Xanathar's Guide to Cleavin' a Goblin Clean in Twain (feat. D&D)

[Mothra]

Continuing to run this Super Sentai Spelljammer campaign. It’s going pretty well, I’m definitely learning a lot.

Creating unique environments and story elements and encounters is relatively easy for me.

The gameplay part though? That’s harder to make really engaging, and that’s the reason everyone’s here.

Various DMing Thoughts

• Combat can get dull if it drags on for too long, or if it’s to linear.

  • I feel like the answer to this is maybe making monsters with more unique abilities and patterns. Something like a vidcon boss megaman monster that you have to figure out the pattern for, then exploit it.

  • Giving good rewards is hard? Money seems so meaningless, and I can’t give them weapons all the time. Hard to think of something cool and rewarding to get from encounters. I gave them those grenades from Spirits Within that let you cushion your fall in an ethereal slime blob, but nobody’s used them. I dunno if little trinkets like that are good rewards.

• Having to learn what spells everyone has suuuuucks. Creating a portal out of plot convenience, then having a player close it with a spell I forgot they had, or having them deploy some kind of stealth ability there’s no easy counter for can make encounters trivial in a boring way.

  • This is a tough one, since you want players to be very creative and try different things, but you also don’t necessarily have so much content for each encounter that you can afford for them to circumvent entire sequences.

  • Example 1: They decided to assassinate the astral elf emperor recently, which is great. They do a stealth mission, but one of them can just turn into a perfect replica of the prince, so, that player just walks past the dangers while the rest of the party can’t really take part in the mission, which trivializes the whole encounter. Then, when the rest of the party tries to sneak through, the thing is revealed and a big ol’ slog of a fight starts. Stealth with a party is weird in D&D.

  • Example 2: I make a dungeon that’s a derelict space station where they see autognomes everywhere, signs of battle, but no sign of the person they’re here to talk to. This NPC is (secretly) also an autognome, mimicing the person they’re there to meet, who has died months ago. One player just reaches out psychically using a built-in D&D ability, and technically, the autognome, I guess, would be able to be contacted, and would respond, so the dungeon is then kinda thwarted since they can just talk to this autognome and she can be summoned there to show them around.

  • In short: You don’t want to quash creativity, but it also sucks when the main encounter / content is trivialized by it, and you didn’t necessarily have the time in the week to come up with something else as a backup.

Dungeon Design

Dungeon design is pretty new to me.

I think exploration is a big part of the fun of D&D, and I want the party to interact more and try things out. I want to avoid there just being one way to do a dungeon, and it’s all on-rails.

With that in mind, what’s the ideal dungeon design? Again, I’m looking to video game design for ideas. You have some locked doors, you look around for the key, you find hidden areas, you fight monsters, you encounter an obstacle with some weird way to around it, etc.

I’ve had it said that you should just make obstacles without knowing what the solution would be, but, seems like it would suck to just not be able to progress, if the party didn’t happen to have any bright ideas. I guess I could just always come up with a deus ex machina to progress them if they get truly stuck, and keep it in the back pocket.

So could use some advice on dungeon design, if y’all have any.

Batship Example

For example, right now I’m doing an encounter with “The Batship”, an extragalactic space bat fighter-jet thing that eats spelljammer ships and is helplessly piloted by a cursed test pilot hooked into an immortality machine against his will:

I have no fucking idea what the team is going to do, but I want to just give them a bunch of options and let them decide.

For whatever reason, the original design of this ship was your standard mean-spirited Gygaxian “there is no way to positively interact with this” philosophy. You can’t really kill it, you can’t save the guy inside, you can’t even explore it… like there’s a rule that every single step you take on this ship forces you to roll a save against being permanently charmed into being a crewmember? And using a wish will monkey paw you into being trapped in a space coffin for ever? Just seems wild to design a cool spaceship and not let the players interact with it or resolve it, or anything.

So, I’ve given them a way to get inside this ship - the plates open enough to crawl in when it curls in to “feast” during its attack - and they’ve spoken to the pilot, who pleaded for death or release. They’ve resolved to heroically save this guy. They cleverly spoke with his guy’s dead internet girlfriend, so I also gave them a code that will be somehow useful here.

I put together a dungeon for this last night, but it’d be great to flesh it out a bit more, add some more interest. The current dungeon just has lore rewards, some weird extragalactic gadgets, and some space weapons (if they find them).

Basically, they enter near the feet of the ship, there’s a combat encounter, they find a way into the “spine” of the creature, then walk down this hallway (the gravity plane is on the wall) fighting monsters, they get across open, battle-damaged sections further up the spine, then they reach the head, where they either have some genius idea to open the main door to the boss, or they find the vents and enter the boss room that way.

When they reach the pilot, there will be battle with the Batship AI, where they can either:

1. Kill the pilot, ending his suffering.
2. Extract him, saving him, which will kill this ship, and with it an amazing spelljammer weapon.
3. Take his place, which will “kill” the Player Character that enters, but leaves the Batship as a Power Rangers-ass green rangery “bad guy ranger” NPC character they can both battle and work with in the future.
4. Reprogram? Which will doom this pilot to a further eternity of being shackled to this ship, but will sicc the ship on the enemy empire they’re fighting.

All the sections behind a thin line are “hidden” and can be uncovered with investigation.

Head:

Spine:

Feet:

[scratchmonkey]

RE: obstacles, think of it like what you’re saying in the spell section – there’s enough weird shit happening in D&D that they’ll be able to figure something out. Or even just avoid the obstacle entirely.

For rewards, the grenades sound great. I love giving people weird little things that aren’t in any official book that they kind of have to figure out. I deal with the money problem by using carousing rules – players spend money in “safe” towns to gain XP, with a chance of bad or just weird things happening as a result. There are plenty of carousing tables and rules out there if you poke around, find the one that makes the most sense to you or roll your own, if it’s a paradigm that would work for your group.

[Tulpa]

@Mothra

seems like it would suck to just not be able to progress, if the party didn’t happen to have any bright ideas.

@Mothra

I want to avoid there just being one way to do a dungeon, and it’s all on-rails.

this is why open-ended obstacles work in non-linear dungeons: there is never just one way to progress through a dungeon. If they get stuck at one obstacle (as unlikely as this is in practice, given what scratchmonkey highlighted), they have other potential routes to explore.

To be honest, I have the same worries about making impassable obstacles (lessened now that all the players are level 20) so to mitigate my own fears, I’ll seed possible solutions in out of the way places in my dungeons. Not in any sort of conscious adventure-game-design sort of way, but I’ll put things I’ll think the players might find useful in random rooms not near the obstacle

[falsedan]

@Mothra

make encounters trivial in a boring way

no that sounds fine and fun. did your players like feeling clever? then it was a good encounter. always be prepared for the story to go somewhere new. not plot prepared, but accepting in yourself

@Mothra

Giving good rewards is hard?

ask them what they’d like? generally I give out money and roll randomly on the item tables in a shop, “ok I got a Bag of Tricks, a powerful staff that turns into a snake (on command, right? something like that, sure) and a hovering adamantine shield that only understands Draconic. how much are they? how much ya got??”

giving out powerful, limited/repeatable-use items is more fun than constant utility items and helps avoid the “oops I forgot you could do that” problem. broom of flying, or boots of flying? and if you accidentally give out something too powerful, run a plotline where the item gets stolen

[Mothra]

Thanks all, helpful feedback.

@falsedan

did your players like feeling clever? then it was a good encounter. always be prepared for the story to go somewhere new. not plot prepared, but accepting in yourself

I think part of this issue is that only one player got to be clever, and the other two didn’t get to do the encounter or engage with the content, or do anything cool.

It’s a tough one, because creative solutions are great, but in these cases one person got to feel cool, and the others didn’t get to do nothin’.

The solution is probably just for me to get better about knowing my player’s abilities, back to front, so I can make better encounters.

[km]

Speaking of, last night in nora a random forgotten item in inventory was used to solve the problem of “we are super fucked, how do we defeat this elder vampire god” as a free action

[Tulpa]

I was ecstatic when you pulled up that item description, totally unplanned-for and an incredible resolution to that situation

[gary]

As one of the non-clever people in the assassination plot, I was quite happy to sneak around cartoonishly with lumpy space plasmoid while two dramatic tableaus happened nearby. It didn’t ever feel like we sequence broke the game, it’s just an alternate path with a whole bunch of other risks

Group stealth where everyone rolls and majority determines the success or not is probably a more equitable way to do it? That’s basically what we did during the escape sequences last session, I think.

I also think maybe my telepathy should have more restrictions, like Message - or I have to know generally who I’m speaking to or where they are. Plus they have to want to answer my “call”. It’s not very defined in the trait description but it seems like it’s based on Message.

[Father.Torque]

Money: since you’re running a super sentai game, it may just be the wrong genre for this. Forget about money, like literally don’t use it. Anything common the players should just have free access to, anything rare shouldn’t be expensive, instead it should be gated - behind adventure! You want magic item x? Well the only person who has one of those is Lachrimos, the court necromancer of Eldorak the Space Tyrant…

I.m.o. the uses of money in dnd are very genre-dependent. Low fantasy is low money, and you desperately need it just for basic survival items; default mid-to-high fantasy, money makes you powerful and political: strongholds, armies - capital. Facilities, laborers. Makes you of regional, then national interest to the other big-money-havers around, like dukes and bishops and wizards in their walking towers. Pulp/OD&D, I like the money-is-experience rule, which works well with the carousing rules Scratch was talking about.

[loki]

a friend lent me the first falcon gamebook, and i just played through it. it was ok.
the story was good: you’re a newly qualified agent in an agency that oversees time travel, to ensure no-one changes history. the agency is a big, multi-species concern, headed by five “lords”, each also from a different species. you uncover a plot tocause big changes to the timeline, apparently with one of the five lords at the top of it, so you go to various different times (not all of which are on earth!) to figure out who’s behind the plot and also stop them.
the problem is in the design. there’s a lot of instant deaths, a lot of pointless linear pageflipping (ie. you get to the end of one entry, and just get told to go to another one, no choice to be made), and also a bunch of instant deaths out of nowhere. you have a bunch of stats that can modify certain dice rolls, all of them start at zero, and at no point during the adventure did any go up or down. also, early on, i got a “psionic dampening circlet” from a fallen enemy, and i was assuming it would protect you from a psychic attack at some point, but it never did. i guess it kind of works as a clue when one of the conspirators is also wearing one when you catch them, but that’s a little abstract?

there’s also an endgame scoring system, where some entries will tell you “score a B” or whatever. then you have to look at the back of the next book in the series (i found a pdf online) to find your score, based on the letters you noted. i scored 2 - “demoted to cadet. back to the academy, falcon”

[extrabastardformula]

Dungeon World is really neat. It’s more DnD than DnD is, and it’s a lot of fun. The whole DM never rolls dice bit could make things less fun to run because everyone should get to roll some dice, but it’s really great stuff. And it’s a really sharp contrast to what I’ve seen in surveys about how 5e players usually leave out things like alignment and XP when they play since those two things are given a lot of life here. Good stuff, my new DnD of choice (though the lighter World of Dungeons has gotten more play from me and probably will continue to do so)

[Tulpa]

I really miss playing dungeon world or at least other much less rules-bound takes on DnD. Dungeon World is just so much easier to run than 5e, because monsters hardly have any stats and they have interesting moves to make. The player moves also make it so easy to keep the game moving forward.

Should come as no surprise that I directly swiped the xp and alignment mechanics from Dungeon World when we started our No Rangers Allowed game (They were the easiest to just import wholesale, since vanilla 5e experience rules are trash and alignments don’t have any mechanics attached)

[extrabastardformula]

i’ gonna be honest. i’ve never played 5e. I pretty much gave up entirely on DnD proper in the 4e era.

[Tulpa]

5e’s about the same complexity as 2e, it’s more like a stripped down 3e than anything

[vodselbt]

hnngh i feel it. the itch to play ttrpgs and GM again - it’s upon me!

[Mothra]

Yield to itttt

[vodselbt]

I think I’m gonna! Started talking to friends about a specifically not long term rpg adventure. I was gonna go with dnd because I’m sort of familiar with it enough but @Tulpa posting about dungeon world above has me interested. I just need to somehow get my hands on the PDF rule book to see what it’s like…

[Father.Torque]

Play online, recruit sb people as players. You will not regret it.

[vodselbt]

I am reading the Dungeon World PDF and it’s getting me to realize that dnd 5e’s reputation for supposedly allowing more social interaction and character roleplay is like true… if you are some kind of naturally performative type or a theatre kid. because that reputation has, i think, no where near the amount of mechanical basis that it seems a game like Dungeon World does.

I have played 5e games where there is every opportunity to build a character with stats that support its rich historical background, but none of the actions in the game really put pressure on players to turn that exposition into an actual performance. often is the case its the attitude the payer already comes to the table with that determines whether that character will come to life during gameplay- which is a pretty damning thing to say of a mechanical rpg system i think!! but it’s no wonder then why real play podcasts like critical roll are babied so hard by WoC because professional actors are the ideal players of this iteration of dnd.

I’m only early into this manual but I am already quite liking what I’m reading and think it will be perfect for my nogamez friends.

[Father.Torque]

@vodselbt

dnd 5e’s reputation for supposedly allowing more social interaction and character roleplay

What. With whom does it have this reputation. Everyone knows dnd is a relatively chunky tactical combat system and gives no mechanical support to roleplaying. Or I thought everyone knew this?