Forbiddance ruined all of the prep work my players did for "Tammeraut's Fate" in Ghosts of Saltmarsh. They spent 7 days planning with each other on Discord, down to the heroic minutiae of the encounter, making sure to scrape every room of the hermitage for supplies. Everybody was very excited to play, and I was excited to see the execution of their plan. That day: I brought in a new player who wanted to play an undead-slaying cleric. Innocent enough, level 11 like everybody else in the group. The onslaught begins, and what does he do? He casts Forbiddance. 40,000 square feet of it. All of that preparation was rendered obsolete, and combat now became unimportant as the horde was being vaporized by radiant energy. For a while, I was tracking all the turns and damage. Probably for about an hour of game time. Then that started to drag on. So, at that point I made the decision to progress time and say that the encounter ended when the last zombie was vaporized. There was so much back and forth chatter and confusion during this time that (for the first time ever, we have been playing since September of last year) one of my players left the table completely frustrated. This entire experience caused a lot of animosity, and had I been thinking on my feet at the time, I would have just created an undead caster that dispelled the Forbiddance area. Then all hell broke loose. Several players thinking it was their fault and offering to leave due to too many players. One player seeing it as his fault for casting the spell and watching the session fall apart. One DM who in the 20/20 vision of hindsight should have acted accordingly. A table full of people completely disappointed and let down by a lot of preparation and excitement culminating an anti-climactic, absolutely awful, and stressful Christmas Day of a session.
My whole takeaway from this:
1. A lot of hard lessons learned. We're all still talking to each other today, and willing to work with each other toward the common goal of this wonderful thing known as D&D. 2. Less is more: I simply can not manage 8 people in Discord and Fantasy Grounds. 3. Maintain player agency at all costs.
I don't think that these modules are playtested as well as they could be. Tammeraut's Fate was written by Greg Vaughn for Dungeon 106 in 2004. Forbiddance is a 5e spell. One would think that after adapting it to the current edition that considerations would be made for the presence of magic that was not there in the original publication.
Ghosts of Saltmarsh is an excellent product, but this sort of oversight on the part of the publisher was a key component in the disruption of a relatively harmonious campaign.
So just to clarify, a PC ruined a battle by spending 10-20 in game minutes casting a spell that required a 1000gp material to be purchased before hand. To cover a 200×200 foot area full of enemies he had to be in, and didn't take damage to lose concentration?
The fact that he could spend 100 rounds at the bottom of a 300 feet deep pit casting that spell without losing concentration is probably on you.
And I assume you are talking about the wreck part of that adventure, because that is the part that has to do with undead after the hermitage.
Yeah, that sounds like a crappy experience. While Forbiddance is a powerful spell, this kind of anti-climactic result does not really serve anybody playing the game.
Not having played or run GoSMarsh myself, I can only say that I feel tweaking and adjusting officially published campaigns is a good practice ahead of every session. It's best that the DM feels like like they have some ownership of a campaign rather than just operating a narrative machine. This shift in thinking seems to help me think on my feet when I need to improvise something that the players do unexpectedly.
I think the biggest miss here, unfortunately, is that Forbiddance takes 10 minutes to cast. From the information you've provided here it looks like they cast this at the start of the battle-- But 10 minutes would take them 100 rounds to finish casting the spell, as a round of combat is 6 seconds. It's more a "prepatory" or "protective" spell, and has no real use in an active combat casting scenario without luring creatures towards an already prepared area. Unfortunately the player may have misread the spell in this scenario, which is too bad that it made the encounter anti-climatic!
Hopefully the next encounter will be even better than this one could have been, though. There's always a next one!
I was a player in the campaign and yeah it was a pretty big buzzkill after we spent time preparing with defenses and such. We even had the giant constrictor snakes and giant rats on our side for the fight thanks to my Firbolg Druid's abilities. Plus most of us weren't fresh for the fight with all our spell slots since we had to deal with the Perryton and then the sick survivors under the Hermitage. It was looking like it was going to be a very taxing battle... but we had prepared for it well. But sadly it went off the rails faster than you can believe.
I don't blame the DM or the new Player for what happened. It wasn't an optimal experience but it hopefully will be a learning one for everyone. As for the thing about the Cleric casting the spell during the battle, he didn't. He cast it before the battle so there was no 100 rounds required to get it off during the battle. A Undead Spellcaster to dispel the shield would have been a good choice, but I think the frustration levels were too high for that even to come to mind. Could have just as easily said they didn't have the required expensive components.
Might not be applicable in this circumstance, I’ve not played the module, but if my players rely too much on wards, magic huts and the like, I don’t have enemies wail away and/or get vaporised all night.
Could they have surrounded the area, and waited the day until the spell ended? Or do they vaporise at day break? Could they have spent the night setting traps, or are they mindless? Etc.
If the players don't discover the location and cause of the drowned dead before sunset, then the undead attack the hermitage. The implication is that the undead return to the sea during daylight.
I could have stepped outside of what the module said and just had the undead stand outside the bounds of the spell, waiting them out. But, would they have known that a ward was in place? Probably not, unless the god of whom they were thralls had told them. However: given that an evil god was at work here, I should have just had said god either dispel the ward or bring down some nasty curse. Live and learn.
I never let PCs use Forbiddance or Hallow on an area that they do not have control over. It has to be used to ward an area under their control.
Allowing players to walk to the front of an enemy stronghold and then pre-emptively nuke everything within 200 feet of the door is a garbage gameplay experience.
Additionally, imagine a scene where an enemy divine soul sorcerer approaches the Inn the players are sleeping in and then Subtle casts a monstrous form of Forbiddance that affects creatures from the prime material plane. The players wake up taking 5d10 necrotic damage per round with no clue at all what is happening. They run around trying to find out what is happening until dead.
I never let PCs use Forbiddance or Hallow on an area that they do not have control over. It has to be used to ward an area under their control.
I like this idea - particularly for the reasons you've mentioned. Players would cry foul if it happened to them, and it's just not a great time for anyone.
I'd still like to think of a way that players could cast this anyway though - but perhaps limit its effectiveness in areas not under their control. Perhaps its duration is decreased, or additional concentration checks have to be made each round an enemy is within the warded area.
I’m going to play Devil’s Advocate. That part of Ghosts of Saltmarsh is meant for four to six 9th level PC’s. 11th level is a pretty big bump up in power from 9th level. You should have bumped up the opponents they were facing because of that, although if I’d been in your shoes I would have done that by adding 1 HD to each of the opponents and the end result wouldn’t have changed. The only way I would have nerfed the spell is I’d have made it apply to the building only, not the surrounding grounds. But my tweaks would have still resulted in the same end result.
You probably should have ended that fight quickly and moved on to the next stage so no one had time to get too frustrated.
You know, the adventure could have gone awry because it was tested and balanced for level 9 characters who would not have access to the problem spell in question.
Just ran this myself, recently. Another thing to note, the Drowned Ones are intelligent undead, and they have one particular ability:
Bound Together, the ability to share each others observations, thoughts, etc when they are within a mile. They should have all been immediately aware of what was happening to any of their allies, and observations of anything happening to the zombie horde with them.
I would have also given them the ability to command the zombies that are with them, so that they don't waste their cannon fodder (who mill around until the Drowned Ones breach the doors anyway).
Very late to this thread, but the OP continually blaming the module itself is bizarre. As a couple people have pointed out, the adventure is designed for a party of 9th level PCs. 9th level PCs don't have access to Forbiddance. Second, as one commenter pointed out, they can share thoughts and observations with each other, and have enough INT/WIS/self-preservation to retreat and wait for a better time. Third, it takes ten minutes to cast, and the attack would be over by then, depending on how the DM runs it. And yet the OP refuses to or is unable to see where he/she went wrong.
In my experience, Tammeraut's Fate is one of the best-written 5e modules I've ever run. And I've run quite a few.
Very late to this thread, but the OP continually blaming the module itself is bizarre. As a couple people have pointed out, the adventure is designed for a party of 9th level PCs. 9th level PCs don't have access to Forbiddance. Second, as one commenter pointed out, they can share thoughts and observations with each other, and have enough INT/WIS/self-preservation to retreat and wait for a better time. Third, it takes ten minutes to cast, and the attack would be over by then, depending on how the DM runs it. And yet the OP refuses to or is unable to see where he/she went wrong.
In my experience, Tammeraut's Fate is one of the best-written 5e modules I've ever run. And I've run quite a few.
OP posted this 2 years ago, and before your comment, the last commenter was 1 year ago. Was there a purpose to this thread necromancy?
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Forbiddance ruined all of the prep work my players did for "Tammeraut's Fate" in Ghosts of Saltmarsh.
They spent 7 days planning with each other on Discord, down to the heroic minutiae of the encounter, making sure to scrape every room of the hermitage for supplies.
Everybody was very excited to play, and I was excited to see the execution of their plan.
That day: I brought in a new player who wanted to play an undead-slaying cleric. Innocent enough, level 11 like everybody else in the group.
The onslaught begins, and what does he do? He casts Forbiddance. 40,000 square feet of it.
All of that preparation was rendered obsolete, and combat now became unimportant as the horde was being vaporized by radiant energy.
For a while, I was tracking all the turns and damage. Probably for about an hour of game time. Then that started to drag on.
So, at that point I made the decision to progress time and say that the encounter ended when the last zombie was vaporized.
There was so much back and forth chatter and confusion during this time that (for the first time ever, we have been playing since September of last year) one of my players left the table completely frustrated. This entire experience caused a lot of animosity, and had I been thinking on my feet at the time, I would have just created an undead caster that dispelled the Forbiddance area. Then all hell broke loose.
Several players thinking it was their fault and offering to leave due to too many players.
One player seeing it as his fault for casting the spell and watching the session fall apart.
One DM who in the 20/20 vision of hindsight should have acted accordingly.
A table full of people completely disappointed and let down by a lot of preparation and excitement culminating an anti-climactic, absolutely awful, and stressful Christmas Day of a session.
My whole takeaway from this:
1. A lot of hard lessons learned. We're all still talking to each other today, and willing to work with each other toward the common goal of this wonderful thing known as D&D.
2. Less is more: I simply can not manage 8 people in Discord and Fantasy Grounds.
3. Maintain player agency at all costs.
I don't think that these modules are playtested as well as they could be. Tammeraut's Fate was written by Greg Vaughn for Dungeon 106 in 2004. Forbiddance is a 5e spell. One would think that after adapting it to the current edition that considerations would be made for the presence of magic that was not there in the original publication.
Ghosts of Saltmarsh is an excellent product, but this sort of oversight on the part of the publisher was a key component in the disruption of a relatively harmonious campaign.
So just to clarify, a PC ruined a battle by spending 10-20 in game minutes casting a spell that required a 1000gp material to be purchased before hand. To cover a 200×200 foot area full of enemies he had to be in, and didn't take damage to lose concentration?
The fact that he could spend 100 rounds at the bottom of a 300 feet deep pit casting that spell without losing concentration is probably on you.
And I assume you are talking about the wreck part of that adventure, because that is the part that has to do with undead after the hermitage.
Yeah, that sounds like a crappy experience. While Forbiddance is a powerful spell, this kind of anti-climactic result does not really serve anybody playing the game.
Not having played or run GoSMarsh myself, I can only say that I feel tweaking and adjusting officially published campaigns is a good practice ahead of every session. It's best that the DM feels like like they have some ownership of a campaign rather than just operating a narrative machine. This shift in thinking seems to help me think on my feet when I need to improvise something that the players do unexpectedly.
I think the biggest miss here, unfortunately, is that Forbiddance takes 10 minutes to cast. From the information you've provided here it looks like they cast this at the start of the battle-- But 10 minutes would take them 100 rounds to finish casting the spell, as a round of combat is 6 seconds. It's more a "prepatory" or "protective" spell, and has no real use in an active combat casting scenario without luring creatures towards an already prepared area. Unfortunately the player may have misread the spell in this scenario, which is too bad that it made the encounter anti-climatic!
Hopefully the next encounter will be even better than this one could have been, though. There's always a next one!
I was a player in the campaign and yeah it was a pretty big buzzkill after we spent time preparing with defenses and such. We even had the giant constrictor snakes and giant rats on our side for the fight thanks to my Firbolg Druid's abilities. Plus most of us weren't fresh for the fight with all our spell slots since we had to deal with the Perryton and then the sick survivors under the Hermitage. It was looking like it was going to be a very taxing battle... but we had prepared for it well. But sadly it went off the rails faster than you can believe.
I don't blame the DM or the new Player for what happened. It wasn't an optimal experience but it hopefully will be a learning one for everyone. As for the thing about the Cleric casting the spell during the battle, he didn't. He cast it before the battle so there was no 100 rounds required to get it off during the battle. A Undead Spellcaster to dispel the shield would have been a good choice, but I think the frustration levels were too high for that even to come to mind. Could have just as easily said they didn't have the required expensive components.
Also, to clarify:
This was the after-sunset onslaught by the undead on the hermitage, not the underwater section near the wreck.
The cleric used the preparatory hour before the sun set to cast the spell, and he did indeed have the necessary components.
Good discussion, and I really value everybody's input!
Yet another lesson learned:
Always have a backup plan.
Might not be applicable in this circumstance, I’ve not played the module, but if my players rely too much on wards, magic huts and the like, I don’t have enemies wail away and/or get vaporised all night.
Could they have surrounded the area, and waited the day until the spell ended? Or do they vaporise at day break? Could they have spent the night setting traps, or are they mindless? Etc.
Yet another flaw in the writing:
If the players don't discover the location and cause of the drowned dead before sunset, then the undead attack the hermitage.
The implication is that the undead return to the sea during daylight.
I could have stepped outside of what the module said and just had the undead stand outside the bounds of the spell, waiting them out.
But, would they have known that a ward was in place? Probably not, unless the god of whom they were thralls had told them.
However: given that an evil god was at work here, I should have just had said god either dispel the ward or bring down some nasty curse.
Live and learn.
I never let PCs use Forbiddance or Hallow on an area that they do not have control over. It has to be used to ward an area under their control.
Allowing players to walk to the front of an enemy stronghold and then pre-emptively nuke everything within 200 feet of the door is a garbage gameplay experience.
Additionally, imagine a scene where an enemy divine soul sorcerer approaches the Inn the players are sleeping in and then Subtle casts a monstrous form of Forbiddance that affects creatures from the prime material plane. The players wake up taking 5d10 necrotic damage per round with no clue at all what is happening. They run around trying to find out what is happening until dead.
Fun, right?
I like this idea - particularly for the reasons you've mentioned. Players would cry foul if it happened to them, and it's just not a great time for anyone.
I'd still like to think of a way that players could cast this anyway though - but perhaps limit its effectiveness in areas not under their control. Perhaps its duration is decreased, or additional concentration checks have to be made each round an enemy is within the warded area.
I’m going to play Devil’s Advocate. That part of Ghosts of Saltmarsh is meant for four to six 9th level PC’s. 11th level is a pretty big bump up in power from 9th level. You should have bumped up the opponents they were facing because of that, although if I’d been in your shoes I would have done that by adding 1 HD to each of the opponents and the end result wouldn’t have changed. The only way I would have nerfed the spell is I’d have made it apply to the building only, not the surrounding grounds. But my tweaks would have still resulted in the same end result.
You probably should have ended that fight quickly and moved on to the next stage so no one had time to get too frustrated.
Professional computer geek
You know, the adventure could have gone awry because it was tested and balanced for level 9 characters who would not have access to the problem spell in question.
[Edit]Ah, Tim found it before I did.
Just ran this myself, recently. Another thing to note, the Drowned Ones are intelligent undead, and they have one particular ability:
Bound Together, the ability to share each others observations, thoughts, etc when they are within a mile. They should have all been immediately aware of what was happening to any of their allies, and observations of anything happening to the zombie horde with them.
I would have also given them the ability to command the zombies that are with them, so that they don't waste their cannon fodder (who mill around until the Drowned Ones breach the doors anyway).
Very late to this thread, but the OP continually blaming the module itself is bizarre. As a couple people have pointed out, the adventure is designed for a party of 9th level PCs. 9th level PCs don't have access to Forbiddance. Second, as one commenter pointed out, they can share thoughts and observations with each other, and have enough INT/WIS/self-preservation to retreat and wait for a better time. Third, it takes ten minutes to cast, and the attack would be over by then, depending on how the DM runs it. And yet the OP refuses to or is unable to see where he/she went wrong.
In my experience, Tammeraut's Fate is one of the best-written 5e modules I've ever run. And I've run quite a few.
OP posted this 2 years ago, and before your comment, the last commenter was 1 year ago. Was there a purpose to this thread necromancy?