Spolier Alert

WARNING: Posts addressing individual campaigns contain spoilers, including: Lost Mine of Phandelver, Horde of the Dragon Queen, The Rise of Tiamat, Yawning Portal, Princes of the Apocalypse, and home-brew content.

Saturday, December 4, 2021

D&D 5E: Druid Shape Shift and FoundryVTT

My games seem to always include at least one player as a Druid, who inevitably love their Wild Shape ability.  As we are now playing on FoundryVTT, understanding how wild shape can be made to work in this VTT is essential. 

The rules for this ability are available on DnDBeyond, Wild Shape, I'll save some bits and not reiterate them here.  There are also multiple guides out there on how to use wild shape, I'll link to one on D&DBeyond here: Druid 101: Wild Shape Guide.  

The challenge I am looking at is how I want to make the ability operate in my games.  That's what I will be diving into in this post. 

Sunday, November 28, 2021

Occultist's Coven Familiar Bond in a Barovia FoundryVTT Game

 One of my players in my Curse of Strahd campaign just started a character based on KibblesTasty's homebrew Occultist v1.1.  We've moved it from Wisdom-based to Intelligence as the group has zero intelligence-centered characters and it feels right for someone to be smart in a group trying to survive in Barovia, and as a largely arcane caster it seems appropriate for the character to push intelligence. 

A more challenging portion of the character has been the Familiar Bond options available to the three coven's defined in the post of the class. Specifically, how to implement one of them in a FoundryVTT based campaign without making them annoying.  

In this post, I'm going to briefly consider each of the three and then dive deeper into what seems like the best-fit ability. 

Friday, November 19, 2021

Implementing Party Loot in FoundryVTT

 

Group loot has been a thing since the first days of D&D.  Back then, a single player might be charged with keeping a paper tally of the groups transactions and occasionally paying for items or making distributionsto the party.  Of course, that player would occasionally lose the paper record causing the DM to loose hair (again) and generally upsetting any semblance of an economy in the game.

With advancing technology, that paper list has typically moved to digital form.  My most recent implementation has been with a shared googles sheets file.  That eliminates the lost paper problem, but leaves the inventory disjoint from the game, especially when using a VTT such as Foundry.  

Saturday, October 23, 2021

Implementing Vampiric Bite and Regeneration

I am in the midst of trying to migrate my Curse of Strahd game from Roll20 to Foundry. I am using Midi QOL to automate damage applications so that I don't lose function from what Roll20 did for me. A bunch of things has gone very smoothly, but I am a bit stuck on two of the vampiric abilities:

Vampiric Bite -- On hit: 6 (1d6 + 3) piercing damage plus 7 (2d6) necrotic damage. The target's hit point maximum is reduced by an amount equal to the necrotic damage taken, and the vampire regains hit points equal to that amount. The reduction lasts until the target finishes a long rest -- I'd like to automate the self-heal component and maybe even the mac hit point reduction, though, I'm totally ready to accept just the self-heal portion.  

Regeneration -- The vampire regains 10 hit points at the start of its turn if it has at least 1 hit point and isn't in sunlight or running water. If the vampire takes radiant damage or damage from holy water, this trait doesn't function at the start of the vampire's next turn -- The conditions seem a bit convoluted for automation, so my current goal is just to create a simple action that does self-healing.