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King of Solomon posted:Why is this even a sticking point for people? Dex as a damage scaling stat isn't even uncommon among games. There's a belief that it's overpowered because of a clash of genre expectations, D&D's refusal to update a lot of it's own dumb bullshit, and nerds being hilariously dumb. Basically, it's consistently presented as "strength is your melee stat" so when people are allowed to use something else, nerds get suspicious that someone's trying to pull something on them, because after all, strength is supposed to be the melee stat. This is completely unhelped by the fact that strength does near gently caress-all outside of it's position as a melee stat (carrying limitations rarely matter), and because D&D is filled to the goddamn brim with spells and effects that completely override brute forcing your way through stuff, not that it matters because both the game and nerds in general consistently assume that, due to their own pathetic bodies, actually performing even minor or every day acts of strength should be near impossible. Lastly: No. 1 Apartheid Fan posted:Because Dex-to-damage makes Thieves/Rogues better in a fight, and until 4E it was their job to deal less damage than a warrior and randomly eat poo poo in combat It turns out 5e's "three pillars" game design was straight up bullshit, and it's still trying to adhere to the idea that rogues are the "skillful" class and fighters are the "fighting" class, please ignore that every class can fight, often times just as good as fighters, and that it's criminally dull to be No Skills McGee when the rest of the party is out having fun in their non-combat situations. D&D fans have a blind spot the size of Jupiter's red spot when it comes to spellcasters, so the only real frame of reference is in rogues, and so you get the idea that rogues are supposed to be bad at combat, and dex to damage "breaks" this.
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Dec 24, 2018 03:16
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Traps are some serious cargo cult design. Originally they were there because D&D was a pure dungeon crawler game where your goal was to loot as much gold as you can carry and then get the gently caress out of the dungeon. Traps were a pacing and resource management mechanic, because almost everything was a pacing and resource management mechanic. Losing HP to traps meant you'd have to bail on the dungeon sooner, and spending too much time looking for traps meant your torches were going down and you were risking random encounter rolls. But D&D hasn't been that in like, a loving while. The days of gold to XP are long since passed, and with it went most mechanical incentives connected to traps. Traps are now mostly just a petty annoyance, because healing and resting mid-dungeon are far easier, and random encounter rolls much, much more rare. People complain about traps because there actually is no real mechanical reason in the game to have them in their current state - beyond "but D&D always-" and such garbage arguments to tradition. The way to make traps interesting is to fold them into your encounters and otherwise trim them away. Traps aren't just vaguely there, traps are a part of ambushes and fights. Since the original conflict of traps is gone, you kinda have to make your own; rather then just putting random trip wires here and there, put the trap right alongside the kobolds sniping you with arrows and trying to lure you into them. You have to create your own time limits and ongoing stressful situations to apply to the party to make traps actually matter. A lot of these arguments apply to the rogue at large, really. Locked doors used to be how you gated away loot, and loving with locked doors again meant the clock kept ticking. But when the clock doesn't matter anymore, locked doors only really exist for the rogue to justify their own existence. Stealth has frankly always been hosed in tabletop games because it's an individual skill rather then a party-wide one, which means trying to sneak around turns it into a single player narrative, and besides which, D&D has pretty much never given good advice on how to do sneaking missions, so it rapidly turns into Super Disadvantage, where you're rolling over and over and over to accomplish your singular goal (in the guise of multiple steps), and just one bad roll means you failed. Now, rogues have almost never been a great class in D&D (outside of 4e), and modern fiction has absolutely moved away from rogues as getting one good stab in then running away, so is it really any wonder why people turn to trying to make them into a "DPS" class instead of a "skills" class?
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Dec 24, 2018 21:08
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Encumbrance makes a lot of sense when you're playing a dungeon crawler where your main goal is "loot as much as possible" and loot has, you know, weight to it, and bags of holding are less common. Like so much else in D&D, it now exists as a vestigial organ.
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Dec 25, 2018 04:24
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Merge the fighter with the warlord that never was, which is to say, revive some of the AD&D perks fighters got. Give them something similar to the Rustic Hospitality feature that the folk hero background gets for free, and have that get stronger as they level up. Fighters are natural protagonists; they aren't magical weirdos like most classes, they aren't religious fanatics like paladins, they aren't dirty woodsmen like rangers, and aren't literal thieves like rogues, and so as you go up in level, more and more people trust and love you and are willing to help you. All a fighter has is their personal strength and their reputation, so give them that reputation. You could start it off pretty easy with an increasing boost to charisma skills (since fighters have no reason to have good charisma because of the mechanical dumbfuckery of ability scores (DTAS) this soothes over that) and add other perks to it as they hit higher levels. At lower levels fighters are just a bit better at connecting to others then most other classes are regardless of their actual charisma; after all, they're the one you could see yourself having a beer with. And if you're not playing a friendly fighter, people are just naturally gonna see you as the guy to absolutely not give poo poo to. By mid levels this is just something everyone knows. Think of it maybe as a sort of "passive diplomacy" or "passive intimidation" score, a natural threshold of "This man is your friend; he fights for FREEDOM" versus "Absolutely do not gently caress with that guy, are you kidding me?" And by higher levels, naturally, people are going to follow you to the gates of hell...or they're going to run away in terror at the grim sight of you entering the battlefield. And I need to be clear: this is not something the GM just vaguely keeps in mind, this is something you put into the actual mechanics.
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Dec 26, 2018 20:04
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Conspiratiorist posted:There's already a Fighter that does all this and it's called Paladin. No? The paladin is a fanatic who's devoted to their cause and their order. They get a normal reason to raise Charisma and can have social skills as their main skills, just like the bard. That doesn't mean they're the sort of assigned "protagonist" class, no more then the bard or sorcerer is. They already have their schtick of their order and their cause. People can like and trust a paladin, but they'll always have a degree of separation from other, normal folk. At this point you're assigning stuff to the paladin that doesn't exist just to deny it to the fighter.
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Dec 27, 2018 19:49
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Conspiratiorist posted:Mechanics. That's definitely a word. Got more words to add to it?
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Dec 27, 2018 20:04
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Conspiratiorist posted:Paladin as a class: Ok, but all you've listed here are combat options. We've also been talking for three pages on how what the Fighter needs is more out of combat options, not in-combat options. The Fighter inspires and leads because they literally get that ability as they level, under this idea. At low levels they get a scaling bonus to social actions, at mid levels they get essentially a passive diplomacy/intimidate score to represent them becoming more famous and obviously battle worn, and at higher levels they get, I dunno, a permanent Charm Person effect on everyone who falls under their passive diplomacy/intimidate score, just to spitball some stuff. The paladin already has "semi-divine warrior with spells," the ranger already has "wilderness warrior," the rogue has "is a thief." The fighter gets to be John Videogames, the designated protagonist. The fighter doesn't need the paladin options because the paladin is already serving Good King John Videogames the First. Or is best friends with John Videogames, Former Hero, Now Retired Innkeeper, who's everyone's friend. Or because they have past history with John Videogames the Grim, or because they trained in swordplay alongside the famous and renowned swordmaster, or because...you get the idea. Paladins have to put points into being social. Fighters become famous by default.
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Dec 27, 2018 21:40
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We're actually talking about the thread's topic and title - the rules of 5th edition - but hey, you can start your own thread on cool homebrews if that's what you're interested in!
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Dec 27, 2018 23:33
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Skyl3lazer posted:Look, to be non-antagonistic for a post or two, all pen&paper systems have issues of one sort or another. In D&D, it's part of the DM's job to adjust the play experience to make the game as fun as possible for themselves and the players. Yes, and our discussion is there because the game doesn't give advice on those matters. You will find nothing in the books about increasing the Fighter's narrative power. Not in the mechanics, not in the GM advice, nowhere. It is a failing of the game. Just sitting back with arms crossed going "eh people will figure it out or they won't" solves nothing. Besides that, we are literally doing what you said. We're making homebrew and houserules to solve that problem! We're making the GM advice you want! You seem to mostly just be upset that people are posting about the game, which is absolute madness.
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Dec 27, 2018 23:51
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Skyl3lazer posted:No, people were complaining that their homerule isn't in the book, so actually playing by that rule didn't solve the problem. Please actually read the last 2-3 pages, its largely people spitballing new rules and ideas.
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Dec 28, 2018 00:39
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DrSunshine posted:To risk throwing in my two cents into the fray, I have an idea for the "fighter" problem. That doesn't involve changing over to a totally different system! So, sorta the opposite of this is something I've tossed around in my own head when thinking about how I'd remake the martial class(es). Namely, let their schtick be manipulating their own attributes, which is something Fighters and rogues could do in the high level abilities of AD&D2e. Let Fighters literally declare (on whatever timer you want) that their strength is actually ten points higher, for example. Wizards can still jerk off to their Knock spell that just auto-unlocks things, and their Invisibility spell that just auto-succeeds stealth...but that requires two spells, whereas a rogue just uses one ability to knock their whole dexterity score up several notches to be simply The Best at those skills. It also creates a cool narrative moment where things are too hard and strenuous for the fighter, at which point he reaches deep down inside and focuses hard and does, in fact, gain the strength of ten mortal men to accomplish the seemingly impossible. By not making it an auto-success you also sidestep the "isn't this just a spell?" problem, not that it'll matter to grogs, who will whine about literally anything that makes non-spellcasters interesting.
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Dec 28, 2018 04:52
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Mind flayers a mechanically lovely because they're incentivized not to go after the big brainy delicious wizards but instead their jock friends, when it should be the opposite.
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Jan 2, 2019 22:22
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thegoatgod_pan posted:To jump in on the Mindflayer debate, as I too hate the idea of locking players out for an hour, the way I’d handle it, is by having stunned people save with disadvantage vs. their domination, to bring the PC back to the table on the side of the bad guys. A good rule of thumb is that actions taken by the GM in general should serve to increase the game's drama. Save or do nothing spells tend to do the opposite of that, whereas at least save or be dominated effects still add to the drama for exactly the reasons given (unless you have the kind of garbage GM that just immediately takes control away from you when charmed).
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Jan 3, 2019 16:52
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There's a difference between rolling to see if you hit (moment of drama) and failing (still small amounts of drama), and not rolling at all and just going on your phone for the next Vague While. Also Mind Flayers are a classic monster and should be written with actual encounter rules instead of just shoved into the Enemies Folder along with literally everything else. Honestly, pretty much everything extremely big, dangerous, and noteworthy should be set up as a full scale encounter, not just a random monster. And I don't mean that this is something that the GM should just know how to do - the books need to be so, SO much loving better at presenting monsters and how they should be interacted with mechanically. Ah, but I just said the forbidden m word.
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Jan 4, 2019 01:07
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It's extremely good gameplay design that one monster's singular ability changes the fight from "extremely easy" to "near party wipe" with no warning to the GM about it.
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Jan 9, 2019 06:49
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It lets you briefly lie to yourself about the possibility of being a cool acrobatic swashbuckler until you realize that D&D has never once taught DMs to actually set a stage and create interesting places to fight in, and that you will basically never get to be a cool swashbuckler unless you artificially push for chances yourself, and then hope your GM knows not to set multiple checks for no real reward.
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Jan 10, 2019 06:30
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D&D basically since forever has tried to out-rules lawyer the rules lawyers, despite, at least since 3e, being written by people who are extremely bad at rules lawyering, then covering it up with muttering "DMs can do whatever they want, rule zero" when it doesn't work out. The problem isn't "natural language," the problem is "confusing and inexact language" because the writers are trying to be overly complicated and making a mess of it. Very little of 5e is actually written in natural language - it's all technical language made a bit flowery at best. Like, Wall of Force starts going in depth with it's contiguous 10ft panels - that's not trying to make the language easy to understand and naturally written, that's trying to get all exact and technical to ensure people don't "exploit" it. Why does it matter how thick the wall is if it's invulnerable to all damage, which is basically the only mechanical effect of a wall's thickness? It's the same thing with claiming 5e is built for "Theater of the Mind" when the entire game is written for explicitly 5 ft spaced out miniatures, then they cough out "and you can ignore that I guess."
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Jan 12, 2019 20:03
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XP made sense when classes leveled at different rates and you got XP directly from looting gold. Since D&D strayed from being a dungeon crawler, XP is cargo cult game design.
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Jan 17, 2019 20:12
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Phylacteries have always been massive bait for the sort of "Well if I were the evil villain, I'd just blah blah blah" sort attitude. They absolutely benefit from rules demanding either the lich stay at least a little close by, or that the item in question has to be powerful and important enough that you can't really just dump it in a hole somewhere, if only to cut out that poo poo.
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Jan 26, 2019 20:45
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General good breaking points for a paladin/sorcerer are paladin 2 and paladin 6. 2 gives you smite (the actual main reason you're here) and fighting style, 6 gives you the aura. If you're going Ancients, consider 7.
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Feb 5, 2019 20:32
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Dameius posted:Matt Mercer took the Pathfinder Gunslinger class and converted it to a 5e homebrew with some additional tweaks and put it on the DMGuild. The general consensus is that the class isn't terrible, but has structural issues that keep it from being on par with the official classes. The actual pathfinder gunslinger class is absolute garbage, is a big part of the problem. Garbage in, garbage out. The actual easiest answer is to not try to be overly fancy about it, and just convert crossbows into guns. Hand crossbows are now pistols, non-hand crossbows are now arquebuses or muskets.
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Feb 15, 2019 23:17
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Trying to understand logical mechanical reasons people find the warlord overpowered is an excuse in futility. "It's overpowered" is simply the easiest and laziest way to dismiss something you dislike.
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Feb 26, 2019 04:09
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lightrook posted:I think the deeper cultural explanation is that most groups expect games to start at level 1, and the average campaign only lasts three or four sessions anyways before real life gets in the way and everything goes tumbling down, so campaigns that start at 1 rarely make it past level 5. The biggest demand for high level content probably comes from people who are tired of rehashing the same early levels over and over, so by definition we're a minority of players and therefore a minority of sales. For the casual players that make up the majority of the playerbase, the main interest comes from campaigns that start from the bottom and work their way up, so that's where the content is. It's absolutely this. It's expected both that you'll start the game "from the beginning," and that leveling is supposed to not be very fast, and so you end up with the perception that every game is supposed to be this long drawn out epic, and that's...just not really doable in the modern hellworld we're all stuck in. And even if it WERE doable to maneuver the vanishingly few non-work hours you have left to coincide with that of your group, expecting the same game to just continue to be the same enjoyment, for years plural, every single time, is likewise a little silly.
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Feb 26, 2019 20:49
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Also, to be honest, I suspect there just isn't even close to there being as much interest in the higher levels as there is for the lower levels. I would wager the vast majority of players overall really don't want to play the Weird Wizard Show that D&D always turns into, despite what some really loud nerds like to proclaim a lot on the internet. But then, if we follow that path, we arrive at "most players don't actually want the dungeon crawling highly mechanical combat focused game that D&D is, they just end up there and modify the game until it's no longer the same game at all, but still just call it D&D."
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Feb 26, 2019 21:54
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The problem with all of this is that, I really do believe, high level play isn't popular because people just don't wanna be that high level. Generally people want semi-low-fantasy adventures of stopping fun baddies in medium stakes challenges and big fights against a single boss dragon, with wizards that throw fireballs and fighters that actually are mighty enough to stand against their foes with naught but good steel and skill. High level fantasy with all it's shapeshifting and flying about and just it's overall general gonzo qualities that high level D&D gets may as well be an entirely different game with different themes - and the fact that it isn't is one of the reasons it's always done so poorly.
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Feb 27, 2019 06:49
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PhyrexianLibrarian posted:On the other side of that coin, as a player, how do you deal with a DM who seems to have a "correct" solution in mind? I'm sorry, but it sounds like your DM really enjoys feeling clever, and will absolutely do so at their players' expense.
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Feb 28, 2019 23:12
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PhyrexianLibrarian posted:(Another example: "You can't Detect Poison on alcohol, because it will always go off because alcohol is itself a poison! Yeah, this is 100% someone addicted to the smell of their own farts. Sounds like their enjoyment is going to come at the expense of your own in most cases, since it sounds like what they enjoy is being "smarter" then you.
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Mar 1, 2019 04:37
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thetoughestbean posted:This honestly reads like a condemnation of 5e’s class balancing to me Bard is basically the only class designed to be an actual adventurer, and more or less entirely on accident, at that. While it's totally a mark against 5e that you can only really achieve this with all bards, it's also...not limited to 5e at all. Everyone but bard typically ends up as such a weird narrative specialist, and with D&D's typical bad mechanics and binary resolution, instead of having a cool specialization or gimmick you pull out every so often, you end up entirely defined by it. So yeah, all bards being the perfect team makes sense, because you finally have a group made of people ready to go out and, you know, adventure. ProfessorCirno fucked around with this message at 08:53 on Mar 5, 2019 |
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Mar 5, 2019 08:49
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Level by level multiclassing was and is a hideous mistake.
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Mar 7, 2019 08:01
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"feats are optional" is great because feats are the only thing that lets non-casters compete in battle, and then only because of how stupidly designed Great Weapon Mastery and Crossbow Mastery are. Naturally, feats are optional, and not the giant lists of spells. Also if you care about optimization dual wielding is only really good on swashbuckler rogues. Just about everyone else has better uses for their mino- sorry, their "bonus action," which is, naturally, neither a bonus, nor a full action.
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Mar 7, 2019 20:44
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The vast majority of the time, multiclassing by level is a hideous trap. Most players aren't GiantitP regulars pouring over builds, they're going "that adventure had a lot of magic in it and I liked that, maybe I should take a level in wizard?" It's not bad becuase it leads to a select few overpowered builds - it's bad because it leads to disgustingly more unplayable ones. The only reason it works is because DMs either fudge stuff nonstop, or, far more often, they just...stop using the rules.
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Mar 7, 2019 22:27
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The problem is that there's no rhyme or reason to the classes both narratively and mechanically. One class is "master of all things arcane forever," another just has "KINDA SNEAKY" written across it. And these identities are hardcoded into the classes as much as possible; if you are a wizard, you are CAST SPELLS and nothing else. Instead of a specialty, it becomes your only schtick. Like, a rogue/warlock could also just be a warlock who's sneaky, but since one class is built entirely around the identity of "sneaky," you end up feeling obligated to get some rogue in there somewhere. And a rogue can't just make an unwise (or exceptionally well detailed) pact with a demon, you have to put all your rogue poo poo on pause to take a level in a whole new class, hope you got the attributes for it.
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Mar 8, 2019 04:18
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Kung Food posted:Forgetting all other factors like RP, flavor, mechanics, ect, why would any DM choose to give themselves this sort of workload? There are a lot of DMs who seriously underestimate how much they add to their own work load, have no idea what a normal work load for a DM would even be, and think "the more I work on it, the better it must be!" D&D largely does nothing to persuade them otherwise, and the culture around D&D in fact mostly does the opposite. quote:reskinning 5e's place as a response to 4e makes it extremely unfriendly to reskinning. After all, that'd be "cheating." That simply isn't always a viable answer to a problem.
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Mar 16, 2019 03:55
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You should roll when there is the possibility for an interesting failure, a possibility for an interesting success, and the party would gain something obviously useful to their quest from the success. All three. If you don't have all three, don't ask them to roll. The problem that happens is that groups start way too far in the "roll for loving everything" category, and then just swing right the gently caress into "never roll for anything" category, because D&D refuses to teach any of this. So you start off having to roll because you were trying to chat up a cute NPC for flavor reasons, which sucks because now only the designated "face" character is allowed to be friendly, and then goes way too far in the other direction where you just "roleplay" out everything and your shy players get left in the dust.
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Mar 18, 2019 11:11
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Kung Food posted:And really, how many "Face" players actually sacrifice for the sake of social interactions instead of they just happen to play a class where cha is their main stat so guess I'm face now. I wonder more the reverse - how many players feel they have to play as the "face" character simply because they want to be social in-game and except to be mechanically punished for it if they don't specialize in it? How many players have sighed and gone on to not play as a fighter or a barbarian or what have you, that they WANTED to play as, all because they expect it mandatory to be the high charisma player if they want to be friendly and/or flirty with NPCs?
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Mar 18, 2019 11:17
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For what it's worth, 4e had an Epic Destiny, the Legendary Thief, that gained a passive stealth score. And yep, so long as you chose, you were just passively invisible to anyone who couldn't beat it.
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Mar 19, 2019 08:39
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Passive ________ skills are a legalistic solution to a legalistic problem that never needed to exist in the first place. It's an incredibly dumb rule based entirely around "we much never, ever give the players advice on when to and when not to roll." How about instead of long convoluted "take 10" rules you just actually try to teach DMs not to make players roll for loving everything?
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Mar 19, 2019 13:22
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Do you all just loving stare at the player who's been asked how they do things or what. How the gently caress is your group and/or GM not throwing out some examples of stuff they could do. "I wanna convince the guard to let us through." "Ok, how do you wanna do that?" *pause* "Do you wanna try to bribe him, convince him you're his bud, threaten him...?" This entire conversation is the most pathetic thing imaginable.
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Mar 20, 2019 04:37
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evol262 posted:Fortunately, there's only one hard and fast rule in D&D, which is that the DM is god." 
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Mar 20, 2019 05:52
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Sounds like your DM is a tool.
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Mar 23, 2019 20:26
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