I was thinking I could mix it up a little each time. There's 6 levels in total, but it'd get a bit boring if they just "found the staircase down" each time
I was thinking one could be like a false trap - A plinth with a button on top. When they hit it, the plinth starts rotating, and a ticking sound starts. Nothing else in the room. The door also closes behind them
Each time they hit the button, the timer resets. As it gets closer to the end, the ticking gets faster and faster
But if they leave it, it opens the staircase down
Another might be that the floor simply gives way bneath them
TIL golarion has a language called canto: "Communication is achieved though percussive hits on body parts, weapons, or cavern walls, and is designed to travel long distances through echoing tunnels." I think that's super beautiful, and now I'm picturing a drow or a little gremlin rhythmically jigging and slapping themselves all over. It's also fun to picture how they'd do that and convey frustration at you laughing at it.
Methods include moving a totem pole into place and climbing it to the level above; tipping over a bookcase to smash a hole through the floor to the level below; sliding down a coal chute (and/or using gum to make his feet sticky so he can walk back up it), climbing a rope to get through the hole he smashed with the bookcase...
I once ran a dungeon where an angel appeared at the end of each level, and revealed the next level entrance only after the party answered a question about the setting/plot.
@BESW Well, I was thinking of adding an angel - but only as a means for the party to get in/out of the dungeon to get back to town for supplies and such
but of course then I looked at it and was like,... no that is spelled wrong, I don't remember exactly how to spell four armed gorilla monster but it isn't that XD
so I was slightly disappointed and assumed you meant something else
(they really went all-in one-note for orcs and gnolls, going so far with the latter as to leave out a PC statblock for them despite having a pile of other monstrous races in there)
I don't read Unearthed Arcana which I guess is where some of this is coming from so these posts do me little good. Guess Ill just wait and see tomorrow
The Arcane Archer is a bit of a letdown too - the fact that they stuck to "you're an arcane archer 2/rest and a boring normal fighter with no subclass the rest of the time" means I'll probably never play one, and the arcane archer concept is something I really like.
There's lots of others that I feel are pretty meh, but I don't care enough about to, well, care.
@Ryan I'm solidly in the 'meh' camp. Part of that stems from the "I don't really care for more than 4 classes and a flavorful MM," the other part stems from the "I coordinate and GM AL, so I must familiarize myself with it." So it kinda feels like work.
@Shalvenay Surprisingly, dndwiki's entry is not bad - a little boring, but includes the classic gnoll trait, and is if anything more under- than over- powered.
reading Unearthed Arcana right now for the first time and a bit disappointed in College of Whispers. I thought it was going to be more about deception. Adding damage to my melee weapon is junk
All this does is linearly adjust the normally-flat 5% probability for each number to occur. What results is a increased or decreased probability of any number above or below average to occur, positively for advantage and negatively for disadvantage. See this AnyDice function set, which yields the...
Also, if you can find some other way of gaining advantage, advantage won't do anything for you. With +2, not only does it stack with advantage, it stacks if you find some other way to get +2.
well wait +2 to Charisma so +1 to to the bonus it gives.
I'm now level 4 with this character and thinking Charisma of 16 to Charisma of 18 so going from +3 to +4. So my total Performance and Persuasion would be +6. Or I can do the Actor Feat which leaves it at +5 but with advantage
So, one of the unique cultural things in boarding schools is that sometimes the headmaster just declares a holiday. Any reason or no reason. Just found out tomorrow's one. Don't have to work!
(Will, though.)
@Miniman Sorry, just got an e-mail about a KS shipping. 4 items, one of which is the OGL.
Boxed set, yes. That's a reward. Wall-sized map. Sure, that's a cool reward. .pdfs of all the stuff. Thank you, that should be standard by now, but let's call it a reward. The OGL? That's reward #4?
Hmm... my e-mail about the headmaster's holiday and my FLGS e-mail saying my XGtE is being held at the counter arrived within minutes of each other. I have long suspected, what I now consider confirmed: the headmaster's a gamer.
In other news, a friend brought me a set of dice from his trip to Mongolia. They're goat-knuckles. They land in one of five orientations, with highly-unequal probabilities.
The largest species of tegu lizard, this beautiful Argentine black and white tegu (Salvator merianae) is our Spotting of the Day! Tegu lizards are members of the family Teiidae, and are native to Central and South America. https://buff.ly/2maeUrK
@Ryan Most of the earliest dice were bones, and pretty much anything to do with probability has at some point been associated with some form of spiritual insight.
'The Gurt Dog' - a Black Dog that haunts the Quantock Hills in Somerset. Unlike most of its kin, this Dog is said to protect wandering children. Parents would allow their children to play unsupervised in the hills, believing the Gurt Dog would watch over them! #FolkloreThursday
Toby's backstory: a Dragon borne warrior built on the values forged in battle, and now really just does not know what the f*** is going on, but somehow rolls with it.
@BESW weak against metaphysical barriers; so ignores physical obstacles but if I draw a salt-circle on the ground around me Grim Jim's left pacing the outside?
@daze413 I'm also reminded of one of the Wk40K Primarchs - he's trapped in the warp until demons invade, and he is summoned to the battlefield. But as soon as the last demon is slain... he vansihes
@daze413 Same lol. I saw a parody of it, where he gets summoned, followed by an epic murder montage, then just stops, pulls all his mean aside and tells them to stop - if they trap the demon instead of killing it, he can stay
Then someone wasn't paying attention and murders it anyway
And I deliberately misheard the modifiers, so instead of a dragon breathing rainbow fire, and a barbarian--we had a dragon, breathing rainbow fire and a barbarian.
I'm thinking about some changes to make it simpler (but not less chaotic) and faster (mostly eliminating "nothing happens" rolls by having failures backfire).
@BESW And I like there being two "axes" along which to consider actions. But I think you're right: as observed, maneuvers don't get much play, so some tweak is needed.
Perhaps you could come up with a different variant; the opposite of Détente? Cos sometimes when playing the Base it turns into a Revolution anyway (Definitely did for us)
@BESW Player A simply chooses their feature from among all lists, then B, then C, ... then C, then B, then A, then A, then B, then C, ..., then C, then B, then A.
Explosion: Roll for abilities as normal and see who has the most features. The other monsters roll until they have at least that many features. Repeat until all monsters have the same number of features (if lots of 6s are rolled, this could take a while).
@nitsua60 Your cap on the total number of abilities in play is the number of years since 1956, the English distribution of the original Godzilla film in which "King of the Monsters!" was coined.
Hah, I figured out how to make the Mutant Bomb Variant nice and simple:
> MUTANT BOMB VARIANT (Prevents Feature imbalance by giving everyone extra Features.) Whenever a 6 is rolled on a Feature Table, every player follows its instructions rather than just the player who rolled the 6.
> MUTANT BOMB VARIANT (Prevent Feature imbalance by sharing 6s.) Whenever a 6 is rolled on a Feature table, every other player rolls on that same table again. Yes, if the new rolls include 6s, this gets scary fast.
> MUTANT BOMB VARIANT (Prevent Feature imbalance by sharing 6s.) Whenever a 6 is rolled on a Feature table, every other player rolls on a table of their choice. Yes, if the new rolls include 6s, this gets scary fast.
Were there camels in Roman Britain? A brief note on the nature and context of the London camel remains — new post by me :) http://www.caitlingreen.org/2017/11/were-there-camels-in-roman-britain.html
BRB building a time machine so I can fetch a giant war otter to ride into Valhalla. http://www.newsweek.com/wolf-sized-otter-formidable-jaws-was-dominant-predator-china-six-million-years-706197
The thing that let third parties publish their own D&D 3.5 material, and let Paizo turn Pathfinder into their own brand without significantly altering the core mechanics.
As for what's wrong with V:tM, I've never played it. I'm given to understand that it's not very coherent, structurally, and that most of its appeal lies in the flavor it gives people permission to indulge in--and its successful implementation depends largely on the players, rather than the system itself.
@nitsua60 and other D&D 5e players, we've been getting a steady stream of "well here's how i personally would rule it" answers on D&D 5e questions, which are an issue because... well, we don't really care how an individual would rule it. we care about gathering expert guidance on how the rules play out, or how the fiction works, or good subjective experienced-based advice on what works well.
3
it's been on my mind to create some kind of meta guidance for why this is an issue for us, and came back to mind this week since one person thought i expected them to be a rules lawyer when i told them they needed to actually provide some guidance w/r/t the rules, not just their opinion.