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I forgot about healing surges. Really elegant design, it's a shame it's gone.
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Jul 11, 2014 02:06
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Amethyst posted:I forgot about healing surges. Really elegant design, it's a shame it's gone. reminds me of the time a guy told me that healing surges weren't a strategic resource like spells/day were
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Jul 11, 2014 02:07
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S.J. posted:reminds me of the time a guy told me that healing surges weren't a strategic resource like spells/day were The only thing keeping those uppity clerics in check is compulsive and continuous healing duties.
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Jul 11, 2014 02:18
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S.J. posted:reminds me of the time a guy told me that healing surges weren't a strategic resource like spells/day were One legit issue with 4E's healing surges is it's rarely an actual strategic choice when it comes to spending them. Basically, the only time there's a real question is if spending one is likely to overheal. Usually, the question on a Leader's turn isn't whether to heal, but simply who has the lowest HP and thus ought to be healed. I think it would have been better for short-rest healing to just be free, and to have fewer surges. Then it's a question whether you actually need to use your limited during-combat healing, or if you can make it without. That's not to say spells/day are some great strategic resource. Casters pretty quickly get so many they cease to be a limited resource. 4E's more limited dailies were a much better strategic resource.
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Jul 11, 2014 02:30
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Healing surges are a pacing mechanism that you can play with but never really "solve."
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Jul 11, 2014 02:36
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Yeah, unless you've got a specific feature that allows you to rip your surges out of your body and hit your enemy with them, healing surges are more a way of keeping score and measuring how well a party is doing. A bunch of adventurers with 2-3 surges left each is different from one that has 5-6 each, even if they've got the same powers readied. Being low on surges is a sign you need to start thinking about pulling back and resting, same as being low on hit points and spells is.
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Jul 11, 2014 02:39
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So we wrapped up the goon PBP of Dead in Thay and figured I will give it a mini-review. The last PBP I did for the 5e playtest was Mines of Madness about a year ago. I managed to get 12 goons to play, two full groups, some with multiple characters along the way. Everyone was level 6, and reached 7 towards the end. So we got to see a bit of everything and I tried a bunch of wacky things on the DM side. Random observations: -Fast combat was the norm. Most fights took 2-3 rounds. It was also a lot easier to keep track of things (conditions, buffs, etc) than the typical 4e PBP games I ran on here. I didn't feel overwhelmed with system management while running two groups simultaneously. -Characters are really hard to kill, thanks to 4e-style death saves. I played around with how far I could push things, and no one died pretty much until I started dropping rocks on the players. Overall you get the same drama as 4e with death saves ticking down and allies forced to save the dying 'at the last minute' and healing from zero and all that. The feel there is very similar. -PC damage can get pretty crazy. The most a player managed was 135 (from one attack, a turn undead) but that was AE and likely won't work at release. For melee, a paladin managed to do something like 120+ from a triple attack routine. That included several smites along with bard song. Not sure if that will be viable for the final version, depends on what is made into a bonus action. -Melee damage definitely got competitive as magic items started to be passed around. Any talk of magic items not being required is complete bullshit. The final boss, a demilich, was completely immune to nonmagical damage. Numerous enemies resisted (take half damage from) nonmagical weapons. And with the round-robin rules for loot distribution in Adventurers League (the new RPGA), everyone including melee will get their fair share. The difference this time around is a caster can't improve his spell damage through magic items (no "wand +1"), but melee/ranged do. When a melee guy gets a Flame Tongue (+2d6 fire damage every hit) it's a big deal. -AE is crucial to have in the party. Your potential sources for it are all spellcasters (cleric/druid included), yes. The entire party doesn't need it, but when swarms of enemies show up you need someone that can do it to take them down enemies before they (thanks to bounded accuracy) whittle away at the group. Our game had one group with AE and one without, and the difference was obvious. Both groups still managed to win their fights, but the non-AE group had a rough time in large battles. -A tank is crucial to have in the party. AC is important. Don't try to tank with a 14 or whatever. Along those same lines, having a 18+ AC goes a long way to ensuring survival. And if you can get disadvantage on incoming attacks (dodge and protection from evil are two easy sources), you are pretty much untouchable. -Save boosts were important too. Bless (+1d4) and the paladin aura (+CHA) go a long way to making sure everyone survives the giant piles of bullshit that get thrown at mid-level parties. Ok so I didn't actually talk about the content of Dead in Thay much. It was a boring, over-complicated, monotonous piece of poo poo with a few bright spots. There was a whole party of 'plot important' NPCs that were supposed to tag along - needless to say, I completely ignored that. I salvaged what I could and ran things right off the rails towards the end. There were some cool situations like the final battle taking place on the interior of a giant "D4", with separate gravity on each side. We also did a gigantic all-hands-on-deck battle near the beginning that was fun to run. But overall the module was a bust. Still had a good time running it. 5e is easy and fun to run, easier than 3e or 4e. Make poo poo up, no math fixes needed because the math is so hosed just leave it be, I could DM this poo poo drunk and it would still work out. I'll be running it again some time. 
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Jul 11, 2014 03:46
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A few more tweets.quote:@dr_hobo_jones : for the champions expanded crit range, are 18-19 automatically a hit? Or are they only crit if attack hits? quote:@Spam_On_Maui : Will any of the books have help/advice for escaping an older edition? I've got a campaign in 3.x I'd like to port... quote:@JRutterbush : handaxes and ranged attacks... "my call would be count as both melee and ranged for purposes of qualifying for benefits"
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Jul 11, 2014 05:42
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Ryuujin posted:A few more tweets. then why didn't he put that in his game
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Jul 11, 2014 05:46
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Hey Chumbo, here's some Fun Facts you failed to mention: -Cleric made a goddamned joke out of combat encounters. -Rogue, Fighter very capable of doing things like 'existing,' getting kills when the Cleric or Wizard were kind enough to let them take down the mortally wounded. -No really, the Cleric straight up made a goddamned Goof out of the combat encounters, Turn Undead or no. -Rogue in particular stood out as a very compelling class with features like 'extra Xd6 of damage,' 'succeed on skills that offer no gain besides flavor text,' and my personal favorite: 'having an archtype that could only use one-half of the three different the three different abilities it gets during the entire adventure.' -Turn Invisible followed by Time Stop and Call Meteors is a legitimate strategy. -Just read the thread, because you do not understand that Cleric was literally a walking apocalypse that could also heal. -Having someone play by phone posting is a completely legitimate way to balance the Wizard; doing so almost puts them below the power level of a cleric. -Turn Invisible followed by Time Stop and Call Meteors was not enough to even down the Cleric.
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Jul 11, 2014 06:09
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Father Wendigo posted:Hey Chumbo, here's some Fun Facts you failed to mention: Try playing sober next time you might hit something.  And you lost the bet about the PHB thing.
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Jul 11, 2014 06:27
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S.J. posted:then why didn't he put that in his game It's a thing called errata. It will probably be put in the next update of Basic or he could say it's the DM's call.
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Jul 11, 2014 06:27
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Aren't time stop and call meteors both 9th level? I thought wizards only ever get one 9th level spell slot?
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Jul 11, 2014 06:27
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Father Wendigo posted:Hey Chumbo, here's some Fun Facts you failed to mention: I don't think you actually know how this works. That or you just glanced and never did any research. Also you do know the classes are not balanced to fight each other. (Though a Fighter will probably kick a level 17 clerics rear end. And vs a Wizard it's really who ever goes first.) MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Jul 11, 2014 |
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Jul 11, 2014 06:29
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Amethyst posted:Aren't time stop and call meteors both 9th level? I thought wizards only ever get one 9th level spell slot? They do. 
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Jul 11, 2014 06:31
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ritorix posted:Make poo poo up, no math fixes needed because the math is so hosed just leave it be
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Jul 11, 2014 06:34
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MonsterEnvy posted:I don't think you actually know how this works. That or you just glanced and never did any research. Um.....are you making a troll post or are you serious, I can't tell anymore. He was not describing fighting a player. This was the game, the cleric comfortably sat there and ate the liches spells, and carried every encountered. I literally have no idea what you mean by glanced and never did any research. This is the game he played in.
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Jul 11, 2014 06:44
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Oh thought he was talking about the edition. In this case it's because Dead in Thay is not a very good adventure and it's using outdated rules.
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Jul 11, 2014 06:46
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kingcom posted:Um.....are you making a troll post or are you serious, I can't tell anymore. He was not describing fighting a player. This was the game, the cleric comfortably sat there and ate the liches spells, and carried every encountered. I literally have no idea what you mean by glanced and never did any research. This is the game he played in. This poster was that Cleric, by the way. If you'd like the things we the players worked with, then here: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B5x7sgceEOgiQ1k2YThFOUdlRDA&usp=sharing&tid=0B5x7sgceEOgiZ2stajFjZlkwRDA
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Jul 11, 2014 06:51
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MonsterEnvy posted:Also you do know the classes are not balanced to fight each other. Then why are DMs encouraged to use the PC rules for enemies?
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Jul 11, 2014 06:55
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chrisoya posted:Then why are DMs encouraged to use the PC rules for enemies? Do you mean giving monsters class levels in that case it's to make enemies harder. I just said they were not balanced that way not that it can't work. An Ogre with 3 levels of Fighter is going to be a deadly threat due to the high hp second wind and expanded crit range.
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Jul 11, 2014 07:05
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MonsterEnvy posted:Do you mean giving monsters class levels in that case it's to make enemies harder. I just said they were not balanced that way not that it can't work. Dont worry the party cleric will be able to roll over it so the rogue should be good to play with himself in the corner so it all balances out you see.
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Jul 11, 2014 07:06
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Your party had 2 clerics, and one died. 
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Jul 11, 2014 07:08
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ritorix posted:Your party had 2 clerics, and one died. Poor July Healbot. You will be missed for your sweet sweet turn undead. Wait turn undead became terrible so I guess we lost nothing.
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Jul 11, 2014 07:10
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MonsterEnvy posted:Do you mean giving monsters class levels in that case it's to make enemies harder. I just said they were not balanced that way not that it can't work. Not really giving monsters class levels, just... having an elf wizard as the bad guy, or an evil cleric. This is standard D&D territory, an expected and suggested use of the classes. They should be designed with that in mind, or alternative ways of handling NPCs should be provided, like in 4e.
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Jul 11, 2014 07:10
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Oh yeah and my Cheat Sheet is updated to the Basic rules for anyone that is actually going to play 5e. 1 page with all the actions and conditions and stuff. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7n5bpadgZz4WmRIdE1HeVBaeFk/ ritorix fucked around with this message at 07:40 on Jul 11, 2014 |
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Jul 11, 2014 07:15
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chrisoya posted:Not really giving monsters class levels, just... having an elf wizard as the bad guy, or an evil cleric. This is standard D&D territory, an expected and suggested use of the classes. They should be designed with that in mind, or alternative ways of handling NPCs should be provided, like in 4e. Well a level 4 Wizard called the Evil Mage in 5e has been marked as CR 1. I don't know his stats exactly but he is not quite the same as a PC of the same level. Honestly we have to wait for actual monsters to come out before we can really tell how this works. ritorix posted:Oh yeah and my Cheat Sheet is updated to the Basic rules for anyone that is actually going to play 5e. 1 page with all the actions and conditions and stuff. This is pretty cool.
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Jul 11, 2014 07:16
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MonsterEnvy posted:Well a level 4 Wizard called the Evil Mage in 5e has been marked as CR 1. I don't know his stats exactly but he is not quite the same as a PC of the same level. Honestly we have to wait for actual monsters to come out before we can really tell how this works. Literally the most dangerous thing in the game at the moment is packs of low level wizards spamming magic missiles.
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Jul 11, 2014 07:19
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kingcom posted:Literally the most dangerous thing in the game at the moment is packs of low level wizards spamming magic missiles. guns are more powerful than swords, makes sense to me
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Jul 11, 2014 07:27
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I played in Ritorix's one serious and two ironic Next games, and was the guy who ended up as team leader and switched builds all the time in both to try out whatever no one else was trying. Let the begin. First character was a multiclass monstrosity with a feat that let him heal people with cheap rear end healing kits once between rests. I stacked a bunch of class features from monk, rogue, and barb to make a guy who had good AC, damage, and pierced nonmagical resistance without equipment so all his starting money could go to healing kits. This let people blunder into traps and play like idiots with no consequences, I'd just heal them up. Unfortunately, the character hit a weird snag: ki points, which I used to do stuff, came back after short rests, which normal parties might take in order to spend hit dice to top off their HP. The healing kit spam, and other class features like Lay on Hands and healing, meant that wasn't really necessary. So the fighter and I never got our crappy short rest cooldowns back unless everyone got their far better long rest cooldowns back. It got me thinking about how the classes each have different timers for getting their moves back. Rogues have stuff that goes off every turn, like cunning action and sneak attack, or at the starts of fights, like the assassin feature, which means they'll want to reset fights trying to get surprise rounds. But if the rogue's party sucks at that and/or has no reason to, they'll never get to use their toys. Wendigo whined about this already. Bards uniquely have this 10 minute duration and rest requirement to get their song back that everyone handwaved once real buffs were down anyway. It's almost as though 10 minute rests are some kind of sweet spot. That leaves Fighters and Monks, the only ones who need to take 1 hour short rests to get their cool poo poo back. No one else has stuff on short rest timers other than hit dice, so if it's not worth spending the time for itty bitty heals, those two classes don't get to play with their toys, which is kinda bullshit because they're just extra attacks, not even anything that really matters. All classes, especially casters and barbarians, want to take a long rest for 8 hours daily or whenever they run out of resources and push on while their buffs are up. Unless everyone is getting hosed, daily resource classes will get to pace the adventure. A combination of that, and getting in a really spread out fight with a bunch of secondary objectives that no one in the party had the speed, range or AE to deal convinced me to switch classes to one that could do those things, and on a "daily" clock. Ritorix mentioned how AE is important, but range is probably even more important than that. Besides the fight I mentioned, another started with melee enemies and melee PCs both outside of charge range. Because the players were probably too drunk to read that they had javelins, all the could do was move and be bored and useless. They wanted to roll dice but they had 25 speed. The new character didn't have that problem. It was a blaster cleric of the Light domain, who gets all the fire spells instead of buffs or heals, and I took a feat that no one knew how it worked: Arcane Archer. After figuring out that I didn't need to hit with the arrow at all to shoot bomb arrows from the Legend of Zelda at people, it ended up being pretty good. It let me blow all my spell slots on Burning Hands and Fireball while never having to get close to them. The wizard tried to do that once and it was terrible. It also got around other DM shenanigans like Legendary Action counterspells, and probably zones of silence. Also I got the chance to do a little bit of arrow damage while casting spells, which added up. I did no real healing for one reason. Back in the playtest, the cantrip Spare the Dying healed 1 hp to someone who was dying as a swift action, which got them conscious again. Because of the way death saves were changed, (Failure counts refresh on heal, rather than on rest) I could keep the wizard alive with 1 hp indefinitely without losing my action, so we both could keep doing our job of casting multiple target, damage on a miss spells round after round. Now what was the problem? The new death rules or the cantrip? Judging by what got changed the designers think it's the latter. The cantrip was nerfed to uselessness in Basic, now it's an action, and just stabilizes the dying without healing them. It's the same as using a cheap rear end healing kit, and a waste of a cantrip slot. Sandbagging clerics now need to rely on Healing Word if they want to have an action, oh well. Anyway, having multiple characters that could do AE and damage on a miss/save from long range allowed my team to steamroll through everything without taking any damage. Even "boss" encounters could be one-round affairs if the ranged AE alpha strike got any decent followup. It struck me as kind of paradoxical, that ignoring almost everyone and just trying to blow up as many enemies as hard as possible ended up keeping my team healthier and happier than playing medic, and what little "cleric stuff" I did was mostly just to make sure the wizard wasn't losing actions, so he could keep on doing more damage. From what I could tell, the War domain cleric was doing the same thing as me except with self buffs to make himself invincible and never not attacking. The guy plugged up a doorway and basically solo'd while his team was stuck losing their actions to healing. It took forever and all their resources but it got his team through a hard encounter that they weren't really built to be able to deal with. Ritorix said it was because they lacked AE, but it was worse than that. They had two bards and a Life cleric all of whom lacked damage in general. In a later fight the Life cleric and bard player and I went hunting for ways they could deal decent damage on IRC and coming up with nothing. They ended up not caring when their characters died to Ritorix's bullshit Meteor Swarm because they just weren't contributing. He even gave them a chance to survive and none of them took it. I wanted to fit one last new build no one had yet tried in before the game ended so I switched to an Avenger Paladin in the endgame, with a couple of feats that I thought looked fun. I just wantd to have a decent chance of finishing up the module without losing horribly to bosses, but the character's damage ended up being completely outrageous, because the guy could spend resources faster than anyone else, and buying feats was way better than stat bumps. One feat gave pretty much cleave and power attack both at once with 'heavy' weapons, the other let me use two weapon fighting with polearms, half of which are heavy, and gave me an opportunity attack when things moved next to me. They pretty much never came up otherwise. All told I got extra attacks, options, and damage from these feats that far exceeded what stat boosts would have given. As if that wasn't enough, one of the magic items we found was a belt of "set strength to high," which made my picking feats instead of pumping strength even more valuable compared to the other characters. The guy almost one shotted bosses by himself, but if the game wasn't ending anyway I have a feeling the unbalancing effect would have hosed the game. In conclusion, the biggest threats in the game were player apathy and enemy spellcasters. Apathy kept my team from killing spellcasters before they could use their auto damage magic missile spam, lockdown, mindcontrol, or AE with DOAM on us. What caused apathy was having nothing but lovely options, which was caused by having lovely pregens, and having cooldowns based on the short rest that no one ever took. It sucks, because fighters and monks are supposed to be good at swinging swords and throwing punches all day, but they don't outperform a dried up ranger barb or pally, all of whom have daily resources, unless they can take hour rests between fights and get theirs back. I think they should make death saves failures reset on short rests again, and make a death save just a 50/50 shot to get 1hp back or accrue a failure. And/or just make short rests 5-10 minutes again, so everyone can actually use their class features. Also maybe don't make magic items that subsume stat bumps, fighters don't need to feel any more redundant and feats don't need to be any stronger relative to stat bumps. Finally, give "support" classes some impactful abilities that aren't just damage negation or out of combat utility. Maybe let them put divine smite-esque effects on the fighter's weapon, or spend spell slots to intensify the power of their ho-hum bardsongs so parties with those classes in them have a chance to win fights ever instead of just lose slower.
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Jul 11, 2014 07:45
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That's more words than the whole pbp game. I find it funny that the two goofy ironic 5e games I ran actually played to completion, that rarest of states for a play by post, while our serious game died on the vine like most games.
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Jul 11, 2014 08:20
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ritorix posted:That's more words than the whole pbp game. I don't know if thats a fair comparison though, murder in baldur's gate is the worst thing ever.
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Jul 11, 2014 09:14
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kingcom posted:I don't know if thats a fair comparison though, murder in baldur's gate is the worst thing ever. I liked my character for that too, but yeah, MiBG was fighting us pretty hard the whole way through.
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Jul 11, 2014 10:22
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I'm planning on playing the starter set next week when it comes out in Australia. Three of us want to act as DM's for old times sake, and prevent burnout. How could we split up the adventure so we can each DM a part? From what I've heard there's different smaller locations we could each do, is that correct? If you play 3-4 hours a session, how many sessions is the starter set expected to take? How tied into Forgotten Realms is the adventure? I want to create our own collaborative world (and one of the DM's has an ongoing 3.5 game already set in FR). Does the starter set adventure tie in to the module's coming out about Tiamat?
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Jul 11, 2014 14:07
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This is good to know. I have a group that has been clinging to Pathfinder, and I will probably never get them to even try anything different, but if I do, the above is good information to have. At least it sounds like your game moved faster than average. One of my biggest hopes for 5e is that it regained some of the speed that the bloated 3e derivatives lost some time ago, and by the sounds of things, it has.
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Jul 11, 2014 14:11
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Underwhelmed posted:One of my biggest hopes for 5e is that it regained some of the speed that the bloated 3e derivatives lost some time ago, and by the sounds of things, it has. At low-mid levels, this is one of the actually good things about Next. No layered buffs, and limited tactics and analysis paralysis. At higher levels hit points seriously outstrip damage dealt on the other hand.
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Jul 11, 2014 16:58
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Comstar posted:I'm planning on playing the starter set next week when it comes out in Australia. Three of us want to act as DM's for old times sake, and prevent burnout. How could we split up the adventure so we can each DM a part? From what I've heard there's different smaller locations we could each do, is that correct? The adventure is from the blandest, most forgettable part of FR, though there's a lot of hooks for the dozens of various factions which means work if you want to change it. The adventure ties softly into Tyranny of Dragons. Basically there's a side event where you might run into an organization that's central to that adventure path.
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Jul 11, 2014 18:18
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LMoP is still a pretty cool adventure however.
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Jul 11, 2014 19:05
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Ryuujin posted:@Plaguescarred : Do thrown weapons coutn as both melee and ranged at all time or just ranged when thrown?  I... what?"My call would be to run it this way." "Wait, really? Even if it causes [slightly odd rules interaction]?" "Yes, according to the suggestion I -literally just gave-, that would absolutely be the case, but it would be better to do it a different way, and in my game, I would do it differently." That is some serious, instantaneous backpedaling that just happened.
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Jul 11, 2014 20:29
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Crasical posted:and in my game that I loving wrote, I would do it differently than the way that I loving wrote it."
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Jul 11, 2014 21:48
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