Depending on their background, previous experience in battle would be entirely understandable. Regardless of their intelligence, to a point. There'a also the fact that an 8 does not make you mentally challenged, it's the average score for many commoners after all.
Knowing how to arrange your troops to perfectly take down a rampaging ogre is different enough than algebra or a logic puzzle that a high INT score may not be neccessary to make tactical choices.
I can maybe see what your DM is getting at, but having that as a hard rule is crap and I'd rather a question the player, "Rygar the Barbarian is not the sharpest tool in the box, right? Are you sure he'd be the right one to come up with multi-layered ploy?" and leave it up to the player to justify whether or not he/she is playing in character or not.
So I need your DM to meet a humble DJ from Jacksonville named Jason Mendoza
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
edited January 2019
Oooh I just thought of a couple of things to add to my Hit Dice rules. Which wording feels better for the first one?
"A player can spend a point of inspiration as if it was a hit die when using hit die abilities"
"A player can spend a point of inspiration to regain a hit die. You cannot go over your maximum number of hit dice".
Secondly,
"With a successful medium medicine check, a player can give one of their hit dice to another player. The check goes up in difficulty (+5, +10, +15 etc...) with each additional check. The difficulty resets after a long rest. A player can't exceed their maximum number of hit dice. If the check fails, no hit dice are lost."
"With a successful medium medicine check, a player allows another player to regain a hit dice, at the cost of one of their own. The check goes up in difficulty (+5, +10, +15 etc...) with each additional check. The difficulty resets after a long rest. A player can't exceed their maximum number of hit dice. If the check fails, no hit dice are lost."
Oooh I just thought of a couple of things to add to my Hit Dice rules. Which wording feels better for the first one?
"A player can spend a point of inspiration as if it was a hit die when using hit die abilities"
"A player can spend a point of inspiration to regain a hit die. You cannot go over your maximum number of hit dice".
Secondly,
"With a successful medium medicine check, a player can give one of their hit dice to another player. The check goes up in difficulty (+5, +10, +15 etc...) with each additional check. The difficulty resets after a long rest. A player can't exceed their maximum number of hit dice. If the check fails, no hit dice are lost."
"With a successful medium medicine check, a player allows another player to regain a hit dice, at the cost of one of their own. The check goes up in difficulty (+5, +10, +15 etc...) with each additional check. The difficulty resets after a long rest. A player can't exceed their maximum number of hit dice. If the check fails, no hit dice are lost."
First wording on first rule. Second Wording on second rule.
Can you guys think of a good glass cannon build? I want to trade all my survivability away for some kind of utility (dps or anything else really). Just something spectacular to fit in between running around ducking away from danger. Thoughts?
In general there arent many classes in 5e that can go pure offense. Every build has some amount of defensive utility built in.
Probably the least defensive class is the sorcerer. (Wild mage ideal) and they also have a lot of utility and raw power with meta magic. Pick empower for damage and subtle for utility
Probably the highest burst damage build is a crit fishing rogue(arcane trickster)/paladin but this is surprisingly defensive. When you crit you dump a spell slot into the attack and then, at say, level 7 you might hit for... 8d6+8d8+5 on a crit.
Just popping in for a few questions: I couldn't find any rules for jumping longer distances. I can (with a running head start) jump my strength score in distance, and I can make a check to potentially go further (but I didn't see any suggestions). I would guess doubling that would be a "hard" check? Same thing with jumping down from a height: it's 1d6 per 10' of falling, but what about if I try to jump down first. I figured 10', 20', 30' for an easy, moderate, and hard progression. Last thing I was looking up: so when you're unconscious enemies have advantage on their attack rolls (and melee attacks within 5' are crits), but I didn't see anywhere that said your AC changed. If you're unconscious, I don't think you should still get your Dex bonus. Honestly, within 5' I think I'd just give you a flat AC of 10 even in plate armor as your enemy could line up a shot on a vulnerable spot.
Am I missing these rules somewhere? Any problems with my proposed house rules?
飛べねぇ豚はただの豚だ。
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
Just popping in for a few questions: I couldn't find any rules for jumping longer distances. I can (with a running head start) jump my strength score in distance, and I can make a check to potentially go further (but I didn't see any suggestions). I would guess doubling that would be a "hard" check? Same thing with jumping down from a height: it's 1d6 per 10' of falling, but what about if I try to jump down first. I figured 10', 20', 30' for an easy, moderate, and hard progression. Last thing I was looking up: so when you're unconscious enemies have advantage on their attack rolls (and melee attacks within 5' are crits), but I didn't see anywhere that said your AC changed. If you're unconscious, I don't think you should still get your Dex bonus. Honestly, within 5' I think I'd just give you a flat AC of 10 even in plate armor as your enemy could line up a shot on a vulnerable spot.
Am I missing these rules somewhere? Any problems with my proposed house rules?
For jumping I would go additional 5' hard, 10' extra hard, 15ft near impossible. I believe there is a feat and some class progressions that improve athletics for things like this.
For Falling. 10ft I don't require a check or do damage (believe the rule is they can fall 10ft safely, but I don't have my book near me), the players are heroic, they can stick that landing. 20ft is medium athletics, 30ft is hard (falling from a 3 story building). Again they are heroic. Anything over 30ft they are taking damage from the entire distance, barring interesting things to land on or in.
For the unconscious I wouldn't mess with the AC. If a melee enemy hits like you say it's an instant crit, which counts as 2 failed death saves. The players are already on the edge of death, don't make it easier to kill them.
The thing to remember about Intelligence is that it's very much a case of raw capacity for data retention and recollection. Which is something you might want for a strategist to be sure, but wisdom is the bread and butter stat since it governs good judgement; (which would cover threat assesment, terrain factors, potential vulnerabilities ect.)
And hey, maybe the barbarian is a savant; someone who's whole mental potential has been hyper focused to the exclusion of all else on one subject upon which they're a genius. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savant_syndrome
I typically never house rule anything that takes away the unique ability of a specific character. I house ruled item use as bonus action in my first game but it makes the thief archtype useless. I had a dm that used flanking rules and it made wolf totem barb useless.
My players tonight happened upon bandit squatters, and despite noticing that they'd set up archers in the tall grasses and other obscuration decided to simply demand the bandits surrender. It didn't go well for them, but they escaped with their lives. They camped for the night and then tried the same thing again the next morning. No stealth, no trying to divide the bandit forces, they just marched right up to them in full view taking arrows the entire time :rotate:, they survived... barely. What was a "medium" encounter of 5 bandits and 1 bandit leader left 3 of them in the dirt and 2 at less than 5 hp, with most of their spells expended.
Them: "You said we wouldn't need to min-max to survive fights in this campaign"
Me: "That doesn't mean you're automatically going to succeed without even trying!"
飛べねぇ豚はただの豚だ。
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
So I'm re-writing the beast master subclass from ranger and making it a Druid Subclass. I want the beast to be pretty powerful so I was thinking of restricting the druid spell casting to cantrips and only ritual spells. I think it would still give the druid a lot of utility but it would remove most combat spell casting, which I'm fine with. There really is so much when writing up a class/subclass that I can see how it can get so broken so quickly, like some of the crazy stuff on D&Dwiki.
So I'm re-writing the beast master subclass from ranger and making it a Druid Subclass. I want the beast to be pretty powerful so I was thinking of restricting the druid spell casting to cantrips and only ritual spells. I think it would still give the druid a lot of utility but it would remove most combat spell casting, which I'm fine with. There really is so much when writing up a class/subclass that I can see how it can get so broken so quickly, like some of the crazy stuff on D&Dwiki.
Any reason for the reduction in power?
It isn't like the Druid is known for its quaint sub-classes.
I'd keep the Druid's spellcasting where its at but maybe put in a rule that they aren't allowed to go into Wildshape when actively commanding their beast?
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
So I'm re-writing the beast master subclass from ranger and making it a Druid Subclass. I want the beast to be pretty powerful so I was thinking of restricting the druid spell casting to cantrips and only ritual spells. I think it would still give the druid a lot of utility but it would remove most combat spell casting, which I'm fine with. There really is so much when writing up a class/subclass that I can see how it can get so broken so quickly, like some of the crazy stuff on D&Dwiki.
Any reason for the reduction in power?
It isn't like the Druid is known for its quaint sub-classes.
I'd keep the Druid's spellcasting where its at but maybe put in a rule that they aren't allowed to go into Wildshape when actively commanding their beast?
So I'm designing the sub class kind of based on He-Man, so the beast will get more powerful as the player levels, and I'm going to have it be able to attack on your turn as a bonus action, so I feel that full spell casting is too powerful on top of all that.
My players tonight happened upon bandit squatters, and despite noticing that they'd set up archers in the tall grasses and other obscuration decided to simply demand the bandits surrender. It didn't go well for them, but they escaped with their lives. They camped for the night and then tried the same thing again the next morning. No stealth, no trying to divide the bandit forces, they just marched right up to them in full view taking arrows the entire time :rotate:, they survived... barely. What was a "medium" encounter of 5 bandits and 1 bandit leader left 3 of them in the dirt and 2 at less than 5 hp, with most of their spells expended.
Them: "You said we wouldn't need to min-max to survive fights in this campaign"
Me: "That doesn't mean you're automatically going to succeed without even trying!"
That's bonkers, if they're that unaware of their options you could introduce them to a smart NPC or just flat out tell them that any character that has been in combat or had combat training would first consider their options and would be inclined to avoid taking arrows to the face.
So I'm re-writing the beast master subclass from ranger and making it a Druid Subclass. I want the beast to be pretty powerful so I was thinking of restricting the druid spell casting to cantrips and only ritual spells. I think it would still give the druid a lot of utility but it would remove most combat spell casting, which I'm fine with. There really is so much when writing up a class/subclass that I can see how it can get so broken so quickly, like some of the crazy stuff on D&Dwiki.
It sounds like you're trying to just make a pet class? I'd probably browse DM's Guild for a "Summoner" or something similar and see if any cover beasts.
Me elsewhere:
Steam, various fora: Ivellius
League of Legends: Doctor Ivellius
Twitch, probably another place or two I forget: LPIvellius
So I'm re-writing the beast master subclass from ranger and making it a Druid Subclass. I want the beast to be pretty powerful so I was thinking of restricting the druid spell casting to cantrips and only ritual spells. I think it would still give the druid a lot of utility but it would remove most combat spell casting, which I'm fine with. There really is so much when writing up a class/subclass that I can see how it can get so broken so quickly, like some of the crazy stuff on D&Dwiki.
You might want to look at the homebrew "Shaman" which is a bit in this direction to get some ideas.
My players tonight happened upon bandit squatters, and despite noticing that they'd set up archers in the tall grasses and other obscuration decided to simply demand the bandits surrender. It didn't go well for them, but they escaped with their lives. They camped for the night and then tried the same thing again the next morning. No stealth, no trying to divide the bandit forces, they just marched right up to them in full view taking arrows the entire time :rotate:, they survived... barely. What was a "medium" encounter of 5 bandits and 1 bandit leader left 3 of them in the dirt and 2 at less than 5 hp, with most of their spells expended.
Them: "You said we wouldn't need to min-max to survive fights in this campaign"
Me: "That doesn't mean you're automatically going to succeed without even trying!"
That's bonkers, if they're that unaware of their options you could introduce them to a smart NPC or just flat out tell them that any character that has been in combat or had combat training would first consider their options and would be inclined to avoid taking arrows to the face.
This would be a situation, definitely the second time, that I would ask them all to roll Wisdom checks
Even if they didn't succeed, hopefully they would meta-game the reason why
The ranger revised version of the beastmaster is really good and the pet scales as you level up.
The base PHB version of the ranger is garbage and I am pretty sure they just recommend using the revised version.
I still think the revised version of the ranger is pretty bad as a whole, with the beastmaster sub class still being the worst. That's why I'm getting rid of the class in my homebrew and moving it's subclasses to classes I think they fit better under, and re-writing where needed.
I have a conundrum with how to approach Omu. My party is finally done in the jungle and has reached Omu at level 7. One of my players has a huge nerd-boner for the Yuan-Ti and wants to run the Fane of the Night Serpent. (I gave him a couple of Jungle encounters in our last session to introduce the Yuan-Ti. He kinda just dropped random bad guys instead of foreshadowing his arc, but that is a minor thing.) Anyway, my problem is more procedural and I'm waffling on how to do this.
We'll be playing another epic weekend session again in March and I've started slowly planning out how the session will go. As the Yuan-Ti are kinda/sorta intrinsically mixed up in Omu, separating my DMing and his DMing is proving to be tricky. Long story short plot recap... the final dungeon needs 9 keys to open. Nine keys are spread throughout the ruined city. Players, Yuan-Ti and Red Wizards are all trying to get the keys. As intended in the module, the party can ally with or fight against the Red Wizards, and the big snake boss will have at least one key at the bottom of his dungeon, the Fane of the Night Serpent. It would be functionally awkward and narratively shit if I kept handing off the Yuan-Ti encounters as we trooped through Omu. Nor do I want to do the city Yuan-Ti encounters myself and just hand him the book when we get to the Fane of the Night Serpent. In the module as written the Red Wizard camp with the first thing of note the party encounters in Omu and it has already been recently sacked by the Yuan Ti. The party can pick up some information and potential allies with the survivors. Then the module intends for the party to explore the city, finding keys and eventually ending up at the Fane of the Night Serpent to deal with the Yuan-Ti and get the final key(s).
My plan is this: The Yuan Ti attacks occur just as the party find the Red's camp. Many Red Wizards die and/or get captured, and the party zealot barbarian (played by the guy who wants to DM) is captured along with them. His PC out of the way, he is free to DM. Enter my PC, an Oathbreaker Paladin who is the head of the Wzards bodyguard unit. He then joins with the party to save his Wizards, save the capture party member, and then eventually turn on the party to try and claim all of the keys for himself. :evil:
The problem is that this necessitates doing the Fane of the Night Serpent first before exploring the rest of the city and getting the rest of the keys. It doesn't make sense that 1) the party, my party anyway, would ally with the Red Wizards unless there is a shared threat and goal and 2) That the party goes tromping around the city with a GMPC and player sitting idle. This seems to be to be very anti-climactic. But this way I get to establish the menace of the Yuan-Ti and explain their presence in the city and make sure it fits the rest of the narrative that I've been building, rather than my friend going "Uh-huh-huh... snake people" and rolling initiative.
Yes, I could always run the adventure as intended and at some point have the Barbarian captured much closer to where the party needs to enter the Fane and hand it over, but again that leaves me handing off encounters in the middle of the session and taking them back with this PC still in the mix, or I take "his" Yuan-Ti encounters and steal his thunder, and most importantly we run too long in the city and we don't have enough time over the weekend to actually finish the Fane of the Night Serpent.
The ranger revised version of the beastmaster is really good and the pet scales as you level up.
The base PHB version of the ranger is garbage and I am pretty sure they just recommend using the revised version.
I still think the revised version of the ranger is pretty bad as a whole, with the beastmaster sub class still being the worst. That's why I'm getting rid of the class in my homebrew and moving it's subclasses to classes I think they fit better under, and re-writing where needed.
revised beastmaster does a good amount of damage, it falls off at ultra high levels but then again nothing in 5e is balanced around high levels
I think it's easier to salvage that for a pet class than to try to make a new one, for example letting the ranger get 2 attacks, or letting the pet attack with its reaction at level 5, giving the pet some kind of special ability, letting the pet benefit from Absorb Elements when cast by the ranger, giving the ranger a spell that brings its pet back to life instantly at full health (3rd level spell probably?). It requires some tweaking to make it have more pop, but it is fairly strong out of the box depending on the campaign you're running
I've been mulling off and on for a while about making a good ranger pet class... like the idea of a form neutral "Stat block" for your pet, instead of picking an existing beast, and you basically get a list of abilities you can plug into your pet - with flying pets having less hitpoints but otherwise being the same. I should revisit this, the ranger in the game im running liked what I ran by him, but I already let him custom build a pet (he has a blink dog) which he is super happy with.
Once you build your pet's statistics you just pick a suitable form of your choice for it. As an example you might pick Strength as its primary stat, Bite for its attack, give it Pack Tactics for its special ability, and at level 10 get an advanced ability for it and pick Multiattack, Poisoned bite, Fire breath, or something else nifty like that... I've just been struggling with a pithy way of presenting this because good god the revised ranger is a lot to keep in mind all the time with your pet
I have a conundrum with how to approach Omu. My party is finally done in the jungle and has reached Omu at level 7. One of my players has a huge nerd-boner for the Yuan-Ti and wants to run the Fane of the Night Serpent. (I gave him a couple of Jungle encounters in our last session to introduce the Yuan-Ti. He kinda just dropped random bad guys instead of foreshadowing his arc, but that is a minor thing.) Anyway, my problem is more procedural and I'm waffling on how to do this.
We'll be playing another epic weekend session again in March and I've started slowly planning out how the session will go. As the Yuan-Ti are kinda/sorta intrinsically mixed up in Omu, separating my DMing and his DMing is proving to be tricky. Long story short plot recap... the final dungeon needs 9 keys to open. Nine keys are spread throughout the ruined city. Players, Yuan-Ti and Red Wizards are all trying to get the keys. As intended in the module, the party can ally with or fight against the Red Wizards, and the big snake boss will have at least one key at the bottom of his dungeon, the Fane of the Night Serpent. It would be functionally awkward and narratively shit if I kept handing off the Yuan-Ti encounters as we trooped through Omu. Nor do I want to do the city Yuan-Ti encounters myself and just hand him the book when we get to the Fane of the Night Serpent. In the module as written the Red Wizard camp with the first thing of note the party encounters in Omu and it has already been recently sacked by the Yuan Ti. The party can pick up some information and potential allies with the survivors. Then the module intends for the party to explore the city, finding keys and eventually ending up at the Fane of the Night Serpent to deal with the Yuan-Ti and get the final key(s).
My plan is this: The Yuan Ti attacks occur just as the party find the Red's camp. Many Red Wizards die and/or get captured, and the party zealot barbarian (played by the guy who wants to DM) is captured along with them. His PC out of the way, he is free to DM. Enter my PC, an Oathbreaker Paladin who is the head of the Wzards bodyguard unit. He then joins with the party to save his Wizards, save the capture party member, and then eventually turn on the party to try and claim all of the keys for himself. :evil:
The problem is that this necessitates doing the Fane of the Night Serpent first before exploring the rest of the city and getting the rest of the keys. It doesn't make sense that 1) the party, my party anyway, would ally with the Red Wizards unless there is a shared threat and goal and 2) That the party goes tromping around the city with a GMPC and player sitting idle. This seems to be to be very anti-climactic. But this way I get to establish the menace of the Yuan-Ti and explain their presence in the city and make sure it fits the rest of the narrative that I've been building, rather than my friend going "Uh-huh-huh... snake people" and rolling initiative.
Yes, I could always run the adventure as intended and at some point have the Barbarian captured much closer to where the party needs to enter the Fane and hand it over, but again that leaves me handing off encounters in the middle of the session and taking them back with this PC still in the mix, or I take "his" Yuan-Ti encounters and steal his thunder, and most importantly we run too long in the city and we don't have enough time over the weekend to actually finish the Fane of the Night Serpent.
Thoughts?
I would try as much as possible to make everything happen with the whole party present.
The way I ended up doing it with a party member who was gaga for the yuan-ti was increasing the wedge between Fenthaza and Ras Nsi - I had Fenthaza being a true believer who wished to destroy the world with the night serpent, an absolute crazy religious zealout, and Ras-Nsi as a too-old world-weary warlord who only wishes to see Mezro again and get back at Acererak for inflicting him with the death curse. Ras-Nsi contacted them through Salida and they ended up going into the Fane in non-hostile terms, but by the end of it half of them got turned into yuan-ti and the rest cut a bloody path out, Ras-Nsi let them use a teleportation pad to get them out of there but gave them his puzzle cubes
if I was running the Fane, I might do something more creative with the various personalities there. That's not my issue.
My issues is more procedural in that how and when do I hand off the reins to another DM without messing up the flow of the entirety of Chapter 3 of the module. Right now my option seems to be Fane first to get that Yuan-Ti love satisfied for one of my players and then city after. But that kinda fucks up the flow of the module. And I want to minimize any fuckery with the flow.
Right now, I'm expect to just have an anti-climactic end to the Omu section of the story. But I'm wondering if there is way out of that which I haven't seen yet.
I think maybe my experience with the beastmaster ranger isn't that bad because as a DM I build my own monsters to use as pets (by tweaking the bear or ape stats) and then treating the Hit Dice of the pet as if they were a player's hit dice (as in, if a bear has d8 hit die, I recalculate it's HP so that the first one is 8 + CON and then the others are 5 + CON so at level 3 it's 3d8 + 3(CON) with one of those d8s being an 8, etc.)
My halfling beastmaster ranger with a pet bear was constantly putting out a lot of damage and control because it had two bodies and two potential AoOs and bears hit hard.
Sharing DM duties for a single campaign seems like it would complicate things a lot in any setting. Doing it because one of the players has a "hard on" for some monsters that are coming up as enemies in the campaign seems like an even worse idea and a trap.
Do you two usually swap back and forth?
I can't imagine as CoS DM sharing with another player what my thoughts are as to what's happening elsewhere in Barovia while the characters are screwing around in the Amber Temple because
a) it will spoil it for that person
b) that person may have other ideas and make them happen during the session they are doing, thereby forcing me to change my plans which i have put a lot of work in
c) if someone wants to run their own campaign I'll happily play it, but then they have to do all the work that goes along with it
I ran a pretty long D&D campaign where I collaborated with another DM and it was incredibly fun. Neither of us played as PCs, period, though (unless a player was unable to attend a session, we'd sometimes play them in combat).
Sharing DM duties for a single campaign seems like it would complicate things a lot in any setting. Doing it because one of the players has a "hard on" for some monsters that are coming up as enemies in the campaign seems like an even worse idea and a trap.
Do you two usually swap back and forth?
I can't imagine as CoS DM sharing with another player what my thoughts are as to what's happening elsewhere in Barovia while the characters are screwing around in the Amber Temple because
a) it will spoil it for that person
b) that person may have other ideas and make them happen during the session they are doing, thereby forcing me to change my plans which i have put a lot of work in
c) if someone wants to run their own campaign I'll happily play it, but then they have to do all the work that goes along with it
We don't normally share DM duties, no. We do normally switch off campaigns or even whole systems. In our group of 5 sometimes 6 regular players, who've been together for more than 15 years, three of us are the GM's running whatever games and campaigns that we like. He is currently playtesting some supernatural, modern world homebrew he's been working on. He has not guest DMed in one of my campaigns before, no. This would be the first time. I don't see an issue with it it because he's read Chapter 4 of the module only and stayed away from the rest of it (not that I'd worry about metagaming in this group. We're good enough that we can separate player info from character info. Also, I'd totally call them on any metagaming bullshit). Mostly he's read the MM, Tome of Foes (excellent!) and the relevant dungeon in ToA. We discussed this at the very beginning of the campaign and, frankly, was super excited to get that level of player buy-in on playing this module. So it not like this is a surprise or last minute change to my plans.
So knowing that he's taking the reins of the Yuan-Ti in the adventure, I've done nothing more with the Yuan-Ti myself than briefly skim the Fane of the Night Serpent chapter, give vague hints that Yuan-Ti can be found in the southern parts of Chult, and drop the backstory of Ras Nsi only as it is known to the Chultan's. The other players have no idea that the necromancer from decades ago is now the big boss snake dude. Only now, as I prepare to run the Omu sections of the module do I see some narrative hiccups that will occur to keep his section mostly self-contained before it comes back around to me.
campaign recap because i had a great session the last two fridays and have been thinking about it, also i have players here so don't read this (you know who you are, also spoilers for length):
so the group decided it was high time to take care of the Hand Problem currently plaguing the sorcerer--for those who don't know, a necromancer marked him with a Mark of Orcus which is Bad News Bears in about 30 different ways, most of which they aren't aware of--and so they embarked on a journey into the depths of an ancient library after learning from the First Seer that there's likely a piece of knowledge located down in the stacks
backstory: the library, called the Esoterica, is a temple of Ioun in one of the oldest cities on the planet. the city has been built over and reconstructed through arcane means many times, including the Esoterica itself, and so the concept I came up with is that the archives below are essentially layered and extremely expansive, and there are sections and levels of the stacks that have been lost and forgotten over many many years, resulting in potentially dangerous and valuable pockets of ancient knowledge waiting to be found. and so the Ioun clergy, being perpetually understaffed, sends its up and coming acolytes into the archives to locate and secure these caches of knowledge, restoring them to functionality and removing any lingering threats
and as a bonus, the Monk is a follower of Ioun, and so with the church's blessing they were given leave to locate and clear out a section of the archive and hopefully find their quarry, which because this is a game and my characters are the protagonists, the sorcerer got Evil Radar in the form of his hand hurting the closer he gets to an item of power bearing Orcus's influence
they located a strange lobby of sorts featuring a mural of an archivist of the library dating roughly ~500 years in the past, and encountered their first puzzle: an empty bookshelf below the painting, and a huge assortment of random-ass books on the shelves all around. the clue was in the painting itself: he was holding one of the first books he wrote, which was part of a 7 volume collection detailing the history of the world (up to his current time, anyway). after they identified the book, they searched for the other books bearing his name, and I gave them 7 note cards each with a book title, and they eventually figured out the order they needed to go on the shelf, which served as the key to unlock his personal archive (the man's name is Morvain Laro, more on him later)
for brevity's sake, what followed was them discovering this pocket of the library that had at some point been infested by huge paper (and flesh/blood) eating caterpillars and moths, which was fun. they also found out that there was a back entrance connected to the sewer of the main city that some cultists from their Other Problem had infiltrated (side note here, the main antagonists of this campaign are the Cults of the Elder Elemental Eye. this is the water cult currently deploying a huge plague in a quarter of the city that has stymied the authorities. they have agreed to clandestinely help work out this issue by way of good-hearted blackmail from a civil servant).
after that they had a miniboss fight with a giant moth that had two great moments: the guest star paladin jumped onto its back with his halberd and stabbed it, and the monk climbed as high as he could and did a falling axe kick onto its head for tons of damage).
another puzzle/trial involving a talking head on a wall (Olmec style from Legends of the Hidden Temple except it's the archivist Morvain Laro, his simulacrum), some theft-prevention mimics, and a cut-in from the Monk's old teacher in the process as a test to gain entry to the restricted area (Guarded Knowledge: Sigma Level)
and then the Real Fun begins. some more backstory on the design--I decided that Morvain Laro was a bit of a narcissist, but generally a good guy, and had a soft spot for fairy tales and other whimsical fiction, thereby giving me leave to design the security of this place with a decidedly fanciful lean. first: there's a homunculus of Morvain Laro here that serves as the custodian. he's sustained by magic and is bound here. Second: the Tome of Glyphimor is here (this is the Orcus-aligned artifact). because it's orcus, it basically leaks corruption, which has mutated the homunculus and driven it insane. it's basically a Slasher movie monster at this point and extremely deadly. Third: the security system itself was designed by Laro based on a bunch of his favorite novels, and involves going into what is essentially a tiny pocket dimension inside a bottle and solving a bunch of puzzles and having a real "80s DnD" kind of adventure, with a twist.
SO--
the party enters Sigma level, and I immediately describe the reality-bent nature of the place. MC Escher on LSD. stairs that come out of the ceiling at odd angles, book shelves that float, pieces of the room that seem to stretch and distort, doors in weird places that lead nowhere or seem to be connected to someplace else entirely, and as they're grappling with this i begin to describe the sound of the Homunculus. uneven footsteps, feverish mumbling. he passes by a bookshelf near them, and they get a look, and he's basically nightmare fuel. squat, thick, no neck, a misshapen, bulbous eyes, a giant mouth with hundreds of sharp, long teeth, and grotesque arms with hands the size of serving platters. they hesitate and try to be quiet and utterly fuck their stealth rolls, and he comes over the bookshelf, climbing like a gross spider.
mechanics aside: I decided well before that this isn't a monster you fight (yet). this whole section is a prolonged skill challenge loaded with imagery and description, and so there are plenty of signs that engaging the homunculus as he is right now is certain doom. the Cleric of Melora's player is not known for particularly tactical/strategic thought, and so I knew I needed a way to effectively signal that this guy is dangerous. and of course, the player squared up to Combat this monster. two things happen here: one, the homunculus has a progressive aura that just deals you psychic damage. if you're within 15 feet, it starts at 20. my party is 6th level at this point, and so this isn't damage that'll kill them. it just sends a message. 10 feet is 40, and 5 feet is 120 (this is an instant kill for anyone in my party). the second thing is the guest-star Paladin, since this was played over two sessions, the guest player couldn't be there for session 2 of this adventure as he was in town for a limited time, so was back to me for NPC-ship.
so Melora cleric squares up, declares he's going to Thorn Whip (after he takes 20 damage). he doesn't get the hint, so I deploy the contingency. the paladin charges in, halberd raised, and the homunculus grabs him and twists him in half like you see the titans do to people in Attack on Titan. this is enough to send the message, and the party boogies. the homunculus is slow as hell (10 feet per round) and so they lose him. I describe the mindfuckery of this section, and when they stop to take a look at stuff, the homunculus catches up and ratchets up the tension again. this continues for a few minutes until they discover the door that leads to Security.
the group gets sucked into the Bottle World and end up at the first of four areas linked by a hub in the form of a ship on the high seas, the Knowledge Seeker. the following stuff is inspired by a lot of things personally, including Myst, Dear Esther, and general horror genre tropes that end up working out to be very effective and spooping the hell out of the players.
The Boat--
this is their hub and rest point. Because this is a pocket dimension and they had been fighting a lot, this is essentially 100% a safe space for them to chill, consider the events and the fuckery that has happened up til now, and generally figure out their next plan. it is also operated by ghostly copies of Morvain Laro all wearing different types of sailor uniforms like from a story book. earlier in the dungeon, in the "mundane" part, they found the archivist's skeleton and his signet ring still in his office, and this is instrumental to getting through security. the bearer of the ring is recognized as the Captain of the ship, and is able to activate the puzzles that deactivate portions of security. the group explores the boat and finds the navigation device at the helm, talks to the crew (the monk does, as he's holding the ring as a church relic), and find out that there's a map of some kind in the captain's quarters. they solve the puzzle in the captain's quarters (wear the ring, sit down at the writing desk in there, and the monk's hand is "possessed" briefly to jot down a bunch of numbers which serve as coordinates to the first destination). they plug the numbers in, and off they go.
The Lighthouse--
this is area 1. pelted by rain, gray skies, sitting atop a lonely island amidst an endless sea, the ship docks and the party heads up a looong set of stairs and find it barren save for stairs to the top and to a basement. they head to the top, find the dark lantern with a clockwork device connected to it that is very clearly missing a cog. this is obvious signalling, and so they head down to the basement. a locked door bearing an inlay for the signet ring. (this is an ongoing thing at this point, so they know the ring doubles as a key. it's also a Ring of Spell Storing so they're very happy to carry it). the first puzzle follows.
The Puzzle of Gods and Seasons
because nothing i do is original, i found this puzzle in searching for good D&D puzzles. essentially, you have a circular room with a mural painted on the entire wall's circumference, and roughly each 90 degree cut of the circle depicts a different god associated with a different season. in this case, it's Corellon (Spring), Pelor (Summer), Sehanine (Autumn), and the Raven Queen (Winter). in the center is a 10 foot diameter raised section in which rests fresh soil. the paintings serve as not obvious clues (Corellon is nurturing a flower in a garden, Pelor is holding the sun, Sehanine is walking a forest path with falling autumn leaves, the Raven Queen is shaping a blizzard) to interact with the soil in which a seedling is buried in the center. the players dug in the dirt and found the seed and started to figure it out--water the seed, it makes a small oak tree. shine light on it, the tree grows. they stumbled on the Autumn bit until the Monk blew on the tree, which caused the leaves to fall, and then Frostbite fulfilled winter, which caused the tree to ice over and shatter, leaving behind the missing cog. the players really loved this puzzle and it was fun watching them figure it out.
they put the gear in the device and activated the lantern which shoots a white beam across the ocean towards the horizon. confused by this, they head back to the boat where the Navigator says they'll follow the beam to their next destination. the team decides a Long Rest is appropriate here, which i am fine with as the boat sails off to...
The Sinking Pyramid--
the boat takes them to a desert and then sails into the sand because fucking storybook baby and eventually "docks" in front of a giant pyramid. the beam of light is striking one of the walls of the pyramid which serves as an early subtle clue. they locate the entrance and head in and find some more clues in the forms of hieroglyphs, indicating (through the light beam) that there is at least one more destination after this, some kind of castle/keep. they wend their way through the pyramid and end up in the center, a square room with sandstone land bridges connecting the corners of the room to the center, in which there is an altar with yet another signet inlay. at each corner there are also pedestals bearing three items each which are part of the puzzle.
The Puzzle of the Three Items
so the puzzle here is that when activated, two things happen: a giant mirror comes out of the ground (this is the obvious thing they need to get the light to) and Morvain Laro's voice booms through the room: 'For those who wish to be rewarded/Choose carefully the three that keep things sorted'. this is another puzzle stolen from the greater internet, but it relies on wordplay involving the objects.
the objects dispersed are thus, all statuettes: a man with an abacus, a rooster, an apple, a warrior with shield and spear, a bear, a courtesan, a huntsman with a bow, a smith at an anvil, and a quill
the solution is to place the man with abacus, the courtesan, and the smith on the center altar, because the objects "keep things sorted/sordid/sworded". this took them some time to figure out--they tried a couple combinations, and when they did the first one i started a 30 minute timer on my phone and had sand start filling the chamber from the ceiling. credit to my players though, they took a random ass guess after figuring out abacus/smith and just threw the courtesan in there, which solved the puzzle and caused the pyramid to sink, allowing the light to hit the mirror and bounce to their next destination...
The Dread Fort--
this is my favorite part of the session. i had the least prep here, knowing only that i wanted some kind of creepy undead situation, and a pretty simple puzzle involving finding three different torches to light three braziers on the ramparts. so i went whole hog here and turned it into a horror movie--the boat goats into a giant cove that looks like a maw, they arrive at this horrible burned and worn fort, and the gate's already open for them.
a few things are in place mechanically behind the scenes: because i want this to be a simple puzzle with a lot of tension and not a combat encounter, there is a persistent magical effect at play that causes sources of light to not work effectively similar to the Darkness spell. unlike normal Darkness, however, it doesn't completely destroy darkvision, only limits it out to about 30 feet. this was crucial to maintaining the atmosphere of the puzzle as it would have really fallen to pieces since my party has a lot of darkvision and sources of light like a smart party, which is great in a tactical scenario, but i needed to be able to put some spoops on the players. so vision is reduced. the other thing is really obvious, but divine spells just don't work here, including turn undead. it would have been problematic for the cleric to just start turning my sources of "threat" here, so that was taken off the table.
some might say this sounds unfair, but bear in mind the threats i'm about to describe are not particularly dangerous, they just need to feel dangerous. there was no combat here, and had it turned into one, things might have been a lot different, but they bought in very hard to the spook level due to the unsettling atmosphere. anyway! descriptions of the setting:
as they enter the courtyard of the ruined keep they find shit Ain't Right. those who can see (3/5 of the group) can make out shapes just out of visual range, humanoid, just standing there and swaying slowly, watching them. this sets them immediately on edge as they realize they just walked into an area where they are very much surrounded by a lot of Things They Aren't Sure Of. and so they nervously approach.
they find their new companions are soldiers, dead skeletons, possibly the guardians of this place? i pull out all the stops here and do some horrible rasping, load up on the descriptions, and turn on my Creepy iTunes playlist. they bunch up and ponder what to do, as the skeletons don't make an aggressive move here, just wait and watch. it was a treat watching them start panicking at the table at this point, and eventually they make the decision, with the sorcerer taking the totally blind Cleric and Monk (human and halfling) by the hand and heading for the central keep. they start pushing open the keep door together and it creaks open... and then i Weeping Angel them. the skeletons at some point have gotten very close when their backs are turned.
they appropriately freak out and quickly get inside the keep, shutting the door, and take a breath and explore. they find a banquet table, a throne, burnt and ruined tapestries and paintings, and some dried blood. they also find their first torch leaning against the back of the throne, which they light. it emits a weirdly lightless and dim purple flame (described as the color of a bruise).
at this point they find out: they're not alone! a pair of skeletons at some point have arrived in the dining hall. a skeleton in a gown, and a smaller skeleton. this is the Lady and the Son. this is where things got REAL fun. the players were not expecting to see the skeleton of a child, and I began having the pair slowly follow them around as they went upstairs to explore some more. they'd already found one piece of the puzzle but didn't really know it yet, so i was very happy they decided to linger here, because i got to use some really good imagery and sounds including the child clacking his jaw repeatedly, and then running past them into his old bedroom and picking up some toy soldiers to clack together. they also found the Lord in his study when they went to explore it... because he was standing right in front of the door waiting for them. it was great. eventually tension got real high as the three pursued them through the keep, constantly behind them making awful noises, and pretty soon they couldn't take anymore so they went outside.
at this point things needed to accelerate, so for brevity's sake they found the next torches, and as they did so the skeletons got increasingly more 'aggressive' and numerous. at the third torch being lit they started advancing with intent to attack, and the group basically had to figure out to light the three braziers on the wall in tandem, which is a simple puzzle but took them some time to figure out due to the high levels of tension from these slow, threatening "enemies".
and as they lit the braziers they got whisked away to the Final Section, the one they didn't know about, and where we stopped: a recreation of their home town plucked from their own memories. i'll detail what happens after we play Friday.
all in all, it was an incredible session, and everyone seemed to really enjoy it. it was great watching them get very worked up due to the atmosphere, and were very complimentary. sorry for the length, if anyone has some questions i hope you ask them, as i was very proud of the whole experience end to end.
So I'm re-writing the beast master subclass from ranger and making it a Druid Subclass. I want the beast to be pretty powerful so I was thinking of restricting the druid spell casting to cantrips and only ritual spells. I think it would still give the druid a lot of utility but it would remove most combat spell casting, which I'm fine with. There really is so much when writing up a class/subclass that I can see how it can get so broken so quickly, like some of the crazy stuff on D&Dwiki.
Any reason for the reduction in power?
It isn't like the Druid is known for its quaint sub-classes.
I'd keep the Druid's spellcasting where its at but maybe put in a rule that they aren't allowed to go into Wildshape when actively commanding their beast?
So I'm designing the sub class kind of based on He-Man, so the beast will get more powerful as the player levels, and I'm going to have it be able to attack on your turn as a bonus action, so I feel that full spell casting is too powerful on top of all that.
Are you married to filling it under druid? Because He-Man always struck me as closer to a barbarian. No spellcasting to worry about, plus you get cool options like sharing your rage with your pet.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
So I'm re-writing the beast master subclass from ranger and making it a Druid Subclass. I want the beast to be pretty powerful so I was thinking of restricting the druid spell casting to cantrips and only ritual spells. I think it would still give the druid a lot of utility but it would remove most combat spell casting, which I'm fine with. There really is so much when writing up a class/subclass that I can see how it can get so broken so quickly, like some of the crazy stuff on D&Dwiki.
Any reason for the reduction in power?
It isn't like the Druid is known for its quaint sub-classes.
I'd keep the Druid's spellcasting where its at but maybe put in a rule that they aren't allowed to go into Wildshape when actively commanding their beast?
So I'm designing the sub class kind of based on He-Man, so the beast will get more powerful as the player levels, and I'm going to have it be able to attack on your turn as a bonus action, so I feel that full spell casting is too powerful on top of all that.
Are you married to filling it under druid? Because He-Man always struck me as closer to a barbarian. No spellcasting to worry about, plus you get cool options like sharing your rage with your pet.
This is certainly something to consider that i hadnt. The rage could symbolize when prince adam and cringer become he-man and battle cat.
I like this a lot. Thank you! Also everyone else too. Lots of great ideas here.
I took a stab at revising the ranger if you're interested in reading through my homebrew. The first part is just me walking through my thoughts on paper, and it's really just there for me. I've tried to hide that text, but I can't figure out how to on Google Docs. The actual class mechanics starts on page 5 with the level chart. The intent is for it to function with the existing archetypes though I recognize that beastmaster could still use some work. One of my players is using it in my game and I'll see how it functions for her.
I've noticed that all the Unearthed Arcana are marked as playtest material. Are these going to be included in a published work at some point or is it more like the older web supplements?
Unearthed Arcana is "extreme" rebalance/adjustments that were released for playtest. they were scaled back and some of it was turned into published content in later books, but certain things like the ranger rebalance just couldn't be effectively added they ruled because they acknowledged some people/groups didn't find any issue with the original versions, and it would be hard to find a place to put it without making people feel like they had to spend more money
I've noticed that all the Unearthed Arcana are marked as playtest material. Are these going to be included in a published work at some point or is it more like the older web supplements?
Specifically for the Revised Ranger, Wizards has said that they've abandoned the concept laid out in the UA, and are looking at new ways to address the problem with the Ranger class.
Mike Mearls has been working through some off this on the D&D official Twitch and there are summaries on Reddit, but he's currently on break from streaming, so no new updates since December I think.
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Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I can maybe see what your DM is getting at, but having that as a hard rule is crap and I'd rather a question the player, "Rygar the Barbarian is not the sharpest tool in the box, right? Are you sure he'd be the right one to come up with multi-layered ploy?" and leave it up to the player to justify whether or not he/she is playing in character or not.
"A player can spend a point of inspiration as if it was a hit die when using hit die abilities"
"A player can spend a point of inspiration to regain a hit die. You cannot go over your maximum number of hit dice".
Secondly,
"With a successful medium medicine check, a player can give one of their hit dice to another player. The check goes up in difficulty (+5, +10, +15 etc...) with each additional check. The difficulty resets after a long rest. A player can't exceed their maximum number of hit dice. If the check fails, no hit dice are lost."
"With a successful medium medicine check, a player allows another player to regain a hit dice, at the cost of one of their own. The check goes up in difficulty (+5, +10, +15 etc...) with each additional check. The difficulty resets after a long rest. A player can't exceed their maximum number of hit dice. If the check fails, no hit dice are lost."
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
First wording on first rule. Second Wording on second rule.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
In general there arent many classes in 5e that can go pure offense. Every build has some amount of defensive utility built in.
Probably the least defensive class is the sorcerer. (Wild mage ideal) and they also have a lot of utility and raw power with meta magic. Pick empower for damage and subtle for utility
Probably the highest burst damage build is a crit fishing rogue(arcane trickster)/paladin but this is surprisingly defensive. When you crit you dump a spell slot into the attack and then, at say, level 7 you might hit for... 8d6+8d8+5 on a crit.
Am I missing these rules somewhere? Any problems with my proposed house rules?
For jumping I would go additional 5' hard, 10' extra hard, 15ft near impossible. I believe there is a feat and some class progressions that improve athletics for things like this.
For Falling. 10ft I don't require a check or do damage (believe the rule is they can fall 10ft safely, but I don't have my book near me), the players are heroic, they can stick that landing. 20ft is medium athletics, 30ft is hard (falling from a 3 story building). Again they are heroic. Anything over 30ft they are taking damage from the entire distance, barring interesting things to land on or in.
For the unconscious I wouldn't mess with the AC. If a melee enemy hits like you say it's an instant crit, which counts as 2 failed death saves. The players are already on the edge of death, don't make it easier to kill them.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
And hey, maybe the barbarian is a savant; someone who's whole mental potential has been hyper focused to the exclusion of all else on one subject upon which they're a genius.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savant_syndrome
Them: "You said we wouldn't need to min-max to survive fights in this campaign"
Me: "That doesn't mean you're automatically going to succeed without even trying!"
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Any reason for the reduction in power?
It isn't like the Druid is known for its quaint sub-classes.
I'd keep the Druid's spellcasting where its at but maybe put in a rule that they aren't allowed to go into Wildshape when actively commanding their beast?
So I'm designing the sub class kind of based on He-Man, so the beast will get more powerful as the player levels, and I'm going to have it be able to attack on your turn as a bonus action, so I feel that full spell casting is too powerful on top of all that.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
That's bonkers, if they're that unaware of their options you could introduce them to a smart NPC or just flat out tell them that any character that has been in combat or had combat training would first consider their options and would be inclined to avoid taking arrows to the face.
It sounds like you're trying to just make a pet class? I'd probably browse DM's Guild for a "Summoner" or something similar and see if any cover beasts.
Steam, various fora: Ivellius
League of Legends: Doctor Ivellius
Twitch, probably another place or two I forget: LPIvellius
You might want to look at the homebrew "Shaman" which is a bit in this direction to get some ideas.
https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/HyjbBsa
This would be a situation, definitely the second time, that I would ask them all to roll Wisdom checks
Even if they didn't succeed, hopefully they would meta-game the reason why
The base PHB version of the ranger is garbage and I am pretty sure they just recommend using the revised version.
I still think the revised version of the ranger is pretty bad as a whole, with the beastmaster sub class still being the worst. That's why I'm getting rid of the class in my homebrew and moving it's subclasses to classes I think they fit better under, and re-writing where needed.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
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I have a conundrum with how to approach Omu. My party is finally done in the jungle and has reached Omu at level 7. One of my players has a huge nerd-boner for the Yuan-Ti and wants to run the Fane of the Night Serpent. (I gave him a couple of Jungle encounters in our last session to introduce the Yuan-Ti. He kinda just dropped random bad guys instead of foreshadowing his arc, but that is a minor thing.) Anyway, my problem is more procedural and I'm waffling on how to do this.
We'll be playing another epic weekend session again in March and I've started slowly planning out how the session will go. As the Yuan-Ti are kinda/sorta intrinsically mixed up in Omu, separating my DMing and his DMing is proving to be tricky. Long story short plot recap... the final dungeon needs 9 keys to open. Nine keys are spread throughout the ruined city. Players, Yuan-Ti and Red Wizards are all trying to get the keys. As intended in the module, the party can ally with or fight against the Red Wizards, and the big snake boss will have at least one key at the bottom of his dungeon, the Fane of the Night Serpent. It would be functionally awkward and narratively shit if I kept handing off the Yuan-Ti encounters as we trooped through Omu. Nor do I want to do the city Yuan-Ti encounters myself and just hand him the book when we get to the Fane of the Night Serpent. In the module as written the Red Wizard camp with the first thing of note the party encounters in Omu and it has already been recently sacked by the Yuan Ti. The party can pick up some information and potential allies with the survivors. Then the module intends for the party to explore the city, finding keys and eventually ending up at the Fane of the Night Serpent to deal with the Yuan-Ti and get the final key(s).
My plan is this: The Yuan Ti attacks occur just as the party find the Red's camp. Many Red Wizards die and/or get captured, and the party zealot barbarian (played by the guy who wants to DM) is captured along with them. His PC out of the way, he is free to DM. Enter my PC, an Oathbreaker Paladin who is the head of the Wzards bodyguard unit. He then joins with the party to save his Wizards, save the capture party member, and then eventually turn on the party to try and claim all of the keys for himself. :evil:
The problem is that this necessitates doing the Fane of the Night Serpent first before exploring the rest of the city and getting the rest of the keys. It doesn't make sense that 1) the party, my party anyway, would ally with the Red Wizards unless there is a shared threat and goal and 2) That the party goes tromping around the city with a GMPC and player sitting idle. This seems to be to be very anti-climactic. But this way I get to establish the menace of the Yuan-Ti and explain their presence in the city and make sure it fits the rest of the narrative that I've been building, rather than my friend going "Uh-huh-huh... snake people" and rolling initiative.
Yes, I could always run the adventure as intended and at some point have the Barbarian captured much closer to where the party needs to enter the Fane and hand it over, but again that leaves me handing off encounters in the middle of the session and taking them back with this PC still in the mix, or I take "his" Yuan-Ti encounters and steal his thunder, and most importantly we run too long in the city and we don't have enough time over the weekend to actually finish the Fane of the Night Serpent.
Thoughts?
revised beastmaster does a good amount of damage, it falls off at ultra high levels but then again nothing in 5e is balanced around high levels
I think it's easier to salvage that for a pet class than to try to make a new one, for example letting the ranger get 2 attacks, or letting the pet attack with its reaction at level 5, giving the pet some kind of special ability, letting the pet benefit from Absorb Elements when cast by the ranger, giving the ranger a spell that brings its pet back to life instantly at full health (3rd level spell probably?). It requires some tweaking to make it have more pop, but it is fairly strong out of the box depending on the campaign you're running
I've been mulling off and on for a while about making a good ranger pet class... like the idea of a form neutral "Stat block" for your pet, instead of picking an existing beast, and you basically get a list of abilities you can plug into your pet - with flying pets having less hitpoints but otherwise being the same. I should revisit this, the ranger in the game im running liked what I ran by him, but I already let him custom build a pet (he has a blink dog) which he is super happy with.
Once you build your pet's statistics you just pick a suitable form of your choice for it. As an example you might pick Strength as its primary stat, Bite for its attack, give it Pack Tactics for its special ability, and at level 10 get an advanced ability for it and pick Multiattack, Poisoned bite, Fire breath, or something else nifty like that... I've just been struggling with a pithy way of presenting this because good god the revised ranger is a lot to keep in mind all the time with your pet
I would try as much as possible to make everything happen with the whole party present.
The way I ended up doing it with a party member who was gaga for the yuan-ti was increasing the wedge between Fenthaza and Ras Nsi - I had Fenthaza being a true believer who wished to destroy the world with the night serpent, an absolute crazy religious zealout, and Ras-Nsi as a too-old world-weary warlord who only wishes to see Mezro again and get back at Acererak for inflicting him with the death curse. Ras-Nsi contacted them through Salida and they ended up going into the Fane in non-hostile terms, but by the end of it half of them got turned into yuan-ti and the rest cut a bloody path out, Ras-Nsi let them use a teleportation pad to get them out of there but gave them his puzzle cubes
My issues is more procedural in that how and when do I hand off the reins to another DM without messing up the flow of the entirety of Chapter 3 of the module. Right now my option seems to be Fane first to get that Yuan-Ti love satisfied for one of my players and then city after. But that kinda fucks up the flow of the module. And I want to minimize any fuckery with the flow.
Right now, I'm expect to just have an anti-climactic end to the Omu section of the story. But I'm wondering if there is way out of that which I haven't seen yet.
My halfling beastmaster ranger with a pet bear was constantly putting out a lot of damage and control because it had two bodies and two potential AoOs and bears hit hard.
Do you two usually swap back and forth?
I can't imagine as CoS DM sharing with another player what my thoughts are as to what's happening elsewhere in Barovia while the characters are screwing around in the Amber Temple because
a) it will spoil it for that person
b) that person may have other ideas and make them happen during the session they are doing, thereby forcing me to change my plans which i have put a lot of work in
c) if someone wants to run their own campaign I'll happily play it, but then they have to do all the work that goes along with it
Working together on the campaign was a blast.
We don't normally share DM duties, no. We do normally switch off campaigns or even whole systems. In our group of 5 sometimes 6 regular players, who've been together for more than 15 years, three of us are the GM's running whatever games and campaigns that we like. He is currently playtesting some supernatural, modern world homebrew he's been working on. He has not guest DMed in one of my campaigns before, no. This would be the first time. I don't see an issue with it it because he's read Chapter 4 of the module only and stayed away from the rest of it (not that I'd worry about metagaming in this group. We're good enough that we can separate player info from character info. Also, I'd totally call them on any metagaming bullshit). Mostly he's read the MM, Tome of Foes (excellent!) and the relevant dungeon in ToA. We discussed this at the very beginning of the campaign and, frankly, was super excited to get that level of player buy-in on playing this module. So it not like this is a surprise or last minute change to my plans.
So knowing that he's taking the reins of the Yuan-Ti in the adventure, I've done nothing more with the Yuan-Ti myself than briefly skim the Fane of the Night Serpent chapter, give vague hints that Yuan-Ti can be found in the southern parts of Chult, and drop the backstory of Ras Nsi only as it is known to the Chultan's. The other players have no idea that the necromancer from decades ago is now the big boss snake dude. Only now, as I prepare to run the Omu sections of the module do I see some narrative hiccups that will occur to keep his section mostly self-contained before it comes back around to me.
backstory: the library, called the Esoterica, is a temple of Ioun in one of the oldest cities on the planet. the city has been built over and reconstructed through arcane means many times, including the Esoterica itself, and so the concept I came up with is that the archives below are essentially layered and extremely expansive, and there are sections and levels of the stacks that have been lost and forgotten over many many years, resulting in potentially dangerous and valuable pockets of ancient knowledge waiting to be found. and so the Ioun clergy, being perpetually understaffed, sends its up and coming acolytes into the archives to locate and secure these caches of knowledge, restoring them to functionality and removing any lingering threats
and as a bonus, the Monk is a follower of Ioun, and so with the church's blessing they were given leave to locate and clear out a section of the archive and hopefully find their quarry, which because this is a game and my characters are the protagonists, the sorcerer got Evil Radar in the form of his hand hurting the closer he gets to an item of power bearing Orcus's influence
they located a strange lobby of sorts featuring a mural of an archivist of the library dating roughly ~500 years in the past, and encountered their first puzzle: an empty bookshelf below the painting, and a huge assortment of random-ass books on the shelves all around. the clue was in the painting itself: he was holding one of the first books he wrote, which was part of a 7 volume collection detailing the history of the world (up to his current time, anyway). after they identified the book, they searched for the other books bearing his name, and I gave them 7 note cards each with a book title, and they eventually figured out the order they needed to go on the shelf, which served as the key to unlock his personal archive (the man's name is Morvain Laro, more on him later)
for brevity's sake, what followed was them discovering this pocket of the library that had at some point been infested by huge paper (and flesh/blood) eating caterpillars and moths, which was fun. they also found out that there was a back entrance connected to the sewer of the main city that some cultists from their Other Problem had infiltrated (side note here, the main antagonists of this campaign are the Cults of the Elder Elemental Eye. this is the water cult currently deploying a huge plague in a quarter of the city that has stymied the authorities. they have agreed to clandestinely help work out this issue by way of good-hearted blackmail from a civil servant).
after that they had a miniboss fight with a giant moth that had two great moments: the guest star paladin jumped onto its back with his halberd and stabbed it, and the monk climbed as high as he could and did a falling axe kick onto its head for tons of damage).
another puzzle/trial involving a talking head on a wall (Olmec style from Legends of the Hidden Temple except it's the archivist Morvain Laro, his simulacrum), some theft-prevention mimics, and a cut-in from the Monk's old teacher in the process as a test to gain entry to the restricted area (Guarded Knowledge: Sigma Level)
and then the Real Fun begins. some more backstory on the design--I decided that Morvain Laro was a bit of a narcissist, but generally a good guy, and had a soft spot for fairy tales and other whimsical fiction, thereby giving me leave to design the security of this place with a decidedly fanciful lean. first: there's a homunculus of Morvain Laro here that serves as the custodian. he's sustained by magic and is bound here. Second: the Tome of Glyphimor is here (this is the Orcus-aligned artifact). because it's orcus, it basically leaks corruption, which has mutated the homunculus and driven it insane. it's basically a Slasher movie monster at this point and extremely deadly. Third: the security system itself was designed by Laro based on a bunch of his favorite novels, and involves going into what is essentially a tiny pocket dimension inside a bottle and solving a bunch of puzzles and having a real "80s DnD" kind of adventure, with a twist.
SO--
the party enters Sigma level, and I immediately describe the reality-bent nature of the place. MC Escher on LSD. stairs that come out of the ceiling at odd angles, book shelves that float, pieces of the room that seem to stretch and distort, doors in weird places that lead nowhere or seem to be connected to someplace else entirely, and as they're grappling with this i begin to describe the sound of the Homunculus. uneven footsteps, feverish mumbling. he passes by a bookshelf near them, and they get a look, and he's basically nightmare fuel. squat, thick, no neck, a misshapen, bulbous eyes, a giant mouth with hundreds of sharp, long teeth, and grotesque arms with hands the size of serving platters. they hesitate and try to be quiet and utterly fuck their stealth rolls, and he comes over the bookshelf, climbing like a gross spider.
mechanics aside: I decided well before that this isn't a monster you fight (yet). this whole section is a prolonged skill challenge loaded with imagery and description, and so there are plenty of signs that engaging the homunculus as he is right now is certain doom. the Cleric of Melora's player is not known for particularly tactical/strategic thought, and so I knew I needed a way to effectively signal that this guy is dangerous. and of course, the player squared up to Combat this monster. two things happen here: one, the homunculus has a progressive aura that just deals you psychic damage. if you're within 15 feet, it starts at 20. my party is 6th level at this point, and so this isn't damage that'll kill them. it just sends a message. 10 feet is 40, and 5 feet is 120 (this is an instant kill for anyone in my party). the second thing is the guest-star Paladin, since this was played over two sessions, the guest player couldn't be there for session 2 of this adventure as he was in town for a limited time, so was back to me for NPC-ship.
so Melora cleric squares up, declares he's going to Thorn Whip (after he takes 20 damage). he doesn't get the hint, so I deploy the contingency. the paladin charges in, halberd raised, and the homunculus grabs him and twists him in half like you see the titans do to people in Attack on Titan. this is enough to send the message, and the party boogies. the homunculus is slow as hell (10 feet per round) and so they lose him. I describe the mindfuckery of this section, and when they stop to take a look at stuff, the homunculus catches up and ratchets up the tension again. this continues for a few minutes until they discover the door that leads to Security.
the group gets sucked into the Bottle World and end up at the first of four areas linked by a hub in the form of a ship on the high seas, the Knowledge Seeker. the following stuff is inspired by a lot of things personally, including Myst, Dear Esther, and general horror genre tropes that end up working out to be very effective and spooping the hell out of the players.
The Boat--
this is their hub and rest point. Because this is a pocket dimension and they had been fighting a lot, this is essentially 100% a safe space for them to chill, consider the events and the fuckery that has happened up til now, and generally figure out their next plan. it is also operated by ghostly copies of Morvain Laro all wearing different types of sailor uniforms like from a story book. earlier in the dungeon, in the "mundane" part, they found the archivist's skeleton and his signet ring still in his office, and this is instrumental to getting through security. the bearer of the ring is recognized as the Captain of the ship, and is able to activate the puzzles that deactivate portions of security. the group explores the boat and finds the navigation device at the helm, talks to the crew (the monk does, as he's holding the ring as a church relic), and find out that there's a map of some kind in the captain's quarters. they solve the puzzle in the captain's quarters (wear the ring, sit down at the writing desk in there, and the monk's hand is "possessed" briefly to jot down a bunch of numbers which serve as coordinates to the first destination). they plug the numbers in, and off they go.
The Lighthouse--
this is area 1. pelted by rain, gray skies, sitting atop a lonely island amidst an endless sea, the ship docks and the party heads up a looong set of stairs and find it barren save for stairs to the top and to a basement. they head to the top, find the dark lantern with a clockwork device connected to it that is very clearly missing a cog. this is obvious signalling, and so they head down to the basement. a locked door bearing an inlay for the signet ring. (this is an ongoing thing at this point, so they know the ring doubles as a key. it's also a Ring of Spell Storing so they're very happy to carry it). the first puzzle follows.
The Puzzle of Gods and Seasons
because nothing i do is original, i found this puzzle in searching for good D&D puzzles. essentially, you have a circular room with a mural painted on the entire wall's circumference, and roughly each 90 degree cut of the circle depicts a different god associated with a different season. in this case, it's Corellon (Spring), Pelor (Summer), Sehanine (Autumn), and the Raven Queen (Winter). in the center is a 10 foot diameter raised section in which rests fresh soil. the paintings serve as not obvious clues (Corellon is nurturing a flower in a garden, Pelor is holding the sun, Sehanine is walking a forest path with falling autumn leaves, the Raven Queen is shaping a blizzard) to interact with the soil in which a seedling is buried in the center. the players dug in the dirt and found the seed and started to figure it out--water the seed, it makes a small oak tree. shine light on it, the tree grows. they stumbled on the Autumn bit until the Monk blew on the tree, which caused the leaves to fall, and then Frostbite fulfilled winter, which caused the tree to ice over and shatter, leaving behind the missing cog. the players really loved this puzzle and it was fun watching them figure it out.
they put the gear in the device and activated the lantern which shoots a white beam across the ocean towards the horizon. confused by this, they head back to the boat where the Navigator says they'll follow the beam to their next destination. the team decides a Long Rest is appropriate here, which i am fine with as the boat sails off to...
The Sinking Pyramid--
the boat takes them to a desert and then sails into the sand because fucking storybook baby and eventually "docks" in front of a giant pyramid. the beam of light is striking one of the walls of the pyramid which serves as an early subtle clue. they locate the entrance and head in and find some more clues in the forms of hieroglyphs, indicating (through the light beam) that there is at least one more destination after this, some kind of castle/keep. they wend their way through the pyramid and end up in the center, a square room with sandstone land bridges connecting the corners of the room to the center, in which there is an altar with yet another signet inlay. at each corner there are also pedestals bearing three items each which are part of the puzzle.
The Puzzle of the Three Items
so the puzzle here is that when activated, two things happen: a giant mirror comes out of the ground (this is the obvious thing they need to get the light to) and Morvain Laro's voice booms through the room: 'For those who wish to be rewarded/Choose carefully the three that keep things sorted'. this is another puzzle stolen from the greater internet, but it relies on wordplay involving the objects.
the objects dispersed are thus, all statuettes: a man with an abacus, a rooster, an apple, a warrior with shield and spear, a bear, a courtesan, a huntsman with a bow, a smith at an anvil, and a quill
the solution is to place the man with abacus, the courtesan, and the smith on the center altar, because the objects "keep things sorted/sordid/sworded". this took them some time to figure out--they tried a couple combinations, and when they did the first one i started a 30 minute timer on my phone and had sand start filling the chamber from the ceiling. credit to my players though, they took a random ass guess after figuring out abacus/smith and just threw the courtesan in there, which solved the puzzle and caused the pyramid to sink, allowing the light to hit the mirror and bounce to their next destination...
The Dread Fort--
this is my favorite part of the session. i had the least prep here, knowing only that i wanted some kind of creepy undead situation, and a pretty simple puzzle involving finding three different torches to light three braziers on the ramparts. so i went whole hog here and turned it into a horror movie--the boat goats into a giant cove that looks like a maw, they arrive at this horrible burned and worn fort, and the gate's already open for them.
a few things are in place mechanically behind the scenes: because i want this to be a simple puzzle with a lot of tension and not a combat encounter, there is a persistent magical effect at play that causes sources of light to not work effectively similar to the Darkness spell. unlike normal Darkness, however, it doesn't completely destroy darkvision, only limits it out to about 30 feet. this was crucial to maintaining the atmosphere of the puzzle as it would have really fallen to pieces since my party has a lot of darkvision and sources of light like a smart party, which is great in a tactical scenario, but i needed to be able to put some spoops on the players. so vision is reduced. the other thing is really obvious, but divine spells just don't work here, including turn undead. it would have been problematic for the cleric to just start turning my sources of "threat" here, so that was taken off the table.
some might say this sounds unfair, but bear in mind the threats i'm about to describe are not particularly dangerous, they just need to feel dangerous. there was no combat here, and had it turned into one, things might have been a lot different, but they bought in very hard to the spook level due to the unsettling atmosphere. anyway! descriptions of the setting:
as they enter the courtyard of the ruined keep they find shit Ain't Right. those who can see (3/5 of the group) can make out shapes just out of visual range, humanoid, just standing there and swaying slowly, watching them. this sets them immediately on edge as they realize they just walked into an area where they are very much surrounded by a lot of Things They Aren't Sure Of. and so they nervously approach.
they find their new companions are soldiers, dead skeletons, possibly the guardians of this place? i pull out all the stops here and do some horrible rasping, load up on the descriptions, and turn on my Creepy iTunes playlist. they bunch up and ponder what to do, as the skeletons don't make an aggressive move here, just wait and watch. it was a treat watching them start panicking at the table at this point, and eventually they make the decision, with the sorcerer taking the totally blind Cleric and Monk (human and halfling) by the hand and heading for the central keep. they start pushing open the keep door together and it creaks open... and then i Weeping Angel them. the skeletons at some point have gotten very close when their backs are turned.
they appropriately freak out and quickly get inside the keep, shutting the door, and take a breath and explore. they find a banquet table, a throne, burnt and ruined tapestries and paintings, and some dried blood. they also find their first torch leaning against the back of the throne, which they light. it emits a weirdly lightless and dim purple flame (described as the color of a bruise).
at this point they find out: they're not alone! a pair of skeletons at some point have arrived in the dining hall. a skeleton in a gown, and a smaller skeleton. this is the Lady and the Son. this is where things got REAL fun. the players were not expecting to see the skeleton of a child, and I began having the pair slowly follow them around as they went upstairs to explore some more. they'd already found one piece of the puzzle but didn't really know it yet, so i was very happy they decided to linger here, because i got to use some really good imagery and sounds including the child clacking his jaw repeatedly, and then running past them into his old bedroom and picking up some toy soldiers to clack together. they also found the Lord in his study when they went to explore it... because he was standing right in front of the door waiting for them. it was great. eventually tension got real high as the three pursued them through the keep, constantly behind them making awful noises, and pretty soon they couldn't take anymore so they went outside.
at this point things needed to accelerate, so for brevity's sake they found the next torches, and as they did so the skeletons got increasingly more 'aggressive' and numerous. at the third torch being lit they started advancing with intent to attack, and the group basically had to figure out to light the three braziers on the wall in tandem, which is a simple puzzle but took them some time to figure out due to the high levels of tension from these slow, threatening "enemies".
and as they lit the braziers they got whisked away to the Final Section, the one they didn't know about, and where we stopped: a recreation of their home town plucked from their own memories. i'll detail what happens after we play Friday.
all in all, it was an incredible session, and everyone seemed to really enjoy it. it was great watching them get very worked up due to the atmosphere, and were very complimentary. sorry for the length, if anyone has some questions i hope you ask them, as i was very proud of the whole experience end to end.
whew
Are you married to filling it under druid? Because He-Man always struck me as closer to a barbarian. No spellcasting to worry about, plus you get cool options like sharing your rage with your pet.
This is certainly something to consider that i hadnt. The rage could symbolize when prince adam and cringer become he-man and battle cat.
I like this a lot. Thank you! Also everyone else too. Lots of great ideas here.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
https://media.wizards.com/2016/dnd/downloads/UA_RevisedRanger.pdf
Unearthed Arcana article on the D&D website.
Specifically for the Revised Ranger, Wizards has said that they've abandoned the concept laid out in the UA, and are looking at new ways to address the problem with the Ranger class.
Mike Mearls has been working through some off this on the D&D official Twitch and there are summaries on Reddit, but he's currently on break from streaming, so no new updates since December I think.