Yeah, the story setup makes it seem like your mission is actually urgent, so I also only long rest when it’s absolutely necessary.

That will just turn the same dead commoners in that r=20’ sphere extra crispy. I don’t think there are any spells in 5e that increase their AoE when upcast and not the damage, duration, or number of targets.

(Either way, if the street is significantly narrower than 20’ then a lightning bolt is going to maximize the carnage.)

If it’s a common item with a listed price, and you’re in a city big enough to reasonably have that item in stock, just do your shopping “offline”. Sometimes I even include a low-level Forge cleric in small towns so the party could do their sub-100gp item shopping. (In that case the cleric charges an extra 10% donation for the Forgetemple, which they will use to feed orphans, create farming equipment, etc…)

If you want to set up a proper telegram system with D&D tech, Magic Mouth is a better choice. Let’s say you set them up onto poles that are spaced 30 feet apart, 4 magic mouths per pole. Say, the line is going east-west:

• Mouth 1: If it hears a “one” coming from the east, it says “one”.
• Mouth 2: If it hears a “zero” coming from the east, it says “zero”.
• Mouth 3 and 4: same but from the west.

Each pole costs 40 GP to set up, so this telegram is rather expensive, costing 7040 gp per mile… but once it’s set up, it doesn’t sleep, doesn’t need payment, doesn’t need maintenance, just two people on each end with a binary code table. You could say that these are skilled hirelings, working in 3 shifts that means that the upkeep of both ends of a line is 12 gp per day.

Peasants shouting the message… well, to make it absolutely sure that the message is heard, you need to put a messaging post every 100 feet. (Loud noises are audible at 2d6×50 feet per the DM screen.) If they are working in 3 shifts, that’s 6 sp per day per post, making the upkeep of the line ~32 gp per mile. Thus the magic mouth setup would become cheaper after only 220 days.

Monodrones are probably much more reliable for that. Or you can straight-up use monodrones to set up a proper Clacks system.

If we’re about to simulate physics, the wooden stick would turn into an expanding cloud of plasma about halfway through the “railgun” anyway.

Evil DM: the bookcase is also a mimic.

A recurring villain was introduced on the first session. She was a human pirate captain with very pale skin. One of my players immediately thought that she was a vampire.

…

So she is a dhamphir now. (Couldn’t make her a full vampire, they met her in daylight.) Not like it gave her much of a boost except for a climbing speed and spider climb anyway.

Plan 1: Raulothim’s Psychic Lance. By the time I get to take that spell, I must have had at least one ASI so I’ll just take metamagic adept for subtle spell. I just have to know the name of the target and be within 120 feet of them (240 if the second metamagic option I take is distant spell), and it’s pretty close to a guaranteed kill vs. a commoner, no murder weapon, and nothing showing that I was there.

Plan 2: Clone. Claim that it’s some revolutionary stem cell rejuvenation therapy and sell it to the super-rich. (Though I might make it fail accidentally if it’s someone like Murdoch or Kissinger. Payment in advance, no guarantees, and I’ll do it on international waters.)

Magma mephit says hello.

Oh hey, that’s my dice. In game and in life.

That final element has this amazing interplay where you feel that you’re burning your humanity (or species neutral equivalent term) as you use magic, and your innate or monsterous side comes through, it was a really cool design and I’d love to see it taken even further with a subclass that also incorporated hitpoints into the flow somehow, meaning that you are a tank before you cast your spells, but literally burn out your life force as you do so, revealing the monster underneath. It could be really cool for a vampire or something else that has an interesting interplay with harm, healing and magic.

The Order of the Lycan blood hunter has a similar mechanic. Every blood hunter has abilities with a HP cost, but the lycan might also go berserk if they start the turn with less than half HP.

Whenever I have a problem, I chuck a fireball at it, and BOOM! I have a different problem.

TBF the only class that gets more than one extra attack is the fighter.

Now of course it would make sense to sum up the levels you have in classes that get multiattack, and if you have >=5, you get an extra attack. But since attack progression is far less regular than spell slot progression, getting something approaching regularity beyond that would be difficult.

Now if OneD&D wanted to boost martials and introduce some sort of a multiattack scaling across multiclassing, here is how that could work:

1. Introduce features called Special Attack and Signature Attack. (Simply because just stacking extra attacks in a way that gives a bunch of half-casters extra attack at level 5-6 would give full martials a ridiculous number of attacks per turn at higher levels.) Special Attack is an attack that deals double weapon damage (which stacks with crits), but other extra damage sources like smites don’t get doubled. Signature Attack is a Special Attack that can also force a save, either a STR save vs. being disarmed, a DEX save vs. being knocked prone, or a CON save vs. being dazed. You pick which one when you get the feature, and you can change it on level up.
2. Introduce an attack progression table which details how many regular and special attacks you get per warrior level. (IDK if Lemmy’s MD syntax allows tables in lists, so see the table below.)
3. Like for spell slots, some classes (fighter, barbarian, monk) count as whole classes, others (paladin, ranger, artificer) count as half, and some caster subclasses (bladesinger, swords bard, hexblade, etc…) count as third.

The table:

So:

• A level 12 single class fighter gets 1 normal, 1 special, and 1 signature attacks.
• So does a fighter 6 / barbarian 6.
• A level 12 paladin counts as a level 6 warrior so they get a normal and a special attack. (Also, in OneD&D the divine smite is a bonus action spell like every other smite, so the level 18 paladin can’t go too nuclear with 3 smites per turn.)
• A fighter 6 / paladin 6 counts as a level 9 warrior, 2 normal attacks and 1 special attack.

Of course this could be refined a bit further, e.g., instead of a generic “special attack” they could pick power attack (must be a strength-based attack), precise strike (must be a dexterity-based melee attack), or pinpoint shot (must be a dexterity-based ranged attack) and they could swap this one on level-ups too. But I think this should be a start.

Look, you spring a door mimic on them just once…

“As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero.”

Dunno. Arcane Tricksters tend to have a higher DEX modifier than INT (and then pick spells that don’t care about the spellcasting modifier), so they are better off with Booming Blade (if stealth is already off the table) or Green Flame Blade unless they run into something that is resistant or immune to nonmagical damage at levels 3-4 and don’t have magic weapons. Might work well with a maxed INT Arcane Trickster / Bladesinger build though.

Ah, yes, the good old days when the level 1 wizard became useless after the first two rounds of the day.

Yeah, he was a condescending sexist prick to the Kiyoshi warriors (initially), and while it did earn him some beatings, it didn’t get him a restraining order and he even got with Suki in the end. That’s high CHA alright.

A typical person not looking for the paladin, yes, they wouldn’t notice that person. (Passive perception.)

Guards who are actively looking for infiltrators? They might very well do that, especially if there are multiple guards. (Rolled perception checks.)

The basic setup will be quite simple: after ruining the country’s plans to set up proper anti-dragon defenses in the capital, he will land on top of the city hall and tell them that he is bored of random raids and now demands the respect and tribute that a dragon deserves. Namely, one million gold pieces and 20 of “their young” per month. First delivery expected in 15 days.

Diplomacy would be viable, if the party could somehow convince the country to give up a significant chunk of their GDP and 20 children per month. But I doubt they would do that.

After which, they will have those two weeks to cross the frozen northern wilderness (a hex crawl with 100 traversable tiles) and confront the dragon directly. There are a number of set encounters and locations on those hexes (the most notable is Clawhold, the only permanent settlement of the Tabaxi tribe who populate the north, and the 13 abandoned mountaintop fortresses that they might come back and clear out even after they take care of the dragon). The dragon himself is nesting in the far northeastern corner of this map (the party starts from the southwest, obviously) in a mountain named the Pillar of Lights.