Dungeons & Dragons: 5th Edition - Its not called Dungeons & No Dragons, son

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Dungeons & Dragons: 5th Edition - Its not called Dungeons & No Dragons, son

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kingcom: Jun 23, 2012

MonsterEnvy posted:

For those (Probably few) wondering why the UA for the Artificer is not out yet, despite its original planned Drop Date being yesterday, the reason is snow.

Yeah its a pretty safe bet they got some higher priorities.

# ? Feb 13, 2019 10:46

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# ? Jun 5, 2024 00:38

P.d0t: Dec 27, 2007; I released my finger from the trigger, and then it was over...

Ginger Beer Belly posted:

My DM has us roll for HP, and simultaneously rolls his own, and lets us choose from our known roll vs his hidden roll resulting in a pseudo-advantage roll. I've had 1 fighter level with a d10 roll and 4 subsequent rogue d8 rolls, and whenever I've rolled a 4 or lower, I've taken the DM roll and I've been lucky in that all of them have been above average and I have a max hp of 55 at level 6.

koreban posted:

Talk to the DM. When a character levels, roll for HP. If the roll is more than the average, take the roll. If not, take the average.

I've been slowly compiling some house-rules and common fixes for 5e, and for rolling HP I've basically settled on "either take the average, or roll with advantage."

The interesting thing about this is statistically, with any HD you use, rolling with advantage results in the book-stated average (or higher) 75% of the time.

# ? Feb 13, 2019 14:22

P.d0t: Dec 27, 2007; I released my finger from the trigger, and then it was over...

lightrook posted:

Hexblade is a nice one-level dip if you want to beef up your bard for melee combat; medium armor and shield proficiency does a lot for your AC, and Hex Warrior usually adds some weight to your hits, on top of picking up the Blade cantrips for extra melee oomph.

The other dip choice for getting some extra melee power is paladin; you also gain medium armor and shield proficiency (but not heavy - you have to start in paladin for that), and the second gets you Smites, which is the main appeal. The other nice part is that paladins are half-casters so you only lose one caster level for your two level dip.

Is Hexblade1/Paladin6 a worthwhile dip to make?

I wonder, since Divine Smite keys off of melee weapon attacks, and Aura of Protection keys off of CHA; if you can use CHA for both of those things, it seems like there's the potential for synergy. It'd also help to stick any smite spells you use, since being CHA-primary means you have a higher paladin spell save DC. OTOH you'd be having to put at least a 13 in STR, any which way.

Would you want to go whole-hog and get Pact of the Blade in the mix? Or does that basically only matter if you're going for Polearm Master?

On a related topic, when multiclassing Paladin, do people typically start with Paladin (for the heavy armor) or go Sorcerer first (for the CON save prof, since smite spells all take concentration)? Is there any merit to starting as a Fighter, and getting both benefits?

# ? Feb 13, 2019 14:57

Conspiratiorist: Nov 12, 2015; 17th Separate Kryvyi Rih Tank Brigade named after Konstantin Pestushko
Look to my coming on the first light of the ~~fifth~~ ~~sixth~~ some day

P.d0t posted:

Is Hexblade1/Paladin6 a worthwhile dip to make?

I wonder, since Divine Smite keys off of melee weapon attacks, and Aura of Protection keys off of CHA; if you can use CHA for both of those things, it seems like there's the potential for synergy. It'd also help to stick any smite spells you use, since being CHA-primary means you have a higher paladin spell save DC. OTOH you'd be having to put at least a 13 in STR, any which way.

Would you want to go whole-hog and get Pact of the Blade in the mix? Or does that basically only matter if you're going for Polearm Master?

On a related topic, when multiclassing Paladin, do people typically start with Paladin (for the heavy armor) or go Sorcerer first (for the CON save prof, since smite spells all take concentration)? Is there any merit to starting as a Fighter, and getting both benefits?

Hexadin is very strong. You take only 1 level of Hexblade, 2 if you're feeling adventurous, but 3 just isn't worthwhile considering how good the Paladin progression is all the way to 13th. Remember you can use Polearm Master with 1h weapons.

For Sorcadin you start Paladin unless you rolled for stats and got an impressive array - Going DEX requires you to meet the 13 STR requirement still, and going STR without Heavy Armor means meeting DEX 14 for AC. Fighter 1/Sorc X is a viable multiclass but no point in taking Fighter levels if you're going Paladin.

# ? Feb 13, 2019 15:15

Toplowtech: Aug 31, 2004

Natural 20 posted:

I do every game because I know how to operate around relatively low hp.

But I've been ratfucked pretty royally by this NGL.

Also please don't pull the sever bullshit. It's not helpful and even though I know it's intended in a light heated manner it's more likely to elicit a response in defense of my friends rather than find a solution under the distressing I have.

FYI i got a cool campaign marginally ruined for me once with my melee Figther with shittier HP than our rolling 4 all the time Wizard in ADD and i learned that if the version of the game allow you to take average, you should ALWAYS take average unless you are 100% sure your gm/group is cool with your rerolling later. Also it's a good time to become a ranged rogue.

# ? Feb 13, 2019 15:17

P.d0t: Dec 27, 2007; I released my finger from the trigger, and then it was over...

Conspiratiorist posted:

For Sorcadin you start Paladin unless you rolled for stats and got an impressive array - Going DEX requires you to meet the 13 STR requirement still, and going STR without Heavy Armor means meeting DEX 14 for AC. Fighter 1/Sorc X is a viable multiclass but no point in taking Fighter levels if you're going Paladin.

So the CON save prof isn't much of a priority, I take it.
I can see the point of going Fighter1/SorcX just for the armor profs, but I'm not sure why you'd take that over Paladin2/Sorc[X-1]

# ? Feb 13, 2019 16:03

Narsham: Jun 5, 2008

The "start a new character" advice for the low hp assassin makes me want to say something caustic about the "save game" generation of RPGs. If you're hating playing the character, fine, but someone asking for tips on survival presumably wants to keep playing this character.

Four suggestions and tactical approaches:
1. Pre-combat triage with the rest of the party. You know you're a glass cannon, and so do they, so develop approaches around it. Having a tough melee character concentrate on getting "sticky" (Sentinal at L4, for instance) helps; a bonus action heal reserved to bumping you to positive hp when you drop is vital. You could be viable at range but that isn't a great opener: if someone wants to push initiative and engage before you go in the first round, that's helpful.
2. Hit & run tactics. As a rogue, you can step up, attack, bonus action to disengage and move away. You'll need to boost speed for that. Taking Mobile at L4 is viable, as you can engage a single foe and then bonus action to dash away. Getting enemies to attack someone else is key when at low hp.
3. Push AC. It's good advice anyway, but if one hit knocks you below zero you need to not get hit. Investing in other defenses if you can will help. You could dip one level to get shield proficiency for +2 AC; dipping fighter gets you second wind and an extra AC with Defense style, as well as a shot at a d10 roll for hp. Grabbing another level for action surge in the surprise round is tempting, too.
4. Boost hp. The low-hanging fruit in this direction has been covered. But if your GM is old-school, I'd expect meta-game solutions to be less effective than in-game ones. Do a quest for better endurance. Talk to your GM about in-game options and possibilities, which could range from an alchemist who needs you to gather ingredients for a potion that will let you get a reroll, to Con boosting tatoos, to a deal with a shady tiefling that ends up with you swapping bodies with someone else. There's some great story opportunities in having a PC with a glass jaw try to correct that situation, and that's more fun than giving up on a character because some of the numbers on your sheet aren't as big as they could be.

# ? Feb 13, 2019 17:13

CubeTheory: Mar 26, 2010; Cube Reversal

Thinking about picking up and running Dragon Heist. Anyone have any opinions they'd like to share about it? Or even just a sort of summary of how it plays?

# ? Feb 13, 2019 17:16

Kaysette: Jan 5, 2009; ~*Boston makes me*~
~*feel good*~

CubeTheory posted:

Thinking about picking up and running Dragon Heist. Anyone have any opinions they'd like to share about it? Or even just a sort of summary of how it plays?

There's no heist, 2/10.

Trollskull Manor is cool, though?

# ? Feb 13, 2019 17:19

Reveilled: Apr 19, 2007; Take up your rifles

One thing that really surprised me with my new group who had only played 1st edition before was how there was zero interest in rolling HP. I expected them to have a bit of a �it�s not real D&D if you don�t roll� grog mentality but as soon as I mentioned the option to take half plus one all four of them sprung for that immediately and one even called having the option to roll a �trap for idiots�.

# ? Feb 13, 2019 17:29

Infinite Karma: Oct 23, 2004; Good as dead

Narsham posted:

The "start a new character" advice for the low hp assassin makes me want to say something caustic about the "save game" generation of RPGs. If you're hating playing the character, fine, but someone asking for tips on survival presumably wants to keep playing this character.

Four suggestions and tactical approaches:
1. Pre-combat triage with the rest of the party. You know you're a glass cannon, and so do they, so develop approaches around it. Having a tough melee character concentrate on getting "sticky" (Sentinal at L4, for instance) helps; a bonus action heal reserved to bumping you to positive hp when you drop is vital. You could be viable at range but that isn't a great opener: if someone wants to push initiative and engage before you go in the first round, that's helpful.
2. Hit & run tactics. As a rogue, you can step up, attack, bonus action to disengage and move away. You'll need to boost speed for that. Taking Mobile at L4 is viable, as you can engage a single foe and then bonus action to dash away. Getting enemies to attack someone else is key when at low hp.
3. Push AC. It's good advice anyway, but if one hit knocks you below zero you need to not get hit. Investing in other defenses if you can will help. You could dip one level to get shield proficiency for +2 AC; dipping fighter gets you second wind and an extra AC with Defense style, as well as a shot at a d10 roll for hp. Grabbing another level for action surge in the surprise round is tempting, too.
4. Boost hp. The low-hanging fruit in this direction has been covered. But if your GM is old-school, I'd expect meta-game solutions to be less effective than in-game ones. Do a quest for better endurance. Talk to your GM about in-game options and possibilities, which could range from an alchemist who needs you to gather ingredients for a potion that will let you get a reroll, to Con boosting tatoos, to a deal with a shady tiefling that ends up with you swapping bodies with someone else. There's some great story opportunities in having a PC with a glass jaw try to correct that situation, and that's more fun than giving up on a character because some of the numbers on your sheet aren't as big as they could be.

5. Go Arcane Trickster and pick up defensive spells. Shield at level 1 will go a long way if you're already making efforts to avoid being hit and raise your AC.
6. Cunning Action - Hide. Find a way to stay near cover and hide as often as possible. It's easy to get Stealth much higher than enemy perception scores.

# ? Feb 13, 2019 17:32

deathbagel: Jun 10, 2008

Reveilled posted:

One thing that really surprised me with my new group who had only played 1st edition before was how there was zero interest in rolling HP. I expected them to have a bit of a �it�s not real D&D if you don�t roll� grog mentality but as soon as I mentioned the option to take half plus one all four of them sprung for that immediately and one even called having the option to roll a �trap for idiots�.

Your new group is good at math.

Dice and I have never really gotten along though, so any opportunity to cut out randomness and get a guaranteed moderate result, I'll take it in a heartbeat. My friends still talk about the time my character flew his Veritech into the side of a mountain while playing Robotech by failing 3 piloting rolls in a row by rolling 100 three times in a row.

DM: Ok, make a piloting roll to see if you can pull off the maneuver.
Me: (with a 98% piloting skill) Ok, let's see. Oh, I fail, double ought.
DM: Ok, well you are a talented enough pilot to get a second chance to recover, make a second attempt at -20%
Me: Hmm... yea... double ought.
DM: Alright, the controls are completely unresponsive, make a piloting skill check to bail out in time.
Me: Ok. Come on dice! Yep... failed. I think my dice are broken they are only rolling 100s.
DM: Well, start on your new character and we'll get you added back in as soon as we can :P

# ? Feb 13, 2019 17:47

mkultra419: May 4, 2005; Modern Day Alchemist; Pillbug

Kaysette posted:

There's no heist, 2/10.

Trollskull Manor is cool, though?

I'm running it for a group now and yeah as originally written it has a lot of plot holes and a distinct lack of heists despite nicely laying out some great villain lairs and doing a good job of fleshing out Waterdeep as a location. With a little renovation work I think its going to come together well. Know that going in if you are considering buying it / running it though, I wouldn't recommend it if you just want to stick to the script so to speak.

My group just started Chapter 2 and is really loving owning their own tavern / homebase. There's some good DMG content people have written like Durnan's Guide to Tavern Keeping and Waterdeep Encounters to flesh out this part of the campaign as well that I'm using.

Justin Alexander is writing a remix for it on his blog The Alexandrian built around tweaking the plot to actually tie all the villains into the events and give a reason to have the party planning and executing multiple heists. I'm stealing a lot of those ideas for my campaign and have started planting seeds already.

# ? Feb 13, 2019 17:55

koreban: Apr 4, 2008; I guess we all learned that trying to get along is way better than p. . .player hatin'.; Fun Shoe

P.d0t posted:

I've been slowly compiling some house-rules and common fixes for 5e, and for rolling HP I've basically settled on "either take the average, or roll with advantage."

The interesting thing about this is statistically, with any HD you use, rolling with advantage results in the book-stated average (or higher) 75% of the time.

The downward skew is the issue, though. D&D is 99% of the time a power fantasy for the players. You can still roll under the average with advantage 5 out of 20 levels of progression. Sure, the other 5 you�ll skew high, but psychologically you�ll feel the low skews harder than the high ones.

Plus the damage scaling of 5e is abominable.

Unless you�re playing hardcore/hardmode rules, your players should never get less than the average.

# ? Feb 13, 2019 18:16

JustJeff88: Jan 15, 2008; I AM
CONSISTENTLY
ANNOYING
...
JUST TERRIBLE

THIS BADGE OF SHAME IS WORTH 0.45 DOUBLE DRAGON ADVANCES

of SA-Mart forever

While I like the idea of rolling against a character's previous HP total in order to keep HP gains normalised, I overall have very mixed feelings about how HP per level should be done. Mind you, I come from a heavy 2nd edition background where rolling was a temporary state of affairs, so take that as you will.

I will again repeat my strong suggestion of adding a character's base Con score to max HP at creation. I've said it before, as have others, but with all of the HP talk I've been thinking about it and trying to remember why and how we did it back in the 2ed days and I think that I remember now. Back in 2nd edition, there was the concept of 0-level characters. These were essentially people of the humanoid races who didn't have class levels, but they still have HP of course. Keep in mind that 2nd also had gains and losses in certain stats as people aged, with mental stats increasing and physical ones dropping. Thing is, something like a regular, healthy man of about 30 would have 1d8 hit points while a level 1 fighter would have 1d10 and, given how stat bonuses worked in 2nd edition, that fighter probably has no con bonus. Going on the idea of reflecting Con as general health, we came up with the idea that HP at level 0 was your Con score, and it made a lot of sense given 2nd edition rules such as ageing and the fact that anyone whose Con hit 0, temporarily or permanently, was dead. So, a level 1 cleric with 10 con would start with 10 HP just for being a person, and then have somewhere between 1 and 8 additional HP for that cleric level. This made player characters feel a bit more special and made low-level combat far less lethal. I know that some people like that, but they can all go piss up a rope with their head tilted back. Apart from 4th edition who essentially did that very thing, I recommend this "house rule" for any D&D edition from the very first to 5th.

As for HP per level, we tried and discussed a number of things as our games were very democratic. Some examples were keeping the better of 2 die, the NWN system of making sure that nobody had less than the midpoint per level, giving everyone a set number of HP based on class and so on. If I had to choose, I'm kind of fond of a set value of some sort, whether it be average or max per level, as it gives a consistent point for building the difficulty of encounters. Admittedly, this is muddled somewhat by the fact that not everyone levels at the same rate in 2nd edition.

Ginger Beer Belly posted:

Yes! The DM's girlfriend is the hostess and she was the instigator on getting me that dice bag while she got her own bag with kitties on it. We have a never ending platter of sliced sausages and cheeses and triscuits in the center of the table as well as your typical vegetable platters with ranch dips. We also have some pretty skilled cooks in the crowd as the druid brings his homemade beef jerky and I bring hand-held items as follows:

https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2014/08/curried-jamaican-beef-patties-recipe.html

https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2015/07/the-food-lab-southern-fried-chicken-recipe.html ... but turned into chicken fingers by slicing strips of chicken breast instead of whole pieces.

Glad you're eating well; I personally just really like Triscuits and Wheat Thins, especially Ranch in this latter case.

# ? Feb 13, 2019 18:52

99 CENTS AMIGO: Jul 22, 2007

I know for a fact that this Stranger Things Starter Set that got announced today is going to get at least a half-dozen of my friends into the game on top of the campaign I'm running with 4 first-timers currently.

It looks like it could be fun, but even if it isn't, I'll get a set of dice and two Demogorgon minis out of it.

# ? Feb 13, 2019 19:03

Roland Jones: Aug 18, 2011; by Nyc_Tattoo

Still working on the support-ish Divine Soul I mentioned before. Things are mostly ready to start, but I wanted to ask a couple questions still.

First, is this a good level one stat array? Character is a Scourge Aasimar, hence those bonuses:

STR 8
DEX 14
CON 14 (13+1)
INT 12
WIS 12
CHA 16 (14+2)

I was thinking that 16 Charisma is as 17 here, since I get the same modifier and can still hit 20 at level 8, and thus have 2 extra points to put into a different stat, but I figured I could ask to see if there's something I'm overlooking.

Second, since I saw mention of Inspiring Leader recently, I'm curious what feats might be good for such a character. So far, Inspiring Leader, Lucky, Resilient, and War Caster are all on my radar, but I'm not sure if there are other/better options, or if I should just increase my DEX/CON instead. I'm interested in more experienced takes on this.

# ? Feb 13, 2019 19:09

koreban: Apr 4, 2008; I guess we all learned that trying to get along is way better than p. . .player hatin'.; Fun Shoe

Roland Jones posted:

Still working on the support-ish Divine Soul I mentioned before. Things are mostly ready to start, but I wanted to ask a couple questions still.

First, is this a good level one stat array? Character is a Scourge Aasimar, hence those bonuses:

STR 8
DEX 14
CON 14 (13+1)
INT 12
WIS 12
CHA 16 (14+2)

I was thinking that 16 Charisma is as 17 here, since I get the same modifier and can still hit 20 at level 8, and thus have 2 extra points to put into a different stat, but I figured I could ask to see if there's something I'm overlooking.

Second, since I saw mention of Inspiring Leader recently, I'm curious what feats might be good for such a character. So far, Inspiring Leader, Lucky, Resilient, and War Caster are all on my radar, but I'm not sure if there are other/better options, or if I should just increase my DEX/CON instead. I'm interested in more experienced takes on this.

That array is pretty good. If you're playing by rules as written, you'll want to focus on stat increases over feats. Resilient(wis) is really good. War Caster is going to be situational. You already have proficiency on Con saves due to Sorcerer. If you're using a ton of concentration spells, and also taking regular damage, it could be worth it, but again, you're served just as well or better by increasing the stats first. Inspiring Leader and Lucky are great if your DM is giving out feats beyond just ASI points, but if not, those will be late game additions, if at all.

# ? Feb 13, 2019 20:38

Roland Jones: Aug 18, 2011; by Nyc_Tattoo