This is the kind of monster that looks at the crappy low level monsters of 3rd and 4th and laughs at them. It's almost like if I was going to play "Complaints with 5E design bingo" this monster would hit almost all of them. A CR that is utterly meaningless against how hard it actually is? Yep. Comes at the worst possible pair of levels to face anything remotely dangerous? Yep. Has ridiculous abilities that can instantly knock a PC out of the fight? Yep. Is capable of preventing your character from ever being resurrected? Yep.
And to cap it all off, it actually manages to throw in 21 HP on top of being resistant to all weapon types that martial characters have. Meaning it even manages to make sure the only people who are spellcasters are remotely relevant against it.
So yeah, at this point I'd scream Bingo and then promptly run from the room on fire. Or something. Seriously, I think a handful of these might be far more terrifying than even the lower level dragons. 4th editions legendary frogs of doom have nothing on this guy.
Edit: This does tell me that CR is back to being an entirely meaningless concept. Again.
Ayup.
I defended the androsphinx as being appropriate for its CR, and I stand by that.
I can't help but be amused at the way these arguments play out, where there is the constant (seemingly) assumption that rules are shitty if the kinds of people who love to break/bend rules to their limit can make ridiculous things happen.
Don't get me wrong, I think 5E has plenty of faults, but "This thing can be exploited by people bent on exploiting things" is such a universal trait of tabletop games in my experience that I have a hard time thinking 5E's problem is "Sometimes, people summon a bunch of things" or "That illusion spell can make a cube of metal that holds a guy in place so you can kill him".
I can't help but be amused at the way these arguments play out, where there is the constant (seemingly) assumption that rules are shitty if the kinds of people who love to break/bend rules to their limit can make ridiculous things happen.
Don't get me wrong, I think 5E has plenty of faults, but "This thing can be exploited by people bent on exploiting things" is such a universal trait of tabletop games in my experience that I have a hard time thinking 5E's problem is "Sometimes, people summon a bunch of things" or "That illusion spell can make a cube of metal that holds a guy in place so you can kill him".
No padlock is undefeatable. With with I have at work I can get through any fucking lock you make. Maybe it will involve an oxy-acetylene torch, but that pad lock will be fucked. This doesn't mean pad locks are pointless. A padlock made from aluminium is just not as good as one made from titanium.
The ease with which you can break things is an important factor in the quality. Be it rules or padlocks.
It's not just that. It's the fact that for an edition that is claiming to be focusing on bringing in new blood, it's doing a terrible job of preventing huge issues with anyone who isn't already highly experienced. And this is at the onset of the game, prior to the loads of splat that will inevitably be released. If a group of new players wanted to get into D&D with 5E and the DM didn't have buckets of experience under his belt, he may very well throw one of those things at a level 1 or 2 party, because hey, it's only CR 2, right? Then he'd watch as his players struggled, possibly died, and probably didn't have much fun. First impressions can be a real bitch, and spending 4-5 hours making characters, getting into it and then watching as your party is obliterated by a brain eating creature sure as hell isn't a positive first impression.
Please don't badwrongfun people over how they play make believe.
It's just a bit silly.
It's a bit silly to have so much hysteria over a framework of rules used to facilitate "make believe". 5th edition is pretty explicit that the rules shouldn't get in the way of good collective storytelling.
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Mr_Rose83 Blue Ridge Protects the HolyRegistered Userregular
More importantly there's a difference between a padlock that actually locks and one that just falls open all on its own. That intellect devoured being CR2 is most assuredly the latter.
The only hope now is that it's a typo and it should really be CR 5 or 7 and the typesetter simply misread the playtest notes.
I can't help but be amused at the way these arguments play out, where there is the constant (seemingly) assumption that rules are shitty if the kinds of people who love to break/bend rules to their limit can make ridiculous things happen.
Don't get me wrong, I think 5E has plenty of faults, but "This thing can be exploited by people bent on exploiting things" is such a universal trait of tabletop games in my experience that I have a hard time thinking 5E's problem is "Sometimes, people summon a bunch of things" or "That illusion spell can make a cube of metal that holds a guy in place so you can kill him".
No padlock is undefeatable. With with I have at work I can get through any fucking lock you make. Maybe it will involve an oxy-acetylene torch, but that pad lock will be fucked. This doesn't mean pad locks are pointless. A padlock made from aluminium is just not as good as one made from titanium.
The ease with which you can break things is an important factor in the quality. Be it rules or padlocks.
True though that may be, all padlocks are designed to bar doors, but not all games are designed to be inherently balanced.
There are some parties who want to play very powerful characters.
There are some players who enjoy breaking systems.
Both of these groups benefit from having imbalance present in the rules. Expert groups may become bored with super powered characters, or dissatisfied when their own characters are less powerful than their friends, but newer players tend to just revel in it, in my experience, or pursue it themselves. If a newer player makes a ridiculous thing, then the rest of the party tends to just saying stuff like "Joe can take the two guys over there pretty much by himself, the rest of us can focus on the other two, right Joe?" to which Joe responds "Those guys never stood a chance" and everyone at the table laughs and celebrates when Joe emerges victorious against his two foes.
And for groups that become irritated when there are levels of player power which are too dissimilar, well, then we get into the universality of system breaking. Any party of expert players which wants all characters at a similar power level have to agree to make a conscious decision not to break things, because most stat and roll based games make it extremely obvious how to break stuff.
I can't help but be amused at the way these arguments play out, where there is the constant (seemingly) assumption that rules are shitty if the kinds of people who love to break/bend rules to their limit can make ridiculous things happen.
Don't get me wrong, I think 5E has plenty of faults, but "This thing can be exploited by people bent on exploiting things" is such a universal trait of tabletop games in my experience that I have a hard time thinking 5E's problem is "Sometimes, people summon a bunch of things" or "That illusion spell can make a cube of metal that holds a guy in place so you can kill him".
Choosing to play a druid and summon some animals doesn't require "people bent on exploiting things." It requires an eight year old that thinks it sounds cool.
There's exploiting by stretching the technicalities of the game's language, there's exploiting by combining options the designers clearly didn't foresee, and there's this, which is just using what's openly provided directly as intended.
If you have to be an expert in the mechanics to avoid inadvertently breaking stuff, then the problem is most definitely with the rules.
Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
Honestly, defending the idea of summoning lots of monsters as if this is some sort of ground breaking exploit that nobody would think of unless they hate fun/want to ruin games is ridiculous. Players have been summoning everything they can for years before 5E, 2nd Edition for example let you summon groups of skeletons or low level monsters trivially. This didn't exactly mean they were all that balanced or worked that well, but the way the bounded accuracy in 5E works and the action economy means that this is a much stronger strategy than it should be. Pointing out that this edition lets a flaw that was a minor quirk in other editions like 2nd become a major potential annoyance/hazard that has to be specifically dealt with is not "powergaming". This is just something someone would do because it's logical and many many players like having lots of pets as an idea. Some of you are acting like it's absurd Pun-Pun levels of abuse here.
It's not just that. It's the fact that for an edition that is claiming to be focusing on bringing in new blood, it's doing a terrible job of preventing huge issues with anyone who isn't already highly experienced. And this is at the onset of the game, prior to the loads of splat that will inevitably be released. If a group of new players wanted to get into D&D with 5E and the DM didn't have buckets of experience under his belt, he may very well throw one of those things at a level 1 or 2 party, because hey, it's only CR 2, right? Then he'd watch as his players struggled, possibly died, and probably didn't have much fun. First impressions can be a real bitch, and spending 4-5 hours making characters, getting into it and then watching as your party is obliterated by a brain eating creature sure as hell isn't a positive first impression.
For example, I have been DMing for 18 years so let me explain how I would immediately think to use this and notably, it's probably the way the designers think this might be used. The first and most important thing is to be able to assess how much it murders any party without spellcasters and react accordingly. If your party isn't full on casters, you need early magical weapons in your campaign straight up (good thing the default setting if FR where discarded +1 weapons are likely found under cabbages or bushes). Then you need to set the adventure around it - I really believe it's that powerful - to make it feel like the threat it is.
Hints need to be given early and often about the power of the creature and what it does. Maybe it's an insane wizards creation that got loose, found its way into a cave and drove out the nearby wolves. The wolves started attacking travelers and farmers due to losing their normal home and hunting grounds to it. When the PCs investigate they find out the wolves are well out of their lair and zombified creatures that seemingly have had their intelligence completely drained are close to where they supposedly came from. At some point maybe they find the original mage who made the thing and he has a note describing what you need to do to defend yourself (maybe Mind Blank or whatever). It becomes clear it's not just any ordinary creature and is quite a threat, so the PCs are well prepared to face it and the creatures challenge makes it a tense - but interesting - fight.
Of course how it will be used is to completely dick over the parties rogue if he ever gets the idea to scout ahead (as it knows where everything is within 300ft of it automatically).
For example, I have been DMing for 18 years so let me explain how I would immediately think to use this and notably, it's probably the way the designers think this might be used. The first and most important thing is to be able to assess how much it murders any party without spellcasters and react accordingly. If your party isn't full on casters, you need early magical weapons in your campaign straight up (good thing the default setting if FR where discarded +1 weapons are likely found under cabbages or bushes). Then you need to set the adventure around it - I really believe it's that powerful - to make it feel like the threat it is.
Hints need to be given early and often about the power of the creature and what it does. Maybe it's an insane wizards creation that got loose, found its way into a cave and drove out the nearby wolves. The wolves started attacking travelers and farmers due to losing their normal home and hunting grounds to it. When the PCs investigate they find out the wolves are well out of their lair and zombified creatures that seemingly have had their intelligence completely drained are close to where they supposedly came from. At some point maybe they find the original mage who made the thing and he has a note describing what you need to do to defend yourself (maybe Mind Blank or whatever). It becomes clear it's not just any ordinary creature and is quite a threat, so the PCs are well prepared to face it and the creatures challenge makes it a tense - but interesting - fight.
I would be much less troubled by the 5e intellect devourer if its stat block was accompanied by a side bar giving exactly this kind of advice to DMs. 5e says it wants to be the edition of DM judgment; if that's the case, they should be providing DMs with sound guidance at every turn, not turning them out into the ambiguous wilderness.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
This feels like something the DMG has to cover very carefully and in depth, preferably with examples.
I am more worried for it to be full of useless faff rules and tables to accommodate the "module" aspect of the design instead of this kind of thing.
This feels like something the DMG has to cover very carefully and in depth, preferably with examples.
I am more worried for it to be full of useless faff rules and tables to accommodate the "module" aspect of the design instead of this kind of thing.
Every edition of D&D has had good advice in the DMG (also, sometimes catastrophic advice). Unfortunately the non-rules parts of the DMG tends to go unread, or read once and quickly forgotten. I think a section on DM Advice should be a standard part of every creature's stat block.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
edited September 2014
Unfortunately this is where things like the natural language inhibits that, because one ability takes up much of a page to describe how it actually functions. So they don't have the space for fluff, a statblock and then DMs advice. Common sense advice of "This creature is unusually powerful when compared against level 2 PCs" gets left out.
Bearing in mind I am sincerely hoping a creature like this is the genuine minority, but so far everything I've seen indicates that CR swings widely from "utterly laughable, no threat" to "OMG what the hell is this thing". Well, at least it's iconic.
Edit: For example, in 4E I could write Body Thief in 2 sentences.
Melee 1 (Stunned Creatures Only), +4 vs. Will (IIRC)
The target is dominated (no save) and the intellect devourer is removed from play until the target is knocked unconscious, in which case the intellect devourer reenters play in a square adjacent to the target. While the intellect devourer has the target dominated it may only move or use its devour intellect power on its own initiative.
Done. Everything else the creature can do is codified in standardized mechanics like dominate. Then I could probably donate a section on how the creature should act in combat and add to an encounter (as it would still be sizably and ridiculously powerful).
..."This thing can be exploited by people bent on exploiting things" is such a universal trait of tabletop games...
I just got finished running a game of MHRP where things got incredibly out of hand. People were rolling 3 d12s on every action, shutting down tons of Gear powers for PP, and every attack was an instant knockout. Those players exploited the game about as thoroughly as it is possible to do.
The game still worked. Everyone got to contribute, encounters were challenging but survivable, and everyone felt that the finale of the campaign was the most compelling of any game I've ever run. That's how a game is supposed to work. 5e doesn't.
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HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
Unfortunately this is where things like the natural language inhibits that, because one ability takes up much of a page to describe how it actually functions. So they don't have the space for fluff, a statblock and then DMs advice. Common sense advice of "This creature is unusually powerful when compared against level 2 PCs" gets left out.
Bearing in mind I am sincerely hoping a creature like this is the genuine minority, but so far everything I've seen indicates that CR swings widely from "utterly laughable, no threat" to "OMG what the hell is this thing". Well, at least it's iconic.
Listen: CR is going to be fucked. Eyeball everything. Same as it always was.
I think 2e XP values were actually more reliable than 3.x or 5e CRs. At least 2e XP values had modifiers for extraordinary abilities.
But does it even make a good "boss" type opponent? It's not exactly a red dragon with lair powers and such to make the battle interesting; it has one trick it spams until its target is dead, and its only defensive capability is its weapon immunity.
The only circumstance I could imagine using this creature is as part of a trap against substantially higher-level parties.
Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
You start off the fight by having it using a possessed host, then it pops out and then possibly into another thrall or something else nearby. It actually has potential for a comical "Chase the brain eating monster" thing as it jumps from host to host.
But does it even make a good "boss" type opponent? It's not exactly a red dragon with lair powers and such to make the battle interesting; it has one trick it spams until its target is dead, and its only defensive capability is its weapon immunity.
The only circumstance I could imagine using this creature is as part of a trap against substantially higher-level parties.
I could design a kick ass adventure where the PCs are chasing down one of these little sons of bitches through a complex of narrow underground tunnels. Maybe it's a goblinoid lair, and the PCs have to face off against a series of bugbears who have been controlled by this thing. The final climactic encounter might be an ogre whose brain has been eaten, and once the ogre is downed and the little bastard flees its host the PCs will be able to finish it off once and for all, having by then been fully apprised of the beast's horrifying capabilities.
I'm not a really experienced DM, and I wouldn't have a level 2 party fight something like this straight up (nor am I vindictive enough to sic one on an 8-INT PC in the hopes of killing him)... I might not be so creative to come up with a thrall-chase, and I can see how a green DM might misinterpret the CR, but this very nearly a "save or die" situation, it seems fairly obvious that the monster/those situations shouldn't be taken lightly.
It's sort of insane how literally people take the rules.
I've run two separate groups of two through the first chapter of the starter set adventure, "Mines of Phandelver" and it's been wonderful how differently they've played out. People who try to break the game with insane amounts of summons and getting into the legal fine print of rest breaks and death are really missing the point and/or have DM's who aren't helping tell a very interesting story.
If you're a high level wizard with 18 pets running around behind you just trying to min-max the shit out of the game, your DM is doing it wrong and you might look at why you're playing role-playing games in the first place.
Please don't badwrongfun people over how they wasn't that the entire last thread?
It's not just that. It's the fact that for an edition that is claiming to be focusing on bringing in new blood, it's doing a terrible job of preventing huge issues with anyone who isn't already highly experienced. And this is at the onset of the game, prior to the loads of splat that will inevitably be released. If a group of new players wanted to get into D&D with 5E and the DM didn't have buckets of experience under his belt, he may very well throw one of those things at a level 1 or 2 party, because hey, it's only CR 2, right? Then he'd watch as his players struggled, possibly died, and probably didn't have much fun. First impressions can be a real bitch, and spending 4-5 hours making characters, getting into it and then watching as your party is obliterated by a brain eating creature sure as hell isn't a positive first impression.
well then good thing that the intellect devourer is in the basic rules. oh it isnt? must be in the starter set. no? is it in the initial campaign hotdq?
no. it's from the monster manual. it's a very unique monster that probably would not be in very many starter games.
I'll listen all day to people who complain that the initial encounters at level one and two Can be lethal, but not this guy.
so another session of 5e last night. level 4s, vengeance paladin, battlemaster fighter, assassin rogue, lore bard, a fighter/thief, moon druid, and me a cleric/goo warlock. we are trying to legitimize a bastard boy as king for a newly vacant throne. the nearby Dwarven queen eliminated the last monarch and three groups of people are vying to place their candidate on the throne.
we are attempting to increase his renown as he could not handle a duel on his own. we just beat the silver thanes to the dragons lair and killed the dragon, then trounced the thanes after they attempted to way lay our group. since we play at the flgs, we tend to have a little turnover, so when we get back to camp one of the abandoned PCs was found murdered by the third group, led by another abandoned PC.
this week we tracked the third group to a destroyed farm and fought them. since we were cleric buddies together, the death of the other cleric fueled some vicious attacks on my part. I felt bad for the fighter, as he could not roll above a 5 for most of the night. frustrated he used his action surge first (just to change his luck) crit, used a battle die, and rolled max damage on all 5 dice. then rolled a 19 on his next attack. great moment of relief.
the druid had been pretending to be a , so when he changed into a bear suddenly we all laughed. great time. paladin almost went down, but he always forgets to lay on hands until after dropping g to 1 HP as a half .
finally kill the leader and I take 10 minutes to prayer of heal the group. end of the session and out pops a land shark.
Please don't badwrongfun people over how they play make believe.
It's just a bit silly.
It's a bit silly to have so much hysteria over a framework of rules used to facilitate "make believe". 5th edition is pretty explicit that the rules shouldn't get in the way of good collective storytelling.
That's not the part that was badwrongfun-y people. The part where you suggest that people who do not play the game for the same reasons you do should examine why they play the game was.
As for people in a thread enthusiastically discussing the topic of the thread being silly, well I guess we're all silly geese. Thank you for choosing to join us. Getting over the fear of looking silly is the first step in really getting into roleplaying.
I am not objecting to defense or attack of 5th with this. I am strictly talking about "Idiots who ROLL play" (or the opposite) kind of comments. I guess if you really want to make value statement about how mechanical/fluffy your RPG should be you can but it is unlikely to lead anywhere good. 5th seems an odd poster child to defend ROLE play with since it has so many mechanical bits. Part of the reason I'm still hanging around this thread is I'm trying to find what 5th handles well. For me it doesn't have much of the things that help story and encourage roleplaying which I actually think would be a positive thing.
AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
edited September 2014
I have always regarded the base game of DnD to be the core PHB, DMG and MM. Hell, I still know DMs who refuse to use anything splat wise outside of those books in many cases. Trying to argue the core three books of DnD aren't the core of the game that most people start with is a truly and genuinely asinine argument. The only reason they aren't now is because the books got a staggered release instead of being released together (or within a couple of weeks at worst).
Edit: And also, I don't even think "New" DM is the problem. In many cases it's going to be people who know enough to write their own adventures, but don't know enough about how to balance out an adventure and pace it. That's going to be the problem with something like this.
I'm not a really experienced DM, and I wouldn't have a level 2 party fight something like this straight up (nor am I vindictive enough to sic one on an 8-INT PC in the hopes of killing him)... I might not be so creative to come up with a thrall-chase, and I can see how a green DM might misinterpret the CR, but this very nearly a "save or die" situation, it seems fairly obvious that the monster/those situations shouldn't be taken lightly.
Which means it should by all rights have a higher CR.
That's the issue and it's only when I can see the book, figure out what the relative CRs are and think "How does this fit in" that we can answer that. But it is pretty obviously significantly lower than it should be given other CR1/2 examples. The point of CR is to give you a rough idea how challenge X is for a party of Y. If it doesn't and you have to look at every single monster to make a judgement on it, then the system is worthless. So far, 5E is leaning on the "this system is worthless" side a bit too much.
You shouldn't want to be facing a young dragon over a bunch of level 2 monsters.
Part of the reason I'm still hanging around this thread is I'm trying to find what 5th handles well. For me it doesn't have much of the things that help story and encourage roleplaying which I actually think would be a positive thing.
It's nice to know why you're here you silly goose. I think the addition of backgrounds was a nice place to start people off roleplaying, but more importantly it's not about getting hung up on things that encourages roleplaying. There are tables for how much a pint of ale costs or the weight of a box of caltrops, but you don't HAVE to use it if it's going to take away from the story you're all sharing.
Similarly, if someone running with 18 pets and monsters that eat brains are rampant in your adventures, I'll return to my earlier comment that: A) a DM can help control things that are actively un-fun for the majority of players and are explicitly told to do that - and If you're going to insist on taking everything literally you might spend some time reflecting on why you're playing (or not playing) at all.
If that 8 year old comes up with the idea of the druid who likes to summon tons of stuff, great. But as the DM I don't have to let that be the solution to every situation to the point where it's not fun for anyone who isn't a druid with 10 pets.
I don't have a dog in the whole "back in 3.x things were good" or whatever edition wars have occurred in the past, but 5th is easy to get into and it's fun for now. Is it the end-all-be-all of RPG's? No, and nothing ever will be.
so another session of 5e last night. level 4s, vengeance paladin, battlemaster fighter, assassin rogue, lore bard, a fighter/thief, moon druid, and me a cleric/goo warlock. we are trying to legitimize a bastard boy as king for a newly vacant throne. the nearby Dwarven queen eliminated the last monarch and three groups of people are vying to place their candidate on the throne.
we are attempting to increase his renown as he could not handle a duel on his own. we just beat the silver thanes to the dragons lair and killed the dragon, then trounced the thanes after they attempted to way lay our group. since we play at the flgs, we tend to have a little turnover, so when we get back to camp one of the abandoned PCs was found murdered by the third group, led by another abandoned PC.
this week we tracked the third group to a destroyed farm and fought them. since we were cleric buddies together, the death of the other cleric fueled some vicious attacks on my part. I felt bad for the fighter, as he could not roll above a 5 for most of the night. frustrated he used his action surge first (just to change his luck) crit, used a battle die, and rolled max damage on all 5 dice. then rolled a 19 on his next attack. great moment of relief.
the druid had been pretending to be a , so when he changed into a bear suddenly we all laughed. great time. paladin almost went down, but he always forgets to lay on hands until after dropping g to 1 HP as a half .
finally kill the leader and I take 10 minutes to prayer of heal the group. end of the session and out pops a land shark.
Did it bring cookies?
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HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
Similarly, if someone running with 18 pets and monsters that eat brains are rampant in your adventures, I'll return to my earlier comment that: A) a DM can help control things that are actively un-fun for the majority of players and are explicitly told to do that - and If you're going to insist on taking everything literally you might spend some time reflecting on why you're playing (or not playing) at all.
Please explain how DMs should control this situation.
I'm not arguing that the mm is not part of the core set of books. I'm simply saying that pointing to one creature within the mm as an example of how CR is broken, is being a tiny bit facetious.
anyways, I realize I'm getting a bit defensive when I realize that I'm equating criticism of 5e with personal attacks against the people, like me, who are thoroughly enjoying ourselves with this edition. I totally get the critics going over how the system has issues. the tone, though, seems to fall into either don't care about the problem or seem to want to shake people and demand they acknowledge how bad 5e is.
well then good thing that the intellect devourer is in the basic rules. oh it isnt? must be in the starter set. no? is it in the initial campaign hotdq?
no. it's from the monster manual. it's a very unique monster that probably would not be in very many starter games.
I'll listen all day to people who complain that the initial encounters at level one and two Can be lethal, but not this guy.
Ah, the Monster Manual, an obscure tome that only the most learned, wise and experienced of Dungeon Masters are granted access to.
Similarly, if someone running with 18 pets and monsters that eat brains are rampant in your adventures, I'll return to my earlier comment that: A) a DM can help control things that are actively un-fun for the majority of players and are explicitly told to do that - and If you're going to insist on taking everything literally you might spend some time reflecting on why you're playing (or not playing) at all.
Please explain how DMs should control this situation.
-An orc beastmaster turns the summoned creatures on their master
-an evil necromancer feeds on the spirits of summoned undead, making him stronger
-a labyrinth just wide enough for the party to walk single file
-kill them
-kill the caster
-make their attacks become ineffectual over time
-position the monster so only a few creatures can actually hit it/they block line of sight so no one can do anything while they're in the way
or, I dunno, don't have every encounter be combat? what good are 5 pets when you'e talking/bribing/bluffing/sneaking/disguising/or any of the other hundred things you can do to create conflict without having someone sic'ing 5 dogs on you. Have you heard of alignment? If you have players who routinely just murder their way through situations, the other players might...you know...care or notice? Think of how horrible it would be to see a pack of wild animals tearing apart humanoids on a regular basis...at some point you'd lose your stomach for it if you're actually role-playing. If you're not, well. Try a video game.
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HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
Similarly, if someone running with 18 pets and monsters that eat brains are rampant in your adventures, I'll return to my earlier comment that: A) a DM can help control things that are actively un-fun for the majority of players and are explicitly told to do that - and If you're going to insist on taking everything literally you might spend some time reflecting on why you're playing (or not playing) at all.
Please explain how DMs should control this situation.
-An orc beastmaster turns the summoned creatures on their master
-an evil necromancer feeds on the spirits of summoned undead, making him stronger
-a labyrinth just wide enough for the party to walk single file
-kill them
-kill the caster
-make their attacks become ineffectual over time
-position the monster so only a few creatures can actually hit it/they block line of sight so no one can do anything while they're in the way
In other words, design every encounter to specifically gimp the summoner. Congratulations: you now have a player-DM arms race.
a DM can help control things that are actively un-fun for the majority of players
As a DM of.. 6 years now? I consider myself to be fairly experienced. I've played since 2e, but only really got into crafting my own stories for others to play a few months before 4e was released. It was a shock shifting sides of the table, but I love it behind the scenes instead of in the spotlight. I get to come up with a dwarven civilization that has a deep history of battle against deep earth elementals and goblin slaves, a continent that is varied in it's terrain that provides both a desert type region for survival based encounters and a heavy forest area for the ranger to flex his tracking skills by helping the party find it's way through the mass of trees and underbrush. I can set up a battle that pits the party against a dragon in it's lair that spirals out of control and has the whole mountain explode in a finale finish to a 3 month long side quest. I throw the players onto a lightning elemental powered train 300ft in the air as it speeds towards a city, getting hijacked along the way, and the players have to mount a rescue on air discs to get control of the train back.
I don't need rules of any kind to do any of that. All I need is a D6, and people to roll it. But I want rules to some of it. The bits where the player wants to know how much damage his fireball does to the earth elemental, or how much damage the cleric has to heal back when they set up camp after pushing himself all day in blistering heat. A clear, concise block of stats that's easily understandable and explains exactly what you need to know about the spell, ability, feat, skill, whatever. It helps me worry about the important things, like where the ranger's next pet hawk is going to attack him from, or what sort of crazy special pieces of gear are found in a dragon's hoard, because it lets me spend time on doing story stuff instead of worrying about how broken a spell is or how it might be interpreted by the players.
I want to fight dragons and elementals, not the wording of wizard spells.
"But you can make one ruling and that's how it works from then on!" - I shouldn't have to make a single ruling if the spell was worded properly so that anyone with a decent grasp on the language it's written can read it. A DM's time needs to be spent on progressing the story and making sure the players are involved in it in a way that makes them want to get to the next encounter to see what new bit of the puzzle they can find. Not deciding if this spell or that feat works this way or that way, and what that might mean later on down the line when the issue is sure to crop up again and again.
TL;DR - DM's don't want to be put into a position of having to rebuild the god damn rules every time they play, they want to fucking use dragons to attack people.
I really like the advice that says a good DM should kill a player's character if the rules that they bought allow them to do something that doesn't work super well.
I'll bet that experience would be really fun for everyone.
Part of the reason I'm still hanging around this thread is I'm trying to find what 5th handles well. For me it doesn't have much of the things that help story and encourage roleplaying which I actually think would be a positive thing.
It's nice to know why you're here you silly goose. I think the addition of backgrounds was a nice place to start people off roleplaying, but more importantly it's not about getting hung up on things that encourages roleplaying. There are tables for how much a pint of ale costs or the weight of a box of caltrops, but you don't HAVE to use it if it's going to take away from the story you're all sharing.
Similarly, if someone running with 18 pets and monsters that eat brains are rampant in your adventures, I'll return to my earlier comment that: A) a DM can help control things that are actively un-fun for the majority of players and are explicitly told to do that - and If you're going to insist on taking everything literally you might spend some time reflecting on why you're playing (or not playing) at all.
If that 8 year old comes up with the idea of the druid who likes to summon tons of stuff, great. But as the DM I don't have to let that be the solution to every situation to the point where it's not fun for anyone who isn't a druid with 10 pets.
I don't have a dog in the whole "back in 3.x things were good" or whatever edition wars have occurred in the past, but 5th is easy to get into and it's fun for now. Is it the end-all-be-all of RPG's? No, and nothing ever will be.
It was kind of you to respond to none of the points I was talking with you about while specifically being hostile to me. I appreciate your participation in the thread.
I'm not arguing that the mm is not part of the core set of books. I'm simply saying that pointing to one creature within the mm as an example of how CR is broken, is being a tiny bit facetious.
anyways, I realize I'm getting a bit defensive when I realize that I'm equating criticism of 5e with personal attacks against the people, like me, who are thoroughly enjoying ourselves with this edition. I totally get the critics going over how the system has issues. the tone, though, seems to fall into either don't care about the problem or seem to want to shake people and demand they acknowledge how bad 5e is.
Yea, the tone here has been ratcheting up quickly. Please know I have no intention of being hostile to you or anything. I really think this should be a place for people to come and talk about good things with 5th. I do think that bad things should be open for comment as well. I think part of why I get frustrated with 5th is it is making some mistakes that were obviously mistakes previously and had been corrected but they're running right back into that wall again.
Similarly, if someone running with 18 pets and monsters that eat brains are rampant in your adventures, I'll return to my earlier comment that: A) a DM can help control things that are actively un-fun for the majority of players and are explicitly told to do that - and If you're going to insist on taking everything literally you might spend some time reflecting on why you're playing (or not playing) at all.
Please explain how DMs should control this situation.
-An orc beastmaster turns the summoned creatures on their master
Do summons work that way in 5e? I don't believe they've ever worked this way before. If they don't normally, and you're changing the rules to permit this, you better inform the player beforehand (so they don't summon because otherwise that's a TPK).
-an evil necromancer feeds on the spirits of summoned undead, making him stronger
This is actually pretty neat. But can the player necromancer feed on the spirits of the evil necromancer's undead? Why not?
-a labyrinth just wide enough for the party to walk single file
On the plus side, this makes the fighter actually useful.
On the negative side, you're still probably better sending all the summons single-file in the lead. And if you do this for more than one encounter, your players will get terribly annoyed / bored.
-kill them
-kill the caster
This is generally the goal of the monsters at all times. This doesn't solve the problem.
-make their attacks become ineffectual over time
How?
-position the monster so only a few creatures can actually hit it/they block line of sight so no one can do anything while they're in the way
This is fair, but only really effective in solo-type fights where the solo can't just wipe them with an area effect.
or, I dunno, don't have every encounter be combat? what good are 5 pets when you'e talking/bribing/bluffing/sneaking/disguising/or any of the other hundred things you can do to create conflict without having someone sic'ing 5 dogs on you. Have you heard of alignment? If you have players who routinely just murder their way through situations, the other players might...you know...care or notice? Think of how horrible it would be to see a pack of wild animals tearing apart humanoids on a regular basis...at some point you'd lose your stomach for it if you're actually role-playing. If you're not, well. Try a video game.
D&D does combat. That's what most of the rules revolve around. Everything else is pretty slim in terms of mechanical support.
If the combat doesn't work because the game is poorly balanced, so the solution is to not-combat, then why exactly is D&D 5E the game to be playing? Surely there are other game systems that do not-combat better. Or that do combat better, for that matter.
Also, packs of animals tend to be great for lots of non-combat situations, such as sneaking, searching, tracking, and intimidating. A reasonably clever group can also use them in many bluff-type situations ("we're a traveling circus / I sell hunting dogs").
At any rate, complaints about combat mechanics are not resolved by saying "don't combat." That's like resolving a general complaint about 5E by saying "don't 5E." I guess it's a solution, but is it the one you want to be advocating?
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Alternatively if a player is doing something unfun at the table, as the DM you can have a goddamned conversation with them.
"Hey bro, your summoner druid is like the coolest thing ever, all summoning wolves and stuff. That's awesome, and everyone loves it. Problem is they're a little too powerful, you're doing like four times the damage of anyone else and I think it's a bit of an issue. How would you feel if we said that maybe you could only have like one summon spell active at a time? Or maybe cap the number of creatures you can have out at a given time to two? Or maybe one per creature type? Maybe your creatures can deal a bit less damage? Or maybe you just don't use quite as many in general. Just spitballing man, everyone wants everyone else to have fun, so just trying to think of how to balance this out while still making sure you can do your whole wolf summoning thing still."
That is the best way that I personally know as a DM to control unfun elements. We do not need the rules to settle disputes when the whole definition of the game is collaborative storytelling.
Yeah the player wants to be powerful and you can keep him that way while taking it down below absurd levels. And if a player is not willing to make that compromise then honestly they're not really playing as part of the group anyway, which is not a problem with D&D but a problem with the group.
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or, I dunno, don't have every encounter be combat? what good are 5 pets when you'e talking/bribing/bluffing/sneaking/disguising/or any of the other hundred things you can do to create conflict without having someone sic'ing 5 dogs on you. Have you heard of alignment? If you have players who routinely just murder their way through situations, the other players might...you know...care or notice? Think of how horrible it would be to see a pack of wild animals tearing apart humanoids on a regular basis...at some point you'd lose your stomach for it if you're actually role-playing. If you're not, well. Try a video game.
Ah, yes: alignment. By all means let's immerse game table in long debates about the exact ethical obligations encompassed by being "chaotic good." That will surely be a productive and thrilling use of my valuable recreation time.
And a D&D party being disgusted by the violence done by a pack of summoned creatures? Get real. Any character concept that would have a problem with gory violence towards enemies is a character concept unsuitable for being a D&D-style adventurer. D&D is not and has never been a system for deep role-playing on themes of justice and the meaning of good -- it is a game where you go into dungeons, kill monsters, and take their stuff. If you think otherwise, then you are not looking at the rule set with clear eyes. Exploration, combat, and treasure are what D&D is about. You can do adventures that contain political intrigue -- Lord knows I love to do that occasionally -- but you will be winging it, because that's really not the kind of conflict that the D&D rules are designed to model.
Also: spellcasters are, if anything, more overpowered in stories that depend on social interaction. Charm person, dominate, zone of truth, ESP, shapechange... You can take over a country with those spells.
"Hey bro, your summoner druid is like the coolest thing ever, all summoning wolves and stuff. That's awesome, and everyone loves it. Problem is they're a little too powerful, you're doing like four times the damage of anyone else and I think it's a bit of an issue. How would you feel if we said that maybe you could only have like one summon spell active at a time? Or maybe cap the number of creatures you can have out at a given time to two? Or maybe one per creature type? Maybe your creatures can deal a bit less damage? Or maybe you just don't use quite as many in general. Just spitballing man, everyone wants everyone else to have fun, so just trying to think of how to balance this out while still making sure you can do your whole wolf summoning thing still."
This conversation you're describing? That's the conversation the developers should be having before they publish broken summoning rules. You are advocating that people do the balancing work that they paid for when they bought the game.
Alternatively if a player is doing something unfun at the table, as the DM you can have a goddamned conversation with them.
"Hey bro, your summoner druid is like the coolest thing ever, all summoning wolves and stuff. That's awesome, and everyone loves it. Problem is they're a little too powerful, you're doing like four times the damage of anyone else and I think it's a bit of an issue. How would you feel if we said that maybe you could only have like one summon spell active at a time? Or maybe cap the number of creatures you can have out at a given time to two? Or maybe one per creature type? Maybe your creatures can deal a bit less damage? Or maybe you just don't use quite as many in general. Just spitballing man, everyone wants everyone else to have fun, so just trying to think of how to balance this out while still making sure you can do your whole wolf summoning thing still."
That is the best way that I personally know as a DM to control unfun elements. We do not need the rules to settle disputes when the whole definition of the game is collaborative storytelling.
Yeah the player wants to be powerful and you can keep him that way while taking it down below absurd levels. And if a player is not willing to make that compromise then honestly they're not really playing as part of the group anyway, which is not a problem with D&D but a problem with the group.
I think this always need to be in the toolkit but it is rarely a fun conversation for anybody involved. I definitely consider it a virtue of a system that decreases the needs for these talks. This is where I was going with the locks analogy. Locks don't really make things safe, they increase the effort for people to get to them. I want rules to function like a reasonable lock and make people getting to broken stuff require a metaphorical set of bolt cutters so when somebody is trying to break them it's obviously different than somebody who leaned against a door and it opened.
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Ayup.
I defended the androsphinx as being appropriate for its CR, and I stand by that.
But this little bugger is a disaster.
Don't get me wrong, I think 5E has plenty of faults, but "This thing can be exploited by people bent on exploiting things" is such a universal trait of tabletop games in my experience that I have a hard time thinking 5E's problem is "Sometimes, people summon a bunch of things" or "That illusion spell can make a cube of metal that holds a guy in place so you can kill him".
No padlock is undefeatable. With with I have at work I can get through any fucking lock you make. Maybe it will involve an oxy-acetylene torch, but that pad lock will be fucked. This doesn't mean pad locks are pointless. A padlock made from aluminium is just not as good as one made from titanium.
The ease with which you can break things is an important factor in the quality. Be it rules or padlocks.
It's a bit silly to have so much hysteria over a framework of rules used to facilitate "make believe". 5th edition is pretty explicit that the rules shouldn't get in the way of good collective storytelling.
The only hope now is that it's a typo and it should really be CR 5 or 7 and the typesetter simply misread the playtest notes.
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True though that may be, all padlocks are designed to bar doors, but not all games are designed to be inherently balanced.
There are some parties who want to play very powerful characters.
There are some players who enjoy breaking systems.
Both of these groups benefit from having imbalance present in the rules. Expert groups may become bored with super powered characters, or dissatisfied when their own characters are less powerful than their friends, but newer players tend to just revel in it, in my experience, or pursue it themselves. If a newer player makes a ridiculous thing, then the rest of the party tends to just saying stuff like "Joe can take the two guys over there pretty much by himself, the rest of us can focus on the other two, right Joe?" to which Joe responds "Those guys never stood a chance" and everyone at the table laughs and celebrates when Joe emerges victorious against his two foes.
And for groups that become irritated when there are levels of player power which are too dissimilar, well, then we get into the universality of system breaking. Any party of expert players which wants all characters at a similar power level have to agree to make a conscious decision not to break things, because most stat and roll based games make it extremely obvious how to break stuff.
There's exploiting by stretching the technicalities of the game's language, there's exploiting by combining options the designers clearly didn't foresee, and there's this, which is just using what's openly provided directly as intended.
If you have to be an expert in the mechanics to avoid inadvertently breaking stuff, then the problem is most definitely with the rules.
For example, I have been DMing for 18 years so let me explain how I would immediately think to use this and notably, it's probably the way the designers think this might be used. The first and most important thing is to be able to assess how much it murders any party without spellcasters and react accordingly. If your party isn't full on casters, you need early magical weapons in your campaign straight up (good thing the default setting if FR where discarded +1 weapons are likely found under cabbages or bushes). Then you need to set the adventure around it - I really believe it's that powerful - to make it feel like the threat it is.
Hints need to be given early and often about the power of the creature and what it does. Maybe it's an insane wizards creation that got loose, found its way into a cave and drove out the nearby wolves. The wolves started attacking travelers and farmers due to losing their normal home and hunting grounds to it. When the PCs investigate they find out the wolves are well out of their lair and zombified creatures that seemingly have had their intelligence completely drained are close to where they supposedly came from. At some point maybe they find the original mage who made the thing and he has a note describing what you need to do to defend yourself (maybe Mind Blank or whatever). It becomes clear it's not just any ordinary creature and is quite a threat, so the PCs are well prepared to face it and the creatures challenge makes it a tense - but interesting - fight.
Of course how it will be used is to completely dick over the parties rogue if he ever gets the idea to scout ahead (as it knows where everything is within 300ft of it automatically).
I would be much less troubled by the 5e intellect devourer if its stat block was accompanied by a side bar giving exactly this kind of advice to DMs. 5e says it wants to be the edition of DM judgment; if that's the case, they should be providing DMs with sound guidance at every turn, not turning them out into the ambiguous wilderness.
I am more worried for it to be full of useless faff rules and tables to accommodate the "module" aspect of the design instead of this kind of thing.
Every edition of D&D has had good advice in the DMG (also, sometimes catastrophic advice). Unfortunately the non-rules parts of the DMG tends to go unread, or read once and quickly forgotten. I think a section on DM Advice should be a standard part of every creature's stat block.
Bearing in mind I am sincerely hoping a creature like this is the genuine minority, but so far everything I've seen indicates that CR swings widely from "utterly laughable, no threat" to "OMG what the hell is this thing". Well, at least it's iconic.
Edit: For example, in 4E I could write Body Thief in 2 sentences.
Melee 1 (Stunned Creatures Only), +4 vs. Will (IIRC)
The target is dominated (no save) and the intellect devourer is removed from play until the target is knocked unconscious, in which case the intellect devourer reenters play in a square adjacent to the target. While the intellect devourer has the target dominated it may only move or use its devour intellect power on its own initiative.
Done. Everything else the creature can do is codified in standardized mechanics like dominate. Then I could probably donate a section on how the creature should act in combat and add to an encounter (as it would still be sizably and ridiculously powerful).
I just got finished running a game of MHRP where things got incredibly out of hand. People were rolling 3 d12s on every action, shutting down tons of Gear powers for PP, and every attack was an instant knockout. Those players exploited the game about as thoroughly as it is possible to do.
The game still worked. Everyone got to contribute, encounters were challenging but survivable, and everyone felt that the finale of the campaign was the most compelling of any game I've ever run. That's how a game is supposed to work. 5e doesn't.
Listen: CR is going to be fucked. Eyeball everything. Same as it always was.
I think 2e XP values were actually more reliable than 3.x or 5e CRs. At least 2e XP values had modifiers for extraordinary abilities.
The only circumstance I could imagine using this creature is as part of a trap against substantially higher-level parties.
I could design a kick ass adventure where the PCs are chasing down one of these little sons of bitches through a complex of narrow underground tunnels. Maybe it's a goblinoid lair, and the PCs have to face off against a series of bugbears who have been controlled by this thing. The final climactic encounter might be an ogre whose brain has been eaten, and once the ogre is downed and the little bastard flees its host the PCs will be able to finish it off once and for all, having by then been fully apprised of the beast's horrifying capabilities.
But I'm a really experienced DM.
so another session of 5e last night. level 4s, vengeance paladin, battlemaster fighter, assassin rogue, lore bard, a fighter/thief, moon druid, and me a cleric/goo warlock. we are trying to legitimize a bastard boy as king for a newly vacant throne. the nearby Dwarven queen eliminated the last monarch and three groups of people are vying to place their candidate on the throne.
we are attempting to increase his renown as he could not handle a duel on his own. we just beat the silver thanes to the dragons lair and killed the dragon, then trounced the thanes after they attempted to way lay our group. since we play at the flgs, we tend to have a little turnover, so when we get back to camp one of the abandoned PCs was found murdered by the third group, led by another abandoned PC.
this week we tracked the third group to a destroyed farm and fought them. since we were cleric buddies together, the death of the other cleric fueled some vicious attacks on my part. I felt bad for the fighter, as he could not roll above a 5 for most of the night. frustrated he used his action surge first (just to change his luck) crit, used a battle die, and rolled max damage on all 5 dice. then rolled a 19 on his next attack. great moment of relief.
the druid had been pretending to be a , so when he changed into a bear suddenly we all laughed. great time. paladin almost went down, but he always forgets to lay on hands until after dropping g to 1 HP as a half .
finally kill the leader and I take 10 minutes to prayer of heal the group. end of the session and out pops a land shark.
That's not the part that was badwrongfun-y people. The part where you suggest that people who do not play the game for the same reasons you do should examine why they play the game was.
As for people in a thread enthusiastically discussing the topic of the thread being silly, well I guess we're all silly geese. Thank you for choosing to join us. Getting over the fear of looking silly is the first step in really getting into roleplaying.
I am not objecting to defense or attack of 5th with this. I am strictly talking about "Idiots who ROLL play" (or the opposite) kind of comments. I guess if you really want to make value statement about how mechanical/fluffy your RPG should be you can but it is unlikely to lead anywhere good. 5th seems an odd poster child to defend ROLE play with since it has so many mechanical bits. Part of the reason I'm still hanging around this thread is I'm trying to find what 5th handles well. For me it doesn't have much of the things that help story and encourage roleplaying which I actually think would be a positive thing.
Edit: And also, I don't even think "New" DM is the problem. In many cases it's going to be people who know enough to write their own adventures, but don't know enough about how to balance out an adventure and pace it. That's going to be the problem with something like this.
Which means it should by all rights have a higher CR.
That's the issue and it's only when I can see the book, figure out what the relative CRs are and think "How does this fit in" that we can answer that. But it is pretty obviously significantly lower than it should be given other CR1/2 examples. The point of CR is to give you a rough idea how challenge X is for a party of Y. If it doesn't and you have to look at every single monster to make a judgement on it, then the system is worthless. So far, 5E is leaning on the "this system is worthless" side a bit too much.
You shouldn't want to be facing a young dragon over a bunch of level 2 monsters.
It's nice to know why you're here you silly goose. I think the addition of backgrounds was a nice place to start people off roleplaying, but more importantly it's not about getting hung up on things that encourages roleplaying. There are tables for how much a pint of ale costs or the weight of a box of caltrops, but you don't HAVE to use it if it's going to take away from the story you're all sharing.
Similarly, if someone running with 18 pets and monsters that eat brains are rampant in your adventures, I'll return to my earlier comment that: A) a DM can help control things that are actively un-fun for the majority of players and are explicitly told to do that - and
If that 8 year old comes up with the idea of the druid who likes to summon tons of stuff, great. But as the DM I don't have to let that be the solution to every situation to the point where it's not fun for anyone who isn't a druid with 10 pets.
I don't have a dog in the whole "back in 3.x things were good" or whatever edition wars have occurred in the past, but 5th is easy to get into and it's fun for now. Is it the end-all-be-all of RPG's? No, and nothing ever will be.
Did it bring cookies?
Please explain how DMs should control this situation.
anyways, I realize I'm getting a bit defensive when I realize that I'm equating criticism of 5e with personal attacks against the people, like me, who are thoroughly enjoying ourselves with this edition. I totally get the critics going over how the system has issues. the tone, though, seems to fall into either don't care about the problem or seem to want to shake people and demand they acknowledge how bad 5e is.
Ah, the Monster Manual, an obscure tome that only the most learned, wise and experienced of Dungeon Masters are granted access to.
-An orc beastmaster turns the summoned creatures on their master
-an evil necromancer feeds on the spirits of summoned undead, making him stronger
-a labyrinth just wide enough for the party to walk single file
-kill them
-kill the caster
-make their attacks become ineffectual over time
-position the monster so only a few creatures can actually hit it/they block line of sight so no one can do anything while they're in the way
or, I dunno, don't have every encounter be combat? what good are 5 pets when you'e talking/bribing/bluffing/sneaking/disguising/or any of the other hundred things you can do to create conflict without having someone sic'ing 5 dogs on you. Have you heard of alignment? If you have players who routinely just murder their way through situations, the other players might...you know...care or notice? Think of how horrible it would be to see a pack of wild animals tearing apart humanoids on a regular basis...at some point you'd lose your stomach for it if you're actually role-playing. If you're not, well. Try a video game.
In other words, design every encounter to specifically gimp the summoner. Congratulations: you now have a player-DM arms race.
Now that's a helpful addition to the discussion.
As a DM of.. 6 years now? I consider myself to be fairly experienced. I've played since 2e, but only really got into crafting my own stories for others to play a few months before 4e was released. It was a shock shifting sides of the table, but I love it behind the scenes instead of in the spotlight. I get to come up with a dwarven civilization that has a deep history of battle against deep earth elementals and goblin slaves, a continent that is varied in it's terrain that provides both a desert type region for survival based encounters and a heavy forest area for the ranger to flex his tracking skills by helping the party find it's way through the mass of trees and underbrush. I can set up a battle that pits the party against a dragon in it's lair that spirals out of control and has the whole mountain explode in a finale finish to a 3 month long side quest. I throw the players onto a lightning elemental powered train 300ft in the air as it speeds towards a city, getting hijacked along the way, and the players have to mount a rescue on air discs to get control of the train back.
I don't need rules of any kind to do any of that. All I need is a D6, and people to roll it. But I want rules to some of it. The bits where the player wants to know how much damage his fireball does to the earth elemental, or how much damage the cleric has to heal back when they set up camp after pushing himself all day in blistering heat. A clear, concise block of stats that's easily understandable and explains exactly what you need to know about the spell, ability, feat, skill, whatever. It helps me worry about the important things, like where the ranger's next pet hawk is going to attack him from, or what sort of crazy special pieces of gear are found in a dragon's hoard, because it lets me spend time on doing story stuff instead of worrying about how broken a spell is or how it might be interpreted by the players.
I want to fight dragons and elementals, not the wording of wizard spells.
"But you can make one ruling and that's how it works from then on!" - I shouldn't have to make a single ruling if the spell was worded properly so that anyone with a decent grasp on the language it's written can read it. A DM's time needs to be spent on progressing the story and making sure the players are involved in it in a way that makes them want to get to the next encounter to see what new bit of the puzzle they can find. Not deciding if this spell or that feat works this way or that way, and what that might mean later on down the line when the issue is sure to crop up again and again.
TL;DR - DM's don't want to be put into a position of having to rebuild the god damn rules every time they play, they want to fucking use dragons to attack people.
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I'll bet that experience would be really fun for everyone.
It was kind of you to respond to none of the points I was talking with you about while specifically being hostile to me. I appreciate your participation in the thread.
Yea, the tone here has been ratcheting up quickly. Please know I have no intention of being hostile to you or anything. I really think this should be a place for people to come and talk about good things with 5th. I do think that bad things should be open for comment as well. I think part of why I get frustrated with 5th is it is making some mistakes that were obviously mistakes previously and had been corrected but they're running right back into that wall again.
This is actually pretty neat. But can the player necromancer feed on the spirits of the evil necromancer's undead? Why not?
On the plus side, this makes the fighter actually useful.
On the negative side, you're still probably better sending all the summons single-file in the lead. And if you do this for more than one encounter, your players will get terribly annoyed / bored.
This is generally the goal of the monsters at all times. This doesn't solve the problem.
How?
This is fair, but only really effective in solo-type fights where the solo can't just wipe them with an area effect.
D&D does combat. That's what most of the rules revolve around. Everything else is pretty slim in terms of mechanical support.
If the combat doesn't work because the game is poorly balanced, so the solution is to not-combat, then why exactly is D&D 5E the game to be playing? Surely there are other game systems that do not-combat better. Or that do combat better, for that matter.
Also, packs of animals tend to be great for lots of non-combat situations, such as sneaking, searching, tracking, and intimidating. A reasonably clever group can also use them in many bluff-type situations ("we're a traveling circus / I sell hunting dogs").
At any rate, complaints about combat mechanics are not resolved by saying "don't combat." That's like resolving a general complaint about 5E by saying "don't 5E." I guess it's a solution, but is it the one you want to be advocating?
"Hey bro, your summoner druid is like the coolest thing ever, all summoning wolves and stuff. That's awesome, and everyone loves it. Problem is they're a little too powerful, you're doing like four times the damage of anyone else and I think it's a bit of an issue. How would you feel if we said that maybe you could only have like one summon spell active at a time? Or maybe cap the number of creatures you can have out at a given time to two? Or maybe one per creature type? Maybe your creatures can deal a bit less damage? Or maybe you just don't use quite as many in general. Just spitballing man, everyone wants everyone else to have fun, so just trying to think of how to balance this out while still making sure you can do your whole wolf summoning thing still."
That is the best way that I personally know as a DM to control unfun elements. We do not need the rules to settle disputes when the whole definition of the game is collaborative storytelling.
Yeah the player wants to be powerful and you can keep him that way while taking it down below absurd levels. And if a player is not willing to make that compromise then honestly they're not really playing as part of the group anyway, which is not a problem with D&D but a problem with the group.
Ah, yes: alignment. By all means let's immerse game table in long debates about the exact ethical obligations encompassed by being "chaotic good." That will surely be a productive and thrilling use of my valuable recreation time.
And a D&D party being disgusted by the violence done by a pack of summoned creatures? Get real. Any character concept that would have a problem with gory violence towards enemies is a character concept unsuitable for being a D&D-style adventurer. D&D is not and has never been a system for deep role-playing on themes of justice and the meaning of good -- it is a game where you go into dungeons, kill monsters, and take their stuff. If you think otherwise, then you are not looking at the rule set with clear eyes. Exploration, combat, and treasure are what D&D is about. You can do adventures that contain political intrigue -- Lord knows I love to do that occasionally -- but you will be winging it, because that's really not the kind of conflict that the D&D rules are designed to model.
Also: spellcasters are, if anything, more overpowered in stories that depend on social interaction. Charm person, dominate, zone of truth, ESP, shapechange... You can take over a country with those spells.
This conversation you're describing? That's the conversation the developers should be having before they publish broken summoning rules. You are advocating that people do the balancing work that they paid for when they bought the game.
I think this always need to be in the toolkit but it is rarely a fun conversation for anybody involved. I definitely consider it a virtue of a system that decreases the needs for these talks. This is where I was going with the locks analogy. Locks don't really make things safe, they increase the effort for people to get to them. I want rules to function like a reasonable lock and make people getting to broken stuff require a metaphorical set of bolt cutters so when somebody is trying to break them it's obviously different than somebody who leaned against a door and it opened.