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Banana Man posted:Also are this point is there a consensus on what the best and worst destined classes are? I remember hearing monks weren’t do great at one point but didn’t play the game enough to understand why 4e monks were the first monks to actually be good in any version of D&D. Not the absolute best class (as mentioned above) but they are effective enough; you don't need as much damage as a slayer when you have enough mobility to make it to the back lines and beat up the mages and archers and make sure they can't get away, and the survivability to stay there. How highly you rate them depends on how much you enjoy the playstyle. The actually bad classes were the assassins (both versions), the vampire, the Crusader (scaling mark punishment is a thing), the Hunter (no non-standard attacks) and the spamtastic psionic classes (which didn't lack power but managed to be spamtastic without being as simple as the slayer or elementalist). I'm not sure Runepriest or Seeker were ever worth it, but that came down in the runepriest's case to being more fiddly than it was worth. Oh, and the Bladesinger gets a lot of hate, often justified.
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Jun 27, 2018 00:34
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Kai Tave posted:Like I kiiiiiinda get this sentiment but my own personal opinion is that 4E didn't really need simplified classes. It wasn't an onerous, exhausting challenge to play a vanilla sword-and-shield fighter and Just Hit Stuff, you didn't need a simplified subclass for the hypothetical player who seemingly can't handle the rigorous complexities of Marking like someone in one of those informercials who can't pour milk into a glass without setting their kitchen on fire. Or hell, a vanilla Rogue with a dagger, you get Combat Advantage and you do BIG MONEY DAMAGE, rinse repeat. The Wizard might have been a scooch more involved with things like copious forced movement and swappable Dailies but, I mean, Warlocks were there. Sorcerers too. I've a player in one group who when you asked him what he wanted to play then about half the time he'd choose a mage in any edition. Thing is he really isn't very good at D&D wizards because he's not that good at keeping track of options. On the other hand he's had the most fun involving the actual mechanics he's ever had in D&D when playing an Elementalist; most of what he wants to do in combat is burninate, and the rest of the wizard class has been the crap he puts up with to do that. I've also seen another player utterly transform in terms of both effectiveness and enjoyment when we switched his PHB ranger for a scout. (It may not be a coincidence that both players had been playing D&D since the 1970s)
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Aug 2, 2018 01:43
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aegof posted:Add Bladesinger to the list, the class that gets Wizard encounter powers as daily powers. The Bladesinger is one of those classes that plays better than it reads. The ability to drop a point of damage and debuff anywhere is surprisingly useful, and a burning hands at +2 to hit and +5 damage absolutely is powerful enough for a daily. It's a little weird, but once they'd explored most of the standard AEDU design space it's one of the more interesting things they did.
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Feb 5, 2019 03:06
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So I'm running a 5e campaign (good job I like the group) and most of them prefer having a battle map and the Cleric player continually tries to roll attack rolls for Sacred Flame and really doesn't like faffing round with all their spells. So if I'm going to use both 5e and a battle map I'm going to bring in as much of a better edition as I can. So far my initial house rules are:
Any other suggestions for things I can/should add?
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Aug 13, 2019 01:30
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Heads up: CBLoader no longer works properly if you open it normally - the CBLoader site is not there any more. If you add "-d" it works and doesn't produce error messages all over the place - but I've had to reload all the .part files.
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Aug 14, 2019 00:08
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Gort posted:Does the interaction of minions and auto-damage powers bug anyone else? Like, four minions are meant to be equivalent to a standard monster - it feels odd that they can all die to a huge zone that does 3 damage, with no attack roll and the zone continues into subsequent rounds. Most of the best MM3 minions gave them a way of resisting some things or having their deaths mean something - for example the orcs got a free swing when they died and kobold minions got a reaction to scatter when the auto-damage AoEs came in. (Ranged minions didn't need this as they could spread out but melee did).
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Oct 7, 2019 22:32
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Plutonis posted:*non-essentials class Thief has a movement option to elbow a minion in the head when they attack a serious target. Not the best but better than nothing.
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Oct 7, 2019 23:58
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dwarf74 posted:DC8 is pretty trivial; that's what makes it Easy. It's supposed to be doable even by people without the skill and trivial for skilled characters. That was my take. If the PCs were rolling against Easy DC it meant they'd done something really smart and outwitted my poor bad guys - or it meant that everyone was teaming up to e.g. let the tank sneak despite the plate armour.
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Jan 3, 2020 02:03
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Moriatti posted:... Yes. It doesn't give much less than any other D&D. Standard rule I used - long rests in base camp, short rests took an overnight sleep. That made wandering monster fights meaningful as endurance actually mattered. Oh, XP for exploring or quests rather than killing stuff.
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Jan 11, 2020 02:59
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One thing I might do if redesigning cards is to add a quick diagram for blasts and bursts so it's easier to remember what the difference between a close blast and a close burst is.
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Jan 20, 2020 03:43
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Sodomy Hussein posted:The thing to understand about Essentials is that it really isn't in any way simpler than a non-Essentials class except that you have less choices as you level up. Several of the Essentials classes are also bad or scale poorly because Mike Mearls isn't a good designer and doesn't like or understand 4E. The thing about this is that not everyone is the same. There are plenty of people who want to plan their turns out with all factors in one go and for those players there's little difference. There are also plenty that don't and for which the much more bite-sized chunks that the Essentials classes decisions are broken up into helps to avoid analysis paralysis. If you find classic 4e classes easy to play then you won't find essentials classes any easier (I actually like the Thief because it gives me its own nice collection of interesting choices). On the other hand if you don't click with classic 4e classes you might like the freedom to be able to simply say "I hit it" and then decide to power attack after the to hit rolls. What Essentials delivered was characters with simple decision points, separating the choice of how to attack from who to attack - and I can think of several players it really transformed the experience of. And I find objections to that to be exclusionary gatekeeping bullshit.
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Aug 18, 2020 03:31
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My Lovely Horse posted:If Essentials delivered that I'm convinced it was largely by accident because it was conceived and designed as the Make D&D Great Again update. And it still equates the "I hit it" classes with martials ("the class your cousin can play") while the arcanes get complex options, which is its own kind of gatekeeping bullshit. I said this pretty much between Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms and Heroes of the Elemental Chaos. Heroes of the Elemental Chaos on the other hand introduced the "I burninate it" class in the Elementalist which is every bit as simple as the simple martials. And I'm not arguing about intent but results. Sodomy Hussein posted:It's not really about gatekeeping, it's that I don't think the Essentials classes accomplish the goal of being "simple" very well. I agree 4E has lovely amounts of pain points for analysis paralysis and I've seen it shut down peoples' brains, and people forgetting to add in one or more of their many modifiers until the end of their turn was common at my tables. I've never seen analysis paralysis from players of the knight, the slayer, the hunter, the scout, the cavalier, the hexblade, the thief or the elementalist even when players of all those classes except the cavalier and thief were prone to analysis paralysis with classic 4e classes. For some people breaking how you attack up from who you are going to attack keeps both decisions small enough that they don't suffer analysis paralysis. That said most of the rest of Essentials was a bit meh. The Mage was a power-boost for the wizard even if Pyromancers and Nethermancers are more inspiring than staff wizards and orb wizards. The Essentials Cleric should have been the start of an interesting idea, with premade character builds that knowingly selected thematically rather than optimally and then gave bonuses to close the gap - but they never followed through on this. The Essentials Sentinel just didn't scale. From the splatbooks Feywild's Skald and Berserker were both interesting and fun and the sort of things we should have seen from late era splatbooks, mixing up the formulas, while the protector was sufficiently meh as the spellslinger druid that I'd forgotten it existed. The Witch on the other hand - we didn't need more wizard archetypes. Heroes of the Elemental Chaos gave us the Shi'ar as Yet Another Wizard - and the Elementalist, which was gold. Heroes of Shadow was the turkey of the bunch - the Binder is pure crap, the Executioner is worse in that it looks interesting but just really doesn't scale. The Vampire doesn't scale - but I was able to pretty much fix that in a single line of house ruling (the Blood Drinker power doing 1d4 damage rather than 1d10 extra damage, meaning that it gets your damage bonuses lets it scale). And the Blackgard doesn't scale. That said the School of Nethermancy was a good idea. Oh, and Neverwinter's Bladesinger looks awful but is pretty decent in play at least in Heroic tier. So yeah. I'll agree with the idea that most of what Essentials delivered was by accident and the worst book (Heroes of Shadow) has Mike Mearls' name as the lead of course. But that doesn't mean that it didn't deliver. I'll forgive a lot of mediocrity in return for adding the Slayer, Knight, Thief, Scout, and Elementalist to the game and by doing so making it easier for more people to actually enjoy things. Also for all I love the 4e Monk class, I'll say that Essentials had a better hit rate than the PHB3.
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Aug 18, 2020 19:34
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Ferrinus posted:A starting regular 4e character who's looking at a battlefield has four choices of power to use: At-Will 1, At-Will 2, Per-Encounter, Daily. Slight addendum. A starting regular 4e character who's looking at a battlefield has four choices and (possibly) four targets for sixteen choices all being made in one gulp. Possibly more with powers that attack multiple targets. A starting slayer looking at a battlefield has a choice as to whether to change their stance at the start of their turn - and some of them just sit permanently in the +to hit or +damage stance. Then which of the four targets to attack. Then whether to deliver a power strike. It's all broken up into bite-sized chunks, and there are not even any "Hit them both" options.
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Aug 19, 2020 00:54
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Ferrinus posted:Eh, "sit permanently in the +to hit stance" is equivalent to having a favorite at-will, which lots of characters playing normal classes do - does a ranger really choose between Twin Strike and whatever else 95% of the time? No - but sitting permanently in + to hit among other things affects charges and attacks of opportunity. quote:I should also note that the elementalist sorcerer enjoying this level of simplicity is pure propaganda, because they do have to choose between a menu of powers completely ahead of time and, likely as not, carefully pan an AoE over the map until the maximum number of enemies are lighting up to boot. "Carefully pan the AoE map" is somewhat overstating things when the AoE map is only 3 squares by 3 squares. It's slightly more complex than a slayer that's not doing a lot of stance-dancing, but less so than classic AEDU.
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Aug 19, 2020 01:45
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Mr. Maggy posted:joining in a game of D&D for the first time and the DM is running 4e. I'm planning on going tiefling bard. I have no idea if this is good or not. The best and worst thing about the 4e bard is that one of their at will attack spells is Vicious Mockery and it does hit point damage. You don't have to take it - but if you want one of your two basic attack types to be to insult bad guys until they'd rather cry than fight this is the class for you. One of your other options is Staggering Note that drives the enemy backwards and gives one of your allies a free swing at the target (although normally you don't take both because you want a melee attack as your backup). The main downside is juggling weapons and implements.
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Aug 22, 2020 19:49
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Maxwell Lord posted:That would make it a pretty bad game if players are punished for taking something that’s not an optimal stat combo. So I guess that stats in your world should be utterly meaningless then. Because everyone in every game is "punished" for sub-optimal choices. And a trap option isn't just a bad option. Int 9 for a wizard is a bad decision in any edition of D&D - but it's screamingly obvious it's bad so it is not a trap. It clearly marks itself as a bad choice. A trap option is something like the 3.X Toughness feat that gives you 3 extra hp. It presents itself as a good choice - but isn't. 4e as written was balanced round a 16 in your primary stat at first level. As played 18 is the baseline.
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Aug 23, 2020 01:59
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DalaranJ posted:So, I'm thinking about how to put basic tactics into games that don't have them, and the thing that jumped to mind was "monster roles" from 4e are intentionally generic tactical roles. But I haven't played a lot of 4e. For tactical combat you really need two: Front liner and back liner. Front liners either don't shoot or shoot really badly, losing about half their damage potential. Back liners have good ranged weapons but suck at melee, losing about half their damage potential and not being very well armoured or very tough. At this point you have tactics - can you make it past the front liners to the back liners and beat them down and force them to melee? And can you pin down the front liners so they can't melee you? A big part of why 5e combat is boring is that you can use Str with thrown weapons and Dex with finesse weapons so if you melee that archer they switch from longbow to shortsword still using dex to hit and only dropping a single die size for damage - and if you glue that thug's feet to the floor his throwing axes still use Str to hit and he just drops a die size or two on damage. 4e then broke front liners into Brutes (lightly armoured, all the muscles, and lots of hit points) and Soldiers (heavily armoured and so hard to hit and damage). Brutes were more dangerous and faster, Soldiers were tough and could take a pounding especially for fighters. This was a good decision even if it's a whole lot more fun to fight an ogre than a knight when they are the same challenge level. The ogre does stuff, the knight prevents you doing stuff both through how it fights and through having solid metal armour preventing you hurting it. The next big role in 4e was actually two roles - Vanilla Skirmishers and Situational Skirmishers. Both these are worth having. Vanilla Skirmishers are just simple vanilla monsters with nothing special about them and that can range or melee. Simple to run but utterly uninteresting on their own. There's a case that e.g. kobolds don't have frontliners and backliners - they have Vanilla Skirmishers and Backliners with their frontline being equally skilled with sword and sling while their back line sucks with slings. And orcs don't really have backliners; they have melee orcs and orcs with javelins that are statted as Vanilla skirmishers. A lot of minions were vanilla skirmishers using the "quantity has a quality all of its own" and minimal DM intervention. Situational Skirmishers on the other hand were inherently interesting because they had a high damage type and a low damage type - but it wasn't the range/melee split but something else. Rogues with Sneak Attack would be the obvious example here (low damage if they can't trigger sneak attack, high if they can) - with another that springs to mind being a momentum based type doing extra damage based on how far they moved before they attacked, and another was a specialist charging type. So with situational skirmishers on the field the question is "Can you prevent the enemy doing their thing" - they are about twice as strong if they can as if they can't. So there's a challenge. Talking of situational and interesting as a bit of spice but even less necessary there's the Lurker. Lurkers were weirdness - things like the Bulette that spent one round in two under the ground as a landshark, or a monster that turned invisible every second round and then came out of ambush with a poisoned dagger. When they attacked they did about twice normal damage and were vulnerable (and squishy) - but the next turn they wouldn't attack and would be exceptionally hard to kill. Not remotely a core role but an interesting and scary one for variety because they really do ridiculous amounts of damage. Then at the least important level we reach the Backliner split between Artillery and Controllers. It was meant to be archers vs mages - this split wasn't terribly useful and the main difference was controllers had more debuffs, artillery was mostly about damage. Artillery/back liner was a nice and well defined control - controllers were mostly Mages Are Special. And no it is not at all necessary for PC roles to match up to monster roles. PC roles are designed round what they contribute, monster roles are designed round the counterplay players can use and deliberately have weaknesses to exploit. The other thing 4e did exceptionally well that made tactics interesting was its use of terrain. This is because 4e characters (PC and NPC alike) frequently got to force each other to move without having to give up all or even most of their damage for it (e.g. in a Bull Rush) and without it being complex. This meant that a fight on a dockside would involve pushing people off the docks, a fight round the campfire would involve pushing people into the campfire (more than one NPC in my campaigns has ended up in a latrine or an open sewer), pit traps aren't a "walk round it when you've seen it" thing, and if a bad guy opens the gates of hell the victory is only to be considered complete if you throw the bad guy through the portal they opened. As I've said in the past the ability to interact with terrain this way makes most RPGs feel like the PCs have spent their time acting in front of a green screen.
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Aug 27, 2020 21:43
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Devorum posted:My current group has only ever payed 5E, and the current DM saw a bunch of YouTube videos about 4E and asked if I would run it for them since I've actually played it before. To agree with everyone else HS1: The Slaying Stone is the best of the bad bunch WotC produced, and ENWorld's Zeitgeist: The Gears of Revolution is probably the best adventure/adventure path published for 4e. As long as you don't mind starting out as the cops. Open up PHB2 - for that matter the main reason not to open up everything (with the arguable exception of the Dungeon Explorer's Handbook, the last published sourcebook for 4e and literally half full of adverts for other products) is to avoid burying people in options. The PHB2 is a definite include - although the PHB2 druid class is slightly disappointing (unlike bards, barbarians, invokers, and sorcerers). 4e IME very much uses narrative pacing, with everyone having at will abilities in combat (at will attacks - 5e would call the spell version cantrips), signature moves they can use 1/scene ("encounter powers") and major abilities they can use 1/long rest ("daily" powers). Out of combat run 4e almost as if it were 5e. Ignore skill challenges (they are good but really badly explained) and you won't get Wizards Solving Everything. The biggest differences are that being proficient in a skill is a flat +5 - and because people get better all round the PCs get a + 1/2 level bonus to all skills. This means that instead of picking a DC that divides by 5 you pick an expected level to be doing [thing] and then easy/medium/hard and look up the number on a table. Or pull one out of thin air. The only other real things worth mentioning about the out of combat experience are that short rests are only about five minutes - and healing surges are much more integrated with the rest of the mechanics as a measure of stamina than hit dice are in 5e; you get more recovery from them and there are more abilities that let you spend them in combat. Notably spending a turn to take a breather ("Second wind") and inspirational abilities - if the recipient is spending healing surges it's not magic, it's inspiration that's letting them fight harder and longer. The first thing to mention about 4e combat is that it's a showstopper. Fights are slightly longer than they are in 5e, but a whole lot more engaging with rather fewer bullet sponge enemies (especially if you stick to the Monster Manual 3, Monster Vault, and Threats to the Nentir Vale for your monster-books; they reworked the math and got better at monster design as the edition went on). An hour for an engaging and cinematic fight makes for an excellent climax to a session (or when you're really uninspired) - but 4e does small fights against two goblins very badly and fight after fight gets monotonous and dull. The second thing to mention about 4e combat is that it's kinaesthetic. Never have a fight without something to push people into/onto/off/over and make sure most of the PCs have forced movement abilities that push or pull. Having a fight by a latrine pit can be fun and pushing BBEGs back through their own summoning portal is really entertaining. Because you're pushing people around without giving up your attack every fight is different and the scenery matters to a point that after playing 4e almost any other system using a battlemap feels like acting in front of a green screen rather than on location with props. This is why Keep on the Shadowfell is terrible. Up to the point where you reach the keep it's actually not that bad. But inside the keep are 17 fights in a row, of which at least a dozen are in basically featureless rooms. The third thing to mention is the fighter class. A 4e fighter when they swing at a target "mark" them as in football for a round (get a box of paperclips to use for status effects - 4e uses them a lot). And they have as a class feature the equivalent of the Sentinel feat on targets they've marked. This means that the 4e fighter might not hit as hard as the barbarian - but they are fast enough or experienced enough that the enemy knows if they take their eyes of that badass if only for a split second they will get the fighter's sword in their face. This is the opposite of an MMO mark - but does the same tactical job of drawing attention onto the fighter simply because the enemy doesn't dare turn their back. Also as a particular point of badassery is the Come And Get It ability which is an optional fighter power where they beckon or call out a challenge to all enemies in 15ft - who then rush them and get cut down. The fourth thing to mention about combat is the warlord class. The warlord is a fighter-type who's not quite as good at personal threat as the fighter - instead focusing on inspiring others. 2/encounter they can let one of their allies spend a healing surge and dig deep to keep going. They also frequently take abilities that let them give their attacks away; the running joke is that the warlord hits people with their axe, the warlord hits people with the barbarian. (There's a build that requires a lot of sourcebooks where the warlord literally never makes an attack roll). The bard has some of these tricks of course.
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Nov 14, 2020 05:35
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Gort posted:It's funny in a way, because I don't really have a problem with, "The barbarian killed the monster, so it didn't get to take a turn" or "the monster hit someone and then the warlord healed the person it hit back up" even though those are both functionally the same as the monster not getting a turn 'cause it's stunned or otherwise disabled. If something's locked died I need to do the admin work to manage it - but it's going to be an excercise in frustration. If it's dead it's back in the box and there's no overhead. Gort posted:Speaking of controllers and minions, minions are all over the place in terms of their relative power. It feels like more thought needed to be put into exactly how killable a party should find them. By the rules, they're meant to be worth a quarter of a standard monster each, but depending on the party or the exact rules for the minion, they can be worth a lot less than that. Most of the minions in Monster Vault who don't have an on-death power have something to protect them from AoEs - such as the kobolds getting a free shift 2 1/encounter if they have the misfortune of ending in one.
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Nov 16, 2020 16:21
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DalaranJ posted:When you use minions is it better for the players to know that they only have 1 hit or to obscure that information? 99% of the time you let the players know that "You're experienced adventurers. These guys are not in your league at all but there are a lot of them." or the like. Reading who's a real threat should be part of the assumed skills of an adventurer. Very occasionally a named NPC can be a minion for comedy or dramatic purposes. Learned sage NPCs who look about 100 years old are sometimes extremely good at not dying while others are one stiff breeze from falling over. Also there are some NPCs who are bullies but fold like a cheap tent when really pressured. It's worth knowing about, but this is not the default case.
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Dec 18, 2020 14:57
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:- Terrain is extremely important. Use difficult terrain, use areas that trigger effects when someone enters (or is pushed) into them, have maps that change when some condition is met, etc. This. Also it doesn't have to be wonderous and fantastical terrain. I've sold a group on 4e just by having the first fight be near the latrine and making sure all the PCs had forced movement abilities. Most of my towns have open sewers again to push someone into. And fights on the harbour docks mixed with PCs with forced movement normally have people going swimming. Also at the more epic scale work out in advance what will happen when someone pushes the NPC through their own summoning portal - because a smart group that's realised how much fun forced movement can be will do this. Even just an ambush at night should have attempts to push people into the camp fire. (Also remember the NPCs should sometimes get to try to do this to the PCs). I've said repeatedly that after 4e any other RPG using a battle map feels like acting against a green screen. Meanwhile in 4e if you're fighting on a second floor walkway with no or a weak handrail and have watched any Hong Kong martial arts films you know what to do. (Forced movement is such a thing in 4e because although other D&Ds have bull rush abilities 4e gives forced movement out as something a lot of characters can use as part of rather than instead of their attacks). quote:- The system is pretty robust. Once your players have a baseline level of familiarity with the system, you can play team monster intelligently -- push the players, use the options available to you, try to "win." In the long run this makes for a much more satisfying experience because the challenge isn't just a narrative conceit, it's something actually present in the game. The PCs are also generally tougher than either you or (especially) they think most of the time. Between leader healing, dailies, and second winds, the game is set up to make the players feel that they are going to lose when the odds are actually in their favour. quote:- Use the MM3 or the "MM3 on a business card", the early monster math makes for long, boring fights.  The "good" monster manuals are the Monster Manual 3, the Dark Sun Creature Catalog, Monster Vault (which is effectively a Monster Manual replacement), and Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale. Also: Skill challenge rules are useful but the way they are explained is just bad. They're a great improv tool, but the officially published examples are generally like watching a good improv comedian, writing down one of their shows, and saying "do that" even if the tool itself is what the comedian uses. If you're an experienced GM you don't need them. Combat is desert not the main course. Too much combat is ... too much and 4e doesn't really do small incidental fights. Build to big fights. And don't worry if the PCs go off in a random direction; shopping from the monster manual based on their level and drawing a few interesting piece of terrain on the spur of the moment will be as engaging as that massive setpiece that took you half a dozen hours to prepare in any other edition. Also specifically on combat design: Don't use blanket terrain that halves everyone's speed (which also means most can't shift). Combat thrives on mobility. And mix your monster types; just artillery or just brutes is fairly boring. Brutes and artillery so you want to lock down the brutes and melee the artillery; you're trying to move past one to get the other. That's instantly far more interesting than handling them all the same way.
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Dec 18, 2020 15:28
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dwarf74 posted:I would actually limit my list of good monster manuals to the Vaults and nothing else. MM3 and DSCS use fixed math but not fixed design philosophy. I suspect that this is a disagreement about where we set the bar. MV and MV:TttNV are probably the two best monster manuals in any edition of D&D and adjacent games ever (and I really wish they'd done more with the NV format even in 5e). The MM3 and DSCS aren't quite as good or as reliable - but getting there.
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Dec 18, 2020 21:22
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Whybird posted:Isn't the point of skill challenges that they're basically just a formalisation of How Things Work Normally? The big change is just that you decide in advance which kind of skill checks will and won't help (like, you can't use Acrobatics to impress the orc king into allying with you by juggling really well) and how many failures your players can have before they lose. To me the core point of skill challenges is that they're a formalization of How Things Work Normally that allows a new DM to have something ready to handle the mechanical part of off the wall PC plans for decent pacing and resolution.
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Mar 2, 2021 13:01
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Commander Keene posted:I think the Essentials books were written in response to all the 3.x grogs whining about how 4e was "too video game-y" because the classes themselves are as much of a backpedal as you can get within the 4e framework. They very much read like a 3.x class ported into 4e as literally as possible. Some of Essentials was good stuff. I maintain the Thief is an actual good class even if it's not pure 4e. And having classes designed for people who aren't so into tactics and just want to hit stuff or blast stuff without having to think too hard about tactics (Knight, Slayer, Scout, Elementalist) is a good thing because it lets more people play at the table. quote:And from what I understand, though I haven't played any, 5e was a major backpedal towards 3.x, though stuff like the advantage mechanics are new. There's actually as far as I can tell almost no 3.X in 5e at all except by way of 4e. What 5e has is similar design goals - which are to take the sheer mess that was 2e and put it onto a sane mechanical engine. The engine they used was the 4e one and there's a vast amount both of 4e fluff and of 4e mechanics buried in there. They just marketed against 4e and burned the warlord.
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Apr 30, 2021 03:43
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Khizan posted:The major backpedal from 4e was getting rid of the AEDU system for powers and dropping the non-caster classes back to having no real options for anything. Oh, definitely. It was the 4e engine and 4e fluff they took (the only thing I can think of that's actually 3.X is giving the sorcerer metamagic and spells known). That said the Tasha's subclasses are vastly better than even Xanathar's, never mind the PHB for giving martial characters agency. quote:And all that aside, when I level up my monk are pretty set in stone, which feels awful. ... There's less choice than 3.5, actually, because 3.5 had feats as a regular thing and 5e does not. Definitely agreed; this is one of the few actual RP (as opposed to mechanical simplification) ways 3.0 improved significantly on AD&D. Of course both 3.0 and 4e are worse than literally any system with XP but no levels this way. And 5e has gone back to 2e's approach.
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Apr 30, 2021 09:43
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Iunnrais posted:Anyone have good homebrew monster mechanics that are useful for incentivizing players to utilize more space in a large battlemap? I have these awesome huge maps, but my players tend to prefer spending their time in one small corner of them. 1: Use artillery monsters. When the monsters do a lot of damage at range and not a lot in melee smart players will mug the archers rather than fight them at range. 2: Set the ground on fire. They have to move then. 3: High ground with cover in the center of the map. Or other advantages. 4: Put the monsters by traps or by e.g. the edge of the dock or the open sewers. Invite the players to push them in. 5: Few monsters all with AoE attacks so the players want to spread out.
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Aug 23, 2021 01:01
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Verisimilidude posted:How do you all run skill challenges? Pure DM side tool for handling absurd PC plans. Three strikes and you're out and the skill challenge handles pacing and difficulty. The players might know they are in one but I never mention it - just using the skill challenge for DCs and a couple of tally charts.
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Mar 9, 2022 18:59
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 21:40 |
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On a random note from running my 4e retroclone earlier today Lurkers work amazingly with Popcorn Initiative.
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May 7, 2023 01:42
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