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Just kill initiative entirely. Players all go first, then all the enemies go, repeat. If the enemy ambushed the players, then they go first instead and keep going from there. If you want to be really wacky, do it the way Shadow of the Demon Lord does it, with phases in 4 turns: 1. Players who aren't moving. 2. Enemies who aren't moving. 3. All remaining players. 4. All remaining enemies. You can even toss some 'balance' in there if you declare spellcasting requires you to be in the slower bracket, regardless of movement.
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May 17, 2017 06:47
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When I run 5E, I just roll initiative for the monster with highest bonus. Any PCs that roll higher go first in whatever order they choose. Any that roll lower go after the monsters, in whatever order they choose. The monsters all go at once, in the middle, but I have them activate as groups of the same creature. If you want to go after the monsters you can delay, but you are stuck going after the monsters from then on. I think I stole this from the Black Hack (although I have players roll once at the start and it think TBH has a new roll each round).
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May 17, 2017 07:19
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"All players, then all monsters" is quick and easy and player-empowering, but it can be too player empowering if the players can alpha-strike hard enough to neutralize the encounter. As the DM, you sort of have the responsibility to at least try and drain the party's daily resources, or else you're just entering combat for nothing.thefakenews posted:When I run 5E, I just roll initiative for the monster with highest bonus. Any PCs that roll higher go first in whatever order they choose. Any that roll lower go after the monsters, in whatever order they choose. This is good. Yet another variant I would put forward is always alternating between a player turn and a monster turn.
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May 17, 2017 08:07
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Ettin posted:I kind of like that idea actually. Rolling every round seems a bit much but I want to give this a try now. (When initiative was a d10 and a round was 10 segments it was easy to spell out who went when by segment. Same with castin times being xsegments. Initiative roll=2 and casting time=3 means the spell goes off on segment 5.)
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May 17, 2017 08:35
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thefakenews posted:When I run 5E, I just roll initiative for the monster with highest bonus. Any PCs that roll higher go first in whatever order they choose. Any that roll lower go after the monsters, in whatever order they choose. This seems like a good balance. It can suck if all the PC's go before monsters and happen to roll particularly lucky, nuking the entire encounter before it even gets to play out. Alternatively, it can also suck to be the one dude who rolls low on initiative and ends up feeling useless the entire encounter because he is immobilized permanently or something like that (happened to one of the guys in my party last night, which was funny, but I can see it being annoying if it happens a lot).
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May 17, 2017 08:46
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kingcom posted:jfc what the hell is wrong with this guy. Lets slow the game waay the gently caress down and just make it all random all the time gently caress it. Lots of random chance is an easy way to hide poor game design.
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May 17, 2017 13:41
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FRINGE posted:As long as the DM can track stuff fast its fun. It also re-mixes the characters/monsters every round. Just keep a (horizontal) list of the players initials and write their initiative (vertical columns growing downward by round) down each round. Scratch them off as they go. For AD&D I had (and still probably have in a box somewhere) 3 cardboard strips with 10 numbered spaces on each. One for turns, one for rounds, one for segments. I would put markers on for monster initiative and time limits on things, and move a big obvious marker up the round and turn tracks to whatever the current number was. Players would put markers on for their initiatives, how long spells had to run, etc. Sounds a bit silly, but it was kinda fun to use and super helpful, and some of the poo poo you might never really get about AD&D shows up really well if time is strictly tracked. Also, when everyone can see right in front of them when their torches are gonna run out, when the next wandering monster check will happen, etc, you can create a sense of urgency and/or stop them spending 15 minutes debating how to open a door just by reaching over and moving the Turns tracker one space along. Obviously you're not gonna want to do exactly that in 5th ed, but I bet using an actual physical track with markers or tokens on it would make even a complicated houseruled initiative system surprsingly fast to actually play.
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May 17, 2017 14:06
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I like the Basic method of splitting each turn into "action type" a lot; just futz around with it a bit. Personally, I like "everything happens at once" (to go with older D&D's minutes long turns), and reversing or at least changing which actions happen first. Everyone proclaims what "action" they're taking, which is basically stating what you're gonna do and what initiative it happens in. Melee characters go first to move and attack, then missile weapons, then lastly spellcasters. Hell, you could even have certain specific spells get cast on different actions to portray them being cast faster. You can do this AND keep the whole "this enemy is aiming at the wizard...!" or "the wizard prepares are horrible spell!" because, well, melee goes first. When two actions interact with each other - player and monster kill each other in the same action - then, well, that's what happened. If you kill the monster in melee, it still deals that final melee attack to you. Again, this can be tweaked with actions or powers or whatever that are actually key worded as Interrupts, which could make certain classes better at certain things, like maybe only fighters get powers that stop an enemy from attacking, or even a straight up class ability that lets them always act "first" in their action whenever beneficial.
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May 17, 2017 14:41
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ProfessorCirno posted:like maybe only fighters get powers that stop an enemy from attacking, or even a straight up class ability that lets them always act "first" in their action whenever beneficial. Any time a game gives me the capacity to pull out a sword and be a straight up dick to the enemy, I'm on board. Double if it's purely martial.
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May 17, 2017 16:30
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User0015 posted:I do agree that initiative should change as combat wears on, but I feel like that can be done pretty easily. An escalation dice, events that cause it to reshuffle (haste gives you a modifier, slow does too), or abilities that let you go faster or slower. Out of curiousity, what's the coolest thing that 13A does with the escalation die? There seems to be this huge goon-boner for the mechanic, and I just don't get it.
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May 17, 2017 16:42
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P.d0t posted:Out of curiousity, what's the coolest thing that 13A does with the escalation die? 1. It increases player to-hit as the battle gets longer. This kinda-sorta addresses the 4e issue of "first-turn novas" by incentivizing you to wait longer and make it a turn 2/3/4 nova instead so that you're more guaranteed of a hit, but more importantly it "guarantees" that the fight is going to run to some kind of conclusion by ensuring that the players will stop missing if the combat goes on for long enough. 2. It modifies certain abilities. This adds a layer of depth by giving abilities another mechanic to key their gimmicks off of, and a layer of anti-analysis-paralysis by pushing certain abilities over others depending on the face of the die. 3. It's part of a sort of "monster AI". Most monsters only have a single attack, but if that attack hits, or misses, or if the escalation die is on a certain face, or if the natural d20 roll is on a certain face, that attack is modified. This gives monsters a sort of auto-pilot where they're only doing the one thing, but their gimmick is built right into how that attack is modified and resolved by various conditional statements so that the DM never "forgets" to do it. 99% of the time people import the escalation die for #1's "stop whiffing eventually" aspect, and that's because it's the most elementally useful part of it without needing a bunch of homebrew and jury-rigging to get #2 and #3.
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May 17, 2017 16:53
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P.d0t posted:Out of curiousity, what's the coolest thing that 13A does with the escalation die? I actually have no idea. I assume it causes something to happen per turn, so I was saying having the initiative change due to escalation seems like a fine idea and easy to implement. gradenko_2000 posted:There's something called Popcorn Initiative where you say "gently caress it" to a mechanically-determined initiative order entirely and just have the players go first, and then the first person to go selects the next person to go after them. It's supposed to increase player engagement specifically for the reasons you stated because you can coordinate combos seamlessly since you yourself know that you should hand-off to the Barbarian after casting Hold Person. See, this sounds amazing and very simple. I can see how certain party builds can alpha strike monster encounters down, especially if you want a few easy encounters, but you could simply interrupt the flow if you felt like it. "Player A go, who chooses Player B, who chooses Player C, but now Gobbo 1 goes and gives a turn to Gobbo2. Ok, Player D go." I might completely steal this idea when I take up the DM mantle.
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May 17, 2017 18:31
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P.d0t posted:Out of curiousity, what's the coolest thing that 13A does with the escalation die? To expand gradenkos second point. The E die also modifies player abilities in a way that puts a sort of limited economy on some things. Wizards get "cyclic" spells which are 1/encounter but at-will if you use them when the E die is even. Commanders(Warlords from 4e) have a series of tactics that become available after a certain die level, usually 3+. These include a big party heal that lowers the Die because you've regrouped and slowed the action down. It creates an economy where things like Color Spray can be limited without making them daily. And in my experience it facilitates player combos because if your Wizard is about to drop an aoe Weaken next round the Sorcerer can Build Power for Double Damage while people's defenses are tanked and the Commander can build up his resources to make sure the Sorcerer can do things like reroll attacks and damage. Razorwired fucked around with this message at 05:36 on May 18, 2017 |
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May 17, 2017 19:38
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I thought I had a clever idea but then just now realized I was thinking of two different parts of rules as written for druidcraft. The first thing says you can make a raincloud as like a weather alert if it was going to rain anyway. The next says any harmless sensory effect. Can you make a tiny raincloud as you're marching through the desert to drizzle lightly on your frogboy friend to keep him from drying out or not? Opinions? Like I'm not creating food and water here I'm just cosmetically helping a frogman not get all scaly and chapped everywhere.
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May 17, 2017 20:01
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Uhh.....ask your DM? If it were my table, enthusiastic yes - frogman with a portable raincloud is an amusing idea. edit: I'm imagining a frustrated frog-dude being all "I don't need this poo poo" and trying to erratically hop away from it only for it to follow perfectly. Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 20:08 on May 17, 2017 |
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May 17, 2017 20:05
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Any advice for playing mats? This one seems good, but if I can avoid spending $30, I will. Do you guys pre-draw maps? Print out ones from a map aggregate? My logic is the characters are new to this area, so they shouldn't be able to look at every corner and know where they are. Also, do you usually use figurines? I found a cheap bucket of a variety of monsters on Amazon which I could use for enemies, but I don't like the idea of spending $7-$12 per figure for a party of 4 when they may bail (two of the players in my campaign are expecting a child in September) or lose interest. But I still think the visual representation would help them instead of just relying on "theater of the mind".
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May 17, 2017 20:27
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Razorwired posted:To expand gradenkos second point. The E die also modifies player abilities in a way that puts a sort of limited economy on some things. 13th Age sounds like 4.5e which I should really, really look into.
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May 17, 2017 20:29
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User0015 posted:13th Age sounds like 4.5e which I should really, really look into. You could also look into The Next Project :iamafag:
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May 17, 2017 20:43
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P.d0t posted:You could also look into The Next Project :iamafag: You had me up until d20.
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May 17, 2017 21:00
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Franchescanado posted:Any advice for playing mats? This one seems good, but if I can avoid spending $30, I will. quote:Do you guys pre-draw maps? Print out ones from a map aggregate? My logic is the characters are new to this area, so they shouldn't be able to look at every corner and know where they are. quote:Also, do you usually use figurines? I found a cheap bucket of a variety of monsters on Amazon which I could use for enemies, but I don't like the idea of spending $7-$12 per figure for a party of 4 when they may bail (two of the players in my campaign are expecting a child in September) or lose interest. But I still think the visual representation would help them instead of just relying on "theater of the mind". Use minis for the PCs, absolutely. Grab some Bones, they're less than three bucks per for player style things. Or raid the 25 cent bin of ancient HeroClix at your local comic shop for stuff that seems appropriate and repaint it as necessary. Minis are great and if you hand 'em off to your players to paint/customize it will really make them think about their character and get invested. For monsters, unless I have something perfect for the encounter handy or it's like a super cool boss fight I use some Pathfinder Pawns I found at Half Price Books.
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May 17, 2017 21:31
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P.d0t posted:You could also look into The Next Project :iamafag: Kind of interested. I'll take a look at the PHB thing and see what it says.
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May 17, 2017 21:48
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One of my groups has got the idea that I hate anything that isn't combat because I don't like shopping and I got frustrated that an interminable planning session culminated in throwing away our resources and plans for some cockamamie scheme that involved animal handling checks to try to milk a spider for silk and led to us getting in a prison brawl while we were still in leg irons. I mean okay we found a guard that we know HATES our captors and you have a bard with +10 deception and two DM-granted deception-based ribbon abilities. But sure let's milk a spider and then spend all our resources on a fight that never had to happen. I feel like I should just suicide this character and make someone that's pure crunch since we're going to charge into everything anyway.
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May 17, 2017 22:55
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Nehru the Damaja posted:One of my groups has got the idea that I hate anything that isn't combat because I don't like shopping and I got frustrated that an interminable planning session culminated in throwing away our resources and plans for some cockamamie scheme that involved animal handling checks to try to milk a spider for silk and led to us getting in a prison brawl while we were still in leg irons. That sounds incredibly painful to play through and hilarious to watch/listen to as an outsider. Do they just not like acting/improv/character work?
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May 17, 2017 22:58
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Can you guys give me some character building advice? I know the basics of the game, but I don't yet really know the difference between useful and poo poo. I want to make a halfling warlock/bard who sold his soul to some hideous thing in exchange for the power to shred faces with his lute solos. I mostly need advice about pacts and patrons and such. I am starting at 4th level.
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May 17, 2017 23:00
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Eldritch/Agonizing blast -> go hog wild.
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May 17, 2017 23:02
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Franchescanado posted:That sounds incredibly painful to play through and hilarious to watch/listen to as an outsider. Do they just not like acting/improv/character work? There's pretty much two, two-and-a-half of us out of 7 who are into the character side of things. The rest of them are kind of hollow gimmicks. Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Eldritch/Agonizing blast -> go hog wild. Yeah, this is going to be the bread and butter of any non-blade warlock's existence. You straight up will never have enough spell slots to treat your spells the same way normal casters do. You pretty much have to lean on Eldritch Blast and Agonizing Blast is what makes that viable. Patron isn't super important, mechanically. Fiend gives you the most offensive punch but the others have some handy utility. Just remember that Warlock learns comparatively few spells and the patron spell list just adds to the options of spells you can take. You don't just get those spells for taking the patron, so it means the list honestly isn't as important as it looks. For pact, you're going to want either Chain for a kickass familiar or Tome for some other cantrips and the Book of Ancient Secrets invocation, so you can take a couple rituals. I strongly advise one of them is Find Familiar. It won't be as good as the Chain pact's insane familiars, but it does a lot of useful poo poo. Basically Chain gets the best familiars in the game and Tome can get you a less useful one but also a ritual book to acquire new spells plus 3 cantrips from any classes in the game. (One of them should be Shocking Grasp or Shillelagh. I prefer the former.) When picking spells, take Hex. Pick the rest with an eye toward the fact that you're not going to be throwing them around like candy. Like for example, Witch Bolt is terrible for a guy who's going to have 2 spell slots all the way through level 10. In your best case scenario, it kills one guy, and it's not transcendently kickass at it, so it doesn't earn its keep. Hellish Rebuke is a really cool spell in a world where you can cast it more than once, but you're not likely to get the hypothetical two short rests per day that the class is imagined around. So the stuff you pick in addition to Hex needs to do something incredibly unique or powerful. Hold Person can completely turn an encounter on its head. Shatter can end a big swarm encounter. You have to pick with the knowledge that where a wizard might frequently spend spell slots, you're going to be living on Hex+Eldritch Blast and your remaining spell slot is an emergency button. Nehru the Damaja fucked around with this message at 23:18 on May 17, 2017 |
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May 17, 2017 23:12
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I am trying to see why hex is so useful. It doesn't effect saving throws, right? And its subtle use is kind of ruined by the fact that it is an attack spell with a verbal component? I'm probably missing something obvious here.
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May 17, 2017 23:34
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It doesn't affect saves but if you land it before combat you can pick dex and gently caress with someone's initiative roll. The bigger deal is it's persistent extra damage. When the hexed target dies, you can keep moving the spell to new targets. So you go from average 5.5 damage on a naked Eldritch Blast to 8.5 with Agonizing Blast (assuming you start with +3 cha modifier), to 12 with Agonizing and Hex. An extra It's also helpful if you have fighty people who like to shove or grapple because the opposed check can be hosed up with Hex. Nehru the Damaja fucked around with this message at 23:54 on May 17, 2017 |
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May 17, 2017 23:40
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Nehru the Damaja posted:It doesn't affect saves but if you land it before combat you can pick dex and gently caress with someone's initiative roll. The bigger deal is it's persistent extra damage. When the hexed target dies, you can keep moving the spell to new targets. So you go from average 5.5 damage on a naked Eldritch Blast to 8.5 with Agonizing Blast (assuming you start with +3 cha modifier), to 11 with Agonizing and Hex. An extra 2.5 damage per shot that you can keep going for the entirety of an encounter is pretty good value, especially at the cost of the occasional bonus action. I see. I overlooked the 1d6 extra damage bit. Wait. Isn't a d6 3.5 damage on average?
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May 17, 2017 23:46
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Yeah I brain-farted and substituted a d4.
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May 17, 2017 23:48
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The Dregs posted:I see. I overlooked the 1d6 extra damage bit. Wait. Isn't a d6 3.5 damage on average?
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May 17, 2017 23:49
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Wait....so it's like hunter's mark but straight-up better? Those did not need to be different spells, 5e is so weird... It's no good for tracking a quarry like Hunter's Mark is. I'd agree it probably oughtta just be one spell but I assume they were split for flavor reasons. I know Pathfinder's Witch class is pretty much a warlock with a lot of focus on various hexes, so maybe they also felt like they needed to build on that? I'm totally ignorant to what the deal was with warlocks in actual wotc products before this.
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May 17, 2017 23:53
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Nehru the Damaja posted:It's no good for tracking a quarry like Hunter's Mark is. I'd agree it probably oughtta just be one spell but I assume they were split for flavor reasons. I know Pathfinder's Witch class is pretty much a warlock with a lot of focus on various hexes, so maybe they also felt like they needed to build on that? I'm totally ignorant to what the deal was with warlocks in actual wotc products before this. Can't you give them disadvantage on stealth checks with it? I suppose that doesn't help if they get far enough away that you need to track them.
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May 18, 2017 00:01
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Wait....so it's like hunter's mark but straight-up better? Those did not need to be different spells, 5e is so weird... It's the same as Hunters Mark pretty much. They do the same damage and can both be shifted to different targets.
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May 18, 2017 00:14
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MonsterEnvy posted:It's the same as Hunters Mark pretty much. They do the same damage and can both be shifted to different targets. Yeah but it's all attacks not just weapon attacks, and if they have a "key" stat you can mess it up. The perception/survival stuff might sometimes outweigh it but usually not I don't think.
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May 18, 2017 00:18
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Yeah but it's all attacks not just weapon attacks, and if they have a "key" stat you can mess it up. The perception/survival stuff might sometimes outweigh it but usually not I don't think. True. But they are different spells for different classes. Warlock vs Ranger.
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May 18, 2017 01:04
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It's the same, pretty much. But different.
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May 18, 2017 01:19
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nelson posted:You had me up until d20. Well, they can't all be PbtA On that note, what would a non-d20 4.5e look like? (assuming the answer isn't just Strike)
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May 18, 2017 01:43
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MonsterEnvy posted:It's the same as Hunters Mark pretty much. MonsterEnvy posted:But they are different spells for different classes. loling
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May 18, 2017 01:59
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They are pretty much the same in their usage. Like while they have some small differences. A ranger does not need Hex or vice versa. The few differences they have matter more for the different classes they belong to.
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May 18, 2017 02:07
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