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There were also teeth as magic items, a vestige that had teeth all over its uh skin and taking on that vestige had teeth grow out of your scalp. Been awhile since I read the monster section but I am going to assume it had some connection to that being that would become a vestige.
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Jun 22, 2017 03:03
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This is why you need to be using a grid. The game is designed around it and breaks down hard when you leave everything to whatever collective idea of positioning you think you have. There are many instances where Fireball obviously can or can't be cast without hitting a friendly target if you can count out the blast radius on a grid. Tracking placement for sneak attack is effortless as well, since you can literally just see if you have an ally next to a target. Whenever I run combat off-the-grid, I very heavily bias towards the players when it comes to movement or lining things up for spells. Unless I had previously described the fight as happening in a tight space or the fighter as having been surrounded, then yes, there's a perfect spot to drop that fireball to just narrowly miss the fighter while hitting their foe. Yes, there's a space you can slip through to get to your target. Yes, that guy is close enough to the fighter to be distracted. This speeds things up (which is why I would be running off the grid to begin with) and cuts out a lot of "DM may I" bullshit. Plus, grids let you have cool terrain features everywhere, which is always great.
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Jun 22, 2017 03:04
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Verisimilidude posted:So let's say I wanted to run Baldur's Gate in 5e. Is Murder in Baldur's Gate close to that story, or is there something better I can use? Have a bunch of friends who have never experienced BG on PC and they're new to D&D, so I'm looking at modules to run for them. * Murder in Baldur's Gate takes place after Baldur's Gate the PC game, and the first thing that happens is that the guy you played in the game is the victim of the titular murder. If you want to run BG in 5e, crib off the events of the PC game itself (esp. if they've never played it) and do that. * The Starter Set is good. Nehru the Damaja posted:Maybe in the wrong place given this fact but I dislike dungeon crawls. I don't get the appeal. Exploring and fighting are great but I tend to favor doing that in locations that make sense like a castle or following a path in the woods. I think the problem with dungeon crawls is that the old-school ones can be very "single monster in a cabinet"-type dealies, which can get rote really quickly. They also tend to have a lot of empty rooms, which can also throw some people off. They also tend to have square rooms, which are completely uninteresting. Personally, I love doing dungeon crawls, but you have to throw modern design sensibilities: multiple enemies per encounter with multiple roles (at the minimum, a melee/ranged duo) dynamic movement across the dungeon so you're not just doing room-by-room clears tactical terrain including hazards and chokepoints Antiquated Pants posted:What do you guys think about perfect spell placement? I've looked around online for some guidance and people have a lot of suggestions for making it possible. If you use a grid, it should be a conscious choice for the caster to place their Fireball in a way that hits you. If they keep doing it, give them poo poo for it. There can be situations where because of the terrain (can't shoot Fireball into a square that doesn't exist) or the monster placement, the Fireball can't be placed "perfectly", but that should be a natural consequence of the terrain or the monster placement. You shouldn't need to implement a separate rule that causes you to be unable to place a Fireball perfectly if the grid already suggests you should be able to. Antiquated Pants posted:Second thing, what about sneak attack? Does everyone treat it like pack tactics and he gets it no matter what if someone else is nearby, or if the enemy is totally focused on the rogue does that prevent sneak attack even if an ally is nearby? In previous editions, you'd get Sneak Attack if you were flanking the enemy. Because 5e purports to be grid-less, they can't claim that anymore, so yes, the idea is that the Rogue gets Sneak Attack whenever an ally of theirs is also adjacent to the target they're attacking. It's supposed to be really easy to activate because it's what the Rogue needs to "catch-up" to other classes with multiple attacks.
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Jun 22, 2017 03:16
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gradenko_2000 posted:Personally, I love doing dungeon crawls, but you have to throw modern design sensibilities: Curious what you mean by the second one -- the dynamic movement.
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Jun 22, 2017 03:21
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Nehru the Damaja posted:Curious what you mean by the second one -- the dynamic movement. I mean the monsters aren't just going to wait for you to get to them (unless there's a specific reason they would). If you're raiding an Orc Fortress, all the orcs in it aren't going to be inert as you move from one room to another - if you make a lot of noise, you're going to draw attention to yourself. Basically, dungeon crawls should be treated more like Payday.
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Jun 22, 2017 03:26
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D&D and heists go really really well together, at least conceptually. A dungeon crawl is basically a robbery except with orcs instead of the public and cops, and you can go to sleep in the middle of it
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Jun 22, 2017 03:32
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I feel like the prevailing oldschool dungeon design concept is something like Doom .wads where there doesn't have to be any concept of what an area is or what function it serves and while that works great in Doom, it feels super tedious to me in D&D. I don't know what the general feeling of it is but I know one of my DMs absolutely loves that poo poo and it kind of torpedoes my enthusiasm. Maybe I should try to put together an episodic campaign for some group themed around heists and other similar "jobs." I had a one-shot intro for a custom setting in the works where the players would break into a massive civic archive of records and kind of pull a Fight Club erasing a shitload of debts. Might mesh well.
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Jun 22, 2017 03:45
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I'm currently playing in a campaign that is a 5E conversion of a Pathfinder adventure path. The DM has decided to use an unrelated dungeon crawl module (adapted from 3.5 or something) as an "interlude" of sorts, I suppose, and I can't wait for this drat thing to be over already and get the actual adventure back on track. There was, for instance, a giant chessboard room in which almost every square either was a trap or spawned a monster. Because you couldn't manoeuvre worth a drat inside the room and because the monsters it spawned were fairly deadly, the only realistic recourse was to have one PC act as a tank (it turned out that a monster would only attack the character that caused it to be summoned) and hope they didn't fold while everyone else took potshots at the monster from a distance. Rinse and repeat three or four times as we made our way across the room.  There also was a hallway into whose walls were bored several interconnecting tunnels about two feet in diameter, just big enough for a Spectator to fit into. Its MO was to emerge from a tunnel, use a couple of its gently caress-you eye rays, and then disappear into a different hole. I may be especially salty as my monk spent virtually the entire fight confused and actually dropped one of her fellow PCs to zero hit points because of it, but it was a pretty dull encounter all the same as the Spectator's tactics meant you pretty much had to ready an attack (preferably ranged because you couldn't count on its coming into melee range) and hope for the best. At least towards the end of it the DM seemed to realise this wasn't much fun and had the critter stay out in the open to get slaughtered. #NotAllDungeonCrawls, I guess, but screw that poo poo all the same.
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Jun 22, 2017 03:48
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Had an idea that I thought of years ago for 4e and just fleshed out. Tell me how bad it is: Warpstone Chunk - Wonderous Item A small piece of hard and glowing green rock, easily chewed up. When eaten, restores one 1st Level spell slot. Make a DC 10 Con save; failing deals you 10 damage that can't be reduced in any way. For every chunk after the first, increase the DC by one and damage by 5. After four chunks, any further uses automatically fail this save while the damage continues to increase by 5. You may also eat multiple chunks in one go; eating two at once restores a 2nd level slot, three a 3rd level and so on. The same damage and DC increase from multiple uses a day applies; make one check at the highest difficulty. Taking a long rest resets your DC and damage from Warpstone Chunks. Designed to give you some power back at potentially a decent cost. Restoring a 5th level slot deals 30 damage that you can't mitigate at all. Not sure on the numbers.
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Jun 22, 2017 04:32
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The other thing that I'll say about dungeon crawls is that you have to keep the rewards flowing. The basic conceit of it, and why the gameplay is still appealing after 40-some years, is "kill them and take their stuff". Unless the group is interested in playing through Tomb of Horrors for the nostalgia value, you go into a dungeon to get loot, and so loot must be had. Kill a bunch of kobolds, they drop some coins and a potion. Kill a larger group, and you get a weapon and more coins from a chest they were guarding. Kill the Mother of All Kobolds at the very end of the dungeon, and you get a huge pay-off. You could even use a model similar to Diablo 3's Greater Rifts, where all the loot is backloaded to the very end, but in this case you have to make it clear that a hoard awaits, and how close the players are to getting there. Some of the earliest D&D supplements were just d100 tables of monsters and d100 tables of treasures, and you'd roll a d20 to check if the room contains treasure, or monsters, or both, and that would be enough, because getting richer and getting better taps into some very basic, but very appealing impulses. You don't have to be too clever by half about your room traps and accouterments, you just have to keep giving the players more stuff whenever they succeed. Admiral Joeslop posted:Warpstone Chunk - Wonderous Item I'd remove the Con save altogether and just make it a straight trade-off for HP versus a spell slot. That's probably already overcosted even without the chance of not taking damage at all.
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Jun 22, 2017 05:45
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Razorwired posted:Imo Sneak Attack is always on from a gameplay perspective because 5e isn't tight enough to tie a whole core class feature to positioning. If you're a verisimilitude guy it's theoretically because if someone is threatened on two fronts the Rogue can pick moments when the target has its guard interrupted. Like if the Fighter slams a warhammer into an Ogre's back the Rogue gets a dirty shot in when said Ogre flinches. Yeah, it makes sense. I'm not super into verisimilitude, I was thinking more from a gaming perspective. I only questioned the sneak attack because pack tactics already exists for creatures that are emboldened by allies rather than whether an enemy is distracted. Also the fact that the rogue has disengage and dodge as bonus actions for a class special. The rogue has literally never used them so it seems like not very rogueish behavior. But that's probably just also be the failing of the DM (sometimes also me) not creating situations that require it more. We're all still noobs even though it feels like we've been playing forever. The gaps are just long enough for us to really forget everything and pretend like we know what we're doing! e: So I'm not even looking to house-rule things or change it up, just really find a solid baseline to work from a balance point of view really.
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Jun 22, 2017 06:38
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I'd be a lot more concerned about the fact that your mage has a staff of fireballs, balance-wise. But that might be my old-school sensibilities.
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Jun 22, 2017 07:28
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Nehru the Damaja posted:Maybe I should try to put together an episodic campaign for some group themed around heists and other similar "jobs." I had a one-shot intro for a custom setting in the works where the players would break into a massive civic archive of records and kind of pull a Fight Club erasing a shitload of debts. Might mesh well. You should run a series of elaborate heist scenarios (including, of course, totally rad environmental combat options for if everything goes south, John Woo-style) that culminate in the PCs robbing ever-increasingly important marks with the final heist being a bank vault of magical items, etc, etc... only for their patron and long-term employer to stab them in the back, leave them for dead in the gutter, and then orchestrate a wicked sick revenge plot against the boss' highly fortified mansion/fortress/lair that the PCs know like the back of their hands from using it as a safehouse between jobs.
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Jun 22, 2017 10:53
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Harvey Mantaco posted:One of my players has a really long running character whose been secretly collecting and meticulously tracking the teeth of the things she's killed. She has a lot. She told me she wants to do something cool with them, like a tooth golem. Any ideas on a cool way this should be orchestrated in game, and mechanically how to use it? Are there any good 1st/3rd party even monsters to base this off of? The teeth could be used to line an obsidian sword:  One tooth from each creature she's killed is used, and one a day she can get some minor bonus based of the racial ability of each tooth's original owner. Once it's used, that particular tooth dims/rots/falls out and can't be used again. You did say they kept meticulous care, right? Like she knows how many of each creature? This is away to make every single tooth matter.
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Jun 22, 2017 13:29
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Jack B Nimble posted:The teeth could be used to line an obsidian sword: A teeth macahuilt, or macateethl, is a baller idea.
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Jun 22, 2017 14:19
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Verisimilidude posted:So let's say I wanted to run Baldur's Gate in 5e. Is Murder in Baldur's Gate close to that story, or is there something better I can use? Have a bunch of friends who have never experienced BG on PC and they're new to D&D, so I'm looking at modules to run for them. The player party is a band of mercenaries relaxing in Beregost when CHARNAME instigates a barfight and gets killed. Now it's up to them to follow the main questline.
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Jun 22, 2017 14:25
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How the heck does the PC from bg1/2 even get killed, a ton of mages teleporting in and using 8th level spells?
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Jun 22, 2017 14:28
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In chapter 1? A couple of bandits or wolves would do it.
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Jun 22, 2017 14:33
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BG1 was like 1000 Ways to Die. Kobolds with flaming arrows, ogre smashed, hallway of lightning bolt trap, etc etc. The most common? That first loving wizard you run into with magic missile.
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Jun 22, 2017 14:38
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The game assumes that the BG protagonist is "Abdel Adrian", and:quote:Adrian and his assailant are almost perfectly matched in skill, but Viekang’s weapon gives him the advantage. To resolve matters quickly, roll a d6 for Adrian and a d10 for Viekang each round. When one of them rolls 2 or more higher than his opponent, the winner has struck a killing blow. If the characters intervene, assume Viekang and Abdel Adrian have half their hit points remaining. His D&D 3.5 Statblock quote:Abdel Adrian CR 4 His D&D 4e statbock: quote:Abdel Adrian Level 3 Soldier And his D&D Next statblock: quote:Abdel Adrian Mind you, this is supposed to be the guy that ended the PC game as an AD&D level 20+ character.
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Jun 22, 2017 14:42
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gradenko_2000 posted:The game assumes that the BG protagonist is "Abdel Adrian", and: that's idiotic
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Jun 22, 2017 14:48
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Round 1: Viekang shits himself in terror and teleports to another continent.
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Jun 22, 2017 14:54
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Skellybones posted:In chapter 1? A couple of bandits or wolves would do it. The most frustrating thing as a kid was going to that inn the game says to go to and get killed by the assassin waiting for you there.
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Jun 22, 2017 15:36
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Skellybones posted:In chapter 1? A couple of bandits or wolves would do it. It sounds like they're pretty much ignoring BG2 entirely and assuming that after BG1 you pretty much just retire to the city. And then lose 3-4 levels. To age, I guess?
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Jun 22, 2017 17:31
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So I decided I'm gonna run the 5e intro adventure, but these aren't complete beginners so I want to throw in some more character-driven stuff to make it a bit more interesting. Any suggestions for changes that can be made? I'm gonna add a hermit tinkerer who lives nearby the town and makes quirky/useless magical trinkets, gonna give the dragon a bit of personality, but I'm not sure what else to do.
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Jun 22, 2017 17:31
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It seems like there's a lot of people starting games with newish people so let me give a shout out to the first chapter of Hoard of the Dragon Queen as a really great sandboxy adventure. The party is coming up on a small city, and as they approach at dusk they see that it's on fire. They get closer and realize that it's under siege by cultists and mercenaries, and there's a bunch of little encounters that the characters can do to help the town built around a couple of really cool setpieces. The entire other 1.85 books of the Tyranny of Dragons adventure path are complete garbage (with a few cool setpieces), but Greenest in Flames is cool and memorable and has a ton of opportunities for the players to shine, with easy and obvious points to throw in your own improv encounters or whatever. On grids vs. ~~theater of the miiiind~~ it really depends - if we're playing something where a room is really well-defined with lots of features, or a ton of enemies, we'll use a grid, but if it's just random encounters during overland travel or assassins attacking in a tiny inn or whatever I let us TotM it and let the players define where things are through their narration. You want to climb a tree and store an action to jump down on someone who hasn't seen you yet? Cool plan, go for it. As far as dungeons go, a lot of published ones are just trash. I always feel that there needs to be a level of cohesion in a dungeon - not perfect verisimilitude or anything, but you should be able to point to any given area and be able to answer "why is this here". Plus, square featureless rooms are boring as hell - the last dungeon my players went through was a mine, powered and lit by tubes of flowing lava encased in transparent crystal. Players could smack enemies into them for extra fire damage, but ran the risk of cracking 'em and causing a leak of lava. A lot of rooms had mechanical elevators meant to move ore around the mine, but the players could use tactically or for shortcuts. The other thing that you can do is add more motivations for people to be there - in the mine, the overall goal was to clear out a lizardfolk infestation, but one player was secretly being paid to sabotage the mine, another was looking for evidence for a murder, etc. They just broke out of a huge prison where the overall goal was to break a party member out, but that party member was in there in the first place because they have a pissed-off minor god hurling lightning at them every time they go outside, unbeknownst to the rest of the party, and now they're planning to go back in there to try to stop some kind of seeping, reality-warping evil that they detected from the depths (that one player is convinced is his warlock's patron god). I mean, of course "you walk into a room and the four gnolls there bare their teeth and jump at you, roll initiative" is gonna fall kind of flat, and that's what a lot of published crawls boil down to. Fun question - what is, in everyone's opinion, the worst official module of D&D throughout history? This is way more subjective than even edition-warring so please don't turn it into a slapfight defending your favorite adventure or whatever, some groups and players like different types of games. I have a ton of stuff from 4th and 5th and some scattered AD&D stuff but I don't run published adventures nearly often enough to have an educated opinion here.
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Jun 22, 2017 18:09
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Define worst, because depending on the lens you're looking through Tomb of Horrors could be the best or the worst.
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Jun 22, 2017 18:35
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Reene posted:Define worst, because depending on the lens you're looking through Tomb of Horrors could be the best or the worst. I would bet there's an even more incoherent, plot-hole ridden, railroading garbage module that ALSO has dumb insta-kill traps and terrible encounters on top of that. Tomb of Horrors is at least honest about the kind of bad it is.
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Jun 22, 2017 18:44
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Reene posted:Define worst, because depending on the lens you're looking through Tomb of Horrors could be the best or the worst. It's all going to be subjective anyway - I'd say something that you've preferably actually played through and had a bad experience with, but actually reading through it FATAL and friends style will do in a pinch. I agree with admanb though - Tomb of Horrors is pretty decent at what it tries to do, which is be a meatgrinder for convention-style tournament games. If you've had a lovely DM force you through it though, please tell us the story.  Bad DM stories are fantastic.
Rockman Reserve fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Jun 22, 2017 |
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Jun 22, 2017 18:55
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Been playing with a cleric for a little while now and I just hit level 3 and I'm not really feeling it. How are the sorcerer or warlock? I'm hoping to play a caster that can do more then a couple things per day. Is there a martial class that compares to the caster classes?
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Jun 22, 2017 20:37
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Low level characters of most classes are like unmolded clay, you're barely even a Cleric yet. What are you not liking? Nobody gets to do more than a couple things per day at low level.
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Jun 22, 2017 20:45
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mango sentinel posted:Low level characters of most classes are like unmolded clay, you're barely even a Cleric yet. What are you not liking? That I get to do 3 things a day, and after that its ineffectively hit things with my mace or crossbow.
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Jun 22, 2017 20:52
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That sounds like every level 3.
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Jun 22, 2017 20:58
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Demon_Corsair posted:That I get to do 3 things a day, and after that its ineffectively hit things with my mace or crossbow. What cantrips did you take? You can do those as many times as you want Also if you hit third level you can now do six cool things a day, seven if you include channel divinity
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Jun 22, 2017 21:00
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I think your casting stat might be a little low. I think you should have like 5 or 6 spell slots by next level, though like half of those are going to be heals so there is that. Clerics are one of the better spellcasters though. I think if you find a flavor you like then it can be very fun. Two sweet clerics I've had were this effete evangelist of Sune, goddess of beauty, who went around avoiding the dirty parts of dungeon and giving everyone fashion tips, and a tempest cleric who was a conman rainmaker vagabond until he actually caught the attention of the gods. Stuff like that makes being a cleric more interesting than the pious priest-warrior archetype, which you can really leave to paladins.
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Jun 22, 2017 21:02
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Demon_Corsair posted:That I get to do 3 things a day, and after that its ineffectively hit things with my mace or crossbow. This is every level 3 character. Your character is more than your spells per day. Clerics have some incredibly useful cantrips and main stat Wisdom has some powerful Skills. If you're bored because you're blowing all your spells in the first combat then feeling ineffective, that's every level 3 character save maybe Rogues. You're chafing at being a low level D&D character, not at being a Cleric.
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Jun 22, 2017 21:07
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Though if your DM is generous with the short rests a Warlock will be able to cast more in comparison to other classes of the same level.
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Jun 22, 2017 21:09
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food court bailiff posted:
Oh man there are some stinkers. personally I really hate White Plume Mountain - it's just a bunch of nonsensical linear set pieces, no idea why it gets such nostalgia. Castle Caldwell gets a few points for being a set of related subadvenrures and then loses them all again and more for them being super dumb adventures - the highlight is forcing a player to recite magic words that sound like 'oh what a goose I am', ha ha ha ha uh. Asticlian Gambit for Dark Sun was pure railroad nonsense - you get mind controlled by a dragon king to do stuff, then the climax is watching a fight between nPCs and getting teleported out. Then you have Blakc Flames, also for dark sun, where you get threatened into doing what a dragon king wants or just killed immediately, and then get to watch NPCs fight. Needle had an enormous maze filled with invisible disintegration fields that you were supposed to map with sticks in front of you, but then added teleporters to it. Went downhill from there with space spiders with a catchphrase of 'gee whiz'. Best of Intentions (IM3) was super dumb and unplayable - it was trying to make Immortal- level play wacky, and managed to be insultingly stupid. A shame since IM2 really nailed writing a module for Immortal PCs.
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Jun 22, 2017 21:10
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SettingSun posted:Though if your DM is generous with the short rests a Warlock will be able to cast more in comparison to other classes of the same level.
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Jun 22, 2017 21:15
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mango sentinel posted:You'd need 4 short rests for a level 3 warlock to be getting more casts than a 3 Cleric.
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Jun 22, 2017 21:19
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