Early on in my current campaign my players were sent on a quest by a wizard friend of theirs, he gave them a sending stone so he could keep in contact with them. After that quest ended my players got a nice big downtime, 1 month. One of my players, who owns a tavern, asked to dedicate that downtime to finding some more sending stones, one for each player and the pairs to be held by the barkeep NPC she employs. I rolled on the tables in XGtE and got a price that they could afford.
Are there any unforeseen downsides in letting them spend all their money on sending stones? I know this effectively gives them party wide telekinesis but since they’re using this NPC as a telephone switchboard (literally how they pitched the idea) I can reserve the right to say he’s busy and can’t forward their messages.
Next thing you know, judging from comments here, the players will give up on magic and ask for some copper cables going all the way back to their base
You know, an inexperienced switchboard operator could easily make the wrong connection, especially in a stressful moment…
The most obvious thing to do is have the NPC be replaced with a doppleganger minion of your next big bad so that the sending stones end up passing along disinfo (splitting the party, giving wrong directions, getting them to discard a magic item under the false belief it is cursed, etc)
This would be good if they received a surprise gift of stones, but is pretty awful for the players who took the time to find the stones intentionally.
You’re not wrong, however, they can have their toys back after they figure out what happened and rescue the NPC. It’s a good hook and requires them to think about spending some of their treasure to shore up their home defenses. For all we know, their players are murder hobos and this is well deserved comeuppance.
My players aren’t murder hobos, but the tavern is in a bad part of town and suddenly has a bunch of magic items
The switchboard model is going to make it a lot worse than telepathy. Consider the action flow:
- Alice wants to send a message to Bob.
- Alice uses her action to send her message to Switch (who, let’s assume is paid to give this job his sole attention.)
- Switch must then spend their action to send to Bob. Bob can freely reply.
- Switch must then spend another action to relay the reply back to Alice.
Switch at any point may need a message repeated costing another action for the sender, and is more likely to need a repeat when messages are sent in stressful situations.
If Switch has other duties, the party might need to arrange ahead of time that they are going to need the service. The service also lacks efficient broadcast capabilities. Each stone needs to be activated sequentially, and Switch can reasonably only be expected to understand one person talking at once.
I think it sits closer to telegraph than a moble phone. Depending on the kind of campaign it might represent a vulnerability that can be exploited.
Perfect. Let the players run with it. The more impractical and overcomplicated it is the more opportunities for the DM to set up unintended consequences.
I say, let them run with their idea. Sounds fun and already full of complications 🤣
The NPC decides to expand the sending stone services without the players’ knowledge. They outsource the switching tasks, and then the production and distribution of sending stones, eventually turning it into a full-blown telecommunications service and call center. The players call in and have to wait in a hold queue for assistance. The outsourced staff don’t know the player characters and don’t really understand or care about the service beyond the specific task they were hired for, so it starts to degrade and provide a worse user experience. A local bad guy hacks into the system and starts eavesdropping on calls. The original NPC sells the business off before it completely collapses, and skips town. Communications failures and chaos ensue.
Shenanigans! 🤣🤘🏽
PCs: “Are we the baddies now?”
let them buy it from a local vendor who’s actually the BBEG.
then have them roll for perception every time the stones are used, crossing their wires and sending them on wild goose chases until the stones are unfucked by some magical authority or the players stop using them because they realize they’re compromised.
Sounds like fun! I would reward the engagement with the stones they want. There’s room for all sorts of ways for it to work really well or really poorly. If they’re consistently using it to circumvent your story beats, maybe some interesting complications or particular defenses might be in order.
