D&D 5E How to take over a Marilith with a cantrip (not really...) - Our playtest report!

[Li Shenron]

Ok, forgive me if the title is obviously a joke... I'm just a tad excited that I finally managed to run a playtest adventure with the latest packet of DnDNext

So here is my thoughts and feeling about what we've seen in action. Admittedly, this was just a very small fragment of the whole game, but at least it's first-hand experience.

THE SETUP

I was asked to run a game of D&D during the Xmas week while at a cottage with friends. I had less than a week to prepare, and I am very out of shape in my DMing skills: I haven't run a game for the last 4-5 years or so, and while I've been keeping track of 5e rules packets, I also got confused already with all the changes at each iteration, so I certainly couldn't consider myself familiar with the current rules. In fact, I've made some pretty big mistakes during the game, but when we found out, we just adjusted ourselves to the (hopefully) correct rules and continue, no big deal.

Having only a few days to organize the material, print some handouts for the players and reference rules for myself, and seek out all my old polyhedral dice and as many pencils I could find at home, I soon quit the idea of running a published adventure. I just would not have had the time to familiarize with the plot and characters. I grabbed a very old BECMI-era adventure of the type where there is no plot, just a dungeon with traps and hazards, and the DM has to fill it with monsters.

I was going to have 3 players, only one of which had played D&D before (not 5e), and the others had almost no idea of what a RPG was. This was not my old usual gaming group. I had no idea of their expectations.

I therefore immediately decided that I was going to test the 5e playtest rules for the following "gaming style": as simple as possible + narrative combat + dungeon crawl.

In more details, the following is what I brought to the table for the players to create their characters. (I could have made it even simpler and use pre-gens, but I took my chances and decided not to spare the players from character creation, which is a very fun part of the game!)

Classes: Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, Wizard.
Races: NONE.
Backgrounds: About half of those in the packet, to make the choice simpler. In retrospective, I should have not used backgrounds at all, it would have saved us a good 15 minutes. I thought that it was going to be important for everyone to have skills and suggested equipment, but the equipment suggested by backgrounds is only a minor addition, and skills are not truly necessary to do things in the game.
Specialties/feats: NONE.
Alignment: NONE.
Equipment: we just used the suggested equipment by class + background.
Ability scores: messed up... I told them that the traditional way is rolling for them, but the fastest way is to use a fixed array. I asked what they wanted to do and they all said "roooolll!". Sadly, one player rolled very well, the other 2 unbelievably low. At the end, I suggested they all used the scores of the lucky players, and they agreed

Explaining the general points of the game (not the rules of exploration or combat yet) + creating the characters still took more than one hour, even with the massive simplification above... they practically had to choose only class, background and class features, but also calculate a few combat numbers. I guess, if they hadn't been new to the edition, it would have been 10 minutes.

Combat: I decided I was going to run this in a somewhat narrative way, i.e. no battlemats and minimal reference to distances and positions. When presenting the rules, I briefly told them that in combat they would have been able to: (a) attack, (b) cast a spell, (c) withdraw or (d) defend themselves (i.e. "dodge"), or alternatively come up with something else. Thus, I let them ask for anything different before presenting more possible combat actions.

Death: I told them that in an old-school dungeon crawl, your PC is kind of supposed to die, whereas in modern RPGing you're practically immune to death (I was pretty honest and upfront). However, I told them that even if this was indeed an old-school dungeon crawl, they were in fact immune to death, not because I cared for their PC but because I didn't want to stop the game for another half hour to create a replacement PC. I made it clear that this didn't mean they were immortal or invulnerable, but that should they "die", they would have been just knocked-out and in case of a TPK they would have been captured, which in fact they were.

(continues)

 

[Li Shenron]

THE CAST

They chose to play a Fighter, a Rogue and a Wizard. Let's call them Noah, Thrush and Sylvie. No Cleric... was I scared? Not at all!

Noah was a Strength-based, sword-and-board tank with the Protector fighting style. A Knight in the background. Everyone's best friend, really.

Thrush was very rogueish and as thief as can be, i.e. Thief rogue scheme + Guild Thief background. This choice caused the first small headache because of the overlapping skills, but I knew you can just replace them (chose Climb and Spot as replacements).

Sylvie was a generalist with the Sage background, so all her skills were Knowledge subskills. Academic Traditions in theory, but the player was so confused and undecided when choosing her known spells, that I stepped in and made a bold, very very generous decision, and told her she could just assume she knew all cantrips and all 1st level spells (she still needed to choose which ones to prepare today of course). I was not going to need to regret this decision later. I told her however that I was not going to give her any suggestion during the game, and in fact she missed some spells she could have used like Read Magic and Identify (as a ritual).

THE STORY

Just a summary, because there really was not much story at all...

The 3 adventurers had acquired a map of a dungeon (half a map actually, only the lower level) belonging to a long-time MIA Wizard, and decided to loot it.

To my surprise, the players were very good at moving in a dungeon. They took a lot of important precautions against dangers, they moved with care, they drew a map, they played the combats very tactically and creatively. They didn't however do so by exploiting the rules... they did all by narrative clever ideas that I was happy not to spoil or ruin. And just so that you know, I didn't fudge a single dice! The only thing I fudged was the actual layout of the dungeon, because it was way too big and tortuous, and after more than an hour of gameplay they hadn't had any combat (they were also very much trying to avoid all of them).

In the first evening of play, they explored half of the upper level, found/disarmed/avoided a bunch of traps, sneaked past a couple of groups of monster (something requiring a good plan, not just a base Stealth check), then almost stumbled upon a group of wandering cultists but managed to quickly arrange a great ambush by hiding in the perfect dark spot, distract the cultists with a Minor Illusion, sneak at their back and slaughter them all before they had a chance to act. They tried (unsuccesfully) interrogating one of them and examining their stuff, but only managed to get a hint that a cult had taken over the dungeon and was preparing a summoning ritual (I know, cheap story, I warned you...). Then continued to explore the level and had a couple more fights with giant centipedes living in the rubble, and a giant snake guarding some treasure, until finally finding the entrance to the lower level. We stopped here because it was already late at night.

On the second and last evening, they scouted the caves below, but the map was not particularly useful since it had no markings. Stumbled again into a few random encounters, always trying (successfully, at least partly - see below) to avoid actual combat, until they found a cave full of webs, set them on fire causing the giant spider (Aranea) to attack them and weaken them, then the smoke and the battle noise caused the cultists' hobgoblin guards to arrive and they won. As promised, the TPK was turned into a TP-capture.

They woke up in a prison cell with vista over the hall where the cultists were summoning a demon (Marilith), and they started discussing how they could stop them from the prison cell. No workable idea was brought up, so they just watched the show. As the Marilith appeared, the cultist Leader made the usual useless speech/praise and asked her for service, at which point the Marilith pointed out that she wanted payment first... the cult leader mentioned about having a bunch of humans ready to be sacrificed. He shouldn't have. Before I could speak the demon's response, Sylvie from the prison cell cast Minor Illusion to replicate the cult leader's voice coming from the cult leader himself... offering himself and all the rest of the cultists in the same room for self-sacrifice! I liked the twisted mind in such a beginner player, and I let it be It also allowed me to put my theatrical side at work and give a pretty good description of the extremely pleased response of the Marilith and the screams of the panicking cultists as she raised up her coil and displayed her six arms fully equipped (it was a nice wow! moment, apparently none of the 3 players have heard of this monster before and I had only described her as a beautiful but at the same time horrific large female figure until this moment... they didn't expect her to be half-snake and six-armed!).

At this point we were very late at night, so we decided to call it finished. We rolled a few dice to let the rogue unlock the prison (once the demon had finished her job and went beck to wherever it came from, obviously), and the whole party looted the cultists bodies or spare body parts scattered in the hall, and left the dungeon from a secret exit found.

 

[Li Shenron]

PLAYTESTING COMMENTS

Overall, I can say that the system definitely allowed me to run the game with the style I had in mind. There was nothing I had left out from character creation or combat rules, that later I felt I should have not.

Fighter: This was the PC that worked better. In fact, it had no problem at all. The player used almost everything on the character sheet except the Ride skill (obviously) and Knight's Station (nobody used their Background's Trait, but this was totally expected).

Rogue: Sneak Attack came up only a couple of times, because while the players were very good before and after combat, during combat they usually played very straightforward (in fact, they did almost nothing else than just attack or cast a spell), so they weren't usually looking for ways to get advantage except when ambushing. Anyway, SA felt just like a minor bonus overall, nothing memorable.
Quick Reflexes felt a nice feature when used for initiative, but also rendered the Rogue totally immune to surprise! It was quite obvious that when surprised, the Rogue would always choose not to skip the surprise round rather than having an init bonus on the second round.
We screwed up Skill Mastery big time... for a while we rolled the d20 twice instead of the d4, no wonder the Rogue was very happy about it. After we found our mistake, our Rogue was very disappointed. I am probably also affected by this course of event because right now I think the current Skill Mastery sucks to the point of being better left off.

Wizard: Generally speaking, cantrips took over spells. Keep in mind that the characters did not have a long rest during the adventure, but anyway the Wizard only cast ONE 1st level spell (in fact, I never knew which other spell she had prepared...), and otherwise did everything only with Cantrips. If you remember, I allowed her to know all cantrips, but truth is that most of the time she used the combat ones (Ray of Frost, Shocking Grasp...) or the illusions to deal with most situations. Maybe the combat cantrips are still a little bit too good.
Detect Magic was the only 1st level spell she used. We thought that 1 minute duration was too short because she expected to use this while advancing in the dungeon. I wonder if this spell could work better if allowed as a Ritual.
Minor Illusion was her favourite spell, and used it both as ghost sound and as silent image. We had a couple situations that the rules didn't make clear: once she wanted to create the image of a lit torch, which I said was beyond the spell capabilities, but in fact the rules don't explicitly say so; another time, she wanted to move the image beyond corners, and I had to let her do so because I couldn't find line-of-sight restrictions in both the spell description and the general rules for magic.
She also made very good use of Knowledge skills to get various clues. I ruled that she could use Arcana to identify magic items (she could have cast Identify as ritual or Read Magic, but I didn't want to suggest them) with only a chance of success. We also agreed that "Dungeoneering" is a silly-sounding name, "Knowledge Underground" sounded a bit better.

Other problems: one problem we found with the short-rest healing rules was that the players tend not to use it when they have only 1-2 hp of damage, because they don't want to "waste" their HD which usually heals more than that, but they all complained that their PCs would have definitely wanted to heal those injuries.
Maybe a hit-point pool of healing would have worked better than the HD mechanic.

Surprise seemed a bit too good to get, because it's a full round worth of actions. When the PC got it, the monsters couldn't sometimes even act before being all killed.

Damage was indeed generally quite high compared to hit points. I think only the combat against the aranea lasted into the third round... (but I have to say that here we made another mistake... in the first day we played that criticals gave also spells an additional dice of damage!).

Saving throws: some confusion from the wording of ST being loosely described as "reactions" which is a technical word. It would be important to clarify this, because if they are technically reactions, you can only do one ST per round, and I don't think this is really the case!

I was worried about the lack of penalties for ranged attacks in melee and casting in melee but they didn't come up because the Rogue could do better damage with the rapier than the shortbow, and the Wizard just preferred spells that worked from range.

(continues tomorrow with comments on monsters)

 

[Tuft]

Engaging description of what sounds like a great game!

To my surprise, the players were very good at moving in a dungeon. They took a lot of important precautions against dangers, they moved with care, they drew a map, they played the combats very tactically and creatively. They didn't however do so by exploiting the rules... they did all by narrative clever ideas that I was happy not to spoil or ruin.

Sounds like classical 1E play indeed!

I may be damaged by that kind of play too, but I always felt sneaking past opponents of unknown capabilities much more exciting than a set-up balanced encounters...

 

[Rhenny]

Great report! I loved reading it. D&DNext does work well with the type of game style you've experienced. I love how easy it is for the DM to improvise on the fly. That wizard idea to mimic the cult leader's voice was awesome.

I've DMd and played the rogue, and I agree with your player's comments. One thing to note is that when the skill dice gets bigger (even next level when it is 1d6 instead of 1d4) skill mastery becomes more and more useful, so what doesn't seem so hot for the 1st level rogue, becomes better at 2nd, and really good at 7th and above. Also, if the rogue really wants to be good at something, he/she can always use skill focus and skill supremacy to really become an expert sneak, etc. Yeah, it eats up feats, but it does allow players to really specialize if they want to.

 

[Li Shenron]

THE BADDIES

The party has fought the following encounters:

Wandering cultists: 2 Dark Acolytes + 1 Dark Adept
Small group of vermins: 6 Giant Centipedes
Guarding snake: Giant Snake, customized with added Constrict ability
Great spider: Aranea (without spells)
Cult's guards: 3 Hobgoblins + 1 Hell Hound

As I mentioned before, the players really tried their best to avoid combat whenever possible. They managed to completely sneak around two encounters (a group of Goblins + Leader, and another wandering cultists party), they simply walked back away from a Gray Ooze (which was too slow to pursue them), sacrificed a shield to a Rust Monster to avoid fighting it (they didn't know it was a very easy monster), and kept a much larger group of Giant Centipedes at bay using torches and the ubiquitous Ray of Frost.

I had planned other encounters in the dungeon: skeletons, zombies, and a toned-down (50% HP) ochre jelly just because I was curious to see how they would have dealt with its "split & spawn" ability, but they didn't stumble upon these. The last group of cultists was about a dozen Dark Acolytes plus one Dark Priest, but I was planning to send clues that they should have not tried to take them all down at once.

My general comment on monsters is that they felt overall quite weak in terms of damage output (except the Aranea) but OTOH had too high attack bonuses. I thought I understood that they were designed this way so that they would hit often but hurt little, therefore creating an "attrition effect" on the PCs, which instead were supposed to hit less but hurt more, but it's hard to tell since the combats usually only lasted 1-2 rounds. Anyway, this IMHO had a couple of problems: (a) it feels artificial in design terms to toss such high attack bonuses to practically all monsters (of course, only I was aware of this, since the players didn't see their stats), and (b) it created an odd effect when the monsters tries something else that uses its ability scores directly (thus no mystery bonus applied).

For example, I thought the Giant Snake was a good chance at testing the Grapple rules. Well, with its +5 attack bonus it had an easy time hitting, but with only +2 to Strength then breaking free from its grab was easy as well for both the Fighter and the Rogue.

Speaking of Grapple, it also felt unnecessary to have 2 levels (grappling + pinning). There is no penalty whatsoever for being only grappled except that your speed is 0.

Something that was unexpectedly powerful was the Hobgoblin's Disciplined ability... with their longspears reach, they were practically able to give each other advantage all the time. They didn't really feel they should have been a 20xp-only monster.

We also got the feeling that the DC of monsters special abilities were too easy to beat. I am unsure however, since the PC's ability scores were pretty damn high. Anyway, the manage to beat almost all occurrences (e.g. I tried to let the Aranea focus on webbing them, since I was aware that 1 successful hit plus its poison would have killed any PC outright, however the webs were for all easy to break free from), although they failed the easiest ones i.e. the centipede's poison. And that was actually quite a cool ability! The players liked (so to speak) the small damage but lingering penalties due to the poison, and when they met more centipedes at once, they immediately decided they didn't want to fight them.

THE TRINKETS

I had hidden a few magic items in the dungeon and on the intelligent monsters, some of which were specifically meant to help them in the most challenging encounters, but eventually they only found a simple +1 amulet of protection, a few healing potions, and two arcane scrolls.

The Wizard player didn't notice she could have identified the scrolls with Read Magic (this is good, since I let her know all cantrips, but because she didn't use more than ~5 of them, this ended up playing quite close to the RAW) and everything else with a ritual-ized Identify (now free of costs), and I didn't want to suggest these unless she noticed them herself. But OTOH I allowed her to identify all items with a Knowledge Arcana check. I think that for Scrolls, the RAW specifically says that you need Read Magic, but the general section on identifying magic items mentions that Knowledge check should be fine (although obviously not automatic, and chance for partial identification is hinted at). For the record, she succeeded with an Invisibility scroll but failed to identify a Rope Trick scroll that I had meant to give them to getting a long rest in the middle of the dungeon (even tho technically the spell lasts 1 hour, but I was going to override this).

 

[Rhenny]

It is true that monsters are not so dangerous, and some of the abilities seem too good for the xp value, but they are definitely moving in the right direction. I've found that the AC values seem to be a bit low. In the new package the Troll has an AC of 11. That's too low. Even an unarmored Troll should have tough hide that's equal to at least AC 13 or 14.

I'm hoping that D&DNext will have default monsters that are not so difficult (like the way they are now), but WoTC will give clear guidelines for DMs to change them easily. Something like...1/2 hp for mooks, regular hit points for average/default, +50% or more for elite. Other abilities will also make a monster more dangerous (as you noticed even with the centipede's poison). This way, individual DMs can mix and match to create more or less challenging encounters whenever they want to. It is always easier to add than take away.

I'm also hoping that WotC makes it so that average encounters last more like 3-4 rounds. Increasing the number of rounds just a little bit will give players more opportunities to make tactical decisions. Easy encounters can take 1-2 rounds...average ones 3-4 rounds...and tough encounters should take 5 or more rounds. If they get this right, then everyone will be able to create encounters that appeal to all play styles including 4e style combat.

So far, I've DMd and played a number of sessions with this package and I've found it really easy to adjust encounters for 2 to 5 PCs, making different encounters more or less challenging as I see fit. I like that type of freedom.