|
Sanford posted:Hahahaha Alternatively: https://www.shopmascot.com/Chester-...E8aAva5EALw_wcB
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2020 13:22
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 18:06 |
|
|
Okay so looking at A Wizard again and now I'm actually making plans for running it for people. Unlike the other poster from earlier though I don't wanna do a 50 villager meatgrinder dungeon. I might find an excuse for people to bring in extra characters if one dies but I wanna otherwise just play it kinda straight. Looking at the rules though while it does have well detailed stats for everything and good ways of fudging the numbers a little to fit into different systems, I'm struggling with finding a good system and level to run them at. I was looking at Old-School Essentials but its saving throw system doesn't look like it'd work so I'd probably end up pitching that for a stat-based save system. Monsters also seem to do a fair amount of damage which would very quickly splatter level 1 characters but there's no guidance on what level to run things at. Anyone have an experience or advice with OSR systems and guidelines to run A Wizard as a dangerous but not like, instantly lethal adventure? I'd possibly need to hand out short rests or healing of some sort because I feel like adventurers stuck inside are gonna die to attrition rapidly.
|
|
#
?
Jul 2, 2020 20:24
|
|
|
currently building a quick side adventure where the party will have to free a haunted Dwarven distillery from a strong spirit
|
|
#
?
Jul 5, 2020 15:09
|
|
|
possibly a djinn
|
|
#
?
Jul 5, 2020 15:10
|
|
|
You'd think they'd want strong spirits, or is this just part of the distillation - remove the impure/undesirable spirits without harming the desirable ones.
|
|
#
?
Jul 5, 2020 19:08
|
|
Glory to Italia!
|
Remove the djinn without disturbing the juice
|
|
#
?
Jul 5, 2020 19:18
|
|
|
The djinn is sick and needs a tonic to help it feel better.
|
|
#
?
Jul 5, 2020 19:28
|
|
|
Ignite Memories posted:Remove the djinn without disturbing the juice Lmao. It could be a crazy ritual to turn a normal spirit into a djinn that involves a lot of juniper and some other spices.
|
|
#
?
Jul 5, 2020 20:35
|
|
|
I love this so much. I just finished my five year run of Eyes of the Stone Thief last night, man that's a great campaign. Loads of room to expand and ornament, but a really solid through line if you just want to run encounters. Gareth Hanrahan is an rpg god. And props to 13th age: right up to the end every fight felt tight and fun, with the players being legitimately threatened but winning through. Final stats: 4 players, 15 characters, 7 deaths, 5 retirements, 1 dead sentient megadungeon. sebmojo fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Jul 5, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jul 5, 2020 20:59
|
|
|
Glagha posted:Okay so looking at A Wizard again and now I'm actually making plans for running it for people. Unlike the other poster from earlier though I don't wanna do a 50 villager meatgrinder dungeon. I might find an excuse for people to bring in extra characters if one dies but I wanna otherwise just play it kinda straight. Looking at the rules though while it does have well detailed stats for everything and good ways of fudging the numbers a little to fit into different systems, I'm struggling with finding a good system and level to run them at. I was looking at Old-School Essentials but its saving throw system doesn't look like it'd work so I'd probably end up pitching that for a stat-based save system. Monsters also seem to do a fair amount of damage which would very quickly splatter level 1 characters but there's no guidance on what level to run things at. Anyone have an experience or advice with OSR systems and guidelines to run A Wizard as a dangerous but not like, instantly lethal adventure? I'd possibly need to hand out short rests or healing of some sort because I feel like adventurers stuck inside are gonna die to attrition rapidly. I ran it with WHFRP 2e and it turned out great. If probably a little easier and less meat-grindery than the module intends.
|
|
#
?
Jul 5, 2020 21:01
|
|
|
Got caught up with the thread after a little bit away. I also got back on the ol' GM horse recently. I have been one of my group's GMs for over fifteen years, but while my group is large it is now spread out and most of us have little kids. So online games have become a necessity. I tried to run a weeknight one for a while, but I kept having to cancel game because I was often too physically or mentally exhausted to run a game right after work. Between that and adjusting to playing online, the campaigns always just fell apart. It was a bummer. I also had a period for a couple years where my work was difficult and at weird hours. I began to feel socially isolated and I really needed to run or play a tabletop game. But nothing was working. COVID-19 showed up and necessitated online play, even more than it was already. By now I had a better job with better hours, but even so I decided to play it safe and run game on a weekend day. So I started running my own home brew revision of 7th Sea. I feel so much better now that the game has been running consistently and everyone is having a great time. It feels like a renaissance for me, no pun intended. I just wanted to share the rare story of COVID-19 not being a huge piece of poo poo. It lit a fire under my rear end and the asses of play players to play online and simply get used to it. Discord is treating us alright (some of us have audio clipping issues, but it's minor), and I'm thankful I can stay connected to my buddies in the middle of Hellworld. 
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 01:57
|
|
|
My players are about to visit a Kult of the Kraken Temple, and I decided to put a little puzzle in their way. The entire temple can be drained or flooded. There's a treasure room with a magically sealed door. There's 2 4-button rows and a single button in front of the door. If the room is flooded, the lower row will have icons showing. If not, the upper row will be active. The buttons themselves are simple - pressing them advances from Fish -> Coral -> Tentacle -> back to fish. However, some buttons are linked with each other, including some on the water side with the dry side and vice-versa. The goal is to have all 8 tentacles selected before pressing the main button. The players can try stopping the draining mechanism at the right time to have both rows of buttons shown simultaneously. I refrained from using more complicated buttons ("this one advances the other one two steps") to keep the frustration to a minimum.  I made this specifically for use in roll20. The buttons are all multi-sided tokens. If someone needs the assets and wants to incorporate this into their game, PM me.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 05:30
|
|
|
As with any puzzle of this ilk, make sure you have some skill checks in mind to allow the characters, not just the players, interact with the puzzle. Let the rogue work with it like a trap to disable or 'freeze' one of the buttons. Let someone roll an int check to puzzle the correct way to get two buttons to line up, etc
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 05:50
|
|
|
That's great advice, thank you! I had planned on one for stopping the draining mechanism at the right time (so both rows are visible), but will incorporate some more (arcana check to show possible linked buttons, for example).
Luebbi fucked around with this message at 06:45 on Jul 6, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 06:39
|
|
|
Luebbi posted:That's great advice, thank you! I had planned on one for stopping the draining mechanism at the right time (so both rows are visible), but will incorporate some more (arcana check to show possible linked buttons, for example). every single obstacle needs at least 3 intended solutions... if you have a puzzle door for example and players fail to solve the puzzle then the game just stops until you have some sort of deus ex machina planned or the players pull out a pick axe and go sicko mode on the walls, which is not really what you want. note that you will have 3 intended solutions but the players will find a fourth that you didnt think of, and sometimes you just have to shrug and say that works too ideally players solve your puzzle door(every party has a different level of puzzle tolerance) but you can not be sure. i like to start puzzles off at baby simple toddler level puzzles and work my way up from there. by the way, in my setting, there is a deity who likes puzzles and you can make more powerful locks by using puzzles and invoking the deitys name in the enchantment, as to explain why there are puzzle doors in all these random places
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 12:12
|
|
|
Railing Kill posted:Got caught up with the thread after a little bit away. I also got back on the ol' GM horse recently. I have been one of my group's GMs for over fifteen years, but while my group is large it is now spread out and most of us have little kids. So online games have become a necessity. I tried to run a weeknight one for a while, but I kept having to cancel game because I was often too physically or mentally exhausted to run a game right after work. Between that and adjusting to playing online, the campaigns always just fell apart. It was a bummer. I also had a period for a couple years where my work was difficult and at weird hours. I began to feel socially isolated and I really needed to run or play a tabletop game. But nothing was working. It's great to hear that your group is doing well transitioning to online games! My game group had a similar issue with audio clipping, and we found that we could improve it by messing with some settings in Discord. If you go into the Voice & Video menu in the settings, there's an option called push-to-talk release delay. From our experience, setting that somewhere between 100 ms to 200 ms fixes the clipping issue.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 14:50
|
|
|
5th edition - my sunday party has a life cleric/druid whose goodberries heal for 4 and they just hand them out by the dozens. The party sit and eat loving goodberries between every single fight which essentially negates the concept of having a certain number of encounters per day. Any ideas on how I can smash this dumb bullshit without looking like I am specifically singling out this player, who built a 100% support character? They are currently in White Plume Mountain and I thought about having Keraptis just cause all fresh food to rot or something but again I really am looking to stop one player's "fun" so I'm not sure how to approach this other than just grinding them through endless roaming encounters to try and use up spell slots. e: the sage advice that mentions the goodberry thing is here: https://media.wizards.com/2016/downloads/DND/SA-Compendium.pdf
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 16:30
|
|
|
Just talk to them about it, say "look, this goodberry thing is making it really hard for me to run the campaign because there's no tension if everyone heals to full after every fight. I'm gonna have to house rule that goodberries as a life cleric give you 13 berries, not that each berry heals for huge amounts." Or make it so each character can only manage to eat 1-2 berries per day since they give so much food value.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 17:09
|
|
|
Syrinxx posted:5th edition - my sunday party has a life cleric/druid whose goodberries heal for 4 and they just hand them out by the dozens. The party sit and eat loving goodberries between every single fight which essentially negates the concept of having a certain number of encounters per day. Any ideas on how I can smash this dumb bullshit without looking like I am specifically singling out this player, who built a 100% support character? They are currently in White Plume Mountain and I thought about having Keraptis just cause all fresh food to rot or something but again I really am looking to stop one player's "fun" so I'm not sure how to approach this other than just grinding them through endless roaming encounters to try and use up spell slots. Doesn't it take a 1st level spell slot and the berries only last a day? How are they getting so many goodberries? Edit: it looks like they should have about 4 1st level spell slots. If they are using all of those slots on this spell every day they will be able to make 40 good berries which can heal 160hp. If they instead used those slots for Cure Wounds they would heal about 48hp total. This seems broken imo. punishedkissinger fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Jul 6, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 17:20
|
|
|
TooMuchAbstraction posted:Just talk to them about it The best thing is just to sit down with a player and see if you can work a thing out. Barring that, though, the second part is a fairly elegant solution. This isn't Skyrim; you can't house a bunch of wheels of cheese every time you get punched.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 17:22
|
|
|
Healing spirit had similar problems with very strong downtime heals. I would recommend some home ruling, or make them roll a d4 for each goodberry they eat or something. You might have to get creative with burning through slots before big fights, but yeah I basically assume my party will start every fight at full strength unless it's part of a dungeon crawl. Trying to keep with the "a certain number of encounters per day" is a losing battle full of random encounters...
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 17:48
|
|
|
punishedkissinger posted:Doesn't it take a 1st level spell slot and the berries only last a day? How are they getting so many goodberries? It's not fair to compare a healing spell to cure wounds because cure wounds sucks rear end. Everything's overpowered compared to it. My take on this is: Who cares? They're eating up their spell slots for upkeep. Every set of goodberries they make is something else they could have done. Yeah it's a lot of HP, hit dice during short rests aren't particularly relevant anymore but... Okay. Still gotta rest to restore those spell slots. Or just let them keep going and doing more encounters. I really don't see the issue. Being topped off on HP during an encounter isn't really an issue compared to being not topped off on spell slots and yeah there's something to be said for managing to shovel berries in your mouth during combat without breaking your stride, so maybe rule that takes an action but other than that I'd just let it ride.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 17:51
|
|
|
Chauncey makes goodberries in the form of a pomegranate, so it takes a while to properly eat them all. This is flavorful and disallows impromptu combat use.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 17:53
|
|
|
Syrinxx posted:5th edition - my sunday party has a life cleric/druid whose goodberries heal for 4 and they just hand them out by the dozens. The party sit and eat loving goodberries between every single fight which essentially negates the concept of having a certain number of encounters per day. Any ideas on how I can smash this dumb bullshit without looking like I am specifically singling out this player, who built a 100% support character? They are currently in White Plume Mountain and I thought about having Keraptis just cause all fresh food to rot or something but again I really am looking to stop one player's "fun" so I'm not sure how to approach this other than just grinding them through endless roaming encounters to try and use up spell slots. if it is breaking your game ask them to stop and barring them saying "no lol" my personal house ruling on this cheese is each good berry is like 3 thousand calories and trying to even eat two a day requires a constitution save which gets gradually harder(10 for second berry of day, 20 for third, 30 for fourth) to avoid throwing it up and getting no effect + sickened punishedkissinger posted:Doesn't it take a 1st level spell slot and the berries only last a day? How are they getting so many goodberries? this. it breaks the game past a certain point when the 1st level spell slots are less relevant because you can effectively trade in the weaker spell slots for a ridiculous amount of out of battle healing, nullifying a lot of resource management which the entire game is balanced around. pog boyfriend fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Jul 6, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 17:55
|
|
|
- You're absolutely singling out this player. Just to make that perfectly clear. - Any option you choose that nullifies this ability/party advantage is smashing this player's fun in particular and it's going to be obvious to them and anyone paying attention. - People will throw out phrases like "breaks the game" to justify smashing player fun in a vacuum, when the real phrase they should be paying attention to is "does this matter?". So. Take a step back, take a deep breath. Think about the answers to some questions: What does increased access to between-combat healing allow them to do? Is this actually a problem? If so, why is it a problem? Does the advantage matter enough right now that you need to take away your player's toys? Does this substantially affect the actual difficulty of combat encounters? Goodberry doesn't heal well enough to be useful as in-combat healing outside very low levels. HP is not the only resource your players have. If your players are ending the adventuring day with full hit points and a bunch of surplus between-combat healing left over but have spent most of their other resources, there's no issue that needs fixing. If your players are ending the adventuring day without having expended most of their resources besides HP and between-combat healing, your encounters are not challenging your PCs enough. Fixing this problem involves looking at the encounters you are running, not eliminating your players' tools.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 19:06
|
|
|
Personally I find the mental image of a party sitting there engorging themselves on fistfulls of goodberries funny. ... ... How many calories are in a goodberry? My chain shirt seems to be slowly shrinking.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 19:28
|
|
|
Olesh posted:- You're absolutely singling out this player. Just to make that perfectly clear. no you are right, which is why they never nerfed healing spirit because high level out of combat healing is not a problem. after thinking about it i think a single spell combination that invalidates the short rest hit dice mechanic is not a problem, actually, because one player thinks the combo that does 40 HP of healing on a single first level spell is cool. this is why you talk to the player: as a dm, you are also a participant in the game. if some player is running something that is ruining your ability to plan encounters and you are having no fun, that is a problem as well. specifically targeting one broken combination which is(read the post of the guy again to be specific) ruining the dms fun and causing encounter balance issues, of an entire kit that player has, is entirely reasonable.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 19:34
|
|
|
For comparison, the post-nerf Healing Spirit is a level-2 spell that (assuming you have a +3 casting modifier) heals 6d6 HP per cast, for an average of 21 HP or a max of 36 healed. Even with the nerf, that makes it significantly more efficient than other magical low-level healing options. Healing 40 HP with a level-1 spell is waaaay outside the curve for leveling magic.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 20:00
|
|
|
pog boyfriend posted:no you are right, which is why they never nerfed healing spirit because high level out of combat healing is not a problem. after thinking about it i think a single spell combination that invalidates the short rest hit dice mechanic is not a problem, actually, because one player thinks the combo that does 40 HP of healing on a single first level spell is cool. Goodberry was not nerfed, because it doesn't contribute to in-combat healing and the game developers think this is fine. You can tell because there's published errata that limited the number of times any one person could get healed per cast of Healing Spirit (useful in-combat), and an Official Ruling from the game's rules manager that confirms the Goodberry interaction (a spell which is not useful in-combat). You're trying to be snide, but these two examples are barely even comparable because one of them is useless except for out of combat healing and the other was not only useful in combat but represented an order of magnitude more total healing pre-nerf. TooMuchAbstraction posted:For comparison, the post-nerf Healing Spirit is a level-2 spell that (assuming you have a +3 casting modifier) heals 6d6 HP per cast, for an average of 21 HP or a max of 36 healed. Even with the nerf, that makes it significantly more efficient than other magical low-level healing options. Healing 40 HP with a level-1 spell is waaaay outside the curve for leveling magic. Post-nerf it's a maximum number of heals equal to 1 + casting modifier (minimum 2), so at +3 it'd be 4d6 per cast - 4d6+16 with the Life domain, for an average of 30 HP healed. It's still twice as effective as a second level Cure Wounds, and it's still usable as in-combat healing.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 20:31
|
|
|
Olesh posted:Healing Spirit was nerfed because it gave players access to an unreasonable amount of in-combat healing. Pre-nerf, this "broke the game" because for the cost of a single spell slot, every party member could receive up to an average of 35 HP of healing over the course of a combat - far, far in excess of the "overpowered" Goodberry's 40 HP total out of combat. And it only got worse when you combine Life domain - Healing Spirit's average 35 HP per party member jumped to an average of 75 HP per party member. crawford is famously inconsistent, and the general gripe people had with healing spirit is that out of combat it basically fully healed the party for a single spell slot. here is a tweet from jeremy crawford about it. https://twitter.com/jeremyecrawford/status/930607373588209664 note that he only seems concerned with the out of combat application.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 20:39
|
|
|
pog boyfriend posted:crawford is famously inconsistent, and the general gripe people had with healing spirit is that out of combat it basically fully healed the party for a single spell slot. Note that he's answering a question about it's potential use out of combat and its comparison to a spell which is only usable out of combat. (Prayer of Healing) Which seems... relevant. Let's do a breakdown, shall we? Assuming a +3 stat bonus (Life Domain numbers in paranthesis) In-Combat: 7.5 (9.5) HP - Cure Wounds - 1d8(+bonus) per cast. Usable in combat, 1st level. 12 (16) HP - Cure Wounds - 2d8(+bonus) per cast. Usable in combat, 2nd level. 14 (30) HP - Healing Spirit - 3.5 + (3.5 *spellcasting bonus) HP per cast (minimum 7), usable in combat, 2nd level, bonus action spell Out of Combat: 10 (40) HP - Goodberry - 10 HP per cast, not useful in combat, 1st level 14 (30) HP - Healing Spirit - 3.5 + (3.5 *spellcasting bonus) HP per cast (minimum 7), usable in combat, 2nd level, bonus action spell 72 (96) HP - Prayer of Healing - 6*(2d8+bonus) HP per cast, for an average 54+(6*bonus) HP. Not usable in combat, 2nd level, 10 minute cast. If you're using Healing Spirit as a basis for comparison, sure, Goodberry seems excessive compared to post-nerf Healing Spirit. But that's disingenuous - not only because Healing Spirit is a spell useful for in-combat healing, but also because Healing Spirit pre-nerf was being compared to Prayer of Healing, a (presumably fine) spell dedicated to out-of-combat healing. And, look at that, Prayer of Healing, presumably fine spell used as the baseline for why pre-nerf Healing Spirit was out of whack, heals for about two and a half times as much as Goodberry from a Life domain cleric. Seems like a reasonable jump between a first and second level out of combat healing spell to me. Edit: Fixed Healing Spirit math Olesh fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Jul 6, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 21:11
|
|
|
I would not take the designers' opinions on anything as necessarily good advice. Life domain Goodberries are preposterously effective. EDIT: also note that Healing Spirit is a straight 1d6 healing. You don't get a bonus to it unless you're Life Domain. So I don't know where you're getting that it's healing 7HP.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 21:18
|
|
|
Olesh posted:Note that he's answering a question about it's potential use out of combat and its comparison to a spell which is only usable out of combat. (Prayer of Healing) this math is disingenuous. it assumes all 6 targets are hurt, and you get optimal use out of the spell for prayer of healing. moreover, it ignores the primary issue of goodberry being a first level spell slot making it extremely casual to toss healing around. in a party of 4, with one person not being hurt in a fight, you select 3 targets to heal after combat and suddenly these numbers do not look too hot for prayer of healing, especially when you consider that prayer of healing is second level. goodberry divides the out of combat healing into smaller chunks which you can optimally pass around throughout the day, whereas prayer of healing is a single cast, and you can lowroll it.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 21:22
|
|
|
Tenik posted:It's great to hear that your group is doing well transitioning to online games! My game group had a similar issue with audio clipping, and we found that we could improve it by messing with some settings in Discord. If you go into the Voice & Video menu in the settings, there's an option called push-to-talk release delay. From our experience, setting that somewhere between 100 ms to 200 ms fixes the clipping issue. Thanks for the tip! I tried goofing around with the bitrate a bit but that didn't help. I'll try this before next game. Olesh posted:HP is not the only resource your players have. If your players are ending the adventuring day with full hit points and a bunch of surplus between-combat healing left over but have spent most of their other resources, there's no issue that needs fixing. This, absolutely. Players in pretty much every system have a bunch of different resources to "pay for" encounters: -HP/Wounds/Hit Boxes/whatever -Innate/passive abilities gained from XP (essentially, XP is the pre-payment to not have to pay other prices for future encounters) -Per-day or other expendible abilities like spells -In-game currency -Expendable items So, thinking of it this way, a player being resourceful or clever with a healing spell is that player choosing to pay with a spell slot what could otherwise be paid in HP. The price of encounters always has to get paid, otherwise the encounters aren't challenging, but it shouldn't be up to the GM how it's paid.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 21:40
|
|
|
Railing Kill posted:
if one specific tool is causing the dm to not have fun and breaking the balance, the dm should talk to the player about that one tool. i do not have an issue with prayer of healing, but the life cleric goodberry interaction has been a problem whenever it showed up because of how efficient it is at dealing with minor wounds throughout the entirety of an adventuring day for a low level spell slot, and the person posting the advice indicated as such. in the case that the games you like to run are ruined by this one specific interaction, the best solution is to know this creates problems with the game you are trying to run and tell players beforehand that you do not allow this interaction, but the next best solution is to talk with the player. the house rule i use is my way of playing with the issue(but i tell players in character creation as to not yank the rug out from under them) E: and to be clear, the issue is how goodberries can be used throughout the day. if you want to have a full adventuring day of many weaker encounters in order to pressure casters to conserve and not just do one big fight a session, it becomes possible to treat the resource loss from one encounter as "7 goodberries", which is a portion of a spell slot, and the 3 remaining berries can be stockpiled for another encounter. it is that extreme efficiency for out of combat healing that is constraining, not the raw number of healing. that is why i have no issue with healing spirit compared to this life cleric/goodberry interaction pog boyfriend fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Jul 6, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 21:56
|
|
|
TooMuchAbstraction posted:I would not take the designers' opinions on anything as necessarily good advice. Life domain Goodberries are preposterously effective. Fixed the math. pog boyfriend posted:this math is disingenuous. it assumes all 6 targets are hurt, and you get optimal use out of the spell for prayer of healing. moreover, it ignores the primary issue of goodberry being a first level spell slot making it extremely casual to toss healing around. in a party of 4, with one person not being hurt in a fight, you select 3 targets to heal after combat and suddenly these numbers do not look too hot for prayer of healing, especially when you consider that prayer of healing is second level. That's the comparison people were making for pre-nerf Healing Spirit, which was brought up as an example of "breaking the curve", using the (presumably fine) spell it's being compared against under optimal conditions to illustrate why pre-nerf Healing Spirit under optimal conditions was a problem. But, under optimal conditions, the (presumably fine) spell it's being compared against averages 2.5x what Goodberry does. And yeah, you can lowroll it. So what? You can also high roll it. Let's circle back here: Goodberry is not really the problem here. The original post indicated that the players were not using enough resources on the encounters and blamed Goodberry: Syrinxx posted:5th edition - my sunday party has a life cleric/druid whose goodberries heal for 4 and they just hand them out by the dozens. The party sit and eat loving goodberries between every single fight which essentially negates the concept of having a certain number of encounters per day. Any ideas on how I can smash this dumb bullshit without looking like I am specifically singling out this player, who built a 100% support character? They are currently in White Plume Mountain and I thought about having Keraptis just cause all fresh food to rot or something but again I really am looking to stop one player's "fun" so I'm not sure how to approach this other than just grinding them through endless roaming encounters to try and use up spell slots. And my original response, now with annotations: Olesh posted:So.
|
|
#
?
Jul 6, 2020 22:13
|
|
|
Olesh posted:And my original response, now with annotations: the final annotation sells the difference between our perspectives to me. ultimately, how much healing any game you are running wants is going to differ(depending on what game you are running a dm might want more or less healing. horror games are going to be a lot more scarce than epic fantasy games). to me, i think the question of safety versus efficiency in using resources is interesting and it allows me to make more of a difference in encounters to more tightly control the difficulty. other groups may not want that added level of decision making and find it annoying, and in the end everyone is going to have a different answer and argue over where the line is. i think every answer is credible, which is why i said in my initial post "if" - you may find the amount of healing is fine for you and your group. aside from my other posts however, here are some other reasons why i house rule to target the goodberry/life cleric interaction:
it just feels like a janky unintended interaction that crawford went "sure, why not" to that has caused me and a lot of my friends who DM 5e headaches over the years.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2020 00:56
|
|
|
I guess my point was that if a first level spell really is causing that much imbalance in your adventures, then find other ways to make the players "pay" for encounters. HP is the simplest payment, but far from the only one. Goodberry doesn't address things that have to be paid in gold, skill usage, (other) spell usage, expendables, or whatever. Even if we're just talking about combat encounters, there's plenty of things you can lay down that can't be addressed by between-encounter healing like Goodberry. Sure it's janky, but it's also narrow and limited in a way that a first level spell ought to be. It just seems like overkill to me to single out the Mr. Oops! All Goodberries player because they found out a way to juke the HP system a bit. Let them have their HP. Then take their statuses and their wallets and their expendables and their wits as players. Challenge them.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2020 02:45
|
|
|
I saw someone talk about goodberries once and how they're boring not because of the healing but because of the food thing. You cannot make a scenario where food is scarce in in DnD if someone just learns how to make infinite food at lvl 1. Their solution was to change the spell into instead of making berries out of nothing you transformed berries before picking them and after that they worked for 24 hours. This way a DM can sort of manage it. I thought that was clever! If a character has making goodberries be their one major thing they do it seems kind of mean to that player to just nerf them mid game, though. Anyway, back to the Wizard! I want to run this in a few weeks but with only two players. We're gonna do it in 5e in that case because it's what we know and no one wants to learn a new system for a one shot. My idea for how to make it last but keeping the deadly tension around is to have the Wizard, instead of killing players outright, when they die they come back but they come back different, making it so that in the end they're different versions of the characters they came in as. I'm thinking stuff like the Wizard punishes a character for dying by replacing all their fingers on one hand with tentacles, move the eyes to the back of the neck, reversing knee joints, make them forget how to speak certain languages, stuff like that, and I would appreciate any suggestions on what I could do for this and what in game or roleplaying effects it could have? I was also thinking about making a way of progression as they ascend by having them roll on a giant table I make and they learn a random skill from a random class (weighted towards lower level stuff). The tower is weird so both of these things seem like they would fit. If anyone has any experience with the module or just read it and is good at gauging challenges what might be a decent level for them to go in? I'll probably tweak numbers as we go along to where it feels OK at the moment either way but I can't really decide where to start. Any criticism or advice on this approach would be appreciated!
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2020 07:59
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 18:06 |
|
|
I like the idea of goodberries being, like, 3000 calories (as each provides enough nourishment for a day which, for an adventurer, has to be quite a lot) so after you eat two or three of them, you start to feel a little ill.
|
|
#
?
Jul 7, 2020 09:55
|
|