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Facebook Aunt posted:
Facebook Aunt posted:movement Yeah, that's a big part of the issue, because with the way 5e is designed, once two martials close into each other, there's very little incentive for either of them to ever move again, or even ways to do so efficiently. In 3.5 you could 5-foot-step and charge to get away from one guy to go hit another, and in 4e has the very similar option of the 1-square-shift and charge. Somehow 5e removed both the 5-foot-step and the charge, so martials are arguably less mobile than ever.
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Jan 23, 2022 21:14
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lightrook posted:Yeah, that's a big part of the issue, because with the way 5e is designed, once two martials close into each other, there's very little incentive for either of them to ever move again, or even ways to do so efficiently. In 3.5 you could 5-foot-step and charge to get away from one guy to go hit another, and in 4e has the very similar option of the 1-square-shift and charge. Somehow 5e removed both the 5-foot-step and the charge, so martials are arguably less mobile than ever.  Oh gently caress I've been running 5e games with free 5-foot step and charge this whole time. There is a player doing a barbarian who last played in 3.5 that keeps doing it....... I'm just gonna hope the players don't notice
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Jan 23, 2022 21:20
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Yeah, no. In order to get away from anything adjacent, you need to either take the swing, dodge action to make the swing and follow-up swing at disadvantage, or spend an action to disengage. Being able to get away from one target safely and attack another target in the same turn is strictly Rogue poo poo in 5e.
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Jan 23, 2022 22:00
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Mendrian posted:D&D no longer makes coherent sense in its design philosophy; its primary goal now is to emulate D&D, so it's more important that the game feel authentic to its roots than the mechanics have a clear or consistent design philosophy. The vast majority of the playerbase is new and ignorant to this history and they seem pretty focused on expanding the playerbase, I don't think even 3/5 people who play care about older editions.
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Jan 23, 2022 22:05
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Ash Rose posted:The vast majority of the playerbase is new and ignorant to this history and they seem pretty focused on expanding the playerbase, I don't think even 3/5 people who play care about older editions. That's not mutually exclusive from what you quoted though. 5E was obviously designed (and arguably marketed) as a "return to real D&D" following 4e and everything around that. You're right that new players don't care about the history of the game inherently, but much of the audience WotC was trying to recapture (and now retain) absolutely did.
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Jan 23, 2022 22:23
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Ash Rose posted:The vast majority of the playerbase is new and ignorant to this history and they seem pretty focused on expanding the playerbase, I don't think even 3/5 people who play care about older editions. Maybe I've spent too long in my own social bubble, but by now everyone has an idea of What D&D Is in their head that's been cultivated from secondhand media exposure in stuff like Stranger Things. Stuff like "Rolled a natural 20" is a pretty widely understood colloquia to the point where new players expect natural 20 rolls to literally alter reality, and by now everyone's seen at least one Wacky D&D Greentext. I'd even argue most of them are written for a non-player audience since the stories typically don't make any sense within the actual game rules, or exist in a space so heavily homebrewed that any resemblance to actual printed D&D is passing at best, like the Bear Rogue greentext for example. So I guess modern D&D is less trying to recreate any actual, historical past and more trying to effect a mythical, idealized past that has never actually existed. Huh, why does that sound somehow familiar, and why do I feel gross for typing it?
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Jan 23, 2022 23:50
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lightrook posted:Maybe I've spent too long in my own social bubble, but by now everyone has an idea of What D&D Is in their head that's been cultivated from secondhand media exposure in stuff like Stranger Things. Stuff like "Rolled a natural 20" is a pretty widely understood colloquia to the point where new players expect natural 20 rolls to literally alter reality, and by now everyone's seen at least one Wacky D&D Greentext. I'd even argue most of them are written for a non-player audience since the stories typically don't make any sense within the actual game rules, or exist in a space so heavily homebrewed that any resemblance to actual printed D&D is passing at best, like the Bear Rogue greentext for example. you could say that about this thread too, tbqh
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Jan 24, 2022 00:08
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lightrook posted:by now everyone's seen at least one Wacky D&D Greentext. I had to google this and I can assure you, no, not everyone is familiar with 4chan memes, especially 4chan d&d memes specifically
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Jan 24, 2022 00:43
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If one of my players wanted to play as a bear with a butler, I would absolutely let them do that. It probably wouldn't even really require special rules or anything, just a player willing to deal with a nonverbal character. I've got one of those in my current campaign and it works out fine. It's not like the player can't describe what their character does or emote appropriately, just that they can't talk except in Bear. If it got boring or they got annoyed, they'd get a special magical doodad that let them speak Common. As long as it was in keeping with the overall tone of the campaign, that sounds just fine.
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Jan 24, 2022 00:48
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Bottom Liner posted:I had to google this and I can assure you, no, not everyone is familiar with 4chan memes, especially 4chan d&d memes specifically Okay that's fair, I really should know better than to extrapolate from my Weird Internet Bubble.
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Jan 24, 2022 01:08
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Bottom Liner posted:I had to google this and I can assure you, no, not everyone is familiar with 4chan memes, especially 4chan d&d memes specifically Greentext screenshots are very prevalent on social media outside of 4chan at this point, there's plenty of tumblrs and twitters and subreddits devoted explicitly to mining a certain type of content from 4chan without the reader having to go to 4chan themselves. It's not exactly mainstream but it's certainly not something only people who pay attention to 4chan see.
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Jan 24, 2022 01:14
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But that's what's so weird about 5e. They know who their audience is but they still cater to people who would never be caught dead in a game like Critical Role. And I mean, the strategy seems to have worked, even, but you'd think they'd tweak stuff to befit that type of game more.
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Jan 24, 2022 01:42
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Mendrian posted:They know who their audience is but they still cater to people who would never be caught dead in a game like Critical Role. I don't think this is true. I think the problem is that they designed the game to court the old school D&D folks, and are now trying to pivot to capturing that new audience but the two approaches are incompatible, at least with the 5e system. Bringing in MtG and CR content really shows their hand. Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Jan 24, 2022 |
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Jan 24, 2022 01:50
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Mendrian posted:But that's what's so weird about 5e. They know who their audience is but they still cater to people who would never be caught dead in a game like Critical Role. I'm going to go out on a limb and say between the Exandria books, adventures in the vein of Candlekeep Mysteries and Wild Beyond the Witchlight, and the MtG crossovers, that WotC are catering to a CR-centric/more general audience. That's before you even go into Stranger Things/Rick & Morty crossovers. Edit: Not meaning to pile on, just stating I can't imagine the world where WotC specifically caters towards the older 3.5 craving fanbase with their 5E releases, and then ships Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos. Blooming Brilliant fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Jan 24, 2022 |
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Jan 24, 2022 01:54
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No no I don't feel piled, or at least it's a very polite pile. You're probably right. I wonder what will suddenly freeze out the grognards.
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Jan 24, 2022 02:09
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Honestly who cares what wizards of the coast blesses with their official seal. DMs guild has any kind of content you could want
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Jan 24, 2022 02:13
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wizards of the coast should give me money i think. i think i deserve itMendrian posted:But that's what's so weird about 5e. They know who their audience is but they still cater to people who would never be caught dead in a game like Critical Role. i think a large part of the strategy is trying to cast a very wide shallow net for a variety of d&d playstyles. as much as people disparage critical role for being overly theatric, it is a mechanically intensive game. on the other hand, stuff like candlekeep mysteries and the strixhaven roleplay sections are clearly catering to a very low combat style of play. they want to have a game system that has a little bit of everything for someone wanting a d&d type experience, and this lack of focus hurts the quality but greatly increases the number of people playing.
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Jan 24, 2022 02:33
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Froghammer posted:Yeah, no. In order to get away from anything adjacent, you need to either take the swing, dodge action to make the swing and follow-up swing at disadvantage, or spend an action to disengage. Being able to get away from one target safely and attack another target in the same turn is strictly Rogue poo poo in 5e. There's a bit more to it than that; there are a steadily increasing number of ways to push people out of combat by hitting them (especially the crusher feat). But 5e feels a lot more mobile than 3.5, mostly thanks to 5e's ability to circle your foes, and 3.5's full round attacks meaning that if you kill someone you're flailing while in 5e you can split the attacks.
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Jan 24, 2022 02:39
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Yeah the pushing of D&D nowadays is extremely more focused on the "Critical Role" and streaming type of game player than the grogs who were mad about 4e or whatever. Maybe in the next edition they'll come up with some actual like structure to social encounters other than having the GM wing it...
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Jan 24, 2022 02:41
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Bottom Liner posted:I had to google this and I can assure you, no, not everyone is familiar with 4chan memes, especially 4chan d&d memes specifically Same, I've played D&D plenty but hadn't heard of them until now. Though they do seem pretty funny. https://www.reddit.com/r/dndgreentext/wiki/hof/
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Jan 24, 2022 03:35
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So, I’m about to DM a Witchlight campaign with 6 players; I’ve been a player in a homebrew campaign for about 3 years now and a lot of what you guys have been expressing about D&D’s issues are things I’ve been wrestling with as a Ranger player for a while now. At the same time, I recently discovered Heart: The City Beneath and fell in love with a few mechanics (story beats being a pre-requisite for character advancement, dice pools representing varying levels of skill proficiency, etc.). I’ve been thinking about what kind low-hanging fruit there is to fix design-wise and there’s a bunch of things: 1) Altering the Encounter Day to represent 1 to 2 Hard encounters (seems like the top of everyone’s list here). 2) Abstracting Limited Use items and GP/currency a la Blades in the Dark 3) Trimming the spell list and/or designating some existing spells as spells and abilities for only certain classes and subclasses (i.e. Steel Wind Strike, etc.) 4) Creating a system for social encounters 5) Creating or re-implementing a Skill Challenge System 6) Adding stats “Martial Prowess”, “Mystical Prowess”, etc. to let the existing 6 stats breathe or perhaps simplify them 7) Separating feats and ASIs as part of character advancement While a lot of these are probably a little more well thought out than others, what kind of fixes would you guys want to see in a new edition?
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Jan 24, 2022 05:11
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I think the key to fixing "encounters per day" is to lose the connection to days. 4e sorta-kinda halfway tried to suggest this with "milestones," but still called them "daily" powers. Just renaming poo poo so that your spells/etc. recharge every 6 encounters, regardless of "rests" or the lack thereof, makes things a lot more consistent. No more 10-minute adventuring day, because retreating to an inn doesn't do poo poo mechanically. The spiel about Wizards needing to spread out their spells while Fighters can keep swinging actually makes sense, and it honestly might even feel better for the Wizard in some ways because she knows how long she has to make them last. You could put in some wiggle room, like "it's every 6-8 encounters, whichever makes most sense into terms of story beats" or something; the important part is that it's independent of the time-scale of the story and out of the party's control. megane fucked around with this message at 05:34 on Jan 24, 2022 |
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Jan 24, 2022 05:30
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Mendrian posted:No no I don't feel piled, or at least it's a very polite pile. Same thing that always does, a new edition announcement.
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Jan 24, 2022 05:52
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I still like the idea of spell power “charging up” as you defeat more encounters, and resetting back to 0 after a long rest. That way there is a tension between declining HP and rising combat power.
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Jan 24, 2022 06:34
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Here's an example of an adventuring day from my group: Encounter 1: The day starts off with a bang as the party's home base in Waterdeep is assaulted by a group working for the Xanathar Guild. On the bodies of a few members of the assaulting group, they find multiple confectionary wrappers, as well as a receipt from an arms dealer. Encounter 2: The party pays a visit to the arms dealer, attempting to convince her not to sell weapons to the factions causing chaos in the city. She refuses, and it comes to blows (could have been a social encounter, but wasn't). Encounter 3: The party investigate the area the Xanathar operate in and find a beholder themed confectionary shop. They determine via observation that there must be a hidden basement under the shop, and elect to sneak in via the sewers, encountering a spectator in the process (encounter 3 here could have been a social or combat encounter with either the guild members in the shop, or possibly with guild members in the district had they attempted to capture and interrogate someone for an entry password). Encounter 4: The party sneaks into the basement, and fight the occupants, some duergar. On the duergar they find a note indicating that a friend of theirs is also being watched by the guild. Encounter 5: The party descends upon the goblins and ogre which have been assigned to guard the other entrance from the sewers from behind. Encounter 6: Searching the basement, the party is surprised by a mimic in the gang boss' office. After the fight they discover additional notes of observations from the surveillance teams based out of here, including notes indicating that Several Zhentarim agents have been observed in the region of a tower in the Sea Ward and that various hooded figures have been visiting the Seven Masks Theatre, which the observer speculates to be drow. Maybe a basement with sewer access counts as a dungeon here. But that aside I'd perceive all of these six encounters to be fairly well connected, narratively. Encounters 5 and 6 less so, perhaps, though this was the very first time any of the players had ever actually fought a mimic so there was novelty in that. I don't know if "we know where you live" and "we know where your friends live" count as significant story beats, but in my book I'd have counted this day to have moved things forward for the party. Ultimately the party went on to have a further two encounters that day that were narratively disconnected from this chain for a total of eight. The players chose to do those, because it was only mid-afternoon by the time they left the basement, and they had some loose ends to tie up. As I recall this day lasted three three-hour sessions; the party spent a looooong time scouting the arms dealer's shop, planning what to do if they ended up having to fight her, and then a long time conversing with her, such that it took up a large part of the first session that covered this day. They completed encounters 3-5 in the second session, and then the third sessions covered the fight with the mimic, searches of the rooms, some time at the party whiteboard trying to tie the clues they'd found into their network of info, and then the mop up of the other tasks. Not every day in my campaign has combat. The session before last we spent the full three hours roleplaying conversations with villagers, and a murder trial for some people the party had captured. And some days there's just one fight because it makes sense. But those aren't adventuring days, to me. Days when the party is adventuring are the ones where the party is actively disrupting the plans of an enemy, and those tend to be action packed.
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Jan 24, 2022 06:42
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Alright goons, I'm looking to run a short campaign (1-a few) sessions at most with my normal dnd group while our usual GM is working on a homebrew. So I've never GMed before, but have played for years and read a preposterous amount of dnd stuff over the years. And the group is all fairly experienced. Anyone got anything they'd recommend that's a bit of fun and not too hard to run? Whether gmsguild or official material.
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Jan 24, 2022 07:34
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Vahtooch posted:Alright goons, I'm looking to run a short campaign (1-a few) sessions at most with my normal dnd group while our usual GM is working on a homebrew. I had a lot of fun running this mini campaign Genial Jack where you are adventuring inside a city swallowed by a colossal whale. It's great for a one or two shot campaign https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/295462/Genial-Jack--issue-1
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Jan 24, 2022 07:43
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I think a good fix for the ways some classes don't get enough to do is to have every character have an in-combat class and an out-of-combat class. These should have little to no mechanical overlap at all. In fact, if they're going to claim that there's three pillars to D&D, every character gets a combat class, a social class and an exploration class. Bards are a social class. Rangers are exploration. There's magical/mundane, and complex/straightforward options in each.
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Jan 24, 2022 11:37
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Space Lummox posted:I think a good fix for the ways some classes don't get enough to do is to have every character have an in-combat class and an out-of-combat class. These should have little to no mechanical overlap at all. I've mulled around a system like this, but instead of out of combat class everyone had a meta-class which gave them different aspects of narrative control. A weather master always decides what the weather is that day. The master of materials decides what things are made of. Master of spaces decides how big rooms and boxes and other spaces are. Just little pieces of DM power, enough to tweak only a small aspect of the narrative.
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Jan 24, 2022 14:50
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Rutibex posted:I've mulled around a system like this, but instead of out of combat class everyone had a meta-class which gave them different aspects of narrative control. A weather master always decides what the weather is that day. The master of materials decides what things are made of. Master of spaces decides how big rooms and boxes and other spaces are. Just little pieces of DM power, enough to tweak only a small aspect of the narrative. look up fellowship 2nd edition. Cheers Space Lummox posted:In fact, if they're going to claim that there's three pillars to D&D, every character gets a combat class, a social class and an exploration class. Bards are a social class. Rangers are exploration. There's magical/mundane, and complex/straightforward options in each. my desire to make exploration pillar actually anything has resulted in me having to homebrew an entirely new system from the ground up. i wish i didnt have to do that and i wish that other dms did not have to do that
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Jan 24, 2022 15:03
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pog boyfriend posted:look up fellowship 2nd edition. Cheers Exploration used to have an actual procedure. Just like combat it was broken into rounds and everything. Takes certain amount of time to search rooms, wandering monsters can come by, you run out of torches, etc. They took out the technical procedures for dungeon exploration at some point though, and only the vestigial parts of it remain.
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Jan 24, 2022 15:13
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To be fair they took those parts out largely because they weren't good. I did an adventure once using the 1st edition random dungeon generation table. It didn't go great. We didn't use that table again.
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Jan 24, 2022 15:18
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I have thought about melee players standing around only because of attacks of opportunity. A away to mitigate this might be to make disengage a reaction. If you want to move away, fine, but counterspelling and other neat poo poo is off the table until your next turn. Rogues and monks don't provoke aaos.
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Jan 24, 2022 15:25
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:To be fair they took those parts out largely because they weren't good. What? The classic D&D exploration systems for dungeons and wilderness have been solid and held up for literally decades. They’re still things 5e steals from today. You having a bad run in with the 1e random dungeon generation system doesn’t make the actual exploration systems worse, as that is a different system!
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Jan 24, 2022 17:10
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I'm starting an Out of the Abyss campaign tonight and my fighter's random starting item is a big spider I made friends with (tarantula-sized, not ridable), can I use this at all or is he just going to be a buddy We haven't rolled to see how long each character has been imprisoned for yet, so I was thinking that if it was on the longer side, I could have tried collecting spider silk to make a garrote
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Jan 24, 2022 17:15
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change my name posted:I'm starting an Out of the Abyss campaign tonight and my fighter's random starting item is a big spider I made friends with (tarantula-sized, not ridable), can I use this at all or is he just going to be a buddy The first thing that comes to mind is learning some form of Speak to Animals and then using the spider as a mini familiar for reconnaissance around the prison.
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Jan 24, 2022 17:18
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Reveilled posted:Here's an example of an adventuring day from my group: Okay, this is a solid 6 encounter day, I'm not trying to take that away from you, but my issue here is this still has pacing issues with RAW. This is good pacing for long rest classes, but imagine playing a Warlock in the same party as a Wizard for this day with RAW short rests. You can narratively fit a short rest after encounter 1. The arms dealer isn't going anywhere, and it makes sense to take time to plan out your approach and get back into shape, but you probably don't want to throw out a whole day for it. After encounter 2, a short rest in any logical narrative sense involves going back to a base or something, which at that point you might as well just long rest since you'd only bother to go back to base if you felt there was no real time pressure or your party was so badly hosed up that they couldn't continue which a short rest might not fix. After encounter 3, much like 2, you either decide that you want to go into this situation fresh, in which case you leave and long rest, or you decide there's time pressure. You're not going to just hang around in an area that you had to sneak into for a full hour waiting for guards to catch you. After encounter 4, you're solidly in hostile territory, same for 5 and 6, and sitting around for an hour seems like a really good way to just get ambushed by the next encounter anyway. Your Warlock has done 5/6ths as many encounters as the Wizard with no reset. Even when you do this good a job of managing days, the short/long rest economy is still not balanced right, because while your martials are getting the extended number of encounters without resetting daily casters, your short rest characters are still suffering the same issue of not getting as many short rests per long rest as you need to make their daily capacity line up with long rest classes. I'm not usually a big fan of saying "this homebrew rule fixes this" but I really think that short rests should be shorter like how Critical Role does it so that you can do them after most encounters. Or, honestly, just straight up go back to Encounter Powers from 4e. e: Rutibex posted:Exploration used to have an actual procedure. Just like combat it was broken into rounds and everything. Takes certain amount of time to search rooms, wandering monsters can come by, you run out of torches, etc. I was a fan of Pathfinder 2e's idea of having explicit timescale mechanics of downtime, exploration, and action, whereas D&D's current rules mostly cover the first and third.
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Jan 24, 2022 17:28
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I don't remember where I saw it, but I'm a big fan of "combat rounds are a minute, exploration rounds are an hour, downtime rounds are a day" rule and giving players an turn for each (slowing down when necessary for the latter two).
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Jan 24, 2022 18:03
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Taciturn Tactician posted:
I mean, that IS how encounter powers worked in 4e, the short (15 minutes) rest reset your per-encounter stuff, something being labeled "Encounter" or "per encounter" is just shorthand for that. And it's a time-frame that just makes more sense than the 1-hour imho, you can narratively fit in catching your breath and tending to wounds in all but the most time-sensitive situations and you always have a sense of when your encounter-based resources come back and don't have to stress about wasting them. Ash Rose fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Jan 24, 2022 |
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Jan 24, 2022 19:17
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Taciturn Tactician posted:Okay, this is a solid 6 encounter day, I'm not trying to take that away from you, but my issue here is this still has pacing issues with RAW. This is good pacing for long rest classes, but imagine playing a Warlock in the same party as a Wizard for this day with RAW short rests. Presently at least we do run short rests as 10 minutes, but back when we had that encounter day, the party took a short rest after encounter 2 by just going to get lunch at a local eatery before heading across town, so I'd dispute that the only logical narrative here was going back to a base. There was no short rest between encounters 3 and 6, but there was a short rest between 6 and the remaining two encounters of the day. A warlock might have been in a bit of a tight spot during encounters 5 and 6, but these encounters were the easiest of the day, partly because they were in a stretch where I expected short resting would be difficult--encounter 4 was the big fight and I'd expected it to be encounter 5. Theoretically, they could have taken a long rest after Encounter 2, or after encounter 6, but the party didn't want to because it was still morning after Encounter 2, and only late afternoon after encounter 6, despite being pretty heavily drained for the day. Why? Because you can only take one long rest every 24 hours, so the time difference between a long rest and a short rest, RAW, isn't an hour vs eight hours, it's an hour vs however many hours are left in the day, and those times are on entirely different scales when it comes to time pressure. The party judged that they should take a short rest after encounter 2 because it had cost them a lot of HP but not many other resources, and that, given that only a few hours had passed since the raid on their base, it was entirely possible news of the raid failing had not yet reached their next target. But if they'd gone back to take a long rest? The guild would almost certainly know the raid had failed by the next day, and would be taking steps to respond. Maybe they'd get ambushed, maybe the shop would have been reinforced with additional enemies, maybe they'd get to the shop and find it deserted, all the potential leads gone. There'd be a small risk of that now if they took a short rest, but they judged that the risk of those preparations being done in an hour was much, much lower than the risk of waiting until the next day. And that for me is the key thing: most villains have minions, and that means most villains have an organisation. Organisations move slowly (even slower in a world without telecommunications), but they are moving to achieve the villain's goal constantly. Often a clever party can find ways to act against their enemy without having to engage in encounters that could lead to violence (and that's why some days might have only one combat, or none at all), but if the party decides at 10am to go back to base and take a long rest at that's them done for the day, we'll fast forward to 6am tomorrow and I'll work out what the villains did with the twenty hours the party so generously gifted to them. If you're playing a more avant-garde campaign where there's no real villain or serious stakes then this isn't a concern, but unless the villain is acting like they're in a cartoon or a video game, they should have a plan to get what they want and be actively working to achieve that goal. Reveilled fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Jan 24, 2022 |
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Jan 24, 2022 21:17
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