|
TheSwizzler posted:maybe a rat sorcerer uses some sort of soul trap spell to take over the body of some kind of brute to use as a boss My friend have you seen Ratatouille?
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2023 02:26
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 6, 2024 11:30 |
|
|
YOUR UNCOOL NIECE posted:My friend have you seen Ratatouille? Raccacoonie?
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2023 03:55
|
|
|
That wearhouse with all those rafters sounds like the perfect place to show off the elite squad of cat riding rat archers. They're deadly accurate while firing in the saddle, and their mounts can make quick work of darting across the rafters and taking seemingly impossible jumps so you can never quite tell what angle they're coming at you from. Of course as rats on cats, they can't really take more than one hit, but its landing one that's the trick.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2023 09:11
|
|
|
Naturally their leader is very fat
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2023 10:27
|
|
|
And wears a hat.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2023 10:27
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2023 16:39
|
|
|
TheSwizzler posted:These are all amazing suggestions and I think I'll be using most if not all of them No idea what they'd use the power generated by the curse to do. Create a Cat Interdiction Field?
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2023 17:59
|
|
|
To the person with the Rotting Dark/Scorching Sun setting they were working on, hope you don’t mind, that really caught my interest and I’ve been wanting to start a game with some friends, planning to directly use that idea, along with the response input from this thread. It’s good stuff.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2023 18:08
|
|
|
YOUR UNCOOL NIECE posted:My friend have you seen Ratatouille? The party has a frenemy who's a lizardman chef, so that's gonna happen sebmojo posted:Naturally their leader is very fat  sebmojo posted:And wears a hat.  Dameius posted:That wearhouse with all those rafters sounds like the perfect place to show off the elite squad of cat riding rat archers. They're deadly accurate while firing in the saddle, and their mounts can make quick work of darting across the rafters and taking seemingly impossible jumps so you can never quite tell what angle they're coming at you from. Something along those lines, my players would murder me if the game had any harm come to cats, macaque monkeys maybe Pickled Tink posted:Have the rats hit the players with a shrinking curse so they get slowly smaller until they are rat sized. They must break the secret Rat God Fetish used to inflict the curse in order to be free from it. The shrinking curse will also allow the player to enter the Rats base of operations and the Rat God Fetish can be tracked by magic letting them know where to go. Doing something like this, I was looking for an excuse to do a rat temple terrain set piece
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2023 18:34
|
|
|
TheSwizzler posted:The party has a frenemy who's a lizardman chef, so that's gonna happen Yeah the mount is flavor, cat was just an easy way to show how elite they are that they're using their natural predators as mounts. Rats using monkeys instead made me picture gnomes riding goliaths so if you go that route I vote you go bigger than macaques. Chimps maybe that basically go beserker if they lose their rider?
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2023 18:56
|
|
|
Do you guys have any suggestions for when a player is getting frustrated due to rolls that just aren't going their way? The player is me. In the last couple sessions with my group I've rolled probably a d20 three dozen times, if not more (two attacks + bonus action attack plus reactions) and have got a number above 8 maybe six or seven times. I mean, I know there's the whole 'haha these dice are cursed' but it's genuinely becoming an issue when my entire turn is *rolls three dice* "Nothing near what I need, and that's my turn" I ask because as a DM I wouldn't know how to solve this aside from inventing methods to give advantage, and even then it only helps so much when even with advantage nothing comes from the dice.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2023 19:06
|
|
|
I don't know what your build is, but could you focus on things that aren't dependent on your rolls of a dice? Like, if you're martial and your system supports flanking, get yourself in position to give people advantage? Or if you're not combat oriented, use the Help action to give people assistance?
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2023 19:18
|
|
|
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1016230372/weighted-dd-7-dice-set-d20-d4-d6-d8-d10
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2023 19:24
|
|
|
I'd recommend floating the option at the table of rolling 3d6, which tends to the same mean as a d20, giving you 10.5 fairly consistently and relying on three dice rolling poorly to turbofuck you. Alternately, make reparations for all the puppies your ancestor kicked.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2023 19:28
|
|
|
Morpheus posted:Do you guys have any suggestions for when a player is getting frustrated due to rolls that just aren't going their way? If you've had your dice for a while, consider giving them a bath - regular old dish soap and a strainer should do fine, or throw a delicates bag in your dishwasher if you'd rather a machine do it. It might be possible they've accumulated little sticky bits in weird places. Consider getting a cheap dice tower. Maybe something's weird about your rolling. If you've verified to your own satisfaction that your dice are fair, don't change anything about how you play. There's no reason for your bad luck to persist, after all.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2023 20:30
|
|
|
I think the best thing you can do as a DM is never tell your players the odds. If a failed outcome is as interesting as a pass outcome then let it fall where it may, if a failed outcome is boring or annoying just shrug and treat it as a success or better yet just give them a pass. This has a hilarious side-effect of your players becoming paranoid with their rolls. In my last post way above, the reason why my players tried to do the infiltrate via smoke bomb trick was because they rolled low on a forgery test to forge their CV's to become waiters. I didn't tell them they failed, they just assumed they did because they had a low total score even though I was entirely willing to just let them pass.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2023 20:48
|
|
|
Morpheus posted:Do you guys have any suggestions for when a player is getting frustrated due to rolls that just aren't going their way? You sound like the Ranger in my 4E game. His daily was Split the Tree: pick two targets, roll to hit both of them, use the higher roll (so, yes, improve your chances to crit both) against both, and do dump loads of damage against any target you hit. Almost invariably, he would miss not only with the two rolls but also with his elven accuracy reroll. Absolutely cursed. He was a DPS machine in all other ways, except when he tried to use this ability. The advice is follow all normal and received dice dehexing methods. They don't work but can't hurt.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2023 21:44
|
|
|
Glazius posted:If you've had your dice for a while, consider giving them a bath - regular old dish soap and a strainer should do fine, or throw a delicates bag in your dishwasher if you'd rather a machine do it. It might be possible they've accumulated little sticky bits in weird places. ask if you can roll low rather than high, like a 1 is a 20 and a 3 is an 18. If your dice instantly swap and start rolling twenties, tie the high/low thing to a coin flip. If the dice seamlessly keep changing their orientation to gently caress with you, consider an exorcism.
|
|
#
?
Mar 4, 2023 22:12
|
|
|
Morpheus posted:Do you guys have any suggestions for when a player is getting frustrated due to rolls that just aren't going their way? In addition to a bunch of the things other people have suggested, I can only add the advice culled from my experience playing woefully underoptimized characters. Namely, spend as much time as you can get away with doing poo poo that doesn't involve the dice. Like, you don't need to worry about a target's AC when you're spending money trying to impress them enough to let you join their gang (at which point you let the rest of the party into the gang HQ), or convincing the High Priest that while the Church does need to maintain a sizable grain storage for next year's Festivus celebrations there should still be enough for them to distribute to starving villagers, or whatever. Things that involve the roleplaying aspect of the hobby. Make friends! Influence people! Do stuff that's cool even if it isn't super effective! Heck, if you RP it out well enough you can earn Inspiration to hold on to until the next combat, where you might be able to use it to actually hit something! Beyond that, the other strategy that worked for me was to find ways to try and squeeze some mechanical bonuses out of things at every turn. "Hey, instead of just standing in front of this guy and swinging my mace at him, I'm going to run up here onto the railing and jump down to attack him from the side his shield isn't on. Hey, can I have a +1 bonus to my roll?" That sort of thing. As long as you're putting effort into trying to innovate, a lot of DMs will absolutely run with giving you bonuses, because Rule of Cool - and also because, if they're any drat good at all, they know how frustrating it is when the dice are turbofucking you, and may be inclined to give you a few extra bennies to make up for it. (if they're not so inclined, they're probably not a ton of fun to game with, so gently caress 'em, lol) Hell, if you're feeling adventurous, try turning your recent spate of failure into a plot hook! You know it's just a hunk of polyhedral plastic that's to blame for your character's struggles, but the character doesn't. If they've whiffed on almost every attack for like a week or two, don't you think they'd start asking themselves what's wrong? Take a trip to the temple at the first opportunity, demand that the Bishop cast Remove Curse on you - because obviously you've been cursed, or else why would your battle prowess be so lacking of late? The point is, if you're getting frustrated by the random elements of the game (and rightly so, it sounds like, you could also consider new dice, oof), then see how much emphasis you can shift to the parts of the game that don't heavily feature that randomness. That way even if you keep rolling like poo poo, at least there'll be a few moments every session you can point at and say "but this part was fun."
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2023 01:01
|
|
|
Bad Munki posted:To the person with the Rotting Dark/Scorching Sun setting they were working on, hope you don’t mind, that really caught my interest and I’ve been wanting to start a game with some friends, planning to directly use that idea, along with the response input from this thread. First game is tomorrow! Share your sessions and I'll share mine.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2023 01:14
|
|
|
Jack B Nimble posted:First game is tomorrow! Share your sessions and I'll share mine. Awesome. Mine probably won't be for a bit, it'll take me a little while to get a foundation laid. What are people's favorite tools for tracking games/world building/etc? Like, some quick googling came up with Obsidian Portal as an example, I know I've seen some more geared toward general fiction authoring and the like as well.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2023 05:04
|
|
|
Trip report on the stealth mission into the shadow merchant's compound: the party deliberately scared off another group of forest-goers from a rival of the shadow merchant that they could have gleaned for information or teamed up with and went in super loud and immediately got separated into three groups, all of which featured a mix of charmed and not-charmed characters, leading to a wild mess between groves of three separate plans that eventually led to 4/7 of the party being charmed and led to the main hall quite confident that they had a handle on the situation. The druid is still a giant spider somewhere in the trees. Two characters are still trying to bluff their way through the mess hall with a disguise kit. I am pretty pleased and looking forward to next week's comedy show.
|
|
#
?
Mar 6, 2023 05:16
|
|
|
I’ve got a session tonight and it feels a bit… flat. Anyone got any ideas to spice this up? To set the scene, we are moving towards the endgame of our very long running campaign. The party have learned that everything that’s gone on over the past few years has been leading towards the god of death trying to ascend as Top God. They’ve foiled various plans, so now he’s going for a blunt approach of causing a massive battle, big surge of power off all that death, take the moment to strike out at the other gods. That’s what they’ve got to stop but they’re not there yet. Tonight’s session is traveling to a fortified bridge that is reliably neutral and closed to military traffic, but now fallen silent to all comms. It’s been taken by the death gods followers and his forces are crossing freely to head for the big battle. The original owners of the bridge, along with their guard dogs and guard eagles, are all locked up. The party need to defeat the baddies, then destroy the bridge (which the original owners won’t want them to do). For the bad guys I’ve got a nice range of duergar from a new book I got this week. The guards are just humans but they could be anything. The bridge is over the river Bland and leads to the Depressingly Bleak and Featureless Plains of Umtab but I’m concerned the “this place is very dull” theme is coming through in the gameplay. Just realised I don’t even have a boss beyond “loads of them bad dwarves in here.” Edit: how did they take the bridge? It’s fortified! Sanford fucked around with this message at 11:59 on Mar 22, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 22, 2023 11:51
|
|
|
Sanford posted:I’ve got a session tonight and it feels a bit… flat. Anyone got any ideas to spice this up? If they're going to destroy the bridge, and if the enemy are duergar, are you doing much by way of traps? Even if gunpowder doesn't exist in this setting, obsessed and slightly evil miners will have some way of clearing big inconvenient chunks of stone, and may be employing it against your party. (it would also give the party stuff they can use to destroy the bridge)
|
|
#
?
Mar 22, 2023 12:15
|
|
|
ok so a bit of a spiel here, maybe someone will find it interesting. I recently finished a reread of the manga Jujutsu Kaisen and it changed my view on magic items. I've always been reticent to give my players any kind of magic loot at low levels because I like to preserve the gritty realistic feel for as long as D&D can sustain low fantasy, but for this campaign I'd rather give them interesting and potentially dangerous artifacts to use. Currently my group are ingratiating themselves to an elf sage important to their community and high-ranking in the Neverwinter Guild of Adventurers, with more than a little political clout in the city. For their first mission this sage sent them to the Sunless Citadel to rescue a lost group of more neophyte adventurers from the village of Oakhurst (just the hook from Tales from the Yawning Portal). The sage (I think a wizard of the Divination School), however, is actually privy to the true nature of the citadel and to its history as a cultic site to the dragon god Ashardalon, and of the situation regarding his vampire lieutenant Gulthias, who has been staked to a tree in the grove beneath the citadel and rather than die has corrupted the tree into a perversion of itself. This is mostly just expanding on the lore I've looked up about the original Sunless Citadel module and these plot elements. The sage's goal is actually a magical artifact the party will come across in purging the dungeon, I think maybe the stake itself, which I might describe as some kind of heavenly lance or a nail from heaven or something because one of my players is an Aasimar warlock that is deathly afraid of anything Celestial because they sold their soul to an outer god. My group is just about to enter the grove area in the last section after dealing with the kobold and goblin factions in the fortress itself. I haven't really worked out the sage's ultimate goal with these artifacts yet but I'm leaning towards some ancient grudge they bear regarding the slow decline of elven culture/species and wanting to right it in some fantastically misguided way. Anyway, I've elaborated on this just to give an idea of how I'm wanting cursed objects in general to become an important concept in the campaign, but I'd also like to extend this to items the group finds and can use. However: a) I'm having a little more trouble coming up with a good mechanical solution to the idea because "cursed items" that lower your stats and raise others or something might work in a limited sense but I feel like they kind of defeat the purpose of the D&D power fantasy. I was thinking that maybe they could permanently occupy attunement spots until a condition is met instead, and not fulfilling that condition would imply some negative effect - maybe worse death saves? the possibility of being cursed and resurrection magic failing or otherwise going awry? I can come up with a thousand effects for "flavor" but it would be nice to think of at least one mechanical concept to tie into the idea that a lot of these objects are unholy relics brought into the world in weird and awful ways. b) I've never really used a lot of magic items before, so if anyone has any particularly good sources for them they'd like to share, that would be cool. I've worked out a concept for one such item that can maybe give an idea of the vibe I'm going for. one of my characters is a druid whose gimmick is that they've had Avatar-ish dreams about their predecessors and they want to communicate with them directly. if anyone is familiar with the module I'm running, my last session stopped right outside the door to the goblin chieftain's room that also leads to the grove level. I've planned that the druid tending the Gulthias tree offered this chieftain an artifact to buy his loyalty: a circlet that allows the chieftain to commune with his ancestors and the past kings of his tribe, however the circlet is cursed and "other voices" (demons? outer gods/entities?) also speak to the mind of whoever wears it and have driven the goblin chieftain mad. I think my druid will be drooling over getting their hands on the item and I'm pretty sure I'll be able to lean heavily into its "curse" and milk it for future plot developments.
|
|
#
?
Mar 22, 2023 12:51
|
|
|
Sanford posted:I’ve got a session tonight and it feels a bit… flat. Anyone got any ideas to spice this up? OK, so I'd probably tweak the set-up to ensure it's as much of a ticking clock as possible. - The duergar who've taken the fortifications are only the advance party (stealthy assassins and rogues who've crept in to open the gates for the bulk of the enemy army - maybe there's even a hidden traitor amongst the guards who can turn on the PCs mid-battle). Perhaps as the party arrives, the defenders are being sacrificed to the god of death, rather than simply locked up, to kick off with high stakes? - Definitely give the approaching enemy forces a big, relatively slow and intimidatingly powerful boss creature - a nightwalker could be appropriate? - to get the players sweating and to emphasise the urgency of destroying the bridge before the attackers can cross it. - Turn the destruction of the bridge into a tactical challenge. Someone needs to be standing on the bridge holding the enemy at bay while the most acrobatic party members swing down to the struts to plant the explosives. (I'd recommend removing the guard eagles from contention to ensure the PCs are essential to the plan's success.) Then the players need to ensure that the bridge defenders can retreat quickly once the fuses are lit. You've also got a moral quandary (whether to destroy the bridge and anger the defenders in the process) which only really has one solution right now. You could seed some cool alternative approaches as well, probably - maybe the fortified bridge contains a temple to a god of the river, and the players can attempt to bargain with it / summon a giant water elemental to drag down and drown the enemy army without destroying the bridge?
|
|
#
?
Mar 22, 2023 13:53
|
|
|
I have recently discovered my party really really likes puzzles and riddles. Is there a good third party supplement for puzzles I can drop into adventures/while I'm building adventures?
|
|
#
?
Mar 22, 2023 20:04
|
|
|
Sanford posted:I’ve got a session tonight and it feels a bit… flat. Anyone got any ideas to spice this up?
|
|
#
?
Mar 22, 2023 20:31
|
|
|
The Slack Lagoon posted:I have recently discovered my party really really likes puzzles and riddles. 1) https://www.google.com/search?q=lists+of+riddles 2) The Grimtooth's Traps series 3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disentanglement_puzzle; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baguenaudier; https://www.wikihow.com/Win-the-Peg-Game; etc.
|
|
#
?
Mar 22, 2023 20:46
|
|
|
Simon Tatham's puzzle collection has some interesting ones in it too https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
|
|
#
?
Mar 22, 2023 21:03
|
|
|
Admiralty Flag posted:Only have one specific supplement family to recommend and that depends on what sort of puzzles you're talking about. Do you mean 1) riddles, or 2) trap-type puzzles, or 3) Towers of Hanoi-type puzzles? We're doing White Plume Mountain, so the kinds of puzzle traps/puzzles in there.
|
|
#
?
Mar 22, 2023 22:02
|
|
|
The Slack Lagoon posted:I have recently discovered my party really really likes puzzles and riddles. D&D 3.5 Book Of Challenges Puzzles, Predicaments, and Perplexities Puzzles, Predicaments, and Perplexities 2 There is a third PPP as well, but I don't think it is anywhere to take a look before you buy. DM Guild, for all of your PPP needs.
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2023 15:41
|
|
|
The Slack Lagoon posted:We're doing White Plume Mountain, so the kinds of puzzle traps/puzzles in there. Fantastical and Dangerous Environmental Hazards as set pieces? It will make a big difference if your party has collected Wave as its Cube of Force ability trivializes much of the rest of the dungeon. An M.C. Echer room with different gravity wells in it, or even moving gravity sources could make for an interesting challenge. A room/encounter where characters periodically swap bodies (everyone pass your character sheet to the player to your left). Bonus points if you include enemies in the rotation. A room that periodically causes different magical effects: - All magical items suddenly are affected by an Immovable Object spell - A "speed limit" like effect from The Expanse ... any launched projectile (including attack roll spells) are suddenly slowed - Positive energy and negative energy Flumphs are randomly moving around. If they touch their opposite, a large explosion occurs
|
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2023 18:10
|
|
|
Sanford posted:I’ve got a session tonight and it feels a bit… flat. Anyone got any ideas to spice this up? Why did the Duergar split with the dwarves? Worshiping rocks instead of statues made of rocks? Or trapping ancestral spirits in crystals? Either way the bad guys have a big old geode with ghosts stuffed into every crystal. The original owners of the bridge didn't protect against literally everyone being possessed by a ghost. But the longer the ghosts are out of their crystal the harder they are to get back in, so the Duergar had to settle for opening everything up and then having the owners lock themselves into their cells. Now the high priest of the dark god is undergoing a lengthy series of rituals to put all these ghosts back in the geode. If the PCs can interrupt this the ghosts are going to want revenge before they go to their promised reward in the Dwarven afterlife. If the PCs can't or take too long the high priest will start letting unused or believing ghosts possess Duergar soldiers and beef them up. Edit: more like chief bard, the ceremony involves all sorts of tapping on rocks and crystals with tuning forks. The prisoners ate their keys. They have info from the lock maker that makes it possible to pick the locks, but probably only to one group of prisoners. Do you go for the leaders who can get the defences working for you but will object to destroying the bridge? The dog handlers who can loose their dogs but not control them with all these ghosts around? Maybe just the raw recruits, who won't understand what you are doing around those bridge supports... habituallyred fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Mar 24, 2023 |
|
#
?
Mar 23, 2023 22:00
|
|
|
Actually managed to have my first session as a DM running Storm King's thunder. I very much enjoyed the experience, but definitely get the having to fly by the seat of your pants now. My players managed to find a couple of mundane items from a fallen giant's bag, and have shown some interest in them as I flavored them a bit (locket with picture of a halfling mother/child & a tombstone with a halfling sounding name). So now I'll be cooking up for them a messed up mini shire that they might find in the wilderness. Combat is definitely the part I'm going to have to work on. Seemed like everyone enjoyed themselves but planning the maps/any of the terrain was challenging. Any tips/advice for making sure I've got some areas set up if the part decides to throw down?
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2023 18:27
|
|
|
LemonRind posted:Combat is definitely the part I'm going to have to work on. Seemed like everyone enjoyed themselves but planning the maps/any of the terrain was challenging. Any tips/advice for making sure I've got some areas set up if the part decides to throw down? There are books of battle maps you can buy, alternatively just imagine what the current area looks like and draw anything meaningful to combat your players aren't gonna notice/care about the terrain most of the time so long as what you're drawing vaguely matches what you described up to that point.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2023 20:10
|
|
|
Reddit's r/battlemaps is a good resource, but I mostly google "$typeOfTerrain drone photo" , or browse around google maps until I find a landscape that matches up.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2023 20:33
|
|
|
Think about ways you can make your players move around or have other goals than burn down the Baddies one at a time. Like a crevasse with archers on the other side, a bell they're going to ring for reinforcements etc
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2023 20:40
|
|
|
Design/prepare mechanics first and in a way that lets it be easily reskinned. To an extent you can always put a different skin on what is doing 1d4+2 or whatever. So just stat some generic baddies and any fight mechanics you want and see where they go. Goblins ambushing from the high ground in a barn mechanically is basically the same as some thugs ambushing from tree branches.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2023 21:11
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 6, 2024 11:30 |
|
|
Anyone know a good/easy way to record audio from Discord on a Mac? I've tried Audacity but I don't think I understand how it works.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2023 17:20
|
|
