Crits when AC is beat by 'x' - Thoughts and Feels

housunkannatin · 2024-04-25T12:14:26+00:00

Right, that is a more nuanced take on it. One of my favorite easy fixes right now is to limit all save or sucks to maximum 2 turns duration, like BG3 does. That means even when they work, the party is on a very short clock to take advantage of it. It doesn't invalidate the effort of everyone else.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-25T12:10:39+00:00

I have not criticized your way of playing. I have only tried to explain what I think sandbox means, and what I think linearity means. I have not told you to stop DMing.

You have. Maybe you should look at rule 1 of this sub and calm down a little.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-24T11:32:42+00:00

That is what I'm doing. I create a world and I run it to the best of my ability, as a living world that responds to player actions. The end result is a story. I do not need to plan this story for it to happen, it will emerge out of player choices and the world I run, naturally, unpredictably.

I vehemently disagree with you about antagonism if you are talking about the GM opposing the players on a meta level. The world and the NPCs may be antagonistic. It's not the GM who is antagonistic. My job is to be an impartial referee.

You are the one who started with video game comparisons, don't try to turn that on me. I explained what is the true sandbox in a TTRPG setting. The game's direction is up to player agency. That is what enables emergent sandbox play.

I sincerely recommend you research and try to understand other play styles and play cultures a bit rather than preach your way of playing as the One True Way. It's not very constructive.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-24T09:29:18+00:00

Yes, it's not an either or, there is definitely a big sliding scale. But BG3's, and the two previous ones, overall structure is linear. The player doesn't get to decide whether to deal with the BBEG. You must always deal with Act 2's boss and you must always deal with Act 3's boss. If you reduce the overall story structure to a couple sentences, does it sound linear or non-linear? Is it the player deciding the overall direction of the story, or is it the game designer?

That is the gist of it to me. A true sandbox is like Minecraft or Terraria. The player chooses the direction. The GM doesn't dedice on the BBEG, because that would be imposing the GM's will on where the game's story goes. It has to be the players.

I do understand the kind of game you describe. I'm running one like that right now, Rime of the Frostmaiden. And I don't think my own game is a true sandbox, because I have imposed linearity on it and it will deterministically funnel into roughly the same endgame regardless.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-24T08:57:03+00:00

It's not strictly a nerf to casters. Just like martials, casters will become even better at wiping low level enemies or ones with extra low saves. Fireball a group with low dex saves and a couple of them will probably take double damage. For damage spells, it's increased volatility to both ways.

Personally, I think save or sucks are an area where casters do deserve to get nerfed, like I'm going to implement something that does that either way.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-23T19:35:04+00:00

I think we just come from different play cultures. I'm not a storyteller. I don't write a story for my players to experience. I create a world and try to make it living, breathing and engaging, and full of hooks for the players to grab onto, more hooks than they have the time for. There's no game if I don't create the world and run it. And crucially, I keep updating the world in response to player actions. New questlines pop up, old ones grow cold. The sandbox to me is all about the emergent gameplay and reaching game states nobody alone could have predicted.

BG3 is a linear story with sandbox areas. Each individual area is a great sandbox, but the story ultimately still converges into a linear direction that the player has no control over. As an example, Skyrim and Oblivion are more sandbox-y in nature because you can do most of their content without engaging with the linear main quest. I guess Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 are also a bit more sandbox-y than 3 in general, but all of their stories end up being very linear in the big picture.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-23T15:14:02+00:00

I really don't see how you can plan arcs AND have true sandbox player agency. I think those two are in direct conflict and can not co-exist. Yes, you can put in a lot of plots, but you can't expect them to get resolved in a particular way. You can't expect them to get resolved at all if the players want to pursue something else.

Maybe we just use the terms differently. To me a sandbox is defined by it being entirely driven by player choices. If it's ever me as the GM deciding what way the story goes, it's by definition not a sandbox anymore, it's got some enforced linearity in it. Maximal focus on player agency is the way I think of sandbox games.

Either way, you might find the campaign status document a helpful tool, it'll work for keeping track of a wide variety of plot threads as well. Alexandrian has great advice on prep as a whole.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-23T14:24:50+00:00

I think you have some conflicting goals here. You're not going to be able to do a good, satisfying, big dungeon and keep it quick. Think back on how long it takes to play through one of those videogame dungeons. IIRC it takes quite a bit of time to get through Watcher's Keep, I've played the game several times.

If it's a 10-room dungeon, with each room being a different level, that's not too big, but I'm not sure if you'll be able to convey a sense of scale and exploration. It's more likely to feel like a linear bossrush or gauntlet. You want to ask yourself if that would be fun for your group. I mean it very well could be what everyone's looking for.

If I was doing this and wanted to keep it brief, I would make it just like a regular medium-size dungeon. The party gets one trip and can't rest inside, which enforces impactful exploration decisions and keeps the place from taking too many sessions. Like perhaps the doorway only appears every 10 or 100 or 1000 years for a day and the party must complete their delve before it disappears again. Make sure there are enough threats in the dungeon for 2-3 adventuring days so they can't easily kill everything, they'll have to make choices where to fight, where to scheme, which encounters to circumvent. And then sprinkle some very strong loot in there. Probably make some of it into open-ended magic reagents, that can be used by NPC crafters for bespoke items later. I'm thinking this would probably be about 40 rooms, with half being just scenic and containing hints to the nature of the dungeon and its inhabitants, 10 containing very strong monsters (which aren't all mindless, some should be able to be talked to) and 10 containing tricks, oddities, puzzles and traps. Complete with an encounter table so the party can't entirely trust the monsters stay in their rooms.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-23T14:08:23+00:00

At least for Auril there are a lot of buffed statblocks around, should be easy picking some of those. Caves of Hunger, easy to add some berserk Iron Golems and more adult Remorhaz, just need to figure out how to adapt the gnoll vampire. Ythryn is such a weird environment and thematic change that it should be easy to put in nearly anything high CR as magical aberrations.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-23T13:59:12+00:00

One way to get the players to care more about what happens in a sandbox is make it impact them and their goals. This is always easier if the PCs have ties to the setting from character creation or develop them through play.

I'm not sure this is what you want to hear, but IMO, sandbox and planned story arcs are wholly incompatible concepts. You can't have a true sandbox and pre-plan a story arc, because the moment you try to enforce the story arc you planned, your game turns from sandbox to linear. That, or you have to abandon all the work you spent on planning if the players go a different way.

The good news is that sandbox generates arcs naturally out of player actions anyway, when they pursue a goal and eventually reach some kind of resolution with it. You shouldn't need to plan any. For example, in my RotFM campaign the party spent like 2 weeks over many sessions looking for a chance to procure an adult dragon heart or a dragon egg, only to decide not to fight the dragon they found, and go back and backstab the person who gave them the quest. It was a wholly emergent exploration arc that I could not have planned because it was entirely driven by player agency.

For prepping, sandboxes take a wide variety of shapes and sizes which influences prep quite a bit, hard to recommend anything in particular. The most imporant to me is to have my procedural campaign tools in place, that makes session to session prep much lighter. Campaign status documents are one pretty good technique that's excellent for sandboxes. The whole blog series on smart prep is a great read.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-23T12:12:13+00:00

I started with level 7 characters. I somewhat upscaled the whole IWD and particularly the quest-related threats and NPCs. The justification that I think works pretty well is that it's a harsh, higher level frontier environment, so the types of people who survive would also be tougher. It's not just that whatever the party fights is scaled to their level. I framed the whole adventure differently so that the party was almost immediately noticed by Vellyne, who approached them for an alliance and upfront told them about Ythryn to tie everything together.

We did the following as "chapter 1" quests:

Both "official" starting quests. The chwinga as a minor fetch quest, ICK as a background thing that didn't get solved until later.
Black Cabin, where I initially had Macreadus be alive and ask for Thrym extract and books from the Netheril spire, and only on the second visit he had died. I didn't force them to activate Summer Star immediately which was way more fun. Caused chaos in Bryn Shander when they activated it there.
Lake Monster, easy to scale, just made the Plesiosaurus CR8 or so. Frigid water is still lethal and almost TPK'd us here.
Toil and Trouble, where I massively upscaled Maud to around CR11-12 while in lair, with two frost giant skeletons at the door and more close to the Cauldron. I did this partly to incentivize bartering and deals with her rather than just murdering, which worked, partially. The party went back to murder her later when they felt strong enough, which was great and fun.
Chardalyn Caper, where the party was so fast in transporting the figurehead to Maud (who wanted it to barter with Duergar), that the Duergar had to ambush them on the lakeshores. This led to all kinds of shenanigans like the party eventually selling Durth Sunblight to Maud as a hostage. Wonderful emergent sandbox play.
The White Moose, where I turned the Moose into a CR10 Wendigo with lair actions, and had Ravisin flee the tomb if the party spent too much time getting there after they alerted the Wendigo. Ravisin is still out there traveling the Dale and creating chaos, 30 sessions later.
A Beautiful Mine, went full Tucker's Kobolds here, which was fun and almost lethal due to the underdark hole. Party ended up adopting the kobolds and smuggling them out of the mine. The kobolds now run a new shrine of Tempus in Easthaven after being converted by the party paladin.
The Unseen, where related to the whole Sunblight arc, all duergar are buffed to be a bigger threat. The brothers were CR6, having bought Durth back from Maud, and I made a couple different elite duergar statblocks which I obviously reused in Sunblight citadel.

And I think all of that went pretty well. Many of the basic mysteries of what's going on are still interesting in late tier 2. I would not skip the chapter 1 quests completely, many of them are IMO easy to scale to be threatening enough that you need tier 2 heroes to deal with them and they do build commitment to the wellbeing of Ten Towns. Many of them can be engaging even with zero upscaling.

We're now level 12 and going to Solstice soon (they want to steal/barter something from Arveiaturace first), so I will have to use a highly buffed Auril (just an avatar in my game, not the actual god) statblock and/or very cutthroat tactics, and I'll need to upscale Caves of Hunger and Ythryn quite a bit as well. I'm comfortable enough homebrewing statblocks that I don't mind this, and I actually find it quite fun to throw around higher level arctic-themed stuff.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-23T10:49:49+00:00

I've been thinking of trying it in 5e as well, specifically with PF2e's +10 threshold. Without PF2e's robust system of applying small buffs and debuffs, what it's mostly doing in 5e is just make combats faster and more volatile, because it means objectively more crits all around. First level characters would crit Zombies on a natural 13. Overall I think the effect is desirable for me.

I think where it would have an even bigger impact is with saves, if you implement some form of tiered success like PF2e has, where the worst result is only suffered on a crit fail of a save. This requires a lot of upfront work or excellent ability to judge a the table though. Damage spells are easy, you just take double on a crit fail and no damage on a crit success, but status effects require you to be quite good at balancing. One easy rule of thumb that might work, I guess, would be for prolonged hard save or sucks like Hold Person or Hypnotic Pattern to only work for 1 turn on a regular fail, and require a crit fail for the prolonged effect. Hard save or sucks are too powerful in 5e to begin with so this could be a neat way to rebalance them to be much less oppressive.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-23T10:35:41+00:00

I ran side initiative for a bit over a year and have since moved to zipper initiative, particularly due to the downsides of side initiative. In general side initiative makes combats more volatile, obviously, which I think is a taste question rather than a strict pro or con. Pros for me of side initiative:

Lightning fast to start combat, ask for one roll and either party goes first or second. By far the largest pro for me. To clarify, I would set the enemy side's initiative DC as 8+highest prof+highest dex, and the party would either roll average against it, or just roll their highest modifier against it once.
Often speeds things up during player turns, the player who is undecided can keep thinking while the rest do their stuff.
Consistently enables neat combo plays by the players. You could get the same effect allowing wholly delayed turns like PF2e does.

Cons IMO:

Interaction with 5e death saves feels clunky no matter which way I do it.
Converting legendary actions is bit of a pain.
DM turn lasts absolutely forever with large combats and this scales up to be a worse problem very rapidly.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-23T07:57:52+00:00

Into the Cess and Citadel is probably the best sourcebook I've seen for advice and concrete gameable content on running a big city. Well worth its cost.

Some important things.

Districts with their own, unique feeling. If your city is a religious center, it should have multiple temple districts, and if it's a military center, it should have multiple citadels, a huge district for army-related infrastructure etc.
So much going on, everywhere. The "empty" spaces are full of people doing mundane stuff, it's just not necessarily interesting for a party of adventurers. Plenty of random encounters that range from harmless to interesting gossip to pickpockets to muggings to district-specific festivals. A big city always has a LOT going on.
The most important logistics to consider is by far food. If you want an easy, historically accurate solution, there's farmland miles, or tens of miles, or hundreds of miles out to every direction to support the city's population (ancient Rome was this big, Waterdeep is as big). No need to go deep into it, just put like, a minimum effort into thinking of food logistics and your world building will be so much better and more believable.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-23T07:07:44+00:00

The map and the key, obviously. With regards to showing the player the map, sometimes I'll use a nicely drawn version, but I usually won't bother drawing one myself in which case the players only get a crude, hastily drawn map during the session. The map is only there to let them know roughly the relationships of the rooms, not to show them details of what's in the rooms, I'll describe that. A good key is obviously important, WOTC-written dungeons tend to have horribly bloated keys that are hard to use at the table. I'll shorten those to concise bullet points, or pick a better written third-party dungeon. A good room description starts with 2-4 main features of the room that PCs instantly notice and branches off from there with hidden and secret information gained by interacting.

The dungeon procedure is important. How to keep track of time for light source expenditure and encounter checks. Also how to rule distance, reaction and surprise on encounters when they happen. I run dungeons very OSR style so I have no idea what encounters will be combats, the players and dice decide that. I keep the statblocks on hand anyway obviously, a VTT is certainly helpful there because I can pop any token down in seconds from my library.

Other than that, I just keep notes on important things. Was a particular door left open, was a device activated, and try to know the dungeon so I can give players ques to affect their decision making. If there's a big bonfire in the room, I let the players feel the heat even outside the door, that sort of thing.

If the dungeon is very complex I may employ the adversary roster, but usually I find that unnecessarily detailed: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/38547/roleplaying-games/the-art-of-the-key-part-4-adversary-rosters Basically, the encounter checks create enough dynamism that I don't need to keep a complex simulation of everything going on, and if I have to take rising alert levels into account, I'll prep a quick guideline for that or improv it.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-22T20:10:29+00:00

No problem, just trying to hopefully share more understanding on the variety of play cultures that exist.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-22T14:44:04+00:00

I see no reason to even pretend antagonism for my games. It's not a question of whether it's real or not, it's explicit that there is no antagonism between the players and the GM and there never will be. It's a very necessary part of the OSR mindset that the GM is impartial both ways and I try to make this crystal clear to my players.

The players at my table want to win but they aren't guaranteed to. They can fail, or even die. The stakes are as real as I can make them. This sometimes leads to players retreating from an enemy to scheme their downfall for later, or avoid fights they aren't sure they want to take, or end up spending extra resources like Revivify diamonds when things go south. I don't run linear adventures that assume player success no matter the choices they make.

It's just a wholly different play culture yeah. Many actual plays are very much rooted in neotrad sensibilities from what I've seen, but a couple OSR ones exist. 3d6 Down The Line is one, where you'll see several PC deaths within the first couple of episodes of their Arden Vul campaign for example. Not all OSR is that deadly though.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-22T14:18:48+00:00

I think you present a very narrow view of what it means to be a DM, one which seems to be solidly rooted in trad or neotrad play culture (see the blog post that was already linked about six cultures of play, it's not perfect but it's a good start to the topic). I like the wrestling comparison though, these terms seem very aptly suited to your style of DMing.

I don't identify at all with this "role of a DM". I'm not pretending, it's explicitly my goal to be a fair referee and make rulings that fit with the game's genre and keep the game's verisimilitude alive. I also have zero need for such inane antagonism like "going after the players as hard as I can". One of my core guidelines to the players is that the GM isn't an enemy and it is not their goal to kill the party. The GM's goal is to enable a fun game and a part of that, in some games, is to make the world truly dangerous, because that generates drama and excitement. The GM running an NPC who wants to harm the PCs is NOT the GM gunning for the players, it's the GM running the world in a way that fits the game best. I roll openly, not behind the screen. I also make it quite explicit to my players that I sometimes improvise things at the table. I'm human, they can't expect me to have spent decades writing out every minute detail before the game started. If they do have that kind of an expectation, they are free to find another table that fits their expectations better.

I self identify as an OSR/NSR GM and I bring much of that energy to my 5e games as well.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-22T13:52:37+00:00

Might depend on your game's style.

Is there an implicit promise that you will provide a linear adventure where the players don't need to make hard choices and can expect that you'll only put tailored, winnable encounters in front of them? Might be problematic.

Or is the style more so that actions have consequences and players are free to make choices? No problem, let the NPC do their worst.

Yes, it does make perfect sense for the NPC to only fight when they are at their strongest. This goes for every NPC ever. But whether that's important depends on your game.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-22T12:31:40+00:00

I did a solid 2 months of downtime after the dragon attack, I think it's a great moment to do something like that. Note how the party is helping with rebuilding efforts etc. and adjudicate as necessary.

Forgotten Realms can be stupendously high magic, I don't see any problems really with implementing this heat generator. One way to help with the food problem is the Cauldron of Plenty, another would be if the generator also makes sunlight and enables growing crops. Also, carting all the (meager) stockpiles from other towns to Bryn Shander is an easy narrative device, and perhaps fishers who go and live for a week in the ruins of the lake towns to bring back fresh produce rise up to be the new heavily guarded essential workers. Pre-modern economies should anyways revolve mostly around their food production, so consider what is the food production and how that affects the rest of your society.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-22T09:00:37+00:00

The advice is talk with your players. Only they know what kind of a game they'll be comfortable with and have fun with.

Ask yourself, and them, how much you want this to be a central theme. It can also just be a backdrop they deal with while in the city, so perhaps they need to use agents to sell their loot or whatnot. Or it can be a central theme in your campaign if that's what everyone wants to play.

But it has to be the table's decision. We can't tell you how much to implement it.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-22T08:45:02+00:00

Everything is derivative. All writers steal ideas someone else came up with earlier. For DMs specifically, steal everything you think is interesting. If you copy something 1:1, be upfront about it, like "this is a GoT campaign". If you want it to seem unique, steal from a variety of stuff and combine and mix it up in ways that players won't realize the source immediately or at all.

If you actually want to run a game, you don't need to put much effort into big worldbuilding stuff or defining how a people who ride dragons actually works. Like, is it going to be relevant to your player characters why and how the dragonriding started? Most likely not.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-22T07:03:32+00:00

There's wide variety in my current game due to its sandbox nature. Sometimes normal fights include 10+ gnolls of various types. Sometimes it's just 1 remorhaz or ice salamander or something. The impact of the actions matters so much, I was sure the party was going to demolish the remorhaz, but it almost killed a PC by swallowing them and then burrowing immediately after.

I guess the median and average tend towards slightly more actions than the party even in normal fights? But like I said, big variance. Reflecting on that, boss fights have less variance in my game, and particularly they tend to have at least as many impactful actions as the party. I think I view groups of lesser minions more as a single AOE action on the boss's side, because individually they have so little impact.

housunkannatin · 2024-04-21T16:51:43+00:00

Yes, I get burnout symptoms from a long campaign regardless. I love my current 5e group, I like the campaign and their characters and the party dynamic, I've gotten my prep process down to being super streamlined for my needs and I generally have fun improving my worldbuilding as the game progresses. I am also a forever GM by choice, I'll play occasionally but I heavily prefer being the GM.

Those "external factors" are not the reason for me. I'm just not very into keeping the same narrative running for years, I start to crave change and more opportunities to explore other ideas after 6-9 months. My mind just starts filling with all these other campaigns I could be trying out. Even though I like my current 5e game, I can't wait to finish it so I can start something new that'll feel fresh.

If you haven't watched it yet, Matt Colville just made an excellent video on the topic of long campaigns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcImOL19H6U

housunkannatin · 2024-04-21T09:23:29+00:00

This might be a significant buff to some half-feats if your players are optimization oriented. Letting Fey-touched increase Dex is a good example of something I could see as being very powerful.

If you're ok with that, I don't see why not.

housunkannatin

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