Dungeons & Dragons... Discuss!

[Tsenta]

God I haven't played D&D in so long. I'm going through withdrawls. X-x

[Chris Brady]

I'm always pleased when a fellow party member decides to include Grease in their spell list. Not only can it be used on surfaces; but also enemy weapons and items too.

The only real downside occurs when battles are fought in a terrain where Grease isn't appropriate.

And clever players can find reasonable way to use it in ways that it might not meant to be.  And I mean in ways that I (As in ME) would feel like a jerk for denying it.

[WindVoyager]

Speaking of inappropriate use of things..................

Never did learn why but the thief in my current D&D table top game stole a bunch of penises, yes penises, from preserved corpses of a small half sunken city that the part was passing through and wanted to use the Spectral Lantern to reanimate them.

We all honestly though the player was stealing gold and the like off the bodies not....peenors. I can't help but to wonder what the hell he planed on doing with them...........then my brain thankfully shuts down and reboots.

[Endorphin]

Sounds like one hell of an elaborate prank in the making!

[WindVoyager]

Sounds like one hell of an elaborate prank in the making!

Can you imagine the distraction that would cause to any one guarding a hide out or the BBEG? Rather hard to do much with a bunch of bodiless animated peenors crawling around

[Endorphin]

I'm just imagining the things you could achieve with Mage Hand!

[Avis habilis]

Sounds like he misunderstood what "Raise Dead" is supposed to do.

[Chris Brady]

Sounds like he misunderstood what "Raise Dead" is supposed to do.

That sounds so wrong for some reason!

[Avis habilis]

Putting the romance back in necromancer.




You're right, that does sound bad...

[Thorne]

Euw?!

Although this does somewhat make me wonder ... if you petrified the things, and used them for switches in a dungeon, would the hapless adventurers be willing to use them, once they realise what they were?

[WindVoyager]

Although this does somewhat make me wonder ... if you petrified the things, and used them for switches in a dungeon, would the hapless adventurers be willing to use them, once they realise what they were?

Don't plant ideas in my head. I'm bad enough as it is

[Songbird]

Hi everyone! Here's a random question for you:

If a PC (or NPC) is turned into an undead creature, then is destroyed and resurrected, does that character remember his or her time as an undead creature, or is that part of his/her "unlife" a total blank?

My rule of thumb is this: If they were turned into a "mindless" form of undead (such as a zombie or skeleton), the resurrected person does not remember any of it. If they were turned into an undead of average intelligence, they remember some of their undead experiences, but not all. If they were turned into an undead creature of high-ish intelligence (liches, vampire lords, etc.) they remember most of their "unlife" experiences.

What do you think? Do you have a particular way of handling such situations? If so, what are they?

[Thorne]

Good question, Songbird.
It's never come up before, and thus, would probably depend on the situation, as much as the setting, for me.

Don't plant ideas in my head. I'm bad enough as it is

Awh. Why not? Inn't that the whole point of being a GM? So that you can mess with your players and occasionally traumatise them, in addition to their characters?

[Chris Brady]

Euw?!

Although this does somewhat make me wonder ... if you petrified the things, and used them for switches in a dungeon, would the hapless adventurers be willing to use them, once they realise what they were?

Stolen.  *Absconds with*

[Thorne]

Stolen.  *Absconds with*

Please /do/ keep us (especially me) informed as to how that turns out.
Especially if it involves a Stone to Flesh spell. *evil grin*

[Avis habilis]

What do you think? Do you have a particular way of handling such situations? If so, what are they?

I'm of a mind to rule that once you've been killed while undead, you can't come back at all. Your soul has departed your body, leaving behind a shell powered by negative energy/whatever it is in 3.x+. More intelligent undead types only think they remember being you because the soulless brain is still full of your memories.

Which I guess would mean you can kill an undead with resurrection, summoning the soul back from beyond to reclaim the body.

Or that you can reincarnate the dead person, who can then go on a mission to kill their original body since it's now a soulless monster.

[Songbird]

I'm of a mind to rule that once you've been killed while undead, you can't come back at all. Your soul has departed your body, leaving behind a shell powered by negative energy/whatever it is in 3.x+. More intelligent undead types only think they remember being you because the soulless brain is still full of your memories.

Which I guess would mean you can kill an undead with resurrection, summoning the soul back from beyond to reclaim the body.

Or that you can reincarnate the dead person, who can then go on a mission to kill their original body since it's now a soulless monster.

Interesting! It's an puzzling question: Does the soul pass on when a person has risen as an undead, or does the soul remain, but is twisted by negative energy and the horror of undeath.

I'd like to hear more people's opinions on that as well!

[Hades]

I don't have the books on hand at the moment and it's been years since I DM/played a D&D game so I may be horribly rusty on mechanics, but I'll still chime in with my two cents worth.

As I recall, the resurrection spells only succeed if the soul of the person is both free to return and wants to return to the body.   Meaning that the soul can't be imprisoned or bound by another spell, and the person actually wants to leave the celestial domain of their chosen god/goddess.   The imprisonment usually isn't an issue I've found, but for some characters the decision to remain with their deity or come back to earth could be a tough one to make.

The memories part though is an interesting question that to be honest I had never considered before you brought it up.  I like the idea that you had initially.  If they are revived as a mindless zombie or shambling undead of some sort, it's likely they wouldn't remember anything of what their body did.   As they become more intelligent undead, more memories likely would come in, though not a complete recollection of events.  Probably more as fuzzy memories, just on the edge of being able to see it crystal clear but enough to recognize bits and pieces of what they did.

The only type of undead that I don't think could be resurrected, short of maybe a Wish spell, would be a lich.  Given that they have to choose to drink the potion that kills them, and that their souls are bound into the phyractory that they constructed, personally I would consider them beyond saving.

[Skynet]

As part of a Kickstarter reward for the upcoming Torment game, the author of The Complete Book of Elves apologizes for his work on video:

Colin McComb's apology for "The Complete Book of Elves"

[Skynet]

So there are many adventure paths for D&D.  Paizo is famous for popularizing the idea, although other companies have created their own ones as well.

The ones I know of:

Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide

Shackled City

Age of Worms

Savage Tide

Pathfinder 6-part modules

Original Dragonlance adventures

Key of Destiny

Way of the Wicked

What are people's experiences with them?  I've run Shackled City, but wondered what people's thoughts were about The Key of Destiny and Way of the Wicked (which appears to have a pbp game on this board).  Both of them look quite interesting, and I'd like to hear people's experiences with them!

[TheGlyphstone]

The only one I've played is Shackled City - it was a miserable experience, but that was due to the DM primarily. Never played any of the others.

[Skynet]

The only one I've played is Shackled City - it was a miserable experience, but that was due to the DM primarily. Never played any of the others.

I ran a little bit of Shackled City for my group once.  Overall it was quite a good adventure, although the first dungeon was unnecessarily complicated.

It's overall quite a good adventure, with a major emphasis on dungeon-crawling.

[TheGlyphstone]

Ours was the Amazing Adventures of DMPC Wizard And Friends - the powerful NPC wizard who ran the only magic item shop on the planet and was friends with every extraplanar item merchant (thus allowing him to creatively mis-interpret our purchases or just deny us anything the GMhe didn't want to sell, spent a disproportionate amount of his time pranking our low-level asses, inevitably appeared to fight/defeat every plot-critical boss we faced, and claimed credit for all our deeds when it wasn't being awarded to a rival party (that's supposedly written in the canon module) we never met face-to-face.

[Skynet]

That DM sounds like a really bad fanfic writer.  Of the "invincible awesome protagonist" kind.

[TheGlyphstone]

Yeah, he was pretty terrible. The game actually ended with us defeating the big bad, and my evil gnome wizard ascending to control the demiplane, but that was only after we beat the BBEG in prison and I decided to go back and finish him off at home, only to be told 'oh, he magically awoke and conjured an entire army of epic demons in a single round, you die', called him out on it, and he admitted he hadn't actually done more than skimmed the last few chapters of the module, so I ended up lord of Occipitus, and game over.

It wasn't so much that he liked writing fan-fiction so much that he was a control freak - he got his fun from telling us 'no' and making us fail at stuff through arbitrary rules-calls and overpowered enemies, and needed his invincible NPC to actually advance the plot so we could go somewhere else and fail again. the NPC was actually a PC of his from previous campaigns who had 'retired', though.