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TheLovablePlutonis posted:And the Lord knows how I tried to derail that poo poo away from xbone loving sucks-thread like stuff. Oh he knows. I just got the book and it looks very polished and more fun then the early playtest stuff I got, which really turned me off to the edition. I'm wondering though, what's stopping fights from being big HP sponge encounters? Damage looks lower than 3E and 4E, but HP are basically the same as 3E.
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Aug 31, 2014 16:37
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Gort posted:Don't worry, it's been through the same maths wringer as everything else.
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Aug 31, 2014 16:54
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I hope 6E ends up getting rid of Fighters and Rogues, and mashes them into the one true non-magic class. Maybe we could hear less about THE CASTORS if the guy who doesn't use any supernatural abilities is the explicit exception to the rest of the heroic characters. The 3.5E Warblade should be the one true martial character, anyway.
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Sep 4, 2014 00:27
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Everyone is making GBS threads their pants over Valor Bards, but I think there is something to be said for Lore Bards to lock down the enemy instead of doing Valor's higher weapon DPR. At 6th level, they can swipe Counterspell from the Wizard list, and start countering magic like a boss. Jack of All Trades makes them especially good at it, almost as good as an Abjuration specialist Wizard (and at a lower level). Cutting Words also lets you "counter" non-magical attacks as a reaction. On the fights that matter, the party usually has more actions than the enemies, so making them whiff usually means your whole party gets a round of attacks instead of just the Bard getting one extra crossbow shot in. Stacking feats instead of ability increases looks like a trap to me. A human with Crossbow Expertise and Sharpshooter has given up 3 points in their primary attribute versus a demihuman with a favorable ability bonus, on top of possible racial abilities. And dual-wielding screws up spellcasters pretty hard unless you take even more feats to cast with both hands full (let alone needing material components or focuses).
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Sep 4, 2014 18:44
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Solid Jake posted:Wait, you don't even get all your Hit Dice back on a Long Rest? You also heal to full on a long rest. I'm sure the grogs are frothing at the mouth over healing more than 2 HP for free. I can't figure out why they made short rests an hour. If I didn't know that a bunch of abilities recharge after a short rest, I don't know what the situation is that I would have my character take such a long break in an obviously dangerous agitation like dungeon-crawling.
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Sep 8, 2014 15:40
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Daetrin posted:If only there was some way to meter what abilities could be used at will, which ones per encounter, and which ones per adventuring day... I guess I'm having trouble what everyone's actually doing during a short rest. Do you pull out a deck of cards and play poker in a clearing before getting back on the road? Obsessively sharpen your sword and fix armor straps for a loving hour? Eat a three-course meal of trail rations, river water, and goodberries? Read in awkward silence? Where there's time pressure, I understand the need of the game system to be able to say "right now you can't rest", and "this option can't be used in combat-time", but it's a pretty jarring gap between dynamic action hero PCs slaying the monster in an epic, grueling, 38-second battle, and then spending 10 minutes for a minor magical effect to save your scarce spell slots out of mechanical necessity, or spending an hour telling scary stories after spending 9 seconds killing 3 kobolds, so you can be ready for the next combat. The ritual tag is already limited to spells that don't have much combat value anyway, would it be so horrible if they took 1 minute to cast instead of 10? Short rests can already be interrupted by an enemies showing up, do they have to prevent you from walking around and doing other non-dangerous adventuring necessities like searching for clues?
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Sep 8, 2014 19:13
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Why won't the argument about the Fighter just die? It's a lovely class with a kind of boring niche, but some nice abilities if you multiclass dip a few levels. Multiclassing is much improved in 5E, where martials don't sacrifice attack bonus, and casters don't sacrifice spell save DCs for doing it. Barbarians, Rogues, Rangers, and Paladins don't get full spell access, either, but seem to have plenty of utility and prospects in combat (Rangers look the worst of the bunch). Rogues especially could be damage powerhouses. Sneak attack outpaces the single-target damage anyone else is going to get, at least with the material we've seen. It's also arguable (I would argue it anyway), that Reliable Talent works on attack rolls. With +4 proficiency at level 11, and 20 Dex, you're hitting an 19 AC automatically. You're probably automatically passing any save you're proficient in. You're getting 23 as a minimum roll on Hide rolls (assuming you have Expertise in it), which you can make as a bonus action on your turn. A halfling can even hide behind other creatures when there isn't convenient terrain. Throwing out all below-average rolls is a huge, huge advantage in a system with a d20 + usually single-digit modifiers.
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Sep 12, 2014 20:47
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moths posted:Because in better games fighters are neither of these things. Fighters (just in concept, regardless of how it's realized in 5E)... fight? Apparently they don't use magic to fight, and they don't use their wits to fight, and they don't help other people fight better, they just strap on heavy armor and pick up weapons and kill people good? The concept of "best at fighting" is completely bankrupt in a game where the most important activity is fighting. Either you're the best, and the rest of the party are just cheerleaders, or you're not the best, and your character is unsatisfying.
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Sep 12, 2014 21:56
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moths posted:Fighters control the enemies, direct the battle, and guard vulnerable party members or key environmental elements. Fighters tank. How does Kyle, the hypothetical tanky character accomplish these things narratively? Brute strength? Weapon mastery (aka martial arts)? Intimidation? Magic? Tactical genius? Self-sacrifice (aka jumping in front of attacks)? Most of those concepts are already another class's niche. Not all of those classes have mechanics to make them especially good as a tank, but again, I'm talking about concept, not mechanics. I'm NOT saying that martial characters shouldn't be able to do crazy stunts that rival Meteor Swarm because only the sacred Wizard can do magic. I'm saying that Fighters are uniquely flavorless, and as soon as you give Kyle the tanky character any kind of flavor, he's probably going to sound more like a Rogue, or Barbarian, or Paladin, or Bard, or 4E Warlord, rather than a milquetoast Fighter.
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Sep 12, 2014 23:12
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ProfessorCirno posted:The problem is that there's only immunities to BPS, never bonuses. Fighters are never rewarded. They're only "not punished."
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Sep 16, 2014 00:12
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Tactical Bonnet posted:I was assuming that the wizard isn't a total fucko and used the spell to make the person who sneaks better at sneaking.
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Sep 18, 2014 04:58
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P.d0t posted:See, therein lies the problem. Some people want to play fighters that don't suck, so 3.x and 5e don't cater to them. But hey, you don't care, so you can just ignore the problem, thus making those games better than 4e.
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Sep 23, 2014 17:50
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Cerepol posted:Well mostly because you can give a Fighter the same ability in that scenario.
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Sep 23, 2014 19:31
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Seriouspost: if I wanted to play a game that was like a videogame, I'd play a videogame. I haven't played WoW for years, but when I did, I had fun. I enjoyed the mechanics. I'm not judging videogames as worse than TTRPGs. TTRPGs are unique because of the fact that your choices aren't limited to what Blizzard (or your DM) built for you. 4E added the fun of videogames to my D&D, but it also removed the fun of being the exception to the rules. And if you're grogging over Wizard Supremacy, Storm of Vengeance wasn't even a Wizard spell. The time I needed it, I was playing a Ranger, and I went questing for an Orb of Storms (which is a magic item that anyone can use) that lets you control the weather and summon a Storm of Vengeance once a week. We wiped out the army, and still had to fight the big bad general in a setpiece battle.
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Sep 23, 2014 20:05
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You mean every party member can't focus like a laser on only what he wants to do? The fighter can't round up every monster by using clicking his class ability on and keep them attacking him (where his stats mean they won't kill him) and the casters might have to fight some enemies themselves? This is a travesty! The fighter can and does have abilities that make it easier to keep enemies engaged with him instead of the rest of the party, when he wants to be stickier. Other classes have abilities that can keep them out of trouble (hiding or the like), or control the battlefield (grease/entangle) to keep enemies away from them. It's not foolproof. But if the tank tangles up 2-3 orcs with a combination of body-blocking, AoO, Sentinel, and actually using offense, while each other party member only has to face 1, he's done his job.
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Sep 26, 2014 21:54
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Transient People posted:Correct. This is because of math scaling. It's actually kind of very lovely that monsters that are fair challenges at low levels remain competitive at high ones because it means you can actually never pull off what Aragorn or Boromir or Gimli or Legolas do in Lord of the Rings, but that's just my opinion. I like it when characters truly begin to take on a mythical tone and being zerged almost literally by twenty rust monsters means that's almost impossible. For 3, say, 12th level characters, fighting 20 orcs would still be an interesting combat in 5E. Even with a Fireball tagging 4-5 of them per cast, some will make their saves and probably live, and even with a caster having very effective AoE spells prepared, some of them are still going to survive long enough to make it an contest. The orcs are at a slight disadvantage in hitting the characters whose ACs are likely in the 19-20 range, but they will connect and do damage.
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Oct 15, 2014 18:37
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Transient People posted:Notice how you have a Big Wizard Man babying the poor stupid martials to make that fight interesting and not a total TPK. That, right there, is the problem. Try running an all martial party and come back to me with the results, we'll if a 20 dude fight is interesting instead of lethal then. I didn't do the encounter budget math, maybe 14 is the right loving number, I don't know. Each martial can probably kill about 2 orcs every round, and every third orc hits for 9 damage. That's about 50 damage the first round, divided among the martials, 35 the second round, 20 the third, and less than 10 the fourth. It's enough to have seriously worn down each party member, probably not knock any of them out. Whatever the results are, there is some reasonable number of orcs that is an appropriate challenge for high level characters.
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Oct 15, 2014 19:10
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Kitchner posted:Or you could just have the group decide when points get given out full stop with the DM only stepping in if they are like "Oh wow, now we have 10 inspiration points each"
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Jan 26, 2015 23:01
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30.5 Days posted:Except that "bad things happening" isn't actually a bad thing because you don't "win" RPGs. Bad things happening is actually a really good thing because obstacles contextualize your play. So like if you seduce the princess in the royal court, you get put in the dungeon and the king offers you the option to be freed if you undertake some wetwork for him. Now you've added depth to the kingdom and also more play time is spent completing what you were doing originally without lovely stretching, so it feels better when you finish it. If you spare a dangerous prisoner's life and he comes back to haunt the players, every time he comes after the players or is revealed to be Behind The Plot, you're calling back to things that happened previously. Should the antisocial player get the benefit when he decides to introduce a complication for everyone else? Sure, setbacks make a richer story, but the inspiration benefit is meant to offset the extra difficulty of the setback, not to reward to character extra for hamming it up during spotlight time.
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Jan 27, 2015 00:54
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These rear end in a top hat, inflexible characters aren't the goal, but they do happen even when there's no inspiration-type mechanic. I'm not the only one who's seen game sessions go bad because if those shenanigans. You're pushing the envelope towards non-cooperative play if you reward people for causing trouble and letting the other characters bail them out. Ideally you don't have assholes, but if you do, at least give the other players that inspiration bonus to offset it.
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Jan 27, 2015 01:56
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Omnicrom posted:I got asked whether I thought Fighter or Rogue was more powerful. That was a sad thing to consider.
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Jan 28, 2015 16:59
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You could let the players invest their money, and give them extra background perks as a reward? That seems pretty mechanically innocuous, but useful and fun.
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Jan 30, 2015 18:42
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Just get some harpoons. Anybody who runs from your army of war elephants gets harpooned in the rear end, then you don't need horses to chase them. This plan is getting into pretty much guaranteed "conquer the world" territory now. edit: ^^^ I wonder if you could convert skeletons into harpoons and shoot your shock troops out of a ballista.
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Feb 1, 2015 17:14
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AlphaDog posted:Putting aside that I said I don't want to use magic, please explain to me how a wizard does what I described better. Why don't you want to use magic? 2/3 of the classes in 5E use magic, and of the other 4 classes, 3 of them also get magic incidentally in some paths. It's a game where you have to go out of your way to not have magic. Is your character being mechanically unable to do a common (for adventurers) thing that important? Lore Bards have the mechanical abilities to do those things. They also have magic on top of those abilities. Multiclass after level 5 or 6 if you want, you have most of the leadership abilities by then anyway.
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Feb 4, 2015 01:31
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Not saying that 5E is an improvement over 4E in the area of healing, but "healer" as a combat role is pretty uniquely a sacred cow when it comes to D&D. It's not really there in fantasy or superhero fiction. Healing after a fight using magic and/or skills is definitely a part of a lot of stories, but not during a fight. If the game is tuned to not have healing during combat as an expected move, it does reduce combat length, just by making sure the combats have less rounds. I think it would be an improvement if healer wasn't considered a combat-pillar role, and was considered an exploration-pillar role. Making your limited resources (in this case, HP) go further over the course of an adventure is usually an exploration-type challenge, at least. Going into a fight at less than full HP is a pretty serious disadvantage, pretty comparable to being ambushed or triggering a trap that starts combat. It's a poo poo-ton easier to balance who gets healing powers and how effective they are when it's not part of the combat action economy, and it makes having not enough/too many healers less of an issue when the party will have an advantage on other exploration-pillar challenges, and preserve their resources more effectively that way.
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Feb 4, 2015 20:20
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thespaceinvader posted:Healer is a stupid role. Which is why 4e *DIDN'T HAVE IT*. It had leader, whose role was 'buff, enable, debuff defences with your standard actions, also heal with your minor actions' And I'd question the implied assertion that healing in fights doesn't happen - no, it doesn't, if your hit points are meat. It does, if your hit points are valour, courage, luck, etc etc etc - good writing is FULL of fights where Good Guy whales on Bad Guy, then Bad Guy whales back, putting Good Guy on his back, then the power of love/heart/friendship/money/pissiness causes Good Guy to rally, come back to his senses, and impale Bad Guy on a steam pipe or whatever. That's what healing in fights does - it lets you have a fight go against you, and turn in your favour. It makes the fight more cinematic, rather than just being 'do Good Guys run out of HP before Bad Guys y/n'? That's a little bit disingenuous. Leaders all have a healing power. Strikers all have a damage boosting power. Defenders all have a marking power. Even if leaders aren't just healing (and healing is a minor action to keep things snappy), that was their role-defining ability. If you're going to the trouble of talking about green bars, you have abstractions like AC and DR and healing, and resistance and advantage/disadvantage, and save-or-suck statuses to keep your green bars going longer. The HP abstraction is no more representative of the green bar than the rest of those things. But green bars are a combat mechanic - they only really matter if they reach 0 before the red bars reach 0. HP is the only one of those things managed as a resource once an encounter is over. It makes sense to manage refilling it next to other out-of-combat resources, and treat being unable to replenish it as an unusual complication, like running out of arrows. Mainly because it's usually not fun to keep charging into danger when you know you aren't prepared for it.
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Feb 4, 2015 20:53
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A feat would make a basic Warlord happen much more easily than an entire class. Tactical Warlord (feat) If you already have Bardic Inspiration dice, you get one more. If you don't already have Bardic Inspiration dice, you get one, which refreshes after a long rest. When an ally spends your Bardic Inspiration die, he can also spend a number of hit dice up to half of his level and regain hit points accordingly. If you have no remaining Bardic Inspiration dice, you can use an action to award one to an ally per the normal Bardic Inspiration rules. If you do, you can also take your normal action, except this action can't be used to Attack, Cast a Spell, or Use a Magic Item.
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Feb 4, 2015 23:35
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gradenko_2000 posted:I've been in a couple of discussions where I suggest a houserule to make crits 1 damage die at max value + 1 rolled damage die + flat modifiers, and people would say that that'd make crits by monsters way too powerful, and then when I would suggest that monsters can either still use 2 rolled damage dice + flat modifiers, or just doubled average damage, there were some that reacted as if it were inconceivable.
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Feb 7, 2015 06:00
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30.5 Days posted:Yeah I mean doing grapples as a bonus action and then having other stuff to spend actions on while grappled so you can move, grapple, break his ankle to slow him, disengage and finish move to next guy would actually be super awesome. Coopting the concentration mechanics and certain spell effects seems promising (if we're pretending to follow the 5E design philosophy that most of you mock). How about instead of this arcane "establish grapple, they try to escape, in future rounds, try and do more..." stuff, just make an attack roll, consume some resource (so you can't just do it at will), and then hit the guy with Restrained plus a spell effect. Silence, Hold Person, Blindness/Deafness, Ray of Sickness, Sleep, Slow, Confusion, etc. The effects that don't require concentration have their normal durations, the ones that do require concentration can break if the grappler loses his concentration, or if the target moves away (by breaking the grapple). Other than the conditions inflicted by the "spell", the grappler and grappled creatures can both take normal actions on each other and everyone else - if the grappled character doesn't care that you're holding on, then he can ignore you, and just because Buff McLargehuge is choking out his human shield, it doesn't mean he can't keep fighting everyone else. It doesn't even have to be size-based. A halfling could climb on a dragon's head and gouge it in the eyes (blindness) or kick a giant in the crotch (ray of sickness) or hop on an ogre's back and choke it out (sleep) without first physically overpowering it. Throw in a rule that if you grapple a creature bigger than you are, you're restrained instead of the target, and you automatically move if it does.
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Feb 17, 2015 22:59
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AlphaDog posted:Leave the grappling rules where they are. 1. Further complicating grapples with a extra conditions divorced from the sort-of keyword mechanics that already exist (the spell mechanics) makes it that much harder to remember the grapple rules, which are already unwieldy. Keep it simple - you say I'm grappling to inflict blindness. You make your attack roll, and if successful, blindness effect happens immediately, without having to make any more notes about the grapple. And you're already trading your action for something other than damage, don't put too many hoops in the way to get that alternate effect, which is supposed to be balanced against damage already (when a Wizard does it). 2. Those options make sense from the standpoint of a human wrestling with another human. A lot of enemies you fight aren't humanoid - a chokehold on a tree creature or a joint crack on a giant snake is overly specific. And if you're grappling with a 30-foot anaconda, you probably aren't holding it down and dominating it like you would a skinny elf. If you just want to brutalize someone with your martial prowess, attack him for damage. If the enemy is dangerous enough that you want to use status effects, then give some genuine and diverse status effects. 3. Obviously knocking an enemy unconscious is the objectively most powerful choice, so who's ever going to do anything else? Using spells as a template gives you the option of (A) linking the concentration mechanic to it, so a more decisive effect like paralysis can be ended, and allies can pitch in to end it early, and (B) having built-in level gating without reinventing the wheel.
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Feb 18, 2015 01:07
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mastershakeman posted:I still think the problem with grappling turns into 'what if the gnoll/minotaur/whatever grapples you instead.' You're not going to win many strength contests vs the traditional melee opponents of d&d, because every one of them relies on absurdly high strength. So unless you just say well, monsters don't know how to tackle you (yet they somehow know how to swing weapons?) I'm not sure how you get around screwing the party over. On top of that, the scary monster probably isn't going to outnumber the party, unless the party is powerful enough that an individual gnoll isn't actually that scary. Getting you in a "hold person" lock so his friends can stab you twice as hard isn't very useful if he doesn't have any friends to do that with. And gouging the eyes of one PC isn't that helpful when a few more are still wailing on him.
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Feb 18, 2015 02:03
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PurpleXVI posted:It'd also avoid the issue that grappling isn't always an option(though with creativity it often would be), and having an entire archetype based around it could screw you a bit sometimes. It'd let the grappler fall back on more generic fighter/barbarian/whatever options if the party's up against a fire elemental or something else where giving it a hug without the appropriate protections would basically be retiring your character. Thinking of grappling as general "dirty fighting" with eye gouges, sand in the face, kicking up dust clouds, debilitating strikes, etc., really opens up the space for all characters. And to be fair, casters are pretty boring if they are stuck using cantrips to attack. A scrappy wizard might take advantage of an unready enemy, too.
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Feb 18, 2015 16:34
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odinson posted:How would you guys use Phantasmal Force to gently caress up a Troll (MM pg. 291)?
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Apr 17, 2015 06:34
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BetterWeirdthanDead posted:The right Cleric build will out-fighting person a Fighter. A Tempest or War Cleric is basically a fighter with also spells even if you don't make an effort to optimize your build.
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Jul 25, 2018 04:20
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Splicer posted:Being the good guys means doing the right thing for its own sake, even if it's worse for you personally. Especially if it's worse for you personally. Just make a note of every time they do a bad thing, and occasionally ooc remind them of what assholes they are every time they pretend otherwise ic. Or do the opposite? Like, if taking prisoners and letting goblins go instead of executing them bites them in the rear end sometimes, also have being good pay off big, sometimes. Like the goblin you let go shows up with his clan to help when the PCs really need it. Or the Queen you failed the persuasion check against still gives partial success because they did X nice thing that she heard about. If being kind/heroic literally always bites them in the rear end and never pays off, that's kind of a big theme in the campaign that the PCs should be brutish sociopaths if they have half a brain in their heads. In that campaign, when a demon offers a favorable deal, there's no reason not to take it.
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Jul 31, 2018 23:50
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Reik posted:Also, weapon proficiency shouldn't be a thing. Let anyone use whatever weapon they want, and convert the simple/martial/exotic weapon proficiency system in to a flushed out martial combat system. Anyone can swing a sword, but only a martial character can unlock different fighting styles and actions with it. And martials have effective scaling options to higher levels (even if it means you need a fix to stop people from just dipping at low levels).
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Aug 1, 2018 18:32
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Finster Dexter posted:I think a fun way to do the survival bits in Dark Sun is to just hand-wave it when it's not an issue (i.e. traveling with a caravan between cities) and then if you want to make it a story point have a random encounter that results in them losing their water supply and then giving them some moral dilemma to deal with to get water while out in the wastes. Survival stuff for its own sake is boring, but survival in the face of moral quandary is role-playing. Agree about survival. It's boring "shopping for groceries" drudgery unless done where there is some kind of drama/conflict. The way the new Eberron 5E guide handles Dragonmarks would be a good template for how to handle Dark Sun Psionics - variant races, with feats at higher levels for potential improvement. The normal "natural" Psionics just had a few random powers of varying strength, and not everyone had them. Defiling and Preserving is a little tougher to model, but I guess you could call all PHB classes Preservers, and give alternate paths for Defilers (since PCs rarely do that). The real weakness of Dark Sun from a design standpoint was probably that the rarity of metal was modeled as all the weapons and armor being crappier than normal. Instead, it should have modeled the bone/wood/glass/stone equipment as normal, and made metal the equivalent of magic/mithril/adamantine items - where it has bonuses compared to the crappy common materials.
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Aug 2, 2018 19:20
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inthesto posted:Can somebody give me a quick and dirty of how wild shape works in 5E? The rules are written like crap, and I'm sure some of my old 3.XE knowledge is interfering too. You also get to include their HP as part of the stat block, on top of your normal HP, and if they run out, you just change back to your normal form and ignore the damage.
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Aug 9, 2018 05:40
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sebmojo posted:What are the odds changes for advantage/disadvantage? It's intuitively simple and attractive, are there any weird fishhooks? The actual odds depend very closely on what you have to roll to succeed. But both mechanics make a bigger difference if you're bad at something than if you're good at something - if you have to roll a 15 to succeed, advantage is a much bigger boost than if you have to roll a 5 to succeed. And if you have to roll a 15 to succeed, disadvantage is a much bigger hindrance than if you have to roll a 5.
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Aug 9, 2018 05:51
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Elysiume posted:The average roll without advantage is 10.5, the average roll with advantage is 13.825, so it counts for around +3.325. That doesn't work with a binary pass/fail. If you need to roll a 15, that's a 30% success rate, or a 51% with advantage (the equivalent of ~+5). If you need to roll a 5, that's an 80% success rate, 96% with advantage (the equivalent of ~+3).
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Aug 9, 2018 06:36
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