Summon Monster I + Invisibility: Invisible Scorpion to poison the orc your teammate is gonna have to duel at the death. Have the monster only attack at the last second, so that it vanishes almost immediately after attacking, reducing the chances of it being seen. (sadly, didn't get a chance to test this. Couldn't find out which orc was the champion in time, didn't want to risk it during the fight)

Idea for future variation: Attack someone with an invisible scorpion (or maybe the centipede. It's bigger), have it attack earlier so that it definitely gets spotted, then use ghost sound to make it seem like there are more invisible animals roaming the area.

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Happy Ides of March

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There's a d&d concept known as the hectopeasant, which is a unit of measure for the amount of damage that can be dealt in a single round by one hundred peasants each armed with a crossbow.

Your post reminded me of that little fact, is all.

Is that from the notion that a bunch of first level bards armed with crossbows could buff each other to the point of killing the Tarrasque?

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I think you're talking about the peasant railgun, which requires the DM simultaneously ignore physics in favour of game mechanics, and inore game mechanics in favour of physics.

Basically, you get an arbitrarily large number of peasants, put them in a straight line, and have each of them ready an action. The one in the back takes a javelin and passes it to the guy in front, who uses his ready action to pass it to the guy in front, etc. The argument goes that when the javelin gets to the front of the line, the last peasant throws the javelin, and because this all took place in the span of a single 6 second round, the javelin has technically traveled a great distance in a short of time, so it must follow that the peasant is somehow capable of throwing the javelin at relativistic speeds.

Needless to say: No DM worth their salt would allow that kind of ruling, because it simultaneously violates both physics and the game rules.

The hectopeasant is just the amount of damage one hundred peasants can do in a single round in any given system, and doesn't require any bullshitting of the rules beyond actually arming hundreds of peasants with crossbows, getting them all to agree with your plan, getting them all in range of whatever it is you want to kill, etc.

No no, the latter is much more what I had in mind, basically the notion is that bards have some ability that gives a +1 to attack and damage, so if you have a few hundred of them mixed in with peasants firing on a Tarrasque so long as it can't march over and kill them they'll eventually murder it.


Oh there we go, Morale bonuses don't stack so it doesn't actually work, bah. Probably for the best though.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dkb1/dnd/tarrasque.txt

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Well shoot. My group's tank has bowed out of the game, they weren't having fun. Basically they felt it was hard to participate / felt a little ignored, they are at same place as DM, Australia, and so their sound and internet would often drop or they'd have to participate through text while the rest of us were on voice.

I feel bad, I kinda talked over them a bit at the last game during a fight where I and the healer nearly died (Boss seemed a bit overtuned, both of its spells did in the 40s of damage when me and the healers health top out in the twenties and low thirties)

On the plus side, we may have an open slot, will discuss what to do with remaining folks soon.

If it opens up, is anyone interested in Saturdays 6-7PM CST so I can refer you to our DM if they don't already have someone lined up or want to proceed with 3 folks?

Also... is it bad taste advertising this soon? I feel a bit guilty about it but I just wanna be practical.

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I've never understood DMs that have it out for the players. The point of a game is to have fun; if the players are steamrolling then buff the encounters, if they're getting stomped despite reasonable efforts then apply a nerf or a break of some sort.

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Talk to your DM about your expectations for the game. It might be your DM thinks what you want is a harsh experience full of brutal enemies and challenges which allow the players to really flex their tactical muscle and get the bulk of their fun from overcoming tough obstacles. Make sure everyone's on the same page.

Course, could just be your DM's a sadist, but hopefully that ain't it.

I was just generalizing. I'm quite satisfied with my DM. Naturally if everyone's on the same page its different, but I was more referring to the types that set your low level party against something like a dragon with no forewarning of any kind.

But yes I agree that every group is different.

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I don't think it's intentional, we kind of murdered our way through a few of the earlier encounters WAY too easily (We like, two-shot a cultist he'd been building up) So I think he was trying to retune the fights to be a challenge and accidentally overshot it.

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Which is respectable. Only downside is - if one doesn't talk about it, others are likely to draw their own conclusions.

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He seems to have it well in hand, we fought a Bulette at the end of our last session which we managed to kill without too much trouble despite our lack of a tank. It missed its bites, thankfully I have a pretty high dex save and I was able to keep it off our cleric (Though it did take a chunk out of our poor cleric initially and so I had to have my hobgoblin shoot arrows at it and shout expletives to get its attention till our cleric and rogue could sneak up behind it and finally put it down.

It was a very fun fight since we were scrambling on rocks in the desert and it was leaping out at us, our rogue had a REALLY clever idea that sadly didn't pan out.

He had a "dust of choking" item, which was always 'too awesome to use' and also a bit dangerous cause of its radius. So recently we killed a "Free Enclave Navy" guy that was secretly an earth cultist and we looted a cloak that belonged to a pirate-king the navy guy had killed, it makes an air-bubble around the head of the wearer. He tricked the cloak into thinking he was underwater by soaking himself in water so it gave him an air-helm so he didn't breath the stuff in, sadly the Bulette made its con save and got out but otherwise it would've been an instant-kill, we gotta get him some more of that stuff because now that we know the trick works though, since it didn't kill -him-.

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I've really been enjoying this guys videos. It's been a fantastic repertoire of D&D lore.

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I liked the idea behind the videos, but the ones that I saw felt uncoordinated, as if he hadn't rehearsed them enough.

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This is a neat little RPG, I like the design of the kobold-esque mouse people, having the head-candle be a part of their helmet is a clever choice.

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This is a reminder that Starfinder comes out in August.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bws...JOSUNIVFU/view
http://paizo.com/paizo/blog/tags/starfinder

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The party was in the middle of an abandoned village square when zombies startled shambling from the houses....

I got extra experience points for re-enacting the Wilson Fisk/Russian mobster car door scene from Daredevil.

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Our party had our first character death, our Rogue/Warlock Juhnan died at the hands of what we -think- was a druid (It was in Horse-with-claws form the whole dang time and seemed convinced he was a demon-worshipper despite the situation being... more complicated than that).

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Wow. I started watching Critical Role exactly four months ago. I've been caught up now for about a month, though. So it took me roughly 3 months to catch up from episode 1 to episode 99.

I don't think I'm quite as enthusiastic about it as when I started. It's still good, but they've let politics bleed into their games. So, I watch it and stuff but I don't donate or buy their merch.

There's a google doc of a bunch of compiled Starfinder info.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...5zJRJRYUI/edit

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Soon, I will be DM'ing my first game. Pretty crazy.

Will you be a merciful DM or go for TPK (total party kill)?

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What system will you be running?

I'd offer to give you advice, but I only really have a single campaign's worth of DM'ing experience to draw from.

I've been loosely following the development of Starfinder, seeing as I don't have any experience running or playing Pathfinder, but the fluff is what I'm really interested in. Still looking a little light on that, but hey, maybe it'll surprise me.

I'll play the monsters and villains according to their intelligence and personalities.

I won't fudge rolls but I'm not going to be trying to kill my players at every moment. I don't view the role of DM as adversarial to the players. It's all about making sure everyone has fun, in the end.

5e. I plan to run Lost Mine of Phandelver and then transition to Storm King's Thunder.