The D&D thread

It has been awhile but, there was the old Bloodstone Pass adventures. Pretty sure you fought Orcus.

Rajaah said:

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I picked up some of the suggestions in this thread!

And speaking of the Hells, I just posed a question in my CRPG thread that probably should have gone in this thread instead now that I think about it, but yeah, I welcome any input on the subject: Rajaah's CRPG Blog

If the link doesn't work, it's Post #163 and it's the last one as of this moment.

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To answer your question -

In my opinion, the Abyss would win because it would likely come down to a battle of attrition. And though the Hell's are massive planes with some incredibly powerful inhabitants, demons/devils require souls to be created, but the Abyss is effectively endless and the creation of its inhabitants are not limited by a resource like the Hells are. And similar to the Hell's, the Abyss has some mind-bogglingly powerful beings that call it home.

Additionally, it's impossible for the Hell's to attack the Abyss as a unified force because the Blood War has raged for tens of thousands of years and will do so for tens of thousands more. It will never end unless there is unified intervention by half a dozen evil gods. Which is even less likely than a cease fire.

*Edit* typos

Rajaah said:

That's a good answer. Hell would almost certainly be playing defense the whole time and fighting on their own terrain. I never even considered the idea of Hell invading the Abyss and conquering it because such a thing seems impossible. And the attrition would be a big thing too.

Somebody should make a Blood War based RTS or sim game. That could be pretty insane.

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They do invasions and try to hold territory from time to time. You can't always go on the defensive and last long. There's a concept called the center of gravity that exists on all strategic levels of war. If they're being pushed by the Abyss, launching a counter invasion into a layer helps by forcing the aggressor to reasses the situation and diminish offensive strength by choosing what to send in response. If you don't respond, you open up a foothold or get your supply lines and logistics disrupted, which could cause an offensive to fail anyway. Of course, almost all of the time this is a sacrifice play that is temporary, as whoever goes is going to be swallowed by the Abyss eventually. There are a couple of excerpts of the Hells holding several fortresses on an abyssal layer for a century or two.

One other thing about the Abyss and its divisions. In Pathfinder they bought the rights to use the Cthulhu mythos, so elder gods like Dagon live in the deeper layers. In D&D (3rd edition I think) there were beings called Obyriths who preceded the Demons, but were defeated and driven into the deeper parts of the Abyss. I believe Pale Night is an Obyrith. So even though the Abyss is huge, there are still places of it unexplored where even demon lords like Demogorgon would fear to tread.

If you like reading up on all the lore that can still go hard, there is a lot of great fluff content in old Dragon and Dungeon magazines on archive.org. Such as the fact that drow women conceive multiple babies at a time in the womb, but the fetuses will attack and devour each other until only one is left. Also, when the fetuses do this, it puts the pregnant drow into a state of ecstasy. (I don't remember where I read this but I know I won't ever forget it!)

Edit: crpg related funny:

Today I learned that both Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins are gay. I knew about Crawford, but didn't have a clue about Perkins. It might be because I don't use social media at all. Regardless, I was still surprised I wasn't aware of that fact.

Also, both of the primary individuals in charge of the direction of D&D being gay explains a lot.

Grabbit Allworth said:

Today I learned that both Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins are gay. I knew about Crawford, but didn't have a clue about Perkins. It might be because I don't use social media at all. Regardless, I was still surprised I wasn't aware of that fact.

Also, both of the primary individuals in charge of the direction of D&D being gay explains a lot.

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Nothing against Perkins. The dude is amazing. And he's one of the few people wizards called somthing like Grandmaster GM or something. But he's also been there through all of 4e as well. Thought he had a different title in the company I think. But yeh 1st time I heard him talk for 5sec I was like yuuup. Lol

Hoss said:

I'm in a 5e campaign and I just got turned into a werewolf. I'm trying to decide if I want to lean into this or get cured in the next town. Anyone got any insight on playing a werewolf? It looks like the wolf has worse AC than me, but about 50ish hps whereas I as a lvl 3 bard only have about 23. The DM was not prepared for us to lean into it (3 of us got bit) so he didn't have any rules ready. He did say we'd be able to control when we wolf out. But supposedly no spells can be cast because we can't speak when turned. If I can find some spells without a verbal component I think I can convince him to let me use them. I just need to look. He said if I turn while injured, I'd get the wolf's full HPs, but then revert back to my own HPS when I turn back. So I can't just transform twice to get a full heal. I'm also unclear on whether I get perception and immunity bonuses while in human form. The stuff he's linked so far sounds like they apply in either form for werewolves.

For anyone who's done this, do you just make a new character sheet for your wolf form? Oh and there are technically 3 forms. Wolf, humanoid, and hybrid. I'll have to see if those would be like 3 different characters.

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I'm not surprised at all that your DM wasn't prepared for you guys to lean in to it because the rules for Lycanthrophy in 5e are kinda scattered around. Not to mention pretty lame.

Your DM probably knows this and wants to introduce something a lot better than how it's handled officially. There are a lot of great 3rd party options.

All that said, it's really hard to answer your questions without knowing the specifics of how your DM plans to handle it.

The way I handle it is A LOT more involved than the RAW. The curse takes time to manifest and once it does your character cannot control the beast inside them. However, over time the character is faced with a series of checks that will determine the outcome of that internal battle. If they win, then they can control themselves while shapechanged. If they lose, they will never be able to control themselves while shifted.

It IS a curse and there must be consequences for it to mean anything. Furthermore, removing the curse is not something I allow with a simple cast of Remove Curse. The process is also a lot more involved and requires some actual effort to cure.

There's a lot more that I could post, but you didn't come here asking for an expose' about how I/we do it.

As far as needing 3 separate character sheets - that seems completely unnecessary because the only things likely to change are: AC, HP, move speed, possibly str/dex/con, and maybe the addition of bite/claw attacks. And of course the inherent abilities of were-creatures (immunity to normal weapons, heightened senses, vulnerability to silver, etc.). All of that can be simply noted.

bigmark268 said:

Nothing against Perkins. The dude is amazing. And he's one of the few people wizards called somthing like Grandmaster GM or something. But he's also been there through all of 4e as well. Thought he had a different title in the company I think. But yeh 1st time I heard him talk for 5sec I was like yuuup. Lol

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Lots about him I like, but lots more about him I don't.

I've seen enough of his Tweets to know that he's just another brainwashed woke sheep with a terminal case of TDS.

Hoss said:

I'm already calling it a gift.

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It certainly can be if your DM is ultra-soft and it basically ends up being a major character boost with no repercussions. That's a huge mistake, but it's not my game.

Hoss said:

It's my first campaign so I wouldn't know either way. I've played like 4 AL one shots, 2 non AL one shots, and now we're 3 sessions into it with this group.

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How much experience does the DM have?

Now that I think about it, that's really not relevant until we know how he intends to handle it.

Hoss said:

I'm already calling it a gift.

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The Dark Powers agree.

The whole "campaign" thing never resonated with me. But I've been DMing my group for 13yrs now with our 4e chars. 3 guys still play the original chars they made. The rest of the members have changed over the years. Some friends stopped playing. Some started playing. No one has made a new character yet though or has permanently died.

bigmark268 said:

The whole "campaign" thing never resonated with me. But I've been DMing my group for 13yrs now with our 4e chars. 3 guys still play the original chars they made. The rest of the members have changed over the years. Some friends stopped playing. Some started playing. No one has made a new character yet though or has permanently died.

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Are you saying that you're not a fan of a defined start and end point?

If so, there are definitely groups that play extremely long-term, open-ended games like that, but you're a tiny, tiny minority of players.

Though it's more of a consequence of how difficult it is to keep a core group of people together for that long. Unless there is a genuine friendship among the players, it's unlikely for a group to stick together for years. In fact, WotC did a survery last year and it revealed that the average number of sessions a group plays was somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 before a group falls apart. It seems counterintuitive, but any campaign that lasts until its completion is an exception. In my 30 years of playing, I've only run 5 campaigns start to finish and another 6-8 that died on the vine due to people moving (this was before VTTs), changes in work schedules, people having children, personality conflicts, and people simply losing interest in the game.

I've never run a campaign with your kind of longevity, but it does have a lot appeal. The idea of fully embracing the characters and shaping the world around them for literally a decade sounds like a lot of fun. However, that kind of game takes truly committed and reasonably talented DM. Not to mention, the players need to be ok with a glacial leveling pace. Otherwise, after a couple years, you end up running games with god-tier characters full-time and that's only fun for so long and a nightmare to DM for. Though I guess the frequency and duration of your sessions matter a lot. Surely you guys aren't meeting weekly. My guess is that your games are probably once a month or bi-weekly for 4-5 hours.

However, I will say that the lack of death is a bit concerning to me. I'm not saying death is necessary for a good game, but if the players understand that it's extremely unlikely that they could ever permanently lose a character that they've invested so much time and energy in, would quickly get stale. I mean, combat is a slog and becomes tedious if you know you're going to win before initiative is rolled. How do your players feel about that?

If the lifespan of your game wasn't nearly as long I could accept that they might just be really good and/or lucky, but no one suffering a permanent death in over a decade screams plot armor. To me anyway.

P.S. Why 4e? It's near-universally regarded as the worst edition. Though its lack of popularity does help keep the price of out-of-print material down. I guess that's a plus.

Yeh the traditional campaign setup has just never been conducive to my groups play style. We are that extremely tiny minority. I just always figured thats how everyone played lol.

In our 20s when we started with 3.5 we played weekly. But now in our 40s with kids and houses we play about every 6 weeks. I do long for those weekly games lol. But it was a lot more stressful to make weekly adventures.

Weve got in our group 3 guys that are the highest at 21. Then a total of 11 other players over the years. They are all between 7 and 19.

Gear wise. Not everyone even has every equipment slot filled. Or feat filled in. But that's on them lol

Usually I only get 5 to 7 that show for a game.

As for death. We we're all avid mmo players. And everyone really approaches dnd the same. That being said. Anytime I've killed someone or multiple people I don't want them to just "bring corpse to priest burrr res". It's has to be meaningful and have an impact.

Two chars have been killed permanently.

Another died in a portal accident one time.

I've had members tag along as ghosts because we didn't have the money to buy a diamond to res them. (The body kept on ice in a bag of holding)

One of our wizards reanimating members corpses one time.

They have also killed eachother a time or two. One time ended in a real fight lol.

One time I killed our lvl 20 warden. He was visibly upset. To the point where I ended up having his sentient dwarven relic weapon sacrifice itself to bring him back and "tell him what he was destined for" after when asked if I planned that. I responded with "oh I don't know, did i?" Now the spirit of his weapon manifests in his dreams as a kind of spiritual guide now and again.

Another time I had 3 party members get cursed with an ancient Netherse curse. The group ended up taking the next 3 months failing to cure it. So the afflicted were slowly transformed into mindless ghouls over the course of 3 sessions. last session they died and their souls were trapped in Shars Citadel of Loss in the Shadowfell. well the other memebers wanted to go and get their souls back.

That was 2 months ago. They are still figuring out what to do now with 2 party members having their souls bound to black soul stones. And now the whole party was just forcefully telephoned to a lost temple of Mystral that's in the Astral sea. But that's for another time.

As for why we chose 4e. At the time everyone liked it a lot more then 3.5. Melee with spell like abilities being able to do more then "roll for basic attack". My players aren't very creative. And half of them can't do somthing if it isn't written down infront of them. Hell one guy does nothing, and I mean nothing, but stand in the back and throw his returning hammer. But that's how he likes it, so he gets it.