@doppelgreener Incidentally, just to check that I understand this correctly, flags on comments are always either a) helpful if the comment is deleted or b) declined if the comment is not deleted?
@Shalvenay heyoo! Tryina get @Ben's multi-engagement question reopened. Not sure how. Looks like the high-level encounter is on the verge of getting closed too
in other news, my phone bricked on me alluvasudden :p
@Miniman I've seen some of my flags to highly-upvoted comments get them edited instead.
but those were on meta, not sure if that holds for mainsite. I think I remember a 31 fake-score comment disappear once, can't recall which question now
@daze413 I mean, it wasn't a "please delete this" kind of flag, just a "I think you should look at this". And I know they did look at it, so I just want to make sure that the "declined" in my flagging history is just because of the way comment flags work.
diamonds head tag description: "also known as Diamond Moderators, Diamond Mods, or Diamonds (from the DIAMON of DIAMONd, and DS of moDS, happily coinciding into one catchy word)
I was typing up an answer and saw three come in while I was adding page refs. Figured there was no need to pile on.
5e protip: when looking for something first look it up in the index, roll 2d20, add the first to and subtract the second from the page number listed in the index, and start looking there.
Unless it's two-weapon fighting rules. Then you have to use 2d100.
Crafting my pre-session-0 campaign-starting e-mail for Tomb of Annihilation. All the talk in here during the last week about over-sharing GMs has me nervous!
@nitsua60 That sounds about right, yeah. I was just curious, since I wouldn't have thought you'd do this until you'd seen the book, if you see what I mean.
> **Plead Extraplanar Diety.** 1st-level Divination. Casting Time: 10 minutes (ritual) Components: Verbal, Material (a copy of The Player's Handbook, costing 50gp) Brandishing the book, you open a rift into a dimension called the fourth wall. Present an argument over how a certain aspect of the world should work (like whether magical fire should behave like physical fire) to an extraplanar diety called a Dungeon Master.
@daze413 Extending the ritual casting time beyond 30 minutes widens the rift to include other similar deities, though of different alignments. After 1 hour the ritual destroys the campaign world.
@Miniman =)
@Miniman To be blunt, I think we're basically a year to year-and-a-half ahead in the pipeline.
@Miniman Oh yeah. I forgot about that one. (For some reason I find it much less helpful in the Book --> resources organization than in the resource (book) one.)
@nitsua60 Well, yeah. It'd be a problem for sure if one of the subclasses was objectively better than all the others. (Although I feel compelled to point out that, at PHB release, this was in fact true).
I can't comment too much, personally, because I haven't seen the sorc much in play.
(Although I find that somewhat telling in itself.)
> **Otherworldly Perception** Conjuration Cantrip. Casting time: Bonus Action (ritual) Components: Verbal, Somatic, Material (an icosahedron, costing 5gp) Looking around, you magically conjure an object or creature that was not part of the DM's description text. Make a Wisdom (Perception) check against a DC that the DM sets, you may automatically succeed if the object/creature you are trying to "find" is harmless and makes sense that it would be there, such as a mug in a tavern, a piece of cloth, or a rock. On a success, you conjure that object or creature in a space the DM determines, depe…
So, we have two kinds of example tags, from what I can see. The first is when you ask a new question, before tags are entered, three are provided as suggestions. For example, today it says (for me) "at least one tag such as (fate monk feats), max 5 tags". Previously, I've seen (fate monk feats...
I mean "Magic" is a different message than "Fuck you" but the "force everyone in the chat to watch that on repeat" makes that difference pretty meaningless.
I guess either people are active and it disappears by itself or nobody pays attention so it is also not an issue.
> Animated Gif License. If an animated gif is posted you may spam the chat without repercussions until the animated gif has scrolled out of view. The animated gif must not have been posted by you.
To help push out the gif -> DnD 5e question: Can a Lizardfolk (Volo's Guide to Monsters) Monk use his Bite Action when the Monk class references unarmed strikes?
I was wondering if in 5e a rogue in darkness could sneak attack, because it would have advantage, but also disadvantage so it kinda doesn't count. The PHB is clear that if you have both then you have neither, so the rogue doesn't have advantage.
The question is if this was a good outcome. On the one hand I had a question about the rules which was answered by RTFPHB. On the other hand I missed out on asking a question, someone answering, voting, rep and social interaction.
@nwp You can go ahead and self-QA, of course. It probably won't get much in the way of upvotes, but it was a real question you had that required pulling things from disparate PHB locations to solve (my personal bar for not downvoting), so it's totally legit.
@nitsua60 No pushback at all! The urgency came more from the fiction than the mechanics, though. They sort of created their own hurry there :P
The situation was like this: they were about to infiltrate/raid a mansion, under which was the shrine of Tiamat I mentioned earlier. The mansion was owner by a greedy pharmacist, whom they trailed there. He had a mercenary company protecting the house, but he left the bugbears guarding the front door because he found them too disgusting to be let inside.
Great. I've had a similar situation in Sunless Citadel (the 5e version), where the players are totally hooked into the "we've got to rescue $TARGETS so there's no time to waste" part of the fiction. But even then I like it, since it's such an easy way for me to feel like I'm not abandoning this important part of making sure there are lots of dimensions to the game.
The players were very wary of facing the bugbears (one of them was a large-sized, hulking one that would've used ogre stats if they had fought). So they climbed in through a window, one of the players used Disguise Self to fool the bugbears to fetch a little something from his store in town (about an hour of round-trip time).
(funny thing is, the bugbears NEVER came back. The town where the apothecary was was heavily militarized because of nearby hobgoblin raids, and the bugbears were slain at the gates, poor things!)
@nitsua60 My players are awesome! ^^
@nitsua60 Our party's cleric cast detect magic inside the mansion part, and detected a "protective ward, possibly an alarm" in the next room. It was a magical painting that shrieked when they entered the room - and yep, they managed to trip the alarm. Our druid used Wild Shape to turn into a cat and scurried out of the room as the others broke the painting to trick the guards into thinking the alarm was caused by just a cat.
General question: I assume there's a simple way to set up a Word document that pulls info from a spreadsheet and lays them out in a form. What's that called? (So I can look up instructions/tutorials.) I've got a single-page sheet summarizing my PCs I usually make, and the next group'll be using shared spreadsheets a decent amount, so I figured I'd make my life a little easier....
@nitsua60 i only know it in hungarian and my google-fu seems lacking. The direct translation would be "circular" and should be in a menu dealing with letters
huge boss level battle for my group last night. Campaign nearly complete. Funny when the DM goes looking for additional magic items outside the DMG - but still makes it random so they're basically not that interesting.
I'm growing warmer towards DMG magic items. Random loot is cool at times.
But I still like homebrewing the occasional item for my party, to fill in the gaps in gameplay. Eg. our other party's barbarian has a magic axe that rewards last-hitting.
@Adam 4 human guards, 4 efreeti, the boss was the king of an invading land who has driven most of our story line (caster), and some sort of weird octopus thing who likes to collect stuff (like Tamatoa, but an octopus) and we're fighting in his lair.
@kviiri I like random loot mainly because it can give the party something less than ideal, which reinforces the idea that the world isn't tailor made around them. It also means that they have to use some creativity when they get something that isn't obviously beneficial.
@Adam This is well-summarized. But then again, the world actually is tailor-made for them to enjoy, so I take care to fix some problems with gameplay with carefully planned magic item drops ;)
But I agree on the creativity thing in all respects.
Loot was mostly from something called an Arcanum or something like that. Boots of balance, bridle of horsemanship(or something similar), a +1 warhammer that no one in the party really uses, gloves of missile snaring, potion of putrescence, potion of resistance (unknown which type), maybe a couple of other things that i'm not remembering :)
@Adam It was pretty awesome. Great mechanics on it.
The battle started off really really poorly. We all rolled bad on initiative and then the Barbarian was climbing with me holding a rope to catch him if he fell.
He fumbled and fell. I fumbled on the save to catch him. We both go in the drink. I fail the WIS save on the octopus and just start "swimming toward the light"
But then that turned out to the best possible thing for me. I broke the charm next round and it attacked me with a grapple. I could now see it and I gave it my Vow of Enmity - cancelling out the disadvantage for being underwater and for not really seeing it (DM gave me enough sight to give Vow, but not to target it well, which seemed fair)
I'm really proud of how I narrated a failed roll yesterday. One of the players was disguised as the mansion's owner, the pharmacist, and was trying to persuade the bugbears to go to the town to fetch something from the apothecary shop, so I gave him advantage on his persuade check, DC 15. He failed miserably, despite that, but it didn't feel right to declare that "the bugbears don't believe you, even if you look and sound like their employer."
So the bugbears just looked at him and said "Sure thing, boss," but continued: "but we'll need the keys to get in."
The rest of the party burst out laughing, the disguised character's player froze for like five secs and then started spinning some quality lies about having had forgotten to lock the store.
@godskook Apropos of nothing, I've got to confess that the reverse of this is a bit of why I like 5e so much. I played becmi/1e/2e then stopped for ~20 years and picked back up with 5e. I've had no trouble bringing into 5e things I liked from 1e and 2e, to the point where I'll run 1e/2e modules without any conversion-prep time. And a lot of the gm-directed 2e splat has been super-useful with almost no effort.
@ryan @NautArch @nwp @GreySage @Adam @CM_Dayton all this conversation about oversharing GMs has me nervous. I sent the following to my next campaign's group last night--look like too much to you?
/* *** begin message *** */ Alrighty, I've been starting to prep Tomb of Annihilation and brainstorm some things, have fielded some questions and gathered some info. Before people get busy with cons and getting ready for school I'd like to throw a few things out there:
**Table.** We've got [player1], [player2], [player3], [player4], and [player5] committed to play the season. I've got feelers out to one regular face from around [town1] and two people from my [town2] game; if we go 0/3 or 3/3 on those feelers it could be challenging, but either of the other outcomes would be a nice result. …
@kviiri Ryan's gm sent him a large pre-campaign setting document that started a conversation in here (a few days back) about gms who assign too much reading.
On the same day I was planning to send my pre-campaign message and had a couple of scraps of notepaper with bullets for all the things I wanted to put out there.
I'd get more upset as a player if I got, say, a huge dump of the GM's homebrew lore without any hint on how our party's supposed to fit in there. That has happened to me once :P
@nitsua60 I think doing it how you're doing it is fine. You never told them to read the entire Tomb of Annihilation. You basically just said, here's the rules. Here's how long the campaign will last.
@kviiri Understandable. I've gotten to the point where I'll only put the time/effort into a homebrewed setting if the players are going to be impactfully involved in the process. At the very minimum a session or two of Microscope....
[wipes brow] whew. I only sent two follow-on messages to that one. Well under the 4-5 that you find annoying =) (Only one was to the whole group, with a link to the description of DDAL07-01; the other was to one person.)
@nitsua60 I told my players up-front that they'll be playing a minimal fantasy world which will evolve as they adventure. Most of the exposition happens in a "newsletter" published between sessions. It also reveals plot opportunities and strokes the players' ego by covering their adventures :)
"Five adventurers face wererat in a sewer, return smelling of victory and poop"
i still havent gotten back into a 5E game :( the one I was all worried about entering last week that wanted me to level up got cancelled
got AD&D tonight, starting my druid. Considering DMing a 5E game. I'd need to buy some miniatures and maps and books and whatnot. Not sure if I'm ready but 5E seems easy enough with the pre-made books.
@Ryan I found 5e to be rather easy to pick up rules-wise, both for the player and the GM. I think the hardest part is doing what's not covered by rules, but if you're a seasoned AD&D veteran that shouldn't be a problem for you.
And thanks to the marvels of bounded accuracy and all that, it's easier to craft winnable encounters.
Easier than in 4e at least - that game was fun but got sour fast if one didn't follow the guidelines in DMG very carefully. Easy mistakes to make include thinking level 7 normal monsters are appropriate substitutes for level 4 elite monsters!
yeah I haven't been playing very long at all for 5E or AD&D but from reading, watching videos, and seeing the differences I know what I didn't like about 5E and kinda want to DM a 5E game that's a bit slowed down I guess would be the way to put it
@adam We also got a drift globe (which was the one thing I could use out of all of them besides the potions), some sort of spider mantle thing that gives some spiderclimb abilities, and a straw hat that protects you from weather. Those last two things went to the barbarian (pending attunement verification)
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely loathed DnD 4e soon after trying my first non-DnD systems. But one's taste evolves with time and things that previously were utterly weird and limiting and stupid start to make sense with more context.
@Adam good for my human paladin. I've got light cast on my maul, but having the globe is better. And I can 1/day cast daylight. That may come in handy and free up our light cleric from ever having to do it.
@Adam although I don't get that it emanates Light at 20 bright/20 dim (40' total), but only stays within 60' of you...which is not illuminating you.
The best thing is to wait until they light their torches / activate their magical light sources, and then let that be the target of all the things out in the darkness with ranged attacks. You can see a light MUCH FURTHER out than you can see BY that light... ~evil GM
@kviiri The purpose of the drift globe appears to be a light source that doesn't occupy your hands. Yet if the drift globe is drifting, it will stay 20 feet behind you once you move out of its range. So you are totally in the darkness and cannot see ahead of you, kind of negating the most direct use of the drift globe.
@kviiri Exactly. It's useful for illuminating one small space and working within that range, but it isn't useful to replace a torch, or a light cantrip cast on your weapon or the like as you move through an area
@kviiri it's 'kinda' useful. my maul with permanent light on it is more useful for my direct needs. But being able to potentially dispel darkness is big.
I played once with a rather conniving thief. She had a stone of continual darkness and a stone of continual light. She loved to use them during combat.
@Adam that Morkoth cast darkness around me during the fight (in an area already silenced...and then dropped Evards on the same area). Drift globe would have been handy for that.
@nitsua60 That doesn't look like oversharing to me. I would have no problem reading it (in fact I read it just now. It took about 5 minutes). I wouldn't worry about that.
Thanks, all. Was, perhaps, unnecessarily worried about it. And I'm sure that they'll all get the fourteen FR books I assigned as "light background" read in time =D
@Adam In my current campaign, 4/5 players have dark vision. It creates some humorous effects as the 5th, a fighter, narrates his adventures running into things and attacking the wrong targets.
@kviiri Those are some uses, yes. It's also useful for making a retreat since you have to be able to see a creature to take opportunity attacks against it.
@kviiri No, because the magical darkness isn't an absence of light, but a darkness that cannot be penetrated. It is like turning on a very bright light in a dark room, but opposite.
Darkness spell. Like a thick, black fog. California requires that casters rapidly say this in additional to any verbal component: "This spell has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory animals."
@nitsua60 I always used to laugh at this in Splinter Cell (it's a video game that revolves around sneaking in the shadows), where you can stand in a shadow in the middle of a corridor that's otherwise well-lit and be effectively invisible to anyone looking through the corridor. Even though naturally they should see one's silhouette.
...not to mention the glowing trifocal goggles and that little patch on Sam's back, but I'm ok with hand-waving those as player aids :P
@Adam Yeah, that's the problem. Because you and I have both experienced mundane darkenss, and having mundane darkness between my eyeballs and a brightly lit area does not stop me from seeing things in that brightly lit area. But in D&D the mundane darkness obscures anything on the other side.
So if the spell had just been "obscurement" or "blackness" rather than "darkness" we wouldn't have this clash. Currently the darkeness spell creates darkness, and then to achieve the effect the spell wants, we have to have a rule elsewhere that (all) darkness obscures things. Which is nutso, given our experience with darkness.
(I houserule that everyone can see everything at all times, unless magically or physically impeded, until someone comes up with a workable "Light and Vision" replacement.)
@nitsua60 True, from a strict reading of the rules that's what we can gather. But I also think that the system expects you to use some common sense if you see something contained within that seems contradictory.
@CM_Dayton Well that's because "common sense" isn't actually "common". But I do believe that if you come across something in the system that feels wrong or contradictory to you, that 5e explicitly tells you "Yes! change it! do whatever you want. It's your game"
As a player and a GM, having a sensible general rule is still preferable. Whether as a houserule or as an official one.
I'm just not sure how I'd formulate it.
"Creatures and objects inside a dark area are considered invisible for creatures that don't have a way to see in darkness, eg infravision." would fix the "darkness blocks LOS" problem, but would still leave the "silhouette problem" open. Maybe that needs a ", unless..."
If you grant everyone permanent invisibility the matter of silhouettes sort of solves itself. That is, unless you hard-science the question of how an invisible person can see, given that their eyes are invisible too.
@kviiri RUN AWAY! Sneak out now! Pretend no one told you the build server is working. Ignorance is your friend. Trust in ignorance. The computer is your friend. Trust the computer.
Anyway, of my three RPG parties, the one that plays most often has a usual habit of taking a beer or two to "lube up the imagination", and while that little alcohol isn't really a health risk or anything, when such little rituals start accumulating it will be.
@CM_Dayton I should only really roleplay dwarves. We had a fight against a mastodontic dragon "yesternight" and he died with a roar that caused the cavern to crumble. First thing I did, pick up my costy metamagic rod I dropped earlier during combat.
Monday, RPG beers. Tuesday, student org's planning night with a glass or two. Wednesday, software release celebration with wine at work. Thursday, other RPG party and more beer. Friday, friday beers at work. Saturday, sauna beer. Etc. I like beer but I'm not comfortable with the idea of being forced by habit to drink more than I actually want to.
...too bad even slightly tipsy players are occasionally really hard to deal with when sober oneself :P
@kviiri I am reminded of a trick I learned in college, when someone would hand me a glass with really bad, cheap, booze in it: walk around with the glass all night, but move around enough that people don't realize it's the same glass. You don't have to actually drink its contents.
Neat. Just saw a mearls answer that high level Charisma casters could prep before a big caster fight with Glibness and pretty much counterspell anything guaranteed.
Considering you only get one 8th level spell, or two if you cast the second at 9th level, I think that's a fair buff if you have the forethought to use it. Plus your counterspells can still be countered as usual, so it isn't really like it's unbalancing too much
Fought an archmage+archdruid combo once: the archdruid cast *foresight on the archmage first round. We dropped the druid pretty quickly, but that archmage came as close as anything to rekking us.
@NautArch If they dont, then I would just stick in some apprentices with any boss mage fight whose real sole purpose is "sit around and cast counterspell/dispel magic"
E1: 3 clubs. E2: pass [adventurers enter] E3: I *wish* we could just get through one game of bridge without being interrupted! [adventurers banished to randomly-chosen planes] E1: it's still your bid. E3: oh, sorry. I'll go 3 notrump. E4: [sighs] pass.
@nitsua60 that reminds me of one reason why I hate OSR published modules... Let me hand you this pretty dungeon full of monsters -- monsters that never wander out and eat each other (or anything else), never leave spoor or messes, and just wait, idly by, for your PCs to show up.
I haven't bought a module since 2e. And those modules were (usually) above ground, so my experience is fairly limited. I am rarely a fan of published adventures...
I didn't use to hate them, back then. But in high school I went on an overnight spelunking trip. After that, I realized how horribly unrealistic those dungeon maps were. It wasn't a long stretch to start (finally) observing the absurdity of the monsters too.
I was going to say we don't incorporate that in ours, but it's mostly because when we encounter monsters, they haven't been just sitting around waiting.
Imagine you were part of a small group (8ish) of Lizardmen who suddenly found themselves teleported to a foreign land, with lots of plains and forests. What would you need?
given the description of lizardfolk in Volos, it doesn't seem like they'd need much. They can survive hostile environments, so as long as there is food to be found, they'll find it, eat it, and kill it. Eating each other until then.
Any DM here ran sunless citadel with his group before, preferably 5e? If so, did you use the two exits that were there towards regions of the Underdark or did you do something to keep those exits for later? I would like to run the sunless citadel but I think my PCs would instantly run towards those exits and I don't (yet) have anything useful I want to place there.
@Secespitus I ran through it pretty recently, but my players didn't really use any of the underdark access points. They never went into the room where the kobolds were getting in, nor were they particularly inclined to go to the area where the goblins came in either
My players are absolutely paranoid that any sound or area of darkness is a shadow dragon rearing up to kill them, so they tend to take the least risk possible
@Adam Have you considered having them actually be stalked by a shadow dragon for a bit? (So they know what that's like and may be less paranoid in the future)
Y'know, apply their fears directly to the forehead?
So, we have two kinds of example tags, from what I can see. The first is when you ask a new question, before tags are entered, three are provided as suggestions. For example, today it says (for me) "at least one tag such as (fate monk feats), max 5 tags". Previously, I've seen (fate monk feats...
