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Darwinism posted:Mearls just does not have that many ideas and isn't interested in the least in people that do. See: the 5E Hexblade having basically the exact same fluff as the 4E Hexblade from a book, shockingly enough, headed up by Mearls. Which in turn was recycled from the 3.5 Hexblade class, which IIRC Mearls liked enough to issue unofficial errata. D&D is basically creatively dead and Hasbro's keeping it alive to market the brand name.
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Dec 29, 2017 23:00
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Honestly shai'ir has been implemented as a wizard subclass and most of the song magic is just pulling off the wizard spell list. 3e bards are in a weird place where they don't do anything as well as the other classes and their buffs aren't super hot without massive investment. You can totally make a dope bard if you specialize in something, but the bard was always the "5th party member" which was usually code for "not good". Required a ton of dumpster diving to be brought up to par.
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Jan 4, 2018 21:17
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SunAndSpring posted:I might be playing this accursed game soon, so what's a good build for a Warlock? It seems weak compared to the Wizard. I have seen a few multiclass wizard/warlock builds where you use the warlock's spell slots to raise legions of skeletons. No idea what it does before then though.
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Jan 5, 2018 21:22
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Toplowtech posted:I still don't know why it isn't the default rule yet at least for the first two asi or feat levels. This goes back to Mearls promising to make a simple fighter for the grognards that would be balanced against the book of nine swords/4e fighters. If this sounds like a pipe dream to you you're not alone.
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Jan 16, 2018 01:19
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The thing is you can totally release errata and not have it be the 4e style minor bullshit changes (like the turn undead die) but keep it to the stuff that actually needed changes (everything about the orb of imposition wizard). The problem is that the design philosophy of 5e is to charge you $150 for a vague outline of the game and the DM is supposed to fill in the many, many holes in the system. Using only core 5e, can you explain how to forge a document? Do I need the charlatan background or the forgers kit? I don't know, and you don't either - not because we're stupid, but because the rules for forgery are incoherent and contradictory and require someone to step in and clean them up. Unfortunately Mearls has your $150 and he's not giving it back, not ever.
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Feb 20, 2018 17:08
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At this point I'm wondering if I shouldn't just shell out money for Shadow of the Demon Lord.
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Feb 20, 2018 18:10
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MonsieurChoc posted:Against my better judgment I'm going to play in an Adventurer's League game of DnD5. I wanna play a Warlock. ANy fun to play builds out there? Hexblade. I ran a variant human with polearm master but you need to use a quarterstaff for three levels. You can also just use hexblade's curse/hex/eldritch blast to stack a bunch of ranged damage on a target and maybe bring them down before you start getting bored. Unfortunately low level 5e is incredibly boring as you smash bags of hit points into each other for low damage, so it really doesn't matter what you run because combat is going to be a boring slog.
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Feb 20, 2018 18:50
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Philthy posted:Do you really need rules for this if you're not explicitly playing AL? I mean, the current skills cover pretty much everything. Just do a deception check. Done. People are going to argue over it? Punch them in the mouf. The only people wanting everything spelled out for them should be AL. Outside of that the rules were meant to be used or tossed at will. The current skills do literally nothing except give me a basis for arguing with the DM because I have "big numbers". If I have a +5 on Deception/Forgers Tools/whatever, is that high enough for a con man? If I want to forge an official document or letter of credit, is that something my character can expect to do or plan around? If the answer is just "argue with the DM" why the gently caress is this a rule that takes up page space if we're just gonna ignore it anyway? We could have had more battlemaster maneuvers instead. To Mendrian's post - you can at least hammer out damage numbers and whatnot. Stuff like the 4e expertise feats really shouldn't be needed in the product I paid 90 dollars for, and if the vast playerbase is hammering out broken crap with your playtest materials you should fix it. When people point out 3.5 evocations are subpar in the pathfinder forum (by providing actual math) you don't go into bizarro land, you fix it. Yes, people hated 4th editions errata, but the vast majority of 4th edition's errata was meaningless garbage like nerfing the turn undead die while releasing new splats for the orb of imposition wizard and leaving the star pact warlock as a dual attribute attack class. I don't think anyone actually minded the idea of errataing away the super broken stuff, but most of 4e errata was pointless nerfs to minor things that kept changing every month and that's just not acceptable. Looking at the 4e PHB errata there are seriously 27 pages of errata and that's just nuts.
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Feb 21, 2018 06:54
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bewilderment posted:More specifically, pick Lore and steal spells from Ranger and Paladin because their 3rd and 5th level spells aren't balanced around them getting them earlier than 15th level. Or just grab animate dead and spam skeleton archers on everyone. You don't get the necromancer damage bonus, but with enough skeletons you don't really care.
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Mar 3, 2018 08:27
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Man, I'm kinda finding it hilarious that you guys are using 4e as a game where fighters got narrative powers. Literally nobody got useful narrative abilities when I stopped playing 4e, the game where you can't even smash an object without arguing with the DM. The game was so terrified of giving players any kind of noncombat ability that familars got special rules where they couldn't interact with anything and fighter "utility" powers were just various forms of buffs (as opposed to hacking through walls or performing awesome feats of strength). Anyway, onto fighter chat, we're never gotta get a cool fighter because D&D has always been incoherent and is held together by nostalgia and identifying as a D&D player rather than actually analyzing the rules. So let's do that. Fighter was never meant to be a bigboy class: A few years back I got to play 1e for a session with E Gary Gygax. If you've ever played 1e, what immediately jumps out is that the paladin and the ranger can do everything a fighter can, but better and the drawback was that you had to roll better stats. Thieves were pretty much useless. Yea, they attempted to fix this with weapon specialization and whatnot, but at the end of the day the fighter didn't do much besides autoattack and the wizard had a whole pile of weird poo poo they could do. They got castles and followers and cool stuff, but I've never seen anyone actually implement this in a D&D game. High levels didn't exist: As much as some posters here enjoy discussing the ultimate power of the 3.5 wizard, he's really not that great at low levels. I asked Gygax what high level fighters had originally been intended to do - and got the answer that people really didn't play at high levels. People end up not playing high level D&D because it becomes stupid -> game designers decide not to care about it -> repeat indefinitely. Sure, the 3.5 low level mage can do a bunch of stuff indefinitely, but for social interaction or sneaking you're going to bring a rogue, because Diplomacy is better than every mind control spell in the game (short of maybe Mind Rape). This isn't to say that 3.5 spellcasters don't become loving bonkers nuts after about level 5-7 (depending on class), but an invisibility spell at 3rd level is a web you're not preparing, and you sure as poo poo aren't taking scorching ray because the fighter in the party can probably deal more damage than that while spending no resources whatsoever. The reason we can't go Augean stables on fools at high level is because high level was not very well thought out, and I'd bet dollars to donuts all the high level crazy wizard poo poo was intended to be NPC-only. Really, the bigger problem with fighter is that no one - even in this thread - can articulate what the hell they are supposed to do out of combat, and so when people post lists of poo poo like "take half damage" or "save or dies" that doesn't fix poo poo. You could build fighters who exploded higher level opponents in one round in 3.X. It's not hard or interesting, you stack all the charge damage multipliers, or Robilar's Gambit/AoOs, or go more controllery and start spamming trips. Sure, you can kill things - even better than most wizards - but you're still just kinda sitting out the noncombat encounters waiting for somebody to cast teleport. Really, killing the rogue class, folding it into the fighter, and giving the result level appropriate abilities like feats of strength or guile that really could just be refluffed spells (Odysseus sneaks so good we just say he invisible!) would go a long way toward fixing all of this.
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Mar 24, 2018 20:20
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mango sentinel posted:Nobody said 4e fighters got narrative shaping power. They're saying everyone was on the same playing field because no one did. Fair, but that's still terrible.
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Mar 24, 2018 20:41
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AlphaDog posted:Could you not end that argument by reading pages 65 and 66 of the DMG and following the rules you found there? Certainly, once we figure out how that interacts with page 2 of the PHB errata where you get to argue whether or not your powers can target objects at all.
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Mar 24, 2018 20:58
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That's...not what I meant to say. What I'm saying is that while we all might have a vision of what we want the fighter to look like (actually competent with a dope bag of tricks out of combat) the actual vision that has been passed down by the incestuous group of D&D designers is a vague clusterfuck of being boring and lovely, and to actually get past somebody needs to throw away all the old stuff and figure out what this drat class is supposed to do. Is he supposed to be a lord who can call on political connections and military force to get things done? Is he a hero of legend who can smite mountains and bring them down? Is he for some reason a random genericman who is adventuring with literal god(plz no)? No two people seem to have the same vision of this guy, because "a guy who fights" literally describes every class in the game. The fact that nobody actually can come up with a common viable alternative for this class is why we get Buhlman and Mearls throwing together a boring and inadequate pile of numbers, and charging you 50 bucks while they inflate the dragons' stats.
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Mar 24, 2018 21:36
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Guy A. Person posted:This is fair and I was probably being overly snarky, so sorry about that. Yeah, I think we're on the same page and I didn't elucidate very well. The Gygax stuff I just thought would be interesting in the vein of "I asked one of the guys who invented the game with this stuff in it, and even he didn't have an answer" rather than one true wayism. So yeah, chalk me up as yet another sad person who just wants Sir Lancelot to actually be good.
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Mar 24, 2018 22:10
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Most of the wizard stuff really only applied to lower level wizards though. As you got to higher levels you got stuff like stoneskin and mirror image that just let you ignore attacks. Really, splitting wizard and cleric up into pyromancer/necromancer/illusionist/etc wouldn't be a bad idea either.
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Mar 25, 2018 23:29
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I really wish there were more options for spectre-summoning necromancers that DIDN'T explode the game by letting you get an army of self-replicating shadows.
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Apr 3, 2018 01:06
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Use magic jar on a lycanthrope for sweet weapon immunity. If you are a 6th level necromancer, the undead legions start coming online.
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Apr 10, 2018 01:36
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Really the underlying problem is that D&D designers have the same philosophy as Bethesda designers and expect you to pay them $50 for a product you need to fix.
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Apr 16, 2018 00:06
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Why does Conan have psionics? I don't remember him doing any of that poo poo in the stories...
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Apr 16, 2018 07:22
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Well here are my unpopular crack theories, laugh at them if you want. -Just burn ability scores. Seriously. People of the same class tend to all look the same ability score wise anyway, so what the hell is the point of having them any more? Ability damage? That is tedious and it sucks. If you want your dude to be strong or smart or whatever, maybe that's a keyword from your background that does stuff? Not sure on this yet. -Split the casters, you don't get to be a wizard who does everything anymore. You can have a class called wizard who does evocation and some divination, sure, but having the thing where you can take animate dead and have an entire army that doesn't conflict with your black tentacles slots. I think even Gary Gygax was planning to do this before TSR got 2e, so this isn't even that hard to justify to grogs. Noe that this lets you have pet classes that are balanced around having their pets out, so the necromancer's life drain does less damage when he has his big undead out. -Every class gets combat powers and then everyone gets a piece of cool narrative poo poo. Not every class can do all the cool narrative poo poo, so if you are a Lord who can do politics things you get a benefit from working with an Assassin who does criminal things. If a druid joins your team you guys can add shapeshifting things to your stack of fun, necromancers can perform divinations by asking dead people, psions can read minds, warriors can smash temples and walls, etc. These scale with your level so high level warriors are smashing mountains and shapeshifters can become rocs or something that carry the entire party. You will probably have to put in some work to prevent Cartman from having his power be that he has all the powers, but it's doable. -After a certain point people get followers and temples and stuff, so you can have a kingdom management and politics minigame. It's something people are always trying to hack into D&D, and it provides a convenient outlet for people who want to have armies, undead legions, demon hordes, or acolytes. They go into the crap pile of guys you can pull out when the kingdom declares war and for everyday adventuring you have your 1 undead hydra or doomguard or whatever. -Multiclassing can go gently caress right off. If you want to play a warrior-wizard people are constantly making that as a hybrid class, so just release one of those in the core book and you kill 55% of multiclass scenarios right there. Include the 4e thing where you just grab a few powers off other people's lists so your warrior can learn a few spells to troll people, and we're gold. -On that note, no passive abilities that boost each other. +20% fire damage is boring and also bad for the game, because it either pushes your character or takes up a customization slot to make you stay level appropriate. Character customization consists pretty much just of class power selection, and once you get a power it just scales with your level. I have some more ideas but I've rambled enough.
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Apr 17, 2018 02:30
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Another thing you can do with your skeleton army: Find a lycanthrope Order your skeletons to grapple it Use magic jar on it You are now immune to nonmagic, nonsilver weapons, go nuts.
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Apr 21, 2018 06:18
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Wagner leitmotifs work hella good for various events.
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Apr 23, 2018 01:40
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OutsideAngel posted:Isn't like 90% of the fun of giving players magic items in seeing what crazy dumb poo poo they'll come up with? 95%, sir!
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Jun 17, 2018 18:53
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That sounds homebrewed.
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Jun 18, 2018 00:22
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Trasson posted:So one of my friends has had a terrible (like his father dying kind of terrible) few weeks and wants me to join in his 5e game. He's running Hoard of the Dragon Queen and is a bit of the way in (this is all day session 2 coming up; I declined to join in the first because I feel about 4e the way diehard SSBM players feel about later Smash games) Warlock is literally the "we like 4e class" in that you get at-wills, encounters (short rest thanks to grogs, but still) and your mystic arcanum dailies. Also the fluff is unchanged from 4e.
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Jun 24, 2018 15:40
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You kinda want to give enemies attacks that seem like something the players could get, which is why all the mage enemies have player spells and not weird-rear end custom attacks. DMing 5e has just convinced me to make my own monsters, because the MM is a busted piece of <expletive>.
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Jul 14, 2018 17:28
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King of Solomon posted:Why stop there? You could go so far as to let the players choose their play order, too. You could, in other words...remove initiative from the equation entirely. But how are we going to reward the people who rolled high dexterity? 
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Jul 15, 2018 04:30
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I feel like the real problem is that FR is the boringest setting they could have picked, and a non-significant portion of that is due to Ed Greenwood's self-insert Wizard Penis.
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Sep 10, 2018 07:10
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ProfessorCirno posted:5e is fun for most players for the same reason 3e was fun for most players, and it's because games stop using rules the longer they go on. The argument of "5e is bad because the rules are bad" is a correct one, and also a flawed one, because the rules being bad doesn't matter for most groups. Games that go on long enough become to straight up freeform roleplaying. I'm gonna cut you off here and counter with the fact that rules for anything not named combat have never, ever been good. 3e's diplomacy rules are famously nonsensical so people just freeformed that poo poo. Hell, look at 4e's skill challenges. The entire point of that system was to provide people with something engaging to do out of combat, but Mearls and co hosed it up so bad it had to be errated 50x and no one knows how it works. People would actually use the social rules if you gave them something engaging to do with them but no RPG designer is willing to do this. This is probably a direct result of the RPG design field needing actual math skills but being a niche market that can't actually afford to hire people competent at anything.
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Sep 23, 2018 21:27
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I feel compelled to point out that while Zak S and the RPGPundit are terrible people, they are also terrible game designers. Do I need to link the Zak S rule challenge?
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Sep 24, 2018 04:44
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lightrook posted:If I asked for a quick gist, how much would I regret it? So on another forum I frequent Zak S followed the google alert about himself (someone reposted his blog entry) and made the claim that he was SO GOOD at rules and his houserules worked that he would accept anybody's challenge to make a rule. The Challenge posted:Some people around here want a "Social Currency" system. A way of representing and recording gratitude, fear, and honorable debts. "Zak's answer posted:Assign a given transaction a bonus and an "expiration", like "This is worth +something on your next charisma rolls for a month. How's that sound, player?" The forum ripped him a new rear end in a top hat for failing to meet some of the requirements (such as heralds) and making a rule that required as much adjudication as having no rule at all. Zak flipped his poo poo, invented ex post facto rulings, and basically screamed obscenities at everyone. The end results were: -no one on the form uses the words "Zak S" but just calls him "shitmuffin" -someone made a Hitler Downfall meme about the incident, which I'm not sure I'm allowed to link by forum rules. TheGreatEvilKing fucked around with this message at 07:15 on Sep 24, 2018 |
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Sep 24, 2018 07:11
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Sion posted:yeah it's a real strong spell for the slot even the designers have said its maybe a bit overpowered because it's fireball of course it has to be op I assume this is a joke, right? I know Mearls is on record as saying this, but Hypnotic Pattern and Fear exist. I also have no idea why you guys are going as far as Tomb as Annihilation when the PHB says the white elves are smarter than the black elves - I mean, come on! Should tell you all you need to know right there.
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Sep 25, 2018 02:45
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Bards were in that weird place where they sucked at everything in 3.5, and it was not helped by the official WotC position being that they were the fifth party member that did everything poorly but maybe you cared? You could totally make a useful bard, but it required a lot of splats or dumpster diving to match a specialist in any given area (or get bardsong to crazy levels). Yea, you were better than a fighter, but that wasn't really a high bar to clear.
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Sep 27, 2018 14:45
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lightrook posted:TL, DR: Punish not the class for the sins of the player. Eh? A flask rogue or spiked chain fighter is more useful than a guy running around with low spell DCs on low level enchantments. Sure, you can turtle with mirror image and whatnot, Alter self is cute but not particularly good without splatbook access. Now you have the problem that martials suck in core without copious amounts of multiclassing, sure, and classes like monk are particularly worthless, but I'd take a spiked chain tripper or spirited charge lancer over a bard any day.
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Sep 28, 2018 05:13
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Splicer posted:There are two kinds of people who've played D&D 3.x, those who think HP is a meaningful component of the game, and those who actually paid attention. If you can do enough DPS to one-round enemies that is a hell of a lot better than playing the immunity/save guessing game, and that's usually the goal of most martials in 3.X. There's a reason the most powerful wizard builds metamagicked orb spells to death.
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Sep 29, 2018 01:09
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Changing the subject, has anyone been following the ranger controversy where Jeremy Crawford declared the ranger beastmaster was totally fine as is?
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Oct 20, 2018 03:07
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Reddit (I know, I know). https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/9p0je8/dd_one_of_the_lead_designers_of_the_game/ As the design philosophy of 5e is Mearls and Crawford basically admitting they can't write rules and fobbing it off on the consumer for the low low price of $150, I'm not really sure why people were expecting a fix.
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Oct 20, 2018 03:33
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I don't know why the Champion needs to exist. It's the same autoattack fighter that has literally never worked in any edition of D&D, it's boring to play, and it's obviously the noob trap fighter for people who think that tracking superiority dice is too hard or something. It seems to be a callback to those early articles about opt-in complexity that never materialized because it's difficult and rulings not rules. There is no good way to balance bigger numbers against abilities really, either your numbers are big enough that the abilities are garbage or having the abilities makes you better enough that numbers are a suckers game.
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Oct 20, 2018 15:42
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theironjef posted:Plus all that stuff you're saying here about 3.5 charop was never intended by the designers. I mean, 3.x is still an era where the designers thought strength was the most heavily weighted stat so the half-orc had to take two penalty stats to get it. Players learning to cobble together little jenga towers of magazine feats to stay competitive was just hobos figuring out how to make mulligan stew. This cannot be overstated. Go read the class advice in Complete Mage, a book released near the end of 3.5, and compare it to the actual characters of people who knew what they were doing. It's a common thing in D&D design for the designers to be far behind the internet in actually understanding the game. Look at the beginning/leadup to 4e, where Mearls and co were insisting that AoE damage was control and the entire internet community was rolling its eyes because the designers had no idea what they were talking about. This is why Mearls can write articles about how grease winning fights is some kind of big insight while the rest of us just kinda cringe and hope someone buys the IP.
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Oct 21, 2018 04:57
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Kaysette posted:No magic resistance for the warlock: I don't know why they keep doing the NPCs>you thing so drat much. Now, having a rule buried in the Monster Manual is stupid (but works for the 2e nostalgia they're desperately trying to capture) but "ha ha actually that rule applies to NPCs only" is just really infuriating.
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Oct 21, 2018 16:26
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