3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
The perennial downfall of DMs is either being too afraid to tell their players "no" (which like, I get it. No one wants to be that asshole DM who doesn't let people do the interesting stuff) or rigidly adhering to the RAW instead of imposing their own rules (like always allowing a spell if the rulebook says it would work). But sometimes you do have to be the bad guy or break the rules when something your player is trying to do is going to be to the overall detriment of the game.
In this instance, I would have said "your spell fails. You don't know why" and then incorporated that as part of the mystery somehow.
"I...I don't know who it was", the ghostly voice hisses from the corpse. "There was only a blur of motion and then...nothing. the last i ever saw was the small brooch my assailant wore...a blood red crow." And the voice goes silent.
There's your hook, best of luck with the investigation
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
edited August 2020
I think you can run a perfectly great compaign without ever telling your players no
It is just going to involve more improvisation
EDIT: Like in this situation, yeah absolutely you can ask the person who killed them, it just changes from a murder mystery to something else. Maybe their killer makes it uniquely difficult to bring them to justice, maybe you find the killer and they don't remember doing it and detection spells confirm they're telling the truth, etc etc etc
EDIT: Maybe they talk to you and refuse to tell you! Why would they do that? Are they protecting someone? Who knows!
I think you can run a perfectly great compaign without ever telling your players no
It is just going to involve more improvisation
"No, but" is very useful to include, and IMO, is much more useful than "Yes, and" for RPGs. I don't think saying yes to everything is likely to create a game that many people would enjoy; though some people will enjoy that, of course, and there's nothing wrong with that, I don't think it has wide appeaal. I think "No, but" in appropriate circumstances is going to land with a lot more people.
edit to respond to edits: I think those are good examples of "No, but" in action. The players don't get what they wanted, but they get something.
I just posted this over on ENWorld in a thread asking what anime would make a great D&D setting. I cheated a bit by talking about Breath of Fire instead. I'm reposting it here in case people find it interesting/inspiring:
The most powerful of all deities, Myria, kickstarted a war at the dawn of time by putting up a fraction of her divine power for the mortal races to compete for. The ancestor gods of each race pushed their creations to win the war and obtain the shard of Myria's power, all save for the dragon god Ladon. Instead, his Brood was tasked with defeating and banishing Myria to end the war. The temptation of greater power proved too much for many of the dragons, though, and eventually the other races had to flee as the conflict became the Brood War, one between dragons who remained loyal to Ladon and dragons who coveted Myria's prize.
As a last ditch effort, Ladon brought together an adventuring party made up of members of the various races led by the champion of the Brood. Together they ended the war by fighting their way to Myria and banishing her to an extraplanar prison, ensuring no one would receive the prize she offered.
The treacherous dragons who had defied Ladon fled, and the rest of the gods, ashamed that they had encouraged violence among the peoples of the world, departed for parts unknown.
Unfortunately, the defeat and banishment of Myria left a "scar" upon reality that manifested as her "son", the demon lord Deathevan. Ladon sent the Brood into the underworld to await the emergence of Deathevan while he himself slept to regain his strength so that they could one day prevent Deathevan and his demons from reaching the surface. However, with the ancestor gods gone, Ladon asleep, and the Brood keeping watch in the underworld, Deathevan's servant Barubary has managed to inspire a seemingly peaceful religion called the Church of Saint Evans whose followers' prayers secretly feed and empower the demon lord. As demons begin to increase in number throughout the world, many of which being former people overwhelmed by sin, the prayers to the false god only increase...
In terms of races, the most interesting departure from D&D may be the fishlike manillo. These undersea people are the major drivers of commerce throughout the world, emerging from the oceans to work as merchants in port cities and helping to guard sailing ships from attack along the sea trade routes they've established.
Breath of Fire 2 in particular had a system of bringing together elemental spirits that could be infused into the party members. In certain cases a party member could fuse with one or more spirits to attain a radically different form and new abilities.
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
I legitimately kind of love when I forget the players can do some weird thing that details my plans
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I think what I would do for the speak with dead conundrum is just have the sheriff respond that you're free to, but necromancy isn't considered admissible evidence, legally speaking. So even if you get the identity, you would need to build a case that actually explains it.
And of course if you just got murder the perpetrator, you're now wanted criminals and would need to build a case in order to prove yourself innocent (or you just have a reason as the DM to constantly be throwing weirdo bounty hunters after the players).
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FishmanPut your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain.Registered Userregular
So I'm playing in a friend's fantasy jungle-western campaign, which has been going since just before lockdown.
This is the third or fourth time I've played in one of his campaigns, and owing to our long association I have a particular talent for inadvertantly 'breaking' his campaigns. The time I ran a forger and skipped straight to the final boss battle by creating fake transport documents past all the encounters, the time I took a Book of Nine Swords Warblade into his high-lethality campaign and slew the Aspect of Tiamat BBEG with a single blow in the first round, multiple times I ran a bard and bullshitted my way through entire adventures... any way, any time I play in one of his campaigns, he's primed for me to turn up and just completely bring down entire chunks of his campaign like so many Jenga blocks.
Anyway, we were resuming the current after a natural in-story break, having just defeating an Ophidian jungle cult last session. Everyone's coming back newly levelled up and he's had a month to prepare this brand new adventure arc, which apparently involves a mysterious killer and puzzling murders for the party to investigate their way through.
The very first scene we came back to was my Warlock walking back into town after a couple weeks in the wilderness only to be greeted by the sounds of a struggle and the crash of glass as a body is thrown into the street from a second story window.
I saunter over and the Sheriff turns up just as I reach the body. He looks at the body. I look at the body.
"So..." I say, ".. did you want me to ask him who killed him?"
There was a slow look of dawning realisation on my DM's face as he grasped the implication that I had gained an ability to Speak with Dead during my level up immediately before his elaborate murder mystery and you could almost hear the tumbling Jenga blocks of planned preparations going out the window as fast as the first victim.
This has now been added to the list of 'times Fishman broke my damned campaign'.
Dead person: "I don't know, they were wearing a mask." Or "They attacked while my back was turned." Or so many other things...
I mean, yes, this is exactly what happened. And there were some hasty crossing out of notes and prep having to be reworked on the fly because the adventure as prepared was remarkably outflanked.
'Broken' isn't a non-recoverable state absent of improvisation. It just means the adventure has gone off-script and the DM is leaning on thinking faster than the players until they can get out ahead of them again.
We don't really view it as a fail state. But the fact that it always seems to be something innocuous I do is amusing and provokes both group in-jokes and long-suffering exasperated DM sighs.
That's unbelievably cool. Your new name is cool guy. Let's have sex.
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Tynnanseldom correct, never unsureRegistered Userregular
edited August 2020
This is why I have my players keep their character sheets on a DndBeyond page I host, so that I can easily tab across their character sheets while I'm prepping for a session. Having their available spells accessible when I'm planning a session lets me be ready for those moments, and reward that sort of thing instead of being caught off guard by it.
After certain events in the tail end of my last 5E campaign I've adopted a philosophy of being damn sure of what a spell can do, its casting time, unique components, etc. I'm going so far as to run mini scenarios for myself where NPCs use magic partially to familiarize myself with many spells.
Any murderer in a world where speak with dead exists should wear a mask at the very least, but if time allows should cut off the victim's head to take with them (if they're interested in using speak with dead themselves) or utterly destroy the head with acid or a bludgeoning weapon.
At level 2, we killed a demon form this same realm that was tormenting & controlling monkeys (and that's how we got level 3, kids!). My artificer ended up modeling her Eldritch Cannon on said monkeys in tribute to them.
So... If you squint a bit, it's Karma coming back around to send a real firm message to the demons about monkey-torture.
Played in my friend's Ravnica game tonight. Set aside my Artificer for the moment, and probably for good honestly since we had no healers. I instead I was playing an Orzhovan Cleric, who is of course kind of a huge piece of shit. I was hoping I might be able to justify swapping back since we also had a new player join us, running a Golgori Druid. However... pretty deep into our combat against a massive tide of Gruul, I was running low on spell slots. So I asked if he had healing spirit or something to pick us back up after combat, so I didn't need to save my last level 2 slot for Prayer of Healing. Particularly since he's a Circle of the Moon druid (wanted to turn into gross sewer animals), so he isn't really casting spells frequently. "Oh, I don't have any healing spells. Only took spells that would make thematic sense for my character." He also took no AoE or control spells or anything. Which he can always swap them out on a long rest... but still kind of a pain and makes me feel like it's unlikely I'll be able to justify my Artificer.
I am enjoying my cleric at least. Fun being kind of an asshole, though I did end up feeling bad about something. Our Simic Monk attuned himself to a very powerful artifact. It was also cursed! So he loses possession of it he is struck blind and deaf. Queue us being arrested this episode. Now, my cleric managed to talk his way out of jail to help as the Gruul attacked, burning some of my spell slots to heal Azorius troops in exchange. Our Monk... was not so lucky. Partially because he tried to lie to them when they had a precognitive mage ready to detect lies. So they took his artifact and got it into storage. After properly gaining the respect and admiration of the Azorius on site by healing their wounded and performing last rites for the dead, I convinced them to release him "If worse comes to worse, he'll be a corpse you can shove to the Gruul to slow them down!" But after giving the rest of the party ample chance grab it themselves, I took the artifact to use as leverage. After repelling the Monk's attempts to take it back, I did remind our Barbarian out of character he could trivially subdue me.
One of the sillier pleasures I have is coming up with ways to describe my spells. For my Artificer it was of course zany gadgets, but I've tried to put some thought into how Orzhovan spells would look. I think the biggest hit was when I described Guidance (and later bless) as conjuring a will-o-wisp to float around the player and assist. Our Barbarian poked it suspiciously, so I responded in a Droopy Dog voice "Please sir, I just need to pay off this debt really badly." I'm looking forward to Spirit Guardians next level when I can describe my cleric conjuring his late father's crew, who are also modeled after the four horseman (a skeletal minotaur berserker with a huge sword, a short skeleton bedecked in gold and jewels with orzhov designs holding scales, a tall gaunt shadow shaped like a cloak carrying a scythe, and an athletic cloaked assassin with a bow and a death mask with a crown design).
Honestly, a Golgari druid not running healing spells makes sense from a metagaming perspective. You cannot perpetuate the life cycle without death, by their logic, and healing stalls death.
I'm just getting ready to host my own 5E game myself (played a few campaigns but never DMed before; playing with the same groups of players though and we're all awesome, friendly folk) and I think my own plan for if my players accidentally get to/run into/interrupt my planned sort-of-BBEG is to give them realistic stats relative to the levels of the PCs so that they could, theoretically, engage and defeat the BBEG but likely will just get *barely* defeated or the BBEG will just happen to slip away. Practically speaking, though, I'll basically stat out a "baby" version of the BBEG just in case they run into that person so the bad guy doesn't just mop the floor with the PC group but also should defeat/escape them without problem. There are also sub-lieutenants that can be battled and dealt with instead while the BBEG gets away, so hopefully it doesn't ever feel like I've stolen a significant encounter from my PCs just because they were more clever than I expected at the time.
[Edit]
Oh! And I have vague ideas of layers on layers for the few main story arcs I've loosely plotted, so if the encounter ends with the PCs being extra-very clever or super-lucky and they beat the BBEG in baby-form, well, they weren't really in charge of it all after all--just the areas the PCs had learned about up to now. (Or whatever... as appropriate. If that particular plotline would end there, that's okay... my experience as a PC tells me that we're always opening up plot threads and avenues to take a story.
The BBEG in the first campaign I played in was a Wizard who had prepared defensive spells specifically to frustrate the party when we attacked him for the first time
It demonstrated that he was out of our league while not directly threatening our lives
He did kill the Druid's animal companion, though, as a demonstration of force that gave us additional motivation to take him down
In the interest of "telling a Player No" a long-standing friendly debate I've had with a player is whether or not she can cast Create Water and drown a humanoid creature.
Spell text "You create up to 10 gallons of clean water within range in an open container. Alternatively, the water falls as rain in a 30-foot cube within range, extinguishing exposed flames in the area."
I argue that the respiratory system is not an open container. She seems to disagree.
I just a no will do, but if you want to get into the nitty gritty the throat has flaps in it that open and close, plus the creature’s mouth isn’t guaranteed to be open. I think the intent is you’re supposed to be able to see if the container is open for the spell to work.
Maybe an additional 1d4 roll if you want to let the dice decide.
1. The spell fails.
2. The spell throws itself at the creature, soaking them, but doesn’t drown them.
3. The spell fills the nearest actual container.
4. The creature starts drowning!
I just a no will do, but if you want to get into the nitty gritty the throat has flaps in it that open and close, plus the creature’s mouth isn’t guaranteed to be open. I think the intent is you’re supposed to be able to see if the container is open for the spell to work.
Maybe an additional 1d4 roll if you want to let the dice decide.
1. The spell fails.
2. The spell throws itself at the creature, soaking them, but doesn’t drown them.
3. The spell fills the nearest actual container.
4. The creature starts drowning!
Disturbing fact time! Content warning, I use mice in biomedical research, and we work really really hard to minimize how many we use and what we do to them, but some weird things still have to be done that way. So if you don't wanna know, don't click spoilers.
it's actually pretty hard to drown something this way! Lungs are real real good about getting fluid out if it's not too thick and the animal can cough and move around. To infect mice with the flu we anesthetize them and put the fluid into their nose while they sleep, you can put a surprising amount while they are still unconscious and they'll still be fine. If they are under lightly at all they will cough it up and often not even get infected. So what I'd expect from a real simulationist bent is that character is for sure disabled for a bit, but will absolutely be able to hack up a lung full of water. Now if you could do the full 10 gallons and force it to be pressurized then sure, I'm pretty sure burst lungs don't work so hot.(human lungs are a bit over a gallon and a half.
Suppose your game world only had three seasons. What are they, what do they represent, and what sort of ecological/astronomical events signal each season?
So in my brainstorming for my future yuan-ti centric campaign I've come up with a concept for a lieutenant of the BBEG that, while I personally find it very compelling, is also probably the darkest scenario I've ever considered for a D&D game. I'm hesitant to use it for fear that a player could find it upsetting (though I could perhaps make it so the full truth surrounding this character never comes to light, meaning that the potentially upsetting parts might never come up).
I'll go ahead and post my brainstorming notes here, which outline the character's potential role in the campaign, her backstory, and her goals.
- She is a member of a secret group composed of yuan-ti purebloods who escaped the cult of Zehir and wish to live normal lives by passing as humans.
- She wrote a rebuttal to a recently published bigoted screed against the yuan-ti and secretly distributed pamphlets containing her writings throughout the city; the pureblood escapees greatly admire her for it and hope it will help lead to a future where they can live openly as yuan-ti.
- She hides a dark secret. In truth, she was not born yuan-ti, unlike her peers. She was a human orphan who suffered from a torturous psychological illness that even a powerful wandering cleric was unable to cure her of. In despair, she eventually attempted to acquire poison to end her life, but was told by the seller, a Zehir cultist, that becoming a yuan-ti would cure her of her malady. Desperate for this last chance at relief, she murdered someone the cult had deemed unworthy of apotheosis and ate of their corpse, as required by the cult of Zehir, before undergoing the human sacrifice ritual that reshaped her into a yuan-ti pureblood. She survived the transformation, and her debilitating mental illness was gone, as promised. In her gratitude that her long time suffering had finally come to an end she became a fanatically loyal follower of Zehir and agreed to infiltrate the cult escapees.
- She believes that humanity needs to be replaced by the mentally hardy yuan-ti; she thinks this would be a mercy that would prevent countless others from suffering as she did.
- Unbeknownst to her, this was all part of a long con. The cult of Zehir cursed her in secret as a child, inflicting upon her the incurable malady. Her own parents were involved, giving birth to her for the sake of the cult's future plans before becoming yuan-ti themselves. One of her parents eventually perished, but the other has risen in the cult's ranks in the decades since, though she is completely unaware of this.
- She eventually kidnaps her yuan-ti pureblood "friends" to try and force them back into the cult, attempting to force them to eat human meat as she once did (primarily procured through humans who did not survive the yuan-ti apotheosis ritual) as part of their atonement to Zehir.
- She despises the long-dead, unknown creator god of humanity for giving humans minds prone to pointless mental suffering and thinks "justice" has yet to be delivered. As such she has become an Oath of Vengeance Paladin whose sworn enemy is a god that has been dead since time immemorial. She wants to learn the deity's identity, is aware of another section of the Zehir cult's experiments with time travel and alternate timelines, and wants to find a way to manipulate time so that the god can be offered up as a sacrifice for Zehir to torture and devour as many times as he wishes for all eternity. She hopes in the process that Zehir will be able to alter the past so that humankind will have been completely transformed into the superior yuan-ti since the dawn of history.
- Presenting proof that the cult was responsible for her past suffering does not faze her. She still believes all mental suffering experienced by humanity since the race's creation is the dead god of humanity's fault, and that the curse inflicted upon her was Zehir's way of preparing her for her holy mission.
- Through time manipulation the curse inflicted upon her as a child could be prevented. She would have never had to endure her suffering, never become a yuan-ti devotee of Zehir, and never gotten involved with the yuan-ti pureblood cult escapees who simply wish to live normal lives free of the influence of Zehir. She is aware of this possibility but believes that it would be a supremely selfish betrayal of all humankind, who desperately need to be remade into the mentally resilient yuan-ti to prevent future mental suffering.
Regarding the time travel stuff, the cult of Zehir is in the infancy of its research and is being very cautious about it. In contrast, this character (who isn't even on the chronurgical research team) secretly wants to essentially abandon her current assignment, hijack the project by staging a coup, and fuck around wildly with the time stream, which would put her in direct opposition to the current leader of the cult of Zehir's wishes and make her target number one for elimination.
@Tox This is a great prompt! I'm sort of working on a steampunk-y flying islands setting, where all of the islands float in a river of magic. I hadn't thought about seasons, but I want to say they go with the flow of the river.
Tropical countries have Hot and Wet seasons. I'd probably add a Dry as the third season after Wet - basically cold / dry (but not wintry cold).
This is essentially the Indian system of seasons, I believe - Summer, Monsoon, and Winter
Not Table top at all but one of the purest expressions of non verbal communication I have seen was traveling through northern india during the summer, riiiiight on the cusp of the start of the wet season. Talking 110 in the shade every day, choosing to take your shower late in the day for a hot one (the tanks were on the roof) or in the morning for a cool one (tanks were on the roof). Stopped in the Indian equivilant of a truck stop gas up/restaraunt when clouds start to come in and the bottom just drops right out. Just a fuckin' torrent where you can't hear anything over the pounding rain on the roof and everywhere else. I swear at that moment anyone in there would have kissed whoever was next to them as a brother and a lover. Just this HUGE tension being let out with the weather. Each person visibly relaxing, leaning back, smiling, free food came out for everyone for no reason, just a bunch of dumb college kids and overworked truckers stuffing face and enjoying the arguably horrible weather.
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
In the interest of "telling a Player No" a long-standing friendly debate I've had with a player is whether or not she can cast Create Water and drown a humanoid creature.
Spell text "You create up to 10 gallons of clean water within range in an open container. Alternatively, the water falls as rain in a 30-foot cube within range, extinguishing exposed flames in the area."
I argue that the respiratory system is not an open container. She seems to disagree.
Given that spells which affect an area instead of a creature require line of sight unless otherwise specified and human lungs are not visible externally, you cannot create water inside lungs.
edit: Also if their mouth is closed it's not an open container so you'd need them to hold their mouth open during the 6 second duration of the spell cast. Seems unlikely.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I would say that a container pretty firmly refers to an object, and a living organism would not apply
The whole thing also has some questionable anatomy. The lungs aren't just big balloons that are empty and you can fill 'em with stuff, so even if you are allowing living organic containers, I would say that maybe you could fill the mouth, but you both cannot see the lungs and they aren't really containers.
However, with the rule of cool in force I do think you could fill a zombie up, or a golem. They won’t care, but I’ll slow them down considerably.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
edited August 2020
Spell text is an example of one of my big beefs with almost every edition (bar 4th) of D&D.
Most D&D - even during combat, the most regimented and organized part of the game - takes place in a very vague fictive space. A character doing melee attacks rolls to do a few points of fight damage to an enemy in a period of time that could last as long as a minute (the length of combat rounds for the first 26 years of D&D's life). Any more detail than that - "you wave your sword and do 6 points of fight" - is called "flavor" and treated with a kind of bemused tolerance. "Sure, Dave, you can say you tackle the orc if you want."
But everyone knows it didn't really happen that way. Dave waved his fightstick and did fight. If he insisted too strongly on any other outcome of his actions, everyone would get impatient or even upset at this spotlight-hugging lame-o. Most characters at most times in D&D have to live with the fact that the only real thing they do per the game rules is make number go down man go die. Or they can pay a bunch of feats to do, like, one other thing.
MEANWHILE
Spells, completely unlike the entire rest of the game, are written in hyper-precise, wildly over-detailed, legalistic language.
D&D spell text be like
"this spell creates 10d100 cubic meters of chocolate Jell-O in a spherical volume, though the Jell-O immediately flows to conform to the shape of any sufficiently large container. Living beings may choose to eat the Jell-O as a full-round action, healing 2 HP per attempt, though must make a DC 10 Constitution save each subsequent round to avoid tummyache. A butterfly with 1d3 hit points flaps its wings near the caster. Meanwhile, 6d10 kilometers away, a pregnant woman (see Table 16-3 for race and age) gives birth to a child named Jellosophes weighing 3d6+5 ounces. Eighteen years from now, the child will have a GPA of (1d4) point (1d10) at the nearest wizard's college or barding school on the same plane of existence.
The Jell-O vanishes after 10 rounds."
And it invites this insane, Talmudic scrutiny from players poring over the text like they're death row lawyers preparing a hail mary case, and it invites them to play this stupid fucking adversarial game where they try and catch the DM out with some kind of "it doesn't say a dog can't play basketball" bullshit.
Meanwhile, the fighter who just wants to do literally anything besides swing a sword? That guy can eat shit.
The reason people got super mad at 4th edition is because it expected wizards to play on that field too, instead of getting to directly alter the fiction in a way no other class could. Now everyone rolls to make number go down, and they fucking hated it.
That's why my game has all the not-Talmudic stuff available to every kind of character, not just wizardy types!
You shouldn't let Create And Destroy Water target creatures, it doesn't have any text about that in the spell and should really have some text saying you can't drown or desiccate things with it. My ranger tried to convince me that his Favored Enemy: Plants feature should apply to making wine, I told him that I would grant him advantage if he attacked a barrel of wine, but he wasn't doing that.
Tropical countries have Hot and Wet seasons. I'd probably add a Dry as the third season after Wet - basically cold / dry (but not wintry cold).
This is essentially the Indian system of seasons, I believe - Summer, Monsoon, and Winter
Not Table top at all but one of the purest expressions of non verbal communication I have seen was traveling through northern india during the summer, riiiiight on the cusp of the start of the wet season. Talking 110 in the shade every day, choosing to take your shower late in the day for a hot one (the tanks were on the roof) or in the morning for a cool one (tanks were on the roof). Stopped in the Indian equivilant of a truck stop gas up/restaraunt when clouds start to come in and the bottom just drops right out. Just a fuckin' torrent where you can't hear anything over the pounding rain on the roof and everywhere else. I swear at that moment anyone in there would have kissed whoever was next to them as a brother and a lover. Just this HUGE tension being let out with the weather. Each person visibly relaxing, leaning back, smiling, free food came out for everyone for no reason, just a bunch of dumb college kids and overworked truckers stuffing face and enjoying the arguably horrible weather.
Trying to do anything in that sort of rain is the angriest I’ll ever be.
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
Spell text is an example of one of my big beefs with almost every edition (bar 4th) of D&D.
Most D&D - even during combat, the most regimented and organized part of the game - takes place in a very vague fictive space. A character doing melee attacks rolls to do a few points of fight damage to an enemy in a period of time that could last as long as a minute (the length of combat rounds for the first 26 years of D&D's life). Any more detail than that - "you wave your sword and do 6 points of fight" - is called "flavor" and treated with a kind of bemused tolerance. "Sure, Dave, you can say you tackle the orc if you want."
But everyone knows it didn't really happen that way. Dave waved his fightstick and did fight. If he insisted too strongly on any other outcome of his actions, everyone would get impatient or even upset at this spotlight-hugging lame-o. Most characters at most times in D&D have to live with the fact that the only real thing they do per the game rules is make number go down man go die. Or they can pay a bunch of feats to do, like, one other thing.
MEANWHILE
Spells, completely unlike the entire rest of the game, are written in hyper-precise, wildly over-detailed, legalistic language.
D&D spell text be like
"this spell creates 10d100 cubic meters of chocolate Jell-O in a spherical volume, though the Jell-O immediately flows to conform to the shape of any sufficiently large container. Living beings may choose to eat the Jell-O as a full-round action, healing 2 HP per attempt, though must make a DC 10 Constitution save each subsequent round to avoid tummyache. A butterfly with 1d3 hit points flaps its wings near the caster. Meanwhile, 6d10 kilometers away, a pregnant woman (see Table 16-3 for race and age) gives birth to a child named Jellosophes weighing 3d6+5 ounces. Eighteen years from now, the child will have a GPA of (1d4) point (1d10) at the nearest wizard's college or barding school on the same plane of existence.
The Jell-O vanishes after 10 rounds."
And it invites this insane, Talmudic scrutiny from players poring over the text like they're death row lawyers preparing a hail mary case, and it invites them to play this stupid fucking adversarial game where they try and catch the DM out with some kind of "it doesn't say a dog can't play basketball" bullshit.
Meanwhile, the fighter who just wants to do literally anything besides swing a sword? That guy can eat shit.
The reason people got super mad at 4th edition is because it expected wizards to play on that field too, instead of getting to directly alter the fiction in a way no other class could. Now everyone rolls to make number go down, and they fucking hated it.
There are very detailed rules for combat that let you grapple, tackle, push, etc, though? And associated feats and even class options for the Fighter and Paladin?
Players don't read them, but they are definitely there.
Spell text is an example of one of my big beefs with almost every edition (bar 4th) of D&D.
Most D&D - even during combat, the most regimented and organized part of the game - takes place in a very vague fictive space. A character doing melee attacks rolls to do a few points of fight damage to an enemy in a period of time that could last as long as a minute (the length of combat rounds for the first 26 years of D&D's life). Any more detail than that - "you wave your sword and do 6 points of fight" - is called "flavor" and treated with a kind of bemused tolerance. "Sure, Dave, you can say you tackle the orc if you want."
But everyone knows it didn't really happen that way. Dave waved his fightstick and did fight. If he insisted too strongly on any other outcome of his actions, everyone would get impatient or even upset at this spotlight-hugging lame-o. Most characters at most times in D&D have to live with the fact that the only real thing they do per the game rules is make number go down man go die. Or they can pay a bunch of feats to do, like, one other thing.
MEANWHILE
Spells, completely unlike the entire rest of the game, are written in hyper-precise, wildly over-detailed, legalistic language.
D&D spell text be like
"this spell creates 10d100 cubic meters of chocolate Jell-O in a spherical volume, though the Jell-O immediately flows to conform to the shape of any sufficiently large container. Living beings may choose to eat the Jell-O as a full-round action, healing 2 HP per attempt, though must make a DC 10 Constitution save each subsequent round to avoid tummyache. A butterfly with 1d3 hit points flaps its wings near the caster. Meanwhile, 6d10 kilometers away, a pregnant woman (see Table 16-3 for race and age) gives birth to a child named Jellosophes weighing 3d6+5 ounces. Eighteen years from now, the child will have a GPA of (1d4) point (1d10) at the nearest wizard's college or barding school on the same plane of existence.
The Jell-O vanishes after 10 rounds."
And it invites this insane, Talmudic scrutiny from players poring over the text like they're death row lawyers preparing a hail mary case, and it invites them to play this stupid fucking adversarial game where they try and catch the DM out with some kind of "it doesn't say a dog can't play basketball" bullshit.
Meanwhile, the fighter who just wants to do literally anything besides swing a sword? That guy can eat shit.
The reason people got super mad at 4th edition is because it expected wizards to play on that field too, instead of getting to directly alter the fiction in a way no other class could. Now everyone rolls to make number go down, and they fucking hated it.
I always wondered why people thought 4e sucked when the ability component seemed like an actual improvement over previous editions.
"It makes DND more like WoW!"
Okay, and? WoW has cool abilities for everyone not just the wizards.
It's why I try to add a lot of flavor to combat for everyone so that it's more exciting:
A near-miss becomes "your axe grazes their armor, letting out a chilling screech"
a miss becomes "they dodge out of the way of your axe, it slams directly into the wooden planks, splitting it in two"
a near-hit becomes "your axe pierces their chainmail, sending an arc of blood through the air"
and a high hit or crit that doesn't kill them becomes "you chop off their fucking arm you badass motherfucker"
One thing I picked up from one of my friends that DMs is to let the player choose the killing blow. "How do you wanna do this" is the best phrase in combat because it means "aw shit that mofo gonna die I can do what I want"
It's also why I ended up with so many severed heads in that campaign.
I wonder if one of the better ways you could do magic is to have a player select a narrow focus, say, freeze, and then they have to make a ‘bullshit check’ to determine whether they do what they said they do.
I create a bridge of ice!
How stable is it? Can it reach that far? Does it take long to make? Does it exhaust the mage?
Edit: I haven’t played Mage: The Subtitle, is that just Mage?
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In this instance, I would have said "your spell fails. You don't know why" and then incorporated that as part of the mystery somehow.
There's your hook, best of luck with the investigation
It is just going to involve more improvisation
EDIT: Like in this situation, yeah absolutely you can ask the person who killed them, it just changes from a murder mystery to something else. Maybe their killer makes it uniquely difficult to bring them to justice, maybe you find the killer and they don't remember doing it and detection spells confirm they're telling the truth, etc etc etc
EDIT: Maybe they talk to you and refuse to tell you! Why would they do that? Are they protecting someone? Who knows!
"No, but" is very useful to include, and IMO, is much more useful than "Yes, and" for RPGs. I don't think saying yes to everything is likely to create a game that many people would enjoy; though some people will enjoy that, of course, and there's nothing wrong with that, I don't think it has wide appeaal. I think "No, but" in appropriate circumstances is going to land with a lot more people.
edit to respond to edits: I think those are good examples of "No, but" in action. The players don't get what they wanted, but they get something.
DIESEL
Against the Fall of Night Playtest
Nasty, Brutish, and Short
The most powerful of all deities, Myria, kickstarted a war at the dawn of time by putting up a fraction of her divine power for the mortal races to compete for. The ancestor gods of each race pushed their creations to win the war and obtain the shard of Myria's power, all save for the dragon god Ladon. Instead, his Brood was tasked with defeating and banishing Myria to end the war. The temptation of greater power proved too much for many of the dragons, though, and eventually the other races had to flee as the conflict became the Brood War, one between dragons who remained loyal to Ladon and dragons who coveted Myria's prize.
As a last ditch effort, Ladon brought together an adventuring party made up of members of the various races led by the champion of the Brood. Together they ended the war by fighting their way to Myria and banishing her to an extraplanar prison, ensuring no one would receive the prize she offered.
The treacherous dragons who had defied Ladon fled, and the rest of the gods, ashamed that they had encouraged violence among the peoples of the world, departed for parts unknown.
Unfortunately, the defeat and banishment of Myria left a "scar" upon reality that manifested as her "son", the demon lord Deathevan. Ladon sent the Brood into the underworld to await the emergence of Deathevan while he himself slept to regain his strength so that they could one day prevent Deathevan and his demons from reaching the surface. However, with the ancestor gods gone, Ladon asleep, and the Brood keeping watch in the underworld, Deathevan's servant Barubary has managed to inspire a seemingly peaceful religion called the Church of Saint Evans whose followers' prayers secretly feed and empower the demon lord. As demons begin to increase in number throughout the world, many of which being former people overwhelmed by sin, the prayers to the false god only increase...
In terms of races, the most interesting departure from D&D may be the fishlike manillo. These undersea people are the major drivers of commerce throughout the world, emerging from the oceans to work as merchants in port cities and helping to guard sailing ships from attack along the sea trade routes they've established.
Breath of Fire 2 in particular had a system of bringing together elemental spirits that could be infused into the party members. In certain cases a party member could fuse with one or more spirits to attain a radically different form and new abilities.
And of course if you just got murder the perpetrator, you're now wanted criminals and would need to build a case in order to prove yourself innocent (or you just have a reason as the DM to constantly be throwing weirdo bounty hunters after the players).
I mean, yes, this is exactly what happened. And there were some hasty crossing out of notes and prep having to be reworked on the fly because the adventure as prepared was remarkably outflanked.
'Broken' isn't a non-recoverable state absent of improvisation. It just means the adventure has gone off-script and the DM is leaning on thinking faster than the players until they can get out ahead of them again.
We don't really view it as a fail state. But the fact that it always seems to be something innocuous I do is amusing and provokes both group in-jokes and long-suffering exasperated DM sighs.
Any murderer in a world where speak with dead exists should wear a mask at the very least, but if time allows should cut off the victim's head to take with them (if they're interested in using speak with dead themselves) or utterly destroy the head with acid or a bludgeoning weapon.
"I do not know. He was a man. Carrying a fish."
One big ol' demon takes a pot shot at my Artificer with its bow.
This turns out to be a mistake! A big mistake, as I use Catapult to send the arrow back... With interest
Then my Eldritch cannon opens fire and crits the Demon
Which got described as the arrow smacking into the demons throat followed by the force ballista shot hammering it through
Anyway, there's one less demon to worry about now, on account of it not having a head nor neck anymore!
40 damage in one round as a level 3 character. Do not fuck with Artificers, they will end you
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At level 2, we killed a demon form this same realm that was tormenting & controlling monkeys (and that's how we got level 3, kids!). My artificer ended up modeling her Eldritch Cannon on said monkeys in tribute to them.
So... If you squint a bit, it's Karma coming back around to send a real firm message to the demons about monkey-torture.
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I am enjoying my cleric at least. Fun being kind of an asshole, though I did end up feeling bad about something. Our Simic Monk attuned himself to a very powerful artifact. It was also cursed! So he loses possession of it he is struck blind and deaf. Queue us being arrested this episode. Now, my cleric managed to talk his way out of jail to help as the Gruul attacked, burning some of my spell slots to heal Azorius troops in exchange. Our Monk... was not so lucky. Partially because he tried to lie to them when they had a precognitive mage ready to detect lies. So they took his artifact and got it into storage. After properly gaining the respect and admiration of the Azorius on site by healing their wounded and performing last rites for the dead, I convinced them to release him "If worse comes to worse, he'll be a corpse you can shove to the Gruul to slow them down!" But after giving the rest of the party ample chance grab it themselves, I took the artifact to use as leverage. After repelling the Monk's attempts to take it back, I did remind our Barbarian out of character he could trivially subdue me.
One of the sillier pleasures I have is coming up with ways to describe my spells. For my Artificer it was of course zany gadgets, but I've tried to put some thought into how Orzhovan spells would look. I think the biggest hit was when I described Guidance (and later bless) as conjuring a will-o-wisp to float around the player and assist. Our Barbarian poked it suspiciously, so I responded in a Droopy Dog voice "Please sir, I just need to pay off this debt really badly." I'm looking forward to Spirit Guardians next level when I can describe my cleric conjuring his late father's crew, who are also modeled after the four horseman (a skeletal minotaur berserker with a huge sword, a short skeleton bedecked in gold and jewels with orzhov designs holding scales, a tall gaunt shadow shaped like a cloak carrying a scythe, and an athletic cloaked assassin with a bow and a death mask with a crown design).
[Edit]
Oh! And I have vague ideas of layers on layers for the few main story arcs I've loosely plotted, so if the encounter ends with the PCs being extra-very clever or super-lucky and they beat the BBEG in baby-form, well, they weren't really in charge of it all after all--just the areas the PCs had learned about up to now. (Or whatever... as appropriate. If that particular plotline would end there, that's okay... my experience as a PC tells me that we're always opening up plot threads and avenues to take a story.
It demonstrated that he was out of our league while not directly threatening our lives
He did kill the Druid's animal companion, though, as a demonstration of force that gave us additional motivation to take him down
Spell text "You create up to 10 gallons of clean water within range in an open container. Alternatively, the water falls as rain in a 30-foot cube within range, extinguishing exposed flames in the area."
I argue that the respiratory system is not an open container. She seems to disagree.
Maybe an additional 1d4 roll if you want to let the dice decide.
1. The spell fails.
2. The spell throws itself at the creature, soaking them, but doesn’t drown them.
3. The spell fills the nearest actual container.
4. The creature starts drowning!
Disturbing fact time! Content warning, I use mice in biomedical research, and we work really really hard to minimize how many we use and what we do to them, but some weird things still have to be done that way. So if you don't wanna know, don't click spoilers.
Suppose your game world only had three seasons. What are they, what do they represent, and what sort of ecological/astronomical events signal each season?
Flood, Winter, Harvest
This is essentially the Indian system of seasons, I believe - Summer, Monsoon, and Winter
I'll go ahead and post my brainstorming notes here, which outline the character's potential role in the campaign, her backstory, and her goals.
- She wrote a rebuttal to a recently published bigoted screed against the yuan-ti and secretly distributed pamphlets containing her writings throughout the city; the pureblood escapees greatly admire her for it and hope it will help lead to a future where they can live openly as yuan-ti.
- She hides a dark secret. In truth, she was not born yuan-ti, unlike her peers. She was a human orphan who suffered from a torturous psychological illness that even a powerful wandering cleric was unable to cure her of. In despair, she eventually attempted to acquire poison to end her life, but was told by the seller, a Zehir cultist, that becoming a yuan-ti would cure her of her malady. Desperate for this last chance at relief, she murdered someone the cult had deemed unworthy of apotheosis and ate of their corpse, as required by the cult of Zehir, before undergoing the human sacrifice ritual that reshaped her into a yuan-ti pureblood. She survived the transformation, and her debilitating mental illness was gone, as promised. In her gratitude that her long time suffering had finally come to an end she became a fanatically loyal follower of Zehir and agreed to infiltrate the cult escapees.
- She believes that humanity needs to be replaced by the mentally hardy yuan-ti; she thinks this would be a mercy that would prevent countless others from suffering as she did.
- Unbeknownst to her, this was all part of a long con. The cult of Zehir cursed her in secret as a child, inflicting upon her the incurable malady. Her own parents were involved, giving birth to her for the sake of the cult's future plans before becoming yuan-ti themselves. One of her parents eventually perished, but the other has risen in the cult's ranks in the decades since, though she is completely unaware of this.
- She eventually kidnaps her yuan-ti pureblood "friends" to try and force them back into the cult, attempting to force them to eat human meat as she once did (primarily procured through humans who did not survive the yuan-ti apotheosis ritual) as part of their atonement to Zehir.
- She despises the long-dead, unknown creator god of humanity for giving humans minds prone to pointless mental suffering and thinks "justice" has yet to be delivered. As such she has become an Oath of Vengeance Paladin whose sworn enemy is a god that has been dead since time immemorial. She wants to learn the deity's identity, is aware of another section of the Zehir cult's experiments with time travel and alternate timelines, and wants to find a way to manipulate time so that the god can be offered up as a sacrifice for Zehir to torture and devour as many times as he wishes for all eternity. She hopes in the process that Zehir will be able to alter the past so that humankind will have been completely transformed into the superior yuan-ti since the dawn of history.
- Presenting proof that the cult was responsible for her past suffering does not faze her. She still believes all mental suffering experienced by humanity since the race's creation is the dead god of humanity's fault, and that the curse inflicted upon her was Zehir's way of preparing her for her holy mission.
- Through time manipulation the curse inflicted upon her as a child could be prevented. She would have never had to endure her suffering, never become a yuan-ti devotee of Zehir, and never gotten involved with the yuan-ti pureblood cult escapees who simply wish to live normal lives free of the influence of Zehir. She is aware of this possibility but believes that it would be a supremely selfish betrayal of all humankind, who desperately need to be remade into the mentally resilient yuan-ti to prevent future mental suffering.
Regarding the time travel stuff, the cult of Zehir is in the infancy of its research and is being very cautious about it. In contrast, this character (who isn't even on the chronurgical research team) secretly wants to essentially abandon her current assignment, hijack the project by staging a coup, and fuck around wildly with the time stream, which would put her in direct opposition to the current leader of the cult of Zehir's wishes and make her target number one for elimination.
Not Table top at all but one of the purest expressions of non verbal communication I have seen was traveling through northern india during the summer, riiiiight on the cusp of the start of the wet season. Talking 110 in the shade every day, choosing to take your shower late in the day for a hot one (the tanks were on the roof) or in the morning for a cool one (tanks were on the roof). Stopped in the Indian equivilant of a truck stop gas up/restaraunt when clouds start to come in and the bottom just drops right out. Just a fuckin' torrent where you can't hear anything over the pounding rain on the roof and everywhere else. I swear at that moment anyone in there would have kissed whoever was next to them as a brother and a lover. Just this HUGE tension being let out with the weather. Each person visibly relaxing, leaning back, smiling, free food came out for everyone for no reason, just a bunch of dumb college kids and overworked truckers stuffing face and enjoying the arguably horrible weather.
Given that spells which affect an area instead of a creature require line of sight unless otherwise specified and human lungs are not visible externally, you cannot create water inside lungs.
edit: Also if their mouth is closed it's not an open container so you'd need them to hold their mouth open during the 6 second duration of the spell cast. Seems unlikely.
The whole thing also has some questionable anatomy. The lungs aren't just big balloons that are empty and you can fill 'em with stuff, so even if you are allowing living organic containers, I would say that maybe you could fill the mouth, but you both cannot see the lungs and they aren't really containers.
Most D&D - even during combat, the most regimented and organized part of the game - takes place in a very vague fictive space. A character doing melee attacks rolls to do a few points of fight damage to an enemy in a period of time that could last as long as a minute (the length of combat rounds for the first 26 years of D&D's life). Any more detail than that - "you wave your sword and do 6 points of fight" - is called "flavor" and treated with a kind of bemused tolerance. "Sure, Dave, you can say you tackle the orc if you want."
But everyone knows it didn't really happen that way. Dave waved his fightstick and did fight. If he insisted too strongly on any other outcome of his actions, everyone would get impatient or even upset at this spotlight-hugging lame-o. Most characters at most times in D&D have to live with the fact that the only real thing they do per the game rules is make number go down man go die. Or they can pay a bunch of feats to do, like, one other thing.
MEANWHILE
Spells, completely unlike the entire rest of the game, are written in hyper-precise, wildly over-detailed, legalistic language.
D&D spell text be like
"this spell creates 10d100 cubic meters of chocolate Jell-O in a spherical volume, though the Jell-O immediately flows to conform to the shape of any sufficiently large container. Living beings may choose to eat the Jell-O as a full-round action, healing 2 HP per attempt, though must make a DC 10 Constitution save each subsequent round to avoid tummyache. A butterfly with 1d3 hit points flaps its wings near the caster. Meanwhile, 6d10 kilometers away, a pregnant woman (see Table 16-3 for race and age) gives birth to a child named Jellosophes weighing 3d6+5 ounces. Eighteen years from now, the child will have a GPA of (1d4) point (1d10) at the nearest wizard's college or barding school on the same plane of existence.
The Jell-O vanishes after 10 rounds."
And it invites this insane, Talmudic scrutiny from players poring over the text like they're death row lawyers preparing a hail mary case, and it invites them to play this stupid fucking adversarial game where they try and catch the DM out with some kind of "it doesn't say a dog can't play basketball" bullshit.
Meanwhile, the fighter who just wants to do literally anything besides swing a sword? That guy can eat shit.
The reason people got super mad at 4th edition is because it expected wizards to play on that field too, instead of getting to directly alter the fiction in a way no other class could. Now everyone rolls to make number go down, and they fucking hated it.
You shouldn't let Create And Destroy Water target creatures, it doesn't have any text about that in the spell and should really have some text saying you can't drown or desiccate things with it. My ranger tried to convince me that his Favored Enemy: Plants feature should apply to making wine, I told him that I would grant him advantage if he attacked a barrel of wine, but he wasn't doing that.
“Um, is that? Is that how you make wine?”
The ranger is barefoot, just elbow dropping into a pit of grapes.
“The bitter wine of vengeance!”
*gets alcohol poisoning and dies*
Trying to do anything in that sort of rain is the angriest I’ll ever be.
There are very detailed rules for combat that let you grapple, tackle, push, etc, though? And associated feats and even class options for the Fighter and Paladin?
Players don't read them, but they are definitely there.
I always wondered why people thought 4e sucked when the ability component seemed like an actual improvement over previous editions.
"It makes DND more like WoW!"
Okay, and? WoW has cool abilities for everyone not just the wizards.
It's why I try to add a lot of flavor to combat for everyone so that it's more exciting:
A near-miss becomes "your axe grazes their armor, letting out a chilling screech"
a miss becomes "they dodge out of the way of your axe, it slams directly into the wooden planks, splitting it in two"
a near-hit becomes "your axe pierces their chainmail, sending an arc of blood through the air"
and a high hit or crit that doesn't kill them becomes "you chop off their fucking arm you badass motherfucker"
One thing I picked up from one of my friends that DMs is to let the player choose the killing blow. "How do you wanna do this" is the best phrase in combat because it means "aw shit that mofo gonna die I can do what I want"
It's also why I ended up with so many severed heads in that campaign.
I create a bridge of ice!
How stable is it? Can it reach that far? Does it take long to make? Does it exhaust the mage?
Edit: I haven’t played Mage: The Subtitle, is that just Mage?