That in particular seems like a good point to just be like 'I'm not with them'... and just watch the fallout. (Well, unless it's 3.5 and one of them is playing a well-made wizard, in which case they'll win...)
Yeah if they decided to play evil characters then its on them if your character decides to let them fuck themselves over. Like u can't be mad about "party betrayal" if they're all evil.
This is 5th edition? Most all the classes are viable, and the fighty types are still pretty much simpler than casters. You can have high wisdom in just about any class, the question is how much will it benefit you. Wisdom-using melee classes are pretty much the Monk and Ranger... and rogues, to a lesser extent. Paladins are neat but mostly Charisma focused. But they do have Smite Evil, useful against undead. CoDzillas got a well-deserved nerf via Concentration, but a fighty cleric is still a decent build - especially for a halloween themed game, which is likely to include more than a fair share of undead, fiends, magical darkness, etc. Though if it's Ravenloft, divine casters don't work there. As for rogues getting lethal very quick... well, a 15th level rogue does an extra ~28 damage on any attack where they have advantage *or* an another ally is adjacent to the target. It may not spike quite as high as a blaster's spells or a Barbarian crit, but with a bit of effort that's pretty much every attack. Yeah. And unlike 3rd edition, undead *don't* just Lolnope off sneak attacks. On the other hand, the Naked Bearbarian tank is a thing to behold (resistance to everything but psychic damage, 30+ AC, 100+ HP, and oh yes enemies have disadvantage if they try to attack anyone else). In general, Barbarians do okay damage but are dependent on crits. Berserkers make up for this by making So Many Attacks (at the cost of slowly/rapidly killing themselves). Wolf Totem barbarians focus on gaining advantage for your allies, and Eagle Totem Barbarians on movement. You can mix and match different totems for the Totem Warrior archetype (Eagle/Wolf/Bear in particular is a Rogue's Best Friend). They need their rage to be good, otherwise they're pretty meh. Fortunately, they can rage 5 times at 15th level, before a long rest. Monks, their thing in this edition seems to be being decent at just about everything. (As opposed to 3rd where their thing was having good saves and basically no other redeeming features.) They move fast, they don't need weapons, and they cycle fast, only needing a short rest to pretty much entirely refresh themselves. They can specialize in buffs/debuffs, pretending to be a caster, or pretending to be a rogue. But they're fairly MAD and overall their abilities just aren't that great (e.g., Cone of Cold is considered a sensible level 17 ability. Meanwhile, the real casters are getting 9th level spells. Yes, you get three of 'em per short rest, which would be an advantage if Warlocks and Sorcerors and Arcane/Natural Recovery didn't exist and also Monks had access to Rope Trick.) Rangers are partial casters, and can specialize in a modest number of combat styles (dual wielding, archery, defense, or one-handed weapons), and can choose between picking a variety of combat improvements or having a pet. The Combat improvements are actually pretty good - focusing on giving you many, many attacks. Having a pet is okay, they're only CR 1/4 but add your proficiency to AC, saves, attacks, and damage. You need to spend an action to get it to Do Things, but you can make an attack as a bonus action when doing so. Rangers are also good at stealth and detection, obviously, including the ability to detect whenever an unnatural creature is nearby ('nearby' meaning within one mile, here). Ranger spells are... actually pretty good? Nothing world-shaking but a bunch of solid buffs and utility spells. Then there's Bards. Bards are what happens when you major in 'just fuck me up, fam' at wizard college. They're full casters, but a little less casty than most full casters. They can bestow last buff-bundles via Bardic Inspiration, they can aid natural healing, and they can learn All The Spells. All of them. They can choose between two Subclasses: The College of Lore, which gives skills, EVEN MORE SPELLS, and the ability to use their Bardic Inspiration to debuff; or the College of Fightan Valor, which lets your allies add Inspiration to damage or defense, just generally makes you better at fighting, and finally cast spells while attacking. Their spell list consists of a lot of buffs and nasty debuff spells. Also, one of their cantrips lets them insult people so hard they die, so that's nice. As for multi-classing... well, a lot of classes have an 'a bit like this other class' archetype built in. Multiclassing will delay you on getting the Cool Features, but your proficiency is universal, which is a welcome improvement over 3E. If there are two distinct features you really want, go for it - particularly if those features are class level agnostic.
I would like to point out that if your DM is ok with it there are more schools for Barss, like Swords and uh Glamour I think, though I don’t know much about them beyond Glamour looking like fun to pretend being a rock star
@BaseDeltaZero Thank you so much for the rundown! It was super helpful and I really appreciate it :D @Raire - alas, my sibling has called dibs on bard </3 Dunno what college but it's guaranteed to be terrible. Just because it's them :P Did end up going with full rogue - I WANT those sneak attacks - and then Arcane Trickster and this was the general party reaction when I mentioned I could only pick spells from certain schools of magic ...so I'm feeling PRETTY GOOD about this decision
I’m gonna be DMing for the second time tomorrow!! I’m very scared and very excited! I’m cobbling together really ugly maps on roll20 because at least it’ll be better than the improvised ‘guys gimme a pencil and a sketch pad a second ‘ ones from session 1..... xD (I love the party so much. We’ve got a rich brat elf noble (Rogue) who’s been kicked out by her parents to learn financial responsibility and hasn’t. We’ve got the Warlock, a half-elf charlatan and professional document-forger passing himself off as a noble. (The Rogue has no idea he’s not, which is why they’re hanging out.) And a little halfling Ranger, and his very big dog, who’s just really excited to practice his Elven with some real elves! He’s a very sheltered scribe who was adopted by a Dwarven scholar after being found living wild in the forest.) Wish me luck????
So Tower Party's second leg of their mini-adventure went well, I think! Having explored the relatively innocuous upper portion of the tower in the first session...well, I say innocuous. They did basically unleash the Globgogabgalab*...and promptly befriended him, because Clay (the sheltered halfling Ranger) is precious and will attempt to befriend just about anything he meets, no matter how strange. Spoiler: session summary spoiler for brevity They've found, hidden away in the basement behind a magically silenced door, an ever-active workshop full of chatty little robots. The party's opinion on the robots ran the gamut - Maerilyth, the rogue, had her uncanny valley hit by them big-time and she wanted as little to do with them as possible. Lucan, the warlock, was not so discomfited, and more focussed on what he could learn about or from them about the location of the missing wizard. Clay chatted up a storm with the little guys, excitedly telling them about the books he'd read in the library and asking them to take him on a tour of the workshop. Very unhappily for a certain member of the party, passage to the floor below meant going through the toolshed...stuffed full of malfunctioning constructs. Maerilyth spent a large portion of the battle atop one of the workbenches, poking at them with her rapier with all the reflexive disgust of someone with a bug phobia spotting a roach on the floor. If that roach was three feet tall and haphazardly weilding a screwdriver. It was...a learning experience in running combat with multiple creatures for sure?? Only four robits, but a weirdly long fight because everything and everyone's dice were cursed - minimum damage if the attacks even hit! In the end, the ranger's dog turned most of them into chew-toys - Apollo is a very good boy. C: Also they discovered an extraplanar entity hidden in the basement, as you do. And they befriended it. Clay is a relentless, unstoppable force of empathy, and the more they chatted to the thing the more they all started to feel kind of sorry for it. It's not used to experiencing the linear passage of time, and is dreadfully bored, and misses its home plane and its many bonded partners and friends terribly. It was really cute to watch them all - even the rogue, who's tended to look down at everything she's met - get all sympathetic for a multi-fractal-headed serpentine monster three times their size. :3 And, bypassing literally everything I'd planned for, they got into the deepest room. The deepest room that was meant to be guarded and require express permission or an adequate bribe to reveal. Because they literally just walked up to the robot butler, and responded to his insistence that they weren't allowed by going, "Well, can't you just escort us there, open the door yourself, and ask the wizard if we're allowed in?" Following protocols and asking nicely, in a house full of robots, gets you everywhere. I planned for everything but the most sensible course of action! .....So now they know where he's been for the last month. Because the Custodian opened the door, and there's the object of their investigation. In a warmly-lit sitting-room. Emaciated, with several weeks of beard growth, sat in the lap of a gigantic humanoid construct that's carding its huge fingers through his hair. They'll deal with that situation next session... :)c The early combat was def kind of clunky - part getting used to roll20, part me having to remember what each creature was using as a 'weapon' - but I think it went okay! Doing multiple NPC voices is, uhhhh, HARD??? There was only one other creature in session 1. But I did remember the Ranger's dog existed this time, so that's an improvement! xD And it seems like everyone particularly liked the Polyhydra - the homebrew creature I'd been sitting on for months and was excited about - so that's a win in my book. And according to @inchwyrm the glitchy robits were Super Unsettling and Uncanny, which I could not be happier to hear. >:D DM Experience Points get??? *yes, that Globgogabgalab. But not exactly! He's an enchanted book gone wrong - big love of reading, big opinions on stealing books from the library (he was meant, in essence, to be an audiobook with a physical form to read from) but an utter inability to actually read, so everything he attempts to dictate comes out as a string of nonsense-words.
Tomorrow I'm starting a new D&D campaign. Unfortunately I still have a lingering sore throat. The upside is that the NPC who gives them the starting quest is cursed and slowly withering away from the inside out. So I'll be able to sell the death-rattle rasp pretty well.
hey! i'm looking to crowdsource some ideas for a campaign i'm trying to put together (if i can ever get my players together in one place for long enough) Spoiler: the setting in question i've got three players, all first-timers, and this will be the first time in a long time that i've DMed a game, so i was trying to keep things simple with a good old fashioned dungeon crawl. it grew legs and got away from me, though. the PCs wake up in coffins, newly-reanimated by a spell gone wrong in the next room. they find themselves in the deepest part of a necromancer's steampunk-themed lair and must fight/sneak their way up through the levels to reach the surface. oh, and the steam-powered machine that runs the place is damaged, so the whole dungeon is slowly filling with water. the final boss is in the massive engine room near the surface. but what i need is ideas for traps, pitfalls, puzzles, or even just flavour. and they haven't got a healer in the party, so something to keep them from dying immediately would also be helpful. The PCs are lvl3; a barbarian, a fighter, and a rogue
Fucking witnessed, I feel that SO hard. A personal favorite flavor of mine for necromancer lairs is the pit filled with undead. Which is uh. Exactly what it sounds like. They're crawling all over each other and attracted to the signs of life in the PCs. This can also be made into a pitfall of sorts, as the water fills up, the undead all float and start "swimming" towards the PCs. Makes for an excellent sense of urgency if they're stuck behind a locked door or even just a skill challenge having them outswim the undead (harder for the rogue probably but hey everyone has strengths and weaknesses). A good piece of flavor which you could also add as a healing room is maybe the PCs find one of the necromancer's tools and that tool happens to bolster their health somewhat. Also, if you wanted to be mean with it, maybe this tool also has some unpleasant side effects, not necessarily immediately. With regards to pure flavor, thematically speaking, the lair should be filled with books, experiments, LOTS of magic shit, etc. A note: there are a few necromancy spells which require gems as an input cost, so maybe have a small pouch of those as a (hidden or not) reward. Traps can get really fun. Tripwires, literal pitfalls and the like are all wonderful classics and are very good for low level parties to contend with. Think Home Alone if Kevin also had access to magic and specifically necromancy. A fun thought that I just had, you've heard of balancing a water bucket on top of a door right? What if there's a zombie there instead of a bucket of water. Since it's in the party's best interest to get out Quickly, maybe make it not quite as fast as them so that it's only really dangerous if it actually hits the person on the way down, and make that clear that it's slow so that they realize they don't need an entire combat encounter, just dodge, or get it off the other party member (probably the rogue who failed their investigation check) and bolt. Something for both flavor and a pitfall that you could do if you want to get the PCs panicking just a little is you could make a door that is sealed by magic which only opens when the water is at x height. Like. It won't Actually hurt them or anything. It's more like the threat of drowning creeping closer and closer until *sploosh* the water all spills out and they're clear to go. I'm not the best at making puzzles so maybe someone else here can offer recommendations for that. If you want to encourage sneaking I would suggest giving them the ability to "blend in" with the undead roaming around or something else which gives them an indication that "hey, time to be sneaky". For example maybe they find in one room a "mask" that they can don. Catwalks are another great way to do this, installing catwalks which would let the PCs just simply walk above and past a room or two. As a challenge, you could place a Treasure of some kind across from the catwalk, and the PCs have to either figure out how to cross from where they are to the thing and back without being seen or falling (into a pit of bodies anyone? listen I just Love the pit of bodies trope it's neat) or decide it's not worth it and continue on (the reward here should be REALLY good if they do get it). I'm sure there's other things too, this is just all I thought of for now. Good luck with your game :D
every single part of this is gorgeous, but specifically a zombie pit that's slowly filling with water is such a wonderfully tense and dramatic image. that is getting pride of place at the start of the adventure to really set the tone >:D
If you have ideas you'd like to bounce off of me or would like to talk more in depth about a concept for a thing I'm more than happy to do it.
Some of my all time favourite traps, though they may need reworking for your setting: A "stuck" door that leads into a wall, often spiked. Since it's not locked, it needs to be forced open, and the harder someone rams into it, the more damage they do to themselves on the spikes beyond. To give an out/way to find it, put it somewhere that really can't fit an entire room, so if they've been exploring (and if they or you are doing mapmaking for the group) it can be determined there's something fishy. Alternatives for the "stuck" door include it leading into a room with a pit behind the door, or a slick slope, or some prepared spell to disable or discombobulate. They can also lead to valuable items if you make enough of them, making each door a gamble and, if they take long enough, a risk-reward puzzle where the time it takes to get through and maybe find something useful has to be weighed against the "filling up with water" thing. A hallway of circular tiles or other not-quite interlocking-shapes, atop oil and possibly a ball bearing equivalent. It makes for unsteady footing and disadvantaged movement and such, but can also be set on fire to make everyone's day more miserable. Of course, the enemies aren't the only ones that can set fires, so if they notice the issue they can use it to clear out a corridor of enemies safely instead. Running water is incredibly dangerous, so you can use it as a challenge to bypass, a section of the flooding base where the water is rushing past. Maybe there's something valuable in the rooms further down, but getting to that safely will be tricky when even getting across this narrow catwalk is hard enough. Of course, a bit of rope and some good strength on at least the Barbarian (plus some knot-tying) should make it manageable. If you are using maps, you can do positioning puzzles in combat, so long as everything is indicated clearly. Have an initiative order for a variety of pipes, say, and on the first turn one bulges, the next it emits a burst of scalding steam, the next a different one bulges, and so on. As long as the first isn't where the players are likely to be, it can be a good way of adding tension to an otherwise rote fight, having to try and get out of the way of the various pipes (maybe two start bulging at a time a few turns in, or one bulges even as another bursts) and even trying to get the enemies in place to take the brunt of the extra damage. (Might make a fun addition to the engine room, if you need something to boost that up a bit, actually.) Another steampunky positioning puzzle would be something like conveyor belts, especially suspended over the water or at least leading to it if you stay on too long. Even if they're slow, if they go different directions or are interspersed with non-moving spaces, having characters being forcibly relocated at the end(?) of every turn can add a neat wrinkle to things. It also makes being knocked prone a bit more of a danger... and the conveyors can have things on them, too, either creating barriers or bringing new enemies into play. Don't know the setting's lore, but you can have fights with groups of enemies that are also enemies with each other. Clockwork golems of some kind fighting zombies, giving the heroes a chance to avoid them but also a way to have a big fight without the heroes getting totally overwhelmed by a horde of monsters all targeting them. Relatedly, choke points can be useful both to let the small group fight lots of enemies, but also to provide a chain of enemies that need to be taken down, possibly with some large (but slow moving) threat coming up the corridor from behind. For keeping them from dying immediately, maybe make a few of the various optional rewards either healing items or things that grant temporary hp, or include one of Dice Friends' house rules (that you can sacrifice your next action to drink a potion when otherwise you'd hit 0 hp). It's more limited than a proper healer would be, but it lets them make a few mistakes, especially because they might not have the time to do full rests with the base flooding. (Ways to slow down the flood of water, or otherwise extend the time they have, might also be good.) This sounds like an intense game, I gotta say, and tricky to run/play, but it's also the sort of adventure I could see people talking about years down the line.
Those are all very, very good. I'm very fond of the choke point + enemy cluster + encroaching wall combo, personally. Necromancers and Steampunk villains alike are prone to delusions of grandeur or an obsession with the cataloging of their own grand exploits, so you could absolutely throw a room with a locked door that, at the very least, has a mural or series of paintings or what have you depicting their ascent to the point that they could reanimate 3 people with adventurer levels on accident. Alternatively, such a room is a fantastic jumping off point for a puzzle room, maybe setting the correct paintings in the correct order to come to learn the technonecromancer's story. Or if you're REAL prone to long writing, make up an origin story, write it down as a journal, and then make them read the book and place the paintings, with failed orders inflicting a trap.
i'll house rule that in for sure, especially because they're new and they don't have much experience managing health points. i think the other part of it will be making sure they've got somewhere to retreat to if things get too hairy. i love this especially because my newbie lvl 3 players are not ready to face a full-fledged necromancer in his lair - but it's very funny to me to picture all this build-up about the guy and he's... just not in today. or he's gone out and the big threat is setting off an alarm that will bring him back. Spoiler: cut for extra story details just for fun & because i've been sitting on this for almost a month, here's the basic plot: the necromancer's lair is mainly built beneath a boiling river, which the necromancer and his acolytes have harnessed for power - used to light the place and for their experiments. one of the experiments goes wrong, however, and the monster escapes into the engine room, damaging the mechanisms (and causing the lair to start flooding) Five of the desperate acolytes flee to the very bottom basement where the extra bodies are kept - blocking and trapping doors as they go to keep the monster from following. they try to raise a highly experimental flesh golem/zombie to protect them down there, but the spell misfires. the acolytes are incinerated - and the energy rebound resurrects three of the spare bodies in the store room. the adventurers wake up with no memory of how they got here, and only spotty memories of who they are.
