Fane of the Elder Temple

Game Master Grimmy

Take it easy DMG

Aw dang, feel better soon, DMG!

Oof. I got COVID this fall and was quite sick for several days despite being young and vaccinated. Good luck.

Get some rest, nap like a cat and may your recovery be swift and hopefully symptomless

Thanks everyone. I’m not symptomless. I am pretty wiped out. I might not post for a few days.

We'll be here, DMG.

I am still too out of it . Kinda keep drifting off into fever dreams haha

Hope you don't end up with lasting damage.

Sorry folks I am still too out of it. Pretty bad case .

Damn DMG, really sorry to hear that.... Just make sure to give your body time to fight it off.

Take your time chief.

Ugh. I hope you're getting the best treatment you can. <3

Remember to take it easy, eat, maybe if you are able catch up on any reading you have wanted to do. Just make sure to let yourself heal.

Thank you so much . That’s exactly what I’m doing.

Definitely on the mend now . Feeling more clear headed today.

Still coughing, sneezey and yellow mucous . Achey and fatigued.

Will start thinking about a post soon tho.

I was just lookin at the thread and interested in what Bez brought up re: metagaming.

I will say there is a convention from old school gaming that I like to follow when I design my homebrews. I feel that the modules I’m using for this campaign follow a similar ethos (although they may not all be that way as there are multiple authors. But the mentality is there.)

What I am talking about is the idea for example that dungeons get more dangerous as you descend a level deeper.

I believe this is a useful convention because it gives players agency over how much risk vs reward they wish to take.

Now this mansion is a side quest that you all stumbled on, and I’m running it as written from the module. I did not stop to check before writing this post how much it does or does not happen to conform to that model. I don’t remember right now what happens to be in the upstairs window ! Even tho I ran this module for my home group years ago.

I will say tho, that the old school dungeons may have increasingly danger as you go deeper but that doesn’t mean there’s an expectation of “players enter here, go to this room next. Deplete 30% of resources to overcome this challenge and then here’s the mini-boss, then the last room with final boss .” It’s not like that. The dungeons that inspired me as a kid were from Janelle Jaquays. I liked her so much that I use Jaquaysian as an adjective for dungeons I like, and I sometimes tweak modules to make them more like Janelle would. What that means to me is that there are choices about where to start and what order to do things. There are environmental factors that could work for you or against you depending on how you utilize them. And generally speaking there is stuff in there that can kill you. Meaning , I don’t stock a dungeon exactly as many CR of encounters as the book says you can handle in one long rest or something like that. The dungeons when I was a kid were the type where, if you kick in the door and announce you are there , and try to fight everything in there all at once, you might die. Or even if you try to “clear each room”. Now not saying I want to discourage anyone from kicking down the door when that’s what their character would do, or that it would end in disaster 100% of the time . Hope you get the idea.

So yeah, all this to say, I haven’t looked at what’s upstairs just now, and not trying to steer you in a particular direction, but it’s always good to stay in character, that’s what I belive .

So there is this meta understanding that dungeons get harder as you go down levels . But it’s a lot different than the encounters I see in modern AP’s where you really can intuit what you are “supposed to do next”, and where the encounter balance assumption depends on you following the blinking yellow lights.

This is the way I do it an these mods I’m running here are the same. If you’ve seen rappan athuk, they have like an estimated challenge rating for a dungeon level , but it doesn’t mean there won’t be something wildly over the top around one corner or in one room. And it doesn’t mean you can’t stumble on a shortcut that skips a few levels and goes somewhere really crazy. It’s not that linear. You don’t know you’re safe by doing it in order. You just know that generally , broadly speaking, it gets worse as you go down. This just gives you some barometer to say, gee we shouldn’t go down those stairs til we rest. Or something like that.

Gosh I hope I’m making sense.

Yeah and I try to implement some similar thing for outdoors adventures too even tho when I was a kid it was not like that. Even when we played BECMI I remember the wilderness was considered more dangerous than dungeons for this reason .

But in my home campaign we have a forest with a trade road , and basically, away from the road approximates going “deeper” in a dungeon.

Stuff like that.

But yeah I’ll go look at the module now but I already know, because I’ve been using this publisher so long and it’s so much like what we did as kids, that you can’t say from meta knowledge that it might not be good to go in an unexpected way. I mean the reason that’s what Bez would do is because you know sometimes it’s good to be unexpected. I wouldn’t expect the module writing to contradict that.

Bez approved. Good health to you, DMG. :)

Ditto. Makes good sense to me. Echoing Bez - hope you're feeling better

Merry Festives to you all - looking forward to the coming New Year and gaming alongside you all!

Merry Christmas everyone!

And I agree with you DMG - hopefully in the majority of cases, there are clues on best ways to approach this or that situation. Also, every once in a while, risk needs to be taken ;)

Merry Xmas everyone!
I am on the mend but still kinda out of it.

Glad to hear that you are recovering. Happy holidays.

This discussion makes sense to me, and fits into the broader theme of rewarding player skill in addition to adjucating character skill. I also feel that you're touching on sentiments about player expectations, such as by signposting a good opportunity to rest with stairs. I think that in any context where you might have something potentially unsatisfying, such as player death, it's good for players to look back at all the information they had access to and think 'yeah, that thing I did was stupid and I deserved to die.' And some of that information should be metaknowledge.

My own experience has also been that it really depends on the player group how obvious you should be about specific pieces of information. For example, imagine your players chased some boss guy to their lair last week, and this week you're preparing a scenario where they have to kill the boss guy before he runs away. With some players, it might be enough to describe minions packing up when the PCs arrive, with others, you might need to put a blinking yellow light in the middle of the dungeon that warns them they need to hurry up or they might fail their objective. I think the reason why so many modules have moved towards the super straightforward, follow the guidelines structures is because they are written for a general audience, where half the audience will just be confused if they actually have to think and put stuff together.

Anyway, those are some vaguely related thoughts I had while reading your post.

Thank you very much for the note.

It’s very related and helps me understand something I was thinking about .

I have always had a vague sense that there are a set of expectations among the player base on these forums which I am not able to grasp because I’m not initiated in them.

I never played in the era of AP’s or organized play or any modern published modules, and I don’t fully know the presumptions and social contract of the modern gamers. I just never got exposed. We tried for not more than two or three sessions over the years before we concluded it wasn’t for us. Even with rotating DM’s and many decades of play, with players at the table now ranging from 8 years old to early fourty’s… we all do old school.

Kind of an oddball group I guess.

So yeah, at the end of the day I would just say do what you want, and don’t try to guess what you are “supposed” to do. We’ll see how it goes.

Sorry I am taking my time with Covid it is really having some cognitive effects on me still.

I’m in a house now with many infected family members! Three young kids age 10-15, two elderly, two recent college grads, one married professional couple. All infected and isolating for holiday break.

We tried playing MTG today and could not even get through a game of commander. Tried dnd too and we just can’t seem to muster the attention and focus. Brain feels too addled!

I am reading and enjoying the new posts coming in. I will post as soon as I feel a little clear headed.

Easing back into it .

Like a powdered gimp suit? Lol

Feeling better finally . Thanks for patience. Everyone else in my family had a mild case but I was wiped out .

My immune system is really week from long term struggles with parasites since I spend a lot of time in India .

Thanks BD also for waiting. I’m ready to bring you in now.

Gad to hear your on the mend chief - looking forward to joining when you're ready :)

To one and all I say: Lang May Yer Lum Reek!

Have a great Hogmanay and even better 2022 everyone.

Hoots Mon!

Looking maybe to be line it to the coty?

Post incoming.

Happy new year all! Glad to hear that you are mostly recovered DMG.

Looking maybe to be line it to the coty?

Ok so one vote for the river path without joining the human caravan.

Also, did Faidh ever heal Akkramar? He was knocked out.

I did

cool.

Hah! I don't remember being healed :P

Akkramar will vote to accompany the human caravan.

Uh oh we might need a tie breaker! Haha

Yeah Faidh let’s track the healing because you might see more combat before you get a chance for long rest.

I do long rests only in safe zones. Works out better for 5e formulation of the average adventure day.

Oh then I am spent On healing! My 5 points be done and gone

Ok here’s what I want to do . Faidh and Akkramar you both level up to level two.

But Ak has six damage still.

Makes sense?

Sounds good!

How does it work in 5e regarding gaining spells due to leveling up and such? Do we need a Long Rest?

I will generally wait for a long rest to announce level up , but this first level up from 1st to 2nd is supposed to come easy after the first bit of adventuring really. That’s why I want to make an exception rather than have you running around at level 1 for too long.

So basically, I want you to add everything you get from leveling up, including new spells and everything (which in your case come from praying).

However if you had spent a spell slot, you will not regain the spell slot until long rest.

So HP max goes up, but damage is not removed.

Spell slots may go up but if one was spent it has not been recovered, and so on.

That’s how I’d like to handle it this time.

If you rest with the towsfolk caravan or elsewhere high can use the mechanics for short rest.

So you can use your hit die to heal yourself and so on.

Long rest will occur when you can get a good day off of bed rest in a safe area such as an Inn or established home base.

These are my home groups variant rules which are not exactly the same as the gritty variant rules given as an option in the 5e hardcovers. Rather, these variant house rules are most similar to what is used in the 5e Middle Earth game.

It is a way of addressing the presumed number of encounters in an adventuring day which is baked into 5e encounter balance and class design.

If you are able to have a long rest after every calendar day of adventuring, even while engaging in some of the other pillars of gaming such as exploration, travel, social encounters and so on, an imbalance arises between the classes because they were designed presuming several encounters before resetting all the resource pools. Essentially, some classes will be able to “nova” in every encounter if long rest can be taken every time the party makes camp.

This is what I find addresses the issue best for games that are not all dungeon crawl. I aim to have you face a series of encounters before being able to long rest, as the design math intends, it’s just that the period in which these several encounters occurs is not narratively bound to be defined as a single calendar day.

So we’re still shooting for several encounters per Long Rest, it’s just that our “day” may be a several days journey or who knows what else. Get what I’m saying?

Let me know your thoughts. This is what we do with 5e at home. I read a lot of blogs before settling on it. The Tolkien 5e books do the same.

Also note, under this house rule, when you camp for the night in the wild you get the benefit of a short rest, however this does not mean you can’t take a short rest at other times during the day and get the benefit as well. You can stop even in a dungeon and take a short rest. Short Rests in my game work as they do in a default 5e game, with no changes. Long Rests are simply not available until you reach a secure place to bed down and recuperate.

https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Character%20Advancement

Leveling up should be pretty easy. Proficiency bonus doesn’t change yet. You don’t get an Ability Score Increase (or optional Feat) yet. Mainly what you do is roll your new Hit Die to raise your HP maximum ( don’t forget con bonus). Under your class description there is a table that shows if you get any new features , spell slots, spells known , etc.

Let me know if any questions I am around.

5E Middle Earth works well - have some nice variant mechanics.

@DMG: Not sure when you want to begin the Vexcentric stuff? Am keen to start when you are ready :)

Okay yea sorry!

I am having a little personal struggle with anxiety and that’s why I keep putting it off one more day because when I take out the pdf to see where to begin I invariably get confused about what should be kept as a spoiler or not.

Horrible place my brain sometimes!

Off to bed now I will make the vex post by Thursday at the latest. Spoilers be damned.

I get Spells, Divine Smite and a Fighting style for my second level and my lay on hands goes up to 10 hp woot

I think the leveling up link is messed up Grimmy :P

Leveling up Akkramar gets:

- 1xlvl1 spell
- Channel Divinity 1/rest: Turn Undead or Artisan's Blessing

Think that is about it :)

Can you cast a smite spell and use a spell slot to smite?

It depends.

If the smite spell smells what the smell spite smites, then the spell smite can smite spells.

jk

I will have to look that up ;)

Added Meliras annotated map to the campaign header.