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.
It’s pretty decent. On top of the grappling bonus action, it gives you proficiency with improvised weapons. This helps when you’re using your shield as an improvised weapon because your other hand is holding someone.
I just found my next feat I think. “Fey Touched”. I know it’s only once per long rest but get this: You get Misty Step AND another 1st level spell from School of Divination or School of Enchantment. School of Enchantment has “Hex” as a first level spell. Imma hex them, choose either STR or DEX, depending on the description of the enemy from the DM. Since I can’t cast two spells in one round, I’m gonna use Misty Step the next round and do a teleports behind you nothing personnel, kid - move, then use Action Surge to do the shove / grapple combo. Fuck, I already look forward to the next level up.
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.
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.
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.
Oh noes! Final proof that D&D iz da demon worships! Burn da witchez - burn dem - buuuuurrrrnnn dems!!111!!
I am old enough to remember the first time around the d&d is devil worship bouy and had this existed back then there would have been burnings at the stake…
It would have been fun to use the Crowley reading for the book of many things, but that wouldn’t be much fun from a game play mechanic.
It kind of sounds like your friend won’t enjoy the kind of D&D you like to run, and that’s okay. You are allowed to enjoy running a challenging campaign with metered resources and meaningful stakes, and he is allowed to enjoy playing a shining hero that doesn’t worry about restraints and desperate measures. Both of those games are perfectly fine as long as everyone is having a good time.
I’m a newer DM who started a campaign 3 years ago during COVID with my brothers. Take my advice with a grain of salt because it may be different from others. My campaign is based around a group of characters that go from start to finish. My campaign revolves around some star wars fanfic I wrote back when I was too poor for college classes, yet knew my writing needed work. Thus, as a DM, I’m the one unwilling to allow player character death.
I am extremely lucky to have very mature players that mostly don’t try to cheese the game. I usually give them a time limit for a mission to be completed, either explicitly from the quest giver, or implicitly where “bad things” will start to happen the longer time goes on and the mission isn’t completed.
Could my players take more long rests? Absolutely, but that could cause them to fail that quest. Could my players take a long rest in the middle of the day right after waking up that morning? Absolutely, but they better have a plan for what they are going to be doing that night when all the shops are closed, it’s dark, and NPCs want to be left alone. And besides, it’s tough to fall asleep once your circadian rhythm is off… It would be a shame if characters needed to start rolling constitution checks to see if they can fall asleep to get that long rest for the next couple of days, and imposing exhaustion levels for not getting a long rest if it goes on long enough…
You’re NTA, but your friend is also NTA in my opinion. There is a lot of communication that needs to happen here and they also need to be able to trust that you’re not “trying to kill them”. You, as the DM are trying to tell their story in such a way that they feel epic, yet balance that by in-game consequences. It might be a good idea to try and sprinkle in some consequences for constantly resting, like the insomnia/circadian rhythm mentioned above, or maybe an ambush from bad guys that figure out the heroes location and prevent a long rest from happening. Forcing them to flee and hide after the ambush, wasting the rest of the day, might help them get moving. Those ambushes should be scary enough that they would go to great lengths to avoid a repeat.
And one final thought is to possibly think of your campaign like a movie. Yes, you’re telling their story, but you’re not telling every moment of their story. You’re not forcing their characters to stop for 3 meals a day, go to the bathroom, and occasionally wash their clothes and take baths. No, you’re hitting the important parts of the story, and filling the gaps with downtime where they can fabricate things, work “jobs”, etc,.
I hope something I’ve rambled about helps you out!
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