Annoying to see that the same ghettoization of AI art is going on here as was on Reddit - AI art is forbidden from the "art" community, and lumped in over with the "AI" community that also handles every other kind of AI stuff. At this point it should be pretty clear that whether something is "AI" or not is not as relevant a division as what kind of AI thing it is.
Any reason the typical swarm statblocks won’t narratively work in such a case?
If you want to homebrew something, maybe make a swarm of x goblins with very low AC, say 3-5, with similar HP. When a character hits, they hit multiple goblins per attack assuming they roll double the given AC. In most hits they’d be taking down at least two or three targets is what I’m envisioning.
Then the swarm reacts after each attack, using x number of the swarm per attack, with maybe three different tiers of attacks available, and each goblin can only go once per round.
As such, as the battle wears on they make fewer and less effective attacks.
But this all recreates what a swarm statblock is to some extent.
Guess i didn’t realize there was an existing stat block. I don’t really want to do something like insects though. but yeah, you got the idea on the rest of it. this is pretty much what i was looking for. basically i want to give the on PC that can’t hit shit some optimism and start killing a few things instead of the druid that headbutts everything to death. Thank you
It’s been a while since I’ve run D&D but there’s some info to be gleaned from how Pathfinder runs swarms. My procedure is based off of some PF2e rules together with some house rulings for off the cuff swarms, and is intended to be quick, minimising admin and adding some exciting flavour to the encounter:
Choose your creature(s) which occupy the swarm
Set the AC to the lowest AC among creatures in the swarm
Don’t worry about the precise number of creatures in a swarm. Just do it based on size. If you want a rough idea of how many creatures fit into a swarm of a certain size, have 4-6 creatures of the same size occupy a space one size category larger. 4-6 groups of creatures of a certain size form a group of one size category larger.
Take average HP of the most populous creature in the swarm. For each size category the swarm is above that creature’s size category, multiply that average HP by 4.
Characters can occupy the same space as the swarm with no penalty
Any creature sharing space with the swarm is automatically hit, assign damage based on the median among damage values in the swarm (5 snakes and 8 kobolds, probably does the damage of a kobold. Could roll luck to see if they take a random venomous bite)
Swarms are immune to grapple, restrained, prone, etc. Swarms are vulnerable to area spells.
Optional: Mind altering magic could affect a swarm hive mind as if the swarm is a single creature. This is completely discretionary. You could probably manipulate a swarm of bees with a single charm spell, but not a city-spanning mob.
Optional: Give resistance to B/P/S damage. If a significant number of creatures in the swarm have a resistance (down to your judgement), add that resistance to the swarm.
Optional: Characters in the middle of a swarm could probably swing wildly and hit something. Give players advantage if they are attacking the swarm while stood in the swarm
Optional: Be narrative about the health of the swarm. Every so often mention one or two of the swarm falling dead or disengaging from the conflict.
One way I’ve done swarms in the past is treating the swarm as an amorphous blob of things. At the end of the round, anyone in a space covered by the swarm takes a certain amount of damage.
Alternatively, if they’re more annoying than dangerous, anyone that takes an action in a swarm space rolls with disadvantage.
Give him a personal sidequest. His bad luck is due to a curse, and there’s something he can do to break it, or at least compensate for it, and you can implement it with a 1 weapon or something to boost his spellcasting skill.
But a swarm would work too, where it has low AC and you whittle it down each turn.
Multiply out the HP by however many you want there to be. Give them multi attack to that number. Say for example it’s 5 goblins in a swarm; every 20% HP lost it loses an attack (do the math ahead of time if it’s a funky number).
To make things less swingy run 2-4 swarms instead. Say you want 20 goblins, make swarm pods of 5 each.
My favourite is the mimic accidentally/on purpose placed inside a bag of holding. Any time the party take something out of it there’s a nonzero chance it’ll be a mimic instead of what they were after.
Seems like a good way to grant the party a bag of holding early on. They just come across it discarded in a corner somewhere, and are stunned that an item in such good shape was just abandoned. It appears brand new and has a mix of mundane objects and apparent treasures inside, and the words “Bran’s Bag of Holding” is stitched in elegant lettering on the outside. If they try to dump it out to do an inventory, one random object remains inside. It takes a very high skill check to notice this, as the mimic mimics the inside of the bag as it holds on. If they dump the bag out a second time, the assortment of objects is the same except for a single item. Asking around reveals that Bran was a famous local adventurer who disappeared suddenly.
Funnily enough, i'm doing a Roll20 campaign with a group of friends, and the setting is that their adventurer's part of an ingame adventurer's guild (helps explain new members and real life absentees).
I was thinking about having them meet another party that's part of the guild since my players aren't the only ones whose a member.
I think this is pretty funny but depending on your players, they might check all 3 for mimics! Some of us were traumatized once and now we are very suspicious…
@plum This is the first time a Mimic I placed that was successfully triggered, and this particular group of players didn't vocalize any suspicions on the book being the Mimic. We ended the session with joking that everything is now a potential mimic, especially that rock over there, or perhaps that Stalagmite, maybe even my sword is a mimic now.
I just gotta patiently wait for the Mimic funny business to calm down before I place another one, muhahahahaha.
There was a campaign a long time back where I gave the party something called the "Infinite Tapestry." It was kind of a low-grade portable hole, a 10'x10' tapestry that depicted an image of an empty stone masonry chamber with bare walls. If the tapestry was hanging vertically and you touched it while speaking a command word, you would appear inside the tapestry where there was another similar tapestry on the fourth wall of the chamber showing the outside world. Both tapestries had to be hanging flat and vertical for the connection to work, otherwise the other tapestry turned black and temporarily inert.
Basically, it was a portable clubhouse. They furnished it, went on a minor quest to get ahold of a magical hot tub to put in there, used it to store all the unwieldy things that parties liked to lug around. Since the connection was relatively "fragile" and could be disrupted easily, trapping whoever was in there until the tapestry could be hung from suitable supports again, they were always careful about using it as a literal camp - they slept outside of it whenever possible and took care not to all be inside at the same time. Which was a bit frustrating because there was a secret to the tapestry that I really wanted to force them to discover.
It wasn't a portable hole, the chamber wasn't an extradimensional space. The tapestry was actually a two-way portal to the Feywild, specifically to a chamber in the basement of an ancient abandoned castle that was the ancestral home of the secret Big Bad of the campaign. But they never examined the masonry inside to discover that the "back wall" was slightly different from the rest (it was a bricked-up corridor leading to the rest of the basement) and circumstances never arose where they'd be able to determine that they were on a different plane of existence in there rather than an extradimensional space.
Eventually, though, an opportunity arose. Through sheer happenstance a minor enemy of theirs discovered the secret of their tapestry, including the command word. He went into the tapestry to search through the party's stuff, but the party spotted him entering it so they took down the tapestry to trap him in there. They spent a day prepping to fight the guy, and then when they were all good and ready they put the tapestry back up... and saw that during the day the guy had spent trapped in there he'd figured out the thing I had wanted the party to eventually figure out, breaching the back wall and escaping into the castle in the Feywild.
So now the party had to dungeon-crawl the ancient castle chasing the trail of this guy, discovering a bunch of stuff about the real Big Bad of the campaign in the process, and once that whole multi-session extraveganza was finished they had graduated from having a simple "clubhouse" to having a whole castle in their pocket. It became their major base of operations and many future adventure seeds focused around it.
It was a lot of fun, but if you're a DM that likes a well-organized storyline it might be troublesome. I had no idea when exactly they were going to discover that whole new branch of the campaign they were carrying around with them.
This is such a great idea! I guess your party already knew about portable holes from previous campaigns and were just assuming that’s what it was? A tricky instance of characters acting according to player experience! Sounds like it worked out really well though.
Yeah, most of my players over the years have been veteran enough that the standard stuff can usually be assumed background knowledge. I think I even gave them a bag of holding so that they'd eventually have a clue from the fact that it didn't blow up from being taken into the tapestry, but as soon as they realized what it was they got rid of it to be "safe" and never took it in there. In hindsight perhaps I should have had a bag of holding be already inside the tapestry chamber when they discovered it, left over in there as loot from the previous occupants. Though that may have clued them in too quickly. Always a balancing act. :)
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