DreamLyrics™ Play-by-Post Forums Fantasy SKT: The Storm King's Thunder OOC thread

1 minute for the spell, but your class has it available as a ritual at the cost of 10 minutes (so 11 minutes total) but without expending a spell slot.

Identify as a ritual is a pretty small item in the overall scheme of things I think, isn't it? The bigger problem, IMO, is in dungeon crawl/heavy-combat style games having to rest for a full hour in order to use any healing dice. I've played n campaigns where in order to rest at all the party had to use an Extradimensional Space or they were continually attacked every few turns.

I am fine either way, just trying to clarify.

Yes, but it's a representative example of the balance inherent in the game. If you tweak one thing without tweaking the whole system, you completely eliminate the need for a spell so useful it's already nerfed with a 1-minute delay (instead of one action) to prevent it from being spammed.

Or heck, 1-hour long rest would probably even make an entire character class useless. I chose a cleric whose primary utility is healing. But if everyone can fully heal by just waiting around an hour, why bother? I'd be (nearly) completely useless in this campaign. Which is fine, if I know that's the rule going in. I'd pick a different character. We'd have an all-fighting party and load up on healing potions.

If we were in a dungeon crawl game I'd be in favor of shortening it. But we're not. We're traversing miles of open territory that take days to get to the next place. I've been throwing an average of one random encounter per 12 hours at you, where night-time ones impact your ability to rest. If you want 1 hour long rests, expect more frequent random encounters and you'll never get anywhere. I don't think we want that in this game.

Given the amount of travel time in this game, I'd have preferred the "Gritty Realism" option.

In reality, other than combat we're not tracking time much beyond "hey, we should probably get back to the inn before dark" and the difference in 10m vs 1h is hardly relevant here beyond that.

Ultimately it is your game, so you get to choose. As you say it doesn't make a lot of difference. It is just something that we as players had expected (10 mins). Yet in reality it is different. It hasn't presented any issues, but it certainly can.

I've been running for school kids recently so I explained short rests as morning break and lunch break, and long rest as bedtime. Although that equates to three intervals a day for short rests, in general it's meant only two short rest intervals because of travel time to the adventure locations. Which is basically the same as the standard rules.

Actually it’s Nep’s game.

And I’m new enough to 5e that I’m defaulting to standard rules unless I’m seeing longstanding exceptions otherwise.

Officially you can consider my ruling “a short rest is N minutes” and ritual spells take N/6 minutes. Fair?

So some FYI's on rest and time in 5e.

Nem's equating a short rest to a those school breaks is pretty accurate. It is precisely what translates into the concept of an adventuring day. The DMG recommends that in an "adventure day" there are 6 major encounters and the parry would need 2 short rests before a long rest. So it's a lunch break and an afternoon (tea?) break before settling in for the night.

There's a very geeky chart to help plot out advancement. It might interest you, check this out. I do this pretty for every game that I run. In fact, I have a spreadsheet that helps me figure out what to do.

As for the rest options, I certainly will keep using the standard option.

Epic heroism is for your video game dungeon crawls where every room can be a deadly encounter. This game is nothing like that.

I used gritty realism when running Tomb of Annihilation. The premise of that game is that there's a curse on the land that prevents and limits magical healing. I eventually got to the point where no magical healing spells worked and only potions of healing did.`

This is fantasy, not reality so you can cast your spells, clean and dress your wounds, have a snack, take care of biological needs, wipe the blood and ichor off of your weapons, shut your eyes for a few minutes, perform a ritual and so on during a 1 hour short rest.

Here's a question for you 5th Ed experts.

Recently I've been running Dragon of Icespire Peak for a group and there's an encounter at the beginning with a manticore outside a windmill.

The four PCs are all 1st level and completely new to role-playing games: Halfling ranger, half-elf druid, human rogue and dwarf fighter. Not even a cleric or wizard.

The adventure suggests the PCs should negotiate because the manticore (CR 3) is too powerful for them and I anticipated they wouldn't and I might have a TPK on my hands if I didn't fudge the encounter.

Of course the PCs didn't negotiate with the manticore, they got stuck in and murdered it. It dropped the ranger to 0 hp but wasted two rounds trying hit the fighter with his AC 17 and only dropping him to 6 hp.

Anyway, I rolled openly and didn't need to fudge anything. I'm fine with that but it reminded me how dubious the challenge ratings are in 5e. Have you guys experienced anything similar with 5e?

I have a lot of issues with the 5e challenge ratings. According to the DnDBeyond encounter builder that was a "deadly" encounter. I would have called that a fair fight but it all depends on how you ran the encounter. Did the maticore fly around out of typical missile range, behind buildings only to emerge and fire spikes from it's tail? Did you give it cover and penalize PCs for long range attacks? Or did you let the PCs gang up on it on the ground?

5e is awfully spongy. I understand that PF2 is way more mathematically balanced, and a threat rating really means something. Though to be fair I am at the stage in my life when I don't want to run really mechanistic or crunch games, so many new rules to memorize. So I haven't braved PF2 even though I have a ton of the books.

Not sure what "spongy" means or implies but the logic behind the math is nonexistent.

There's a supposed formula to calculating a monster's CR but if you try to use it I guarantee you that grey matter will start oozing from your ears, you'll be crying tears of blood and froth will dribble down the corners of your mouth if you don't give up soon enough.

Agree with Nep, Neal. The Difficulty rating of an encounter is dramatically more impacted by the tactics used by the foe than by their HPs and attack/damage dice. A small gang of Goblins, who maximize their bonuses and use good tactics can be a much deadlier encounter than a much high CR monster who does not. Neps tactics are quite good (Naturally), and using them would limit the pcs to missile weapons or the druid's 1st level spells (which are VERY limited for damage or against a flying foe).

Also, if the pcs had shortbows, the Manticore could even stay at short range for itself while at long range for the pcs (anywhere between 80-100 feet distance) which would give it no penalty to its tail spike attacks but give the pcs disadvantage on their missile attacks. If it hid behind the windmill and flew out to shoot its tail spikes and then returned behind the windmill for cover, that would make it even harder.

If it just landed in their midst and let all of them hack away at it while it attacked the best armored enemy every turn then it would be much easier than a CR3.

Of course using optimal tactics like that with a brand new set of players could easily drive them away from coming back to play <g>.

I would add that the environment makes a difference.

1st level PCs fighting a manticore on flat ground at 1st level could be easy. Fighting a (Lava Child (Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage - also CR 3) while crossing a narrow, rickety, burning footbridge to get to the other side of a river of flowing lava might be deadly.

You got my meaning of spongy perfectly well.

For an experienced DM this is math that we don't need. I can look at a stat block and determine that it's a cakewalk and I know what needs to be done to balance it out. For a novice DM this is a huge challenge.

I recently replied to a Reddit thread which said something like "My four 1st level PCs killed XYZ". XYZ was supposed to be the party mentor, the person that provided leads. Aside from that huge issue, XYZ was a level 8 necromancer with 4th level spells with 6 companion "monsters" and a familiar.

My curt response was "Then the DM did something wrong". Aside from how this would break the DM's game, there's no way a party of four 1st level PCs should have lived past the first round against XYZ.

The manticore starts the encounter on the ground at Umbrage Hill and he was third in initiative order, allowing the ranger and fighter to melee it. I figured the manticore would chew through two of them in two rounds so I had it stay and fight rather than waste a round disengaging or suffering free attacks to take off.

It certainly would've been a closer fight if the manticore had been aerial using its tail spikes. I suppose at the heart of the matter is the swinginess of the d20 itself. I wasted an entire turn trying to hit that AC 17 dwarf.

A mean DM would have disengaged, had the manticore fly behind the structure to gain cover. It would use half it's move to emerge to shoot spikes before flying back for cover. Flying is a huge advantage. So is cover.

Yes, and so is playing the tactical game of staying at long range for the pcs to give them disadvantage on their attacks. Top of the windmill would probably work for that too.

Aye, I think you're right and the challenge rating probably tries to account for that. I just saw 68 hp and three attacks and assumed it'd be extremely deadly without much tactical manouevring. Having said that, if it had dropped the dwarf, it then would've been free to take off and I think the remaining bard and rogue would've been in deep trouble. So perhaps it all hinged on that round of whiffing on the AC 17 dwarf.

OK, so the current situation brings up the old discussion of "if you split a troll in two do you get two trolls or does only one part regrow and the other part dies?"

Whichever part has the spleen grows back. I just made that up now but it probably works as a rule.

I'm thinking this is about the current situation in this game

Yes. There's an arm. Why didn't it grow into another Troll? Is it that when a part is chopped off a Troll the only part that regrows is:

- The part with the head?
- The part with the heart?
- The part that contains > 50% of the body mass?
- The parts are able to "move/slither" back together to reattach?
- Other?

I am thinking if all parts grow into new Trolls that an effective tactic for Trolls in combat would be to cut off their fingers and toes and 20 new Trolls appear!

I am so going to use that in a game!