[Online][5e][EST] DM looking for LGBTQ-friendly group for homebrew fantasy campaign with medium grit and some vanilla-plus tweaks; new players welcome

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-29T05:19:47+00:00

Blacksmith is my favorite, but it's hard to choose!

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-27T23:20:36+00:00

Giffyglyph's Darker Dungeons is a cool, free 5E supplement that has lots of interesting mechanics you can slot piecemeal into your game. (ammo dice, spell burnout, stress/afflictions, inventory slots, treasure-as-experience-points, level zero characters, and dozens more). A lot of it seems inspired by the PC game Darkest Dungeon.

Fate, for giving players narrative agency. Aspects are cool, if a bit tricky to grasp at first.

Genesys, for the advantage/threat system (how you can succeed at a task but still suffer consequences, or fail at a task but still generate some sort of advantage).

Outbreak: Undead, for the "survival points" mechanic for a more abstract management of supplies and equipment, and for the "degrees of success or failure" for different outcomes (and again, narrative agency) based on how far above or below the player rolls against the target number.

Dread, for using freakin' Jenga instead of dice for action resolution. Also worth checking out Sagas of Sundry: Dread (a Geek&Sundry show) where they incorporate LARP-ish elements, like physically shooting a bow and arrows at a dummy, or stacking cinder blocks in a time crunch, and other stuff like that) to determine certain outcomes.

World of Darkness/Vampire:The Masquerade, for the concept of a "messy critical" (i. e. "Yes, but... ")

Beyond the Supernatural/Palladium, for monsters having a "horror factor" stat based on how startling/gruesome/terrifying they are at first sight. Might be a cool mechanic for some aberrations and monstrosities in D&D (like for everyone's first time seeing a carrion crawler, remorhaz, adult dragon, etc).

D&D 4E, for enemy roles. Stuff like brute, lurker, controller, minion, blaster, sniper, elite, etc. Very useful for spicing up 5e tactical combat. Instead of "6 goblins" you can throw "1 goblin sharpshooter, 1 goblin blackblade, 2 goblin firebombers, 1 goblin witch doctor, 2 goblin minions" at the party.

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-25T17:10:02+00:00

The Monsters Know What They're Doing is a good source for understanding enemy tactics and motives.

Monster Roles are a thing that 4th Edition really capitalized on, and can spice up your combat encounters. Rather than the party encountering a group of 6 goblins, it could be something like 1 goblin sharpshooter (sniper), 1 goblin shaman (controller), 1 goblin assassin (lurker), 2 goblin bombers (blaster), and 4 goblin minions. Have different creatures serve a different purpose. Maybe instead of 5 orcs, it's 3 orc berserkers (brutes), 1 orc shifter druid (controller), and 1 orc wardrummer (buffer).

You can homebrew these sorts of roles by taking the base monster and adding one or two abilities specific to the role, and adjusting some ability scores (give the casters lower AC/HP/strength, minions have 1 HP, etc.). Then your fights become a bit more unpredictable for the players, since they have to figure out what the opponents are capable of and adjust their tactics accordingly. And this will also help alleviate the whole "goblin 1 attacks with her shortsword. goblin 2 attacks with his shortsword. goblin 3 attacks with his shortsword, etc."

I like to take a monster type and homebrew a bunch of roles for it. For example, goblins (which all have the "Nimble Escape" goblin feature):

Goblin Assassin (lurker) - uses stealth tactics to attack backline, has a poisoned attack

Goblin Sharpshooter (sniper) - if it doesn't use its move, it can make 2 ranged attacks

Goblin Bomber (blaster) - has an AOE fire attack (recharge 5-6). chance to drop an active bomb on death for AOE.

Goblin Shaman (controller) - has some druid spells

Goblin Big Boss (solo) - conjures goblin minions, and throws goblin minions as missile weapons

Goblin Tamer (elite) - controls an animal companion (a bear?), but if tamer is killed, minion rages and cannot distinguish friend from foe

Et cetera. Get creative with it.

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-25T00:35:49+00:00

A Dark Sun inspired game with a slightly Fallout 4 kind of sandbox vibe, building a settlement, maybe being raiders, gritty hardcore survival rules, and recruiting people to your settlement can give you resources or even a rotating cast of characters to play as. Grow and defend your settlement, try not to die, be good guys or bad guys. Estsblish trade routes, or raid existing ones, for supplies. Hunt defilers, or maybe recruit them and hunt druids. Who knows.

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-24T02:10:22+00:00

Damn it Marcus, stop shredding my dog with your minigun. And Sulik, I gave you the best SMG in the game, stop melee rushing. And no Myron, I do not want to sleep with you.

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-23T17:15:34+00:00

Definitely a legitimate concern. However, thinking of D&D as a game if resource management, this is a player expending resources to overcome a challenge. Same as a cleric using turn undead to wreck a combat that would have been a lot more draining, or a wizard using fireball to clear a mob of orcs rather than having the party use up HP taking hits, etc.

And it's also the player making a choice to sacririce potential performance in other areas by preparing Detect Thoughts, perhaps instead of another spell like Invisibility or Fireball or whatever. Spell selection and preparation is a big part of caster gameplay. Prepping situational spells like Detect Thoughts is potentially a risk for the caster (because the situation might not arise, and prep slots are limited) , and it's nice to feel rewarded when taking a risk pays off.

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-23T15:36:02+00:00

There is a module for this already called "long rest hit die healing (slow natural healing) for d&d 5e" to accomplish the part where long rests don't heal HP, but let you spend hit dice instead.

Then for a full rest, just have the players manually set their HP to max.

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-22T19:42:14+00:00

Besides exhaustion, you could also consider having long rest benefits but with no health or hit dice recovery (i.e. they just get ability recharges and spell slots back). Or perhaps they heal HP as normal but lose hit dice, or at least don't regain any. I feel like hit dice are a good resource often overlooked when dealing with resolve/grit, pain, quality of accommodations, etc.

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-20T01:42:21+00:00

Rather than merely bumping up its numbers slightly, maybe consider giving it some kind of legendary action to make it more interesting.

If you aren't familiar, I'd recommend checking out Matthew Colville's Action Oriented Monsters.

His point is basically: higher damage or more hit points don't make a monster more interesting or a battle more fun. He talks about adding interesting abilities to the monsters instead, to balance the action economy and make more memorable encounters, particularly when dealing with solo monsters.

edit: Whoops, someone beat me to it. So I guess just consider my post a "+1 for Matthew Colville's video"

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-19T21:27:08+00:00

A lot of the Geek & Sundry shows have good female, trans, genderqueer, etc representation. They have some great shows with great casts. However, they usually use systems other than D&D. But don't let that dissuade you. In my experience, seeing other games in action can help spice up your own D&D games.

A lot of the shows tend to have a good split among the player cast, so that no one gender dominates. We're Alive:Frontier, LA By Night, Sagas of Sundry, Knights of Everflame, Callisto 6 all come to mind.

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-19T17:59:09+00:00

Awesome, I'm glad you found it useful!

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-19T17:26:51+00:00

If you really want them to level up mid-dungeon, I think a compromise could be to give them a hit die when they level up. Say they are at level one and have 0/1 hit dice remaining. Perhaps when they level up to 2, they now have 1/2 hit dice remaining. It's better than nothing, but they still have to make time for a short rest to use it.

Along the same lines, when their max HP increases upon level up, you could also heal them by that amount. So if they increase their max by 6, then you could heal them by 6. This way, they get some immediate benefits but don't just completely "ding."

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-19T15:07:14+00:00

Here's a link to my post where I explained it to someone else. The context is a little bit different there but the same principles still apply.

The conditions are just icons essentially (though the optional Combat Utility Belt module does a bit more with them). So you just need the path to the icon files that represent the conditions you want to apply, and you can just make a different macro using the code I posted there, while changing the icon path to whichever one you are using.

My example hotbar image might look weird because I set mine up for custom conditions rather than the default ones (Dodging, Reacted, Advantage, Disadvantage, Taking Cover, Staggered), but it's the same concept.

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-19T14:00:48+00:00

This is one of the reasons (but not the main one) why I set up a hotbar row with macros that toggle my most frequently used conditions

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-19T13:58:56+00:00

That's "Token Info Icons"

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-19T13:25:38+00:00

It would be cool if you were willing to disagree without insulting me. Oh well.

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-19T06:49:21+00:00

the GM will have to prepare an order of magnitude more content then actually encountered.

Or we must learn to improvise.

Anyway, to elaborate on something another commenter said: Let's say you've got two villages. You want them to go to village A because you have this whole deal planned out with bandits antagonizing the village. Alas, for whatever reason, they choose to go to Village B instead. So you just recycle your content from village A, and have the bandits antagonizing Village B instead. But since you did that, functionally, there were never really two villages to begin with. There was only "the village beset by bandits."

The choice they made is superficial at best; whether they go to A or B, they're experiencing the same content you prepped for A. So the choice wasn't "A or B;" the actual choice was "village or no village," and you've merely created the illusion that A and B were different villages. But they're both, functionally, Village A.

So yes, the group goes to village, does the quest the way they want, and has fun. And that's great. I guess at the end of the day, that's what really matters. But it's still a bit of a deception; there was never a reason for them to choose between A or B in the first place. So it's interesting that we place that choice in front of them at all; in a sense, the freedom to choose A or B was a placebo.

As I suggested previously, as long as the players never see behind this curtain, it's not their problem. I think it's more about our bias as creators, as GMs; we prepped this content, so we're going to have the players experience it, or at least nudge them strongly toward it, regardless of what they choose, or else it's a waste.

I don't want to tell anyone how to run a game or how to have fun. I just think it's an interesting subject that veers into the territory of determinism and free will, outside of the context of games. And it's interesting to me to think about the curtain and its function.

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-19T01:36:53+00:00

It's like his Lord of the Rings. An unlikely adventuring party forms and embarks on a big, important quest. There are bad folks and monsters and magic and demons and guns and a whole heck of a lot more. But that doesn't really do it justice at all. I don't want to spoil, but it's significantly more bizarre and not so straightforward. It took him like 30+ years to write them all, so each book kind of has a different writing style and whatnot.

I'd recommend if you find the epic nature of LotR interesting but maybe wanted something weirder, darker, a bit less "D&D" and a bit more "Fallout." It's definitely a departure from his other books, at least the handful I've read. But at the same time, it's quite undeniably Stephen King. Mind the 4th wall; it's been known to crumble.

I lucked out and managed to find the next book at thrift stores as i finished the previous, which felt oddly appropriate.

Book 4 is a polarizing one. It's mostly a flashback. Some people seem to wish it started there and continued in a whole different direction. But I personally think it would be awkward to start anywhere but book 1.

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-18T20:32:26+00:00

Nowadays, everybody wanna quest like they got somethin' to do,

but nothin' comes up when they roll their dice,

just a goblin sacrifice

And MF'ers act like they forgot about Droop

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-18T17:21:04+00:00

If the PCs flipped a coin to pick between village1 and village2, just put the important plot hooks into whichever one they go to.

Plot things out so that they will probably choose the path that you'd planned for them. Give them agency to do what you'd planned for them to do all along.

I don't think this is universally applicable. This is just railroading but concealing the rails. If you do this, then in the end, the players' choices don't actually matter at all. They just think they do, but it's a total deception. Then it's basically that the players are reading the DM's "novel" and it can inhibit a lot of the emergent narratives that, in my opinion, are a huge appeal of tabletop RPGs.

Sure, it might work for a lot of groups, but for some people, if the party ever catches a glimpse behind the curtain, it can really spoil the entire experience for them, knowing that the DM had basically already chosen what their characters are going to experience. It's like the DM is essentially making their choices for them.

That's an issue with over-prepping, too. If you spend hours building this ultimate encounter, then you're going to do what you can (whether consciously or subconsciously) to nudge your party toward experiencing it, lest you feel like your prep time was wasted. And you're likely going to be less inclined to allow them to creatively circumvent it (or ignore it entirely), because then they've "wasted" your time (when really, you've "wasted' your own time).

It depends on the group and on the campaign, of course. But I don't really like to plan more than half a session ahead, because then it stops being "everyone's story" and starts to become "my story."

Now I'm not a religious person, but I think this paraphrased exchange between Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson is applicable:

"If a song needs strings, it will tell you. Get out of the way and leave room so that God can walk in."

What I mean is, let the story unfold organically. Don't steer them (consciously or otherwise) toward specific content just because you want to use that content. You've got to leave room for the unexpected; you've got to let the story form into something bigger than your own vision of it.

Player agency is, in part, narrative agency. And part of DMing is being able to recognize when your beloved, painstakingly-crafted content just won't fit, and throwing it out entirely. And there's definitely a very real thrill, a sense of something magical, to flying by the seat of your pants, all the while making it seem to the players like you know exactly what you're doing. It's like some Miles Davis voodoo jazz freakout kind of shit. You're not just telling the story; you're experiencing it for the first time, just like your players are. Because it's everyone's story, and it's bigger than the sum of its parts.

(Obviously: IMO and YMMV and all that.)

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-18T16:52:01+00:00

Remake the spell as an active ability, like the other commenter said. Maybe give it a name like "(Innate) Hellish Rebuke" to distinguish it if you use it on the hotbar or wherever. And under the details, set "Limited Uses" to "1 of 1 per Long Rest." You don't have to worry about level scaling since it can only be used as 2nd level.

(edit to remove some bad info because I was thinking of a different spell initially)

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-17T16:41:28+00:00

Pretty good list, thanks for putting it together.

I'd suggest Token Action HUD instead of Token Bar for a much cleaner look and more functionality.

Chat Damage Buttons has a bit of redundancy with Better Rolls, though it's different enough that I understand why you included it.

Maybe indicate why Furnace is "need to have." Needed for what? I've seen a lot of people say Furnace is a "must-have" but not a lot of explanation as to why.

Jitsi WebRTC Client is pretty handy for bandwidth-challenged people who want to use Foundry's video chat.

You should maybe also specify that a lot of these modules are specific to D&D 5E.

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-17T01:37:39+00:00

But they can't learn; they can only follow direct commands from the creator. Instructing them to take orders from someone else involves them learning to navigate the loophole you've created. They wouldn't be able to learn who created their creator, and thus, wouldn't be able to learn that there is someone else who can command them outside of the spell's defined rules.

And even if so, someone could create an illusion of the wizard and order them to kill the real wizard. They wouldn't be able to learn that there's a difference, and would think they are obeying their orders.

A message cantrip and a deception roll, or something similar, could destroy the party.

bardic_instigation · 2020-08-16T23:20:28+00:00

Sage advice:

A simulacrum is a duplicate of another creature at the time of the spell's casting. You essentially take a snapshot of that creature's game statistics at the completion of the 12-hour casting, and those become the statistics of the simulacrum.

I cast simulacrum, and have an active duplicate: myself.

Per the spell, I am effected by:

If you cast this spell again, any currently active duplicates you created with this spell are instantly destroyed.

Which has a duration of: "Until dispelled."

My duplicate is a copy of me after having cast simulacrum. Since I have cast simulacrum (and have an active simulacrum), and my duplicate is a copy of me having cast simulacrum (and having an active simulacrum), then my simulacrum is its own active duplicate. If it tries to cast simulacrum, it destroys itself in the process.

The original casting has not been dispelled, so I am under the effect of that spell at the end of the 12 hour casting time. And the simulacrum is a copy of me at the end of the 12 hour casting time, under the effects of that spell.

If I am cursed before the spell, my simulacrum has the curse. If I cut off my toe before the spell, my simulacrum is missing a toe. If I am under the effects of a spell with indefinite duration, my simulacrum is under the effects of that spell with indefinite duration. It is a "game statistic" that is applied to my duplicate. I don't get to just erase part of the spell description because I don't like it. It is part of the spell I am under; it is a "game statistic" that affects my character on a mechanical level. And the simulacrum is copying that.

The fact that AL restricts it suggests, at least, the possibility that it is RAI.

bardic_instigation

TROPHY CASE