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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. 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
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Dec 23, 2018 23:10
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The bit where DMs run all trap and secret finding as Investigation without thinking is currently loving my 5E group over. We don't have a Rogue or a Wizard (the only Intelligence class in the game), so nobody is good at Investigation or any knowledge skills. Aside from the DM not being appropriately fluid with skill use, it's also an example of other design flaws in 5E; the distribution of primary stats is really weird and uneven across ability scores, for example. Constitution gets a pass because it's an important rider for everyone, but Intelligence is much less frequently called for spellcasters than Charisma, and there's no reason for anyone but 2H weapon users (and I guess people who want to pass saves against certain maneuvers) to care about Strength. Even if they want to keep the six ability score system, they could do a better job of designing classes around it. Sorcerer and Warlock, for example, are incredibly conceptually redundant and would just be one class in almost any other game.
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Jan 22, 2019 02:41
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Admiral Joeslop posted:What are the best Rogue archetypes? Working on a Kobold Rogue, melee based. Swashbuckler is neat, though Rakish Audacity isn't quite so good with a Kobold, as I would always want to double up on an enemy to get that sweet sweet Advantage. Charisma to Initiative is nice, as is Fancy Footwork to just waltz away after stabbing something. Unsurprisingly, Arcane Trickster is the best overall. They get tons of utility and fun options, and even do more damage than most (all?) other Rogue ATs thanks to the SCAG cantrips, which you absolutely want to take at least one of (probably Booming Blade) as a first pick. Spellcasting is a hard class ability to beat, even when the level progression and schools are both limited. Swashbuckler's decent, but aside from your own objection re: Rakish Audacity you should keep in mind that all Rogues have some limited ability to waltz away after stabbing because you can use Cunning Action to Disengage. Thief has some utility for clever players with DMs who love to litter battlefields with interesting doohickies and thingamabobs to interact with like traps and switches; it's great for players who like solving problems in creative, unorthodox ways (using skills and innocuous objects and minor magical items) IF they have a DM who likes to reward and play along. Investigator is pretty neat if you really want to lean into detective stuff and the game is likely to have a lot of non-combat challenges; advantage on Perception and Investigation all the time is pretty invaluable, given that Perception is usually the most frequently called skill in the game. Arcane Trickster is the safe bet if you just want a powerful, fun Rogue without some other specific intention, though. EDIT: beaten all to poo poo but I think that's solid advice so I'm leavin it
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Mar 1, 2019 21:20
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Conspiratiorist posted:The problem with Inquisitive is that getting advantage on Perception and Investigation at level 9 is rendered almost entirely redundant by getting Reliable Talent two levels later. lol I didn't even think about that inthesto posted:Why is it that Arcane Trickster is the best rogue archetype while EK is the worst for fighter? IDK that EK is actually the worst, esp if we're including all the splat ones, but imo it's a function of the schools you get primary access to. Illusion/Enchantment have a lot of synergy with either what a Rogue does in the party (subterfuge, sneaking, social stuff) or in combat (giving you one million ways to get out of trouble or inflict SA damage), while Invocation is mostly just blasting which doesn't solve the Fighter's core problems or make the Fighter better at being a Fighter. Baku fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Mar 1, 2019 |
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Mar 1, 2019 21:41
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koreban posted:Long answer: EK isn't the worst for fighter, it's just the absolute best at one very specific thing: humongous AC tank type. And then you run into the same problem you have with nearly every tank build in D&D outside 4E: in the absence of effective ways to compel enemies to focus on you and make it hard for them to engage allies, giving up offensive bonuses to maximize your personal survivability becomes counterproductive to the goal of "keeping everyone alive". If you absolutely must do that, an actual Abjurer with a dip for armor proficiency and Con as their secondary stat is an extremely tough nut to crack who's way, way better at being a credible battlefield threat and keeping enemies away from their team than an EK.
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Mar 1, 2019 23:39
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Infinite Karma posted:You don't need tanks in D&D 5E, they give everyone self-contained offensive and defensive abilities already. And they give plenty of tradeoffs to increase defensive opportunities. There's no holy trinity of tank/healer/DPS in this game design, and complaining that you can't maintain aggro is misunderstanding the game you're playing. Sure, but I'd suggest that that's at least an understandable problem since one edition of the exact same game ago the classes were explicitly, deliberately assigned roles. And since you can still specialize all the ones that have actually interesting options - mostly the 9th level casters - in any of those directions without forcing square pegs into round holes (the "healer Cleric" is a spec called Life, the "tank Wizard" is a spec called Abjurer, this is stuff explicitly supported and not people twisting the game out of shape).
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Mar 2, 2019 15:54
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Conspiratiorist posted:It's actually based around being Cleric+ It's called "Life". The first two abilities it gets do nothing but make you a better, more efficient healer. The third ability it gets incentivizes healing by giving you HP for healing other people. The capstone maximizes every healing spell you cast. It gets one thing that isn't about healing, Divine Strike, which seems to miss the larger point that every Cleric domain gets a mechanical analogue to Divine Strike at the exact same level so that their ability to do damage with a weapon isn't 100% obviated by offensive cantrips and blown away by every other class. The only other one you could argue is armor proficiency, but the fact that it doesn't also get martial weapons like the two other core Cleric domains (Tempest and War) who get heavy armor should clue you in that it gets heavy armor to "make you tougher" so that you can keep healing and buffing people. Life Cleric is "Cleric but better" in the same way that every single specialization is "Cleric but better", in that all of them make you a better Cleric, but what Life expressly does is make you a better healer. It's a specialization for people who want healing to be a primary function of their character and a more efficient combat option. I have no idea how you could argue that it isn't, and if "healers" aren't supposed to be a thing in 5E D&D, somebody should tell the designers that.
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Mar 2, 2019 23:20
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That you think playing a Life Cleric as a healer is laughable is a problem with the game and/or design of the spec, not with my (or any reasonable player's) inference that a "Life Cleric" focuses on healing.
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Mar 2, 2019 23:21
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Infinite Karma posted:Dude, what does "healer" mean to you, that word doesn't nearly describe enough. Do you want his role to be "heals every turn in various ways?" My entire response was predicated on the notion that D&D and fantasy gaming in general have, historically, often given classes or builds implicit or explicit (in 4E) defined roles that tell you what your class's tactical function in the party and the game is supposed to be. The initial thing that started me posting about it was a response to the assertion that that was asinine - that there was no "holy trinity" in D&D - except there frequently has been, it just isn't as rigidly codified as the one in MMORPGs. It's morphed into an argument about what "healer" means, in which I felt like somebody was making fun of me for drawing the inference that a Life Cleric is supposed to be - by some standard - "a healer", or is a Cleric build option for people who like to heal and want to do it as much or more than other parts of playing a Cleric. It's whatever. I concede whatever argument we're having at this point. I will say it's extremely loving weird that it doesn't seem like some of the people I've been arguing with understand how you could roleplay a "tank" without being condescending to other players' agency or why someone would want to be a "healer", or whatever.
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Mar 3, 2019 00:43
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A lot of that stuff is just a big semantic problem, also. Take "Intelligence", for example. If you call a stat in a game that, people are going to read it and go "okay, so characters who don't have this are stupid", but that isn't even true in D&D. In real life we (people who aren't weird bigots) understand intelligence to be a complicated thing that isn't a single binary or variable, is insanely difficult to accurately conceptualize and measure, and is culture-bound. Several of the other ability scores - particularly Wisdom and Charisma, but also to some extent Dexterity at least - also represent qualities that, in real life, are part of the spectrum of things that constitute "intelligence". So do skill, tool, language, and saving throw proficiency, and some class abilities. Having a penalty to Intelligence doesn't mean your character is "stupid" at all, in any meaningful sense, but it sure reads that way because of the language the ability score uses.
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May 13, 2019 01:39
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Glagha posted:I mean you really don't see the difference between "elves magically don't sleep" and "gnomes can speak to animals" and "these people are just more intelligent, by nature, than the other kinds of people"? I feel like this is a bad faith argument. Hint the difference is completely fictional fantasy traits applied to different kinds of beings as opposed to things that are rooted in centuries of bad, racist science. Nah, you're just electing to draw the line about what level of metaphor is acceptable in a different place. Nobody has to be arguing in bad faith for that to happen.
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May 13, 2019 01:43
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DalaranJ posted:It's an incredibly complex question, and I need to get to bed soon, but one aspect that has not been discussed yet here is that it is implicit in the alignment structure that authoritarianism is considered morally superior to anti-authoritarianism. If you look closely, you can see that this was known to the designers of 3rd edition to be a problem, and I think there's some evidence that this is the case in 5th edition as well. I just think that it was a bizarre position for the game to take as it seems to me that the type of people who would most likely become adventurers would tend to be anti-authoriatrian. What do you mean? The most direct shorthand is that Lawful characters are predisposed to respect authority and Chaotic characters to shun it, but I feel like the idea that chaos is inherently evil and law is inherently good made its way out of the game a very long time ago in any real way. Is there an obvious thing I'm missing?
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May 13, 2019 12:22
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Mr. Lobe posted:I thought at one point law and chaos was the only alignment axis, and evildoers tended to be chaotic. Yeah, this is true in OD&D. Law is conflated with communal values and Chaos with individualist ones, and the early books basically said outright that chaotic behavior tended to resemble "evil". You could be a chaotic hero or lawful villain in theory, but in practice that isn't how things worked. Re: the politics question, I honestly think it's fair to map Good/Evil to the Left/Right axis and Law/Chaos to Auth/Anti-auth on the political compass. A sane, rational Chaotic Evil person is basically just a "true" objectivist: the only thing that matters is what they want, and they don't give a gently caress about the damage they cause other people or society in the taking.
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May 13, 2019 13:24
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Glagha posted:Xemnas gesundheit
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May 13, 2019 16:44
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Gharbad the Weak posted:Point buy was lowered in 5e, probably to encourage the Real D&D Experience. I think this is a logical extension of the modest ability score cap and the fact that you can +2 a single stat with on an ASI, both of which were good decisions, so I'm cool with that
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May 19, 2019 15:43
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TheGreatEvilKing posted: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. that scenario you outlined is a problem with racial ability score mods, not 5E point buy; if point buy let you go to 16 instead of 15, you'd be in exactly the same predicament because races with +2 stat mods would be starting at 18 and the bar for what's "playable" would shift from 16 to 18 I don't know why you think it's different than any other edition of D&D in that regard Baku fucked around with this message at 23:15 on May 19, 2019 |
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May 19, 2019 23:12
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gradenko_2000 posted:the problem is that the Ranger was a discordant class from the very beginning - it was basically an attempt at emulating Aragorn from LOTR, but it had so much of an overlap with the Fighter that it was also supposed to be a straight upgrade from the Fighter that you could only access if you rolled well enough to meet the minimum stat requirement I've also seen the idea articulated quite well - I believe in this very forum, if not this thread - that the Ranger's had identity problems since 3E because the Druid has become increasingly powerful and versatile. Fighty Druids have become more viable, Druids have become increasingly good as generalist nature guys (who get all the mundane nature skills, animal companions, etc apart from spellcasting), and they've gradually sloughed off the thematic restrictions they used to have - on spell schools/spheres, weapon and armor choices, etc - leading to a scenario where they just totally obviate the Ranger class even beyond the norm for caster supremacy.
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May 21, 2019 08:16
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The weapon thing is a fundamental clash between thematic identities and mechanical identities; the Fighter's thematic identity is that he's the master of war, the badass mundane who doesn't know a lick of magic and doesn't beg, borrow, or steal power from gods and devils, but is a born-and-honed soldier who's the party rock when poo poo hits the fan because he can kick your rear end six ways, whoever you are and whatever he has at hand. It's a thematic identity that makes perfect sense in an RPG where combat isn't the main focus or, if say, you have like three classes - guys who mess with magic, clever little men, and fighters - but it's weird and becomes a problem in the actual situation D&D is in, which is that 2/3rds of the rules are about fighting monsters and there's a bunch of different classes whose "thing" is being terrifying in a scrap.
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May 21, 2019 09:10
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The current iteration of Artificer is really kooky and fun at level 1. I cast Arcane Weapon as a bonus action and then shot a guy for 16 damage on a non-crit on my first round of combat ever. Rapidly falls off as the die on heavy xbow stops being so impressive, but lol
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Jun 20, 2019 06:05
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I disagree about Rogues - I think there's very much something to that class and archetype that isn't adequately represented by anything else in D&D and that they had some genuinely good ideas about in 5E (Cunning Action is cool) - but the overall point that niche protection isn't really a thing in D&D is valid. There's barely any class in the game that can't somehow be replaced by another, mechanically or thematically. Unfortunately, the Ranger kinda sucks mechanically and is kind of boring and unappealing thematically. If you rated each class on a 1-10 scale in each of those two ways, its combined score would almost definitely be the lowest in the game, granting how subjective the latter is. And it has been for a very long time, bar 4E where it was at least real good at murder. Baku fucked around with this message at 07:32 on Jun 20, 2019 |
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Jun 20, 2019 07:23
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The Dregs posted:I was watching Matt Colville and he had an interesting take (from an even old gamer he knew) on how the introduction of rogues screwed up the game for everyone else. He said before the rogue, everybody would sneak around, and anyone could try to pick a lock. Then the rogue came along and turned everyone else into lumbering buffoons so that it could have its own niche. I don't know if I agree totally, but it does make sense. My only contention there is that characters like Bilbo Baggins and The Gray Mouser existed long before the Thief class did. The idea of a weak little guy who saves the day by outwitting and outmaneuvering all the proud warriors and mysterious, deranged wizards around him is an oldschool fantasy archetype, and one that's probably always had a lot of appeal to some of the nerdy people playing tabletop games. The Thief's defining qualities - helping the party deal with things like traps and puzzles you can't beat with force, hitting below the belt - fit right into that archetype. It was filling a logical design space, unless you just wanted D&D to have three classes forever. I think you could easily make the same argument about, for example, the Cleric. Because the Cleric exists, Fighters can't be effective combat medics and Mages can't cast healing spells. The only difference is that the Thief wasn't there right from the beginning, but at this point "the beginning" is so far back that suggesting there's some meaningful difference there seems academic. I'd definitely be willing to hear the argument out, I just like Rogues a whole lot.
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Jun 20, 2019 12:25
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I mean, that makes a kind of sense, but so does having "magic guy" be a class that casts spells, and you can choose what kind of spells you cast by picking your archetype or w/e (the same way you'd pick "sneaky guy" choices for your Fighting Man in that system), and all the stuff about being an arcane or divine caster is just fluff bc it basically already is. I dunno. It's obviously really stupid that (for ex) 3.X gave Fighters so few skill points and such a limited skill pool; there was absolutely no just mechanical or thematic reason for it.
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Jun 20, 2019 14:57
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Conspiratiorist posted:If we're keeping to form with an hypothetical future edition then I'd get rid of Bard, Barbarian, Druid, Ranger, Rogue, and Warlock, and fold their mechanical niches into the remaining classes and archetypes. Back to my Rogue defending: why on Earth do you think the Monk is worth preserving while axing both the Bard and Rogue? Its fluff/tone/theme/archetype is basically a bunch of vaguely-racist cliches about the mystical orient and how the only way to be good at unarmed combat is to do kung fu, and its mechanics are a hodgepodge of clunky gimmicks that range from attacking too many times to a variety of peculiarly-specific powers inherited from prior editions like speaking every language. If Battlemaster Maneuvers became the Fighter's core mechanic (which they should), there's really not a lot of ground you don't cover by making it an unarmed Fighter spec/build path. Baku fucked around with this message at 10:52 on Jun 26, 2019 |
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Jun 26, 2019 10:50
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Toplowtech posted:There need to be a punch and kick and grab type of fighter but yes, the monk is a kung-fu cliché class that should just be a fighter subclass if only to normalize adding Wuxia level stuff to that class. yeah this is also what I meant really the idea that monk is good or cooler than fighter because it gets to do "cooler" stuff or have the option of jumping high or w/e is the exact problem with fighter, there's no reason every kind of fighter shouldn't be able to do anime special attacks that other combatants can't emulate; they treat stuff like being very multilingual, having more good saves than normal, or crippling pressure point strikes like supernatural mojo and then deny that mojo to fighters because fighters are supposed to be Normals and it's loving insane; monk and barbarian are bigger problems for fighters than rogues are, because every time someone comes up with a cool thing fighters should be able to do *even in combat*, they make a new class instead of giving it to fighters and to the question of whether fighter and rogue would benefit the most from being fused, I guess that's true and the root problem with fighter is a lack of narrative agency, but I also think it's true that 9th level casters past about 3rd level in d&d have *too much agency* and the entire game eventually devolves into a chess game between the dungeon master and that loving guy who always plays a wizard or a druid to determine if they have a spell that can completely circumvent an encounter or enable the rest of the party to do so in a single turn maybe rogues not being good at fighting and fighters not being good at not-fighting would be okay, if mages even had to loving choose between battle magic and stuff like divination, teleportation, or healing (to include poo poo like disease/poison curing etc), but they don't and never have, and trying to make other things besides combat mechanically important in d&d is hard because the combat is so up its rear end with stuff like the monk's flurrying hit spam, summon spells, and casters with infinite options in general that everyone has to shave between rounds I'm just mad at d&d right now because I want my group to switch to something else for six months, which hasn't happened in three years, I'm sorry,
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Jun 27, 2019 21:12
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TBF Druids already have an interesting superpower that's both useful in combat and for narrative agency/non-combat encounters - Wild Shape - which if more fully fleshed-out could be an entire fun class unto itself
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Jun 27, 2019 23:08
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Lurdiak posted:Personally if I was designing something like D&D from the ground up I would focus on the sneaky, dodgy, lock-pickingy aspects of rogues, not the chained backstab damage. I feel like they're always gonna be too glass-cannony to be as good at DPS as people want them to be. A "you can't catch me" focus would be more mechanically satisfying than just increasing the number they do when they stab. You know how there was never a Martial Controller in 4E? I think something like that would also be a good niche for a Thief or Rogue class. For some reason - because it's easy to write, straightforward, and a lot of people like it probably - "dirty fighting" has been reduced to dealing massive backstab damage, but you could just as easily take it in the opposite direction and make them a class that's bad at "fighting" in terms of dealing or taking damage but has all kinds of ways to debilitate, debuff, and disable opponents so the tough guys can do work. Throw sand in their eyes!
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Jun 27, 2019 23:25
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dex_sda posted:And that still doesn't even factor in bardic inspiration or cutting words. The class is so outlandishly good it is absolutely crazy. The 5E Bard in general and Lore in particular feels like some mad nerd who was tired of people making fun of his pet class deliberately overpowered it to make people play it, like they did with Cleric and Druid in 3E. Which is weird because AD&D Clerics and 3.X/PF Bards weren't actually bad to begin with. Even in 2E the meme of the Bard as useless fifth wheel was a thing, but the worst class was very obviously the single-class Thief. It's like they're preoccupied with the notion that support must be inherently boring, and the only way to fix that is to make support characters do everything well.
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Jun 28, 2019 23:58
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Looking forward to playing a Mountain Dwarf Three Halflings in a Trenchcoat
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Jul 1, 2019 03:03
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I talked about this in the worldbuilding thread, but I did something like that with the Drow in my college homebrew setting. Their contemporary society was still ruthlessly ambitious and matriarchal, but their original rebellion against greater Elfkind, for which they were cursed by Corellon to never walk in the daylight again, was justified. Like, Elf society was a corrupt aristocracy and the first Drow were legitimate revolutionaries who only didn't build a better world because the Elven creator god isn't a socialist. That's not the story the Elves tell, obviously. Orcs in that same setting were a kind of nomadic steppes people who represented the "barbarians" separating a Romanesque human empire and the "far east". They were raiders, but their aggression was largely retaliatory because the leadership of those human societies wanted to eliminate them to build our world's silk road. Attempts at diplomacy with them were backhanded colonizer poo poo.
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Jul 2, 2019 21:01
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JustJeff88 posted:Years ago, I had an idea that never left the ground but which drew from the Cold War mentality. This is very cool. I've always found it passing strange the way so many fantasy settings build their geography on the back of Earth geography, but ignore Earth history (or focus entirely on medieval and ancient history, like the Hundred Years War). The problem being that we understand more modern history much better, and generally (if we try to focus on good sources and avoid propaganda) have a much clearer picture of who did what and why from which to build an understanding of people and societies. One of the things I dug about Eberron was the attempt to use WWI as inspiration.
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Jul 2, 2019 22:07
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JustJeff88 posted:nobody has ever really said "Sure, this horde of devils wants to enslave all the races of the prime material plane, but look at how many female devils there are in positions of authority!" Which is an interesting choice, imo; if I were writing Hell, the epitome of LE in D&D, that's the faction/plane I'd be absolutely most likely to turn into a rigid patriarchy. And you don't need races of literal evil guys to justify murder-hoboing, just say that the bad guys are really malicious bandits or necromancers or slavers or fantasy Nazis. Most games have at least some kind of simple plot, and that one is less morally-conflicting for most people than killing orcs or dark elves because the Monster Manual and the mayor of Dundershire both say they're evil. Baku fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Jul 3, 2019 |
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Jul 3, 2019 23:01
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It's also got elves, dark elves, and dwarves, which aren't exactly standard in Final Fantasy games.
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Jul 4, 2019 06:29
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Opentarget posted:On illusionist chat though, I've been wanting to play a literal stage magician for a while now. Basically an illusionist wizard but when the party gets into a scrap he's just in the back pulling rabbits out of hats and faffing with a bunch of handkerchiefs tied together because he is totally not the guy to have in a fight. Split the difference. Don't be a burden to your group in combat; focus on indirect control spells like Grease that create battlefield hazards your allies can exploit (which will create chaos) and creative use of illusions to spook enemies, create distractions, and generally be a confounding nuisance to the enemy. You can still capture the vibe of a "non-dangerous", nutty, or pacifist Wizard while being a valuable asset to your party in battle. Playing Illusionists straight - that is, solving problems by using illusion magic in novel ways - is actually a ton of fun, they might be my favorite Wizards in D&D.
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Jul 11, 2019 19:13
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Yeah. Like I've seen people make the case that they don't like point buy because they think it's too low and it's fun to be able to roll higher, but uh... just raise the number of points you get and make the cap 16 or 17 instead of 15?
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Jul 14, 2019 21:59
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I have some kind of brain block where no matter how many points I have I won't put Con above 14 on anything It's so boring - but it helps me save points to have weird tertiary stat bonuses
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Jul 14, 2019 22:17
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Disparity, imbalance, and randomisation aren't inherently fun. They're fun for some people when they think they might get an advantage out of it. Imbalance yes, but not randomization. People like randomization and chance in games in big and small ways for lots of reasons, including the fact that randomization (when it happens to favor "bad players" or people picking the worst classes) can actually balance an imbalanced game. Competitive games usually have some random element because if they didn't, the better player would win 95% of the time, and that's not as much fun for anybody. Admittedly things are equally likely to go the opposite way if you roll, but you know what makes Fighters more playable? Having twice as much HP as the mages and the Cha left over to be the party face. My group doesn't roll stats and part of why is that I was a tireless advocate for the fairness of point buy, but as long as everyone's on board I don't see why people get so hung up on "proving" that rolling for stats is the wrong way to play. Who cares? Not everybody has fun the same way, and if people wanted to play a fair game they could do a lot better than D&D in the first place.
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Jul 15, 2019 03:35
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It speaks to the larger root problem that D&D, as the "gateway game" that everyone who knows nothing about the hobby is familiar with, has to kind of appeal to everyone, whether those people are seeking an experience akin to a really good tactical CRPG where most of the gameplay consists of well-balanced, challenging grid combat, people seeking narrative-driven theater of the mind where the rules are less important than the act of roleplaying itself, and people who want some goofy beer-and-weed game where memorable, funny poo poo happens (a thing randomization contributes to). Like this may make me a cynic but I think the first and third group are destined to never see eye-to-eye on game mechanics, and a game which tries to please them both - which D&D is kind of obligated to attempt - will never be great. There's actually something to 5E's "everything has two official rulings or is up to the DM, choose your adventure" approach that isn't just a copout, apart from where the options that do exist have really obvious issues and the books are terribly organized and often fail to offer the first group their variant rule at all.
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Jul 15, 2019 03:45
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DalaranJ posted:Here’s my informal survey: Taking this based on my previous main, our current game started two weeks ago. Generally I play either roguish types or support casters. 1. Yes, a Trickery Cleric. I played her from level 1 to level 7 with more-or-less the same party (my teammates were a Paladin, Druid, Fighter, and Warlock). 2. Most, but not all. 3. Bless and Healing Word were my staple spells; I often used a level 3 slot on the former (to affect the entire party) and burned all my level 1 slots on the latter picking downed people up or doing a little triage with an otherwise-wasted bonus action. Level 2 was something of a "dead level"; the Trickery domain spells (Mirror Image and Pass Without Trace) were cool with the latter coming in major handy twice ever, but in practice I never cast spells like Mirror Image because pre-casting isn't really a thing with me and combats rarely lasted long (in terms of rounds) so spending one buffing my own survivability rarely felt "worth it" compared to attacking and helping to eliminate the threat. 4. I felt it was exactly enough, honestly. Much more (including if I were like, 8-10 levels higher) and the decision to use a spell slot wouldn't feel like it cost me anymore, while a more limited number would've made me feel like my character - as a classical "support" Cleric - wasn't helping after a round or two due to the generally weird and questionable nature of Trickery's first Channel Divinity (baby Mirror Image), my only real non-spell ability. Cleric cantrips didn't seem great. Baku fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Jul 15, 2019 |
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Jul 15, 2019 21:59
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The ability score folding thing - treating Str/Con, Dex/Int, and Wis/Cha as interchangeable for some specific purposes - is yet another of the things 4E was right about that it's insane they didn't preserve. The "six saves" thing in 5E, for example, is bewildering. And that alone would make the "dump stats" more generically useful. The decision to dump Wis and have a +1 or +2 Cha bonus on a non-Cha primary character would be much easier for me if that was my will save. It's probably a good thing in the game as-is that Wizard is the only Int class, tho. It makes a lot of sense for Warlock to be one - the fictional archetype of the lock, imo, is a character with high Int and low Wis/Cha, the put-upon nerd or weirdo who takes the cheater's path to power - but then it's a lot easier for Wizards to get involved in the Sorclock Eldritch Blast Thing and gently caress all that.
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Jul 16, 2019 23:00
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 07:00 |
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Tools all have the same problem as the Medicine skill usually does, which is that even low-level magic often does the same thing better, or with a lesser investment of time/money.
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Jul 17, 2019 09:03
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