D&D General How Was Your Last Session?

[Richards]

Oops, sorry - I guess I should have mentioned we play 3.5. I had no idea 5E's confusion spell doesn't have a table of potential effects. (That is, assuming there's still a confusion spell in 5E? I honestly don't know. And at the risk of veering this thread off scope, can anyone tell me how the confusion spell works in 5E? Now I'm all curious.)

And Scrivener of Doom: thanks, but now I'm blushing!

Johnathan

 

[cbwjm]

Oops, sorry - I guess I should have mentioned we play 3.5. I had no idea 5E's confusion spell doesn't have a table of potential effects. (That is, assuming there's still a confusion spell in 5E? I honestly don't know. And at the risk of veering this thread off scope, can anyone tell me how the confusion spell works in 5E? Now I'm all curious.)

And Scrivener of Doom: thanks, but now I'm blushing!

Johnathan

5e confusion does have a table of random effects, not sure if it is the same as 3e. On a d10 roll at the start of the afflicted's turn:

1. Move in a random direction and take no action.
2-6. Doesn't move or take actions
7-8. Makes a melee attack against a random target if in range, otherwise it does nothing that turn.
9-10. It can act and move normally.

 

[Richards]

Ah, that explains it. In 3.5, it's percentile dice and it looks like this:

01-10 Attack caster with melee or ranged weapons (or close with caster if attack is not possible).
11-20 Act normally.
21-50 Do nothing but babble incoherently.
51-70 Flee away from caster at top possible speed.
71-100 Attack nearest creature (for this purpose, a familiar counts as part of the subject’s self).

Thanks for the clarification!

Johnathan

 

[Richards]

And getting back to the main subject of this thread, we had another 3.5 session yesterday, in which the D&D PCs are in Gamma World tracking down the sibling of a jackalope mount ridden by the gnome fighter PC. It turned out he'd recently been kidnapped by hissers (snake men very similar in appearance to D&D's yuan-ti abominations), which involved an attack upon a hisser nest with some interesting locals as allies. (I figure you can't visit Gamma World without encountering hissers - it's practically a requirement!)

Johnathan

 

[cbwjm]

Hissers sounds like the Yuan-ti's redneck cousins.

 

[The Green Hermit]

Ah, that explains it. In 3.5, it's percentile dice and it looks like this:

01-10 Attack caster with melee or ranged weapons (or close with caster if attack is not possible).
11-20 Act normally.
21-50 Do nothing but babble incoherently.
51-70 Flee away from caster at top possible speed.
71-100 Attack nearest creature (for this purpose, a familiar counts as part of the subject’s self).

Thanks for the clarification!

Johnathan

I think I want to combine the two lists now!

 

[noko]

I have set my 5e game on a version of Toril where the old Isle of Dread is known as Tymora and has a strongly Polynesian flavor, a good deal of the background music is Hawaiian ukelele or ocean sounds played under the TOA soundtracks and rum is involved in game but I digress. My players have made their way to the town of Tymora, running into a wedding party on the way which was attacked by a party of bandits led by a powerful hunter attempting to kidnap the bride.

This past session they discovered the wedding party was in need of cash for the burial of the bride's uncle (killed in the ambush) and agreed to go pearl diving. Most of my players are from the Moonsheas and have a small quantity of a moss that reconstitutes into a water breathing elixir. They recognized the moss for sale in the village marketplace by a seller who had no idea what it did. They proved its usefulness and headed off with the groom and friends to dive for valuable black pearls off the coast at the base of a large coral reef. They gained quite a few pearls but were attacked by swarm after swarm of venomous coral snakes and barely survived. Two members of the groom's group did not survive but it was still quite a haul and the party was able to afford all the supplies they needed to journey into the interior. As they were heading out, they realized there was a commotion in the marketplace with speculators attempting to buy up all the remaining Moonshaes seaweed. Actually, the only remaining seaweed of the right type is aboard the PC's ship, where it's been sitting unused in the hold for the past in-game year. They quietly joined their Tabaxi guides, mounted their riding lizards, and headed out of town to the massive jungle gates and the island proper. Next game tomorrow night.

 

[Richards]

Hissers sounds like the Yuan-ti's redneck cousins.

I even gave the hissers encountered by the PCs their traditional weapons: laser guns and golf clubs!

Johnathan

 

[noko]

People were tired, grumpy, and unprepared, so I cut it short. Today we are supposed to start some downtime, so I am going to review what tool proficiencies can actually do. Along with using the ones we have, my kids need to start thinking about what might be beneficial to start training in. House rules say that they can still produce goods while training, but it takes longer (plus the 1 gp training charge), decreasing every 50 days of training, so that in the last 50 days production is at normal speed, just with the added on training fee. I haven't figured out how to do something similar with languages/weaponry. Languages will probably be connected to a d20 roll and weaponry will probably have some reduced effectiveness.

How do other people handle this? It just doesn't make sense to me to go from 0% proficiency the entire time you are training to 100% proficiency the day you finish training.

I handle it by not thinking about it too hard. Not to mention, they've usually obviously needed the upgrade for a bit so it's sort of a relief to say it's done.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Had a good session, exploring a dungeon, finding stuff, but were reminded of the perils of short rests without really thinking it through. The Warlock's player was basically demanding a short rest, so we took one. In a dungeon full of weird statues of death dogs. After we'd killed a bunch of cockatrices. As one of the players I feel like I am partially responsible for this idiocy, but in my defense, I didn't realize cockatrice petrification in 5E was never permanent.

Anyway, yes, the many death dogs un-petrified about 10 minutes into our "short rest". I feel this was partially bad luck. Even with 24 hours, how were we to know it happened exactly 24 hours ago. I suppose we should have at least been smashing the "statues" which we had by then realized were petrified, but we don't have the usual "smash all suspicious statues" policy going because that doesn't end well in Ancient Greece-analogue worlds.

So we were surrounded by death dogs, and very nearly eaten. Un-ideal positioning and tight confines left the AC12 Sorcerer fighting one of the dogs one-on-one, but she gave a good showing (at once point overcoming disadvantage with every single roll on her main and off-hand attacks being totalling over 20!), whilst my AC18 Druid could only watch. Next time I'll grapple her and move her away, and then take her place. I should have thought of that at the time! Pretty close to a TPK and I think if the DM hadn't been forgetting to roll some stuff (that we didn't realize he was forgetting until he said), we'd have been puppy chow.