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My group has expressed that they want to play a pre-written module. I'd like to avoid a mega dungeon crawl, but it seems like all the remaining modules have some really heavy criticisms across the board. Is anyone kind enough to give me brief pitches, pros, and cons for Rise of Tiamat, Storm King's Thunder, Out of the Abyss, and Dragon Heist?
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Mar 1, 2019 18:01
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inthesto posted:My group has expressed that they want to play a pre-written module. I'd like to avoid a mega dungeon crawl, but it seems like all the remaining modules have some really heavy criticisms across the board. The answer is Storm King’s Thunder. Rise of Tiamat is a hobbled mess that requires a good deal of recalibration to make work. Out of the Abyss is basically one big dungeon crawl due to underdark mechanics, sanity systems and drow. Dragon Heist is a big city adventure that’s not actually a heist, and does what Lost Mines did better, only worse. But, hey, you get a property out of it. (This can be done in LMoP with a creative resolution of a populated manor house.) Storm King’s Thunder is a big region-wide airship adventure that’s highly rated. While not the most well written thing ever, it’ll tick all the boxes for your checklists. Big monsters, dungeons, open areas, mystical puzzles, dragons, cultists, airships, notable cities from the books.
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Mar 1, 2019 20:06
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What are the best Rogue archetypes? Working on a Kobold Rogue, melee based. Swashbuckler is neat, though Rakish Audacity isn't quite so good with a Kobold, as I would always want to double up on an enemy to get that sweet sweet Advantage. Charisma to Initiative is nice, as is Fancy Footwork to just waltz away after stabbing something.
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Mar 1, 2019 21:01
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Admiral Joeslop posted:What are the best Rogue archetypes? Working on a Kobold Rogue, melee based. Swashbuckler is neat, though Rakish Audacity isn't quite so good with a Kobold, as I would always want to double up on an enemy to get that sweet sweet Advantage. Charisma to Initiative is nice, as is Fancy Footwork to just waltz away after stabbing something. Thief if you want utility, Swashbuckler if you want to trigger sneak attack if you aren't doubling up, or Arcane Trickster if you want an amazing Mage Hand Ledgermain and some utility through spells. Those are basically the only worthwhile options, otherwise go Bard and don't worry about Sneak Attack damage in exchange for being the best at basically everything else.
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Mar 1, 2019 21:05
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koreban posted:But, hey, you get a property out of it. (This can be done in LMoP with a creative resolution of a populated manor house.) Also the castle. That's what my group ended up flocking to at the end.
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Mar 1, 2019 21:06
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Admiral Joeslop posted:What are the best Rogue archetypes? Working on a Kobold Rogue, melee based. Swashbuckler is neat, though Rakish Audacity isn't quite so good with a Kobold, as I would always want to double up on an enemy to get that sweet sweet Advantage. Charisma to Initiative is nice, as is Fancy Footwork to just waltz away after stabbing something. Arcane Trickster is best because magic. Swashbuckler is okay. If you want to melee it's the best at it after Arcane Trickster. Thief's Fast Hands has some potential for shenanigans. It also gets UMD and an excellent capstone but they come in too late to be relevant for most campaigns (13th and 17th). Scout is so-so; having outdoorsman skills is nice if that's what you're into. The rest are bad, each in their own uniquely terrible way.
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Mar 1, 2019 21:07
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Conspiratiorist posted:Scout is so-so; having outdoorsman skills is nice if that's what you're into. PHB ranger is objectively better than Rogue if you're looking for outdoorsman skills and aren't married to the idea of rolling a fistful of D6s. You'll do more, and more consistent damage, while basically never failing outdoorsy stuff, and also getting spells.
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Mar 1, 2019 21:11
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The character I'm thinking on would fit Swashbuckler but could also be changed to work with Arcane Trickster so I guess that's convenient and now I have to make decisions.
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Mar 1, 2019 21:18
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Admiral Joeslop posted:What are the best Rogue archetypes? Working on a Kobold Rogue, melee based. Swashbuckler is neat, though Rakish Audacity isn't quite so good with a Kobold, as I would always want to double up on an enemy to get that sweet sweet Advantage. Charisma to Initiative is nice, as is Fancy Footwork to just waltz away after stabbing something. Unsurprisingly, Arcane Trickster is the best overall. They get tons of utility and fun options, and even do more damage than most (all?) other Rogue ATs thanks to the SCAG cantrips, which you absolutely want to take at least one of (probably Booming Blade) as a first pick. Spellcasting is a hard class ability to beat, even when the level progression and schools are both limited. Swashbuckler's decent, but aside from your own objection re: Rakish Audacity you should keep in mind that all Rogues have some limited ability to waltz away after stabbing because you can use Cunning Action to Disengage. Thief has some utility for clever players with DMs who love to litter battlefields with interesting doohickies and thingamabobs to interact with like traps and switches; it's great for players who like solving problems in creative, unorthodox ways (using skills and innocuous objects and minor magical items) IF they have a DM who likes to reward and play along. Investigator is pretty neat if you really want to lean into detective stuff and the game is likely to have a lot of non-combat challenges; advantage on Perception and Investigation all the time is pretty invaluable, given that Perception is usually the most frequently called skill in the game. Arcane Trickster is the safe bet if you just want a powerful, fun Rogue without some other specific intention, though. EDIT: beaten all to poo poo but I think that's solid advice so I'm leavin it
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Mar 1, 2019 21:20
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The problem with Inquisitive is that getting advantage on Perception and Investigation at level 9 is rendered almost entirely redundant by getting Reliable Talent two levels later.
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Mar 1, 2019 21:28
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Why is it that Arcane Trickster is the best rogue archetype while EK is the worst for fighter?
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Mar 1, 2019 21:36
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Conspiratiorist posted:The problem with Inquisitive is that getting advantage on Perception and Investigation at level 9 is rendered almost entirely redundant by getting Reliable Talent two levels later. lol I didn't even think about that inthesto posted:Why is it that Arcane Trickster is the best rogue archetype while EK is the worst for fighter? IDK that EK is actually the worst, esp if we're including all the splat ones, but imo it's a function of the schools you get primary access to. Illusion/Enchantment have a lot of synergy with either what a Rogue does in the party (subterfuge, sneaking, social stuff) or in combat (giving you one million ways to get out of trouble or inflict SA damage), while Invocation is mostly just blasting which doesn't solve the Fighter's core problems or make the Fighter better at being a Fighter. Baku fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Mar 1, 2019 |
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Mar 1, 2019 21:41
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inthesto posted:Why is it that Arcane Trickster is the best rogue archetype while EK is the worst for fighter? Short answer: Extra Attack. Long answer: EK isn't the worst for fighter, it's just the absolute best at one very specific thing: humongous AC tank type. Champion is probably the absolute worst Fighter archetype, but that's looking at Fighter the wrong way. Fighters have several very good archetypes that outshine most other melee-centric classes. Battlemaster, Cavalier, Samurai are all very good. Arcane Archer has some distinctive builds that outshine rangers at the thing Rangers do well. EK will get you the highest AC tank possible, plus Absorb Elements for managing elemental damage, but it's finicky and can be countered by a DM who gives enemies even a modicum of intelligent, tactical capabilities.
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Mar 1, 2019 21:44
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inthesto posted:My group has expressed that they want to play a pre-written module. I'd like to avoid a mega dungeon crawl, but it seems like all the remaining modules have some really heavy criticisms across the board. I've been running SKT for a while now. There are a lot of neat set pieces, with some intricate stuff, and then a LOT of travel. Because the whole thing is spread out all over the Sword Coast, it can take a while to get anywhere.. you're basically bouncing from city to city (or other location) doing encounters at each one. This would be cool, if they gave you a few more things to do at each place, but they give you small blurbs for descriptions, so you need to study up on Sword Coast stuff. My guys finally got their airship, tho! That's help speed things up!
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Mar 1, 2019 22:07
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As part of Drive-Thru RPG's GM's Day sale, Kobold Press' Midgard setting book and the 5th Edition core supplement can be purchased for $12 USD. Ordinarily they're $55, so you're saving a lot of money. Midgard is one of my favorite settings, and I wrote an in-depth FATAL & Friends on its Worldbook here.
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Mar 1, 2019 22:29
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Conspiratiorist posted:The problem with Inquisitive is that getting advantage on Perception and Investigation at level 9 is rendered almost entirely redundant by getting Reliable Talent two levels later. Strong disagree. +5 Passive Perception is a big deal. Overall, though, for Rogue subclasses: AT > Swashy > Thief > Assassin > Inquisitive > Scout > Mastermind
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Mar 1, 2019 23:00
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PicklePants posted:I've been running SKT for a while now. More spoilery griping about SKT below: There's no details on what happens if any of the giants succeed on make progress. Each giant group is written as if they're frozen in time, waiting for the PCs. The players noticed and I've done my best to keep them threatening but....you can't give me anything? There are guidelines for the sort of attacks made by the various groups of giants, but nothing on genuine progress towards their goals. The story has them go to an oracle, who sends them on an explicitly useless fetch quest, so they can go back to the oracle and have a set-piece encounter - I had them go to a giant stronghold instead of the fetch quest, so it was okay, but that was a weird choice. Then you go to one of the five strongholds to get an artifact so you can go see the storm giants. There are five full chapters of giant strongholds and the campaign explicitly only calls for one. (I made the fetch quest into another, so they did at least two, but that's yet more wasted pages. I'd have the party do all of them if they were all interesting, but they're....inconsistent.) There was a really tense fight that, had the players lost, would have ended up with the party possessed and their powers/names used by the fire giants to win the struggle and turn on their war machine. There was nothing in the book that even remotely hinted at this possibility, but it's an obvious emergent result of the powers the enemies had. It would have potentially been really cool, but also entirely done wholesale by me. Who makes an rpg book with a 100-foot tall death machine and doesn't even allude to how it works? Why wouldn't you assume the death machine gets turned on at some point? Anyway I'm sure this is rambly and I dunno how helpful it is but there are much better modules out there if you don't need WotC on the cover. My next campaign is going to be a sandbox for sure - no more self-important save the world wankery for me for a good long while.
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Mar 1, 2019 23:06
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Your SKT complaints seem to mirror a lot of my complaints about running Out of the Abyss. All of my players favorite/most memorable parts were things that I added or improvised( This could also just be a symptom of D&D itself) . The demon lords invade the Underdark but you aren't really given a ton of info about what they are doing with their time or what their short-term goals are. The book just assumes you are railroading your players through each chapter and ticking off the boxes.
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Mar 1, 2019 23:21
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koreban posted:Long answer: EK isn't the worst for fighter, it's just the absolute best at one very specific thing: humongous AC tank type. And then you run into the same problem you have with nearly every tank build in D&D outside 4E: in the absence of effective ways to compel enemies to focus on you and make it hard for them to engage allies, giving up offensive bonuses to maximize your personal survivability becomes counterproductive to the goal of "keeping everyone alive". If you absolutely must do that, an actual Abjurer with a dip for armor proficiency and Con as their secondary stat is an extremely tough nut to crack who's way, way better at being a credible battlefield threat and keeping enemies away from their team than an EK.
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Mar 1, 2019 23:39
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Curse of Strahd has a bit of that going on where it mentions Strahd and his spies and servants are supposed to periodically harass the players to test them or learn about them, but leaves it up to the DM to decide when and how that happens. Which suits me just fine, I'm looking forward to running this and coming up with the different ways these things can happen. But if you run it completely straight out of the book with nothing of your own added or improvised, the players will never see Strahd until the final showdown or unless they roll him as an encounter in his castle. It doesn't bother me too much but I don't think any of the official adventures, from what I've seen, just let you run things 100% by the book if that's what you would prefer to do. Even Lost Mines of Phandelver has a few blank spots like Wyvern Tor.
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Mar 1, 2019 23:42
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I'd prefer for the book to contain useful information, and only useful information. I'm actually totally fine with making stuff up and gluing in other modules. There's tons of foreshadowing you gotta do in SKT for it to make any sense from a player perspective but that's more okay with me, if only because I figured out it was necessary in advance - it's not like the book tells you to make sure to mention these things. From an information clarity perspective, I'm actually much more bothered by the reams of extraneous information than what I see as missing. Like if it says at the start, "we're gonna give you concise descriptions to jump start your imagination and only go into detail if it's important", and they actually do that, great! One short line is usually enough for a room in a dungeon, I'd prefer descriptions that are brief and to the point. It's a lot worse to masquerade itself as a book that has lots of detail everywhere, only to omit stuff that really is important. Like how does this rate above "what might happen if the fire giants succeed"? This is me picking a random entry, not cherry picking, there are dozens of entries as banal as this one about places no party is likely to visit. quote:Beliard is a market-moot for local cattle drovers. It surrounds the intersection of the dusty Dessarin Road and the Stone Trail.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:01
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But if the players do go there there's an idea for a sidequest about a Helmed Horror on the loose, possibly with clues to its location on the corpse of the dead innkeeper who tried to get it back. I get that the complaint is that it took up space that more pressing topics could have used, but if they didn't skimp on the important stuff I'd say that entries like that are perfectly fine.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:08
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Okay well you already described it better than they did - I guess you aren't paid per-word to post.  My version that captures the relevant part you describe: quote:Beliard - Cattle village. The inn here was famous for it's non-functioning helmed horror, but it's missing now. So is the innkeeper. FWIW the suggested encounter has nothing to do with the helmed horror and is about hill giants stealing cattle. It's not awful, and if you're focusing on hill giants it's a fine encounter, I don't really have any complaints about it, but there are tons and tons of paragraphs of details throughout that players have no avenue to ever actually learn let alone care about or use.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:15
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No. 1 Apartheid Fan posted:And then you run into the same problem you have with nearly every tank build in D&D outside 4E: in the absence of effective ways to compel enemies to focus on you and make it hard for them to engage allies, giving up offensive bonuses to maximize your personal survivability becomes counterproductive to the goal of "keeping everyone alive". If you absolutely must do that, an actual Abjurer with a dip for armor proficiency and Con as their secondary stat is an extremely tough nut to crack who's way, way better at being a credible battlefield threat and keeping enemies away from their team than an EK. Sure. You're absolutely correct, but if we're talking about a class/archetype analysis it gets *really* wonky as soon as you introduce multiclassing. It's much more useful to describe the capabilities of the class by itself from, say, level 1-8 or 1-10 and discuss the features, strengths, shortcomings, than to permutate every combination of multiclass/archetype interaction they can undergo. As for the EK, reach weapons and sentinel can go a long way toward "keeping everyone alive" and their capabilities are tailored well toward sacrificing the +2 AC from a shield to grant them better PBAoE control. You're definitely very limited by the adventure you're in, whether open world versus enclosed spaces, corridors, dungeons, etc. however, it's a thing that they do well for being a fighter. Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Like how does this rate above "what might happen if the fire giants succeed"? This is me picking a random entry, not cherry picking, there are dozens of entries as banal as this one about places no party is likely to visit. Night Below posted:First, it is not plausible that nothing happens in Now, SKT does a terrible job of bringing this up at the beginning of the book (an error replicated in just about every 5e adventure book, if we're being honest), but it's been a long tradition in the game space that side-adventures and DM flavoring are a part of the experience. If you wanted a step-by-step adventure that has perfectly formulated progression trees that all land you at the final encounter with a varying level of good-ending/bad-ending resolution, there's video games.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:20
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Okay yeah, it's egregious padding when you put it like that. We all know what a little pastoral village looks like and they don't need to spend words on that when they can just get straight to the interesting part. Plus padding in lieu of main plot information is kind of rear end.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:21
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:FWIW the suggested encounter has nothing to do with the helmed horror and is about hill giants stealing cattle. It's not awful, and if you're focusing on hill giants it's a fine encounter, I don't really have any complaints about it, but there are tons and tons of paragraphs of details throughout that players have no avenue to ever actually learn let alone care about or use. What about having the Hill Giants come in and drink up all of the pond water, leaving the villagers with a conundrum of having nowhere to water or bathe their cattle. They're facing the very real possibility of losing their livlihood and their village and having to caravan down towards Triboar or Neverwinter, else lose their livestock. Upside: it's the sort of adventure that just screams for someone with a Decanter of Endless Water to resolve. Now you can take a session to help the village, integrate a magical item that hardly anyone ever plays with, and do a little lore digging: The bones of the inkeep and the helmed horror are found at the bottom of the pond in a sinkhole from which the helmed horror is unable to escape. The innkeep had the key to both his inn, and his heirloom box, containing said Decanter of Endless Water, and it was he who was responsible for keeping the pond filled, as there was a pipe from his inn to the bottom of the sinkhole from which he maintined the pond. Turns out his ancestor had pledged to, I dunno, some Fae creature [insert your mcguffin] that he would ever look after the people of this village and maintain this pond, else the local fae would lose their favorite willow tree that grew near the pond and drank from its supply. The fae respond by granting some small boons to the adventurers and one of the locals must take up the task of keeping the pond filled and running the inn.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:28
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Anyway I'm sure this is rambly and I dunno how helpful it is but there are much better modules out there if you don't need WotC on the cover. My next campaign is going to be a sandbox for sure - no more self-important save the world wankery for me for a good long while. What are some 3rd party modules to look into?
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Mar 2, 2019 00:35
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koreban posted:I can't think of a single adventure book that doesn't do this to a large degree, but I also think that it's absolutely core to the notion of what D&D *is*. I've been reading Night Below for an adventure inspiration in my current campaign and on Page 6, addressing the DM, there's an entire four paragraph section detailing the requirement that the DM account for several flavorful "side-adventures" to fill in periods of time, and allow for NPCs to perform tasks required for the purposes of the adventure. If the fire giants succeeded they definitely weren't getting to the end of the campaign as written in the book and it would have been extremely different and fun and the players would have to rebuild their name. I'd have been 100% happy to just do my own thing from there, but man, a paragraph of text about what the giants are going to try and do would be so much better than what's there. Their motivations are concisely described as "they're gonna rebuild this thing and unleash it on the world", and they got close to doing that, but there's literally nothing about what they'll do when they the machine is turned on, no rules for running it, nothing. Who might they attack? To what end? This is, in fact, one of the *better* defined of the five giant schemes. The cloud giants are "looking for a cache of dragon magic", with no mention of what sort of magic, what it might do, where it is, anything. To advance this plot they...survey the land to make better maps and capture a single random dragon and torture him for information he doesn't have. Like, I guess to summarize, when I say thin, I don't mean "there are blanks to fill in along the way in the campaign", I mean the giant plots that are supposed to be central to the whole campaign are extremely thin and there's no guidance for what they might do if they succeed. Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Mar 2, 2019 |
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Mar 2, 2019 00:46
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Okay, I see what you mean and I got mixed up by the example you gave. A better example of that is Tomb of Annihilation that gave a definitive timeline and consequence for failure to meet that timeline. SKT isn’t as meatgrindy as ToA was. Players are supposed to win. That’s sort of the spirit of the whole endeavor. You’re not wrong to criticize the lack of consequence for failure, but the descriptions are pretty irrelevant because failure of the party generally means that they’ve been killed and the results are inconsequential because “welp, adventure’s over guys.” in my game I had the fire giants “turn on” an adamantine lava dragon construct that required the player with the Ise rune to dive into the heart of the creature to freeze it, destroying what would have otherwise been a “cataclysmic” dragon rampage (literally ripped off from WoW. No one caught on and it worked well.)
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Mar 2, 2019 00:53
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Spoilers for SKT. Yeah. I had the problem with the Giants being kind of stagnant too. The frost giants just kinda do their thing.. It's hard to keep things focused on the hill giants. I think I've just found out a hook to make it seem like the Cloud giants are a threat. The fire giants and their building of the giant machine has kept them interested. My players didn't want to go to Gauntelgrim, so.. I just had the Drow succeed in their mission to get the elemental. The Fire Giants now have a way to power a machine.. the PC's know. Over the next few sessions, I'll have them learn that the parts they've previously recovered have been bought, or stolen and are on their way to the fire giants. But it's mostly been me twisting things, and making connections. They seem to enjoy it though!
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Mar 2, 2019 00:56
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inthesto posted:What are some 3rd party modules to look into? Hot Springs Island is pretty nice. Using it's own language, it's a hex crawl on a powder-keg of an island just waiting for players to provide the spark to make things explode between the local factions. It's written as system neutral but someone has statted up all the creatures for 5e and I can dig that up if you need it. This could totally function as a complete "campaign", moreso than most adventure modules. Anomalous Subsurface Environment I've run a few sessions of as a side game and its been wonderful. It's a post-apocalyptic science fantasy megadungeon where the players uncover a long-buried facility under a mountain. The human inhabitants on the top floor have all died but there are service-and-maintenance automatons fighting each other for parts. Some of them have human bones as replacements for parts of their own that have broken down. It gets weirder from there but yeah. It sounds like you aren't into the megadungeon thing but I can't miss an opportunity to plug this one. It's written for basic dnd so monsters get like, HD, AC, attacks, it'd be some work to convert. Most modules aren't going to be campaign in scope - does your group need the "one story over the whole campaign" thing or do they just want to try some prefab stuff? The following are more like, large-scope adventures than full campaigns. Deep Carbon Observatory - An ancient civilization was rumored to have left its secrets under a lake by a dam, but no one has ever sought those secrets and returned. Now the dam has broken, society in the region has quickly crumbled, and it's now or never unless you want someone else to claim the treasure first. This module has some of the best writing I've ever seen in an rpg product though it's theme is definitely grim/sad, I think you have to want that mood to some degree to run this. (I think it's sincerely grim, that's not code for juvenalia as it would be in some parts of the rpg space) Also uses basic dnd stats. Gardens of Ynn/Stygian Library - I pair these because the same woman wrote both of them and they're very similar in style from a gm perspective. Basically, you find yourself in a strange place, and the DM procedurally generates it using tables included in the book during play. One is a magical garden left untended so it's grown wildly on its own. The other is a library on an otherworldly plane of knowledge. So like, players enter and you roll a starting room, along with some sort of detail and maybe an encounter, and they can keep going deeper and find new locations or connections to old ones, and the table changes as you get deeper. I think these are really cool because something I've found I really like as a DM is when I am genuinely surprised at what happens in game, and so by rolling for what room is next and what's encountered there, I can be surprised too. This sort of table often prompts my imagination way better than a completely blank canvas or a concrete fixed description ever will, because I find out right when it's relevant what's actually there. (You could also pregen these if that's more your taste but I think you'd lose something.) I can keep going if you're interested but that's a lot of words already.
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Mar 2, 2019 01:13
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PicklePants posted:Spoilers for SKT. Haha I read that gauntlegrym encounter and decided it was super lame. The important artifact just happens to be stolen while the players are there??? Pfft. So instead, on a session when not everyone could make it, I did a side game in dungeon world where the players are drow trying to use their iron flask to steal a the titan powering the forge of gauntlegrym. The players succeeded wonderfully. It's a way better encounter from the drow perspective. For cloud giants, Felgolos (or "sparky" as his friends call him) has become a dear friend of the party and I don't think I'll have any trouble convincing them to intervene. Also I made up a bonkers but fixed-in-place artifact that the players found before the giants, and now have to decide whether or not to destroy it. Basically it lets you uncap the range, area, and number of targets of spells while you sit in this scary biomechanical machine that bores into your skull and connects you to a mass of nerve cells along the wall. It works over a 5 mile radius and can affect the major city nearby.
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Mar 2, 2019 01:19
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Honestly only the fire giants have a reasonable chance of completing their goal. The artifact the Frost Giants are looking for is on another continent. And the only means they have of tracking the owner detects the nearest person sharing his blood. Given that owner is immortal and ageless he quite a few blood relatives in the north. The hill giants plan is just stupid (appropriate for them) and is just feeding their leader. The Cloud Giants have no leads on the Cache they are looking for, other then an unlucky dragon they captured, who does not know where it is either. The Stone Giants are being manipulated and think the way to impress the gods is to dismantle the works of the small folk. But while they will cause much death and destruction, they are not neourmous enough to take on a major human settlement.
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Mar 2, 2019 01:24
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Hey, I'm gonna be playing a Circle of the Moon Druid for an upcoming campaign, starting at level 5, and I'm wondering if a 1 level dip in Monk or Barbarian would be worth it. Monk gives me pretty much guaranteed better AC in animal form, Barbarian gives me only slightly more AC in animal form sometimes but some pretty decent buffs in Rage to being an animal if I lose concentration on whatever I cast pre-turning into a wolf. The cost is, obviously, a slight delay in the power curve and the loss of Archdruid but lmao level 20. Another option is getting a few more levels in Barbarian but those are a more significant tradeoff. Getting bear totem would be nice to become even more tough to kill but that's an entire CR delay on my animal forms and I have no idea if it's worth it. Level 2 Barbarian is worth considering too because Reckless Attack is actually fairly nice in beast form and Danger Sense is a pretty solid feature. Can't decide, wondered if people here had some experience with it.
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Mar 2, 2019 01:24
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MonsterEnvy posted:Honestly only the fire giants have a reasonable chance of completing their goal. The artifact the Frost Giants are looking for is on another continent. And the only means they have of tracking the owner detects the nearest person sharing his blood. Given that owner is immortal and ageless he quite a few blood relatives in the north. The hill giants plan is just stupid (appropriate for them) and is just feeding their leader. The Cloud Giants have no leads on the Cache they are looking for, other then an unlucky dragon they captured, who does not know where it is either. The Stone Giants are being manipulated and think the way to impress the gods is to dismantle the works of the small folk. But while they will cause much death and destruction, they are not neourmous enough to take on a major human settlement.
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Mar 2, 2019 01:34
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Well.. the world might be safe, but Giants are still killing massive of people, driving towns into starvation with food disruption, raiding the poo poo out of coastal towns with winter wolves, and destroying stuff.. destroying towns, because their lil' person civilizations. There's a lot of death, and destruction Giants can still do. I guess your fire giants can still unleash a primeval titan on the world, or what's his face with the ring of winter can pop back up suddenly, or rumors of him can pop up? The PCs don't know if it's true or not.
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Mar 2, 2019 01:58
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Toshimo posted:Strong disagree. +5 Passive Perception is a big deal. So this may be better in the GM thread, but since this coming up here I thought I should ask: what exactly are the major weaknesses of the Mastermind? And how can I shore that up as a GM? One thing I can definitely see is that there is little to help them in combat. They have their bonus action Help from a distance to provide someone else advantage (a little less helpful since they benefit the most from advantage), and then at 13 they get Misdirection, which is worded a bit weird so other GMs may not grant it as liberally as I would have. The optional aspect of Insightful Manipulator can be good for RP but the rest of it feels very limited and the capstone is very underwhelming. Am I missing anything? I'm asking because one of my players had very little experience and chose Mastermind (I did recommend other subclasses but this was what interested them). They're a good role player, but I would like to get them working with a bit better tools as they go further (currently level 6, mind you, so there's time before it becomes an issue).
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Mar 2, 2019 04:24
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When choosing a background, if you choose one that gives a skill you're already proficient in, you can choose another skill. Is there a rule that it still has to be from your class list?
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Mar 2, 2019 04:30
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Admiral Joeslop posted:When choosing a background, if you choose one that gives a skill you're already proficient in, you can choose another skill. Is there a rule that it still has to be from your class list? No.
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Mar 2, 2019 05:22
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Trojan Kaiju posted:So this may be better in the GM thread, but since this coming up here I thought I should ask: what exactly are the major weaknesses of the Mastermind? And how can I shore that up as a GM? Yes, you need to offer opportunities to use things like Master of Intrigue to infiltrate enemies, which also allows for Insightful Manipulator. Take the option to add insight into history or personality for the latter. Master of Tactics calls for one of two basic builds: you either use ranged attacks getting Sneak Attack from an ally adjacent to the target, and then use your bonus action to grant that ally advantage, or you use Mobile to step up, attack, step back, and grant an ally advantage. (This is, needless to say, suboptimal much of the time.) Honestly, your best usage is in conjunction with another PC with sneak attack. You can use the advantage to help a paladin crit hunt, I suppose. Misdirection is useful if you have cover from an ally, so note the circumstances where that can occur: the best option is having a high AC ally in a doorway between you and a ranged attacker. It's probably most optimal if you can redirect to an enemy engaging you in melee while another takes ranged attacks at you, so you can make sure that circumstance comes about from time to time. (If you never choose to have enemies in this position, the ability is much less useful.) The capstone is amazing only if a major enemy has mind-reading skills. At this point, you almost need to let the player devise an infiltration plan, abstract its success or run it as a side adventure, and then spring an encounter with the Mastermind in disguise as one of the PCs enemy. (Think Lando in Return of the Jedi.) That's also good in that the Mastermind could take cover behind an enemy who thinks he's an ally and his friends could "shoot" him and have the attack redirected via Misdirection. It takes a very particular kind of campaign to make this all work more than once, but it would be awesome to have one PC infiltrate the enemy organization, be the only survivor of several attacks by the party, and end up the big bad's second-in-command.
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Mar 2, 2019 06:07
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