Spell Research

Last night, Our Heroes got off much more lightly than they should have because of our collective ignorance about how some of their spells actually worked.

Today, I've been reading through the spells in the PHB to clarify matters for the future.

My players may come to regret making me do my own rules-learning, because I'm getting lots of ideas. Oh yes. LOTS.

[Insert maniacal Evil-Overlord laugh here]

Lesser Lesser Restoration

 This spell is designed as a stop-gap, temporary remedy for ability loss.

Lesser Lesser Restoration

2nd level abjuration 

Casting Time: 10 minutes
Range: Touch
Components: V,S,M (powdered stimulant herbs mixed with brandy) 

You draw a magical circle of runes and sigils around a creature and, while chanting the verbal component of the spell, have them drink an infusion of stimulant herbs in brandy. The spell will temporarily reverse 1d4 points of one characteristic loss. If more than one characteristic is below its normal maximum, the characteristic to be targeted by the spell must be specified when the spell is cast.

The spell can be cast multiple times on the same recipient, affecting the same or different characteristics each time. 

The spell will not raise a characteristic above its normal maximum, nor does the spell address any underlying condition causing the characteristic loss — it will not, for instance, neutralize poison, nor cure a wasting disease. 

Characteristic points restored by the use of this spell disappear at the rate of one per casting per six hours. 

For example, if the spell is cast twice to restore, respectively, 3 points of STR and 4 points of DEX, after six hours one point each of the restored STR and DEX would be lost. If it were cast twice with both castings affecting STR, after six hours, two points of STR would be lost — one for each casting of the spell.

Casting the spell using a 3rd level or higher spell slot increases the amount of ability points restored by 1d4 per level above 2nd.

Children of the Night of the Living Dead Go Mad in Dorset

Well, the party managed to survive its first encounter with a roving band of zombies, and with only one near-death experience. They learned two things:

1. Zombies in 5e are MUCH SCARIER than they used to be, and
2. Critters that stop to munch on you when you go down instead of moving on to another (moving) target are MUCH SCARIER than intelligent, tactically-savvy critters.

Having waded through years of game "development" in which player-characters have steadily become more and more unstoppably invulnerable superheroes, able to wade through oceans of mook-blood with impunity, it's rather refreshing to have them have to think twice about whether they should fight or run.

5e Character Sheet Update

I've uploaded updated versions of my 5e chracter sheet designs, now including a space for Death Saves. That's a bit of the sheet that's sure to get plenty of use.

Mark I: A4 double-sided

Mark II: A5 booklet fold

NOTE: if you stick a piece of that invisible mending tape (the stuff with the matte finish) over areas like this, you can keep pencilling and erasing it until the cows come home and you won't wear a hole in your character sheet.

D&D5e Character Sheet

I put together this character sheet for D&D5e for a couple of reasons. It includes an arrangement of characteristics and their related skills and saves that I like, and it's rather less rigidly laid out and sterile than some. It could be more compact, but I wanted to leave plenty of room so that you don't have to cramp up your writing hand fitting in teensy-tiny pencil scrawls.

I've printed it with both pages on the same sheet too, and everything is still easily legible. That has the added advantage of giving you a whole extra side of the page to use as a jotter.

The link points to a PDF file, approximately 160 KB in size.

Later...

This version is laid out with both of the above pages on the same side of an A4 sheet, to be printed double-sided and folded down to an A5 tent-fold. The inner pages are lined and framed, but otherwise blank — write whatever you want in there.

This one is also about 160 KB.

Yowzah! It's New! It's Shiny!

I now own my very own copy of the 5e PHB. I am more excited by this than may be properly appropriate for a Gentleman Of A Certain Age.

I have to say, even on a very brief acquaintance, I can see that it contains a hell of a lot of fluff that I would have ruthlessly edited out, had it been up to me. But it wasn't.... those FOOLS!

It's got lots of good, useful stuff in it too, so that's all right.

---

I see a few areas where I want to make some changes, though they're pretty minor really.

1. I'll be changing the time scale for ritual spell casting. The rules as written say a ritual spell takes ten minutes longer than normal to cast, but my view of rituals is that they're the sort of things that take a lot longer than that — hours, possibly days.
2. I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think I may equate one feat with one point of characteristic increase, with the rider that the character can take no more than one feat at a time. So, when the character gets a chance to increase a stat, they can either take two points of increase, or take one feat and one point on a stat. I do like the feats as presented — I like them much, much better than the system used in D&D3.x
3. I think I may institute STR reductions for halflings, gnomes and elves. The idea of a three foot tall hobbit with a strength of 18 just offends me. I know that this is not a game of realism, but tough.

Done — from now on, elves will get -1 STR, gnomes get -2 STR, and halflings get -3 STR. That still means a halfling could conceivably start with 15 strength and thus be stronger than a burly six-foot human blacksmith, but c'est la vie. The alternative to that is to also institute STR Maxima, which I am loath to do.

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I've started playing around with the character creation rules, recreating my favourite old character, Prince Fnord the Pretty Neat and Well Beloved at 13th level. It gratified me to see how compact his basic character description could be in 5e at this relatively high level; the great bulk of his character sheet would be taken up with equipment and magical doo-dads. The hardest part about the conversion was thinking about just how to define his personality traits along the lines of the samples given. However, considering how long Fnord's been around, I don't really think it's really all that necessary; his character has long been established, so I don't really need any set written guide as to how to roleplay his reactions.

A New Beginning

Last night we had our first go at D&D 5e, using the el-cheapo Starter Set, with me in the DM's chair running the supplied adventure, Lost Mine of Phandelver.

Inevitably there were some hiccups, since none of us really knew what we were doing. We've all played enough 3e to be comfortable with the fundamentals of playing the game, but it took us a little while to start to come to grips with the new survivability mechanisms. Also, since we were using the pre-fab characters, and none of the others had seen any of the character creation rules in the Basic Rules PDF, we had to do a little bit of deduction to figure out why some of the values given were as they are.

However, I think we're getting a decent handle on it, and it seems to play pretty smoothly and easily.

One thing that I think deserves special mention: the Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic is a stroke of genius; kudos to whoever came up with that one. It's simple and intuitive, and it could be slotted into just about any RPG system (though it might get a bit cumbersome in the buckets-o'-dice games.)

One major down-side to using pre-fab characters is that players don't have the same emotional attachment to them as those they've built themselves; I have no doubt that when my PHB arrives, there will be a massive cull and replacement of characters.

The adventure is written with a neophyte DM (as well as players) in mind, which is handy because it meant I could devote more of my limited intellect to learning the new rules rather than juggling monsters and encounters. Something that I think would have been advantageous though, would have been to have the various maps printed on separate sheets — it's not a biggie, but it would have meant less page-flipping. (I've since scanned and printed them myself.) Also, having the monster descriptions/statistics in the same booklet meant I had to keep jumping from my place in the adventure to the stat-blocks and back... fortunately, the 5e monster stat-blocks are about a bajillion times simpler than the 3e ones, so it's not usually too bug a deal to scribble down the relevant info in my notebook.

I'm feeling cautiously optimistic about this version.

Now, about that Kool-Aid...

This just arrived this morning. I ordered it from Amazon, because it was on sale for a shiny penny (actually about thirteen bucks) and I thought it would be a fairly cheap and easy way to get to grips with D&D5e, and more convenient than trying to use the Basic Rules PDF at the table.

Plus, it includes another set of dice to add to my collection. You can never have too many dice. They look like quite nice dice too; the standard D&D set of polyhedrals moulded in a pearlescent dark blue with good, clear, readable white numbers.

Those free Basic Rules, by the way, have improved a lot since their first release. It's been split into separate files intended for players and DMs, and now includes information about a bunch of monsters. It still suffers from over-padding in some areas, and from a paucity of material in others (e.g. character backgrounds, magic items), but it's definitely better and shows signs of getting better still. My major complaint about it is that it's pretty much just a layout dump from the hard-copy design, so unless you've got a good, large-format tablet, it's a real pain in the arse to try to use at the table.