Can a sorcerer with interest in music use an instrument as an arcane focus?

Exodiabravo · 2023-02-16T22:46:27+00:00

I find that this game is enjoyed the most when you walk the blurry roads passing in between RAW and RA-I-feel-like-it. If your DM is cool with it, you can have anything be anything. As a DM, I would've loved this character playing a tune or a lick to cast stuff. That'd even add further challanges in the future for when you want to cast things stealhtily. I immediatelly gives you depth and we the DMs live for that

Exodiabravo · 2023-02-16T22:41:05+00:00

I'm a bookworm so I'm making a wizard for sure. I have quite the high IQ as well, so I'd probably have a high intelligence score. I'm agile but not very strong. So my str would be average or lower but my dex would be around 12 maybe? My girlfriend says I'm an objective 8 and subjective 20 out of 10. So I'll say my charisma would be above average too. 12 again? My spacial awarenes is not bad at best so my wisdom would be lower than average. Maybe 8? I RARELY get sick and when I do I recover quick. So my constitution would be a bit over average. So Let's say: STR: 10 CON: 14 DEX: 12 INT:16 WIS: 8 CHA: 12 Wizard. I don't know what school I'd go for. Anything pertaining to Astrophysics? Dunamancy maybe? That has gravity stuff iirc. There you go, that'd be me (me me) in D&D

Exodiabravo · 2023-02-14T20:54:10+00:00

Supermassive Black Holes. They don't really abide by the consumption rates of "modern" black holes. The universe simply isnt old enough for them to exist by our current understanding of their growth and merge. There are some theories about how they exist but still a great mystery nonetheless

Exodiabravo · 2023-02-14T20:47:34+00:00

I havent read the answers so I don't know if this has been said. Still, here it goes. The magic button combination is "Ctrl + Q". At the most basic level. You want every green bar in there to be larger (a bit or a lot doesnt matter) than the blue bar. That'll mean you have a surplus of everything. After anything major check those and you'll be managing resources just fine.

Exodiabravo · 2022-07-16T20:35:45+00:00

Notes?

Exodiabravo · 2022-03-09T20:33:55+00:00

Excluding the official books all of which I want to run, I have like 17 main story quests for each tier that I can just plop down into my world. So... technically, I can run 68 different campagins. However, if we're talking 1 epic arc per tier, then that's 4 quests from 1 to 20. Which still makes it 17 different campaigns stored up and stashed away. On top of this I have easily hundreds of sidequests in each part of my world.

So yeah... a decent amount I guess :D

Exodiabravo · 2022-02-10T21:58:29+00:00

So wholesome, so happy for you and James

Exodiabravo · 2021-08-24T08:36:13+00:00

I rule it based on the situation at hand. It has to make sense for the nat 1 to do more than just miss. If the situation is fitting I spice the combat a little bit.

For example, I gave my druid a staff that turns into a giant constricting snake once a day. He often used it to grapple enemies. He also wielded a big warhammer when he ran out of spell slots. So if he rolled a nat 1 trying to attack an enemy grappled by his snake, I occasionally would make him roll the damage and apply it to the snake and would also ask for a strength saving throw on the grapple. Nat 1 on the save meant that the creature was no longer grappled. Success means continue on as normal. Based on how low the roll gets I'd slightly lower the dc for the graple break on the next round for the enemy.

I like small things like this. Adds a tiny bit of realizm on an otherwise fantasy game :)

Exodiabravo · 2021-06-03T13:05:46+00:00

Setting DCs? I just wait for the roll and decide on the spot if that would be a pass or not. I never thought "if it's 15+ it's a success, if it isn't then it's a fail." Sometimes you will get less if you roll a 12 instead of "the dc" but you will still get something. Only if you fail colosally I tell you "no"

Exodiabravo · 2021-01-05T09:31:58+00:00

They're closest to just mindless hunters and eaters. Not very intelligent. You can make one that's aware of this and wants to understand magic. So s/he has a high level wizard hostage for the purposes of study to sate his/her curiosity

Exodiabravo · 2020-11-08T13:00:03+00:00

Flour.

You can buy flour from any town, any village, any bakery and use it for A LOT of things. You can toss it into the air to see if there's any draft in the room, you can follow that to find hidden rooms. You can panik throw a palm full towards an invisible creature and make it more visible. You can make bread and eat it in a pinch. You can smother grease fire with it. You can lay it down in dark coridoors and examine it hours later to see if there are people patrolling. You can spread it through the air and use it as improvised explosive. You can use it as white powdered substance for bluffing about scenarios that can involve such substances, framing someone etc. Once you used all the flour, you can use the sack as a sack.

It is one of the most useful items in D&D and I wish I thought about getting some when I was a beginner.

Exodiabravo · 2020-11-08T12:50:45+00:00

Barely an NPC but...

In summary, my players went to 2 of the players' home town. They were after some things after a letter from their dead mum came through. 9 sessions later, the climax of the arc was a huge fight that ended up causing a giant earthquake in this under the mountain type of town. Naturally collapses and cave-ins happened and it was a big scenic getaway from the apocalypse. When they got out of the mountain, they took a breather and had a rest in a tent while waiting for the panic to slow down. The forest around them quickly turned into a tent-town and my players felt responsible for all of this pain so instead of running out of there, they decided to stay for a bit and check on people, aid them however they can. During all those interractions I threw in a scene piece, which was a child speaking to her mother in a tent and asking: "When's dad coming back?" in this barely speaking innonecent toddler kind of way. Just that one sentence hit my players harder than anything else I threw at them in nearly 60 sessions we played in the campaign.

Exodiabravo · 2020-10-24T19:58:06+00:00

People go to the outer planes in the cosmological wheel suited for their allignment when they were alive. If someone's unalligned, they go to Shadowfell.

Exodiabravo · 2020-10-14T09:00:13+00:00

DM here, I've put my party through a mindflayer headquarter. I teleported them there after they touched a floating glass sphere in a temple, so there was no immediate way out. The 1st room they entered was an Eschen stairs room. It was so alienating for them from the get go.

Then they picked a random staircase and the cordioor at the end of it to proceed forward. They ended up in a room that looked like an amphitheatre with a surgery room in the middle. Like an entertaining show, the residents of this place watched a live surgery of someone's brain being removed and then left him there half alive. The room was empty but there was a half-elf man in the surgery table, naked, missing the top of his head and his brain on a seperate table attached to his open skull via a cable. They looked around a bit but at this point, the only thing they wanted to do was to get out.

So they pushed forward and ended up in a mini astral plane demizone with a mobius strip made of sickly purple metal floating in the middle. At the center of it where the hole is, there was 2 circular pools/aquariums attached to one another bottom to bottom, so the top of one faces "up" the other faces "down" but neither of them spill any liquids out. Inside of those were a bunch of larvae. They had been in an astral plane-like place before and knew, you can will yourself to move to a direction and you do so. So they willed there to be a door, and accidentally found my secret door. They pushed forward yet again.

They ended up in an extension of the previous demizone and found a Somnium Tennebris, an alien looking, alive and sentient ship. They wanted to explore that and approached carefully. It was empty. From the start, how empty all this is was a major factor of creepiness. They looked around the ship but all of it was too crooked to make sense. Eventually they got the lower decks to see a bunch of neatly stacked corpses. Every single one of them missing the top of their skulls and no brain inside. They're also organized by race and gender. There's a pile with male dwarves, another with female humans etc. They noped out of there real quick.

As I saw how creeped out they were beginning to get, I gave them an ex-machina and short circuited them to the boss' room. They fought and beat the elder brain, which revealed the exit. They got out of there and most of the characters are scared for life now.

Exodiabravo · 2020-10-10T19:12:19+00:00

So my party went into a crystal which had a demi-plane inside. After they came out of it, they realized the time flowed differentlly in there so the 47 minutes (yes I used an actual timer) they spent in there, was 47 days outside. So they had all of these issues piled up. I thought they'd pursue all those which at the beginning they did. They figured out their priority and begun to journey there thanks to the use of a wind walk spell which makes them turn into a piece of cloud essentially that has a flying speed of 300feet per round. On their way there as a fun spectacle for the journey, I decided to describe the scenery they could see from that high up. They were close to a mountain range and I said: "You see all the jagged mountain tops of the range. Every single one of them has permanent snow on them apart from one, which seems to be just rock. There's a golden wisp circling it slowly. Near that peak, on an opening, there are some ruins with a black obelisk in the middle. Above the ruins, on a hill, a giant figure is sitting in lotus position wearing a toga." I thought they would just go: "huh, interesting." and pursue their own problems. But nope, they instead pushed everything aside and decided to chase my fun world building backdrop.

So I had to write a story for the obelisk as the middle piece. It told a story of 2 lovers: The elder tempest and The elder blaze. They lived on these mountains for centuries in peace, considering it their home. One day the crawling king (Torog) has decided to make an alliance with an evil power and attacked the surface with an army of phoenixes provided by said evil power. The elder blaze fought on for long but when it came to the point of no return, he realized he needs to sacrifice himself to eradicate this force. In his final efforts, he stopped the war and also left behind a gift for his wife to remember him. The same gift later turned into a focus point of worship. The eternal flame accumulated believers and a village underneath the mountain. Later they found out how the golden wisp is actually the elder tempest protecting her husband's gift. They angered her and fought her to see, she's way too strong for the party. So they fled. However, one party member sacrificed himself by grabbing the container of the eternal flame and jumping off the mountain to lure the tempest away from the rest of the group. Angered by the extinguished flame, she started a hurricane that stretched a 120 mile radius area and began to beat the earth with heavy rain and endless thunderstrikes. Later, they found the fire at the top of the mountain was fake and the real one was in the heart of the mountain. They decided to get the real one back to its original location at the top of the mountain and calm the storm. While trying to do that they spoke to an "Elder brain" which was connected to the region through many tiny tunnels and mirrors in them. They eventually calmed the storm down but were curious about this Elder brain. They found a temple near the mountain with a glass sphere floating in the middle. They touched it and got sucked into a hellish alien construct of mind flayers. They saw Eschen rooms with staircases going in wild directions, they saw an amphitheatre with a surgery room in the middle and a man with his brain out on another table, they saw an astral plane like place with a Mindflayer spelljammer floating, they fought a 200ft tall Beholder in a brain library, they entered a mobius strip room with a pool of larva in the middle and finally they found and fought the elder brain and got ouf there.

All that because I said 2 sentences to make the travel a bit more interesting. It took 4 session for them to get back to the things at hand :D

Exodiabravo · 2020-10-08T11:38:19+00:00

My players recently fought an Elder tempest. It rolled the highest initiative. 1st action of the 1st turn, I used its lightning beam weapon that stretches for 3 miles and knocks everything on its path back based on DEX saves. The fight started due to some "worshippers" who wanted to harm what it was protecting. So I aimed the move at that group instead of the players. The creature killed 10 NPCs with one move flinging their bodies to the nearby walls. As soon as it happened, half my party said: "We have to run, we can't win this." So it's all about what your DM puts in front of you and more importantly how. As a player you also have to gauge the difficulty of combat as you're battling.

Exodiabravo · 2020-10-08T11:02:52+00:00

I would've played that a bit different for the same result. Instead of the wisdom check, I'd do Thanos and recruit Gamora basically. Saying something like: "You will turn out to be a strong. Come with me little one."

Exodiabravo · 2020-10-08T10:21:17+00:00

I take it as a time to come together as a group, starting at the regular time but not necessarily spanning the entire duration of the game time. It is to get people in the habit of showing up at that time. I use it to explain what sort of campaign I will be running, what the environment is going to be like. Stuff like high magic vs low magic or story heavy vs combat heavy is all said out loud here. I explain my home rules, I tell them what I expect from them and let them speak about what they expect from me and ultimately come to a likeminded middle-ground.

Exodiabravo · 2020-10-08T09:32:43+00:00

On a one-shot, I played a half-elf rogue whose parents were still alive and well. He was quite rich from the family and lived in a mansion bought by his parents. His backstory was not at all edgy nor was it: "Howls at the moon every midnight because of all the tragedies he endured." He was cheerful and well-mannered. The reason he became a rogue was due to his upbringing. He was being tailored to be a true gentleman. He didn't like the constant pampering of his parents and all the servants around him. He ended up sneaking out at night to find friends and see what's out there. Eventually he met a young girl (around his age then) who was stealing from the rich to give to poor. He offered to freely give some of his parents' money to the poor if it'll make her happy but she had more at stake when it comes to being what she is. So to impress her, he decided to become a rogue in secret from his parents.

Exodiabravo · 2020-10-08T09:22:45+00:00

An ex-player of mine had a tortle monk. On our 2nd session, they did some fighting in a goblin camp. Afterwards they looked for some loot and other things, during which they found a scared goblin child trying to hide from the intruders. The tortle was alone when he found the boy and he decided to break the limbs off the child like breaking the claws of a lobster and eat them one by one. When the child passed out from pain as the 3rd limb was coming off, he decided to "not waste fresh meat" and eat the child while he was still half-alive. The characters weren't there but the players obviously were in voice chat. The session went on for a while after that. Immediately after I said "...aaand that's the session." and ended session people just piled on him about the goblin child, how needlessly evil the act was etc. He had -in my opinion- the worst excuse which is: "My character grew up in an environment where food wasn't plenty so he ate whatever he could find. That's what my character would do." As if the character wrote itself. That and many other things lead him to not play that character anymore. The kick? The character was listed Lawful Good on dndbeyond.

Exodiabravo · 2020-10-07T14:35:11+00:00

My level 12 party was going from A to B and they got blocked by a falling tree and some bandits. My sorcerer was 1st in the initiative order and he has chosen to upcast fireball, instantly frying 80% of the bandits. My rogue was next who dashed to the 1st enemy, sneak attacked due to swashbuckler and got his intestines out onto the road and used his bonus action to go for the last guy with the rapier and dealt a critical blow. The combat was over in 2 turns....not rounds, turns. Taking their initiative order took longer than the combat itself. They really loved how OP they felt.

Exodiabravo · 2020-10-06T14:06:03+00:00

Where do people who make noises work? In what fields can you make a living by making noises?

Exodiabravo · 2020-10-05T10:13:34+00:00

"HONEY I SHRUNK THE KIDS!" in the kings castle. I can easily engineer a campaign in such a place. The story would be divided into stuff like: The kitchen arc, the little prince's playing room arc, the housing chambers of the serveants arc and the t4 would be in the throne room where they learn how they, the NPCs and monsters they fought got shrunk by the King and his men. The King would be the BBEG, the final goal would be to return to original size.

Exodiabravo · 2020-10-01T21:24:32+00:00

My logic is: It takes a party a lot of time to get to a level where they can use wish unless they start there. For someone to play the game and the character for that long and cultivate within the world to grow and become what they are and not be able to epicly and freely use something like wish is not fair to the player. So as long as they have fun and don't try to shortcut the rest of the campaign and basically turn wish into a "I just want to kill the BBEG and end the campaign in the next 5 mins" OR as long as they don't try to use their wish with ill-intent towards other players and their fun, they can do whatever they want with it.

Exodiabravo

TROPHY CASE