I'm getting ready to run Curse of Strahd for my group and I am considering doing an alterations to magic thing (like they did in Dungeon of the Mad Mage). I was thinking of doing something to radiant damage so it's not as deadly to the denizens of Barovia (taking away the vulnerability to it or making it to where the vampires are resistant to it-this would not pertain to the magic items in the campaign however). This thought came from the fact that I have a few mid maxers in the group and they are already talking about doing as much radiant damage as possible. What are your thoughts?
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‘A’OHE PU’U KI’EKI’E KE HO’A’O ‘IA E PI’I – (No cliff is so tall it cannot be climbed.)
Normally I wouldn't recommend doing something like that, but people who metagame based on knowing what the campaign is about sort of deserve it. There's already a decent amount of alterations to magic in CoS.
If it were me I wouldn’t do nothing to nerf radiant damage. If they want to be happy cheesing radiant damage I would let them. Instead I would just crank up the difficulty of the encounters to compensate. Every monster has maximum HP (or higher) instead of average, and I would up the monster count per encounter too whenever possible, stuff like that. Of course, I would pro for that regardless, so you might want to dial it up even more than that, but that’s entirely up to your discretion.
Don’t nerf radiant damage, but remove/change the damage vulnerabilities of enemies as you please (although try to keep some consistency there, e.g. all creatures of the same type have the same resistances/vulnerability).
Keep the vulnerability occasionally, so the players don’t feel they’ve been cheated.
I'm getting ready to run Curse of Strahd for my group and I am considering doing an alterations to magic thing (like they did in Dungeon of the Mad Mage). I was thinking of doing something to radiant damage so it's not as deadly to the denizens of Barovia (taking away the vulnerability to it or making it to where the vampires are resistant to it-this would not pertain to the magic items in the campaign however). This thought came from the fact that I have a few mid maxers in the group and they are already talking about doing as much radiant damage as possible. What are your thoughts?
‘A’OHE PU’U KI’EKI’E KE HO’A’O ‘IA E PI’I – (No cliff is so tall it cannot be climbed.)
Normally I wouldn't recommend doing something like that, but people who metagame based on knowing what the campaign is about sort of deserve it. There's already a decent amount of alterations to magic in CoS.
If it were me I wouldn’t do nothing to nerf radiant damage. If they want to be happy cheesing radiant damage I would let them. Instead I would just crank up the difficulty of the encounters to compensate. Every monster has maximum HP (or higher) instead of average, and I would up the monster count per encounter too whenever possible, stuff like that. Of course, I would pro for that regardless, so you might want to dial it up even more than that, but that’s entirely up to your discretion.
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Don’t nerf radiant damage, but remove/change the damage vulnerabilities of enemies as you please (although try to keep some consistency there, e.g. all creatures of the same type have the same resistances/vulnerability).
Keep the vulnerability occasionally, so the players don’t feel they’ve been cheated.
If you end up nerfing radiant damage, be sure to have the Dark Powers offer it... for a price.