Profitable pirate ventures need to be built on rich trade routes so they have big, fat, juicy merchant ships to plunder and pirate.
What competing powers does your pirate area sit between?
What are those powers doing to patrol the waters and stop their trade ships from being plundered?
Whose the most famous pirate hunter in the area? What’s their methods and what’re they doing right now?
Whats the latest ‘big haul’ the pirates have pulled in? What were they rumoured to have found? Similarly whose the last pirate to have been caught or killed? How?
This sounds like tonnes of fun, hope your players enjoy!
The Southern Isles are in the location that The Pirates Isles are in vanilla DnD, I just thought the original name was lame. I have used some of the original lore for some of the islands, but mostly it’s my own stuff. That means the surrounding powers are Sembia, Turmish, These, Aglarond, etc. Yo be honest I’ve not put a lot of research into those. The Isles attract a sorts of folk from all sorts of places.
The Southern Islands Company are a proxy for the Turmish government, and it is them who patrol the islands looking for pirates.
The most famous pirate hunter is probably Commadore Roger Todgeson. He has a long standing enmity with Captain Verse, a pirate captain who has the lofty goal of ousting the Company and starting a pirate republic. Currently he is on his way to Thatch, a town in the Western region, and the place most newcomers to the Isles make landfall The party are also on their way there. Captain Verse feels it is time to try and liberate the town and has asked the party to come to his aid. The Company sense unrest is afoot and have call s Commadore Todgeson to help sure up their forces. The party and their crew, along with Verse and his own crew, will try to take the town before he arrives, and then defend it on e he does.
The last pirate to be caught and killed… hm… I’ll say that would be Captain Jack Chaffinch. He was taking a prize out East when he ran into Todgeson’s ship. They fought valiantly but were overwhelmed and when Todgeson arrives at Thatch he’ll hang him up in the Harbour as a warning nitnto resist him. Chaffinch’s ship sails with Todgeson, having been captured. Could they take the ship back ? Apparently he’d managed to take a Theskian treasure galleon before being caught himself. Could be the gold is still in its hold, just waiting for greedy pirates hands to reclaim it!
I had a blast watching the first episode. There’s something so satisfying about watching new players playing D&D and get engrossed in the story like they did. The queens are such fun to watch. It helped introduce D&D (and Brennan Lee Mulligan) to my friends. They didn’t even notice the episode was 2 hours long!
I love creating the bones of a world or a situation, then seeing how the party interpret, contribute, and react to it, then reacting to their decisions for the next session.
Also sometimes, making traps and BBEG plans for them then being able to pull it off (and watching like a proud parent as they successfully get out of the situation)
Yes exactly. For me, the most rewarding part is including the breadcrumbs to the real story while allowing them to explore the world we're building together.
I’ve just been throwing breadcrumbs in front of my party for years now and taking them where ever they go. Its been so much more fun than just ‘telling my story’ for me. I would always have the start of a story I wanted to tell, but could never sort out the middle and the end, so I just let the players do it now and enjoy the show.
Personally I despised the amount of character artist advertising that goes on on Reddit’s DnD community. In absence of any way of filtering such things out of my feed on Lemmy, I’ll likely just unsub from any community where that sort of thing becomes the norm.
Personally I don’t see it as a problem when someone posts some art they did (commissioned or otherwise) that has D&D relevance, and in the body of the post mentions “I am taking commissions, DM me for details” or whatever. However, it becomes a problem when they’re posting everything they make, and it’s clear the intention is to fish for sales, not to show off some neat, topical art. It’s very hard to draw up hard and fast rules for this, and I think everyone would have a different idea of what’s ‘too much’.
I think the rules laid out in #1 are pretty straight forward, no spamming the comments, no replying to every comment with your link. Just a single link in the body content of your post. I would expect any DM spamming to also be reported as that’s just rude.
Frankly I just am not interested in people’s character art. To me that is very distantly related to ttrpgs. I join a community like this to discuss what people are actually doing in their games, not to see a bunch of drawings.
Not really, when all the subclasses are just on a spectrum bleeeing into each other. None of them feel unique anymore, just a mash of x+y class. It just adds cruft, limits actual creative choice in character building, adds to dm workload, and makes everything feel samey. It’s like the custom stat benefits rule from Tasha’s. On its face, seems like a good idea. But now you just have every race being a reskin of each other. Kill the subclass. Embrace class differences. Let players make their characters unique based on the stories we make together, not trying to fit them into a predefined cookie cutter box.
It’s like the custom stat benefits rule from Tasha’s. On its face, seems like a good idea. But now you just have every race being a reskin of each other. Kill the subclass. Embrace class differences. Let players make their characters unique based on the stories we make together, not trying to fit them into a predefined cookie cutter box.
This is so bizarrely self-contradictory.
Force players to only play the nine classes with no subclasses or features, force species into hard-locked stat differences ... to avoid them being cookie-cutter? Like forcing anyone who wants to play a reasonably-optimized STR character to play a species with inherent STR bonus increases creativity somehow? As if using Tasha's rule to play an unconventional species as a STR class means that player somehow cannot possibly also give their character a unique and interesting story as well as a slightly unconventional class/species combo? Make it make sense.
If you think that having more tools to customize and differentiate species and classes reduces creativity, that's a you problem and not a rules problem.
Eh agree to disagree. You’re falling into the trap that 5e sets of assuming what is on the character sheet it’s all that’s available to the characters. By forcing players into subclasses that are all just cookie cutter perfectly balanced slight variations of each others, you’re encouraging players to stay entirely in their sheet and everyone basically does the same thing with different flavor, to fulfill ONLY the specific fantasies pre ordained by WOTC. To approach every problem by first looking to their sheet and trying to find the right number instead of creatively looking at the narrative we’re building together and finding a unique solution. It’s not a “me” problem to acknowledge that 5e subclasses and races are incredibly samey mechanically, and if you can’te see that I suggest you try to look past the matrix and pretty illustrations WOTC uses to distract from the fact, and look to the actual fundamentals of how the game works. Prof. Dungeonmaster I think has a great take on the subject: youtu.be/UwPnhr2b8VU**___**
Please, tell me what I think some more. It went so well here.
You’re falling into the trap that 5e sets of assuming what is on the character sheet it’s all that’s available to the characters. By forcing players into subclasses that are all just cookie cutter variations of each others, you’re encouraging players to stay entirely in their sheet. To approach every problem by first looking to their sheet and trying to find the right number instead of creatively looking at the narrative we’re building together and finding a unique solution.
None of this is true. It's a weird strawman that you've made up, that would make absolutely no sense to any real person's opinion - if you weren't trying to create a fictional scenario where having more diversity of choice and options was somehow bad.
It’s not a “me” problem to acknowledge that 5e subclasses and races are incredibly samey mechanically,
It's absolutely a 'you' problem to see a wide variety of options with very few mechanical constraints, and go "yeah, that limits creativity" - if you feel your creativity is somehow enhanced by having hard mechanical limits on which races and classes can do what tasks in a TTRPG ... you can still create that experience for yourself in 5E. Like, having more options doesn't prevent you from playing however confined and restricted you want - so making all of these points about me, about other people is just projecting your own limitations on the rest of the world and then criticizing them for a problem only you seem to have.
and if you can’te see past the matrix and pretty illustrations WOTC uses to distract from that, that’s a you problem, for not really getting how this game works at the fundamentals.
Like that. That's not my opinion, "pictures" aren't why I have my opinion or why I might have the opinion I don't, and I definitely understand the mechanics more than fine. You just made up an opinion for me, made up an explanation why I might have that fictional opinion, and then got snide with me about an entirely fictional scenario you put on me.
You can just not use Tashas if you want. Imagining that other people need hard-coded stat penalties just to "be creative" and that's somehow impossible in a system where you, or they, can still choose to have hard-coded stat penalties is just the wildest thing to pretend is 'wrong' with D&D.
The easy way we fixed it when we still played dnd is that casters know what the spells are, even if it’s not in their spell list. You know if the enemy is casting firebolt or finger of death. Consider that if it’s possible to counterspell counterspell, which only has somatic casting components, then probably there is sufficient time to tell what each spell is. This fixes the bad feel of counterspelling because the spell is known by having everyone do it. Everyone knows what the spells are so you can choose to be strategic and get the most out of your counterspell.
If you want to justify it, you can imagine that all fire spells have some fire movement or incantation, add to that something related to size or expansion, plus a bead of fire forming, that’s a spicy fireball.
I’m aware of people who decouple the “cast a spell” step from the “announce the spell” step, and implement rules to identify which spells are being cast ahead of time. I think it slows the game down too much for my liking, but that’s an option.
To make Counterspell more fair and give it a degree of interaction, I run counterspell as a contested check (d20 + spellcasting modifier + level of the spell/counterspell). It gives players an active role in the outcome, and it feels less cheap when the NPC negates their spell.
Oh now that’s an interesting house rule. That actually gives me an idea for situations where you upcast counterspell but it still requires a check RAW: adding a bonus for the level of the upcast. So if a 6th level spell is cast, and a 5th level counterspell comes out in response, the counterspell caster can add another +2 to their D20 + spellcasting ability check
I personally only give NPC casters spells that fit them thematically or have in game reasons for having that spell. If counterspell is one of those, then I will use it to the full extent that an accurate portrayal of that NPC allows.
In your situation, if you are having the players roll to recognize spells, an easy solution, albeit one that slows things slightly, is having the NPC do this as well. I personally don’t bother with using a reaction to recognize the spell I just call for the check if they ask (within reason of course). The roll can be made behind the screen, but it should help things feel more fair for the players. I know most tables will use an arcana check with a DC of 10+spell level. Some tables will just have the caster roll against their intelligence score. Roll it however you feel is appropriate.
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