Old-school dungeon crawl using 5e playtest rules

[Jimmy Disco T]

Hi all


Just to let you know, I'm having a bit of a tricky time at the moment with family members on both sides of my family in two different hospitals for some fairly serious reasons. Posts from me may be a bit sporadic for the time being. If I'm holding up the flow of the game at any point then please by all means NPC me until I get back into the swing of things.

 

[Kobold Stew]

Sorry to hear it, Jimmy. Be well, and best wishes to your family.

 

[Li Shenron]

Some questions for the DM from the update -- more!

So in making the transition to the new druid, I asked about dropping Guidance and the background.



We've used Guidance, and so I understand if you'd rather I kept it; if so I'll cast it now. But I think it's a spell neither of us particularly like, and with more choice for the druid's cantrips, I'm still happy to swap it out.

The background seems legit to me RAW, but I thought I'd confirm.

I've got a third question now, that I hadn't noticed before, that has emerged because of this thread.

I see there's been a change in the Druid armour proficiency rules -- whereas i the play test, it was just select armours (light armours and hide), it now says proficiency in all light and medium armours but with the absolute proviso that no metal armours.

By my read, that's a big change, because it means that the dwarves proficiency in armours does not improve what the Druid can do. It also means that Bartleby's scale mail is no longer right. If that swaps for Studded Leather (which is apparently fine?), Bartleby's AC will go from

Scale 14 +2 (dex) +2 (shield) = 18
Stud 12 +3 (dex) +2 (shield) = 17

so that's another point off the AC. I'll make that change, if it's alright to swap studded for scale.

When the character started, there were two strengths with the Mountain Dwarf Druid that made it interesting -- the Wisdom bonus and the possibility of wearing armours. With the PHB, these are now gone.


Please let me know if you are seeing things differently, or if I'm missing something. Cheers!

Sorry that I noticed your post only today

You can still swap the cantrip if you want to. I don't see any problem with that, we're still using this PbP game to better understand how we like 5e, so experimenting a bit with it is OK.

I also notice that thread with the Druid's armor restrictions. IMHO they are really dumb: we can have an evil paladin but not a druid in metal armor. This is truly dumb design. Except that since it's part of a Druid's "ethics", I demand it's just at the same level as alignment stuff is: totally irrelevant, unless you want it to be otherwise. Hence, you can wear any armor you want (and by the RAW, you're proficient in scale mail).

Hi all

Just to let you know, I'm having a bit of a tricky time at the moment with family members on both sides of my family in two different hospitals for some fairly serious reasons. Posts from me may be a bit sporadic for the time being. If I'm holding up the flow of the game at any point then please by all means NPC me until I get back into the swing of things.

Sorry to hear that I wish them all the best for a good recovery!

 

[Kobold Stew]

Hi Team,

Please forgive the impertinence of this post. I used to enjoy this game a great deal, but I feel we've lost what momentum we had.

We have been playing with these centipedes in different ways for seven weeks of real time at this point. While once we had a real energy that was driving this narrative forward, now I feel we are spinning our wheels. I honestly have no idea how many of us are actively here, or if we are still engaged in the game or not. PBP is always slow, but this is becoming agonizing. What might have been a fun 15-minute puzzle if we were all sitting at a table has not bloated into something I no longer am interested in solving.

I would like to keep playing (we've been at this for almost year now), but not if it means characters yelling at each other (even if it is "in character"), or Monty Python jokes. I may be alone in feeling this way, in which case you should tell me so. But I'd like to know who's still here, and who wants to continue. Once we know that, we can (please) move on.

 

[Shayuri]

Seeing as how one of the 'pedes is a PC, we're kind of obligated to see it through.

Sorry I'm not as smart as my character, and have no real idea what to do.

There's probably something super-obvious in hindsight, but I'll be damned if I see it now. I'll just go with my original plan B and we'll see what happens.

 

[Jimmy Disco T]

I'm still about, but my one idea about breaking the curse didn't work! I believe the PC centipede has a clue to of some sort... Would it be possible for our DM to take brief control of them and drop a hint, just to get us going?

 

[Kobold Stew]

I'm glad. I've just tried something else.

 

[Li Shenron]

Seeing as how one of the 'pedes is a PC, we're kind of obligated to see it through.

Yes, I have been trying to poll the player because I was about to take over his/her character to give you the next (big) clue how to break the curse.

But I don't know how to proceed now. Since I'm getting no response from the player, if you want, you can just leave the cursed humans/centipede to their own and continue exploring the other rooms. Or I can give you that clue

 

[Shayuri]

Hm. I guess we can send the NPCs out the way we got in...should be fairly safe as far as we know. And Su's retainers should be keeping camp not too far off, so they can hang out there, or try to get to town if they prefer.

So yeah, I'd be happier with the clue, so that we actually have some resolution to this scenario that we've spent so much time on.

 

[Kobold Stew]

Is communication in centipede form not viable? I finally thought I'd made a breakthrough, something that would work.