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Hello, new DM here for a very green group. We are all pretty big video game dorks, but none of us have played D&D before. We are following Keep at the Shadowfell, but I've been tweaking things to make the beginning a bit more interesting. I have created a weird sort of encounter for next week and was wondering if some more experienced players/DMs might tell me if it's going to suck or not. (I sort of want them to think outside of the box more in and out of combat, and this what I came up with to try to encourage that.) In the cave under the waterfall, the players find a blocked up door after defeating the normal encounter there. If they open it, there is a large clay/rock golem type creature inside. I tailored the creature so that it has a lot of defense, but doesn't hit very hard, and I intend for the players to kill it by dragging it into the waterfall using the grappling hooks they found outside. The defender is a water type Genasi, so the monster will run away from him as a sort of clue. Do you guys think they will be able to figure it out?
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Jul 7, 2009 16:15
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Yeah, ground level, in a cave behind a waterfall. In addition to the water genasi making him immediately flee, I had planned to describe the creature's blows as having dried chunks of dirt flying off. I've already emphasized that the waterfall/river is extremely rough terrain, though they could move through it slowly. Is that a situation players are supposed to use strength or athletics checks, though? When/how to apply checks is still something I'm not super-clear on.
cbirdsong fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Jul 7, 2009 |
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Jul 7, 2009 18:18
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Lugubrious posted:As long as (like Mikan said) he didn't take an unreasonable amount of damage so it's realistic that he survived, it's fine. If you're trying to set him up to be a recurring bad guy, having the PCs meet/fight him a couple times with him barely getting away each time helps make it that much more satisfying when the party finally wrecks his poo poo for good. I would just make it so that when he becomes bloodied, he gets some big bonus to running/movement, and then make it so that when the finally face him for the (planned) last time, they can use the environment to make sure he can't easily escape.
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Jul 27, 2009 04:02
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Annakie posted:There are 5 minion skeletons in the room. Every round, all the skeletons that were defeated in the previous round reform and come back to (un)life. Do I give experience for all 5 only once, or do I give experience for each time one is killed? The module is unclear about it. There is a similar scenario in Keep at the Shadowfell. The players enter a hallway with about 10 sarcophagi lining the walls, and after they pass a certain point, the sarcophagi open and skeletons start coming out. I actually tweaked the encounter so that there were way more minion skeletons respawning each turn, but then adjusted their hit bonus so that they missed a bit more to balance it out. My players' reactions to the giant horde of undead that endlessly respawned were quite entertaining, and it really forced them to strategize and consider movement and character placement more than any previous encounter. Anyway, to answer your question, it said to give experience for each one, and you could easily tweak it so that there are way more minions there if you want them to get more experience.
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Jul 30, 2009 16:10
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My players are distracted by phones with annoying frequency. One player received three phone calls within an hour and then proceeded to leave to go to a bar after the last one, and another cannot leave his goddamned iPhone alone. I don't think that telling them "put that poo poo away" out of game would work terribly well, so I was thinking of instating an in game penalty - something like -5 to all rolls on the next turn for texting and -10 for actually answering a call. It seems like the easiest way to get them to pay attention to the game, but am I being a passive aggressive rear end in a top hat?
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Aug 25, 2009 17:47
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Option B feels like a bit of a cop out. If you want to still let there be consequences to their actions without just pulling a bait-and-switch to make them feel better and basically reassure them that they can do no wrong, it has to be something along the lines of option A.
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Apr 26, 2010 16:27
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I got one of the 30 page easel-size pads with a 1-inch grid from Office Depot, which allows me to pre-draw and prepare maps. I tried Gaming Paper, and it just didn't seem worth the price. For when I want/need to draw something on the fly, I got one of these poster frames from Target, and just used the clear plastic laid over a blank sheet from the grid pad for dry erase. If one of my players is playing a class with lots of temporary AOE status effects, then I can even lay the plastic over a pre-drawn map for easy zone marking/removal. Best of both worlds.
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Aug 25, 2010 05:06
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Apocadall posted:Close to what I had in mind would happen, except now they want to start looking for allies and build an army to crush that city. I wasn't even expecting it. This is great. Your players are now an RPG trope. You absolutely have to have an adventuring group stereotype come after them. I hope there are some past events you can distort into reasons for elves/dwarves/humans in power to send people after them, so then they can come in and shout about distorted versions of past events as justification for trying to kill them.
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Apr 18, 2011 17:36
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gos_jim posted:So basically MapTools is the mythical Game Table that Wizards has been failing to create since 4e came out. Don't think too highly of it. As evidenced by the incredibly long explanatory posts, Maptool is incredibly user-unfriendly.
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May 26, 2011 14:39
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Affi posted:The artificer wants to stock up on rituals! Should I be restrictive? The campaign is in Eberron and magic is everywhere but should I let him gobble up 8 rituals just because he found some spending money? plester1 posted:I say let him have all he wants. Rituals are typically non-combat and don't really make anything overpowered, just way more interesting IMO. On this subject, I am about to start a 4e game where I've just reskinned or slightly reworked a bunch of low-level rituals and martial practices to basically act as noncombat powers. They mostly cost 1 healing surge or a tiny amount of residuum. Each character gets 3-4 depending on how much other non-combat utility the class has. Since I'm premaking characters, I've also made sort of an alternate character sheet layout to try to cut out a bunch of the unnecessary or extraneous stuff. (Level 1 character builder sheets are like 5 pages now, and have so drat much empty space!) I've also reworded powers and flavor to be much simpler, and am considering just removing the names of powers entirely, to cut down on the "I use <power name>!" sort of play that can crop up. Here are the sheets and the stuff I changed: Artificer - Ditched weird one-infusion-per-encounter limit on healing. Added a cantrip because why should wizards have more cool poo poo? Mage (Enchanter) - Removed the spellbook to cut down on complexity and keep the enchanter flavor strong. Knight - Integrated guardian theme. Averaged warforged damage bonus in, and added hammer expertise slide bonus to powers. Hunter - Simplified or removed out-of-combat aspect bonuses. Removed crossbow expertise cover bonus to make Aimed Shot relevant. Executioner Assassin - Assumed ki focus would always be applicable and added expertise into powers. Thief Rogue - Converted light blade expertise bonuses into an at-will no action power. Anyone ever tried anything like this? Am I making a horrible mistake?
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Jan 24, 2012 07:06
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Thuryl posted:In one campaign I ran, one of the PCs' major sources of news and rumours was an immensely popular quartet of travelling bards named Carter, Landon, Harris and Stark. I don't think any of my players ever caught the reference. I don't know how you resisted doing ridiculous Beatles accents and giving the whole thing away.
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Feb 2, 2012 01:31
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Interstellar Owl posted:I'd like to do a town defense, pretty much against waves of undead as they try to take the town, but give the players a chance to build barricades/defenses and train guards. I was thinking of using a point system on things they could spend time and stuff on, any have any ideas? If you running 4e and have DDI, there is a Chaos Scar adventure called Dead by Dawn that is a take on this idea. My group enjoyed it.
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Feb 3, 2012 06:15
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The cool thing about inherent bonuses is that it largely doesn't stack with the bonuses provided by items. You can use it and not worry about players keeping up mathematically, and the players can just focus on items with neat powers, or not take any at all if they don't care. So I would use them, and then just keep doing what you're doing, but with the understanding that whatever they take is what they found. That way, if two people want the same item, they can take it, because there were two of those.
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Mar 21, 2012 15:51
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I have been running a modified version of The Slaying Stone as a side adventure for my 4e group while the DM moved. He finished early and joined mid-campaign as basically a double agent. He told the party he was sent by Questgiver A to help them, but he's actually working for Questgiver B, a prominent figure in our main campaign. The plan was for him to drop small hints along the way and secretly steal the macguffin near the end, so the other players would look back and see what was going on all along. (The macguffin is important in the main campaign, so it won't be a lame gotcha ending that goes nowhere.) Awesomely, though, his true motives were revealed in the in the course of the final battle. However, now the party is probably going to try to capture or kill him. I have a monster statblock built out for the player to use, but he is probably going to try to run away, so I need some sort of two-sided skill challenge for a chase through a city infested by goblins and kobolds. Not just any city, though, as the final battle also ended up turning the standard ruined city into a floating chunk of land, basically like Dalaran in WOW. Even if they manage to recover the macguffin, they are still trapped on a floating city full of goblins who want to kill them. TL,DR: Anyone have any examples of/ideas for a skill challenge with two opposing sides, or a skill challenge involving running across or escaping a (floating) city filled with hostiles?
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Apr 14, 2012 18:00
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Captain Walker posted:-What should I change about Slaying Stone? I'm already planning to replace the bullshit first encounter (wolves in difficult terrain) but what with? Just cut it. It's mechanically and narratively boring, and unimportant to the story at large.
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Feb 28, 2013 00:17
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Captain Walker posted:How do the PCs meet Treona, then? Hopefully there's something in the PC backstories you can use, but otherwise you can just have them start there? The plot as written is a lady hearing about some sweet adventurers, and then waiting until she can save them from wolves to give them a job. Just cut that out and have her summon them mysteriously.
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Feb 28, 2013 15:42
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