simple- a group skill challenge that requires X successes before Y failures.
In practice, if you weren't the absolute best in the group at <skill> your contribution was likely to be a net negative. So the best way to handle skill challenges was to let the best person (or people in the case of tied modfiers) do it on their own, and everyone else sit on their hands for the scene, which is the exact opposite of the goal (everyone helps complete the task).
At print, the target DCs were also too high, so groups were _very_ likely to fail. It was just a basic math failure, that escalated with level- the DCs simply weren't on the same scale as PC skill totals, the DCs advanced faster.
WotC published at least six different fixes to them system, none of which really solved the problems.
As time went on and developers left (or more accurately, more fell to the annual christmas pink slips (they got fired), every year for the duration of the edition), one of major problems with it came to light: when they were internally testing 4th edition, they didn't use the skill challenge system. At all. They winged it with a bunch of houserules instead (and iirc the DC chart by level was written up in the last week before the books were sent to print).
For the official internal playtests for the new edition, the developers used house rules instead.
I'm sure there was a less punishing version of exhaustion that Frenzied Berserker was designed around and it never got updated.
5e is alright, but it just seems half baked in several areas. Some classes seem fully developed and cool, and if you play those then the game is pretty solid. Other stuff is obviously an afterthought.
I think D&D suffers from too much specificity in their rules packages and the class system is impediment to decent games and role-playing.
They need a more "a la carte" system where there are martial skills, and magic skills, and players can use skill points/XP to "Buy into" whatever they want IF they can meet the base requirements to simulate different archetypes or not at their choosing.
Now, you have Ulron the Frenzied Berserker! Which means you get Y mechanical advantages or advantage choices.
Instead the player has Ulron the Frenzied Berserker because I chose to play him as a frenzied berserker but he can actually swing an Axe pretty well, has a centering ability to help boost his crit % if he prays to Krum before attacking, and has the skill points to lay a good Boast out to intimidate his opponents because that is what I want to play.
Of course, that would COMPLETELY kill the class system as we know it and also force people to try and get creative and build their own "archetypes" instead of handing it to them.
Hmm.
I rarely find class interacts with roleplaying in any way at all.
There are a few exceptions, like wizard = educated, and barbarian= unfortunate cultural stereotype, or street urchin= rogue, but thats more player choice than something set in stone.
Roleplaying is more about personality and back story, not class mechanics.
--
your example puzzles me, because except for crit % (which isn't an in-character roleplaying characteristic at all), swinging an axe well is in there by default, and boasting intimidation is easily accomodated by skills (either from class or background).
Easy E wrote: I think D&D suffers from too much specificity in their rules packages and the class system is impediment to decent games and role-playing.
They need a more "a la carte" system where there are martial skills, and magic skills, and players can use skill points/XP to "Buy into" whatever they want IF they can meet the base requirements to simulate different archetypes or not at their choosing.
Now, you have Ulron the Frenzied Berserker! Which means you get Y mechanical advantages or advantage choices.
Instead the player has Ulron the Frenzied Berserker because I chose to play him as a frenzied berserker but he can actually swing an Axe pretty well, has a centering ability to help boost his crit % if he prays to Krum before attacking, and has the skill points to lay a good Boast out to intimidate his opponents because that is what I want to play.
Of course, that would COMPLETELY kill the class system as we know it and also force people to try and get creative and build their own "archetypes" instead of handing it to them.
I know, I know, not exactly a hot take.....
AGREED!
The level/class system is honestly poison to the rp part of the rpg. It's long out dated. You can have semi classes ala the FF Starwars games or "professions" in other games. But they are jumping off points. Not a box you are trapped inside.
) I ought to do something about that, but I'm just completely stuck for interesting ideas, and no one is playing one so they might as well not exist for the time being.
hyenas, man...) or a giant or a hell, a kraken, and you've got yourself a bona fide horror beastie This is an extreme example, and possibly still not the most interesting, but it gets the point across. Setting the tone is 80% of the work, and the players are actively helping with that, and the rest can be just a few mechanical tweaks to raise the stakes or change the familiar into the unknown.
