Out Now on the DMs Guild
Wintry Blast |
All month long I've been converting cards from Magic: the Gathering into D&D ideas. Today, Flame Jet from Urza's Destiny came up. This card was not particularly good in 1999 when it was printed, and it definitely isn't a good card now (note: it has never been reprinted). Be that as it may, it still managed to inspire a pretty nice environment trap/hazard for our 5e games. Travel is can be a difficult facet of the game for some DMs and players. No one likes a daily grind of random encounters and rotating watches, and a montage-approach can sometimes cheapen the experience if not done correctly. This post DOES NOT come close to solving or addressing this problem, but I have found traps or hazards like the one below helpful in getting players from Point A to Point B with a little bit of excitement, consequence, and action. The important thing is the concept of Failing Forward. Regardless of how the PCs roll and what consequences they face, at the end of the day, they reach their destination...perhaps with a memorable journey to look back on. Without further ado, I give you Flame Jets. Feel free to download the pdf below and use it in your games. If you do, I'd love to hear about. Hit me up on Twitter @rjquestgiver.
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I've been busy converting cards from Magic: the Gathering into D&D 5e concepts. Recently, I somewhat randomly selected the Talruum Champion card from Visions, a Magic set which came out way back in 1997. This was the golden age of Magic for me. I was in seventh grade, not a care in the world, playing Magic with my friends and family at every possible moment, and spending all of my lunch money at the local game shop on packs of cards. With that in mind, I jumped at the chance to take this pretty pedestrian Magic card and make it something epic for our D&D games. Below is what I came up with, the Talruum Champion! This guy is an intense, suped-up version of a normal minotaur. He has the Brute ability from the bugbear and wields two scimitars (to match the art) instead of a greataxe. I also home brewed the First Strike ability to match the card's mechanics and flavor text. Included is a little background for he and his clan. I imagine them as desert-dwellers, territorial, and extremely proud. I've been reading Troy Denning's The Verdant Passage recently, which is a D&D novel placed in the Dark Sun setting. These guys would fit perfectly in that world! I must give credit to the wonderful people who created Legendary Bestiary over on the DMs Guild. That is where I got the Legendary Actions that appear in the stat block below. That supplement, in my-opinion, is a must-have for DMs. It helps you take mundane and boring monsters, and create bosses or mini-bosses out of them. Anytime I have a lead ogre or a fabled owlbear, I turn to that supplement to make the creature stand out from its peers. Anytime your Big Bad Evil Guy has a pet dire wolf, or the party must negotiate with the centaur chief....turn to this supplement to make those creatures shine! I can't recommend it enough. (Bonus: they have other supplements in this line to cover higher CRs and extra source books). Without further ado, I give you the Talruum Champion. Feel free to download the pdf below and use it in your games. If you do, I'd love to hear about. Hit me up on Twitter @rjquestgiver. Happy questing!
Back on February 1st I started my month-long project to convert a mostly random card from Magic: The Gathering into a D&D 5e concept. You can view February Feature for more details on that project.
For today, I want to expand on a few of the concepts from the first week and string them together into a rough adventure outline. My goal is to do this a time or two more throughout the month. I hope these expanded treatments provide inspiration to you, dear reader. I can't tell you how often I've received a partial idea from some book, show, piece of art or tweet that has sparked something within me and lead to a great font of creativity. I hope the below can do that for you. Our adventure sketch starts off with the PCs traveling toward a lone, distant mountain in search of treasure and a fabled relic rumored to be lost within the peak. No one has dare braved this mission in generations due to the rumors of undead guarding the horde. First, the PCs must traverse a bleak and swampy stretch of land leading up to mountain. I imagine this place very similar to the Dead Marshes from Lord of the Rings. Instead of the faces of the dead appearing in the muck, however, let's use a howling wind that carries the agonizing cries of the departed. This is where our first Magic card conversion comes in: Maddening Wind. This card serves as an environmental hazard, much like a blizzard or extreme heat. Depending the scale you use, PCs may be traversing this landscape for miles, hours, or days. The scale will determine how often you want to call for checks. Whenever you decide to call for checks, PCs need to succeed on a WIS saving throw or suffer psychic damage. Adjust the DC and damage as you feel appropriate. If stringing checks together, maybe the first failed check deals 1d4, the next failed check 1d8, the next failed check, 2d6, etc. Conversely, perhaps each failed check only deals 1d6, but after the third fail, the PC suffers Madness effect as found in the DMG. As PCs are traversing this landscape, we need another layer of threat. This is where the Bog Rats come in. Treat these critters as a suped-up swarm of rats and introduce them when and where you need to apply extra tension or amp up the sense of despair. The rates get advantage on bite attacks if the scent of blood is in the air. They also carry the troglodyte's stench ability, meaning they can temporarily poison a PC. I imagine the PCs marching along through this muck when one of them steps through a soft spot, sinking one leg deep into the swampy mud below. As they extract their leg, a swarm of rats follows up through the hole and starts crawling up the character who unwittingly disturbed them! Eventually, the PCs make it out of the muck and to their mountain destination. At this point they see an grand and ornate opening carved into the side of the mountain, obviously a vestige of a long-lost kingdom seated here ages before. Before this doorway stands an army of undead at full attention, as inspired by Lim-Dul's High Guard. This is a battalion of skeletons (you decide the appropriate amount for your group). These are special skeletons though. Give them advantage on initiative checks and make it so they can't be surprised. Essentially, these undead stand at the ready, unmoving, unblinking, until a threat enters their radius and then they attack with the unison and determination of Dany's Unsullied from Game of Thrones. What's more, give each skeleton the zombie's undead fortitude ability to account for the card's regeneration ability. Finally, the PCs make it through the undead, into the mountain palace, and find the Big Bad Evil Guy. Depending on character level, this could totally be a lich or some home brewed lessor lich. Maybe it's a wraith or perhaps a Sword Wraith Commander from Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes. For flavor and story, I think I'd go with the Commander. Perhaps he orchestrated a misguided coup against his queen long ago and now he is damned to walk these halls as spirit, constantly reminded the the noble oath he broke all those years ago. This can also explain the horde of undead outside the gates. Those skeletons were soldiers under his command that he corrupted toward his ill-fated cause. Sure, they killed the queen and usurped power, but then ruin followed. The kingdom collapsed and their souls were damned. According to its stat block, the Commander's wears a breastplate. Make it magical and make it half-plate or full-plate to better suit the needs of your party. Either way, upon slaying the spirit, the PCs can loot an item inspired by Ashnod's Battle Gear. While wearing this armor, the PC gets +2 damage to all melee attacks and advantage on Intimidation checks. Their Hit Die pool, however, is reduced by two while wearing it and they can't remove the armor without a Remove Curse spell. It's powerful, but it's tinged with corruption of the spirit who previously wore it. There you have it, a sketch of an adventure inspired by just FOUR Magic: the Gathering cards! I hope you enjoyed this creative exercise. What elements would you have included? What obvious opportunities did I miss? Hit me up on Twitter @rjquestgiver to let me know. February is for a month for love. Two of my loves are Dungeons & Dragons 5e and Magic: the Gathering. To celebrate (and as a creative exercise), all February long I am using one random Magic card per day as inspiration and converting it into a D&D concept. The cards might end up becoming magic items, NPCs, villains, plot points, spells, potions...you name it!
How am I doing this? I'm using a website called Sealed Deck Generator to open a single pack of Magic cards for each day of the month. I'll start with Fourth Edition for Day 1 (because that's when I started playing the game as a wee lad). Of the cards revealed in that pack, I will select one and I'll do so quickly! Since this is an every day endeavor, I will aim to trust my gut and not spend a whole lot of time wringing my hands over the selection. Likewise, I'm not spending a ton of time worry about balance, fleshing out ideas, etc. Some ideas will be need more refinement than others to work into an actual game of D&D, and that's OK. I should mention that all of these ideas are being shared on Twitter, and as well all know, you can't get too wordy over there. Occasionally throughout the month, I will take an idea and expand upon with a blog post, giving it the full creative treatment. These ideas I will hand pick based on what is inspiring me and how much more I have to say about the concept I came up with. Please follow me on Twitter @rjquestgiver to track this project. I'll be using the hashtags #dnd and #mtg in each post. And of course, check back here for those more in-depth treatments. I hope you all enjoy this project and find some inspiration of your own. Share the love! When introducing the game to new players I often say "Don't look at your character sheet, just tell me what you want to do and we'll figure it out." This seems to actually work for the grand total of about one session. There is something about humans that makes us want to optimize our choices, to never do the incorrect thing. I have a longtime friend. He's a really good guy. But sometimes he drives me nuts when we play D&D together because he treats his turns like a chess move. He considers all the possible options, asks for advice out of character, then announces a move only to further consider a bonus action or something else before finally moving initiative to the next person. I know there are methods as DM can employ to help ease that problem along, but this isn't necessarily a post about that. This is a post about how to encourage your players to play for fun and not to play the optimal mechanics of their characters.
First, allow me to share my House Rules with you. That is a no frills document I share with my players before every campaign and thanks to Roll20, I've made it an easily accessible handout available in game. This document is a living document that gets tweaked and improved between campaigns. In its current manifestation, you'll see a section under Combat that reads, "Characters are encouraged to act cinematically and not be restrained by the base mechanics of the game." I then list a few examples. My goal with this statement is to set the tone as the DM right up front. Is it a panacea? No, but it does help. You know what really helps? Modeling the behavior through the monsters I run. When the players see the bugbear use their morningstar to golf swing through the campfire, spewing glowing embers everywhere, that gives them A) Pause and B) License to do something equally as creative. The amazing Mike Shea of @slyflourish had an excellent post on this topic just this week. He encouraged his readers to Replace Flanking with Cinematic Advantage. Give it a read, it helps drive home this point about not playing the character sheet, but playing the scene. My favorite line from Mike's post encourages us as at DMs to draw players out for the mechanics of their characters and into the story of the situation itself. Included in Mike's post is a list of twenty examples of how characters might gain "cinematic advantage." I've stolen five of them at the end of this post and added some mechanics on what happens on a fail. All DCs are assumed to be 12, but of course, you adjust this up or down for your situation. Success on any of these means the character gains advantage on their attack, but please, consider other bonuses as well. Maybe they get extra damage on the hit, maybe they get a wider crit range because of their maneuvering, maybe their momentum allows them an extra bonus action attack. However you decide to go about this, the point is the same. We want more FUN in our games. Crunch and optimization may be fun to some (I would argue they should play a video game or something more blatantly strategic like Magic: the Gathering, but I digress). We want FUN in the game because fun is what we remember. We don't remember how the rogue used their Cunning Action every round or how the fighter attacked, action surged, and attacked again... I hope you enjoyed this post and be sure to checkout the table below. Find me on Twitter if you'd like to discuss at @rjquestgiver. Happy rolling! Cinematic Moves
PS. There's an excellent episode of the Manifest Zone podcast from early 2019 that talks about Swashbuckling Action in your TTRPG games. Give it a listen! When my DM duties lightened up recently, I was eager to get in on some action as a player. This lead me to the great site Start Playing Games. If you are unfamiliar, this is a site that helps connect players to DMs. The games themselves take place on Roll20, Discord, or some other platform, Start Playing Games just serves as the catalyst to get people connected. The platform supports not just D&D 5e, but other games as well. You can choose from one-shots or ongoing campaigns, too.
Because I was just dipping my toe in the water, I found a one-shot that fit with my schedule and budget (yes, the DM can charge a fee for their games, some are free). The one I signed up for was $10/person and it was well worth it! The DM, Tyler, did a great job at navigating this group of five strangers through a three-hour one-shot. We were all engaged, had our moments to shine, utilized all three pillars of D&D, etc. It truly was fantastic. That positive experience got me thinking, more games should be like one-shots. The great thing about a one-shot is the pacing. There is often a very clear objective. Characters are also often swept away into the ongoing events of the world around them. There is no time wasted meeting in the bar, haggling with a vendor, not trusting the rogue, etc. A certain set of assumptions instantly immerse the characters and set them on the path of adventure. I was so inspired by that game, that I started rewriting Lost Mine of Phandelver into a series of one-shots. I know what you might be thinking, "Isn't a series of one-shots a campaign?" Yes, and no. The idea is that a character needs not to have participated in Episode I, for example, or even Episode II, to take part in Episode III. In my rewriting of Lost Mine, Episode I is the Goblin Caves, Episode II is the Redbrand Hideout, and Episode III is Wave Echo Cave. When I run a one-shot of Episode III, players simply need to show up with a level 4 character. I give a bit of background as to the general events that lead up to the party now staring into the wide and dark mouth of this ancient cave system, and off we go. I make sure the objective is clear. For this example, get to the Forge of Spells before the Black Spider does and rescue any dwarf prisoners you may come across. Other episodes, like one just solely focused on Venomfang and Thundertree, can be adapted as well. I highly recommend the YouTube series by Matthew Perkins on how t o tweak Lost Mine to make it even better. If you are familiar with that adventure, you know there are a lot of side quests and NPCs that can be overwhelming (especially for new players). Matthew's advice streamlines the story and the action. I also highly recommend the recent video by Professor Dungeon Master, 4 Pro Secrets for Designing D&D Adventures That Don't Suck. The advice here marries well with the idea of one-shots. The four concepts are:
Let's hammer this point home by talking about The Mandalorian (don't worry, no spoilers). To me, each episode of The Mandalorian is a one-shot. Sure, there is an overarching narrative that ties the episodes together, but each is like a mini-adventure on their own. String together enough mini-adventures, you have a campaign. The show is full of action across all three pillars of play. Each episode has a climax and a satisfying conclusion. For me, personally, the show suffers from a constantly moving MacGuffin (sorry Mando, the princess is in a different castle). But the point is, the formula works for our D&D games. From this point forward, every game session I run will be prepped through the lens of a one-shot. I will make sure to have all four elements listed by Professor DM. I will make sure to rewrite or cut parts of a published adventure that detract from the whole, as Matthew Perkins suggests. I will employ more cut scenes. Meaning, instead of worrying about how the PCs get the looted goods and the injured Sildar from the Goblin Caves at the start of Lost Mine, we will jump to their arrival at Phandalin. We don't need to worry about those boring details in between. Episode I ends with the party slaying Klarg, Episode II starts with them navigating Phandalin. Jump to the action. What are your thoughts on this? Any other tips or advice to share from your experiences? Hit me up on Twitter to discuss. It's easy for us who know how to play D&D or other TTRPGs to take some things for granted. My wife reminds me that when I was teaching her and her friends to play that I failed to explain a core, unwritten concept, that they only later discovered after several sessions. What was that concept? I guess you could describe it as the "illusion of choice?" Or, perhaps, "the myth of the right answer?"
My wife is a very resource-minded and deliberate individual. These traits carry over into her roleplaying. Her early days of D&D were plagued with the fear of making the "wrong" choice. I think many new players can relate to this. It's as if they treat the game as a "choose your own adventure" book. Decide poorly, turn to page 47, and you die. Game over. In reality, we know that good GMs and DMs do not run games this way. This fear of choosing wrong resulted in my wife and her friend group trying to avoid as much conflict in game as possible. If one hallway smelled of orcs, they chose the other hallway. Obviously, as DM, I then had an ochre jelly or some other baddy ready for them down that path. Once they realized that there isn't a right answer and that you can't win the game through a successful series of correct decisions, they relaxed and started enjoying the game more. I kept this lesson in mind when explaining "how to play" D&D to my brother-in-law over a recent beer. Off the cuff I came up with a plausible example of gameplay that involved milking info from the town guard. I explained the core mechanic:
I was reminded of all this recently when reading through the Pathfinder 2e Core Rulebook. On page 14 of that text starts an "Example of Play." I'm sure other books, including D&D books include something like this, but I was really impressed with way Pathfinder laid it out. I wish I had this on hand to give my wife and her friends early on in their TTRPG education. Asking a bunch of new players, "What do you do?" can be overwhelming for them. The Pathfinder example illustrates rich options that are a mix of roleplay, mechanics, and out-of-character elements. I strongly encourage you to track down this short section of the Core Rulebook and give it a read. I will definitely be using it (or a version of it) as I bring new people into the hobby. One key part of that "Example of Play" touches on initiative. In 5e, Dexterity is a god-stat. It impacts some important skills, some attacks, your armor class, and your initiative. I was struck by how Pathfinder 2e uses Perception for initiative instead, with the option of using other stats as appropriate. In the example from the Core Rulebook, one of the characters gets to use Stealth for initiative since they were hiding when the fight began. I love this. I'd like to experiment with using this system in my 5e games. I could see Insight being a good skill to use for initiative when negotiations with a thug or bandit goes sideways as the character intuits that the foe is done talking and is ready to pull his blade. What are your thoughts on this? What other skills might be used for initiative in the right situation? Also, how do you explain the broad brushstrokes of D&D to a curious new initiate? Comment below or hit me up on Twitter (@rjquestgiver). Thanks for reading! Quick Note: After a long hiatus due to the BBEG that is 2020, I am back and rededicated to regular blog postings on this site. I hope you enjoy.
If you haven't read my original post about Crit Fails and Successes, I recommend you do so as I'm not regurgitating those thoughts here, just expanding on them. My views on Crit Fails and Successes have evolved since that original post. Initially, I suggested throwing caution to the wind and using all threat levels of cards regardless of the level of your party. After seeing my players straight up annihilate some bosses and mini-bosses, I've reassessed. The Crit Hit Deck for Players and the Crit Fail Deck for Players each have four tiers of severity. The lowest tier is recommended for first level players, with the second tier suggested at level 5. The lower tier cards still offer plenty of flavor and dramatic moments for your game without totally breaking it early on. I've also recently added the Critical Hit Deck for GMs to my arsenal. With this, it is definitely important to stick to the recommended threat levels since low level characters are so squishy to begin with. This crit hit deck replaces my previous house rule of calling for a DC 12 Con Save when a player is nat 20'd by a monster (suffering a level of exhaustion on a failed save). I've learned that exhaustion is hard to track and doesn't really offer a great dramatic flair. There is no critical fail deck for GMs, so I still use my rule of the monster automatically granting advantage for the next attack against it. And since so many of us are playing online these days, I recommend turning off the feature in your virtual tabletop (VTT) that auto rolls crit damage. My groups use Roll20 and having that crit damage auto roll causes unnecessary confusion when using these crit decks. The decks are designed to replace normal crit rules, not lay on top of them. For example, if a card says to triple damage, you are tripling the damage of a normal hit, not tripling the damage of what would have been the regular crit. Lastly, each of these decks (when used in their entirety) provide 208 outcomes. Mechanics aside, the vibrancy they bring to your story and combat narration is enriching. I, personally, sometimes struggle with combat narration as a DM (and as a player for that matter). This is skill I'm working on and these decks help develop that vocabulary and flow. Instead some simply stating, "Your 12 misses the orc." I can more naturally say, "Your blade strikes the orc's hide armor and slides off without harm." Thank you for your time and hit me up on Twitter (@rjquestgiver) if you have questions, comments, or would like to further the conversation. The 5e rules as written for criticals are, in my opinion, lacking. We've all had experiences where the fighter lands a crit on the creature, only to have their damage be less than a typical blow. We've also had the ho-humness of a natural 1 meaning nothing. Many of us DMs homebrew our own rules to help spice up the game in this area. Below are two tools and a couple mechanics I use that are straightforward, easy to implement, and fun.
It all starts with a couple resources from Nord Games. First, we have the Crit Hit Deck for Players. Follow that up with the Crit Fail Deck for Players, and you have everything you need. Easy, right? The rules are simple, when a player rolls a nat. 1 or a nat. 20, draw the appropriate card and use the mechanics for the type of attack made. For the crit hit deck, the types of attacks are slashing, piercing, bludgeoning and magic. For the fail deck, the attack types are melee, ranged, natural and magic. As with anything else, if you don't like the mechanic as presented, tweak it or draw a new card. Sometime the mechanic may not fit your situation exactly, and that is ok. Just roll with it. Both decks have cards of varying severity in them. The official rules suggest that you use different severity categories dependent on the average player level of your group. I throw caution to the wind and just mix them all together. This can result in some truly epic moments for the players. In one game, the fourth level druid wild shaped in an ape and punched a minotaur in the face, KOing it just in the nick of time. This was balanced out a few levels later when that same druid had a crit fail against a hydra at a very inopportune moment. Both situations were great fun and high drama. Moments the entire group remembers. Moments that would have been lost to the haze of memory if not for the flare brought by these crit deck mechanics. It's important to note that I do not use these decks against the players. Some of the crit hits are devastating (such as quadrupling damage, imposing severe conditions, and the like). I don't want a monster to outright kill a character due to the luck of the draw. Instead, this is how I hand crit hits and fails for monsters: Crit Hits: The monster deals crit damage as presented in the 5e rules (double all damage dice). The PC then needs to succeed on a DC 12 Con save or suffer one level of exhaustion. This can represent a cracked rib, bloody nose, or other ill-effect from the devastating blow. Crit Fails: The next attack against the monster is made at advantage. This can represent the monster losing its balance, exposing its flank, etc. I like this method, and I think my players do too, because all the drama is centered around the actions of the characters. The monsters crit fails and successes aren't meaningless, but they also don't drastically change the trajectory of the combat. I also like the using the exhaustion rules whenever possible. Too often a barbarian can just charge into combat and waylay until the dust settles. The occasional concussion blow from a crit can facilitate a change in tactics or offer some opportunity for roleplay. These decks are a go to item for every game I run. I can't recommend them enough. Looking for more great resources to enhance your game? Checkout the Toolkit page where I've listed some of my favorites. Both of these decks are among them! I've become a fan of skill checks, but only when they are well done. Ghosts of Saltmarsh has a nice system for determining outcomes based on group checks, resulting in varying degrees of success and failure. The DMs Guild Supplement, Challenge Accepted, has a similar system. I was inspired tremendously by both these sources when constructing my own skill challenges for Wintry Blast. Whereas the challenges in Saltmarsh and Challenge Accepted can serve as full-fledged encounters, certain situations call for something a bit more nimble and streamlined. Below is one such example from Wintry Blast. Throughout that adventure there are five such tables to help DMs bring otherwise mundane skill checks to life. For a bit of setup, early on in the adventure the characters are challenged with retrieving a farmer's hogs whose enclosure was destroyed in a recent attack. Rescuing these hogs from the wild is a springboard into a grander series of events. In this scene, each character who is searching for the hogs make a Wisdom (Survival) check. Alternatively, only one character makes the check, at advantage, since they are receiving help from the rest of the party. Consult the table for outcomes. Regardless of the outcome of the check, the characters immediately find the missing hogs after Outcomes are resolved. This type of table allows for characters who roll really well to find an extra bonus, and it allows characters who roll poorly to fail forward. That concept of failing forward is an important one. I've kicked myself a number of times after a game session when a character's low roll resulted in a flat fail, not allowing the story line to easily proceed. Mike Shea of Sly Flourish has a great article about Failing Forward that I highly recommend. I've learned from those previous mistakes, and always build in a failing forward option where ever critical story elements are involved.
Looking for more great resources to enhance your game? Checkout the Toolkit page where I've listed some of my favorites. The Sly Flourish Blog is among them! Visit the Wintry Blast page to learn more about the adventure. It's available now on the DMs Guild. |
AuthorD&D 5e enthusiast. Creator on DMsguild. Supporter of creators, content and good times. Follow me on Twitter @rjquestgiver Archives
July 2021
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