D&D thread
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@CarrieVS said in D&D thread:
Separate incident: how much damage do you think a flameskull would take when it regenerates by bursting out of one of the glass vials its crushed remains have been put in in a vain attempt to stop it regenerating?
Not enough?
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@Tsaukpaetra said in D&D thread:
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
old D&D trick
What does it do?
(A)D&D trolls regenerate all damage to their bodies, except if it’s caused by fire or (IIRC) acid and similar things. For some unexplained reason, this happens as follows, according to the AD&D Second Edition Monstrous Manual:—
If a troll is dismembered and scattered, the largest surviving piece regenerates.
So you kill the troll, burn the corpse except for a finger, then store that finger in a container small enough that it can’t grow into a full-size troll. When you’re in trouble, open the container …
OK, technically that doesn’t work since the same book says trolls regenerate lost body parts “within a week” but it’s a fun thought to have an instant troll-in-a-box.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Tsaukpaetra said in D&D thread:
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
old D&D trick
What does it do?
(A)D&D trolls regenerate all damage to their bodies, except if it’s caused by fire or (IIRC) acid and similar things. For some unexplained reason, this happens as follows, according to the AD&D Second Edition Monstrous Manual:—
If a troll is dismembered and scattered, the largest surviving piece regenerates.
So you kill the troll, burn the corpse except for a finger, then store that finger in a container small enough that it can’t grow into a full-size troll. When you’re in trouble, open the container …
OK, technically that doesn’t work since the same book says trolls regenerate lost body parts “within a week” but it’s a fun thought to have an instant troll-in-a-box.
You just have to add some timey wimey magic as well. And keep killing the troll every week to keep it fresh. Which will make for one angry troll.
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Several people weren't available to play yesterday, so the DM ran a one-shot campaign for the three of us who were. We were three normies sitting in a bar. Wizard said, "Hey, wanna make 300 gold each? Take this barrel of wands and test them. Let me know if they work. But they're dangerous; test them outside of town. There's a bandit hideout north of town; you can try them there."
300 is a lot of gold, so we agreed to test the wands. (Also, it'd be a really boring campaign if we didn't.) However, I pointed out that we don't know whether the wands work. If we attack the bandits, they're likely to fight back, and if the wands don't work, we're going to have an unpleasant time. So we head east into the forest, instead.
We started aiming random wands at trees and stuff. For each wand, we rolled 1d10000 for the wand effect — 83 pages for the DM to look through to find it. He told us one possible effect, presumably with a 1/10000 probability, is to destroy the universe, bringing the game to an immediate end.
I don't remember all of the effects, but here are a few interesting ones:
- One character made himself smell like
, but only to himself; fortunately, the rest of us didn't smell anything. - One wand reminded the user that he had once gone to mage school and learned a "restore the dead" spell. This came in handy when...
- A wand instakilled the user. At least he appeared dead to us, although he was still conscious of his own existence and was able to cast restore the dead on himself.
- One wand, possibly the same one that reminded the user of the restoration spell, caused a stream of old acquaintances to pass by, reminding him of old, petty grievances they had with him, such as, "One time in elementary school, you stole my pencil."
- One wand had no visible effect, but in the distance, we heard a sound like sand being poured. We later found out that it had turned the mayor of the town into a pile of gold dust. This wand makes several later appearances in the adventure.
- On wand made our daggers very hot. When one character threw his dagger away, it started a white-hot fire. The fire was quenched when...
* Another wand turned everything in the vicinity to glass. - Another wand drenched the target and the user in ice-cold brine. This was used later to extinguish a different fire.
- A wand made all our food disappear.
- A wand that made it start snowing. (We were unaware of it, but it had actually triggered a global ice age that eventually would kill everything on the planet.)
- A wand made my head shift 1d4+3 inches left on my neck.
- Later, while traveling through a mountain pass (and being accosted by ne'er-do-wells who sought to extort an exorbitant toll for crossing the pass, a wand made the rocks start speaking, saying what a nice chap the person who used the wand was.
- A wand reminded me that I, too, had attended mage school but hadn't finished because my healing spells had ... side effects.
There were a few others, like one that conjured human-sized pigeons that did pecking damage to to PCs (and I suppose NPCs, but that didn't happen to occur) within range, one that caused the user to vomit 2d100 meters of rope, and one that reduced the wizard who hired us to a blubbering pile of depression and self-pity, but enough about the wand effects for now. A little plot.
While in the forest, we had found a a ship, possibly created or transported there by a wand. On the ship was a lockbox, and in the lockbox was a map, apparently a treasure map, leading to the mountains west of the town. We eventually crossed through the town and headed west. As we passed through the town, we learned that the mayor had been turned into a pile of gold dust, causing quite a commotion. Nobody in town knew how it had happened.
I had the idea to get out of sight of the town, then start using the gold dust wand repeatedly until we'd turned the entire town into gold dust, then go back and pick up the gold. I managed to use it a few times before one of the other characters tried to wrestle it away from me, complaining of the moral evil of killing people for gold. Unfortunately, his DEX roll beat my DEX roll handily, and to prevent further attempts, he swapped the gold dust wand and suicide wand so that he knew which was which, but I didn't. I decided that it wasn't worth 50% chance of killing myself.
We continued west. We reached a ravine with a bridge guarded by an elf who wanted a toll higher than all our combined money to cross. The character with the gold dust wand aimed it at a fish in the river running through the ravine, then threw it into the river to prevent me from using it. However, the wand didn't turn the fish into gold dust; it turned the elf into gold dust, and the other PC jumped into the river and retrieved the wand. So we scooped up the ex-elf and continued across the bridge. Eventually we reached the X on the treasure map, which turned out to be the cave workshop of the wizard who hired us, and who had somehow teleported three pirates to his workshop and who were demanding treasure from him.
In a series of events I don't remember clearly, we killed two of the pirates, the third surrendered, I was injured in the fight, I healed myself but lost a pinky as a side effect, the wizard came down with the worst case of imposter syndrome I've ever seen, the PC with the gold dust wand was incapacitated, I grabbed the wand from him and used it on the pigeons that were attacking us (turning the other pigeon into gold dust), and the campaign ended through a combination of having accomplished (more or less) the objective, having destroyed the world in an ice age, and one player having to leave for work.
- One character made himself smell like
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@HardwareGeek Heh; sounds like another adventure that used The Net Libram of Random Magical Effects. Here's a couple others:
r/DnD - The Commoner Curse of 300 Wands
r/DnD - "The Commoner Curse of 300 Wands", the Sequel
Back in the day I ran a Scholar Wizard who was also a Wild Mage; the occasional surge was bad enough. :)
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@Tsaukpaetra said in D&D thread:
@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
my healing spells had ... side effects.
?Not unless you have an amputation fetish.
No, I do NOT want to know.
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Played Pathfinder last night.
In the middle of combat the bard used bardic powers to buff our barbarian. In accordance with her character and custom she actually sang the bardic spell on voice chat to properly RP the role.
She chose to sing a slightly lyric tweaked version of Stan Bush's The Touch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A52--FKUQgU
It was awesome, because unbeknownst to any of us, including the GM, she'd actually hooked up her electric guitar into her PC as a LINE-IN connection so instead of just her voice we also got a pretty damn epic rock guitar accompaniment over Mumble.
She was awarded an instant hero point for the effort. Because not only was that awesome, but it was completely in character and totally relevant to the actual events transpiring in game.
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@Vixen said in D&D thread:
the bard used bardic powers to buff our barbarian. In accordance with her character and custom she actually sang the bardic spell
That makes a rather nice difference from how my group’s player who usually played a bard in (A)D&D used to do it …
GM: “It’s a new round, what do you do?”
Fighter: “I hit the leftmost orc with my sword.”
Ranger: “I shoot an arrow at the orc on the right.”
Mage: “I cast magic missile at a third orc.”
Bard: “I sing a little song.”The worst thing about this was that singing a song was actually the most useful thing she could do … At least at low level — at higher level, I failed to see the point of them at all when the bonuses provided by those songs weren’t really significant anymore.
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@Gurth If I'd play a support class I'd make sure to have at least one combat skill, in case I'd need it. So if I'd be a healer for example I'd also have some sort of weapon proficiency or martial arts skill to defend myself.
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I made the mistake of creating a pure healer character once, that was a pacifist and did not attack anything. The entire skill and perk set was peaceful, and she couldn't use armour because of being a winged elf so no heavy stuff.
She did have a dagger to be able to block attacks, but that was it.
Add to that the racial phobia of caves.Was a bit hard to play that character in a gang of boffer smurfs. Not that they didn't appreciate having an actual healer around, but they did fuck all to actually keep the healer alive during fights.
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As we needed a healer I thought that if my character would die I'd make the new character healer first and damage second, instead of damage first and healer second (as he is now). And despite taking the most damage of the entire group this far (thanks to the warrior being a coward who runs away from danger despite wearing heavy armor) I have not yet died. I just have a bazillion scars, a limp and a permanently damaged elbow. And as soon as we get out of this stupid forest I am continuing my plans to claim rulership of the land we're in, because I am seriously starting to deserve it at this point.
The warrior is just following us others around, the thief just cares about money, the wizard is incompetent and the healer I dunno yet. And the entire party except me is lower class, I'm at least upper middle class. We did during the last meeting get a letter from the current ruler asking us to find a good husband for his daughter to take over in his place, as his daughter being a priestess means she can't rule. And I have spent a lot of private time with his daughter, getting all healed up by her and even getting massage lessons~
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@Atazhaia
INB4 the DM's plot twist: the daughter is a priestess of the Clan of the Preying Mantis.
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@izzion I suppose I'll have to kill her too then and establish myself as the de facto ruler of the land in that case. I have already survived one assassination attempt (barely).
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@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
@Gurth If I'd play a support class I'd make sure to have at least one combat skill, in case I'd need it. So if I'd be a healer for example I'd also have some sort of weapon proficiency or martial arts skill to defend myself.
AD&D bards are jacks-of-all-trades, with very much the emphasis on “master of none”. Their main unique ability is inspiring others, but like I said, after a while that’s just not really effective anymore. At that point you’re mainly a combination of a spellcaster with very few spells and a thief with much lower chances of success than a real one.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
AD&D bards are jacks-of-all-trades, with very much the emphasis on “master of none”.
switch to pathfinder. they fixed that. :-)
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@Vixen Did you miss the first letter of the D&D version I prefer? :)
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Vixen Did you miss the first letter of the D&D version I prefer? :)
nope. but you should still switch to pathfinder where bards are balanced properly. ;-P
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@Vixen If I want to play a pure fantasy RPG, I much prefer Earthdawn over any D&D version or clone, really.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Vixen If I want to play a pure fantasy RPG, I much prefer Earthdawn over any D&D version or clone, really.
hmmmm....... i wonder if they have a PDF quickstart to do for our oneshot-newgame sessions we do whenever a player can't make it to a regular session........
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I just finished DMing the canned 5E campaign of Out Of The Abyss. It's a very nice campaign, but with occasional inconsistencies and vagaries right when you'd like it to be specific.
I started the campaign because I wanted to play D&D, but nobody I knew was willing to DM. So I threw myself upon that sword, and a beer-and-pretzels game was had by all. (I haven't the time/inclination to write a serious game.) The game went terribly slowly (I think we averaged a session about every five weeks or so), and by the end, one of the players had dropped, one had moved three states away, and one couple was about to have their first kid. So now that it's over... I have nobody to play with.
On the plus side, I now know several people who are involved in other games, so maybe I'll join one of those. Or maybe I'll just wait the ~4 months until the couple's kid is born, and we restart the group with someone else as GM. Assuming that the couple has any sanity left after having a kid.
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@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
Assuming that the couple has any sanity left after having a kid.
I mean, doesn't "being a D&D player" come with a pre-requisite of having no sanity?
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@izzion said in D&D thread:
I mean, doesn't "being a D&D player" come with a pre-requisite of having no sanity?
Apparently, Critical Role has become so popular that role-playing is now "cool."
I'm not sure what to do with myself now. I mean, my entire life has been predicated on being not cool, and suddenly I'm fashionable? Or, at least, no longer a Satan-worshipper?
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@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
I'm not sure what to do with myself now. I mean, my entire life has been predicated on being not cool, and suddenly I'm fashionable?
Don't worry, I'm sure there's something else about your personality and/or appearance that makes you an uncool nerd.
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
Don't worry, I'm sure there's something else about your personality and/or appearance that makes you an uncool nerd.
Thank you so much. You really know how to cheer a guy up.
And you're right! My know-it-all attitude and imperfect teeth definitely prevent me from sitting at the cool kids' table!I was worried there for a moment.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Vixen Did you miss the first letter of the D&D version I prefer? :)
You could always go back to First Edition; that Fighter 7/Thief 8/Bard 1 has to be as useful as a Magic-User 9, right? Plus by the time that MU gets to 10th level your Bard will also be 10th level (along with those Fighter and Thief levels)!
Anyway...
I liked the Bard I played in Pathfinder (1e) Society; he was almost all support and social with just a smidge of combat (and even that was more support than damaging). Once when I was playing a high level adventure I was asked what I did in combat and my response was "Give you guys +5 to everything and haste, then stay in the corner and hope I don't die." Good times. :)
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@Vixen said in D&D thread:
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Vixen If I want to play a pure fantasy RPG, I much prefer Earthdawn over any D&D version or clone, really.
hmmmm....... i wonder if they have a PDF quickstart to do for our oneshot-newgame sessions we do whenever a player can't make it to a regular session........
That, I don’t know. I own exactly one Earthdawn book published after the original edition that’s by now 26 years old :)
But a quick look turns up that there is one for the current edition.
@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
I'm sure there's something else about your personality and/or appearance that makes you an uncool nerd.
Like, oh, I don’t know, having been a TD
member for five years?@Parody said in D&D thread:
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Vixen Did you miss the first letter of the D&D version I prefer? :)
You could always go back to First Edition
I have no nostalgic reasons to prefer that, though :)
that Fighter 7/Thief 8/Bard 1 has to be as useful as a Magic-User 9, right?
An experiment of mine along those lines in D&D3 wasn’t successful, I can report. For one campaign I decided to make a monk, then for the next level go paladin instead. Then by level 3, I thought a fighter level would be handy. By the time the campaign ended, I was playing a Monk 1/Paladin 1/Fighter 1/Cleric 1/Rogue 1/Ranger 1 and was outclassed in pretty much everything by all the other players in the group who had level 5 or 6 single-class characters.
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@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
@izzion said in D&D thread:
I mean, doesn't "being a D&D player" come with a pre-requisite of having no sanity?
Apparently, Critical Role has become so popular that role-playing is now "cool."
I'm not sure what to do with myself now. I mean, my entire life has been predicated on being not cool, and suddenly I'm fashionable? Or, at least, no longer a Satan-worshipper?
Things I like go in and out of fashion, it doesn't really bother me. Currently my beard is cool but my long hair isn't. That will probably flip in the next few years
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Representative picture from today's meeting:
Battle vs. a group of orcs and goblins in a tree. Which was quite the mess.
We were hiking through the woods, going through orc territory. Night came and we found no good hiding place, so we climbed a tree to make camp in it instead. During my watch I spot a goblin sniffing our tracks. Thinking I can surprise him I draw my bow, aim an arrow and fires... and does a critical failure, instead striking our healer's arm. Then the tracker calls for the rest of his group and we have a party of 7 vs us. I manage to kill their archer. The enemy mage levitates a couple berserkers into the tree. I get knocked unconscious, but am revived by the healer. I shoot the mage and sets him on fire, making him run away. A couple others climb the tree and gets killed. The final orc gets second thoughts about the whole idea and runs away too.
Then we continue our trip towards the troll lands. I critical success the tracking roll and find the lair of the chief troll, then manage to wake up a couple great apes leading to another battle and me getting knocked unconscious again. After the battle we retreat and hide to rest up, then return to the cave. I sneak into the cave again and come into a great room, this time finding the troll. I try shooting and miss, then flee out. The troll obviously does not follow me outside so I take some free shots at him and miss them all before he retreats. I follow and finally strikes him, setting him on fire, then try to run out again, but gets caught by the troll and thrown into the cave. Then I just go onto the defensive while the troll slowly takes fire damage. My friends now deciding to help by throwing flaming torches at the troll, who tries brutalizing me but does an epic critical fail (getting double negative effects) so I take no damage at all during the battle.
After the battle we search the cave and find the legendary sword that it was rumored the troll was hoarding. I pick it up, only to have the sword engage me in a battle of will, but I succeed in out-willing it and (begrudgingly?) am allowed to wield it, with a feeling of "UNWORTHY" at the back of my head. Guess the sword doesn't like outlanders...
And even though the sword does amazing damage, and if even I can use it thanks to giving me the required skill, I decide that showing off this artifact unnecessarily will just lead to trouble and wrap it in a cloth before slinging it over my back. So now my hunter got... a bow, a magic archer ring, a dagger, knuckle irons, a sword and a magic wand in his arsenal.
And as a bonus, this representative comment from the DM about my hunter after getting knocked out the second time: "You can't lose him, he's your best tank!" Because my ranged fighter takes more of a beating than our sword and shield equipped warrior. :P
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@Atazhaia I've been playing an Investigator, a skill monkey class from Pathfinder. This week we ran into a bunch of rock trolls in a narrow stretch of cavern. My major contribution was stepping up and poking one with my rapier, provoking it into doing its three attacks on me rather than the guys who could actually do damage. I ended that combat only mostly dead (stable at -11 thanks to a lucky roll).
Later that night I moved next to one of our guys who had gotten confused so he'd attack me instead of someone else if that 1-in-4 came up. That time I didn't go down and was able to move away safely and let someone else play tag with him next round.
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I just thought I'd share this comic. It's pretty fun for people that do tabletop roleplaying.
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@Carnage said in D&D thread:
I just thought I'd share this comic. It's pretty fun for people that do tabletop roleplaying.
Excellent Mobile support I see.
I can tell because there's fucking t swipe gestures!
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@Tsaukpaetra said in D&D thread:
Excellent Mobile support I see.
The "simplified view" is somehow even worse, mostly. An almost 15 year old coming out story, with begging for money for transition surgery, repeated dozens of times. But at least there is one actual comic after the first or second iteration of the begging, which seems to be entirely lacking from the default view. That comic is pretty amusing, but not worth wading through the rest of the site.
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
repeated dozens of times. But at least there is one actual comic after the first or second iteration of the begging
I never escaped the trans story...
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Did a probably silly/stupid thing and picked up an Ultimate license for Fantasy Grounds on Steam during the sale, since it's 50% off and that'll let me have other people who haven't paid for a license connect to it with the demo version and play properly should I ever decide to get an online game going.
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@boomzilla said in D&D thread:
Someone's wizard is going to be depressed over the death of their familiar for the next few sessions?
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My dice hate me. In the entire session yesterday, only one spell hit its target. And when it hit, I rolled a 1 for damage.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in D&D thread:
I could take that dice. I'm mainly playing games where 1 is a crit.
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
My dice hate me. In the entire session yesterday, only one spell hit its target. And when it hit, I rolled a 1 for damage.
In my last session, another player rolled so badly he lost an eye from trying to drink whiskey
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
My dice hate me. In the entire session yesterday, only one spell hit its target. And when it hit, I rolled a 1 for damage.
My group has one player who hardly ever seems to roll well. It’s not that his characters have low stats or anything, it’s almost like he has trouble making even average dice rolls. This got distinctly weirder the couple of times when his character was played by someone else (guest player — give him the character of a regular who couldn’t make it) and the character performed a lot better …
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@HardwareGeek
I recommend upgrading to DannyOceanDice(tm)
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@PleegWat said in D&D thread:
@boomzilla said in D&D thread:
Someone's wizard is going to be depressed over the death of their familiar for the next few sessions?
Or permanently lose a Constitution point, case depending. Best to keep your familiar out of these situations.
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@Jaloopa said in D&D thread:
@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
My dice hate me. In the entire session yesterday, only one spell hit its target. And when it hit, I rolled a 1 for damage.
In my last session, another player rolled so badly he lost an eye from trying to drink whiskey
How far down the Moving Maneuver chart is that one?
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@izzion The DM suggested checking my (plastic) dice for bias by floating them in salt water and seeing whether they tend to float with the same face up. One of my two d20 shows a strong bias towards the group of faces 2-18-4-16. The other one (the one I was using for most of yesterday's session, because the first one had been rolling so badly) is too dense to float in even a saturated saline solution; it drops straight to the bottom of of the container with a clunk, so if it's biased, it needs a different method to find it. If it is biased, it's going to have a bigger effect. The numbers are arranged consecutively. Opposite faces sum to 20, but adjacent faces are all low or all high or all in the middle. If it's biased towards one part of the die, that isn't offset by having a mix of high and low numbers in that area.
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@Parody said in D&D thread:
@Jaloopa said in D&D thread:
@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
My dice hate me. In the entire session yesterday, only one spell hit its target. And when it hit, I rolled a 1 for damage.
In my last session, another player rolled so badly he lost an eye from trying to drink whiskey
How far down the Moving Maneuver chart is that one?
He was given a drink of some 25 year old whiskey, DM decided to make him roll for if he could drink it without coughing and he got a critical fail. Another roll for if he dropped the glass, another critical fail so he convulsed and hit his face. How much damage? Another critical fail. At this point something bad has to happen, so it was 11-20 for his dominant eye, 1-10 for the other one. He decided his die was unlucky so rolled another one for this and got an 18.
Later on, we were all drinking and another critical fail had him pass out
