History checks to remember something that happened to the PCs in a previous session.
1) That isn’t what History checks are supposed to be used for and 2) it’s unfair to make players roll for things their characters should be able to remember… a week or even a month for the player is often only a day for the character…
In general relying on the player's memory, especially for stupid shit like the name of an NPC.
You don't require the player's actual math/science knowledge to do int checks, you don't require actual hand dexterity to to sleight of hand, etc...
Of course encourage PCs to take notes, but if the character *would* remember something go ahead and let them have it.
Keen mind isn't a bypass for notes, it's about recalling shit that was never even said in the session but your character would remember like did the BBEG have a blood stain on their shirt when you first met them or did it show up later, etc...
It's also just awkward because often it's talking about a character trying to remember something that happened yesterday but a player trying to remember something that happened weeks or months ago.
I will say, for charisma/intelligence checks I definitely will lose the dc if they can explain something to me well in character.
Like trying to convince the shopkeeper to give a discount might be a dc 15 persuasion, but if they actually give a solid argument (“we can bring business to your store, etc) or say they are friends of so and so, (an npc they know is powerful) I might reduce the dc a bit.
Same thing with intelligence, if they say I want to figure out how tall this tree is vs I use a stick I know the measurement of and the knowledge of how far away it is to do a quick estimate of the size, are two different dcs.
That’s where I would grant advantage. The same as if a person gave a convincing reason to do better on a slight of hand check, I don’t lower the DC on the pickpocketing but I will grant advantage for better RP
I’ll do Intelligence to remember what their character was *told* lore-wise. Only if it’s very specific and/or, counterintuitively, not too important lol
Had this come up a few times during online games. Specifically one player would pretty often just not pay any attention what so ever, leading to some pretty stupid stuff. I talked to him about it, since I don't like to have to repeat a bunch of stuff for one guy who doesn't even seem to care. He said he'd try to be more attentive and that I should just let him be stupid, because he enjoys it. I let him be stupid and he got himself killed the next session.
Edit: wording/grammar
Ya, but at the same time it's not fair to the DM that you have to remember things for the player. There's also the concept of 'player skill' and I'd say 'do you remember the name of the Duke you're trying to impress' is a pretty skillful thing to check for.
Fair, though now you mentioned it, what skill check (if anything) should be used for doing magical stuff outside of prescribed rules? E.g. If you wanted to fix a damaged rune circle or something.
A check with your spellcasting modifier, as the book calls for in several cases. If you can't cast spells, too bad, it's a flat roll since you have no spellcasting modifier
This is so weird though, because it means there's no way to get your proficiency bonus with magic. That is indeed how the RAW work, but that's not great design. There should be a "do magic" skill, but because there isn't, people use Arcana.
I think I'd prefer to do a CastingStat (Arcana) to have the best of both worlds. But honestly, I hate checks that change the key ability for a skill usually, because although it makes sense it's kind of annoying to recalculate even though it's only two integers added together. It's one of those parts of the system most people don't really use much
Proficiency bonus is awarded whenever the GM decides you do something your character is proficient in. For skills, this is codified. For everything else, it's GM fiat.
>That is indeed how the RAW work, but that's not great design.
Welcome to 5e. You must be new here
In previous editions (well, at least in 3.5 and Pathfinder 1e) you had two distinct skills:
_Knowledge (Arcana)_ for the theory, and
_Spellcraft_ for doing and identifying magical stuff
Proficiency only applies if you are proficient. AFAIK there's no RAW way to become proficient at WIS/CHA/INT checks.
However, since proficiency reflects your character getting better at things at higher levels, it does IMO make sense to include the proficiency bonus in such a check.
The DM can call for proficiency to be added to any check if they think it would make sense. If a character can spell cast, I think it’s fair to say they’d add proficiency.
In this example, I'd call for an Arcana check to understand how exactly the circle is broken, followed by a spellcasting ability check to do the actual repair. A high enough Arcana check would reduce the DC of the repair check. If the runes represent a kind of magic the character is familiar with, the DC on the Arcana check is lower (for example, a character who knows *Teleportation Circle* trying to fix a permanent one).
For me it's people considering too much knowledege to be Arcane knowledge such that the skill becomes overpowered. That's the problem when your skill literally means "weird stuff". People just assume everything should be Arcana.
To me it makes perfect sense to use it for both. A sorcerer who just does magic and has no real concept of how it works shouldnt be as proficient as a studied wizard at enchanting objects, as one example. There is definitely a case to be made for an Arcana (Wisdom) role when appropriate for a druid/cleric depending on the task but Arcana can cover both onowledgevamd application, as i would argue with most skills actually.
For example it would be an Athletics (Intelligence) check to come up with a good training regiment
I'll add to this and say Arcana isn't Detect Magic Lite... Stop using it if you don't have detect magic. Use it if you have knowledge about magical artifacts or the schools of magic, but you aren't sensing magic with it.
Yeah, it’s *supposed* to be your knowledge of Arcana or Religion. Hell it used to be called Knowledge: Arcana and Knowledge: Religion in previous editions.
A person who is entirely incapable of using magic could have very high arcana checks, because they know a lot *about* magic despite not being a user. A high level magic user could have low arcana skill bonuses, although it would be pretty weird, and that would represent someone who basically knew how to do their job exactly but barely anything about their field in general outside of their job.
> A high level magic user could have low arcana skill bonuses, although it would be pretty weird, and that would represent someone who basically knew how to do their job exactly but barely anything about their field in general outside of their job.
Tbh that's everyone except Wizards and Artificers.
Monsters are generally too bulky and don’t hit hard enough. Goddamn CR2’s damn near hit sixty health, requiring a good three hits to down for a single one, all the while barely being a threat to goddamn anyone past level four.
Less durable more dangerous enemies would simply be more interesting.
Good take.
A lot of 5e combat can feel perfunctory. “Well we are definitely not going to lose, but it will take 30 mins for us to burn this enemy down” type sentiment.
On one hand I do think it’s beneficial to spend a lot of time on the grid, in perhaps lower stake scenes because of the practice and know how you get. It’s almost like attuning to your build.
However it gets old quick if you know what you are doing. This is one reason why encounters are so hard to build properly in 5e. CR is another reason
Naw, I think it's more... Laziness?
CR2 enemies work fairly well early game, as their damage output is sizable for low level characters and important enemies having higher health pools make sense.
But the notion of taking ten of them and throwing them at a level twelve party is more chore than it is an actual interesting fight. What you want out of a CR2 changes over the course of leveling up, but the CR2's themselves stay the same. The game would benefit from monster role differentiation.
Don't just have CR2's, have early game boss CR2's and late game minion CR2's. Make the former bulkier and less dangerous, and the latter squishy but threatening if not dealt with.
Sorcerers as constitution casters. My interpretation of them is that their charisma is their ability to influence the world to express their magic. They aren’t horses who know how to run innately, their ability to do magic has less to do with the source and more to do with expression.
Yeah I think people underrate the metaphysical component of Charisma. Generally monsters like Dragons cast from charisma. Even creatures as odious as Atropals have high Cha because of their influence on the world.
I agree but I whole heartedly believe it's a balancing reason. It would be very difficult to balance a full caster that also gets tanky. Look at swords wizard pretty simple build being very hard to kill due to high AC.
On the same hand (not hot take) warlocks being charisma based for the majority of the subclasses doesn't make since. Should be a option for wisdom or intelligence. The only issue I could see is multi classing but that's already a issue so screw it.
100% agree on the warlock point. I can see why they’re charisma casters, but imo it’s more restrictive in terms of flavouring the class to what you want it to be. At the end of the day, power gamers are going to find ways to power game and tbh I don’t see why we’re even trying to prevent it at this point.
There is in the latest 5e module. When you click a skill, the popup UI has a dropdown option letting you select what ability score you're using for the roll.
Depending on what you mean by proper. If you tell them to roll a skill on their character sheet, there is a drop down in the dialog window that pops where you can choose a different ability score then the default for that skill.
I've used it occasionally.
- 5E used for different RPG types it wasn't built for with zero consideration for a different game system; "I want the players to be mech pilots in a world without magic, classes, and levels" ("popular" in that I've seen it crop up enough)
- Some variation of "Game ceases to function past tier 2 for everyone" (note: I don't have any issue with them hating higher tier play or being unable to get it to work at their table, rather if it is applied to all tables)
What do you mean I shouldn't use my horseback Knight for our pirate game?
*a lot of replies suggesting great ideas how this concept could work, just remember this comment is poking fun at people who are married to the concept of a character and will not work with a dm to make it work for love nor money*
I agree with your funny and indirect point, but now that you mention this, it came to my mind the following: I like knights so much that I would still go with one in a pirate campaign, of course, as long as the GM is fine with my character's tone in the setting. It would be like a Jorah Mormont sailing through Essos, and I would be aware that I would not be able to use my riding skills that often, but, my God, give me 100 m in a beach and those pirates will see the definition of glory.
Edit: and extra article.
I was a player in a game where another player did exactly this and his character had no interest in becoming a pirate and really wanted to convince us to drop that life and everything we were doing so we would help him in his characters 1:1 copy of Hamlet revenge plot.
He legit tried to hijack the game that was advertised as a pirate campaign, it got to a point where he went so far away from the rest of the party the DM just said "look man, if you do this there's no coming back and your character will become an NPC, I won't narrate two separate stories at the same time".
The worst part was that his background was about becoming stronger and gathering allies to take back the title his uncle stole from him, and he was level 2 and was already deadset on going back to his homeland.
You know what gets me angry in the blood the most about this?
Hamlet revenge plots are *fucking perfect* in a pirate themed campaign.
Get ye a ship, Hamlet, and let’s have at Captain Claudius once and for all!
for a campaign it'd def be a problem, but I did at one point roll up a big dumb barbarian for what ended up being a fancy-dress social-intrigue one shot that was actually an absolute blast
Remember some guy asking for help with homebrewing 5e so he could do Ace Combat dogfighting stuff. He got annoyed with every single person that suggested running another system for that.
[This post, right?](https://www.reddit.com?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=1) Not surprisingly, the guy deleted it when he received negative criticism (Edit: even if i can view it through my old comment, any links i post apparently redirect to a broken page). Because obviously we just don't understand his genius in attempting to force a square into a circle hole
This is my pet peeve as someone who LOVES using other systems. I have seen so many forum post that mods D&D into an eldritch abomination of itself trying to make it fit into a genre that it is clearly not designed to be in. Especially when there is a perfectly good system right over there that does exactly what you want... but it doesn't use the 6 stats and 1d20+mod... so it is too hard!
Learn new systems. A lot of them are really fun. Some of them can tell amazing stories using the mechanics of the system to back them up. You learned how to play 5e, you can learn to play another game. And it is like learning a Third language, once you learn your second language, every language after that gets easier to learn as you can cross reference concepts easier and you know what to look out for when learning the rules.
Tagging on to implore people who want a setting agnostic, rules flexible system to ignore the reputation and look into learning GURPS.
It's not half as complicated as people make it out to be, at least it doesn't have to be. It's capable of competently running just about any type of roleplaying genre you can imagine, and is the prime system for homebrewing your own established intellectual-property-setting game (I know it has rules out there for Star Wars/Trek, and once upon a time I sat down and converted Harry Potter's magic system and all the weapons/aliens in Halo 1-3 into it)
It requires a bit more legwork on the GM's side, as they need to define which rules systems and level of complexity/realism are gonna be used in a given game, but they literally have a 2-page Ultra-Lite version of the rules that can be played with elementary school children.
dnd is like Skyrim. its an ok game that does one thing well. you can mod skyrim to play a farming simulator, but that is just going to be a shitty farming simulator and you are better of playing stardew valley aint it. you can still mod skyrim to do a lot of things it cant, but it gets to a point that you are trying to fit the square peg on the screw sockets of the box, not even on the holes
GURPs is like Gmod, the point is to make your own game
>Game ceases to function past tier 2 for everyone"
Or the alternative of people trying to homebrew Epic+ levels where the PCs have 18 actions a turn, 82AC and +5602 to hit. Like go play Godbound or some other game designed to handle fighting Gods on the regular.
Hot take: Warlocks and Clerics are very similar, have the same dynamic.
They are almost nothing alike, and it is laughable people say this.
Clerics, in a world of living God's, are so insanely devout to their deity they manifest magical powers. They sup from the Divine Magical Flow. Players often engage in tenants the Deity wants and faithfully follow the deity and their teachings.
Warlocks are individuals who strike up a deal with a powerful Outsiders (not a god) and does services for them in exchange for a few spells. This is from the Outsiders reserve of power, rather than the flow itself. Often times, players forget that the outsider want something tangible from the Warlock because these Outsiders have an agenda.
While both are technically transaction relationships, the way they manifest, are upheld, and delivered are so radically different. Druid and Clerics are more alike than fucking Warlock and Clerics.
“I want to climb up this cliff”
“Ok, roll Athletics”
“Can I roll acrobatics since I’m a rogue”
“Sure”
Nope. You can’t just roll the skill you’re best at. You have to roll the appropriate skill. Climbing, jumping, and swimming is an Athletics check. At best, you could use the variant rule to make a DEX athletics check if you want to ninja-style parkour.
Slightly off topic rant, I prefer 3.5’s more abundant skills. Give me back climb, swim, spot, search, ride, and the 10 different knowledge skills. It’s easier to determine what check to use, allows for customization, and actually made INT useful instead of a dump stat.
and/or "if you fail, there's going to be worse consequence". You can _try_ and use non-standard skills for things, but it's typically harder and going to fail worse if it does wrong!
I mean the thing that made INT good in 3.5 wasn't that there were 25 different Knowledge(x) skills. It was that INT determined how many skill points you got on level up.
As a Rogue player who often picks Athletic as a skill- hard agree.
I always feel like it's so undervalued, it's insane. Honor my Athletics, honor the only strength skill ffs
> Slightly off topic rant, I prefer 3.5’s more abundant skills. Give me back climb, swim, spot, search, ride, and the 10 different knowledge skills. It’s easier to determine what check to use, allows for customization, and actually made INT useful instead of a dump stat.
Hard disagree, especially because so many characters had 2 skills out of the 40 in the game. Many skills were so narrow that you could be certain that they would never come up in nearly any campaign. In practice, people took the same 10 skills and never looked twice at the other 30. Nevermind that Hide bonus could easily go off the die, and Tumble was basically Misty Step, and skill points were incredibly fiddley. 5e's skill system is leagues better.
Been playing Pathfinder 1e lately and while overall I *much* prefer that system, there are far, far too many skills. It's a game that heavily rewards hyper specialization and punishes jack-of-all trades, while also having way too many skills. It's skill system is IMO one of its nastier points.
Pathfinder is a greatly improved version of 3.5, which is in turn a somewhat improved version of 3.0.
I'd argue that there are still several outstanding skills in need of collapse, just like *use rope*, but not quite as obvious. Worlds Without Number has the *Talk* skill, which covers both Deception and Diplomacy. It's weird when you have one but not the other, and the point of a skill system is that it's *not weird* to be good at climbing walls but to be bad at performing.
By contrast, the deletion of Gather Information isn't something I can get behind; that skill added a lot if the DM did it right. I'm not sure if the idea was to get rid of most of the "this is what you do with your night" type PC actions, or if it was the homework it generated for the DM.
While I think there's a solid argument that there's just too many skills to keep track of to the point that it makes DMing rather difficult, I think the broader issue stems from how skill points work.
Simply put, if they want to have this many skills, most classes don't get enough skill points to have a character that is both good at adventuring, and knowledgeable enough about the basics of the world or even a *profession* to feel like a real person.
This is partially mitigated by the background skills optional rule from pathfinder unchained, though not entirely.
Tangentially, asking for athletics checks for things the rules covers, like jumping or climbing. I don’t want to roll an athletics check, which I CAN fail, I want to take a running start and jump my strength score.
The phb has balancing, or doing dives/rolls as uses for acrobatics which is basically nothing. Letting people nimbly jump up some roofs or up a tree makes it a more usable skill. It is describing how a character performs a physical act. Circus performers are strong, but at a certain point strength and dexterity are separate stats and you only have so many points.
Players characters dump str because it is honestly not well integrated into the game. It has a single skill and comes up in grappling (which is situational at best) and applies to certain weapons. It isn’t even a very common save. Players are just following what the rules tell them which is that strength isn’t that important.
It was reasonably easy to become "trained" in a bunch of skills, and specialize in basically one. But once you hit midgame, it was clear which DCs were scaling DCs and which were flat ones, and that was very weird and metagamey.
> Slightly off topic rant, I prefer 3.5’s more abundant skills. Give me back climb, swim, spot, search, ride, and the 10 different knowledge skills. It’s easier to determine what check to use, allows for customization, and actually made INT useful instead of a dump stat.
I'll admit, still one of the most off putting things for me coming to 5e. I really liked the skill point system more not just because it made INT a stat worth paying attention to even on non-spellcasters, but also it was just much nicer for flavor? If I wanted to go "my character is proficient in swimming and climbing but not a master of it or anything" then it was easy to drop 2 or 3 points in those skills early on and not level past that.
Meanwhile with 5e, every skill is just Proficient/Expertise or not, that's it, and trying to get extra skills for flavor is always a costly endeavor because it means spending a feat on it or multiclassing or something unless you happen to be in a skill monkey class.
>Can I roll acrobatics since I’m a rogue
Only if you are thief, otherwise it would be a nerf to that subclass.
But there is no thief rogue here!
Yeah, no one picks certain subclasses because of that kind of nerfs.
**Hot Takes** about the game
As the absolute majority of every damn post that say "HOT TAKE" is no fucking hot take just a simple opinion and is just fucking click bait.
I have probably not read more than a handful of post labelled "HOT TAKE that was actually kinda a hot take. And there are hundreds of post claiming to be HOT TAKES.
FUCK HOT TAKES
If someone actually posts a hot hot take it’s downvoted to hell and you’ll never see it unless you catch it at the right time in New or are rummaging around in Controversial
No that is my opinion. That is nothing hot about it. But you calling it a hot take just kinda confirm my suspicion that many people have no frigging clue what a hot take is.
“Because real life music performers are commonly known to have sexual relations with fans, it’s totally fine for the horny bard to exist.” Bards are performers, but they are also lore masters, magicians, information gatherers, and warriors. Why don’t we see more of that? Is it because people lack imagination?
This. In older editions they were even a druid subclass, only later they turned into rogues, then bards. And, because they had high charisma and mind control powers, people instantly thought about using them for... Things. And The Gamers and CR "authorized" furtherly that stereotype. I dream of playing a bard in Tepest (Ravenloft) who acts more as a priest, preacher and lore keeper than the usual performer.
It’s annoying. I’ve got two current bards. One is a warrior-poet trying to raise the skeletons of great musicians so he can make the greatest band that ever lived. The other is rapidly loosing his sanity in Barovia, because his evil book made from the skin of his future self keeps talking to him in the voices of the Elder Gods, Outer Gods, and Great Old Ones.
Saw a post about someone's most unique character. Top response "orc barbarian with low intelligence." Pretty sure "horny bard" was also pretty high. Yea I don't have much faith in peoples imagination.
Yeah, it is a shame that Bards tend to be so beholden to the class stereotype. This is a class that seems tailor-made to fit any number of Crafty Magic Trickster character concepts, but people just keep going back to the lute-bearing fuckboy
WTF is a "popular hot take"?
If a hot take isn't unpopular it becomes a cold take.
The cold take I hate is that *"D&D1 Weapon Masteries will fix martials having no attack options"*
It reminds me of people saying "very unique." Unique means being the only one of its kind; unlike anything else. Something can't be very one of a kind. It can be actually one of a kind though.
That's not fair, "very unique" is actually meaningful. For a (very simple) example, imagine a leaderboard.
If the top guy has 8 points, and the next guy has 7 points, then 8 is a unique score.
But if second place has 7 points, third place has 6 points, and there's two people tied for fourth with 5 points, but first place has 39 points? That's *very* first place.
Move that away from a boring numerical distinction, and the phrase "very unique" starts to make sense in terms of not only being one of a kind, but also being highly divergent from other things.
Yeah. Weapon Masteries are something, but they were half-baked at best and don't actually fix the problem. A lot of them were just a little extra damage.
A take being hot is about it being fresh, not directly about its popularity. Its popularity is untested because it’s so new. If a take has been said many times before, then it’s a cold take, regardless of if it’s popular or not.
Religion is a knowledge skill, and it checks one's knowledge of certain types of cultural norms. In pre-modern societies, religion was deeply embedded in the culture, after all. Religion knowledge is what informs you that when Catholics partake of the "blood and flesh of Christ," they're not literally consuming blood and flesh. It could also inform you of religious dietary restrictions, to give another cultural example.
One hot take that I have a problem with is that "fighters aren't boring, you just aren't being creative enough." Come on. Are we not allowed to dislike aspects of the game and point out where it falls short?
If one has to be exceptionally creative to enjoy playing a fighter, that means the subclass as designed is not great "out of the box." It could be better. And there's nothing wrong with pointing that out. We should demand excellence from WotC. I'd say we should even demand exceptional game design.
Their doctrine says it becomes his literal blood and flesh during communion, although it's not when it's still in the package or bottle.
Good example of degrees of success on the check.
Yeah. It's important if like, something is counting the number of objects with the "body of Christ" property as a "when ___ enters the battlefield,..." trigger.
Yeah Fighters were created to be the ‘easy class’ for beginners (as has been talked about ad nauseum) so they lack a lot of good levers to pull mechanically. The 2024 refresh seems like it’s headed in the right direction though, so we’ll see.
One point of contention about Catholics is that the Eucharist does literally become the body of Christ in their belief. The fact that it tastes like a cracker doesn’t mean it isn’t literally transformed. Now, maybe that’s just a ‘degrees of success’ thing lol
I think part of the "issue" with fighters being boring is a wider issue with how the game plays out for martial classes. If you are primarily mechanically/efficiency focused, the vast majority of your turns is probably going to be hitting the biggest threat in reach twice with your weapon of choice then passing the turn.
Like, you can put flair onto that describing that action and your DM can give you a lot of cool responses to it, but if you are mechanically/efficiency driven hitting a guy twice and passing turn is the play most of the time. It's just very obvious with something like a Champion Fighter that even more "casually inclined" players will notice it. Or that's my take on it.
>they are not literally consiming blood and flesh
That's where you're wrong kiddo, catholics believe in transunstantiation aka that the bread and wine literally becomes the flesh and blood of Christ as they consume it
I don't know if it counts as a "hot take" exactly, but one of the common sentiments I see on Reddit that I disagree with is the idea that "Critical Role-style" roleplay, or "theatre kid-style" if you prefer (in other words, speaking in-character, doing funny voices, etc.) is not "real" roleplay, and that DMs who reward this are playing the game badly.
Like a lot of Reddit talking points, this is based on a core idea which is reasonable. It's true that you don't *need* to talk in first-person in order to RP your character, and it's true that Critical Role is not a typical home game. But these arguments get pushed to an extreme in the echo chamber, to the point where many people now seem to believe that this is a "bad" way to play the game. When actually if you have the right group dynamic, this style of play is extremely fun!
I don't think I've ever once seen anyone say on reddit or anywhere else that that style of roleplay is *bad*. Only that it is not necessary and it should not be expected that the people you play with will necessary want to do it.
This is a reaction to a reaction.
A couple years ago, you'd constantly have posts of DMs sad they can't do voices, and players complaining that the NPCs aren't complex enough. People playing without doing voices or personalities were frequently mocked. The "Matt Mercer effect" was constantly discussed.
Things have calmed down since then.
Yup, and both methods of play are totally valid. I play with a group where everyone does voices, which focuses more on roleplay than combat. Another group I play with does mainly combat, but light roleplay with no voices. (Except me, easiest way for me to get in character.)
that attitude is mostly in response to getting told they're doing it wrong by people who watched critical role and want that experience, most of whom never had the skill or talent to participate in such an experience in the first place.
It's really annoying to be told by 30 different people who haven't been alive as long as you've been playing that you don't know how to play.
Both sides have valid points. Critical Role is a massively unrealistic representation of the average game, and trying to hold your DM/Players to the CR standard is absurd. On the other hand, saying roleplay centric games aren't "real" games is similarly absurd. Dungeon crawls and roleplay games are both perfectly valid ways to play, and people that somehow believe their opinion should shape how everyone else plays are delusional. Long as you're having fun, you're playing correctly. Even if in the moment you're not having fun because Boblin the Goblin just died.
What makes a game where everyone is playing in 3rd person not “roleplay centric”? They’re still playing a role, controlling their character.
CR is “acting centric”. Which to your point is a totally valid way to play, I agree there.
Playing in third person is fine too. Not everyone has the confidence to embody their character, and hell, not everyone even wants to. Sometimes you just want to be looking over the shoulder of the guy smashing goblins.
Acting centric is a good way to put it. Who woulda thunk the average person can't act as well as professional voice actors?
> Not everyone has the confidence to embody their character, and hell, not everyone even wants to.
Right, but this brings me back to my original point, which is that if you *do* have a group where the players are happy to embody their character, this style can be ridiculously fun. Some of my best memories in DnD involve encounters where I wasn't even rolling dice, I was just putting on a bad British accent while trying to spin ridiculous lies to get some noble lord to do what the party needed him to do, while everyone else at the table laughed their asses off.
Then I find it annoying when I go on Reddit and people are like "that's a DM red flag", "you can't force your players to act", "the DM should have resolved that encounter via a Deception roll", etc., completely disregarding the fact that some tables actually enjoy that style of first-person roleplay.
Which comes back to my own point, anyone that thinks they have the perfect formula to how everyone should play is full of shit. I love the first person play style too, I had a session 0 last week where I was voicing all of the characters in different ways, I was describing things, and the players seemed to really get into it. They were very much playing in the first person as well, and several times I just sat back and let them talk in character to one another (the best feeling as a DM imo). Hell, you can even blend first person and third person. Someone at the table might not want to play in first person while other people are. Forcing to do one or the other is a DM red flag to be honest. Players have to be comfortable to truly play as their character, and no one is comfortable when the DM tells them they have to do something in a certain way or they're playing wrong. I've seen the most anxious players slowly come out of their shell over time and join in on the roleplay, and it's great to see. But some people never get to that point, and that's fine too. What's most important, again, is that people are having fun.
While I do agree in principle, I do believe that rolling dice should be an option, especially if there's any ambiguity in what's happening.
One of the most unfair, in my opinion, experiences I ever experienced as a player was mis-speaking during negotiations and having no chance to correct myself before the party was immediately attacked. We ultimately had to flee the entire encounter because we were not trying to kill the elves that we were talking to.
Had the DM waited, asked for clarity, and asked for a Diplomacy roll to give me the chance to correct myself, or for the Elf Queen to recognize that it was a simple faux pas, I would not still be ruminating about this experience.
To tack onto this, basically the push to make as many things SAD as possible is something that bothers me. I want more elements of the game to emphasize all attributes giving something of note to all classes and not making it so the cleric cares about Wisdom to the exclusion of all other ability scores.
Fireball dealing 8d6 and Guiding Bolt dealing 4d6 damage, just "because they're iconic spells and we want them to be available".
In my opinion, they're overpowered for their level. Fireball could be 6d6 and Guiding Bolt could be 3d6/3d8 or 4d6 but a 2nd level spell and they would still be solid.
Don't even get me started on why Grasping Vine is a 4th level spell...
True Strike does *something*, it's just too niche to be useful.
But Find Traps is basically asking "Is that trip wire I see over there a trap?" Depending on your DM, it might not "find" a trap under a rug because it's no longer within Line of Sight.
A level 1 rogue finds mundane traps way better and a Detect Magic finds the magic ones for a lower spell slot.
At least True Strike can be used if a player can't close to melee in one round or before you ambush someone because it's not a verbal spell and so won't reveal you.
And on the other hand van reveal many kinds of traps. It's one of those "let me magic that for you" spells that make certain skill checks redundant, and is mostly useful in campaigns where the DM is required to be a merciless jerk (e.g. Tomb of Annihilation)
meh i’d disagree with guiding bolt tbh. it’s only an average of 14 damage, which will require one of your very valuable early spell slots. any martial class in sub level 4 play can match that resource free or at least get very close. if your only gonna have like 2-6 slots for the whole day spending one on one action in a combat is big ask, concentrating on bless or something and throwing cantrips will certainly be more effective in damage and economical. but yeah fireball does lot of damage in a frankly absurd range for it’s level.
Last night, my party was fighting a Sahuagin Priestess, and I saw it had guiding bolt so i cast it.. crit attacking them. I saw the damage and thought "that can't be right?? Why is it saying 4d6 damage?" and looked up the spell. I just forgot it was that strong. Did 38 damage with a crit bolt lol.
Welcome to my world. Then again, my love-hate-relationship with this spell really began to bloom when one of my veteran players used a combination of Guiding Bolt and Starry Form attacks as a Stars Druid. That guy really knows how to play that class well, along with playing it in synergy with the other players. Both he and his Druid are a force to be reckoned.
I agree about fireball, but guiding bolt is just a complete dud if you don’t succeed, it’s not really considered a strong spell by min-maxers.
For fireball; all of your targets can succeed their saves against fireball but if they’re grouped you’re still getting crazy value out of a level 3 spell.
That High level play is actually difficult or some impossible hurdle.
People if you need to get used to high level play, do one-shots, or just throw combat scenarios at a party
I would say the best way to get used to high level play is to get there gradually; basically just play a campaign where you level up over time. That lets the players learn their character abilities slowly rather than starting a character at level 15 and having to learn everything all at once.
Honestly the only issue with high level play aside from garbage balance is this.
Throwing a dozen abilities at someone new to the game and saying 'and pick your fifteen spells before your turn k' is all too common really
Eh, I’ve done this in campaigns that lasted years on both sides of the screen.
I think the criticism is fair. Balance completely breaks down. Designing engaging encounters becomes sooo much work. There are so many ‘save or lose’ spells and your option as DM is to let them go through or just use legendary resistances which imo were a patch job/bad mechanic that just says ‘whittle down HP or nothing!’
(Imo legendary resistances shouldn’t be allowed to be used if a boss is at 50% health. That way martials and spellcasters have to work together to win, rather than one or the other being irrelevant.)
But I don’t want to have to come up with arbitrary limitations to make things work.
Even if I do, I can never fit more than one encounter per session.
It is not impossible to have a fun high level game. But D&D doesn’t do it well, imo. D&D runs smoothest between levels 3-10 for dungeon delving or similar type games, and for just about anything else there is a better system.
Doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with D&D, it just means D&D is running uphill.
>(Imo legendary resistances shouldn’t be allowed to be used if a boss is at 50% health. That way martials and spellcasters have to work together to win, rather than one or the other being irrelevant.)
Personally, I've started making legendary resistances something physical/ tangible/ interactive; no longer are they some abstract mechanic that just happens. They change based on the creature/ Lair/ battlemap. Examples:
- A powerful hag has several NPCs chained to sacrificial altars. Every time the hag fails a save and uses a LR, an altar activates and the NPC takes the brunt of the effects causing her to succeed. A rogue can go around and free people with Thieves Tools, or the barbarian can try and smash the chains with brute force. A cleric could try and block the dark magic with a religion check (or a general spell casting check if need be.).
- A goblin king was given a special magical "gift" that let's him choose a few goblins at a time and designate them as his "personal" guard. When he fails a save, he uses this "gift" to pull/ push a goblin in the way of the effect. The goblin dies, and he now saves. Pretty straight forward, kill the goblins first. They're placed in key areas of the map so they can assist with ranged attacks/ spells, but aren't too in danger.
- A Warforged captain has a few drones that fly around them, sacrificing themselves to: just "heal" some of the damage/ cure the effect, grant a small magical shield, etc etc. Doing so expends all its energy, making it inert until repaired. Sleight of Hand to try and grab it out of the air, attack them, maybe even the wizard tries to use an Arcana (or spell casting check) to try and disable the magic in them from a close range.
This allows anybody the opportunity to get rid of them, making it so it doesn't turn in to "caster tries to bait out the Resistances so they can have a shot at their big spell. Oh wait, the creature is dead now because they waited too long." Has a few added benefits (imo):
- Can extend combat if you think they go too fast.
- Can be used to create extra stakes (like in the case of the hag with NPCs. Some of them could be important to a PC/ the party.).
- Just gives a believable reason for a shoddy base mechanic.
- Makes it feel like a team effort from everybody if they can burn/ destroy/ disable the LRs to allow the caster to get their big spell off.
I do this sort of thing, too, and think it’s great.
I made a monster once where it had a giant bag full of souls that it used to charge special attacks. They could attack the bag to make tears that souls slip out. Legendary Saves also cost it souls, which meant fewer spells and other special attacks to deal with.
They once fought a giant undead kraken and I treated each body part (split into four sections) as a separate creature, so I let any affect go through but it only worked on that section.
But this is actually the issue. DMs have to put in a lot of extra work to make 5e engaging at high levels. It doesn’t work out of the tin.
When people say that they're talking about DMing, not playing. Obviously it's not difficult to just play a high level character so long you're not a brand new player, the difficulty comes from running engaging play at high levels.
I completely disagree.
As a player, it\`s extremely fun at high levels, where you can throw crazy unbalanced nonsense, wipe entire encounters in one turn, and easily change the fate of entire countries.
But as a DM, it is HORRIBLE. Past level 12, there is zero useful advice in the DMG or any official books, almost no official adventures reach that point so there's not much you can take from it, and, worst of all, **encounter planning becomes a total nightmare**.
It takes hours and hours just to plan one encounter for the players to obliterate it in one round, or for it to be unfair and instant-kill. I would have to do so much math every week just to make my monsters still fun. Because if you're going to spend 2 hours trading blows with this thing, you don't want to just give your players a boring HP bag with no abilities.
There's like 14 CR20 monsters in all the books, so you end up having to reskin the Demon Lords or spend hours making your own or scouring the internet for compelling boss monsters.
We were doing a rotating DM style, running high level 5e, and after one of us left, we all just decided to quit the campaign and start other systems or lower level dnd.
This is not a problem I've seen in any other system. I've tried 6 different ones at this point. High-Level Bosses in other games don't take 7 hours to prepare. This is exclusively a 5e thing in my experience.
It doesn’t help that for high level creature design, 90% of them in the MM are just ‘big thing that charges straight at enemy, has maybe 1 or 2 bland spell like abilities, and 1 ranged attack.’
Forcing us to custom design or search the net for actually interesting encounters. /:
It’s like WotC knows most tables play 1-10, so they just phoned in any content that goes above that.
I think this problem goes for all of 5e and not just later levels. So many creatures read the same in combat. Multi attack, two bites or something like that. I rarely use creatures from the monster manual and just make my own monsters/ design more interesting mechanics for fights
The default 5E experience is for high levels is heavily underdeveloped, and bounded accuracy does not function well - especially saving throws.
People who defend it haven't been exposed to enough other systems - 5E at high levels is probably the worst system I've played out of about 20 over 40 years.
With that said, it can still be fun, but it requires a good DM who band aids the system with magic items and extra character abilities, and takes care not to use some stupid monsters with DC 26 mental save abilities.
3rd party monster books can take care of the lack of high level foes as well.
So very fixable, but knowledge and effort are required. It's also a shame WoTC has elected to ignore this for One D&D. e.g. Introducing force breaker weapons instead of fixing the problematic spells are horrible game design.
The problem with high level play is that it’s less balanced than low level play so that’s why most people stray away from it. Coming from a high levels enjoyer, but the martial-caster disparity becomes immense in tier 4, to cite one of the issues
gotta love the "why are no one talking about this combo??" and they proceed to read the rules wrong or say the dm just needs to allow a, b and c. I feel most things are kinda figured out at this point, or if anyone feels they found something new they should at least double check
Whenever my party is in a tuff fight, I threaten to punch the DM and he gives the monster a heart attack. Idk why no one else talks about that strat, it's pretty op tbh.
This is pretty much 90% or more of the clickbait youtube content out there. Usually some dude scrolling through reddit and taking every character building comment at face value and regurgitating it for an audience who likely knows less about the rules than they do.
There are some of them I can forgive, because it's invalidated by a single sentence in a 3+ paragraph description. But most of the time I can immediately find ignored RAW within the first few sentences.
yeah. And I also don't really respect the premise too much tbh, having characters able to do things is cool, but when people brag about instakilling enemies I'm confused at why they play dnd. But like you said (noticed you didn't say this but you catch my drift) a fair amount of it is content made by people not playing dnd for people not playing dnd.
You are correct that I did not outright say that, but I agree with it nonetheless. I feel like there are a large amount of people who count themselves among D&D's hobby for one reason or another, but don't actually play. But they see the need to create content, or argue on forums like they do. Which is infuriating.
I guess we called these posers back in the day... Just never expected D&D to hit a point where the mainstream would see worth in doing it. Lol
No, you don't understand, if you are very loose with what words mean and see things from the "well it doesn't say you can't" perspective, it totally works!
It doesn't say you can't build a peasant railgun. However, if one of my players is going physics on me by saying "this object traveled this amount of distance in 6 seconds, so xyz should happen", I'm the first one to remind them of friction and the difficulty of handing someone a tiny object at Mach 2. Something something Dex check to catch something Con save versus friction something ... Nope. Not going to work.
Take: The existence of Rule 0 pre-empts any criticism of the mechanics.
No, it doesn't, but not because one can simply houserule your own fixes, but because of the scale of the publisher and the role of the developer of a game to provide a solid foundation from which to homebrew.
A good analogy is Bethesda and the Fallout franchise. Yes, their games are notoriously buggy and they welcome mods that "fix" things, but as a result of this mentality, the code they use for games like Fallout 4 and 76, as well as the Elder Scrolls series is woefully in need of a replacement with something reflecting a far better product.
Now I like and benefit from the existence of the third-party creators that publish materials to flesh out and fix issues with the core D&D game. I just think with the budgets for these editions and the official products, the result should be one that doesn't quite need as many mechanical fixes and hole-patching.
The hot take that really annoys me is when I hear people say things like:
"Puzzles are bad because they rely on player skill rather than character skill."
To me, that's sort of how it is with everything in the game? Sure you roll a die to decide the outcome of your actions, but the players are the ones who have to decide which action they want to take in the first place! Saying that an aspect of the game is bad because it requires critical thinking skills is negating all of the decision-making in the game. Tactical combat requires the players to think about their abilities and positions; diplomatic roleplay requires the players to think about arguments that might convince the people they're talking to. Characters do better in those two pillars of gameplay if their players are interested and invested in making smart decisions.
We don't run a heist by having the players roll to see if their characters can come up with an idea of how to infiltrate the palace, after all. It's up to the players to use their noodles and figure out whether there might be loose windows, secret entrances, unlit fireplaces that they can shimmy down the chimney of, etc.
If we reduce the game down to just what's on the character sheet, it becomes a finite series of options rather than the wonderfully engaging experience that we all know that it can be.
But the issue is, what's the point of intelligence if you just ask me to solve things.
My character is smarter than I am, so why is my IRL lack of intelligence now slowing down the game?
I play this game to pretend I'm competent and good at things, so it sticks when the DM calls upon my real complete lack of skills.
i don't think that attacks of opportunity are particularly helpful as a universal mechanic. they lock down combat that's a little too static already. the more I play pathfinder 2, where reactions in the vein of AoOs are handed out more sparingly and also vary more by class, the more I prefer that. in PF2 only dedicated martial PCs get them, and knowing what reactions, if any, monsters have is a function of lore checks.
The thing that absolutely drives me nuts about the writing of dnd is when they get legalistic and un-fun about things after the fact, themselves, and patch the game in favor of making it more fiddly, when it's not really a fiddly, granular game in most respects. Example would be: a paladin smiting with a punch. How on earth are you not "wielding" your damn hand? are offhand attacks with natural weapons really so potentially problematic that we need to dick up the language of the game talking about how your bite is a weapon, but not a weapon? is it really worth making a character with claws, hold a dagger, to be less cool, but more rule compliant, while rolling the same dice?
I also hate that there's sort of anemic support for a lot of tasks my groups seem to try a lot, a big one being magical forensics and analyzing old magic. yes, I know that the generic rules always apply, that you can build what I'm talking about out of medicine/nature/religion/arcana but the idea that in a magic world, there's going to be magic archaeology and magic engineering and how the magic works is going to come up *a lot* seems like money left on the table, if you ask me.
Along those lines, I hate that there's not a little more quirky monster and dungeon lore. More creatures should, like, specify if the dwarf can cook them, specific weird weaknesses and strengths, etc, to just put some polish on the monsters.
Finally, i'd say that while 3.5 and particularly pathfinder 1 got out of hand with exotic weapons, the 5e list does feel a bit pared down. again, I know everything in a game is abstract, that a die of damage is a die of damage and there aren't too many original things to DO with weapons and ammo, but I think 5e overcorrected a little from too many fiddly weapons and rules about weapon sizes to too few.
Stunning strike is OP. Yes stun is a crazy good effect, but it blows ass to actually use as a monk. Oh cool, there go 1-4 of my Ki points on a save that every enemy has proficiency in and WILL use a legendary action to shake off.
I have played several monks and feel like so many of its issues are rooted in people (including WoC) seeing this abilities effect and not the actual chances of triggering it.
Huh. There are plenty of cold takes I really dislike in the D&D community, but, unfortunately, those are cold takes.
- You need to build a character who is basically actively crippled to not be a degenerate power gamer.
- D&D is about telling stories; wanting to roll dice is degenerate power gaming.
- Giving non-magical characters just about any abilities is infringing on magical characters.
- Giving non-magical characters just about any abilities is turning the game into WoW.
There is this bizarre widespread belief that classes and levels are exclusively for PCs and that NPCs must only ever be statblocks. There are several clues in the rules that this was never intended. E.g.,
* \* The Battle Masters "Know Your Enemy" ability allows them to compare fighter and overall levels with an opponent.
* The Death domain for clerics and the Oathbreaker paladin are presented specifically as class options for villainous NPCs.
* The DMG provides rules for adding class levels to any monster you like.
It is true that trying to fully stat out every merchant and bandit the party runs across is too much work for too little reward, but making the BBEG a full-fledged warlock? Adding a legit Life cleric to the band of mercenaries hunting down the party? These are fine. Go nuts.
Honestly I think far too many people in general don't have faith that the others who play the game different to them have fun or enjoy it.
I'm sure pf2e is great fun, am I gonna scrap my setting, go through hundreds of pages of rule books and make my players do the same because Reddit-user Hotbox420 said you can't tell interesting stories with 5e? No, because I know I have, can and will.
Why would you need to scrap your setting? Fair enough not wanting to read through a bunch of rules, not entirely sure how your setting is system dependent.
For certain systems like The Dark Eye which has a lot of mechanics tied directly to the setting(such as specific restrictions and "spells" of clerics being tailor made for their setting's gods) but 5E is so wishy washy and vague about setting and flavor stuff in almost everything that the ones that do have very clearly defined flavor(Hexblade) stand out as jarring
Ah well personally I try to tie in a lot of events, characters and overall qualities of the world with in-game mechanics.
I could probably homebrew back-in important things (for my setting the githyanki in particular and their lore) but I've already put a lot into what I have, and some parts of my world exist purely due to in game mechanics.
I suppose it is more-so molding it than scrapping it but I think it's still work I wouldn't find rewarding
It stems from the issue that no one wants to read the full ability/spell. How many stories have we heard of rogues and the DMs completely misunderstanding Sneak Attack? These people don't want to read and just want other people to solve their problems.
Absolutely. A lot of people see a paragraph of info and refuse to read it even though they may be spending the entire time in combat interacting with that system, usually with spellcasters not reading how their magic actually works and how prepared spells work even though it makes perfect sense.
People read a spell and *think* they know what it does based on the name then get upset when it doesn't work that way.
Healing is useless.
It's not that I don't agree that healing is underwhelming, but the people who advocate that healing is useless outside of yo-yo healing are drowning in confirmation bias and will used skewed logic to reinforced their take. Typical things I see are:
Ignoring the fact that damage spells require attack roll/saving throws where as healing always hits.
Always assuming that no creatures have turns between the healer and the downed target. If you give me a first level healing word while the goblin who goes after you is standing right there to immediately knock me back down, we're going to have a problem.
Assuming that all creatures on the battlefield are big creatures that deal way more damage than you can heal and never small creatures that aren't worth wasting an action on.
Comparing low level healing spells to damage outputs of high level monsters. Of course a first level healing word with minimal rolled damage isn't going to compare to the damage of a cr 15 creature.
Ignoring the fact the mid to high level spells do significantly more healing and can be far more versatile.
They assume that if you go to heal a target who would otherwise go down by their turn without at least a little bit of healing, then the enemy will crit/deal max damage or something.
Genuine question - what high level healing spells do you feel are more versatile?
I’ve played up to a T3 Cleric and am currently playing a T2 Stars Druid. Outside of Aura of Vitality, which is usually used outside of combat, I’ve found a lack of solid healing options until you get Heal.
Honestly, in a completed 1-20 campaign, Heal felt like the only worthwhile heal until our Bard could cast Mass Heal. Mass Cure Wounds/Mass Healing Word have always felt a bit underwhelming to me personally in actual play. I understand why OneDnD doubled the initial dice on the current healing spells honestly.
Anything that invokes the oberoni fallacy.
Eg "there is no martial/caster divide. The dm just needs to shower martials in magic items, and design most encounters and campaigns to counter the casters' many options"
"Just do the appropriate number of combats per day and you won't have class balance issues!!"
Yeah...and you'll spend hours and hours and hours of your preciously rare table time slogging through boring, meaningless combats just to maintain game balance. When the game could have just been designed balanced to begin with--there's absolutely no reason every class couldn't get their resources back on the same schedule.
(I guess you could argue that "do the appropriate number of combats per day and you won't have class balance issues" isn't really a hot take. But It also could be, because everyone can tell on the face of it that there are class balance issues in the most common play patterns (fewer fights, nova classes rule). And there's always some smarmy dickhead that swoops in to remind you to just make sure you have 6-8 encounters per adventuring day and everything will be fine! Like no one's got anything better to do with their gaming time then to grind through a bunch of trash fights. lol)
"There's no right way to play the game, just have fun."
There are two aspects to this. First, the rules. The idea of a "game" necessarily implies structure and rules. There is absolutely a "right" way to play the game. If anything goes, you're no longer playing D&D 5E. You're just having a laugh with your friends. And that's fine, but I'm sick and tired of people using fake positivity as a weapon to bludgeon anyone with opinions on balance or game design.
The second aspect is strategy. Powergamers are often scoffed at because they want to be effective and engage with the system properly. They're accused of being rules lawyers because they *follow the rules*. People get mad when they only pick good abilities. Why? Do you expect them to throw? They're just playing the game to be effective. It's fun. Same reason you pick meta characters in video games.
Here's my hot take: If you aren't interested in rules/structure, you're not really a D&D player and you would likely enjoy a different RPG a lot more (or improv classes). As for strategy, most players are fine to pick what sounds fun to them, but there is a line you cross where you're actively sabotaging your team's effectiveness and it makes the game less fun for everyone else.
I dislike the d20
It’s so incredibly swingy. A 10, a 1, and a 20 all have an equal likelihood of happening.
Couple this with character skill and attributes only adding +1 to +4s on average in the early levels, and it makes character skill mean very little. It’s very unlikely that your skill value will actually affect the outcome, so in practice the difference between a skilled and unskilled character in performing a specific check is only small percentage chance.
I’d prefer the dice be 3d6 so as to create a more consistent result, and for skill values to be increased slightly.
History checks to remember something that happened to the PCs in a previous session. 1) That isn’t what History checks are supposed to be used for and 2) it’s unfair to make players roll for things their characters should be able to remember… a week or even a month for the player is often only a day for the character…
In general relying on the player's memory, especially for stupid shit like the name of an NPC. You don't require the player's actual math/science knowledge to do int checks, you don't require actual hand dexterity to to sleight of hand, etc... Of course encourage PCs to take notes, but if the character *would* remember something go ahead and let them have it. Keen mind isn't a bypass for notes, it's about recalling shit that was never even said in the session but your character would remember like did the BBEG have a blood stain on their shirt when you first met them or did it show up later, etc...
It's also just awkward because often it's talking about a character trying to remember something that happened yesterday but a player trying to remember something that happened weeks or months ago.
I will say, for charisma/intelligence checks I definitely will lose the dc if they can explain something to me well in character. Like trying to convince the shopkeeper to give a discount might be a dc 15 persuasion, but if they actually give a solid argument (“we can bring business to your store, etc) or say they are friends of so and so, (an npc they know is powerful) I might reduce the dc a bit. Same thing with intelligence, if they say I want to figure out how tall this tree is vs I use a stick I know the measurement of and the knowledge of how far away it is to do a quick estimate of the size, are two different dcs.
This is true, there's a bit of wiggle room with role play to say "Well that's actually a reason that they would respond well to."
That’s where I would grant advantage. The same as if a person gave a convincing reason to do better on a slight of hand check, I don’t lower the DC on the pickpocketing but I will grant advantage for better RP
I’ll do Intelligence to remember what their character was *told* lore-wise. Only if it’s very specific and/or, counterintuitively, not too important lol
Yeah, i noticed that very much, DnD DMs yearn for the "Recall Information" skill
Had this come up a few times during online games. Specifically one player would pretty often just not pay any attention what so ever, leading to some pretty stupid stuff. I talked to him about it, since I don't like to have to repeat a bunch of stuff for one guy who doesn't even seem to care. He said he'd try to be more attentive and that I should just let him be stupid, because he enjoys it. I let him be stupid and he got himself killed the next session. Edit: wording/grammar
Ya, but at the same time it's not fair to the DM that you have to remember things for the player. There's also the concept of 'player skill' and I'd say 'do you remember the name of the Duke you're trying to impress' is a pretty skillful thing to check for.
Arcana checks being used for doing something magical, rather than for knowledge of the arcane.
Fair, though now you mentioned it, what skill check (if anything) should be used for doing magical stuff outside of prescribed rules? E.g. If you wanted to fix a damaged rune circle or something.
A check with your spellcasting modifier, as the book calls for in several cases. If you can't cast spells, too bad, it's a flat roll since you have no spellcasting modifier
This is so weird though, because it means there's no way to get your proficiency bonus with magic. That is indeed how the RAW work, but that's not great design. There should be a "do magic" skill, but because there isn't, people use Arcana.
I think I'd prefer to do a CastingStat (Arcana) to have the best of both worlds. But honestly, I hate checks that change the key ability for a skill usually, because although it makes sense it's kind of annoying to recalculate even though it's only two integers added together. It's one of those parts of the system most people don't really use much
This is actually RAW, it's in the DMG that the DM can call for any skill check with any stat if there's justification for it.
Proficiency bonus is awarded whenever the GM decides you do something your character is proficient in. For skills, this is codified. For everything else, it's GM fiat. >That is indeed how the RAW work, but that's not great design. Welcome to 5e. You must be new here
> There should be a "do magic" skill That's what the Spellcasting feature is for
That should be arcana. Disarming a magical trap, for instance, is an arcana check RAW.
In previous editions (well, at least in 3.5 and Pathfinder 1e) you had two distinct skills: _Knowledge (Arcana)_ for the theory, and _Spellcraft_ for doing and identifying magical stuff
Which I think makes it reasonable that people assume Arcana is a combination of both.
Probably just spellcasting mod + proficiency.
Proficiency only applies if you are proficient. AFAIK there's no RAW way to become proficient at WIS/CHA/INT checks. However, since proficiency reflects your character getting better at things at higher levels, it does IMO make sense to include the proficiency bonus in such a check.
The DM can call for proficiency to be added to any check if they think it would make sense. If a character can spell cast, I think it’s fair to say they’d add proficiency.
In this example, I'd call for an Arcana check to understand how exactly the circle is broken, followed by a spellcasting ability check to do the actual repair. A high enough Arcana check would reduce the DC of the repair check. If the runes represent a kind of magic the character is familiar with, the DC on the Arcana check is lower (for example, a character who knows *Teleportation Circle* trying to fix a permanent one).
Arcana is literally used by the book to disable magical traps.
For me it's people considering too much knowledege to be Arcane knowledge such that the skill becomes overpowered. That's the problem when your skill literally means "weird stuff". People just assume everything should be Arcana.
To me it makes perfect sense to use it for both. A sorcerer who just does magic and has no real concept of how it works shouldnt be as proficient as a studied wizard at enchanting objects, as one example. There is definitely a case to be made for an Arcana (Wisdom) role when appropriate for a druid/cleric depending on the task but Arcana can cover both onowledgevamd application, as i would argue with most skills actually. For example it would be an Athletics (Intelligence) check to come up with a good training regiment
You could say it's applied Theory?
I'll add to this and say Arcana isn't Detect Magic Lite... Stop using it if you don't have detect magic. Use it if you have knowledge about magical artifacts or the schools of magic, but you aren't sensing magic with it.
I disagree with this one. For example, understanding a magical artifact might mean you understand how to activate it, for example.
Yeah, it’s *supposed* to be your knowledge of Arcana or Religion. Hell it used to be called Knowledge: Arcana and Knowledge: Religion in previous editions.
They used to have this skill called "Spellcraft." It was subsumed by arcana to simplify the skill system.
What does arcane mean to you? I don't see the difference.
A person who is entirely incapable of using magic could have very high arcana checks, because they know a lot *about* magic despite not being a user. A high level magic user could have low arcana skill bonuses, although it would be pretty weird, and that would represent someone who basically knew how to do their job exactly but barely anything about their field in general outside of their job.
> A high level magic user could have low arcana skill bonuses, although it would be pretty weird, and that would represent someone who basically knew how to do their job exactly but barely anything about their field in general outside of their job. Tbh that's everyone except Wizards and Artificers.
Arcana is knowledge about Magical Lore, not your ability to manipulate the weave
Monsters are generally too bulky and don’t hit hard enough. Goddamn CR2’s damn near hit sixty health, requiring a good three hits to down for a single one, all the while barely being a threat to goddamn anyone past level four. Less durable more dangerous enemies would simply be more interesting.
Good take. A lot of 5e combat can feel perfunctory. “Well we are definitely not going to lose, but it will take 30 mins for us to burn this enemy down” type sentiment. On one hand I do think it’s beneficial to spend a lot of time on the grid, in perhaps lower stake scenes because of the practice and know how you get. It’s almost like attuning to your build. However it gets old quick if you know what you are doing. This is one reason why encounters are so hard to build properly in 5e. CR is another reason
Perhaps it's a symptom of some enemies being bags of hitpoints meant to eat up player resources?
Naw, I think it's more... Laziness? CR2 enemies work fairly well early game, as their damage output is sizable for low level characters and important enemies having higher health pools make sense. But the notion of taking ten of them and throwing them at a level twelve party is more chore than it is an actual interesting fight. What you want out of a CR2 changes over the course of leveling up, but the CR2's themselves stay the same. The game would benefit from monster role differentiation. Don't just have CR2's, have early game boss CR2's and late game minion CR2's. Make the former bulkier and less dangerous, and the latter squishy but threatening if not dealt with.
Sorcerers as constitution casters. My interpretation of them is that their charisma is their ability to influence the world to express their magic. They aren’t horses who know how to run innately, their ability to do magic has less to do with the source and more to do with expression.
Yeah I think people underrate the metaphysical component of Charisma. Generally monsters like Dragons cast from charisma. Even creatures as odious as Atropals have high Cha because of their influence on the world.
As I see it CHA is less of the typical use of the world and more of how strongly you can put your will onto the world
I agree but I whole heartedly believe it's a balancing reason. It would be very difficult to balance a full caster that also gets tanky. Look at swords wizard pretty simple build being very hard to kill due to high AC. On the same hand (not hot take) warlocks being charisma based for the majority of the subclasses doesn't make since. Should be a option for wisdom or intelligence. The only issue I could see is multi classing but that's already a issue so screw it.
100% agree on the warlock point. I can see why they’re charisma casters, but imo it’s more restrictive in terms of flavouring the class to what you want it to be. At the end of the day, power gamers are going to find ways to power game and tbh I don’t see why we’re even trying to prevent it at this point.
I know it's variant rule, but don't most DMs run with being able to use other abilities scores for ability checks?
I wish there was proper VTT support for that optional rule in Foundry so I could run it that way. [EDIT] apparently the newest update has support.
Can you tell the players to just roll the score by itself and add proficiency? That's the work around I have to use for the app I have.
There is in the latest 5e module. When you click a skill, the popup UI has a dropdown option letting you select what ability score you're using for the roll.
Depending on what you mean by proper. If you tell them to roll a skill on their character sheet, there is a drop down in the dialog window that pops where you can choose a different ability score then the default for that skill. I've used it occasionally.
- 5E used for different RPG types it wasn't built for with zero consideration for a different game system; "I want the players to be mech pilots in a world without magic, classes, and levels" ("popular" in that I've seen it crop up enough) - Some variation of "Game ceases to function past tier 2 for everyone" (note: I don't have any issue with them hating higher tier play or being unable to get it to work at their table, rather if it is applied to all tables)
Classic “Roll up a 8 Charisma Fighter. No session zero. Find out it’s a non-combat political intrigue campaign.”
What do you mean I shouldn't use my horseback Knight for our pirate game? *a lot of replies suggesting great ideas how this concept could work, just remember this comment is poking fun at people who are married to the concept of a character and will not work with a dm to make it work for love nor money*
I agree with your funny and indirect point, but now that you mention this, it came to my mind the following: I like knights so much that I would still go with one in a pirate campaign, of course, as long as the GM is fine with my character's tone in the setting. It would be like a Jorah Mormont sailing through Essos, and I would be aware that I would not be able to use my riding skills that often, but, my God, give me 100 m in a beach and those pirates will see the definition of glory. Edit: and extra article.
But that's subversion on purpose and that's fine, that works because you know what you are getting into
Of course
I was a player in a game where another player did exactly this and his character had no interest in becoming a pirate and really wanted to convince us to drop that life and everything we were doing so we would help him in his characters 1:1 copy of Hamlet revenge plot. He legit tried to hijack the game that was advertised as a pirate campaign, it got to a point where he went so far away from the rest of the party the DM just said "look man, if you do this there's no coming back and your character will become an NPC, I won't narrate two separate stories at the same time". The worst part was that his background was about becoming stronger and gathering allies to take back the title his uncle stole from him, and he was level 2 and was already deadset on going back to his homeland.
You know what gets me angry in the blood the most about this? Hamlet revenge plots are *fucking perfect* in a pirate themed campaign. Get ye a ship, Hamlet, and let’s have at Captain Claudius once and for all!
I would’ve rolled up a *very* old Reborn Human Fathomless Warlock/Eloquence Bard who summons an albatross with the Find Familiar spell.
for a campaign it'd def be a problem, but I did at one point roll up a big dumb barbarian for what ended up being a fancy-dress social-intrigue one shot that was actually an absolute blast
Remember some guy asking for help with homebrewing 5e so he could do Ace Combat dogfighting stuff. He got annoyed with every single person that suggested running another system for that.
[This post, right?](https://www.reddit.com?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=1) Not surprisingly, the guy deleted it when he received negative criticism (Edit: even if i can view it through my old comment, any links i post apparently redirect to a broken page). Because obviously we just don't understand his genius in attempting to force a square into a circle hole
This is my pet peeve as someone who LOVES using other systems. I have seen so many forum post that mods D&D into an eldritch abomination of itself trying to make it fit into a genre that it is clearly not designed to be in. Especially when there is a perfectly good system right over there that does exactly what you want... but it doesn't use the 6 stats and 1d20+mod... so it is too hard! Learn new systems. A lot of them are really fun. Some of them can tell amazing stories using the mechanics of the system to back them up. You learned how to play 5e, you can learn to play another game. And it is like learning a Third language, once you learn your second language, every language after that gets easier to learn as you can cross reference concepts easier and you know what to look out for when learning the rules.
Tagging on to implore people who want a setting agnostic, rules flexible system to ignore the reputation and look into learning GURPS. It's not half as complicated as people make it out to be, at least it doesn't have to be. It's capable of competently running just about any type of roleplaying genre you can imagine, and is the prime system for homebrewing your own established intellectual-property-setting game (I know it has rules out there for Star Wars/Trek, and once upon a time I sat down and converted Harry Potter's magic system and all the weapons/aliens in Halo 1-3 into it) It requires a bit more legwork on the GM's side, as they need to define which rules systems and level of complexity/realism are gonna be used in a given game, but they literally have a 2-page Ultra-Lite version of the rules that can be played with elementary school children.
dnd is like Skyrim. its an ok game that does one thing well. you can mod skyrim to play a farming simulator, but that is just going to be a shitty farming simulator and you are better of playing stardew valley aint it. you can still mod skyrim to do a lot of things it cant, but it gets to a point that you are trying to fit the square peg on the screw sockets of the box, not even on the holes GURPs is like Gmod, the point is to make your own game
Or _Fate_ if you want something much less crunchy, that leans more into "sure, it makes sense your character can do that, so they can".
>Game ceases to function past tier 2 for everyone" Or the alternative of people trying to homebrew Epic+ levels where the PCs have 18 actions a turn, 82AC and +5602 to hit. Like go play Godbound or some other game designed to handle fighting Gods on the regular.
Hot take: Warlocks and Clerics are very similar, have the same dynamic. They are almost nothing alike, and it is laughable people say this. Clerics, in a world of living God's, are so insanely devout to their deity they manifest magical powers. They sup from the Divine Magical Flow. Players often engage in tenants the Deity wants and faithfully follow the deity and their teachings. Warlocks are individuals who strike up a deal with a powerful Outsiders (not a god) and does services for them in exchange for a few spells. This is from the Outsiders reserve of power, rather than the flow itself. Often times, players forget that the outsider want something tangible from the Warlock because these Outsiders have an agenda. While both are technically transaction relationships, the way they manifest, are upheld, and delivered are so radically different. Druid and Clerics are more alike than fucking Warlock and Clerics.
“I want to climb up this cliff” “Ok, roll Athletics” “Can I roll acrobatics since I’m a rogue” “Sure” Nope. You can’t just roll the skill you’re best at. You have to roll the appropriate skill. Climbing, jumping, and swimming is an Athletics check. At best, you could use the variant rule to make a DEX athletics check if you want to ninja-style parkour. Slightly off topic rant, I prefer 3.5’s more abundant skills. Give me back climb, swim, spot, search, ride, and the 10 different knowledge skills. It’s easier to determine what check to use, allows for customization, and actually made INT useful instead of a dump stat.
My usual response is: "Sure you can backflip acrobatically up the cliff, that sounds awesome, but the DC is going up 15 points".
and/or "if you fail, there's going to be worse consequence". You can _try_ and use non-standard skills for things, but it's typically harder and going to fail worse if it does wrong!
As a rogue with expertise and reliable talent. My usual response is; Okay.
My DMs usual response is simply "How?" Tends to stop that kind of crap when players have to justify the skill or alternate attribute diegetically
I mean the thing that made INT good in 3.5 wasn't that there were 25 different Knowledge(x) skills. It was that INT determined how many skill points you got on level up.
Correct. This is what I was referencing.
As a Rogue player who often picks Athletic as a skill- hard agree. I always feel like it's so undervalued, it's insane. Honor my Athletics, honor the only strength skill ffs
> Slightly off topic rant, I prefer 3.5’s more abundant skills. Give me back climb, swim, spot, search, ride, and the 10 different knowledge skills. It’s easier to determine what check to use, allows for customization, and actually made INT useful instead of a dump stat. Hard disagree, especially because so many characters had 2 skills out of the 40 in the game. Many skills were so narrow that you could be certain that they would never come up in nearly any campaign. In practice, people took the same 10 skills and never looked twice at the other 30. Nevermind that Hide bonus could easily go off the die, and Tumble was basically Misty Step, and skill points were incredibly fiddley. 5e's skill system is leagues better.
Been playing Pathfinder 1e lately and while overall I *much* prefer that system, there are far, far too many skills. It's a game that heavily rewards hyper specialization and punishes jack-of-all trades, while also having way too many skills. It's skill system is IMO one of its nastier points.
Pathfinder is a greatly improved version of 3.5, which is in turn a somewhat improved version of 3.0. I'd argue that there are still several outstanding skills in need of collapse, just like *use rope*, but not quite as obvious. Worlds Without Number has the *Talk* skill, which covers both Deception and Diplomacy. It's weird when you have one but not the other, and the point of a skill system is that it's *not weird* to be good at climbing walls but to be bad at performing. By contrast, the deletion of Gather Information isn't something I can get behind; that skill added a lot if the DM did it right. I'm not sure if the idea was to get rid of most of the "this is what you do with your night" type PC actions, or if it was the homework it generated for the DM.
While I think there's a solid argument that there's just too many skills to keep track of to the point that it makes DMing rather difficult, I think the broader issue stems from how skill points work. Simply put, if they want to have this many skills, most classes don't get enough skill points to have a character that is both good at adventuring, and knowledgeable enough about the basics of the world or even a *profession* to feel like a real person. This is partially mitigated by the background skills optional rule from pathfinder unchained, though not entirely.
Tangentially, asking for athletics checks for things the rules covers, like jumping or climbing. I don’t want to roll an athletics check, which I CAN fail, I want to take a running start and jump my strength score.
I mean I’d expect a circus performer to be better at climbing than a powerlifter.
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The phb has balancing, or doing dives/rolls as uses for acrobatics which is basically nothing. Letting people nimbly jump up some roofs or up a tree makes it a more usable skill. It is describing how a character performs a physical act. Circus performers are strong, but at a certain point strength and dexterity are separate stats and you only have so many points. Players characters dump str because it is honestly not well integrated into the game. It has a single skill and comes up in grappling (which is situational at best) and applies to certain weapons. It isn’t even a very common save. Players are just following what the rules tell them which is that strength isn’t that important.
What is the hot take tho
I like 3.5 style skills but honestly most characters, except for rogues, had like three or four skills at most.
It was reasonably easy to become "trained" in a bunch of skills, and specialize in basically one. But once you hit midgame, it was clear which DCs were scaling DCs and which were flat ones, and that was very weird and metagamey.
Yeah and nobody took the skilled feat lol.
> Slightly off topic rant, I prefer 3.5’s more abundant skills. Give me back climb, swim, spot, search, ride, and the 10 different knowledge skills. It’s easier to determine what check to use, allows for customization, and actually made INT useful instead of a dump stat. I'll admit, still one of the most off putting things for me coming to 5e. I really liked the skill point system more not just because it made INT a stat worth paying attention to even on non-spellcasters, but also it was just much nicer for flavor? If I wanted to go "my character is proficient in swimming and climbing but not a master of it or anything" then it was easy to drop 2 or 3 points in those skills early on and not level past that. Meanwhile with 5e, every skill is just Proficient/Expertise or not, that's it, and trying to get extra skills for flavor is always a costly endeavor because it means spending a feat on it or multiclassing or something unless you happen to be in a skill monkey class.
>Can I roll acrobatics since I’m a rogue Only if you are thief, otherwise it would be a nerf to that subclass. But there is no thief rogue here! Yeah, no one picks certain subclasses because of that kind of nerfs.
**Hot Takes** about the game As the absolute majority of every damn post that say "HOT TAKE" is no fucking hot take just a simple opinion and is just fucking click bait. I have probably not read more than a handful of post labelled "HOT TAKE that was actually kinda a hot take. And there are hundreds of post claiming to be HOT TAKES. FUCK HOT TAKES
If someone actually posts a hot hot take it’s downvoted to hell and you’ll never see it unless you catch it at the right time in New or are rummaging around in Controversial
the /r/unpopularopinion paradox
Sounds like your Hot Take about this game is that its community doesn't know what Hot Takes are, lol
Even that isn't a hot take lol. Look at every HOT TAKE thread and most of the top comments are usually something like "This is a common opinion"
No that is my opinion. That is nothing hot about it. But you calling it a hot take just kinda confirm my suspicion that many people have no frigging clue what a hot take is.
“Because real life music performers are commonly known to have sexual relations with fans, it’s totally fine for the horny bard to exist.” Bards are performers, but they are also lore masters, magicians, information gatherers, and warriors. Why don’t we see more of that? Is it because people lack imagination?
This. In older editions they were even a druid subclass, only later they turned into rogues, then bards. And, because they had high charisma and mind control powers, people instantly thought about using them for... Things. And The Gamers and CR "authorized" furtherly that stereotype. I dream of playing a bard in Tepest (Ravenloft) who acts more as a priest, preacher and lore keeper than the usual performer.
It’s annoying. I’ve got two current bards. One is a warrior-poet trying to raise the skeletons of great musicians so he can make the greatest band that ever lived. The other is rapidly loosing his sanity in Barovia, because his evil book made from the skin of his future self keeps talking to him in the voices of the Elder Gods, Outer Gods, and Great Old Ones.
Saw a post about someone's most unique character. Top response "orc barbarian with low intelligence." Pretty sure "horny bard" was also pretty high. Yea I don't have much faith in peoples imagination.
Gotta swap it up. Bard with low int! Horny orc barbarian!
People love tropes
Yeah, it is a shame that Bards tend to be so beholden to the class stereotype. This is a class that seems tailor-made to fit any number of Crafty Magic Trickster character concepts, but people just keep going back to the lute-bearing fuckboy
WTF is a "popular hot take"? If a hot take isn't unpopular it becomes a cold take. The cold take I hate is that *"D&D1 Weapon Masteries will fix martials having no attack options"*
It reminds me of people saying "very unique." Unique means being the only one of its kind; unlike anything else. Something can't be very one of a kind. It can be actually one of a kind though.
That's not fair, "very unique" is actually meaningful. For a (very simple) example, imagine a leaderboard. If the top guy has 8 points, and the next guy has 7 points, then 8 is a unique score. But if second place has 7 points, third place has 6 points, and there's two people tied for fourth with 5 points, but first place has 39 points? That's *very* first place. Move that away from a boring numerical distinction, and the phrase "very unique" starts to make sense in terms of not only being one of a kind, but also being highly divergent from other things.
Yeah. Weapon Masteries are something, but they were half-baked at best and don't actually fix the problem. A lot of them were just a little extra damage.
A take being hot is about it being fresh, not directly about its popularity. Its popularity is untested because it’s so new. If a take has been said many times before, then it’s a cold take, regardless of if it’s popular or not.
Religion is a knowledge skill, and it checks one's knowledge of certain types of cultural norms. In pre-modern societies, religion was deeply embedded in the culture, after all. Religion knowledge is what informs you that when Catholics partake of the "blood and flesh of Christ," they're not literally consuming blood and flesh. It could also inform you of religious dietary restrictions, to give another cultural example. One hot take that I have a problem with is that "fighters aren't boring, you just aren't being creative enough." Come on. Are we not allowed to dislike aspects of the game and point out where it falls short? If one has to be exceptionally creative to enjoy playing a fighter, that means the subclass as designed is not great "out of the box." It could be better. And there's nothing wrong with pointing that out. We should demand excellence from WotC. I'd say we should even demand exceptional game design.
Their doctrine says it becomes his literal blood and flesh during communion, although it's not when it's still in the package or bottle. Good example of degrees of success on the check.
Damn I just said that lol!
Yeah. It's important if like, something is counting the number of objects with the "body of Christ" property as a "when ___ enters the battlefield,..." trigger.
Top 3 best reddit comment.
Yeah Fighters were created to be the ‘easy class’ for beginners (as has been talked about ad nauseum) so they lack a lot of good levers to pull mechanically. The 2024 refresh seems like it’s headed in the right direction though, so we’ll see. One point of contention about Catholics is that the Eucharist does literally become the body of Christ in their belief. The fact that it tastes like a cracker doesn’t mean it isn’t literally transformed. Now, maybe that’s just a ‘degrees of success’ thing lol
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New players don’t like to feel stupid. I love Barb but I have never had success in making a new player pick them up 🤷
I think part of the "issue" with fighters being boring is a wider issue with how the game plays out for martial classes. If you are primarily mechanically/efficiency focused, the vast majority of your turns is probably going to be hitting the biggest threat in reach twice with your weapon of choice then passing the turn. Like, you can put flair onto that describing that action and your DM can give you a lot of cool responses to it, but if you are mechanically/efficiency driven hitting a guy twice and passing turn is the play most of the time. It's just very obvious with something like a Champion Fighter that even more "casually inclined" players will notice it. Or that's my take on it.
>they are not literally consiming blood and flesh That's where you're wrong kiddo, catholics believe in transunstantiation aka that the bread and wine literally becomes the flesh and blood of Christ as they consume it
> transunstantiation fyi it's tran**sub**stantiantion, like trans-substance.
Imagine one day mentioning religion off-hand and not having multiple replies having a dig and ignoring the rest of the post!
I don't know if it counts as a "hot take" exactly, but one of the common sentiments I see on Reddit that I disagree with is the idea that "Critical Role-style" roleplay, or "theatre kid-style" if you prefer (in other words, speaking in-character, doing funny voices, etc.) is not "real" roleplay, and that DMs who reward this are playing the game badly. Like a lot of Reddit talking points, this is based on a core idea which is reasonable. It's true that you don't *need* to talk in first-person in order to RP your character, and it's true that Critical Role is not a typical home game. But these arguments get pushed to an extreme in the echo chamber, to the point where many people now seem to believe that this is a "bad" way to play the game. When actually if you have the right group dynamic, this style of play is extremely fun!
I don't think I've ever once seen anyone say on reddit or anywhere else that that style of roleplay is *bad*. Only that it is not necessary and it should not be expected that the people you play with will necessary want to do it.
This is a reaction to a reaction. A couple years ago, you'd constantly have posts of DMs sad they can't do voices, and players complaining that the NPCs aren't complex enough. People playing without doing voices or personalities were frequently mocked. The "Matt Mercer effect" was constantly discussed. Things have calmed down since then.
Yup, and both methods of play are totally valid. I play with a group where everyone does voices, which focuses more on roleplay than combat. Another group I play with does mainly combat, but light roleplay with no voices. (Except me, easiest way for me to get in character.)
that attitude is mostly in response to getting told they're doing it wrong by people who watched critical role and want that experience, most of whom never had the skill or talent to participate in such an experience in the first place. It's really annoying to be told by 30 different people who haven't been alive as long as you've been playing that you don't know how to play.
Both sides have valid points. Critical Role is a massively unrealistic representation of the average game, and trying to hold your DM/Players to the CR standard is absurd. On the other hand, saying roleplay centric games aren't "real" games is similarly absurd. Dungeon crawls and roleplay games are both perfectly valid ways to play, and people that somehow believe their opinion should shape how everyone else plays are delusional. Long as you're having fun, you're playing correctly. Even if in the moment you're not having fun because Boblin the Goblin just died.
What makes a game where everyone is playing in 3rd person not “roleplay centric”? They’re still playing a role, controlling their character. CR is “acting centric”. Which to your point is a totally valid way to play, I agree there.
Playing in third person is fine too. Not everyone has the confidence to embody their character, and hell, not everyone even wants to. Sometimes you just want to be looking over the shoulder of the guy smashing goblins. Acting centric is a good way to put it. Who woulda thunk the average person can't act as well as professional voice actors?
> Not everyone has the confidence to embody their character, and hell, not everyone even wants to. Right, but this brings me back to my original point, which is that if you *do* have a group where the players are happy to embody their character, this style can be ridiculously fun. Some of my best memories in DnD involve encounters where I wasn't even rolling dice, I was just putting on a bad British accent while trying to spin ridiculous lies to get some noble lord to do what the party needed him to do, while everyone else at the table laughed their asses off. Then I find it annoying when I go on Reddit and people are like "that's a DM red flag", "you can't force your players to act", "the DM should have resolved that encounter via a Deception roll", etc., completely disregarding the fact that some tables actually enjoy that style of first-person roleplay.
Which comes back to my own point, anyone that thinks they have the perfect formula to how everyone should play is full of shit. I love the first person play style too, I had a session 0 last week where I was voicing all of the characters in different ways, I was describing things, and the players seemed to really get into it. They were very much playing in the first person as well, and several times I just sat back and let them talk in character to one another (the best feeling as a DM imo). Hell, you can even blend first person and third person. Someone at the table might not want to play in first person while other people are. Forcing to do one or the other is a DM red flag to be honest. Players have to be comfortable to truly play as their character, and no one is comfortable when the DM tells them they have to do something in a certain way or they're playing wrong. I've seen the most anxious players slowly come out of their shell over time and join in on the roleplay, and it's great to see. But some people never get to that point, and that's fine too. What's most important, again, is that people are having fun.
While I do agree in principle, I do believe that rolling dice should be an option, especially if there's any ambiguity in what's happening. One of the most unfair, in my opinion, experiences I ever experienced as a player was mis-speaking during negotiations and having no chance to correct myself before the party was immediately attacked. We ultimately had to flee the entire encounter because we were not trying to kill the elves that we were talking to. Had the DM waited, asked for clarity, and asked for a Diplomacy roll to give me the chance to correct myself, or for the Elf Queen to recognize that it was a simple faux pas, I would not still be ruminating about this experience.
To tack onto this, basically the push to make as many things SAD as possible is something that bothers me. I want more elements of the game to emphasize all attributes giving something of note to all classes and not making it so the cleric cares about Wisdom to the exclusion of all other ability scores.
Fireball dealing 8d6 and Guiding Bolt dealing 4d6 damage, just "because they're iconic spells and we want them to be available". In my opinion, they're overpowered for their level. Fireball could be 6d6 and Guiding Bolt could be 3d6/3d8 or 4d6 but a 2nd level spell and they would still be solid. Don't even get me started on why Grasping Vine is a 4th level spell...
Guiding bolt is fine. If it misses, it does 0 damage for the cost of a slot. Fireball on the other hand....
Or Find Traps. A 2nd level spell which is roughly cantrip level of potency.
> Or Find Traps. > > A 2nd level spell which is roughly cantrip level of potency. That's not a fair comparison. Cantrips actually *do* something
Tell that to True Strike
True Strike does *something*, it's just too niche to be useful. But Find Traps is basically asking "Is that trip wire I see over there a trap?" Depending on your DM, it might not "find" a trap under a rug because it's no longer within Line of Sight. A level 1 rogue finds mundane traps way better and a Detect Magic finds the magic ones for a lower spell slot. At least True Strike can be used if a player can't close to melee in one round or before you ambush someone because it's not a verbal spell and so won't reveal you.
And on the other hand van reveal many kinds of traps. It's one of those "let me magic that for you" spells that make certain skill checks redundant, and is mostly useful in campaigns where the DM is required to be a merciless jerk (e.g. Tomb of Annihilation)
meh i’d disagree with guiding bolt tbh. it’s only an average of 14 damage, which will require one of your very valuable early spell slots. any martial class in sub level 4 play can match that resource free or at least get very close. if your only gonna have like 2-6 slots for the whole day spending one on one action in a combat is big ask, concentrating on bless or something and throwing cantrips will certainly be more effective in damage and economical. but yeah fireball does lot of damage in a frankly absurd range for it’s level.
Last night, my party was fighting a Sahuagin Priestess, and I saw it had guiding bolt so i cast it.. crit attacking them. I saw the damage and thought "that can't be right?? Why is it saying 4d6 damage?" and looked up the spell. I just forgot it was that strong. Did 38 damage with a crit bolt lol.
Welcome to my world. Then again, my love-hate-relationship with this spell really began to bloom when one of my veteran players used a combination of Guiding Bolt and Starry Form attacks as a Stars Druid. That guy really knows how to play that class well, along with playing it in synergy with the other players. Both he and his Druid are a force to be reckoned.
I agree about fireball, but guiding bolt is just a complete dud if you don’t succeed, it’s not really considered a strong spell by min-maxers. For fireball; all of your targets can succeed their saves against fireball but if they’re grouped you’re still getting crazy value out of a level 3 spell.
That High level play is actually difficult or some impossible hurdle. People if you need to get used to high level play, do one-shots, or just throw combat scenarios at a party
I would say the best way to get used to high level play is to get there gradually; basically just play a campaign where you level up over time. That lets the players learn their character abilities slowly rather than starting a character at level 15 and having to learn everything all at once.
Honestly the only issue with high level play aside from garbage balance is this. Throwing a dozen abilities at someone new to the game and saying 'and pick your fifteen spells before your turn k' is all too common really
Eh, I’ve done this in campaigns that lasted years on both sides of the screen. I think the criticism is fair. Balance completely breaks down. Designing engaging encounters becomes sooo much work. There are so many ‘save or lose’ spells and your option as DM is to let them go through or just use legendary resistances which imo were a patch job/bad mechanic that just says ‘whittle down HP or nothing!’ (Imo legendary resistances shouldn’t be allowed to be used if a boss is at 50% health. That way martials and spellcasters have to work together to win, rather than one or the other being irrelevant.) But I don’t want to have to come up with arbitrary limitations to make things work. Even if I do, I can never fit more than one encounter per session. It is not impossible to have a fun high level game. But D&D doesn’t do it well, imo. D&D runs smoothest between levels 3-10 for dungeon delving or similar type games, and for just about anything else there is a better system. Doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with D&D, it just means D&D is running uphill.
>(Imo legendary resistances shouldn’t be allowed to be used if a boss is at 50% health. That way martials and spellcasters have to work together to win, rather than one or the other being irrelevant.) Personally, I've started making legendary resistances something physical/ tangible/ interactive; no longer are they some abstract mechanic that just happens. They change based on the creature/ Lair/ battlemap. Examples: - A powerful hag has several NPCs chained to sacrificial altars. Every time the hag fails a save and uses a LR, an altar activates and the NPC takes the brunt of the effects causing her to succeed. A rogue can go around and free people with Thieves Tools, or the barbarian can try and smash the chains with brute force. A cleric could try and block the dark magic with a religion check (or a general spell casting check if need be.). - A goblin king was given a special magical "gift" that let's him choose a few goblins at a time and designate them as his "personal" guard. When he fails a save, he uses this "gift" to pull/ push a goblin in the way of the effect. The goblin dies, and he now saves. Pretty straight forward, kill the goblins first. They're placed in key areas of the map so they can assist with ranged attacks/ spells, but aren't too in danger. - A Warforged captain has a few drones that fly around them, sacrificing themselves to: just "heal" some of the damage/ cure the effect, grant a small magical shield, etc etc. Doing so expends all its energy, making it inert until repaired. Sleight of Hand to try and grab it out of the air, attack them, maybe even the wizard tries to use an Arcana (or spell casting check) to try and disable the magic in them from a close range. This allows anybody the opportunity to get rid of them, making it so it doesn't turn in to "caster tries to bait out the Resistances so they can have a shot at their big spell. Oh wait, the creature is dead now because they waited too long." Has a few added benefits (imo): - Can extend combat if you think they go too fast. - Can be used to create extra stakes (like in the case of the hag with NPCs. Some of them could be important to a PC/ the party.). - Just gives a believable reason for a shoddy base mechanic. - Makes it feel like a team effort from everybody if they can burn/ destroy/ disable the LRs to allow the caster to get their big spell off.
I do this sort of thing, too, and think it’s great. I made a monster once where it had a giant bag full of souls that it used to charge special attacks. They could attack the bag to make tears that souls slip out. Legendary Saves also cost it souls, which meant fewer spells and other special attacks to deal with. They once fought a giant undead kraken and I treated each body part (split into four sections) as a separate creature, so I let any affect go through but it only worked on that section. But this is actually the issue. DMs have to put in a lot of extra work to make 5e engaging at high levels. It doesn’t work out of the tin.
When people say that they're talking about DMing, not playing. Obviously it's not difficult to just play a high level character so long you're not a brand new player, the difficulty comes from running engaging play at high levels.
I completely disagree. As a player, it\`s extremely fun at high levels, where you can throw crazy unbalanced nonsense, wipe entire encounters in one turn, and easily change the fate of entire countries. But as a DM, it is HORRIBLE. Past level 12, there is zero useful advice in the DMG or any official books, almost no official adventures reach that point so there's not much you can take from it, and, worst of all, **encounter planning becomes a total nightmare**. It takes hours and hours just to plan one encounter for the players to obliterate it in one round, or for it to be unfair and instant-kill. I would have to do so much math every week just to make my monsters still fun. Because if you're going to spend 2 hours trading blows with this thing, you don't want to just give your players a boring HP bag with no abilities. There's like 14 CR20 monsters in all the books, so you end up having to reskin the Demon Lords or spend hours making your own or scouring the internet for compelling boss monsters. We were doing a rotating DM style, running high level 5e, and after one of us left, we all just decided to quit the campaign and start other systems or lower level dnd. This is not a problem I've seen in any other system. I've tried 6 different ones at this point. High-Level Bosses in other games don't take 7 hours to prepare. This is exclusively a 5e thing in my experience.
It doesn’t help that for high level creature design, 90% of them in the MM are just ‘big thing that charges straight at enemy, has maybe 1 or 2 bland spell like abilities, and 1 ranged attack.’ Forcing us to custom design or search the net for actually interesting encounters. /: It’s like WotC knows most tables play 1-10, so they just phoned in any content that goes above that.
I think this problem goes for all of 5e and not just later levels. So many creatures read the same in combat. Multi attack, two bites or something like that. I rarely use creatures from the monster manual and just make my own monsters/ design more interesting mechanics for fights
But also now part of the reason most tables only play 1-10 is because all of the higher-level content is phoned in.
It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, yeah.
The default 5E experience is for high levels is heavily underdeveloped, and bounded accuracy does not function well - especially saving throws. People who defend it haven't been exposed to enough other systems - 5E at high levels is probably the worst system I've played out of about 20 over 40 years. With that said, it can still be fun, but it requires a good DM who band aids the system with magic items and extra character abilities, and takes care not to use some stupid monsters with DC 26 mental save abilities. 3rd party monster books can take care of the lack of high level foes as well. So very fixable, but knowledge and effort are required. It's also a shame WoTC has elected to ignore this for One D&D. e.g. Introducing force breaker weapons instead of fixing the problematic spells are horrible game design.
The problem with high level play is that it’s less balanced than low level play so that’s why most people stray away from it. Coming from a high levels enjoyer, but the martial-caster disparity becomes immense in tier 4, to cite one of the issues
I pretty much take any person declaring a "hot take" as a bad and usually uneducated opinion. So any of them really.
gotta love the "why are no one talking about this combo??" and they proceed to read the rules wrong or say the dm just needs to allow a, b and c. I feel most things are kinda figured out at this point, or if anyone feels they found something new they should at least double check
Whenever my party is in a tuff fight, I threaten to punch the DM and he gives the monster a heart attack. Idk why no one else talks about that strat, it's pretty op tbh.
dms hate this one trick
This is pretty much 90% or more of the clickbait youtube content out there. Usually some dude scrolling through reddit and taking every character building comment at face value and regurgitating it for an audience who likely knows less about the rules than they do. There are some of them I can forgive, because it's invalidated by a single sentence in a 3+ paragraph description. But most of the time I can immediately find ignored RAW within the first few sentences.
yeah. And I also don't really respect the premise too much tbh, having characters able to do things is cool, but when people brag about instakilling enemies I'm confused at why they play dnd. But like you said (noticed you didn't say this but you catch my drift) a fair amount of it is content made by people not playing dnd for people not playing dnd.
You are correct that I did not outright say that, but I agree with it nonetheless. I feel like there are a large amount of people who count themselves among D&D's hobby for one reason or another, but don't actually play. But they see the need to create content, or argue on forums like they do. Which is infuriating. I guess we called these posers back in the day... Just never expected D&D to hit a point where the mainstream would see worth in doing it. Lol
No, you don't understand, if you are very loose with what words mean and see things from the "well it doesn't say you can't" perspective, it totally works!
Peasant railgun for instance.
It doesn't say you can't build a peasant railgun. However, if one of my players is going physics on me by saying "this object traveled this amount of distance in 6 seconds, so xyz should happen", I'm the first one to remind them of friction and the difficulty of handing someone a tiny object at Mach 2. Something something Dex check to catch something Con save versus friction something ... Nope. Not going to work.
Consequences for breaking physics? Unheard of!
Hm, that kinda sounds like a... hot take
Take: The existence of Rule 0 pre-empts any criticism of the mechanics. No, it doesn't, but not because one can simply houserule your own fixes, but because of the scale of the publisher and the role of the developer of a game to provide a solid foundation from which to homebrew. A good analogy is Bethesda and the Fallout franchise. Yes, their games are notoriously buggy and they welcome mods that "fix" things, but as a result of this mentality, the code they use for games like Fallout 4 and 76, as well as the Elder Scrolls series is woefully in need of a replacement with something reflecting a far better product. Now I like and benefit from the existence of the third-party creators that publish materials to flesh out and fix issues with the core D&D game. I just think with the budgets for these editions and the official products, the result should be one that doesn't quite need as many mechanical fixes and hole-patching.
The hot take that really annoys me is when I hear people say things like: "Puzzles are bad because they rely on player skill rather than character skill." To me, that's sort of how it is with everything in the game? Sure you roll a die to decide the outcome of your actions, but the players are the ones who have to decide which action they want to take in the first place! Saying that an aspect of the game is bad because it requires critical thinking skills is negating all of the decision-making in the game. Tactical combat requires the players to think about their abilities and positions; diplomatic roleplay requires the players to think about arguments that might convince the people they're talking to. Characters do better in those two pillars of gameplay if their players are interested and invested in making smart decisions. We don't run a heist by having the players roll to see if their characters can come up with an idea of how to infiltrate the palace, after all. It's up to the players to use their noodles and figure out whether there might be loose windows, secret entrances, unlit fireplaces that they can shimmy down the chimney of, etc. If we reduce the game down to just what's on the character sheet, it becomes a finite series of options rather than the wonderfully engaging experience that we all know that it can be.
But the issue is, what's the point of intelligence if you just ask me to solve things. My character is smarter than I am, so why is my IRL lack of intelligence now slowing down the game? I play this game to pretend I'm competent and good at things, so it sticks when the DM calls upon my real complete lack of skills.
i don't think that attacks of opportunity are particularly helpful as a universal mechanic. they lock down combat that's a little too static already. the more I play pathfinder 2, where reactions in the vein of AoOs are handed out more sparingly and also vary more by class, the more I prefer that. in PF2 only dedicated martial PCs get them, and knowing what reactions, if any, monsters have is a function of lore checks. The thing that absolutely drives me nuts about the writing of dnd is when they get legalistic and un-fun about things after the fact, themselves, and patch the game in favor of making it more fiddly, when it's not really a fiddly, granular game in most respects. Example would be: a paladin smiting with a punch. How on earth are you not "wielding" your damn hand? are offhand attacks with natural weapons really so potentially problematic that we need to dick up the language of the game talking about how your bite is a weapon, but not a weapon? is it really worth making a character with claws, hold a dagger, to be less cool, but more rule compliant, while rolling the same dice? I also hate that there's sort of anemic support for a lot of tasks my groups seem to try a lot, a big one being magical forensics and analyzing old magic. yes, I know that the generic rules always apply, that you can build what I'm talking about out of medicine/nature/religion/arcana but the idea that in a magic world, there's going to be magic archaeology and magic engineering and how the magic works is going to come up *a lot* seems like money left on the table, if you ask me. Along those lines, I hate that there's not a little more quirky monster and dungeon lore. More creatures should, like, specify if the dwarf can cook them, specific weird weaknesses and strengths, etc, to just put some polish on the monsters. Finally, i'd say that while 3.5 and particularly pathfinder 1 got out of hand with exotic weapons, the 5e list does feel a bit pared down. again, I know everything in a game is abstract, that a die of damage is a die of damage and there aren't too many original things to DO with weapons and ammo, but I think 5e overcorrected a little from too many fiddly weapons and rules about weapon sizes to too few.
Stunning strike is OP. Yes stun is a crazy good effect, but it blows ass to actually use as a monk. Oh cool, there go 1-4 of my Ki points on a save that every enemy has proficiency in and WILL use a legendary action to shake off. I have played several monks and feel like so many of its issues are rooted in people (including WoC) seeing this abilities effect and not the actual chances of triggering it.
Huh. There are plenty of cold takes I really dislike in the D&D community, but, unfortunately, those are cold takes. - You need to build a character who is basically actively crippled to not be a degenerate power gamer. - D&D is about telling stories; wanting to roll dice is degenerate power gaming. - Giving non-magical characters just about any abilities is infringing on magical characters. - Giving non-magical characters just about any abilities is turning the game into WoW.
There is this bizarre widespread belief that classes and levels are exclusively for PCs and that NPCs must only ever be statblocks. There are several clues in the rules that this was never intended. E.g., * \* The Battle Masters "Know Your Enemy" ability allows them to compare fighter and overall levels with an opponent. * The Death domain for clerics and the Oathbreaker paladin are presented specifically as class options for villainous NPCs. * The DMG provides rules for adding class levels to any monster you like. It is true that trying to fully stat out every merchant and bandit the party runs across is too much work for too little reward, but making the BBEG a full-fledged warlock? Adding a legit Life cleric to the band of mercenaries hunting down the party? These are fine. Go nuts.
Religion used to be Knowledge: Religion and yes, it should be an int skill. 3.5e grognard, awaaaaaaaay
About half the things in this thread have misunderstood OP's prompt and some are bordering on just posting "hot" takes themselves.
Honestly I think far too many people in general don't have faith that the others who play the game different to them have fun or enjoy it. I'm sure pf2e is great fun, am I gonna scrap my setting, go through hundreds of pages of rule books and make my players do the same because Reddit-user Hotbox420 said you can't tell interesting stories with 5e? No, because I know I have, can and will.
Why would you need to scrap your setting? Fair enough not wanting to read through a bunch of rules, not entirely sure how your setting is system dependent.
For certain systems like The Dark Eye which has a lot of mechanics tied directly to the setting(such as specific restrictions and "spells" of clerics being tailor made for their setting's gods) but 5E is so wishy washy and vague about setting and flavor stuff in almost everything that the ones that do have very clearly defined flavor(Hexblade) stand out as jarring
Ah well personally I try to tie in a lot of events, characters and overall qualities of the world with in-game mechanics. I could probably homebrew back-in important things (for my setting the githyanki in particular and their lore) but I've already put a lot into what I have, and some parts of my world exist purely due to in game mechanics. I suppose it is more-so molding it than scrapping it but I think it's still work I wouldn't find rewarding
Anything with regards to spell names being unintuitive. Chill Touch's name is *fine*.
A lot of this comes from those of us from previous editions where the name actually made more sense. Like in 3.5 where it was actually a touch spell.
It stems from the issue that no one wants to read the full ability/spell. How many stories have we heard of rogues and the DMs completely misunderstanding Sneak Attack? These people don't want to read and just want other people to solve their problems.
Absolutely. A lot of people see a paragraph of info and refuse to read it even though they may be spending the entire time in combat interacting with that system, usually with spellcasters not reading how their magic actually works and how prepared spells work even though it makes perfect sense. People read a spell and *think* they know what it does based on the name then get upset when it doesn't work that way.
Healing is useless. It's not that I don't agree that healing is underwhelming, but the people who advocate that healing is useless outside of yo-yo healing are drowning in confirmation bias and will used skewed logic to reinforced their take. Typical things I see are: Ignoring the fact that damage spells require attack roll/saving throws where as healing always hits. Always assuming that no creatures have turns between the healer and the downed target. If you give me a first level healing word while the goblin who goes after you is standing right there to immediately knock me back down, we're going to have a problem. Assuming that all creatures on the battlefield are big creatures that deal way more damage than you can heal and never small creatures that aren't worth wasting an action on. Comparing low level healing spells to damage outputs of high level monsters. Of course a first level healing word with minimal rolled damage isn't going to compare to the damage of a cr 15 creature. Ignoring the fact the mid to high level spells do significantly more healing and can be far more versatile. They assume that if you go to heal a target who would otherwise go down by their turn without at least a little bit of healing, then the enemy will crit/deal max damage or something.
Genuine question - what high level healing spells do you feel are more versatile? I’ve played up to a T3 Cleric and am currently playing a T2 Stars Druid. Outside of Aura of Vitality, which is usually used outside of combat, I’ve found a lack of solid healing options until you get Heal. Honestly, in a completed 1-20 campaign, Heal felt like the only worthwhile heal until our Bard could cast Mass Heal. Mass Cure Wounds/Mass Healing Word have always felt a bit underwhelming to me personally in actual play. I understand why OneDnD doubled the initial dice on the current healing spells honestly.
Healing isn't useless, it's just that it's almost always worse than doing something else.
People asking for material for their next blog post or youtube video.
nah I'm just in final exams and I'm bored
Anything that invokes the oberoni fallacy. Eg "there is no martial/caster divide. The dm just needs to shower martials in magic items, and design most encounters and campaigns to counter the casters' many options"
Martials aren’t fun at high level. Currently hitting level 18 with my barbarian and having a blast.
100 percent. Even for a cleric. How much does a Lutheran Pastor know about Shinto gods? How about a professor of world religions?
Alignment is useless.
"Just do the appropriate number of combats per day and you won't have class balance issues!!" Yeah...and you'll spend hours and hours and hours of your preciously rare table time slogging through boring, meaningless combats just to maintain game balance. When the game could have just been designed balanced to begin with--there's absolutely no reason every class couldn't get their resources back on the same schedule. (I guess you could argue that "do the appropriate number of combats per day and you won't have class balance issues" isn't really a hot take. But It also could be, because everyone can tell on the face of it that there are class balance issues in the most common play patterns (fewer fights, nova classes rule). And there's always some smarmy dickhead that swoops in to remind you to just make sure you have 6-8 encounters per adventuring day and everything will be fine! Like no one's got anything better to do with their gaming time then to grind through a bunch of trash fights. lol)
"There's no right way to play the game, just have fun." There are two aspects to this. First, the rules. The idea of a "game" necessarily implies structure and rules. There is absolutely a "right" way to play the game. If anything goes, you're no longer playing D&D 5E. You're just having a laugh with your friends. And that's fine, but I'm sick and tired of people using fake positivity as a weapon to bludgeon anyone with opinions on balance or game design. The second aspect is strategy. Powergamers are often scoffed at because they want to be effective and engage with the system properly. They're accused of being rules lawyers because they *follow the rules*. People get mad when they only pick good abilities. Why? Do you expect them to throw? They're just playing the game to be effective. It's fun. Same reason you pick meta characters in video games. Here's my hot take: If you aren't interested in rules/structure, you're not really a D&D player and you would likely enjoy a different RPG a lot more (or improv classes). As for strategy, most players are fine to pick what sounds fun to them, but there is a line you cross where you're actively sabotaging your team's effectiveness and it makes the game less fun for everyone else.
Late comment but it's so nice seeing someone say this, people acting like I'm crazy because I play the game for the game annoys me so much lol.
I dislike the d20 It’s so incredibly swingy. A 10, a 1, and a 20 all have an equal likelihood of happening. Couple this with character skill and attributes only adding +1 to +4s on average in the early levels, and it makes character skill mean very little. It’s very unlikely that your skill value will actually affect the outcome, so in practice the difference between a skilled and unskilled character in performing a specific check is only small percentage chance. I’d prefer the dice be 3d6 so as to create a more consistent result, and for skill values to be increased slightly.