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Scornful Sexbot posted:So one of my players was killed (ripped apart by a four armed giant pretty metal imo) and I am having some trouble weighing how to reintroduce him to the game from a mechanics perspective. On the one hand I want dying to be kind of a pain so that there is an element of risk and death has consequences, but on the other hand its a game we play for fun so I don't want to make it too much of a chore. What do you guys usually do? Your ideas sound reasonable to me. If you're looking for making serious consequences which aren't tedious, I usually offer my players (if they're interested in keeping their dead character) 2 or 3 choices on getting revived with ominous yet vague consequences story-wise. It's more fun imo to add drawbacks to death within the fiction than mechanically. Also, most drawbacks within the fiction naturally lead to mechanical punishments, so that ends up working itself out anyway. E.g.: your character dies? They get revived by a mad Frankenstein scientist and have their race change to Warforged. However, the scientist might then become a recurring villain, adding a complicating front which the party must juggle with the rest of the threats they are already facing. Mechanically, this then ends up consuming more rations as they need to travel to more places to fight this new threat, it encourages them to spend less time taking rests as they have reduced time to handle other time-sensitive threats, and yada yada. (Also, it's lots of fun to have a funeral for the dead character. And make everybody give a little eulogy. If the character was beloved, it can be genuinely touching, or if nobody knew the character well it is absolutely hilarious having everyone fumble with some terrible speeches.)
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Dec 3, 2022 20:16
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My style as GM has gone from XP to milestone to reward cards back to XP. I plan to stick to using XP from now on. The frequent reward of XP is powerful because 1) it means the players are feeling mechanical character progression happen every session (reducing feelings of stagnation) and 2) the players get faster feedback on their behavior, steering them towards desired system behaviors faster (i.e., for D&D, going into dungeons and killing monsters). My latest campaigns with XP have just felt much better for the players, and so that's what I'd always recommend.
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Feb 6, 2023 17:22
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Last week, my players and I (GM) completed a 20ish session campaign. We laughed, we cried, we finished everyone's character arcs and actually completed the core conceit of the campaign (obtaining a magic wishing claw and thereafter making wishes). Something that was really awesome was that we spent about 2.5 hours after the end of the final session to just chat about the campaign. A post mortem of sorts. We went through each player character and had everybody mention their favorite moments of that character, and then had a long discussion of best party moments, good and bad parts of the campaign, etc etc. I had pre-written a bunch of questions and favorite moments as discussion starters. Really fun and educational for me - if you ever have a chance, I'd recommend doing some sort of post mortem like this in your campaigns. As a final send-off and thank you, I made a partially-AI-generated party portrait. It turned out fabulously. It was a process to get it working, and I'd be happy to share that if anyone has interest. - Now, I'm starting a new campaign this Sunday (with mostly different players). It looks like it will also be 5e, but I wanted to do some jank stuff with the system. Has anybody touched the ICON RPG systems? My current intent is to use ICON's narrative system and throw it on top of D&D's tactical combat & spell systems. This would give me a better list of skills for players to use (no dubious/useless skills like Religion) and the Blades in the Dark narrative flow (i.e., player picks skill, I decide Position and Effect) whilst still keeping the familiarity of D&D classes, combat, magic, etc. Is this a bad idea?
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Mar 2, 2023 18:55
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Nehru the Damaja posted:I swear any time I nearly join a group and get a document about a homebrew world, it's 100% just a proper noun stew. Never a sense of the religions, the ideologies, the economies -- the kind of things that tell me what my character in the world might be. Is it not just assumed that, in these worlds, people worship the typical gods? Toil under feudalism in an agrarian economy? I feel that most D&D character ideas should work for most all homebrew worlds. Proper noun stew is a plague, though, totally agree there. Minimal, selective proper nouns are the way to go. Honestly, almost all detail that I've seen in world documents is extraneous. As an unrequested example, this is the usual extent of information I give to players about a homebrew world and it works out fine: Lost Kingdom of the Underdark posted:The Lost Kingdom once housed the greatest treasure of all-time: a troll's hand which grants any desire at the curl of its finger. Between you and this treasure lies a fabulous journey of golem philosophers, forests where water falls upwards, man-eating halflings, and other wonders which only your deep-elf guide has ever seen. For an aspiring adventurer, this incredible journey seems like a wish come true. Planning anything more than this before player character creation is deleterious to game flow and player creativity imo. I have no interest in constantly checking an almanac of preexisting details about the world whenever the players go somewhere... I just prepare the light details of whatever location they're going next. And I usually just empower my players to define their homelands in session 0. Plus, the DM should be answering any questions about the world at the same time during character creation. Big rear end world documents should be behind-the-scenes and liable to change dramatically at a moment's notice anyway.
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Mar 28, 2023 21:04
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Mendrian posted:As somebody with a very long homebrew document, I still completely agree with the sentiment. I started with a pantheon based entirely on the Tarot, both because it was fun to think about and also because it was immediately recognizable. My history was a bunch of descriptor names ("the Age of Three Empires", "The Long Siege", etc) rather than proper nouns. And I started my map with the only detail on precisely where the characters started, with other nations and cities being mostly vague and filling in details as I went. I also use the descriptor naming scheme (i.e., "Lake of Burning Mice" instead of "Lake Pyromuria" and such) for most things and it's much easier for both players and myself to remember. It's a good system ❤️ (My current campaign's gods are also loosely inspired by Tarot Cards haha) NeurosisHead posted:That's all well and good, but the reality is that you're probably playing online, you probably started trying to organize your game 2-4 months ago and spent the intervening time cancelling and rescheduling. By the time your actual first session rolls around everyone has already made their character (it's probably one of a dozen they've been waiting for a chance to play), there's no session zero, and as a DM you've got this homebrew world that you've been noodling on and expanding because what the gently caress else are you going to do while you wait for the game to come together? The best you can do is hope to cludge all of the moving pieces together in a way that's at least fun moment to moment for your players and improvise the rest. I totally understand why some DMs prep these huge documents from D&D-withdrawal. But if you really want to craft a world on your own, shouldn't you just write a book? Also, related to the mention of scheduling issues, DM's should be heartless and push sessions forward even when someone can't come; consistency is better than accommodation. Best policy is to explicitly tell your players that you'll always play D&D at a scheduled time even if only one player shows up.
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Mar 28, 2023 22:16
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Nehru the Damaja posted:You're probably right, but I also very much do not get the point of a homebrew world if it's stock fantasy with relabeled mountain ranges. Well, the point of a homebrew world is so that you can make poo poo up without worrying about violating anyone else's canon. I have friends that are huge nerds and if you contradict preexisting literary canon from some paperback you've never heard of, it can completely throw them off. I've seen people get apoplectic, even. Like, stupid mad. However, the salient point is that freedom from expectations is freeing for both the DM and her players. Zurai posted:These are very, very different things that require different skillsets. World design is closer to technical writing than creative writing, among many other things. I completely agree. But I don't understand your point. You can make an almanac for the design of your world; people publish those sorts of more technical books all the time. I'll elucidate that my meaning was, in D&D, the truths of the world are uncovered by playing with your friends. Even for the GM. If you're designing the entire world as a solo activity, you'd be better off writing a book.* *in my opinion
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Mar 29, 2023 02:20
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Hra Mormo posted:Ahh, brings back memories of my long-time group's Warhammer Fantasy campaigns played over multiple decades and systems. At least 60% of all session time spent on either nerding about fluff accuracy or arguing about realistic depiction of medieval existence. Warhammer Fantasy/40k was exactly what I was thinking of, what is it about their lore that makes it so sacrosanct to fans 
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Mar 29, 2023 13:13
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PeterWeller posted:This is a good point, but groups should also really internalize the whole "take ownership of the setting and make it your own thing" that every setting book and boxed set has stated in its introduction. My group has been playing in FR for literally decades, and we have contradicted a lot of "canon" along the way, but we've also developed our own interconnected histories within that setting and have our own timeline of adventures and cast of NPCs and former PCs. Totally agreed! I'm glad that has worked for your group.
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Mar 29, 2023 19:44
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Are there TTRPGs with weapon progression systems ala Dark Souls upgrades? I feel like that's a system which would be well suited for Dungeons and Dragons. That might start treading into 4e weapon systems, I dunno. IIRC there was a whole method of melting down magic items to get other, better items? It would be nice for players to have options to drag a beloved weapon along through a whole campaign. Plus, more options for rewards. What if looking behind that abandoned obelisk in the distance revealed mystical upgrade stones? Sounds better than random coins. On the Dark Souls note, I also think weapon coatings beyond "silvered weapons" would be nice. Combined with a weapon upgrade system, you could have interesting dynamics between magical weapons, temporary magical coating, different resources for upgrading magic vs mundane weapons, etc. Maybe it's all just too cumbersome for most players but, I dunno, it might help with the lack of interesting nonmagical loot in 5e. I know, it's a meme to post about naively grafting systems from other games to 5e but it's exciting me at the moment dammit. I also want to complain about Vancian magic but that will be a rant for later.
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Apr 8, 2023 21:56
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My thanks to everyone for the weapon upgrade ideas! I'm still reading and pondering.
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Apr 9, 2023 12:49
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I like to appeal to the party's sense of self preservation. Don't wanna go to the dungeon? The orcs grow overconfident and attack the town. Don't want to raid the abandoned wizard tower? Elementals, drawn by the party's magical aura, hound them such that they can't sleep over the night. Generally, I plan beforehand (that is, during session prep, not during the game) to have bad guys do bad things. This is something concrete, not a vague masterplan. I have a list with me during the session of things that the bad guys will do if the "heroes" do nothing. It might look something like this: 1. Goblins extort the townsfolk for money. 2. Goblins fly kites to drop bombs on the town. 3. Fisherman are attacked in the Catfish Swamp. Whenever there's a lull in the action, I drop one of those things on the players and make sure they know only they can stop it. You can see how this will force the players to the dungeon unless there's something really weird going on with Player-DM expectations (e.g., your players didn't realize that their characters need to be adventurous to be adventurers). Again, it's helpful to make these evil things concrete and non-sequentrial so you can throw them in anywhere during the session. If you're interested in more, I recommend looking into Dungeon World's "Adventure Fronts" system. Also, everything Zurreco said is great. Those are all good methods to try and different ways to think about your problem. edit: rereading the post, I think you would like the players to take problems more seriously? In that case, I mean, you can usually just kill a player character and that's that. Just foreshadow repeatedly that the encounter might be deadly, and if they decide to pants the Death Slaad despite the warnings then maybe that character gets what they get. No need to steer them away from it haha HOMOEROTIC JESUS fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Apr 14, 2023 |
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Apr 14, 2023 20:42
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Toshimo posted:You know how I know your party is different from ny party? 
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Apr 14, 2023 22:03
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What is everyone here doing for music and ambience during sessions? I usually have a player handle it, but I'm kinda interested in trying to do it myself. My experience so far has been that random D&D playlists on the internet stink. Reasons include tracks being dissonant from the alleged playlist theme, inconsistent volume, random pop or non-instrumental songs, and use of the Skyrim OST.
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May 12, 2023 00:18
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Thanks for all these! I am gravitating towards putting together my own playlists, but I'll try out some of the pre-curated stuff too.
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May 13, 2023 01:52
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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.
HOMOEROTIC JESUS fucked around with this message at 14:11 on Jul 10, 2023 |
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Jul 10, 2023 14:08
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5e Tools has been taken down in the past but it's been stable the last few years. It's extremely easy to run your own instance of it too so it's not like WotC could do anything about it if they tried. Personally though, I really only use it for the books I own. Gosh, it's such a good resource for building printable spellbooks and monster lists. With proficiency in using the filters you can really cut down on wasted time skimming through books and web pages.
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Jul 10, 2023 14:40
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Tias posted:First session as GM over! Everything went well, except I'm not sure how to award XP.. The XP math looks good beyond the aforementioned note about the XP being divided among the players (comes out to 67 XP per person). If you're ever feeling uncertain, Kobold Fight Club is a great resource. Also, since you're just starting out as a GM, I'd recommend sticking to XP over milestones. I have a few reasons for this, but my primary reason in your specific case is that you should try out the rules as initially presented before deviating. Same sorta spirit as "don't change course in a fog"; you'll want to wrap your brain around the GMing process in total before trying out homebrew or variant rules. Give it a few sessions and then discuss with your players if introducing new rules like milestone leveling make sense. Anyway, congrats on your first session as GM! GMing is my favorite part of D&D and it's awesome that you're doing it. If they keep coming back, you're probably doing it right.  - Re: XP vs Milestone Chat I used to do milestones, but I do XP leveling and prefer it these days. In my experience the players prefer XP leveling as well. Here's a few reasons in no particular order:
For perspective, I've DMed 2 campaigns with milestone leveling, 1 campaign with "goal card" leveling, and 3 campaigns with XP points. I do recognize that it's all subjective and it depends on you and your players. It's an age old discussion that others have covered extensively in better ways. Or sometimes funnier ways. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbgYM39j8Mc
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Jul 11, 2023 00:10
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Monathin posted:I think the rest of your points have merit even if I'm a hardcore "milestone levelling or bust" guy but I really can't believe this has ever actually occurred. 5e is a very combat-focused game. If people are playing, they accept they are going to be getting into fights. If 'lack of XP' is disincentivizing fights then there's likely a completely different problem that is in fact making that happen that is being band-aided by 'well, we won't get XP if we don't fight'.  People are complicated and want a mix of things out of D&D. At the time of the complaint my friends and I had a grand view that D&D could be anything you wanted it to be, not just dungeon diving and fighting dragons. There was a question of "what's the proper breakdown of exploring, roleplaying, combat, fingerpainting, and romance" which we didn't know the answer to. Removing an element like combat XP reduces the reward from fighting and tips the balance of party decision making towards those other things. This didn't stop them from getting into combat (and they had plenty), and I don't fault myself for not railroading them into violence if they expressed during the session that they wanted to avoid it.More detail about that particular complaint: the player was excited about both combat and the campaign narrative. This was a problem because accomplishing the goals of the campaign (and thus achieving milestones) did not necessarily require more than a few combats. The tension of feeling like they had to choose between prioritizing between combat and advancing the narrative was unpleasant. Combat can feel like a waste of time when you're on the way to save the princess from the dragon.
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Jul 11, 2023 05:05
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Caphi posted:If they care about the plot to the extent that they are pursuing it to the exclusion of extraneous combats, it seems like everything is fine and you don't need extraneous combats or to bribe them to put up with extraneous combats? Players will optimize the fun out of their game. They'll avoid extraneous combats if they don't feel like that need them, yes, but a player can find a way to make any combat extraneous. Even combats that they think might have been fun. That is the bad design pattern that arises when you drop the intrinsic reward for rolling initiative. The other rewards of combat can always be found by other ways: gold can be stolen, weapons forged in a place of safety, and princesses saved by subterfuge. Yeah, you can force encounters to always devolve into inescapable combat, but... you could also just not do that. Combat will happen naturally if you give players a pre-existing, system-based incentive to do it, and when it happens that way there's no stink of robbing the players of agency. Yeah, maybe it's a "bribe", but XP is no more bribery or confectionery than gold, weapons, level ups, or narrative climaxes are. It is a great way to make a fantasy action/adventure game encourage players to violently fight bad guys in the narrative with minimal reservations. As for incentivizing loving around for combat XP, I'm not sure I understand your point. If the players see that advancing the narrative will get them combat XP, then it's clear that the optimal way to play is to just enjoy the narrative. No need for extraneous combat. If extraneous combat XP gave more benefits than narrative-tied combat, then sure, I'd agree with you, but it doesn't. Unless the DM has crafted an incredibly bizarre campaign haha Also, to be clear, this "Narrative-Combat Tension Through Milestone Leveling" problem is not an active one, it was constrained to one campaign which ended years ago. The player and I talked and we changed what we did at the table. IMO the biggest thing for crushing that issue and most tabletop issues thereafter was to open up an explicit forum to give positive and negative feedback after the end of every session. Every player talks at least once. People are way more comfortable to give feedback when it's just... part of the game. Gosh, "Stars and Wishes" or something like it should just be in the rules as near-mandatory parts of D&D sessions.
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Jul 11, 2023 06:33
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Arivia posted:This is because combat is the only thing 5e actually has good rules for and therefore the game incentivizes it above everything else. Totally right, I wish I had understood that when I first started playing the game. disaster pastor posted:If you're covering three arcs and not leveling, your DM doesn't understand milestones, arcs, or leveling, holy poo poo. What a player thinks is an arc might not be what the DM thinks is an arc. If the players take more sessions to hit a milestone than the DM expects, it can happen quite easily. nelson posted:You can kind of combine the two. Milestone leveling, but DM uses their personal notes of XP earned as a guideline for pacing. This is IMO best practice for milestones if you do them. It doesn't have to be exact but the DM needs to have a record of player activity since the last level up. I'll remember what the players have done, but I will 100% forget what the timeline of level ups was without such a record. What I like about the default XP system is that I don't really need to remember, the players do it for me.
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Jul 11, 2023 16:41
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No, the milestone level up disincentivizes quality posting, which is why we need posting XP
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Jul 19, 2023 01:20
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Depends on the group, but my groups can often take 4 hours to handle 3 encounters. Sometimes I wish they'd go faster but whatevs, we're all having fun . My notes/prep for the session is usually 1 single-sided page of handwritten lists with combat/explo maps on the side. Something like:
Maybe more related to your points, having NPC ideas in advance is important as they are hard to do well ad lib. I like having Name / Distinct Visual Features / Goal / Chief Emotion ready. For whatever reason it works for me. Better improv DMs can probably do more with less.
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Jul 30, 2023 03:31
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Zurreco posted:Does landing a crit double the damage rolled from your expended hit die? Imagine being a Paladin and landing a crit with this and spending your highest level spell slot plus all of your hit die If the DM doesn't let you double the hit die damage on a crit, the DM is wrong, regardless of the rules
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Aug 3, 2023 00:53
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I think that a major issue here is that consumers are not buying these books for the arts' sake, but rather that art in a TTRPG book is a perfunctory marker of "written content quality" and "legitimacy". It's a marker to convince consumers to buy the book, and to please the reader on their first and maybe second read. If you could get an AI to do this... then it's almost a no-brainer for the seller to use an AI as much as feasible. I never look at the pictures when using the 5e books, and I use the books quite a lot. If these books were explicitly artbooks, I'd have a hard time ever seeing someone attempt to add AI art into them.
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Aug 5, 2023 18:29
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Dexo posted:I mean, sorta? Great point, the advent of digital tools for TTRPGS does tip the balance more towards buying the physical books for the arts' sake. I don't know how that affects most sales in general, since there are both the digital and physical sales of books these days. HOMOEROTIC JESUS fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Aug 5, 2023 |
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Aug 5, 2023 18:48
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Raenir Salazar posted:I buy the hard cover books because they're nice to hold in my hands, not really for the art, its just sometimes more convenient to flip through than a pdf, and if I ever go start hanging out at nerd cafes it'd be fun to potentially pull out some books for an impromptu D&D session as an ice breaker. You should bring some pre-made characters with the books, or the impromptu session may just be character generation
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Aug 6, 2023 17:46
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Funzo posted:I'm going to start up a game for my wife and our two teenage kids soon. They want to avoid dungeon crawler type games and want more mystery/heist type stuff. Can anyone point me to books they're aware of that lean in to that kind of thing? Third party is just fine too. I'll likely end up homebrewing something, but its nice to have the bones of something to work with. I'm also thinking of just going with Wild Beyond the Witchlight, but I need to read it again to see if it does what I think it does. Yeah, D&D is a good dungeon crawler / combat game but, as you said, if you want to do anything else you usually gotta homebrew it. I'd be thinking of trying another system entirely, like Dungeon World, Blades in the Dark, or another narrative game instead. If you want a specific recommendation, I've enjoyed the ICON RPG narrative system too as a catch-all for non-combat activities (it's Blades in the Dark based with a high fantasy spin). Blades in the Dark would likely be very solid too, but I've never played it. It should be fine to homebrew stuff too though. I've never used the books recommended above, but I have had friend play Wild Beyond the Witchlight and have a great time. If you homebrew, I recommend bringing in "clocks" from Apocalypse World (they are essentially narrative "healthbars"; try to make them player-visible if at all possible) and aggressively using fail forward principles (assuming you weren't already). When you're doing a mystery, you can't have the players miss a key plot-hook clue because they failed their roll. You'll still want to use "dungeons" that aren't dungeons, like mansions and castles, I think. There is a great, enjoyable suspense to be found in "what's in the next room?" that transcends dungeon-crawling No one is asking, but I will have my fun and share how I do narrative stuff within D&D these days: I don't set DCs for checks anymore, I just use the same three DCs for everything:
(I explicitly stole this from Apocalypse World, I just adapted the numbers to D&D)
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Aug 7, 2023 18:10
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I am cruel and I like to make the 500 gp diamonds difficult to find. 
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Aug 19, 2023 18:41
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Dexo posted:Sorry guys, this diamond is only worth 499 gold and 1 electrum See, this guy gets it 
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Aug 19, 2023 18:44
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Kaal posted:If you want a 50 GP Revivify, you might just get a 50 GP outcome! LOL they are revived but only their head comes back to life
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Aug 19, 2023 23:09
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Goffer posted:Princess Bride revivify style This was exactly what popped into my brain for the above post. Makes for a fun story, just need to make the player use their PC's personal assistant or something so they don't get frustrated with lack of personal agency
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Aug 19, 2023 23:24
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Hot off the presses from today's D&D session: My halfling assassin player, Marias, failed a critical roll and was grabbed by a giant recurring villain sharkman named "Charity". Last time that the players saw Charity, Marias threw a chamberpot on its face and stealth-kicked it down a humongous chasm, making some bad blood between the two. So, with an impossibly strong throw derived of pure vengeance, Charity hurled Marias a grand total of 760 ft into the air, and the sharkman took an inhuman jump to speedily meet Marias at apex of his flight. In its selachimorphic hands was a purple-black greatsword of Shar, and it readied a brutal attack from below. Marias calmed himself, loaded his rifle, and turned to aim at the sharkman as the pair approached their fated intersection. So, here we were, high in the sky above an Abbey of Shar in the pouring rain, in the middle of the night, on a new moon. The new moon is when Shar's power is at its strongest, and thus her symbol, a blazing purple ring, was dominating the night as its sole astral body. The ring framed the moment in a dull, near-useless light. Neither of the two figures in the blackness worshipped Shar, though only one held a priceless piece of her arsenal. We rolled initiative to decide who would strike first in the clash, and the sharkman won. But... I had a spontaneous, terrible idea and proceeded to offer my player the world's worst deal: we skip the usual boss fight. Instead, whoever hits their attack first instantly kills the other in an epic showdown. I made it clear that they could turn me down, and that Charity would go first, and that the deal altogether was probably a bad idea for them. However, the player loved the danger that the agreement would impose and accepted. We rolled the dice and they landed as they did. Marias, the halfling assassin, reached the apex of his flight, and aimed his rifle, barely able to make out the dark form of the monster soaring from below in the rain and darkness. His mind flashed through his training in the Navy Krakens - stay calm, keep it steady, and get the job done at any cost - and then, finally, Charity was in his rifle's iron sights. He was ready, and his killer's hands wouldn't miss this shot in a million years. But, as he pulled the trigger, a flash of purple burst out of his gun's breach. No bullet escaped the barrel. A misfire! Charity flashed by, stinking of blood, and Marias saw his rifle slowly slide into pieces. This is the story of how my PC was chopped into dozens of pieces by the 12-slice greatsword kata of a 15 ft. sharkman, hundreds of feet into the air on a new moon's storm under the unholy light of Shar. We had a tearful moment describing Marias' last thoughts and the inviting, heavenly cobbler shop that appeared before him as the light came to him. The very same cobbler shop back home which he was saving up money to buy. He entered the shop, and all his long lost friends in the Navy Krakens were there with him. It was finally time to join them. This is not the end of the story though, as the party paladin had used Misty Step to land on top of Charity before it made its jump. That became its own set of ridulousness that ended with the paladin failing a banishing smite, trading her soul to the devil to kill the manshark, piecing Marias back together in midair, using revivify on him, and then, after all that, Marias hits the ground with enough force to instantly kill him a second time with no diamond or spell slots remaining. Marias' player was grinning the entire time. Anyway, everyone had an awesome time in the most outrageous way and I have no clue how I will live up to this in the future. We'll see what happens after the funeral next week. HOMOEROTIC JESUS fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Aug 21, 2023 |
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Aug 21, 2023 04:37
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PeterWeller posted:This is epic and beautiful, and you should be proud of your group for doing D&D right. Thanks, it's really great to have a group that's down to clown for ridiculous, outre encounters. I am definitely proud of my players and the enthusiastic energy they're bringing each session <3 This makes it two different PCs I have killed in two different campaigns the last week, and both players loved it to death. in retrospect, I think the big things making the deaths work were 1) the threats were foreshadowed over several hours with player-visible clocks, 2) that players were explicitly told that death was potential outcome when those threats arose, and 3) the players explicitly chose the risk of death. I guess that communication and consent really are the secrets to doing D&D right, huh
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Aug 22, 2023 04:52
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I love the way that the MCDM "Flee Mortals" book does Legendary Resistance. Each time a monster uses their Legendary Resistance, they get some sort of debuff until the end of their next turn (releases grappled creatures, can't use specific powerful attack, gets half movement, etc). It makes the spells which were used meaningful without letting mages dominate boss monsters.
HOMOEROTIC JESUS fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Aug 31, 2023 |
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Aug 31, 2023 16:16
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Verisimilidude posted:Looking to start another 5e campaign. We're about to wrap up a WFRP campaign and would like to play something a bit less rules heavy and less intense for a bit, as a palate cleanser. Note: the standard HP gain is half the hit die rounded up, not down, plus CON mod I do like most the Baldur's gate changes. They should probably all be standard. It's fun that you guys will be using them. Verisimilidude posted:Still thinking about whether to do XP leveling or Milestone Ah yes, the evergreen question... e: the war has already started History Comes Inside! posted:Never don’t be using milestones there’s already enough maths in dnd I will always recommend just doing XP, the math is easy and I'm too lazy to list the reasons I like doing it, but it's an overall good game mechanic HOMOEROTIC JESUS fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Aug 31, 2023 |
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Aug 31, 2023 16:39
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Verisimilidude posted:Standard HP gain is what I was going for! I'll take a note of that. It's the only place in the game that I know of where you round up instead of down. Very strange but it's in the players favor at least. I guess they want the safe option for HP gain to be better than the risky option (i.e., rolling for it). Verisimilidude posted:I personally love XP leveling. Gives you the sensation that you're getting close to leveling up. It works well for my group, and Foundry lets you add XP very painlessly to character sheets. XP will be gained across the entire group, and it gives players a reason to risk fighting more monsters. Yup, agree with all of this
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Aug 31, 2023 16:52
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My mini solution these days: https://dnd.wizards.com/products/campaign-case-creatures It is extremely useful. I just wish they'd come out with more of the static clings. They are ridiculously restickable but I can't find anyone who is making the darn things. There's no 3rd party sheets at all, so I just have the sheets in the box.
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Aug 31, 2023 21:58
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Finster Dexter posted:I don't understand why this isn't a physical print. Seems like a slam dunk for book sales. It fills the dearth of high-level content, fits with the new planescape material coming out, and is written by icons of RPG gaming and genre fiction? idgi It looks like a recipe for a great campaign book. I agree about it being strange for there to be no physical print, yeah. Anybody bought it and looked at it? I can't be certain if this is an "internal politics sabotage a good project" situation or a "this book actually sucks and they didn't want to waste more money" situation.
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Nov 4, 2023 22:10
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HellCopter posted:I gave it a once-over. As a runnable campaign it seems a little loose, there are zero battlemaps in the entire book and as-written there's no plot reason to visit 75% of the locations other than "there might be treasure there". As a guy that likes more structured content I would have to take a lot more time to rebuild it. But as a sourcebook and high-level campaign it looks fantastic. Thanks for taking a look. The book sounds useful, at least for filling up an adventure. I know at least one of my players expressed interest in exploring the Nine Hells so I might see if they like the idea of book for higher level play.
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Nov 5, 2023 15:29
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My players have elected to do a "High Seas Kaiju Slaying" campaign. Anybody have random advice / resources for a homebrew nautical campaign? I know it's been brought up before in this very thread but I am too low energy to hunt that down. I have a Cricut and I'm cutting out miniature scale cardstock boats with it so I'm excited for the ship-to-ship and ship-to-Kaiju combat. I am also curious if anyone has fun ideas for giant monsters. There will be, of course, fantasy Mothra, Godzilla, etc. Zonko_T.M. posted:I played a halfling paladin named Hup who was based off Don Quixote. I charged blindly into every possible danger. Did I nearly die because of getting stunned by a monster in a cave while my party was two rooms behind? Yes. Did I solve traps by setting them all off while my DM got increasingly grumpy? Yes. Did my party ever get stalled trying to figure out what to do? No! The "blithely charges into danger" archetype is really helpful in busting stagnation and making things exciting. My favorite characters to DM for are often this type of character
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Nov 7, 2023 22:07
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