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