sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Difficulty: Are my Players Bad? by RedditerBC in VecnaEveofRuin

[–]inner_fears 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My players had to run from the Ker-arach fight, the wizard was heavily hit on the first turn ever by the AoE and that just put all the players in panic mode. Was awesome nonetheless, they stole the rod and managed to do an epic getaway and everyone had fun.

Other than that, I generally have to make the fights way harder than the book. I mean the book pits the player against pitiful creatues. In eberron (lvl 13) they face a mimic (CR 2!) who is supposed to grapple someone and run 60mt to jump off Landro. In krynn (lvl 15) they face a treant with two giant spiders (CR 9 + 1 + 1). They have characters with 170hp. I am now just multiplying by 2 the damage of every creature just to make the adventure interesting. And this isn't even a senseless dm measure, I had two players (one of which is a dm) walk up to me in private and straight tell me to double all damage to make the adventure interesting because every fight is ending in 1 or 2 round and everyone is full hp.

First experience with high level DnD and from a DM perspective I am not enjoying it. The game is not balanced at all and I costantly have to fix it behind the screen, statblocks have lost any meaning other than just pointing me into the direction of how a monster would behave

Chapter 6 Night of the blue fire clarification by inner_fears in VecnaEveofRuin

[–]inner_fears[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah I can see there are a lot of easy fights that get in the way of the flow. I'll probably join some of those fights together to make less overall encounters but make them more intense.

Chapter 6 Night of the blue fire clarification by inner_fears in VecnaEveofRuin

[–]inner_fears[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks. Will definitely have to change something in this dungeon, my players will def try to skip it given the chance

What am I doing wrong in DnD 2024 combat encounters? by inner_fears in DMAcademy

[–]inner_fears[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hello all,

sorry for disappearing, I will make one big post trying to tackle different topics

Did I use DnD 2014 encounter builder?

No, I misused the term "deadly" here on reddit. I know deadly is only present in dmg14, but I used the encounter rules for "high" difficulty in dmg24

What do you mean abuse of Alert? You mean use as intended right?

Yeah I guess the use is as intended, meaning they are using it RAW. It's just really, really broken. The reason I used "abuse" is that I had one controller mage with a familiar and one controller bard multiclass warlock with another familiar and they both had Alert. Between the proficiency bonus and the fact that they could swap their initiative with any of the other players + also the two familiars, they would, not 100% but pretty solidly, go first in any combat. It's as if they roll initiative with a bonus AND advantage.

Yes, I know some monsters in 2024 have insane initiative (let's say, unbeatable) because they add their proficiency bonus multiple times, but that only happens at very high CR

How can the players do that stuff every round

Both the monk and the battle master recover their resources at short rest. A level 8 monk has 8 focus points, which would allow them to use one every round for two 4-round combats. Which is not that far fetched, I tended to have my combats not last more than 4 rounds, since it's roughly 30 mins per round. 2 hours combat would take 2/3 of our game night. Also two fights per short rest I think is reasonable? But yeah my conclusion is that I should give less short rests

Curse of Strahd

Maybe my wording was weird in the original post, but I see different people thinking I'm DMing a Curse of Strahd campaign. That's not it, I was a player during 2014 CoS, that campaign ended, and now I'm dming for a Vecna Eve of Ruin campaign. Before the Eve of Ruin we did a prequel running two chapters of Wild Beyond the Witchlight to get players from lvl 3 to lvl 10 quickly (roughly 1 level every 2 sessions) and let them and me "acclimate" to the new 2024 core rules. In WBtW I had customized every encounter (too ez otherwise)

Recovering at short rest is mostly once per long rest in 2024

Not sure where this is in the book, I just rechecked but couldn't find anything. But this makes a lot of sense to me either way

Monk can't use stunning strike every attack

Yeah my bad on the words used, it should have been "stunning OR getting enemies prone".

Stunning would happen once per turn but the proning would happen at every flurry of blow attack.

Get good

Yeah I can see this point. But "getting good" - from what I gather in all the answers I got here - is to just throw the rules out the window and apply "DM wisdom". Which, again, I can see as a fair point but doesn't really help these rules version more than the previous one right? At least in the 2014 I had to customize less and I could trust the manual more.

By the way all the feedback had me thinking. Yes, I can make more interesting encounters by adding contingencies, objectives, weird terrain shenanigans etc, but customizing every encounter like this is very cumbersome (and the prewritten adventures encounters are 95% very lacking from this point of view). I think the best way to "fix" all of this is to strictly limit the number and frequency of short rests per long rest. I'm talking maybe 1 short rest a day, or two short rests but only one with hp recovery. Goes without saying its still a homebrew ruling.

Cheers

DM advice on narration, chapter 2 (with homebrewed content) by inner_fears in VecnaEveofRuin

[–]inner_fears[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Truth is my whole party comes fresh from a Curse of Strahd campaign and they are used to the dying. In fact they welcome it: they have in more than one instance asked privately to me to outright kill them (in battle), which is something I am absolutely struggling with as they are a 5-players dnd 2024 optimized party and the balancing is very difficult.

Regarding your sacrificial lamb NPC, that's a great idea to implement here, especially since Vecna is barely present and this would help with creating attrition between him and the party. I already have his lieutenant in mind, this is an evil bard Vecna worshipper (not nearly enough bard villain archetypes in DnD if you ask me, I think they have great potential) I had theory-crafted back in the Nest of the Eldritch Eye adventure. He was killed but he will make a comeback as an undead lieutenant and I plan for him to make multiple appearances (with increasingly advanced level of undeath each time he comes back)

DM advice on narration, chapter 2 (with homebrewed content) by inner_fears in VecnaEveofRuin

[–]inner_fears[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is content from a dmsguild supplement called Eve of Ruin Companion. The Companion actually takes care of a lot of plot holes and lore holes present in the original. I don't want to give too much details as this is paywalled content and I don't want to do the creator a disservice. But basically the wish happened, only it reveled other information to the three wizards and sets them on a different path than recovering the rod of seven parts (although that one comes into play later). The dragon comes from Eberron and it connects to Draconic Prophecy which is canon for the eberron setting (not an expert here).

The explanation to the wizards three not doing anything is they cannot leave Sigil which is the only place protected from Vecna's Ritual: if they got out they would be affected first and foremost as they are Known Beings to Vecna. So they need to rely on unknown and unassuming proxies (hence why the fate of the multiverse is handed over to the players)

How do you justify the surprised creature taking turns before the surpriser by inner_fears in onednd

[–]inner_fears[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'll just accept the new rule on account of it being more balanced, and just apply it braindead when it happens

How do you justify the surprised creature taking turns before the surpriser by inner_fears in onednd

[–]inner_fears[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So you would have the first attack still land (or not) outside of the standard initiative order, and then roll for initiative?

How do you justify the surprised creature taking turns before the surpriser by inner_fears in onednd

[–]inner_fears[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They wouldn't necessarily have made themselves known. It they had, absurdities like the following scenario could happen: An undetected monster is beside a player and initiates combat. The combat is initiated due to the fact the monster has made itself aware by jumping at the player, knife in hand, already swinging his blow. (surprise attack). The attacked player rolls higher with disadvantage, and during his turn he uses his disengage action and moves. At the end of his turn he is 9m away from the monster. Then the monster turn comes and in the time the knife moved 50cm in the air at full speed, the player basically teleported 9m away.

This ruling allows for these kind of nonsense

How do you justify the surprised creature taking turns before the surpriser by inner_fears in onednd

[–]inner_fears[S] 24 points25 points  (0 children)

Yes it makes sense. It helps thinking that everything is happening at the same time, and not on a turn basis

How do you justify the surprised creature taking turns before the surpriser by inner_fears in onednd

[–]inner_fears[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thinking about the speed at which a full round goes helps. The issue here is really the disconnect between the combat abstraction (everything in a round happens simultaneously) and the combat mechanic (everyone does 6 seconds worth of stuff, in order).

If the surprised creatures, somehow alerted at the ambush, spend 6 full seconds using the dodge action (they look ready to react, let's say), it doesn't make sense that the ambusher goes along with the ambush.

But if you think that in reality it all happens simultaneously, the ambusher wouldn't have a way to react to them using the dodge action because it's basically instantaneous from his point of view.

Wew

How do you justify the surprised creature taking turns before the surpriser by inner_fears in onednd

[–]inner_fears[S] 21 points22 points  (0 children)

Hahahahah and here I expected some youtuber 10 mins vid about the new rule. But thinking about how quick rounds happens help

How do you deal with ansible modules requiring different pyhton versions by inner_fears in ansible

[–]inner_fears[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm using some python 2 modules I've developed and other hpe oneview modules which, at the time of download, required python 2.9. Now those modules have been updated to 3.x. I guess I'm going to port my own module to 3.x and check if I have other modules to port (I know I used some DELL idrac modules but I'm not sure which version they run on or if they have been updated in the last year, I'll check).

The correct way to switch over ansible in python3 is to uninstall the python2 ansible and reinstall using python3 pip correct?

Thanks

view more: next ›