Campaign: Travels in Barovia

Joe is planning to host a campaign set in Barovia, a land lost in time, currently under the stewardship of one Count Strahd von Zarovich. Strahd has quite a history in the worlds of D&D, some of what the players may have heard is likely true, other portions may turn out to be myths.  This posting is intended to share some links intended to be useful for the campaign and do a bit of a level set, especially to provide guidance for character creation and setting of some expectations. 

The campaign setting is reasonably described as dark Gothic horror rather than a more typical heroic fantasy setting. To quote from Wikipedia:

Gothic fiction, which is largely known by the subgenre of Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature and film that combines fiction and horror, death, and at times romance. ... Another well known novel in this genre, dating from the late Victorian era, is Bram Stoker's Dracula

Campaign Links & Resources

• House Rules (to be reviewed/updated during session 0): Version 3.0
• Session Notes and Group Treasure: Travels in Barovia -- Player Notes
• Session 0 Notes
  

The player notes document requires permission to access.  Please request that, if you are a player in the game, which will give you edit authority to the file. 

Feat: Mage Slayer

There is a nifty feat titled Mage Slayer which seems clearly intended to make melee characters effective at shutting down casters or at least noticeably better at that task.

By RAW the Mage Slayer when he/she is nose to nose (within 5 feet) of a caster can poke that caster as a reaction to a spell cast.  Disappointingly, the mage slayer must politely wait for the cast to complete before making his/her attack.  

That wait can be rather disappointing if the caster decided to polymorph the mage slayer into a slug, teleported away, or any of a myriad casts that disable the mage slayer's ability.  

I'd think the mage slayer wouldn't patiently wait for the spell to complete, he or she would smack the caster and hope to fizzle that spell before it completes.  This posting considers how to make that work in 5E (hint: a house rule).

Exhaustion and Fatigue

 

Exhaustion is described in the Player's Handbook in Appendix A.  I read it as being rather clear and understandable as well as punishingly debilitating.

The high level of punishment is my driver for this post.  Exhaustion is used in 5E as a penalty for extended forced marches, long term exposure to extreme conditions, chases of a minute or so duration and a few other things.

Recovering from exhaustion requires a long rest to heal one level, meaning that a character that has pushed forward for days and reached 5 stacks of exhaustion is going to need 5 days of rest to fully recover.  That is a lot, but it is an extreme level of exhaustion from great and extended effort.  A chase, run RAW, can result in that same level of exhaustion in 8 rounds, less than a minute of running.  This implies that a far number of people running a quarter mile sprint end up incapacitated for the better part of a week before they are back to normal and suggests that longer sprints are just impossible.   

Average Adventurers are Anything But Average (in D&D 5e)

One of the first issues facing any new campaign is how the characters will be created.  I believe there are actually two issues that tend to be addressed a bit sloppily together when it comes to establishing character stats: (1) The technique to come up with values, and, (2) how to make the characters heroic, or amazing, or simply better than average - as the player who wants to play a below average character is fairly rare.  

A similar issue also arises on hit points and in some games critical hits.  Both of these aspects are oh so tempting to buff to make the player characters feel more heroic. 

While the DM can always, with effort, scale challenges to fit any inflated "heroic" party, that just seems unnecessary to me.  The game system also tends to break more easily at its limits.  A character with multiple 20s in stats is going to be taking feats which when stacked can result in synergies that are both fun (for some) and game-breaking for everyone.

In this post I will be spelling out my view on the following topics, generally advocating an average approach, which given that adventurers are far, far from average, is actually heroic.   

1. Starting Stats
2. Hit Points per Level
3. Critical Hits
   

Light, Darkness, and Darkvision...ok, mostly Darkvision

 

You just can not see in the dark.  Well, unless you are playing D&D 5E as one of the something like 70% of races that have Darkvision.   

Darkvision is pervasive in D&D 5E.  Most of the playable races have it, almost all of the monsters have it. Tasha's even introduced an option to let everyone have it.  It is just pervasive.

I've seen many adventuring groups with one poor human being lead around in the dark by his group mates who refuse to light a light. Presumably there are whole underground cities with nary a light source to be had...hmm, that just doesn't jib with typical fantasy world visions.  It also makes dungeon delving a different thing than what I want to run.  So, I'm going to look deeper into this topic in this post and make sure I know how I want to handle this topic.

Inspiration - A Non-Inspired Rule per RAW

D&D 5E didn't add many new elements; it largely streamlined and simplified mechanics that have been in one or more of the earlier versions.  Inspiration is one of the brand new items. It essential provides the DM an ability to give any/all player(s) a virtual cookie, a reward, in the form of advantage on a future roll of his/her choice.   

The idea seems really solid.  Give the DM something other than Gold, Magic, or XP with which to reward players.  Sadly, the actual rule works out to be a tad bit uninspiring. 

In this post, I will take a closer look at the rule, discuss a bit of info from the web and define how I want to try handling Inspiration in my next campaign. 

Chase Scenes

The assassin fires a crossbow bolt through the window, landing a bolt in the chest of her target.  He then leaps from the balcony and attempts to escape into the crowd hoping that his slight lead over the party will be enough to get away....What follows could be an interesting chase event or just a simple counting of distances with a predetermined result just playing out as difference in speeds.  I've DMed such an event rarely but never had I been happy with the way it worked.  

I ran across a post on oldschoolroleplaying.com that reviews the history of pursuit rules in D&D.  I think it makes an interesting read.  In this post, I will look at how chases are defined in RAW and consider a couple alternative rules.  

UA Class Features and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything (TCoE)

Tasha Contemplating

 TCoE includes a large number of class specific options.  Each class has a number of OPTIONAL Class Features and then a handful of new subclasses.  

Tha Class Features are most, but by no means all of the features specified in the 2019, UNEARTHED ARCANA Class Feature Variants article. They will be the focus of this posting.

The subclasses are a combination of new and retreaded information. Many of them have previously been specified in various Unearthed Arcana articles.  Some are from campaign source books, such as Artificer from Eberron and Bladesinger from the Sword Coast. I've not looked in detail, but I presume that some tweaks have been made and that the TCoE version, as the newest is the default RAW definition. I'm not going to look further at the subclasses unless a game setting suggests one as useful or a player wants to play one.

Rests Revisited & Revised

Back in July 2020 I put together some thoughts on rest durations and effects in response to an interesting video I watched.  The author of that video suggested several changes, some of which resonated with me while others seemed like change for changes sake.  

In this post I am will spell out the experimental home rule, subject to refinement and further change, that I would like to implement in my next game to define four levels of rests:

1. Breather (10 minutes)
2. Short Rest (1 hour)
3. Long Rest (8 hours)
4. Full Rest (12+ hours in safety)

Character Creation and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything (TCoE)

Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, the most recently published rule book contains a lot of additions of this and that.  A fair number of those additions are formalization of what has previously been UA or specific campaign material.  What I am looking at in this post is all new defined in a section titled Customizing Your Origin that basically (optionally) throws the entire D&D rule book out the window.  It allows assignment of stat bonuses to any stat, changing languages, even adding darkvision to any character all as OPTIONS.

This post will discuss the customizing origins rules in TCoE as I see them and outline what I will typically be allowing in my games. 

Rests: Breather, Short, Long, and Full

I've long been bothered by the high power of the Long Rest the relative weakness of Short Rests in my D&D 5E games.  It always seems that if a place for a short rest can be found, a place of a long rest is only slightly more elusive.  A group on an extended delve need only find that lovely niche to hide in for eight hours and they are miraculously fully healed and rejuvenated.

I'm not alone in this thinking, as I was just pointed at a video by a guy calling himself the dungeon coach.  First a link to his video and then my reactions to some elements.  Finally, what I think I would like to do in my games.

Monster Maker

There has been some considerable excitement in these parts surrounding the use of GiffyGlyph's Monster Maker.  This post is a pointer to it and a few supporting notes.

Home Page for the tool: giffyglyph.com/monstermaker/

The system the author is introducing substitues Monster Points for D&D 5E's rather bastardized CR ratings for building challenging encounters. It also provides an easy to use custom moneter building UI that crafts useful monster cards.

Overall this seems like amazing stuff.  Something that I look forward to using. So much so I have added a link for the app to the side bar in the DM section.

Drawing Roofs for Battlemaps

Roofs are a critical element of some battlemap drawings, my current focus with Campaign Cartographer.  While a lot easier to deal with than crenelations and arrow slits, there are some tricks of the trade so to speak that I have been trying to acquire.  This posting will summarize my findings so far.

Here is a barn roof that I drew with this information. 

Drawing Crenelated Walls

Crenelated walls and Arrow Slits are signature items of our typical fantasy castles.  Since I wanted to be able to draw these castles in Campaign Cartographer, I needed it puzzle out how to do it.  It's not a feature that comes baked in, though there are a number of techniques and one product that can do the the job.  This article will contain my learning to date on this subject.

Finding Symbols in CC3+

After you've collected a bunch of symbols, the next challenge may be finding the one that you want.  There are some that are handy for any given setup and then there are all the rest.  I'll address both types.

Adding Symbols to CC3+

Like so many things in the D&D world, working with CC3 to draw maps is fun.  It is also quite challenging, at least early  on.  I used to be simply frustrated with it as the program's learning cliff, not curve, cliff, is daunting.  I have managed to summit a few foot hills on my way toward the top of that cliff and I have to say I enjoy the challenge.

As I make this ascent, I am trying to write articles on this blog to give myself a toe-hold in the future and perhaps help someone who is following me.

This installment is all about gathering more symbols for my library and hopefully how to use them.

A Discussion on Areas of Improvement

Hey!  first article posting from Jon.  Good to see.  His post cntains thoughts about the most recent session and some solid ideas for improvement.  I encourage the Tales of Exandria participants to read and discuss in the comments thread for this article. ~Joe

 

House Cleaning

I really enjoyed this game but I’d have a couple things brought up generally for smoother game play. I’d like to stress that I’m having a blast and I’m not frustrated with anyone. But there are some things I’d like to look at to make the game run smoothly. This is going to be a long post. Just know that I’m not mad, this is tuning up an already fantastic game that I’m truly enjoying running. But if we can focus on these 4 things, we can probably nip some worse things in the bud and improve the game as a whole. But just don’t misunderstand the long post for a rant. I am utterly thrilled with how this game has been going. I just want to bring some stuff up so we can make this even better. And I’m DM so if I don’t, no one does.

[11:37 PM

Additional Roll20 Notes

I've now run two roll20 sessions.  As my mentor and spirit guide, in the Roll20 universe, has been feeding me information and the name of macros he has created I have been taking notes.  This post will contain some of my most useful learning's, commands really.

Adventures in Wildemount

Jon has taken on the somewhat daunting task of running two sets of adventurers in Wildemount based home-brew games as we enter a world of potentially extended stay-at-home orders.  Both games are initially running on Roll20, though one group intends to return to face to face gaming when the virus allows.  This link has links to various resources for the two games.

Impressions: First Roll20 Session as a DM

The Corona Crisis has forced my normal Face-to-Face (F2F) D&D game to either go into hiatus (never a good thing for a long running campaign) or to go online.  We've opted to try online play using Roll20 as our software engine as at least one of our players has fairly deep experience with it as a player and a deep programming background making macros and such an accessible option.

I'm writing this article the morning after my first session.  My intent is to summarize the bumps and some potential actions to smooth out the game moving forward.

Campaign Cartographer Battle Map Creation

Recently I wrote an article about how to start a battlemap in CC3 and upload it into Roll20.  I omitted all of the details about how to create said map.   This article will discuss some of teh challenges I have faced and what I did about them.  Perhaps most importantly, it will have links to other pages that give nitty gritty advice.

Making Maps & Roll20

With the current Corna Virus Panic, we've choosen to cancel regular face to face games.  That has driven a desire to play online with roll20.com seemingly our tool of choice. It's not the same, but it is simialr, even better than F2F in some regards.  It does have a learning curve and for a GM drives a critical need to have VTT maps for every encounter.  This article is going to serve as a repository for things that I learn and links to resources.

Leveling: Points vs Milestones, Part 1

I believe this is the first installment of a three part series on leveling.  The parts are expected to be:

1. Experience per RAW
2. Issues and Benefits
3. How I Want to Handle Leveling

The follow on posts may change, or never exist, but that is my thought as of today.

Action Oriented Monsters

Matt Colville put up a video this past October that presented what seems like a nifty and simple method to make certain encounters more interesting.  Specifically to make "boss" encounters and experience.

He called his idea Action Oriented Monsters and that seems like a solid name for this.  It is something that I want to dive deeper into and likely use in my games.

Cutting Words vs Attack Rolls

 The College of Lore Bard's ability Cutting Words allows a Bard to reduce an attack roll with one inspiration die roll.  That's a d6 to d12 reduction in an attack roll that can easily be the difference between a hit and a miss.  The rules on it are rather clear and it has been clairfied with a Sage Advice but it seems to lead to an undesirable in play result.

Index: What is on the Bear It Blog?

As on early 2020 there are a bunch of assorted tidbits on this blog.  Enough of them that I am sometimes challenged finding what I know must be here somewhere.  This post will be my ongoing attempt at maintaining a navigation post for the content.  It isn't properly a table of contents or an index, but something in between.

Before getting into creating groupings of internal links, I want to point out to the reader that there are two search blocks on this blog (both do the same thing).  One is at the top left of page, the other is in the right side bar.  Either can be used to search for a topic/word within teh scope of the BearItD&D blog.

This post is also linked from the page header: INDEX.

Counterspell and Knowing What is Cast

Counterspell is one of the potentially messiest spells in the game.  Enemy caster begins casting something, player wonders what that spell is (doesn't want to blow a 3+ level spell stopping a cantrip), player opts to counterspell, enemy decides to counterspell the counterspell, another player decides to counterspell the counterspell of the counter spell, then one or more heads explode around the table.

There are clear RAW answers to most of teh relevant questions.  I'm not much satisfied with them.  This post will summarize relevant RAW as I understand it and then offer the rule that I intend to use.

Encumbrance: Weight and Size

The rules in D&D 5E for encumbrance, weight, and size are very generalized.  I've seen the rule generalized as:  "It is absolutely 100% true that almost no character will ever, in their class' native gear, need to worry about carrying too much. And the heaviest armors have STR prereqs anyway, which makes basic gear even less of an issue." (Deliverator) That's a fundamental feature of the most basic encumbrance rule:

Carrying Capacity. Your carrying capacity is your Strength score multiplied by 15. This is the weight (in pounds) that you can carry, which is high enough that most characters don't usually have to worry about it.

Push, Drag, or Lift. You can push, drag, or lift a weight in pounds up to twice your carrying capacity (or 30 times your Strength score). While pushing or dragging weight in excess of your carrying capacity, your speed drops to 5 feet.

Size and Strength. Larger creatures can bear more weight, whereas Tiny creatures can carry less. For each size category above Medium, double the creature's carrying capacity and the amount it can push, drag, or lift. For a Tiny creature, halve these weights.

D&D 5E Aerial Combat

Aerial combat is defined, sort of, in RAW.  The relevant rules are as badly fragment as the Aquatic rules and they are rarely used, so they are a bit of a challenge to smoothly get right during play.  I will attempt to produce an updated summary and add just a bit in this article.

Before getting into the nitty gritty, I want to give credit to Michael Long published a good summary of the Aerial Combat rules on his Tribality blog back on 2014. His article is an easy read, though it lacks XGE information.

House Rules -- Some Minor Tweaks and Things

In speaking with my group last night, we identified several more things that we have found unclear or that can stand to be better documented for our use.  I'll  role them into my house rules document, for now, I am putting the items and some dicussion into this article.  The topics include:

• Feat: Shield Master 
• Feat: Great Weapon Master
• Feat: Sharpshooter
• Feat: Tough and Durable
• Class: Druid Shape Change Healing
• Rules: Knot Tying
• Rules: Resting in Armor
• Rules: Cost of Creating Scrolls

PDF Busting Links

Some of my documents include a reference to an internal portion of a page.  Something like this:

https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/between-adventures#TrainingtoGainLevels

In teh original document will link to the file specified before the pound sign (hashtag for you young'ns) and then jump to the internal is that follows the pound sign. A problem occurs when converting to PDF format.  The above ends up like this:

https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/between-adventures%23TrainingtoGainLevels

It's kind of the same, in that %23 is the code for our friend the pound sign, but it will get a 404 error when followed.

A quick workaround is to shorten the link with bitly.  Just pop the URL into the page at bitly.com and use the short form, which for this case will be:

  https://bit.ly/2UUq1VC

 That's it.

Changeling

I have been playing a changeling bard in our Shadows of the Apocalypse campaign for some months now, and I have to say playing a character with a handful of personalities is fun. I do bump into some questions about the effects of changing and the detect-ability of it at times. I've also been interested in the rule changes that have been made that affect the class.

The race was added to 5E via Unearthed Arcane (UA) at least twice (Races of Eberron 7/2018 and Unearthed Arcana: Eberron 2/2015) and now in the official Eberron supplement.  Keith Baker, creator of Eberron, has written more about changelings outside the official Wizards publications, but given his relationship to the subject, his thoughts are nearly cannon and I will generally accept them as supplements to RAW.  In particular he has published FAQ: Changelings on his blog.

Notes on Arcane Lock and Tiny Hut

In recent sessions groups I have been playing with had questions on the details of two spells.  I want to share the resolutions we came up with for them in this post.

1. Arcane Lock
2. Tiny Hut

Swapping Weapons & Interacting With Objects

Characters sometimes want to swap in hand items in combat.  Some games just allow whatever to happen (I have been known to do that) but it seems wrong for a character to sheath a sword, grab a ranged weapon from his back and put away his shield and then have a normal turn.  This post is aimed at defining where the line exists between free action to swap and spending an action. 

I found this topic discussed on Stack Exchange if you want to see other thoughts on the subject. 

The PHB p. 190 has a paragraph that addresses this in the Other Activity on Your Turn section.

You can also interact with one object or feature of the environment for free, during either your move or your action. For example, you could open a door during your move as you stride toward a foe, or you could draw your weapon as part of the same action you use to attack.

Druid Wild Shape -- Form Availability

Druid wild shape is a fantastically useful and flexible ability.  An element that I was not properly enforcing is embedded in the first line of that capability:

Wild Shape
Starting at 2nd level, you can use your action to magically assume the shape of a beast that you have seen before. You can use this feature twice. You regain expended uses when you finish a short or long rest. (Emphasis added)

Exactly what those beasts are requires a bit of thought.  Typical druids have seen many animals before they start their adventuring career.  Does seeing require 'in person" encounters or would drawings and descriptions suffice?  What animals are likely to have been seen by any particular druid.

Aquatic Adventures

The rules for adventures in aquatic environments in D&D 5E are a bit disjoint, scattered across multiple books and multiple sections within those books.  I've tried to draw them together in a two pager for my own reference and spell out some of my interpretations (house rules).

The PDF can be found on my Google Drive: D&D 5E Aquatic Encounters.

Moon Druid Wild Shape - Buff at Higher Levels

Moon Druids are a popular choice in many games.  At low levels they have huge effective hit point pools from two animal shapes and then their natural amount.  They make great tanks at certain levels.  Debatable they are too good at these major step levels.  There big power steps are:

• Level 2 -- First access to wild shape
• Level 4 -- Swimming forms
• Level 6 -- CR2 Wild shapes
• Level 8 -- Flying forms 
• Level 10 -- Elemental forms

They receive bumps to wild shape at 9, 12, 15, and 17 when more shapes become available, but those bumps are smaller because of narrow choices (there just aren't a lot of beasts in high CR categories) and they fall behind other melee attackers on the accuracy front.

In this post I will look at two homebrew rules that buff these relative weaknesses.

Character Creation (Borrowed from Dungeon Dudes)

Character creation is both one of the most fun, exciting, tedious and potentially dooming events of many campaigns.  A long running campaign where one or two characters are head and shoulders above others makes it hard to avoid situations where the spotlight shines excessively on the high-stat characters.

I just watched a Dungeon Dudes video that delves into some house rules that they use that address this and a few other issues.  I think all the rules they suggest have some merit.  I'll go over them in this post.

Casting Higher Level Spells from Scroll

I have been wrestling with the case of a multi classed caster trying to cast higher level spell from scroll.  For an example, assume a 4th level wizard / 1st level cleric and a Fireball scroll (3rd level).

TL;DR: Must be able to cast the appropriate level spell or make ability check.

Five Simple House Rules — Dungeon Dudes

I just watched a video recommended to me (thanks Jon) titled Five Simple House Rules for Better Combat in Dungeons and Dragons 5e by the Dungeon Dudes.  In it they lay out five house rules that they like to use and I wanted to crystalize my thought on them.  So, here we go.

First, the house rules in summary:

1. Critical Hits: Maximize First Set of Die Results
2. Healing Potions: Maximize Healing Potions
3. Flanking:  Provides +2 to hit not advantage
4. Bloodied: Use Bloodied condition defined in D&D 4E
5. Minions: Use 1HP minions essentially from D&D 4E