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Kitchner posted:I wonder if my DM is going to allow that or not. I'm getting +5 to all my deception rolls so it should be easy enough to fool some peasants, and they are genuinely the penises from magical lizardmen so technically I'm only lying about what they do. Considering that your GM allows you to harvest genitalia from dead enemies, I'm pretty sure his powers of judgment are so withered that you could get away with anything.
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Feb 13, 2015 20:52
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Apollodorus posted:What are some advantages of D&D Next compared to Pathfinder? Basically, ask yourself what you felt about 2e D&D and 3e D&D. If you felt like 3e D&D was pretty close to perfection and needed no fixing, stick with Pathfinder. If you felt, on the other hand, like what you wanted was a midpoint between 2e and 3e, some sort of mythical 2.5e, then you might be interested in 5e. Mechanically it's very similar to 3e D&D, keeping most of the basic mechanics and ideas outside of revamping the skill system and the advantage/disadvantage mechanic, but thematically it hews a lot closer to 2e's low-magic and more "street-level" concepts. Apollodorus posted:What are some potential pitfalls? Is there anything cool from Pathfinder or previous D&D editions I could incorporate to make the game more interesting? So far the only "pitfall" I'm noting is that some of the archetypes seem a bit inferior to the others, and that, much like in 3e, monster "CR" is wildly misleading and should be completely ignored if you're using the MM, unless you want to deal with a TPK within three sessions. And I think about the most important content you could add or houserule to make the game more fun would be more feats, 5e vastly improves on feats as a thing over 3e, but the selection feels really, really tiny. Unfortunately since feats were so badly implemented in previous editions, you probably can't lift many from them.
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Feb 16, 2015 19:29
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Well, in my opinion the only way to deal with CR's is to ignore them, they can't be "fixed," because as soon as you're out of the very most basic creatures, every encounter is going to have different amounts of difficulty based on such basic things as what classes your PC's have. Sometimes a raw Fighter party will stomp through something that wizards couldn't handle even five levels higher, and vice versa. The only real alternative is to simply look at the creatures and their abilities, compare the creatures' attack bonuses to PCs' armor classes, damage to HP, resistances to abilities, sometimes you just have to hazard a guess, and if you guess wrong, fudge something during the fight to avoid a TPK. If you really want to insist on using them, the safest thing would probably be to, yeah, apply some sort of multiplier, but I feel like it's better to simply learn not to rely on them at all.
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Feb 16, 2015 21:24
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Kitchner posted:You could just grant xp at specific story milestones or per session attended as suggested as alternatives in the DMG if for whatever reason the xp of the creatures no longer matches the official CR rating. Yeaaaaah, I don't know any GM's who actually give XP for monster kills in any system any longer. I think most people with any experience migrate to giving XP for "story advances" or per session or something along those lines. XP for monster kills really only seems like a mechanic I'd use if I was intentionally doing some retro beer&pretzels, boardgamey dungeoncrawl thing.
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Feb 17, 2015 12:05
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I don't think that's so much where it "falls apart" as "that's where the GM is going to have to make some judgments, one way or another."quote:-In combat, how "shared" is information? Say a rogue keeps ducking behind a corner to break LoS then hides (via cunning action) in order to gain advantage for the next turn. One enemy is on to these shenanigans and moves toward the rogue's position and gains line of sight, but the rest of the enemy team is still out of it. Does the rogue still have advantage against everyone besides the one enemy who can see him/her? That one enemy could just use a second to go: "HEY GUYS, THERE'S A loving ROGUE WITH A CROSSBOW IN THIS BUSH." And the information is "shared" without any need for telepathy or wizardry.
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Feb 17, 2015 18:40
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gradenko_2000 posted:I love your idea of explicitly and mechanically defining rest opportunities and treasure handouts. I want to try this, it's a very cool idea. Giving the PC's "tokens" to help define when they want rests is actually kind of a cool idea, though it might take some serious effort to fluff in some cases(perhaps an adrenaline surge after the first fight in a chain restores some HP and limited-use powers?), and I don't think it'd be unfair to say the DM is allowed to go: "Hey, PC's, explain to me how you manage to rest/recover here." rather than just making it an entirely free thing to use. Though the GM shouldn't be too aggressive about analyzing their rest-justification, he should just push them to come up with something cool rather than taking it as an instant heal effect. Tying it into the treasure economy, though, I think that may be a bad idea. Because if PC's just get to trade tokens or milestones for whatever they want out of the game's selection of magical items(assuming they have enough tokens to "afford" it), then you recapture one of the things I hated the most about 3.x, the way that everything magical and non-standard might as well just have been in a loving shopping catalogue. Magical and special items are no longer unique or interesting, or a defining thing about a character(that he's wielding a long-lost relic of a dead empire he recovered from a tomb or something), it's just another +X item he bought, in 3.x for gold, via this system for "tokens" or "milestones." A system like this might be alright for a total newbie GM who's unsure of exactly how to balance level-ups and treasure handouts, and with total newbie players for whom the main attraction of treasure is that it gives them bigger numbers. But it feels like it takes away something from the, well, story, of a game, to use it at, I loving hate to say it, but at a "higher level" of play, unless you're intentionally doing something dungeon crawly.
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Feb 18, 2015 12:28
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Ratpick posted:I think you misunderstood a part of my post: the idea of these tokens is not to give the PCs free rein to decide when they rest, it's a mechanic for the DM to pace their adventure in such a way that the PCs get a breather every once in a while. They're every bit a resource for the DM to pace the adventure as they are for the PCs to be able to predictably get a rest after a string of encounters. Looks like I did! It didn't occur to me that it would also help the GM with pacing issues, though that's a good idea, too. And I legitimately liked a lot of the idea with my own interpretation, too, like, giving the PC's a bit of narrative control, like... "After defeating the ogres, covered in their blood and our own, every member of our party is galvanized by a surge of adrenaline. We'll surely pay for it at the end of the day, but for now we feel ready for another encounter at any moment!" [mechanically a short rest or something] And, after thinking about it, I could also kind of see some cooperation with the PC's on treasure options. If the GM doesn't have some hard-set railroad that he expects the adventure to trundle on down, perhaps after hitting a milestone that gives his character access to a new magical item, the party's Fighter pulls the GM aside and goes: "I was thinking, maybe at the end of the tomb I could find..." and they talk it over, and come up with the Blade-Key of Emperor Nebbitzazz, which smites enemies of his ancient empire(lizardmen or something, perhaps) and grants the wielder the ability to open any of the Empire's old tombs or facilities simply by presenting the blade and demanding entry, suddenly providing a shitload of hooks as, after the final encounter, the PC's find both that and, as the GM rapidly improvises, also a large mosaic mural on the wall, a map, indicating where other of the Empire's old forts, tombs and facilities can be found... Obviously it wouldn't be a fit for every game, some GM's have very clear ideas about what they want to do with their game, and their players often trust them with near-total narrative control if it's proven not to lead to bags of severed lizardman genitals in the past.
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Feb 18, 2015 13:20
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Grappling feels kind of vestigial, though, like it's only there because the earlier editions had grappling rules.
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Feb 28, 2015 05:11
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NameHurtBrain posted:Speed doesn't help when fighting something that flies though. Which was more of my concern. Had an issue in HotDQ where dragon sat on ceiling 40 ft up. Monk futiley threw darts at disadvantage. Might I suggest that if the GM throws something flying at a party that cannot deal with something flying effectively, or if half the party cannot, then the GM has hosed up, not the game?
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Mar 1, 2015 03:13
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isndl posted:HotDQ is an official WotC module though. Are you saying it's the DM's fault for running an official module as written? Yes, yes I am. Similarly, if the GM uses a monster only looking at its CR, not thinking about it, and it TPK's the entire party, that's the GM's fault, too. Generally, any time the GM does something that's unfun for his players, it's his fault. If it turns out that the entire system is unfun for his players... then it's his fault for choosing to run it(unless his players refused to play anything else).
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Mar 1, 2015 03:28
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AlphaDog posted:Are you really saying that when you run an official module as-written using the rules as-written and it doesn't work out very well, that's somehow not the fault of the people writing the module and the rules? On the one hand, the people writing the module are at fault for writing a poo poo module, but the GM is also at fault for using that module unthinkingly. And unless it's a REALLY common situation that'll crop up in almost any game using said rules, I don't think you can necessarily pin that one on the ruleset itself. Not saying 5E is flawless, but this one's down to user error in my mind.
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Mar 1, 2015 04:08
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So, I made some tentative houserules for 5E, trying to be as unintrusive as possible while also giving martial classes a few more options in combat, and Gradenko suggested I post them in here when I brought them up. It's very much a first-pass thing, hasn't seen much in the way of testing yet, likely unbalanced, but I think it's a good start, at least conceptually. Pastebinned for the sake of not making a huge loving lump of a post: http://pastebin.com/Rp6KZ0ti The short version is that I took as many of the Battlemaster maneuvers as possible and made them something that everyone could do in a fight, in exchange for taking a penalty to their attack roll(and in a few cases, taking a penalty to their next attack rolls), as well as adding in a few new ones(largely options for grapplers, to make that something someone might plausibly use, ever). I tried to focus on things that would let people do new stuff, while avoiding as far as possible maneuvers that just involved shuffling numbers around or getting straight bonuses. On top of it, I also packed a bit of a generic attack bonus for classes, based on how central physical combat is to them, so that it's easier for, say, a pure fighter or barbarian, to have these maneuvers' attack penalties offset, than it is for a wizard if he tries it. Additionally, I'd suggest letting players come up with personalized maneuvers, specific to them, dependant on props and abilities. For instance, an Eldritch Knight might have a special variant of a shield bash that involves enchanting his shield with something before slamming into an enemy's face and unleashing the spell. A Ranger might have some form of trick/magical arrows. In general, I'd make them more powerful than the base maneuvers everyone can use, but balance this out by having the penalty they provide last for the remainder of the fight(or until the next short rest) to indicate that the maneuvers are more complicated/exhausting/consume resources that need to be rebuilt/regathered. And of course the base maneuvers would also be available to any reasonably tough enemy fighters the players come up against, making them a bit more complicated to do battle with, too. The downside to these houserules is that, of course, they're basically incompatible with the Battlemaster archetype, but I think that's a small loss.
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Mar 10, 2015 22:58
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