/5eg/ Fifth Edition General:

Any serious analysis of a sympathetic villain reveals they're actually terrible, unsympathetic people, and the author is relying on you not look too deep into this or put far less weight on the villain's atrocities than whatever their triggering event or goal is. The teensiest bit of moral calculus blows the whole thing up--even villains whose justification IS based on moral calculus.

I blame the shades of grey morality bullshit that started infecting everything a little over a decade ago.
>here's our badguy
>oh but it's bad writing if he's unrelatable
>here's a tragic backstory
>don't you feel sorry for this literal mass murderer
Yeah, sorry, you're not getting me to excuse the Holocaust and WW2 on Hitler being sad because he couldn't get into art school or a Jewish bully stealing his lunch money.

To explain further, the only thing fighter has over paladin is they barely have more sustained damage

Oathbreaker just shits all over a GWM+PAM fighter by using PAM.

Oathbreaker sacrificed a support aura ability for 'lol more damage' and is probably the best sustained damage output in the game, on top of all their other abilities including probably the single-best burst damage in the game not including magic missile abuse.

Better? Added your suggestion and also covered the case of gaining martial weapon proficiencies from other sources (feat/multiclass). I do worry about how it compares to open hand a little. Hand has slightly less average damage, but the ability to knock up to 2 foes prone with Flurry is extremely powerful.

Summary of changes from UA Kensei for anyone who gives a shit:
>Path of the Kensei
+Kensei weapons are Monk weapons
-You only get to pick 3 from the martial list, excluding the 1d12 or 2d6 melee weapons
-No using STR for ranged weapons
-AC boost only happens if Attack action is used for unarmed strikes
-No pummel
+Flurry of Blows can be used to make a weapon attack instead of 2 unarmed attacks

>Sharpen the Blade
+Treat 1's as 2's on damage dice for kensei weapons

>Other
+Pretty pictures

It's a very large radius and the damage is rarely resisted. You'll appreciate it if you need to wipe out a mass devils or demons. It doesn't really shine against most things you want to kill though. Most living things burn.

>can't use the greatsword
what's the fucking point then
>can still use GWM via polearms
this is just a 'no fun allowed' rule

No idea what you're talking about, but the nations did stop his death robot army, so that means whatever they've got now must be even better than the death robot army was, and is therefore better prepared for the aliens than the villain was alone.

So, what is the best Adventure Module? Are there any adventure modules well suited to a low number of players?

how about "the government killed all my friends because their dungeon insurance expired while they were taking an unauthorized long rest in the dungeon and now I shall get my revenge by blowing up the factory where they make the request forms for level 9 monstrosity theme dungeons?"

You've got 100 super-soldiers, the other 10 nations of the world have 1,000 soldiers each. It's 100 vs. 10,000. Your super-soldiers kill 90 soldiers per death they sustain and are eventually defeated.

The aliens arrive and there's just 1,000 shitty soldiers left. Oops. Your super-soldiers were worth 9,000. It would have been far better to combine those with even a third of the world's other soldiers.

War is destructive. The combined nations of the world don't necessarily beat your army because they have superior technology, but because they now grossly outnumber you. But after a long war, both forces are far depleted and should be much easier pickings for the aliens. It was pointless to start a war.

There is the slight problem that they are very prone to being gangbanged by fiends and undead.

>can't use the greatsword
The problem is that there doesn't seem to be a simple way to balance using a greatsword/greataxe/maul and using monk unarmed strikes at the same time, without a massive low-level damage spike. And making kensei weapons not monk weapons screws up other features of the base class. It's lose-lose. Any suggestions?

>can still use GWM via polearms
Thanks for reminding me. Although this decision is predicated on the topic above.

I hope ancap DnD will become one of the memes of /5eg/, it deserves it.

That sounds fair. If I absolutely hate knowing it, I can swap it out next level.

> So, what is the best Adventure Module
Curse of Strahd. There's no discussion. Either you know that Curse of Strahd is the best adventure, or you're wrong.

If they raise dead or anything similar, they can counter-gangbang, though.

I don't think using two-handed weapons with a Kensei is bad, just being able to get +2 AC all the time by sacrificing an attack to MA but largely making up for the damage in the rest of the round. They can have proficiencies and use whatever weapons they want, just no weapon stat usage when gaining their AC (in a round, because they should still be able to reaction attack with their greatsword).

That's true, an oathbreaker/necromancer duo may be the best love story possible in 5e.

there's no way to donate your undead to someone else so they can use animate dead to sustain is there?

toilet mimic

dick move?

>Tfw one of your players used Circle of Death to execute a cave filled with hundreds of civillian slaves to prevent them from being sacrificed to an infernal demon godess.
>Tfw when several sessions earlier, his companions called him stupid for picking that spell claiming you can't save the world with a circle of necrotic doom.

Rappan Athuk's first level is one long poop joke culminating in an almost invincible shit mimic/toilet mimic

Here's a good villain. Fucking Marder from Galient, a show about giant robots and guys with swords from the 80s, when sci-fi and fantasy always came as a pair.

Marder is from a galaxy-spanning civilization whose technology has advanced to the point where no one wants for anything. There is no disease, no hardship, no commerce, no need to work, and no resource scarcity. The human drive to invent and explore has died out, as civilization has reached the limits of their technological capability. Everything is completely stagnant; humanity has even lost the ability to design or build new machines themselves, or even understand how their technology works, as the mechanized systems are completely self-replicating and self-sufficient. The people wander around with blank faces, knowing neither joy nor sorrow, having their every physical need catered to by machines, existing purely to live out their lives as lengthily as possible. Every time another civilization (all human, resulting from an earlier diaspora) meets theirs, it is immediately outclassed and absorbed.

Marder has a problem with the vast and overwhelming majority of humanity being nothing more than zombies. He believes that conflict is responsible for driving innovation and exploration; not just conflict between peoples, but conflict between man and environment. He wants to start a violent assault on a planet which will jar awake its "sleeping" peoples and read them into his cause, taking his ever-growing army from one defenseless, slumbering world to another, until all humanity is awake and suffering and in-fighting and warring just enough to want to push the boundaries of knowledge.

Animate dead animates them with spirits from shadowfell or something. At best the spirits might mimic what the creature did in their past life like muscle memory or something while idle.
It doesn't bring their actual spirit back.

To that end, he searches for and finds one of the backwards planets outside the galactic hegemony that still possesses the ancient, war-waging technology that the grander galactic civilization abandoned long ago. The ancient weapons are unknown to the people, who have a simple, pre-feudal culture and a medieval level of technology. He uses his advanced knowledge to make weapons far beyond them, and goes about enslaving villages one by one, absorbing them as new soldiers and manufacturers for his dark army, while searching for the ancient technology that will let him take his crusade to the stars.

He is a brutal despot and purposefully inefficient in his conquest. He immediately quashes any internal rebellion, but allows outside resistance movements to flourish and move largely unopposed. He wants to stoke the fires of hatred and liberty in the people, to create and identify leaders who can help his greater purpose, and to suss out which methods are best for rousing humans to action.

When these resistance leaders confront him, he always makes a pitch that they join him. He does not want them to bow and scrape, to acquiesce because they fear destruction or desire a less wretched existence, but because they have been convinced that he is right in technological progress and a striving for physical and intellectual betterment are at the heart of humanity's purpose. He seeks willing participants in his bloody crusade, styling their future conquest as a liberation, a resurrection, rather than some base power-grab. But he is under no delusion that he is "a good guy" or is doing "the right thing"--he openly admits that he is playing the part of a demon.

Need some help with a plot line I've written myself into, so I'll condense as much as possible.

The players have been in contact with two mining companies. One is owned by a young dude who inherited a stone quarry from his father. The other company is owned by a grossly successful businessman who used to work with the aforementioned father, and wants to buy the business out.

The stone quarry has become infested/haunted by some kind of monster(s), and its keeping the miners from working. Young dude thinks rich businessman is the cause of it. He isn't, but the players think he is, due to the businessman being a tiefling who has the whole "devil in a nice suit" thing going on.

What ACTUALLY happened is that someone, a third party not yet known to the players, is down in a recently-uncovered wing of the mines, fucking around with an ancient fucky dark magic altar previously belonging to some lich the king slew years ago. And a Great Old One is involved somehow but I don't know how to finagle that in yet either.

So now I need some reason for the tiefling businessman to be interested in the failing mine that doesn't make him out to be a villain.

>using a Spider Clan slut to represent your homebrew class

Shamefur dispray

Well, maybe the tiefling owed the guy something and wants to 'help out' (and also, at the same time, get some insight as to what's going on) to pay back the debt, even if he can't repay the guy's father anymore. So they're fine with helping scout things out, or at least it looks like an act of kindness.

The aesthetics distantly remind me of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vay_(video_game). It's a shame I barely played that game back in the day. Now I want to go to a monster-infested cave and maim things.

We've just hit level 5, and as a paladin I can now cast find steed.

I was leaning towards getting an elk, or is there a similar power level of mount that would be better?

He's interested in it because he thinks he can buy it for cheap and then deal with the problem itself. Much cheaper to buy a failing mine, then pay some adventurers or a group of clerics/paladins/church to go in and fix the evil brewing there than it is to buy a successful potential mine. Kinda like how people in the real world go and buy shitty houses, then fix the place up themselves and sell it for quadruple what it would've been if it had been a normal house.

A very large turtle.

Ambush Drake.

Also, he kidnaps a Queen and puts her in fucking green carbonite because he thinks she's hot and will eventually love him. This is completely separate from his desire to reawaken humanity, but also underscores the fact that he is a massive asshole.

He finally unearths and overhauls the technology he needs to take his crusade on the road, amasses an army large enough to crush the first sleeping planet he encounters, and teleports his whole HQ, army, and the rebel forces attacking him at that moment right into the middle of a city on said sleeping planet. He causes widespread destruction and mayhem, crushing everything, slaughtering tens of thousands, until at last the sleeping people begin to shows signs of actual life.

Whereas for hours they stood there, passively watching death and destruction unfold, letting robots run right up to them and slice them in half, or staring uncaringly at explosions racing towards them or falling debris, they now began to dodge, and even pick up bits of wreckage and swing back at the footsoldiers marching on them. Marder had his proof of concept; he could wake not just the "barbarians" of that lost world up, but also the slumbering people of his own civilization through violence.

But then the galactic council that oversees everything noticed this, worried about this violence and "wakefulness" spreading to other solar systems, and did what their ancestors have always done when this happens--pressed the button to deploy THE ERASER, an ancient spacefaring weapon they didn't even understand anymore. It zoomed over in a matter of hours, vaporized everything, and Marder's ambitions were crushed. His last act was to basically say, "Well, this didn't work. There's always a bigger dog. I gave it a good shot. I'm sorry to have dragged your backwards planet into my fight, let me send you back before you get atomized along with me. Also, here's your mom (the Queen) back."

If you don't want him to seem villainously interested in the mine, have him withdraw his offer, not just reduce it, since he thinks the trouble there makes it worthless and he doesn't have any way to fix it.

>Marder
Off topic, but a general of the IMC in Titanfall is also called Marder.

>So now I need some reason for the tiefling businessman to be interested in the failing mine that doesn't make him out to be a villain.

Since the mines now count as a dungeon due to the presence of monsters, the government has dispatched a crack team of assassins to kill all of corporation A's miners. The tiefling leader of corporation B is in a desperate race against time to find the miners and sell them dungeon insurance before the government comes to kill everybody (leaving the monsters alive, of course).

Plot twist: He brought the wrong kind of insurance, so it is a moot point either way. The PCs will still have to pay taxes on their way out.

He's great because he is unabashedly a bad guy. His motivation is not one of personal loss, failure, or petty revenge; there is no event in his background that "breaks" him in a way that reveals his moral fortitude was weaker than any number of normal people who've faced similar losses. He doesn't want your sympathy (because he isn't sympathetic), he doesn't try to guilt you, he doesn't want to argue that you (or the other characters) are "just like him", or any other villainous cliché that's now en vogue.

You can kind of see where he's coming from, and maybe you could make an ethical or philosophical argument that stagnation is death or the people he was fighting weren't alive to begin with, but it's a really tough sell. It's not only hard to justify to his own people, but pretty much impossible to justify to the citizens of the backwards, medieval planet he invaded and trashed; these guys don't give two shits about the galactic community. They don't even know what a galaxy is. But it's not ACTUALLY impossible, and conquered people actually did sign on and become totally loyal to him, even to the point of going down with the ship when he offered to teleport them back.

Good villain. Shit fashion sense. 80s as fuck.

>So now I need some reason for the tiefling businessman to be interested in the failing mine that doesn't make him out to be a villain.

>he knew someone in the mines and thinks that i he explores it he can find out what happened to them
>possibly even a lover

>interested in the shrine, thinks he can sell it

>is actually pious and wants to destroy the shrine for his god
o
>thinks the shrine belongs to his god and wants to restore it

>knows of a hidden gold vein or some other resource

>wants to sell it to deep gnome refugees as cheap housing

Appreciate the responses.

Followup inquiry: fluffing up a lich's apprentice, who also wants to be a lich, but has been touched by a Great Old One.

Okay, We've just rolled up our new group for Into-the-Abyss and I want advice on how to play my character as it seems I've fallen for a trap that I did with my last group.

Party consists of me, a Male Human Cleric of the Forge, hearty and supportive of his friends, was studying how to work with the rare adamantine metals when he got seperated from his caravan in the underdark and wound up captured by drow as a slave.

Unfortunately his friends include.
A Female Half-drow bard with a scouser accent, even amoungst the common drow she had to be extra vicious and cut-throat due to being half-human. Nice in general but loses her temper and gets stabby quick.
A Female Halfling Sorceress who weaves umbral shadow to her own will. Flighty and selfish she does what she wants, when she wants, however she wants.
A Male Goblin Rogue who works as a jeweller and fence, he found himself as a slave with nothing but his bad attitude and penchant for stabbing people in the kidneys. Voted most likely to open a chest of treasure and ask the GM how much he can stuff up his sleeves with a 14 on his slight-of-hand.
A Male Half-Orc Fighter, Dumb and dense as a brick, simple and naive but does what he is told because he isn't smart enough to come up with his own ideas. Hits things hard and that is about it.

As I've already retired one character in my last campaign when I realised that he was the Lawful Good upstanding citizen folk hero fighter amoungst a crew of a Dickass Assassin, Dickass Paladin, Dickass Barbarian, and Dickass Warlock, and while it isn't so bad playing the straight man, I got tired of playing the game where I take down the villian ready to take back to town to face justice and then try to guess which of my four companions is going to sneak behind my back to torture and murder the prisoner in the middle of the night for a jolly.

So how can I play the friendly/fatherly cleric that works with this group of twats or should I just roll a Dickass X instead.

>Over a millennium ago, in a far away part of the galaxy, a huge interstellar war had taken place. During the conflict, a large machine escapes the battlefield. Its guidance system damaged and pilot dead, but it continues hurtling outward into space. After a time, it crashes into the planet of Vay. This planet is inhabited by people, but they have little technology. The machine, programmed only for death, rampages across the planet killing and destroying anything it sees. It takes the combined forces of the five mightiest wizards on the planet to stop the machine. Its power is sealed away in five magical orbs, which are taken to far away hidden places. The machine itself is also locked away.
This is the kind of science fantasy backstory that gives me a boner.

As for the art, it's Yoshiyuki Takani.
He does cool robots and tanks.
>google.com/search?q=yoshiyuki takani&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiiupPR44HSAhWmsFQKHY6zATgQ_AUICCgB&biw=1440&bih=719

>fluffing up a lich's apprentice
lewd

>but has been touched by a Great Old One.

LEWD

Apprentice is actually the BBEG, plans on bringing back the lich for the GOO to consume so he can indirectly learn how to become a lich. Infuriatingly intelligent and tactical, knows when to run and when he might die(from the party and other hazards). Set up many precautions including having someone else take the blame for his actions.

That's perfect.

>want to make sorcerer
>make sorcerer
>literally only player, no session yet, rolled stats
>discover rogue

Holy shit, rogues are awesome

I don't know if I want to be a thief assassin or detective

If I go assassin I want to make poisons and throw daggers

Think my DM would be PO'd?

Can't really make poisons too well in D&D 5e.

You can have two villains. They don't have to be working together or even know about each other. Villainous plots often intersect. The businessman could find out about the demon shit and realize he's way in over his head, too, and now seek the party; he originally wanted the mine because, well, he likes fucking money.

Reminds me of an old HGWT episode, but there's only one bad guy. More people need to base plots on HGWT episodes.
youtube.com/watch?v=AhpJLlA-OL0

>profiency with poisoners kit
>deathblow someone with a dagger
>their high initiative fart stops surprise

Assassin is shit

Simply ask for the much more sensible ruling that if all non-stealthy people are surprised (And thus nobody can potentially rat you out and yell out that there are stealthy people trying to sneak up on you) that you get a 'surprise round' where there is no iniative and you can just do all your assassin shit.

This way you don't fight with the DM with how combat and initiative works when you want to end combat because you lost initiative and then restart initiative.

Not everyone wants to play a horror campaign. Picking something specific, some players are going to enjoy the fact that Strahd can just turn up apropos of nothing to antagonise the PCs, and some are going to look at that and say "yeah, we get it, the super DMPC could kill us all because he's just so powerful, maybe if we're lucky he'll do just that and we can play something else".

this desu

surprise rounds > surprise initiative
turn delays > ready actions

Good luck getting a table to treat CoS like a horror game, ha ha.
>oh shit there's vampires and werewolves here, let's fuckin' kill 'em
The closest this gets to horror is when the party realizes
>oh shit they're tough, run away, we're gonna need a better plan for this shit
then come back two weeks later with dynamite in a barrel of holy water

So me and a few friends recently picked up 5e starter set with the mines of phandelver adventure, but in our first fight we got trounced.
There were a few lucky rolls by the DM and a few unlucky rolls by us which ended us but after that, every fight with goblins seemed to always be this almost deadly fight.
Is there something we might be missing?

>tfw playing a big fucking 6'8" dragonborn paladin
>tfw strahd is four foot eight or some shit

gonna have a whole lot of fun when I find that sunlight sword and shove it right up that fuccboi's ass

So I was looking at the human ethnicities in the PHB (thinking about removing the skill bonus trait and making them give different bonuses) and I was a little unsure of which each one exactly is. Can anyone familiar with forgotten realms confirm my suspicions?

Calishite - Middle Eastern

Chondathan - Mediterranean

Damaran - Slavic

Illuskan - Nordic

Mulan - Egyptian

Rashemi - African

Shou - Asian

Tethyrian - French

Turami - Pacific Islander

Nah that fight's one of the harder ones at that level because they ambush you. I had the Cleric go straight down during the first round because he told everyone to stay back while he checked ahead.

3.pf oldman detected.

At the very least I know that Rasheman is Russian-esque and Tethyrian are this weird Spanish hybrid thing (though that's more Amn.)

>This is the kind of science fantasy backstory that gives me a boner.
It was extra-cool at the time because I'd played Vasteel beforehand (the only game on this list without its own wikipedia page) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Designs and the war machine was clearly from that game. They even called it an ATAC.

But we spotted them beforehand and weren't ambushed.
We also lost our Cleric first round after a goblin crit.

To be fair, intuitively speaking there's little reason to expect a vampire to be able to overpower a room full of adventures and little reason to think its a better idea to wait days or weeks before fighting him, considering he may be simply waiting for them to fall asleep, etc.

I'm still baffled by how crazy fuckin strong 5e vampires are compared to... every other iteration of them in past editions.

I'm a new DM with an enthusiastic group of players. I want to run through the modules

What is a good sequence for me to go through, knowing that I should start by Lost Mines of Phandelver?

Anons? Two simple questions:

Could 4e's Swordmage be converted as a new class in 5e, or are you basically stuck making the best of it with an Eldritch Knight Fighter, a Stone Magic Sorcerer, a Blade Pact Warlock, or a Bladesinger Wizard?

Secondly, would you consider a Runesmith subclass for the Artificer to be thematically appropriate, given it's an explicitly magic-based "gadgeteer" sort of archetype?

I really want to like phoenix sorcerers, but they seem absolutely horrible on paper.

Their core ability works for 1 minute per day. Really?

Compare the 5e warlock to the 4e warlock. That's about the best you're gonna get.

You could run Lost Mine, and then jump to Elemental Evil. I think.

Curse of Strahd is trash if you run it as written.
It's presented as a sandbox but has one route you basically have to follow to have any hope of fighting appropriate encounters, and because it's a "sandbox" it's possible to miss pretty much every important encounter.
Also, I have a feeling a lot of people would be opposed to the idea of the mists.
It's great if you're willing to put work in, but people use premades because they don't want to put work in.
SKT is better as written.

> want a class bloat in 5e
you need to get your head over that mentality user. Either learn to refluff or go back to 3.5 and complain about the game being broken.

After running mines, start CoS. If you're unsure, there's a guide on DMing it in the mega, full of good ideas and advice.

I want the BBEG of my campaign to be a terrorist who storms a magic armory and steals a bunch of gear for his crew with plans on destroying a massive city, and I want each of the PC's to have a gang member to go toe to toe with. What would a good antithesis be for the PC's player races be?
I've got a kenku, so I suppose I would want to do something with him going against a Yuan-Ti.
Should the goliath go against an elf or a dwarf? Or maybe a gnome?
Should the tabaxi go against a werebear?
What even would be a match for the triton? A tiefling, a lizardfolk, a rakshasa?

...I think almost all of the modules are just 1-15, so if you run Phandelver you can't run anything else, and running any of the modules is incompatible with running any of the other modules.

I'd be okay with having to always start back at level 1 if that were the case

You misunderstand me

I want to know the sequence of Modules I should master in order to give an enjoyable progression of gameplay with me as a DM.

Like, first I should give'em phandelver, next maybe start over at Out of the Abyss then maybe next curse of strahd?

What says isn't entirely true.
IIRC both Elemental Evil and Storm King's Thunder have sections that pretty much explain how to transition from Lost Mines.
I feel like even Curse of Strahd might have something to that effect.

Strahd actually works decently as a continuation since you can skip Death House and the group has a bit more of a choice of locations based on their levels.

What said.
Rashmi are Russians (Ukraine / Belarus, really) with Mongolian skin tone (but not features).
Amn is Spain.
Calishites are "black" Egypt / Moorish Spain.
The actual Muslims in FR are Zakharan.
Chondath is Mediterranean Italy, yes.
Damarans are Slavo-Germanic.
Mulan / Mulhorandi are literally, actually, really Egyptians. Canonically from Earth, teleported to Forgotten Realms.
Shou is a blanket for all Asians in Faerunian FR, but go to Kara-Tur and it's majorly Chinese, with other areas and peoples dedicated to Japan, Korea, etc.
Turami are black Moors, Moroccan / Tuareg ethnically but very different culturally.

>maybe start over at Out of the Abyss
As someone who ran that as my second campaign, I'd advise against it unless you're really confident in your abilities.
The prison break opening can get confusing with all the characters you have to keep count of, and the exploration and chase elements can be hard to pull off if you don't really know what you're doing (like I didn't).
It doesn't help when you've got a new group of players who don't really "get" what the Underdark is about.

Eh, I don't think it'd go well with my style of DMing. I'm not very good at horror.

Honestly, I was thinking either OotA or Storm King's Thunder, which would you say was better of the two?

They do, actually. Depending on the game though, they warn that you might be a bit higher levelled than recommended.

Nothing that takes place in Ravenloft needs a transition. You get there by accidentally tripping through a portal, wandering down the wrong forest road that gets increasingly misty for no apparent reason, or pissing off the wrong entity. Any party at any time could find themselves outside Barovia and go "oh fuck".

It's like those episodes of Scooby-Doo where the gang is just heading back home from a concert but Fred takes a shortcut because it's raining and suddenly theyr'e in front of a spooky-ass mansion. There was a realm transition somewhere that you didn't notice and now you're boned.

Well, how is Princes of the Apocalypse like then? Pretty good?

I mean, I know the Dragon stuff is supposed to be the black sheep of the family

The dragon stuff is a pretty big railroad. There's a few articles on how to fix it, though, and those are pretty good.

PotA is great as a series of inter-connected adventures and dungeon runs, but it's actually so high-stakes that it's hard to fathom there being so little interest or aid from outside nations and forces as there is. It's not like you're in the middle of nowhere and no one knows what's going on; Neverwinter and Waterdeep are a stone's throw away and you're trying to stop an Elder Evil and four hideously powerful Elemental Princes (who, in their full glory, could match a few demigods) from rampaging across a key economic trade route.

It begs for a little spicing up by the DM. The adventure runs through to level 15 and no one in the world really takes notice. A party of five level 15s should have their own fucking barony or something.

the slightest hint of depth
Ganon is a pretty typical "im gonna take the macguffin and take over the world" type, but he has a certain amount of class and presentation that give him depth. not to mention the story bits in WW and TP that deepen that.
a little depth that all it takes

I want a quick one shot to try my hand at Dming. I'm already a rule monkey at my table, thanks to you guys.

Is book of lair from kobold press a good starting point for a new DM?

>Curse of Strahd is trash if you run it as written.
I agree, the travel encounters are ridiculous and the setting doesnt feel "alive" at all.

It can definitely happen that you get downed by a cat in the first fight. Level 1 sucks. I start newbies in LMoP with the maximum starting HP for their class.

Fuck man. You just convinced me to go and give Galient a proper watch instead of getting distracted after the first 5 episodes.

>cat
Fucking autocorrect. I meant crit.

/m/anlyman in my /5eg/?