#5.5e

[biggs-regretti]

Marmalade "Dandy" Amberberry Halfling, Bard of Dance

[cocoshomebrew]

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creating Dungeons & Dragons Homebrew Content

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[rpgtoons]

start a new campaign

[honourablejester]

Random topic, here, but illusion spells are one of the areas where you really realise that D&D 5e/5.5e is a combat game? Because illusion spells really are written combatively.

What I’m talking about is, almost all the illusion spells will have a paragraph down the bottom to something like the following effect:

“If a creature uses its action to examine the sound or image, the creature can determine that it is an illusion with a successful Intelligence (Investigation) check against your spell save DC. If a creature discerns the illusion for what it is, the illusion becomes faint to the creature.”

Specifics may slightly vary depending on the level of spell and the range of effects it has. The sentence I want to focus on, though, is that last one.

If a creature discerns the illusion for what it is, the illusion becomes faint to the creature.

Now. I know this is so that a PC who has successfully seen through an illusion over a hidden entrance or whatever has a chance to see through to what it’s hiding. But the thing about it is, it bakes in that illusions can only be used for deception. They literally become less effective if you try to use them for anything else.

What am I talking about here? Okay. I had a character, an elven illusionist wizard, who used illusions primarily for social purposes. Illustration and entertainment. He had a whole philosophy about it, about using lies to illustrate the truth. And one of the things he did was he used minor illusion to put on street shows for kids. Because it’s a cantrip, you can spam it. And he basically used it to put on … like, stop motion puppet shows? He’d tell a story, and have a little minor illusion stage with toy characters on it, and when something changed in the story he’d do a quick drop and recast of the illusion to act like stop motion animation to illustrate what was happening.

The reason he did puppet shows was because minor illusion, as a cantrip, has a lot of caveats to it. It has to fit in a five foot cube, it can’t show creatures (you need levelled spells for that), it can’t have motion or additional effects, and you can’t have multiple illusions up at once, if you cast again the original image is lost.

Now, a five foot cube is actually pretty big if you’re not using it for combat tricks. Like, if you think of a five foot by five foot doll house or toy stage? Lots of room there. And he used toys because it has to be an object, not a creature. And he used the drop-and-recast trick for motion because moveable illusions tend to be very high level. He also had the Keen Mind feat so he could hold a lot of detail in his head for his illusions, to enable the drop-and-recast manoeuvre. But once you allow for those caveats? You can have a pretty big and involved little fake world to play stories out on.

But the one thing with all D&D illusion spells. If someone knows its an illusion, it becomes faint.

So if you bring up an illusion, on purpose, within view of everyone, with everyone knowing it’s an illusion because you’re not actually trying to lie to them, you’re just trying to put on a show, the illusion becomes faint. See-through and misty.

Now, my guy Hiero basically worked with that, having a faint spectral element to all his shows, working with the limits of the medium. We made it work. It just. It highlights the bias? The game assumes that illusions will only be used for combat or deception. That the only reason you would cast an illusion is to lie to someone.

There’s no room for an audience to willingly buy in to an illusion and still retain the full effect. There’s no anticipation that someone would use illusion for, say, illustration purposes. One of the other uses Hiero put minor illusion too was basically a mobile wanted poster. When we were looking for a particular guy, he’d put up a palm-sized illusion of him in his hand and ask people had they seen him, rather than mucking around with verbal descriptions (because of the ‘object’ rule, we glossed it as an imaginary statue of the guy). There are so many non-hostile, non-deceptive ways to use the ability to casually generate any image you want on the spot. But the game assumes that instead it’s going to be for hiding, for trickery, for combat.

Now. There is still something exciting about working with the limits of a medium. Like, there was a lot of mileage gotten out of the limits of minor illusion. He made great friends with a dwarven artificer and toymaker, for example, because he wanted to learn about toys and how they looked and how they functioned for his illusions. It’s a great plot device.

But where the limits are just tends to highlight what the expected or intended usage is.

And in D&D 5e, illusions are written very combatively.

[prokopetz]

Assuming you've been keeping up with the reveal-videos made by Wotc showing some of the 2024-5e content, is there anything mechanics wise that they included that you were surprised at/has assumed they wouldn't go with? Or have the design team generally stayed the expected course.

Given how substantially 5E's actual content ended up differing from the bulk of its pre-publication preview material, I'm not inclined to believe a word Hasbro says about anything in 5.5E until I see the published text with my own eyes.

[delverschoicettrpg]

Running Daggerheart for the First Time | Running the Game

What a joy it is to discover a new tabletop role-playing game (ttRPG) that just clicks with both my players and me as the game master. I didn’t know whether this would be the case with Daggerheart. Critical Role’s flagship fantasy ttRPG came out close to a year ago now, on May 20th, but it wasn’t until autumn that I received my copy. I wouldn’t have the opportunity to explore the game for another half a year. You know how it is - a campaign takes a long time to progress, even if you’re lucky enough to have a weekly game. After twenty-eight sessions of D&D 5.5e, however, my players and I finally put a wrap on that campaign’s first Act. It was a time for a change.

I picked a few different options: Heart: The City Beneath (RRD), Draw Steel! (MCDM), Alien (Free League), and Daggerheart itself (Darrington Press). It was a close thing between MCDM’s heroic cinematic RPG and Daggerheart, but I’m glad Daggerheart won out. Having the physical book is such a boon; while I’ve been a Patreon supporter of MCDM for years and so receive .pdf versions of all their products, reading (or even skimming) through hundreds of pages of game text makes for exhausting work. And in the realm of purely subjective preference, I much prefer the interior design of Daggerheart to that of Draw Steel! Besides, I’ve already played two sessions of the MCDM ttRPG (and wouldn’t you know it, the combat is excellent!).

The Quickstart adventure is short and sweet, and does a great job of introducing the main pillars of play as Daggerheart defines them. Exploration, combat, social, all popped out of the page and engaged us in a two-hour-long session that went by seamlessly.

Daggerheart attempts to accentuate the co-ownership of the narrative between the game master and the players. Conversation is a lot more two-sided by design than it is in D&D; as the game master, I was instructed early on to invite my players to add details of their own to the world; not minor details either but the kind of texture that keeps popping into the game. When I asked the Ribbit Rogue Barnacle’s player (L.) to define a unique feature about the strange Wood in which the adventure took place, he told me, “The trees’ bark is entirely smooth”. This detail is both narratively memorable and has mechanical effects: when Varian the Ranger went jumping from tree to tree like an absolute madlad, I naturally had to increase the difficulty check to reflect the fact player L. had added. This made for a hilarious moment later on in the session when Varian attempted to climb up a tree to get the attention of the local Arcanist, only to slowly slide down the trunk in a way that should be familiar to all who grew up with the Looney Tunes and similar slapstick comedy animations.

The narrative of the Quickstart adventure was your classical fantasy adventure thoroughfare. On the road to delivering a mysterious package to an elderly Arcanist, the adventurers come across a merchant’s overturned cart. They investigate, in the process interacting with a stryxwolf (an owl-wolf hybrid) that’s nibbling on the merchant’s corpse.

The game doesn’t have an initiative system, which might sound a little daunting at first but works out without a hitch. None of my players attempted to hog the spotlight and take two actions in a row (though if someone were to attempt it for good reason, I’d let them--and I expect the other players would, too). I played this first fight without making much use of Fear, instead having various opponents act after one of the players did. The one time I did use fear, to activate one mob’s special ability, I was pleased with the effect. Fear-fuelled abilities pack a punch, though I’m sure I’ll have more to report on that in the weeks to come. I chose to use Fear in a more narrative capacity, focusing the camera lens towards various slightly disturbing images that Stressed the characters out. For example, the very first Fear token I received went towards focusing one character’s attention towards the merchant’s ruined body, the visceral reality of a human being turned into a scavenging animal’s meal. Of course that’d bring them a point of Stress! Fear, then, is a potent tool not just in combat but in exploration. By allowing the game master to focus on a particularly disturbing detail, it ups the ante--in a way that I really enjoyed, and came naturally.

The social encounters benefit from Fear in a similar way. Having the stack of tokens next to me is a constant reminder that I can pick any one moment to introduce a fresh complication to the scene my players are in. It doesn’t have to be anything life-threatening: one of the PCs had gone onto the local tavern’s second floor without following a rather strange local custom, and so the innkeeper came up to yell at her. This stressed the PC out but also led to one of the most hilarious moments to ever mock anime fanservice on our table.

An easy difference to spot about Daggerheart’s design as opposed to D&D 5e has to do with subclass design. Entire subclasses are designed not around combat differences so much as narrative ones: one Rogue subclass, for example, allows its players to insert a shady NPC contact in any village, town, or city of significance. They come up with the character details in the scene - I didn’t even know about the ability until I heard Barnacle tell his fellow adventurers that he had an acquaintance who could be trusted to give them some much-needed information.

I really enjoy the asymmetrical design as represented by the different rolls made by the players and myself. Their 2d12 rolls fuel both their own resource, Hope, and my Fear, depending on which of their two dice is higher. Meanwhile, I get to keep using my cool obsidian d20 whenever foes attack the PCs--everyone’s happy! (Eh, except for my players, but that’s because that die rolls really, really well.)

I’d stacked a solid cache of the GM resource by the time the party reached the final encounter of the adventure. I would’ve kicked their arses, too, if only one of our players didn’t need to do real-world stuff!

Now, this is a game that lives or dies by you and your group’s comfort with improvising. This is not news to anyone who has read about Daggerheart, seen it played in Critical Role’s Age of Umbra campaign, or follows general ttRPG discourse, but it has to be highlighted. If my players and I weren’t comfortable with improv, I wouldn’t have picked this game up; if you and yours enjoy improvising together, I see no reason why you wouldn’t pick this up. If you’re stuck playing D&D especially but don’t necessarily want to keep up with Wizards of the Coast’s overpriced releases and dated design, I can heartily recommend picking Darrington Press’s game up and giving it a whirl. That said, I don’t see a reason why you should pick Daggerheart up if you’re not into making split-second character decisions or are looking for more rigid combat design (in which case, might I recommend Draw Steel!?)

After all is said and done, what are my first impressions of Darrington Press’ ambitious new fantasy ttRPG? It’ll have a long shelf life. The Core Rulebook has everything necessary for months and years of adventuring. With Darrington Press nabbing two powerhouses of tabletop and D&D design, Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford, the future of this game seems to me very bright indeed. I will be engaging with it extensively over the weeks and months to come, in order to better understand the allowances and limitations of its design; but the fact that a single two-hour quickstarter adventure has me so excited to experience more of Daggerheart? That is an excellent sign for what’s to come--excellent enough to make me hopeful, at any rate.

Following the Quickstart adventure, we went through the six campaign frames the Core Rulebook provides. What a thrill it was to see every one of my players get excited for some of them - and different ones, too. When we voted for which one of the six to explore first, I found myself having to cast the tiebreaker vote between Beast Feast (inspired by Dungeon Meshi, one of my favourite anime of recent memory) and Age of Umbra (a dark soulslike fantasy world). A difficult choice, and one I didn’t want to make. I’d set up a campaign across both worlds - and happily so. But I have a vivid idea of a dark fantasy story set up in the Age of Umbra, and so I ultimately went with that one; plus, how is a nerd like me supposed to miss out on the opportunity to emulate one Matthew Mercer?

I’m excited to write all about it in the weeks to come; hopefully it’ll be a time to remember.

[calicolen]

Thanks for letting me come to game night guys :) is it okay if I run my homebrew spells by y'all?

9/11 Flashback - Cantrip - Does what it says.

Imagine Dragons - Cantrip - Target Self, grants the caster the ability to observe dragons invisible and harmless to others.

Destroy babies - Level 3 Wizard, Warlock, and Sorcerer Spell - All creatures with an age modifier lower than 2 within 30 meters of the caster take 10d4 force damage.

On a successful dex save: no damage

Evil Power - Level 8 Warlock Spell - Target a creature within 1000 meters, the targeted creature's history will now be unanimously remembered as evil, scandalous, mischievous, and twisted. All future actions done by the targeted creature will also be unanimously judged as evil, scandalous, mischievous, and twisted.

10.5 Billion Ants - Level 9 Warlock and Sorcerer Spell - Target a creature that you can see, 10.5 billion ants are summoned 5 meters above the targeted creature.

[bburn-art]

Absolutely ripping off orthodox churches for their art style