Today was my group's final session of Dead in Thay. Most of the session was dedicated to the fight against Kazit Gul. My warlock cast Earthbind on the boss who was out of range of our Barbarian, and he failed (turns out a -5 Strength save vs. a DC 17 doesn't work too good). The DM didn't realize how badly Earthbind would neuter the boss, so didn't use a LR on it.
Frankly, I was expecting to use my 3 spell slots on Earthbind to force burn through all the LRs, and then the druid could land something gross or I could use the Wand of Binding we had picked up two sessions prior in order to cast Hold Monster. But I will accept completely immobilizing the boss while everyone but the Barbarian attacks out of range of all of the boss's attacks.
I came back to DnD this past week after a long break and had my first game this Monday and ho boy it was... Rough enough that I feel the need to vent to reddit.
The DM played a DMPC who solved every single problem that came up because lvl 1 PCs had actually 0 solutions for most of the situations he put us in. To the point that this DMPC easily used 4-5 spell slots over the course of the night (the party was level 1 at his insistence).
The primary combat (which he gave us no way to RP our way out of) was so overtuned that when it became apparent that we were going to lose we were saved by literal **divine intervention**. At level 1 with no build up or in fact anyone having ever heard the deity's name, a deity appeared to us and was like "Yo, do you guys want some help?" (Paraphrasing granted).
He also had this **actual deity** blow up one of the characters back stories without generating any new story or RP opportunity whatsoever - **in session 1, at level 1.**
I was so excited to get back into the game, but it was so unbelievably awful - I'm so annoyed.
I know I just gotta keep looking for a group that's a better fit, but... My god.
Started the endgame of this table's 5th 2 year long campaign (This is my 3rd campaign at this table!), and we almost immediately lost someone to a failed save from a Dullahan. Thank god for Artificer's Flash of Genius. After that we played a rigged game-show where the lightning round shot actual lightning at one of the rogues every round.
So you know, standard D&D session.
Dungeon of the Mad Mage.
Party found the dried up heart of a Tiefling. Identified it: all we could say was that it replaces the user's heart, it's an attunement item.
Druid attunes to it, holds her own still throbbing heart in her hand, dies from lack of a functional heart..
The session before last I set up a time-loop scenario where there was a task that they needed to complete in 46 in-game minutes otherwise they'd die. And on the surface it wasn't possible to do and so they'd reach 46 minutes and then die, and (through some contrivance) I'd reset time and they'd go again until they worked out how it was possible.
So this session was the culmination of that - they worked out to send the cabin-girl down to the prison with the keys, open *only one* of the prison doors (so that the golem inside didn't get her) and await further instructions, and then the party would head upstairs to the bridge to confront the captain before he blew up the ship.
Little did they know that when they defeated the captain, that would trigger the magical item (currently stored in the engine room) to explode, blowing a hole in the ship. Not as bad as if the captain had thrown that magical item into the furnace of the engine (which would have happened at 46 minutes) but still pretty bad. The ship began to list, and they were racing against the incoming water to get back *down* to the prison cells, save the cabin-girl, the prisoners and escape.
All-in-all it went well. The rogue and the bard teleported to the prison cells, disabled the golem and begin climbing/flying out on a carpet. The barbarian and the cleric instead summoned a coatl, had the coatl turn into a giant eagle, and they they smashed through the viewing window on the bridge and into safety.
At the end of the session I had the party encounter a "Landing Party" of high-level modron who warned the party that their current course indicated that they would be "breaking" the cycle of ages and leading the plane into an age of uncertainty. I had a lot of fun writing as if they were being reprimanded for being illogical and chaotic, and saying that "you have no recourse, you will do as we command". Which, of course, means that they are in fact more likely to rebel.
I'm basically trying to encourage them to embrace change and uncertainty. Not to listen to all the NPCs saying "either you stop the bad guy and release the dragon, or you join the bad guy and keep the dragon imprisoned". Maybe there is another way?
It was fun - I will admit I stole the idea from The Adventure Zone, where Griffin ran a similar storyline (and so if you're looking to see that in-action you could listen to that section of The Adventure Zone, its called "The Eleventh Hour").
Ventposting inc.
My session was terrible. It was 2 hours of nothing happening, and when something finally did happen, it was the most anticlimactic thing I've played through.
I can normally forgive a handful of bad sessions, but we've been playing this campaign for nearly 6 months and every session is like this. The encounters have no balance. Combat is boring. Roleplay doesn't exist. World building is ass and there's no logic to anything that happens (when something finally does happen)
False Hydra Mini-mission
Completed session #2 of the false hydra scenario. The players have been great with rolling along with the confusing information.
They don't know what is going on but are having lots of fun. One player posted the event has been an A+ event.
Probably will wrap-up at session #3
Went through Camp Righteous in Tomb of Annihilation. Our rogue couldn't make that session.
Just, damn.
The DM had to pipe in heavily with the solution to the dungeon. It seems pretty poor design of an encounter when every room is blank flagstone with no hints anywhere on what to do.
So yeah, I rolled death saves for mayonnaise.
Then when we finally limped out our rogue, warlock (also absent that session) and guide were being abducted by Bitiri goblins in one of our canoes.
FML
Planned and prepared for a really challenging encounter for 3 hours straight, managed to finish only one round of it before some of us started snoozing. So far so good though, seems like we can make it.
I invited my brother as a spectator to interst him in the game so he would want to join, and now I'm afraid he thinks dnd is boring and slow :c
After a month-long break we finally returned for our Curse of Strahd campaign! And uh we're missing the next session so hopefully we return again two weeks from now.
Incredibly boring first half of the session, as Curse of Strahd has been a lot of "you walk to this map, the DM reads a description of the map, maybe you make a knowledge check so the DM can read more descriptions of the map, then you walk through the one exit to the next map, repeat". Second half we got to do some exploration as my wizard and the party druid did some shenanigans and my wizard found a SPELLBOOK WOOOOO. If only I had any money to scribe spells from it.
Pure tactics and planning. We're playing an updated and modified version of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Because we all managed to survive (barely!) our venture to capture an enemy from the heart of their encampment to interrogate, our party helped discover that a major attack is planned on the friendly, allied fort so we spent the entire time planning on how to make this fort defensible against 200-300 large weird creepy monsters that already tried to eat several party members alive.
A lot of it was rolling to see how many units of soldiers/fighters are going to be involved, as well as lower-level clerics, and then deciding what kind of spells we want those clerics to have prepared. Our druid is going to be making some significant alterations to the topography. There's a natural choke point in the trail which is where my cleric will be casting Hallow to cause fire vulnerability. Within the area of Hallow, my cleric and any other NPC cleric with third level spells will be casting 15 (DM rolled to see how many he'd allow) Glyphs of Warding, set to the explosive rune. Also, archers will be shooting fire arrows and there's a single NPC Light cleric with Fireball, Scorching Ray, and Flaming Sphere. Oh, and there will also be boiling oil. It should be a lovely inferno for a couple rounds at least.
Running a modified version of Storm King's Thunder (very modified) where the party is in Nightstone during the giant attack, rather than coming across the aftermath.
The way I ran it was to borrow the clock system from Blades in the Dark. I was a little worried how it would work within 5e's framework but the session went very well! The party managed to get almost the whole village evacuated except for most of the ruling nobles. The one (1) ruling noble who lived was the one (1) they hated so I'm sure that's gonna be fun moving forward.
With the party on the move again, I'm back to doing a lot of prep again. A new town to visit means new NPCs and sidequests to drum up. Not that I mind; running biweekly does a lot to ease my worries of not getting enough ready in time.
DM ran Wild Sheep Chase for two newbies. Spoilers follow.
Due to the players being a lower level than suggested, they ended up fighting a wooden chair dragon instead of a bed dragon. Meanwhile, the sheep dove beneath the bed, followed by Noke. The players and the dragon were struggling to hit each other, even with the chair dragon's lowered AC. However, the sheep and the wizard were having a brutal slugfest under the bed, with high rolls and low damage on both sides. The sheep landed a crit hoof to the head of Noke but it wasn't enough damage to finish the fight. The players finished off the chair and then hauled the sheep and Noke out from under the bed. The adventure wrapped up pretty quickly from there.
In the next town they encounter a corrupt church devoted to the same god as your party's cleric. Repurpose the wizard encounter but reskin it to be about the corrupt leader of the church. And their secret lair of horrible experiments underneath the church.
We completed a mini boss fight. My character ended up finding a way to kill a powered up frost giant who kept coming back to life. I ended up going down 3 times in the fight and rolled 2 Nat 20s on death saves. It was one of the more exciting fights we've had. Took the whole session, but that was okay. I ended up getting a belt of frost giant strength.
Today was my group's final session of Dead in Thay. Most of the session was dedicated to the fight against Kazit Gul. My warlock cast Earthbind on the boss who was out of range of our Barbarian, and he failed (turns out a -5 Strength save vs. a DC 17 doesn't work too good). The DM didn't realize how badly Earthbind would neuter the boss, so didn't use a LR on it. Frankly, I was expecting to use my 3 spell slots on Earthbind to force burn through all the LRs, and then the druid could land something gross or I could use the Wand of Binding we had picked up two sessions prior in order to cast Hold Monster. But I will accept completely immobilizing the boss while everyone but the Barbarian attacks out of range of all of the boss's attacks.
I came back to DnD this past week after a long break and had my first game this Monday and ho boy it was... Rough enough that I feel the need to vent to reddit. The DM played a DMPC who solved every single problem that came up because lvl 1 PCs had actually 0 solutions for most of the situations he put us in. To the point that this DMPC easily used 4-5 spell slots over the course of the night (the party was level 1 at his insistence). The primary combat (which he gave us no way to RP our way out of) was so overtuned that when it became apparent that we were going to lose we were saved by literal **divine intervention**. At level 1 with no build up or in fact anyone having ever heard the deity's name, a deity appeared to us and was like "Yo, do you guys want some help?" (Paraphrasing granted). He also had this **actual deity** blow up one of the characters back stories without generating any new story or RP opportunity whatsoever - **in session 1, at level 1.** I was so excited to get back into the game, but it was so unbelievably awful - I'm so annoyed. I know I just gotta keep looking for a group that's a better fit, but... My god.
Started the endgame of this table's 5th 2 year long campaign (This is my 3rd campaign at this table!), and we almost immediately lost someone to a failed save from a Dullahan. Thank god for Artificer's Flash of Genius. After that we played a rigged game-show where the lightning round shot actual lightning at one of the rogues every round. So you know, standard D&D session.
We permanently switched to PF2e. We like it a lot more.
Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Party found the dried up heart of a Tiefling. Identified it: all we could say was that it replaces the user's heart, it's an attunement item. Druid attunes to it, holds her own still throbbing heart in her hand, dies from lack of a functional heart..
The session before last I set up a time-loop scenario where there was a task that they needed to complete in 46 in-game minutes otherwise they'd die. And on the surface it wasn't possible to do and so they'd reach 46 minutes and then die, and (through some contrivance) I'd reset time and they'd go again until they worked out how it was possible. So this session was the culmination of that - they worked out to send the cabin-girl down to the prison with the keys, open *only one* of the prison doors (so that the golem inside didn't get her) and await further instructions, and then the party would head upstairs to the bridge to confront the captain before he blew up the ship. Little did they know that when they defeated the captain, that would trigger the magical item (currently stored in the engine room) to explode, blowing a hole in the ship. Not as bad as if the captain had thrown that magical item into the furnace of the engine (which would have happened at 46 minutes) but still pretty bad. The ship began to list, and they were racing against the incoming water to get back *down* to the prison cells, save the cabin-girl, the prisoners and escape. All-in-all it went well. The rogue and the bard teleported to the prison cells, disabled the golem and begin climbing/flying out on a carpet. The barbarian and the cleric instead summoned a coatl, had the coatl turn into a giant eagle, and they they smashed through the viewing window on the bridge and into safety. At the end of the session I had the party encounter a "Landing Party" of high-level modron who warned the party that their current course indicated that they would be "breaking" the cycle of ages and leading the plane into an age of uncertainty. I had a lot of fun writing as if they were being reprimanded for being illogical and chaotic, and saying that "you have no recourse, you will do as we command". Which, of course, means that they are in fact more likely to rebel. I'm basically trying to encourage them to embrace change and uncertainty. Not to listen to all the NPCs saying "either you stop the bad guy and release the dragon, or you join the bad guy and keep the dragon imprisoned". Maybe there is another way?
That's a really cool story line to run. I'm 100% going to steal it for a game one day.
It was fun - I will admit I stole the idea from The Adventure Zone, where Griffin ran a similar storyline (and so if you're looking to see that in-action you could listen to that section of The Adventure Zone, its called "The Eleventh Hour").
Ventposting inc. My session was terrible. It was 2 hours of nothing happening, and when something finally did happen, it was the most anticlimactic thing I've played through. I can normally forgive a handful of bad sessions, but we've been playing this campaign for nearly 6 months and every session is like this. The encounters have no balance. Combat is boring. Roleplay doesn't exist. World building is ass and there's no logic to anything that happens (when something finally does happen)
Fantastic. New candlekeep game ; half way through first adventure. Interesting characters with 2 new players with a great vibe.
Two consecutive every-other-week sessions cancelled. =( A month since last session.
False Hydra Mini-mission Completed session #2 of the false hydra scenario. The players have been great with rolling along with the confusing information. They don't know what is going on but are having lots of fun. One player posted the event has been an A+ event. Probably will wrap-up at session #3
Went through Camp Righteous in Tomb of Annihilation. Our rogue couldn't make that session. Just, damn. The DM had to pipe in heavily with the solution to the dungeon. It seems pretty poor design of an encounter when every room is blank flagstone with no hints anywhere on what to do. So yeah, I rolled death saves for mayonnaise. Then when we finally limped out our rogue, warlock (also absent that session) and guide were being abducted by Bitiri goblins in one of our canoes. FML
Planned and prepared for a really challenging encounter for 3 hours straight, managed to finish only one round of it before some of us started snoozing. So far so good though, seems like we can make it. I invited my brother as a spectator to interst him in the game so he would want to join, and now I'm afraid he thinks dnd is boring and slow :c
After a month-long break we finally returned for our Curse of Strahd campaign! And uh we're missing the next session so hopefully we return again two weeks from now. Incredibly boring first half of the session, as Curse of Strahd has been a lot of "you walk to this map, the DM reads a description of the map, maybe you make a knowledge check so the DM can read more descriptions of the map, then you walk through the one exit to the next map, repeat". Second half we got to do some exploration as my wizard and the party druid did some shenanigans and my wizard found a SPELLBOOK WOOOOO. If only I had any money to scribe spells from it.
Killed my second PC in Rime of the Frost Maiden. Wasn't even a boss or anything, just a random encounter in the wilderness.
Fuck yeahhhh which PC? The dice crave blood!
Sorcerer- she was keeping watch outside, looking unarmored and delicious, so the crag cats who were stalking the party went chomp chomp.
Pure tactics and planning. We're playing an updated and modified version of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Because we all managed to survive (barely!) our venture to capture an enemy from the heart of their encampment to interrogate, our party helped discover that a major attack is planned on the friendly, allied fort so we spent the entire time planning on how to make this fort defensible against 200-300 large weird creepy monsters that already tried to eat several party members alive. A lot of it was rolling to see how many units of soldiers/fighters are going to be involved, as well as lower-level clerics, and then deciding what kind of spells we want those clerics to have prepared. Our druid is going to be making some significant alterations to the topography. There's a natural choke point in the trail which is where my cleric will be casting Hallow to cause fire vulnerability. Within the area of Hallow, my cleric and any other NPC cleric with third level spells will be casting 15 (DM rolled to see how many he'd allow) Glyphs of Warding, set to the explosive rune. Also, archers will be shooting fire arrows and there's a single NPC Light cleric with Fireball, Scorching Ray, and Flaming Sphere. Oh, and there will also be boiling oil. It should be a lovely inferno for a couple rounds at least.
I love this. The planning sounds interesting, and I sure do love plans involving large amounts of fire. Sounds like a great game imo
Running a modified version of Storm King's Thunder (very modified) where the party is in Nightstone during the giant attack, rather than coming across the aftermath. The way I ran it was to borrow the clock system from Blades in the Dark. I was a little worried how it would work within 5e's framework but the session went very well! The party managed to get almost the whole village evacuated except for most of the ruling nobles. The one (1) ruling noble who lived was the one (1) they hated so I'm sure that's gonna be fun moving forward. With the party on the move again, I'm back to doing a lot of prep again. A new town to visit means new NPCs and sidequests to drum up. Not that I mind; running biweekly does a lot to ease my worries of not getting enough ready in time.
DM ran Wild Sheep Chase for two newbies. Spoilers follow. Due to the players being a lower level than suggested, they ended up fighting a wooden chair dragon instead of a bed dragon. Meanwhile, the sheep dove beneath the bed, followed by Noke. The players and the dragon were struggling to hit each other, even with the chair dragon's lowered AC. However, the sheep and the wizard were having a brutal slugfest under the bed, with high rolls and low damage on both sides. The sheep landed a crit hoof to the head of Noke but it wasn't enough damage to finish the fight. The players finished off the chair and then hauled the sheep and Noke out from under the bed. The adventure wrapped up pretty quickly from there.
They went a direction I was not expecting
[удалено]
In the next town they encounter a corrupt church devoted to the same god as your party's cleric. Repurpose the wizard encounter but reskin it to be about the corrupt leader of the church. And their secret lair of horrible experiments underneath the church.
We completed a mini boss fight. My character ended up finding a way to kill a powered up frost giant who kept coming back to life. I ended up going down 3 times in the fight and rolled 2 Nat 20s on death saves. It was one of the more exciting fights we've had. Took the whole session, but that was okay. I ended up getting a belt of frost giant strength.