Yeah it's pretty good and opens up additional builds, background, and spell.
Thanks! It seems like it's exactly what I'm looking for. I have to say the 5e rules are much easier for me to get into than before, so I'm really enjoying even the free basics they released online.
Man I'm hyped for our next session. Party's going into a swamp where people really don't go, in no small part because the stories say a black dragon lives deep in the mire. Well, the stories are true, and the party is going to meet somebody who escaped the dragon a long time back. And they're going to have to go into the swamp anyway if they want to find the lost library that's beneath it, which is where they think they need to go to find the location of a relic they're seeking.
And when they get deep in the swamp, they're going to find the remains of that black dragon who has been dead for quite some time. And I'm hoping they start to feel some relief right before I tell them about the two black dragons that burst up out of the swamp to fight them. =D Hey, at least they're going to be younger than the dead one.
Man I'm hyped for our next session. Party's going into a swamp where people really don't go, in no small part because the stories say a black dragon lives deep in the mire. Well, the stories are true, and the party is going to meet somebody who escaped the dragon a long time back. And they're going to have to go into the swamp anyway if they want to find the lost library that's beneath it, which is where they think they need to go to find the location of a relic they're seeking.
And when they get deep in the swamp, they're going to find the remains of that black dragon who has been dead for quite some time. And I'm hoping they start to feel some relief right before I tell them about the two black dragons that burst up out of the swamp to fight them. =D Hey, at least they're going to be younger than the dead one.
Nice. I'm still trying to figure out how to handle playing out the naval blockade of the party's home city (which they are currently returning to, with a number of pirate ships at their side), which is likely to be a big part of the next session.
Man I'm hyped for our next session. Party's going into a swamp where people really don't go, in no small part because the stories say a black dragon lives deep in the mire. Well, the stories are true, and the party is going to meet somebody who escaped the dragon a long time back. And they're going to have to go into the swamp anyway if they want to find the lost library that's beneath it, which is where they think they need to go to find the location of a relic they're seeking.
And when they get deep in the swamp, they're going to find the remains of that black dragon who has been dead for quite some time. And I'm hoping they start to feel some relief right before I tell them about the two black dragons that burst up out of the swamp to fight them. =D Hey, at least they're going to be younger than the dead one.
Nice. I'm still trying to figure out how to handle playing out the naval blockade of the party's home city (which they are currently returning to, with a number of pirate ships at their side), which is likely to be a big part of the next session.
Sounds fun. Do you know whether or not the party is going to turn it into a ship battle or if they're going to be trying to use another approach?
After multiple weeks of not playing the party got together again to go through the Curse of Strahd. We picked up where we left off last time, having killed the Night hag and one of her daughters, the party decided to rest at the mill as they did not want to brave Barovia at night. They slept and avoided the trap the other night hag had left for them once they woke up. Not wanting to go around the forest through the path, they decided to brave the forest to cut a couple of hours off the journey. They were saved by Ismark making the survival check so they did not wander around the forest like idiots but they did encounter a revenant. Instead of trying to speak to the revenant they engaged it in a heated battle where the revenant dropped multiple party members and they barely managed to kill it. They looted the body and continued to the town of Valllaki.
They wanted to get the breatsplate they got off the revenant repaired so they tried both the coffin maker and Blinksy the toy maker to get the breastplate fixed as the town does not have a blacksmith. Henrik the coffin maker brushed them off and refused to open the door. They made friends with Blinksy who agreed to fix the armor if they bought some toys from him. They agreed and gave them to the children they had rescued last time. Blinksy noticed Ireena looked just like the dolls that the town's Baron, Izek, had been forcing him to make. Sufficiently creeped out the party bought a mask for Ireena and went on to St. Andral's Church. Father Lucian, who runs the church, agreed to take the children in and after a lengthy conversation they managed to get him to tell them why he was so nervous: the bones of St. Andral, the one thing protecting the church from Strahd's evil manage, had been stolen. After interrogating the altar boy and Milivoj the ground's keeper they found out that Henrik had stolen the bones.
The party, without having done a long rest since the Revenant fight, decided to go back to the coffin maker's house. Henrik refused to let them in so they kicked in his door. He quickly broke down and told them the bones were upstairs but he refused to get them so "Salty Thunder", the party Bard, decided to go get them. The town guard, having heard the door being kicked in, went to investigate. Henrik started screaming help so they tried to shut the door and then ran into another room. At the same time the Bard went upstairs and decided to search the junk room, thinking the bones were probably hidden in there. he opened one of the boxes that had been recently disturbed to see a tiefling fighter in plate mail, staring up at him, his pointed vampiric teeth twisted in a sickening grin. The vampire leapt up, and the box next to him exploded as another vampire, an elven wizard rose from the box. Combat started, the wizard failed to knock out the bard with sleep by 1 hp (he had 32 hp, she rolled 31 on the die) so the bard used thunderwave to knock the wizard back, shouted "vampires!" and started running. He broke one of the other boxes with the thunderwave, which revealed a vampiric drow rogue. The rest of the party and the town guard started rushing up the stairs, but not before the vampire fighter managed to get ahead of the party's bard and block the entrance to the steps. Some hectic combat ensued as part of the party started trying to catch the house on fire, hoping to trap the vampires in it while the rest of the party and the town guard tried to fight the vampires. In that time another vampire, a human bard, had revealed himself and joined the fray. The leader of the town guard and Ireena stalker, Izek, showed up as well and the mini-boss started fighting on the party's side against the vampires. The warlock ran down the stairs and used burning hands to catch the ceiling of the first floor on fire and him and the bard booked it out the building (the bard had managed to tumble out of the vampire fighter's square). As the rest of the party (mostly npcs) sprinted down the stairs as the fifth vampire revealed himself by punching through the already damaged floor of the second floor/first floor ceiling and plummeted to the first floor and right in front of the stairs. We ended the session with the guards and Izek fighting four vampires on the second floor, two of the party outside of the building and the other's inside of the stairwell, staring up at the half-elven vampire monk who crashed through the burning floor to block their exit, half of the room wreathed in flames.
Overall it was a lot of fun. I modified all of the vampires that were hiding in the coffin maker's shop by giving them some basic class abilities (the book describes them as an adventuring party Strahd had turned, but it used just basic vampire spawn so I decided to spice it up. They also have only seen five of the six vampires now). I wasn't expecting the party to immediately barge into the coffin-maker's shop without having at the very least taken a long rest as they were mostly burnt out of their abilities. I had planned on using these vampires in smaller roles throughout the town as they finished quests in Vallaki, maybe killing one or two of them in the meantime. Instead they bumbled right into their lair in the town, and they slowly staggered out of their boxes to fight them. I'm nervous how this fight is gonna go, but luckily we have two other players who weren't at this session who will be fully healed and with all abilities to help the party make their escape/ kill some of the vampires.
Curse of strahd has been going great with my group, though we are expieriencing a problem of new players showing up every week and no they don't have characters ready and no they don't know what kind of character they want to play and the sign says D&D starts at 5:30 so whats the problem with us wanting to make characters at 5:30....
I digress.
Anyways, the party was at this winery, trying to help keep it safe from some druids and their horde of blights; the first wave of 24 twigblights went down easy enough and they were able to take a short rest before a giant swarm of 30 needle blights with another druid showed up, and lord love a duck: for CR1/4 critters those things are *dangerous* with ac 13, HP 13 and a ranged attack that does 2d6+1; given that my (10 person) party was a mix ranging from level 1-3 they were in for a hell of a fight; not the least of which was because most of them decided to just sally forth and fight them in the open because why would you ever try and use the winery for defense. Also: a handful of them heard ravens going nuts upstairs.
Further aggravating the situation was that the scenario technically called for the arrival of another wave of blights to F' up the party and me being the kind of GM that I am decided "fuck it I'm not rolling 40+ attacks a turn" and decided to remove the third wave of blights in favor of one big monster: a tree blight.
Now for those of you who don't have access to Curse of strahd you'll be forgiven for asking "What the hell is a tree blight", and I'm glad you asked that: it's a 30 foot tall CR7 murder machine with a bucket of HPs that lashes out with 4(!) attacks per turn, two of which occur with it's roots and two with it's branches. Adding to the fun is that the roots while much weaker are able to strike at range and grapple their targets; one of the players was particularly shocked when his first level fighter was taken down from full health by a single hit from the roots.
I'm not going to lie: describing the tree blights movement and appearance (a hollow in it was moving like a maw and drooling blood as it began surging towards the players; I also enjoyed likening it to a hungry hungry hippo with white marbles within reach), and the way it was dope smacking players really added a sense of urgency the way a horde simply couldn't.
Meanwhile inside of the winery, the players discover there is a druid fighting with a handful of ravens, swining around a really creepy looking staff; the arcana druid in the party is able to note that it is a gulthias staff and thus has a connection of some sort to blights. In an act of desperation, the players snap the staff after they and the ravens are able to beat the druid to death, and the blights all scream and die.
Also: one of my players who had a pet sloth named jeff discovered that after they'd been seperated, a druid had wild shaped into one and pretended to be him, much to the shock and anger of his owner when he reverted back and thunderwaved the heck out of him. He's determined to get that sloth back, but he might not like what he finds :P
Curse of strahd has been going great with my group, though we are expieriencing a problem of new players showing up every week and no they don't have characters ready and no they don't know what kind of character they want to play and the sign says D&D starts at 5:30 so whats the problem with us wanting to make characters at 5:30....
When I use to do the public D&D thing I'd have a few pre-made characters ready for folks like that. I'd certainly offer to help them change it up after the game or if they'd like to show up a bit early next week we could do it then!
Man, I hated people like that even if it was entirely reasonable for somebody who didn't know D&D.
The problem I have with Handing out premades is that players look at the sheets and just kind of goggle at what all these words and numbers mean and when I come around to their turn their responses are invariably "Ummm.... I don't know.... what can I do?"
Having players involved in character creation helps them to understand how their character works
Also: we'll be going to three tables next week, so I'll probably be able to shave a couple of players off of my table so that that sessions become less of a chore of me having to remember minutia of every spell, power, class ability or racial trait.
The problem I have with Handing out premades is that players look at the sheets and just kind of goggle at what all these words and numbers mean and when I come around to their turn their responses are invariably "Ummm.... I don't know.... what can I do?"
Having players involved in character creation helps them to understand how their character works
Also: we'll be going to three tables next week, so I'll probably be able to shave a couple of players off of my table so that that sessions become less of a chore of me having to remember minutia of every spell, power, class ability or racial trait.
It's definitely a battle of priorities here but a good premade sheet isn't the same as a normal character sheet. Anything they're going to use that session should be right there on it. This does mean that you'll be picking their spells and shit but it should only be for a single session and I strongly advocate they keep any progress/treasure/whatever from that session to keep them hooked.
In that situation I'm going to be striving to minimize the total person-downtime which means the five folks (or whatever) who are ready to go get to impose a little inconvenience on new guy, this one time.
Curse of strahd has been going great with my group, though we are expieriencing a problem of new players showing up every week and no they don't have characters ready and no they don't know what kind of character they want to play and the sign says D&D starts at 5:30 so whats the problem with us wanting to make characters at 5:30....
I digress.
Anyways, the party was at this winery, trying to help keep it safe from some druids and their horde of blights; the first wave of 24 twigblights went down easy enough and they were able to take a short rest before a giant swarm of 30 needle blights with another druid showed up, and lord love a duck: for CR1/4 critters those things are *dangerous* with ac 13, HP 13 and a ranged attack that does 2d6+1; given that my (10 person) party was a mix ranging from level 1-3 they were in for a hell of a fight; not the least of which was because most of them decided to just sally forth and fight them in the open because why would you ever try and use the winery for defense. Also: a handful of them heard ravens going nuts upstairs.
Further aggravating the situation was that the scenario technically called for the arrival of another wave of blights to F' up the party and me being the kind of GM that I am decided "fuck it I'm not rolling 40+ attacks a turn" and decided to remove the third wave of blights in favor of one big monster: a tree blight.
Now for those of you who don't have access to Curse of strahd you'll be forgiven for asking "What the hell is a tree blight", and I'm glad you asked that: it's a 30 foot tall CR7 murder machine with a bucket of HPs that lashes out with 4(!) attacks per turn, two of which occur with it's roots and two with it's branches. Adding to the fun is that the roots while much weaker are able to strike at range and grapple their targets; one of the players was particularly shocked when his first level fighter was taken down from full health by a single hit from the roots.
I'm not going to lie: describing the tree blights movement and appearance (a hollow in it was moving like a maw and drooling blood as it began surging towards the players; I also enjoyed likening it to a hungry hungry hippo with white marbles within reach), and the way it was dope smacking players really added a sense of urgency the way a horde simply couldn't.
Meanwhile inside of the winery, the players discover there is a druid fighting with a handful of ravens, swining around a really creepy looking staff; the arcana druid in the party is able to note that it is a gulthias staff and thus has a connection of some sort to blights. In an act of desperation, the players snap the staff after they and the ravens are able to beat the druid to death, and the blights all scream and die.
Also: one of my players who had a pet sloth named jeff discovered that after they'd been seperated, a druid had wild shaped into one and pretended to be him, much to the shock and anger of his owner when he reverted back and thunderwaved the heck out of him. He's determined to get that sloth back, but he might not like what he finds :P
I'm impressed they manage to get to the wizard of wines winery at that level. Did you start them in a different area, or did they manage to travel through Barovia, the huge trail to Vallaki, and then wonder to the winery while avoiding the many encounters of death that can happen?
I have been thinking about modifying that encounter as well as there is an absurd amount of blights for that encounter just from a paperwork perspective.
The last time I was at a game store I flipped through Curse of Strahd and took at a look at the maps. At the back of the module was a folded poster map that I couldn't open.
I wanted it SO much.
But if I can't get my group of players to buy into 5e, I'm not going to spend the money on it. Sigh. Those few hundred dollars I spent on 4e books were (except for the few games I played here via pbp) wasted. Alas.
The last time I was at a game store I flipped through Curse of Strahd and took at a look at the maps. At the back of the module was a folded poster map that I couldn't open.
I wanted it SO much.
But if I can't get my group of players to buy into 5e, I'm not going to spend the money on it. Sigh. Those few hundred dollars I spent on 4e books were (except for the few games I played here via pbp) wasted. Alas.
I never spent any money on 4E books, even though I ran a game for a couple years. I just did the subscription and all the online tools made it easy to never use the books.
Curse of strahd has been going great with my group, though we are expieriencing a problem of new players showing up every week and no they don't have characters ready and no they don't know what kind of character they want to play and the sign says D&D starts at 5:30 so whats the problem with us wanting to make characters at 5:30....
I digress.
Anyways, the party was at this winery, trying to help keep it safe from some druids and their horde of blights; the first wave of 24 twigblights went down easy enough and they were able to take a short rest before a giant swarm of 30 needle blights with another druid showed up, and lord love a duck: for CR1/4 critters those things are *dangerous* with ac 13, HP 13 and a ranged attack that does 2d6+1; given that my (10 person) party was a mix ranging from level 1-3 they were in for a hell of a fight; not the least of which was because most of them decided to just sally forth and fight them in the open because why would you ever try and use the winery for defense. Also: a handful of them heard ravens going nuts upstairs.
Further aggravating the situation was that the scenario technically called for the arrival of another wave of blights to F' up the party and me being the kind of GM that I am decided "fuck it I'm not rolling 40+ attacks a turn" and decided to remove the third wave of blights in favor of one big monster: a tree blight.
Now for those of you who don't have access to Curse of strahd you'll be forgiven for asking "What the hell is a tree blight", and I'm glad you asked that: it's a 30 foot tall CR7 murder machine with a bucket of HPs that lashes out with 4(!) attacks per turn, two of which occur with it's roots and two with it's branches. Adding to the fun is that the roots while much weaker are able to strike at range and grapple their targets; one of the players was particularly shocked when his first level fighter was taken down from full health by a single hit from the roots.
I'm not going to lie: describing the tree blights movement and appearance (a hollow in it was moving like a maw and drooling blood as it began surging towards the players; I also enjoyed likening it to a hungry hungry hippo with white marbles within reach), and the way it was dope smacking players really added a sense of urgency the way a horde simply couldn't.
Meanwhile inside of the winery, the players discover there is a druid fighting with a handful of ravens, swining around a really creepy looking staff; the arcana druid in the party is able to note that it is a gulthias staff and thus has a connection of some sort to blights. In an act of desperation, the players snap the staff after they and the ravens are able to beat the druid to death, and the blights all scream and die.
Also: one of my players who had a pet sloth named jeff discovered that after they'd been seperated, a druid had wild shaped into one and pretended to be him, much to the shock and anger of his owner when he reverted back and thunderwaved the heck out of him. He's determined to get that sloth back, but he might not like what he finds :P
I'm impressed they manage to get to the wizard of wines winery at that level. Did you start them in a different area, or did they manage to travel through Barovia, the huge trail to Vallaki, and then wonder to the winery while avoiding the many encounters of death that can happen?
I have been thinking about modifying that encounter as well as there is an absurd amount of blights for that encounter just from a paperwork perspective.
The thing about the curse of strahd campaign that I've wanted to maintain as much as possible is the theme of horror; I straight up told the players at the start of the season that while I have no intention of being malicious, I would be running the campaign at par and would make no effort to try and do my typical "are you sure?" approach to warnings; the party would be able to go where it pleases and pursue the plot threads that they desire without any prompting from.
As a result, they've gotten pretty far and are actually enthralled at how the fights are *hard*; so far they've had to run from 2 battles, learned to dread the sound of wolves howling, had two players killed by vampires and a third rage quit the party because they left him to fight a vampire by himself that was actually beating him with the corpse of one of the afformentioned adventurer.
The last time I was at a game store I flipped through Curse of Strahd and took at a look at the maps. At the back of the module was a folded poster map that I couldn't open.
I wanted it SO much.
But if I can't get my group of players to buy into 5e, I'm not going to spend the money on it. Sigh. Those few hundred dollars I spent on 4e books were (except for the few games I played here via pbp) wasted. Alas.
I never spent any money on 4E books, even though I ran a game for a couple years. I just did the subscription and all the online tools made it easy to never use the books.
Skipping 4E also made it easier for me to stomach the cost of all of the 5E books. I won't buy a campaign module that I'm not going to personally run, though. I have a friend who buys them all for completion sake, and I just feel like that is a great way to burn yourself out/resent the amount of money you've spent.
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Casually HardcoreOnce an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered Userregular
So I'm DMing (for the 1st time) Curse of Strahd and...like....are lvl 1 characters suppose to be disposable?
The Animated Armor was rough on my players (Paladin, Warlock, Cleric).
Ravenloft having a high threat level is desirable; the party should be judging the threat level of every encounter carefully from a risk/reward standpoint.
Like, my party has so far straight up run from 3 fights, won 4 and cowered away from another and they absolutely adore it.
Also: CoS is one hell of an adventure to cut your GMing teeth on :P
Gaddez on
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Casually HardcoreOnce an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered Userregular
Ravenloft having a high threat level is desirable; the party should be judging the threat level of every encounter carefully from a risk/reward standpoint.
Like, my party has so far straight up run from 3 fights, won 4 and cowered away from another and they absolutely adore it.
Also: CoS is one hell of an adventure to cut your GMing teeth on :P
Well I figure if I make it so the holy items are in areas of progressing difficulty and nudge the players in the right path it'll be a more linear game.
For example, I'm planning to have my players play a session of Dread and role play the kids who're captured and butchered by the Hags. So hopefully this'll give the players a OOC reason to want to go to the hag and make things a little bit personal.
I like the idea of playing in a game where running away might be the right answer for 70% of the encounters, but my problem would be that as a player I will then have a hard time not using any metagame knowledge about what we're up against. I wouldn't want to end up using run away as the default action and never making any progress.
I like the idea of playing in a game where running away might be the right answer for 70% of the encounters, but my problem would be that as a player I will then have a hard time not using any metagame knowledge about what we're up against. I wouldn't want to end up using run away as the default action and never making any progress.
Ideally, you have players who look at the situations and tries to come up with tactics for fighting smarter rather then harder.
Ravenloft having a high threat level is desirable; the party should be judging the threat level of every encounter carefully from a risk/reward standpoint.
Like, my party has so far straight up run from 3 fights, won 4 and cowered away from another and they absolutely adore it.
Also: CoS is one hell of an adventure to cut your GMing teeth on :P
Well I figure if I make it so the holy items are in areas of progressing difficulty and nudge the players in the right path it'll be a more linear game.
For example, I'm planning to have my players play a session of Dread and role play the kids who're captured and butchered by the Hags. So hopefully this'll give the players a OOC reason to want to go to the hag and make things a little bit personal.
Ravenloft having a high threat level is desirable; the party should be judging the threat level of every encounter carefully from a risk/reward standpoint.
Like, my party has so far straight up run from 3 fights, won 4 and cowered away from another and they absolutely adore it.
Also: CoS is one hell of an adventure to cut your GMing teeth on :P
Well I figure if I make it so the holy items are in areas of progressing difficulty and nudge the players in the right path it'll be a more linear game.
For example, I'm planning to have my players play a session of Dread and role play the kids who're captured and butchered by the Hags. So hopefully this'll give the players a OOC reason to want to go to the hag and make things a little bit personal.
The first main quest besides where the hell am I? for my players in CoS was hunting down the hags as well. Its a good motivation. For the Death House, the animated armor isn't too bad, I ran a one-off with it and two players (Paladin and Cleric) were able to handle everything alright, though to be fair they were both experienced players.
Speaking of CoS, I ran another session today. We picked up the fight in the burning building with the new player, a Dwarven Paladin, showing up and rushing into the burning coffin-maker's house. This drew the rest of the party back into the fray, and they had a heavy back-and-forth fight against the five vampires. They were soon joined by more of the town guard. The Paladin made quick work of the monk vampire, hitting him with all of his smite evils through three turns, with the guard and Ismark helping as well. In the second floor Izek managed to crit and then role really high damage on his second attack, almost dropping the vampire fighter who proceded to run away and get hit again. The vampire fighter ran down the stairs and was killed by the Warlock. The flames started enveloping the whole second floor so the vampire rogue jumped into the hole made by the monk to get onto the first floor, which would prove to be his downfall because, despite being a rogue, he managed to fail every single dexterity saving throw and mostly kill himself with the massive fire damage he was taking for being in an inferno. The wizard vampire ran out of spells and tried to escape but ended up surrounded by guardsmen, the warlock, the bard, and Ireena, who beat him to death. Izek killed the swashbuckler and they all rushed out of the building right before it was filled with flames.
Izek demanded to know what was going on, and the party fed him some half-truths. He decided to take them to see the Baron, and the party, not wanting to fight the town guard, agreed. While Izek was first demanding answers the party bard snuck around and saw that there were tracks leading away from the building made by another vampire. He went back to the group (after sneaking Ireena away from Izek) and followed them with going to the Baron. Izek took them in front of the Baron who demanded answers and with some good rolls and support explained to the Baron that Henrik had stolen the bones from the church and was helping the vampire. The Baron managed to get the same info from Henrik, and asked the party to help hunt down the last vampire with Izek so that the town's mood would not be ruined for the upcoming festival. The party agreed and set-off.
They got back to Henrik's burning house and all of the party but the Warlock and Izek started following the tracks. The Warlock and Izek decided to take a short rest instead. After following the tracks and questioning some townfolk, they managed to follow the tracks to a two story building. They knocked on the door and the Bard managed to see through the lies of the guy on the front door while the Paladin used Divine Sense to detect that the vampire was on the second floor. They sent one of the guards to go get Izek and the Warlock while they managed to (surprisingly) climb on top of the building and tie a rope onto it so they could help the others go through the second window. Izek and the warlock came back with the two guards and Izek immediately started knocking down the door. Taking this as a signal, the Paladin made an acrobatics check to grab the rope and swing through the window, landing right in front of the vampire. Combat started and 6 cultists and a cult fanatic came out of the room, three cultists on the second floor and three with the fanatic on the first floor. The cultists were quickly cut down but the vampire, which they found out was a cleric and the leader of the vampire spawn, was much harder for them to fight. The difficulty was compounded with the fact that only the warlock had taken a short rest so everyone else was burnt out of most of their abilities (I'm not sure why the party made this choice, but meh). The cleric did lots of damage to the whole group through multiple turns through the spirit guardians spell, and had it up for three or four rounds before he failed a concentration check to lose the spell. The vampire cleric luckily missed with most of his inflict wounds, only hitting Izek with them. The party bard had to run away at one point due to being at one health, only coming back once the spirit guardians spell had dropped. During the fight Ismark fell out of the window and onto the ground, almost dying from the combination of spirit guardians and fall damage. The vampire was only kept from healing as the Paladin kept on kitting him with holy water. During the fray the vampire managed to kill Izek completely (he hit him twice while Izek was on the ground so he automatically failed to death saving throws, and then failed one on his own) and managed to drop the party paladin and one of the guards. They finally killed the vampire with the warlock's burning hands spell. That meant that in-game, in the course of around an hour and half/two hours, they managed to kill 6 vampire spawn. Having defeated the toughest threat in the city and (unknowingly stopping Strahd's plot to completely destroy the church) the party leveled up to level 5.
I was really impressed with them as they had only one long rest in-between four tough fights (three night hags, then long rest, then revenant fight, then short rest, vampire spawn fight (5 of them), then only the warlock took a short rest, then boss vampire spawn fight). It is impressive but with the way they play full of bluster it is going to blow up gloriously in their face sooner or later, as luck has pushed them through some of these tough fights (the vampire spawn cleric boss fight being the most noticeable).
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Casually HardcoreOnce an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered Userregular
Oddly the biggest problem I'm having is convincing my players that there's nothing in a room.
"I search the room"
rolls a 15
"You did a thorough search of the room and uncover nothing of value"
"Hmm.....I'm going to do a super thorough search"
rolls a 21
":You rip the floorboards out, tear off the plaster from the walls, cut open the mattress, rip out all the drawers from the wardrobe, punched holes into the ceiling, and after all that time there is still nothing of worth in this room"
"hmmmm.....just one more search"
"oh for the love of god there isn't anything in this room!"
Oddly the biggest problem I'm having is convincing my players that there's nothing in a room.
"I search the room"
rolls a 15
"You did a thorough search of the room and uncover nothing of value"
"Hmm.....I'm going to do a super thorough search"
rolls a 21
":You rip the floorboards out, tear off the plaster from the walls, cut open the mattress, rip out all the drawers from the wardrobe, punched holes into the ceiling, and after all that time there is still nothing of worth in this room"
"hmmmm.....just one more search"
"oh for the love of god there isn't anything in this room!"
Have them declare "I do a search" and then have them tell you how they're going to search, before they roll. I have a feeling they're second-guessing you because they are afraid of you going "well you searched but you didn't do this and find the thing"
Another thing you can do is have them operating under time constraints. Yes, they can do a thorough search of the room... but that's going to take like twenty minutes and the guy did just leap out the window...
Oddly the biggest problem I'm having is convincing my players that there's nothing in a room.
"I search the room"
rolls a 15
"You did a thorough search of the room and uncover nothing of value"
"Hmm.....I'm going to do a super thorough search"
rolls a 21
":You rip the floorboards out, tear off the plaster from the walls, cut open the mattress, rip out all the drawers from the wardrobe, punched holes into the ceiling, and after all that time there is still nothing of worth in this room"
"hmmmm.....just one more search"
"oh for the love of god there isn't anything in this room!"
Have them declare "I do a search" and then have them tell you how they're going to search, before they roll. I have a feeling they're second-guessing you because they are afraid of you going "well you searched but you didn't do this and find the thing"
Another thing you can do is have them operating under time constraints. Yes, they can do a thorough search of the room... but that's going to take like twenty minutes and the guy did just leap out the window...
Oddly the biggest problem I'm having is convincing my players that there's nothing in a room.
"I search the room"
rolls a 15
"You did a thorough search of the room and uncover nothing of value"
"Hmm.....I'm going to do a super thorough search"
rolls a 21
":You rip the floorboards out, tear off the plaster from the walls, cut open the mattress, rip out all the drawers from the wardrobe, punched holes into the ceiling, and after all that time there is still nothing of worth in this room"
"hmmmm.....just one more search"
"oh for the love of god there isn't anything in this room!"
Have them declare "I do a search" and then have them tell you how they're going to search, before they roll. I have a feeling they're second-guessing you because they are afraid of you going "well you searched but you didn't do this and find the thing"
Another thing you can do is have them operating under time constraints. Yes, they can do a thorough search of the room... but that's going to take like twenty minutes and the guy did just leap out the window...
You can also tell them that they cannot search the room again for awhile. The first search roll stands, and they cannot search the room again until they short or long rest or at the very least until its been awhile. It's a bit more of an extreme decision, but I've seen it used before to move the game along and it's not necessarily bad. There is even a sort of logic to it as people often get frustrated and just go over the same habits and methods of searching if they re-do a search meaning they don't find anything different.
Edit: This doesn't mean that another player cannot search the room or area, just that each person's role stands alone.
So I'm DMing (for the 1st time) Curse of Strahd and...like....are lvl 1 characters suppose to be disposable?
The Animated Armor was rough on my players (Paladin, Warlock, Cleric).
the first couple of levels are kind of squishy in general, and death house has a few pretty strong encounters where unlucky dice can really get away from the party. curse of strahd also has encounter levels all over the place depending on where they go afterwards, and it's one of those things that i've been finding you have to decide whether you want to run things as they are in the books or whether you want to sort of tinker things on the fly depending on how they go about their business. your decision on that probably depends a bit on whether your players want a brutal death adventure or not, and how well they understand that you are allowed to nope away from battles if they're going sour.
Ravenloft having a high threat level is desirable; the party should be judging the threat level of every encounter carefully from a risk/reward standpoint.
Like, my party has so far straight up run from 3 fights, won 4 and cowered away from another and they absolutely adore it.
Also: CoS is one hell of an adventure to cut your GMing teeth on :P
Well I figure if I make it so the holy items are in areas of progressing difficulty and nudge the players in the right path it'll be a more linear game.
For example, I'm planning to have my players play a session of Dread and role play the kids who're captured and butchered by the Hags. So hopefully this'll give the players a OOC reason to want to go to the hag and make things a little bit personal.
Ravenloft having a high threat level is desirable; the party should be judging the threat level of every encounter carefully from a risk/reward standpoint.
Like, my party has so far straight up run from 3 fights, won 4 and cowered away from another and they absolutely adore it.
Also: CoS is one hell of an adventure to cut your GMing teeth on :P
Well I figure if I make it so the holy items are in areas of progressing difficulty and nudge the players in the right path it'll be a more linear game.
For example, I'm planning to have my players play a session of Dread and role play the kids who're captured and butchered by the Hags. So hopefully this'll give the players a OOC reason to want to go to the hag and make things a little bit personal.
The first main quest besides where the hell am I? for my players in CoS was hunting down the hags as well. Its a good motivation. For the Death House, the animated armor isn't too bad, I ran a one-off with it and two players (Paladin and Cleric) were able to handle everything alright, though to be fair they were both experienced players.
Speaking of CoS, I ran another session today. We picked up the fight in the burning building with the new player, a Dwarven Paladin, showing up and rushing into the burning coffin-maker's house. This drew the rest of the party back into the fray, and they had a heavy back-and-forth fight against the five vampires. They were soon joined by more of the town guard. The Paladin made quick work of the monk vampire, hitting him with all of his smite evils through three turns, with the guard and Ismark helping as well. In the second floor Izek managed to crit and then role really high damage on his second attack, almost dropping the vampire fighter who proceded to run away and get hit again. The vampire fighter ran down the stairs and was killed by the Warlock. The flames started enveloping the whole second floor so the vampire rogue jumped into the hole made by the monk to get onto the first floor, which would prove to be his downfall because, despite being a rogue, he managed to fail every single dexterity saving throw and mostly kill himself with the massive fire damage he was taking for being in an inferno. The wizard vampire ran out of spells and tried to escape but ended up surrounded by guardsmen, the warlock, the bard, and Ireena, who beat him to death. Izek killed the swashbuckler and they all rushed out of the building right before it was filled with flames.
Izek demanded to know what was going on, and the party fed him some half-truths. He decided to take them to see the Baron, and the party, not wanting to fight the town guard, agreed. While Izek was first demanding answers the party bard snuck around and saw that there were tracks leading away from the building made by another vampire. He went back to the group (after sneaking Ireena away from Izek) and followed them with going to the Baron. Izek took them in front of the Baron who demanded answers and with some good rolls and support explained to the Baron that Henrik had stolen the bones from the church and was helping the vampire. The Baron managed to get the same info from Henrik, and asked the party to help hunt down the last vampire with Izek so that the town's mood would not be ruined for the upcoming festival. The party agreed and set-off.
They got back to Henrik's burning house and all of the party but the Warlock and Izek started following the tracks. The Warlock and Izek decided to take a short rest instead. After following the tracks and questioning some townfolk, they managed to follow the tracks to a two story building. They knocked on the door and the Bard managed to see through the lies of the guy on the front door while the Paladin used Divine Sense to detect that the vampire was on the second floor. They sent one of the guards to go get Izek and the Warlock while they managed to (surprisingly) climb on top of the building and tie a rope onto it so they could help the others go through the second window. Izek and the warlock came back with the two guards and Izek immediately started knocking down the door. Taking this as a signal, the Paladin made an acrobatics check to grab the rope and swing through the window, landing right in front of the vampire. Combat started and 6 cultists and a cult fanatic came out of the room, three cultists on the second floor and three with the fanatic on the first floor. The cultists were quickly cut down but the vampire, which they found out was a cleric and the leader of the vampire spawn, was much harder for them to fight. The difficulty was compounded with the fact that only the warlock had taken a short rest so everyone else was burnt out of most of their abilities (I'm not sure why the party made this choice, but meh). The cleric did lots of damage to the whole group through multiple turns through the spirit guardians spell, and had it up for three or four rounds before he failed a concentration check to lose the spell. The vampire cleric luckily missed with most of his inflict wounds, only hitting Izek with them. The party bard had to run away at one point due to being at one health, only coming back once the spirit guardians spell had dropped. During the fight Ismark fell out of the window and onto the ground, almost dying from the combination of spirit guardians and fall damage. The vampire was only kept from healing as the Paladin kept on kitting him with holy water. During the fray the vampire managed to kill Izek completely (he hit him twice while Izek was on the ground so he automatically failed to death saving throws, and then failed one on his own) and managed to drop the party paladin and one of the guards. They finally killed the vampire with the warlock's burning hands spell. That meant that in-game, in the course of around an hour and half/two hours, they managed to kill 6 vampire spawn. Having defeated the toughest threat in the city and (unknowingly stopping Strahd's plot to completely destroy the church) the party leveled up to level 5.
I was really impressed with them as they had only one long rest in-between four tough fights (three night hags, then long rest, then revenant fight, then short rest, vampire spawn fight (5 of them), then only the warlock took a short rest, then boss vampire spawn fight). It is impressive but with the way they play full of bluster it is going to blow up gloriously in their face sooner or later, as luck has pushed them through some of these tough fights (the vampire spawn cleric boss fight being the most noticeable).
How did those two players deal with the fight with 5 shades in the crystal ball room?
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
Oddly the biggest problem I'm having is convincing my players that there's nothing in a room.
"I search the room"
rolls a 15
"You did a thorough search of the room and uncover nothing of value"
"Hmm.....I'm going to do a super thorough search"
rolls a 21
":You rip the floorboards out, tear off the plaster from the walls, cut open the mattress, rip out all the drawers from the wardrobe, punched holes into the ceiling, and after all that time there is still nothing of worth in this room"
"hmmmm.....just one more search"
"The room eats you."
Fixed that last line for you.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Do what matt mercer does and just don't accept any additional rolls from that player. They searched it. They ripped it to fucking pieces, whoever lives there now knows something is wrong when they go there, even drum up some astral evidence of the players involvement of b&e.
Even if they roll a Nat 20, just refuse it stating their character simply doesn't know.
It is true that we dms should say yes alot, but we do have the power to say no to stuff that bogs everything down or trying to game the system.
Do what matt mercer does and just don't accept any additional rolls from that player. They searched it. They ripped it to fucking pieces, whoever lives there now knows something is wrong when they go there, even drum up some astral evidence of the players involvement of b&e.
Even if they roll a Nat 20, just refuse it stating their character simply doesn't know.
It is true that we dms should say yes alot, but we do have the power to say no to stuff that bogs everything down or trying to game the system.
De facto I'm cool with this but in actual play your job is to communicate expectations for the game and manage those you can't change.
If the die roll is what is prompting the re-searches than roll it yourself and hide the result.
If it's just the feeling of missing something bring in time issues and the take 20 concept. Adjust DCs accordingly.
Or just adopt the clearly communicated stance "You have searched this room to the best of your ability, you can't think of anyplace new to search" as a method of doing what you suggest without giving the false hope and jilted feelings that letting them roll with no point is likely to generate.
Yeah, there should not be multiple rolls for something like searching. The order of operations goes like this:
1) Passive perception potentially reveals something to the high wisdom/proficient in proficiency characters.
2) If one or more players says they want to actively search the room, let them make an active check.
3) The results stand. The roll represents them doing the best job they can at searching that particular room.
Otherwise you're going to end up with people just asking to search again and again until someone rolls a 20 and they can feel satisfied they potentially found everything.
My players know that I won't ever hide anything truly important behind a missable secret door or whatever anyway. But I use a lot of stuff that rewards people who invest in high passive perceptions. Stuff like environmental hazards/benefits they can use to their advantage that require fairly high perception to spot, enemy ambushes they can thwart by seeing them coming, etc.
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
"You have found everything in the room that there is to find."
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Ravenloft having a high threat level is desirable; the party should be judging the threat level of every encounter carefully from a risk/reward standpoint.
Like, my party has so far straight up run from 3 fights, won 4 and cowered away from another and they absolutely adore it.
Also: CoS is one hell of an adventure to cut your GMing teeth on :P
Well I figure if I make it so the holy items are in areas of progressing difficulty and nudge the players in the right path it'll be a more linear game.
For example, I'm planning to have my players play a session of Dread and role play the kids who're captured and butchered by the Hags. So hopefully this'll give the players a OOC reason to want to go to the hag and make things a little bit personal.
Ravenloft having a high threat level is desirable; the party should be judging the threat level of every encounter carefully from a risk/reward standpoint.
Like, my party has so far straight up run from 3 fights, won 4 and cowered away from another and they absolutely adore it.
Also: CoS is one hell of an adventure to cut your GMing teeth on :P
Well I figure if I make it so the holy items are in areas of progressing difficulty and nudge the players in the right path it'll be a more linear game.
For example, I'm planning to have my players play a session of Dread and role play the kids who're captured and butchered by the Hags. So hopefully this'll give the players a OOC reason to want to go to the hag and make things a little bit personal.
The first main quest besides where the hell am I? for my players in CoS was hunting down the hags as well. Its a good motivation. For the Death House, the animated armor isn't too bad, I ran a one-off with it and two players (Paladin and Cleric) were able to handle everything alright, though to be fair they were both experienced players.
Speaking of CoS, I ran another session today. We picked up the fight in the burning building with the new player, a Dwarven Paladin, showing up and rushing into the burning coffin-maker's house. This drew the rest of the party back into the fray, and they had a heavy back-and-forth fight against the five vampires. They were soon joined by more of the town guard. The Paladin made quick work of the monk vampire, hitting him with all of his smite evils through three turns, with the guard and Ismark helping as well. In the second floor Izek managed to crit and then role really high damage on his second attack, almost dropping the vampire fighter who proceded to run away and get hit again. The vampire fighter ran down the stairs and was killed by the Warlock. The flames started enveloping the whole second floor so the vampire rogue jumped into the hole made by the monk to get onto the first floor, which would prove to be his downfall because, despite being a rogue, he managed to fail every single dexterity saving throw and mostly kill himself with the massive fire damage he was taking for being in an inferno. The wizard vampire ran out of spells and tried to escape but ended up surrounded by guardsmen, the warlock, the bard, and Ireena, who beat him to death. Izek killed the swashbuckler and they all rushed out of the building right before it was filled with flames.
Izek demanded to know what was going on, and the party fed him some half-truths. He decided to take them to see the Baron, and the party, not wanting to fight the town guard, agreed. While Izek was first demanding answers the party bard snuck around and saw that there were tracks leading away from the building made by another vampire. He went back to the group (after sneaking Ireena away from Izek) and followed them with going to the Baron. Izek took them in front of the Baron who demanded answers and with some good rolls and support explained to the Baron that Henrik had stolen the bones from the church and was helping the vampire. The Baron managed to get the same info from Henrik, and asked the party to help hunt down the last vampire with Izek so that the town's mood would not be ruined for the upcoming festival. The party agreed and set-off.
They got back to Henrik's burning house and all of the party but the Warlock and Izek started following the tracks. The Warlock and Izek decided to take a short rest instead. After following the tracks and questioning some townfolk, they managed to follow the tracks to a two story building. They knocked on the door and the Bard managed to see through the lies of the guy on the front door while the Paladin used Divine Sense to detect that the vampire was on the second floor. They sent one of the guards to go get Izek and the Warlock while they managed to (surprisingly) climb on top of the building and tie a rope onto it so they could help the others go through the second window. Izek and the warlock came back with the two guards and Izek immediately started knocking down the door. Taking this as a signal, the Paladin made an acrobatics check to grab the rope and swing through the window, landing right in front of the vampire. Combat started and 6 cultists and a cult fanatic came out of the room, three cultists on the second floor and three with the fanatic on the first floor. The cultists were quickly cut down but the vampire, which they found out was a cleric and the leader of the vampire spawn, was much harder for them to fight. The difficulty was compounded with the fact that only the warlock had taken a short rest so everyone else was burnt out of most of their abilities (I'm not sure why the party made this choice, but meh). The cleric did lots of damage to the whole group through multiple turns through the spirit guardians spell, and had it up for three or four rounds before he failed a concentration check to lose the spell. The vampire cleric luckily missed with most of his inflict wounds, only hitting Izek with them. The party bard had to run away at one point due to being at one health, only coming back once the spirit guardians spell had dropped. During the fight Ismark fell out of the window and onto the ground, almost dying from the combination of spirit guardians and fall damage. The vampire was only kept from healing as the Paladin kept on kitting him with holy water. During the fray the vampire managed to kill Izek completely (he hit him twice while Izek was on the ground so he automatically failed to death saving throws, and then failed one on his own) and managed to drop the party paladin and one of the guards. They finally killed the vampire with the warlock's burning hands spell. That meant that in-game, in the course of around an hour and half/two hours, they managed to kill 6 vampire spawn. Having defeated the toughest threat in the city and (unknowingly stopping Strahd's plot to completely destroy the church) the party leveled up to level 5.
I was really impressed with them as they had only one long rest in-between four tough fights (three night hags, then long rest, then revenant fight, then short rest, vampire spawn fight (5 of them), then only the warlock took a short rest, then boss vampire spawn fight). It is impressive but with the way they play full of bluster it is going to blow up gloriously in their face sooner or later, as luck has pushed them through some of these tough fights (the vampire spawn cleric boss fight being the most noticeable).
How did those two players deal with the fight with 5 shades in the crystal ball room?
I had to look it up to see what you were referring to and we had to stop before we got to that point as it had already been four hours, but I can see that encounter would have been a little nasty, except for the Paladin's Divine Smite and Cleric spells probably would have been able to cut through at least a couple of shadows.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
So I'm DMing (for the 1st time) Curse of Strahd and...like....are lvl 1 characters suppose to be disposable?
The Animated Armor was rough on my players (Paladin, Warlock, Cleric).
the first couple of levels are kind of squishy in general, and death house has a few pretty strong encounters where unlucky dice can really get away from the party. curse of strahd also has encounter levels all over the place depending on where they go afterwards, and it's one of those things that i've been finding you have to decide whether you want to run things as they are in the books or whether you want to sort of tinker things on the fly depending on how they go about their business. your decision on that probably depends a bit on whether your players want a brutal death adventure or not, and how well they understand that you are allowed to nope away from battles if they're going sour.
I think that's the biggest thing. The running away. Players are conditioned through most RPGs, tabletop and video game, that if they are somewhere, they should be strong enough to win.
It has to be telegraphed in big bold letters on fire on a mountainside that this area is too tough, or this encounter will kick your ass. I think just using players passive perception to key off it would work best.
"You see the monster come up to bat, and you can tell without much effort that you think a hit from his club could pulp you". It doesn't take a tactician to realize you are going to lose a fight if it's something that isn't even a contest.
So I'm DMing (for the 1st time) Curse of Strahd and...like....are lvl 1 characters suppose to be disposable?
The Animated Armor was rough on my players (Paladin, Warlock, Cleric).
the first couple of levels are kind of squishy in general, and death house has a few pretty strong encounters where unlucky dice can really get away from the party. curse of strahd also has encounter levels all over the place depending on where they go afterwards, and it's one of those things that i've been finding you have to decide whether you want to run things as they are in the books or whether you want to sort of tinker things on the fly depending on how they go about their business. your decision on that probably depends a bit on whether your players want a brutal death adventure or not, and how well they understand that you are allowed to nope away from battles if they're going sour.
I think that's the biggest thing. The running away. Players are conditioned through most RPGs, tabletop and video game, that if they are somewhere, they should be strong enough to win.
It has to be telegraphed in big bold letters on fire on a mountainside that this area is too tough, or this encounter will kick your ass. I think just using players passive perception to key off it would work best.
"You see the monster come up to bat, and you can tell without much effort that you think a hit from his club could pulp you". It doesn't take a tactician to realize you are going to lose a fight if it's something that isn't even a contest.
There's also the issue that, in most RPGs (especially D&D), running away tends to not work.
Monsters / enemies are faster than the party (or, at least, faster than part of the party). So, yeah, you could run away, but you have to leave the dwarf and the foot knight behind. Or yeah, you could run away, but you're on-foot and the enemy can fly.
So, given that escape for the group is impossible, why bother even trying?
IMO D&D is not the game you should be running if the vast majority of the potential combat encounters are not actually meant to be fought. D&D is a combat game, and while there's obviously a place for the "clearly too tough, you should run away" encounters, I just feel like if you're trying to run a horror campaign that's built around a party that's nearly always going to be up against threats that are too strong for them, there are just other games that are such a better fit for that type of game.
"You have found everything in the room that there is to find."
Very much this.
Don't tell them that they couldn't find anything, tell them that they FOUND that there was nothing.
Remember, DnD isn't a hard-coded video game (and remind them of this too). Much of the time, their roll determines whether or not there was even anything to find, so rolling again would be pointless because the first roll already shaped the reality (even with a premade adventure, like CoS, the item placement in the book is just a guideline for the omnipotent DM to choose whether or not to follow.)
Another option, if they are having difficulty with finding nothing, is have them find mundane items that are worthless (or, in the case of Death house, you can have them find all manner of valuables that are worth a fortune...at least as long as the illusion persists. Then it's just dust and ash.) They may be more willing to accept that there was nothing important to find if they at least found something unimportant.
IMO D&D is not the game you should be running if the vast majority of the potential combat encounters are not actually meant to be fought. D&D is a combat game, and while there's obviously a place for the "clearly too tough, you should run away" encounters, I just feel like if you're trying to run a horror campaign that's built around a party that's nearly always going to be up against threats that are too strong for them, there are just other games that are such a better fit for that type of game.
I feel like 5e is a little different. There is so much you can do in 5e that has nothing to do with combat. We are three long sessions in to our curse of Strahd campaign, and the last two sessions only saw one real combat each. Everything else has been skill checks and investigation, etc. My +9 in deception helps with that...
What I love about 5e is that the simplicity allows you to do pretty much anything with it. advantage and disadvantage are easy to assign to things, and the DM can choose any skill they see fit for any situation.
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Thanks! It seems like it's exactly what I'm looking for. I have to say the 5e rules are much easier for me to get into than before, so I'm really enjoying even the free basics they released online.
PSN: ShinyRedKnight Xbox Live: ShinyRedKnight
And when they get deep in the swamp, they're going to find the remains of that black dragon who has been dead for quite some time. And I'm hoping they start to feel some relief right before I tell them about the two black dragons that burst up out of the swamp to fight them. =D Hey, at least they're going to be younger than the dead one.
Nice. I'm still trying to figure out how to handle playing out the naval blockade of the party's home city (which they are currently returning to, with a number of pirate ships at their side), which is likely to be a big part of the next session.
Sounds fun. Do you know whether or not the party is going to turn it into a ship battle or if they're going to be trying to use another approach?
They wanted to get the breatsplate they got off the revenant repaired so they tried both the coffin maker and Blinksy the toy maker to get the breastplate fixed as the town does not have a blacksmith. Henrik the coffin maker brushed them off and refused to open the door. They made friends with Blinksy who agreed to fix the armor if they bought some toys from him. They agreed and gave them to the children they had rescued last time. Blinksy noticed Ireena looked just like the dolls that the town's Baron, Izek, had been forcing him to make. Sufficiently creeped out the party bought a mask for Ireena and went on to St. Andral's Church. Father Lucian, who runs the church, agreed to take the children in and after a lengthy conversation they managed to get him to tell them why he was so nervous: the bones of St. Andral, the one thing protecting the church from Strahd's evil manage, had been stolen. After interrogating the altar boy and Milivoj the ground's keeper they found out that Henrik had stolen the bones.
The party, without having done a long rest since the Revenant fight, decided to go back to the coffin maker's house. Henrik refused to let them in so they kicked in his door. He quickly broke down and told them the bones were upstairs but he refused to get them so "Salty Thunder", the party Bard, decided to go get them. The town guard, having heard the door being kicked in, went to investigate. Henrik started screaming help so they tried to shut the door and then ran into another room. At the same time the Bard went upstairs and decided to search the junk room, thinking the bones were probably hidden in there. he opened one of the boxes that had been recently disturbed to see a tiefling fighter in plate mail, staring up at him, his pointed vampiric teeth twisted in a sickening grin. The vampire leapt up, and the box next to him exploded as another vampire, an elven wizard rose from the box. Combat started, the wizard failed to knock out the bard with sleep by 1 hp (he had 32 hp, she rolled 31 on the die) so the bard used thunderwave to knock the wizard back, shouted "vampires!" and started running. He broke one of the other boxes with the thunderwave, which revealed a vampiric drow rogue. The rest of the party and the town guard started rushing up the stairs, but not before the vampire fighter managed to get ahead of the party's bard and block the entrance to the steps. Some hectic combat ensued as part of the party started trying to catch the house on fire, hoping to trap the vampires in it while the rest of the party and the town guard tried to fight the vampires. In that time another vampire, a human bard, had revealed himself and joined the fray. The leader of the town guard and Ireena stalker, Izek, showed up as well and the mini-boss started fighting on the party's side against the vampires. The warlock ran down the stairs and used burning hands to catch the ceiling of the first floor on fire and him and the bard booked it out the building (the bard had managed to tumble out of the vampire fighter's square). As the rest of the party (mostly npcs) sprinted down the stairs as the fifth vampire revealed himself by punching through the already damaged floor of the second floor/first floor ceiling and plummeted to the first floor and right in front of the stairs. We ended the session with the guards and Izek fighting four vampires on the second floor, two of the party outside of the building and the other's inside of the stairwell, staring up at the half-elven vampire monk who crashed through the burning floor to block their exit, half of the room wreathed in flames.
Overall it was a lot of fun. I modified all of the vampires that were hiding in the coffin maker's shop by giving them some basic class abilities (the book describes them as an adventuring party Strahd had turned, but it used just basic vampire spawn so I decided to spice it up. They also have only seen five of the six vampires now). I wasn't expecting the party to immediately barge into the coffin-maker's shop without having at the very least taken a long rest as they were mostly burnt out of their abilities. I had planned on using these vampires in smaller roles throughout the town as they finished quests in Vallaki, maybe killing one or two of them in the meantime. Instead they bumbled right into their lair in the town, and they slowly staggered out of their boxes to fight them. I'm nervous how this fight is gonna go, but luckily we have two other players who weren't at this session who will be fully healed and with all abilities to help the party make their escape/ kill some of the vampires.
I digress.
Anyways, the party was at this winery, trying to help keep it safe from some druids and their horde of blights; the first wave of 24 twigblights went down easy enough and they were able to take a short rest before a giant swarm of 30 needle blights with another druid showed up, and lord love a duck: for CR1/4 critters those things are *dangerous* with ac 13, HP 13 and a ranged attack that does 2d6+1; given that my (10 person) party was a mix ranging from level 1-3 they were in for a hell of a fight; not the least of which was because most of them decided to just sally forth and fight them in the open because why would you ever try and use the winery for defense. Also: a handful of them heard ravens going nuts upstairs.
Further aggravating the situation was that the scenario technically called for the arrival of another wave of blights to F' up the party and me being the kind of GM that I am decided "fuck it I'm not rolling 40+ attacks a turn" and decided to remove the third wave of blights in favor of one big monster: a tree blight.
Now for those of you who don't have access to Curse of strahd you'll be forgiven for asking "What the hell is a tree blight", and I'm glad you asked that: it's a 30 foot tall CR7 murder machine with a bucket of HPs that lashes out with 4(!) attacks per turn, two of which occur with it's roots and two with it's branches. Adding to the fun is that the roots while much weaker are able to strike at range and grapple their targets; one of the players was particularly shocked when his first level fighter was taken down from full health by a single hit from the roots.
I'm not going to lie: describing the tree blights movement and appearance (a hollow in it was moving like a maw and drooling blood as it began surging towards the players; I also enjoyed likening it to a hungry hungry hippo with white marbles within reach), and the way it was dope smacking players really added a sense of urgency the way a horde simply couldn't.
Meanwhile inside of the winery, the players discover there is a druid fighting with a handful of ravens, swining around a really creepy looking staff; the arcana druid in the party is able to note that it is a gulthias staff and thus has a connection of some sort to blights. In an act of desperation, the players snap the staff after they and the ravens are able to beat the druid to death, and the blights all scream and die.
Also: one of my players who had a pet sloth named jeff discovered that after they'd been seperated, a druid had wild shaped into one and pretended to be him, much to the shock and anger of his owner when he reverted back and thunderwaved the heck out of him. He's determined to get that sloth back, but he might not like what he finds :P
When I use to do the public D&D thing I'd have a few pre-made characters ready for folks like that. I'd certainly offer to help them change it up after the game or if they'd like to show up a bit early next week we could do it then!
Man, I hated people like that even if it was entirely reasonable for somebody who didn't know D&D.
Having players involved in character creation helps them to understand how their character works
Also: we'll be going to three tables next week, so I'll probably be able to shave a couple of players off of my table so that that sessions become less of a chore of me having to remember minutia of every spell, power, class ability or racial trait.
It's definitely a battle of priorities here but a good premade sheet isn't the same as a normal character sheet. Anything they're going to use that session should be right there on it. This does mean that you'll be picking their spells and shit but it should only be for a single session and I strongly advocate they keep any progress/treasure/whatever from that session to keep them hooked.
In that situation I'm going to be striving to minimize the total person-downtime which means the five folks (or whatever) who are ready to go get to impose a little inconvenience on new guy, this one time.
I'm impressed they manage to get to the wizard of wines winery at that level. Did you start them in a different area, or did they manage to travel through Barovia, the huge trail to Vallaki, and then wonder to the winery while avoiding the many encounters of death that can happen?
I have been thinking about modifying that encounter as well as there is an absurd amount of blights for that encounter just from a paperwork perspective.
I wanted it SO much.
But if I can't get my group of players to buy into 5e, I'm not going to spend the money on it. Sigh. Those few hundred dollars I spent on 4e books were (except for the few games I played here via pbp) wasted. Alas.
I never spent any money on 4E books, even though I ran a game for a couple years. I just did the subscription and all the online tools made it easy to never use the books.
The thing about the curse of strahd campaign that I've wanted to maintain as much as possible is the theme of horror; I straight up told the players at the start of the season that while I have no intention of being malicious, I would be running the campaign at par and would make no effort to try and do my typical "are you sure?" approach to warnings; the party would be able to go where it pleases and pursue the plot threads that they desire without any prompting from.
As a result, they've gotten pretty far and are actually enthralled at how the fights are *hard*; so far they've had to run from 2 battles, learned to dread the sound of wolves howling, had two players killed by vampires and a third rage quit the party because they left him to fight a vampire by himself that was actually beating him with the corpse of one of the afformentioned adventurer.
And the party loves it. 8-)
Skipping 4E also made it easier for me to stomach the cost of all of the 5E books. I won't buy a campaign module that I'm not going to personally run, though. I have a friend who buys them all for completion sake, and I just feel like that is a great way to burn yourself out/resent the amount of money you've spent.
The Animated Armor was rough on my players (Paladin, Warlock, Cleric).
But yeah, I haven't run it yet, but it seems kinda harsh
There are means of ressurection in CoS, though death would lose its impact if it just happens all the time
Like, my party has so far straight up run from 3 fights, won 4 and cowered away from another and they absolutely adore it.
Also: CoS is one hell of an adventure to cut your GMing teeth on :P
Well I figure if I make it so the holy items are in areas of progressing difficulty and nudge the players in the right path it'll be a more linear game.
For example, I'm planning to have my players play a session of Dread and role play the kids who're captured and butchered by the Hags. So hopefully this'll give the players a OOC reason to want to go to the hag and make things a little bit personal.
Ideally, you have players who look at the situations and tries to come up with tactics for fighting smarter rather then harder.
The first main quest besides where the hell am I? for my players in CoS was hunting down the hags as well. Its a good motivation. For the Death House, the animated armor isn't too bad, I ran a one-off with it and two players (Paladin and Cleric) were able to handle everything alright, though to be fair they were both experienced players.
Speaking of CoS, I ran another session today. We picked up the fight in the burning building with the new player, a Dwarven Paladin, showing up and rushing into the burning coffin-maker's house. This drew the rest of the party back into the fray, and they had a heavy back-and-forth fight against the five vampires. They were soon joined by more of the town guard. The Paladin made quick work of the monk vampire, hitting him with all of his smite evils through three turns, with the guard and Ismark helping as well. In the second floor Izek managed to crit and then role really high damage on his second attack, almost dropping the vampire fighter who proceded to run away and get hit again. The vampire fighter ran down the stairs and was killed by the Warlock. The flames started enveloping the whole second floor so the vampire rogue jumped into the hole made by the monk to get onto the first floor, which would prove to be his downfall because, despite being a rogue, he managed to fail every single dexterity saving throw and mostly kill himself with the massive fire damage he was taking for being in an inferno. The wizard vampire ran out of spells and tried to escape but ended up surrounded by guardsmen, the warlock, the bard, and Ireena, who beat him to death. Izek killed the swashbuckler and they all rushed out of the building right before it was filled with flames.
Izek demanded to know what was going on, and the party fed him some half-truths. He decided to take them to see the Baron, and the party, not wanting to fight the town guard, agreed. While Izek was first demanding answers the party bard snuck around and saw that there were tracks leading away from the building made by another vampire. He went back to the group (after sneaking Ireena away from Izek) and followed them with going to the Baron. Izek took them in front of the Baron who demanded answers and with some good rolls and support explained to the Baron that Henrik had stolen the bones from the church and was helping the vampire. The Baron managed to get the same info from Henrik, and asked the party to help hunt down the last vampire with Izek so that the town's mood would not be ruined for the upcoming festival. The party agreed and set-off.
They got back to Henrik's burning house and all of the party but the Warlock and Izek started following the tracks. The Warlock and Izek decided to take a short rest instead. After following the tracks and questioning some townfolk, they managed to follow the tracks to a two story building. They knocked on the door and the Bard managed to see through the lies of the guy on the front door while the Paladin used Divine Sense to detect that the vampire was on the second floor. They sent one of the guards to go get Izek and the Warlock while they managed to (surprisingly) climb on top of the building and tie a rope onto it so they could help the others go through the second window. Izek and the warlock came back with the two guards and Izek immediately started knocking down the door. Taking this as a signal, the Paladin made an acrobatics check to grab the rope and swing through the window, landing right in front of the vampire. Combat started and 6 cultists and a cult fanatic came out of the room, three cultists on the second floor and three with the fanatic on the first floor. The cultists were quickly cut down but the vampire, which they found out was a cleric and the leader of the vampire spawn, was much harder for them to fight. The difficulty was compounded with the fact that only the warlock had taken a short rest so everyone else was burnt out of most of their abilities (I'm not sure why the party made this choice, but meh). The cleric did lots of damage to the whole group through multiple turns through the spirit guardians spell, and had it up for three or four rounds before he failed a concentration check to lose the spell. The vampire cleric luckily missed with most of his inflict wounds, only hitting Izek with them. The party bard had to run away at one point due to being at one health, only coming back once the spirit guardians spell had dropped. During the fight Ismark fell out of the window and onto the ground, almost dying from the combination of spirit guardians and fall damage. The vampire was only kept from healing as the Paladin kept on kitting him with holy water. During the fray the vampire managed to kill Izek completely (he hit him twice while Izek was on the ground so he automatically failed to death saving throws, and then failed one on his own) and managed to drop the party paladin and one of the guards. They finally killed the vampire with the warlock's burning hands spell. That meant that in-game, in the course of around an hour and half/two hours, they managed to kill 6 vampire spawn. Having defeated the toughest threat in the city and (unknowingly stopping Strahd's plot to completely destroy the church) the party leveled up to level 5.
I was really impressed with them as they had only one long rest in-between four tough fights (three night hags, then long rest, then revenant fight, then short rest, vampire spawn fight (5 of them), then only the warlock took a short rest, then boss vampire spawn fight). It is impressive but with the way they play full of bluster it is going to blow up gloriously in their face sooner or later, as luck has pushed them through some of these tough fights (the vampire spawn cleric boss fight being the most noticeable).
"I search the room"
rolls a 15
"You did a thorough search of the room and uncover nothing of value"
"Hmm.....I'm going to do a super thorough search"
rolls a 21
":You rip the floorboards out, tear off the plaster from the walls, cut open the mattress, rip out all the drawers from the wardrobe, punched holes into the ceiling, and after all that time there is still nothing of worth in this room"
"hmmmm.....just one more search"
"oh for the love of god there isn't anything in this room!"
Have them declare "I do a search" and then have them tell you how they're going to search, before they roll. I have a feeling they're second-guessing you because they are afraid of you going "well you searched but you didn't do this and find the thing"
Another thing you can do is have them operating under time constraints. Yes, they can do a thorough search of the room... but that's going to take like twenty minutes and the guy did just leap out the window...
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You can also tell them that they cannot search the room again for awhile. The first search roll stands, and they cannot search the room again until they short or long rest or at the very least until its been awhile. It's a bit more of an extreme decision, but I've seen it used before to move the game along and it's not necessarily bad. There is even a sort of logic to it as people often get frustrated and just go over the same habits and methods of searching if they re-do a search meaning they don't find anything different.
Edit: This doesn't mean that another player cannot search the room or area, just that each person's role stands alone.
the first couple of levels are kind of squishy in general, and death house has a few pretty strong encounters where unlucky dice can really get away from the party. curse of strahd also has encounter levels all over the place depending on where they go afterwards, and it's one of those things that i've been finding you have to decide whether you want to run things as they are in the books or whether you want to sort of tinker things on the fly depending on how they go about their business. your decision on that probably depends a bit on whether your players want a brutal death adventure or not, and how well they understand that you are allowed to nope away from battles if they're going sour.
How did those two players deal with the fight with 5 shades in the crystal ball room?
Fixed that last line for you.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Even if they roll a Nat 20, just refuse it stating their character simply doesn't know.
It is true that we dms should say yes alot, but we do have the power to say no to stuff that bogs everything down or trying to game the system.
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De facto I'm cool with this but in actual play your job is to communicate expectations for the game and manage those you can't change.
If the die roll is what is prompting the re-searches than roll it yourself and hide the result.
If it's just the feeling of missing something bring in time issues and the take 20 concept. Adjust DCs accordingly.
Or just adopt the clearly communicated stance "You have searched this room to the best of your ability, you can't think of anyplace new to search" as a method of doing what you suggest without giving the false hope and jilted feelings that letting them roll with no point is likely to generate.
1) Passive perception potentially reveals something to the high wisdom/proficient in proficiency characters.
2) If one or more players says they want to actively search the room, let them make an active check.
3) The results stand. The roll represents them doing the best job they can at searching that particular room.
Otherwise you're going to end up with people just asking to search again and again until someone rolls a 20 and they can feel satisfied they potentially found everything.
My players know that I won't ever hide anything truly important behind a missable secret door or whatever anyway. But I use a lot of stuff that rewards people who invest in high passive perceptions. Stuff like environmental hazards/benefits they can use to their advantage that require fairly high perception to spot, enemy ambushes they can thwart by seeing them coming, etc.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
I had to look it up to see what you were referring to and we had to stop before we got to that point as it had already been four hours, but I can see that encounter would have been a little nasty, except for the Paladin's Divine Smite and Cleric spells probably would have been able to cut through at least a couple of shadows.
I think that's the biggest thing. The running away. Players are conditioned through most RPGs, tabletop and video game, that if they are somewhere, they should be strong enough to win.
It has to be telegraphed in big bold letters on fire on a mountainside that this area is too tough, or this encounter will kick your ass. I think just using players passive perception to key off it would work best.
"You see the monster come up to bat, and you can tell without much effort that you think a hit from his club could pulp you". It doesn't take a tactician to realize you are going to lose a fight if it's something that isn't even a contest.
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There's also the issue that, in most RPGs (especially D&D), running away tends to not work.
Monsters / enemies are faster than the party (or, at least, faster than part of the party). So, yeah, you could run away, but you have to leave the dwarf and the foot knight behind. Or yeah, you could run away, but you're on-foot and the enemy can fly.
So, given that escape for the group is impossible, why bother even trying?
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Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Very much this.
Don't tell them that they couldn't find anything, tell them that they FOUND that there was nothing.
Remember, DnD isn't a hard-coded video game (and remind them of this too). Much of the time, their roll determines whether or not there was even anything to find, so rolling again would be pointless because the first roll already shaped the reality (even with a premade adventure, like CoS, the item placement in the book is just a guideline for the omnipotent DM to choose whether or not to follow.)
Another option, if they are having difficulty with finding nothing, is have them find mundane items that are worthless (or, in the case of Death house, you can have them find all manner of valuables that are worth a fortune...at least as long as the illusion persists. Then it's just dust and ash.) They may be more willing to accept that there was nothing important to find if they at least found something unimportant.
I feel like 5e is a little different. There is so much you can do in 5e that has nothing to do with combat. We are three long sessions in to our curse of Strahd campaign, and the last two sessions only saw one real combat each. Everything else has been skill checks and investigation, etc. My +9 in deception helps with that...
What I love about 5e is that the simplicity allows you to do pretty much anything with it. advantage and disadvantage are easy to assign to things, and the DM can choose any skill they see fit for any situation.
Conversely, when ever an attempt to detect traps is made, whether there are any or not, the negative answer should always be:
"You don't detect any traps."
Always.