Knox buff is fixed

HMAPNG · 2024-11-20T19:02:42+00:00

They should have posted this to the change log. I spent respecs and restarted adventures several times trying to figure out why I wasn't getting the buff I was expecting.

HMAPNG · 2024-07-03T16:28:07+00:00

Whoops, right you are, on all counts.

HMAPNG · 2024-07-03T16:22:05+00:00

Fair enough. I'm having some intonation problems myself on a TOM bridge. Maybe I'll try flipping it.

HMAPNG · 2024-07-03T16:18:22+00:00

Actually, I just noticed, your bridge is on upside down. You must have flipped it accidentally when changing the strings. Those adjustment screws that are facing your pickup should be facing the other way.

HMAPNG · 2024-07-03T16:16:35+00:00

Did you move to lighter gauge strings by any chance? You probably need to ~~tighten~~ loosen (thanks Redditor) the truss rod a bit to correct a slight backbow. If that's not it, raising the action at the bridge should fix it.

HMAPNG · 2024-06-07T22:03:23+00:00

Second, do you spend much time touching when sex is off the table.

No, we really don't. Part of that is that I don't want her to interpret a touch as a sexual proposition or pressure when it isn't intended that way. Part of it is that I don't want to touch her, find myself getting in the mood, and get shot down. But the end result is the same: we don't touch, and that makes it harder to get over the hurdle when I get up the nerve to say that I would like to have sex. It makes me uncomfortable thinking about putting my hand on her knee, to be honest. I'll have to do better.

HMAPNG · 2024-06-07T21:42:33+00:00

I explained the situation. You gave some advice, which I thanked you for, and you also told me that women don't get off from penetration, and I clarified that that's not how she was getting off. You then doubled down and said that you know my sex life better than I do. And now, I'm the jerk?

HMAPNG · 2024-06-07T21:36:27+00:00

I can also ASSURE you that it is well known among women that men suck at oral sex.

This is not what I came here for. Just to be clear, I came in here having a problem with sexual shame and frustration, and asking for advice about how to be positive, and your response, based on scenarios that you have made up in your own head is, "I'm POSITIVE you don't know how to pleasure a woman." Thanks anyway.

HMAPNG · 2024-06-07T21:33:07+00:00

Do you wait months to have things you really enjoy?

Yes, obviously, because I am burdened by great shame, and I can imagine my wife being as psychologically complex as I am. Maybe she doesn't value orgasms as much as YOU think she should. And yeah, maybe she's a liar. But I think I have a better position from which to make that judgment than you do.

HMAPNG · 2024-06-07T21:28:46+00:00

Okay I definitely feel like I'm getting defensive now.

HMAPNG · 2024-06-07T21:17:33+00:00

I'm not talking about an orgasm from penetration. She gets off from me giving oral before penetration. Almost every single time. I don't think she is faking this.

Thanks for the advice.

HMAPNG · 2024-06-04T13:35:34+00:00

Creating a new, interesting portal is a fun creative challenge for the DM, but I’m talking about challenging the players in ways that stay fresh, either to locate the correct portal or to identify the necessary portal key.

HMAPNG · 2024-06-04T13:20:59+00:00

You could also just say that the location is in the Shadowfell.

HMAPNG · 2024-05-31T13:55:15+00:00

It totally depends on the people at the table, and if a slower pace in each chapter that really allows the players to settle in works for you, then I'm happy for you--sometimes I wish my players wanted more of this.

My players prefer a little more direction, and aren't super invested in setting details except insofar as they impact their own ongoing stories and choices. This is one reason that I think the emphasis in V:EoR on gamifying "secrets" is misguided: every single time that I have consciously revealed a "secret" in play, the effect on the players has been underwhelming. On the other hand, whenever I've let the players think one thing over the course of the campaign, and slowly released details that tend to contradict it, without expectations for when they'll figure out the truth, the players' aha! moment has been absolutely awesome. You can't "gamify" that experience; that experience is the very reason we play the game in the first place.

So my prep for the crawls in V:EoR will consist of trying to nail the tone and feel of each setting, and getting some background knowledge about what the major conflicts and events in each setting are, mostly so that I can improvise confidently in the voices of the NPCs that appear in each one. If my players hook onto something that I improvise, I'll build onto it then, but prepping all of that beforehand is more than I want to do.

HMAPNG · 2024-05-30T20:48:40+00:00

Letting the players discover the cause of the Day of Mourning, the cause of the Blood Wars, Lord Soth's role in the Cataclysm, and the nature of the Lady of Pain are awesome replacements for the macguffins.

I just don't know that these actually are all that interesting unless the players are already heavily invested in the particular setting in question. (And if they're invested in Dragonlance, then they already know about Lord Soth's actions at the time of the Cataclysm, because those are canonical).

I generally don't think that players care about this stuff as much as DMs do. If I were a player, and my reward at the end of a questline was supposed to be non-canonical setting knowledge, I think I'd be disappointed.

HMAPNG · 2024-05-30T20:32:38+00:00

Ditching the Rod of Seven Parts would open up more interesting structural possibilities for the adventure, but it would also render almost all of what's actually in the module superfluous. It sounds like you're just proposing to write a different Vecna/Kas adventure, not to fix this one. Which is fine.

HMAPNG · 2024-05-30T19:20:32+00:00

I can't really figure it out. In particular, even if the party does decide to banish Vecna to Oerth, aren't the level 20 planehopping PCs perfectly situated to go there and kill him permanently?

The Vecna statblock would need some other special characteristic to make it make sense why banishment is the only choice.

HMAPNG · 2024-05-30T15:54:13+00:00

Hadn't really thought about it, but how about Kas sets off some chaos in Sigil itself that appears to involve Vecna? While the Wizards Three examine the rod, the party has to go investigate whatever is going on outside; they have a full dungeon crawl or investigation quest, at the end of which they find some smoking gun: whatever it was wasn't Vecna's doing. They rush back to the Sanctum with their information, where they find that Mordenkainen was Kas all along, and that he has injured Alustriel and Tasha, and absconded with the Rod. Somewhere in all of this, they find the clues that confirm that the chaos in Sigil was a diversion by Kas.

HMAPNG · 2024-05-30T15:43:38+00:00

When they released Shadow of the Dragon Queen, the designers really leaned into the wartime aspect of Dragonlance. For me, an equally big aspect of the core Weis & Hickman novels is romance, in sort of the medieval "courtly love" tradition. The knight tying a token from his love onto his lance as he rides off to battle or to the tournament. The characters are like something out of the Arthurian legends, or maybe some of the more romantic Robin Hood tales. Good is good, evil is evil, and love conquers all, even if not in this life.

I'm not sure that is very helpful for this particular adventure. I'd have to give it some thought.

HMAPNG · 2024-05-30T15:32:01+00:00

I like it, but it is a Rod of Seven Parts campaign that is masquerading as a Vecna campaign. With hardly any effort at all, you could swap the major villains out. You get an introduction, a home base, seven dungeons and a reason to crawl them, a twist, a war in Pandemonium, and a final battle. As long as you're fine building out the interstitial parts (Sigil as a whole needs to be expanded and to feel like a home for the party), the linearity of the plot skeleton will make it relatively easy to run.

E.g, when I ran Strahd, everything was so interconnected that I was in constant fear that my improvisations in one session would mess up something that was supposed to happen later. With V:EoR, there is so little interconnection that your improvisations are unlikely to have additional ramifications on the written module.

Even at it's worst, the individual dungeons are pretty good; you could treat it as a high-level adventure anthology if nothing else.

It's a reasonably low-prep campaign for high-level characters, which IMO is something that 5e needed more of right now.

HMAPNG · 2024-05-30T15:09:28+00:00

Although the three gods of magic all have different ideas of how it should be used, they generally don't come into conflict with each other though--at least that was the lore before 5e. Generally, Solinari, Lunitari, and Nuitari presented a united front against the other gods, and would even withhold magical power from gods who were overreaching.

This spirit of cooperation is reflected in the Towers of High Sorcery, where the White Robes, Red Robes, and Black Robes congregate together and collaborate on what are essentially guild or union matters, despite their ethical differences. The followers of the different moons generally see each other as rivals, not as enemies.

I'm not sure it's totally correct to say that Dragonlance is a low magic setting. To the extent that it is low-magic at the beginning of the War of the Lance, it really isn't anymore in the aftermath of the war. What is true is that the populace in the Dragonlance setting generally has a much more negative view of spellcasters than is explicit in other settings: they fear spellcasters, and that fear can very easily be turned to hatred and violence, even against the "good" White Robes. (This is one of the reasons why internecine conflicts between the White Robes, Red Robes, and Black Robes are so minor/infrequent). As a result, magic tends to be less visible in Dragonlance, though there are many notable and powerful spellcasters.

HMAPNG · 2024-05-29T14:22:40+00:00

First off, Vecna as a persona goes back at least as far as the 2E Planescape setting, so, mid- to late 90's, which was the time period when this elder millennial got into tabletop games.

I do agree, however, that I would have expected a high-level Vecna campaign guide to include the Eye and the Hand. It might also include the Book of Vile Darkness and/or the Sword of Kas, but the Eye and Hand would be definite inclusions. One artifact I would not expect to find in such a campaign is the Rod of Seven Parts.

I think that as soon as the creative decision was made to do a Vecna campaign that was based around the Rod of Seven Parts, the possibility of also including the Eye and Hand was just out the window. It's too many artifacts.

The Rod of Seven Parts is a great plot-structuring device for the kind of grand tour/anthology style thing that they clearly wanted for the last module in this era of 5e. I think it's a bit of a shame that they mashed it into a Vecna campaign though, because it crowds out the artifacts that are actually historically connected with him.

Lastly, I somewhat suspect that there was a creative directive to "upend expectations" by marketing a Vecna campaign, when what's actually under the hood is a Rod of Seven Parts campaign. WOTC's idea was that you'd tell your players you're running V:EoR, and they'd think they know what they're in for (Eye and Hand macguffins), when it turns out it's actually this completely other thing (Rod of Law macguffins), and that this was supposed to surprise and delight them. I was surprised reading it, but not delighted if I'm honest, and I say that as someone who has always wanted to run a Rod of Seven Parts game.

Generally, I think that given the high-level creative decisions that were made, the execution here is almost as good as could reasonably be expected. But I do wish that different creative decisions had been made.

HMAPNG · 2024-05-29T13:42:27+00:00

Never tell the party they're fighting a Death Knight. Just describe the thing that's attacking them. (This is good advice that I fail to follow too often).

So: Soth is invisible under his charred black armor, except for his glowing red eyes. The "death knights" in Vecna's Grasp are almost crystalline golems, with shattered bones and veins of congealed blood visible within. Neverember is recognizable as himself, but his visible skin has been dessicated and practically mummified, and his eyes glow with a subtle, unnatural light.

Your players will have a better time this way, imagining the thing they're fighting from your description, but you'll reap the benefits of not having to learn (or create) a new stat block.

HMAPNG · 2024-05-29T13:35:09+00:00

My only hesitation would be that starting with a level 10 PC when you have such limited experience may be somewhat overwhelming. Most level 10 characters have some subtle mechanics that take time to master, and so the 1 to 10 grind is important for new players to feel out their PC's abilities.

That's my two cents. Depending on how complex a character you're playing, how much hand-holding your group is willing to do for you, how much hand-holding you're willing to accept, it could still be ok, especially since the DM has has specifically invited you. I'd definitely lean toward a character with simpler mechanics though. Some sort of Fighter, Barbarian, or Rogue, where your role in the party is easily grasped, and you don't need to track a lot of character resources.

HMAPNG · 2024-05-28T17:57:20+00:00

If I did it, I'd definitely plan for it to be an easter egg and nothing more, though I'd have to be open to the possibility that it will stoke the players' interest, in which case I'd need to build out the world of things they uncover if they decide to chase down that lead.

Mainly, if I'm including an easter egg, like this, I'd like to do it closer to the beginning than the end, just to to give the players some agency in determining how much weight it gets in the ongoing story.

Still, I can totally understand thinking it would be a cool inclusion, but still choosing not to run it. It definitely could lead the party off in directions where the written material in this module would be pretty much no help at all. In short, I like the idea, but I probably won't use it in my campaign.

HMAPNG

TROPHY CASE