D&D Campaign 2: D&D Harder

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Raid
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Re: D&D Campaign 2: D&D Harder

Post by Raid » Fri Aug 05, 2022 8:14 pm

I'm thinking Lawful Neutral for Opus.

Charr was probably Chaotic Neutral, but as with everything with Charr his alignment was never very well defined. I feel I've been fairly consistent playing Arctiss as Neutral Good.

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Re: D&D Campaign 2: D&D Harder

Post by Sly Boots » Fri Aug 05, 2022 8:16 pm

Damn, was thinking LN for Corvus too

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Re: D&D Campaign 2: D&D Harder

Post by Raid » Fri Aug 05, 2022 8:32 pm

I don't see a problem having multiple characters with the same alignment. I can't imagine these two being similar to the point of it being dull. To be honest I'm expecting to be playing him more as Chaotic Neutral to start anyway for... reasons.

Opus has to be neutral on the good/evil scale because it's the only way I can justify him not being evil when he's going to be raising the dead.

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Re: D&D Campaign 2: D&D Harder

Post by Sly Boots » Fri Aug 05, 2022 8:49 pm

Yeah, it makes sense for Corvus because he's basically a vengeance machine, hunting an ostensibly evil foe (vampires/undead) but not being particulaly careful about whether innocents get caught in the crossfire. He won't intentionally make evil choices, but he operates by his own code and if there's a choice between saving someone or killing a vamp, he's taking door no2.

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Re: D&D Campaign 2: D&D Harder

Post by Mantis » Fri Aug 05, 2022 8:50 pm

Raid wrote:
Fri Aug 05, 2022 8:32 pm
Opus has to be neutral on the good/evil scale because it's the only way I can justify him not being evil when he's going to be raising the dead.
He could be a good necromancer!

I think we were pretty good in the past as a group at not getting too hung up on alignments anyway. They're not meant to hamstring your character and mean they can never take actions outside of it.

The definitions are pretty broad anyway, but I find they are good as a starting point for identifying a vague consistency with the way someone acts without necessarily preventing them doing something left field at times. For instance, Sage was literally the envoy for the God of Atrophy and chaos for the first half of the campaign but he still took lawful actions at times. Though naturally he felt dirty afterwards and had to cleanse himself by asking random strangers to pull cards from the Deck of Many Things.

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Re: D&D Campaign 2: D&D Harder

Post by Raid » Sat Aug 06, 2022 5:54 am

Mantis wrote:
Fri Aug 05, 2022 8:50 pm

He could be a good necromancer!
I can see it now.

Thank you young Tabaxi for rescuing my son!

It was no problem madam, all it took was reanimating the skeleton from the decaying body of your recently deceased husband! You could almost say, he had the power inside him all along! Hahaha!

Hahaha!

{The skeleton contorts in an unsettling manner for it has forgotten what laughter means}


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Re: D&D Campaign 2: D&D Harder

Post by Wrathbone » Sat Aug 06, 2022 9:01 am

Mantis wrote:
Fri Aug 05, 2022 8:50 pm
I think we were pretty good in the past as a group at not getting too hung up on alignments anyway. They're not meant to hamstring your character and mean they can never take actions outside of it.
100% this. I see it as actions define alignment, not the other way round. I think it's fine to say your character is a particular alignment simply as a guide for how they intend to act, or how they see themselves, and as a DM I tend to have my own thoughts on what a character's current alignment would be (based on their actions) for a couple of reasons: firstly, it can have an impact on certain spells and items that depend on alignment, and secondly, I think it can be a good indicator of how a character is changing. Korvak was originally meant to be neutral good, for instance, but I think it's fair to say he's veered at times into true neutral or even chaotic neutral territory, maybe even a pinch of evil every now and then, and now he's trying to steer himself back from that.

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Re: D&D Campaign 2: D&D Harder

Post by Raid » Sat Aug 06, 2022 9:18 am

Yeah, I don't really assign a lot of importance to alignment. It's nice as a starting point maybe, but it feels like it ought to be overridden depending on the circumstances anyway. I'd describe myself, Chris, the Human Bank Clerk, as Lawful Good, but I break enough rules to veer into Neutral Good fairly frequently because it's the right thing to do.

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Re: D&D Campaign 2: D&D Harder

Post by Raid » Fri Aug 19, 2022 7:15 am

I'm sticking this in here as I guess it's more likely to be relevant to this campaign than Mantis', although obviously I'm not expecting us to change systems halfway through a campaign, but it's going to directly affect D&D Beyond eventually.

Wizards of the Coast just announced the next edition of D&D, although they're insisting that they're done with editions as a concept. From comments I've read it's not the first time they've tried this, and players just ended up referring to it as an edition anyway. It's called One D&D, and it sounds more like it's building on 5E than replacing it. WotC released a trailer for it, but it's one of those talking head ones that's more "this is why D&D is the most important thing that's ever happened to me" than actual information, so Dicebreaker have done a brief rundown of some of the new stuff.



I guess one of the biggest changes they're making is that they're introducing their own Unreal Engine powered virtual tabletop system, having purchased D&D Beyond earlier in the year. I like the idea as a concept, but I question whether it's really going to be popular, as I can imagine designing a 3D environment is going to be much more work than the 2D stuff that we've been using, and is it really necessary when D&D feels more like an oral system than a visual one anyway?

They're implementing more concrete rules for the Inspiration mechanic, which is something I know we've not used on the forum games, but I've seen it in the Oxventure (which is more Johnny dishing out extra dice for being funny and then the players forgetting to use them). There's a new race that's being positioned as the upper-planes version of Tieflings that seemingly lets you stick any animal head you want on a human body, and I look forward to DMs having to explain that in-world.

It's not coming until 2024, but there's a beta version that you can playtest now.

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Re: D&D Campaign 2: D&D Harder

Post by Wrathbone » Fri Aug 19, 2022 9:54 am

Yeah, I watched most of it last night - some interesting developments but it is very much updates to the existing rules, and crucially everything new will be compatible with 5e. I'd be keen on trying out some of the rules in our games, but only if everyone is happy with that (and of course I'd go over anything like that in advance so the rules don't suddenly change).

The 3d tabletop built into dndbeyond could be great for many scenarios, but it remains to be seen how flexible it is in terms of scenery (and how easy it is to make something complex). I imagine it's great for dungeon crawling, but for something more unusual or exotic I can't see it being feasible compared to just grabbing a map image and putting it on roll20.

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Re: D&D Campaign 2: D&D Harder

Post by Raid » Fri Aug 19, 2022 10:19 am

I think they were implying that existing 5E content would be OneD&D compatible, I don't think they meant that new material would work on the old system.

The 3D tabletop is certainly the part that's intrigued me the most about this. I think certain things like lighting are probably going to be simpler to set up in a 3D engine. I don't know exactly how it works in the 2D system we're currently using, but I'm guessing from some of the errors that we've seen in recent sessions that you're basically drawing polygons to show which areas a light affects? Unreal tech has had dynamic light sources for nearly quarter of a century now (I dabbled with the editor a bit back in the original Unreal Tournament days), so I'll hazard a guess that in this new TTS, lighting is going to be as simple as the DM plonking down a light source asset, and the engine works out exactly which areas are going to be strong and dim light, or total darkness. Each asset will probably have a slider for the strength of the light it gives off.

But with a 3D engine, there's so much more detail than on a 2D map, and it's going to take away a lot of the implied or spoken elements of map design. In a top-down 2D map, you plonk down a town house and all you see are the roof tiles. You tell the players that there's a balcony, or that the walls are made of shimmering obsidian. With a 3D asset, the asset needs to match the description much more closely, or you need to build your own structure using pre-built components or textures. If they're planning on providing a fully featured building creation system, in the fashion of something like Planet Coaster, then that's a huge time sink, either of building them yourself or browsing through a long list of things others have built trying to find the one that matches your idea.

That's why I'm not sure how popular this will be. I love the idea of it, but I think a likely outcome is going to be very generic looking maps that use common assets that don't quite match the DM's vision. I'd have to look into how some of the 3rd party options that I've seen advertised work, see if this is a problem with those. There's a ton of potential, but the user tools are going to have to be stunningly intuitive and simple to catch on, and I've never seen a 3D editor that does that while still providing the granularity that the developers want to offer.

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Re: D&D Campaign 2: D&D Harder

Post by Wrathbone » Fri Aug 19, 2022 2:06 pm

What could be great is if purchased adventures include prebuilt maps. That would be a huge incentive to run published campaigns in there. Roll20 does that too, but you have to buy the module there which is the same price (sometimes more) as buying the book on dndbeyond with a pretty horrible interface for actually reading the material.

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Re: D&D Campaign 2: D&D Harder

Post by Bird » Wed Oct 19, 2022 1:21 pm

I'm just looking at my character for the next one, looks like I've unlocked extra backgrounds now that he's in the campaign so I've tweaked him a little to match his story better.

I was wondering, am I supposed to enable any of these additional features on the bard class for this campaign?
Level 1: Additional Bards Spells
Level 2: Magical Inspiration
Level 4: Bardic Versatility

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Re: D&D Campaign 2: D&D Harder

Post by Wrathbone » Wed Oct 19, 2022 3:58 pm

Looks like they’ve been recently added - I wonder if other classes have similar options. Anyhow, I’m happy for them to be enabled.

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Re: D&D Campaign 2: D&D Harder

Post by Mantis » Wed Oct 19, 2022 4:15 pm

Seems like it. Wizards get some extra spells at level 1 and then a bonus feature at level 3 which lets them swap out their cantrips with any off the wizard list whenever they take a long rest.

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