ROLL INITIATIVE!!! | Bitterness and Dread | Exandria Unlimited: Calamity | Episode 2 (P5) [Reaction] 

Brennan is very good at subtly guiding players to where they need to be without it feeling like railroading. Matt always has several maps ready depending on where the party goes. Maps can also be made somewhat generic to fit many different scenes, so, depending on where the party goes, one map could be a bedroom, an study, a library, a storage room, etc. just by swapping out a couple pieces of furniture

Matt has said that he prepares multiple maps for each session because he never knows exactly what the party is going to do.

It's not insane to see the end of the world and to start freaking out. Then, anyone who tried to help them would see the end as well and start freaking out. The Oracles didn't go mad. They're being perfectly reasonable. The end IS coming. They saw it. Being calm at that point would be the thing that would make you crazy.

detect magic is a 1st level spell, most spell casters get in the game, which allows the caster to see magical essences, like on traps and glyphs, that gives the inclination of the schools of magic cast. but when used it doesn't give everything in terms of magic that was cast. like for example if seeing a glyph of warding a 3rd level spell, and casting detect magic one might see the schools of abjuration and or evocation magic, as its a glyph that might hold the power of a fireball.

I know we've all been harping on wizard hubris and the arrogance of mages being a hallmark of the Age of Arcanum and all that, but I do feel like I should point out that magic users even in this time period are not monolithic. The detail about Velucia renouncing magic is really fascinating to me. She sniffed out something fucked was going on, and although we don't know specifically what, we know that it caused her to conclude that Avalir was the crux of the issue and she gave up everything on the spot. Velucia was from the Ring of Gold, the second highest level of Avalir's hierarchy, to hold that station requires a huge amount of magical capability, never ending work and dedication. So to see someone that deep into the Arcane renounce her magic is huge for showing more nuance for the people of this age. In regards to the druids refusing to trust the mages, while that choice does make sense looking at most of the mages we've gotten to know in this story, I don't know if the druids treating the mages of Avalir as a monolith of blind greed is 100% accurate. We're seeing some of the most extreme cases here, not the whole picture. You can be a powerful wizard and still be sensible and considerate of others even at this time. The trouble comes in trying to find those good eggs amongst the rotten. Yes, greed runs high but I think it's equally as concerning that trust runs so low. The more you look at it though the more there is no "right" way to go about things; the Calamity just seems to become more and more inevitable.

Only the DM knows how many hit points the bad guy has. You can kinda guess a ballpark if you know about that kind of creature, but beyond that there's no way to know. That's where a lot of the suspense comes from. Jeremy Crawford is the lead rules designer for D&D. Basically, he MAKES the rules for the game system, and is the official answer for a lot of weird questions they get, which is why Brennan said "it's in the portion of the Player's Handbook that's on Twitter." Because he answers some questions there and that becomes the official ruling, as if it was written in the rulebook from the start. So the fact that he was watching live, and interrupted to text Brennan with a ruling on Marisha's counter-spell question, is a huge flex in itself. But playing D&D isn't that hard. You don't need to know everything up front to get into it. You tell the DM what you want to do, maybe they ask you to roll some dice, then they tell you whether you did it. Any rules complications are up to them to figure out or decide on. That's it, that's the whole game. The only reason they're being this exact about "official" rules here is because there are so many other people watching live, and chat loses its shit if they ever get anything wrong.

You asked about their minis. I do believe that either Matt makes them (he's mentioned liking to do that kind of thing) or the crew makes them (which makes more sense considering the detail), but the players get surprised with them, and it's always so cute.

there's a bunch of short clips about the map making process out there. well just on the CR channel anyway.

When it comes to enemy health and stuff, you sort of have to use context to figure it out, but generally Wizards have very low health even at a high level. Wizards are the squishiest, but they have huge spells. Glass canons

Just some basic system info for context. The standard movement speed for any character in dnd is 30 ft in one round, or 6 squares or dots depending on the map you're looking at. A dash action can double this. Faster movement without expending resources like actions is reserved for those who build towards movement speed, and creatures suck as horses or those that can fly. A normal person like you or me has roughly 5 hit points, 6 max. A fireball dealing 40+ damage is an explosion so powerful that anyone in the proximity would be not just dead but blown to tiny pieces. A player character in d&d caps at level 20, and the characters in this campaign are level 14. At this level, and with the equipment these characters possess, they can go toe to toe with some of the most dangerous creatures that exist in D&D, such as ancient dragons, aboleths, and extremely powerful Devils like pit fiends. There is plenty above their weight class, but such threats are few and far between. This assumes a fair fight, though. Endurance is the real test of a D&D party. Eventually, even the mightiest warrior and wisest wizard will run out of limited resources like spell slots and hit dice when faced with enough enemies and individual battles in a day.

new to your channel, but I'm loving re-watching this series with you! love your thoughts and theories along the way

Each square is 5 feet, which is also melee range, but weapons with the “Reach” feature extend your melee range to 10 feet. Typically, PCs have a movement speed of 30 feet per turn, and there are special rules for calculating diagonals on the grid

SOOOO excited to see your reaction to the next one!

Some technical stuff! You don't get to know how much HP opponents have, in general for DnD combat the point is to work off only the knowledge your character would have as much as possible. If your character wouldn't know how strong they are or what abilities they have then you the player should act accordingly. If the player knows stuff about an opponent that their character doesn't and acts on that knowledge in a way that doesn't make sense for the character's level of knowledge thats called meta-gaming and that is very frowned upon, it's basically cheating. Obviously though as people become more knowledgeable of DnD you start to have a general framework for the power levels of things and whatnot. A reference for you, PCs start at around 4-15 HP at level one depending on their build and level 20 characters can have a wide range of health but even the squishiest builds can hit 100 HP while beefier ones can well exceed 200 and even pass 300 in very rare cases. Squares of a combat grid are 5 feet, you gotta be 5 feet from an opponent to use melee attacks (with some exceptions). Movement and range always follow a 5 ft framework (aka distances are almost always multiples of 5). Combat gets real crunchy! There's lots of rules, especially with spellcasters because there are so many different spells each with their own text for how they function. If you're ever curious about a spell being cast, there are spellbook apps for DnD 5e spells that are quite handy for pulling up the spell rules in you ever wanted to look at them for yourself in real time! No one expects even a super experienced player to know the rules for every spell in existence, there's literally hundreds of them, so there are lots of tools out there for finding info quickly.

CLIPPY!

Lets go Joe More calamity 🎉

Yo, Joe! Let's gooooo!

You said to correct you if you aren't saying something correctly. You're saying Ex-AHH-ndria when it's Ex-AND-ria. Not a huge deal, it just sounds wrong and I figured you would want to know.