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Shes Not Impressed posted:Right. I've always wondered why people couldn't throw a frost bolt as a cantrip if it's the same damage as a fire bolt. I think there is an optional rule, either in the DMG or some supplement liek Taldorei, where the DM can allow you to change the damage type when you learn the spell. The condition is that elemental damage has to stay in the same realm, so Fire Bolt can't become Psychic/Force Bolt.
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Aug 18, 2022 23:46
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The smart play is to use Tasha's races and ODND backgrounds so you can start with +4 +2 at level 1.
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Aug 19, 2022 03:41
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GHOST_BUTT posted:If you give them a keep or a manor house or something they'll excitedly work on finding just the right mason to touch up the stonework, dragons be damned. This was our situation with Ghosts of Saltmarsh and with Waterdeep: Dragonheist. Players having a bit of agency regarding their permanent base of operations really fills out the gaps where you aren't questing. It also gives people a change to meet NPCs they normally wouldn't and to use their earned coin on something other than buying new equipment. In Dragonheist, we spent multiple sessions doing theater of the mind interactions with guilds to make our manor just right and completely forgot about the overall story for a while.
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Aug 20, 2022 07:12
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VaultAggie posted:I have a question about Plant Growth. My character is carrying around a potted Cherry Blossom bonsai. If I cast plant growth on it, will it expand to cover the 100’ radius or will it just expand to cover one square and any other plants within that 100’ radius also expand to their square. Basically, does it create a 100’ radius of overgrown plants regardless of how many plants are there or does it just expand the ones that are there? Should be the latter. I would argue that dormant seeds or whatever can sprout new growth in areas tha currently don't have anything too help fill out the effect of the spell. Your singular tree will also get big, but not 100' radius big.
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Aug 21, 2022 16:21
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I'm just wrapping up an Out of the Abyss campaign where I played a HalfOrc Artificer Alchemist. Aside from having never triggered their melee crit racial skill, it played like any other caster. Since you sometimes get targeted in combat, the ability to not fall the first time you drop to 0 HP also saved us a few times. I used pre-Tasha's point buy and the stats worked out. Prob wouldn't have changed with Tasha's rules since I didn't have anything below 10 at level 1. Having thematically high CON is a great synergy for casters, esp for Artificers or Sorcerers who have proficiency in CON saves.
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Aug 31, 2022 15:26
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5E Monks are rad as gently caress and probably the most fun class to play. While their Hit Die and Unarmed Strike scaling could/should be tweaked, most of the complaints I hear come from folks who insist that Monks can only be played a certain way. You don't have to Stunning Strike everything you see. You don't have to take the Mobile feat. You don't have to compete with everyone for DPS, tanking, etc - find a role you enjoy (not casting, though) and stick with it. I'll agree that I'm really tired of seeing caster magic items in every new publication, but at least the recent Dragonhide Belt was a nice pat on the head for Monks.
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Sep 2, 2022 05:06
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Staltran posted:The problem is that there aren't really any roles monks are good at, other than maybe locking down a single enemy with low to mediocre AC and con saves. Stunning striking everything you see or taking mobile for hit and run are just attempts to squeeze blood from a stone. I would say that they do plenty of roles above average so you have versatility. High DEX means you're a good infiltrator. Evasion, Slow Fall, Diamond Soul, etc make you survivable in non-standard combat encounters. With some luck in your stat rolls, you can have decent AC at any level and can buff it with Patient Defense. My last Monk was the frontliner of our party. They were always able to get high initiative, engage in the first round, mitigate hits, and hold down key targets while the rest of the party did whatever. I haven't played another martial that was able to dependably do any of that without needing a shitton of magic items. Verisimilidude posted:While I agree with your sentiment I don’t think “make your own fun” is a great talking point The main point is that people keep trying to stuff Monks into a niche and then complain that they're inefficient when Monks are a super versatile class. The amount of times I have heard that Monks suck because you could always play a Fighter with GWM is... too many times.
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Sep 2, 2022 06:47
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RC Cola posted:I try to play a monk in everything because I like the concept. I love my monk, he's just so bad that the rest of the party complains constantly about how useless I am. No offense, but your party complaining about your inefficiencies makes them sound unbearable. So long as you didn't actively build or play them wrong on purpose, that is.
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Sep 2, 2022 15:38
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Cool kids get Bracers of Defense on their Wizards just so they don't have to cast Mage Armor daily.
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Sep 2, 2022 18:08
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The Expert sidekick is a good way to make up for one less player since they basically do the Help action every turn and can bring an exotic language proficiency. My Stahd campaign has one in the party and it absorbs some of their risk. I've made it clear that I have no qualms killing their helper to make a plot point work.
Zurreco fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Sep 6, 2022 |
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Sep 6, 2022 17:37
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Out of combat Help is only powerful in the way that Taking 20 auto-success is powerful. You can also limit it to be a flat bonus instead of advantage of they're relying on it too much.
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Sep 6, 2022 18:40
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Underwater sight is up to you. When we ran that dungeon, we had a murky water condition depending on the floor. Normal vision was 10 ft dim, dark was 10 bright 10 dim. Otherwise normal rules applied for simplicity. It's easier to just say that everyone is swimming regardless of their speed. If someone wants to try walking, require them to have med or heavy armor on to ensure they have enough traction.
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Sep 6, 2022 23:38
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Having run a few feat at level 1 campaigns, I would definitely suggest you disallow people from choosing "[X] Master" feats. The weapon ones make early combat too swingy and the armor ones make combat trivial. It also makes sense that a level 1 adventurer would not be a master of any specific skillset.
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Sep 7, 2022 17:15
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pog boyfriend posted:i dont think i understand this one. great weapon master maybe but like, i can not imagine 4 weapon proficiencies or 1 higher AC with 16 dexterity on medium armour breaking the game. same with the DR for heavy armour master - blocking 3 damage from all nonmagical sources is cool, but if you take 8 damage reduced to 5 at level 1 you are still in immediate danger. plus what if an enemy uses a spell? As I said, it's from experience mostly. We had a session 1 for Hoard of the Dragon Queen (where attrition is super important to the story) become irrelevant because the Paladin with Heavy Armor Master was tanking entire fights/traps and taking 0 damage. I've also seen level 1 GWM Barbarians absolutely murder higher CR encounters early game without any real tactics or good rolls involved. Eventually it is apparent that the feats which directly influence damage taken/received create imbalances that are absorbed at later levels. It's not often that you're running into CR <1 enemies that aren't doing bludgeoning/piercing/slashing.
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Sep 7, 2022 20:59
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Yeah, feats should never break balance but should totally shine on occasion. I took HAM as a late level half feat in Call from the Deep and my DM ran me through a trap that did 100 instances of d4 damage. I think I took like 18 points of damage after reductions.
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Sep 7, 2022 21:27
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Running a Circle of Blight Druid as a healer could be a lot of fun as well.
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Sep 10, 2022 20:10
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Grapples are underpowered so letting it happen more often is fine. RAW is vague so I run that you need a free hand (or comparable prehensile limb like Loxodon trunk) to initiate a grapple but not to maintain the grapple.
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Sep 11, 2022 04:08
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It's also easier to aim high and start slightly peeling back the OP stuff than it is to shoot to low and start spitballing buffs.
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Sep 13, 2022 15:53
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Honestly, the worst part of running (and playing) travel and exploration is balancing things that actually happen on a given day. If you want to streamline the process, set 3 times per day (morning, afternoon, night) that the players have to roll a d12. 9 gives warnings of nearby danger, 10 gives observation of threats but no encounter, 11 is a mild encounter (batch of creatures or traveling bandits), 12 is a dangerous encounter (large creature, people hunters, dangerous weather event). Every roll under 9 is a normal portion of travel, which admittedly most travel should be just walking. If the players roll low and ask to do something, let them. If the players do something stupid or risky, like blowing something up or starting a large fire at night, have them roll an additional d12. Once you have that laid out, just pick a number of days you want them to travel and have some setpiece obstacles to overcome, like fording a raging river, scaling a cliff, coming across a goblin raid, etc. I've also had DMs include rolling for weather, which is fine. It adds more stuff to do, but also means you have to wrap in impacts of good/bad weather into your encounters. Tomb of Annihilation does a great job with exploration and travel. The map is a hex grid with most of it uncharted for players, you have to roll to see if you know where you're going, and you have a list of potential encounters on a dice table depending on the biome you are in. You can also vary the speed that you travel, especially if you take the time to get other modes of transport, which modifies your ability to navigate and the amount of encounters you might see in a given day. If you need something to work off of, I would suggest pulling directly from that.
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Sep 22, 2022 18:14
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Bobby Deluxe posted:I've heard other people say having them effortlessly off an NPC the players already know is a higher level can also be effective. Are there any other good ways others know of signalling to players? Tread carefully, since this kinda takes agency away from players. I'm running Curse of Strahd right now and offed a recently met NPC to demonstrate the clear and present danger of the setting. The players absolutely did not like not being able to intervene (or at least attempt anything) in the process. Alternatively, either don't have the finality of death or make it an unliked NPC.
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Sep 23, 2022 00:10
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Dehydration
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Sep 23, 2022 06:57
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A simple solution is to make your PC a specialist from an enclave/group/whatever where people only did what was under their purview. That way, even if you the player know how to solve a problem, limit it only to how your character would rationalize it. You can acknowledge other characters' strengths while using humor to explain why your PC can't fix the problem. I once played a Monk that was a master carpenter like this, where his only approach to solving problems was fight, be blunt about the situation, or make something from wood. Otherwise, just talk with the DM about your concerns
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Sep 23, 2022 21:51
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PHB is probably the only thing you might need, but only to help aggregate all of the base rules in one place. If you are comfortable with the free starter rules info that is out there, everything else from the three base books should be easily found via searching roll20 or wikidot. If you are writing your own campaign or homebrew, just say it's "dnd5e adjacent" so you don't have to get it all correct until you're invested in a ruleset.
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Sep 26, 2022 05:16
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Shield only seems OP because 95% of the time it is being used to save a very squishy caster from a chonky hit. When that isn't the case, like a rat biting your level 3 Wizard or whatever, Shield looks like a very wasteful use of a spell slot. But that is just the best way to use the spell. You wouldn't see it otherwise. Same thing happens with people occasionally complaining about Divine Smites. Yeah, if your Paladin only uses them when fishing for crits against Fiends or whatever, it's gonna look wicked strong.
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Sep 27, 2022 22:20
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There is nothing more fun than having your party observe an insanely high roll result since it communicates that they are in a bad way. If you want to hide the final value of the roll, that seems needlessly cryptic. If you also don't even want to provide a range (at least 5 more than your AC) then you're just an adversarial DM.
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Sep 29, 2022 04:03
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"The demon rolls to attack. *rolls* What is your AC?" "My AC is currently 18." "The demon hits you." "Can I cast Shield to block the attack?" "You can cast Shield to find out." "I use my reaction to cast Shield!" "The demon still hits you. Please expend one spell slot." "What was the final value of the attack roll?" "That is only for the DM to know." There are so many opportunities to streamline the situation or mitigate impact to quality of play by simply saying "they rolled a 24" or "you feel that this attack would still land through Shield." Playing requires a certain level of trust between the DM and the players and if the DM is going to sit there and make you needlessly hinder yourself without any context, they are adversarial. I would absolutely quit that campaign at the end of the session and would advise anyone else to do so as well.
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Sep 29, 2022 17:06
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If you had a player who rolled attacks, then didn't relay the result and instead asked the DM for the AC of the target before stating that the attack landed, folks would immediately assume that the player was fudging their rolls to get to a predetermined result. Somehow the DM doing it in the other direction is totally ok, though.
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Sep 29, 2022 17:51
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Azathoth posted:Yeah, I don't see anything wrong with hidden DM rolls and unhidden player rolls, or even a DM doing some rolls hidden and some unhidden. If everyone's a stranger then folks should probably default to everything being public, but meh players should expect some level of DM fuckery. Yeah, the whole point of the conversation was DMs who were hiding information to the direct detriment of their players. It takes nothing away from the campaign to provide a tiny bit of info/context so that your players don't feel cheated out of resources. There is a big difference between "you need to be shown that this enemy is immune to fire damage so you can adjust" and "you need to infer that the roll was high but can't actually do anything about the situation in the future."
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Sep 29, 2022 18:45
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PeterWeller posted:Zurreco is saying that withholding the enemy's to-hit roll so the PC doesn't know whether or not Shield will work is unacceptable. Correct, though oversimplified. Mirage posted:... is not an ideal DM-player interaction. Even more correct. That situation comes off as "the monster hits because I says it does." The conversation was about where the line is between a DM withholding information for a purpose and the DM withholding information purely to punish players. The former is running the game normally, the latter is playing an adversarial role to your players. A PC should be able to appreciate that an enemy rolled a 30 to hit them because they are there in the moment on the receiving end of a very effective attack.
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Sep 29, 2022 20:48
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What is it that you're trying to achieve with the build? A melee sword fighter in armor that can also dabble in magic? It sounds like you have three requisites based on that Can cast magic Proficient in simple melee Proficient in some level of armor You can do all of that with almost any class save Sorcerer or Druid, and even those can be waived with feats or Tasha's rules for proficiencies. Just to add to stuff you might want to also look into: Fighter - Eldritch Knight Artificer - Armorer Wizard - Bladesinger Bard - College of Swords Paladin is probably the best option since you have so many ways to infuse Smites into your melee strikes. They're also insanely tanky and party friendly if you're new to 5e. Zurreco fucked around with this message at 04:06 on Oct 9, 2022 |
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Oct 9, 2022 03:40
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Regalingualius posted:1. Would going with the Oath of Vengeance be a bad idea gameplay-wise? RP-wise, it was my first choice because my backstory for him is that his life got ruined twice by his father, who became a Lich in a society that really hates necromancy and is heavily into sins of the father (and grandfather (and great-grandfather)) mentality. 1. Vengeance is probably the easiest Paladin subclass to RP since it is so straightforward ("evil must be punished") and rarely puts you in a situation where your oath gets you in trouble. Devotion or Conquest are probably the next best if you find Vengeance too cookie cutter. 2. STR highest priority, CHA and CON next, everything else after. 3. Katana is just a flavor change to a Shortsword or a Longsword. Ask your DM if you can go with the latter, especially if you aren't using a shield. 4. Since Paladins don't need well rounded stats, variant human is better than standard. As you are relatively new to the game, picking a simpler feat that isn't too difficult to remember will help you learn the game faster. I would advise taking Resilient (STR) since it buffs your STR stat and also gives you proficiency with STR saves.
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Oct 11, 2022 16:52
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So much of the RAW conflicts are because D&D doesn't use a keyphrase + glossary approach to spells and skills. Hopefully they address that in ODD where building a spell mostly requires building a sequence of key words. There are very few spells that are so unique that you can't predict what terms you need.
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Oct 14, 2022 17:05
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For ease of use, the spellcard for Cloud of Daggers makes it seem like it only occupies one entire grid space. If you wanted to argue that you can snap it to a grid intersection to occupy 4 x 0.25 grid spaces, cool, but the DM is open to introduce a means to diminish the efficacy. Probably something like enemies treating it as difficult terrain to avoid it or introducing a DEX DC to dodge it. Letting CoD fully affect 4 spaces seems unbalanced. I think that CoD being a 2nd level spell slot is fair as well. Spell AOE is not the only thing that should scale with spell level, so comparing it to Create Bonfire misses the point - they are both designed to lock down one square on the map but one is drastically better in every way. Compare Cloud of Daggers to Flaming Sphere instead. Both are 2nd level spells meant to create persistent damage in a small AOE. However, one is a mobile version but uses bonus actions, has a DC, and does half the damage.
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Oct 14, 2022 20:41
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The Slack Lagoon posted:Why can druids use medium armor when the only nonmetal option is hide armor, which is worse than studded leather? Reflavor breastplate to be petrified wood. ezpz
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Oct 14, 2022 21:42
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This is my breastplate, made from organically handgrown human sternum.
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Oct 14, 2022 23:04
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We just wrapped up a campaign with a full caster Circle of Spores Druid. They were super tanky, never got incapped, and were never hurting for resources. I've seen people claim that spores lends itself to melee tank Druids but it just seems like a strong subclass all around. The only downside is that your class skills use damage types that are commonly resisted.
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Oct 15, 2022 03:20
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NotNut posted:I'm trying to come up with a name for neutral good outsiders, like how lawful good outsiders are angels and lawful evil outsiders are devils. My ideas so far were Goodfellows, Benefactors and Samaritans. Does anyone have other ideas or opinions on which of those is best? Benefactors is the best in your list. Philanthropists might also work.
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Oct 15, 2022 20:44
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I've bought most of the books in physical form because there is a nonzero chance that websites can revoke access to the content. I share a pdf of the PHB with new players but always suggest they buy their own copy just to snuggle up with on a cold rainy day.
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Oct 16, 2022 23:09
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If you want to waive the cost of something low level like Find Familiar or whatever, that is one thing. You can also dole out residuum if you want to get around the material scarcity issue. However, there are so many spells that would be outright broken if you could cast them without consuming a rare material. Imagine being able to cast True Resurrection or Clone multiple times in a day. It would trivialize any real danger associated with adventuring. Death, amongst other long term effects, have to be real consequences with stacking consequences if you want to undo them. There either needs to be a spell level limit wherein valuable components are required or you need some sort of overarching timer to prevent players from simply dipping out, resetting the party, and coming back after a long rest. Of course, all of that only matters for a campaign. If you're playing a one shot or whatever, fun is more important than accountability. friendlyfire posted:This is tedious beancounting. As a general rule, players should only need to track the expenditure of interesting, important resources. 1 GP per arrow is video game poo poo, even in OSR-style games. Prison breaks or similar hardscrabble scenarios (Lair Of The Lamb) would be the exception, but I would quit a game where the DM valued my time so poorly as to make me count my arrows. Related, I believe in my bones that a lot of the grog talk about counting torches is exaggeration. The way I read it was that the DM simply requires every player to spend 1 GP to fully restock on everything in the pack. Is that not accurate?
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Oct 18, 2022 21:48
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friendlyfire posted:I don't mean this to sound confrontational, but is that not still a waste of your time to track? Either it's a significant amount and worth tracking, ala "I'm building a castle" or it's insignificant accounting and not worth even the microsecond it takes to adjust your character sheet. Do you feel the same about PCs having to pay for rooms at an inn?
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Oct 18, 2022 22:01
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