|
Sodomy Hussein posted:Yeah 4E moves away from ticky-tack encounters you can resolve in 5 minutes and do on the fly. Regardless of what us 4E people say, 4E is not a great game on the fly. What it does do is ask you the DM to have involved, at least fairly well-planned encounters that are balanced to be challenging and not "the table says 2d6 goblins appear." 4E is also terrible without significant terrain details; if you play it lazily on a flat plane it just doesn't work, that will actually break certain characters' builds. I think that's why I'm still all  about 4E. I was lucky to fall in with a great GM and group of players. Interesting story, great combats/set pieces, we rolled with the system updates, and wonderful inclusion of our characters' histories in the arc. We finished around Level 20 due to people moving away but it was one hell of an ending.
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 04:37
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 5, 2024 14:15 |
|
|
I have just discovered Wild Soul barbarians. I take back every complaint I had about melee classes.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 05:04
|
|
|
Also, Belt of Fire Giant Strength seems hilariously overpowered all the way to level 20.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 05:16
|
|
|
Mordiceius posted:Also, Belt of Fire Giant Strength seems hilariously overpowered all the way to level 20. Fixed stat items are dumb as hell and were a plague on Organized Play until they started phasing them out.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 05:19
|
|
|
Toshimo posted:Fixed stat items are dumb as hell and were a plague on Organized Play until they started phasing them out. Yeah basically at character creation you could go "lol I'll just dump STR knowing I'll get my Belt of Absolute Unity" and when that "came online" you would pretty much trash any character who built something less min/maxed
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 05:22
|
|
|
At the start of my last session I absentmindedly searched Spotify for 'dungeon music' and couldn't understand why all the Dungeons and Dragons playlists had BDSM in their titles 
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 13:11
|
|
|
I got to say, I'm really enjoying my new character who is an Aasimar who constantly makes accidental double entandres. Fighter is generally pretty dull but I took the arcane archer arch type so that I can grab beguiling arrow and be a literal cherub.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 13:32
|
|
|
Nissin Cup Nudist posted:Not to rehash edition wars, but why was there such a large kickback against 4e? From what I gather, combat was changed up significantly but that can't be the only reason? I talked about it some in a previous post too. The petty, grog shithead "  IT'S AN MMO YOU GUYS" saying is a lovely meme, but there are some things about it that can be examined through that scope. The way gear and stats and feats interacted coupled with the way higher level enemies scaled created a *huge* incentive to CharOp the poo poo out of your character to keep up with the scaling curve. Feats weren't fun or dynamic, there were a million billion of them, but because of the aggressive charop needed to be able to keep up into mid/endgame, there were like 3-4 mandatory feats, 2-3 niche feats specifically for your build, and everything else was the hottest garbage. Gear was similarly atomized - typically there was one or two sorts of magic weapon/armor/ect that your character would want, and when you upgraded, you upgraded to the +2/+3/ect version of that same item. If you didn't do the extensive research to figure out exactly how to best-in-slot all your equipment for your level (or if your DM was playing a low magic campaign and didn't know to account for everyone being behind in gearing) it became incredibly difficult to function. IMO I wasn't as big on 4e At-Will powers at a certain point on the melee characters because in a lot of cases it was just "Basically an auto attack but you can move 5 feet/mark target/gain temporary hp/make someone else attack for you because you are lazy". I also really lost the thread of 4e character building around the time PHB 3 came out, especially when so much of those books were dedicated to page after page of all the power descriptions. Doubly so with regards to class overlap - Is a Seeker really so appreciably different from a Ranger that they needed it's own class? 5e handled a lot of those things a lot more gracefully, basically rolling classes back together and handling the differentiation through Archetype selection. The Genius of 5e was that they did a fantastic job flattening the scaling curve. All the flat +attack/hp/resist feats are out. Stats are capped at 20, and you get 3 attunable magic item slots so you have to actively make choices about what your gearing priorities are. There are plenty of gripes to be had in the transition, namely the loss of like fighter/Rogue encounter powers, the loss of Warlords as the best class in the game, ect. However, in terms of general gameplay flow - I still like 5e WAY WAY more than I ever did 4e. There's also a certain genius behind the UA system and releasing new archetypes and such for free on the internet, If I want to try something new, I just find the 3ish page PDF online and send it to the DM for approval. Warlord aside - the only thing I really want to try again from 4e that doesn't have a close approximation in 5e is like an Avenger. You can kind of jimmy things with like a Celestial Pact Blade Warlock, but I think it would probably be better if there was a Divine equivalent of a Arcane Trickster.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 14:28
|
|
|
Splicer posted:Sorry dude, the ASIs and HP go ups are a class feature, and as such only apply from class levels not character levels. Like how the battle master says you get new dice at 7th level, it means 7th level in the class not level of your character. If your GM doesn't care then yeah go nuts go fighter. I went back and double checked and although the language is kind of confusing, the general consensus is that you're right. UA stuff is apparently not balanced for multiclassing either
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 14:40
|
|
|
change my name posted:I went back and double checked and although the language is kind of confusing, the general consensus is that you're right. UA stuff is apparently not balanced for multiclassing either e: if you're playing a module with an obvious theme GFE is pretty nice though. Splicer fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Aug 18, 2020 |
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 15:15
|
|
|
DisposableHero posted:Had my very first session this Saturday. I'm doing a hybrid thing where I've created my own setting and inciting event that's going to segue in to Dragons of Icespire peak (with some names changed). My group has 5 folks only two of which have ever played D&D at all (and none in 5e). First session was reviewed pretty well so I'm encouraged going forward. For the following it's relevant that we're playing fully remote thanks to social distancing. yeah, thats what i do. remember to use music and ambience to your advantage as well, i tend to go overboard on this aspect but just taking like a 1 hour dungeon ambience thing helps quite a bit. generic fantasy art is nice as well, i honestly just run a search for creative commons stuff approximately 5 minutes before i think its relevant(second monitor ftw) on the off chance that any extended improv thing would happen. roll20 is actually just clunky though. you have to get used to it. for battlemaps what you can do is just make a lot of battlemaps you think will come up, and leave blank spaces. dont write a giant sign saying "THE DRAGON DUNGEON TAVERN" or something because then if the party leaves that town the map is useless. instead, just narrate that the sign says this. or, if they leave the town, next time they have a barfight you have this convenient(albeit dusty) battlemap that you can whip out of seemingly nowhere. as long as they never got into the first barfight, its brand new to them
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 15:17
|
|
|
Splicer posted:It might not have come across in text well but that "sorry dude" was sincere, I hit the same problem with my UA beast master when I was thinking of splashing Rogue. Do talk to your GM about it, they may not care. Fighter may be a hard sell because you'd eventually be getting extra ASIs but on the other hand you'd have the inherent downgrade of being a Fighter. No worries, it's fine. We're playing through a bunch of converted Eberron modules from 3.5 (Forgotten Forge and a few others up to 6) and we're mainly fighting cultists, warforged, and undead at this point, so I'll have to think carefully about that.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 15:53
|
|
|
While I won't mourn the loss of 4E's feat taxes,DeathSandwich posted:All the flat +attack/hp/resist feats are out. I'm not sure they designed for not having flat bonuses so much as they acted on the backlash over the particular flat bonuses the feat taxes were providing and then forgot about it when making the above feats.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 16:34
|
|
|
change my name posted:No worries, it's fine. We're playing through a bunch of converted Eberron modules from 3.5 (Forgotten Forge and a few others up to 6) and we're mainly fighting cultists, warforged, and undead at this point, so I'll have to think carefully about that. From a "getting new stuff" point of view, battlemaster wouldn't kick in until level 8 and level 9 is when a ranger gets to pick up woodland friends
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 16:59
|
|
|
SilverMike posted:While I won't mourn the loss of 4E's feat taxes,
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 17:16
|
|
|
pog boyfriend posted:yeah, thats what i do. remember to use music and ambience to your advantage as well, i tend to go overboard on this aspect but just taking like a 1 hour dungeon ambience thing helps quite a bit. generic fantasy art is nice as well, i honestly just run a search for creative commons stuff approximately 5 minutes before i think its relevant(second monitor ftw) on the off chance that any extended improv thing would happen. roll20 is actually just clunky though. you have to get used to it. Thanks. I'll give this a try next session. And I guess for roll20 that'll just be practice. I'll set up a player client on a spare machine and play with the GM tools so I can be more confident on what is visible or not.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 17:24
|
|
|
If you go to the settings tab once you launch a session, there's an option to join the session as a player.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 17:40
|
|
|
Sodomy Hussein posted:Yeah 4E moves away from ticky-tack encounters you can resolve in 5 minutes and do on the fly. Regardless of what us 4E people say, 4E is not a great game on the fly. What it does do is ask you the DM to have involved, at least fairly well-planned encounters that are balanced to be challenging and not "the table says 2d6 goblins appear." 4E is also terrible without significant terrain details; if you play it lazily on a flat plane it just doesn't work, that will actually break certain characters' builds. I'm going to disagree hard about 4e as a game on the fly - or more accurately I'm going to say that 4e is the best version of D&D to improvise with even if it's no Apocalypse World or Blades in the Dark. This is because an improvised fight using three monster types with different roles just plucked out of Monster Vault on the spur of the moment and the excellent 4e Challenge Rating system or even literally created on the fly using the MM3 on a business card math plus some cover and two pieces of interactive terrain like stairs to push the enemies down and a fireplace is going to be mechanically as much fun as that big epic setpiece you spent hours getting ready in any other edition - and that if that setpiece even works rather than fails (as they sometimes do). It normally won't have the emotional weight behind it of a good capstone - after all you haven't spent the last half dozen sessions trying to run that scumbag to the ground. But mechanically it will probably be better. Also the 4e skill challenge rules as an improv tool need talking about - they are extremely badly explained and the math did not work at launch. On the other hand the basic principle of "Three strikes and you're out" and some numerical benchmarks for number of successes needed and the XP reward is one of the best systems for handling Off The Wall Improvised PC Plans I'm aware of in literally any RPG. Which is absolutely the hardest thing for a new GM to handle. As for 4e adventures, the two people normally liked were The Slaying Stone and Madness at Gardmore Abbey, with some respect for Thunderspire Labrynth. Also ENWorld's Zeitgeist: the Gears of Revolution. But honestly if you wanted something pre-written it was quicker and easier to prep and run Pathfinder adventure paths in 4e than Pathfinder - and they tended to run better there as well.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 18:33
|
|
|
A while ago I played a 4E game literally run out of a 3E dungeon - straight up "you open the door. there are two goblins in there. they roll initiative." - and it was great. Fights often took place in little rooms with no interesting terrain to speak of and were open in a round or two, but each one represented a miniature optimization challenge: how cleanly can you dispatch this gaggle of monsters? Can you do it without spending any dailies OR losing any hit points that healing surges will have to make up for? It was actually pretty exciting to roll the dice and see if my big encounter attack that left my barbarian open would hit, and then if the enemy counterstrike would miss, or whatever, because we were gambling with real stakes each and every fight - just relatively small stakes.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 19:49
|
|
|
4e definitely favors big setpieces over smaller encounters though I wonder if you could do the latter as the former, in a way. Like, instead of 6 rooms with two or three goblins in them, you've got a group of goblin bandits. They've set up a little fort inside the dungeon, you can approach it from different rooms, and if you're clever enough you can separate them and pick them off one at a time, but if they're all alerted they'll try to fight as a group, but with forced movement you can try and separate some or set up your own good defense point that they can't assault as much. Basically the whole group of goblins is an encounter, maybe scaled to be more challenging than average, but with good strategy the PCs can make it easy, or even talk their way through it or just demoralize the goblins enough to send them fleeing. D&D tends to end up sort of abstracting things to one room = one encounter, which is understandable, that's the easiest way to do it, but "zooming out" can create some interesting situations.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 20:15
|
|
|
For anyone that's run Avernus, is it appropriate to do a lore dump somewhere about the difference between devils and demons, the basics of the Blood War, etc?
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 20:54
|
|
|
Nehru the Damaja posted:For anyone that's run Avernus, is it appropriate to do a lore dump somewhere about the difference between devils and demons, the basics of the Blood War, etc? Probably will come up somewhere around the graveyard encounter so you could have the NPC there do it. Everyone is still gonna confuse the two constantly regardless
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 21:18
|
|
|
Candlekeep is a good spot to let you loredump that kind of stuff; you could also just give your players a bit of homework and have them read the MM entries on them if you want to keep the pace going. I made sure the session would end not too long after they had that opportunity (I stopped right after meeting the wizard who ports them over so I could start Avernus proper in a new session) so that they could read it during downtime and not worry about applying that stuff to combat right away. If your players really don't care and just wanna know how to kill them faster, just tell them they're both fiends and call it a day Crumbletron fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Aug 18, 2020 |
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 21:24
|
|
|
Nehru the Damaja posted:For anyone that's run Avernus, is it appropriate to do a lore dump somewhere about the difference between devils and demons, the basics of the Blood War, etc? here is the rawest advice anyone can ever give you: you can info dump anytime, any where, if the scene is funny
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 22:37
|
|
|
devils are lawful evil, demons are chaotic evil, and they loving hate each other that’s all they need to know
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 22:41
|
|
|
Maxwell Lord posted:4e definitely favors big setpieces over smaller encounters though I wonder if you could do the latter as the former, in a way. I think a lot of people built encounters in 4E like this. I did. I ran some pretty classic dungeon crawling in 4E where the dungeons were keyed by area and each contained an encounter. Sometimes the party used the layout to short rest before completing an encounter and had an easy time of things. Other times the party would enter a new encounter area before short resting and find themselves in some trouble. It all balanced out overall and led to the sessions that had me comparing 4E to my fond memories of BECMI.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 23:28
|
|
|
Maxwell Lord posted:4e definitely favors big setpieces over smaller encounters though I wonder if you could do the latter as the former, in a way. This reminds me of the Against the Giants mods from late 4e, which we played the LFR versions of. Mostly you just got given a HUGE map, and you could take it slowly and quietly and try to avoid proccing too much at once, or you could just Leroy Jenkins the whole thing and probably die - or sometimes, you could hole up in a little sniper nest and pepper half the map with arrows whilst they tried to find you, and so forth. It's a pretty interesting way to play IME, and one I kind of miss.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2020 23:46
|
|
|
edit: nevermind
Mordiceius fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Aug 19, 2020 |
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2020 00:56
|
|
|
How exactly does the shadowfell and feywild work? I know they’re reflections of the material plane, like a shadowfell ruin where a castle would be in the material plane, but is that a constant thing? If a town settles in the material plane, will a shadow version start construction in the shadowfell or will there just be a flat plot of land there?
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2020 11:45
|
|
|
I always treat the Feywild as being weird as gently caress with some bits being straight up copies, other places run on concepts etc. Having the Fay be terrifying, weird and capricious with entire areas based on seasons that sort of thing. Shadowfell has a bit less to draw on thematically in my opinion.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2020 12:01
|
|
|
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqicWlixyLw This hasn't been discussed here, so posting it now. -Early access starts on september 30th -5 recruitable companions: Human warlock, A Cleric, a vampire (I think he's rogue), Githyanki warrior, human wizard -Early access should be about 20 hours of content, up to level 4
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2020 12:28
|
|
|
VaultAggie posted:How exactly does the shadowfell and feywild work? I know they’re reflections of the material plane, like a shadowfell ruin where a castle would be in the material plane, but is that a constant thing? If a town settles in the material plane, will a shadow version start construction in the shadowfell or will there just be a flat plot of land there?
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2020 12:30
|
|
|
I just realized that, RAW, a Goliath PC with 18 strength and a block and tackle can lift 4,320 pounds, or 2.15 tons.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2020 12:43
|
|
|
With the right setup so could you. The problem is finding pulleys and mounting points strong enough to handle the actual weight.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2020 13:26
|
|
|
Splicer posted:Whatever best suits the story you want to tell for that town. Which seems like a cop out answer but really it is the answer. Maybe a town springs up. Maybe it's something just town-adjacent, like some particularly weird wolves. Maybe the nature of the town affects the shadowfell version, so if the mayor is corrupted by greed there's an encampment of shades worshipping their corpulant god. Maybe the only reason the town exists at all is because a bunch of shadowfell denizens or people trapped in the shadowfell have gathered there which called out to the material plane to create a real town to match the reflection. This is usually how I set things up, and then the feywild is just full of totally capricious and borderline manic fey + jovial animals that have gotten trapped there by accident and can now walk and talk and wear clothing.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2020 15:15
|
|
|
The strength limits are weird, I assume because encumbrance is literally the worst thing ever . A 10 strength person (average) has no problem walking around all day with 150 extra pounds, but can only deadlift 300.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2020 15:18
|
|
|
Used to play with a group of friends that lived near the client site, since I'm not working on that project anymore and COVID logitical concerns I've unfortunately have to drop out of my current party. What's the best way to find a goon party and play remotely nowadays?
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2020 15:40
|
|
|
xilni posted:Used to play with a group of friends that lived near the client site, since I'm not working on that project anymore and COVID logitical concerns I've unfortunately have to drop out of my current party. If you're a DM? Just advertise. They always come to you. If you're a player? I have no idea. Try /r/lfg maybe. --------- Quick question-- for a Rogue's "Uncanny Dodge" ability which means 1/2 damage on one attack against them as a reaction, does that include a spell attack or anything that induces a saving throw? My Rogue strikes me as the type of guy who will try to claim it for everything, and I kind-of only want it to be for physical attacks. I don't think he'd Rules Lawyer me on it, but knowing what RAI versus RAW is in this case would help a lot.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2020 16:05
|
|
|
xilni posted:Used to play with a group of friends that lived near the client site, since I'm not working on that project anymore and COVID logitical concerns I've unfortunately have to drop out of my current party. Also bug the tg chat thread for discord invites
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2020 16:08
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 5, 2024 14:15 |
|
|
mind the walrus posted:If you're a DM? Just advertise. They always come to you. Spell attack yes, so long as they can see it. Saving throw no, because that's the perview of Evasion. I think RAW it would not be considered an Attack formally but someone with better knowledge of the actual words should confirm that.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2020 16:09
|
|
