The General D&D thread

Healing Word is also run to role-play, I always ask my players what the specific word is for each casting.

Yeah, I need to get better at roleplaying that sort of stuff. Vocal components and all.

I usually split my words between "silly" or "serious!"

For serious, it's great for Clerics and stuff. A shouted word in Draconic, a word that everyone just understands means "heal," a short little sentence with the word at the end being the healing word- always fun.

For silly, "get the fuck up" or similar is always hilarious. I personally like "live" or "RISE" and I've always wanted to play somebody that's literally just a gym coach that's less magically healing you and more shouting at you to get UP AND GET BACK IN THE FIGHT, MAC!

I've yet to seriously play any kind of spellcaster character.

I have come up with a possible Assassin Rogue character, though. Basically a Warforged that talks like HK-47 and thinks that he makes more of an impression with his skills if he is as conspicuous in his jobs as possible. Meaning lots of property damage and flash.

Edited by theLibrarian on Mar 2nd 2021 at 7:50:47 AM

I ran an extra session for my players today.

We normally play every other tuesday, this tuesday not being that one, but one of the players is getting married the day before and his fiancee, who will then be his wife, veto-ed him joining in from their honeymoon suite. (And that's not even a joke, by the way, he said that and we all laughed and then she took away his microphone and asked us to please tell him to stop trying to convince her to allow it... And we were all 'Dude... Really?')

But the reason I mention this is that that same player who's getting married also started a new character this session (his previous one retired to spend more time with his kid) and this new character casts Guidance the following way:

Verbal Component: "You can do it!"
Somatic Component: and a shoulder pat.

Which he did several times in his first session and it had us laughing our asses off every time. It would have gotten stale after the third time if the Bard hadn't decided to run with it and give Bardic Inspiration to the Barbarian who just got Guidance by giving two and singing "I think so tooooo."

Players, man. Just... Players.

Edited by Robrecht on Mar 2nd 2021 at 4:29:29 PM

All that stuff is fun, but I find I run out of ideas quick. Between vicious mockery and bardic inspiration, my bard's approach is... interesting. In my previous session I gave someone bardic inspiration by shouting "don't fucking die on us" and cast vicious mockery by just screaming. It does kinda work with the character since they're established as being very unrefined, but it's not perfect.

I did kill a giant hyena by telling it to "play dead" though, that one was pretty good.

Reminds me of an idea for an Orc rogue whose "stealth" thing was just intimidating anyone that sees him.

"YOU NO SEE GROG!"

I am still a fan of my bugbear rogue joke concept.

And yeah my party may be dumb but again, Healing Word at low levels is still a pretty sad thing. And our GM is uh. Not good at building encounters. His setups have had to constantly give us NPCs that appear out of nowhere with potions to heal us because instead of pitting like, half level CR hordes that we can cleave through he keeps chugging equal level AND boss parties to fight.

So for example, my Sleep spells against a horde of 10 goblins would have slept half of them and kept us from a lot of trouble. Instead, I am lucky if they sleep one of the bandit targets we keep getting and three are still left up, flanking our tanks who fall like flies.

Edited by Aszur on Mar 3rd 2021 at 10:47:23 AM

Ooh, if we're sharing game tales: I will now forever refer to my Clerics biceps as "the jaws of life" after somebody called them that when she broke a womans jaw to stop her from trying to swallow her daughter whole.

... That probably deserves context. We were hunting for missing people that were (almost certainly) kidnapped by the Yuan-Ti, and, well, we found some of them. A mother and her daughter- the former had been essentially alien expiremented on to transform her into some kind of snakelike monster, and was trying to eat the kid (poorly, as despite the augmentations she was still a human, but she was probably going to kill her even if she couldn't swallow her). Notably, this was unwilling on both sides- the poor woman was crying as she did it.

Naturally, we said no to that- I wonder why- and Sariel, my lovely Tempest Cleric, marched forwards and basically grabbed her. The others were basically prepared to chop her head off to stop her from killing the kid, since she was already suffocating, but I managed to roll high enough on Athletics to wrench her free. The kid survived, the woman had her jaw broken. She would have bled out from a few other injuries, but we mercy killed her and took her body back to try to find out what the fuck had happened to her.

Notably, this was also the day we got a new player. The game so far hasn't been particularly light-hearted but it wasn't this dark xD Everyone was fine with it (including them) and it was a great session, but I'm still infinitely amused that they picked the one session where it got horrifying to join.

My players started out at level 3 with two Bards (one of whom was College of Lore, the other was a Rogue 1), a Pact of the Chain Warlock, an Open Hand Monk and an Artillerist Artificer. The Warlock was a veteran player, the Artificer was completely new and the others had at least some experience.

That's a party combination that doesn't lend itself to durability, either through HP, defenses or healing.

And they requested I try to fit in at least one combat moment per session on average i.e. one encounter per session or a bigger, session-long (series of) encounter(s) if there's been a couple of sessions with no combat.

And I thought to myself 'Sure, I can just send a level appropriate challenge at them and then tune that down based on how they do.' Turns out, how they did was steamroll my encounter.

Because they were aware that they had no real tank or dedicated healer, but they did have a lot of spellcasting, range and mobility. So when I had them encounter a group of bandits coming out of the treeline on a backwoods road to demand their money, their immediate response was to get into the opposite treeline and execute what I can only describe as a counter-ambush.

The party is level six now, one of the players (the monk) had to stop playing for personal reasons and the Bard/Rogue and Warlock started new characters, a Wolf Totem Barbarian and a Divination Wizard respectively, instead, but I've learned that I have to send an encounter that would provide a decent challenge for a regular party one level higher at them if I don't want them to run roughshod all over it.

Note: You might assume they're combat munchkins, but... No. The Warlock-come-Wizard player loves giving his character quirks and handicaps that reduce his combat effectiveness and the Artificer decided that he was going to focus on supporting the group in combat for a while because, as a new player, he doesn't want to ruin all the fun for the others by taking all their kills (I've tried to explain that as an Artillerist, dealing damage is his main strength, while the Bard and Divination Wizard are better at support so it's ok for him to use his combat potential, but bless his heart he wants to be a team player and give them a chance to shine too).

Basically my players are very smart and good at using positioning and terrain to their advantage. When I gave them a lot of room to play with, they used that room to keep all the enemies but the two archers from being able to do anything.
When I essentially locked them in a room with a juvenile dragon and its minions, they used positioning so that the dragon couldn't use its breath on more than one of them and even then not without hitting its own minions (which it promptly did, because dragon) and then focused it down once it took care of its own minions.(Which was a pickle, because it was supposed to kick their asses and then declare it was bored when they were on their last legs and leave with a cryptic plot hint as its final goodbye and instead I had to pull a way to open the door and a letter with that hint on it out of my ass for them to find in its hoard.)

At this point I'm genuinely starting to wonder whether I'm just bad at making challenges too, but in the other direction from your DM.

Is a level 5 party supposed to be able to handle a Young Dragon and 6 Cultists with ease?

Edited by Robrecht on Mar 3rd 2021 at 9:22:15 PM

How many fights are they having between long rests?

Because that’s what makes fights difficult, having to preserve resources between fights, as long as they’re outside OTK range a party can deal with a single big fight easily enough if it’s the only fight they’re gonna have.

As for your specific encounter, what type of dragon? Also just basic cultists?

Edited by Silasw on Mar 3rd 2021 at 8:46:15 PM

My DM does not use short rests whatsoever. So. Even some of my abilities are useless. Like the hole point of a lore bard song of helaing is the extra healing but I do not get to use that because reasons

Short Rests are kind of another one my pet peeves with 5e. Because it's not super easy to consistently make the plot work into a state where the party has time to take an hour off, but not enough time to go to sleep for the night.

But a bunch of classes are balanced around exactly that happening. Like you're complaining about Song of Rest not being useful, but I imagine if your party has a Monk, they're just feeling useless in general.

This is the sort of thing you'll probably want to discuss with your DM, and see if you can find a solution. Or, since you're a Bard, in the worst case scenario you can just learn Catnap and then you get to decide when Short Rests happen.

Though it also sounds like you guys could stand to just buy potions in bulk so the NPCs won't have to come in and save you.

Edited by Gilphon on Mar 3rd 2021 at 4:22:55 AM

I have short rests be 5 minutes, while keeping long rests at 8 hours.

I can justify the players taking a 5 minute breather before bursting in on the cult meeting, an hour would be absurd.

A Young Black Dragon, five basic cultists and a Kobold Dragonshield (from Volo's).

All of them were definitely within OTK range from the Dragon's breath, but it only got off three breath attacks and the Monk made his dex save (the cultists around him were insta-killed whether they made the save or not) and had enough natural hitpoints to stay standing, the Artificer would have died despite succeeding on his save but he used Absorb Elements as a reaction and stayed up with three hitpoints and the Warlock failed his save and couldn't do anything about it, but the dragon got a low roll.

The cultists were really only there to keep the party from immediately ganging up on the dragon in the first turn (particularly the combination of the Warlock's Hex affecting Con saves and the Monk's newly learned Stunning Strike).

My own analysis of the fight was that they basically won by (as I mentioned), once they knew the area the dragon's breath covered, making sure the dragon never had the opportunity to hit more than one of them with its breath, tempting the dragon to take out its own allies once they realized that, being a dragon, it didn't consider any of the cultists except the Dragonshield to be worth preserving if it had the opportunity to hit members of the party with a breath attack and then focusing the Dragon down the moment the Dragonshield fell.

They were still very lucky. If the Monk had failed his save, they would have been screwed, if the roll against the Warlock had been better it could have KO'ed him, even instant killed him, which would have been devastating at that level, but they still would have won the fight at that point. They were also incredibly lucky they fought it at a location that was emphatically not its lair, because if it had had lair actions they would've been dead.

On the subject of Short and Long Rests:

I try to design my multi-stage encounters in such a way that the party has the opportunity for a Short Rest somewhere along the way (particularly before a big climax). I know it's usually incredibly rude to say people are playing D&D wrong, but if, as a DM, you don't allow Short Rests either explicitly or implicitly by creating scenarios where the party always feels like they're under too much time pressure to take a moment to rest, you're definitely fucking up how the system is supposed to work. If you're not going to allow Short Rests, you really should offer some kind of alternate way in which the P Cs with features that rely on Short Rests can still use those features.

If I design a series of encounters where at the end, there's a cult meeting that the P Cs are going to barge in on, I make it so that they enter into a back room of the meeting spot and not all of the cult members, including the leader, are there yet and the party has the option of barging in immediately and have a relatively easy fight with a lot lower rewards or hiding where they are and waiting for everyone to arrive (which conveniently takes close to an hour) so they can take out the entire cult at once, disrupt the ritual they want to perform once and for all rather than just making the now-alerted leader find a new location and new cultist before they can try again or snag the HVT they were there for. In fact the dragon encounter above was structured that way with a series of 'speed bump' fights through the sewers ending in a storage room adjacent to the cult's main meeting spot.

Having Short Rests take five minutes is, however, also an excellent solution. Especially if you want the sequence to feel action-packed and frenetic.

I have a personal dislike for the five minute Short Rest option, but that's because the DM I played my Eldritch Knight used that rule (and the 1 hour Long Rest) and as convenient as it was, I had a feature that took one hour and 'can be during a Short Rest', to which the DM said 'well no, that ritual takes an hour and a Short Rest takes five minutes, but you can do it during a Long Rest without interrupting that instead' and I was fine with that until I realized that no one in the party ever wanted to take a Long Rest to let me switch out my bonded weapons even if we had time, unless they needed a Long Rest too.

Which was a problem because my whole concept was that I had a whole collection of weapons with situational utility in our traveling wagon and I'd bond what I thought I'd need in upcoming fights so that I could switch out my longsword for a weapon more suitable to the task (a halberd to fight big creatures or a net to capture someone non-lethally, for instance).

But that doesn't make the rule bad, it just makes how that was handled bad and my irrational personal grudges are thankfully irrelevant to other people's gamed :P

"the Warlock's Hex affecting Con saves"

Hex only affects ability checks, not saves.

Mhm. That's a reasonable common misconception, but yeah, the secondary effect of Hex doesn't actually do anything useful. Unless you're planning for something weird like grappling.

X3 Yeah that sounds like the DM being annoying pedantic. I prefer the 5 minute version because I like structuring dungeons that flow pretty directly, and I don’t want to explain why the necromancer spent an hour sitting in his room after the party smashed up the skeletons outside.

As for your dragon encounter, yeah that should have been a tough fight, how’d they do so much damage to it that it wasn’t able to do a ton of damage with the breath, claws/bite and play keep away by flying so it couldn’t be melee attacked?

Though it doesn’t sound like it was super easy for them, if the Artifacter got down to 3 HP with a successful save.

Edited by Silasw on Mar 4th 2021 at 8:56:39 PM

Thought some of you would find this interesting.

An "AI" based dungeon map drawing program called Dungeon Alchemist is kicking around kickstarter. I hope this takes off. Maps are one of the more time-consuming things to work up digitally.

It has currently gathered nearly 40 times their goal in Kickstarter, so you could say it took off.

Lol. I meant the development becoming very rapid. Yeah, they really scored big time with this one. Algorithmic map drawing that is reasonably responsive would be freaking awesome.

I feel silly now, because not only should I have remembered that, I should have remembered it specifically about that example because at the time I was the one who pointed out it didn't work like that.

The Dragon didn't really have an opportunity to fly because they were basically in a basement. Part of the issue of trying to limit my players' ability to do their usual 'spread out and wear them down' thing is that it also limited the ability of their opponents to do the same.

As for how they got it down without anyone dieing...

Young Dragons don't get legendary resistance yet and Bards can choose Faerie Fire as one of their 1st level spells. It took the two Bards two turns to get Faerie Fire to stick, but from that point on every 2d10 Firebolt and 2d8 Force Ballista attack from the Artificer, both 2 1d10 Eldritch Bolts from the Warlock and the two 1d6+(I don't remember) attacks from the Monk and the 1d8+4 +2d6 attack from the Bard with Rogue levels (or really, at that point, the Rogue with Bard levels) every turn all had advantage, there were multiple crits for the party during the fight.
Meanwhile the Dragon's attacks were somewhat blunted by the fact that the Monk (who was the only one in Melee with it and who had the Sentinel Feat) kept using Patient Defense which gave the Dragon disadvantage on its attacks against him.
The Bard (the full one) did have to jump in and use a 3rd level Cure Wounds on the Monk twice and got an opportunity bite from the dragon for her trouble both times (which let the Monk hit the dragon again too, because flippin' Sentinel).

Edited by Robrecht on Mar 4th 2021 at 1:18:33 PM

Yeah from the sound of it you rather blunted the dragon’s mobility advantage, which would have enabled it to focus the spellcasters and actually avoid most of the monk’s attacks.

Now, effectively removing the dragon’s flight seems to have made the encounter an appropriate difficulty, so it all worked out, but I’d keep in mind giving flyers room to fly for future encounters.

Amusingly enough the dragon fight (a white (with element appropriate blue stats) dragon wyrmling) I did not that long ago for my group was also in a basement, though because it was super deep I made the ceiling high enough for the dragon to fly, also the floor was ice so the the party had trouble moving around.

It was a fun end to the dungeon (an old lighthouse deep underwater with a map at the top with a language even magic couldn’t decipher), especially as the meant meant to be any living dragons in the region my players are in (due to me needing the pad the kingdom’s timeline).

Edited by Silasw on Mar 4th 2021 at 12:32:50 PM

To be fair, even if theoretically the Dragon had had room to fly, it wouldn't have practically been able to do so once the Monk with Sentinel got into Melee with it.

And to be honest using any kind of flier (or climber or swimmer) to play keep-away... Is something I stopped doing when one of the players in a previous campaign had her character killed by a flier I used that way and her next character was an Aarakocra Barbarian (Ancestral) armed with a Glaive and a bunch of nets (because Flying creatures that have their speed reduced to 0 fall unless they're specifically noted as being able to hover).

This wasn't malicious, she made that character with the intent to protect the party from flying enemies, not to beat me at my own game. But she did end up basically destroying any encounter I threw at the party that include fliers or massed ranged attacks and it was then that realized just how frustrating having to deal with flying enemies that can attack without having to land and/or take opportunity attacks is in D&D.

That’s entirely fair, just make sure to factor that into your encounter creation, as the challenge ratings for flyers assumes that they’re able to utilise that extra mobility as part of combat.