/5eg/ D&D 5e General

Any tips to start DMing Out of the Abyss?

My D&D group is going to start podcasting our games. Any suggestions on how to make it an entertaining experience?

> inb4 voices

We're not wanting to make a radio drama, just broadcasting our game because most D&D podcasts suck and we're pretty sure ours is just as bad if not better than most.

Explain it like I'm an idiot....

Bumping request from previous thread. Hoping someone can share a pdf of the Planar Bestiary.

dont do it, its cringey as fuck

The NPC fellow prisoners from the beginning? Stat them out as proper characters, then distribute them amongst the party to run. This'll help train them to deal with the larger force they'll be bringing into the Underdark later on in what we'll call Part II, and also allows them to develop them. You keep running them in terms of personality, but they run them in terms of mechanics. Just make sure that you give NPCs with "secrets" (like Buppido or Sarith) to players whom you know can keep secrets.

Here ya go, full write-ups that you can hand out with character sheets to the players. I took some liberties with assuming the classes they'll be part of.

If it's IRL: make sure you have a proper audio setup for it, and test audio and work out all kinks before the first session.

If it's online: use OBS and Roll20 with overlays and shit to make it an alright viewing experience.

>What is you favorite D&D or Fantasy Art?

DEFINITELY Larry Elmore.
Clyde Caldwell is great too, but all of his stuff looks like it's about thirty seconds away from being a softcore porno while Elmore actually can draw a woman who is sexy AND fully clothed.

There's a REASON they got him to draw those old Everquest box art things.

High-quality microphones with pop filters for everyone. Seriously, the mic built into a laptop is not what you want and it'll make your podcast physically hard to listen to.

Me? Fuck no dude.
Fat Monk is one of my favorite character archetypes in kungfu stuff!

A tarrasque is the equivalent of 3,100 wolves. Wolves should be a standard.

Is there are third party bard college that lets you control animals?

Print has nothing to do with it. There are two ways to manage the "trick". First, you can use images with actual transparency. I used this trick in my diopsid homebrew
homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/ryUtCn6

What this guy did was replace the entire background page with his pre-formated image. The first page of the Arcanist for example. i.imgur.com/Opi8DdE.jpg

>Clyde Caldwell
When Clyde Caldwell goes to a KFC, he only ever orders two things; breasts and thighs.

That's awesome.

They are for me. 50 xp is a nice round number that's easy to calculate around, not to mention something that most people can appreciate in real life since most people are at least passingly familiar with wolves, or at least big scary dogs.

I can think of zero reasons why this would be bad. Even if you're going for 'realism', just handwave it with Ki and have fun.

IRL at a table. We've tested sound on our last 3~4 sessions, making improvements each time. Our newest setup has Directional Mics for each player and DM,and I think we're about ready to go live. Trying to do as minimal editing as possible for an organic experience.

I know. But all my players are pretty sure that it's not as bad as the dozen or so we've researched (ie: listened to) so far, and they've been hyping me up.

This.

In fact that's one of the few monks that wouldn't earn instant cringe status. The others being

>Shaw brothers LE beardomancer
>old man CG or true N drunken boxer (debatable)
>LG boxing Catholic priest
youtube.com/watch?v=IAidqFI3P00

anything else you can come up with might as well be a barbarian or fighter

>Everquest box art things.
THATS why his style looks so familiar. Thank you.

I actually think it might be Keith Parkinson, but the box art quite clearly evoked Elmore's style.

They both painted their arts. With like, actual paint. Not some paint program.

Dayum, that barbarian chick has some serious DAT ASS going on.

>Keith Parkinson
HNNNGGGHHH

I just want to be 14 and play Everquest again. Can we make this happen?

>won't let me trade my proficiencies for monk's unarmored defense

Why would he?

> Trying to do as minimal editing as possible for an organic experience.
Danger! You will never believe how much pointless filler is in a typical game session until you listen to one from the outside. If you're going to even try doing this with minimal editing, you need to train the players hard to avoid stammering, talking over each other, derailing a conversation, looking up what their own spells and abilities do in the middle of their turns, or ever arguing about the rules. You need to frontload all of your setup time so it doesn't happen during the podcast. Things like changing maps, looking up monster stat blocks, and tracking initiative have to take practically no time as they're happening. Train the players to be ready when their turns come around so each turn takes 20 seconds or less.

There's no such thing as too much editing. I've even considered doing the reality show thing where you cut away to a segment of one player in a different recording session talking about what just happened, maybe with some light background music to indicate a cutaway in an audio-only format.

No, I'm afraid not.
That said, I GM ALL my games classic-style and try to evoke classic D&D art's feel.

The modern WoW-inspired style of
Objective>Dungeon>Hit Shit>Reward>Repeat
is extremely unappealing to me and so I focus on a mix of narrative, character focus, travel, adventure, and I most ESPECIALLY try not to make combat repetitive, instead treating combat as a general potential outcome for encounters rather then an assumed inevitability.

...

Not him but it is a fair trade, doesn't break anything (you'll generally have *lower* AC than your armored counterparts), and is supported by the devs as an appropriate houserule?

This kind of fantasy art always cracks me up. Look how much shit is happening and how no part of it relates to any other part of it. My favorite is how Mr. Bighead and the dragon have just taken a time-out from the battle to admire the eye candy.

Pic related isn't so bad because at least you can assume that the monsters are on the same side of a great battle, but even then there's still goofy townsfolk going about everyday business and looking out the window without a care in the world as though there isn't a battle going on all around them.

With Everquest at least it's because it was kind of a spread with each part on a different section of the box with Elftits McNotingame on the front cover.

This guy rides like a faggot. Or he was just galloping at full speed and recently stopped.

I like that though. It speaks volumes about the setting and has so much to say about not just what's happening in the picture, but an idea of that world / setting as a whole.

>I like that though. It speaks volumes about the setting and has so much to say about not just what's happening in the picture, but an idea of that world / setting as a whole.

>"The Demonlizard Army is attacking again."
>"Aye? Must be Thursday."

I want to run a Jack London wilderness survival campaign, but at the same time I don't want it to be a highly abstract hexcrawl. My plan is to make city scale maps of wilderness regions but use "dungeon map scale", populate it with interesting sites that are relevant to the setting and let my players loose. I realize this approach works so well for dungeons because it is a confined space that bottlenecks where the players can go. Is my best choice then, to simply describe visible landmarks, see where the party goes and then describe what they would see as they arrive to their destination?

How do you deal with one of your players picking Ranger?

What does it say? That this town gets attacks by giants and dragons so often that it isn't even a big deal anymore? That nothing is really at stake? That's usually the kind of thing you want to make players forget about when selling an MMO.

That at least isn't an MMO picture.

Or druid? My party doesn't even carry food anymore since the druid learned Goodberry.

I want to play with you.

That dragon looks some sort of Hollywood reimagining of Trogdor the Burninator.

It is, though. It's for Ultima Online.

There's a first party bard called the bard that has magical secrets to pick up dominate beast.

Trogdor wishes he had abs like that.

Anyone know what adventure league module drops the magic shield of advantage on initiative?

No, and neither does your character. No cheating.

Got two games ongoing now IRL.
Trying to figure out all the fiddly bits of r20 though just in case I ever need to/want to use it
But it's daytime.
And Trogdor comes in the night.

Presumably those characters (and perhaps the Outlander background) are not options in such a campaign.

Also, while goodberry makes you not need to eat, it's probably a shitty way to live for long periods of time. Joyless and spartan.

A survival adventure is about survival. An adventure about gourmet cooking and high living sounds cozy as fuck and I'd play it, but that's not really a wilderness survival adventure.

see Bruegel the Elder

I would personally use the optional rules in the DMG to give greater consequences to rash actions, impose advantage/disadvantage for clever thinking, preparation, etc.

Fuck off, I'm one of the regular DMs and want a magic item for the occasional time I play.

I got dicked out of any magic item worth a damn for my last character because I was walking around with fucking +1 studded leather and eyes of charming. This time I'm playing extra sessions to keep my guy on par.

My DM let our Assassin rogue take the swashbuckler rakish audacity at level 4 instead of ability score improvement or feat because it fit his character

That's a false dichotomy. There's more options than "a berry, so now I won't starve to death" and a Michelin-star meal.

And just because the characters have more things to worry about when they're afield doesn't mean they can't or won't take some time to eat better when they can afford it.
In fact, in many stories about survival those sorts of times can be what keeps someone going.

>An adventure about gourmet cooking and high living sounds cozy as fuck and I'd play it

We totally cribbed that shit from Dragon's Crown in our last campaign.
My Monk had Chef's Tools proficiency and if I made a successful check anyone who had a short rest eating the delicious meal gained extra HD to spend on healing, and in one case even recovered spell slots!

He's like my favorite painter, though, because when he paints a painting full of shit it all makes some kind of sense. Either it's a single moment where all those things really would be happening at the same time and place, or it's an encyclopedic display of every single children's game he could find or something like that.

MMO box art is more like a Bosch painting, where it's just whatever the fuck.

Yeah, after two weeks of eating nothing but goodberries, I'd probably call for a Will to live save or something.

>Wake up
>Get my cart of goods for the market
>Waking into town
>Say hey to the invading lizard people and adventurers, ask them how the battle for the realm goes, the usual small talk to not seem rude
>After some small talk go on my way, they resume murdering each other
>Reach the main gate
>Just one dragon and troll today, nice weather it seems
>Walk through their fight with the usual "excuse me, pardon me, coming through"
>Jackasses can't even have the decency to kill each other off the stairs
>Get to the market and sell wares
This town really went to shit ever since Adventurers started moving in, I guess it's helping the local economy a lot though.

How do you run politics successfully?

>wake up
>due to receive important foreign dignitaries today
>the main castle is temporarily on fire, so we have to redirect them to the other castle
>"Welcome! Please don't mind the dragon and the giant and the harpies and the lizardmen."
>I think they weren't impressed
>fuck

Explain in more detail and I'll tell you.

Hey Veeky Forums, my friends invited me to play a game on 5eg D&D online with them. It'll be our first game, for both the dm and the players. I'm playing as a tiefling rogue/cleric of Balthazar who lives in a temple with his parents and reformed people/races who are victims of prejudice and wanders the streets, trying to investigate crimes, make sinners and repent and generally be a purifier and redeemer (Think bringing young tiefling urchins in, helping drunkard and addicts and investigating murders). What directions could I take this in? What are some good roleplaying oportunities? My character hates evil and demons/devils (Even though he seeks to purify evil and get evil creatures to turn a new leaf) but there's a warlock in our party. Should I try to convert him, or any other characters? I speak Abyssal and infernal anyways, so I could try to talk to whatever he summons. I could post my character sheet if you want (well, post the information but not a pic or a document)

Thank you

Strong NPC's

youtu.be/C1SfZ2Fp_BQ

Layers of intrigue

And most importantly, self-directed players that would be interested in playing a campaign like that in the first place.

You need to focus on characters, a LOT.
The PC's also need to have the actual motivation to get involved in that shit and not wait for you to hand them an objective; you can't do intrigue like a WoW quest, that's kind of the exact opposite of the whole thing.

In figuring out plots, always remember that people resort to intrigue and deception because direct violence is not possible or not acceptable; think of other ways that they'd try to pull the task off.

Thanks for the tips! Will definitely keep all this in mind.

Pretty easily if you know your way around acrobat and photoshop.

where in the book are the stats on a weapon of warning?

DMG near the end of the magical items section.

Sword of selfaril, you're welcome

>weapon of warning
Thank you user

Playing first barbarian in 5e, almost level 4 and thinking of taking the greater weapon mastery feat. Is it worth getting over stats?

-5 to hit for 10 damage is a very steep cost. I only get +5 to hit normaly so that would bring it to just a straight roll... cleave is nice...

Or I can up my strength and dex by one each and upgrade each modifier thus incresing offence and defence.

Really divided on the choices here and would like some outside imput.

GWM is easier to take early as a barbarian because you can mitigate that -5 to-hit with Reckless Attack.

Both GWM or stat increases are viable, solid options for you. Go with what feels better.

Can I just let the PCs start with a magic item, then have an NPC take it from them? Somebody told me that always motivates npcs.

Depends on the average AC you're expecting to encounter

It doesn't have to be the theft of a magic item. It can be the theft of anything at all. PCs will move mountains and cross oceans to get back a stolen copper piece.

>Yeah, after two weeks of eating nothing but ramen, I'd probably call for a Will to live save or something.
that shit wont even kill you in the real world, and goodberries are better for you than fried salt lick noodles

>caster supremacy

>dm rolls for random magic item
>player finds the book of vile darkness
>on a generic bugbear bandit on the middle of a populated trade road
>our faces when

We just kinda left it there and continued on

You left the source of evil? On the side of a trade road?
If your DM doesn't lose that later then shame on him.

The current character I'm playing survives mainly off Goodberries because they're already carrying a ridiculous amount of gear and extra rations are heavy, and not having to worry about food is one less thing for someone on the road to keep track of.

That said I play Goodberries as being like a super-multivitamin. It gives you a boost of energy (+1 hp), all the nutrition you need to go on, and suppresses appetite but if someone puts a steak in your face and you haven't eaten anything with substance in a few days it's going to be damn tempting.

Isn't the book of vile darkness just a mundane book with evil shit written in it?

Imagine it being like the bible. Except there's only like 7 copies in the world.

Money is on someone somewhere in the world REALLY wanting that copy.

It's a book with basically instruction manuals on every evil thing you could want to do.

none of us wanted to fuck with it out of character because we had good alignments and knew if you read it you take a shit ton of necrotic damage, we were level 4

"This is a work of ineffable evil"
I'd say source is over playing it but it's definitely not just mundane random evil. It really boosts an evil casters xp and wisdom, while hurting good at the mere touch of it's pages. A less madness driven necronomicon.

Wear gloves? No, do a whole deal with not touching it but storing it. Take that to the nearest good aligned church and let them go about getting rid of it. Although to destroy it you have to end all evil.

Are Archliches a thing in 5e rules anywhere?

fuck you, goodberries are goddamn delicious!

I wonder if there are any recipes in there.

There's literally no way to do this in the DMG, your DM just did it for jollies.

A bugbear can have up to 3pp and their horde might have a rare magic item if you are absurdly lucky.

It'd be like living off of vitamin pills exclusively if it was possible. It would fuck up your digestive system from lack or use for sure.

What if that bugbear was really evil?

Upgrading your Str and Dex will probably help you more often than taking GWM will. As appealing as feats seem, I find its usually better to take the ability score increases the first couple of times at least.