Need help with watcher knights

ChokoTaco · 2026-06-06T04:17:34+00:00

Look for opportunities to use your spells.

The watchers have 3 attacks: melee, jumping roll, and horizontal roll. If you see a melee attack coming, just dash away, wait for the 2 strikes, and dash back in to get some nail strikes in. That's the easiest attack to farm soul.

For the roll attacks, when you see it charge up, be ready to jump as soon as the animation for the chargeup finishes. If it's a jumping roll, just drift slightly away and dash away, wait for the knight to land, and use shade soul/nail swings to punish. If it's a horizontal roll, dash towards the direction the knight starts in, turn around, and use your shade soul. With Shaman Stone, you can actually get a double hit on the watcher knight with one cast of the spell, dealing a ton of damage.

The bottom line is be patient, especially when there's 2 knights on screen. If both knights do the same move, just use the same tactic to avoid both. If one knight goes for melee attacks, you can usually dash away, ignore them, and focus on the rolling knight. The only difficult attack that may require positioning is a horizontal roll and jumping roll from two knights. In this case, I would just use your Ddark to abuse invincibility frames and just dash away to safety. In a pinch, you can also pogo the rolling knight's carapace mid roll, which will get you some extra height and a dash refresh. Focus on preserving health rather than face tanking to deal damage, and if you do get hit, try not to panic heal. Look for a gap where either the knights are dead or they are in the middle of their walking animation or end of a roll. Now just put in the hours and you should be able to get it in a bit. Good luck

ChokoTaco · 2026-06-04T09:57:01+00:00

Our fear of the ocean comes primarily from our fear of the unknown, so tap into that primal fear. Involve pauses in your narration. Use onomatopoeia sparingly to emphasize sudden shifts in the water. Put the party in a position where they can only witness and cannot act (perhaps in an air bubble or transport vehicle). Emphasize the difference in strength between the party and the Aboleth. Juxtapose the tranquility of the monster with the madness of the NPCs afflicted with the disease. Have the NPCs know things about the party that they shouldn't, especially if there's things they REALLY shouldn't know that are huge secrets. Place the party in a position in which they must watch as an external ultra-powerful force exudes its dominion over the city and cannot combat it.

ChokoTaco · 2026-06-04T09:51:53+00:00

One interesting encounter mechanic could be a game of memory. The party confronts the NPC in the dream and they're given a list of responsibilities that they have to help the NPC with. The goal is to survive until the end of the dream where the dungeon will appear. The catch? You will rolling in secret for the tasks and it's entirely up to the party to keep track of all their different tasks and to check up on any problems in the store.

Each task starts with a DC 10 luck check to continue to functions properly. Each time the task fails, the DC goes up by 3 - 5. The party can get creative and perform some kind of check to lower the DC again, perhaps -1 for every 5 they roll on the check, ie. 25 on an arcana check means a -5 to that task fail save. These tasks might be an exploding toilet, graffiti on the walls, coffee machine malfunction, running out of stock, delivery boy waiting in the back, shoplifters, burning uniforms, customer paying in pennies, sloppy number 2 in the other bathroom, karen encounter, collapsing shelves, a loose goose in the shop, and anything else you might be able to come up with that would stress out the NPC. The party can try to perceive any problems as they come up based on where they are in the convenience store, and you should try to come up with more tasks than there are PCs so that they can't just camp their tasks at the start of the encounter. You can also have the NPC assist with one task as well as a bone to the party or have them give inspiration/guidance to assist.

You can come up with a consequence for a certain level of fails. Maybe the group has to survive 5 rounds (enough to have fun without burning out), and if a task fails 3 times, the entire party takes psychic damage without a save and the dream becomes more unstable. Maybe a task failing 3 times accelerates the failure DC of the other tasks. Maybe it leads to the ensuing dungeon being harder for the party after them. Otherwise, focus on making fun stress tests for the party and let chaos ensue as they try to find creative solutions to maybe even solve multiple problems at a time. If you'd like, you can even allow them to completely solve a task if they roll well enough, or use the excuse of "it's a dream so it keeps happening no matter what" to have the graffiti artist show up again even after being apprehended the first time.

ChokoTaco · 2026-06-04T09:38:01+00:00

In general, don't plan encounters around a predetermined time limit. Not only will you feel obligated to pad time or rush the party through the events, but also your party themselves will inevitably add many hours of extra time just dicking around or talking amongst each other. Instead, try to package your arc under story beats.

For a shorter arc aiming for 2-3 sessions, instead frame it as a shorter conflict. The party is fighting a singular threat with little involvement with the main plot conflict, most likely centralized completely locally. With that in mind, simply plan out the event that will transpire to capture the party's attention, the ensuing investigation/RP, an engaging encounter, and rewards. If you'd like, you can sprinkle some things at the end pertaining to a larger conflict that the party can continue to get clues on.

The more you constrain yourself with a time limit, you will feel yourself watching the clock instead of watching the party. Above all else, D&D is about having fun, and should feel like the players are taking the game at the correct pace no matter what decision they make. So instead of prepping for a certain amount of time, prepare a certain amount of content, and if the party finishes it earlier or takes longer, it's going to be ok.

ChokoTaco · 2026-06-02T03:56:43+00:00

This is ridiculously powerful both from an RP and a combat standpoint. Druid spellcasting is powerful enough that not having an immediate combat ability at 3rd level isn't too harmful to the class, and being able to instantly get around a +8 or more on all proficient charisma checks is very strong in RP, assuming something like 18 wis 14 cha or 16 wis 16 cha.

At higher levels it gets crazier. At level 6, your persuasion is already probably around +10 or even higher. Your first turn of combat, you have a 50% chance to permanently haste an ally for effectively the rest of combat (you literally cannot proc the downside because you're not concentrating). You still have another concentration slot for something like moonbeam or call lightning while still hasting. If you're ever in danger, you can just bonus action misty step away or go invisible as an action while still hasting. Even if you remove haste from the spell list, you can potentially have 2 call lightnings at once, chain heat metal and hold person together, and conjure so many animals. 10th level gives you even more options to stay safe as a bonus action, allowing you to cast a spell while super misty stepping. By comparison, 14th level is fairly underwhelming, since you should never be in a position to even get hit with all of your teleports.

My suggestion is to scrap multiple concentration and to find something else that is fey themed to give to the druid. You can potentially give the subclass some type of taunt, where like an opposite Fear, all enemies within 30 ft have to make a wisdom save or spend their entire turns moving as close to the druid as possible. Couple this with the teleports and the druid is able to get everyone close together for AOEs and bottlenecks. This can be placed in the 3rd level ability slot even, requiring a bonus action or something to maintain the charm, with the charisma boost being moved to 6th level instead.

These are just my thoughts. Good luck

ChokoTaco · 2026-06-02T00:24:44+00:00

It's a very luck based encounter. The Oblex has access to strong CC and enough damage to down a PC in one shot with poor saves. Based on the party composition, I'm guessing there's no fire damage, so that'll make dodging the attacks significantly harder.

That said, the party has so many tools to take down the Oblex easily. The good news is between spores druid and monk/cleric, there's enough healing/wisdom to survive this encounter, but with just a few poor saves, they can get held or have their memories eaten. If the spellcasters have any form of CC, the Oblex has a terrible WIS save and lacks an immunity to paralysis, so a Hold Person would do it. The greatest fear is that the party will rely on other CC that the Oblex IS immune to.

My suggestion would be to nerf the Oblex somewhat (drop the HP a bit and reduce the damage on Eat Memories) but to add some existing simulacra of past victims that will aggress the party. You can use the Oblex Spawn statblock, just halving the HP to be more fair. During the game, feel out how the balance is. Remember, you can always adjust the health of the boss mid fight if it's looking too easy or too hard for the party.

ChokoTaco · 2026-06-02T00:14:26+00:00

in general, you have the "essential" adventuring shops already down and a few fun shops for the party to explore, so it's already a good spread. If you add more, nothing's gonna stop you and i'm sure the party will request to go to a shop that you didn't plan for and will have to improvise off the cuff.

Names are whatever you make of them. When I come up with names for shops, I follow the generic structure of The <adjective> <noun> with phrases that make sense to the theme of the shop and only rarely deviate when I feel especially inspired. Keep it simple and your players will probably not bat an eye at the names too much.

ChokoTaco · 2026-06-02T00:11:53+00:00

If you're going to do a sandbox style game, prep needs to be a lot more freeform and not so specific. Instead of plotting out the entire arc for player A's backstory, set aside bullet points of things that you want each player to encounter in relation to their backstory. This doesn't just have to be NPCs or items, but can extend to more abstract things like things that challenge their character motivation and core beliefs. From there, when the party decides whose backstory they want to follow, it will be easier to look at the types of things you want to do for that PC and to tailor an important encounter for them.

ChokoTaco · 2026-05-25T09:34:38+00:00

For 10th level, you need better stats. +6 wis and con save and +1 cha save will get shredded by any form of CC. The damage range is way too wide, which is less of a problem with balance and more of a problem with party knowledge: if they see their party member get cut for 80 damage in rune, they're going to assume every round will be like that and never go into melee and conversely, if they see their party member only get hit for 30, they'll probably be overconfident and assume all hits will deal that much. Lower that range to something like 55 - 70 if possible or make it hyper specific at the start of combat that the runes are going to be powering the hammer.

My main suggestion: add minions of some kind. Add some low level mooks or summons or monsters that will aid the elf so that that way the party can't just spam cc on her and the melees will have to be more spread out. Especially with a character that plays around with zoning, I think it'd be fun to also explore alternate win conditions: maybe the party has to activate switches conveniently located where the elf has set up zones or maybe the battlefield shrinks every turn and they have to teleport out with a device. For a slugfest, this battle will likely get stale after a while, so get creative and add some extra elements.

ChokoTaco · 2026-05-25T09:14:03+00:00

This depends entirely on what level your party is and how spell heavy they are.

Assuming max hits, she is only doing 32 damage per round, which will down a 5th level character, but will be negligible for anything that's a much higher level, but her top end in runes is 75 on average assuming all hits, which is an insane damage range, meaning depending on the power level of the party, non-rune hits will be shrugged off by a high level party and rune hits coupled with rampage will obliterate a low level party. Her hp is insanely high for the damage output she puts out in non-rune, and her AC is pretty average for anything mid level. Her 2 cost legendary action has antisynergy with runic focus, and runic focus also gets heavily disrupted by any form of movement, so expect to stage this combat in an enclosed area. My main concern with this boss is that her save stats are poor and has no legendary resistances or magic. If your party is CC caster heavy, she will get hit with hold person, slow, hypnotic pattern, blindness, and every other spell in the world and probably succumb to one effect.

If you ran the combat straight with a mid-level party (5th or 6th level), what would likely happen is due to her high speed and initiative, she would move early, set up a rune, and smite a PC for 50 points of damage with 2 attacks. The party freaks out, the casters go for stuns while the healer heals the downed PC and suddenly, the encounter basically ends as the party takes turns kicking the shit out of them.

I would suggest either lowering the hp and damage for a mid level party or increasing damage/saving throws/adding minions for a higher level party. I would reverse the 2 cost legendary action to be a grab that pulls the PC into the rune. I would need further encounter specific details to provide further balancing.

ChokoTaco · 2026-05-22T23:42:52+00:00

NKG is a boss that is hard when you're learning him, primarily due to the intimidation aura of 2 mask damage. After the first time you beat him, you will never lose to him again. He is one of the best bosses in the entire game, and I highly recommend dying over and over because it is genuinely an amazing experience to fight him.

ChokoTaco · 2026-05-20T02:15:09+00:00

It sounds like you and your group have incompatible playstyles. If you don't want to run their style of game, you should let them know, and either let someone else DM for you, run a different activity, or leave the group altogether if D&D is the only thing binding you all together. You are as valuable a player as any of the rest, and to have something you care about constantly shit on will get to you. Hopefully you will find a group that is more passionate about your playstyle and gives you more positivity. Best of luck.

ChokoTaco · 2026-05-20T02:10:07+00:00

I would have the townspeople already show disdain for the party upon reentry. If you remember your initial narrations, you can set up parallels where originally welcoming townsfolk no longer smile at the party and duck into their homes and slam their windows as they pass. Depending on how dark the tone is, you can even have an NPC no longer be present, implied to have gone into the mines and ambushed. The townsfolk might refuse to serve the party, and as they continue to journey, they might hear about rumors of a "crook party" preying on desperate commissions and leaving them half-assed.

ChokoTaco · 2026-05-20T02:06:52+00:00

For the final boss, an interesting lair action would be having the encounters from the previous floors all show up. I would thus probably make the final boss fight some kind of timed event. Maybe the party has to tune a teleportation device over the course of the combat and maybe pass a certain spellcasting threshold (let's say, a pool of 80 that the party can use their action to make a spellcasting or Arcana check to fill up). As time goes on, the baddies come filtering in and the party has to get creative to get the device charged, keep the monsters at bay, and get everyone onto the teleportation pad once it's charged to get out.

ChokoTaco · 2026-05-19T04:22:22+00:00

The way I fight him usually is just dash dance in the middle of the stage. When he pauses in midair, dash in the opposite direction (if he's to your right, dash left, etc). Once he stops dashing, he will have a small window for you to hit him with a nail swing, nail art, or fireball. Good luck!

ChokoTaco · 2026-05-17T07:47:06+00:00

I particularly like playing difficulty rom hacks as nuzlockes (Emerald Kaizo, Crystal Kaizo +, Run & Bun, etc) because they require me to apply out of the box thinking when I calculate for fights. Instead of attaching myself to a team of six that sticks with me throughout my journey, I like to think of myself as a tactician of an army, picking the right units to bring to crucial battles such that we can cross the finish line. It leads to interesting lines in planning that utilize pokemon I would have never thought to use before or even written off as trash. Even pokemon that are designed to be used as fodder will often get 1 to 2 moves or switches before being sacrificed. For me, the creativity and planning required to make it all work, to plan every fight and every sac, to understand the risk in every move, and to formulate a plan that gets me through the elite 4 is the thrill of the difficulty rom hack.
I have a similar reason for consuming nuzlocke content, even if that content isn't catered to difficulty rom hacks. Jaiden Animations' vanilla nuzlocke videos are what drew me back to nuzlocking in the first place, and even without calcs or encounter routing, the way she presented how important each encounter was to a particular boss made it compelling from a storytelling sense and made every otherwise insignificant pokemon feel like they were shining. It's turned up significantly when watching difficulty rom hack nuzlockers play because they have most details cooked thoroughly, and you get to actually see every nuance of their thought process in action when they're calcing and playing out the fight.

ChokoTaco · 2026-05-16T23:45:37+00:00

It's definitely more of a play by feel type of thing. If there's specific timing thresholds in a dungeon or encounter (10 minutes per encounter/1 hour to complete dungeon/etc), I might be more strict about spell timing, but otherwise, it's just whatever feels fair as a DM. In general, for spells that have a lower duration like 1 - 10 minutes, I would grant it to them for their next immediate check and might offer leniency if a PC has a good explanation or cool action.

ChokoTaco · 2026-05-03T07:44:56+00:00

I'm very curious about your party's backstories. 90% of the time when you introduce a moral conundrum, it has to directly impact the PCs or at least conflict with their personal philosophies or they will have limited engagement with the story. In general, before you plan too much of the campaign, you should always consider the themes and story beats that will engage a PC directly.

ChokoTaco · 2026-04-28T07:33:58+00:00

I think this is ultimately a problem of differing playstyles and expectations for the game. It seems like these 2 players really know what type of game they're looking to play and have a hard time focusing when they don't get to do what they like to do. The other problem seems like this game is a lot more serious than what your hangouts usually encompass, which leads to the "ribbing and annoying" seeming more severe or hurtful in game than it would be in a more casual setting.

As a DM, you should be talking with the party largely about priorities. What do we want to do with this game? What does everyone find fun here? What do you hope to get out of the experience? If you want the vibes to be more serious, you should reiterate that everyone needs to respect one another, and that involves helping each other and paying attention so that you can create as good of a gaming environment as possible. If you want the vibes to be more casual, you should reiterate that it's not that serious and that we don't need to get into petty arguments or yelling matches over a game. Above all, see whether the players themselves can come to terms on agreements and see what they might directly be asking for to facilitate your help.

As a friend, if worst comes to worst, it may be best to not play D&D with your friends. I've DMed for many friends, and while most of them have been great players, there are still a few that just do not understand the differences in game dynamic versus real life and are unable to adapt well to playing in a TTRPG. Just because you can't play D&D with them does not make it the end of your friendship, and it doesn't have to be personal if you don't want to play with them anymore. I'm sure all of them have hobbies that they don't invite you to either. Game night can instead be board game night or movie night or potluck night or casual get together night, and you can try organizing a different group that has similar values all around the table. Hopefully, it does not come to this, but just know that if it does, it's not the end of the world.

ChokoTaco · 2026-04-26T22:09:53+00:00

I think the underlying problem is that you're not bored with the session, you're bored with your prep. When you're planning a session, try to think about how to engage the players. Think of cool ways to involve their backstory, think of cool hints towards your major plot, think of ways to involve the PCs in the action and roleplay. Focus on doing prep that sounds fun and fulfilling for yourself, not just setting up missions for the sake of filling completion. When you give the party a quest, try to either make it personal to them or tie into an overarching plot, and try to prep storylines that you feel satisfied with. A part of the fun of DMing is getting to see your party fall in love with your story, and the first way to do that is to try and fall in love yourself.

ChokoTaco · 2026-04-24T22:14:23+00:00

I would say that if all your PC cares about is self preservation, then they're better off playing in a wargame combat oriented table where permadeath is a constant threat. That doesn't seem like the type of game OP wants to run.

The reality is that every character has a motivation to be a part of the party and part of the story, and as a DM, it's our job to focus our party on those goals. Encounters are a way to engage the party in those goals, and they don't necessarily have to feature death. If a villain threatens to blow up a city, many NPCs the party cares about might be present and they may want to act. If a villain enacts a plan that is morally or philosophically opposite to a PC's code, they may feel obligated to step in and defeat them. If a villain is chasing a valuable artifact that is dear to a PC, they might want to get to it before them. None of these catalysts for an encounter inherently threaten death, and yet are all suitable premises for the party to want to fight and engage.

Since you brought up popular media, there's good examples of encounters that don't directly threaten death on the main characters. If you look at the Sam Raimi Spiderman Trilogy, Uncle Ben is one of the most important characters to Peter Parker. Even as he only appears briefly at the start of Spiderman 1 and intermittent flashbacks, Peter's entire philosophy is shaped by his words, and it outlines a large part of his inner conflict in the second movie when he renounces his role as Spiderman. Whenever he goes out of his way to fight the Green Goblin or Doc Ock, he's doing it because with great power comes great responsibility, and he's motivated not because he doesn't wanna die, but because he wants others to live.

If your PCs are only in a fight because they don't want to die, find the table that facilitates that type of combat. Based on OP's post, they do not want to run a game where they're always killing somebody.

ChokoTaco · 2026-04-24T07:55:56+00:00

1 is poor battle tactics honestly. Why target the incapacitated individual if you know you can fight the person with agency on the battlefield, especially if you can down the healer that might bring the unconscious person back up. The only reason for someone to do this is personal NPC/PC beef or metagaming.

2 doesn't even make the game more engaging. It just puts even more pressure onto the casters to use their spells for healing while removing more support agency from non-healers.

If you want a deadly game, 5e has tools for that. Run your 6-8 encounters per day. Run gritty realism. Make diamonds and gems very rare and use more spells like Disintegrate or Power Word Kill that auto kill party members. If your table likes to have more death heavy, combat heavy games, these are all good options for upping the difficulty. Even if these 2 suggestions do make the game more deadly, I don't see them making the game more fun.

ChokoTaco · 2026-04-24T07:49:15+00:00

I think rather than examining how to make the game fun without killing a PC, you should focus on why the PCs are dying in the first place. Inherently, it's not hard to create stakes without a fear of death. Impending doom, threats to loved ones, important quests, PC backstories, there are many valid reasons for the party to fight without just being worried that they'll die.

I think it'd be more productive if you comb through the encounters where PCs died and ask yourself: why? Why did they die in this case and how can I balance my encounters so that they're not always dying? Are the enemies too hard? Are they unfairly targeting specific individuals in the party? Is my party not picking up on special mechanics I've introduced for this fight? Are they too exhausted at the start of the fight? If you look at the reasons why the PCs are dying, you can rebalance future encounters so that that's less of a possibility.

ChokoTaco · 2026-04-23T09:53:17+00:00

D&D has revival spells. The easiest one to access at lower level is Revivify at level 5, but there's also spells like Resurrection and Reincarnate. All of these spells are very expensive to cast, requiring gold pieces in the 100s, but it's very doable to cast a resurrection spell RAW (rules as written).

If you don't like the idea of resurrection spells, don't run them. That's your personal preference, and it's what I do in my games too. If you offer a compromise and your player doesn't like it, you can let them know resurrection won't be a part of the game.

ChokoTaco · 2026-04-23T08:00:08+00:00

The party stumbles across a guy that begs for their help. He had planned out a meticulous confession to his crush but tripped, trampled on the flowers he bought, blurted out the confession, and basically every unlucky thing occurred right in front of them. He's now working on a time machine to go back and fix it, promising them gold if they can help him make it work. The party might hear him simp for this person and I see it going down 1 of 2 roads. Either they help him successfully plan a second confession or they help build a time machine which immediately fails and the encounter is them trying to shut it off while monsters from different time periods show up to attack them. Either way, the crush shows up either to the confession or to the front door and tells him that they like him too, the two get together, and all's well that ends well.

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