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CubeTheory posted:Anyone have any good ideas for a beast in the cr 9-12 range being hunted by a caveman-esque npc in the Shadowfell? Can you bash together some sort of legendary critter? An ancient sabertooth tiger that's been so stepped in the strange magics of the shadowfell that it is able to harness the power of the land itself. Make it a spellcaster that can cast out of either the druid or sorcerer spell list on top of being a nasty big cat.
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May 1, 2018 18:08
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Yeah and look how well they're doing 
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May 1, 2018 18:13
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DeathSandwich posted:Can you bash together some sort of legendary critter? An ancient sabertooth tiger that's been so stepped in the strange magics of the shadowfell that it is able to harness the power of the land itself. Make it a spellcaster that can cast out of either the druid or sorcerer spell list on top of being a nasty big cat. gently caress yeah legendary displacer beast
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May 1, 2018 18:16
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Novum posted:gently caress yeah legendary displacer beast There you go. I was going for more of a "Something caveman flavored" flair, but with the Shadowfell involved, a legendary displacer beast would fit the bill just as well. Legendary displacer beast sorcerer that is constantly teleporting around and harassing the players with negative energy spells and counterspelling your own casters would be a fun challenge.
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May 1, 2018 18:29
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duh, the displacer beast has saber teeth
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May 1, 2018 18:39
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Splicer posted:Spell sniper + Booming Blade + a whip is hilarious what does this do? just let you use booming blade as a magic PAM + sentinel? e: no you'd need war caster and other stuff for that. so you just let someone close, step back (provoking an AoO), then tag them with booming blade?
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May 1, 2018 18:53
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kidkissinger posted:There are tribal cannibals I believe. To be exact they are cultists of the Night Serpent who are working with the Yuan Ti to be elevated into being Snake People. mango sentinel posted:A click language being in the book isn't inherently problematic, it's that lots of players attempting accents with it will have been conditioned by generations of people mocking the languages it's based on. Something the book should address. There are the Moldfolk aka vegepygmies. They are humanoids created when an alien fungus consumes a corpse. Originating from the old classic expedition to the barrier peaks. (Were the characters explore an alien spaceship.) 
MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 19:08 on May 1, 2018 |
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May 1, 2018 19:05
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CubeTheory posted:Anyone have any good ideas for a beast in the cr 9-12 range being hunted by a caveman-esque npc in the Shadowfell? One of the main reasons I am exicted for M's Tome of Foes is that over half of the monsters are supposed to be CR 10 or higher. (Monsters in the Shadowfell are also supposed to be expanded in it.)
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May 1, 2018 19:13
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Valentin posted:what does this do? just let you use booming blade as a magic PAM + sentinel? Pretty sure it does nothing? I mean Spellsniper increases the range of a ranged attack cantrip, not a cantrip that has no attack roll but forces you to make a melee weapon attack as part of casting it.
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May 1, 2018 19:24
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I am super excited for my session tonight. Towards the beginning of the campaign, my players had a long series of encounters with an aboleth that ultimately ended with the aboleth and a wizard friend being stuck in a timeless extra-dimensional space right before the wizard was slain. The wizard was extremely powerful, something they didn't realize until the battle with the aboleth began. They've been living in the wizard's house for several months and just recently the wizards estranged son, a paladin of Bahamut, returned to find these strangers in their father's house. They decided to try and reopen the space and destroy the aboleth as they are many levels higher now, and in doing so recovered the unconscious body of the wizard friend. They were unable to wake him with wizard magic and discovered that the wizard was drawing on his own soul to fuel his spells in the battle with the aboleth, and has severely damaged it. Their last session ended with them staying in an old abandoned house outside the mountain under which they fought the aboleth. Tonight when the session begins they will be awoken in the middle of night by a knock at the door and be met by a mob boss from the town they stay in that has been tracking them for some time. The players have known he has been tracking them. The mob boss will be accompanied by his very powerful Eladrin wizard that is always with him and he will talk to them a little about their unconscious wizard friend, revealing that he is a legendary wizard from the magic school of Elmhome, known as the Slipstream Sorcerer, a master of time and space magic. His unconscious state has provided an excellent opportunity to probe his mind and learn all of his secrets while he can't defend himself. At this point initiative starts and the Eladrin wizard will be teleporting around the room, grabbing people, flickering into the Shadowfell, and then returning without whomever he grabbed, abandoning the party in the Shadowfell one by one as the battle goes on. The mob boss is going to watch all this and probably hum "Girl from Ipanema" or something as he is being projected there and is just an illusion. I'm excited as this begins the segment of my campaign that takes place in the Shadowfell and several storylines intersect here that have been hinted at and I've got no one to talk to about this as all my friends are in the game so you all get to read me rant about it.
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May 1, 2018 19:47
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That sounds like an unwinnable encounter. How are you going to ensure that your players don't get sneaky on you, run away, scatter, or straight up murder the Wizard? Maybe you just cutscene the whole thing, but it sounds like you want to do a round by round play of him grabbing people and disappearing. That still means they're going to open up on that wizard, then as soon as one of them gets zapped to the shadow realm, they're going to play defensively.
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May 1, 2018 20:30
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gradenko_2000 posted:I stand corrected Huh. I might be slightly wrong, because the RC doesn't have a declare before initiative. Maybe an earlier version does? The intention based on the snippet above seems to be that damage equals no casting, so I'd probably say that if you took damage in the round you don't get to cast (in 3+ make a concentration check as if maintaining a spell)
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May 1, 2018 20:32
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DeathSandwich posted:If you don't like the dungeon as written, change it. Make it a Resident Evil style Spencer Mansion where you've got to collect some archaic puzzle pieces to make progress while being harried by a constant trickle of lovely zombies and skeletons. Add a couple of minor villains like a death pact warlock or something as your Albert Wesker analogue that keeps defying death somehow. I'm not saying I don't like it, I just wasn't sure if I'm interpreting it correctly. The adventure doesn't really tell you whether you should encourage your players to explore the house in a particular manner or how to encourage them and I wanted to see what other people had done. I'm pretty sure there's at least one or two people in this thread who have done Strahd before.
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May 1, 2018 20:34
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User0015 posted:That sounds like an unwinnable encounter. How are you going to ensure that your players don't get sneaky on you, run away, scatter, or straight up murder the Wizard? I know my players characters better than they do and I've played it out in my head a million ways. There are only four of them and I had one of my players agree to preroll a save from dominate person so I already know he's failing it. There is only one other prominent spellcaster and he doesn't have the tools to stop it. They can try to escape but this guy is hasted by a magic item and can misty step many, many times, and they're in the middle of nowhere. It's basically unwinnable but they've known this guy has been watching them, they've known the strength of the wizard, and they've had lots of time and opportunity to do something about it. Planning was their chance to win the encounter and they didn't do that so they have essentially already lost. Also, I'm not killing any of them or anything.
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May 1, 2018 20:43
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Also WoTC just announced a Stream that would bring in the next storyline. From the title (Stream of Many Eyes.) art and other things, it's looking like it's going to be Undermountain. (Which is FR's Megadungeon.)
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May 1, 2018 21:04
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CubeTheory posted:I know my players characters better than they do and I've played it out in my head a million ways. There are only four of them and I had one of my players agree to preroll a save from dominate person so I already know he's failing it. There is only one other prominent spellcaster and he doesn't have the tools to stop it. They can try to escape but this guy is hasted by a magic item and can misty step many, many times, and they're in the middle of nowhere. It's basically unwinnable but they've known this guy has been watching them, they've known the strength of the wizard, and they've had lots of time and opportunity to do something about it. Planning was their chance to win the encounter and they didn't do that so they have essentially already lost. Also, I'm not killing any of them or anything. Even if you're not killing them, it sounds railroady and DMPC-y as gently caress. You're already determined to strand them in the Shadowfell, Why not just have the players wake up there, tangled up in a obscure ritual of the above wizard rather than having him show up and jazzhand everyone away one by one because he's specifically kitted to gently caress over your PCs? Think about why your mob boss would want the PCs whisked away to the shadowfell rather than just killing them outright because if your magical DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 21:13 on May 1, 2018 |
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May 1, 2018 21:08
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I would have him just open a portal and drop them in.
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May 1, 2018 21:10
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Is it cool to ask for advice? I just started running a game for my friends. I had them start at level 4 because a) I wanted to skip levels 1 and 2 because you don't really get your cool poo poo until 3 and b) I found a fun looking adventure on the DMs Guild that was for a group of level 4-5 PCs. But I feel like I screwed them out of a bunch of loot. How much money and magic items should they have at level 4?
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May 1, 2018 21:10
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MonsterEnvy posted:Also WoTC just announced a Stream that would bring in the next storyline. From the title (Stream of Many Eyes.) art and other things, it's looking like it's going to be Undermountain. (Which is FR's Megadungeon.) isn't that the place with the portal to the far realms in it?
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May 1, 2018 21:12
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lowercase16 posted:Is it cool to ask for advice? Page 135 in Xanathar's gives a guideline for magic items a group should expect to have at different tiers. It's certainly not a hard rule but it's a decent baseline suggestion. Alter it as you see fit.
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May 1, 2018 21:18
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DeathSandwich posted:Even if you're not killing them, it sounds railroady and DMPC-y as gently caress. You're already determined to strand them in the Shadowfell, Why not just have the players wake up there, tangled up in a obscure ritual of the above wizard rather than having him show up and jazzhand everyone away one by one because he's specifically kitted to gently caress over your PCs? Because he would lose a fight to them straight up, I just know that they can't put out enough damage to take him down before he bops them out of the plane. It's not railroady if I've given them multiple opportunities to deal with this guy on their terms and they just shrugged and did nothing. It's like a player walking into a room labelled 'traps' and then getting mad when they fall in a pit. Eladrin in my setting have already been established to have the planeshift thing and they know it, they know he has a haste pocketwatch, Misty Step is a second level spell, I didn't create a secret kryptonite NPC to beat them, they've literally seen all the cards, have decent hints at his motivation, and still put themselves in a compromising position. They were literally told outright before they left the city that the guy knew they were leaving and was watching them.
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May 1, 2018 21:21
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It just seems like a waste of time to have the fight happen at all if the result is already determined. Will the fight be fun? Probably not really. Does the fight help advance the plot or provide important characterization? I'm not so sure.
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May 1, 2018 21:26
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Nehru the Damaja posted:Page 135 in Xanathar's gives a guideline for magic items a group should expect to have at different tiers. It's certainly not a hard rule but it's a decent baseline suggestion. Alter it as you see fit. Thanks. Still waiting for Xanathar's to be delivered, unfortunately. Oh! I forgot to ask about healing potions, too. My players really only have one tank - a paladin - and he went down last week. Since he's also their healer, this is obviously very bad. I feel certain that they'd have bought some healing potions to shore up this weakness had they actually played levels 1-4, so I'm just gonna give them some. How rare are healing potions?
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May 1, 2018 21:26
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lowercase16 posted:Thanks. Still waiting for Xanathar's to be delivered, unfortunately. Common they are buyable in regular stores according to the PHB. 50 g a pop is the default price so they are not cheap however. AnEdgelord posted:isn't that the place with the portal to the far realms in it? It has portals all over the place the Dungeon is stupidly massive, there are several towns inside the thing. Though the portals all tend to be to bad places as the Dungeon's creator wanted fiends and other nasties to come through it and infest the dungeon. MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 21:35 on May 1, 2018 |
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May 1, 2018 21:31
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Ryuujin posted:Pretty sure it does nothing? I mean Spellsniper increases the range of a ranged attack cantrip, not a cantrip that has no attack roll but forces you to make a melee weapon attack as part of casting it. Spell Sniper works with the SCAG melee cantrips, allowing 10ft reach attacks with them.
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May 1, 2018 21:33
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kidkissinger posted:It just seems like a waste of time to have the fight happen at all if the result is already determined. Yeah I was wondering if the route to go is have the mob boss tell them he needs them out of the way and they can either go to the shadowfell voluntarily but he'll promise to put them in a safish place there, vs fight and get dumped wherever if they lose
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May 1, 2018 21:33
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lowercase16 posted:Thanks. Still waiting for Xanathar's to be delivered, unfortunately. This is a super useful item cost chart that should have been included in the DMG. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8mF8uNMRN_mX3otSG9vMUpSREE/view?usp=sharing e: Links are hard Trent Squawkbox fucked around with this message at 22:19 on May 1, 2018 |
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May 1, 2018 21:35
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mastershakeman posted:Yeah I was wondering if the route to go is have the mob boss tell them he needs them out of the way and they can either go to the shadowfell voluntarily but he'll promise to put them in a safish place there, vs fight and get dumped wherever if they lose If it's the players fault that they're in this position then this seems better imo.
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May 1, 2018 21:43
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CubeTheory posted:Because he would lose a fight to them straight up, I just know that they can't put out enough damage to take him down before he bops them out of the plane. It's not railroady if I've given them multiple opportunities to deal with this guy on their terms and they just shrugged and did nothing. It's like a player walking into a room labelled 'traps' and then getting mad when they fall in a pit. Eladrin in my setting have already been established to have the planeshift thing and they know it, they know he has a haste pocketwatch, Misty Step is a second level spell, I didn't create a secret kryptonite NPC to beat them, they've literally seen all the cards, have decent hints at his motivation, and still put themselves in a compromising position. They were literally told outright before they left the city that the guy knew they were leaving and was watching them. If your BBEG is a Mob Boss, I feel like showing up with a wizard to whisk them away isn't his real MO. A better concept is to make them an offer they can't refuse, to tantalize them to doing his work for him. In this case, instead of probing Sleepy Wizard's brain for secrets, maybe he needs Sleepy Wizard too. If the players like Sleepy Wizard and want to help him, Mob Boss could offer them something in the shadowfell to wake him up, and his handy Eladrin planeswalking wizard can get them there. Incentivize them to do what you want, instead of impossible wizard bullshit. It also gives them the option to refuse, they have a regular old fight, and then the players are stuck in a, "Well poo poo" moment while the Mob Boss talks poo poo about how disappointed he is they wouldn't agree to his oh-so-reasonable deal. Because they can't wake up Sleepy Wizard you can remind them that thing in the shadowfell to wake him up still exists. Hint hint nudge nudge.
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May 1, 2018 22:44
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CubeTheory posted:Because he would lose a fight to them straight up, I just know that they can't put out enough damage to take him down before he bops them out of the plane. Then play that up. Don't build him specifically to make the players flail uselessly against it because there is nothing less fun than a bad guy you have all but guaranteed you are going to lose against. He has to cheat and send the players to the shadowfell in order to defeat them rather than fighting them face to face; don't also make him a hypercompetent nightcrawler who is able to teleport around them at will while the players flail uselessly as he dispatches them to another dimension one by one. For real, just have them wake up or fall into a trap portal into the shadowfell. Have an illusionary image of the bad mage tell the players "yeah, I can't take you head on, but have fun in the upside-down". If you need him to nightcrawler someone, have him pop into the shadowfell and steal away the coma wizard.
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May 1, 2018 22:54
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Ryuujin posted:Pretty sure it does nothing? I mean Spellsniper increases the range of a ranged attack cantrip, not a cantrip that has no attack roll but forces you to make a melee weapon attack as part of casting it. Valentin posted:what does this do? just let you use booming blade as a magic PAM + sentinel?  But also if you stack it on a rogue you get insane mobility and a scaling damage boost to your sole attack (run to within 10 feet, magic whip, cunning action to run 30+ feet away). Go Arcane Trickster, grab the two scag cantrips and Arcane Familiar for Owlvantage, run around saying "I'm not touching you!" all day every day.
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May 1, 2018 22:57
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I appreciate all the feedback. I have a lot of context to what I'm doing that mitigates some of it, and some of it I'm going to incorporate. The mob boss isn't actually the big bad guy, he's actually an agent of the ruler of the city and basically a puppet. The ruler controls the crime because he believes there will always be crime in a city, and it's better to control those elements then let them run wild. The Eladrin wizard is basically on loan from the ruler as muscle. Not that this invalidates your arguments, but it's one reason the mob boss isn't particularly mob boss-y.
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May 1, 2018 23:01
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CubeTheory posted:I appreciate all the feedback. I have a lot of context to what I'm doing that mitigates some of it, and some of it I'm going to incorporate. The mob boss isn't actually the big bad guy, he's actually an agent of the ruler of the city and basically a puppet. The ruler controls the crime because he believes there will always be crime in a city, and it's better to control those elements then let them run wild. The Eladrin wizard is basically on loan from the ruler as muscle. Not that this invalidates your arguments, but it's one reason the mob boss isn't particularly mob boss-y. The problem is tone whiplash. If this is someone who knows he's outclassed by the players, why fight the players alone even if your plan is to bamf them into another dimension one by one? Having an existential threat wizard who is cocky enough to fight the players solo but also be aware he is outclassed and can't beat them in a straight up fight? Tone down the nightcrawler bullshit and give him a wall of mercenary meat to jam up the players while he drops portals under the players. If he's got the power to just move someone to the shadowfell essentially at will and he knows he's outclassed by the whole of the players, why wouldn't he just grab someone, send them to the shadowfell, and kill of the party one by one? Has he been demonstrated to have this power before or is this something you are literally pulling out of your rear end? If he's able to do it at will, what's to prevent him from doing it at literally every point in the future that you encounter him? There is a right way and a wrong way to do the "whoops, you're in the upside down now" especially as a way to separate you from a plot McGuffin. Literally Nightcrawler is the wrong way to do it. Make it a ritual to drag you into the shadowfell, but in order for him to pull you in and keep you there, he has to maintain a ritual on the Shadowfell side while the mob boss has a chance to do what he wants to do with coma wizard. Make your players have to find rear end in a top hat wizard's wards and deduce where he's sourcing the ritual from instead of making it a "Well you didn't kill him when you could so here's an unwinnable fight" deus ex machina. There's nothing that would make me quit a game faster than something like that.
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May 1, 2018 23:24
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CubeTheory posted:I appreciate all the feedback. I have a lot of context to what I'm doing that mitigates some of it, and some of it I'm going to incorporate. The mob boss isn't actually the big bad guy, he's actually an agent of the ruler of the city and basically a puppet. The ruler controls the crime because he believes there will always be crime in a city, and it's better to control those elements then let them run wild. The Eladrin wizard is basically on loan from the ruler as muscle. Not that this invalidates your arguments, but it's one reason the mob boss isn't particularly mob boss-y.
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May 1, 2018 23:40
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DeathSandwich posted:The problem is tone whiplash. If this is someone who knows he's outclassed by the players, why fight the players alone even if your plan is to bamf them into another dimension one by one? Having an existential threat wizard who is cocky enough to fight the players solo but also be aware he is outclassed and can't beat them in a straight up fight? Tone down the nightcrawler bullshit and give him a wall of mercenary meat to jam up the players while he drops portals under the players. To add to this, if you do it that way, you can then write the bad guy as someone who knows he can't take you on even footing, so now if you want to get back to Sleepy Pete, you either have to fight me on my terms, in my base, with my minions and my traps, or you can stay in the shadowfell and fall to madness and warped beasts, or try to worn back to the material plane from another method.
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May 2, 2018 00:59
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They're announcing a new module on June 1. I hope it's Planescape but I worry anything they release with that name on it wouldn't do it justice.
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May 2, 2018 01:10
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Nehru the Damaja posted:They're announcing a new module on June 1. I hope it's Planescape but I worry anything they release with that name on it wouldn't do it justice. Unlikley it looks more like Waterdeep/Undermountain. However we are getting three more books this year (Not counting Mord's Tome of Foes.) so we could get something planescape related this year. As there have been hints towards it.
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May 2, 2018 01:13
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quote:Teleporting Boss Guy Question about 5e: Is it possible to do something along the lines of "I hold my action until This Wizard appears, and cast [disabling spell] as a reaction"? Because that's the first thing I'd do. And if it works, you have some party members in the Shadowfell on their own, or you have to come up with a reason why [disabling spell] doesn't work. Or, quite possibly, why a variety of them don't work.
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May 2, 2018 01:37
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The other thing is going into a boss fight with the idea that it's a punishment for your players playing badly / not planning properly poisons the whole thing - as a GM you're not going to be running the fight with everyone having a good time as your motive, and that's incredibly obvious to everyone at the table despite what you might think.
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May 2, 2018 01:50
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Gharbad the Weak posted:Question about 5e: Is it possible to do something along the lines of "I hold my action until This Wizard appears, and cast [disabling spell] as a reaction"? Because that's the first thing I'd do. And if it works, you have some party members in the Shadowfell on their own, or you have to come up with a reason why [disabling spell] doesn't work. Or, quite possibly, why a variety of them don't work. Ready action, PHB p. 193
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May 2, 2018 01:50
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