The Most Perilous Adversary in D&D, or any roleplaying game
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ก.ค. 2024
- A short video on what I believe to be the greatest adversary in not only D&D, but any roleplaying game.
Adventuring party illustration from B1 In Search of the Unknown by David Sutherland.
Camping Equipment illustration by Michael Fitzhywel: www.artstation.com/artwork/1PkyX
Dungeon passage by Alyn Spiller: www.deviantart.com/alynspille...
Link to Questing Beast’s video: • The Lost Dungeon Crawl...
Link to my BECMI Dungeons and Dragons playlist: • BECMI Dungeon and Dragons
BECMI Berserker logo and artwork created and gifted by the very generous Steve Young, contactable at steveyoungwork@hotmail.com Thank you, Steve!!
If you like this video and want to support me further, please consider buying me a coffee at: www.buymeacoffee.com/becmiber... Your support is greatly appreciated.
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Just a note. Amundsen beat Scott to the South Pole (by 5 weeks). Not Shackleton.
Ah! I got my Scotts mixed up with my Shakletons. Will pin this post. Thanks for the correction!
I thought it was gunna be scheduling.
Definitely the case with my games!
🤣
Go for a Westmarches-style “living campaign”! No schedule, no core group, no commitment, etc!
@@abethecop1 I’m lucky enough to have a weekly game
So true :)
One thing to keep in mind is the rule of threes:
3 minutes without air
3 hours in extreme heat/cold without shelter
3 days without water/sleep
3 weeks without food
People tend to get way too focused on the food.
The real issues with Mother Nature would be around the harsh weather/environment as well as 'traps'. Glaciers with deep crevasses under the snow give me the heebie-jeebies. Avalanches, frozen rivers that are just not quite frozen thickly enough for your plate-mail wearing knight... And there are also various desert equivalents. And of course oceans provide their own aquatic deserts for castaways...
Rule of Threes😊 3️⃣
A good meteor strike sending your wold back to the Stone Age can be fun too…
sleep is a lot longer. some kid went 11 days with no sleep as a science fair and was fine.
@@GeneBateman1970 Those are obviously generalizations and go in discrete steps. I, carrying my own hefty food reserves with me, could probably last 3 months on a starvation diet rather than 3 weeks. But I would imagine 3 days without sleep, while not killing you directly, would make you very likely to do something stupid/careless in a survival situation.
but we have no enviromental rules in BECMI for that
I ran Isle of Dread a while ago, and the party actively complained at me when I pointed out they hadn't acquired firewood when climbing the mountain and then their Rakasta hireling froze to death in the night.
I must admit that as a DM I had always thought that a player meeting his demise at the hands of the weather was a pretty sad way to go, so I never incorporated the weather as a factor in adventures unless it was a seafaring chapter. For desert travel I always had the players hire a local guide who knew how to provision the party. After watching this video, I realize that I wasn’t giving my players the full experience. I am very impressed by the DM’s in the comments section that incorporate nature as another layer to the adventure. Where was the Berserker in 1987 when I needed him? Another great video.
Hire a ranger!
honestly i would almost on autopilot hired a guide for the wilderness
Timely video! My players' secomd group of characters are setting off for the Wolf Nomad lands, then up to Blackmoor, and in winter, too. The weather will doubtless be a factor.
Have a great game!
Oh man i forgot the tent...
@@lexington476 Last famous words when looking at the approaching heavy hailstorm...
Yeah, having read Tolkiens books even before knowing anything about RPGs,nI always take into consideeation the hazards of traveling on the wilderness
Love this video. I always take the weather into account in my campaigns. More so at lower levels, but if the party is in a harsh environment, they need to deal with the consequences. They longer they avoid the issue, less likely they are to survive.
I had a party trudging through an unexpected blizzard. They had prepared for the cold, as winter was setting in, but they didn't plan well for the wet. I explained to them how hypothermia works, and what they needed to do to avoid it. But one player expected to be able to go on since his strength, constitution and HP were higher, and figured he could survive on his own. He left the party in a shelter and walked an additional 5 miles through the storm, before reaching an abandoned farm. Where he stayed the night. The next day the rest of the party caught up with him, just in time for the cleric to save his life. From that game forward he had respect for nature.
6:49 - start of overview of relevant systems
I love running wilderness. It adds a great more to the story.
Great food for thought, BB. Thanks for the content.
My pleasure!
We always played through the Wild like we did IRL when hunting and hiking and camping out... if, obviously, a lot more dangerous and perhaps interesting at times. 😅
But, after all these years and my family not having any real experiences with this stuff, need something to add to our games. As such, I must rely on movie scenes for them, and books they read, and then I use other systems with specific mechanics for "Journeys" (Dragonbane, Forbidden Lands, The One Ring, etc) to help with this and, like they're used to, systematize it for them.
Also, as such, I employ a vast array of various tables in books and Dragon Magazines, etc.
Great video, as usual, sir.... thnx! 👊🤓
You’re welcome.
My simple addition for my C&C game is importing a 5e-like exhaustion rule. A simple if you don't eat, drink, or sleep each day you get a 1 point of exhaustion. When you reach 7 points you die. And you can only remove one point per day with proper food, water, and rest. Each point of exhaustion results in a -1 to all rolls. So, if they rake up 3 levels of exhaustion than they will have a -3 to all rolls.
I use a weather roll to kick off almost every session. d20 1 = worst case scenario, usually a terrible storm, tornado, hurricane, dust storm, etc. 20 = perfect day for the party's purposes, like a convenient fog bank rolls in to help a party of thieves pull off a heist, otherwise, usually a beautiful, sunny day, with a gentle breeze. It's a good opportunity to throw in something odd too, like excessive pollen coats the town yellow, or double rainbow! What does it mean!?
A party with moderate levels of fatigue is going to find foes adapted to the environment and fresh a lot harder. They won't forget having to chase down and beat the desert goblins just to steal their canteens...
Love it! And this is exactly the kind of excitement I’m talking about. The players will remember that more than finding yet another dusty sword.
very fun video!
Brilliant video! You eloquently argued the problem and pointed a solution that doesn't require extra rules or even entire game modes, and you addressed my concern that deadly weather could cause meaningless deaths: you only die if you disrespect it, the central part of the game is still action and combat but traveling is a fundamental part of the adventure genre as well. And now I get to ask for more Con checks because the lack of Con ability checks always bothered me for some reason.
Please forgive any spelling mistakes, English is my 3rd language and my phone has auto correct to another language.
Your English is great! Glad you found the video helpful.
- all adventures face
- requires preparation
- readily avoided
15 seconds in and I'm calling it: travel
My players in my urban campaign, "What's travel?"
@@Argonnosi For example, travel in a urban setting is going from your inn to your contact's home, when it is smacked right in the middle of the slums and you are dressed like a fancy, flashy, rich-looking dandy.
Hello Becmi, this was a great video, and very on-point. I'm glad I found (and am now subscribed to) your channel! :-) I wish my players weren't so adverse to things like resource management (i.e. food & water), which they just jot down on a character sheet and forget about, then get mad at me if I have the temerity to bring it up in-game.
Thanks for subbing! I hope you can get them interested soon. Can make for a much different game and keep the attention of players. Good luck!
I love running outdoor adventures, and there are a million ways to challenge your players with the environment. It can also come to their rescue in some cases, like where the tribe of orcs are chasing them, it starts raining heavily, and the orcs may lose sight, scent and trail of them in the downpour. If the players play well and make good rolls, anyway. Lol.
Yup. This is the kind of thing I would cover in a video on nature in a tactical situation.
This is the best thing I ever saw.
Mother Nature, here I thought it was dysentery. 🤣 🤣 🤣 I like Five Torches Deep approach to logistics, their Load, Supply, and Foraging rules.
"Today is a foe that i believe is the most difficult, the most deadliest and the one that requires the most preparation to face"
You mean the next gazeteer in the series?
Ha! I’m sorry, I will get there in the end.
So the inhumanly cold weather had settled over the PC party, who had done all their players could think of to stay warm. I awarded them the requisite bonuses for their cleverness, and had them all roll in three stages to stave off icy death until the blizzard passed. After the second roll, one of the less hardy PCs was in dire straits. It was pretty clear that another failed roll would mean curtains for him.
The players went over their options one more time, and the agitated player appealed to me for some help or hint.
"At least one of you has an option you could use, which could help a lot," I said, enigmatically. Much poring over sheets followed, but nobody could think of anything. They bundled the stricken PC up extra carefully, and braced themselves for the final roll. A dismal failure, or the story wouldn't be worth telling. And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
"Well, what was it then? What could have saved me?" asked the unfortunate player. I felt he might be insinuating I had been unfair. So I explained "The party did find several Potions of Cold Resistance last session."
"Well, that wasn't bloody obvious!" he cried in angry sarcasm. Everyone else pored over their sheets one more time to find who the culprit was who hadn't noticed those potions. Nobody would accept the blame, until it turned out the dead PC's player himself had taken all those potions, and there they were on his sheet.
i think killing the player was a bit over the top
@@thodan467Not all that crazy, imho. People die of thirst in the desert with water still in their flasks. It’s an unfortunate situation, but it is what it is.
@@xenmaster2203
killing the player , the PC i do get
@@thodan467 real
@@xenmaster2203
I could not resist that joke
In general, if the players carry the appropriate supplies and rations, I hand wave the survival aspect save for encounter events.
I think this is the majority.
Super cool art there Bud
Thank you. The artist is credited in the vid description.
I really like your take on the Exhaustion rules. It's something I'd probably adapt. And yeah, 5E *had* the means of doing stuff like this. Sadly, they listened to a focal few and nerfed Exhaustion bad for 5.5.
Encumbrance is a litmus test for players.
Very true.
Yeah, I'm gonna need a video on blizzards getting in the way of random encounters.
Funny enough, I would refer to such an encounter I ran where visibility was 10' and party members were stumbling into enemies as much as each other. Ended up being a memorable session.
Well said, sir, per usual. 😊 I was usually the Party Quartermaster whenever I had the chance to play, so I get it. As a forever GM my players usually couldn't be bothered with such things. Old Grogs appreciate the bivouac minutia and military types like myself, but I suppose it depends on the group. As a solo player I love imaginary camping. 😂
depends on the circumstances, if that detail is worth having and adding to the experience or is only needless time wasting bean counting.
@@thodan467 , thanks for the input.
i will be using your rules for fatigue for 3.5. use a fortitude save for each level, thank you
You’re welcome.
Okay, everyone plays Warforged 🤖
I usually hand wave things now. I used to run with an old school group and we were very serious about weather and food etc. This group is great and we are currently starting Isle of Dread, half of the group have never played it and I am having a blast. The other people I play with are not fans of weather and complained, they took precautions so why is it an issue? They are a different breed, nice people but more into hack and slash with less story.
For the most part I'm leery of elaborate houseruling of weather and other hazards. If you really feel strongly that more rules have to be made up then be upfront with your players before you spring stuff on them that's not in the rules.
Of course. Rules should not be a surprise to players.
I love that aspect of the game and it actually frustrates me when DMs say something like "You do not have to write it down or spend gold with this BS. Let's just assume you have any mundane equipment, like chalk, winter clothes, mirrors or flint all the time. Oh, and let's not count arrows. That's boring".
These environmental details are another layer to keep the game dynamic and fresh. Don't just put combat as the only source of challenge in the game, then complain combat is getting boring.
That’s a really good point. If you have to pay attention to less and less then of course any demand on it will become tedious.
@@zeIIendor Arrows... Something no one playing an archer build ever takes into consideration... until the DM points out that they have run out while the archer is in the middle of a very tough boss fight and the boss is very, very pissed off by all the harassing the arrows of the archer caused him until then.
The same goes for costly spell components or other very necessary magical consumables in other games.
I find, in all editions, this matters at low level but becomes mostly irrelevant at higher levels. So I am very strict at low levels but as the PCs tools expand I don’t bother as much. The best system I’ve seen (and use) is the one from Dollmenwood.
I like 5e exhaustion as well.
I must add that "environment" is not just climate or biological needs. It can be natural "traps", such as ready to collapse cliffs or caves, carpets of poisonous mushrooms that exhale toxic spores when disturbed or stepped upon, a deadly little spider living inside that lost magic helm laying where its last owner passed away, thorny vines hidden among the rest of the undergrowth of a forest which can entangle anyone passing through without something like a machete, and so on.
Also, many do not think that your very inn can kill you. You can get lice, ticks or fleas in a seedy inn and end up dying of plague. You can eat or drink unsafe food and die of cholera. You can get bobed, sacked and robbed in the common room or when getting outside to relieve yourself. And so on.
Yup. Lots of nastiness out there if you want to include it.
The problem are the modern players who feel your being to antagonistic when you use environment
Its worth noting that people (certainly Humans) with high muscle mass have a higher calorific requirement. You might consider negative modifiers to starvation based upon Constitution.
Now THAT is hardcore! 😃
@@tommo9757 Not Constitution... Strength. That's where the muscles are included. High Intelligence could be a factor too, since brain power requires a lot of energy, even more than muscles.
2:50 - As far as I'm concerned, infravision or "darkvision" is simply low-light vision, like a cat or an owl would have. It's also more accurate, since animals like cats and owls actually see into the IR and UV spectrum. They require almost no light-- _above ground._
Underground is a totally different matter. No light means _no light,_ including infrared and UV. Hence, dwarves and elves still cannot see, without some kind of light source. Creatures who spend their lives in total darkness go blind. They do not evolve night vision goggles, or see heat, like the Predator!
An easy fix to darkvision, is to require every party to have at least one decent light source, since 5e rules have otherwise made humans obsolete. If they use 5e cantrips (i.e., the _light_ spell), then have each player be able to have only one cantrip active at a time. When the wizard casts _firebolt,_ because he's saving his "good" spells for something more important, the magical light on the fighter's shield goes out, leaving everyone in the dark. This turns even the broken 5e cantrips into a resource to be managed.
@@fleetcenturion Infrared is always present, so for infravision there is always something to see, unless it is too cold. A cat can see even in total darkness, if the objects around it are still warm enough to emit heat in the IR spectrum it is able to see.
@@ObatongoSensei - Nothing you said there was remotely accurate. If it were, there would be predators, feasting on helpless, blind cave-dwelling creatures.
@@fleetcenturion You just cited vipers and rattlesnakes, among the others... They navigate in the dark thanks to thermal vision only, which is especially good to catch warm-blooded prey. Their preferred ones are those dwelling in burrows.
@@ObatongoSensei - Snakes sense heat with their tongues; they don't see heat. Most have very poor eyesight, in fact.
Biology was never your thing, was it?
@@fleetcenturion Vipers and their cousins have spots below their eyes that are basically Infrared secondary eyes. They literally see heat, far better than other animals with IR sensitivity in their eyesight. Other snakes do not have them, though.
Where their eyesight suck is at perceiving colors and fine details, but it is good at perceiving movement.
Snakes are deaf and have no or very reduced sense of taste. They use their forked tongue in place of the nose they do not have as the organ for the sense of smell. The tongue is forked for the same reason why we have two nostrils: for stereo-smelling things.
Biology is one of my favorite things, actually, since I was three years old, half a century ago.
Incorrect. The deadliest foe to any party are the twin gods of Scheduling and Coordination. They have ended more parties than all other causes combined.
can you show me the rules in BECMi?
Rules Cyclopedia, page 150.
@@becmiberserker
thank you
The weather doesn't play well with modern players and their 50 page back stories! You can't possibly expect something as trivial as weather to take out that illegitimate scion of the king and the half dragon half faerie baker! All kidding aside I think the reason weather isn't used so much in modern versions of the game is simply because its not flashy or glorious enough for the superheroes to deal with. That and it all comes down to the game master and whether or not they actually know what they are doing or are just cosplaying as a game master.
@@nordicmaelstrom4714 Trivial weather... not flashy... such as flash floods from heavy rain, lightning storms, tornadoes, fire tornadoes, ash rain during a volcanic eruption, hurricane-level winds, tsunamis or anomalous waves, huge sandstorms, baseball-sized hailstorms, freezing rain, and so on.
A good DM can always throw some flashy and glorious climatic death event at the most boisterous of characters.
@@ObatongoSensei I guess the word sarcasm has no meaning to you eh kid? Do not lecture me. I've been game mastering for a quarter of a century and use weather all the time. See yourself out.
@@nordicmaelstrom4714 Well... For me it's been about 40 years.
It may be that I didn't catch your sarcasm and you didn't catch mine, but the point was that maybe weather not being glorious or flashy enough is not the true reason. Since modern systems give out experience almost only through combat, it becomes very hard to give an official challenge rating to weather or environmental hazards, which can easily kill you at any level, so they just ignore them.
@@ObatongoSensei Eh no worries. I should not of snapped at you but I have absolutely zero tolerance for people on social media. I was being entirely tongue in cheek with the first post. Weather is an absolute great tool to use in campaigns and for certain ones can be far worse than whatever creatures or villains the players may encounter. I honestly don't care much for wotc versions of the game so I find just about everything about them annoying. Have a good one.
@@nordicmaelstrom4714 Yeah. I remember AD&D 2nd Edition to be really lethal with various climatic and environmental dangers, but then 3rd edition happened and suddenly they were a nuisance at best. Modern games do not even explain that with the wrong spell you could literally destroy the very place you are in alongside the enemies you were aiming at. A DM has to understand it by himself.
Whats with all the long Midroll Ads?? Please don't be another channel I have to unsubscribe from.
That's TH-cam, not BB.