and to further continue the conversation didn't mean to dogpile you @override367 -- i think if you dispense with the Charmed effect it's still not Great, it's still a fucked power dynamic, but at least it's not unnatural mental influence
but if you're going to stick with it, i think what you've laid out is the best plan--it's basically impossible for this not to be some exploitative weird shit as it was laid out
how do you have a not fucked-up power dynamic in D&D? adventurers can just walk into a commoner's home and take their children and nobody can do anything to stop it
D&D is full of fucked up power dynamics, the very concept of nobility existing is fucked up. I've axed what's essentially the Awakened portion the spell (the charm portion was the same as the spell Awaken) because that's a problem
The awakened creature is charmed by you for 30 days or until you or your companions do anything harmful to it. When the charmed condition ends, the awakened creature chooses whether to remain friendly to you, based on how you treated it while it was charmed.
I went to lunch with the cleric from my party and showed him this thread and expressed my concerns, he was kind of taken aback that I would suggest him or his character would treat people as slaves. To paraphrase "my character's entire deal is freedom and liberation from oppressors'"
Which puts us back to the players being in the same situation they are in whenever they interact with any npc, these particular NPCs are actually less exploitable than commoners because they have a particularly powerful guardian who only wants the best for them (they don't know it yet but when player 6 comes back from her summer job she's going to actually play as one of them)
if you take out the charm effect it's a lot less of an issue
and yeah, D&D is full of fucked up shit, that's why these sorts of things have to be handled with consideration and care
I think making them not be mentally handicapped and removing the charm really negates a lot of the pernicious elements (setting aside the Intern shit, fuckin capitalism)
They're not mentally handicapped, not any more than half-orcs are (a low wisdom score *does not mean you're handicapped*), and after texting my players and getting some startlingly upset reactions at what I was accusing them of there's a pretty strong consensus they don't want to drop the acq inq thing and want to see what direction this new species takes (which is actually, not entirely connected to the acq inq franchise, despite the original order from head office being "to create interns", which is what I believed Omin Drahn would say given his previous actions). The druid mentioned awaken which is I mentioned it, if you were DMing would you allow a player to cast the Awaken spell?
I'm reminded that we're a group of 6 socialists playing D&D and none of us are in danger of becoming champions of capitalism because the characters in the game are
edit: I'm not sure where you're getting the gilded cage thing from? I don't think I ever hinted or insinuated that this group of people were prisoners or couldn't just leave. That... wouldn't last very long because as I said, slavery is a crime... *currently* we haven't developed any personalities because the session ended 5 minutes after them popping into existence, where it's going to go I can't say because I don't pre-script NPC interactions, it depends what the party does
What I suspect will happen is they will be offered residence in the village, since it's about 3/4 empty, after that I can't begin to guess. We got months ingame before their franchise opens, ill probably have some percentage of the newbies move to the nearby city
i'm not a fan of mental influence in general, so no--when you're dealing with sentient creatures who can't reasonably fight back/are compromised like that, it raises a lot of red flags for me. if the imperative was "cast awaken, now go live your lives!" not a problem for me as much
but "make 'interns'" even if your group is Woke As Hell is still super problematic
it's like a Flowers for Algernon situation here my dude--if their primary score to determine autonomy is compromised by their creator's intent (to make them "dim witted" as you said) and the mechanics force penalties on them (through advantage on the players' behalf) they're going to be really easy to manipulate
like, it doesn't matter if your players are saying they're not going to yank the leash, the leash is still there
to add onto this, the group in question has no way to get out of the situation. you say "just leave"--with what contacts? to where? with what money/resources?
who can they appeal to? their goddess? probably not as much since she enabled this whole situation
They're not mentally handicapped, not any more than half-orcs are (a low wisdom score *does not mean you're handicapped*)
Let me rephrase this to give you some perspective on it. The curvy girl in a loincloth slung over the arm of the barbarian is not so weak as to be handicapped, but she is disadvantaged compared to the barbarian. Even if the barbarian says "Grog am staunch feminist, always require enthusiastic consent." is the overall image any less concerning knowing that said woman can't resist? Isn't the implication that it'd be bad for her to even try to resist fucked up?
how do you have a not fucked-up power dynamic in D&D? adventurers can just walk into a commoner's home and take their children and nobody can do anything to stop it
It's not about having a balanced and fair dynamic in every situation, it's about how that dynamic is framed and portrayed. Is my character a good person for doing what he does? Is he morally ambiguous and riding the line? Or is he awful? Using your example, imagine player characters did just walk in and take some children like that. At that point, isn't there a big difference between portraying them as heroic, and portraying them as assholes? Even just ignoring what was done is a statement in and of itself.
So going back to your game, your player characters would be taking a newborn race of people, who are inherently disadvantaged in comparison to them, and making use of considerable power in ensuring that race can't really say "No" when the players say "Work". If they're still good guys after that? It's a statement. If they recoil in horror of what they've done? That's a statement too. Maybe the devil's in the details.
But be aware of what you're saying and how you're saying it.
They can leave, because I say they can leave, and they can't be manipulated, because I say they can't be manipulated - without serious, improbable, unrealistic consequences on behalf of anyone who would do so
because it's not a real world and I can control it. The reason they are dim witted (again, 10 int 6 wisdom is hardly handicapped, the interactions so far are mostly because we're talking about 5 minute old people, and you seem to think wisdom score of a creature binds the DM's hands in how easy a creature is to manipulate. not true!) is because they have a stat allocation and were min maxed in a different direction. Bam easily undone, as is any charm
With that done we just have what my players think is an interesting plot development, and the problematic aspects exist entirely in the same realm as "What if the party decides to murder everyone in the village they're in"
They can leave, because I say they can leave, and they can't be manipulated, because I say they can't be manipulated - without serious, improbable, unrealistic consequences on behalf of anyone who would do so
because it's not a real world and I can control it.
Cool, that's basically throwing down a red card and saying "Hey these themes exist, but we're not exploring them in this game right now, because comfort and fun." That's not only totally valid, I enthusiastically approve of it.
They're not mentally handicapped, not any more than half-orcs are (a low wisdom score *does not mean you're handicapped*)
Let me rephrase this to give you some perspective on it. The curvy girl in a loincloth slung over the arm of the barbarian is not so weak as to be handicapped, but she is disadvantaged compared to the barbarian. Even if the barbarian says "Grog am staunch feminist, always require enthusiastic consent." is the overall image any less concerning knowing that said woman can't resist? Isn't the implication that it'd be bad for her to even try to resist fucked up?
how do you have a not fucked-up power dynamic in D&D? adventurers can just walk into a commoner's home and take their children and nobody can do anything to stop it
It's not about having a balanced and fair dynamic in every situation, it's about how that dynamic is framed and portrayed. Is my character a good person for doing what he does? Is he morally ambiguous and riding the line? Or is he awful? Using your example, imagine player characters did just walk in and take some children like that. At that point, isn't there a big difference between portraying them as heroic, and portraying them as assholes? Even just ignoring what was done is a statement in and of itself.
So going back to your game, your player characters would be taking a newborn race of people, who are inherently disadvantaged in comparison to them, and making use of considerable power in ensuring that race can't really say "No" when the players say "Work". If they're still good guys after that? It's a statement. If they recoil in horror of what they've done? That's a statement too. Maybe the devil's in the details.
But be aware of what you're saying and how you're saying it.
Yeah and ... there would be consequences if they did that... but they won't because I know my players and as I said on the last page, I'm quite sure that by the time next sunday rolls around and we have 3 months of downtime while they get to know this new group of people they're going to realize that they can't do anything like that
I mean the rogue might try and con a few of them to help commit crimes (which she has a habit of doing), and that will create conflict with the rest of the party, which I trust them to handle.
if you put into place safeguards against the weird shit then it's not a problem
and if it works for you it works for you; but the original situation as presented made me go ick
Fair enough
I got my feathers ruffled because I read some intent that wasn't there, and I agreed with you, which is why I'm amending the "create species" spell to not have the function of Awaken where the created creature is charmed, and I'm going to just break the rules of the spell marginally so they have more wisdom without reducing any of the attributes the players wanted (they have a bunch of proficiencies, natural stealth, a cantrip, telepathy, and darkvision)
Right at this moment these people are so naive you could hand them a knife and say "stab yourself" and they would, but again, that's only because they're a few minutes old. The party is going to more or less be denied access to them for a time, and since they gave the race telepathy, because of this thread I've decided to leverage that to make it harder to abuse them (as they can talk to each other)
That doesn't mean I won't let any of them work for the party's franchise, after all they do pay pretty well.*
*one thing I'm not sure I mentioned is that the NPC, the creator of these people, is the one who has the final say on hiring for the Acquistions Inc Franchise, this gives me absolute DM fiat without any asspulling as to how that goes down
This conversation about morality in game sessions reminds me of the time a player running a Chaotic Evil character in a game I was in announced out of nowhere that they were using the Catapult spell to launch a baby from it's crib at it's mom's head at high speed for no reason at all.
The reaction in the moment from the other players was basically the same as a reaction to a shock value joke. If you thought about it for more than two seconds you'd find it really fucked up, but no one thought about it that long.
Similarly, there was another game where a player's True Neutral Monk executed a Mortal Kombat style fatality on an NPC out of the blue before saying "I'm Chaotic Evil now."
In the game I run none of the PCs in the party are good. We've got Lawful Neutral, Lawful Evil, Chaotic Neutral, and Chaotic Evil. Everybody's civil because their goals don't put them at odds with each other.
They're in the Nine Hells now, and as part of the evil set dressing I had an imprisoned Chaotic Good celestial. To my surprise, the Lawful Neutral character decided to buy the celestial from their devil captorto set them free...after forcing them to come along and help fight in a dangerous mission first for the "greater good". Several sessions later the character kept his word and set the celestial free (I had changed the character's alignment to Lawful Evil until he did so, at which point it reverted to Lawful Neutral). Unbeknownst to him, however, said celestial didn't appreciate being magically compelled to serve the character, hasn't forgiven him even after being freed, and plans to screw the Lawful Neutral character over as revenge.
Said Lawful Neutral character has since reverted to Lawful Evil again by allying with devils and keeping a cache of soul coins. However, his devilish allies also plan to betray him soon.
I explain all this because in this case the character is doing evil things and will soon suffer the consequences.
It would be nice if my next campaign actually has heroic characters, though.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
edited July 2019
We're currently trying to play good characters in the game I'm in right now, and you know what? It's goddamned hard. We had a discussion yesterday during our session about the greater good. A powerful giant wizard has said we are the ones to set the Giant world straight again, so do we risk our lives freeing some slaves that are right in front of us? If we die, potentially many more people would be hurt or killed. At what point do you cross that line? At what point do you even define it? Hard conversations. Especially when one of your players has an INT of 6 and the other is a super intelligent INT 18 wizard pre-teen that is all of 12 years old.
We are also WAY down on loot from where we would be because we don't wantonly loot, or if we do recover treasure we try to give reparations to those effected by the enemies in the first place. I know it's caused our DM some consternation and re-working of sections of the module.
With the weird multiple story lines multiple character thing I have going for my players I've definitely rigged it so they all have bad guy characters, and problematic characters, and goofy characters, and as many characters and plot lines as we can fit in our little world.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
With high level enemies basically ineffectually cat scratching similar level PCs, you better be prepared to bring all of the bullshit to the table if you want to have an encounter be even remotely challenging.
Yeah, after I used the stats for two of the Ravnica big bads (Rakdos and Borborygmos) only for them to go down like chumps I realized I needed to use better tactics, buffs, and various homebrew methods of increasing difficulty.
It's bizarre how little damage a lot of high CR enemies put out. I'm using a lot of goristros right now because they actually do manage to pack a punch if you can get a charge in.
It's entirely frustrating, because they learned absolutely nothing from the exact same situation and problem from 4th edition.
We're currently trying to play good characters in the game I'm in right now, and you know what? It's goddamned hard. We had a discussion yesterday during our session about the greater good. A powerful giant wizard has said we are the ones to set the Giant world straight again, so do we risk our lives freeing some slaves that are right in front of us? If we die, potentially many more people would be hurt or killed. At what point do you cross that line? At what point do you even define it? Hard conversations. Especially when one of your players has an INT of 6 and the other is a super intelligent INT 18 wizard pre-teen that is all of 12 years old.
We are also WAY down on loot from where we would be because we don't wantonly loot, or if we do recover treasure we try to give reparations to those effected by the enemies in the first place. I know it's caused our DM some consternation and re-working of sections of the module.
My players expressed a similar distress at taking a priceless cultural artifact from a village that also happened to be a sun sword. We worked it out that it regularly disappears from the fighter's gear and is magically returned to the hand of the statue it was claimed from. However the fighter(eldritch knight) has bonded it, and may call it back to his grasp at any time.
Eventually they will have to put it with a new statue in an ancient temple, but by that point they'll hopefully have realized the temple is that village's roots in antiquity (there's also a member of that village in the party with a similar deal on the artifact they made their warlock pact of the blade with, one hand held his weapon of shadow the other hand held the sun sword).
With high level enemies basically ineffectually cat scratching similar level PCs, you better be prepared to bring all of the bullshit to the table if you want to have an encounter be even remotely challenging.
Yeah, after I used the stats for two of the Ravnica big bads (Rakdos and Borborygmos) only for them to go down like chumps I realized I needed to use better tactics, buffs, and various homebrew methods of increasing difficulty.
It's bizarre how little damage a lot of high CR enemies put out. I'm using a lot of goristros right now because they actually do manage to pack a punch if you can get a charge in.
It's entirely frustrating, because they learned absolutely nothing from the exact same situation and problem from 4th edition.
Solo encounters are mostly for low level adventurers, high level encounters should always have adds, or else the party can alpha strike the main threat.
When I last played D&D we had a world that banned magical use though religion. {I kind of took this game and built up it's world over the last few years of why there was dungeon groups and the need to adventure with that overwhelming religion.
So magical items were hard to find as most were either broken or lost {I made the tiefling/dragonborn war the reason of why as it was only a little more than 100 years before this and though the teifling civilization was broken no one knows what happened to the dragonborn both the cites of them and sites of battles were dangerous places for reasons. So there was the need for people to go find out what happened to the dragonborn or all that loot rumored to be in their haunted abandoned cities
Magic is use is banned because of the fallout of the war so the scars are still around on the countryside
I had gotten rid of many of the magical creatures because of the anti magic attitude that was going on so many are in hiding or dead
I have much of this written down as I wanted to try out this world but there are silly things I want to try out on people as well like the learning tree and other things have popped up over the years I want to try out
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
With high level enemies basically ineffectually cat scratching similar level PCs, you better be prepared to bring all of the bullshit to the table if you want to have an encounter be even remotely challenging.
Yeah, after I used the stats for two of the Ravnica big bads (Rakdos and Borborygmos) only for them to go down like chumps I realized I needed to use better tactics, buffs, and various homebrew methods of increasing difficulty.
It's bizarre how little damage a lot of high CR enemies put out. I'm using a lot of goristros right now because they actually do manage to pack a punch if you can get a charge in.
It's entirely frustrating, because they learned absolutely nothing from the exact same situation and problem from 4th edition.
Solo encounters are mostly for low level adventurers, high level encounters should always have adds, or else the party can alpha strike the main threat.
Even with adding additional creatures, all you're doing is increasing the cat scratching and just delaying the inevitable further.
What you need to do is drastically increase the damage. Players can mince through 500+ HP of creatures at high levels trivially, while taking almost nothing in return because high level creatures collectively deal no damage. They learned this in 4E and it worked spectacularly well, preventing having to do overwrought and massively over-engineered encounters just to bother players slightly. It's still one of the most frustrating things about 5E that they've learned nothing from the past, making any adventure over 10th level basically not worth the effort.
In the game in running, the party has thoroughly defeated Strahd, they just haven't killed him. They've destroyed the crystal heart, have all 3 special items (though they can't use one because nobody in group qualifies), they beat all the brides (whom i had upped to regular vampires instead of spawn), they forced Strahd to retreat multiple times. And then they leveled up to 10. The only reason they haven't killed him is that instead of looking for him (he's napping in his coffin, felling semi-safe) they left the castle, with half the party teleporting to Krezk and half to Tsolenka pass (one of the PCs is impulsive).
Strahd ain't no dummy though. If they don't get back to him within next 8 hours, he's getting his armor from the ramparts, his sword and shield from his secret treasury, and teleporting to Amber Temple to make some deals (+4 to str, +4 to cha, 3 auto self res, at cost of some flaw character traits he was ok with and no teeth until the third/final self res). The self res feature will put him at 616 hp, and the armor and shield at ac 23.
With high level enemies basically ineffectually cat scratching similar level PCs, you better be prepared to bring all of the bullshit to the table if you want to have an encounter be even remotely challenging.
Yeah, after I used the stats for two of the Ravnica big bads (Rakdos and Borborygmos) only for them to go down like chumps I realized I needed to use better tactics, buffs, and various homebrew methods of increasing difficulty.
It's bizarre how little damage a lot of high CR enemies put out. I'm using a lot of goristros right now because they actually do manage to pack a punch if you can get a charge in.
It's entirely frustrating, because they learned absolutely nothing from the exact same situation and problem from 4th edition.
Solo encounters are mostly for low level adventurers, high level encounters should always have adds, or else the party can alpha strike the main threat.
Even with adding additional creatures, all you're doing is increasing the cat scratching and just delaying the inevitable further.
What you need to do is drastically increase the damage. Players can mince through 500+ HP of creatures at high levels trivially, while taking almost nothing in return because high level creatures collectively deal no damage. They learned this in 4E and it worked spectacularly well, preventing having to do overwrought and massively over-engineered encounters just to bother players slightly. It's still one of the most frustrating things about 5E that they've learned nothing from the past, making any adventure over 10th level basically not worth the effort.
Yeah, my players just hit 9th level and I've been slowly scaling up encounter level to the point that they're pretty easily chewing through level 12-13 encounters without expending a whole lot.
I'm trying to avoid writing too many of my own monsters because I'm intentionally doing minimal prep and relying on a lot of improvisation for this campaign, but I can't even reliably solve the problem by just throwing CR 12/13 stuff at them as a baseline from now on because one CR X monster is still a wildly different level of threat from another CR X monster and sooner or later I'll end up finding one of the ones that actually deserves its CR and converting the party into a thin undifferentiated paste.
With high level enemies basically ineffectually cat scratching similar level PCs, you better be prepared to bring all of the bullshit to the table if you want to have an encounter be even remotely challenging.
Yeah, after I used the stats for two of the Ravnica big bads (Rakdos and Borborygmos) only for them to go down like chumps I realized I needed to use better tactics, buffs, and various homebrew methods of increasing difficulty.
It's bizarre how little damage a lot of high CR enemies put out. I'm using a lot of goristros right now because they actually do manage to pack a punch if you can get a charge in.
It's entirely frustrating, because they learned absolutely nothing from the exact same situation and problem from 4th edition.
Solo encounters are mostly for low level adventurers, high level encounters should always have adds, or else the party can alpha strike the main threat.
Even with adding additional creatures, all you're doing is increasing the cat scratching and just delaying the inevitable further.
What you need to do is drastically increase the damage. Players can mince through 500+ HP of creatures at high levels trivially, while taking almost nothing in return because high level creatures collectively deal no damage. They learned this in 4E and it worked spectacularly well, preventing having to do overwrought and massively over-engineered encounters just to bother players slightly. It's still one of the most frustrating things about 5E that they've learned nothing from the past, making any adventure over 10th level basically not worth the effort.
Personally I've been adding on auto-damaging auras, poisons, extra attacks through haste, I houseruled that crits do max damage plus an additional damage roll while also giving certain monsters a once per fight guaranteed crit, etc.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
With high level enemies basically ineffectually cat scratching similar level PCs, you better be prepared to bring all of the bullshit to the table if you want to have an encounter be even remotely challenging.
Yeah, after I used the stats for two of the Ravnica big bads (Rakdos and Borborygmos) only for them to go down like chumps I realized I needed to use better tactics, buffs, and various homebrew methods of increasing difficulty.
It's bizarre how little damage a lot of high CR enemies put out. I'm using a lot of goristros right now because they actually do manage to pack a punch if you can get a charge in.
It's entirely frustrating, because they learned absolutely nothing from the exact same situation and problem from 4th edition.
Solo encounters are mostly for low level adventurers, high level encounters should always have adds, or else the party can alpha strike the main threat.
Even with adding additional creatures, all you're doing is increasing the cat scratching and just delaying the inevitable further.
What you need to do is drastically increase the damage. Players can mince through 500+ HP of creatures at high levels trivially, while taking almost nothing in return because high level creatures collectively deal no damage. They learned this in 4E and it worked spectacularly well, preventing having to do overwrought and massively over-engineered encounters just to bother players slightly. It's still one of the most frustrating things about 5E that they've learned nothing from the past, making any adventure over 10th level basically not worth the effort.
Personally I've been adding on auto-damaging auras, poisons, extra attacks through haste, I houseruled that crits do max damage plus an additional damage roll while also giving certain monsters a once per fight guaranteed crit, etc.
We fought some fire salamanders and goddamn that auto fire damage when you hit them with a melee attack was a fucker. Auras are great. I like taking bloodied abilities from 4e as well to introduce new mechanics mid battle. Also enemies that explode or do other creative things on death.
i Make sure to always give solo enemies legendary actions and resistances regardless of if they are supposed to have them
Taking a partial action at the end of a player's turn doesn't do much to make an enemy threatening if that player's turn is to hit it for 80-90 or more of its 170 HP, though. Likewise, giving enemies cool new abilities when they hit half HP doesn't impact the fight much if they lose the other half before they get to act again.
And on the flip side, the 'basic' legendary action is to make an attack, but the damage of those attacks gets pretty unthreateningly low. Taking a partial action at the end of a player's turn is also not very threatening if that action is to hit a player with 80+ HP for 12 damage.
The damage and HP numbers are what's misaligned, and it's real hard to fix that with special actions because monster have to be alive to take actions - and they usually aren't, especially for actions they don't start with, because 5e combat is so short.
Auto-damage auras are definitely one way to try and solve that, but I'd argue that they're basically the bluntest possible instrument for that purpose (you're basically just unavoidably 'taxing' the players some HP so they have a small enough amount that enemy damage can threaten them - you could accomplish the same goal with equal finesse by just saying 'hey, house rule: HP is too high, so you all have 2/3rds as much HP as your sheet currently says' at the start of the session) and they introduce problems of their own if you're running gridless the way 5e so badly wants you to, because it becomes hard (or at least contentious) to adjudicate who is or is not in the aura at any given time - you end up inviting a lot of time-consuming 'wait, I take damage? I thought I was out of the aura. Did I have enough movement to get out? I think maybe I did. I wanted to be out. Wait, where is he? Where are you? If you're in the aura, I shouldn't be, because we moved in opposite directions last turn, remember?' logistical discussions in the middle of your cool fight.
Our 5th D&D campaign that recently took a break was at level 9 and yeah, I could see our DM struggling to give us a challenge that wasn't also two lucky rolls away from just killing a party member. For the past year every single time a big bad went down my reaction was "wait, already?".
To their credit, all of the fights felt challenging, they just always felt like the main guy was far squishier than I would have expected them to be.
I feel the players dogpiling the main target is a big issue, simply because after a certain point their combined damage output is stupid. In the last fight, where we fought a pissed-off Rakshasa we robbed, it teleported to the roof while summoning devils to attack and kill innocents on ground level, which forced us to split our forces to deal with them, giving it more rounds... but even so it felt too squishy.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
edited July 2019
It is worth noting I've actually tried to solve this issue by making players actually roll their hit points.
It has resulted in quite a degree of hilarity already. At higher levels, it really feels like monster damage was based on the idea of people rolling HP and rolling worse than average the entire way. At least some players are feeling like taking toughness is a good idea! Minding, rolling HP makes those first 3 levels even more deadly than they regularly are.
Thing is, the higher level you are, the more your rolls normalise. And rolled health is, on average, higher than unrolled. And the problem with encounter balance happens at higher levels. Soooo...
I think the best solution is to add alternate objectives or mess with terrain so it creates extra difficulty, but if you want a mechanical solution, there are a few things from my own game that are pretty easy to run/remember:
-Give the monster a powerful move (at least 2x its normal damage/effectiveness) with a short cooldown (not a %chance, just a set number of turns). Since DnD combat length is supposed to be 1-3 turns, a 1 turn cooldown is the right choice. Play this up too, "the dragon's chest glows red..." because it will make the players feel fear and relief when they take it down without that happening. It should always use this on its first turn.
-Give the monster resistance to hard disables that can be worn down, a reaction that prevents/removes them, or make it downgrade hard disables to soft ones (restrain -> slowed movement, stunned -> disadvantage on attack rolls / lose 1 multiattack).
-Depending on the monster type, on-death effects. Straight-up death explosions feel extremely bad for martials, but I like delayed death explosions since there is counterplay and it can split the party up. The other one I like is cultists that give their remaining team members a stacking damage bonus.
If you use anything like this, I would make sure to narrate it pretty clearly, make a tracker visible to the players, or both.
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
I almost always do the rolls but that’s because I love gambling and often play classes or characters where con is not great so I hope I get lucky and get above the standard health up you get.
I can take or leave rolled health, but rolled stats can go eff themselves. God, we ended up with such a party of Haves and Have Nots the one time we did that.
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
I did rolled stats too. My gnoll characters are both runts and actually rolled on the lower range of sums you get using the rolling method so it felt thematically appropriate. Also my monk’s strength is -1.
Funnily enough since gnolls are already like 7-8 feet tall on average she feels small but is like 6 feet.
Regarding damage, the high level Oath of Vengeance Paladin in my campaign is an absolute monster who seems absurdly overpowered.
After casting Haste on himself and assuming he gets a chance to make an opportunity attack (which he easily can with Soul of Vengeance) he can conceivably attack using his Improved Divine Smites and Flame Tongue Greatsword for:
1st Attack: 2d6 + 6 slashing plus 2d6 fire plus 7d8 radiant (5th-level spell slot)
2nd Attack + Haste Attack (combined)
: 4d6 + 12 slashing plus 4d6 fire plus 12d8 radiant (4th-level spell slots)
Opportunity Attack: 2d6 + 6 slashing plus 2d6 fire plus 6d8 radiant (4th-level spell slot).
Rolling with my dice app I just got 56 slashing damage plus 27 fire damage plus 118 radiant damage in one turn.
Keep in mind my house rule that crits maximize the damage roll and add a second rolled one, as well as the fact that his Oath of Enmity can give him advantage easily.
I can't believe Divine Smite isn't limited to once per turn.
i Make sure to always give solo enemies legendary actions and resistances regardless of if they are supposed to have them
Taking a partial action at the end of a player's turn doesn't do much to make an enemy threatening if that player's turn is to hit it for 80-90 or more of its 170 HP, though. Likewise, giving enemies cool new abilities when they hit half HP doesn't impact the fight much if they lose the other half before they get to act again.
And on the flip side, the 'basic' legendary action is to make an attack, but the damage of those attacks gets pretty unthreateningly low. Taking a partial action at the end of a player's turn is also not very threatening if that action is to hit a player with 80+ HP for 12 damage.
The damage and HP numbers are what's misaligned, and it's real hard to fix that with special actions because monster have to be alive to take actions - and they usually aren't, especially for actions they don't start with, because 5e combat is so short.
Auto-damage auras are definitely one way to try and solve that, but I'd argue that they're basically the bluntest possible instrument for that purpose (you're basically just unavoidably 'taxing' the players some HP so they have a small enough amount that enemy damage can threaten them - you could accomplish the same goal with equal finesse by just saying 'hey, house rule: HP is too high, so you all have 2/3rds as much HP as your sheet currently says' at the start of the session) and they introduce problems of their own if you're running gridless the way 5e so badly wants you to, because it becomes hard (or at least contentious) to adjudicate who is or is not in the aura at any given time - you end up inviting a lot of time-consuming 'wait, I take damage? I thought I was out of the aura. Did I have enough movement to get out? I think maybe I did. I wanted to be out. Wait, where is he? Where are you? If you're in the aura, I shouldn't be, because we moved in opposite directions last turn, remember?' logistical discussions in the middle of your cool fight.
Are you using the average monster hitpoints or are you maxing them?
The Monster Manual I believe assumes your party are uh... not going to be great at the game? If you look at something like the C team or Dice Camera Action where nobody is optimally built the challenge ratings make more sense
A lot of it comes down to the DM and monster party composition as well. Some monsters are just dumb brutes, but a lot of them are smart and don't want to die and will use tactics (for example, strahd can pop out and fireball while the party is fighting something else and then return into the walls, a Succubus will simply flee to the ethereal plane if her charm fails, goblins like to lead players into ambushes)
a few games ago my level 6 party which is more than capable of smoking fire giants by being clever almost TPK'd to some hobgoblins because I had the hobgoblins attack from trenches and a Devastator attacking from max range with fireballs... but a lot of it, yeah if you throw 6 hill giants at your level 8 party it says deadly, but the party probably won't take any significant damage if they play cleverly and have the right spells
If you feel like you actually need to hurt the party, give the monsters more hitpoints, have the monsters do things like grapple and drag party members away while their cohorts block the escape, fight more dirty
Regarding damage, the high level Oath of Vengeance Paladin in my campaign is an absolute monster who seems absurdly overpowered.
After casting Haste on himself and assuming he gets a chance to make an opportunity attack (which he easily can with Soul of Vengeance) he can conceivably attack using his Improved Divine Smites and Flame Tongue Greatsword for:
1st Attack: 2d6 + 6 slashing plus 2d6 fire plus 7d8 radiant (5th-level spell slot)
2nd Attack + Haste Attack (combined)
: 4d6 + 12 slashing plus 4d6 fire plus 12d8 radiant (4th-level spell slots)
Opportunity Attack: 2d6 + 6 slashing plus 2d6 fire plus 6d8 radiant (4th-level spell slot).
Rolling with my dice app I just got 56 slashing damage plus 27 fire damage plus 118 radiant damage in one turn.
Keep in mind my house rule that crits maximize the damage roll and add a second rolled one, as well as the fact that his Oath of Enmity can give him advantage easily.
I can't believe Divine Smite isn't limited to once per turn.
I did describe in this thread how my 10th level Paladin basically 1 shot the campaign's BBEG thanks to a crit. She had taken a token amount of damage from the Artificer, but I did like 100 damage and popped her Death Ward.
It's really the DM's fault for giving her vulnerability to radiant damage.
Posts
but if you're going to stick with it, i think what you've laid out is the best plan--it's basically impossible for this not to be some exploitative weird shit as it was laid out
D&D is full of fucked up power dynamics, the very concept of nobility existing is fucked up. I've axed what's essentially the Awakened portion the spell (the charm portion was the same as the spell Awaken) because that's a problem
I went to lunch with the cleric from my party and showed him this thread and expressed my concerns, he was kind of taken aback that I would suggest him or his character would treat people as slaves. To paraphrase "my character's entire deal is freedom and liberation from oppressors'"
Which puts us back to the players being in the same situation they are in whenever they interact with any npc, these particular NPCs are actually less exploitable than commoners because they have a particularly powerful guardian who only wants the best for them (they don't know it yet but when player 6 comes back from her summer job she's going to actually play as one of them)
if you take out the charm effect it's a lot less of an issue
and yeah, D&D is full of fucked up shit, that's why these sorts of things have to be handled with consideration and care
I think making them not be mentally handicapped and removing the charm really negates a lot of the pernicious elements (setting aside the Intern shit, fuckin capitalism)
I'm reminded that we're a group of 6 socialists playing D&D and none of us are in danger of becoming champions of capitalism because the characters in the game are
edit: I'm not sure where you're getting the gilded cage thing from? I don't think I ever hinted or insinuated that this group of people were prisoners or couldn't just leave. That... wouldn't last very long because as I said, slavery is a crime... *currently* we haven't developed any personalities because the session ended 5 minutes after them popping into existence, where it's going to go I can't say because I don't pre-script NPC interactions, it depends what the party does
What I suspect will happen is they will be offered residence in the village, since it's about 3/4 empty, after that I can't begin to guess. We got months ingame before their franchise opens, ill probably have some percentage of the newbies move to the nearby city
but "make 'interns'" even if your group is Woke As Hell is still super problematic
it's like a Flowers for Algernon situation here my dude--if their primary score to determine autonomy is compromised by their creator's intent (to make them "dim witted" as you said) and the mechanics force penalties on them (through advantage on the players' behalf) they're going to be really easy to manipulate
like, it doesn't matter if your players are saying they're not going to yank the leash, the leash is still there
to add onto this, the group in question has no way to get out of the situation. you say "just leave"--with what contacts? to where? with what money/resources?
who can they appeal to? their goddess? probably not as much since she enabled this whole situation
Let me rephrase this to give you some perspective on it. The curvy girl in a loincloth slung over the arm of the barbarian is not so weak as to be handicapped, but she is disadvantaged compared to the barbarian. Even if the barbarian says "Grog am staunch feminist, always require enthusiastic consent." is the overall image any less concerning knowing that said woman can't resist? Isn't the implication that it'd be bad for her to even try to resist fucked up?
It's not about having a balanced and fair dynamic in every situation, it's about how that dynamic is framed and portrayed. Is my character a good person for doing what he does? Is he morally ambiguous and riding the line? Or is he awful? Using your example, imagine player characters did just walk in and take some children like that. At that point, isn't there a big difference between portraying them as heroic, and portraying them as assholes? Even just ignoring what was done is a statement in and of itself.
So going back to your game, your player characters would be taking a newborn race of people, who are inherently disadvantaged in comparison to them, and making use of considerable power in ensuring that race can't really say "No" when the players say "Work". If they're still good guys after that? It's a statement. If they recoil in horror of what they've done? That's a statement too. Maybe the devil's in the details.
But be aware of what you're saying and how you're saying it.
because it's not a real world and I can control it. The reason they are dim witted (again, 10 int 6 wisdom is hardly handicapped, the interactions so far are mostly because we're talking about 5 minute old people, and you seem to think wisdom score of a creature binds the DM's hands in how easy a creature is to manipulate. not true!) is because they have a stat allocation and were min maxed in a different direction. Bam easily undone, as is any charm
With that done we just have what my players think is an interesting plot development, and the problematic aspects exist entirely in the same realm as "What if the party decides to murder everyone in the village they're in"
if you put into place safeguards against the weird shit then it's not a problem
and if it works for you it works for you; but the original situation as presented made me go ick
Cool, that's basically throwing down a red card and saying "Hey these themes exist, but we're not exploring them in this game right now, because comfort and fun." That's not only totally valid, I enthusiastically approve of it.
Yeah and ... there would be consequences if they did that... but they won't because I know my players and as I said on the last page, I'm quite sure that by the time next sunday rolls around and we have 3 months of downtime while they get to know this new group of people they're going to realize that they can't do anything like that
I mean the rogue might try and con a few of them to help commit crimes (which she has a habit of doing), and that will create conflict with the rest of the party, which I trust them to handle.
Fair enough
I got my feathers ruffled because I read some intent that wasn't there, and I agreed with you, which is why I'm amending the "create species" spell to not have the function of Awaken where the created creature is charmed, and I'm going to just break the rules of the spell marginally so they have more wisdom without reducing any of the attributes the players wanted (they have a bunch of proficiencies, natural stealth, a cantrip, telepathy, and darkvision)
Right at this moment these people are so naive you could hand them a knife and say "stab yourself" and they would, but again, that's only because they're a few minutes old. The party is going to more or less be denied access to them for a time, and since they gave the race telepathy, because of this thread I've decided to leverage that to make it harder to abuse them (as they can talk to each other)
That doesn't mean I won't let any of them work for the party's franchise, after all they do pay pretty well.*
*one thing I'm not sure I mentioned is that the NPC, the creator of these people, is the one who has the final say on hiring for the Acquistions Inc Franchise, this gives me absolute DM fiat without any asspulling as to how that goes down
The reaction in the moment from the other players was basically the same as a reaction to a shock value joke. If you thought about it for more than two seconds you'd find it really fucked up, but no one thought about it that long.
Similarly, there was another game where a player's True Neutral Monk executed a Mortal Kombat style fatality on an NPC out of the blue before saying "I'm Chaotic Evil now."
They're in the Nine Hells now, and as part of the evil set dressing I had an imprisoned Chaotic Good celestial. To my surprise, the Lawful Neutral character decided to buy the celestial from their devil captorto set them free...after forcing them to come along and help fight in a dangerous mission first for the "greater good". Several sessions later the character kept his word and set the celestial free (I had changed the character's alignment to Lawful Evil until he did so, at which point it reverted to Lawful Neutral). Unbeknownst to him, however, said celestial didn't appreciate being magically compelled to serve the character, hasn't forgiven him even after being freed, and plans to screw the Lawful Neutral character over as revenge.
Said Lawful Neutral character has since reverted to Lawful Evil again by allying with devils and keeping a cache of soul coins. However, his devilish allies also plan to betray him soon.
I explain all this because in this case the character is doing evil things and will soon suffer the consequences.
It would be nice if my next campaign actually has heroic characters, though.
We are also WAY down on loot from where we would be because we don't wantonly loot, or if we do recover treasure we try to give reparations to those effected by the enemies in the first place. I know it's caused our DM some consternation and re-working of sections of the module.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
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It's entirely frustrating, because they learned absolutely nothing from the exact same situation and problem from 4th edition.
My players expressed a similar distress at taking a priceless cultural artifact from a village that also happened to be a sun sword. We worked it out that it regularly disappears from the fighter's gear and is magically returned to the hand of the statue it was claimed from. However the fighter(eldritch knight) has bonded it, and may call it back to his grasp at any time.
Eventually they will have to put it with a new statue in an ancient temple, but by that point they'll hopefully have realized the temple is that village's roots in antiquity (there's also a member of that village in the party with a similar deal on the artifact they made their warlock pact of the blade with, one hand held his weapon of shadow the other hand held the sun sword).
Solo encounters are mostly for low level adventurers, high level encounters should always have adds, or else the party can alpha strike the main threat.
So magical items were hard to find as most were either broken or lost {I made the tiefling/dragonborn war the reason of why as it was only a little more than 100 years before this and though the teifling civilization was broken no one knows what happened to the dragonborn both the cites of them and sites of battles were dangerous places for reasons. So there was the need for people to go find out what happened to the dragonborn or all that loot rumored to be in their haunted abandoned cities
Magic is use is banned because of the fallout of the war so the scars are still around on the countryside
I had gotten rid of many of the magical creatures because of the anti magic attitude that was going on so many are in hiding or dead
I have much of this written down as I wanted to try out this world but there are silly things I want to try out on people as well like the learning tree and other things have popped up over the years I want to try out
Even with adding additional creatures, all you're doing is increasing the cat scratching and just delaying the inevitable further.
What you need to do is drastically increase the damage. Players can mince through 500+ HP of creatures at high levels trivially, while taking almost nothing in return because high level creatures collectively deal no damage. They learned this in 4E and it worked spectacularly well, preventing having to do overwrought and massively over-engineered encounters just to bother players slightly. It's still one of the most frustrating things about 5E that they've learned nothing from the past, making any adventure over 10th level basically not worth the effort.
Strahd ain't no dummy though. If they don't get back to him within next 8 hours, he's getting his armor from the ramparts, his sword and shield from his secret treasury, and teleporting to Amber Temple to make some deals (+4 to str, +4 to cha, 3 auto self res, at cost of some flaw character traits he was ok with and no teeth until the third/final self res). The self res feature will put him at 616 hp, and the armor and shield at ac 23.
Yeah, my players just hit 9th level and I've been slowly scaling up encounter level to the point that they're pretty easily chewing through level 12-13 encounters without expending a whole lot.
I'm trying to avoid writing too many of my own monsters because I'm intentionally doing minimal prep and relying on a lot of improvisation for this campaign, but I can't even reliably solve the problem by just throwing CR 12/13 stuff at them as a baseline from now on because one CR X monster is still a wildly different level of threat from another CR X monster and sooner or later I'll end up finding one of the ones that actually deserves its CR and converting the party into a thin undifferentiated paste.
Personally I've been adding on auto-damaging auras, poisons, extra attacks through haste, I houseruled that crits do max damage plus an additional damage roll while also giving certain monsters a once per fight guaranteed crit, etc.
We fought some fire salamanders and goddamn that auto fire damage when you hit them with a melee attack was a fucker. Auras are great. I like taking bloodied abilities from 4e as well to introduce new mechanics mid battle. Also enemies that explode or do other creative things on death.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
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Strahd has some, it didn't help much. See my post upthread a bit.
Taking a partial action at the end of a player's turn doesn't do much to make an enemy threatening if that player's turn is to hit it for 80-90 or more of its 170 HP, though. Likewise, giving enemies cool new abilities when they hit half HP doesn't impact the fight much if they lose the other half before they get to act again.
And on the flip side, the 'basic' legendary action is to make an attack, but the damage of those attacks gets pretty unthreateningly low. Taking a partial action at the end of a player's turn is also not very threatening if that action is to hit a player with 80+ HP for 12 damage.
The damage and HP numbers are what's misaligned, and it's real hard to fix that with special actions because monster have to be alive to take actions - and they usually aren't, especially for actions they don't start with, because 5e combat is so short.
Auto-damage auras are definitely one way to try and solve that, but I'd argue that they're basically the bluntest possible instrument for that purpose (you're basically just unavoidably 'taxing' the players some HP so they have a small enough amount that enemy damage can threaten them - you could accomplish the same goal with equal finesse by just saying 'hey, house rule: HP is too high, so you all have 2/3rds as much HP as your sheet currently says' at the start of the session) and they introduce problems of their own if you're running gridless the way 5e so badly wants you to, because it becomes hard (or at least contentious) to adjudicate who is or is not in the aura at any given time - you end up inviting a lot of time-consuming 'wait, I take damage? I thought I was out of the aura. Did I have enough movement to get out? I think maybe I did. I wanted to be out. Wait, where is he? Where are you? If you're in the aura, I shouldn't be, because we moved in opposite directions last turn, remember?' logistical discussions in the middle of your cool fight.
To their credit, all of the fights felt challenging, they just always felt like the main guy was far squishier than I would have expected them to be.
I feel the players dogpiling the main target is a big issue, simply because after a certain point their combined damage output is stupid. In the last fight, where we fought a pissed-off Rakshasa we robbed, it teleported to the roof while summoning devils to attack and kill innocents on ground level, which forced us to split our forces to deal with them, giving it more rounds... but even so it felt too squishy.
It has resulted in quite a degree of hilarity already. At higher levels, it really feels like monster damage was based on the idea of people rolling HP and rolling worse than average the entire way. At least some players are feeling like taking toughness is a good idea! Minding, rolling HP makes those first 3 levels even more deadly than they regularly are.
As opposed to what? Max HP at every level? Who does that?
Does D&D have an easy mode now? Pfft.
Since most DnD doesn't go above level 10, there can be a lot of swinginess in rolling, most folks go for the guarantee.
-Give the monster a powerful move (at least 2x its normal damage/effectiveness) with a short cooldown (not a %chance, just a set number of turns). Since DnD combat length is supposed to be 1-3 turns, a 1 turn cooldown is the right choice. Play this up too, "the dragon's chest glows red..." because it will make the players feel fear and relief when they take it down without that happening. It should always use this on its first turn.
-Give the monster resistance to hard disables that can be worn down, a reaction that prevents/removes them, or make it downgrade hard disables to soft ones (restrain -> slowed movement, stunned -> disadvantage on attack rolls / lose 1 multiattack).
-Depending on the monster type, on-death effects. Straight-up death explosions feel extremely bad for martials, but I like delayed death explosions since there is counterplay and it can split the party up. The other one I like is cultists that give their remaining team members a stacking damage bonus.
If you use anything like this, I would make sure to narrate it pretty clearly, make a tracker visible to the players, or both.
Funnily enough since gnolls are already like 7-8 feet tall on average she feels small but is like 6 feet.
After casting Haste on himself and assuming he gets a chance to make an opportunity attack (which he easily can with Soul of Vengeance) he can conceivably attack using his Improved Divine Smites and Flame Tongue Greatsword for:
1st Attack: 2d6 + 6 slashing plus 2d6 fire plus 7d8 radiant (5th-level spell slot)
2nd Attack + Haste Attack (combined)
: 4d6 + 12 slashing plus 4d6 fire plus 12d8 radiant (4th-level spell slots)
Opportunity Attack: 2d6 + 6 slashing plus 2d6 fire plus 6d8 radiant (4th-level spell slot).
Rolling with my dice app I just got 56 slashing damage plus 27 fire damage plus 118 radiant damage in one turn.
Keep in mind my house rule that crits maximize the damage roll and add a second rolled one, as well as the fact that his Oath of Enmity can give him advantage easily.
I can't believe Divine Smite isn't limited to once per turn.
Are you using the average monster hitpoints or are you maxing them?
The Monster Manual I believe assumes your party are uh... not going to be great at the game? If you look at something like the C team or Dice Camera Action where nobody is optimally built the challenge ratings make more sense
A lot of it comes down to the DM and monster party composition as well. Some monsters are just dumb brutes, but a lot of them are smart and don't want to die and will use tactics (for example, strahd can pop out and fireball while the party is fighting something else and then return into the walls, a Succubus will simply flee to the ethereal plane if her charm fails, goblins like to lead players into ambushes)
Here's an 11 minute video about how to make a goblin fight that challenges a 5th level party for examples on that
a few games ago my level 6 party which is more than capable of smoking fire giants by being clever almost TPK'd to some hobgoblins because I had the hobgoblins attack from trenches and a Devastator attacking from max range with fireballs... but a lot of it, yeah if you throw 6 hill giants at your level 8 party it says deadly, but the party probably won't take any significant damage if they play cleverly and have the right spells
If you feel like you actually need to hurt the party, give the monsters more hitpoints, have the monsters do things like grapple and drag party members away while their cohorts block the escape, fight more dirty
I did describe in this thread how my 10th level Paladin basically 1 shot the campaign's BBEG thanks to a crit. She had taken a token amount of damage from the Artificer, but I did like 100 damage and popped her Death Ward.
It's really the DM's fault for giving her vulnerability to radiant damage.