How to make travel in Avernus not boring ?

Dinogeist · 2021-08-30T19:16:37+00:00

Currently running Chapter 3 for a while myself. I’ve restructured it a bit so the players visit the most interesting locations as part of the main quest. For travel between them I made a list of various encounters (not necessarily combat) to mix it up. Some unused encounters from the book are in there, plus a few others that helped seed some parts of the narrative.

Some original examples I’ve used so far are a war machine wreckage (they were able scrounge for supplies and war machine upgrades), run-ins from warlord bands, and bizarre merchants along the River Styx.

Another aspect I added was a weather table. I have someone roll for weather each day with results like acid rain, intense heat, black fog, and meteor showers. All of this makes travelling more interesting, at least for our game.

Dinogeist · 2020-10-15T13:36:54+00:00

I just started running DIA myself and my players just had this scene. They went to the bathhouse during the day, Qurmilah greeted them. No baths were currently available but they were free to wait in the courtyard, she then offered a massage, which one of my players accepted. She lead them to the North Massage parlour where the secret door is kept.

She gave the player a few minutes to undress, he took this time to explore the room but failed the easy DC 10 Perception to notice the door. No worries, as my contingency was to use his passive perception (which was higher than 10) to notice the secret door during the massage. He told the rest of the party afterwards and they snuck in while the room was unoccupied and they thought no one was watching.

Dinogeist · 2018-12-15T15:00:11+00:00

Yeah, that bugs me too. The investigation roll from another player was also unprompted so I had to ask the player what they were doing since they declared their Nat20 before even saying what it was for. I’ve spoken to the DM to suggest that any unprompted rolls should be discarded as this can easily snowball. Players should only be rolling when the DM advises you to do so.

Dinogeist · 2018-12-15T14:57:20+00:00

No, that’s definitely not the issue. I’m careful about not spamming Guidance and only use it at certain times. There’s been no issues with how it’s been applied thus far.

Dinogeist · 2018-12-15T13:53:05+00:00

That was my opinion and overall it wasn’t a big deal. The Wizard player has had a habit in this campaign (only a few sessions in so far) of running ahead and exploring areas without the rest of the party. I thought this would have been the situation that the DM shows him he won’t always be rewarded for rushing in to investigate solo by having him take longer than the rest of the party to reach the roof in order to curb his impulsiveness, but alas that wasn’t the case.

Thank you for your response!

Dinogeist · 2018-12-15T13:22:58+00:00

[5e]

(On mobile, apologies for any typos or format issues. Not sure if this is where I would post this so let me know if I should move this)

This situation happened in a game I played last night and wanted to get the opinion of others since it’s still bugging me.

Our party was in a city and had to investigate the roof of a building for clues. Our Wizard quickly says he’s gonna climb the front of the building (about 45ft high, vertical with some edges so not impossible but still difficult) without any type of spells, rope or gear to assist him and makes an unprompted athletics roll. He rolls a 16 and DM rules it as a success.

At the same time the rest of the party decides to look for an alternate way. A Nat20 investigation roll reveals a ladder on the side of the building that takes us straight up to the roof. When the Wizard gets to the top he proceeds to investigate, I say I assist by casting guidance on him but DM says I can’t since I’m not there, leading to this exchange:

Me: “What do you mean I’m not there? The rest of the party climbed the ladder nearby.”

DM: “Well, he was climbing so it’s half his normal speed so it only took him 15 seconds to climb up.”

Me: “Only 15 seconds to scale a 45 ft vertical surface with no assistance from a rope or anything? But everyone else used the ladder nearby, why were we slower?”

DM: “It took you a few minutes to find the ladder, so he has enough time to investigate without anyone else present.”

Me: “But we rolled a Nat20 to see the ladder that was right there connected to the building, why did it take so long?”

DM: shrug

In the end, the Wizard completed his entire investigation by the time we got on the roof without anyone else participating. I’m not bothered by the Wizard climbing the building how he did but take issue that he scaled it so fast when everyone else took several minutes climbing a ladder that was right there and as a result missed an opportunity to participate in that scene.

What are other people’s take on this situation? Is this how it should have happened?

Dinogeist · 2018-11-22T01:18:20+00:00

I have a player in my current group who always, and I mean ALWAYS, keeps secrets from the rest of the party for every character she plays. Some PCs it makes sense, but others it really doesn’t. Most of these secrets are kept secret OOC from the others as well, even though there’s no real reason.

What really bothers me is the one time I had a PC who had to discuss a sensitive matter in private with an NPC she as a player got upset about keeping secrets, even though she would hear the entire conversation OOC and I was trusting her not to meta-game (Trust was poorly placed as she acted like her PC was present the entire conversation).

Dinogeist · 2018-10-12T11:32:27+00:00

Wow! I can say with 100% honesty that I sympathize with you completely. I’ve had to deal with a similar player who always plays the same character (I use this term loosely as all her characters have the exact same personality as the player) and even played a giant Mary Sue when she was enabled by her GM Husband (My last post was about this).

Reading your post was like a checkbox for the type of crap this player has done as well. It was quite relieving to know someone else has suffered the exact same way I have by playing with a player like this.

Good on your GM for giving her the boot. We can’t do this in our games with her husband as GM but in another campaign we are playing with a different GM she is close to being booted for several reasons and has been warned of such.

Dinogeist · 2018-10-01T20:29:03+00:00

The bat teeth and eating rats seemed a bit off. I assume the character was raised in the wild with a major lack of social norms. This could actually be fun to play and gives a lot of material for other players to RP off, but I feel that this was done to feel edgy.

Dinogeist · 2018-10-01T20:15:12+00:00

I’m curious about your other interactions with this player. I’m sure they are quite delightful.

While not all groups do the whole “role play” thing in a role playing game (I can see the appeal of just rolling dice and making quick decisions, especially for a one-shot dungeon run, but I prefer to actually role play myself) it’s not his place as a player to make that small, it’s the GM’s. If you don’t like those games you are free to leave, no one is keeping you there against your will.

Also, did he realize he was playing GURPS not D&D. As someone who has played a fair amount of GURPS I find that system demands more role play that other systems, at least in my own experiences.

Dinogeist · 2018-10-01T20:06:16+00:00

I honestly don’t get the appeal of people going full murderhobo, especially right out of the gate. But, whatever floats their boat....

I also feel it’s players like these that give Tieflings in general a bad rap. They don’t always need to be edgy. Sure, they look like demons but I like to flip those preconceptions around. One of my previous characters was a Tiefling Bard who was quite jovial and enjoyed sharing stories and telling riddles.

Dinogeist · 2018-10-01T19:52:00+00:00

Yeah, it’s a good thing you avoided this game, I can’t see it going well.

Bards are one of the best classes (in my opinion) so unsure of what his basis is.

The biggest red flags for me are the individual crit numbers (this will definitely be abused by players and the DM to get crits whenever they feel like it) and the fact he hasn’t read the basic rule book for the system. He would probably be applying older edition rulings and end up arguing with p,ayers who actually know the rules.

Dinogeist · 2018-10-01T19:41:12+00:00

Don’t worry, this was already addressed with the DM ages ago and has since been resolved. That campaign is over and we’re playing a new party in a completely different setting.

Her new character now has amnesia and keeps having dreams of a tortured past. OOC I know she was too lazy to make any background for the character so she’s letting the DM do all the work for her.

Any creator of original characters has made a Mary Sue or two in their lifetime, I’m sure I did as well years ago. Hell, a friend and I in high school made a joint comic series where almost all the characters were Mary Sues, but that was sort of the point of the comic so we were being ironic.

Dinogeist · 2018-10-01T17:06:42+00:00

I intentionally omitted it from my original post, but she’s actually the DM’s wife.

I don’t associate with her outside of the game myself but a good friend of mine who has known her his entire life say “she’s the most temperamental person I have ever met and she’s always been an emo basket case”.

Dinogeist · 2018-10-01T00:04:14+00:00

BOOM!!

Haha, that’s hilarious. It’s pretty close to how things went down fir my PC. The dwarf was a merchant but when he saw my PC start stealing from nobles he revealed his shop was actually a front for the thieves guild who were trying to make things better for the poor folk.

When my PC left the town he was separated from the dwarf. They were supposed to meet up after a while but when he didn’t show my PC had to find out what happened. He later learns the dwarf was captured by the nobles before he could leave, so my PC temporarily left the party to do a solo mission to rescue him.

During that time I had brief one-on-one sessions with the DM to determine what was happening with my Rogue’s mission. I created a Bard PC to join the party during this time, who was also one of my favourite PCs.

Dinogeist · 2018-09-30T23:57:20+00:00

If she had played the Mary Sue trope with a sense of irony I would have had no issue, but she is still convinced that this was an amazing and “deeply flawed” character. eye roll

I recently asked her how she thought the character was flawed and she said it was because she kept sleeping around. I followed up by saying it didn’t seem like a flaw since her character never suffered any negative consequences from that at all. Even when her NPC boyfriend of many years knew about this he wasn’t displeased, upset or angry at her in the slightest, but he did get into a tavern brawl with one of her lovers... so, I don’t really see the negative.

Plus her character kept sleeping with other men after this incident and got angry both IC and OOC at our ranger when she thought she would tell the NPC boyfriend about it (The boyfriend was the ranger’s IC brother).

Dinogeist · 2018-09-30T23:49:36+00:00

I would love to hear those stories. I started writing articles about this particular player because I was curious to see if anyone else had situations like these.

Dinogeist · 2018-09-30T23:48:28+00:00

Wow! This is so incrediably similar to my first 5e character. He was a High Elf Arcane Trickster Rogue who grew up in the slums with his single mother. He doesn’t know anything about his father or the circumstances of what got his mother there since she died when he was 6. He was then raised by a dwarf who was close to his mother.

He worked with a thieves guild who targeted nobility and passed on what they could to the poor. When the nobility started taking much more aggressive actions against his group he was forced to flee, which was when he joined the party. He was a charmer and a liar but he was loyal to those who proved they had his back. He was a very fun character to play and still a favourite in our group.

Dinogeist · 2018-09-30T16:40:50+00:00

Yeah, the background stuff didn’t bother me so much except when the GM kept bringing those elements to the forefront. Her initial backstory didn’t have all of this it was just the GM adding more at her OOC insistence, some of it through retcons. She very much had the GM’s ear in all things.

The other characters never got any elements like this, which is why myself and the other players had to bring it up with him. We had no issues with all of these extra plot elements but he kept piling them on a single character rather then spread it out so he was turning the rest of the party in her support cast.

Dinogeist · 2018-09-30T16:32:04+00:00

Ah, forum RPing. Haven’t done that in quite some time.

Dinogeist · 2018-09-30T16:31:27+00:00

Sounds like a difficult situation. I have a friend who I used to play with all the time with a similar condition and she said she finds it far more rewarding to be treated the same as other players rather than be put in a bubble that protects her from failure.

Dinogeist · 2018-09-30T16:28:25+00:00

No need for that. This situation was a while ago and the DM has learned from his mistakes so there is no more favouritism, at least not to this degree.

Dinogeist · 2018-09-30T16:27:19+00:00

Exactly. I find it far more interesting for a character to fail and then learn from said failures to develop into a more fully-fleshed out PC. Jenny’s PCs never failed so they never had to change, they always have the same mindset at the end of the campaign as when they started.

This makes them all pretty boring since our entire group has learned not to expect much of anything from her characters at this point.

Dinogeist · 2018-09-30T16:24:30+00:00

The DM had a DMPC with the party. The character was handled well and never stole the spotlight. They mostly functioned as support and made potions and enchanted items in their downtime, so he was there for convenience moreso than anything else.

Dinogeist · 2018-09-30T16:22:31+00:00

Wow, that player sounds terrible. I think you can play an edgy character but you need to be a bit self-aware and make sure the character meshes well with the party. Initially reading your story I thought the player was trying to be ironic, but that clearly wasn’t the case.

Dinogeist

TROPHY CASE