D&D and Tabletops RPGs V7: Yes you can talk about tabletops other than D&D - Games

We're sent on a mission to clear out a forest of necromancers to secure the empire's flank in it's advance against the kingdom (which is also an empire). It's a time sensitive mission, since we want to regroup with the war effort. We attack a fortress, recouping before storming the last building, We reach level 4. The monk, sick of me speaking goblin to the soldiers when I didn't want him to know something, takes the feat that gives him three extra languages. He also took abyssal and infernal, since the plentiful books we were picking up were one of the two. The GM had him find a staff that translates everything during the very same rest. After we cleared the fortress, with captives to answer our many questions, and an attic filled with more loot that we could carry, we learn that there's a dungeon (which'd be our first, the GM had one prior, but I wasn't fond of treason for low pay) filled with drow who'd been trading with the evil necromancers. The next course of action was obvious to me. We [I]trade[/I] with the drow for easier to transport treasures -Gets hyped for a next session of high stakes trading with capricious evil elves, rather than a dungeon crawl-

Im making my first from scratch character, and im thinking orphaned goliath barbarian, raised by a treant, with hella high strength and piss poor int, basically lennie from "of mice and men". Knowing my friends its gonna be fun to want to be lawful good but be so dumb and gullible that you dont know the laws and anyone you trust a little can convince you of basically anything. [editline]14th March 2018[/editline] Anybody do something like this before? Any tips? [editline]14th March 2018[/editline] Im considering something along the lines of "cant remember anything that happens whine enraged"

While browsing the D&D subreddit for stories, I had a flashback of one of our most ridiculous encounters. So the players infiltrated deep into a bandit hideout and huddle outside a room, trying to listen in on what's inside. I describe sounds of drunken merriment, rolling bones, and clacking coins. It sounds like four or so of them in there, so they're a little hesitant to bust on in, given that the bandits are fairly skilled duelists. However, the bard takes this opportunity to demonstrate his savvy and attempts to disguise himself as one amongst their ranks before intruding on the party. So he does, and it initially goes about as well as you'd expect with "who the bloody hell are you?" being the first exchange. "I'm the new guy" the bard shoots back. They don't buy it because he's clearly not in uniform, only disguising the fact he's a halfling. He continues by saying that he was put on corpse hoisting duty for the resident semi-insane, cannibal abomination that lives in the small chasm there and got his uniform dirtied up and it was getting washed. Their response? "Yeah, shit's gross man, pull up a chair!" Mead is one hell of a drug. At any rate, before he takes a seat, he asks one of the bandits if he wants his glass topped off before sitting down, to which they nod and hand it over. Well, between the cask and the table, he manages to sleight of hand some mysterious potion he found earlier into the cup, hoping it'd provide a distraction for the rest of the group. With abated breath, the bard watches as the bandit thanks him and takes a sip. Poof! He's gone. The bandits jump from their seats in shock, while the voice of the vanished one echoing out, asking what the matter was. Without missing a beat, the bard yells "HE'S A GHOST! GUARD YOURSELVES!" and the bandit draw their blades, swinging wildly at the prior bandit's location. Screams, steel and blood flies through the air in the ensuing chaos, but before the rest of the party decides to burst in to help, the action dies down. After the brawl, the now visible bloody bandit's corpse is what remains of the fight, with another wounded from the invisible one defending himself. The bard maintains control of the situation, now claiming the ghost has released control of their deceased friend, but its curse is contagious, cautioning that they should bind their friend, the one wounded earlier, to a chair. They do so without hesitation, then are convinced to lock their weapons into a nearby box to avoid giving the ghost a means to harm them. Just as they finish disarming themselves, the bard goes and raps on the door. The party bursts in, quickly slaying one bandit and subduing the remaining one before drawing their attention to the one in the chair. White with fear and dripping with sweat he shouts: "W-Wait, wait! There's a g-ghost in here!"

[QUOTE=Birdman101;53201584]Im making my first from scratch character, and im thinking orphaned goliath barbarian, raised by a treant, with hella high strength and piss poor int, basically lennie from "of mice and men". Knowing my friends its gonna be fun to want to be lawful good but be so dumb and gullible that you dont know the laws and anyone you trust a little can convince you of basically anything. [editline]14th March 2018[/editline] Anybody do something like this before? Any tips? [editline]14th March 2018[/editline] Im considering something along the lines of "cant remember anything that happens whine enraged"[/QUOTE] Similar but not quite played through yet but my current back-up character in the event mine dies during the campaign is a GM approved stone giant named Tofu (don't ask how I got the go-ahead on that one, I have no fucking idea, I asked nicely and was told to just not go overboard with it). I rolled a 4 and a 5 for his ability scores, luckily with race mods that means his dex is now 8, but his intelligence is 5. He's also a crusader from Tome of Battle and if he ends up in play and survives long enough to get there, he'll probably multi-class into Devoted Defender. He's got weathered carvings and murals of most of the good aligned deities as he's been around for hundreds of years and while his charisma and wisdom aren't low enough to make him gullible to evil, his low intelligence makes me feel like he's easily swayed to fight for holy causes. That -3 int modifier hurts though because stone giant is a +4 level adjustment alone, he's literally only going to get 5 skill points total at level 6, 4 from first class level (GM ruled that even though he's level adjusted, it would be his first class so he gets the skill points for first level, which imo is a good call in this instance), and 1 for every fucking level after lol. The racial skill points for stone giant technically give him at -17, and I'm fortunate the GM didn't tell me to just award negative ranks because 31 strength (+16 race mod) is OP.

That just sounds like a nightmare for everyone else involved.

Good lord I'm glad I don't have to plan encounters for a party where one member has a 31 strength.

Yeah, I'm not actually sure I want to play him like this, everyone else is already pretty much kinda given some sort of benefit that my human monk wasn't and tbh I don't need to be OP at something now so I probably don't need to be then. If I did play him I'd personally nerf him I think, because 31 strength is fucking absurd.

31 strength is probably going to make combat a complete joke, be fully prepared to be asked to reroll after your first combat. I

I'm probably going to personally reduce him to like 18 or 19 and just call it good. Idk what the authors were thinking making this a +4 level adjustment, all things considered.

4 LA is a shitton, and being Huge means everyone can hit you extremely easily. It might seem really good, but it has it's drawbacks. You can't fit inside most buildings or dungeons, people run in fear at the sight of you, you can't wear practically any magic items not tailored for giants, much less non-magical items, and you're going to be pulverized in 1 hit by the time everyone else is level 5.

Yep. It's definitely a mixed bag, and after level 10 or so you're going to need 31 strength to one shot things before they obliterate you, because there is literal chunk of weaponry/skills/spells designed just to deal with stuff of your stature and build, and most of it hits like rabid beavers on meth when magic infusion is involved. Not saying it won't be worth the story and scenario investment, but it's not a win button by any stretch.

Being huge would fix that balance problem, but the stone giant race is only Large in SRD. Funny enough I found a homebrew page on Dandwiki.com that is actually more balanced than the SRD stone giant race. 4LA is a lot considering what it means for losing class levels late game, having only a max of 16 in one class only, but for what the character would be, it's pretty OP for early levels in combat especially.

Hey, so I'm been DMing (5e) for a group of friends for ~6 meets now, and the whole group, including myself, is fairly new to RPGs in general. We have a party of 5, and I'm having a hard time coming up with challenging, but not immediately deadly encounters. They just fought and killed Mezzoloth, but he almost wiped half the party with his Cloud Kill spell. It ended up being a fun encounter, but it was almost disastrous. I'm finding the problem to be that the players don't have a lot of health because they're only level 5, but they need to fight higher level enemies because there's so many of them, and those higher level enemies do LOTS of damage at once. Would it be better to just manually adjust some monsters to have buffed HP, but regular attacks, so that they won't one shot players, but also provide a bit more challenge? Is there a better solution?

I think generally it's considered a good move to use the lower-levelled monsters but in trickier ways. Making your monsters think makes combat a lot more involved and not as simple for the GM, but you can add extra challenges to adjust to how your players act. If things have been a simple slugfest, try setting up some low-level humanoid monsters with ranged weapons in hard-to-reach places, while there's a main threat to deal with down below. Then your players have to split up and if they're also organizing, it becomes a game where their tactics matter as much as their firepower. If your players have been tackling threats individually fine, you could also spice things up with an occasional gimmick fight, which I guess might be self-explanatory. But just stuff where "KILL BADDIES" isn't the goal so much as "GET THROUGH THE TRAPPED ROOM" or "DISABLE THE WARDS AND KILL THE ONE CONTROLLING THE BADDIES". Simple extra tasks they have to do so that the numbers aren't so high, but there's a very real threat of being overrun or incapacitated, etc. etc. disclaimer i dont run d&d

5e balance is utter shit. You are meant to use lots of little enemies and even then in multiple waves, to drain resources like AoE magic and abilities and health. Single powerful creatures are a pathetic joke once they hit level 5. It becomes rocket tag - either they land a powerful hit that wipes out 1+ PC in 1 hit, or they get torn to shreds posthaste. Large groups of weak dudes aren't much of a threat either, tbh, but they are resource intensive if you back them up with a couple tougher guys. Really, you need to design encounters so they are pretty much always in the 'deadly' range, because otherwise they're a fucking joke. Now, having really easy encounters isn't a bad thing either, as introduction to a new enemy or just an impromptu battle. However, for dungeon crawling where a long rest ALREADY heals you to 100% full, draining resources is a god damn joke unless you can physically trap them in the dungeon, because otherwise they can just go a distance, pop a Leomund's Hut (a ritual, at that), and rest with impunity.

A possible solution to them just backing off, besides just barring them in, is to have the enemies gather up and create fortifications around them/at the mouth of the dungeon. They know now that they have attacking foes, and if they don't back off far enough they see the dome of Leomund's Hut. You'd likely have to house rule that they can't fire projectiles out for fairness sake, but even then, I think it'd still be possible. Debuff's that don't wear away on long rest are also an option, as well as throwing an enemy with legendary actions. Admittedly, though, the easiest way to balance is to make sure everyone's playing in-character. 5e is very character-focused I feel, and so your players need to get into the mindset of their character and not that of a chess master, so to say.

In really any edition of D&D one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) contributors to encounter difficulty is action economy. Even a statistically more powerful enemy can get beaten pretty easily given that they'll be fighting multiple player characters that can act multiple times compared to the fact they're only able to act once per turn. If you find PCs are getting through encounters more easily, consider padding them out with trash minions to tie PCs up and block access to the heavier hitting guys. A sorcerer is significantly more dangerous if access to him is blocked off by a bunch of armored goons and superior or equal numbers also make it harder for PCs to flank enemies. Weaker enemies can also serve to wear PCs down and encourage them to expend resources that they might want later on such as spells or healing items, although to have that take effect you'll probably need to police where and when they rest more.

Thank for the ideas, guys! I've tried to stay away from having too many enemies at once because the combat becomes a massive slog, with me doing a bunch of stuff while the players just sit there waiting for their turn, but having one big guy with a few weaker monsters in support would probably help a lot (I had one combat where a monk just stunned a big baddie with a great hit roll, and they just dominated the fight from there. It was super anti-climactic.) I especially like the idea of having an encounter be about more than just killing the enemies (like reaching a point, getting an item, etc.) That would add a lot of excitement and pressure.

Went into a boss fight expecting it to be a like 30+ vs. 1 encounter (we had a lot of goblin allies), the boss cast thunderwave killing all the goblins, and then summons a bunch of zombies/wolves. I got knocked out first round, one of our players ran in and got surrounded. A turn goes by, I get brought back by cure wounds, and the boss decides he's "done with us" and walks over to a window and starts casting a spell (probably to teleport?). I'm another room over in the keep, but I leaned out of a window (dm told me if I get hit I will fall and get knocked out again, yolo), and cast Hideous Laughter on the boss, and he falls to the ground prone. Our sorceress runs into the room and yanks his staff from his hands, passes a wisdom check, and realizes she can controls the zombies and essentially unsummons them. She got the staff to use as her focus now, and I got a nifty little ring that gives +1 to my bardic inspiration rolls, and the fight ended well earlier than the DM had originally planned.

Also don't be afraid to let them know they don't have to kill everything to win a combat, there's plenty of ways to end a conflict that don't involve killing everything in standard combat as if it were a video game. A few very obvious hints about alternate solutions tend to do wonders I find when working with new players, just enough to get their brain thinking about abstract solutions.

Yeah, I'm really trying to make the experience seem fluid and natural. The players all know that they are basically never forced into one choice. Our last quest was centered around the party going into a town where all the inhabitants were being mind controlled by a teanager who found an amulet possessed by a demon. During the development, 3 of the 5 party members fell to the mind control and were telepathically sent to the main building to be looked over as new subjects. The other 2 pretended to be under the control as well, but one totally botched their performance check when entering the room. The kid with the amulet noticed and put his hand out to mind control the party member, but he instantly yelled out that he wanted to throw a javelin (He's a huge orc barbarian). They thought that this kid would be the final boss, but he actually only had 10 hp. So the orc through the javelin, hit the kid, and killed him in one shot. The party wasn't sure what was going on until the demon crawled out of the kids body, which started the real final scene. One of the party members then picked up the amulet, which immediately started whispering to him about putting it on, and how much power he could have. He hasn't put it on yet, but as long as they hold onto it, the demon will continually try to get someone to put it on. It's cursed, so if they do, then they won't be able to take it off and it's going to have some pretty severe effects, while also giving them a dominate monster spell.

Dominate Monster is a ninth level spell; I'd be wary of giving that to a group of low level adventurers.

The amulet is going to be SUPER debilitating in other ways. Basically, every time you use it, the demon within the amulet is going to get more powerful and have greater control over you. It will sap your stats continually until you are able to get it removed, which will restore the stats.

I spent the last half year last year building up a simplified TU based GURPs system with skill branches. Now I have friends re-using what is basically an untested system to modify/change or just use that system in general and I have no idea how that happened. Help.

https://i.imgur.com/vaXLrqI.png Fuck this program

Does anyone know where I can find an unreasonable amount of character art in various genres? For my Mutants game I've basically got as much genre clash as one can possibly have, so I need everything from your normal Superheroes to Cyberpunk to DnD to basically everything. I've used Pinterest for a good while but I can never find much in the way of original stuff, as far as Superheroes are concerned, and of which I probably need the most of atm.

Google image search? That's what I usually consult, though some times it take a few times of modifying my search terms to get quite what I'm looking for.

pintrest is your best bet for character art

But the fact that I couldn't find anything on Pinterest was the issue here. :/ Most of my searching for Superhero stuff results piles and piles of DC and Marvel stuff, when I'm searching for more original concepts. I've found SOME, but that was usually only after spending a good 15 minutes of hardcore searching finding proverbial needles in the haystack.

Well, after some looking around, and help from Meltingdata, I think I got my character art conundrum covered. Thanks to everyone who replied though!