@trogdor I'd like to play again so that I get a better feel for the game. Maybe a game like that would be a way to see if my wife would like other RPGs .... but I won't be introducing such a game unless I have a better grasp of it
Don't have the players draw maps
This answer is challenging the premise of your suggestion. From everything I have experienced with players new and old, having players make the maps has never worked well and I would recommend not doing it at your table.
Firstly though, I think there are some se...
I'm not sure how coherent that answer came out actually. So do tell me if I'm raving or not lol
@Rubiksmoose I think I agree with you (after a skim of your answer) - its not a fair comparison that your character would only know/remember what you know/remember
@SirCinnamon @KorvinStarmast yeah I think my big beef was with how how and why OP was trying to do this. If not for that I probably wouldn't have answered
Fwiw, I'm generally fine with asking the player's to map things out as long as everyone is cool with it, but not if it is supposed to have in game ramifications if they screw up.
I'm going to be running LMoP in a few weeks, my plan was to put the "Player" map of Cragmaw Hideout on the roll20 interface and hide like 90% of it, only revealing portions as players explore it.
Yeah, definitely doing map creation that way then. =D
The problem with letting players create maps is that you always think you've perfectly described the scene, and then you compare their maps with yours, and your "open-sky pavilion" has somehow become an underground sewer complex. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Caller: Listen at the east door. Ref: (After appropriate check) You hear shuffling. Caller; Two of us (specifying which two) will throw our weight against the door to open it. All will be ready for combat. Ref: (After rolling two dice:) The door opens! You can't be surprised, but the monsters — you see half-a-dozen gnolls — can be (Here a check for surprise is made, melee conducted, and so on.) Caller: Okay, what does the room look like — we're examining the walls, ceiling, floor, and contents of the room itself.
@GcL I'm not too worried about that. I'm running for a group of new-er players, so trying to step them through learning the game, and having them write maps is probably going to end poorly for them.
@Xirema Also, neither roll20 nor fantasy grounds support doing that. Player drawn maps usually only work for physical table top or between artists that already have a near real-time drawing sharing system worked out.
I also hate fitting grids to images by hand. Neither system have an api for applying a grid by a coordinate offset and sizing. I'd write (copy pasta) a grid detection function for a system that provided the apply grid api.
Except for SVG.... it doesn't work for those. Although, you could probably figure it out. There's only so many ways people are actually going to define grids, and nested squares isn't likely to be one of them.
I did do some preliminary testing, it took... effort, but I was able to take a map of Cragmaw Hideout and very nearly map the square grid of the map to the square grid of roll20.
Was only off by like 5% on the edges of the map, decided it was "Good Enough"
@Xirema That is also my experience. I convert a lot of old sprite maps from our favorite SNES games to battle maps. They're regular 32 pixel squares, but neither fg nor r20 make it easy to set the grid just right.
Usually takes two or three attempts... which is just frustrating enough to slowly build up a disdain? no... it gets worse than that. It's like a contempt for doing it.
For the new 5e question that just showed up in the listing: does anyone have a good example of a question of the form "Here's my BBEG; how would this party fare against it?"? In particular, I'm looking for a good example of the kind of statblock you'd post in the question.
For example, say I cast Gate and say Orcus's name, assuming he didn't veto the gate opening would this summon him? Or would I have to say his true name for this to work?
What would be the challenge rating for this custom NPC enemy? It's definitely more than 8 but I don't know what. In essence, it's a Drow Elite Warrior combined with an Assassin:
Drow Elite Assassin
Medium humanoid (elf), neutral evil
Armor Class 16 (Studded Leather)
Hit Points 75 ...
I DMed my first session last week. We played the scenario Lost Mine of Phandelver from the D&D 5e Starter Set.
My players haven't yet entered the first "dungeon" but will likely next session: (LMOP spoiler here)
While we're all new to D&D mechanics, I'm the only one who knows (mostly thanks to...
@GcL I think it does, hence why I voted. It is unclear what spells the creature is capable of casting, and it is necessary to know those spells to accurately gauge the CR of the creature.
@GcL If the OP adds that info into the post, I'm happy to reopen the question. But evaluating the CR of a level 18 spellcaster without knowing what spells they can cast will lead to a wrong answer, IMO.
@Xirema or at the very least a useless one. A wizard has access to a vast variety of spell options. I have no idea what a reasonable range of spell assumptions would even look like. And it would all be moot if OP decides to go with something different (which they don't seem to understand)
@GcL having an "absolute and objectively correct answer" is not the standard by which we judge the clarity of a question however.
CR definitely involves almost as much handwaiving as it does actual calculation. That doesn't mean we should accept a lack of basic necessary information.
I mean, I don't think we disagree on that, but that's not the reason I'm voting to close.
If I looked at the stats as-is, I could say "oh, that's a CR 5 creature: tons of hit points, but 0 damage output, so we'll give it a 5 just to accommodate the possibility that the environment is a potential hazard".
I could also say "CR25, because this spellcaster has access to Meteor Swarm, and with a save DC of 24, that would TPK most parties that aren't already level 15+, and anything on top of that would be lethal to most parties".
@Xirema A creature whose CR "might be 5 or might be 25" is useless to a DM.
Listen if you are designing an encounter, all other things aside, it seems entirely reasonable to ask you to think about what spells you are equipping to your one enemy.
@Rubiksmoose That's a laudable goal. Please refrain from asserting what my goals should be. It does not make me feel good? amenable? happy? when I hear or read an assertion about what I should be or want to do. At least if I haven't solicited that kind of advice explicitly.
@GcL How about this? The goal of the site you're participating in, is as Rubiks states: to provide solutions that can be easily found by everyone else who has the same problem later on.
I think it's reasonable to expect people to share the goals of the community they've joined, but it's certainly reasonable to expect to be called out when actively circumventing them.
@GcL My intent with that was to stress what the desired behavior of any responsible community member is. What you are trying to do right now is circumvent the entire point of the site.
The question will now not get re-opened because the user got an answer another way. The user will not be helped to learn the site's conventions and will either leave, or will expect to get poorly-formatted questions answered the same way in the future. And the answer will not be available to anyone else who has the same problem in the future.
@GcL All we want to do is get the question reopened. I am asking you right now to help us do that.
You can then freely post an answer.
@GcL I was already in the process of creating a chatroom for everyone to help when you created yours (beat me by a few seconds). We need to talk to OP and get some information. Alternatively, you could rustle up a few reopen votes and just reopen it since you feel that it is fine as-is.
I am unsure the OP is reasonably capable of clarifying the question significantly, given attempts to coax that out of them have led to the declaration that the character has all items and knows all spells.
And then that they're new at this so they can't possibly be expected to decide all these things we're trying to understand from them.
@Carcer When questions are clearly unable to be edited and re-opened, we happily invite users to chat to work on answers with them. When users are having trouble with editing a question based on comment support, we eagerly invite them to chat to help them workshop it.
I'm the first to shout that the Stack Exchange model is deeply flawed and inhumane, but going vigilante and shutting the community out isn't the solution.
but I do have a strong suspicion that the only properly stackable answer is a frame challenge that says the question is impossible to answer without committing to a specific spell list and set of items
@Rubiksmoose To be completely transparent, there actually are private chatrooms: elected moderators (and staff) can create rooms that are not visible in room-lists and which have manually-managed R/W permissions.
I believe it's publicly known that each site has one by default that elected mods have access to (the "moderator room") and that there exists one (the "Teacher's Lounge") that all elected mods around the Network have access to.
I believe that some sites' moderators set up private rooms for moderation conversations with users; I don't believe that RPG has any private rooms other than the mod-channel.
Given who's in there, the advice would be better than mine about CR balancing anyways. Never been something I enjoyed or considered myself super expert in.
But very broadly homebrew is for creating new complex things that are distincly different from any published stuff. House-rules are for slight to moderate modifications of published stuff.
Sometime in the next few days, I think I'm going to put up a question with a self-answer evaluating the CR of a boss monster I created, maybe to hopefully create a good "Canonical" version of that kind of question.
@Carcer oh yeah, thank you for that BTW lol. While normally I am more than happy to accept corrections like that, that would have been a very poor time I think. :)
As with the vampire-to-lawn-chair problem, it involved Matter magick in Mage 1e. One of the examples listed of "coincidental magick" for Matter was "transmuting bullets into air" with the coincidence of "the gun was never loaded." Now, earlier examples in the book of coincidental magick in the bo...
> The two most common types of oMage players on the Internet are Average/Process, and Omniscient/Result. They get into huge arguments. EDIT: Or they did, until we invented HAP\HOP\HYP|RBD/PBD on the Mage forum to stop them. Then they mostly got into arguments over which was official, until Malcolm Sheppard showed up and said "None. The writers don't think about this [stuff] nearly as hard as you all do. Christ." Or something to that effect.
@trogdor One axis is Hypothetical Average Perceiver vs Hypothetical Omniscient Perceiver (vs Harass Yonder Passerby, which should be a joke but I know it's not totally a joke); the other axis is Result-Based Determinism vs Process-Based Determinism. Massive arguments about which combination of the two axes is "right."
Basically it boils down to how the magic system works in Mage: you take damage for doing things that are obviously magical, but the system is contradictory on how to determine that. HAP\HOP\HYP|RBD/PBD is an attempt to codify the different player positions on the subject.
Now you just gotta hope no one downvotes anything :P
[accidentally dv's something]
Was just curious to see if you did have any negative posts, and I just peeked at a few of your 0-score answers, to see if they were just zero, or balance +/-
the page hadn't loaded properly and when I clicked, it jumped, so I accidentally dv'd it haha. I rectified it though :P
The Thief archetype Rogue's Second-Story Work (PHB, p. 97) feature states:
[...] you gain the ability to climb faster than normal; climbing no longer costs you extra movement.
However, the Centaur's Equine Build racial trait (GGR, p. 16) says:
In addition, any climb that requires hand...
@Ash I'd personally recommend it. It's a 2-sided series about a Magician in modern-day England (Magic is common knowledge, and separates class) and a Djinni named Bartimaeus.
Djinn are controlled by the magicians to do their bidding, which is how they do "magic".
@BESW I personally had a similar issue, because one perspective is a 3rd-person, of the Magician, and the other is a first-hand perspective of the Djinn. I personally found myself sort of grinding through the former, so that I could get back to reading more of the latter.
It's funny. The 3rd person perspective is full of immersion... mystery... danger... etc. And the 1st person perspective is very much the opposite. Sarcastic, humorous, and "immersion-breaking"
My DM for my Thursday CoS game just announced, 15 minutes before our session tonight, that he's not really enjoying running a published adventure (specifically, "dming a planned and modules campaign doesn’t feel right for me. Having limited opportunity to put my own brain for it makes it a lot less fun on my side."). He said he figured it was better to let us know now rather than running tonight's session and then announcing the campaign was canceled.
I got pretty fed up with running a certain module cough PrincesoftheApocalypse cough, and in retrospect, I probably should have just said so rather than feeling like I had to get past the finish line.
If only I was in a more appropriate time zone to you guys haha. I'm really starting to feel like I don't belong in my group any more due to conflict of interest
Don't have the players draw maps
This answer is challenging the premise of your suggestion. From everything I have experienced with players new and old, having players make the maps has never worked well and I would recommend not doing it at your table.
Firstly though, I think there are some se...
For example, say I cast Gate and say Orcus's name, assuming he didn't veto the gate opening would this summon him? Or would I have to say his true name for this to work?
What would be the challenge rating for this custom NPC enemy? It's definitely more than 8 but I don't know what. In essence, it's a Drow Elite Warrior combined with an Assassin:
Drow Elite Assassin
Medium humanoid (elf), neutral evil
Armor Class 16 (Studded Leather)
Hit Points 75 ...
I DMed my first session last week. We played the scenario Lost Mine of Phandelver from the D&D 5e Starter Set.
My players haven't yet entered the first "dungeon" but will likely next session: (LMOP spoiler here)
While we're all new to D&D mechanics, I'm the only one who knows (mostly thanks to...
The Thief archetype Rogue's Second-Story Work (PHB, p. 97) feature states:
[...] you gain the ability to climb faster than normal; climbing no longer costs you extra movement.
However, the Centaur's Equine Build racial trait (GGR, p. 16) says:
In addition, any climb that requires hand...
