Combat Action: Hide

The rules for hiding in combat are all over the place in the PHB. Also, there's a lot of "The DM will tell you when you can do this"-type verbiage to these rules. So, for clarity, let me explain exactly how I intend to adjudicate the Hide action in our campaign.

You may attempt a Hide action whenever there are NO enemies who can see you clearly. If you are behind cover, under concealment, in darkness or shadows that your enemies can't see through, then you can't be seen clearly. If even one enemy can see you clearly, you may assume that you can't hide from any of them (under most circumstances).

In order to successfully hide, you need to make a Stealth skill check against a DC equal to the highest passive Perception amongst the enemies. When you announce your attempt to hide, I'll find that DC for you before you roll.

If you are successful in your Stealth check, you will gain the status of Hidden. Characters with this status gain advantage when making an attack and grant disadvantage to their enemies' attacks against them.

Your Hidden status ends when any of the following things happen:

• You choose to stop hiding (as a free action)
• You make an attack (hit or miss)
• You take the Dash action
• You make any kind of loud noise or bright light or any other thing might reasonably make an enemy want to look in your direction (like triggering a noise-trap).

Note that I have removed the assumption that a creature will see you in combat when you "come out of hiding and approach" (PHB p.177) and replaced that restriction with the No Dash restriction.

Item MVP of the Adventure: the Net

You see them show up in gladiator movies all the time, but the lowly net doesn't make it into fantasy adventures very often. Yet, I'm pretty sure just about every edition of D&D since AD&D has included it in one expansion or another - assuming it wasn't already in the main equipment list. So when one of my newbie players decided to buy three of them during character creation, I was just a little worried that he'd find them disappointing once we actually got down to play.

As it turns out, I was wrong. Really wrong.

You can find the description for the net at the bottom of page 148 in the PHB. It reads as follows.

Net. A Large or smaller creature hit by a net is restrained until freed. A net has no effect on creatures that are formless, or creatures that are Huge or larger. A creature can use its action to make a DC 10 Strength check, freeing itself or another creature within its reach on a success. Dealing 5 slashing damage to the net (AC 10) also frees the creature without harming it, ending the effect and destroying the net.When you use an action, bonus action, or reaction to attack with a net, you can only make one attack regardless of the number of attacks you can normally make.

That... just doesn't sound very powerful. With a range of 5/15, it's hard to attack someone with. And, since it only requires a DC 10 STR check or 5 points of slashing damage to escape from, it seems like most creatures can get out of it with no problem at all. Sounds like you're better off just making a normal attack.

And yeah, all of that is very true. The value of the net comes in with the knowledge that "restrained" isn't just a descriptor, it is a specific condition which may be found on page 292 of the PHB. In short, a restrained creature can't move, has disadvantage on its Dex saving throws, and all attack rolls against a restrained creature have advantage. Also, a restrained creature's attacks are made at disadvantage.

If you manage to get a net on a creature in the right place in initiative, some or all of your allies may gain advantage to attack it. That's a big deal for everyone, and doubly so for your Rogue players since Sneak Attack is triggered when the Rogue has advantage on their attack rolls.

And if your initiative order isn't so lucky? Your target will either lose its move that round and have a disadvantaged attack (if it doesn't try to escape), it will lose one of its Actions trying to escape, or both (if it attempts to escape and fails).

Every time my players get nervous about a creature, that net comes out. If the creature doesn't die while it's trapped, then it dies on the turn it escapes.

Not bad for 1 gp.

Polearm Defense

There is some sweet stuff going on with polearms in the 5E rules. Let's cover the basics first.

Reach
A weapon with the reach tag can attack 5' further away than your attacks with non-reach melee weapons. Assuming you don't have any other reach modifiers, that means you can make a melee attack up to 10' away. Cool.

Ready
When you ready an action, you're saying "If this happens, I do that." Your action technically becomes a reaction, but Ready covers most basic actions.

Shoving a Creature, on p. 195 of the PHB says that you can take a special attack to shove or trip a character who is "within your reach." Success means you can push them 5' away from you or knock them prone. Since this maneuver is an attack and doesn't say the attack is unarmed, it's safe to say that you're using your weapon and that weapon's reach extends your range for shoving.

Take a moment to consider the implications of using that "shove" with a whip. Cool, yeah?

Now imagine a combat situation. You're the only one standing between your party of squishy ranged attackers and a Bugbear ready to attack. If the Bugbear gets past you, it'll be hard to defend your allies. Do you step forward and attack? I wouldn't.

"I'm going to ready my action. If that Bugbear steps into my reach, I'm shoving with the intent to knock him prone."

Cool, right? Well hold on, because I can do you one better.

Opportunity attacks can't normally be used to make grapple or shove attacks, since the rules for grapple and shove specifically say that you need to use your Attack Action and Opportunity says you just get to make a melee attack on your reaction. It's much more limited than Ready actions, and it should be.

But...

If you're playing a Fighter who takes Battle Master at 3rd level, you can learn the Pushing Attack maneuver. Pushing Attack says that when you hit a creature with a weapon attack, you may spend a superiority die (you'll have 4 of those at 3rd level) to attempt to drive the target back up to 15' foot away!

Now, note that Pushing Attack does not require that the attack be part of an Attack Action. It can be part of a bonus action or even part of an attack of opportunity. The major limiting factor is how many times you can make a Pushing Attack before taking a long rest (once again, 4 times at level 3).

Finally, let's take a look at the feat of Polearm Master. With this feat, when you take an Attack action to attack with your polearm, you can take a bonus action to make a melee attack with the blunt end of the weapon. Also, when you're wielding your polearm, other creatures provoke attacks of opportunity when they enter your reach with that weapon.

Are your fingers tented with anticipation? Because mine are!

Okay, so I'm going to make a Human Fighter. At first level, I'm going to take Polearm Master as a Feat. At third level I choose Battle Master as my Archetype and pick Pushing Attack as one of my three maneuvers. Whenever an enemy moves into my range that I don't want near the back line, I'll throw them back with my pushing attack. If that fails and my opponent is foolish enough to end their movement in my reach (remembering that it takes a full 30' of movement to cross my threatened space), then I'll likely make a Shove attack with the intent to knock them prone. 

It may not be a game-breaking power combo, but I sure as heck will talk like I own that 25'x25' space I'm standing in.

Intro to Fantasy Grounds

Play across a virtual table top? No thanks. I think the personal interactions we share across the table in person are way too important to my enjoyment of the game. Also, every program I've seen strikes me as lame and clunky. I don't need the table (virtual or not) to make the game any harder to play. In fact, Lisa and I tried playing D&D with someone across the internet once and it was incredibly lame.

It's not verbatim, but that's about what I had to say when Mark asked me if I'd consider playing an RPG with him over a virtual table top. It was last year some time, and I was still living in Mebane, but my move to Fayetteville was on the horizon. We hadn't played anything in person since early December the year before and didn't have any plans to play anything before my move. Our RPG time was fading and wasn't likely to restore itself; the victim of another friendship becoming long-distance.

Fast forward to March of this year. I find an article on Kotaku (which I can't seem to find now) that's initially about 5th edition D&D but quickly spins into a review about a virtual table top called Fantasy Grounds. While I'm sure the article went into quite a bit more detail, I remember exactly two things I took from it: Fantasy Grounds could automate all the grindy parts of D&D combat and it was available on Steam.

I was immediately enthralled. I jumped into forums, Steam reviews, and YouTube posts about Fantasy Grounds looking for the one bad review which would turn me off of the software. When I didn't find that after a few hours of searching I contacted Mark to see if he was still up for a game. He was.

After I proved to myself that I had more than a few adventures in me and we had a crew of potential players together, we discovered the first (and possibly largest) downside to Fantasy Grounds - it isn't cheap.

The licence for the tabletop software is $40 per player or the GM can invest in a $150 licence that will allow him or her to connect to an unlimited number of trial users. On top of that is the cost of the license for the game you want to play. The license for D&D 3.5 and D&D 4 are included, as are a few other systems like Fate and CoreRPG. But I wanted to run 5E. That's another $50 per book - $50 for the PHB,  $50 for the DMG, and $50 for the MM. It's important to note that buying the book licenses for 5E aren't technically necessary to play 5E via Fantasy Grounds. The mechanisms and SRD are already included. Buying those three licenses just cuts down on the typing you're going to have to do. I invested in the PHB license to ease character creation, so my total investment came to $130 - a copy of FG for me and one for Lisa, plus the PHB. If you add in what the other players paid for their software our grand total came to $290.

How are you feeling? Hot flashes? The vapors? I know; it is pricey. But hang tight and I'll tell you about how it's been totally worth it.

How long does it normally take a new D&D group to make their characters? I mean, I generally assume our first session will go long and we might have all the characters made by the end of it. Between sharing the books around, looking up stats for weapons, armor, and spells, and copying all the information you need to your character sheet - not to mention the time it takes to just make the decisions a player needs to make to create their character - making a group of new characters takes forever.

That's where Fantasy Grounds got its first chance to impress me. You want to be a Tiefling Thief? Open a fresh character sheet, drag Tiefling onto it then drag Thief onto it. Then go over it and review for accuracy. It's not a perfect system, but I'd estimate that 80-90% of the things you need recorded on your sheet have just been recorded for you, including little automatons like popup windows asking which class skills you'd like to take. The same thing went for gear and spells. Drag magic missile onto your character sheet and all the information you need appears.

Everyone did their characters separately, because I wanted to avoid wasting a day that everyone could show up at the same time, but I'd estimate that I spent less than four or five hours total walking folks through the process.

Wait... how is that faster than usual?

Well, because almost all my players made their characters in different sessions. I had three experienced D&D players make their characters in less than an hour each. I also had two players who had never played any form of tabletop game make their characters together in about two or three hours. Naturally, we spent a lot of time chatting about what each of their decisions meant and would mean as the game rolled out. Had everyone been online at the same time, I'm fairly confident that we still would have wrapped up in less than four hours. The experienced players would have had their characters all done in the first hour and then would have spent the rest of the session helping out the newbies.

I'm very confident that a player who is experienced in the game they're playing and the Fantasy Grounds interface (yeah, there's a bit of learning curve there) can get a new or low-level character created in no more than ten or fifteen minutes.

This is getting a bit longer than what I normally like to post, so I'm going to wrap it up now. Sometime later this week I'll tell you about how much I love tokens and maps and combat in Fantasy Grounds.

Crafting and the Potion of Healing

According to the description of the herbalism kit on p. 154 of the PHB, proficiency with that kit is required in crafting potions of healing. Since more than half of my player characters have that proficiency, I figured I'd better learn all about crafting potions before my players got around to asking me if they could do it.

First, I found the crafting rules on p. 187 of the PHB, under Downtime Activities. These rules state that you can craft 5 gp worth of non-magical product per day at a cost of 2.5 gp in raw materials. Okay. That's cool, but it's for non-magical items. Since a potion of healing is clearly a magical item, I'd better keep looking.

In the DMG on p. 129 there are rules for crafting magic items. Cool. According to these rules, since a potion of healing is a common crafting item, it requires a 3rd level character and 100 gp to produce one. It also says on p. 135 of the DMG that consumables are generally half the value of non-consumables. Okay, so 3rd level and 50 gp to produce a potion of healing?

But wait...

In the PHB, the price of buying a potion of healing is 50 gp.

Unless our heroes are in a situation where they couldn't possibly buy a potion off the shelf, why would they consider spending 50 gp to wait two days for their own potions to brew. Are NPC vendors selling potions at cost? And am I really going to make my players wait for 3rd level to make use of their cool-ass herbalism kits?

Screw that.

House Rule: Potions of healing are to be treated as non-magical items for crafting purposes. If you are proficient in the herbalism kit you may craft a single potion for 25 gp worth of herbs. This process takes 10 days. Multiple characters may team up to craft the potion faster if each of them is proficient with the herbalism kit.

For now this house rule will only apply to the common potion of healing.  We will revisit the topic at a later time to discuss the higher level healing potions.

What good is Medicine?

Medicine is one of those skills that doesn't seem to have a lot of use when you first look at it. Why take it? Why not invest in another skill with more clearly defined uses?

According to the PHB pp. 178:

Medicine. A Wisdom (Medicine) check lets you try to stabilize a dying companion or diagnose an illness.

That's only two things! And the first one can be accomplished in dozens of better ways, most of which involve giving the dying character at least one hit point. You can also buy a Healer's Kit for 5 gp and stabilize a character without the need to make a roll.

So that leaves diagnosing an illness. Let's think about that for a minute. Restoring someone's hit points does not remove a disease. You would need medicine to diagnose the disease and then an herbalism kit to concoct a remedy. So how often might a hero become diseased?

I found seven creatures in the Monsters' Manual that have attacks which my disease the heroes. I also found a segment in the Dungeon Masters' Guide all about adding diseases as plot elements, including the statistics for three sample diseases.

That's pretty cool stuff.

But what if I, as the DM, don't ever include monsters that carry diseases or plots about diseases? What then?

You can still use medicine to earn gold and inform the flavor of your character.

DM: So, you guys just rolled into town. What do you do first?
Thirsty Character: I find the tavern.
Greedy Character: I find a place to fence those gems we stole.
Medical Character: I'm going to go door to door offering my services as a healer. I'm specifically looking for folks who are down with a fever or other illness that need my help.
DM: Cool. Are you charging for your services?
Medical Character: Maybe...

Do that kind of thing often enough and two really cool things will happen. The first is that everyone will get a really solid idea about what kind of hero your character is (which is completely awesome). The second thing is that I will get the idea that you'd like to see an adventure that includes a supernatural disease.

Item of the Day: Healer's Kit

For 5 gp, a Healer's Kit can stabilize a dying character without a skill roll.

Healer's Kit. This kit is a leather pouch containing bandages, salves, and splints. The kit has ten uses. As an action, you can expend one use of the kit to stabilize a creature that has 0 hit points, without needing to make a Wisdom (Medicine) check.

That's pretty handy!

Of course, now I'm wondering what use the Medicine skill really has. I'll dig into that question and get back to you.