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theironjef posted:For a second there I was thinking "Wait, Crono is too edgy? I mean he's got punk hair and he doesn't talk but still, he loves his mom and his cat(s)!" Before I realzied they were talking about the other thing, I thought it was a joke about Magus being the main character
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Nov 1, 2020 18:59
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Not exactly the same thing, but City of Bones is a fantasy story set in a post-apocalypse where the apocalypse was caused by the precursor wizards, i.e. it's explicitly magical in nature. The protagonist is an archaeologist of sorts, who studies the artifacts of the old civilization. There's still magic, but it's mere remnants of what used to be possible...granted that the apocalypse turned most of the world into a desert, so most people aren't too torn up about magic being mostly gone.
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Nov 1, 2020 19:03
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Affi posted:I just bought Rime of the Frostmaiden; 1. The combination of "Icewind Dale is a remote, rural part of the world where it's almost impossible to buy magic items" and the lack of non-monetary loot for martial characters might be a source of potential frustration for those players. It's entirely possible to play a Fighter or whatever and finish the game at level 11 without a +1 weapon. Try to find spots to shoehorn in stuff that might interest or benefit them (there's a bunch of places where you loot a weapon the book deems interesting enough to describe, but with no mechanical purpose; those are good). 2. Be wary about letting them start in a random town and chart their own course through the first couple of levels. The sidequests aren't created equal, and it's pretty easy to walk into a super dangerous situation at level 1 or 2 and get owned. Be ready to retune some of that stuff, or just read through those initial quests and pick whichever you think would be easiest for your party makeup.
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Nov 1, 2020 19:17
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Mef989 posted:So I am brain storming ideas for my next campaign. One of them that I am trying to develope would be in a real world setting a thousand years or so after an apocalyptic event where the world has reverted to a pre industrial society and history of what used to be is lost. I was thinking that I would come up with syncopes of real world names so that the players do not actually know that these are real world settings, and only slowly reveal it as they discover long lost and burried sites. I was thinking it would be a low magic setting so no arcane classes, but still wanted to allow divine casters. My question is what would religion look like that far in the future in an isolated community, where it could evolve into something unrecognizable? I don't really want to use DnD religions in a real world based setting, but also wouldn't want to use current/real religions as they currently are, since that seems awkward too. Just trying to get ideas for a few new pantheons that could be very losely based on real religions, but different enough to not be directly recognizable. In the beginning, there was nothing. Then, there was The Spirit of Order, also called The Singulariton, or The One. The Spirit of Order craved control, authority and power, so he created our world, that he might hold dominion over it. Over time as his craving for power grew, he crated new things. First the Titans, great beings of incredible power, so that he might feel the thrill of power over those indebted to him. The Titans loved the Spirit for giving them life and dominion over parts of creation. Then He made humanoids, that he might feel the thrill of power over those who have none. This concerned the Titans, for the humanoids were made in their image, and they saw the Spirit's treatment of the Humanoids as a subtle threat of how he might see them. Then he made monsters, that he might feel the thrill of power wielded cruelly. This last act was too much for the Titans, who gathered the Humanoids and led them in battle against the Spirit and his monstrous hordes. The war lasted aeons, but ultmately the Titans forced the Spirit to withdraw from our world, which is why we worship them today. The withdrawal of the Spirit of Order is why monsters roam the wilderness unorganised; without the Spirit to guide them, most have reverted to animal instincts. However, not all was well in the house of the Titans. With the Spirit gone, the world became unstable, and the Titans had to expend great effort to keep it going (hence why they do not grant all our prayers). Among them, a fierce debate erupted on their future relationship with the Humanoids. Some (known as the Titans of Dominion) believed that the humanoids should be forced to worship the Titans, as this was only fair compensation for the shelter and protection they gave. Others (the Titans who Preside) argued that the Humanoids must be free to do as they wish, and that the Titans should earn the worship and respect of the Humanoids through their actions. When the Dominion began taking matters into their own hands and enslaving the Humanoids, the Presiders attempted to force the Titans as a group to pledge to respect the freedoms of Humanoids. The Dominion argued that in expelling the Spirit, they had a right to do as they pleased, and no law could bind them to restrict their acts against "their" humanoids. So both sides claimed the other to be merely a return of the Spirit of Order's ideals, and they fell into war. Ultimately the Presiders won out, which is why any Humanoid may freely choose which Titans they honour, and the Dominion were banished to the Underworld. At the very least, most Humanoids pay their respects to Raham, the Woodsman, the Builder of the House of the Titans, who led the Titans who Preside against the Titans of Dominion and secured a future for all Humanoids. He is also honoured as the Titan of Civilisation, for teaching Humanoids how to build homes from wood rather than living in huts, tents or caves. His ruined temple still stands today.
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Nov 1, 2020 19:53
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Baku posted:2. Be wary about letting them start in a random town and chart their own course through the first couple of levels. The sidequests aren't created equal, and it's pretty easy to walk into a super dangerous situation at level 1 or 2 and get owned. Be ready to retune some of that stuff, or just read through those initial quests and pick whichever you think would be easiest for your party makeup.
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Nov 1, 2020 22:40
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Baku posted:1. The combination of "Icewind Dale is a remote, rural part of the world where it's almost impossible to buy magic items" and the lack of non-monetary loot for martial characters might be a source of potential frustration for those players. It's entirely possible to play a Fighter or whatever and finish the game at level 11 without a +1 weapon. Try to find spots to shoehorn in stuff that might interest or benefit them (there's a bunch of places where you loot a weapon the book deems interesting enough to describe, but with no mechanical purpose; those are good). On that note, is it just me or are quite a lot of modules weirdly stingy with magic items? At this point we've gone through Dragon Heist, Curse of Strahd, and Descent into Avernus, and I'd be surprised if among all of those we ended up coming across more than like half a dozen magic items. And very nearly all of those were immediately plot-related. It was particularly annoying in Avernus, since pretty much everybody and their mother seemed to have resistance to nonmagical. It's D&D, just let me have my dang Longsword +1.
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Nov 1, 2020 22:41
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downtimejesus posted:I got this feeling too, now finally at level 3, but the sidequests we did in level 1 and 2 sessions were rough. We just hit level 3 in our campaign and them yetis and crag cats were tough at 2, even with 5 players
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Nov 1, 2020 22:46
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Perestroika posted:It's D&D, just let me have my dang Longsword +1.
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Nov 1, 2020 22:51
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That comes up a lot and it seems like it would be an easy fix with a sidebar that says like "Hey, make sure everyone in your party that relies on weapons has +1 or better weapons before starting this" or just "don't forget, we didn't heavily populate the loot tables with gear because we don't know what your specific party needs, so you do that part, okay?" Of course neither would work for AL.
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Nov 1, 2020 22:53
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I find it a stark contrast playing old vs new modules. I was a player in Storm King's Thunder where at level 10 we barely saved up enough money to get one of our characters some mariner's plate that was rolled on a table in the book. I'm now GMing White Plume Mountain where the level 8 to 9 players have a chance to get: over 40k in cash or cash equivalent items spread across the dungeon A spellbook of a level 6 wizard with the appropriate number of spells known; a flesh golem that serves them; +1 chainmail; darkvision goggles; boots of springing and striding; a stone of good luck; The following spell scrolls: Fear, Hold Person, Conjure Minor Elementals, Dispel Magic, Magic Mouth, Protection from Fiends, Armor of Vulnerability (slashing) The following potions: Flying, Greater Healing. And to top it all off: The legendary weapons Wave, Whelm and Blackrazor. I think this 1979 module is much more munificent than our cheapass contemporary content. That said nobody in our party uses strength so I'm having to add a belt of giant strength just to make those weapons any use at all.
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Nov 1, 2020 23:08
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People are so terrified of Monty Hauling that they went too far in the direction of stinginess
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Nov 1, 2020 23:24
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Azza Bamboo posted:I find it a stark contrast playing old vs new modules. I old AL rules, among all of the full-book adventures, SKT was considered the very best for loot. For partial adventures, WPM was basically the loot jackpot. Everything else gives substantially less (shout out again to WDH where your entire party can finish the book without a single relevant non-consumable magic item).
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Nov 2, 2020 00:57
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I swear the modules started getting stingy due to weird Adventurer League treasure point poo poo.
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Nov 2, 2020 02:12
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Toshimo posted:I old AL rules, among all of the full-book adventures, SKT was considered the very best for loot. For partial adventures, WPM was basically the loot jackpot. Everything else gives substantially less (shout out again to WDH where your entire party can finish the book without a single relevant non-consumable magic item). I got offered real life money several times to do AL "loot runs" of SKT so players could have items in other games.
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Nov 2, 2020 04:41
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The introductory dungeon for Basic D&D, In Search of the Unknown, for levels 1-3 has the following magic items as potential treasure: Mace +1, Spear +2, 2 scrolls of Cure Wounds, (cursed) Bag of Devouring, +1 Shield, +1 Chainmail, 1 scroll of Sleep, +1 Ring of Protection, Potion of Invisibility, plus assorted treasure to the value of 2842 gp. Now it does say that the DM should only include about a half to two thirds of the treasure when actually placing it (the module was designed to teach DMs to key a dungeon by placing all the treasure and monsters in a list, left big blank spaces in the actual dungeon descriptions and then told the DM to literally fill in the blanks as they thought best). The second adventure I played of D&D after In Search of the Unknown was The Lost Island of Castanamir, another adventure for levels 1-3 which included among its loot a Belt of Flying and an Amulet of the Planes. Imagine a 5th edition module just giving you the ability to cast Plane Shift at will at level 1.
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Nov 2, 2020 04:56
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Reveilled posted:The introductory dungeon for Basic D&D, In Search of the Unknown, for levels 1-3 has the following magic items as potential treasure: I loved/love that gonzo stuff. Gave the game a real feeling of organic adventure, just finding whatever. I'm a huge fan of 5e, but I can see where many of my favorite things about D&D were sacrificed in the quest for balance.
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Nov 2, 2020 05:26
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I feel like it's not even balance necessarily, it's just veering away from high fantasy for anyone who isn't a full caster.
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Nov 2, 2020 05:28
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I wonder if you can get around the lack of magical gear in adventures by letting the PCs craft some themselves. There are some, admittedly pretty barebones, rules for it in Xanathar's that you could use as a framework for it.
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Nov 2, 2020 05:34
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The gonzo stuff is fun, but like I also get from a writing and game design perspective why "you guys find an Amulet of the Planes on your first adventure" isn't the kind of thing that just randomly happens in level 1 pre-writes anymore. All of a sudden, your medieval fantasy adventure game is a series of bad Sliders episodes; whatever you thought this was going to be about, it isn't. That can be fun, but when it happens in every game it's exhausting and a real turn-off to people there for what it says on the tin
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Nov 2, 2020 05:39
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AnEdgelord posted:I wonder if you can get around the lack of magical gear in adventures by letting the PCs craft some themselves. There are some, admittedly pretty barebones, rules for it in Xanathar's that you could use as a framework for it. The problem is that (at least in the modules I've played), there aren't months of downtime for it. In my homebrew game the wizard's been cooking up up some scrolls and wands of magic missile in the weeks and months between quests from their agency, but in my Frostmaiden game, we've just been traveling from frozen town to frozen town and resting in barebone inns. I'd be surprised if the entire module took more than a month in-game to complete, but I don't know for sure since we're only level 3.
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Nov 2, 2020 05:51
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As awful as the old wealth by level systems were, you usually could get the items you needed to stay level appropriate. This modern stinginess has me missing the old magic marts.
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Nov 2, 2020 05:53
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:As awful as the old wealth by level systems were, you usually could get the items you needed to stay level appropriate. This modern stinginess has me missing the old magic marts. But you can't just HAVE a magical walmart around to sell magic items at any 24/7 convenience that would be so silly and broken hahaha Anyway can this next haunted mansion/dragon cave we go have a +3 weapon in it? I think i'm falling behind in damage.
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Nov 2, 2020 05:59
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The Shame Boy posted:But you can't just HAVE a magical walmart around to sell magic items at any 24/7 convenience that would be so silly and broken hahaha Look man it's all about DM Empowerment! It's why you can't plan around magic items and the skill system doesn't work!
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Nov 2, 2020 06:02
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Devorum posted:I loved/love that gonzo stuff. Gave the game a real feeling of organic adventure, just finding whatever. 3.x with wealth by level and mandatory magic items is immensely worse in that you were required to get certain magic items to keep up, and you just had to find them. if a dm gave you anything but a level appropriate cloak of protection or amulet of natural armour or whatever boring rear end stay item, they were a complete jackass. i like the 5e design of "make magic items feel important and sparse" so much on paper, but the actual implementation in modules tends to be very lacking. its there... sort of. you just dont get the feeling these items are truly impressive(and they often are not, anyway). there is a middle ground that xanathars recommends which is far better. as a dm you can give out more stuff too, but if you had any reason to use the busted CR system the moment you do that you can just forget about it and start balancing live(which, to be honest, you should be doing anyway?)
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Nov 2, 2020 06:02
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Honestly I think the problem could be much more easily solved by just making the more boring, mechanically-focused magic items (Your +1 weapons and armor, consumables and the like) purchasable in-game, while keeping magic items that actually do weird, magical things as rare drops you only get from adventuring. At the end of the day there's nothing implicitly "magical" about a sword that is slightly better at hitting and damaging things, so I don't see the particular harm to the setting it would do to make them more readily available.
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Nov 2, 2020 06:02
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AnEdgelord posted:I wonder if you can get around the lack of magical gear in adventures by letting the PCs craft some themselves. There are some, admittedly pretty barebones, rules for it in Xanathar's that you could use as a framework for it. For me personally, crafting isn't as interesting as finding the gear. Just being able to make a +1 longsword feels less special than finding it, because it means that the item is ultimately kind of mundane instead of having its own storied past. But other players like being able to make their own stuff, so hey, let them! Baku posted:The gonzo stuff is fun, but like I also get from a writing and game design perspective why "you guys find an Amulet of the Planes on your first adventure" isn't the kind of thing that just randomly happens in level 1 pre-writes anymore. All of a sudden, your medieval fantasy adventure game is a series of bad Sliders episodes; whatever you thought this was going to be about, it isn't. Yeah, there's some items that qualitatively change the adventure. But there's plenty of scope for really cool magic items that aren't nearly as campaign-defining but are still really powerful, and IMO it adds a lot to the setting when you can imagine that this nameless barrow that your group literally tripped and fell into might hold, like, a dragon mask or a Vorpal Sword. I'm reminded of this silly video about the Zelda games, and specifically a part where it notes that after a certain point in the series' development, you knew that the most interesting thing you could ever find in an optional bit of exploration would be, like, a piece of heart or a rare consumable. The developers weren't going to waste their time putting interesting, useful prizes or cool set-pieces to explore in a place that they didn't know all of their players were going to see...but that in turn removes a lot of the suspense and magic from exploring, because there's nothing special to be discovered. Everything important will be on the critical path, and everything not on the critical path won't be important. In a game like D&D, the world can tailor itself to the players and there's no reason why you can't have that sense of adventure and discovery. It just requires the DM to place interesting and magical stuff in the party's way, regardless of what direction they decide to head in. (I don't claim to support that video's validity on the Zelda series as a whole, and note that it was made before Breath of the Wild came out)
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Nov 2, 2020 06:04
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You can square the +1 longsword being crafted/coming from the Magic Mart with the idea of interesting, storied items, and I think part of a DM's job in an ongoing game is to figure out ways to do that. One way is making the crafter interesting; in the real world any sword collector would consider a Masamune blade a priceless work of art, and they aren't magical at all! Maybe this guy cranking out +1 longswords in the Ten Towns is someone special, with a truly special gift and an interesting story - or sidequest - to tell. If party members are making magic items, dig into what makes that process cool. Let the party chop shop dead monsters to use their parts in magic items and weapons/armor ala Monster Hunter. Ask the guy receiving or crafting the +1 longsword to describe what it looks like. It's kind of a lot of work for something unceremonious, but it's not like you should constantly be tripping over weapon upgrades in 5E (which has 20 character levels and enhancement bonuses limited from +1 to +3) anyway. You don't have to do it often, and that specific case - a martial character's primary weapon - is usually something they're enthusiastic about helping develop. Baku fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Nov 2, 2020 |
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Nov 2, 2020 06:51
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The heart containers and such were fine for exploration. Getting all of them was a great feeling. The items you gained during the main quest gave you more abilities, which is what you should be getting doing the main quest.
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Nov 2, 2020 06:52
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pog boyfriend posted:3.x with wealth by level and mandatory magic items is immensely worse in that you were required to get certain magic items to keep up, and you just had to find them. if a dm gave you anything but a level appropriate cloak of protection or amulet of natural armour or whatever boring rear end stay item, they were a complete jackass. Nobody explained the change to players, though, so they are still expecting magic items, both older players used to 3e/4e as well as newer players who have played RPG video games or watched critical role or whatever. And the 5e magic items are more boring than 3rd or 4th edition items, as well. (I'm all for 5e, its fine, this just happens to be one of my pet peeves.)
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Nov 2, 2020 07:08
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AnEdgelord posted:I wonder if you can get around the lack of magical gear in adventures by letting the PCs craft some themselves. There are some, admittedly pretty barebones, rules for it in Xanathar's that you could use as a framework for it. This is exactly what I've been doing, I've got an NPC that pops up occasionally and lets the players combine their mundane items with misc stuff they've found on their journey to give it specific improvements. Slap a bunch of gems on your cape? That's a charisma bonus. Found a cool bird talon? Whack that on a sword to increase its damage. I couldn't think of treasure to find on that throwaway NPC you killed, and gave you a bunch of pocket lint? Shove that in a ring with a bunch of gold coins, now it can cast a spell!
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Nov 2, 2020 07:31
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Mef989 posted:So I am brain storming ideas for my next campaign. One of them that I am trying to develop would be in a real world setting a thousand years or so after an apocalyptic event where the world has reverted to a pre industrial society and history of what used to be is lost. IMO the definitive work of this genre is The Wheel of Time and it is shameful that it hasn't been brought up yet. It's a really rich setting, and even just reading the first book or two would probably give you a bunch of fun ideas.
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Nov 2, 2020 08:18
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My husband had our normal D&D game get interrupted by a trip across a non-Euclidean bridge over a river that shouldn't exist and we ended up coming across a full horror themed spooky mansion adventure complete with phantasmal haunts, jump scares, dolls talking in hosed up nursery rhymes, and ghosts. As a Paladin I've been having an absolute blast, and we even fought a Zombie Beholder and I found a Flame Tongue! Zombeholder almost dusted our Eldritch Knight but we all made it through. Halloween might be over for the rest of the world but at least for next week my group and I are knee-deep in spoopy-town.
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Nov 2, 2020 09:14
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pog boyfriend posted:3.x with wealth by level and mandatory magic items is immensely worse in that you were required to get certain magic items to keep up, and you just had to find them. if a dm gave you anything but a level appropriate cloak of protection or amulet of natural armour or whatever boring rear end stay item, they were a complete jackass. I agree this this pretty much 100%. The magic item proliferation in 3.x means farmers would eventually be finding +1 rings every time they tilled their farms. I have other games for when I want wild magic items to be found at any level.
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Nov 2, 2020 10:23
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I did a reverse-spooky thing for Halloween. I'm in two IRL groups: one I'm a player in that meets on Fridays or Saturdays, and one that I'm DMing on Sundays. The DM for the Friday/Saturday group put out a "hey anyone want to run something for Halloween?" feeler and a certain inspiration struck. The group I run on Sundays had just started clashing with dark elves. So I ran a one-shot for the F/S group (two drow and a collaborator deep gnome) explicitly to foment chaos for the Sunday group and oh boy it was fun for all of us as they played the unseen villains in the night. The targeted party didn't get to it this week, but they know a shoe is eventually going to drop. All they really know about the shoe is that a weapon prototype codenamed "Lead Dragon" has gone missing in transit (they understand story context enough that the report that "bandit activity is suspected" for a prototype referred to only by codename with no further detail is obviously on some level going to end up being related to the Drow they've been running into) soon: dark elves carrying shotguns
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Nov 2, 2020 12:03
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Baku posted:It's kind of a lot of work for something unceremonious, but it's not like you should constantly be tripping over weapon upgrades in 5E (which has 20 character levels and enhancement bonuses limited from +1 to +3) anyway. There's more ways to be magical and powerful than the bonus, and most campaigns don't run the entire gamut from 1 to 20. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with handing out a +3 weapon to a level 12 character if they only have two more sessions to go anyway. Or if there's still a long way to go, you can give them a Sunsword or something that has other abilities besides the plus that don't directly affect to-hit/damage rolls. If ever there's a crime in D&D's magic item system, it's that the vast majority of found loot is really loving boring. "This armor is identical to the armor you had previously, except it makes you 5% harder to be hit." "This weapon is identical to your old weapon in every way, except that it's slightly more accurate, slightly more damaging, and can hurt enemies that have resistance to nonmagical damage." Are these useful? Sure. Are they boring? Also sure. And this is even more frustrating because there's so much cool loot in the DMG et al that just doesn't get handed out for whatever bonkers reason! I can go on dndbeyond and search through their items database and spend a lot of time going "ooh, that looks really neat!" about items that have powers other than just +1/2/3 to hit/damage/AC. And yet everyone fixates on the +1/2/3 gear because without it the martials fall even more glaringly behind the full casters.
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Nov 2, 2020 15:30
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I made a magitek mech suit which runs on lamp oil. It’s more of a liability than a boon sometimes but the player likes it
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Nov 2, 2020 15:43
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:There's more ways to be magical and powerful than the bonus, and most campaigns don't run the entire gamut from 1 to 20. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with handing out a +3 weapon to a level 12 character if they only have two more sessions to go anyway. Or if there's still a long way to go, you can give them a Sunsword or something that has other abilities besides the plus that don't directly affect to-hit/damage rolls. They then immediately hosed it up by making a bunch of weapons whose special powers were +bonus damage essentially ruining the whole point of the thing, but hey, they tried.
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Nov 2, 2020 16:11
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The issue is that they decided magic weapons and stuff shouldn't be super common but then designed a bunch of monsters with "you gotta hit this thing with magic lol"
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Nov 2, 2020 16:40
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Thats why I always ask my DM if I can start with a Silvered weapon if I deduct the cost from my starting gold.
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Nov 2, 2020 16:45
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Baku posted:Though I must admit, "D&D doesn't allow you to be better or worse at something, only succeed or fail more often" is a helluva sentence; this thread is a very strange place It's an awkward way of phrasing something fairly important. As people get more skilled they can do more as well as do things better. 5e starts to allow things like this, so I'll use a 5e example to illustrate. Picking pockets can be done by a lot of people, and is a simple skill check. Someone with Expertise is slightly better than someone without - but fundamentally they are picking the same pockets in the same way and the difference is occasional points on a dice. Meanwhile an expert thief should be able to do a brush pass and pick someone's pocket without breaking their step while walking through a crowd. In 3.5 that's -20 to the check, which is silly. In 5e the Thief archetype at level 3 gets to do it as a bonus action - meaning that because they are a thief they can cut through a crowd picking pockets without slowing. This was the sort of thing feats should have done but they were too much of a mess to actually do. 4e powers were a vast improvement. And 5e does a little. But games like Fate and Apocalypse World do this sort of thing much much better. There's far more to skill than numbers going up - especially when the numbers are on a d20.
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