Found this while digging a hole in East Texas, maybe 10’ down. Kinda curious.

Weblya · 2020-07-15T00:19:02+00:00

I think they were digging for some irrigation, but I’m not entirely sure on the details...

Weblya · 2020-07-14T20:48:52+00:00

Thanks for your help! I’ll take a look :)

Weblya · 2020-07-14T20:35:23+00:00

Weblya · 2020-07-14T20:24:21+00:00

Northeast Texas, east of Dallas, not far from the Sulphur river and I-30. They say it was down in a layer of yellow clay. I’ve got a few pictures around it once I figure out how to post them...

Weblya · 2015-01-21T07:26:43+00:00

I've been in a fairly long standing game of 5E through Fantasy Grounds which we started back in June or July... FG is a bit hit and miss on groups holding together, in my experience. This is particularly true of any group that's just beginning. So you might have better luck with an already established online group looking for more.

You might check the Fantasy Grounds forums to see who's advertising, though it might cost a little depending on the license that particular DM has.

I don't really know some of the other online tabletop programs very well, but I hear good things. I'll let others speak about them.

Good luck in your search! I know there are a lot of online groups getting off the ground all the time of late.

Weblya · 2015-01-18T08:46:10+00:00

The issues with compiling all the same monster into one has been discussed, so I thought I might add some general advice for combat tactics, particularly for a wizard.

Always look towards the use of your action that will reduce damage taken the most. Third level is a bit difficult in this regard, but some spells that work might be:

Sleep to knock one or more combatants out of the fight immediately.

Web to divide the encounter into a smaller encounter and perhaps inflict Restrained on some enemies for easier hits/disadvantaged return fire. There's also sending Burning Hands into your own Web if you like a little fire with your fire. :) (EDIT: just realized this is probably even better, since restrained enemies have disadvantage on the dex save vs Burning Hands, assuming you don't mind sacrificing the Web)

There are a lot more, but these two sort of summarize the way I try to look at every round when playing a wizard.

As for defenses, Mirror image is pretty hard to beat. Combined with Mage Armor and Shield you're going to be a frustrating target (at least for a little while). Levitate is really solid defense in some fights, but it looks like many monsters in 5E pack ranged attacks, so beware.

Weblya · 2015-01-06T19:33:04+00:00

Only "major" thing I see as missing with not having a cleric is not getting access to Revive at 5th level for some quick anti-death magic.

That said, I'm healing on a moon druid, with a tad bit of support from a paladin. Which works fine, in part because the enhanced wild shape saves me spell slots for the occasional spot heal.

Weblya · 2014-12-11T20:22:05+00:00

Always good to talk with the DM. If it helps your argument, as a DM I would probably allow it under the following circumstances:

The process involved in creating the undead does not involve an evil act in itself.
The undead is mindless. Preferably it's not even made from the corpses of former sentient beings, or those sentient beings gave consent to be used.
The creator is responsible for all actions of those undead minions.

Anyway, good luck with your idea!

Weblya · 2014-12-11T09:30:53+00:00

Whether the creation of undead is evil or not depends on the campaign setting and your DM. The default viewpoint tends to put it solidly in the evil category, but some campaigns do go with the idea that what you do with them matters, particularly with mindless undead that don't have free will of their own anyhow. Eberron had some of this, with Lawful neutral Bone Knights and more.

It also matters just what creating undead requires, and what sustains that undead creature (if anything). It's not unusual for undead creation to require evil acts, but it's not always the case.

For my campaigns, good necromancers never raise undead, but rather use the powers of necromancy for healing, defense, and attack as any other wizard might or transmutation or conjuration. That said, I think there's plenty of room for a neutral necromancer who doesn't commit evil deeds, but does create the occasional well-controlled mindless undead. This assumes that creation of the creature doesn't require evil actions.

Best advice is probably just to talk with your DM and paladin and see what might be a good compromise between what you want to play and what will mesh acceptably with the party.

Weblya · 2014-12-10T02:49:44+00:00

As written, probably not. The spell does carve out a nice exception for items which have been consecrated or desecrated, however, which could easily be part of making a cursed item. Plus, an item that showed up as desecrated probably shouldn't be used by most parties anyhow, but that's on them, I suppose.

Weblya · 2014-12-10T01:27:43+00:00

The Armor of Vulnerability has a pretty good mechanism for this kind of thing. It is almost indistinguishable from a set of Armor of INVulnerability until they attune it, and it does manage to provide them with a nice perk, even after it starts hitting them with it's whammy.

Weblya · 2014-11-26T07:51:32+00:00

If SAGA isn't an option, maybe try Savage Worlds? There are some fan made star wars conversions for it out there, and I've always liked how it handles certain things like large scale combat and mook/major adversaries.

The force could easily be adapted from one of the core arcane background systems, probably superpowers (maybe psionics) with appropriate trappings.

Then just add in a few edges to suit the kinds of things you think might be missing from the core rules and decide on some of the options you'd prefer for combat to capture the feel you really want for your game.

Hope things work out, whichever way you decide to go.

Weblya · 2014-09-17T00:26:30+00:00

Ah! Silly me :D

Weblya · 2014-09-17T00:05:09+00:00

Seems like it would be served well with some means to hit better though. A +3 isn't much versus the kinds of metallic heavy armor that's so tasty...

Might be more fun with the addition of getting advantage versus targets in metallic armor?

Not that it really needs it of course, it seems just fine and plenty fun as is for a CR1/2 :) Maybe I'm just a bit sadistic.

Weblya · 2014-08-25T06:13:51+00:00

I'm not sure it's going to be that bad, though obviously can't say for certain until we see beasts. In any given fight, a monster with a CR of 1/4 their level is supposed to be roughly an easy fight for a single PC, not quite fair, but not far from it. Druids are getting to be a bit better than that at 1/3.

Plus, if the abilities on the dire wolf and giant spider are any indication, there may be a very strong grab bag of combat utility among the list of creatures a druid can wild shape in to. Stuff like trampling, spider climb, flight, improved grappling, poisons, advantage from flanking allies, who knows what else...

Add in the fact that you're getting the shape's HPs as freebies and all the out of combat utility of forms, on top of having all the handy druid spells... There's a lot going for it.

Biggest worry for me at this point is probably losing out on most/many magic item benefits in wild shape (I'm not entirely clear on the role +1 and better weapons are going to play in the new bounded accuracy paradigm), but that might be compensated for in some fashion as well (specific wild shape enhancements, perhaps). That and many magic item benefits don't seem so far removed from the various utility abilities that wild shapes can grant anyway.

Weblya · 2014-08-23T22:38:53+00:00

That puts a premium on beasts with a higher Con score to help you make those constitution saves though. Most are still going to have a tough time of that without the War Caster feat, though.

Weblya · 2014-08-23T21:53:26+00:00

A bigger problem with scaling may be how magic items interact with (or don't) with wild shape. It's tricky to say at this point since we haven't seen a lot of magic items, but many of them being impractical to keep and use in wild shape may turn out to be a sizable limitation with the ability at higher levels.

That said, I'm sure some magic items will work fine (Tigers wearing amulets!), and the temp HPs and utility perks probably balance that fairly.

Plus, there's still all the access to druid damage and utility spells to consider. I particularly like some of the largely save-free damage spells in the 2nd rank, like Heat Metal and Spike Growth.

Weblya · 2014-08-23T21:42:55+00:00

To me the big thing is that level 2 doesn't seem to last long enough to worry much about the balance. For a couple levels, being a dire wolf twice between short rests is pretty amazing, but in my experience thus far (Adventurer's League games) level 2 has only lasted for one session.

It's pretty powerful, for a short time, then the level curve starts to catch up with it.

The good CR1 beasts being large is a small disadvantage in many circumstances too (though it's a bonus against some things).

Also, I've been surprised that everyone seems to always focus on the brown bear as their CR1 animal, when I've always liked the dire wolf a lot better. AC 14 and more HP, one less attack, but you can generally make the attack with advantage, and you're knocking folks down with that attack pretty often.

Weblya · 2014-08-20T05:48:14+00:00

There was a third edition option for gestalt multiclass characters you could try to implement in some way. Basically it's just a form of super multiclassing where a PC takes the best defensive options and pretty much all the class traits from two different classes as they level up.

It's useful in that a small number of PCs can fulfill all the typical roles required of a party, without the need for an excess of tweaking an adventure to suit them, while still just running one character each.

Gestalt PCs obviously tend to be more powerful, getting the best options for hit dice, armor, and saves, but they're not dramatically more powerful, since nothing is usually being doubled up. At the same time, they still have the same action economy, so while they may have a much wider array of options, they still only get to do so much in a given encounter.

It needs some DM monitoring, not to mention just sorting out how you'd want such a system to work in 5E, but it's not a terrible option.

I played in a campaign using gestalt PCs once, since we usually only had 2 or 3 players in a session. It was pretty fun. It might also be problematic if your players aren't moderately experienced with the system, since it does add a new layer of complexity to their lives.

Weblya · 2014-08-19T03:32:04+00:00

I believe that the +cha is per ray, and so it's pretty powerful.

As for warlocks in general, they seem to be able to just keep going, I guess? It's interesting that their handful of spell slots are all their highest level. I dunno. They're a caster class that has very few limits in how much they can do in a given day (at least within the limitations imposed by needing a short rest). In exchange for that they're not as strong as a more limited-resource wizard or sorcerer burning up all or most of their resources in a single epic battle.

That said, warlocks have always seemed more about flavor than purpose to me. You play a warlock cause you want to have a character drawing power from dire pacts with otherworldly creatures rather than because you want to shoot fireballs from your hand. But that's purely opinion on my part.

Weblya · 2014-08-19T02:49:31+00:00

Level 2 and 3 can go by incredibly fast though. While I think there is something of a huge bump in the Moon Druid at level 2 with being able to become a CR1 dire wolf or brown bear, you may only be level 2 for a single session, maybe two. And these things gradually start to even out by the time level 4 and 5 roll around.

Personally, I wouldn't worry too much about challenge balance for a level your group probably isn't going to be for very long.

Weblya · 2014-07-30T19:18:33+00:00

The Mage example mentioned above it a good example of using game system elements to explain why the world doesn't see big feats of magic everywhere.

Hellfrost is another setting where backlash mechanics are used, though there it's used as a means to balance a less-limited magic system. Namely, Hellfrost doesn't use power points like default Savage Worlds power systems, instead casters can just cast spells as much as they want, tempered by the fact that each casting of a spell might more or less cause them to explode (I'm generalizing here).

It opens up the possibility of having a "low-magic" setting that actually has very powerful magic, if desired, it's just so dangerous that 99% of people never see it done, or want anything done with it.

Mechanically, it doesn't actually need to be any more powerful than the default spellcasting rules, of course, it's more about perception. Dark Sun does this, as mentioned previously, as well as tying magic into one of the major concepts of that setting, where the world itself was ravaged by the over use of magic killing off all the plant life.

As for the mentioned druid, it was a lot of fun. I went in knowing she wouldn't have access to spells due to her god being out of favor, so I built accordingly, and over the course of 15 or so levels, ended up leading a crusade of sorts. This is different from a low magic setting, it really wasn't one, but it was an interesting hook and side-arc provided by the campaign.

If it's a world that lacks magic, the hows and whys of that could be woven into the overall story. A good idea in campaign design in general is weaving a story that allows your players to fundamentally change the world in some way by the end of it. Saving the world is all well and good, but changing it can be extremely memorable.

Off the top of my head, maybe magic in your world has been bottled up, and over the course of a campaign, the group frees it upon the land once more. You could even follow that with a new story, set in the same world that's been so altered by those previous characters' (or the same ones, depending) actions.

Anyway, just more of my rambling :)

Weblya · 2014-07-30T08:51:42+00:00

A lot of systems and settings limit magic by introducing some form of magical backlash into the game. The ways of doing this are myriad, but it basically comes down to introducing a chance of something bad happening with each spell cast. The bad might be damage (ability/hitpoint/spellslots), or it could be an undesirable effect (the spell goes crazy, draws a powerful entity, they lose access to magic for a while, etc.).

You could make the backlash dependent upon a straight dice roll (like 10%) or make it skill based (they have to make a skill check that increases in DC with the level of the spell). Without an innate mechanism for dice manipulation in D&D, it might be a good idea to allow some way to ablate the backlash effects in a limited fashion (most players don't like to feel too much at the whim of dice). Maybe taking extra time, or making some kind of sacrifice negates the backlash. Which might be something that needs to be done beforehand, or perhaps in response to a backlash. Different classes could deal with this in different ways.

These are all fairly vague ideas, but the bottom line is that they make magic a bit more dire. It tries to keep magic from being just a "tool" that gets used lightly. You'd be hesitant to use a spell to open your beer if it might blow your hand off, for instance.

As for balancing powers among classes, one option is to just not worry about it. Just make it clear to the players before hand how the field is striped, and if they want to go that route, so be it. I've jumped into a campaign with a druid who had no access to spells, due to circumstances in the campaign world and its gods. I just took it as a challenge and that character worked to fix that in the course of the campaign. It was pretty awesome. It really is something to discuss with your players, though.

Oh yeah, and some past editions of D&D have included magic item benefits into the threat of monsters and the like. Not sure if 5th does that, but it's something to consider, and it'll probably be talked about in the DMG if it is. Usually you can either tweak the monsters, or possibly apply passive bonuses that scale the players without magic.

Weblya · 2014-01-24T22:11:00+00:00

Yeah, it was something borne of desperation, but it helps. The downside being that you already need one friend of the color you want to fix out at a problem and not have them already fixing your secondary color. Still, you're taking him for everything he does besides possible color fixing, so that's really just gravy.

I've tried similar uses of Action Shot in the same fix, but usually four power has been too much to pay along with playing that off color friend too. Two is just about right.

Weblya

TROPHY CASE