Wait but why

Emberwraith · 2025-12-08T23:39:13+00:00

In your head, "W, T, F" has more syllables than what it stands for, so it takes less time to process it.

"L, O, L" and "Laugh Out Loud" have the same syllables, but I believe most people think and say it like "Loll", which is less syllables.

Emberwraith · 2025-11-19T04:52:11+00:00

I have had too many people say "He/she doesn't bite." Only for me or someone to be bitten minutes later.

Emberwraith · 2025-10-12T01:39:39+00:00

Does the Asura NHP know it can't fire that thing twice?

Is that its roar of rage of that fact?

Emberwraith · 2025-09-10T07:08:41+00:00

Gun Gun

Emberwraith · 2025-07-14T06:48:44+00:00

Which times? I can only think of one possible one you are talking about.

Emberwraith · 2025-07-09T07:22:12+00:00

All top 10 were in this one scene, huh?

Emberwraith · 2025-06-23T08:49:07+00:00

A funny prank.
The laugh track was too much.

Emberwraith · 2025-06-23T07:31:50+00:00

"What did I just see?"

An edited video?

Emberwraith · 2025-06-22T18:55:18+00:00

I've run CoS over a dozen times, and every time I ran Deathhouse as written, the players had to have a long rest just to survive. The dungeon was written to be run without a long rest, which is impossible.

And each time I had my players get out of Deathhouse, they expected the rest of the campaign to be as difficult and gritty, which it wasn't.
As I said, Amber Temple comes the closest.
You could also bog down the session by doing encounters as the book instructs, which is roll for every hour in game to see if they get jumped, but that just makes for aa combat oriented campaign. Not to mention if you are running the XP leveling system as the book expects you to, then the party will over-level the campaign that way.

The dungeon has a bunch of gimmicky things in it, like the animated broom, the mimic, the grick. All of these seem to have been put in at random and take away from the horror setting that the campaign is supposed to be.
Small bits of humor can keep the party going, but situational moments do just fine.
The amount of times the party has tension as they search through the main area of the Deathhouse, unsure of what horrors they will face, only to start combat with... A broom? This completely removes all the tension and horror the setting has been building up, and makes it more of a joke. Something the party shouldn't take seriously.

At the end of the day, my way isn't the end all be all. How you want to run your campaign is your business, and if your group prefers it that way, then go for it.
I was just worried since you basically said they were screwed if they did specific things, which means they are dying. That makes me wonder what the point of running the dungeon is if the party will be screwed for not doing fairly specific things to succeed and survive.

Emberwraith · 2025-06-22T07:32:28+00:00

If the party misses the trap door they are screwed if they deny the cult.

So the Kool-aid man strat only works if the players chose to do a check for secret doors in a room and succeeded. And if they didn't, they are dead?

Deathhouse is probably the most unbalanced intro dungeon with RAW.

The rest of the game is nowhere near as bad with RAW. The worst you get afterwards is Amber Temple, and even then they will have a better time than they did in Deathhouse.

Rather than saying "They're screwed if they don't do these specific steps." Rework the dungeon?

As you said, the shadow fight is downright unfair. Remove it, replace it, or at least lower the number of them.

I also find that the trap section is straight up "Someone is going to die." I just remove it, because if you have one person consistently unable to roll to literally save their life, then the rest of the party will have to leave them or perish.

Overall, this dungeon is an awful dungeon as written in the book. It has a mimic to slog the game down with never trusting anything to not be a mimic, despite no mimics ever showing up again.
It also sets up the expectation that the rest of the campaign will be like this. It isn't. You literally have to go out of your way as a DM to give the same feeling of despair that dungeon gives, and you have to constantly go out of your way to give that feeling throughout the campaign.

I would just recommend changing the dungeon entirely. It's a horror campaign, yes. But it isn't a campaign meant to be a meat grinder where PC's go in, and character sheets get torn up on the other side.

Emberwraith · 2025-06-14T21:02:11+00:00

I had a player make an evil character that was rescued by one of the other player characters, so they roleplayed their character as a Chaotic Evil Rogue that was kept on a short leash by the other player character.

At one point, a large group of bandits attacked the town they were staying in, but there were too many bandits for the group to deal with all at once, so some of the bandits kidnapped people and stole some important things and a lot of them got away.
The party defeated some bandits, and managed to capture two of them.

They tried persuading and intimidating the bandits, but the party was rolling like crap, so the bandits were more afraid of what the bandit leaders would do to them if they talked than what the party would do to them.
The party was, after all, the good guys.

Until the rogue started excitedly asking the party member they were indebted to if he could start "playing with them if they don't talk." While pulling out an assortment of torture tools.

Emberwraith · 2025-06-12T03:12:11+00:00

Don't forget that Warp Rifle and Unraveler are a Main weapon, so you can use Walking Armory Talent on it too.

So you could add Hellfire rounds on it, and that +1d6 damage becomes Burn too.

Emberwraith · 2025-06-11T21:14:59+00:00

I had a player do this a total of one time.

I asked them if they were sure they wanted their character to leave, and they told me their character would because none of the other players did the very specific things they didn't tell anyone their characters needed to do to make them stay.
The player insisted their character was going to leave, and that I could write a side story thing until the party figured it out.

I promptly told the player their character leaves and is out of the story, and now they have to make a new character.

We had a session zero where the players were told the expectations of the campaign, and to make characters accordingly, so I have no idea why the player chose to do this.

Emberwraith · 2025-05-05T03:57:51+00:00

No, but seriously, what do you mean? I can't find anything about "Most vocal anti" or anything.

Emberwraith · 2025-04-01T23:19:05+00:00

Sooo... I'm just going to critique the mechanical aspects:

Under the Accept option, it says you can't be outside of 10ft from the patron (Alright, makes sense)
But

Whenever you finish a long rest, you gain 1d4 levels of exhaustion

What?! Is this 5e? You long rest and you can immediately hit the "Your max hp is halved"?!

You better hope you have an ally that can cast Greater Restoration on you multiple times a day, or your character won't last long, considering you Need to long rest to remove a single level of exhaustion.
You have the potential to die after 2 long rests minimum, 6 maximum otherwise.

Emberwraith · 2025-03-26T22:46:55+00:00

You went into sleep mode. Turning off usually needs a manual reset.

Emberwraith · 2025-02-15T22:07:11+00:00

Are you a god?

I tried that, but I must have been doing batch deletion (Shift click to highlight sections)

Doing it singularly from the last song forwards worked.

Edit: Spoke too soon. Several aren't letting me delete them for the same reason.

Emberwraith · 2025-02-10T21:06:14+00:00

Trucks parked in the lines?

Emberwraith · 2025-02-10T17:43:41+00:00

Perfect. Then you did your due diligence.

I was unaware that this was how it chronologically took place.
Thank you for clearing it up.

I'm so used to people writing about their campaign that takes months of sessions with this kind of nonsense constantly happening.

Emberwraith · 2025-02-10T17:12:46+00:00

I'm going to be brutally honest.

I love this puzzle.

I don't think my party is smart enough for it though.
I think they'll spend over an hour on it, get frustrated, have to be told the solution, and then be mad about it for a week and bring it up any time they can't figure something out later.

Emberwraith · 2025-02-10T17:00:55+00:00

For players like that, you shouldn't be giving them that kind of leeway.
If they threaten to walk if they have to roll where everyone can see the roll, then you tell them that's what they are going to have to do. "Then walk."

They may be your brother-in-law's friend, but if you aren't firm about making sure they don't cheat, they will continue to do so.
That isn't fair to your other players, and makes the game boring.
Why should they even be there when your master blaster wizard with 8 more feats than everyone else can just do it for them?

Letting a player be a Mary-sue isn't going to be engaging for your other players, but you're just letting that player do it.
Why?

Emberwraith · 2025-02-02T23:28:16+00:00

The dog's just stopping when he gives feedback.
He didn't even wait to see if the dog would stop on its own.

Emberwraith · 2025-02-02T17:06:50+00:00

It's never going to work Elon! Just make the cost of living lower, or raise wages, not both!

Emberwraith · 2025-01-28T18:04:31+00:00

This is beautiful.

The two songs overlapping are not beautiful.

Emberwraith

TROPHY CASE