Love the idea of a battle encounter between two vessels of the same faction fighting each other. I'm running a sci fi campaign and my players have just left their 1st planet and was planning an encounter before they get to their destination. This will be added for sure!!!
I'm running a table of new players who seem to enjoy negotiating their way out of anything they can, I'm absolutely going to use the social mini game the next time they try to bend the town meeting to their will. Thank you for everything you create and share.
This persuasion encounter is perfect. And all of this can represent so much. Charisma checks can be a persuasion: come on friends let's not be brash, or it can be an intimidation addressed to that specific token Flipping the token is trying to discern who is most valuable to charisma check, so this might represent spending an afternoon with a council member or whoever the token represents to get to know them without any check, or perhaps in a situation with possible hostility and the conversations goal is to talk your way out, the token flip over can represent something different like an observation of body language to determine who might be the one deciding for the group, you flip over a token, and it's a 1, not an important Goon in the situation, so that might look like you making eye contact with a thug and drawing you blade, they take a step back, look nervous, and look to the group, it's obvious someone else is the important 3. This ALSO gives you a guide on NPC crafting. You know you need 8 guys, 2 important ones, 2 lesser important, and some thugs. Or whatever the chart says. And if you're using this as the existing status of your powerful members in a city, it can be cool to see encounters over time shift 2s to 3s and 3s to 2s and so forth. AND NOW THINK ABOUT THIS. you are in a council asking for something from let's say 7 people. You only successfully got the charisma checks on 5, BOOM you can use the other 2 to coerce against the party, have them be disgruntled, or however they might react. Imagine doing this in chult, where each of the 7 merchant princes have monopolies on the items that are sold in the shops. You piss off 2 of em and you might find some really niche middle fingers thrown your way. And some of those guys will just have you killed or try to. Imagining a boss encounter for this system to be like a person you Have to convince, like a queen with absolute authority, and she has like a Lockout on attempting to Persuade or Flip over her token, until you hit a certain number of earned points on the encounter. Like... You have to win over a bunch of that queens encounter and stuff before making that vital roll
I’ve just discovered your videos and am super appreciative!!! I’m new to dnd and living in a country where the spoken language isn’t my native, so it isn’t always easy for me to come up with creative ways to pass along “information” to the players. I will definitely use some of these.
I psyched to use the BBEG aftermath technique and the minigame. They both have a place in my current long-running campaign. While the PCs already know who the BBEG is, there is still a lot to learn that an aftermath scenario would be perfect for. There will also most likely be attempts made to rouse the rabble (I'll be shocked if the players don't go this route, but, hey, player agency...) and the minigame will be an interesting way of resolving that. For immersion purposes, I'm trying to think of good ways to add a roleplay element in there. Usually, the way I run social encounters for larger groups is similar to with smaller groups--roleplaying with the occasional CHA skill check--but with mechanics for the skill checks either seeing how much of an audience is convinced, persuaded, intimidated, whatever, or counting the audience as a single entity. Whichever makes more sense for the encounter and flow of the game. If I can introduce this minigame and still maintain some RP, that'll be fantastic. UPDATE: I just re-watched that section of the video. I suppose I could RP encounters as tokens are flipped over but before rolling the CHA check, but that might cause a pacing issue. Any thoughts?
I ran the whirlpool encounter with my party, the ranger used her giant tressym to carry people to their boat, the rogue just dove in over and over using all his movement, the wizard used dimension door on the whirlpool, the druid wildshaped into a giant octopus and their kobold wizard companion used skywrite to call for help. It was easily the coolest non combat encounter we've had at the table and they felt so heroic!
Thank you for sharing suggestions like this. I really like the mechanics for the survivors in the water as they are drawn closer to doom. Adds suspense
Love the content you bring for games and the vibe you've got in these. I've run something like the "whirlpool" encounter a couple of times (with different skinning/etc) and it's always a blast- I highly recommend that type of encounter for GMs once you are comfortable with the mechanics of a system, as having a dynamic battlefield and time-sensitive actions (but not combat) can be very exciting. The social encounter is also quite neat, although my optimization brain looks at it and says that _maybe_ the values on the tokens (or the relative frequency) need to be tweaked slightly. To run some basic math: the "average" value of a token is 1.75, if you are picking blindly. Spending a turn to reveal a token's value takes your turn, effectively costing you that many points in return for a chance to get a higher-value token on a future turn. Since the other values are 2 and 3, the respective value of doing so is either 0.25 or 1.25, depending on your luck. (Revealing a 1 also has a nonzero value because it functionally increases the "blind" value of other tokens on the field, but that is a bit more complicated to actually calculate so we'll ignore it here.) So the maximum value return on revealing and then persuading one of the tokens is 0 + 3 = 3, whereas the value on simply attempting to persuade two different tokens is 1.75 + 1.75 = 3.5. In other words, you are _always_ better off simply blind-persuading tokens than attempting to puzzle out who is who. (You might argue that since the more valuable tokens have higher DCs that is some additional info, but since players actually have very little control over the results of their persuasion check dice, the functional value of that is pretty close to zero.) The way to fix that would be to lower the blind (average) value of the tokens in the pool, which could be accomplished several ways. You could put in more 1s, making blind picking a worse return; you could change the win condition to needing to convince at least one of the high-value people; or, my personal favorite, you could introduce some "poisoned" tokens that have a negative value (perhaps backbiters, traitors, or gossips that work against the characters' interests), making blind picking a lot more risky. Alternatively, having a reveal action reveal more than one token also achieves this effect- my gut instinct says either two or three would do the job, but I haven't run the numbers there. Anyways, a bit of a nitpicky digression there, but keep up the great work and all hail the Dark Lord of Th'reedi.
🥳🫂👍🏿 Thank you for sharing - I’m on a quest to collect every house rule on UA-cam and beyond - I’ve added this and several other of your videos to my playlist - this is #2,409 - I’d love to hear about any more you use ❤
Careful with that Blender warlock patron Kelly! Nice video, some fun and different encounters!. Though i think I'd have to have a planar solution prepped for that whirlpool... my players love throwing themselves into dangera Legend Keeper feels a lot like the Notion pages/databases I use atm, but I do think that mouse over feature is nice.
😯 You just gave me a great idea: Replacing the whirlpool with a Blackhole 😈 In the middle of Town (or dungeon, or boss arena or whatever). The Blackhole sucks you in another dimension if you get sucked in and you have to find a way to escape or the others have to save you 🔥
I'm going to use that! Also, did your pirate campaign use guns? If so, what stats did you use for them? I've seen several but can't find a good balanced stat block for my group
👁👁 no puppies were sacrificed in the making of these awesome encounter ideas ... ... yet 😈 Great one, will take note and see how I will use them in the current campaign.
Hey I don't know your editing work flow, but is it possible to add a visual and audio cue when you move onto the next idea? If could just be something small like saying "okay my next idea is" or having text show up at the bottom saying "idea #2" before your start with the next one. Right now the tone of your delivery, the lack of any pause between ideas does not indicate you've started a new point. Your flow is smooth and unbroken between ideas. It's like you're reading one long paragraph. It has separate sentences yes, but each new idea needs to be a new paragraph. My comment is getting long, but it was still readable. I bet that's no longer the case with this new paragraph huh? It would have been more pleasant if I'd broken it up into multiple paragraphs. Same with your delivery. Anyway this is just a small thing which ups the quality of your videos and helps hold the attention of the viewer. Thanks for reading so far.
I used blender. It's a great program, but I wouldn't recommend it for doing quick things for d&d. I think the camera in dungeon alchemist would be the easiest way to do some fly throughs of 3d environments. But you trade speed and ease of use for flexibility because you have to work within the assets that dungeon alchemist has
İf concious ones cant swim against the pulling effect on their own what is the meaning of them being concious ? I though you are gonna mention about this but you just skip it
I like the persuasion game. But what sense does it make to waste your action on turning a token if you can make the persuasion check instead. If you take the persuasion check you always have the chance in winning this token, which overall gives you more points in average and if you fail you mostly know what value it has. I guess you should overthink this mechanic.
And now even with 3d graphics. Your production value is insane. And the content is applicable in my games! Incredible. Thank you! :)
Love the idea of a battle encounter between two vessels of the same faction fighting each other. I'm running a sci fi campaign and my players have just left their 1st planet and was planning an encounter before they get to their destination. This will be added for sure!!!
I'm running a table of new players who seem to enjoy negotiating their way out of anything they can, I'm absolutely going to use the social mini game the next time they try to bend the town meeting to their will. Thank you for everything you create and share.
This persuasion encounter is perfect. And all of this can represent so much.
Charisma checks can be a persuasion: come on friends let's not be brash, or it can be an intimidation addressed to that specific token
Flipping the token is trying to discern who is most valuable to charisma check, so this might represent spending an afternoon with a council member or whoever the token represents to get to know them without any check, or perhaps in a situation with possible hostility and the conversations goal is to talk your way out, the token flip over can represent something different like an observation of body language to determine who might be the one deciding for the group, you flip over a token, and it's a 1, not an important Goon in the situation, so that might look like you making eye contact with a thug and drawing you blade, they take a step back, look nervous, and look to the group, it's obvious someone else is the important 3.
This ALSO gives you a guide on NPC crafting. You know you need 8 guys, 2 important ones, 2 lesser important, and some thugs. Or whatever the chart says. And if you're using this as the existing status of your powerful members in a city, it can be cool to see encounters over time shift 2s to 3s and 3s to 2s and so forth.
AND NOW THINK ABOUT THIS. you are in a council asking for something from let's say 7 people. You only successfully got the charisma checks on 5, BOOM you can use the other 2 to coerce against the party, have them be disgruntled, or however they might react.
Imagine doing this in chult, where each of the 7 merchant princes have monopolies on the items that are sold in the shops. You piss off 2 of em and you might find some really niche middle fingers thrown your way. And some of those guys will just have you killed or try to.
Imagining a boss encounter for this system to be like a person you Have to convince, like a queen with absolute authority, and she has like a Lockout on attempting to Persuade or Flip over her token, until you hit a certain number of earned points on the encounter. Like... You have to win over a bunch of that queens encounter and stuff before making that vital roll
I’ve just discovered your videos and am super appreciative!!! I’m new to dnd and living in a country where the spoken language isn’t my native, so it isn’t always easy for me to come up with creative ways to pass along “information” to the players. I will definitely use some of these.
I psyched to use the BBEG aftermath technique and the minigame. They both have a place in my current long-running campaign. While the PCs already know who the BBEG is, there is still a lot to learn that an aftermath scenario would be perfect for. There will also most likely be attempts made to rouse the rabble (I'll be shocked if the players don't go this route, but, hey, player agency...) and the minigame will be an interesting way of resolving that. For immersion purposes, I'm trying to think of good ways to add a roleplay element in there. Usually, the way I run social encounters for larger groups is similar to with smaller groups--roleplaying with the occasional CHA skill check--but with mechanics for the skill checks either seeing how much of an audience is convinced, persuaded, intimidated, whatever, or counting the audience as a single entity. Whichever makes more sense for the encounter and flow of the game. If I can introduce this minigame and still maintain some RP, that'll be fantastic.
UPDATE: I just re-watched that section of the video. I suppose I could RP encounters as tokens are flipped over but before rolling the CHA check, but that might cause a pacing issue. Any thoughts?
Man, I love your channel, this has upped my DM game strongly. Thank you so much and hey, I appreciate you.
I wish I had a mustache like that
Same
It’s Movember…
Start it up!
I absolutely love all of these systems. I run weekly games and always love mixing things up for my players and these are incredible. Awesome job!
This channel is a goldmine. I appreciate YOU.
I ran the whirlpool encounter with my party, the ranger used her giant tressym to carry people to their boat, the rogue just dove in over and over using all his movement, the wizard used dimension door on the whirlpool, the druid wildshaped into a giant octopus and their kobold wizard companion used skywrite to call for help. It was easily the coolest non combat encounter we've had at the table and they felt so heroic!
Great new vid Kelly - loving the animations, and I'll definitely try these encounters out.
Im getting ready to start running a new campaign and discovering your channel was like striking gold. Keep it up :)
Thank you!
you're stuff is Epic tier! thanks for all the clever and ingenious ways to keep players excited and playing!
These are fantastic, I needed some last minute ideas for me dnd session in an hour! You're a lifesaver.
I love your content. Thank you!
Thank you for sharing suggestions like this. I really like the mechanics for the survivors in the water as they are drawn closer to doom. Adds suspense
Love the Persuasion mini game, need that for my next session. Thanks
Love the content you bring for games and the vibe you've got in these. I've run something like the "whirlpool" encounter a couple of times (with different skinning/etc) and it's always a blast- I highly recommend that type of encounter for GMs once you are comfortable with the mechanics of a system, as having a dynamic battlefield and time-sensitive actions (but not combat) can be very exciting.
The social encounter is also quite neat, although my optimization brain looks at it and says that _maybe_ the values on the tokens (or the relative frequency) need to be tweaked slightly. To run some basic math: the "average" value of a token is 1.75, if you are picking blindly. Spending a turn to reveal a token's value takes your turn, effectively costing you that many points in return for a chance to get a higher-value token on a future turn. Since the other values are 2 and 3, the respective value of doing so is either 0.25 or 1.25, depending on your luck. (Revealing a 1 also has a nonzero value because it functionally increases the "blind" value of other tokens on the field, but that is a bit more complicated to actually calculate so we'll ignore it here.) So the maximum value return on revealing and then persuading one of the tokens is 0 + 3 = 3, whereas the value on simply attempting to persuade two different tokens is 1.75 + 1.75 = 3.5. In other words, you are _always_ better off simply blind-persuading tokens than attempting to puzzle out who is who. (You might argue that since the more valuable tokens have higher DCs that is some additional info, but since players actually have very little control over the results of their persuasion check dice, the functional value of that is pretty close to zero.)
The way to fix that would be to lower the blind (average) value of the tokens in the pool, which could be accomplished several ways. You could put in more 1s, making blind picking a worse return; you could change the win condition to needing to convince at least one of the high-value people; or, my personal favorite, you could introduce some "poisoned" tokens that have a negative value (perhaps backbiters, traitors, or gossips that work against the characters' interests), making blind picking a lot more risky. Alternatively, having a reveal action reveal more than one token also achieves this effect- my gut instinct says either two or three would do the job, but I haven't run the numbers there.
Anyways, a bit of a nitpicky digression there, but keep up the great work and all hail the Dark Lord of Th'reedi.
Thanks for all your vids! I will, for sure, use the shipwreck encounter one day. Appreciate you.
🥳🫂👍🏿
Thank you for sharing - I’m on a quest to collect every house rule on UA-cam and beyond - I’ve added this and several other of your videos to my playlist - this is #2,409 - I’d love to hear about any more you use ❤
Totally gonna try the whirpool encounter and the mini game!
Great video 👌 Thanks for sharing these! I will definitely give a look to your sponsor.
Hey Kelley look how far you’ve gone I remember getting in from the ground floor!
I'm so happy you're along for the ride!
Careful with that Blender warlock patron Kelly!
Nice video, some fun and different encounters!. Though i think I'd have to have a planar solution prepped for that whirlpool... my players love throwing themselves into dangera
Legend Keeper feels a lot like the Notion pages/databases I use atm, but I do think that mouse over feature is nice.
Oh man, that persuasion minigame would have worked *so* well with a module I ran a while back.
😯 You just gave me a great idea:
Replacing the whirlpool with a Blackhole 😈 In the middle of Town (or dungeon, or boss arena or whatever). The Blackhole sucks you in another dimension if you get sucked in and you have to find a way to escape or the others have to save you 🔥
That sounds very fun!
Perfect content and your videos
I'm going to use that! Also, did your pirate campaign use guns? If so, what stats did you use for them? I've seen several but can't find a good balanced stat block for my group
I'm definitely going to steal the persuasion minigame :)
Wait, does it count as a steal if you ask us to? 🤔
👁👁 no puppies were sacrificed in the making of these awesome encounter ideas ... ... yet 😈 Great one, will take note and see how I will use them in the current campaign.
Cool 😍❤️ thank you. I love your videos 🥰
Hey I don't know your editing work flow, but is it possible to add a visual and audio cue when you move onto the next idea?
If could just be something small like saying "okay my next idea is" or having text show up at the bottom saying "idea #2" before your start with the next one.
Right now the tone of your delivery, the lack of any pause between ideas does not indicate you've started a new point. Your flow is smooth and unbroken between ideas. It's like you're reading one long paragraph. It has separate sentences yes, but each new idea needs to be a new paragraph. My comment is getting long, but it was still readable. I bet that's no longer the case with this new paragraph huh? It would have been more pleasant if I'd broken it up into multiple paragraphs. Same with your delivery.
Anyway this is just a small thing which ups the quality of your videos and helps hold the attention of the viewer. Thanks for reading so far.
What software did you use for the 3D animation? It looked really clean and I've been considering using some sort of animation for my DND group.
I used blender. It's a great program, but I wouldn't recommend it for doing quick things for d&d. I think the camera in dungeon alchemist would be the easiest way to do some fly throughs of 3d environments. But you trade speed and ease of use for flexibility because you have to work within the assets that dungeon alchemist has
Tell me about why you moved from Obsidian to Legend Keeper?!
İf concious ones cant swim against the pulling effect on their own what is the meaning of them being concious ? I though you are gonna mention about this but you just skip it
At the very beginning he says conscious survivors could potentially grab ropes thrown to them while unconscious ones would need to be retrieved
I like the persuasion game. But what sense does it make to waste your action on turning a token if you can make the persuasion check instead. If you take the persuasion check you always have the chance in winning this token, which overall gives you more points in average and if you fail you mostly know what value it has. I guess you should overthink this mechanic.