An unexpected dip back into Vestitas, this time dealing with a natural hazard that lurks deep within the jungle.
Month: May 2017
A Shiverpeaks Bestiary, Part 3
This entry contains the first monstrously effective healer, so let’s talk about the difference between D&D combat and Guild Wars combat. Although they use the same system, the common abilities of each make them actually very different from one another. This is not to say that D&D characters can’t fight Guild Wars monsters, nor that Guild Wars characters can’t fight D&D monsters, just that the way the Guild Wars characters/monsters fight is very different. In Guild Wars, healing is common, effective, and limited by recharge rates, not uses per day. Thus, when fighting Guild Wars monsters (or for GMs fighting Guild Wars characters, who will be a thing after we wrap up the monsters), you must either focus fire to drop an enemy before the healer gets a turn – preferably focusing that fire on the healer themselves so you won’t have to worry about them going forward, although the enemy’s front line might take issue with that strategy – or else stunlock or otherwise mitigate the healer’s effects on the battle, usually by having a member of your party dedicated all of their actions and reactions to stuns and interrupts.
How Dungeons React to Intruders
Generally speaking, a dungeon has enough firepower in it to completely slaughter a party. Generally speaking, a party beats the dungeon. Why does the party win? They have a number of key tactical advantages that players tend to get good at over time. They aren’t usually able to articulate why the things they’re doing work, but they figure out what works and stick to it, leveraging these advantages without even being able to tell other people what they are. So what are they?
Necromancer Lords Are Crazy OP in 5e
At low levels, like LMoP, necromancers work fine. At mid-to-high levels, things go nuts.
At mid-levels, especially right around the level 9-13 area, necromancers can command armies of skeleton archers dozens strong. It’s fairly easy to issue commands to archers that allows them to send an obscenely large rain of arrows down on enemies, and few things are more deadly in 5e than a large number of incoming attacks. Damage reduction is very rare and AC isn’t often 20 or higher until the end game, so your skeletons aren’t going to be fishing for crits against level-appropriate opposition. A level 11 necromancer has 3 third-level spells that can command up to 4 skeletons each, 3 fourth-level spells that can command up to 6 skeletons each, 2 fifth-level spells that can command up to 8 skeletons each, and 1 sixth-level spell that can command up to 10 skeletons, for a total of 54 skeletons. CR 11 creatures – who are supposed to be a decent encounter for the entire party, not one character – typically have an AC in the neighborhood of 17. A skeleton archer has +4 to hit and hits AC 17 40% of the time, and deals an average of 5.5 damage for each hit. 5.5 times 0.4 hit rate is an average damage of 2.2 per skeleton per round. With 54 skeletons, he’s got a per round damage output of 118.8 (slightly higher, actually, I’m not counting crits). CR11 creatures usually have between 150-200 HP and will be dead in two rounds. The roc and marid will take three.
In those three rounds the monster has basically no chance of killing the intervening seven hundred and two hit points of skeletons standing between them and the necromancer, nor do they have particularly good odds of sniping the necromancer for what is, if the necromancer is smart enough to make CON his #2 priority after INT (this even makes sense roleplay-wise, since it’s a perfectly acceptable archetype to have a necromancer be filled with the unholy stamina of the dead), over 50 HP. The roc has the best odds, because it can fly over the skeletons to target the necromancer directly with an average of 50 damage, so it only needs to get slightly lucky to drop the necromancer in one round, plus the necromancer is unlikely to kill it until it’s had two rounds to act, maybe three depending on initiative. It’s also got a fly speed greater than the effective range of the skeletons’ shortbows, so even when engaging at visual range it doesn’t have to spend a round taking arrows just to get in combat distance.
Still: One out of a half-dozen CR11 creatures stands a chance against a level 11 necromancer. The others are lunch meat. Most of them won’t even make an appreciable dent in the skeleton horde before dying. The necromancer doesn’t care that he has to sacrifice all of his level 3+ spells to do this, because nine spells would never solve half the encounters that his vast skeleton army can.
It’s not as bad at levels 15+. Just four more points of AC causes skeleton hit rates to drop by half, and the rate of new spell levels bringing in more skeletons to the horde is barely keeping pace, which means the average damage per round is only slightly higher (140.8), but most monsters now have about 300 HP, which means they take 3 rounds to kill. Monsters also have AoE effects slightly more often, which means that 3 rounds is more often actually enough to chew through a good number of skeletons, although it’s still the case that basically no monsters can win (closest is a stalemate by assassinating the necromancer before succumbing to skeleton volleys), just that the necromancer is much more likely to take appreciable amounts of damage to his horde if he fights several in a row. That still makes him approximately as powerful as an entire four person party.
To keep this post from getting any bigger, I won’t go into detail on mirror match or swarm battles except to say that the necromancer can split his damage into discreet chunks and this means he’s equally effective against lots of little enemies as he is against one big one.
So, are necromancer lords overpowered? Yes. Very very yes.
Medieval Stasis is Dumb
Generally speaking, a setting with a 10,000 year history could probably compress that down to 1,000 years and not lose a single thing, and getting rid of medieval stasis is by far the easiest way to explain medieval stasis. Few of the explanations typically posited to explain 10,000 years of medieval tech and society actually hold up to scrutiny (and by “few” I mean “not a single one I have encountered, but I’m leaving wiggle room in case there’s a better one I haven’t heard of”).
A Shiverpeaks Bestiary, Part 2
Today we have minotaurs, dryders, and ice drakes. The first two have entries in the Monster Manual, but their Guild Wars incarnations have significant differences.
Elven Lifespans Should Be A Bigger Deal Than They Are
Elves are dicks. I wrote an article about it and I stand by it – in nearly every D&D setting, elves have been somewhere between moderately and extremely dickish (Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance, two of the biggest D&D settings around, lean towards the extreme side). So, when I say that elven lifespans should be a huge deal and that middle-aged elves should logically have crazy-high character levels even if they’re bog standard elven guards or the local apothecary or whatever, that’s not because I’m an ardent supporter of the “misunderstanding Tolkien” school of worldbuilding, it’s because being able to live for a very long time is a huge advantage which is pretty thoroughly underestimated by D&D. I use elves as an example here, but dwarves are quite similar.
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The Importance of Fluff
This one is actually a forum post, which is why it references a conversation that this blog isn’t actually having. Other than the weird segue at the beginning, it’s a pretty self-contained post.
Dragonlance: In The End, Evil Shall Always Triumph Over Good
Of the big three D&D settings (Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, and Dragonlance, ignoring meta-settings like Planescape), Dragonlance is the setting used to exemplify epic fantasy. A titanic struggle between good and evil rocks Ansalon down to its core whenever Wizards can find the money to pay Hickman and/or Weis to squeeze out another trilogy, bold heroes facing off against tyrannical overlords, whose triumph is inevitable. The tyrannical overlords, I mean. Good guys never win lasting victories in Dragonlance.
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“Limited-Time Content” And “Living World” Are Not The Same
So here’s this bizarre idea that crops up now and again, the idea that you can make an MMO, an RPG society of some kind, or some other shared-universe experience more “realistic” by offering most or all content on a very limited time basis, “as it’s occurring.” So if it’s the old 3rd edition Living Greyhawk, for example, whenever you show up to your friendly local gaming store on game night, there’s going to be some kind of adventure going on, but each week it’ll be a different one. If you miss the week, you miss the adventure forever because it already happened and is now over. Or, an MMO where every two or three months the game updates and old content gets removed in favor of whatever’s going on right now.
This can seem genuinely immersive at fist glance, but it falls down so quickly under scrutiny that it really isn’t worth the costs (which we’ll get into later), because these “living worlds” never have the dedication to be genuinely alive. Except EVE Online. EVE Online totally does have a truly living world, and it has that by putting things almost entirely in the hands of the players. A living world doesn’t just mean that all events are limited time, it means that how the populace of players reacts to an event is the determining factor in how it resolves and that players can start events on their own initiative just by starting large scale conflicts between factions, whether those factions are built by the players from the ground up or pre-determined by the devs and then turned over to player leadership.
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Chamomile Has A Blog 