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[D&D 5E] Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
Denada
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
For the first time in history, there is an edition of D&D that actually lets you roleplay.
Never before has a set of game rules enabled people to tell cooperative stories in a fantasy setting. In Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition, finally you can use your imagination. You can adjust, add, or ignore rules as you see fit, which was impossible in every other edition of D&D. You can use a grid, which 5E is designed for, or you can play without one and just kind of guesstimate everything. Can you do that with any other edition of D&D? Technically yes, but literally no you cannot.
Where will you go when you start up your campaign and stream it on Twitch? The Forgotten Realms? Some other part of the Forgotten Realms? That specific D&D setting is open to you like it has never, ever been before!
D&D 5E. The greatest, most creative, easiest, best-selling, most popular, and most improvisational edition of D&D that has ever and will ever exist.
If you need clarification, ask your DM!
Never before has a set of game rules enabled people to tell cooperative stories in a fantasy setting. In Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition, finally you can use your imagination. You can adjust, add, or ignore rules as you see fit, which was impossible in every other edition of D&D. You can use a grid, which 5E is designed for, or you can play without one and just kind of guesstimate everything. Can you do that with any other edition of D&D? Technically yes, but literally no you cannot.
Where will you go when you start up your campaign and stream it on Twitch? The Forgotten Realms? Some other part of the Forgotten Realms? That specific D&D setting is open to you like it has never, ever been before!
- Pretty good adventure books.
- Kind of OK digital tool(s) that are still in beta I think.
- A digital magazine that is actually a mobile app that I've never looked at.
- The ability to buy physical books, and then pay for the same content over and over again on different platforms.
D&D 5E. The greatest, most creative, easiest, best-selling, most popular, and most improvisational edition of D&D that has ever and will ever exist.
If you need clarification, ask your DM!
D&D/d20 Discussion Thread | Bread Space | One Eldritch Summer | I Want to Save the World but I'm Just a Level 1 Skeleton
Denada on
+39
Posts
Bravo
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Damn.
Not all in one day.
It sounds like to me you're not committed enough to DM. step up your game.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Edit: damn i wish I rolled that well at the table.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
So far the party consists of a Tabaxi of indeterminate class. I might need a DMPC for this one. Or to just them more magic items, earlier maybe.
Rock the DMPC, a three man party in published adventures can get rough.
My DM, when there is a companion character, creates a "monster" stat block for it and asks for one of the players to use it. It works really well. The party has a bit more muscle and useful skills, but the npc isn't going to out shine the players.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
When I was running my longer game in 5E awhile ago, I got myself into a predicament where the party was traveling with like 4 companions. (They were originally intended to be a hostile adventuring party but they made friends)
I gave each one an index card with HP, AC, a single attack move, and an ultimate ability they could use once per day. It worked out pretty well.
Edit: Perfect.
Sounds like someone's just failed their save vs tashas
I can't wait to run that micro adventure where the level 2 or 3 dudes get to see a demigod greedily ransacking the alter at the end of the dungeon just to have him sheepishly spawn a xvart warlock and then bounce.
Hottest burn since Dark Sun
I keep this little list of reminders on a post it on my DM screen and every time I describe a new encounter, especially combat, I go down the list to make sure I don't leave anything out. Generally I like to have 2-3 elements of this in combat, using the Dynamic features for my set pieces. For example, in the one shot I played last weekend, I gave the players overwhelming numbers of zombies: 6+ for the party of three 2nd level adventurers, but they usually had a few chokepoints they could abuse and it took place at night. For the final encounter with the Gibbering Mouther, besides all the weird terrain features it adds, I had corpses sprinkled around the pit they found it in which if it absorbed them allowed it to heal and start moving faster.
What hit them with hypnotic pattern?
Is it something that might put them in a cell for any reason?
This sounds like a text book Stargate Atlantis setup.
The other way, which would take a bit more cleverness and may or may not be cooler: the army is difficult terrain. In Lord of the Rings, did Legolas or Aragorn ever take real damage from any of the nobody orcs? No, it was only ever the dangerous stuff like the cave troll that did more than scratch them. So the players can only move at half speed through the mob of grunt orcs, under the assumption that they are hacking and slashing every couple of steps. The other orcs represent the genuine threats, which the players have to navigate the crowd to get through: perhaps skill checks like Intimidate might let them move at full speed for a turn as the horde steps away from the terrifying barbarian, or the Wizard might use a fireball to clear a path. Meanwhile the important orcs don't count the horde as difficult terrain and get new (or reflavored) powers that control the horde to deal extra damage or otherwise impede the party. Maybe the orc shaman sends the horde into a frenzy and now ending your turn in the horde causes you to take a small amount of fixed damage. The orc commander might insist that the horde pile in on one character, preventing them from moving at all.
Yes, all that is more complicated than just saying "yup, 3d10 orcs" but if they're not going to be an appreciable threat anyway than why bother spending time having each one attack? Better to spend 10 minutes planning than an hour of each player saying "I swing my sword at the next closest orc, 12 damage, pass turn."
Rest assured, that approach is MUCH cooler.
Yeah that's a pretty neat idea. Takes a little narrative buy-in from the players, but it's a clever use of available rules to represent something cinematic.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
A lot of good info in there.
Xanathar's Guide comes out at the point where in prior editions they were working on or coming out with the next edition of the game. Instead they put that level of effort into making this the first big expansion of the game. (They say later they don't anticipate a new edition until 10 years as gone by in most likelihood, if feedback continues as it is - and 6th edition would be highly likely to be backwards compatible with 5e).
The playtest had HALF A MILLION playtesters. Wow.
The next big expansion is mystic (Psion) and artificer and revised ranger. They will come out, but need more testing and refinement. Ranger also needs to be free rather than a paid product. It will be a free download.
Every product being released in 2018 has either been written, or is being written. One is at the tail end of the editing/layout process. Another is in the playtest phase. A third is in the finalizing development phase. And a fourth Mearls won't talk about at all. So, looks like four major products for 2018.
There will be a balance between rules crunch and adventures/story in the products. They are trying to very carefully manage and curate the rules balance aspect. Adventures get about 300 playtester groups. Rules get a whole lot more.
They are very pleased with the 10 person collaborative DMsGuild group producing content and adventure related stuff on DMsGuild for them right now. That team will also be coming out with their own subclasses and such for Xanathars for example. They will be looked at internally by WOTC but are for home game use only and are not nearly as highly playtested as official content. But it's very good content and does get a sweep of review from WOTC.
The team feels D&D overall is in a very good place right now. They've seen an enormous positive reaction to the game. They think probably only the early 80s matches the level of popularity of the game, and that it is more popular that probably any other time in the history of the game other than being matched by the early 80s.
They're very happy with the slowed release schedule as it gives them so much more time to focus on what they put out and the future. The most important aspect of that is their ability to plan out the future properly. In prior editions they worked on, the focus was always on getting the next book out. But with 5e they can spend a lot more time planning the game out into the future rather than just on the next product. Right now they are focusing mostly on 2019, spending a lot of time thinking about the entire year's experience and putting it all together cohesively and to build D&D in a planned way which brings more people into the hobby and make them feel welcomed. They didn't have a lot of time to ask those questions and plan them out in prior editions. They also think the slowed release schedule has allowed them to get a lot more new players as one of the barriers to entry (the quantity of rule books) is no longer there.
On Psionics, they re-read the Darksun books a lot. A lot of the thinking they do these days is thinking of D&D as a multiverse, and as Darksun being part of the prime material plane with greyhawk and forgotten realms in one big shared multiverse. And they asked why in a devastated world Psionics is prominent. They are very focused on what psionics is, why it exists in this universe. They felt in prior editions D&D focused on very specific things, and less about the myths about those things and why things did what they did and how they related to the rest of the cosmos and the things in it. As an example, the Draconomicon focused a lot on the anatomy of dragons, but little about why dragons in relation to who they are, why they do what they do, how they related to the rest of the cosmos.
Specific to Psionics and that topic, Mind Flayers used to rule most of the material plane, so what was going on with the Gods for those years, and how does that relate to the psionic powers of the Mind Flayers? Mind Flayers had no Gods, so what did it mean for the Gods when the Mind Flayers ruled, and what happened with the Gods when the Mind Flayers fell? Those are the kinds of questions they are asking, along with where Psionics comes from and how it works.
On Settings (with a lot specific to Eberron). One challenge D&D had in the 90s was the settings were competing with each other. But now that they are thinking of settings as a "genre" as opposed to a "place" it twists a bit what they can do with a setting, so it does not necessarily have to compete anymore. They need to focus on what role a setting places in the larger game. So "typical D&D" looks a lot like Forgotten Realms. Dark Sun is "Post-Apocalyptic D&D". Ravenloft is "Gothic-Horror D&D". Eberron is either "Film Noir D&D" or "Pulp D&D". Genre becomes the focus, as a means of changing what the feel of D&D will be for a game, and as a means of explaining that setting to a new player. They have an idea of what they want to do with Eberron, but a lot of it just comes down to doing it right, so they take the time to make sure that when it comes out it will feel like a definitive book. They don't want it to be a "product line". They never want you to buy a book and need anything more than the core three books to use it. So if they ever put out one Eberron book and then a second one, the second one would not assume you owned the first one. And they always want you to use most of a book they put out, rather than just a small part of it. And they want you to be able to pick up a setting book and use it right away rather than spend a lot of time on preparation.
[This marks the half way point of the session]
Big survey coming out next week on Adventurers League. They want to bring the League into the 21st century and more friendly to a new audience.
On Forgotten Realms novels: They feel the novel business is very tricky, and they are a game company. They're not necessarily good at novels business. They don't have a good plan for novels, and they do not have a novel publishing expert on their team right now. It's not something they say they will never do again, it's just not their focus this year. They would consider a partnership, but they're not looking for it.
On Planescape and the other settings: They have a rough draft cosmological ties for how all the settings could come back and fit together and have products, including even Spelljammer and Dark Sun and Eberron and Greyhawk. They want to make sure for each setting product, they assume this is the first time you're seeing that setting, and not require prior knowledge of it.
In terms of story lines, they don't plan on doing a story line that lasts multiple products like Tiamat did, at least not right now. They didn't have the product mix down pat during the Tiamat two book adventures. They have a better sense now of how long it takes a DM to get trough content. They also found two adventure big books a year was too much, and many DMs were not keeping up. The Adventurer's League content is intended to expanding the Adventure content for those minority number of groups that can absorb two big adventures a year or more.
[This marks the 45 min mark]
Subclass feats are likely not in the future from the WOTC team, as it's took fine a level of detail. New subclasses are in the future, and new classes and races probably well.
The PHB is selling so well they're afraid to make any changes to the PHB...not even changing the index or footers which they want to badly do and know needs to be done. They would consider posting a better Index online though for people to print.
Ten years to the next PHB doesn't surprise me. During the roundtable with Mearls, Colville, Koebel, and Mercer, Mearls stated they've switched D&D from a product-based business to a lifestyle-based business. Make one book, sell a million hats.
I like that list a lot, I do basically the same thing but I never penned it down. I'll have to add that to my DM cheat sheet.
Thank fucking christ
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
Question: Has the 5e PHB already outsold the entire run of 3.0e and 3.5e PHB sales combined over the course of the entire run of 3e? (Twitter user Mark Cronan)
Answer: yes, 5e > 3.5e + 3e (Mike Mearls)
I don't think we've hit anywhere near the peak yet. I think we'll get another big surge once Amazon's LotR series comes out.
I mean, there's two videos of Matt Colville and Satine Phoenix talking about nothing but encounter building for 20 minutes each, and they have a combined 170k views. There's a huge audience for this shit, and I know a considerable number of grognards who don't have any idea who these people are. These are all new people coming into the game.
Its mimicking the awareness threshold the same way video games hit it. Once everyone started playing them, it was socially acceptable to play them (catch 22 for sure). People (for the most part) have realized that DnD isn't this bogeyman out to steal children or create Satanists. Its the Make Believe we played as five year olds, except now since we are older, we want something more sophisticated and it just so happened dice are the agreed upon adjudicator of ''what happens next''.
edit**
I think 5e's streamlined mechanics also helped it a big deal. When Penny Arcade started it with 4e, it proved the market was there, but I really do think all the esoteric +2's and -2's and condition modifiers really glossed over a lot of early adopter enthusiasm. Flattening out the math and just rolling advantage and disadvantage were big wins for 5e because everyone loves to roll dice and they don't need to worry about every little modifier or how secondary stats are derived. Its just a straight ability saving throw or add ability and proficiency and beat this number.
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
- Krog the Dragonborn barbarian, who grew up alone in the wilderness and has a Data-like lack of understanding of social subtleties.
- Ecks the kobold monk, who is five years old and essentially still a child.
- Lux the drow trickster-priest, who is continually baffled by his colleagues.
They needed a DMPC to carry the party, and I think I came up with the perfect one:- Lonny the halfling bard, who hero-worships the other three and is convinced that they will be the greatest heroes the realms have ever known, and that he will be the one to write the first songs about their deeds, which he'll witness first hand.
Shaping up to be good fun!