Tag: Dungeons and Dragons

  • The Hunter should be among your D&D Backgrounds

    The Hunter should be among your D&D Backgrounds

    Myth, legend and story energize Dungeons & Dragons. The game, especially in its 5th edition circles back and amplifies itself. So many of the tales which helped create the game are those of the zero who becomes a hero. A small town X becomes greater than life, saving kingdoms and worlds.

    These zeroes have so many professions. In 5th edition these preheroic roles are captured in Backgrounds. The game does a decent job of offering several. But some are missing — like the Hunter. A Hunter may be chasing a stag and stumble upon a sleeping woman. Or they set traps for furs, travelling to the city later.

    Currently you could use an Outlander or a Folk Hero. But you aren’t a hero yet. That’s going to happen at the table. The Outlander ignores many of the stories of a hunter who is part of the community from which the tale starts. That’s why you need a Hunter. So here it is.

    Photo by Vincent M.A. Janssen on Pexels.com

    Hunter

    Whether for your lone homestead or for a large city you hunt for your people’s food. You may do this with a bow, or a sling, or traps. You do this swiftly and effectively, honoring the prey for what they provide your family, friends, and neighbors. You may be a pseudo-noble authorized to hunt on the Queen’s lands or a trapper out in the wilds.

    Some hunters are expert trackers, others can stalk their prey for miles, while others still use snares. A hunter may focus on specific beasts, or not. No matter their preferred protein when they are on the trail they are completely dedicated to success.

    Skill Proficiencies: Survival, Stealth
    Tool Proficiencies: Leatherworker’s or Woodcarver’s Tools
    Languages: None
    Equipment: A non-magical ranged (w/ 10 pieces of ammunition) or 3 thrown weapons or 2 hunting traps, traveler’s clothes, waterskin, knife, whetstone

    Feature: Provider

    During a long rest you are able to find enough food for yourself and your proficiency bonus number of people for a day. You can do so and still gain the benefits of a rest, but still must sleep or trance as appropriate to your race or lineage. Additionally, you have twice your proficiency bonus for your Stealth or Survival skill gained from this Background when in natural surroundings. This bonus does not stack with Expertise or similar rules at any time.

    You are not proficient with the weapons that are starting equipment.

    For personality use the Folk Hero or Outlander, for now. When the Before We Were Heroes project is available for purchase every Background will have their own traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws.

    The Hunter can also be played as a Trapper without any changes beyond the name. Just choose the hunting traps for your equipment.

    Hunter Design Goals

    As usual this design started with the massive hole in the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook not having many mundane backgrounds and trying to shoehorn them into the Folk Hero. But being a hero is what playing the game is about, not the story in your past.

    With the Hunter I wanted to explore a way to grant Expertise, under a different name, to any character at 1st level. But, this is as pricey as the cantrip granted by the Drudge. There must be a cost. That cost isn’t just dropping a single skill, but dropping a skill and one language/tool/etc. That didn’t seem to be enough though. So, the rule is that a Hunter must choose one of two skills and cannot have the other at 1st level. Our mundane hunter is either good at tracking/trapping or good at sneaking — not both.

    The inspiration has to start with Artemis, Orion, and the Huntsman. But there are more, so many more. Missing this trope is glaring. Crockett, Boone, Ishi, and others can guide you to your own character.

    Other Custom Backgrounds

    

  • Add the Herbalist Background to your 5th edition D&D games

    Add the Herbalist Background to your 5th edition D&D games

    Picking herbs from a backyard garden, a hot house, or a forest outside of town the herbalist collects natural items that aid and harm. An herbalist can heal, poison, invigorate. They know the powers of plants and fungi to change how humanoids and beasts experience the world.

    Photo by murat esibatir on Pexels.com

    Herbalist

    You are a naturalist. You use the art and science of foods and other natural goods to change the way people experience the world. Maybe your favorite tisane helps awaken the weary, or heal the hurt, or cure a disease, or puts people to sleep. A poultice could stop blood flow, or cool the overheating.

    There’s power in the natural world and your various recipes. Clerics count on gods. Druids channel the magic of nature. An herbalist knows that life interacts with itself in interesting ways. There’s a magic to that, it’s just not ‘magic.’

    Skill Proficiencies: Nature, Survival
    Tool Proficiencies: Herbalist Kit
    Languages: Druidic
    Equipment: Sickle, 2 candles, Scroll case with 5 pieces parchment or a notebook, common clothes, component pouch, herbalism kit, 2 vials (1 w/ either antitoxin or healing potion)

    Feature: A Dash of This; a Dollop of That

    Using a short rest, you can always find the various fungus, plants, and whatnot needed to make antitoxin, healing potions, poison, or coffee-like substances. Your recipes manifest as salves, poultices, potions, pills, or any other way to deliver the ingredients. Any of your recipes take just a Bonus Action to use as they are more potent than typical.

    The personality traits, ideals, bonds of flaws of the Acolyte, Folk Hero, Hermit, Outlander, and Sage all make sense to borrow from during the playtest of this Background. When published all Backgrounds will have unique character traits.

    Herbalist Design Goals

    Again, this design exists because the Guild Artisan puts most Backgrounds that are related to Tools into a Guild. That’s fine for some stories, but it ignores so many others.

    A rural or farm community Herbalist is common in the lore upon which D&D is based. These can become Druids, Rangers, Clerics, Sorcerers, Wizards, and Warlocks most commonly. There’s also a fit with certain Barbarians, Monks, and Paladins. Frankly, a Rogue (Assassin) and Paladin (Devotion, Ancients), and even a Fighter (Eldritch Knight). Because frankly every background should have a story with every core class.

    There was also a desire to have access to Druidic, my least favorite D&D language, at a Background level. A couple Backgrounds grant access to Thieves Cant, and it makes sense to have at least one grant Druidic. Shortly, there will be a post about a new take on Druidic that expands it to cover at least one more class and a couple more Backgrounds soon.

    Nynaeve al’Meara from the Wheel of Time is a foundational character for this Background.

    Custom Backgrounds for 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons

  • Embracing the Mechanics of Backgrounds

    Embracing the Mechanics of Backgrounds

    As Wizards of the Coast makes changes to how race & lineage impact character creation there is some pushback towards removing Ability Score Increases from race and having that instead be a floating adjustment. There are many proposed adjustments and several games or third-party products include adjustments to this part of the system, to varying degrees.

    Ancestry & Culture and Level Up are the two that I’ve been most intrigued with to this point. My home game just uses floating ASI for simplicity’s sake. Another movement tries to connect the ASI to Backgrounds. One such proposal on reddit suggests this because;

    The backgrounds we have in basic 5e are fairly lackluster. Here’s some tools and a little feature. It’s kinda meh. You can almost skip them in character creation.
    What I’d like to see are dozens of backgrounds that provide: tools, languages, equipment, more substantial features, as well as appropriate ASIs. They could provide so many more variations with every published book as well as allow for plenty of homebrew.

    There are a few reasons this suggestion would not work at my table, and isn’t recommended.

    • You can already suggest that your Floating ASI connects to your character’s Background. As well as writing your character’s story as if the Floating ASI connects to your racial/species/lineage origin, or to Class, or whatever element you want. This empowers players to tell the widest variety of tales possible.
    • Assumptions about weak/strong, or unintelligent/smart people in specific roles aren’t as bad as those connected to race, but they’re still not great. Being a weak Farmer is a good story, whether or not the character is a Remarkable Drudge.
    • Backgrounds already do a lot of mechanical work. Embrace those mechanics. Their design tells your table so much about who you are and why you do the things you do. The Background rules do not need to change. They need to be used.
    Photo by Canan YAu015eAR on Pexels.com

    Mechanics of Backgrounds

    To review every Background in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition as written includes two skills (roughly 1/4 to 1/2 of the skills your character begins with), two languages/tools/games/instruments/kits (closer to half of the beginning amount), and a social or exploration themed feature. A removal of Backgrounds further reduces the social and exploration pillars bringing the game back to its wargaming roots, which ignores current desires of most gamers.

    This change also ignores the Traits, Ideal, Bond, and Flaw system. These few short sentences are guidance towards personality, more so than the archaic use of Alignment. They tell you about the who of your character. They are not a complete personality, but a snapshot. This system also adds mechanics to roleplay. When a character plays their Traits, Ideal, Bond, and/or Flaw they are granted an Inspiration Die. This d20 is consumed when a player wants to grant their character advantage (a handy house rule is that players can grant each other an Inspiration Die based on roleplay too). Having advantage is powerful. The math shifts.

    Together there are ten mechanics attached to Backgrounds. TEN.

    Plus those mechanics attach themselves to something else that race and calls do not — the story of what you did Before. Your zero to hero journey is fundamentally intertwined with Backgrounds.

    Backgrounds Empower Story

    What were you before you picked up a sword or spell to fight a bandit? How did that upbringing and background inform who you are becoming? Real world ‘adventurers’ are not the same, even if they are from the same ethnic group and took the same adventuring job. A studious nerd from the ‘burbs who became a linguist with the Special Forces has a different story from the hunter from rough rural lands who became a linguist with the Special Forces.

    Tools aren’t ‘meh.’ They are powerful ways to talk about what your character is outside of combat. Tools are one of the best ways to explain your character’s hobbies. And your character must have a hobby. People in the times that inspire our game had hobbies. Tools are also ways to tell cultural stories about a region. The existence of an expert coffee roaster or athlete carries worldbuilding implications. Knowing more languages than typical speaks to a character’s education (either by book or by street or by silk road)

    Those social and exploration features are some of the only ways that a Fighter will have social and exploration mechanics. The class is so blank slate that without Backgrounds that hole is massive. They also augment the ways that the rest of the Classes interact with those pillars of the game.

    Backgrounds help D&D players differentiate their characters by adding another layer of story from Before as they begin to tell the story of Now.

    Custom Backgrounds for 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons

  • Latest Unearthed Aracana sends us to the Phlogiston (maybe)

    Latest Unearthed Aracana sends us to the Phlogiston (maybe)

    With the announced pace of products picking up, we should also expect Unearthed Arcana’s pace to pick up. Today, Wizards of the Coast sent out the latest Dungeons & Dragons playtest document with six new races to play n the game. They have strong flavors of my favorite settings from the days of yore — Spelljammer.

    Unlike the foundational settings of D&D Spelljammer has no relationship to the real world or literature. The concept is D&D in space, but an odd kind of space with ships that look like dragonflies and mind flayer heads, all powered by hooking up a magic user to a chair/helm/etc that sucks magic from them. Each “solar system” exists within a crystal sphere, and outside of that is a highly flammable sea of a Phlogiston.

    There are prates, even crafter gnomes, space monkeys that can glide, Victorian hippo-people, asteroid trading posts run by beholders, fleets of mind flayers. The whole of the setting is comc book/cartoon joy with themes of exploration similar to Star Trek.

    Some of the new races are also part of the Planescape realm and the thri-keen are one of the signature elements of Dark Sun.

    Astral Elf

    An elf denizen of the Astral Plane who is likely thousands of years old.

    What I like

    Radiant Soul is a cool way to bounce back from death’s door once per day. That you must be down and making death saves in order to use it connects the mechanics to Astral Elf’s planar nature.

    Trance Tools are a non-cultural way to gain proficiency, nifty little mechanic. Maybe my favorite from this drop, which is funny because…

    What I don’t like

    Don’t know why the world needs another elf, ever. There are a lot in D&D these days, with more to come for every new setting. The Astral Elf, if the feedback is strong, will be the 14th elf within official D&D worlds for Fifth Edition.

    Also, just after so many reminders that each playable races is supposed to have a human-like age spectrum, the Astral Elf is even older than normal elves.

    Will I play one?

    Probably not. Elves and all their permutations are my least played race. The idea of an ancient people viewed as the ideal of sapience has little appeal to me.

    Autognome

    A mechanical gnome gifted with free will.

    What I like

    True Life is a brilliant way to empower healing for living constructs. The Warforged need this in the expected minor racial reworks coming with the three-book gift set.

    Built for Success strongly connects the rules of the race to why the race exists. Gnomes created these automatons to be better than gnomes are, at least at certain tasks.

    What I don’t like

    Sentry’s Rest is another variant on Trances. Having a party with a creature that needs 4 hours, and another that needs 6 hours, and most that need 8 hours adds unnecessary complexity to organizing watches.

    Will I play one?

    Yep, I love the little people. Also, I enjoy tool users and specialists. These would make strong Rogues.

    Giff

    A hippo-headed being of impressive size.

    What I like

    They’re big, really big. Playing a super-sized race that doesn’t have to smush itself through most passages is a great way to feel more powerful than you are in real ife. Hippo Build embraces this.

    What I don’t like

    Damage Dealer connects more strongly to Rogues and Paladins than the Giff’s traditional role as a Fighter. Also, that’s it. They only have two traits. The Astral Elf, embracing their racial superiority have seven.

    Will I play one?

    Yep. Absolutely. Anthropomorphic races are cool. The Giff’s traditional Victorian military culture can be fun. There will be a search for another trait that connects to their build, maybe something as boring as Tough Hide which gives them an extra hit point every level.

    Hadozee

    A highly adaptive simian being who uses winglike membranes to glide.

    What I like

    The climbing speed and Glide are both great ways to capture their tree glider meets monkey vibe.

    Dexterous Feet allowing a bonus action to Use an Object is good, but it doesn’t go quite far enough.

    What I don’t like

    Dexterous Feet should include the tail, and to enable more fun, should allow the activity via a Reaction too. Yes, that break the standard for Reactions, but it’s cool.

    Will I play one?

    Maybe. Kinda want to be an Artificer or Wizard, who manipulates their magic components with their feet and tail.

    Plasmoid

    An amoeba-like being.

    What I like

    These things are bizarre, the oddest playable concept in the game. You have no standard form, as you are an Ooze. Shape Self enables you to look kind of like a person and also lets you grow an ‘arm’ up to ten feet long.

    What I don’t like

    The mechanics are great, the ability to be one the creatures mentally needs a lot of explanation.

    Will I play one?

    Not until the lore is revealed. My head needs help wrapping around this concept even more than it does for Lizard Folk.

    Thri-kreen

    A six-limbed, telepathic insectoid.

    What I like

    Secondary Arms is a good solve for how these six-limbed peoples work with the D&D action economy. There is a fun synergy with Two-Weapon Fighting and with light thrown weapons when you have multi-attack or related abilities.

    What I don’t like

    Sleepless Revitalization reveals another Long Rest variant to confuse the party.

    With five racial traits, most with power, they are insectoid elves.

    Will I play one?

    No, but they are absolutely necessary for the world of Dark Sun, and maybe in my own world (spoiler?).

  • 8 Cantrips to Enhance Fall Festival Celebrations

    8 Cantrips to Enhance Fall Festival Celebrations

    Festivals, holidays, and celebrations are great ways to add verisimilitude to your game. Plus, everyone likes a party. With Halloween and its associated celebrations (All Saints Day, Samhain, Harvest tide, Día de los Muertos, etc) there is frequently a lean into those themes within our gaming. That can be as simple as skeletons, headless horse riders, ghosts, or more complexity. Or it can just mean the presence of cornucopias, jack-o’-lanterns, and candles as the party walks through a village.

    Copying real world makes sense. Twisting and adapting it a bit makes even more sense. You can advance your game world even more by leaning into the Dungeons & Dragons of it all (or your game of preference) by leaning into what makes D&D unique and special — the presence of various kinds of magic.

    Photo by David Gomes on Pexels.com

    Over the next month I’ll be following the prompts from Magic: The Gathering to share the lore and rules within my campaign world. Some will be short hits, others expansions on previous lore. These prompts may just inspire regular rather than irregular blogging.

    https://twitter.com/wizards_magic/status/1443977494164426752

    This entry grew when thinking about pumpkins. And then the mind drifted. Pumpkin > Jack ‘o Lantern > Will o’ Wisp > Dancing Lights. These 8 utility cantrips in the Basic Rules can add a bit of flavor to your world’s Fall festivals.

    • Dancing Lights – A spell almost certainly inspired by the Will o’ Wisp, the four tiny lights can be any color, a pale silver would be best for this usage. Place them behind a cloth used for ghostly apparitions inside windows and trees making those fake ghosts look even more spectral.
    • Druidcraft – There are so many ways to use Druidcraft that it almost needs its own post, but what if your fake cemetery started to reek, or you cause a group of tree leaves to fall all at once?
    • Light – The image attached to the post almost perfectly demonstrates a use for this tiny spell. Lighting up a carving for the hour after sunset is magic I can get behind.
    • Mage Hand – What haunted house doesn’t have a torch floating by in a spectral hand?
    • Message – Within worlds of lighter magic Message can be used as a friendly spook as people walk about the town.
    • Minor Illusion – A couple of the descriptions of possible illusions read as if they were designed for Halloween… “its volume can range from a whisper to a scream” and “muddy footprints” are ideal haunts.
    • Prestidigitation – Create small marks on doorways that ‘ward’ off evil spirits or welcome visiting neighbors.
    • Thaumaturgy – The ability to dim all lights along a street creates an unwelcome space where spirits can hide and fear can thrive.

    How do you incorporate the mystical, fantastic, and magical into your Fall festivals?