Hi Everyone,
I've got my Beginners Box yesterday and I'm loving it :)
This sunday I would like to start playing with my friends (ages 28 to 31)
I have a couple of questions:
- We would like to play with a party of 5 (4 Pre-gen's and 1 new PC)
Can I make a (for example) Barbarian as an extra character and what do
I have to change so that it works with the BB Story.
- Everything in the book is in a different metric system as we live in
The Netherlands: Do I have to convert feet/inches into meters or can I
just talk about squares.
Thanks in advance for your support!
Han.
1 square = 5 feet, don't try and convert into meters or you'll end up having to deal with fractions and making things far more complicated.
You can quite happily play the game dividing feet by 5 and talking in squares, if it makes you more comfortable, but if you just think of feet as "game units" it really doesn't hurt to get used to playing in feet. Or simply change feet to "game units" (each square is then 5 game units) if it helps you.
Thanks for the quick answers.
To be prepared i've downloaded a converter app ;-)
About the 5 players, is it too easy and therefore less fun or is it doable without for example adding an extra goblin?
I assume you are playing Black Fangs dungeon?
If so, add an extra goblin in room 2 and 8 and an extra skeleton in room 9.
Add a zombie hanging in the webs to room 5, and a skeleton to rise out of the water in room 7.
Blackfang is tough enough as it is.
Those additions should make your 5 player adventure a bit tougher.
As a rule of thumb, you can adjust the encounters for 5 players by just increasing the XP of the encounters by 20%.
You can also throw new monsters into the middle of a fight to keep tensions high. So if the players go into a fight and by round 2 have killed most of the badguys, just have a goblin or two come running in because they heard fighting. You want to keep this fluid though since you don't want to do the same thing if the players are getting beaten up pretty badly.
You can also add some health to monsters if they die too quickly. Another 15%-25% or so HP will usually let them live through an additional hit. This can also make things a bit more interesting if your players like to swarm bad guys.
A third way is to change where the monsters are so they are a bit more spread out and tactical. This makes things interesting for the players, having to decide if they all run at the three goblins by the table or the fighter goes to the one on the side so he doesn't circle around and hit the wizard.
These are ways to make easy fights a bit harder - more targets, longer lasting badguys, and tactical considerations; I don't recommend doing any of them if the fights are already hard or if your players are still learning the ropes.
Thanks Tim and Murphy, this is exactly what I was looking for.
I'll keep the first few encounters intact and see how it goes.
If it's too easy I'll ramp the difficulty up a little.
I'll post here how everything went.
Well guys we had our first session last evening.
For everyone this was a new experience.
We had lots of fun, people tried the craziest things and I think I came up with a few good outcomes to that :)
The players liked it but I also had a few moments where they argued about what to do and they couldn't agree on it.
[SPOILERS AHEAD for players]
For example: attacking the golbin king or go and search for the toy.
What I did was make the goblin king angry and threatening to attack if they would not go search for his toy.
Do you have more tips on keeping the flow going in these kind of situations?
Depending on the situation, letting the players sort it out themselves can work, for example if they're all in the bar debating whether to do quest A or job B from the locals. Let them take a few minutes to come to a consensus, if they get nowhere and it devolves into analysis paralysis, give them a poke.
If they're arguing about whether or not to just attack and kill me, or help me, I'm pretty sure I would only stand around so long before deciding maybe I don't want their help after all. You'll get better at knowing when they need to be nudged and such, but remember that their actions and inactions have consequences. You can only debate how you want to flee a collapsing cave so long before the point becomes moot, right?
If you want them to go in a certain direction, have something they value stolen from them, then let them chase it down.
If they stall and argue, throw a wandering monster at them, something with a higher CR that is hard to kill. Give them a way out like a porticus they can drop behind them in a dungeon, or a waterfall they can leap off of outdoors. Punish them when they get indecisive, but always give them a painful way out. Above all, make it memorable.
@Proley: that's true, I think maybe it's because we are all longtime friends that they know each other too well.
Haha I like your thinking Tim :)
What is a porticus?
Arrg! I am a horrible speller. I ment to say portcullis. (Face palm)
Translating 5 feet (5') = 1 square = 1 meter (1m) just works fine for horizontal distances. I tend to keep the normal rate (5'=1m50) for vertical distances.
Double benefit : it's simpler, and quite more architecturally accurate. Five feet(1m50) wide corridors are for hospitals, not for medieval keeps ou subterranean dungeons !
Nice.. I'm gonna try that one out