CCI - OOC Thread

[Matt4]

Of course they also have proficency in Athletics... Sigh 

Just out of curiosity (and frustration for the umpteenth attack which Miles missed), you said they haven't any weapon but are they armored, naturally or not? Because damn...otherwise they should have 22 in dexterity and it seems weird...

[Daos]

I'm not really sure.  As far as I know, Juju Zombies were never officially updated to 5E, so I made do by finding someone's homebrewed rules for them.

[Matt4]

Hmm..I see..it's just that between their Strenght and their Dexterity they seem stronger than young dragons XD

[Daos]

I don't know what the STR and DEX of young dragons are in 5E, so I cannot say.

[Daos]

I was working on chapter two last night and realized a couple of things.

The first is, apparently zombies don't always go last in initiative anymore in 5E?  At least, I can't find any reference anywhere to that.

The second is, zombies seem to have a new ability that lets them sometimes get back up after being defeated.

Considering how quick you were to point out errors I've made in the past, I'm sort of surprised these two slipped past you.

I guess it's too late to do anything about it now, but the zombies you've already defeated should probably be considered a lower CR because of these errors, though.

[Matt4]

For the Initiative thing I asked you why you weren't rolling it for the zombies but you said they were supposed to go last, so I thought it was something peculiar to this module. I'm not aware on how they work in other editions.

For the undead fortitude thing, I actually assumed you removed it willingly to make things easier for me since I was playing alone. After all, as the DM I assume you have the monster card in front of you and..it's literally written there how they work, it's not something you could have misunderstood...That's why I didn't think it was necessary for me to point it out. (I actually always debate if pointing out your mistakes or not since I don't know if it bothers you, so I try to avoid it if it's not entirely necessary.)

(this is not a jab at you by the way, I like the way you DM and I never judge one if they make a mistake.. DnD is a complicated game full of weird rules about everything, so something will slip eventually...I'm not sure if yours was a jab at me though. :/)

[Daos]

No, in 2E zombies always lost initiative automatically (to represent them being slow and jerky in movements), and I guess I just assumed that was still the case.  I should have paid closer attention to things.

When I copied down the 5E version of zombies, I must have forgotten the Undead Fortitude part in my notes.  I'm still very new to 5E, and haven't memorized these sorts of things the way I have in 2E.  I haven't changed anything about the module so far, other than making it 5E instead of 2E.  It is designed to be a solo game, after all, so there'd be no reason to lower the difficulty to accommodate a single player.  If anything, it being in 5E has already made it much easier, as 5E characters are much stronger than 2E ones.

For the record, it does not bother me when someone points out a mistake I've made, especially with 5E where I am still learning the system.  I wasn't making any jabs at anyone, I just have 25 years of 2E stuck in my brain and get confused easily, especially while running a 2E module that I've crudely hammered into a 5E shape.  (In retrospect, it probably would have saved me a lot of time and trouble if I had just run this game in 2E, like it was meant to be, but it was an opportunity to learn more 5E, and I think I have learned more since starting this, so I don't really regret it.)

[Matt4]

I mean, it's true that 5e PCs are stronger than 2e PCs (at least from what I saw when creating Kaelestia), but monsters are also stronger. Undead fortitude is no joke, once a group of zombies were wiping our lvl 4 party of 4 just because they flat out refused to die. So yeah the player character may be stronger, but if the 10 monsters they are fighting against are also stronger than they used to be in 2e, you will make things harder than they were supposed to be in the module.
Like for example I would have only put 7 or 8 zombies in the wight fight, if you would have used the "normal" version of the zombies.

And that's fine, I read your sentence as "you only point out my mistakes when it suits you" so I was a bit baffled. The fact is that I'm used to play with DMs that change things about monsters regularly to make fights more exciting or easier, etc. That's why I thought those were deliberate changes instead of mistakes.

By the way, since I saw you were a bit unsure on how to determine what kind of armor a monster is wearing, it usually appears this way: 



Next to the Armor Class there will the value and in brackets what kind of armor they are using (so you'll have leather, plate, shields, natural armor which are scales or carapaxes, etc). If the monster is instead unarmored you have to add their dexterity modifier to 10. That's why I thought it was weird that the JuJu zombies had 16 as CA since I assumed they were unarmored.

edit: also reminder that Miles gets a bonus attack since he killed the first juju zombie

[Daos]

Good to know.  My notes just say AC 16, so either the homebrewed notes I copied them from didn't mention it or I copied it down wrong.  Either way is possible.

And Miles didn't use great weapon master in his last attack.  It was just a regular attack.

[Matt4]

Oh, you don't have to use the other ability from GWM to be able to use this. It's a passive ability you gain once you have the feat!

"On your turn, when you score a critical hit with a melee weapon or reduce a creature to 0 hit points with one, you can make one melee weapon attack as a bonus action."

It doesn't make any reference to the fact you have to use the other part of the feat to gain this benefit.

[Daos]

Huh.  Wow, this really is a powerful feat.  Kind of weird that I've never had a player take it before.

Okay, post edited.

[Matt4]

Yeah, it's..kinda broken tbh but it's for Martials that usually could use the power boost so...

I'll post something tomorrow morning, it's 4 am and I just finished an intense session in the Underdark ;_;

[Daos]

Wow, only 12 pages and it still took 3 months to finish.

Anyway, I'm sort of swamped right now with Tyranny of Dragons, but once that's done, I'll try and figure out XP and such and we can move on to chapter two.

[Matt4]

Ahah I feel like the last battle slumped me over, it took exactly one month to finish. I launched my first attack on the 14th of September!

And no problem, I'll wait!

[Daos]

And here I hoped we'd wrap up the entire thing before Mystery of the Missing Patrol was released.  Well, it's technically still possible, I guess.

How did you like chapter one?  Chapter two is much less intense and nail-biting, but I remember chapter one being one of my favorite times playing AD&D.