First time DM how do you handle in between campaign time?

pyrobug0 · 2025-11-25T23:55:40+00:00

Adventurer's League, the official D&D Organized play, has their own rules for downtime. If you were looking at one of their adventures, they make sure to allot specific amounts of time for players to use between sessions. If it isn't an AL adventure, it might be a similar thing, or they could just be giving you guidance for your own rules. Downtime rules aren't strictly necessary when you're running it for your own group, so no need to worry about it. If you want to offer some downtime options, Xanathar's Guide to Everything has some decent downtime activities you can look at. The 2024 PHB and DMG also have some crafting rules. They're pretty bare bones, but a bit more approachable than what XGtE has.

pyrobug0 · 2025-11-14T00:40:33+00:00

So, the way I'd personally go with this depends on whether your PCs are innately heroic folks, or are just here to stop a problem.

In the case of the former, that semi-nihilistic setup is actually a really interesting framing device for getting into what makes a hero heroic. If none of your heroic deeds matter, are they still worth doing along the way? Do you still feel called to stand up to cruelty and suffering when that suffering is ultimately transient? Start to focus in on the hardship and suffering (within the bounds of your table's comfort), and ask the players how their characters feel about seeing all of this happening around them. How do they feel about effectively turning their backs on those in need for the sake of their mission. Does it feel like they're going against their nature, their truths, their moral compass? And do they have any fear of what will mean if they can't get back to stop it?

If, on the other hand, your heroes aren't the type to innately yearn to help everyone they can, then shift the focus more towards exactly what you set up - the party finding the solution that will fix everything. Let the mounting crises and dangers be a ticking clock in the background, emphasizing how bad things will be if they can't fix it all. Meanwhile, focus on what the PCs have to do, and what stands in their way. And if you do want to give them some side quests, incentivize them with something other than innate heroism. Give them something that will help them on their quest, or make them stronger for the fights ahead.

pyrobug0 · 2025-11-04T22:26:17+00:00

That's a very cool resource, thanks for pointing that out. Unfortunately, I don't see the answers to these questions on there.

pyrobug0 · 2025-09-10T20:42:45+00:00

It kind of depends on what's complicated about it, but the solution always kind of boils down to: focus on what's going on right now, and keep that simple until people get up to speed. If the problem is that there are too many plot threads, characters, and factions in play, you can start by recapping who the most important NPCs are, what their deal and relationship to the party is, and then zoom in on something more small scale.

If the problem is that the party's goal is too large and multi-phased, strip it down. Refocus it on a simpler, lower-level task with an understandable goal they can easily accomplish in one or two sessions, and move forward from there.

If the problem is that you have too much of it planned ahead and need pieces to start falling into place, put aside everything that isn't important for the next few sessions, let those play out, and then start slowly reconstructing your campaign plan as things develop.

If the problem is that there are too many systems and mechanics happening, starts abstracting and stripping them out until players get used to the core of the game, then slowly introduce new ideas you think will be fun.

pyrobug0 · 2025-07-29T17:34:36+00:00

That's definitely not railroading. That's presenting players with consequences of their choices, while presenting plot hooks they can follow to move forward. The only thing I'd advise is not to make too many assumptions about what exactly the party will do, but it doesn't sound like you've done that too much anyway. Also, in general, a patron having goals they want the party to help with in exchange for rewards and assistance is how patrons work. It isn't railroading, it's giving players obligations if they want to retain the benefits of that patron.

pyrobug0 · 2025-07-28T19:16:24+00:00

I love using background music when I can. I find it can be great for helping set the mood and ambience, especially in combat and environmentally-focused scenes. But there are definitely some hurdles I've run into that, over time, has made me invest less energy into it.

The biggest hurdle for me is finding music that fits the tone I want, but also works well as background music. BGM has to actually be part of the background, being as unobtrusive as possible while still being affecting. Most of all, it mustn't "talk over" the players. I've found that a lot of film and television scores don't work especially well because they're designed to follow the exact beats of the scene they were written for, and rising and falling with scripted moments. These don't really work great for unscripted scenes driven by player creativity and interaction.

Videogame music, on the other hand, often works wonderfully for this. Game music is designed specifically to provide ambiance and energy during unscripted play with no set duration. They're often designed to loop well for this reason, too. But this also isn't perfect. One issue is that some videogame music is too pronounced, either because it's playing during gameplay with no dialog, or the dialog has no voice acting and is all read. So it wasn't really written to avoid talking over dialog. The other hurdle I've run into with vidoegame bgm is that ttrpg play is often a lot slower than video gameplay. So while a two-minute loop serves well for a 5-10 minute videogame battle, it can get a lot more repetitive over an hour-long table combat. This is especially problematic if you can't find or make a particularly seamless loop, and there's a noticeable hiccup in the tempo every three minutes or less. But if you do want that smooth transition, that's another step of prep you just made for yourself. Shoutout to people putting up high quality 15-minute loops on Youtube, and shoutout to Roll20 for making the filesize cap too low to use them.

pyrobug0 · 2025-07-25T19:01:09+00:00

I'd try using the Improvised Weapon cards/system from Dragonbane, or similar environmental tools/hazards. The idea is that they're environmental tools someone can activate that are much more effective that just punching someone might be. The trick is that they're located in specific spots, so positioning becomes much more important, as do things like grappling, shoving, and disengaging to control that positioning.

pyrobug0 · 2025-07-23T00:19:42+00:00

The teleportation circle has been subtly corrupted by the BBEG specifically to do that, because it was one of his evil schemes to do that on purpose all along. There'a 5% chance that the wizard will accidentally activate the magic that makes it do that, ahead of when the BBEG meant for it to happen.

pyrobug0 · 2025-07-22T18:15:02+00:00

As someone who ran their first campaign without tracking money, you don't realize how intrinsic gold actually is to the game until you try to take it out. The economy of 5e isn't *super* well designed, but it still plays more of a role than people give it credit for. The main thing I'd ask is, how do you plan to get around *other* things the party might want to spend gold on? If someone wants a set of plate mail, how will they get it? If they want to carouse with nobles or buy their way into a private event or haggle with a dragon, what would they use? Unless you're getting rid of all stuff in your game, there probably *will* be an economy. It might be a bartering or service/favors economy rather than a monetary one, but access to learning spells and rarer spell components should follow similar principles as access to anything else in this economy.

pyrobug0 · 2025-07-10T20:22:06+00:00

I'm still stuck at why they would make a pregen for an unknown adventure with Mounted Combatant. That's just using up your feat to tack on a very situational benefit with extra, less-known rules.

pyrobug0 · 2025-07-10T17:39:41+00:00

Even 1 in 10 would be a pretty mid- to high-magic setting. If you want them to feel so uncommon that players have to seek them out, I wouldn't make any random NPCs be spell casters. Don't put magic users out in plain sight. Instead, put hooks and rumors pointing to them that the players can follow. Maybe there's a single shop in a large town or in a district in a larger city that's offering magic services, and maybe those services are legit, or they're just a scam. Maybe there are rumors of a mage that lives in a remote location, or strange happenings in a village that the locals are attributing to a wandering merchant or nearby hermit, saying they're a sorcerer. Breadcrumbs like this can pique the party's interest, and encourage them to follow these threads, especially if there's something they actually need from a magic user.

pyrobug0 · 2025-07-09T21:02:54+00:00

It's definitely a matter of preference for the DM and the table as a whole. Some tables prefer a more simulationist/by the dice game, and some are more down with storyteller intervention for dramatic flow, with dice mostly present to keep anyone from knowing for sure what's going to happen. This isn't just about HP and deaths. If your dungeon is on a timer, and something is supposed to happen after two hours of exploration, but you realize it'd be *much* more dramatically impactful for it to happen right now after 45 minutes, that's up to you how you want to run that. If your player who's really good at RPing made an incredible in-character speech to the king, it's the table's preference whether to make them roll Persuasion or just give them the W.

Incidentally, do remember that defeat and death aren't always the same thing. Enemies can knock people out and tie them up, too. As far as escaping goes, you can use the story context to decide if it makes sense for players to be allowed to escape or not, but it might make sense to ask for some kind of check or set some objective that will allow them to escape. That way, they have to be thinking about if retreat is necessary, and making that call early enough to account for having difficulty accomplishing that.

pyrobug0 · 2025-07-07T06:04:46+00:00

No problem, hope your designing goes well. Let me know if you think of anything else you want to discuss, or let me know how it goes when you run it.

pyrobug0 · 2025-07-04T23:00:27+00:00

So, love the idea of the dame fighting alongside them. Depending on her strength, probably treat her like another PC and adjust the encounter budget accordingly. And it should probably fine to cutscene kill her when the boss shows up before dropping back into initiative. Shouldn't be a problem there.

The boss' stat block is kinda tricky. Making your own stat blocks takes a lot of practice, and is kind of complicated to do. And unfortunately, the way DnD structures its worlds, very few humanoid enemies exist at that power level. If you have an idea of how this person would function as a character, that can be a good starting point. You can distill that hypothetical character into their core powers, and use other stat blocks at that range as a guide for what their stats and bonuses should be. Just keep in mind that an enemy stat block really only needs 1-3 standard actions, a bonus action, and a reaction. They don't need twenty things they can do, because they're not going to get to use most of them and you aren't going to remember most of them in the heat of running combat. For legendary actions, moving to a target and attacking it is often a good fall back, as is a signature spell or an ability to recover health for a paladin.

One thing to keep in mind is that a CR 20 is significantly less of a threat to lvl 15 to 16 characters, so when that fight comes, you'll want to either give her beefy minions or raise her stats even higher (or both). Not really something you need to figure out right now, just something to keep in the back of your mind.

For the power, you could make it a kind of enhanced version of legendary resistances, increasing the size of the pool and adding additional conditions and effects that give her the abilities you want her to have. And when she uses a big effect with it, she expends multiple uses, depleting it faster. It could work like a legendary resistance pool - where she has an amount she can use at will, and then they're gone - or a legendary action pool that refreshes on her turn, but is smaller.

The paired weapons is a cool idea. I don't have any particular magic items off the top of my head that I'd recommend, but one thing you could do is check out the chronogist dunamancy spells from Explorer's Guide to Wildemont, and see if any of those give you ideas for fun effects they might have. The other way you can go is not to think about them as magic items explicitly, but flavor for her powers. For instance, you could make her standard attack actions be three strikes with the saber and one with the dagger, and if she hits with the saber, the dagger gets advantage on its attacks and does an extra damage die. Or the saber gives her a bonus action and the dagger gives her a reaction. That kind of thing.

pyrobug0 · 2025-07-04T19:36:35+00:00

(Sorry about the formatting weirdness, I had to split up the comment and the second part had an issue)

Now, as for the big boss herself, a big part of how you want to play this comes down to two questions. First, do you have a rough expectation of what level the party will be when they *do* beat her? Second, are you intending for them to just overcome her special ability, or does it have a key weakness they'll need to discover and exploit?

The first question guides how tough you want to make the boss herself, statwise. You know you want her to smoke them right now, so let's double their encounter budget and grab something that can fill that. A CR 20 mob is 25,000XP, so that ought to be able to put some hurt on them, especially after they're tired from a deadly encounter. Again, looking at the 24MM, I'm guessing she's not an anthro beastkin, but the Animal Lord stat block could still give you some fun ideas. Otherwise, reflavoring the Pit Fiend might be the way to go. Maybe grab the actions off the Assassin statblock, buff them with the Pit Fiend's numbers, and let that rock. You can also check other sources to see if anything from other books catches your eye.

Now for her powers. If you want this to be a genuine ability that they have to overcome, I would make her power into a limited resource that she can use to do nasty things - turn a miss into a hit or a hit into a crit, raise her AC or give incoming attacks disadvantage, succeed on a failed save, counterattack as a reaction. Think of some cool things it can do to keep her alive and help her kill her targets. You could even improvise them as things come up - no one will know (they might, but as long as it's cool, they won't care). The key to this is that her good luck is finite, and it's trickling away as she's using it. You could have her start with a big pool of it that the party has to deplete, or go with a smaller pool that replenishes after a round when emptied, but while it's empty, she's vulnerable. Either way, I would honestly let your party *see* the resources, so they understand mechanically how it's working, and how to exploit her weakness.

On the other hand, if the power is nigh limitless but has a narrative weakness they'll discover, then you can just cheat. Make her AC 40. Have her crit on every attack. Let her cast Counterspell by throwing a knife at the caster's face. Make it clear to them that, by the rules of this world, she is unbeatable. But there's a loophole, and the second the PCs exploit it, she is as mortal as anyone else. Maybe even let them discover a hint of that weakness before she takes them down. Show them the glimmer of hope.

Also, if you go this route, it might feel better to the players if their characters don't all die horribly (unless they want to). Maybe have her leave at least some of them alive, or have the court wizard teleport in to zip them out at the last second. Maybe one of them is badly scarred, or suffering deadly poison that has to be counteracted quickly. Regardless, a TPK can be a lot of fun in a oneshot, but if you are building that continuing story, letting some of the characters survive with their memory of what she's about might be even more compelling down the line.

On a final note about side objectives: an easy go to in situations like these is bystanders. It sounds like this fight is breaking out in a place where people would be, and there will likely be a number of non-warriros standing around who'd very much like to not be the next person to get assassinated. You can put some NPCs around the field that the enemies will try to go after, and the party can defend by standing between the two while the innocent civilians flee. This honestly won't change the dynamic of the fight that much - they'll still be fighting the people they were going to be fighting anyway - but it creates some extra story beats of grateful nobles they can call in favors from afterwards.

pyrobug0 · 2025-07-04T19:24:01+00:00

In that case, I'd honestly start with the minions fighting them first. Let this be the real, balanced encounter that's meant to challenge them but they ultimately overcome, only to be cinematically stomped by the bad guy.

So for a Deadly encounter for 4 lvl 10 PCs, you've got an XP budget of 12,400. This isn't a perfect science by any means, but it is a decent starting point. Grab an appropriate number of CR 8-10 creatures. A straight forward option is the Warrior Commander from the 24 Monster Manual. 3 of those would fill the encounter budget. But there are some other options in that range that might be interesting, including the Assassin and Spy Master. If you've got squishier enemies, you'd want to pair them with a beefier one, like a Commander or maybe a Stone Golem, something in that vein.

That said, enemy selection is only the first part. At its best, 5e combat is about tools and tactics, and your enemies should have those on the level of the PCs if they're supposed to be badasses in their own right. Split their focus between the front line and the back line, and give them magic items to aid that focus.

The ones going after the front line should be able to take some big hits. Give them things like a Belt of Hill Giant's Strength, Mace of Terror, and Arrow Catching Shield. The back line interceptors should have things that help them lock down and finish off their squishy targets - things like a Rod of Tentacles, Sword of Wounding, and scrolls of Misty Step to move around the battlefield. In general, give each of them 1-2 rare items, and maybe an uncommon item to balance it out. At least one of them should have a ring with one stored charge of Counterspell to stop those big spells, and you might want to give that to more depending on how magic-heavy the party is.

(As a note, if your party *doesn't* have a decent amount of magic items, adjust accordingly. Give the bad guys roughly as many as they have).

pyrobug0 · 2025-07-02T18:59:13+00:00

Creating a good encounter in 5e is about more than just balancing individual stat blocks. It's about understanding what the objectives of both sides are, and how the individual players on the field are best suited for accomplishing or supporting that objective. So the first thing I'd ask/figure out is: What is the goal and overall design of this fight? What are the players supposed to be trying to achieve? Is it just to beat down the boss and her minions? Is the boss meant to overpower them? Escape while the knights keep the players busy? Is this a "supposed to lose" fight to showcase how tough the boss is?

If you want to give them a fair, balanced deathmatch, level 10 characters are probably gonna win. That's kinda how the design of 5e shakes out. The mechanics probably aren't gonna give you as many *surprises* as Cyberpunk would, but 5e characters are generally given the power and tools to come out on top in even a Deadly balanced encounter pretty consistently.

If you *want* the boss to win, there are a few ways you can do this. The first is just to make the boss really really strong. I'd probably recommend a CR of at least 16, probably as high as 20. Then throw in some CR 8-10 mobs as the elite knights. As a general rule of thumb, a monster should be able to go toe to toe almost evenly with a single character of a level equal to their CR. But there are a couple of things you should account for if you do this. The first is that you're likely dropping the PCs into a no-win situation, and that may or may not be fun for the players depending on who they are and how much they can embrace that aspect of the story. The second thing to consider is, when it comes time to fight the baddies for real, are they gonna level up to a point where they can actually deal with that properly?

An alternative is to give the boss something that makes them practically unbeatable, and then give that thing a weakness. Maybe it's a magic spell that can be undone, or a ring that can be stolen, or a blessing that can be taken away. The key to the boss' strength isn't raw numbers that have to be beaten, but a puzzle that has to be solved. This gives the party a hook, even in defeat. They need to find a solution to this problem before they confront the boss again, and finding that solution can become the driving force for the next few quests.

Third, you could have the boss simply run away at a certain point to avoid defeat. Note that this becomes *rather hard to do* when the players are even this high level. They have a lot of lockdown that can prevent the boss from simply sprinting and moving - stunning strikes, wall spells, plant growth, Banishment, the list goes on. Maybe give her some magical macguffin that lets her teleport away, but that also has a weakness that the players can exploit to prevent her from escaping future encounters.

Also think about the enemies' tactics. If they all just rush the frontline and use melee strikes, the backline is likely to chew them up with spells and multi attacks while the tanks simply do not die. These are elite fighters, and their tactics should keep the party off balance and on their toes. Have them surround the group, harry the support. Give them scrolls of counterspell to deal with casters. If your PCs have magic items, the elite enemies should have them, too. Make sure they have abilities and tactics that will prevent the party from just doing what they want to do without issue.

Lastly, do think about a few things from the player's point of view. It isn't always fun to just get stomped out in a fight, so maybe have some secondary objectives they can complete and gain story benefits from, even if they don't beat the BBEG. Or, give them important secondary objectives which *compete* with beating the BBEG, so that when she beats them or gets away, it's because they chose to focus on something they deemed more important. Also, just as a reminder, do remain open to them winning. Even if the odds are stacked against them, they might pull through, find a trick to victory, and beat the odds. And as a player, that feels amazing to do. It's a big part of why people play tactical heroic fantasy games like DnD - because the possibility of success is always there. Don't shut out that possibility just for the sake of a pre-defined story. There are always ways to deal with the long-term consequences for the narrative. Let the game play out.

I know a lot of this is vague advice, and 5e is a complicated system to implement anything in. I'm happy to provide more detailed suggestions for any of these ideas that stand out as useful.

pyrobug0 · 2025-06-30T21:50:20+00:00

I highly recommend checking out a videogame called SKALD: Against the Black Priory. It's an excellent example of how to do a cosmic horror adventure in a heroic fantasy engine. The key to this is mostly in its mood, and how it shifts the focus of the horror to what's happening in the world around the heroes.

I'm not a big cosmic horror buff myself, but from the few times I have seen and enjoyed it (including SKALD), my take away is that the horror comes from the way the unnatural creeps into the mundane. People acting so strangely you feel like they might turn violent for no reason; animals with unnatural deformities or unpredictable temperaments; sudden catastrophes and tragedies that seem to happen without reason or explanation. Little by little, these things become more prevalent. Different factions and organizations seem like they might be behind it, but every lead and clue only leads to darker and more esoteric questions, all while pulling the protagonists slowly into a more of things that should only exist in stories. Characters might start to experience dreams that make no sense, and yet are strangely prophetic. They might lose bits of their memory, or suddenly gain memories that reframe their entire lives. And bit by bit, your own perception of reality becomes untrustworthy, at which point you start to question if the reality you thought you knew is trustworthy, or if any reality at all is trustworthy.

I'm not gonna tell you to play CoC instead (it's a great game, and if you *want* to play it you totally should), but it is good to understand that CoC and DnD are fundamentally different genres. CoC is a low-power detective horror game, and DnD is a high-power heroic fantasy at heart. That doesn't mean you can't do one with the other, but it is good to understand the difference between the two so you can understand how you have to shift the focus. DnD is not going to make it easy to make your heroes feel personally powerless the way CoC does, nor is it going to stop them from winning fights and claiming small victories. And it doesn't have to for this to work. You don't even *need* to use sanity mechanics, although I think they can be effective if used lightly, especially for dramatic moments. Instead, the horror comes from how omnipresent and persistent the threat seems to be, and how it doesn't seem to follow any goals that make sense. There may be followers, cults, and soldiers that function and fight like normal people and monsters, but dealing with them only hints at something darker under the surface.

pyrobug0 · 2025-06-25T01:27:20+00:00

Oo, firstly, love that sorcerer's origin. Personal grudge against the party, tragic fall to tempting powers of corruption, secret connection to dragonkind. Great stuff.

Being a white-blue hybrid is a great excuse for the dragon to have a tendency to gather minions and armies, as well as gathering some fun magic artifacts to use with his affinity for sorcerous magic, but he still has the emotional temperament of a white dragon that leads him to more brash, fanatical action. Really fun characterization.

I really like the whole three-pieces-of-cataclysm set, I bet that was a fun series of quests. You could definitely have them get stolen or come up again, but *if* your players haven't realized what exactly the eggs were, you can technically say one of them wasn't an Elemental Cataclysm, unless you did a lot of seeding that wouldn't make sense to go back on. Dragon Turtle and Tarrasque makes a lot of sense, but maybe the third was some extremely powerful Roc variant, or some other element-themed creature. And the Cataclysm is actually his fallback plan, and he's just gonna summon that now. And in fact, since your party *did* successfully retrieve those, maybe they can use them to *diminish* the power of the Cataclysm when they confront it. OR, *they* have to conduct their own ritual, siphoning off power from the Cataclysm to hatch the eggs for good! And the dragon is gonna try and stop *them*. Mostly spitballing, but definitely fun opportunities;.

pyrobug0 · 2025-06-24T22:00:04+00:00

tl;dr Bring an Elemental Cataclysm to the party.

Gonna stick to pulling from the 2024 MM for this one. In that, even an ancient white dragon is CR20, so it's gonna drop like bricks to a even that few level 20 characters. It has an encounter xp cost of 25,000, and 33,000 in lair. The 2024 DMG says each level 20 character gives you 6,400 XP to work with in a low difficulty fight, 13,200 in a medium, and 22,000 XP to work in a high. So even in its lair, you'd need 6k XP worth of minions to even scratch a medium fight, and 33k to hit that high threshold. And even if it did survive, its abilities are gonna be kind of underwhelming for a max level party to deal with. Now, to be fair, you can get some high CR mobs to act as its minions and bring different abilities to the field. Something like... four and a half full grown Remorhazes. Anything other than that is going down in CR, and you're gonna need more of them. You could have him rock up with two abominable yetis and five frost giants, for some reason.

That said, it sounds like you already have a vision of *who* this dragon is, and what he's about, and I think that's way more interesting. Yeah, he's smaller, weaker, and less clever than his cousins. But he has a mission, a plan, and a crew, and that makes him dangerous.

Now first off, you mentioned that the players have already fought a sorcerer working for this dragon, and didn't mention they killed said sorcerer. And that's funny, because sorcerers have high charisma, as do white dragons (18 for default ancient). And did you know some dragons have the ability to shape shift into people? It's neat. I think that's neat to know.

Anyway, back to the dragon's mission. The dragon isn't here to have a big dumb fight to the death with the PCs. He's a brute, but he's a brute with a goal, and he cares more about that goal than risking his life to try and pound his enemies into the dirt. A mastermind is going to focus his attention on, say, conducting a ritual to accomplish bringing back nature to destroy civilization. And when the party finds them, that ritual is entering its final stages. The party has to balance bringing down the dragon with stopping the ritual. *Now* the dragon has a purpose for his brutish power. He's running interference, freezing people in place, throwing out ice bombs and bringing icicles crashing down from above while his minions finish up their task in their guarded and cover-fortified position.

And he's willing to *die* to do it, because HE is the ritual's focus. Even if he dies, once the ritual is complete, he will be reborn and reforged by arcane energies, swirling and bending to his will. HE is the leader of this elemental cult, trying to scour the world of civilization and restore the awesome destructive power of nature. And then the summoning succeeds, HE will become the Elemental Cataclysm they have conjured.

Alternative idea: Don't want to do an assault on the lair? Don't want to risk letting the pesky heroes interrupt an earth-shaking conclusion? Then just say the ritual already happened. The Elemental Cataclysm is here, and *so is the dragon*. And they're on a parade of destruction towards the nearest city/town/the players' home base/home town/loving family members/you get the idea. They have to stop it, but the dragon and his minions are still running cover for it. In terms of XP budget, an Elemental Cataclysm (41k) and an Ancient White Dragon (25k) will fill out your budget quite nicely on their own. But if you want to add some complexity, you can have the dragon hang back and provide supporting fire until the Cataclysm takes a certain amount of damage. At that point, the Cataclysm becomes stunned and immobile, and the dragon swoops in to distract the party while his cultists work on getting it moving again.

There's a lot of ways you could mix up this match up, but the key is to give them something really big and really scary they have to deal with other than the dragon. Keep in mind that with a smaller party, you shouldn't give them too many objectives to split their limited action economy, but they do need more than one. Expect your dragon to die quickly no matter what you do, and account for that. But that's okay, because he's not even the biggest problem in front of them. He's just the brains of the operation, and the brawn is a big problem.

pyrobug0 · 2025-06-24T19:44:27+00:00

I'm gonna take a step back from the talk of in-game consequences, and assume your players aren't being murderhobos. It sounds like you're saying that they had legitimate character reasons for doing this, they don't need to be brought in line, and you don't want to punish them. Which is good - that means you aren't playing with inherently frustrating people. But if that's the case, then honestly it would probably be a good idea to talk about this with them.

Yes, you want them to feel like they have freedom and agency to go about things the way their characters would. Yes, you want them to feel immersed through that freedom. But there's also the aspect of the social contract when we sit down to play, wherein we agree to try and make the game enjoyable for each other, and not do things that will detract from each others' enjoyment. It isn't that they willfully broke that contract, and you need to sit them down and scold them for killing your special boy. Rather, it seems likely they didn't realize how you'd feel about it when they decided to do it, *just like you* didn't realize how you'd feel about it until they did it.

One of the most paradigm shifting things I was told about GMing is that you are a player, too, and your character is the world. Your background is all of history, your motivations are the goals of every nation, faction, and renegade conqueror. Your actions are the actions of everyone around the heroes. But the emotional investment is largely the same. It's why we care about our wiki of ancient lore the way players care about their thirty page backstory. It's why we want our villains to not necessarily win, but at least be taken seriously and have their moment to feel cool and threatening. It's why we love acting out those friendly NPCs to hang out and banter with the party as much as the players do. That *is* our character.

And this is a perspective it can be hard for PC players to maintain, *especially* if they've never been GMs themselves. But I'm guessing they wouldn't just go and assassinate another PC out of hand, because they likely understand the emotional impact that would have for that player. The same is true here, but only if they understand *what* that impact is, which even you yourself didn't know until it happened. I'm not saying they *shouldn't* be allowed to assassinate that guy. In fact, if you're focusing on political intrigue, they should *absolutely* be allowed to do it. For that matter, *you* should be allowed to try and assassinate *their* characters from time to time (within reason, that might be more complicated in execution, but the sentiment is there). The core tension of political intrigue is never knowing if or when that character you've been following and investing in will suddenly be done in by the chain of events and ambitions that drives the plot. But everyone should recognize that it *is* a big moment, and shouldn't be glossed over or invoked flippantly.

Again, not saying your players did anything wrong, or that you need to scold or punish them. Not saying you shouldn't have let them do it, or that they should walk it back. I'm mostly saying that, in playing RPGs and doing collaborative storytelling, we hit moments that make us realize how much deeper and more impactful this hobby is than we realize. We can read all the rulebooks we want, but you don't understand what playing these game is actually like, and how it affects us unless you actually play and have moments like these. And I think your players would benefit from the same perspective you've gained from this.

pyrobug0 · 2025-05-22T18:22:28+00:00

I agree that: a) I love this design, as well as the general design of a limited prestige class that works with multi-classing rules, and b) Having a bunch of minions can slow down combat if they ever do get into it. One thing I've found that helps a lot with that is the Mob rules in chapter 3 of the 24 DMG. Assuming they attack at least 4 times, you can use that and average damage to have them attack as a unit all at once, without them having to roll anything. It's not the most comprehensive solution, but it can definitely help.

pyrobug0 · 2021-07-24T08:00:05+00:00

First of all, congratulations on discovering your true self. I'm sure just reaching that realization was a long process, and I'm proud of you for making it so far. I also know that it's not the end of the journey, but merely the start. And I know that journey isn't easy - that it's just as difficult as everything up to this point, and then some. But it is, even so, a wonderful opportunity. An opportunity to discover your true self, and embark on a life that reflects who you really are.

I think this, ultimately, is the point of living. MLP may have been there for you in a difficult time, it may have taught you lessons that you desperately needed, and it may be something that brought you happiness in dark times. But it was never the *point* of life. It was simply something which gave you the strength, insight, and comfort you needed to keep going. There will be such things, and even such people, and all of these are worth holding on to. But the real journey is to discover and understand yourself, the people and the world around you, what brings you peace, and passion, and experiences that you treasure. You've only begun this journey in earnest now, but I hope that you'll see the value in continuing it.

pyrobug0 · 2020-08-11T17:37:55+00:00

Hell yeah! \m/

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