#d&d5

[tenleaguesbeneath]

Imagine if baseline D&D character tactical competence were gated as metagaming the way other things were.

"It's a loud and chaotic battle and they're shooting arrows at you, I don't think you'd notice that the rogue who was trying to flank the enemy formation just got ganked. I'm not letting you cast Healing Word on them without a perception roll."

[got-geek-vibez]

[odragaozumbi]

1D6 Magias para Remodelar a Realidade

Existem muitas magias poderosas, mas poucas realmente contornam os alicerces do jogo. Os feitiços listados a seguir foram pensados para D&D 5e, mas funcionam em sistemas d20 em geral e são capazes de alterar as regras básicas, por isso deve ser incluídos com cuidado.

Acredita-se que essas magias, se é que elas existem, são pronunciadas na língua da criação do multiverso. Elas não podem ser escritas ou representadas graficamente e ninguém sabe ao certo as consequências de tentar memoriza-las.

Para efeito de regras provisórias, são consideradas as seguintes características para todas as magias, a menos que se especifique diferente nas mesmas: sem nível ou escola; tempo de conjuração de 1 ação; alcance/área global; duração de 1 minuto; componentes apenas verbais.

 Conjuração 1: “Ymointh”

Efeito: Todo ataque de oportunidade é um sucesso.

  Conjuração 2: “Nuvintyg”

Efeito: O tempo de conjuração, alcance, quantidade de componentes, duração, número de alvos e tamanho da área de efeito de todos os feitiços lançados durante a duração dessa magia tem seus valores dobrados.

  Conjuração 3: “Bildrenth”

Efeito: Embaralhe 20 pedaços de papel com os números de 1 a 20 escritos neles. Toda vez que algum personagem precisar rolar um d20, ao invés disso ele deve pegar um pedaço de papel e usar o valor como resultado da sua rolagem. Descarte os papéis usados, recolocando-os no baralho apenas se todos os papéis já tenham sido usados.

  Conjuração 4: “Qandrei”

Efeito: Sempre que o turno de um personagem terminar, decida aleatoriamente qual será o próximo personagem a agir. Inclua o personagem que acabou de agir no sorteio também.  

  Conjuração 5: “Eimrule”

Alcance: Todos os personagens em um raio de 15m do conjurador.

Efeito: Os personagens afetados jogam 1d10. Pela duração da magia, todos os testes do personagem recebem o valor tirado como bônus modificador, substituindo qualquer outro valor que receberiam normalmente.

  Conjuração 6: “Paerolth”

Efeito: Todas as magias preparadas podem ser lançadas como se fossem truques (sem precisar usar espaços de magia), mas têm o custo adicional de metade da vida atual do conjurador, arredondado para cima (exemplo: com 13 pontos de vida, o conjurador perde 7).

[youka3000]

Many people seem to like Ayta, my “Shaman King” character! So, I decided to draw a fullbody of him.

[sirpoley]

On Towns in RPGs, Part 6: Wait, Wasn't This About Maps?

In the first article in this series, I embarked on an ill-defined quest to figure out what, if anything, a town map is actually for in tabletop play.

In the second, I took a look at the common metaphor comparing towns to dungeons—unfavourably.

In the third, I proposed an alternate metaphor: that cities are more like forests than dungeons.

In the fourth, I looked at how forests are used in D&D to see what we could use when thinking about cities.

In the fifth, I got into to the nuts and bolts of designing cities for use in D&D.

Now, we're going to break out the Gimp (or, for you fancy folks, Photoshop) and make some maps.

Splitting the Map in Two

Back in the first article, I compared these two images of medieval Nuremberg:

In that article, I argued that we can make things easier for ourselves as DMs, and be more effective besides, by splitting a D&D map into two separate illustrations: one to set the tone, and one for crunch, much like the tourist map on the right. It's ugly as sin, but if you're a tourist in old Nuremberg, it tells you exactly what you need and no more. Functionally, this particular map wouldn't be very useful in D&D (again, it emphasizes actual streets, which we don't care about, because towns are not dungeons) but, because towns are forests, we can look to existing high-functioning D&D map design—that is to say, regional maps—as inspiration.

Cutting Out the Illustration

By adding an illustration, which, unless you're publishing this city, you can just steal from the internet, you're taking a lot of the load off of your map. The map no longer has to be particularly pretty, it doesn’t have to show individual buildings or roads, and it doesn't have to fit any particular theme. All it has to do is be easy to read, functional, and packed with information. Think about it a little like a character sheet for your city.

What's Left for the Map?

Most D&D town maps try to give a literal depiction of the exact layout of the streets (which isn't useful) and also serve as an evocative piece of art (which is, but can be done better and more easily in other means), but doesn't provide much in the way of useful gameplay information. So… what is useful gameplay information?

Travel Time

Consider the map of the area around Neverwinter Woods that I used earlier. Somewhere in pretty much every RPG rulebook is a table showing daily travel speeds through various different terrain types. In D&D 3.5, for example, an unencumbered human can cover 18 miles overland on flat ground, or 12 miles per day through forests. These values can be increased by major highways. Knowing this information, it becomes trivial for the DM to quickly count up hexes (which are 5 miles each), look up a few numbers on a table, and do a quick calculation to tell the party how many days it takes to get from, say, Neverwinter to Leilon (13 hexes→65 miles→24 miles per day on a highway→2.7 days travel time, rounded to 3). This is important information narratively, but also for game mechanics, as it determines how much food the party must carry (which plays into the encumbrance and wealth rules), and how many random encounters they risk, well, encountering.

Now try to do the same calculation with this map:

An unencumbered human can walk 300 ft per minute, or hustle 600 ft  in the same time, though jogging through the city armed to the teeth (as most PCs are) might attract attention. Try to figure out how long it takes to get from, say, #14 to #18 on the map without giving up. There's no grid of any kind, so you'll have to actually measure the distance. You can't travel in a straight line because of the intervening buildings except along the major highways, so you can either measure it in chunks, or, I guess, use a piece of string or something. Then take your measurement, compare it to the scale and divide it by 300 or 600 to find out how many feet it took to do such a thing, and then…

…realize that this number is actually pretty useless. Even if you go through the above steps (which I can't even bring myself to do for this example, and would absolutely not do during play), it's not a helpful measurement. It doesn't take into account crowds, traffic, getting lost, being accosted by strangers, looking for a street sign that's hidden behind a bush, and all of the things that actually determine how long it takes to get around in a city. So, like every other GM in history, you'll never look twice at the "movement per minute" table, never look at the scale, never look at the map, and just say, "eh, it takes ten minutes."

If that works for you, that's fine; you've read a series of walls of text and won't get much out of it. But if you're like me, you'll always have a nagging feeling that you're giving up.

The map of the region around Neverwinter was created with the express purpose of being used in D&D. It is highly specialized for exactly this purpose. The map of Sutulak here was designed, apparently, to help with the morning commute of Sutulakers. So let's turn the city of Sutulak into the forest of Neverwinter.

We need to figure out the town equivalent of forests, mountains, fields, and highways. Highways are literally highways—broad, relatively straight avenues that cut through cities and connect key destinations (such as a market and a gatehouse). As for plains, forests, and mountains? They map pretty clearly to me as low, medium, and high-density construction. Higher density leads to more confusing, twisty, and narrow roads, as well as denser crowds, making it slower to move through these areas (both because you risk taking the wrong turn, and you'll be delayed by traffic). Low-density is the opposite: the more spread-out the buildings are, the more space there is to move between them, the less people there are doing so in the first place, and the easier it is to see where you're going and take the right streets. If your town has large-scale natural elements, such as forests and hills, they should also be included on the map. Sutulak here is criss-crossed with bizarre inner city walls with limited chokepoint entrances, which should also be included on the map.

Districts

In the fifth article in this series, I argued that D&D towns should be thought of as a small number of named, memorable districts (plus a couple of less-memorable Hufflepuff districts). Each district can have its own distinct flavour, racial makeup, police force, and random encounter table (if you use those), and a memorable name.

Points of Interest

Critical buildings and places should be marked with numbers that correspond to a key somewhere. For the more artistically inclined, you could also pick out these buildings in other ways, such as the Nuremberg tourist map's large silhouettes of major attractions.

Putting it Together

You've stuck with me this far, let's power through to the end. Let's take this useless map of Sutulak and turn it into a cutting-edge game aid, step by step.

1.     Give it a grid. You can use a square grid (like a pleb) or a modern, high-tech hex grid. Either is absolutely fine. I just overlaid a hex pattern as a new layer over the original one.

Counting distance is massively easier now. No string or ruler needed; just count the hexes.

2.     Highways and Barriers

The various walls and highways criss-crossing the city are important both narratively and mechanically, so let's highlight them, too. Try to keep the number of these small so as to be significant and memorable, don't just connect everything to everything else with a highway, because then we're back at the level of worrying about individual roads.

Red lines are highways and allow faster movement; grey lines are walls and prevent movement barring some kind of skill check, spell, etc. Crossing them may also be illegal.

3.     Embrace Abstraction

This map still has a bunch of minor streets and buildings confusing the issue. Here's where we're going to embrace full abstraction by removing them outright. Stop seeing the trees, start seeing the forest; there are no buildings or roads, there is only districts and density. Let's get this out of the way first of all: this won't be pretty. With a proper illustration, though, it doesn't need to be.

What I'm going to do is use different fill textures to denote different types of hexes representing district and density. District allocation is more of an art than a science; theoretically I could use every walled-in subdivision as its own district, however, this crazy criss-crossed town has too many of those to be memorable. Instead, I'll combine a few walled-in sections into districts, and in doing so, declare that they have economic, cultural, and ethnic ties to each other. A real artist could do pretty textures in these areas (like the forest texture in the Neverwinter map), but as this is a test case, and I am not a real artist, I don't want to get too bogged down in aesthetics and I'll use simple pattern fills.

Here's the district map. Different angled lines represent different neighbourhoods. There are five, which I've creatively titled North, East, South, West, and Central. Each district (except central) has at least one gate to the outside world and one highway. I've also moved the walls above the grid layer (making them more visible) and removed the grid outside the city as it was noisy and unnecessary.

Now we can inject building density into the equation. Building density implies population density, which tells us how narrow, twisty, and crowded the streets are, which finally solves our 'movement rate' question.

Here we have it: five districts, clearly delineated from each other through textures, and density represented by weight of the lines. Central district there is packed, as befitting a city center, so the entire district is at maximum weight. Because moving through cities has little to do with your physical movement capabilities and more to do with traffic and navigation skill (a Ferrari wouldn't get you through traffic any faster than a Honda), we can largely ignore a character's movement stat and base movement just off of hex density. Maybe we can come back to this, but for the time being, let's say you can move through low density hexes (with little traffic and lots of clear sightlines making for easy navigation) and highways at a rate of 3 hexes per minute, medium density hexes at a rate of 2 per minute, and high-density hexes at a rate of 1 per minute. Highways boost speed not only because they are broad and straight, but also because it is much harder to take a wrong turn on them and have to double back.

If you wanted a coarser grid, you could make each hex 300ft, and say that it took you 1 minute to move through a light density hex, 2 minutes to move through a medium density hex, and 3 minutes to move through a high density hex.

Future Improvements

I also added points of interest numbers in this step. If I were to do it again, I'd make them more distinct, such as using the original map's white circles, or perhaps with stylized building silhouettes, like the Nuremberg tourist map.

Districts can also be denoted using colours, with darkness and lightness indicating density, perhaps given borders like nations on a world map to distinguish them a little more from each other. Gates between walled prefectures are also important enough that maybe we could borrow a little from dungeon maps and give them a bright, visible "door" symbol. Also, the medium and heavy weighted areas are a bit too similar looking for my taste, so improvements could be made there, as well.

Still, I think this is the right direction. I'm going to let this idea percolate for a while, and maybe try it out in a game or two of my own, before tinkering with it too much.

[morkaischosen]

D&D 5e Background: Constable

I noticed the other day that there’s no background support for a concept that comes up in some D&D backgrounds: the heroic watch officer, the counterpart to the Criminal and Charlatan. Soldier does a reasonable job, but it’d be good to have something with a background feature that directly supports the kind of hero whose response to being mugged is actually to deliver the muggers to the authorities. Thus!

Constable

Law and order are the pillars society is built on, and your life has been spent serving them. You were trained to prevent crimes, find evidence (whether it’s a hidden knife wound on a body or an incriminating letter in a locked drawer), and to bring the perpetrators to justice. You might have been part of the close camaraderie of a city watch, the only student of a grizzled travelling peacekeeper, or an independent bounty-hunter catching outlaws for a pouch of gold, but now you use those same skills in the adventurer’s life.

 That’s not the only thing you learned on the line between law and crime, though. You know how to wear your authority like a cloak, but what you do with it is another question. Do you have a deep faith in the importance of integrity, even when nobody’s there to see? Did some injustice teach you that sometimes you need to bend the rules to do the right thing? Or did you see that the law is as corrupt as anything else, and learn to exploit your position to get what you want?

 Skill Proficiencies: Intimidation, Investigation

Tool Proficiencies: Vehicles (land), thieves’ tools

Equipment: A symbol of your position (watch officer’s badge, etc.); a set of manacles; a hooded lantern; a handbell or whistle; common clothing; a belt pouch containing 10gp

 Feature: I Am The Law

As an adventurer, you work independently, but you’re still recognised as an officer of the law. You can invoke the right to investigate a crime, meaning law-abiding people will be inclined to answer your questions and cooperate in ways they would refuse to a stranger. You know local laws (at least the more straightforward ones - the subtleties of taxation or the details of magical-scroll regulations might be beyond anyone but a specialist), and you are familiar enough with the authorities that you can easily hand over the people you arrest to be tried as local law dictates; your accusations will be treated seriously, and your testimony is likely to be trusted when it contradicts other people’s claims.

 None of these features require that you be acting in good faith, but if a blatant abuse of your position is discovered and news spreads, you are likely to lose that trust. It may, however, open opportunities for bribery and corruption.

 In addition, you are supported at a poor-quality lifestyle, either in accommodation belonging to the organisation you work for or by the generosity of the more enthusiastically law-abiding common folk.

 Suggested Characteristics

Discipline, study of the law and exposure to the seedy side of society all combine to shape a constable’s worldview. The conflict between high ideals and the realities of life’s harsh edges leaves its mark on you.

 Personality Traits

1: Nothing breaks my gruff demeanour.

2: I quote subsection and paragraph of laws most people have never heard of.

3: I’m always wary and alert - I know how quickly a conversation can turn into a murder.

4: I feel more at home among criminals than among the people I’m sworn to protect.

5: I tell people what I’ve deduced about them from their appearance and behaviour.

6: I’m always trying to assert my authority.

7: I treat everyone with respect, even when I’m arresting them.

8: I try to build camaraderie with joking insults, but anyone outside the group who tries it on will regret it.

 Ideals

1: Protect And Serve: The law exists for the good of society - I serve the people first and the law second. (Good)

2: By The Book: It’s my duty to enforce the law; bending the rules opens the door to corruption, even if we do it for the right reasons. (Lawful)

3: Justice Justifies The Means: I’ll get whoever did this, whatever it takes. (Chaotic)

4: Power Corrupts: Everyone’s on the take, so I look out for myself first. (Evil)

5: Keep The Peace: If everyone goes home unhappy and unstabbed, I’ve done my job. (Neutral)

6: Respect Authority: The authorities are there for a reason - I trust them, even if what they say seems to bend the rules. (Lawful)

 Bonds

1: I’ll do anything to protect my home and its people.

2: My partner died on the job; I’m going to bring retribution to those responsible.

3: I’ll never do anything my old mentor would disapprove of.

4: Someone escaped justice through legal tricks and bribery - I’m going to see them pay for what they did.

5: I listen to the people who slip through the cracks - nobody else will.

6: I look after the families of people who lose them to this job - dead comrades and imprisoned criminals alike.

 Flaws

1: I won’t compromise on justice, even when it’s hurting people.

2: I can’t let anyone find out about my corrupt dealings.

3: I take out my frustrations on the other side when I get into fights, and it can go too far.

4: Once I’ve decided someone’s scum, they’re nothing to me and I won’t believe a word they say.

5: I’m a sucker for a sob story.

6: I’m swayed by status - I’d let a noble get away with things I’d see a commoner in chains for.

 Variations

I was persuaded to throw in Thieves’ Tools proficiency here, as your investigator will have a much easier time finding people’s incriminating paperwork if they can open the locked drawer, and it’s easier to spot the signs of a picked lock if you know how to do it yourself. If you want your constable heroes to be a touch more straightforward - whether it’s because they’re a Carrotesque pillar of good-natured obstinacy or just because you don’t want anything looking like a better idea than kicking the door down - you could give the character a language proficiency instead. City watch officers might be exposed to a few different languages in one place, while a Western-style travelling peacekeeper might serve insular communities where Common is rarely spoken.

[commie-robot-fairy]

D&D!

So this entry isn't even one of the ones on the roster, but I did promise at least part of it a while back.

Nulara Rusene was always an adventurous, free-spirited sort - but sometimes too clever for her own good. A Waterdhavian street rat, she did what she needed to get by, and occasionally provide a bit for those around her. Until the day she met the Man. A nice outfit and a silver tongue, he made her suspicious at first, but he talked her around. She didn't really understand the deal he was offering, but two things stood out: He was offering her poIr and opportunity, a chance to get off the streets and perhaps change the world, and he asked nothing in this world.

It wasn't until much later - when she could actually see and plan for a future - that the significance of selling her soul hit her.

It was supposed to be impossible to break an infernal contract. But didn't adventurers do the impossible? And she had poIr, now, though probably not enough. So she set out, seeking to be the sort of adventurer that could break the chains of the Nine Hells.

She's come a long way since then, having fallen in with a group of traveling companions. They've amassed considerable Ialth and holdings, and her poIr has only grown. She's been testing herself against dragons, as they rush to stop an evil cult from summoning Tiamat herself into this realm. If they can pull this off, it'll be a sign that she's almost ready... she just needs one more thing.

Design notes: I'll be honest here. I didn't exactly have a character concept that was clicking for us when it came time to build (and didn't have enough book access to study in my own time), so I fell back on a default: Recreate Iron Man out of genre. (This is a long-running gag for me.) Nulara accomplishes that handily, capable of flying in full plate and packing an assortment of missiles, bombs, repulsor blasts, and a handful of utility spells. She never did click for me as a character, though, as you can probably tell from the rather sketchy background I've given her... until the session before last took her character arc in an unexpected direction.

In the absence of a Wizard or Sorcerer, Nulara became the Arcana expert and Identify caster by default. And after a particularly tough battle, we had some nice loot to identify. Including an Artifact!

The Eye of goddamn Vecna.

"Make a Wisdom check," said the DM, grinning. "DC 20." Of course, I'd been making an Iron Man expy - Wisdom was my dump stat. It was literally impossible. So Nulara gouged out her own eye on the spot and jammed the damn thing in. Of the rest of the party, inly the Cleric had any idea what was going on, and she's reserved judgement, for now.

The rest of the party has no idea that Nulara is suddenly evil.

She knows where the hand is, and is likely to try to talk the party into helping her get it once the current crisis is resolved. She also, of course, has the magical capability to conjure her own theme music. And if she overuses her newfound awesome, a literal Evil God will possess her body on the spot.

Infernal powers, evil, ancient cursed artifacts, two tiers, and even has her own theme music. Nulara's story is no longer about buyer's remorse and redemption; it's about the corrupting forces of power. She's become the Secret Side Boss.

[got-geek-vibez]

Truth.