Kornaki
2013-03-13, 09:20 AM
My party's in an exploration campaign and currently crossing a frozen tundra dotted by lakes. I feel like the "dangerous wilds" haven't really been played up enough, so I want to try a very simple encounter. They start crossing a frozen lake without realizing it (there's a decent amount of snow on the ground), and the lake cracks and they fall in. No enemies, just the players and their slowly increasing constitution checks as they break the surrounding ice trying to climb out.
I have a couple of questions about this encounter:
1) How does wand activation work underwater? They have a wand of swim and a wand of waterbreathing (they spend a lot of time on boats). Using a wand requires a verbal component kind-of sort-of, so I'm not sure if it can be activated while underwater (if it can be it's not the end of the world, it still sucks to burn five charges of a wand because nobody can make a swim check)
2) What should the requirements for getting out of the water be? Nobody has relevant magic for this, so it's going to be something along the lines of grabbing onto the ice and pulling up. Common wisdom is that you can't do it because the ice just keeps breaking but googling confirms it's possible but hard... should it be a combination strength/dex check, or should there be some sort of skill component to finding the strongest part of the ice?
I'm reading about this thing called 'gasp reflex' where when people fall through they gasp and start drowning immediately. I feel like that might be good to have because otherwise they have a dozen rounds or so of just floating around before anything actually becomes dangerous, if someone starts drowning right at the get-go, but if I was a player and I started drowning off the bat I would probably get mad. Would a reflex or fortitude save to avoid this be reasonable or should I just forget it?
I have a couple of questions about this encounter:
1) How does wand activation work underwater? They have a wand of swim and a wand of waterbreathing (they spend a lot of time on boats). Using a wand requires a verbal component kind-of sort-of, so I'm not sure if it can be activated while underwater (if it can be it's not the end of the world, it still sucks to burn five charges of a wand because nobody can make a swim check)
2) What should the requirements for getting out of the water be? Nobody has relevant magic for this, so it's going to be something along the lines of grabbing onto the ice and pulling up. Common wisdom is that you can't do it because the ice just keeps breaking but googling confirms it's possible but hard... should it be a combination strength/dex check, or should there be some sort of skill component to finding the strongest part of the ice?
I'm reading about this thing called 'gasp reflex' where when people fall through they gasp and start drowning immediately. I feel like that might be good to have because otherwise they have a dozen rounds or so of just floating around before anything actually becomes dangerous, if someone starts drowning right at the get-go, but if I was a player and I started drowning off the bat I would probably get mad. Would a reflex or fortitude save to avoid this be reasonable or should I just forget it?