Escalation

Had a great time DMing last night. However, there was one frustrating encounter where the players were surprised by a Remhorhaz. The wizard's response was hold monster, and that was pretty much the end of the encounter. The monster was not proficient in any saving throws whatsoever, meaning it needed a natural 18 or higher in the die to break free. My challenging battle had become a game of teeball. What was the real problem here? Was it that the monster had no proficient saves? Or was the real problem spellcasting itself?

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World Spells

The Civ IV mod Fall from Heaven II introduces a new feature to the base game: magic. But this ain't your uncle's spellbook. These spells affect entire cities. Then there's this really cool feature each civilization has called World Spells. They are literally spells which affect the whole of the game world. As far as I can tell there isn't any kind of spell system for 5e that covers magic on such a large scale. It's a really cool idea so I'm going to try my hand at whipping something up (+1 for mixed metaphors!).

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Gritty Realism

Short rest = 8 hours

Long rest = 7 days

Ever since I read the passage on Gritty Realism in the Dungeon Master’s Guide I’ve wanted to try this. Imagine a game where going to sleep doesn’t heal every wound. Imagine a game where getting hit by an ogre with a greatclub matters. I think it’d be pretty cool. My players, on the other hand, had different opinions.

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Oath of Reaping

Last time you got to read about my character concept - a man who's been possessed by a demon since childhood. Throughout his life Alistair experienced incidents when the demon was let out and caused great tragedy. This ultimately leads him to attempt the unthinkable, except the demon won't let him die. Alistair is convinced he is unable to die (and in 5e it can be pretty hard), so after receiving a life changing vision he dedicated himself to the god of death in the hopes of earning his eternal rest.

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Advanced D&D 5e: Skills

Hi folks! The other day I was talking with one of my players, OrkBossJo, and one of things we discussed was how great it’d be if there were more choices in the skill system. As is, you pick your skills at character creation...and that’s it. Unless you want to spend a feat (no thanks). I fondly remember the skill system from 3.5. While some might complain about the book keeping, every time you gained a new level there were a variety of things a player could do with their newly minted skill points. And does anyone remember when a high intelligence gave you extra skills?

I think it’s high time we bring a little more complexity to skills, and with it more choices for the players. Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition is an excellent game. It is my favorite edition of D&D by far. However, when the R&D team at Wizards was designing the game they were creating D&D for every target audience. I think the experienced players and anyone who wants a few more choices at the price of a little more complexity should get it. So for today I’ll give you guys the first thing me and OrkBossJo came up with.

Currently the skill system only distinguishes between trained and untrained skills. You always get to add the appropriate ability score modifier. The only distinction is whether you’re adding the proficiency bonus. What if there were a third category? Enter stage right: Untalented skills.

These are skills a player is not only unable to add their proficiency bonus to, but makes those checks with disadvantage. That’s right. If you’re untalented in a skill there’s only a snowball’s chance in hell of something good happening when making a check. Every class will have a handful of skills for which they are particularly ill suited. Yes, we’re adding a penalty, but there’s an upside.

Intelligence matters again. You can choose a number of untalented skills equal to your Intelligence modifier, and upgrade them to untrained skills. If your modifier is a penalty, you need to choose an equal number of untrained skills and downgrade them to untalented. Wait, there’s more! Let’s make the skill feat matter again too. If you take the Skilled feat, you can choose any number of your untrained or untalented skills and make them trained skills, in addition to upgrading a couple of untalented skills to untrained. I think this system will not only make the skill feat more relevant, but give more flavor to your character by making you worse at skills you already weren’t using. Plus, don’t you think it’s a little odd that every Orc with a decent Intimidate skill is also better suited to persuade people with argumentation and the art of deception?


Sample Untalented Skills List
Barbarian: Arcana, Investigation, Medicine, Religion
Bard: None
Cleri c: Acrobatics, Survival
Druid: Investigation, Sleight of Hand
Fighter: Arcana, Nature, Religion
Monk: Arcana, Performance, Sleight of Hand
Paladin: Stealth, Sleight of Hand
Ranger: Arcana, Performance, Religion
Sorcerer: Athletics, Medicine, Religion
Warlock: Insight, Medicine
Wizard: Athletics, Acrobatics, Survival

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Barbarian Archetype: The Reaver

This here is a new subclass for the Barbarian put together by my friend Kintaro. It has some really interesting mechanics where the Barb generates temporary hit points while raging and can spend those hit points to do some crazy stuff. Check it out:

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Reader Mail Bag: July

Welcome to the next installment of answering your emails. First up a light one, then a good meaty one!

From Cat:

So, my girlfriend and I are playing D&D together. We both have two characters and change turns being DM. She is new to the game and I'm trying to keep her interested without being to pushy. I'm struggling with building a game she can enjoy. So far we've been playing adventures that are all wrapped up in one session and are about to try HotDQ. I was hoping you could give some ideas on how to keep her engaged.

My response:

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A Pirate’s Life V: Ships of the Line

We’re back to the high seas! Today I have around twenty ship stat blocks for you from the Age of Sail. Starting with the stat blocks from Sid Meier’s Pirates! and the Dungeon Master’s Guide, I tinkered with the statistics to come up with a meaningful manner of integrating ships into the Naval Travel & Combat system put together so far. First, let me walk you through the DMG’s ship stats, where it’s lacking and what’s needed to fix it.

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A Pirate's Life IV: Ship's Surgeon

In the last part of this series we explored a mini-game for a player to manage crew morale on a ship during a naval battle. Today I’d like to shine the light on what happens to a crew not mentally but physically during combat, and a player role for managing this. We’ll go over the role of a ship’s Surgeon, how many crew get injured or killed, and how the Surgeon goes about reducing this number. After quite a bit of thought, and discarding a few working theories of how things might play out I eventually settled on a system informed by enemy damage dice.

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A Pirate’s Life III: Non-Combat Roles

Let’s get right to it. We have a bunch of PCs on a single ship. One player is the pilot. The rest are gunners. The choice is pilot or gunner, and the player with the best skill bonus is the pilot. Not much of a choice. We need other options, preferably non-combat options that give some diversity to the choice. Many ships had positions whose focus was to manage the crew’s morale, from this we’ll extrapolate a few ideas from 5e’s Bardic Inspiration mechanic. Further, we need to look at another basic role that is a pillar of D&D: the healer. First we’ll start with the morale manager.

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A Pirate's Life II: Naval Combat

Last time we went through a game structure for ship movement during naval combat. It wasn’t super simple, but the result was (hopefully) something intuitive with strategic depth. Let’s do the same for the combat itself. The limitation of the ruleset is that it only keeps one player occupied at the table unless each player is commanding a different ship. So we need things for the other players to do that are also intuitive and have strategic depth, while not creating anything already covered in the rules.

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A Pirate’s Life: Naval Movement & Travel

My PCs are planning to leave Haven after just one quest. It’s not because they didn’t like it, but the party’s Captain is playing a cleric of Tali. As such he doesn’t like staying in one place for too long. After putting a lot of work into Haven, I’m having strong urges to railroad them back there but I’m going to channel this into expanding the sandbox to the high seas. Let’s go sailing.

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