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Nehru the Damaja posted:DM is going to try a variation of the optional flank rules. I'd describe it as a step between no flank rules and the DMG ones. Positioning alone doesn't confer advantage, but any enemy engaged with two opponents at melee range (which can include the attacker) can be "flanked" by using Help as a bonus action rather than a full action. So one person uses "flank" as a bonus action, and another person flanking the creature claims the flanking bonus? Or everyone else can claim the flank bonus? Until the flanker's next turn? I think you're onto a good idea. (In the heartbreaker I'm slowly building, helping a party member is part of the basic action economy.)
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Mar 24, 2017 01:26
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I felt like advantage was too good for flanking. So I made it the same as cover. Enemy takes a minus 2 to ac.
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Mar 24, 2017 01:33
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Kibner posted:If you just want to do the RP thing with him, Fall of Magic is good. It doesn't have any dice rolls but is about learning how to improve as a group with prompts. It has the players tell there story of traveling to the end of the world with the last powerful magician as magic is dying. Haha yeah, thanks though. Six is this weird age where they really want to do older things, but have this major disability called "being six." I'll check it (and the other suggestion, thanks) out.
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Mar 24, 2017 01:40
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Harvey Mantaco posted:Haha yeah, thanks though. Six is this weird age where they really want to do older things, but have this major disability called "being six." If nothing else, here is that video I was talking about with some young kids playing it. They seem to be a bit older than six, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-bgr-uy-PU
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Mar 24, 2017 02:00
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Harvey Mantaco posted:My six year old was listening to us play a bit of dnd (we PG'd it up a bit so he could listen before bed time) and his eyes were like saucers. He loved rolling the dice and "helping" and deciding what to do. Hero Kids, by Justin Halliday is one that I can guarantee works with 6-8 year old kids and is a kinda D&D-alike. 6 is probably too young to learn any RPG by reading the book, but with an adult or a slightly older kid to help he'll probably be fine with anything not overly complicated. I was 8 when my parents handed me the Mentzer red box Basic D&D (probably assuming it was a board game), and a couple weeks later I was somewhat successfully DMing for my friends and my little brother and he would have only been 6 or so at the time. E: Also, and since you have a 6 year old you probably don't need telling, but you're gonna want to aim for Adventure Time or maybe The Hobbit, rather than Conan The Barbarian or Lord Of The Rings. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Mar 24, 2017 |
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Mar 24, 2017 02:01
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AlphaDog posted:
I was shooting for more of a kingdom death: monster aesthetic - how can I show my child more gory tittymurder tia (That recommendation is killer though. You're the best.)
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Mar 24, 2017 02:21
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I felt it was important to say because I've read a few accounts of people somehow managing to gently caress this up when trying to RPG with children.
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Mar 24, 2017 02:26
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So my group is about to finish up Curse of Strahd in a few weeks and we're looking at what's next, but I've not seen any official, not homebrewed campaigns that really knock my socks off, and don't remember what people considered highly reviewed in here. Is there anything that goes level 10-20 in the official material right now? What is good from level 1 on other than Strahd? I'm homebrewin' hard with a madcap antics high-shenanigan evil campaign for my table, but the other DM that just ran Strahd has learned how nice it is to DM pre-written campaigns and doesn't want to homebrew or run other people's homebrews unless they are solid. I remember one campaign was being completely poo poo on in this thread but I don't remember which one because it was being abbreviated a bunch. Was it Out of the Abyss that was being panned?
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Mar 24, 2017 02:54
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Paramemetic posted:I remember one campaign was being completely poo poo on in this thread but I don't remember which one because it was being abbreviated a bunch. Was it Out of the Abyss that was being panned? It's Princes of the Apocalypse and Horde of the Dragon Queen that are the iffy ones.
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Mar 24, 2017 03:28
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bewilderment posted:It's Princes of the Apocalypse and Horde of the Dragon Queen that are the iffy ones. Princes looked straight up bad but Horde of the Dragon Queen seemed okay on my quick look over. I run kobolds tho and am just really excited to have a BBEG that I literally worship as a curveball. I'd be a player, not the DM, so without spoilering too much in what way is it not so good so I can let the DM know and see what he thinks before he commits on it?
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Mar 24, 2017 03:45
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Paramemetic posted:Princes looked straight up bad but Horde of the Dragon Queen seemed okay on my quick look over. I run kobolds tho and am just really excited to have a BBEG that I literally worship as a curveball. I'd be a player, not the DM, so without spoilering too much in what way is it not so good so I can let the DM know and see what he thinks before he commits on it? It's not really a curveball since the bad guy is pretty obvious from session 1 or 2. The start of the campaign has too many fights, and literally has an 'unwinnable boss fight' setup. It was written while bits of 5e were being finalised so some of the encounters are off challenge-wise.
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Mar 24, 2017 03:48
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bewilderment posted:It's not really a curveball since the bad guy is pretty obvious from session 1 or 2. I mean that the BBEG is going to be a dragon of some sort is pretty obvious from the module name, I meant more that it's a curveball to the party generally and an opportunity for sick RP if every time we see the dragon I go "whoa, you own." Okay, so it just needs adjustment and tweaking from the DM for possibly being a quick wipe with unbalanced encounters?
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Mar 24, 2017 03:54
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welcome 2 Clown Town posted:On the topic of improvisation, I'm running a 5e campaign for the first time and its our first D&D game as a group in like 6 years. I'm having a bit of trouble balancing encounter so that they aren't either hilariously easy or completely unfair. This might not be exactly what you're looking for, but I wrote a guide on how to make "medium" difficulty encounters that can be used as a baseline of what an encounter should be, which you can then adjust upwards from there. Cranking up the HP is a perfectly fine way to make an encounter harder, since combat is largely about efficiency and endurance. If you want to be more "fair" about it, dig into the capabilities of your players and math out how much damage they can put out per round (using different abilities), and then plot the expected HP value from there.
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Mar 24, 2017 03:58
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lifg posted:So one person uses "flank" as a bonus action, and another person flanking the creature claims the flanking bonus? Or everyone else can claim the flank bonus? Until the flanker's next turn? Haha it was apparently designed to make sure that my familiar can't just be a free advantage machine forever. But that's fine -- the system as is makes it plenty easy for the owl to drop Help action anyway.
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Mar 24, 2017 06:07
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You don't need any flanking for them to use help, do you? My rogue has been doing it with his tressym for bow sneak attacks.
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Mar 24, 2017 06:33
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:You don't need any flanking for them to use help, do you? My rogue has been doing it with his tressym for bow sneak attacks. You know what, you might be right. I mean you don't need flanking for help in general but I thought under this custom rule I did. When I think back to how it played out, that may not be the case.
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Mar 24, 2017 07:25
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Harvey Mantaco posted:My six year old was listening to us play a bit of dnd (we PG'd it up a bit so he could listen before bed time) and his eyes were like saucers. He loved rolling the dice and "helping" and deciding what to do. Star Wars RPG  Come to think of, theme/genre aside, it doesn't seem like THAT terrible for a kid. The dice are colour-coded, and the pregens even have the pool ready to go, it's symbols rather than numbers (so counting instead of getting lost with plus and minus)...
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Mar 24, 2017 09:53
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I can see where mastershakeman is coming from. A good tactical battle entrenched in the rules can be fun. It becomes a challenge in it self like a chess game. Though, I don't think 5e is really the system for that style of play. There really aren't enough rules to allow for it. Maybe I'm wrong and I haven't been doing it right, but all the battles I've ran that followed that formula in 5e tend to be rather boring for me as the GM. The rules definitely need to facilitate tactics more if that style of play is to be sought after. The lovely thing is that there isn't really a decent section in the hand book to help DMs and players to act more creatively in combat. 5e is written like a tactical game, but it fails at that, while the simplicity of the rules and the advantage/disadvantage subsystem really lends itself to creativity.
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Mar 24, 2017 10:10
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Harvey Mantaco posted:My six year old was listening to us play a bit of dnd (we PG'd it up a bit so he could listen before bed time) and his eyes were like saucers. He loved rolling the dice and "helping" and deciding what to do. Generic Octopus posted:I really like Ryuutama, it's pretty kid-friendly in regards to both content and complexity. I will second Ryuutama. It's really not complicated at all, and the built in feel and fluff is innocent and cute without being overly childish.
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Mar 24, 2017 14:14
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Looking up Ryuutama, it sounds like a fun game to run for the kids at the library I work at. Any other comments on the game? It sounds pretty mellow.
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Mar 24, 2017 15:20
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Vengarr posted:I use KFC and 5e Tools more than the actual books at this point. Wait so someone already made D&D Beyond and made it better? This is somewhat hilarious to me. But unsurprising. If only they had an iPad app.
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Mar 24, 2017 17:31
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Deified Data posted:Looking up Ryuutama, it sounds like a fun game to run for the kids at the library I work at. Any other comments on the game? It sounds pretty mellow. The default game tone/assumption is pretty tame/mellow; basically, the world is sustained by 4 dragons, who feed off the stories collected by Ryuujin, the GM-character. So in the fiction the GM is basically running around looking for/causing stuff to happen so they can record good stories. Everyone in my group said at some point or another that it read like a TRPG version of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, if that gives you any context. All that said, the tone can vary wildly depending on the GM's choice of Ryuujin (there are four types, which range from the laid-back Green who collect stories about adventure & exploration, to the somewhat menacing Black, who collects grim stories of drama & death) and how the world is constructed. For instance, my table decided that the world was shaped like a d20, and sector 1 was where the corpse of a great demon fell after battle with a god generations ago. Though dead, a great miasma billows forth from the crater where its corpse is said to lay, and all manner of foul monsters spring forth from it to terrorize the world. The various kingdoms of the world have united to try & hold them at bay, but containment is practically impossible; as such, very few people willingly venture from the cities & villages for fear of the monsters, which became a crisis of its own since so few stories could be recorded & fed to the Dragons. So an independent organization was created to randomly select people by lottery to go forth and adventure (dubbed the Emergency Volunteer Independent Lottery). So yea, you can run the gamut from "friendly game about delivering bread to the neighboring village" to "the world is a horrible place on the constant brink of death please make it stop."
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Mar 24, 2017 18:04
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http://planescape.com/ Shared by the official Facebook page. EDIT: And Beamdog's. A Planescape EE would be nice but they would try an insert a new companion or something and... 
Kavak fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Mar 24, 2017 |
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Mar 24, 2017 19:19
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Kavak posted:http://planescape.com/ Shared by the official Facebook page. Why would that be bad. None of the new companions or anything in the earlier entries were intrusive and even if you did dislike them you could just not use them. While I would like a Planescape EE I do hope we would also get a book as well.
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Mar 25, 2017 04:30
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MonsterEnvy posted:Why would that be bad. None of the new companions or anything in the earlier entries were intrusive and even if you did dislike them you could just not use them. Tell that to the Red Wizard battle you're forced to do when you meet Neera But seriously, Planescape's companions tie very tightly into the plot and themes of the game, and adding another one would feel very fanfictiony. I hope they keep things to bug fixing and cut content.
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Mar 25, 2017 05:12
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Has anyone played something like a 3 Warlock 17 Fighter as an archer battlemaster? It'd take til level 8 to really get things online but with UA you could make a longbow with arrow smites your pact weapon, have Hex, have a big strong Mage Armor via invocation, and Warlock could fill in for the missing extra attack while you delay Fighter 5 because Eldritch Blast would keep scaling. I'm just looking for something fun that would spice up a Battlemaster archer. The Arcane Archer UA didn't really do it for me.
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Mar 25, 2017 05:32
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Nehru the Damaja posted:Has anyone played something like a 3 Warlock 17 Fighter as an archer battlemaster? It'd take til level 8 to really get things online but with UA you could make a longbow with arrow smites your pact weapon, have Hex, have a big strong Mage Armor via invocation, and Warlock could fill in for the missing extra attack while you delay Fighter 5 because Eldritch Blast would keep scaling. You only get two smites per short rest, that eat on your valuable spell slots (for Hex, Darkness, or anything else) for 4d8 extra damage each (avg 18). It's alright for flavor reasons and you don't have to worry about ammo or non-magical resistance, but it's strictly worse than using a Hand Crossbow from a numbers perspective. An always-on bonus attack with Sharpshooter is just that strong. Either way, I'd recommend starting Fighter for the CON saves and switching to Warlock at 5 after you get your Extra Attack, or Fighter 1 then Warlock till 5 to get Extra Attack through your Invocation before switching back to Fighter. You likely want 6 (ASI)/7 (+1 sup die)/11 (Extra Attack 2) levels of Fighter and the rest in Warlock, also.
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Mar 25, 2017 07:02
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In other news I got tales of the Yawning Portal and it is pretty cool. If anyone has any questions I am willing to answer within 8 hours cause I need to sleep.
MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 08:24 on Mar 25, 2017 |
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Mar 25, 2017 08:17
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What level ranges are the dungeons in it? Does it look good for using it piecemeal like speculated?
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Mar 25, 2017 08:35
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Conspiratiorist posted:You only get two smites per short rest, that eat on your valuable spell slots (for Hex, Darkness, or anything else) for 4d8 extra damage each (avg 18). I must be missing something about the hand crossbow. What puts that over a longbow? Also I think as written you can make any magical non melee weapon your pact weapon, so if you had a forge cleric or just found a +1 weapon, you could do the ritual to make that your pact weapon. I don't have the exact text on hand but I'm pretty sure they only specify melee for your initial pact weapon, not one you designate as such
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Mar 25, 2017 08:53
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Nehru the Damaja posted:I must be missing something about the hand crossbow. What puts that over a longbow? 1. Crossbow Expert feat lets you make an attack with a Bonus Action if you're wielding a Hand Crossbow. The damage die difference between ranged weapons matters little when the bulk of your damage output comes from Sharpshooter, so as I said, an always available bonus action attack is very strong. 2. As written you can make any magical weapon your pact weapon. Moonbow *creates* its own specific piece of equipment, though; you can't smite with a magical bow you picked up and made into your pact weapon.
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Mar 25, 2017 15:25
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After a game last night, I was talking with the barbarian, who is doing absurd (compared to most current enemies) damage at level 6 using Great Weapon Mastery. I've done some light calculation in the past and it seems like fighters and rogues have a fairly nice damage curve that the barbarian is already near the end of - but also that the barbarian is going to gain fairly little damage beyond that between now and 20, and very little in the way of other "pillar" stuff on the side. In the meantime the GM is starting to inflate enemy HP to compensate but that just makes it one of those situations where if the barbarian goes out (or, god forbid, gets charmed), the rest of us will probably take a loss. This is worrying to both of us and we were talking about how we could address it, as players, as a table, and along with the GM, both so he can be less imbalancing in the near future and age more gracefully later (it's a fun game outside of system gripes so we're hoping it goes a proper campaign length). Thoughts? Or are we just off base? Caphi fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Mar 25, 2017 |
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Mar 25, 2017 18:01
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Caphi posted:After a game last night, I was talking with the barbarian, who is doing absurd (compared to most current enemies) damage at level 6 using Great Weapon Mastery. I've done some light calculation in the past and it seems like fighters and rogues have a fairly nice damage curve that the barbarian is already near the end of - but also that the barbarian is going to gain fairly little damage beyond that between now and 20, and very little in the way of other "pillar" stuff on the side. In the meantime the GM is starting to inflate enemy HP to compensate but that just makes it one of those situations where if the barbarian goes out (or, god forbid, gets charmed), the rest of us will probably take a loss. What's the rest of your party, for context?
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Mar 25, 2017 18:38
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MonsterEnvy posted:In other news I got tales of the Yawning Portal and it is pretty cool. If anyone has any questions I am willing to answer within 8 hours cause I need to sleep. Like, I know it's a cliche by this point, but I've always wanted to run it.
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Mar 25, 2017 19:06
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Tir McDohl posted:What level ranges are the dungeons in it? Does it look good for using it piecemeal like speculated? The Sunless Citadel is for 1st to 3rd level characters Forge of Fury is for 3rd to 5th The Hidden Shine of Tamochan is for 5th level characters White Plume Mountain is for 8th level characters Dead in Thay is for 9th to 11th level characters Against the Giants is for 11th level characters Tomb of Horrors is for high level parties and but sending them in at any time after level 11 should work best. It works very well for piecemeal the Dungeons and stuff can be put anywhere. You just need a plot hook to send the party over to the site of the dungeon and the details around it. Bad Seafood posted:Tell me, o bard, of the Tomb of Horrors. The Tomb of Horrors is dangerous but from looking at it becomes less so the higher level you are. (As you have the ability to take more punishment for messing up and falling for traps.) There are few traps that are instant kills, but they are pretty smuck baity and anyone who falls for them probably should have thought it through better. (Yes I will hold onto this cursed gem that was surrounded by skeletons that is pulsing with light and started glowing brighter and hotter after we used it.) Going in at a lower level will make it more challenging but I don't recommend going with characters that you are attached to. It's much less dangerous then the original version but that makes it better for allowing established characters to go into at least. Anything you would like to know about it in detail?
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Mar 25, 2017 19:59
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Awesome. I just preordered it.
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Mar 25, 2017 20:30
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Does Mearls apologize for his utter lack of talent, dedication, or workmanship in it at all?
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Mar 25, 2017 20:33
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Arivia posted:Does Mearls apologize for his utter lack of talent, dedication, or workmanship in it at all? probably more than you put into this post
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Mar 25, 2017 20:39
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Oh the Yawning Portal is described a bit along with its owner. (Along with facts that he is kind a jackass as he will refuse to pull people who went into Undermountain back up if they can't pay the fee.) Along with likely patrons of the tavern. 
MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Mar 25, 2017 |
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Mar 25, 2017 20:47
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Jesus, really, Elminster? The 5e Realms are turning into a parody of themselves.
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Mar 25, 2017 20:53
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