Chris Perkins had a great idea to allow Jim Darkmagic to drop a Fireball in the right space using theatre of the mind.
He asked for an Arcana check to determine the wizards ability to time his fireball properly enough to be able to catch the optimum number of bad guys in its radius on a dynamic battlefield. I don't know if that's 100% applicable to all situations...but was super sexy at the time and, I think, exactly what "rulings not rules" means.
Not sure I really understand the context of what you're describing. Being that D&D is a turn based game, the optimal number of targets you can catch with fireball is just whatever you can hit on your turn. Maybe they were on a battlefield that was meant to be fluid and just kind of winging it in terms of how many enemies he could hit on his turn?
Yes...the AQI team was fighting a trio of ice hockey playing frost giants where using giant hockey sticks to fling giant ice pucks at our heroes. At one point Jim Darkmagic wants to fireball the three pucks to melt them away, but also to catch as many giants as he can. Giants moving around the area on hockey skates, mind you. He left it up to the DM to tell him how he could achieve that. After a moments thought he asked for an Arcana check, as a measure of Jim's awesome wizardry and his ability to time/place the fireball just so and catch as many Giants as he could along with the pucks.
Yes. It was kind of a silly fight where giants were literally ice skating around a room shooting huge ice hockey pucks at people, and they weren't using a grid so there was no clear indication of exact distance/position to anything.
Mike wanted to try and hit both giants and as many of their pucks as possible (to melt them), Chris had him make an Arcana check to see if he'd be able to 'time the detonation' correctly in order to do so, the idea being that he needed to hit a fixed area in order to get the (stationary) pucks, but also try to do so as the giants were skating through that space in order to catch them in it too.
It was both a good example of an improvised 'yes, but' solution to a player asking to do something kinda weird that you don't quite have a rule for, and a great example of why I would hate trying to play without a grid. "Nobody really knows where the fuck anything is" has been a significant feature of just about all the theater-of-the-mind AQI sessions. It's an even more noticeable problem in the C Team stuff, if you've been watching that - I'm assuming they've shifted away from a map in order to serve the needs of the format (your audience can't necessarily see your map/minis very well if you're using them for a show, and you don't want to spend too much time fiddling with maps when you're already pretty time-limited) but they seem to be spending way more time asking each other where things are in relation to other things than they'd ever have to spend moving minis around.
I mean I see situations like that as a good example of a group that should probably be playing another game besides D&D, since the rules of D&D just say that you hit as many iceskating giants as are in the 20 foot radius of a fireball when you use it on your turn. When you cast the fireball, the giants aren't moving around and you're looking for a chance to hit all 3, they just are where they are at the moment you cast the fireball.
I don't mean to say they're doing anything wrong, and Perkins is a great GM no doubt. Just that if you're going to play fast and loose like that, you could just play say Dungeon World where abstract fictional positioning is part of the rules and you don't have to be limited by the turn based positioning of D&D's RAW.
And yeah, I'm not a fan of playing D&D abstract with no map/grid because if I'm going to do that, I'm 100% just going to play Dungeon World instead where I don't have to fight against or ignore the rules of the game to just use my GM whim about positioning, or worse try to keep track of the position of 10+ combatants in my head.
Fictional positioning IS part of 5e's rules. The DMG rule on the exact scenario we're discussing is "If you're not using miniatures or another visual aid, it can sometimes be difficult to determine who's in an area of effect and who isn't. The easiest way to address such uncertainty is to go with your gut and make a call. If you'd like more guidance, [here's a table you can roll on]. This approach aims at simplicity instead of spatial precision. If you prefer more tactical nuance, consider using miniatures."
Edit: Admittedly, this is a bad rule - or, more accurately, is a weird absence of a rule, in which the official standard rule for a game system is basically 'fuck it, make it up, it's all pretend anyway, who gives a shit!", but it is the actual factual 5e rule for this. Miniatures and a grid are an optional variant rule.
It's very important that the DM feel free to make the decisions that work best for his table, and not feel bound by an overabundance of complicated game mechanics. It's this sort of thinking that allows 5e to be the broadly appealing game that it is, and also allows it to be made by a team half the size of 4e's team who still want to be able to clock out by 4 on Fridays.
Granted, flexibility for the GM is important. You don't want to destroy Schroedinger's Cat, after all.
But at some point you should recognize that the reason people tend to buy RPG books is so that they don't have to do the mechanical heavy lifting. Things that will come up with some regularity should be addressed. With rules.
I play two types of games. One is the tactical turn based game. If you want to know who you can hit with your AOE spell in 13th Age, look at the rules for the spell. It's going to tell you 1d4 nearby enemies in a group or whatever. And we use a dry erase board for minis and positioning(no grid because the game doesn't use a grid). So there's no GM fiat about whether or not the enemies you want to hit are in a group, etc. You can just see it on the table.
The other is stuff like Dungeon World or other PbtA games where it's just all abstract.
I just don't like being in the middle, where I am playing a game like D&D that asks you to use very specific feet based measurements for everything from movement to spell effects and then suggests you play the game without a grid so that you just have to use constant GM whim decisions to play the game.
5E didn't need complicated mechanics to make gridless combat work better. 13th Age did it with a smaller team than 5E had working on it. All you have to do is just use abstract range bands and targeting mechanics that don't rely on measurements.
Granted, flexibility for the GM is important. You don't want to destroy Schroedinger's Cat, after all.
But at some point you should recognize that the reason people tend to buy RPG books is so that they don't have to do the mechanical heavy lifting. Things that will come up with some regularity should be addressed. With rules.
Yes, but consider this: That is hard and requires a lot of work, while expecting your customers to fill in all the blanks you left and do all your playtesting for you via Unearthed Arcana is super easy.
The corollary to the old Gygax quote about the DMs figuring out that they don't really need the rules is that eventually WotC was going to figure out that people would still buy a DMG consisting of a single page reading "Why are you asking me, stupid? Make it up yourself" as long as it came in a nice hardcover and still said "Dungeons and Dragons" on the cover - and that such a DMG is much cheaper to make.
Also, just because I enjoy the little inconsistencies:
If you actually use the table they give you for adjudicating the number of things you can hit with an AoE, it produces some odd results.
Notably, apparently you're supposed to be able to hit the same number of targets with a Lightning Bolt (100-foot line) as you do with a Fireball (20-foot sphere), even though in practice that seems extraordinarily unlikely.
Also, you know how Dragonborn breath weapons can be either a 15-foot cone or a 30-foot line? You might think that those are supposed to hit the same number of targets, too, since presumably the breath weapons should all be more or less on the same power level - but you would be mistaken! A 30-foot line only hits 1 thing, but a 15-foot cone hits 2, even though hitting 2 things with a 15-foot cone requires them to be within 15 feet of each other but hitting 2 things with a 30-foot line only requires them to be within...30 feet of each other. Gold and Red Dragonborn are the only ones who get both a 15-ft cone and a Dex save instead of a Con save, so if you're playing one of the 8 other colors, you have apparently chosen poorly.
But at some point you should recognize that the reason people tend to buy RPG books is so that they don't have to do the mechanical heavy lifting. Things that will come up with some regularity should be addressed. With rules.
This is why I eventually gave up on running both 5E and 13th Age. I don't want to buy a game where half the book is basically "Now you write the rules!"
Well with 5E it was more because 4E is so much better in every way, but I wanted to get a dig in at 13th Age so I threw them both together for the sake of the bit.
I don't even consider it a dig at 13th Age to recognize that it's not simulationist and has huge gaps in the rules. Stuff like rules for grappling(they call it grabbing) are insanely half-baked. And tons of the talents in the game require improvised player/GM creation of stuff in the middle of battle like the ranger's terrain stunt. They're just very open about it, and they did effectively design the things I care about, like knowing which enemies get hit by spells, common-sense monster math/encounter building, etc.
13th Age is an odd duck. It's aimed squarely at advanced D&D players (and GMs), the same group of players that used to be Pathfinder's target audience.
So it's going to be a weird construct. But Eyes of the Stone Thief is a master's level course on encounter and dungeon design. The bestiary is easily the best d20 bestiary ever written. There is no DMG. Just shrugs all around. It's not "now figure this out" it's more "you've already got this figured out."
13th Age is an odd duck. It's aimed squarely at advanced D&D players (and GMs), the same group of players that used to be Pathfinder's target audience.
So it's going to be a weird construct. But Eyes of the Stone Thief is a master's level course on encounter and dungeon design. The bestiary is easily the best d20 bestiary ever written. There is no DMG. Just shrugs all around. It's not "now figure this out" it's more "you've already got this figured out."
Gotta disagree about the same group idea. They are nominally in the group "Advanced D&D players" but there are subgroups there that are important. The typical Pathfinder player would revolt in disgust at a lot of the 13th Age stuff, especially a lot of the fluffy narrative ideas and the utter rejection of "rules as physics".
He just means 13th Age is aimed at people who already understand and know how to GM and play f20 games, and he's absolutely right. It's why there's no DMG, the book skips explaining basics of how to run a game, etc.
I agree that the primary people who still play Pathfinder wouldn't want 13th Age, because it's not simulationist enough though.
13th Age is 3.5's distinct classes and lots of customization options within each class but without the simulationism, 4E's easier to understand power structures and monster math/encounter building without the "every class functions exactly the same" framework and without the wargame style focus on stuff like pushing/pulling/situational modifiers, with some PC focused sort-of narrativist elements like the one unique thing and icon relationships, that are there to guide the GM to telling a story about these particular characters where those choices are a part of the story.
But it 100% assumes you already understand f20 gaming to get involved in it.
13th Age is what you get if you wanted to take the good from 3.5 and 4E and streamline it. It's baffling that 5E didn't basically look like what 13th Age is to be honest, but then again, Heinsoo and Tweet weren't working at WotC any more.
I do both, depending on the game. If I'm playing 13th Age, absolutely we're using the dry erase board with minis. It's simply too hard to track which enemies can be intercepted by tanks, positioning of all the PCs/enemies, etc. And I run hard combats in that game, so it's only fair the players get a clear picture of what they're up against.
But when I run PbtA games, even ones like Dungeon World that are heavy on combat, I don't ever use any visual aids.
13th Age is D&D.
Pathfinder is D&D.
This thread is not exclusively for discussion about D&D5, and some of the most interesting discussions that have ever happened in it have been about other editions.
I'm good. You can create whatever threads you want, but I'm not going to use them.
13th Age is D&D.
Pathfinder is D&D.
This thread is not exclusively for discussion about D&D5, and some of the most interesting discussions that have ever happened in it have been about other editions.
I'm good. You can create whatever threads you want, but I'm not going to use them.
They may have been made by people who enjoy D&D, worked on Modules and/or splat books for D&D and Based their mechanics on D&D but they aren't D&D for the same reason that Heroes Unlimited isn't D&D (despite utilizing similair dice mechanics for combat and/or magic/psionics).
I think some people might be a little more understanding Joshmvii, if you didn't take every discussion about 5e and turn it into an opportunity to dump on it and proceed to tell us how 13th age or Dungeon World is better. The implication being that we're somehow wrong in how we choose to have fun.
This thread while titled D&D5 has always been filled with discussions about other editions. Amusingly, the only reason I even found out 13th Age existed is because people like Aegeri posted in this D&D5 thread about it while discussing issues they had with D&D5. And then about how much better D&D4 was (in their opinions), and so forth.
I absolutely do not take every 5E discussion and talk about other games. The main reason I still visit this thread is that even though I don't play it any more, I know 5E well and like taking part in discussions about classes, encounter building, whatever. When people are asking for advice about builds/feats/multiclassing, etc I'm always the first to jump in and help with that stuff.
If the discussion is about how a game handles a thing, and I talk about my opinions about how the game handles that thing and also talk about how I like other games handling it, it doesn't mean I'm saying other games are better and that people are doing something wrong. I'm not making that implication. I get that D&D fans in general are very defensive about their game, you see it massively on the D&D subreddit too, but that doesn't mean every discussion that includes how other games do things is shitting on D&D.
Dude, on this page alone you pivoted at least 4 of your posts away from 5e and onto how other games are better than D&D.
Edit: Which, to be clear from me, is totally cool that you think that. You are probably even correct! But maybe step back and try to understand how it could rub some people the wrong way.
If all you want to do is say "5e is not good because it isn't 13th Age", you should go back several pages. You have said that in so many of your posts! We get it, you think 5e is inferior! We don't care. Stop repeating yourself over and over again.
....your starting to sound like a politician who doesn't know what they are doing (THIS IS SPEAKING ABOUT THOSE SORT OF POLITICIANS IN GENERAL! NOT JUST "HIM")
I'll take your word for it. I like to discuss RPGs relative to other games that occupy the same spaces, but it's cool if this thread doesn't want that. I'll keep my discussions here on point for a 5E echo chamber.
Oh, please. There's been plenty analysis and critiquing of 5e in here. But you so consistently respond to those topics with, "I think 13th Age handles it perfectly, in that system..." I legit went to check your profile to make sure you weren't shilling and actually had posts on other topics.
Sorry, this thread is only about 5E, so I cannot remark on other games.
That new yawning portal product seems like it could be pretty cool. I think 5E has a good track record with their published modules, and it's a cool way to introduce a new generation of players to some cool old adventures.
I regularly run TotM style (because drawing out the map is a thing we don't have time for in our 2 hour game sessions where I'm trying to get multiple combats in multiple locations handled).
My players love it.
Am I playing fast and loose?
Yes, we're having fun, not writing computer programs where we need explicit rules and structure.
Like my favorite part of the 5e system is how easy it is to bash it into whatever shape I need.
I make mini games and skill challenges that my players need to deal with all the time.
The combats can be on the grid or entirely theater of the mind, and in TotM play I can in fact massage things to give a more exciting and compelling combat than I necessarily could with straight lock to grid playing. Both because I can't be caught out on stupid miniature placement, and because I can work in multiple directions and dimensions.
For instance I modified nothics (they are like the puttys of my current campaign) to have a climb speed, and my party will regularly fight them in caves, caverns, and cities where they are crawling all over the walls and ceilings. Actually modeling that out would just suck regularly. Heck one of my players ended up with boots of spider climbing and gets in on the spiderman game regularly too.
Heck at least once I used the grid simply like an elevation drawing to show where in the death tyrants massively tall lair the characters were so as to track fall damages.
I'm a giant fan of not having to be locked to grids, and I like that 5e doesn't cease to function when you get away from them.
Sorry, this thread is only about 5E, so I cannot remark on other games.
That new yawning portal product seems like it could be pretty cool. I think 5E has a good track record with their published modules, and it's a cool way to introduce a new generation of players to some cool old adventures.
Is yawning portal the next book they are putting out with all the old school dungeons?
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VizardObserverThe Duke of Ridiculous PoppycockyRegistered Userregular
edited March 2017
My desert campaign, Kings of Khantar, has fallen to the wayside due to college once again. Damn this cruel world! Damn it all!
On a more positive note, I am now part of a super fun Forgotten Realms sandbox game, where I play a Fighter Knight (UA) with the Mounted Combatant feat and a Warhorse. I am having a ton of fun with my character and I got a cool specialized magic item that works with my Knight features. My current character goal is to capture a baby Bulette and raise it as a mount, so I can become a TRUE Tunnel Fighter. Playing in this sandbox game has made me much more open to running a sandbox game of my own, which I think my IRL players would enjoy a lot more as well.
(If anyone is interested in that kind of stuff, the games have VODs on youtube)
And on the subject of grids vs Theater of the Mind, I've said it before but I am vastly in favor of grid combat. I want the combat of my game to be an engaging and equally fun part of the experience for all members, and part of that is tactical grid combat. 4E makes tactical combat much easier to conjure, and my fingers are still crossed for a 5.5 or a 6e that moves towards a more tactical combat space (although that is HIGHLY unlikely with the design direction they've gone down). Who knows! Maybe someday someone will write up a 4E conversion that uses flattened math and the dream edition of D&D will arise from those ashes, and I will be in a pure state of bliss.
Sorry, this thread is only about 5E, so I cannot remark on other games.
That new yawning portal product seems like it could be pretty cool. I think 5E has a good track record with their published modules, and it's a cool way to introduce a new generation of players to some cool old adventures.
I'm going to be running it next season and for the most part I'm looking forward to it with one ironic exception: the doomvault.
I got to try this thing back in the beta and for the most part it really sucked; I think it was partially on the GM who kept running fights like gauntlets as well as having fights we straight up had no chance against (there was a kraken that one of our two parties ran into in session 1). This might have been a case of beta jank, us being terminally under leveled (we were about level 7, never leveled and the minimum that the printed version listed was level 9 so...) or just the GM being a prick, but in any event I am not looking forward to trying it out one bit
Theatre of the mind vs Grid.... I would say it depends on the situation as well as the combat at hand. If you are fighting a couple orcs in the open field, then it is easy to just use theatre, but if you had something more intricate (lets say a catacomb or pyramid), then i think a grid would help indicate pieces of the area and specific spots more efficiently than theatre of the mind.
Both are fine in their own right, but again, there needs to be set criteria before I have the need to draw it on a grid.
My counterpoint there would basically be 'why are you having players just fight a couple orcs in an open field?'
Uninteresting combats, in my opinion, are mostly a waste of everyone's time. I tend to avoid using stuff like random encounter tables for this reason - if there's no reason for the fight, no greater consequences or implications other than 'try not to die', and nothing special about the terrain, circumstances, or tactical situation then all I'm really doing with a random encounter is making the table spend half an hour going through the motions of a foregone conclusion before they're allowed to continue with the interesting, consequential part of the game.
Basically almost any situation that falls beneath the threshold of 'this encounter is not interesting/important enough to justify a grid' is likely to also fall beneath my threshold of 'this encounter is not interesting/important enough to have'.
My counterpoint there would basically be 'why are you having players just fight a couple orcs in an open field?'
Uninteresting combats, in my opinion, are mostly a waste of everyone's time. I tend to avoid using stuff like random encounter tables for this reason - if there's no reason for the fight, no greater consequences or implications other than 'try not to die', and nothing special about the terrain, circumstances, or tactical situation then all I'm really doing with a random encounter is making the table spend half an hour going through the motions of a foregone conclusion before they're allowed to continue with the interesting, consequential part of the game.
Basically almost any situation that falls beneath the threshold of 'this encounter is not interesting/important enough to justify a grid' is likely to also fall beneath my threshold of 'this encounter is not interesting/important enough to have'.
You could spin it as the DM wanting to sap HP/Spell Slots before a more important encounter that you want to make more difficult through the more limited resources the PC's have available as opposed to them dropping all their spell slots on fireballs and smites and just pop whatever you put in front of them
My counterpoint there would basically be 'why are you having players just fight a couple orcs in an open field?'
Uninteresting combats, in my opinion, are mostly a waste of everyone's time. I tend to avoid using stuff like random encounter tables for this reason - if there's no reason for the fight, no greater consequences or implications other than 'try not to die', and nothing special about the terrain, circumstances, or tactical situation then all I'm really doing with a random encounter is making the table spend half an hour going through the motions of a foregone conclusion before they're allowed to continue with the interesting, consequential part of the game.
Basically almost any situation that falls beneath the threshold of 'this encounter is not interesting/important enough to justify a grid' is likely to also fall beneath my threshold of 'this encounter is not interesting/important enough to have'.
You could spin it as the DM wanting to sap HP/Spell Slots before a more important encounter that you want to make more difficult through the more limited resources the PC's have available as opposed to them dropping all their spell slots on fireballs and smites and just pop whatever you put in front of them
Yeah, but there's no reason not to do that with an interesting encounter instead - it's not like fun is a finite resource you need to ration. And if you take a stock 'random' encounter and start adding elements that actually make it tactically interesting, you very quickly hit the point where it starts to justify a grid and become clunky to track without one.
My counterpoint there would basically be 'why are you having players just fight a couple orcs in an open field?'
Uninteresting combats, in my opinion, are mostly a waste of everyone's time. I tend to avoid using stuff like random encounter tables for this reason - if there's no reason for the fight, no greater consequences or implications other than 'try not to die', and nothing special about the terrain, circumstances, or tactical situation then all I'm really doing with a random encounter is making the table spend half an hour going through the motions of a foregone conclusion before they're allowed to continue with the interesting, consequential part of the game.
Basically almost any situation that falls beneath the threshold of 'this encounter is not interesting/important enough to justify a grid' is likely to also fall beneath my threshold of 'this encounter is not interesting/important enough to have'.
You could spin it as the DM wanting to sap HP/Spell Slots before a more important encounter that you want to make more difficult through the more limited resources the PC's have available as opposed to them dropping all their spell slots on fireballs and smites and just pop whatever you put in front of them
Yeah, but there's no reason not to do that with an interesting encounter instead - it's not like fun is a finite resource you need to ration. And if you take a stock 'random' encounter and start adding elements that actually make it tactically interesting, you very quickly hit the point where it starts to justify a grid and become clunky to track without one.
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Chris Perkins had a great idea to allow Jim Darkmagic to drop a Fireball in the right space using theatre of the mind.
He asked for an Arcana check to determine the wizards ability to time his fireball properly enough to be able to catch the optimum number of bad guys in its radius on a dynamic battlefield. I don't know if that's 100% applicable to all situations...but was super sexy at the time and, I think, exactly what "rulings not rules" means.
I thought it was quite elegant.
Mike wanted to try and hit both giants and as many of their pucks as possible (to melt them), Chris had him make an Arcana check to see if he'd be able to 'time the detonation' correctly in order to do so, the idea being that he needed to hit a fixed area in order to get the (stationary) pucks, but also try to do so as the giants were skating through that space in order to catch them in it too.
It was both a good example of an improvised 'yes, but' solution to a player asking to do something kinda weird that you don't quite have a rule for, and a great example of why I would hate trying to play without a grid. "Nobody really knows where the fuck anything is" has been a significant feature of just about all the theater-of-the-mind AQI sessions. It's an even more noticeable problem in the C Team stuff, if you've been watching that - I'm assuming they've shifted away from a map in order to serve the needs of the format (your audience can't necessarily see your map/minis very well if you're using them for a show, and you don't want to spend too much time fiddling with maps when you're already pretty time-limited) but they seem to be spending way more time asking each other where things are in relation to other things than they'd ever have to spend moving minis around.
I don't mean to say they're doing anything wrong, and Perkins is a great GM no doubt. Just that if you're going to play fast and loose like that, you could just play say Dungeon World where abstract fictional positioning is part of the rules and you don't have to be limited by the turn based positioning of D&D's RAW.
And yeah, I'm not a fan of playing D&D abstract with no map/grid because if I'm going to do that, I'm 100% just going to play Dungeon World instead where I don't have to fight against or ignore the rules of the game to just use my GM whim about positioning, or worse try to keep track of the position of 10+ combatants in my head.
Edit: Admittedly, this is a bad rule - or, more accurately, is a weird absence of a rule, in which the official standard rule for a game system is basically 'fuck it, make it up, it's all pretend anyway, who gives a shit!", but it is the actual factual 5e rule for this. Miniatures and a grid are an optional variant rule.
Yikes.
It's very important that the DM feel free to make the decisions that work best for his table, and not feel bound by an overabundance of complicated game mechanics. It's this sort of thinking that allows 5e to be the broadly appealing game that it is, and also allows it to be made by a team half the size of 4e's team who still want to be able to clock out by 4 on Fridays.
But at some point you should recognize that the reason people tend to buy RPG books is so that they don't have to do the mechanical heavy lifting. Things that will come up with some regularity should be addressed. With rules.
The other is stuff like Dungeon World or other PbtA games where it's just all abstract.
I just don't like being in the middle, where I am playing a game like D&D that asks you to use very specific feet based measurements for everything from movement to spell effects and then suggests you play the game without a grid so that you just have to use constant GM whim decisions to play the game.
5E didn't need complicated mechanics to make gridless combat work better. 13th Age did it with a smaller team than 5E had working on it. All you have to do is just use abstract range bands and targeting mechanics that don't rely on measurements.
Yes, but consider this: That is hard and requires a lot of work, while expecting your customers to fill in all the blanks you left and do all your playtesting for you via Unearthed Arcana is super easy.
The corollary to the old Gygax quote about the DMs figuring out that they don't really need the rules is that eventually WotC was going to figure out that people would still buy a DMG consisting of a single page reading "Why are you asking me, stupid? Make it up yourself" as long as it came in a nice hardcover and still said "Dungeons and Dragons" on the cover - and that such a DMG is much cheaper to make.
Also, just because I enjoy the little inconsistencies:
If you actually use the table they give you for adjudicating the number of things you can hit with an AoE, it produces some odd results.
Notably, apparently you're supposed to be able to hit the same number of targets with a Lightning Bolt (100-foot line) as you do with a Fireball (20-foot sphere), even though in practice that seems extraordinarily unlikely.
Also, you know how Dragonborn breath weapons can be either a 15-foot cone or a 30-foot line? You might think that those are supposed to hit the same number of targets, too, since presumably the breath weapons should all be more or less on the same power level - but you would be mistaken! A 30-foot line only hits 1 thing, but a 15-foot cone hits 2, even though hitting 2 things with a 15-foot cone requires them to be within 15 feet of each other but hitting 2 things with a 30-foot line only requires them to be within...30 feet of each other. Gold and Red Dragonborn are the only ones who get both a 15-ft cone and a Dex save instead of a Con save, so if you're playing one of the 8 other colors, you have apparently chosen poorly.
This is why I eventually gave up on running both 5E and 13th Age. I don't want to buy a game where half the book is basically "Now you write the rules!"
Well with 5E it was more because 4E is so much better in every way, but I wanted to get a dig in at 13th Age so I threw them both together for the sake of the bit.
So it's going to be a weird construct. But Eyes of the Stone Thief is a master's level course on encounter and dungeon design. The bestiary is easily the best d20 bestiary ever written. There is no DMG. Just shrugs all around. It's not "now figure this out" it's more "you've already got this figured out."
Gotta disagree about the same group idea. They are nominally in the group "Advanced D&D players" but there are subgroups there that are important. The typical Pathfinder player would revolt in disgust at a lot of the 13th Age stuff, especially a lot of the fluffy narrative ideas and the utter rejection of "rules as physics".
I agree that the primary people who still play Pathfinder wouldn't want 13th Age, because it's not simulationist enough though.
13th Age is 3.5's distinct classes and lots of customization options within each class but without the simulationism, 4E's easier to understand power structures and monster math/encounter building without the "every class functions exactly the same" framework and without the wargame style focus on stuff like pushing/pulling/situational modifiers, with some PC focused sort-of narrativist elements like the one unique thing and icon relationships, that are there to guide the GM to telling a story about these particular characters where those choices are a part of the story.
But it 100% assumes you already understand f20 gaming to get involved in it.
13th Age is what you get if you wanted to take the good from 3.5 and 4E and streamline it. It's baffling that 5E didn't basically look like what 13th Age is to be honest, but then again, Heinsoo and Tweet weren't working at WotC any more.
Personally, I like to use both. No maps for trivial encounters, but important set-piece combats and the like get the full treatment.
But when I run PbtA games, even ones like Dungeon World that are heavy on combat, I don't ever use any visual aids.
If there isn't I can start one for you to post in to your hearts content.
Pathfinder is D&D.
This thread is not exclusively for discussion about D&D5, and some of the most interesting discussions that have ever happened in it have been about other editions.
I'm good. You can create whatever threads you want, but I'm not going to use them.
They may have been made by people who enjoy D&D, worked on Modules and/or splat books for D&D and Based their mechanics on D&D but they aren't D&D for the same reason that Heroes Unlimited isn't D&D (despite utilizing similair dice mechanics for combat and/or magic/psionics).
I absolutely do not take every 5E discussion and talk about other games. The main reason I still visit this thread is that even though I don't play it any more, I know 5E well and like taking part in discussions about classes, encounter building, whatever. When people are asking for advice about builds/feats/multiclassing, etc I'm always the first to jump in and help with that stuff.
If the discussion is about how a game handles a thing, and I talk about my opinions about how the game handles that thing and also talk about how I like other games handling it, it doesn't mean I'm saying other games are better and that people are doing something wrong. I'm not making that implication. I get that D&D fans in general are very defensive about their game, you see it massively on the D&D subreddit too, but that doesn't mean every discussion that includes how other games do things is shitting on D&D.
Edit: Which, to be clear from me, is totally cool that you think that. You are probably even correct! But maybe step back and try to understand how it could rub some people the wrong way.
....your starting to sound like a politician who doesn't know what they are doing (THIS IS SPEAKING ABOUT THOSE SORT OF POLITICIANS IN GENERAL! NOT JUST "HIM")
That new yawning portal product seems like it could be pretty cool. I think 5E has a good track record with their published modules, and it's a cool way to introduce a new generation of players to some cool old adventures.
I regularly run TotM style (because drawing out the map is a thing we don't have time for in our 2 hour game sessions where I'm trying to get multiple combats in multiple locations handled).
My players love it.
Am I playing fast and loose?
Yes, we're having fun, not writing computer programs where we need explicit rules and structure.
Like my favorite part of the 5e system is how easy it is to bash it into whatever shape I need.
I make mini games and skill challenges that my players need to deal with all the time.
The combats can be on the grid or entirely theater of the mind, and in TotM play I can in fact massage things to give a more exciting and compelling combat than I necessarily could with straight lock to grid playing. Both because I can't be caught out on stupid miniature placement, and because I can work in multiple directions and dimensions.
For instance I modified nothics (they are like the puttys of my current campaign) to have a climb speed, and my party will regularly fight them in caves, caverns, and cities where they are crawling all over the walls and ceilings. Actually modeling that out would just suck regularly. Heck one of my players ended up with boots of spider climbing and gets in on the spiderman game regularly too.
Heck at least once I used the grid simply like an elevation drawing to show where in the death tyrants massively tall lair the characters were so as to track fall damages.
I'm a giant fan of not having to be locked to grids, and I like that 5e doesn't cease to function when you get away from them.
Is yawning portal the next book they are putting out with all the old school dungeons?
On a more positive note, I am now part of a super fun Forgotten Realms sandbox game, where I play a Fighter Knight (UA) with the Mounted Combatant feat and a Warhorse. I am having a ton of fun with my character and I got a cool specialized magic item that works with my Knight features. My current character goal is to capture a baby Bulette and raise it as a mount, so I can become a TRUE Tunnel Fighter. Playing in this sandbox game has made me much more open to running a sandbox game of my own, which I think my IRL players would enjoy a lot more as well.
(If anyone is interested in that kind of stuff, the games have VODs on youtube)
And on the subject of grids vs Theater of the Mind, I've said it before but I am vastly in favor of grid combat. I want the combat of my game to be an engaging and equally fun part of the experience for all members, and part of that is tactical grid combat. 4E makes tactical combat much easier to conjure, and my fingers are still crossed for a 5.5 or a 6e that moves towards a more tactical combat space (although that is HIGHLY unlikely with the design direction they've gone down). Who knows! Maybe someday someone will write up a 4E conversion that uses flattened math and the dream edition of D&D will arise from those ashes, and I will be in a pure state of bliss.
I'm going to be running it next season and for the most part I'm looking forward to it with one ironic exception: the doomvault.
I got to try this thing back in the beta and for the most part it really sucked; I think it was partially on the GM who kept running fights like gauntlets as well as having fights we straight up had no chance against (there was a kraken that one of our two parties ran into in session 1). This might have been a case of beta jank, us being terminally under leveled (we were about level 7, never leveled and the minimum that the printed version listed was level 9 so...) or just the GM being a prick, but in any event I am not looking forward to trying it out one bit
Both are fine in their own right, but again, there needs to be set criteria before I have the need to draw it on a grid.
Uninteresting combats, in my opinion, are mostly a waste of everyone's time. I tend to avoid using stuff like random encounter tables for this reason - if there's no reason for the fight, no greater consequences or implications other than 'try not to die', and nothing special about the terrain, circumstances, or tactical situation then all I'm really doing with a random encounter is making the table spend half an hour going through the motions of a foregone conclusion before they're allowed to continue with the interesting, consequential part of the game.
Basically almost any situation that falls beneath the threshold of 'this encounter is not interesting/important enough to justify a grid' is likely to also fall beneath my threshold of 'this encounter is not interesting/important enough to have'.
You could spin it as the DM wanting to sap HP/Spell Slots before a more important encounter that you want to make more difficult through the more limited resources the PC's have available as opposed to them dropping all their spell slots on fireballs and smites and just pop whatever you put in front of them
Want to play co-op games? Feel free to hit me up!
Yeah, but there's no reason not to do that with an interesting encounter instead - it's not like fun is a finite resource you need to ration. And if you take a stock 'random' encounter and start adding elements that actually make it tactically interesting, you very quickly hit the point where it starts to justify a grid and become clunky to track without one.
I was only giving an example....