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mango sentinel posted:One of the most iconic monsters in the game and an incredibly key spell for reigning in the most powerful classes in the game. One is a an 8th level spell, the other is a fairly high level monster that will usually be the focus of a plotline or boss of a dungeon. So yeah pretty rare. Conspiratiorist posted:My experience vs Beholders as a kickass paladin has been to force them to keep the anti-magic cone on me while my party does the killing, because otherwise I'd immediately turn it into sashimi - you're on an strictly melee class vs a flying monster that can shut down all means of reaching it short of growing non-magical wings, so that's the best you can hope for, really. A paladin in my group did some pretty good Beholder killing, using his innate misty step once he was out of the cone to teleport on top of the beholder and force it down while savaging it.
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Jan 18, 2019 11:14
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ILL Machina posted:Can we please call them Gaussian distributions to further alternate the non-mathed. It's not gaussian. It's discrete and tends towards a triangle
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Jan 18, 2019 11:23
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I've been experimenting with using extra Downtime days as a reward for things in my game. The usual stuff: solving a problem creatively, good role-playing, doing or saying something that amuses me We aren't very far into the campaign yet, but so far, it seems like a decent idea. I'm using milestones, so I can't give out bonus xp, and the inspiration die seemed underwhelming to me, so this seemed like a better, more tangible way to encourage my players.
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Jan 18, 2019 13:35
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mango sentinel posted:One of the most iconic monsters in the game and an incredibly key spell for reigning in the most powerful classes in the game. I mean one of these requires at least a 15th-level character (which is the high-end level of all but one of the published adventures) and one requires a CR 13/14 monster, so... yes? Gauntlets of ogre power are only an uncommon magic item which means you could have them pretty early. That's a lot of levels of not getting messed up by antimagic fields.
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Jan 18, 2019 13:59
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I'm assuming that your players aren't going to talk about it OOC and come to an agreement about a narrative that works for everyone, and that there's no twist you could put on the situation to make them all pull in the same direction right at the end? That post might have been a bit like summarizing the last season of GoT then asking what Jon Snow should do - to someone who has never seen the show. Long campaigns get pretty drat convoluted. Oh well, writing it out at least let me solidify some ideas. I would like the finale to be a bit drawn out. I'm thinking the big ritual will be maybe 3 rounds where the players secretly bid on narrative outcomes, then I narrate the results per round and they react next bidding round. I don't want open PvP at this point and a kumbaya agreement isn't likely either, but if it happens organically that's ok. I might make a little sheet of unique options for each player with a section to write in whatever.
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Jan 18, 2019 14:04
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ritorix posted:That post might have been a bit like summarizing the last season of GoT then asking what Jon Snow should do - to someone who has never seen the show. Long campaigns get pretty drat convoluted. Oh well, writing it out at least let me solidify some ideas. I’m glad you wrote it out because that campaign sounds awesome. I’ve never run one to 20 before and it’s cool thinking about really epic advancement options.
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Jan 18, 2019 14:40
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My Monster Manual has lovely binding but it looks like Wizards is replacing it without me sending it back  I guess they had enough reports of hosed up binding that they no longer want to inspect the book for user error??? CJ posted:It's not gaussian. It's discrete and tends towards a triangle You're right, the distribution of 2d is a triangle. But adding dice (independent random variables) causes the distribution to trend towards a normal distribution as per the central limit theorem so you can at least say that much. So obviously the solution is to add more dice and to make attack rolls 3d6 or 4d6-4 or some bullshit to get that nice bell curve shape
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Jan 18, 2019 16:09
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I'd imagine my party will probably die before hitting content like Beholders. We have me, a Paladin who likes to hit things with a hammer but who will probably end up healing a bunch for reasons that will soon be apparent, a Monk, a Fighter who uses a rapier, a Bard, and a Ranger. Our DM is also not throwing his punches at all -which we are all on board with 0 and we have come very close to having the party wiped out in each of our two sessions thus far.
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Jan 18, 2019 17:11
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Pendent posted:I'd imagine my party will probably die before hitting content like Beholders. We have me, a Paladin who likes to hit things with a hammer but who will probably end up healing a bunch for reasons that will soon be apparent, a Monk, a Fighter who uses a rapier, a Bard, and a Ranger. Our DM is also not throwing his punches at all -which we are all on board with 0 and we have come very close to having the party wiped out in each of our two sessions thus far. Considering that the best form of healing is less keeping someone from going down, and more healing them a little bit once they do, you should be fine to be honest. Sometimes you don't even bother getting someone up, unless you're looking for a retreat. As for WotC and books, they've always been really good about replacing them.
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Jan 18, 2019 18:08
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CJ posted:It's not gaussian. It's discrete and tends towards a triangle Wow, you're right, and I've been solidly math burned. Poisson, then, trending towards the middle? Or binomial?
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Jan 18, 2019 21:17
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Glory to Italia!
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ILL Machina posted:Wow, you're right, and I've been solidly math burned. Poisson, then, trending towards the middle? Or binomial? Poisson is the probability of a number of events occurring in a fixed interval if the interval between events is exponential. Binomial is the number of successes for a fixed number of samples with a fixed rate of success. Intuitively i think it would end up looking binomial as you added dice, but with 2 dice i think the formula for a given result is something like (sides - modulo(result - sides - 1)) / (sides ^ 2)
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Jan 18, 2019 22:06
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CJ posted:Intuitively i think it would end up looking binomial as you added dice it does, as a consequence of the central limit theorem - adding up a bunch of independent probability distributions trends towards a normal distribution/"bell curve" for continuous functions or the binomial distribution for discrete functions. (the binomial distribution is itself a result of the CLT because you're adding up the results of a bunch of Bernoulli trials) In fact it doesn't even matter what the dice are; here's "sum 1d4 + 1d6 + 1d8 + 1d10 + 1d12 + 1d20" in Troll: 
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Jan 18, 2019 22:21
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Conspiratiorist posted:Half-attribute feats aren't going to be worthwhile here since you don't have stats to round up, nor is Resilient (Constitution) a must-have if you're going Ancients, so the only feat I can truly recommend here is Polearm Master, which would very significantly boost your offense while wielding a Glaive/Halberd or Spear/Quarterstaff. Other than that, just max your Strength followed by your Charisma.
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Jan 18, 2019 23:25
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Bhodi posted:Great weapon fighting comes out statistically better than an ASI with a two handed maul or greatsword, being able to re-roll those 1s and 2s really adds up and in the midgame you're generally going to be hitting monster's AC, so the +1 to hit is less important. If your DM will let you re-roll 1s on your smite dice, it's even better (technically disallowed from comments in sage advice, not because it's unbalanced but because it "bogs the game down") GWF is not a feat.
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Jan 18, 2019 23:34
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Yeah oops, nvm, made a variant human paladin earlier this week and mixed up the types
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Jan 18, 2019 23:49
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Toshimo posted:GWF is not a feat. No, but there is that Vicious somethingorother feat that is fairly similar.
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Jan 18, 2019 23:50
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the_steve posted:No, but there is that Vicious somethingorother feat that is fairly similar. Savage attacker, it lets you roll weapon damage twice, but it's OPT and 100% limited to just the weapon's base damage, so it's almost always worse than an ASI.
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Jan 18, 2019 23:56
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Pendent posted:I'd imagine my party will probably die before hitting content like Beholders. We have me, a Paladin who likes to hit things with a hammer but who will probably end up healing a bunch for reasons that will soon be apparent, a Monk, a Fighter who uses a rapier, a Bard, and a Ranger. Our DM is also not throwing his punches at all -which we are all on board with 0 and we have come very close to having the party wiped out in each of our two sessions thus far. Bard gets Healing Word, Ranger gets Goodberry and Healing Spirit. A Paladin shouldn't be wasting their actions in combat healing unless it's to save someone on the verge of failing their last death saving throws, or as previously mentioned, precursor to a full retreat.
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Jan 19, 2019 00:25
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Standard action healing in RPGs is a trap, unless you can heal for more than an entire round's worth of damage. Especially in 5E where there's no negative HP and the d4 of healing word will pick up someone who's down no matter how hard they got hit. Healing between fights and between days is so easy that only that last HP really matters.
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Jan 19, 2019 01:27
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I’ve been less concerned with healing in the middle of combat and more concerned with using all my spell slots on patching people up between fights. That should be less of an issue if the bard and ranger will have some ability to help sustain though. Do you think I can get away with not having Cure Wounds prepared and just using lay on hands to take the edge off between short rests given the party comp and the fact that we’re level 2?
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Jan 19, 2019 02:50
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Levels 1-3 are absolutely brutal due to the swingy damage/HP values and not having options. Keep 5 hp of LoH around to cure Poisoned or bring back people (using only 1 HP per) and the rest for general patching up. The Ranger has much better healing than you with Goodberries, though (10 hp flat per 1st level spell slot). A better use of your spell slots is mitigating damage by way of Shield of Faith, Protection from Evil, Bless to boost everyone's fighting prowess (the faster the baddies die, the less damage they can deal back to you). Also, save your smites for when you crit or to secure kills that deny enemy turns. At level 5 you should have all the sustain in the world with Healing Spirit, and in the case of a Lore Bard, at 6 they can steal either that or Aura of Vitality.
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Jan 19, 2019 03:29
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I'm going to the CritRole live show and Q/A with my wife tomorrow. Anyone have any pressing questions for D&D celebrities?
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Jan 19, 2019 04:10
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What is their best “Taako” story? Ie: Which character (I’m thinking PC but this could work for NPCS) did they give a goofy name to only to be the most important character in the campain / arc?
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Jan 19, 2019 07:21
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In episode 34 of campaign 2 why did Travis not add his hex damage to one of his attacks?
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Jan 19, 2019 09:52
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CJ posted:In episode 34 of campaign 2 why did Travis not add his hex damage to one of his attacks? He fjorgot.
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Jan 19, 2019 16:27
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ConanThe3rd posted:What is their best “Taako” story? Ie: Which character (I’m thinking PC but this could work for NPCS) did they give a goofy name to only to be the most important character in the campain / arc? I think Orly Skiffback falls into that slot. I've heard matt say he wasn't supposed to be so pivotal when he wrote him up. The Travis question was funny too, but I think I'm going to just ask them to say hi to my wife from the stage.
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Jan 19, 2019 22:15
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I meant ask something but there were a bunch of much better questions and I never got a chance. Hold out for the vod in February, hopefully it'll have the Q&A. Ashley Johnson IS here today.
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Jan 20, 2019 05:44
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So until recently my experience of d&d was mostly through the infinity engine games (2e and 3e based) which I enjoyed but also at times was frustrated with since there seemed to be all these annoying restrictions on character creation. X class/race can’t be combined with Y class race also you can’t use swords for some reason if you z etc etc. Most of the group I play with has had a similar experience with d&d along with a lot of “I rape the elf lol” type horror stories. This lead us to abandon the system years/decades ago or to never actually play it tabletop (me). Now I’m running a game of AiME mostly because we wanted to play a middle earth game and attract new players to our group. I pointed out that AiME probably would get new players because we could sell it as “dnd but middle earth” while The One Ring (what AiME is based on) is asking people to learn a new thing they have never heard of. This is how I ended up dming for the first time because I was challenged “if you like that idea so much you dm it!” AiME has gotten me flipping through the players handbook a bit and I’m finding that a most if not all of the stuff I didn’t like is gone. Describing this to my friends I’ve come to realize our knowledge of what d&d is, is very dated. Now I’m trying to sell them on running Curse of Strahd and Im wondering if there’s a nice chart or short article describing the differences between 2/3e and 5e (none of us ever messed with 4e)?
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Jan 20, 2019 14:21
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Curse of strahd is really really hard to dm and ours is pulling his hair out over it. It's a sort of hub based thing so players can go places in any order so you have to scale encounters up or down on the fly as necessary. Some (looking at you, bonegrinder) are scaled way too high for when the pcs are likely to encounter them and you will absolutely TPK if you play it straight. There are a million different characters and one innocuous convo question has him flipping back and forth in the book; not only is it not well organized but nothing has in-line stat blocks so you have to, for every session, reference the monsters section and gen the blocks yourself for what you think they might be facing. It's so bad that you can also buy a companion book which does some of this work for you, but he says it's still a gigantic chore. It's basically the opposite of a module - it's basically a campaign book.
Bhodi fucked around with this message at 15:32 on Jan 20, 2019 |
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Jan 20, 2019 15:30
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Ah that’s good to know in advance. It won’t be me running it but a veteran DM who’s used to running free form naraitive based games (herding cats). I was wondering if I need the DM guide if we are just running from an adventure book. It looks like a bunch of unneeded stuff because we’re not new to RPGs just D&D from this century.
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Jan 20, 2019 16:25
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Dndbeyond's hyperlinking for monster block and spell lookups is sooooo nice that I honestly can't imagine playing without it.
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Jan 20, 2019 21:15
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Also the critrole show last night was fuckin nuts. I met a bunch of nice nerds, too. Didn't get the mic during the Q&A, but I'm glad I didn't, everyone else had much better questions than I did. A++ would liveshow again, despite it being five hours and ending at 2am.
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Jan 20, 2019 21:19
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Numlock posted:Ah that’s good to know in advance. It won’t be me running it but a veteran DM who’s used to running free form naraitive based games (herding cats). It depends on if you want to run 5e RAW or a portmanteau of 5e and your DMs recollection of 3.X. Which isn't a slam against y'all. Even tables that know all the 5e rules by heart wind up cutting in various rules from their edition of choice. Whether or not the design holes are genius intentional grayspace or Mearls and Crawford just showing up for a paycheck is a fight that makes people in this thread big mad.
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Jan 20, 2019 21:33
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Bhodi posted:Curse of strahd is really really hard to dm and ours is pulling his hair out over it. It's a sort of hub based thing so players can go places in any order so you have to scale encounters up or down on the fly as necessary. Some (looking at you, bonegrinder) are scaled way too high for when the pcs are likely to encounter them and you will absolutely TPK if you play it straight. There are a million different characters and one innocuous convo question has him flipping back and forth in the book; not only is it not well organized but nothing has in-line stat blocks so you have to, for every session, reference the monsters section and gen the blocks yourself for what you think they might be facing. It's so bad that you can also buy a companion book which does some of this work for you, but he says it's still a gigantic chore. It's basically the opposite of a module - it's basically a campaign book. lol you don't scale CoS encounters, you're meant to either run away or get dunked on if you bite more than you can chew. The Bonegrinder is an excellent example: the Hags are explicitly described to avoid combat for all but direct confrontation, and if they do fight, they do so with the aim of taking prisoners for their own twisted ends. Know why this is? Because the Bonegrinder is intentionally set up as an encounter PCs fresh off Barovia Village just cannot beat by fighting. You're indeed correct that it's a campaign book rather than a classic A-to-B-to-C module, though.
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Jan 20, 2019 21:56
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ILL Machina posted:Dndbeyond's hyperlinking for monster block and spell lookups is sooooo nice that I honestly can't imagine playing without it. It's a godsend for a newbie.
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Jan 20, 2019 21:56
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Numlock posted:So until recently my experience of d&d was mostly through the infinity engine games (2e and 3e based) which I enjoyed but also at times was frustrated with since there seemed to be all these annoying restrictions on character creation. X class/race can’t be combined with Y class race also you can’t use swords for some reason if you z etc etc. I don't have a nice chart or short article, but as someone who did every edition but 4th, here's what I'd consider a basic breakdown of the differences between 2e and 5e: (2e) No more class/race restrictions. Gnome paladins, fine. Half-orc wizards, fine. (3e) PHB Races no longer get penalties to their stats, so your gnome paladin doesn't need to deal with a permanent -2 strength penalty on top of missing out on a +2 from being a dwarf instead. It's basically impossible to make a character that's unplayable unless you try, and the gap between an RP-focused character and a Min-maxed character is now much much smaller. (3e) No more prestige classes encouraging you to follow a very specific build to unlock some cool abilities, replaced by subclasses that everyone picks at levels 1-3. (2e) Weapons are now basically split into simple and martial, and as a general rule the way it works is if you're a martial class or a mountain dwarf you get to use martial weapons (including swords if you're a cleric, for example). Probably the only time you'll run into a weapon restriction for a weapon you'd reasonably want to use is if you want to make a (non-dwarven) wizard or sorcerer with a sword like Gandalf, but your DM wouldn't break anything by just letting your wizard be proficient in whatever weapon. (2e) No more dumb tables for saves and THAC0s. Roll dice, add your modifier, succeed if you equal or beat target, that's how all rolls work now. Need to save vs a spell? The stat block the DM is looking at will say "spell save DC: 14" and if your roll plus the bonus to that save on your sheet is 14 or better you pass. And related to this... (3e) the similar system in 3e was clouded by an endless parade of modifiers, plus this, minus that etc. With a few exceptions, all that is replaced by advantage and disadvantage. If the circumstances favour you (DM thinks you did a great job RPing your persuasion attempt, say) roll two dice and use the highest. If circumstances are against you (e.g. firing a bow at long range), roll two and use the lowest. (2e) Spell casting now works with slots, if you're a class that prepares spells you still pick the ones you want to use that day, but instead of having to think "hmm I want two mage armors and three burning hands today" you just prepare mage armor, burning hands and whatever else and then have five 1st level slots to spend on your prepped spells in any combination. Other classes just know their spells and don't prep. (3e) Cantrips are now useful, every spell casting class has one or two damage-inducing spells which they can cast as often as they want, so a low-level wizard no longer spends most of the day throwing darts. Non-damaging cantrips can buff your comrades or make for cool RP moments. You'll probably find uses for your cantrips even at higher levels. You can pick up the starter kit for pretty cheap which has basic rules and an included adventure that essentially everyone recommends as the best way to start, with roleplaying, overland exploration, dungeon exploration and combat all rolled up together to showcase the system.
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Jan 20, 2019 22:28
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Thanks, that’s exactly what I wanted.
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Jan 21, 2019 05:04
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Curse of Strahd DM experience post: I'm a new DM... like CoS is the first module that I've DM'd at all, for absolutely new players (I know, probably a bad idea), and yeah, it's been sort of a nightmare, but the supplemental DM's guild resources and the write-ups on reddit have been pretty handy. My players been really good though and seem to be having fun so we keep going! They've acquired two items, dealt with a few story hooks, and recruited Savid to the party (there's only 3 5th level PCs, and he's now their "meat shield".... OK guys!). Just cleared the winery last session, and have a date with Izek in a few days to clear up his .. "living any longer" status. We're playing loose with the rules but learning as we go, but it's been pretty great so far. My wife even guest DM'd (also a new DM... like prepped a few days before the session) when I had to travel, running this thing: https://voidgarlic.files.wordpress.com/1982/07/assault-on-gumdrop-mountain2.pdf after the other two characters ate a dream pastry. They don't know it was the hags having their way with the two chars that'll be referenced when they make it back to Bonegrinder, so that'll be pretty fun! Anyway, RPGs are fun, running D&D is fun, ok thanks g'night
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Jan 21, 2019 06:24
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I'm going to be DMing a game for seven of my friends who have never played any tabletop games and they all really wanted to try Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition. I warned them that seven is a very large party for almost any system, but said I would do my best to make sure they all have a good time. I've decided to run them through Lost Mines of Phandelver and we've already had a "session zero" where I walked them through most of the rules of character creation. I decided to use the house rule of giving them their CON ability score to HP on top of the regular HP, so most of them have between 20 and 24 hp and won't get murdered by goblins 15 minutes into the campaign (knock on wood). Most of them chose race and class combinations that appealed to them without caring about minmaxing, but I at least made sure they had their ability scores in good places (no one with 8-10 CON, no casters with a low score in their casting stat, etc.). I'd like any advice you all have for running large games. I've consulted the internet, for better or worse, and decided on the following: code:
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Jan 21, 2019 22:00
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Use folded index cards to represent the players/monsters for turn order. Put critical stats on the back so you can see them (AC/DC/PP).
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Jan 21, 2019 22:08
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