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Locnar

Locnar

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I've had countless characters hit by a poison bite or poison needle trap , and 90 percent of the time it was a save vs. poison or die!

Dan does not DM much anymore, too much time is getting sucked up by the podcast production, which is a shame because he is a DM after my own heart. Strict by the book.
 
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j00t

j00t

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honestly, i think you guys are just being difficult for the sake of it. the average character lvl to be at in order to have 100hp is like... lvl 13 or something? if you're that high and the dm is hitting you with a 2d4 poison, then the issue isn't the rules being easy, it's your dm not understanding appropriate challenge. if you are TRYING to kill your players, it's incredibly easy. all it takes is a roll or two in the DM's favor to royally screw a party. the more players there are at a table, the easier it is for them to win, obviously because it can come down to just simple action economy being so grossly in their favor. but a good DM can create some deathtraps really pretty easily for any size party. deborah ann woll (true blood, daredevil) just started playing a handful of years ago. she DM's and she's really pretty great. one of her signature moves is creating encounters that you cannot simply outroll the DM. the encounters aren't HP sponges, even if it presents itself that way.

there are also modules that are specifically designed to be brutal and unforgiving to your players. one of my weekly games is tomb of annihilation and there are all kinds of traps and puzzles and monsters that will just outright kill players if they aren't playing really well. and even then... out of the 6 players we have, we've had close to 15 characters between us all (in tomb of annihilation, death is permanent. no revive spells will work at all. the entire hook for the story is that revive magic has stopped working, and anyone who has previously been revived in any shape starts withering away). the DM has actually said on multiple occasions that he re-wrote certain encounters because it would have most likely ended in a tpk. so instead of all of us dying, it was only 3/4's of us.

i WILL concede that 5e has basically done away with "save or die" mechanics, which i'm happy with, personally. there are still a few "save or suck" spells like feeblemind and such...
 
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Arden

Arden

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At least a few people here are criticizing a system they've never even played, so I'd take that criticism with a pretty big grain of salt.
 
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ziggyholiday

ziggyholiday

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j00t said:
honestly, i think you guys are just being difficult for the sake of it. the average character lvl to be at in order to have 100hp is like... lvl 13 or something? if you're that high and the dm is hitting you with a 2d4 poison, then the issue isn't the rules being easy, it's your dm not understanding appropriate challenge. if you are TRYING to kill your players, it's incredibly easy. all it takes is a roll or two in the DM's favor to royally screw a party. the more players there are at a table, the easier it is for them to win, obviously because it can come down to just simple action economy being so grossly in their favor. but a good DM can create some deathtraps really pretty easily for any size party. deborah ann woll (true blood, daredevil) just started playing a handful of years ago. she DM's and she's really pretty great. one of her signature moves is creating encounters that you cannot simply outroll the DM. the encounters aren't HP sponges, even if it presents itself that way.

there are also modules that are specifically designed to be brutal and unforgiving to your players. one of my weekly games is tomb of annihilation and there are all kinds of traps and puzzles and monsters that will just outright kill players if they aren't playing really well. and even then... out of the 6 players we have, we've had close to 15 characters between us all (in tomb of annihilation, death is permanent. no revive spells will work at all. the entire hook for the story is that revive magic has stopped working, and anyone who has previously been revived in any shape starts withering away). the DM has actually said on multiple occasions that he re-wrote certain encounters because it would have most likely ended in a tpk. so instead of all of us dying, it was only 3/4's of us.

i WILL concede that 5e has basically done away with "save or die" mechanics, which i'm happy with, personally. there are still a few "save or suck" spells like feeblemind and such...
Click to expand...

Ya I was thinking along the same lines. It comes down to appropriate difficulty level.
 
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Pancreas

Pancreas

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I don't think the majority of dms play their monsters very well. Most encounters occur in flat open rooms or fields with unobstructed views. The monster mindlessly attacks one player after another closing into melee range and sitting there until dead.

Most monsters are complete pushovers when presented to the players this way.

However, creating an interesting terrain feature that splits up the battle field, creating regions where monsters can hide, or sneak up, and playing them cautiously and cleverly can drastically increase both the difficulty and the interest factors.
Currently the group I am running is trapped on a boat at sea. The single mast is broken, they are low on supplies and the captain and his mercenaries were killed in a large naval battle when they were ambushed by lizard men riding wyverns and pteranodons. They survived by rowing away from the fight. They were pursued for a while but when it was apparent no one on deck was still alive the riders turned back to the larger battle.

There was a wyvern that was killed on deck and it's corpse was left draped over the bow.

The blood trickling into the water attracted a predator. The bow of the boat got partially crushed when huge tentacles burst from the water and dragged the wyvern corpse off. I almost grabbed several people on deck but everyone rolled really good Dex saves. I did flatten the player playing a kobold though.

They think that what attacked them was a kraken, and they think it's gone. They are wrong on both accounts.

The wyvern will keep it satisfied for a few days, but as long as they are adrift, it will return once it gets hungry.

If they hurt my creature enough it will simply fuck off to the deep to nurse its wounds. I am hoping to eat a player or some NPCs before that happens though. Should be fun.
I like creating encounters that feel more like puzzles than straight up slug fests, although those have their place as well if used sparingly. But my favourite thing is stalking players with monsters and attacking them when them when it makes the most sense for whatever creature it happens to be at that moment. Which is usually the worst possible moment for the players. Those passive perception scores matter. If the monster has even an animal level of self preservation it will attempt to flee when it feels like the fight is unwinnable. Then the players can try their hands at being the hunters. Great way to lead then into an ambush as well.

Ultimately comes down to what the group wants, but I honestly wouldn't be able to handle dming a dungeon crawl with one room after another of enemies just sitting around with a thumb up their ass waiting to get killed. Someone could just roll off some dice in a corner solo if that's all the interaction they wanted.
 
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j00t

j00t

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yeah i totally agree. when i was talking about the dragons earlier, reds have such a scary reputation because their entire statblock is built based on being a straightforward fight. and like you said, that's how a lot of dm's play their monsters so when you line up all the dragons and play them the same way, the reds are going to come out on top. but if you play the dragons how they are designed, greens and blues become very, very scary, very, very quickly.

my dm tends to have a good balance between fights that are designed to eat up our resources and fights that are meant to be won outside of typical combat. even the straightforward fights tend to be dps races (because those can be fun, too).

2 examples, spoilered for length
one time we fought a bunch of fiends that had started attacking some small town church. we were pretty low level and the head priest sort of functioned as like a lvl 4 cleric with limited abilities because he was just an npc, but he was someone our characters definitely had made a connection with. the fiends started showing up one or two a round, then more and more each round. at the end of the day all we had to do to "beat" the encounter was to kill all fiends, but they started showing up faster than we could kill them, and so they started going after commoners in the church and then the head priest. we realized innocents were going to start dying so we had to change our strategy up pretty significantly in order to save as many people as we could. in the end, we only had 1 or 2 losses and the DM gave us some extra rewards for each person we saved. he said the encounter was designed as a Pyrrhic victory, we would win but how many villagers would we have lost in the process. we did way better than he expected and so he rewarded us accordingly.

we also fought some weird demi-god plant thing, i can't remember. the campaign was eldritch themed so it was like an eldritch tree or something. anyway, we fought our way into the main chamber/boss lair and as soon as we attacked it, the entire chamber filled up with fluid. we had to dps this thing down before we all drowned. it didn't have any physically damaging attacks, but these tentacle things would shoot out at us and try to restrain and/or "charm" us. it wasn't trying to hit us to death, it was just trying to slow us down so that we'd drown.

i think when the DM plays monsters like they are their own creatures, and creates encounters that aren't just straight up "here's a big ogre that wants to smash you and he's not going to stop until you're smashed" then it encourages the players to start thinking in those kind of terms as well.

another spoilered example for length
in my current main game, we were basically captured by this high ranking lord of the hells. (homebrew campaign with some homebrew monsters, this one is the greek echidna and her mate typhus the hyrdra). millennia ago, asmodeus imprisoned typhus and echidna and made a deal that he would let them out if she presented him with some hidden super artifact. so she finally was able to narrow down where the pieces were (a staff that was broken into 3 pieces) and kidnapped a bunch of adventuring parties from across the plane to send them to find the pieces. we were one such party but we had made friends with some of the other parties in the past. we all split up and focused on different leads, and blah blah blah we ended up finding all of them. we kept in lose contact as we don't have a cleric in our party but have access to 1 sending spell per day. the group (called the blackhammers, a bunch of surprisingly honorable duergar) that we were the best relations with we ended up together for the very last leg of the whole thing. we had been daisy chaining sending spells basically to help alleviate one group spending 8 spells slots on communicating.

so we are about to do the same thing, send a message to one of the few other groups who had survived the hells to say "hey, we got everything we need, head to the boat we getting out of here" except at the very last minute, our bard decides that he doesn't quite trust the situation (because that's how our DM rolls) and he says "i'm going to cast sending to that group, and tell them where to meet us. but i'm also going to tell them we haven't seen the blackhammers (a lie, they were standing right next to us) so could they use sending to tell them where we are all meeting up."

the DM just smiles. "I am so proud of you." we're like, wtf? what? what's going!?

and he says, "you cast sending and tell them the plan. in a minute the leader of the blackhammers starts cussing loudly and angrily. as it turns out, that group told the blackhammers that everyone was meeting at some ruins about 5 miles east of where your boat is." he's like, i was going to surprise you guys with that, but you figured out IT'S A TRAP!


The Monsters Know What They’re Doing - Ready-to-Use Tactics for D&D 5E
this is actually a pretty good resource for dm'ing monsters and the tactics that makes sense for them
 
Locnar

Locnar

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question because I am very new to R20 and i've seen this come up. What is the deal with "paid" DMs or R20 games you have to tip or pay or wtf ever?

Is that a new thing?
 
A

a_skeleton_05

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Not many people want to DM. Not many of the people that do are good DM's. Not many of those are great DM's. Like anything else in life: If you do something great: Don't do it for free. Some people are happy to pay a great DM to run the game for them and their buddies.

You can see some of the ones that charge do games on twitch, usually in the lower viewership numbers, and the difference between them and the regular Joe DM's is obvious.
 
Qhue

Qhue

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dnd-mlp-1229922 (1).jpeg
 
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Aaron

Aaron

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Seeing as Tolkien imagined a lot of LotR during WWII, I seem to remember that the main inspiration for both Mordor and Orcs were Germany and Hitler's legions.
 
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Sevens

Sevens

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Aaron said:
Seeing as Tolkien imagined a lot of LotR during WWII, I seem to remember that the main inspiration for both Mordor and Orcs were Germany and Hitler's legions.
Click to expand...
Tolkien categorically denied that LoTRs was inspired by or had anything to do with WW2. In fact he hated works of literature that were allegory in nature. He always said all he wanted to do was write a good story about good vs evil with no hidden meaning or agenda.


In his own words:
In a foreword to the second edition of Fellowship of the Rings, J.R.R.Tolkien rebuffed any notion that World War II influenced any part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He wrote: As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical
 
j00t

j00t

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Being inspired by WW2 and his faith isn't the same as basing his stories off them. I mean, shelob very much IS inspired by his own terror of spiders, but what shelob is, isn't based on spiders. It's a subtle difference that can have a pretty wide berth between the two
 
Phanton

Phanton

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You know, obviously I'm not advocating for racism but to white wash it out of a game aimed at being as realistic as possible is fucking dumb. I enjoyed Everquest precisely for that reason. As an Iksar, you'd get fucking killed if you showed your face in other people's lands, unless you somehow proved to that race that you were not like the other lizardmen. The same applies to religion. Cazic-Thule was still a no go in many areas even if you did manage to be tolerated by the guards. It makes for a more dynamic and thought provoking experience if you have your players navigate issues of race and difference in the world. I honestly would like to know what the rationale is in doing this, besides dodging a difficult subject so that people can continue to cosplay carefree without acknowledging an uncomfortable truth about the world we (and thus our D&D campaigns) exist in.
 
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Arden

Arden

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Phanton said:
You know, obviously I'm not advocating for racism but to white wash it out of a game aimed at being as realistic as possible is fucking dumb. I enjoyed Everquest precisely for that reason. As an Iksar, you'd get fucking killed if you showed your face in other people's lands, unless you somehow proved to that race that you were not like the other lizardmen. The same applies to religion. Cazic-Thule was still a no go in many areas even if you did manage to be tolerated by the guards. It makes for a more dynamic and thought provoking experience if you have your players navigate issues of race and difference in the world. I honestly would like to know what the rationale is in doing this, besides dodging a difficult subject so that people can continue to cosplay carefree without acknowledging an uncomfortable truth about the world we (and thus our D&D campaigns) exist in.
Click to expand...

Honest question: are they trying to eliminate "in game" racism, like you are describing? Or are they trying to prevent traditional real world tropes and assumptions that they believe are racist from influencing the game? Because everything I've read seems like the latter- but i fully admit I might not have read something that indicates the former.

Before you guys flip out, I actually have serious issues with both approaches, but like I said, I haven't seen what you are describing (yet).
 
j00t

j00t

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they are pandering to a very vocal minority who want BOTH. they want to get rid of in game racism as well as "racist tropes" that have influenced the game.

the fact of the matter is that even a mediocre DM can understand the nuances of these tropes and use them appropriately (or not at all). in my home game we're playing as a clan of dwarves. during an early part of the campaign a huge chunk of the clan got kidnapped/sold to an underdark city. we had to go and rescue them and we ended up running parallel to a group of duergar. there was a TON of tension between us and them, as there should be, but we basically were forced to work together due to the situation. there was a ton of "we'll most likely kill you in the morning" type conversations but at the end of the day they became kind of recurring characters that we'd run into throughout our adventures and we all became pretty staunch allies.

but if you are a terrible person and just HAVE to virtue signal, that whole story can't exist because diversity.
 
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