D&D Next - 5e Discussion

Honestly I think I'm done with DND. The whole session was nominally a fight, but almost all of it was the bad guys running away and us dashing to keep up. And then setting off like 5 lightning bolt traps in a row with no way to detect them really in a narrow hallway. (Apparently I should have tried dispel magic on the glyph, but how was I supposed to know it was a non-standard glyph of warding that keeps firing??)

And our wizard.. mixed bag. He'd split off from the party and, to his credit, figured out an alternate route that put him ahead of the baddies. But he wasn't able to stop them. Couple rounds of action and they got past him and escaped.

Though to the wizard's credit the main baddie happened to have legendary resistance so the wizard's portent + polymorph did nothing. Which sucks. Legendary resistance sucks.

So it wasn't great. Two hours of "I dash" and the baddies got away.

But even aside from that I've reached a point where like every piece of DND has something that annoys me. Time to find a new system. One that's not a close relative. If I never see another d20 or traditional six stats in a game, I might be okay with that.

You guys must play rarely for being level 4 after a year ?

To give you an idea, I play every week and my players are around level 13 after 2 years. But they started level 3 true.

Side game. Got paid and a new job to bust a smuggling ring. Bought some scrolls of AoE spells to B.L.A.S.T. Artived at smugglers, botched assassination of sentry so had to go in guns (spells) blazing. Used one scroll then remembered I have a indestructible horn of blasting. 120g wasted. But then we are so rich my Bard cannot carry her 40lbs of gold...

Great! Though currently i'm playing Call of Cthulhu instead of D&D. We're playing through masks of Nyarlathotep using pulp cthulhu rules, and its been a blast so far. I'm playing a wealthy gentleman thief (secretly a thief, of course)

Went pretty damn good, I think.

It was the first session of a new campaign where I needed to rely on my world building and prep work and just improvise to get the party where they wanted to go.

They had just been given their Big Epic Quest, and had no idea where to start. 45 minutes of rp-talk between themselves and sharing bits and pieces of their characters and they figured out their next 3 places to go to learn more about the World Ending Threat.

It couldn't have gone better honestly. Super glad that my prep work payed off. After my last campaign I took a lonf break to kinda reflect on what went wrong and how I could change my thought processes and approach to create a better experience, and so far it's working!

We had our 250th session of this particular campaign!

They liberated two guards from the enemy team—the party has been showing considerably more mercy now that they're in control of the Set cult's former quarters as opposed to when they were waging guerilla from the shadows—but one of the two liberated guards got her leg eaten by cephalopods as they were making their way to Gosterwick. In the end the entire party went there with them, escorting them, and then they were too exhausted to take the four-hour trek back to Arden Vul. So they were spending some time buying diamond dust and making silver dust, for spells.

I'm back. I ran my weekly session of mage and it didn't go well. I am mildly cursed.

The players encountered a magical murder and theft at the end of the previous session. Someone had walked in to an apartment tremendously accelerated, shot a dude, stole his magic book, and left.

The players had dealt with the spirit of murder that had manifested at the crime scene, though they got pretty banged up by it. The other room mate came home and was like what the fuck, my room mate is dead , who are you, get out.

So the players left. Most of the clues and leads in there largely unexamined.

They didn't ask any questions after the initial introduction. Which was made by the NPC. They didn't ask the room mate "do you know what your friend was working on? Why did he have a map of our friend's house?"

The next morning they tried to brute force teleport to another group that's gone missing. They tried before and failed because there's a high withstand rating and clash of wills involved. They know this. They tried anyway. The dice were not in their favor. They could have been. It was 5 dice versus 8. One of the players was very cranky about this.

So they went to talk to another member of their order. She told them explicitly to go investigate the murder. The players decided not to.

They went back to the library to do more research on the haunted house at the center of the story. But they don't really have any new information from the last time they did this, so I couldn't think of much more to give them.

It doesn't help that one of the players has rather low system mastery. One of the other players gently pointed it out. She said she wasn't offended. But it's a little annoying. It's been 12 weeks. That's a lot of time to read the book.

She also seems to have like anxiety about there being too many plot threads open. That might just be an incompatible preference thing because I do tend to have games where there's a lot of stuff going on, and it's up to the players what they want to focus on. Some of it might be connected. Some might not be. Maybe the new street drug is related to the ghosts. Maybe it's not. That's for you to find out!

So it kind of sucked. I think one of the players had an good time, one okay, and the low mastery one a bad time.

We are clearing a temple, and are fighting mutated gargoyle-like creatures that lay eggs in you if they hit and you fail a roll. We saved some survivors, healed one of the eggs, and found our objective on the bottom level of the temple. There was a mutated guy next to it and we ended on a cliffhanger as my moon Druid in spider form leapt at him from behind.