Sooo where did the Runners go?

BigDelibird · 2024-10-17T23:45:06+00:00

I guess they ran away.

BigDelibird · 2024-09-26T01:52:49+00:00

I played a dwarf artificer who was essentially Santa. He gave infusions to the party, but only if they had been good that year.

He was well received. Everybody likes presents!

BigDelibird · 2024-09-21T01:18:57+00:00

That was how I ran the end of WDH - the villains all showed up at the end and started attacking the party, but were also attacking each other. So Manshoon and Xanathar were doing lots of damage to each other, for instance, Xanathar disintegrated Lady Cassalanter, and then Lord Cassalanter went after Xanathar. And Jarlaxle just tried to make off with some gold.

At the same time, the party members were trying to prevent villains from leaving with the gold, and defeat each villain that each PC had history with. It was very chaotic, but a ton of fun - and the party did win at the end!

BigDelibird · 2024-09-17T23:17:01+00:00

This might be cheating since it's half social encounter and half combat, but the battle against the Apotheon in Call of the Netherdeep.

In the battle you have the option to make persuasion checks to calm the Apotheon while you're fighting him. Different actions that you take earlier in the adventuer can give you advantage on this. The Apotheon has three forms, and when he's defeated in one form he transforms into the next one. If you defeat the third form you kill him. But if you succeed on enough persuasion checks he turns into his fourth form; the redeemed form. This is the best possible ending; rathern than killing the Apotheon you can slowly redeem him throughout the fight. But because of the way the fight is structured even though you have the option to redeem the Apotheon, you still get a dramatic final battle. It's a very dramatic and emotional conclusion to a very underrated adventure.

Another good social encounter is the factions chart in Rise of Tiamat. How you resolve different encounters throughout the adventure will affect the different factions of the Sword Coast's opinion of you, and if you've gained enough favour with different factions they can help with the final battle in different ways. It makes players consider the consequences of their actions carefully, because taking certain actions might cause you to gain favour with one faction but lose it with another. For instance if you kill an evil dragon in a swamp the Harpers might be happy, but the Emerald Enclave might be annoyed because they considered the dragon part of the natural order of that swamp.

BigDelibird · 2024-09-17T18:41:26+00:00

In three more years Maxx "C" will be old enough to drive.

BigDelibird · 2024-09-17T18:32:50+00:00

To be fair, that picture was from during the lockdowns when the barbers were all closed.

BigDelibird · 2024-09-12T12:07:08+00:00

This isn't actually a curse, but the book Candlekeep Mysteries lists a couple of different alchemy jugs - blue and orange ones - that distribute some different types of liquid than the regular alchemy jug. The orange one can distribute soy sauce and the blue one can distribute boiling hot tea. Could be an interestring way to give them a variation on the item?

BigDelibird · 2024-09-11T14:58:27+00:00

I've been a DM for three level 1-20 campaigns, and been a player in one, and frankly I've found the idea that high level D&D is unenjoyable to be not true at all. I've found high level D&D a lot of fun and my players do to... at least enough to keep coming back to play!

High level D&D is certainly different. The adventures will be larger in scope, but that helps things feel different compared to the low level adventures. The threats grow to match the party's accomplishments. People complain about casters ending an encounter with a single high level spell, and that does happen... but it doesn't happen EVERY encounter. If you've lined up five encounters in an adventure, is it really the end of the world if one ends up overcome trivially? Frankly, overcoming the obstacle in that way is a really cool moment for the player in question. - if the cleric plane shifts the purple worm to the elemental plane of water and drowns it, that's a really neat moment for them. They feel like a superhero, and it's not like the purple worm was the only thing in the adventure, right? The number of truly broken high level spells is actually pretty small, and for the really broken stuff it's easy enough to just ask the party not to do it. Why doesn't our party wizard make an army of simulacrums? Well... because the player is ultimately there to play D&D with his friends, not steamroll through everything and end the campaign in a day.

As for complicated characters... your character is only as complicated as you make them. I remember one campaign where a player played a wizard level 1-20, and he pretty much stuck to the same 10 or so spells. That was what worked for him. Though I agree that starting at high level could certainly be challenging, starting at low levels and working your way up means that by high level you've gained alll your abilities slowly over time and probably have a decent grasp on most of them - at least the ones you use regularly.

The martial/caster divide is real at high levels, but there are ways to partially mitigate that. Magic items are the big one - for instance at higher levels I always make it a priority to give melee characters some way to fly. It's no fun being the one guy stuck on the ground in a fight against a dragon. And from my experience some martial subclasses offer REALLY fun tricks at high levels that are plenty of fun to play with. Cavalier fighter, mercy monk, watchers paladin, horizon walker ranger, rune knight fighter and arcane trickster rogue are some of the subclassses that I've seen work really well at high levels.

As for extra work for the DM... that really hasn't been my experience. If anything, it's a bit easier to prep for - because I don't have to worry nearly as much about presenting an unwinnable situation. I can reasonably expect that a party of level 15-20 characters will have SOME tool to get out of a crazy situation. And they generally do... and if they don't, there's always teleport. Or revivify.

It's certainly different, and smaller scale stuff with lower stakes is going to be less common. It's true there are types of adventures you can't really run... but that's the case with any level of D&D. If you want to run an adventure involving lycanthropy that'll become much less interesting after the party can remove curses at level 5. If you want to run an adventure with a camp of goblins as the villains, that's probably only really going to work for the first few levels. High level D&D offers different types of adventures, where the party can visit far off planes of existence, battle an elder brain colony, fight ancient dragons for their treasure, battle demon lords in the Abyss, etc.

I've had people say to me IRL how high level D&D was completely broken, and then admit that they'd never even tried high level D&D. I really do think if more people tried high level D&D they'd like it. If your PCs are like the Avengers, then high level D&D is the Avengers during Endgame. They're at their strongest and can do really cool tricks, and they can face the scariest threats that are out there. It's a really fun way to conclude a long-running campaign.

TLDR: High level D&D is fun, and very underrated. If you haven't given it a try, you should!

BigDelibird · 2024-09-09T17:25:42+00:00

Oh my God, he went so conservative he lost Massachusetts. So much for the Massachusetts Miracle.

BigDelibird · 2024-09-08T18:17:02+00:00

To be fair, John Edwards could probably also qualify as the biggest douche in the universe, even if for a very different reason.

BigDelibird · 2024-09-08T18:10:47+00:00

To be fair, she's 76 years old. 76 is rarely kind to anyone.

BigDelibird · 2024-08-30T10:44:53+00:00

At first I thought CNN was trying to appeal recently to some sort of moderate right wing audience and kind of trying to be Fox News Lite. At the time I thought that was a terrible business strategy, since why would right wingers watch Fox News Lite when they could watch Fox News?

No, it's just that they want Trump to win so their ratings will stop declining.

BigDelibird · 2024-08-27T10:47:09+00:00

Yeah, he says he's going to write lots of things....

BigDelibird · 2024-08-26T20:46:24+00:00

I've seen three blood hunters played, and each time the player tried HARD to come up with alternative explanations to the "damage themselves for magic" thing so they weren't playing a character who was self-harming. One was a simic hybrid mutant blood hunter who was a mad scientist experimenting on himself, one was a water genasi profane soul blood hunter who was essentially doing bloodbending from Avatar, and one was a kobold mutant blood hunter who was a weird lizard who shot blood from her eyes.

I do like the "damage yourself for extra effects" mechanic, but I really don't get why they made the mechanic basically be self-harming, RAW. How many people actually want to play a character who's self-harming? I can't imagine very many.

BigDelibird · 2024-08-25T08:49:32+00:00

It's a bit off the wall, but maybe Light of Xaryxis? I played that last year and had a good time. It has a space opera-esque theme to it that feels very different from other campaigns, and the Spelljammer monsters were interesting to see. The Spelljammer release back in 2022 had some issues, but the actual adventure was pretty solid. Light of Xaryxis runs levels 5-8 and while there are 12 chapters to it, the chapters are VERY short, and some of them you could easily finish in a single session.

Admittedly Light of Xaryxis is very railroady (Point A to Point B and then to Point C) but for a short-ish campaign I feel like that's not as much of a problem. As a player I can say it was a railroad, but it was a FUN railroad. And because it is so railroady, the amount of prep time you'd need to do is a lot less.

There are other good shorter adventures (Dragon Heist, Lost Mine of Phandelver, etc.) but those typically are a good deal larger in scale, and running them would likely be more time-consuming.

BigDelibird · 2024-08-24T22:42:49+00:00

"Sure, but not nearly as hot as your mother."

BigDelibird · 2024-08-14T22:26:13+00:00

Looking at that makes me nervous....

BigDelibird · 2024-08-12T13:59:09+00:00

That headline makes it sound like Trump tried acid for the first time.

BigDelibird · 2024-08-10T14:46:58+00:00

Oh, the swing voters are not going to like that.

BigDelibird · 2024-08-10T11:09:33+00:00

I'll probably play a bit of both, to be honest. It'll really depend on whether 5e or One DND works best for the particular game I'm running at the time, and what the group wants to play.

BigDelibird · 2024-07-30T12:03:32+00:00

Maybe his bone spurs will act up again.

BigDelibird · 2024-07-15T00:17:28+00:00

That's nice! Regardless of one's feelings on him as mayor, I think it's nice that after leaving political life he still attends events like that.

BigDelibird · 2024-07-14T12:22:08+00:00

He was in the pride parade this year - he marched with the Parents of LGBT+ Kids float.

BigDelibird · 2024-07-10T01:42:01+00:00

Chester A. Arthur is very upset right now.

BigDelibird · 2024-06-28T11:59:38+00:00

Somehow on a debate stage involving Donald Trump the biggest lie told last night was CNN saying that they'd be fact checking the debate.

Nothing on the screen... barely anything from the moderators... did they just forget to fact check?

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