I was reading about some original DnD editions today and came across an excerpt of combat that mentioned non-fantastic combat.
The excerpt in question was
Assume the following dice score by the Hero. Note that he is allowed one attack for each of his combat levels as the ratio of one Orc vs. the...
Episode 6 of the Rise of Tiamat adventure (chapter 14 in the combined Tyranny of Dragons book), "Metallic Dragons, Arise", has cover art featuring 3 metallic dragons.
The art (full-resolution image here) depicts a gold dragon (the big one on the left), an unknown dragon that I'm trying to identi...
I'm often inspired to create flawed legendary items. Maybe the idea was to make a dagger that would teleport into other people, but it ended up just being shy and instead it just freaks out and moves.
Other such items are:
> Legendary Dud: this item has no extra value, use or special qualities, other than the fact that it is legendary
> Bag of Scolding: anytime you interact with the bag, it berates you
@bobble I still basically write fanfic β itβs just that eventually I put in the same characters into a thousand settings so they became more and more developed
Almost every D&D campaign I've ever run (and a few that weren't D&D) have included a grumpy old librarian-priest, and a town called Stone's Throw because that's how big it is.
Within a certain radius around Stone's Throw, I suppose so.
The librarian-priest was an early PC of mine, and he was popular with my friends so I made him an NPC in a lot of my games afterward. Sometimes a friend, sometimes an antagonist, sometimes integral to the plot and sometimes a cameo.
And I totally rip off stuff from whatever fiction I'm interested in for my campaigns. The Witch Queen was named for a character from the Wizard of Oz sequels, the three hags were lifted directly from the Prydain Chronicles right down to lines of dialogue, I quoted Walt Whitman for catfolk marriage and funeral rites....
Both Inferno Blade (stronger) and Burning Blade (weaker) have a swift action as the initiation action, which make sense, as the boost only lasts until your turn ends, however, Searing Blade stands out as it's the only one that requires a standard action.
I've looked up the errata but this maneuve...
https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/188515/how-to-i-run-the-tomb-of-horrors-better?noredirect=1#188516 Twilight Clerics are considered broken? I had no idea this was a common opinion :P
It looks like a good subclass, and there's one on my party rn, but maybe because he rolled poor stats, it doesn't seem out of place with the rest of us
@nitsua60 I also retracted the close vote, since A stated in a comment under my answer what they were looking to try and do, so I edited that into the question, and corrected the prose in the process
@BlueMoon93 300' radius dim light is a ridiculous feature, for starters ...
If it was 60 or 120 at least it would be close in scale to other class features.
@ThomasMarkov Yeah, many issues with that domain, I have no idea what the folks in the back room were smoking when they decided that it was ready for release in final form.
@ThomasMarkov Oh, wait, does the dim light overwrite the darkness spell? I think we have a Q&A on that, checking .. nvm
@KorvinStarmast That's the thing, it really appears quite polished. To me it's well written, there aren't any weird rules interactions immediately evident, but it's just really strong.
@BardicWizard ah, I used to use pre-existing settings but don't anymore. I do take inspiration from other fiction: there was a scene in Loki I thought was cool, but it would be cooler tweaked a bit, so I plopped the general idea into a fresh works and made up some characters that would take the story in the direction I wanted
Headdesk: you're running ToH, not ToA. 'S'okay, though, because I know at least a couple regular chatizens have run 5e's ToH, too. — nitsua6043 secs ago
Hey everyone this is Marcel Mercado, the artist behind the art. As many have pointed out, that is another silver dragon. The brief called for one Gold dragon, and two silver dragon. Quadratic Wizard nailed it on the head.
@nitsua60 in roll20, how do you overlay the darkness spell using dynamic lighting? You ever done that? I was messing with it last night and I am not sure if I have to go into each PC's sheet and mess with the settings?
@nitsua60 Y'know, it's nice to know that I'm not the only one that gets these two mixed up. In my mind, it always seems like a dungeon that's specifically designed to kill people should be the Annihilation one, since that's what it does... (Still haven't found a group willing to bite to let me run it. I like the idea of playing it almost like Paranoia, just slapping characters into the meat grinder until fun comes out.)
@KorvinStarmast No, I just had noticed that both you and Thomas had interacted with the question, and might have noticed my earlier (erroneous) comment.
@KorvinStarmast I don't remember at all--it's been years since I played with R20 lighting, sorry.
@LCooper We did that a couple of years back when Ready Player One was on the school's summer reading list. (Before the movie.) Another GM and I had a stack of pregens and kids could come to the table, three at a time, make a run at it, and go back to the end of the line when they died. It was hella-fun =)
During fall orientation the director of student activities rented a bunch of arcade games and had us set up in the student center, so the kids could come down and play many of the referent-games in the book.
@nitsua60 Oh, that sounds like a ton of fun! Mind if I ask how quickly people wound up dying? I was thinking about a marginally less wholesome drinking game variant, because it seems like a grand time, but I'm not familiar enough with the module to know what things would be likely to come up.. (other than the apparently-ubiquitous 10ft pole)
I have a player who is playing a blind PC. She is a 3rd-level Ranger and she has chosen Blind Fighting as her fighting style, so she has blindsight of 10 ft. (TCE, p.41).
From what I gather from the blinded condition, she has disadvantage on ranged attack rolls that are more than 10 feet away.
Sh...
@LCooper I've run into it twice as a player back in AD&D. Do not recommend doing with a character you want to keep. Also, it's a bit gimmicky in that unless you already know the trick of some of the traps, you're pretty much hosed. That should probably be my goto example of why Rogue-like D&D is not fun.
@GcL That's why I was thinking to maybe do some fiddling with tone and go for a less Rogue-like experience and more of a Paranoia vibe- embrace the chaos and repeated deaths and get a little silly with it (which, knowing my usual players, would wind up happening anyway)
@LCooper Doing the jump/reset thing removes death and loss of character as a deterrent or bad outcome. Then it becomes a game of escape room where the players are just waving chickens at stuff in order to stumble upon the right trick. At that point, reading the module with the DMs notes and then watching a movie is a better use of time.
If you could replace death & loss of character with something else to serve as a deterrent, that might be interesting.
@GcL Hm, yeah, that's a good point on mechanics-- it seems like a common discussion about TOH is how to handle getting people back into the dungeon and how to make it punishing without being too much of a slog-- which sort of gets us back to Roguelikes.
Maybe take a page from Hades' book and put a gaggle of delightful and sometimes romanceable NPCs outside the dungeon?? (Joking! Mostly.)
@LCooper I don't think the original players in Gygax's group actually finished it. The story I got is that they noped the heck out shortly after all their henchmen were dead.
@GcL With my current plan of playing it as sort of a drinking game, I suspect that I won't get anyone to the end either! But a few hours of dungeoneering chaos sounds like a worthwhile use for a weekend night to me ;)
@LCooper Pretty frequently--20 min on average, I'd say?--but keep in mind they were 3-PC parties whose players were high schoolers who (generally) didn't know how to play D&D.
In my experience ToH (5e) was actually pretty easy: I and three other players at an AL table managed the whole thing without any deaths. Or, really, any close calls.
@GcL I think the key was that in the entry hallway we quickly glommed onto one or two things (thematically), and that drove us to be pretty methodical and persistent in finding paths... if that makes sense.