pog boyfriend posted:

Extremely helpful advice.

Kaysette posted:

Help, I need ideas for an NPC ork wizard that isn’t really a wizard. I know we did this once but I can’t find it. Hold person is just grappling, summon animals is tipping out a sack of badgers, fireball is a Molotov cocktail, etc.

Nash posted:

Need some advice on tinkering with a class.

Some background. In my campaign Teiflings are from not-Egypt where necromancy is normal and accepted. Many people will sell their bodies to be used after they are dead. It’s just a body so no big deal. A player thought this was cool and wanted to be a noble who purchased a contract to have an undead be a bodyguard.

This player was thinking of being a chain pact warlock with his undead bodyguard being in place of a familiar. I like the idea but am trying to brainstorm the mechanics of doing this. Also I’m trying to think of cool ways to connect the warlock pact with the contract he bought for the undead.

Should I just take the chain pact rules and play as is, just substituting the stats in for an undead of my choice? He had said he thought it would be cool to upgrade his bodyguards equipment. Would gearing up his undead bodyguard be a bit too powerful? Any cool ideas in general would be welcome.

Arcsech posted:

Animate Dead on a short rest is a pretty big deal - I’d be very careful with that.

theironjef posted:

Quit trying to make "optimizers" a bad thing. It's never going to be a bad thing.

theironjef posted:

Optimizers are people who pick through the tools that are made available to them. If the tools are so imbalanced and easily abused, that's not on the player, it's on the designer or the person who gave them the big list of options. This scenario where we're saying "Hey players, build your character with this stuff. Beware though, several of the choices make you a bad person" is some horse nonsense.

Madmarker posted:

The absolute maximum at any table should be a total of 6 people, 1 DM and 5 players.

please knock Mom! posted:

I would quit d&d if I had to play with that guy’s group judging from the posts which end up itt

Zuul the Cat posted:

Also, don't just kill poo poo to kill it, you're not a group of murder hobos.

Toshimo posted:

GreenMetalSun posted:

Would kill for Planescape, though Dark Sun and Spelljammer are runners up.

Splicer posted:

You are a bit yeah. You "invented" a problem (not knowing where east is) and then "solved" it by rolling perception (should really have been survival though). She "invented" a problem (the way is blocked by debris) and "solved" it by athleticsing it out of the way. It's all made up (tm). Giving the players an opportunity to take over the making up is pretty much the entire point of skill challenges.

If I'd been the GM in that situation the only thing I would have done differently is maybe encouraged the player to embellish a bit, to maybe tie it into the result of your roll somehow or give the next player something to build off. I'd also have asked you to embellish what you were doing a bit.

You: "I use perception to locate the sun, to try to determine East"
Me: "You find the sun fairly easily, but do you notice anything else?"
You: "Nope"
Me: "OK anyone else?"
Her: "I use my athletics to move a log that's blocking the path."
Me: "Is it a big log? Why is it there? Is it the only thing blocking the path or is it the easiest piece to move from a larger blockage?"
Her: "It's most of a tree, it blew down in a storm."
Me: "Sounds good. who's next?"
Him: "A river we need to ford is swollen from the same storm. I rig up something to help us get the cart across safely"
Me: "OK let's have a look at those tool proficiencies"

MrSargent posted:

I have a question that doesn't involve player-created logs.

Having my first session on Sunday and was helping my buddy build his Half-Orc Barbarian on DND Beyond. He ended up with absolutely ridiculous rolls and adding in his racial bonus this is what his ability scores look like:

Strength (20) - yah he rolled an 18 with +2 racial bonus
Dexterity (17)
Constitution (16)
Intelligence (12)
Wisdom (15)
Charisma (10)

Am I going to need to re-balance some encounters due to his massive +7 to hit and +5 dmg bonus? I feel like he's going to decapitate every goblin in one swing.

hyphz posted:

The "immersion" that's meant is the player being able to have the same mindset as their character - or, rather, the mindset that we think they have when we see them.

So, if you can make stuff up in the world, you lose that immersion because you have to restrain yourself and think about the plot and storytelling concerns - whereas if your character could do it they could just magic themselves up piles of gold, just like you probably would if you gained that power.

I put the caveat of "the mindset that we think they have" on it because Hit Points are otherwise a classic objection to this; your character is completely unimpeded until they run out of Hit Points, and always know how much damage they can take until they die, while in the character's head they would be perfectly aware of the fact they are wounded and be terrified they might die at any time. So this isn't really getting into the character's head; it's getting into what we project as being in their head when a classic fantasy hero decides to fight on in spite of having been seriously injured, but that's enough.

Disargeria posted:

"I would like to roll to persuade the room to reveal its tricksy secrets"

MustardFacial posted:

hey someone tell me all the flaws of D&D

Toshimo posted:

Cool. Convince everyone to stop snapping up the garbage books for just 1 cycle. I'll wait.

kingcom posted:

I assume the biggest reason is that its a tiny team of people doing any of the development and farming out a bunch of work to freelancers. Hasbro does not care about the product other than a license to farm out every now and again.

Splicer posted:

Courtly love. There were a few fan things but I don't think anything official.

You might be thinking of pathfinder, they gave it mechanics at least once.

Nehru the Damaja posted:

What I like about this is the notion that it could lead to the Wife Guy Paladin.

FFT posted:

That's just Penance (formerly Speedball)

poor life choice posted:

The DM for the game I'm in likes to use a fumble table for natural 1 attack roles. As an extra attack/martial character enthusiast this is a bummer! Other than "make a halfling" and/or constantly staying on the lookout for advantage are there many ways for lower-level characters to reroll or bypass an undesirable die roll?

e: in all other ways the group is great and the DM in particular is fantastic, this is my one grievance.

sponszi posted:

Yeah now that Fey-Touched is a thing our group has a joke about the "misty step tax" that you basically have to pay if your gonna be adventuring in a place where wall of force/web/etc exists as a martial class

Fumbles posted:

are we seriously back to the 'I'm not WIELDING it I'm HOLDING it' level of weapon juggling?

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

My DM is *adorable* sometimes

A year ago he decided to let our bard resolve his lyncanthropic curse in a way that let him remain a werebear

Last night: "why did I let you have something that powerful? It warns you this could happen! But I've made it part of your character now! It's part of the plot! We can't retcon it! You're immune to nonmagival damage! You have a hundred and fifteen hit points!"

The bard's counter: "when you think about nerfing me, please put as much thought as I did into min/maxing this, I who just realized tonight, after a year, that I had a hundred and fifteen hit points as a bear"

The problem is we all love it just for the constant bear puns

change my name posted:

Send him on a quest for reagents (like spun gold, a magical loom, drow silk, etc) and it can be turned into a friendly flying carpet ala Aladdin? Maybe just the 3' x 5' one?

Enjoy posted:

Lawyers and Liches

DourCricket posted:

Haha, I remember hating Psionics in 2E! Though I also didn't have anything other than the core books so I was just trying to make sense out of what was in the monster manual at the time.

DourCricket posted:

I went to my first con in 2019 (Origins) and signed up for a 2E game just for some nostalgia. When I got there and they handed me the character sheet and saw there was no THAC0, they just converted it to AB, I almost left in disgust Seriously though THAC0 is terrible even if I love its stupidity out of nostalgia