D&D thread
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Alrighty. Epic campaign session complete. Hero of Tempus, The Smasher, epic ~~barbarian. Good raging. Very good. Exploded some weird thing.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
In a campaign I'm playing with friends, I'm working on obtaining a pet owlbear. Just need to wait for it to be weaned.
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@abarker said in D&D thread:
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
In a campaign I'm playing with friends, I'm working on obtaining a pet owlbear. Just need to wait for it to be weaned.
Your DM. Do they seem to like you?
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@Gribnit said in D&D thread:
@abarker said in D&D thread:
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
In a campaign I'm playing with friends, I'm working on obtaining a pet owlbear. Just need to wait for it to be weaned.
Your DM. Do they seem to like you?
Most of the time.
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@abarker said in D&D thread:
@Gribnit said in D&D thread:
@abarker said in D&D thread:
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
In a campaign I'm playing with friends, I'm working on obtaining a pet owlbear. Just need to wait for it to be weaned.
Your DM. Do they seem to like you?
Most of the time.
Giving you an owlbear is probably not one of those times.
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@Gribnit said in D&D thread:
@abarker said in D&D thread:
@Gribnit said in D&D thread:
@abarker said in D&D thread:
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
In a campaign I'm playing with friends, I'm working on obtaining a pet owlbear. Just need to wait for it to be weaned.
Your DM. Do they seem to like you?
Most of the time.
Giving you an owlbear is probably not one of those times.
If it turns on me, my party will make short work of it. We've got 5 level 6 characters.
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@abarker said in D&D thread:
@Gribnit said in D&D thread:
@abarker said in D&D thread:
@Gribnit said in D&D thread:
@abarker said in D&D thread:
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
In a campaign I'm playing with friends, I'm working on obtaining a pet owlbear. Just need to wait for it to be weaned.
Your DM. Do they seem to like you?
Most of the time.
Giving you an owlbear is probably not one of those times.
If it turns on me, my party will make short work of it. We've got 5 level 6 characters.
Eh, I doubt it'll turn on you. If I were a DM and a player wanted an owlbear, the last thing it would do is turn on them. It would just be the shittiest, grouchiest, least-enjoyable pet ever.
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Yesterday, my group was making their way through the temple of the Eye of the Allfather in Storm King's Thunder, and we found a nasty trap in the living quarters (hallway with bedrooms on each side): when you entered this one part of that hallway, all of the doors would be sealed by Wall of Stone spells, and then a boulder would appear at the end of the hallway and crush anyone still in the hallway. (It had a neat reset, too: the boulder would be caught by a statue, which would animate and push it back into the original place.)
So, that was a nasty trap. Did 10d10 damage/DEX save avoids. Most of the party did not have 55+ HP, being at 6th level, so if you failed that save, you went down. And the living quarters we searched were empty; just some occasional rotting furs from previous Giant inhabitants.
But, you see, there were two rooms down at the end of the hallway that we didn't get to search. We knew that 10 of these rooms were empty, but were the last two? We had to know. Well, some of us had to know. There was one guy who refused to get involved on such a fool's errand, but we weren't about to listen to him. So we tried some shenanigans with the bard casting Leomund's Hut to try to block the hallway (alas, he placed it wrong, so it didn't block the boulder), and one guy managed to run to the end of the hall to see just what was in those last two rooms. Well, he found nothing. Just like what was in the first 10 rooms. But we learned a thing!
Unfortunately, that guy then had to run back over the trigger to get out of the dead-end that was the living quarters. So our bard cast Leomund's Hut again, this time in the middle of the hallway. And it worked! Blocked the boulder and everything. But the bard has to stay inside the Hut, or else it disappears. So there he was... in the middle of a hallway... with an invisible force shield blocking a boulder from smashing him in the face. And if he got 20 feet away from the boulder, the force shield would disappear, leaving an angry boulder for him to deal with. But hey, at least he's killed its momentum, right? Even if he fails, it should be rolling slower?
Not so much. That trap was made of magical bullshit shenanigans, and it kept its magical bullshit shenanigans even after coming to a complete halt. So the bard exited his Hut, the force shield disappears, and now he has to make the same DEX saving throw that anyone else would, or face exactly the same damage, with no advantage or any other mitigating factors to help.
He fails the saving throw, and the damage is enough to drop him. The boulder, meanwhile, takes another round to get to the end of the hallway, and all of those living-quarters-rooms are still sealed up with Walls of Stone. The bard starts making death saves. And fails every single one. Meanwhile, the cleric of our party is down at the end of the hallway, and he starts sprinting to get to the squishy caster to heal him before he dies. The bard fails three straight death saving throws, and perishes before the cleric arrives.
But wait! The cleric has Revivify now! (I had to remind the cleric of this; he's not the most on-top-of his spell list.) But Revivify requires 300gp of diamonds, and so then we spent five minutes trying to figure out whether we had any diamonds or not. We'd been given a lot of "gems" over the past several sessions (something like 50 gems totaling ~1200gp), but had no idea which ones were diamonds and which ones weren't. The GM briefly considered rolling to see a) who was carrying the gems, and b) whether they were diamonds, but decided to just be lenient and say 300gp of those gems were diamonds, and that either the cleric or bard were carrying them.
So, all that, death and all, to discover that the last 2 rooms out of 12 were empty, just like the first 10 rooms we saw. Yay!
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@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
Yesterday, my group was making their way through the temple of the Eye of the Allfather in Storm King's Thunder, and we found a nasty trap in the living quarters (hallway with bedrooms on each side): when you entered this one part of that hallway, all of the doors would be sealed by Wall of Stone spells, and then a boulder would appear at the end of the hallway and crush anyone still in the hallway. (It had a neat reset, too: the boulder would be caught by a statue, which would animate and push it back into the original place.)
...
Kinda want to fill a 30' spherical iron cage with zombies now.
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@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
Unfortunately, that guy then had to run back over the trigger to get out of the dead-end that was the living quarters. So our bard cast Leomund's Hut again, this time in the middle of the hallway. And it worked! Blocked the boulder and everything. But the bard has to stay inside the Hut, or else it disappears. So there he was... in the middle of a hallway... with an invisible force shield blocking a boulder from smashing him in the face. And if he got 20 feet away from the boulder, the force shield would disappear, leaving an angry boulder for him to deal with. But hey, at least he's killed its momentum, right? Even if he fails, it should be rolling slower?
Leomund's Tiny Hut (also available as just Tiny Hut) can be ritual cast and lasts 8 hours at a time. He could have simply moved to the edge of the existing tiny hut and redone the ritual cast until he got past the reset point.
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@Gribnit said in D&D thread:
@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
Yesterday, my group was making their way through the temple of the Eye of the Allfather in Storm King's Thunder, and we found a nasty trap in the living quarters (hallway with bedrooms on each side): when you entered this one part of that hallway, all of the doors would be sealed by Wall of Stone spells, and then a boulder would appear at the end of the hallway and crush anyone still in the hallway. (It had a neat reset, too: the boulder would be caught by a statue, which would animate and push it back into the original place.)
...
Kinda want to fill a 30' spherical iron cage with zombies now.
About how big is "go insane from seeing it" big, if we're talking a spherical cage filled about 1/3, 1/2 full of zombies? Thinking 30' is lowballing it. Bigger than a house is definitely a problem.
Any way left to scale a monster or was that Too Hard?
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@abarker said in D&D thread:
@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
Unfortunately, that guy then had to run back over the trigger to get out of the dead-end that was the living quarters. So our bard cast Leomund's Hut again, this time in the middle of the hallway. And it worked! Blocked the boulder and everything. But the bard has to stay inside the Hut, or else it disappears. So there he was... in the middle of a hallway... with an invisible force shield blocking a boulder from smashing him in the face. And if he got 20 feet away from the boulder, the force shield would disappear, leaving an angry boulder for him to deal with. But hey, at least he's killed its momentum, right? Even if he fails, it should be rolling slower?
Leomund's Tiny Hut (also available as just Tiny Hut) can be ritual cast and lasts 8 hours at a time. He could have simply moved to the edge of the existing tiny hut and redone the ritual cast until he got past the reset point.
We didn't think of that; the bard was ritual-casting it, but we didn't realize it was a non-concentration spell.
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Finally, all the ruleset problems are solved. Players know what their options are in all situations and the correct balance has been found between storytelling, playability, customizability, carlos, carlos,
cCarlos, carlos, and Carlos. There will never be another version of D&D.
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Bard can't roll under 20,what do?
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As a break from"proper" campaigns, we're currently playing a small adventure as a party of Muppetborn
I'm based on the Count, a monk of the Way of Shadow, because it seemed kind of vampire like. We also have a warlock big bird, a dog wizard and Fozzie Bear as a barbarian. After two sessions I'm nearly dead due to being more interested in counting things than being careful of traps. Everyone is thoroughly annoyed with Fozzie, who won't stop telling terrible jokes, and we've pissed off every ally by acting like Muppets
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@Jaloopa said in D&D thread:
As a break from"proper" campaigns, we're currently playing a small adventure as a party of Muppetborn
I'm based on the Count, a monk of the Way of Shadow, because it seemed kind of vampire like. We also have a warlock big bird, a dog wizard and Fozzie Bear as a barbarian. After two sessions I'm nearly dead due to being more interested in counting things than being careful of traps. Everyone is thoroughly annoyed with Fozzie, who won't stop telling terrible jokes, and we've pissed off every ally by acting like Muppets
The Muppetborn look a bit min/maxed: no skills, a few fixed languages, built-in healing, +2 AC, and those subraces get some very nice powers. The Grouch, in particular, looks fantastic on a heavily-armored wizard, now that arcane spell failure has gone away. The only drawback is no +INT, which just means you're one ASI behind for a while, but the heavy armor makes up for it. Most other races have a smorgasbord of skills, languages, and maybe a combat/magic feature, but these went all-in on features.
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@PotatoEngineer apparently there are pages and pages of additional rules for them. Rubbing on other fuzzy surfaces can build up static and cause electrical damage when you touch people (good for surprise attacks), fall damage and weight class are reduced, probably more that the DM will reveal at the funniest possible moment
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@izzion said in D&D thread:
@boomzilla said in D&D thread:
Theme song railroading!
You can pick
Thunderhorse, you just never do pickThunderhorse.
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One of my players just said (in our Discord channel):
I'm still trying to figure out who was scrying on us <back there>. We really haven't made any real enemies.
My (silent) reaction:
: Oh you sweet innocent summer child. That's going to make the reveal even more fun.Because they have made enemies. I'm amazed he didn't make the connection between being scryed on in a town half-way around the world from where they'd been and a few days later having a group of assassins sent after them by someone who really had no reason to know they were there.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
Because they have made enemies.
indeed they have. indeed they have.
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The weekend session ended on a massive cliffhanger.
We've been playing this campaign as a noble family. Me, as the head of family, have been trying to politic my way into the position of emperor by helping out every other noble around with every little problem they have, in the hope of getting enough brownie points to increase my influence. So all sessions up until now have been a lot of problems happening, the increase of problems making us suspicious of a lot of plotting happening behind the scenes.
So, we (finally) got to the grand yearly feast/counsel with all the nobles around. Having had a premonition about Bad Stuff
going to happen at it, we all went in with caution. And in the end it ends with... me losing the Emperor vote with 1 to an outsider nobody has heard of.I call out (publically) that foul play is about, but manage to fumble the roll so I made a complete ass of myself in public instead. (Having 18 charisma and failing feels bad.) This is followed up by the post-counsel dinner where I get to sit around angrily. There is a lot of confusion about an outsider being voted in as the leader of the country. After the dinner the voted-in leader comes to talk to me, hoping to smooth things out with me. I make a remarks about how I know they (the organisation she represents) being up to no good, and I don't trust her at all. She seems to genuinely want to work things out with me, despite me knowing she represents an evil cult. And after the talk the DM made me roll and left me with the feeling she was not lying, making me even more confused as to what the hell was going on.
Not that I had much time to think about it, as just after she walked away from me a scream was heard, she rushed back to me and collapsed in my arms with a dagger sticking out her backside. And there the DM ended the session. So, yeah, now we're left with an, um, interesting situation. We got a new leader. I publically voiced my disagreement with this. And on the same evening as she was elected, she is murdered right after talking to me. So, uh, it does not look good. Also, we do not have time to deal with this shit right now. We need to keep investigating the troubles in the land, because we have a lead on where to go now.
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@HardwareGeek that sounds more like having 7 charisma and failing.
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
Having 18 charisma and failing
Oof!
Not just failing, but CRITICALLY failing! Both the best and worst moment to do that too.
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@Atazhaia Is the critical chance independent of your value in the stat, then? Like, test with a D20 ≤ value, and rolling 20 is always a critical failure?
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Atazhaia Is the critical chance independent of your value in the stat, then? Like, test with a D20 ≤ value, and rolling 20 is always a critical failure?
Usually, a 1 is a critical failure in recent D&D. A 20 is almost always a critical success.
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@Gribnit I know, but @Atazhaia isn’t playing D&D (right?) and I was giving a generic example of a way in which fumble chance is the same for everyone regardless of competence.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Gribnit I know, but @Atazhaia isn’t playing D&D (right?) and I was giving a generic example of a way in which fumble chance is the same for everyone regardless of competence.
Fair, applicable. The quibble for D&D would be that some rolls have no fumble chance, and some characters can't fumble, but, these are D&D quibbles.
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@Gribnit said in D&D thread:
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Atazhaia Is the critical chance independent of your value in the stat, then? Like, test with a D20 ≤ value, and rolling 20 is always a critical failure?
Usually, a 1 is a critical failure in recent D&D. A 20 is almost always a critical success.
Thankfully in non-stupid editions (
), the 1 is only a critical failure on- attack rolls, in which case it's merely an automatic miss, with no other effect
- (5e) death saving throws (to not die when dropped to 0 HP), where it counts as two fails instead of one.
And a 20 is only a critical success on
- attack rolls, in which case you double the damage dice (5e)
- death saving throws (5e), in which case you're automatically back in the fight at 1 HP.
For anything else, it's merely the worst/best possible result given your modifiers. Although if a 1 isn't a failure and/or a 20 isn't a success...you probably shouldn't have been rolling in the first place. Because rolls are only to resolve uncertainty, and "can't do it/can't fail it" aren't instances of uncertainty.
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I'm kind of nervous about the surprise turn my campaign took this weekend.
We went to investigate a burning wreck that fell from the sky. Took out a couple carrion crawlers, a flesh golem, some gnome squidlings, and some gnome ceremorphs. Then, on our way to the town we were originally headed to, we were attacked by an invisible stalker.
We finally got to where we could take a long rest, and lucked out to get a undisturbed night's rest. As we were packing up in the morning, my cleric/warlock's sword started vibrating in it's sheath. Looking up, she saw Acererack approaching. This is problematic as he's the patron for my character's warlock husband and he doesn't like my character. Not only that, but he is currently embroiled in a patron war. As Acererack was talking to our party, my character started hearing this ringing sound. When she asked if anyone else heard it, Acererack said he did. He then ordered my character's husband to kill her. At that, my character started glowing, getting larger, growing wings, etc. The party wizard did an arcana check and determined that my character now was on par with a minor diety (the DM said my character was now effectively a CR20). As my character felt a growing urge to attack Acererack, the session ended.
I think my survival next session might depend on what my character's husband decides to do. It would probably also help if the rest of the party lends me a hand, but there's a very good chance my character will die next session.
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@abarker I am impressed with your DM that you are at all worried at this point.
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@Gribnit It's not just him. Our group has some interesting dynamics that make me uncertain how some of them will respond to the situation. That, and he mentioned that this version of Acererack is a CR23. He also hasn't given me the full stats and abilities for my character's current form, so I have no idea how to approach the fight.
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@abarker depends on how the party falls out then, fair enough. A 4-player party should be able to survive (maybe by fleeing) a +4 CR encounter at even player CRs, but sounds like CR20 isn't the norm. However, at CR20+ the difference of 3 CR is much less than at 1-4 or 10-13 CR - by 20 all the bad stuff is on the table and 3 Stooges Effect sets in a bit.
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@Benjamin-Hall We're actually playing with Mythrax right now (as the DM likes variety and testing systems). Which does things a bit... weirdly. In that base stats ends up in the normal 3-18-ish range, while skills are % based and rolled for with d100. The roll itself was for Influence, which is one of my best skills (partially because my charisma) and was at about 75% chance of success. But I rolled a natural 100, and anything above 95 is considered a critical failure. You can save bad rolls with Luck, but, uh, not a natural 100 roll. So, yeah...
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Status Pre-rolled the treasure for an encounter later tonight. If they survive, they gonna be rich.
42,000 gp, 28,000 pp (so 322k gp worth in coin), 4 legendary magic items: defender, sword of answering, a cubic gate, and a staff of the magi.
Now they just have to survive. They're level 10, up against an ithillich with a staff of the magi. In its lair (well, during the second half). They do have a ring of mispelling and are planning to stock up on scrolls of death ward.
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Season finale funtimes. Tried to inform the authorities about an impending invasion. They were busy doing internal bullshitting. Went home, rested for a couple weeks, then the bad feeling senses kicked in. Sun goes down, but the entire estate is on full alert. I get a carrier pigeon. But I don't have time to deal with it because a couple people sneaking around outside the estate. Turns out to be the authorities (one of them being my childhood friend who joined them). But instead of trying to talk to me they murder my guards and invade my house. So we murder them in return. (They also set fire to my tea house!)
After the battle, my now dying friend asks me "It was not true what they said, that you were conspiring against the country?" I tell him that I was working for the country, trying to root out the evils inside it. And then he told me to find [other childhood friend] who had been banished from the order for standing up for me, as he has key information. And after that I could finally read the message I got, which was a bloody paper from our "neighbours" and another childhood friend, telling me that "[the authorities] have betrayed us. My father is dead, our guards are all dead. My brother is missing. Save yourselves."
So, because I figured we were no longer safe I have decided to retreat from my estate for now, along with all surviving guards and key people in the household. And we need to find the exiled one. And because our neighbours are on the way to where he had gone we're gonna see if we can save them on the way. But because this was a season finale, the continuation will happen in September. Fuck.
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I love it when a plan comes together. And the NPCs get to pull a fast one on the PCs, preying on their known character flaws. Sometimes, you just make enemies, and those enemies aren't combat types. Multi-layer plots (deceptions hidden behind obvious deceptions) are fun, especially when they hit the character's buttons just right.
Oh, and when their greed leads them to take corrupt bargains. The bargain will be kept...but since they didn't buy the land through official, sanctioned channels, they won't have political cover when the first plot comes to fruition.
And when people don't get references. Hint--if the NPC is named Jezebel, she's probably not on your side. But they heard "Jessiebelle", and I didn't see fit to correct them.
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@Benjamin-Hall nobody suspects the hairdresser
