D&D 5E Converting Old Adventures

[Paul Farquhar]

People used to carry military oil so they'd at least have a source of fire damage.

True, but fire damage is trivially easy to come by anyway. That’s what I find anyway - they do that damage type anyway and don’t notice the strengths and weaknesses, or they don’t have/can’t figure out what the right damage is in the time available.

Then, back in 3rd edition it was a case of “my attacks hit so hard that I don’t care about damage reduction!”

The session before last I did have a creature that I simply wrote it that it could not be killed without a life stealing weapon. It ran off when reduced to zero hp. Then the party had to find a fortune teller to tell them how to kill it - who obviously needed a side quest completed. Not to mention having to acquire a life stealing weapon.

 

[Micah Sweet]

True, but fire damage is trivially easy to come by anyway. That’s what I find anyway - they do that damage type anyway and don’t notice the strengths and weaknesses, or they don’t have/can’t figure out what the right damage is in the time available.

Then, back in 3rd edition it was a case of “my attacks hit so hard that I don’t care about damage reduction!”

The session before last I did have a creature that I simply wrote it that it could not be killed without a life stealing weapon. It ran off when reduced to zero hp. Then the party had to find a fortune teller to tell them how to kill it - who obviously needed a side quest completed. Not to mention having to acquire a life stealing weapon.

That all sounds awesome to me, like an old-fashioned monster hunt. I miss that about D&D.

 

[Faolyn]

But will the fight last long enough for them to figure that out, and change tactics, or will it be a case of “that fireball only did half damage, but it’s nearly dead anyway so we might as well keep going”?

In Level Up, nearly all monsters have a Legends & Lore section. With a good enough Arcana or Nature or Religion roll, you get info about the creature--which would usually include details about "this monster is immune to X damage but vulnerable to Y damage." I know they had this in 3x and probably 4e D&D as well.

So just include this in 5e. Unless the monsters are ambushing and it's a surprise encounter, there should be plenty of time for one PC to use their action to make the roll.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

In Level Up, nearly all monsters have a Legends & Lore section. With a good enough Arcana or Nature or Religion roll, you get info about the creature--which would usually include details about "this monster is immune to X damage but vulnerable to Y damage." I know they had this in 3x and probably 4e D&D as well.

So just include this in 5e. Unless the monsters are ambushing and it's a surprise encounter, there should be plenty of time for one PC to use their action to make the roll.

Don’t like that sort of thing. Most of my monsters are custom. Their stats are not a matter of public record.

 

[Voadam]

In Level Up, nearly all monsters have a Legends & Lore section. With a good enough Arcana or Nature or Religion roll, you get info about the creature--which would usually include details about "this monster is immune to X damage but vulnerable to Y damage." I know they had this in 3x and probably 4e D&D as well.

So just include this in 5e. Unless the monsters are ambushing and it's a surprise encounter, there should be plenty of time for one PC to use their action to make the roll.

Sometimes that works fine, sometimes it is inappropriate.

Ravenloft for example has rules for customizing vulnerabilities for individual vampires and mummies and ghosts and werebeasts and constructs and such based on their individual curses and backstories and the point is often for these things to be discovered in investigations and not just known with a roll.

Sometimes the point of throwing in a purple ooze is that nobody but the DM who created them knows them and what works or does not work against them and so the players have the experience of going up against the unknown and try different things and get surprised when they accidentally hit them with damage types that do different things instead of damaging them.

Sometimes a mix is appropriate "It looks a bit like a black dragon but the color is more like a dark mauve and some of the features seem like a warped version of a black dragon. You know black dragons are generally immune to acid and spit acid."

 

[James Gasik]

True, but fire damage is trivially easy to come by anyway. That’s what I find anyway - they do that damage type anyway and don’t notice the strengths and weaknesses, or they don’t have/can’t figure out what the right damage is in the time available.

Then, back in 3rd edition it was a case of “my attacks hit so hard that I don’t care about damage reduction!”

The session before last I did have a creature that I simply wrote it that it could not be killed without a life stealing weapon. It ran off when reduced to zero hp. Then the party had to find a fortune teller to tell them how to kill it - who obviously needed a side quest completed. Not to mention having to acquire a life stealing weapon.

See now, in the game that just went on hiatus, I was the only party member who could do any fire damage- we had a Cleric, Ranger, Monk, and my Wizard as the core group, with occasional appearances from our Bard (and later Barbarian). So when we had to fight trolls, it was pretty rough (hence why I want fire arrows to be a thing) since all they could do otherwise was use torches as improvised weapons. And most of the fight, I was reduced to using Firebolt as opposed to any real spells, because I only had one Fireball I could use. So while it may be true that you can acquire fire damage easily in the system, you do have to build for it; depending on your party makeup, you can find yourself lacking.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Don’t like that sort of thing. Most of my monsters are custom. Their stats are not a matter of public record.

Like, in-universe? Within the setting the monsters are unique and never-before encountered? That's some interesting worldbuilding.

 

[Faolyn]

Sometimes that works fine, sometimes it is inappropriate.

Ravenloft for example has rules for customizing vulnerabilities for individual vampires and mummies and ghosts and werebeasts and constructs and such based on their individual curses and backstories and the point is often for these things to be discovered in investigations and not just known with a roll.

Sometimes the point of throwing in a purple ooze is that nobody but the DM who created them knows them and what works or does not work against them and so the players have the experience of going up against the unknown and try different things and get surprised when they accidentally hit them with damage types that do different things instead of damaging them.

Sometimes a mix is appropriate "It looks a bit like a black dragon but the color is more like a dark mauve and some of the features seem like a warped version of a black dragon. You know black dragons are generally immune to acid and spit acid."

Don’t like that sort of thing. Most of my monsters are custom. Their stats are not a matter of public record.

This though, is (most of the time) a fairly rare experience. It doesn't matter if the creature is homebrew or not because we're not talking about player knowledge. Unless you have the majority of your monsters as unique beings that have never been encountered before by anyone (who lived to tell the tale) somebody has encountered a purple ooze or mauve dragon before. Somebody may have even encountered that mauve dragon before.

If you've decided that that the adventure opens with portals dispensing, I dunno, vrocks or something, and nobody from that world has ever seen or heard of a vrock before, then it makes sense that an Arcana roll is going to come up with "you have no idea" most of the time and "otherworldly beings are often resistant to nonmagical weapons" on a really good roll, even though vrocks are in the MM. And in fact, a player, knowing their PC has never seen or heard of one of them before, says, "it's a demon, so of course it's resistant to cold, fire, and lightning damage, and to damage from nonmagical weapons" is guilty of metagaming.

But if you've decided that the Greygrass Hills are home to packs of vicious flurbles that frequently attack travelers, then people are going to darn well know that flurbles run away if hit with cold damage, even though they're personal homebrew.

 

[Faolyn]

This is exactly what they are. There isn’t a monster round every corner, that makes no sense. Most people in the world will never see a monster, probably don’t believe monsters exist.

You replied in the wrong thread, so I'm switching back to this one.

Sure. In a setting with almost no monsters, you'd have a case--although I find it hard to believe that there wouldn't be any scholars or other groups of adventurers, storytellers who go around telling tales of great heroes who fought terrible beasts, ancient tomes from a more knowledgeable time, or your setting's version of the Van Richten Guides, any of which would justify a PC getting to roll Arcana.

I mean, in my upcoming campaign setting, which is vaguely Victorian in level, probably most monsters have been driven to extinction, but there's still libraries and museums where you can find information about them. There's whole exhibits with stuffed manticores and harpies and other such creatures.

But you realize that in most D&D settings, monsters may be rare, but not so vanishingly rare that nobody believes in them. And in D&D's default setting concept, monsters aren't actually all that rare.

 

[James Gasik]

I suppose it's worth noting that I'm very transparent as a DM. I roll dice in the open, I tell players the AC of monsters before they make the attack roll, I give them indications of what their good saves might be, and once someone would encounter a resistance or immunity, I try to give them some indication of it's existence before they commit to an attack. Further, if it's a monster I feel they may have heard of, I don't mind giving them a die roll to have heard of it.

As an example of this in practice, I once had a Bard player try to Command a Gnoll. Now Command is language-dependent, and Gnolls only speak Gnoll. So I asked him to make an Intelligence check to realize that fact (I think I used History for this (knowledge of Gnolls), or it may have been Arcana (knowledge of how the spell works), it's been awhile). He fails, so I ask if he knows Gnoll. He doesn't, so the spell fails to work.

In this instance, I saw the mistake, and decided to see if the character was savvier than the player.

Sometimes, it's unavoidable that the players find things out the hard way. And that's fine, so long as it doesn't come up often. Another thing I need to point out is that I really don't think punishing players for a specialization is fun, so I rarely do it. If the Wizard Dark Schneider only knows spells that deal Fire or Lightning damage, I'm not going to have him run into a custom homebrew Purple Dragon that's immune to both elements without him seeing the thing coming a mile away. If a player wants to build around a theme, like Elsa the Ice Sorceress, I'll have a chat with the player about how likely it is for the campaign to veer into the northlands where ice resistance is common, and make sure they keep that in mind as they gain new spells.

One of the worst experiences I ever had in older D&D was the Ranger. The subject of choosing a Ranger's favored enemy was such a drag. I could only guess at how prevalent a monster type would be at game start, so I'd steer them towards common choices. And I'd always have to double check the monsters in an adventure to see if there was a chance for the Ranger to shine. More than once, I'd give the Ranger a chance to switch to a new favored foe, after a particularly harrowing encounter.

So yeah, if my attempts to make damage types more relevant in the game go south, believe me, I'll stop before it becomes problematic.