Tag: character

dnd 5e – Can a Centaur character carry a size medium creature?

Carried? Yes, as cargo. As a mounted rider? No.

A reasonably strong Centaur should have no issue physically carrying a medium creature.1 With only a strength of 10, a centaur has a carrying capacity of 300 pounds, increasing by 30 pounds for each point added to their strength score. But being carried in this way does not confer the benefits of having mounted the centaur, which seems to be what is being asked, as evidenced by use of the word “rider”.

Eqiune Build specifies which things the centaur is considered large for:

You count as one size larger when determining your carrying capacity and the weight you can push or drag.

The rules for mounted combat say:

A willing creature that is at least one size larger than you and that has an appropriate anatomy can serve as a mount, using the following rules.

Since being mounted is not mentioned in Equine Build, you are still considered medium for the purposes of what size creature can mount you – small or smaller.

This is definitely rule-as-intended. In the Unearthed Arcana (.pdf link) version of the Centaur race, the Equine Build feature included the following text:

Finally, a Medium or smaller creature can ride on your equine back if you allow it. In such a situation, you continue to act independently, not as a controlled mount.

This portion of the feature was removed for the official release of the Centaur playable race in Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica.

1 Thanks to user SirTechSpec for pointing out this important distinction.

movement – How do I make my character attack on the side of the character that I click the LMB on (Unity)?

Unfortunately I can not provide you with a copy&paste code snippet, because too many details depend on how exactly you set up your project. So I can only give you a few pointers of what tools you have to use and how you might use them to solve your problem.

What you need to do is:

  1. Find the position of the mouse cursor on the screen.
  2. Convert it to a position in world space
  3. Calculate the directional vector between player position and cursor position in world space
  4. Use that directional vector for your projectiles

Step 1 is very simple. The Input.mousePosition property gives you the screen coordinates of the mouse cursor.

Step 2 depends on how you set up your camera. When your camera uses orthographic projection, your world is 2d and the camera is looking straight at it, then the z-coordinate does not matter. That means you can just use the Camera.main.ScreenToWorldPoint method. But when you are using a perspective camera, then it gets a bit more complicated, because the position in world-space depends on the distance between the camera and the object the player is pointing at. You need to perform a raycast from the camera through the mouse cursor. Thankfully, there is a handy utility method for calculating that ray: Camera.main.ScreenPointToRay(Input.mousePosition). You can then feed that ray into Physics.Raycast / Physics2D.Raycast to find the point the cursor is pointing at. Or when your game mechanics takes place on a 2D plane, you can store its definition in a Plane object and use the method plane.Raycast to find where the mouse-ray intersects that plane.

This, of course, all assumes that you have exactly one camera in your scene which is tagged as the “Main Camera”. When this is not the case, then you of course need to specify which camera you want to use to translate its perspective to the game world. So you have to substitute Camera.main with the respective Camera component.

Step 3 is again much more straight-forward:

Vector3 shootingDirection = (mouseCursorWorldPosition - player.transform.position).normalized

And in step 4, you just need to apply that shooting direction to the projectiles. Now there area again at least a dozen different ways to make a projectile move across the screen in Unity. About half of them start with rotating the projectile into the shooting direction. Which you can do by simply changing the transform.forward property:

projectile.transform.forward = shootingDirection;

The other half involve move the object by a vector, either directly by changing its position or indirectly by applying a velocity of force. But in any case, you need a vector which multiplies the direction vector by the desired speed/acceleration/force of the projectile:

projectileVector = shootingDirection * projectileSpeed

Can an incapacitated character still use Bonus actions?

The Incapacitated condition says:

An incapacitated creature can’t take actions or
reactions.

Can someone who is incapacitated still take bonus actions?

dnd 5e – Do Cantrips use your character level or class level?

While it never explicitly states this anywhere in basic or the PHB, it only states the level at which the cantrip increases in power. One of the design goals of 5e and one of the things it imported from 4e was that there should never be a time where a magic user is forced to resort to making a weapon attack that they are ill-suited for. Cantrips act like 4e’s At-Will spells and as such level with each “tier” in 5e to maintain their usefulness. Tying this to character level means that players who multiclass or for example start off with a free cantrip (such as High Elves) are still able to make use of those cantrips throughout the whole of the game.

A clarification was added to the Sage Advice Compendium.

Cantrips
If a character has levels in more than one class, do the character’s cantrips scale with character level or with the level in a spellcasting class?
Cantrips scale with character level. For example, a barbarian 2 / cleric 3 casts sacred flame as a 5th-level character. (Sage Advice Compendium V_2.0; page 11)

dnd 5e – If a character takes the (accurate) form of an aboleth, does the character gain their ancestral-genetic memories?

Via the spells true polymorph and shapechange, it is possible for any qualified recipient to gain a very accurate form of an aboleth. (A CR or level of 10+ is required to use true polymorph this way – though shapechange only requires one to cast the spell.)

The description of the aboleth in the Monster Manual (page 14) suggests that all of these creatures have an ancestral-genetic memory of every previous aboleth that ever existed. The description does not say this directly, but does state that they have ‘flawless memories’ and will ‘pass on their knowledge and experience from generation to generation’ – without stating how this is done.

Hence my question:

Does taking the form of an aboleth allow a character to gain their genetic memory?

If so, any wizard, bard or sorcerer with access to either of these two spells (or other similarly accurate shape-changing magic) could have rapid, accurate, and powerful research capacities.

gm techniques – What to do when a player character does something that seems suicidal?

In the current example text, Player 4 seems not to be warned by the GM nor his own common sense that this will result in a hostile reaction.

That aside, if the player is set upon his character suiciding, it’s best IMO to confirm their knowledge of the risk, then to let them, then ask why after session.

  • Sometimes, it’s a character that’s not what the player envisaged. Sometimes, especially in old-school games where the GM enforces “play what you rolled,” it’s a way to be rid of a bad character or a character that isn’t anything like what the player wanted.
  • Rarely, it’s a way for a player to drop out of a group and make it look like the GM’s fault.
  • In other cases, it’s poor descriptions resulting in not reacting appropriately.
  • In a few cases, it’s some secret the player kept about his character that he thought would be cool triggering stupid behavior.

When dumping a bad, undesired, inept, or boring character, the issue is one of expectations. In general, such players should not play in games where the rule is “play what you rolled.” Use of alternate generation methods was instituted in both D&D and T&T for that very reason; Champions, GURPS, and many others went to deterministic CGen methods so players could get what they wanted every time. Less litigious types might allow rolling two or three and picking one to appease such players, or even allow retiring them after some number of sessions or adventures, or even arrange a “good death” for them, and allow them to go out a hero.

The rare cases where it’s dislike of the game – either the system, the setting, or the campaign – it’s a way for a player to quit without looking like their quitting. And often, to save face by making it look like a GM being unfair. In even rarer cases, it’s a player putting the GM into the unfortunate double bind – either look like a jerk for not allowing the suicide, or for killing the PC over a misunderstanding of the situation.

Far more common in my experience is the player not having the same mental image of the situation and/or the odds. Inexperienced players and inexperienced GM’s are often causes for this – and the combination of both can be a comedy of errors. In dealing with this situation, one just needs to confirm that the player understands the risks.

In the case of Secrets, it’s a very common misconception that secrets are best kept in roleplaying games. There are two kinds of secrets a character can have – those the GM should know about, and those that everyone at the table should know about, even tho’ their characters don’t. Any secret that motivates your character should be something the GM is aware of. If it was a case of some motivation or backstory that the GM didn’t read because the player wrote 10 pages of it, get the player to write a one paragraph (of no more than 10 sentences of no more than one typed or two hand-written lines each) listing of the key motivations, including any relevant secrets.

In all these cases, communication failures are usually the root cause. Only in the rare case of the Jerk player trying to make the GM look bad is it not really a communication failure (and in that case, it’s a player error).

fate – Should I prohibit a player from having a character goal that makes me uncomfortable?

Me (Gamemaster) and a few friends are gearing up to start a FATE game set in a society inspired by ancient Greece, with a direct democratic political system.

One of my players wants to play a wealthy merchant transitioning into politics, and has outright mentioned wanting to use his wealth to buy votes/sway the system.

This sort of thing makes me really uncomfortable because of its effects in real life. I think having a player character pursue this sort of goal would lessen the fun for me as the game master, as it would serve as a constant reminder of the sort of stuff that goes on IRL. It’s the sort of thing I would consider an appropriate method for a villain, not a PC.

I don’t want to be the moral police and get in the way of him playing a character he enjoys, but I also want to have fun without grappling with this issue in my game.

Should I talk to him about it and encourage him to pursue alternative ways of achieving his character’s goals? I could just have it be really difficult to do in the game, because this society is partially setup this way because of people that have tried to do this in their history, but I honestly think this is an out of character issue, because it makes me as a person uncomfortable.

character creation – Are any of the kingdoms/realms of the Forgotten Realms based on real world civilisations?

Have designers/writers for D&D ever cited explicit real world corolaries (current or historical) for any of the civilizations or peoples of the Forgotten Realms?

I’m looking at building a new character for an upcoming campaign and I think it would help me to role play better if I can contextualize it as a citizen of a real country or region.

dnd 5e – Can an evil character cover their alignment?

Is there any way for an evil NPC to cover up their alignment if a player attempts to detect evil?

I am working on a Silver Dragon antagonist. This NPC will appear to the players as a number of human NPC’s setting tasks, missions, appearing as a friend. The dragon’s goal is to attempt to prevent an ancient doomsday prophecy coming to fruition. Each spell it learns will become branded to its scales in a series of runes which in human form will take the form of tattoos so over time the players may be able to work out these different humans are connected in some way.

The Dragon will determine the only way to stop this prophecy is to enact an ancient ritual involving it sacrificing itself to destroy all intelligent creatures with evil or chaotic alignment in all the planes of my world therefore becoming the very prophecy it was seeking to prevent. At first I thought the dragon would remain good as it believes its aims are good, but, I now see it will have to have its alignment shift as the campaign progresses and it becomes more convinced that mass genocide is the only way to save the world from lawful good at the start, to chaotic good and then chaotic evil.

Is there a current way for this dragon to hide its true alignment from any magical check or am I going to have to create a way for it to do this? Possibly one of the spells the party hunt out for it.

dnd 5e – Can players choose specific points in space, down to the inch, to cast a spell so as to avoid hitting a prone character?

Say there is a character that is prone, such as if they were unconscious, and they are surrounded on all 8 square grids (assuming that a grid is being used) by other creatures. Can a player cast a spell that has a sphere effect such as fireball or shatter such that only the 8 creatures surrounding the one that is prone be hit?

Would this potentially have any adverse effects with potentially breaking or having any unintended consequences for any other spells/effects down the line if this were allowed?

Obviously when it comes to casting some spells, the caster has the option to “choose a point in space”, but when playing with the understanding of a grid system that works in chunks of a given dimension does is it feasible to have spells cast in such a way so that a body lying prone won’t be affected by a spell cast just overhead?