The General D&D thread

Just to add an idea, impersonating a guest is technically also being covert, just more visibly so.

One avenue I'd had prepared for my player's in a jailbreak campaign was that they walk in through the front door by impersonating an architect and his team sent to do renovations. If the party knows XY & Z will be visiting the stronghold they can try intercepting and interrogating, or delaying them (or arriving early and hoping the real deal isn't also early).

It's also likely going to require a few Deception & Persuasion checks, but it'd probably be easier than having a non-stealth optimized party sneaking, and allows the Face character to handle any tough speech checks. If the Face is not the rogue, that frees up the rogue to do sneaky stuff while the party distracts some of the attention.

New UA for those interested: "Heroes of Krynn Revisited". The kender pop up again, this time with the Kendar Ace feature removed and the fear resistance bumped up to fear immunity, and the background feat thing's been more developed. No subclasses this time.

Basically, in this version some backgrounds get a specific feat at level 1. Everyone else, meanwhile, gets to choose one of three feats to get for free (either Skilled, Tough or the new Divinely Favored). Then, at level 4 and regardless of background, everyone gets to choose a free bonus feat out of a larger-but-still-limited selection of feats (including Alert, Mobile and War Caster).

No armour proficiencies from background feats this time, but you can get a Battle Master maneuver to use, and a [proficiency bonus] amount of superiority dice that recharge on long rests.

Edited by Lavaeolus on Apr 25th 2022 at 11:03:04 AM

Part of doing a stealth mission can also be doing the pre-work, make part of the adventure being getting plans to the building or disguises.

Ya'll don't mind if I mine this conversation for ideas, right? Because I've been thinking about how to set up a sort of fantasy heist with Dungeons and Dragons and I'm curious about what sort of defenses and traps you can set up in, say, a noble's vault?

...Wouldn't be ungrateful for any ideas for the scenario I just mentioned.

Right, like casing the joint (scouting the area and finding infiltration and exfiltration routes) and coming up with a safe place to get away from the heat or wait for it to die out are also important parts of a heist.

Edited by fredhot16 on Apr 25th 2022 at 2:06:42 AM

Giving everyone more feats is nice, and limiting it to a short list makes sense (otherwise the power levels would be unbalanced and min-maxed characters could get even worse faster). Though these are still pretty good feats, and I feel like maybe less powerful, more flavourful feats might make sense for low-level characters. But granted, this is clearly present in this UA to make up for other backgrounds not getting feats while those two do. While this UA just suggests this for War of the Lance campaigns, I could see it working in any game really (possibly with an altered feat list).

Also, if I'm interpreting it right, Divinely Favored lets you use a holy symbol as an arcane focus (provided it uses the right spellcasting ability). So that's neat.

As we've been stressing it, it depends on the party make-up. Throwing a True Sight-having guard if none of them have Invisibility (or an equivalent phase-shift) makes no sense, for example.

One I use a lot is Animal Eye Spy of sorts. Wardens with familiars make for good paranoia, particularly if they have Flock of Familiars. It's always fun to see the players panicking a bit if that particular rat is a spy of the evil guy or not and trying to find ways to fool a random rodent who may or may not be a familiar.

See, you do have to limit this to specific settings, because otherwise they just power creep every other background out of relevance forever. Like we saw the same thing with the Strixhaven backgrounds.

+ Which makes me think, a noble could totally splurge and have a blind guard on the payroll. Why? He has the Blind Fighting style, is placed in a narrow corridor, and strict instructions to ask for a sign / countersign disguised as normal conversation any time he detects someone approach. The fact he's blind means that A) characters relying solely on Invisibility or stealth can't get by B) Characters who are using mundane or magical disguises (that rely on visuals more than knowledge) get stumped. However, characters who case the noble's mansion and find or overhear the pass phrase don't need to worry about any other visual checks.

I let players take a 1st-level feat but I just ask them to make it something flavorful rather than optimized. I don't enforce it, I just politely ask.

@Suggestions: Good ideas all round. I'm liking the 'stealth tiers' concept, since it's easy for me to grasp as someone who's played a lot of Splinter Cell. :V And of course, methods of escape if things go south are important.

I was just thinking about the campaign I've had on my mind for a while, and on reflection it's basically a spy flick, because there's several factions that each want dirt on each other (including two literal spy agencies) and at some point the players will have to go snooping around in a restricted area for information, probably several times.

In particular, the first leg of the story revolves around rescuing a person they've been hired to protect (this is the whole reason the party is gathered in the first place) from a large crew of Sky Pirates, since they won't get paid the absurd amount of money they were promised otherwise. After finding the secret pirate base, which is a task in itself because it's hidden inside the cliffs of a small, innocuous-looking island miles out to sea, and their airships are disguised with magical invisibility, they have to get in and do their thing, and this place is a fortress in a Diesel Punk-esque setting, with spotlights, mines, and gun-toting guards, and they're not expecting any visitors (and even if they were, the pirates are all of a certain very non-humanoid race, so the party would stick out like sore thumbs unless one of them happened to be a member of the same race). So with all that said, the players should have some clear avenues of entry, not to mention actually being able to do their job.

Re stealth missions-or any mission:

I invented "Resolution checks" for skills. The basic idea is that in a complex environment, there are "tasks" and each "task" requires you to roll a normal d20 skill check, but success doesn't automatically complete the task: you instead roll resolution dice (kind of like rolling damage), and then once you've hit a certain threshold, the task is resolved. Proceed using standard initiative order, though 1 round isn't necessarily 6 seconds.

So this allows characters to attempt skill checks without a cost of failure; rather, the cost is they don't proceed to resolve tasks. Throw in a time limit, or add "complications" (at the end of each round task X is unresolved, add Y that has negative consequences), and you've basically turned skill challenges into D&D combat.

Whether people *like* that or not has been a huge point of personal preference in my group. And the devil's in the details on implementation. Important to make sure there's more than one type of task (stealth, deception, etc) involved, so that players with crappy skills in one area can do things in another.

What did Kender Ace do that they had to remove it?

Kender Ace was the ability that allowed them to pull random items from their pockets. Not sure why it was removed, but I suspect that it's the unpredictable and situational nature of the ability.

too many Kender were being killed on sight,the killings had to stop!

I imagine it's to prevent a Deck Of Many Things sort of scenario. There's no tension if you can just pull anything out of your pockets to help the situation.

Spread Legend
5th level bardic ability (ribbon)

A bard is capable of ensuring that your reputation precedes you. That is, in fact, entirely their point.

As a bard, you may ensure that any ally of 5th level or greater has a reputation that the common folk know well. Choose one or more epithets to apply to your allies that other people will refer to them by.

This may affect social interactions, depending on the nature of the stories told, the people they were told to and how they may have been retold. You may not use this ability on yourself but a fellow bard might.

So my players just had a somewhat tense dinner with a green dragon, from my side it felt somewhat like the starting scene of Inglorious Bastards. The dragon was actually perfectly happy with just giving them the information they wanted, so that in the future they would do some harmless minor collection for him, the dragon just wanted the prestige of having somewhat strong people work for him. The players meanwhile assumed the worst, probably because the dragon served the last hopeful dragonslayer for dinner.

In the end the players Dimension Doored out of there, with the gravely insulted dragon giving chase. So now my players are on the shitlist of a dragon, who explicitly consideres strong subordinates his greatest treasure. This is going to be fun.

Bonded Weapon
feat

Gain all the features of the Eldritch Knight's Weapon Bond if you haven't already in addition to the following:

• Upon taking this feat, choose Int, Wis or Cha. You may use the ability scores in place of Str or Dex for the purpose of attack rolls with your bonded weapons.
• Your bonded weapons count as magical for the purposes of overcoming damage resistance or immunity if it hasn't already.

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Improved Weapon Bond
feat
Prerequisite: The features of the Eldritch Knight's Weapon Bond

You gain all the features of Bonded Weapon feat if you haven't already in addition to the following:

• You may use Int, Wis or Cha, same as you use for Bonded Weapon, in place of Str or Dex for the purpose of damage rolls for your bonded weapons.
• With your bonus action, you may telekinetically control one of your bonded weapons, attacking and moving it equal to your speed. If the weapon is heavy, you will have to use your action instead.
• Once per short rest, you may enchant one of your bonded weapons for one minute with a bonus action such that it does an extra 1d8 of Force damage so long as it is within five feet.
• If you are using the Cleave rule, the weapon may split its movement as well as its damage among multiple creatures but comes to a halt for the action if and when it misses.

Thoughts?

Literally the only classes that would take this would be Kensei and Spellsingers (and admittedly martial clerics, who this would break beyond belief), and even then only to let them be SAD with their casting stat also being their hitting stuff with swords stat.

But just straight up stealing a subclass feature from fighter? And not even one of the better ones, like maneuvers from Battlemaster.

Actually, that's what I'll compare it to: Martial Adept, which gives a very limited portion of Battlemaster's feature, and which does not improve like Battlemaster's feature does. Martial Adept provides 2/3rds of the maneuvers and 1/4th the dice with which to use them, and that's before the Battlemaster levels up and their maneuver pool, dice damage, and dice available to use ALL increase with level. It lets non battlemasters get a bit of the battlemaster flavor and power, while subtly increasing the versaility of a battlemaster who chooses the feat.

This is just powercreeping half of Eldritch Knight's 3rd level features, and not the one that improves via level up either.

Just imagining a Peace Domain Cleric or a Stars Druid running around with those feats make me shudder. The Peace Domain is busted enough as it is, while the Circle of Stars would absolutely fuck shit up with that feat; slap a light crossbow on that bugger and you're getting 6-13 magic damage per attack at range plus the Archer Starry Form.

There's also the Metamagic and Eldritch Adept feats from Tasha's; they do the same thing as Martial Adept in that they give casters Sorcerer/Warlock features in extremely limited forms that can't be upgraded at all.

Edited by ITNW1989 on May 4th 2022 at 3:55:05 AM

So, the other day one of the other players in the group I'm in brought up an interesting idea. They said they disagreed with the concept of the 'designated healer', as they played that role in an earlier game and it left a sour taste; they spent most of their rounds healing while everyone else got to do the exciting stuff, and if any of the team went down for any reason (opposition is too much, healer had to deal with an immediate threat, helaer had to prioritize one player over another, healer just wanted to do something else, etc.), they'd get these Looks like they're not doing their job.

So when they ran a game themselves, to prevent this from happening, they gave all the PCs a free healing spell/ability that didn't count against their spell slots. Apparently this worked out well for them, and my instinct tells me it's a good idea because in our current campaign, we have tonnes of abilities but tough enemies to force us to be resourceful, so I imagine having a healbot on the team would actually be a detriment. Indeed, all but one of our party now have healing abilities (myself included), and the one who doesn't is the frontline fighter and closest thing we have to a tank.

So I'm debating to myself if I should implement this idea for when I run a game, but I'm interested to hear a second opinion. Is this a good idea?

Edited by PresidentStalkeyes on May 4th 2022 at 1:15:45 PM

It's not a terrible idea, role locking players is restrictive and not conducive to fun. That, and it looks at Clerics and Druids in a lopsided way that doesn't understand the damage prevention they could be doing, like summoning or buffing or nerfing enemies. If the party wanted a heal bot, they should hire an NPC and let the cleric or druid do more active things in battle

To your question, adding Cure Wounds to a caster's spell list isn't terribly unbalanced, I think design wise we're seeing the devs realize that a lot of classes had poor spell selections and moved to add it as a subclass feature.

For arcane classes, you can probably handle it as a magic item that grants Cure Wounds once per day, and/or adds it to their spell list. Then it's a conscious and interesting strategic choice if the wizard wants to Fireball their problems away or save an ally, etc.

For martial classes, giving them the Healer and/or Cook feet would do much the same and give them extra utility outside of combat.

Since it's topical, the last time I ran a campaign I noticed one player was extremely combat mechanically inclined, and didn't have much to do outside of combat, so I came up with a weapon that was mechanically better, but also expanded an existing feature (Second Wind) so he could use it to heal others. "Sharing his breath" as it were, and from then on having to decide whether to help the innocent or save it up for combat.

x3

Actually I've seen a lot of people extol the virtues of Eldritch Adept. While the list of Eldritch Invocations non-Warlocks can take is limited by the pre-requisites there are still some viable sources. Armour of Shadows (cast Mage Armour at will without using spell slots) is just flat out useful for any caster that can't wear armour. Gift of the Depths can be useful for anyone depending on the campaign, Mask of Many Faces (cast Disguise Self at will) is a handy infiltration tool for Rogues, as might One with Shadows (can become invisible in dim light while staying still). Though you might want to swap it out with Shroud of Shadows (cast Invisibility at will) once you pass the level requirement.

And Devil's Sight is just flat out useful for anyone. Shadow Monk's who can cast Darkness using ki points but can't natively see through it and Shadow Sorcerers who can only see through their own Darkness when they use sorcery points especially benefit, but Arcane Tricksters can also get a benefit from it. And having anyone dropping Darkness without having to worry about adversely affect the party (or actively benefit from it) can just wreck encounters.

The point wasn't that Eldritch/Metamagic/Martial Adept aren't good, the point was that those feats basically give other classes small, much more restricted access to class features, unlike the homebrewed Weapon Bond feats above that outright steal an entire subclass feat wholesale plus some extra bonuses.

Using the same example above, a Circle of Stars Druid with Metamagic Adept can use Twinned Enlarge/Guiding Bolts twice a day, which is much less than what a Sorcerer of the same level can do, and they can only keep doing it twice a day for the rest of their lives. Which is limited, but still potentially a good investment. A Circle of Stars Druid with the homebrewed Weapon Bond above, however, can just easily leave Dexterity at 14 and focus on pumping up as much into Wisdom and Constitution without ever having to worry about their ranged weapon attacks being useless, since all of their crossbow attacks will be using Wisdom for rolls, as well as ignoring resistance in most cases.

Edited by ITNW1989 on May 5th 2022 at 7:05:26 AM

So I came up with a very disturbing campaign idea for Spelljammer, since that's coming out.

After the characters meet one another, maybe go on an introductory quest or something, they're asked by a mining guild to investigate why one of their ships has dropped out of contact. Traveling to the ship's last known position, they find it utterly abandoned. However, coming over whatever passes for communication systems in Spelljammer is a creepy lullaby, and upon entering the ship, the party is attacked by hordes of undead creatures...who can only be killed by removing their limbs.