I use ChatGPT for name generation, and you can start seeing the name table it has squirreled away after a certain point. I wonder if you ran several sessions with it, if you’d start seeing a lot of the same plot points and characters showing up?
I have not used it enough to tell. I asked it to make a one-shot for me. It set up the entire plot, created the stat blocks for the monsters, set up the encounters. Created the traps and the puzzles. It even made the magic items, along with detailed descriptions and lore. I’ve had it help with making a custom setting, including custom races and classes. It’s not copy/paste perfect of course, but good enough of a framework that I can easily go in and tweak stuff. Definitely saves hours of work.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for putting this all together into one spot. I just followed almost everything on the sidebar. A suggestion, though, you may get more traction if you make links that are usable for people using other lemmy instances and kbin. I had to manually search for everything to go subscribe to it.
@Brunbrun6766 The links are still broken for me, only DM academy takes me to the .world community. Sadly, from Kbin I'll just have to search for all these, as the links won't let me subscribe right away.
I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm saying it shouldn't be done.
We just saw lemmy.world collapse in ruin from a hack, for example. It came back quickly, but if it hadn't and all of the TTRPG communities had been there it would have been quite a mess to recover from.
I think it's ok to have themed instances. People are still free to create communities on other ones, even if they're similar topics. No one is saying ALL ttrpg has to be ONLY one roof. I help admin an instance that's devoted only to sci-fi and fantasy communities (any media) but only those themes. Some of the communities we have also exist elsewhere and that's the great thing about the fediverse.
No one is saying ALL ttrpg has to be ONLY one roof.
That was what I interpreted dumbles' objection to be, he didn't like that these communities weren't on TTRPG.network.
To be clear, I'm not opposed to "themed" instances. I just don't think it's bad to have communities scattered around on other instances as well as that.
people are free to go to these places and make their own communities. It wont be me as I am here on .world and as stated above !dnd has been on .world before ttrpg network existed
that's what I ended up doing, searching via kbin magazine search. Weird. I'd like to see the entre instance in case there are other communities not shown here.
Yeah, not sure I want ALL of them for subscriptions, I just wanted to see what else they had in case I did want to subscribe. I'm sure it will be back up eventually and I can go check.
The 4e minion with this exact adjustment you describe is precisely how our our table handles it.
My players love it when I throw swarms at them - an epic pile of miniatures on the table, carving a swathe through your enemies… it’s great power fantasy stuff, and a nice way of emphasising how powerful leveled characters are.
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