"Can the characters find a way to travel back in time and prevent the apocalypse? What information would they need to discover to make it possible? Are there other creatures about with the knowledge but lacking either the ability or resources to attempt it?" "Is there something that can be done to restore the monsters to sanity and restore some balance to the world?" - This would allow humanoids to begin to reestablish some sort of society and civilization. In your example, an apocalypse caused the monsters to go "insane" and attack everyone else. Survival can be a useful subplot to put pressure on the player/characters to achieve their goals quickly to minimize risks and increase chances of success but it usually won't sustain a game. At the end of the session, the players don't discuss the cool achievements they might have, they discuss, "Well we survived again, I wonder what comes next? More 'survival'?" oooh so dangerous" but I have to ask, unless you actually want to have the possibility of killing the party off with these encounters then are they REALLY dangerous? Or do they just take up time?Īlso, you mention it is a survival D&D game in a post apocalyptic world, but it is important to realize that survival by itself will not be a long term motivation for the players to keep playing. The DM may feel that having the random encounters makes the world feel "scary. I'd also add, that as you have discovered, traveling cross country with multiple random encounters is BORING, time consuming, not fun and will usually kill the enjoyment for most if not all of the players eventually since random encounters typically serve NO purpose. You can make the evaluation more or less complex, ranging from auto-success, one skill check, chains of multiple skill checks, automatic failure, but it always comes down to evaluating whether the character was successful in the task they were attempting. If you don't want to use skill checks to evaluate the usage of character skills then what DO you want to use? To hit, skills and saves are the mechanics that D&D 5e makes available to the players and the DM for resolving situations where the outcome is uncertain. To echo one of the other posters, this is D&D 5e. Sorry for the longwinded answer, hope it helped. Remember that complications can arise beyond just "you fail", such as weather problems (comes into play with the survival aspect earlier) or maybe even it gets taken over if the players leave it for adventures, which starts a whole new story arc. Using ability checks is useful, but dont overdo it or else it becomes a snooze fest of rolling dice. They generally tell you that they need to aquire materials (which includes going to towns or villages and bartering with traders), for which the material cost may not be just gold, or the characters may not have enough gold, leading to more quests in order to recieve/find some. If not, then there are plenty of free supplements on the internet as well as videos on youtube. Thats another point: read through any class/race abilities that could be applicable to travel and make scenes for these abilities to come into play (rangers especially).Īs far as building is concerned, i believe that xanathars has some rules on it. It also opens up the possibility for unique spells or abilities, and helps the rangers feel special by being able to say "its my favoured terrain, we can pass through fine!". Remember that difficult terrain exists, and it could be that the players run into a patch of swampland that is ruled as difficult terrain: this means that they have to choose between going through it: but being slowed dramatically, or finding/planning a different route, or even going to somewhere else (if its a fetch quest and the item can be found in multiple places). E.g you know that ettercaps and spiders live in the forest, meaning if the players ever go through it then you can create an encounter with them, and make it meaningful to the story. This allows you to know what creatures will be in the area, and how you can create encounters. This doesn't have to be the whole kingdom, just the immediate area from the players. Monstrous Compendium Vol 3: Minecraft Creaturesįor the survival part, i would recommend having a solid plan for the area the characters are in.
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