> Concept: Small-town cow with big dreams Gardener +3: My flowers bring all the butterflies to the yard Bachelorette +2: Gotta grab the bull by the horns Cow +1: Even-tempered milk maid
> Outstanding in her field. You have +2 to create advantages related to pastures.
> Chewing cud. You have +2 when resisting boredom. Also when taking any Careful action which is purely mental, you can increase the roll's success by one step if you double the time it takes to accomplish (you may double it further to further increase the level of success).
(For those scoring along at home, "Outstanding in her field" just gives +2 because it's very broad and a creative player can make the +2 relephant pretty often; "Chewing Cud" gets an extra effect because the +2 is narrowly defined and is likely to not come up at all in any given adventure.)
> Big tipper. Once per session you can get a favor from someone in the service industry, like being seated in a fully booked restaurant without a reservation.
There are plenty of resources on the Olympian Gods, but do any of them answer the question, "How would I fare in a fistfight against this guy?"
I got u, bb
SHOULD YOU FIGHT: GREEK #GODS EDITION
#FolkloreThursday
picture citations at end
ARES: God of war. I know you're thinking, "Don't fight the literal god of war." Wrong. Ares is extremely dumb, so just goad him into charging, side-step & let him run off a cliff or something. He's basically Wile E. Coyote, you absolutely must fight him. Video if possible.
@KorvinStarmast I completely agree with your assessment in this question but I think maybe calling it a "sloppily written question" might be a bit too much. I agree that it was very sloppy but maybe OP is just bad at English/writing or something? It's their first question.
Nothing wrong with saying "I am unhappy with the way we are currently playing, but I want to keep playing. Can we agree that _________________ and do that from now on?"
@SPavel Hopefully they're bearing in mind the fun and comfort of their fellow player if they're interested in maintaining a relationship with that person.
I confess that I have been somewhat close to the player as described here a few years ago when we started playing and I knew the rules better than the DM by far.
It took me a long time to find the right balance between correcting or informing the DM of a rule they didn't know about and being a punk rules lawyer unintentionally usurping DM authority.
Yeah now that it pretty much the dynamic we have. The DM and everyone just openly asks me if there's unclarity. And obviously in cases of ambiguity I just say "your call DM".
@goodguy5 right on. That is pretty much the tone I take now, but even those I have reduced a lot if I think the ruling is fair and/or fun and there's no reason to correct them.
@SPavel I'm guessing we're talking about different kinds of groups and dissent, since I've got in mind friends sitting around a table and one saying "Please don't decide my paladin's backstory for me, I'm interested in establishing that myself so ask me about it instead." or something.
That's a social contract renegotiation to happen on the spot.
I'm talking about scenarios more like the one in the question: the thing the group wants to do that they consider to be fun is considered by one player to be detrimental to the fun. What are that player's rights in dissenting against that thing?
Certainly the player ought to have some, but the consensus of the whole group is obviously more valuable, though by how much?
The group can neither say "suck it up, buttercup" nor fold under the one player's demands.
Last time I faced that situation it was with a group of friends who had mutually exclusive tastes in genres so we just did something else entirely, and three of us tried out a thing where we aligned.
@doppelgreener I am going to make the guess that the question is dealing with some teenagers, and the social dynamics of a peer to peer situation. I bit back my desire to reply "go find an adult to be your DM" because I don't think it solves anything, and also because (unfortunately) some of the adults I have played with are as bad about that sort of back biting as was described in the question.
@doppelgreener That is one way to handle dissent: "we, as friends, will do another friends activity that we all enjoy, and then we will also do the other thing that a subset of us enjoys"
Each player, one after the other, assigns a number of action tokens to action spaces, which lets them build buildings, recruit adventurers, earn money, play Intrigue cards, or gain Quests. They can use money and adventurers to complete Quests, which give points and can also give the player powerful abilities.
Each action space can only be used 1/round, so there's strategy in blocking opponents while still trying to complete your quests.
Hmm, a new user has just 'rephrased' his unanswerable question into an entirely unrelated and very different question. Not sure sure if this necessitates much moderater attention. But, at the least, any comments posted are now incomprehensible as they don't relate in any way to the current question.
@SPavel I've never played any of the D&D board games. Judging by covers they've just seemed like WotC saying "X is a popular board game, let's re-skin it with our PI and sell it for $100."
But maybe I'm wrong? Do they stand on their own merits as board games?
@nitsua60 Lords of Waterdeep, in particular is a genuinely good game. The game mechanic of 'Worker Placement' it's based around wasn't enitrely original, but it was fairly new and it was an entirely original implementation of it.
@nitsua60 It was very positively received by many boardgame hobbyists with no interest in D&D or RPGs.
@SPavel "re-skin" may be too harsh. I guess I look at something like that and thing "oh, a worker placement game. There are lots of good worker placement games, why should I pay for one and pay for this brand?"
@Tiggerous That's good to hear, though. May have to check it out.
@nitsua60 Don't get me wrong, it's not my favourite Worker Placement game (Agricola), but Worker Placement is one of my favourite mechanics, and this really filled a niche of more accessible worker placement in a different way to any existung games when it was first released. Since then that market has got a little more saturated, but everyone I've taught it to has enjoyed it, and none of those people, that I can think of, had an existing fondness for DnD to draw upon.
@Tiggerous I guess by that definition yes, though IMO to be a worker placement game, the game should center on the workers and even have a way of making more workers (like the example given, Stone Age)
@SPavel There are two methods on top of that. One of the Warfare quests let's you permenantly recruit an extra worker (called the Lieutenant), and one of the player built buildings gives you an extra worker (the Ambassador) who plays before anyone else at the beginning of the next round.
@Tiggerous Interesting, I haven't encountered either of those yet. Those seem quite powerful!
My coup de grace last time was completing the "take 3 of your workers back to your tavern" quest at the end of the round, when my workers were occupying my powerful buildings
@SPavel Well the Lieutenant is very powerful, but it's a very expensive quest with no other reward, so it's really a matter of if you can complete it early enough in the game to get enough benefit from it to outweigh the cost.
Could anyone help me out with a quick issue on DnD 5th edition that does likely not warrant a full-blown question (or might even already have been asked on the main but I couldn't find it)?
@SPavel The Ambassador can be used by a different player each round, but can be lucrative for the person that built the building, as a consequence of that.
@Tiggerous I was also lucky enough to draw the "2 gold and take the first turn token" card and then the "activate a space occupied by an enemy" card, allowing me to claim the first turn token early & keep it two times when it was challenged
I did eventually lose it, but it allowed me to build 4 buildings (and shed 4 corruption with my Plot quest that placed corruption off my tavern and onto tiles when I built buildings)
The first tile I corrupted was the "draw intrigue and take the first turn token" action
I shall: I've got an adventure that says my players could *spot the hidden monsters* by passing a Perception DC of 10. I am stumbled as any adventurer will already have a passive perception of *at least* 10 - so anyone should see them without having to pass an active check (unless they got 9 or less WIS that is)...
Assuming that is a mistake on the adventure's side, what would be a proper Perception DC for hiding a group of rats in a *very dark cellar*, behind barells and such?
@dot_Sp0T I mean there is no reason why only a subsection could not be surprised.
The only thing that changes is that some people won't be able to act which seems like a good thing to learn about surprise and a good advantage to those with the abilities that allowed them not to be surprised. But that is your call.
I mean, I'll allow anyone spotting the rats to warn the others before they are attacked - if nobody wants to shout/warn then indeed some will be surprised
@MikeQ Yeah, my original plan was something like "choose one from these X quests" with the players knowing the main reward for each of the quests (of course some lesser loot would also be found). But one of my players is a fan-ish of West Marches gameplay which is somewhat foreign to me, and expressed a desire to always have a "n+1"th option to "do something else".
The players pick a quest and complete it, the other quests "escalate" into more dire ones and new ones unlock, rinse and repeat until the BBEG is down.
@JAD If I've understood correctly, the West Marches thing is that the players decide what they're going to do between sessions (or at the end of the previous session) so the GM has the time to prep it
@kviiri I never played a West Marches campaign...do you have to plan every quest so it can be solved in one session? If not, pcs just "disapear" or "appear" out of thin air if next day there are not the same players?
While the whole "part RPG, part strategy" appeal of building a resource base and gathering loot by picking one's quests according to what the party wants and needs appeals to me greatly, it might not appeal as much to my players in practice. Heck, even I might wind up not liking it :P
there is always the old switcheroo: I planned for this wizard tower. Instead, they want to go to the dungeon of the evil overlorld. thats just the wizard tower but inverted and refluffed, but they'll never know.
"You can go to the goblin camp, or investigate those ruins, or explore that mysterious pit. Or, you could wander around town and see what happens"
and then you have a list of "quests" that could occur in town - and they can be REALLY abstract, like you write up some NPCs and their motives, and leave it open-ended to see how the PCs interact
@Helwar Well, if they would know in this case because a large part of the campaign concept is that each quest improves the world in some rather specific way and there's one particularly good piece of loot or other reward waiting at the end
The basic concept of the campaign is that the players'll be helping a struggling resistance movement get their ranks together against a malicious spirit that's all but over overtaken their island and seeks to expand their evil regime to the whole world afterwards.
So I'm aiming for each quest to have both a concrete reward (eg. +2 holy symbol of happiness) and a "how-this-helps-the-resistance" which also includes something concrete for the party (eg. access to a service).
@kviiri For the "do something else" side quests, you could consider abstract rewards like information, whether it's a tactical hint or some story revelation
One thing is still unclear, does 'something else' here mean 'we go look somewhere else for quests', or 'we don't want to do those quests, we want to go do/kill/explore X instead'?
@JAD Not all side-quests have to be combat related. Example: If "do something else" means spending the day shopping in town, then maybe the PCs learn that about some problem from the blacksmith. If they resolve it (using skills, roleplay, or just spending time), the blacksmith may give them a discount in the future.
My players had a blacksmith quest which they assumed would be 'kill some monsters and gain favor with me'. What they instead had was a quest to inspect the two iron sources the blacksmith did business with, discover why there's been so many quality issues as of late, and after the facts were gathered, get them to BOTH stop sabotaging the other iron mine's supply.
Expected: Monster slaying. Received: Disrupting nasty business competition that was resulting in poor quality goods for everyone.
@Maximillian Brilliant! Even if it doesn't immediately further the campaign's apparent plot, as long as the players enjoy it and it's not disruptive, then it's good.
The party got a small gold compensation, but they got a permanent 15% discount on crafting orders and already-made goods.
The players were expecting a cookie cutter good/evil game of monsters, door bashing, and treasure. They did not expect to have talk two groups down, play detective, and broker talks to resolve conflict. They're not particularly good at it. But sometimes heroes have to do things a bit out of element.
If I want to slow down the level progression for my players without having to tell them could I just make more encounters have multiple creatures (dnd 5e, considering how XP budget changes with numbers)
Though as DM I always end up having to take a sidequest character and flesh them out, because there's always at least one PC who gets way too interested to know more, and I'm loathe to reveal "I just made this guy up on the spot and don't have a lot of detail."
I fallback on tools like AEG's old 'Ultimate Toolbox' which has a few hundred pages of d20 lists of random descriptors, people, places, monsters, and things.
@Maximillian Also, kudos for adding noncombat challenges. Too many GMs assume that since the system is focused on combat and dungeon crawls, then their games must exclusively consist of those elements.
@DavidCoffron I don't know that much about how 5e budgets xp but I will tell you from my experience if you just add up how much they would get then remove a percentage based on how much you want to slow progression it is highly unlikely that any of them will notice or question your math. Unless you are playing a campaign they have done before then they might notice the slowdown.
They really would have liked to have killed one of the two iron mine companies and be done with it but having a PALADIN in the party in earshot when the rogue mutters tends to help keep that from happening.
I pay out XP for resolving encounters non-violently. If they resolve a planned combat non-violently, it is sometimes a prorated amount of XP instead of the full amount, but enough to compensate the effort they put in.
Kill the baddy now, get the whole thing. Get him to leave without fighting, I'll give you half, because you better believe he's coming back later with more resources.
Once or twice I've had to pause a session halfway through. "Alright so you guys did something major that I didn't account for and I have no material to proceed from here." Which results from doing things like converting the big-bad.
I'll let my players try just about anything, I just caution them that we can end early if they do anything too crazy.
Also never have your big bad try to deliver a villainous speech in the start of your story with veteran players. "Yeah I have a bow and these three bought crossbows."
Yeah I am going through ToA and when we got summoned to the Yuan-ti boss in the lost city, we just told him we wanted to stop the death curse and had no beef with him so we basically skipped an entire chapter of the book in one non combat encounter.
Also if you ever have a player who works in supply chain management, be prepared for a group that plans not to address the big bad, but cut off any and all resources he may be harvesting and having carted to his fortress.
My players are not allowed to: Introduce the idea of democracy/representative government to peasants under feudalism or similar cultures. My party cannot introduce the concept of union representation to working classes. (Guildship is fine.)
@JAD Probably not. Depends on whether the BBEG has unlimited time and access to other resources. And even if they don't, they may still come after the PCs for revenge. And from a GM perspective, that's okay!
I tripped up a gm once in rifts by sneaking into a base and putting rocks in the intakes of their samas' and sky cycles then setting off the alarm, so when the soldiers responded they blew up all of their power armor.
@MikeQ Or the Disorder Of Villainous Men And Women And Members Of Other Races Although You Would Think That In A Fantasy Setting The Words "Man" And "Woman" Would Be Race-Agnostic And Refer Solely To Gender.
