Critical Misses

A little while ago, I adopted a house rule that made critical hits more impactful and speeded them up just a bit, that is, critical hits roll normal damage and add the maximum dice roll as a bonus. As an example, a sword that would do 1d8+2 damage, will do 1d8+10.  This causes critical hits to always do more damage than normal hits and eliminates the need to roll an extra die or double the roll (depending on how crits are being handled).

This change feels good to me, it makes crits impactful, that is what everyone expects them to be and it doesn't slow things up, actually steam lines things a bit.

The unintended consequence is that it penalizes damage done via saving throws which can't crit at all, and now they miss out on the possibility of a damage jackpot. It also creates what feels like an asymmetry between impactful critical hits and a simple auto-miss on a roll of 1, a roll sometimes referred to as a critical miss.

Mind Sliver (UA) Allowed?

One of my players asked me recently if he could use the Mind Sliver (MS) spell from Unearthed Arcana on his Wizard.  I'm inclined to be very careful about adding spells that are home brew or a play test status.  It's easy to have unintended consequences that cause ripples that I'd rather avoid.

MS is a cantrip offered to four classes, Bard, Sorc, Lock, Wiz. It  does minor (d6) damage and imposes a d4 penalty on saves if its target fails an INT save.  That is an amazing effect, one of the very few,  perhaps only spammable ability that affects saving throws and it hits INT a rarely targeted stat that is often low and fairly easy to judge before the cast.

Magic Item Costs or Values

The magic item pricing system for D&D 5e, if we can call what it a pricing system, combines uselessness with insanity.  I'm going to delve into my thoughts on the subject in this article and point to what seems like a reasonable alternative.

Scaling Cantrips?

Ism't it curious that the damage cantrips scale while the utility ones do not.  To some degree that makes sense, there are more powerful utility spells covering some of the same things as cantrips, but certainly not all of them.

If utility cantrips were to scale, they must do so carefully so they do encroach on abilities provided by higher level spells.  Fortunately, this and other potential pitfalls have been considered by the OP in this thread: Evolving Cantrips.

I'm far from certain that I want to use the home brew he suggests, but it seems worth a look.

Here is a link direct to the newest (as of today) incarnation of this brew: Evolving Cantrips & Psionic Talents V2.5. The "printer friendly" version isn't browser friendly, it dies in Safari, seems to work in Chrome.

Shadows of the Apocalypse

Joe has recently had the opportunity to join a campaign being DMed by Jonathan in his home brew world, titled: Shadows of the Apocalypse.

To no one's surprise, I have begun a journal and created a background document for Jin my changeling bard.  The documents are linked here, be warned that these reflect his thoughts and view point and as such may both be incorrect and spoilers of a sort, though my intent is they will allow up to date players in the campaign to review events and be ready to play at each session with a good memory of what "just happened" even if it was weeks ago IRL.

Jin's Journal
Jin's Background

Yawning Portal Series

Roy is running an ongoing series of modules, so far from the Tales of the Yawning Portal publication. As of now, we have largely finished the "Forge of Fire," the adventurers needing only to exit the place, we think.

I have started keeping a journal for these expeditions, which I expect to break up into different documents for each module.  The journal can be found at:

Forge of Fire

I have also created a channel on my discord server, if you are playing in this campaign, you are invited to join the server, let me know your screen name and I will be able to grant access to the campaign channel.  Note the campaigns on my discord server are all private.

Bear It D&D Discord

One Shot Adventures

This past Monday, our regular session was canceled as two players were going to miss the session.  There was some desire to run a on-shot adventure, which is a bit of a challenge in our relatively short play window (4 hours at max).  This got me to thinking about how to make it possible to pull off.

We really need two things to be ready to roll quickly, a set of characters and a scenario to run.  That got me to looking around the web and I ran across some useful pages for both issues.

Creating Characters: Point Buy vs Rolls

One of the longest lasting element of any character are his opening stats.  It feels great to roll those dice and get monster stats.  It feels a lot less great to come up with middling numbers. Often times a DM will allow a reroll, but their is a tendency for some people to just accept what they have rolled and possibly be unhappy with it for a long time. 

I've always favored point-buy or similar approaches as they result in the same resources for all players.  This starts everyone off on an even playing field and pretty much assures that class abilities will matter.

I ran across an article that discusses the benefits of point buy on the web, and want to share the link here: Dungeon Solvers: Why You Should Use Point Buy for D&D 5e Character Creation

Another approach that allows rolling stats, is a collective pool.  All the participants roll up their set of stats and then the numbers are put into a common pool. The players then take turns taking the number of their choice from the pool.  Most likely in an order determined by high rolls, reversing in the next round, so that the person who picks first in round one picks last in round two.  The next two sets of rounds can retain the same order or determine new orders.