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lowkey13
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No Longer an Interest Check - 5E Rise of Tiamat + Corebooks PBP - OOC
- Thread starter Envisioner
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jmucchiello
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Regarding Ana's reaction to Keth, there will probably be some unexpected prejudice that manifests as coldness. But assuming Keth is an upstanding person, Ana should get past her initial desire to avoid the half-orc.
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Envisioner
Explorer
Well, sorry to triple-post earlier, but I think this finally gets me all caught up.
Well I’d call 35ish more than “a few”, but still, the fact you can complete a character in less than an hour has me impressed. I’ll look at him after I’m done posting this.
They do not. I admit that they are less interesting because of this, but I think they’re inherently more interesting than elves and dwarves in the first place, so I consider it balanced out. Per the PHB (page 43), tieflings get +2 CHA, +1 INT, darkvision, resistance to fire damage, the Thaumaturgy cantrip (which is pure flavor and largely irrelevant; it might as well just be the phrase “I look really cool”), and 1/day spells Hellish Rebuke and Darkness (which come online at levels 3 and 5, so you have both of them by now). I think that’s pretty close to what you said anyway, but if not, this is what I’d like you to use.
Well put. I certainly try not to abuse my rule 0 privileges, but the bottom line is, there is no game without a GM, and being a GM is a lot of work. “Your cooperation is appreciated”, I say in much the same tone of voice that an employer says “we appreciate you obeying our company policies” despite the fact that they’ll fire your butt the moment they catch you doing otherwise.
Well this inherently leads to the question “why isn’t everyone a wizard” and “why haven’t non-wizards gone extinct” and so forth. I very much try to push away from this approach to wizardry, toward a more “hard fantasy” approach where magic’s limits are very specific; I can’t go as far as I’d like to since we’re sticking with Forgotten Realms, so I have to respect the milieu despite how uncomfortable it makes me. But even if wizards are all-powerful, I can easily say “please no wizards” in the game if necessary; I’d prefer not to go that far, so again, I appreciate your willingness to work with me.
In most cases, it’s more like “because the wording doesn’t specifically say you can’t”. But also there’s the fact that I generally haven’t read all the spells, and certainly haven’t memorized them. In some cases, I know their 3E version but haven’t double checked how 5E changes it (even though comparing the two is something of a hobby of mine; it’s also an immensely huge task that isn’t particularly rewarding, so the work goes very slowly).
There are aircraft, and there are anti-aircraft missiles, and there are measures that allow aircraft to defeat such missiles. The DM could have ruled that this was super ultra-darkness specifically created to thwart warlocks with Devil’s Sight. He may not have been quick-witted enough to think of that (or something even better) on the fly. Sometimes this sort of thing is the work of a bad DM; sometimes it’s the work of a bad player; sometimes it’s just a matter of being on different wavelengths. As long as the social contract of the game is respected, it should be possible to work such issues out.
Did you explicitly tell him so in advance? If so and he still put the ultra-darkness there, then maybe he was a bad DM. But if not, if you were trying to outsmart him by showing up for the session that he wouldn’t expect, then he was within his right to say “okay, I need you guys to go left, I could have just said the right hallway didn’t exist, instead I put a purely ornamental hallway that you can’t enter here, and now you’re trying to enter it, I must refuse”. That’s not so unreasonable when you put it that way, is it?
Probably, though perhaps not right in the middle of a session. There’s no one right way to handle this sort of thing; it just has to be negotiated.
You can absolutely pull the creature through spikes or a wall of fire; that sort of possibility is much of the reason to even have a spell that moves the target. (Pulling them off a cliff would require you to be past the edge of the cliff, so the usefulness is very situational, unless you’re flying and they’re not; if I put a 5-foot-wide chasm there and monsters on the other side of it, it’s likely I do in fact want you to yank them down there to their deaths.) I don’t know where you get the stuff about them being heavier, that isn’t in the spell text in my version of the PHB (which I believe is an early printing, since it’s fallen apart at the bindings and I heard that they fixed this issue later). I’m honestly not sure about the parts about using it to catch yourself, I’ll have to think about it. Since it’s a cantrip and thus unlimited in use, my first instinct is to say it should be pretty restricted in its applications, but I might go the other way on that because Rule of Cool. Lemme get back to you.
Hm. That’s very potent, but the wolves are pretty individually weak. There are a lot of ways that plan can fail, so I’m probably willing to say that it has a chance of succeeding. I’ll try to math it out later to be sure, but we’ll say that it can work this well at least once. Maybe as a result, the specific pack of wolves that you were summoning gets tracked down in the wild and slaughtered by your enemies, and then you have to find eight new wolves and establish a summoning bond with them, and they may not have the Pack Tactics if they weren’t previously a pack together...this way, the extremely effective tactic becomes a reward for sustained effort on your part, rather than just a single overpowered spell that the designers didn’t think through properly.
Pretty sure this is absolutely fine.
I’m going to have to give this one a second look before I’m sure (level 10 is pretty far off, so I have time). But my first blush impressions are, number one, there are enemies that can burrow, so you’re not totally invicible, though with tremorsense you’ll probably at least get a warning of their approach so they are unlikely to surprise you – although perhaps some of them have evolved a countermeasure, if they commonly prey on other burrowers. And two, I’m pretty sure there’s a rule against gaining more than one or maybe two short rests per day; the intent of the resting rule is to give the players what 4E called “encounter powers” and “daily powers”, so that some powers are 1/day and others are 1/battle. These durations are not meant to be used as a way to justify becoming permanently eenweencible. Again, I’ll have to look at this more carefully, the way the playtesters ideally should have before they signed off on all this stuff.
This is extremely stupid, but also entirely irrelevant, since this campaign caps out at around level 15. I did vaguely have thoughts of exploring the Epic Boons someday, and I’d rather not have to just say “no moon druids” at that point, but it’s likely to be a different campaign anyway, so we won’t worry about it for now.
The definition of “unique and intelligent” would seem to be subjective here. Given that magic is inherently just “the ability to do anything” unless it’s restricted, telling a decent story becomes basically impossible if there aren’t some such restrictions imposed; it turns everything into a childish duel of “bang I shot you” versus “nuhuh you missed”, and that’s not my idea of a good time. Exactly how to solve such issues is something every GM has to work out their own answer to; I have very limited real-life experience over the years, so I have yet to get all such matters figured out to my satisfaction. The solutions I have figured out, I’m inordinately proud of (for instance, the issues we’re having with Tiny Hut here echo similar problems I had with the 3E spell Rope Trick, which was available even earlier and could be read as allowing infinite rests; my solution there was to imagine that the extradimensional space involves the players clinging to an infinitely-long rope above a vast expanse of empty air, which certainly aren’t restful conditions, but do create a pretty cool mental image, and add a great deal of drama to the situation instead of simply letting the players avoid all danger with an utterly blase’ approach), and I gradually accumulate these innovations over the years. One day, I’ll have what is effectively a new edition created; for now, I essentially treat every game as an opportunity to conduct impromptu research and playtesting towards that goal.
I assume you mean “sweet talked”, although the typo is hilarious. I’d be interested to see the mechanics of how this worked, but I also think it could lead to some great roleplaying opportunities. While the Diplomacy rules have been broken for a long time, it’s been established for even longer than that, well before D&D itself, that bargaining with devils is a situation that goes wrong very quickly. So if this sort of situation did come up, I’d milk it for extra drama by assuming that your very impressive Persuasion check did change the devil’s mind, but only for a minute, before its naturally treacherous persona resurfaced and began plotting how to corrupt its new “friend” into the service of the Nine Hells.
Fighters being boring is definitely true (although 5E is a great improvement on 3E in that regard), and magic being something else entirely is also true. My attitude is generally that magic should be more effective than non-magic, but also more complicated, difficult to achieve, and costly. Playing a wizard effectively should be a huge amount of work, damned near on the order of passing a college class (since this way the player’s experience mirrors that of his character). I’m hugely opposed to things like the Eschew Materials feat in 3E, or the Spell Component pouch which carries over into 5E with the same effect; both of them make Wizarding easier, probably to appeal to the Harry Potter crowd, whereas I favor a more Aleister Crowley approach. Being unable to cast your best spell because someone picked your pocket and stole your entire supply of grasshopper legs or whatever – that’s good storytelling (well, it’s a hasty and crappy example of that which, if written much better, would become good storytelling). Just having a magic “I win” button for everything, which requires no thought or effort to exercise – at that point, we return to those questions I mentioned earlier about how “muggles” continue to defy Darwinism in such a universe.
Now skills, that’s an entire other rant for me to get into. As a 3E veteran, one of my biggest problems with 5E is the streamlining of the skill system; one of the reasons I never jumped to Pathfinder was that I tremendously disapprove of doing things like combining Hide and Move Silently into a single Stealth skill. 3E had more than twice as many skills as 5E does, and IMO even that number was inadequate; redefining a few old Skills as now being Tool Proficiencies is an interesting approach, but it doesn’t change the fact that many of the newly-combined Skills are just far too broad (Athletics, I’m looking at you). While I’m willing to go with these changes, out of a mix of laziness and accomodating the immense 5E playerbase, I also use the same simplicity as a reason to be very strict about Rule 0ing any system abuses that players may try to perform. The brevity of the written rules is not meant to make them widely open-ended legal documents; they are simply quick summaries meant to give GM and players alike a starting point.
I appreciate the spirit of what you’re going for; however, if I wanted to have to spell everything out in full detail in advance, I’d go code a video game. Playing in the tabletop RPG format inherently requires ambiguity and creativity. If your approach is to plan things in advance, then I would encourage you to tell me about these plans well in advance, so I can decide whether I agree with the logic you’re basing your approach upon.
I’ll give you an example that comes directly from the published adventure – one of the random encounters from the “Sea of Moving Ice” chapter (which is quite some distance away, so I’m hoping any spoilers I accidentally give here will be largely forgotten by the time we get there, but it’s still fairly early in the adventure path, so there’ll be time after it for us to continue adapting to each other’s game styles). So, let’s say that Keth is on board this ship, one specifically built for navigating Arctic waters, and the captain has mentioned in passing that these freezing seas are haunted by numerous monsters, among them the Merrow. I will now quote the entire text of that episode, with a few inconsequential edits, from the text of the book.
“At one point, either by day or night, with the ship either in open water or beached on the ice for repairs, five Merrow move as close as possible to {the ship} before attacking. If the characters are on the ship, the Merrow try to swamp it by making a DC 25 Strength check, with a +2 bonus to the attempt for each additional Merrow involved in the attempt. Success means that {the ship} lurches dangerously, and each creature on board must make a DC 15 Strength or Dexterity saving throw. On a failed save, the creature is dumped overboard. (To make things easy, divide the 40 crewmen into groups of five and make one saving throw for each group.) A creature that falls into the frigid water is swimming, and must make a DC 12 constitution save at the start of each turn that it is in the water. On each failed saving throw, the creature suffers one level of exhaustion. Characters in the water are preferred targets for monsters in the water.”
So, with only that text to base an entire encounter on, I must try to run the battle. Now, if your first reaction to the captain’s mention of Merrow is to immediately cast some spell which freezes the entire ocean for a 5-mile radius around the ship, trapping the merrow in solid ice, I’m going to be grumpy. (I’m not sure whether a Druid of level 8 or so has a spell on that order, because I haven’t memorized the entire freaking Druid spell list and everything on it.) So instead, let’s say that you take a more measured approach, and cast a spell that will warn when the merrow approach the ship, despite the fact that they’re lurking deep underwater and swimming up toward the ship’s shadow (or, if it’s on the ice, they’re slinking around behind the lee side of the berg, targeting the ship and crew by smell in the middle of the night, while most of the crew and perhaps also the PCs are asleep; they no longer have the whole dark ocean to hide in, but they do have a greater ability to tell how much activity is aboard the ship and thus save their ambush for the moment of lowest crew preparedness, so it works out to about equal degrees of danger either way.)
Given that this whole encounter is just an environmental hazard, not part of the main action of the adventure (and thus, if you expend too many resources, it’s likely that the main villain of the chapter will intuit that you’re at a weak moment and will strike out of nowhere right after this battle finishes), how would you approach this situation? You’re not likely to fail the saving throw and fall off the ship, nor do you likely care about the crew who have gone overboard, but the rest of the party is probably preoccupied with trying to save them; are you willing to risk fighting toe-to-toe against five CR 2 Merrow all by yourself? Or are you going to pull out some obscure technicality in the DMG which says that you can spot the merrow swimming under the ship by watching how the ripples of their passage reflect in a nearby iceberg, and prevent the entire encounter that way? Give me an idea of how your character is going to be acting while I’m preparing to spring this ambush on the party (or more properly on the NPCs, since the merrow don’t especially care whether they’re eating Keth and Annaliese or just a bunch of random sailors, but if they make off with too many of the sailors, you might be left unable to propel the ship, and thus stranded in the North with no way to either complete the mission or get home), as well as what you’ll do once initiative is rolled. It’s okay if you pretty easily beat the creatures, since this isn’t meant to be a major battle, and it’s also okay if you prudently advise the captain on a way to protect the crew against such dangers, since merrow are a known threat, even though the specific ambush is meant to come as a surprise.
Either way, what it amounts to is that I want you to gain an earned victory, but not gain an unearned one; your achievement should come from you actually having a good plan in-character, not just a better understanding of the out-of-game rulebook than mine.
Well I’d call 35ish more than “a few”, but still, the fact you can complete a character in less than an hour has me impressed. I’ll look at him after I’m done posting this.
They do not. I admit that they are less interesting because of this, but I think they’re inherently more interesting than elves and dwarves in the first place, so I consider it balanced out. Per the PHB (page 43), tieflings get +2 CHA, +1 INT, darkvision, resistance to fire damage, the Thaumaturgy cantrip (which is pure flavor and largely irrelevant; it might as well just be the phrase “I look really cool”), and 1/day spells Hellish Rebuke and Darkness (which come online at levels 3 and 5, so you have both of them by now). I think that’s pretty close to what you said anyway, but if not, this is what I’d like you to use.
Well put. I certainly try not to abuse my rule 0 privileges, but the bottom line is, there is no game without a GM, and being a GM is a lot of work. “Your cooperation is appreciated”, I say in much the same tone of voice that an employer says “we appreciate you obeying our company policies” despite the fact that they’ll fire your butt the moment they catch you doing otherwise.
Well this inherently leads to the question “why isn’t everyone a wizard” and “why haven’t non-wizards gone extinct” and so forth. I very much try to push away from this approach to wizardry, toward a more “hard fantasy” approach where magic’s limits are very specific; I can’t go as far as I’d like to since we’re sticking with Forgotten Realms, so I have to respect the milieu despite how uncomfortable it makes me. But even if wizards are all-powerful, I can easily say “please no wizards” in the game if necessary; I’d prefer not to go that far, so again, I appreciate your willingness to work with me.
In most cases, it’s more like “because the wording doesn’t specifically say you can’t”. But also there’s the fact that I generally haven’t read all the spells, and certainly haven’t memorized them. In some cases, I know their 3E version but haven’t double checked how 5E changes it (even though comparing the two is something of a hobby of mine; it’s also an immensely huge task that isn’t particularly rewarding, so the work goes very slowly).
There are aircraft, and there are anti-aircraft missiles, and there are measures that allow aircraft to defeat such missiles. The DM could have ruled that this was super ultra-darkness specifically created to thwart warlocks with Devil’s Sight. He may not have been quick-witted enough to think of that (or something even better) on the fly. Sometimes this sort of thing is the work of a bad DM; sometimes it’s the work of a bad player; sometimes it’s just a matter of being on different wavelengths. As long as the social contract of the game is respected, it should be possible to work such issues out.
Did you explicitly tell him so in advance? If so and he still put the ultra-darkness there, then maybe he was a bad DM. But if not, if you were trying to outsmart him by showing up for the session that he wouldn’t expect, then he was within his right to say “okay, I need you guys to go left, I could have just said the right hallway didn’t exist, instead I put a purely ornamental hallway that you can’t enter here, and now you’re trying to enter it, I must refuse”. That’s not so unreasonable when you put it that way, is it?
Probably, though perhaps not right in the middle of a session. There’s no one right way to handle this sort of thing; it just has to be negotiated.
You can absolutely pull the creature through spikes or a wall of fire; that sort of possibility is much of the reason to even have a spell that moves the target. (Pulling them off a cliff would require you to be past the edge of the cliff, so the usefulness is very situational, unless you’re flying and they’re not; if I put a 5-foot-wide chasm there and monsters on the other side of it, it’s likely I do in fact want you to yank them down there to their deaths.) I don’t know where you get the stuff about them being heavier, that isn’t in the spell text in my version of the PHB (which I believe is an early printing, since it’s fallen apart at the bindings and I heard that they fixed this issue later). I’m honestly not sure about the parts about using it to catch yourself, I’ll have to think about it. Since it’s a cantrip and thus unlimited in use, my first instinct is to say it should be pretty restricted in its applications, but I might go the other way on that because Rule of Cool. Lemme get back to you.
Hm. That’s very potent, but the wolves are pretty individually weak. There are a lot of ways that plan can fail, so I’m probably willing to say that it has a chance of succeeding. I’ll try to math it out later to be sure, but we’ll say that it can work this well at least once. Maybe as a result, the specific pack of wolves that you were summoning gets tracked down in the wild and slaughtered by your enemies, and then you have to find eight new wolves and establish a summoning bond with them, and they may not have the Pack Tactics if they weren’t previously a pack together...this way, the extremely effective tactic becomes a reward for sustained effort on your part, rather than just a single overpowered spell that the designers didn’t think through properly.
Pretty sure this is absolutely fine.
I’m going to have to give this one a second look before I’m sure (level 10 is pretty far off, so I have time). But my first blush impressions are, number one, there are enemies that can burrow, so you’re not totally invicible, though with tremorsense you’ll probably at least get a warning of their approach so they are unlikely to surprise you – although perhaps some of them have evolved a countermeasure, if they commonly prey on other burrowers. And two, I’m pretty sure there’s a rule against gaining more than one or maybe two short rests per day; the intent of the resting rule is to give the players what 4E called “encounter powers” and “daily powers”, so that some powers are 1/day and others are 1/battle. These durations are not meant to be used as a way to justify becoming permanently eenweencible. Again, I’ll have to look at this more carefully, the way the playtesters ideally should have before they signed off on all this stuff.
This is extremely stupid, but also entirely irrelevant, since this campaign caps out at around level 15. I did vaguely have thoughts of exploring the Epic Boons someday, and I’d rather not have to just say “no moon druids” at that point, but it’s likely to be a different campaign anyway, so we won’t worry about it for now.
The definition of “unique and intelligent” would seem to be subjective here. Given that magic is inherently just “the ability to do anything” unless it’s restricted, telling a decent story becomes basically impossible if there aren’t some such restrictions imposed; it turns everything into a childish duel of “bang I shot you” versus “nuhuh you missed”, and that’s not my idea of a good time. Exactly how to solve such issues is something every GM has to work out their own answer to; I have very limited real-life experience over the years, so I have yet to get all such matters figured out to my satisfaction. The solutions I have figured out, I’m inordinately proud of (for instance, the issues we’re having with Tiny Hut here echo similar problems I had with the 3E spell Rope Trick, which was available even earlier and could be read as allowing infinite rests; my solution there was to imagine that the extradimensional space involves the players clinging to an infinitely-long rope above a vast expanse of empty air, which certainly aren’t restful conditions, but do create a pretty cool mental image, and add a great deal of drama to the situation instead of simply letting the players avoid all danger with an utterly blase’ approach), and I gradually accumulate these innovations over the years. One day, I’ll have what is effectively a new edition created; for now, I essentially treat every game as an opportunity to conduct impromptu research and playtesting towards that goal.
I assume you mean “sweet talked”, although the typo is hilarious. I’d be interested to see the mechanics of how this worked, but I also think it could lead to some great roleplaying opportunities. While the Diplomacy rules have been broken for a long time, it’s been established for even longer than that, well before D&D itself, that bargaining with devils is a situation that goes wrong very quickly. So if this sort of situation did come up, I’d milk it for extra drama by assuming that your very impressive Persuasion check did change the devil’s mind, but only for a minute, before its naturally treacherous persona resurfaced and began plotting how to corrupt its new “friend” into the service of the Nine Hells.
Fighters being boring is definitely true (although 5E is a great improvement on 3E in that regard), and magic being something else entirely is also true. My attitude is generally that magic should be more effective than non-magic, but also more complicated, difficult to achieve, and costly. Playing a wizard effectively should be a huge amount of work, damned near on the order of passing a college class (since this way the player’s experience mirrors that of his character). I’m hugely opposed to things like the Eschew Materials feat in 3E, or the Spell Component pouch which carries over into 5E with the same effect; both of them make Wizarding easier, probably to appeal to the Harry Potter crowd, whereas I favor a more Aleister Crowley approach. Being unable to cast your best spell because someone picked your pocket and stole your entire supply of grasshopper legs or whatever – that’s good storytelling (well, it’s a hasty and crappy example of that which, if written much better, would become good storytelling). Just having a magic “I win” button for everything, which requires no thought or effort to exercise – at that point, we return to those questions I mentioned earlier about how “muggles” continue to defy Darwinism in such a universe.
Now skills, that’s an entire other rant for me to get into. As a 3E veteran, one of my biggest problems with 5E is the streamlining of the skill system; one of the reasons I never jumped to Pathfinder was that I tremendously disapprove of doing things like combining Hide and Move Silently into a single Stealth skill. 3E had more than twice as many skills as 5E does, and IMO even that number was inadequate; redefining a few old Skills as now being Tool Proficiencies is an interesting approach, but it doesn’t change the fact that many of the newly-combined Skills are just far too broad (Athletics, I’m looking at you). While I’m willing to go with these changes, out of a mix of laziness and accomodating the immense 5E playerbase, I also use the same simplicity as a reason to be very strict about Rule 0ing any system abuses that players may try to perform. The brevity of the written rules is not meant to make them widely open-ended legal documents; they are simply quick summaries meant to give GM and players alike a starting point.
I appreciate the spirit of what you’re going for; however, if I wanted to have to spell everything out in full detail in advance, I’d go code a video game. Playing in the tabletop RPG format inherently requires ambiguity and creativity. If your approach is to plan things in advance, then I would encourage you to tell me about these plans well in advance, so I can decide whether I agree with the logic you’re basing your approach upon.
I’ll give you an example that comes directly from the published adventure – one of the random encounters from the “Sea of Moving Ice” chapter (which is quite some distance away, so I’m hoping any spoilers I accidentally give here will be largely forgotten by the time we get there, but it’s still fairly early in the adventure path, so there’ll be time after it for us to continue adapting to each other’s game styles). So, let’s say that Keth is on board this ship, one specifically built for navigating Arctic waters, and the captain has mentioned in passing that these freezing seas are haunted by numerous monsters, among them the Merrow. I will now quote the entire text of that episode, with a few inconsequential edits, from the text of the book.
“At one point, either by day or night, with the ship either in open water or beached on the ice for repairs, five Merrow move as close as possible to {the ship} before attacking. If the characters are on the ship, the Merrow try to swamp it by making a DC 25 Strength check, with a +2 bonus to the attempt for each additional Merrow involved in the attempt. Success means that {the ship} lurches dangerously, and each creature on board must make a DC 15 Strength or Dexterity saving throw. On a failed save, the creature is dumped overboard. (To make things easy, divide the 40 crewmen into groups of five and make one saving throw for each group.) A creature that falls into the frigid water is swimming, and must make a DC 12 constitution save at the start of each turn that it is in the water. On each failed saving throw, the creature suffers one level of exhaustion. Characters in the water are preferred targets for monsters in the water.”
So, with only that text to base an entire encounter on, I must try to run the battle. Now, if your first reaction to the captain’s mention of Merrow is to immediately cast some spell which freezes the entire ocean for a 5-mile radius around the ship, trapping the merrow in solid ice, I’m going to be grumpy. (I’m not sure whether a Druid of level 8 or so has a spell on that order, because I haven’t memorized the entire freaking Druid spell list and everything on it.) So instead, let’s say that you take a more measured approach, and cast a spell that will warn when the merrow approach the ship, despite the fact that they’re lurking deep underwater and swimming up toward the ship’s shadow (or, if it’s on the ice, they’re slinking around behind the lee side of the berg, targeting the ship and crew by smell in the middle of the night, while most of the crew and perhaps also the PCs are asleep; they no longer have the whole dark ocean to hide in, but they do have a greater ability to tell how much activity is aboard the ship and thus save their ambush for the moment of lowest crew preparedness, so it works out to about equal degrees of danger either way.)
Given that this whole encounter is just an environmental hazard, not part of the main action of the adventure (and thus, if you expend too many resources, it’s likely that the main villain of the chapter will intuit that you’re at a weak moment and will strike out of nowhere right after this battle finishes), how would you approach this situation? You’re not likely to fail the saving throw and fall off the ship, nor do you likely care about the crew who have gone overboard, but the rest of the party is probably preoccupied with trying to save them; are you willing to risk fighting toe-to-toe against five CR 2 Merrow all by yourself? Or are you going to pull out some obscure technicality in the DMG which says that you can spot the merrow swimming under the ship by watching how the ripples of their passage reflect in a nearby iceberg, and prevent the entire encounter that way? Give me an idea of how your character is going to be acting while I’m preparing to spring this ambush on the party (or more properly on the NPCs, since the merrow don’t especially care whether they’re eating Keth and Annaliese or just a bunch of random sailors, but if they make off with too many of the sailors, you might be left unable to propel the ship, and thus stranded in the North with no way to either complete the mission or get home), as well as what you’ll do once initiative is rolled. It’s okay if you pretty easily beat the creatures, since this isn’t meant to be a major battle, and it’s also okay if you prudently advise the captain on a way to protect the crew against such dangers, since merrow are a known threat, even though the specific ambush is meant to come as a surprise.
Either way, what it amounts to is that I want you to gain an earned victory, but not gain an unearned one; your achievement should come from you actually having a good plan in-character, not just a better understanding of the out-of-game rulebook than mine.
Envisioner
Explorer
Entirely aside from the game as a whole - I'm writing on an unreliable laptop here, so I'm attempting to avoid losing my posts by composing them in LibreOffice first. But whenever I transfer them from that document to this text editor, every one of my paragraph double-spaces turns into like six spaces here. Is there an easier fix for this than just individually transferring the text blocks one at a time, so that they have the right spacing for whichever window they're in?
Envisioner
Explorer
Bannor looks like he's probably fine. My only concern is with the Alert feat, but since we already have one variant human, I shouldn't discourage you from playing one too. I would appreciate it if you could edit the text in the post from "attacks cannot have advantage" to "attacks against Bannor cannot have advantage" or something like that. It's still possible for the entire rest of the party to be surprised before he can alert them; he might dodge out of the way a split-second before they strike, but this doesn't protect everyone else. That's probably the only issue I have with him; I'm too mentally exhausted to officially approve any other characters at this point, but I don't think Bannor, Druos, or Keth have any problems that remain to be worked out, beyond the discussion of Tglassy's general problem-solving approach. (And sorry to triple-post again, sigh.)
In that scenario, it would depend on what level we are. If we’re lvl 9, he’d be a Killer Whale and in the water already. Killer whales have blindsight out to 120 ft.
But if we’re lvl 8, like you said, then to start, he’d use a 3rd lvl spell slot on Conjure Animal to summon 4 reef sharks, then Wild Shape into a Hunter Shark. Reef sharks are the wolves of the water, they have similar abilities. Hunter Sharks are CR 2, Reef sharks are CR 1/2. We’d focus on one enemy at a time.
All the sharks have blindsight to one degree or another. He may spend much of his time on a boat in Hunter Shark form, just because he is more comfortable in a predator form. At lvl 8, he can spend a total of 8 hrs per short rest in Wild Shape form.
If he’s already in shark form, he’d have to come out to use the Conjure Animal Spell, but he can just wait until they knock him out of it. And once they knock him out of his second Wild Shape, he can use Polymorph to become a Giant Shark, which is CR 5. Can’t have Conjure Animal on at the same time as that, but they’d be gone by then.
Also, Conjure Animals are Fey Spirits that take the form of the beasts in question.
But if we’re lvl 8, like you said, then to start, he’d use a 3rd lvl spell slot on Conjure Animal to summon 4 reef sharks, then Wild Shape into a Hunter Shark. Reef sharks are the wolves of the water, they have similar abilities. Hunter Sharks are CR 2, Reef sharks are CR 1/2. We’d focus on one enemy at a time.
All the sharks have blindsight to one degree or another. He may spend much of his time on a boat in Hunter Shark form, just because he is more comfortable in a predator form. At lvl 8, he can spend a total of 8 hrs per short rest in Wild Shape form.
If he’s already in shark form, he’d have to come out to use the Conjure Animal Spell, but he can just wait until they knock him out of it. And once they knock him out of his second Wild Shape, he can use Polymorph to become a Giant Shark, which is CR 5. Can’t have Conjure Animal on at the same time as that, but they’d be gone by then.
Also, Conjure Animals are Fey Spirits that take the form of the beasts in question.
jmucchiello
Hero
All I want to say here is, we haven't started playing yet. So arguing what is or isn't allowed is fair. When the game starts, as long as rules don't appear out of nowhere, the GM can rule however he wants. If something seems powerful, I hope the first response is to allow it and see if it really is disruptive. Then if it is disruptive, you use the ooc thread to request the player make a change that will apply at the end of the current encounter.
One of the nice things about PbP is we aren't wasting time discussing the rules. As long as the IC thread is still moving because the current ruling stands while the players and DM can discuss whether that will be the ruling forever or not in the OOC.
tglassy, I don't think we need to continue asking Envisioner "what about this" for every possible thing that might be considered over powered.
One of the nice things about PbP is we aren't wasting time discussing the rules. As long as the IC thread is still moving because the current ruling stands while the players and DM can discuss whether that will be the ruling forever or not in the OOC.
tglassy, I don't think we need to continue asking Envisioner "what about this" for every possible thing that might be considered over powered.
L
lowkey13
Guest
*Deleted by user*
You know, if Envisioner wanted to depower the dominance of spells, without nerfing the spells themselves, we could always play with the optional Gritty Realism rules for resting. That makes a short rest into 8 hours and a long rest into 7 days. One short rest a day, and we can only long rest when we have a week of safety. Then, Leomund’s tiny hut is still useful, but not as useful. Same with all the other spells. Rituals become very important, and full castors will be very hesitant to use their spell slots.
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