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Section Z posted:Poisoned status is insane in 5th edition, so be mindful of it as something to throw at the players. It's disadvantage on attack rolls and ability checks (Which won't hinder your Vs Save casting While we're on this topic... -exhaustion is batshit insane and will automatically kill you at 6 stacks. To my knowledge, there are no effects available to players to inflict exhaustion stacks on an enemy but there might be some monster attack buried somewhere -intellect devourers can just arbitrarily kill you on contact if you're not a wizard/don't have a high int -banshees get an actual AoE save or die at CR 4 I'm wondering if there shouldn't be a list of newb trap monsters in the OP that hit far above their weight class/have horrific abilities newbie DMs might want to avoid, thoughts?
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Dec 22, 2018 21:26
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). I expect this as much as anything is why straight up "Poisoned" as a status is single digits super loving rare as far as I can recall.
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You really can't win with Fighters. Fighters started out as the class that you had to take if you didn't roll high enough to be a paladin or a ranger, classes that were basically Fighter++. Sure, they got a bunch of stuff to kill dudes harder, but even if we rolled a bunch of maneuvers out a la spells that fighters could take to kill things (Tome of Battle, 4e) there's still the problem that you need something for the class to do out of combat. Now, you can point to various mythological heroes like Beowulf, Achilles, and Gilgamesh, but those guys aren't really D&D fighters because those guys are kings and lords with education and political powers (also divine blood in some cases as well). You either need to: -Drop the fighter, replace it with a Lord class, and give him a bunch of abilities around being rich and inspiring people in addition to his combat abilities (the result of long, arduous training). These guys all have swords and plate armor anyway, those aren't cheap and the sword is a badge of office as well as a weapon. -Say gently caress it and give the fighter magic abilities as he levels up. This will piss off the people who want to be like, totally mundane all the time and don't want to use nerdy magic garbage. -Similarly to 2, tell people they're not allowed to just be fighters after level 5 or so and make them become Death Knights or Demigods. People get very angry when this is suggested. -Kill the rogue class and give his stuff to the fighter. Tell people if they want to be a knight that they can just not take stealth skills and put it in heraldry and diplomacy instead. There is no possible way to balance "a man with a sword and no other useful skills" against "a man who can stop time". There just isn't. That character concept is not going to be useful at all when the opposition consists of flying dragons who can strafe you with fire breath. The fighter needs to be given some kind of usefulness outside of this (archery skills, actual non-combat usefulness).
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Dec 27, 2018 05:59
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Ryuujin posted:Why are those heroes not D&D Fighters? If you say it is because of divine blood, or other gifts beyond the norm. Then what about Wizards and other magic users? In the same stories where these legendary warriors come from pretty much all serious spellcasters have divine/demonic blood or some other gift that sets them above the norm. And D&D doesn't have any trouble giving spellcasters these abilities beyond the norm. Heck D&D Wizards put most magic users from myth, legend, and the suggested reading list to outright shame. Gandalf was basically an angel, and had low level Druidic magic at best. Merlin generally didn't pull off the kind of stuff D&D Wizards can do, and he was part demon and possibly aged backwards. That's my point. Look at what Hercules did (diverting a river) and look at what D&D fighters can do (hit things with a sword harder, but not enough to impress the necromancer and his endless legions). Hell, look at Beowulf - he is hardcore enough to swim underwater and fight demons in hand to hand combat, while also being a wise and educated man who can run a kingdom. A D&D fighter cannot do the latter, because he is busily lowering his intelligence to stay on par with the expected strength score. Your second paragraph pre-empts what I am going to say, which is that Mearls would have you believe that getting an extra sword stab per round is the equivalent of creating a duplicate of you that can throw out your entire spell complement. You could easily go through a bunch of myths and legends of warriors doing crazy poo poo, come up with a "spell list" (give it some nonmagical name, I don't care) and put that on par with a D&D mage. Mearls is not going to do that because he is literally advertising this edition as being for you to fix because he's too lazy to do his job and balance the game. Have fun!
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Dec 28, 2018 00:26
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ProfessorCirno posted: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. Just give them the auto-successes, honestly. Otherwise you still have the thing where the fighter can't make the DC 50 jump check but the mage casts fly, plus you can give them actual high level abilities too.
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Dec 28, 2018 07:31
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That prevents the table full of wizards from stabbing each other over the headbands of intellect, so I'm OK with this?
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Dec 29, 2018 02:16
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Why is the monster design in this edition so awful? Everything has too drat many hit points and it feels like enemies have better attacks than characters get. Is there something I am missing?
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Apr 1, 2019 01:56
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Baller Ina posted:I'm making a Lore Bard and I'm going to take Fly and Haste for my secret spells Animate dead solves literally everything in 5e by throwing enough dice at it.
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Apr 15, 2019 17:36
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Cuntellectual posted:I don't know much about 5e, but I'm going to try playing in a game with some friends who are. I'm somewhat familiar with 3.5. You are a necromancer. You raise an army of the dead and trivially own everyth - ow, ow, fine! Fighter isn't bad. The best dps build seems to be archery. You are a variant human*, and take the sharpshooter feat. You grab the archery combat style and go battle master, because champion is a trap and EK is better for melee guys. You take maneuvers that grant advantage or a hit bonus and use that to compensate for sharpshooter, then you roam the land, dunking on fools with high ranged DPS. If you're doing melee fighter I recommend something similar to the halberd build below, with the caveat that you can grab sentinel and actually tank things. *as far as I can tell there is no reason to play anything else, ever.
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Apr 26, 2019 21:55
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Can't you use fighter action surge for real doublecasting?
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Apr 29, 2019 00:35
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Zak S is just the perfect mixture of incompetence and assholishness. I haven't seen a gaming forum that hasn't run him out.
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Apr 30, 2019 21:11
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Infinity Gaia posted:At level 1 sleep is actually kinda OP. It does become terrible very quickly, but you can just switch it out then. Be careful in AL. Things can get far too much HP if you're the lone level 1 in a party of level 4s.
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May 1, 2019 17:48
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Gharbad the Weak posted:Point buy was lowered in 5e, probably to encourage the Real D&D Experience. The idiotic 5e counterpart to this is that some characters aren't playable until you roll well enough. If you want to play an elf with a great sword you're better off rolling to go for a 16 then being saddled with a 15 str. I personally despise rolling for stats for the reasons outlined earlier in the thread, but 5e's point buy (like much of its rules) is a garbage fire.
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May 19, 2019 15:56
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Lid posted:https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-coventry-warwickshire-48483746 Reprehensible. How was he not beaten?
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Jun 3, 2019 12:45
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He sounds like an angry, bitter isolated man. None of those things came up with those groups at all.
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Jun 3, 2019 15:58
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And our dreams of competent game design are forever crushed.
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Jun 3, 2019 19:41
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Baker is fine. Wyatt is responsible for some dumb poo poo. Wyatt did 3.5 Book of Exalted Deeds.
TheGreatEvilKing fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Jun 4, 2019 |
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Jun 3, 2019 23:56
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10 bucks says that guy is trying to get an extra concentration slot on the owl.
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Jun 5, 2019 04:31
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Pathfinder 2e takes the worst parts of 4e, combines them with the worst of Pathfinder, and unifies them into a great turd log.
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Jun 6, 2019 13:38
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I don't know why people keep following Crawford tweets because the official D&D crew has never had a good grasp on the rules. Remember Skip Williams and Not Reading The 3e Books? I remember. Not sure if there was a 4e Sage Advice variant reknowned for inaccuracy, but D&D rules tweets/clarifications have a long and official history of being incoherent.
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Jun 9, 2019 19:01
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The 4e errata was easily one of the worst things about the edition. I remember them desperately rewriting everything except orbizard for about a year, then ignoring playtest feedback on barbarian multiattacks. Power creep cost money. Pointless nerfs were free.
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Jun 10, 2019 17:26
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Hey all, I'm a relative D&D newbie -- played some 3.5 like 15 years ago and then relatively recently joined a group of other mostly-newbies in a friend's campaign. I'm playing wizard, and could use some advice on my spell picks because I have chosen some stinkers. I mean, I don't think my character is bad necessarily, but he could be better. My goal was to make a "gently caress with the bad guys" caster, who helps everyone else do their jobs better moreso than deals direct damage themselves. Unfortunately 5e makes that sufficiently not-straightforward, especially early on when we're fighting miscellaneous animals and zombies, that newbie me wasn't really able to figure out how to accomplish that. I took Charm Person and Disguise Self at L1 and we've yet to meet an NPC we would want to manipulate rather than either talk to as an ally or kill. Look into Suggestion as well, it completely incapacitates a target if they fail one save. That's generally what you want to focus on as a control wizard. Hypnotic Pattern and Fear are good, fireball is overrated with Mike Mearls' vile lust for HP inflation, and if you really want to do damage stop loving around with bad spells and grab animate dead.* You also want the ability to hit as many saves as possible, so grab int and cha spells even if they aren't outright save or dies. How creative are you at arguing with your dm over the image spells? *Seriously, monster hp are all over the place. Looking up math for average hp per cr indicates that cr 2 monsters have 49.11 on average (https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/2nn6ld/the_monster_quick_stats_by_cr_table/) and a fireball does 28 on average. You can waste a turn on fireball and still have all the monsters trash the monk, or cast hypnotic pattern and reduce incoming damage.
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Jun 17, 2019 16:11
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Awful, and the DM is also very rigid in interpretation of the rules. He doesn't like making judgement calls. We've talked about this a few times, but I don't really want to get into rules fights so it's easier to just stick to spells that have clear game-mechanic effects. If I ever get the School of Illusion capstone, then illusions will become a lot more useful as they'll be real (at least in part), but that's a long ways in the future, if ever. You might want to ask your dm to switch schools. Illusion has been "argue with your DM" in almost every edition (even 4e had some of this) and you're not going to have much fun as an illusionist. Diviner is really strong, as is necromancer (though necromancers should be handled with care).
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Jun 18, 2019 01:52
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I have no idea why people keep trying to shoehorn in "mundane" characters into a high fantasy narrative when half of the legends of these guys give them supernatural powers anyway. Aragorn is a ranger who can heal people because he's the rightful king appointed by God, Beowulf has superhuman strength and can fight underwater for arbitrarily long amounts of time, Conan is not an especially high level character and requires divine intervention to fight sorcerers in open combat. Achilles is literally invulnerable, Hercules is the son of Zeus, etc. People like to pretend their heavily armored warriors are hard working heroes unlike those stupid magic jerks, but the dirty secret is that having armor, weapons, and military training in that time period means your superpower is being rich instead of smart. Don't get me wrong, you should be able to play Lancelot in a fantasy game, but a lot of these mythological heroes are anything but mundane.
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Jun 20, 2019 22:47
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I'm not the person saying that other people's fun is stupid and lovely. Did it occur to you that other people's fun can, in fact, be stupid and lovely, and "but it's fun" is not a defense? I suppose it could be fun to play Shopping Cart Hero in real life, but it's a stupid thing to do.
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Jul 15, 2019 07:39
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Just grab animate dead, best spell in the game.
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Sep 5, 2019 01:36
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The wheel turns, and the edition wars continue. Seriously half the 5e haters usually start whining about how 4e did X better, so I'm confident that whenever we get 6e MonsterEnvy or whoever will lead the charge against whatever new mechanics abomination Mike Mearls puts out.
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Sep 14, 2019 23:38
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Kaysette posted:This page has been a good conversation until this shitpost This is what I get for not realizing all the "5e masters HATE it" discussion is on the previous page.
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Sep 14, 2019 23:50
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theironjef posted:You've got this like almost completely right, though I'd say the whole "It's truthful that I may know the answer to this" type stuff is basically a squishy ban instead of a real one. Players are likely to prefer an actual ban, since then they don't feel like they wasted their resources. Plus the last thing you want to do is get your players going on crafting weasel-proof syntax, that's boring in the main. I wouldn't say it's a waste, you know every word is true. That's certainly better than wasting time investigating outright lies. It's a tool, not an out of the box solution.
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Sep 15, 2019 21:10
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Gonna echo the rest of the thread here, but when one of your characters has a hotline to Jesus and can ask him for help maybe don't expect "who knifed the abusive husband" to be a plot the players take seriously.
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Sep 16, 2019 15:40
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3e is weird because the designers just blatantly assumed that everyone was familiar with the 2e paradigm and no one would ever deviate from it. I love the edition to death, but most of its glaring problems stem from the fact that if you don't play blaster wizard or healbot cleric the game looks rather different, and God help the unprepared who run into a pit fiend who spans mass hold monster on the wing rather than sticking around to melee the fighter, rogue, and cleric. Thus I can't tell if the 3e designers assumed everyone knew what to do or just knew they were unqualified to give advice.
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Sep 16, 2019 19:51
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Arivia posted:Part of the problem was that 3e was also a moving target. 3.0 is a bunch of inherited gameplay from 2e, assuming everyone was playing the game that way. By the time 3.5 came out, Wizards knew they weren’t playing it that way any more, and so the rules changed. In particular 3.0 still has the necessary components for a dungeon crawl - it talks about encounter distances and random monsters and dungeon design - and 3.5 instead leans hard on set piece dungeon design. The audience for 3.0 is very different than the one for 3.5. They really didn't. The druid got buffed in 3.5 despite being probably the best class in the core book (thanks, Ed Stark!). They didn't do anything to make fighters able to stand toe to toe with hydras and giants, and actually nerfed a lot of warrior prestige classes in the 3.5 rereleases in Complete Warrior. Monks didn't get fixed, etc. Look at any 3.5 book that gives character building advice, it is almost always wrong. I'm also convinced that the ivory tower game design is ipso facto rationalization given that none of the sample NPCs look anything like what people actually played. But going back to the original point, it's no wonder 5e collapses out of combat because no one has been able to define what a social challenge looks like mechanically, and we can argue about this all we want, but ultimately the root cause is that for the last 3 editions the designers did not understand their own game.
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Sep 16, 2019 22:47
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BattleMaster posted:edit: I'm often pretty harsh toward 5E but that's because it's frustrating; I think there are a bunch of good core ideas in the edition but the design team wasn't quite skilled enough to pull it off (not to mention the whole vibe of "no you shut the gently caress up dad" about lessons learned from 4E) and doesn't understand their own system well enough to pull off a good 5.5E. I don't know why you would think this. The core idea of 5e is that Mearls and co aren't going to write rules because that's hard, so they're going to offload the actual rules writing onto the DM and mutter some poo poo about DM empowerment. I present to you the skill system, which doesn't function at all. Literally every idea 5e has presented has been bad, like ability scores as saves, feats OR asi, or how bounded accuracy just encourages you to hire peasant archers. Blockhouse posted:I know they've said they're hesitant to go back and redo stuff like Ranger or add spells to Sorcerer origins because it's "hard" to change stuff in books that are already out which I can understand to an extent but also maybe you guys should be putting out real actual digital copies of your game because it's 20fucking19 This is 100% an overreaction to 4e's fountain of errata fiasco. I don't want to go too deep into this, but the constant loving errata nerfing unimportant poo poo and ignoring orbizards (while the feat taxes to keep your character on par cost actual money) was widely despised. 5e is Mearls and co realizing they can't write game mechanics, but none of them are qualified to work real jobs either. It's the RPG equivalent of that Wheel of Time pilot where those guys desperately wanted to just sit on the license.
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Sep 18, 2019 01:06
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Anybody actually use UA? I just remember dismissing it as Mearls' bad lunch break articles and stopped after seeing loving prestige classes coming back.
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Oct 5, 2019 04:29
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The monk goes down when someone readies a grab and the rest of the monsters dogpile them. One of these days D&D will come up with a useful vision for the monk. Today is not that day.
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Oct 6, 2019 20:29
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The problem with all the out of combat stuff is that, despite exploration and social interaction being one of the three pillars of the game, there are no rules except for spells that have defined effects, and in the land of arguing with the DM the defined rule is king. If there was a social interaction system besides someone rolling high vaguely on a social skill and that maybe causing good things to happen, rogues and fighters could possibly interact with it and get actual results. If someone managed to make exploration actually interesting via some kind of system, rangers and barbarians could interact with that with actually defined abilities. Instead the entirety of both systems are "argue with your DM that you can use the big numbers on your character sheet, then argue that the number you rolled is sufficiently big for something to happen." If I have to deal with this "subsystem" to get from Happy Town to the Lair of the Evildoers, but my character knows Teleport and can just...teleport to the Lair of the Evildoers, guess which is better? Ultimately the problem will never be fixed until two things happen: -Actual rules for social encounters and common exploration challenges need to be written, and nonmagical characters need to be given abilities that interact with this. This can even come in the form of binary abilities, such as automatically tracking critters/enemies in the wilderness (which is good for DMs because you can advance the plot and let the PCs follow the slavers), telling super lies that everyone believes, whatever. -The classes either need to come with out of combat schticks assigned or there needs to be some kind of opt-in abilities that let you do things out out of combat like let people social good or perform divinations or whatever. I personally prefer the former as you can make classes thematic, but arguing that a fighter should have fewer social abilities because he's good in combat is just an encouragement for fighter players to go play Smash Bros instead of participating in the encounter where the party needs to convince the Duke to lend money or whatever.
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Nov 18, 2019 09:58
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Narsham posted:The problems are three-fold, as I see it: If you are going to just Magical Tea Party social interactions then...don't give them any rules, period. No bluff scores, no persuasion, nothing. Get all the numbers out of the system, take Charisma out of the game and run mages off intelligence, kill Charm spells, etc. You can't simultaneously claim social encounters are a pillar of the game and then not actually build that pillar. That said, I agree with your points about a rule set and will add the caveat that I can't see the current D&D design team writing something that wasn't awful.
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Nov 18, 2019 18:48
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Midig posted:Guys. How can I make a feud between dwarvish clans an interesting aspects for PCs to enjoy without massive dice roll combat or having them talk and talk and talk and talk. Maybe one of the clans goes rogue/dishonorable and makes an ambush attack in a diplomatic meeting along with vicious creatures and magic that kills many of them. Then they turn against that clan, but to their suprise they have allied themselves with a dragon, hill giants and other creatures? The clan war is mostly ritualized at this point because it's been 200 years or some stupidly long time frame. Instead of murdering each other in the streets, they end up doing extremely ritualized mock combat but refer to it as a serious war. The PCs can get hired as "mercs" for both sides to do a war dance and count coup for easy money, or if they really gently caress it up and actually attack a clan member dwarven society starts to break down as people wonder if they still need the feud and young hotheads want to escalate into a real fight.
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Nov 19, 2019 02:27
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What's new to talk about with 5e? I'm serious. There is no splatbook treadmill so we can't really talk about new classes, I have never seen a table let me use Unearthed Arcana (I know some of you guys have), the combat rules are pretty basic, no one is interested in coming up with spell combos because this causes a pile of whining about how the incoherent fighter class doesn't work, and you can't really plan gay tiefling drama hour because it's all improv and I tend to start rolling my eyes because I wanted to have a cool tactical fight against interesting opponents instead of slamming into thick bags of HP with no interesting abilities. Monsters? Half the conversation on monsters is how CR was calculated by grams of crack smoked, but I don't see anyone going "hey look at this cool demon dude, how can I use it to challenge my players?" They don't do anything interesting. You don't have stuff like you did in 3.5 where the pit fiend could grant wishes and then you could write a plot around how the king bartered his kingdom to marry the most beautiful woman in the world and now the PCs have to save it from devils. The Players Handbook and Xanathar's are 95% of the available player options and they've been solved. You either crowd control or you burst damage, and burst damage is awful in this edition because CR is fucky and everything has too much HP, so out comes the Hypnotic Pattern and then you focus fire enemies to death one at a time. The only mechanical discussion to be had is making fun of the lack of mechanics or discussing adventure paths, and you can't really do the latter without spoiling half the thread and making it real awkward if you have to play one. Is the Eberron book out yet? Is there enough crunch to analyze? Otherwise I could write some character guides or something if people are interested.
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Nov 19, 2019 02:41
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Where does the axe end, and skull begin?
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Nov 19, 2019 04:23
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So the first class guide is gonna be wizard unless someone has a request for a different class.
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Nov 19, 2019 15:56
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