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Slippery42 posted:In a game I DM where the world has to deal with a moon druid, I've tried to arrange some encounters such that the melee-only wild shape forms can't get to every enemy. I'll either include flying enemies or geography that separates a squad of enemy archers from the rest of the fight. The only time I've even knocked the druid out of wild shape was because he forgot brown bears have better stats than black bears and was using the CR 1/2 creature. This is pretty much my strategy, too. Sometimes I put lots of dudes around the bear and let him go nuts. Everyone enjoys the story of the moon druid absolutely crushing a bunch of cultists. But it's been pretty effective to have the enemies just simply fight on their own terms. A particularly successful encounter saw the moon druid in bear form shaking a tree to knock a scout down (thus giving the scout disadvantage on his actions) while another party member delivered the damage. It was cool because everyone was satisfied, including the moon druid who felt standing up and clawing/shaking the tree was a very bear-thing to do. I try very hard to stay away from the kind of balanced encounter that would work amazingly well in 4e because this game's combat sucks compared to 4e. Everything needs to be a kind of puzzle where damage is a way of solving it. Combat in and of itself is not a rewarding thing to do in 5e, which is kind of damning to say but it is what it is. opulent fountain fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Mar 7, 2016 |
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Mar 7, 2016 00:45
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Slippery42 posted:In a game I DM where the world has to deal with a moon druid, I've tried to arrange some encounters such that the melee-only wild shape forms can't get to every enemy. I'll either include flying enemies or geography that separates a squad of enemy archers from the rest of the fight. The only time I've even knocked the druid out of wild shape was because he forgot brown bears have better stats than black bears and was using the CR 1/2 creature.
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Mar 7, 2016 00:50
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The Crotch posted:The big (party composition-dependent) problem with these sorts of strategies is that they often hit other, non-druid people even harder. Like, hey, great, the harpies are dancing over the bear's head so he has to stick to his normal form and use spells. Meanwhile, the fighter throws stuff I guess? This isn't as bad in 5e as it would have been in 4e, because of the permissiveness w/r/t to using STR or DEX on weapons. Like, the best DEX weapons are two-handed ranged, and the best STR weapons are two-handed melee, but you're still getting your full modifier to your rolls when you switch to a finesse melee or thrown weapon, respectively.
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Mar 7, 2016 00:53
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Yeah, if anything, the real core issue with the Moon Druid is that twice per rest (to start with) it can turn into a better melee fighter than the fighter for an hour at a time, with a huge amount of ablative hit points and self-healing available, and still be a full caster. Keeping stuff at range just means it has to stay a (n admittedly relatively poor offensive) caster, whilst the fighter throws stuff or shoots arrows even less effectually than he hits things up close.
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Mar 7, 2016 00:56
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P.d0t posted:This isn't as bad in 5e as it would have been in 4e, because of the permissiveness w/r/t to using STR or DEX on weapons. Like, the best DEX weapons are two-handed ranged, and the best STR weapons are two-handed melee, but you're still getting your full modifier to your rolls when you switch to a finesse melee or thrown weapon, respectively.
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Mar 7, 2016 01:08
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My coworkers are nerds and we're thinking of doing a 5e campaign. None of us have really played it before but our DM has all the stuff for us. I had a concept in my head for a character that throws a harpoon with a chain attached and impales people and drags them around, because I am a terrible human being. Like some kind of hosed up bounty hunter. Are there any books with weapons like that, or cool house rules that someone has on hand? My DM is pretty open minded as long as it isn't clearly game-breaking bullshit.
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Mar 7, 2016 06:16
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I don't think there's any rules for harpooning people. At first glance, it looks like you could just take the javelin stats, call it a harpoon, and say that it lets you make a grapple check if you hit (or instead of an attack, or whatever).
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Mar 7, 2016 06:31
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AlphaDog posted:I don't think there's any rules for harpooning people. Beaten, but yeah, this is How I Would Do It (TM) There's also this thing from the 3rd Edition Frostburn supplement: quote:Harpoon: 15 gp cost, 1d10 piercing damage, 30 foot range increment In 5th Edition terms: * the Reflex save translates into a DEX save * creatures already cannot charge without the charge feat, so whatever * cannot run translates into cannot use the Dash action * full-around action translates into uses up all your movement and your action Everything else is directly translatable
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Mar 7, 2016 06:43
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Depending on your interpretation of the rules, you can use a weapon (such as a reach weapon) to Shove (aka Trip) enemies 
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Mar 7, 2016 07:01
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Do what I've always done (or at least, tried), and convince your DM that you can use a hunting trap as a reach weapon, swinging it by the chain. When it hits, it'll then snap shut on the enemy.
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Mar 7, 2016 08:01
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The Merrow in the monster manual have a harpoon with rope attack.
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Mar 7, 2016 08:40
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Merrow's an attack at 20' range (60 long range) or Reach, does 2d6 damage, and if the target is smaller than huge it must beat the merrow at a STR contest or be pulled 20' toward it. I don't think giving it Greatsword damage would be a good idea for PCs (maybe set it to 1d6 instead), but the rest seems OK. (e: Smaller than Huge is Large, right? That includes some pretty big stuff (eg, Ogres) for the PC to be dragging around, which could be seen as awesome or bullshit depending on your group). I think it'd be a better idea in general to look for existing PC-facing abilities/rules (grapple, in this case) to use for nonstandard attacks than it would to rewrite stuff from the monster manual, but I feel like that's putting more thought into it than the system really calls for. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 09:21 on Mar 7, 2016 |
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Mar 7, 2016 09:17
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Damage report of my first time DMing: Went really well! After browsing around, I went with The Five Temples of the Earthmother. Also yeah holy poo poo you weren't kidding about level 2 being easier to watch over than level 1. The very first encounter in the campaign left three unconscious and one dead. (To be fair, was their own god drat fault. They were aware of the trap but wanted to be "heroic" in character, so charged in to save the captured villager.) Let the dead person take over the commoner follower they get, then had them work on another character to be introduced at the first town. All went really well! The campaign was super easy to follow and had no real special rules.
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Mar 7, 2016 09:27
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My character class is Cassandra.
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Mar 7, 2016 10:28
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Unearthed Arcana has hit a new low as it's now just short reviews of DM's Guild third-party content.
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Mar 7, 2016 17:24
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gradenko_2000 posted:Beaten, but yeah, this is How I Would Do It (TM) My DM likes your conversion and I think he's going to be a-okay with me playing a character based around that weapon. Now I just need to actually come up with a concept (mechanically, not story-wise) that utilizes it without being poor in combat. I need to figure out what they're going to do AFTER they throw the harpoon, but before it is retrieved from the target.  Also I think I'm going to cart around a bunch of caltrops/bearings/oil/hunting traps.
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Mar 7, 2016 19:40
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gradenko_2000 posted:Beaten, but yeah, this is How I Would Do It (TM) Yeah, but you need to tweak that save. DC 10+1d10+STR could easily be a DC 15-25 for a strong PC. And for a 5E save those are way high.
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Mar 8, 2016 00:36
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jng2058 posted:Yeah, but you need to tweak that save. DC 10+1d10+STR could easily be a DC 15-25 for a strong PC. And for a 5E save those are way high. Yeah, okay. It should probably be something more like DC 8+proficiency bonus+STR to bring it in line with the rest of the game, and the Concentration check should be the standard DC 10 or DC 50% of damage taken, whichever is higher.
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Mar 8, 2016 00:42
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gradenko_2000 posted:Unearthed Arcana has hit a new low as it's now just short reviews of DM's Guild third-party content. I thought you were kidding at first, but... http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/march-2016-review ... wow. So I guess now every other month we get shills for other people's work, so the design team has more time to... do what exactly? Their releases are already extraordinarily slow for a modern D&D edition, and now they're cutting their workload in half?
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Mar 8, 2016 01:17
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It's not even that good for the people making stuff for DM's Guild, either. Spotlighting content every eight weeks isn't exactly a winning plan to get people engaged with the ecosystem, and doing that in lieu of "normal" content is basically diluting an already thin column into pointlessness. There's no reason that the DM's Guild Spotlight isn't a weekly feature separate from UA.
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Mar 8, 2016 04:58
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LFK posted:There's no reason that the DM's Guild Spotlight isn't a weekly feature separate from UA. Of course there's a reason. The reason is , just like everything else regarding this edition.
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Mar 8, 2016 05:07
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Sage Genesis posted:
Sit in a Jury.
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Mar 8, 2016 05:27
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So regular DM is out for a few weeks, I've suggested we do a high level cheese campaign, but was informed it'd be preferred if it was a module. Any advice/suggestions? Cassa fucked around with this message at 07:05 on Mar 10, 2016 |
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Mar 10, 2016 06:59
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Elder Evils but converted to 5e. Other than specific numbers should be fairly easy, similar terms and mearls etc. I think someone in the thread already did a conversion guide of sorts? Edit: Any excuse to use ATROPUS, THE WORLD BORN DEAD 
Ambi fucked around with this message at 11:29 on Mar 10, 2016 |
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Mar 10, 2016 11:27
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Ambi, is your avatar Blackblood, and if so where's the picture from?
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Mar 10, 2016 14:21
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Afraid not, sorry, it's Killboy from Deff Skwadron, a warhammer 40k graphic novel about an ork fighter squadron.
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Mar 10, 2016 14:36
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Sage Genesis posted:I thought you were kidding at first, but... The way they word it is even better. quote:This month, Unearthed Arcana takes a break from giving the D&D design team a chance to introduce new material for your games. Instead, we’ll take a look at some of the most interesting and fun new material to appear on the Dungeon Masters Guild.
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Mar 10, 2016 16:45
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I don't even get people who try to claim there's some grand plan to all this or some cool 11th dimension chessmaster poo poo that Mearls is pulling off, as opposed to simply "the D&D team has never been lazier."
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Mar 10, 2016 22:18
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If you're a webcomic artist working out of your basement in 2004 it's okay to take a break and have a week of guest comics. If you're actually being paid a living wage to come in and Do The Thing, this is less acceptable.
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Mar 11, 2016 03:23
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Scott Adams, the guy who does Dilbert and occasional MRA posting, is doing that right now. He's having a few weeks off and getting guest artists in. Dunno if they're being paid or doing it "for the exposure". It's actually an improvement.
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Mar 11, 2016 13:33
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I think it would be fine to take a break if they had actually done anything substantial.
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Mar 11, 2016 19:19
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Monks. Are they finally worth something?
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Mar 12, 2016 01:16
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DJ Dizzy posted:Monks. Are they finally worth something? 5e monks are actually pretty legit.
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Mar 12, 2016 01:32
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DJ Dizzy posted:Monks. Are they finally worth something? Idk about 2e or 3e/PF, but monks in 1e, 4e, and 5e are all pretty good.
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Mar 12, 2016 01:46
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What do you mean by "finally"? The 5e Monk hasn't changed since the edition's release unless you count playing quantum hot potato with Unarmed Strike mechanics.
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Mar 12, 2016 01:58
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I was referring to the abysmal performance of 3.5 and PF.
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Mar 12, 2016 01:59
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gradenko_2000 posted:What do you mean by "finally"? The 5e Monk hasn't changed since the edition's release unless you count playing quantum hot potato with Unarmed Strike mechanics. They did get a cool new path in SCAG that turns your fists into lasers. Monks look fun and are about as good as you can get without being a spellcaster. Way better than 3.5.
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Mar 12, 2016 02:18
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They are not as bad as the fighter. They get some cool powers, but you need to juggle ki points, which only regenerate after each (short or long) rest. The only thing that I think would be thematic that is completely overlooked is monks being able to grapple with DEX as a default.
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Mar 12, 2016 02:41
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How does the sun soul compare to the open fist? Is unarmed combat viable?
DJ Dizzy fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Mar 12, 2016 |
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Mar 12, 2016 03:10
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DJ Dizzy posted:I was referring to the abysmal performance of 3.5 and PF. There was some oversight in a splatbook monk variant that let them take any [fighter] feat without having the prereqs, including epic feats. Even with access to that cheesey poo poo monks were still weak. Says it all, really.
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Mar 12, 2016 03:18
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