|
Toshimo posted:Why even have all that duration nonsense? 5 rounds is effectively forever, already. Because if you don't give it an explicit end time someone will argue that it lasts literally forever and make it an ancient curse or something.
|
#
¿
Dec 23, 2018 04:10
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 06:36 |
|
|
Nehru the Damaja posted:Yeah, I feel like there's a pretty universal agreement among DMs though to the effect of "gently caress it, you get a Haversack or a Bag of Holding. I don't want to have to track this poo poo." And for some reason, this doesn't hurt Muscles Malone's feelings the way removing traps makes your Resident Thieves Tools Expert feel unwanted. I think, classically speaking, this can be traced back to encumbrance being dumb as hell. Nobody sets out to build a hero whose cool gimmick is 'I can carry a lot of stuff', and worrying if your dude in heavy armor can carry it, his weapon, and some food without keeling over is lame.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 25, 2018 01:35
|
|
|
Infinite Karma posted:Carrying a backpack with dungeoneering tools, rope, tents, ladders, etc. makes complete logical sense for adventurers, because they have no idea what they'll run into, but it also makes terrible thematic sense, because Hercules isn't going to fight while carrying a giant camping pack on his back no matter how strong he is. And nobody imagines their character with weapons and armor and spell flourishes, with 100lb of bulky gear towering over him all day every day. I mean, it's not all that far off what a modern soldier carries, weight wise. A modern infantryman is often hauling 70-100lbs of poo poo into a fight.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 25, 2018 03:51
|
|
|
Sage Genesis posted:Kender and Gully Dwarves, though. People who want to play kender need to be fired into the sun. That is all.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2019 08:11
|
|
|
Subjunctive posted:I’ve never used or encountered mind flayers in my previous playing or DMing of D&D. I just read the stat block, and while I don’t like control loss, my assumption is that the people who have intensively studied this game while developing it assigned the CR appropriately. (Certainly by now there would be errata if something were way off.) To discover that a pair of mind flayers could slaughter a level 12 party, rather than being a way to warm up and flex like a pair of tyrannosaurs would be, would be both distressing and embarrassing as a DM. That is never a good assumption. The general takeaway is that mind flayers are a 'gently caress you' monster from back in the day that is drastically under-cr if encountered cold, on the asumption that players should have the metagame knowledge of how they work to trivialize them.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2019 10:48
|
|
|
MonsterEnvy posted:I am not trying to change your minds about it, I already said you guys won't agree with me. LIke it's a fundamental difference in a opinions and playstyle, most of you guys seem to be very cautious and risk averse in games. The idea of characters being disabled or killed seems to be a negative mark for a lot of you. Risk averse? Nah. Grown rear end adults with limited free time who don't need to spend it bored because our buddy the GM picked a monster that specifically has 'go get pizza' effect durations.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2019 15:39
|
|
|
I don't mean to be dismissive, but do you honestly not see the difference between failing at what is attempted and being unable to act at all?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2019 16:14
|
|
|
koreban posted:One of the most memorable sections of the Drizzt trilogy is him being captured by mind flayers and having to work out an escape. Like, this is in the zeitgeist of D&D. I don't know how to explain to you the difference between what is good storytelling in a novel, and what is engaging in gameplay. The Drizzt captivity would be boring as hell and bad if we had to play it round by round, too. Mind Flayers are fine to have in the game. Taking players out of the game for more than a couple rounds with a single high-probability ability isn't. This is why Maze was such a pain in AD&D. quote:
Taking the Fighter out for 10 minutes was no fun but good tactics. The D20 version is 10 minutes, with a DC20 Int check every round to break free.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2019 07:05
|
|
|
Generally, one round of combat is fine, although a 75% hit rate AOE that does that would be a powerful ability on its own. Making that last multiple rounds is, given a failure of a surprise roll, a 75% chance of a one shot party wipe. That's worse than the OSR stuff people bitch about being meatgrinders for the sake of meatgrinders. Honestly, my 'fix' for it would simply be to make the AOE deal non-lethal psionic damage. Fits the purpose on the monster of letting them subdue targets to brainmunch while still letting players use the established mechanics for dealing with damage to interact with the results of the attack. Easy peasy.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2019 10:28
|
|
|
No Luck Needed posted:I am more thinking 1d2+1 tarrasques. I am a big fan of reskinning monsters. I think the tarrasques are going to be children of dagon, chtulu, or asmodeus or what not. I think they are going to be underwater encased in giant eggs but being underwater these eggs would be covered in coral, plant life, and home to fish so might not be that obvious. Originally there would of be four eggs but a few of them are broken; whatever the parentage, the tarrasques were being created to be world destroyers and the remaining ones were never unleashed. So the players do a thing and unleash the tarrasques, each going separate directions with the players have to corral the monsters into fighting each other big kaiju monster style. Hope the players can make sure all the tarrasques finish each other off or are able to deliver the killing blows so the monsters do not destroy civilization. Angels. Players are never ready to have inherently Good things try to roll them, and there's a lot of fun to be had with either 'Good does not mean Nice' or 'Lawful Good when applied fully is indistinguishable from Lawful Evil'.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2019 16:21
|
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted: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. It's mostly terrible lovely design, part GM incompetence to look at that statline and not go 'woah, this save is pretty high for a multi-target one-shot ability with that much duration...' Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:An ability that halves the parties actions per turn would be much more fair if it just gave her two turns for the party's one instead of some people getting hosed. Psionic nonleathal damage. It's right there, has the same general effect, but is way easier to work with and recover from.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2019 09:51
|
|
|
Just a note, unless that wall is a dome or anchored to a ceiling, there's no reason a targeted spell with sufficient range to make the jink can't hit someone behind it. Combat is in a 3 dimensional battlefield, not 2. Hitting people with Magic Missile around corners or using Flamestrike on people behind walls of force since it specifically comes from above, not from the caster, is the oldest of old school. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 11:57 on Jan 12, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2019 11:55
|
|
|
CJ posted:What do you all think of adding a humanity system to 5E? I watched Made in Abyss recently and replayed Dark Souls and i really like the feeling of adventuring wearing down your soul. After thinking about it a bit i think it would also help mechanically as well. The setting would be sort of like a fantasy version of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., where there was some great cataclysm that flooded the world with demonic energy making everywhere outside of cities hazardous. That is a terrible idea in a game which is by nature purely a dungeoncrawler. Seriously, mechanics that punish players for playing the game as intended are bad.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2019 06:13
|
|
|
I wonder how much of that is a reaction to how absurdly you could abuse summoning in 3.5. Druids got real crazy.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2019 06:36
|
|
|
Infinite Karma posted:Encounter building is busted as hell RAW anyway. So build encounters assuming the players will always be fresh and at 80-90% power. That usually means just putting in more enemies. Design them to be fun combat challenges in their own right (and interesting stories), and don't play the resource minigame. Let them rest when they want and can justify it. Discourage them from taking long rests at the beginning of the day however you want, it's an inherent weakness of the system. I always draw a line between dungeons and encounters when planning a session. Dungeons are meant to be a series of encounters under time pressure with decreasing available resources. Regular encounters can be built assuming full character power will be mostly regained between them. That way everyone gets to use their One Big Thing fairly often which makes them feel good, and the times when they can't just rest real quick make for stronger tension.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2019 10:07
|
|
|
kingcom posted:Its got uhh issues. One of the biggest is that its built from a pathfinder conversion and it means there is a very large number of levels of nothing before mechanics show up and even then there are some real problems with the class going forward if you're a little unlucky. Gunslinger is Real Bad in PF as well, because their implementation of guns is terrible.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2019 12:47
|
|
|
Toshimo posted:Use folded index cards to represent the players/monsters for turn order. Put critical stats on the back so you can see them (AC/DC/PP). If you have space, go one better and get a magnetic whiteboard, and some cheap magnets you can layer with PC names, then just slap down in order as people roll initiative up. My old GM always kept one of these standing in the corner of the table, and it really helped speed combat along by letting the party know who was going when.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2019 12:16
|
|
|
kazr posted:This + dry erase markers have been invaluable to my game. I use dice to represent enemies https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0015IQO2O/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_tLlsCbN9RDEMA Chessex maps are the gold standard. I always used them for any D&D after 2e because it was so built around 5' squares.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2019 06:54
|
|
|
DrSunshine posted:The distance limitation is so that the player isn't just like, so what if I bury my phylactery in a deep hole somewhere and now I'm safe forever? The proficiency is a nice perk. I like that suggestion, that's a good suggestion! I personally thought about maybe a wisdom bonus reflecting a long life of experience. How about giving the phylactery itself as many saving throws as you get? So effectively you get double the saving throws, but split it among your controlled body and your phylactery? I mean that is, in fact, the purpose of a phylactery. I would probably remove the distance limitation, but if you wanted to keep it interesting, make it so that the phylactery has to be the target of any beneficial spells or effects, rather than the body they are animating. That way they have a reason to keep it nearby.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 26, 2019 07:48
|
|
|
inthesto posted:Speaking of "not all thieves are rogues", what are some characters who have "rogue" written on their character sheet but aren't criminals of any kind? The classic dungeoneering rogue doesn't need to be a thief. They're treasure hunters, and adventuring is a respectable-ish profession.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2019 08:18
|
|
|
Froghammer posted:That's what I've gathered. Blood Hunter scratches the "Use HP as a resource to deal damage to enemies" itch that's everywhere in video games but DnD is super hesitant to touch for whatever reason, and it's generic enough to cover any sort of dark knight / deranged monster hunter / martial-oriented forbidden magic boy. D&D is hesitant to touch it because it becomes a pain in the rear end for the rest of the party rather than a resource management issue for the player using it. That style of character turns into an incredibly action inefficient method of turning the party healer's spell slots into damage. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Dec 31, 2019 |
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2019 03:31
|
|
|
Madmarker posted:How many encounters did they have beforehand? If that was the first or second fight of the day and everyone was nice and stacked with spell slots and hp, the party will punch way above its weight. You should really be aiming for 3-6 combat encounters per long rest. Yeah, this is the biggest thing about D&D scaling. If you let your party go into every encounter rested, they are going to go top-down on it and lay it to waste.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2020 08:55
|
|
|
Glazius posted:I wasn't being metaphorical. Players can't make the sun rise. The Earth rotates on its own until the part of the Earth the players are on is exposed to the sun again. Human intervention cannot achieve this. It is not possible. Controlling risk in line with what their resources can tolerate, isn't it? I mean that's the central tension of all D&D combat.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2020 10:16
|
|
|
Declan MacManus posted:i would ask them what kind of character they want to play; if they don’t know, fighter is fine, but pretty much any martial at level 2 is going to be simple enough in terms of what they can do that it shouldn’t be too much for a new player to learn I go the opposite way on this. Giving people Fighters as a newbie class is doing them a huge disservice because fighters have the smallest suite of ways to interact with the game mechanically and the least solutions to problems that aren't a monster to be stabbed. Fighter is a class for people who want to engage heavily with the combat mechanics, and is best played by people who already know they find that their main locus of fun in playing. My go-to starter for people is Cleric. They have a good selection of magic and decent martial abilities to back it up, and have a built in spot in the team dynamic.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2020 13:17
|
|
|
That's been pretty much the answer to high-end monsters since AD&D. They are generally meat tanks with good resistances, so save or lose is pretty much the option. Another part of why there's such a late game power issue between classes, because martials don't get save or die abilities.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2020 16:34
|
|
|
mind the walrus posted:Saw this on the mostly-garbage /r/dndmemes today and ngl... I felt it: Not going to lie here, you sound like you'd be terrible to play with. Let people have fun. The goal of a GM isn't to make players sit though their Song of Ice And Fire knockoff, and there's nothing collaborative about telling your players they shouldn't bring their ideas to your game.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2020 21:41
|
|
|
Taciturn Tactician posted:I feel like you and I have vast gulfs in our perception of a "new player". To me, a new player is someone like how I was when I was first introduced to the game: they don't own any of the books, they've heard of D&D because of course they have but they've never done any tabletop before, and the challenge is getting them to the table and convincing them that doing all this paperwork to roll dice is actually going to result in a good time. If you start them as cleric, you are either half building their character for them, or you're giving them the massive assignment of "hey before you have any fun, can you go ahead and pick from this big list of subclasses that you have no idea about and read up on twenty two spells on top of all the poo poo already involved in making a character and us teaching you how rolling a dice to attack people works?" I can't think of a faster way to unsell someone on this hobby than frontloading all this poo poo. Even if you pick spells for them you're still going to have to explain a subset of them. Meanwhile, if you stick to martials, you basically just ask if they wanna be a dude in armour, a shirtless guy with a big axe, a kung fu fighter, or a sneaky guy, and then you completely ignore spellcasting and about the most complicated list of things for them to look over is what fighting style they want as fighter, and you defer subclass stuff until you've already had a few sessions and sold them on the idea. If they decide after a few sessions, actually, spellcasting looks really cool, conveniently wizards has given fighter a subclass where they can start doing that. Bit disingenuous there, aren't we? Starting a new cleric, even at level three is 'so what kind of belief do you want your character to have' followed by 'glance over this list of spells and pick a couple to know'. You don't have to gently caress about with subclasses and the like, it's a new player's first character, they're not spreadsheeting out a min/max 20 level build for it and there's no reason that you as the DM can't let them change it later if they don't like how it rolls.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2020 03:32
|
|
|
Baller Ina posted:Clerics get their entire spell list, not "a couple to know". Show a new player a list of 15+ spells and say "what do you want to cast today" and I feel like they'll be a bit overwhelmed. I think Artificer might be a good choice for a new player- in combat prowess mixed with a limited spell list, which you can curate for your new player. That's the point. They can change it up at any remem, so the only pressure is 'pick a couple you want to be able to do at the start of the game', with zero pressure for it to be a long-term decision since the character's a good night's sleep away from a new spell list if this one sucks for the player.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2020 15:27
|
|
|
A very high skill ceiling is a really good way to put it.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2020 17:30
|
|
|
Azza Bamboo posted:I hate to sound like a weirdo here but if the players can't find the trap door needed to advance to the next part of the dungeon, then does it need to be a trap door? At some point the players will try something that maybe makes sense and as the GM you can have it just work and then lead where the trap door would have gone. Turning the failures into a running joke can be great as well. In my PF game our party are known amongst themselves as the 'doorlords', because somehow in 13 levels we have never once successfully unlocked a door. To the point that now our fighter has an adamantine axe for the specific purpose of door removal.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 3, 2020 08:33
|
|
|
Tenik posted:The secret is planning a quarter of what you think you need, improvising most of it mid-session, and letting players take care of the rest The clever GM's secret is to remember that it takes five minutes to reskin an encounter. Present your players with false choices, so they feel they have narrative control, but either way you're using the fight you mechanically prepped for and just swapping out NPC flavors and set dressing. Also, I rather like the gods being objectively real in Faerun because they're also not omnipotent or omniscient. The religious argument isn't the unprovable 'is God real' question, it instead hinges on if the gods are worthy of worship.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2021 14:33
|
|
|
Leperflesh posted:haha, a sheet of glass, this one weird trick that wizards hate! And that's why Resilient Sphere is the god-spell, and has a specifically called-out in the rules ability to be targeted by Disintegrate.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2021 01:56
|
|
|
Rutibex posted:If a natural 1 or a natural 20 gets rolled something interesting is going to happen. It is the will of Savras. But what if, and brace yourself here, something intesting happened every time dice got rolled in the first place?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2021 03:23
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 06:36 |
|
|
Mr. Lobe posted:DnD literally started out as a war game called Chainmail. Every other social and storytelling element that has been grafted onto that foundation hasn't changed its fundamental character. If you want a tabletop game oriented around things that aren't killing dudes, I recommend selecting something built from the ground up for that purpose. Frankly, DnD is anywhere from mediocre to awful at everything but its core, which is combat. Even the combat isn't stellar sometimes because it still suffers from... being designed as a war game. You know, one where your wizards are special solo units power equivalent to ranks of fighters.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 18, 2021 13:41
|
|