My Converted Campaign: Character Conversion Retrospective

Last year a made a number of posts about converting my homebrew campaign edition on its return from hiatus from 3.5E to 5E.  I wrote about my plan for character conversion here.  If we get to play once a month we feel fortune.  So here we are, a little over a year later and fourteen games under my belt as DM and a little time to share some thoughts.

Basically I am happy with my decision to rebuild characters rather than convert.  I think I made the right choice to use the default array, even though the original characters were rolled.  As much as I grew up in the everything is random rolled first edition environment, I like that I understand the relative power the characters have, and all the characters have about the same relative power.  Although I am not saying that each class is equally powerful, or each player's character choices are equally effective.  5th edition characters really do rely heavily on their stats for their bounded accuracy power - or in other words the addition of a small number of points to a success role feels very powerful in this game.

The players initially grumbled about not being able to exactly match their previous score, but in the end they built characters which for the most part feel like their earlier edition counterparts, and more importantly play and role play close enough that no one feels in game a character is significantly different. Important note: we converted eighth level characters to eighth level characters and I have not had them level up over the course of the game yet - my focus is on them learning the new rules, and their abilities.  I expect to start letting them level up soon. Fourteen games in and everyone is enjoying the game and focused on the story and the challenges facing them.  Success!

Now, there are places where the conversion had challenges, or is still untested.

Paladin/Sorcerer multi-class character: We had some concerns how this would play out, as the original character was a bit of an optimization experiment, or in other words depended quite a bit on some specific 3.5E rules for combat tactics.  My impression is the character is still at its core what it was before, a hard to hit, hard hitting against a single opponent, fragile if you get through its AC build.  No question in my mind a full effective contributor to the game.  Now, some of the spell and attack combination tactics this player used previously do not work thanks to changes in spells and the buff limiting concentration rule, as an example the player no longer sees the enlarge spell as pragmatic use of a spell most of the time.  The net effectiveness in combat has been replaced by the smite feature.  Most of his spell slots get burned using smite, and of course the extra slots from the sorcerer often go that way too if they don't get used by a well timed shield spell.  I am open to be a little more lenient if this player wants to swap out spells.

Mounted Combat fighter: Our fighter build his character to be a mounted combat monster.  That does not translate as well to 5E, as there is only one feat and feats are harder to come by in 5E than they were in 3.5E.  Now, in practice in our game mounted combat opportunities were hit or miss.  If they ended up doing in city, in building or in dungeon adventures it certainly was not conducive to a mounted rider.  About half of our campaign is in the outdoor or wilderness, and sometimes it goes in long spurts of one or the other.  Having advantage from horseback against hordes of orcs certainly gives the feel of something special for this character, but the feat does not give advantage against large creatures (makes sense) so even out of doors the positives from the feat are limited.

House Ruled Ranger: One character had a house ruled ranger (does every game have one of those?) which was basically a woodland expertise fighter without spells.  I have not been happy with the ranger options in the Player's Handbook, or the unofficial test versions published by WoTC.  Since this player did not return after the hiatus, it has not significantly effected our game.  I used his character as an NPC, and hand waved a bunch of rolls, which was no problem.  I am hoping the player will return in the future, even for just a cameo, and I am determined I can build another house rule ranger to give him the feel he had!

Cleric Domain Conversion: This is largely untested.  Our cleric did not return after hiatus, and converting NPCs is just not the same.  Overall, I am pleased with what I see in the cleric options, but that is not the same as seeing how the conversion of a cherished character is implemented.

Magic & Masterwork Items: Bringing over items as is, or as now described in the core rule books would HUGELY break the bounded accuracy of the game.  As it was this campaign was based on the characters having legendary weapons which effective balance quite a bit to start, and then add in the copious amounts of magic stuff 3.5E and I allowed in the game would create a difficult to manage situation.  I had to cut back on the magic.  Sounds like a good topic for my next campaign conversion post!

The dice never lie.

5e My Paladin Experience First adventure at level 3

We just leveled up!  I posted some notes about my experience playing this character in my last blog entry.

I continue to be happy with the role play opportunities of the character, and it performs well enough in play so I do not feel like I am penalized by 'bad' choices.  Good on you 5e.

In our first outing since gaining third level we encounter a bunch of gnolls in close quarters situation.  I through myself in harms way repeatedly to protect the squishy characters, and my AC 19 splint and shield hold up very well, especially when the DM rolls poorly for the monsters.  I take minimal damage, and without resorting to dodge.  In these encounters with the gnolls we are in small rooms with doorways and not a lot of room to maneuver.  The party casters unload lots of literal fire power in the very last encounter: flaming sphere, burning hands, firebolt, sacred flame, channel divinity radiance of the dawn.  I somehow manage not to get caught in the flaming sphere and burning hands, so my fire resistance continues untested!  Not that I am complaining however.

Also speaking of fire, the tiefling racial ability at third level is Hellish Rebuke.  Technically, this requires a free hand to cast which makes it not very useful for a sword and board paladin.  In the spirit of rulings not rules, we discussed this.  Though it has a somatic component, the spell description basically says you point at the bad guy who hurt you and utter the words.  From a color perspective, I make those words be in infernal.  So basically we discussed what would it hurt if my character could use a sword hand to point a finger at the enemy, would that really break anything?  We decided not to change the spell per se, but to say tieflings, or at least this tiefling had a little more flexibility with this racial spell as a somatic component.  I am happy to abide by the letter of the law, if I cannot use the hand at all - such as restrained or carrying a heavy load or something like that, I could not use the spell.  Rulings let me keep a cool ability which has perfect color for my character.

As to spell casting, I get another slot and a my oath spells which are always prepared.  I am not sure if I will ever choose Bane of one of the other choices, and I am on the fence whether Hunter's Mark will turn out to to be useful.  It may see use in situations where I can drop minions with a little extra damage beyond what I normally can do with my weapon.  I will have to test it.  For now, Divine Smites continue to use most of the spell slots but the additional choices are nice to have.

I did not get to use my main oath ability - Vow of Enmity.  I was about to use it on the gnoll I had just Hellish Rebuked, when it ran from the room and time ran out.  See if I can get him next session!

The dice never lie.

5e My Paladin Experience Level 1-2

Hi all, Happy New Year.

I am lucky enough to get to play in a game in addition to the main campaign I run, and which I have posted irregularly on our conversion experience.  The other game is also 5e, and we are playing in Ptolus.  There are four players: a human wizard, a human warlock (who is covering our stealth requirements), a human cleric of light, and me playing a tiefling paladin (handling our tank duties).  We started at 1st level.

I chose the paladin more for roleplaying purposes than for effectiveness covering the party damage soaker, though I did want to see how the paladin class plays out to understand it better when I am on the other side of the DM screen.  I had no delusions the paladin is a top notch tank.

At first level the Lay on Hands feature came in handy, especially since the party is a bit like cockroaches when the light switch goes on - when combat starts everyone heads off to their own personal bit of excitement leaving the paladin to his own devices.  The Divine Sense feature might be a bit misplaced as a 1st level feature; unless your campaign dives right into undead thingies (and ours did not) it is not a feature which has much use.  (as of this writing at 2nd level approaching 3rd I have yet to use the feature).  The Thaumaturgy cantrip (gained from tiefling race features) has been fun for role playing but not particularly useful in most combats, but the darkvision is always useful.  Surprisingly enough the party has yet to 'accidentally' catch me in a fire spell so my resistance there is untested.

Given a suboptimal choice of race and the desire to split my best scores amongst strength, constitution and charisma, my character was not a combat power house.  I could bottle up the enemy for a round or two at an opening, but I usually needed to rely on dodge to survive until the party remembered to work together.  Paladin at 1st level feels a bit weak.

2nd level for paladin seems pretty big.  Since I plan on selecting the Oath of Vengeance for roleplay reasons, I chose the dueling fighting style as it fit the need for extra damage and the lack of interest in being a protection type character.  Spellcasting of course is huge but more because of burning the slots with Divine Smite.  With the exception of Shield of Faith, Divine Smite tends to be a sounder choice for using a spell slot at this level.  In most cases the guarantee of damage after a hit is a better choice than the potential damage, side effect and the risk of losing the spell which requires concentration of most of the spells.  Sure, if you have an opponent who is vulnerable to a specific damage type, or happens to be hanging around at the edge or a cliff or raging river to be pushed, or you are desperate to have an opponent be afraid for a round or two while you take care of other business, then Searing, Thunderous or Wrathful Smite can be useful.  But mostly, I am finding Divine Smite is the main item in the tool bag.  Since paladins have no spell recovery until a long rest - use those smites wisely oh noble (or not so noble) paladin.

With the 2nd level hit points, and the Divine Smites available, I thought I could control doorways and dish out damage.  So far, that has not been very effective for me.  All it takes is a little turn of the die rolling luck and I am in trouble.  Seems the better choice if one must control a bottleneck is Shield of Faith and the dodge action.  From there trust your party to recover from cockroach syndrome and get the job done, while you soak up attacks and get the occasional attack of opportunity.

Still just trying out the options and having fun.  Looking forward to 3rd level and both the mechanics and roleplay opportunities for Oath of Vengeance features.

The dice never lie.

5e official retcon - our experience

My last post talked about the 5th edition retcon situation.  I will take a few paragraphs to share our experience since restarting the campaign with 5th edition.

The shield spell has been the most common retcon.  I have two characters who can cast it (wizard and multi-classed paladin-sorcerer).  My first concern was me remembering from game to game to behave differently when player characters are about to be hit.  This has not been so much a problem, I am learning.  Seems whenever those two PCs are about to be hit by something the shield can affect, I successfully pull of the "it looks like you will be hit" or some such phrase and then sit silent staring expectantly at the player for a few seconds.  As I had hoped my players did 'get' it fairly quickly.

No player has so far taken the Lucky or Defensive Duelist feats, so I don't have experience there.  Therefore I have not needed to change my rolling behind the screen preference.  Also, my players roll their own d20s in the Cone of Fate when they should not know the outcome.  For example, if I do not want them to know how stealthy they are... or are not.

The most challenging play so far has been the wizard, who is a diviner with the portent feature.  So now any attack roll, saving throw, or ability check is fair game for a retcon.  The first few sessions had some awkward moments.  I first erred by simply saying the outcome, only to be corrected by the diviner who said differently.  Next I spent way too much time staring expectantly and then have nothing happen.  I eventually settled in to staring expectantly only when something 'big' is happening.  I let the little things go by and they rarely get corrected, and mostly the corrections happen when a player makes a poor roll and the diviner sees it differently.  These small amount of retcons does not seem to be busting our immersion, especially since the wizard only gets two d20 pre-rolls with each long rest.

So far so good, retcon is not making our game less fun.  On the contrary, the shield spell is making them less risk averse, and the portent feature has been jolly good fun when worrisome moment gets quickly turned to a sigh of relief and cheers.

The dice never lie.

5e official retcon - what you thought happened did not really happen

For some spells and other features D&D 5th edition employs a sort of retcon capability for creatures to be able to potentially undo, or make not happen something which has otherwise apparently happened.  This edition is not the first to make use of this as a capability. I am not really going to argue for or against having this in the game (that has been done quite adequately around the interwebs), but rather talk my struggle with making it flow smoothly.

Possibly the most familiar example of this to most D&D 5e players is the Shield spell.  As a reaction which you take when you are hit by an attack or targeted by the magic missile spell, an arcane spell caster can fire off this spell. In the case of an attack the result is your armor class goes up 5 points which might have the attack, which was just described as a hit, be a miss.

In the past as DM I may have described the following: "The ogre grunts as your spell burns his filthy hide.  He turns and hurls the crude spear he was clutching directly at you," rolls a d20 with appropriate damage die behind the screen, "although you turn aside to avoid the spear you are not fast enough, you take 8 points of damage."

With the retcon capability I should probably say instead, "although you are turning aside to avoid the spear it looks like you will not be fast enough....."

Then what?  OK, so D&D is a game and sometimes we have to metagame.  However I would prefer to stay in game as much as possible.  I could say, "Do you have a reaction to take, or does it hit?"  Ugh.  That sucks the life right out of the immersion faster than a vampire dining on a red shirt NPC.

How I am trying to handle it is to metagame the first few times with a player and after that not remind them they have that option and just assume they will jump in and use their ability when I give them the pause.  How long do I pause without wasting time an making the whole thing look silly?  I finish with "it looks like you will be hit" or some such phrase and then sit silent staring expectantly at the player.  I hope my players will 'get' it fairly quickly as I do not relish the stare expectantly DM action.

The next challenges are to remember to change my behavior and state the expected hit, and to come with lots of different language to use so I am not repeating the same tired phrases.  I suppose the latter is a variation of the same problem we DMs have when trying not to say, "it hits you for 5 hit points of damage".

I have not figured out all the possible retcon capabilities.  In addition to the Shield spell, I can think of the wizard divination school roll substitution reaction and the Defensive Duelist feat as two other examples.  I am certain there are many more.  So it is not just doing this with wizard, it is doing this on any roll - and with the divination feature as an example a clever player might use this feature in unexpected ways and not just when a monster attacks a player.

Then there is the Lucky feat which is just..... lucky.

Now I may have to reveal rolls I normally choose to keep hidden.  I suppose that could be a whole post on its own, whether to keep roles hidden.  I will summarize by saying I rarely if ever fudge rolls, so that is not why I keep my rolls private.  It is more to keep the metagaming to a minimum.  I do not want the players calculating monster to hit bonuses and figuring out possible max damage based on me showing dice.  And now in some of these retcon cases, a retcon is not automatic success.  In the example of Shield spell, I only want them to know they could put up a Shield but not to calculate in advance to know for certain if it will be beneficial.

Since we have limited experience with 5e, no player in my game has taken the feat yet.  So I have not crafted a strategy to handle that yet.

What others retcons are there out there in 5e?  How do you handle it? Any good suggestions for keeping things in game and fresh?

The dice never lie.

Converting My Campaign To D&D 5E: Detect Magic

One of the staple spells in D&D is detect magic.  When I first read the new spell for 5E I did not really dwell on the changes.  But, after seeing the players use it in action, I really like the updated version.

Way back in 1E, lower level wizards in our game rarely consumed a coveted spell slot

with detect magic when they were out adventuring.  With so few slots available, you loaded up on reliable party saving spells, or escape spells.  That means when gathering loot, you grabbed everything you could that might even remotely have the chance of being magical and sorted it all at in the safe confines of whatever you called safe confines. There, without the constant threat of annihilation you felt marginally safe using up spell slot on detect magic and hoped for the euphoric moment of discovering the party had indeed grabbed the right stuff.

With the addition of cantrips in 3E, detect magic could safely be used in the field.  Of course there were the complications as everything in 3E had complications.  You needed to build your spellcraft skill to keep a high success rate.  However, if you took a few rounds you would learn not just whether there were magic items, but how many, where, how strong and what school.  If you wanted to hide you magic items there was still the old stand by various thicknesses of various materials but barring that, you pretty much found all the magic items if you cast the spell.

I never gave the changes between 1E and 3E too much thought until I saw the 5E detect magic spell in use.

For the duration, you sense the presence of magic within 30 feet of you. 

I take this as you just 'sense' that magic is within 30' of you in any direction.  You would not know the direction, just sense the existence/presence of magic within 30'.  You would not know the number of items, or even the relative strength.

If you sense magic in this way, you can use your action to see a faint aura around any visible creature or object in the area that bears magic, and you learn its school of magic, if any. 

Key word here is visible.  If you do not see it, you would not see the aura. I like this so much.  You would still have to search for the magic item which you sensed.  This brings the other players back into the game.  Sure, you might find clever ways of narrowing the search area using some geometry and such.  But just having the item obscured by a floor board, a closed cabinet, a locked draw, you name it - keeps the search in 'searching for treasure'.

The spell can penetrate most barriers, but it is blocked by 1 foot of stone, 1 inch of common metal, a thin sheet of lead, or 3 feet of wood or dirt.

This section refers back to the sense statement.  If there is a visible barrier of this sort, you certainly could not see the item anyway.  I like that they remain consistent with earlier editions in this way.

Low level 1E kept the search in by simply making spells rare.  I like that detect magic can be cast as a ritual, and like even more that simple change in language which keeps the search in the game.  It definitely gets my DM juices flowing with ideas.

One interesting point, as I tried to look up the school of magic for the potion they located, I did not find one.  Not sure if I am supposed to extrapolate that, or, as implied by the spell (if any) not every item/object will have a school.  Until I learn otherwise, I am going with the later.

The dice never lie.

Converting My Campaign To D&D 5E: Web Tools

Strictly speaking, the task of converting tools is more about restarting a campaign than it is about 5th Edition.  Let me tell you about our web tools.

Previously we had used Yahoo Groups as our primary web tool.  If communication was

the only thing we did on-line, we would be staying with Yahoo.  Alas, Yahoo has fallen behind the times.  They have made little to no investment in Groups, and what changes they did make I felt were detrimental.  

After research different options, wikis, gaming sites, etc. I decided to move to Google Sites.  Partly this was because I was already familiar with the Google tool set, and partly because it is all free.

Communication

Yahoo Groups was a friendly way to make sure that everyone was copied on messages, kept message history, allowed email responses once the topic was started so you did not have to go to the site to keep a conversation going.  All communication was kept in the same location whether it was game scheduling, out of character chatter, or in character talk.  It could be difficult to find what you sought.

Google Groups is a powerful communication tool, with many more options than we will need.  The main drawback to changing to Google is Groups is a separate tool from Google Sites, where Yahoo Groups was integrated.  Yes, I can create links in our Google Site to the Google Group, it is not the same.  Yes Google Groups allow you to respond to posts via email just like Yahoo.  Trouble is, if you want to start a new post in Groups you go to a different URL than the Site.  For some of my group, this is confusing and complicated.

Like Yahoo, Google requires you have one of their email accounts to log into the site. Use Chrome, and stay logged in there, and you will never see a login screen.  I find it works rather nice.  For the tech savvy - I created the Google Group first and then used the Google Group for permissions in Google Sites, Google Drive, and Google Calendar to minimize administration.  Add someone to the Google Group, and they get access to all the web tools.

The intention is to use Google Groups for game scheduling and meta type communication. Other type of communication should be handled elsewhere.

Also under communication, when a new file was added to the Yahoo Site you were presented with the option to notify the Group (within the bounds of what individuals had setup in their Yahoo Group accounts).  Google Site relies on individual group members to setup their own notification preferences by site or by page.  If folks have not setup to be notified, they do not get notified.

Game scheduling

Yahoo Groups used an integrated calendar, and all was well until they 'streamlined' their site and move calendar to a place where people could not see it easily.

Google Calendar is a separate tool from Google Sites.  After creating a calendar for the gaming group it was easy enough to display it in a window on the site.  However, to update the calendar you must follow a link and update what looks like your own Google Calendar, except you select the game group calendar from a drop-down menu.  So far this is confusing the heck out of my group.  Part of our first get back together session will need to be a lesson on this.  If we cannot schedule a game, we cannot play.

Adventure logs

After all the disappointment above, you might be wondering why did I move to Google? Because Google Sites is awesome.  We have a story oriented campaign and the adventure logs are a tremendous help in keeping things straight, knowing where we left off, and for looking up old information to insure consistency.  Except when you have 80 adventure logs in MS Word.  Yahoo only allowed us to store files, not create web pages.  Searching for information because time consuming and frustrating.  I tried to combine logs into larger cumulative files, create HTML documents instead, and some other things I do not even remember but nothing worked well.

In Google Sites you can make adventure log posts which are web pages and easily search-able.  Searching is now easy, quick and effective; and not limited to the logs.  I cannot tell you for me how HUGE this really is.

If you have a dungeon crawl game and the history is really unimportant, then this will not mean much.  But, if like me, when during a session the players ask, "What was the name of that healer we met in the capital?", instead of responding, "Uh, um, let me look, ah, hmm......  Well, will just call him Bill for now", with a few clicks I can respond instead, "Raynoldus, Priest of Balben".

Campaign information

The only option for campaign information in Yahoo was to save it in files.  To search for information you browsed through a folder structure and read the titles of documents.

In Google Sites I have turned all those documents into web pages, in a hierarchical structure, with some links to make life a bit easier.  There are pages history and description of places, the gods, the coinage, various lore, supporting characters, house rules including divine domains, and so on.  The key here is now it is all search-able.  Want to see what you might know about Raynoldus?  If he shows up in any adventure logs, campaign history, supporting cast list, DM handouts, or in any in or out of character chats you know immediately.

Notice I just mentioned in and out of character chats?  My intention is instead of having in/out of character chats mixed in the scheduling and logistics communications in Groups, they will each have their own separate location within the Site.  This has the benefit of quickly and easily segregating the two types of conversations which I hope will help players find them easily (searchable) and keep focus.  The down side is you must go to the site to post them, no respond via email.

I have some spreadsheets I had built to organize information which I can now serve up in the site.  For example, there are some customer armors available.  I built an armor table of PHB and customer armor available, stored it in Google Drive and shared up a read only version on the site.

Maps, pictures, and files

Electronic copies of maps and various pictures are stored in a folder like structure area. Additionally, these can be embedded in a web page.  For example, one character had a portrait drawn, that file is in the folder structure.  The city map of Penchawn is located with the city description, so players can read the map and map key together.

At this time I think character sheets will remain a pencil and paper affair, with a scanned copy kept on the site for backup.  It appears 5th edition is simple enough that players will not all be driven to electronic tools for character building.  Since there are no robust tools yet, paper works fine.



We have not started the game yet.  I hope to finish the character conversions soon, but I am currently waiting on the players.  Then the main act - the campaign restarts!

Next up - Table Tools

The dice never lie.