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mango sentinel posted:Rolling 1s played to comedic or dire effect can be really great, especially in cases of PCs swinging for the fences at stuff they shouldn't. Playing every 1 as a dire critical failure is idiotic. PCs are typically trained, skilled adventurers, not buffoons. Maybe talk to your group about that. Olympic archers don't have a 1/20 chance to shoot themselves in the dick every time they draw, maybe neither should your ranger. That's how my DM plays them, to the comedic effect, along with joking with frequent misses in general. Our rogue has some sentient weapons for example, and he missed twice in as many attacks. Apparently the kuo toa just asked him "Aight dude, want me to just take them? Would be a waste otherwise" Good opportunity to get some levity in between die rolling.
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Aug 10, 2016 00:28
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Every table I've ever sat at employed natural 1s as a special failure result, but almost always as either a mild inconvenience or a comedy option.
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Aug 10, 2016 00:38
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In Rolemaster rolls 5 and below and 96 and above were considered "open" rolls, and you had to roll again and add (or substract) the numbers. You could keep doing this indefinitely as long as you kept getting "open" rolls, and end up rolling 293 to your attack... Or -76 for your critical failure. When that happened, you went to the Critical Failures Table and compare your roll against the type of action you were attempting to do. You could literally kill yourself with your own swords, trip while attempting a kick and break your neck, or put a crossbow bolt through your ally's head.
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Aug 10, 2016 01:31
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Edmond Dantes posted:In Rolemaster rolls 5 and below and 96 and above were considered "open" rolls, and you had to roll again and add (or substract) the numbers. You could keep doing this indefinitely as long as you kept getting "open" rolls, and end up rolling 293 to your attack... Someone did a ran a battle simulation between the pre-statted soldiers in rolemaster, and found out the crit fumble rules made them take more damage from their own side than the enemy.
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Aug 10, 2016 04:34
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I've gone so far as to houserule that natural 1's aren't even misses (or skill check failures) if the total modified roll is still high enough to hit the target number. It hasn't come up very often, but it has allowed the occasional hit/success.
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Aug 10, 2016 04:46
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I'm going to be running Storm King's Thunder once it releases, assuming it isn't complete dogshit. I plan to ignore as many Adventurer's League rules as I can get away with and I will be using the Escalation Die from 13th Age, at least behind the scenes. Any other recommendations for 5E?
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Aug 10, 2016 05:38
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Admiral Joeslop posted:I'm going to be running Storm King's Thunder once it releases, assuming it isn't complete dogshit. I plan to ignore as many Adventurer's League rules as I can get away with and I will be using the Escalation Die from 13th Age, at least behind the scenes. Any other recommendations for 5E? Skip to level 3. Every adventure I've played pads poo poo out til that point anyway (Princes of the Apocalypse being the worst offender, since none of that poo poo is even tangentially related to the plot.) Alternatively, if you want to start at level 1, let the PCs add their CON score (or pick between STR or CON scores. IMHO) to their HP at level 1. Or just don't let monsters crit as per the normal rules, that also solves most of the problem. And remember to give out Inspiration and/or liberally apply Advantage post-hoc to lovely rolls.
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Aug 10, 2016 07:25
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I'd consider letting players start every session with an Inspiration die already in their possession. It increases player agency and reminds everyone that the mechanic exists.
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Aug 10, 2016 07:40
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I think between the players and our GM, we've remembered to do Inspiration maybe twice.
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Aug 10, 2016 07:49
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The alternative is to use the Action Points mechanic in the DMG*, which removes the "did I do some roleplaying that let me earn a die?" question altogether in favor of a bank of d6's that you can trigger whenever you really need something to go your way. * which is itself a derivative of the Action Points variant rule from 3.5e / Eberron
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Aug 10, 2016 07:58
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In 5e they call them Hero Points, though. Goons who play 5e PbP seem to prefer them. The thing with Advantage (i.e. from Inspiration) is it can turn a lovely roll into... any roll (randomly.) Whereas Hero Points turn an "ok but not quite good enough"-roll into "usually a success"; if you rolled a 2 and you need a 10, tough poo poo. It's a fine line, but it really depends on your taste.
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Aug 10, 2016 08:05
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I am in general a big fan of targeted uses of limited resources over praying to RNJesus. A Battlemaster throwing in a Superiority Die to end an enemy NOW, WHEN YOU NEED IT, is vastly more useful than a Champion potentially critting an enemy unpredictably. Even if the latter's batting average is better.
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Aug 10, 2016 08:10
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It sucks to spend an action point and fail anyway, have them just add +20 to the roll. Even damage rolls.
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Aug 10, 2016 08:43
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gradenko_2000 posted:I am in general a big fan of targeted uses of limited resources over praying to RNJesus. A Battlemaster throwing in a Superiority Die to end an enemy NOW, WHEN YOU NEED IT, is vastly more useful than a Champion potentially critting an enemy unpredictably. Even if the latter's batting average is better. It's worth noting that the latter's batting average actually isn't better unless you go for some absurd 10+ amount of encounters without taking a short rest.
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Aug 10, 2016 09:19
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So deck of the abyss update, now we gotta make 15th level characters to save the 10th level monk and ranger and I'm kinda thinking that we don't really need this hassle. They were sidelined in a fight vs the mindflayers and we didn't lose anything, and the cleric is guaranteed a level up so yeah. Onwards, not backwards. People die all the time in the underdark. But I'd love some charop suggestions for a 15th level Cleric, most of the group is making melee, except for one sorceror, and a paladin from a prior game is making a return.
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Aug 10, 2016 09:44
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Cassa posted:So deck of the abyss update, now we gotta make 15th level characters to save the 10th level monk and ranger and I'm kinda thinking that we don't really need this hassle.
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Aug 10, 2016 11:30
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Splicer posted:That cleric from the DMG that's a necromancer but better Light cleric since radiant and fire damage gently caress up everything in the Underdark. Good synergy with the paladin, too.
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Aug 10, 2016 12:36
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where do critical misses even originate from? I've always played with them but I can't find them in the early rulebooks. Maybe just hackmaster bleeding over?
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Aug 10, 2016 13:18
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Don't think fumbles were in AD&D, but they're an optional rule in 2nd ed. DMG page 61. The suggested way is that it's some bad event that doesn't cause damage but makes you lose next round's attack. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 14:15 on Aug 10, 2016 |
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Aug 10, 2016 14:13
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Critical hits were an optional or even non-existent rule all the way up to AD&D 2nd Edition, with Gygax even explicitly repudiating the idea in AD&D 1e and Dragon Magazine. People just thought that a "natural 20" was special enough to deserve an extra effect. Critical fumbles were just an inversion of that idea: if your 1970s OD&D-playing group made it so that nat 20s decapitated heads or dealt double-damage or whatever, it would only be fair if natural 1's also had a special negative effect. It's cultural osmosis that's been passed down from generation to generation.
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Aug 10, 2016 14:28
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GM in current game uses critical misses. It's made me paranoid about reporting ones.
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Aug 10, 2016 14:59
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The first campaign we played our DM did ridiculous fumbles every time. As time went on though everyone started getting pretty annoyed with it because it made the characters into bumbling fools. As a DM myself I just have them be regular misses, depending on the check I have different levels of information they get or overlook. For attacks I do roll a % after a 1 and if it's a 90%+ then it might be something special, but I don't make it so much a "fumble" but something unexpected happens to cause the unusual miss.
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Aug 10, 2016 15:32
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Ran the first part of the starter box adventure last weekend. Good stuff, but I knew the system was going to be brutal at 1st so I implemented a houserule: At 1st level and ONLY at 1st level, you have extra hp equal to the max result on your HD. You don't actually gain extra HD and you don't add your CON modifier. I feel like this simple fix significantly improved our enjoyment of the game. The wizard got beaten up, but she lived. The fighter dropped to 0 hp at one point, but only after tanking a ton of hits from the boss and his minions, and the cleric picked him right back up. I don't feel bad that it vastly increases low-level survivability because if the game goes on further, 6-12 extra HP will quickly become irrelevant, but by then the PCs will have far more ways to stay on their feet and mitigate damage.
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Aug 10, 2016 17:47
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If I just gave a fighter the Champion archetype poo poo for free while they level into one of the other ones how would that balance out?
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Aug 10, 2016 19:06
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Novum posted:If I just gave a fighter the Champion archetype poo poo for free while they level into one of the other ones how would that balance out? Pretty good. Do it.
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Aug 10, 2016 19:21
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Novum posted:If I just gave a fighter the Champion archetype poo poo for free while they level into one of the other ones how would that balance out? On the whole, I think fighter is actually one of the better off martials though. Rangers are pretty awful and rogues are really lackluster outside of the free move action. But if they can't sneak attack for any reason they're dead weight. So you could also maybe just give the rogue the assassin for free, and I dunno about the ranger. Paladins sound like they're in a decent spot, and bear barbarians are pretty good tanks, if kinda boring. Maybe you could give Champion stuff to the barbarian too? What you're not going to fix by tacking on a few extra passive abilities is the fact that most of the martials never really have a way to choose to shine. Sure, you can hit for a decent sized crit, but that's out of your hands. Really what you're doing is speeding up the mop-up phase of the combat, where the spellcasters have either blown their big disable or decided the party can just slug it out. Either way that part of combat is pretty boring, so I say go for it.
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Aug 10, 2016 19:22
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ImpactVector posted:Rangers are pretty awful I was recently discussing the difference between the ostensibly nature-themed Paladin archetype vs. the Cleric Nature domain; shockingly, Clerics get similar stuff but more and sooner and better. I wonder what would happen if you just straight up stapled that domain's progression onto Rangers.
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Aug 10, 2016 20:55
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I think Beastmaster Ranger truly is awful as written, but in general the other ranger paths aren't as bad as a lot of players want them to be. If you're relentlessly into tunnel-focused min-maxing and specialization it is true that there's no one thing in a ranger's wheelhouse that another class can't do better (druids are better at nature magic, rogues with a high int build are better at stealth and scouting, fighters are better at bow fighting or duel wielding.) But while each of those classes are good at one thing and most likely unremarkable at the others, rangers are solid silver medalists at all of those things at once, and that is pretty ok imo.
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Aug 10, 2016 21:05
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Bluedeanie posted:I think Beastmaster Ranger truly is awful as written, but in general the other ranger paths aren't as bad as a lot of players want them to be. Ranger doesn't really get anything that makes it a good "jack-of-some-trades" class as you're describing here. It gets an extra attack, a stealth feature, and some spells, but that doesn't put it in "silver medal" position in any niche; it is itself "unremarkable" at all that. Mechanically I'd argue it's strictly worse than Rogue or Fighter in every practical respect, which are themselves not good when compared to other classes.
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Aug 10, 2016 21:33
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Ranger is a fuckawful jack-of-all-trades. They can gather food better than other classes, and they're sometimes a little faster at overland travel. When they eventually get a pile of mediocre spells (and they have to choose specific spells to learn, unlike every other divine class, so gently caress versatility I guess), they can burn them to learn if members of certain broad creature groups exist in their general area. No expertise, no advantage on anything except tracking their favoured enemies. But hey, at level 10, you can get a +10 bonus to stealth so long as you stand still and take no actions! Maybe some day I'll gain the incredible ability to be immune to tracking (nonmagical only). The ranger's combat abilities are a wash. The "good archetype" is a worse fighter than any other weapon user. Horde Breaker is actually useful, but god drat, look at the rest of that trash. Giant Killer? Steel Will? You don't see anything even remotely useful again until level 11. I guess having the worst class capstone in the game (~+3 or +4 to either the attack roll or the damage roll on one attack against a favoured enemy once per round, only on your turn) isn't really a big deal because who the gently caress is playing to 20, especially single-class god drat ranger, but it's a nice final insult. The ranger is a jack-of-all-trades class that is worse at being broad than classes that are supposed to be specialized, let alone the loving bard.
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Aug 10, 2016 22:01
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Ranger is particularly frustrating because Natural Explorer and Favored Enemy are all circumstantial bonuses, and largely those are "ribbon" abilities. Like, it's great if you're in a campaign where the DM tells you from the get-go "we're gonna be in the Underdark the whole time, and you'll fight lots of Gnolls" or whatever. And Natural Explorer still requires you to have pre-existing proficiency with the applicable skills, in order to gain the mechanical benefit (and which skills those are is about 50% up to the DM) and it's a class that doesn't otherwise benefit from INT; it basically tells you "invest in INT skills and we'll give you additional math to support it, otherwise your class feature does nothing." I've definitely seen parts of ranger used in effective builds, particularly the Spell-less Ranger and that absurd Ambuscade Ranger. But straight out of the PHB, you gain all the Ranger's Armor and Weapon proficiencies and a bonus skill if you MC into it later. As a straight-class? I mean, dip in for the lower-level benefits, but then figure out the class that focuses well on the thing you want to be good at, and take that one the rest of the way, IMHO.
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Aug 10, 2016 22:02
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Paladins are actually Good, as are Barbarians (so long as you take the right totem), at least mechanically. The thing about Champion is that nothing he gets is interesting. Adding the Champion as a default "all melee gets this" doesn't actually help a lot; it just makes some of their combat numbers go up, and few melee NEED that. Like, for whatever it's worth, once you grab a polearm and the appropriate feats, you're going to be a good Thing Killer. What non-casters lack isn't the ability to kill stuff better, it's the ability to do anything else. Except Ranger, Ranger's a pile of dogshit.
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Aug 10, 2016 22:43
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I am reading the play test from January 28, 2013, and it looks actually a lot better than what the final game ended up being for martial characters. Any reason not to use the classes there instead? How would they stack up in actual play? Martial damage dice (add a d6 to an attack, damage, or reduce an attack by that amount), martial damage (add d+x damage to any attack you choose x times a day), turning a miss into a glancing blow, more maneuvers that seem cool. So the martial damage dice come back every round, but do you save them for defense, or use them for an attack? Seems pretty cool. I don't see a ranger there. I think they just ran out of ideas for it, and threw something together. Might be why it's so bad.
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Aug 10, 2016 23:21
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I swear there was critical misses in 2e, but it might have been some Dragon magazine thing, or some third party book we used. I just remember a few people in the party were missing limbs at one point.
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Aug 11, 2016 01:40
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Philthy posted:I swear there was critical misses in 2e, but it might have been some Dragon magazine thing, or some third party book we used. I just remember a few people in the party were missing limbs at one point. AlphaDog posted:...they're an optional rule in 2nd ed. DMG page 61. They're there, but they're an optional rule and the book specifically calls out that they "shouldn't cause damage". Everyone I played with at the time except my regular group was all "haha, you missed and hit the wizard, only 3 damage though, wait I guess he's dead" with them, and that sucked. Were the missing limbs etc tables a thing from a 2e supplement? I remember tables for that kind of thing from the time. My first thought was Dark Sun, but I don't think that was it. I could be conflating it with the time I looked at MERP and went "haha, gently caress this". I know they're in Hackmaster and they work well there, but Hackmaster isn't D&D. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Aug 11, 2016 |
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Aug 11, 2016 01:54
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Dragon #39 had some infamously terrible critical hit/critical miss tables, including "miss and kill your own spleen" or whatever. So probably Dragon, or another RPG, or maybe Player's Option: Combat and Tactics? Things were fuzzy back then.
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Aug 11, 2016 01:59
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AlphaDog posted:Were the missing limbs etc tables a thing from a 2e supplement? I remember tables for that kind of thing from the time. My first thought was Dark Sun, but I don't think that was it. I could be conflating it with the time I looked at MERP and went "haha, gently caress this". You're thinking of Player's Option - Combat and Tactics as the source for the first official critical hit tables. First, you would need to trigger a critical hit by rolling a natural 18, 19, or 20, and have the final modified roll be 5 higher than the required to-hit for that target's AC. Then you would roll for Location (or you used a Called Shot which meant you hit the targeted location) Then you would roll for Severity  I'm pretty sure this is also how Hackmaster structured their critical hit tables, just that they turned it up to 11 and made you roll d10,000 for severity rather than just d10.
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Aug 11, 2016 02:28
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gradenko_2000 posted:You're thinking of Player's Option - Combat and Tactics as the source for the first official critical hit tables. That's it! I actually even own that book, but it's boxed up with all the other RPG books I don't care about instead of being on my game shelf. Hackmaster crits were... more complicated than that. Roll your d10,000 and apply modifers if there is a size difference between attacker and defender. This gives you the hit location (different tables for hacking, crushing, and puncturing weapons). Calculate your Base Severity Level, (Defender's AC) - (Attacker's THAC15) + (Attacker's current attack modifiers) = BSL. "Defender's AC" in this case is location-specific (ie, a dude in plate with no helmet is unarmored for BSL if the crit is to the head). Roll 1d8 to adjust the Severity Level from your BSL. this die penetrates both ways ("penetrate" means "if you roll max (or min), roll the dice again with -1, continue until you don't roll natural maximum (or minimum)"). 24 is the maximum, if BSL falls to 0 your crit becomes just a normal hit. Regardless of table results, the defender gets a massive bruise, and depending on he severity will remove certain combat benefits (like penetrating damage, follow-through damage, etc until the injury heals). Look up the results on the table, get a code like "x3, a3, d4, f". Use another table to translate this into "triple damage, -3 to hit, -4 to dexterity, fall prone" or whatever else. Check if the damage you did was the maximum sustainable byt he body part hit (as a percentage of target's hp), and if it was, the crit "follows through" into the next body part. You're done, and it was probably a super lame result like "an extra d4 damage"! Unless you hosed up. You probably hosed up. Do it again to make sure. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Aug 11, 2016 |
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Aug 11, 2016 02:56
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The Crotch posted:The ranger is a jack-of-all-trades class that is worse at being broad than classes that are supposed to be specialized, let alone the loving bard.
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Aug 11, 2016 06:07
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mango sentinel posted:I really don't know that there's design space for them with the other phb classes. Ranger should really just be like a more fightery druid but without the shapeshifting. Give them some Short Rest mechanics like warlock slots or Channel Divinity (Hunter's Mark comes to mind as one that fits) or just flatout be like "this is a half-caster class that also gets cantrips, from the Druid list." That in itself would literally make it unique in the PHB. Give them loving Jack of All Trades, if that's what they're supposed to be; why just give it to Bards? Make it a 3rd level thing for Rangers if you have to. Like, gently caress. It's in this weird design space where it's not supposed to be the best at Fighting or Skills or 
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Aug 11, 2016 06:54
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