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My dad has expressed interest in playing D&D again, and is trying to get some of his old friends together for it, I’ve agreed to DM. Because I’m a player in another game I don’t want to go reading descriptions of all the published adventures for fear of spoiling things if my game’s DM runs them, so I’d like a recommendation. They played basic and 1st AD&D, so I’m after an adventure with very light RP (their idea of RP is “I stab my dagger through the innkeep’s hand and yell “where is the dungeon?!”) and a massive gently caress off huge dungeon. What would fit?
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Dec 22, 2018 17:42
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Kaysette posted:I’d run Lost Mines of Phandelver to get then to 5 then turn them loose in the Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Cool, that works, thanks! Mega dungeon is probably right up their street and mad mages as villains fits right in with the early 1e modules’ baddies.
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Dec 22, 2018 19:58
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:This is out of left field and it's statted for basic d&d not 5e but I've been liking what I see in Anomalous Subsurface Environment. Cool setting and a huge dungeon with robots and laser guns and such in addition to the usual goblins and things. OK, initially I assumed there was some new simplified version of basic D&D you were talking about here and I was going to make some wilfully obtuse joke where I'd pretend I thought you were talking about early 80s Basic D&D. I'm glad now that I looked this up before posting that so I could realise that you really did mean early 80s Basic D&D. Holy poo poo. Maybe this would be good as a campaign break, if we get a regular game going. Need to feel out the group a bit, see how they'd take what sounds like Expedition to the Barrier Peaks meets Dungeonland meets Greyhawk Ruins.
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Dec 23, 2018 02:52
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In terms of removing the drag on the game, I’d suggest that you use passive perception for detecting traps immediately and tell your players you’ll always have them roll active perception at the last second before the trap is triggered. If they succeed, you tell them they’ve spotted the trap, if they fail, “click”. That way players never need to say “I’m checking for traps” and players don’t need to read into a request for a perception check, there’s an immediate consequence.
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Dec 24, 2018 14:42
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Infinite Karma posted:Carrying a backpack with dungeoneering tools, rope, tents, ladders, etc. makes complete logical sense for adventurers, because they have no idea what they'll run into, but it also makes terrible thematic sense, because Hercules isn't going to fight while carrying a giant camping pack on his back no matter how strong he is. And nobody imagines their character with weapons and armor and spell flourishes, with 100lb of bulky gear towering over him all day every day. Going to write an adventure called Bothies & Barrows where the PCs use their backpacks to LARP as hikers in the Scottish Highlands.
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Dec 25, 2018 02:38
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I'm reminded of the recent Fist of the North Star game where the protagonist uses his gargantuan muscles to mix cocktails heretofor unknown to mortal man. I really do like the idea that the Fighter is widely hailed as an awesome hero or a scary ultrabastard more readily than other character types, but I think it has a bit of an issue in that it sort of thrusts the role of party leader onto the fighter, which wouldn't necessarily be what the fighter player actually wants. Dunno how you'd simulate it mechanically, take 10 on persuasion/intimidation like that Rogue ability, take 20 some x number of times per long rest? Similarly I like in principle the idea that fighters just loving slaughter stuff that's weaker than them, but mechanically what that probably means is less dice rolling for the player (either not needing to roll damage, or the DM is rolling the creature's save-or-die), and rolling dice is a key fun part of D&D for many people (i'd guess, especially people who pick Fighter as a class). There's a variant in the DM's guide for plot points (page 269) where the players can interject with actions or additions which the DM just has to accept as true. Maybe give high level fighters heroism points, where some number of times per long rest or per session they can just say stuff like "I smash through the dungeon wall" or "I'm going to arm wrestle this guy for the key" and that just happens, as long as it's related to their martial abilities or their imposing/inspiring demeanor.
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Dec 27, 2018 19:11
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Roughly how many sessions do you think it would take to run Dragon Heist? Assuming session lengths of about 3-4 hours. I don't need anything exact here just a very rough ballpark from people who've played it before.
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Jan 17, 2019 20:50
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:One of my current DMs just fakes tracking XP because two of the players really really need the xp number to go up several times before the level number increments. It's been going on for over a year and they have yet to notice that they're actually milestone leveling. I did this throughout my entire teenage DMing career. Oh, um, yeah, I'm keeping track of experience, don't worry guys! Hm, the next module is for level 7-9 and they're level 5, I'll just give them a level halfway through this module and then another one at the end, whatever When my dad was my DM back in first edition he told me he was tracking XP too, but I'm now pretty sure he was winging it just like me.
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Jan 18, 2019 00:11
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Same, kinda. I take your point for 1st edition, but in my dad's defence I think I our thief was 8 years old so I doubt he minded much. 
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Jan 18, 2019 00:39
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Your dad sounds pretty awesome Thanks! He had a group at his work back when he was in his 20s and they used to play every lunchtime. He kept the books when that wound up and that's how I got into it. I mentioned back at the start of the thread that he's got the gang back together and my first game as DM for them is next week! I'm looking forward to it, we'll probably run Tales from the Yawning Portal or Mad Mage after LMoP. I'm expecting a full on murderhobo game though, I asked them to share with me some of their favourite moments from their time playing D&D and I got back stories about lethal PvP, TPKs, and a massive dispute over the ownership of a pair of Gauntlets of Ogre Power. I can't wait til they find those in Wave Echo Cave. Maybe Tomb of Annihilation if the overland stuff in LMoP goes really well, I'm usually a bit of a softie DM and I feel I could get in touch with my inner Gygax if I had some character sheets to tear up.
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Jan 18, 2019 02:54
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Numlock posted:So until recently my experience of d&d was mostly through the infinity engine games (2e and 3e based) which I enjoyed but also at times was frustrated with since there seemed to be all these annoying restrictions on character creation. X class/race can’t be combined with Y class race also you can’t use swords for some reason if you z etc etc. I don't have a nice chart or short article, but as someone who did every edition but 4th, here's what I'd consider a basic breakdown of the differences between 2e and 5e: (2e) No more class/race restrictions. Gnome paladins, fine. Half-orc wizards, fine. (3e) PHB Races no longer get penalties to their stats, so your gnome paladin doesn't need to deal with a permanent -2 strength penalty on top of missing out on a +2 from being a dwarf instead. It's basically impossible to make a character that's unplayable unless you try, and the gap between an RP-focused character and a Min-maxed character is now much much smaller. (3e) No more prestige classes encouraging you to follow a very specific build to unlock some cool abilities, replaced by subclasses that everyone picks at levels 1-3. (2e) Weapons are now basically split into simple and martial, and as a general rule the way it works is if you're a martial class or a mountain dwarf you get to use martial weapons (including swords if you're a cleric, for example). Probably the only time you'll run into a weapon restriction for a weapon you'd reasonably want to use is if you want to make a (non-dwarven) wizard or sorcerer with a sword like Gandalf, but your DM wouldn't break anything by just letting your wizard be proficient in whatever weapon. (2e) No more dumb tables for saves and THAC0s. Roll dice, add your modifier, succeed if you equal or beat target, that's how all rolls work now. Need to save vs a spell? The stat block the DM is looking at will say "spell save DC: 14" and if your roll plus the bonus to that save on your sheet is 14 or better you pass. And related to this... (3e) the similar system in 3e was clouded by an endless parade of modifiers, plus this, minus that etc. With a few exceptions, all that is replaced by advantage and disadvantage. If the circumstances favour you (DM thinks you did a great job RPing your persuasion attempt, say) roll two dice and use the highest. If circumstances are against you (e.g. firing a bow at long range), roll two and use the lowest. (2e) Spell casting now works with slots, if you're a class that prepares spells you still pick the ones you want to use that day, but instead of having to think "hmm I want two mage armors and three burning hands today" you just prepare mage armor, burning hands and whatever else and then have five 1st level slots to spend on your prepped spells in any combination. Other classes just know their spells and don't prep. (3e) Cantrips are now useful, every spell casting class has one or two damage-inducing spells which they can cast as often as they want, so a low-level wizard no longer spends most of the day throwing darts. Non-damaging cantrips can buff your comrades or make for cool RP moments. You'll probably find uses for your cantrips even at higher levels. You can pick up the starter kit for pretty cheap which has basic rules and an included adventure that essentially everyone recommends as the best way to start, with roleplaying, overland exploration, dungeon exploration and combat all rolled up together to showcase the system.
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Jan 20, 2019 22:28
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Do you think Perception, is over-emphasised compared to Investigation? I don't really feel satisfied with how 5e handles this. The DMG talks a bit about what the difference is, something like "A high-wis low-int character could recognise that a patch of the wall was cleaner than the rest but not deduce there was a secret door there, while a low-wis high-int character might fail to spot that the patch of wall was cleaner, but once pointed out, would instantly deduce that it must be due to a secret door". My issue is that this distinction pretty much never comes through in actual dungeon exploration. There's almost never a "players must succeed a DC:10 perception check to find signs of the secret door, then a DC:15 investigation check to confirm its existence and its manner of operation", it's usually just "players can find the secret door with a DC:15 perception check". Now, I can see immediately why making the player do two rolls to find a secret door would be tedious and dumb, but given that perception-only is how things almost always work, it just doesn't match up with what's stated in the DMG, I feel. I know a lot of DMs work by a rule of "you can use either" but I don't feel very keen on that, because in that case there doesn't feel like there's a good reason to have two skills at all. I know in some groups' campaigns stuff like research will make Investigation useful in its own right, but that's not how my own campaigns have generally gone. What I'm thinking of trying in my upcoming campaign is taking the view that investigation is used to find things like secret doors, and instead just dropping hints about hidden stuff in the room descriptions based on passive perception. My logic here is two-fold in that in the general case it gives non-wizards a reason not to just dump int as it now has a use other than making the DM paraphrase their campaign materials or the monster manual, and in the specific case that I've got a high-wisdom party of two clerics and a ranger and I feel like the party's rogue is going to get outshone at his core niche. I'm mixing this with a rule of "if the player is about to trigger a trap, they get to make a perception check to avoid it at the last second", so what it boils down to I guess is "DM asks for perception checks, Players ask for investigation checks." I'll report back if anything interesting come of it but I'm curious to hear any thoughts from people who've maybe thought about this before.
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Jan 22, 2019 01:33
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If a dead player resurrects at their phylactery, then there's a definite incentive not to just bury it in a hole in the ground and never go back, at least until the party has access to teleportation magic. "As your spirit coalesces around your body, you awake on the soft grasses of your homeland, above where you buried your phylactery all those centuries ago. You are struck with two realisations: you are thousands of miles from the site of your death, and your former companions. It will likely take you months of overland travel to rejoin the group. Second, you are all alone in this hostile wilderness you have not visited in an age." Up until teleportation magic, that's functionally the same as the PC being dead for at least the duration of the current adventure. Players might instead hide their phylacteries close to the site of the adventure, but that sounds like a positive to me, as a DM? Once the players have a reputation, villains will know the PC is soulbound, and hunt for the phylactery, a "dead" PC who expects to wake up a day's travel from the group might instead wake up in the villain's lair if the villain or their minions have successfully tracked the PCs or scried on them, and then gone to get the PC's phylactery.
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Jan 26, 2019 10:38
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Had my first session DMing for the D&Dads yesterday! First time DMing in about thirteen years, but I forgot how much I actually liked sitting behind the screen. We had a great time with mercifully no PvP (yet). I wasn't sure how they'd get on keeping notes on the bazillion different quests they get in Phandalin, so I made them up little index cards with quest details on them as a sort of quest log to help them decide what to pursue, which I think helped a lot. As a group, I've discovered that it doesn't really cross their mind to do interrogations, they captured a goblin and a redbrand in the course of their fights but aside from asking each of them what was in the next room, they've not tried to glean any further info about wider events (even if the people being questioned wouldn't know). I've got a framing device of the adventure being a story Gundren is telling other people (think the intros to the Borderlands games), so I might drop a few hints in the second session recap that the links between all the various bandit groups is a thread worth pulling on. Questions for the thread: I think I might have to rework one guy's cleric for him. At the group's request I provided them pre-gen characters for the adventure (they gave me race & class), and two of the players wanted to be clerics, so I made one as a War cleric and the other as a Light cleric. But the light cleric player didn't have much interest in actually using Sacred Flame and just wanted to hit stuff with his mace all the time, so I feel like he's going to be happier if we swap his domain for something a bit more smashy (of course, I'll talk with him first). There's quite a few different melee focused domains, I'm thinking of switching him to Forge, but what's your favourite? One alternative I'm considering if he wants to stay a light cleric is making Sacred Flame into a spell attack like Fire Bolt, essentially, because honestly it's not much fun when your main attack has the DM rolling instead of you. I can't think of anything this would gently caress up, right? Also, any suggestions for where to reintroduce Glasstaff if the PCs let him get away? We finished the session right at the door to his workshop, and I'm planning to prep for a chase in the event they act quickly enough (they found his go bag, so he can't turn invisible), but provided he does get away, I'm thinking he and the last of the redbrands might ambush the group as they return to Phandalin after one of the wilderness excursions.
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Jan 27, 2019 12:14
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Mr. Prokosch posted:To clarify the idea that animate dead is "cancer" pretty much any summoning style spell is extremely overpowered and will make fighty guys feel superfluous. The ideal use of your spell slots isn't to fireball it's to manage 8 or so skeletons and have them all attack as a bonus action for the rest of your career. But as a wizard you need to follow the gentleman's agreement to not ruin the game. Doesn’t Animate Dead only summon a max of three undead when cast at a higher level? I think the real gently caress you is probably Conjure Minor Elementals cast at 8th level by a Conjurer. Twenty four mephitis with an extra 30HP so they don’t all go down to one AoE, plus you are immune to concentration checks on the spell.
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Jan 28, 2019 00:19
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Zev posted:I asked this in the board games thread, and maybe I should ask it here too. Sidibaba has the exploration element of dungeon crawling without the combat, while Last Night on Earth has turn based movement on a grid with dice based combat.
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Jan 29, 2019 10:14
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Nehru the Damaja posted:I'm bored at work. What's a good YouTube channel with dnd stuff that isn't take20, nerdarchy or D&D stories (I hate those) or Treantmonk or Role Initiative (they're fine but I'm familiar already) Dael Kingsmill does D&D content in addition to videos on mythology and folklore.
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Jan 30, 2019 22:02
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Nehru the Damaja posted:I'm looking for some kind of deity to add a little background heft to a character who's generally unsentimental and who looks at their oath as taking on the burden of doing what must be done. Less "muah ha ha I will make everyone bow to me" and more "Arthas did nothing wrong." What about Tempus? He's LN if memory serves and is the god of Battle. You get LG followers of Tempus who are all about defending those who can't defend themselves so people can't object on the grounds of "Tempus is bad I won't adventure with you", but you can easily play a LN paladin of Tempus as being all about "victory at all costs". You can spin it as being the most humane way to fight in the long run, people who lose any hope of opposing your will are people who will never need to die by your hand, you're stripping their dignity to spare their lives. Grab a few quotes from WWI and civil war commanders and adapt them to the setting: Winston Churchill posted:No compromise on the main purpose; no peace till victory; no pact with unrepentant wrong -- that is the Declaration of July 4th, 1918. William Sherman posted:War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is the sooner it's over. John Fisher posted:The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility. Lord Kitchener posted:We must make war as we must, not as we would like.
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Feb 8, 2019 12:07
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Re:concentration, I've been watching some D&D streams lately and one thing I saw that was really cool was in the final battle of High Rollers: Dead Reckoning, the party faced off against a Thayan Wizard who had psychic links with three slaves who he could transfer the concentration to, allowing him to have potentially up to four concentration spells running all at once unless the party were willing to kill the slaves. I thought this was a really neat way to do a final boss battle with an evil wizard, since it really sold the idea that this guy was using some seriously evil poo poo to break the laws of magic and doing stuff that no wizard should be able to do no matter how powerful in a way that just being higher level or having a bunch of legendary actions doesn't. When the villain transferred his spell to his thrall, it gave a real feeling of "oh gently caress, this guy can break the laws of reality", which is exactly the feeling you'd want an evil wizard to give off.
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Feb 10, 2019 02:08
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One thing that really surprised me with my new group who had only played 1st edition before was how there was zero interest in rolling HP. I expected them to have a bit of a “it’s not real D&D if you don’t roll” grog mentality but as soon as I mentioned the option to take half plus one all four of them sprung for that immediately and one even called having the option to roll a “trap for idiots”.
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Feb 13, 2019 17:29
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Roland Jones posted:Alright, thought it might be something like that but wasn't sure. Thanks. I'll run this by the GM; given how free she's been with bonuses and stuff, even unasked (discussing my proposed character's backstory and asking for suggestions on what's most appropriate regarding this or that and such with her has resulted in her giving me some extra stuff completely unprompted, catching me by surprise), I think she might like that idea. I don't run the houserule myself, but I'd say that given that feats are in principle meant to be equivalent to ASIs, the ones which have half an ASI are essentially also only half feats, so I'd give players the attribute increase from the feat too because otherwise someone is getting two ASI/Feats and another player is getting one and a half.
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Feb 14, 2019 00:01
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Midig posted:Good point. I simply gotta nerf it. No way around that I think. I'd be careful with that, obviously you know your group better than any of us, but nerfing a spell to impose difficulty that the spell is specifically designed to negate can feel pretty bullshit if you're the player on the receiving end of that nerf, if the characters could previously make food and water when it didn't matter and now they can't the one time it's actually important. If it's new characters in a completely new campaign that's less of an issue, but in that case I think you'd be better setting out at the start something like the aforementioned Dark Sun 4e caveat that the spells to create food and water just flat out don't exist in this setting/location cause like the pantheon's god of fertility is dead or something.
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Feb 23, 2019 23:21
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My current group has finished Phandelver and we're moving on to other things. Originally I'd intended to run Dungeon of the Mad Mage due to them being old school 1e players and I thought a mega dungeon would land well, but my feeling having run Wave Echo Cave is that they actually enjoyed the overland stuff and small dungeons of the earlier chapters more than the Cave which took up a full session of relentless combats. So, I'm looking at Tomb of Annhilation instead. The Party's level 5 already, am I right in guessing that the party won't be at too high a risk of death in the jungle exploration stuff if they play sensibly, and I only need to get nervous from Omu onwards? They do have two clerics so healing is more available than for your average party. Also, Omu seems to reference Dwellers of the Forbidden City, which I've never played but my players have (albeit over thirty years ago). Does the similarity actually go any deeper than "is a jungle ruin" and "has some yuan ti"?
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Mar 22, 2019 01:15
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C-SPAN Caller posted:Just make sure if anyone died and was ressurected in lost mines if you're running tomb of annihilation you'll need to think up a reason to handwave why that npc is suddenly withering, else it might feel kind of cheap to that player. Luckily nobody died, though some got close in the fight with the Flameskull, the secret true boss of Wave Echo Cave. That said, the group stopped one room short of full-clearing the cave, and so we'll be opening the next session with the wraith fight and then conclusions in Phandelver, so I'm considering reworking the wraith so that instead of draining max HP equal to damage taken it takes off some smaller amount like five or six HP so that "why aren't our wounds healing" can be a suitable adventure hook without putting some players down half their HP, along with putting the incomplete Chult map in the wraith's room as the "map to a dungeon of your own design".
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Mar 22, 2019 01:39
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Infinite Karma posted:Hell, a 100 or 200 or 400 year old elf might have a completely vanilla name that just sounds crazy because that's old as hell. Plenty of English names from the 1600s would easily sound like jokes too, in 2019. I went with a 16th century style horatory name for a wizard I made. Her parents called her Grace-of-the-Light-Behind-The-Sun, a name she found deeply embarrasing and told no one about. Meanwhile the group I DM features a Dragonborn sailor inventively called "Salty", and an elf who's art looked so much like Sean Bean that he's now officially "Boromears".
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Mar 24, 2019 01:43
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Gamerofthegame posted:tbh it's frankly stupid that people don't try to do neverwinter nights 1&2 again Beamdog put out Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition last year, but it's a straight modern PC compatibility update more or less, and I discovered that unlike the Baldurs Gate Enhanced Editions, NWN being one of the first forays into 3D RPGs is just too janky to be fun to play in the present day. Maybe they've improved the controls and such since release but I haven't touched it after just about four hours playing it.
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Apr 16, 2019 08:17
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Raar_Im_A_Dinosaur posted:Can anyone remember the earlier discussion in the thread about how to use passive vs active perception when dealing with traps in a dungeon? If it was my post you're thinking of, the extra bit was the "click" rule. Right after the player fails the active check, the DM says "click" and all players must immediately decide what they are doing in response to the sound of the activating mechanism. Do they drop to the floor, jump backwards, raise their shield over their head, etc. The DM then makes a call based on the trap's mechanism what effect if any that has on the trap. It might give them advantage or disavantage on a save, it might auto fail or auto succeed, might avoid or double the damage.
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Apr 20, 2019 09:22
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Arthil posted:Yeah the idea is that it isn't as simple as [Spell Name] - [Components] - [Words] but that you need to understand the intricacy of what you're doing, having practiced it many times and written down exactly what worked for you. If rituals were literally just recipes with no special skills necessarily required, I wonder if everyone would go through a phase where they get a ritual book for wintermas, make a new year's reslution to take up ritual casting as a hobby, and then three weeks into the new year have already shoved that book into the drawer under the hob alongside the potion mixer, never to be seen again.
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Apr 22, 2019 01:09
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Mendrian posted:Campaign idea: ritual caster, except all the rituals are just apps. Reminds me a bit of the Laundry novels, where magic is done by solving multi-dimensional mathematical equations that burn your brain, so the safe way to do magic is to offload the actual spellcasting bit to a phone or other computer.
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Apr 22, 2019 09:22
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change my name posted:Is Subtle Spell actually worth choosing as a metamagic option? I like the idea of being able to cast spells even if you’re bound/silenced/locked up and restrained or whatever, especially flavor-wise, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone advocating for it. I think whether subtle is worth it depends a whole lot on how much your DM actually follows RAW and RAI on casting spells non-subtly. If your DM takes the view that, say, the Verbal component of a spell like Suggestion is just the suggestion itself (i.e. it works like a Jedi Mind Trick), or that the Somantic component of a spell can be hidden via sleight of hand then subtle spell is less worth it.
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Apr 29, 2019 20:30
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Azza Bamboo posted:hmm Add a charming high elf grandad with a fondness for jam, have him solemnly intone that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. I'm dipping my toe into online play for the first time because a friend has assembled a group of people to play from up and down the country. I have literally no idea how to run campaigns online despite years of at-table experience, is Roll20 relatively easy to learn for players and DM?
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May 24, 2019 19:30
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Soysaucebeast posted:I haven't played any full sessions with it, but I did check it out a few months ago. It seems relatively intuitive so far as I can tell. There was an interactive tutorial also, but everything it showed me send pretty obvious. Thanks! So far it seems relatively intuitive. I'm looking at running Dragon Heist, and I remember a few months ago there was a supplement released which featured an actual bank as the location of the vault. Has anyone here read that supplement? What was the bank vault chapter like? Just a convoluted access method (I've heard it replaces the three keys with three employees) and then a few rooms, or an actual proper bank that requires planning to rob?
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May 25, 2019 23:56
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:What houserules do you use? This is more of a "house style" than a house rule, but most DMs I've seen or played with tend to narrate low-rolled insight checks as "this person seems completely genuine" or "you're not sure, but you see no signs of deception". I prefer to do the opposite, and narrate low-rolled insight checks as the reasons players might think someone is suspicious (e.g. "you feel like they're avoiding eye contact with you"), since as far as I'm concerned that's the baseline default: if a player is insight checking an NPC, they're already suspicious and it's painful watching a player caught between wanting to be the dutiful roleplayer who was just told that they have no reason to suspect this NPC and wanting to say "gently caress the insight check, my character doesn't believe that". With suspicion-on-low, though, ignoring the dice becomes "gently caress the insight check, I choose to trust this person", which is just a regular old leap of faith, doesn't create a PC-Player conflict, and maintains player agency without someone at the table saying the word metagaming. It's been a very successful change over what I think is the conventional method, but I do need to mention it to new players to my games since it's tripped up some people before who only expect to hear their suspicions confirmed when they've successfully insighted a liar.
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May 30, 2019 00:50
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Willie Tomg posted:Which is the attack you get per round unless you're a martial multi in which case its advantage you wouldn't get otherwise, and also every check in the entire campaign and it doesn't use a slot during short rest and it liberates the party to do other stuff and I'm done with this conversation. Its a magical buddy that's very powerful and SHOULD be used by magical classes, IMO. Almost certainly terribly unbalanced ideas because I'm typing these just before 2am: Bat - Echolocation: While adjacent to you, your bat nullifies advantage attackers get from being unseen. Cat - Nine Lives: Damage done to a conscious cat is always non-lethal (allowing them to be revived with healing magic in combat, or if you don't want to waste a spell, just revive normally from unconsciousness without having to recast the ritual) Frog & Snake - Poisonous: While adjacent to you, your magical frog adds 1d4 poison to all your attacks and damaging spells. Hawk - Harrier: As an action, a Hawk can make swooping feints on a target in movement range, distracting the target without directly closing distance enough to cause opportunity attacks. Harried targets have disadvantage on attacks against the wizard. Rat - Augh augh it's in my shirt get it off me get it off me - Your rat can occupy the same space as a creature. If it does, it's assumed to be directly on the creature. Any attacks which specifically target the rat do full damage to the creature the rat is on. Attacks and effects that damage the rat but do not target it specifically (e.g. AoE attacks) are not affected in this way. Creatures can make a contested acrobatics check as an action to remove the rat. Raven - Mimicry - Because your raven is magical, it performs its mimicry as if it was casting a minor illusion cantrip with your spell save DC.
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Jul 24, 2019 01:45
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Yeah, i think the only time it's good for the other players not to know background stuff is when nobody knows this stuff. I have a harper rogue in my current group who has Harper HQ pissed off at him after he royally hosed up a job, but it's only ever referred to as "the incident" and all other harpers the party interact with refuse to talk about it for increasingly ludicrous reasons. But all the players are fully in on the idea that nobody at the table knows what happened in the incident, even if the rogue and half my NPCs do. That's what makes the secret fun!
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Aug 30, 2019 00:07
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I'm running a game with an investigative element currently, and the way I handle speak with dead is usually to decide in advance that, if the PCs use the spell, the corpse can tell them one of a possible set of clues. And then on the night depending on how events are unfolding I pick whichever clue is most appropriate (maybe two if needed), and adjust the events slightly to account for any missing information. Same with Zone of Truth, don't approach it from the point of view of "how do I stop my PCs short circuiting things", instead think "what piece of information do I want to give a player who uses Zone of Truth?" and then even if the NPC starts giving deliberately obtuse answers or pleading the fifth after that (which you can easily justify with "[character] realises they've said too much and clams up"), the players still got a reward for use of their resources.
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Sep 16, 2019 02:08
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I just want to let whoever came up with the Faerie Dragon Cafe idea from like twenty pages ago know that you completely destroyed the last half of my session tonight while the party sat around roleplaying being high for about an hour straight. 10/10 would puff the magic dragon again.
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Jan 28, 2020 23:21
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I feel like something along the lines of warlock invocations plus monk ki abilities might be the way to go for Psionics, ditching spell slots for more passives, at will powers, and once per rest abilities.
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Feb 4, 2020 11:47
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Monk, but instead of magical kung-fu powers you're a big fat angry tonsure'd dude who punches gently caress out of wrongdoers. Back when I was a kid playing 1e, I was totally unaware of Wuxia as a genre or eastern monasticism generally and assumed the monk class was based on Friar Tuck, the only monk I knew. I couldn't quite grasp what the connection between monks and unarmed combat was but assumed it was some part of the Robin Hood story I wasn't familiar with. I really do need to put in some drunken master monks who sell caffeinated wine into my next campaign.
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Feb 22, 2020 09:26
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Arthil posted:So uh... The problem is that this is one of the only disabled characters in 5e. If there were a large number of disabled characters, one character who considers their disability as something important to carefully hide would be a character trait. But when a character is the only example of a group, their flaws become their group's flaws, their attitudes become the group's attitudes. So it's not surprising someone who is disabled might be disappointed that the only character who shares their particular condition is someone who hides it because it makes them weak, rather than proudly displaying it because it makes them strong. Empowerment is meant to be part of what makes Fantasy fun, and this does the opposite. And yes, the leg isn't mentioned as being magical, so logically it would be an impedance to her combat ability, but there's no reason that leg *couldn't* have been written as magical, or some fantasy steampunk doohickey or whatever.
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Apr 30, 2020 16:08
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