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Chad seems like the bright sort of fellow who would spike town ale supplies, bait supernatural creatures into town and fill peoples tavern rooms with wood shavings and dwarf semen.
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May 20, 2017 18:14
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Two Headed Calf posted:pyromancers for the floor plan + https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/1zdxej/i_just_finished_sorting_out_a_2_gb_archive_of/ This looks awesome, but the gdrive mentioned doesn't seem to exist any longer. Do you know of another site? It's too big for my mega quota.
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May 20, 2017 19:05
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Subjunctive posted:This looks awesome, but the gdrive mentioned doesn't seem to exist any longer. Do you know of another site? It's too big for my mega quota. What about the torrent?
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May 20, 2017 19:31
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Gao posted:Last session, I played out the trip there, and they had to cure a witch who had eaten some cookies that Chad laced with laxatives in order to get her to uncurse the moleman who had given them to her. But now I'm not sure what other pranks Chad should be doing, what should be driving this session, or what to do with any of the buildings. I don't have to use everything they gave me, and I really only need a rough outline to run a session, but I figured I'd see if any of you had some ideas. some random ideas, mix and match as usual: chad is getting into politics. he wants to invite a vampire lord to give a speech on how great it is to be ruled by a tyrannical lord, and insists that REAL freedom is allowing the bloodthirsty monster to speak. chad resents being trapped here. he wants to leave, the locals want him gone, it's just that nobody is really sure how he got here in the first place. Something Horrifying And Otherworldly was sealed away deep beneath the city, and the inexplicable buildings were built by the long-forgotten death cult that once worshipped it. the crystals are the result of it growing as it loosens itself from its bonds, and its waste energy is what's feeding the fruit from underground. I kind of like the idea that not-cthulhu has chilled out in captivity and is happy with its essentially symbiotic relationship with the city above, and that the challenge is getting the people in the city to chill out about it or deal with a revival of the death cult against not-cthulhu's wishes.
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May 20, 2017 20:45
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I'm trying to recreate the StarCraft Lurker in 13th age, and I'm wondering if I should go for a burrow ability, or invisibility fluffed as a burrow ability. (Lurkers in StarCraft dug under ground were stationary, invisible, and would plink at you from a-far.) I'd ask this in the 13th age thread, but it's dead, and I refuse to move onto 5e. I've already got a bunch of the enemies statted up, and used it to great effect. Turtlicious posted:The plot is going to be basically, you saved the world from Earthly threats, but now mystical creatures from another world are invading. They are a terrifying and ruthless amalgamation of biologically advanced, psionic aliens. They're dedicated to the pursuit of genetic perfection, they relentlessly hunt down and assimilate advanced species across the galaxy, incorporating useful genetic code into their own.They rapidly create new strains of their own species, and they relentlessly assault all those who stand in their way. The idea behind these next few encounters is that all of the individual Zerg provide something to all the other ones, like all the Zerglings give expanded crit, all the Hydralisks give DoT, All the Ultralisks give space, the Overseer gives Escalation die. I want to keep introducing new kinds of alien that fit the theme, so that they never feel like they've "got it" but still can figure out new strategies by piecing together fights they already have. I'm wondering if an immobile, invisible turret would be unfun to fight though, or if it would add tension giving them something they need to hunt down.
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May 20, 2017 21:10
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Turtlicious posted:I'm trying to recreate the StarCraft Lurker in 13th age, and I'm wondering if I should go for a burrow ability, or invisibility fluffed as a burrow ability. Invisibility in 13A is a strong defensive effect, but it's only a 50% miss chance (which still applies miss damage!) if the invisible creature is attacking. It's not as disruptive as it is in other post-WOTC D&D games. Burrow is basically immunity to damage while the creature is underground, but the creature has to emerge to attack. Burrowers fight like bulettes: they pop and attack, attack then dig. If they don't fail their dig check, they repeat turn 1, and if they do fail, they repeat turn 2. Also consider just using "resist 16+: any attack that doesn't cleverly deal with the fact that they're mostly underground but immobile", which is my personal go-to for weird poo poo.
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May 20, 2017 21:18
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Turtlicious posted:What about the torrent? I didn't find any peers when I tried. I ended up dropping 5€ on a Mega account, since I'd happily pay that for the content really.
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May 20, 2017 21:29
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Gao posted:Chad Chad's vandalizing structures with magical graffiti. He may or may not realize the graffiti is magical, he's just makin' street art, brah. Maybe the stuff he's spray painting is coming to life and attacking people, or maybe it's forming portals to other dimensions (like some Mario Sunshine poo poo) and Bad Things are coming out of the gates.
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May 20, 2017 22:38
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Chad is replacing all of the mead and beer in every tavern in town with PBR, and all the wine with boxed wine.
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May 21, 2017 01:20
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Chad is replacing all of the mead and beer in every tavern in town with PBR, and all the wine with boxed wine. Chad is (your campaign setting)'s biggest monster.
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May 21, 2017 03:18
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Kwyndig posted:Chad is (your campaign setting)'s biggest monster. Give the biggest snob in the party a taste for Boone's while you're at it. Bonus points if they are an elf or elf-equivalent. "You don't know what everyone is whining about, this is the best wine you've ever had."
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May 21, 2017 03:54
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On the way to the town have the party keep encountering young people travelling to town to take part in Chad's new Wynd Festival. When the party gets to town they're promptly funneled into a "festival ground" that's a mini adventure. The place is locked down, there's wild dogs everywhere, supplies are sparce and you have a bunch of fops trying to fight over a single loaf of bread. When they beat the encounter have Chad offer to trade their treasures for tickets to the next Wynd festival.
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May 21, 2017 08:53
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Chad has been claiming to be the leader of their party while they were away, and may have accidentally promised to slay a dragon or two on their behalf.
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May 23, 2017 09:10
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I just finished writing the basic plot outline for a sci-fi game. It's in the near future where PMCs are a major force in warfare, and they're part of a secretive and highly advanced PMC that has access to top secret power armor (think the Nanosuit from Crysis). They're sent to Africa on a mission to journey into the jungle with a rag-tag band of local mercenaries with outdated 20th century equipment, ostensibly to infiltrate a research facility. I want the mission to be a little suspicious for these guys, and for them to start questioning the lack of information they're given about exactly what they're doing. When they reach the coordinates, they find the facility long since abandoned. It turns out there's something screwy going on back home in London, and the Board prepares to activate their suits' self-destructs to get rid of them....only for the signal to never go through. A Board member has betrayed and assassinated the rest, and offers them employment and the truth if they join him. If they refuse, he can activate their self-destruct and be rid of them. Does this seem like an unfair level of railroading? They never actually get to work for the guy, since poo poo goes south on the way back to London, but I'm concerned about whether putting them under an instakill button gives them too little choice. At the same time, I'm currently at a loss for how to not kill them and encourage them to move the plot forward.
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May 23, 2017 18:12
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Is one of your players literally Ghandi? Because I'm having trouble seeing how "Those fuckers just tried to kill us!" Isn't going to be reason enough for them to want to go back to London. To clarify, leave the board intact and have the defector just interfere with the self destruct and contact the players after going into hiding and offer their help. If the group's response to an attempted assassination is going to be "Live and let live" you might need a different plot entirely. Keeshhound fucked around with this message at 18:24 on May 23, 2017 |
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May 23, 2017 18:20
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Here's kind of a weird DMing question. I'm running Rise of the Runelords for my group, and one of the early areas (the Sandpoint Glassworks) is fairly large but doesn't have much going on on it's main floor, except for one large room. There's not much for the PCs to find or interact with, but the map is still large and detailed. It feels like it would be awkward and a waste of time to have them go from room to room without finding much, but at the same time, it'd be too handwave-y and railroady to just send the players directly to that room and encounter. Am I the only person who finds this an awkward situation, and how would you deal with it in your games?
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May 23, 2017 19:13
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Backup Oboe posted:Here's kind of a weird DMing question. Pushing the players past non-content and into content isn't railroading, it's pacing. I'm not familiar with Rise of the Runelords but is there any value to the empty rooms at all? Are they intended to ramp up tension or set expectations or anything like that? If there's really just nothing to them, and if your players have no particular fascination with exploring places, I'd skip them past.
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May 23, 2017 19:39
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Keeshhound posted:Is one of your players literally Ghandi? Because I'm having trouble seeing how "Those fuckers just tried to kill us!" Isn't going to be reason enough for them to want to go back to London. Not necessarily a "live or let live", but not trusting the guy who saved them and wanting to refuse to join him. They don't actually stay with him for more than a few minutes, but they don't know that when the offer is presented. Here's the full plot I have planned. You might be able to help me figure out a different progression: The players are agents for the Silus Division, a PMC in this near-future setting with top secret power armor technology. They get sent to South Africa (which is in the midst of a civil war) to join a band of mercenaries and travel to a research facility in the Congo jungle. They're not given any more information than that, and I want the PCs to start questioning exactly what they're doing while the people in charge keep insisting that everything is fine, please continue with the mission. What's going on is that a few months ago, the Silus Division discovered that one of their agents was replaced by a clone and the original found murdered. They covered everything up to perform their own investigation without causing a panic, and because the PCs were agents suspected of being clones (either paranoia on the Silus Board's part or actual evidence; it depends on whether I want any PCs revealed to be clones) they were sent on a hasty wild goose chase to an abandoned Silus facility in the Congo. Both the allied mercenaries and the enemy soldiers they encounter on their odyssey were paid off by the Board to keep up pretenses. They're being sent on an intentional suicide mission where they either get killed because they're clones or get killed because the Board is paranoid enough now that they'll get rid of them just to keep them quiet about the fake mission. While their mission is going on, more clone infiltrators get discovered trying to sabotage or assassinate Silus Division operations and the mission control gets more tense as things progress, as they need to pretend that nothing bad is happening to maintain the charade. The Board member who assassinates the rest and saves them is a clone, but he doesn't tell them anything at first instead of basically "Come with me if you want to live" and sends a VTOL to pick them up. By the time they're back in London, the clones have gone feral and turned the Silus Division HQ into the ending of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It's here that the PCs discover the clones and the investigation into it that was going on without their knowledge, through recovering documents and logs scattered around. They find their benefactor dead in the boardroom, with a piece of paper with coordinates on it. The coordinates are the Swiss Alps headquarters of David Five, the first ever rapid-grown human clone. He believes that cloning allows you to create a perfect human, so he killed his creators and stole their technology to try and create an army that can replace humanity with "perfected" clones. He wants the PCs to join him and will kill them otherwise, which sets them up for the "final battle" if they refuse his offer.
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May 23, 2017 19:48
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admanb posted:Pushing the players past non-content and into content isn't railroading, it's pacing. I don't think it does much to do that - it's storerooms, employee bunks, preparation rooms, etc, so I think I'll handwave the additional rooms and draw their attention to the one room where the major encounter for the area takes place. If they want to search through the rest of the building I'll give them the basic information.
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May 23, 2017 20:54
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Backup Oboe posted:I don't think it does much to do that - it's storerooms, employee bunks, preparation rooms, etc, so I think I'll handwave the additional rooms and draw their attention to the one room where the major encounter for the area takes place. If they want to search through the rest of the building I'll give them the basic information. I did poke around the internet for it a bit and it sounds like it's intended to be a recurring location -- with the PCs potentially even buying it as an investment. In that sense it makes sense to map it out, since if you come back to it and it's infested with goblins or under attack by a competing business you would want a consistent place. For this simple scenario, I would do what you're doing.
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May 23, 2017 21:20
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@chitoryu12 I wouldn't stress it. It's a decent hook and how the players take it will probably be more up to how shady you make the defector guy. Had I been the player I'd have taken that bait hook line and sinker. @Backup Oboe I've been dealing with some similar stuff writing an encounter in a manor house. I say gently caress faffing about in empty rooms. Just let them explore some bullshit rooms, condense any interesting details and then hand-wave the rest. Makes for better pacing and saves you half an hour of at-the-table-discussion of whether the ruffled bed linens means an ambush is about to happen.
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May 23, 2017 22:08
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chitoryu12 posted:Not necessarily a "live or let live", but not trusting the guy who saved them and wanting to refuse to join him. They don't actually stay with him for more than a few minutes, but they don't know that when the offer is presented. If they want to go after him as an opponent, let them. They can just ransack his notes or office for the info he was going to give them anyway. If they don't trust him and don't want anything to do with him, you should point them at someone else who has the same info, or possibly point out that raiding guy-who-saved-them is an option.
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May 23, 2017 22:13
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chitoryu12 posted:Not necessarily a "live or let live", but not trusting the guy who saved them and wanting to refuse to join him. They don't actually stay with him for more than a few minutes, but they don't know that when the offer is presented. My approach would still be to just have the benefactor interrupt the detonation, then contact the group, give them the location of the board and ask them to kill the others while he hides. This has a couple of benefits; first it gives the players a target for their anger over the betrayal, which makes them more likely to want to go where you want them to go, and second, it feels more believable than for the defector to call them up and say "hey, I just disarmed the bombs strapped to your asses and killed 12 people, would you like to fly to my place to discuss your future employment?" More generally, any time you have an NPC strong-arm the players, I'm of the opinion that you should give them the opportunity to get their horrible revenge in relatively short order. So if you do have him say "do it or I'll blow you up," then when they get to London he should still be alive, freaking the poo poo out in a panic room somewhere for them to confront after destroying the antenna that relays the destruct code. Another way you could use it would be to have the benefactor be cagey about whether or not he has the killswitch, then have it fall into the hands of your final villain, with ample opportunities for the party to either jailbreak or otherwise circumvent it, so that they get to do a variation of (in HR terms) Adam's "I guess you underestimated me  " to Zhao.
Keeshhound fucked around with this message at 22:48 on May 23, 2017 |
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May 23, 2017 22:21
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Cease to Hope posted:If they want to go after him as an opponent, let them. They can just ransack his notes or office for the info he was going to give them anyway. Well, the guy who saved them is back at HQ anyway (he's a clone of a Silus Board member) so they're going there regardless of whether or not they want to work with him or want to shoot him and take his poo poo. As they arrive, they receive a distress call from him that abruptly cuts off; it's the clones filling the place growing feral and killing him, so the PCs basically go through a quasi-zombie level. I wanted to do it to have a vibe not unlike System Shock, BioShock, etc. where the players have to piece together the events of the past few months through notes, emails, and audio logs (which I recorded beforehand) and realize their part in the bigger game that was being played.
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May 23, 2017 23:05
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chitoryu12 posted:Well, the guy who saved them is back at HQ anyway (he's a clone of a Silus Board member) so they're going there regardless of whether or not they want to work with him or want to shoot him and take his poo poo. As they arrive, they receive a distress call from him that abruptly cuts off; it's the clones filling the place growing feral and killing him, so the PCs basically go through a quasi-zombie level. In that case, you're overplanning. All you need to do is get the players inside the HQ. Have the detonation fail, and a VTOL arrive on site. The pilot of the VTOL informs them that he works for "a friend" who wants to meet them in London at a neutral location. If they agree, then when they get there, they get the call and things proceed as planned. If they refuse, then they trudge back through the jungle, get ambushed and discover that the board knows they survived and is sending assassins after them, and they need to go back to London and raid the HQ, either to destroy the records of who they are so they can disappear, or to kill the board. Either way, when they enter the HQ, things go back to the original plan.
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May 23, 2017 23:21
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chitoryu12 posted:I wanted to do it to have a vibe not unlike System Shock, BioShock, etc. where the players have to piece together the events of the past few months through notes, emails, and audio logs (which I recorded beforehand) and realize their part in the bigger game that was being played. hate to break it to you but this only works like .001% of the time. the kind of player that will keep track of those notes, emails and details only shows up once in a while. It still can work, if your players are all in on the concept from the start, but it'll need some help positioning the fluff so the players care. If you do try to leave a trail of information bread crumbs, link them to NPCs that the players REALLY care about. It's the younger sibling, whose indoctrination is wearing thin who is leaking stuff to the PCs, or the old Lieutenant of your muscle, and old Lt, while he liked the paychecks from this steady government gig, has quickly begun to realize he's guarding a factory for soylent green. Make the stakes real high, and link the players to your breadcrumbs, otherwise they will murder their way through your clues, or ignore them entirely.
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May 23, 2017 23:23
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TheTofuShop posted:hate to break it to you but this only works like .001% of the time. the kind of player that will keep track of those notes, emails and details only shows up once in a while. Yeah, I'd let subtle stuff come out in play and/or be player directed, otherwise it's potentially a lot of wasted effort that may constrain you when you should be open to emergent coolness. And yes to the below about simplifying - have NPC goals and have them move as directly as possible to achieve them.
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May 24, 2017 00:56
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Backup Oboe posted:Here's kind of a weird DMing question. This should be how the majority of buildings and locations work, really, in roleplaying and real life. Think of how you'd run it if there wasn't even that one encounter. How would you play it if it was a peaceful location? Are there any NPCs to chat to? What would you do if you were giving a real-life tour of the place (to a group of really headstrong guests)? The players arrive at this factory or whatever, give them an impression from the outside, and ask what they do. Give a little more information than they ask for ("this room is an office, like most of the others in this wing") , to emphasize that the place is easily accessible. Try not to go strictly room by room, and certainly don't describe rooms as being "X by Y feet with exits north and west" and stuff like that.
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May 24, 2017 12:23
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For some reason my players really rebel against it when I try to sort of usher them past areas where there's nothing interesting. I think a few of them have this idea where things have to be realistic, meaning (in their minds) that it's unsatisfying to just skate past the boring parts for the sake of pacing, and they really want to search every single drawer on this abandoned office building floor one by one. Although I did make a pretty fun "magic" item for one of those players. Fucker kept asking if everything was magic. Like, anything wearable or wieldable, "Is it magic? Does it have anything special?" Everything. So eventually I had him find a braided leather bracelet (because I wanted his character to look like a frat boy jackass wearing it) that had the following special ability: "Skepticism: This bracelet is so thoroughly not magical that it makes you passively scrutinize everything wearable you see. You won't be fooled again. The GM will always tell you if clothes, armor, weapons, or jewelry are magical, and if the GM doesn't tell you, then it isn't. Period." I was a least a little proud of that one.
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May 24, 2017 18:01
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Old school dungeon design says that more rooms should be empty than occupied, and accordingly their random dungeon generation methods also produce similar results. It's supposed to be more organic and less "dense", but it does take some getting used to if you think every room must have something to interact with in it.
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May 24, 2017 18:08
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gradenko_2000 posted:Old school dungeon design says that more rooms should be empty than occupied, and accordingly their random dungeon generation methods also produce similar results. I use those rooms to leave hints as to what can be encountered in other rooms, like appropriate trash for intelligent enemies or gnawed on carcasses with distinct tooth marks for monsters, something to roll knowledge-style checks on. Makes the place feel more lived in.
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May 24, 2017 18:32
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I skate past the parts with nothing in them 95% of the time because I assume my players can visualize what the empty/unwritten parts look like on their own. You're traveling through a forest, you know what trees look like. Maybe there's a deer just off the path, maybe there isn't. The deer isn't magical, so who cares? Look, there's a patch of mushrooms of unusual size & color. I mention that because there's something to roll knowledge: nature about and depending on how well you roll it's either a delicious almost-meal or deadly poison or just drugs. lol I lied it's always drugs
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May 24, 2017 18:48
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I used to have lots of empty rooms and hallways in my interiors, but over time I realized that even though these types of things are realistic, they don't really add anything to the game. In a video game or film you can use them to ratchet up the tension but it's very hard to get the same effect in a tabletop RPG because it can be impossible to communicate to the players that, seriously, there's nothing essential in this room at all!!
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May 24, 2017 19:29
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Polo-Rican posted:In a video game or film you can use them to ratchet up the tension but it's very hard to get the same effect in a tabletop RPG because it can be impossible to communicate to the players that, seriously, there's nothing essential in this room at all!! What are you saying? That's EXACTLY how you ratchet up the tension. "John, what's your spot hidden?" "15" *rolls dice behind screen* "You don't see anything suspicious"
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May 24, 2017 20:49
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Keeshhound posted:What are you saying? That's EXACTLY how you ratchet up the tension. Every time I do that to my players they spend an incredible amount of time scouring everything and it is never not funny
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May 24, 2017 21:15
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I tried to mess with my players once by rolling secret Perception checks for them when they were looking around the lobby. The people who failed didn't notice anything unusual, the ones who succeeded noticed a man in black standing in the corner looking at them, and the one who had a critical success saw him follow a party member who had previously been poisoned to lure him into a vulnerable area. The one who got a critical failure saw an innocent man looking like he was drawing a gun, and I was hoping it would cause something to happen. Unfortunately his response to someone seemingly drawing a gun was "wait and see" and he didn't take any action, which would have inevitably gotten him shot in the face if it were an actual threat.
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May 24, 2017 21:26
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Harrow posted:For some reason my players really rebel against it when I try to sort of usher them past areas where there's nothing interesting. I think a few of them have this idea where things have to be realistic, meaning (in their minds) that it's unsatisfying to just skate past the boring parts for the sake of pacing, and they really want to search every single drawer on this abandoned office building floor one by one. This is clever, I like it.
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May 24, 2017 21:30
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After a lot of trial and error my method for secret Perception checks has become: take party's passive perception scores (which you calculate, if the system doesn't provide for it); take target DC, subtract 10, use the result as a modifier to roll once against passive perception; compare and proceed accordingly. None of the usual "well Jim rolled a 1 but the DM had him roll so there has to be something".
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May 24, 2017 23:39
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Harrow posted:For some reason my players really rebel against it when I try to sort of usher them past areas where there's nothing interesting. I think a few of them have this idea where things have to be realistic, meaning (in their minds) that it's unsatisfying to just skate past the boring parts for the sake of pacing, and they really want to search every single drawer on this abandoned office building floor one by one. A member of my old group would always be incredibly thorough in empty rooms, even if I tried to, without directly saying it, heavily imply there wasn't much important. He'd also have a tendency to completely ignore the things that I'd actually emphasize as well. One of the other players in that previous group would always make the same joke after every combat encounter: "I equip the ring." He'd do it for every game, so when I had a chance to run a D&D 5E game, he made the joke again after the very first encounter, so I said, "sure. The ring is made of two thin copper bands that have been intertwined. It fits perfectly on your finger as though it was made for you. It also feels faintly warm to the touch." It wasn't anything special, distinctly non-magical, but I figured it sounded like something you'd find on the trinket table in the equipment chapter and just threw it in there to gently caress with him.
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May 26, 2017 00:05
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Backup Oboe posted:A member of my old group would always be incredibly thorough in empty rooms, even if I tried to, without directly saying it, heavily imply there wasn't much important. He'd also have a tendency to completely ignore the things that I'd actually emphasize as well. Obviously the details the DM tells you about are too EASY.
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May 26, 2017 01:32
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