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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Twilightwaits" data-source="post: 4314607" data-attributes="member: 70456">OK. For my first post here at ENWorld, I'm going to pick this thread.robertliguori: I would say that they aren't in fact different at all. I would assume that a competent, able DM would take inspiration from the acts of his players and the scenarios they create, as much as they take inspiration from the DM and his story.Now, I would make a few caveats to this, for the particular scenario in discussion.Credible Threat exists as a rule because ultimately, you must have some way to reign in players. Yes, this is an arbitrary metagame issue. In the real world, people abuse power all the time, using any means neccesary. We see that in American politics, but I'll not sully this forum with any further discussion of THAT truly evil topic. Admittedly, we don't have people bouncing around via mystical transportation via sacrifice IRL, but if we did, I am sure there are people who would abuse the daylights out of it.However, D&D is a game of cooperation, and in order for the game to function, as its base, there must be guidelines for BOTH sides to follow. Just as your players shouldn't exploit the RAW to gain an advantage when it doesn't make logical sense in a DM's game world, the DM should not go out of his way to abuse the RAW to deny players what is rightfully theirs.You don't expect your players to abuse the Warlock Pact or similar abilities by killing a sack of rats which pose no actual threat. Conversely, if your players force a monster to surrender, successfully find a way to contain it, beat and abuse it to the point of near death, and then let the warlock kill it as a sacrifice, after expending such an effort to contain what is obviously going to be a dangerous, potentially life threatening risk should it escape prematurely, then they SHOULD arguably receive something for it. However, they should be prepared to suffer the repercussions of such an act (IE: a shift in alignment, possibly legal ramifications).It should be stated here that minions are in fact a credible threat. However, I think most people are taking the idea of minions in this thread to an extreme.Minions can and -will- kill you if you ignore them. I know this first hand; the first party my players ran chose to ignore minions, figuring they couldn't be that dangerous. Three rounds later, they were hip deep in kobolds with no escape, and wound up TPK'ed.They exist only as a literary or cinematic device; take for example, the Uruk's in the Battle of Helm's Deep and elsewhere. For all we see of the Uruk's in the movie, for all we read of their ferocity, the Fellowship defeats them rather easily, through skill at arms. They can and do kill people; I believe it was Glorfindel who perished at said battle (its been a while since I've read the books though; I know there is an elf who dies). This is a man who stood up to a Balrog in solo combat and WON.I digress; minions exist to let you recreate such scenes. They are dangerous; they can and will murder you if you let them. However, rather than saying to your players "The battle rages around you, and five Orcs step out from the throng to challenge you while the combat swirls around", you can literally have them face down a HORDE of orcs. Orcs which are a credible threat, but aren't going to TPK your party if you're careful. Yes, they die in one hit, but they are literally the epitome of swarm tactics, using weight of numbers to outmaneuver and crush the party.Now, as pertains to the sacrifice of commoners, chickens, or other such miscellany.While a single commoner is not much threat to a PC, a village would be. Eventually,numbers will overwhelm individual power. Ultimately, the PC's lack the actions to make a serious dent in 1,000 level  1 commoner minions. This constitutes  a credible threat via swarm tactics, albeit the farther extreme of it. Thus, killing any part of the relevant threat would suffice for the activation of a Warlock Pact, assuming the intent is in fact to sacrifice the whole village.In the case of the chicken sacrificing warlock...my pagan roots aside (I won't let this thread devolve into a discussion of Vodou, Vodun, Hoodoo, and who's right, wrong, or in between, as well as the misconceptions carried with each), I would say that it would be feasible...assuming the chicken in question had some intrinsic value as a sacrifice. The Gods of ancient Greece didn't accept pig slop; they wanted whole goats, and rare pure white cows, and all sorts of incredibly valuable, extremely rare things.I would place the Pact Master of such a warlock as being much the same way, demanding a QUALITY sacrifice for the expenditure or use of some of IT's power.More the kind of answer your guys were looking for?</blockquote>

Verification