Ding
You guys remember that time I forgot to tell my Starfinder players to level up? TLDR: It nearly resulted in a cancelled session, and was no-good-very-bad GMing on my part. My players forgave me though, and I think that might have something to do with today’s story.
So no shit there they were, down in the depths of a Cult of the Devourer stronghold. They’d run into some nasty mind spores on the way in, so they weren’t at 100% Int or Wis in the first place. That’s not a good place to be when you come face-to-face with a killer trap. As per the module:
Half a dozen tiered pillars are interspersed throughout this wide hallway, which ends in a concave wall made of plated steel. A strange pile of body parts and viscera lies next to the easternmost pillar. The faint scent of ozone hangs in the air.
A quick inspection of the body parts revealed that the victim had been “cut into little chunks.” This is what we in the adventuring business like to call a “warning sign.”
So what did my players do? They strode boldly fourth into the Chamber of Devouring. And if you’ve been paying attention to words like “ozone” and “little chunks,” you can probably guess what was coming. Same deal if you’ve ever seen the Resident Evil movie (NSFW: lasers).
The bases’s defenses whirred to life. The inevitable laser trap did its thing, and the intrepid crew of the Yellow Rag began to fail their saves in spectacular fashion. Things went particularly poorly for the irascible editor-in-chief of our National-Enquirer-in-Space. He managed to natty-1 his Reflex save, which prompted a second save. And as per the module, if you fail that save, the results include 20d6 fire damage and the phrase “minuscule chunks of gore.”
By some miracle, the poor sod managed to avoid the chunky salsa result. Even so, “just” normal damage was well over half his hit points. The party’s healer spent her turn patching him up, so at least he was out of single-digit-hp territory.
“Thanks,” he said. ” Now let’s be careful out there, people. Another hit like that would probably kill me.”
GMs love getting straight lines like that. The hard part is keeping the smile off your face.
“The laser wall slows to a stop at the far end of the room,” I said. “Then it reverses course.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” said our very-badly-burned ysoki.
“Give me another save,” I replied
Of course he failed again. What followed was a moment of high drama as the damage was calculated. Silence held around the table. No one breathed. The figures were double-checked.
“I’m dead,” said our beloved news rat. “I’m exactly dead. The massive damage rule is just enough to kill me.”
A glum mood enveloped the table. “How much did you heal me for again?” he asked without much hope.
Our healer could only shake her head. “It’s twice your envoy level plus Charisma mod. At character level 4, that’s only twelve points of healing. I’m sorry.”
There was a further moment of silence as we all contemplated the inevitability of death. Then our technomancer spoke up. “You’re fourth level? I thought we were supposed to be fifth.”
“I’m fifth,” said the hard-bitten soldier.
“Me too,” said the dead rat.
“Everyone is supposed to be fifth level,” I confirmed.
“Oh.” The healer blinked down at her outdated character sheet. “Well in that case, heal for another two stamina.”
There was much rejoicing.
So let that be a lesson to the rest of you! Always keep track of your XP, and always make sure that you bring a fully-leveled character to game. That extra edge can (and did) make all the difference.
Question of the day then! Have you ever caught a life-saving detail on your sheet? Was it a mid-session level up? A forgotten bonus? A seldom-used item tucked into the back corner of your inventory? Let’s hear about all those clutch mechanical life-savers down in the comments!
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Ah, the good ol’ reversing trap… gets ’em every time.
.emit yreve me’ steg …part gnisrever ‘lo doog eht ,hA
Sometimes, the lasers come back.
A similar issue started occurring when our group moved onto D&D Beyond. We roll hit points manually, however that can cause some issues when creating a higher-level character, as it sets the rolled number equal zero, so that you can later roll the die and add that. It doesn’t tell you this unfortunately, so we’ve had several players see their hit points, assume the site already rolled it, then walk into the session with 5th level wizards at 15 hit points.
Handy automated character sheets: only as handy as the users who use ’em and the programmers who make ’em.
I run into similar stuff with Hero Lab. Remembering to toggle on conditional modifiers becomes that little bit more difficult when the sheet seems to do everything for you.
You must be a fortune teller or something, or I’m the king of coincidences.
Not an hour before the comic was posted, I listened to Androids & Aliens (Glass Cannon crew, playing Starfinder’s Dead Suns AP) episode 62, where they reached the exact same mind spores/lasers trap as you’re describing. And where Ellie’s character had the exact same unfortunate outcome as your poor Editor-in-Chief.
Damn I need to catch up…
Laurel and I were using A&A as a road trip soundtrack, but we stopped around the Qabarat University of Xenoarchaeology and Xenoanthropology. Current circumstances make road tripping more difficult. :/
So, what’s the discussion topic of this comic? Ding-ing mid-session? We’ve had that before, sort of.
On that topic, though, our group has a strange arrangement for our next session – we’ve been told to ‘prepare for a level in advance’, because we’re likely to level mid-session and mid-dungeon, so when we do ding, we’ll be able to do it quickly / without wasting too much time.
Ok fine. There’s an no official discussion question now. Happy?
SATISFACTORY!
Agh, this’s giving me flashbacks to those tests where they give you a statement, but forget to actually ask the question. I don’t know what you want from me!
I GM only on VTT; FantasyGrounds specifically; and luckily that keeps track of XP for all players, as long as I don’t forget to award them.
But I had players still forget to level smth on occasion, so I tend to do most of the leveling up at the end of the session as a group.
People rarely forget stuff in that situation, and it gives them the chance to discuss cool new stuff they can do.
That is a major caveat. Knowing me, my players would be fighting balors at level 3.
“Wow… You guys sure don’t seem to have many hp. Did you roll low or something?”
The group level-up is something my guys have moved away from (probably because we’re all on Roll 20 at the moment). There’s something to be said for surprising new abilities coming out in combat, but I do think I prefer the planning and excitement that comes with the group version.
is Chef a recurring character? Or is that a levelup to Nth level NPC mid menue in a live cooking restaurant?
Ranger has been a member of Team Bounty Hunter since the beginning: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/origin-stories-team-bounty-hunter
So my penmanship has often been characterized as “War-crime level”. During Tomb of Annihilation I often would lament my lack of a crowbar. My character sheet was starting to fall apart so I took some time to transfer it to a new sheet (Which immediately ended up with a blood-smear next to the death-saves from a mosquito I swatted) during the transfer I noticed some faded writing that looked to be from the beginning of the campaign. After taking a minute to try and decipher, I realized that I had a crowbar the whole time.
Welcome to the wizard class. Here’s your robe and hat:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/arcane-notation
So there we were, 2 PCs against a boss monster tuned for a party of 6.
Me: “Well, I can cast Shield which makes one person invulnerable, but it only lasts until the end of my next turn.”
Other player: “Actually, it’s until the beginning of your turn after that.”
Cue back-and-forth Shields until the GM gave up because the boss couldn’t touch us. (This system used MP, and it’s possible I would have run out of MP before the boss ran out of HP – but given how fast the other PC was chewing through it when he didn’t need to worry about his own defense, quite possibly not.) Had our PCs had their own theme music (the pair had had some plot of their own), it would most certainly have been playing. Never for the rest of the campaign would those two PCs be in battle on their own, with no one else to care about.
Note that this was toward the end of the campaign, Shield being a high level spell, so there weren’t many further occasions where there was any danger of them possibly pulling that again anyway.
Well hit me with the YouTube link? What would you pick for their theme song?
This isnt related to the question, but it does deal with EXP. The last 3 sessions if my game the players havent had any combat, so no gain in EXP. Well last session I gave them a bad guy to deal with. The party wanted to get info from him, so they kidnapped him instead of fighting him. Once they got what they needed, they killed him. The stat block I used for this guy was a CR 9, meaning g each party member got 1250 exp from one kill that didnt require a roll (he was tied up so) and it pushed them all to level 5. That was not at all my I tention but in so glad it happened.
I make it a point to award XP for RP in combat-less sessions, just to make the point that killin’ stuff isn’t the only way. For example, tying dudes up and then killing them will also earn you XP.
How do you determine the amount of XP for RPing?
Usually about a session’s worth.
Noob question, but what is that?
One thing I personally like doing is giving them XP for overcoming obstacles, even if they do it in a non-combat way. For instance bluffing their way past a guard, or convincing a foe to instead join their cause, would give them the same XP as defeating them in combat would have.
For “milestone” style achievements where there isn’t a clear foe (say convincing the wealthy aristocrat to aid their cause or brokering a peace between two neighboring communities where it was clear to a fight was never on the table) I generally go with something in the neighborhood of the groups CR+2, adjusted a bit up or down if the task was particularly easy/hard or significant.
Threw me off with your use of “milestone” there. Just to make sure we’re on the same page, you’re talking about “major accomplishments,” not the alternative level-up system: https://levelupcorner.com/milestone-vs-xp/
Correct. I am indeed referring to the general concept of a significant step/accomplishment towards something from which that level-up system presumably takes its name.
First a little mechanics backstory. When 5E was out we make a campaign with it, one was more than enough, we haven’t played another again. But we have use the system and rule, by heavily modifying the system and rules. One of the changes we have made is that the pc don’t level up the normal way. We made a list of the thing pc got and at which level, how much xp is needed to get to each level and then with some mad mathematics we got a list of how much each thing you get at level-up would cost. Then when we play we just pay with the xp for the things like HP, spell-caster levels, spell slots and that kind of things. So you are a some hp short of death and you got xp to spend you get hp on the spot. You have spend you spell sloths? Get some more in the middle of a fight. We used this system for the first time when we preparing for a game based on Doomlord, a game i play, and it was really great. Specially since we combined xp with Soul-Energy for the game Since that time we have use this system each time we use 5E for the rules, like with the setting i make and that 🙂
So yes, there are stories, too many 😀
Huh. Neat way to inject a little additional complexity into 5e.
Reminds me of the race-building rules back in Pathfinder: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/creating-new-races/
Well, for the game we needed to adapt many things so we used that too, but mainly the system was instead-of-leveling-up-buy-what-you-want. Kinda like exalted where you buy things with xp but in D&D and ignoring the very concept of level. We only keep track of how many xp was already spend to calculate more or less the tier of the pc. Any thing that adds complexity to a game is welcome for me. That is why i play to get my complexity fix of the week 😛
If i may ask, how were the exams you were studying? The other days seeing the news and how US is doing things with the plague i was thinking of that and if you manage to approve or they were suspended. I too need my knowledge fix of the hour 😀
The eight-hour written test went well. Managed to write something like 4,500 words in the allotted time, so I’m sure they gave me the passing grade for sheer volume if nothing else. Now I’ve got a teleconference with the committee on Friday to close out the semester. It’s a 15-minute presentation followed by 90 minutes of Q&A about the trajectory of my research.
It’s flattering to have a room full of professors all focused on your work, but that’s also the slightest bit intimidating. Doubly so since I’m using some of their published work as a starting point for my own stuff.
The TLDR is that I’m using Erving Goffman’s frame analysis as way to analyze actual play podcasts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_analysis
And they are worse than a room full of TTRPG players? o_O¡
Don’t worry, you will be excellent 🙂
Thanks for asking. 🙂
Thanks for answering. Watching on the news i wasn’t sure if your classes continued or not. Here the first days of quarantine there was the news of some people presenting and defending their thesis by Skype and chat. Good luck and keep safe and healthy, you and Laurel and everybody else 😀
In my experience, the most often-forgotten lifesaver in D&D is paladin auras. I keep having to remind my fellow players whenever paladins are close enough (in fairness, it’s not usually their own class feature, so they can’t be expected to keep track of it all the time). On one memorable occasion, the party cleric narrowly failed his save against a Harm spell and lost a lot of health… but he’d forgotten that my Oath of the Ancients paladin was right next to him, and since her aura gave him resistance to spell damage and a big enough bonus to make the save, he’d only take a quarter of that damage.
So, to start with, some context. My Cleric in the 5e game I was playing until recently is somewhat notorious in the group for inexplicably surviving Big Dumb Explosions. My first session opened up with a literal god falling on me and crushing me, and I walked it off. It only got worse from there. So were in the middle of our hard earned castle about to destroy the Wand of Orcus… and it blows up, because reasons. I dive in to heroically cast Death Ward on the poor sorcerer standing at ground zero, but don’t have time to hit myself… and fail my save, taking enough damage to instantly disintegrate me. Cue the DM cheering at finally having managed to get me while the party pouts, when suddenly I remember “WAIT! I HAVE A LUCK POINT!” I reroll the save, and this time I manage to pass, so between that and me being a goliath, instead of getting disintegrated I am thrown across the scenery into a building for the umpteenth time… and walk it off again while the DM groans at me.
I think this best sums it up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZqVUjziexk
I think this about sums it up: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/from-hells-heart
You see, the first issue here is using massive damage rules. They have a bad habit of just punishing players and enemies just for being unlucky when it comes to traps, and nobody should be doing enough damage in one hit anyways (and if they are, they certainly don’t need to add save or die to it)
“Massive Damage” is a little different in Starfinder:
Two weeks ago our group was fighting a Corpse Flower. Most of us had come across one of the zombies prior to the fight and inoculated ourselves against its pollen. Except the fighters. The two combat geniuses with proficiency in Con saves could not roll above a 3 to save their lives.
Eventually the GM ruled that the pollen dispersed and we had to go ahead and fight the beast. So there we were, a Cleric cough (Warlock) cough, a Ranger, two Fighters and a Rogue/Monk, all level 4, attempting to kill off a CR8 critter with lair actions when at any moment the two close range meat shields could keel over for a round if they even approached it. On the first turn it launched two zombies from its pods, and down went the Psychic Warrior. He rolled a 2. Then he got mulched, because the thing had three attacks, zombie minions and a hatred for all things Fighter, which meant that one of our Ranger’s few spells was used to pull him up (which really hurt, because gritty rest rules meant that spell was gone for a week). We needed to stop the thing, and as I went to set off my second rune I realized… it passively gave me advantage on saves against poison. I felt a bit dumb, because I’d picked the rune precisely for that passive, because we were planning on running a monster-of-the-week campaign, and poison is EVIL. Especially with gritty rest rules. So I bit the bullet and waded in. And saved.
I was honestly mostly superfluous, aside from soaking up damage like a sponge for a round or two and imposing disadvantage on one attack a round. The Warlock fired off an impossible flaming sphere the thing just… could… not… save against that racked up 70-80 points of damage on its own. But if my Fighter had gone down we’d have needed to really scramble, since the Flower tried to kill people it incapacitated (so that it could snack on them to restore health) so I’ll take the win where I can get it.
Remembering your buffs is truly the hardest Int-based skill challenge. I’ve screwed it up more than most.
Good on ya for reassessing mid-combat!
I DM for two different groups, one is generally on top of stuff and the other is less so. In news for the less so group, we did a one shot where they were hunting down a creature for a noble under the assumption that the creature was causing night terrors for the noble’s wife.
They go through the dungeon, pretty much wiping the encounters until they get to what was supposed to be a joke room with two beholders staring one another down with anti magic cones active. I figure they would look at the non-threats and just move on, we had to roll for initiative, eye beams were fired, both beholders ended up dead in part because they, reasonably, assumed the other Eye Ball was a bigger threat than these lesser beings. Not without one player going down to a disintegration ray. We lament over the pile of dust before one of the players, who was trying out a cleric/rogue multiclass, asked if they could revive him. Ultimately he didn’t have any spells for it prepped, but while I was checking his sheet I found out he didn’t have all of his allotted prepared cleric spells. I’m pretty lenient and almost everyone was trying something new, so I let him lock in the spells he was missing, one of which just happened to be capable of reviving his ally (who’d have thunk it? )
At the end they managed to barely take out an ancient black dragon, but the dude who got revived was the one who got the final blow.
Good on ya for the lenient call. I did something similar back here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/habeas-corpus
It wasn’t strictly RAW, but I think it was the right call. Same deal on your end. I’m willing to be the non-dead player appreciated it anyway.
Of course there is:
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0034.html
Were you trying to reply to someone else?
Oh man, we just ran into a Bullette in our interdimensional gladiatorial arena’s desert biome. We knocked it out but didn’t kill it though. Anyway, so far I haven’t failed to level up my character yet, but it’s a little easier for our game as XP is handed out at the end of each match, rather than per encounter. A few people have done so, but in those cases, it was due to them not reading the server rules, and so not realizing we were using Fast XP progression.
I was playing in a 4th edition D&D campaign when a new player joined. Hisd character took some hits and announced he was now bloodied (in 4th edition that means you’ve dropped below 50% of your max HP). So I healed him up. Then, after another hit or two, he was back to bloodied. I did some quick mental math and concluded something was odd. He hadn’t taken quite that much damage, so he shouldn’t be bloodied quite so soon. I asked what his max HP was and I realised it was way too low. He’d hadn’t realised how max HP is calculated in 4th edition. Unlike 3rd and (eventually) 5th edition, it isn’t your hit dice size + CON modifier for first level. It’s hit dice size + CON score.
That’s all I’ve got to say about what’s outside the window. There were horses in fenced-in gardens with guards on the opposite side of the glass. There were wolves and shark aquariums as well.