DMG II -- In my hands . . .


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Particle_Man said:
Feats include: having a mentor, having an apprentice, guild membership and guild leadership. Just skim reading though...

That's all of them, I believe. ;)

As for the rest of likuidice's original question, there are no new spells or other abilities -- except for the aforementioned teamwork abilities, which are very cool. There's also an extension of those abilities, companion spirits, which allows the party access to a "pool" of stuff: HP of healing, plusses to skills, etc.

As a whole, the book doesn't really have the whole "players' grab-bag of cool stuff" thing going on. ;)
 

Felon said:
Yes what? Is there a condition or isn't there? A mob of crazed villagers can be considered to be in a primal state of mind, allowing them to act with a single will.

Or, any time the village gets attacked by a troll, can the villagers start leaping together into an amalgam battleform like a medieval Voltron?
By my understanding, a mob can occur any time there's a sufficient number of creatures of the same type and inclination to form the mob. A troupe of gorillas, for instance, or a horde of zombies could form a mob just as easily as a bunch of angry peasants.

I've been reading about the Regulators' rebellion in North Carolina history, and I gotta say mobs are a scary thing. They even dragged one of the Founding Fathers out of his house and kicked him half to death. I'm getting htis book on thursday just so I can put the fear into my players of low-level monsters in very large numbers.
 



DamnDamnDamn! I like this book! I'm torn!

I especially like the mob creature rules. All the threads about "how many hundreds of commoners can a 20th level Barbarian wipe out before dying?" are definitely gonna change...
 

Henry said:
I especially like the mob creature rules. All the threads about "how many hundreds of commoners can a 20th level Barbarian wipe out before dying?" are definitely gonna change...

That's the #1 thing I'm interested in as well. Those of you that have the book - how suitable do you think the "mob" template is for a quick and dirty mass combat system? Can mobs use missle weapons?
 


I just got this book for my burfday from a member of my gaming group and I like it a lot so far. I've started reading from the beginning and haven't skipped ahead so I can't answer any questions about mobs and such (not yet at least).

But thanks to the fact that Robin Laws helped to write it and it incorporates a bunch of stuff about Player Types and how to cater to them from his Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering, I can now answer a lot of threads by saying, "Do you have the DMGII?..."
 

It sounds like I'll be disappointed with the mob template again. I had issues with it from the Dungeon article and it sounds like it hasn't changed much from there. I understand using variant rules for hp and damage when we have thousands of insects or vermin, and it would make sense for similar rules for hundreds of low-CR creatures like commoners or zombies. But 48 commoners transform into a 30 HD creature with hp equal to all the creatures combined? That strikes me as a little ridiculous. For one thing, the saves are insanely boosted. If a bunch of commoners have little to no chance to avoid a DC 20 fireball, how come they can easily evade it when tightly stacked together? And it should be much easier to lose their combat effectiveness than just invidually-targetted death effects. A decent fighter would theoretically take off 2% of the group's total combat effectiveness per hit, or 10% in a full attack. And I agree that it's silly that Cleave and Whirlwind Attack gets nerfed, and even area effects are much less effective this way. I mean, the only real value of Cleave, Whirlwind Attack, and evocation magic at this point is takign out mooks, and this would completely nerf all of them.

And the large size mob's even weirder! I mean, a dozen ogres? That's two rounds of attacks by a barbarian or one mid-range fireball, but they become ten times stronger by squeezing together a bit? That's not even enough to justify the argument that a fireball wouldn't kill them all because the inner bodies block the damage to those farther back, especially since the mob would lose no combat effectiveness from said bodies.

Oh, Lonny, I just realized the chaos this could cause if the PCs try to turn it about. Finally a really effective combat use for those hundreds of 1st and 2nd level followers you get from Leadership! Or they could just gather a few dozen beggars and use Diplomacy to incite them. I'm sure somebody here remembers the infamous "beggar mob" stories from Knights of the Dinner Table.
 

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