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if the pit is bottomless wouldn't they stop half way once they reach the centre of gravity
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Sep 23, 2022 08:54
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| # ? May 31, 2024 09:41 |
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Rutibex posted:if the pit is bottomless wouldn't they stop half way once they reach the centre of gravity So they would remain suspended and helpless, no food or water for as long as it takes. Grisly.
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Sep 23, 2022 09:15
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Mr. Lobe posted:So they would remain suspended and helpless, no food or water for as long as it takes. Grisly. there would be other adventurers and people who jumped into the pit to eat......
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Sep 23, 2022 09:23
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Rutibex posted:there would be other adventurers and people who jumped into the pit to eat...... I don't think you can meaningfully hydrate on the blood of another person.
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Sep 23, 2022 09:31
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Mr. Lobe posted:I don't think you can meaningfully hydrate on the blood of another person. If the pit is open the centre would be full of water from rain, and rotten corpses.
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Sep 23, 2022 09:36
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Rutibex posted:If the pit is open the centre would be full of water from rain, and rotten corpses. Sounds like some pretty tainted water, then. Is death from dysentery an upgrade?
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Sep 23, 2022 09:39
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Mr. Lobe posted:Sounds like some pretty tainted water, then. Is death from dysentery an upgrade? It means a first level cleric could in theory survive. You could have wars down there between evil clerics animating water logged adventurer corpses. Like that episode of Voyager where everyone is trapped in a void and they all eat each other.
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Sep 23, 2022 09:45
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i have to wonder at the air pressure down there
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Sep 23, 2022 12:13
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Elendil004 posted:I once told several players that a pit was bottomless, they even used their senses and such to check it. Because it was there, they were convinced there was something in it, so they jumped in and were mad when they died. Excellent. I recently had a situation where a well, full of perfectly normal drinking water, flummoxed my players so much they spent 10 minutes discussing what to do about it. From the start I said “it is a well filled with clean drinking water”, but that didn’t stop them from making their goblin sidekick test it, cast detect magic on it, beseech their gods to unlock any knowledge of this well, test if the water was actually holy water, and finally swim in it to see if it led to some hidden passage. (It was only 3 feet deep, and they could see the bottom)
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Sep 23, 2022 13:03
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St0rmD posted:Have them be escorting an NPC they need to keep alive and who they know can't survive a fight, and have the thing you want them to run from be obviously gunning for that NPC. Then you can turn it into a chase encounter where the object is for them to get the NPC away safely, and they can feel like heroes doing that.
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Sep 23, 2022 13:10
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Rutibex posted:if the pit is bottomless wouldn't they stop half way once they reach the centre of gravity no because they still have momentum going in as they slingshot through the centre of gravity, they would hurtle past it, reach a lower relative point due to friction, and repeat the process until they lost all of their energy(assuming the planet is round, which it is not. all fantasy worlds are flat earth)
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Sep 23, 2022 13:13
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pog boyfriend posted:no because they still have momentum going in as they slingshot through the centre of gravity, they would hurtle past it, reach a lower relative point due to friction, and repeat the process until they lost all of their energy(assuming the planet is round, which it is not. all fantasy worlds are flat earth) According to 2e spelljammer only 5% of planets are flat. Some are cubes, some are pyramids, etc.
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Sep 23, 2022 14:30
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Rutibex posted:According to 2e spelljammer only 5% of planets are flat. Some are cubes, some are pyramids, etc. all the people on spelljammers are working with fantasy nasa to hide the truth from you. wake up!
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Sep 23, 2022 14:38
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pog boyfriend posted:no because they still have momentum going in as they slingshot through the centre of gravity, they would hurtle past it, reach a lower relative point due to friction, and repeat the process until they lost all of their energy(assuming the planet is round, which it is not. all fantasy worlds are flat earth) Assuming a shaft through the center of gravity of a spherical object. Maybe the bottomless pit is a magical extradimensional space of infinite depth but constant gravity and pressure? That reminds me. I once had my party exploring a Stargate containing Egyptian pyramid full of portal traps. A player fell into a pit containing magical darkness. The rest of the party tried to throw down ropes and probe it with staffs but didn't get anywhere while I privately described to the other player several rounds of falling through magical blackness. Then a portal activated on the ceiling and the unfortunate free falling pc slammed into the barbarian at terminal velocity.
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Sep 23, 2022 14:53
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Regarding fleeing: I currently run out of the Abyss and my players were exploring the pudding court in the city of Blingdenstone. They happen upon the mad king of the slimes, The Pudding King, who is under the influence of the demon lord Jubilex. They do so in the worst kind of way while being on the run from other slimes and the whole exploration becomes a big continuous battle of 3 sessions. They realized quickly that they were overextended and running low on resources and tried to flee. Most of the enemies were oozes, so running was not really off the table. They only really managed to escape by the skin of their teeths with some clutch saving throws. It was great and I had some of my best DM moments so far. There is no real lesson here, just that sometimes these situations can happen organically if you let them. I was fully prepared to let the players pay for their stupid decisions. Regarding travel: I hate it as a DM. I tried it and I absolutely loathe the tedium of having the players roll for foraging, of rolling for random encounters and other things to keep track of. I resigned myself to only having one pre-designed encounter, or series of encounter per stretch of travel, usually set up like a small dungeon. Example: The group had a travel-time of aprrox. 7 days from the Darklake to Blingdenstone. There was a drow outpost along the way adjacent to a colony of intelligent spiders along the way. This kept the the group busy for about 2 1/2 sessions (3 hours per session) and I just kinda glossed over the rest of the journey. To me this is the best way to introduce some flavor to travel and not have it be such a dull affair. In a previous campaign I floated the idea of skipping the foraging rolls with the players and one of them insisted on rolling for every travelling day. It was pretty miserable. I was kinda new as a DM and had not even prepared anything meaningful for that stretch of travel. Definitely don't do that.
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Sep 23, 2022 15:07
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Foraging and rations isn't fun. This is coming from the oldest of old school hex crawling DM. What happens when they run out of rations? Starving to death in the wilderness isn't entertaining, and rolling to forage isn't entertaining. Just skip it. Same with torches
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Sep 23, 2022 15:15
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I feel like I've had a wildly divergent experience of travel from you guys. In games I've both played and DMed, wilderness travel wasn't just hostile encounters, it was also finding other travellers (and generally interesting people do travelling) or nonhostile wondrous beasts (guys should we try to tame that unicorn?) or hidden villages of gnomes or something.
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Sep 23, 2022 15:18
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Mr. Lobe posted:I feel like I've had a wildly divergent experience of travel from you guys. In games I've both played and DMed, wilderness travel wasn't just hostile encounters, it was also finding other travellers (and generally interesting people do travelling) or nonhostile wondrous beasts (guys should we try to tame that unicorn?) or hidden villages of gnomes or something. Final Fantasy has a lot to answer for. It's greatest sin is teaching people that random encounter are always combat. They should be more like Fallout 1 and 2. Sometimes it's combat, some times it's a random farmhouse it the waste
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Sep 23, 2022 15:23
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You know you can just edit it out, right? "After two weeks of hard travel you arrive at your destination, tired and hungry."
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Sep 23, 2022 15:34
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travel pwns. people skip it because wizards forgot to put the game in for travel
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Sep 23, 2022 15:35
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Goons, I come to you in need of help. I am forever worried about being "that guy" at the table. There's lots of different reasons, and it's not a problem unique to D&D, but a big reason is social anxiety. Those tiny lulls in conversations have always made me cringe. I'm very cognizant about it outside of D&D and have worked real hard on it for years and years, but D&D adds the whole mechanics aspect to it and I'm afraid it makes it worse. I'm sure, like a lot of folks here, I like D&D mechanics and making cool characters. I grew up playing where you had to be careful not to be too weak because the mean DM did play pretty adversarially. It's been something I have been borderline obsessing over lately because my newest campaign is all women and then me, a dude. I really, really wanted to just fade into the background and support, but I feel like I'm failing at that. Anyways, lots of red flags here. I think I generally do okay, and I've never had someone give me a talking to or picked up on people being frustrated with me, but it's something that concerns me greatly. So here's my ask for help. I feel like I can never shake the need to play a character that has lots of solutions to problems. Anyone have any ideas for how to stop doing that? My current party didn't have a face character, which I really didn't want to play, so I rolled a Warlock and talked to my DM about me being able to just help other characters without actually doing the talking. I thought Warlocks would be more simple, but I took Pact of the Tome and now I have too many solutions again. Thankfully, one of our players switched to a Sorcerer and now maybe I have more options. I'd love to just play some sort of Paladin/Barbarian/Fighter/Ranger, but our party of 7 already consists of 2x Paladins, Druid, Sorcerer, Ranger, Cleric, then me the Warlock. Does this resonate with anyone else? I know the right answer is to just try to take a step back with my current character, but again, I feel like it's just making it harder for me to do.
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Sep 23, 2022 17:46
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Verisimilidude posted:Excellent. I recently had a situation where a well, full of perfectly normal drinking water, flummoxed my players so much they spent 10 minutes discussing what to do about it. From the start I said “it is a well filled with clean drinking water”, but that didn’t stop them from making their goblin sidekick test it, cast detect magic on it, beseech their gods to unlock any knowledge of this well, test if the water was actually holy water, and finally swim in it to see if it led to some hidden passage. (It was only 3 feet deep, and they could see the bottom) Maybe I'm a killjoy or just not an especially tricksy DM, but this sort of poo poo drives me insane at a game table. I want to play D&D, not spend hours safeguarding myself from incident. Obviously you didn't do it though! It was your players doing that thing.
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Sep 23, 2022 17:57
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Internet Explorer posted:Goons, I come to you in need of help.
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Sep 23, 2022 18:00
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pog boyfriend posted:does anyone in the group other than you have a problem with what you are doing? Not that I've noticed and no one has talked to me about it. My wife plays with us and she's usually not shy about nudging me if I'm not doing great in that department, but I could see her maybe not wanting to deal with it because it's D&D. And it's not like I want to make it her responsibility. It's a good question, though. I'm not 100% sure it's been a problem. I just really don't want it to be.
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Sep 23, 2022 18:05
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Internet Explorer posted:Not that I've noticed and no one has talked to me about it. My wife plays with us and she's usually not shy about nudging me if I'm not doing great in that department, but I could see her maybe not wanting to deal with it because it's D&D. And it's not like I want to make it her responsibility. Then you're probably fine. Show this post to your wife and ask her how you're doing? I worry about backseat-driving other player's characters too. To avoid it these days I usually pick characters who have a very clear roleplaying reason to not do it (e.g., monk with vow of silence; very stupid minotaur who has a drax-like degree of literal thinking)
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Sep 23, 2022 18:09
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theironjef posted:Maybe I'm a killjoy or just not an especially tricksy DM, but this sort of poo poo drives me insane at a game table. I want to play D&D, not spend hours safeguarding myself from incident. Obviously you didn't do it though! It was your players doing that thing. Normally I reward my players for coming up with creative secrets that I wouldn't have normally thought of. Like if a premade dungeon has an empty room that my players take interest in, or a particular detail really makes my players think and prod for something creatively, I'll say "wow, I can't believe you thought of that" and give them some small reward. They get to feel super smart and cunning along with receiving some gold as well, and I get the joy of my player feeling good, so everyone is happy. This time tho, it was literally just a well. I don't want to do this for every inane thing they interact with, because then they'll catch on, and every searchable room will take forever to get through.
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Sep 23, 2022 18:11
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Internet Explorer posted:Not that I've noticed and no one has talked to me about it. My wife plays with us and she's usually not shy about nudging me if I'm not doing great in that department, but I could see her maybe not wanting to deal with it because it's D&D. And it's not like I want to make it her responsibility. the thing is there is a really high probability that everyone is grateful you are stepping in to fill in the role, also
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Sep 23, 2022 18:12
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Mr. Lobe posted:I feel like I've had a wildly divergent experience of travel from you guys. In games I've both played and DMed, wilderness travel wasn't just hostile encounters, it was also finding other travellers (and generally interesting people do travelling) or nonhostile wondrous beasts (guys should we try to tame that unicorn?) or hidden villages of gnomes or something. Yes, but you can just write those things in and skip the rest of the travelling tedium. The only thing that it is really good for is athmospheric campsite roleplay, characters getting to know each other, etc. or fun interactions that convey information about the game world. Skipping roadside encounters entirely is no fun either. But for me they just work better if they have some thought put into them.
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Sep 23, 2022 18:37
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Re- social anxiety- I’m playing a literal brain damaged kobold in a game I just joined, partially so I can just take direction and learn how to group tends to interact. It seems to be working out. (Believe it or not it makes sense from a story perspective)
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Sep 23, 2022 18:38
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:e.g., monk with vow of silence; very stupid minotaur who has a drax-like degree of literal thinking) For this exact reason my next character is going to be an up for anything guy who just wants to hang out and help his friends do what they want to do.
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Sep 23, 2022 19:03
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Jack B Nimble posted:For this exact reason my next character is going to be an up for anything guy who just wants to hang out and help his friends do what they want to do. I'm running a loxodon druid right now who's unperturbed by most things, but in an incredibly pessimistic way. Less "The Dude abides" and more "This'll probably get us all killed, but that's OK. Ready when you are."
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Sep 23, 2022 19:12
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Chinook posted:Re- social anxiety- I’m playing a literal brain damaged kobold in a game I just joined, partially so I can just take direction and learn how to group tends to interact. It seems to be working out. (Believe it or not it makes sense from a story perspective)
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Sep 23, 2022 19:21
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Jack B Nimble posted:For this exact reason my next character is going to be an up for anything guy who just wants to hang out and help his friends do what they want to do. It's not working so well with our current DM because it turns out all 3 of us have 'basically just chill guy who will go along with whatever' and my first character (now dead) was basically the only character with any real motivation.
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Sep 23, 2022 19:49
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champagne posting posted:The Spelljammer included adventure starts this way with "you're supposed to run away" I am putting the tavern they're in basically at the docks, so even if the players stand and fight the infinite blights, they see the ship and see that it's an obvious way out of here. Or they will see that the thugs are harassing commoners and step in to help. Captain Sartell can also come out of the shadows and say "hey i need to get to my ship, help me and ill give you a ride out of here"
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Sep 23, 2022 19:51
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Bobby Deluxe posted:I've played two characters like that now, and the first worked because he was a himbo fighter from a small village, we had another player who had a big epic backstory to lead us, and the DM was casual enough that most of it was just having fun. That's fair, and I can see how that's a danger, but my group tends towards "six highly invested grognards recreating the argument at the council of Elrond."
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Sep 23, 2022 20:00
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champagne posting posted:The Spelljammer included adventure starts this way with "you're supposed to run away" I'm in the same boat (har) and I think I'm just gonna dial up the devastation as the crystal vines burst out of the ground. Think the movie 2012: earthquakes (like the spell), people falling into abysses, buildings being smashed flat, etc. You HAVE to run, because the ground is literally crumbling under your feet. Maybe make them pause occasionally to save people from astral blights or free a building from vines while people scream inside, but always keep the clock ticking. Play up that its the end of the world and they're saving who they can. It's less a challenge than a setpiece. Then as they make it to the docks they'll see the thugs bullying the crowd and hopefully their hero instincts will kick in.
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Sep 23, 2022 20:07
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If you're starting Light of Xaryxis from Spelljammer Academy you can also have the vines just attack the academy and the players escape on a merchant ship at the spelljammer dock. edit: Any suggested stats for Wizpop, Pffred or Krik-lit? I am going to have them come along as sort of misc crew, 3 or so levels behind the party but I don't really want to make them full characters though as I write this maybe I ought to. Elendil004 fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Sep 23, 2022 |
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Sep 23, 2022 20:46
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Internet Explorer posted:Goons, I come to you in need of help. Thanks Goons for the answers and commiseration. I appreciate you!
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Sep 23, 2022 21:45
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A simple solution is to make your PC a specialist from an enclave/group/whatever where people only did what was under their purview. That way, even if you the player know how to solve a problem, limit it only to how your character would rationalize it. You can acknowledge other characters' strengths while using humor to explain why your PC can't fix the problem. I once played a Monk that was a master carpenter like this, where his only approach to solving problems was fight, be blunt about the situation, or make something from wood. Otherwise, just talk with the DM about your concerns
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Sep 23, 2022 21:51
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| # ? May 31, 2024 09:41 |
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Internet Explorer posted:Thanks Goons for the answers and commiseration. I appreciate you! Also remember that as a player, you might be able to tell another player something that helps them to make a choice, then as a character, stand aside and let that players' character do the thing. Especially if the player is potentially struggling and their character ought not to be.
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Sep 23, 2022 21:55
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