Topic: The Dungeon and Dragons Thread

@Tyranexx Yeah to this day I am not sure why that sorcerer was doing in the front. what had happened was the sorcerer had 12 hp, the orog hit a crit and happened to exactly 12 damage doubled. So if a character gets a negative of their hp max they die. Those deaths in your game sound crazy. An auto death huh? That’s crazy.

Has your drakewarden been in any danger? And I hope you meet Sunday.

@Themagusx1 I started back in middle school with D&D Basic. Dabbled in AD&D 2nd Edition (mostly through TSR games), 3rd Edition & 3.5 (mostly through SWRPG and Neverwinter Nights) and finally 5th Edition. I have always picked up various books to feed my own interest in the world building aspect, but went long stretches without actually playing the game.

This latest run of playing the game started with me finding the Sneak Attack and High Rollers: Aerois podcasts and following their sessions. I picked up the Starter's Kit and Essential's Kit when they released to play with my kids, but they were still a little too young to play. When the pandemic hit, a group of us threw together a Discord server and Foundry to run DND and we have been playing ever since.

I don't know if I would consider myself knowledgable, but just lucky to have found really a bunch of really good Dungeon Masters who share their insights over the years. My D&D Basic years consisted of me and my friends constructing impossible dungeons that made Tomb of Horrors seem fair. Most of what you are seeing is that lately I have been studying hard lately to make this campaign enjoyable for the kids that will be playing it.

@Themagusx1 If you have X hp left out of Y and you take X+Y damage, you are instantly killed. Outside of first level characters, the only place I have seen it was with fall damage or massive spell attacks. It is how my first Battle Smith died, as he fell to his death from a bridge over a deep ravine. Orcs cut the ropes holding the bridge together and I failed my strength and dexterity checks to try an save myself. I had also just decided to unprepare feather fall the last long rest because I wasn't using it.

@Darknyht Nice, I been playing a long time. Started with the black box begginner set, not sure if that was part of the basic series. Then like you graduated to second edition, and still have fond memories of that edition. I still even enjoyed THAC0 which was good times.

That’s cool, are your kids old enough now? I got my son into the game when he was eight, and he picked it up pretty quickly. He still plays to this day and has an interest in dming.

That’s good you found a group on discord, and that’s how my group will be playing through discord. It’s good to also studying and you are really are trying to be a good dm. It’s good that you have had good dms over the years. I unfortunately have had a mix of good and bad.

I am curious about your old dungeons that were more impossible than tomb of horrors. Those must of been pretty crazy?

@Darknyht Yep I have seen the x+y damage kill at level 2 myself but no higher than that. I think that sorcerer I mentioned earlier was level 2 when they were killed. Damn, that’s a crazy situation to be in with the bridge and the orcs. Fall damage is pretty nasty in the end. I remember a ranger in one of my 2e games rope was cut and he fell 60 feet down to his doom. I think he was level 4, god that was in 2000 lol.

@Themagusx1 Oof. So a bad play and some unlucky numbers for that Sorcerer to boot. The DM truly felt bad about the auto death, especially since we saved that same character a few sessions before from doppelgangers.

No major Ranger danger recently, though I've had to roll death saves early in the campaign when she fell during a duel with a half dragon. Thankfully, he fell in the swamp castle battle.

@Tyranexx Yep not a smart move. I remember the first character I ever had die was on second edition, and it was a wizard. Back then hp maxes especially at low levels were low. This wizard had 2 hp, and ran into a trap on accident and got crushed by a boulder. I felt bad about it, but the player rolled up a new character and that one survived the campaign. You run into any crazy traps?

A duel with a half dragon huh? Glad your character survived that duel. So it was one on one duel. In the battle where the half dragon finally died, was it you that killed them or some one else?

@Themagusx1 the Basic rules I first started with was the 1983 Red Book edition. It covered levels 1-3. The classes were Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, Thief, Halfing, Elf, and Dwarf if I remember correctly.

We never needed the blue book which contained levels 4-14 because I don’t think we had a character live past level 2. There were a lot of puzzles with an answer that was nonsensical, and a wrong answer was a death trap. A 10’ pole was standard equipment to survive as you could safely poke things. Typical dungeons only nine year olds can think are fair.

I think they to a better job these days with the Basic rules they give away now. We would have had a field day with just that. But back then TSR was draconian in protecting their brand.

@Darknyht Ok I gotcha, I know which box set you started with. And you are right about how TSR was. About a year ago or so, your post reminds me, I read a book called Game Wizards which was about the early years of TSR up to when Gary Gygax got ousted from the company. It’s a hell of a read. I would recommend it.

@Themagusx1 I'll add it to my book wish list as it sounds interesting. They were a strange company back then. They knew that they only had D&D, but they threw away so much money at stupid things over the years. It sounds like Super Mario by Jeff Ryan which covered Nintendo's journey into video games up until the launch of the Wii.

The traps that stand out strongest in my memory were from the TMNT RPG that Palladium Books put out. They were designed to be solvable but difficult, and the adventure module even warned you to use throwaway characters as there were high chances of death. Each character walked into a room individually and had to solve the riddle that went with the death trap.

Somewhere in the house I still have the book, but I don't remember the riddles. The one was a room with a dragon head on a pillar. Every 30 seconds (real time), it would spray acid out covering an eighth of the room, giving the player 4 minutes to solve the riddle. Another was a room that the floor pull away leaving the player on a rope that slowly withdrew into the ceiling and a pit of spikes below. They all ran on real time timers, and while the riddles were not super hard the stress made it difficult to think. They have always stood out because that was my first encounter with good puzzle traps in a game.

@Darknyht oh nice, I think you would enjoy the book. Oh yah they did do some weird stuff. Wasn’t there something about a railroad investment or something, if I can remember them wanting to get into that. I will have to check out this Super Mario book.

Oh yeah Palladium stuff was crazy. I never looked into the turtles rpg, but it may be something to track down. Did you play Rifts or any of the other Palladium stuff?

That trap has sounds crazy, and it’s crazy how it runs on real timers!

@Themagusx1 I played Rifts, Heroes Unlimited, TMNT, and Ninjas & Superspies. I owned a lot of books for those plus Palladium RPG. Again the world building is what got me more than the game.

Mostly was we did was make super heroes and have battle royales. I liked the system but power creep eventually ruined it. It seemed like ever new Rifts book that came out upped the power scale while the damage output for most characters stayed the same.

Yeah the traps were fun. It is not the only time I’ve seen real world timers for traps, but that was the first.

A lot of old PC adventure games did similar things by using the CPU clock. You had to basically run a program to tie up the processor to play them with later generations of computers because the timers became insanely fast.

@Darknyht @Themagusx1 A guy that I worked with years ago tried to get me into Rifts and I hated it. I don't know how if the way they where playing it was correct or not but to me it was just one huge power gaming fest. The amount of damage things did and how much HP things had it was just crazy. I did not enjoy it at all.

Funny thing with the TMNT RPG was that it came out a few years before the TV series did and even the toys. It was based more on the comics. I guess the head of Palladium Games at the time blamed the cartoon series for the failure of the game because the cartoon series made the Turtles more kid friendly and comic and of course the RPG was aimed at teenagers, but teenagers didn't want to be seeing playing with TMNT cause that was for kids.

@Darknyht @Tasuki yeah that’s the thing with the Paladium stuff was how high hp and damage was. I can imagine powercreep really working its way into those games. I played Palladium a couple of times and thought it was a little tough to grasp, but I was only thirteen so who knows.

That TMNT rpg sounds interesting just for the lore. I would be interested in getting it just for the lore aspects as opposed to the rules.

@Themagusx1 Oof. I always knew most casters in fantasy settings were glass cannons, but that HP stat sounds horrible! What character did that player roll to replace the wizard? All the way back in 2nd edition too.

We unfortunately didn't end up playing this weekend. Plans for next weekend though. We've dealt with a couple of traps, usually nothing too dangerous. The most memorable was in the dungeon of that swamp castle where our bard unfortunately triggered a jar of powder in a treasure room. He started attacking us since it was an illusion trap. He was knocked out non-lethally.

@Tyranexx HP stats were pretty rough in the older editions. The player who played that wizard I think I rolled a fighter due to him not liking how low his hp was with that wizard which I can’t blame him. I forgot what the hit die for a fighter was and how high their hp can go at level one. Back then to healing up could take weeks in game time, such as bed rest and stuff like that. The rules were sort of hyper realistic back then. Would you try an older edition of the game?

That sounds like hell of a trap. You gave me an idea for one though by telling me that story for my game as I write out the dungeon.

@Themagusx1 @Tasuki It didn't help, but they moved the ruleset into Heroes Unlimited, which is what we played mostly, along with the martial arts from Ninja & Superspies. We played Rifts, but we mostly played without the power creep as we homebrewed the world using a mixture of stuff. The Second Edition of Heroes Unlimited came out later and fleshed out the world better with supplements, but I understand that it wasn't for everyone.

The lore was interesting, as only the main book had the Turtles in it. After that, it mostly focused on Mutants in general. I think you can still get the rules in a book called After the Bomb, but it stripped out the licensed stuff. They also had the license to Macross and Robotech at one point but I never picked up any of that as a kid.

The one thing that Palladium had for it was the world building was unique and the artwork was interesting. The other two I picked up books for but never played was their Beyond the Supernatural and Nightbane settings. Both were really interesting for people who like Supernatural, Buffy, or X-Files type stuff.

The company itself was interesting in that Palladium RPG mostly came out of their modified D&D campaign. The same thing happened with Midkemia Press, where Raymond E. Fiest wrote the history of their world in his books and they created their own modified RPG from it.

@Themagusx1 I can't blame that player for rolling a tankier character either; I would've been irked by such a low HP stat too. Healing sounds like it was way realistic to a fault back then. I'd try older editions of the game depending on the mechanics. I've heard 3.5 wasn't bad?

It was a heck of a trap. We even knew one would possibly trigger in advance through different checks, but the Bard rolled badly. Happy I gave you an idea for your own game though!

@Darknyht Palladium had quite the history to it. So just out of curiosity why was not the second edition Heroes Unlimited not for everyone? Oh yeah I forgot they had the Robotech liscence for a while. I wonder how that played, but any hoo there was really a lot to Palladium stuff.

That’s interesting that they stripped the TMNT stuff and made a game about just mutants. I suppose they lost the rights to it.

And I did not know they came out of a modified D&D campaign. I really need to look more into Palladium and their history.

@Tyranexx Yeah that was too low. No 3.5 was not too bad, and than 4th edition everything seems to have a lot of hp. And then 5E they seem to balance everything out. Anyhoo, are there any classes that pique your interest outside of your Drakewarden?

And yeah thanks again. I am working on the adventure so it will be fun to integrate that trap into the game.