different types of criminal organizations for dnd

#DIFFERENT TYPES OF CRIMINAL ORGANIZATIONS FOR DND HOW TO#

In a tightly packed, cramped space, it can take as few as two or three people to make a faction.

Whether they’re a gang of local ruffians or a vast, shadowy conspiracy of powerful wizards, one of the great things about factions is that they scale up and down really well.

Factions Can Be as Big or Small as You Need Them To Be That’s a lot of information, and it’s all going to be the basis for what we’re talking about today, so let’s break it down.

#DIFFERENT TYPES OF CRIMINAL ORGANIZATIONS FOR DND HOW TO#

They contain lots of types of enemies, and in many ways the individual characters - from mooks and mercs all the way up to the folks in charge - are all shaped by the faction itself, which can do a lot of legwork when it comes to worldbuilding, establishing tone, and figuring out how to play certain NPCs. Why Should I Use Factions in My DnD 5e Campaign?įactions are, in many ways, the ultimate D&D monster.įactions can be as big or small as you need them to be.

Fighting Factions: Making Mass Combat Not Suck.

Why Should I Use Factions in My DnD 5e Campaign?.

More often than not, things are very swingy.Īs a dungeon master who wants to do more than veer back and forth between wish-fulfilling power fantasy and ignominious player death, it can be hard finding something to appropriately challenge your players in these “middle levels” when PCs can do crazy powerful stuff but they also can’t take crazy amounts of punishment. Sure, there are some exceptions, like monsters with escape mechanics or the right combination of abilities and resistances to keep things interesting, but these usually require a decent amount of DM skill and more than a little luck. However, in 5e’s mid-game, the action economy is such that any solo monster that can stand its ground against the PCs long enough to make for an interesting combat encounter is also likely to be strong enough that it will down or even kill an adventurer in one round of combat. Stuff in the CR 5-13 range with enough hit points to stand up against a party of mid-tier heroes, like young dragons, giants, and even slightly trickier left-field decisions like an Oni. It’s tempting to push them toward big, scary solo monsters. You can keep your epic fantasy give me your poor, your hungry, your pathetic scheming picaros and self-serving desperados having low-stakes, chaotic escapades, but I digress) and need something tougher to fight. I’m talking about the “mid-tier” play, somewhere between levels 5 and 10 - after the game is all about beating up goblins and bandits for their lunch money and before the bit where taking on dragons, archmages, and sometimes literal gods stops being a complete suicide mission.Īt this point, the PCs have progressed beyond fighting four nameless kobolds who kidnapped the town’s prized pig (although I maintain this sort of madcap nonsense is peak D&D.

There comes a point in the progression of an adventuring party from zeroes to heroes where I think D&D 5e struggles to provide the right amount of challenge.

Different types of criminal organizations for dnd