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Moreau posted:Does cosmic horror work within dnd? Are there any good splat books or sites that delve into that area? Thinking about some fun ways to flavour an Ancients Paladin order Petersen Games put out a 'Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos' book for 5e that does a good job putting stat blocks on all the usual suspects and talks some about how to make a horror-themed 5e game work. I tend to agree that 5e and D&D in general isn't really the ideal system to do that, it's generally good advice about running a horror game.
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Jun 3, 2020 14:26
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Glagha posted:Cosmic horror doesn't work in D&D for the same reason regular horror doesn't work. It requires a certain amount of powerlessness in the face of something unknowable. There's already cosmic horror themed things like people said: Mind Flayers, any number of other far realm related critters and Great Old One warlocks. If all you want is the set dressing there's good poo poo out there. The issue is that everyone's gonna fight whatever is there though. Mind Flayers, despite the tentacle faces, are something you can stab. You can fireball a Gibbering Mouther. It's hard to have horror when you can just go fistfight whatever you're scared of. Exactly this. In my game last night, the party stumbled on/was lured to a remote house, and when they opened the door, their (collective) estranged family was there being weird. Everything is subtly wrong and creepy and it was supposed to be a slow burn to reveal that a mindflayer was trying to extract information from them... but they immediately saw who answered their knocking, said "gently caress no", and started stabbing everyone inside
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Jun 3, 2020 14:51
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Syrinxx posted:Still hoping the Beyond dice rolling can be integrated via Beyond20 somehow.
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Jun 3, 2020 16:34
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Sorry if I've been posting too much about this character, but I'm trying to figure out the best allocation for my gun-using "Bounty Hunter" Human Warlock. STR is always 8, INT is always 10. I'm pretty sure that I want to keep my level 1 Feat as Alert given the combination of his profession and backstory. 2) DEX: 15 // CON: 14 // WIS: 10 // CHA: 16 - and @ Level 4: +1 DEX, Resilient (Dexterity) 3) DEX: 14 // CON: 14 // WIS: 12 // CHA: 16 - and @ Level 4: +2 DEX 4) DEX: 16 // CON: 13 // WIS: 10 // CHA: 16 - and @ Level 4: +1 CON, Resilient (Constitution) 5) DEX: 14 // CON: 14 // WIS: 12 // CHA: 16 - and @ Level 4: Spell Sniper (or some other non-half-score feat) 6) Other, perhaps using a different feat. 7) DEX: 14 // CON: 14 // WIS: 12 // CHA: 16 - and @ Level 4: +2 CHA The guns would largely be a cover to disguise my usage of Eldritch Blast, and I'd probably try and disguise most other spells and spellcasting as the effects of guns or devices. Essentially a Warlock pretending to be a Gunslinger (but without any of the features a Gunslinger gets except proficiency with Firearms - I'd drop the Hexblade's Proficiency with shields for that). I'd eventually get the Spell Sniper feat at some point, probably 8 or 12. I would need to work out with the DM the prevalence of firearms in the campaign, so I'm not sure how much I'd shoot actual bullets, which means I'm not sure how useful high DEX would be - although the benefit to AC is nice. I could have a Light Crossbow as a backup weapon, but that's not really the aesthetic I want. I want my patron to be an Archfey for the spells and features of that patron (plus backstory stuff involving time fuckery from transitioning between Feywild and the prime material plane), but I don't have the slightest idea which specific Archfey would be a good fit or why they'd take an interest in someone who was strung up by the arms and left to slowly bleed to death by his last bounty target's gang. (I mean, other than acquiring a useful tool who literally owed them their life.) Stabbey_the_Clown fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Jun 3, 2020 |
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Jun 3, 2020 16:36
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Moreau posted:Does cosmic horror work within dnd? Are there any good splat books or sites that delve into that area? Thinking about some fun ways to flavour an Ancients Paladin order Effective cosmic horror leverages things that players have little to no agency over and are difficult to comprehend. It's harder in D&D thanks to how capable characters are but not impossible.
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Jun 3, 2020 17:31
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If i wanted to do cosmic horror in DnD I would make up unfair game mechanics they cannot interact with like 'if this enemy hits you, your D6 is destroyed' or maybe an enemy that attacks the players themselves
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Jun 3, 2020 17:44
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Horror in D&D is kinda dumb. You can come up with (or bring back) bullshit mechanics such as level drain but it’s not fun.
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Jun 3, 2020 17:49
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:
TAKE 18 CHA @ 4.
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Jun 3, 2020 17:54
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nelson posted:Horror in D&D is kinda dumb. You can come up with (or bring back) bullshit mechanics such as level drain but it’s not fun. Don't do it mechanically, do it by loving with stuff they care about.
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Jun 3, 2020 17:56
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I like horror so long as you accept that at its core D&D is a combat focused game so at some point if you stat up an elder god someone's gonna try to kill it, and if you bend over backwards to try to find ways to add in fear and sanity mechanics, make monsters way beyond the pale in power and immune to everything, and try to just fit fear and disempowerment into a system not made for it, you could just play a different game in the first place.
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Jun 3, 2020 17:57
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Glagha posted:I like horror so long as you accept that at its core D&D is a combat focused game so at some point if you stat up an elder god someone's gonna try to kill it, and if you bend over backwards to try to find ways to add in fear and sanity mechanics, make monsters way beyond the pale in power and immune to everything, and try to just fit fear and disempowerment into a system not made for it, you could just play a different game in the first place. The thing to realize is that cosmic horror, frequently in Lovecraft's stories, has a lot of pyrrhic victories. In the original Call of Cthulhu story, the narrator successfully escapes by driving his boat into Cthulhu; a lot of other narrators escape for now, but the actual monster isn't killed/the situation isn't solved. THAT you can do in D&D, and 3e talks about it in its books dealing with horror/cosmic stuff (Elder Evils, Lords of Madness, Heroes of Horror.) It is possible to have D&D characters with heroic powers who grow and get strong and have harrowing experiences and eke out limited victories as a horror game: but they know they can't stop the inexorable, endless destruction of everything, and their actions are just delaying the inevitable. That doesn't take a sanity system or detailed fear mechanics or a lot of player disempowerment: it's framing, narrative, and tone, and it's still a horror game. This kind of stuff goes way back in D&D. It's in Gygax's original inspirations; it's in the Temple of Elemental Evil; it's in the Manual of the Planes. The idea of cosmic evils that can never be ended, just fended off, has always been a part of the game, and you can pick it up and bring it right into the forefront if that's the game you want to play.
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Jun 3, 2020 18:06
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when i say cosmic horror campaigns take the power out of pc, do not do it by making the players powerless. make their powers powerless. in a campaign i ran, the "enemies" they fought were being reanimated by something called the rot which they found out about through journal entries and the key was framing - the players were trapped in this town that sunk beneath the ground fighting a completely alien and incomprehensible entity that does not physically exist. the encounters they faced were hard, and victory was meaningless other than removing an immediate threat. there was no victory, there was only finding a way out. that was horror. random encounters, inability to sleep safely, a sense of dread, and the implication that whatever came here could not be stopped and what it was trying to do is completely inscrutable was far more effective than saying "sory your dice dont work bro  its cthulhu"E: also, redefine what an encounter is. its not always the monsters, but the potential of a monster. have people explore a house in combat initiative and make stuff move around at random to foster a sense of paranoia, use body horror on benign animals like a squirrel that has multiple giant spider legs growing out of it. play up the sense that everything is wrong and nothing is safe pog boyfriend fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Jun 3, 2020 |
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Jun 3, 2020 18:25
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Toshimo posted:TAKE 18 CHA @ 4. Okay, that makes sense, so I guess what makes the most sense for the rest of the stat line would be DEX 14, CON 14, WIS 12.
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Jun 3, 2020 18:26
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Also make clear your players know they're gonna be in for a horror campaign, otherwise they'll get really frustrated when stabbing Cthulhu doesn't work
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Jun 3, 2020 18:34
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Also make clear your players know they're gonna be in for a horror campaign, otherwise they'll get really frustrated when stabbing Cthulhu doesn't work Yeah you gotta hit him with a boat.
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Jun 3, 2020 18:39
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mango sentinel posted:Yeah you gotta hit him with a boat. With a Steamboat, in the Willy Disney has been trying to send us a message all along
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Jun 3, 2020 18:51
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They can have small victories against the unknowable void but letting them actually punch out an elder god kind of defeats the point? Like when I ran something vaguely cosmic horror-related for a leg of a campaign, the characters succeeded in their quest to return a town to the prime material plane but their further venture into the whateverzone led to facing down a great old one and immediately turning tail. If you do have them in that position, heavily broadcast that they are tiny, insignificant, and powerless before it and then make the fleeing into some sort of skill or combat challenge. They fight their way out through Cthulhu (or whoever) minions while it gives chase or attempts to consume them. They're in danger but they can still use their various powers to survive, and surviving will feel like a win. It's not really horror but powerlessness against an uncaring, impossible force isn't really what this game is designed to create.
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Jun 3, 2020 18:55
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Check out the Wasted West in the Midgard campaign setting by Kobold Press. It features about a dozen cosmic horror entities - called Dread Walkers - that have been frozen in time and place in a great desert on the material plane. It fuses cosmic horror, post apocalyptic, and traditional D&D tropes quite well.
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Jun 3, 2020 19:34
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One of the things in D&D that makes horror not quite work is that the PCs don't really have to do horrible things. Magic is by default a pretty toothless and flavorless experience; there's no real subsystem to interact with. If greater magic means becoming evil, losing your sanity, servility to bizarre entities, or risking tearing reality apart, then you've got something. Level 1 cosmic horror characters can be heroic, but by level 5 it should be clear to them that their idealism was naive, and by say level 10 they should be trading in.
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Jun 3, 2020 19:47
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Glagha posted:Cosmic horror doesn't work in D&D for the same reason regular horror doesn't work. It requires a certain amount of powerlessness in the face of something unknowable. There's already cosmic horror themed things like people said: Mind Flayers, any number of other far realm related critters and Great Old One warlocks. If all you want is the set dressing there's good poo poo out there. The issue is that everyone's gonna fight whatever is there though. Mind Flayers, despite the tentacle faces, are something you can stab. You can fireball a Gibbering Mouther. It's hard to have horror when you can just go fistfight whatever you're scared of. The Level 8ish party I was in ran the gently caress away when they realized they were dealing with Illithid. Later in the campaign at 12, we faced down what you could amount to a Baby Old God. Aboleths have been a big thing in the game, and the DM uplifted them from what they are in the statblock into some truly otherworldly and powerful beings. While we did defeat the thing, and (maybe) foiled the Aboleth plan, we had to throw ourselves through one of the many portals to other planes where the battle happened to escape destruction. Our first encounter with an actual Aboleth, we were entirely powerless. And our poor barbarian took an offer from the thing to act as its eyes, which slowly allowed it to worm in deep and force him to do things. Lots of uncomfortable sweating, feeling like he couldn't hydrate. Tossing up saltwater. All while he was seeing things only he could see, because he let the Aboleth into his head. As soon as we took out a dire threat to the Aboleth(much later after the encounter), a Planetar that was intent on wiping out entire cities to starve the aforementioned Baby Old God, it took direct control of the barbarian and threw him at us with everything he had. Arthil fucked around with this message at 22:51 on Jun 3, 2020 |
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Jun 3, 2020 22:41
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Horror can be done well, you just gotta know how to present that sort of story well while only letting them interact with things interactively in ways that don't feel forced. For example, if a party is really good at killing things then make it so that those things don't stay dead. Also never let them actually face an actual elder god, fighting it's avatar or something sure; like the Eldrazi from MTG; something that is just its "shadow" on the grand material plane but isn't actually "it". A set back sure if they manage to defeat it, but not something that actually matters in the long run. In 6,000 years the party will all be dead and the elder evil will still be out there, squirming and convulsing in screeching hatred for all living things, not interrupted not even for a moment by the actions of the party, it never noticed them to begin with. Which is the other thing about lovecraftian inspired evil things is that most of the time, the biggest most powerful things, i.e the ones you'd be worry about being world enders, these things don't know about you. They don't care about you. They have as much care about you as you do for the ants that lay beneath your feet. So basically everything the party faces and barely manages to surmount are things that never actually mattered in the grand scheme of things. Like, all of these weird alien golems that you cleared out? Just its immune system fending you off, at best you were like a bacterial infection to its awareness. The ancient cults? All of them are just deluded, none of them will get any reward other than dying first. They were all driven insane by knowledge beyond their comprehension. There's lots of ways to still have things that your party can attempt to stab or talk to, but still have in the end, contribute to the Great Unnerving. You can also have like, alien civilizations that are more advanced than the world you're party is from and everything is all Arthur C Clark of impossibly advanced science is basically magic and they all get destroyed in a blink in the eye by some elder thing just off the edge of everything and they were invading your world to escape from the greater threat. Basically, on the small encounter by encounter scale, you have a lot of options to make the party feel like they are in control, but gradually introduce elements where it's clear they are losing control, and then eventually coup de grace them by showing, spec ops the line style: They were never in control, nothing they did mattered, nothing they did was worth the elder being's notice, they were nothing, and this is a mercy, because if they did get noticed, that would be nightmarish.
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Jun 3, 2020 23:05
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Arthil posted:
I want to play in your game
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Jun 4, 2020 00:04
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SO i've been listening to a lot of DnD Horror stories on youtube and came across this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YkzdHU9fcU With some tweaking, you could make a cult-horror campaign around a adventuring company that travels around in an airship that hires new people and it turns out it's basically a cult and the PCs are set to be sacrificed once their powerful enough? Something like that. whoops, wrong video BigRed0427 fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Jun 4, 2020 |
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Jun 4, 2020 02:02
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BigRed0427 posted:SO i've been listening to a lot of DnD Horror stories on youtube and came across this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxHT1KXdrfk I love everything about this idea. It's along the same lines of an idea where every adventure should end like the ending of 8-bit theater. The powers that be arresting the party for high crimes and putting them on trial.
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Jun 4, 2020 02:25
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Nehru the Damaja posted:I want to play in your game It was a really fun 2 years. We've not stopped wholesale, DM just needs time to recharge and think of where to go with it next. That first encounter had us dealing with Chuul on the shore of a small cavern lake, but mid-fight our entire sense of self went sideways and suddenly we were underwater staring at the 4-5 vertical eyes of an enormous creature. Then there was how the ranger became a bard instead, partying with a pixie and doing some hella good feywild drugs. Speaking of Chuul, the loving Aboleth tricked us into thinking we had found another of the portals they were opening by digging through other planes (lore wise, they can't just go straight to the material it has to be through another plane). They lured us out with a small-scale plague spread by imported fish in the city my Fighter was from. When we traveled to the coast and dove deep to an underwater fishery... everyone had been turned into slime-zombies, there was a storm giant who was barely fighting against mind control and when we finally went into a series of caverns under the fishery we discovered a temple with 6 big tentacle statues and a portal in the center. loving portal was an illusion and the tentacles came alive. After surviving that, we had to fight our way tooth and nail through the now alerted hive of Chuul behind us. Only through a mix of cleverly blocking off paths and forcing them to come at us on our terms let us survive. 34 loving Chuul. It was a literal Aliens "THEY'RE COMING OUT OF THE WALLS MAN!" moment.
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Jun 4, 2020 03:50
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Does anyone know anything about the people behind this and the product itself? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/exaltedvales/exalted-vales-region-guide-and-campaign-for-5th-edition?ref=2q3stg
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Jun 4, 2020 04:39
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Thanks to all for the cosmic horror discussion! I should note that I'm not the dm, I'm just looking to fluff up an Order of Paladins that my Oath of Ancients lad can belong to - tying in to the whole 'oath predates the elves' aspect.
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Jun 4, 2020 05:05
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I'm starting a Theros campaign next week. It's my first time running a campaign in years and my first time ever running one online. Is there a dead simple browser-based virtual table top that allows me to do the following? Import a jpg/png/whatever as the background Draw and remove a few rectangles as fog of war/aoes Import a few jpg/png/whatever as tokens that I can assign to people so they can move around Do not need: snap to grid, measurement, dice rolling, dynamic lighting, voice/video, campaign management, character sheets, initiative tracking, and whatever other crap makes all these ones I've tried (roll20, astral, etc.) bloated and annoying I just spent 3 hours following along to roll20 tutorials, reading forum posts, watching "quickstart" youtube videos, etc. and the idea of actually using this for a campaign makes me want to die.
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Jun 4, 2020 05:37
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Rosalind posted:I'm starting a Theros campaign next week. It's my first time running a campaign in years and my first time ever running one online. Is there a dead simple browser-based virtual table top that allows me to do the following? Roll20 is very much "take what you need and skip the rest", so I'm not sure that it wouldn't suit your needs. If you'd like, I can spin up a fresh blank game and show you how to get it to do just the things you want (any day but 6/4).
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Jun 4, 2020 06:51
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If your players are open-minded, one way to handle cosmic horror in D&D is to start violating the assumptions of the game itself. D&D is a game laden with rules and systems that are often needless or bizarre artifacts from decades ago maintained for the sake of tradition. It's a game for "rules lawyers". So make your players uncomfortable by messing with the rules and assumptions of the game. You have to be careful about how you do this, to avoid just being that dick DM that pisses people off because you aren't consistent. But if you're also creating an uneasy, tense, horrific mood with setting and descriptions and encounter design and poo poo, you can add to that mood by making the players confused. A monster's AC changes a point or two from round to round without clear explanation, a successful saving throw inflicts worse consequences than a failed one, an NPC the party *knows* is Lawful Good - they've done the alignment checking mechanisms, made the Insight checks with a natural 20 - just keeps giving off a sinister vibe and definitely seems to be up to something vile, but they can't put their finger on it or explain how that fits with the (mechanical) information they have about the NPC. Kind of taking the Eternal Darkness approach to a tabletop RPG and letting your players sweat and go crazy trying to understand the changing rules or predict the next anomaly.
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Jun 4, 2020 10:01
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Rosalind posted:I'm starting a Theros campaign next week. It's my first time running a campaign in years and my first time ever running one online. Is there a dead simple browser-based virtual table top that allows me to do the following? You can use a shared google draw page for this. Much easier than roll20.
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Jun 4, 2020 11:44
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Yeah the concept of removing squares/rectangles to reveal areas seems like a good idea but it honestly never came off very good to me as a player when online. More often than not the person DMing would reveal areas in extremely confusing ways. Like keeping an area completely blacked out when it was 10-ft from us and there was nothing to suggest why. For online play I just cannot go back from using dynamic walls, specifically with FVTT. Any time spent covering a map up with certain shaped squares to hide things wouldn't be much or any quicker than doing very simple walls.
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Jun 4, 2020 11:55
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No. 1 Apartheid Fan posted:If your players are open-minded, one way to handle cosmic horror in D&D is to start violating the assumptions of the game itself. D&D is a game laden with rules and systems that are often needless or bizarre artifacts from decades ago maintained for the sake of tradition. It's a game for "rules lawyers". So make your players uncomfortable by messing with the rules and assumptions of the game. This could be fun if done right, but very frustrating and arbitrary if done wrong. I'd suggest implementing Sanity checks for this sort of thing, to give players a mechanical anchor when it seems like the game is turning into an uncontrollable visual novel. It's very easy as a DM to underestimate how opaque they are being, because they have so much more information than the players do. If the players feel like the world stops being coherent, or that they are no longer protagonists, then they're likely to lose engagement. Kaal fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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Jun 5, 2020 02:51
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My DM for the above mentioned game asked all of us if we were comfortable with the concept of our characters perception of things essentially being gaslighted. We all said we were fine with it. The previously mentioned encounter at the fishery is why he asked. If a character failed a save, -everyone- they were with shifted to look like slimy aboleth zombies and the actual slimy aboleth zombies looked like innocent people. I think the only thing he failed at with this is upon failing the save, the monsters should have stopped attacking that person. Regardless we did spend a session or so wondering if we'd actually just slaughtered a fishery full of innocent triton and water genasi.
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Jun 5, 2020 02:57
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In addition to the thing about wanting to avoid seeming like you're being railroady or unfair, one thing is I think that makes cosmic horror work best if the bloodborne formula of having it be a big bait and switch. Where things begin "normal", perhaps gothic horror. Lots of undead, vampires, ghouls, wights, werewolves, but slowly transition into weird things as they hit mid-levels and onwards with the reality warping 4th wall leaning things done only sparringly and built up over time. Basically you gotta foreshadow them in a low stakes way first so there isn't unfairness generated but also hints at the mechanic's existance moving forward in a higher stakes environment. As an example regarding sanity checks, don't call them Sanity checks, only make it apparent what they actually are once they got enough knowledge or faced a certain boss that it unlocks what it is and how to mitigate it.
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Jun 5, 2020 03:07
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Does anybody have the beyond version of the DM's guide for 5e? How does it compare to the hard copy?
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Jun 5, 2020 09:23
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NoNotTheMindProbe posted:Does anybody have the beyond version of the DM's guide for 5e? How does it compare to the hard copy? The Beyond version takes less shelf space and is automatically updated with errata. The D&D Beyond app is really nice for browsing. The images are beautiful. nelson fucked around with this message at 15:25 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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Jun 5, 2020 14:25
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NoNotTheMindProbe posted:Does anybody have the beyond version of the DM's guide for 5e? How does it compare to the hard copy? I mean it's basically the same. It works well, they don't try to put limits on copy/paste or any other crappy limitations - it's basically just web pages. I have both because I like paper books, but if I had to pick just one it would probably be the Beyond version.
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Jun 5, 2020 15:32
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I loving hate everyone who decides to play a child character in D&D and before I get quoted, no, your reason for doing so isn't cute or quirky enough to change my mind.
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Jun 5, 2020 18:57
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please knock Mom! posted:I loving hate everyone who decides to play a child character in D&D and before I get quoted, no, your reason for doing so isn't cute or quirky enough to change my mind. Agreed. Its either creepy, annoying, or both.
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