Last night on D&D 5e with my pack of level 6 characters. Solstron the Paladin dwarf (me), elf druid, half elf bard, half elf ranged fighter/rogue and human wizard.

We were exploring a swamp due to recent troll activity in the villages near the area and we found an area with rotting humanoid carcasses, skulls etc but no one there. The druid changed into an aquatic serpent and explored a deeper part of the swamp where she encountered a crocodile that was in reality a lizardfolk druid. It was late so the bard did a Leomund's Tiny Hut and we slept like babies. When we woke up and left the tent, we were ambushed and surrounded by 8 lizardfolk people, including the druid/shaman and a big ass warrior with a trident. The wizard used counter-spell has a reaction immediately when he left the tent has he heard the shaman summoning a spell, good thing since it was entangle apparently. He used it later on as well and managed to counter Heat Metal and it was destined for my character!

The big ass lizarfolk was tough to kill but I did it by myself while the others were handling the others. The wizard impressed with his lightning bolt and turned the shaman into ashes. I used 3 or 4 divine smites to take down the lizard king (he had like 80 HP) and after his death, it was easy to dispatch of his minions. After that, we did a short rest (I was almost out of spell slots) and decided to continue our exploration. We killed a fire king during the last session and we got a wand that he used to look for adamantium (Wolverine!?) and we used that to look for the precious metal as well. So the wand showed us the way. We reached a large clearing with really ancient ruins. We weren't quite fresh but still decided to enter this big ruined castle. We were in waist deep water when water blasts surprised us. Only the wizard failed his strength check (obviously) and took some damage. When we regained our senses, a huge creature appeared! The first two people in line received a huge acid blast when the BLACK DRAGON appeared! Solstron failed his dexterity check and took motherfucking 51 damage (my HP is 72) so he decided to retreat even though he never does (since he's courageously dumb.) He almost died later on because of a mosquitoes swarm and I managed to really suck in this battle. I used the spell Aid on my bros to help but did almost nothing else. The druid, the fighter/rogue with his crossbow and the wizard did all the damage and we killed the dragon. We almost all died when he used the lair action and made the ceiling fall on us (I was luckily out of the fortress with the bard) but the fighter did his save or it was instant death for him.

After the death of the dragon, we spent all day recovering and exploring the fortress for loot. We found a shitload of money and some other stuff. The pack decided to give me the Cloak of Protection (+1 AC) and this combined with plate mail could give me 23 of AC! (I have 21 now.) We also found a 1 ton adamantium monolith. We'll deal with all of this in the next session.

Nice! Epic as fuck. Our campaign really doesn't have very much combat in it, maybe 1-2 small encounters per session. That whole session I mentioned above had one minor encounter (in which me and one other person "accidentally" told members of the opposing thieves guild where the brothel was, and then ran away) and one major encounter, where we found a group of thugs with a thief captain. The DM doesn't like combat much because he's very lazy when it comes to statting large numbers of enemies Plus, none of us really like the kind of "meat-grinder" campaign some people enjoy. That's why 5e is such a good fit for us, I think. When a battle does pop up, we're done with it in maybe 15 minutes, and the rounds go by quickly. Often we don't even need to get the mat and minis out.

Oh nice, I didn't notice there was a boardgame and RPG thread here before! Cool stuff.

Lately we've been playing a lot of Catan, Pandemic and Citadels. Catan has started some fierce ongoing rivalries and trade embargoes Also recently bought Agricola. It took a real effort to try to learn the rules enough to even start playing it, but after we did it was a lot of fun. Also like having board games like that where if you want to play by yourself technically you can do that too.

I like worker placement games, but the issue I have with Agricola is it can be pretty easy for inexperienced players to make a couple bad moves and screw themselves in the long run. Or maybe that's just me and I'm bad at it, haha. I played Lords of Waterdeep recently, which is D&D themed worker placement and a bit more at my skill level. There are definitely some sub-optimal choices, but generally no move is going to be outright terrible, so even with some clear front runners the point spread wasn't too wide at the end of the game.


Yeah, most of our encounters we don't bother with a grid and all that, which is perfectly fine with me.

Was never a hardcore D&D fan but I thought this fits the thread.

http://www.polygon.com/2017/3/13/149073 ... -app-curse

Yeah I read about that earlier, very curious to see how that turns out.

Yeah I totally get that with Agricola. The first time we played it it was the same. Basically it was only like half way through the game that I started to realise the strategy I should have been taking all along, and by that time I was already fucked. I think I managed to finish with like 9 points or something like that. Even while sucking at it though I still quite like it. I think I've seen Lords of Waterdeep around our local gameshop but never looked at the description. Sounds cool though from what you say.

And yeah with D&D (although recently we switched to Dungeon World which I'm liking less than D&D) combat I'm like the opposite of you guys. I like the grid and character tokens since I'm always the one wanting to know where the fuck I am in relation to the enemies lol

Speaking of games and apps, I had a chance to play Descent cooperatively against the iPad. I'd never played the game before, but was familiar with the derivitive Imperial Assault. It provided a very smooth playing experience, and cooperative dungeon fighting is a lot of fun. Our time with Imperial Assault would have been WAY better if it had been organized with an app when we played it. Too many mistakes and pressure for the Empire player. Descent was seamless and methodical this way. Great way to play.

One of the regulars in the local D&D group conveniently moved to Japan, so they've got a spot open in their regular campaign now. I met up with the DM guy last night over some pizza and beers to get some background on the other players and their characters and campaign and to get started on rolling my character. The other guys are level 6 and about to embark on a big dungeon crawl that'll be sort of the climax of their campaign. The dungeon crawl is expected to last a few sessions. They're starting me at level 4 so hopefully I don't drag the party down too much.

I decided to go with a half-orc barbarian wielding a big greataxe. I'm still researching stuff for his background but right now I've got some ideas. He's got some really high rolls, thankfully (17 str, 16 con, 15 dex, 14 wisdom, 12 int, 11 cha), so he hits like a truck and has a lot of HP. His background is as a soldier, so I'm going to try to come up with some plausible backstory where he was a member of a sort of Fighter's Guild sort of military unit with fairly strict lifestyle/rules of engagement/general ethos that has slowly become more interested in profits and morally questionable contracts and so he abandoned them to strike out on his own and maybe try to recreate past glories by joining up with this group of adventurers he's heard about. Seems like a good reason to get him involved at this late stage of their story. Also in the group is a dwarf cleric, a human ranger, a dwarf fighter and an elf sorcerer I think. It's set in Forgotten Realms, and I'm hoping to have some fun interactions with the dwarves especially. My character is going to be kind of terrible about picking up on social cues and such, and is really naive about kind of more standard social interaction, but has a lot of wisdom about the art of war, which should hopefully be helpful. Still working on a name and such.

Honestly, don't bother making too much of a backstory. Just do the broad strokes. Most of the important "backstory" will come from the actual games you guys play together and the relationships your characters develop with each other.

When you're a min/maxxer like me, backstory is 95% of the fun--you just made this bizarre abomination, so how the hell did it ever come to be?

I'm not going for a bizarre abomination. Their campaign is coming to an end, so I figure I'll just make a "go-to" barbarian character or something rather than something really goofy and unconventional for my first gaming session with people I don't know and who might get pretty angry if the new guy shows up with some clusterfuck of a character who gets their characters killed through some tomfoolery. After I get to know the people better, and maybe on the next campaign, I'll come up with something a bit stranger.

Yeah, it helps to think about it like an ensemble TV show like Farscape or Star Trek or something, where each character has a very simple backstory with maybe one or two hooks - like how much backstory does Miles Obrien even get? He was an enlisted man, fought in the Cardassian wars, is a very capable engineer/technician, and has a wife. That's basically it. Even a more unusual character like Odo or Data really doesn't get much more than that.

^I hadn't thought of it like that before, but that's a great way to put it.

So, I introduced a group of friends to Eldritch Horror and much to my delight they all had a blast. It's a co-op game and although we got wrecked everybody had fun. I took the role of lead investigator and at one point I was given the option to either advance the Doom (DOOOOM!) tract or accept an agreement with dark forces. At this stage in the game I knew it wasn't a good trade, but I let my pals sort it out and after some discussion they decided it was a good idea to accept the agreement. When the Reckoning came I flipped over the card and it started with the rather ominous "you didn't think much of giving the names and descriptions of your companions at the time..." and then it made me chose one other player to die. So I chose my friend who really insisted it was a good idea to take the agreement. We all had a laugh, and then lost three rounds later as the world was devoured by the blind idiot god Azathoth. Good times!

Backstories can be a DM's best friend, though. Clues and intrigue to misdirect the player into a trap! Six-fingered man killed your father? Recognizable demon wiped out your village? Elder sister left home to find a cure for your mother's illness and never returned? Entire stretches of your campaign can be spent resolving one of the players' backstories!

Oh for sure! My DM loves that shit and uses it well. In my current campaign we're being stalked by the former mentor of our ranger, who one day suddenly abandoned his young pupil to seemly take up a darker path. We aren't sure why he is pursuing us, but he appears to have connections to the Arcanum, a society of powerful and xenophobic elves that our noble born half-elf bard fled from. Personally, I think that maybe the mentor dude is being manipulated but I've sworn an oath to my ranger friend that I will help him slay his former master. And as a Goliath barbarian my word is true, forged through iron and blood. Plus, I was lonely after leaving my people so if my new friend says someone is a bad guy and wants my help to kill them ehhhh, I'm game.

I think the main point failsafeman made is that you don't need to write a novel. Bring a few good ideas to the table and see how they play out with the group.

Oh, yeah, I'm not getting all wordy or anything. I just want a plausible reason for my guy to be showing up right before they start the campaign-ending dungeon crawl to be like, "hey can i come with u guize" without clashing with all of the stuff that's already happened in the area.

Here's what I've got: he was an experienced but not high-ranking member of The Order of the High Heart (hail Gene Wolfe), a sort of city guard/army for hire established in Helm's Hold southeast of Neverwinter in the aftermath of that huge plague when the place was pretty well wrecked and lawless. These were general do-gooder types. Over time, the more powerful religious sect The Order of the Gauntlet moved in and kinda took the reigns on protecting the city. They have a splinter group called The Order of the Gilded Eye that's even more zealous, basically stopping at nothing to dish out their divine lawful goodness wherever evil is perceived (this part is all already part of the universe, except the Order of the High Heart part which I made up).

Anyway, since his fighter's guild was getting pushed out by the zealots, they opted to come under the shadowy wing of the often morally questionable Zhentarim, which my guy was not really cool with. So he packed up his shit and headed south, looking to join a more agreeable organization to put his A-grade head busting skills to good use, when he started hearing rumors of the group of heroes who he'll be joining.

It's an eyeroll at the ludicrously appropriate timing: two sessions before we'd been talking about black puddings becasue they're iconic 'odd;y named' things Plus the GM really likes ozes and tentacled things so OOTA is really working for him :S XD

I was really sad to leave Glabagool behind, he was blinkin' awesome And our water elemental halfbreed (they've got a name I can't remember; this is also the least experienced player!) wanted to swim through it... ::facepalm::

On the Agricola front, I much prefer Caverna: seems a bit more forgiving and a lot more fun because it's fantasy dwarves

Have not played Caverna but was reading a bit about it. Will give it a go at some point. We've still been playing Agricola a lot lately, still really challenging but at least I've improved a bit. I'm at least consistently scoring more in the 20-30 point range vs a few weeks ago when we first started even getting over 10 point was a challenge haha. My "highest" score at this point has been 28 points. Still really enjoying the game though even though I suck at it lol. Assistant Ploughman (think that's what it's call, can't recall now) that allows you to plough a field every time you visit the day labour space, is definitely my favourite occupation at this point. Always happy when I snag that one. I still have trouble with the "family planning" aspect of the game, which according to the strategies I've read online is supposedly where the focus should be. Most of my points are still coming from basically racing to fill up as many fields as possible. I think part of it too is that I lose focus sometimes between food production strategy and points strategy so I don't like to grow my "family" too much. Too many times I've ended up having to focus too much on feeding my "meeples" instead of getting a proper strategy down early on.

I'm typically not a fan of worker placement games (because I suck at them), but Lords of Waterdeep is pretty good. It's something my group discovered when we were still figuring out which kinds of games each of us like, and it's still a go-to to this day. I've only won it once, and I think that was by dumb luck, but it's a solid experience with a lot of choices going on.

My preferred incarnation of Lords, though, is Champions of Midgard. I'm a sucker for viking themes, and it has many of the same elements you see in Lords of Waterdeep (worker placement for resources, resource management, questing, acquiring warriors of different classes) but it has more of the random element that I enjoy. Your warriors are six-sided dice, and the result of combat against monsters is dictated by how well you roll and the abilities you have to mitigate the poor rolls. Your clan leaders give you in-game bonuses (as opposed to the end-game extra points you get from the guild leaders in Lords) which can help in combat or in the acquisition of resources. I love it because you can be great at Euro games and have the best strategies, yet still fall victim to the luck of the dice. But both games have the same strategic elements: depending upon turn order, sometimes somebody will get to the location you needed before you so it becomes a matter of settling for the next best option, or just doing something randomly and hoping it works out.

So, in our last session, we were planning to somehow dispose of this evil lazy baron who had refused to help us deal with the thieves guild war (even though it's happening in his own jurisdiction and he's losing tax money because of it), so we thought about talking to his son or someone with power to help instead. The only problem is, his son is 10, and all of his officials are shitty yes-men. However, as we were looking for the baron, we found that he was at an inn visiting some town, with only about 10 guards with him...so we immediately decided to assassinate him.

We talked to the baron's young son to feel him out, and as it turns out he's actually a boy genius, but also maybe evil. Well, better an evil guy who owes us one than an evil guy who won't lift a finger to help. Our ranger was able to convince the baron's horses that he eats horse meat, and as he was a disgusting fellow to begin with, they completely believed him. We convinced the baron's wagon guy to let us bring the horses around, and at just the "wrong" moment, our rogue set off a small explosion that spooked the horses, our ranger dropped the reins, and the horses trampled the shitty baron to death.

So, nobody suspects us, and nobody cares to investigate too closely anyway. The baron's son gave us 50 guards to help deal with the thieves guild war, and we'll be wrapping that up next session hopefully.

Kind of a weird campaign so far - practically no combat, very little dice rolling for skill checks even, but we're getting a lot done and the DM isn't being a wuss or anything. We're just solving most of our problems creatively.

Haha, that's incredible.

My first session with the main group got called off because one guy's son was in the hospital (not serious - people go to the hospital for the sniffles in Korea) so we're meeting up the first weekend of April instead. I'm also doing a one-shot session with some other newbies this Saturday with a level 2 version of my half-orc barbarian, so that should be a fun way to get into the swing of things without worrying about fucking up a long campaign.

ha! I love it when characters have a blind spot. Makes the role playing really fun. I really enjoy having to remember all the stuff my character can't do or wouldn't know.

I have some of the backstory development files and tables from Ultimate Campaign if you want them (for Pathfinder, but it's probably enough to give you some ideas, so you aren't having to reinvent the wheel). I found them really, really helpful. You can make as much or as little as you want. I tend to like a medium amount because too much and you're getting into irrelevant details (type of bunny eaten when child), and too little and you end up filling in too many of the blanks with your own knee-jerk reactions (type of meat you'd eat vs. what character likes -- bunny. Imagine a half orc chasing after every bunny he came across. Tedious, but yummy!). That said, fsm is right in that a lot of the decisions will get made in game. My character (half-orc, also) developed a taste for eating dwarf, which is not part of his explicit backstory, it's just something that cropped up as I put myself in the dude's shoes. He hates slavers, and killed several of them, and he was hungry, and he wanted to eat them, but the paladin talked him out of it, and now he's just kind of got this thing in the back of his head where he wants to eat dwarf cooked on an open fire.

I'm playing a half orc at the moment, and I find their almost guaranteed life of hardship and conflict basically requires some nuance in backstory so that playing is believable. Impersonal sword and board is pretty dull. I can send you the files if you're interested.

Hmm, nah. That sounds really interesting but I don't wanna accidentally borrow your ideas even subconsciously. Though I'd be interested in reading it once I've put him through a couple of sessions.

I just think it would be kind of enjoyable for my character to know that he's imposing and intimidating and therefore would attempt to use that to his advantage in social situations, but thinks he's only intimidating when he acts tough on purpose and is otherwise oblivious to why people are put off by his presence. Hopefully the DM knowing this kind of thing about my character could result in some good scenarios.

Oh, I didn't mean files on my own character, I meant the Pathfinder background builder materials that I used to make my character's backstory.

It ended up providing feats, etc., that come with certain events that have happened in the past. For instance, I had already decided that he'd killed as a youngling. Turns out there's a modifier for that. He doesn't know his homeland, and there's an attribute adjustment for that. They aren't all good for you, which is really cool.

Just had my first session! It was just a one-shot with some other newbies, but I was using a level 2 version of my half-orc barbarian to get into game mode for next week's campaign. It was pretty basic stuff with more combat than I expected. Showed up in a town with a new constable type guy who replaced another guy who went missing after only a week on the job a couple months prior. There's a town militia made up of ruffians who recently killed a guy in broad daylight then came back later and abducted his family. After getting some information out of various townfolk we headed toward the ruined manor where the ruffians stay and didn't see or hear anything, so we went to the inn where they hang out. Some of them accosted us outside the inn and despite efforts to avoid a fight they were itching for one so fight we gave them. Much blood was spilled, and I hauled one guy back to the constable for questioning. We then went back to the inn and tried another approach to being friendly - gambling with some of the ruffians, but they just tried to rob us and weren't in a playful mood so we killed those bastards as well.

Then we went to the ruins and down into a cellar for a nice dungeon crawl with some interesting combat scenarios and some traps and stuff, plus that family who were being kept as slaves. We finally found the missing constable, who was also the wizard ringleader of this slaver ruffian gang. Our ranger, who is also a sage, researcher, curious about ancient things and philosophically inclined, kept questioning this guy about his own research and his motivations but it got pretty boring so I definitely axed him a question. He had some sort of magical shield that raised his armor class to 20 or something but I rolled a crit and scattered his brains all over the walls.

Definitely looking forward to next week's session with the main group!

Interesting first session, batman!

Played one with my dwarf paladin last night. It was quite fun. We were still near the fortress where we killed the dragon. A big adamantine monolith was hidden in the fortress and turns out the fire giants really want to get their hands on the stuff so while we were wondering what to do with the monolith, one appeared with his minions (1 fire giant, 5 ogres, 20 hobgoblin, 20 goblins) and we killed them all. We were in a swamp near a cliff and we heard them coming from far away. The wizard sent his flying cat as a scout and the bard had the time to summon a Leomund tiny hut to give us a big bonus. The wizard made himself invisible, waited for them to come down the cliff and unleashed a big ass thunderbolt (40 damaged points on 3 of the ogres and the fire giant) and I took care of the goblins and the hobgoblins. I kept them busy while the druid used her Call Lightning spell (damn that's good). She also used Summon Spikes while the forces were approaching and it killed like half of the goblins and it badly hurt the ogres.

4 of us stayed near the hut while our ranged fighter climbed on the fortress and found a great vantage point. He basically makes like 40 points of damage every turn with his crossbows. I played the tank role well with my 22 AC and kept the enemies busy

The white dice are hobgoblins trying to hurt me. At what time, I was surrounded by 10 goblins and it was their turn to attack, only 1 managed to beat my armor class and he did 1 of damage lol.


After that, we went to a big city and met the Harper Order to report on the situation. This is a fun campaign so far.

Haha nice, I've got my party built out of Legos too, all except for our damn Goliath luchador grappler. Not enough giant minifigs!

We don't use miniatures because the DM says it just kinda makes things more mechanical and less imagination-y. He does bust out a little whiteboard with like football diagrams for more complex fights, though. I can't really picture doing a battle like the one Tony described without really keeping track of all of that stuff - maybe we'll get to that point later on, but even the campaign I'm joining is only level 6 people so it's not like they're fighting armies.

Yeah like I mentioned earlier, we'll go entire sessions without busting out the mat and minis, but sometimes you really need them. What they work really well for actually is exploring tunnels/ruins/buildings/whatever. The DM just draws right on the mat what we can see, filling it in as we turn corners and such. Sure, he could just describe "a long dark hallway made of rough stone" or whatever, but actually being able to see the layout as well adds a surprising amount of tension, since you just KNOW there's going to he some bullshit waiting right around the corner, and unlike video games, every single encounter can potentially fuck you up.

Oh, for that, my DM uses a computer monitor that has pretty detailed maps. He opens them up in photoshop and then puts another layer of black on top which he erases with an eraser brush thingy to reveal things that we can see.

Pfff, we use a mat and marker pens and it's as fun! No need for complex, expensive shit!

Ah, we're almost level 7 and since three of our players are super experimented, it's totally fine to kill armies hahaha! I really think a mat and figurines are necessary for battles like those just to make sure everyone knows what's going on and there's no confusion.

Miniatures/tokens all the way! I'm General Patton, goddammit!

Haha, yeah, I can see them being nice. The computer has other advantages, too; the DM pulled up painted backgrounds for some different places we went to, and has a playlist of music he queued up for different situations. It was immersive, damnit!

My DM has a bluetooth speaker that he plays a soundtrack on too. Changes it up for combat and everything! Pretty sure my DM could beat up your DM.

My DM (me) makes his own soundtracks. My DM is awesome.

My DM doesn't use a soundtrack because he knows it's fucking annoying!

No way dude! It adds a lot as long as it's background shit and not too loud. Try it!

Yeah, I don't think I'd like it if he played really engaging music, but he sticks to subtle stuff. He had just woodsy medieval instrumental folk for the outdoor wilderness areas, more upbeat folk with barroom noise for the tavern, deep echoey ambient with water dripping and stuff for the dungeon area, even boss battle music! It was really subtle and added a nice touch.

Sorry, double post!

Had my first session with the ongoing campaign today and felt so weak at first. Some of the other people couldn't make it so it was just me, a half-elf warlock and a halfling fighter. Our first encounter was some crazy shapeshifter (druid?) woman with a giant boar pet who was running a toll operation on this bridge. Immediately the warlock runs to the side of the road and used his double eldritch blast to just blow the boar clear off the bridge into the ravine below. I then go to engage the woman in combat and she starts turning into a wereboar. I smack her with some impressive damage but hey, she's a wereboar and immune to normal damage, so nope. The halfling comes over and messes her up pretty bad with his magical sword, then the warlock blows her ass into the ravine as well.

Later on we got ambushed by some elemental cultists and I was pretty ineffective until I started doing some serious damage via a couple nasty crits that did actually help turn the tide of battle, but the fighter being two levels higher than me made a really big difference and the warlock just had so much useful shit going on. Still super fun, and I managed to kill half of the cultists as well as the big landshark (or something?) beast one of them was riding, so it was a pretty good day. I'll also level up from the experience, and getting to level 5 on my barbarian plus having the frenzy on rages skill lets me attack three times per turn, so that's pretty nice.