As a game of existential horror obviously we had a session including *checks notes*
A Burger joint and discussing what 'only place with real meat on the station' qualifies as.
A Chai Tea cafe where the scientist got some psychedelic tea for a mild high.
A gay bar too close to the station module's power plant. Resulting in one wall that's far too hot to touch at times. The Bar is called Icarus.
A hostel made out of abandoned back corridors and storage spaces stuffed with any beds, bedding and bunkbeds that are donated. They met a tagger scrawling 'YAN DEEZ NUTS' in reference to the station's owner and local mob boss Yandee.
I'm sure *plot stuff* happened too that was mildly imposing but mostly the session was "welcome to crime city, your captain's gone to chat with a so far unmentioned employer, please relax and have some fun"
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DepressperadoI just wanted to see you laughingin the pizza rainRegistered Userregular
that sounds dope
I'm only in one campaign atm, but we never like, get to give our characters time to breathe, it jumps from combat to combat, you know?
Like, I wanna have some downtime, I wanna get up to mischief! I wanna meet the interesting people who populate this fantasy world my friend has crafted!
Thanks! I was kind of leaning towards circle of land for the extra spells, yeah, but you make a good case for circle of dreams too. However, this might be a bigger group so someone else might be a healer so we'll see
Druids are pretty versatile too. Like Circle of the Moon if you want to tank, Circle of the Land if you want spells for days, Circle of the Shepherd, Circle of Dreams, or Circle of Wildfire all off improved healing and other benefits beside, Circle of Spores if you want to both melee and cast at the same time, etc.
Circle of the shepherd is actually insane btw. The unicorn totem is a joke. Like it doesn't seem like it till you realize a healing word restores 3 hit points to the whole party. Which might not seem like a lot but in a party of 5 is 15 hit points healed on top of the d4+mod it usually does. That's just at level 3 if you make it to 10th that's a first level spell healing 50 damage across the party in addition to its base d4+mod. Lemme use 3 turns (or in the case of my house rule that allows healing word and cure wounds in the same round, 1 and a half turns) and 3 first level slots to get the party 30 hit points of healing each.
Oh also I'm gonna do the game breaking thing and summon creatures into every combat cause that's what I do, and I'm gonna keep healing those summons as well (at ten it just happens by having a totem spirit up). Now I can use wild shape to summon an owl to P.A.M. as well which is just delightful.
Circle of the Shepard is absolutely a character you have to build encounters around because so long as they actually well use their strengths they're gonna fuck the whole dynamic of every single fight they are near when they have resources to leverage.
Druids in general are good at that, but especially Circle of the Shepherd yeah.
My GM has been attempting to thwart my Circle of the Moon Druid recently which is kind of exhausting. May just make a new character since I didn’t even want to really play one, but our initial party was a Rogue and a Cleric/Monk hybrid for a combat heavy campaign (Mad Mage) so I had a lot of holes to sure up. Since then we have gained a Paladin, so I can probably swap.
I'm only in one campaign atm, but we never like, get to give our characters time to breathe, it jumps from combat to combat, you know?
Like, I wanna have some downtime, I wanna get up to mischief! I wanna meet the interesting people who populate this fantasy world my friend has crafted!
In general the only hints are:
A) Get away from combat centric games
If the game specifies recovery time/mechanics be strict about it
C) Be super forceful about 'hey, this is boring time fill it'
Like, there's really no way to make boring downtime happen than spending time on the boring downtime stuff.
Mehcanics help force it but really it's just sitting with the GM and asking "so where do I recover? With whom? How'd it go?"
As with all fictional bits you can start at building blocks of Where Why How When Who?
I'm only in one campaign atm, but we never like, get to give our characters time to breathe, it jumps from combat to combat, you know?
Like, I wanna have some downtime, I wanna get up to mischief! I wanna meet the interesting people who populate this fantasy world my friend has crafted!
In general the only hints are:
A) Get away from combat centric games
If the game specifies recovery time/mechanics be strict about it
C) Be super forceful about 'hey, this is boring time fill it'
Like, there's really no way to make boring downtime happen than spending time on the boring downtime stuff.
Mehcanics help force it but really it's just sitting with the GM and asking "so where do I recover? With whom? How'd it go?"
As with all fictional bits you can start at building blocks of Where Why How When Who?
You're falling into a self-defeating trap by calling it "boring downtime." If you talk about it as though it's boring, then they will approach it as though it is boring.
Downtime doesn't have to be boring! Downtime becomes boring when it is dragged on interminably. If players have a very short summary of what they wish to do during downtime, that's fine, if it expresses what their character is doing. Sometimes all you have to say about what your character is doing during downtime is "They're fixing up their armor and sharpening their weapon."
You can roleplay a short scene of them buying something from a shopkeep or something if you feel like it, but there should not be a feeling that downtime has to be of equal length to the parts of the session where you are dungeon crawling or whatever.
My favorite question fir any group of characters is "it's Tuesday, what's your character got going on?" Just flip the script and be ready to improv whatever it is they do with Tuesday, even if their goal is to sleep without interruption.
Hello all, I’m going to start a Choose Your Own Adventure over at the roleplaying sub-forum on here tomorrow.
It’s just going to be about a farmer, with a real Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley vibe. No ulterior motive/shocking twist. It doesn’t need much participation, just turn up when you like to cast a vote or nudge things here and there. I’ve burnt myself out once before doing a CYOA, so while I intend to post daily, the scope of the game will be small, with short posts. I’ll be drawing a map though that’ll get fleshed out over time, which might be fun to watch grow!
I’ll call it... A Peaceful Time.
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GrogMy sword is only steelin a useful shape.Registered Userregular
I'm only in one campaign atm, but we never like, get to give our characters time to breathe, it jumps from combat to combat, you know?
Like, I wanna have some downtime, I wanna get up to mischief! I wanna meet the interesting people who populate this fantasy world my friend has crafted!
Bring it up with your GM/the group. They might just think that isn't what any of you are interested in, they're not going to know you feel this way if you don't tell them.
Druids in general are good at that, but especially Circle of the Shepherd yeah.
My GM has been attempting to thwart my Circle of the Moon Druid recently which is kind of exhausting. May just make a new character since I didn’t even want to really play one, but our initial party was a Rogue and a Cleric/Monk hybrid for a combat heavy campaign (Mad Mage) so I had a lot of holes to sure up. Since then we have gained a Paladin, so I can probably swap.
There's a lot of reasons I have a general "only one druid" rule for my tables
I'm only in one campaign atm, but we never like, get to give our characters time to breathe, it jumps from combat to combat, you know?
Like, I wanna have some downtime, I wanna get up to mischief! I wanna meet the interesting people who populate this fantasy world my friend has crafted!
In general the only hints are:
A) Get away from combat centric games
If the game specifies recovery time/mechanics be strict about it
C) Be super forceful about 'hey, this is boring time fill it'
Like, there's really no way to make boring downtime happen than spending time on the boring downtime stuff.
Mehcanics help force it but really it's just sitting with the GM and asking "so where do I recover? With whom? How'd it go?"
As with all fictional bits you can start at building blocks of Where Why How When Who?
You're falling into a self-defeating trap by calling it "boring downtime." If you talk about it as though it's boring, then they will approach it as though it is boring.
Downtime doesn't have to be boring! Downtime becomes boring when it is dragged on interminably. If players have a very short summary of what they wish to do during downtime, that's fine, if it expresses what their character is doing. Sometimes all you have to say about what your character is doing during downtime is "They're fixing up their armor and sharpening their weapon."
You can roleplay a short scene of them buying something from a shopkeep or something if you feel like it, but there should not be a feeling that downtime has to be of equal length to the parts of the session where you are dungeon crawling or whatever.
I mean, my point is very much that the boring, mundanities of mechanics can force you to have the roleplaying scenes you most like.
But that requires being willing to drag players through "hey how much does it cost to live here? Where do you go stay? What do you do while passing time?"
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
Circle of the shepherd is actually insane btw. The unicorn totem is a joke. Like it doesn't seem like it till you realize a healing word restores 3 hit points to the whole party. Which might not seem like a lot but in a party of 5 is 15 hit points healed on top of the d4+mod it usually does. That's just at level 3 if you make it to 10th that's a first level spell healing 50 damage across the party in addition to its base d4+mod. Lemme use 3 turns (or in the case of my house rule that allows healing word and cure wounds in the same round, 1 and a half turns) and 3 first level slots to get the party 30 hit points of healing each.
Oh also I'm gonna do the game breaking thing and summon creatures into every combat cause that's what I do, and I'm gonna keep healing those summons as well (at ten it just happens by having a totem spirit up). Now I can use wild shape to summon an owl to P.A.M. as well which is just delightful.
Circle of the Shepard is absolutely a character you have to build encounters around because so long as they actually well use their strengths they're gonna fuck the whole dynamic of every single fight they are near when they have resources to leverage.
shepherd healing is good, but it matters a lot less when you are fighting things that will one-shot characters like mammoths (a common threat in rime of the frost maiden *shudders*)
druid summoning is pretty terrible honestly a cr2 fey at lvl 7 isn't going to be swinging too many fights in your direction that weren't already going that way
the better conjurations take a minute and still require concentration, so you're going to be hoping shit isn't smart enough to punch you in the face instead
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
now warlocks dropping conjure elemental or aberration every combat?
if you want to make sure your group never gets any undirected time to explore / do odds and ends then all you have to do when asked by the DM "what do you do" is state blankly and then ask what you're supposed to do to get to the next plot point
I'd kind of like some downtime in the game where I play my halfling necromancer so he could spend time making some scrolls, maybe acquiring a magic wand or two, and just studying necromancy and magic in general. He's got a backpack full of junk that he can study!
But the party is currently on a mission to find a lady that has been haunting his dreams and wants the cursed book he currently possesses, and they're gonna try and find a way to get her to stop fuckin with him. It was keeping him from getting long rests and about to start giving him exhaustion, until they did a favor for a witch and he got a magic dreamcatcher that's been letting him sleep (for now). So no time to stop and do downtime stuff for now.
Also have a more long-term goal of finding some asshole cultists, but that's something to worry about another day :rotate:
Circle of the shepherd is actually insane btw. The unicorn totem is a joke. Like it doesn't seem like it till you realize a healing word restores 3 hit points to the whole party. Which might not seem like a lot but in a party of 5 is 15 hit points healed on top of the d4+mod it usually does. That's just at level 3 if you make it to 10th that's a first level spell healing 50 damage across the party in addition to its base d4+mod. Lemme use 3 turns (or in the case of my house rule that allows healing word and cure wounds in the same round, 1 and a half turns) and 3 first level slots to get the party 30 hit points of healing each.
Oh also I'm gonna do the game breaking thing and summon creatures into every combat cause that's what I do, and I'm gonna keep healing those summons as well (at ten it just happens by having a totem spirit up). Now I can use wild shape to summon an owl to P.A.M. as well which is just delightful.
Circle of the Shepard is absolutely a character you have to build encounters around because so long as they actually well use their strengths they're gonna fuck the whole dynamic of every single fight they are near when they have resources to leverage.
shepherd healing is good, but it matters a lot less when you are fighting things that will one-shot characters like mammoths (a common threat in rime of the frost maiden *shudders*)
druid summoning is pretty terrible honestly a cr2 fey at lvl 7 isn't going to be swinging too many fights in your direction that weren't already going that way
the better conjurations take a minute and still require concentration, so you're going to be hoping shit isn't smart enough to punch you in the face instead
The minute long summons are practically a trap for this reason. The lower level swarm conjurations are actually way better, especially for the Shepard that gives them higher hit points each, and makes their damage count as magic. 8 wolves wrecks about any combat it gets dropped into simply by putting 8 bodies on the player's side of things, at level 11 you can drop 16 wolves onto an encounter. It cannot be understated how much body count le that changes encounter math. 4 giant wasps will wreck most fights. At level 7 you've got summon fey so you can bring in 4 satyr with 14 extra hit points each, and all their damage counts as magic. That will pretty much always turn any normal combat to the party's advantage unless you've planned for the fact that right after you start initiative the party increases by N bodies. Like yeah eventually you just start punching the druid to try and get the mess off the battlefield but you can really only do that with intelligent enemies that understand the druid is the reason why there's 16 wolves here, get past their wolves, and strike down the druid before they are a bear, by then they could have war caster, and resilience con, and the constitution score of a bear
And that's ignoring the whole rest of a party with them entirely.
Circle of the shepherd is actually insane btw. The unicorn totem is a joke. Like it doesn't seem like it till you realize a healing word restores 3 hit points to the whole party. Which might not seem like a lot but in a party of 5 is 15 hit points healed on top of the d4+mod it usually does. That's just at level 3 if you make it to 10th that's a first level spell healing 50 damage across the party in addition to its base d4+mod. Lemme use 3 turns (or in the case of my house rule that allows healing word and cure wounds in the same round, 1 and a half turns) and 3 first level slots to get the party 30 hit points of healing each.
Oh also I'm gonna do the game breaking thing and summon creatures into every combat cause that's what I do, and I'm gonna keep healing those summons as well (at ten it just happens by having a totem spirit up). Now I can use wild shape to summon an owl to P.A.M. as well which is just delightful.
Circle of the Shepard is absolutely a character you have to build encounters around because so long as they actually well use their strengths they're gonna fuck the whole dynamic of every single fight they are near when they have resources to leverage.
shepherd healing is good, but it matters a lot less when you are fighting things that will one-shot characters like mammoths (a common threat in rime of the frost maiden *shudders*)
druid summoning is pretty terrible honestly a cr2 fey at lvl 7 isn't going to be swinging too many fights in your direction that weren't already going that way
the better conjurations take a minute and still require concentration, so you're going to be hoping shit isn't smart enough to punch you in the face instead
The minute long summons are practically a trap for this reason. The lower level swarm conjurations are actually way better, especially for the Shepard that gives them higher hit points each, and makes their damage count as magic. 8 wolves wrecks about any combat it gets dropped into simply by putting 8 bodies on the player's side of things, at level 11 you can drop 16 wolves onto an encounter. It cannot be understated how much body count le that changes encounter math. 4 giant wasps will wreck most fights. At level 7 you've got summon fey so you can bring in 4 satyr with 14 extra hit points each, and all their damage counts as magic. That will pretty much always turn any normal combat to the party's advantage unless you've planned for the fact that right after you start initiative the party increases by N bodies. Like yeah eventually you just start punching the druid to try and get the mess off the battlefield but you can really only do that with intelligent enemies that understand the druid is the reason why there's 16 wolves here, get past their wolves, and strike down the druid before they are a bear, by then they could have war caster, and resilience con, and the constitution score of a bear
And that's ignoring the whole rest of a party with them entirely.
Oh don’t worry, by the time you’re done rolling the attacks for each of those 16 wolves the other players will have been asleep for hours anyway.
I wonder if anybody has converted the big summons to swarms. Like a large or huge creature spawns that is a 16 wolf "Swarm".
It's tough cause the whole point of the 16 wolf move is controller based. You're locking down the field by throwing one or two wolves on as many of the enemies as possible to potentially gain advantage over them for your party and punish their movement. Can't do that with a singular swarm monster.
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
Summoning a bunch of stuff is very cool
It also bogs stuff down to the point where, as another player in the same party as that, I might start accidentally dropping fireballs for maximum collateral damage or something
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
Yea summoner seems like a good class for when you just have a small group, like 2-3 players.
It also bogs stuff down to the point where, as another player in the same party as that, I might start accidentally dropping fireballs for maximum collateral damage or something
The DM in my head: "yeessssss"
Anger_managment_nicholson_nodding.gif
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
Circle of the shepherd is actually insane btw. The unicorn totem is a joke. Like it doesn't seem like it till you realize a healing word restores 3 hit points to the whole party. Which might not seem like a lot but in a party of 5 is 15 hit points healed on top of the d4+mod it usually does. That's just at level 3 if you make it to 10th that's a first level spell healing 50 damage across the party in addition to its base d4+mod. Lemme use 3 turns (or in the case of my house rule that allows healing word and cure wounds in the same round, 1 and a half turns) and 3 first level slots to get the party 30 hit points of healing each.
Oh also I'm gonna do the game breaking thing and summon creatures into every combat cause that's what I do, and I'm gonna keep healing those summons as well (at ten it just happens by having a totem spirit up). Now I can use wild shape to summon an owl to P.A.M. as well which is just delightful.
Circle of the Shepard is absolutely a character you have to build encounters around because so long as they actually well use their strengths they're gonna fuck the whole dynamic of every single fight they are near when they have resources to leverage.
shepherd healing is good, but it matters a lot less when you are fighting things that will one-shot characters like mammoths (a common threat in rime of the frost maiden *shudders*)
druid summoning is pretty terrible honestly a cr2 fey at lvl 7 isn't going to be swinging too many fights in your direction that weren't already going that way
the better conjurations take a minute and still require concentration, so you're going to be hoping shit isn't smart enough to punch you in the face instead
The minute long summons are practically a trap for this reason. The lower level swarm conjurations are actually way better, especially for the Shepard that gives them higher hit points each, and makes their damage count as magic. 8 wolves wrecks about any combat it gets dropped into simply by putting 8 bodies on the player's side of things, at level 11 you can drop 16 wolves onto an encounter. It cannot be understated how much body count le that changes encounter math. 4 giant wasps will wreck most fights. At level 7 you've got summon fey so you can bring in 4 satyr with 14 extra hit points each, and all their damage counts as magic. That will pretty much always turn any normal combat to the party's advantage unless you've planned for the fact that right after you start initiative the party increases by N bodies. Like yeah eventually you just start punching the druid to try and get the mess off the battlefield but you can really only do that with intelligent enemies that understand the druid is the reason why there's 16 wolves here, get past their wolves, and strike down the druid before they are a bear, by then they could have war caster, and resilience con, and the constitution score of a bear
And that's ignoring the whole rest of a party with them entirely.
Oh don’t worry, by the time you’re done rolling the attacks for each of those 16 wolves the other players will have been asleep for hours anyway.
Ideally you'd just roll one attack and use that for all 16 of the wolves (and then use their default damage, thus not needing to roll for it either)
Circle of the shepherd is actually insane btw. The unicorn totem is a joke. Like it doesn't seem like it till you realize a healing word restores 3 hit points to the whole party. Which might not seem like a lot but in a party of 5 is 15 hit points healed on top of the d4+mod it usually does. That's just at level 3 if you make it to 10th that's a first level spell healing 50 damage across the party in addition to its base d4+mod. Lemme use 3 turns (or in the case of my house rule that allows healing word and cure wounds in the same round, 1 and a half turns) and 3 first level slots to get the party 30 hit points of healing each.
Oh also I'm gonna do the game breaking thing and summon creatures into every combat cause that's what I do, and I'm gonna keep healing those summons as well (at ten it just happens by having a totem spirit up). Now I can use wild shape to summon an owl to P.A.M. as well which is just delightful.
Circle of the Shepard is absolutely a character you have to build encounters around because so long as they actually well use their strengths they're gonna fuck the whole dynamic of every single fight they are near when they have resources to leverage.
shepherd healing is good, but it matters a lot less when you are fighting things that will one-shot characters like mammoths (a common threat in rime of the frost maiden *shudders*)
druid summoning is pretty terrible honestly a cr2 fey at lvl 7 isn't going to be swinging too many fights in your direction that weren't already going that way
the better conjurations take a minute and still require concentration, so you're going to be hoping shit isn't smart enough to punch you in the face instead
The minute long summons are practically a trap for this reason. The lower level swarm conjurations are actually way better, especially for the Shepard that gives them higher hit points each, and makes their damage count as magic. 8 wolves wrecks about any combat it gets dropped into simply by putting 8 bodies on the player's side of things, at level 11 you can drop 16 wolves onto an encounter. It cannot be understated how much body count le that changes encounter math. 4 giant wasps will wreck most fights. At level 7 you've got summon fey so you can bring in 4 satyr with 14 extra hit points each, and all their damage counts as magic. That will pretty much always turn any normal combat to the party's advantage unless you've planned for the fact that right after you start initiative the party increases by N bodies. Like yeah eventually you just start punching the druid to try and get the mess off the battlefield but you can really only do that with intelligent enemies that understand the druid is the reason why there's 16 wolves here, get past their wolves, and strike down the druid before they are a bear, by then they could have war caster, and resilience con, and the constitution score of a bear
And that's ignoring the whole rest of a party with them entirely.
Oh don’t worry, by the time you’re done rolling the attacks for each of those 16 wolves the other players will have been asleep for hours anyway.
Ideally you'd just roll one attack and use that for all 16 of the wolves (and then use their default damage, thus not needing to roll for it either)
That kinda defeats the mathematical reason for pushing the numbers out, the move works by forcing so many rolls that some are bound to be successful even though they mostly shouldn't be. Its basically the same idea as orks in 40k, they suck at almost everything but they roll a shit load of dice to hopefully get results. Reducing it down to 1 of those same dice rolls changes the math pretty devastatingly. If you're going for speed it'd probably be better to roll 2d8 to figure out how many hit and then be judicious about which ones hit favoring results for the player (or possibly flipping a coin to see which way to favor the hits).
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Yeah who exactly is that ideal for, because I don't think it's the person who decided on summoning too many wolves
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
Circle of the shepherd is actually insane btw. The unicorn totem is a joke. Like it doesn't seem like it till you realize a healing word restores 3 hit points to the whole party. Which might not seem like a lot but in a party of 5 is 15 hit points healed on top of the d4+mod it usually does. That's just at level 3 if you make it to 10th that's a first level spell healing 50 damage across the party in addition to its base d4+mod. Lemme use 3 turns (or in the case of my house rule that allows healing word and cure wounds in the same round, 1 and a half turns) and 3 first level slots to get the party 30 hit points of healing each.
Oh also I'm gonna do the game breaking thing and summon creatures into every combat cause that's what I do, and I'm gonna keep healing those summons as well (at ten it just happens by having a totem spirit up). Now I can use wild shape to summon an owl to P.A.M. as well which is just delightful.
Circle of the Shepard is absolutely a character you have to build encounters around because so long as they actually well use their strengths they're gonna fuck the whole dynamic of every single fight they are near when they have resources to leverage.
shepherd healing is good, but it matters a lot less when you are fighting things that will one-shot characters like mammoths (a common threat in rime of the frost maiden *shudders*)
druid summoning is pretty terrible honestly a cr2 fey at lvl 7 isn't going to be swinging too many fights in your direction that weren't already going that way
the better conjurations take a minute and still require concentration, so you're going to be hoping shit isn't smart enough to punch you in the face instead
The minute long summons are practically a trap for this reason. The lower level swarm conjurations are actually way better, especially for the Shepard that gives them higher hit points each, and makes their damage count as magic. 8 wolves wrecks about any combat it gets dropped into simply by putting 8 bodies on the player's side of things, at level 11 you can drop 16 wolves onto an encounter. It cannot be understated how much body count le that changes encounter math. 4 giant wasps will wreck most fights. At level 7 you've got summon fey so you can bring in 4 satyr with 14 extra hit points each, and all their damage counts as magic. That will pretty much always turn any normal combat to the party's advantage unless you've planned for the fact that right after you start initiative the party increases by N bodies. Like yeah eventually you just start punching the druid to try and get the mess off the battlefield but you can really only do that with intelligent enemies that understand the druid is the reason why there's 16 wolves here, get past their wolves, and strike down the druid before they are a bear, by then they could have war caster, and resilience con, and the constitution score of a bear
And that's ignoring the whole rest of a party with them entirely.
Oh don’t worry, by the time you’re done rolling the attacks for each of those 16 wolves the other players will have been asleep for hours anyway.
Ideally you'd just roll one attack and use that for all 16 of the wolves (and then use their default damage, thus not needing to roll for it either)
That kinda defeats the mathematical reason for pushing the numbers out, the move works by forcing so many rolls that some are bound to be successful even though they mostly shouldn't be. Its basically the same idea as orks in 40k, they suck at almost everything but they roll a shit load of dice to hopefully get results. Reducing it down to 1 of those same dice rolls changes the math pretty devastatingly. If you're going for speed it'd probably be better to roll 2d8 to figure out how many hit and then be judicious about which ones hit favoring results for the player (or possibly flipping a coin to see which way to favor the hits).
Yeah but I'm playing a tabletop role-playing game, not a miniature war-game.
I'd argue that the gain of potential successful rolls for your wolf-pack does not out-weigh the negative of it sucking time, energy, & focus from the game.
Zonugal on
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Circle of the shepherd is actually insane btw. The unicorn totem is a joke. Like it doesn't seem like it till you realize a healing word restores 3 hit points to the whole party. Which might not seem like a lot but in a party of 5 is 15 hit points healed on top of the d4+mod it usually does. That's just at level 3 if you make it to 10th that's a first level spell healing 50 damage across the party in addition to its base d4+mod. Lemme use 3 turns (or in the case of my house rule that allows healing word and cure wounds in the same round, 1 and a half turns) and 3 first level slots to get the party 30 hit points of healing each.
Oh also I'm gonna do the game breaking thing and summon creatures into every combat cause that's what I do, and I'm gonna keep healing those summons as well (at ten it just happens by having a totem spirit up). Now I can use wild shape to summon an owl to P.A.M. as well which is just delightful.
Circle of the Shepard is absolutely a character you have to build encounters around because so long as they actually well use their strengths they're gonna fuck the whole dynamic of every single fight they are near when they have resources to leverage.
shepherd healing is good, but it matters a lot less when you are fighting things that will one-shot characters like mammoths (a common threat in rime of the frost maiden *shudders*)
druid summoning is pretty terrible honestly a cr2 fey at lvl 7 isn't going to be swinging too many fights in your direction that weren't already going that way
the better conjurations take a minute and still require concentration, so you're going to be hoping shit isn't smart enough to punch you in the face instead
The minute long summons are practically a trap for this reason. The lower level swarm conjurations are actually way better, especially for the Shepard that gives them higher hit points each, and makes their damage count as magic. 8 wolves wrecks about any combat it gets dropped into simply by putting 8 bodies on the player's side of things, at level 11 you can drop 16 wolves onto an encounter. It cannot be understated how much body count le that changes encounter math. 4 giant wasps will wreck most fights. At level 7 you've got summon fey so you can bring in 4 satyr with 14 extra hit points each, and all their damage counts as magic. That will pretty much always turn any normal combat to the party's advantage unless you've planned for the fact that right after you start initiative the party increases by N bodies. Like yeah eventually you just start punching the druid to try and get the mess off the battlefield but you can really only do that with intelligent enemies that understand the druid is the reason why there's 16 wolves here, get past their wolves, and strike down the druid before they are a bear, by then they could have war caster, and resilience con, and the constitution score of a bear
And that's ignoring the whole rest of a party with them entirely.
Oh don’t worry, by the time you’re done rolling the attacks for each of those 16 wolves the other players will have been asleep for hours anyway.
Ideally you'd just roll one attack and use that for all 16 of the wolves (and then use their default damage, thus not needing to roll for it either)
That kinda defeats the mathematical reason for pushing the numbers out, the move works by forcing so many rolls that some are bound to be successful even though they mostly shouldn't be. Its basically the same idea as orks in 40k, they suck at almost everything but they roll a shit load of dice to hopefully get results. Reducing it down to 1 of those same dice rolls changes the math pretty devastatingly. If you're going for speed it'd probably be better to roll 2d8 to figure out how many hit and then be judicious about which ones hit favoring results for the player (or possibly flipping a coin to see which way to favor the hits).
Yeah but I'm playing a tabletop role-playing game, not a miniature war-game.
Oh sorry I just assumed this thread was talking about D&D, my mistake
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
I love playing summoner types and while one big summon might not be as effective as bogging down enemies as a mob of little ones, it's still pretty effective in 5e.
summons were murderously powerful in pathfinder 1 but they are pretty useless in 2e I find, which is disappointing.
Yeah, mass rolling would be easier. Make them buy a lot of d20s. Price of entry to play.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Of course realistically I agree with you, and the prospect of adding even one additional actor to the already overcrowded D&D combat system sounds like something to be avoided at all costs. But my approach would probably be rewriting the spell (and all summoning spells) to something like this:
Call of the Wild
Level X Druid Spell
The caster summons a fifteen foot diameter pack of large predators native to the region. The area of effect is considered to be difficult terrain, and any movement into/out of/within the affected area causes an immediate X damage. Additionally, any enemy creatures within the area of effect are considered to be flanked for the purpose of sneak attack etc. At the start of the caster's turn, all enemies within the area immediately take 3X damage.
This spell is maintained by concentration, and at the start of the caster's turn, they may move the pack up to thirty feet, dealing X damage to any creatures within the pack at the end of their movement.
I haven't played D&D in like a decade so adjust numbers as you see fit. If you want, you could give an HP value to the pack for targeting purposes - in my mind this is less a literal pack of wolves and more like, spectral wolves or wolves formed out of the plants and surrounding nature as a sort of roiling mass of tooth and claw.
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
Yeah d&d is weird, keeping up the war game facade is actually part of the bit.
But does it make for a more enjoyable experience for everyone at the table?
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
edited April 2021
If I had a player playing a summoner doing stuff like that, they need to bring their own numbered tokens, and have a dice roller app prepped and ready for rolling. I would force standard damage though.
I know some dms want the summoner to issue commands and maybe even give summons their own initiative, but I strongly favor just having them act under direct control of the summoner on the summoner's turn.
I think summoning a horde is thematically great but that it's absolutely detrimental to the play experience.
Definitely never give them their own initiative, but I had another idea to simplify it.
The caster gets to designate an area for them based on the horde size. Enemies in that area have their movement messed with somehow. On caster's turn the horde smacks all hostiles within the zone once (roll damage, save for half). The horde can be damaged, damage equal to the health of a creature reduces the area it occupies. It must always occupy a contiguous region (or, for simplicity, just make it a circle).
Basically, the idea here is to emulate the basic deployment of siccing a critter on every enemy's effects without having to actually manage it.
Also, I'd say enemies in there are flanked.
Plenty of knobs to turn on the idea to balance it I think (how impaired is movement? How much damage?).
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As a game of existential horror obviously we had a session including *checks notes*
A Burger joint and discussing what 'only place with real meat on the station' qualifies as.
A Chai Tea cafe where the scientist got some psychedelic tea for a mild high.
A gay bar too close to the station module's power plant. Resulting in one wall that's far too hot to touch at times. The Bar is called Icarus.
A hostel made out of abandoned back corridors and storage spaces stuffed with any beds, bedding and bunkbeds that are donated. They met a tagger scrawling 'YAN DEEZ NUTS' in reference to the station's owner and local mob boss Yandee.
I'm sure *plot stuff* happened too that was mildly imposing but mostly the session was "welcome to crime city, your captain's gone to chat with a so far unmentioned employer, please relax and have some fun"
I'm only in one campaign atm, but we never like, get to give our characters time to breathe, it jumps from combat to combat, you know?
Like, I wanna have some downtime, I wanna get up to mischief! I wanna meet the interesting people who populate this fantasy world my friend has crafted!
Druids are pretty versatile too. Like Circle of the Moon if you want to tank, Circle of the Land if you want spells for days, Circle of the Shepherd, Circle of Dreams, or Circle of Wildfire all off improved healing and other benefits beside, Circle of Spores if you want to both melee and cast at the same time, etc.
Oh also I'm gonna do the game breaking thing and summon creatures into every combat cause that's what I do, and I'm gonna keep healing those summons as well (at ten it just happens by having a totem spirit up). Now I can use wild shape to summon an owl to P.A.M. as well which is just delightful.
Circle of the Shepard is absolutely a character you have to build encounters around because so long as they actually well use their strengths they're gonna fuck the whole dynamic of every single fight they are near when they have resources to leverage.
My GM has been attempting to thwart my Circle of the Moon Druid recently which is kind of exhausting. May just make a new character since I didn’t even want to really play one, but our initial party was a Rogue and a Cleric/Monk hybrid for a combat heavy campaign (Mad Mage) so I had a lot of holes to sure up. Since then we have gained a Paladin, so I can probably swap.
In general the only hints are:
A) Get away from combat centric games
C) Be super forceful about 'hey, this is boring time fill it'
Like, there's really no way to make boring downtime happen than spending time on the boring downtime stuff.
Mehcanics help force it but really it's just sitting with the GM and asking "so where do I recover? With whom? How'd it go?"
As with all fictional bits you can start at building blocks of Where Why How When Who?
You're falling into a self-defeating trap by calling it "boring downtime." If you talk about it as though it's boring, then they will approach it as though it is boring.
Downtime doesn't have to be boring! Downtime becomes boring when it is dragged on interminably. If players have a very short summary of what they wish to do during downtime, that's fine, if it expresses what their character is doing. Sometimes all you have to say about what your character is doing during downtime is "They're fixing up their armor and sharpening their weapon."
You can roleplay a short scene of them buying something from a shopkeep or something if you feel like it, but there should not be a feeling that downtime has to be of equal length to the parts of the session where you are dungeon crawling or whatever.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
It’s just going to be about a farmer, with a real Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley vibe. No ulterior motive/shocking twist. It doesn’t need much participation, just turn up when you like to cast a vote or nudge things here and there. I’ve burnt myself out once before doing a CYOA, so while I intend to post daily, the scope of the game will be small, with short posts. I’ll be drawing a map though that’ll get fleshed out over time, which might be fun to watch grow!
I’ll call it... A Peaceful Time.
Bring it up with your GM/the group. They might just think that isn't what any of you are interested in, they're not going to know you feel this way if you don't tell them.
There's a lot of reasons I have a general "only one druid" rule for my tables
I mean, my point is very much that the boring, mundanities of mechanics can force you to have the roleplaying scenes you most like.
But that requires being willing to drag players through "hey how much does it cost to live here? Where do you go stay? What do you do while passing time?"
shepherd healing is good, but it matters a lot less when you are fighting things that will one-shot characters like mammoths (a common threat in rime of the frost maiden *shudders*)
druid summoning is pretty terrible honestly a cr2 fey at lvl 7 isn't going to be swinging too many fights in your direction that weren't already going that way
the better conjurations take a minute and still require concentration, so you're going to be hoping shit isn't smart enough to punch you in the face instead
that is dumb
But the party is currently on a mission to find a lady that has been haunting his dreams and wants the cursed book he currently possesses, and they're gonna try and find a way to get her to stop fuckin with him. It was keeping him from getting long rests and about to start giving him exhaustion, until they did a favor for a witch and he got a magic dreamcatcher that's been letting him sleep (for now). So no time to stop and do downtime stuff for now.
Also have a more long-term goal of finding some asshole cultists, but that's something to worry about another day :rotate:
The minute long summons are practically a trap for this reason. The lower level swarm conjurations are actually way better, especially for the Shepard that gives them higher hit points each, and makes their damage count as magic. 8 wolves wrecks about any combat it gets dropped into simply by putting 8 bodies on the player's side of things, at level 11 you can drop 16 wolves onto an encounter. It cannot be understated how much body count le that changes encounter math. 4 giant wasps will wreck most fights. At level 7 you've got summon fey so you can bring in 4 satyr with 14 extra hit points each, and all their damage counts as magic. That will pretty much always turn any normal combat to the party's advantage unless you've planned for the fact that right after you start initiative the party increases by N bodies. Like yeah eventually you just start punching the druid to try and get the mess off the battlefield but you can really only do that with intelligent enemies that understand the druid is the reason why there's 16 wolves here, get past their wolves, and strike down the druid before they are a bear, by then they could have war caster, and resilience con, and the constitution score of a bear
And that's ignoring the whole rest of a party with them entirely.
Oh don’t worry, by the time you’re done rolling the attacks for each of those 16 wolves the other players will have been asleep for hours anyway.
It's why you'll see the 8 wasps instead.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
It's tough cause the whole point of the 16 wolf move is controller based. You're locking down the field by throwing one or two wolves on as many of the enemies as possible to potentially gain advantage over them for your party and punish their movement. Can't do that with a singular swarm monster.
It also bogs stuff down to the point where, as another player in the same party as that, I might start accidentally dropping fireballs for maximum collateral damage or something
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
The DM in my head: "yeessssss"
Anger_managment_nicholson_nodding.gif
Ideally you'd just roll one attack and use that for all 16 of the wolves (and then use their default damage, thus not needing to roll for it either)
That kinda defeats the mathematical reason for pushing the numbers out, the move works by forcing so many rolls that some are bound to be successful even though they mostly shouldn't be. Its basically the same idea as orks in 40k, they suck at almost everything but they roll a shit load of dice to hopefully get results. Reducing it down to 1 of those same dice rolls changes the math pretty devastatingly. If you're going for speed it'd probably be better to roll 2d8 to figure out how many hit and then be judicious about which ones hit favoring results for the player (or possibly flipping a coin to see which way to favor the hits).
Yeah but I'm playing a tabletop role-playing game, not a miniature war-game.
I'd argue that the gain of potential successful rolls for your wolf-pack does not out-weigh the negative of it sucking time, energy, & focus from the game.
Oh sorry I just assumed this thread was talking about D&D, my mistake
summons were murderously powerful in pathfinder 1 but they are pretty useless in 2e I find, which is disappointing.
I haven't played D&D in like a decade so adjust numbers as you see fit. If you want, you could give an HP value to the pack for targeting purposes - in my mind this is less a literal pack of wolves and more like, spectral wolves or wolves formed out of the plants and surrounding nature as a sort of roiling mass of tooth and claw.
But does it make for a more enjoyable experience for everyone at the table?
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
The moment I am slowing fights with 10+ conjured monsters, I'd need to ask what I can do to expediate that slow-down of the game experience.
Definitely never give them their own initiative, but I had another idea to simplify it.
The caster gets to designate an area for them based on the horde size. Enemies in that area have their movement messed with somehow. On caster's turn the horde smacks all hostiles within the zone once (roll damage, save for half). The horde can be damaged, damage equal to the health of a creature reduces the area it occupies. It must always occupy a contiguous region (or, for simplicity, just make it a circle).
Basically, the idea here is to emulate the basic deployment of siccing a critter on every enemy's effects without having to actually manage it.
Also, I'd say enemies in there are flanked.
Plenty of knobs to turn on the idea to balance it I think (how impaired is movement? How much damage?).
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