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I need a small bit of advice for a game I've just started. It's using CofD and set in a high school. I've done pretty good introducing the character threads I wanted so far (Secret half brother, incommunicado sister turns out fine and in the middle of a big scheme, sabotage of a scholarship) but I'm, in all that set up I kinda forgot to introduce the major short term threat. (No one in Crasterford Lodge read this next bit) An imprisoned earth spirit trying to sink the school I did want the game to have a consistent "5 minutes to midnight" where they're having to deal with threat after threat, but I also don't want it to come out of nowhere in a half assed fashion.
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Jul 5, 2019 21:03
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Farg posted:I'm working on a reward/unique feat for one of my players, who is a arcane trickster rogue with a mark of storm (eberron game) Self-generated advantage is a big boost for a Rogue. What came to mind immediately upon reading is the player using their wind powers to curve a shot, allowing them to ignore half or 3/4 cover like the one bullet point from Sharpshooter. Could be upgraded into ignoring full cover if they can curve it through an unblocked adjacent space.
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Jul 5, 2019 21:30
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OscarDiggs posted:I need a small bit of advice for a game I've just started. It's using CofD and set in a high school. Throw in a new even-shorter-term threat spinning out of one of the character threads (scholarship sabotages had some unexpected spillover and sabotaged a second scholarship, and the would-be recipient is losing his poo poo over it?) while laying the groundwork for the proper short term threat.
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Jul 6, 2019 02:58
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Okay, that may work. Thanks.
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Jul 6, 2019 09:45
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So my players are coming out of Curse of Stradh and while i had no plans to continue with these characters after the campaign was over we suddenly decided we wanted to so here i am  .The bad thing about this is that i didn't really establish a world for them before they went to Barovia so they will be coming back to basically a blank slate. I kinda want them to come back to a world where they know something is off right from the start. How would yall handle this kind of situation? I wanted to do something slightly higher tech so they could use guns and poo poo. I was also thinking since they are all level 10 that it's about time they get their own little castle/keep/fiefdom and have a chance at being semi-important people. Only real problem i see is that they left for Barovia as level 1 nobodies and now come back into this new world as level 10 nobodies.
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Jul 7, 2019 06:51
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Two birds, one stone: they come back and are instantly recognized as the local nobility, shown to their keep, etc. Gives them their headquarters while making them go "uh, wait a second, this isn't our stuff." Obviously you'd have to build pretty heavily from there but it's a start.
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Jul 7, 2019 07:16
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Do an opening session where they appear out of nowhere in a kingdom or town under attack by something they can totally take on, that gives them a reputation boost and have a noble or someone come out of nowhere to challenge them with a title and plot of land on the line or back them since they took care of “blank” problem besieging his lands. Have a tournament happening in the town and let term enter where it was fixed in favor of a local mafia enforcer, and them showing up and winning causes the local organized crime syndicate to attack them. They beat them drive em off, bam instant rep as good guys and another reason to have a patron. Combine these ideas with a few more for a kind of jump cut opening session of them kicking rear end and taking names to establish them in this new world.
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Jul 7, 2019 23:15
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You could have the gate out of Barovia take them to a laboratory in a fortress, where a hobgoblin chief and her wizard minion have just finished casting what they thought was a spell to summon a legion of bloodthirsty demons to fight on their side. What they got was the PCs. They're in a perfect position to decapitate the goblin forces and liberate the fortress they captured (or, equally, to just take control of them themselves, if they fancy it). If they do stop the goblins raiding travellers and restore order, the local lord is willing to grant them ownership of the fortress as a reward.
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Jul 8, 2019 08:14
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Yeah, think 10th level adventures, they should be deciding the fate of kingdoms at this point.
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Jul 8, 2019 08:35
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Seconding the advice of "go big." Have them come back quite literally in the middle of a battle and turn the tide, or otherwise save the day. Throw them into the deep end right from the get-go, don't give them time to notice that the setting is still sketchy; by the time they've caught their breath, you'll have it fleshed out.
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Jul 8, 2019 09:29
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I’ve got a guy in my 5e group who has made a forge cleric with an AC of 22 at level five. Melee monsters that would tear the rest of the party to shreds can barely touch him. What are some good ways to ruin his day since he has the worst Dex and Int scores you could ask for?
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Jul 8, 2019 19:44
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fat bossy gerbil posted:I’ve got a guy in my 5e group who has made a forge cleric with an AC of 22 at level five. Melee monsters that would tear the rest of the party to shreds can barely touch him. What are some good ways to ruin his day since he has the worst Dex and Int scores you could ask for? Anything that forces a saving throw?
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Jul 8, 2019 19:47
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fat bossy gerbil posted:I’ve got a guy in my 5e group who has made a forge cleric with an AC of 22 at level five. Melee monsters that would tear the rest of the party to shreds can barely touch him. What are some good ways to ruin his day since he has the worst Dex and Int scores you could ask for?
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Jul 8, 2019 19:54
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fat bossy gerbil posted:I’ve got a guy in my 5e group who has made a forge cleric with an AC of 22 at level five. Melee monsters that would tear the rest of the party to shreds can barely touch him. What are some good ways to ruin his day since he has the worst Dex and Int scores you could ask for? Any spell that forces any save. Enemies that help each other with advantage or adding to the attack roll. Throw boulders at him to dodge. Just don't keep throwing random melee mosnters at him (unless you want him to do something crazy like making him feel like a badass wading through waves of minions before a boss that forces a save and knocks him on his rear end).
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Jul 8, 2019 20:10
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fat bossy gerbil posted:I’ve got a guy in my 5e group who has made a forge cleric with an AC of 22 at level five. Melee monsters that would tear the rest of the party to shreds can barely touch him. What are some good ways to ruin his day since he has the worst Dex and Int scores you could ask for? Been a while since I played 5e but there are lots and lots of monsters that don't target AC, look for some mages and junk. Don't have the melee monsters target him; there's no need for you to play your monsters poorly in a game where the players are making hardcore min max characters. Our group had a thri kreen duelist and his AC was insane, so I'm sure that GM would empathize with you.
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Jul 8, 2019 20:21
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Charm person
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Jul 8, 2019 20:45
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Heat Metal.
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Jul 8, 2019 21:38
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Make sure the attacking mobs are getting advantage through flanking, knocking him prone (could be an ability that you tack on that causes him to make a save or fall prone), restrained, etc. Giant spiders with web can be brutal once he is immbolizied. Are you throwing things that are a high enough CR at him? Level 5 should be facing some things with a decent to hit, getting some advantage and enough attacks will get some damage to stick. Cool to take him down a peg, but make sure you aren't crushing his gimmick constantly - he obviously designed his dude to serve that purpose.
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Jul 9, 2019 16:05
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fat bossy gerbil posted:I’ve got a guy in my 5e group who has made a forge cleric with an AC of 22 at level five. Melee monsters that would tear the rest of the party to shreds can barely touch him. What are some good ways to ruin his day since he has the worst Dex and Int scores you could ask for? He's designed his character to be unhittable and untakedownable -- so don't try to do that. Instead, throw combat encounters at the party where the enemies are trying to do things other than kill him. Maybe they're grabbing innocents and running off with them, or flooding the area he's in with water, or sniping at his teammates from afar in positions he'll have a hard time reaching in his armour. Or they're using pit traps to separate him from the weaker members of the party, so he can't properly protect them.
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Jul 9, 2019 18:32
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sebmojo posted:Charm person My last campaign there was a min/max'ed barbarian who was murder hobo-y and we turned a major combat encounter he almost rolled lucky through into a huge RP encouter via Charming.
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Jul 9, 2019 18:44
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I despise the dynamic of "okay you, the GM, have to walk the razor's edge between countering your players enough to challenge them, but not countering them so much that their build decisions are negated." It's something you kind of have to do in badly-designed systems, but a better game wouldn't be so reliant on hard counters in the first place. Hard counter systems de-emphasize tactical decisions and emphasize build decisions, which is extremely counter-productive in a genre where most of your play time is going to be in tactical combat, making moment-to-moment decisions.
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Jul 9, 2019 18:46
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I despise the dynamic of "okay you, the GM, have to walk the razor's edge between countering your players enough to challenge them, but not countering them so much that their build decisions are negated." I think this depends on the players a lot too. Clearly someone who si going to try to make a ridiculously OP/unkillable build needs to be "countered", because power gamers can bring down a whole table. Push them to make more balanced characters and think through their actions a little more than just doing the thing that cheeses most of 5e's monsters. My party right now is druid, ranger/cleric multiclass, wizard, and rogue. Not one of them is optimized to do a drat thing, but they find some really creative solutions to problems sometimes and I tune the combat difficulty accordingly. Far better than the last time they all took optimized builds and blew through everything that wasn't a gimmick.
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Jul 9, 2019 18:53
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Nephzinho posted:I think this depends on the players a lot too. Clearly someone who si going to try to make a ridiculously OP/unkillable build needs to be "countered" Why?
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Jul 9, 2019 18:54
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Nephzinho posted:I think this depends on the players a lot too. Clearly someone who si going to try to make a ridiculously OP/unkillable build needs to be "countered", because power gamers can bring down a whole table. Push them to make more balanced characters and think through their actions a little more than just doing the thing that cheeses most of 5e's monsters. I don't want to "push them to make more balanced characters," because that's bullshit. I want a game robust enough that they can push the game to its limits (and I can pick whatever monsters I want, using an objectively-defined budget for the encounter) and within a certain margin of error, it just works.
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Jul 9, 2019 18:55
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admanb posted:Why? Because there are other people playing at the table, too.
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Jul 9, 2019 18:56
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So, is the party not in agreement about making min maxed PCs?
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Jul 9, 2019 19:22
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AC is one of the least effective means of defense that PCs have in 5e. So many monsters and spells require DEX, INT, or WIS saves, and even successful saves often confer half damage rather than just negating the spell. That said, if your player isn't being an rear end in a top hat about his 22 AC, don't be an rear end in a top hat and blow up his character. So he's tanky, let him be cool and absorb the blows from whatever monster the team is facing, so that the rest of the party can complete an objective or something.
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Jul 9, 2019 19:31
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If there's one thing that sounds less fun than a player optimizing their character, it's the GM optimizing every encounter to counter that character.
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Jul 9, 2019 19:55
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Designing every encounter to be a hard counter to a player's schtick is sucky and bad, but my reading of the original request wasn't that, it was "this player's build means that none of my encounters challenge him, how can I overcome this?" Switching up encounters so that they showcase a downside of a character's build is fine so long as you mix it up with encounters deliberately designed to make them look awesome (and to share spotlight time with other members of the party, naturally)
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Jul 9, 2019 20:58
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Whybird posted:Designing every encounter to be a hard counter to a player's schtick is sucky and bad, but my reading of the original request wasn't that, it was "this player's build means that none of my encounters challenge him, how can I overcome this?" Switching up encounters so that they showcase a downside of a character's build is fine so long as you mix it up with encounters deliberately designed to make them look awesome (and to share spotlight time with other members of the party, naturally) Oh it was totally just a few encounters to try to check the player from being total ham during a casual campaign. The current one is going much much smoother. With the AC character I would probably give them a set piece of wading through dozens of little bastards who can't even touch them, maybe some kind of hallway/elevator fight -- but there would also be fights where they just got grappled over and over while poo poo was fired at everyone else. admanb posted:Why? I run a casual/RP heavy table and try to encourage people to play something that is fun and not worry too much about "will I be effective in combat". If you don't care about and have a table full of people who are into it, go nuts.
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Jul 9, 2019 21:20
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Nephzinho posted:I run a casual/RP heavy table and try to encourage people to play something that is fun and not worry too much about "will I be effective in combat". If you don't care about and have a table full of people who are into it, go nuts. So what happens if one player decides they want to be a combat bad-rear end because that's how they picture their PC? Does that negatively affect the players who are more into the RP part of the game anyways? I don't mean this as an attack -- I just find it interesting when even RP/narrative focused games get concerned about balance. It feels like a relic of patterns of play they're no longer concerned with.
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Jul 9, 2019 21:27
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admanb posted:So what happens if one player decides they want to be a combat bad-rear end because that's how they picture their PC? Does that negatively affect the players who are more into the RP part of the game anyways? We currently are running a very episodic campaign that varies between role play heavy and combat heavy segments so everyone gets their preferred time. Our current combat-badass player is a tiefling son of a demon who was prophesized to bring about the end of the world, but ran away to be a pastry chef. He is very good at lighting things on fire when the need arises but is driven by his loyalty to his mentor in the kitchen to not burn everything down after going murder hobo early in the campaign and getting their shop boycotted and run out of town. So he and his restraint are baked into the character, and whenever a fight breaks out he gets to shine. Really when I think about doing min/max gameplay, I just wonder why you would play DND instead of something else. And if they really want to go down that road, I'll just do a level 11ish one shot and advise people to go nuts with whatever bullshit they want, knowing that they're going to face (beatable) bullshit.
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Jul 9, 2019 21:37
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Take care of suggesting people use flanking for enemies. You open yourself up to letting the players getting to do it as well. Or as I often do, especially with the rogue who either seems confused about how sneak attack works or is just trying to be clever to fish for advantage. "The moment I let you all use flanking rules, I begin using flanking rules."
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Jul 9, 2019 23:01
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admanb posted:So what happens if one player decides they want to be a combat bad-rear end because that's how they picture their PC? Does that negatively affect the players who are more into the RP part of the game anyways? In my experience, when one player decides "I want to be the combat badass and I will ruthlessly optimize my character to get there" and the rest of the players are less optimized and more RP-oriented, it leads to combat encounters being incredibly unengaging for the non-optimized players, because they all get an air of "eh, whatever, it's just gonna be another combat where I sit back and watch The Amazing Combat God wipe the floor with the enemies. Maybe on my turn I'll get to toss in some chip damage, oooo." So those players check out of combat and try to steer the game towards RP-heavy scenarios where maybe Ithey get a chance to get a little bit of the spotlight - and given that the ruthlessly optimized guy has probably built his character such that he's less useful in non-combat situations, that means now he's going to be bored, waiting for moments when maybe all this talking poo poo will be done and he can go back to hitting people, which is where he gets to shine. A really good GM can balance things out so that everyone has a chance in the spotlight, but that isn't an easy thing to do sometimes, you know? Especially when one person is seriously optimized to the point where the GM is having trouble challenging them in a combat without wiping out the rest of the party as collateral damage. It's a hard line to walk!
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Jul 9, 2019 23:34
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Character progression currencies shouldn't be split between mutually incompatible modes. If your game radically separates combat and non-combat mechanics into two different modes / silos, it shouldn't even be possible to make a "combat specialist," especially not at the cost of non-combat abilities. It's the Shadowrun Hacking problem all over again.
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Jul 9, 2019 23:37
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Character progression currencies shouldn't be split between mutually incompatible modes. If your game radically separates combat and non-combat mechanics into two different modes / silos, it shouldn't even be possible to make a "combat specialist," especially not at the cost of non-combat abilities. Sort of, if Shadowrun Hacking usually entailed bringing all the non-hackers along where the adventure tended to expect them to be useful and they found they really weren't.
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Jul 9, 2019 23:46
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I try my best not to metagame against my players and hard-counter a character. It sucks when this happens. I made a dude to kill poo poo with a bow and I keep getting forced into swordfights! I got an armored fighter and everything in the adventure uses psychic attacks! Haha, wizard, you've come to Magic Immunityville! GOTCHA! This is, IMO, abuse of your god powers. But it's also no fun to just watch some loving dwarven berserker constantly berserking. I am lucky enough have a really tight group who are interested in storytelling so when I'm making up an adventure for them I oftentimes use what I call the "Spotlight/Darkspot" technique. This boils down to giving each PC a specific challenge in the adventure that lets them shine at what they are good at and a challenge that, er, doesn't. Bad-rear end bear totem barbarian coming to civilization? You're absolutely getting a setpiece where you kick a gang of local toughs up and down the street while their attacks bounce off you. BUT You're also going to need to make a CHA check to keep the city's lord from locking all of you up after brawling through the town. Playing a diplomat? You're absolutely going to get a chance to persuade the lord to hire your party! BUT You're also going to have to fight something by yourself. A lot of times I'll start adventure design with this in mind and make up a Spotlight/Darkspot for each character and then build around those. I also have a general rule that a failure in their Spotlight moment can potentially be deadly but a failure in the Darkspot should introduce serious complications that MAY LEAD to death. For example, I'd never give that barbarian a Darkspot where if he failed the CHA check the lord had them killed on the spot. That's just loving with your players. Instead they'll be imprisoned (complication) and how they get OUT of that complication could kill them if it's clumsy or stupid or super unlucky. The weakness of otherwise strong people is a great source of stories, adventure, and roleplaying tension. Ask, say, Saruman. But you need to give them those moments of strength to contrast with that weakness. This, of course, works best if your players understand that sometimes, Losing Is Fun.
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Jul 10, 2019 05:24
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JonathonSpectre posted:This, of course, works best if your players understand that sometimes, Losing Is Fun. The shame is that if you're a dipshit GM, failure means a game over screen, not fun. In that case, players will fight tooth and nail to never get "Darkspotted," and to always act like goal-optimization robots instead of roleplaying PCs with strengths and flaws. It's hard to gain back the trust of players where failure might be okay, when you've previously broadcast that it's not.
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Jul 10, 2019 05:35
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Have them bring Barovia with them. Killing Strahd causes the pocket dimension to collapse, and the whole place smashes into their home plane. Gives them a kingdom that they've "earned" a bit more, and all sorts of fun shenanigans about a new kingdom that suddenly springs into existence
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Jul 10, 2019 09:43
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Have them bring Barovia with them. Killing Strahd causes the pocket dimension to collapse, and the whole place smashes into their home plane. Gives them a kingdom that they've "earned" a bit more, and all sorts of fun shenanigans about a new kingdom that suddenly springs into existence
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Jul 10, 2019 10:21
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