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Post by Plum on Jun 5, 2018 15:56:17 GMT 1
What level are you coming in at? I have a sorcerer who started at STR 6, but managed to get up to STR 8 thanks to their first ASI. The rigours of adventuring have made her strong! Well, stronger at least. She's still weaker than average but at least she'd beat a child in arm wrestling now.
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Post by Zejety on Jun 5, 2018 16:01:51 GMT 1
Level 1, but I'll likely have to pick up War Caster at 4. Haven't quite checked which spells of mine have somatic components but no material ones. Gishing is no fun if you have to sheath your weapon every other turn.
I'm also already kinda MAD so I don't know when I'll have an opportunity to raise a quinary stat. Maybe if it comes with a half-feat... :>
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Post by Plum on Jun 6, 2018 9:15:41 GMT 1
You could drop the shield and go two-hander? That means you'll always have a hand free for casting. You lose two AC but save a feat, plus works from level one. I suppose it depends whether you're going to be the primary tank in the party or an off-tank?
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Post by Zejety on Jun 6, 2018 9:24:08 GMT 1
I don't know all of the party make up yet, but it looks like I'll be somewhere in-between main and off-tank. The only other front-liner is a Moon Druid, though 2 of the 3 ranged people are fighters, who can probably take a hit or two. War Caster is pretty great in general though, not just for the somatic components. And with my Warlock HP, I'll definitely need all AC I can get. I've decided to go with the Dragonborn and Life Cleric versions btw.. Though I'm sure i'll miss the +1 AC from Forge Domain, always having Bless and Cure Wounds prepared is just too amazing.
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Post by Southpaw Hare on Jun 11, 2018 5:57:18 GMT 1
I apologize that I haven't made time to discuss my RPG goings-on lately. My schedule has been pretty busy these days. Nevertheless, I'd like to report that my Street Fighter RPG was a huge success. The players came up with some appropriately ridiculous characters to go along with the absurd setting I provided for them: Scott Fulman - A theme park mascot at Reptar World (Reptar from Rugrats became more popular and anime in this timeline due to all the dinosaur martial arts) who fights with a form of Shotokan Karate that also incorporates dinosaur-style moves and his dinosaur suit, such as pouncing and tail strikes. Chris Torres - Stunt director of the 1995 Mortal Kombat movie (Midway Games being one of the things I didn't wipe from this universe) who is super rich despite the movie being awful, who believes that fighting needs to be more violent and bloody as opposed to all this honorable combat stuff, and who is looking for talent for his next film.
REACHARGE - A former man who was effectively killed in the Y2K alien invasion (which is really sad considering how pathetic it was), but was rebuilt Robocop-style by the Disney Corporation. He is an extreme cyborg with extendible limbs, projectile reflection shields, and computerized senses. Xian - A Chinese teenage boy based off of most Jackie Chan characters, who is humble and polite and knows a lot of Kung Fu, and inevitably gets swept up into whirlwind adventures he doesn't intend to. Fu Lee - A super old 100+ man who constantly spouts "Wisdom" that is so bizarre that you can't tell if he's actually wise or just super senile. He knows defensive and evasive martial arts and uses them to just generally confuse people.
The group first met each other by all attending a meetup group for mixed martial arts (and I mean REALLY mixed in this world) at Central Park (except REACHARGE, who was poorly spying on them - everyone noticed the weird robot hiding behind the trees and ignored it). The park was filled with NPCs that set the tone of this alternate universe: there were two karate people that crossed paths walking down the sidewalk and had to fight each other after locking eyes, Pokemon-style, there were ninjas calmly practicing standing on the water in the middle of the lake, and there was even a father playing "Hadouken" with his young son (you count "1, 2, 3, Hadouken!" and both shoot fireballs at each other so they clash). There were also a variety of characters at the meetup group, including a very loud teenage boy who was super excitable and loved to cheer and commentate. I had two of the PCs - Xian and Fu Lee volunteered - fight each other as a warm up for getting used to the rules.
Soon after, a massive earthquake hit Hogan City. People checked their phones and found out that a giant black castle had suddenly risen out of the bay near the Statue of Liberty, and also appeared to be slowly sucking up energy from the populace. Soon after, there was a press conference with Mayor-President Hulk Hogan explaining how, in recognition of the Lead Fist First Act of 2002, which states that in the event of a supernatural threat, the Mayor-President must personally lead the assault himself, he announces that he's already getting the chopper warmed up to bring him, Vice President Mike Tyson, and Secretary of the Interior Robert Downey Jr. to the castle to kick the asses of whatever is in there.
At this point, the kid who is with the group starts getting upset, claiming he needs to help Hulk Hogan and crew, but might not get there in time (the Mayor-President lives and works on Governor's Island, which is a stone's throw away from this castle). He reveals himself to actually be Elisael, Angel of Hype, and explains that he has the power to boost peoples' ability with his inspiring cheers and sick fighting commentary. Without him, Hogan's Heroes don't stand a chance, and without them, he has no one to assist. The party agrees to help him by being a backup group that will assault the castle, even if it is after Hogan's Heroes already enter and probably lose. Elisael reveals that, with some effort, he can create a large bubble of air that can carry them all through the sky and to the castle. Along the way, Scott realizes that he needs to get his suit, but there's no time... then they spot some guy on the streets down below wearing a T-Rex costume, decide that will have to do, land in front of him, ask for his pants, and fly off again (Chris Torres gives him $100 and thanks him for helping save the world).
The air bubble is able to penetrate the forcefield surrounding the castle, something that only the combined forces of Hogan's Heroes were able to do by brute force with punches and unibeams. Once inside, the group found an arena and a demonic hostess, who welcomed them and explained the situation: she was attempting to resurrect Lord Hexagon, a great demon lord, by absorbing energy from humans. If not stopped, she would eventually be successful; however, trying to stop her also makes the process go even faster, as any energy expended inside the castle through fighting is also absorbed. Because she can control the environment inside the castle, the group was forced to obey her rules in which she forced them to fight a series of 2-on-2 fights against her minions in order to work their way up the tower.
And so, they fought a progression of enemies based on thinly-veiled fighting game characters and memes. These included a ripoffs of Melee Fox, Mewtwo, and a literal giant turtle ("Billy the Turtle" is now something of a running gag in our RPGs for different reasons). These battles were the majority of the combat gameplay for the one-shot, and it turned out pretty well! Eventually, the group made it to the penultimate floor, where they had to face off against brain-washed versions of Hogan's Heroes, but they got to do it with all of them at once. It was a thrilling boss battle, and in the end, they not only won, but they utterly wrecked Mike Tyson, performing some crazy 5-man finishing combo on him that left him in traction. In the process, Fu Lee sadly died (there are no rules for dying, but the player wanted him to for dramatic story reasons) - the player then took control of Hulk Hogan himself instead to finish off the game.
The group arrived at the top of the tower, and despite the fact that the big Gage of Energy was only at about 85%, the demon lady tried to summon the demon lord anyway. Lord Hexagon appeared as a giant bee-man demon with a sword (and a honeycomb-shaped belt buckle) and, although he was not at "full power" (he was only like 12-feet tall when he was supposed to be like 50), he fought the humans anyway. The group then proceeded to wreck him as well, tossing him back and forth between them like a volleyball in extended team combos. To finish him off, the group performed one of these sequences, tossing him off the side of the tower, and ending with Hulk Hogan Power Bombing him into the sea.
The castle then started self-destructing, and the group escaped using one of Elisael's air bubbles. Now containing more people, the bubble wasn't air to fly very well, and so it landed in the ocean and floated gently away, giving the group a nice view as the castle slowly sank down into the water (and also caused a second devastating earthquake to the city in the same day). The end.
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Post by Plum on Jun 11, 2018 9:50:44 GMT 1
Oh man that sounds awesome! Good timing too - we had a karate grading yesterday and I got to be a boss fight
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Post by Zejety on Jul 26, 2018 20:36:11 GMT 1
Has anyone here played or DMd the 3rd edition adventure Forge of Fury or the 5th edition remake in Tales From the Yawning Portal? I was asked to run it on Tuesday, but I'm not half-way done reading. Curious if there's a twist I need to be aware of of or if I'll be fine running the beginning without deeper insight.
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Post by Plum on Jul 30, 2018 10:33:21 GMT 1
So, we had a one-shot campaign yesterday with a fairly new DM. It was a straight-up arcade style dungeon run through an old castle with accelerated levelling and easy resting. We were going to from third to sixth/seventh level in the space of this one castle, and a short rest only took five minutes so short-rest powers were up every encounter. There was also a loot chest after every fight, with items randomly selected from a huge table of incredible gear. Like I said, it was an arcade-style hack-and-slash adventure. Everything was going pretty well and we'd hit level four within a few rooms, before we found the wishes. Again, loot was entirely random so up until this point we'd found a few nice potions, some +1 bolts for my boltslinger (hand crossbow battlemaster fighter) and some sweet efreeti armour. Then my fighter finds a ring with three wishes. Oh boy. Knowing how easily that could just end the session immediately, I wished for the knowledge to perfectly use the remaining two wishes to get a lovely +3 hand crossbow and some +3 studded leather. Powerful but in keeping with other items dropped. Then the next person finds a luck blade, also with three wishes. Ohhhh boy. Our rogue immediately wished that he was a level six rogue (we were level four at the time, and this seemed like a reasonable power bump. Yes, a level four party with access to six wishes...) and the DM handled it pretty well, ripping his soul out of his body and depositing it into a level six rogue elsewhere in Faerun. We used the second wish to teleport the body containing our friend back to us, so he got his level six at the cost of two wishes and a new body. So far, so good. Five wishes down and a decent spike in power level, but nothing too broken. Then our druid uses the last wish - "I wish I could shapeshift into any creature in existence at will", and the DM said ok. Druid immediately shapeshifts into a Terrasque and starts tearing up the castle, beelining straight for the final tower, walking through walls and anything else in its way (the player in question is known for trying to break campaigns - nice enough guy, but likes to watch worlds burn). At this point the DM realises that he might have made a mistake. We take a break for pizza while he figures out what to do and eventually he settles on the nuclear option, "Seeing a terrasque tearing towards his tower, the mage uses his own wish ring and rewinds time to just before you entered that room". So we basically just retconned the whole thing. We did not find any wishes in that room, nor in the remaining castle and we all booed the druid for losing us access to our cool stuff. We worked our way through the rest of the castle and killed the big bad in an epic finale and had a great time. And everyone learned a valuable lesson about unrestricted loot tables and giving wishes to Olly
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Post by Plum on Aug 13, 2018 15:56:59 GMT 1
Another one-shot D&D 5e last night, this time with our regular DM. He wanted to do a high level monster hunt, asking us to bring along level 16 characters for a dungeon run. I went for a Aasimar Paladin 6/Sorcerer 10, which is a character that I never thought I'd get a chance to play. We also had a ranger, a swashbuckler, a moon druid and a hexblade. What we did not have, and immediately regretted when the first room nearly wiped us out, was a character with any INT or investigation ability. Most things in the dungeon were DC18 or higher, so rolling +0 for investigation meant that we triggered almost every trap and missed almost every secret door. My poor Pally was down 70 hitpoints in the FIRST ROOM, having got caught by two separate traps, and as the room filled with deadly poison gas we repeatedly tried, and failed, to find a way to switch it off. In the end, we had to blow some spells dimension dooring out of the room, then take a short rest while the gas cleared. We then smashed our way through the now closed stone door to get back into the room, used a high level Fly to skip the floor entirely and cast dispel magic to open the closed door at the far end, since no-one thought to bring the Knock spell. Room one complete! The rest of the dungeon was easier after that, though the reverse gravity room proved challenging since we were trying to avoid burning magic slots. A system of ropes and ball-bearings eventually got us through it with minimal magical expenditure, though not before my Paladin had crashed into the ceiling and been attacked by a horde of gravitationally challenged skeletons. In the final room was a teleporter and, with our usual caution we all leapt into it... at which point our DM asked us to leave the room and grab some drinks. By the time we came back, the entire tabletop was a volcanic hellscape, with hills, pits and rivers of lava. Our DM had actually made a fully 3D environment out of layered cardboard, complete with embedded lighting effects, then painted it up as a volcano map and it looked incredible! We despatched the various minions with ease and carved our way to the centre, just as a priest finished his ritual spell to summon our final boss - a blue dracolich. While the rest of the party dealt with the ground based magma golems and priest, my Aasimar popped her wings, ignited her holy weapon and flew up to engage in an epic aerial battle against the undead dragon. Oh boy it was a blast Back to our regular scheduled campaign next week and after rolling 36d8+25 radiant damage in a single attack action, rolling 1d8+3 just isn't going to feel the same. Paladins are bananas!
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Post by Bomber678 on Aug 13, 2018 18:41:52 GMT 1
In a campaign a while back, I was playing a gruff hardy dwarf paladin. We're exploring a temple and come across some angry darkness beast, so being headstrong, we rush in to fight. The thing smacks me in the face for about fifteen damage (we're only about level three) and the dm asks how much health I'm on. "Oh about 25 still". I then smite evil and smack it for huge damage and we kill it. Afterwards, he said "I really expected that damage to scare you guys, but you have a lot more health than I expected."
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Post by Plum on Aug 13, 2018 21:05:19 GMT 1
My poor Pal/Sorc only had 118 health at level 16 though - one round of attacks from the dragon hit me for 100+...
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Post by Plum on Aug 28, 2018 10:11:28 GMT 1
We played through the new Legend of Five Rings RPG starter set yesterday and it was really fun! Being in the L5R universe, it's set in a mystical feudal Japan and in the starter set you all represent teenagers going through an initiation tournament to try and become samurai. Coincidentally, this means lots of varied tests and competitions which is an ideal way to learn the systems and the set does a really good job of bringing in the rules bit by bit.
Mechanically, everything is driven by skill tests. A test might be interrogating a suspect, or performing a tea ceremony, or invoking the spirits for a magical effect, or striking with a weapon. Each test has two components, the skill and the ring. The skill is the ability of the character in that particular area - martial melee, courtesy, artisanal ability, survival etc. You have a rank in the skills ranging from zero to three (in the starter set at least) and every rank in the skill lets you roll a lovely white D12 in the test.
In addition, you also have a ring for the test. The rings represent philosophies or the way that you will approach the test. Earth is grounded, solid etc, while Fire is inventive and ferocious. Sometimes you'll be told which ring is to be used, but usually you can choose the one that best suits your character. In a legal debate, you might choose to apply Air to a governance test (knowledge of law and government), representing your character's cunning and manipulative nature, or Earth, representing their many hours of hitting the books for research. Fire might be presenting an obscure past case in a new light, while Water is about flexibility, perception and balance - perhaps rather than argue the law, you might seek to find a compromise. Finally the Void ring is about the spirit, the universe and the nature of all things. To use Void, perhaps you would argue that while the law is clearly against you, your actions were morally right and it is the law itself that is wrong. Each character has different strengths in different rings, representing their attitude and approach, and each ring rank lets you roll a black D6. The ring also determines how many dice you can choose to keep from the test - you might be amazing at ranged combat, with three ranks letting you roll three D12, but if you're weak in Water and that's the ring you need to apply for some reason (perhaps you're picking up an unusual crossbow and the Water ring represents your ability to understand and adapt) then you'll only be able to keep one of the resulting dice, hurting your chances of success. If you continue to practice with that crossbow maybe you can use the Earth ring in future, or if you modify the crossbow to better suit your needs maybe you can use the Fire ring.
The faces on each dice could come up with a number of different results - Successes are always good, and each test has a difficulty level showing how many successes you need. Strife symbols are generally bad and represent the stresses building up in your character; when their strife gets too high, they have a breakdown of some variety (in the starter set, my character freaks out about the petty political games and backstabbing going on while there is genuine evil trying to kill everyone). The final symbol is the Opportunity, which isn't a success but represents some other option or... opportunity. In combat for example, hitting an opponent might be a difficulty 2 martial melee check, and I use Earth (solid and grounded, in combat it makes it harder for opponents to hit me). If I roll one success, one opportunity and one strife, I have failed my attack. But the DM might decide that the opportunity means I recognise from his defensive parrying that he is no mere bandit, but someone with formal sword training. On a subsequent attack, I might switch to Water (perceptive, flexible) and use an opportunity to test his defences further, to see if I can determine which clan he might have come from by his fighting style. That could then give me an advantage on future turns or open up non-combat dialogue opportunities.
It's a really interesting system and I'm very much looking forward to playing a non-scripted session next! The whole starter set took us about four hours to play through, which I think is typical and while it's a little railroaded, it does a great job of introducing all of the mechanics and getting you up to speed, whilst also giving plenty of opportunity for inter party discussion and conflict. Also my Crab won the whole tournament, becoming Topaz Champion, so that clearly makes it an excellent game.
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Jude
Member
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Posts: 111
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Post by Jude on Oct 4, 2018 0:10:19 GMT 1
Have any of you ever used roll20 or Fantasy Grounds or other online options? Do you have any opinions on them? I've really been in the mood to start running something again, even if it is just like once a month. Might end up doing it with my old friend group but might find some local people. Also Eberron is making its officialish 5E debut. Hopefully this sells well and Wizards decides to make a proper source book. There have been whispers that this was on their to do list for a long time so it's nice that it is finally happening.
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Post by Plum on Nov 9, 2018 11:44:42 GMT 1
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Post by Zejety on Nov 9, 2018 17:41:39 GMT 1
A friend backed the recent 2nd edition Numenera Kickstarter and is eager to run a campaign. I won't have time to join before December so they are warming up with a smaller group until then. I thought my original character design filled a niche in the group but it turned out I'd fill the last slot in an all-speed party. Gotta come up with something different! I'll see what it will be. In other news: I've come to appreciate D&D Beyond. I'm not using the app for anything, really. But it's great to be able to purchase only pieces of new books. I have no interest in a Ravnica splatbook, but I'll take those sub-classes, thank you.
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Post by Plum on Nov 9, 2018 17:51:54 GMT 1
In other news: I've come to appreciate D&D Beyond. I'm not using the app for anything, really. But it's great to be able to purchase only pieces of new books. I have no interest in a Ravnica splatbook, but I'll take those sub-classes, thank you. Oh yeah, I really like the way they've done that. Plus, if you do decide you want to buy everything eventually, you get it discounted by the bits that you've already bought which is super nice. I mostly use the Beyond for the character builder and playing around with ideas. Once I've settled on a character, I tend to build it in the Fight Club app on my iPad, which is my favourite D&D tool. It lets me mess with things as required and add a variety of useful counters and trackers etc. The Beyond app is really good (and getting better), but I prefer the way things are laid out on Fight Club
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Post by Plum on Nov 12, 2018 17:23:04 GMT 1
Our final club day of the year was at the weekend and I got to try a whole bunch of new titles (well, new to me anyway). Hoplomachus was great fun and one that I wanted to try given that CTG's Cloudspire is currently on Kickstarter (well, pledge manager, since the KS just finished) Heaven & Ale was a brain burning tile placement and resource acquisition euro. The guy teaching the game finished with a score in the high sixties while the rest of us, all beginners, just about scraped into the twenties! Really fun though and one that I'd definitely try again. Sagrada - this was all the hotness a few months back (along with Azul) and I was glad to give it a try. It's a dice placement game where you're using dice to build a stained glass window, following various patterns and rules. Not terribly deep but lots of fun and a little less nasty that Azul. Going forward, I'll be playing Clank! In! Space! on Wednesday, which is another game I've been wanting to try for ages, and my bf is looking to start up a Dungeon of the Mad Mage D&D campaign, which I'm very much looking forward to
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Post by Zejety on Dec 19, 2018 23:42:17 GMT 1
Wrong thread, Plum. Looks like I'll be DMing another D&D oneshot over the holidays. Decided to read through A Boy and his Modron. Looks nice so far, but translating some of the dialogue/information to German will be a pain. The last oneshot I ran for that group was very dungeon-heavy, so I appreciate this more balanced content. Hope I can manage to finish prep-work on top of other CHristmas preparations...
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Post by Plum on Dec 20, 2018 11:04:21 GMT 1
I just looked at the Boy and his Modron one-shot - that looks super cute. I'll have to mention it to our DM as he likes mixing one-shots into his homebrew campaign as a palate cleanser between major story arcs We played more Dungeon of the Mad Mage last night. My BF is DMing and his DM style is quite different from our regular DM. Our regular DM tends towards freeform stuff and rule of cool, while my BF plays closer to the rules. It helps that it's a dungeon campaign, so we can't go totally off script So far it's been a lot of fun, though my Warlock has been lucky with her Hypnotic Patterns, making two potentially difficult horde battles into relatively simple encounters where we could deal with the threats one by one. Unfortunately our rogue has just picked up a cursed weapon that is definitely putting a crimp in his rogue-ing. This means I'm going to need to pick up Remove Curse at my next level but that's probably a useful spell to have on standby in this dungeon anyway
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Post by Plum on Jan 17, 2019 14:07:20 GMT 1
I thought this would be a better place to talk about the Celestial Warlock (D&D 5e) with Zejety, rather than the chatbox I'm playing a level 5 half high-elf celestial tome-pact warlock in our Dungeon of the Mad Mage campaign and having a blast. A little background - our party of four contains a fighter/rogue, a pure fighter and pure monk and myself. So I came into a party with zero magical ability and zero support ability. I wanted a divine/arcane hybrid so I could do a half-assed job of healing while also dealing with arcane threats via counter spell/dispel magic. That left me with Divine Sorcerer (but I've played one of those recently and wanted to try something else, amazing though they are), Arcana Cleric (but I'm not super into clerics), Lore Bard (bards....meh) and the Celestial Warlock. So from Celestial I get bonus action weak healing that's good enough to get someone back on their feet and cure wounds for emergency healing and dumping spell slots before a short rest. The Light and Sacred Flame cantrips are useful enough but rarely used (the party all have access to darkvision). Revivify is tempting but the material costs are high and I'd rather take a spell that would stop us from needing it. Guiding Bolt is usually a great spell, but with only two spell slots, 6d6 damage to one creature really isn't good enough. At level six I can add my CHA bonus to fire or radiant damage once per turn which is fine but unexciting compared to the damage output of Eldritch Blast. If I only had access to two or three cantrips then I could see a case for relying on Sacred Flame instead of EB, which would make this more useful, buuuut... I'm a tome-lock baby and one with high-elf blood! That means I get SEVEN chosen cantrips at level five - three of which can come from any spell list, in addition to Light and Sacred Flame. More than enough to take EB as well as a bunch of useful tricks (mage hand, guidance, message, minor illusion, prestigitation, mending...). As if that wasn't enough arcane-utility, I also took the tome invocation for ritual casting, giving me a bunch more useful spells - Find Familiar (my little owl lives in the hood of our rogue, letting me see what he's up to when he's scouting ahead, reapply guidance and talk to him via message), Identify etc. Plus since we came in at level five, my DM let me use my starting funds to scribe some extra rituals instead of buying fancy equipment, so I've also got Tiny Hut and Comprehend Languages Finally, the actual Warlock spells I've grabbed are more about shutting down incoming damage, since I'm teamed up with three hard hitters. Invisibility and Fly give us flexibility and allow us to bypass obstacles. Counterspell and dispel magic shut down magical traps and spellcasters. Hypnotic Pattern shuts down hordes (our one weakness, we have no-one with big AOE damage) and Cure Wounds gives me emergency healing when my celestial heals are running low. As well as the book of secrets, I spent an invocation on eldritch sight, giving me perma Detect Magic. That's a concentration spell, hence no Hex or other long term concentration spells, with the exception of Guidance which I can cast at will whenever our rogue is about to attempt something. My last invocation was a tricky choice - lots of useful defensive tricks, but since I didn't want to rely on Sacred Flame for my regular attacks, I picked up agonizing blast, letting me keep pace with the damage output of the fighters. I might drop it in the future if I need stronger defences but I've been enjoying the raw damage of it so far. At six I'll be picking up Remove Curse (don't ask) and might consider switching something out for Flaming Sphere. It would be nice to have a use for my bonus action but again, I'm the only party member that can deal with arcane threats so I feel like I should keep my spell slots free for counter spells wherever possible
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Post by Plum on Jun 6, 2019 16:52:09 GMT 1
Brilliant D&D session last night (Dungeon of the Mad Mage). As the party was previously a rogue, a wizard (me), a druid and a monk, when the rogue died his player decided to bring in some muscle. His greatsword wielding eight-foot tall goliath barbarian was introduced and explained that he'd heard we needed some serious strength on the team, while flexing dramatically and generally being an arrogant ass. My wizard leaned over and coughed politely, "Actually... I'm stronger than you, and more athletic...". "What?... That's not- I mean, I'm eight feet tall and have sixteen in my strength stat!" "Yeah... I have eighteen though, I'm pretty strong for a wizard" At which point our druid interrupted, "erm... I also have eighteen strength, sorry. So you're only the third strongest" "Ehhhh", said the nearby monk, "I'm also stronger - you're actually the weakest member of the party. Sorry string-bean". That led to much banter and joking at his expense, until we finally reached the first encounter of the session. At this point he pulled himself together, ready to prove himself and show that raw stats don't make a hero! Charging at a enemy with a savage battle cry, he immediately rolled a miss, followed by a critical miss that saw him stumbling and dropping his great sword. Taking pity on the now distraught goliath, my wizard offered him her spare dagger as clearly the sword was a little too much for him. The poor kid was clearly trying too hard to impress! He eventually managed to shake off his bad luck and was actually a really useful addition to the team for the rest of the evening but it's easily the funniest character introduction I've ever seen and I was genuinely in tears with laughter when he rolled the critical miss and fumbled his weapon. The player in question role-played it all perfectly as well, going from an arrogant and boastful character to having an inferiority complex over the course of an hour, before finally managing to claw back some respect as a useful party member and ending the night as a full group member and equal (my celestial warlock retired when her teammates literally got disintegrated in front of her eyes and she barely made it out herself)
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Post by Zejety on Aug 18, 2019 17:42:43 GMT 1
I've gotta roll a new character for an ongoing campaign.
Some backstory: My fighter knowingly put on a cursed armor for plot reasons and the negative effects are of the mind-control variety that I was starting not to have fun. I'd have talked to my DM about it but last session he introduced a convenient point for an extended party split. SO while my fighter and an NPC are heading one way, the two other PCs and another NPC are heading another. That means I'll make a new guy to meet them in the elven lands!
The party consists of a Monk and a Moon Druid who would prefer to stay a bear for 100% of session time. The NPC might be a Warlock. The party is kinda understaffed in the arcane and subterfuge departments (the NPC is decent at stealth), and we also have no heals in case the frontline Druid drops. So I was thinking Bard (Celestial Warlock could have also been interesting). I'm currently turn between the Colleges of Lore and Whispers. I don't enjoy playing evil characters, but I guess you don't *have* to play a Whispers bard as evil... One funny hook is that the Druid is ANCIENT and at this point has become synonymous with the boogeyman in Elven culture. So a storytelling bard would be excited about observing him, and the myths would be an interesting aspect to the fear-based Whispers features... Thoughts?
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Post by Bomber678 on Aug 20, 2019 7:32:11 GMT 1
I played my first session of a new campaign, a spiritual sequel to the sky pirates one from a few years back, on Sunday night. We had to plan and execute a heist to steal a very magic thing from a mansion during a party.
We're using spheres of power too, which is pretty cool.
We laid out a plan involving the ratman sneaking inside to steal it, the engineer and I (a kind of fighter) to attend the party properly, and the robot to wait outside in the shadows as our backup plan. So the ratman goes upstairs but he can't pick any of the locked doors. So we sneak the engineer up to the second floor as well, and they pick all the locks and find nothing. They then concoct a plan to plant an explosive in the upstairs gambling room to distract all the guards to see what's behind a guarded door. They walk through the gambling room, the engineer passes the explosive to the rat, the rat tries to place it under the table without anyone seeing, but rolls just low enough that a guy at the table sees him and grabs him. The engineer legs it, while the rat is held by the gambler as the device goes off. As soon as it explodes, the rat legs it and escapes. The engineer finds a mechanical cat and calls the robot in for backup. They try to fight it, but it's tough. The rat finds me, we both get up to the roof, and slay the beast. Enginner picks the lock the cat was guarding... Oh boy, it's a room full of magic items. The rat rushes up to grab the orb and.... the windows in front of him smash open as someone we've faced before bursts through. A vicious looking lady with the mansion's guards appear at the door behind us. And the gambler and his bodyguard, revealed to be a guy we really pissed off in the past, pop up through the floor. Oh dear.
GM cuts the session at that point. "Find out next time!"
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Post by Plum on Aug 21, 2019 11:06:37 GMT 1
Sigh, I did have a longer reply but my stupid Mac just lost it In short, I played a Celestial Warlock (Tome) and she was an amazing arcane swiss army knife, packing tons of cantrips, utility rituals, heals and control spells. Unfortunately while she was amazing outside of combat, we're running a combat heavy campaign and I got bored of throwing out eldritch blast over and over. A lore bard is also a great choice. You can spot heal when the druid goes down, throw out control spells, pick up the best arcane spells with your extra magical secrets and still do all the fun bard social stuff. The whispers bard is also great, but waiting until L10 before magical secrets means that you might suffer for lack of a dedicated arcane caster (no counterspell, no fly, no fireball etc). Of course that depends on your campaign - if you rarely face enemy spellcasters then you can probably live without an arcane expert. You could also consider picking up Ritual Caster which would give anyone access to useful things like identify, detect magic, tiny hut, floating disc etc
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Post by Plum on Aug 21, 2019 11:09:17 GMT 1
We had to plan and execute a heist to steal a very magic thing from a mansion during a party. That sounds awesome! The best plans are the ones that go massively, explosively wrong
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