BESW's Spoil-Lair

So, this the culmination of a loose adventure about tracking down something that's being done to local animals.

Oh?

We're gonna start the session having narrowed it down to "there's something unbalanced about the natural forces in this particular village."

So we have a skill challenge to find where the imbalance is.

And of course, they can't fail to find the source or the adventure would grind to a halt.

So instead it's a challenge to find the source without tipping the source off.

To do it quietly, gotcha

Once they find out that the imbalance is in the caves below the village, there's another challenge to get through the traps and hazards and not get lost. Again, they can't fail because that'd be boring, so it's a challenge to get to the center without tipping off the bad guy in the middle.

The second challenge will be easier or harder depending on if they succeeded or failed at the first.

10:08 AM

i am interested in what might make them lose their way, but go on

It's a complex cave network, kinda like a maze.

And of course there'll be hinky supernatural stuff to make it more confusing.

Once they arrive at the middle, they find a rogue druid trying to channel the primal power of many animals into a single powerful companion.

what a jerk!

He and his Frankenanimal are protected by the power of the ritual, and the party has a third skill challenge: interrupt the ritual before it completes, by dousing the magical fires, releasing the trapped animals, negotiating with the primal spirits, etc.

But this skill challenge has a twist: it has a physical component. The ritual has nodes, and at least one skill check must be made at each node, to turn it off.

And active nodes are leaking little primal animal spirits that are easy to take down, but really annoying if you ignore them... and wherever one dies, that square burns with primal fire for the rest of the scene.

Once the final skill challenge is completed, the ritual is either completed and the druid has an Awesome Empowered Companion to help in the fight--or the ritual is interrupted and the animal companion is a half-undead monstrosity that rampages across the map.

So I'm designing the little primal animal spirits, the druid, and two different animal companions.

So during the encounter, the party has to run around the room, defeating little minion enemies to stay safe, while disrupting the ritual in time?

Right.

10:15 AM

Man that sounds way more exciting than any of my encounters

And the fires from the extinguished minions remain through the druid/companion fight too.

So they can get pushed into the fires, or they can push the druid into them.

@Javelin also more than any of mine

And I'm thinking the Empowered companion will be able to teleport from fire to fire.

I have been,..... making some pretty weaksauce ones

While the undead one will probably be afraid of them.

10:16 AM

Probably one of the most exciting things I've ever done was have a goblin run up, get stopped in its tracks by a player ability, then get drop-kicked forward to be able to attack said player (the drop kick performed by a second goblin).

This is the sort of thing 4e's great at.

It's exhausting to do regularly, but it's a lot of fun too.

(Oh, and the third skill challenge is harder for each of the previous challenges that were failed.)

I mentioned it in general chat earlier, but I have had to max enemy HP for an entire campaign because of how powerful I made the players with my magic item distribution....

yeah I never understood how hard it would be to regularly design encounters

and I still wasn't doing this level of thing either

So the boss fight was just a slug fest, which ended in under a minute in-world time

Terrain effects that can be made to work for the PCs or the NPCs depending on tactics, skill challenges simultaneous with combat, monsters with cool synergies...

The empowered companion will have a mark that lets it interrupt attacks made against its master.

Also both of them will have auras.

10:19 AM

Environment is my biggest issue in general, so I think it's really cool when that is paid attention to

The undead companion has an Aura 2: when you start your turn in the aura, save vs poison or be slowed until the start of your next turn.

Ouch

The empowered companion has Aura 2: when you start your turn in the aura, save vs fear or be pushed your speed as you run away.

@Javelin When I found 4e's terrain feature mechanics, I was SO HAPPY.

What are they like?

If they can even be explained o-o

They take a lot of different forms.

At their simplest, they're just powers (like an attack, or granting a bonus) without an associated creature, which either trigger on certain cues (like when a creature enters a square) or are activated by a creature using one of its own actions (like flipping a switch).

For example, by standing in a teleportation circle at one end of the map and using a move action, you can teleport 8 squares to anywhere you can see.

Or any creature that starts its turn in the squares that are on fire.... takes fire damage.

10:28 AM

so it's a structured system for describing effects that happen due to the environment?

But it's also as simple as having interesting stuff like difficult terrain that costs 2 squares to move through instead of 1 (so you probably can't shift through those squares), or pillars that grant cover

Yup.

And part of the coolness is that they're suggesting interesting things.

like, there is a [thing] in this/these locations, and they can be interacted with for [results] or perform [function] passively

Yeah.

I mean, those things exist in several editions. But I do feel you, it sounds a lot nicer to me to have a uniform system for all of those things

I had a scenario where a pillar in the middle of the combat field allowed anyone next to it to spend a standard action to make a lightning attack against area burst 1 within 10. That was a popular location to fight over.

10:30 AM

because difficult terrain exists, and cover is a thing, and traps exist, and so on and so forth, but they aren't under one banner, so i can't find environmental things in one place

THAT sounds cool

Right. The joy of 4e was having everything consolidated and standardized so that creativity was about finding new ways to apply a limited but flexible toolset.

Anything you can think of as a power a creature might have? Slap it on a terrain feature.

I think that's what they are trying to do with 5e, but from a different angle

Especially because a number of people moved away from 4e, feeling it was too video-gamey

It was a lot like Fate's Bronze Rule.

What's the bronze rule? Or the implied silver rule, for that matter? (And then I noticed the words* Bronze Rule were a link)

> Golden Rule: Decide what you’re trying to accomplish first, then consult the rules to help you do it.

> Silver Rule: Never let the rules get in the way of what makes narrative sense.

> Bronze Rule: You can treat anything in the game world like it’s a character.

10:35 AM

I have no idea how Fate works o-o; But I've tried looking at it, so I think I can barely understand

Fate's my group's default "We don't know of any specific system that will be best for the kind of game we've decided to play so we'll use this" system.

my group isnt remotely well defined enough to know what kind of game we're playing, so we wing it and D&D seems to work well enough

And 4e helped me a LOT in getting into a headspace for understanding Fate easily, especially compared to 3.5 which was my other big RPG experience at the time.

3.5 is a mess now that I have 5e

I've looked at 5e a bit, and figure if I ever want something that's mechanically similar to non-4e D&D again, I'll use 13th Age.

It's got all the same nifty bits, but 100% less obligation to stick with D&Disms that don't really work, just because they're traditional.

10:38 AM

Like what kind of D&Disms?

Skills.

Parsing the d20 in a particular way.

The deific not-actually-a-pantheon.

I am particularly curious about "parsing the d20" because I am not sure what you mean by that

The "zero to hero" mode of play.

So, in D&D and the d20 System, you check for two things when you roll a d20: if it hit maximum or minimum, and then the sum of its result and your modifier.

In 13th Age, depending on your character choices, you're also going to be checking the d20's unmodified result against a host of other triggers beyond just "max or min?"

For example, bards. One most turns in combat a bard makes a simple attack.

Then depending on what the d20 rolls, they get to do something else too.

They'll have one effect that triggers on a roll of 5 or under. Another that triggers on an even roll. Another that triggers on 17 or higher.

Which means that if they roll 2 or 18 they could choose one of TWO different effects.

One build gets to, once per encounter, subtract 1 from their unmodified roll.

That way they can shift what gets triggered by the raw result at the cost of being less likely to hit with the actual attack.

I mean, one of the things I vouch for in the name of 5e is that it is vastly more flexible than 3.5e

I still vividly recall the 30-some-odd random magic item generation tables in the back of the 3.5e DMG

the developers learned not to do that because its kind of silly, so 5e is more skeletal and can even be considered incomplete

So the attitude I have taken about 5e is that if it doesn't exist, and I need it, I can just make it up and base it off of something else.

I'm narrow minded so I always forget to make cool things outside of the norm, but I have seen other people do it. I can see that kind of mechanism^ being welded on handily

I do appreciate that 5e has placed group customization as more of an assumed feature of D&D, because it always was but 3.5 and 4e both tended to get a bit uppity about the idea they weren't complete systems for which tweaking was unnecessary.

Unfortunately in practice, from my outsider's perspective, that seems to largely manifest in an "It's not broke if the user can fix it" approach to system design.

That's something I REALLY appreciated in 4e: they were constantly updating, fixing, and commenting on how the system worked compared to how they'd expected it to work.

There was a much more solid sense (compared to 3.5) that if you changed things, you knew what effect the changes would have, because the designers were sharing their learning with you. (Except skill challenges. They never did seem to notice that skill challenges as written are completely and backwardsly broken.)

And it's what I love even more about Fate: probably at least half of the Fate Core book isn't rules, it's explaining how and why the rules exist, what effect they have, and how to hack them to have different effects. And they keep releasing new Toolkit books explaining how to hack Fate to achieve different goals.

10:55 AM

I can respect that. Maybe I just come from a weird perspective, I don't know, but Fate is hard for me to understand and D&D does what I need it to do o-o

That's fine. Fate's not for everybody, that's for sure.

And if D&D is genuinely working for your group, that's all the endorsement it needs.

I don't know about my group as a whole, because we have varied playstyles (much to our dismay...)

Personally I started noticing that my groups were having more fun the less we were using the D&D rules, and that I was putting a lot of effort into bending the game to what we needed.

Ah, yeah, in that case it makes more sense to just find something that is already shaped more like what you need

We weren't not having fun, just... we were having fun in spite of the system we were using, and I was burning out trying to force it into shape or force it to the side.

10:57 AM

Less fun?

Definitely more effort for the payout.

Now we play Fate, and InSpectres, and Bubblegumshoe, and Cthulhu Dark, and Golden Sky Stories, and Lady Blackbird, and...

One of the great benefits we've got is that not being tied to a long-form campaign means we can play whatever game fits our mood for that night.

I had a chance to try Lady Blackbird once! I played an engineer guy

I'll never forget what I did...

(We like long-form campaigns, but it's really not something we even COULD do very well right now.)

Lady Blackbird has that memorable effect on folks, I've found. It's really designed to throw you into doing cool stuff that has meaningful consequences right away.

Would you like to hear?

Sure.

11:02 AM

Okay! So, me and my party members were imprisoned in separate jail cells. My character waited for when the guards weren't paying too much attention, and he cast a darkness spell around the cell bars so he could escape without being seen.

Then in the cover of his magical darkness, he contorted his body like a gymnast to fit through the bars.

But the guards at the end of the hallway had noticed his shadowy silhouette, so he decided to engage them.

Keeping his body all twisty, from the darkness, he used a jump spell to propel himself forward in the most horrifying manner at the guards, wailing at the top of his lungs.

One of them passed out, and the other had tried to shoot at him in a panic, after which that guard was promptly dispatched.

The End.

Nice.

Forever proud of that, and the image will never leave me.

Troggy tends to play the bodyguard who can use her hands as if they were sledgehammers, which makes breaking out of the brig very... dramatic.

Oh dear...

Unfortunately that was the only session we did, and we never got to find Lady Blackbird :/

Aw.

> Incomplete Experiment: brute + controller: high damage bursts w/movement debuffing.
- resists psychic
- vulnerable to fire
- Aura 2: noxious aura (start turn in aura, save vs poison or poison dmg + slowed until end of next turn)
- MBA: dmg +prone
- Standard: 2 MBAs
- Gout of bone shards: Encounter, refresh when bloodied or if all attacks miss (standard): MBAs against area burst 1 within 10, on hit immobilize until end of next turn. Area becomes difficult terrain for duration of encounter.

Successful Experiment: skirmisher + soldier; highly mobile, uses marks to jump back to ally; swordm…

@trogdor [gestures up] First draft, thought?

11:18 AM

it does do a lot of stuff

probably not tooooo much though

It's got an MBA, a standard action that's just two MBAs, an "on start of your turn" aura, and an encounter power that it should get to use at least twice.

Dare I ask, what is MBA?

Melee Basic Attack.

Oh! And the Gout of bone shards does that attack within 10 squares, I am guessing?

It's the default "use this when you've got nothing else applicable" attack, and a lot of simple effects use it.

For example, if somebody provokes an opportunity attack by leaving a square adjacent to you, or by casting a spell next to you, you get to make a melee basic attack against them.

And yes, the Gout of Bone Shards is "Hey, that attack you normally can only make against one target who's adjacent to you? Go ahead and pick a square within 10 squares of you, and make that melee basic attack against everyone in that square and every square next to it."

11:23 AM

Hot dog, that's great

Yeah, they need a ranged attack or they can get pinned into a corner and be kinda useless.

The Successful Experiment instead has teleportation.

(But it's limited by needing to be near a fire, unless triggered.)

So it needs to be in/near one fire, and then can teleport to another one?

Right.

And remember, there's gonna be fires scattered around the scene, everywhere a primal animal spirit was fought.

And if they interrupt the ritual and get the Incomplete Experiment instead, it has a limited-use "I HATE YOU PEOPLE IN THE BACK."

Is the druid able to make more of them? Or might more appear during the fight naturally?

The fires, I mean.

I was thinking that the fires would be set during the skill challenge and not moveable or have any added afterward, but that somebody with Nature or Arcana could spend a standard action next to one and make a check to put it out.

11:27 AM

Sounds good

I do kinda like the idea of the druid having control over them though....

Hah! The druid can turn the fires back into primal animal spirit minions.

Do the primal animal spirit minions turn back into fires again if they die?

Yes!

Fantastic!

For the record, this is the token I'm using for the primal animal spirit:

11:29 AM

Owlbear-lettes?

Yup.

And this is the Incomplete Experiment:

Instead of going Hoo, do they go Wot?

Oh that looks great

I haven't chosen exactly what to use for the Successful Experiment yet.

Kiiinda thinking about an owlephant.

That's horrifying.

The successful one, whatever it looks like, is the one that can teleport to defend its master. You're in an underground cavern, after maneuvering through a maze, quietly dodging traps. Before you, in the center of the cavern, a druid appears to be performing a ritual on an amalgamation of primal beast energy. (Fast Forward) You strike the villain, when suddenly the experiment appears behind you, a fierce look in its eyes.

I would not want an owlephant suddenly behind me, that's for sure.

> Wild Spirit: Small Minion Controller 5
Phasing; immune to fire
Init +7; AC 19, Fort 17, Ref 18, Will 16
MBA: Powerful Paw: +8 vs Ref; 6 fire damage, slide 1 square and shift into vacated square
Smack Back (immediate reaction when missed by melee attack): MBA against attacker.
Pyre: On death, leaves a Hot Spot in that square: starting your turn in a Hot Spot inflicts 5 fire damage. DC 22 check (standard action) removes all Hot Spots in close burst 1.

(I was originally going to have them all be doing cold damage, but then I remembered the tiefling hasn't had a chance to show off their fire resist feature yet.)

(They're immune to the damage dealt by spirits and hot spots.)

11:39 AM

Sneaky of you

Yeah, the fire is still scary, but it's also a chance for somebody to be awesome.

That's why the Incomplete Experiment deals poison damage, and the Successful Experiment pushes: the dwarf fighter (defender) has racials to resist both those things.

As Apocalypse World says "Be a fan of the characters."

Give the players opportunities to feel good about their build choices.

12:53 PM

BTW, @trogdor, one thing I did back in the day to streamline 4e encounters was, I re-did the dice math: I took the average damage of an attack and divided it by 2. That number was the damage modifier. Then I took that number and divided it by 3.5, rounded to the nearest whole number, and used that many d6s for the damage roll.

So if an attack was supposed to, say, an average of 50 damage, that'd be 7d6+25.

It kept the damage from getting too swingy, and meant I never had to worry about any dice except a pile of d6s and a d20.