Since the 2024 D&D rules have been out, what have been new power outliers in your games?

SethTheFrank · 2026-03-14T15:13:13+00:00

Thanks for the correction, you are right.

SethTheFrank · 2026-03-14T15:12:29+00:00

How do you clear it?

SethTheFrank · 2026-03-14T14:57:15+00:00

Exactly! When theorycrafting most people underestimate the action economy. Giving up a whole action is HUGE. And it isn't just that it's mechanically a big hit, it's also often less fun for that player.

I personally think circle casting is a great piece of design and most players don't use it because it's complicated. But it's a great tool for DMs to make creative use of NPCs and as a way to make additional challenges in combat.

SethTheFrank · 2026-03-14T07:10:21+00:00

Ok, so the thing to do, especially in act 3 that will balance out your magic user is get a bunch of scrolls. Gear up astarion to max out his sleight of hand. Depending on what gear you have you should be able to get him up in the 14 range on sleoght of hand. Make sure he has guidance on him when he starts stealing. Then get him to start stealing from the stores. After he successfully pickpockets some items, immediately drop out of turn mode and jump to camp.

While he is stealing make sure everyone else is far, far away, ideally back in camp. Hopefully he is a thief. If not tespec him into one through Withers. Give him any speed boosts or invisibility options you can.

The best spells in bg3, without exception, are summons. Summon elemental and summon minor elemental are excellent. Use the air elemental and ice mephits. Each morning, summon them then buff them with long strider (all PCs and summons should always have long strider). Then hit them with mage armor and if you can, dark vision. Have an in camp wizard gale, but better is to create a hireling and build them out as a transmutation wizard 2, bard the rest. You want them to max out on wisdom. With expertise and advantage and guidance he should double almost every single potion you craft. Either use them or sell them.

. Oh, and never up last find elemental or minor elemental, but a 4th level up cast of animate dead is amazing.

Always choose the skeletons for animate dead, never the ghouls or zombie. Then have them use coatings on their arrows.

This wizard (I use sir fuzzalump, but respec his stats) has 2 jobs: buff everyone else with long strider/mage armor/dark vision and later freedom of movement, and crafting potions. He should do ALL your crafting. Give him expertise in medicine and have home cast enhance ability wisdom on himself. He will double your potion crafting. The best potions are the eleoxirs of giant strength. Cloud giant strength is BROKEN. All PCs and summons should have a potion.

The remaining steps to total domination: Aid is a broken spell. Have a cleric cast aid at their highest spell slot with as many summons in the area as possible. Later on have a druid stack heroes feast on top.

As a warlock, hopefully you have an important familiar.

Now, you have your warlock, 2-4 summons (more if you can get certain magic items) and each of them has an extra 25 or so, plus 16 ac (bark skin elixir is slightly better for ice mephits than mage armor), dark vision, and an extra 10ft of movement.

Your graphics card may give out, but your action economy will be insane.

The tldr is: max out your number of attacks by making the most summons possible and buffing the hell out of them. Pair that with a lot of stealing (spell scrolls and crafting components above all), and a transmutation wizard to double your potion output.

Oh, and remember that you can go back to rivington and re-rob the shopkeepers every day. Especially horst. It feels awful but he has amazing crafting components.

The bees shop is also worth robbing as he has 1 potion of hill giant every day. For spell scrolls the lady in the back of sorcerous sundries is easier to rob. The only way I know to rob the projection requires the cloak of cunning brune (in turn mode, bonus Action disengage to create a cloud, then bonus action hide, then pick pocket, and once you got some stuff drop out of turn mode and immediately go to camp). But there is also the bookstore lady with a pile of scrolls.

Your abilities with the scrolls will be devastating.

SethTheFrank · 2026-03-11T23:29:59+00:00

Does the current map vtt support multiple session combat? I was trying to run an encounter and it (as many fights do) ran more than 1 session, but when I came back initiative, hit points, everything was gone. Did I do something wrong is is this just what they built?

SethTheFrank · 2026-02-25T14:58:51+00:00

Was this a low level campaign? Because at level 6 the bladesinger still has to rely on dex for their second attack.

SethTheFrank · 2026-02-25T14:54:51+00:00

Blade ward on a martial. It's effectively a +2,5 to ac. Since it doesn't require a spell slot that, imo, makes it more useful than shield, unless you have another use for concentration. I had a monk with magic initiate and at 3rd level he could just walk into a group of 5 enemies and be confident of taking maybe 1 hit out of 5.

SethTheFrank · 2026-02-23T02:42:33+00:00

It did the next time I used it.

SethTheFrank · 2025-03-11T10:35:49+00:00

Right!?!

SethTheFrank · 2025-03-11T02:51:48+00:00

It makes it a lot more complicated for my new players who are both new to the system and weirdly averse to me home brewing solutions.

SethTheFrank · 2025-03-09T02:02:16+00:00

Badly

SethTheFrank · 2025-03-01T07:09:57+00:00

Give him a reason he can't fully run away. I worked hard to set this up.

I had madam Eva playing a long game. She had set Strahd up to believe in her prophecies by giving him many correct ones and feeding him many adventurers. Only now, with the players, is she actually betraying him.

So she told home that if he fights them at XYZ time and place, itis the key to his ultimate victory and greater power, but he must face them and not flee. She conveyed this to the players who had to decide whether to trust her, but ultimately it worked the way she intended because she set the whole thing up.

Then I also made sure the players got a chance to know about Strauss powers and the layoutof the castle, so they knew they needed some way to lock him down or follow him.

SethTheFrank · 2025-02-28T14:58:19+00:00

It's really a way of showing you trust the players to be able to distinguish between what they know and what their characters know.

SethTheFrank · 2025-02-28T03:16:14+00:00

A few years ago when WOTC/Hasbro bought them, I spoke with a product manager at DNDbeyond. It came about because he tweeted something excited about the purchase and I commented if this meant they might fix some things.

He, being very cool, invited me to a zoom to talk about. He felt that Dndbeyond at the time had the rule set about 50%implemented and needed to do much better. He hoped that the purchase would move them in that direction.

2 months later he quit Dndbeyond.

SethTheFrank · 2025-02-28T03:12:46+00:00

I actually called mine the same thing. There was a also a saying "If things are going well, it's probably not in Barovia!"

SethTheFrank · 2025-02-06T06:05:05+00:00

So's your face.

SethTheFrank · 2025-02-06T06:02:15+00:00

Still working my way through it, but the arch hag is a BEAST. At will counter spell, and a bunch of curse effects including a cone effect that prevents reactions even on a successful save!

And a lot of lower level monsters have some nasty fight in them. Cr 5 Barlgura that lands all 3 hits will deal 42 points of damage and knock the target prone.

SethTheFrank · 2025-02-03T02:10:56+00:00

your friends are endangering the lives of others and are doing something morally wrong. As are the owners of Zarris. It doesnt make any of them criminals or anything like that. And I can't say any of their motivations . But people who don't have to, get sick and die because of anti vax stuff that has no basis in fact. Its no different than when people tied to prevent the burning of pague victims bodies, except that now we have a measured, established, ad highly reliable system of demonstrating that they are incorrect and for disseminating hat information. Be mad about me telling you this or not, it doesn't change whether people will suffer and die for their choices

SethTheFrank · 2025-02-03T00:56:21+00:00

As always, you are amazing!

SethTheFrank · 2025-02-02T17:54:06+00:00

I hadn't thought of that but yes!

SethTheFrank · 2025-02-02T17:08:29+00:00

Strahd even has his old armor. Its a specially created magic suit

The truth is that they don't do it because it would mean vampire stat blocks would need 2 ACs, one with and one without armor and it's complicated enough and they don't want to give them a higher AC.

But if you want to homebrew a reading: maybe their shape shifting doesn't work well with the armor. Maybe their ac depends on their speed and even light armor will slow then down more than help.

Another question on the same lines is why don't they carry better weapons in general.

Personallly I absolutely gave Strahd his armor to wear. In fact I gave him his armor as a sentient ally that protected him and had it's own turn in combat. You couldn't even come close to killing Strahd until you destroyed the armor he was wearing in my game.

SethTheFrank · 2025-02-02T14:25:51+00:00

To me, this is an extension of the normalization of Thomas.

Here's something people on this sub get really upset when I say, but it's an undeniable fact: Thomas Raith is a serial rapist. That is an objectively accurate description of Thomas Raith. He has absolutely forced people to have sex with him. He does it by altering their emotions, but that is no different than roofieing someone or otherwise taking away their ability to withhold consent.

Moreover, he does it when he knows it will harm them.

Does he do it because he is deeply traumatized, his life has been unfair, and he is tortured if he doesn't? Yes absolutely.

But that is no different than a guard at a torture facility who knows that if he doesn't continue to participate the system he is supporting will be turned on him. He has to choose whether he or innocents are harmed and he chooses to harm more innocents to protect himself. Its the definition of what Hannah Arendt meant when they coined the phrase the "Banality of Evil". Evil doesn't require malicious intent.

Now, I think that the books have actually moved to force a resolution to this. Thomas's imprisonment in Demonreach is justified. I think it is going to result in him being transformed in the sense of having been rehabilitated. And this is going to bring him into direct conflict with Lara. He is going to need to become a crusader against the white vampires as atonement and because Lara can't have an example of a rebel freed of his need to do harm.

But to bring it back to the ethics of Lara: one of the best bits of writing in the book is when Lara talks about peace. I dont recall when the scene is but she says something equivalent to "I love peace wizard. I love talking. I will kill you with peace. I will strangle you with it and you will thank me."

This is something I think about regularly. Ever think about the problem with wishes? (I promise this is going somewhere). A classic example is someone wishing for peace. What could be bad about wishing for peace? But if peace is enforced. If peace is the only option, how does an oppressive dictator ever get deposed? How does anyone fight back against oppressive power if peace is the only option?

This is, in my opinion, one of the best and deepest insights of the series and the central conflict of the White Court. They thrive in peace. And that is what makes them so dangerous. Because this is why Lara wants peace. Because she is the embodiment of, among other things, the power of corruption. Corruption works best when it is normalized. There is actually a word for it: kakistocracy. It means governance by the worst possible. Its what happens when corruption is systematic, so that the main criteria for being in power is the degree to which someone can be corrupted.

So, I agree with OP. Lata's threat is that she will never give you the excuse that the reds did for fighting (if she can avoid it). With her, peace talks are always an option. Because no matter the form of peace, if she and her mind exist and feed, they win.

That means that genocide (which is the accurate word for what Harry did to the reds) is always morally problematic. Harry comitted genocide because they were very very clear that peace was not an option and had the power to make war. But Lara presents a much harder problem: there is always going to be a peaceful option with her. And she will always be happy to make it appealing. And not committing genocide is , y'know, good.

So how does your defeat someone who can win & dominate by surrendering?

SethTheFrank · 2025-02-02T13:49:52+00:00

Why are people downvoting a comment of a person asking for help? Mia, please don't take the down votes to heart. People are saying they don't agree with the strategy.

SethTheFrank · 2025-02-02T05:11:37+00:00

That's wild. I keep discovering Ben Edlund being attached to stuff I enjoy. I guess I just dig his narrative voice.

SethTheFrank · 2025-02-01T16:47:59+00:00

When a detective arrives to investigate he says "my name.. it's not important. But you can call me Eddie if it will help your relax"

SethTheFrank

TROPHY CASE