TheTofuShop posted:

An enchanted, intelligent axe; blessed by the mountain lords it was once wielded by a powerful barbarian who embarked on a bloody quest for vengeance. Though the barbarian slew his rival, his quest for bloodshed only instilled more violence in the region and led to the destruction of their entire village and the grim death of it's former owner.

Having seen the vicious cycle of violence, the axe now wishes to push it's new owner towards pacifism, as it is the only way to not continue the cycle it has witnessed (perhaps many times before)

TheTofuShop posted:

poo poo, quote is not edit.

Could also be possessed by it's former master(s) a ghost barbarian constantly urging them towards peace and nonviolence.

Sanford posted:

My party fought the dragon, and while the two fighters distracted her the rogue climbed the outside of the ruined tower she was in, tied a rope round the biggest stone and threw it down. Then they all pulled and toppled the tower down on her. I let them roll a big handful of dice for damage to keep the fight moving on, but are there D&D 5e rules for a massive lump of stone falling on a dragon?

I also tried to give them a tiny taste of a Whybird-style moral dilemma by having the druid tell them that although he considered the zombies dealt with, he would never allow the town to be resettled because of the danger of the new townsfolk digging up the zombies and re-spreading the blight. Resettling the town is the archer's personal objective and he's a bit murder-happy so I assumed his response would be to off the druid and resettle the town anyway. They actually responded by going back to where they buried the zombies, and using the stone and wood from the ruined tower to lay a lovely patio and a nice deck over the top. I had no idea how to make them roll for that so I just let them get on with it...

Baronjutter posted:

Our poor DM last night tried to give us this hand-crafted puzzle because players asked for more puzzles. 3 rooms, each room having a switch which lowered a pillar into a receptacle and opened the next door. Each room had 4 suits of armour that would come alive, one at a time, and fight us.

We roll into the first room and one of these things come alive, it's surprisingly hard and nearly kills us so we have to hyper-focus on defeating it. As soon as we do another activates. We kill another one, we flip the switch and see the general state of how the puzzle is solved but the next chamber the pillar is broken. What we were "supposed" to do is split up with some people distracting/tanking the monsters while the others figure out the puzzle in each room. What we thought we had to do was kill every single monster. We played for 3 hours, a non-stop slog of fighting these very tanky animated suits of armour. By the end all the players were bored and pissed off, the DM was very frustrated we didn't do things right, and we had only killed 5 of the things in this never ending war of attrition. I ended up thinking maybe we needed to use these huge pillars to kill the monsters, so we set up elaborate situations to force them into the little pits and lower the pillar down on top of them, crushing them.

The key mix up was someone asking if they could fix the broken pillar using mending, someone else saying "the pillars are magical, mending won't fix them" and the DM confirming with "yeah your character would know that wouldn't work" so we took that as official word from the DM that trying to fix the pillar was out of the question and "wouldn't work" because they would no longer be magical and thus no longer open the doors, which are all magical as well. We were in fact supposed to gather up the stone chunks and assemble them into the receptacle to open the next door. People were so pissed by the end of the game, but then the DM realized that by killing so many of these very high level enemies in rather creative ways we got a huge amount of experience, and the mood instantly changed from "gently caress this I don't even know if I want to play anymore" to "woah, great game guys!"

So the lessons as a DM are: If you make a puzzle and players are brainstorming ideas on how to solve it, be very careful what you say as players might take it as official word their idea would not work. And, if everyone is really upset at your game just shower them in experience.

Waffles Inc. posted:

I've got hint notes and whatnot

Subjunctive posted:

gently caress that’s brilliant.

Ignite Memories posted:

You seem like good people.

I ran a fun clue based murder-mystery manor adventure as a guest DM for a friend a few years ago, and am currently starting up a strike game about a fantasy catering company.

My advice re:louvre heist is to play it with friends and have everyone play themselves.

kazr posted:

That's a uh... very interesting rule. What are your players reactions to that?

Bad Munki posted:

I don't understand, are you saying everyone plays with just a single set of dice? As if they somehow don't all have a mountain of dice dumped out on the table in front of them? lol yeah right

BadSamaritan posted:

My group has been playing a bit with Lamentations of the Flame Princess characters and none of use would have any dice left if we used that rule. A 3 hp spell caster is usually not long for the world.

Malpais Legate posted:

Okay, two things for my current 5e game's arc:

Y'all got any ideas for setpieces in a magic-laboratory type area? It's supposed to be the like, magical research lab from an ancient civilization. I was thinking of covering the staples with the Owlbears, But Worse wing filled with the remains of mismatch monsters, and a library with ~forgotten knowledge~ and ~ancient spells.~ Anything else you'd think would be here? I was also considering a defunct magic item forge with still-lingering magic in it. I just want this stuff to have obvious points of interaction, so my players won't poke their heads in the door and go "nope moving on."

Second, set in the same ancient-magical civilization: What kind of gatekeeping/warding would you think the aristocracy would use to separate itself from the lower classes? I wanted to avoid the bog-standard "magical bubble shield." My current line of thought involves gatehouses that only respond to displays of sufficiently high-level magic. Otherwise, the peasants (and, by extension, the player characters) would have to climb over walls or up sheer cliff faces to gain entry.

Comrade Gorbash posted:

To riff off Dragonatrix a bit, it also sounds a bit like you're falling into the trap a lot of GMs (myself included) get stuck in. Namely, feeling like we have to narrate the connective bits of travel and have all the story show up "on screen" for the PCs.

IME, pacing in tabletop RPGs works best when it works like TV. There's no reason you can't smash cut directly from rescuing the prince from the dragon, to standing before the queen's throne as she announces her gratitude and hands out rewards... and a new mission. Even long-narrative shows like Game of Thrones skip past a lot of travel time, etc., with little more than an aside or bit of narration, or even just a chyron.

If the town the PCs arrived in doesn't have anything interesting in it, just narrate past it to the next bit of interesting things. This even works with NPC interactions - if a PC wants to hit up the blacksmith and you can't think of any interesting interaction, you don't have to RP it out. You can cover it in one line, or even throw it to the PC to describe if they're comfortable with that. The trick there is that recognizing when the player has something interesting for that encounter and letting them take the lead to bring it out. But if it's just going to be small talk, bounce right by it.

You may also want to consider switching to a more episodic story. Rather than try to have one giant narrative through line for the whole campaign when you start, just have the PCs be the recurring characters in a series of adventures. Over time recurring NPCs will appear organically, and you may find a season-long plot thread to pull on. Or not, and that's fine too.

kazr posted:

Can anyone get me the goonmade guide to making better creature stats? I can't seem to find it

DivineCoffeeBinge posted:

One of the things that most of the Legendary Actions writeups I've seen (at least in 5th) that I don't see in your writeup goes something along the lines of "Once a Legendary Action is used, it cannot be used again until all other Legendary Actions have been used once." That is, if you use Action A, you can't use it again until you've used Action B and Action C. Using that rule will keep you from spamming one ability too much (and if your players detect the pattern they can start to anticipate and adjust their tactics, giving that warm fuzzy "boss fight" feeling).

Beyond that, without doing any math or anything that seems like an appropriate setup; dangerous without being ridiculously deadly and the only directly targeted ability, Arrest, is nonlethal. Looks good to me, let us know how it goes!

Ilor posted:

^^^ This.

The especially important bit is to have things that the PCs aren't addressing move along at their own pace. PCs ignore all of the signs that there's an assassination plot on? Oh, poo poo, the Duke just got killed! Stuff like this gives the players the sense that they're caught up in larger events.

Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:

Consider structuring things like a monster of the week tv series, perhaps with a looming larger threat that players can receive hints about and maybe prepare a bit for but isn't the focus of the adventures, at least at first.

Comrade Gorbash posted:

I think the best way to handle the difficulty of scheduling is to set the expectation that it's game night.

Then you make sure to have something else to do with the subgroup of people. Board and card games are a great option, as are having small one-shot RPGs (Firebrands, Fiasco, etc.) and even multiplayer video games.

If everyone's available, great! We play the campaign. If too many people or someone critical to a certain moment misses, then it's still game night and you can do something fun.

Having that expectation up front tends to make it easier - and weirdly reduce absenteeism, in my experience. Your group still wants to show up, but feels less like assholes if they do miss a session.

Ignite Memories posted:

Zodack posted:

Trojan Kaiju posted:

I'm trying to make a map of a ship on a dock and, looking online at examples, I see a lot of similar-looking maps. I figure there's a map builder I can use to easily make it but I have not found it, so far. Anybody got any good resources for a not-art-inclined person to easily and intentionally build maps?

Pollyanna posted:

Is there ever a case where an NPC that is truly out of the party's league ala Overlord is interesting and worthwhile? I imagine that scenarios where an NPC shrugs off their strongest attacks and magic and wildly outclasses them qualify as bad gaming in the common sense. Or am I assuming too much?

Ysengrin posted:

Yeah, the big key is that any boss fight that has an unbeatable enemy needs an objective other than "fight the bad guy" as a goal, clear signposting of this (no half measure, it has to be literal 'your attack is deflected by an invisible forcefield' style), possibly even you out of character pulling aside your players and telling them "no really, this is not a fight you're designed to win through combat," and even then you're going to sometimes just have people run face first into it. Especially if you've done the "Good GM" thing of not throwing them into unwinnable encounters before, which will have likely trained them to be used to fair fights. As Ace said, you need to have some sort of payoff for your players.

I did manage to pull it off once, where my players summoned a hostile Dragon God via their narrative tokens in order to try and kill off one of their enemies, and after doing that it attempted to kill them. I did a little time out before the fight to mention "normally I don't make things that you can't in theory beat in a fight, but this is the exception. You can totally try to fight if you want, and if you win I'll roll with it, but that'll be a genuine surprise if you actually manage it." Then it fried some of their NPC allies to demonstrate the kinds of numbers it had for its attacks, and they decided to do a fighting retreat while figuring out how to banish it back to its plain, which involved a lot of dodging its attacks (I gave it an MMO style attack indicator, where it'd mark the areas it would hit next turn and then they had to scrabble away).

Ysengrin posted:

Oh yeah, definitely. For my boss, I actually gave his most damaging attack a Mercy limit (so if you take the hit you'll only be brought down to 1 hp) but then it left behind a bunch of fire tiles that meant if you stayed there you'd tick over to 0, and broke up the map for them. Wing buffets to knock them around, and a couple of projectiles that crept along the battle arena to deny them area. All things that they could avoid and not die to, but made it really feel like they had to adapt to it's actions rather than them dictating the terms of the fight.

Highly damaging but telegraphed attacks, and nonlethal positioning abilities, are great for that type of "overwhelming" NPC because your players have to actively do something to avoid it, rather than just hope their AC is high enough to tank the attack. Scary without being a guaranteed lethal.

I'd also avoid the temptation of having them dueling with another NPC and them just dodging the fallout of the fight though. It seems like a handy way to "explain" why the NPC isn't just directly focusing them down, but in practice it ends up feeling like a sideshow. Unless you manage to turn it into a proper Kaiju fight and not just Sorcerer #1 vs Sorcerer #2.

siggy2021 posted:

This one actually came up at the beginning of the adventure and they started running out of food and spent an entire session panicking and it was good times. Then the Cleric had the sudden realization that they could just case Create Food and Water.


It's not so much the being cautious. Being cautious is fine. Searching every god drat wall drags everything down, especially when there is a mechanic built into the game for that already (Passive Perception) and it's already been made clear that your natural 24 passive perception is enough to see anything hidden.

It's really a combination of overly cautious and exploring each and everything thing in the dungeon and refusing to move on until you figure it out, even when there is nothing to be figured out. I would think if you were being overly cautious you would just say gently caress it I'm not touching that and move along.

I don't know. I'm just kind of salty right now because in a 5 hour session we got through three smallish rooms of the dungeon instead of nearly two of the small floors like I thought we would.

blastron posted:

It is exactly that. In canon, it’s made by the same rear end in a top hat lich that made the Tomb of Horrors. You get sealed in when you enter and can’t teleport out, and resurrection magic doesn’t work. It features fun things like “make a Dex save or be ground to paste”, a room that instantly destroys all non-living, organic matter (such as your component pouch and the straps on your armor), a mirror that traps you inside it with no way out when you look at it (and a variety of teleportation traps that leave you facing it), golems that show up to interrupt your rests... and, of course, a fountain that reverses your sex.

That said, it was real fun to run as a DM and my players had a blast. Everyone went in with the understanding that the module had a ton of unfair bullshit in it and approached it very creatively, and I did my best to reward them for it while still keeping the spirit of the module.

OscarDiggs posted:

What's the advice when it comes to a max number of players?

I'll be running my first PbP game here soon and while I was commited to 5 players, I've had 6 applications so far. If I were a bit more experienced I'd have all 6 but I'm worried about my ability to pace, plan encounters and give everybody something to do if I go to high. Are these fears unwarranted or is it something to actively consider?

Sanford posted:

They got a handful appraised and have been really careful not to let anyone know they have more than maybe 250gp worth at any time. Through some weird rolls and even weirder decisions on their part the crime boss that owned the gems is dead, and so is the only member of the city guard who knew the players swiped the bag. They rolled two nat 20s in a row when the guard captain asked if they’d taken anything else from the mansion, and then two more in the following conversation. When fully 50% of your rolls in a social encounter are 20s you can pretty much do what you want.

Actually I want to revise my question - I just want something interesting to happen with the gems. Something they can spend them on that isn’t game breaking would be fine. I’d prefer a plot hook though.

mango sentinel posted:

Are there any go to books that are good resources for running urban or megacity adventures/campaigns? System and fantasy/sci-fi doesn't really matter.

mango sentinel posted:

I actually feel like that's probably the thinnest aspect of that book, it's why I'm asking.