I force my players to split the party, just doesn't make sense for them all to be in the same places at the same time all the time.
Like once it is obviously go time and they are in a dungeon I rarely split them, but I'm going to be working on that in the coming adventures to force them to achieve simultaneous goals in separate regions to be successful.
In Lost Mines of Phandelver, there's a dragon that purposefully runs away at half health, never to be heard from again. I thought that was dumb. So, I ran the dragon as smart, it interrogated the PCs and tried to bribe them to leave him alone, and then attacked. When it couldn't kill them, it flew away to recover. It then attacked their base of operations (they mentioned where they were from). I crafted 6 scenes of places that were important to the PCs, and asked them to pick 4 (there are 4 players) for how they would try to rescue / recover the thing in question (the bar, a helpful NPC's home, etc). I had no idea who would pick what, but it let me create short scenes to give each player a chance to shine on their own. We ran them sequentially, but technically, each party member was alone at the time.
I ran it kind of like how you might run Dungeon World - shifting spot light from player to player, combined with sort of skill challenges in D&D 4e where they needed a number of successes to save the thing they wanted to save. I also told the players up front that they could attempt to save as many things as they wanted, in any order they wanted, or could try to team up, all of which would affect the number of successes they'd need, as well as how high the DCs would be that they'd need to beat.
I've also done it with attuning to legendary weapons or magical items - a mental / dream scene of just the person, learning more about the thing they're attuning to, with their success or failure informing how many benefits they'd get from the object to start.
I kind of like having the party split in situations where it's not necessarily boss / mob combat. Even then, I've run a scene where our rogue snuck into the back of a hide out while the rest of the party created distractions in the front. If you think of the thing they're infiltrating / attacking as a real organization with a finite number of antagonists, as long as that is scaled properly to what the party can handle, you can split it up to provide appropriate challenges for whatever the party comes up with to deal with it. A frontal assault gets one kind of response, while a stealth mission gets another, all informed from your initial planning session.
Diagnosed with AML on 6/1/12. Read about it: www.effleukemia.com
So we had our first session of tomb yesterday and while we didn't get a whole lot of action in, we did get to have a fairly good introduction to port african name.
High points for the first session included:
~establishing my character's goal of seeing the merchant princes brought down so that a proper socialist state can be created in chult.
~getting some side quests going involving a hunt for some dwarven doohickey so that we can get ourselves a guide on the cheap and hunting for a shiled guardian (I fully intend to utilize the funds from these ventures to fund the revolution for the poor people suffering under an oligarchy).
~Learning that at least one legendary artifact is floating around in the form of the ring of winter.
Really looking forawrd to heading into the jungle so that I can help my companions get there zombie stomping on.
Cool. I'm planning on running this for my IRL group. It won't be a short process since we meet so infrequently, but when we do we game for a day and a half straight through.
Therefore, I am eager to subscribe to your newsletter!
I force my players to split the party, just doesn't make sense for them all to be in the same places at the same time all the time.
Like once it is obviously go time and they are in a dungeon I rarely split them, but I'm going to be working on that in the coming adventures to force them to achieve simultaneous goals in separate regions to be successful.
Our party split up last time we were searching a village once it became obvious there was a lot of ground to cover and nothing especially dangerous aside from some goblins.
Session 2 1 party memeber dead, zero rolls for initiative
After picking up our guide (an albino dwarf named radgriz), our party headed out... and learned that this map is going to be a complete bastard to navigate, since each of the hexes is apparently going to take a day to cross and our destination is easily 2 and a half months away.
Oh well, gotta get a dwarf his gewgaw.
anyways, we head deeper into the jungle and come to the realization that we screwed up a little bit by not buying a plethora of survival gear (like rain catchers), but we felt that we could use our brains to solve our various issues.
Eventually we find ourselves at a wrecked settlement, where some scrounging turns up 5 raincatchers, a holy symbol of torm, a cave and a big ass statue of a guy carrying a crocodile. Figuring that we should see if anything useful was in the cave, we headed in and immediatley discovered a pit trap. Then a spiked ceiling trap (which the kenku set off). Then we came across some tiles that required us to jump to glowing spots in order to safely navigate.
Me and the barbarian were feeling pretty good as we came up on a door and we set about opening it, with the barbarian triggering some sort of thunder ward, causing me to take 8 points of damage and go sailing some 30 feet through the air before someone cast featherfall on me to make sure I didn't get splattered by the fall. Still though, the barbarian was able to smash his way through it and discovered a room full of dinosaur bones and a 30 foot high pillair with a spiraling staircase surrounding it along wth murals of the croco carrier and a ceramic jug on top of it.
Now at this point, we had faced 4 traps and we felt that we had to be fairly clear so collectively we encouraged the barbarian to climb the stairwell, where he almost imediatley set off another god dam trap (lightning this time) the words of consolement that he'd be alright turned to ashes in my mouth as the gm announced that he suffered 38 damage, 13 more then he needed to kill him in his injured state.
At this point I decided to start thinking outside the box and decided to build an ad hoc grappling hook from dinosaur bones which with some effort I was able to hook the platform with, passing it to one of our burly fighters so that he can bypass the steps entirely. Once up their he picks up the jug and heads back down and we hastily backtrack out of the cave of utter dickery.
Perhaps feeling sorry for us, the GM decides to skip a fight with some goblins and tells us that we now have an alchemist jug which will (amongst other things) ensure that we have 2 gallons of mayonnaise a day!
As to the poor barbarian who got blasted to pieces, he has elected to come back as a lizardman trickster cleric and I suggested to him that he should be worshipping the crocodile that tricked a guy into carrying him.
It takes a whole in-game day to cover just ONE of those hexes? Shit...Chult is a lot larger than I thought.
Also...isn't the whole campaign a race against time? There are only a certain number of days before the Soulmonger does its thing and the world is doomed? I hope the campaign has built in enough time for players to go farting around...
1. I take it as a case of it being a "deepest darkest africa" sort of jungle; without roads or proper trails it's going to be super slow going.
2. At this stage it is and it isn't; the party hasn't learned what Accerak's end goal is and as such we don't have as much imperative to deal with him. Further: we dinged for 2 at the end of last session, so even if we did know about the soulmonger and where it was, we would at best annoy it's guardians for about a minute.
No, of course. I don't expect a starting party to straight for the BBEG. And I get, and totally dig, the whole "hump through a terrible jungle to find the terrible dungeon" thing.
But the way Perkins had it in the AQI live game there was that anyone who was suffering from their souls being 'monged was losing max HP per day. So, the way I took it, is that any party looking to save the world from oblivion after death has maybe a few months before all the high level NPC's the Forgotten Realms are done for.
I'm concerned about letting my party loose in the jungles, which I want to do, but still somehow keeping them on track to save the world.
No, of course. I don't expect a starting party to straight for the BBEG. And I get, and totally dig, the whole "hump through a terrible jungle to find the terrible dungeon" thing.
But the way Perkins had it in the AQI live game there was that anyone who was suffering from their souls being 'monged was losing max HP per day. So, the way I took it, is that any party looking to save the world from oblivion after death has maybe a few months before all the high level NPC's the Forgotten Realms are done for.
I'm concerned about letting my party loose in the jungles, which I want to do, but still somehow keeping them on track to save the world.
Perkins stepped over a lot of the set up for ToA, and instead got the whole angle of Jim's condition along with Omin's resurrection difficulties to get the party on an airship to the exact right location straight away. Kinda like how Viari can do ridiculous shit with only rolling dice once, whereas in a legitimate campaign that would take half an hour to resolve.
No, of course. I don't expect a starting party to straight for the BBEG. And I get, and totally dig, the whole "hump through a terrible jungle to find the terrible dungeon" thing.
But the way Perkins had it in the AQI live game there was that anyone who was suffering from their souls being 'monged was losing max HP per day. So, the way I took it, is that any party looking to save the world from oblivion after death has maybe a few months before all the high level NPC's the Forgotten Realms are done for.
I'm concerned about letting my party loose in the jungles, which I want to do, but still somehow keeping them on track to save the world.
eh, people like elminster will stasis or imprison themselves until the situation passes by.
No, of course. I don't expect a starting party to straight for the BBEG. And I get, and totally dig, the whole "hump through a terrible jungle to find the terrible dungeon" thing.
But the way Perkins had it in the AQI live game there was that anyone who was suffering from their souls being 'monged was losing max HP per day. So, the way I took it, is that any party looking to save the world from oblivion after death has maybe a few months before all the high level NPC's the Forgotten Realms are done for.
I'm concerned about letting my party loose in the jungles, which I want to do, but still somehow keeping them on track to save the world.
Perkins stepped over a lot of the set up for ToA, and instead got the whole angle of Jim's condition along with Omin's resurrection difficulties to get the party on an airship to the exact right location straight away. Kinda like how Viari can do ridiculous shit with only rolling dice once, whereas in a legitimate campaign that would take half an hour to resolve.
Yes. I understand that. Its a show, not a normal D&D table. But that still doesn't answer my question/concern about a "time limit" in the campaign. Omin's resurrection difficulties are one thing. But Jim's rapidly declining max HP is the more important source of my question.
If an (N)PC has only 75HP and is losing 1 per day...I'm sure someone in this thing is feeling a sense of urgency. I assume that there is some hook given like "Everyone who was ever risen before is slowly withering away and dying again, now go get moving and saving the everyone in the world from permanent death!"
I guess I could always buy the book myself a few weeks earlier than I had planned and find out for myself.
Might as well ask here: my girlfriend wants to run a one-shot Halloween session with our regular group. She has never DM'd before and neither have I, so we're kind of at a loss for a good resource to build the session. We watched and read a bunch of advice for DM'ing, but have a hard time to put enough on paper to actually get advice from an experienced DM. She has a map of a mansion, she knows the general twist and turns she wants to have at the ready and she has an idea for how to give the players the options to become strong enough to stand a chance against the Big Bad Evil God, but that's about it. Where should we look? The DM manual is not helping much...
Might as well ask here: my girlfriend wants to run a one-shot Halloween session with our regular group. She has never DM'd before and neither have I, so we're kind of at a loss for a good resource to build the session. We watched and read a bunch of advice for DM'ing, but have a hard time to put enough on paper to actually get advice from an experienced DM. She has a map of a mansion, she knows the general twist and turns she wants to have at the ready and she has an idea for how to give the players the options to become strong enough to stand a chance against the Big Bad Evil God, but that's about it. Where should we look? The DM manual is not helping much...
Sounds plenty to me already.
There are tons of resources out there, but ultimately everyone has their own method.
try throwing in 2-5 combat encounters, the boss, maybe a puzzle or two, some loot, and you're good!
The only other point I'd consider making is:
NPCs will generally cause the PCs to talk stuff out.
A haunted mansion generally doesn't have a lot of those, putting more emphasis on the DM filling the void with something else.
If you or your gf wants to outline the adventure here I'd gladly look over it.
The thing about DMing is that it's one of those things that frankly is best learnt by doing; assuming your players aren't total dicks things will come together as you play and if they don't in a way that you want, you can at least learn stuff about running future sessions; I've been playing roleplaying games for 27 years and I'm still learning stuff about how to do things in a way that makes the adventure fun and interesting for both me and the players.
But in the spirit of giving real advice, I'll give you these pieces of advice:
1.You want to go 40/40/20 on preparation/adaptaion/flex, that way you have a good mix of cohesive narrative and adaptation to the players actions/preferences, with a little bit of flex so that you can put more of either into your session.
2. Know what your players are going to be in advance. Nothing is worse then when you wind up with a party that is a weird kludge of classes (like 4 open hand monks and a berserker) and having to readjust your encounter/rp plan because various party jobs simply aren't being fulfilled.
3. When it comes to building fights, it's important to carefully read through the monster stat blocks so that there aren't any rude surprises for you midway through the fight; in theory a level 1 4 man party is a match for 4 jackalweres but I seriously doubt that they've a prayer of winning unless they get real lucky with some magic.
Rather than a bunch of mooks to fight. Just have them fight and kill the BBEG like 2-5 times. Give them ways to run away or escape from the fights until the last, and just have him teleport around the map so they can never get away from him.
The thing about DMing is that it's one of those things that frankly is best learnt by doing; assuming your players aren't total dicks things will come together as you play and if they don't in a way that you want, you can at least learn stuff about running future sessions; I've been playing roleplaying games for 27 years and I'm still learning stuff about how to do things in a way that makes the adventure fun and interesting for both me and the players.
Bolded for Truth.
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Powerpuppiesdrinking coffee in themountain cabinRegistered Userregular
okay i'm going to be playing a 5e game i think... there are some mastery traps in terms of character power, right? What are the 3 best classes and 3 worst, briefly
I don't need to be stronger than the other characters just not notably weaker
okay i'm going to be playing a 5e game i think... there are some mastery traps in terms of character power, right? What are the 3 best classes and 3 worst, briefly
I don't need to be stronger than the other characters just not notably weaker
No, there aren't any traps. There's a few things you can do to be a little more powerful than expected, but basically no straight up bad choices.
okay i'm going to be playing a 5e game i think... there are some mastery traps in terms of character power, right? What are the 3 best classes and 3 worst, briefly
I don't need to be stronger than the other characters just not notably weaker
the only thing i can think of that gets all the theorycrafter's frothing are the "power attack" feats, i.e. sharpshooter and great weapon master.
If people start picking those then you might have a problem on your hands.
The classes are fairly well balanced.
I think the vanilla ranger beast master is pretty bad.
I also hate warlocks, but that's more of a mechanics niggle.
okay i'm going to be playing a 5e game i think... there are some mastery traps in terms of character power, right? What are the 3 best classes and 3 worst, briefly
I don't need to be stronger than the other characters just not notably weaker
The problem is that balance of the classes is heavily influenced by how often the party rests and for how long. If you are always short resting then Warlocks become very good, if you never short rest then they compared poorly with Wizards or Sorcerers. Fighters are a little bit in the same boat but they're not directly competing with the normal spellcasters so it's less relevant there.
Other than that, yeah, the PHB ranger is just all over the place and they've rebuilt it like 3 times on their website. Otherwise most of the classes generally work but don't really expect to be able to play against type.
So avoid Ranger and I'm good, is what I'm hearing?
Always the right decision
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
edited October 2017
I've been having a blast as a Barbarian with the Path of the Totem Subclass. I do decent damage, and can tank a TON of damage when raging. By level 3 you get resistance (1/2 damage) to all damage except psychic.
I would say the Path of the Beserker sub class is broken, as you stack exhaustion when you use the main class feature of Frenzy, and exhaustion can only be gotten rid of 1 per long rest (or some high level spells), and it's super debilitating.
I've also played a Fighter with the battle master subclass and that is a ton of fun. lots of neat things you can stack on to your regular attacks to either enhance damage, trip or disarm enemies, grant advantage to a party member and things like that. One of the earlier level things that is slightly unbalanced is using a pole-arm battlemaster fighter with the pole-arm feat and great weapon fighter. One of the inspiration dice lets you add a d8 to your to hit roll, which helps negate the -5 to hit when using one of the great weapon features, -5 to hit / +10 damage. So early in the game you can do ALOT more damage than pretty much anyone else to a single target, and with pole arm specialty you can do an extra attack as a bonus action that can take advantage of those features. By level 10 though you've pretty much reached parity with the magic users and don't really gain anymore power, though you can gain more versatility.
The Eldritch Knight fighter subclass can be a lot of fun. You don't get much in the way of spell slots, but spending them to cast Shield or Absorb Elements can be fun. Blur is another really good defensive spell that's pretty sure to make your DM grind some teeth. Being a fighter you get proficiency in all armor and shields, and watching the DMs face fall when you get to add 5 to your AC as a reaction can be pretty amusing.
The base chassis of ranger has some unfortunate holdovers from earlier editions. Things like Favored Enemy and Natural Explorer are just too restrictive for a modern(ish) game. Burning one of your very limited spell slots to find out that that some types of creatures are within a mile of you (Primeval Awareness) but not learn anything that was actually useful is wasteful. Land's Stride is useful if a bit narrow in focus. Hide in Plain Sight just adds an RP restriction to an already just OK ability. And on, and on, and on.
I would only really consider using a ranger in a one off (where the limitations don't matter). Unless the DM lets you use the Revised Ranger UA. Makes the base class much more versatile and does great things for Beast Master.
Can you give us an idea of what you'd like to do in broad strokes with your character so that we can give you some advice?
naw, DA covered it. I was thinking some sort of bodyguard or seneschal for one of the other players, but then they said maybe somebody sneaky would be good, so who knows. I'm an old hand at DnD and I think this is a very beer and pretzels crew so character concept is (sigh) likely to be largely irrelevant. Both crossbow cheese and great weapon cheese have already been suggested, I learned today.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
The swashbuckler subclass of the rogue looks super fun. Its the character type I want to play next.
The swashbuckler subclass of the rogue looks super fun. Its the character type I want to play next.
Swashbuckler is really solid with the right party, though I do caution that it takes some finesse to make it work well; you just about always have advantage on your attack rolls and can churn out some serious damage with two weapon fighting/sneak attack, but the class really needs to stay mobile since it can't stand up well in a brawl from what I've seen.
The swashbuckler subclass of the rogue looks super fun. Its the character type I want to play next.
Swashbuckler is really solid with the right party, though I do caution that it takes some finesse to make it work well; you just about always have advantage on your attack rolls and can churn out some serious damage with two weapon fighting/sneak attack, but the class really needs to stay mobile since it can't stand up well in a brawl from what I've seen.
Well that seems pretty standard to the regular rogue archetype. Good to know though. Theres just a lot of fun thematic stuff to pull from to play a great swashbuckler.
The swashbuckler subclass of the rogue looks super fun. Its the character type I want to play next.
Swashbuckler is really solid with the right party, though I do caution that it takes some finesse to make it work well; you just about always have advantage on your attack rolls and can churn out some serious damage with two weapon fighting/sneak attack, but the class really needs to stay mobile since it can't stand up well in a brawl from what I've seen.
Well that seems pretty standard to the regular rogue archetype. Good to know though. Theres just a lot of fun thematic stuff to pull from to play a great swashbuckler.
A curveball of a swashbuckler starts with one level of fighter for medium armor, shields, and the dueling fighting style. Then, if you're a human, take Shield Master or Medium Armor Master before you move to Rogue. Either way it'll help your odds of not getting hit, or make you very hard to hit with a fireball - especially when your rogue abilities start up.
I went Monk/Swashbuckler dip with DM given finesse unarmed weapons.
It's pretty fun.
(Still don't get why Monk unarmed isn't finesse but w/e)
Because in 4e MC Monk was a super, super popular feat because it gave you the unarmed proficiency which allowed you to use a ki focus which had some of the best enchants.
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In Lost Mines of Phandelver, there's a dragon that purposefully runs away at half health, never to be heard from again. I thought that was dumb. So, I ran the dragon as smart, it interrogated the PCs and tried to bribe them to leave him alone, and then attacked. When it couldn't kill them, it flew away to recover. It then attacked their base of operations (they mentioned where they were from). I crafted 6 scenes of places that were important to the PCs, and asked them to pick 4 (there are 4 players) for how they would try to rescue / recover the thing in question (the bar, a helpful NPC's home, etc). I had no idea who would pick what, but it let me create short scenes to give each player a chance to shine on their own. We ran them sequentially, but technically, each party member was alone at the time.
I ran it kind of like how you might run Dungeon World - shifting spot light from player to player, combined with sort of skill challenges in D&D 4e where they needed a number of successes to save the thing they wanted to save. I also told the players up front that they could attempt to save as many things as they wanted, in any order they wanted, or could try to team up, all of which would affect the number of successes they'd need, as well as how high the DCs would be that they'd need to beat.
I've also done it with attuning to legendary weapons or magical items - a mental / dream scene of just the person, learning more about the thing they're attuning to, with their success or failure informing how many benefits they'd get from the object to start.
I kind of like having the party split in situations where it's not necessarily boss / mob combat. Even then, I've run a scene where our rogue snuck into the back of a hide out while the rest of the party created distractions in the front. If you think of the thing they're infiltrating / attacking as a real organization with a finite number of antagonists, as long as that is scaled properly to what the party can handle, you can split it up to provide appropriate challenges for whatever the party comes up with to deal with it. A frontal assault gets one kind of response, while a stealth mission gets another, all informed from your initial planning session.
High points for the first session included:
~establishing my character's goal of seeing the merchant princes brought down so that a proper socialist state can be created in chult.
~getting some side quests going involving a hunt for some dwarven doohickey so that we can get ourselves a guide on the cheap and hunting for a shiled guardian (I fully intend to utilize the funds from these ventures to fund the revolution for the poor people suffering under an oligarchy).
~Learning that at least one legendary artifact is floating around in the form of the ring of winter.
Really looking forawrd to heading into the jungle so that I can help my companions get there zombie stomping on.
Therefore, I am eager to subscribe to your newsletter!
Our party split up last time we were searching a village once it became obvious there was a lot of ground to cover and nothing especially dangerous aside from some goblins.
1 party memeber dead, zero rolls for initiative
After picking up our guide (an albino dwarf named radgriz), our party headed out... and learned that this map is going to be a complete bastard to navigate, since each of the hexes is apparently going to take a day to cross and our destination is easily 2 and a half months away.
Oh well, gotta get a dwarf his gewgaw.
anyways, we head deeper into the jungle and come to the realization that we screwed up a little bit by not buying a plethora of survival gear (like rain catchers), but we felt that we could use our brains to solve our various issues.
Eventually we find ourselves at a wrecked settlement, where some scrounging turns up 5 raincatchers, a holy symbol of torm, a cave and a big ass statue of a guy carrying a crocodile. Figuring that we should see if anything useful was in the cave, we headed in and immediatley discovered a pit trap. Then a spiked ceiling trap (which the kenku set off). Then we came across some tiles that required us to jump to glowing spots in order to safely navigate.
Me and the barbarian were feeling pretty good as we came up on a door and we set about opening it, with the barbarian triggering some sort of thunder ward, causing me to take 8 points of damage and go sailing some 30 feet through the air before someone cast featherfall on me to make sure I didn't get splattered by the fall. Still though, the barbarian was able to smash his way through it and discovered a room full of dinosaur bones and a 30 foot high pillair with a spiraling staircase surrounding it along wth murals of the croco carrier and a ceramic jug on top of it.
Now at this point, we had faced 4 traps and we felt that we had to be fairly clear so collectively we encouraged the barbarian to climb the stairwell, where he almost imediatley set off another god dam trap (lightning this time) the words of consolement that he'd be alright turned to ashes in my mouth as the gm announced that he suffered 38 damage, 13 more then he needed to kill him in his injured state.
At this point I decided to start thinking outside the box and decided to build an ad hoc grappling hook from dinosaur bones which with some effort I was able to hook the platform with, passing it to one of our burly fighters so that he can bypass the steps entirely. Once up their he picks up the jug and heads back down and we hastily backtrack out of the cave of utter dickery.
Perhaps feeling sorry for us, the GM decides to skip a fight with some goblins and tells us that we now have an alchemist jug which will (amongst other things) ensure that we have 2 gallons of mayonnaise a day!
As to the poor barbarian who got blasted to pieces, he has elected to come back as a lizardman trickster cleric and I suggested to him that he should be worshipping the crocodile that tricked a guy into carrying him.
Also...isn't the whole campaign a race against time? There are only a certain number of days before the Soulmonger does its thing and the world is doomed? I hope the campaign has built in enough time for players to go farting around...
2. At this stage it is and it isn't; the party hasn't learned what Accerak's end goal is and as such we don't have as much imperative to deal with him. Further: we dinged for 2 at the end of last session, so even if we did know about the soulmonger and where it was, we would at best annoy it's guardians for about a minute.
But the way Perkins had it in the AQI live game there was that anyone who was suffering from their souls being 'monged was losing max HP per day. So, the way I took it, is that any party looking to save the world from oblivion after death has maybe a few months before all the high level NPC's the Forgotten Realms are done for.
I'm concerned about letting my party loose in the jungles, which I want to do, but still somehow keeping them on track to save the world.
Perkins stepped over a lot of the set up for ToA, and instead got the whole angle of Jim's condition along with Omin's resurrection difficulties to get the party on an airship to the exact right location straight away. Kinda like how Viari can do ridiculous shit with only rolling dice once, whereas in a legitimate campaign that would take half an hour to resolve.
eh, people like elminster will stasis or imprison themselves until the situation passes by.
Yes. I understand that. Its a show, not a normal D&D table. But that still doesn't answer my question/concern about a "time limit" in the campaign. Omin's resurrection difficulties are one thing. But Jim's rapidly declining max HP is the more important source of my question.
If an (N)PC has only 75HP and is losing 1 per day...I'm sure someone in this thing is feeling a sense of urgency. I assume that there is some hook given like "Everyone who was ever risen before is slowly withering away and dying again, now go get moving and saving the everyone in the world from permanent death!"
I guess I could always buy the book myself a few weeks earlier than I had planned and find out for myself.
Sounds plenty to me already.
There are tons of resources out there, but ultimately everyone has their own method.
try throwing in 2-5 combat encounters, the boss, maybe a puzzle or two, some loot, and you're good!
The only other point I'd consider making is:
NPCs will generally cause the PCs to talk stuff out.
A haunted mansion generally doesn't have a lot of those, putting more emphasis on the DM filling the void with something else.
If you or your gf wants to outline the adventure here I'd gladly look over it.
But in the spirit of giving real advice, I'll give you these pieces of advice:
1.You want to go 40/40/20 on preparation/adaptaion/flex, that way you have a good mix of cohesive narrative and adaptation to the players actions/preferences, with a little bit of flex so that you can put more of either into your session.
2. Know what your players are going to be in advance. Nothing is worse then when you wind up with a party that is a weird kludge of classes (like 4 open hand monks and a berserker) and having to readjust your encounter/rp plan because various party jobs simply aren't being fulfilled.
3. When it comes to building fights, it's important to carefully read through the monster stat blocks so that there aren't any rude surprises for you midway through the fight; in theory a level 1 4 man party is a match for 4 jackalweres but I seriously doubt that they've a prayer of winning unless they get real lucky with some magic.
Bolded for Truth.
I don't need to be stronger than the other characters just not notably weaker
No, there aren't any traps. There's a few things you can do to be a little more powerful than expected, but basically no straight up bad choices.
the only thing i can think of that gets all the theorycrafter's frothing are the "power attack" feats, i.e. sharpshooter and great weapon master.
If people start picking those then you might have a problem on your hands.
The classes are fairly well balanced.
I think the vanilla ranger beast master is pretty bad.
I also hate warlocks, but that's more of a mechanics niggle.
beyond that .. play what you want!
The problem is that balance of the classes is heavily influenced by how often the party rests and for how long. If you are always short resting then Warlocks become very good, if you never short rest then they compared poorly with Wizards or Sorcerers. Fighters are a little bit in the same boat but they're not directly competing with the normal spellcasters so it's less relevant there.
Other than that, yeah, the PHB ranger is just all over the place and they've rebuilt it like 3 times on their website. Otherwise most of the classes generally work but don't really expect to be able to play against type.
avoid the beast master. the hunter ranger is fine!
everything else is close enough to not matter.
Always the right decision
I would say the Path of the Beserker sub class is broken, as you stack exhaustion when you use the main class feature of Frenzy, and exhaustion can only be gotten rid of 1 per long rest (or some high level spells), and it's super debilitating.
I've also played a Fighter with the battle master subclass and that is a ton of fun. lots of neat things you can stack on to your regular attacks to either enhance damage, trip or disarm enemies, grant advantage to a party member and things like that. One of the earlier level things that is slightly unbalanced is using a pole-arm battlemaster fighter with the pole-arm feat and great weapon fighter. One of the inspiration dice lets you add a d8 to your to hit roll, which helps negate the -5 to hit when using one of the great weapon features, -5 to hit / +10 damage. So early in the game you can do ALOT more damage than pretty much anyone else to a single target, and with pole arm specialty you can do an extra attack as a bonus action that can take advantage of those features. By level 10 though you've pretty much reached parity with the magic users and don't really gain anymore power, though you can gain more versatility.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
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I would only really consider using a ranger in a one off (where the limitations don't matter). Unless the DM lets you use the Revised Ranger UA. Makes the base class much more versatile and does great things for Beast Master.
On that note our GM had to end the game earlier than planned.
naw, DA covered it. I was thinking some sort of bodyguard or seneschal for one of the other players, but then they said maybe somebody sneaky would be good, so who knows. I'm an old hand at DnD and I think this is a very beer and pretzels crew so character concept is (sigh) likely to be largely irrelevant. Both crossbow cheese and great weapon cheese have already been suggested, I learned today.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
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It's pretty worthwhile!
In what way?
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
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Swashbuckler is really solid with the right party, though I do caution that it takes some finesse to make it work well; you just about always have advantage on your attack rolls and can churn out some serious damage with two weapon fighting/sneak attack, but the class really needs to stay mobile since it can't stand up well in a brawl from what I've seen.
Oh wait, dnd thread, nevermind. I thought was the WoW thread.
Well that seems pretty standard to the regular rogue archetype. Good to know though. Theres just a lot of fun thematic stuff to pull from to play a great swashbuckler.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
A curveball of a swashbuckler starts with one level of fighter for medium armor, shields, and the dueling fighting style. Then, if you're a human, take Shield Master or Medium Armor Master before you move to Rogue. Either way it'll help your odds of not getting hit, or make you very hard to hit with a fireball - especially when your rogue abilities start up.
It's pretty fun.
(Still don't get why Monk unarmed isn't finesse but w/e)
Because in 4e MC Monk was a super, super popular feat because it gave you the unarmed proficiency which allowed you to use a ki focus which had some of the best enchants.