Recent content by JamesLFlowers

So this past session our DM, who is the hell spawned child of a mad genius and a evil demon, setup the encounter to happen in an extraplanar region of chaos. And being chaotic, the environment kept changing. One round, everything slowed down, the next magic stopped working, etc. The look on...

Godhood. I had a AD&D thru 2e Paladin whose patron God of Justice was killed in a Godswar and he took the remaining part of the God into his soul. He advanced through 20th level and into Epic level games before finally transitioning into becoming the new God of Justice and patron of LG...

A recent high level adventure, the party was sent to stop a rampaging tarrasque. But, it turned out to be an intelligent spell-casting beast not the normal dumb force of nature. Was a major mind-blown experience when it in the middle of combat, its stopped and asked why we were attacking it...

In the end, you are doing exactly what I was trying to get at. An internal faction conflict of a powerful faerie court... now what side do you choose? Who do you trust? Who do you not trust? What actions do you take? And those actions have overarching consequences, which could include...

Lots of situations requiring roleplay rather than combat. Make players actually think and work their skills rather than simply bash another boss. By the time a player and character reaches a high-level they should be able to work through complex politics, and other high level problems. And...

There are many real world examples of the evolution of Orcs in the game. Rough tribal groups that were pillagers and raiders and evolved into traders, explorers, etc over time.

One issue we found in our last high-level game was just the time some things take. When you take into account features, abilities, counter-abilities, lair actions, legendary actions, and everything else, a round of combat can really stretch out. In the end we found that after a point...

Command is a ONE-WORD spell. So any intelligent creature is going to think of ways around the command. For example "APPROACH" well I was coming over there to kill you anyway. "HALT" well I stopped but it doesn't stop me from shooting you full of arrows as soon as I am able. This has always...

Played 2e extensively during high school and college. Always felt that 2e was one of the heydays of D&D with new settings, game world expanding, etc. Unlike a lot of people, I loved THAC0 and always found it an easy way to calculate hits and misses in combat.

My current DM loves monsters who seem to be one thing and then suddenly are something else, especially when the transformation is due to player actions. Sort of like feeding the Mogwai after midnight or the Flerken from MCU. Its so cute... AHHHHH!

Mid-Apocalypse. Just finished a campaign in Peterson's Planet Apocalypse setting where the lost lower plane of Underhell has resurfaced and is invading the Material Plane. The players were able to defeat the ArchLord in charge of the invasion of Toril and shut the portals which stopped that...

Make the party work for it. Now I don't mean throw things overpowered so the party gets killed. But make the party think and work. Something more than the run up to the bad guy and bash him with the magic sword while the guy in the robe hits him with a Ray of Death and Destruction. Remember...

A few thoughts... Ship to ship combat... as others have posted, the goal is to loot the ship which means you have to take it. So ship to ship combat is more disabling than destroying and then BOARDING which is standard character on NPC combat except you don't have that great over-armored...

"A true pirate is going to be evil". This one I am going to have to disagree with. Look at the history of piracy in the Caribbean and you see that many pirates ended up pirates because of politics. Take Captain Kidd. He set out on a legally financed and supported privateering mission. He...

I have seen many works where the Seelie Court is "beautiful" and the unSeelie Court is "ugly". So a creature like a brownie would be UnSeelie simply because they were not beautiful. Also seen it broken out in terms of power, a creature would be unseelie simply because it did not have power -...