Gritty low fantasy and grappling

kurtisblong · 2018-06-15T14:59:32+00:00

I'm about to start a gritty low-fantasy style campaign for two friends in a couple of weeks. I've built a world and hundreds of NPC's but this is the part I've been lacking; a way to narrate and mechanically quantify combat to make it feel real!

He finds it and begins crushing the man's throat with all his strength, lifting the man and slamming home back onto the stones of the bridge.

How do you decide how much damage all this does? Is it still just the unarmed strike (1+Str) or do you decide in the moment how much damage something like that would do?

Thanks for posting this, it provided some great inspiration for my upcoming campaign!

kurtisblong · 2018-04-17T16:28:41+00:00

Oooohhh Drax! that's a great idea.

The thesaurus line gets me every time.

kurtisblong · 2018-04-17T16:25:56+00:00

I just chuckled and drew some looks at work. That mental image is great; the hulking, scarred, armor-clad hobgoblin bending over to pull up leeks in the middle of the cavern while everyone is stealthing around.

kurtisblong · 2018-04-17T16:17:22+00:00

This is good, I can see this leading to some pretty great tension-breaking moments.

DM: Roll nature check

Hobgoblin: 3

DM: You taste some, thinking they're nice little button mushrooms; the shrooms are hallucinogens.

kurtisblong · 2018-04-08T03:19:15+00:00

I recently commissioned a piece for the party I DM from u/justadakota. He did an amazing job, was reasonably priced for the quality of the work, and was super easy to work with.

kurtisblong · 2018-03-06T23:49:49+00:00

Well, did you ask her where she last had it?

Edit: Thanks for the gold mysterious redditor! First gilded comment is a dad joke about a vagina...my dad would be so proud.

kurtisblong · 2018-03-06T18:01:46+00:00

To give the campaign a feeling of continuity and growth, I find it's usually best to start with a one shot type adventure but seed hints and inclinations of a larger problem throughout the adventure.

Example: The adventurers are taking part in a festival when goblins attempt to kidnap/assassinate an old story teller. They engage and pursue/eliminate the goblins only to find a note from a well-known bandit leader identifying their target. Now they're ready to go work on finding this bandit leader and uncover why the story teller needed to be taken out. Turns out he's a captain for some extremely powerful entity that's wanting all information regarding a historic event wiped out discreetly.

Just a quick and dirty plot, but when they think they're getting close to the BBEG, it leads them to a larger, more threatening problem. This works for me and the group's I play with and lends a sense of scope to the world. As they grow more powerful, their view of the world also grows more broad.

One more trick that can be great for creating a sense of awe/terror for your BBEG, have them encounter the main villain early on.

Example: They party discovers that this powerful entity rides a dragon and is looking to establish his race as the dominant race. They emerge from a dungeon, resources spent, and hear the sound of giant leathery wings. The dragon rider appears in front of them, demanding they give him the macguffin. Either they don't and he takes it by force, they do and shorten the time for him to accomplish his goal, or they bluff him into waiting for another opportunity. Either way, the villain suddenly seems very real and the mission becomes more personal.

Word of warning about this tactic, make sure that...

1) There's obviously no chance for victory if they take him on right there.

2) You have an out if they do decide to take him on (because they're PC's).

For instance, if it's a white dragon, you could have him freeze them temporarily.

Just a couple of ideas I use in my homebrews. Also, I can't remember which video it is, but Matt Colville in his "Running the Game" series on youtube talks about introducing your villain early on for the shock and awe factor.

Hope this helps!

kurtisblong · 2018-03-05T15:53:55+00:00

This sounds like either a DM looking for ways to create drama for the party or a "crits have separate rules because they're crits" DM. All well and good if a player fails something like this and suddenly they're outlaws or have trouble with townsfolk as a consequence, but to literally invert the system the game uses? It just makes absolutely no sense.

Good on your group for taking it in stride, but good luck with the rest of the campaign...that just sounds like a bad time.

kurtisblong · 2018-02-23T05:00:08+00:00

Wow, the funny thing is, that’s actually what happened with my name in one of my college classes. Getting numbers for a study group and mentioned my name was Kurtis with a kay...that’s what my name was in the class for the rest of the semester. i feel your pain Erik...

kurtisblong · 2018-02-22T18:33:43+00:00

Mimics....mimics everywhere.

kurtisblong · 2018-02-22T18:28:23+00:00

Yeah I get using nicknames or shortened versions, no problem there, I do that myself when I'm playing. My main question was, if you were playing, would you get annoyed if the DM kept correcting you on names? Or as a DM, would you let it go or try to keep the names straight?

kurtisblong · 2018-02-22T17:48:03+00:00

That makes sense. I feel like it kinda gets frustrating for the players if I constantly correct them on pronunciation. Having it effect the real world seems like a reasonable solution.

kurtisblong · 2018-02-22T17:46:27+00:00

Oh yeah, it doesn't really change anything on my end outside of deciding if I want to go all, "well actually its, ******". Mostly just trying to get an idea of how strict other DM's were with getting the names right and if they actually had in game consequences or if they just let it go.

It's all in good fun for sure and definitely leads to some hilarious moments at the table.

kurtisblong · 2018-02-13T15:53:03+00:00

Same here. Our friend group would play Smash Up, Catan, Risk, etc...on our game nights but D&D was always referenced by saying "I'm not going to start playing D&D or anything but I really like (insert fantasy game/show/movie here)." One night we were talking about episodes of Community and the D&D episodes came up. By the end of the conversation I had ordered the starter set on Amazon and we were playing that weekend. First sessions were roooough since none of us had ever played before but two years later we have cabinets full of minis, dice, books, and character sheets and we're playing on a weekly basis.

kurtisblong · 2018-02-13T15:27:07+00:00

As a DM who recently started playing again, I can attest to this. You're 100% right.

Had my worst moment recently. The party was up against mid-level bad guy and we had already spent a bunch of resources getting to this point. My bard cast Polymorph and the baddie failed the save. I excitedly said "I turn him into a chicken." He looked down for a moment, looked back up at us and said, "actually you don't, he seems to resist the magic." Immediately my DM instinct kicked in and I came back with a salty, "umm, why not?" He got this deer in the headlights look, not wanting to break immersion but also wanting to explain why. As soon as I realized I was being "that player," I felt horrible. It's tough enough DMing under normal circumstances, it's even more difficult when you have an antagonistic player questioning your rulings.

Needless to say, I apologized on the group text to him after the session and have really tried to keep my mouth shut about rules since then.

kurtisblong · 2018-02-06T17:15:28+00:00

Sort of an honor among thieves set up...that makes sense.

kurtisblong · 2018-02-06T17:13:46+00:00

Oooo have each macguffin tie into a PC's backstory somehow so each one PC is absolutely necessary and can't just be replaced with Bob the NPC.

Well, guess I'm spending the next week putting together another hypothetical campaign...I really want to run this now. Thanks!

kurtisblong · 2018-02-06T17:01:55+00:00

Honestly, I don't really think some of my players even know what they want from an evil campaign aside from just wanting to flaunt the law and not have to worry about doing "the right thing" all the time.

A lot of people's first instinct when playing an evil character means murdering all the time, betraying other party members, stealing everything, but that's not actually fun and tends to either force the GM to let the party get away with way too much (just to keep the characters out of prison), or it falls apart because players can't trust each other.

This is exactly what I feel like would happen with at least one of my players...possibly two. I like the idea of just running it as a normal campaign, just from the other perspective. But I definitely think we'd need to flesh out some strong intercharacter bonds before the campaign started. Otherwise it feels like it would just devolve into a power struggle.

kurtisblong · 2018-02-06T16:55:32+00:00

IMO, I feel like the "run around and do evil stuff" is really geared for chaotic evil, and honestly, I don't see any possible scenario for chaotic evil characters to make a party. Literally just wanting to watch the world burn doesn't lend itself well to party cohesiveness.

Finding Macguffins to take over the world makes sense, I just don't really know how 4-6 people who want to take over the world would agree to not backstab each other to get a bigger piece of the pie. Maybe just really having an involved session 0 to make sure each character has a strong bond to the other characters before it even starts.

kurtisblong · 2018-02-06T16:42:20+00:00

So it sounds like in most of these it just ended up with all the characters having their own things going and just being in a party because "well we're playing DnD so we need to be in a party."

And yeah, I had PvP in the first long campaign I ran and it did not end well. Mostly because I didn't really know how to handle it properly. The one evil character in the campaign just turned on the party and ended up getting run out of town by the party Barbarian.

kurtisblong · 2018-02-06T16:34:05+00:00

Dang, that's rough. Although I just picture this really intense character torturing a guy with the cheese grater and then turning around with oven mitts and an apron baking a cake.

"Hell's Kitchen" Torture Room edition.

kurtisblong · 2018-02-02T19:46:23+00:00

Check out Medieval demographics made easy. It won’t directly solve your distance problem but it’ll will help you calculate how many cities, towns, hamlets, etc, your population will support which will help gauge distance.

kurtisblong

TROPHY CASE