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To be fair that crit is 22d6+5 for an average of 82 damage.
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Aug 7, 2014 21:14
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Jack the Lad posted:To be fair that crit is 22d6+5 for an average of 82 damage. 
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Aug 7, 2014 21:15
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The Starter Set should have come with 2d20 for Advantage/Disadvantage.
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Aug 7, 2014 21:18
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Jack the Lad posted:To be fair that crit is 22d6+5 for an average of 82 damage. Meanwhile, Wizard hits everything on the battlefield for 40d6 damage. That once a day is probably more frequent than the Assassin will get his "DM-may-I" surprise round.
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Aug 7, 2014 21:25
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Jack the Lad posted:To be fair that crit is 22d6+5 for an average of 82 damage. how often do players get surprise rounds? An ability that you can do unlimited times per day that only activates once a month is dumb. if it is going to have that many strictures on it then you actually have a candidate for reasonable save-or-die
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Aug 7, 2014 21:51
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treeboy posted:yeah assassin is really terrible. Lvl 17 ability: guaranteed crit if target surprised. The assassin's level 3 Assassinate ability is a guaranteed crit when the target is surprised. Unlike 3e, crits double the dice rolled, not the static bonus, but this does include sneak attack. Basic Rules posted:Critical Hits So if a level 20 assassin hits you while you're surprised, you take 2[W]+ 20d6 + 2[Any Extra Dice] + Dex + [misc static mods]. If you fail the saving throw, all of that damage is doubled again. So cracking 100 damage is easy, because 20d6 is about 70 damage on its own before being doubled.
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Aug 7, 2014 21:52
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LightWarden posted:The assassin's level 3 Assassinate ability is a guaranteed crit when the target is surprised. my problem is that surprise rounds happen rarely if ever for the PC's in most campaigns. This may as well not exist as a feature for the Assassin Rogue. edit: even if with this feature the rogue goes out of his or her way to setup surprise rounds there's all the other required rolls commensurate with such an endeavor. stealth rolls, perception rolls, not to mention the fact he could still roll a 1 on the attack itself and just plain miss. For an archetype's top tier level 17 ability that's dumb.
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Aug 7, 2014 21:55
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Iunnrais posted:One of my friends is trying to convince me that 5e is the greatest thing, simply because of the Advantage mechanic of "roll 2d20, use the higher result". What do people think about this single mechanic?
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Aug 7, 2014 21:58
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Yeah, I tend to steal things to use in other RPGs, and I'd steal Advantage/Disadvantage.
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Aug 7, 2014 22:05
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treeboy posted:my problem is that surprise rounds happen rarely if ever for the PC's in most campaigns. This may as well not exist as a feature for the Assassin Rogue. I'm partially in agreement with you that surprise rounds are rather rare for most PCs, but it's not as hard to set up surprise rounds as it sounds. Assassins have advantage against any target that hasn't acted, rogues can sneak attack from any distance and you can split your move as you wish before/after your action, so you can hide until you get into longbow range, take a shot, roll twice on the attack to hit, sneak attack and hope for the best then bug out. However, it completely changes the pace of the game and there are feats (Alert), spells (Foresight) and monster abilities (Vigilant, as seen on beholders, ettins and the barbed devil) that flat-out make it so you're never surprised, and I'm pretty sure there are class features that grant it too. Edit: And even if you do go for the gold, proper resistance can still halve your damage and deny the kill. It's absolutely a gimmick feature that will either be useless, rare or annoyingly game-defining. LightWarden fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Aug 7, 2014 |
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Aug 7, 2014 22:19
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It'll work until the DM gets tired of it working and then uh-oh now the guards are on alert and your fighter keeps clanking around in loud armor.
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Aug 7, 2014 22:34
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All that does is give the fighter disadvantage on the stealth roll to get surprise. Looks like tricky characters that refresh some abilities on initiative will want to skirmish against tough foes, meaning resetting fights without resting. That only really works with hour long short rests, otherwise resetting a fight means both sides rest up back to full probably anyway. Could be interesting.
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Aug 7, 2014 22:43
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Plus you can leave the fighter 30 feet back and then haul rear end to rejoin your group as the fighter rolls initiative and regains dice. Fight for a round, then disengage and retreat, then come back in a few minutes and roll initiative again.
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Aug 7, 2014 22:49
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So, surprise works a bit differently in 5e. It's per-person. Some combatants can be surprised while others are on the ball, not an entire side surprising the other. A rogue has a decent chance of hiding vs most passive perception scores (monsters with high wisdom? naah). It gets better in the dark - even with darkvision turning pure darkness into dim light, that is still disadvantage on passive perception, which translates to -5. They won't be seeing you. And you get a full round worth of actions with surprise, not just a single action, so you can attack and move and take bonus actions like Cunning Action(Hide). e: Basically an assassin player just always needs to try to be stealthy in combat situations like a dungeon or whatever. When the two opposing sides get in a fight, even if half of the enemies see you, you can just shank one who didn't have enough passive perception. ritorix fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Aug 7, 2014 |
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Aug 7, 2014 22:50
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Lightning Lord posted:In the spirit of this thread, why would I play 5e when BECMI does this so much better? Because it's got the word "Basic" in the title and is therefore for babies.
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Aug 7, 2014 22:53
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slydingdoor posted:All that does is give the fighter disadvantage on the stealth roll to get surprise. Nope, the DM adjudicates who even can be surprised: quote:Determining Surprise It's 100% DM whim as to when the guards go full alert. The deathscream of the first guy you assassinate could alert the rest of the dungeon to the PC's presence. Or maybe they're just always on high alert!
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Aug 7, 2014 22:59
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Here's the relevant rules: The DM determines who might be surprised. If neither side tries to be stealthy, they automatically notice each other. Otherwise, the DM compares the Dexterity (Stealth) checks of anyone hiding with the passive Wisdom (Perception) score of each creature on the opposing side. Any character or monster that doesn’t notice a threat is surprised at the start of the encounter.
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Aug 7, 2014 23:01
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Iunnrais posted:One of my friends is trying to convince me that 5e is the greatest thing, simply because of the Advantage mechanic of "roll 2d20, use the higher result". What do people think about this single mechanic? It's good, but doesn't go far enough. because it doesn't stack, and you only need one source of one to cancel out ALL possible sources of the other, it steers the designers heavily AWAY from its use in the places it was SUPPOSED to be used (i.e. basically any small fiddly bonus should be replaceable with 'chuck an extra d20, see if it's lower/higher'), so you either wind up with the silly situation of 'i'm prone, blind, deaf, grabbed and dazed, but because he's also blind I take no penalties from ANY of those', or those start being fiddly bonuses again. SHould have been a dice pool. Sum the positives and negatives, roll that many dice, take the lowest/highest. Same thing as happened with CA in 4e really. It was supposed to be the be-all and end-all of attack bonuses, it wound up being so prevalent and non-stacking that it was only really useful as a 'can sneak attack' flag. Like so many things in 5e, advantage had a lot of potential, but was compromised into mediocrity. IMO.
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Aug 7, 2014 23:11
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Would it break anything for advantage plus advantage to equal "roll 3d20, pick highest", and advantage plus advantage plus disadvantage equalling "roll 2d20, pick highest"?
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Aug 7, 2014 23:14
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Gort posted:Would it break anything for advantage plus advantage to equal "roll 3d20, pick highest", and advantage plus advantage plus disadvantage equalling "roll 2d20, pick highest"?
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Aug 7, 2014 23:20
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Enjoy rolling 40d20 for all the multiattacks in your houseruled game because condition stacking of all things is your sacred cow.
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Aug 7, 2014 23:26
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Gort posted:Would it break anything for advantage plus advantage to equal "roll 3d20, pick highest", and advantage plus advantage plus disadvantage equalling "roll 2d20, pick highest"? 5e's math is loose enough that you're going to have to wing the numbers anyhow, and the incremental effect of adding an extra reroll gets smaller as you increase the size of the dice pool, so it would probably be pretty safe. It's just a matter of how many separate conditions you want to track.
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Aug 7, 2014 23:26
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The whole point of advantage is winging the fiddly +1 UEoNT bonuses and gaining some speed in return. No good reason to give that up.
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Aug 7, 2014 23:27
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ritorix posted:The whole point of advantage is winging the fiddly +1 UEoNT bonuses and gaining some speed in return. No good reason to give that up. Exactly. One of the charms of the system is that you just have to identify which of four states you are in: neither advantage nor disadvantage, just advantage, just disadvantage, or both advantage and disadvantage. If you can confirm there's no disadvantage, and at least one reason for advantage, you can move onto rolling instead of taking time to see if there's any additional reasons for advantage. It may not represent every condition that may be going on, but it's faster and good enough.
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Aug 7, 2014 23:29
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thespaceinvader posted:It's good, but doesn't go far enough. because it doesn't stack, and you only need one source of one to cancel out ALL possible sources of the other, it steers the designers heavily AWAY from its use in the places it was SUPPOSED to be used (i.e. basically any small fiddly bonus should be replaceable with 'chuck an extra d20, see if it's lower/higher'), so you either wind up with the silly situation of 'i'm prone, blind, deaf, grabbed and dazed, but because he's also blind I take no penalties from ANY of those', or those start being fiddly bonuses again.
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Aug 7, 2014 23:33
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slydingdoor posted:Enjoy rolling 40d20 for all the multiattacks in your houseruled game because condition stacking of all things is your sacred cow. I'd probably cap it, at maybe 5 instances - because much as with statics, once you get to +/-10, you basically don't need to bother tracking them any more. I'd also stick something in the rules that says when you get a condition imposing +1 advantage, you take a green die, and when you get a condition giving -1, you take a red die, and you just.. match them as you go and roll the leftovers. It's by no means fully thought through, but I'm sure they could have managed to make advantage be what it could have been, which is 'the ONLY in-play bonus/penalty system the game needs.
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Aug 7, 2014 23:34
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thespaceinvader posted:I'd probably cap it, at maybe 5 instances - because much as with statics, once you get to +/-10, you basically don't need to bother tracking them any more. Personally if I was going to make the advantage/disadvantage system any more complicated, the furthest I would go would be to introduce a second level of "superior" advantage/disadvantage that gives you best/worst of 3 rolls (one of which will cancel out opposing standard advantage/disadvantage), but still without any ability for advantage/disadvantage to stack. That way you could define really big modifiers without having the situation where they get canceled out by something that should be a minor bonus, but you still don't have to count up all the minor bonuses all the time. Although actually I guess you could take care of that scenario without any changes to the underlying mechanic simply by saying "You have advantage on this roll and ignore any source of disadvantage" or vice versa. Or, like others have said, you could just roll with it and revel in having the potential for a tactically deep game with light mechanical overhead.
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Aug 7, 2014 23:51
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If you have both Advantage and Disadvantage from at least 1 source each, roll 3d20 and take the middle number!
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Aug 8, 2014 00:05
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seebs posted:So basically, as long as you're playing with non-assholes, it's fine. I'm so tired of this obvious fake lie people tell about their perfect groups. If your group plays old school rpgs regularly and never have any arguments it's not because you're non-assholes, it's because you're boring sycophants. seebs posted:I am pretty sure that 5e's tolerance for "up to the GM" is an intentional design choice, specifically accepting a much broader range of ambiguity in exchange for a much, much, shorter set of rules. quote:So basically: I don't think that "fewer ambiguities" and "clearer" are necessarily the same thing at all. seebs posted:But yes, very clean, easy-to-read, rules. However! There's still a fairly large number of things to keep track of, and on the whole, I am not sure the additional complexity adds a lot of value. When Mearls says 'up to the GM' he's not making the game simpler, he's making it more complicated. He's not saving time, he's wasting time. Time at the table, and time learning the rules. A Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Aug 8, 2014 |
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Aug 8, 2014 00:17
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Gabriel Pope posted:Personally if I was going to make the advantage/disadvantage system any more complicated, the furthest I would go would be to introduce a second level of "superior" advantage/disadvantage that gives you best/worst of 3 rolls (one of which will cancel out opposing standard advantage/disadvantage), but still without any ability for advantage/disadvantage to stack. That way you could define really big modifiers without having the situation where they get canceled out by something that should be a minor bonus, but you still don't have to count up all the minor bonuses all the time. Yeah, I don't think arbitrarily stacking advantage/disadvantage does much for the basic cleanliness of the mechanic. I think if you're going to use it you should try and make it as central and uncluttered a mechanic as possible.
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Aug 8, 2014 00:31
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Jack the Lad posted:The whole '4e combat is long and fiddly' thing really bugs me because it's become an accepted talking point - even among fans of 4e - but in my experience it's no worse than any other RPG. Yeah, the biggest issue facing 4E is player choice paralysis. A group that knows the system reasonably well, have bothered looking at what their teammates can do, and whom are on the ball can make 4E combat pretty snappy. It's just that many P&P players do get afflicted with choice paralysis. You could always start pulling out a stopwatch and giving people time limits if you want to force them out of that mentality, I suppose.
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Aug 8, 2014 00:54
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LuiCypher posted:I think we need to balance fighters by putting a cap on how many times they can attack with their swords in combat - theoretically infinite attacks is incredibly OP, especially considering that wizards can only have so many spells. In game justification: Swinging around sharp bits of metal is very tiring! No, no. What we do is give the swords durability ratings. When they run out, they break and you need to get a new sword. Also, no repairing them ever. (could you imagine if they got all Fire Emblem on martial characters? That'd be incredibly cruel. I'm surprised they haven't thought of it)
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Aug 8, 2014 01:00
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A Catastrophe posted:So anybody who doesn't bow to DM fiat is an rear end in a top hat. Or any GM who doesn't cave to the group alpha nerd is an rear end in a top hat. Or anyone who is really excited to do something cool and finds themselves arguing with other players who see things differently is an rear end in a top hat. Anybody who gets confused and frustrated is an rear end in a top hat. Anyone who gets discouraged and tunes out is an rear end in a top hat. Any GM who can't handle an absurdly demanding workload of fiat and rules minutia is an rear end in a top hat. Not at all! It's just that, in my experience, as long as everyone is basically interested in the game being fun, more than in Winning Arguments, things don't become problems. quote:I'm so tired of this obvious fake lie people tell about their perfect groups. If your group plays old school rpgs regularly and never have any arguments it's not because you're non-assholes, it's because you're boring sycophants. Oh, we occasionally have arguments, but in the current group, I don't think I've ever actually seen someone mad about them. Because, really, we don't care that much about the exact ruling, as long as we can all agree that it's a ruling we can live with, which it turns out we can. quote:When Mearls says 'up to the GM' he's not making the game simpler, he's making it more complicated. He's not saving time, he's wasting time. Time at the table, and time learning the rules. I am not at all sure about that. I'll know more in a few months, I guess.
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Aug 8, 2014 01:04
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Jack the Lad posted:Here are a bunch more pages including the Rogue, Gnome, Half-Orc, Sailor, Charlatan and Gods. I see they did the alphabetized only spell list in the printed book, so they are in fact, terrible at formatting, rather than very devious marketers.
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Aug 8, 2014 01:06
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Jack the Lad posted:To be fair that crit is 22d6+5 for an average of 82 damage. It's doubled again from Death Strike.
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Aug 8, 2014 01:11
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ritorix posted:The DM determines who might be surprised. If Does the assassin get to hide the rest of his party now?
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Aug 8, 2014 01:13
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moths posted:Does the assassin get to hide the rest of his party now? 
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Aug 8, 2014 01:21
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Here's something I've been thinking about for the last day or so that might make a fun thought experiment - assuming we can't change the list of available spells but we can change almost everything else about the way the class interacts with magic (e.g. method of casting, method of memorizing, method of gaining spells), what would it take to balance the wizard? By "balance" here I mean "bring in line with the rest of the base classes in terms of number of options and overall power level." Is it even possible with things like wish in the spellbook? What if the wizard has to devote lots of time or money to high-level spells?
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Aug 8, 2014 01:28
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Well I'm at work and we've got the PHB here. The artwork is nice.
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Aug 8, 2014 01:29
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moths posted:Does the assassin get to hide the rest of his party now? You must not have been paying attention. The assassin doesn't need to hide their entire party.
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Aug 8, 2014 01:30
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