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Honestly past about 10th level in 4e the actual dice are a relatively tiny amount of the damage compared to static bonuses; I'd be perfectly happy playing in 4e without damage dice at all and just doing static blocks of damage. It works a hell of a lot better using average values from the DM side too; that's one of the bits of late-4e monster design 5e fortunately DID manage to keep which really smooths things out.
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Sep 11, 2015 11:20
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Yea as a DM I do just call out static, average amounts of damage dealt by monsters. Makes things so much faster.
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Sep 11, 2015 11:24
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I just roll attacks and damage together and color code. Main hand is blue. Did the blue d20 hit? Then add the blue damage etc. and gently caress you if you don't have your damage dice out and ready.
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Sep 11, 2015 14:00
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ActusRhesus posted:I just roll attacks and damage together and color code. Main hand is blue. Did the blue d20 hit? Then add the blue damage etc. and gently caress you if you don't have your damage dice out and ready. When I ran an epic archer ranger I'd have an entire standard action's dice in my pot colour coded with a predetermined order of attacks. I.e. 5 d20s and 10 d10s for damage, potentially. I made sure I had enough even if I got given double attack rolls by our bard for a turn so I could shake and dump all the dice together. Causes minor issues when you crit, but otherwise it works pretty nicely.
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Sep 11, 2015 14:18
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If you need a laugh, the GITP forums have a thread up where posters are trying to design the best martial character in 5E. At least half the builds involve just knocking the opponent prone and using an immovable rod to pin him/her/it in place.
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Sep 11, 2015 15:18
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ActusRhesus posted:I just roll attacks and damage together and color code. Main hand is blue. Did the blue d20 hit? Then add the blue damage etc. and gently caress you if you don't have your damage dice out and ready. This. All the loving time. That One Time I played Pathfinder, i was doing this with my Ranger, and it blew the DM's mind. ~grognards~
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Sep 11, 2015 16:01
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You know those Chessex containers full of D6s? When I played my Warblade I'd just grab a few of those, remove however many I needed to get the correct amount, then hurl them into a board game box top to determine damage.
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Sep 11, 2015 16:09
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Kurieg posted:You know those Chessex containers full of D6s? When I played my Warblade I'd just grab a few of those, remove however many I needed to get the correct amount, then hurl them into a board game box top to determine damage. Coincidentally, this is how I played Axis&Allies
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Sep 11, 2015 16:10
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Selachian posted:If you need a laugh, the GITP forums have a thread up where posters are trying to design the best martial character in 5E. The natural language dickering is infuriating. "buuut what is a RANGED attack?" "what is heavily obscured?" and then they start talking Stealth rules 
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Sep 11, 2015 16:11
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Can someone please give a quick overview of these references to the 'skeleton economy'? I'm guessing it's really easy and effective for a low-level necromancer (or maybe cleric?) to solve problems by raising and commanding a bunch of skeletons?
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Sep 11, 2015 19:27
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Jenny Angel posted:Can someone please give a quick overview of these references to the 'skeleton economy'? I'm guessing it's really easy and effective for a low-level necromancer (or maybe cleric?) to solve problems by raising and commanding a bunch of skeletons? Got it in one, although I believe the name originally came from measuring class effectiveness in terms of skeletons.
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Sep 11, 2015 19:29
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The main problem, as I see it, is that the spell can re-acquire twice as many skeletons as you can raise with it. The second problem is that boosting spell levels is a poorly thought out mechanic. So you can raise a poo poo ton of skeletons, rest for 8 hours, raise a poo poo ton more, rest for 8 more hours, and maintain control of the entire batch for another 24 hours. As the days move on, you have to spend more and more time maintaining your horde, but at that point, you have hundreds of them.
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Sep 11, 2015 19:35
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So what you're saying is that if I ever run a 5e game, it should be about a group of scrappy underdog dropout necromancers starting the Skeleton Rebellion against the evil empire
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Sep 11, 2015 19:40
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Yes. While abusing the fact that a bunch of rules don't specify the type of skeleton.
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Sep 11, 2015 22:20
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Aren't there only warhorse, vanilla, and minotaur versions?
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Sep 11, 2015 23:04
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Jenny Angel posted:Can someone please give a quick overview of these references to the 'skeleton economy'? I'm guessing it's really easy and effective for a low-level necromancer (or maybe cleric?) to solve problems by raising and commanding a bunch of skeletons? It's partly the above, but it can also be extended to its logical conclusion - in a world where one person can trivially put the dead to work at menial manual labour and/or basic military grunt soldiering, what effect does that have on the wider world? Why is it that necromancers are feared and hated evil dudes rather than the much-loved men that keep our sewers maintained, our fields plants, our walls defended and our spits turning? I mean, much loved by everyone except the farmers' unions, and so forth. It always bugs me when they don't think beyond the most surface level when writing magic, because a world where skeletons are the basic unit of economic work would be fascinating but Necromancers Are Evil because
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Sep 11, 2015 23:22
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thespaceinvader posted:It's partly the above, but it can also be extended to its logical conclusion - in a world where one person can trivially put the dead to work at menial manual labour and/or basic military grunt soldiering, what effect does that have on the wider world? Why is it that necromancers are feared and hated evil dudes rather than the much-loved men that keep our sewers maintained, our fields plants, our walls defended and our spits turning? I mean, much loved by everyone except the farmers' unions, and so forth. I played in a 3.5 campaign once that sorta did what you're talking about here. There was a nobleman named Count Vaclav Chernbog who was known for an obsession with occult research and a frightful demeanor, so it was super easy to assume he'd be a side villain, but his angle was actually that he took executed criminals and separated them into skeletons and ghosts, putting the skeletons to work on menial infrastructure tasks around his county and giving the ghosts more involved community service work. We allied with him, and he ended the game with an incredibly spooky fiefdom populated mostly by various sentient undead and patrolled by skeleton work crews. He was a fun character.
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Sep 11, 2015 23:44
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You wanna call Karl the Necromancer evil when he puts food in the bellies of Happyville's population and makes sure almost nobody dies from construction accidents? The reason this town is full of talented artisans is because it can be, all of our basic needs are taken care of by the skeletons. Sure, the clacking gets a little old and sometimes they just walk right up to you and put their bony hands on your face for no earthly reason I can tell, but hey, it works for everyone. I can focus on my painting because the food is cheap and prepared well (skeleton chefs are surprisingly hygienic provided they are properly bleached and cleaned before being put into the kitchen)
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Sep 11, 2015 23:54
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I've already made the antagonists of my campaign a bunch of necromancers who multi-classed for warlock short-rest slots. I like to try and follow the same rules that the players do. Never let a player be a necromancer though, and never play one yourself. It's a logistical nightmare and everyone will hate you for rolling several hundred attacks per round.
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Sep 12, 2015 00:06
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You can't beat a chef that can be steam cleaned, man. This is exactly the stuff I mean, I really want people who write magic systems to THINK about this poo poo when they write them and not just assume that their fantasy world looks just like medieval europe with teleportation and fireballs bolted on. I mean, I remember getting into a big argument with a guy who insisted that Eladrin were broken because they could teleport 25 feet once every 5 minutes. He was all about how they could get into anyone's bedroom or shop, or break out of prison trivially or whatever, and I just couldn't get him to wrap his head round the idea that this is no more powerful an ability under most circumstances than the ability to loving CLIMB, and can be defeated by the simple expedient of shutters. BUt that really, what would happen in a world where a significant chunk of the population could do this, is that things would LOOK DIFFERENT. People wouldn't have exterior-facing windows less than 30 feet up, and city walls would all be 40 feet high at least. Shops would lock their strongboxes away in a back room (not that they wouldn;t do this anyway...). Prisons would have airlock-type arrangements so that the cells could only see into a still-locked area just outside, and the guards could then see into said area but not into the cells. Etc etc. But the argument was just boiling back to 'but Eladrin break my WOOOORLD'. Well, your world sucks rear end if something as simple as 25 feet of line of sight teleportation every five minutes breaks it, but loving intercontinental permanent teleportation portals are FIIIIINE. E: Vanguard Warden posted:I like to try and follow the same rules that the players do. This is a really bad idea BTW. Players and DMs have wildly different roles and requirements in the game, holding them to the same rulesets is asking for trouble. DMing to the same rules as the players use is WEIRD because they are running and building a single character each in extreme detail, and you are building and runnign EVERYTHING ELSE. Trying to do that to the same rules is just  . The attitude that its necessary is one of the things that needs to be killed from D&D. The shared spell list alone makes DMing 5e a potential misery if any of your badguys are casters.
thespaceinvader fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Sep 12, 2015 |
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Sep 12, 2015 00:06
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thespaceinvader posted:You can't beat a chef that can be steam cleaned, man. To be honest but I find this kind of worldbuilding pretty annoying. Like it can be a fun thought experiment, maybe even a basis for fantasy fiction. But most people who play D&D want to play in pseudo-medieval Europe, not some magitech dystopia dominated by in-universe rules lawyers. You aren't smarter than everyone else just because you figured out some loophole in the rules, it's just that other people generally don't care. Also the reason people complained about Eladrin so much was because it was a racial ability, implying that a large number of people in the world would have it. Whereas PC abilities, magic items, etc can generally be waved away by saying that they are not common enough to be extrapolated onto the social/economic milieu.
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Sep 12, 2015 00:44
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If most people want to play medieval-fantasy Europe, then maybe the system they use shouldn't be full of abilities that drastically change the world without any rules-lawyering or figuring out loopholes?
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Sep 12, 2015 00:54
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Massive use of undead draws in evil, negative, or shadow energy (depending on your setting) so a farm maintained by undead will grow stunted withered crops or start mutating into carnivorous or poisonous plants, wild and domesticated animals will be spooked by the undead or get sick, the locale will get unpleasantly gloomy and twisted, and the people supposedly benefiting from all this will get sick or insane.
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Sep 12, 2015 01:03
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That's just propaganda from the Fleshhaving Farmer's Union.
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Sep 12, 2015 01:10
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Most versions of D&D either imply or flat-out state that magic and magic items are incredibly common. Worldbuilding that makes use of that can be fun and interesting, or can be tedious. I definitely think it's worse to try to pretend that magic is uncommon and everything's very much like whatever you think history looked like except for every town having various temples full of spellcasters, every city having wizard schools, every forest being full of magical creatures, and every single abandoned building or old cave being full of magic potions, discarded spellbooks, glowing swords, and stuff.
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Sep 12, 2015 01:10
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The Crotch posted:That's just propaganda from the Fleshhaving Farmer's Union. Buddy I know my skeletons
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Sep 12, 2015 01:14
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thespaceinvader posted:It's partly the above, but it can also be extended to its logical conclusion - in a world where one person can trivially put the dead to work at menial manual labour and/or basic military grunt soldiering, what effect does that have on the wider world? Why is it that necromancers are feared and hated evil dudes rather than the much-loved men that keep our sewers maintained, our fields plants, our walls defended and our spits turning? I mean, much loved by everyone except the farmers' unions, and so forth. There's a Sanderson novel with that.
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Sep 12, 2015 01:47
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AlphaDog posted:Most versions of D&D either imply or flat-out state that magic and magic items are incredibly common. Worldbuilding that makes use of that can be fun and interesting, or can be tedious. I definitely think it's worse to try to pretend that magic is uncommon and everything's very much like whatever you think history looked like except for every town having various temples full of spellcasters, every city having wizard schools, every forest being full of magical creatures, and every single abandoned building or old cave being full of magic potions, discarded spellbooks, glowing swords, and stuff. Some settings are like this, but the 3.5 and 5e DMGs both say that magic is fairly rare outside of big, powerful cities, and 5e specifically says that most NPCs in the world are not of the player classes; most priests aren't clerics, most soldiers aren't fighters, most alchemists aren't wizards, ect. Similarly, the worldbuilding section in the 3.5 DMG straight up says that there is maybe one 10th-ish level wizard is a decent-sized city, a small handful of level 5-ish ones, and a decent number of level 1/2 ones. e: I mean it's not like Ars Magica where hardly anyone has ever seen magic, but the world isn't inundated with the stuff, except like Eberron.
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Sep 12, 2015 04:10
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AlphaDog posted:Most versions of D&D either imply or flat-out state that magic and magic items are incredibly common. Worldbuilding that makes use of that can be fun and interesting, or can be tedious. I definitely think it's worse to try to pretend that magic is uncommon and everything's very much like whatever you think history looked like except for every town having various temples full of spellcasters, every city having wizard schools, every forest being full of magical creatures, and every single abandoned building or old cave being full of magic potions, discarded spellbooks, glowing swords, and stuff. I think people just use "Medieval Europe, except with magic" as a shorthand because as you said, thinking about all of the logical conclusions and implications of magic being real, even at various levels, would be tedious unless you're all on board or perhaps you're only focusing on a few key aspects to form a setting's schtick, such as "wizards rule because holy poo poo they have magic" or "necromancers are actually good guys because they offer free labor forever"
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Sep 12, 2015 06:00
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gradenko_2000 posted:unless you're all on board
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Sep 12, 2015 06:02
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fool_of_sound posted:Some settings are like this, but the 3.5 and 5e DMGs both say that magic is fairly rare outside of big, powerful cities I still think this is dumb all it takes to learn spells in D&D is an int of 11 or more you don't even have to be that drat smart. Everyone should know at least a couple spells for protection or their work.and everyone should definitely be able to use scrolls at the very least.
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Sep 12, 2015 06:13
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That's 11 Int on a ~special person~ who has the midichlorians to do magic in the first place. That means that unless stated otherwise, every character who can multiclass into a magical class but hasn't is effectively in an uncertain state where they both have and have not got the ability to learn magic.
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Sep 12, 2015 06:17
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Skellybones posted:That's 11 Int on a ~special person~ who has the midichlorians to do magic in the first place. D&D 5e posted:Creating a wizard character demands a backstory No all you have to do is have an int of 11 and be taught. Sorcerers are explicitly the class that has naturally high midichlorians.
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Sep 12, 2015 06:28
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If you run the town generation rules by the (3.5) book the shithole farming communities that don't have some sort of primary spellcaster class are the minority. I mean, it IS true that most NPCs are not player classes. And it's also true that most spellcasters are Adepts because of how NPC classes are generated versus the PC classes. But pretty much everyone in D&D world has seen a sorcerer, wizard, druid, or cleric. Powerful spellcasters are rare, sure. But everyone knows someone who knows someone who has actually real magic.
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Sep 12, 2015 06:30
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I've never liked it when settings painted the players as ~special snowflakes~. I've always felt that it diminished your accomplishments. It also leads to people crying about broken immersion when those filthy martials  do something crazy, like jumping moderately high. Magic should just be the new physics of the world for everyone, and spellcasters just deal in it exclusively.
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Sep 12, 2015 06:51
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I like running settings where magic and stuff is real and exist and is pretty cool, so you can do stuff like lightning elemental trains or whatever actual cool stuff you want to do, but then the PCs are just slightly better (mostly due to being PCs) and then they get to do the real cool poo poo, and fight the really cool enemies(eventually culminating in either god or at least some kind of god level foe at the end of a campaign). I never really enjoyed the "everyone is a shitfarmer" type of campaign. Also, to see what else does this: Basically every fantasy story and video game ever. Because that's the fun way to do it.
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Sep 12, 2015 06:57
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more from the D&D Facebook page: "We gave you psionics to playtest with in a recent Unearthed Arcana, and you gave us your feedback! Mike Mearls talks about what we learned and how things might change for the next draft."
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Sep 12, 2015 07:02
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fool_of_sound posted:Some settings are like this, but the 3.5 and 5e DMGs both say that magic is fairly rare outside of big, powerful cities, and 5e specifically says that most NPCs in the world are not of the player classes; most priests aren't clerics, most soldiers aren't fighters, most alchemists aren't wizards, ect. Similarly, the worldbuilding section in the 3.5 DMG straight up says that there is maybe one 10th-ish level wizard is a decent-sized city, a small handful of level 5-ish ones, and a decent number of level 1/2 ones. Yep, the books say that magic isn't common and that magical items are rare and precious. Then the settlement generation rules mostly create communities with spellcasters and the loot tables distribute magic stuff like candy. If you want to ignore that stuff, that's OK. 5e explicitly gives you the option of ignoring magic items completely, which is why I said "most versions". It's just lazy as gently caress to leave all that stuff in, assume it changes nothing much about your pseudohistorical setting, and then complain about Eladrin teleports or whatever. goldjas posted:I never really enjoyed the "everyone is a shitfarmer" type of campaign. I don't think being a shitfarmer is a great starting asumption for D&D as a whole, but there's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of zero-to-hero. I mean "Farmboy becomes hero" is practically the fantasy cliche. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 07:16 on Sep 12, 2015 |
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Sep 12, 2015 07:11
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The key problem is inconsistency, but that's been true of every edition of ~real D&D~.
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Sep 12, 2015 07:20
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I'm pretty sure most players feel somewhat special. Even if they aren't that unique snowflake, they are a member of a special class. When you see a big strong NPC, he isn't someone with a pile of NPC adept/expert/whatever levels, he is an NPC who has PC levels. The big important people are basically <class> level X. Dungeon World is a good example of the unique, because the player is the only person who is exactly that, which was fun to play/dm. However, there is still a huge gap between shitfarmer and NPC with class levels. If you're going to give serious consideration to magic effecting the setting, you're going to have to start with serious homebrew changes to spells with huge impact, and be open to changing setting/spells when you or the players spot a giant inconsistency. For example, consider teleport combined with bags of holding and the effect that could have on trade. Powerful wizards should likely be able to fund themselves in major cities based on just moving some goods/people once a day for less than an hour of work in some sort of arrangement with a guild, or maybe a smuggling guild works with or has a wizard that moves their contraband goods. A bag of holding is something like 500 lbs, if that was heroin IRL, how much profit would they make? How would that change how the authorities act/etc? These sort of thought experiments can be a lot of fun if people are in for it, and can make a world feel a lot more immersive. If your group doesn't like that then having magic have no impact is fine, and just have fun with it. Not every book series is going to be wheel of time or stormlight archive, sometimes they're gonna be conan the barbarian, and that is OK.
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Sep 12, 2015 07:58
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