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To each his own :) I think you’re missing out. :) I have been playing D&D since 1979, and I turn 49 years old next month. And let me tell ya, technology like this has greatly improved my access to and efficiency of gaming. I am a busy professional, with very little time for tabletop sessions, so PbP is the main gaming outlet for me. So doing it this way allows me play on the go, during lunch...

but do I need DPR? ranger, paladin and assassin all make great DPR. maybe i need to combine DPR and control. like walls and swords, bigby and cantrips?

My wife practically burned our 4E books as a sacrificial offering to the gaming gods, so I can neither confirm nor deny your statement. I don't remember having the option to do a mundane fighter build until essentials came out. Several of my friends and I were disappointed at the time that we couldn't build a truly mundane fighter or rogue with the initial release of books. I guess I...

Nice catch! The first mention of the Morninglord was, in fact, in Vampire of the Mists, the first Ravenloft novel. That novel includes Jander Sunstar, a character from the Forgotten Realms. The Domains of Dread book from the Ravenloft campaign setting incorporated the Morninglord into Ravenloft proper. The reference doesn't come from I6. The note provided by Coroc above comes from the...

Any campaign, PbP, tabletop, or otherwise is a lot of work; but having a chat app for OOC and DM questions / comments makes things EASIER, not harder, at least in my experience. But hey, don’t take my word for it. Look and see for yourself, here are all of my PbP campaign threads here on ENWorld. All of these threads are the same campaign, same characters, starting June 2016 running to present...

Assume it's a newbie that doesn't know how you rule. Why would they not state that they want to jump across the chasm? After all, that's what their character wants to do. Run after the BBEG without hesitation, leaping across the chasm along the way. Except you just confirmed what I said in your very first line of this post. "They can't...". They can't because you've decided they can't...

Saemund nods in agreement..."but let us be sure to come back for them if possible. They would make a handsome addition to our inventory." Saemund assists the others in the search.

Morale break is not a rational behavior. It is brought on by fear of death by violent combat.

Eh, I still think you're wildly overstating the case. I guarantee you I could build a heroic-tier fighter, or rogue, or ranger that does nothing but hit people with a sword, occasionally for extra damage or maybe knocking somebody down. Blinding Barrage and Come and Get It don't make the 4e fighter or rogue mystical anymore than Eldritch Knight and Arcane Trickster do for the 5e fighter or...

Detect Magic should be renamed Detect Everything

Because NPCs don’t behave randomly. They have goals and motivations that aren’t determined by a random die roll. From the Evil Lich Lord to the random Giant spider, all NPCs have a reason for being there and their goals determine their behavior in dire situations. Morale rules are extra dice and tables that are completely unnecessary. They’re fine and all. Just not necessary.

Woo hoo!! Exclaims Adi at the discovery..."I wasn't going to saying anything, but I was beginning to think that this was another troll hunt like the one Raven sent us on when we were children. Remember? We found ourselves at the bottom of a canyon staring at a young wild ram with it's horns stuck in a thicket...it was bellowing something awful, but it sure wasn't a troll." Adi starts laughing. "I...

I've included suggestions from lycanthropejeff with mine in a Something Happens in the City! generator. It's a bit rough at the mo but I'll update it with more suggestions and a bit more diversity soon.

Is it up to the DM to roleplay (ie, decide) if a monster hits or miss, or makes a save? If you roll for those, why not for morale? In a way it's more "fair" , the dice have spoken

Eberron Campaign Guide Undead: Buried deep, beyond the prying eyes of the common worshipers, is an ossuary where Vol’s mummy high priest, Malevanor, performs the most profane rituals, twisting corpses with dark magic to create atrocities and undead horrors. To shore up the nation’s demoralized and weakened armies, the Blood of Vol provided Karrnath with rituals that produce loyal undead...

It's a very short step from 'make an Athletics check to finish your jump even though you're out of movement' to 'make an Athletics check to move the last 10 feet up to the bad guy so you can attack' to 'make an Athletics check to move as far as you want regardless of your speed'. The point of things like the 'Improvise an Action' action and using ability checks are to adjudicate things that...

Cr has always been more show than game. If you're watching for the show, you might get upset when you fav char gets killed off. And if you're watching for the gameplay, well, you wouldnt be watching CR. You'd be playing.

They can’t cross the chasm on this turn, though, so what action should they declare for this turn if that’s their intent? It’s mostly the habit you have of telling me what I do, which you’ve just exhibited again, although what you say above is fine, except I’m not sure what you mean by “jump down”. I've been assuming a functionally bottomless chasm, but if jumping down and running across...

Not sure what exceeding limits has to do with advantage or disadvantage. This is about whether the odds are with you or against you. If players sometimes can consider the odds stacked against them it seems reasonable that at other times they can consider the odds in their favor, and thus roll with advantage over and over?

You shouldn't worry about being a tank anymore. Instead, take defensive spells where the NPCs will choose other targets and require no concentration: Blink, Fire Shield, Mirror Image, and Shield. Barbarians make great tanks because they're not terribly hard to hit and don't mind getting hit. As far as offense, look towards more DPR (Tenser's Transformation, Shadow Blade, Haste).

Corporate amnesia..

That's not true. In D&D a rock is just a rock, but an earth elemental is magical. A tree is just a tree, but a treant is magical. A person is just a normal mundane person, but a wizard uses magic. And so on. There's lots of magic in the D&D world, but the world itself is not magical as a whole. This holds true even with the other planes. If your PC went to Hell and encountered a river of...

I actually use more encounters then that. However Portent is what you use when you have to have them fail. I also make sure a diviner that is well played will get more information then any other person in the game. The player just needs to RP that they are casting the bones, reading the signs and all all the other stuff divinest do to uncover the future. If it’s their focus and they do...

Just a minor quibble: game stories doesn't actually work that way, and that expectation is borked.

They aren't opposite, really. Just very different. If you wanted to, you could combine them into a style that is different than either one. For instance, you could create a town, but have a rule where each player gets to create one building and 2 NPCs to give the town a different flavor from pure world building. Or you could allow the players to each, once per session, add or remove an...

It is a known bug that the page/post count and the ignore/block module doesn't play well with each other.

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No mention of Lathander in the original. Just checked.

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I unusually award the same xp if monsters flee as if they are killed. I've never used morale rules, and I have been playing since 1st edition. It's up to the DM to role-play when monsters flee, and up to the players to role-play when their characters flee.

2 things - and both are based on "control" 1: Control the battlefield. A classic example is to use a spell to cut the enemy gang in half (classic way to do that is with a wall spell). The party then deals with the first half, while the second scrambles to circumvent/deal with your wall spell. An "even" fight is now two uneven fight in a row, *far* easier to win. 2: Control the...

MechaPilot, Ok, I admit it. I considered 4E's martial powers to be effectively spells and supernatural. Not that they were Spells(TM) or Supernatural(TM) as defined in the book, but spells and supernatural as a layman not into gamer-speak would define them. For better or worse, even though I've played D&D pretty much since it started, I don't do gamer-speak. In addition, I was...

I think the first mention of Lathander in connection with Barovia is in one of the spin-off novels. The artefacts are deity non-specific in the original module. I suspect that is where some of the other information on the Forgotten Realms wiki comes from.

I'm a big fan of items that scale with the character; I don't like PCs chucking their +1 item because they found a +2 item. In D&D terms that means, for example, that the sword that sheds light on command becomes a flaming sword, doing additional fire damage, then becomes a flaming and holy sword, doing additional fire and radiant damage. Or the magic staff gives an extra spell slot of the level...

The counts titles. The Big Sucker Vanity Vamp Needle teeth needle teeth never brushes his teeth. Yellow Teeth The Sucking Count Silly Strahd von von von von von von BAT man! I hear you knocking but you can't coming! Count in Black.

Yep, that seems likely. Of course, it's relatively easy to set any Ravenloft adventure in almost any other setting - just rule that the relevant bit of the demiplane has come into conjunction with the other plane. :) I'm afraid I don't have the adventure to hand either, for the same reason. I looked up the publication dates online. :)

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This is a thoroughly muddled tome. The Monster Manual part is excellent and I wish it were most of the book. But most of the demi-human fluff lore doesn't belong in this book, being that they're mostly not foes, and is pretty much a waste of space and money for those who have created their own worlds. Really, if you shuffled the contents of this book with the contents of XGTE, with the fluff...

well here i found something Matrix Sorcica posted in a 2016 thread http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?480668-Curse-of-Strahd-Can-Borovia-be-situated-in-Forgotten-Realms/page3 "IIRC, there's advice in Expedition to Castle Ravenloft on placing it in FR. I seem to recall it's somewhere in the Galena Mountains in Damara. " So maybe not in the original module but later on. Is I6...

In terms of his title, it looks like his family were "long unseated from their ancestral thrones". So it's likely that his family were rulers of a kingdom once upon a time, but that the throne passed to another family. That being the case, it seems likely that Strahd was given the title of Count when he conquered Barovia (by whoever was the current king), but that he considered himself to be a...

That's highly unlikely. The original Ravenloft module was published in 1983, some four years before TSR published FR (although it had been mentioned in Dragon before then). It's rather more likely that Ravenloft came out of Tracy Hickman's own home campaign rather than FR (or, indeed, Greyhawk).

Asking for clarification... You would have said no to the player asking to apply disadvantage to reflect her fear even though she could have chosen to not attack at all "to reflect her fear" or chosen to just ignore her fear and attack fully? Both extremes would be allowed but not the middle ground? main reason i ask is not to criticze your table rules but because others seem to have...

Paul Farquhar well i cannot find the exact source and maybe i am wrong, maybe i only read somewhere where to put Barovia in FR, but there is one weak and one very strong indicator that Barovia is connected to FR and maybe had ist prime material roots there (which come into Play in roots of evil it is not exactly drawn into the mists but there exists a prime material Barovia parallel), see the...

No obviously. Just like in many places in the rules. Consider... A character has speed 30. He can choose without gm permission, blessing or without beseeching that divine permission to move 30', dadh to 60', not move at all or to move any distance in between. ***He can volunarily choose to do less than his most.***

I'm very sorry to hear that.

A couple observations. First, yes, absolutely, the notion that a player voluntarily choosing to take a penalty would lead to players) not voluntarily taking penalties is baffling. Also, yes, agree as well, inspiration rewards for GMs who do those are perfectly fine for these cases. No barter needed, as barter for inspiration iirc is not core rules anyway. It seems like possible the...

I don’t know what the laws of Barovia are, but presumably he’s both.

You are wrong, because the meaning of the verb "cast" has no indication of tense. Thus, RAW is, in this case, ambiguous.

In order to be a king, the place your rule has to be a kingdom (and visa versa). Historically they have been many, in modern terms, would be considered nation-states, which where not kingdoms.

"I felt a great disturbance in the Thread, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, 'Oh Heavens, not this debate again.'"

More likely to be Weis and Hickman than Perkins.

Ah, you've confused abstract for meta You're still playing games with your scene framing. You're pretending that's all the information you have. But, you actually are using more information than what's in your frame by choosing game systems that hapoen to have more precise definitions of injury. That doesn't make hitpoints meta -- hitpoints don't becone meta because other systems use more...

Yeah, I seem to have slowed down again this year too. However, back in 2016 I made a conscious effort to paint at least one mini every single week (which wasn't always easy) ...but it resulted in this lot: ...which kinda made the whole thing worth while :) (I kinda wish I had recorded my progress here too - rather than just on my blog)

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The group reacted quickly, but more were coming. Chrysagon stepped forward to stand between the two tents and took a deep breath before closing his eyes. "And when the night is darkest, The places that have never known light, I will go with you and I will burn bright!" Then the symbol engraved in Chrysagon's shield ignited, ready to unleash the power of Kelemvor, the Judge of the Damned. ...

That entire world in D&D is presumed magical. You are trying to apply a modernist mindset that distinguishes between the mundane and the magical to a world that presumes a premodern worldview wherein the supernatural, magical, and irrational are infused into everything of the cosmos. Everything. In such a worldview, whether you are playing 0E-5E, there is no "just a mundane person" in this world....

I think telling them is fine, but CR is not a very straightforward indicator of threat beyond the so-rare-it-is-useless case of a solo monster. The XP value is better since at least those values are designed to be added together, but even then you need the encounter guidelines tables as well as some intuition about how far off they are, which itself varies between PC parties. Assuming the # of...

Ultimately, whisper it, but it’s just possible that Americans mistook the European/British ranking system...

Meh. Barovia is a County, not a country. It has been ripped from the prime material plane as is. Nothing to say he is any kind of heir to whatever country his County belonged to. As for King’s this and King’s that - maybe guest rooms originally? As for King’s Accountant, perhaps every county had such a position to levy taxes ultimately for the King.

Levels of Sorcerer or Bard can allow you to cast more AofAs per long rest. A Hexblade can get heavy armour proficiency at the cost of just one feat. Other warlocks can get medium armor + shield for one feat.

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Barovia was never explicitly part of the Forgotten Realms. The original module makes no mention of the Realms, and suggests that Barovia be located in whatever campaign setting the DM is using. And I don't believe Barovia was ever mentioned in 2nd edition Forgotten Realms material, It's official location became "The Demiplane of Dread" only a couple of years after the first two adventures...

Well classically it was always Count. Barovia (prime) has ist origins in FR, it would be helpful and interesting to check wether it was a kingdom in FR. The last two adventures in the hyskosa hexad give some clue where prime barovia is in the FR, i just cannot recall it from Memory atm.

The definition of the various ranks of the peerage (Including "Prince") vary from country to country and age to age. In the original Ravenloft module he is referred to as Count, but not Prince. But Prince does not necessarily refer to the offspring of a monarch. Machiavelli's book, "The Prince" is really about the Medici - who ruled Milan by virtue of owning everything, rather than hereditary....

Lorelei will pursue at normal speed and uses her action to cast Eldritch Blast at the swamp giant again, if she is within range (120ft). Otherwise if she can see that she is out of range, she'll Dash in order to get closer but she will still stay far enough so that the monster can't suddenly turn around and attack her in melee, using her best judgement to estimate the distances. Feel free to...

When I was a little bitty baby My mama done hatch me from my egg-sack In them old mithral mines back home Well It was back in in the Mere of Dead Men Just a dozen miles from the Thornhold border In them old mithral mines back home Well let me tell you now well got me in a fix I got my legs caught under a wizards tricks I had to limp a long, long way back home

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"I am quite adept at sorting things out" Aes pronounces, not looking at anyone in particular, and not entertaining any discourse on the topic. After, she studies the forest edge, and other townsfolk, a fork tongue licks at her snout for an instant. Her attention falls to the nearby gnome as he pitches his voice to be heard, her mouth forming a thin line which could be mistaken for a smile as...

Yeah, your interpretation of charisma in pathfinder...

I like the core idea though. Drop to 0 hp- 1 wound. Once at 3 wounds - dead. Id just incorporate some penalties like with exhaustion (maybe a double level of exhaustion) per wound. The group I play with is fine with penalties and rolling with disadvantage, after all its a game and plenty of other times u r penalized in D&D. Death rarely happens so when it does its ok it has some risk element to it

Stamr too is tired of the threats from his kinsman, but says nothing at this time. He's excited. He's not actually ever used the cloak he has been given. Or has taken, as the constabulary in Waterhorse insists. But might as well try it now. he lifts the hood over his head, and in doing so feels the tail of the cape bind itself to his ankles. Its a mysterious, magical feeling, and he's not...

waiting to take my action until the others have moved...

At Ramiel's introduction, Amicus looks down (further down), and rubs his hands through his hair. "Yeah. That's right." A meek smile.

OK I thunk up a couple more options for "instant death" that are less harsh than "die at 0". It seems to me that the salient effect is that you want heroes to die on their feet instead of bleeding out, but you want one-shot protection because getting one-shotted is sucktastic and unfun. 1. Bounce-Back: If you drop to 0 hit points, and you haven't dropped to 0 hit points since your last...

That’s not true, in 3.x zombies and skeletons has charisma 1, and the other undead have lower charisma than pathfinder’s ones

No. It's simply illustrative that HP in D&D are metagame information. The OP defined metagame information and asked for games which may or may not use it to a greater or lesser degree. Metagame was defined as making decisions as a character without the information that character would have. I provided the information a player has: You're standing on a bridge leaning on your spear. You're...