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Into the Odd [Tabletop Roleplaying] Appreciation Zone
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It'll be taking place in a circus, which gave me ample material to work with! It's also essentially home turf for one of the PCs, so I decided it would be fun to have lair actions that are favourable to the players.
The players are starting at level 5 and all have some experience, but I'm curious if you guys think this is too much, or if there are adjustments I should make.
The darker something is, the higher up it is!
1: Audience seating. This will probably be where two members of the party start, and there will be bystanders to protect.
2: Ice rink. One member of the party, Eteri, will probably start here. It will have the secondary effect of Sleet Storm (difficult terrain, dex saving throw to not fall prone) for everyone but Eteri.
3: Platform (performing awakened animals). On initiative 15, enemies on this platform will be attacked by animals.
4: Platform (illusionist). On initative 10, the illuisionist will cast minor illusion on this platform to attempt to divert an enemy attack.
5: Platform (strongwoman clown). on initiative 5, enemies on this platform will need a dex saving throw to avoid knives, barbells or fiery juggling clubs.
6: See-saws.
7: Ladders.
There is a second story 30 feet up which players can attempt to reach by climbing up the platforms, taking a longer safer route up the ladders, or (i'm hoping) by catapulting themselves up using the see-saws.
8: Trapezes. Creatures will need to use an action to hook a trapeze towards them, and use their full movement to make acrobatics checks to move to the other side (or stop at any trapeze).
9: Highwire. Creatures make an acrobatics check when getting on and at the start of each of their turns - DC6 to stay on the rope, DC12 to not treat it as difficult terrain. If they take damage, DC10 dex saving throw to stay on. They will also pass through a ring of fire and a ring of lightning - acrobatics or dex save (player's choice) to not take damage from them.
How are you going to deal with bystander damage? Are they going to try and run for the exits, maybe creating difficult terrain if your players try to run through them?
True, and I don't want to clog up the initiative too much (the bystanders have to move as well, after all) so I may cut out the lair actions and bring them in if the fight is proving too tough.
Yeah, I think having the bystanders move to the exit is a great idea - the creatures will attack at random (probably decided by dice roll) unless they're being engaged. The audience will have commoner stats, and a few key NPCs (Eteri's fellow performers and parents) will have a bit more hp, but be in more danger since they're further from the exit.
Kinda smells like just the basic Telekinesis spell, honestly, so you could use that as your starting point.
https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Telekinesis#content
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
once you've got telekinesis do you just start carrying tarps around because moving an object isn't contested by strength? like, can you pick up an object that a creature is standing on or holding onto (but not wearing or carrying)?
Depends on if you're playing Magic Carpet Ride by Steppenwolf or not.
Disadvantages of playing a 4000 year old spirit all about the philosophy of a harmonious and proper death: Your GM sometimes asks you about the interior politics of that community which needs way more writing than you wanted to put into "I am the anti-undead deertaur lady"
This just makes me wince as I remember every adversarial dnd DM I've ever had (damn near all of them)
"Oh, the thing insta-gibbed me? The thing you led me to think was plot related and completely necessary to access, but actually there was no way for me to touch it and not die?"
Sometimes it wasn't a thing, sometimes it was an invading army.
I do think playing with an adversarial DM can be fun if everyone knows what's happening and the DM isn't just being an asshole. That puzzle box probably still not okay even by those standards, like...I think I'd put some warning signs up in story, ask if you were sure, and then probably just knock you out and turn it into a challenge to get you out of it. I like the idea of extremely dangerous artifacts that you shouldn't be playing around with, especially at third level, but there are ways to have consequences beyond "you're fucking DEAD"
I don’t know why the damage was psychic in particular, but if ‘mind’ was a theme of the box, I might have made failure lead to a Thing hitching a ride in the warlock’s mind. From there you get some fun interactions as the Thing is pursued by the warlocks patron, and some strange agreement is made over time or one supplants the other.
Also: One good way to mix up consequences is to destroy armour, weapons, items, or kill nearby NPC instead of dealing damage to them.
dude on craigslist is selling a bunch of board games, so I now have the collector's edition of Genotype (squee, so lush!), Maiden's Quest, and Watergate for very reasonable/cheap. ...I also proceeded to raid Tuesday Morning for jigsaw puzzles, so y'know, long-term entertainment for the cost of a movie theater experience scored. Now I just need to dig through my stash of notebooks to find one for these free solo rpg°s burning a hole in my pocket, and the personal ludoteca will be fully refreshed for the next little while.
Recently I did have someone die fighting random nonsense. A zombified beholder rolled his disintegration ray and a dwarf fighter who I assumed would be able to tank the blast became literally dusted. We ended up turning that into something narratively with the player who that happened to making another dwarf who has his brother and another player who was his wife wanting to have him brought back to life but I think the fact that we felt we had to do that in the first place says something about how unsatisfying the death was.
I think this is all sort of besides the point though. The stories that started this conversation to me seem to miss even the "point" of how it adversarial DM should act. There's an argument to be made that they shouldn't exist at all but if you're playing that role and it's something everybody wants it seems clear to me that to have any fun at all you have to play it fair. You give someone a box. You decide that any failure to open that box will mean their death. To me this means two things.
First, that you better thoroughly signpost that box. If the players don't know what they're risking you aren't playing fair. If you give them something, tell them That opening it is risky, then that's something. There's a kind of excitement to gambling your character's existence that way. That's basically why the deck of many things is fun. There's no fun in not knowing that you're in any danger, doing something mundane, and then getting told that you died. Congratulations DM. You didn't play fair. Nobody had fun. When I was playing as a teenager both I and other DMs got into this situation a lot. Sometimes it can feel handholdy. Sometimes it can feel like it would be unrealistic for the players to get that information. Doesn't matter how realistic your game is if it sucks.
The second thing is that the DC shouldn't be so stupid high. I'm assuming that this takes place in 5th edition so maybe I have this completely backwards. I'm always seeing these stories online where a DM sets the DC at something absurd. I don't really think DC's should ever go above 20. There are probably exceptions to this but setting your DC to something like 30 always seems like it's trying to beat a PC to the punch when it comes to Min-Maxing. Totally the wrong approach. If a player put a lot of their time and energy into having big numbers on a certain skill then that means that the vast majority of the time, maybe literally 100% of the time, they should succeed at the check. They wanted to be good at the thing so let them be good at the thing. Even for a DM it wants to run things more adversarily this is dumb. It's the same thing as creating an impossible combat encounter. If you want to beat your third level party you can throw a few balors at them. Good for you, you did it. Even in that type of game you wouldn't do that. You'd craft a fair encounter on paper and then use every possible advantage to make things difficult. Also you'd probably lose anyway because when it's four against one the PC's almost always find more shenanigans than you. Skills should be the same way. If you knock someone over the head with an impossible skill DC and then tell them they take enough damage to die you're just being a dick. You haven't won anything you haven't outsmarted anybody. You've just been a dick.
You signpost the dangers of the box. You give it a reasonable but difficult DC. At this point the player is probably don't use the box because most PCs are risk-averse. Sometimes you get someone who likes to play the odds and then you get to have your fun. Maybe they blow up maybe they don't but everybody has a good time. If you really want to push the box issue you could make it a part of the story. Signal to them that an important plot item is in the box. Then maybe they take a second look at it. Then again maybe they don't.
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I need to play with more people, because this hasn't been my experience. And in Acq Inc shows most combat is just hand-waved away after someone spends enough time describing some ridiculous attack plan that is near impossible to translate to actions described in the books.
And when Jump was its own skill?
Hm... I could learn to read, or I could Jump or Spot slightly better...
Was just thinking about that recently.
Maybe barbarians are still illiterate. I don't know 5e.
I'd still want that death to be narratively satisfying and not like, a single impossible failed roll (unless that was somehow the character, but I'm having trouble seeing that exactly still).
It's stupid but I think it would be hilarious
Old-school/OSR style games are often built with death as a major assumption, but it also often takes maybe three to five minutes to roll up a new character. In 3E/4E/5E, it takes serious time and there's background being built and a lot of accounting work that goes into making up a character, and it makes death a much larger concern.
Some elements that occurred during the session:
-- The party summoned as many beasts from their two Bags of Tricks to stop Gregory the Choldrith from advancing upon them, when he realized they were taking too long to bring him children to eat.
-- Last night I settled on who Gregory the Choldrith was in personality & demeanor:
-- The party backtracked to the Choldrith's lair, which was adorned with dead bodies webbed to ceiling planks so that Gregory could put on stage-plays with his "puppets." And naturally, these being D&D players, they stole Gregory's stage play manuscripts, his treasure, and burnt his bedroom for good measure. My players are such assholes...
-- The party then escorted the rescued children back out of the Shadow Maze, returning to the Nu-Metal music festival where the adventure began. And to leave it, without being truly noticed, they had their summoned panther attack Fred Durst (who was on stage).
-- When they returned to their lodging, their landlord tried to recruit them into becoming a protection squad for his restaurant mafia. They aggressively turned down his offer, RUDE!
-- I ended the session with some cut-scenes of what was happening to their enemies. In fact, this party has managed to keep every villain alive, a feat the MCU still hasn't managed!!
The party got some new treasure, they leveled up, and we have a new adventure starting this Friday.
He admitted he fucked up sign posting the danger, but we also were towards the end of the adventure and were rushing a bit so we went for it fast on our ends. If it has just been me I think he would have tried to fix it but two more people also immediately tried after me, one dying as well and the second dumping every bonus/inspiration thing he had to succeed.
A brutal and unpoetic end, but my warlock had already started a cult within the school so it might work out fun narratively. Cults don't usually care about the specifics of their martyrs death, just how they can spin it.
I haven't watched any Acquisitions Inc, but I do not understand how they can just openly admit "This game cannot be trusted to resolve encounters in fun and interesting ways" without moving on to a system that can actually do that. It boggles my mind
They've actually moved away from resolving encounters in fun and interesting ways, back when they had more time and wanted to showcase more of the system they spent a lot of time in big set-piece encounters and they could spend 15 minutes just resolving these big conflicts/battles until they either ran out of time or hit a threshold they'd somehow do a crazy amount of damage and move on. This was when they had a steady schedule of live games and podcasts and could reliably play for 2 hour long live games every few months during PAX-season. I'm not sure how this is going to develop further, but with Mike bowing out and no designated DM to replace Chris Perkins it seems like the whole "campaign" (for want of a better word) is winding down.
I think their Chult game was the best example of big set-piece encounters, with a lot of time spent manipulating a dinosaur race, an actual combat encounter in a palace and then going into the jungle. Obviously Chris Perkins was not going to spoil the actual campaign, so he had a new NPC who had backstage access to one of the big dungeons in that module, so they'd literally run between the walls to skip the big dungeon in a slightly satisfying way.
Legion of doom incoming?
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No one's character is the guy who gets fucked up in a few fights then has to retire. You always get continual growth till you die.
Which is a real limiting factor on how you can tell stories.
Oh, no, likely not.
I just think its nice to populate the world with prior NPCs with very concrete histories related to the players.
Which character? Oh, that was determined by a roll of the die.
The character chosen was the party's fighter, whose backstory talks about them serving as a peace-keeper (which happens to match up chronologically with the prior continent-wide war).
So... Because I am a very good DM, I'm gonna take inspiration from one of my favorite 'former-soldier' stories:
It seems like the exact opposite could be a lot of fun. Characters come in the strongest they will ever be, and only accumulate injuries, stress, fatigue, etc. and become worse with time.
Throw in a mechanic where when a character dies you get bonus points for your next build, so the longer a character lives for the stronger your next character starts. Make retiring give a flat bonus so living through missions is better than retiring but retiring is better than dying mid mission.
I think it would be fun.
Alien has really thorough rules for it, though as someone who's lost way too many V:TM characters(admittedly back when I sucked at playing it), I'm still leery about using it in a game.
It’s not as explicit as a design but this is sort of how Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay works. Dying is relatively hard, but accumulating permanent injuries is much easier.
After I posted it I also realized it made me think a bit of Call of Cthulhu where your character is pretty much as sane as they will ever be at creation, but your skills so go up as you play longer.
Look if you guys wanna brainstorm a Darkest Dungeon RPG I'm down but someone should try to get the rights first.
https://gofund.me/fa5990a5
And no, you really can't gain/spend enough XP, so over time you do eventually get worse and basically die.
When they find the crashed airship they are going to find a tribe of kids who have been living there since the crash, after all the adults left to get help after "preparing the princess" in the old temple. I'm completely ripping off Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome here and I want to see if my players catch it. The "Princess" was a brass dragon egg that they fled the city with to avoid the destruction. It is ready to hatch but the automatons guarding the temple only regard everyone as enemies. In their minds the players can sense a being that is "ready" and it's the Dragon who is ready to hatch. The kids plead with the players to help their princess.
I wonder if the players will listen or just kill all the kids. Its kind of a rando group so we'll find out. They don't seem terribly blood thirsty so I think it should turn out interesting.
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