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I think I want to try playing D&D with my kids. They're 6 and 7 and have a big imagination and we already have a lot of fun with creative story telling when we go on hikes in the woods and play outside in the winter. They're both comfortable sitting and playing boardgames as that's something we've done a fair bit of. I played a fair bit of PnP RPGs years ago but it's been a while (last DnD I played was 3.5). I was usually the GM and I'm quite comfortable in that role. I bought the starter set today. I'm thinking of trying to play with just the 2 of them plus maybe a character for me to play as well as GM? Just so the party size is appropriate. I think a couple of my friends would also enjoy playing with my kids (one in particular is an elementary school teacher), and I could maybe get one or two of their friends into it later as well. But I'd like to get a feel for how the two of them like it before trying to put together a larger group. Any advice or tips for me embarking on this? Should I tailor anything for the younger audience? Is running a party of 2+1 going to work out?
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Nov 7, 2022 16:14
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 23:57 |
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good call and advice on the dmpc. i have a couple of adults who are willing to participate in this kids game with me, so i think i'll be able to get around that issue. and hopefully they can take the role of nudging the story along when the next moves aren't obvious or solve puzzles but still let the kids be the stars
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Nov 8, 2022 01:29
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pog boyfriend posted:if it looks like they are about to go down path B have an npc that sounds like cuno disco elysium say "look at these brave heroes too CHICKENSHIT to go down path A!!! whats the matter? scared? gonna cry?" lmao
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Nov 11, 2022 21:32
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brap posted:I would prefer to put my thumb on the scales for the players at levels 1-2. I wouldn’t tell them I’m doing it, but just have a contingency in mind or improvise one. lol my players just finished the opening dungeon as well and got a crit success on the animal handling roll for soothing the 3 wolves near the entrance. they wanted them to fight the goblins and do other tasks but then didn't use them for that (plus i'd have made it hard, the book states they won't attack goblins, but still possible since they probably don't have much love for them), and then when they found the lionshield coster crates or w/e they wanted to rig them up to haul the crates back to the cart sled dog styule lmao. i let them roll a few checks but they blew it, so they ended up just releasing them to the wild at the cave entrance. was a fun bit of improv, i honestly almost let them have some wolf companions but i wasn't sure how i was going to handle that so i'm glad they let them go
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Nov 28, 2022 15:14
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sebmojo posted:Next fight when your players are in trouble they hear a distant howl, then next round BAM WOLF BUDS TO THE RESCUE lol that's a good idea actually
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Nov 29, 2022 14:05
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yeah i've read that about a lot of the published modules and have noticed it flipping through some of them while deciding what content i want to run for my players. you have 200+ pages of d&d module and so much of the content is so sparse you need to flex the dm muscles pretty hard in some places to make stuff coherent. which i personally like because i've always run homebrew so i like to tweak and tinker anyway, but i can see being annoyed if you've picked up something with the intent to just dive in and run it and you have to do a bunch of gm prep anyway. i just picked up the essentials kit so i can have a physical copy of the dragon of icespire peak but the whole adventure is really just bones, the framework is there but there's no story really. like the whole adventure is just delivered via a job board and at the end the players have to eventually decide they want to fight the dragon now lol. i have plans to add an actual backstory and make the encoutners interconnected and ditch the job board thing but i can see being a new dm and trying to run this thing and it just being boring and aimless for the pcs
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Nov 29, 2022 15:23
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Halloween Jack posted:You're a changeling. The whole concept is that you can impersonate other people. You're asking if these magical powers include, what, faking an injury or walking with a limp? Halloween Jack posted:No! Just say yes and move on! lol abslotely this
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Dec 2, 2022 19:39
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oh so what i was allowed to change into a humanoid with a broken leg but i can't change into a gumby? that's practically the same thing, dm is being very arbitrary
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Dec 2, 2022 21:26
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Chakan posted:Hopefully I can shortcut a lot of this conversation by reminding people that Gygax used the “nits make lice” argument when talking about how it was moral for a paladin to kill orc children. Depictions of orcs in DND have been racist against Africans since the start. "nits make lice" was about murdering american indigenous tho
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Dec 20, 2022 15:11
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controllers own because they do wacky poo poo that makes the game more fun and that encourages me to adlib more fun stuff
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Jan 25, 2023 19:19
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yeah my pcs took 2 sessions to level up to level 2, basically clearing cragmaw cavern (playing lmop). but i think we've done 4 more sessions and the pcs are so rp heavy that they're just getting into tresendar manor now, so they probably won't hit level 3 for another maybe 1 or 2 sessions. they spent basically a whole session interrogating the townmaster and then locked him in jail while they set off to tackle the redbrands lol. some sessions are just pure story development and stuff i guess
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Feb 6, 2023 01:15
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Oldsrocket_27 posted:If you want your players to get to the next level faster you can always just hand out more XP for combat or social actions, or give it earlier than the milestone, whatever. No one's gonna call the cops. this is true too. lmop does xp a la carte but i think i'm gonna switch to milestone based and literally just level the players up when i feel it's time
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Feb 6, 2023 02:11
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if i were dm of that campaign i would simply say "no you don't get xp for this bullshit"
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Feb 6, 2023 19:19
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this is just the same old argument as always. "the game system is practically forcing me to be a gimmicky powergaming monkeycheese troll! i don't want to be like this but i'm practically obligated to maximize my damage output, per the ruels of the game!"
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Feb 6, 2023 20:27
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homeless snail posted:Its a dumbass premise imo because its absolutely the DM's fault not making both options award equal amounts of XP if they're meant to be equally interesting to the players. Just like you should get full encounter XP for encounters you sneak past or subvert somehow, you should also get that much XP for doing, a social encounter or whatever else that's, equally interesting. Is that just milestone XP? Only in so much as, the first people that did milestone XP just followed this logic all the way to the end, but you don't have to go that far if you want to bookkeep encounters. agreed. the game is ultimately a collaboration between dm and players are certainly not being "encouraged" by the framework of the system to power/metagame. all it takes is some communication between the dm and players as to what kind of experience everyone wants. iof i ever had players that acted like some of these ridiculous hypotheticals i'd tell them to gently caress off to some other game
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Feb 6, 2023 22:27
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i wanna do some candlekeep mystery stuff but there's not a ton of detail in the book on the actual location itself. if my players want to explore candlekeep, i'd like to at least be familiar at a high level with the layout ands stuff. are there any good sources for this? also tangentially, if you were to pick any one source of information on the sword coast, what would that be?
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Mar 30, 2023 15:34
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2 good answers, thank you both!
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Mar 30, 2023 16:29
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my gf and i just finished watching breaking bad and now we're watching the sopranos. we've been talking about playing some sort of ttrpg revolving around these themes/elements, a crime story basically where a crew of PCs finds ways to make money illicitly while being nominally part of some larger organization while trying to move up/grow powerful and break off. that sort of thing. i was looking at systems to use to run this (primarily FATE and pbta game "cartel") but i'm thinking now maybe it would be interesting to just pivot somehow to a crime storyline after we're done LMoP in 5e. the PCs have already all drifted to a morally grey alignment, wouldn't be a stretch to somehow get embroiled in a crime family type story or heist. anyone have some good ideas for 5e adventures of this nature aside from the one with "heist" in the name which is NOT a heist i've come to learn?
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Apr 24, 2023 17:27
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Dienes posted:They just published Keys From the Golden Vault, which is all heist themed adventures. oh wow. this looks like basically exactly what i'm looking for lol. very timely. thank you
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Apr 24, 2023 17:48
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ooo the phandalin dungeon. interesting
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May 23, 2023 21:16
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Sandwich Anarchist posted:Just picked up 5e material after my wife showed interest after watching the movie. Haven't played since 3.5. They really seem to have made effort to cut back on power creep, wow. Armor seems useful! 20 AC actually seems to mean something. i played waaaay back as a kid with some used ad&d 2nd books and eventually switched to 3.5 as a young man in the mid 2000s. i didnt love the complexity of 3.5 and then 4e completely killed my enthusiasm. i'm back over 15 years later now and loving 5e. it's really good
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May 28, 2023 19:32
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there are a bunch of opportunities to join factions in LMoP. i'm getting to the point where the pcs are about to go to cragmaw castle so those opportunities are coming up in the book. where can i read more about what it means to be apart of this faction and stuff? is it all in the sword coast sourcebook or? i don't want to give this to my pcs and then it never comes up again lol
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May 29, 2023 01:00
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Inkspot posted:If you're not interested in the default factions and don't plan to go beyond Lost Mines, don't bother. lol word. thanks. thinking to continue the adventure around the sword coast after lmop but yeah i looked around and there's not a lot of info for those factions. seems like it was a planned thing that was abandoned, like someone else said
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May 29, 2023 17:29
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Apocron posted:Hoping to in person DND game for the first time in over a decade. I only have experience with 3.5/4e but from what I understand there’s not much to worry about as far as rules are concerned. I’m hoping to integrate the Lost Mines of Phandelver and Dragon of Icespire Peak material and was wondering about if anyone has any advice about NPCs or encounters that could make the adventure more interesting. Any twists or wrinkles you cooked up for your game. hi i'm running lmop now and can give a bunch of interesting twist and wrinkle that i put on my game. i considered running icespire peak after as well so i"ve thought about that. Unfortunately i'm in quebec this week on a company trip and they keep me plaster every day after work. i've set an alarm for myself when i get back to respond to.tbis in earnest. 
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Jun 14, 2023 03:31
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Lamuella posted:This can also go the other way. A friend of mine was once playing a sorcerer in Lost Mine Of Phandelver, and there was an encounter with twig blights. lol buh how can your character possibly know that plants are weak to fire??? metagame much?
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Jul 6, 2023 13:08
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HOMOEROTIC JESUS posted:Well, there's the 5e (dot) tools site which you could hop in just to look at the subclasses. That would be my first stop before digging deeper and/or hunting down books. Any use of that website beyond looking at the names is piracy, so bear that in mind. whats the story with that site? how is it allowed to exist?
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Jul 10, 2023 14:21
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Zurreco posted:There's a great "debate" about this on Contested Roll. The argument against exp is basically "You are accepted into Wizard academy. There are no classes - you are sent into the basement on day one to slaughter an endless supply of rats. You become a level 10 Wizard within 2 weeks after killing all of the animals, livestock, and passers-by in town. You are now strong enough to challenge the big bad demon that has been ruling the neighboring kingdom for a decade." this argument is so bad it hurts my head lmao
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Jul 11, 2023 01:30
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theironjef posted:Honestly the last two pages have been bullshit armchair psychology, this is just the silliest outgrowth of it. Milestone vs. XP and how they can affect the engagement of your players? Talking to your players about what they want from the game is also a form of engagement, and it doesn't involve anyone describing endorphins as doled out by an RPG book chart! lol yeah. i swear sometimes rpg players forget that they're playing a game of their own volition with their friends for fun
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Jul 12, 2023 16:22
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Arione posted:I buy all the books and supplies, I bought the $550 beyond character pack they use, and usually provide the food more often than not. To cover the cost of the IotR minis I pay for half of the bill, and they split the other half 4 ways. Strahd ran us 2k for singles on ebay to get everything, so they all chipped in $250. 
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Aug 31, 2023 21:24
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my pcs killed venomfang in lost mines of phandelver lol. much to my surprise. they were level 4, but only 3 PCs. i didnt expect them to fight him and if they did, for it to be a party wipe. i used a modified speech i found on reddit and had a long back and forth rp with them which they were suspicious of him the entire time about. basically he tried to connive them into grouping up to blast with the breath weapon. they were suspicious of him all along and basically used the cottage attached to the tower he was roosting in to soak up his first blast of breath weapon. then, the druid in the party, using a philter of love i dropped from a random loot drop from a table earlier, bullseyed the dragon with it in the mouth when he was preparing his breath weapon. she prepared an action on her turn with the trigger to throw the philter if he opened his mouth to use the acid breath, i made her make a disadvantaged improvised thrown weapon check since she was going for accuracy, she used inspiration to negate the disadvantage, and landed the roll. we went into a hilarious back and forth where the little gnome druid was trying to seduce the druid and convince it to not hurt her partymates. a few failed checks meant he kept trying to kill the other PCs but he couldn't use his breath weapon as they stayed continuously clumped up around the dragons new love of his life and he refused to hurt her. at half health he attempted to flee, but the cleric commanded him to return. they fought another couple rounds, nearly bringing him down, but also knocking the cleric out and reducing the wiz to 2 hp. venomfang attempts to flee again and the wizard pops the flying potion he took off the dragon cultist in the same town, flys after him and burns the last of his spell slots to bring him down. it was so loving epic, best encounter of the whole campaign so far. took nearly the whole session and the PCs loved it. loving love this game hot cocoa on the couch fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Sep 4, 2023 |
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Sep 4, 2023 02:05
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i played lmop with my 8 year old until it was summer and she wanted to play outside with her friends instead and it went really well. were now planning to play mouse guard next
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Sep 10, 2023 15:53
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cant even imagine people not paying attention and having something ready in d&d. a board game sure, a ttrpg? lol wtf
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Sep 14, 2023 00:35
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has anyone read thru phandelver and below yet? i read a bit of the synopsis of it and some reddit thumb throughs but wondering about goon feedback. were closing in on wave echo cave in our run thru of lmop so it would be pretty convenient to just jump into that after, if it's good. the other transition i had in mind was to princes of the apocalypse, or possibly dragon of ice spire peak with some mods
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Sep 15, 2023 00:33
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phandelver and below looks sick. read through it last night. we're planning on retiring 3/4 of the characters that ran lost mines and rolling new ones, so it's not a huge deal, but it's kinda disappointing that theres basically no connection to lmop. like it could be set literally in any town, the events of lmop do not matter at all(which can be a plus if you're coming from another campaign ofc) otherwise looks dope. were introducing a new player after lmop too so starting off soft with a couple sessions of investigation should be good, then a short dungeon dive. the middle section interlinked dungeons look great, lots of good opportunities for non combat encounters with npcs and cool puzzles. and then the descent into the lovecraftian hell of the far realms at the end looks so awesome i got giddy just reading it and thinking about how to present the weird. looks like a really solid module
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Sep 22, 2023 13:09
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there's too much poo poo in all the expansions so we just play base 5e using the original 3 books. maybe at some point ill get around to reading the others on 5e tools and decide which are worth it
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Oct 4, 2023 17:00
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change my name posted:https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1591-bastions-and-cantrips-build-a-base-and-test 
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Oct 10, 2023 23:29
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i dove right in on lmop with my 7 year old and she loved it. my 6 year old didnt have the focus for it and now she's 7 and my older 8, and the younger one still doesn't care for it. it's very dependent on the kid. some 5-7 year olds will thrive, some as old as teenagers won't have the attention span for it
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Oct 20, 2023 17:57
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:Did WotC just decide to not advertise that they were dropping an extra book this month on DMs Guild? A high level adventure/nine hells sourcebook, written by the Baldurs Gate writer and one of the more prominent sci fi/fantasy writers and that 100% of the sales were going to Extra Life. oh wow
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Nov 3, 2023 20:14
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no specific advice on feats, but i googled how long people take to play LMoP after seeing you call it a "short" campaign (which i guess it is). 20-40 hours people say. my pcs just killed the bbeg on session 25, i'd estimate an average of 3 hours a session lmao. about 75 hours or so. some people run this thing in like freaking 15 hours. how?! granted i fleshed a lot of stuff out so i'm not overly surprised to see a high number vs the average. but wtf people completeing this poo poo in 3 sessions.../?
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Nov 20, 2023 19:15
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 23:57 |
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Speaking of LMoP, I want to share the boss fight with the thread. My PCs had just hit level 5 basically on their first encounter inside Wave Echo Cave (I think it was an ochre slime in the mining tunnels), and took a long rest in the storeroom so they could level up. So they were beefy for basically the whole dungeon. They clowned on most encounters, and so I experimented with making the Spectator a legendary monster to make sure it was still challenging. This walloped them but they dealt with him fine, and the Flameskull as well (including one epic moment of the dwarf cleric leaping up onto the water wheel to chase him as he flew away lol). So I knew I really needed to buff the end boss to make it an experience. I told them they should long rest before fighting him, insinuating it may be a party wiper, and dropped clues as to where The Spider was operating so as to not have them stumble into him. I made him a 3-phase fight, planned to have him use darkness and invisibility to fight from the shadows while the bugbears + giant spiders attacked, then when he went down (he only has like 27 hp), he would transform into a CR6 version of a drider with 2 hit point pools of 61 hp each. I got this idea from some blog. When the first pool ran out, his AC would drop, he would increase to 2 actions per combat round, and have an insane multi attack - basically the drider going full monster mode and attacking recklessly. So they schemed and planned in secret, and opened the doors to the temple. Immediately the wizard ran in, misty stepped into melee range with The Spider, and disarmed him of his spellbook  . In secret the wizard took the gauntlets of ogre strength from the cleric specifically to win this grapple/disarm contest lol. Meanwhile, the druid summoned 2 CR1 creatures, and, having agreed to roll for them randomly, got a giant toad and a giant spider. She ordered the giant toad to eat The Spider, and after having been stripped of his spellbook, and surrounded in melee, the toad did. While The Spider was digesting in the toad, the wizard gives back the gloves, and the cleric casts spirit guardians, pushing into melee where she can to clean up the others in the room. Basically just as the last extra goes down, The Spider "dies" inside the toad, and bursts forth as a drider.Now phase 2 I think, I'm gonna do some damage to the PCs. The Drider gets some hits in before making its way up a column to attack from a range. The cleric, equipped with both the aforementioned gloves AND the boots of springing and striding (both items collected in this dungeon, it worked out perfectly), jumps 24 feet in the air from the ground, grapples The Drider, and rides him like a bucking bronco lmfao. My players were hooting and hollering, it was great. All the while she's got her spirit guardians laying in hits on his turn. He wasn't even able to make much use of his many attacks, as I had him try to break the grapple, and lose consistently vs the high strength cleric. He did get a few hits in but not much. They continued to wallop him, and just as he breaks the grapple and the cleric falls from the column to the ground, he's near death and the druid finishes him off with 1d4+2 damage from a slingshot (her only ranged tool left lol). I'm really glad I buffed him waaay up, but even then, I'm still glad they loving clowned him because they wouldn't stop congratulating themselves on their planning, preparation, and talking about how powerful level 5 felt with all their new spells (fireball, spirit guardians, and summon creatures putting in work). Really satisfying final boss fight in the campaign. hot cocoa on the couch fucked around with this message at 14:29 on Nov 21, 2023 |
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Nov 21, 2023 14:26
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