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Kaysette posted:Or go full Dark Souls with a sun-praising paladin in the mood for some jolly cooperation. Or team up with another player and go for both.
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Apr 15, 2016 04:39
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CaPensiPraxis posted:EDIT: I really enjoy playing 3.5 if the game I'm playing is (mechanically) focused around playing gimmick builds, not just good ones. My favorite are the alternate mechanic spellcasters, who either use vancian casting with some totally different slots or casting mechanic, or (fixed versions of) truenamers/binders/etc. Some of the outright casters can also be fun if you pick a theme and religiously stick to it. Yeah I'm running a 3.5e game with a Warlock, Binder and a Dungeoncrashing Fighter/Intimidating Barbarian with a bunch of homebrew and houserules, and while it's getting to that point where it's difficult to even challenge them, at least everyone is relatively on the same plane, even if that plane is "literally shut down the encounter by round 2"
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Apr 15, 2016 05:02
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How does multi classing work in 5e? Is it worth it?
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Apr 15, 2016 06:43
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FordCQC posted:How does multi classing work in 5e? Is it worth it? Fighter level 1, wizard/bard everything else. Namaste friend. Its kind of a dumb optimization mess really and literally every class is improved by taking a wizard level or 2 with no downsides.
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Apr 15, 2016 06:46
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FordCQC posted:How does multi classing work in 5e? Is it worth it? They made multiclassing between spellcasting classes much more fluid and less punishing, but still think that putting class defining features at levels 17 and above are a good idea as a consequence.
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Apr 15, 2016 06:51
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Playing Curse of Strahd or such, and running around blindenstone when we ran into some enemies that caused petrification. Which is a bitch of a status to be honest. 1/2 our party got turned to stone, luckily the charm spamming bard and ranger stomped everything that Glabagool didn't eat. Which made me look up how to get rid of Petrification and is it really just Greater Restoration/wish? :/
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Apr 15, 2016 07:21
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AlphaDog posted:I agree with the first part, but I found Dungeon World to be extremely easy and fun to GM once I got a handle on the system. I really like that I mostly end up reacting to the PCs' actions (and players' thoughts and comments) rather than trying to plan everything out in advance, and that this is a core assumption of the system. To play like that in D&D (any D&D) takes a lot of prep work, maybe even more than trying to run something that is close to on-rails. You can do this in D&D fairly easily, actually - it just requires a different set of preparations than you usually do. It's basically the sandbox model the OSR advocates for, that was popular during OD&D/1e and fell out of favour from 2e through 4e. (Pathfinder flirts with it a little bit.) Look at some OSR blogs like the Hill Cantons or Hack & Slash; Frog God Games products like the Borderland Provinces (this one comes in 5e) also work towards this model. The Borderland Provinces Journey Generator is loving amazing. My problem with Dungeon World is that it's not a good game for replacing D&D. That might seem counterintuitive, but if you think about what Dungeon World tries to do, it's trying to replicate and evoke fantasy fiction, which is very different from D&D. It does the kinds of back and forth and switching focus and so on you find in fiction very well, but it doesn't replicate D&D's play styles or dynamics. So Dungeon World works really well for people coming into fantasy roleplaying games and who want to play a game like the Lord of the Rings or whatever. It doesn't work for me, because I just like D&D and want to run a D&D game on its own terms. I didn't like running it because I found it really mushy and slow to make D&D challenges out of. But if I'm not playing D&D, PbtA works well - Monsterhearts or AW, for example.
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Apr 15, 2016 10:32
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FordCQC posted:In AD&D Ravenloft, playing a paladin was a death sentence more or less. Have they toned that down? I'm not that familiar with the 2e Ravenloft campaign setting, but Curse of Strahd is a sequel to the Ravenloft module from 1e, not the campaign setting. The base assumptions in those two cases are very different: "damned folk trying to survive in a horrific prison-world" versus "adventurers stuck in a gothic horror realm and trying to find a way home through heroic acts." A paladin fits the second very well, but not the first. As with a lot of things in 5e, the only answer is ask your DM. If they're running Curse of Strahd, a paladin is fine. If they're running a separate Ravenloft campaign, then it might not be.
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Apr 15, 2016 10:37
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Arivia posted:You can do this in D&D fairly easily, actually - it just requires a different set of preparations than you usually do. It's basically the sandbox model the OSR advocates for, that was popular during OD&D/1e and fell out of favour from 2e through 4e. (Pathfinder flirts with it a little bit.) Look at some OSR blogs like the Hill Cantons or Hack & Slash; Frog God Games products like the Borderland Provinces (this one comes in 5e) also work towards this model. The Borderland Provinces Journey Generator is loving amazing. The majority of D&D I've run since 1988 has been sandbox games in BECMI through 2nd ed. It's "fairly easy", yes. It still requires as much, if not more, preparatation than a game in those systems where you go from encounter to encounter in a set order. Arivia posted:My problem with Dungeon World is that it's not a good game for replacing D&D. That might seem counterintuitive, but if you think about what Dungeon World tries to do, it's trying to replicate and evoke fantasy fiction, which is very different from D&D. It does the kinds of back and forth and switching focus and so on you find in fiction very well, but it doesn't replicate D&D's play styles or dynamics. That's a legit reason not to like Dungeon World, but I'm kinda  at the idea that D&D isn't intended to emulate fantasy fiction.
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Apr 15, 2016 11:15
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AlphaDog posted:That's a legit reason not to like Dungeon World, but I'm kinda I think that comes from the game's wargaming roots. D&D has always had other influences than fantasy fiction - in 1e and 2e it was wargames, and by the time 3e rolled around you had people making a new edition of D&D for its own sake, drawing from their own experiences playing D&D. Sure, D&D has taken characters and ideas from fantasy fiction a plenty, but the narratives and the modes of play have always been significantly different. Gygax's dungeon philosophies and Arneson's Temple of the Frog are both distinctly different from fantasy fiction, and things go from there. The closest D&D has ever come to emulating fantasy fiction was Dragonlance's original modules, and then one of the discourses of design throughout 2e. (Otherwise there wouldn't have been anything to go back to the dungeon from in 3.0.) edit: I think you could argue that a lot of people play D&D in order to emulate fantasy fiction, because that's what they want to do. That's conversely why D&D fits a lot of groups poorly and DW does well, because DW is a system designed for what they're actually trying to do. D&D isn't designed to emulate fantasy fiction, and that's why it feels so bad to those groups. Arivia fucked around with this message at 11:37 on Apr 15, 2016 |
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Apr 15, 2016 11:33
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AlphaDog posted:That's a legit reason not to like Dungeon World, but I'm kinda
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Apr 15, 2016 11:41
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AlphaDog posted:That's a legit reason not to like Dungeon World, but I'm kinda Serious answer, D&D is intended to emulate fantasy fiction, DW is intended to emulate fantasy fiction.
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Apr 15, 2016 12:40
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Rangers fight with two swords because obviously that's what they'd do in a war game. Also there's these short guys called hob... sued? By Tolkien's estate? OK OK, tell them we'll settle and change it to "halflings". You put in an appendix with a list of what now? It's too late to change it? poo poo man, people are going to think the game's about the same sort of stuff in those books! why would you give them the wrong impression like that? -Gary Gygax, probably.
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Apr 15, 2016 13:08
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AlphaDog posted:Rangers fight with two swords because obviously that's what they'd do in a war game. Also there's these short guys called hob... sued? By Tolkien's estate? OK OK, tell them we'll settle and change it to "halflings". You put in an appendix with a list of what now? It's too late to change it? poo poo man, people are going to think the game's about the same sort of stuff in those books! why would you give them the wrong impression like that? Why are you being deliberately dense? Three different people have explained this in different ways to you now. D&D isn't meant to emulate fantasy fiction, it's really not that hard to understand.
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Apr 15, 2016 13:15
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Arivia posted:D&D isn't meant to emulate fantasy fiction, it's really not that hard to understand. D&D was meant to emulate fantasy fiction, it's just that by now D&D has developed enough of its own style that when you say you want a game that "does D&D", you're talking about a completely different subgenre and aesthetic. But D&D has never officially acknowledged that, such that people who aren't deep into the hobby and into the jargon will look at D&D and think it's still meant to emulate fantasy fiction.
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Apr 15, 2016 13:22
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Arivia posted:Why are you being deliberately dense? Three different people have explained this in different ways to you now. D&D isn't meant to emulate fantasy fiction, it's really not that hard to understand. Are you really trying to say that D&D was never meant to emulate fantasy fiction?
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Apr 15, 2016 13:25
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Whatever it was meant to do originally, the only fantasy fiction D&D is capable of emulating nowadays is the sort written by authors who grew up playing D&D and can't break out of that paradigm.
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Apr 15, 2016 13:32
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Whatever it was meant to do originally, the only fantasy fiction D&D is capable of emulating nowadays is the sort written by authors who grew up playing D&D and can't break out of that paradigm. Absolutely.
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Apr 15, 2016 13:32
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Also worth noting that 5th Edition actually does have an Appendix N full of fantasy fiction, so (like a lot of things with 5th Edition) the writers are still trying to keep up appearances that it's a fantasy fiction emulator. I mean, my God, they've got Terry Brooks, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Glen Cook, Hickman and Weis, Ursula LeGuin, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Terry Pratchett, and JRR Tolkien in there. And because they need maximum nerd cred, it also has August Derleth and HP Lovecraft, China Mieville and George RR Martin. EDIT: I really want to highlight how that list is so simultaneously generic and broad and ... can I use the term schizophrenic for this? Like, if your game is supposed to emulate Warriors of Mars, the Black Company, Dragonlance, Lord of the Rings, the Cthulhu Mythos, Game of Thrones, and loving Discworld all at one point or another, what is it?! gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 14:00 on Apr 15, 2016 |
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Apr 15, 2016 13:41
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From the introduction and foreword to the 5th ed PHB, about the original creators: "They were tired of merely reading tales about worlds of magic, monsters, and adventure. They wanted to play in those worlds, rather than observe them."
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Apr 15, 2016 13:43
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AlphaDog posted:Rangers fight with two swords because obviously that's what they'd do in a war game. Also there's these short guys called hob... sued? By Tolkien's estate? OK OK, tell them we'll settle and change it to "halflings". You put in an appendix with a list of what now? It's too late to change it? poo poo man, people are going to think the game's about the same sort of stuff in those books! why would you give them the wrong impression like that? e: beaten As an aside, Aragorn didn't dual wield as a thing. AFAIK rangers dual wield because drizzt dual wielded and was a ranger. So Splicer posted:D&D is only intended to emulate D&D Splicer fucked around with this message at 13:57 on Apr 15, 2016 |
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Apr 15, 2016 13:54
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Splicer posted:As an aside, Aragorn didn't dual wield as a thing. AFAIK rangers dual wield because drizzt dual wielded and was a ranger. So Rangers only get dual-wield from 2nd ed, right? If that's right, then yeah, it's because drizzt, I'm an idiot. Instead, I should have used one of their level titles is literally "Strider" as the example.
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Apr 15, 2016 14:07
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AD&D rangers aren't dual wielders  Also D&D very explicitly did not start off as a way to emulate fiction, which is why OD&D and AD&D characters, well, can't. It's why it's impossible to make Conan. That wasn't the point. That doesn't mean people didn't try to USE D&D to emulate fiction, mind you, just that it wasn't what the game was made for - and to be honest, it's still not what I think of when I think "D&D." I don't think Dungeon World is that great because it's stuck between trying to be D&D and trying to be a more narrative game and, in my opinion, doesn't do either with enough satisfaction.
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Apr 15, 2016 14:08
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I guess we're using "emulate fiction" differently, but when the rulebook contains a list of fantasy novels and the author's comment "The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft, and A. Merritt; but all of the above authors, as well as many not listed, certainly helped to shape the form of the game", I don't know how I'm supposed to read that as anything other than "I tried to make a game about the same kind of stuff you find in those books".
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Apr 15, 2016 14:20
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AlphaDog posted:Are you really trying to say that D&D was never meant to emulate fantasy fiction? Never? No. That was the stated goal of the Dragonlance project, and it influenced 2e as I stated previously. Otherwise, D&D has never been designed to emulate fantasy fiction, yes. OD&D/1e were about the dungeon and the sandbox (hexcrawl), 2e was really big about bringing other influences into AD&D (campaign settings, historical reenactments, so on), and 3e had the back to the dungeon philosophy. I think you're confusing taking elements of fantasy fiction and incorporating them into D&D with the game actively emulating fantasy fiction. Gygax took alignments from Moorcock and halflings from Tolkien, sure, but he never made his games to emulate those fictions in narrative or style. The Forgotten Realms have a wide gulf between the novels and the gaming content, and specifically had different philosophies for both until 5e. Dragonlance is the only D&D standard that's ever broken from different interpretations of D&D as D&D first and foremost. (You could possibly include the Conan and Lankhmar modules as the same, but I'm not at all familiar with them so I can't talk about them.)
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Apr 15, 2016 14:24
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AlphaDog posted:I guess we're using "emulate fiction" differently, but when the rulebook contains a list of fantasy novels and the author's comment "The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft, and A. Merritt; but all of the above authors, as well as many not listed, certainly helped to shape the form of the game", I don't know how I'm supposed to read that as anything other than "I tried to make a game about the same kind of stuff you find in those books". Influences and making a game about aren't the same at all. Go compare the rest of the 1e DMG to Pelgrane's Dying Earth RPG, there's a huge difference in play.
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Apr 15, 2016 14:25
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AlphaDog posted:Rangers only get dual-wield from 2nd ed, right? If that's right, then yeah, it's because drizzt, I'm an idiot. *industrialisation and the peasants not knowing their place Splicer fucked around with this message at 14:29 on Apr 15, 2016 |
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Apr 15, 2016 14:25
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AlphaDog posted:Are you really trying to say that D&D was never meant to emulate fantasy fiction? What does the wizard emulate? Definitely not Vance, Merlin, or Gandalf. The only thing it ever emulated was a wargame artillery piece. The cleric is a crazy mishmash of influences added to counter another PC's vampire character. The fighter definitely can't emulate Hercules, Beowulf, or Cu Chulainn. The thief has plenty of fantasy fictional analogues (everyone loves a good heist story), but the mechanics have always been hit or miss (literally, with a starting ~30% chance to successfully use their skills in older editions). And I'm not 100% up on all fantasy fiction, but I haven't heard of any involving 10 foot poles or adventurers deathly afraid of cloaks or listening at wooden doors. (Sorry if that comes off as confrontational. I'm more just poking fun at the game itself.)
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Apr 15, 2016 14:48
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MERP is probably the poster-boy for that "doesn't actually emulate the thing it says it does, despite nominally containing all of its elements" effect
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Apr 15, 2016 15:29
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gradenko_2000 posted:MERP is probably the poster-boy for that "doesn't actually emulate the thing it says it does, despite nominally containing all of its elements" effect Wasn't MERP basically D&D with Tolkien names slapped on, complete with whole new regions created just for new things to stab and rob?
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Apr 15, 2016 15:41
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Arivia posted:Wasn't MERP basically D&D with Tolkien names slapped on, complete with whole new regions created just for new things to stab and rob? RoleMaster, actually, but RM is just positive-percentile-based D&D* anyway, so yes. The game world was all Tolkien, except you still murderhobo'd everywhere and were expected to get piles of treasure and lots of magic items (necessary to keep pace with the monster mechanics!) and cast lots of spells. * feel free to take offense at my being overly reductive!
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Apr 15, 2016 15:48
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It's funny because one of the more valid criticisms of Dungeon World is that it spends too much time and effort attempting to emulate D&D specifically instead of fantasy fiction in general. Things like using the six classic stats, rolled hit point damage, pseudo-vancian Wizards, etc. and an emphasis on mechanical +X bonuses in a lot of playbook moves are often cited as weaknesses of a game that's based on a system which is frequently stronger when it's emulating fiction than one specific RPG. By contrast you have Fellowship which is less concerned with being D&D But *World and more about zeroing in on a specific type of heroic journey ala Lord of the Rings.
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Apr 15, 2016 17:54
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I tried Dungeon World with a bunch of people used to D&D 5e as you all got me a bit excited. I really enjoyed it and I think it was ran properly but I think it was a matter of expectations that everyone else seemed to not really get what they needed from it. There was some real eye opening "You know, I think I always just wanted a tabletop game with roleplaying elements." That's great though, glad people figured out what they wanted. However, I have taken a lot of tips from DW that I'll be applying to my D&D games. I enjoy the player contributions. Also we talked it over and all liked the idea of if someone fails a roll within, say 5, they have the option of succeeding but the DM enacts one of the dangers or complications outlined in DW (such as suffering an attack, losing an item or gaining the attention of a monster deeper in the depths). I had someone bring up "stunt points" from another game (that they didn't remember.) She was saying that apparently you roll 3 dice along with your 20 if you're making a standard melee attack and if you get any doubles or triples you get stunt points you can spend on special stunts? I was thinking that it might be a cool way to bridge the "fun poo poo to do" gap between casters and melee. (I know there's other problems with 5e, but one battle at a time) Has anyone seen anything like this fleshed out? Even if it's not specifically for 5e that's fine, I'd butcher it up for our needs anyway.
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Apr 15, 2016 18:02
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Harvey Mantaco posted:I tried Dungeon World with a bunch of people used to D&D 5e as you all got me a bit excited. I really enjoyed it and I think it was ran properly but I think it was a matter of expectations that everyone else seemed to not really get what they needed from it. There was some real eye opening "You know, I think I always just wanted a tabletop game with roleplaying elements." This sounds like a good group. Also, learning just what everyone enjoys is huge and should help everyone have more fun in the future.
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Apr 15, 2016 18:11
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Being bad at a thing does not mean you aren't trying to do that thing.
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Apr 15, 2016 18:33
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Harvey Mantaco posted:I tried Dungeon World with a bunch of people used to D&D 5e as you all got me a bit excited. I really enjoyed it and I think it was ran properly but I think it was a matter of expectations that everyone else seemed to not really get what they needed from it. There was some real eye opening "You know, I think I always just wanted a tabletop game with roleplaying elements." One of my favorite things I took from Dungeon World is how I react to failures on knowledge checks. Nowhere in the moves does it say "lie to your players", so whenever they flub a knowledge check, I always "reveal an unwelcome truth" to tell them something that they didn't want to hear. It eliminates a lot of metagaming around trying to minimize the effects of a roll the players know they flubbed but having to act on bad information. That said, DW specifically has lost a lot of its shine for me after we had a Captain break the game mechanics over their knee with the hireling rules. Getting massive bonuses to damage with a highly focused hireling kind of messed things up. I probably could have done something about it, but I don't like having to fix games like that, especially when it involves nerfing a PC.
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Apr 15, 2016 18:34
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Harvey Mantaco posted:I had someone bring up "stunt points" from another game (that they didn't remember.) She was saying that apparently you roll 3 dice along with your 20 if you're making a standard melee attack and if you get any doubles or triples you get stunt points you can spend on special stunts? I was thinking that it might be a cool way to bridge the "fun poo poo to do" gap between casters and melee. (I know there's other problems with 5e, but one battle at a time) This is a mechanic from Fantasy AGE. It's a D&D-like game, but where D&D's basic die roll is a single 20-sided die for a range of 1 to 20, Fantasy AGE uses three 6-sided die for a range of 3 to 18 (that's biased toward the middle values). When you roll the dice in Fantasy AGE, one out of the three d6's should be a different color. That's your Stunt Die. If any two of the three d6's come up as doubles, then you can do a Stunt. Stunts cost Stunt Points, and the number of Stunt Points you have to work with is determined by your Stunt Die. So let's say I roll three d6's, and they come up as 4, 5 and 5. And my third die is the Stunt Die. A Stunt is triggered because I rolled doubles, and I have 5 Stunt Points to work with. The game then has a number of Stunts available:  With 5 points, I could for example spend all 5 points on the Lethal Blow Stunt to add 2d6 damage to my attack, perhaps if I was attacking with a crossbow I could spend 1 point to do a Rapid Reload Stunt, then 3 points for a Lightning Attack Stunt to shoot again (but first I had to instantly reload my crossbow with Rapid Reload), and then spend the last Stunt Point on Skirmish to push the target away by 2 yards.
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Apr 15, 2016 18:42
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Harvey Mantaco posted:I had someone bring up "stunt points" from another game (that they didn't remember.) She was saying that apparently you roll 3 dice along with your 20 if you're making a standard melee attack and if you get any doubles or triples you get stunt points you can spend on special stunts? I was thinking that it might be a cool way to bridge the "fun poo poo to do" gap between casters and melee. (I know there's other problems with 5e, but one battle at a time) To add to the above, Dungeon Crawl Classics has a similar system with its Mighty Deeds of Arms rules (which, IIRC, are only for fighters). You roll an additional die every time you roll to hit -- starting with a d3 at first level, and increasing in size after that -- and if you get 3+ you can add a special effect to the attack or do a stunt.
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Apr 15, 2016 19:24
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gradenko_2000 posted:Also worth noting that 5th Edition actually does have an Appendix N full of fantasy fiction, so (like a lot of things with 5th Edition) the writers are still trying to keep up appearances that it's a fantasy fiction emulator. I mean, my God, they've got Terry Brooks, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Glen Cook, Hickman and Weis, Ursula LeGuin, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Terry Pratchett, and JRR Tolkien in there. Ask your DM.
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Apr 15, 2016 20:10
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gradenko_2000 posted:This is a mechanic from Fantasy AGE. It's a D&D-like game, but where D&D's basic die roll is a single 20-sided die for a range of 1 to 20, Fantasy AGE uses three 6-sided die for a range of 3 to 18 (that's biased toward the middle values). That's kinda cute, anything else noteworthy about the system?
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Apr 15, 2016 20:30
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