Kinda disappointed by the article (Waterdeep, but no Myth Drannor, or Icewind Dale, or Thay? No Underdark?!!?!), so in protest I'm gonna post the OG D&D world - Greyhawk - the origin of Vecna and the late, great Gary Gygax's personal campaign setting.
It’s not even though. Tolkein was very deliberate about what he included in his world, whereas Forgotten Realms is just “we need to make up some shit so that everything can go here”
Once heard a guy tell me about a game he was in. When a player didn’t show up the character turned into a gold coin. And when the player returned the coin would turn back into a character. During the game the party found out the BBEG was the one doing rituals to turn people into the coins.
For me its the Star Spawn Emessary I mean, look at that thing. But for real the entire Far Realm take on eldritch horror type monsters is just fascinating to me and one of my favorite fantasy types.
This is the sort of build that makes me want WotC to drop onednd and start over without trying to jam in backwards compatibility. The system doesn’t have to be balanced to be fun, but things get increasingly busted as new stuff is added. At some point you just have to reset, though there’s a lot of value in the “PHB +1 splatbook” rule
I always wanted to play a Malconvoker, but my group would not have been comfortable with it. It's a class whose core conceit is that they summon demons and make pacts with them that trick the demons into serving good causes. The demons are convinced that the Malconvoker is a traditional evil cultist or self-serving wizard, but it turns out all the favours they grant them are twisted to good ends and all the prices they demand get paid in unexpected ways that turn out to be not as costly as intended.
The key stat is charisma and bluff is the most vital of skills, of course.
The Chameleon and the Thousand faces were some of my favourites in concept because of their flexibility, though I never had a chance to play them. Gish builds in general were a lot of fun. There also was a Sand mage in a desert theme manual that was very interesting.
Jade Phoenix Mage was pretty cool. The capstone ability was that you literally explode, dealing a huge amount of damage to everything nearby and literally vaporising yourself. Then you reform on the same spot 1d6 rounds later completely healed of damage and most conditions, with all your gear.
I’m still a pretty new player, but I’m fairly certain that in my group’s second combat encounter, our DM saw that we were going to struggle, so a few rounds before he thought we’d die, he started hinting that people on the street were hearing us. He didn’t play around with his rolls at all, which meant us getting hit by some very powerful (even permanently crippling) critical hits, and some of us rolling awfully on his critical miss table. As we started to go down, one by one, the door was getting battered, and when the crew was down to 1 member alive, the city guard arrived and intervened, scaring the remaining mobs and healing up the three of us on the floor.
To me, it meant that he cared about the dice rolls and wanted consequences and actions to feel real, but also he didn’t want our journey to end on the first night. But he didn’t make the entire encounter feel like a victory, and our characters had to deal with the repercussions of that encounter.
Sometimes that’s what it takes for new players to really feel and understand the consequences of their actions. Combat might not always be the best solution and escaping a battle is always on the table.
My DM once fudged something and I didn’t question it at all. It was in curse of Strahd, the party was level 3. He was using the RAW rules in the adventure for random encounters, one of which says the party can get jumped by 3d6 wolves. He rightly surmised that us getting ganked 10 wolves wasn’t a very interesting conclusion to our story, so he made up some dumb deus ex machina, and I was 100% there for it. If WOTC can’t make a balanced random encounter table, why should we be beholden to it?
The point is to tell an exciting story - there’s no right or wrong definition of what that means for you.
The dice’s purpose is to take you down paths you might not have chosen deliberately but the goal is still to have an exciting story. If the DM wants to be like “I recognize the dice have made a decision but given that it’s a stupid ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore it” then he has my full support.
Maybe a cleaner way would be to decide up front: which outcomes am I ok with? and simply cap the roll at that. You know the paladin only has 17 HP left and you don’t want the paladin to go down so the maximum roll you want is 16. So if you have roll 4d6 damage. You do: roll 3 roll 8 roll 12 roll 18 16.
If you don't mind dying, tell them and tell them they needn't save you. I would tell tree and ask them not to do that, at least with me. I'd prefer if they wholly didn't but meh
These days I play more 13A and it explicitly discourages such behavior too
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