Again, I think I've been playing too much Mage, cause my first thought to purify drink and food being used that way was "yeah sure, good use of creative thaumaturgy."
Your avatar is Bow, so excess creativity is very much on brand.
After seeing the more of the rest of the party's plans, Hugo Clashcannon, Hobgoblin Artificer, is my next new character.
It's kind of bonkers how weak 1st level Artificers are. I'll just be clenching my teeth until 3rd-5th or so. Seems like they overdid it when trying to balance them for the possibility of firearms.
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FishmanPut your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain.Registered Userregular
After seeing the more of the rest of the party's plans, Hugo Clashcannon, Hobgoblin Artificer, is my next new character.
It's kind of bonkers how weak 1st level Artificers are. I'll just be clenching my teeth until 3rd-5th or so. Seems like they overdid it when trying to balance them for the possibility of firearms.
I didnt actually feel that weak? Honestly i've been kind of a murderforce in @Endless_Serpents game. No one else is near Gear's kill count. First level i took firebolt, and used Catapult when i really needed to make something have a bad day. 2nd level was much the same, just fire bolt each day every day, and 3rd level you get to take up Artillerist if that's your jam, and artillerist will Mess Shit Up with a bit of fore planning.
I will however say they should get Mending for free, and the way their spell slots are distributed is awkward as fuck. (You start with 2, get your 3rd at 3rd level, and then you have zero extra spell slots till 5th where you suddenly double to having 4 1st level and 2 2nd level).
I'm not a huge fan of their infusions (Just as a system, i think it's real awkward and dosent hit the crazy inventor fantasy very well)), but Enhanced Arcane Focus is crazy good.
I will say they def benefit from a gm who's willing to engage with you on crafting - you get a lot of tool kit profs, and being able to make stuff goes a long way to leveraging that.
Got a new 5E campaign starting up next month, set in Neverwinter, which is going to be interesting because I've played several of the video games located there, but never actually had a tabletop character visit it. I'm trying to actually avoid making a character with roots in the city, so that they can encounter this location as a totally new place, and that the DM won't feel pressured to reflect the version of things that I've got built up in my head. If his version differs from what I've seen in other media, then that's the version that takes precedent.
Character Origins: She was an NPC in a game I ran who I found entertaining enough to graduate her to the potential PC file. A super rich elf with blood ties to her people's royal family. She was a Hobbyist Adventurer - chasing monsters and scouring ancient ruins purely for fun, throwing around enough money to brute force "success" even when her expenses often massively outstripped the profits. Whereas the PCs were adventuring because they desperately needed to collect the bounty from driving off those Orc Bandits if they were going to be able to cover expenses, so failing a job because Cerridwyn and her rotating cast of hirelings sniped it out from under them was especially frustrating. The camper with the brand new, too fancy, vastly oversized tent that takes up three spots, full of unnecessary gadgets powered by their noisy and stinking diesel generator, who ruins the campground for everyone else.
Character Story: I would be playing her on her way down to rock bottom. Politics at court have disenfranchised her family, and her parents can no longer support her. Her "party" wasn't willing to stick around once she wasn't subsidizing them. Her coffers are empty and she's down to her last handful of silver, because she's never had to manage her own budget before. For the first time ever, she has to get a real job, and learn what a dangerous, unpleasant business adventuring is for many of the people desperate enough to make their living off of it. And also recognize that her accomplishments so far have been inflated vastly beyond her actual skill level, because she's been able to hire much more competent people to carry her.
Personality: She is not stupid by any means. Her education has genuinely been excellent, and she has seen a lot of the world. She's just been insulated from the worst of it, and is deeply naive about the trials that afflict everyone else. That said, she's always been generous to a fault, just super condescending about it, and doesn't really understand that she can't afford such grandiose gestures any more. I expect her experiences to shake her out of this mindset pretty quickly, but I'm not making concrete plans because I want to see what kind of person she develops into organically.
Look: Even without her personal team of stylists following her around, her appearance is flawless. She's still a goddamn Elf after all, and luminous, ethereal beauty is kind of effortless for their whole stupid asshole species. Impractically long silvery-white hair, violet eyes, voice like a songbird. Stylish wardrobe and top shelf equipment - same stats as the standard level 1 adventurer gear, but you can tell from looking at it that she paid five times as much for the Brand Name. Likely to become a target of thieves if she doesn't divest herself of some of that shit.
Cerridwyn Fallingstar sounds like an amazing concept.
See your first mistake was going down the roasted path
You should have chosen the oath of the deep fat fryer. It's a much more self sufficient tanking option due to the increased damage output to the opponents arteries.
Now I'm thinking of rust monsters as biological weapons. Most D&D settings are high-tech enough that metal is ubiquitous and essential in both everyday life and military/defensive use. If you're running a game that involves political/military conflict, one of the sides might be developing an avenue of attack where they drop rust monsters on their enemy, either in a single shock-and-awe bombardment or by gradually and secretly introducing them into a capital city's vermin ecosystem. PCs can be involved at any stage and for either side, they can be tasked with capturing rust monsters to build out the attacker's arsenal, or hunting down rust monsters multiplying in the capital city's sewers, or helping the defenders prepare for the oncoming rust monster assault that the spy network learned about, etc.
At least one of those two Ecology articles I mentioned claimed that rust monsters don't breed in captivity and that past attempts to use them in war have led to them escaping and ruining their captors' own equipment, which partially explains why rust monsters aren't used in warfare literally all the time.
Feel free to ignore that, though!
To me, that sounds a lot like they recognized that following through on all the implications of a rust monster - really, following through on the ecology of any of these fantasy creatures that populate D&D - would immediately turn it from It's Roughly Europe With Various Traits Of Different Ages From 500 CE to 1700 CE Except There Are Fantastical Beasties into something that is completely different and unrecognizable, and tried to preempt it with a "now now, you can't use these monsters outside the narrow scope that we've proscribed, and here are the very rational reasons why". Which is completely fair enough! In a world where zombies can happen with regularity, there is no way that any human settlement buries its dead (1) in one piece and (2) near where people live. In a world where someone can just cast a spell to make food and water, there is no way they would ever be allowed to cast anything else - except Resurrection. It stops being "Like our familiar world but with a fun twist!", and becomes something different, something that requires a lot of work and effort to grasp. I think Dark Sun is actually a great example of taking a core fantastical premise and following through all the ramifications of it over the millennia, how they compound and result in a society - in a whole world - that's different from the familiar Forgotten Realms-esque generic fantasy setting.
Anyway, even if we accept that they don't breed in captivity, there are still ways to build a war machine around them. Have adventuring parties go and retrieve them (made easier if you set aside a nature preserve where they can breed in freedom, but within a constrained space). Have wizards clone them. Even if you can only amass a handful of them, release them into your enemy's sewage system and watch the city slowly crumble - literally, if nothing else.
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gavindelThe reason all your softwareis brokenRegistered Userregular
Our paladin using Purify food and water to help preserve a corpse in tropical heat. So she spent a week, in a dinghy, behind the main boat constantly ritual casting this on the corpse.
I really couldnt argue against their argument that bodies are technically a form of food!
Not buying it. You think a decaying body's food? Eat your mate's arm, we'll talk.
I mean, they needed to block the decay. That's a result of bacteria etc, it seemed reasonable to me that purify food and water would deal with the bacteria causing rot etc. Meats meat.
I suspect it got a little insect eaten, but the goal was to keep it intact in the tropical heat because it was evidence.
More seriously I'd rather reward my players for creative solutions than get bogged down
It is creative. Rule #1, always: if it worked for your party, go for it. Fun is more important than RAW, and nothing kills energy like 2 hours reading rule books midsession.
Just be careful with creative thaumaturgy in DnD - half or more of the party is at zero dots. If you play fast and loose with magic like that, then you're drastically increasing your caster utility value, so you gotta increase the utility of your non-casters as well.
What I'm saying is: if you're gonna let Purify Food and Drink preserve a body, I want to suplex a train.
I'm three sessions into my Underdark campaign and have encountered my nemesis: the Unfettered Brainstorm.
I've got so many ideas, remember so many things from D&D materials I've perused, and know I can easily find more material online. I could never be satisfied with running a pre-made adventure, no matter how much time and effort I could save.
Here's a general outline of the basic facts of my campaign so far:
- The campaign setting is Exandria, specifically beneath the Cliffkeep Mountains. The major dwarf city of the continent, Kraghammer, and a duergar stronghold, Emberhold, are nearby, and an Underdark fire giant city, Vulkanon, is close enough that the duergar have had dealings with them.
- The "safe" area is the Seven-Pillared Hall (from 4E's Thunderspire Labyrinth adventure). The wizard who rules the Hall, the Ordinator Arcanis, may be a Vecna worshiper.
- The party will soon begin exploring a deeper, ancient dwarven city called Delvewellen (from the 2E Dungeon Magazine adventure The Shards of the Day). Many different factions have inhabited the ruins and still fight for control of it. In the original adventure these factions were deep gnomes, myconids, duergar, mind flayers, kuo-toa, drow, and driders.
- The god Torog once ruled the Underdark of Exandria and dwelled there but was banished to the Far Realm 800 years ago. Lolth and her loyal drow tried to fill the void but are losing to an increasing number of aberrations, with many drow defecting to either flee towards the surface, worship Tharizdun instead, or surrender to the aberrations and be remade.
Beyond that there are a thousand things I want to do. I want to update older edition monsters that I think are cool (rukarazyll, misfortune devil, vril, deathknell beetle, earthcancer centipede, yrthak, writhing crag, ti-khana, avolakia, etc), I want to add a lot more detail to the existing factions (the duergar have Infernal contracts with devils, and one has been informed by a devil that she is the long lost princess of Emberhold and heir to the throne; she wants to stage a coup against the current leader of the Delvewellen duergar faction), I've discovered a 4E primordial named Balcoth was an ally of Vecna's and a former fire giant and want to work that in somehow, I want to give the mind flayers some futuristic weaponry, I want to add more factions to Delvewellen and figure out who their allies and enemies among the other factions are, etc. Plus I have minis I want to paint and have even worked on some homemade ones constructed from cutting up cheap plastic animal figures and gluing them together in new configurations.
Plus I've got to figure out what kind of development will arise from the PC Shadar-Kai Way of the Long Death Monk (a race created by the goddess of death who hates undead and a subclass devoted to studying death) and the PC Hollow One Dragonborn Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer (a Hollow One being a kind of quasi-undead revenant animated by the strange magic of a cursed land).
Got a new 5E campaign starting up next month, set in Neverwinter, which is going to be interesting because I've played several of the video games located there, but never actually had a tabletop character visit it. I'm trying to actually avoid making a character with roots in the city, so that they can encounter this location as a totally new place, and that the DM won't feel pressured to reflect the version of things that I've got built up in my head. If his version differs from what I've seen in other media, then that's the version that takes precedent.
Character Origins: She was an NPC in a game I ran who I found entertaining enough to graduate her to the potential PC file. A super rich elf with blood ties to her people's royal family. She was a Hobbyist Adventurer - chasing monsters and scouring ancient ruins purely for fun, throwing around enough money to brute force "success" even when her expenses often massively outstripped the profits. Whereas the PCs were adventuring because they desperately needed to collect the bounty from driving off those Orc Bandits if they were going to be able to cover expenses, so failing a job because Cerridwyn and her rotating cast of hirelings sniped it out from under them was especially frustrating. The camper with the brand new, too fancy, vastly oversized tent that takes up three spots, full of unnecessary gadgets powered by their noisy and stinking diesel generator, who ruins the campground for everyone else.
Character Story: I would be playing her on her way down to rock bottom. Politics at court have disenfranchised her family, and her parents can no longer support her. Her "party" wasn't willing to stick around once she wasn't subsidizing them. Her coffers are empty and she's down to her last handful of silver, because she's never had to manage her own budget before. For the first time ever, she has to get a real job, and learn what a dangerous, unpleasant business adventuring is for many of the people desperate enough to make their living off of it. And also recognize that her accomplishments so far have been inflated vastly beyond her actual skill level, because she's been able to hire much more competent people to carry her.
Personality: She is not stupid by any means. Her education has genuinely been excellent, and she has seen a lot of the world. She's just been insulated from the worst of it, and is deeply naive about the trials that afflict everyone else. That said, she's always been generous to a fault, just super condescending about it, and doesn't really understand that she can't afford such grandiose gestures any more. I expect her experiences to shake her out of this mindset pretty quickly, but I'm not making concrete plans because I want to see what kind of person she develops into organically.
Look: Even without her personal team of stylists following her around, her appearance is flawless. She's still a goddamn Elf after all, and luminous, ethereal beauty is kind of effortless for their whole stupid asshole species. Impractically long silvery-white hair, violet eyes, voice like a songbird. Stylish wardrobe and top shelf equipment - same stats as the standard level 1 adventurer gear, but you can tell from looking at it that she paid five times as much for the Brand Name. Likely to become a target of thieves if she doesn't divest herself of some of that shit.
Cerridwyn Fallingstar sounds like an amazing concept.
I'll use her eventually, don't you worry. The character file is huge, but I cycle the top candidates out into play pretty regularly.
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
Finally played in the Ravnica game again because of several delays. One of our players left because his new job made scheduling hard, but we gained two new players. Though they both decided to play Azorius, a cleric and paladin duo. We were also down a player due to a family obligation, so it did end up leaning a little too heavy in the two Azorius kind of running the show but that should be less of an issue when we have a more even spread of guilds. Got to try out the Artillerist, having respecced from Battle Smith since I didn't figure we needed every party member to be melee range. We got attacked by Dimir assassins riding horrors, and after confirming with my DM secretly that they were working with a rival cell in the Dimir, I lit them the fuck up. I used Shrapnel, my force ballista shaped like a beetle, to blast one off it's mount on my first turn. On my second I loaded a special round in my arcane firearm which isn't just totally an outlaw star caster gun and cast Shatter for 24 damage to the riders and their mounts. Also I leveled the building they were flying over. After that they decided to hit the ol' dusty trail.
For Halloween this year I'm doing another Vampire the Masquerade game. This time I gave the coterie playing full reign to choose their faction and location, and they decided to be Anarchs in New Orleans. I saw that New Orleans doesn't have any lore for V5, which works well enough for me. Still kind of deciding on what I'm going to do for the game. Thinking of maybe drawing a bit from one of the Hecata options, and having the villain be a wraith serial killer inhabiting a Vampire's body, but still kind of turning over what to do with that.
I've posted a bit about my game last year, which was very fun if a bit more a comedy of errors than anticipated. Actually I think this time instead of posting little excerpts from it, I'll just toss pretty much everything out. Last year I had a different group (well, one player in common) as a coterie looking for a missing Tremere at the behest of Baron Abrams in Hollywood. The Tremere had recently defected from The Camarilla and had stopped reporting in. The only piece of information they had was that the Tremere, Theodore Ignacious, owned a vacant lot. The coterie was a Malkavian janitor named Clarry, a Brujah bartender named Galaxy, and a Ventrue who was also the mayor of LA named Jacque. So they went to investigate the lot, but came across their first stumbling block. A warehouse next to it was a drug lab and the gang running it had guards posted and put up barbed wire around the lot (the mob boss was Ignacious' ghoul, tasked with keeping people away from the lot, but the coterie never discovered this). I figured with all their vampiric powers, some gangsters should be pretty simple to deal with. The coterie decided they didn't want to go in loud, and came up with a plan to convince the gangsters they were there to purchase drugs. They dominated the guard outdoors and commanded him to bring them to his boss. Now if you're thinking, couldn't they have just dominated the guard, tied him up, and figured out a way past the fence... the answer is yes. That being said, they entered and had a conversation about buying cocaine with a mob boss who was very upset people were loudly discussing their criminal actions. Eventually he just sold them some damn cocaine to get them to leave, and on their way out Clarry's player asked me "Wait, why did we do that?" and all I could do was shrug and say "I figured you guys were going somewhere with this, I can't tell you what your plans are." So he came up with the brilliant plan to leave his cocaine behind and started arguing with the guard to get him to let him back in.
"Okay, roll me Manipulation plus Subterfuge"
"I'm bad at those."
"Oh. Roll well then!"
So he got a bestial failure. I decided he was overcome with a sudden overpowering urge to eat, and hey, there was a human just arguing with him in biting range. So he started tearing out this gangsters throat while screaming about wanting his cocaine. Jacque decided to use dominate to force Clarry off the poor man... only to get a bestial failure! So I inflicted the Venture clan compulsion to need someone to follow his orders. Finally Galaxy ripped out a stop sign with potence and smacked him off. Then they saved the gangster, and stowed his unconscious body in an ally and went to sneak around over the fence. Clarry had soaring leap, so it wasn't an issue for him and Galaxy had celerity and acrobatics, but they needed to figure out how to get Jacque over. So they threw him. I made him make a (very easy) acrobatics check to avoid landing too loudly and alerting the gangsters. Bestial failure.
So I decided he took a point of damage as his inner beast took over and he tried to grasp at something to stabilize himself... and grabbed the barbed wire. I did decide to be merciful and figured that slowed his descent enough he didn't alert anyone though. And that was session one, which I did not expect it to be a two session game, but these things happen. Next session the coterie, finally in the lot, found it full of trash. Nothing remarkable, except a mirror which Clarry's auspex enhanced senses could detect the faintest hint of blood on. So they found a rat and smeared it's blood on some slight indents in the frame, and found it went dark. Clarry went in first, and... ceased to be. For a moment anyway, as he passed through the abyss, but I didn't let the players know this until everyone ended up in the mirror. On the other side they found themselves in a creepy old manor with no windows. An enchanted manor with hallways like mazes and out of the corner of his eye Jacque caught an image like a giant insect leg disappearing in the door? Probably nothing. To cut down this story a bit, they ended up in a library and fought some obviously possessed individuals and found a journal, a personal museum of artifacts guarded by some animated suits of armor where they found a book on binding malevolent entities, and... a dungeon with an autopsy table which had a corpse strapped to it. Which of course got up to attack when they were leaving, and they found a strange obsidian stone embedded in it's heart after ripping it out. The coterie eventually made their way to his personal chambers, sealed with a passcode encoded in a poem in his journal and entered to find Ignacious... possessed by an abyssal entity, shadow pouring off him with tentacles and massive claws. Jacque set about using a spell from the tome they found to bind it into the obsidian stone while Clarry and Galaxy worked to keep it away from him. Which was greatly complicated when they rolled bestial failures! Long story short, it erased some of Clarry's organs and stabbed right through Galaxy. Which is when a massive arachnid leapt out... and started helping them restrain Ignacious. An Anansi! Decided to add that after Tube posting about them. Incidentally, with two players not doing great health-wise and a giant spider suddenly jumps out, it was fun to soak in the dread before I ended my dramatic pause and explained it was helping.
Eventually Jacque sealed the entity in the shard, and they saved Ignacious. The Anansi introduced themselves (though I have forgotten their name) and explained they and Ignacious deal in mystical artifacts together. Ignacious then explained how he totally was attacked by a Lasombra who sicked the abyss monster on him, must have been The Camarilla. Which was of course a huge lie, he had obviously been experimenting on people and had books on summoning and binding. But the coterie took his word with no questions asked, so, you know... *shrug*
Hoping to match it, since it was a very fun game. People are still making characters, but so far we have a Nosferatu with the bugs in his skin power, and a very run of the mill Toreador... so that's gonna be a fun relationship.
Again, I think I've been playing too much Mage, cause my first thought to purify drink and food being used that way was "yeah sure, good use of creative thaumaturgy."
So in the Mage game I'm playing in, where our Mind/Entropy street magician had a Quiet of "Your magic always works?"
Yeah. The next session, the dice LOVED him. 4+ successes on every Arete check he made save two. One was for an extended cast where he was just building up some successes, got zero total, so the character just went "Huh my magic is still working, but it's just taking awhile..." Willpower check to see if the conflict in reality was noticed: FAILED
The other one was for an Entropy 3 infused bullet aimed at the center of a Rokaea, trying to make his pistol round rupture and destroy as many internal organs as he could without blasting the Garou who had that damn wereshark in a full nelson. "Weird, usually my magic doesn't take this long." Next round, five successes. Willpower check to see if the conflict of his thoughts vs reality are noticed: PASSED buuut because of the magnitude of the successes he'd gotten prior...
He now has the flaw Overconfident, preventing him from spending Willpower on Arete checks for free successes.
Our paladin using Purify food and water to help preserve a corpse in tropical heat. So she spent a week, in a dinghy, behind the main boat constantly ritual casting this on the corpse.
I really couldnt argue against their argument that bodies are technically a form of food!
Not buying it. You think a decaying body's food? Eat your mate's arm, we'll talk.
I mean, they needed to block the decay. That's a result of bacteria etc, it seemed reasonable to me that purify food and water would deal with the bacteria causing rot etc. Meats meat.
I suspect it got a little insect eaten, but the goal was to keep it intact in the tropical heat because it was evidence.
More seriously I'd rather reward my players for creative solutions than get bogged down
It is creative. Rule #1, always: if it worked for your party, go for it. Fun is more important than RAW, and nothing kills energy like 2 hours reading rule books midsession.
Just be careful with creative thaumaturgy in DnD - half or more of the party is at zero dots. If you play fast and loose with magic like that, then you're drastically increasing your caster utility value, so you gotta increase the utility of your non-casters as well.
What I'm saying is: if you're gonna let Purify Food and Drink preserve a body, I want to suplex a train.
Suplexing a train is definitely how i run things. As far as i'm concerned, if you've got a good strength score you can do a lot of bullshit in battle and out, because you know. Leverage. It goes a long way! I WANT my players to stunt and do crazy stuff, rather than just "I wave my sword at them for the xth time"
I will also note that the only party member who's not some sort of caster is the Rouge, and if @PirateQueen doesn't reverse-pickpocket bombs onto things, i will be super sad. Steal them from Phoebe when phoebe's not looking! It's for a good cause.
(To quibble slightly, it was less this preserves the body perfectly and more "I'm content to say this is blocking the bacteria etc that would normally start a body decomposing". For what they needed the body preserved for , it was a good fix).
Just be careful with creative thaumaturgy in DnD - half or more of the party is at zero dots. If you play fast and loose with magic like that, then you're drastically increasing your caster utility value, so you gotta increase the utility of your non-casters as well.
Let me tell you a story of how our DM let our wizard trick an Ogre with an illusion of a White Dragon and then proceeded to trivialise two further sessions with similar tricks until our DM put his foot down.
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
Illusion magic is always really annoying to deal with in D&D specifically, because in a mechanically focused game, the mechanics for illusions are essentially "lol I dunno you figure it out"
Illusion magic is always really annoying to deal with in D&D specifically, because in a mechanically focused game, the mechanics for illusions are essentially "lol I dunno you figure it out"
This may be a problem for my other dm given my barbarian took Minor Illusion. Thoguh that at least calls out you can make an opposed Intelligence (Investigation) check to see through it.
So... hmm. How would i handle it? I'd probably say: a, if your passive investigation (10+Int+Investigate, if you're trained in it) beats out hte spell dc, you automatically see through an illusion. That sherlock scan goodness at work as you go "now wait a minute" and spot the thread. Or at least enoguh to know that something's fucky and this is /not/ what it seems. (Becuase hey, if your pcs are trained in a skill, they should get to be awesome in it).
From the other side of things: I'd probably secrelty roll Int+Investigate (Maaaybe Wis+Percerption for creatures that are more on the senses/smell), and go from there.
MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
Okay, assume they failed the "save"
Think about what sort of outsized benefits are gained from a CA trip
In many cases it essentially becomes a save or die spell unless the DM is willing to just play total Calvinball with it and eschew mechanical interactions entirely in favor of just figuring something out, a method which can often leave players feeling like the DM didn't give their action due consideration
Think about what sort of outsized benefits are gained from a CA trip
In many cases it essentially becomes a save or die spell unless the DM is willing to just play total Calvinball with it and eschew mechanical interactions entirely in favor of just figuring something out, a method which can often leave players feeling like the DM didn't give their action due consideration
Illusion magic in D&D is a headache
The other side of that is when the players feel like their minor illusion cantrip should be enough to turn an adult dragon away.
I don't mind it when players get creative with illusions or the like when setting ambushes or to frighten away dumber monsters, etc. That's kind of the point of an RPG. Otherwise you might as well play a boardgame. I like to work with them to figure out something cool mechanically. Even if its just the fire giants "missing a turn" by hurling boulders at the imaginary dragon swooping down on them from above before they twig that its an illusion. This happened a few sessions ago where the bard wanted to distract and scare away the giants. Well, they were giants. They were scared. Scared enough to take their attention away from the party and waste a turn trying to attack an illusion. That's not too shabby for a 3rd level spell. My bard then tried to argue that his illusory dragon would turn and burn to dodge the boulders and continue the charade and I said, no... giants are not stupid ogres. They saw their boulders fly right through the dragon, they figured it out. There are reasonable limits to these things.
Steelhawk on
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I'm fond of illusion magic in D&D, but that's probably specifically because it's poorly suited to the game as a whole.
To me it feels like what most magic should be - changing the circumstances of the encounter in order to make things easier for the rest of the party to solve the problem. And while D&D has some status modifiers and stuff like that which can be used to represent this fairly well, it often doesn't feel satisfying to say that your clever illusion just gives the enemy disadvantage on their next attack or whatever. There's a tension between the description of what the magic does and the rules of what the magic does - it's certainly not the only place that D&D has this tension, but it's probably one of the more noticeable ones.
Low-level illusion magic should be like bad CGI. Someone not paying much attention or not thinking about it too hard shouldn't notice, but anyone applying some scrutiny or who has seen some photoshops in their time should be able to see it for what it is. Personally I think a spell attack or spell save DC vs an Intelligence (Arcana) check would be pretty fair.
Low-level illusion magic should be like bad CGI. Someone not paying much attention or not thinking about it too hard shouldn't notice, but anyone applying some scrutiny or who has seen some photoshops in their time should be able to see it for what it is. Personally I think a spell attack or spell save DC vs an Intelligence (Arcana) check would be pretty fair.
I'm thinking of an early 2000's SyFy original movie I saw where the CGI monster seemed to be well lit in exactly the same way no matter how dark it was.
The issue with illusion magic in D&D/traditional fantasy RPGs is that it does not interact with the encounter and HP/resource use structure in a way that will work properly.
It either works and lets you smartly skip stuff (for one spell slot? Shame on you).
Or it doesn't and lets you get like, what, a sneak attack if the GM's nice?
Think I finally decided on a final boss for my Underdark campaign:
Shoth-Gorag, BBEG of the 4E Chaos Scar series and a Far Realm entity. I'm gonna have the kuo-toa be its followers, and since the kuo-toa have a reputation for making up fake gods the party will brush them off until this dude shows up (I'll probably need to make-up a kuo-toan name for this guy, too; "Shoth-Gorag" doesn't sound like a name the kuo-toa would invent).
I have to have a figure to represent this thing, so I went to the store and bought these buckets of cheap dinosaurs and marine animals to cut up and glue together into an unholy monstrosity.
I've already done this to make minis for the 3E rukarazyll, yrthak, and arrowhawk monsters, so I've got some practice and leftover spare parts.
Hexmage-PA on
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
My personal favorite illusionist character was playing a wizard right when 4E came out (the one time you'll ever catch me playing a wizard)
There wasn't any rules basis for him being an illusionist, so he just was - all of his spells worked roughly the same as you'd expect mechanically, but they were a series of complicated illusions
4E was also better about wizards being more status stuff than direct damage, but when he did damage, it could be assumed that it was either getting the enemy's guard down (for the hit points = poise model) or enemies who, in their panic about seemingly being set on fire, actually ended up injuring themselves in the process
I kinda want to hack together a backwards version of d&d where magic actually really blows and the classes that rely on it are way weaker than martial classes in general.
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Der Waffle MousBlame this on the misfortune of your birth.New Yark, New Yark.Registered Userregular
The issue with illusion magic in D&D/traditional fantasy RPGs is that it does not interact with the encounter and HP/resource use structure in a way that will work properly.
It either works and lets you smartly skip stuff (for one spell slot? Shame on you).
Or it doesn't and lets you get like, what, a sneak attack if the GM's nice?
shadow evocation: you can throw meatfireballs and now your target gets *two* chances to avoid what's honestly not a lot of damage in the first place.
The issue with illusion magic in D&D/traditional fantasy RPGs is that it does not interact with the encounter and HP/resource use structure in a way that will work properly.
It either works and lets you smartly skip stuff (for one spell slot? Shame on you).
Or it doesn't and lets you get like, what, a sneak attack if the GM's nice?
shadow evocation: you can throw meatfireballs and now your target gets *two* chances to avoid what's honestly not a lot of damage in the first place.
Go to 3e where with the right prestige class shenanigans you could throw the equivalent of Shadow Evocations where they took MORE damage if they realized it was an illusion.
The issue with illusion magic in D&D/traditional fantasy RPGs is that it does not interact with the encounter and HP/resource use structure in a way that will work properly.
It either works and lets you smartly skip stuff (for one spell slot? Shame on you).
Or it doesn't and lets you get like, what, a sneak attack if the GM's nice?
Why is the focus always on the mechanical result though and not the way you got there?
Nobody tells people about how they got a sneak attack on the whozits for extra damage. They tell stories the about the time the wizard used this awesome illusion that fooled all the bad guys and the rogue got to sneak around because of the distractions and landed a sweet backstab on the big bad guy and everyone cheered.
Sometimes I feel like D&D would be better with a more robust resolution mechanic, like the Genesys system or something. If you could start adding dice or Advantage or Threat or something then the results of illusion magic or martial stunts or whatever could have a lot more play that appeals to both the fiction and the actual game.
The issue with illusion magic in D&D/traditional fantasy RPGs is that it does not interact with the encounter and HP/resource use structure in a way that will work properly.
It either works and lets you smartly skip stuff (for one spell slot? Shame on you).
Or it doesn't and lets you get like, what, a sneak attack if the GM's nice?
Why is the focus always on the mechanical result though and not the way you got there?
Nobody tells people about how they got a sneak attack on the whozits for extra damage. They tell stories the about the time the wizard used this awesome illusion that fooled all the bad guys and the rogue got to sneak around because of the distractions and landed a sweet backstab on the big bad guy and everyone cheered.
This gets into the larger philosophical arguments about D&D so I'm not sure you're going to get a satisfying response, but let me give you my perspective as someone who has played a lot of D&D but kind of doesn't like it anymore.
The first part is that combat in D&D is always a mechanically-based system with mechanically-based results. In many groups you'll never hear the sweet backstab story because they did the math and decided that everyone getting the jump on the bad guys and the wizard having an extra 2nd level spell was more important than the rogue getting a single sneak attack, especially since the rogue would likely have trouble finishing the job when the warrior couldn't get past the mooks to engage the big bad and get them more sneak attacks.
Now maybe it's a big bad that's a terrifying sorcerer with no HP and your rogue is an assassin so they get an auto crit and one-shot them. That's pretty sweet. But D&D isn't a game about one big dramatic combat and your wizard only has so many spell slots. Every time they choose the illusion they're filling a slot that may potentially do nothing for the chance that it one-shots a sorcerer.
Alternately, your group figures out it's quite mechanically efficient. Now your open each of your session's 2-4 combats per session with the wizard casting illusion so the rogue can get in a free sneak attack. The 17th time your wizard makes an illusion of a big troll and says "boo" is a lot less exciting than the first, and your wizard is probably pretty bored at looking at their list of 2nd level spells and just picking illusion over and over again.
Now at this point you may be thinking, who the hell thinks that much or that broadly about D&D? And the answer is people who play a lot of D&D. And there are a lot of people who play D&D. In fact I would venture that there are more people in the world who are playing in two simultaneous D&D campaigns than there are people who are playing any other RPG. If it's not more, it isn't far off. So D&D as a game that encourages people to play a lot of and nothing but D&D, whether in its mechanics, its marketing, or its socialization, falls prey to the consequences of people who play enough of a game that they can't not see the "game" part.
Now you're probably thinking, wouldn't we be better off if they played an RPG other than D&D? And yes, yes we would.
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
And a consequence of all this is that people who are dissatisfied with D&D - with the gameplay loop, with the chasm-like divide between the fiction and the mechanics - spin their wheels furiously, engaging in ever-more elaborate and byzantine feats of worldbuilding or character creation, trying to "fix" it, trying to recapture the magic.
"The problem isn't that no matter what I do it comes down to how fast I shave HP off a monster. The problem is my character wasn't original enough! So here comes Boffo, the tall dwarf. Sure, he'll spend half to three-fourths of his useful lifespan on a battlemat doing 1d8 axe damage like my last five dwarfs...but this one is tall."
I'm not trying to take a deuce on people's heart and creativity here. I'm not. But like, if you're spending all of your weekends lovingly detailing a new world to play D&D in, you need to come to terms with the fact that you'll still, at the end of the day, be playing D&D. That cool take on gods and divine power you came up with? That wild idea you have for where dragons come from? I gotta be honest: if those ideas can't be boiled down to shaving HP off a monster on a battlemat, then most of your players will almost never have cause to even think about those things you worked so hard on, much less engage with them.
There's a point past which you're better off writing your own fantasy novel.
Or playing a different game.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
I made this mostly for a different conversation but it works here too.
Start by Loading a Basic Monster. These are monster templates for you to use as a starting point. Want to make a fire demon with tentacles for arms? How about a skull aberration with spidery crab legs?
Add clothing, body parts and items. Browse the library of parts and find what your monster needs. We've got tentacles! Eyeballs! Horns! Wings! Claws! A set of hats because Jared thought there should be some! Borrow parts from other monsters and attach them wherever you think they should go.
One-click pose presets. Posing monsters is super simple - TitanCraft gives you a menu of easy presets so you can quickly try out new poses and find one that fits. Or, if you already know exactly what you want:
Create Your Own Poses. Each monster part has an internal skeleton made of posable bones. You can select any of these bones and use simple tools to move them around, rotate them, and change their size. You can give your monster any pose you can imagine.
Edit Proportions. Proportions sliders give you additional control over your monster's appearance. You can control individual parts separately, or modify all similar parts at the same time to give it a uniform look. And, if you're looking for a specific style, you can pop open the Advanced panel and edit proportions bone-by-bone. This allows you to create some cool effects like super-sharp horns or alternating ridges on tentacles.
Save and Share Your Creations. If you've made a monster you particularly like, you can generate a unique URL pointing to it. Once you've got that URL, you can save it to load your monster again later, or share it so your friends can check out and load your design. You can also use other people's monster URLs as a starting point to create your own monsters.
Pssst - we're not supposed to directly link to Kickstarters here
Oh, okay. I'll edit that part out but leave the demo link.
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Der Waffle MousBlame this on the misfortune of your birth.New Yark, New Yark.Registered Userregular
Started running a PF2 campaign for my group.
something I hadn't considered but after multiple years of running very story-heavy systems having something just so completely fucking straightforward is kinda nice sometimes.
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Your avatar is Bow, so excess creativity is very much on brand.
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It's kind of bonkers how weak 1st level Artificers are. I'll just be clenching my teeth until 3rd-5th or so. Seems like they overdid it when trying to balance them for the possibility of firearms.
Hold on, I'm getting a new character idea...
I didnt actually feel that weak? Honestly i've been kind of a murderforce in @Endless_Serpents game. No one else is near Gear's kill count. First level i took firebolt, and used Catapult when i really needed to make something have a bad day. 2nd level was much the same, just fire bolt each day every day, and 3rd level you get to take up Artillerist if that's your jam, and artillerist will Mess Shit Up with a bit of fore planning.
I will however say they should get Mending for free, and the way their spell slots are distributed is awkward as fuck. (You start with 2, get your 3rd at 3rd level, and then you have zero extra spell slots till 5th where you suddenly double to having 4 1st level and 2 2nd level).
I'm not a huge fan of their infusions (Just as a system, i think it's real awkward and dosent hit the crazy inventor fantasy very well)), but Enhanced Arcane Focus is crazy good.
I will say they def benefit from a gm who's willing to engage with you on crafting - you get a lot of tool kit profs, and being able to make stuff goes a long way to leveraging that.
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Cerridwyn Fallingstar sounds like an amazing concept.
I always been dinner.
At level 10, I unlock roast potatoes and gravy.
So you're the tank, right? Drawing all the enemy's attention?
You should have chosen the oath of the deep fat fryer. It's a much more self sufficient tanking option due to the increased damage output to the opponents arteries.
Anyway, even if we accept that they don't breed in captivity, there are still ways to build a war machine around them. Have adventuring parties go and retrieve them (made easier if you set aside a nature preserve where they can breed in freedom, but within a constrained space). Have wizards clone them. Even if you can only amass a handful of them, release them into your enemy's sewage system and watch the city slowly crumble - literally, if nothing else.
It is creative. Rule #1, always: if it worked for your party, go for it. Fun is more important than RAW, and nothing kills energy like 2 hours reading rule books midsession.
Just be careful with creative thaumaturgy in DnD - half or more of the party is at zero dots. If you play fast and loose with magic like that, then you're drastically increasing your caster utility value, so you gotta increase the utility of your non-casters as well.
What I'm saying is: if you're gonna let Purify Food and Drink preserve a body, I want to suplex a train.
I've got so many ideas, remember so many things from D&D materials I've perused, and know I can easily find more material online. I could never be satisfied with running a pre-made adventure, no matter how much time and effort I could save.
Here's a general outline of the basic facts of my campaign so far:
- The campaign setting is Exandria, specifically beneath the Cliffkeep Mountains. The major dwarf city of the continent, Kraghammer, and a duergar stronghold, Emberhold, are nearby, and an Underdark fire giant city, Vulkanon, is close enough that the duergar have had dealings with them.
- The "safe" area is the Seven-Pillared Hall (from 4E's Thunderspire Labyrinth adventure). The wizard who rules the Hall, the Ordinator Arcanis, may be a Vecna worshiper.
- The party will soon begin exploring a deeper, ancient dwarven city called Delvewellen (from the 2E Dungeon Magazine adventure The Shards of the Day). Many different factions have inhabited the ruins and still fight for control of it. In the original adventure these factions were deep gnomes, myconids, duergar, mind flayers, kuo-toa, drow, and driders.
- The god Torog once ruled the Underdark of Exandria and dwelled there but was banished to the Far Realm 800 years ago. Lolth and her loyal drow tried to fill the void but are losing to an increasing number of aberrations, with many drow defecting to either flee towards the surface, worship Tharizdun instead, or surrender to the aberrations and be remade.
Beyond that there are a thousand things I want to do. I want to update older edition monsters that I think are cool (rukarazyll, misfortune devil, vril, deathknell beetle, earthcancer centipede, yrthak, writhing crag, ti-khana, avolakia, etc), I want to add a lot more detail to the existing factions (the duergar have Infernal contracts with devils, and one has been informed by a devil that she is the long lost princess of Emberhold and heir to the throne; she wants to stage a coup against the current leader of the Delvewellen duergar faction), I've discovered a 4E primordial named Balcoth was an ally of Vecna's and a former fire giant and want to work that in somehow, I want to give the mind flayers some futuristic weaponry, I want to add more factions to Delvewellen and figure out who their allies and enemies among the other factions are, etc. Plus I have minis I want to paint and have even worked on some homemade ones constructed from cutting up cheap plastic animal figures and gluing them together in new configurations.
Plus I've got to figure out what kind of development will arise from the PC Shadar-Kai Way of the Long Death Monk (a race created by the goddess of death who hates undead and a subclass devoted to studying death) and the PC Hollow One Dragonborn Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer (a Hollow One being a kind of quasi-undead revenant animated by the strange magic of a cursed land).
I'll use her eventually, don't you worry. The character file is huge, but I cycle the top candidates out into play pretty regularly.
For Halloween this year I'm doing another Vampire the Masquerade game. This time I gave the coterie playing full reign to choose their faction and location, and they decided to be Anarchs in New Orleans. I saw that New Orleans doesn't have any lore for V5, which works well enough for me. Still kind of deciding on what I'm going to do for the game. Thinking of maybe drawing a bit from one of the Hecata options, and having the villain be a wraith serial killer inhabiting a Vampire's body, but still kind of turning over what to do with that.
I've posted a bit about my game last year, which was very fun if a bit more a comedy of errors than anticipated. Actually I think this time instead of posting little excerpts from it, I'll just toss pretty much everything out. Last year I had a different group (well, one player in common) as a coterie looking for a missing Tremere at the behest of Baron Abrams in Hollywood. The Tremere had recently defected from The Camarilla and had stopped reporting in. The only piece of information they had was that the Tremere, Theodore Ignacious, owned a vacant lot. The coterie was a Malkavian janitor named Clarry, a Brujah bartender named Galaxy, and a Ventrue who was also the mayor of LA named Jacque. So they went to investigate the lot, but came across their first stumbling block. A warehouse next to it was a drug lab and the gang running it had guards posted and put up barbed wire around the lot (the mob boss was Ignacious' ghoul, tasked with keeping people away from the lot, but the coterie never discovered this). I figured with all their vampiric powers, some gangsters should be pretty simple to deal with. The coterie decided they didn't want to go in loud, and came up with a plan to convince the gangsters they were there to purchase drugs. They dominated the guard outdoors and commanded him to bring them to his boss. Now if you're thinking, couldn't they have just dominated the guard, tied him up, and figured out a way past the fence... the answer is yes. That being said, they entered and had a conversation about buying cocaine with a mob boss who was very upset people were loudly discussing their criminal actions. Eventually he just sold them some damn cocaine to get them to leave, and on their way out Clarry's player asked me "Wait, why did we do that?" and all I could do was shrug and say "I figured you guys were going somewhere with this, I can't tell you what your plans are." So he came up with the brilliant plan to leave his cocaine behind and started arguing with the guard to get him to let him back in.
"Okay, roll me Manipulation plus Subterfuge"
"I'm bad at those."
"Oh. Roll well then!"
So he got a bestial failure. I decided he was overcome with a sudden overpowering urge to eat, and hey, there was a human just arguing with him in biting range. So he started tearing out this gangsters throat while screaming about wanting his cocaine. Jacque decided to use dominate to force Clarry off the poor man... only to get a bestial failure! So I inflicted the Venture clan compulsion to need someone to follow his orders. Finally Galaxy ripped out a stop sign with potence and smacked him off. Then they saved the gangster, and stowed his unconscious body in an ally and went to sneak around over the fence. Clarry had soaring leap, so it wasn't an issue for him and Galaxy had celerity and acrobatics, but they needed to figure out how to get Jacque over. So they threw him. I made him make a (very easy) acrobatics check to avoid landing too loudly and alerting the gangsters. Bestial failure.
So I decided he took a point of damage as his inner beast took over and he tried to grasp at something to stabilize himself... and grabbed the barbed wire. I did decide to be merciful and figured that slowed his descent enough he didn't alert anyone though. And that was session one, which I did not expect it to be a two session game, but these things happen. Next session the coterie, finally in the lot, found it full of trash. Nothing remarkable, except a mirror which Clarry's auspex enhanced senses could detect the faintest hint of blood on. So they found a rat and smeared it's blood on some slight indents in the frame, and found it went dark. Clarry went in first, and... ceased to be. For a moment anyway, as he passed through the abyss, but I didn't let the players know this until everyone ended up in the mirror. On the other side they found themselves in a creepy old manor with no windows. An enchanted manor with hallways like mazes and out of the corner of his eye Jacque caught an image like a giant insect leg disappearing in the door? Probably nothing. To cut down this story a bit, they ended up in a library and fought some obviously possessed individuals and found a journal, a personal museum of artifacts guarded by some animated suits of armor where they found a book on binding malevolent entities, and... a dungeon with an autopsy table which had a corpse strapped to it. Which of course got up to attack when they were leaving, and they found a strange obsidian stone embedded in it's heart after ripping it out. The coterie eventually made their way to his personal chambers, sealed with a passcode encoded in a poem in his journal and entered to find Ignacious... possessed by an abyssal entity, shadow pouring off him with tentacles and massive claws. Jacque set about using a spell from the tome they found to bind it into the obsidian stone while Clarry and Galaxy worked to keep it away from him. Which was greatly complicated when they rolled bestial failures! Long story short, it erased some of Clarry's organs and stabbed right through Galaxy. Which is when a massive arachnid leapt out... and started helping them restrain Ignacious. An Anansi! Decided to add that after Tube posting about them. Incidentally, with two players not doing great health-wise and a giant spider suddenly jumps out, it was fun to soak in the dread before I ended my dramatic pause and explained it was helping.
Eventually Jacque sealed the entity in the shard, and they saved Ignacious. The Anansi introduced themselves (though I have forgotten their name) and explained they and Ignacious deal in mystical artifacts together. Ignacious then explained how he totally was attacked by a Lasombra who sicked the abyss monster on him, must have been The Camarilla. Which was of course a huge lie, he had obviously been experimenting on people and had books on summoning and binding. But the coterie took his word with no questions asked, so, you know... *shrug*
Hoping to match it, since it was a very fun game. People are still making characters, but so far we have a Nosferatu with the bugs in his skin power, and a very run of the mill Toreador... so that's gonna be a fun relationship.
"too much"
Yeah. The next session, the dice LOVED him. 4+ successes on every Arete check he made save two. One was for an extended cast where he was just building up some successes, got zero total, so the character just went "Huh my magic is still working, but it's just taking awhile..." Willpower check to see if the conflict in reality was noticed: FAILED
The other one was for an Entropy 3 infused bullet aimed at the center of a Rokaea, trying to make his pistol round rupture and destroy as many internal organs as he could without blasting the Garou who had that damn wereshark in a full nelson. "Weird, usually my magic doesn't take this long." Next round, five successes. Willpower check to see if the conflict of his thoughts vs reality are noticed: PASSED buuut because of the magnitude of the successes he'd gotten prior...
He now has the flaw Overconfident, preventing him from spending Willpower on Arete checks for free successes.
Suplexing a train is definitely how i run things. As far as i'm concerned, if you've got a good strength score you can do a lot of bullshit in battle and out, because you know. Leverage. It goes a long way! I WANT my players to stunt and do crazy stuff, rather than just "I wave my sword at them for the xth time"
I will also note that the only party member who's not some sort of caster is the Rouge, and if @PirateQueen doesn't reverse-pickpocket bombs onto things, i will be super sad. Steal them from Phoebe when phoebe's not looking! It's for a good cause.
(To quibble slightly, it was less this preserves the body perfectly and more "I'm content to say this is blocking the bacteria etc that would normally start a body decomposing". For what they needed the body preserved for , it was a good fix).
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This may be a problem for my other dm given my barbarian took Minor Illusion. Thoguh that at least calls out you can make an opposed Intelligence (Investigation) check to see through it.
So... hmm. How would i handle it? I'd probably say: a, if your passive investigation (10+Int+Investigate, if you're trained in it) beats out hte spell dc, you automatically see through an illusion. That sherlock scan goodness at work as you go "now wait a minute" and spot the thread. Or at least enoguh to know that something's fucky and this is /not/ what it seems. (Becuase hey, if your pcs are trained in a skill, they should get to be awesome in it).
From the other side of things: I'd probably secrelty roll Int+Investigate (Maaaybe Wis+Percerption for creatures that are more on the senses/smell), and go from there.
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Think about what sort of outsized benefits are gained from a CA trip
In many cases it essentially becomes a save or die spell unless the DM is willing to just play total Calvinball with it and eschew mechanical interactions entirely in favor of just figuring something out, a method which can often leave players feeling like the DM didn't give their action due consideration
Illusion magic in D&D is a headache
The other side of that is when the players feel like their minor illusion cantrip should be enough to turn an adult dragon away.
I don't mind it when players get creative with illusions or the like when setting ambushes or to frighten away dumber monsters, etc. That's kind of the point of an RPG. Otherwise you might as well play a boardgame. I like to work with them to figure out something cool mechanically. Even if its just the fire giants "missing a turn" by hurling boulders at the imaginary dragon swooping down on them from above before they twig that its an illusion. This happened a few sessions ago where the bard wanted to distract and scare away the giants. Well, they were giants. They were scared. Scared enough to take their attention away from the party and waste a turn trying to attack an illusion. That's not too shabby for a 3rd level spell. My bard then tried to argue that his illusory dragon would turn and burn to dodge the boulders and continue the charade and I said, no... giants are not stupid ogres. They saw their boulders fly right through the dragon, they figured it out. There are reasonable limits to these things.
To me it feels like what most magic should be - changing the circumstances of the encounter in order to make things easier for the rest of the party to solve the problem. And while D&D has some status modifiers and stuff like that which can be used to represent this fairly well, it often doesn't feel satisfying to say that your clever illusion just gives the enemy disadvantage on their next attack or whatever. There's a tension between the description of what the magic does and the rules of what the magic does - it's certainly not the only place that D&D has this tension, but it's probably one of the more noticeable ones.
I'm thinking of an early 2000's SyFy original movie I saw where the CGI monster seemed to be well lit in exactly the same way no matter how dark it was.
It either works and lets you smartly skip stuff (for one spell slot? Shame on you).
Or it doesn't and lets you get like, what, a sneak attack if the GM's nice?
Shoth-Gorag, BBEG of the 4E Chaos Scar series and a Far Realm entity. I'm gonna have the kuo-toa be its followers, and since the kuo-toa have a reputation for making up fake gods the party will brush them off until this dude shows up (I'll probably need to make-up a kuo-toan name for this guy, too; "Shoth-Gorag" doesn't sound like a name the kuo-toa would invent).
I have to have a figure to represent this thing, so I went to the store and bought these buckets of cheap dinosaurs and marine animals to cut up and glue together into an unholy monstrosity.
I've already done this to make minis for the 3E rukarazyll, yrthak, and arrowhawk monsters, so I've got some practice and leftover spare parts.
There wasn't any rules basis for him being an illusionist, so he just was - all of his spells worked roughly the same as you'd expect mechanically, but they were a series of complicated illusions
4E was also better about wizards being more status stuff than direct damage, but when he did damage, it could be assumed that it was either getting the enemy's guard down (for the hit points = poise model) or enemies who, in their panic about seemingly being set on fire, actually ended up injuring themselves in the process
shadow evocation: you can throw meatfireballs and now your target gets *two* chances to avoid what's honestly not a lot of damage in the first place.
Go to 3e where with the right prestige class shenanigans you could throw the equivalent of Shadow Evocations where they took MORE damage if they realized it was an illusion.
Why is the focus always on the mechanical result though and not the way you got there?
Nobody tells people about how they got a sneak attack on the whozits for extra damage. They tell stories the about the time the wizard used this awesome illusion that fooled all the bad guys and the rogue got to sneak around because of the distractions and landed a sweet backstab on the big bad guy and everyone cheered.
This gets into the larger philosophical arguments about D&D so I'm not sure you're going to get a satisfying response, but let me give you my perspective as someone who has played a lot of D&D but kind of doesn't like it anymore.
The first part is that combat in D&D is always a mechanically-based system with mechanically-based results. In many groups you'll never hear the sweet backstab story because they did the math and decided that everyone getting the jump on the bad guys and the wizard having an extra 2nd level spell was more important than the rogue getting a single sneak attack, especially since the rogue would likely have trouble finishing the job when the warrior couldn't get past the mooks to engage the big bad and get them more sneak attacks.
Now maybe it's a big bad that's a terrifying sorcerer with no HP and your rogue is an assassin so they get an auto crit and one-shot them. That's pretty sweet. But D&D isn't a game about one big dramatic combat and your wizard only has so many spell slots. Every time they choose the illusion they're filling a slot that may potentially do nothing for the chance that it one-shots a sorcerer.
Alternately, your group figures out it's quite mechanically efficient. Now your open each of your session's 2-4 combats per session with the wizard casting illusion so the rogue can get in a free sneak attack. The 17th time your wizard makes an illusion of a big troll and says "boo" is a lot less exciting than the first, and your wizard is probably pretty bored at looking at their list of 2nd level spells and just picking illusion over and over again.
Now at this point you may be thinking, who the hell thinks that much or that broadly about D&D? And the answer is people who play a lot of D&D. And there are a lot of people who play D&D. In fact I would venture that there are more people in the world who are playing in two simultaneous D&D campaigns than there are people who are playing any other RPG. If it's not more, it isn't far off. So D&D as a game that encourages people to play a lot of and nothing but D&D, whether in its mechanics, its marketing, or its socialization, falls prey to the consequences of people who play enough of a game that they can't not see the "game" part.
Now you're probably thinking, wouldn't we be better off if they played an RPG other than D&D? And yes, yes we would.
"The problem isn't that no matter what I do it comes down to how fast I shave HP off a monster. The problem is my character wasn't original enough! So here comes Boffo, the tall dwarf. Sure, he'll spend half to three-fourths of his useful lifespan on a battlemat doing 1d8 axe damage like my last five dwarfs...but this one is tall."
I'm not trying to take a deuce on people's heart and creativity here. I'm not. But like, if you're spending all of your weekends lovingly detailing a new world to play D&D in, you need to come to terms with the fact that you'll still, at the end of the day, be playing D&D. That cool take on gods and divine power you came up with? That wild idea you have for where dragons come from? I gotta be honest: if those ideas can't be boiled down to shaving HP off a monster on a battlemat, then most of your players will almost never have cause to even think about those things you worked so hard on, much less engage with them.
There's a point past which you're better off writing your own fantasy novel.
Or playing a different game.
I made this mostly for a different conversation but it works here too.
It's just rubbish at being anything else
There's even an Alpha demo to try.
I'm tight on cash at the moment, but I'm gonna try to throw at least some money at this.
In the meantime I'm about to start cutting up cheap plastic dinosaur toys and gluing them back together like the unfairly maligned Sid from Toy Story.
Oh, okay. I'll edit that part out but leave the demo link.
something I hadn't considered but after multiple years of running very story-heavy systems having something just so completely fucking straightforward is kinda nice sometimes.