duckduckgames

[duckduckgames]

Miette, 5e

The only thing more entitled than adventurers is a cat. Give them a taste of their own medicine with Miette.

Miette acts, essentially, like a mimic, blending into an existing object. When a player attempts to interact with the object, however, an outraged Miette will turn out to have been part of, or the entirety of, the object. Miette is vaguely catlike, but will have odd protrusions and color schemes to assist her camouflage. Both Truesight and Detect Magic will reveal the presence of Miette beforehand, and interaction this way will typically find her to be in a good mood (DM’s choice, or 5-in-6 chance).

When Miette is outraged, however, she is quite unreasonable. Run her like a sphinx, or even a dryad, either forcing the players to solve a puzzle or riddle, or making unreasonable demands like leaving behind a player to stay with her for one thousand years. If the players fail the puzzles, or can’t talk their way out of the heavily biased deal, Miette may become hostile and attack. Solving the puzzle or coming to some sort of compromise has a 2-in-6 chance to put her in a good mood.

When Miette is in a good mood, she can purr, granting 2d8 health and the effects of a short rest on the party immediately. She is also happy to cast Bless or Protection from Lawful (See Below) on the party, if requested.

In combat, Miette fights smart and will attempt to use Hold Person on casters and ranged fighters to force melee fighters to activate her reaction. She will usually cast Protection from Lawful as soon as the party is nearby, and has a 3-in-6 chance to also cast Bless before combat begins.

Anyways, here’s the statblock:

Miette

Small fae, Chaotic Neutral

Armor Class: 18 (Natural Armor)

Hit Points: 72 (29d6-29)

Speed: 40ft, climb 30ft

STR: 8 (-1) DEX: 18 (+4) CON: 9 (-1) INT 16 (+3) WIS: 13 (+1) CHA: 15 (+2)

Saving Throws: Dex +7, Con +2, Wis +4

Skills: Acrobatics +7, Stealth +7, Perception +4, Deception +5

Damage Resistances: Non-magical piercing, slashing, and bludgeoning

Condition Immunities: Charmed, Restrained

Senses: Blindsight 5ft, Darkvision 60ft

Languages: Common

Challenge: 6

Abilities

Underfoot: Creatures within 5 ft of Miette have disadvantage on attacks made against it. Miette can occupy another creature’s space without penalty, regardless of size. Miette does not trigger opportunity attacks when exiting a creature’s space.

Innate Spellcasting: Miette’s innate spellcasting modifier is INT (DC 14). She can cast the following spells without material components.

At Will Disguise Self, Protection from Lawful

3/day Hold Person, Bless, Tasha’s Hideous Laughter

1/day Cure Wounds

Actions

Multiattack: Miette makes 3 attacks, two claws and one bite

Claw, Natural Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, 5ft range, one target. Hit: 12 (4d4+4) Slashing Damage

Bite, Natural Weapon Attack: +2 to hit, 5ft range, one target. Hit: 6 (1d12-1) Piercing Damage

Jail for 1,000 Years!: Miette may cast Hold Person as a bonus Action

Reactions

You KICK Miette?: After a creature within 5ft deals damage to Miette with a weapon attack, Miette may spend its reaction to chastise, dealing 3d8 psychic damage to the creature. A successful Charisma Save reduces this damage by half.

Unique Spell

Protection from Lawful

2nd Level Abjuration

Casting Time: 1 action

Range: Touch

Target: One willing creature you touch

Components: V S M (A set of scales, broken in half, which the spell does not consume)

Duration: Up to 10 minutes

Classes: Cleric, Paladin, Warlock, Wizard

Until the spell ends, one willing creature you touch is protected against certain types of creatures: celestials, constructs, fey, fiends, and undead. In addition, they are protected from any humanoid with the Lawful alignment.

The protection grants several benefits. Creatures of those types have disadvantage on attack rolls against the target. The target also can’t be charmed, frightened, or possessed by them. If the target is already charmed, frightened, or possessed by such a creature, the target has advantage on any new saving throw against the relevant effect.

#miette #cat #d&d 5e #d&d homebrew #d&d #tabletop rpgs #tabletop roleplaying

[duckduckgames]

I’ll never forget the first session I ran in the system. We had a player die from a spider. Not a giant spider. Not a magical spider. A normal, venomous spider just bit and killed this poor wizard, and his journey was over. Good times.

BECMI Dnd (Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, Immortal dungeons and dragons) is quite satisfying at times. I've slain dragons, undead and powerful death knights all in the same campaign were I saw a giant rat instantly kill a player who was scrounging for coin in a dungeon entrance.

#d&d #tabletop rpgs #tabletop roleplaying

[duckduckgames]

Bring back all the bonus skills. I’m sure there are plenty of horny bards who would drop that Expertise on the Rope Use skill in a heartbeat

Bring back the Run skill.

#tabletop rpg #d&d 5e #d&d 2e #old school dnd #d&d

[duckduckgames]

There are also some excellent middle-ground options. Edge of Empire, a fantasy flight Star Wars system, doesn’t track ammo UNLESS you have a critical failure while shooting. Your gun is out now, and if you aren’t carrying ammo packs, you’re out of luck. When you run into a rule that doesn’t work in your game, check if you can modify it to work instead.

I’ve been giving players “units” of rope for dungeon delving lately. No length, just a number of units. Want to use a lot of rope for something? That’s a unit. It keeps away the busy work, while also providing an extra track of resource management, which is fun if you like that style.

A lot of the discourse about “bad rules” in tabletop RPGs boils down to people saying “I cannot imagine any kind of game in which rules of this type would be beneficial, therefore it’s an objectively bad rule and everyone who uses it is stupid”, and frankly that usually says a lot more about the limitations of the speaker’s imagination than it does about mechanical game design.

One of the more common examples I run into is keeping track of bullets or arrows or whatever. You’ll see all sorts of thinkpieces on RPG design blogs about how keeping track of expendable resources in a fine-grained and concrete way is never useful or necessary in a tabletop roleplaying game, and anybody who does is either a creepy math fetishist, or else simply too stupid to realise that they’re doing pointless busy-work – like, have y’all literally never heard of survival horror as a genre?

If you’re running the sort of game where resource starvation is meant to be a constant threat and being able to keep your distance from the baddies is an overwhelming advantage, making ammunition into a scare and countable resource is a pretty obvious piece of game-mechanical genre emulation. Yes, there are more abstract and arguably more “elegant” ways to handle it, but keeping track of individual arrows or bullets has the virtue that it’s intuitively obvious to everyone and doesn’t create any weird edge cases that need to be reasoned around. This isn’t rocket science.

Naturally, if you’re not playing a game that would benefit from foregrounding that trope, don’t use that rule. That doesn’t mean rules of that type are objectively bad – it means your particular group isn’t playing the particular kind of game where they’re useful. If you start assessing game rules from the perspective that only certain specific genre tropes are worthy of game-mechanical emulation, you’re on a short road to turning into one of those dogmatic weirdos who thinks there’s only one correct way to pretend to be an elf.

#d&d 5e #d&d ideas #tabletop rpgs #tabletop roleplaying #homebrew #tabletop homebrew

[duckduckgames]

Trail-side Surgery Session

Just had a full 3-hour session that primarily involved improvised surgery on the side of a mountain trail.

A horny bard managed to take some inadvisable actions, and get the (now sprouting) vine of a jungle dryad wrapped around their heart. Due to a biffed random encounter role, I decided this was the right time to trigger the growth of said vine. While the players discussed leaving the poor sap to his fate, they eventually settled on something I’d not quite considered; just ripping it out of him.

Surprisingly, they managed to improvise some pretty stellar surgery ideas, using fire spells to sterilize instruments, etc. In the end, the bard escaped with only a few-months health reduction, and some truly nasty scars (the fighter wiffed the first role to crack open the poor elf’s sternum)

#tabletop rpgs #funny #rpg session #rpg stories #tabletop roleplaying

[duckduckgames]

It’s doubly a shame as well, since there are systems, like GURPS, which are actually designed to function as building block systems that can be heavily modified. Try getting your players to pick up GURPS, though

In my experience, the just-run-everything-with-Dungeons-&-Dragons ethos is big part of the reason why it’s so hard to find anybody who’s willing to GM. Not because D&D is particularly difficult or unpleasant to GM in itself, but because the presumption that you ought to be able to hack D&D for literally any premise is the main culprit behind the notion that being willing and able to rebuild the system from the ground up – on the fly, if necessary! – is an entry-level responsibility that any GM should be able to handle. People who make good game moderators don’t necessarily make good system engineers, and restricting the GM’s chair to folks who can do both unreasonably narrows the field.

#d&d 5e #tabletop rpgs #game design #gurps