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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:A couple of problems: Just assume he's using his familiar to scout when necessary, and tell him you've got it covered - don't have the players slow down play by describing how they cautiously approach every alley and hill. Call it the "good TV rule". The times when it's genuinely safe, you (as DM) don't bother with the familiar in the narrative, and the times when it's genuinely unsafe, you have the familiar scout ahead (i.e. you say "as the party approaches the corner, the familiar spots an ambush" or "an arrow flies past the familiar before you reach the corner") and give fair warning. If an enemy would have the means and motive to attack a familiar, let it happen. But like you said, it's not really mechanically a big deal, it just knocks it out for a few fights. The player just doesn't want to walk into a trap or an ambush or get hurt by a gotcha. So don't do gotcha bullshit. Don't have bandits ambush the party. If they get ambushed, make it a narrative consequence of intentional, skilled ambushers and not failing to make an investigation/perception roll every 5 feet.
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Jul 24, 2019 01:24
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:A couple of problems: Number one, talk to your player. Number two, your player put some investment into an information-gathering tool, but nothing says the information has to be complete or accurate. The enemy is camouflaged, or has decoys. Reinforcements arrive that the owl didn't see. Number three, talk to your player. You don't want to be like "you're not allowed to have a cool thing" but at the same time, the owl is changing the way the game works for everyone else at the table. If everyone just wants Final Fantasy Tactics where you get to decide how everyone enters the battle, sure. But if the other players aren't on board, he's limiting the amount of situations that can arise. Kaiser Schnitzel posted:The other is my players are probably about to be involved in a big battle between a fey army, a half orc army, and a human army. They are planning to convince the fey and humans to work together to beat the hobgoblins, and then the PCs will wipe up whoever is left-all the armies are trying to capture the little town that's adopted them. They stand a decent chance of convincing them to work together, but I don't think it will be a long lasting alliance. What are some cool and weird flavor things about a fey army? What, if anything, should I do about mass combat? Totally abstract it, maybe with a few little fights the PCs get into? Give them some mission to hunt down X or stop Y (Any ideas of those missions?) Party of 4 6th lvl PCs. 1) Entirely up to how you want to characterize the fey. If you want to go for the big obvious things, they have far-too-opulent feasts lying around the camp that are basically conscription bait, changeling/stolen soldiers, people from anachronistic eras because they've been stuck with the fey so long. I don't know D&D lore so if there's some specific cultural stuff about the fey, you're on your own there. 2) Are your players commanding troops in battle? Do you need the outcome of the battle to be randomized? If no to either of those, there's no need to have any rules for mass combat, as you can give the players a series of small encounters as their part of the battle. If you want something specific for the PCs to do, give them a target to assassinate or a plot device (weapon, bomb, elite platoon) to stop. For a simpler variant, they have to guard a strategic location, knowing that the opposing army will try to take that location, and send two or three waves of enemies (with some interesting boss-type enemy in the last wave) at them. e: And for the wererat thing, both "everyone's a wererat" and "only one of them was a wererat, dummies" are perfectly fine. Djeser fucked around with this message at 01:33 on Jul 24, 2019 |
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Jul 24, 2019 01:30
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Why is your player's character is the first and only person in the fiction to think of this incredibly easy and obvious, yet game ruiningly OP, use of a first level spell? The PCs have a bird in the air, but the enemy doesn't, and nor do they have active or passive countermeasures? Why not? Or in other words, shoot the bird down! It's an hour to re-cast so use time pressure to prevent that happening. The enemy are under trees, camouflaged, and have one eye on the sky, so the PC's bird goes "nobody there" and then they're ambushed by dudes with twigs on their hats. Make the PCs take measures against the enemy's birds, and have the enemy take similar measures. The player has signaled "aerial recon is a thing", and sure, you could talk to them about not doing that, but you could also give them what they wanted while showing them the downsides. E: And hey, a weird bird circling where it shouldn't be screams "enemy caster here", so it could be more of a "we can see you and you can see us" tradeoff rather than a straight "we're invisible, you're not" thing. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Jul 24, 2019 |
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Jul 24, 2019 01:51
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:A couple of problems: As an aside, I never knew a single player in 2e to take a familiar because of the absurd downsides to losing one. Hell, I think I've seen a grand total of 3 familiars in all of my time playing 3e, and two of those had the player drop after their familiar was shot to death the moment it did anything besides sit on the PC's shoulder.
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Jul 24, 2019 01:54
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Infinite Karma posted:The player just doesn't want to walk into a trap or an ambush or get hurt by a gotcha. So don't do gotcha bullshit. Don't have bandits ambush the party. If they get ambushed, make it a narrative consequence of intentional, skilled ambushers and not failing to make an investigation/perception roll every 5 feet. Djeser posted:Number one, talk to your player. Number two, your player put some investment into an information-gathering tool, but nothing says the information has to be complete or accurate. The enemy is camouflaged, or has decoys. Reinforcements arrive that the owl didn't see. Number three, talk to your player. You don't want to be like "you're not allowed to have a cool thing" but at the same time, the owl is changing the way the game works for everyone else at the table. If everyone just wants Final Fantasy Tactics where you get to decide how everyone enters the battle, sure. But if the other players aren't on board, he's limiting the amount of situations that can arise. Djeser posted:2) Are your players commanding troops in battle? Do you need the outcome of the battle to be randomized? If no to either of those, there's no need to have any rules for mass combat, as you can give the players a series of small encounters as their part of the battle. If you want something specific for the PCs to do, give them a target to assassinate or a plot device (weapon, bomb, elite platoon) to stop. For a simpler variant, they have to guard a strategic location, knowing that the opposing army will try to take that location, and send two or three waves of enemies (with some interesting boss-type enemy in the last wave) at them. I hadn't thought of the fey army being composed of ancient stolen soldiers-that's a great idea. The leader of the fey army is, at least nominally, a servant of the main fey lord the party has been dealing with off and on for a while, and the players immediately started speculating that fey general is trying to rebel against fey lord. I hadn't even thought of that, but I like it. DMing got way easier when I realized you just have to steal the players' own ideas from them.
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Jul 24, 2019 01:55
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At the very least I'd present the players with two or three different things they can do in the battle to influence the outcome. They can choose to A) reinforce the main attack, reducing Army casualties and increasing chance of overall victory. They can choose to B) move to reinforce the town walls which have been left thinly manned in an attempt to send every able bodied man to the front - the enemy army sends a column towards the town, is it a feint or the main effort to flank our Army? C) Attempt X? Leave it up to the players - let them attempt to infiltrate the enemy rear lines and assassinate key leaders, etc etc. You can do a battle for all of the options but that is secondary to the narrative impact they have on the story and the results of them not choosing the other options
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Jul 24, 2019 02:27
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Yawgmoth posted:Your player is sending you some pretty heavy signals here, namely that they don't find the "suspense" of not knowing what's over the hill before going over it to be fun. So don't make the surprise of getting ambushed or being surprised or anything of that sort be the driving source of tension in the game. So the player scouts and sees a huge army or whatever; who cares that they don't get surprised by it? They still have to deal with it, and there's your tension. Don't make the "what is it" the source of drama, make the "how do we deal with it" the big deal. Honestly I'm not even sure how the familiar is "ruining your fun" by scouting; you still get to do a big reveal, you just don't get to play gotcha with surprise encounters anymore (which aren't really fun for the table like 95% of the time anyways). I didn't think of that, but yeah, that too. Or maybe getting the drop on the enemy is super fun for them, in which case let them do it? My Blades in the Dark group always start by sneaking up or ambushing or otherwise surprising the oppo just as the poo poo kicks off, but it's never once gone 100% right for us.
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Jul 24, 2019 02:45
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:I'm not sure how the battle is going to play out at all-it could go anyway and that would be a fun direction for the story. I'm not sure I really need it to be randomized/down to a die roll per se, but I definitely want the PCs actions (or inactions) to determine the outcome. They may choose to sit back and let everyone else fight it out and deal with whoever wins, or they might want to get super involved and take command. I'm trying to be at least a little prepared for those various eventualities. Maybe the only system I need is going 'eeeehh yeah that seems like what would happen considering the circumstances' Here's the secret: prepare a couple encounters for the players. If they want to charge into battle, these encounters are the enemies they encounter on the way. If they want to help out but not on the front lines, these encounters are on their way to the side objective. If they want to sit back, they see some of the enemies trying to take a point that will be strategic. Those encounters are the enemies they face as they go to defend that strategic point. If they don't want to engage at all, those encounters are the enemies that they fight as they wade onto the battlefield after one of the sides has won (whether these are stragglers from the losing side after a pyrrhic victory or war parties from the winning side. Both are valid stories.) Certainly, you can let the PC's actions reflect on the way the battle works without having an actual mechanic for it. If they help out one side, that side does well. If they don't, that side does poorly. What that means in the story is up to you, but I would have a rough plan of how each eventuality would turn out, and alter that based on the players' performance. Generally, you just want them to feel like their choice had weight without being the single deciding factor.
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Jul 24, 2019 05:01
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The blessed page. Smoke em if you got em.
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Jul 24, 2019 06:07
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Glory to Italia!
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I've recently started using some background ambience sounds and it's gone well - my settings are so generic I can always google up a "desert winds" or "dank cave" and find something straight away. However, I'm really struggling with "city on the brink of civil unrest". There's lots of general city ambience, and plenty of riots, but nothing inbetween. I'm looking for general city sounds with a bit more crashing and banging and screaming thrown in, but all of it far off and scattered and fading as quickly as it appears. Can anyone help me with better Youtube search terms, or perhaps point me at a source of sound effects I might not know about?
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Jul 24, 2019 08:02
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"Protest"? Like https://youtu.be/0NJn_Hx6hDY Could you use free audio software (Audacity?) to fade riot sounds in/out of a city soundscape? Or mash a "distant battle" one up with a marketplace one or something? Yeah, effort, but not heaps really. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 08:41 on Jul 24, 2019 |
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Jul 24, 2019 08:37
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Have you tried tabletopaudio.com? It usually does the trick. It's even got a soundpad option where you can put together sounds from its different categories to fade in/out as needed (say, crowd sounds and combat sounds).
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Jul 24, 2019 08:54
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Infinite Karma posted:First of all, familiars were much, much more powerful and survivable in previous editions, compared with the statlines in 5E. But 5E didn't want pets/summons to be viable, so they made familiars very weak, and in return they took away the harsh penalties for them dying. It seems like you are in "stop player from being useful" mode and are kind of pissed off that you can't overwhelm the familiar and make it a non-issue. Why do you care, if all it's doing it ruining your suspense? Suspense is easier to maintain than balance. As someone who played a wizard with a familiar in 5e pretty recently, this is definitely the correct answer.
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Jul 24, 2019 13:22
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:The scout bird always catches me off guard because I have to suddenly figure out what IS within a mile radius of the party and, uh, I don't usually know? If it's genuinely a situation where you don't have any encounters planned, you can just give a pretty broad brush description. 'You can see the road stretches off into the distance through farmland that gradually turns into wild meadows spotted with clumps of trees. It looks like you will reach the forest by about noon. Your owl notices typical wildlife but nothing that should be a threat.' There's a tiny bit of a trust issue here where your player needs to believe you that a non-threatening description can be taken at face value, but hopefully that's not hard to establish. It's ok to not have a detailed map of your entire game world, and probably most of the time your players will be satisfied with a nice version of 'nothing' as an answer to 'what's over the hill'? You can also definitely use this familiar scouting thing to draw attention to locations you *have* planned out. 'The owl flies around, you see the forest stretches out for miles in every direction, like an ocean of green, with the road you're traveling on as the main feature breaking it. You can expect to cross a river in another couple of hours. Probably slightly off the road to the east in your direction of travel, the spire of a ruined church sticks up through the canopy of leaves, a curious thing to find so far from settlements.' In other words, the familiar drone can become your buddy for easily throwing out encounter hooks for them. I'm sure you've thought of this, but although the owl gives some mechanical benefit in 5e, to people and creatures who pay attention to these things, it would be a pretty strange thing to see an owl out in the daylight. I'm not saying kill it all the time, but it would make sense for clever enemies to figure out what it is and get prepared in some fashion.
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Jul 24, 2019 13:52
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Yeah if you don't have anything planned then there isn't anything there other than appropriate scenery. If you do have something planned then the bird sees it. D&D doesn't do huge mass combat dealies at all so I would just have an idea of who is going to win and some smaller combats for the players to get involved with that can turn the tide if they do enough.
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Jul 24, 2019 16:15
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Part of it does depend on how much your players tend to stick to the story and how much they run off on side things. For some groups, if you mention that there's an old mill on the river in the distance, they're 100% going to that mill to check it out. Some will just be focused on getting to Castle Whatthefuck and doing the mission. If it's the former, you just need to learn to be careful about throwing in flavoury details that are intended to be background until you're more comfortable improvising.
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Jul 24, 2019 16:26
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Sanford posted:I've recently started using some background ambience sounds and it's gone well - my settings are so generic I can always google up a "desert winds" or "dank cave" and find something straight away. However, I'm really struggling with "city on the brink of civil unrest". There's lots of general city ambience, and plenty of riots, but nothing inbetween. I'm looking for general city sounds with a bit more crashing and banging and screaming thrown in, but all of it far off and scattered and fading as quickly as it appears. Can anyone help me with better Youtube search terms, or perhaps point me at a source of sound effects I might not know about?
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Jul 24, 2019 18:41
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Please give me all your best ideas for objects that would be funny if a chaos mage randomly summoned them, and could (even remotely) plausibly damage an enemy when dropped on their head. Should not be wildly incongruous with a fantasy setting nor too many actual weapons. So far I've come up with the gamut of cutlery and kitchen tools, a pineapple, and a small but precisely rendered porcelain likeness of the chaos mage.
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Jul 24, 2019 19:19
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A goblin prince. (You can tell he's a prince because he's wearing a shoddily constructed crown.
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Jul 24, 2019 19:29
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Keeshhound posted:A goblin prince. (You can tell he's a prince because
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Jul 24, 2019 19:46
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My Lovely Horse posted:Please give me all your best ideas for objects that would be funny if a chaos mage randomly summoned them, and could (even remotely) plausibly damage an enemy when dropped on their head. Should not be wildly incongruous with a fantasy setting nor too many actual weapons. 10GP worth of copper pieces. An anvil. A dragon's skull. A baby gelatinous cube (which prompty imprints upon the nearest party member and believes they're its mummy.) A bucket of assorted wands, most of which are out of charges and a few of which can have their final charge squeezed out with some effort. A goldfish bowl, complete with fish and tiny castle. A chest of costume jewellery, possibly convincing enough to fool the party. A cloth dummy sewn in a perfect likeness of the setting's archvillain. The toe of a huge, stone statue, about the size of a bowling ball. An anvil. Ten thousand watermelons. An upside-down bucket of tar. A cactus. A beehive. An octopus. A bag of flour. A giant bag of marbles, which then bursts and covers the floor. A glass sphere filled to the brim with butterflies. A 3D scale model of the dungeon that the party are in right now, with notes written on it. A sack of letters, all of them addressed to the nearest king and containing reams of highly inventive abuse.
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Jul 24, 2019 19:49
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A sizable hog (with or without blue ribbon). A ship's wheel. An enormous egg. One of those person-sized chess pieces. Topiary. A stack of dishes, unwashed. A small wheelbarrow. A brass door knocker, with or without grotesque face. The giant grub of a giant insect. An amphora of high-quality olive oil.
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Jul 24, 2019 20:05
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Three pigs, labeled 1, 2, and 4.
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Jul 24, 2019 20:08
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Various items, and then pets, and then people, that slowly make it clear he's opening a portal to a nearby cottage. Start with household goods coming out of the portal with startled yells from within, then pets and shouting, then a child and screams of the kids name. Finally, the mom comes through, but with a rope around her waist, and she's trying to get her kid and their cat and dog. Edit: and a lot of his mundane poo poo comes from that house. His cutlery, clothes, food. They've been convinced their home is haunted. Jack B Nimble fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Jul 24, 2019 |
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Jul 24, 2019 20:13
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A tome entitled “Sir Henrick’s Finest Witticisms” followed by another book titled “Sir Henrick’s Not As Good Witticisms”
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Jul 24, 2019 20:25
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My Lovely Horse posted:Please give me all your best ideas for objects that would be funny if a chaos mage randomly summoned them, and could (even remotely) plausibly damage an enemy when dropped on their head. Should not be wildly incongruous with a fantasy setting nor too many actual weapons. Literally just a sack of potatoes.
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Jul 24, 2019 20:32
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Labeled: onions
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Jul 24, 2019 21:03
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A barrel of ballbearings which will rupture after hitting the ground/some poor sap.
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Jul 24, 2019 21:36
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A small tree A swarm of angry cats A rubbish bin, upside down so it falls on someone's head and pins their arms A large dollhouse, a pair of tiny doll legs sticking out from under it A cuckoo clock that chimes the hour A dog, the dog is a very good boy Carefully describe a medieval anvil without saying "anvil", "blacksmith" etc, and then just say "yeah" to the first player who says "so it's a ________?" and that's what it is.
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Jul 24, 2019 23:41
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Four horseshoes with hooves attached, but no horse.
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Jul 24, 2019 23:56
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Infinite Karma posted:Four horseshoes with hooves attached, but no horse.
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Jul 24, 2019 23:58
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Avatar post combo right there yawg. On topic, a wardrobe out of which bursts a lion and a doll wearing a witch's outfit dyed white.
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Jul 25, 2019 00:04
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A perfectly laid table for two. Fancy china, fine porcelain candelebra. Everything you could want, except the actual table. It appears as if there were a table under it, then crashes to the ground and the tablecloth catches on fire.
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Jul 25, 2019 00:04
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27 balloons full of raspberry jelly
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Jul 25, 2019 00:08
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Red Metal posted:Three pigs, labeled 1, 2, and 4. Wait a few sessions, a Dire Boar labelled 3.
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Jul 25, 2019 00:15
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A grand piano with a wizened old man playing the melody they heard "X" who gazes at them sadly before disappearing in a cloud of smoke
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Jul 25, 2019 01:30
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A blue whale, accompanied by a bowl of petunias.
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Jul 25, 2019 01:42
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The caster's future self while they are taking a poo poo, then instantly whisked back to their correct time. Some time later have the character temporarily teleported away for some unknown mysterious reason.
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Jul 25, 2019 02:11
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The caster's familiar under the effects of an Enlarge spell Seventeen red dragon scales (the dragon they used to be attached to will later hunt down the wizard, being very put out) A massive, glowing d20; whatever number said d20 rolls will automatically replace the next roll made by the wizard A character from a previous campaign, who looks very confused for a moment before winking out again ("you remember the session where Greg couldn't make it? Well, now you know where his character was") The marching band from National Lampoon's Animal House A 1982 Buick Roadmaster the fragments of a previously-shattered weapon that was once held by one of the setting's great heroes; they no longer have any special powers besides 'being sharp bits of metal'
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Jul 25, 2019 03:09
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:the fragments of a previously-shattered weapon that was once held by one of the setting's great heroes; they no longer have any special powers besides 'being sharp bits of metal' Certain members of the Kingdom Of Generica Historical Preservation Society, however, are very upset.
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Jul 25, 2019 03:20
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