Archive for March, 2018»
Gamers of the Galaxy
DM: Ronan comes striding out of the wrecked ship. Like before, he appears to have taken no damage from the crash. He sneers at you and bellows to the crowd, “Behold! Your ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’!”
GAMORA: Gaah, that damn infinity stone! He’s basically casting globe of invulnerability on himself.
DM: He also steps in Groot.
ROCKET: Son of a bitch!
DM: Rocket, your turn.
ROCKET: The infinity stone is mounted in his hammer, right? Could I maybe shoot the hammer out of his hand?
DM: With a regular gun? Not likely.
STARLORD: Unfortunately, you used your hadron enforcer already. That recharges on a short rest, right?
ROCKET: Yeah. …But, hey! Can I spend my inspiration point from protecting all those civilians to get the hadron enforcer‘s charge back?
DM (thinking): Okay, sure, but it got kinda smashed up in the crash. Make a DC 15 tool proficiency check to get it working.
ROCKET (rolls): Aw, shit! What a time to roll a freakin’ nine.
GAMORA: Geeze, and you blew an inspiration point on it.
DM: Well, you can keep trying on your next turn– if you get a next turn. Ronan’s on the ground, now.
ROCKET: Crap.
DM: Drax? Your turn.
DRAX: I assist Rocket on his next roll.
DM: Okay. Gamora?
GAMORA: Um… crap, I dunno, I’m a fighter. Can I just… I dunno, keep my eyes open and be ready to jump in?
DM: Delay requires an action and a trigger.
GAMORA: Okay, I guess if I see an opportunity to grab the hammer, I’ll do that.
DM: Good enough. Starlord?
STARLORD: What’s Ronan doing?
DM: He’s getting ready to smash the hammer down and destroy all life on the planet. Y’know, like one does.
ROCKET: Craaaaaaap.
STARLORD: I challenge him to a dance-off.
GAMORA: What???
DRAX: Pffft!
ROCKET: Oh God.
STARLORD: You said my tape player was going, somewhere off in the wreckage, right? Well, it says right here: my bond is “I treasure my mixtape from home more than life itself.” If I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die dancing to my mixtape!
DM (laughs): Sure, why not? Go ahead and make a Deception check, with advantage for tying into your traits.
STARLORD (rolls): Aww, yeah! Twenty-frickin’-SEVEN! (sings) Oooo-ooh child, things are gonna get bet-ter!
DM (still laughing): Okay! Ronan tries a DC 27 Wisdom save (rolls) and blows it bigtime. He’s effectively stunned for a round at Starlord’s pelvic sorcery.
TABLE: (laughter)
STARLORD: Gamora! Take it!
GAMORA: I am so not taking it.
STARLORD: I meant take the hammer.
GAMORA: Can I use my readied action to grab the hammer while Ronan is stunned?
DM: Call it a disarm check. Make an unarmed attack roll against Ronan’s Athletics check. (rolls)
GAMORA (rolling): Uh… man! Another nine.
DM: Yeah, no. Ronan’s got a vice grip on that thing.
GAMORA: Yeah, I’m just gonna stand there and stare at Starlord like he’s nuts.
DM: Okay, new round! Ronan is stunned and just stares at Starlord. “What are you doing?”
STARLORD: I’m distracting you, ya big turd blossom!
DM (laughs): Rocket, roll on your tool check again. You have advantage this time, thanks to Drax’s aid.
ROCKET (rolls): Nineteen! Hadron enforcer online, baby! I shoot the motherfucker! I mean, I shoot the hammer out of his hand.
DM: Unfortunately, it took your turn to make the skill check.
DRAX: So it’s my turn? I shoot the motherfucker.
DM: That works! You grab the hadron enforcer from Rocket and basically use it to make a ranged 5d10 disarm! Go ahead and total it up, the damage will be the difficulty for his Athletics check. (rolls)
DRAX (rolls, with no small amount of satisfaction): Thirty four!
DM: Ahahahaha, no. Not only does Ronan not make his Athletics check, the hammer explodes into a bazillion pieces, sending the infinity stone flying into the air!
ROCKET: Oh crap oh crap oh crap!
STARLORD: I’m basically standing next to Ronan, right? ’cause we were having a dance-off? Can I grab the infinity stone before it hits the ground?
DM: You can try! Give me a Dexterity save.
GAMORA: That thing does 100 necrotic damage per round and then you have to make Charisma saves to not explode!
STARLORD: Yeah, but while I’m lying there making death saves you can slap a container onto it. The Charisma save I’m not worried about.
GAMORA: But we don’t have a healer!
STARLORD: Well maybe there’s a paramedic in the crowd. (rolls) Anyway! I roll a sixteen.
DM: You nab it out of the air! You take 100 points of necrotic damage!
STARLORD: Ow.
DM: Fortunately, your Mystery Boon kicks in– turns out you are resistant to necrotic damage! So you only take 50.
STARLORD: Yay? I have fifteen hit points. (rolls) Twenty-two Charisma save.
DM: You are not killed outright on this round, but you are stunned and unable to act. A massive ball of purple-black necrotic energy swells around you, engulfing you and Ronan both. Ronan looks more than a little offended that you aren’t dead.
STARLORD: I bet he does!
DM: He also takes 100 points of damage, and is offended by that, too! It’s not enough to kill him, but it clearly hurts. He shouts, “Who are you???”
STARLORD: So all I gotta do is stand here dying at him to take him out?
DM: Pretty much!
STARLORD: Winning! When he shouts “Who are you?” I just give him my most smug, “You said it yourself, we’re the Guardians of the Galaxy, bitch!”
DM: Starlord taunts the badguy! It doesn’t do anything, but points for going out in style.
GAMORA: You said the damage happens every round, right? So he’s going to keep taking it?
DM: Yes. It spreads out through everyone in contact with whoever’s touching the stone.
GAMORA: Okay, I grab Starlord’s hand to absorb some of the damage and ready an action to shove a container onto the stone when Ronan drops.
DRAX: I’ll grab on too.
ROCKET: Ditto.
DM: Okay, new round! Ronan takes 100 points of damage, which is forty-odd more than he had. He explodes with a look of deep resentment on his face.
TABLE: (cheers, high-fives)
DM: You all take 100 points of damage split four ways, so 25 each, except for Starlord, who resists it and takes 12.
STARLORD: Two! I have two friggin’ hit points! Eat that, Ronan the Dickhead!
ROCKET: Ronan-the-A-Loser, more like!
GAMORA: I shove the infinity stone into the container!
DM: The purple-black cloud of necrotic energy immediately dissipates! Revealing Yondu and a dozen Ravagers. “Well, well, that was quite a light show!”
DRAX: Seriously?
STARLORD: Geeze, if it isn’t one damn thing, it’s another around here.
-The Gneech
Fictionlet
“So a genie grants you a wish,” said Greg. “What do you wish for?”
Alex looked up from his taco. “Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “Unlimited, inexhaustible health and prosperity.”
“Yeah, okay, that’s pretty good,” said Greg.
Brigid shook her head. “Every movie ever made, retroactively to the beginning of time, and going on forever, no matter how good or how bad, has the same production values, the same script, the same special effects and soundtrack etcetera, but an all-woman cast and production crew. Citizen Kane? Women. Casablanca? Women. Star Wars, The Goonies, Logan’s Run. Not a man to be found. No other changes.”
Greg pondered this, then slowly nodded. “Okay,” he said.
“I want to change my wish,” said Alex.
-The Gneech
PS: Bonus Fictionlet from Twitter!
Me: A joke about Black Panther and Toto. Go!
Brigid: “Watson, I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more!”
Greg: “I bless the reigns down in Africa!”
Brigid: Fuck.
#fictionlet
This One Goes to Twenty (#DnD)
Fire giants. They’re just bad.
It’s been a year and a half since the campaign started at the Keep on the Borderlands; the characters have reached 7th level and finally, after much meandering, gotten to the Eye of the All-Father in Storm King’s Thunder. If we assume that KotB was the prologue, and snuffing out (so to speak) the fire giants’ hopes of reviving the Vonindod was Act One, we are now at the beginning of Act Two.
Storm King’s Thunder is written in the weird meandery style for the first part, but then once you hit the Eye of the All-Father, it pretty much becomes a straightforward run to the end. There are some branching points, but they all lead to the same destination, somewhere around 10th or 11th level. So it’s still a bit away, but we are now at the point where I can see the end of Storm King’s Thunder looming on the horizon, and have been thinking about what the campaign would do next.
I had the idea of ending the campaign when we reached the end of SKT to start something new; I was particularly looking at doing a Spelljammer(-ish) campaign that brought in a lot of the flavor of the MCU cosmic stuff, inspired by Thor: Ragnarok. And I still like that idea, but as I was thinking about it, I had a very sudden and definite message from the subconscious:
…Well okay then. O.o
There’s lots of reasons for this, not the least of which being we’ve never reached that kind of a level in any of our campaigns, and so it would be something completely new for us. Also, I just like this group of characters, and I’m not ready for their story to be over– and I suspect the players probably feel the same way. Finally, by all accounts (and our own experience so far), 5E is the system that, if you’re going to go to 20, you want to do it in.
(In Pathfinder we’d already be hearing creaks around the edges of the system by now. In 5E, at 7th level, the combats are taking a little longer than they did back in the KotB days just by virtue of having more complex characters and tougher opponents, but the action is still fast and furious. Out last session had a chase/combat against a behir in a cave maze (CR 11!) that was done 75% as “theater of the mind” and basically went like this:
For all the chasing around and getting in potshots at the monster (or FROM the monster) it all ran very smooth and quickly and led to a fingernail-biting climax where the barbarian NPC was one round away from being digested in the creature’s belly and saved by the players pulling out all the stops to save her. I can’t think of another system we’ve used that would have handled the situation half so well.
But having decided that I want the campaign to reach level 20, that leads to the question of what to do for the second half. There are some tweaks written into Storm King’s Thunder itself that provide ways it can be expanded on, and I’ll happily add those in, but even that isn’t likely to take the party past 12th or 13th.
So what I’ve decided to do was to pull out some of my still-unplayed higher level 3.x edition adventures, particularly from Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics line, and tie them together into an “adventure path.” Some of them involve giants and make for obvious “sequel” material, particularly if [SPOILER REDACTED] manage to escape rather than suffer Death By PC when their nefarious scheme to [SPOILER ALSO REDACTED] comes to light. I also found another one that could provide a kind of cool “Return to the Keep on the Borderlands” side-trek as a change of pace from fighting giants all the dang time and that could possibly act as setup for Spelljammer later.
The ones I’ve found so far could take the game as far as 16th or 17th. Beyond that… I have no idea. That’s probably at least another year and a half away itself anyway, so I have time to work on it, and by then hopefully WotC will have gotten around to some of that “supporting higher-level play” they’ve been talking about. But it seems to me that once you get into that realm, where even the wizard has 80+ hit points, the barbarian becomes as strong as a giant and can rage indefinitely, and the cleric can literally resurrect people at will, the stories are going to have to look very different.
You don’t “dungeon crawl” at that kind of level. I don’t know what you do do… but you don’t dungeon crawl. Really that, more than anything, is going to be the challenge at that point.
-The Gneech
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-The Gneech