No Longer an Interest Check - 5E Rise of Tiamat + Corebooks PBP - OOC

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Envisioner]

@Envisioner

Sorry- had to deal with stuff over the weekend. I had written up a monk (point buy).

I can roll it if I'm still in?

I think we have five characters, but one of them I haven't really looked at and another one is not finalized. Someone might end up being stuck as an alternate, or sent on a solo adventure, or I might divide the party, or I might decide to just run with 6 (or my slightly control-freak tendencies might alienate a player or two and we'd be back down to traditional party sizes). You misewell go ahead and roll.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[mips42]

We have a lot of "Monster killed a whole village" motifs going on, I wonder if we can combine them a bit?

Also @mips42, you'e backstory is a lot like Keth's, with the whole "became a bounty hunter and is therefore known and tolerated" thing. Any chance they've worked together?

It's certainly possible that Keth and Dumos would have worked the same bounty at some point, If not travelling together, Keth would definitely remember Dumos, whereas Dumos would likely not. He does not socialize well.

 

[tglassy]

Rule 0 - the DM is god.

A wizard gets to get away where a rogue can't because magic. They can literally turn invisible or fly. A team of wizards who are prepared enough can take on literally anything, because magic. A wizard can be made to mimic any other class, because magic.

If you don't like Leomund's Tiny Hut, which was only ever once used in the way you describe in any game i've played or run ( and only ever used that one time, period, actually), then this is going to be a fun game of "you can't use that spell like that, even though the wording specifically says you can". I had a DM rule that I couldn't see into the darkness of a particular room, even though I was a warlock with Devil's Sight, which specifically says I can see in magical darkness. He said, essentially "Because I said so." If that's the case, then why did I pick that invocation? I literally picked it for that specific occasion. If he was just going to negate it right when it got useful, should I be allowed to switch it with something else when it is deemed useless by DM fiat?

Here's some questions, then:

Thorn Whip: A cantrip that makes a vine shoot out from your hand and grab someone, pulling them ten feet closer to you. If they are heavier than you, you get pulled closer instead. Can I pull someone through spikes or a wall of fire? Can I pull them off a cliff? If I'm falling, and only ten feet from the lip of the cliff, can I target the lip of the cliff and pull myself towards it? Can I use it as a makeshift Indiana Jones whip? Or can it only be used on enemies?

Will you be nerfing my Conjure Animals spell, since I can literally conjure 8 wolves with one spell, each of which can individually knock a bad guy prone and grapple them and all of which would have advantage on all their attacks because they would be attacking together?

What about the damage over time concentration spells? Like Heat Metal or Call Lightning? They allow me to cast them, and then do damage every other round as a bonus action. I can cast Call Lightning, then turn into a Dire Wolf and attack, using a bonus action every round to blast someone with lightning at the same time.

Or the big one. At lvl 10, my druid can turn into an elemental. And because of how resting works, it can literally be permanent, or close to it. At lvl 10 he can stay in elemental form for 5 hours. An earth elemental can pass through rock and stone as if it were air, without disturbing it, and they have Tremorsense, and they are immune to exhaustion. So they can literally stay underground while everyone else is sleeping, rest for an hour to regain their ability to Wild Shape, and keep watch on the camp, all while completely undetectable by any baddies, but still able to sense if any are on the ground. Renew the Wild Shape, then rest another hour before everyone else gets up, which doesn't require sleep, and I can stay an Earth Elemental for another four hours during the day, following everyone, and at any time during the five hours I can either reform the wild shape, which heals the earth elemental, or turn into a different kind of elemental, thus healing renewing the hit points.

And that's at lvl 10! At lvl 20, I can literally renew my Wild Shape at ANY MOMENT with a bonus action, healing all the hit points, with a bonus action, every round. AND i'll still be able to use magic while Wild Shaped at this point. Of course that's level 20. Moon Druids are nearly unkillable at lvl 20.

Point is, are those going to be nerfed? And if Magic is going to be nerfed that heavily, as in every time someone finds a unique and intelligent way of using it, should I be making a character that relies less on magic? Because trust me, you don't want me breaking out Ryder. He's a Rogue and has literally sweat talked a devil into working for him. I don't need magic to break a CR challenge. I just use what the game gives me. My most boring characters are plain fighters. Magic and skills is where it's at.

I don't mean to cause trouble, but I want to get in the open what is or is not going to be allowed, so I can plan accordingly. I plan my characters based on what the rules say I can do. If there are rules or options that are going to be nerfed or done away with altogether, then I need to know so I can make changes accordingly.

 

[Envisioner]

He's not wrong. Any wizard of 6th level would have access to that spell as a matter of course.

This may be true of D&D players who are at least somewhat knowledgeable with regard to optimization, but it may well not be true of the enemies you’re fighting, which are designed in the way Wotco thinks is correct, not the way the players build a character with the intent of overcoming them.

I also worry about you saying you don't approve of tactical complexities in spells because you think being able to create difficult terrain will somehow outshine the uses of the other spells.

In this case it’s mostly concerning because it increases the difficulty of playing without a battlemap, something that I may or may not be up to constructing on this forum software. If I did construct a map, I’d then have to keep updating it whenever you cast a spell that changed the terrain, or whenever that spell expired and the terrain went back to its previous form in that particular area, while possibly still being altered elsewhere. There are already spells like that which I have to worry about, but at least keeping it restricted to the corebook puts a finite limit on the number of them that I have to work with.

If that's the case, you may be upset at how I play. I often take utility spells more often than damaging ones, and I like to control a battlefield, rather than just deal damage. Minor Illusion is my favorite cantrip, though I don't have it with this character, because it has near infinite versatility. Major Image is even better. I've ended whole fights before they started with that one.

This sort of thing is encouraged; the difference is that it makes the game easier rather than harder. Lateral thinking is good; detailed tactical scenarios are difficult to analyze, even if they’re not constantly changing on an in-game second-by-second basis. If this was a video game that I had programmed to write itself, I’d be on board with spells like Erupting Earth, but my tools are limited, so anything that turns a long drawn-out battle into a quick funny story gets thumbs-up, while unnecessary complications are best avoided.

The spells in the Player's Handbook have plenty of tactical uses that can get them out of a CR challenge. Hell, I've used a lvl 4 Dragonblood sorcerer, with only Player Handbook spells and feats, to effectively grapple a Shadow Dragon and hold him down so the party could defeat him. The Dragon couldn't get out, and had already wasted its breath, and I held him down in the sunlight. Enlarge made me big enough to do it and gave me advantage on the grapple check, and a 20 in Strength from rolling high and an ASI (when most Sorcerers dump strength) gave me enough skill to keep the dragon from being able to break the grapple. It kept wasting its turn trying to break the grapple or hit me, and since it was prone, it had disadvantage against me. My party wailed on it from a distance, and boom, no more shadow dragon. This same Sorcerer, at lvl 6, beat a Planetar ON HIS OWN, using a similar strategy by grappling the Planetar and holding it in an environmental hazard until it died. Again, it kept trying to break the grapple and couldn't.

Well these are both pretty frightening scenarios, but also fairly awesome ones. I sense that I will have to work around your character with a certain degree of finesse, but I think I can handle it. After all, I won’t be stupid enough to have a shadow dragon attack you outdoors during the day….

I had a Rogue who literally talked a Chain Devil into joining the group and they used it to fight the Pit Demon that attacked them later.

This is exactly the kind of thing that will be instrumental in this encounter path, which does seem to feature several fights that are above the Challenge Rating of the party at the time. (Granted there are also much easier battles sprayed about willy-nilly; I hope you won’t go full HAM on all of them...)

With a Warlock, I can get Devil's Sight to see through Magical Darkness, then plop a Darkness spell on to the enemy so I can see them but they can't see me, then go to town.

If the 5E monster manual fails to indicate that a monster has darkvision, but it clearly should based on its environment and such, I reserve the right to rule that it does. This kind of trick will work sometimes, but not always.

With a Wizard, I can do so many crazy shenanigans with the Magic Mouth spell that I could ruin the economy of pretty much any city selling what amounts to an alarm system for the entire city, given enough gold and time to do it, and that's only a lvl 2 spell. It is literally possible to use the Magic Mouth spell to create a telephone. It's complicated, but it works.

Well, the Forgotten Realms is not a Tippyverse. If you do too much of this kind of thing, Elminster might show up and haul you away for a series of lectures in why breaking too many genre conventions is a bad idea. (There’s an entire speech in the 3E Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting which is about exactly this subject; there’s a reason why Szass Tam is still around even though Elminster doesn’t want him to.) If we were playing in my setting, which is a little bit more of a Tippyverse (though still far short of that extreme), I’d have a different approach, but would still not let you have complete free reign. In many cases, it’s difficult to define a problem until it comes up, so I might allow you to exploit the wording of an ill-considered spell once to effortlessly trounce one Beyond Deadly encounter, but then immediately after that, Mystra herself shows up and puts the whammy on you, and that spell works differently from now on. In my CW, this sort of thing has been done in advance as much as possible, whereas with FR I’m stuck dealing with an obnoxious number of bad precedents set by canonical materials, but all of that goes out the window as soon as we go IC.

By the time we're lvl 6, we should be past the "We need to find a safe place to rest" part of the game.

I firmly disagree with that statement. Level 6 is not the peak of achievement; level 20 is, so you're less than a third of the way there. To use basketball as an analogy, you’re still only in the High School leagues, you’re simply above the Rookie level. You’re probably past food being a serious problem; shelter is still an issue that has the potential to come up, if not ordinarily, then certainly due to the action of monsters and spells and such. And because granting free Rests means getting your spell slots back, they can't even be balanced by increasing the spell grade; you might need to wait until 17th level to get Grade 9 slots, but you're still meant to have a finite number of them, so spells that grant you a rest need to be balanced very carefully, to ensure that they don't perfectly solve every problem you'll ever encounter.

By lvl 5, spell casters get access to a bunch of great powers, even without the extra books. Keth has Conjure Animal, and can conjure two Dire wolves, or 8 normal wolves, with a single 3rd level spell. Not to mention the fact that he can BECOME a Dire Wolf at lvl 2, and a Sabertooth Tiger at the current level. Two more levels and he can fly whenever he wants, though the Wizard has been able to do that since lvl 5.

Given that the animal stats are balanced by the (admittedly flawed) CR system, I’m not too worried about any of this, except maybe for tactics such as sending disposable animals down every hallway to check for traps (which might eventually get Mielikki annoyed with you, so I don’t recommend getting into the habit of it).

Having a Leomund's Tiny Hut isn't going to solve every problem for us. Even if we use it in the middle of a battle, that just gives the bad guys the ability to surround us and wait out the spell. I had a party try that on me once. They woke up to a Dracolich looking down on them with an army of undead surrounding them.

I did eventually think of that, which is why I approved the spell. But even if it doesn’t break the game completely, it can lead to surreal and annoying scenarios that break immersion and undercut the feel of the game. I’ve decided to accept the risk in this case, but I have to think about these things.

And if we're running an adventure made for those who are lvl 6 or above, then it will be prepared for these spells and abilities. Nerfing them will only make the CR larger than it should be.

Once again, this is based on the assumption that the publishers and writers of these books are hardcore character optimizers, rather than people who are working on deadline and don’t have the mental energy to think through every potential implication of the wording they’ve settled on for one of twenty spells they have to pound out that day. The intended effect of the D&D rules is to create a milieu for sword-and-sorcery adventure games, in which the genre conventions of fantasy literature tend to be upheld in most cases, with a fair but not infinite degree of wiggle room. To use a common 3E example, the point of the Glitterdust spell is to give a potential defense against invisible creatures; the fact that it also served to blind everyone, and thus could frequently solo a monster of high CR simply because it didn’t happen to have a good save versus this particular effect, was a result of unintended consequences. And the GM is absolutely, no matter what, ALWAYS within his right to fix these problems. As long as he’s not doing it arbitrarily just out of spite for players that he dislikes, the players should trust that he’s working hard to create an entertainment experience that they’ll enjoy, and not complain every single time he takes one of their toys away, just because he didn’t plan ahead well enough to realize that he should never have given them that particular toy in the first place.

 

[Envisioner]

Okay, finally got to Mips's character. The mention of some sort of alternate Tiefling makes me think that you missed the "core book only" stipulation. I also don't recognize the spell Toll the Dead.

Flaw: If there's a plan, I'll forget it. If I don't forget it, I'll ignore it.

Hrm, this sounds dangerously close to a Leeroy Jenkins approach. I'd better let the other players decide whether they're okay having this guy in the party with them; if they decide it's okay, I'll run with it.

Other than that, Dumos looks like he's probably okay. I'll give him a more careful look later, after I catch up with the rest of the thread. I could use some suggestions as to how to bring him into the party, since he doesn't seem to share the "close to nature" theme of the first two characters, and thus probably isn't nearby them while they're getting their initial Call to Adventure.

 

[Envisioner]

I'd be willing to drop my "Point Buy" down to 48, and just subtract 7 points worth from my stats.

This sounds agreeable.

That would probably bring me to:

Str: 17 (15 + 2 Race)
Dex: 16
Con: 16 (15 + 1 Race)
Int: 12
Wis: 18 (16 + 2 ASI)
Cha: 9

I'd drop my Charisma down from 14 to 10, and drop a point of Intelligence. Then I'd drop another 3 points from Intelligence (going from 14 to 12) to snag a 16 in Dex, just for the extra point it gives.

But your Charisma was 9… whatever, I’m not going to micromanage this. 16+ in all physical stats plus 18 wisdom is very impressive indeed, but you’ve got a backstory which justifies it, so I guess it’s cool. We’ll need some Ubermensches to beat this adventure path anyway.

That is at least a LITTLE better than just saying I'm a demigod with a 16 in nearly every stat. (No seriously, my brother once asked "What happens if I roll an 18 on every stat right in front of you?" and my answer was "I'd declare you a demigod.")

That’s amazing. I’m totally stealing it.

 

[mips42]

We have a lot of "Monster killed a whole village" motifs going on, I wonder if we can combine them a bit?

Also @mips42, you'e backstory is a lot like Keth's, with the whole "became a bounty hunter and is therefore known and tolerated" thing. Any chance they've worked together?

It's certainly possible, Keith would definitely remember Dumos, whereas Dumos would be more along the lines of "look, another human" He does not socialize well.

Envisioner, I would have sworn Tieflings had sub-races in the PHB but, if you say no, I'll change it. Now a regular Tiefling and Toll the Dead changed to Vicious Mockery.

 

[tglassy]

Teiflings have no sub races until Mordenkeinan's Tome of Foes came out. Now they have sub races. Although, "Of Asmodeus" is actually the vanilla Teifling, so it's actually fine.