I think that’s possible and can certainly be your head canon or what you run at your table.
That said, I believe the connections between the two are entirely due to the githyanki’s enslavement by the illithids. Learning the wrong lessons from their oppressors is a sad, but not unbelievable, outcome. The note about aboleths is interesting but I’m not familiar enough with their lore to effectively speculate why they would not know about illithids - perhaps they just didn’t come into contact with them until the height of the illithid empire.
This kind of lore stuff is why I stick to homebrew tbh
The first issue is Death Ward. It basically negates a big downside of the item.
The item also doesn't seem that good for a desperation self sacrifice scenario. Most likely in any scenario where such a move is necessary the user won't be anywhere near full hp. Reducing the value of the item. The small range also severely limits the use of the item.
I would say in a lot of scenarios casting any aoe spell centered on the person would achieve more. A simple fireball is around 28 damage with much higher aoe.
The item requires a lot of planning and preparation to be useful rather than being an emergency item to get out of a tricky situation. Which isn't necessarily bad but goes against your inteded usage.
the low-hp scenario is why I included the bit about sacrificing death-throws for added damage. the idea is that if you sacrifice all 3 death throws, you’d have reached your massive-damage threshold anyways. WRT the AOE, its pretty big. assuming you don’t have any levels of exhaustion, and you want to survive, you get a 30 foot radius (5+5*5).
so say your character has a max HP of 90, but you’re down to 10, and you’re not exhausted (which is pretty common, i think). you could deal 70 damage to all creatures in a 30 foot radius, and still survive (unconscious, severely debuffed, and with 1 remaining death save). or 100 damage to all creatures in a 35 foot radius, and die.
but the fact that it wasn’t clear to you is a pretty good indication that this is probably too mechanically complicated to be actually fun :(
also you raise a good point about Death Ward. Thematically it would be fine - you’re “willingly sacrificing” your health, rather than taking damage, so apply it directly to your hitpoints rather than temp hitpoints, bypass all those kinds of defenses, etc… but that just adds even more mechanical complexity.
I have to admit I underestimated the damage a bit. I imagined it to be around 40 in most scenarios.
But I think streamlining the range wouldn't hurt. Instead of making it optional by expending exhaustion give it a longer base range and cause a fixed amount of exhaustion. Or perhaps make the user fall in a magical coma for X-time instead. Because I would say exhaustion rules are often ignored and I personally didn't even know how many levels there are and what they do.
A player in our party recently got a magic item that can boost your athletics and double your move speed once per day. I didn’t get how useful it could be until I saw him grapple an evil priest and just fucking drag him from one side of the map to the other.
Turns out grapple + double move speed + dash action is super awesome for getting enemies out of position and screwing up their formation.
I’m sure you can find more if you talk to your party members or DM though. Off the top of my head, Glamour Bards have an ability that lets the whole party move up to their movement speed as a reaction. Then there’s Haste obviously. Ask your party if they have any spells or features that can make you fast 😃
Something that doesn’t directly affect grappling, but that could definitely be beneficial, would be looking at ways to increase your movement speed. The faster you are, the easier it is to drag enemies to the edges of cliffs
Good idea! I already have the “Aggressive” trait from being an Orc but this only allows movement towards an enemy. I’ll look around for ways to improve speed.
Not sure who Raith Roguestar is, but the original source for these monsters (and more! a Pumpkin King boss with lair/legendary actions!) appears to be …tumblr.com/…/medievil-pumpkins-dd-5e-monster-sta….
As cool as being able to guarantee a roll with their dice would be, that would take away all the fun for me because I love the uncertainty of rolling and getting an unpredictable outcome.
The computer-designed objects called trajectoids follow a predetermined path when rolling, and usually look somewhat like peeled potatoes. Examples of trajectoids
I haven’t seen a trajectoid with an obviously arbitrary, complex path, such as someone’s signature (as opposed to demos of epicycles), so there may be limits to what lines can be made.
I think the similarly-looking gömböcs are cooler: convex, uniform objects that always return to one stable orientation when laid on a flat surface. gömböc gif
Not entirely irrelevant to D&D. Now we know that a skilled scholar could sculpt a boulder to roll in a specific way (for an Indiana Jones-style trap) without casting spells. Still, adjusting the terrain is a more productive way to do that.
But they’re not useful as dice. Nobody ever uses a die’s trajectory shape to determine a random in-game outcome.
A gömböc could technically count as the most rigged die – only ever rolling up one number – if the only requirements for a D&D die were for it to be a convex object with uniform density.
I dish out some damage with the warpick and usually throw it at an enemy or simply drop it in the middle of combat. Sometimes I throw away the shield too or use it to grapple, like topple an enemy and then use the shield to pin them down as a ‘grapple’. I try to flavor it differently, depending on combat situation, as not to make it too boring for everyone while just going “Imma grapple them”.
I mean, if your DM is letting you grapple with a shield definitely keep doing that lol.
But apart from that, remember the old grapple-shove combo. A prone creature cannot stand up while grappled. So if you can do both to the same target, they can’t move until they beat you in 2 athletics contests, and they have disadvantage on attacks while prone.
He only lets me do it when I have one hand free to technically ‘grapple’ and I have to topple/shove them to make them prone. But thanks for the reminder!
I try not to do ‘unrealistic’ grappling and try to use the tools I have to grapple. For example, use the pick to pierce their limbs and keep them in place or pin them down with the shield when prone. But always with a hand free to make the condition to grapple legit.
Would be more useful if they weren’t visually distinct and obviously unfair. Also, if you have to take into account the surface as well, this is just fully misleading.
You said in another comment that you enjoy DMing a game that has unpredictable results for the DM as well. A lot of good advice has already been given, but might I suggest giving your players more agency that you’d most likely see falling into the realm of the DM usually, so they create unexpected events for you as well?
Say you have the character of your friend destroy said Annis Hag, but blast! she had a curse prepared to fall upon anyone who would dare defy her to the point of death. Now instead of throwing your idea of a punishing burden on the player, you could instead go: “You can feel an evil magic engulfing your very being. It muddles your senses and try as you might, you are incapable of escaping its grasp. As it burns itself into your very bones and soul, you feel one of your abilities weaken. Which ability is affected?”
That way the player retains agency, can pick the least punishing option (in their opinion), have consequences but it doesn’t feel like they just got punished for doing well or making a choice just as much as you simply deciding “That’s how it is now. Enjoy!”. Could also add an element of chance and put it down to a roll of the dice, but that might again feel too arbitrarily punishing to that character.
The curse then mightn’t just have that main effect, mind you. But at least the worst one is more down to what the character feels and fears rather than what the DM wants to dish out. It will also give you something to ponder and think about in how to work with whatever the player chose or came up with. You could let them describe how the curse alters their appearance, do they suddenly have a mark on their skin? If so where, what size, shape and color? Now you have a PC with an odd mark of their own imagination and you can build on that. Or the player might come up with horns sprouting from their head, etc. Using this, you can have NPCs react to these changes and really play into them.
Player Agency might help alleviate the feeling of it being a punishing campaign, by giving them some room to breathe in all the pressure and stress.
This seems like a neat idea, although I worry that if it’s not executed right it seems like I’m just making up weird stuff to make the game harder. As it stands, I stick to the RAW pretty closely so that I feel like I’m being reasonably fair. I tend to doubt myself a lot when I homebrew mechanics that work against the player.
I think I mentioned the word in the post but didn’t elaborate: dilemmas. It seems like this is a big part of what you’re suggesting: letting the players take part in deciding what negative consequences they suffer where there is no answer that is strictly positive for the players. I do feel like I have failed to present my dilemmas in a way that gets perceived as fair, it just seems like the players assumed that there must be time to loot the vault and escape from the demon without consequence, when I was trying to make it clear that they can either get away quickly, or loot the vault and have a powerful enemy catch up to them.
And to be honest that’s kind of been the most fun I’ve had is when I offer a choice between safety without maximum reward, or taking a risk that requires a clever solution to escape from. I feel like I telegraph the danger but I can’t overcome this underlying assumption that I’m not actually going to follow through on the threat.
Yeah, alright. Can you provide an example of how you present the choice during a session? Maybe it’s really as simple as being far more on the nose with how you say it?
I’ve found my players often really do not grasp implied information and it just leads nowhere. But I get the feeling you’re already really clear with how you approach it.
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