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A Fire Distinguisher. You point it at something and it determines whether or not that thing is fire.
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Oct 5, 2018 10:34
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dreadmojo posted:Or it's a ring of teleportation I think I could get away with this, or minor variations, over and over and over. "Yeah it's a staff of illusion". "Yeah it detects as illusion magic". <10 minutes later> "You'll never guess what!" e: Tome of Deception Rod of Disappointment etc Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 11:05 on Oct 5, 2018 |
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Oct 5, 2018 10:58
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Wand of Disintegration Lens of Invisibility especially mean: Necklace of Fireball
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Oct 5, 2018 11:37
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I was reading the teleporting ring as teleporting away with your finger.
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Oct 5, 2018 12:41
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Apologies in advance to my players.
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Oct 5, 2018 13:18
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Kommando posted:Hey pal. Wanna buy a ring of conjuring? Only 10 gold pieces. Once purchased, the salesman immediately disappears. Whenever it’s left alone the ring tries to sell itself to passersby.
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Oct 5, 2018 17:27
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Marco Polo radar: a handheld device that detects objects by bouncing sound waves off of them and listening for a response. Unfortunately, it does this by shouting "Marco!" as loudly as it can and can only detect an object if it responds "Polo!".
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Oct 5, 2018 17:27
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Happy fun ball Wand of Mordenkainen's Conjunction
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Oct 5, 2018 19:11
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A wand of Fireball that reflects off any surface if it doesn't hit an organic target. Forever.
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Oct 5, 2018 19:16
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A Necklace of Fire Balls
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Oct 5, 2018 19:19
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Various Willy Wonka style candies
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Oct 5, 2018 19:22
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A potion of giant growth: makes giants sprout from the ground around you. They're confused and upset.
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Oct 5, 2018 19:25
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A potion of giant growth: makes you develop a giant growth. Roll on the critical hits table to see where, and roll to see if it's benign.
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Oct 5, 2018 19:29
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These are maybe a little better than you want for malfunctioning, but there's a lot of ideas if you're looking for inspiration. Some examples: quote:Bag of Horror
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Oct 5, 2018 19:29
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So as a DM I’m kinda torn about this. See my players are great, but oftentimes they make really stupid decisions. One PC was killed in the second session because of non-cooperation and poor use of explosives. Things were close again last session when they tried to take a short rest inside the house of a noble they had burglarized and alerted him to their presence. Naturally this made the encounter considerably harder as the City guards had time to mobilize a response. Everyone narrowly escaped, but this all leads to my question. How do I make sure my players’ actions have consequences while also not having the party get killed? ninja edit: this is 5e DnD
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Oct 5, 2018 20:20
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My current DM is having that same issue, so I'd be interested an answer as well. Two people playing like they don't know they're in a game and 3 who do whatever because it's just a game gets... interesting. I'm actually having my current character retire from the group of "self-destructive idiots" and bringing in someone, looser?
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Oct 5, 2018 20:43
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unwantedplatypus posted:So as a DM I’m kinda torn about this. See my players are great, but oftentimes they make really stupid decisions. One PC was killed in the second session because of non-cooperation and poor use of explosives. Things were close again last session when they tried to take a short rest inside the house of a noble they had burglarized and alerted him to their presence. Naturally this made the encounter considerably harder as the City guards had time to mobilize a response. Everyone narrowly escaped, but this all leads to my question. How do I make sure my players’ actions have consequences while also not having the party get killed? Depending on the group you might just need to start signposting things a little more when they do poo poo that seems like it's obviously stupid to you. If they decide to take a power nap in the Noble's mansion, say "hey, this is probably going to get you caught, are you sure you want to do this?" It might just be an issue of them not thinking far enough ahead yet.
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Oct 5, 2018 20:51
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Keeshhound posted:Depending on the group you might just need to start signposting things a little more when they do poo poo that seems like it's obviously stupid to you. If they decide to take a power nap in the Noble's mansion, say "hey, this is probably going to get you caught, are you sure you want to do this?" It might just be an issue of them not thinking far enough ahead yet. More like playing a P&P game like it's a crpg where you just pitch a tent 4 feet away from the dungeon boss and he's all "It's cool, I'll wait"
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Oct 5, 2018 20:52
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Have a formula for your ' this is your one warning' dm observations, like 'its obvious to you that this will have serious consequences: do you want to proceed?' If they do, then let the dice fall, losing a few characters because they deliberately did something dumb isn't terrible.
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Oct 5, 2018 20:56
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dreadmojo posted:then let the dice fall, losing a few characters because they deliberately did something dumb isn't terrible. example: Doing castle ravenloft and the whole party save one guy wanted to turn right at a fork, so he wandered off left on his own
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Oct 5, 2018 20:59
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Oh boy, does signposting not work on us. The wizard barely RPs, and when he does it goes poorly. After we managed to snag this incredibly powerful and dangerous artifact we needed a place to store it temporarily. My dude's goddess is sort of like a cross between Hades and the Raven Queen (or so I'm told, don't know dick about her), so her main temples are highly secure vaults. I want to leave it with them, but his old teacher is in town and he thought it would be safer with her. The DM described the look on her face as being like Gollum seeing the One Ring. The wizard said nah, it'll be fine, she basically raised me. I wasn't around to contest the idiocy of leaving it with her, and next thing we know she stole it and everything went to poo poo. I can deal as a player, but my guy wanted to eat his own fingers in frustrated rage. Or kill the two who handed it over, maybe both.
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Oct 5, 2018 21:05
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Act it out. Have outbursts. You don't have to like your co-workers, just be able to work with them. If there's nothing keeping the party together beyond having all shown up in town at the same pub, it's reasonable to have the character leave.
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Oct 5, 2018 22:43
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I very much have. Cassius saying "This is a terrible idea and will kill us all." is a standard part of every planning session. He is very dedicated to his mission (stop these cultists who hosed with his Company (ex-merc) and the chucklefucks, as much as it pains him, are his best shot at them. He's saved his party members at his expense and waded through literal fire to get it done. After this dungeon they'll be dealt with, or if this doesn't finish them then it's beyond our ability. Either way he'll peace out and wait for the end of the world or start a new Company. I've posted about it in their thread before (or the 5e one) and as frustrating as they are in-character, we get along out. This is my dude's final mission, but not mine.
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Oct 5, 2018 23:03
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Like, if you're OC okay with writing your character out of the plot then fine, you do you, but the way I see it when you're playing an RPG it's not like you're channelling some portal to another world whose inhabitants you have no direct control over. If I'm playing a game and I think "My character would totally do this thing but it would be really un-fun if he did" then my response is to brainstorm with the other players for a reason why he wouldn't. Like, your character is pissed that one of his companions put their trust in an old mentor even after she was clearly dodgy... so what has happened in your character's past that means he can't bring himself to hold it against the companion? Finding stuff like that out about my characters when I didn't even know there was anything to find out is one of the things I love most about RPGs.
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Oct 6, 2018 00:35
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sleepy.eyes posted:Oh boy, does signposting not work on us. The wizard barely RPs, and when he does it goes poorly. After we managed to snag this incredibly powerful and dangerous artifact we needed a place to store it temporarily. My dude's goddess is sort of like a cross between Hades and the Raven Queen (or so I'm told, don't know dick about her), so her main temples are highly secure vaults. I want to leave it with them, but his old teacher is in town and he thought it would be safer with her. The DM described the look on her face as being like Gollum seeing the One Ring. The wizard said nah, it'll be fine, she basically raised me. I wasn't around to contest the idiocy of leaving it with her, and next thing we know she stole it and everything went to poo poo. That actually seems like a pretty decent plot hook.
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Oct 6, 2018 08:46
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Yeah, it ended up being a Dr Who style time travel adventure. She used it to change history and the world we woke up in was almost unrecognizable. Instead of a warring patchwork of tiny kingdoms there was a united empire in a cold war with the failing (but very dangerous) remains of a dragonborn khanate. The longer we stayed the more of our memories of the old timeline faded so we were on a timer before we stopped existing as who we were. We had to break into the tomb of an Imperial Hero (his mentor), the two who were supposed to scout decided to try and break into her sepulchre, in broad daylight, and ended up setting off tons of traps. And alerting every guard within a mile. They did manage to get into it, got trapped by the angry imperial honor guard, the wizard decided to desecrate her remains for the betrayal instead of running, the rogue almost died when the coffin was also trapped (surprise) and the wizard got captured. The rogue escaped because the DM didn't want us to get stopped this easily and got help. The public execution of the wizard was postponed until the Emperor could attend, giving us time to plan a jailbreak. Thankfully the most secure prison in the empire had no magical defenses and the bard had watched the rogue do enough lock picking to get full prof. for free and snuck through the entire thing to rescue the wizard. At this point we figured out that neither of them actually grabbed the book we needed from the tomb (they were busy looting trapped treasure) so we had to break back into it to get it. Security was even more lax this time so the bard pulled it off through fasttalking the guards. We then had to flee because the rogue started bragging about how dumb the guards are in a public tavern right next to the palace (where one might expect an off duty guard to go) and so now they knew what the rest of us looked like. We then figured out we needed to get into the tomb again, and the DM was so annoyed that we just skipped having to sneak in and we pretty much go to teleport in. We did some crap and fixed the timeline. It was a wild, inconsistent ride full of poor decisions, just like the rest of the campaign.
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Oct 6, 2018 15:19
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I am hoping the thread can help me with some imagination problems. I am running my first DnD game for years, my players are all totally new to tabletop gaming and are having a great time and I am really enjoying myself as well - making a very concentrated effort to never say no and to instead use the Yes But, or use NPC's to point out weird behavior ("Hey those goblin heads you have tied to your belt really stink, and are super gross. You aren't bringing them into my Inn.") I only have three players, which suits me fine because I can give them all plenty of time in the spotlight and let them all shine as they have all picked very different roles in the group. My problem is that one of the players keeps botching her roles and I am running out of fun and exciting ways to describe critical failures. I don't like to punish my players for making a bad dice roll. (Although I will happily take advantage of a bad decision) In our last session, the rogue - who is the botcher - decided to sneak behind some thugs that were trying to rob one of the other players and pull their swords from their scabbards before they could draw them. She roleplays out sneaking around them while insults were traded between them and the party cleric and continually rolls really well right up to moment when she declares she is going to pull the swords from the thugs scabbards, disarming them and surrounding them, at the same time. She rolls a natural one. I resolved it that one of the sword wasn't very well looked after and jammed in the scabbard as she pulled with all her might, causing the thug to topple over backwards on top of her, pinning her under him but also removing him as a threat for the start of the fight. The party loved it, and Cobbie's amazing plans and terrible execution have become a running joke after only a few sessions. I have checked with the player, and they are totally ok with this, finding it hilarious and loving a game where they can mess up rather than everything just going perfectly. This the fourth time in two session Cobbie has had a clever plan to deal with a situation without it needing to turn into a muderfest that has had a natural one rolled right at the critical moment. Going forward, what advice to people have with describing really fun critical failures, that don't punish the player who had them too badly - but still make the resulting situation a lot of fun to play through.
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Oct 8, 2018 05:20
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Don’t do critical failures
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Oct 8, 2018 05:30
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Phrosphor posted:Going forward, what advice to people have with describing really fun critical failures, that don't punish the player who had them too badly - but still make the resulting situation a lot of fun to play through. Sounds like you're on the right track, but have you tried asking the player what happens when they mess up? When you say the player "loved it" and it's now a running joke, etc, that makes me think that they'd be into making up their own "I messed up, but..." outcomes. Obviously don't drop it on them in the middle of a game, talk about it first to set expectations and limits, but it really sounds like they might enjoy taking (some of) the creative work off your back. Wrestlepig posted:Don’t do critical failures Well yeah, but what they're describing isn't "lol you rolled a one and lol this chart says you chopped your own head off rofl" garbage bullshit critical failures. "On the lowest possible roll, something unexpected complicates matters" is probably the best possible way you could do "critical failure", and it's what they're already doing. e: Like, that sword/guards situation sounds fun. The PC failed at what they were trying to do, reached the fail condition "combat starts", and the fumble means "there's an upside/downside complication" instead of "lol you (roll) (roll) decapitated an ally". e2: Except for the "rolls really well until they didn't" thing, that is. Don't make players roll more than once to do the thing. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Oct 8, 2018 |
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Oct 8, 2018 05:34
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Yeah, look at how many rolls you are making your players do, particularly if (say) a wizard can cast invisibility but a rogue has to roll multiple stealth and doing poo poo rolls and npcs get to roll to detect her. If you get a roll for a situation it's legit to let it ride for a while. Another solution would be to (maybe by way of a quest) give her a luck token that lets her 'store' a good roll at some minor cost.
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Oct 8, 2018 05:59
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dreadmojo posted:Yeah, look at how many rolls you are making your players do Yeah this. The more rolls you make, the greater the odds of a "critical fumble" popping up, because on average that's going to happen once every 20 rolls. Which not only means more chances for failure, it also means you'll have to actually come up with those kinds of complications, so really it's more work for everyone.
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Oct 8, 2018 10:02
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By RAW a nat 1 is only a automatic miss on attack rolls. If they roll a 1 on say, a stealth check then you still add everything up and see what their total is. So a rogue good at stealthing still might be successful, especially if anyone trying to spot them also rolls low. Also... Wrestlepig posted:Don't do critical failures
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Oct 8, 2018 11:50
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It's a common line of humour in my (non d20) group how ludicrous a world would be if the crit fails you hear were a thing. It's a matter of weeks until you inevitably crit fail driving to work and careen off the road, totalling your car, or critically fail to brush your teeth and stab out your own eye.
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Oct 8, 2018 14:23
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Rohan Kishibe posted:It's a common line of humour in my (non d20) group how ludicrous a world would be if the crit fails you hear were a thing. It's a matter of weeks until you inevitably crit fail driving to work and careen off the road, totalling your car, or critically fail to brush your teeth and stab out your own eye. While I get what you're saying, this is perhaps not the best example.
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Oct 8, 2018 14:30
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For games that lack a failing forward mentality, I've instituted a bad luck table for critical failures. Roll a crit fail, roll on the table. The results are heavily skewed in favor of simply "You miss/you don't do the thing you wanted to do," but there's some wiggle room allowing for more inconvenient, complicated, and occasionally hilarious outcomes. Allows for that feeling of dread without necessarily screwing you over simply because your character needs to make more rolls; you basically need to roll snake eyes for anything wacky to happen. That said, Rohan Kishibe posted:critically fail to brush your teeth and stab out your own eye.
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Oct 8, 2018 17:53
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My half-orc has a hell of a time brushing his teeth, but that's because they're attached to his dwarf.
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Oct 8, 2018 18:39
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Bad Seafood posted:For games that lack a failing forward mentality, I've instituted a bad luck table for critical failures. Roll a crit fail, roll on the table. The results are heavily skewed in favor of simply "You miss/you don't do the thing you wanted to do," but there's some wiggle room allowing for more inconvenient, complicated, and occasionally hilarious outcomes. Allows for that feeling of dread without necessarily screwing you over simply because your character needs to make more rolls; you basically need to roll snake eyes for anything wacky to happen. I, too, hate people who roll more often do to character build.
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Oct 8, 2018 18:42
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For my Dark Sun SotDL campaign, I made a natural one "if you're using a non-metal weapon you get a critical hit, but your weapon breaks" and the players loved it. None of them rolled a natty one tho. Yet.
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Oct 8, 2018 18:54
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Piell posted:I, too, hate people who roll more often do to character build. If you and your table hate the idea of goofy critical failures (or critical failures as a concept just in general, for whatever reason), it should go without saying you're not interested in any method of metering them out. Phrosphor's table seems to enjoy them, only they're happening so often he's running out of tips and tricks for implementing them. My solution, among others presented, reduces how often they happen, but still lets them happen if that's what he and his players want. My table likes them, but I came to the realization (independently) they affect certain classes and character types (typically martials; especially monks) more than others, so this was the solution I came up with.
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Oct 8, 2018 19:35
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Dearest Thread: what's behind that door? [ed]This became a novel. Sorry, I tried to keep it brief but I failed. It's a lot to unpack, but so much of it feels specifically germane, at least to me. :/ This thread is always some grade A brainstorming, and this thing is going to be the jumping off point for the entire campaign, I don't wanna gently caress it up. I have a general idea for the campaign, but I had to do some really heavy ad-hoc story building last time. It worked great! I'm in a position to do pretty much ANYTHING, and there are tons of really exciting hooks centered directly on the players. They want to know more. A little background, in-game and out, to try to set the stage here: The group: It's a small group. Was just two PCs, we have a 3rd with us now, but he's going to be coming and going. Ranger, sorcerer, and the sometimes guy is a cleric. We were running with just the first two, and I just feed them lots of potions. Low-level so far but I'm pretty much going to ensure a level per session since we play pretty sporadically and they like that aspect of the game. The setting: The setting itself is an endless archipelago, goes on literally forever, an actual plane of a world. Lots of maritime stuff, but there's plenty of land to adventure on as needed. It's a low-magic world, to the point that most consider magic at all to be a myth. On its face, it's a pretty low-key world. I have a lot waiting below the surface (sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively) but that will come with time. For instance, even among the secreted away magic users (of which one of our players is a member), actually permanently imbuing objects with magic is a lost art. So things like potions are extremely valuable (but, with the trouble they've already been getting in to, not so rare as one would have imagined.) The characters: Human ranger: an aggressive and somewhat incendiary character. Short tempered, but dangerously devoted once allied. Not yet at the point where he has magic, which works well with the story, because he's only just becoming aware of the stuff at all. His acquisition of ranger magic will be written as a "growing awareness of true potential" type thing. If he hadn't met the sorcerer, he may never have developed those skills. Dragonborn sorcerer: his entire race is practically unknown to the common folk of the world. Forced to travel at night and generally do everything he can to hide himself from the public eye. His people have used their innate powers to hide themselves away from the world, and the world has more or less forgotten about them. Dog cleric: this started as a "Ha ha, wouldn't it be funny if..." thing, but then we realized it actually works super well for our out-of-game needs. Due to a mis-reading of the rules early on, the ranger acquired a dog companion when he oughtn't have. No worries, he hadn't actually gotten to do anything yet, so it turns out it's just a friendly dog that has adopted the party. Cue our third player being able to rejoin us and needing a spot. I offered the dog role, with full character options, and he went with that. The story there is that he was a cleric of a long forgotten god (we went with FR's Fharlanghn as a convenience, but are not at all using anything specific to the FR setting here.) The cleric (human at the time) had been given a sort of "final mission," and was cursed to assume the form of an inconspicuous creature, to carry his knowledge through time in safety. The mechanic here is that when the player can join us, the dog is awakened-plus, and when the player can't, he's just a dog. The dog does not age when he's not awake, nor does the cleric remember anything from those times. It's a sort of Jekyll and Hyde scenario. This is his first conscious moment in over three thousand years of mindless wandering. So he knows very little of the current world, but is a wonderful source of lost knowledge. Key among those being the language of potions, which the players are now starting to figure out, much to their benefit and enjoyment. That will help them get through their cleric-less times, when the dog is just a dog. The story: I'll try to keep this concise: the party, through a series of apparent coincidences, has become embroiled in something apparently much larger than they initially realized. The ranger, originally out for blood on a deal he got entirely shafted on, is now realizing he was intentionally dropped precisely where he needed to be to align his own chain of events with those of there sorcerer and, eventually, the cleric. You might remember me from those two prop trinkets a while back, the sphere and the tile and the map and all that. Well, after five real-life months, they discovered those actually did something, and are now in full pursuit of that topic. It has led to the discovery that the ship captain who stiffed the ranger is actually a) on the run from bigger forces, b) intentionally brought the two original characters together, c) has brought the two character to their current locale and most recent discovery, and d) is MAYBE not actually an evil rear end in a top hat (the ranger has, intentionally or not, gone from "I'm going to straight up murder that motherfucker" to "I have to find him, I just can't promise I won't kill him." As part of this whole series of events, they keep running into a set of symbols. Two they know, one being a blessing and one a curse (water good, fire bad. It goes with the maritime setting.) The cleric, from his own time, knows the symbols well, as representative of fire, water, earth, air, and life. (I refuse to say heart, I don't need no Captain Planet up in here.) These symbols are used to describe the properties of the potions they've found, which means they can now, at least on some level, interpret or guess at the meaning of, even without the cleric (who can read them outright.) But we also know they have a much deeper meaning than that, thanks to the map at least, and damnit, they want to know what! The current situation: while attempting to research the connection between the cleric, his knowledge of these ancient symbols and magic, and the fact that they found those exact same symbols on this mysterious map, which used key components they both happened to have when they had never before met, they become involved with one of the oldest libraries known. This library, incidentally, used the earth/mountain symbol heavily in its antiquated decorations, something nobody would really notice unless one knew the symbol itself. In the deepest archives, they found a chamber featuring that same symbol, and followed it to the puzzle pictured above. They solved the puzzle, and have unlocked the large metal doors at the end of the corridor. In that process, they also discovered that apparently everyone--everyone, not just the PCs--somehow has some sort of elemental affinity. What that means, they don't yet know, but the puzzle involved using an individual's affinity to trigger an aspect of the puzzle, and so they had to determine all their own affinities through experimentation, and also bring in some people off the street to fill some holes in the list. The ranger is fire, the cleric is earth, and the sorcerer is air. Anyhow, they solved the puzzle, got the key, unlocked the door, and as they finally swing them open--"Okay, it's 1AM, I'm calling it, guys." What's behind the door???
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Oct 8, 2018 22:12
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