Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Burnside" data-source="post: 9595053" data-attributes="member: 6910340">I don't think TotM is less deadly (we had a TPK in Cragmaw Hideout, for example). I think complaints that 5E is too easy don't have a universal answer, but often boils down to some combination of three factors, none of which have to do with TotM vs minis/battlemaps/VTT:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Player skill level/system mastery means a difficult encounter for one table will be easy for another</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">DM gives out too many magic items</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Long rests occurring more frequently than designers intended</li> </ul>As to how you run something like Cragmaw Castle in TotM, the short answer is that TotM leans into a more cinematic, less granular/tactical style. When the Fellowship is passing through Moria, we see only what they see. We're not worried about exactly how many goblins are in Moria, and where precisely they are relative to the party. With Cragmaw, I basically decide that if the party "alerts" the castle's inhabitants, creatures start moving towards the source of the disturbance and arrive in such-and-such number of rounds based on their starting position. I might have a note that the goblins partying in the dining hall never get alerted unless a creature actually enters their area, because they are making too much noise. I will have some notes to track this - TotM doesn't mean I have to track everything in my head, it just means that not everything has to be visually represented. I'm not saying that tokens/battlemaps/minis don't offer a kind of fun that you don't get through TotM, because with TotM the tactical aspects are necessarily simpler. But TotM also offers much faster and much more flexible play; the DM can be very responsive and add new physical ideas and twists and features on the fly because it's all just verbal - you don't have the rigidity of a physical map to adhere to. If I suddenly have an idea mid-session that Cragmaw Castle has a secret elven prison hidden beneath it that you can access through King Grol's wardrobe, then I can instantly add it - I don't need to worry that it's not on the map, or that a map for that whole prison area doesn't exist, or that I don't have a token for the banshee in that prison.</blockquote>

Verification