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Wyvernil posted:This gives me an idea for a "divine source" or "iconoclast" Warlock that draws power from the gods without being beholden to them. I really like that idea, sort of a hacker/priest mashup could work... or maybe something more parasite-flavoured... e: "Yeah, I kind of outgrew the whole 'worship' thing, decided to diversify my power sources. I take some necromantic bits from death, a bit of wrath from the thunder gods, a sprinkle of ruinous curses of infinite madness. But, I mean, you do you." 
lofi fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Apr 17, 2018 |
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Apr 17, 2018 00:18
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xiw posted:Multiclassing serves a few different purposes for an alternative way of doing things I'd seriously suggest looking at Shadow of the Demon Lord, which is a level and class based game with a "multi-classing" system that solves most of these issues- everybody gets an ancestry (race) that provides benefits at level 0 and level 4, a basic path (class) that provides 4 levels of benefits (1,2,5,8), an expert path that provides 3 (3,6,9) and a master (or 2nd expert path) that provides 2 (7,10, and if it's an expert path you can pick either path's level 9 features) the number of paths available scales at each tier, so you've got 4 basic paths defining common party roles (magician, priest, rogue, warrior) and then increasingly large numbers of increasingly specialized expert/master paths (16 expert and 64 master in the core book iirc) this gives you the sort of customization multi-classing always aimed to provide (both in mechanically supporting specific concepts + giving characters increased definition throughout their career), while avoiding a lot of the pitfalls of traditional D&D multi-classing since the game knows what your decision making process will look like and each path is balanced around providing you a certain (rough) level of mechanical benefits per level (with a lot of functionality loaded into deliberately conceptually broad base novice paths), which makes it very hard to gimp yourself *too badly* by just taking fun + fluffy options (though not being gimped is a long way from being maximally effective - the game has quite a lot of room for character optimization) LGD fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Apr 17, 2018 |
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Apr 17, 2018 00:32
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If DnD had a more flexible list of powers for non-casters, there'd be a lot less need for multiclassing to work as it does currently (i.e. allowing a complete change of direction for story/RP purposes and/or adding new abilities). Instead a mix'n'match powers system would give non-casters or half-casters a lot of flex.
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Apr 17, 2018 00:59
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Why not give every caster an Eldritch Blast thing that's like, their primary "thing" So a Warlock has EB, a Wizard can choose between a lightning bolt, ice bolt or fireball, or some sort of statis thing or something And the rest of the abilities as you level up key to that one like, "main thing", changing it and making it more powerful or differently useful Then make all of the other spells into scrolls or other things like that
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Apr 17, 2018 01:08
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the DnD spell list is definitely one of the biggest bugaboos in the design. A Necromancer should be its own class. Ditto an Illusionist. Evocation? Sorcs only. Something like that. The universality of any one DnD caster's spell selection is a huge problem.
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Apr 17, 2018 01:11
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Waffles Inc. posted:Why not give every caster an Eldritch Blast thing that's like, their primary "thing" This sounds good to me. I'm okay with fighter powers being "I attack" or "ask your gm" if wizard powers are also "I attack" or "ask your gm".
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Apr 17, 2018 01:13
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lofi posted:I really like that idea, sort of a hacker/priest mashup could work... or maybe something more parasite-flavoured... That would be a lot like a Glorantha god-learner, where they changed myths to suit their goals, with predictable results.
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Apr 17, 2018 01:18
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Well, the results were often mostly unpredictable, but God Learners are literally a group whose motto is basically "gently caress Should, We Could". This is also a good motto for a certain kind of player character so I'm all for it.
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Apr 17, 2018 01:28
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Serf posted:the superior design of Shadow of the Demon Lord haunts this thread The real shadow of the Demon Lord is his good design ethos.
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Apr 17, 2018 01:31
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roll will to avoid losing your enthusiasm for D&D NEXT: Dungeons & Dragons: The Fifth One
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Apr 17, 2018 01:41
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Wyvernil posted:But I guess there's a niche for a mechanically-simple fighter that does nothing but "I hit the guy". The people who play these kinds of characters are probably the same ones who spend the whole game on their phones not paying attention. I think there should be a few options that are extremely simple, because there will be people who literally cannot handle a certain amount of complexity. If it were any game other than The Game Everyone Knows, it'd be a lot easier for me to say "Play something else", but in some places, if you're going to get to play at all, D&D is your option. I've played games with people who have disabilities that affect their capacity to make these complex decisions, and having simplified characters means they can play the game that everyone else plays. Serf posted:i'll whip you up a normie hack no prob Man I've wanted to play that game throw that my way too
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Apr 17, 2018 01:56
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I like that it’s a Normie Hack and not a “This Could Be Actually Triggering For Some Of My Players” Hack but I’m not going to say no or not say thank you for putting in the effort.
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Apr 17, 2018 01:59
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Mr. Maltose posted:I like that it’s a Normie Hack and not a “This Could Be Actually Triggering For Some Of My Players” Hack but I’m not going to say no or not say thank you for putting in the effort.
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Apr 17, 2018 02:01
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two of my players were actually "joined" by forbidden magic  [goon project]lets make a table of goblin odd habits that don't involve genitals, body fluids, or cannibalism
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Apr 17, 2018 02:08
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Turns out my players are totally cool with Lost Mines and since I might keep running 5e after this adventure same characters or not I'm moving it to my dumb personal setting because who wants to play an entire campaign in the Forgotten Realms honestly The only thing is I really want to do something different with the setting's gods and I'm not sure what yet. What would be cool but not completely "gently caress you if you play a cleric or paladin" levels of change?
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Apr 17, 2018 02:15
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Blockhouse posted:Turns out my players are totally cool with Lost Mines and since I might keep running 5e after this adventure same characters or not I'm moving it to my dumb personal setting because who wants to play an entire campaign in the Forgotten Realms honestly Use the Eberron Pantheon.
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Apr 17, 2018 02:20
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Blockhouse posted:Turns out my players are totally cool with Lost Mines and since I might keep running 5e after this adventure same characters or not I'm moving it to my dumb personal setting because who wants to play an entire campaign in the Forgotten Realms honestly Let the party Paladin(s) and Cleric(s) tell you about their god(s). Don't make the player have to learn a bunch of stuff that will be integral to their character's core belief systems--let them make it up themselves.
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Apr 17, 2018 02:20
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Well here are my unpopular crack theories, laugh at them if you want. -Just burn ability scores. Seriously. People of the same class tend to all look the same ability score wise anyway, so what the hell is the point of having them any more? Ability damage? That is tedious and it sucks. If you want your dude to be strong or smart or whatever, maybe that's a keyword from your background that does stuff? Not sure on this yet. -Split the casters, you don't get to be a wizard who does everything anymore. You can have a class called wizard who does evocation and some divination, sure, but having the thing where you can take animate dead and have an entire army that doesn't conflict with your black tentacles slots. I think even Gary Gygax was planning to do this before TSR got 2e, so this isn't even that hard to justify to grogs. Noe that this lets you have pet classes that are balanced around having their pets out, so the necromancer's life drain does less damage when he has his big undead out. -Every class gets combat powers and then everyone gets a piece of cool narrative poo poo. Not every class can do all the cool narrative poo poo, so if you are a Lord who can do politics things you get a benefit from working with an Assassin who does criminal things. If a druid joins your team you guys can add shapeshifting things to your stack of fun, necromancers can perform divinations by asking dead people, psions can read minds, warriors can smash temples and walls, etc. These scale with your level so high level warriors are smashing mountains and shapeshifters can become rocs or something that carry the entire party. You will probably have to put in some work to prevent Cartman from having his power be that he has all the powers, but it's doable. -After a certain point people get followers and temples and stuff, so you can have a kingdom management and politics minigame. It's something people are always trying to hack into D&D, and it provides a convenient outlet for people who want to have armies, undead legions, demon hordes, or acolytes. They go into the crap pile of guys you can pull out when the kingdom declares war and for everyday adventuring you have your 1 undead hydra or doomguard or whatever. -Multiclassing can go gently caress right off. If you want to play a warrior-wizard people are constantly making that as a hybrid class, so just release one of those in the core book and you kill 55% of multiclass scenarios right there. Include the 4e thing where you just grab a few powers off other people's lists so your warrior can learn a few spells to troll people, and we're gold. -On that note, no passive abilities that boost each other. +20% fire damage is boring and also bad for the game, because it either pushes your character or takes up a customization slot to make you stay level appropriate. Character customization consists pretty much just of class power selection, and once you get a power it just scales with your level. I have some more ideas but I've rambled enough.
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Apr 17, 2018 02:30
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Well here are my unpopular crack theories, laugh at them if you want. Yes to all of this. Normalize damage output across classes, give everyone a slice of narrative power and utility, standardize multiclassing as hybrid advanced classes, gently caress ability scores. I don't personally care about followers but that sounds cool and that recent kickstarter sure makes stuff like that seem popular.
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Apr 17, 2018 02:37
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FRINGE posted:This is really dumb. If you make the vast amount of good material from before unusable a bunch of people will never look at The question posed wasn't "fix D&D so it sells better" though, and I'd argue that there is a very good chance that we are in a bubble where it's impossible to tell if D&D is actually doing well long-term or if these good sales they're seeing are people playing the game once or the game being gotten by/given to people that watch a stream and will never play. Personally, it's gotten harder to find AL locally and I don't see any uptick of groups looking for play in local areas, so I'm sorta leaning towards this just being a bubble that 5E is lucky enough to enjoy. Also whether or not people are having fun playing is completely irrelevant. The complaints in this thread are sometimes over the top but they're not somehow invalidated because someone likes playing D&D. What the hell is that argument?
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Apr 17, 2018 03:52
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Kaysette posted:Yes to all of this. Normalize damage output across classes, give everyone a slice of narrative power and utility, standardize multiclassing as hybrid advanced classes, gently caress ability scores. I don't personally care about followers but that sounds cool and that recent kickstarter sure makes stuff like that seem popular. On the other hand gently caress summons and gently caress hirelings. D&D combat ain't quick and adding 50 different minions whiffing a turn doesn't help.
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Apr 17, 2018 03:58
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People have fun playing lovely games all the time, much like they have fun engaging in all sorts of lovely activities, because being in a group with your friends engaging in social action is something the human brain is rigged to reward with dopamine. But that doesn't mean the game is allowing the fun to happen, enhancing the fun, or even inhibiting the theoretical "Maximum Fun" of game night. It's a lovely metric, and you'd think after nearly a decade of people talking about this people would stop saying "But we're having fun so it's fine".
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Apr 17, 2018 03:59
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Got yelled at by someone on the internet for suggesting that taking prisoners is a waste of time in D&D as evil aligned beings aren't likely to stop being evil. This is supported textually, correct?
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Apr 17, 2018 04:25
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Xae posted:On the other hand gently caress summons and gently caress hirelings. That’s true, gently caress the way they are currently done. Minions should essentially replicate spell-like effects in combat. Wall of shields instead of wall of fire, seize him instead of entangle, etc. Conjuration has hosed up combat since at least 3.5
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Apr 17, 2018 04:25
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kidkissinger posted:Got yelled at by someone on the internet for suggesting that taking prisoners is a waste of time in D&D as evil aligned beings aren't likely to stop being evil. A Goblin is defined as being "neutral evil", and since there is no textual support for changing of alignments, then yes, someone who is evil ... is evil.
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Apr 17, 2018 04:31
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Mr. Maltose posted:People have fun playing lovely games all the time, much like they have fun engaging in all sorts of lovely activities, because being in a group with your friends engaging in social action is something the human brain is rigged to reward with dopamine. But that doesn't mean the game is allowing the fun to happen, enhancing the fun, or even inhibiting the theoretical "Maximum Fun" of game night. It's a lovely metric, and you'd think after nearly a decade of people talking about this people would stop saying "But we're having fun so it's fine". It’s also worth asking who isn’t having fun. There’s people who enjoy the rules as is and people who mostly ignore them, and that’s fine, but there’s also everyone who got party wiped in the first fight or stared at their phone for 10 minutes because the rogue and GM are trying to hash out exactly how pickpocketing in a fight via Magic Hand works, or spends most of their mental energy as a GM redesigning encounters and mechanics. If we want to talk about fun we need to talk about avoiding or fixing issues with the game.
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Apr 17, 2018 04:37
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Wyvernil posted:Maybe the concepts of the battlemaster and monk could be combined to make a Martial Technique list to complement the spell list? The monk could fit in as a "martial caster" type who focuses on techniques(including the over-the-top supernatural stuff that would be at home in DBZ), while the fighter and rogue specialize in the less flashy/more sneaky techniques. Sort of how the Swordsage and Warblade functioned in the Book of Nine Swords supplement for 3E. I had some similar thoughts and put some efforts into making a Universal Martial Maneuvers homebrew. Here's the $2 version and here's the PWYW version. It folds Battlemaster into all fighters, extends limited maneuvers access to other martials and barely any maneuvers access for casters. The maneuvers are indeed short-rest based. 5e playtests had something of this kind of system but it morphed into the more rigid feats / ASI system and yeah. gradenko_2000 posted:the DnD spell list is definitely one of the biggest bugaboos in the design. A Necromancer should be its own class. Ditto an Illusionist. Evocation? Sorcs only. Something like that. The universality of any one DnD caster's spell selection is a huge problem. I agree with this, along with extending something like martial maneuvers to non casters. For me allowing more flexibility to character abilities / powers than the 5e class / feats would help.
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Apr 17, 2018 04:40
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kidkissinger posted:Got yelled at by someone on the internet for suggesting that taking prisoners is a waste of time in D&D as evil aligned beings aren't likely to stop being evil. There're two other good reasons to take prisoners:
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Apr 17, 2018 04:46
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Blockhouse posted:who wants to play an entire campaign in the Forgotten Realms honestly This comes up every few pages, but just in case: FR is staggeringly vast and if all you know about is The Sword Coast then you have 95% of it to use in lots of other ways.
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Apr 17, 2018 05:20
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:This sounds good to me. I'm okay with fighter powers being "I attack" or "ask your gm" if wizard powers are also "I attack" or "ask your gm". Did someone say simple magic guy with the option to just mindlessly I-attack-the-biggest-one whenever your attention is dragged away from your phone for a second? Work in progress, needs another archetype, needs to be playtested way more. CHANNELER: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4oz3kpa9b6p0tsj/CHANNELER.pdf?dl=0 Xae posted:On the other hand gently caress summons and gently caress hirelings. Did someone say "gently caress summons"? How about gently caress you, buddy? I kid, I kid. Summons, minions, pets, hirelings etc all suck pretty bad. I've been thinking about how you'd do summoning without making each of your turns be 10+ turns. that combined with thinking about my Channeler class in terms of how it feels really weird but kinda cool to have a magic character that doesn't cast any spells at all. Here's what I've come up with so far. Work in (very early) progress, third archetype missing, everything completely untested, numbers mean basically nothing because I pulled most of them out of my rear end as a starting point. DEMONOLOGIST https://www.dropbox.com/s/m6dp35dt0q2w8ka/DEMONOLOGIST.pdf?dl=0 Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Apr 17, 2018 |
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Apr 17, 2018 05:37
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FRINGE posted:This comes up every few pages, but just in case: FR is staggeringly vast and if all you know about is The Sword Coast then you have 95% of it to use in lots of other ways. sure but uh nobody gives a gently caress
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Apr 17, 2018 05:49
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FRINGE posted:This comes up every few pages, but just in case: FR is staggeringly vast and if all you know about is The Sword Coast then you have 95% of it to use in lots of other ways. I get it but if I'm going to play in a generic fantasy setting I rather it be a generic fantasy setting made by me and my friends Like there's nothing I specifically like about FR enough to do a whole game there like I would Eberron or whatever. Maybe that's because so much of the Realms have disseminated into D&D and fantasy as a whole but that doesn't change how I feel about it.
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Apr 17, 2018 05:55
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How can I prevent my dragon's breath'd familiar from getting instasniped every time?
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Apr 17, 2018 05:56
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kidkissinger posted:How can I prevent my dragon's breath'd familiar from getting instasniped every time? Have him hide behind you. If it is small enough that should give it total cover.
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Apr 17, 2018 06:07
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MonsterEnvy posted:Have him hide behind you. If it is small enough that should give it total cover. And with 60ft. of movement he can still blast away. Nice!
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Apr 17, 2018 06:10
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Blockhouse posted:I get it but if I'm going to play in a generic fantasy setting I rather it be a generic fantasy setting made by me and my friends I enjoy playing in published settings and also like the Realms quite a bit. But of course there is nothing wrong with using your own setting. It's not like Lost Mines is super attached to FR other then the map which can easily be cut and pasted into your own setting.
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Apr 17, 2018 06:10
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FRINGE posted:This comes up every few pages, but just in case: FR is staggeringly vast and if all you know about is The Sword Coast then you have 95% of it to use in lots of other ways. Just last session I took my home-brewed island chain and retconned it to be one of the remote chains on the west side of the world so I didn't have to bullshit everything off the top of my head when my dudes decide to sail around the world. Feels like a lot of weight off my shoulders, because none of us know anything other than Sword Coast (specifically LMoP and maybe some Baldur's Gate or something) so it's new to us either way. They may very well end up back in the Sword Coast, but it's a big rear end area regardless and none of us are married to the exact lore of the world anyways so at least I don't have to spend my time making maps.
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Apr 17, 2018 06:16
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kidkissinger posted:How can I prevent my dragon's breath'd familiar from getting instasniped every time? hold it in your arms and tug it's tail when you want it to fire
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Apr 17, 2018 08:25
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If you're really concerned, you can always boop it away into a pocket dimension, at the cost of an action.
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Apr 17, 2018 08:29
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FRINGE posted:Thats a good argument for keeping them separate. Sorcerer should be Con, since they are burning their own energy for spells. Having that much "life energy" doesnet mean they can military press a horse. xiw posted:Multiclassing serves a few different purposes Splicer fucked around with this message at 09:23 on Apr 17, 2018 |
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Apr 17, 2018 09:16
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