Big armies

In my DnD session lat night we had a gigantic battle.  The scenario was us defending a small fortified keep against a swarm of zombies.  I think the people designing the scenario thought we would try to defend each entrance separately and prepare elaborate traps and such, but we decided on a simpler plan.  We sat in the highest room in the tallest tower that had a single trapdoor as an entrance and waited for the zombies to come up the ladder one at a time.  That seemed like the easiest possible way to smash a mindless swarm.

Of course this would be a terribly boring battle to run.  It is an excellent plan in terms of winning, but not much of a plan in terms of being entertaining.

Thankfully even though my character is excellent at coming up with tight plans, he has a tendency to throw away the plan to PEWPEW some enemies.  I flew away through the air and chased down some zombies with fire spells, and the combat became the chaotic flowing mess through the keep that the designers had surely intended.

One issue with this sort of combat is that it can involve way too many combatants and have a lot of boring math.  Our side summoned eight giant owls, and we could have spent hours rolling attacks for the owls and the zombies as they slowly clawed each other to death.  While this would have been correct by the rules, it would have been a tragic waste of our time.  Sometimes Naked Man has run fights on a big scale like this and we have gotten bogged down in endless slogs between summons and enemies that simply aren't fun or interesting.  This time though he nailed it because we refused to roll and came up with a decent approximation.

We decided that given the stats on the owls they would do about 45 damage a round, which is enough to kill 2 zombies.  The owls flew over a pile of zombies and every round 2 zombies were removed.  This solution is quick and accurate enough to preserve the flow of advantage in the battle.

Shoving this sort of thing off to the side is quite useful.  Some of the zombies were fast and deadly, with weapons and special powers.  Rolling out the combats between those zombies and us is worth it, because each attack is meaningful.  Naked Man managed to set up the fight so that the owls and slow zombies had a huge battle off screen (helped by a fireball or two), and the real fight against the tough, interesting opponents got to take centre stage.

This sort of thing is not the easiest to manage.  The game doesn't provide aproximations for these sorts of things, but they are a key component in having a big battle and not having it be a chore.

In the end it was an enjoyable time.  Still, if I were building the game, I would find more ways to make enemy turns quicker.  Fixed damage and singular attacks would definitely figure into the list.  If only somebody had made a game like that... oh wait.

Send in the animals

Last time I talked about the DnD spell Animate Objects, where you attack your enemies with chairs.  This time I want to look at Conjure Animals to see how that spell stacks up.  Conjure Animals is a *lot* more complicated because it gives a similar choice betwen a few big summons or a ton of small ones, but there is a lot of variety in the summons.  Animated objects always have the same stats, but a wolf is not the same as a giant wasp!

The two spells share the same fundamental flaw - the game is balanced around the idea that attacking once for 15 damage is about the same as attacking twice for 10 damage, which is about the same as attacking 8 times for 6 damage.  This idea is patently absurd, but all the summon spells and indeed the entire Challenge Rating system is based upon it.  Yesterday we saw that animating a ton of small objects is vastly superior to a big one, and with animals it is the same.  Pick the big one, you get a huge, tough critter than hits for 10 damage / round.  Pick 8 small animals though, and each of them hits for 5 / round.

Conjure Animals lets you summon 1 CR 2 animal, 2 CR 1 animals, 4 CR 1/2 animals, or 8 CR 1/4 animals.

Animal              CR     Dmg/animal   Total damage

Giant Elk             2             11                11

Brown Bear         1             9                  18

War Horse           1/2          7                  28

Wolf                    1/4         5.5                 44

You see the problem.  Sure, swarms of animals are at risk of being Fireballed, but they deal preposterous damage.  A fighter at level 5 swinging with a big sword probably does about 20 damage a round, and we don't want summon spells to completely replace fighters.  Given that, I think summoning a Giant Elk that is worse than a fighter but has a ton of health is a reasonable thing.  It lasts a full hour, has as many hitpoints as any characters in the group, and some animals have special abilities like flying, tracking, swimming etc that you can leverage.  It is a spell I would happily cast.

However, summoning swarms of weak animals is a huge problem.  If you max out on stuff like wolves your fighters are going to feel utterly useless.  The wolves do several times as much damage as they do, and if the enemies do decide to start chopping through the wolves that is *great*.  The wolves have 88 HP total!  They will still do a ton of damage and save your group a huge amount of incoming damage too.

The solution here is simply to nerf the number of animals you get when you go for lower CR ones.  Instead of doubling the numbers each step down, I would change it from 1,2,4,8 to 1,2,3,4.  Nice and easy, and it actually works out well with the damage numbers.  The CR 2 is the worst still, but at least the others all deal similar overall damage.

The other issue with this spell is that it is extremely overpowered when cast at higher level.  If you level up Fireball from 3rd to 5th level, for example, the damage goes up 25%.  However, if you level up Conjure Animals from 3rd to 5th level, you get *double* the animals.  This is a problem!  It makes all higher level summoning spells a joke compared to Conjure Animals, and uplevelling spells is supposed to be a way of filling in spots, not invalidating high level spells.  The way I would fix this is to make the spell summon 1 more animal of CR 1 at level 5, or one extra CR 2 animal at level 7.  This is still worth doing, but leaves room for actual high level summon spells to compete.

Even after both of these nerfs Conjure Animals is still better than any other summon spell in the book, I think.  At 5th level it deals more damage than the Bigby's Hand or Animate Objects spells, and it makes Conjure Elemental and Mordenkainen's Sword look like ridiculous jokes on multiple fronts.  Even after my suggested nerfs, I think you have to make the types of animals that are summoned be determined by the GM, and have the GM pick weak animals.  I tried to pick the best animal types for my numbers above, but if you instead pick randomly the spell is a lot more fair.  Many of the animals have worse attack routines than the optimized ones above, and that would reduce its power level reasonably.

I like the idea of summoning animals to attack your enemies.  It is also cool that their abilities are based on the abilities of the base creatures.  As usual, the theme is good, but the math sucks.

Send in the chairs

The Animate Objects spell in DnD is thematically great.  You are in the middle of a fight in a workshop, and you cause the bench, a couple of crowbars, and a table to rise up and bash away at your enemies.  You could also use it to help carry people, break stuff, or accomplish other tasks.  Awhile ago MattInTheHat came up with a *fantastic* plan for the spell - he threw some coins at his enemies, telling them to buy some better insults, then animated the coins and bashed them with them.

This was a great dramatic moment.  The coins were marvellously effective.  I eventually picked up the spell myself and paid for a bunch of small metal pieces with my character's initials on them so I could toss them at my enemies and do similar things.  This is all well and good, except that it is hideously unbalanced.

The way the spell works is that you get 10 slots of objects.  The bigger the object, the more slots it takes up, but the more damage it does.  However, tiny objects are a huge outlier in terms of their damage per slot.  Consider the chart below, written against AC 16.

Size    Slots    Damage  Hit      Total Damage  Dam/Slot/Round

Tiny    1          1d4+4     +8              4.225        4.225

Small   1          1d8+2     +6             3.575        3.575

Med     2          2d6+1      +5            4               2

Lrg       4         2d10+2     +6            7.15          1.789

Huge    8         2d12+4      +8           11.05        1.381

The problem is obvious.  The thing that really matters is the damage per slot, and tiny things utterly dominate that metric.  Large things hit hard, but there are so few of them that they do terrible damage.  It feels to me like you ought to want to animate big stuff if you can, but the opposite is true.  You might think that coins are perhaps too small to work, and that is reasonable.  (The spell does not specify.)  However, you could always just have 10 daggers on a bandolier or somesuch, if need be.  

The real thing we ought to figure out is how good *should* the spell be?  I will use the spell Disintegrate to benchmark just how absurd Animate Objects is.  Disintegrate is a single target 6th level spell that does 75 damage with a save to avoid.  Animate Objects, if up levelled from 5th to 6th and used on Tiny objects does 78 damage with attack rolls - quite similar.  However, Disintegrate is a single action, and Animate Objects does that damage every round!  Also Animate Objects uses many attacks that can all smash enemy concentration and also will take attacks of opportunity if they enemy tries to move.

It is clear to me that Animate Objects on tiny objects is completely busted.  It is the best single target attack, and is as powerful as a fighter, but the spellcaster can cast other spells while the objects beat down.

So how do we fix this?  There are two basic approaches - first, to restrict how often you can use it, and second to change the numbers.  The first one would entail insisting that tiny objects be of highly specific sizes.  You could insist that they be the size of a sword, for example, so that having 10 of them on your person is extremely difficult, and thus you could only use Animate Objects under specific circumstances.  Unfortunately there are ways around that - I would probably have a summoned minion carry around a box of swords for me to animate in that case.  This approach also doesn't fix the issue that large objects are terrible.

The other approach is to fix the numbers.  Generally small things have the problem that they have low strength so they do little damage, but these small things have massive dexterity and use dexterity for their damage rolls.  I don't see any reason why we need to shackle ourselves to the listed strength and dexterity numbers.  The tiny object get many attacks, which is especially powerful against casters, so their damage should be the weakest overall.  Large things are harder to come by and are often restricted by their size, so they should hit hard.  Here are my suggested new values:

Size    Slots    Damage  Hit      Total Damage  Dam/Slot/Round

Tiny    1          1d4+1     +5              1.75           1.75

Small   1         1d8          +4             2.025         2.025

Med     2         2d6+2      +6             4.95           2.475

Lrg       4         2d12+3    +7             9.6            2.4

Huge    8         4d12+5    +9            21.7           2.713

These new values look a lot better.  If you have a bunch of small things they are still fantastic at bonking spellcasters many times to disrupt casting.  Their damage is still good, and definitely worth casting.  If you animate big stuff it is worse at disruption, but hits very hard.  (But still not nearly as hard as the base version of the spell on tiny objects.)  Tossing coins at people is a fine thing to do, animating swords does better damage, and finding chairs or tables or anvils to punch people with is better yet.  That feels way more appropriate thematically, and stops this spell from being quite so brutal.  

Having some spells be better than others is fine, but you have to keep the best ones from dominating everything.  Fireball, for example, is so overpowered that it is often the best thing to cast in a single target situation, even though it is obviously designed for AOE.  That is a problem.  Animate Objects, as written, is similar.  It is supposed to be a spell you maintain over many turns, but it is actually the best one shot single target attack.... and then it keeps doing that every turn.

Next I may tackle Conjure Animals, which has many of the same problems that Animate Objects does.  Summoning a horde of wolves or bears delivers absurd damage in the same way, because the game is designed around the idea that 4 attacks for 10 each is about as good as 1 attack for 20.

Cash money

Naked Man and I often lock horns about money.  Not real world money though, just the currency that we use in our RPGs.  Recently we have been talking about how our characters interact with gold and how we would like for it to work.  NM loves the idea of gold mattering to characters.  He is a big fan of them seeking out treasure to buy the things they want, keeping track of expenses, and budgeting.  In his ideal world we would each keep track of exactly how many coins we have of each denomination and have fun collecting old and obscure currencies that we can then try to convert into more useful coinage.

I, on the other hand, built a whole roleplaying system where player wealth is described simply by Destitute - Poor - Professional - Landowner - Mayor - Royal - Monarch.  What level you are at tells you what stuff you can buy and what you can own.

I often give NM trouble because in our DnD game I do a lot of rounding of money and don't bother to keep meticulous track of it.  I also complain about pricing of things when those prices don't make sense to me.  For example, early on we ended up in a big city and I wanted to learn spells.  The prices seemed ludicrous to me, because to learn a single level 1 spell was 1000g.  1000g could buy me a decent magical item, so the idea that it cost 1000g to just look at someone else's spellbook for an hour seemed absurd to me.  Who in the world is paying those prices?  The person selling the spells doesn't even expend anything when they make a sale!  These strange prices often come up because we are combining sources from a variety of editions, some of which are decades old.  This leads to some strange situations.

For example, in our last session we suddenly got rich.  Up until this point we had accumulated roughly 30,000g between all of us.  About half had been spent on various things like spell research and magic items, and the rest we were carrying around in cash.  In this session we sold a bunch of items we had gotten in our recent adventure for a total of 70,000g.  50,000g of that was in just 2 items that we were selling because they weren't much use.  It makes sense in the lore of the world that these items would be valuable and sought after - they had a history and were completely unique.  Unfortunately that windfall makes it hard for us to take money seriously otherwise.

How do you make yourself worry about small change when you randomly stumble upon single items worth as much as all the loot you have ever seen?  I think DnD has always had this sort of problem because as you level up you find more and more expensive and powerful things, and this leads to out of control inflation from the perspective of characters.  

It is hard to worry about spending 100g on something when you will randomly open a box and find 10,000g in it!

This trouble is exascerbated by our current campaign style.  We are on the clock trying to save the world from apocalypse.  Adventurers that take long breaks and choose their missions based on monetary rewards can interact with world economics in fun ways.  Do we go fight the ogres, which is easy, or do we delve into the lich's tomb, which is dangerous, but probably much more rewarding?  That is a good question.  However, our adventures are often part of saving the world and so we don't have a lot of choice.  Chasing ogres for cash isn't happening.  I suspect that interesting monetary dilemmas are extremely hard to maintain in a race to avoid armageddon.

One thing NM has wanted is for spell components to be expensive.  He likes the idea of spells that have expensive components that we have to either find or pay for as a way to bleed off some of our money.  That works for me, but it is a tricky balance to strike.  Recently I came upon a bunch of spells, some of which had expensive components.  However, the spells were extremely weak, much worse than other ones that didn't have any extra cost.  That isn't going to make for any interesting decisions - why would I pay 1000g to cast an inferior spell?

After some back and forth NM decided to improve those spells and suddenly there were some interesting choices.  A few of the spells were decidedly more powerful than similar free ones, or at least offered a unique perk.  I like that situation, as it lets me choose between free spells or spending cash on something new and exciting.  I have to decide what to prepare each day, so I face the challenges of figuring out when I will need the big guns and getting ready to spend resources on them.

There are ways to make gold interesting in a fantasy RPG, but I don't know that they end up being worth the effort.  When I think about fantasy stories none of them ever involve the characters taking months off to go fight trivial opponents to collect cash.  That isn't a bulletproof argument though, because we aren't playing a book, we are playing a game, and these are different things.  

When I am running games I don't think I am willing to put in the effort to build a complete economic system for the players to interact with.  It is just too much, and I am not interested in something half baked.  NM, on the other hand, seems dead set on including an economics simulator in his fantasy RPG.

Going walkabout

I recently finished running some gamers through a one shot scenario in my roleplaying game Heroes By Trade.  Overall they seemed to have a great time, and the experience gave me some insight into one particular rule in DnD that I did not include in Heroes By Trade.  Naked Man gave me a lot of flak for not having it, but now that I have seen people's reactions I am sure I made the right decision.

That rule is attacks of opportunity.  The basic idea is that if you do something that leaves you open your opponents can take advantage and bash you.  That outline looks fine, but the way DnD implements it is disastrous.  The key problem is that 'leaving yourself open' includes simply walking away from the enemy.

This means that once a melee character closes in, you are stuck next to them.  This is especially true if the melee character has a single huge attack, because often you lose half of your HP if you move away, so you are trapped next to them for the duration of the battle.  

I can see where this comes from.  Old DnD fighter design was that fighters walked up to people and bashed them.  They had no options, no choices.  If a ranged character was a bit faster they could simply walk away and keep on shooting and the poor fighter was absolutely wrecked.  It seems kind of silly that a ranged character who is slightly faster can so trivially defeat a melee type, so the designers decided to make it punishing for anyone to walk away from a melee combatant.  Walk away, you get smashed.

They solved the problem wrong.

The problem is that melee types have no options.  You don't solve that by locking down ranged people so that *nobody* has any options!  You solve it by giving melee characters meaningful ways to keep people in range.  Unfortunately the solution they went with is to keep fighters mind numbingly boring and make it extremely hard to maneuver around a battlefield.  Once people lock swords, everyone stands in a pile fighting.  

The players in my test game were DnD veterans.  When a monster walked next to them they wanted to move away, and then looked at me with big, sad eyes, asking if they were going to take an attack of opportunity.  I said no, because my game doesn't have such a thing.  Their faces lit up with glee, and they moved around the battlefield to find a better vantage point.  The players clearly wanted to wander, and in Heroes By Trade you can.

Of course you do have to solve the problem of melee being trivially defeated by ranged folks who keep on running away.  My solution is to give melee options.  They can knock a ranged person down, preventing them from running and making them easy to bash.  They can grab a slippery caster, keeping them within reach.  They can dash madly across the battlefield to get in position to thump.  They can't always do all of these things of course, compromises must be made, but they have ways to keep a ranged enemy pinned down, just as the ranged enemy has ways to escape.

I am extremely pleased with my choices, particularly after seeing the results in this game.  Players have a lot more fun when they are actively involved.  It is more exciting to choose to use Immobilizing Shot to pin an enemy in place that to simply walk next to them and have attacks of opportunity keep them close.

People want to make choices, to have control over their fate.  They also like to be able to run around in a fight and do exciting things.  Attacks of opportunity prevent both of these things.  Good riddance.

Multi pronged attack

Back in the day when I was running DnD campaigns I would try to have monsters make multi pronged attacks.  I found that if all the monsters were just beating on the characters trying to reduce their HP to zero, the fight wasn't that interesting.  You can have multipronged attacks by simply having archers shooting at the party while melee beaters run in from another angle, but that still lets the party respond in fairly simple ways.

I much preferred making the extra attacks entirely different from the main one.  For example, on monster could be grappling characters trying to swallow them, while the other is reducing their Charisma score.  Is it more of a problem that someone gets chewed on, or that their essence is drained away?  Not an easy thing to figure out!  You can also have enemies trying to execute prisoners, set fire to houses, or any number of other things.  Forcing the party to balance threats that are orthogonal to one another makes for exciting gameplay.

We had an entertaining example of a multipronged attack in my DnD game with Naked Man last week.  We hopped through a portal and were immediately attacked by a group of Shadows, a Ghost, and Wraith.  The Shadows drain Strength, the Ghost possesses people, and the Wraith bashes down.  The Wraith was fairly predictable in that it was attacking our HP, which scales with level.  The Shadows attack our Strength though, and that is a stat that doesn't improve as we level up.  Our defenses against Shadows stay basically the same from level 1 to 20, but since we are higher level encounters contain ever greater numbers of them.

This situation leads to some silly circumstances.  If we encounter the Shadows in a big room, I Fireball their end of the room and they all die instantly.  Trivial encounter.  This time though we were in a tiny space, surrounded on all sides.  The Shadows started draining our Strength and AOE effects were not usable.  We could have easily had someone die on round 1 with nothing they could do about it, against monsters that are rated to be utterly trivial to us at this point.

It ended up that we used a lot of resources fighting off all the undead, but we did win.  The issue is that the battle was so binary.  Both sides can wipe the other out nearly instantly without any recourse.  This just isn't true for other weak monsters like orcs, which have the same difficulty assigned to them as a Shadow, but who are no threat whatsoever to a high level party like ours.

The Ghost gave us real trouble too.  Being able to possess one of our people and fight against us is a devastating blow, especially when we have no idea at all how to stop it.

I love the idea of one monster bashing, one monster messing with brains, and a third group of monsters attacking in another totally different way.  However, I don't know that it worked out as well as we could have hoped.  Being possessed doesn't give you a lot of fun choices.  In a computer game it would be fun, as the player still would control 3 characters.  However, being taken out of the battle with a single roll before you get a turn isn't great.  Nobody wants to sit out a long, intricate encounter entirely.

The glass cannon Shadows didn't work out that well either.  We summoned some critters to distract them, and Naked Man was left with a choice.  He could have the Shadows ignore our summons and beat on us, in which case he probably wipes out a character, or maybe all of us.  Alternatively he could have the Shadows attack the summoned monsters, which pretty much removes the Shadows from the fight entirely.  Neither answer is particularly satisfying, and it comes from Shadows being set up in a binary all or nothing sort of way.  He chose to have the Shadows bash on our summoned critters and we beat the fight.  I think that is the better choice, but he obviously didn't like it.

It is a tricky thing to evaluate.  I love the idea of multipronged attacks, but without customizing monsters to the party it seems quite difficult to make the reality match the fantasy.  DnD has this thing where characterse get better at resisting HP reduction with level, but most other sorts of attacks are just as good at high level as at low level, and that puts encounter designers in a weird place.  If you don't attack HP, your critters are locked into being trivial or deadly, with almost no room for challenging in the middle.

Silly secrets

Secret doors are silly.

This isn't a universal truth, but it is where we have arrived due to extreme overuse of the trope.  When playing DnD or other similar games I can absolutely imagine secret doors being used in ways that are fun and immersive.  In the creepy old manor occupied by a vampire there could be a secret prison located in the basement, but the only easy way to get there is a secret door located behind a bookcase that leads to a tiny stairway.  That scenario works.

The problem is that somebody saw a secret door in a movie or something and decided that they had to put a couple of those in their DnD module.  Then somebody else saw that, and decided to put six secret doors in *their* module.  After years of this we are stuck with games that assume that there will be secret doors scattered everywhere, and no adventure is complete without them.

This progression takes the secret door from a memorable event to an annoyance.  Searching every room for secret doors is drudgery, and leaves the game feeling stale.  A secret door should be a singularly exciting event, not 

"Okay, we search the room for secret doors.  Not because we have *any* reason to think there is one, but becasue they are absolutely everywhere so we search everything for secret doors."

"You find a secret door."

"Fine, mark it on the map, moving along."

What great adventure, such excitement!

A good rule of thumb is that if the characters will never remember finding the secret door, nor care about where it leads, it shouldn't exist.  Solving the puzzle to figure out which piece of the intricate fireplace to push on to get to the secret laboratory is a fine thing to do.  Finding a generic secret door in a featureless wall that goes straight to the next room and which has absolutely no reason to exist is boring and pointless.

This is largely true of all kinds of things in gaming.  If the players have an optimal choice that they should always take you should automate it away.  This is especially true if making that choice takes time at the table to resolve and isn't exciting or fun.  Figuring out a puzzle to open a secret door embedded into a fireplace - fun!  Rolling to see if you find a secret door in every featureless chunk of wall - awful.

The solution is one that scenario designers and GMs have to implement.  No secret doors unless they are rare, unique, and engaging.  If you aren't describing something that catches player interest, and if they aren't legitimately surprised to find it, cancel that secret door and just put a regular door.  I know that every scenario designer wants to surprise players with new and unexpected things.  Unfortunately secret doors have been so overused that they don't fill that function anymore; we need something different and fresh to entertain our jaded, cynical brains.

An ordered list

When I first saw 5th edition DnD I thought its handling of magic items was excellent.  In older editions magic items got complicated and felt a lot more like an optimization problem than like a fantasy adventure.  Characters had to be decked out in magic top to bottom, and had a variety of slots that needed to be filled.  You needed magic boots, magic belt, 2 magic rings, magic hat, etc.  Fantasy stories don't have these absurd numbers of magic items, and this felt to me like it could be better.  5th edition simply has 3 slots for magic items, which reduces the total number of items you need.  I liked that plan.  

I don't like the plan much anymore.  At low levels those 3 slots aren't relevant because you don't have enough magic items.  At medium levels you swap magic items around the party until everyone has their 3 slots full.  At high levels new magic items either are better than your current ones and bump an old one off, or they are useless.  In my campaign with Naked Man we regularly find new items that he is excited to tell us about, consider them, and then try to figure out how much money we can sell them for.  Everyone already has their 3 items, so a new item with niche use or which simply isn't that powerful is worthless.

I can't even save up for later.  I know that I will have 3 attunement slots now and will never get more, so if an item is bad, no point in keeping it.  I do want characters to have different values for items, but a system where most new acquisitions are met with 'meh, I guess we can sell it' isn't working well.

Characters pretty much have an ordered list of magic items, and everything below 3rd place is junk.  That doesn't have to be the case.  Right now the system is bad - it doesn't matter at low level, is okay at medium level, and is bad again at high level.  We should start with 1 slot and go up to 5 or so over time.

A conversation with Naked Man left me thinking about how to implement this.  One thing he pointed out, which is entirely true, is that many characters make their last meaningful advancement choice at level 3.  After that they just use feats to buff stats and continue to get the abilities that are listed.  No other choices are made.

We can potentially solve both of these problems simultaneously.  Feats have the trouble that there are a few great ones and a ton of rubbish ones.  Improving all the terrible feats so that characters consistently take them would be useful - raw stats should be a default just in case you happen to hate all the listed stuff, not the standard thing everyone does.  Right now though I don't want to rewrite all the feats.  

Instead I think I should simply add a new feat to the game:  Mighty Spirit.  Add 1 to your total number of magic item slots.  In addition to this I would also start slots at 1 instead of 3.  Of course this needs to be counterbalanced by giving characters more feats.  My initial thought is to add new feats at level 6, 10, 14, and 18.  This would mean that a player who wanted to take tons of weird feats is welcome to, people who just want more stats can do that, and somebody who wants to have a huge number of magic items can make that happen.

While taking another copy of Mighty Spirit doesn't sound exciting in itself, it opens up some really cool options.  When you take it you aren't just increasing a number, you are adding some powerful new abilities to your character.  By the time peopel are high level they likely all can use a bunch of magic items, but the degree to which this happens is player controlled, giving them more impactful choices.

I want magic items to feel impactful.  I want people to have real choices later in character life that matter, and aren't just +2 to a stat.  I think we can do these things at the same time.

Flappy flap

Lately I have been playing some DnD with a couple of people using an alternate race that grants flight.  They are a type of Tiefling, decended from both human and infernal creatures, and their bat-like wings allow them to fly around.  They do lose out on standard Tiefling abilities to get flight, but as anyone who has ever tried to GM a game with a flying character in it can tell you, flight is busted and is vastly superior to other racial abilities.

The counter argument is usually that at level 5 a Wizard can cast Fly.  That holds no water though because this costs a memorization slot, one of your few high level spells for the day, only lasts a short time, and can cause you to fall to your death if you fail a Concentration roll.  It also doesn't address the issue that flying destroys a huge percentage of encounters and challenges that characters deal with from levels 1-4.

We definitely found flying to be a serious balance issue in our games so far.  I certainly think it needs adjustment but which adjustment exactly is tricky.  A lot of GMs just flat out ban flying races, and I think that is a fine solution.  You could build a race that flew but was packaged with hideous restrictions to go along with it, but honestly I don't think that would be much fun.  The problem is that flying destroys so many basic assumptions about the challenges in the game that you can't just fix it by making the character otherwise useless.  It would still end up that the flying character automatically defeats whole swaths of the game by themselves, and then does nothing otherwise.  Hardly interesting.

Our flying characters were able to avoid traps effortlessly, hover in the air using ranged attacks to trivialize enemies, and evade spell effects.  This sort of thing can be solved by making a set of rules about how flying works that are restrictive in reasonable ways.  For example, characters with flying want to be able to hover in place, fly straight up, swap direction instantly, and perform tasks without any hindrance.  None of that needs to be true, and in fact it seems kind of absurd when you consider what flight looks like on a large bird.

A hummingbird can do all that stuff, but hummingbirds are tiny and eat stupendous amounts of food to accomplish their feats of aerial magic.  A flying character is going to look a lot more like an oversized pelican weighed down by a ton of gear.  No hovering for them!

I imagine the following rules for flying characters.

1.  You can only ascend at 1/3 of your flying speed.  

2.  While aloft, you must take a move each round for your full flying speed or fall.  

3.  You need at least a 20 foot wide space to turn in.

4.  All attacks made while flying are at disadvantage, and all spell casts require a Concentration check or the action is wasted and the spell is lost.

5.  You can carry at most 5*Str pounds of gear while flying.

This makes you feel not like an attack helicopter or a hummingbird, but rather a big clunky flappy bird that can get aloft if you need to.  You can still get up to the tower to grab the thingie when your companions would have to climb.  You can scout effectively and avoid many outdoor hazards.  You can even engage melee opponents from on high, though the penalty to attacks and spells makes this much less effective.  These are significant advantages.

What you can't do is constantly be out of reach so your friends have to soak all the attacks.  You can't just zoom around ignoring all area control type spells.  You can't launch yourself through tiny dungeon corridors, attacking enemies at will then dodging out of reach again.  

This ruleset means that outdoors, outside of combat, flying has huge advantages.  This feels right!  It should be great in that situation.  In a fight though being a bipedal creature with big clunky wings just isn't an advantage unless your opponents are totally unable to attack someone in the air.  In the tight corridors of a dungeon wings aren't much use at all, except perhaps for gliding over a pit of spikes.

That feels, to me at least, like a good spot.  I would still love to have flying, and I think it would still be the absolute best racial ability, but it won't break most combat encounters and it will be situational.

When I built Heroes By Trade I included a race with wings, but their wings weren't strong enough for flight.  They could slow their fall easily and thus jump down from any height, and even run on water for short distances using their wings to help out.  Players found this useful and thematic, but it never broke anything.  That might be my best answer yet if someone really wants wings, though I suspect that most people that want wings really do want to take off into the wild blue yonder.

How not to be stunned forever

My group has completed the Tomb of Horrors.  The second half of the dungeon was even more absurd than the first half, if that is possible.  We crushed our way through it avoiding nearly all of the traps by holding our breath, touching things with magical forces instead of our bodies, and having trap and magic scanning going at all times.  We came extremely close to losing someone to a ridiculous crushing room trap, but thankfully the monk's reflexes were enough to save us.

Finally we came up against the lich at the bottom of the dungeon.  Time for an epic battle!  It was a battle we certainly should lose, by the numbers.  The lich in its lair is a CR 23 encounter, and our group is only level 12.  However, we have a few things going for us that aren't at all normal.  Our rogue had a sword that does extra damage to undead and converts all the damage dealt to radiant damage.  This blade is ridiculous because it bypasses all weapon damage reduction and just ruins undead, like a lich.  We also had multiple characters with the lucky feat because we knew that nasty saving throws were going to happen and we wanted rerolls on those.

The lich led off by instantly killing one character and fearing the rest.  Our rogue chopped in, hitting for half of the lich's hit points in a single attack, so the lich fired a DC 19 Charisma save at the rogue, and the resulting failure meant the rogue was disintegrated.  On round 2 we had half the party dead!  

As I was playing a cleric I decided to just pour on the radiant damage attacks, but this was a foolish endeavour.  The lich, like many legendary opponents, has the ability to ignore three failed saving throws and choose to make them instead.  It also has the ability that if it makes a saving throw, it won't take any damage from the attack that hit it.  Unfortunately we had nobody else forcing saving throws, so the lich was effectively immune to my character.  I could eventually cast enough times at it to get through its three free saves, but it would definitely have killed me by that point.

Thankfully I wasn't actually needed in this fight.  Our melee warlock ran in and bashed the lich to death with a hammer and we won.  One character I managed to bring back from death, the other was gone.  This is an excellent result for a CR 23 at 12th level, but the fight felt extremely frustrating to me.

Here is the thing:  Legendary monsters need some way to avoid being destroyed by save or die attacks.  If they just have normal saving throw numbers, parties will toss endless saves at them and the monster will fail some and be incapacitated for the entire fight.  Slowly beating a monster to death while it is Held / Stunned / Tripped / whatever does not make for a climatic battle scene.  You need to avoid this.  One way would be to simply give legendary monsters outrageous save numbers so they can't fail.  That has the problem that all spells with saves are literally useless, and honestly feels pretty silly.  Players would absolutely have to metagame and refuse to use anything that has a save.  You could also give the monsters incredible hit point totals so they live 20 rounds and the players run out of saves to toss at them, but that makes the fight interminable and wretched.

The solution of 3 free saves though is a pretty crappy one.  If you have a party full of people who toss out saves the opponent will quickly run through their free saves and then get wrecked.  If you have only one person who tosses out save effects though, that person is completely unable to do anything.  The brawlers can do their normal bashing routine, and the people who use attack rolls for spells are fine, but all spells with saves are right out.  That is not a great mechanic at all.

One solution is building a game where groups don't regularly have access to huge numbers of save or be incapacitated effects.  Monks are the worse offenders I have seen, as they can force enemies to save 4 times in a single round.  This usually results in a trivial fight where the big scary boss stands there stunned until it dies.  That just isn't fun.  Sure, the character gets to feel powerful, but 'We wrecked it, super easy' is not the epic story we want to tell.

Another way to do it would be to give legendary monsters advantage on all saves so they get to roll twice.  That is still a huge benefit, and makes saving throw based attacks fairly weak, but it feels so much better to have a chance of doing something instead of no chance at all.  Full immunities suck.  This style would mean that at least you would know that firing off save effects at bosses is unlikely to work, but if it happens to get through it is devastating.  That seems much better to me.

A third approach could be to simply make legendary enemies immune to stun / paralyze and other similarly crushing effects.  Those monsters don't need to be massively resistant to fireball, or being tripped by a fighter, or other similar things.  The real problem is just them being taken out of the fight, and dealing with that directly would be a far better solution than the 3 free saves mechanic.

This whole problem set is just an extension of DnD 5th edition's insistence on going back to nostalgia instead of building something new.  4th edition didn't have this same problem because we didn't have lots of abilities that took people out like we do in 5th.  Monsters got to take actions even if the players really unloaded on them.  I want to fuss at the 5th edition designers about this, because it shows up all over the place.  Unfortunately I have missed the boat on that particular change by a bunch of years now, and I don't see them changing it to suit me.

A pit of lava

 Today myself, Naked Man, and some friends set out to conquer the Tomb of Horrors.  The Tomb is an old DnD adventure written before I was born.  I have never looked at it, but I have heard many a tale about its outstanding implausibility and lethality.  The stories did not lead me astray.  We only got about 2/3 though the thing, but it is definitely the pinnacle of absurd funhouse dungeons that try to kill characters in the most over the top ways possible.

I had a fun time playing.  The group is great.  However, the dungeon is a silly mess that I couldn't take seriously.  

I actually went into the session figuring it would be brief.  Everyone else seemed to be sold on the idea that if their characters died to something they would just bring in a new one and keep going.  I wasn't into that idea at all.  If we aren't going to die to the dungeon, why bother playing in the deadliest dungeon?  If we are going to go for nonsense deathtraps, then let us actually respect them and let the heroes die.  If I die, I am out, and I go home.

But we didn't die.  None of us even came all that close, really.  We are all in good shape and have lots of resources left at this point, most of the way through the dungeon.  I am sure it gets even more dangerous near the end, so I expect us to have a TPK next session, but we could live, you never know.

In the first hallway we found a Sphere of Annihilation sitting in a carving, 5 gigantic poisoned pit traps, a dart trap, a switch trap, and a teleporter that sent us to all kinds of different places.  In the first hallway!  You might imagine that a dungeon designer who had access to 'teleport anywhere' as well as 'anti magic zone' and 'undetectable trap' could easily dispose of any interlopers, but this dungeon was clearly built by an idiot who merely wanted to inconvenience invaders, not actually stop them.

For example, one trap is a hallway with an illusion of weak enemies fleeing in fear.  If you enter the hallway, the entire 13 meter length of hallway turns into a slide, sending everyone on it into a pit of lava.  We know that the lich could simply have teleported us all into the lava.  But they didn't.  They could have put the lava under or above the hallway, killing us all easily.  But no.  They made sure to make a trap that is both preposterous and also not necessarily lethal.  They also made sure to make the mechanics of it completely ridiculous.  How exactly does a chunk of rock that big shift like that?   How is everything nearby not destroyed by the lava?  "Magic", obviously.

From a game standpoint, instantly lethal traps that you can't avoid aren't much fun.  From an immersion standpoint, an opponent with godlike power, unmatched intelligence, immense time to prepare, and home ground advantage should be unbeatable.  The sensible way that this situation plays out is that the lich inhabiting the Tomb simply murders us without any effort at all.  Instead the lich is a bumbling fool, wasting their power and resources on fruitless endeavours, because that way our party has a chance.

One issue with a place this full of secret doors and traps is that it encourages wretched, boring play.  We have a rogue with incredible Perception and Investigation skills, so he automatically finds everything.  We have a warlock who casts Detect Magic at will, so every single magical effect is found immediately.  In each corridor and each room we promptly find all the magic and all the traps, but everything takes a long time to do because we have to keep talking about searching with our powers on every single thing.  We can't just move down a corridor - we have to slowly walk, talking about investigating each thing we find.  Tedium, not fun.

If, for example, you have the Find Traps spell but can only cast it a few times a day, that is interesting.  You have to pick the right spot to use it, and conserve resources.  But constant, always on detection simply means that there is temporal overhead, and every single thing we do has to be framed in "I stare around the room Perceptively!"  Detect Magic is the worst offender here.  I would personally remove it from the game completely because I think it torpedoes fun, but at least it should always cost something.  I understand the appeal of making players think about the things they find, and consider how to handle them, but you don't encourage this by just filling every corridor with pits of spikes that the players defeat with tedium - you include evocative descriptions that they can interact with in normal, sensible ways.  Avoid things that require the GM to say "Well, it works because Magic."

I am glad I got to try out this thing.  I like playing with these people.  But geez, what a badly designed mess this thing is.

I did not cast Fireball

Dungeons and Dragons is back on!  DnD is not the easiest activity to do while a pandemic is in place, but we have managed to make it work by sitting outdoors at a substantial distance from one another.  It seemed like it might be a total mess, but it actually has worked out just fine so far.

As usual though, I am causing Naked Man, my GM, no end of headaches.

Our first session back we were slogging our way through a funhouse dungeon in search of a MacGuffin.  After many traps and terrible monsters we found ourselves decending down a series of underground waterfalls to the bottom of the complex.  It was an arduous and dangerous journey down, and at the bottom we encountered a pack of undead ghouls.

Usually this would be where I would say "I cast Fireball" and we would roll initiative.  Before I could get to that though one of the ghouls and our party Bard started chatting one another up.  It seemed there might be some useful information to be gathered, so I played along, trying to get the ghoul to tell us useful things.

Talking worked!  The ghoul revealed the MacGuffin, and we managed to convince it that we were perfectly fine with it going to the world above to murder and destroy.  It planned to visit the surface and after inflicting terrible mayham and destruction it wanted to go back and bring the entire ghoul race up to continue the slaughter.  Somehow we convinced it that we weren't bothered by this, and we agreed as a group to use the MacGuffin.

Naked Man was perplexed.  He had expected us to murder the ghoul and take the MacGuffin, and began planning the inevitable sneak attack the ghoul would inflict on us at the worst possible time.

I knew that a backstab was going to happen.  No doubt at all.  But one thing I know for sure is that if there is going to be backstabbing, I am going to backstab first!

I told the ghoul that I wanted to cast a spell on the MacGuffin so we could figure out how to use it.  It said to me "You aren't going to cast a spell to engulf us in fire, are you?"  Naturally I answered "Well, that is exactly the sort of thing I could do, but I won't!"  This answer seemed to satisfy it, and Naked Man leaned forward eagerly, wondering what sort of divination I would cast.  I certainly wasn't going to Fireball them.  We were roleplaying, figuring things out with guile and trickery, not just blasting our way through!

I cast Wall of Force instead, and encased the ghoul in a bubble.  That way we could murder all of its friends while it stood there helpless.  A thinking man's gambit, not some clumsy Fireball!

We blew up the rest of the ghouls, and then let the named ghoul out of the bubble and killed it too.

Naked Man was flabbergasted, as apparently I had totally sold him on my willingness to be chummy with an undead monster planning a full scale undead invasion from the cold dark.  No way was I *ever* going to go back up that waterfall with a pile of undead in tow, just hoping they don't start chewing on me halfway up!

I totally respect the choice to turn an obvious fight into a roleplaying encounter.  That is fantastic.  But you gotta remember that players are rarely going to negotiate with the vanguard of an invading army in good faith, especially when that vanguard is undead.

Also having thought more about it I shouldn't have cast Wall of Force.  Fireball would have been far better.

Finally I should note that the ghoul told us nothing of use.  If I had just Fireballed it at the outset we would know just as much useful information.  So much for clever play.  It amazes me how often I think "I should just Fireball, screw this roleplaying" and it turns out after much roleplaying that I really should just have Fireballed from the outset.  

I did it again

Many years ago I was in a DnD campaign where I caused a lot of problems.  The GM had a fairly sedate pace for us much of the time with lots of travel, so characters with spells got many opportunities to use them.  DnD is unfortunately balanced around groups having many fights in a single day, so this ended up being a bit of a problem.  I was playing a cleric and so with the slow pace (which it should be noted, I quite like) I was able to always use all my best spells and be overly powerful in combat.  If we had done standard dungeon crawls with tons of pointless, contrived fights to drain away my spells things would have been more balanced, but that wasn't the sort of game we were playing.

We also had issues with me solving all the problems we encountered with some spell or other.  We were playing with all the expansions and extra books at the time, so whenever some difficult situation showed up I was free to peruse all the cleric spells ever printed to find the one that would trivialize it.  We got to the point where when we found a difficult situation the other characters would look at me expectantly, assuming I would suggest sleeping for the night so I could memorize the spell that would whisk us safely past the obstacle.  I busted us through a stone wall with Stone Shape, summoned creatures to scout or carry us, and made us immune to all kinds of other things.  It was frustrating for the GM I am sure, because it made so many of his creative works fall down flat.

This wasn't much fun for the other players, I think, and it felt kind of silly to me too.  I can't just look at the solution to a problem and do nothing just so somebody else can try something far inferior, so I decided to retire my cleric and take up a paladin instead.  I still could cover the healing role, but my spell list was much more restricted to simple bashing and healing so other problems could still pose a threat.

Recently I concluded that my crossbow specialist in my 5th edition DnD game was too good.  Other characters could do similar damage to me under ideal conditions, but I could do my damage to any target on the map, while they had to run about and struggle with rounds where they could do nothing at all.  I also had the ability to burst out huge chunks of damage on command which they did not.  Like before, I retired my character to let everyone else have a better chance to be the big hero.

I decided to start up a cleric instead, so I could take over the healing and buffing while other characters did the beatdown.  I settled on a Light cleric because the roleplaying stuff behind this seemed to fit.  The first fight we stepped into was against trolls, which regenerate like crazy until you apply fire damage to them.  Light clerics also get lots of fire spells so I used Wall of Fire, Flaming Sphere, and Scorching Ray to blast them with fire.  Our melee people got to deal a lot of damage, but nothing like the carnage I was laying out with my burnination.

The next fight was supposed to be a deadly confusing mess with our group and a pile of allies being ambushed in the dark by a bunch of gnolls with night vision.  A big part of the challenge was the vision disparity with our allies being overwhelmed by foes they could not see nor effectively fight.  Just before the gnoll attack hit, I used Daylight and filled the entire battle area with bright light, completely negating the surprise attack and giving all of my allies light to see by.  We brutally crushed the gnoll attack and sent them fleeing with their entire leadership wiped out.

Our next fight is for the following day, and I already have another spell lined up to completely trivialize it.  The enemy force we face is overwhelmingly powerful, and although we have allies with us we would be crushed if we fought them in open combat.  Thankfully I expect to be able to defeat all of them without any danger at all because I have a day to prepare just the perfect response.

For much of this campaign we have had barrages of fights every day and I wouldn't have been overpowered as a cleric.  Now we are back to 1 encounter per day, and my new cleric is dismantling them by employing the cleric spell list to its greatest possible effect.

I don't know if Naked Man, my GM, likes the creativity I bring to the problems he presents to us, or if he finds this all kinds of frustrating.  My fellow adventurers certainly love the way we stay alive, but they also surely grumble at the way I solve all the problems.  Now the only question is whether or not Naked Man will respond to my arrogance towards our latest problem by trying to kill me off once and for all.

A fresh new adventure

I am going to be GMing a fantasy gaming campaign again for the first time in a while.  I have made a couple of stabs at running games for Pinkie Pie, but they always ended quickly for one reason or another.  This time it is a game for 5 players who are all adults, so my standards for people's effort are going to be way higher, and hopefully we will get some exciting times in.  The last time I did this was probably around ten years ago, so there is definitely some rust to shake off.

It is weird running a game for people you don't know.  Normally the GM takes charge and organizes things, but I wandered into this gig without having met some of the players at all.  That makes things... tricky!  With people I know it is easier to know how much to push for things, and what I can expect.  Hard to do that without experience with the players.

Also I managed to totally avoid taking my own advice about setting up a game.  I have often said that it is trivial to get a bunch of people to say they want to play DnD.  The interesting part comes in actually hammering out a schedule that has you meet regularly.  My theory is that you should pick the schedule first and get players based on that.  Don't just invite six people and then hope you can all meet up, that is a recipe for meeting twice over six months and giving up.  First pick a schedule, and then choose players that can meet it.

I apparently didn't do that, and we are scheduled to meet once a month.  This usually shakes out to meeting once every two to three months, so I am dubious.  But it is too late to do anything about that now, so I will run it and hope that my worries are unfounded.

One of the issues with this campaign is that my stuff is all at Naked Man's house.  I took my miniatures back and forth to games at his place for awhile, then ended up just leaving them all with him.  So it went with my battle mat and my markers too.  I am going to have to confiscate many of my things to go to this new game and that will leave Naked Man's house sorely lacking in materials, as much of the stuff that he uses actually belongs to me.

I would just buy more miniatures, but the $5 price tag for each one gets me every time.  How can such a small thing cost so much?

The last thing that is making this all exciting is that the people aren't actually going to be playing DnD... they are going to be playing my game, Heroes By Trade.  I expect they will enjoy it and I am confident in the work I have done, but there is always a bit of extra pressure when both the in person experience and the game mechanics themselves are something you have personally created.

I do love to see my creations in action though, so that part of it has me pumped up.

The deck. Again.

I have had The Deck Of Many Things show up in a variety of my gaming campaigns over the years.  For those not familiar, The Deck is a powerful artifact with absurd abilities.  You draw a card, and then based on which card you draw, crazy stuff happens.  You could be instantly killed, get a wish, be granted treasure, have monster spawn to murder you, among other things.  Usually The Deck showing up ended with some characters destroyed and the campaign totally derailed.

People do love their random draws though!

This time it worked out fine.  We drew one card, got a huge pile of treasure, and then The Deck disappeared.  A good result, considering the total range of options.  Having a pile of money meant that our characters can now pursue some of their harder to reach goals like buying land or expensive spell components.

But the process of getting the deck was not well written.  We acquired it by clearing out Gardmore Abbey, a 4th edition adventure.  Scattered throughout the abbey were the 22 cards in The Deck, but until they were brought together they were much weaker and had their own separate abilities.  The way the cards worked is that when a combat begins, a single card chosen randomly from all cards present manifests.  It puts a thing on the ground in a random place, and anyone can stand on the thing and do something cool.  It works for *anyone* though, so having a card doesn't help you, because the enemies can use it themselves if they feel like it.

The NPCs all treat the cards as if they are powerful and exciting things.  My group pretty much laughed at them, because a random card spawning in a random place that benefits the enemies as much as us.... how is that a good thing?  Certainly once you have a single card getting lots more of them isn't any use, that actually makes them worse because you have no idea what will happen.

The trouble was that the cards actually were super powerful for the enemies.  They got to use the abilities without taking actions, and their cards always popped up and overwrote ours.  As soon as my group grabbed a card though, it instantly became crap and lost all of its good abilities.

I can totally understand writing in a singular enemy that has a powerful item that works for them but not for others.  That can be a fine thing once in a while.  But writing in an endless stream of enemies with powerful, dangerous items that promply and without any in game explanation nerf themselves once the players touch them is a wretched mechanic.  It just makes us bitter and destroys immersion.  How are we supposed to believe in the world when the writers of the module clearly decided that if the players had access to all this stuff it would be overpowered, so lets just write in 'this stuff doesn't work for the players' on everything?

The whole thing about finding the scattered cards is fine.  The card abilities are fine too.  They aren't particularly good, but they are neat and bizarre and chaotic and thematic, which is okay overall.  The problem is that the writers felt desperate to have the enemies use them, but then felt equally desperate to prevent the players doing the same.  If they had just accepted that the cards would do random, not particularly powerful stuff for everyone that would have been fine.  The bait and switch isn't fun though, especially when it happens over and over and over.

It is unfortunate because some of the stuff in Gardmore Abbey is actually a lot of fun.  Overall I quite enjoyed the module.  I liked exploring the grounds, I liked the variety of encounters and situations, and the history was interesting.  It was a good place to play.  The way various encounters linked together was amusing too, even when we did them in the wrong order and made things extra hard for ourselves. 

However, it had two major problems.  First, the cards as described above.  They were meant to tie the whole place together, and instead they became a running joke.  Second, there were way too many random and pointless fights.  There were a lot of monsters that had no narrative purpose or sense to them, and were just there to pad the experience totals.  Not interesting, that.

The finale to Gardmore convinced me that I need to retire my character.  Being a crossbow specialist is just unfair.  When the other single target dps characters can stand beside an enemy and swing they are worse then me, but not *that* much worse.  But I can do full damage to anyone within 120 feet of me, and they are melee, so they spend much of their time unable to do anything or taking weak actions to try to get into range.  It isn't right that I do as much damage as the other two combined, so crossbow man Wilbur needs to go.... and The Deck provides as good a reason to change things up as any.

Dead. Almost. Sort of?

In my last DnD session my character died.  It wasn't one of those grand deaths where I made a great sacrifice for the common good, or where I heroically attempted something truly difficult and paid the price.

It was one of those questionable, sorry deaths.  I was in a fight.  Monsters spawned randomly, then they attacked me and I died.  I had no place to run to, no tactic to use.  There was no reasonable defence.  The only way to save myself would have been to run away from the fight earlier and leave my friends, which would have resulted in them being dead instead.

When I am GMing I hate this sort of thing.  I try to let the dice do the talking in fights, but I work hard to set up encounters so that if you die, there was a reason.  I want you to have made a choice.  Maybe that choice was just to be foolish and aggressive, but at least I want the player to be able to think that they did something to make that happen.  "I should learn to fall back and heal when I am hurt" is a fine lesson to carry away from a death.  "I sure did die heroically!" is also good.  "I got killed and there was nothing I could do about it at all." doesn't cut it.

The main reason I died without any recourse is that we were fighting Shadows.  Shadows drain your Strength score and my group had no way whatsoever to avoid, prevent, or heal that sort of attack.  One moment I was fine, the next shadows all appeared next to me and my Strength score was drained to zero, killing me.  Shadows are a scary opponent when there is only one or two, but when there are a dozen they are death machines, especially when they randomly appear and then attack, denying us any way to defend ourselves.

The module offered us a way out though.  We were defending a paladin doing a cleansing ritual to get rid of the taint in a holy temple.  The god associated with the temple decided to reward us for winning, and one of the rewards was a resurrection.  The resurrection in question didn't help at all with having my Strength drained, but that was handwaved away and the boon was deemed able to resurrect me anyway.

Problem is, we each got a boon.  And one of those boons had to be used to resurrect me.  Everyone else was going to get an extremely powerful, permanent bonus, but I was going to get 'not dead'.  That makes being killed totally randomly feel even worse.  I did nothing wrong, the GM/dice declared me dead, and I get punished hard.  Even worse, one of the options available was to make my weapon magical.  Nobody puts magical crossbows in modules, so if I missed this I would be using a nonmagical weapon and doing half damage forever. 

I was perfectly content with being dead.  I don't like 'oh no, you are dead.  Let's warp reality so you aren't dead' as a mechanic.  Why bother to roll dice at all, if you can't lose?  Just declare all the enemies defeated and move on, or describe battles narratively.  If losing is impossible, then winning is irrelevant, so if I am dead I want to stay dead.  However, the boon being able to bring me back was definitely intended, so saying that the resurrection also included a spell to remove my Strength penalty is quite reasonable.  Still, I wasn't exactly thrilled about everyone else getting amazing, fun new powers while I got to look on.

Things didn't quite turn out that way though.  One of the other characters decided to use his boon to bring me back to life, which meant I could use my boon to ask for a magical weapon so I can stop being terrible against the endless hordes of monsters that are resistant to nonmagical weapons.  More than that though, now we have a story, and a debt.  I owe that character something huge, something that will be terribly difficult to repay.

He didn't even make out that badly from all of it.  After we decided on our boons and he didn't get a cool thing, we found another really powerful magic item and he grabbed it.  We all ended the session with something new and exciting we can do, which is a good way to finish off a big section of a module.

So in the end a silly, pointless death turned into something cool and exciting.  It set up potential conflict or drama in the future, and I sure do love that.  All the credit goes to the player though, not the module.  This combat and the fallout from it were a disaster waiting to happen, and we successfully snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

Too much of a thing that once might have been good

DnD has lots of mechanics that are holdovers from previous editions, some of which are good.  Some... not so good.

I have been thinking about the mechanic where monsters are resistant to non magical weapons.  In old DnD this would have been total immunity, which is a really nutty ability.  It has a place in stories, no doubt, as 'oh no, we can't hurt the werewolf with our regular weapons, we have to find something better!' is a fine place for a story to go.  I like that source, that idea.  A few monsters have special powers that require special solutions.  I dig it.

But lately there are way too many copies of this ability lying around.  We have mostly fought our way through Gardmore Abbey and it was often a frustrating experience.  In modern editions monsters aren't totally immune to nonmagical weapons, instead they are simply take half damage instead.  While that is safer from a balance perspective, it isn't a good mechanic. 

Magic weapons are already good.  Making anyone without a magic weapon suck a lot of the time isn't making the story work - they don't usually have an option to get a magic weapon.  If they did, they would already have gotten it!  All this does is make the people without magic weapons feel stupid, and people with magic weapons feel powerful.

You can have lots of powerful monster abilities that totally wreck certain characters.  That is valid!  But if half of the fights involved huge AOE silences the spellcasters would rightfully be grumpy.  Do it occasionally, and it becomes something to work around.  Do it constantly, and they just feel like they chose the wrong class.

Weapon resistance is an example of this done wrong.  Many of the fights in this module offered a variety of targets, all of which were weapon resistant.  No strategy there, the characters without magic just suck.  If you had a fight where some enemies are resistant and others aren't, that at least has some play.  The characters without magic weapons can focus on the enemies they can affect.  But when you toss weapon resistance around like crazy and don't give any opportunity to work around it you are just kicking the people who are already down, because they are weapon wielders who don't have magic weapons already.

As you might have guessed, I was one of the two characters without a magic weapon.  The guy who got a magic weapon right away pounded through all the weapon resistant monsters with glee, while the other two of us sucked.  Overall my character was still extremely powerful, don't get me wrong.  Crossbow specialists are ridiculous.  But the weapon resistant mechanic is not a way to cope with that, especially when it hits other characters too, making them weak.  Get rid of this stupid mechanic, and nerf crossbow specialist somehow, that seems like a good compromise to me.

I am happy with some weapon resistance, especially when there is some counterplay available, or when it is a plot point.  But making it commonplace means it isn't exciting, it isn't surprising, it is just a way to keep down the people who are already weaker. 

Whose bullshit reigns supreme?

In my last DnD session we had a showdown to see whose ridiculous bullshit abilities would carry the day.  As you level up in the game you get more health, more attacks, and more damage.  Those abilities aren't bullshit.  Bullshit abilities are ones that let you defeat opponents by denying them any chance to act, and rendering their abilities and stats irrelevant.

For example, we went into a room that had a weird shadow spider thing in it.  Its stats were based off of a shadow dragon, but it had at least one extremely important additional ability.  Shadow dragons are CR 13, and this one was located in a deep dungeon so its extra powers related to being in shadow were all in effect.  With us being level 9 it was extremely deadly, as it had a breath weapon AOE that hit for 60% of our health and the ability to hide for free on its turn and then run away so we couldn't target it.

All of this is nasty.  We started up the fight, it went first, and it breathed on us, taking off 40% of the party's health.  Then it zoomed back into its lair.  We ran in but couldn't see it, so we summoned some bats to use their echolocation to hunt it down.  I was impressed with its bullshit hiding ability, but we had a trick in mind:  As soon as it appeared, one of us would cast insect plague, an AOE that does damage every round, and then I would cast a spherical wall of force around it.  The plan was that it would sit there in the wall, unable to leave, and slowly die to the insects.

That is some bullshit right there.  I am going to use that combo on other nasty creatures, have no doubt of that.  We set up our combo and waited for it to die.

Except it had another whole level of bullshit.  In addition to all the normal shadow dragon stuff, it got to plane shift at will.  So every turn it can hide for free, move away, and then *teleport to another plane*.  Then it can teleport back wherever it wants, whenever it wants.  If it felt like it, it could just plane shift back as soon as its breath weapon was ready again and roast us.  Of course, it plane shifted out of the Wall of Force, and fortunately it didn't come back right away because if it had we would have flat out died.  What are we supposed to do against a monster that is never visible except during its turn, and can leave the fracking plane any time things go against it?

Level up our bullshit, obviously.

Our monk has the ability to stun monsters.  He can fire off four stuns a round when need be, so when the shadow spider came back to finish the job an hour later, having conveniently given us time to rest and heal up, the monk went first, ran up to it, and stunned it over and over.  It finally failed on the third try, so we got to spend a round unloading on it.  On his next turn he stunned it again, and then again on his turn after that.  Before it got even a single action we plowed through nearly 200 hit points even though it was resistant or immune to everything except psychic, radiant, and force damage.

I don't know about high level play against such creatures.  It seems like a silly contest of looking up in the rulebook to see whose bullshit abilities trump whose and the loser doesn't get to do anything on their turn.  Winning is its own kind of fun, clearly, but it doesn't actually feel that great to cast Magic Missile over and over against a helpless opponent until it finally keels over.

It also must feel absurd to be the GM and to have to stare down Insect Plague / Wall of Force or endless stuns.  What is an enemy with powerful abilities but without teleportation supposed to do?  Stand there and die, I guess.

Of course if you add 'plane shift at will' to a powerful monster, it ought to be considered several CR higher than listed to account for the extra power.  I wonder if we will get experience for a standard CR 13, or a full and proper CR 15 reward?  I learned a lot from that encounter, after all, since I cast a level 1 spell 3 times.  But a bigger and badder target for that level 1 spell changes how much I learn about magic!  (XP systems are stupid).

Run, a dragon!

In my DnD campaigns over the past few years we have run into a number of dragons.  They have varied wildly in power from baby dragons at CR 4 to legendary dragons at CR 20.  One thing that has been consistent though is that when you run into a dragon it is dangerous for you right then.  Never have I been in a level 8 group that ran into a CR 4 dragon that we could just beat up easily, and I think this is because adventure designers make sure that every time you see a dragon it is set up to be a deadly opponent.

Other creatures aren't like this.  When you are level 1 or 2 an ogre is a dangerous foe, capable of downing characters in a single hit.  By the time you are level 8 you know that ogres are trivial and you can just blast away groups of them with AOE attacks or tear them apart with weapons if you want.

Dragons though, those aren't fixed in difficulty.  Some are trivial, some are terrifying, and they are constantly positioned so that they are a deadly encounter for whatever level the party is at the time.  I think sometimes adventure writers forget how weird this is.  My character knows that they have grown dramatically in power.  They know that previously challenging foes are easy to defeat now.  And yet when we find out that the ruins we are investigating contain a dragon we are supposed to automatically be terrified.  Even if we beat a dragon long ago, this new dragon is definitely something we should be worried about.

It feels strange because our characters know for sure that if we are level 10, there are dragons that we can beat up without worry, dragons that will be a serious challenge, and dragons that will kill us all without trying.  Knowing 'there is a dragon!' tells us almost nothing about what challenge we will face.  Except, of course, that we know that every dragon in an adventure will be a terrifying challenge, because that's how adventures are written.

What I really want to see is an adventure where the characters face a dragon that just isn't a challenge.  Let something else take centre stage, and subvert expectations. 

The actual fight against the dragon this week was an illustration of the issues with the way crossbow characters work in 5th edition.  I am playing a crossbow specialist and my feats allow me to fire crossbow bolts in melee range without penalty, as well as shooting without any attention paid to cover.  We had our two melee characters ready to fight the dragon, and I hid in the far corner of the room behind a pillar.  I could easily blast at the dragon at full strength from there, weaving my bolts around obstacles.  When the dragon flew across the room to bite me, I stood in its face shooting away anyhow. 

When you build a crossbow character your numbers are good, no doubt, but the real issue with the build is how it doesn't care about the fight.  I don't care about distance, terrain, obstacles, anything.  As long as I can see an opponent, I pump huge damage into them.  That is great from a 'be powerful' perspective, but it does have something lacking in the 'fights are interesting' perspective.  I suppose is it still interesting for me to use cover and terrain against my enemies while ignoring it myself, but I think the game might be better if I didn't have all of these abilities to ignore the map.

A dragon

My DnD group has a dilemma.  We have been clearing out Gardmore Abbey, slowing wading through hordes of zombies, gnolls, minotaurs, and demons.  The current dungeon is finally clear, with one notable exception:  A dragon.

The other inhabitants of the dungeon told us that the dragon is terrifying and they would never try to attack it, but that doesn't actually tell us a lot about whether or not we can just walk in there and beat it up.

Trouble is, unlike many monsters in DnD, dragons have a vast range of power.  If I am going up against a lich, I know that it is bad news unless we are level ~13 or so.  If we are fighting a gnoll, I am not worried, even if we are all level 1.  But a dragon?  It could be a baby, easy for our level 6 party to wipe out.  It could be a serious challenge.  It could also be so powerful it kills us all on its first action.  No way to know!

In fact, we have had all three types of dragons in my campaigns with Naked Man.  One dragon that ran away after it took a single bowshot for 3 damage, one that was a tough fight at level 4, and one that could have ravaged an entire country if it felt like it.  In all cases though, it was a dragon... and we had to guess whether or not we can take it on.

I wonder if the people who wrote this module thought about this.  Did they intend for 'its a dragon' to terrify us so we give up immediately?  Did they figure we would just walk in and brawl it, thinking of it as a fair and reasonable encounter?  I have no idea what they intended!  I suspect they thought that 'its a dragon' would give us a sense of the challenge of the beast, but it sure left us without a clue.

So now we have to decide if we will be sneaky and try to steal from the dragon, walk in and try to negotiate with it, or go with my favourite - ambush it and kill it before it kills us.  In this module we have ended up fighting every single monster to the death, so I see little reason to imagine that this pattern will suddenly change.  If we are going to fight it to the death, might as well start the fight with a surprise round, right?