u/JTexpo

Howdy,

Was running a one-shot the other day for a novice group of players, and had a funny story I wanted to share. To keep it brief, the party was snooping around in an NPCs quarters looking for some good gear to pocket. I had a player roll an investigation saving through which resulted in a nat-one.

As a result, I told them "You find a hand to a petrified hand! One what emits power like no other"

This was when everyone suddenly was confused as if I just made a blunder. the table started to question "but I rolled a nat-one?", and I simply responded with "I know"... and then suddenly they found a petrified chest- a petrified foot- and a petrified head! They were finding the pieces of Vecna, and were consumed by greed that they didn't know I was tricking them.

You should have seen the look on their faces when suddenly the paladin is blasted with a power-word kill, and animates back as a death-knight!

Sure the party was a bunch of level ones, and this was their first time playing; however, they critically failed their investigation saving through what else was I to do? Anyways... after a TPK, I made sure to explain to the players that it was all their fault & they should have used their heroic inspiration dice to re-roll.

Everyone clapped and applauded me for my best DMing in the world, and I even got to meet all of the world leaders and shake their hands! My next session will be at the UN, and I'll be running Curse of Strahd.

Cheers!

howdy,

Was running a one-shot the other day for a novice group of players, and had a funny story I wanted to share. To keep it brief, the party was snooping around in an NPCs quarters looking for some good gear to pocket. I had a player roll an investigation saving through which resulted in a nat-one.

As a result, I told them "You find a magical parchment piece of paper. It has some words written on it that echo with arcane energy"

this was when everyone suddenly was confused as if I just made a blunder. the table started to question "but I rolled a nat-one?", and I simply responded with "I know"... curiosity would get to the better of the group, and before a mage could cast 'detect magic' the paladin read off of the spell-scroll!

A cast of 'charm person' would inadvertently hit the groups druid (who succeeded the throw), and then the magical item disintegrated in the paladins hands...

moral of the story:

What's worse than not finding anything good? Finding something great, and accidentally wasting it!

*I don't think this would work for all players, so definitely know your audience; however, it did result in a lot of laughs as the party scrambled to 'undo' the action

Cheers!

Howdy,

I (42 M) am running a really unique and never thought of campaign, where players need to act out their characters. Want to lie? Forget the dice, give me your best tale. A bard? You better bring an instrument that would be fantasy & play it well - no electric pianos! Lockpicking? I kick you out of my parents basement and tell you to break in.

Anyways... I (48 M) and my player (30M) got into a combat- which meant, I gave them a bow for them to RP out. I (49M) stood 30 feet away from them (29M) with my katana, and rushed at them swinging!

like an absolute idiot the player (23M) fails his (22M) attack roll, and misses me (51M)- I (57M) scored a natural crit, because I (65M) know the way of the blade, and cut off his (21M) arm.

this resulted in the rest of the table getting upset and calling the ambulance - which I (67M) told them was cheating, since they had a cleric PC already & our table couldn't accept more players at it...

Anyways... I'm (72M) facing 7 years to life, and I wanted to see if the judge (58M) was unbased in their ruling-

so Reddit... AITA?

literally 1 feat - all disadvantages of prone are gone!

Additionally, range attacks against you now have disadvantage... sure you could stand up and go back prone at the end of all of your attacks, but my OC is just like me- lazy... I aint standing my ass up

thank you for coming to my ted-talk

Howdy,

As someone who likes to play summoners (and long time DM) I noticed that 2024 changed the encounter difficulty calculator to make it easy for DMs to calculate difficulty. The major change to the difficulty calculator was removing the group modifier that monsters would have

for instance:

• a group of 4 adventurers fighting 10 CR 1/2 in 2014 would mark the encounter as "deadly" awarding 2500xp, due to a 2.5x multiplier- since the players are outnumbered heavily
• the same encounter by 2024 rules, would be labeled as "low" awarding 1000xp, and removing the multiplier

I understand that 2024 is trying to make this easier on DMs; however, if none of the players have effective AOEs (or even if the monsters aren't positioned for AOEs to be used) - then the players very quickly will be overwhelmed by the monsters.

Of course, to play devils advocate, if the DM places all of the monsters in fire-ball formation, the encounter is completely trivialized.

DnD while fun, has always seemed to have an unbalance in favor of swarms. With more dice, there's more chances to hit or crit. Having 2 monsters instead of 1 is practically like having 1 monster with advantage on its attacks - worse though, as both of the attacks from the 2 monsters could hit. Additionally, if the HP is split amongst a group of mobs instead of one, there's no roll over damage for heavy hitting single target attacks or spells.

This isn't to say, don't run hoard encounters, but that I find the 2024 calculations on hoard encounters to be very unbalanced - compared to 2014.

what are y'alls thoughts?