part of it is that like, my campaign is a good deal more dark than he seems to have thought going in? He seemed pretty upset that the necromancy class had a dead student brought in to practice necromancy spells on
I mean it's supposed to be fucked up, but it's the kind of fucked up everyone else signed on for - that kind of thing happens when you insert yourself into a game without having a conversation with the DM ahead of time. For all he knew he was stepping into a my little pony version of FATAL (he didnt even know it was 5e when he showed up!!)
Okay, so I know there's 3 sides to every story and all, but even a generous interpretation of this guy's actions leaves you fully justified in dumping his ass.
Man up and kick him. Do it over text if you have to. Say this: "I have discussed with the other members and a majority vote has decided that you are not a good fit with this group. I wish you luck finding a party that will better suit you."
You even have plausible deniability about being the bad guy with those words.
Personally, I have always found it much better to take the responsibility for asking a player to leave directly as opposed to making it a group or similar decision. One reason is that it won't affect relationships outside of the game bar yours, which often makes things much easier for the other players overall. Another is that I feel as DM, one of the responsibilities is deciding who does or doesn't come into the game. Anyone at my tables, bar the store games I run where I don't have as much choice, is usually there because I agreed to them joining in the first place.
If I didn't want you in my game, you wouldn't be there essentially and so I always take responsibility for removing a player onto just myself.
It looks good, and the focus on lighting and vertical space as tactical elements is interesting, but I feel like these guys are pressing their luck.
its SRD, you can make whatever you want with SRD
Not finding a current reading on this but the original OGL, which is what lets folks use the SRD, had a carve out for "Interactive Games" and computer programs. (Because Wizards didn't have those rights themselves to pass through the OGL.) So that's a solid "Uh, maybe."
I would hope they've consulted a quality lawyer because it does look like some cool stuff.
part of it is that like, my campaign is a good deal more dark than he seems to have thought going in? He seemed pretty upset that the necromancy class had a dead student brought in to practice necromancy spells on
I mean it's supposed to be fucked up, but it's the kind of fucked up everyone else signed on for - that kind of thing happens when you insert yourself into a game without having a conversation with the DM ahead of time. For all he knew he was stepping into a my little pony version of FATAL (he didnt even know it was 5e when he showed up!!)
Okay, so I know there's 3 sides to every story and all, but even a generous interpretation of this guy's actions leaves you fully justified in dumping his ass.
Man up and kick him. Do it over text if you have to. Say this: "I have discussed with the other members and a majority vote has decided that you are not a good fit with this group. I wish you luck finding a party that will better suit you."
You even have plausible deniability about being the bad guy with those words.
Personally, I have always found it much better to take the responsibility for asking a player to leave directly as opposed to making it a group or similar decision. One reason is that it won't affect relationships outside of the game bar yours, which often makes things much easier for the other players overall. Another is that I feel as DM, one of the responsibilities is deciding who does or doesn't come into the game. Anyone at my tables, bar the store games I run where I don't have as much choice, is usually there because I agreed to them joining in the first place.
If I didn't want you in my game, you wouldn't be there essentially and so I always take responsibility for removing a player onto just myself.
Typically I agree, but this DM clearly has issues with "just kicking" this problem player. Basically my suggestion is the same principle as putting a few blank cartridges in the ammo for a firing squad.
KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
So. The GM has written - or it was always that way - that the green dragon in Mines of Phandelver hadn't done anything nor was planning anything nefarious. The party may have just been used as useful stooges for a minor lord to kill off someone who did nothing wrong (and also got them to release the weird Cthulhu-Lucifer thing for a sec and ruin a few peoples' minds). Now the GM is making rumblings that perhaps momma dragon is on her way for the next adventure.
Not to beg for mercy, but in honest penance for a mistake borne out of riding the high of her new strength and newfound confidence, I might make an earnest attempt to ask the dragon to become its servant. That way, if somehow I convince the dragon to make me its thrall, I can actually check if it really is not an asshole. If it separates me from the party, the perfect time to have my brother or a cocky ronin character replace Kae'Arh for a time. If it decides to just try to kill her, I tried and now this is self-defense.
That makes a few paths open. Help the genasi bard, go on a Berserk quest to heal the mentally damaged people's minds by finding a wish or something, or deal with the dragon stuff. I think he wanted to go with the published Hoard adventure but he is good at changing stuff around from playing with him in Dark Heresy and mix-and-matching stuff.
Also, had a little talk with the problem player. His dismissive confusion and interruption to the letters things along with interrupting the other party's stuff seems to come out of us having very different philosophies in play. By his words he's here for strictly the adventure stuff, seeing and making funny stuff happen, and fighting. He only sees value in doing stuff if it's going to make a mechanical change in the world that he can see. He doesn't fully understand why we do the way the rest of the party plays, but his words have it that he understands that is the way we do it in a way that he at least can see that it has value to us. This has me like 90% satisfied with a niggling 10% in that I feel like he could fully understand rather then hold this stance of like sympathetic toleration (I guess) even if we're not looking to convert him to our way. That 10% isn't enough to make a fuss over. His other behavior is.
I just found a bunch of homebrew monsters, among them a take on Geryon made before the release of the official version in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. I just ran a one-on-one battle with the official version of Geryon versus a paladin who had already used up some of his spell slots, and the archdevil went down before he could even attack.
I really advise upgrading the official Geryon by doubling his hit points and adding these features:
By the end of my campaign I had started to feel like a lot of monsters didn't have enough tricks, so I started doing things like giving horned devils wall of fire and mariliths cloudkill.
Minions are a GREAT mechanic for paladins, I like to give minions 2 "hitpoints", in that one hit will bloody them, and adding a smite or a second attack will finish them, an aoe spell will take 1 hit off
Spells like Divine Word, Dispel Evil and Good, and Banishment can be effective as well as they make the paladin's steed go away
One thing I did with Mariliths is that I made their teleport their movement instead of an action. Power spike? Holy hell yes, but after fighting one my players are fucking terrified of them, they kill everyone in order of squishification. I have to do things like this because my players will easily kill say, an adult dragon with 7th level characters if they can at all prep for it (and pen it in, I tend to have my dragons fly away and let their breath recharge and come back which vastly increases how deadly they are, I also have had a young dragon run away, short rest and spend hit dice, and come back which the party was pretty sure wasn't fair)
Minions are a GREAT mechanic for paladins, I like to give minions 2 "hitpoints", in that one hit will bloody them, and adding a smite or a second attack will finish them, an aoe spell will take 1 hit off
Spells like Divine Word, Dispel Evil and Good, and Banishment can be effective as well as they make the paladin's steed go away
One thing I did with Mariliths is that I made their teleport their movement instead of an action. Power spike? Holy hell yes, but after fighting one my players are fucking terrified of them, they kill everyone in order of squishification. I have to do things like this because my players will easily kill say, an adult dragon with 7th level characters if they can at all prep for it (and pen it in, I tend to have my dragons fly away and let their breath recharge and come back which vastly increases how deadly they are, I also have had a young dragon run away, short rest and spend hit dice, and come back which the party was pretty sure wasn't fair)
I like the two hits and it's dead idea, or if you really overkill, 1 hit.
The paladin in my last campaign was almost always accompanied by a Pegasus that let him zip right to the boss of an encounter. Oftentimes it was tested, too.
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
edited August 2019
Good ending to the adventure. Also, yes that lord breached protocol and had us just kind of summarily execute a dragon for no good reason. Furthermore, momma dragon is here now and looking for who killed her child. So we're taking an adventure to basically the GM's version of Thay. Not to run, but because we need to deal with this eldritch lantern now and they have information. Gave hug.
Edit: So the Gm has actually said he totally gave an incentive to kill the dragon that wasn't there in the first place. I am not truthfully upset out of game, but ingame and thinking it over it does make me sad that I was the one to offer a peaceful solution of finding it a new home. He by his words got caught up a little in metagaming and I got caught up in metagaming as well in that at the moment the nobleman started catastrophizing about the dragon I thought he was following the normal DnD lore of chromatics being evil along with thinking, "this is Dungeons and Dragons and if I say we shouldn't kill the dragon after this then I'll be seen a stick in the mud." Now I realize everyone actually was on the choice of leaving it alone. So I as a character got to keep this kind of stain on my soul and I as a player now realizing my mistake gotta go forward making decisions with this character realizing she's made a big mistake with no easy way to fix it. Which is awesome character-wise and gives her a new thing to focus on after growing a lot over the course of the adventure but now my character's heart is heavy and my heart is kind of heavy by proxy.
It's just so cool how invested TTRPGs can make you. Especially with great DMs.
So I'm thinking of implementing a few specific Warlock pact patrons into my next campaign and thought a good way to do that would be by adding thematic spells to a Warlock's spell list. How do these three look?
Cryonax Great Old One Pact Spells
Cantrip: Ray of Frost
1st: Ice Knife
2nd: Snilloc's Snowball Swarm
3rd: Sleet Storm
4th: Ice Storm
5th: Cone of Cold
Ben Hadar Celestial /Olhydra Great Old One Pact Spells
Cantrip: Shape Water
1st: Create or Destroy Water
2nd: Melf's Acid Arrow
3rd: Tidal Wave
4th: Control Water
5th: Maelstrom
I tried to avoid overlapping with the Warlock spell list and Patron spells. This made making the Zaaman Rul/Imix spell list a bit harder.
Minions are a GREAT mechanic for paladins, I like to give minions 2 "hitpoints", in that one hit will bloody them, and adding a smite or a second attack will finish them, an aoe spell will take 1 hit off
Spells like Divine Word, Dispel Evil and Good, and Banishment can be effective as well as they make the paladin's steed go away
One thing I did with Mariliths is that I made their teleport their movement instead of an action. Power spike? Holy hell yes, but after fighting one my players are fucking terrified of them, they kill everyone in order of squishification. I have to do things like this because my players will easily kill say, an adult dragon with 7th level characters if they can at all prep for it (and pen it in, I tend to have my dragons fly away and let their breath recharge and come back which vastly increases how deadly they are, I also have had a young dragon run away, short rest and spend hit dice, and come back which the party was pretty sure wasn't fair)
I like the two hits and it's dead idea, or if you really overkill, 1 hit.
Yea a crit is 1hko, as is a spell of an aoe of a high enough level (I don't obfuscate that information, I'll say like "you think a vitriolic sphere could kill these" with a simple check)
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
In that last session, the bard finally got the pet she wanted for the whole adventure. She went out to a grove with a lot of candy and sweet stuff and made friends with a pseudo-dragon. When the pseudo-dragon was introduced to the rest of the party, my kobold assistant and it narrowed eyes at each other. Later he explained he doesn't like dragons to the bard and overhearing it I told him he was above the pseudo-dragon in hierarchy. Also, the pseudodragon tried to sneak up on the eldritch lantern in the middle of the night but after being caught and transmitted images of what came out of the lantern it flew to the bard's sleeping pouch and hid most of itself except for its eyes and snout to stare at the thing.
In not-Neverwinter the bard got to do a performance in a big forum and got a decent amount of gold out of it. In the crowd was my character's twin cheering and giving gold and they met. Before the performance, she was feeling down and we got to talking in-character about her family and love basically while the rest were shopping or doing the math for a duel. She then offered to comb my hyena hair and I obliged and she was like, "oh my god are we bonding?!"
Speaking of animal people stuff, do y'all think blacksmiths, clothiers, and leatherworkers automatically cut in access for races like tabaxi, lizard people, and the like for their tails to hang out or would that be like a faux-pas and leave that up to the wearer? In the possibly last session with that cleric, I tried to sincerely whisper to the armourer to deal with that. I instead accidentally stepped on the tabaxi's tail and we had a conversation about boundaries.
Speaking of boundaries, I summarized the last 90 minutes of my game as follows to the cleric
"So, you gathered three accomplices to break into a noble lord's house - a well-respected breeder of horses and gryphons who rubs elbows with the council and sovereign herself, using a long forgotten teleportation circle underneath his house. You encounter his special needs adopted elven daughter, and based solely on her having weird sharp teeth and walking funny, you and your co-conspirators tackle her to the ground, you put her to sleep with a sleep spell, and evade the guards hauling away your kidnapping victim. Once the lot of you get somewhere safe, you give her an unsolicited medical examination. Is that correct?"
Cleric: "When you put it that way it sounds like we're evil skeevy criminals."
Cleric: "So, what did I find, was I right? I mean sleep wouldn't of worked if I wasn't right"
Me: .... "Yes, you were right, not only is she not an elf, she's some kind of Frankenstein's monster of human and harpy parts"
Cleric: "I told you guys I was right"
Fighter: "Question, okay so like, when this teenager wakes up and starts screaming and panicking in confusion and terror in a minute, does that make cleric any less of a criminal after the house guards are undoubtedly drawn to the cries in the basement of this mansion - seeing as we have no way to teleport back out of here"
Cleric: "Okay so I hadn't thought about that part, but this PROVES the noble is up to some fucked up shit"
Sorcerer: "Yeah but I'm pretty sure DM's summary is what he's going to tell the authorities"
Cleric: "But we ARE the authorities"
Rogue: "I think we like, had to tell someone we planned on doing this? I don't think we can just commit crimes and use our status as fantasy-SPECTREs to get away with it after the fact"
Cleric: "Okay im going to level with you guys I may not have thought this through, lets tie her up and hide her in the wine cellar until we can find some actual proof he's done anything illegal.... wait DM is it illegal to build monster-children?"
Me: "Not that you know of"
Rogue: "Hey I'm used to being the criminal, welcome onboard everyone else"*
*She says, while stuffing bottles of wine in her bag of holding
Edit: The cleric is absolutely right, this nobleman is a necromancer, and a weirdo fleshcrafter. He would be at home in Barovia and if they make their way to his lab will find not only flesh golems, "the lost", and that scene out of Alien 3 with a bunch of variations of this creature in tanks begging for death, if they go all the way they'll find that he serves the great kraken slarkrathel and is responsible for a number of area disappearances. I was NOT expecting the cleric to immediately have a eureka about something I described about the girl in the kitchen, I was expecting them to follow up with - yaknow - casing the joint, or talking to literally anyone, or investigating anything. Essentially he's recreated his lost daughter, with the kraken whispering secrets to him. The kraken's cult is, of course, responsible for his daughter's disappearance to begin with.
So here's a question: What are they going to do with his adopted daughter? She may be the product of terrible experiments, but she's still a sapient individual who should be deserving of the ability to live and grow and become a decent person despite her troubled origins. How she was brought into this world is something she had literally no control over.
KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
Also in that session, we had to play a good cop bad cop routine with the son of a farmer who ran away from home to find us to like be our squire basically. We are apparently heroes to him for fighting off the redbrands in Phandelin. This same boy won arm-wrestling contests against all of us to get into the group. This boy got his mind destroyed by trauma which only got fixed when we implored a great priestess of Mystra to please erase the events of that day in his mind. After that, we were dead set on returning him home. We bought him some neat toys and a fancy sword that was to be a surprise. The bard had the idea of telling him that his home town needed defending and he could be the hero of Phandelin to fight off other brigands (which would be gone by now as Neverwinter sent a force over to break up the slavery ring and we killed a good number of them) menacing the town. So we sit him down for a talk.
I say "good cop bad cop" but it was more like good cop sad cop. The bard played good cop and convinced him that the town could really use his help and that he'd be doing us a really big favor by protecting it. I went the route of tearfully convincing him not to be like me. Don't run away from home, don't cut your childhood short, and don't almost die on the side of a mountain. That convinced him well enough. I am very happy we fixed him and didn't have to do our original plan of leaving this traumatized child at the edge of town and hope his father never realizes he was with us. I already had one big fuck-up and a nuke of being on our trail.
So here's a question: What are they going to do with his adopted daughter? She may be the product of terrible experiments, but she's still a sapient individual who should be deserving of the ability to live and grow and become a decent person despite her troubled origins. How she was brought into this world is something she had literally no control over.
Their current plan is to find somewhere for her in the town the Noble lives in, failing that she gets to live in the clerics house until a new home is found. Also he has explain why her father had to go away. They have lots of money so that helps.
The authorities would just kill the girl so it's on them, I suspect they're going to dump her on the church of pelor or something with a substantial donation and give her the narrative gendry baratheon boat treatment - she's going to hate all of them though, so I wouldn't mind keeping her around as there aren't enough NPCs that hate them in the story
Also in that session, we had to play a good cop bad cop routine with the son of a farmer who ran away from home to find us to like be our squire basically. We are apparently heroes to him for fighting off the redbrands in Phandelin. This same boy won arm-wrestling contests against all of us to get into the group. This boy got his mind destroyed by trauma which only got fixed when we implored a great priestess of Mystra to please erase the events of that day in his mind. After that, we were dead set on returning him home. We bought him some neat toys and a fancy sword that was to be a surprise. The bard had the idea of telling him that his home town needed defending and he could be the hero of Phandelin to fight off other brigands (which would be gone by now as Neverwinter sent a force over to break up the slavery ring and we killed a good number of them) menacing the town. So we sit him down for a talk.
I say "good cop bad cop" but it was more like good cop sad cop. The bard played good cop and convinced him that the town could really use his help and that he'd be doing us a really big favor by protecting it. I went the route of tearfully convincing him not to be like me. Don't run away from home, don't cut your childhood short, and don't almost die on the side of a mountain. That convinced him well enough. I am very happy we fixed him and didn't have to do our original plan of leaving this traumatized child at the edge of town and hope his father never realizes he was with us. I already had one big fuck-up and a nuke of being on our trail.
I think I recognize what NPC your DM adapted for that kid and my fighter had to convince him to stay on his farm as well. This coming from a fighter who is like 21 years old and was knocked unconscious twice in the last few days, so I basically went "don't focus on football, you'll get a lot of head traumas and the chances of making it to the NFL are too slim to destroy your body over".
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
edited August 2019
His name was
Carp
and I haven’t read the campaign book so I don’t know what he changed. Edit: don’t know severity of it but spoiling in case
I believe I am the most often downed person in the party. So I would have also offered that up. I don’t usually like stroll right in the middle of groups or leave combat for attacks of opportunity but it seems like enemies get very lucky rolls against me. I used patient defense on three folks targeting me after I Matrix cartwheeled over them to save a friend whose disguise plan failed and the attacks only went down from 2 natural twenties and a hit to three hits. Yey. I am a monk so that makes sense healthwise. Kind of glad I picked Sun Soul now because even though Open Palm is very cool technically, Astral is a stand and I’m into that, and the rest are various degrees of rad getting to Dragonball blast folks four times from thirty feet back is really worth it for me in the not dying area.
the fighter in my game has a low wisdom score and has the world view of Standard_D&D_Adventurer, upon discovering this used to be a harpy his reaction is to cut her throat and toss the body in the nearest refuse bin, to the incredible consternation of everyone else. The cleric wants to figure out how to improve upon the bad guy's process to fully convert her to a human (assuming that's what she wants), the rogue wants to "Fix her" so she's a harpy again (and buddy up because boy howdy my budding organization could use a flying agent), the sorcerer wants to sit her down and ask her what she wants to do, the warlock is the only one pointing out that sooner or later she's going to magically charm one or all of the party
They're having this conversation in discord right now in character and it warms my blackened DM heart enough to not yell at them for metagaming because they absolutely do not have enough time to have this discussion right now where the session ended
1) Look into the Pathfinder 2E bulk rules and a 5E conversion for them to see if it looks like an easy enough way to track encumbrance for me to want to bother with it.
2) A critical miss on a weapon attack causes the weapon to take a permanent and cumulative -1 penalty to damage rolls. If its penalty drops to -5, the weapon is destroyed. Using the proper tools or the mending spell during a short rest eliminates up to a -3 penalty, and after a long rest eliminates up to a -4 penalty. A destroyed weapon takes a week to restore to its original state.
On the latter house rule the point is to create an extra incentive for the party to take short rests and to encourage trying out weapons the party finds, like those dropped by monsters.
It’s extra, fiddly maintenance that is basically resolved with a hand wave and hoses warriors the most, as they’ll be making more attacks per round on average.
It’s extra, fiddly maintenance that is basically resolved with a hand wave and hoses warriors the most, as they’ll be making more attacks per round on average.
I was thinking about possible rebuttals to this, but nope, you're right. I'll remove it. I just really liked the weapon breakage mechanic in BoTW, but I can see how it doesn't work in D&D.
I want that Eberron book to come out and I want to rip off Prototype/Insidious/Venom/every movie where some shady organization tries to create a supersoldier and it goes wrong really hard and have a band of players hired to break into a warehouse get infected with a weaponized version of the Mourning and have to go on the lam while they try to figure out who's behind it all.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
Yea im finding with my house rules that if they are going to be fiddly, they better be lifting the players up, or they aren't going to remember or want to engage at all.
My thinking with the weapon breakage rule was this:
- Encourages weapon users to always seek advantage and incentivizes other characters to help him get it. Flanking, figuring out how to sneak up on enemies to ambush them, magical aid, etc.
- If a weapon gets damaged they can pick up another weapon they find which might have some odd detail or superficial magical effect.
- Gives a reason to carry around a spare weapon they've wanted to try, like swapping a longsword for a halberd.
- Gives an excuse for more short rests for characters that recharge abilities on a short rest.
- Gives a reason to actually use Smith's tools or mending.
- Supports a grittier feeling campaign.
- In my experience players expect something bad to happen on a natural one.
My original thought was to have less mechanical impact. Just say "a weapon breaks after a number of critical misses equal to the weapon's attack bonus plus one". However, I changed it to bring it more in line with the rust monster's effects on weapons (although I guess I could change the rust monster instead...).
I have played in campaigns where a critical miss means a weapon breaks, or you drop/throw it, or you hurt yourself somehow, etc (said campaign also had multiple instances where verbal component spells couldn't be cast due to silence or water-filled chambers). I thought this would keep that spirit while not having someone's weapon just shatter out of nowhere.
Aside from giving the smith's tools and mending a use, players will already naturally seek the rest of those anyway. No melee player will go "well I could get advantage, but I can't be bothered".
That weapon breakage rule is actually pretty close to the old breakage rule from Dark Sun, with the caveat that it only applied to non-magical non-metal weapons (and was kinda intended to make it a Big Deal to even find a metal weapon in a low-magic environment).
I'd generally agree though that that level of bookkeeping is not for most campaigns. It really only mattered in Dark Sun because Dark Sun was all about survival and bean counting supplies and being such a low-magic/low-treasure environment that 'enough water for a week in the desert and an extra sword for when your current sword inevitably breaks' was exciting loot - I don't think you could get that sort of environment to work in 5e without a lot of changes (and significant buy-in from players that they wanted to play a sort of Darkest Dungeon-style survival/resource management game).
I want that Eberron book to come out and I want to rip off Prototype/Insidious/Venom/every movie where some shady organization tries to create a supersoldier and it goes wrong really hard and have a band of players hired to break into a warehouse get infected with a weaponized version of the Mourning and have to go on the lam while they try to figure out who's behind it all.
You can probably do this with Ravnica too.
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MrVyngaardLive From New EtoileStraight Outta SosariaRegistered Userregular
Generally I confine my PCs' weapon breakages to "were you using it improperly?" and if they're using it on something immune to such, that potentially qualifies as "improperly".
Dropping and fumbling? Sure - a serious melee even with experienced people can have stuff go wrong. Combat is chaotic and things can go terribly wrong at weird times. Weapons that are well-made from strong materials shouldn't entirely break down on a mere fluke.
"now I've got this mental image of caucuses as cafeteria tables in prison, and new congressmen having to beat someone up on inauguration day." - Raiden333
I'm mostly brainstorming ways to overcome what I perceived as problems during my previous campaign.
For one, the party almost never took short rests and would try long resting in places they really shouldn't have. Even when I had monsters attack during a long rest it didn't really change how they played.
Second, there wasn't much strategizing or synergy. Everybody pretty much just ran in guns blazing, and flanking was surprisingly infrequent. I'd like to have moments where someone scouts ahead, reports on the enemy composition, and then the rest if the party sneaks into an optimal position.
Third, I want tools to matter more.
Fourth, I felt like the previous campaign was too easy. I want this next one to have situations that are very difficult and require careful planning. For example, a monster that could one-shot down a PC just so happens to be standing next to the edge of a balcony, meaning that someone could shove the monster off for others to try and kill it with ranged attacks before it makes it back up the stairs.
I'm planning for my next campaign to take place in a jungle filled with trapped ruins and ruled by yuan-ti and demons with little chance for safe resting places or restocking beyond ally encampments that the party helps to found and defend. Just thought that would show what kind of tone I'm going for.
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Personally, I have always found it much better to take the responsibility for asking a player to leave directly as opposed to making it a group or similar decision. One reason is that it won't affect relationships outside of the game bar yours, which often makes things much easier for the other players overall. Another is that I feel as DM, one of the responsibilities is deciding who does or doesn't come into the game. Anyone at my tables, bar the store games I run where I don't have as much choice, is usually there because I agreed to them joining in the first place.
If I didn't want you in my game, you wouldn't be there essentially and so I always take responsibility for removing a player onto just myself.
Not finding a current reading on this but the original OGL, which is what lets folks use the SRD, had a carve out for "Interactive Games" and computer programs. (Because Wizards didn't have those rights themselves to pass through the OGL.) So that's a solid "Uh, maybe."
I would hope they've consulted a quality lawyer because it does look like some cool stuff.
Typically I agree, but this DM clearly has issues with "just kicking" this problem player. Basically my suggestion is the same principle as putting a few blank cartridges in the ammo for a firing squad.
"Hey man, we talked it over and had a vote and decided you're not welcome back to the D&D group anymore"
"wtf who is this?"
"Oh you don't know me"
"Then who is we?"
"The internet."
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
You really shouldn't have made Charisma your dump stat.
*Ring ring*
Hello?
Hi, Mr TerribleDruid? Go ahead and roll initiative.
Wait ..what?
Okay, I got 22, so I'll go first.
What's...what are you talking about? Who is this?
I cast Banishment, give me a...ooh. a charisma save. Not your strong suit.
What.. who is this?
Yeah, a 6 isn't going to work. Looks like you're out of the group. Best of luck to you on your new demiplane.
Wait what I'm out? Wha*click*
Not to beg for mercy, but in honest penance for a mistake borne out of riding the high of her new strength and newfound confidence, I might make an earnest attempt to ask the dragon to become its servant. That way, if somehow I convince the dragon to make me its thrall, I can actually check if it really is not an asshole. If it separates me from the party, the perfect time to have my brother or a cocky ronin character replace Kae'Arh for a time. If it decides to just try to kill her, I tried and now this is self-defense.
That makes a few paths open. Help the genasi bard, go on a Berserk quest to heal the mentally damaged people's minds by finding a wish or something, or deal with the dragon stuff. I think he wanted to go with the published Hoard adventure but he is good at changing stuff around from playing with him in Dark Heresy and mix-and-matching stuff.
Also, had a little talk with the problem player. His dismissive confusion and interruption to the letters things along with interrupting the other party's stuff seems to come out of us having very different philosophies in play. By his words he's here for strictly the adventure stuff, seeing and making funny stuff happen, and fighting. He only sees value in doing stuff if it's going to make a mechanical change in the world that he can see. He doesn't fully understand why we do the way the rest of the party plays, but his words have it that he understands that is the way we do it in a way that he at least can see that it has value to us. This has me like 90% satisfied with a niggling 10% in that I feel like he could fully understand rather then hold this stance of like sympathetic toleration (I guess) even if we're not looking to convert him to our way. That 10% isn't enough to make a fuss over. His other behavior is.
I really advise upgrading the official Geryon by doubling his hit points and adding these features:
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
By the end of my campaign I had started to feel like a lot of monsters didn't have enough tricks, so I started doing things like giving horned devils wall of fire and mariliths cloudkill.
The horned devils are in tuxedos while a 4 piece band plays in the background? Fuck I might have to do that at some point.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Spells like Divine Word, Dispel Evil and Good, and Banishment can be effective as well as they make the paladin's steed go away
One thing I did with Mariliths is that I made their teleport their movement instead of an action. Power spike? Holy hell yes, but after fighting one my players are fucking terrified of them, they kill everyone in order of squishification. I have to do things like this because my players will easily kill say, an adult dragon with 7th level characters if they can at all prep for it (and pen it in, I tend to have my dragons fly away and let their breath recharge and come back which vastly increases how deadly they are, I also have had a young dragon run away, short rest and spend hit dice, and come back which the party was pretty sure wasn't fair)
Then the party left the castle.
Next time they face him, he will have donned his animated armor and retrieved his sword from the vault.
I like the two hits and it's dead idea, or if you really overkill, 1 hit.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Edit: So the Gm has actually said he totally gave an incentive to kill the dragon that wasn't there in the first place. I am not truthfully upset out of game, but ingame and thinking it over it does make me sad that I was the one to offer a peaceful solution of finding it a new home. He by his words got caught up a little in metagaming and I got caught up in metagaming as well in that at the moment the nobleman started catastrophizing about the dragon I thought he was following the normal DnD lore of chromatics being evil along with thinking, "this is Dungeons and Dragons and if I say we shouldn't kill the dragon after this then I'll be seen a stick in the mud." Now I realize everyone actually was on the choice of leaving it alone. So I as a character got to keep this kind of stain on my soul and I as a player now realizing my mistake gotta go forward making decisions with this character realizing she's made a big mistake with no easy way to fix it. Which is awesome character-wise and gives her a new thing to focus on after growing a lot over the course of the adventure but now my character's heart is heavy and my heart is kind of heavy by proxy.
It's just so cool how invested TTRPGs can make you. Especially with great DMs.
Cryonax Great Old One Pact Spells
Cantrip: Ray of Frost
1st: Ice Knife
2nd: Snilloc's Snowball Swarm
3rd: Sleet Storm
4th: Ice Storm
5th: Cone of Cold
Zaaman Rul Celestial /Imix Fiend Pact Spells
Cantrip: Fire Bolt
1st: Hellish Rebuke
2nd: Flame Blade
3rd: Flame Arrows
4th: Divination*
5th: Immolation
* Divination offering sacrificed in flame
Ben Hadar Celestial /Olhydra Great Old One Pact Spells
Cantrip: Shape Water
1st: Create or Destroy Water
2nd: Melf's Acid Arrow
3rd: Tidal Wave
4th: Control Water
5th: Maelstrom
I tried to avoid overlapping with the Warlock spell list and Patron spells. This made making the Zaaman Rul/Imix spell list a bit harder.
Yea a crit is 1hko, as is a spell of an aoe of a high enough level (I don't obfuscate that information, I'll say like "you think a vitriolic sphere could kill these" with a simple check)
In not-Neverwinter the bard got to do a performance in a big forum and got a decent amount of gold out of it. In the crowd was my character's twin cheering and giving gold and they met. Before the performance, she was feeling down and we got to talking in-character about her family and love basically while the rest were shopping or doing the math for a duel. She then offered to comb my hyena hair and I obliged and she was like, "oh my god are we bonding?!"
Speaking of animal people stuff, do y'all think blacksmiths, clothiers, and leatherworkers automatically cut in access for races like tabaxi, lizard people, and the like for their tails to hang out or would that be like a faux-pas and leave that up to the wearer? In the possibly last session with that cleric, I tried to sincerely whisper to the armourer to deal with that. I instead accidentally stepped on the tabaxi's tail and we had a conversation about boundaries.
"So, you gathered three accomplices to break into a noble lord's house - a well-respected breeder of horses and gryphons who rubs elbows with the council and sovereign herself, using a long forgotten teleportation circle underneath his house. You encounter his special needs adopted elven daughter, and based solely on her having weird sharp teeth and walking funny, you and your co-conspirators tackle her to the ground, you put her to sleep with a sleep spell, and evade the guards hauling away your kidnapping victim. Once the lot of you get somewhere safe, you give her an unsolicited medical examination. Is that correct?"
Cleric: "When you put it that way it sounds like we're evil skeevy criminals."
Cleric: "So, what did I find, was I right? I mean sleep wouldn't of worked if I wasn't right"
Me: .... "Yes, you were right, not only is she not an elf, she's some kind of Frankenstein's monster of human and harpy parts"
Cleric: "I told you guys I was right"
Fighter: "Question, okay so like, when this teenager wakes up and starts screaming and panicking in confusion and terror in a minute, does that make cleric any less of a criminal after the house guards are undoubtedly drawn to the cries in the basement of this mansion - seeing as we have no way to teleport back out of here"
Cleric: "Okay so I hadn't thought about that part, but this PROVES the noble is up to some fucked up shit"
Sorcerer: "Yeah but I'm pretty sure DM's summary is what he's going to tell the authorities"
Cleric: "But we ARE the authorities"
Rogue: "I think we like, had to tell someone we planned on doing this? I don't think we can just commit crimes and use our status as fantasy-SPECTREs to get away with it after the fact"
Cleric: "Okay im going to level with you guys I may not have thought this through, lets tie her up and hide her in the wine cellar until we can find some actual proof he's done anything illegal.... wait DM is it illegal to build monster-children?"
Me: "Not that you know of"
Rogue: "Hey I'm used to being the criminal, welcome onboard everyone else"*
*She says, while stuffing bottles of wine in her bag of holding
Edit: The cleric is absolutely right, this nobleman is a necromancer, and a weirdo fleshcrafter. He would be at home in Barovia and if they make their way to his lab will find not only flesh golems, "the lost", and that scene out of Alien 3 with a bunch of variations of this creature in tanks begging for death, if they go all the way they'll find that he serves the great kraken slarkrathel and is responsible for a number of area disappearances. I was NOT expecting the cleric to immediately have a eureka about something I described about the girl in the kitchen, I was expecting them to follow up with - yaknow - casing the joint, or talking to literally anyone, or investigating anything. Essentially he's recreated his lost daughter, with the kraken whispering secrets to him. The kraken's cult is, of course, responsible for his daughter's disappearance to begin with.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I say "good cop bad cop" but it was more like good cop sad cop. The bard played good cop and convinced him that the town could really use his help and that he'd be doing us a really big favor by protecting it. I went the route of tearfully convincing him not to be like me. Don't run away from home, don't cut your childhood short, and don't almost die on the side of a mountain. That convinced him well enough. I am very happy we fixed him and didn't have to do our original plan of leaving this traumatized child at the edge of town and hope his father never realizes he was with us. I already had one big fuck-up and a nuke of being on our trail.
Their current plan is to find somewhere for her in the town the Noble lives in, failing that she gets to live in the clerics house until a new home is found. Also he has explain why her father had to go away. They have lots of money so that helps.
The authorities would just kill the girl so it's on them, I suspect they're going to dump her on the church of pelor or something with a substantial donation and give her the narrative gendry baratheon boat treatment - she's going to hate all of them though, so I wouldn't mind keeping her around as there aren't enough NPCs that hate them in the story
I think I recognize what NPC your DM adapted for that kid and my fighter had to convince him to stay on his farm as well. This coming from a fighter who is like 21 years old and was knocked unconscious twice in the last few days, so I basically went "don't focus on football, you'll get a lot of head traumas and the chances of making it to the NFL are too slim to destroy your body over".
I believe I am the most often downed person in the party. So I would have also offered that up. I don’t usually like stroll right in the middle of groups or leave combat for attacks of opportunity but it seems like enemies get very lucky rolls against me. I used patient defense on three folks targeting me after I Matrix cartwheeled over them to save a friend whose disguise plan failed and the attacks only went down from 2 natural twenties and a hit to three hits. Yey. I am a monk so that makes sense healthwise. Kind of glad I picked Sun Soul now because even though Open Palm is very cool technically, Astral is a stand and I’m into that, and the rest are various degrees of rad getting to Dragonball blast folks four times from thirty feet back is really worth it for me in the not dying area.
They're having this conversation in discord right now in character and it warms my blackened DM heart enough to not yell at them for metagaming because they absolutely do not have enough time to have this discussion right now where the session ended
1) Look into the Pathfinder 2E bulk rules and a 5E conversion for them to see if it looks like an easy enough way to track encumbrance for me to want to bother with it.
2) A critical miss on a weapon attack causes the weapon to take a permanent and cumulative -1 penalty to damage rolls. If its penalty drops to -5, the weapon is destroyed. Using the proper tools or the mending spell during a short rest eliminates up to a -3 penalty, and after a long rest eliminates up to a -4 penalty. A destroyed weapon takes a week to restore to its original state.
On the latter house rule the point is to create an extra incentive for the party to take short rests and to encourage trying out weapons the party finds, like those dropped by monsters.
It’s extra, fiddly maintenance that is basically resolved with a hand wave and hoses warriors the most, as they’ll be making more attacks per round on average.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
I was thinking about possible rebuttals to this, but nope, you're right. I'll remove it. I just really liked the weapon breakage mechanic in BoTW, but I can see how it doesn't work in D&D.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
- Encourages weapon users to always seek advantage and incentivizes other characters to help him get it. Flanking, figuring out how to sneak up on enemies to ambush them, magical aid, etc.
- If a weapon gets damaged they can pick up another weapon they find which might have some odd detail or superficial magical effect.
- Gives a reason to carry around a spare weapon they've wanted to try, like swapping a longsword for a halberd.
- Gives an excuse for more short rests for characters that recharge abilities on a short rest.
- Gives a reason to actually use Smith's tools or mending.
- Supports a grittier feeling campaign.
- In my experience players expect something bad to happen on a natural one.
My original thought was to have less mechanical impact. Just say "a weapon breaks after a number of critical misses equal to the weapon's attack bonus plus one". However, I changed it to bring it more in line with the rust monster's effects on weapons (although I guess I could change the rust monster instead...).
I have played in campaigns where a critical miss means a weapon breaks, or you drop/throw it, or you hurt yourself somehow, etc (said campaign also had multiple instances where verbal component spells couldn't be cast due to silence or water-filled chambers). I thought this would keep that spirit while not having someone's weapon just shatter out of nowhere.
I'd generally agree though that that level of bookkeeping is not for most campaigns. It really only mattered in Dark Sun because Dark Sun was all about survival and bean counting supplies and being such a low-magic/low-treasure environment that 'enough water for a week in the desert and an extra sword for when your current sword inevitably breaks' was exciting loot - I don't think you could get that sort of environment to work in 5e without a lot of changes (and significant buy-in from players that they wanted to play a sort of Darkest Dungeon-style survival/resource management game).
You can probably do this with Ravnica too.
Dropping and fumbling? Sure - a serious melee even with experienced people can have stuff go wrong. Combat is chaotic and things can go terribly wrong at weird times. Weapons that are well-made from strong materials shouldn't entirely break down on a mere fluke.
For one, the party almost never took short rests and would try long resting in places they really shouldn't have. Even when I had monsters attack during a long rest it didn't really change how they played.
Second, there wasn't much strategizing or synergy. Everybody pretty much just ran in guns blazing, and flanking was surprisingly infrequent. I'd like to have moments where someone scouts ahead, reports on the enemy composition, and then the rest if the party sneaks into an optimal position.
Third, I want tools to matter more.
Fourth, I felt like the previous campaign was too easy. I want this next one to have situations that are very difficult and require careful planning. For example, a monster that could one-shot down a PC just so happens to be standing next to the edge of a balcony, meaning that someone could shove the monster off for others to try and kill it with ranged attacks before it makes it back up the stairs.
I'm planning for my next campaign to take place in a jungle filled with trapped ruins and ruled by yuan-ti and demons with little chance for safe resting places or restocking beyond ally encampments that the party helps to found and defend. Just thought that would show what kind of tone I'm going for.