I personally enjoy the way yall include the squadie-b’s in your decisions and choices. It makes it feel more like a genuine community with a voice to be heard. Understandably the final choices are yours and need to be made to make your personal lives better ❤
Pathfinder 2 also has sneak attack for rogue. You get it any time your target is "Off-guard". You can make someone "Off-guard" by doing things such as flanking or being hidden.
Mags I need you to know that there is nothing I love more in this world than listening to you talk about your dnd characters 💜 Also I have a hexblood bard/warlock who is literally just a bird who made a deal with a hag to be a person, her name is Wren. She runs into glass. 😂
I just want to say with the healer wanting to go last thing, if you have this mindset, try look at it this way. If I go last, I can react to what happens, sure. If I go first I just get an extra round of setup, and then I get to react at the top of the round anyway(pretty much the same as if I was last but I just get an extra prep round! win win!) maybe I can set up some continuous damage, maybe I can move to a safer spot and cast bless, maybe I give out temp hit points, its all good. But yeah, I don't like the rule this came from, initiative means you react the fastest, and whoever comes next reacts to you taking the initiative in a fight. I've always thought of a round being 6 seconds, but not everyone being on the EXACT same 6 seconds, player one starts at second 0, next goes at 0.5 seconds next at 1 second, and so on(Just an example). we each get our 6 seconds but they keep overlapping each other. Having to declare all your actions also gives your DM a big chance to react to things you haven't even done yet, cast an AOE they could just happen to spread out the enemies. say your going to heal, the enemies could do less damage actions and more prep actions.
AAHH WHAT THE HELL I ALSO have a hexblood character named Briar! She's a weird little swamp druid and while she doesn't have chicken feet, her staff/flying broom is shaped like a big ol' chicken leg she salvaged from her family's witch hut.
As a Curse of Strahd DM it is quite a difficult campaign, because when you finish "chapter 1" the entire country opens up and the only thing stopping the players from walking right into the final dungeon is common sense. It's also a module where if the players sit around, bad things are going to happen because the villains are always up to no good. Downtime should be a conscious choice, not forced upon the players because the wizard got bit by a vampire
In my dnd games, I like to treat big wounds as a "roleplaying wound" rather than statistical, after a fight I invite my players to tell me how they go about treating their wounds during their rest, or how it affects them as they progress throughout the day. I almost always make players characters with scars or gain scars, even if they technically heal completely because I feel it tells a story. If a character dies and gets revived or gets brought back after falling unconscious, I like to ask them to make some change (Temporary or not) to their appearance that fits the way they were knocked out. My group is a lot of fun, and often players choose to give themselves a bit of a disadvantage to certain things due to the things that happened, but only if everyone thinks it's fun. My group and I also customized our exhaustion rules so it's less extreme, but we still need to mind our actions and have a consequence for poorly taking care of yourself as a character.
Third Rule: Yeah, that sort of extra work should grant a temporary boon, like a reroll or advantage or something like that. And maybe if someone builds up a bunch of those points, they can spend them all on a single permanent boon, like a bonus Feat or Ability Score improvement or additional HP or something on level-up. Like, if someone accumulates more than 5 of these Piety Points, they can exchange all of them for a permanent boon on level-up, but they also have to spend them when they want to utilize the temporary boons they can grant as well, so you have to sort of pick and choose whether you want advantage now or hold on to your points to get a Feat when you level up later.
I think one of the problems with the piety points rule is that it unbalances the characters stats going into the game. The reward could be something else like a resource that a character could use to benefit themselves AND/OR other members in the party. Like luck points that to give themselves or others advantage, gold or items. And that might feel a little bit better than ASI increases. And for the same reasons as before, there also needs a cap, otherwise this could also begin to be unbalanced.
Just a thought here on the changing the declaration and action order, I think it's important to remember it's not fast reaction time on a massive scale, a round is 6 seconds, the fighter gets to hit first, the enemy hits back, the claric heals. It happens so fast the order doesn't matter really except for the strategy of it, inmy opinion of course
Also the 0 level, just sounds like a session zero option to me, get your backstory going, you can play how you started and why you are going out for adventure kind of thing Sounds nice, but only for one session for me
Currently playing curse of strahd, and I've been at a table that did the effects rules. It would be brutal to take a week off, I am aware that modules can be home-brewed and can be changed for ease, but Cos is such a time based game, many important events happen at the same time, along with all the gruesome fights , needing a week off could easily mess up so many plots, on top of the fact that the fights could lead to multiple effects at once, having to have these extra disadvantages in an already grueling game would make it so difficult.
The Level 0 thing sounds like it was trying to imitate Worlds Beyond Number's (podcast with Brennan Lee Mulligan, Erika Ishii, Lou Wilson, and Abriya Iyengar) 'The Wizard, The Witch, and The Wild One' which had a prologue adventure where the three players were children and getting to know each other. It was an amazing story that lasted about 8 episodes, but this was notably largely in part to all of them being incredible story-tellers who are all there to do that thing. If you drop this on your table without getting the buy-in from the players I can't imagine it feeling great.
I don't understand how people can say that great weapon master and sharp shooter are too over powered and then also Say material classes are so much weaker then spell casters
Second Rule: So casting a cantrip resets the entire rest for that character. Does that mean that if a fighter uses an axe to cut firewood or a ranger uses their abilities to locate a safe place in the woods to camp, their rests are reset as well? I mean, they're using the abilities afforded to them by their class to perform those actions, after all. This sounds like someone just wanting to punish casters for being casters. And yeah, this absolutely sounds like something the DM did as a "gotcha" thing. I'll bet the guy casted the cantrip, and everybody roleplayed around the fire for ten minutes, and then as they were packing up to leave, the caster went to erase his spent slots and the DM said, "Um, acktually, you keep your spent slots as well as your damage because you casted that cantrip last night, ehehe. You need another full day of rest to get them back," with all kinds of smugness.
Fourth Rule: I like and dislike this rule, because while it does let the party plan out their turns pretty effectively, it also hurts the ability of players to react to the situation. For example, if the cleric is going last in initiative, which lets them state what actions they are going to take on their turn first through this rule, it's entirely dependent on the rest of the round going a specific way. So if the cleric gets to state their action first, and they say "I am going to heal the barbarian on my turn", and the barbarian doesn't take any damage during their turn, then the cleric has to rethink their entire turn on the fly, which could slow things down since they already had a plan in mind for what they wanted to do.
when my group played Curse of Strahd no one died. I think if our DM didn't let things some of the players pulled slide it would have been more difficult. He was just over it at the time though and wasn't having fun anymore.
Honestly, there a lot of house rules that I use at my table, that I've seen similar on these, but for some reason we seem to dodge the worst of the effects of these. For example I have a severe injury table, BUT, I have written out how to fix the issues (medicine check, followed by a full rest and a cure wounds while fully healed and rested to allow the magic+body to heal the damage). I also don't have it be automatic, but have it be a bit of a random roll, where half the time nothing happens, or at worst you get a bit of ptsd that causes a frightened condition for a little bit (easily saved out of with a DC 10 save). I also have the severity controlled by the number of failed death saves. I do this not to punish the players necessarily (which is why I have a clear and easy path out of it) but to make healers not ignore people who are dying or who went down. I had so many players just allowing their allies to be yoyo'd and it was giving me cognitive dissonance about the role play of it all.
i think what the OP with the initiative switch etc is trying to do (badly, i think this is a silly idea) is make the fact that everyone is acting almost simultaneously over 6 seconds in ‘reality’. so if the monster hits an enemy round one, that’s happened less than 6 seconds before the last persons turn, so they shouldn’t be reacting to that for ‘immersion’. but like jack said, fixing a problem that’s not there
I don't think my dm would ban sneak attacks, but I couldn't blame him for hating the wild magic barbarian rogue combo😅 rage giving the thrown property to a greatsword + reckless attack gaining advantage + magic sword giving divine smite + CRIT!!!!!!! Dm would have been justifies this one time😂
The injury table for CoS would not work at the table I am currently playing at. It is not uncommon for multiple players to go down in combat. There have been very few combats where we have all managed to Remain conscious so much so that the DM has legitimately showed us proof that that is how it’s balanced in the module
Brandon Lee mulligan in world's beyond number did a level zero prologue character creation thing but it lasted at most 12 hours and most importantly everyone was into it so it can be really cool but not something you can just dump on people
Absolutely UNRESTFUL in regards to making a long rest 24 hours and contingent on not casting cantrips?! 😭😭😭 poor spellcasters! You have to have that conversation to see if everyone wants to play that way lol
Having played a chunk of CoS the injury table idea would not work. One of our clerics was crushed by a large thing (not saying due to spoilers) and took so much damage it was an insta kill. My PC avoided the same fate a bit later in combat because our DM allowed her Steel Defender to take a lot of damage. Our wizard on at least two occasions was 2 HP under being insta killed. My PC nearly tpk'd the party trying to get into something. Oh and we had a bunch of death saves in the Death House module that is before it.
fundamentally disagree with you guys about SS and GWM!! they are the only way for martials to be as powerful as casters are. more than that, there should be similar feats for one-handed weapons and unarmed attacks!! otherwise "optimization" of martials is gonna stay the same boring 2-3 feat combinations.
![[4K] Watch SpaceX Catch A Starship Rocket From Space!!! #IFT5](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/pIKI7y3DTXk/mqdefault.jpg)
What do you mean, we're done, Mags?! You can't break up with me like this!!!
A public breakup!!
I love the idea of wearing a shirt that says "attack the unaware" and people just looking at me horrified because they don't get the meme lol
I personally enjoy the way yall include the squadie-b’s in your decisions and choices. It makes it feel more like a genuine community with a voice to be heard.
Understandably the final choices are yours and need to be made to make your personal lives better ❤
Pathfinder 2 also has sneak attack for rogue. You get it any time your target is "Off-guard". You can make someone "Off-guard" by doing things such as flanking or being hidden.
Mags I need you to know that there is nothing I love more in this world than listening to you talk about your dnd characters 💜
Also I have a hexblood bard/warlock who is literally just a bird who made a deal with a hag to be a person, her name is Wren. She runs into glass. 😂
I just want to say with the healer wanting to go last thing, if you have this mindset, try look at it this way.
If I go last, I can react to what happens, sure.
If I go first I just get an extra round of setup, and then I get to react at the top of the round anyway(pretty much the same as if I was last but I just get an extra prep round! win win!) maybe I can set up some continuous damage, maybe I can move to a safer spot and cast bless, maybe I give out temp hit points, its all good.
But yeah, I don't like the rule this came from, initiative means you react the fastest, and whoever comes next reacts to you taking the initiative in a fight. I've always thought of a round being 6 seconds, but not everyone being on the EXACT same 6 seconds, player one starts at second 0, next goes at 0.5 seconds next at 1 second, and so on(Just an example). we each get our 6 seconds but they keep overlapping each other.
Having to declare all your actions also gives your DM a big chance to react to things you haven't even done yet, cast an AOE they could just happen to spread out the enemies. say your going to heal, the enemies could do less damage actions and more prep actions.
Listened to the podcasts while mowing my yard today. Had to pop in here and leave a comment. Thanks for sharing the pic crew you used in the discord!
AAHH WHAT THE HELL I ALSO have a hexblood character named Briar! She's a weird little swamp druid and while she doesn't have chicken feet, her staff/flying broom is shaped like a big ol' chicken leg she salvaged from her family's witch hut.
As a Curse of Strahd DM it is quite a difficult campaign, because when you finish "chapter 1" the entire country opens up and the only thing stopping the players from walking right into the final dungeon is common sense. It's also a module where if the players sit around, bad things are going to happen because the villains are always up to no good. Downtime should be a conscious choice, not forced upon the players because the wizard got bit by a vampire
Been a long time since I have been here, LOVE the beard!!! Miss you guys ill be swinging back through great content as always!
Mag's 'And you've been you' at the end really took me out for some reason 😂😂😂😂
In my dnd games, I like to treat big wounds as a "roleplaying wound" rather than statistical, after a fight I invite my players to tell me how they go about treating their wounds during their rest, or how it affects them as they progress throughout the day. I almost always make players characters with scars or gain scars, even if they technically heal completely because I feel it tells a story.
If a character dies and gets revived or gets brought back after falling unconscious, I like to ask them to make some change (Temporary or not) to their appearance that fits the way they were knocked out.
My group is a lot of fun, and often players choose to give themselves a bit of a disadvantage to certain things due to the things that happened, but only if everyone thinks it's fun.
My group and I also customized our exhaustion rules so it's less extreme, but we still need to mind our actions and have a consequence for poorly taking care of yourself as a character.
I’ve seen the level zero thing before and have really wanted to do it. BUT IT WAS SESSION 1 THING ONLY. By the end you know what you’ll be. That’s it.
Third Rule: Yeah, that sort of extra work should grant a temporary boon, like a reroll or advantage or something like that. And maybe if someone builds up a bunch of those points, they can spend them all on a single permanent boon, like a bonus Feat or Ability Score improvement or additional HP or something on level-up. Like, if someone accumulates more than 5 of these Piety Points, they can exchange all of them for a permanent boon on level-up, but they also have to spend them when they want to utilize the temporary boons they can grant as well, so you have to sort of pick and choose whether you want advantage now or hold on to your points to get a Feat when you level up later.
I think one of the problems with the piety points rule is that it unbalances the characters stats going into the game. The reward could be something else like a resource that a character could use to benefit themselves AND/OR other members in the party. Like luck points that to give themselves or others advantage, gold or items. And that might feel a little bit better than ASI increases. And for the same reasons as before, there also needs a cap, otherwise this could also begin to be unbalanced.
Just a thought here on the changing the declaration and action order, I think it's important to remember it's not fast reaction time on a massive scale, a round is 6 seconds, the fighter gets to hit first, the enemy hits back, the claric heals. It happens so fast the order doesn't matter really except for the strategy of it, inmy opinion of course
Also the 0 level, just sounds like a session zero option to me, get your backstory going, you can play how you started and why you are going out for adventure kind of thing
Sounds nice, but only for one session for me
As soon as those tiktok slide memes started populating my fyp I Immediately thought of you guys 😂 buts it’s okay I’m the same way too 🎉
Drinking orange tango, having a chippy tea later, feeling sleepy because I actually left the house.
Currently playing curse of strahd, and I've been at a table that did the effects rules. It would be brutal to take a week off, I am aware that modules can be home-brewed and can be changed for ease, but Cos is such a time based game, many important events happen at the same time, along with all the gruesome fights , needing a week off could easily mess up so many plots, on top of the fact that the fights could lead to multiple effects at once, having to have these extra disadvantages in an already grueling game would make it so difficult.
Got snacks and had panda express for lunch, got my ginger energy Arizona, finishing off my manager vids 🙃 while planing for dnd tomorrow!
Briar should meet morrigan(my hexblood sorcerer soon to be sor-bard)
You guys are absolutely amazing oh my gosh I'm so glad I found y'all
The Level 0 thing sounds like it was trying to imitate Worlds Beyond Number's (podcast with Brennan Lee Mulligan, Erika Ishii, Lou Wilson, and Abriya Iyengar) 'The Wizard, The Witch, and The Wild One' which had a prologue adventure where the three players were children and getting to know each other. It was an amazing story that lasted about 8 episodes, but this was notably largely in part to all of them being incredible story-tellers who are all there to do that thing.
If you drop this on your table without getting the buy-in from the players I can't imagine it feeling great.
I don't understand how people can say that great weapon master and sharp shooter are too over powered and then also Say material classes are so much weaker then spell casters
31:29 ONE CLOG TO RULE THEM ALL
Second Rule: So casting a cantrip resets the entire rest for that character. Does that mean that if a fighter uses an axe to cut firewood or a ranger uses their abilities to locate a safe place in the woods to camp, their rests are reset as well? I mean, they're using the abilities afforded to them by their class to perform those actions, after all. This sounds like someone just wanting to punish casters for being casters. And yeah, this absolutely sounds like something the DM did as a "gotcha" thing. I'll bet the guy casted the cantrip, and everybody roleplayed around the fire for ten minutes, and then as they were packing up to leave, the caster went to erase his spent slots and the DM said, "Um, acktually, you keep your spent slots as well as your damage because you casted that cantrip last night, ehehe. You need another full day of rest to get them back," with all kinds of smugness.
Fourth Rule: I like and dislike this rule, because while it does let the party plan out their turns pretty effectively, it also hurts the ability of players to react to the situation. For example, if the cleric is going last in initiative, which lets them state what actions they are going to take on their turn first through this rule, it's entirely dependent on the rest of the round going a specific way. So if the cleric gets to state their action first, and they say "I am going to heal the barbarian on my turn", and the barbarian doesn't take any damage during their turn, then the cleric has to rethink their entire turn on the fly, which could slow things down since they already had a plan in mind for what they wanted to do.
when my group played Curse of Strahd no one died. I think if our DM didn't let things some of the players pulled slide it would have been more difficult. He was just over it at the time though and wasn't having fun anymore.
Honestly when I saw those
" me when I" annoyed face memes or whatever it's called I thought of you guys first, also love briya ( I don't spell good)
Honestly, there a lot of house rules that I use at my table, that I've seen similar on these, but for some reason we seem to dodge the worst of the effects of these.
For example I have a severe injury table, BUT, I have written out how to fix the issues (medicine check, followed by a full rest and a cure wounds while fully healed and rested to allow the magic+body to heal the damage). I also don't have it be automatic, but have it be a bit of a random roll, where half the time nothing happens, or at worst you get a bit of ptsd that causes a frightened condition for a little bit (easily saved out of with a DC 10 save). I also have the severity controlled by the number of failed death saves.
I do this not to punish the players necessarily (which is why I have a clear and easy path out of it) but to make healers not ignore people who are dying or who went down. I had so many players just allowing their allies to be yoyo'd and it was giving me cognitive dissonance about the role play of it all.
i think what the OP with the initiative switch etc is trying to do (badly, i think this is a silly idea) is make the fact that everyone is acting almost simultaneously over 6 seconds in ‘reality’. so if the monster hits an enemy round one, that’s happened less than 6 seconds before the last persons turn, so they shouldn’t be reacting to that for ‘immersion’. but like jack said, fixing a problem that’s not there
I don't think my dm would ban sneak attacks, but I couldn't blame him for hating the wild magic barbarian rogue combo😅 rage giving the thrown property to a greatsword + reckless attack gaining advantage + magic sword giving divine smite + CRIT!!!!!!! Dm would have been justifies this one time😂
The injury table for CoS would not work at the table I am currently playing at. It is not uncommon for multiple players to go down in combat. There have been very few combats where we have all managed to Remain conscious so much so that the DM has legitimately showed us proof that that is how it’s balanced in the module
You guys need to play smarter lol.
@@trequor probably 😂
I would love to run a level 0 start campaign but I think it would only take a maximum of 3 sessions
Brandon Lee mulligan in world's beyond number did a level zero prologue character creation thing but it lasted at most 12 hours and most importantly everyone was into it so it can be really cool but not something you can just dump on people
Absolutely UNRESTFUL in regards to making a long rest 24 hours and contingent on not casting cantrips?! 😭😭😭 poor spellcasters! You have to have that conversation to see if everyone wants to play that way lol
Having played a chunk of CoS the injury table idea would not work. One of our clerics was crushed by a large thing (not saying due to spoilers) and took so much damage it was an insta kill. My PC avoided the same fate a bit later in combat because our DM allowed her Steel Defender to take a lot of damage. Our wizard on at least two occasions was 2 HP under being insta killed. My PC nearly tpk'd the party trying to get into something. Oh and we had a bunch of death saves in the Death House module that is before it.
coming over from Spotify to give some love
Can you guys link the Picrew? Or does someone have the link for it?
28:55 You two are entirely too cute!
I feel like the declaration then initiative homebrew really focuses on feeling like battle strategy is metagaming.
Mostly punishing for support players who depend on reacting to combat
Ayeeeeeeeee penultimate! Celebration! I have been blessed🎉
Y’all are so cute
fundamentally disagree with you guys about SS and GWM!! they are the only way for martials to be as powerful as casters are. more than that, there should be similar feats for one-handed weapons and unarmed attacks!! otherwise "optimization" of martials is gonna stay the same boring 2-3 feat combinations.
Mag's 'And you've been you' at the end really took me out for some reason 😂😂😂😂