Different topic: has anyone (in DnD or otherwise) ever had random encounters that go well? In my experience they always seem to either slow down the action or are just irrelevant and forgettable.
@Helwar There's an answer on here that alludes to t his part of the book, but one of the nice things the devs did in that book was explain their idea on how, from levels 1-20, magic items would end up getting distributed over the course of a campaign. This includes consumables.
@GreySage Yes, frequently. (D&D) I don't understand the problem.
@GreySage In the current edition, not as often as in previous, in terms of raw frequency.
@GreySage In fact, or ToA campaign has built into it a 15% chance of a random encounter, and we have to figure out whether to fight it or avoid it.
What do you mean? I check for surprise, and if none, it's roll initiative and off we go unless either the NPC or party would / does initiate a parley before hand.
Also, sometimes random encounters are very short: "we avoid the pack of hungry wolves by crossing the river."
@GreySage Sometimes I just narrate over them: "On your journey you beat down the odd wolf to frighten it away and help a traveler who was being pestered by a couple thugs. You arrive at the next city in need of a good night's rest in a comfortable bed"
No, not exclusively in travel times; in town, and in dungeons. Mind you, as I matured as a DM and world builder, I used less random encounters in dungeons.
@GreySage many times, the random encounters are to appeal to the player's that want regular combat, if you are in a more roleplay heavy group, you can just ignore them
And because of my style of DMing, I often made random encounters fold into the world, or the plot, if I saw an OK fit. (In cities and towns this was a bit easier than in the wilderness and it's a pack of giant hyenas)
What I'm thinking is that, if all the PCs are doing is traveling to some other city, then they will just unload all their resources and completely destroy any encounter, since they are unlikely to face anything else before resting
Let me give you an example. Random encounter with a Cyclops. We are level 2. We chose to avoid. Why? Had a mission. Also, my ranger is chose enemy of Giant and is pretty sure a cyclops can one shot any of us.
No, I don't mostly run wilderness exploration games. That can be part of a game. When we started, way back, a lot of us used exploration to help fill out our worlds, sort of like what West Marches does now.
I prefer a balance of wilderness, town, and dungeon. My brother likes to run travelogues. Another DM we play with likes caverns and dungeons, and a few wilderness. Yet another was almost all wilderness and exploration.
That last was my nephew. (I miss his campaign, but RL does its thing ... it's dormant now)
@GreySage If you really want to give your players a rise, set up an entire adventure day of travel that has up to 6 encounters; why roll randomly? :) They will need to choose when to engage, and when to avoid.
Creatures only provoke Opportunity Attacks when they move out of reach using their actions
The rules state that only when the enemy uses their movement, action, or reaction to move out of your reach will they provoke an Opportunity Attack from you.
From the PHB:
You also don't provoke an op...
@Rubiksmoose I'm confused. The question, the answer, and the comment saying "hey this is basically a dupe of this other question" are all posted by you?
@MikeQ Related does not mean dupe. Though it is very closely related, I would argue that the focus of this question on forced movement specifically makes it worthy of standing on its own. Really the only reason I wrote this is so that we have something to dupe questions (like the recent one on Levitate) to.
@SimonH. that is the trademarked rubiksmoose efficiency lol. But actually I just posted it as a self-answered question so I asked and answered it at the same exact time.
@Helwar It's an important question, and certainly worth asking, but I still think it's either opinion-based or too broad. Aside from comparing the monetary costs of magic items, people will have different perspectives about what is or isn't appropriately powerful, and will have different interpretations about what items "should" be in a low-magic game.
Me: What did you do at school today?
5-year-old: Learned about dragons.
Me: Your class learned about dragons?
5: I learned about dragons. I don't know what everybody else was doing.
The idea was to get a "standard magic game" item, something objective and ass little opinion based as possible. This will get them items more powerful than the rest of the world (as it's still low magic) but I don't think it will break anything too much :S
@Helwar more specifically, after a question is closed, the first edit you make will put it in a review queue that high rep users can see and they can vote on whether to reopen or not (or make edits and reopen).
@Helwar It looks good now and I voted to reopen. You don't need the blurb at the top saying you edited it by the way, anyone can click on the "edited" text and see the edit made.
@GreySage Yes, frequently. The key, in my experience, is to have the author of the random encounter understand that it's an expository tool, primarily.
@GreySage I think random encounter tables are strong when they're full of things GMs might like to communicate experientally. "My kobolds use poison. Like, a lot." "Pit traps might be hidden just beyond obvious traps." "NPCs have lots of useful information."
Anything I'd be tempted to infodump, I try to look for a place in a random table to throw it.
Anything I think "ooh, that's really neat and they'll never see it coming" in the Dungeon of Doom, I take little pieces of any try to find space in random encounters for.
@nitsua60 Yeah I can see that, wasn't my intention. I was trying to get more information as to why this question was asked/question if it needed to be done.
I feel like I do a better job of portraying the NPC with the story about the lost jungle city when it comes up in some context (shoreline encounter? There's literally a couple taking vacation who'll give you drinks and share stories. Tavern encounter? It's overheard from a drunk. Wilderness encounter? Find NPC half-dead and here's why.), I don't have to try and drop huge blinking arrow-signs saying "plot-advancing info here!" anywhere, and the players tend to remember things that happened organically better than "anyone have notes from when nitsua dumped all that info?"
@GreySage I'm going to go ahead and delete it, then, without prejudice =)
@KorvinStarmast I HATE using the DMG as a shopping list, that's why I didn't even have it, and didn't want my players to look into it... But since they bought the damned thing and are constantly referencing it to me... ¬¬
yeah, it's always a struggle. We agreed on the game we were gonna play... They asked me to come up with something, I told them what kind of game I wanted to run and everyone was ok with it, that was more than a year ago and since then I had more conflicts with this issue than I care to admit
@Helwar next time they open the DMG on you, take them to page 38/39 and show them the bit about "low magic settings" and what items tier 2 players might start with ...
@Helwar It's a bummer when tension like this creeps in at a table ... because we do this to have fun ... what does the whole party look like. Warlock, Sorcerer, and who else?
I have reminded them of it in conversation and everything, but I haven't had a "serious conversation" about it yet
Druid (Warlock's wife), Shadow Monk/Rogue, and Barbarian (Sorcerer's GF, she just recently changed characters from an explorer, as now that she knows more of the game she wanted something different)
Awesome group, love the mix. I'll need to get back home to get my books and put together an answer. In mean time, I hope more people vote to reopen. I did.
13th Age is a D&D-like system designed as an independent collaboration between two of the lead designers for 3.5 and 4e. It collates a lot of the learning from the experience of designing those systems, but it's not bound by franchise traditions to keep anything that they don't think is necessary or useful.
If I wanted to play a long-form D&D campaign, 13th Age is what I'd use.
@Anaphory Not nearly so aggressively. It's more narrative than that.
Some of the bits on the sheet that probably seem weird for D&Ders: - Backgrounds replace skills; they're player-defined phrases describing something in your character's past, and you add the modifier to the roll when you take an action that your background would be helpful for--if the justification is lean the GM will ask you to talk story to explain it. - Icons are major setting-defining NPCs. Everybody has relationships with a few of them, which influence how good and bad things happen to you when you encounter their allies or spheres of influence.
@Helwar My table's moon druid tends to go double-Allosaurus when it looks like a serious fight's brewing: conjure one and WS into another first round, then unleash the pain.
Creatures only provoke Opportunity Attacks when they move out of reach using their actions
The rules state that only when the enemy uses their movement, action, or reaction to move out of your reach will they provoke an Opportunity Attack from you.
From the PHB:
You also don't provoke an op...
