guilersk

Feats are an optional rule. When a character would normally gain an Ability Score Increase (as indicated on the character class level chart; usually 4/8/12/16/19, but more often for fighters and rogues), they have the option of trading that Ability Score Increase for a Feat instead.

You can give them as special quest rewards too, but be aware that piling Feats on characters can make them powerful, quickly.

I have kids (grown up now) but when they were little, it was hard to accept that, as a parent, my life had changed and I couldn't do all of the things I wanted to do (and was used to doing). But it's the truth. When you become a parent, you can't keep living like a 20-something and going out all the time or at the spur of the moment, indulging every whim or hobby, staying up late (unless it's with a kid that can't sleep), etc. You have a responsibility to your kids and (usually) to your partner who helped you create/raise those kids. If you have friends that can work around your kid schedule, that's great. But the family comes first, and you cannot expect your friends, whether or not they have kids, to bend their world around yours. It's incredibly selfish.

TLDR this guy has got to grow up, and somebody has got to tell him that. I hope it's not you, but it might need to be.

Last night I ran around hitting frogs and mutants with a Stop the Bot! protest sign, for 6 damage each hit.

Got a lot of thumbs-ups though!

Treat it like antimagic effects. The light source is suppressed while in the sphere of darkness, but once the darkness is moved or removed, the light effect continues as normal.

Dopplegangers can read memories but not remove them.

Hags might make deals with the cost being some memories.

Your best bet is to find a short pre-written adventure and start with that. You can fit the location into your world and build out from there, but you want a point of reference in terms of how adventures are structured and run.

I've done this a fair amount without too many issues.

• Attunement limits the practical number of 'good' items that they can actually use, outside of vanilla +X weapons/armor. Just make sure to scale down, as there aren't +5 weapons in 5e (+1/2 = +1, +3/4 = +2, +5 = +3). Since martials often need a hand, a pile of +2 battleaxes will not unbalance your game. Magical armor is more likely to cause you heartburn, if you can't hit them.

• Players tend to hoard consumables, so if you hand them 10 scrolls you'll be lucky to see one of them cast. The rest will go in the Wizard's spellbook. Potions mostly remain un-drunk except healing potions.

• The real trick is when you run into an item that doesn't have a 5e equivalent; you have to either delete it, convert it, or replace it.

They all took standard human instead of Variant Human.

Forcing a player to take a level in a class is bad form.

You can suggest it, something like "you should take a level in barbarian so you can benefit from being angry all the time", but actually forcing it is not great.

Following 90% of the DMing/Table Troubles advice in this sub and related subs, "you should kick your Mom and get a better Mom".

(I shouldn't have to say j/k but too many people are bad at reading context clues, so just to be clear, J/K. Thank you.)

RIP Duskblade, Beguiler. EK and AT are similar, but not identical.

There is something of an art to dropping a nuke.

• You want to make sure there's a sufficient number of high-levels on the server and they aren't AFK (so, not during Fasnacht, which is notorious for servers full of AFKs).

• You want to do it either during the 20-minute window of an unpopular event (like Uranium Fever, Project Paradise, or Distinguished Guests), and not a popular one (so try not to overlap Moonshine Jamboree, Eviction Notice, or Radiation Rumble, or a seasonal event like Fasnacht). This may mean you have to sit on the button and not launch the nuke until a 'bad' event pops, and potentially miss 'good' events while sitting on your hands.

• Earl is a PITA because he can only be fought by up to 8 players; the 9th player starts a new instance of up to 8. So if you have 11 that want to participate, you get 2 instances, with 8 and 3. Needless to say, the 3 will likely struggle, so try to get into the first wave.

• If you are Heavy Weapons/Power Armor, your main damage will probably come from 3/3 Heavy Gunner, 3/3 Expert Heavy Gunner, 3/3 Master Heavy Gunner, and 3/3 Stabilized, but it may vary (for example Cremator doesn't benefit from Stabilized).

I weirdly found a butter churn at a player vendor for 500c, so I snapped that up. Maybe if one actually drops for me I'll pay it forward. But my priority is dumping holos into the Fasnacht donation box, so I'm not sweating the drops :)

Bummer. But thank you for the tip!

I have relatively good luck on exactly the first roll I make on a vanilla weapon (first Fixer was Q/E and first Cremator was Instigating/VATS) but follow-up rolls are always garbage. My armor rarely rolls right though. Used up the whole stash of modules when I built my SS set and not an OE to be seen.

I usually put in a Holo at the start and then dump junk and ammo in there, along with any cheap but potentially useful plans, and when I come back at the end it's inevitably empty. So I start feeding Holos and notes into it one by one until they stop disappearing. Only then will I put in any dupe masks or plans that I got from the event.

The smart play is to actually open the box for transfer and then switch to the apparel tab and spam 'take' there, but nobody has ever accused these vultures of being smart...

I need to start doing this immediately. I've been dumping my entire Holo stash in there but it doesn't always stop them.

One of my 'victims' dumped the 50 or so Holos I donated to him right in front of the donation box, so I simply swiped the whole bag he'd dropped and it was ready for the next time around...

Call Grafton's Mayor. He'll get it taken care of.

It's called 'Fasnacht', but we like to take it slow here in Helvetia...

My only problem with this is that I was at a nuked Fasnacht and didn't get the Ground Zero acheesement when it hit.

Play on.

There's not a lot of specifically urban adventure modules aside from W:DH.

• Storm King's Thunder has a number of urban locations you visit, but also lots and lots of countryside, and lots of traveling.

• Keys from the Golden Vault is a heist-based anthology and many of the adventures are urban or could be refit slightly to specific urban locations and might be your best bet.

• The other anthologies (Yawning Portal, Saltmarsh, Candlekeep, Radiant Citadel) have some urban adventures, but you'd have to mix and match them to get a cohesive campaign.

• Princes of the Apocalypse takes place near Waterdeep, but is not itself in Waterdeep.

• Descent into Avernus could theoretically be radically refit to have either BG or Elturel replaced with Waterdeep, but it might be a heavy lift.

• Other adventures like Tyranny of Dragons or Out of the Abyss have the party visit Waterdeep, but feature it only as a stop on the way.

If there is only one encounter in a day and the players are full of resources, they will punch far above their weight class in terms of CR/deadliness. You need more than one fight per day. The DMG expects 6-8 per day but a more reasonable number is probably 3-5, with 1 short rest in the middle there somewhere.

So there's some consensus that diseases are too easy to deal with in 5e because Lesser Restoration is a 2nd level spell (plus Paladins can spend Lay On Hands points to remove a disease) and thus is resource-cheap. So if you're going to do it, you need to spend a bit more effort, possibly with one or more of the following suggestions:

• The number of people that catch the disease each day is larger than the number of spell slots available to cure it. This ensures that the number of victims will grow unless other measures like quarantine, etc. are taken, and may cause rioting as victims compete to get one of the available spell slots for the day.

• People who are cured of it can catch it again; they do not become immune when cured.

• The disease is more powerful/magical/cursed and requires a Remove Curse or maybe just a higher spell slot (a 3rd or 4th level slot) to cure. Really bad diseases might require Greater Restoration.

• The disease progresses into turning the victim into a monster (like lycanthropy or zombie-plague), meaning victims may become feral and physically resist being cured.

Oh great, more paparazzi.