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Trivia posted:
I really wish Planeshift Amonkhet came with an adventure. Or that we got a proper book for that setting instead of Strixhaven. Dienes fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Jun 28, 2021 |
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Jun 28, 2021 13:58
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Trivia posted:The irony of CoS is that it's billed as an adventure that pushes your character into dark places, potentially corrupting any good-aligned character. That sounds fun until you realize that the fine line between the character and the player is fickle, and if the character starts to think "this sucks what's the point" then the player probably does too. I dont remember if Har'akir ever got an adventure back in 2nd, but you can probably adapt the plot of Stone Prophet into an adventure. And if you're looking for story seeds, L5R had a Legends of the Burning Sands source book that featured an Egypt analogue prominently. Macdeo Lurjtux fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Jun 28, 2021 |
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Jun 28, 2021 14:50
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That new Ravenloft book has an Egyptian style setting/world described but none of them are full adventures, just like, starters for adventures really, you’d be doing the lions share of the work yourself.
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Jun 28, 2021 14:53
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Egyptian adventures: the classic D&D touchstone is adventures written by Tracy Hickman for 1e called Pharaoh and Desert of Desolation. For 5e stuff I’d look at Kobold Press; they do good work and have a bunch of Egyptian flavored stuff for their Southlands setting. I think one of the early 4e adventures (Thunderspire Labyrinth?) was set in a pyramid but it was also not very good.
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Jun 28, 2021 15:34
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Has anyone here already had the time to check out Kobold Press' The Scarlet Citadel? Seems like a neat megadungeon.
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Jun 28, 2021 18:24
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:I dont remember if Har'akir ever got an adventure back in 2nd, but you can probably adapt the plot of Stone Prophet into an adventure. RA3 Touch of Death was set in Har'akir. It was one of the Grand Conjunction Modules. I recall it being pretty good, but that's me remembering how I felt about it in the 90s.
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Jun 28, 2021 18:28
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Y'all are driving me nuts!!! Curse of Strahd is a gazeteer masquerading as an adventure!! This is both good and bad. Bad because your GM has to do a LOOOT of work and if your GM is bad then it will be unfun. Good because your GM can do whatever the gently caress they want because literally all that's in the book is a premise "Find items/people from Tarokka so you can kill Strahd and go home" and a list of places and people. That's it. Everything else is what you make of it. If you feel like its a railroad that's because your GM is railroading you! If you think CoS is a railroad try playing a Paizo adventure path.
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Jun 28, 2021 19:12
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BattleMaster posted:Don't run Strahd as a horror game, run it as Castlevania! The players are the morning sun, come to vanquish the horrible night! Yeah, D&D style horror when I've seen it work is more Aliens than Alien, you're tough enough to fight back but if you charge in and/or didn't expect what the monsters could do you get your rear end kicked fast. CoS actually manages that well enough; wandering like an idiot is a good way to get into a bad fight, as is fighting without a plan. Also it's worth being serious about not letting PCs have a "one fight workday"; they are wandering in deadly areas that realistically should NOT be safe for a long rest without strong effort and cleverness (if they can casually camp out in Castle Ravenloft itself anytime you are making it far too easy) and delays in things like rescuing NPCs should result in seeing fangs in the NPC's mouth if they dilly dally getting there. Getting true horror tension is hard, but to use the Castlevania metaphor getting it to where it's the equivalent of "I've got a small bit of health left and one more fight before a save point" can do quite a bit to engage players. When we finally staked Strahd we were literally completely out of spells and drat near out of hit points thanks to the constant attrition, made for incredibly tense gaming. Also Strahd is the most glorious of villains for D&D because it's virtually impossible to have him killed off permanently early (i.e. outside his lair) thanks to his vampire and spellcasting abilities even if you underestimate your PCs, and you have a ready excuse for him to quit if he wins too easy (the whole point of his grabbing the PCs in the first place is to have fun, what's great about winning in an anticlimax?). So you can do the equivalent of "early boss battles" with him swooping in and leaving before he gets beaten or TPKs the group, or popping up to mock/monologue at the party (because his abilities make it easy to avoid having to fight if he doesn't want to) and unleash some sort of minions on them while he leaves sneering. It may make him more old-style serial villain rather than a horror (our paladin took to counting every time we drove him off i.e. holding up two fingers to Strahd retreating after we beat him back the second time, three the third time, etc.) but if it's hard to realistically get the PCs afraid of him you can still make him someone they'll love to hate, especially if he keeps getting away every time thanks to flying/invisibility/turning to gas (our DM even had him jump off the top of the tower in Ravenloft to retreat away once because hey, he could survive the fall easily after all). Your players also get more opportunities to learn from their mistakes and fight him better to boot.
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Jun 28, 2021 21:11
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Megazver posted:Has anyone here already had the time to check out Kobold Press' The Scarlet Citadel? Seems like a neat megadungeon. I've had an eye on it as I've generally liked what Kobold Press stuff I've seen - but I can't find a single drat review or anyone anywhere talking about it lol. Have you read it?
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Jun 28, 2021 21:55
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Epi Lepi posted:Y'all are driving me nuts!!! Curse of Strahd is a gazeteer masquerading as an adventure!! This is both good and bad. Bad because your GM has to do a LOOOT of work and if your GM is bad then it will be unfun. Good because your GM can do whatever the gently caress they want because literally all that's in the book is a premise "Find items/people from Tarokka so you can kill Strahd and go home" and a list of places and people. That's it. Everything else is what you make of it. If you feel like its a railroad that's because your GM is railroading you! If you think CoS is a railroad try playing a Paizo adventure path. lol, you have to be more specific because that's exactly what people are complaing about and discussing. It's mostly one thing (a gazetteer) while trying to be another (an adventure) and because of that failing at both. A huge part of what's talked about here is even broader than that. How do you translate that kind of horror to a tabletop RPG effectively, and is CoS giving you the right tools to do that? Maybe it works better if you change the tone (make it more castlevania or evil dead?), even though that's not the original intent? Maybe it doesn't work at all jn the D&D system? If not, why? Telling us it's just the DM's fault for not putting on enough effort or whatever, with a lot of exclamation marks isn't adding anything to the discussion!!!!!!! Like, every adventure is what the players and DM make of it and even the objectively worst material could be saved by having the right people involved putting in enough effort, but that's not the point, and coming in here telling everyone they're wrong for critiquing CoS is lazy and dumb.
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Jun 28, 2021 22:15
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As someone who grew up playing World of Darkness 1.0 (mostly Werewolf and Vampire), it is baffling to me why anyone would want to try to take a power fantasy ruleset and then try to apply it to gothic horror. As flawed as those games were, they had building that kind of atmosphere and tension baked fully into the rules, and while yeah a good DM can shoehorn that poo poo into D&D, so many basic assumptions of the 5e systems run contrary to the what the module wants you to build. VTT support and player familiarity aside, if that's the module that your table wants to run, sit down and have a serious discussion about trying a different system.
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Jun 28, 2021 23:05
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Taeke posted:lol, you have to be more specific because that's exactly what people are complaing about and discussing. It's mostly one thing (a gazetteer) while trying to be another (an adventure) and because of that failing at both. No people are complaining it is a railroad pretending to be a sandbox and that the tone is too depressing. Those are 100% the result of how your GM runs it. It's a hard adventure to run but I have found it to be a very rewarding adventure because you can put so much of your own spin on things. Strahd can be a looming threat that never gets encountered until the end or he can masquerade as a friend in his Vasilli von Holtz persona until he betrays the party or a consistent thorn in the players side. Ireena can be the heart of the game or just a minor protection quest depending on how your players react to her, and her story can end in various ways. Vallaki can end up with vastly different political landscapes, or be burned to the ground or your PCs can just get kicked out forever. There's no specific route your players have to take, they do not have to visit any location besides Ravenloft itself. What characters become major players is entirely up to the PCs, and a little bit the Tarokka along with where they visit and when. Azathoth posted:As someone who grew up playing World of Darkness 1.0 (mostly Werewolf and Vampire), it is baffling to me why anyone would want to try to take a power fantasy ruleset and then try to apply it to gothic horror. I don't understand this take. You're playing from a completely different perspective in World of Darkness. You're playing as the vampire/werewolf and the point of the system is confronting the horror in the self. Curse of Strahd is about beating Fantasy Dracula, eventually, after struggle and toil. It's about bringing hope to a dark land and facing monsters, not being loving sad and dead. The book does not pretend to be anything different.
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Jun 28, 2021 23:11
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DourCricket posted:I've had an eye on it as I've generally liked what Kobold Press stuff I've seen - but I can't find a single drat review or anyone anywhere talking about it lol. Have you read it? No, which is why I was asking. I think it came out about a week ago, which is why there's no proper reviews yet.
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Jun 28, 2021 23:21
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Epi Lepi posted:I don't understand this take. You're playing from a completely different perspective in World of Darkness. You're playing as the vampire/werewolf and the point of the system is confronting the horror in the self. Curse of Strahd is about beating Fantasy Dracula, eventually, after struggle and toil. It's about bringing hope to a dark land and facing monsters, not being loving sad and dead. The book does not pretend to be anything different. I'm not saying it should have the same tone as WoD, I was just using that as an example of a setting that does horror well in large part because horror conceits are baked into not just the setting but the rules and various systems. CoS wants players to feel a way that the rules are not conducive to supporting. A good DM can make it work, but a good DM can make drat near anything work with enough effort. I'm not saying it's a failure of a module, just that it's very much trying to hammer a square peg of a module into a round hole of a system.
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Jun 28, 2021 23:24
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Taeke posted:lol, you have to be more specific because that's exactly what people are complaing about and discussing. It's mostly one thing (a gazetteer) while trying to be another (an adventure) and because of that failing at both. I wonder if you started playing later than Epi Lepi did? Most classic adventures in the early days were what you're calling "a gazetteer," as they provided information about a setting, usually a dungeon, along with a framework or adventure hook to get PCs to that setting, and then pretty much left everything else for the DM to fill in. Back in the days of 1E, introductory modules like B1 went even further by providing a generic dungeon map and having the DM populate it with a series of provided encounters. Later 2E and 3E adventure modules vacillated between more railroaded storylines and maguffin hunts and settings with adventure hooks, although they tended to be better about providing some villains or NPCs with motivations which might affect how things went over time. Mostly, though, they relied on the DM to improvise if things got off the rails, or used the same sort of crude methods used today to ensure they stayed on. (I recall being deeply disappointed by Vecna Lives! for precisely that reason. You either ignored most of the adventure, or drove the locomotive over the players.) I'm less familiar with 4E. My impression in 5E is that there's some variation between the "setting with adventure hooks" approach and the "story-driven adventure" approach and that books are more likely to fail on the setting-details end of things, like Descent into Avernus being more focused on detailing Baldur's Gate than the main adventure setting. Some of the stuff I've read about seems to be driven more by a CRPG attitude in the sense that the setting only exists to provide PC adventuring opportunities, which is a drastically different approach than having an existing setting that the PCs stumble into and disrupt. My guess is that part of the change reflects the design philosophy turning toward the "only provide content that will see play" approach. If a part of the setting isn't important to the specific adventure the PCs are on, it won't be provided in any detail. In theory, that maximizes the amount of the "product" that a DM gets to use over the course of a campaign. In practice, it distorts play as it means the designers have to craft the adventure in a way to compel PCs into exploring only in the areas covered by the published materials, or to handwave the rest and allow the DM to extrapolate on the basis of 2-3 sentence descriptions where necessary. Whether this is a better or worse approach than detailing a complete setting and giving PCs reasons to explore, while running the risk that they miss huge sections, is hard to say. But in terms of attitude and DM execution, there's a huge difference in how to run a setting-based adventure where the PCs are stumbling upon an ongoing story and getting caught up in it, and running a PC-focused adventure where the whole world revolves around the PCs, whatever they're trying to do, or whoever they're trying to stop, and nobody much cares about what happens in their absence. As for Ravenloft, it always had gothic trappings but it was never really exactly gothic horror, except perhaps for campaigns that started PCs from Ravenloft and expected a high burn-out rate. That's part of why TSR spun off the Masque of the Red Death gothic horror setting from Ravenloft, which was (among other things) very low magic. Van Richten's Guide classifies Barovia as a Gothic Horror setting, but while CoS provides all the materials necessary to pull that off as the Guide defines it (saying Gothic Horror is about humanity and depravity), there's not as much help in conveying that atmosphere in play and if players aren't all-in, you can't pull it off successfully. For example, the "nature of humanity" thread starts strongly with "my son is a vampire," and continues throughout whether it be the humanity-or-lack-thereof of vampires, the question of souls being reborn, the plight of the werewolf, the lost humanity of ghosts, or even the depravity-generating husks in the Amber Temple. The Abbey is perhaps the strongest expression of these themes as presented external to the PCs. But all of this is presented as patently obvious thematically and there's almost no guidance for a DM who doesn't already know how to convey the proper atmosphere. Running Castle Ravenloft the way you would Undermountain or the Caves of Chaos is easy to do, and you'll undermine the theme if you do that. If 5E Adventurer's League was your first introduction to D&D, you have a very different set of tools, assumptions, and approaches going into CoS than if you've been playing for 30+ years. I strongly suspect that the "CoS is great" crowd is disproportionately older-school RPGers and the younger crowd find it lacking, but I might be way off. WotC has kind of a thankless task because they want to appeal to both groups.
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Jun 29, 2021 00:22
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People like to praise CoS's sandbox but I found it obnoxious. Everywhere we went was a constant trigger for something new to happen, even if we were just passing through, and the resulting quest bloat caused us to run around like headless chickens. We went five months and only finished one of the five fortune cards. By that point I was at my wits end and I was constantly trying to herd cats to get us to finish one loving side quest. Limitations CAN be a good thing. Going to the grocer and seeing 15 choices for ketchup is too much. Narrow that down and a more meaningful decision can be made. This was also the point that I started hating milestone leveling, as I couldn't help but meta and think "I doubt this side quest is going to level us, so why bother. Yes there might be treasure, but this is CoS and so far the treasure is poo poo."
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Jun 29, 2021 01:18
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CoS highlighted some player incompatibilities in my group, on top of some intrinsic issues. It felt like there was very little progression: we never got loot outside of the magic sword the Paladin started with (which ends up feeling unfair when one player starts with a magic weapon and no one else will ever get one) and narratively it seemed like nothing we did ever actually made anything better. The other issue is that it was supposed to be a lethal dangerous game and we had a couple players who were instigators and couldn’t handle trying to be careful and planning things. We should have had a TPK at Arganvostholt but were saved by Deus Ex and for me, this shattered the illusion that we were actually playing in a lethal game.
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Jun 29, 2021 16:55
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Trivia posted:People like to praise CoS's sandbox but I found it obnoxious. Everywhere we went was a constant trigger for something new to happen, even if we were just passing through, and the resulting quest bloat caused us to run around like headless chickens. We went five months and only finished one of the five fortune cards. By that point I was at my wits end and I was constantly trying to herd cats to get us to finish one loving side quest. This aligns with my experience quite a bit. It felt like a lot of wandering about the map. Even when my party accomplished a task, it didn't feel as if we were getting anywhere. Nothing felt like it had any consequence to it, including whenever Strahd would show up. The only fun I really had was when I treated it all as a farce. I was fortunate enough to have bought a Strahd puppet from Blinsky and I would just bust him out for vampire ventriloquism whenever Strahd was mentioned in some way or showed up. Otherwise, I didn't find anything in CoS particularly compelling.
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Jun 29, 2021 17:21
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I’m planning an expedition to the frozen north and whipping up some potential encounters for the level 9 party. One of them will be a frost giant slaver who sends in his pet to weaken the group first, and I was trying to decide between a Behir and a Remorhaz. Both have pretty similar stats and are CR 11, but… the Behir seems way tougher and can do more interesting things. Is this just the case of “official CR is poo poo”?
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Jun 29, 2021 17:30
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Epi Lepi posted:Y'all are driving me nuts!!! Curse of Strahd is a gazeteer masquerading as an adventure!! This is both good and bad. Bad because your GM has to do a LOOOT of work and if your GM is bad then it will be unfun. Good because your GM can do whatever the gently caress they want because literally all that's in the book is a premise "Find items/people from Tarokka so you can kill Strahd and go home" and a list of places and people. That's it. Everything else is what you make of it. If you feel like its a railroad that's because your GM is railroading you! If you think CoS is a railroad try playing a Paizo adventure path. Yeah...that's the sign of a badly written adventure module. I don't know what to tell you, but an adventure module shouldn't be something else pretending to be an adventure module and it shouldn't require tons of GM labor to make it work. That's, like, the entire point of adventure modules. I've played through a dozen Paizo APs and enjoyed most of them (*cough* Second Darkness *cough*) more than I've enjoyed Strahd. I enjoyed the old school modules that required a lot of DM labor to make work, but they were up front about that and it was the standard of the time. It was expected. That expectation hasn't been the case for a couple of decades now at the very least. That said, I ran B1 last year and it took less DM labor to get to run on all cylinders than Strahd and you basically have to make your own dungeons. I've run the original Ravenloft module multiple times and it works without needing to spend hours rewriting the thing. Devorum fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Jun 29, 2021 |
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Jun 29, 2021 18:16
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change my name posted:I’m planning an expedition to the frozen north and whipping up some potential encounters for the level 9 party. One of them will be a frost giant slaver who sends in his pet to weaken the group first, and I was trying to decide between a Behir and a Remorhaz. Both have pretty similar stats and are CR 11, but… the Behir seems way tougher and can do more interesting things. Is this just the case of “official CR is poo poo”? remorhaz is tankier and has burrow and immunity to frost and fire. the behir is stronger in terms of damage output but the guerrilla warfare aspect of having the remorhaz being able to burrow out and attack randomly then burrow to safety to do hit and run tactics makes it superior imo.
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Jun 29, 2021 18:55
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Devorum posted:Yeah...that's the sign of a badly written adventure module. I don't know what to tell you, but an adventure module shouldn't be something else pretending to be an adventure module and it shouldn't require tons of GM labor to make it work. That's, like, the entire point of adventure modules. I have a love/hate relationship with Paizo APs, they can be fun but they're written too much with a specific path in mind that you can end up beating your head against a wall if your party doesn't do the exact thing in the exact order the writers assumed would happen. They also build way way way too many fights into each book and it can be a slog. I much much prefer how CoS is written, I have put a lot of work into running it but it was enjoyable work, and I never felt like I was fighting the adventure. I'm obviously the only person who's got extreme brainworms for this adventure, peep the Curse of Strahd subreddit for tons of info and takes from tons of people. Don't go there as a player of course. I like how there is no route that the players are forced on. There are no forced encounters with Strahd, there are no forced resolutions to any of the events in any of the locations. The adventure is honestly very simple and I don't understand how people get so far in the weeds sometimes with it. You're trapped and can't leave until you defeat Strahd. There are some people and items scattered across the land that can help you defeat him. That's it. Everything else can be as prominent or not as you and your players want it to be. There should be no issues with character motivation as going home again is a pretty universal one. People complain about the grimdark tone but I've never found it to be that grimdark. The book itself highlights how you should be using levity and humor to offset and underscore any actual horror and frankly most of the horror in the book is fun creepy horror. I also think that committing to making your players feel powerless all the time and sabotaging them all the time is a GM mistake that should be avoided. The book limits your party's resources and Strahd should be played as someone who at least thinks he's always in control but it doesn't say to poo poo on your players all the time. It doesn't say that every NPC should be dour and hateful. From my perspective my players are bringing hope and light to a hopeless world and that's not that grimdark to me. There are only a few things I don't like about it. There is an encounter in Vallaki that is way deadly for the level the players are likely to be when they get there. The mongrelfolk in the Abbey squick me out. Some of the tarokka results are just way better than others. Frankly if the idea of fighting Fantasy Dracula in Fantasy Transylvania is appealing to you then this is a good module for it. And if that doesn't then don't play it and expect it to be what it's not.
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Jun 29, 2021 19:11
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pog boyfriend posted:remorhaz is tankier and has burrow and immunity to frost and fire. the behir is stronger in terms of damage output but the guerrilla warfare aspect of having the remorhaz being able to burrow out and attack randomly then burrow to safety to do hit and run tactics makes it superior imo. Will probably go with this then. Since the MM says anyone touching or attacking the remorhaz takes fire damage, I assume it can also just try to slam into players as it moves, too?
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Jun 29, 2021 19:15
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change my name posted:Will probably go with this then. Since the MM says anyone touching or attacking the remorhaz takes fire damage, I assume it can also just try to slam into players as it moves, too? By RAW no. You could add it as a homebrew ability. As it doesn't have any action or bonus action or feat to ram into things. By RAW only touch spells and melee attacks not at reach trigger it.
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Jun 29, 2021 19:21
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Weird how CoS is by far the most well-received of the 5E adventures (outside maybe the starter box?) and is based off of one of the most well-regarded adventures in 1E with Ravenloft - yet this thread seems pretty down on it? I've intentionally not read it as I was hoping to play it unspoiled some day so I can't really comment, just a peculiar observation.
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Jun 29, 2021 19:34
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Dexo posted:By RAW no. You could add it as a homebrew ability. As it doesn't have any action or bonus action or feat to ram into things. By RAW only touch spells and melee attacks not at reach trigger it. Will probably give it an ability to force dex saves for that 3d6 if it moves 20 feet in a straight line and then past someone; the way I'm picturing this is like fighting a giant flaming train that constantly runs past, burrows, and keep popping up at random.
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Jun 29, 2021 19:38
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Epi Lepi posted:I have a love/hate relationship with Paizo APs, they can be fun but they're written too much with a specific path in mind that you can end up beating your head against a wall if your party doesn't do the exact thing in the exact order the writers assumed would happen. They also build way way way too many fights into each book and it can be a slog. I have no issues with the tone, really. I just don't think it meshes well with a high power RPG like 5E. And I can see how the module might be good with a lot of work. But, again, that should be made clear before it's purchased. It shouldn't be labeled a standard adventure module if it's actually a sandbox toolkit. This is especially egregious when it comes to groups like mine where everyone but me is ESL and has only ever played 5E and expects an adventure module to provide a more structured adventure. I love the idea of fighting fantasy dracula. The problem is that without a lot of work the module just feels like wandering aimlessly through the sadlands while Strahd appears occasionally to charm someone or talk poo poo. And I'm not crapping on anyone who enjoyed it. I'm glad y'all did, and hope all the people planning on playing it do, too. I just think the module should be clear about what it is.
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Jun 29, 2021 19:58
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curse of strahd rules because i go off the rails with every adventure path anyway so the strahd rails being virtually nonexistent is a plus for me. if you want to play adventure paths as written and not worry about it then you will not have a good time with it.
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Jun 29, 2021 20:22
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DourCricket posted:Weird how CoS is by far the most well-received of the 5E adventures (outside maybe the starter box?) and is based off of one of the most well-regarded adventures in 1E with Ravenloft - yet this thread seems pretty down on it? Yeah I'm kind of in the same boat. I've thought about running a reskinned CoS game at various times, and I've come up with a few different ideas about what I would want to do to make it work, but I also intentionally haven't read into it deeply in case I end up being a player rather than DMing it down the line. It seems like a good adventure, with a couple different ways of theming it, though like many of the 5e books it seems very sandboxy to me. It sort of boggles my mind that WoTC keeps releasing these adventure campaigns that have so little structure or focus. They often seem to be DM crib notes from someone's table rather than a game intended to actually be played. One of the biggest complaints is that 5e relies too heavily on DMs putting in the work to make these books playable, and pretty much all of the WoTC releases are like that. To my mind, it seems really obvious that every book should be organized so that a group can just play through it on a railroad if they want to, and then add in alternative paths and suggestions for groups that branch out on their own. It is way easier to adapt an existing structure than to be constantly creating material out of whole cloth in order to connect the unrelated setpieces that fill so many books. And that's before considering how often central plot issues are barely detailed while random background information is lavishly explained. Some of these books seem like they're adventure modules in name only, when they're really more like fantasy world codexes. And while those books certainly have their place, that definitely isn't what people seem to want. Kaal fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Jun 29, 2021 |
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Jun 29, 2021 20:28
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Kaal posted:Yeah I'm kind of in the same boat. I've thought about running a reskinned CoS game at various times, and I've come up with a few different ideas about what I would want to do to make it work, but I also intentionally haven't read into it deeply in case I end up being a player rather than DMing it down the line. It seems like a good adventure, with a couple different ways of theming it, though like many of the 5e books it seems very sandboxy to me. IMO it's not a 5e problem. You have to do some level of modification in all the campaign books no matter what. I remember having to do that back in 3.5e too. Hell, I had the 3.5e Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil book and I remember there being so little connective tissue between the plot and the actual dungeons that you largely had to develop your own plot and reasons for the players to want to go to the dungeons.
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Jun 29, 2021 20:55
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I ran CoS for a rando pick up group for about a year. It is... a weird premise. Once you internalize how Strahd is meant to be used (first as a sort of trickster figure and then as a genuine antagonist only when the players are high enough level to threaten him) you can kind of make it work. It is definately a lot of work (too much work) for a new DM to use. I liked it, but with several caveats. I am very comfortable improvising, and the module gave me just enough to work with (maps, stats, items) that I could focus on what I like (characters, motivations, story). It got out of my way a lot. That said, its format is actively hostile to new players, to the point where one of my players came to me about three months after we finished. He was confused why half of what I ran wasn't in the book and asked, "so what do I actually do with this (book)", for which, yeah, it's like half of what you need to run a game.
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Jun 29, 2021 22:06
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I asked a few weeks back about good numbers for DND games to prep for my game when I start it in the future. My buddies game ended a little earlier than anyone was expecting, didn't define our expectations before starting the game and one of the people playing didn't quite know how long an RPG could go on/what he was signing up for. He thought that in a role playing game someone needed to be like Pierce in that one episode of Community I guess and killed us all cause he got bored and sick of playing and the DM kinda let him (also not experienced, kinda felt like the game was winding down a bit anyway). A whimper rather than a bang unfortunately. So I'm starting mine earlier than expected, it's 4 people, 2 who've played D&D before and 2 who haven't at all (and the walking TPK has decided to sit this one out). The ones who've played before are thinking a Glory paladin and a bard of undecided flavour whereas the two new people have opted for an Arcane Archer fighter and the other guy has flipped through a big collection of all subclasses, including UA stuff and gone for a tranquility monk, I did a bit of a google and a few results say this is considered a bit overpowered, is that to an egregious degree or would it potentially be alright? He'd probably be fine swapping ultimately but seems quite excited about just playing what he's picked and has a fun sounding character idea so I'm hesitant to say anything, they aren't gonna be min maxing or anything so it's probably fine. Is that a probably accurate take?
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Jun 29, 2021 22:07
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thebardyspoon posted:I asked a few weeks back about good numbers for DND games to prep for my game when I start it in the future. My buddies game ended a little earlier than anyone was expecting, didn't define our expectations before starting the game and one of the people playing didn't quite know how long an RPG could go on/what he was signing up for. He thought that in a role playing game someone needed to be like Pierce in that one episode of Community I guess and killed us all cause he got bored and sick of playing and the DM kinda let him (also not experienced, kinda felt like the game was winding down a bit anyway). A whimper rather than a bang unfortunately. I can't imagine a healing monk will ever rise to the level of egregiously overpowered. I'm sure it'll be fine, because that sort of character is going to empower the team rather than stealing focus for themselves. You might have to deal with some healing shenanigans, but I'd bet that the impact will be that the party doesn't take short rests as often. The only real issue would be if there was another player who also wanted to be a healer, because then there would be a head-to-head healing competition that the monk would probably win.
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Jun 29, 2021 22:22
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Kaal posted:I can't imagine a healing monk will ever rise to the level of egregiously overpowered. I'm sure it'll be fine, because that sort of character is going to empower the team rather than stealing focus for themselves. You might have to deal with some healing shenanigans, but I'd bet that the impact will be that the party doesn't take short rests as often. The only real issue would be if there was another player who also wanted to be a healer, because then there would be a head-to-head healing competition that the monk would probably win. Cheers, I expect everyone else will be fine with letting him take the lead on keeping everyone a bit topped up.
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Jun 29, 2021 22:36
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Cithen posted:This aligns with my experience quite a bit. It felt like a lot of wandering about the map. Even when my party accomplished a task, it didn't feel as if we were getting anywhere. Nothing felt like it had any consequence to it, including whenever Strahd would show up. The only fun I really had was when I treated it all as a farce. I was fortunate enough to have bought a Strahd puppet from Blinsky and I would just bust him out for vampire ventriloquism whenever Strahd was mentioned in some way or showed up. Bwahahahaha, we had a bard in our group who did the same drat thing. Wound up backfiring when Mordekainen heard it and immediately freaked out thinking out Strahd was there and came in ready to kill us (boy when folks realized he cast a Time Stop at the start to buff up everybody pretty much wet themselves in and out of character). Can't recall whether we convinced him "Strahd went thataway" or if we just ran away fast enough to live. One of the funniest moments in our game was when we tried to use a Sending to convince him to come to us at the Abbey where the priest could cure him and receiving a response of basically "Oh no, the voices in my head are back!"  .
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Jun 29, 2021 23:15
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Speaking from years of experience - having OP 'support' characters is the easiest to manage and really means you can just throw bigger and badder enemies at your party earlier. I would not be concerned about it but - feel free to tell the player that since it is only test material you maintain the right to potentially tweak them a bit as the game goes on. E Kaal posted:
I'm 8 months into a Frostmaiden campaign and I feel this. I love all of the parts but I have to put in a lot of effort (well, a moderate amount, people on the internet already did the heavy lifting for me) stitching it together into an actually cohesive whole. DourCricket fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Jun 30, 2021 |
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Jun 30, 2021 02:31
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Picked an oddly fortuitous time to check out this thread, as I'm getting back into the D&D, preparing to run something, and Curse of Strahd is foremost. It's either that or an old Planescape module (Doors to the Unknown) with stats pulled from 5e sources. It's a group that loves heavy roleplay, but I have yet to see how well they deal with not being railroaded, at least if the sandboxy CoS is the choice of game. Cithen posted:I was fortunate enough to have bought a Strahd puppet from Blinsky and I would just bust him out for vampire ventriloquism whenever Strahd was mentioned in some way or showed up. God. Now I just want puppets for all the Ravenloft darklords. Mazed fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Jun 30, 2021 |
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Jun 30, 2021 04:45
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Mazed posted:Now I just want puppets for all the Ravenloft darklords.
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Jun 30, 2021 08:52
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DourCricket posted:Weird how CoS is by far the most well-received of the 5E adventures (outside maybe the starter box?) and is based off of one of the most well-regarded adventures in 1E with Ravenloft - yet this thread seems pretty down on it? I think it's well-received by experienced or veteran DND players. It's billed as a kinda subversion to typical DND tropes. That's all cool and good if you've experienced the tropes, but if you're new then those tropes are meaningless and maybe it's best to do the tropey poo poo first and then branch out to subversion. It became an issue because my new DM googled "best DND campaign," saw CoS, and went with it without much further research.
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Jun 30, 2021 09:15
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I’m currently doing CoS as a player in a 3 man party, it’s great. The dm is experienced though. 3 players doesn’t sound like much but I’m a necromancy wizard and the two others are paladins so we’re doing ok for now
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Jun 30, 2021 09:19
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