@Jonathan Hi!

So, I'm trying to prep a D&D 5e combat encounter, and it'd be nice to have a CR1 or less "supporting caster" type monster

I'm struggling to find one in the MM though, any ideas?

the characters are L3, and I want a couple of CR½ monsters plus the caster for a medium-ish encounter

@detly Pixies are the best support casters around, and they're only CR 1/4.

Actually, depending on what you're trying to do, pixies might be too good - they're labelled CR 1/4 but they're way more powerful than that.

That's interesting

The other monsters are two raven swarms (CR1/2 I think)

the casters can def. be squishy

they're new players, and I want the casters there so that they (and I) can be tactical and make combat interesting

there'll be plenty of environmental stuff around for them to improvise with, and I don't want to penalise them for it by saying "well, that worked, but this thing still has a million HP"

While it doesn't fit any of your requiremements, scarecrows are awesome and would go awesomely with raven swarms.

Super creepy

Haha the pixies have 1HP, but they can do some major tactical spells

Great idea

Dryads have some interesting stuff

Satyrs too, if you give them pipes

I ruled satyrs out for some reason, but now I can't remember why

Dryad's a nice idea too

But I think pixies are ideal for this

That seems to happen a lot :)

Hah

Tactics fun over TPKs :)

yeah, I don't know much about 5e, but I agree that in practically every game tactical fun is better than TPK

I dunno, one of the most fun sessions I've had was when I set out to TPK using some really cool monsters.

I didn't kill of a single player, and it's the fight my players remember the best.

I honestly still can't understand why some people seem to like having TPK's

I've been meaning to write about this for ages

It's not about having TPKs. It's about challenging your players, forcing them to think about fighting.

I did TPK the PC's a couple of times, but it was always accidental

that being said, those sessions were supposed to be deliberately difficult, even though they were not supposed to have that exact result

But I feel like it's this paradox of "I want the threat of death to be real to make fights meaningful and tactics necessary" vs "D&D is inherently probabilistic with a high spread"

yeah

It does depend on your players - I knew going in that nothing less than a fight I planned as a TPK would even be a challenge to them.

that is one of the problems with D&D that drove my group to stop using it

ah here it is: "They [the player] want the repeated experience of narrowly escaping death, but D&D is probabilistic, so there's only so narrow it can be without ending up being a coin flip."

"Those odds have to catch up with them at some point; if they don't, you're fudging which means you're not providing the narrow part of the narrow escape."

the thing is, I know some DM's actually WANT a TPK to happen

not all, but some for sure

I don't think that is the right way to go with it, but then again, some PC's are probably at least ok with it

or even like it because they can take it as a challenge

I wouldn't go so far as to say that means they are doing it wrong, but I certainly don't agree with that style of play, or at least don't want to engage in it myself

I don't like it when one of my characters dies before I am ready for that to happen, and it is definitely not cool when someone else is making it their mission to kill one of my characters off without my consent

of course, if all the PC's in a given group are ok with it then I don't see a problem with it in such cases

it just isn't for me

XD

Yeah, if I'm a DM I'll always make the contract that even if character death is okay, I'm gonna make it heroic

Like, you're not going to lose your L8 cleric to rabid badger in an alley in Fallcrest

because it rolls a 20

and you were just about to buy a healing potion, really

yeah, that would just be humiliating...

You'll be fending off a white dragon while your party get the hostages out

the randomness of death in D&D doesn't appeal to me anymore

I realize you can work around it, but I have come to like trying other systems out and just trying to avoid any with that same aspect

except stuff like Great Ork Gods, cause that whole system is built for you to have fun while several of your Ork characters die XD

In Great Ork Gods random, inglorious character death is also built into the system's mechanics, but the game isn't trying to tell long-form stories about character arcs, character creation isn't a significant sunk cost, and system mastery can't mitigate anything.

my first one immediately tripped down a hill and hit several things on the way down XD

@BESW yeah exactly

While in D&D the inbuilt tendency for random, inglorious character death tends to get in the way of the system's other goals.

While I don't normally promote my own blog here (ha), I had considered this particular conundrum before. Waaay before.

@Magician indeed you did

I wonder if I even agree anymore with half the stuff I wrote back then.

mm

I am reading it now

I thought this was the goblin dice thing

it is not

I strongly disagree with a lot of the things about RPGs I whole-heartedly endorsed five years ago.

@trogdor Well, combat in D&D is usually what goblin dice are for.

yeah

but this isn't that post

so I have not read it before, therefore I am reading it now

Speaking of writing stuff, I thought the second part of the Sunless Fate conversion would be about ship combat, zeafaring, trading, and maybe GMing advice if it fits. I haven't even finished writing up ship combat yet, and I'm already approaching 1k words.

@Magician so far I agree with a lot of it, though to be fair I am also not sure 4E itself needed much tweaking to the death mechics

that being said, perhaps the best thing to do is remove the particularly random elements of death saving throws

@trogdor Tension, though. It takes a while to get to the point where a single saving throw decides a character's fate.

We've had a few character deaths in our 4e campaign, but I think none of them were due to failing death saving throws.

@Magician but so far, close to the end but not done yet, the things you suggested in this don't remove the possibility of death

they just make it hard for it to happen in a relatively random way

That's true. The post doesn't go quite as far as Fate's "characters die only when you want them to". It does make random death very unlikely without changing the way combat works.

yeah

I suppose, this by itself still wouldn't make me want to play 4e over fate at this point

in fate, the last time the character I was playing would have actually died in a D&D type game, instead he "died"

like in a movie where the hero "dies" but shows up later and explains why he really didn't

I liked that because the thing that "killed" him kinda came out of left field, but I could still let it dramatically "kill" him and have him come back later so I could still play him for a bit

and if I have a character I either want to have die, or am ok with dieing at the current time under the current circumstances, I can still have or let that happen, it just isn't going to happen because someone else decided it, or even worse, solely because some random dice said so

@eimyr How is your workoliday going?

Okay, here is quite possibly the stupidest RPG question I have ever asked, but

If you had to pick a lowish level monster that best represented Microsoft Office's Clippy, which would it be?

(In D&D 5e still)

...has 5e statted the flumph yet?

The intellect devourer would be a good choice too.

Hahahaha

"You look like you're trying to think coherently! WOULD YOU LIKE HELP WITH THAT?"

oh yeah, here it is, the flumph

It's a Lawful Good creature from the plane of Silly and Unused Monsters.

They're helpful but useless, and most people forget them until reminded.

Wow

I shall refluff them as malevolent agents of distraction

And in both 3.5 and 4e, they were only statted up as part of April Fools' jokes.

VTC opinion based

it's an idea generation question

enworld.org/forum/… says flumphs are in the 5E Mon Man…

They are indeed.

We had a brief and bemused conversation about it a while back

@RobertF @KMallory @Shalvenay game tonight (woo). @Grubermensch and @JoshuaAslanSmith tagging yous guys for completeness

@waxeagle Unfortunately can't make tonight - it's my wedding anniversary

Wife: "Rob, want to go out tonight for our wedding anniversary". Me: "Nope, playing D&D." = major repercussions

@RobertF totally hear yah

@waxeagle exciting!

Flumphs are great. I populated a Dwarven mine in an asteroid (carved into the shape of a giant Dwarf head) with them when I ran a 5e/Spelljammer one-shot.

Ooh, earthquake.

@waxeagle AWWWW YEHHHH

@BESW ah, I didn't feel it, must have been when I was driving

Damn the comments on the new question. Feeling sorry for poor purplemonkey

@Asteria [sigh] [leaves comment]

VTC unclear, no system specified: rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/79409/…

ah, it must have one of the tags I blocked

Oh wow, that one has quite a story to it

@doppelgreener Flagged for mod attention before it turns into an edit war.

@BESW up-voting your comment, because yay politeness!

Politeness. It's not just nice, it's a rule.

Alas, it does.

One more close vote needed.

oh was this question in the review que,..? because I don't think I blocked any non system related tags

@trogdor It hasn't made it there yet.

oh

huh

no wonder I can't see it then

The review queues are actually pretty slow to pick stuff up.

well, until it got linked anyway

Ah, d7 stepped in. Thank goodness for that.