+1 Thread of Tabletop Roleplaying

There's a few starter sets hitting the shelves now which are fully playable rules sets with mini campaigns. When I ran Phandelver I got twelve sessions or of it. The new D&D starter had another campaign and character generation. The new Cthulhu starter set comes with a complete rule set and four adventures.

They make the Star Wars starters look a bit rubbish in comparison with their four pre-gens and single evening of play. That said, you going download another couple sessions of play to continue the story and the sets do manage to explain the system pretty well. And they come with all the tokens and dice and tat which you expect from FFG.

I think as long as you get to play enough that you know if you want to spend your time and money on the full game then it's done it's job.

Session 1, take 2 of Lost Mines last night. I'm taking the first first session as canon, starting this group a few days later in Phandalin, and folding in the quests from the Essentials Kit for extra activities.

For a group with such little experience (only one had really played TTRPGs before), they mildly astonished me. There were a couple of points in the session where I was able to just keep quiet for up to ten minutes as they RP'd among themselves; they didn't pick any fights in the tavern or town (no one even got drunk); and when they stumbled across an ogre on their way to their first quest, they avoided combat and stealthed around it.

Next week, they have the opportunity to face some Ochre Jellies in a Dwarven ruin; some of them might not want to risk much exploration, but there's a dwarf in the party with the archaeologist background, so I'm pretty sure he'll be tempted. I might have to tone down the damage in the final trap, though; 4d10 seems like a lot when nobody put anything into Con…

Last night I finally got around to running a session of Troika! I've mentioned this one a few times in the Soc because it keeps on turning up free, so there's a good chance you already own it.

Troika is a planar fantasy adventure game loosely based on what the author imagined Planescape and Spelljammer were like based purely on their adverts in Dragon magazine. It was also written as a counter to all the overly prescriptive rules sets out there, using Fighting Fantasy as a base and adding a healthy does of random generators to keep things weird.

I used the adventure in the book, a quest to get from Reception in the Blacmange & Thistle Hotel to your room on the sixth floor. The journey included murderous owls, a demonic spa leak, a giant slug king, a suffocating gas being, a shop in a lift shaft, spies, reality breaking down because a wizard was asleep, spontaneous appearance of friends, dice games with mandrill hotel staff, lobster chucking, grilling, partying and a call to further adventure.

Recommended.
Gonzo/10

In tonight's Expanse session, my players managed to get themselves into a situation where they were interviewed by security forces separately. I started a call with each of them, individually, in turn to grill their characters about recent events, and it turned out so much better than I could have imagined.

I started the session with very little in the way of a plan or even a goal; they're on the way back to Eros Station after picking up a mysterious crate that turned out to belong to a major biotech corporation, but they've been intercepted by corporate security after opening the crate triggered an automated IP-in-distress call.

In their individual interviews they were all evasive and vague enough – while managing to make the necessary deception rolls – that the interviewer couldn't reasonably think they intentionally stole the thing. But they handed me more than enough rope to hang the captain and XO NPCs, who between them have links to a suspected corporate saboteur and a borderline-terrorist faction of the OPA, and can be considered suspects in the bombing of a secret research facility (which happened in the campaign's cold open narration).

So now they're all en route to Luna for further questioning.

I'm now four sessions in on my D&D starter sets mashup game. They've decided to investigate the Redbrand (a low-level criminal gang who've been roughing up local businesses), and confronted them at their tavern hangout. The rogue snuck round the back, but bit off more than he could chew (again; he made his death saves, at least), but they all surprised me by doing entirely non-lethal combat, and taking every enemy alive.

They're now recovering in the Redbrand's tumbledown watering hole, having stripped their captives of weapons & armor, and selling it all. Fortunately, I have a money-sink planned, in the event they keep being so enterprising.

Aniki: Your Expanse game sounds perfect. How's the system holding up?

Ninchilla: My players skipped the inn, went straight to the hideout and got themselves killed.

My Vampire 5th Edition starter kit is rapidly approaching playtestable with players that have never played the game before. Anyone interested? Ideally people that have never played before, have some vague interest, and want something they can just kind of step into.

Your Expanse game sounds perfect. How's the system holding up?

Pretty good, so far - but we've still not had any combat (personal or ship-to-ship).

Ninchilla: My players skipped the inn, went straight to the hideout and got themselves killed.

That's still a distinct possibility, but a couple of the players are fairly cautious (and I'm willing to pull my punches to avoid a TPK in early levels). Also, I didn't realise until after the fight that the Ruffians had Multiattack…

Multiattack makes all the difference. I guess they were drunk.

My other D&D group (the one with adults rather than teenagers) TPK'd a few weeks ago too. I might have mentioned it already. Anyway, rather than rolling up new characters I had the Yuan-ti who had been tracking them scoop them up and take them back to their lair as slaves.

This is actually one of the options for triggering the dungeon which comprises chapter 4 of the adventure, there is then potential avenues for escaping, or playing politics or instigating a slave revolt. The tricky bit was that the dungeon is intended for levels 7-9 and my players were only level 5.

Tonight though, they did it. They scrounged up some equipment, found their own armour, made some allies, figured out how some teleporter pads worked, killed the Necromancer in charge and then fought their way out of the dungeon. I didn't think they would manage it.

I must be doing something right as a DM, as the party ambushed me last night with the news that they've gifted me Volo's, Xanathar's, Tasha's, and Curse of Strahd on Roll20.

I don't compare myself to any other DMs (consciously, at least), but I only ever think about the stuff I missed, or kick myself for the stuff I forgot to do (I keep meaning to mention the weather, because it's gonna be a plot point, and haven't remembered once yet), but they also mentioned how much they look forward to sessions.

Now I really feel pressure to do a good job…

There are always things you wish had been different, how could there not be you are essentially presenting a first draft. It's fine crappy human memory file in the blanks and smooths over the rough edges.

That's a big pile of stuff to be gifted, well done! There's a lot of good stuff in Xanathars for players and GMs. The lists of names are wonderful.

My D&D group's "kill everything" approach to diplomacy continues, as they obliterate their way through the remaining monster population of Thundertree - not helped in the slightest by the rogue's determination to sneak off alone at every opportunity to trip over violent gangs of twig blights and ash zombies.

I tried to gently encourage a diplomatic solution with the dragon cultists, but the druid wanted to confront them; even that was cut short when the Sidekick healer (who was being operated by the druid player for combat purposes, rather than me) landed a crit Guiding Bolt to the leader's head. I'd even upgraded him to CR 2, but 48 radiant damage to the face was hard to argue with.

On the plus side (for me), all this noise has attracted the attention of the white dragon that they knew was there, so I ended the session with it coming out for a chat with the "little morsels".

Next week will be interesting.

@Ninchilla how did the dragon encounter go?

Two weeks ago my D&D players decided to wage a guerilla war against a small city of snake people. This went ok at first with the killing three Yuan-ti patrols, but the Yuan-ti put together a counter-attack while the PCs were trying to recover.

This ended up being a four hour battle with five tired PCs against twenty snake people, their mage leader and a zombie T-Rex.

The group's rogue didn't survive the fight. I don't think the player minded though as when he failed his third death save he shouted, "Ha! Finally, I'm free of that useless Rogue cunt!"

PSA: Rogues in 5e suck.

@Ninchilla how did the dragon encounter go?

They killed it! Best/worst thing was that the paladin - who had a Dragon Slayer longsword - couldn't roll above a 14, while the fighter/barbarian - who has mundane shortswords couldn't seem to miss.

The (NPC Sidekick) healer died (max hp 21 vs 49 cold damage), and a couple of the actual PCs got zeroed, but thanks to a stupid magic item I gave them a few sessions ago, and some terrible rolls from the dragon, they were able to pull through.

PSA: Rogues in 5e suck.

In what way? I just multiclassed into rogue on my ranger…

At level five most classes get a second attack or access to third level spells, Rogues get their Sneak Attack damage increased from 2d6 to 3d6. But that only matters if they are able to hide or are attacking from Advantage. And they still need to hit with their one attack. Then if they do hit it's still not as good as the Paladin or the Ranger with Sharpshooter.

The class is clearly supposed to shine outside of combat to balance it but sneaky Thief moments are done in five minutes and then combat lasts an hour (or four) so it isn't a fun mix for the Rogue player.

[sneak attack] only matters if they are able to hide or are attacking from Advantage.

Or if they have an ally (who's not incapacitated) adjacent to the target - I've always found it fairly flexible, as long as there are other melee fighter in the group. My Phandelver party's rogue is a swashbuckler, too, so he can also sneak attack if he's 1v1 on the target, as long as he doesn't have disadvantage.

Agreed that Sharpshooter is brutal on a ranger.

So yes, flanking or aid from another character can also trigger it, but it's a lot of things which have to align which means that half the time the Rogue doesn't hit and when he does he's still doing less damage than a single hit from the Paladin or the Ranger and less damage overall than anyone else in the party.

For sure damage output isn't everything but my player wanted to play a sneaky deadly assassin/scout and D&D did not provide.

We tried to fix it, first with a +1 Rapier which lets him cast Misty Step and second with a level of fighter but it wasn't enough. I'm thinking that from 5th level a Rogue should be able to use their Cunning Action to make a Bonus attack, give them a second chance at triggering their Sneak Attack, if they are happy to not Disengage or whatever.

My 13th Age game has gone on hold as two of my players have just had a baby; I filled the last two sessions with a two-shot of Electric Bastionland, hacked into the setting of the manga/anime series Made in Abyss – neatly merging two of my latest obsessions into one mega-obsession. It's my first foray into a rollable-tables-heavy system, so of course I decided to use a setting that would require me to write a bunch of my own on top of coming up with a mechanical implementation for a in-universe sickness that affects people who venture into the eponymous Abyss.

It turned out really well, though – the players all enjoyed it (even though only one of them was familiar with the source material), and they all survived more-or-less unscathed, which I wasn't expecting. Though as it turns out, I'd missed a big chunk of prep that I was supposed to do, and hadn't actually mapped out the area they were exploring. I'd just been rolling on a 2d20 table of landmarks and environments every time, instead of having a more structured route ready.

There's potential for more with this system and party, for sure – I had it set up to lead into a second adventure, and the players have asked when we'll be doing that – but I think I might leave it there until I've had more time to come up with rules and tables for stuff and let one of the players run something for a couple of sessions (in between our ongoing Expanse game).

I'm thinking that from 5th level a Rogue should be able to use their Cunning Action to make a Bonus attack, give them a second chance at triggering their Sneak Attack, if they are happy to not Disengage or whatever.

You can bonus-action attack with an offhand weapon, thigh since rogues don't get Two-Weapon Fighting, that's a bit less effective even if you do hit. Alternatively, Tasha's Cauldron has an optional rule called Steady Aim:

As a Bonus Action, you give yourself advantage on your next Attack roll on the current turn. You can use this Bonus Action only if you haven't moved during this turn, and after you use the Bonus Action, your speed is 0 until the end of the current turn.

So they sacrifice mobility, but get a higher chance to hit and guaranteed sneak attack if they do.

A rogue having to sacrifice mobility seems bad.

Yeah, that's a shitty deal.

Your Electric Bastionland game sounds great Aniki. It's a perfect system for just winging it. The Bastionland blog is worth a look too. Lots of interesting content.

The Expanse RPG has a mechanic in it called The Churn, where certain things (a success with 6 on the drama die, spending fortune to increase a roll, etc.) cause a counter to increase. At certain milestones, it triggers complicating events, with a full 30-point Churn causing an Epic event – which, in this case, resulted in the enemy warship the party is assaulting firing a torpedo at their unarmed freighter, on the float some 31,000km away.

Next session will start with some desperate rolls to hack the torpedo's guidance systems – which will be made easier if the party remembers that they found some admin credentials in the captain's safe last session which allow them to trigger a full security override.

I've done the maths, and assuming a 20g burn on the torpedo, they've got about 20 minutes to sort it out before impact. I expect the security reset is going to take some amount of time to complete, so they'll have to think of it early enough for it to matter.

What's complicating things for me as GM, is that one of the main plot NPCs and a couple of side-story maguffins are on the PCs' freighter…

Maguffins at least can be recovered from wreckage. NPCs not so much.

In last night's D&D session, my kenku bard/rogue dropped to zero twice in the same combat, to the same enemy.

Kind of my own fault, as I'd run straight at the thing to help out another PC, a druid who'd just taken 103 damage from it in a single round.

I cast Invisibility on the druid and gave them Bardic Inspiration; on their next turn they transformed into a giant snake (which startled a number of people when I dropped to 0 and lost concentration on my Invisibility spell). After being healed up to a mighty 8 hp by the artificer, rather than disengaging and getting away I just attacked the monster again, which it didn't take kindly to, and it put me down again.

Pfft the only hit point you need to worry about is the last one, until then it's smooth sailing.

Tomb of Annihilation continues. After 38 sessions over almost a year I think we have had enough of 5e and Roll 20, but we are almost done with this campaign. Tonight the group cleared out the dungeon which makes up chapter 4 of the adventure. Last week they finished with the city which is the subject of Chapter 3. So next week week they move on into the massive dungeon which makes up the rest of the campaign. About 100 rooms across six levels, supposedly deadly traps and a few really nasty bosses. I'd better go read through Chapter 5.

I've done the maths, and assuming a 20g burn on the torpedo, they've got about 20 minutes to sort it out before impact.

I re-did the maths, because I'm that sort of person, and it turns out I'd gotten it wrong.

They have just over four and a half minutes.

Are you going to set an actual timer?

I considered it, but I think that's a little harsh. The Expanse has an Advanced Test, where you make multiple rolls towards a common goal. Each roll takes a certain amount of time in-fiction (I'm thinking ~30-60 seconds, depending on the action), and successes add their Drama Die result to a running total. If they hit that threshold in time, then they win. If they don't, then I'll be rolling my first ship damage of the campaign.

I ran a time-loop adventure in our 13th Age campaign a little while back where I did have a timer set; there was a list of stuff that would happen on a schedule, so every 10-15 minutes I'd have one of them trigger.

After nearly a year of play my 5e group finally entered the tomb in Tomb of Annihilation. It’s design is influenced by the infamous AD&D adventure Tomb of Horrors which is little more that a sequence of unavoidable death traps. Knowing this my players are being super cautious and have so far managed to avoid or disarm every trap they have encountered. It’s still fun though and they are convinced everything is just one room away from going very wrong. Also there are six floors to this dungeon, so I’m sure the best is yet to come.

They have just over four and a half minutes.

Having actually read the recap notes for once, and realising they had discovered an override key for the ship's security system, my next Expanse session started off with less outright tension than I'd expected – I should have had a backup plan, like duelling hackers or having to fend off the two remaining crewmembers while the progress bar ticked up. Oh well - I'll know for next time.

However, rather than claiming the ship as "legitimate salvage " and bombing (literally) around the system in their newly-acquired and moderately-armed light frigate, the players decided to fix it all up again, put the previous crew back on board, and leave it behind at the end of the session – despite my best efforts to give it to them basically for free.

One character's estranged corporate-baddie mother was trying to give it to her as part of a bribe, which was rejected outright. (This made perfect sense in character, so I can't be too mad.) But after the session ended it occurred to me that the mother wouldn't give up so easily, so after consulting with the player, the same offer was made to and accepted by their NPC captain.

This has the added bonus of giving me an excuse to cut down the number of NPC crewmates the players have around them; the medic, XO and captain are all off on the old ship to do their part in the deal, while the PCs take the new shiny to run some errands.

They picked up another NPC (importantly, one who doesn't have authority over them, which is the main reason I wanted rid of the captain and XO), got some exposition that has thrown a spanner in all sorts of works (montyburns.gif), and have started some investigations into other plot threads that were temporarily on hold.

And they've levelled up!

My favourite RPG Whitehack just launched it's 3rd edition, and this time it comes in PDF!

Recommended by me.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/348152

I’ve just backed the One Ring Kickstarter.

We’ve spent this year playing the 5e version and worked our way through the opening scenario with the characters finishing at level 7, and finally some interesting abilities.

However looking at the new/old rulebook, the emphasis seems to be west of the Misty Mountains, so I’m going to translate their characters from 5E to the old system and take them to Angmar.
After making them play a session as hobbit thieves.

I felt very close to my first-ever TPK last night.

The party have been steamrolling almost everything I've thrown at them to date, so I deliberately built a slightly vicious encounter to test them (eight CR 3 and one CR6 against a party of 5 level 4s). The basic setup was that an orc warchief they have a bit of history with was undergoing a ritual to ascend into the service of one of the orcish gods; but the thing was set up so that they had the opportunity to stop the ritual in progress, and make things easier for themselves.

Instead, they split the party.

The druid, bard, and rogue decided to take a short rest a quarter-mile from the ritual site (they'd done their usual Full Nuke on the previous encounter) while the fighter/barbarian and sorcerer/paladin snuck ahead with 30 hp between them (along with an orcish defector as guide) to scope things out. Inevitably, they got spotted by one of the orcs, who took out the sorcadin in one hit.

Fortunately, the fighter/barbarian had a sending stone, so he was able to call for backup…

…in 12 rounds.

And somehow, they almost managed to hold out. The sorcadin rolled a nat 20 on his third death save, bringing him back into the fight long enough to use both a scroll and necklace of fireballs. There were a bunch of low attack rolls from enemies, and a very lucky/clever use of a deck of illusions-summoned "cloud giant" to scare off two-thirds of the remaining orcs.

All three of the characters in the ritual circle - NPC orc, sorcadin, and fighter/barb - were at zero hp when the druid and bard arrived (the rogue had stayed behind to finish his short rest*). Everyone had managed to make enough saves to stabilize, but then the druid got knocked out, and the Big Bad - by this point the only remaining enemy - kept saving against the bard's spells. He would have KO'd her, too, but she pulled out a Cutting Words against one of her attacks, then healed the druid, who managed to deal the final blow.

I was hoping for dramatic, but that came closer to the wire than I expected. I'm glad they all made it through, and there were some big cheers when the luckier rolls came up. Looking forward to a more chilled-out session next time, though.

*This was in part because the player had a 5am start, so left the session early

That is a massive encounter! I thought I was harsh.

I ignored CR and rated encounters by XP including modifying the effective XP by the number of opponents. I found that what the DMG calls deadly is a fun fight and double that is when PCs start actually dying. Your encounter was 10xdeadly.

Sounds like a fun session though.

I think they would have walked it if they'd all been there from the start, and for sure if they'd managed to stop the ritual; the starter set and essentials kit, which I'm using as the basis for this stage of the adventure, are very generous with magic items, so they're all geared to the teeth.

That will make a big difference.

Man, a lord of the rings game being on kickstarter can fuck right off. KS should be there to support indie games and small press stuff. Onyx Path is about as big a company as I can truck with putting an RPG on kickstarter, so a company that's like "hah we have the Aliens license and now the Lord of the Rings" license can do one. Remember when Shenmue 3 went on Kickstarter? Remember how that was extremely fucking weird and everyone knew the project was going to happen anyway regardless of funding but it being there sucked all the air out of the room for smaller projects that needed the attention more?

Still.

Somehow, this is the second worst RPG kickstarter this week, so that's cool.

I don't think it is too much of a Spoiler to say that the 5e adventure Tomb of Annihilation ends with a big lethal dungeon. My group have now lost two PCs in just five sessions within the Tomb. We are having a lot of fun with it.

@Ninchilla how are you finding the adventures in the D&D Essentials kit? I'm looking for some beginner material and I like the open world set-up and the scale, I'm just curious if the individual dungeons are good.

I haven't really run many of them as written; the whole thing seems fairly piecemeal, so I drastically rewrote a bunch of it to be about a schism in the orc tribe decimated/displaced by the dragon, with one group led by the shamans apprentice seeking coexistence with the prime of Phandalin, and the other led by the chieftain's son, out for conquest and battle to steel themselves for an eventual assault on the dragon themselves.

Out of the box it's very MMO-style, where there's a job board and new quests become available after completing two in the previous tier. There's a mine full of wererats, a group of cultists trying to summon a lightning boar, a manicure menacing an old woman, some paranoid gnomes, and a bunch of other stuff, but none of it connects. Each individual bit seems solid enough, I'd just have appreciated more of a narrative arc/through-line than "the dragon is ultimately responsible for all these problems."

a manicure menacing an old woman

Well if she hadn't let her cuticles get into such a state…

Fuck, autocorrect. A manticore.

Thanks for the info!

He certainly nailed your request.

He certainly nailed your request.

Could have done with a little more polish though.

The puns on this forum are really beginning to gel.

I don't want us to have too mani-pedi jokes, though.