The Pink Dice Chronicles

I used to always play the lawful good / chaotic good character.  I was the paladin with an inner struggle and a drinking problem.  I was the hero that wanted to always save the day and didn't need to get paid.  Then something changed.  After reading again and again about the dangers of lawful stupid and rogue vs paladin, I decided not to be limited.  I decided to play the chaotic neutral character, a person motivated differently that didn't really care about ideas like good and law. In the beginning, it was just a way for me to avoid entanglements with alignment.  With a chaotic neutral alignment, no one could argue alignment over my actions. It was the ultimate flexibility.  My character was batman without all of the hand-wringing over innocent people. Then, as a GM, it started to sink in.  I played this way because I hated alignment.  I hated playing with people that broke the social contract and fought against other PCs.  I hated ...

The beastmaster ranger is one of those classes in D&D 5e that has been proclaimed underpowered and that is generally avoided.  For giving up significant, attack, defense, and damage capabilities from Hunter, the ranger gets an animal companion.  The problem is that the animal companion doesn't scale very well, and the ranger has to give up his own action to command the animal companion to do anything useful. I understand the philosophy behind the way this class was built.  The action economy doesn't easily accommodate having two character with a full set of actions without becoming overpowered.  However, having two creatures share an action economy is also a big problem, because it just isn't effective, especially with the underpowered stats of the animal companion.  Compare this against the druid wildshape, for example, where the animal and character stats effectively stack, and you can see why this combination is underwhelming. Had the design focused o...

The party had a bit of a quandry this week.  With two wagons full of treasure, a barrel of very valuable black powder, and a signet ring, they had to decide what to do.  They think the ring will get them into Baldur's Gate into the lair of the bad guys who stole the riches of Grievance and other villages.  They are worried the black powder will be dangerous is given to the bad guys.  They find themselves unable to remove anything from the wagons due to some sort of curse.  They also find they can't light anything in the wagons because of some protection.  They douse the 5000gp worth of blackpowder in water, making it useless and head to Baldur's Gate. Upon entering the edges of the city, they find Flaming Fist guards watching the bridge.  Akag meets up with another dwarf from Mithral Hall, Sir Darno, Paladin of Moradin, sent to investigate a shipment of mithral.  The dwarves have learned to use Bullettes to pull their shipments of mithral to avo...

This week, the party from Grievance finished clearing out a set of caverns where some "cult" was hiding loot away stolen from local villages.  The party loaded the loot on wagons, only to be confronted by some upset kobolds.  Lesh jumped on to his favorite horse Tim and ran down a large number of them, while the partly quickly dispatched the rest. Lesh and Anders then tied themselves to the bottoms of the wagons with Elmeren accompanying them in dog form.  Two guards turned to their cause drove them out of the caverns, through the encampment of enemies in the canyon, and out onto open roads.  Varn, the NPC investigator from Baldur's Gate, accompanied the others to meet them. They returned with the goods to Grievance where they returned many goods to the town and still made a large amount of gold, set aside to help them further investigate treasures still being transported to Baldur's Gate by the "cult". Varn had arranged for the party to meet up with a...

I am a bit behind on game summaries, so I though I would just do a recap, increasing detail as we approach the latest session. So the party met in a tomb outside of Grievance during a spring squall filled with lightning.  After clearing some obstacles and gathering some treasure, they headed back to Grievance.  Grievance was attacked by "cultists" and a blue dragon.  The party was able to save many people and take out quite a few bad guys before the intruders fled with Grievance's wealth. The party tracked the "cultists" (they seemed to be disguised as cultists) and kobold army back to a forward camp, that they ambushed.  There they gained some more gold and more insight into the main camp. The main camp lie in a canyon with various groups of tents scattered therein.  A single lone watchman's tent lay on the land overlooking the canyon.  The party took out the guards and searched the main tent (the largest), finding a hostage.  His name was Varn,...

From reddit: In a session recently my players asked for a ruling on fall damage when it came to flying creatures. RAW fall damage would be equal to the number of feet a target was from the ground no matter how fast they were travelling prior to that. The issue came up where I was attacking with a dragon that had a fly speed of 80 and one of my characters used his turn to paralyze it using a houseruled effect that is basically a copy/paste of hold monster. Since the dragon was paralyzed it couldn't continue flying and fell. It was strafing them at 30ft in the air so RAW it would have taken 3d6 damage, but he thought that was unfair given that it had moved (80ft) and then dashed (an additional 80ft) showing that it obviously was moving at 160ft per round, which if converted to fall damage would be 16d6. TlDR: Is fall damage RAI velocity and therefore equal to ft/round. There were some very misinformed responses to this question.  The bottom line is that the horizontal velocit...

So our new 5e party consisted of: Anders -- Halfling Rogue Elmeren -- Wood Elf Druid Lesh -- Half-orc Barbarian WIlliam -- Human Paladin The party starts in the woods outside the town of Grievance somewhere between Greenest and Beregost.  A squall blows inland from the sea.  Lightning strikes are everywhere and the individuals  sought shelter.  Lesh is the first to find an old tomb built into a hill.  The old stone doors had been blown open by lightning.  Inside he found an empty, but dark stone room where he started a fire. Slowly over time the other three appeared, fleeing close lightning strikes and taking refuge during the storm peace around the fire.  Some looked around but could not decipher old runes in the faded stonework along the ceiling.  3 sets of double stone doors stood strong.  Lech tried to open one set, but it was no use. After a while, as the waters from the storm dripped down into the old stone structure, p...

Articles like this " Clunky Mechanics in 5E ", " Flank You Very Much: Tactical Play in D&D ", and others, start to address tactical, aka simulationist concerns in the new D&D Next / D&D 5e ruleset.  One particular rule, flanking, has been a controversial subject since the beginning.  I'm going to pick on this particular example to explore an important aspect of simulation, namely fidelity.  Simulation is one of the few areas I would consider myself an expert in, so I think this discussion is warranted. Simulation is the representation of a specific system using a series of mathematical relationships.  Simulation allows us to predict the outcome of the system without having to have a real system.  Fidelity is the level of detail that we include in a simulation.  Up to a point, fidelity can decrease the uncertainty in the prediction we make.  At some point, however, too much detail in a simulation simply clouds the uncertainty of the result...

Torin, I hope this letter finds you well.  I am unable to check in with you until we've cleaned up all of our most recent mess.  We have uncovered a cult responsible for the recent murders and killed their leader, a vampire who was holed up in the old Shadowclock Tower.  I am unable to share much more about the situation, as certain people involved were charmed and are people of power.  They, luckily, were happy to have our assistance in escaping this evil plot.  I think our efforts have also went well enough that I shall be named heir to the Foxglove Estate which will be managed by our company of 4. I need to search our knowledge base on a ring I have acquired.  With each use, the ring speaks to me.  It steals away my own energy to negate spells.  I am somewhat fearful that it may at some point unleash something best left out of our world. Regards, Llarm Blacksword.

Torin, My Friend, I am writing this in case anything bad happens to me, I want to have it known what was really going on.  I cam to Magnimar not just to check in, but in pursuit of a conspiracy of strange murders stretching from Standpoint to here leaving nearly 30 dead.  Foxglove is dead by our hands, but he had turned, and we found him mad in the caverns under the Misgivings, a ghast set on death, and on a leash from some group here.  We know now the group as the Brothers of Seven.  Xenesha is connected to Foxglove and the Brothers of Seven, but we do not know how, why, or even who she is yet? Tonight while investigating the Foxglove townhouse we were jumped by mercenaries paid to find and kill us.  We killed one of them.  If it comes to it and you need protection or a witness, you can find the other working in our factory in Standpoint as a guard.  He is loyal to us now. In the townhouse, where we barely escaped from nearby guards, we found a ...

Ask a player to show you their character and they will hand you a character sheet.  Ask your player to describe their character, and they will tell you the same thing the character sheet says, perhaps in interpreted words, maybe with a picture or a small but of disjointed history.  This static view of the character is really contradictory in every sense of playing a character, since so much of the story in an RPG is the growth of a character. I've tried to do something like this before with Pathfinder.  The problem with Pathfinder is that there is a lot going on in the rules and it is hard to capture everything in a short form.  It could be done in software, but I've never found any software that did it.  Even working through a progression to meet the simple requirements for a prestige class can take a lot of work in Pathfinder.  Planning over levels is hard  Trying to capture the full progression of a character in both stats and personal growth is u...

Hoard of the Dragon Queen is a solid adventure outline, but has some possible shortcomings ( ref1 , ref2 , ref3  ).  The adventure is a bit of a railroad as outlined, the maps are difficult to use for groups used to battlemaps, and it just really doesn't have the unique details that other adventures have had.  However, as a GM, reading the adventure was a real treat because it has enormous potential.  In many places the characters have an enormous abundance of choices that can influence their success or demise.  It just needs to be rebuilt a bit for my style of GMing. I am planning on GMing this as my first D&D 5e adventure.  It's going to be a roll20 game.  My hope is to drag this adventure into a form that represents the tactical complexity that is available while adding opportunities for new plot paths through the adventure.  I also want to clarify the motivations available to the PCs a bit, so the adventure feels like a bit less of a rai...

Our DM tonight at intermittent internet connectivity, so we had a short session, just long enough to finish off the Misgivings by taking out Foxglove (the Skinsaw man?) and a couple of ghouls and some other creature. Level 5!  2 Attacks per action and 4 if I use my Action Surge!

Torin, I hope this letter finds you well.  I still await the assistant you had planned to send.  There is much to do here and I obviously cannot handle all of it myself, as the local sheriff looks to our group to assist with matters now. In fact, just this week the sheriff came to use with a murder investigations.  It was some sort of ritualistic killings, from what I have seen, and there have been multiple deaths.  It all seems to point to some sort of intelligent undead.  We're leaving this day to go to the Misgivings, the old manor belonging to Adrienne Foxglove, a friend of the others and local nobleman.  I hope he is ok. I am very excited by the trip.  I've never been to the Foxglove manor, and the rumor is that it is haunted.  It lies on the coast down a couple days from Standpoint.  The ride will be a nice change of scenery. My skills continue to increase with magic.  I have now learned a method for casting while still hol...