Hoss
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I saw that. I'm a creation bard so I can already animate one thing. I have a dragon dick that I carry around for that purpose.
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I saw that. I'm a creation bard so I can already animate one thing. I have a dragon dick that I carry around for that purpose.
So I've always read and seen people posting how most groups only play lower level chars and not a lot of people do higher lvl stuff.
Like the whole journey into svernus book. They made that for lvls 1 to 10? You're in hell. That should be like lvl 15+ stuff.
For my group, only over the last maybe 1.5 years we've had 4 of our group memebers break 20. Two are lvl 22.
From a DMs standpoint. I do feel more pressure to keep it interesting. We've moved past the realm of mundane long ago. We don't want to go "find a missing child" or "clear a cave of orcs"
The past say 3 months. We've been in Chult. Doing dinosaur races, flying our magic zeppelin over the forest, seeking out dead god's. And were moving towards the fane of the night serpent and moving into taking on Acereraks Atropal and Soulmonger.
I think we'll be doing somthing with my paladin friend squaring off against the fallen paladin Ras Nsi and his army yuan-ti. Then also reclaiming an ancient ruining blade from thr corpse of the dead god that this atropal is from.
Like the whole journey into svernus book. They made that for lvls 1 to 10? You're in hell. That should be like lvl 15+ stuff.
For my group, only over the last maybe 1.5 years we've had 4 of our group memebers break 20. Two are lvl 22.
From a DMs standpoint. I do feel more pressure to keep it interesting. We've moved past the realm of mundane long ago. We don't want to go "find a missing child" or "clear a cave of orcs"
The past say 3 months. We've been in Chult. Doing dinosaur races, flying our magic zeppelin over the forest, seeking out dead god's. And were moving towards the fane of the night serpent and moving into taking on Acereraks Atropal and Soulmonger.
I think we'll be doing somthing with my paladin friend squaring off against the fallen paladin Ras Nsi and his army yuan-ti. Then also reclaiming an ancient ruining blade from thr corpse of the dead god that this atropal is from.
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Hoss
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Wait, you can go over level 20?
Almost no one around here plays level 1. You have to find a beginners introduction to D&D game to do that. They usually start 3-5, do an adventure, and go up to 6. I think my group started at level 1 with a one shot, then did a beginner dungeon at lvl 2 before we got into tyranny of dragons at 3.
I don't want to metagame, but does anyone know how high you get in tyranny of dragons? We're using milestone leveling so we're keeping up with where we're supposed to be according to the book.
I should have mentioned that lol. We play 4th edition. So the levels go to 30.
But it's taken us 12 years of playing these characters to get this far.
So do you guys do the 5e thing where you all level and gain exp at the same rate?
Hoss
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yes. Generally after a big boss fight. Like the last 2 levels came after fighting dragons. The one before came after clearing out a castle. But we are not murder hobos. I'm pretty sure we got one level without a single fight once. We managed to charm or otherwise incapacitate everyone then snuck around and stole the thing we came for.
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Hey there's more than one way to skin a cat.
I do the old school thing where everyone has different exp. And after every session I tally everyone's exp. But our group ranges from lvl 7 to lvl 22 currently. Thats spread across 14 players. Not everyone shows up though. Like last weekend we played and only 5 or the 10 that confirmed made it in the end.
The way I do it is. You only get exp for being there. You show up late and miss an hour. You miss the exp from that hour.
I do the old school thing where everyone has different exp. And after every session I tally everyone's exp. But our group ranges from lvl 7 to lvl 22 currently. Thats spread across 14 players. Not everyone shows up though. Like last weekend we played and only 5 or the 10 that confirmed made it in the end.
The way I do it is. You only get exp for being there. You show up late and miss an hour. You miss the exp from that hour.
Hoss
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We level even if we miss. When we add a new person, they just come in at our level. I've never played where we kept up with xp points. (unless you count muds and EQ).
Must be hard to balance encounters for levels 7 and 22. Hope the level 7 isn't the tank.
Ehh it's more of on them to sorts stay in their lane a bit. But balance is actually super easy. I hit who I want and for hoe much I want. Even if I roll. It's all part of the illusion on the group lol. And in us playing for 12yrs I've only killed maybe 4 characters. But even then. They just get revived lol. And all 4 deaths were more mcguffins then actual combat deaths.
Though two did have their souls stolen by Shar. And we ended up going to the plane of shadow to recover them from her tower prison.
Edit: I did kill one char permanently. Our frie d passed in RL. So we retired his char. He got turned into an artifact weapon i named after his char. It was epic.
Though two did have their souls stolen by Shar. And we ended up going to the plane of shadow to recover them from her tower prison.
Edit: I did kill one char permanently. Our frie d passed in RL. So we retired his char. He got turned into an artifact weapon i named after his char. It was epic.
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Djay
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The Curse of Strahd group I was in started at 3 and ended up around 15 (which is beyond the module, but the DM homebrewed some stuff). Currently in a Dungeon of the Mad Mage campaign that the DM says will go to level 20...we started at 5 and are level 9 right now. But, yeah, most adventures cap around lvl 12 without adding homebrew. I think that's about where the Call of the Netherdeep campaign ended that I DM'd...I did start them at level 1 because it was my first time DMing, so I did a small 1-3 module first to see if I could hang.
In 5E, characters are near-impossible to kill at the high levels, so I think that's part of the reason most campaigns aren't designed with those levels in mind, but I am excited to finally get a character up there just to check it off the list. Currently playing a Rogue...combat is boring with basically one attack per round with the main objective being to get sneak attack damage. If I miss or can't get sneak attack, it really feels wasted. But the roleplaying with this character has been really fun and I'm looking forward to the higher tier abilities that I'll never ever get another chance to try. Definitely going back to a magic user in the next campaign, though.
In 5E, characters are near-impossible to kill at the high levels, so I think that's part of the reason most campaigns aren't designed with those levels in mind, but I am excited to finally get a character up there just to check it off the list. Currently playing a Rogue...combat is boring with basically one attack per round with the main objective being to get sneak attack damage. If I miss or can't get sneak attack, it really feels wasted. But the roleplaying with this character has been really fun and I'm looking forward to the higher tier abilities that I'll never ever get another chance to try. Definitely going back to a magic user in the next campaign, though.
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Hoss
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So, I think I've decided to multiclass my bard into sorcerer. Main reason for it was that with draconic origins I get a +3 to unarmored AC and I'm wearing the black dragon mask which lets me add my cha modifier when not wearing armor. I was sitting at 19. 10+3(dex)+6(cha). Now I will be at 22. I also really like the reaction spells where I can defend myself if I get hit and there are more better cantrips than a bard gets.
Earlier in the campaign I knocked up a woman who wants to be the white wyrm speaker. My character doesn't know about it yet, but I saw my DM rolling behind his screen. He laughed and told me my pullout game was weak. I said "Who said I pull out?" He was like, allright then, you'll make a great father. I plan to use that as the event that caused the sorcerous origins even if my character doesn't know about it yet.
Earlier in the campaign I knocked up a woman who wants to be the white wyrm speaker. My character doesn't know about it yet, but I saw my DM rolling behind his screen. He laughed and told me my pullout game was weak. I said "Who said I pull out?" He was like, allright then, you'll make a great father. I plan to use that as the event that caused the sorcerous origins even if my character doesn't know about it yet.
Hoss
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I forgot to tell yall that I finally got to drop my 2 ton rock on a dragon. The DM asked siri how much damage 2000 lbs would do falling from 30 feet and she answered 10d10. He was expecting some ft-lbs calc that he would have to translate into hps, but when he saw that he was like "fuck it, I hate math, lets go with that." I figured it would only be 4d10 so I was happy.
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When we used to play MERP in college, that's kind of how we rolled. If a particular person did something extraordinary with their character, typically you would get an XP bonus. The DM kind of held everything in check, and nobody necessarily exceeded everybody else but it was just kind of a nice reward. I remember something that one of the guys playing in dwarf Warrior head backed up an elf fighting a bunch of wargs even though the doors hated elves or whatever. I think he ended up leveling a little bit before the rest of us, but everybody seem to be neck and neck.
I guess the problem I see with that sort of stuff though is if you're a hard-ass about it, all it's going to do is create competition which the group isn't going to want to cooperate together other than just compete against one another. These games are about having fun with your friends, if I wanted to compete against them I'll play a stupid FPS with them or something.
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Is the mad mad mage stuff about that crazy wizard who lives underwater deep? That's not elminster but I don't remember the guy's name. I had a whole bunch of old second edition stuff and it specifically covered him and waterdeep.
Ran a campaign back in college where we were doing stuff in that area, and it was all about him having traveled to other planes which apparently was a thing he did, but he encountered Cthulhu, and everybody was having a fight of cottonians and stuff and there's the pirate city underneath water deep, and at night all of the people were getting taken from their homes to be converted with some sort of parasite, and it was all this big hive mind bullshit. Eventually this giant Cthulhu type monster came through a portal and everybody had to fight it.
Made for a really good time.
Djay
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Yeah, Halaster Blackcloak. I sent this to my DM when I found it in BG3:
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I don't know what deal I had bought but it was a second edition advanced kit, and at the time we were playing 3.5. I tried my best to take some of the older concepts or adventures from 2nd edition and roll it into the current one. Everything was about us being in waterdeep. One of the other stories or whatever was the assassin's guild that's run by vampires, I don't remember what the hell they're called, they were there to try to take out the mayor or Governor some bullshit, but everything was going to drive the party down below the city into the Mad wizards layer.
From what I remember that was like a huge giant maze and it was going to be this whole second or third massive element to the story. My idea though was that Halaster was jumping to different dimensions, encountered Cthulhu or another God within the mythos, made him mad, and then he came back to spread these parasites around waterdeep.
I'm not the best game master but I thought it was a pretty neat story as did everybody else and we had fun. Normally my money you used to play we would take turns cooking dinner, I normally somebody would bring over a whole bunch of stuff to barbecue, or maybe you would make a big pot of spaghetti. Couple cases of beer, stay up till 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., I'm just have a great time.
That's what tabletop RPGs are all about.
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No clue what that is. Maybe. Like I said I just remember it being back from advanced second edition, and when we were playing 3.5 and 5th, there wasn't here as much box adventures float around at the time, so we would just take older deals and convert everything into the new system.
I used to download PDFs of the older books and when I worked at UCS back in college fixing laser printers, when you would do your burn in test, we had some just stupid text file to run through the printer to make certain it worked. I used to bring in discs of those d&d manuals and print them up companies dime, then took them to go get bound and a spiral binder deal over at office Max. Probably printed up hundreds of dollars worth of books.
It was cool because my boss played with us, and he didn't give a shit. Toner and paper, more than you could ever dream of.
Hoss
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xerox subsidy or the xerox benefit. Kids today may never know how huge that was. Now they just buy a printer and throw it away when it runs out of paper.
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HP 4plus and 4050s typically. Used to get some odd Brother printers in on occasions. 4 plus is a workhorse, and the 4050 is even better. That thing is a beast, and if you're running an office that's probably one of the best pieces of equipment you can possibly have if you're constantly printing stuff and don't choir color. Fast and efficient, but the four plus is still the OG laser printer.
Occasionally we will get these color hp's in that have this weird carousel deal to hold all the different toners so you can do coloring. They were kind of a pain in the ass to work on, but pretty fun when they showed up. Island I really like that job with all those folks I used to work with. Met a lot of good friends so how I guess I'm in for 25 years or something at this point when all of us were at the shop. One of those guys are who I ran d&d campaigns with, or when we played MERP.
I think we spent about three or four years every Saturday running some sort of campaign. We would always meet at one of my buddies houses who had the most room, and we would rotate who would make dinner. Maybe barbecue, for like a big pot of spaghetti, for an occasions I would make a gumbo. Sit around drink beer, cook in the evening, stay up till three or four in the morning adventuring.
Great times. As much as I like being able to do the virtual tabletop stuff, I miss those days where everybody got together and actually rolled dice I had a big dry erase board to map stuff out, somebody would put in a CD of Conan soundtrack to emphasize the seriousness of the campaign.
Hoss
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Otto korrect, or text to speech?
"choir" instead of require really makes me think text to speech.