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Azza Bamboo posted:Why wouldn't WotC make DnD pay to win? I'm more confused by the people who think DnD hasn't been pay-to-win since like, 3rd edition. That was one of the main impetuses behind the splatbook treadmill.
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Oct 21, 2018 16:51
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Splicer posted:I tried to due diligance before posting but got caught by Roll20s Pact of the Chain hyperlinking to the full MM Quasit entry Dang, that’s really annoying and I’m sure a lot of people play that way. The only reason I knew about that tweet is someone in our ToA campaign played a chainlock and it came up.
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Oct 21, 2018 16:56
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Gharbad the Weak posted:I'm very, very strongly on the side that NPCs and PCs should be built in different ways. But normally I think in terms of PCs being able to do things that an NPC can't. Contrast "No you can't do that, you're not these exact two orcs".
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Oct 21, 2018 16:57
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Gharbad the Weak posted:I'm very, very strongly on the side that NPCs and PCs should be built in different ways. But normally I think in terms of PCs being able to do things that an NPC can't. It goes both ways. NPCs vary from cardboard cutouts that do An Interesting Thing and are then mown down by the PCs - so that Interesting Thing should be big and high impact, and way more punchy than the weight of the NPC would indicate, to entire-campaign villains who are casting world-ending mass-murder rituals. Neither of which the PCs should necessarily have access to.
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Oct 21, 2018 17:24
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Reene posted:I'm more confused by the people who think DnD hasn't been pay-to-win since like, 3rd edition. That was one of the main impetuses behind the splatbook treadmill. The 3.x splatbooks were to scattershot for pay to win to have been the case. Take a look in any one of those random Tome and Blood or whatever little prestige class splats and you'll see very little but dumb, forgettable ideas. Any class that stands out dramatically above others in 3.x is basically a mistake that designers made. They didn't have grand designs, they were just shortsighted and there was too much old stuff to bother taking into account when designing new ones. What I'm trying to say is that 3.x was the process of random mutations and natural selection, there was no intelligent designer.
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Oct 21, 2018 17:29
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The splatbook mill was definitely there to they could sell stuff, period, but I wouldn't say it was "play-to-win" in the sense that every new splatbook upped the ante more and more with every release, because a lot of 3e's power lay right in the core, a good chunk of splat was aimed at providing "better balanced" alternatives, and most splat was just downright mediocre. I mean, I don't think anyone could look at Essentials and accuse the new Mearls-driven PHBs to be more powerful than the originals
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Oct 21, 2018 17:33
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Nehru the Damaja posted:I've tried to homebrew a fighter in the style of action heroes before and it's tricky as hell to make an interesting/good martial thing. Ideally he'd be moving through a fight disarming people, throwing their weapons, picking up other ones, improvising weapons from the area around him, etc. Somewhere between a John Woo hero throwing away his guns for more on the ground and Jackie Chan beating the gently caress out of everyone with whatever he can find. I would start with a Monk for what you’re trying to do. They have a lot of cool action hero features.
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Oct 21, 2018 17:42
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Parts of it mesh well with monk but to me part of the appeal is making a fighter where the billion weapon proficiencies matter, because you're chucking axes and improvising spears and shooting an idiot with his own crossbow etc.
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Oct 21, 2018 17:59
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Sodomy Hussein posted:It kicks over a major sacred cow to combine ability scores, of which D&D really needs at most four ([Str/Con], [Dex], [Int/Wis], [Cha]). That way lies games that don't have ability modifiers and further heresies unimaginable. Way behind on the thread (I only pick it up for a read occasionally) but just wanted to chime in and say, I never said that games can't do without ability scores. I honestly agree with your assessment here (particularly since INT hasn't done anything since 3.5, and actually does less in 5e than 4e since it can't be used for AC) it's just that it's really hard to try and "fix" 5e by combining ability scores, without having weird knock-on effects. Just in the example you've used, you'd end up with [Int/Wis] being used for 10 skills, whereas [Str/Con] is still just 1, for instance. Like, that might not actually even mechanically be a problem, per se, it's just weird.
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Oct 21, 2018 18:07
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Nehru the Damaja posted:Parts of it mesh well with monk but to me part of the appeal is making a fighter where the billion weapon proficiencies matter, because you're chucking axes and improvising spears and shooting an idiot with his own crossbow etc. Yeah the main advantage monk has is with improvised stuff that doesn't have a clear parallel, but as long as you can clearly (and preferably quickly, so as to keep some semblance of that Jackie Chan flow) define the equivalent, Fighter with its 4+ maximum actions after 5th level could make it work. If it's a lot of throwing poo poo in a panic then a DM might penalize you for grabbing all that in one turn but I would rule the grab and immediate throw as a single attack action. It's too bad Monks don't really have the action economy that they should. They should have at least one more Extra Attack and a scaling Flurry of Blows to get closer to that Muhammad Ali ideal of 12 punches in 3 seconds.
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Oct 21, 2018 18:19
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Josef bugman posted:Okay quick thing but why are Pact of the Chain warlocks considered so much better than the other 2? I still grab find familiar via 'tome pacts can cast rituals now' invocation. And of course it's winged snake. But I took that because it's happened to have an actual lore blurb that essentially described them as really fancy carrier pigeons  It also likely that people find it less bullshit if you burn a spell slot to turn your familiar invisible, though I generally play with a GM who tells our Bard "Don't forget your familiar can use aid other" so I expect they'd love self applying invisible familiars. Section Z fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Oct 21, 2018 |
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Oct 21, 2018 19:16
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I forget what's the deal with Pact of the Chain but as I recall the advanced familiars you can pick have some really neat abilities, and I think there's some nonsense you can do to use flyby tricks to get advantage all the time or something.
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Oct 21, 2018 19:26
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Glagha posted:I forget what's the deal with Pact of the Chain but as I recall the advanced familiars you can pick have some really neat abilities, and I think there's some nonsense you can do to use flyby tricks to get advantage all the time or something. Shoot, a basic owl has flyby. That said, every DM I've met either hates running separate familiar initiative or thinks flyby is bullshit without stopping to think "let's just shoot the owl"
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Oct 21, 2018 19:35
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So if your spells are going to break the world and setting than just don't include them. Telling people they can't learn abilities in a tabletop RPG because that magic is for cutscenes is just stupid. I'm fine with NPCs not having all the moving parts that PCs do, but people will want to play dark mages and whatnot and explaining that this is a JRPG cutscene because we can't figure out how to balance teleportation magic is just idiotic.
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Oct 21, 2018 19:49
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:So if your spells are going to break the world and setting than just don't include them. Telling people they can't learn abilities in a tabletop RPG because that magic is for cutscenes is just stupid. I'm fine with NPCs not having all the moving parts that PCs do, but people will want to play dark mages and whatnot and explaining that this is a JRPG cutscene because we can't figure out how to balance teleportation magic is just idiotic. Expecting every single piece of magic in the world to be a spell the players can learn seems pretty dumb
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Oct 21, 2018 19:53
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Why does 5e feel the need to have things like Nature, Survival, and Medicine all as separate skills, while also having things like Herbalism Kit and Poisoner's Kit as a tool proficiencies? Likewise, why have musical instruments as tool profs, when Performance is right there (and your average DM will just ask you to use that skill, anyway?) IMO knowledge skills shouldn't be tied to ability scores, anyway -- but before we get carried away, they really need to curate the skills list a bit more tightly, first.
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Oct 21, 2018 19:53
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P.d0t posted:Why does 5e feel the need to have things like Nature, Survival, and Medicine all as separate skills, while also having things like Herbalism Kit and Poisoner's Kit as a tool proficiencies? Though at least our usual 5th ed GM never goes "ACTUALLY, Investigate would be the appropriate check in this case!" to further deepen that issue in 5th ed. But then he also encouraged the Cleric to take Observant to get around that issue  Only barely related, Expertise on Athletics or Acrobatics is fun because that has a notable impact on "ACTUALLY, this would be other skill that starts with the letter A" moments. Section Z fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Oct 21, 2018 |
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Oct 21, 2018 19:58
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Having passive perception, perception, and investigation is fuckin' asinine.
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Oct 21, 2018 19:59
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:So if your spells are going to break the world and setting than just don't include them. Telling people they can't learn abilities in a tabletop RPG because that magic is for cutscenes is just stupid. I'm fine with NPCs not having all the moving parts that PCs do, but people will want to play dark mages and whatnot and explaining that this is a JRPG cutscene because we can't figure out how to balance teleportation magic is just idiotic. 5e is a low design effort RPG. Teleportation is hard to balance and design adventures around, so why not keep it out of players hands, its easier. It's a great lazy schtick for villains to arrive or escape though, so lets keep it for them. If you're bothered by that asymmetry that's an absolutely rational thing to be bothered about, it drives me nuts but hey 5E is crazy successful so all is forgiven on a corporate level.
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Oct 21, 2018 20:01
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Andrast posted:Expecting every single piece of magic in the world to be a spell the players can learn seems pretty dumb I'm not expecting to learn a mind flayer's mind blast, but if a human wizard shows up with a spell I don't have and I'm a human wizard I'd expect to be able to learn it.
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Oct 21, 2018 20:03
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I'm not expecting to learn a mind flayer's mind blast, but if a human wizard shows up with a spell I don't have and I'm a human wizard I'd expect to be able to learn it. why?
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Oct 21, 2018 20:42
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tbh I've never found "PCs and NPCs should be built differently" to be a very good answer in the case of rule-breaking magic in D&D 3.x/5E/etc., because those iterations of D&D have defined essentially all magic as something that can be studied and learned by anyone intelligent enough to do so, and coming from a specific list of effects (no freeform stuff, the magic extremely inhuman creatures can do as part of their nature is defined in reference to PC spell lists, etc.) if game goes out of its way to create and reinforce the idea that every magic effect is something you could eventually learn how to do, "why can't I ever do that?" is actually an extremely reasonable question LGD fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Oct 21, 2018 |
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Oct 21, 2018 20:48
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LGD posted:...game goes out of its way to create and reinforce the idea that every magic effect is something you could eventually learn how to do That's the bad thing being discussed, yes.
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Oct 21, 2018 21:25
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Clearly the game needs blue mages. Gotta learn that Grand Train.
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Oct 21, 2018 21:33
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theironjef posted:Clearly the game needs blue mages. Gotta learn that Grand Train. Grand Train is still beholden to your stats. 1000 Needles or bust 
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Oct 21, 2018 21:36
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I'm not expecting to learn a mind flayer's mind blast, but if a human wizard shows up with a spell I don't have and I'm a human wizard I'd expect to be able to learn it. Sure, but it takes a year of practicing every day, or you have to go to a special school only other wizards can teleport you to. A good DM will have like fifteen ways to tell you that you technically can learn the spell...just not right now.
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Oct 21, 2018 21:44
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I'm not expecting to learn a mind flayer's mind blast, but if a human wizard shows up with a spell I don't have and I'm a human wizard I'd expect to be able to learn it. Monsters need to be designed for efficiency, because the average monster is going to exist in-game for about three rounds and maybe twenty minutes of real time. Their stat block should be easily readable and, outside of flavor text describing what they're about, be absolutely concise. Fundamentally, it's a game, not a simulator. PCs and monsters don't work on the same rules because they're not the same thing. In our current world, where we're having a board game/RPG revolution of choice and availability, pretty much every game designer understands this except the ones working for D&D/Pathfinder properties. One of the most offensive things to me in the Pathfinder previews has been their monster descriptions.  This is a total disaster of a stat block. It places no value on readability or concision. As a technical writer, this is an abomination. To loop 5e back in, every time a monster stat block tells you to look up a spell--a thing designed for use by a player, not a monster--that's also a huge fail. P.d0t posted:Way behind on the thread (I only pick it up for a read occasionally) but just wanted to chime in and say, I never said that games can't do without ability scores. That's true and generally how it bears out, but [str/con] is more important to day-to-day survivability for characters who are martial-oriented, so grabbing more skills by being an [int/wis] guy ends up being a kind of balance. I've written and digitally-published a game that uses Might, Agility, Wit, and Charisma. It works out pretty well and it actually becomes much easier to balance things, because it becomes much easier to combine concepts when you don't have to worry about, for example, if a caster should be Int or Wis-based, and other problems in need of a reason to exist. Name Change fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Oct 21, 2018 |
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Oct 21, 2018 22:03
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Sodomy Hussein posted:This is a total disaster of a stat block. Gah! I had repressed that memory, why would you show us such a thing?
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Oct 21, 2018 22:11
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A very common problem seems to be people flip flopping between "Well, it's a game mechanic so-" and "But LOGICALLY-" to suit their personal preference. Then a lot of time is wasted when players try to follow the claimed reasons for something not desired by the GM. For whatever reason, this is a huge blindspot I always fall for this despite how cynical I am of such things. Same for being told "There are no rails, you can do whatever you think will work" and then pissing people off when I take their word for it. Or people declaring that "REALISM" is their primary concern, only for a realistic suggestion to reveal their actual intentions. "It's not REALISTIC if you're immune to ALL poison!" "Oh. Okay... Wait, if 'realism' is the problem, how do tiny puppeteer parasites poison me through my armored space commando suit? Yay I'm focusing on what the GM cares about  ""Uh..." I'd honestly prefer if people would be more upfront with "BECAUSE I DON'T LIKE IT THAT'S WHY". But I guess that feels more confrontational, and they can't fool themselves that they are simply a blameless GM with circumstances 'entirely out of their hands' if they are up front that they just hate it, or they don't have any idea how to resolve the scene if you use it, etc. Making up a dozen in fiction reasons for why your wizard can't learn another wizard's spell just means you are still saying "But you COULD learn it." If you don't want your player to learn it, just tell them instead of trying to play coy about it. Which also leads to less frustration with your party going on a long tangent to try and meet those claims to learn 4th level NPC Get Out Of Jail Free, rather than follow the plot. "We kidnapped the ancient cultist. Now we can learn it!" "Uh... You also... Need to learn it under the light of a leap year moon?" "Okay, we'll wait "
Section Z fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Oct 21, 2018 |
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Oct 21, 2018 22:31
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Sodomy Hussein posted:Monsters need to be designed for efficiency, because the average monster is going to exist in-game for about three rounds and maybe twenty minutes of real time. Their stat block should be easily readable and, outside of flavor text describing what they're about, be absolutely concise. Why are function calls bad? Standardizing PC/monster abilities so you don't have to deal with special snowflake exceptions everywhere isn't a bad thing. If the terror of looking up fireball is really what's keeping the monsters down, you can reprint it if worst comes to worst. There is absolutely no reason a player fireball and enemy dark wizard fireball needs to work differently at all, and it's easier to adjudicate when they do the same thing. But to answer section z's post, I will be up front that I absolutely hate "that's not for you, player! Go sit in the corner!" with the burning hate of a thousand suns. I suspect the "good dms" who explain that actually you need to get another wizard to teleport you to wizard school for 15 years (despite the fact that you already went to wizard school for 15 years to get the first level, and that's explicitly not how wizardry works) are probably not going to be happy when the player decides to ignore all the plot hooks to go follow the suggestion to track down another NPC wizard to learn Curse of the Black Flame or whatever. Now you can totally have NPC wizards that just know fireball, magic missile, and lightning bolt to simplify combat rather than having a full PC spell list and reprint the spells there. That satisfies the endless complaints about the tyranny of looking things up in the rulebook AND simplifying NPCs. Yet no one ever seems to suggest this...
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Oct 21, 2018 22:40
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Sodomy Hussein posted:This is a total disaster of a stat block. It places no value on readability or concision. As a technical writer, this is an abomination. There's a magic blood hat. There's a little guy who is afraid of God. The little guy makes the cap. At a glance, it looks like the stat blocks of 3 barely related objects. Just writing a small tale about what the gently caress was going on would eliminate the need for 9/10ths of this stat block. Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Oct 21, 2018 |
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Oct 21, 2018 22:45
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Why are function calls bad? Standardizing PC/monster abilities so you don't have to deal with special snowflake exceptions everywhere isn't a bad thing. If the terror of looking up fireball is really what's keeping the monsters down, you can reprint it if worst comes to worst. There is absolutely no reason a player fireball and enemy dark wizard fireball needs to work differently at all, and it's easier to adjudicate when they do the same thing. Mainly I've discovered that "GM just straight up tells you No" feels like a far lesser evil than- "GM pretends there are REASONS he cant let you do thing. Everybody's time is wasted as you try to meet an growing list of REASONS. Until eventually the GM declares 'uh, we don't do that in this group' or some other limp wristed version of No" I'm a wobbly case that doesn't WANT to rock the boat usually, and would be happy to trail along wherever the intended plot leads. But also tend towards being disruptive in the most mundane of ways which are a real bastard for GMs to field without openly admitting that it's because it's a game with arbitrarily followed rules be it personal preference or module writers. Stuff like "Sorry, Not Section Z player. You can't possibly shoot the Edge of the empire tuskan raiders from this range with your slug rifle" "Waaaaait a minute. If the Tuskan raiders are out of range of our party's slug rifles... How could THEY shoot US with slug rifles? Okay guys we're safe to sprint for the ship unopposed. I bet our cargo will even be safe from plot mandated damage." "Uh..." Section Z fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Oct 21, 2018 |
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Oct 21, 2018 22:51
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Nehru the Damaja posted:Parts of it mesh well with monk but to me part of the appeal is making a fighter where the billion weapon proficiencies matter, because you're chucking axes and improvising spears and shooting an idiot with his own crossbow etc. Since you're talking houserule solutions these are the options we use at our game: Norts Universal Martial Maneuvers: This one I put together mainly trying to address our martial players ideas as well as the main points this thread has highlighted re martial shortcomings. It's very much intended that a player can propose a new maneuver and fit it into this system. Claytor summed it up best: Claytor posted:Nort's Universal Martial Maneuvers saves the Fighter by killing the Battlemaster. You can play any other Fighter archetype and still use the Battlemaster's maneuvers. In fact, the Battlemaster's maneuvers are made available to every character. Fighters get the most maneuvers, the most dice, and the biggest dice, and regain all of their dice on a short rest. Other martial classes get fewer maneuvers, their dice are fewer and weaker, and they only regain one die on a short rest. Casters get a few maneuvers later in the game, with a few small dice which recover one at a time on a short rest. The idea is that Fighters and other martial classes benefit from a variety of new options, while casters might pick up a couple of utility abilities for battlefield healing or a quick AC boost. For weapon specific techniques we also use Beyond Damage Dice with some tweaks: And then there's Martial Arms Training Manual, which is similar to Beyond Damage Dice. It's quite popular but I haven't read it carefully enough to decide whether to add it or replace BDD. Our martials have plenty options now so it doesn't come up anymore.
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Oct 21, 2018 22:56
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Why are function calls bad? Standardizing PC/monster abilities so you don't have to deal with special snowflake exceptions everywhere isn't a bad thing. If the terror of looking up fireball is really what's keeping the monsters down, you can reprint it if worst comes to worst. There is absolutely no reason a player fireball and enemy dark wizard fireball needs to work differently at all, and it's easier to adjudicate when they do the same thing. Yeah but the problem is, you've already decided that the enemy dark wizard is explicitly casting "Fireball". What if it's a necromancer who wants to cast "The Final Pyre", or a demon who calls for the "Brimstone Rain", or a fire giant king invokes "Blood of Ymir" or whatever? Why are they the exact same thing? The problem with making monster/npc magic the same as pc-magic is that it discourages creativity. Every special ability gets translated through the same lens over and over, whether it's in Monster Manual 1 or Monster Manual 5 (or whatever 5e calls their next couple of monster books). For a "you can anything" fantasy game, I can hardly think of something worse than standardizing all supernatural forces into the same static little list of effects. It's not terror that makes me not want to look up fireball yet again. It's boredom. Edit: But if it really is just a wizard casting plain old fireball, then yeah, snag his book and copy away.
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Oct 21, 2018 22:57
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Why are function calls bad? Standardizing PC/monster abilities so you don't have to deal with special snowflake exceptions everywhere isn't a bad thing. If the terror of looking up fireball is really what's keeping the monsters down, you can reprint it if worst comes to worst. There is absolutely no reason a player fireball and enemy dark wizard fireball needs to work differently at all, and it's easier to adjudicate when they do the same thing. The description for Fireball is 135 words, five stat lines, and two paragraphs, much of which conveys information a player needs and a monster doesn't, and the rest of which is again a disaster as far as conciseness and readability goes. Whereas I can essentially write: quote:Fireball (This is still not as concise as it could be.) It introduces other possibilities, like I can change all that flavor or stat text for balance or other purposes (it's an iceball now/it's a Final Pyre, not a Fireball/8d6 is too much or little/etc.) and not have to worry about whether it matches Fireball exactly, because I'm not married to a piece of information designed only for a player. I can then do even complex lists of monster powers this way and save 90% of the space on the page, which I use for other things. If Tim the Wizard wants to learn the Iceball he saw earlier, he's in luck, because you can just give him Fireball and say it is does cold damage instead. Nothing is lost. In this version of events, I'm not doing ten times the writing for half the readability, asking DMs to bust out anything other than the monster stat block during a fight, making certain that a designer wrote what my monster can do or else I can't use it, or writing my own book of house magic that no one is ever going to read.
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Oct 21, 2018 23:03
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Sodomy Hussein posted:
Well that Statblock makes me appreciate the relative simpleness of the 5e Redcap and most other monsters. However I disagree with the spell thing. There is nothing saying that spells are designed to be used for players over monsters. Given that Monsters in every single edition have had access to spells, and they have had access to them in this edition from day 1. Spells are a neutral thing that both players and monsters can use. However there is of course nothing wrong with magical abilities that do things similar to spells but are not. MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Oct 21, 2018 |
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Oct 21, 2018 23:03
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Sage Genesis posted:Yeah but the problem is, you've already decided that the enemy dark wizard is explicitly casting "Fireball". What if it's a necromancer who wants to cast "The Final Pyre", or a demon who calls for the "Brimstone Rain", or a fire giant king invokes "Blood of Ymir" or whatever? Why are they the exact same thing? The problem with making monster/npc magic the same as pc-magic is that it discourages creativity. Every special ability gets translated through the same lens over and over, whether it's in Monster Manual 1 or Monster Manual 5 (or whatever 5e calls their next couple of monster books). Refluffing is literally the solution for all of that. Ignoring the fact that you can be a PC necromancer but not a demon or fire giant, you can seriously just say the necromancer's fireball looks like a flaming skull or whatever and that the demon's fireball manifests as a rain of fire. It's not even hard. Ultimately, the game needs to be parsed by humans, and having 5 different fireballs with various piddly bonuses/alterations is in no way conducive to that. As a player I don't particularly care that the incoming fire AoE is 10 feet wider vs inflicting a -2 penalty to attack, I'm just going to visualize a fiery explosion - and if it's actually different enough that I care, make it a new spell. Sodomy Hussein posted:The description for Fireball is 135 words, five stat lines, and two paragraphs, much of which conveys information a player needs and a monster doesn't, and the rest of which is again a disaster as far as conciseness and readability goes. Fifty percent of this is that the D&D designers are bad at writing concise descriptions and the other 50 is that this stuff might actually come up for a monster. Spell components come up if you attempt to silence, restrain, or sunder the enemy (component pouches), fireballs igniting the wooden barriers may come up especially as part of encounter design, and it wouldn't be hard to imagine a monster needing to scale their spells up.
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Oct 21, 2018 23:16
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Ultimately I think a lot of these problems with the spells in D&D comes down to the fact that D&D is much more a D&D simulator rather than a fantasy simulator. In any piece of fantasy fiction powerful magic is usually balanced out by it having some extreme cost associated with it: Either it is going to be extremely capricious and tend to have potential side effects the caster won't like, require the caster to make some form of meaningful personal sacrifice or require the caster to do morally questionable things to cast. None of this is reflected in D&D where magic is super easy to cast and learn, requires little to no investment or cost on the part of the caster and always works exactly as written with little to no room for backfire. We're then expected to buy into a world where magic works this way but things are otherwise pretty much the same as it was in medieval Europe and not some sort of crazy, Eberron-esque magical space future. And don't get me started on how disproportionately powerful D&D magic is compared to the magic of its inspirations...
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Oct 21, 2018 23:19
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Refluffing is literally the solution for all of that. Ignoring the fact that you can be a PC necromancer but not a demon or fire giant, you can seriously just say the necromancer's fireball looks like a flaming skull or whatever and that the demon's fireball manifests as a rain of fire. It's not even hard. Ultimately, the game needs to be parsed by humans, and having 5 different fireballs with various piddly bonuses/alterations is in no way conducive to that. As a player I don't particularly care that the incoming fire AoE is 10 feet wider vs inflicting a -2 penalty to attack, I'm just going to visualize a fiery explosion - and if it's actually different enough that I care, make it a new spell. Refluffing is not the solution for that, because I want all of those abilities to be different. Actually, mechanically, meaningfully different. And you really exaggerate how hard it would be to parse for a human, you can literally condense the effects down to one or two lines in a stat block, as Sodomy Hussein showed. No DM will ever read two lines of Brimstone Rain and then suddenly get the vapors because he thinks Fireball looks kind of similar if you squint. (Also, if the DM starts to tell you brimstone rains down at a demon's command, do you actually, genuinely imagine a fiery explosion? Why would you even do that?)
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Oct 21, 2018 23:26
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Sodomy Hussein posted:That's true and generally how it bears out, but [str/con] is more important to day-to-day survivability for characters who are martial-oriented, so grabbing more skills by being an [int/wis] guy ends up being a kind of balance.
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Oct 21, 2018 23:43
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