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The 13th age bard is pretty good but it probably diverges quite a bit from what one would consider a jack of all trades.
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Nov 29, 2014 22:05
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Azran posted:Has a crunchy RPG really managed to make a jack-of-all-trades class properly without it just being worse in both aspects and not being incredibly redundant? Can't think of a D&D example - I'd say Warcaster for the Iron Kingdoms RPG, but it's a niche that I personally enjoy but gets incredibly neglected. The problem with most jack-of-all-trades is the "master of none" part. I've seen non-class based games make jack-of-all-trades characters who do well, because they typically have an ability or meta-currency or something that lets them momentarily make them a master of one of those trades. In D&D the only example that comes to mind is the Factotum, almost entirely due to being part of the proto-4e stuff that added per-encounter mechanics along with some generally very strong abilities.
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Nov 29, 2014 22:19
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Azran posted:Has a crunchy RPG really managed to make a jack-of-all-trades class properly without it just being worse in both aspects and not being incredibly redundant? Can't think of a D&D example - I'd say Warcaster for the Iron Kingdoms RPG, but it's a niche that I personally enjoy but gets incredibly neglected. 4E Bard with the Bard of All Trades feat
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Nov 29, 2014 22:23
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I think the Bard works best when they're less "Jack of all trades" and more "designated faceman".
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Nov 29, 2014 22:45
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Darwinism posted:4E Bard with the Bard of All Trades feat Make it a cunning bard and add Resourceful Magician!
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Nov 29, 2014 23:48
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The guy playing the Bard in our 5E game is loving the million skill proficiencies and lower proficiency bonus on everything else. He can do anything
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Nov 30, 2014 00:01
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neonchameleon posted:Ignore the 2e Bard haters. They are comparing the Bard to the wrong class. A Bard in 2e was the best way of playing a low level wizard in a game without a pack of hirelings; a level 3 bard cast like a level 2 wizard (off the same number of XP), had a decent number of hit points, weapons, and armour, and some thief skills. The wizard only definitively pulled ahead at magic at level 7 - and the game soft-capped only a couple of levels after that.
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Nov 30, 2014 00:13
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I've been playing a bard. They're a lot of fun since you get to give the bardic inspiration away for others to use as a free action, so you don't end up just going "I play the harp still" for your turn. You've got a lot of support magic and "face of the party" stuff which gives you a decent amount of narrative control without descending into the extreme narrative and balance destruction of some classes (At level 5 and without minmaxing, which will probably change that a lot).
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Nov 30, 2014 03:52
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When I made my druid I knew I was going to get tired of paging through the PHB, so I went full nerd and wrote a spell card generator.   Not sure if anyone is as insane as I am about cards, but I figured I might as well post it in case it'd help someone else out. The UI is still a tad rough, but it's functional. There were other, similar tools out there already, but none of them laid out the cards exactly how I wanted. Plus most of them are web-based, and that opens up a can of worms I wouldn't want to touch with a 10-ft pole.  I might go back and add a line at the bottom for writing in the save/attack math in the future, but probably nothing that automatically calculates it. And if anyone else has any other ideas about improving the card layout to make it more functional I'm open to ideas.
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Nov 30, 2014 20:21
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Would you mind if I linked that to a friend?
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Nov 30, 2014 22:38
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Not for nothing, but you might want to look at http://hardcodex.ru/ before you reinvent the wheel Although yours does look easier to use offline.
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Dec 1, 2014 00:36
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gradenko_2000 posted:Not for nothing, but you might want to look at http://hardcodex.ru/ before you reinvent the wheel And yeah, go ahead and link it to whoever. ImpactVector fucked around with this message at 03:18 on Dec 1, 2014 |
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Dec 1, 2014 01:05
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ImpactVector posted:I was trying to use that but couldn't get it to print the border lines on the cards for some reason. Oh shoot! I had that problem too! Yeah I'm definitely going to check out your project now if yours fixes that.
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Dec 1, 2014 01:08
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Night10194 posted:2E Bard, man. Everything bad about the 2E Thief with none of the dubious 'good' things. The 2e Bard worked perfectly well at low-to-mid-level if you treated it as a hybrid Fighter/Mage with some minor Thief skills rather than a variant Thief. The Bard was the only non-Warrior class that could use any weapon (and any armor, if they didn't mind not being able to cast spells while wearing it), and they didn't have any restrictions into their selection of Wizard spells. At higher levels the properly multiclassed Fighter/Mage clearly outperformed the Bard in every category - but then, who ever actually plays at high levels?
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Dec 1, 2014 02:53
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gradenko_2000 posted:Oh shoot! I had that problem too!
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Dec 1, 2014 03:31
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gtrmp posted:The 2e Bard worked perfectly well at low-to-mid-level if you treated it as a hybrid Fighter/Mage with some minor Thief skills rather than a variant Thief. The Bard was the only non-Warrior class that could use any weapon (and any armor, if they didn't mind not being able to cast spells while wearing it), and they didn't have any restrictions into their selection of Wizard spells. At higher levels the properly multiclassed Fighter/Mage clearly outperformed the Bard in every category - but then, who ever actually plays at high levels? I played a high level second edition Bard for several months back in the late 90s. We started at high level with an XP total to build a character from, which got my bard to 16th level and a fighter/mage to 10/11. That gave me a 6th level spell while the mage only had 5th, although I did have 2 fewer spells overall. I recall bard abilities being pretty useful too. I'm not denying that the numbers will show that the ftr/mge is better, or that the bard is pretty underwhelming, but it wasn't bad at higher levels either.
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Dec 1, 2014 03:34
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I didn't see anything about it in the OP, but is this a good place to look for players for a 5E game? I'm 2 people down on a game I was going to run and all my usual players are busy or otherwise unavailable. Beyond that, how have people found balancing encounters past level 5 or so? It seems a lot of PCs come into their own at that point and can handle things quite a few steps above their level in CR at that point, further making a mockery of the term.
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Dec 2, 2014 05:38
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Chronische posted:I didn't see anything about it in the OP, but is this a good place to look for players for a 5E game? I'm 2 people down on a game I was going to run and all my usual players are busy or otherwise unavailable. I think you probably want the recruitment thread stickied at the top of the subforum. Also balancing encounters sounds like a nightmare because CR doesn't seem to follow any discernible formula.
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Dec 2, 2014 06:41
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Rannos22 posted:I think you probably want the recruitment thread stickied at the top of the subforum. Thanks, didn't notice it before. Yeah, encounter balance is whack as poo poo. The best I've been able to do is just slowly slowly increase the average power of larger groups of foes since single foes usually get shredded, and groups of foes that are slightly too powerful will in turn shred the party. I'm hoping they rebalance a lot of the monsters in a later MM or something like that, though perhaps they will do localized MMs with setting rulebooks like they had with Ravenloft and Planescape.
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Dec 2, 2014 09:22
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WOTC just dropped a Dungeon Master Supplement: Magic Items By Rarity, to separate the various items into the Common, Uncommon, Rare, Very Rare, Legendary, Sentient and Artifact types. I gotta say though, if they're leveraging "digital distribution" as much as they already are what with this and errata to the Basic Rules and Online Supplements to Hoard of the Dragon Queen/Rise of Tiamat, why the deuce have they not yet released full PDF versions of the books? The previews of the DMG practically guarantee that they can already do this.
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Dec 2, 2014 11:52
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Based on WotC's previous tantrum concerning digital distribution, their reasoning is probably along the lines of "something something pirates!"
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Dec 2, 2014 12:08
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Littlefinger posted:Based on WotC's previous tantrum concerning digital distribution, their reasoning is probably along the lines of "something something pirates!" The work-experience kid who was supposed to do that side of things got fired for asking how surprise actually works. Now the project is forever impossible.
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Dec 2, 2014 12:16
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Eh, I can understand having some reservations against digital when your flagship product's release gets scooped by free bootleg PDFs.
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Dec 2, 2014 14:55
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Yeah. Honestly the one thing that this edition has done really well it's the release of the Basic Rules PDFs for free - they're enough that I can link my players to them and give them a reference guide without making everyone buy a full PHB.
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Dec 2, 2014 15:18
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moths posted:Eh, I can understand having some reservations against digital when your flagship product's release gets scooped by free bootleg PDFs. Now they just scan them into PDFs and pirate them that way. And that means I can't have a nice legitimate PDF to look at on my tablet.
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Dec 2, 2014 15:31
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I can sort of understand the nature of PDFs precluding them from being part of a Steam-esque distribution model where they're technically locked away behind DRM but the DRM is so unintrusive and the trade-off in price and convenience so in favor of the consumer that the consumer doesn't mind, but even then I have to agree with Andrast. People are/were going to pirate the books regardless, and trying to lock them away behind a no-PDF-at-all "DRM" scheme is just punishing legitimate users who either have to paw through the books to look up every little thing that they're looking for, or they have to resort to pirated PDFs anyway (which, as scans go, still aren't very easily searchable nor well-indexed - all you're doing is dodging the wear and tear on the paper product). There's also the point straight from video game piracy discussions circa early '00s that completely preventing access to the product does not convert every former pirate into a new customer: they're just not going to bother playing the game at all.
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Dec 2, 2014 15:49
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While it'd be convenient for players to have digital copies of the books (or digital tools!), I'm guessing WotC probably doesn't really want to do anything that'd cut into their physical book sales until they're already on the decline.
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Dec 2, 2014 15:54
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We ran our first session this weekend and had a great time. One thing that did come up that I didn't know how to handle was loot. When the party massacres a group of goblins am I supposed to make up the sort of loot they are carrying? Or just say "All the gear was destroyed in combat". The Mines of Phandelvar book has everything else in great detail but nothing on loot (Except for treasure chests at certain junctions).
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Dec 2, 2014 16:39
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Lets look at D&D insane history of revenue generation:
Might as well go down the rabbit hole and monetize D&D by making the D&D App. I ponder if Trapdoor Technologies was hired to do this. Ultimately I don't think the development money was ever in existence to make a high quality D&D app, but if it did exist, this is how I think it would work. The app contains the basic rules for free. It contains a character sheet with basic building functionality and built in die-roller. You need to do a thing? You touch a thing. Die rolls, gives you a result. The app contains in-app upgrade purchases. You can buy the $30 complete unlocks (whole PHB, whole DMG, whole MM) or just pay for the rules modules that you use. Modules are priced at the $8 mark or so. Its cheaper to buy the whole package than to buy all the unlocks. You can even do stuff like price individual monsters and spells at X cents each. Go hog wild. Use the now massive utilization data on which classes people are playing, spells they are casting, monsters they are fighting etc to make intelligent choices about your market.
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Dec 2, 2014 16:48
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m.hache posted:We ran our first session this weekend and had a great time. One thing that did come up that I didn't know how to handle was loot. "Bounded Accuracy" is supposed to make it so that you won't need to hand out anything specific* to the players. I would go with some gold every encounter, with a ~nice~ item at milestones and narratively appropriate points. The DMG has treasure tables based on CR if you want to hand-out loot based on such guidelines, but you could probably do just fine winging it with whatever sounds cool. * provided that as a DM you also don't throw in ghosts that need a +1 Sword to be hit if you don't also give them the +1 Swords in the first place
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Dec 2, 2014 16:59
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Laphroaig posted:the D&D App Also, the rules are searchable and linked together, which is a massive improvement at the table over a book or even a well-produced PDF. Need to know how a spell works? Tap it.
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Dec 2, 2014 17:02
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m.hache posted:We ran our first session this weekend and had a great time. One thing that did come up that I didn't know how to handle was loot. The basic rule, per-PHB on loot is that monsters will have whatever weapons and armor make sense or are on their statblock or whatever, but that those items are too crude/beat up/low quality to be worth anything at market. If one of your players needs/wants to/can actually use a basic goblin shortsword for some reason, just give it to them, but otherwise don't sweat loot unless it's supposed to advance your narrative. Save the good stuff for capital-T-Treasure hoards, and just up the quantity to reflect the sort of challenges your players have overcome since their last big haul.
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Dec 2, 2014 19:54
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moths posted:Eh, I can understand having some reservations against digital when your flagship product's release gets scooped by free bootleg PDFs.
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Dec 2, 2014 20:16
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CaptainPsyko posted:The basic rule, per-PHB on loot is that monsters will have whatever weapons and armor make sense or are on their statblock or whatever, but that those items are too crude/beat up/low quality to be worth anything at market. If one of your players needs/wants to/can actually use a basic goblin shortsword for some reason, just give it to them, but otherwise don't sweat loot unless it's supposed to advance your narrative. Save the good stuff for capital-T-Treasure hoards, and just up the quantity to reflect the sort of challenges your players have overcome since their last big haul. This kind of loot reward system has always bothered me, from a ~verisimilitude~ standpoint. Who's gathering all this stuff, and why isn't it used to, you know, fight off the murderhobos slaughtering your tribe of orcs or whatever?
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Dec 2, 2014 20:27
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PCs always loot the corpse anyway. If there's a +1 Super-Duper sword in the adventure, make sure someone is swinging it at the PCs.
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Dec 2, 2014 20:59
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Laphroaig posted:Might as well go down the rabbit hole and monetize D&D by making the D&D App. I ponder if Trapdoor Technologies was hired to do this. This was the plan. Your Wizards account linking your pdf access to the apps and webpage, all linked up with portable character sheets and dm campaigns, with hyperlinked spells and options. Now that plan is scrapped or seriously delayed.
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Dec 2, 2014 21:02
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Playing 4E, with an Insider subscription (access to the Compendium), and using MapTool with Rumble's lite framework just proves to me how awesome a subscription model could be for Wizards if they would just get their loving heads out of their asses. With MapTool, I get a virtual tabletop. If I'm playing a published adventure, I can import the maps directly, with all the beautiful artwork and everything, and set up vision blocking and light and other fun stuff so less time is wasted arguing over whether that goblin can see me or not. Monster images can be imported into the tokens too, so players can hover over and get a cool picture of what they're fighting rather than an awkward description from me (that interrupts combat) or holding up the book (and trying to cover up any important information). It also tracks initiative and statuses and does math for rolls for powers and all sorts of other stuff. With the compendium, I can import monster stat blocks in a few seconds, and get an encounter decked out in fifteen minutes, including lots of their powers. Wizards could literally do all of this, and since they control distribution and could make their own tabletop, they could deliver entire dungeons pre-made and ready to go. You could conceivably even play without a DM if you were willing to be all hack'n'slash about it. Just keep writing up new dungeons, adventures, monsters, and you have a dedicated fanbase that's committed to new content. You don't even have to worry about piracy since something new is coming next month. Currently I pay about $5 a month for Compendium access, and it saves me time when I can just import monsters into my game. I still have to set up maps, and vision, and lighting, and tweak lots of little things that don't work perfectly. Imagine what could be if they provided all that other stuff, ready to go, too.  E: And like people have said, an app version of the Rules Compendium. A friend showed me a (paid) Pathfinder app that you can search, and he says he uses it literally every game to search spells, equipment, monsters, and rules. Make something worthwhile WotC so I can give you my loving money. DarkHorse fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Dec 3, 2014 |
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Dec 3, 2014 00:11
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Seriously, of the many mistakes Wizards made with DDI, not having any app support was- well, one of them. This should have been elementary- you have all the rules and some nifty applications in one place, now let us access that place from our mobile devices, $$$$$$$$$.
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Dec 3, 2014 00:15
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I enjoy that having pdf's available to purchase online is bad because pirates will steal it but having an OGL that allows your competitors to rebrand your product to steal your customers is a-okay!
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Dec 3, 2014 01:34
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Rannos22 posted:I enjoy that having pdf's available to purchase online is bad because pirates will steal it but having an OGL that allows your competitors to rebrand your product to steal your customers is a-okay! In fairness, they abandoned PDFs AND the OGL at the same time.
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Dec 3, 2014 01:50
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