Short background: three friends and I started playing DnD back in October, and have been running a session or two a month since then. The players are at level 4, and we started with the Dragon of Ice Spire peak and have added in our own side characters, motives and so on. The players will probably be ready to start tracking down the dragon in another 3-4 sessions once they hit level 6. We have (I think) a pretty well-rounded mix of combat, story-telling and exploring, and a pretty open story in terms of their ability to impact it and add their own elements. All is going pretty well.
Except how the heck do you make for stressful/challenging/tough moments outside of combat? Even at level 4 I feel like they have a great suite of powers to make sure that most environmental or economical challenges really don't matter. Between the three of them, they have Rope Trick for safe short rests, Good Berry for an Endless food supply, a (very generous reading of) Levitate to make it so they can slowly float over or up a lot of spikes/ravines/etc, as well as Detect Magic and now Identify to cut through a lot of mystery. Trapping them on top of a mountain was barely an inconvenience, as they were able to deal with the cold, barrenness and icy rivers all pretty handily. I guess I am having a hard time thinking of things that feel: 1. Appropriate to their level and the world around them, but also 2.threatening or mysterious in a way that isn't instantly solvable and 3. doesn't just create moments of "well your cool identify power fails on this object because I want it do for the plot", and I also don't want them to get bored using the same solutions time and again. Do you have some suggestions or out of the box thinking on how to create storytelling elements for the party that makes them struggle a bit but allows for fun solutions?
(I guess some of this could be solved by ramping up the number of encounters, but I think that the 5/6 per adventuring day seems like a ton, and is more combat than they'd prefer, and generally once they have a single good scrap they want to circle the wagons and heal up for the night.)
First up, Goodberry: Get this spell outta your game ASAP. It combines both being horribly overpowered with removing fun aspects of survival (which is detrimental to everyone, including the players). As you lose out the need for your players to ever go looking for food, ever again, and ensures that you can just burn 1st level spell slots out of combat to heal 10 hit points, which is way better than a first level Cure Wounds. You can do this just by making a ruling, you can do it in-game e.g. "The world-tree has been poisoned!" or you can nerf the spell slightly.
In my campaign, players can only benefit from a single Goodberry per day, and it only gives them enough sustenance for a single meal. On a low activity day, players need 2 meals, on an adventuring or travelling day they need 3.
By using Levitate, Rope Trick and the like, your players are burning precious resources. They're using Rope Trick exactly as it's intended to work, but you can still have some fun with them. What happens if during their short rest a tired giant decides to take a snooze right underneath their extradimensional space? If you want to make the use of those spells feel more important, then follow up quickly with combats, and make sure that they're having several Medium level encounters between long rests.
If players are coming up against terrain challenges outside of combat situations, then you may need to think about what you're trying to achieve. Let's say they come to a ravine. If they fall in it, they die, right? So they need a fairly safe way across..
How about throwing in some further conditions, such as making them shepherd a bunch of children through a swamp? If they have eight children to look after, it gets harder and harder to just magic your way through.
Goodberry basically eliminates survival as a gameplay focus, yes. One elegant fix that Zee Bashew recommended on his video about it was to houserule that Goodberry consumes its material components, i.e. the holly sprig(?) you need. So each cast of Goodberry becomes a precious resources, rather than just "Eh, I've got a first-level left at the end of the day. Lemme pop some Goodberries for tomorrow, then get the spell slot back".
Levitate: maybe be less generous with levitate. Heh, it's a fantastic spell, but unless the user has some means of maneuvering themselves, all it allows for is up and down. if the players use grappling hooks and such to haul themselves around while levitating, that's the sort of preparedness and utilization of resources a good DM is supposed to encourage. if they start getting complacent with Levitate? Nothing like a harpy attack to remind players of why the air doesn't belong to them. You don't even need to do that more'n maybe once or twice - the fact that an attack happened while they were vulnerable like that at all will be enough to make them consider their options carefully in the future.
There are also spells in the game that can disguise items/objects from divination magic. Nystul's Magic Aura, I believe it's called, or the Amulet of Proof from Detection or whatever the dumb thing is called. On top of entirely mundane traps or items - Detect Magic and Identify can't solve your party's problem for them if what they're searching for is a mundane journal in a house full of mechanical traps.
At 4th level, they may be low on the PC power scale, but they are head and shoulders above the vast majority of the people in the world. There’s nothing wrong with a situation that would be difficult for a normal person being trivial for them. And some of the problems you describe may not really be a big deal. If they have someone with goodberry, for example, that same person probably has a high enough survival skill that hunting/foraging for food is going to be a trivially easy roll anyway. So they’re swapping a spell slot for a skill check that they’ll most likely pass
Also, don’t let them circle the wagons after a fight. Throw in a wandering monster and they’ll start having second thoughts about how to spend their spell slots. You only need to do it once or twice, enough that they know it could happen at any time. PCs should never know when the next fight will happen, otherwise they’ll blow all their resources on their last fight of the day. Instead, you should decide what the last fight is, not them. Or put them on a timer — they have to get to town in a day or bad things happen, so they don’t have as much time to rest.
The other thing you can do is skip environmental challenges. They’ve proven they can navigate the wilderness fairly easily, so just hand wave that part. Say they get to wherever they’re going and hit them with the next bit of the campaign.
Throw some just really weird stuff at them. Maybe there's a door without a lock, maybe there's a riddle to solve. Maybe disguise your environmental hazards -- after all, pit traps work because you aren't supposed to notice the pit until the ground has vanished under your feet.
You can also play around with things that are more role play based. There's a mad old man wandering the woods -- is he an evil wizard, or just someone's grandfather? Or both? Maybe your players come across a family also stranded on top of that mountain -- only they're normal people, and slowly starving and freezing to death, unlike the adventurers.
The other thing to remember about environmental challenges is that you don't have to throw just one of them at the party. If you don't have a map, you can run into a lot of cliffs and ravines. If you don't want it to take forever, you can just use representative challenges. For example:
"You run into multiple cliffs, ravines, and similar challenges. Describe how you are going to cross them."
"We cast levitation and ..."
"Okay, that works. How many levitation spells are you willing to use up?"
"<4th level caster has 3 level 2 slots>. 2"
"You successfully cross a cliff and a ravine. You have traveled a mile. Your destination is still nine miles away. Describe how you're going to cross the next ravine."
Repeat until (a) they arrive, or (b) they propose a solution that does not involve consumable resources.
"The barbarian will climb and let a rope across".
"That will be a DC 15 athletics check for the barbarian, and DC 10 for everyone else. Roll once per mile to cover everything you run into. For each failure, suffer 2d6 damage."
After a few levels, the players aren't gonna be challenged by basic environment hazards. Seems like that's normal to me. They've got high-level wizards, why would they be challenged in crossing a forest or a ravine, or surviving on top of a mountain?
I'm not a fan of artificially making the players' spells useless. Seems like that would make the players feel like "powering up" is useless since the DM will just make their hard-earned spells pointless. The trick is to INCREASE the challenges that players face, instead of nerfing the players so that the same challenges still work.
My guess is at that level, the best challenges start to be ones that are deliberately placed by an enemy. You can certainly make complex non-combat dungeon exploration. Once you allow "the enemy" to deliberately plan traps to hold off high-level wizards, and communicate to the party that the enemy is ready for wizard incursion, then you as DM can make challenges that preclude a direct spell solution without it seeming contrived.
If they’re using the same tricks over and over agin, this shouldn’t be too hard. You say they keep short resting in Rope Trick’s pocket dimension? Make the area they’ll fall back into when the spell ends as dangerous as before the rest. A pack of wolves has caught their scent and is sniffing around the area looking for where they went. On the other hand, maybe remind them how much is still going on around them while they check out. They can see Cryovain fly over their area in the direction of where they’re going. He swoops down, grabs a claw full of people/animals/whatever, and blasts it with ice on the way out. Maybe he just took a key NPC. Maybe they could have fought him outside of his stronghold. ||(Players assume dragons get lair actions, which Cryovain does not)|| Maybe he took what could have been valuable loot. If only they hadn’t been resting, they would have beat him to it. He really could take it and make some actual treasure worth finding at the Hold.
You can also make travel involve non-combat, not environmental, encounters. Put people in their path that have intel they might want. Or goods to trade for. Or make the challenge helping them navigate the environment. “Oh, no. Their wagon has a wheel stuck in a 1ft deep hole in the road.” They might try to burn a levitate to help them. Except maybe these are more the ***** type. Better insight check these poor folks. Otherwise you may find your packs a little lighter when they get on their way.
Put a wild magic zone on their path. Maybe around a clearly magical tree. Then when they use detect magic, a surge triggers. There could be an old druid nearby who comes in response to the surge caused by his tree, and could either explain it, or defend it if necessary. Maybe in addition to the surge, a tree near them awakens and attacks if some condition is not met. —Ooh! The tree prefers to drink potions instead of water. Even a basic healing potion poured at its roots will cause it to deactivate its awakened defenders. Maybe the reward for befriending the tree is some twigs or sticks from the tree which make for good spell focus wands, or other spell components.
It’s a bit of homebrew, and takes you outside the adventure guide for this story, but if you’re having trouble making travel interesting, maybe that’s what it takes.
First up, Goodberry: Get this spell outta your game ASAP. It combines both being horribly overpowered with removing fun aspects of survival (which is detrimental to everyone, including the players). As you lose out the need for your players to ever go looking for food, ever again, and ensures that you can just burn 1st level spell slots out of combat to heal 10 hit points, which is way better than a first level Cure Wounds. You can do this just by making a ruling, you can do it in-game e.g. "The world-tree has been poisoned!" or you can nerf the spell slightly.
In my campaign, players can only benefit from a single Goodberry per day, and it only gives them enough sustenance for a single meal. On a low activity day, players need 2 meals, on an adventuring or travelling day they need 3.
By using Levitate, Rope Trick and the like, your players are burning precious resources. They're using Rope Trick exactly as it's intended to work, but you can still have some fun with them. What happens if during their short rest a tired giant decides to take a snooze right underneath their extradimensional space? If you want to make the use of those spells feel more important, then follow up quickly with combats, and make sure that they're having several Medium level encounters between long rests.
If players are coming up against terrain challenges outside of combat situations, then you may need to think about what you're trying to achieve. Let's say they come to a ravine. If they fall in it, they die, right? So they need a fairly safe way across..
How about throwing in some further conditions, such as making them shepherd a bunch of children through a swamp? If they have eight children to look after, it gets harder and harder to just magic your way through.
Would your players find it fun to forage for food and water? Roll d20 ... nope don't find any food today ... gain a level of exhaustion ... a week later ... oops sorry you starved lets roll new characters.
Do any of your players have create food and drink? Effectively does more than goodberry though with admittedly a higher cost but goodberry doesn't provide water just food (depending on how you read it).
If you want survival challenges then getting lost exploring can be more of an issue.
As for being cold on a mountaintop? What did the players use to deal with this? The number of spells which help with environmental challenges are pretty small and generally pretty niche. Creating fire can be fairly easy with any number of cantrips ... but the DM can rule that the fire doesn't keep going without fuel if they wish. Are you burning snow? Or is it just magical fire? Most of the cantrips appear to create normal fire by burning something.
Anyway, goodberry isn't really a problem in my experience. It can become a bit of a healing source/nuisance when leftover spell slots are converted to goodberries at the end of a day, especially if the character has a level of life cleric.
Anyway, goodberry isn't really a problem in my experience. It can become a bit of a healing source/nuisance when leftover spell slots are converted to goodberries at the end of a day, especially if the character has a level of life cleric.
Pretty sure there's no interaction there. Disciple of Life is triggered by 'use a spell of 1st level or higher to restore hit points', but casting goodberry does not restore hit points, and consuming a goodberry is not using a spell. I'd probably make goodberries expire at the end of a long rest, though, so you can't have saved up healing from the previous day.
Thanks so much for everyone who took the time to respond. Collectively, you all managed to answer more than I was even trying to ask, and realize that there were a lot of things I took for granted about how our campaign is running that you all solve in very different ways. Perils of this being my first game of DnD, I suppose.
I don’t think I will rein in their powers for now, just because it wasn’t something I did a good job establishing from the start and I don’t want it to feel like I exist only to take things away. If I want them to play more of a LoTR style fantasy game, and they all want to be super-heroes, well that’s something I can address before we start the next leg of our campaign. Now that I have a little bit of experience, I can set expectations beforehand if I want to focus on survival or back-country exploration.
Adding in complexity and variety of what they’re facing will help out a ton. They have some competent NPC friends right now, but I can see them meeting some important but incompetent folks in the near future. Stuff to make them less sneaky, more cumbersome, and too many mouths to feed them all good berries! I will also work on introducing some clever and organized enemies that are actively seeking to undermine them. Most of the combat and adventure has centered around either big monsters, or orc rabble, so I will work on playing up the planning and counter-measures of their new foes.
As a side note, is there a helpful breakdown of terms or “sub-categories” for styles of DnD play? I realized that what I am going for is a lower-magic but still “classic” fantasy feeling universe, but I am not sure how to look for content like that specifically.
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Short background: three friends and I started playing DnD back in October, and have been running a session or two a month since then. The players are at level 4, and we started with the Dragon of Ice Spire peak and have added in our own side characters, motives and so on. The players will probably be ready to start tracking down the dragon in another 3-4 sessions once they hit level 6. We have (I think) a pretty well-rounded mix of combat, story-telling and exploring, and a pretty open story in terms of their ability to impact it and add their own elements. All is going pretty well.
Except how the heck do you make for stressful/challenging/tough moments outside of combat? Even at level 4 I feel like they have a great suite of powers to make sure that most environmental or economical challenges really don't matter. Between the three of them, they have Rope Trick for safe short rests, Good Berry for an Endless food supply, a (very generous reading of) Levitate to make it so they can slowly float over or up a lot of spikes/ravines/etc, as well as Detect Magic and now Identify to cut through a lot of mystery. Trapping them on top of a mountain was barely an inconvenience, as they were able to deal with the cold, barrenness and icy rivers all pretty handily. I guess I am having a hard time thinking of things that feel: 1. Appropriate to their level and the world around them, but also 2.threatening or mysterious in a way that isn't instantly solvable and 3. doesn't just create moments of "well your cool identify power fails on this object because I want it do for the plot", and I also don't want them to get bored using the same solutions time and again. Do you have some suggestions or out of the box thinking on how to create storytelling elements for the party that makes them struggle a bit but allows for fun solutions?
(I guess some of this could be solved by ramping up the number of encounters, but I think that the 5/6 per adventuring day seems like a ton, and is more combat than they'd prefer, and generally once they have a single good scrap they want to circle the wagons and heal up for the night.)
First up, Goodberry: Get this spell outta your game ASAP. It combines both being horribly overpowered with removing fun aspects of survival (which is detrimental to everyone, including the players). As you lose out the need for your players to ever go looking for food, ever again, and ensures that you can just burn 1st level spell slots out of combat to heal 10 hit points, which is way better than a first level Cure Wounds. You can do this just by making a ruling, you can do it in-game e.g. "The world-tree has been poisoned!" or you can nerf the spell slightly.
In my campaign, players can only benefit from a single Goodberry per day, and it only gives them enough sustenance for a single meal. On a low activity day, players need 2 meals, on an adventuring or travelling day they need 3.
By using Levitate, Rope Trick and the like, your players are burning precious resources. They're using Rope Trick exactly as it's intended to work, but you can still have some fun with them. What happens if during their short rest a tired giant decides to take a snooze right underneath their extradimensional space? If you want to make the use of those spells feel more important, then follow up quickly with combats, and make sure that they're having several Medium level encounters between long rests.
If players are coming up against terrain challenges outside of combat situations, then you may need to think about what you're trying to achieve. Let's say they come to a ravine. If they fall in it, they die, right? So they need a fairly safe way across..
How about throwing in some further conditions, such as making them shepherd a bunch of children through a swamp? If they have eight children to look after, it gets harder and harder to just magic your way through.
Goodberry basically eliminates survival as a gameplay focus, yes. One elegant fix that Zee Bashew recommended on his video about it was to houserule that Goodberry consumes its material components, i.e. the holly sprig(?) you need. So each cast of Goodberry becomes a precious resources, rather than just "Eh, I've got a first-level left at the end of the day. Lemme pop some Goodberries for tomorrow, then get the spell slot back".
Levitate: maybe be less generous with levitate. Heh, it's a fantastic spell, but unless the user has some means of maneuvering themselves, all it allows for is up and down. if the players use grappling hooks and such to haul themselves around while levitating, that's the sort of preparedness and utilization of resources a good DM is supposed to encourage. if they start getting complacent with Levitate? Nothing like a harpy attack to remind players of why the air doesn't belong to them. You don't even need to do that more'n maybe once or twice - the fact that an attack happened while they were vulnerable like that at all will be enough to make them consider their options carefully in the future.
There are also spells in the game that can disguise items/objects from divination magic. Nystul's Magic Aura, I believe it's called, or the Amulet of Proof from Detection or whatever the dumb thing is called. On top of entirely mundane traps or items - Detect Magic and Identify can't solve your party's problem for them if what they're searching for is a mundane journal in a house full of mechanical traps.
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At 4th level, they may be low on the PC power scale, but they are head and shoulders above the vast majority of the people in the world. There’s nothing wrong with a situation that would be difficult for a normal person being trivial for them. And some of the problems you describe may not really be a big deal. If they have someone with goodberry, for example, that same person probably has a high enough survival skill that hunting/foraging for food is going to be a trivially easy roll anyway. So they’re swapping a spell slot for a skill check that they’ll most likely pass
Also, don’t let them circle the wagons after a fight. Throw in a wandering monster and they’ll start having second thoughts about how to spend their spell slots. You only need to do it once or twice, enough that they know it could happen at any time. PCs should never know when the next fight will happen, otherwise they’ll blow all their resources on their last fight of the day. Instead, you should decide what the last fight is, not them. Or put them on a timer — they have to get to town in a day or bad things happen, so they don’t have as much time to rest.
The other thing you can do is skip environmental challenges. They’ve proven they can navigate the wilderness fairly easily, so just hand wave that part. Say they get to wherever they’re going and hit them with the next bit of the campaign.
Throw some just really weird stuff at them. Maybe there's a door without a lock, maybe there's a riddle to solve. Maybe disguise your environmental hazards -- after all, pit traps work because you aren't supposed to notice the pit until the ground has vanished under your feet.
You can also play around with things that are more role play based. There's a mad old man wandering the woods -- is he an evil wizard, or just someone's grandfather? Or both? Maybe your players come across a family also stranded on top of that mountain -- only they're normal people, and slowly starving and freezing to death, unlike the adventurers.
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The other thing to remember about environmental challenges is that you don't have to throw just one of them at the party. If you don't have a map, you can run into a lot of cliffs and ravines. If you don't want it to take forever, you can just use representative challenges. For example:
"You run into multiple cliffs, ravines, and similar challenges. Describe how you are going to cross them."
"We cast levitation and ..."
"Okay, that works. How many levitation spells are you willing to use up?"
"<4th level caster has 3 level 2 slots>. 2"
"You successfully cross a cliff and a ravine. You have traveled a mile. Your destination is still nine miles away. Describe how you're going to cross the next ravine."
Repeat until (a) they arrive, or (b) they propose a solution that does not involve consumable resources.
"The barbarian will climb and let a rope across".
"That will be a DC 15 athletics check for the barbarian, and DC 10 for everyone else. Roll once per mile to cover everything you run into. For each failure, suffer 2d6 damage."
After a few levels, the players aren't gonna be challenged by basic environment hazards. Seems like that's normal to me. They've got high-level wizards, why would they be challenged in crossing a forest or a ravine, or surviving on top of a mountain?
I'm not a fan of artificially making the players' spells useless. Seems like that would make the players feel like "powering up" is useless since the DM will just make their hard-earned spells pointless. The trick is to INCREASE the challenges that players face, instead of nerfing the players so that the same challenges still work.
My guess is at that level, the best challenges start to be ones that are deliberately placed by an enemy. You can certainly make complex non-combat dungeon exploration. Once you allow "the enemy" to deliberately plan traps to hold off high-level wizards, and communicate to the party that the enemy is ready for wizard incursion, then you as DM can make challenges that preclude a direct spell solution without it seeming contrived.
If they’re using the same tricks over and over agin, this shouldn’t be too hard. You say they keep short resting in Rope Trick’s pocket dimension? Make the area they’ll fall back into when the spell ends as dangerous as before the rest. A pack of wolves has caught their scent and is sniffing around the area looking for where they went. On the other hand, maybe remind them how much is still going on around them while they check out. They can see Cryovain fly over their area in the direction of where they’re going. He swoops down, grabs a claw full of people/animals/whatever, and blasts it with ice on the way out. Maybe he just took a key NPC. Maybe they could have fought him outside of his stronghold. ||(Players assume dragons get lair actions, which Cryovain does not)|| Maybe he took what could have been valuable loot. If only they hadn’t been resting, they would have beat him to it. He really could take it and make some actual treasure worth finding at the Hold.
You can also make travel involve non-combat, not environmental, encounters. Put people in their path that have intel they might want. Or goods to trade for. Or make the challenge helping them navigate the environment. “Oh, no. Their wagon has a wheel stuck in a 1ft deep hole in the road.” They might try to burn a levitate to help them. Except maybe these are more the ***** type. Better insight check these poor folks. Otherwise you may find your packs a little lighter when they get on their way.
Put a wild magic zone on their path. Maybe around a clearly magical tree. Then when they use detect magic, a surge triggers. There could be an old druid nearby who comes in response to the surge caused by his tree, and could either explain it, or defend it if necessary. Maybe in addition to the surge, a tree near them awakens and attacks if some condition is not met. —Ooh! The tree prefers to drink potions instead of water. Even a basic healing potion poured at its roots will cause it to deactivate its awakened defenders. Maybe the reward for befriending the tree is some twigs or sticks from the tree which make for good spell focus wands, or other spell components.
It’s a bit of homebrew, and takes you outside the adventure guide for this story, but if you’re having trouble making travel interesting, maybe that’s what it takes.
Would your players find it fun to forage for food and water? Roll d20 ... nope don't find any food today ... gain a level of exhaustion ... a week later ... oops sorry you starved lets roll new characters.
Do any of your players have create food and drink? Effectively does more than goodberry though with admittedly a higher cost but goodberry doesn't provide water just food (depending on how you read it).
If you want survival challenges then getting lost exploring can be more of an issue.
As for being cold on a mountaintop? What did the players use to deal with this? The number of spells which help with environmental challenges are pretty small and generally pretty niche. Creating fire can be fairly easy with any number of cantrips ... but the DM can rule that the fire doesn't keep going without fuel if they wish. Are you burning snow? Or is it just magical fire? Most of the cantrips appear to create normal fire by burning something.
Anyway, goodberry isn't really a problem in my experience. It can become a bit of a healing source/nuisance when leftover spell slots are converted to goodberries at the end of a day, especially if the character has a level of life cleric.
Pretty sure there's no interaction there. Disciple of Life is triggered by 'use a spell of 1st level or higher to restore hit points', but casting goodberry does not restore hit points, and consuming a goodberry is not using a spell. I'd probably make goodberries expire at the end of a long rest, though, so you can't have saved up healing from the previous day.
Thanks so much for everyone who took the time to respond. Collectively, you all managed to answer more than I was even trying to ask, and realize that there were a lot of things I took for granted about how our campaign is running that you all solve in very different ways. Perils of this being my first game of DnD, I suppose.
I don’t think I will rein in their powers for now, just because it wasn’t something I did a good job establishing from the start and I don’t want it to feel like I exist only to take things away. If I want them to play more of a LoTR style fantasy game, and they all want to be super-heroes, well that’s something I can address before we start the next leg of our campaign. Now that I have a little bit of experience, I can set expectations beforehand if I want to focus on survival or back-country exploration.
Adding in complexity and variety of what they’re facing will help out a ton. They have some competent NPC friends right now, but I can see them meeting some important but incompetent folks in the near future. Stuff to make them less sneaky, more cumbersome, and too many mouths to feed them all good berries! I will also work on introducing some clever and organized enemies that are actively seeking to undermine them. Most of the combat and adventure has centered around either big monsters, or orc rabble, so I will work on playing up the planning and counter-measures of their new foes.
As a side note, is there a helpful breakdown of terms or “sub-categories” for styles of DnD play? I realized that what I am going for is a lower-magic but still “classic” fantasy feeling universe, but I am not sure how to look for content like that specifically.