The effect of this? Characters had to use the Dash action to get past, and so had a round of doing nothing but letting the foes get another attack on them. So, it takes 35 feet of movement to move past the snake for its allies. Squeezing past the snake? It’s possible, but it’s effectively difficult ground.
Fifteen feet of a corridor filled by a snake gives substantial cover to the creatures on the other side. Next time, I know what the rule should be, and I’ll advise the player of how it should be handled.Įven getting this rule wrong, having a giant snake wander through the hallways caused a few problems for the other characters. People were having fun, so better to let the fun continue. Instead, I played the snake as being able to move and fight normally and then made a note to look up the rule afterwards. I half-remembered it, and I didn’t want to stop the session to look it up. It does require you to remember the rule though. Suffice to say the snake suffers disadvantage on attacks and Dexterity saves, is slower to move, and opponents have advantage to hit it.
See the Player’s Handbook, Combat, Movement and Position to find the actual rules. So, what happens when a Huge Snake (15-foot square space) is in a 10-foot-wide corridor? Well, it can fit, but it’s considered to be squeezing. The square facing allows this movement without having the unfortunate situation where a creature can’t turn around. Instead, Combatants always change their stance and move around. It’s not too far from what should happen in combat: no combatant stands still and facing the same way all the time. So, D&D uses square facing so each combatant could potentially be facing in any direction. This is far fiddlier than you want in D&D. The trouble with facing is that you then need rules to cover how you change which way you’re looking (or which way is front). Why? Because D&D doesn’t assume combatants are facing one direction. In 3.5E, this changed to be a 10-foot by 10-foot space. In 3E, a horse took up a 5-foot by 10-foot space. This is something that dates from the 3.5E revision to D&D. Despite the snake being a long, relatively-thin creature, the rules in D&D assume they occupy a square space. This huge creature is not the natural inhabitant of these walls. The Dungeon Master is likely going to need to flesh out the descriptions of the rooms and situations further, but it provides most of the basic building blocks.ĭuring our play of the adventure, we had the fun of having a druid turning into a giant constrictor snake. However, get the right group of players and Dungeon Master, and there’s a lot of fun to be had. It would be possible to run this in a very boring fashion, I feel. There’s perhaps less range to the encounters than you might expect, as many are simply new ways of encountering Yuan-Ti or Kraken Society members, but there’s more than enough variety for a 2-hour slot.
Ten chamber encounters and ten hallway encounters provide a fair selection of encounters. The maze was built by a mysterious wizard, so there are a lot of old-school traps, strange features to examine, and a lot of combat though the exact proportion of each depends on which encounters the DM chooses to use. At that point, an ending encounter triggers, and the adventurers escape.Īlthough I’m typically not fond of this adventure structure, where the players’ actions do not influence how they complete the adventure, it works fine in this instance. Instead of having a structure where the players choose which direction they go until they find the way out, the DM instead just chooses encounters for them until time runs out. It’s complicated by the fact that the corridors are also playing host to a battle between Kraken Society cultists and Yuan-Ti, both of which are more than happy to kill the adventurers. The adventurers are in the middle of a lot of mazey corridors trying to find the way out.
#GIANT CONSTRICTOR SNAKE 5E HOW TO#
It’s the second time I’ve run it, and so I was much more confident about how to approach it. It’s a 2-hour DDAL-legal adventure written by Luke Gygax and Thomas Valley. I ran Oh, We’re In It Now on the weekend.