Guidance would be so much more amazing if it included a role-play element where the god in question explains how to do the action while nattering at you like a stereotypical jewish mother.
Edit for examples:
"If you'd spent more time studying history you'd know that it was Azoun the 4th that defeate the Tuigan host!"
"Oh sure, trust the Zhenatarim agent, see what I care."
"You're cousin Joseph ~the one that went to medical school in waterdeep~ wouldn't be having so much trouble with staunching the bleeding."
Guidance would be so much more amazing if it included a role-play element where the god in question explains how to do the action while nattering at you like a stereotypical jewish mother.
Edit for examples:
"If you'd spent more time studying history you'd know that it was Azoun the 4th that defeate the Tuigan host!"
"Oh sure, trust the Zhenatarim agent, see what I care."
"You're cousin Joseph ~the one that went to medical school in waterdeep~ wouldn't be having so much trouble with staunching the bleeding."
"I cast Guidance."
"What does your deity whisper in the back of your mind?"
"Quit lolly-gagging. "
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AegisFear My DanceOvershot Toronto, Landed in OttawaRegistered Userregular
Does anyone else feel that Guidance is kind of a goofy thing to exist? Having a cleric in your party means that all non-combat skill checks are automatically +1d4 at the cost of one cantrip known.
Get back to me when your Cleric of Lawful Lawfulness and Upholding the Law has used Guidance to improve the Rogue's chance to pickpocket or pick a lock, or tried to help someone tell a clever lie, or helped a poacher track a protected animal.
Prayers should only work if the God involved is okay with the action, hence why Guidance isn't THAT bad.
Depending on the setting, it's not even as involved as that. In Forgotten Realms (at least in previous editions), divine magic of sufficiently low level (orisons especially, but I believe it was 1st or 2nd spells either) was a result of the divine manifestation of the faith of the caster themselves, independent of the deity they were worshiping. Anything higher that that (especially spells which specifically communed with one's deity) required direct divine granting of spells (and so clerics of dead deities didn't have all that much power unless the dead deity's portfolio was secretly repurposed by someone else).
Does anyone else feel that Guidance is kind of a goofy thing to exist? Having a cleric in your party means that all non-combat skill checks are automatically +1d4 at the cost of one cantrip known.
Get back to me when your Cleric of Lawful Lawfulness and Upholding the Law has used Guidance to improve the Rogue's chance to pickpocket or pick a lock, or tried to help someone tell a clever lie, or helped a poacher track a protected animal.
Prayers should only work if the God involved is okay with the action, hence why Guidance isn't THAT bad.
Also, many players forget to cast buffs all the time
Druids get guidance too.
I cast it on an assassin recruiter who was pinned under the other bear Druid, because the fighter wanted to coup-de-grais him after we had disarmed and interrogated him.
He escaped. Briefly.
He was javelined the next turn and bled out.
These are what I want you to ask yourself if you read this. Yesterday I heard about a new RPG called Scarlet Wake from Reddit. It was described as a sort of Kill Bill/John Wick crazy violent RPG where there is no DM/GM and each player has their own version of Beatrix Kiddo/John Wick. While that player has the "spotlight", the other players are roleplaying and controlling the bad guys that must be taken down. Each player picks five people, "Marks", that ruined their life. Only the fifth Big Boss-type Mark is shared with the other players, and the whole RPG is a competition between the players to kill whoever messed their lives up the most. Super vulgar, and violent, and I could only play it with a select few friends.
Well, could something similar work with 5e? Wait! Wait, hear me out.
Say there are four of us at the table. We each have a level 3 character. We can choose to go it alone , or two on a team, or three on a team with one going it alone. There must always be at least one odd person out.
Then, each player/team rolls a few dice to see the size of the map/scene (5x5, 10x10, 20x20) and the size of the encounter. Large (Multiple low CR minions), Medium (3-4 monsters), or Duel (Single powerful enemy).
Roll initiative as a team, and on your turn you play your character's actions, followed by whatever monsters you control in one or another player's specific hell encounter where you try to make the smartest monster decisions to kill them. After writing that, it basically sounds like Munchkin: The RPG, which is almost full circle for Munchkin, isn't it?
Challenges:
1. Need to pre-build tables and encounters to roll on so they all have the same difficulty
1a. Alternatively, if you had a deck of monsters you'd just say "You rolled this. Draw three cards from the Large Encounter deck and give them to your fellow players as you see fit."
2. You and the other players would need to be pretty mechanically familiar with 5e, otherwise this would bog down even faster than a normal game where people don't think about their turn until it's time to roll dice.
2a. You could combat this by sticking with the same model that Scarlet Wake does; the Spotlight is the player's turn, and it only lasts 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, either it's already been resolved or there's a To Be Continued-esque cliffhanger until it's that player's turn again.
3. To set up all the tables and potential encounters you'd need somebody designing them. You could even call them a...Dungeon Master! Wait, doesn't that defeat the whole purpose?
3a. Sort of, but I just want to play more and DM less, while still setting encounters up. You could do this with any number of players. The more players, the more likely you are to basically have team sessions where one side of the table is trying to outwit the other. At the end of the night, hopefully somebody can lay claim to The Treasure! Yeah, you're right, that sounds exactly like Munchkin.
Does anyone else feel that Guidance is kind of a goofy thing to exist? Having a cleric in your party means that all non-combat skill checks are automatically +1d4 at the cost of one cantrip known.
It's mitigated by the fact that players only occasionally remember it exists.
I like the implication of Guidance cast by a Warlock the best.
Rogue: "Ok, I'm gonna make a check to pick this lock."
Warlock: "Hold up, I've got your back!"
Warlock: *Fills the Rogue's mind with 1d4 worth of the warbling screeches of a demented planet-eating space mollusk from outside of Time.*
Rogue: "OH GOD WHY IS THIS HELPING?"
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
Does anyone else feel that Guidance is kind of a goofy thing to exist? Having a cleric in your party means that all non-combat skill checks are automatically +1d4 at the cost of one cantrip known.
Guidance requires actions to be things you prepare for and even in non-combat this will reduce a lot of its value. Plus if you have things which happen one after the other then guidance cannot be used because it costs an action.
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AegisFear My DanceOvershot Toronto, Landed in OttawaRegistered Userregular
Guidance also kind of hinders any other concentration spells you might otherwise want to keep running at that moment.
I like the implication of Guidance cast by a Warlock the best.
Rogue: "Ok, I'm gonna make a check to pick this lock."
Warlock: "Hold up, I've got your back!"
Warlock: *Fills the Rogue's mind with 1d4 worth of the warbling screeches of a demented planet-eating space mollusk from outside of Time.*
Rogue: "OH GOD WHY IS THIS HELPING?"
I also like the idea that you could also subtract stray thoughts allowing them to better focus on the task at hand.
1d4 worth of thirst, memories of their homeland, that itch on their nose, etc.
Yessss... 1d4 worth of the crystalline clarity of thought and purpose that reveals to them why they should shed this flawed mortal shell and ascend to unity with the soul-flames of your master's Prison Star.
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
I like the implication of Guidance cast by a Warlock the best.
Rogue: "Ok, I'm gonna make a check to pick this lock."
Warlock: "Hold up, I've got your back!"
Warlock: *Fills the Rogue's mind with 1d4 worth of the warbling screeches of a demented planet-eating space mollusk from outside of Time.*
Rogue: "OH GOD WHY IS THIS HELPING?"
I also like the idea that you could also subtract stray thoughts allowing them to better focus on the task at hand.
1d4 worth of thirst, memories of their homeland, that itch on their nose, etc.
Maybe your GoO Warlock actually consumes people's distractions as a delicacy, a la Bogeypop Phantom. Well, that's horrifying.
I like the implication of Guidance cast by a Warlock the best.
Rogue: "Ok, I'm gonna make a check to pick this lock."
Warlock: "Hold up, I've got your back!"
Warlock: *Fills the Rogue's mind with 1d4 worth of the warbling screeches of a demented planet-eating space mollusk from outside of Time.*
Rogue: "OH GOD WHY IS THIS HELPING?"
I also like the idea that you could also subtract stray thoughts allowing them to better focus on the task at hand.
1d4 worth of thirst, memories of their homeland, that itch on their nose, etc.
Maybe your GoO Warlock actually consumes people's distractions as a delicacy, a la Bogeypop Phantom. Well, that's horrifying.
Tamoachan continues to amuse me, since the party was unable to exit the room that they started the session in due to wanting a long rest and not being able to get it due to the dungeon having a *strong* system for random encounters: effectively every hour the party rolls a d12 and if they get a 1 an encounter fires (assuming I can logically get it to occur given the terrain).
Thus for a long rest they have to check 8 times.
As such my party fought 2 willow the wisps, a swarm of snakes and had a rough encounter with a vampire (there were also some fire beetles but they didn't get past a trap earlier).
Also, one of the players got real whiny after we learned that there was another random encounter due at the end of this session and demanded that I change the result of the dice roll. My response was that I was willing to do so but I would be changing the result of one of his dice rolls as a pound of flesh.
Yea, that sounds like a fun time for your players.
The thing is, they wouldn't be wasting this much time with it if they weren't trying to force long rests endlessly; they know that the mechanics but are insisting on having long rests whenever they use a handful of spells.
Do the benefits kick in as soon as you initiate one as long as you finish it, interruptions or not. Or do the benefits only happen if you do a full 8 hours with no interruptions?
Like, if your max hp is 100, and you are sitting at 1hp, resting 8 hours puts you at 100. But what happens if you have an encounter 7 hours in? Are you still at 1hp? Is it proportional so you are at 87hp? If proportional, how would that work for spell slots. Now assuming you take no further dmg, could you sleep one more hour to get to full?
Seems dumb that you could literally rest for a week and regain nothing as long as single goblin pops out of a bush every 7 hours and you slice him in half before continuing to rest.
Presumably if you rested for at least an hour but not eight hours you would gain the benefits of a short rest but not a long rest.
Realistically if you rested for almost but not quite eight hours before being interrupted your DM should probably be saying 'fuck it, close enough, long rest, let's move on' unless there's a clear narrative reason not to, especially if you've managed (for example) two six-hour rests punctuated by a random encounter in the middle and even more especially if it's also clear that the party is for some reason dead-set on sitting in a room fighting random encounters until they get a rest.
The flip side is that if for some reason the DM doesn't want the party to get a rest, there either needs to be a reason not to rest beyond 'moderate risk of a random encounter' or the second rest-interrupting encounter needs to be made to be dangerous enough that the party stops trying to brute-force the encounter table by grinding through half a dozen clearly-nonthreatening encounters until a rest 'sticks'.
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AegisFear My DanceOvershot Toronto, Landed in OttawaRegistered Userregular
edited August 2017
RAW you gain the benefits at the end of the rest.
Presumably if you rested for at least an hour but not eight hours you would gain the benefits of a short rest but not a long rest.
Yea, this is how it works. Rests are defined by their duration (at least 1 hour for short rest, at least 8 hours for long rest), not whether you declared what type of rest it is. There are some activity-based differences (you can stand watch in a long rest for up to 2 hours without it invalidating the benefits, but not in a short rest), though these seem overly minor. If your long rest is interrupted but lasts more than 1 hour, you gain the benefits of a short rest instead (and thus could spend hit die to recover HP before engaging whatever interrupted you).
But man would that be overly dickish to interrupt a long rest at 7:59 on the clock.
Although, in the above interruption scenario, Elves would still be gaining all long rest benefits since they only need 4 hours of trance. Elves are cool.
Yeah I find there's pretty much only 2 good reasons to interrupt a rest. It's either a set encounter that was planned to happen, or would happen if the party rested in a certain place. Or it's deliberately intended to discourage the party from resting in a certain area, with the implication that more interruptions would happen.
Yea, that sounds like a fun time for your players.
The thing is, they wouldn't be wasting this much time with it if they weren't trying to force long rests endlessly; they know that the mechanics but are insisting on having long rests whenever they use a handful of spells.
For a party like that, it's worth pointing out that RAW you can only get the benefits of a long rest once per 24-hour period (PHB p186). So if they have a long rest, cast a few spells and want another long rest then they'll need to wait around for 8-16 hours before resting, so that's even more random encounter checks to throw at them.
The 10 minute adventuring workday thing really irks me, so I'd advocate that the next time your players try this, have something horrible come along and eat their faces. Really eat their faces. Like, Fuck 'em...Have one or two of them roll up a new character because their faces got eaten so badly. And when they whine and complain, call them giant wussies who can't handle adventuring for more than 10 minutes at a time and that's what they get for being giant wussies who keep trying to rest in the wrong places and at the wrong time.
This kind of antagonistic DM thing is just silly, talk to your players OOC about your feelings with regards to frequent long rests killing dramatic tension or verisimilitude or whatever.
In 3.5 I was in a game where the DM was dead set against us sleeping, too, to the point where even sleeping in extradimensional spaces wasn't enough and creatures kept finding the invisible window into the rope trick. Being young and stupid, instead of talking through why such ridiculous things kept happening, the party started burying the spellcasters alive for the night.
That's right, we'd carry around a coffin and the cleric and I (the wizard) would sleep in it, beneath the earth, while the melee classes stayed up all night defending the air pipe. Naturally, of course, after working for a session suddenly the world was filled with burrowing creatures.
Every single bad game of D&D I've had involved some kind of heavyhanded force escalation from the DM trying to prevent things from going in a way he didn't envision it. Recent real example in a different situation than camping:
"I intimidate the prisoner, <high roll>"
"Nope, he's in fact super cocky"
"While the rogue's talking to the prisoner I cast Detect Thoughts"
"Nope, he's got Mind Blank up"
"...at level three?"
Just roll with the punches in game and have a conversation about your expectations out of game.
Tamoachan continues to amuse me, since the party was unable to exit the room that they started the session in due to wanting a long rest and not being able to get it due to the dungeon having a *strong* system for random encounters: effectively every hour the party rolls a d12 and if they get a 1 an encounter fires (assuming I can logically get it to occur given the terrain).
Thus for a long rest they have to check 8 times.
As such my party fought 2 willow the wisps, a swarm of snakes and had a rough encounter with a vampire (there were also some fire beetles but they didn't get past a trap earlier).
Also, one of the players got real whiny after we learned that there was another random encounter due at the end of this session and demanded that I change the result of the dice roll. My response was that I was willing to do so but I would be changing the result of one of his dice rolls as a pound of flesh.
Get ready for everyone to roll Warlock in your next campaign.
Not every instance of ridiculousness/unreasonableness in a game is the fault of the DM.
That's ridiculous, I've never heard of players metagaming or trying to take a rest after every encounter while debating the DM on why they should have advantage.
My players just usually start with Mom jokes, so at least there's no impact mechanically.
Tamoachan continues to amuse me, since the party was unable to exit the room that they started the session in due to wanting a long rest and not being able to get it due to the dungeon having a *strong* system for random encounters: effectively every hour the party rolls a d12 and if they get a 1 an encounter fires (assuming I can logically get it to occur given the terrain).
Thus for a long rest they have to check 8 times.
As such my party fought 2 willow the wisps, a swarm of snakes and had a rough encounter with a vampire (there were also some fire beetles but they didn't get past a trap earlier).
Also, one of the players got real whiny after we learned that there was another random encounter due at the end of this session and demanded that I change the result of the dice roll. My response was that I was willing to do so but I would be changing the result of one of his dice rolls as a pound of flesh.
Get ready for everyone to roll Warlock in your next campaign.
Not Gming next season :snap:
Besides that: the dungeon we're playing in is distinctly AD&D in it's style and origin, and part of playing the older systems was appreciating that spells were a resource that you needed to conserve when possible because you didn't know when the next long rest was going to go down and the more spells you cast the longer that rest was goning to need to be.
Further, the way that the dungeon is structured with it's various hazards, it's clear that this is about speed running as opposed to going at your own pace and allowing things to happen as they may.
So yeah; not a case of me being antagonistic to the players so much as them refusing to adapt to the nature of the environment.
I'm trying to find a post in one of the old D&D threads, this was in the really early days of 4e, so nearly 10 years ago now (shudder). Someone was complaining about the rebalance of casters and relayed a story from 3e. He was playing a caster and the whole party were high level, and the other players did something to make him angry, so he summoned 4... pit fiends maybe? That had aoe damage auras and killed his entire party in the space of one round.
Does anyone else remember that? A friend of mine is new to D&D, started with 5e, and wanted to know what the other versions were like, and I was hoping to use that story. I want to get the details right, though.
Tamoachan continues to amuse me, since the party was unable to exit the room that they started the session in due to wanting a long rest and not being able to get it due to the dungeon having a *strong* system for random encounters: effectively every hour the party rolls a d12 and if they get a 1 an encounter fires (assuming I can logically get it to occur given the terrain).
Thus for a long rest they have to check 8 times.
As such my party fought 2 willow the wisps, a swarm of snakes and had a rough encounter with a vampire (there were also some fire beetles but they didn't get past a trap earlier).
Also, one of the players got real whiny after we learned that there was another random encounter due at the end of this session and demanded that I change the result of the dice roll. My response was that I was willing to do so but I would be changing the result of one of his dice rolls as a pound of flesh.
Get ready for everyone to roll Warlock in your next campaign.
Not Gming next season :snap:
Besides that: the dungeon we're playing in is distinctly AD&D in it's style and origin, and part of playing the older systems was appreciating that spells were a resource that you needed to conserve when possible because you didn't know when the next long rest was going to go down and the more spells you cast the longer that rest was goning to need to be.
Further, the way that the dungeon is structured with it's various hazards, it's clear that this is about speed running as opposed to going at your own pace and allowing things to happen as they may.
So yeah; not a case of me being antagonistic to the players so much as them refusing to adapt to the nature of the environment.
I haven't read the dungeon so I'm just going on what you've mentioned here, but it sounds like they're exactly adapting to the environment.
If they know the random encounter mechanics are a 1/12 chance of an encounter, once per hour, that's almost exactly a 50/50 chance that a long rest will 'stick', which means if they need to rest in the dungeon they'll have a 50% chance to get a rest with no encounters, a 75% chance to get a rest with one encounter before it 'sticks', a ~90% chance to get a rest with 2 encounters first, and so on.
So if they're not close-to-certain that they can finish the whole dungeon without resting, then the cautious, strategically-reasonable play is to rest when they've still got 2 encounters worth of gas left, because otherwise they might have to fight multiple encounters in a row on E the whole time. Actually pushing until you need a rest before resting in that environment is overextending, and the fastest way for them to get wiped out would be to push almost all the way through the dungeon on one rest and then be forced to rest before the end, roll poorly on the encounter table, and have to fight through 2-3 random encounters with no spells or hp left.
And since a 'normal' adventuring day is usually only 4-6 encounters, resting with 2 still in the bank probably means resting every other fight, which is what it sounds like they're doing. That's not refusing to adapt to the environment, it's adapting successfully to an environment that is encouraging a very grindy method of play.
"While you were sleeping for the second time today, the dungeon superintendent sealed you into the chamber with airtight mortar. After you wake up, start rolling suffocation death saving throws."
Presumably if you rested for at least an hour but not eight hours you would gain the benefits of a short rest but not a long rest.
Yea, this is how it works. Rests are defined by their duration (at least 1 hour for short rest, at least 8 hours for long rest), not whether you declared what type of rest it is. There are some activity-based differences (you can stand watch in a long rest for up to 2 hours without it invalidating the benefits, but not in a short rest), though these seem overly minor. If your long rest is interrupted but lasts more than 1 hour, you gain the benefits of a short rest instead (and thus could spend hit die to recover HP before engaging whatever interrupted you).
But man would that be overly dickish to interrupt a long rest at 7:59 on the clock.
Although, in the above interruption scenario, Elves would still be gaining all long rest benefits since they only need 4 hours of trance. Elves are cool.
If you interrupt at 7:59 on the clock then your party gains the benefit of a long rest 1 minute into the combat.
"While you were sleeping for the second time today, the dungeon superintendent sealed you into the chamber with airtight mortar. After you wake up, start rolling suffocation death saving throws."
Tamoachan continues to amuse me, since the party was unable to exit the room that they started the session in due to wanting a long rest and not being able to get it due to the dungeon having a *strong* system for random encounters: effectively every hour the party rolls a d12 and if they get a 1 an encounter fires (assuming I can logically get it to occur given the terrain).
Thus for a long rest they have to check 8 times.
As such my party fought 2 willow the wisps, a swarm of snakes and had a rough encounter with a vampire (there were also some fire beetles but they didn't get past a trap earlier).
Also, one of the players got real whiny after we learned that there was another random encounter due at the end of this session and demanded that I change the result of the dice roll. My response was that I was willing to do so but I would be changing the result of one of his dice rolls as a pound of flesh.
Get ready for everyone to roll Warlock in your next campaign.
Not Gming next season :snap:
Besides that: the dungeon we're playing in is distinctly AD&D in it's style and origin, and part of playing the older systems was appreciating that spells were a resource that you needed to conserve when possible because you didn't know when the next long rest was going to go down and the more spells you cast the longer that rest was goning to need to be.
Further, the way that the dungeon is structured with it's various hazards, it's clear that this is about speed running as opposed to going at your own pace and allowing things to happen as they may.
So yeah; not a case of me being antagonistic to the players so much as them refusing to adapt to the nature of the environment.
I haven't read the dungeon so I'm just going on what you've mentioned here, but it sounds like they're exactly adapting to the environment.
If they know the random encounter mechanics are a 1/12 chance of an encounter, once per hour, that's almost exactly a 50/50 chance that a long rest will 'stick', which means if they need to rest in the dungeon they'll have a 50% chance to get a rest with no encounters, a 75% chance to get a rest with one encounter before it 'sticks', a ~90% chance to get a rest with 2 encounters first, and so on.
So if they're not close-to-certain that they can finish the whole dungeon without resting, then the cautious, strategically-reasonable play is to rest when they've still got 2 encounters worth of gas left, because otherwise they might have to fight multiple encounters in a row on E the whole time. Actually pushing until you need a rest before resting in that environment is overextending, and the fastest way for them to get wiped out would be to push almost all the way through the dungeon on one rest and then be forced to rest before the end, roll poorly on the encounter table, and have to fight through 2-3 random encounters with no spells or hp left.
And since a 'normal' adventuring day is usually only 4-6 encounters, resting with 2 still in the bank probably means resting every other fight, which is what it sounds like they're doing. That's not refusing to adapt to the environment, it's adapting successfully to an environment that is encouraging a very grindy method of play.
I disagree, vehemently, particularly since the math from my persective works out to closer to a 75% chance of interruption (8 chances on a d12 works out to 8/12 that someone will get a 1) and thus should be encouraging players to conserve resources as much as possible since for the most part from what I've seen the dungeon works as a "death by a thousand cuts"; as far as I can tell the toughest thing in the dungeon in terms of fights was a vampire spawn that they fucked up in less then two full rounds because it fought almost completely unsupported.
Further, in a great big chunk of the dungeon, there is a poisonous mist that does a d6 of poison per hour spent in the dungeon, thus if the players go for the long rest then they nominally take 8d6 of poison damage.
So for them, the goal should be to GTFO as quickly as possible.
The average number of 1s you can expect is 8/12, the probability of having zero 1s is (11/12)^8 or 49.9%, and naturally the odds of at least one 1 is 50.1%.
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AegisFear My DanceOvershot Toronto, Landed in OttawaRegistered Userregular
If you interrupt at 7:59 on the clock then your party gains the benefit of a long rest 1 minute into the combat.
Yea, looks like this was clarified in a pair of tweets. Not sure if it would kick in mid-combat rather than just after the combat ends, but yea, the interruption needs to be an hour long.
Posts
Edit for examples:
"If you'd spent more time studying history you'd know that it was Azoun the 4th that defeate the Tuigan host!"
"Oh sure, trust the Zhenatarim agent, see what I care."
"You're cousin Joseph ~the one that went to medical school in waterdeep~ wouldn't be having so much trouble with staunching the bleeding."
"I cast Guidance."
"What does your deity whisper in the back of your mind?"
"Quit lolly-gagging.
Depending on the setting, it's not even as involved as that. In Forgotten Realms (at least in previous editions), divine magic of sufficiently low level (orisons especially, but I believe it was 1st or 2nd spells either) was a result of the divine manifestation of the faith of the caster themselves, independent of the deity they were worshiping. Anything higher that that (especially spells which specifically communed with one's deity) required direct divine granting of spells (and so clerics of dead deities didn't have all that much power unless the dead deity's portfolio was secretly repurposed by someone else).
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
Also, many players forget to cast buffs all the time
I cast it on an assassin recruiter who was pinned under the other bear Druid, because the fighter wanted to coup-de-grais him after we had disarmed and interrogated him.
He escaped. Briefly.
He was javelined the next turn and bled out.
My druid's neutral I think
2. Would it be doable?
These are what I want you to ask yourself if you read this. Yesterday I heard about a new RPG called Scarlet Wake from Reddit. It was described as a sort of Kill Bill/John Wick crazy violent RPG where there is no DM/GM and each player has their own version of Beatrix Kiddo/John Wick. While that player has the "spotlight", the other players are roleplaying and controlling the bad guys that must be taken down. Each player picks five people, "Marks", that ruined their life. Only the fifth Big Boss-type Mark is shared with the other players, and the whole RPG is a competition between the players to kill whoever messed their lives up the most. Super vulgar, and violent, and I could only play it with a select few friends.
Well, could something similar work with 5e? Wait! Wait, hear me out.
Say there are four of us at the table. We each have a level 3 character. We can choose to go it alone , or two on a team, or three on a team with one going it alone. There must always be at least one odd person out.
Then, each player/team rolls a few dice to see the size of the map/scene (5x5, 10x10, 20x20) and the size of the encounter. Large (Multiple low CR minions), Medium (3-4 monsters), or Duel (Single powerful enemy).
Roll initiative as a team, and on your turn you play your character's actions, followed by whatever monsters you control in one or another player's specific hell encounter where you try to make the smartest monster decisions to kill them. After writing that, it basically sounds like Munchkin: The RPG, which is almost full circle for Munchkin, isn't it?
Challenges:
1. Need to pre-build tables and encounters to roll on so they all have the same difficulty
1a. Alternatively, if you had a deck of monsters you'd just say "You rolled this. Draw three cards from the Large Encounter deck and give them to your fellow players as you see fit."
2. You and the other players would need to be pretty mechanically familiar with 5e, otherwise this would bog down even faster than a normal game where people don't think about their turn until it's time to roll dice.
2a. You could combat this by sticking with the same model that Scarlet Wake does; the Spotlight is the player's turn, and it only lasts 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, either it's already been resolved or there's a To Be Continued-esque cliffhanger until it's that player's turn again.
3. To set up all the tables and potential encounters you'd need somebody designing them. You could even call them a...Dungeon Master! Wait, doesn't that defeat the whole purpose?
3a. Sort of, but I just want to play more and DM less, while still setting encounters up. You could do this with any number of players. The more players, the more likely you are to basically have team sessions where one side of the table is trying to outwit the other. At the end of the night, hopefully somebody can lay claim to The Treasure! Yeah, you're right, that sounds exactly like Munchkin.
It's mitigated by the fact that players only occasionally remember it exists.
Rogue: "Ok, I'm gonna make a check to pick this lock."
Warlock: "Hold up, I've got your back!"
Warlock: *Fills the Rogue's mind with 1d4 worth of the warbling screeches of a demented planet-eating space mollusk from outside of Time.*
Rogue: "OH GOD WHY IS THIS HELPING?"
Guidance requires actions to be things you prepare for and even in non-combat this will reduce a lot of its value. Plus if you have things which happen one after the other then guidance cannot be used because it costs an action.
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
I also like the idea that you could also subtract stray thoughts allowing them to better focus on the task at hand.
1d4 worth of thirst, memories of their homeland, that itch on their nose, etc.
Maybe your GoO Warlock actually consumes people's distractions as a delicacy, a la Bogeypop Phantom. Well, that's horrifying.
I do aim to please.
Thus for a long rest they have to check 8 times.
As such my party fought 2 willow the wisps, a swarm of snakes and had a rough encounter with a vampire (there were also some fire beetles but they didn't get past a trap earlier).
Also, one of the players got real whiny after we learned that there was another random encounter due at the end of this session and demanded that I change the result of the dice roll. My response was that I was willing to do so but I would be changing the result of one of his dice rolls as a pound of flesh.
The thing is, they wouldn't be wasting this much time with it if they weren't trying to force long rests endlessly; they know that the mechanics but are insisting on having long rests whenever they use a handful of spells.
Do the benefits kick in as soon as you initiate one as long as you finish it, interruptions or not. Or do the benefits only happen if you do a full 8 hours with no interruptions?
Like, if your max hp is 100, and you are sitting at 1hp, resting 8 hours puts you at 100. But what happens if you have an encounter 7 hours in? Are you still at 1hp? Is it proportional so you are at 87hp? If proportional, how would that work for spell slots. Now assuming you take no further dmg, could you sleep one more hour to get to full?
Seems dumb that you could literally rest for a week and regain nothing as long as single goblin pops out of a bush every 7 hours and you slice him in half before continuing to rest.
Realistically if you rested for almost but not quite eight hours before being interrupted your DM should probably be saying 'fuck it, close enough, long rest, let's move on' unless there's a clear narrative reason not to, especially if you've managed (for example) two six-hour rests punctuated by a random encounter in the middle and even more especially if it's also clear that the party is for some reason dead-set on sitting in a room fighting random encounters until they get a rest.
The flip side is that if for some reason the DM doesn't want the party to get a rest, there either needs to be a reason not to rest beyond 'moderate risk of a random encounter' or the second rest-interrupting encounter needs to be made to be dangerous enough that the party stops trying to brute-force the encounter table by grinding through half a dozen clearly-nonthreatening encounters until a rest 'sticks'.
Yea, this is how it works. Rests are defined by their duration (at least 1 hour for short rest, at least 8 hours for long rest), not whether you declared what type of rest it is. There are some activity-based differences (you can stand watch in a long rest for up to 2 hours without it invalidating the benefits, but not in a short rest), though these seem overly minor. If your long rest is interrupted but lasts more than 1 hour, you gain the benefits of a short rest instead (and thus could spend hit die to recover HP before engaging whatever interrupted you).
But man would that be overly dickish to interrupt a long rest at 7:59 on the clock.
Although, in the above interruption scenario, Elves would still be gaining all long rest benefits since they only need 4 hours of trance. Elves are cool.
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
For a party like that, it's worth pointing out that RAW you can only get the benefits of a long rest once per 24-hour period (PHB p186). So if they have a long rest, cast a few spells and want another long rest then they'll need to wait around for 8-16 hours before resting, so that's even more random encounter checks to throw at them.
Your mileage may vary.
In 3.5 I was in a game where the DM was dead set against us sleeping, too, to the point where even sleeping in extradimensional spaces wasn't enough and creatures kept finding the invisible window into the rope trick. Being young and stupid, instead of talking through why such ridiculous things kept happening, the party started burying the spellcasters alive for the night.
That's right, we'd carry around a coffin and the cleric and I (the wizard) would sleep in it, beneath the earth, while the melee classes stayed up all night defending the air pipe. Naturally, of course, after working for a session suddenly the world was filled with burrowing creatures.
Every single bad game of D&D I've had involved some kind of heavyhanded force escalation from the DM trying to prevent things from going in a way he didn't envision it. Recent real example in a different situation than camping:
"I intimidate the prisoner, <high roll>"
"Nope, he's in fact super cocky"
"While the rogue's talking to the prisoner I cast Detect Thoughts"
"Nope, he's got Mind Blank up"
"...at level three?"
Just roll with the punches in game and have a conversation about your expectations out of game.
Not every instance of ridiculousness/unreasonableness in a game is the fault of the DM.
Get ready for everyone to roll Warlock in your next campaign.
That's ridiculous, I've never heard of players metagaming or trying to take a rest after every encounter while debating the DM on why they should have advantage.
My players just usually start with Mom jokes, so at least there's no impact mechanically.
Not Gming next season :snap:
Besides that: the dungeon we're playing in is distinctly AD&D in it's style and origin, and part of playing the older systems was appreciating that spells were a resource that you needed to conserve when possible because you didn't know when the next long rest was going to go down and the more spells you cast the longer that rest was goning to need to be.
Further, the way that the dungeon is structured with it's various hazards, it's clear that this is about speed running as opposed to going at your own pace and allowing things to happen as they may.
So yeah; not a case of me being antagonistic to the players so much as them refusing to adapt to the nature of the environment.
Does anyone else remember that? A friend of mine is new to D&D, started with 5e, and wanted to know what the other versions were like, and I was hoping to use that story. I want to get the details right, though.
I haven't read the dungeon so I'm just going on what you've mentioned here, but it sounds like they're exactly adapting to the environment.
If they know the random encounter mechanics are a 1/12 chance of an encounter, once per hour, that's almost exactly a 50/50 chance that a long rest will 'stick', which means if they need to rest in the dungeon they'll have a 50% chance to get a rest with no encounters, a 75% chance to get a rest with one encounter before it 'sticks', a ~90% chance to get a rest with 2 encounters first, and so on.
So if they're not close-to-certain that they can finish the whole dungeon without resting, then the cautious, strategically-reasonable play is to rest when they've still got 2 encounters worth of gas left, because otherwise they might have to fight multiple encounters in a row on E the whole time. Actually pushing until you need a rest before resting in that environment is overextending, and the fastest way for them to get wiped out would be to push almost all the way through the dungeon on one rest and then be forced to rest before the end, roll poorly on the encounter table, and have to fight through 2-3 random encounters with no spells or hp left.
And since a 'normal' adventuring day is usually only 4-6 encounters, resting with 2 still in the bank probably means resting every other fight, which is what it sounds like they're doing. That's not refusing to adapt to the environment, it's adapting successfully to an environment that is encouraging a very grindy method of play.
If you interrupt at 7:59 on the clock then your party gains the benefit of a long rest 1 minute into the combat.
Montresor! For the love of God!!
I disagree, vehemently, particularly since the math from my persective works out to closer to a 75% chance of interruption (8 chances on a d12 works out to 8/12 that someone will get a 1) and thus should be encouraging players to conserve resources as much as possible since for the most part from what I've seen the dungeon works as a "death by a thousand cuts"; as far as I can tell the toughest thing in the dungeon in terms of fights was a vampire spawn that they fucked up in less then two full rounds because it fought almost completely unsupported.
Further, in a great big chunk of the dungeon, there is a poisonous mist that does a d6 of poison per hour spent in the dungeon, thus if the players go for the long rest then they nominally take 8d6 of poison damage.
So for them, the goal should be to GTFO as quickly as possible.
Given that it's gone off 5/6 times my party tried to rest I'd say it's a hell of a lot higher.
Yea, looks like this was clarified in a pair of tweets. Not sure if it would kick in mid-combat rather than just after the combat ends, but yea, the interruption needs to be an hour long.
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12