Last night's Strahd session was frustrating for me. All the action took place on a really big map and we had a time limit to stop something from happening. On three different turns I double moved so I would be within casting range on the next turn, only to have my target taken out by another party member. It was partially my fault, I did give them extra movement twice with Mantle of Inspiration but the night was still kind of meh. Other players got some time to shine so in the long room that's good I guess.
We did hit a milestone in the campaign so we jumped up to 5th level, I'm excited to throw Hypnotic Pattern around next session.
D&D doesn't really have a good way to deal with POWs baked in. It's easier just to kill everyone in battle.
Sure. But don't think that's limited to D&D though.
True. I just have most of my experience in D&D.
Really it breaks down to what do you do with a hostile agent you've captured, potentially miles from anywhere. Double down on this if your a good aligned party.
if you have suggestion it lasts for 8 hours, so you can suggest they go knit a sweater instead of fighting
"The suggestion must be worded to make the action sound reasonable."
Asking Bob, the roided out thug with an axe to abandon his friends and go do something he considers a complete waste of time is the exact opposite of what the spell requires :P
Look Bob had life aspirations before becoming a wandering bandit
Last prisoner my players took coughed up the info immediately, he was not being paid enough to deal with these psychos. He's now an NPC with the party as, after they fixed his shattered legs (he got em on the way to being a prisoner), They offered to compensate him monetarily, and really that's all he cares about. He's definitely going to betray the party someday. Probably long after they no longer expect it to happen.
I've been planning a new 5e campaign for maybe a week now, and last night I found out that OneNote, which I used in college, is free now and has pretty good mobile support. So I spent tonight transferring all my plaintext notes into it. I really like the organizational system of Books > Sections > Pages, and the quicklink feature is great, although it's travesty that it doesn't work in OneNote Online.
I've got things broken down into Sessions, Encounters, Greater NPCs, Lesser NPCs, Places, Lore, Homebrew, and Ideas.
I also picked up the 5e PHB from the shop where I play on Thursdays and got some advice on what night would work best.
Next step is make some creature tokens like the ones listed a few pages back in this thread.
There's a pretty great DND onenote notebook put together you can download, that I found pretty useful when I was DMing. It has a bunch of the SRD tables put into it for easy reference. My copy of it is 2-3 years old, but it looks like tons of stuff has been added since I used it.
One thing I liked doing with it was taking scans/phone pictures of monster stat blocks I knew I was going to use and pasting them into onenote. So I could just jump to a tab, or have them all to the right of the dungeon map for when I needed to look at them, rather than making notes by hand or having to look in the MM. Same thing with the spell descriptions for casting NPCs.
I've been planning a new 5e campaign for maybe a week now, and last night I found out that OneNote, which I used in college, is free now and has pretty good mobile support. So I spent tonight transferring all my plaintext notes into it. I really like the organizational system of Books > Sections > Pages, and the quicklink feature is great, although it's travesty that it doesn't work in OneNote Online.
I've got things broken down into Sessions, Encounters, Greater NPCs, Lesser NPCs, Places, Lore, Homebrew, and Ideas.
I also picked up the 5e PHB from the shop where I play on Thursdays and got some advice on what night would work best.
Next step is make some creature tokens like the ones listed a few pages back in this thread.
There's a pretty great DND onenote notebook put together you can download, that I found pretty useful when I was DMing. It has a bunch of the SRD tables put into it for easy reference. My copy of it is 2-3 years old, but it looks like tons of stuff has been added since I used it.
One thing I liked doing with it was taking scans/phone pictures of monster stat blocks I knew I was going to use and pasting them into onenote. So I could just jump to a tab, or have them all to the right of the dungeon map for when I needed to look at them, rather than making notes by hand or having to look in the MM. Same thing with the spell descriptions for casting NPCs.
OMG this is amazing. There's a chance I might be starting up a 5E campaign in the near future and this would save me so much work! My 5E curmudgeon heart has grown 1d3 sizes this day.
Session #3 of "Nerdy Dad's Group" tonight. Will they get revenge on the Redbrand Ruffians? Or will they head off side-questing into the wilderness and avoid a (perceived) drubbing like they got last time?
Either way, I drew maps and asked my son to make some Lego minifig adventurers to borrow. He's 6 and has no idea what is going on, so I expect criminals and police officers and dinosaur hunters.
Session #3 of "Nerdy Dad's Group" tonight. Will they get revenge on the Redbrand Ruffians? Or will they head off side-questing into the wilderness and avoid a (perceived) drubbing like they got last time?
Either way, I drew maps and asked my son to make some Lego minifig adventurers to borrow. He's 6 and has no idea what is going on, so I expect criminals and police officers and dinosaur hunters.
I love my Surface Pro, but OneNote to me was nothing more than a handy scratch pad that is rarely used (where I still prefer a real pen and a piece of paper that I can rip up when done with it) or is used as something for my daughter to scribble on when she wants to play on "Daddy 'Puter"
After skimming that site @tinwhiskers put up, I am definitely going to dive deep into it now!
Session #3 of "Nerdy Dad's Group" tonight. Will they get revenge on the Redbrand Ruffians? Or will they head off side-questing into the wilderness and avoid a (perceived) drubbing like they got last time?
Either way, I drew maps and asked my son to make some Lego minifig adventurers to borrow. He's 6 and has no idea what is going on, so I expect criminals and police officers and dinosaur hunters.
Making the maps was a big hit, and we only used the boring Old Owl Well one I pilfered from the net and redrew on graph paper (going over the lines with my kids markers). The minifigs were also a fun hit and my son kept creeping down to see how we were using them. I'm excited to see the reaction when they get to the Redbrand Hideout and Cragmaw Castles I drew the same way. I like the look of mini's but don't want to get into them due to the escalating costs and time involved to paint, etc. But the mini-figs and simple blocks as enemies went over well. A 1" scale as I drew things is a titch small for mini-figs, but we got by.
As predicted, they skipped the Redbrands and went side-questing with an Ogre random encounter along the way. Old Owl Well for a zombie fight, then Agatha/Conyberry (one of the rogues Nat20'd a charisma check and pocketed the Comb) and they got to Wyvern Tor. They took out the Orc sentry, and when they poked a scout into the cave the level 2 party wisely decided to come back later rather than face 7 Orcs and an Ogre. We ended the session with a random wolf encounter and some story awards/DM largesse back in Phandalin for a bump to level 3.
I'm pretty sure next session we'll be taking on the Redbrands!
Reading Mordenkainen's makes me want to take my Strahd campaign planar when my group is done there. I just don't want to fly solo without a book though.
Reading Mordenkainen's makes me want to take my Strahd campaign planar when my group is done there. I just don't want to fly solo without a book though.
i put a random corpse collector in Chult, just mindlessly walking around sticking zombies to itself. It will leave my players alone if they leave it alone.
But they're D&D players so
also their household (they stay in a big manor house in Chult and have about a dozen servants, guards, and their children living inside) is slowly being devoured by an oblex but none of them have noticed yet (I even literally mentioned the ooze tendril coming from the little boy to the monk but he was busy plotting how to cheat at a dinosaur race)
New campaign settings for 5e coming out this year, to be announced in July
These new publications won't be full-blown storylines, but rather an introduction to different worlds set inside the D&D multiverse. "It's going to be more like at the level of how Barovia [introduced in the Curse of Strahd adventure storyline] is in terms of stuff. Here's a thing that's going to give you a taste of the setting, but we're not going to that setting yet, we're just letting you get in there and start doing it."
Seems like it will be multiple settings in one publication without an adventure
So it could be an introduction to places like Eberron, Dark Sun and Spelljammer, with proper adventure modules coming later
The campaign I'm running continues to go well with the parties cheating at the dinosaur races, the bard hooking up with a tabaxi zhentarim agent and the gunslinger hooking up with a yuan-ti agent. For their third guide they're taking the crazy one armed dwarf with a death wish against dragons.
The sorceress accidentally murdered a family and panicked and magic missiled the remaining child during a very botched theft attempt and then ran home and shut the door and cast darkness on herself and hid under the bed for the rest of the night
The monk's adopted young harpy was taught that eating cats is okay because nobody thinks to just go buy it some meat
The rogue has gone exploring the sewers again solo and was dominated by cranium rats a second time and sent to go attack the nearest guards (one of these days she'll successfully sneak by the psychic rats to steal their treasure)
Acererak showed up to remind the party the jungles of chult exist, I mean, to threaten their impending ANNIHILATION MWAHAHA
The rogue has gone exploring the sewers again solo and was dominated by cranium rats a second time and sent to go attack the nearest guards (one of these days she'll successfully sneak by the psychic rats to steal their treasure)
And then the boss cranium rat says "I don't think you come here for the treasure"...
I like more narrative driven stuff, but I'll be damned if that doesn't sound like a hell of a sandbox, Override.
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dresdenphileWatch out for snakes!Registered Userregular
A friend is starting an online game with all of our college buddies. He's sent us setting information, but we're on our own to create characters. One of the other players suggested we all play the same class. My contribution was that our group should be called "Oops; All Barbarians!"
Read the Tome of Foes over the week, and as usual, all the tables are the best part of the book. I really liked the appendix, it's much improved from previous books as I recall - it's got 4 different sorting methods for the monsters, especially the "by region" index is useful as it also lists the CR.
I also found the chapter about Elves neat, and I was wondering if or how it differed from how their ancient history was set in other editions.
I like more narrative driven stuff, but I'll be damned if that doesn't sound like a hell of a sandbox, Override.
they've been in Nyanzaru for 7 sessions and I've basically kept it like that, with a * lot of stuff for them to do in the city, everything from dealing with vampires at the docks to a yuan-ti sea assault (which they suicidally steered their flaming fist ship right into instead of just warning the city), to apprehending a beggar prince warlock at the bath house who may have kidnapped a merchant prince's son
that last fight was great because the Sunites don't let anyone into the bathhouse with so much as a sock and the (bad guy) warlock summoned 4 types of water elemental, one from each pool, but each pool of water in the bathhouse has different magical properties (herbal restorative, hot water, cold water, salt water), and they figured out how to use that against the opposing elementals, the towels are enchanted to magically stay dry so they figured out they did lots of damage to water elementals, and the party has a monk who just did naked cannonballs into each elemental because lolmonk. Very much a fight of improvisation, the rogue sneak attacking with chair legs, the sorceress just up and grappled the warlock and used his arcane focus to cast her spells (later they asked how he had a necklace with an arcane focus and I reminded them that nobody so much as made a fuss when asked to leave everything in the lockers, had they TRIED to keep "jewelry" out of fear of it getting stolen, the attendants wouldn't have put up much fuss)
...I mean it probably would have been advisable to clear the families out of the bathhouse before confronting the mad warlock, but they kept the casualties down to one crushed old man, one father and his little girl frozen (but still alive just barely), and one masseuse who was turned into confetti by the whirling salt elemental. Another successful adventure, because the person they rescued was way more important than those people!
but they're finally done with all that and now the Main Quest is increasing its pressure on the party so they finally got their shit together and are heading off to Oralangu, right into a yuan-ti trap because the gunslinger is sleeping with a yuan-ti agent who reports their movements to Ras-Nsi. This will be great
*I only use that guide as a baseline, I changed a lot of the stuff in there to make it more challenging since the party is a bit higher level
A friend is starting an online game with all of our college buddies. He's sent us setting information, but we're on our own to create characters. One of the other players suggested we all play the same class. My contribution was that our group should be called "Oops; All Barbarians!"
in one of his vids Matt Colville mentioned the "lets all play the same class" thing (which, btw, has been a Thing for a veeeeery long time. A whole series of books from the 2nd ed era are about running single-class parties and there's articles about it going back to the 70s).
I think he hit the nail on the head there when he pointed out that, no matter how cool such things sound in principle (and they do), it is just about impossible to get a group of actual humans to make a set of characters for such a game. At least someone is going to have to be all precious and show up with the one "different" character in the group.
Odds are if everyone agrees beforehand to make an all barbarian party when they show up at the table you won't have a single one.
A friend is starting an online game with all of our college buddies. He's sent us setting information, but we're on our own to create characters. One of the other players suggested we all play the same class. My contribution was that our group should be called "Oops; All Barbarians!"
in one of his vids Matt Colville mentioned the "lets all play the same class" thing (which, btw, has been a Thing for a veeeeery long time. A whole series of books from the 2nd ed era are about running single-class parties and there's articles about it going back to the 70s).
I think he hit the nail on the head there when he pointed out that, no matter how cool such things sound in principle (and they do), it is just about impossible to get a group of actual humans to make a set of characters for such a game. At least someone is going to have to be all precious and show up with the one "different" character in the group.
Odds are if everyone agrees beforehand to make an all barbarian party when they show up at the table you won't have a single one.
if were to pick all rogues, I am 100% positive the person who ALWAYS picks rogue will pick something different
A few games back my group decided to do a themed party, we were all going to be representatives if a thieves guild. Not necessary rogues, the guild does need enforcers, accountants, entertainment, etc... Then, turns out, only 3 out of 7 of us (at the time) went with that as background. Because one person thought a local townie sounded more interesting. And another thought there can't be druids in the rogue guild, especially not ones raised by wolves which sounds interesting. And so on...
Man Sunday night was an interesting evening at the usual bar event.
In one game, we were whisked away to a land often flooded to the point where the trees are half submerged. Where Elf and Drow are in a frequent state of war. The DM used his usual character that he plays with us at another table as our 'In' for this, and we ended up aiding the elves in an assault on a city which had been lost to the drow. This wasn't a small skirmish either, but full on Total War styled warfare with our group acting as a spearhead to push through the enemy lines and reach the city, to try and free prisoners taken when it was captured.
Via some fun usage of Greater Invisibility, and our Warlock using Create Thrall on a guard we captured we were able to find the prisoners and free them. Once again the scale here is large, there were a thousand prisoners at least and freeing them created quite the distraction. Leading them to the armory of the city, a voice echoed out around us as the forces left within the city took up positions on roof tops around us and the prisoners. Very likely a Matron, or other Matriarch of the drow. To our surprise the street below us opened up and dropped us a good 30-feet... with stored flood waters rushing in as the street sealed again above us!
Managing to escape up to a safe enough platform, we were about to turn around and find a way back... when we hear... or -feel- a loud crashing sound. Looking behind us we see nothing but a massive scaly, clawed hand... and then a draconic head rising up out of the depths we escaped from. A wild battle in a super enclosed space ensued, the dragon being felled but taking a lot of punishment first. As we tried to recover... the street opened up again, with the DM's character cheerfully telling us it looks like we've been busy!
Us leading the prisoners to the armory, and getting the attention of most of the drow left in the city, gave the elven army a chance to push in and overtake them. We found out later the dragon had been an Ancient Silver Shadow Dragon, and between that and the demons that were with the drow on the battlefield it was clear they were dabbling in dangerous things to try and win.
After that was over, we were approached by the player who is our resident monk. Looking a bit sheepish he says "So... I kind of got captured and all my stuff was taken." With plenty of evening left, a few of us remaining at the bar settled down to free him and get his stuff back. Turns out, he'd sought to assault his former monastery on his own, believing he was now strong enough to do so (for reference most of us are Level 20 with these characters). He learned very quickly just how deadly fighting large groups of other monks were! Instead of going from the bottom up... we had two people that were capable of flight that lifted myself and the monk right to the very top of the monastery to face the Grand Master that had taken over and turned many students into mercenaries and assassins for hire.
Finding the Grand Master alone, the four of us moved in... and he did a devastating blow to the paladin, before the rest of us managing to subdue him and allow our friend to end it. But before it could happen.. suddenly all of us needed to make CON checks, and at the same time the unconscious form of the Grand Master was grabbed and whisked away. Almost immediately the paladin gave chase with his flight, grabbing our monk friend to pursue. Me and the DM from the first game were left to deal with the monks who had attacked us from the shadows. It was a crazy chase, straight down the mountainside with one monk getting in their way with a powerful staff that had belonged to our monk friend, and then the sheer difficulty of catching up to a max level monk NPC that could move through the shadows.
My barbarian had only one option by the end of it once the rabble at the top were done with... he flung himself off the back of the monastery and down the mountainside. I've a ring that gives featherfalling, so it was a rough but not deadly trip down. The battle was going south when I caught up, with the paladin left stunned and freefalling and the monk and the now conscious Grand Master escaping. Try as I did with my javelin, I could not hit them through the dense trees and the one time I would have struck the Grand Master deflected it.
Regardless we chased them off. Our friend was able to find the rest of his equipment other than what the two stronger monks had taken, and he found the upper floors of the monastery abandoned leaving the lower levels filled with confused younger trainees... now looking to him to lead.
A friend is starting an online game with all of our college buddies. He's sent us setting information, but we're on our own to create characters. One of the other players suggested we all play the same class. My contribution was that our group should be called "Oops; All Barbarians!"
in one of his vids Matt Colville mentioned the "lets all play the same class" thing (which, btw, has been a Thing for a veeeeery long time. A whole series of books from the 2nd ed era are about running single-class parties and there's articles about it going back to the 70s).
I think he hit the nail on the head there when he pointed out that, no matter how cool such things sound in principle (and they do), it is just about impossible to get a group of actual humans to make a set of characters for such a game. At least someone is going to have to be all precious and show up with the one "different" character in the group.
Odds are if everyone agrees beforehand to make an all barbarian party when they show up at the table you won't have a single one.
Not completely the same, but a woman who has joined our campaign has been playing a lot of games with her family and friends and one of those games was a story based on the crusades, so the DM wanted them to make either Paladins or Clerics and they didn't have anybody taking another class. So sometimes it can work.
DnD is cooperative storytelling, so if the plan is to do a single class campaign or setting then that should be obvious for everyone upfront and the players should Yes And the fuck out of that. For example: I am looking into a campaign where magic is incredibly scarce and mostly invisible to regular people. If I ever manage to get it to the table I will have a Session 0 just discussing how that world would work and we would come up with the kind of classes and backgrounds the players could go with.
----
We had a short session last Sunday @ LMoP and it was an absolute slugfest. We are in the
Wave Echo Cave and managed to stumble into the room with the Flaming Skull. We assumed it would be low on HP, but high in AC, only to find out that this was definitely a mini-boss with -50% to piercing damage (most of us have piercing weapons). We also assumed it would have an attack of opportunity, but when we tried it out the DM found out that the skull had nothing to make a regular attack with.
. We all survived, but needed a long rest. Considering we didn't know where we were we figured we would explore the space a bit and see if we could wash away the remains of the skull by figuring out how to open the canal going through the room. Sadly the DM was rolling plenty of dice behind his screen and we had a random encounter to further fuck us over. After disposing of the encounter we ran all the way back to one of the first rooms of the dungeon and we barricaded ourselves in for a long rest.
We know the Flaming Skull will be back when we awaken, but annoyingly we still have no idea what we should be doing in this dungeon. We keep forging ahead and running into mobs, but we are mostly just stumbling through and dealing with problems as they arise (literally, on account of ghouls and skeletons)
Tomb of Annihilation should be run without sticking to RAW, for example rolling for jungle events is great but it's probably a better idea to preroll and create an outline of each day's adventures
Chult is also an ideal playground to dump stuff, I've got a half dozen "mini dungeons" that are basically a room or two and a thing, like a Breath of the Wild dungeon, aimed at one hour in length, spread around. Also given my party's acceptance of any and all allies, I have (from Tomb of Annihilation companion) a lost frost giant they'll find laying on a rock, who will ask them dejectedly if they know Artus Cimber and then sigh and offer to come with them because she's 5000% lost. Combat difficulty gets easier, unless they actually run into artus, at which point she'll try to literally grab him and take off into the jungle ( I know by raw a giant moves at half movement while absconding with a person but, eh? that seems wrong, humans are papillon sized to them)
Tomb of Annihilation should be run without sticking to RAW, for example rolling for jungle events is great but it's probably a better idea to preroll and create an outline of each day's adventures
Yes. Humping through the jungle and rolling encounters as presented in the book is a slog.
I would even go so far as (assuming water and food needs are met) plotting out the entire journey between points on the map and dropping in your pre-planned "random" encounters that way.
Tomb of Annihilation should be run without sticking to RAW, for example rolling for jungle events is great but it's probably a better idea to preroll and create an outline of each day's adventures
Yes. Humping through the jungle and rolling encounters as presented in the book is a slog.
I would even go so far as (assuming water and food needs are met) plotting out the entire journey between points on the map and dropping in your pre-planned "random" encounters that way.
I have the first 30 "days" planned, with random encounters only happening if they fail their navigation to their destination (oralangu at present), and even those are ready to go, I'll pick something that won't clog up the session. For example if they've just finished 3 hours of combat and miss a roll I won't have them run into wandering dinosaurs or thayans, instead they'll find some chwingas or maybe a dead party of adventurers with mysterious wounds
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We did hit a milestone in the campaign so we jumped up to 5th level, I'm excited to throw Hypnotic Pattern around next session.
Comics, Games, Booze
Look Bob had life aspirations before becoming a wandering bandit
It's like a little zen koan.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
There's a pretty great DND onenote notebook put together you can download, that I found pretty useful when I was DMing. It has a bunch of the SRD tables put into it for easy reference. My copy of it is 2-3 years old, but it looks like tons of stuff has been added since I used it.
http://www.cryrid.com/digitaldnd/2018/05/17/dd-onenote/
One thing I liked doing with it was taking scans/phone pictures of monster stat blocks I knew I was going to use and pasting them into onenote. So I could just jump to a tab, or have them all to the right of the dungeon map for when I needed to look at them, rather than making notes by hand or having to look in the MM. Same thing with the spell descriptions for casting NPCs.
OMG this is amazing. There's a chance I might be starting up a 5E campaign in the near future and this would save me so much work! My 5E curmudgeon heart has grown 1d3 sizes this day.
Either way, I drew maps and asked my son to make some Lego minifig adventurers to borrow. He's 6 and has no idea what is going on, so I expect criminals and police officers and dinosaur hunters.
Or are they rogues, paladins and rangers?
I love my Surface Pro, but OneNote to me was nothing more than a handy scratch pad that is rarely used (where I still prefer a real pen and a piece of paper that I can rip up when done with it) or is used as something for my daughter to scribble on when she wants to play on "Daddy 'Puter"
After skimming that site @tinwhiskers put up, I am definitely going to dive deep into it now!
As you can guess, the themes are urban and heist
There's a stream going all weekend:
edit:
Apparently release is Sept 6th in game stores, Sept 18th otherwise
Making the maps was a big hit, and we only used the boring Old Owl Well one I pilfered from the net and redrew on graph paper (going over the lines with my kids markers). The minifigs were also a fun hit and my son kept creeping down to see how we were using them. I'm excited to see the reaction when they get to the Redbrand Hideout and Cragmaw Castles I drew the same way. I like the look of mini's but don't want to get into them due to the escalating costs and time involved to paint, etc. But the mini-figs and simple blocks as enemies went over well. A 1" scale as I drew things is a titch small for mini-figs, but we got by.
As predicted, they skipped the Redbrands and went side-questing with an Ogre random encounter along the way. Old Owl Well for a zombie fight, then Agatha/Conyberry (one of the rogues Nat20'd a charisma check and pocketed the Comb) and they got to Wyvern Tor. They took out the Orc sentry, and when they poked a scout into the cave the level 2 party wisely decided to come back later rather than face 7 Orcs and an Ogre. We ended the session with a random wolf encounter and some story awards/DM largesse back in Phandalin for a bump to level 3.
I'm pretty sure next session we'll be taking on the Redbrands!
Well holy shit
Dragon Heist was only part 1
Part 2 is Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage
Undermountain campaign, level 6 to 20
I have no opinions on the book, but holy shit that's some great cover art.
WotC shooting for some of them Thanos dollers
i put a random corpse collector in Chult, just mindlessly walking around sticking zombies to itself. It will leave my players alone if they leave it alone.
But they're D&D players so
also their household (they stay in a big manor house in Chult and have about a dozen servants, guards, and their children living inside) is slowly being devoured by an oblex but none of them have noticed yet (I even literally mentioned the ooze tendril coming from the little boy to the monk but he was busy plotting how to cheat at a dinosaur race)
the monsters in Tome of Foes are fantastic
New campaign settings for 5e coming out this year, to be announced in July
Seems like it will be multiple settings in one publication without an adventure
So it could be an introduction to places like Eberron, Dark Sun and Spelljammer, with proper adventure modules coming later
The sorceress accidentally murdered a family and panicked and magic missiled the remaining child during a very botched theft attempt and then ran home and shut the door and cast darkness on herself and hid under the bed for the rest of the night
The monk's adopted young harpy was taught that eating cats is okay because nobody thinks to just go buy it some meat
The rogue has gone exploring the sewers again solo and was dominated by cranium rats a second time and sent to go attack the nearest guards (one of these days she'll successfully sneak by the psychic rats to steal their treasure)
Acererak showed up to remind the party the jungles of chult exist, I mean, to threaten their impending ANNIHILATION MWAHAHA
I also found the chapter about Elves neat, and I was wondering if or how it differed from how their ancient history was set in other editions.
they've been in Nyanzaru for 7 sessions and I've basically kept it like that, with a * lot of stuff for them to do in the city, everything from dealing with vampires at the docks to a yuan-ti sea assault (which they suicidally steered their flaming fist ship right into instead of just warning the city), to apprehending a beggar prince warlock at the bath house who may have kidnapped a merchant prince's son
that last fight was great because the Sunites don't let anyone into the bathhouse with so much as a sock and the (bad guy) warlock summoned 4 types of water elemental, one from each pool, but each pool of water in the bathhouse has different magical properties (herbal restorative, hot water, cold water, salt water), and they figured out how to use that against the opposing elementals, the towels are enchanted to magically stay dry so they figured out they did lots of damage to water elementals, and the party has a monk who just did naked cannonballs into each elemental because lolmonk. Very much a fight of improvisation, the rogue sneak attacking with chair legs, the sorceress just up and grappled the warlock and used his arcane focus to cast her spells (later they asked how he had a necklace with an arcane focus and I reminded them that nobody so much as made a fuss when asked to leave everything in the lockers, had they TRIED to keep "jewelry" out of fear of it getting stolen, the attendants wouldn't have put up much fuss)
...I mean it probably would have been advisable to clear the families out of the bathhouse before confronting the mad warlock, but they kept the casualties down to one crushed old man, one father and his little girl frozen (but still alive just barely), and one masseuse who was turned into confetti by the whirling salt elemental. Another successful adventure, because the person they rescued was way more important than those people!
but they're finally done with all that and now the Main Quest is increasing its pressure on the party so they finally got their shit together and are heading off to Oralangu, right into a yuan-ti trap because the gunslinger is sleeping with a yuan-ti agent who reports their movements to Ras-Nsi. This will be great
*I only use that guide as a baseline, I changed a lot of the stuff in there to make it more challenging since the party is a bit higher level
in one of his vids Matt Colville mentioned the "lets all play the same class" thing (which, btw, has been a Thing for a veeeeery long time. A whole series of books from the 2nd ed era are about running single-class parties and there's articles about it going back to the 70s).
I think he hit the nail on the head there when he pointed out that, no matter how cool such things sound in principle (and they do), it is just about impossible to get a group of actual humans to make a set of characters for such a game. At least someone is going to have to be all precious and show up with the one "different" character in the group.
Odds are if everyone agrees beforehand to make an all barbarian party when they show up at the table you won't have a single one.
if were to pick all rogues, I am 100% positive the person who ALWAYS picks rogue will pick something different
In one game, we were whisked away to a land often flooded to the point where the trees are half submerged. Where Elf and Drow are in a frequent state of war. The DM used his usual character that he plays with us at another table as our 'In' for this, and we ended up aiding the elves in an assault on a city which had been lost to the drow. This wasn't a small skirmish either, but full on Total War styled warfare with our group acting as a spearhead to push through the enemy lines and reach the city, to try and free prisoners taken when it was captured.
Via some fun usage of Greater Invisibility, and our Warlock using Create Thrall on a guard we captured we were able to find the prisoners and free them. Once again the scale here is large, there were a thousand prisoners at least and freeing them created quite the distraction. Leading them to the armory of the city, a voice echoed out around us as the forces left within the city took up positions on roof tops around us and the prisoners. Very likely a Matron, or other Matriarch of the drow. To our surprise the street below us opened up and dropped us a good 30-feet... with stored flood waters rushing in as the street sealed again above us!
Managing to escape up to a safe enough platform, we were about to turn around and find a way back... when we hear... or -feel- a loud crashing sound. Looking behind us we see nothing but a massive scaly, clawed hand... and then a draconic head rising up out of the depths we escaped from. A wild battle in a super enclosed space ensued, the dragon being felled but taking a lot of punishment first. As we tried to recover... the street opened up again, with the DM's character cheerfully telling us it looks like we've been busy!
Us leading the prisoners to the armory, and getting the attention of most of the drow left in the city, gave the elven army a chance to push in and overtake them. We found out later the dragon had been an Ancient Silver Shadow Dragon, and between that and the demons that were with the drow on the battlefield it was clear they were dabbling in dangerous things to try and win.
After that was over, we were approached by the player who is our resident monk. Looking a bit sheepish he says "So... I kind of got captured and all my stuff was taken." With plenty of evening left, a few of us remaining at the bar settled down to free him and get his stuff back. Turns out, he'd sought to assault his former monastery on his own, believing he was now strong enough to do so (for reference most of us are Level 20 with these characters). He learned very quickly just how deadly fighting large groups of other monks were! Instead of going from the bottom up... we had two people that were capable of flight that lifted myself and the monk right to the very top of the monastery to face the Grand Master that had taken over and turned many students into mercenaries and assassins for hire.
Finding the Grand Master alone, the four of us moved in... and he did a devastating blow to the paladin, before the rest of us managing to subdue him and allow our friend to end it. But before it could happen.. suddenly all of us needed to make CON checks, and at the same time the unconscious form of the Grand Master was grabbed and whisked away. Almost immediately the paladin gave chase with his flight, grabbing our monk friend to pursue. Me and the DM from the first game were left to deal with the monks who had attacked us from the shadows. It was a crazy chase, straight down the mountainside with one monk getting in their way with a powerful staff that had belonged to our monk friend, and then the sheer difficulty of catching up to a max level monk NPC that could move through the shadows.
My barbarian had only one option by the end of it once the rabble at the top were done with... he flung himself off the back of the monastery and down the mountainside. I've a ring that gives featherfalling, so it was a rough but not deadly trip down. The battle was going south when I caught up, with the paladin left stunned and freefalling and the monk and the now conscious Grand Master escaping. Try as I did with my javelin, I could not hit them through the dense trees and the one time I would have struck the Grand Master deflected it.
Regardless we chased them off. Our friend was able to find the rest of his equipment other than what the two stronger monks had taken, and he found the upper floors of the monastery abandoned leaving the lower levels filled with confused younger trainees... now looking to him to lead.
counterspell mindgames for days
steals the king's clothes off his body by imposing natural ones
Not completely the same, but a woman who has joined our campaign has been playing a lot of games with her family and friends and one of those games was a story based on the crusades, so the DM wanted them to make either Paladins or Clerics and they didn't have anybody taking another class. So sometimes it can work.
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We had a short session last Sunday @ LMoP and it was an absolute slugfest. We are in the
When I start posting my session notes it's going to be interesting to see how much my GM has tweaked and added.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Chult is also an ideal playground to dump stuff, I've got a half dozen "mini dungeons" that are basically a room or two and a thing, like a Breath of the Wild dungeon, aimed at one hour in length, spread around. Also given my party's acceptance of any and all allies, I have (from Tomb of Annihilation companion) a lost frost giant they'll find laying on a rock, who will ask them dejectedly if they know Artus Cimber and then sigh and offer to come with them because she's 5000% lost. Combat difficulty gets easier, unless they actually run into artus, at which point she'll try to literally grab him and take off into the jungle ( I know by raw a giant moves at half movement while absconding with a person but, eh? that seems wrong, humans are papillon sized to them)
Yes. Humping through the jungle and rolling encounters as presented in the book is a slog.
I would even go so far as (assuming water and food needs are met) plotting out the entire journey between points on the map and dropping in your pre-planned "random" encounters that way.
I have the first 30 "days" planned, with random encounters only happening if they fail their navigation to their destination (oralangu at present), and even those are ready to go, I'll pick something that won't clog up the session. For example if they've just finished 3 hours of combat and miss a roll I won't have them run into wandering dinosaurs or thayans, instead they'll find some chwingas or maybe a dead party of adventurers with mysterious wounds