Recent content by Fimbria

I have played a semi-peaceful paladin, mostly by accident. I was aiming for a lighthearted feel to the character, and part of that was the resolution to roll diplomacy at every opportunity. As it happened, that campaign featured many undead, automata, plants, and other non-sentient opponents, so...

Lots of good advice here; it will be difficult to add to this. Seems to me there are three primary defenses in the world: surprise, social pressure, and tanks. Surprise: You see that rogue? The one with with sending stones, a silent blade, and a sleep spell? That is a scout. Their job is to...

Mostly the implications are that it's a safe explanation of how the spell works. You can summon bears even if you are adventuring in a bear-free region. You will never accidentally summon the king's dancing bear during a performance. You can send a thousand bears to their deaths without a twinge...

Here's a bit of unintuitive logic. In homebrew games, experience points are actually a malus, not a bonus. The DM will generally scale encounters to match the party level, so gaining levels is a treadmill. At best, it goes nowhere. At worst, you're playing 3E or 4E and the scaling guidelines...

It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If the goal is to reward the player for overcoming obstacles and provide a sense of progression besides leveling up, then a +1 sword is exactly what you need. It's clearly better than what the party was using before, but it doesn't change how the...

Magic Item: The One Thousand and Forty Scrolls of Ezz Rarity: depressingly common Upon discovering these scrolls, the party must cast the spell written on it on or before the eighteenth day of the fourth month of the year. Failure to do so will doom the party to endless harassment by devilish...

You are completely nonproductive, always on the move, you have no goals beyond eating and talking, you take only what you can carry because you can't store anything for more than a day... Are you a professional convention crawler?

(XP for taking the high road: cool story material goes on the table, but bad player behavior is handled outside. Despite all of the advice to the contrary, most successfully resolved conflicts start with direct assertive communication.) As Cap'n Kobold says, it depends on who determines the sin...

By the way, now that you've written several pages of material on this character and built up an emotional bond with her, are you certain that your DM is running a non-fatal campaign? Because it would really suck if your character died five minutes into the first session.

I'd suggest a small revision. Give him the amulet of bear striding, but change it so that it never recharges. After those three uses are expended, you and the player will evaluate it. If you like how it turned out, the druid will reverse engineer the spell, and from then on it will part of his...

Buy two scarecrows. Disguise them as halfling mages. When a fight breaks out, set them down gently, back off as far as you can, and shout "Wizards, cast the summoning ritual!"

Wear a crown and impersonate the king. Hide under a cardboard box and be Snake. Stand on stilts and play a giant. Make an inflatable disguise and play a dragon. Disguise yourself as a giant tentacle, then cast Mirror Image and play Cthulhu. They don't have to be disguises *for you*. Wear...

He can't. He's the highest authority around. The moment he signs a piece of paper, it becomes legal currency. He can't forge anything in his own country. However, he could go to the next kingdom and forge documents there. He could buy from traveling merchants with false contracts. When the...

You threw something that you thought your players could handle, and through some combination of imperfect judgment and poor luck, you failed in your goals. It sucks, but it kinda happens to everyone. The question is, how do you handle failure? Generally, people who fail in their goals do one of...

Two weeks of downtime to make money while building a village, while playing the role of the mayor. 1. Establish a trade route to a neutral nation or village. 2. Build a bank or other business. 3. Levy taxes. 4. Convert one of your old dungeons into a gold mine. 5. Sell the rest of your old...