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Nehru the Damaja posted:Thinking of running a Githzerai druid though I have a hard time imagining what beast shapes would be for a druid who's never seen an actual grizzly bear, just its ideal form in astral space Ends up looking like Suburban Sasquatch. Conspiratiorist fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Aug 26, 2018 |
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Aug 26, 2018 15:14
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Bad Seafood posted:You see a collection of abstract numbers and flickering imagery in keeping with your position on the bear alignment chart. gently caress, I'm shapeshifting into bears that look like cops
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Aug 26, 2018 15:22
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Nehru the Damaja posted:gently caress, I'm shapeshifting into bears that look like cops 
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Aug 26, 2018 15:31
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Hey people, I'm sure you get this kind of question all the time but do you know which 5e premade campaigns are good? Relatively new players, open to all kinds of gameplay.
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Aug 26, 2018 16:18
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A jargogle posted:Hey people, Phandelver is widely considered pretty good. Storm Kings Thunder is a meandering clusterfuck without the necessary guidance. Those are the only two I know well enough.
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Aug 26, 2018 17:15
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This is true of most low-level modules, but Lost Mines of Phandelver is very lethal. The goblin ambush and later the cave will wipe out the typical novice party, and as presented there's little room to do them as anything but straight combat.
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Aug 26, 2018 17:23
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I haven't run it yet but I've been reading through Curse of Strahd and I'm digging it so far. As someone who's always been critical of Faerun's kitchen sink approach to fantasy, Barovia has a much stronger sense of self. Not sure I'd recommend it for first-time players though. Its gothic trimmings aren't indicative of how most campaigns are going to go down, and the included Death House starter adventure is a bit of a meat grinder if you're only just learning the game. Once everyone more or less understands how to proceed, however, it seems like a good follow-up campaign.
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Aug 26, 2018 17:28
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Conspiratiorist posted:This is true of most low-level modules, but Lost Mines of Phandelver is very lethal. The goblin ambush and later the cave will wipe out the typical novice party, and as presented there's little room to do them as anything but straight combat. Not really. I have not seen a party get wiped on it in forever. (Though death is a risk when they fight the Bugbear.)
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Aug 26, 2018 17:29
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Gerblins surprisingly effective with the 1d20+4.
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Aug 26, 2018 18:02
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The goblin cave is less dangerous by design than it is by virtue of being a dungeon for level 1 characters, whose limited health and resource pool can make the margin for error/misfortune a bit harsh. The cave itself is not particularly unreasonable on its own merits unless you're guiding a minuscule party.
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Aug 26, 2018 18:06
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Bad Seafood posted:The goblin cave is less dangerous by design than it is by virtue of being a dungeon for level 1 characters, whose limited health and resource pool can make the margin for error/misfortune a bit harsh. The cave itself is not particularly unreasonable on its own merits unless you're guiding a minuscule party. This is exactly what I mean. Level 1 PCs are very fragile, so any situation that forces moderately challenging combat for them is dangerous and murderously so when it compounds. Encounter 1 in LMoP is a goblin ambush, straight up. The best you can do here is spotting it before it happens so you're ready, else you're surprised and out of position. Either way hope your players have good ranged composition and/or know the correct way to deal with close in with ranged enemies. Next up you follow the goblins to their cave, which hopefully they're tackling fresh by having had the sense to take a short rest and the casters didn't blow their spells on the ambush, which is a lot of good game sense to ask from new players. Here they meet yet more archers, this time in three quarters cover, possibly previously alerted by an escaped goblin from the ambush and even if not, as the module is telling you itself that's how to play goblins, encouraged to flee further into the cave and warn everyone. Then comes the cave itself. There's three ways and two of them are wrong: one leads to the party losing a third of its HP before they get into any more combat proper, another leads to the party running headfirst into a bugbear while out of position, and the last - the safest one - leads to a straight up fight that's only preferable by way of elimination and because it offers an opportunity to end it early through diplomacy. Only, said diplo entails the players agreeing to immediately go do more fighting and then come back, only to be betrayed continue fighting anyway. It's not Death House with its specter and shambling mound which will challenge even a party that knows what they're doing, but the goblins in LMoP will tear apart novice players if the DM doesn't pull the punches. Compare to Sunless Citadel, in which combat happens at the pace of the PCs choice, with plenty of chances for diplomacy and alternate approaches, and where the module itself assumes you'll have established decent enough relations with either of the factions to pull back and rest if things get hairy.
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Aug 26, 2018 19:48
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Sunless Citadel was the first time I actually had fun in 3.x. It's a good module.
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Aug 26, 2018 20:03
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Here's a breakdown of our AL try at Lost Mines. Y'all can let me know if this is typical/atypical. This was all done on R20 with AL rules and a fresh party of L1s, some of whom rotated in or out by night. We had 3-5 people at any point and progressed very slowly imo. Various classes, but my PoV is a Rogue (eventually Assassin). Encounter 1 - Goblin Ambush: We roll up on the busted up cart. 2 of our dudes are immediately "I investigate the cart" and I'm like "100% I do not this is a trap, I go straight into the woodline for cover." We mincemeat the goblins largely by half the party hiding behind trees/stumps and firing back with high rolls and me creeping through the woods garroting gobbos. Did not ever feel threatened. Our party then goes full RP about not wanting to track the goblins to their hideout because we don't have anything invested in that and that we already have a cart and horses and poo poo and maybe we should just take them to town. I vote for murderhobo time and our GM just sort of pushes us to go into the woods. I specifically explain that I have no desire to walk the obvious trap-laden path and I'm gonna stick to the woodline since then I can actually maybe stealth. Our lead melee dude misses every perception check and gets hit by a trap and of course I get hit too because the GM disregards my stated intent. Encounter 2 - Guards outside the cave: Having had enough of this poo poo, I tell the party to hang back as I stealth over to the guard camp and murder the poo poo out of the first one and knock the second out. The rest of my party arrive in time to interrogate the goblin. Having gotten basically nothing of value from him, I proceed to drown him in the stream as my party ponders what to do with him. Oops. We then get into the cave and immediately find the guard dogs. I toss them some goblin corpses and make my Animal Handling check and they turn out to be Very Good Boys. I am the only person with Darkvision and the only person who cares about stealth, so my party hangs way the hell back with a rock with a light spell in someone's pocket and a hooded lantern or something. Encounter 3 - Some dude on a rope bridge: I spot him first and snipe him off the bridge. I proceed to use my climbing gear to hop up on the bridge. My party follows suit, but since my GM is a super stickler at all times for making extra skillchecks, even though we have infinite time, tied off pitons, a rope, Guidance cantrip, and people helping on both ends, our STR-dump caster fails an Athletics check, which means fall damage and making enough noise to cause the goblins to let loose some sort of dam. We all make it up, though and go east from the rope bridge. We call it a night here. End Session 1. Everyone still L1 I think. Session 2 starts and now we have a new party configuration where nobody has a good concealable light source. Our GM has one of the new guys fire up a torch or something right at the start, which of course means I can't even try to stealth into... Encounter 4 - Yet Another Goblin Ambush: Since I can't stealth and the goblins are clearly expecting us despite the fact that we are coming from the wrong direction (and the fact that our GM insists on moving our tokens the way he feels like we should be moving, so there's never an "I peer around the corner"), I immediately eat all the arrows and go unconscious. I curse the fact that I still can't afford studded leather yet and proceed to nap through combat while becoming increasingly bored. It occurs to me later that I don't think any of our newbies are taking healing word, so action economy tonight sucks. Since we've been fighting directly outside his door, the GM rules that the Bugbear has just been watching us murder his dudes the whole time but doesn't care. As a fellow bugbear, I try to bluff our way out of the combat coming up, but despite good rolls, the GM says we must fight. Of course, even though we are in the middle of talking when I'm like "This isn't going anywhere, chuck my dagger at him", we still can't get surprise round because... Encounter 5 - Return of the Son of Goblin Ambush + A Bugbear: I immediately eat all the arrows again and go face down and it reminds me that my GM probably doesn't believe in passive perception. I'm pretty sure I get cure wounds twice and immediately knocked out over and over again because my body is blocking the doorway and I never get a round to stand up so the bugbear has perma-advantage. I am yet again bored by non-participation. My party eventually stops healing me and just mops up. At this point I am incredibly "gently caress this poo poo" and tell my party to stay way the gently caress back and pop their double moves when they hear some screams (theirs or mine). I stealth back across the bridge, down the hall and finally. Encounter 6 - WTF I actually get to ambush for a change?: I immediately turn 2 goblets into giblets and run back up the hall. This fight goes very quickly and I kill half the gobbo squad. Negotiations happen, but they don't have a leg to stand on since we've already killed everyone else, so we kill 1 more of them to make the point and the rest surrender. End session 2. Between sessions, I move to level 3 (and everyone else up to 2 or 3 depending on how many sessions). We get handed a bunch of handouts to skip the town RP and pick the "Go murderhobo a bandit stronghold" quest. Session 3: We roll in and it's just a series of tiny hallways that we try to make preparations for in different ways, but none of them matter because our GM wants to hear certain precise keywords that we never know and so we waste a lot of IRL time trying to set up ambushes/ prevent ambushes and none of it ever matters. Session 4: This culminates in an encounter where I pick a lock on a door, listen, hear nothing, say "I open the door" and the GM immediately pushes my token inside and I get surprise attacked by 2 guards. I am basically checked out at this point. We finish off the guards and I go "Ok, so my Subclass gets me proficiency in Disguise kit and Poisoner kit. Poisoner kit has literally zero use in AL, so we're gonna use this here disguise kit. I'm gonna disguise myself as a guard." to which my GM says "But you are a bugbear. How could that even work." and one of my party members goes "Face/Off" and everyone loses their poo poo so hard the GM basically has to let me try and cut this dude's face off and wear it as a crude human mask. We bounce over to some pit with a weirdo telepathic monster dude who wants "meat" and I'm like "dude have we got some corpses for you" and toss the dead guards in while high fiving each other. I interrupt a poker game with some other guards and proceed to get dealt in as Guard #5 but they are all "dude you don't look so good" and I'm like "I got into it with the meat monster" and they are like "that sucks" and then I shiv two of them to death with my longass bugbear arms and that's a thing. We find the hidey hole of the boss dude but he turned invisible and ran away. Our GM doesn't permit a chase. That's pretty much the end of it for us since our GM is unavailable for the forseeable future. So, to sum up:
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Aug 26, 2018 21:00
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Only read the first part of all that and I'll reiterate Assassin Rogue is cancerous.
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Aug 26, 2018 21:24
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Toshimo posted:Here's a breakdown of our AL try at Lost Mines. Y'all can let me know if this is typical/atypical. Well, it's comforting to see you enumerate all the stupid things I found in the module that made me decide to never run it happen in real play. Except a trap in the goblin cave that you seem to have avoided thanks to genre savvy. E: Splicer posted:Sunless Citadel was the first time I actually had fun in 3.x. It's a good module. I have never heard someone I trust praise a WOTC module before so I guess now I'll have to take a look at this.
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Aug 26, 2018 21:56
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Conspiratiorist posted:Only read the first part of all that and I'll reiterate Assassin Rogue is cancerous. Yeah I skimmed the rest of the post super hard but I was gonna highlight that as a "definitely don't do that" thing.
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Aug 26, 2018 21:56
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Dragonatrix posted:Yeah I skimmed the rest of the post super hard but I was gonna highlight that as a "definitely don't do that" thing. I mean, I didn't want to be AT, and Thief is largely a bunch of blank spaces as well in AL.
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Aug 26, 2018 22:05
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DalaranJ posted:I have never heard someone I trust praise a WOTC module before so I guess now I'll have to take a look at this.
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Aug 26, 2018 22:16
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A jargogle posted:Hey people, An option that's somewhat overlooked is to run a season of Adventurers League modules. Each module is fairly self-contained, but they typically have some sort of arc tying them together. For example, season 1 is mostly about thwarting plans of the Cult of the Dragon which were the featured baddies in that season's hardcover (HotDQ/RoT). Rather than giving you a dungeon or town map and encouraging the players to explore, these are structured more around guiding them from set piece to set piece. Not to say there's no freedom for exploration or creativity, but there's somewhat less than other adventures. Whether this is a bad thing comes down to taste. Players prone to analysis paralysis might benefit from more rigidly-structured adventures like these. The modules themselves are generally well-balanced (from what I've seen), and they also have some built-in tools making them much more convenient to DM. Every encounter offers simple rebalancing guidelines if your party isn't the size and level it was written for, every potential enemy has an in-document statblock, and there's a convenient rewards summary at the end of each adventure. You can typically get a full season from DM's Guild as a bundle for roughly the same price as hardcover adventures, or $3-4 per module if you buy them individually. If you want freebies, the first half of season 1 (starting with "Defiance in Phlan") is sitting in an open directory on WotC's own site. Slippery42 fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Aug 26, 2018 |
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Aug 26, 2018 22:33
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Splicer posted:I am gratified and alarmed by the implication that someone finds me trustworthy through my internet posting Well, about game design. I'm not asking you to be the godfather of my children here.
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Aug 26, 2018 22:46
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Toshimo posted:Lost Mines stuff Yeah I'm playing in it for the first time and even though we have the party doubling up on familiars to just give everyone constant advantage all day, it's still a terrible opening. Once you get past the first chapter and into the town itself the adventure opens up a bit and gives you some actual decisions and rewards but drat that opening is so rough and full of adventure ends on a few bad dice rolls or player decisions.
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Aug 27, 2018 01:17
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Toshimo posted:Here's a breakdown of our AL try at Lost Mines. Y'all can let me know if this is typical/atypical. A little of column A, a little of column B. The DM seemed to miss a few things that would have worked out in the players' favor. Notably, the goblin you interrogated does know some useful stuff (number of goblins in the cave, the fate of Sildar and Gundren, and that they weren't attacked at random). Also, there's enough noise in the cave from the waterfall that the noise of someone falling probably shouldn't have alerted goblins in the following area. Having sniped the sentry on the bridge, you guys should have been the ones to achieve surprise in the pool room. Some of the times surprise didn't work out in your favor were actually as-designed, however. The Redbrand guards that ambushed you were alerted that you'd be hostile by your fight with skeletons in the previous room. Those skeletons don't attack anyone wearing Redbrand attire, and that gives the guards the reason and time to prepare an ambush. Similarly, Glasstaff was alerted to your approach by his familiar keeping watch in the previous room. Even if his head start was only a single round, which would only happen if you didn't investigate his laboratory at all and went straight for the next door, one round is enough for him to get out out sight (move + misty step + dash). It's honestly only worthwhile to play a chase if the party enters his room from the secret entrance. The ease by which a party can stumble upon the front entrance to his room and trigger his flight while casually exploring the hideout is a design choice I'm not fond of, and it happens again in a later dungeon with much higher stakes if you take the "wrong" route. In general, LMoP is a decent though not flawless adventure. Like much of 5e's published material, it's about 80% there, but it needs a few tweaks and a good DM to take it the rest of the way. It sounds like yours might be enough to keep the lights on, but not up to the task of elevating it from above-average to good.
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Aug 27, 2018 02:51
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Slippery42 posted:A little of column A, a little of column B. Yeah the glass staff thing was really badly designed. Its something thats rigged to hurt you unless you've a) figured out there is a secret entrance there, b) figured out that is specifically his room and c) assumed that the secret door leads to his room and not alerted anyone else nearby. Its possible but requires a tonne of hurdles or else he can just run and you're hosed, something that you've likely never seen or encountered before in the adventure and is pretty contradictory to the rest of the dungeons format and wouldn't assume this bandit leader would flee at the first sign of trouble. I'm glad our GM threw that out and just had him spend a couple of rounds buffing as a consequence for not doing this.
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Aug 27, 2018 02:58
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Welp my players just managed to shimmy up the fissure straight into the fight with the bugbear in LMoP. They're still level 1. They will at least have surprise on him, though.
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Aug 27, 2018 03:04
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I'm not even sure what was up with Glasstaff. IIRC, we actually searched the crates in the area where his secret door ends and didn't even make a roll. Then we get down to the bottom, listen to the doors, choose the one with dudes in it over the one with bubbling noises or whatever the description was, did our murderhobo thing. Apparently he was peaced out for like 10 minutes while we wrecked all his poo poo and his people, through a door we didn't even get to look for (again, with this DM, it was very much "You need to specify you are looking at this 5ft section of wall, which is no different from any of the rest of the passage, and that you are specifically checking for secret doors, or I don't even mention it or let you roll"), and I still don't know what the downside is (I guess we miss out on loot/xp from the boss).
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Aug 27, 2018 03:11
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Imagined posted:Welp my players just managed to shimmy up the fissure straight into the fight with the bugbear in LMoP. They're still level 1. They will at least have surprise on him, though. The fissure from the hounds?
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Aug 27, 2018 03:12
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I feel if the DM does have Glastaff run he should still leave behind his note from his boss. But the Goblins should not have gotten nearly as many surprises against you as they got.
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Aug 27, 2018 04:26
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Toshimo posted:The fissure from the hounds? Yup
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Aug 27, 2018 04:31
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Given how Glasstaff a lookout familiar, Misty Step, and a bug-out bag that includes an invisibility potion, it's hilariously easy for him to get away. Misty Step in particular means he only needs to be conscious and at any given turn he can flee 90 feet. There's practically no counterplay possible within the rules, at the level you're facing him.
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Aug 27, 2018 04:32
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Imagined posted:Yup Our GM ruled that the fissure was goblin-sized and we could not climb it.
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Aug 27, 2018 04:48
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MonsterEnvy posted:I feel if the DM does have Glastaff run he should still leave behind his note from his boss. We found the note, but I don't remember any indication of a familiar and he definitely out of the dungeon before we even knew that he existed.
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Aug 27, 2018 04:51
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Toshimo posted:We found the note, but I don't remember any indication of a familiar and he definitely out of the dungeon before we even knew that he existed. The rat running around the room before Glasstaff's (if you dont take the secret door) is his familiar.
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Aug 27, 2018 05:04
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Toshimo posted:Our GM ruled that the fissure was goblin-sized and we could not climb it. Well I have a good friend in the party for whom this is their first experience in roleplaying games of any kind. I had just earlier this evening given him the speech about "Remember you can try to do anything in this game." (pretty soon after he'd had his lawful good character convince everyone to go straight to the "Let's murder all the chained up wolves" plan.) Guess whose idea it was to shimmy up the shaft? Must admit it didn't occur to me to tell him it was impossible, since even the adventure text says that it is. Guess I didn't remember I could do anything.
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Aug 27, 2018 05:22
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Bad Seafood posted:I haven't run it yet but I've been reading through Curse of Strahd and I'm digging it so far. As someone who's always been critical of Faerun's kitchen sink approach to fantasy, Barovia has a much stronger sense of self. My take on Curse of Strahd so far is basically that Death House is fine (and it'd work great as a place you stumble into, and then escape back to the normal world) but the "real" part of the adventure is boring, poorly-signposted trash on a par with POTA, just with less combat.
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Aug 27, 2018 05:48
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Wrong thread  But climbing chat reminds me of how often I've wondered about the opposite problem of "PC too big". The age old question of monsters too big for some place with 5 foot hallways as the primary connections. Section Z fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Aug 27, 2018 |
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Aug 27, 2018 05:57
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P.d0t posted:My take on Curse of Strahd so far is basically that Death House is fine (and it'd work great as a place you stumble into, and then escape back to the normal world) but the "real" part of the adventure is boring, poorly-signposted trash on a par with POTA, just with less combat. I'm having a blast playing it at the moment. What do you mean poorly signposted?
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Aug 27, 2018 06:33
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kingcom posted:The rat running around the room before Glasstaff's (if you dont take the secret door) is his familiar. Ha ha. I just pulled up the PDF for this and skimmed the parts we've done. So far the things our GM did ~not-RAW~ are:
Also, it's pretty dumb to me that: If you do everything right, you miss the first big treasure cache and magic item in the adventure. We made a truce with the nothic by giving it dead Redbrands, detected the pit was full of foul magic and didn't get caught by the booby-trapped bridge. So, we completely missed the +1 Longsword and fat pile of loot with it. However anyone dumb enough to fall into the cursed pit easily spots it, RAW.
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Aug 27, 2018 06:35
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Re the spoiler: I thought so too. When I ran it, I had the Nothic offer the party their pick of any one thing in his chest as thanks for feeding him basically every bandit and bugbear in the hideout that they killed (including Glasstaff). Obviously the sword was the standout winner. Granted I had an ulterior motive in wanting my players to be well-equipped, as I knew they'd be my companions in GenCon's AL games 
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Aug 27, 2018 07:12
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edit-I am dumb and found it...ugh, literally right after posting this, I critically failed that investigation check Madmarker fucked around with this message at 07:49 on Aug 27, 2018 |
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Aug 27, 2018 07:35
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sebmojo posted:I'm having a blast playing it at the moment. What do you mean poorly signposted? Like, we never know what the gently caress the game wants us to do. And usually we follow a lead as far as we can take it, and it's just like..... the plot hits a brick wall, and says, "I dunno what you're talkin' about, maaaan." It's a lot of nothing. Irina doesn't know poo poo about anything. Fishermanguyman doesn't know who made him do the thing. Apparently trying to fight people in the windmill was the incorrect thing to do (or it somehow should have gone better for us) but we basically had to back off from there and shrug. People at the tavern in Vallaki are just a bunch of nothing. We went to the chapel-thing in front of the graveyard-thing, and we were like.... "there's 4 rooms and they each have a thing in them, I guess? but we don't know which ones matter or don't, and have no idea how we were supposed to know." And then dude has the thing locked in the basement which I guess was nothing -- we were told to just leave it alone (we opened it up and had a look, but didn't bother trying to fight it.) Like, we've had fun laughing at the campaign, but it's really been a whole lotta us having fun in spite of the module, and not because of it.
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Aug 27, 2018 08:14
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