"Gender at the Gaming Table," by M Grant: an index of essays about how to handle gender in tabletop roleplaying games, and particularly for game masters who want to run an inclusive, representative game.
From the Archfey warlock patron feature Misty Escape (PHB, p. 109).
When you take damage, you can use your reaction to turn invisible and teleport up to 60 feet to an unoccupied space you can see. You remain invisible until the start of your next turn or until you attack or cast a spell.
T...
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Because my group likes to push the envelope, but the current DM is probably expecting a bit too much from us. I'm trying to see if I could run a few one-shots to give our group a breather.
So he can keep giving us Dante-must-die Mode
But we can take a break every other weekend on some more appropriately leveled content.
We just barely beat every encounter, so he's not WRONG about us being able to handle it
But the player fatigue is gonna hit HARD if the Wizard's spells never stick, the strikers never land meaty blows, and the tank is always down.
I was gonna run a Mummy Lord dungeon, but the more I look at it, the more I see it getting completely squashed, so I was hoping to adapt it or see how appropriate it would be to early party levels
See if maybe they could fight it at lower levels with optimization or if it needs to be buffed with the players at higher levels
@Rubiksmoose I just realized I didn't answer your question. Yeah, for the DM to design appropriate encounters. Not for the party to design a min-max brigade.
@Axoren The biggest thing I can think of is making sure that you avoid the "One Encounter per Adventuring Day" habit that a lot of DMs fall into. If you try to make a single encounter powerful enough to expend the entirety of a party's resources, it'll cause the encounter to become extremely swingy, which is one way that players start trying to min-max against. It creates a kind of Arms Race between the DM and players.
If the players aren't constantly stressing in every single fight that a single bad roll or bad decision could cause a TPK (or at least land them all in a dungeon somewhere), they're not going to push as hard for every game-breaking combo they can think of.
@Xirema I am fairly aware of that. For a less-optimized group, I ran a one-shot. Everyone blew their load early on some wolves and almost couldn't deal with ghosts and a giant skeleton later on in the same day.
People expect the one encounter per day, and Pathfinder encouraged 3-6 encounters per day.
The main issue I have is designing a series of encounters that don't result in that being the DM's fault, rather than players being generous with their resources.
The wide EXP budget system (multiple encounters) seems to favor martials with no dependence on resources, where as the narrow EXP budget systems (a couple of Deadly encounters per day) favors people with Nova Resources and Nuking potential.
Is there a way to figure out what to bring to the table? No plan survives first contact with the party, I'm well aware, but I just don't want them to spend 4 hours playing through Happy Fuzzy Bunny Land d20 if I underestimate them.
@GreySage I was going to suggest a slightly less ironic version of that: start with a series of [what you expect to be] easy encounters, and if the players blow past them without much issue, end the Adventuring day with a "Bonus Boss" that is harder than what they've dealt with. If they struggle to defeat the "easy" encounters, then create a narrative justification why the Bonus Boss isn't there anymore.
especially at higher levels, designing challenging encounters is less about "throw more enemies at them" and more about "give them other objectives besides just fighting until one side dies"
NPCs to protect or help escape, a timer until something bad happens, etc.
@V2Blast I really like this sort of event, but I never have a good idea of determining the difficulty.
If your goal is to protect an artifact from being destroyed, for example, the wizard can set up a wall spell and then it terms back into an Extermination.
If it's about protecting an NPC, banish them for a minute while the party Exterminates.
The one-shot where my players ran out of resources before fighting a giant skeleton? They spend all of their Nova resources damaging an inanimate object that they thought was in their way.
Depends on the level of interest of the players. You can do a real puzzle that any single player can look at and work on as long as their character is doing it. (effectively taking them out of combat)
Or just have it be an in character mechanical thing. Skill checks, moving around, putting stuff in order... etc.
FYI, never take encounter design advice from me: my plan for the next campaign I'm going to run is
- In session 0, give them a one-time-use wand that can, with no saving throw, paralyze a single enemy target for 24 hours, - Tell them that they should save it for a powerful "End Boss" wizard that they need to apprehend alive - Throw a suddenly way-too-difficult fight against a different wizard halfway to the "End Boss" - And reveal that the "End Boss" was actually dead the whole time.
In the best cast scenario, I psyche out the players into using the wand before they think they need to and…
My plan for the Mummy Lord one-shot was that I would have the players stumble upon a village where people are starving and their crops don't grow, but they're still meagerly fed by the local deity. The local deity is a Mummy Lord that self-deified themselves to usurp the position of the original deity, a snake god, who was trying to solve the problem of their famine. The Mummy Lord struck the snake god down, ate their heart, and achieved divinity so that everyone in their village would be fed.
It worked, for a while, but as people died and people were born, food would only magically appear in the storehouse enough to feed only the people who were originally part of the village when the Mummy Lord became the deity.
So, the players are going to be tricked into stealing some food from the storehouse because they're lost, hungry, and they haven't been able to find food for miles. Effectively, leading them to steal food from the Mummy Lord, causing them to need to deal with the curse they've just acquired, or be cursed for life.
There's also the fact that the village is having to ration the food that appears in the store house to the point where they have to have a lottery to decide who will go hungry and who will be sacrificed to reduce the village's need for food. This leaves them with a dwindling youth population and a growing elderly population that must be protected and kept alive, or their food portion will disappear with them.
If the party defeats the Mummy Lord, but doesn't realize the gravity of it being a deity (also just being a mummy), the Mummy Lord will revive and they'll have to fight it again.
They need to realize they need to either destroy its heart or bring it's heart back to the snake god and reinstate it as the deity.
After their first bout with the Mummy Lord, if they fail to realize they need to destroy the heart, the snake god will approach them and inform them. But the dungeon will be harder as now the Mummy Lord knows to expect them, and is fully aware of them at all times in their domain.
That pretty much sums up the plan for the one-shot.
Encounters and dungeon design are the part I'm having trouble with right now, and I expect the players to min-max somewhat.
@Axoren But then wouldn't they just run into the problem later down the line after the snake god can only provide the amount of food for the population when they were re-deified?
So the snake and mummy play an eternal game of divine hot potato?
Even then, why re-deify the snake god if their unwillingness to provide food for the village was what caused the whole problem in the first place?
@Yuuki The Mummy's dynamic with the Snake God is a fable, in a sense. The idea is that things aren't that simple. The Snake was biding time to get through the tough time while still getting people to survive. The Mummy Lord was a worshiper who wanted immediate gratification. The Snake God being reinstated is one option, and it goes with the animist idea of Snakes being a sign of rebirth, allowing the return of the village to prosperity. If the Snake God is not reinstated,
The people are now free to leave because they are no longer possessions of the Mummy, and are no longer cursed.
An off-topic question requesting Where to get feedback on homebrews was just asked. I left this comment below:
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@Ben That reminds me - I went and bought Diablo. No idea when I'll play it, as there's a crazy amount of cool games coming soon, but I'm one step closer :)
@Shalvenay Lately I've been trying to make sure my players get to face off with the BBEG before I leave for grad school in the fall, but they're apparently more interested in winning a local mayoral election
@Ben I've barely touched Diablo 1 in the past, but it'll almost certainly be Sorc. Both because Sorc was my favourite in 2, and because everything I've heard about D1 makes me think playing anything except Sorc is likely to go poorly.
@Miniman Very true. From my experience of the three classes, the sorcerer was the most "broken", which, in reverse, was probably actually the most balanced.
But yeah. Between Sekiro, the Hollow Knight sequel, the Ori sequel, Halo 3 finally on PC, and I know there's more stuff that I'm forgetting right now, it's going to be a while before I get to D1.
I'm in a situation where I don't have time to do any of the things I want to do, so I basically have to restrict my list from "what I want" to "what I really really want"
It's the curse of gaming these days. When I was younger I had time to play games but no money to buy them. Now I can afford them but have no time to play them.
The PCs then go and gain some experience and come back at level three to finish the introduction arc by defeating their first (and now recurring) enemy
@Ben What's your party comp? We'll need that to know if they can handle a stronger enemy
From the Archfey warlock patron feature Misty Escape (PHB, p. 109).
When you take damage, you can use your reaction to turn invisible and teleport up to 60 feet to an unoccupied space you can see. You remain invisible until the start of your next turn or until you attack or cast a spell.
T...
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Stack Overflow was an early and strong supporter of OpenID. We built...
An off-topic question requesting Where to get feedback on homebrews was just asked. I left this comment below:
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