Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 2902779" data-attributes="member: 1165">Absolutely not!I keep a "library" of NPC cards. It's pretty easy to create a bandit group and have them attack in the night. There either needs to be a warning ("there are bandits in these hills", burned out caravans, etc) or some reason (the bandits have trackers who followed the PCs). It's almost like a random encounter, as coming up with these reasons takes little time, but you're pulling out that spiked chain warrior and the druid bandit king you've been saving up for a fun occasion instead of just throwing a dozen low-level warrior bandits at them like the random encounter table would tell you to do.Also, players kind of hate those encounters. They're really hard to actually suprise the players (okay, who's on first watch and where are you putting your camp ... oh, I'm not paying more attention than I usually do, really), they probably didn't draw their camp so you have to do it on the battlemat or ask them to do it, it takes players a round or more to wake up and get up from being prone, they have to draw weapons, they probably aren't wearing armor, all their hour-per-level buffs are gone which is a huge deal if you're a wizard, etc)...The last time a DM did that to me, I was a mounted warrior. It took me so long to wake up, get up, pull out my sword etc that I ordered my horse (which I've never used to attack before) to fight. It kicked a fair amount of arse due to the Wild Cohort template, which is fair, I guess, because my character didn't get to do a blasted thing by the time the encounter was over. We faced a single rogue, and instead of CdGing me (he easily could have), he stole something from me. He nearly made it into the woods, too, where he would have been safe. It was a plot-based and not a random encounter, and the DM obviously did not go out of his way to kill our characters at our most vulnerable, but it was still frustrating wasting all that time just waking up, getting up, and dealing with the darkness.I wouldn't use the Survival skill rules to avoid getting lost. That just makes the heroes feel incompetent. Distant mountains, the passage of the sun, moss on trees and the freaking road they're probably following (heroes without survival tend to do that, you know) generally prevents the heroes from getting lost. Even if they can't walk on the road because of patrols or something, they probably know which direction it's going in and can walk a mile west of it (or whatever direction).</blockquote>

Verification