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On a failed save, <spell> gives advantage on <skill> checks for the next <time>. E: ^^^ Beaten, but it really is that obvious, right? e2: poo poo, you could even go with "gives the effects of skill training if the target has not trained the skill, else gives advantage". e3: Maybe add: When cast in a >=(level +2) slot, in addition to the regular effects, target can take a d20 result of 10 if that is higher than the die result. When cast in a >=(level+4) slot, take a result of 20. Or same deal with different numbers. (late edit: that might not interact very well with Advantage, I can't do the math right now). Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Nov 16, 2017 |
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Nov 16, 2017 07:43
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AlphaDog posted:I have here the AD&D DMG.
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Nov 16, 2017 09:16
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Vehementi posted:jk we played another session
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Nov 16, 2017 10:32
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AlphaDog posted:Have I got your point right? The philosophy to apply is: Instead of instantly overcoming any relevant obstacle, a spell reduces the difficulty of a relevant obstacle, including making an impossible obstacle possible. it's really not all that great though, i mean i guess it takes your martial guy from useless to cleanup crew but it's the same problem as early game sleep
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Nov 16, 2017 11:21
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AlphaDog posted:Messing with the amount of daily resources will only ever change the amount of stuff that the party gets done in a day, unless you also come up wth a compelling, mechanical reason for them to proceed after all their good tools are used up. I agree, you still need a time limit. The thing is, even vague time limits have been good enough for my party to try and get as much done in a day as they can, but we're still not doing 5-8 encounters because getting into 8 violent conflicts a day is just incredibly difficult to organically put into the story unless you're in a dungeon or you're psychopaths. I think it would be totally fine for our magic users to have less slots so we're actually making hard choices. I love the idea of using missions as milestone goals to get your rests. You could even combine that with Gradenko's "press your luck for more treasure" recommendation to have additional mission objectives the players could attempt to accomplish by risking precious resources.
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Nov 16, 2017 11:58
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Nickoten posted:I love the idea of using missions as milestone goals to get your rests. You could even combine that with Gradenko's "press your luck for more treasure" recommendation to have additional mission objectives the players could attempt to accomplish by risking precious resources. That's more or less how both the games I play in work. An adventure is generally broken up into a sections which count as "days". You get short rest stuff (practically) automatically every 2 fights. But you don't get long rest stuff until the end of a section - that is, until you get time to actually chill out for a bit. e: So we know that we'll get long rest recovery after encounter 6, 7, or 8, and manage resources accordingly, we just don't know how much game-time is going to pass before that point. It might be a week or two as we struggle along through the wilderness sleeping rough and standing guard and foraging for food and stuff with a "short rest" representing two days of marching without fighting, or it might be a frantic 10 minutes of kicking doors and clearing rooms with a "short rest" representing a 15 second catch-your-breath-and-wipe-the-blood-off lull in the fighting. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 12:37 on Nov 16, 2017 |
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Nov 16, 2017 12:17
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the funny thing is that some posters in this thread come up with cool and good ways to improve D&D on the daily but as 4e demonstrated any attempt to push the game forward or try different things reveals how insanely reactionary people will get
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Nov 16, 2017 12:30
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Vehementi posted:jk we played another session Your GM is a power tripping rear end in a top hat that doesn't deserve to run a game.
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Nov 16, 2017 12:35
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I went looking for spells that could probably be folded into the skill system. I probably missed some, and I've almost definitely included some that shouldn't be there. I'll try to arrange it into a readable list, sorted by skill. The skill names are a quick eyeballed guess, some aren't skills, but stuff listed as something you could do with a stat check. The numbers are spell level. Alarm (perception) 1 Alter Self (disguise, survival) 2 Animal Friendship (animal handling) 1 Arcane Eye (perception) 4 Augury (investigation, insight) 2 Beast Sense (perception, investigation) 2 Calm Emotions (persuasion) 2 Charm Person (persuasion) 1 Clairvoyance (perception, investigation) 3 Command (intimidation) 1 Commune (investigation) 5 Commune With Nature (investigation, survival, nature) 5 Compelled Duel (intimidation) 1 Comprehend Languages (investigation) 1 Compulsion (persusaion) 4 Contact Other Plane (investigation) 5 Create Food And Water (survival) 3 Darkvision (perception) 1 Detect Evil And Good (perception) 1 Detect Magic (arcana) 1 Detect Poison And Disease (medicine) 1 Detect Thoughts (perception) 1 Disguise Self (int, disguise) 1 Divination (investigation) 4 Dominate Beast (animal handling) 4 Dominate Monsters (intimidation) 8 Dominate Person (intimidation) 5 Druidcraft (nature) 1 Enhance Ability (as stat) 2 Fear (intimidate) 3 Find The Path (nature) 6 Find Traps (perception) 2 Foresight (perception) 9 Freedom Of Movement (dex/escape) 4 Friends (persuasion) 1 Geas (persuasion) 6 Glibness (charisma/any) 8 Hold Monster (str/grapple) 5 Hold Person (srt/grapple) 2 Identify (arcana) 1 Invisibility (stealth) 2 Jump (athletics) 1 Knock (dex/lockpick) 2 Legend Lore (history) 5 Levitate (athletics, acrobatics) 2 Lovate Animals Or Plants (investigation, nature) 1 Locate Creature (investigation) 4 Locate Object (investigation) 2 Mass Suggestion (persuasion, performance) 6 Mislead (stealth) 5 Modify Memory (persuasion) 5 Nondetection (stealth, sleight of hand) 3 Pass Without Trace (stealth) 2 Plant Growth (nature) 3 Purify Food And Drink (survival) 1 Revivify (medicine) 3 Scrying (perception) 5 See Invisibility (perception) 2 Seeming (disguise) 5 Sequester (sleight of hand, stealth) 7 Silent Image (deception) 1 Speak With Animals (animal handling, investigation) 1 Speak With Dead (investigation) 3 Speak With Plants (nature, investigation) 3 Spider Climb (athletics) 2 Suggestion (deception, persuasion) 2 Telekinesis (str/grapple str/carry) 5 Tongues (int/communicate without speaking) 3 True Seeing (perception) 6 Water Breathing (con / avoid drowning) 3 Zone Of Truth (perception, insight) 2 Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 12:48 on Nov 16, 2017 |
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Nov 16, 2017 12:45
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AlphaDog posted:Have I got your point right? The philosophy to apply is: Instead of instantly overcoming any relevant obstacle, a spell reduces the difficulty of a relevant obstacle, including making an impossible obstacle possible. Yep, that's it exactly. Elfgames posted:it's really not all that great though, i mean i guess it takes your martial guy from useless to cleanup crew but it's the same problem as early game sleep Perfect, good, enemies, etc. The big thing that it would change is that niche protection would actually protect niches. Sure, the wizard can cast knock, or command, but someone still has to actually successfully pick the lock or intimidate the baddies into surrendering, and it's probably not the wizard.
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Nov 16, 2017 13:26
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The actual easiest fix to daily spells is to just make it so there is no 8 hour long rest. Make a long rest in a full blown easy weekend, your respite in Rivendell, your vague time period before the camera cuts to you asleep and naked on a lovely inn room floor as the owner is stomping up the stairs angrily. Make it something you can't just do in the middle of other poo poo. This was incidentally the much older edition solution. When every spell adds to how long you have to rest, and when resting is far more dangerous due to random encounter rolls, and when managing that risk was much harder and you had far fewer tools, and when leaving the dungeon was still a loving thing you had to do...well, that's real goddamn different, because now resting mid-adventure is something that is super risky. No, you did everything you could to prepare BEFORE entering the dungeon, so you could rest happily after leaving that hellpit. I'm not saying this is the BEST fix to the issue of daily spells vs non-daily abilities and how it warps game timeframes. I'm just saying it's an easy as hell fix. EDIT: I've said it a bunch, but seriously, all these problems start to evaporate when you put D&D back where it was designed to be - a PVE dungeoncrawler. Knock isn't overpowered when spells are a serious opportunity cost, and casting it isn't silent. ProfessorCirno fucked around with this message at 14:48 on Nov 16, 2017 |
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Nov 16, 2017 14:44
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I loved the neverwinter nights version of knock that played that up and made having a thief buddy useful. It was AOE, affecting all locks in range: Good! It made an enormous gong noise that alerted everyone when the doors opened: Oh god bad.
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Nov 16, 2017 14:55
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Vehementi posted:Tried to climb out a thing but the guide said that you need to make climbing checks every 10' and it's a 70' climb so obviously not possible for any character of any skill to ever successfully climb that due to inevitable low rolls. That whole post is awesome but this is just perfection. What guide is your DM referring to?
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Nov 16, 2017 15:21
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Splicer posted:How long have they been GMing? This is either his first game or he's been GMing for about 30 years probably
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Nov 16, 2017 15:21
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Spitting out ideas before morning coffee is always dangerous, but would another way to manage spell scarcity be to make it take multiple long rests for a wizard to fully replenish? Something like "you recover your spell casting modifier + 1/4 your level spell slot levels per long rest" . You only recover half hit dice during a long rest so there is precedent for a long rest in 5e not recovering all your resources.
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Nov 16, 2017 15:22
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Soylent Pudding posted:Spitting out ideas before morning coffee is always dangerous, but would another way to manage spell scarcity be to make it take multiple long rests for a wizard to fully replenish? Something like "you recover your spell casting modifier + 1/4 your level spell slot levels per long rest" . You only recover half hit dice during a long rest so there is precedent for a long rest in 5e not recovering all your resources. From the AD&D DMG:  I'm not citing this as an example of a hard rule that you can already use, but it means that Gygax did kinda think about it even back then.
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Nov 16, 2017 15:32
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The problem with all these time limit aspects is that for many parties, after a certain level it’s just not an option to continue once the wizard is tapped out, because there might always be a flying shielded intangible etc. enemy around the next corner. So the time limit ends up not creating tension but creating a dull “uh, we lose I guess” situation. Dungeon crawling board games have the same problem with even harsher time limits. It’s a constant problem, strategic management was fine for the battlefield but it doesn’t work in the dungeon.
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Nov 16, 2017 15:39
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I would feel pretty loving useless if the party was like "welp, wizard is out of slots, but we can't rest. gg" and I wasn't that wizard.
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Nov 16, 2017 16:56
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Kaysette posted:That whole post is awesome but this is just perfection. What guide is your DM referring to? He seems to think that every round of casual careful climbing needs its own climb check. That combined with the module's guidance for climbing DOWN this hole "If a character's check fails by 5 or more, the character must succeed on a DC 10 Strength saving throw or fall the rest of the way down" means we ded Same with swimming. We were exploring underwater in a calm lake and had to make a swim check every round (15 feet) or swim extra slowly that round.
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Nov 16, 2017 17:31
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That's really, really bad DMing.
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Nov 16, 2017 17:38
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SettingSun posted:I would feel pretty loving useless if the party was like "welp, wizard is out of slots, but we can't rest. gg" and I was the DM. My take.
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Nov 16, 2017 17:41
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Blacknose posted:That's really, really bad DMing. He is, but in his defense: if the Dungeon Master's Guide is bad, then the new DMs who read it will more often than not also turn out bad.
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Nov 16, 2017 17:41
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Yeah the two captured guys who lost their characters in that room after not being able to climb out did everything right. There was another path they could have taken at an earlier fork but they could not have known, so with the information the characters and players had at the time they behaved optimally and could not have survived, kind of a waste of a session for them. It was a fighter and cleric who got captured. The fighter is played by this older guy who wanted to harken back to his d&d 1.0 days and show his son the game. His character has been KO'd on the first round of every combat so far due to focus fire and crits and every enemy uniformly having a 1d12 greataxe
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Nov 16, 2017 17:43
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Vehementi posted:He seems to think that every round of casual careful climbing needs its own climb check. That combined with the module's guidance for climbing DOWN this hole "If a character's check fails by 5 or more, the character must succeed on a DC 10 Strength saving throw or fall the rest of the way down" means we ded I've played that game. It also included per-character leveling (e.g. if you miss a session, you don't get the XP). It was awful.
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Nov 16, 2017 18:25
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I mean, in my first 3.0 game the DM stuck a Tarrasque behind a 50/50 fail trap in a level 1 dungeon. The "puzzle" was that one lever would open the door and the other would release the Tarrasque. There was no way of knowing which lever would do what. Later he confessed that he saw the Tarrasque entry and really wanted to throw it in a game. The guys am ace DM now but everyone kind of sucks at DMing when they start. I'd have a talk with the guy if he's new because it sounds like he's fallen into the Makes Sense style of DMing. Maybe the fact that gating skill checks behind infinite skill checks guarantees failure. Several people miss simple things like that because they got sold on D&D as a reality simulator. If he's an experiemced DM bad habits might be too ingrained to budge at this point. Maybe your town has a rad AL scene?
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Nov 16, 2017 18:27
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It turns out understanding some basic probability is really important for a GM. I find it amazing that all the bad GM habits are the ones that permeate the culture, so as new GMs we assume it's what we're supposed to be doing until something (but not the DMG for some reason) teach us better. Though there seems to be a very vocal community out there with battered PC syndrome and vocally scream for the right to be abused by the DM in their games.
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Nov 16, 2017 18:39
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Probably the best "how to GM" thing I've seen was that goon guide on how to run dungeon world (http://www.mediafire.com/file/ypk10uede2sgri6/Dungeon+World+Guide+pdf+version+1.2.pdf). 5e really needs something like that, with lots of explanation and examples behind the rules. ritorix fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Nov 16, 2017 |
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Nov 16, 2017 18:59
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Starting DMs who think sadistic rulings are hilarious/DMs who should know better like that are a major reason why players so often go straight to caster supremacy. Really hard for the DM to gently caress with you when the effect just says you win.
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Nov 16, 2017 19:02
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Has anyone tried tying feats to different pieces of mundane gear? Make it pricey so gold actually goes somewhere but off the top of my head: Brutal Weapon property: Savage Attacker Phrase Book: Linguist War Saddle: Mounted Combatant Battle Flag: Inspiring Leader I'm stripping the stat bonuses out of course but I think it would be interesting to let people essentially buy access to some of the lower tiered feats via gear.
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Nov 16, 2017 19:58
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Some things I've noticed about magic I win buttons. First, at least in games I've played in and run, upper level limit is somewhere around 12. Maybe 15 every now and them. Most of the published adventures tend to knock off about there, and most home brewed games kind of unwind as well. So anytime somebody starts talking theory craft, I start blocking it out after that point. It does however change the value of everything below that allot. So with that as my background. When it comes to magic I win buttons it's almost never about game breaking and more about fun breaking. Dishing out extra damage or circumventing an irritating obstacle is almost never fun breaking for the players. Defeating an intricately trapped clip face with a teleport spell is generally going to be seen as a in by the players instead of 30 minutes of chances to fail dice rolls. Extra damage, AOE, incapacitate spells are all powerful, but the DM does have an endless number of monsters, if need be he can tinker on the fly to keep things exciting. Then there's fun breaking. This includes most of what lets you break the action economy. At the low end there's find familiar which doesn't require an action to use for things like help compared to the beast master which does have to spend an action for that exact same task. We can call that demoralizing. Then there's conjure animals which can bring a whole horde of allies into the game, but mostly means the caster gets to take 4-9 actions in a round. Bounded accuracy normally keeping things in check serves to make each of these creatures a decent threat. Then there's animate dead. No concentration, no duration. With the way the spells written you can build up a decent contingent fairly easy. Necromancy school indicates that this is working as intended. For a bonus action you can tell the entire horde to do a thing, or general orders is fine. After a couple of levels you have a platoon of skeletons trooping after you. First problem, it takes forever to roll there attacks. Second the damage output is equal to a fireballs, except it happens every turn. Last, at a certain point it becomes harder to balance because having enough to kill the undead usually means the party dies as a result. There are RP solutions, but they aren't really satisfactory for a game mechanics problem. Yes undead cause problems with the locals, lets add an hour or so of game time into hide the skeleton army. But it also stands out against all the other action economy breaks. Haste, one person gets one attack and then is tired. Third level concentration spell. And since for me this started as a beast master gripe, the pet getting to act as part of the rangers action is in the long run going to work out to as much damage as a hunter with Colossus slayer.
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Nov 16, 2017 20:32
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I'd like some feedback about how to better role play/adjust the mechanics for narrative purposes of my character. The basic idea I've been going with is: Wizard magic by way of a prison shiv. My character got hosed over young and locked away by a rich guy with connections for a long time. Had to grow up and learn to protect himself in prison and since the homebrew realm we're in is very heavily magic'd up by way of a god dying and falling on the island (like, all over the island), narratively the DM accepted him learning magic in prison from another mage and using it to survive. The character is Neutral Evil, and is honestly built more like an arcane rouge than a normal wizard. My main spell is catapult because it makes everything around you into a weapon, which is useful for surprise ganks and to not have to worry about carrying a weapon on you. Other than that I have ice knife (important for what I'm going for later build wise) and a host of disguise, escape, or misdirection spells. So far I've been rping it as him being very distrustful and always being in disguise either with disguise self or alter self and always staying away from the group when they're doing town business or talking in the tavern, but being within earshot to listen in, only begrudgingly joining them when he absolutely has to. I started trying to have him be the "guide to being treated like a criminal by society" since the game started with us being framed for murdering a beloved general and no one wanting anything to do with us, but since my guy was already a criminal his mentality was "Wow, ok this changes nothing". I'd go disguised and buy provisions and fence their loot for them so we'd have money. Otherwise they'd be stuck buying poo poo tier goods for god tier prices from the one "merchant" who would do business with them. I've also taken to cleaning up their "mistakes" when it comes to being criminals in the eyes of society. An example of cleaning up being: The druid decided to try and charm the drug dealing black market merchant for better stuff, ended up not buying anything, found out (from me via the DM) that using charm is potentially considered a crime, and that using on a crime boss is going to get her into deep poo poo. Their solution was to write a note "apologizing" and had me deliver it to them. Which I did, and then bought some gear with the remaining time on the spell. I later went back after the spell had worn off to watch and see what the merchant would do and when I saw he was a bit too ecstatic with the note decided to steal it back solo (and end up taking two heavy warhammer blows from the guy's Orc body guard) and destroy it to avoid the blackmail issue. I didn't have to deliver the note initially, but I wanted an excuse to beat up on the guy since my character hates drug dealers. So far it's just been stuff like that. But recently I've been thinking that I should alter the way the spells I have work to reflect their origin. Either cruder, or less effective, or differently effective. For instance a regular mage using Shocking Grasp would be trying to do damage primarily with the "no reactions" effect as a bonus, whereas my guy would probably prefer just a temporary paralysis and forego the damage all together. Or misty step losing range but gaining the ability to go to places I can't see exactly, since he used it in a prison where it's all cells and you know where everything is going to be since it's all uniform and you can then just hop from cell to cell. Maybe change ice knife to ice shiv, lose the explosion damage, but let me wield it short range for 1-2 turns as a melee weapon instead of just throwing it. Just some ideas I've been throwing around to add fluff to my guy.
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Nov 16, 2017 22:21
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Reading the Fighter stuff in Xanathar's has me convinced that Battlemaster Maneuvers should just be the Fighter's core mechanic instead of attacking more times than anybody else. That's probably absolutely not a novel observation in this thread/forum but it really stood out when I became interested in Samurai and Cavalier then immediately realized it would mean giving up Maneuvers.
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Nov 17, 2017 01:15
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wizard on a water slide posted:Reading the Fighter stuff in Xanathar's has me convinced that Battlemaster Maneuvers should just be the Fighter's core mechanic instead of attacking more times than anybody else. I believe they were at one point in the playtest, but that wasn't simple enough for Mike "Misses Every Shot He Takes" Mearls.
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Nov 17, 2017 01:39
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Crain posted:Just some ideas I've been throwing around to add fluff to my guy.
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Nov 17, 2017 01:46
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Arivia posted:I believe they were at one point in the playtest, but that wasn't simple enough for Mike "Misses Every Shot He Takes" Mearls. Mike 'Wall Chat' Mearls. Mike 'Roll a Wisdom check. Everyone failed again?' Mearls
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Nov 17, 2017 01:58
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Mike "String Cheese" Mearls.
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Nov 17, 2017 02:06
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Mike "MC Killsalot" Mearls
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Nov 17, 2017 02:16
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Also a friend of mine is playing an Artificer in our current game and I wanted him to be less unhappy about the fact that Xanathar's didn't give a better/revised version of the class from UA or add anything for them, so I quickly threw together a list of new spells from it that I think make sense for an Artificer either mechanically or thematically. I'm not even the DM, I'm just giving this to him and the DM and saying "let him use these". 1st: Absorb Elements, Catapult, Snare 2nd: Earthbind, Pyrotechnics, Skywrite, Warding Wind 3rd: Thunderstep, Tiny Servant, Wall of Sand, Wall of Water 4th: Elemental Bane, Sickening Radiance, Vitriolic Sphere I dunno. I feel like their spell list is too conservative already and the class definitely has bigger problems than this, but it's a small nice thing I can do for a guy determined to play a prototype class that he's enamored with so.
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Nov 17, 2017 03:24
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Realistically how much of the Fighter would some of the more mechanically liberal members of the forum fold into the base class? All of Battlemaster? All of Champion? Both?
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Nov 17, 2017 03:30
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Mendrian posted:Realistically how much of the Fighter would some of the more mechanically liberal members of the forum fold into the base class? All of Battlemaster? All of Champion? Both? In my perpetually ongoing rewrite I've folded most of Champion and Battlemastter into the base class. Maneuver dice feel like a good concept to build a fighter around. I took the expanded crit range from Champion and gave that to Barbarian though. Expanded crit range feels like it fits better there, especially since barbarains get extra crit damage. A 20% crit change and monster damage on a crit seems very synergistic for a class built around HULK SMASH
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Nov 17, 2017 03:40
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