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Reveilled posted: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. Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Dec 23, 2018 |
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Dec 23, 2018 01:50
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Reveilled posted: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. I don't think it'd be *that* much work if you wanted to do it in 5e, you'd probably come up with a monster HD to attack roll modifier convention in your head soon enough and work from there. There's been several projects to rewrite the Basic D&D rules with more modern formatting - I've been looking at B/X Essentials for that lately. If they want to do like, character build type stuff where they spec out a character and plan what to take at each level than 5e will be better but if your party of dads wants to just jump in the dungeon to kill some stuff and take their treasure I think basic would be pretty fun.
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Dec 23, 2018 08:33
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Reveilled posted: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”.
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Dec 24, 2018 18:36
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Toshimo posted:Official modules have explicitly proscribed DCs for traps. For instance, Dungeon of the Mad Mage effectively has 3 tiers of trap: DC15, DC17, and DC20. I think those largely map to the level range of the particular floor of the dungeon that the trap falls on. Okay but a DC 15 trap that I know in advance will be seen and not not something I could ever see myself putting in a dungeon. Why would I bother? Making my players think "ahh, a trap, I must be in a dungeon"? I get the point of traps in a game where you gotta explicitly talk about how you search the room, 10 foot pole and all that, but not this. So either I'm making a trap that I know 100% will be spotted or I'm making one that requires a DC 20 roll? Does everyone get to roll? If so, that's still practically guaranteed to be spotted. If not, that's a pretty harsh check depending on how I choose who gets to roll. In general I'm making stuff up or converting it on the fly but I'm definitely choosing to use any given module and using traps as written seems like mostly an exercise in describing traps they can't possibly trigger, at least using those rules as described.
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Dec 24, 2018 18:55
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I think nobody gets good poo poo now? To the point where you're supposed to not give out the stuff the published adventures say to give out? No clue how that works for plot critical items. I really can't imagine being an AL DM and doing anything short of goading my players into renouncing the AL rules and accepting the fun poo poo.
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Dec 29, 2018 02:02
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Infinite Karma posted:This makes me think of Flasks, i.e. reusable potions. Anyone tried anything like that before?
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Dec 29, 2018 19:42
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get this boys...someone doesn't like barack obama
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Jan 3, 2019 22:03
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I made a variant mindflayer that just did it's mind blast damage every turn until you passed a save, like it was still reverberating in your mind...only 1 person died it was fine. 10 round stun seemed dumb/lazy.
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Jan 3, 2019 23:59
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Pussy Quipped posted:Without the CHA Invocation isn't it still more damage than a Wizard firebolt?
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Jan 4, 2019 23:04
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If they get level 2, they could knockback with it which is something, I guess.
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Jan 4, 2019 23:08
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In 5e, it will take a 10 int fighter on average 10 rounds to pass the check, and many fighters likely have 8 int which makes it impossible. It won't last for up to 80 minutes like the AD&D one but 10 minutes is still pretty harsh.
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Jan 5, 2019 04:10
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MonsterEnvy posted:What are you talking about here? I am looking around the page and I can't find what this is in reference to. Oh oops, forgot to hit refresh, it's the maze spell.
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Jan 5, 2019 04:24
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I think quicksand would be a save? There's a difference between everyone rolling for the same effect on their own character, and having everyone roll for something that the group succeeds at if even one person at, like history checks.
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Jan 7, 2019 06:28
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Haha okay, fair enough. It looks like the example is a survival check, so I'm thinking it's to see if the quicksand is a problem for the group as they travel across a long distance. If it's something the group has to do more than once, then making everyone check individually is almost always going to result in a "person-stuck-in-quicksand" scene, while a group check has the roughly the same odds of succeeding as an average character doing a single check. A group of 5 has a 83% chance of having someone roll a 6 or lower.
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Jan 7, 2019 06:59
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Spikes32 posted:Cons: only does things in combat, does nothing to help martials stay relevant outside of combat compared to spells.
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Jan 8, 2019 17:16
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An ability that halves the parties actions per turn would be much more fair if it just gave her two turns for the party's one instead of some people getting hosed.
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Jan 9, 2019 06:53
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How much you vibe with the campaign is a lot more important than how far apart things are - please don't choose one based on the latter.
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Jan 16, 2019 18:17
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Traps play a very different role in groups that are good at finding them vs groups that aren't. It's not like your DM doesn't know you don't have a trap guy. In the former group, they serve to make you feel strong and crafty and all that but have little mechanical effect. In the latter group they're a tax on resources because you're probably gonna blunder into them. I'm not a big fan of traps in general but it's not like the DM isn't choosing to put one in, knowing whether you're likely to set it off or not in advance. Putting your low-int group in a dungeon full of traps was a conscious choice that the DM probably wouldn't have made if instead your group was likely to disarm them all on the way in - why spend game time on "yep, you find another one" ad nauseum? Passive perception for traps is also pretty meaningless. The DM knows what your passive perception is and chooses the DC of the trap, whether they choose a DC above or below that passive perception is completely arbitrary. It's impossible good-faith decide trap DCs when you know that some of those DCs will never be triggered, outside of the positive externality that is making your trap guy feel good. "Use passive perception" is code for "DM fiat" for whether you find the trap or not. (Excepting the player using some ability to raise their passive perception at a key moment.)
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Jan 22, 2019 03:30
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Make your phylactery a pebble and throw it in the open ocean, or better yet, bury it under the ocean floor.
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Jan 26, 2019 12:43
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PicklePants posted:I've been running SKT for a while now. More spoilery griping about SKT below: There's no details on what happens if any of the giants succeed on make progress. Each giant group is written as if they're frozen in time, waiting for the PCs. The players noticed and I've done my best to keep them threatening but....you can't give me anything? There are guidelines for the sort of attacks made by the various groups of giants, but nothing on genuine progress towards their goals. The story has them go to an oracle, who sends them on an explicitly useless fetch quest, so they can go back to the oracle and have a set-piece encounter - I had them go to a giant stronghold instead of the fetch quest, so it was okay, but that was a weird choice. Then you go to one of the five strongholds to get an artifact so you can go see the storm giants. There are five full chapters of giant strongholds and the campaign explicitly only calls for one. (I made the fetch quest into another, so they did at least two, but that's yet more wasted pages. I'd have the party do all of them if they were all interesting, but they're....inconsistent.) There was a really tense fight that, had the players lost, would have ended up with the party possessed and their powers/names used by the fire giants to win the struggle and turn on their war machine. There was nothing in the book that even remotely hinted at this possibility, but it's an obvious emergent result of the powers the enemies had. It would have potentially been really cool, but also entirely done wholesale by me. Who makes an rpg book with a 100-foot tall death machine and doesn't even allude to how it works? Why wouldn't you assume the death machine gets turned on at some point? Anyway I'm sure this is rambly and I dunno how helpful it is but there are much better modules out there if you don't need WotC on the cover. My next campaign is going to be a sandbox for sure - no more self-important save the world wankery for me for a good long while.
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Mar 1, 2019 23:06
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I'd prefer for the book to contain useful information, and only useful information. I'm actually totally fine with making stuff up and gluing in other modules. There's tons of foreshadowing you gotta do in SKT for it to make any sense from a player perspective but that's more okay with me, if only because I figured out it was necessary in advance - it's not like the book tells you to make sure to mention these things. From an information clarity perspective, I'm actually much more bothered by the reams of extraneous information than what I see as missing. Like if it says at the start, "we're gonna give you concise descriptions to jump start your imagination and only go into detail if it's important", and they actually do that, great! One short line is usually enough for a room in a dungeon, I'd prefer descriptions that are brief and to the point. It's a lot worse to masquerade itself as a book that has lots of detail everywhere, only to omit stuff that really is important. Like how does this rate above "what might happen if the fire giants succeed"? This is me picking a random entry, not cherry picking, there are dozens of entries as banal as this one about places no party is likely to visit. quote:Beliard is a market-moot for local cattle drovers. It surrounds the intersection of the dusty Dessarin Road and the Stone Trail.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:01
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Okay well you already described it better than they did - I guess you aren't paid per-word to post.  My version that captures the relevant part you describe: quote:Beliard - Cattle village. The inn here was famous for it's non-functioning helmed horror, but it's missing now. So is the innkeeper. FWIW the suggested encounter has nothing to do with the helmed horror and is about hill giants stealing cattle. It's not awful, and if you're focusing on hill giants it's a fine encounter, I don't really have any complaints about it, but there are tons and tons of paragraphs of details throughout that players have no avenue to ever actually learn let alone care about or use.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:15
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koreban posted:I can't think of a single adventure book that doesn't do this to a large degree, but I also think that it's absolutely core to the notion of what D&D *is*. I've been reading Night Below for an adventure inspiration in my current campaign and on Page 6, addressing the DM, there's an entire four paragraph section detailing the requirement that the DM account for several flavorful "side-adventures" to fill in periods of time, and allow for NPCs to perform tasks required for the purposes of the adventure. If the fire giants succeeded they definitely weren't getting to the end of the campaign as written in the book and it would have been extremely different and fun and the players would have to rebuild their name. I'd have been 100% happy to just do my own thing from there, but man, a paragraph of text about what the giants are going to try and do would be so much better than what's there. Their motivations are concisely described as "they're gonna rebuild this thing and unleash it on the world", and they got close to doing that, but there's literally nothing about what they'll do when they the machine is turned on, no rules for running it, nothing. Who might they attack? To what end? This is, in fact, one of the *better* defined of the five giant schemes. The cloud giants are "looking for a cache of dragon magic", with no mention of what sort of magic, what it might do, where it is, anything. To advance this plot they...survey the land to make better maps and capture a single random dragon and torture him for information he doesn't have. Like, I guess to summarize, when I say thin, I don't mean "there are blanks to fill in along the way in the campaign", I mean the giant plots that are supposed to be central to the whole campaign are extremely thin and there's no guidance for what they might do if they succeed. Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Mar 2, 2019 |
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Mar 2, 2019 00:46
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inthesto posted:What are some 3rd party modules to look into? Hot Springs Island is pretty nice. Using it's own language, it's a hex crawl on a powder-keg of an island just waiting for players to provide the spark to make things explode between the local factions. It's written as system neutral but someone has statted up all the creatures for 5e and I can dig that up if you need it. This could totally function as a complete "campaign", moreso than most adventure modules. Anomalous Subsurface Environment I've run a few sessions of as a side game and its been wonderful. It's a post-apocalyptic science fantasy megadungeon where the players uncover a long-buried facility under a mountain. The human inhabitants on the top floor have all died but there are service-and-maintenance automatons fighting each other for parts. Some of them have human bones as replacements for parts of their own that have broken down. It gets weirder from there but yeah. It sounds like you aren't into the megadungeon thing but I can't miss an opportunity to plug this one. It's written for basic dnd so monsters get like, HD, AC, attacks, it'd be some work to convert. Most modules aren't going to be campaign in scope - does your group need the "one story over the whole campaign" thing or do they just want to try some prefab stuff? The following are more like, large-scope adventures than full campaigns. Deep Carbon Observatory - An ancient civilization was rumored to have left its secrets under a lake by a dam, but no one has ever sought those secrets and returned. Now the dam has broken, society in the region has quickly crumbled, and it's now or never unless you want someone else to claim the treasure first. This module has some of the best writing I've ever seen in an rpg product though it's theme is definitely grim/sad, I think you have to want that mood to some degree to run this. (I think it's sincerely grim, that's not code for juvenalia as it would be in some parts of the rpg space) Also uses basic dnd stats. Gardens of Ynn/Stygian Library - I pair these because the same woman wrote both of them and they're very similar in style from a gm perspective. Basically, you find yourself in a strange place, and the DM procedurally generates it using tables included in the book during play. One is a magical garden left untended so it's grown wildly on its own. The other is a library on an otherworldly plane of knowledge. So like, players enter and you roll a starting room, along with some sort of detail and maybe an encounter, and they can keep going deeper and find new locations or connections to old ones, and the table changes as you get deeper. I think these are really cool because something I've found I really like as a DM is when I am genuinely surprised at what happens in game, and so by rolling for what room is next and what's encountered there, I can be surprised too. This sort of table often prompts my imagination way better than a completely blank canvas or a concrete fixed description ever will, because I find out right when it's relevant what's actually there. (You could also pregen these if that's more your taste but I think you'd lose something.) I can keep going if you're interested but that's a lot of words already.
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Mar 2, 2019 01:13
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PicklePants posted:Spoilers for SKT. Haha I read that gauntlegrym encounter and decided it was super lame. The important artifact just happens to be stolen while the players are there??? Pfft. So instead, on a session when not everyone could make it, I did a side game in dungeon world where the players are drow trying to use their iron flask to steal a the titan powering the forge of gauntlegrym. The players succeeded wonderfully. It's a way better encounter from the drow perspective. For cloud giants, Felgolos (or "sparky" as his friends call him) has become a dear friend of the party and I don't think I'll have any trouble convincing them to intervene. Also I made up a bonkers but fixed-in-place artifact that the players found before the giants, and now have to decide whether or not to destroy it. Basically it lets you uncap the range, area, and number of targets of spells while you sit in this scary biomechanical machine that bores into your skull and connects you to a mass of nerve cells along the wall. It works over a 5 mile radius and can affect the major city nearby.
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Mar 2, 2019 01:19
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MonsterEnvy posted:Honestly only the fire giants have a reasonable chance of completing their goal. The artifact the Frost Giants are looking for is on another continent. And the only means they have of tracking the owner detects the nearest person sharing his blood. Given that owner is immortal and ageless he quite a few blood relatives in the north. The hill giants plan is just stupid (appropriate for them) and is just feeding their leader. The Cloud Giants have no leads on the Cache they are looking for, other then an unlucky dragon they captured, who does not know where it is either. The Stone Giants are being manipulated and think the way to impress the gods is to dismantle the works of the small folk. But while they will cause much death and destruction, they are not neourmous enough to take on a major human settlement.
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Mar 2, 2019 01:34
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Revised Ranger/Hunter ain't so bad.
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Mar 4, 2019 15:51
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inthesto posted:SKT recommends reading the entire book before attempting to run it You should also read this guy's guide! https://www.dmsguild.com/product/193601/A-Guide-to-Storm-Kings-Thunder How are you starting the campaign? It includes a starter adventure that gets the party to level 5 super quickly, and maybe your group will dig that, but I kinda regret having levels 3-5 go so quickly - those are some fun levels. Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Mar 5, 2019 |
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Mar 5, 2019 19:27
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inthesto posted:I've only read the introduction and summary so I haven't really dug into the meat of the book yet, but I've heard both from this thread and reviews elsewhere that the first chapter of the book seriously lacks direction. Most likely, I'm just going to have the players make characters at 5th level and drop them straight into chapter 2. Also I was pouring over my players' notes the other day and noticed they wrote "knightstone" and I had never clarified. I dunno if I have the heart to correct it now. If you do start in chapter 2, 100% start in media res in the middle of the attack on the town. As written the chapter starts with the players farting around town, delivering a message or something, which is fine for an established campaign, but it's a missed opportunity if you don't open in the middle of the chaos. Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Mar 5, 2019 |
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Mar 5, 2019 20:21
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5e counterspell is super-boring fwiw. I can put it on a monster and turn a player's turn into a no-op, or they can take it and spend a reaction so the big evil monster does nothing for a round, so long as I've arbitrary classed their power as a spell instead of an ability.
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Mar 6, 2019 17:15
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Admiral Joeslop posted:Are there any non-mobile character builders worth a drat that aren't D&D Beyond? Orc Pub doesn't have non-SRD stuff anymore and I'm sure not paying Wizards more money for content I already have, or any money at all for their handling of the Zak S stuff. edit: gently caress it, ettin you can probate me if you want gently caress the mods !!! https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B6chOKnndfctUEhtQnBMeHRqTXc Be sure to delete your characters within 24 hours if you don't have a license for those feats!!! Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Mar 6, 2019 |
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Mar 6, 2019 18:03
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FWIW, if I were your DM and you took the great weapon fighting style, I'd let you use a greatsword/greataxe on a halfling because that image rules.
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Mar 7, 2019 16:07
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Mr. Lobe posted:I kind of like this as a weird personality quirk, a spellcaster who insists on keeping his magic cat aloft next to him through considerable expended effort. Probably won't keep it up in combat though.
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Mar 7, 2019 20:44
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Yeah did you make a character who doesn't want to go on the adventure? You should want to go on the adventure. You can figure out why - maybe you'd quite like to go back home, maybe you think this guy's a jerk, maybe you have empathy for the people around. I haven't spoiled myself on this one so I don't know quite where the action is - have you had a few sessions without any fighting or anything? I can understand being bored by a session, 100%, some sessions are unengaging, but it seems weird if it's because your character lacks motivation - you made up the character and its motivations, can't you make up different ones so they are interested in the adventure? Like, I also like player-driven sandbox play, so I get wanting to choose where you go and what you do, but you signed up for a premade module. My understanding is that it becomes more of a sandbox soon, but it shouldn't be surprising that it involves people and their problems. Why are the people of Barovia different from the dwarves of lost mines? Why did you care about them? Like I'm not saying your criticism is illegitimate, I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason you're dissatisfied, but I don't think it's that your characters motivations aren't aligned with the situation, given that you get to wholesale make them up anyway.
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Mar 10, 2019 18:18
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Yeah my druid wears a worked bulette hide - there's no need to further wring flavor out of what's already a relatively sanitized, soulless affair.
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Mar 14, 2019 19:15
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mastershakeman posted:Why do you want things as bland as possible
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Mar 15, 2019 16:54
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Passive skills are just GM fiat if the GM knows what the players' skills and is also setting the DC. I can't choose to do a "clean room" guess at how hard is this trap to spot - I know that either they see it automatically if I choose number X, and don't if I choose Y.
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Mar 19, 2019 15:45
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I don't like the mechanical incentives for one guy to do most of the talking. I don't have an answer besides "don't call for them very often" unless you want a full-blown social combat subsystem. In general I'd rather you say what your character would say and maybe then roll if the other person doesn't want to act but you have leverage, or you're lying overtly, or something like that. I don't think you gotta be an expert liar to lie in-game but I want to hear what you say. This is distinct from lifting heavy things because "players speaking as their characters" is a core part of a tabletop RPG to me in a way that lifting heavy things isn't.
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Mar 19, 2019 16:42
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I don't think it's unfair to ask people to do things out of game and in fact deciding what should be a roll versus what should just be accepted is a big part of running the game. I don't think they have to come up with an expert lie but they gotta come up with something. There's not really a time limit either, I'm not requiring they respond in real-time or anything, but it's most fun if they do. The game regularly tests the player to do things their character might know implicitly - I don't think "what lie do you tell?" is any less valid a question than "what action do you take in the fight against these mummies?" - a fighter PC might well know better than their player what tactics to use, but we still have the player decide, because we've decided that decision is part of the game. I think speaking as your character is part of the game also.
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Mar 19, 2019 16:55
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Dragonatrix posted:I agree, it's not! Which is why, oh I don't know, "I tell him that I'm the lost heir to the crown" is a valid answer.
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Mar 19, 2019 17:02
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