You could lead with “We almost TPK’d last session” instead.
But we didn’t, we lived to finish the AP. I would like to share a dicey story from my Sunday 5e Tomb of Annihilation game. My party of 6 lvl 4 players encountered a stone golem on a bridge with a 100 foot drop. The golem proceeded to knock our weird rogue player and my druid (the main healer of the group) off the bridge to our deaths. The rogue was knocked off first and came within 3 hp of instant perma death. Then proceeded to fail two death saving throws. I was knocked off and downed instantly, crit failed on my first death save to make it an instant 2nd fail. The party was trying to climbing down a rope to get to us. The DM used our NPC guide’s affiliation with jungle fairies to give the rogue a moment of hail mary and another player jumped off the bridge, barely survived the fall thanks to bonus temp hp and managed to get me up before I ended up maybe failing the last save throw. It was a tense encounter, I was getting ready to roll another character after I got pushed off the bridge and crit failed the first save throw. But we all lived…barely.
Unfortunately for both the characters that got pushed off, neither have access to Feather Fall. I was preparing to Wild Shape into a Giant Spider and climb down the side of the bridge, but my turn was after the Stone Golem’s turn so I got the express trip of the bridge.
Ooooo if we get another person playing a healer I feel like my Goblin Alchemist firebug becomes viable again! But I won’t do that to the poor GM and I’ll stick with druid.
Also, the my Tomb of Annihilation game is getting tense as far as the party situation. The rogue player is playing the overly quirky, irritating asshat character and he is (probably unknowingly) headed towards a confrontation with my Firbolg Druid. This player likes to do things such as using his Arcane Trickster Mage Hand to slap people in the face and place the blame for situations misguidedly on others when it is his at least partially his own fault half the time, the kind of player who has such a low Constitution score as to have a negative modifier to Constitution and ho related things and yet refers to this as a “ballsy move” rather than just poor character building. The DM is awfully patient putting up with this player character, but the character at the very least is headed towards a face off with my Firbolg Druid who I can best describe as “gentle when stroked, fierce when provoked.” Should be fun if it the situation boils over.
Greetings Programs! Looking forward to the first session.
So far I have a Half-Elf Cleric Acolyte . I’m looking into the Warpriest doctrine, but could go with the Cloistered build if the group would like/needs a more focused healer.
queue @Cortillaen The master of giving Pros and cons when questions about builds come up!!! He has helped me immensely with my characters. Oh if you have an andriod smartphone I definitely recommend Pathbuilder2 Second edition to enhance anything he tells you.
Have you decided on a deity? That will have an impact on just about every other aspect of your Cleric. Some have some nice domain spells, some gives you access to some extra spells not on the Divine list that may be to your liking, and they can give you proficiency in a specific weapon.
As for Warpriest vs Cloistered, it’s not quite as straightforward as it seems at higher levels, but it’s pretty simple for this adventure: Better weapon proficiency and very slightly better AC, or better spell attack bonus and spell DCs. Neither option actually gives you any more spellcasting, just better bonuses primarily to offensive spells. So a Warpriest can heal just as well as a Cloistered Cleric.
Also worth noting is that the difference between Unarmored, Light armor, and Medium armor is purely how much DEX you need and the STR needed to avoid the check and speed penalties. All three options have the exact same AC limit. 20 DEX unarmored, 16 or 18 DEX (depending on the armor) in Light Armor, or 12 or 14 DEX (depending) in Medium armor all give you the same AC in the end. So a Cloistered Cleric is probably only going to be 1 AC behind a Warpriest, and even that goes away much later. Or you could do Cloistered and take a Champion Dedication to get Heavy armor proficiency, not need DEX at all, and end up with 1 higher AC than the other options (though then you need to spend another class feat later on to get Expert in Heavy armor).
In the end, if you want to do melee stuff, feel free to go Warpriest. On the flipside, this is probably a good adventure for a caster Cleric to get some mileage from their few attack spells.
Also, Your Divine Font (heal or Harm) gets a number of charges equal to 1 plus your Charisma Bonus. So CHR is an important stat to get higher. For example, Rockie my Cloistered cleric in the previous campaign has a CHR of 16. So his goddess only allows him to have the healing font which with that +3 CHR modifier gives him 4 Heal spells that do not require me to spend spell slots. You can only get up to 3 spell slots per level for your lower level spell levels. And you have to pick those spells for the day, it is not a situation where you can just say I am casting a heal using this spell slot on the fly.
Thanks for the advice guys, a few things for me to factor into the build…I’m starting to get the hang of the various feat’s and skills. The PathBuilder has been really handy, but doesn’t include the Half-Elf (go figure). oh well, It’s helping to get me closer to how many options and what choices are out there. I’m sure I’ll have some questions on Thursday.
@Cortillaen - I’m thinking of a “wandering cleric” traveling light type, so the heavy armor seems opposed to that. the Diety is “Irez” with the heal font. The trust in the future (luck domain) concept again seems to lend itself to the errant nature of his journeys pursuing the discovery of new languages, scrolls, runes and such. It also opens up the Archana book. The focus will be the heal aspect, but also be able to defend/support to some extent if things get dire.
Like what Rando said, half-elf (along with half-orc) are sub heritages of the Human ancestry. So would would choose Human as your ancestry and then specify the half-elf sub heritage.
EDIT Forgot to mention, picking half-elf will give you access to all the human ancestry feats as well as some ancestry feats unique to half-elves.
Sesh Zero, yep. Character creation, getting spells/effects setup, asking questions, talking about builds, talking about party composition, basic adventure background. Y’all will literally have no ground to stand on as I haven’t imported any maps into FGU yet. There isn’t any tokens for NPCs/monsters either. In fact there’s no story content pasted into FGU yet either!
[Edit] I downloaded the latest for the extensions we were using including the SR drag 'n drop spell thingie, and it’s um… behaving badly in FGU. There’s a real noticeable slowdown in performance if you have the spell list from that extension open, and that spell list doesn’t have a whole heck of a lot of useful pre-made stuff on it anyway.
So I figured out how to kludge in ghost touch. We can add the “epic” damage type to the weapons and then I’ll manually add a weakness to “epic” on the appropriate creatures (incorporeal).
Disrupting is going to mean having to add some effects shenanigans to the character sheet.
