Thanks for the tips, I forgot that you can take other class cantrips!! I’ve got an artificer with guidance, so we’re good there.
I’m interested in shape water thematically, but I don’t really see how this spell can be used to really solve problems. How are you supposed to utilize this spell?
By forging documents I mean like make a piece of paper look like whatever we need upon an inspection, temporarily of course— sorry for the confusing wording!!
I agree about the saving throw cantrip. I’m considering mind sliver for that so the other casters have an easier time with their attacks, but the toll the dead damage is respectable too. I’ll probably save this for my level 10 cantrip though, since my party is mostly casters and we will get decent non-attack roll cantrips without me.
So I think with shape water you can freeze the water? And again, DM dependent, this might mean you can break locks, traps and other delicate machinery (or maybe even stone blocks and the like). Frozen water can form steps. Animating the water can be fun too - remember that minor illusion can’t move.
I’m pretty sure it’s widely seen as being completely useless. If you have allies who are also proficient in the social skill they can give you advantage, and then you don’t have an angry NPC realise an enchantment spell is wearing off and come at you.
Looks like there is !dnd_lfg but I feel like there’s not enough traction over there yet to be super useful. Maybe a matrix chat would be a good thing to put together?
It’s an unrelated messenging platform. Not unlike a federated discord but best used for chat right now. VoiP is still an early feature if I understand correctly. Right now matrix is the best alternative to DMs if you’d like to keep your conversations private.
I’m up for anything as long as it isn’t unnecessarily tedious like Tomb of Annihilation. I like stories with enough lore to dive into if I’m interested, but not so much that it takes time away from other things.I’m fine with violence, nudity and stuff like that as long as it has a purpose within the story.
It’s interesting to me that we could already see the signs of some of this just based on what they defined to break the VTT-specific rules of the OGL update, which was anything that had effects that made it too video-game-y. Showed they fundamentally misunderstood what VTTs are for and do six months ago, and it seems that hasn’t changed.
I get the feeling their system will just take all the worst parts of video gaming - micro transactions, walled content, and bugs - and make D&D worse. I'm betting it will be a corporate profit first, community second approach.
What would be awesome is something that makes the table top experience easier and blends the best elements of VTT with in-person gaming. I'd love to a hybrid system in which physical tokens can interact with a digital table top.
“Community second”? That’s very optimistic. Personally, I can’t recall the last time WotC considered their community anything more than a source of backlash (and rightfully so, with their history).
I’m with you. Don’t get me wrong, I have a tv and use arkenforge for maps. But 2d is enough of a time sink (epically when the map is only one part of the whole session)…
I own it. It’s fun to play with but ultimately suffers from the same problem that almost every tool in this style does. The resources you get to use are limited to the ones that they’ve thought to include. If you want to make a jail, that’s fine, you can make it work. A tavern? Easy. An ancient Greek temple? Eh, you can get there with a bit of imagination. A bathroom? Sorry, bud, you’re on your own.
I’ve traditionally used Dungeon Painter Studio for my maps, and while it has similar limitations, it has the benefit of being able to import other art, and you get a whole dimension to hide your crimes in. That vaguely bookshelf- looking rectangular thing on the map? It’s an armory cabinet in the barracks. Now in the bathroom it’s a medicine cabinet. In the bedroom? A wardrobe. You can’t see what’s in it, can’t see how tall it is or how high it’s mounted on the wall, so you get to fill in the details with my description. 3d limits your ability to do that because everything looks like what it is. So if you don’t have a model of what you’re looking for, it’s more obvious when you’re making do.
That’s been my biggest struggle as well. I can spend way too much time finding the right map for an encounter, only to never actually use it.
The other option is building the encounters around the map, but a lot of the maps I find don’t ‘inspire’ me a whole lot, or aren’t thematically relevant to what I want to run (this dwarf king’s tomb looks cool, but I’d want at least a few other rooms in this dungeon, with other encounters. And my players are on a quest to kill a dragon, not a dwarf king)
I almost prefer a minimalistic tool; just a basic map that I can draw up quickly, basic tokens for enemies, and just flesh out my descriptions more.
This is precisely why I love Owlbear Rodeo. Just what I need, no unnecessary fluff or mechanics, super easy importing, website with no installs. I’m interested in the new version, but I’m not DMing an online game right now so no subscription from me yet.
i’d you’re gonna do a 3d map, dungeon alchemist is the way to go. that’s what i’ve been using. it’s pretty versatile and gets frequent content updates. nice looking maps in 2 or 3 dimensions.
I tried virtual tabletops in 2020 but I just didn't enjoy it the same way. Little things that don't matter while you're sitting round a physical table with your friends, like waiting while other players take their turns in combat encounters, suddenly play out very differently when you're sitting at home on your own and can easily get distracted by your phone or TV without appearing rude. The players all just felt a lot less connected to what was going on in the game.
My group meets infrequently anyway and will often fill a whole day with the equivalent of multiple sessions when we do meet up, but when we played online during Covid we found it hard-going just getting through a two hour session.
Like... we switched to meeting on discord and I scribbled out updates to the 'table' in paint. none of the VTT's were flexible enough for the homebrews I was cooking up, though.
The more featured the vtt the more pain in the ass it was. In the end I first used a PowerPoint and had "shapes" that were like tokens. Then found a vtt that was basically that. Just literally a background, very simple tokens (circle with space for 2 letters) and a freehand pen.
We’re all spread out across our city and getting together for in-person games was always a pain. Pre-pandemic we played maybe once a month on average, though our games usually ended up being at least 4-8 hours at a time. Since the pandemic when we switched over to online, we’re playing weekly in a consistently 2hr game. I actually prefer how it is now, I like the smaller chunks of time and I like not having to always drive over to others’ houses. It does take a bit more prep work for whomever is GMing, since alot of us tend towards battlemaps, but we’ve also done a bit of theatre of the mind as well.
I honestly don’t care to go back to live games, maybe it’d be fine for one-off substitutions of our normal weekly games, but with kids it’s a huge hassle to organize for those long games and honestly, I just don’t know that I have the patience to hang around that long for games anymore. The other people I game with tend to be horrible about timing and will setup ridiculously long combat encounters, such that we’re spending a full 6 hours on a combat session because they thought us going up against like 30 guys would be a quick fight. And of course the enemies NEVER run away, they will always fight to the last man for the vaguest of reasons.
Our group uses Roll20 character sheets on tablets around the table, they’re really handy for managing all the buffs and math (Pathfinder 1e). Still rolling dice and using minis. That’s the right level of digital stuff for me.
I like foundry. I also liked astral. I didn't like r20 much. Owlbears is OK. Playing in just a Mural is also more than fine.
The dnd vtts purpose is to be a walled garden that only plays dnd, ever, and keeps you playing dnd and putting microtransaction in front of you so you pay and play only dnd EVER
That’s awesome! My friend group tried out DND in a similar way, none of us had ever played before so one stepped up to DM. I’ve become a DM myself since then, almost begrudgingly at first but I’ve really come to enjoy it. But if I may ask, what got you to set up a DND community before playing yourself? Were you inspired by communities on other sites, or by following campaigns (Critical Role et. al)?
I have been immersed in the D&D community for over a decade of my life. I’ve owned most of the books of the last 10 years, and I have listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts, consumed every comic there is to consume, ready days of articles, etc.
But my friend group has always been either uncoordinated, in different parts of the world, or just different places in life that things have never lined up for us to actually play the game. FINALLY things have lined up just right and I am DMing not one but TWO groups!
Yes, because all my players have PCs with 3d acceleration and are wiling to install a multi-gigabyte client /s
Roll20 has basically supplanted all other VTTs simply by the virtue of being accessible though the browser. All you need for a session is a way to illustrate the scene, roll some dice, maybe have a character sheet upload feature, and that’s it. This seems like a way to shove microtransactions down the user’s throat and a whale milking machine. No thanks.
Tome of Beasts books are fantastic. I once found two monsters in Kobold Fight Club from that and made a themed dungeon around them, giant ant and Spawn of Akyishigal, the Demon Lord of cockroaches.
The whole Tome of Beasts series is pretty great, including the Creature Codex. Some of them are a bit too “out there” for me to use in my particular game, but I’d rather have that than another reskinned goblin.
The main 4 monster books from KP are published under an OGL and are available on open5e , you don’t get any lore, art, or advice on how to run the monsters without paying for the books, but you can see the statblocks.
The kobold press website also has a tool that can show you the environments a monster can typically be found in.
I would still recommend getting the books, especially if you want to use any of the higher CR monsters as the lore makes it a lot easier to understand the mindset the creators had when designing them.
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