The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent
vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums
here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules
document is now in effect.
[D&D Discussion] 5th Edition HD Remaster Coming in 2024, Entering the Disney Vault in 2025
Posts
Also fun (horrifying) fact: since swarms don't technically occupy space you can stack them on the same target to just utterly fuck up someone.
Since I'm stealing from The Culture going all out: The world will be roughly divided into nations that correspond to the values of much more advanced, involved civilizations, since this entire place is a social experiment. Everyone (except the idirans) is human, although there are significant variations and some parts of humanity like the Gzilt have diverged so much to be a distinctly different species (while still compatible for the purposes of having children)
The Gzilt Regency is a militaristic nation mostly made up of grey skinned non mammalian humanoids who are all given a rank from birth. Power flows down from the top, with the middle echelons of the government having the most actual power. Their belief that captains and majors and the like have the best view of society's actual functioning, and how to actually implement governmental goals gives the middle manager bureaucrat tremendous autonomy and power.
The Unnamed_Culture_Analogue is a Republic that does its best to ensure fairness and equality of outcome, they are a hedonistic, socialist state that believes war is a last resort, they value diversity above all and have no majority racial group, and are trying their best to make such ideals work in a world stuck at a 13th century technological level but with "magic". They have created powerful golems containing the "souls" (consciousnesses) of a host of previous monarchs to act as their executive decision makers. They meddle constantly in the affairs of others in as polite a manner as possible.
The Idiran Ascendancy is an ethnostate of non humanoid tri-legged immortal beings, they are mostly hated by everyone and not playable. They are superior to humans in essentially every way biologically, and believe their religion and their biological immortality gives them a divine mandate to run everything. They are the only people unable to use magic on this world (like the "Gods" introduced a balancing mechanic...) but it would take a dozen crossbow wielding humans to have any hope to take even one of them down in a fight. They aren't evil, they are simply better, and they know it. If you're willing to accept their religion, even feeble you can have a fine life in their society.
If this one shot goes well I will obviously diversify the number and breadth of civilizations and options to play as, but it doesn't really matter mechanically, since the players just get +2 to a stat and +1 to another stat of their choice. The humans of this world don't know what genetic modification or cybernetic additions are, but they all have them, who knows from where, and players can just pick from a list of adaptations (wings, four arms, extra lungs, shit like that) that makes their character special. The one shot will be relatively small scale so those 3 nations will be enough for it
My guess is probably the rogue/wizard or the melee rogue, whomever takes the most damage as a percentage of their HP
Buuut. It doesn't really matter all that much unless your party tends to take more than 1 short rest per combat day.
The reason for this is because your HP == Expectation(HD) + starting HP bonus of 2,3,4, or 5 based on class +.5 per level.
You might notice that this is roughly the same for each character and that its roughly equal to your starting HP amount. There is a wider percentage variation for lower HD classes but a wider raw value for higher HD classes. So if you only take 1 short rest per day then any character from 1 HP will heal to full on a probability schedule
You could head over to anydice and do an exact calculation to find the probability you get back up to zero from 1(or any number) by doing xdy - x(avg y+.5) - starting HP +1. Any value above 0 heals you to full.
So for a level 3 wizard its 3d6 - 13. Which will heal to full 25.93% of the time. You could also make this as a percentage as final health by dividing by final HP but raw values are just as good. Compare to a barbarian (3d12-25) which makes it to 0 21.06% of the time.
Note that these numbers are con independent for healing but con dependent for percentages(multiply by 100/max HP to get as a percentage in anydice if you just divide by HP you will get issues with display rounding). As you heal the roll + con. And your HP goes up by con so you're always on a flat +/- value there.
Sooo...
since the rogue gets knocked out a lot its probably going to be them. Otherwise its whomever takes the most damage as a percentage of their HP
But that makes sense with the %s, your essentially saying the low hp characters "fill up" faster.
We do take multiple short rests per day, since nobody in group has any kind of heal spell.
The first part in Baldur's Gate is absolutely a mess, and absurdly dangerous. I've only read the initial setup of the remix (I'm a player) but that makes a lot more sense than just throwing random characters into it.
Avernus is clearly meant to be the main goal, but the steps laid out in the first section made sense to us as if it were a whole third of the game but that's only due to a lot of red herrings that seem to be just there as plot hooks mixed with an intended sequence of encounters that sees us at third level essentially trying to take over the city. I don't want to give too much away, so pm if you want some more detailed thoughts (and our unused plan to take over the city!)
This hasn't been helped by having a relatively squishy party (Wizard, Warlock, Rogue, Cleric for the first encounter, joined by a barbarian for the first big dungeon then switched them out for a paladin after that) but this is a Campaign that is happy to throw a fireball at a level 2 party. There's also a few encounters that do need specific tools, and are almost lethal without them - tools that are very rare at the level you need them.
I reckon the biggest thing to decide is how long you want to spend in Baldur's gate - because there is a lot of story there and good plot hooks for a more social set of missions (and honestly the dungeons will happily cater to higher level players than intended with very little modification). It's a city on the brink of chaos, riven by class divisions and politicking nobles seeking power whilst the city itself lies under a supernatural death sentence.
Or it's a familiar area that's just there to level up the PCs so they can survive the main plot. In which case I'd just start your PC's higher level and jump ahead on something more specific to the campaign.
I think the fact that none of our group is all that familiar with the Sword Coast and Baldur's Gate hasn't helped - it's not a leap from the familiar into the new for us as half of us know more about Sigil than here.
Well knew...my wizard is a scholar of the planes (having been a Planescape DM for years) but is finding that the books he's read are perhaps not as accurate as he once thought. I've been intentionally keeping myself in the dark, as a lot of changed over the last three editions!
It has everything to do with short rests because if you only take one short rest then everyone (usually)easily heals to full any per-time healing before that is immaterial. Any per-time healing after that tends to also be moot. If you take multiple short rests its possible that you could run out of healing surges in a way that you would not have them ready for the next short rest.
Not sure what you mean by healing surges but if it's hit dice then yeah, so far this have been a real resource to carefully manage.
Btw i forgot to say but the first 3 characters are level 4 and the rogue and rogue/wizard are level 3 (because they joined the game a few sessions late and we are doing actual xp awards).
I'd give it to the barb personally. The barb should be the front line fighter who's getting hit, possibly with the monk as a close second.
The druid should have spells to restore HP, or use wild shape to buff the HP pool while in combat, or just rely on the summoned elemental to take the damage.
Slow HP regen isn't going to help someone that get's one-shot regularly, which sounds like the fate of the rogue and rogue/wizard if they're not staying sneaky.
Just saying, it seems to me that the Barb's job is to take damage, and use the Barb skills to reduce the damage taken. The barb should also get the item that heals them over time between fights.
Well then who runs out of healing surges most often?
Sounds like y'all need a party member with a high Persuasion bonus more than a ring of regeneration. ;-)
Has anyone run into any in-game difficulties with oversized bases? The base I have covers about a 6×6 space, but the four corner spaces are only partially covered so I'll have PCs trying to stand in them.
Depending on the quality of the model and who you bought it from:
a cocked head, raised eye-brow and judgemental stare from the gf :P
This is good info! I'm both excited and wary about the stuff in your spoiler, but I think my players will be into it.
Is it really that necessary to let them do different elements? Shouldn't they just be prepared since they know we're going into hell? Maybe I'm just mean?
I mean, it's not necessary if they've built their casters out to do a wide variety of damage types, or took Chromatic Orb as a nice Jack of All Trades offensive spell.
But, if you've got, say, a Red Dragonborn Sorcerer with a red draconic bloodline who has followed the "Fireball, only fireball, always fireball" school of spell selection, combat's going to be a slow going affair when everything is resistant to their fire damage.
In that case, I think I'd create some homebrew magic item that allows them to give a spell a different damage type X times per long rest. Something that requires attunement.
It's not, but also trying to build a wizard at level 1 without meta gaming it, he would more than likely have some fire based spells, and the majority of the big spells are fire based. There's the UA wizard stuff that lets you swap out a cantrip on level up, and we thematically did that so I ended up with chill touch cantrip, and melf's tiny tennis balls instead of fireball or meteors.
Now if someone takes fire spells while in Avernus? Well that's on them. like when I talked to my DM about Melf's Meteors, my character had in game knowledge at that point, so being able to modify an existing spell made sense, and I'm focusing on more area control and buff spells anyways.
I also will let players reflavor elemental spells when they learn new ones on level up, or spend the amount of resources as it would take to scribe a new spell to change one they already know. So like instead of fireball they cast snowball, etc etc.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
No. There is elemental adept which lets you ignore resistance and lets you treat any 1 on a die as a 2. Which is still 100% necessary for a single damage type spellcaster. Only works on elements and only on a single
A bit late with this, but I had a conversation with him last night. He is playing a paladin for reference, strength based.
He said he’s enjoying everything, but a bit regretful that he chose Lawful Good as an alignment. There was a mass raid on a bandit camp last session and he wanted to use some of the npc soldiers as shields against the enemies but decided it wouldn’t fit to get them killed like that.
We chatted about things, I said we could change his alignment if he played to play something else, along with swapping to one of the more streamlined paladin variants.
He wants to continue playing with things as is for now, I mentioned that while it wasn’t lawful good to literally kick npcs into danger, but if a lawful good character could order them to flanking positions to help shore up the line around him.
Anyway, was a positive conversation and he seems happier about things.
I’m going to roll up a cavalier for him to look at and see what he thinks if he continues to be unhappy.
Wait why do your 4e Paladins have alignment restrictions?
I mean think about it, you're fighting something potentially the size of Godzilla. Let's say it is Godzilla. In that case, you don't (at ground level) have a single point of attack, you have two feet separated by a reasonable distance, plus a tail. The board game Mice & Mystics actually implements this in one of its encounters, where you're facing off against a cat and instead of having a cat token, you have a large paw token that chases you around.
Is there a rule system for 5e which encourages this sort of consideration for scale? I'm imagining a battle against a Monster Hunter-scale creature that consists of multiple leg/tentacle/whatever tokens which act independently of each other on a shared initiative.
They're not, he specifically wanted to play a lawful good paladin of Bahumat.
I'm just as happy for him to pick whatever lawful to neutral god/alignment he wants. I suggested something like Kord to him when he originally looking at characters since he very much wanted a crusadery type of paladin rather than a charisma focused one but he liked the idea of the dragon motif.
I miss being able to build weird shit and it working, just because of the sheer wealth of options available.
Ive seen a few third party monsters that have stat blocks for unique bits. Things like krakens and stuff. The tentacles are a group of unique monsters and the body is separate.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Some of you might have seen that over in the TTRPG SE thread i'm working on a monster generation system (And one that's explcitly drawing on Monster Hunter), and that's areally good point. My system dosent have any mechanics attached to it yet, but i should make a point of noting that Gargutuans are big fucking things, and their tail, their multiple heads, whatever, could all count as separate bits.
Also it's a monster hunter tradition to disarm monsters by ripping bits off them before monsters rip bits off you, so that'd work well.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
Maybe a Gargantuan monster has X tokens and utilizes {X-2} of them on each of its turns?
I'm in the middle of taking it. It's pretty comprehensive. You state the year you first played D&D, what editions you've played, what editions you've played within the last year, how often you play, your top three favorite campaign settings, what your main motivations are in playing D&D (group planning, char op, miniatures, etc), what you believe are qualities of a good DM (rules mastery, wit, challenge, setting lore knowledge, etc), and so on.
Yeah, i'll figure it out. I'm really not worrying about attaching rules to this Generator right now - all it is right now is a set of dice rolls to create unique monsters on the fly that are still beliable-ish, i guess. It's intentionally written to be very vague.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tjFUTVmkVfR2U7Qorp9dDMnumATrBpXPFvzkW1XWpZU/edit
Here's a link if anyone wants to try it out. Example critter:
Using google to generate the first 3 dice gave me 4, 3 and 7. So it's a Gargutan Ape/knuclewalking style Saurian-crocdilian beast, and let's see what geth says it's got for special spice
Geth says it's hide has multiple broken weapons and other battle damage, that it's completely unphased by. It's neck and legs are all unnaturally long, so it probably looks like a Chalicothere. It can jump vast distances, covering immense amounts of ground... and just to make it really creepy, It's got an extra set of arms that are normally hidden it can unfold out form it's body. Since it leaves it vauge, i like the idea here that it's got a thinner set it keeps hidden against it's belly that unfold to grab stuff or throw things
So this one came out as a Tarrasque-like creature, albeit one that can apparently jump and has 4 arms for messing shit up. Which must be terrifying, can you imagine the impact craters it'd leave? The multiple weapons imapled in it imply it's hellafucking tough... and honestly i';m still just worried about the "jump vast distances" bit.
Geth roll 4d71
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
This survey seems way too broad for that, and I haven't seen any questions yet asking what you'd like to see changed. For example, right now I'm looking at this:
EDIT: I wonder what the intention behind this question is?
It's possible, I guess. It seems more to me like they're interested in how to integrate digital tools to D&D, which they could hypothetically do with 5E.
I was honestly a bit perplexed by questions like "how do you feel about tracking initiative?"
This is another of the exact kind of question they'd be asking to prep for a new edition.
Variations of this kind of survey were frequent back in the D&D Next days.
Free, but i ended up paying a bit because i liked it.
I like it because it lets me randomize initative every round but also define initiatives that are static or have adv/disadv.
Well the next question after the authors question is if you would be influenced about buying a piece of D&D content if they were attached. They are fishing to see if the folks who got negative press actually matter to the broader D&D community.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
1) official activities ala adventurers league
2) premade adventures
And 1 is shut down for the foreseeable future. They asked about designers because some of those designers are writers. They’re getting to “should we get some new splat out or should we write some new modules or should we recycle old ones so we can put gygax’s name on it”
Additionally they asked about production support materials and online resources. IE its “what do you use and how do you use it”. If you answered that you DM’d you got a bunch of questions about what aspect of prep work was hardest/made you less likely to engage.
So to me it looks like “is there the space to expand d&d beyond?” Now that a lot of our designers are not working on adventurers league what should we do with them.
Yea I fully expect D&D Beyond to pick up tools for campaign management, and man, if they can ever get a VTT off the ground that fully integrates with all that stuff? That would be nice. Just thinking about being able to build an encounter in a tab in campaign management, then be able to click a button and have it transported to the VTT seamlessly? That would be nice.
Just thinking about that with pre-built adventures would be amazing. You buy the adventure, it comes with a fully editable campaign loaded into your campaign management tab, ready to rock and roll with the VTT. MMMmmm. Thats integration that I like right there.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981