Are we still sneaking past goblins? At this point in the campaign? I thought we were past all that! Well, it’s good to see my li’l green buddies again in any case. It’s just unfortunate that they’ll never see Allie the Allosaurus.
If you guys are unfamiliar, pass without trace is pretty dang useful in 5e D&D. Especially in a game noted for its “bounded accuracy,” a large static bonus is potent stuff:
Pass Without Trace: A veil of shadows and silence radiates from you, masking you and your companions from detection. For the duration, each creature you choose within 30 feet of you (including you) has a +10 bonus to Dexterity (Stealth) checks and can’t be tracked except by magical means. A creature that receives this bonus leaves behind no tracks or other traces of its passage.
There are a couple of important things to note about the spell. First and foremost, it’s “pass without trace,” not “pass without a trace.” If you say the latter you’ll sound like a fool. A damn fool!
The second important thing is the spell’s effect of obviating group stealth checks. I’m not kidding about those goblins never spotting Allie. With her massive +0 to stealth in addition to the spell’s +10, a goblins Passive Perception will still never catch up with the dino. This can be frustrating for a DM, taking us all the way back to our discussions of flight and invisibility as game-changing abilities. When magic straight up blanks an entire challenge genre (e.g. stealth, climbing, picking locks), it can feel like great swaths of the game are suddenly closed off from play.
But consider what this looks like from a player’s standpoint. The class fantasy of using your woodcraft to sneak your pals through the undergrowth and straight up to the enemy commander’s tent is right friggin’ there. Druids and rangers dream about those moments! How exactly are they supposed to make it happen without the spell?
In that sense, here’s what not to do: “Yeah, it was always an auto-pass with this group. Stealth isn’t a real challenge anymore, so I just assume they get past the guards every time.” Poppycock, say I! These aren’t going to be long or involved challenges, but they are still necessary to living out that aforementioned class fantasy. And silly as it sounds, the best way I’ve found to help your player feel like a genius is to complain loudly. Complain every time.
“Again!? How do you always have that prepared? Stupid OP pass without trace! Very well then. Because of Sneaky McStealthFace over here, you all get surprise on the gobbos. Yeah, even Allie.”
In short, there are a million and one ways to adjust difficulty when it comes to your adventures. But in the case of “I magically make the problem go away” abilities like pass without trace or knock or find traps, it’s OK to let your players simply have the W. And obvious as that may sound, it’s a lesson that many GMs in my experience could stand to learn.
So what do you say, folks? What’s an example of a “perfect magical solution” that you’ve utilized in-game? Did it serve to overcome a supposed-to-be difficult challenge, making you feel like a tactical prodigy? Or did you find your ability suddenly side-lined due to its potential for anticlimax? Tell us your tale of “passing without stats” down in the comments!
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Allie has a spotlight, tophat, cane and spotlight ready for the moment the spell runs out.
The spotlight is important you said it twice.
I’m thinking one of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OwnBuPbMqc
How do you say ‘Putting on the Ritz’ in Allosaurus?
That goblin sure is taking advantage of his Knowledge (Geography) doctorate…
As his white coat shows, he doesn’t just have a doctorate in geography, he’s also a professor of geology! … But sadly, he did not study any archaeology…
Weird how professor are showing up in my fiction now. I just think they’re so relatable!
Clearly Druid is sneaking Allie past the goblins because they don’t agree with her. Gastronomically, that is. 😉 Only a fool would argue with an allosaurus.
Dino poo bags are just full size garbage bags. No fun carrying ’em as you finish your walk.
For reasons related to my username this comic fills me with joy. Any chance we might see mammoths or other extinct fauna in a handbook entry on how no one ever picks common animals for their wild shape?
“You mean I can become any animal I’ve ever seen?”
Instant plesiosaur.
Buddy of mine when he played a druid wildshaped into a walrus for a dive bomb attack.
It wasn’t an arctic campaign or anything, he just chose it cause it amused him.
Our druid tended to favour the dire skunk…
Luckily, I made this device that tracks microtremors and displays them, now take this flamer and go look for them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgxrucghX7I
Same result, honestly.
oh, this is so cute.
I know I’ve had a few issues where a character has had a skill that makes anything under a difficulty of 3 negligible, when in this system I interpret setting difficulty 3 is akin to saying “ha ha, NO”.
It should be noted that the system in question works like the Price is Right: you want to roll no higher than your stat and over the difficulty of the roll.
More important than the +10 is that, “and can’t be tracked except by magical means”. It doesn’t matter how high the stats go, if the tracking party isn’t using (doesn’t have, or doesn’t think to use) magical means, don’t bother rolling the dice. Magical tracking implies specialized tools specifically for tracking, which in most D&D settings are rare.
Although this isn’t a perfect “magical” solution, a related issue comes up sometimes in the Traveller system – including in offshoots, most notably Cepheus’s versions, some of which were written for D&D-like fantasy worlds (vs. the core Traveller rules being for sci-fi). There are no crits or botches in the system, so if you can rig up dice modifiers – including skills, tool bonuses, and everything – so you effectively have to roll at least 2 on 2d6, that’s an autopass.
These rules sometimes get applied to situations that are supposed to be routine, to model what sort of conditions usually apply to average people doing routine tasks, so as to judge how much more difficult (or not) it is for adventurers doing adventuring things. For example, piloting an undamaged ship in good condition into port under calm conditions should not go horribly wrong even 1/36th of the time (just because someone rolled 2 on 2d6). Maybe minor problems – meeting the difficulty number exactly – but the difficulty for average tasks, before skills et all, is 8+ on 2d6. Skills rarely go beyond 2, +1 more for attribute bonuses, making this effectively 5+. If one forgets to add anything else, the odds and consequences of failure can make adventurers fearful to perform tasks that commoners routinely do, just because dice are actually rolled for the adventurers’ tasks.
A response sometimes seen is to gear up (and make sure to remember to apply gear bonuses), expensively if need be, to ensure autopass even in challenging situations. This is sometimes justified in-universe: the person acquires and practices with good enough gear that they can and do perform a given task in simulation 10 or 100 times in a row without fail. (Voyages can take days – it’s called “Traveller” for a reason – so there is time for this sort of practice.)
The most OP spell the characters ever had was “Shadow Walk”. The evil ranger in one of my short high level evil campaigns had it and they waltzed through some tough areas I had set up. Getting surprise at the level they were at was pretty much a guarantee that they were going to win the encounter. Took out their first storm giant encounter in three rounds. Of course if there are NO SHADOWS, like in the area a group of lightning para-elementals had set up, then even OP spells like that fail.
> it’s OK to let your players simply have the W
Your players, or your player ? In a “players vs DM” debate, yes, letting them have the win is good, because there is no such rivalry.
But those abilities of “magic makes challenge go poof” don’t always work well in a group. When your nonmagical character put points in Disable Device, but someone points out that taking 20 on a lock takes 10 minutes while Knock is a standard action. Or when you’d like to Gather Information, but the Arcanist knows Ears of the City which is 1500 times faster and gives better results. There are many occasions where, in the presence of nonmagic characters, magic that trivialize challenges is an issue.
Of course, how to handle the way your players react to the challenges you put in the world, and how to handle intra-party balance, are different issues. But they both come from the same source, and both are (mostly) for the GM to handle.
(By the way, I did my Gather Information check, and the Arcanist just spent the next 1d4 hours reading a book. But it still wasn’t a fun moment for me, as I felt useless due to the existence of magical abilities that trivialize what I wanted to do. And to be clear, information gathering was *not* the Arcanist’s specialty or passing interest and we didn’t have overlapping builds; another player actually had to remind him that he knew that spell.)
Pass Without Trace for me is a good example of a) how inconsistent 5e is and b) how bounded accuracy breaks apart.
Basically the designers tried to shake things up a lot and reduce the amount of math needed, and so they came up with bounded accuracy, but then they let a bunch of pure numerical bonuses sneak past, like Pass Without Trace or the bonus damage from the Sharpshooter/GWM feats. Those things would have been good but not gamebreaking in older editions, but in 5e the bounded accuracy principles make those things pretty freaking busted and surprisingly difficult to balance at times. Same thing with magic items ; the designers’ baffling insistence to balance the game without taking magic items into account means that even a simple +1 item can end up much more impactful than it should be(especially in the case of AC increasing items).
That’s not to say those are bad things. Playing with a bunch of powergamers, my approach tends to be “let the players have their good thing”, and we definitely enjoy feeling badass and powerful. But it can be quite a headache when I try to design something that would actually be a challenge when those abilities are into play.
The “balance” around bounded accuracy is really weird too.
Adult red dragons have an attack bonus of +14, which means they were either expecting players to have 25 AC for a 50/50 chance to hit, or they wanted its attacks to be close to automatic hits. I think it’s probably more likely the former than the latter, but who the heck knows.
Find Traps should never be mentioned in one sentence with Pass Without Trace, unless “is trash” is put after Find Traps.
The spell, as it is written, is bloody useless. It does not show the location of traps, it has a large range that will probably trigger at least something in a big trapped dungeon (or run a false positive if the house next to the one you are breaking into is trapped), it wastes a 2 lvl slot without being a ritual, it does not work on natural weaknesses. In no way, shape or form it can be considered a “I magically make the problem go away” ability.
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/f/find-traps/
Sorry then, I was thinking about the 5e version, since the topic of bounded accuracy came up and the 5e version of PwT got mentioned. The PF version seems alright.
5e Find Traps should logically reveal itself.
/spittake
Recently I ran a mini-campaign that I titled Vertical London while our normal DM was busy being a new dad and not getting enough sleep. It was four sessions long, enough to showcase each one of the caste levels and give one player a chance to shine a little brighter. Then came the final boss fight.
The final boss was in fact four NPCs that the party had encountered previously:
a gang leader named Greenband Leader who was ‘Brightstar Associate’ Stan’s nemesis,
a no good thieving archivist named Tim Jamp, who was Jimmy the Relic Hunter’s nemesis,
a hoighty toighty upper crust gentleman named Cromulent Twimp, a rival businessman to our own bookbinder Hobart Hadd,
And a mother named Gareth’s Mum, who was our knife crime kid’s mum.
Now, Tim Jamp had recently stolen as many magic items from the Reliquary as he could hold and had run off into the Deeps where only the Feral caste and monsters (and Gareth, who had always fit right in) made their home. The party followed a trail of spilled coins only to find at the end of it, all four of these opponents bedecked in magic arms and armor…except for Gareth’s Mum, who had made effectively full plate out of Hobart’s printing press after he’d offered her a job. Gareth was amused that he’d have to stab his mum next, but promised to stab everyone else first. Meanwhile, Hobart was *fuming.*
But Jimmy had the initiative. Not only that, Jimmy was an Inquisitor, and Inquisitors have fire spells. Not only that, but Tim Jamp had loaded Cromulent with as many magic items as he asked for, which was ‘most of them’ because he deserved all the expensive things.
And not only that, but Jimmy realized that one of those items was a Necklace of Fireballs.
I was so happy. Natural 20s happened, natural 1s happened, Cromulent never knew what hit him. I’ve *always* wanted to see one of those things go up, and by golly Jimmy delivered. The proctor of this boss fight, the Ancient Warrior Statue, had to pick up the pieces and restart the fight, except that there wasn’t enough of Cromulent to put back together. Oh well…a fierce back and forth later, the party seized the upper hand and knocked out Gareth’s Mum before Gareth was done with Tim and the fistfuls of scrolls Tim was trying to use.
As it turned out, this whole mess started because Gareth’s Mum wanted to find somewhere else to live that wasn’t in the Deeps next to her criminally insane son, and had sold herself into indentured servitude to have her services auctioned somewhere more respectable, and her name was Valerie, which Gareth heard, acknowledged, and immediately forgot.
And it ended with the party attuning to The Warrior’s Regalia which they’d found over the course of their short quest (it was looking for new warriors), with the promise to wear their pieces of the Regalia for the rest of their lives and then have their souls interred within as the Regalia’s egos after their death. It was their favorite of three options, and then the Statue sent everyone still alive (including Gareth’s Mum) up to the Gentry levels at the top of Vertical London. Scene closed, everyone congratulated each other, we all got to laugh at the 69 damage the Necklace of Fireballs did.
(Does it sound too perfect? The DR was impossibly perfect for me that day, I don’t know how many countries I saved in a past life to get that kind of karma but they’re welcome)
Not me specoiically but a guy who played wizard of our team would cast levitate on himself to avoid ground based traps when ever he suspected there were those. our merry band at this point was lacking a rogue(due to gm considering a rogue with silver dagger being bigger threath to wererat than barbarian with normal weapon, he was wrong) so we really didn’t have much other optuons but send the big pool of hitpoints in first and hope some ones perception would catch the traps. Exept the floating wizard… damn soellcasters.
And that’s why Staff of the Woodlands is a staple go to for druids – it lets you cast PWT at will… (also Awaken for a measly 6 charges…)
Nice to see (or not, as the case may be) Allie back. She’s always been one of my favourite minor characters.
“What’s an example of a “perfect magical solution” that you’ve utilized in-game? Did it serve to overcome a supposed-to-be difficult challenge, making you feel like a tactical prodigy?”
I don’t play the D & the D, so this is less (or more)… ah… a problem/opportunity. However, there is a spell in GURPS Magic that has this issue (okay, a lot of spells, but this one ends up on a lot of GM’s “aw hell naw” lists) and that’s Lockmaster.
It does exactly what it says on the tin, it’s basically GURPS version of Knock. Since GURPS fantasy campaigns trend* towards being less “wild and wolly” with it’s magic than the D & the D, a simple spell that just pops locks open for very little cost castable as often as the mage wants (with a few minutes rest between if they go “crazy” casting everything)? Yeah, a lot of GMs balk at this ‘nonsense’.
Of course a lot the GURPS Magic utility spells have this opportunity to derail careful laid plots, so a lot of of GURPS GMs (used to*) heavily restrict magic, or run low/no magic fantasy.
* Things have changed in the last 20 years in GURPS, big influx of “youngsters” who want things “done differently”. Bah. Humbug I say! But, the two sibling series of “GURPS Dungeon Fantasy” and “Dungeon Fantasy Powered By GURPS”† are built along the lines of ‘Dungeon Delving Kitchen Sink Power Fantasy’, so the whole idea is to embrace these “will break your carefully built campaign” spells and let the PCs go nuts being superstars that are large and in charge.
† GURPS Dungeon Fantasy (often referred to in GURPS circles as “DF”) came out in 2007 and was a GURPS genre series (20+ splats and going) that work along side GURPS Basic, GURPS Magic, and GURPS Fantasy to setup basically running “old skool D&D style” GURPS campaigns (the kind of games the author remembered from his youth, so vaguely 2e AD&D).
Dungeon Fantasy Powered by GURPS (aka DFRPG) is a standalone boxset that needs no other GURPS rules, it’s a “ready-to-run” version of DF straight out of the box.
Because both of these games toss out I (and I suspect you Claire) love about roleplaying (social interaction with NPCs, towns, shopping spree sessions, social ‘realm management’, etc) and because it embraces the “go gonzo guys” aspect of power-fantasy, it has less issue with the “campaign breaking spells” that a more “realistic” GURPS Fantasy campaign would tend to have.
There was a time in our current Pathfinder campaign where my dwarf was finding his beard under near continuous assault, whether from mud, sewer water, acid spells, fireballs, assassin blades or whatever…then I realised that the humble Prestidigitation cantrip could be used for personal grooming…and these days beard attacks are very uncommon, almost perfunctory…