tfw you're months at least from starting ur campaign but ur occasionally struck with a desire like the burning of a thousand suns to play one particular NPC (and the NPC won't even appear in the not-even-started campaign until midgame at least, which is probably months more!!!!!!!!!!) weep
I think it depends on what you're doing with it, some. If you've got proficiency in Perform, almost certainly not. Voice has always been something of a grey area for bards, though, and most DMs seem to come down on "if you want to, do it, if not, don't worry about it" as far as it goes.
For what it's worth, I have access to the Player's Handbook, Monster's Manual, Dungeon Master's Guide, Elemental Evil Player's Companion, and the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide. If you know there's stuff in one of them that you're interested in, ask me questions and I can PM you with the contents. I'm proooobably not gonna put too many quotes of direct text in here, just in case there's copywrite bots scouring this corner of the net.
I've got a copy of Volo's Guide to Monsters (which is in the running for my all-time favourite D&D splatbook, even if it's up against some stiff competition), though it's on loan to a friend at the moment.
Hey what are the recommendations for best unearthed arcana? I kinda wanna use 5e for a campaign I've been thinking of (students from magic school have to slay a dragon for their final test)
Personal best moment of our Giant Slayer Pathfinder campaign so far: I play a half-elf summoner called Atticus, who has an eidolon called Hocus. Hocus is a monstrous, fanged, horned, winged, four armed otter. Atticus rides him in to battle and flies about on him. Our party is laying siege to a giant military camp. There are giants, dragons and wyverns congregating against us on the battlefield. Something huge lurches out of the mist. It's bigger than anything else on the field. It's ugly. It has an extra arm. Atticus originally planned to flee. He enjoys playing the hero, but he's really just a rich city boy playing adventurer for a lark. He's very much not invested in the idea of going out in a blaze of glory. But Grit (our dwarven barbarian tank) has run over and gotten in Big Ugly's face. Atticus hesitates, hovering above the battlefield on Hocus' back. He makes a decision. He casts a spell: one of the highest level spells he knows. The spell hits. Big Ugly turns in to a squirrel. Hocus, who likes squirrels very much, swoops down and eats him. Ta da! Throughout the campaign we've also had: An impromptu election campaign. Grit and our ifrit oracle, Vex, formed one party. Atticus and Hocus were the other, along with Ricardo. Ricardo was our human inquisitor, until he got petrified by a medusa. So Atticus put him in a little wagon, adorned him with sashes and rosettes, and had Hocus drag him around town whilst (badly) playing a trumpet. Questionable behaviour between Atticus and a tribe of frog people. Atticus now has to make constitution rolls every session, and if he fails he gains another frog-like attribute. So far he has webbed fingers and toes and a frog tongue. A completely off-book side quest where we tried to save a very intelligent four-armed gorilla from being sold in to slavery. The gorilla was just intended as an aside, to set the scene. We freed him and now he's a chef in some port town somewhere. Stealing a giant's poorly written self-insert fanfic about another giant and making it our quest to deliver it to the subject of said fanfic. Spiking a camp's beer supply with hallucinogenic frog glands. Setting up a karaoke night at every tavern we stay in. Mercilessly bullying our work experience boy, who we picked up in some village somewhere. It then turned out that the boy was a shapeshifter, and his true form was a dragon, and he was actually hundreds of years old, and could easily have eaten us in our sleep. Infiltrating a vampire masquerade ball. This was actually in the campaign. What wasn't in the campaign was the shopping trip beforehand, where several of us bought velvet catsuits to wear to said event. Blowing up a chimera with dynamite.
I've made a mistake. I've started to learn about grappling. The joke here is, grappling in 3.5 was complicated and somewhat difficult to get the hang of, relying a lot on the DM to make rulings whether to follow the Rules As Written or the Rules As Intended. It has a reputation for being a pain. The rules here in 5e look a lot simpler, and I'm realizing it might be fun to play with, and fits one of the character concepts I'd been thinking about. eta: I've just learned about the minmaxy beauty of bearbarians.
Just went for Baleful Polymorph again. Turned the frost giant priestess - that killed and turned our ifrit in to a graveknight- in to a snail. Everyone is pounding the table yelling 'ESCARGOT! ESCARGOT!' I love this spell.
@Nertbugs I was under the impression that polymorph stops working when the polymorphed creature's new form loses all its HP—like, if you turned a monster into a bug and tried to crush the bug, it would become a monster again as soon as the bug lost its singular hit point. am I wrong about that, or?
I feel like I should cross post this from OOCQ, despite playing pathfinder rather than d&d proper *Just to add to the shenanigans: waving said trophy at the other demons was an attempt at an Intimidation check. Which failed horribly, and the failure took the form of turning the demons on instead :P
That's true in 5e, but the fact that baleful polymorph is a separate spell suggests Nertbugs is playing 3.5 or Pathfinder.
Campaign in question is indeed Pathfinder! The effects of Baleful Polymorph are permanent. It's a bit ridiculous, but I can only use it once per day (and even then I try not to overuse it because it's so much funnier when it comes out of the blue). I am part of a 4e campaign too, but no one in that party can perform any polymorph-type spells, so I haven't had any experience of how the mechanic works in that setting.
Ok so- I was originally going to run a game where the characters were all leaving the wizard college for their final exam but all the players wanted school shenanigans sooo now we are doing Beacon Academy by way of Hogwarts. PCs got assigned into a team for the next four years and spent all session getting to know each other with fun activites and quizzes! PCs are: half-elf fightgirl druid Liam Bloodhaek, whi gave herself the name Bloodhawk and acts like someone who'd name herself Bloodhawk; Cadbern Tanton the human wizarding prodigy who is the Worst At Social and still thinks Papa Snowtimes is real; and an angsty teen fallen aasimar who is on the run from his demon girlfriend's dad and is also a rogue pretending to be a mage. He's called Lucifer Justlucifer because he fucked up at fake names.
I just need to babble about my current character's concept here. So, I am playing a full-blooded orc (from Volo's) in a world that mostly follows usual D&D rules about, say, what humans think of orcs. She is 15 years old, raised in human lands, has an int of 7, and a neutral good paladin of an agricultural deity. What this means from the "lets turn this collection of numbers into a person" perspective is that she grew up surrounded by humans who were expecting her to be a stupid, violent orc. Being raised bilingual and the resulting delayed language acquisition played into this, so by the time she was approaching adolescence she had a deeply ingrained sense of worthlessness. Cue joining the church, because then she can at least try to be good and useful. Only, it turns out that being a cleric involves a lot of reading and mediating local disputes and neither of those are really in her wheelhouse, so the priests decided that her goddess had chosen a different path for her. So, they got her lessons in the basics of using weapons with the local guard, and sent her off into the wilderness to be a paladin. So far, she has recovered the weapon of a paladin from local history, gotten very lost, announced her presence in several towns by starting with, "I will not eat your children," and given a sermon to orphans because she got lost in a slum. It's definitely a roleplaying challenge for me, but I'm enjoying it immensely.
Yesterday the ranger's player was out sick, so we had their character's miniature (an Oshawott, because why not) just chilling at the start of the cave we were exploring. The ranger, who is unnamed and has super low charisma, is basically a feral half elf who hasnt spoken at all I don't think? Also we dropped some loot off with the packmule who had to stay at the entrance of the cave. So I sort of envisioned them just like: [Threeshoes, Ebik, (oh no i forgot the bard and druids names) are fighting goblins and a bugbear who is Ready To Wrassle, activating traps by tripping over them, repeatedly missing stationary skeletons, and uncovering desecrated dwarven altars] "....Wait, where's the ranger?" [camera cuts to the cave entrance. The Ranger is guarding a chunk of quartz and brushing the mule determinedly] "I'm sure they're fine." Also, the fun moment the druid enters the goblin shaman's room, activating a trap, and the rogue goes "oh uh sorry i forgot to check for traps. Also i don't know how to disarm things? Also i'm too short to step over the trap so i'll just wait out here"
Spoiler: large image Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal pointing out the ramifications of dungeon crawls...
DM: because you somehow managed to avoid the Major Boss Battle in the last dungeon, I'm forcing an encounter so you can actually get the information you need from the enemy. Of the same level. Actual risk of death for once! Someone might need to use one of those potions you got waaay back at the start of the game! [Four rounds, an incredible number of enemy failures, and inordinate amounts of asswhooping later...] Us: so Boss 1 is barbecue and Boss 2 is a smear in the ground C: and only one of us came near dying! DM: why. OTL go up two levels, you still don't have the information you goddamn maniacs, leave someone to interrogate, please. I can only send [heavens oracle] so many Visions From The Stars.
Our dwarf barbarian, Grit, has picked up a Very Useful Item. Said item is a marble carving of a woolly mammoth. It also happens to be magic. You can use it to summon forth an actual woolly mammoth, which sticks around for 24 hours or until dismissed. Grit has a fairly good Handle Animal skill check bonus. He's tried to have pets before. There was a bear, who was set on fire and perished. There was a bison, who was also set on fire and perished. He's not had great luck. But this mammoth, if killed, just goes back in to the statue and can be re-summoned later. As long as the statue is intact, the mammoth is fine. He's named it Skippy. We're on our way in to a big town for a shopping episode. We will all be arriving on our steeds: Grit on Skippy. My character, Atticus, flying in on his monstrous otter (Hocus, aka 'The Ottercopter'). Vex, our evil Ifrit oracle, on a nightmare steed made of darkness. We will look so badass. We're also sort of planning on giving Grit and Skippy a big debut by recreating the 'Make Way For Prince Ali' bit from Aladdin.
