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Really Pants posted:Most Zone powers will now explicitly say "A creature can only take damage from the zone once per turn," to prevent you from bouncing them in and out of it with a big Slide and dealing the damage a couple times over. I'm guessing they didn't include that in the Rules Compendium, so when they made that decision it or the pile of powers had to be changed?
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Mar 22, 2015 05:06
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Not So Fast posted:I think having feats be a supplement to the class Archetype works a lot better than how 4e worked. If you have trouble picking one, take the flat ABI, but otherwise you can find neat stuff that compliments the class without being "I need this to actually do anything" like how some 4e feats worked. 13th Age definitely solved the feat problem more than any other D&D system I've played. Feats are chosen as specific upgrades to class features, spells, or powers so for instance a feat for a rogue's sneak attack is listed as part of the sneak attack feature right there on the same page. No flipping back-and-forth trying to figure out if the feat applies to the power or not. There are also a few general feats as well, but none of them are math fixes or fiddly bonuses. If I were to build a character builder for 4E, I would totally program some basic logic into which feats are displayed beyond just like what the character could potentially qualify for such as: (1) don't display feats for things the character is not proficient in, (2) don't display feats for the character's multiclass which are based on powers or class features the character doesn't have, (3) don't display feats that enhance a damage type that the character is incapable of producing, (4) specifically recommend math fix feats and the level when they're considered customary to take, and (5) hide obsolescent feats by default. I feel like this would make the 4E feat system much, much better.
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Mar 22, 2015 06:49
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Rosalind posted:If I were to build a character builder for 4E, I would totally program some basic logic into which feats are displayed beyond just like what the character could potentially qualify for such as: (1) don't display feats for things the character is not proficient in, (2) don't display feats for the character's multiclass which are based on powers or class features the character doesn't have, (3) don't display feats that enhance a damage type that the character is incapable of producing, (4) specifically recommend math fix feats and the level when they're considered customary to take, and (5) hide obsolescent feats by default. I feel like this would make the 4E feat system much, much better. I'd be really happy if feats were grouped by their function rather than their prerequisites. So I could just scroll down to the 'Expertise' feats for my attack boost, then look at the 'Damage' feats when I want to try and kill things faster, etc. and never look at the feats I don't care about. Ideally, it'd be a filter system based on tagging.
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Mar 22, 2015 06:57
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Really Pants posted:Most Zone powers will now explicitly say "A creature can only take damage from the zone once per turn," to prevent you from bouncing them in and out of it with a big Slide and dealing the damage a couple times over. e: Mordenkainen's has got to be the worst book in the 4E line. Every time I look through the builder and come across an item where I think "what is this bullshit" it's from Mordenkainen's.
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Mar 22, 2015 09:37
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The Zone rule would have been a fine universal rule but...Lemniscate Blue posted:I'm guessing they didn't include that in the Rules Compendium, so when they made that decision it or the pile of powers had to be changed? Yup. They still missed a few, but most of them are dailies so it's not as critical. And even 1/turn zones as still very powerful; there's a reason why Flame Spiral is the Sorcerer's best spell.
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Mar 22, 2015 10:34
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Because they didn't want to errata the rules comp., a large amount of metagame for awhile turned into finding the powers they hadn't adapted yet and this long weird dumb rule hunt. Zone abuse remains one of the dumber aspects of 4e's metagame. The other dumb one is the equally long weird rule hunt for anything that could constitute as a "double tap."
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Mar 22, 2015 11:00
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Would it be fair to say that sort of thing was to 4E what "we'll just flood the dungeon with the decanter of endless water" was to 3.5?
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Mar 22, 2015 11:08
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My Lovely Horse posted:Would it be fair to say that sort of thing was to 4E what "we'll just flood the dungeon with the decanter of endless water" was to 3.5? Naw, it's more the super super super in depth picking apart of rules a word at a time that lead to the dumber combos. On the lower end you got "I took this one PrC and now my character knows and can spontaniously cast almost all cleric spells!" On the higher end it was poo poo like Pun-Pun or the Locate City Nuke. The answer is to stop trying to use a thousand little specific rules and just be really BROAD about it. "Each attack is one single attack that benefits from all modifiers once." Then if a power breaks that rule it has to say it. Or poo poo, 4e has keywords, add that; unless a power has the Multiattack keyword (which cannot be added otherwise) it doesn't benefit from modifiers more then once. Likewise with zones - just put in a single goddamn rule that states enemies can only suffer zone damage either once per round or once for each square they voluntarily move through it. If you have a big wall of fire, it's the dumbest thing imaginable that it's actually somehow more damaging to jump in and out of the wall then it is to just sit and roast inside. But asking D&D to use broad and simple rules without wiggle room has been an exercise in pointlessness ever since fuckin' AD&D 1e, a game built on having as many tiny little rules that intersect in the worst ways as possible.
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Mar 22, 2015 11:33
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It would have been possible to genuinely fix 4e (a 4.5e, if you will) and produce a good, balanced, interesting system for combat and non-combat. They asked the 4e CharOp forum about it and we produced something like 10 pages of genuinely useful suggestions - whilst we enjoyed hunting for silly combos, and producing theoretical builds that could backstab Vecna and remain entirely undetected... most of us actually PLAY balanced, relatively low-op characters, and are quite comfortable with, indeed, heavily encourage, a balanced game where everyone's optimising at roughly the same level, to avoid spotlight hogging. We suggested fixing zones, multi-attack/single large attack discrepancy, ridiculous skill optimisation, the hunt for item bonuses to damage, etc etc etc. That's why we were all so bloody pissed off when, when it could have actually fixing 4e, 5e instead failed to fix 3.5. thespaceinvader fucked around with this message at 12:30 on Mar 22, 2015 |
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Mar 22, 2015 12:27
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thespaceinvader posted:It would have been possible to genuinely fix 4e (a 4.5e, if you will) and produce a good, balanced, interesting system for combat and non-combat. They asked the 4e CharOp forum about it and we produced something like 10 pages of genuinely useful suggestions - whilst we enjoyed hunting for silly combos, and producing theoretical builds that could backstab Vecna and remain entirely undetected... most of us actually PLAY balanced, relatively low-op characters, and are quite comfortable with, indeed, heavily encourage, a balanced game where everyone's optimising at roughly the same level, to avoid spotlight hogging. We suggested fixing zones, multi-attack/single large attack discrepancy, ridiculous skill optimisation, the hunt for item bonuses to damage, etc etc etc. Can you link or is it buried in the depths of the WotC forums' re-org from a year or two ago?
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Mar 22, 2015 13:14
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It's not stickied any more, so I doubt very much I could find it even if I had a lot more time than I do currently. Asking in the Q&A thread over there is reasonably likely to yield someone who bookmarked it at the time, though.
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Mar 22, 2015 14:03
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Not So Fast posted:I think having feats be a supplement to the class Archetype works a lot better than how 4e worked. If you have trouble picking one, take the flat ABI, but otherwise you can find neat stuff that compliments the class without being "I need this to actually do anything" like how some 4e feats worked. While I'll agree that feats should never be "I need this just to be able to operate well on a basic level" and that 5e generally succeeds in that regard, and even that many of 5e's feats provide new abilities and effects beyond just +x to something, 5e still takes a step backward by making players choose between it and the ASI. Feats by themselves are impossible to balance as long as their scope of possible effects is so broad, never mind when they're a choice between it and +1 to an attribute modifier.
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Mar 22, 2015 14:17
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thespaceinvader posted:It's not stickied any more, so I doubt very much I could find it even if I had a lot more time than I do currently. If someone finds this, please do share it. Possibly in the 4e thread, I'd hate to further derail this one with the ensuing discussion.
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Mar 22, 2015 16:32
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I have the beginnings of a houserule in my head. Basically, at level 3, Martial characters gain 2 archetypes:
Fighter: chooses from Barbarian, Fighter, and Rogue archetypes Rogue: chooses from Fighter, Ranger, and Rogue archetypes Thoughts?
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Mar 23, 2015 03:34
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Yes please? Man a Barbarian with the Champion Fighter Archetype and Bear Totem Archetype would be nice. So please run a game where I can do this. Also Beastmaster Archetype for the Ranger would be much nicer on a class with another Archetype already. Also hahaha a Fighter or Rogue taking both spellcasting Archetypes. Though this does remind me, it is ridiculous that a Barbarian can't get Expertise in Athletics.
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Mar 23, 2015 03:48
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P.d0t posted:I have the beginnings of a houserule in my head. Basically, at level 3, Martial characters gain 2 archetypes: This sounds like a great idea, and you should do it. But there are some weird cases here, like taking a Barbarian archetype without any levels in Barbarian. Those archetypes mostly modify the Rage ability, so if you don't have Rage then it's kind of a bad choice. It might be more effective if you create a list of archetypes from Fighter/Ranger/Rogue/Barbarian and then modify them to be appropriate to any of the martial classes. So Path of the Berserker would come with a sort of pseudo-Rage, where you don't get all of the Rage bonuses (no DR, no bonus damage) but you can use the Berserker abilities that are only usable during rage.
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Mar 23, 2015 05:04
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P.d0t posted:I have the beginnings of a houserule in my head. Basically, at level 3, Martial characters gain 2 archetypes: Would there be any restrictions on this when someone chooses to multiclass? Could a fighter 3/rogue 3 begin acquiring features from 4 archetypes, for example?
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Mar 23, 2015 05:51
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P.d0t posted:I have the beginnings of a houserule in my head. Basically, at level 3, Martial characters gain 2 archetypes: It would not be terribly difficult as written to game this to accumulate more spells than any full caster possesses.
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Mar 23, 2015 09:30
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:It would not be terribly difficult as written to game this to accumulate more spells than any full caster possesses. Spells mucking up things for martials? Say it ain't so! 
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Mar 23, 2015 10:45
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Thing is its not like the martial classes need more powers, they just need ones which give a bigger impact in play.
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Mar 23, 2015 12:03
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Yeah; giving a broader range of lovely things to choose from still gives them a range of lovely things to choose from.
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Mar 23, 2015 18:18
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RE: organised play stuff Encounters and Expeditions are different things, right? You'd do one or the other, rather than one leading into the other? Someone showed me the GM's PDFs for the Tyranny of Dragons stuff and I can't work out if they interact or are just plot-adjacent.
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Mar 23, 2015 20:48
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mirthdefect posted:RE: organised play stuff They're adjacent. You can do one or another or both. Even with the same character. Elemental Evil encounters started last week (you can still get in fairly early now) and EE Expeditions starts next month.
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Mar 23, 2015 22:03
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:It would not be terribly difficult as written to game this to accumulate more spells than any full caster possesses. That's well-addressed by normal multiclassing rules, I think. Even if you take both of the casting martial archetypes, you're still only a half caster, so your spell progression is defined as such
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Mar 23, 2015 23:39
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QuarkJets posted:That's well-addressed by normal multiclassing rules, I think. Even if you take both of the casting martial archetypes, you're still only a half caster, so your spell progression is defined as such I think the assumption people are making is that you'd get both spellcasting progressions at the same time because you get both path features --so, you'd be able to cast a boatload of spells up to 4th level. Going with the Multiclassing chart instead, Eldritch Knight and Arcane Trickster are 1/3 spellcasters, so at level 20 you'd have 40/3 caster levels. That still gives you a 20th level fighter with 7th level spell slots (even if you only have 4th level spells), as well as both tracks of path features.
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Mar 24, 2015 00:09
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Taran posted:I think the assumption people are making is that you'd get both spellcasting progressions at the same time because you get both path features --so, you'd be able to cast a boatload of spells up to 4th level. Going with the Multiclassing chart instead, Eldritch Knight and Arcane Trickster are 1/3 spellcasters, so at level 20 you'd have 40/3 caster levels. That still gives you a 20th level fighter with 7th level spell slots (even if you only have 4th level spells), as well as both tracks of path features. quote:You determine your available spell slots by adding together all your levels in the bard, cleric, druid, sorcerer, and wizard classes, half your levels (rounded down) in the paladin and ranger classes, and a third of your fighter or rogue levels (rounded down) if you have the Eldritch Knight or the Arcane Trickster feature. According to the rules, even someone who is Rogue 3 / Fighter 3 with both of the casting martial archetypes is still just a 1/3rd caster, not 2/3rd. So in this weird houserule scenario I think it's clear that choosing both casting martial archetypes would also leave you as a 1/3rd caster But even if you further houseruled the houserule so that you're a 2/3rd caster, that's still not anywhere close to accumulating more spell slots than a full caster. Sure, if you take the most liberal interpretation possible then you'll have more spells known but that doesn't count for much, especially when you remember that you're restricted to 4 specific schools QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Mar 24, 2015 |
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Mar 24, 2015 06:45
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So I had a question about how Use Magic Device interacts with scrolls. Basically, does it? I mean the Rogue's Thief Archetype Use Magic Device says you ignore class, level and ability for magic item use. Does that class/level part extend to the spell list, thus allowing a rogue to use scrolls?
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Mar 24, 2015 18:18
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I'd hope so, they're included as magic items and I'd argue that spell list is linked to class pretty loving tightly here. But then, I'm still not sure whether healing potions count as magic items, so other rulings may exist.
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Mar 24, 2015 19:28
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Lotish posted:So I had a question about how Use Magic Device interacts with scrolls. Basically, does it? I mean the Rogue's Thief Archetype Use Magic Device says you ignore class, level and ability for magic item use. Does that class/level part extend to the spell list, thus allowing a rogue to use scrolls? This is D&D Next, where the only correct answer is 'ask your DM'.
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Mar 24, 2015 21:59
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Is it so wrong that martial be better than full casters even one time? Let them have their spells I say!
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Mar 25, 2015 00:36
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Lotish posted:So I had a question about how Use Magic Device interacts with scrolls. Basically, does it? I mean the Rogue's Thief Archetype Use Magic Device says you ignore class, level and ability for magic item use. Does that class/level part extend to the spell list, thus allowing a rogue to use scrolls? It comes down to "Ask your DM", but keep in mind that the Basic Rules were at one point changed very specifically to only allow you to use scrolls from your own class' spell list. This could be interpreted either way as "you really shouldn't ever get to use scrolls with spells for another class" or "this makes Use Magic Device all the more useful because they're the only ones that can use scrolls with spells for another class"
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Mar 25, 2015 00:44
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A tabletop gamer was asking for advice from the writer of a new game he had been playing. "Lately, the game has been less fun; thinking that the rules are unclear and unfair, and finding themselves prone to arguing about them, my friends have been less and less interested in playing. Starting a new campaign seems pointless, and I fear only misery will come of it," he said to the writer. "How can I bring fun back to the table?" To this, the writer said, "The veteran DM Pagliacci has been looking for players for his weekly game. Join that game, and he'll surely show you how the answers you've been seeking." "But sir," he replied, "I am Pagliacci."
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Mar 25, 2015 01:27
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NEXT thread is done. Lets wrap it up folks.
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Mar 25, 2015 01:51
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So WTOC released a new column going over a few questions people have had about casting spells. It is very dumb and I have no idea what person would actually ask these questions Here's the worst of it. quote:Can a spell with an attack roll be used as the attack in the Attack action or as part of the Extra Attack feature? quote:Can you use a melee spell attack to make an opportunity attack? quote:If a spell's material components are consumed, can a spellcasting focus still be used in place of the consumed component? quote:What’s the amount of interaction needed to use a spellcasting focus? Does it have to be included in the somatic component? After reading those last two the only conclusion I can come to is why anyone would use a focus and line itemize their entire spell list for versimilitude over just keeping a free hand and a component pouch.
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Mar 25, 2015 05:23
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When Dragon was still a print magazine they had a Q&A section and every single month it was blindingly obvious stuff. Back then though you wouldn't get pants-on-head retarded clarifications for largely non-existent rules, though.
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Mar 25, 2015 05:32
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Take your pick on which is closer to the truth: that these questions get asked so often that WotC answers them in the magazine, or WotC just answers the easy questions because someone didn't get poo poo done before the deadline appeared. I'm guessing the latter.
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Mar 25, 2015 05:37
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:When Dragon was still a print magazine they had a Q&A section and every single month it was blindingly obvious stuff. Back then though you wouldn't get pants-on-head retarded clarifications for largely non-existent rules, though. The pants on head retarded stuff is what confuses me. Because by clarifying this all they've done is made things even more confusing. Like, There are spells where one of the material components is a powdered gemstone worth X GP, which logically would mean that it's consumed, but it's not. So you draw a magic circle with your gem dust and then just scrape it back up and put it in your bag. You can use the same scrap of meat all day every day to summon beasts because it isn't consumed, even once it has long since gone rotten and stale. Also a spell focus will also cover somatic components but only if it's allowed to cover for material components as well. Kurieg fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Mar 25, 2015 |
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Mar 25, 2015 05:39
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If I were to throw together a crib sheet for 5e newbies like myself formatted for low ink use when printing, what ought to be included? What do you wish had been outlined a little more clearly when you started playing? And if someone has already done this, could I get the link? All I've found out there is DM screens, multi page lovely formatting, only combat-related, or festooned with colored boxes and pretty pictures that waste ink. I'm just looking for the stuff that would help not consult the PHB every three minutes.
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Mar 25, 2015 07:01
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Kurieg posted:You can use the same scrap of meat all day every day to summon beasts because it isn't consumed, even once it has long since gone rotten and stale. You don't have to worry about it rotting, just keep a piece of beef jerky in your component pouch. That stuff lasts forever.
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Mar 25, 2015 07:28
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Lemniscate Blue posted:If I were to throw together a crib sheet for 5e newbies like myself formatted for low ink use when printing, what ought to be included? What do you wish had been outlined a little more clearly when you started playing? I keep a full copy of all the status effects handy pretty much every game. I bring the rules for grappling/shoving/lifting/jumping whenever I play a character that's going to get fancy enough to need it. The rules for hiding and obscured vision can be a nightmare, so anyone playing a rogue should have that immediately available. Everything else has always seemed somewhat straightforward.
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Mar 25, 2015 08:06
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