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Imagined posted:This is way bigger of a deal than I realized. Like, I'm thinking about switching from 5E to well, just about anything else, for the PbP I'm running in Discord, and realizing that means living without fancy online character builders, a Discord bot that has all 5e spells, abilities, and monster stats built into it, tons of homebrew content generators, lists, etc. Not playing 5E basically means going back to books and paper for anything beyond rolling dice. What game are you looking at that both needs that kind of stuff, and doesn't have it? I've played a bunch of games (star wars and CoC mostly) that seem to have equivalent online tools to D&D, and a bunch of other games (PbtA stuff, FATE) that doesn't have an "everything included" type online solution but doesn't suffer from it either. E: I play a bunch of RPGs online but I don't run any, so it's definitely possible that there's a bunch of GM-side stuff that doesn't exist for CoC or SW but does exist for D&D and I'm totally unaware of it, I'm just not sure what it would even be for those systems. E2: Because I don't run games online, I'm also mostly unaware of tools etc that haven't been shown to me by a group I'm in. I should probably get with this poo poo because my main group's going to be scattered across a triangle 500km on each side next year and online is the only way I'll be able to run anything for them. Is there a thread about making the TTRPG online thing work well as GM? I'd be more interested in general info than RPG system specific. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Sep 23, 2018 |
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Sep 23, 2018 02:22
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Imagined posted:This is way bigger of a deal than I realized. Like, I'm thinking about switching from 5E to well, just about anything else, for the PbP I'm running in Discord, and realizing that means living without fancy online character builders, a Discord bot that has all 5e spells, abilities, and monster stats built into it, tons of homebrew content generators, lists, etc. Not playing 5E basically means going back to books and paper for anything beyond rolling dice. smh @ entitled millenials these days
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Sep 23, 2018 02:28
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Elfgames posted:holyshit that AV is monsterenvy as gently caress It was not me just going to say. As mentioned earlier, I can't actually pay for anything on these forums. MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Sep 23, 2018 |
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Sep 23, 2018 02:36
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Splicer posted:
Easily cause the game is pretty well balanced, that does not mean some classes don't have flaws. And despite the Ranger's flaws it can still be useful and not feel weak. But that does not change that it is still flawed. Imagined posted:a Discord bot that has all 5e spells, abilities, and monster stats built into it Thats a cool tool were did you find it. MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Sep 23, 2018 |
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Sep 23, 2018 02:38
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AlphaDog posted:What game are you looking at that both needs that kind of stuff, and doesn't have it? No, but that's a great idea for a thread and I have a lot of ideas for contributing to it. Also yeah 5e has definitely hit the tipping point where having an online resource with all the spells/monsters/etc listed is really nice and helpful just for sorting out your options. I use one for Pathfinder just to find stuff and then go to my actual books for the actual work; having something that can spit out all cold terrain CR 4 monsters is great though. e: PDF search is also great for that kind of thing. It matters more in systems with more content, whether it's lore or rules concepts, that way you can sift through it all. Some simpler systems don't need it, but can have great resources written for them, like the Dungeon World GM's Guide.
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Sep 23, 2018 02:43
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MonsterEnvy posted:Easily cause the game is pretty well balanced, that does not mean some classes don't have flaws. And despite the Ranger's flaws it can still be useful and not feel weak. But that does not change that it is still flawed. https://avrae.io/
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Sep 23, 2018 03:01
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Listen. I know that MonsterEnvy would defend 5e no matter what and has even denied the existence of obvious, glaring problems with 5e. I know that is obnoxious to anybody with a sense of how games are designed or who has played a lot of different systems. But can we agree to not engage in another round of, "Are you sure you like 5e? What do you like exactly? Could you please show me a list of enumerated things that I can carefully deconstruct and tell you what systems are better?" I'm not saying don't help people who come into the thread looking for alternatives, I think it's just sort of weird and creepy to outsiders and is kind of off putting to the rest of the forum. I'm just asking for a brief ceasefire before we descend into another four pages of madness.
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Sep 23, 2018 03:01
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Mendrian posted:I think it's just sort of weird and creepy to outsiders and is kind of off putting to the rest of the forum. It is.
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Sep 23, 2018 03:07
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If the bad posters stopped posting, this thread would immediately die. And I'm not saying "everyone who posts here is bad", I mean if we removed the drama, what would we really have? I'm not saying it's a bad idea, mind Edit: I moderated a forum for a period of time, and we had some really bad people on it. Half the forum was getting mad at the drama. I booted them, and then... well, everyone stopped talking as much, and threads started dying, and then the forums died. What I'm saying is that I made a really bad moderator. Gharbad the Weak fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Sep 23, 2018 |
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Sep 23, 2018 03:39
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Mendrian posted:
I agree it's why I refused to play around with Alphadog about it.
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Sep 23, 2018 03:47
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Mendrian posted:But can we agree to not engage in another round of, "Are you sure you like 5e? What do you like exactly? Could you please show me a list of enumerated things that I can carefully deconstruct and tell you what systems are better?" yeah why would we ever examine the things we like?
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Sep 23, 2018 03:52
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MonsterEnvy posted:I agree it's why I refused to play around with Alphadog about it. I disagree.
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Sep 23, 2018 03:54
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Elfgames posted:yeah why would we ever examine the things we like? Yeah because that's definitely the same thing dude.
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Sep 23, 2018 04:26
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AlphaDog posted:I disagree. Ok.
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Sep 23, 2018 04:29
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Personally I find this thread almost impossible to read because it's just non-stop posting about how bad 5e is, and I really wish the mods would make a thread rule against it. 5e is far from perfect and there are better systems and so on but it is impossible to have a reasonable discussion about literally anything in this thread because here comes Arivia to tell us why this game is trash and here comes MonsterEnvy to suck the game's dick and it's all incredibly tiresome. I just want to talk about D&D, and playing D&D, and cool D&D ideas and books and stories and yes even house rules to fix problems. I do not find it especially difficult to make GM rulings about things not covered in the 5e rules, and I think it's a far better option than the insane mess of supplements and mechanics that Pathfinder is. I do not, however, go to the Pathfinder thread and tell people there how much their game sucks and that they should try Some Indie Bullshit: Pathfinder but Better like people constantly do here.
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Sep 23, 2018 04:45
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Gharbad the Weak posted:If the bad posters stopped posting, this thread would immediately die. Best thing for it really, the group therapy is clearly going nowhere
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Sep 23, 2018 04:49
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koreban posted:How about instead of continually shouting from the top of the hill you’re determined to die on, let people who are enjoying, or trying to enjoy, a game with their friends do so without the Westboro Baptist Pathfinder Society protests you insist on bringing to every single topic? You, monsterenvy, and aplhadog are the insufferable shitposting trio of this thread, but you’re far and away the worst of the bunch.  (Although monsterenvy & alphadog each contribute advice / suggestions often) This is a good post.
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Sep 23, 2018 04:50
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How about a middle point where ppl who hate the game can still be smug and self satisfied and ppl who like it can hold discourse? I want to know what people use for baseline ground rules for their games. For instance: I ignore darkvision and make sure everybody knows it because I hate keeping track of it. I don't hand out or charge anything in units that aren't gold or platinum because who cares. I only use average damage on my monsters and I roll to hit (and everything I roll) in public
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Sep 23, 2018 04:56
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It's actually a really bad post because "Making someone feel bad online" and "Abetting the harassment of a minority game designer into literally abandoning their business and the internet entirely" are two different things. Arivia is a terrible poster but it's not because they won't let you enjoy D&D without squaring that circle.
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Sep 23, 2018 04:57
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Novum posted:How about a middle point where ppl who hate the game can still be smug and self satisfied and ppl who like it can hold discourse? Well there is nothing wrong with anything you said there.
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Sep 23, 2018 05:02
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Novum posted:I ignore darkvision and make sure everybody knows it because I hate keeping track of it. I'm working on homebrew stuff and I'm honestly considering just gouging darkvision out entirely. In my actual play experience, it serves no purpose.
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Sep 23, 2018 05:10
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CeallaSo posted:I'm working on homebrew stuff and I'm honestly considering just gouging darkvision out entirely. In my actual play experience, it serves no purpose. It's fine and negligible until you have a DM that gets irrationally excited by the prospect of having more fiddly bits to fiddle with. In other words, how do I tell my well-intentioned, relatively-inexperienced, and somewhat-overzealous DM that expecting us to track how many silvers we're carrying and whether spells have verbal, somatic, and/or material components is not the height of tabletop gaming? I guess if I don't track them then he probably won't notice, but after he read the nitty-gritty details of spellcasting he seems unreasonably excited to tell either of the party's paladins that they can't, in fact, cast Bless if their hands are full holding equipment.
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Sep 23, 2018 05:37
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lightrook posted:It's fine and negligible until you have a DM that gets irrationally excited by the prospect of having more fiddly bits to fiddle with. Even they don't track generic spell components or muse over "Wait, does 5th edition casting focus rules bypass burning hands demanding a two handed gesture?" As for shields? While they do go out of their way to give our holy players a pass, they obsess over the warcaster feat when it comes to arcane types.
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Sep 23, 2018 05:51
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lightrook posted:It's fine and negligible until you have a DM that gets irrationally excited by the prospect of having more fiddly bits to fiddle with. You probably can't tell them. In my experience, when someone inexperienced in RPGs gets into the "track coppers, track arrows, track lamp oil, you never said you sheathed your sword so you don't have a free hand" type of D&D, they'll find it hard to regard "don't track any of that poo poo, cast your spell and don't worry about the sword" as real proper actual D&D. The opposite is also true - the free-and-easy guy isn't going to believe that anyone really for real tracks loving lamp oil, are you goddamn joking? It's really really hard to just talk someone through how both playstyles are valid. It's way easier to show them during actual play, either by running D&D how you want to play it, or by running a non-D&D game where things are closer to the way you want D&D to play.
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Sep 23, 2018 05:52
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I've seen the argument that a lack of darkvision can serve as a drawback to playing a variant human when it's so, so good otherwise, but my impression is in practice it mostly kind of falls to the wayside. We're kind of at a crossroads in the campaign I'm playing in because our rogue/cleric, UA changeling, is the only one without darkvision. There is a pair of Goggles of Night available for purchase, but their player is weighing the pros and cons of buying it vs - Just using Find Familiar (arcane trickster) to summon an owl who kind of perches on their shoulder and scopes poo poo out for them - Buying a hooded lantern and dealing with the consequences for stealthing purposes. Our DM saying "gently caress it this is too much overhead" for nonmagical darkness would definitely simplify things, but I can see how it might potentially balance things out if you're actually enforcing it.
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Sep 23, 2018 05:53
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I don't really understand how people who are serious about vision run their games. Mixed-vision parties seem absurdly unwieldy for the DM if you fully engaged with the rules.
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Sep 23, 2018 06:05
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Mr. Maltose posted:It's actually a really bad post because "Making someone feel bad online" and "Abetting the harassment of a minority game designer into literally abandoning their business and the internet entirely" are two different things. Arivia is a terrible poster but it's not because they won't let you enjoy D&D without squaring that circle. That's fair enough, I do think that koreban has accurately ascribed a motivation for many posters here who continually argue a)D&D5e is a lovely game design play something else and b)Mike Mearls is a lovely person for the reasons you're alluding to. It's a good post that highlights that for the benefit of people new to the thread or new to the game. I followed this thread for some time before I got around to actually reading the OP. I also think many of those same posters make great contributions that improve people's experience with the game.
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Sep 23, 2018 06:07
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gandhichan posted:We're kind of at a crossroads in the campaign I'm playing in because our rogue/cleric, UA changeling, is the only one without darkvision. There is a pair of Goggles of Night available for purchase, but their player is weighing the pros and cons of buying it vs Find Familiar requires an action to see through the familiars eyes.It falls apart as soon as you roll initiative.
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Sep 23, 2018 06:27
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Valentin posted:I don't really understand how people who are serious about vision run their games. Mixed-vision parties seem absurdly unwieldy for the DM if you fully engaged with the rules. So darkvision (and its predecessor infravision) date back to original D&D where the exploration mechanics were much more thorough and robust. Back then a torch’s light radius and longevity were big important things you tracked all the time. Whoever held a torch was at a disadvantage in combat, in carrying loot and so on. It was a big deal. Darkvision let some characters get around that. Not having to carry light sources was a huge huge bonus back then. (This was also why light used to be a useful spell comparable to sleep, because light meant no torch carrying.) Over time D&D has moved away from strict exploration rules so darkvision isn’t nearly as important. A modern D&D game doesn’t need to care about it because the problem it solves isn’t a problem for many games these days. If you don’t keep track of light sources’ radius, if you just assume someone carrying a light is enough to illuminate an entire room around them, or you just don’t bother with light sources at all, don’t bother with darkvision either. Maybe someone with darkvision can see down a long pit further or some other narrative use. I’d guess most 5e games and most of the printed adventures follow this model. If you do care about light sources’ radius, then darkvision has value because it’s still a player tool to solve problems. This matches better with Curse of Strahd (for atmosphere) and Tomb of Annihilation (for survival/exploration.)
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Sep 23, 2018 06:30
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Valentin posted:I don't really understand how people who are serious about vision run their games. Mixed-vision parties seem absurdly unwieldy for the DM if you fully engaged with the rules. I have never once seen a DM successfully pull off the "some of you can see, others can't" thing while also sticking to the rules, in this or any other edition of D&D. Light sources used to be really important to have (and to track if you wanted to make AD&D work properly), for sure, but as soon as some characters could see while others couldn't it was always a clusterfuck. Also, I have yet to see a 5th ed group engaged with the rules to the point where a human who goes outside at night is literally blind, as in "you get the blinded condition" as in "you can't see, at all". Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Sep 23, 2018 |
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Sep 23, 2018 06:31
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clusterfuck posted:Find Familiar requires an action to see through the familiars eyes.It falls apart as soon as you roll initiative.
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Sep 23, 2018 06:35
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clusterfuck posted:Find Familiar requires an action to see through the familiars eyes.It falls apart as soon as you roll initiative. Ah yeah, then that's totally out. We had a 1 v 1 v 1 battle royale a bit ago, and their way of working around the warlock's Darkness spell involved locating his position with mage hand legerdemain and shooting out from a hiding place to cancel out the disadvantage; I guess that could technically work with nonmagical darkness as well, but at this point it's looking like dropping over a good third of their funds on goggles are the way to go. Or the Light bullets.
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Sep 23, 2018 06:40
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Elfgames posted:yeah why would we ever examine the things we like? I realize this is an almost involuntary response to the normal call to sanity in this thread, but I'm not asking you not to critically examine 5e. I'm asking you to not rehash the same tired poo poo for the 3000th time because MonsterEnvy made a post. At least wait for somebody new to come into the thread, and loving ask. I don't want to keep posting about posting, so I'll stop there. Feel free to respond, but I'm going to keep on truckin'.
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Sep 23, 2018 06:41
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Mr. Maltose posted:It's actually a really bad post because "Making someone feel bad online" and "Abetting the harassment of a minority game designer into literally abandoning their business and the internet entirely" are two different things. Arivia is a terrible poster but it's not because they won't let you enjoy D&D without squaring that circle. Here’s the rub: it’s been like 6 months or more since I had the conversation with Arivia and she made me aware of the specifics of that situation. In the interim I forgot the specific details, only that the play tester people were horrible people and Mearls was guilty of bad associations and not firing or removing the horrible people when the issue was brought up. Since then, her incessant shot posting has overwhelmed my capacity to give a gently caress about her crusade to the point where I really don’t care anymore because 1. she’s well past being able to do anything about it 2. this is the furthest place from the proper forum to wage that war 3. I’d rather ride the wave of popularity of this game and create welcoming and inclusive groups of players to have fun playing with 4. any reasonably intelligent adult can neither be expected to track and perfectly adjudicate every edge case rule interaction, nor can “ask your DM” be as egregious an autism ableist dog whistle as gets painted with every broad stroke criticism here. Example: dude wants to scribe a level 1 bard spell into his wizard spellbook. An answer that lets people know that 5e isn’t good at resolving this rule interaction might be: “There’s no rule as written for this specific interaction. Mike Mearls has ruled on Twitter that they can, Jeremy Crawford has ruled they can’t because bards don’t use spellbooks, this nothing to copy from. It’s ultimately a no if you go by the canonical heirarchy of rules adjudicators, but it’s not in the FAQ. This is a classic ‘ask your dm situation.’ You can try to use this idea from [insert other game systemshitoosters here] where they handle similar edge cases by [specific example], or ask about being able to do it if you have something like the Keen Mind feat to be able to do that.” It’s simple, answers the question and doesn’t clog up the thread with 4 pages of arguing over how pathfinder did it better or how everyone who plays 5e is a horrible person or there can be no fun at a table unless there’s a codified rule in a 5th printing subcodex for martial-gish archetypes. It’s just exhausting trying to read this thread for the pleasure of getting a 10 minute fix where I’m thinking about something other than the daily stresses of job/wife/kids. D&D is a hobby and a 4 hour a week escape from mid-life bullshit, but it’s like a bad Facebook politics discussion in here. Made worse because the same shitposters drop D&D keywords into their posts like it makes them contextually relevant sort of like how that crazy uncle or cousin puts the boilerplate “this is my exercising my FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS TO FREE SPEECH” on his racist dog whistle Facebook posts like its some magical ward against a 30 day suspension for promoting racism. That’s my lack of brevity response to your, honestly valid criticism. I should be more sympathetic to the specific harms done here, but I just don’t have the energy or the mental constitution to carry so many people’s crosses, especially for my escapism hobby.
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Sep 23, 2018 06:46
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koreban posted:Example: dude wants to scribe a level 1 bard spell into his wizard spellbook. Literally no one is doing this dude. I pointed as much out in my first response to you tonight. No one's here to derail a specific rules question or stop you from talking about 5e. I and AlphaDog don't make posts like that, and MonsterEnvy doesn't make many. That is not a problem with this thread. quote:It’s just exhausting trying to read this thread for the pleasure of getting a 10 minute fix where I’m thinking about something other than the daily stresses of job/wife/kids. D&D is a hobby and a 4 hour a week escape from mid-life bullshit, but it’s like a bad Facebook politics discussion in here. Made worse because the same shitposters drop D&D keywords into their posts like it makes them contextually relevant sort of like how that crazy uncle or cousin puts the boilerplate “this is my exercising my FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS TO FREE SPEECH” on his racist dog whistle Facebook posts like its some magical ward against a 30 day suspension for promoting racism. This is a discussion thread for a game 30+ years old. Just because you're unwilling to engage with the larger history and issues of D&D doesn't mean everyone else needs to dumb their conversation down for you. If you don't understand what people are talking about, ask. We're all here to talk D&D and that's fun, so answering questions about D&D is also fun. Again if you're looking for a criticism-free happy 5e place, this isn't the forum for you.
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Sep 23, 2018 07:00
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Valentin posted:I don't really understand how people who are serious about vision run their games. Mixed-vision parties seem absurdly unwieldy for the DM if you fully engaged with the rules. If there's dim light all about, everyone can see everything anyway. If the party is in darkness, then a person without darkvision is going to have a 40 feet sight radius (torch/light), everyone else 60. You are assumed to still be able to hear or have your fellow party members point to threat sources, and enemies aren't explicitly hidden unless they actually Hide, so it only affects the use of ranged weapons (disadvantage from being beyond your sight) or spells that require LoS for targeting. It's not complicated, and even a full darkvision party will want light sources anyway to avoid disadvantage on Perception checks. Conspiratiorist fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Sep 23, 2018 |
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Sep 23, 2018 07:45
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Phoneposting but how does LoS for spells work when you're Blinded? Is it just disadvantage or can you not do it at all? Is there a difference with "a target within range" and "a target you can see within range" or does that just not come up?
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Sep 23, 2018 08:06
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AlphaDog posted:Phoneposting but how does LoS for spells work when you're Blinded? Is it just disadvantage or can you not do it at all? Is there a difference with "a target within range" and "a target you can see within range" or does that just not come up? Edit: Spells with "targets within Range": Acid Splash, Aid, Animate Dead (a "corpse or pile of bones" within range), Animate Objects, Antipathy/Sympathy, Astral Projection, Spells with "targets you can see within Range": Bane, Banishment, Blight, Blind Deafness Conclusion: after a quick look, it looks like only los offensive or debuff spells have the "target you can see within range", no los condition for buff and summon spells. I think it's disadvantage roll since that's also the effect of invisibility. Toplowtech fucked around with this message at 08:29 on Sep 23, 2018 |
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Sep 23, 2018 08:20
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AlphaDog posted:Phoneposting but how does LoS for spells work when you're Blinded? Is it just disadvantage or can you not do it at all? Is there a difference with "a target within range" and "a target you can see within range" or does that just not come up? If the spell says 'a target you can see', then you can't cast it on targets you cannot see, be it because of light conditions or because you're blinded or because they're invisible. For spell attacks, it only matters for Lightning Lure, Chromatic Orb, Steel Wind Strike, and Wall of Light. VVV Conspiratiorist fucked around with this message at 08:30 on Sep 23, 2018 |
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Sep 23, 2018 08:24
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Conspiratiorist posted:If the spell says 'a target you can see', then you can't cast it on targets you cannot see, be it because of light conditions or because you're blinded or because they're invisible. I wouldve hoped that part was obvious, yeah, just trying to remember if there were different "can see in range" and "in range" wordings. I was also asking about stuff like fireball where you pick the origin point. Can you do that when you can't see? I guess you can? Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 08:29 on Sep 23, 2018 |
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Sep 23, 2018 08:27
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