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For glory blood and souls the solution is a map that allows movement in eight directions! (As long as youre not using a ruler for distance.) For an easy way to help people visualize who is where and facing which way it should be fine. Of course the real solution is obviously to play on the surface of a hyperboloid using a perspective projection. At least according to one guy. http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/54027/why-dont-we-use-octogonal-maps-instead-of-hexagonal-maps
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Jan 29, 2017 20:50
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That's exactly what you're proposing, at least as the characters are concerned. Your octagon/square grid is just how your represent that on euclidean paper.
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Jan 29, 2017 20:58
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just use a freaking ruler
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Jan 29, 2017 21:14
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FRINGE posted:For glory blood and souls the solution is a map that allows movement in eight directions! (As long as youre not using a ruler for distance.) For an easy way to help people visualize who is where and facing which way it should be fine.
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Jan 29, 2017 22:06
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Splicer posted:Assuming the little squares don't impose extra movement, this is identical to a square grid rotated 45 degrees. Maybe some geometry/cs person could generate one with the squares expanded and the octagons side-truncated such that the center points of all units were closer to uniform distances from one another? edit - oh wait, that might already be true...
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Jan 29, 2017 22:16
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lol if you don't play D&D on the surface of a soccer ball
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Jan 29, 2017 22:25
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Hey hey hey it's Dungeons and Dragons. 
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Jan 29, 2017 22:33
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FRINGE posted:Ive never done it, but if I was going to try it I would allow the squares to be used. (Obviously the map would not define distance, just position and facing.)
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Jan 29, 2017 22:33
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have each player draw their character on a pog and slam the big bad into them
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Jan 29, 2017 22:50
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My 5e game is good because the GM is cool and my friends are weird, but I'm playing the bard and feeling like, on top of everything else bards are good at, Song of Rest is a bit of an almost required multiplier on hit dice and will only get better as we level. Only bards can do this, it's free, and without it we'd be going through twice as many HD, which is tight at level 4.
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Jan 29, 2017 23:00
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I thought 5e didn't need grids
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Jan 29, 2017 23:13
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I'm diving into DMing because I couldn't find a local game and have some friends that have never played. I've only played using Fantasy Grounds or one-shots drawn on the grid mats. What's the best way to provide maps for the published adventures like Storm King or Strahd?
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Jan 30, 2017 00:42
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You can take the digital maps provided with the e-versions, blow them up so the squares are as big as you want, and print them out. There are often high-res versions online, so they end up looking pretty good. I did this with the Death House from Curse of Strahd. I went further and cut out each room of the house, leaving the border intact (which I pasted onto the back of an old poster). As the party opened doors in the house, I would hand them the room and let them paste it in it--so the map would get filled in organically. It also got them thinking like "Hey, why is this room clearly smaller than the dimensions of the house suggest it should be" for rooms with secret doors. It worked really great. Slightly muted by the fact that the actual House portion of the Death House is fairly barren. "Here's a bathroom. Here's a den. Here's a dining room, a kitchen..." So many rooms with flavor text and nothing else.
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Jan 30, 2017 01:49
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My group is ungodly slow. We get through like maybe 1 fight per session and maybe some chit chat with npcs. Mostly its tons of deliberation about how to best walk down a hallway and perception checks every third tile just in case that algae might be dangerous.
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Jan 30, 2017 01:56
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Novum posted:My group is ungodly slow. We get through like maybe 1 fight per session and maybe some chit chat with npcs. Mostly its tons of deliberation about how to best walk down a hallway and perception checks every third tile just in case that algae might be dangerous. In that sort of case, I will occasionally tell my players that there is nothing to worry about. Roleplaying is good so long as it's fun. Twenty minutes of preparation for each 10 foot corridor crawl is not fun. (e: however, beware that giving that knowledge may reinforce the deliberative behavior. Use with care.) At some point, if people are still deliberating far too much: silence the table, single out a player with an intense look and say to them, "what all that in mind, Frank, what do *you* do?" Zomborgon fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Jan 30, 2017 |
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Jan 30, 2017 02:23
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So is Death House basically the party re-enacting Home Alone from the point of view of the burglars?
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Jan 30, 2017 03:05
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Holy poo poo, my brain. What is this. My first time DMing ever and it just went apeshit. I planned out an innkeeper, Innmedya AKA Mouth, just to give the party the campaign/setting primer and to let them secure a convenient place to catch some shut-eye (Innmedya's Rest [heh]). They hogtie him, ransack his poo poo, threaten murder expect him to help them after that at risk to his life and well-being -- all before they even looked out a window to see where they'd woken up from their magical kidnapping. Even when they did, the looming, black cathedral barely even got a rise out of them. No, there was still plenty of elbow-dropping to be done on this poor dude. After I have him send them to the next plot-hook (which leads them to Pecunius III, a representative of the Infernal Revenue Service), they immediately return to start grilling him again. At this point I'd had the guards show up twice to complicate their kidnapping and try to get a conflict in, only to have them make lucky-as-gently caress rolls to smooth things over. One of which establishes that our Warlock "looks just like" the Innkeeper (they're both half-elves.) I'm out of ideas and I'm just trying to get them out into the city as they repeatedly ransack the joint, so I toss in a ledger detailing a shipment of unusual chemicals that relate to a peculiarity in the setting, and I tried to make this seem like more than an obvious jab in the right direction by including an entry for "Sue." Oh, this was recent? Where is Sue? If he has money to spend on inlaid tableware and fine wines but not much on his person, this must've cleaned him out! And because he was so greedy, it wasn't in the cards to have it be something not in the house. I panicked as they went upstairs to his chambers looking for Sue, the only place they hadn't been, which had been silent the whole time despite shouting and crashing and screaming for mercy. Could've made it a custom sword, or a boat, or any number of things. But again, I had no clue what to do and just blurted something out, so Sue ended up being a, uh, recreational golem. So I finagle this into a way to get them on a common goal and back out the door -- they help him get a soul to bring Sue to life, and he helps them get into the quest location. Only, when the guards show up and start taking him away (my last attempt at getting them out the door), the first combat roll of the game happens. And what do you know? It's a 1. Yeah, Mouth ate it right then and there. The party discussed (outside the game) the possibility of bringing him back. I begrudgingly agree so he's stable. Then the second combat roll happens, courtesy of our Warlock. 1. Definitely dead and done with... exceeept this setting has an odd quirk where souls can't come or go as normal, so people have adapted using these little soul battery things to preserve them (a far extrapolation of someone's post in here or in Murphy's) so they can be recycled into new life. Sure enough, they find Mouth's soul. So now our Warlock has stolen Mouth's clothes and used a disguise kit to make himself the spitting image of Mouth so he can go make the chemical exchange, which Mouth had indicated included the last few ingredients to transpose a soul into the golem. And they plan to go through with Mouth's last request using the soul they have on-hand. For the record, I only wrote Mouth a brief monologue and two canned lines to get them out the door. No stats, no background, nothing. Now he's getting doppelganged and having his soul shoved into the golem courtesan he fell in love with, and the first thing he'll see upon waking is a pretty close approximation of his old likeness being worn by the person who killed him. What the gently caress?
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Jan 30, 2017 04:22
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Caphi posted:My 5e game is good because the GM is cool and my friends are weird, but I'm playing the bard and feeling like, on top of everything else bards are good at, Song of Rest is a bit of an almost required multiplier on hit dice and will only get better as we level. Only bards can do this, it's free, and without it we'd be going through twice as many HD, which is tight at level 4. Bards are kinda built around extending a party's endurance, so it's hardly surprising. After all, it's what they give up respectable at-will damage for. Song of Rest is one tool they get for this, but probably one of the weaker available to them since it's a single die roll with nothing added to it. Bards who poach Aura of Vitality or that UA Glamor bard's temp HP ability on the other hand...  They aren't the only ones who get cheap heals, either. The Healer feat is open to anyone, and far stronger across all levels. Fighters get a self-only short rest heal at level 1. Life clerics can patch everyone to 50% with a channel divinity starting at 2. Moon druids can soak up tons of damage before anything meaningful is done to the party's HP pool. If you extend it to long rests, Paladins, along with one of the new UA Druid and Monk flavors can all restore a fair chunk of HP before dipping into spell slots. Novum posted:My group is ungodly slow. We get through like maybe 1 fight per session and maybe some chit chat with npcs. Mostly its tons of deliberation about how to best walk down a hallway and perception checks every third tile just in case that algae might be dangerous. This is something that annoyed me enough as a player that I was inspired to try and fix it in the game I DM. I've had some success by tying traps/other hidden crap entirely to passive perception, and allow successes on any remotely relevant ability check that my PCs ask for to lower the DC to detect every hidden thing in the dungeon. It also gives me a convenient mechanism to allow the players to fail forward. Instead of "you fail to pick the lock", I'd say something more like "the door swings open, but in your frustration while working the lock, you damage it beyond recognition", while a success would be something to the effect of "The door swings open. You recognize the mechanism used from your days in thief school and recall that a similar device can be used to trigger certain kinds of traps. You're now on the lookout for other signs of these"
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Jan 30, 2017 04:33
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Skellybones posted:So is Death House basically the party re-enacting Home Alone from the point of view of the burglars? There's a Curse of Strahd playlist filled with classical music that I was going to play during the adventure. But my party insisted on turning on the OST to Luigi's Mansion. It fit perfectly. Yes, except in reverse. The Doom Haus is happy to have you enter, but once you try to leave everything tries to kill you. Slippery42 posted:This is something that annoyed me enough as a player that I was inspired to try and fix it in the game I DM. I've had some success by tying traps/other hidden crap entirely to passive perception, and allow successes on any remotely relevant ability check that my PCs ask for to lower the DC to detect every hidden thing in the dungeon. It also gives me a convenient mechanism to allow the players to fail forward. Instead of "you fail to pick the lock", I'd say something more like "the door swings open, but in your frustration while working the lock, you damage it beyond recognition", while a success would be something to the effect of "The door swings open. You recognize the mechanism used from your days in thief school and recall that a similar device can be used to trigger certain kinds of traps. You're now on the lookout for other signs of these" Man, the solution to traps hit me when I was driving today. Just give the trap a Stealth score and have it make an opposed roll vs. the party's passive perception. If the party has something they're keyed on (like they're looking for any trapped statues and the trap is in a statue), give the trap Disadvantage. Done. My party was making a Perception roll in every room and it was like...blegh. We'll be here all day. Vengarr fucked around with this message at 05:01 on Jan 30, 2017 |
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Jan 30, 2017 04:51
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Vengarr posted:There's a Curse of Strahd playlist filled with classical music that I was going to play during the adventure. But my party insisted on turning on the OST to Luigi's Mansion. I lean heavily on the Lost Highway soundtrack for creepy background music. Some of those tracks loop nearly seamlessly. (But now I'm gonna have to try Luigi Mansion OST.)
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Jan 30, 2017 05:05
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Vengarr posted:You can take the digital maps provided with the e-versions, blow them up so the squares are as big as you want, and print them out. There are often high-res versions online, so they end up looking pretty good. That's a really good idea. Is there a way to print from Fantasy Grounds owned content? Also, does anyone have any videos of someone DMing from behind the screen? I have a good idea of how it works on FG/Roll20 but not in person. Edit: nevermind, i found this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRMVTmbe-Is empathe fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Jan 30, 2017 |
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Jan 30, 2017 05:22
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Anyone seen any good examples for a Bard flavored after being like a layabout traveling philosopher? The PHB mentions a couple times off-hand about Bards doing things other than music and I like the idea of some work-averse academic who travels from town to town bloviating about old concepts in natural philosophy - phlogiston, aether, the crystalline spheres, etc. Instead of singing people to health, they get a solid night's sleep after being bored into slumber by your lectures and Vicious Mockery could take after Diogenes type cutdowns (e.g. "Behold! A man!") I kiiiinda need to create this now.
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Jan 30, 2017 06:02
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Kraven Moorhed posted:Holy poo poo, my brain. What is this. My first time DMing ever and it just went apeshit. here's your problem, stop doing that.
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Jan 30, 2017 06:05
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Nehru the Damaja posted:Anyone seen any good examples for a Bard flavored after being like a layabout traveling philosopher? The PHB mentions a couple times off-hand about Bards doing things other than music and I like the idea of some work-averse academic who travels from town to town bloviating about old concepts in natural philosophy - phlogiston, aether, the crystalline spheres, etc. Instead of singing people to health, they get a solid night's sleep after being bored into slumber by your lectures and Vicious Mockery could take after Diogenes type cutdowns (e.g. "Behold! A man!") I kiiiinda need to create this now. This is mostly fluff (not mechanics) so just do it, ffs. If you need to haggle with your DM, ask if you can trade a musical instrument prof for a language, since they're equivalent in Background-generating currency, IIRC.
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Jan 30, 2017 06:15
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if you need to haggle with your DM  them
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Jan 30, 2017 06:21
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It was less a question of if I could do it and just whether anyone's seen it pulled off well or wanted to spitball something. I love that the Sage background has "Discredited Academic" which fits wonderfully for what is ultimately a high fantasy Ted Talker speaking out his rear end.
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Jan 30, 2017 06:59
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Kraven Moorhed posted:Holy poo poo, my brain. What is this. My first time DMing ever and it just went apeshit. You kinda dug your own hole here. Your players sound like psychopaths., and you let them run free. I mean, it's your first time DMing so it's a learning experience but drat those players sound unhinged.
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Jan 30, 2017 07:25
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Kraven Moorhed posted:Holy poo poo, my brain. What is this. My first time DMing ever and it just went apeshit. Either they need to get on your game, or you need to provide theirs. Either way is fine, but otherwise you will be stressed/upset or they will be bored/upset.
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Jan 30, 2017 09:29
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Kraven Moorhed. posted:Holy poo poo, my brain. What is this. My first time DMing ever and it just went apeshit. I've noticed that some players like to really push new DMs in the weirdest ways. New players either shut down from overchoice, or go really crazy with it pushing all the boundaries. I don't think this was your fault at all, and you can still fix it. Just go with it and let them get it out of their system. It might break this campaign into pieces but with the next one just tell them what you expect a more serious game this next time, and if they go around beating inn keepers they will end up in the dungeon or in a noose. No more pulling punches.
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Jan 30, 2017 10:31
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Really Pants posted:I thought 5e didn't need grids 5e is actually 100% written with a grid in mind but it's very coy about it and dances around the subject, like "Everything is measured in 5-foot increments and a single medium-sized character occupies a 5' by 5' space and eight medium-sized creatures can fit in spaces adjacent to a medium-sized creature BUT THERE'S NO GRID THEATER OF THE MIND!!!" Grids are actually cool and I don't get the hate for them. They just make everything so much easier to visualize, everything from "Am I close enough to the goblins to move and make a melee attack or would I need to run to do that" to "How many of those goblins could I catch with a single fireball?" and "Is that goblin in short, medium or long range?" poo poo, I use grids nearly all the time even when I run B/X. That's not to say that theater of the mind doesn't work, it absolutely does, but it presumes a game that isn't obsessed with precise measurements in distances and relative positioning but is willing to abstract that poo poo and 5e is definitely not that game any more than any other edition of the game is.
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Jan 30, 2017 13:50
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I never liked grids and maps because honestly I'm lazy. The table we typically play makes it very inconvenient for me to reach the map. I'd basically have to stand and reach over my screen to get to it. I adopted the 13th Age relativity rules to narrative combat and after an adaption period it works pretty well.
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Jan 30, 2017 14:01
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Yea, my players just burned a back woods hamlet to the ground, somethings going to catch up with them! There are consequences for murder hoboing!
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Jan 30, 2017 14:05
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Honestly though, I remember when I first started playing way back and my experiences were similar. When I was courted to play as a kid DnD was described to me as "being able to play through your own version of The Lord of the Rings" which sounds awesome. So I created a Dwarf Fighter and was raring to go on an adventure. I was brought in to an existing game where I'd meet the party on the road. Well I introduce myself and the party immediately captures and starts to torture me. This was my first goddamn game so this didn't make a lot of sense to me. The DM let this go on for like 10 or 20 minutes before he basically had to force the party to accept me. There was a lot of stretching of the chaotic neutral alignment in that game.
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Jan 30, 2017 14:16
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SettingSun posted:There was a lot of stretching of the chaotic neutral alignment in that game. And that's the reason why I had the character creation rule "Chaotic, moral-Neutral, Tiefling, Rogue, being a new TRPG-er: pick up to two." Sometimes the alignment system can be useful.
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Jan 30, 2017 14:27
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I just thought about why I like my grids so much and I realized there's something more it than simply precision: it's easier to make dynamic combat scenes when you have a clear visualization of the scene. Without a grid in place combats tend to devolve to a simple "PCs and monsters stand on opposite sides of the field, the PCs' front row hits the monsters with melee attacks while the back row shoots and casts spells, monsters do the same" type of exchange. With a grid (or any kind of map really) when there's an immediate visual cue of what sort of terrain there is and where the characters are standing in relation to each other it opens the field to stuff like "stand behind the pillar and snipe at the enemy from safety" or "Set up a defensive position at the top of the stairs so we have the high ground and an easily defensible bottleneck", and then the DM can easily retaliate with "Oh, you like using pillars for cover? Well how do you like the lich casting disintegrate at you so even if it misses it'll hit the pillar and destroy your cover?" or "Well, the orcs decide to push against your shield wall, and the orcs at the back are helping out, if they pull these off they'll push you away from your easily defensible position and allow them to swarm out." Now, all of that could happen without a grid and in theater of the mind, but having a clear visualization of that situation and the various terrain features in it makes it much more immediate. When your DM reads the description of a room to you, how many features of that room do you actually remember when it comes time to search it for traps and treasures or whatever? How many times do you end up going "Wait a minute, is the bookshelf on the wall to my left or to the right?" or "Wait, there's a treasure chest? I didn't hear anything about a treasure chest." or "How many doors did you say there were again?" Now imagine that situation but there's goblins in it. No matter how well you describe the terrain and special features of the room the fight is taking place in, you should give it a maximum of two rounds before your players have forgotten about all the features of the room and settled into a pattern where the room itself might as well not exist. Having said that, it needs not be so: if the DM is proactive and actively weaves their descriptions into the narration of the combat they can help their players more clearly visualize the scene in which the combat takes place and thus allow for more dynamic combats. Myself, I find it easier to do with a grid (and I also have a terrible memory so I'd probably forget about the layout of the rooms myself if I didn't have a visual reminder).
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Jan 30, 2017 14:33
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It's possible to draw/describe things like "this is a chokepoint", and "this area is impassable", and "this is the high ground", and "this is a bottomless pit" even without a grid, but once you do that, you then have to contend with things like "how far can I go in one turn?" and "how far can I shoot?" and trying to be consistent. And you might try to further try to work through it without a grid by eyeballing "okay, a human can move ~6 inches a round", but at the point you're reverse-engineering the need for a grid anyway. EDIT: Going back to this: Thumbtacks posted:How exactly would you roleplay a character with extremely high wisdom and extremely low intelligence? I think the spread is something like 18wis - 7int. Taking a page from Blue Rose: quote:Wisdom And as a bit of trivia, the order of STR-DEX-CON-INT-WIS-CHA wasn't always like that. The original order was STR-INT-WIS-CON-DEX-CHA. The first three were "primary" ability scores. Fighters liked STR, Magic-Users likes INT, Clerics liked WIS. And then the other three were "secondary" ability scores. CON added health, DEX added missile accuracy and initiative/speed, and CHA determined how many hirelings you could have. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Jan 30, 2017 |
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Jan 30, 2017 14:41
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Bring back the Leadership feat, let's bog down combat with more PC meatbags.
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Jan 30, 2017 15:18
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Moving away from the grid is possible and even good for some games but it reduces the boardgamey nature of combat. For example: Edge of the Empire uses a zone-based system similar to what Fate does. In that game, every combat is parsed in terms of relative range bands, which is cool and simple for figuring out weapon ranges and narrating dynamic scenes. However, it has some weaknesses, too. If you have too many individual enemies in play, you can't really have them break up and engage the players individually because if you do, it becomes a clusterfuck to narrate - some characters are Engaged with one enemy, Close to another and Medium range with a third. Bring terrain features into play and you've got a recipe for "wait, which guy was I next to?" In other words, it's a useful system for describing relative engagement ranges with one or two groups of enemies, or for describing distance to a specific objective, but once you involve more than a handful of things it becomes harder to use without a lot of handwaving. Since D&D uses individual turns, initiative and character placement the mat is usually my preference for anything other than very simple combats, but I could see avoiding its use in a more narrative heavy game.
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Jan 30, 2017 15:21
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Elfgames posted:if you need to haggle with your DM I wanted to do a tiefling barbarian who triggered Thaumaturgy when I raged, but the extra action was deemed unbalanced. Disappointing.
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Jan 30, 2017 15:24
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Mendrian posted:For example: Edge of the Empire uses a zone-based system similar to what Fate does. In that game, every combat is parsed in terms of relative range bands, which is cool and simple for figuring out weapon ranges and narrating dynamic scenes. However, it has some weaknesses, too. If you have too many individual enemies in play, you can't really have them break up and engage the players individually because if you do, it becomes a clusterfuck to narrate - some characters are Engaged with one enemy, Close to another and Medium range with a third. Bring terrain features into play and you've got a recipe for "wait, which guy was I next to?" You can still make maps with Edge of the Empire and you don't need a "square based" world to do it. Just a hand drawn map on an erasable board and some tokens. You lose absolutely nothing as far as positioning goes and you can make the fight as complicated or as simple as you want.
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Jan 30, 2017 15:28
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