WOTC has likely directed that all of its products to be more in line with today's shift in morals to openness and acceptance and understanding.
Which may be clumsy at times in getting there, but overall a good thing.
WOTC has nothing to do with this book
Fair enough. I still think the powers that be at CR (a group that embodies these new morals WRT gaming) are still working closely with WOTC using the cachet of D&D, and their other releases are WOTC books.... so everyone involved here is on the same page.
I think it's more that they want people to be able to play as a goblin in their world (after Nott's popularity) and they don't trust DMs to run a land being prejudiced against goblins without just repeating racial stereotypes from the real world and decided it'd be best to just say "Yeah you can be a goblin it's fine"
I don't really fault them, probably the best way to go about it
I'm a bit disappointed because as human civilization back over in good ol' Tal'dorei continues to expand "into the frontier" (almost all civilization was wiped out 800 years ago, since then it's been a slow re-emergence of civilization) there are some great opportunities to deal with the subject of colonialism head on as the countryside is full of unaffiliated villages, towns, tribes, cave-dwellers, river-folk, etc, etc of many different species. Deciding "nah the goblin tribes and humans just suddenly decided they were one people" seems like a cheap way to get out of dealing with that
Personally I think I'm going to go ahead with an approach more along those lines and use the original and new books in tandem.
For example, I'm okay with Kraghammer becoming less xenophobic and more accepting of non-dwarves, but I'm not interested in it being just a more idealized version of its original self. "Greed drives Kraghammer", as the original TCS book said, and I think it's more interesting to imagine that the current ruler pushing for workers rights, greater opportunities for non-dwarves, and integration into the Republic of Tal'Dorei could be seen as a threat to the continued dominance of the dwarven noble houses of Kraghammer. Perhaps there's an assassination plot in the works that a party of adventurers would need to thwart.
So apparently one of the big changes in the new monster book is that monsters that previously had the magic weapons trait and had attacks that deal bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage now do force damage with those attacks instead.
Personally that sounds like a bad decision, as now the barbarian's damage reduction is a lot less useful and magic items that grant force damage reduction are much more vital.
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
I do like how it is dumb from both directions. Several things are written such that "Force" damage is kind of special, Barbarian Rage being a huge one. Making such a massive change this late in an edition is weird. That really should be errata sort of thing.
I don't really care, but it also reverses like 40 years of D&D treating the "Force" damage type as a kind of special thing.
So apparently one of the big changes in the new monster book is that monsters that previously had the magic weapons trait and had attacks that deal bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage now do force damage with those attacks instead.
Personally that sounds like a bad decision, as now the barbarian's damage reduction is a lot less useful and magic items that grant force damage reduction are much more vital.
Sounds like their way of solving the high level monster cat scratch issue without actually solving the problem.
Or mix and match things from both sets of stat blocks.
Or just make new creatures entirely that if you squint just right look a lot like the creatures you used to know.
I'd want to see more of the book and the rules changes, but yeah, the change sounds unnecessary at best.
This book is what 5.5 in 2024 is going to be so, and I didn't think I'd say this, I'm not that interested
That creeping comforting dread when you realize that you've succumbed and become a gronard.
Yeah it's definitely fair to insult me because I don't like WOTC's design decisions, I've only been playing TTRPgs since 2017
My next campaign is going to be LevelUp's Advanced 5th Edition
....it wasn't an insult.
I've been pretty vocal that D&D left me behind an edition ago. It happens to everybody eventually. Once you've realized it happened, you can just get on with accepting it.
Or mix and match things from both sets of stat blocks.
Or just make new creatures entirely that if you squint just right look a lot like the creatures you used to know.
I'd want to see more of the book and the rules changes, but yeah, the change sounds unnecessary at best.
This book is what 5.5 in 2024 is going to be so, and I didn't think I'd say this, I'm not that interested
That creeping comforting dread when you realize that you've succumbed and become a gronard.
Yeah it's definitely fair to insult me because I don't like WOTC's design decisions, I've only been playing TTRPgs since 2017
My next campaign is going to be LevelUp's Advanced 5th Edition
....it wasn't an insult.
I've been pretty vocal that D&D left me behind an edition ago. It happens to everybody eventually. Once you've realized it happened, you can just get on with accepting it.
sorry I think I misunderstood, I've only ever heard Grognard at the FLGS as an insult meaning "neckbeard" usually applied to "that guy" and also someone who is an old traditionalist (usually a conservative)
I guess it's not necessarily negative after a googling, my bad! we're good
Anybody who prefers an earlier version than me is a grognard neckbeard, and anybody who prefers a later version than me is betraying what made D&D great as it panders to the lowest common denominator
Anybody who prefers an earlier version than me is a grognard neckbeard, and anybody who prefers a later version than me is betraying what made D&D great as it panders to the lowest common denominator
Sorry, I don't make the rules
Well, at least they're clearly written with little room for interpretation.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
Or mix and match things from both sets of stat blocks.
Or just make new creatures entirely that if you squint just right look a lot like the creatures you used to know.
I'd want to see more of the book and the rules changes, but yeah, the change sounds unnecessary at best.
This book is what 5.5 in 2024 is going to be so, and I didn't think I'd say this, I'm not that interested
That creeping comforting dread when you realize that you've succumbed and become a gronard.
Yeah it's definitely fair to insult me because I don't like WOTC's design decisions, I've only been playing TTRPgs since 2017
My next campaign is going to be LevelUp's Advanced 5th Edition
....it wasn't an insult.
I've been pretty vocal that D&D left me behind an edition ago. It happens to everybody eventually. Once you've realized it happened, you can just get on with accepting it.
sorry I think I misunderstood, I've only ever heard Grognard at the FLGS as an insult meaning "neckbeard" usually applied to "that guy" and also someone who is an old traditionalist (usually a conservative)
I guess it's not necessarily negative after a googling, my bad! we're good
I have regarded myself as a Grognard for a long time as I've never been a particular fan of 5th edition at any point.
Having to run 3-5 games of it every week in my store for most of 4 years was a definite challenge to my sanity, but nobody can say I didn't give it a fair go. I have basically no interest in 5.5, although I do like what they are doing with races some of their other decisions are frankly somewhat baffling. Then again, I found most of 5th editions decisions baffling and yet like Todd Howard says, "It just works".
My biggest challenge with A5e has been the amount of time it takes to hammer stuff into VTT, although the developers of it are going to release a VTT thing, who knows when that is
It definitely needs a balancing passover but I'm confident in my homebrewing abilities to take care of it, it does resolve a lot of the problems I have with 5e
I haven't exactly been subtle with my take on the direction of 5e; changes to races and lore have been done in a way that is more puzzling/irritating then compelling and feels like it wants to have it both ways:
They want the Name recognition of places like forgotten realms and people like Elminster.
They want to be completely free to do whatever the hell they want in order to have broader and broader market appeal while avoiding offending anyone (other then people who have supported the game for decades and actually liked FR for it's lore I suppose)
And it just leads into really weird fucking shit that leaves people like me dealing with their weird ass decisions; things like Dragonbait being plunked down in chult for no reason or Jander Sunstar apparently being splintered into dozens of shards of himself (most of which seem to be assholes?) or How Doctor Mordenheim is apparently a girl now (and maybe lesbian?). Factor in how they're just trying to go "not all drow/orcs" without working with the viable tools that they actually had in the setting and you can see how Grognards like myself can be frustrated with how it feels like the company had a hostile takeover by a bunch of gorp eating hipsters.
A better approach for all of this would have been some combination of the following:
1. Create a new setting. Doing this would give people the freedom to re-interpret the races/sociopolitical nature of the various races to be whatever the fuck they want them to be; High elves that are gender fluid, berserker gnomes, Victorian Kobolds, Pacifistic orcs... whatever the fuck you want.
2. Create new races/characters. Instead of trying to hamfistedly try and change races in order to placate naysayers, why not just create new ones? MTG does this all the time and they've had no problem emulating that in their specific settings.
3. Wait for 6th edition. A lot of the frustration that me and other people have stems from the fact that they're trying to Retcon stuff that they themselves printed in this very edition ultimately undermining the setting and casting doubt on the worth of any other source material going forward since we can't know whether they'll waffle on that due to a sudden influx of players with differing values.
the way they're kind of lazily handing the races are one of the reasons I'm moving to A5E (again, picking and choosing what bits I want to keep, for example I don't tie stat bonus to culture). Creating a character in A5E does exactly what WOTC claims they want to do, but actually did the work
we're prepping for a game in ~3 months and the players are all absolutely thrilled to have character creation be so meaningful at low level, I have had to homebrew a few more heritages and I've more or less used the 5e race as a guide
Lore wise there are a few decisions I don't like, they literally didn't need to change drow for example, we have decades of stories about good drow and not so good drow communities that have branched off, but get next to zero mention in the PHB (Vhaerun and Eilistree), we get no lore about Many Arrows and how it's recovering after the last war, I want them to put the work in and create some damn lore
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
edited January 2022
Create a new setting.
They don’t need to. Eberron got all of this right from its conception :P They should have just used it instead.
I do not care for Eberron and would dislike it being the default setting
The decision to have no default setting at all I get and makes sense, but Really Hammering It Home in the middle of an edition does annoy me, they're literally republishing the core books with major changes "5.5" in 2024, so why all these changes now, IDGI
Lore wise there are a few decisions I don't like, they literally didn't need to change drow for example, we have decades of stories about good drow and not so good drow communities that have branched off, but get next to zero mention in the PHB (Vhaerun and Eilistree), we get no lore about Many Arrows and how it's recovering after the last war, I want them to put the work in and create some damn lore
Which is again why I think this whole thing is so stupid: you have everything you need to "fix" this problem without having to go make-up gun on the whole damn thing.
It really feels like the people making these decisions have never actually looked at the game or the lore for FR (which even if you didn't have contact info for all of the thousands of creators over the years still has a wiki with over 40k pages) hence why I have so much contempt for the decision they are foisting on the rest of us.
So how does A5E handle skills? Is it pretty much the same where everyone gets 4 skills and then nobody in the party can do anything ever or did they improve on that?
So how does A5E handle skills? Is it pretty much the same where everyone gets 4 skills and then nobody in the party can do anything ever or did they improve on that?
A5E doesn't use expertise, if you have multiple sources of proficiency (and boy howdy are there a lot of ways to get these), you gain "expertise dice". One expertise in a skill is +1d4, 2 is +1d6, 3 is +1d8. You max out at 1d8, however Rogues can get 1d10 in a specialty if they really stack it. You also always get a number of "specializations" that are context specific up to your prof that are special about your character. For example, you can pick "pickpocketing" for sleight of hand. Every class gets "knacks" of varying levels of power, most of them let you get extra proficiencies or expertises
So if I build a skill monkey rogue I can be proficient in a shit load of skills
If I want to build the world's best pickpocket, I can do this at level 2:
Cultural Skill (Prof Sleight of hand)
Rogue Skill (1d4 expertise)
Skill Specialization: Pickpocketing (1d6 expertise when pickpocketing)
Rogue Knack: Sleight of Hand+Ability to set traps as an action and hide them (1d8 expertise when pickpocketing)
So at level 2 I would have Ability Score (+3), Prof (+2), expertise (+1d8) when pickpocketing, making me a hell of a pickpocket at level 2, but instead I could have gotten
Cultural Skill: Engineering (a new skill)
Rogue Skill: Acrobatics (rogues get 4 skills + thieves, forgers, disguise kit in a5e)
Skill Specialization: Engineering, repair
Rogue Knack: Perception+30ft darkvision
Expertise dice are untethered from Prof so it makes your character that can play the fuck out of their lute less of a clown at level 1
I've been thinking for a while that D&D, if it wanted to, could just shift a lot of the negative traits ascribed to goblins and orcs and whatever to certain low CR demons and make them more common as low-level enemies.
Part of the argument against having orcs and goblins and such as common enemies is that there are frequently good individuals, they reproduce, and they may be native to the area (and therefore attacking them is reminescent in some ways of colonialists demonizing and attacking native peoples). In contrast, low CR demons (manes, rutterkin, dretches, quasits, etc) are are pure evil without the civility that devils can have, don't reproduce, are invaders from the Abyss rather than natives of the world, and don't even really die when destroyed unless destroyed in the Abyss. Their presence in large numbers also increases the Abyss' link to a world, so wiping out incursions is also an imperative, and there are higher CR demons that can serve as bosses forcing lesser demons into servitude (though, being Chaotic, many of these demons would probably flee to go do their own thing, further making them a threat to the countryside even as the boss demon summons more minions from the Abyss).
Most of the time demon incursions could be more along the lines of pest infestations that usually don't progress into goristros and balors or whatever showing up. A few wandering dretches and manes and such in the area could be a sign that a temporary, unstable portal to the Abyss formed recently and dumped a bunch out somewhere close by. This could also attract mortal demon cultists and demonologists to the area who hope to re-open the portal and make it stable.
It's a shame they're MtG creatures, because the small cackler demons from Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica could really fill the evil goblin niche.
Cacklers are small, jabbering jesters that spice up Rakdos performances with their chaotic antics. Their incessant cackling can inspire uncontrollable laughter by making everything—even the most horrifying spectacles—seem hilarious.
I could see these guys as replacements for the Pathfinder 1E style of goblin that sings gleefully about killing dogs and eating babies, but with the bonus of magic. They have the Mimicry trait to mimic sounds and voices, so they could lay ambushes by mimicking past victims' cries for help or whatever. They also have Tasha's Hideous Laughter once per day, which is also good for incapacitating victims and forcing them to laugh as they get chopped down.
The only thing is I have the suspicion that putting demons in the goblins' niche might somehow end up making people want to start portraying literal demons more sympathetically, decry making them mostly Chaotic Evil, and in the long run cacklers or dretches or manes or whatever will be humanized in much the way goblins have been and made a PC race.
orcs and goblins in FR are not native to the world of toril iirc
orcs are a lot more established and WOTC is just uninterested in telling us what the only orc civilization is like
goblins almost exclusively live in the underdark and in general there seems to be far less of an issue with killing goblins, because they're almost always portrayed as comic relief and take up the role that droids do in star wars
I'm not sure if Cacklers can really take the place of goblins, because demons mean you need to go hunt them all down, every one, goblins you just need to foil whatever they're up to - I've never seen an official campaign where you go to the goblin's home and murder all the goblin babies in their goblin cribs
So how does A5E handle skills? Is it pretty much the same where everyone gets 4 skills and then nobody in the party can do anything ever or did they improve on that?
A5E doesn't use expertise, if you have multiple sources of proficiency (and boy howdy are there a lot of ways to get these), you gain "expertise dice". One expertise in a skill is +1d4, 2 is +1d6, 3 is +1d8. You max out at 1d8, however Rogues can get 1d10 in a specialty if they really stack it. You also always get a number of "specializations" that are context specific up to your prof that are special about your character. For example, you can pick "pickpocketing" for sleight of hand. Every class gets "knacks" of varying levels of power, most of them let you get extra proficiencies or expertises
So if I build a skill monkey rogue I can be proficient in a shit load of skills
If I want to build the world's best pickpocket, I can do this at level 2:
Cultural Skill (Prof Sleight of hand)
Rogue Skill (1d4 expertise)
Skill Specialization: Pickpocketing (1d6 expertise when pickpocketing)
Rogue Knack: Sleight of Hand+Ability to set traps as an action and hide them (1d8 expertise when pickpocketing)
So at level 2 I would have Ability Score (+3), Prof (+2), expertise (+1d8) when pickpocketing, making me a hell of a pickpocket at level 2, but instead I could have gotten
Cultural Skill: Engineering (a new skill)
Rogue Skill: Acrobatics (rogues get 4 skills + thieves, forgers, disguise kit in a5e)
Skill Specialization: Engineering, repair
Rogue Knack: Perception+30ft darkvision
Expertise dice are untethered from Prof so it makes your character that can play the fuck out of their lute less of a clown at level 1
So how does A5E handle skills? Is it pretty much the same where everyone gets 4 skills and then nobody in the party can do anything ever or did they improve on that?
A5E doesn't use expertise, if you have multiple sources of proficiency (and boy howdy are there a lot of ways to get these), you gain "expertise dice". One expertise in a skill is +1d4, 2 is +1d6, 3 is +1d8. You max out at 1d8, however Rogues can get 1d10 in a specialty if they really stack it. You also always get a number of "specializations" that are context specific up to your prof that are special about your character. For example, you can pick "pickpocketing" for sleight of hand. Every class gets "knacks" of varying levels of power, most of them let you get extra proficiencies or expertises
So if I build a skill monkey rogue I can be proficient in a shit load of skills
If I want to build the world's best pickpocket, I can do this at level 2:
Cultural Skill (Prof Sleight of hand)
Rogue Skill (1d4 expertise)
Skill Specialization: Pickpocketing (1d6 expertise when pickpocketing)
Rogue Knack: Sleight of Hand+Ability to set traps as an action and hide them (1d8 expertise when pickpocketing)
So at level 2 I would have Ability Score (+3), Prof (+2), expertise (+1d8) when pickpocketing, making me a hell of a pickpocket at level 2, but instead I could have gotten
Cultural Skill: Engineering (a new skill)
Rogue Skill: Acrobatics (rogues get 4 skills + thieves, forgers, disguise kit in a5e)
Skill Specialization: Engineering, repair
Rogue Knack: Perception+30ft darkvision
Expertise dice are untethered from Prof so it makes your character that can play the fuck out of their lute less of a clown at level 1
That sounds incredible, goddamn.
my favorite knack is one the cleric gets where you can use wisdom for intimidation as long as you are ranting about the end times being upon us
there's also like 144 battle maneuvers and all the martials get them (although only the fighter gets to choose from all 8 schools) that include some pretty great combinations
For example you can take a maneuver that lets you mount a larger creature against its will (think dragon's dogma climbing a boss) as a bonus action, and you can combine it with the mounted combat maneuver to sacrifice your mount as a reaction when you take damage, forcing whatever you're mounting to take the damage you would have taken and dismounting you, you can do some pretty epic shit as a martial
like one of the ranged maneuvers is you can just use a reaction to make an opposed ranged attack roll against another ranged attack you can see, if you exceed their roll, your projectile intercepts theirs and it doesnt hit, one of the paladin maneuvers lets you counterspell with your fist, etc
the fighter in my curse of strahd game used this on Sunday and he was just giggling like an idiot
Drow were in 4e Essentials and they were fine, honestly. Like, still clearly Drow, but not the super edgy evil anymore (unless you just played it that way)
The decision to have no default setting at all I get and makes sense,
Let's not pretend for a second that Forgotten Realms is not the default setting of 5E because it clearly is. Yes they wrote the core books from a neutral POV, but the vast majority of splats and damn near every adventure I can think of off the top of my head is Forgotten Realms.
The default setting is Forgotten Realms and they are trying to hammer FR into these new assumptions while ignoring existing lore, instead of building something new or using an established setting that already does what they want.
The decision to have no default setting at all I get and makes sense,
Let's not pretend for a second that Forgotten Realms is not the default setting of 5E because it clearly is. Yes they wrote the core books from a neutral POV, but the vast majority of splats and damn near every adventure I can think of off the top of my head is Forgotten Realms.
The default setting is Forgotten Realms and they are trying to hammer FR into these new assumptions while ignoring existing lore, instead of building something new or using an established setting that already does what they want.
The upcoming book makes all the races setting neutral in prep for the 2024 pass where everything is made amorphous and setting neutral, so it's just basically going to be like:
Elf:
Elves have pointy ears, if you want
They have these stats, if you want, if not, pick what you want
They have these other traits, if you want, otherwise whatever
No Lore
That is what they are currently doing, trying to de-setting all the races, because few writers at WOTC these days like the forgotten realms and they no longer have a "lorekeeper" type person to contextualize things and keep anything consistent
Or more snarkily they're trying to make it so all settings are equally valid, they're trying to "coherent timeline for legend of zelda games" everything and in doing so are doing a disservice to every setting (based on the leaks from the book)
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
Yeah and again, I think a lot of this is a symptom of FR being the dominant default for a lot of 5E stuff.
It's like the weirdest overreaction to your own decisions I've ever seen.
FR is unquestionably the most popular setting, as the "Default", and they should have just stuck with that* and had any differences from that be present in the books made for alternative setting.
Like I think it's okay to have Eberron Goblins and FR Goblins be different things and the best part of it is if you wanted to use FR goblins in Eberron or vice versa, the printed material is right there, you just need to copy and paste
I would rather have 5 distinct varieties of a fictional thing and pick the one I want for a given campaign I'm running than one that's so bland I might as well homebrew it from the get go
*I'm not opposed to a different default setting, but that should come with either the total reprint or a new edition
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
As a side Tangent Ive been watching “escape from the blood keep” from Dimension 20. Fuck is it good. Its got players of all experience levels from the college humor crew and Matt Mercer playing just the saddest wraith ever. Brennan Lee Mulligan DMs.
Only like 6 videos and its had me laughing out loud every episode.
Override367 gets it; by ripping out the lore and essence of a setting (whether it's FR, Ebberon, Theros, Dragonlance or the fucking nentir vale) You're not making it better, you're making it more bland and generic and that goes double for the various races that exist within the setting.
Override367 gets it; by ripping out the lore and essence of a setting (whether it's FR, Ebberon, Theros, Dragonlance or the fucking nentir vale) You're not making it better, you're making it more bland and generic and that goes double for the various races that exist within the setting.
Plus having More Stuff to pick from means I have an excuse to order more books and get the dopamine rush from putting another thing on my shelves
When death takes me I prefer to have it be as a result of a cascade of my millions of D&D books collapsing on me, caving the floor in, and collapsing the building
Posts
I think it's more that they want people to be able to play as a goblin in their world (after Nott's popularity) and they don't trust DMs to run a land being prejudiced against goblins without just repeating racial stereotypes from the real world and decided it'd be best to just say "Yeah you can be a goblin it's fine"
I don't really fault them, probably the best way to go about it
Personally I think I'm going to go ahead with an approach more along those lines and use the original and new books in tandem.
For example, I'm okay with Kraghammer becoming less xenophobic and more accepting of non-dwarves, but I'm not interested in it being just a more idealized version of its original self. "Greed drives Kraghammer", as the original TCS book said, and I think it's more interesting to imagine that the current ruler pushing for workers rights, greater opportunities for non-dwarves, and integration into the Republic of Tal'Dorei could be seen as a threat to the continued dominance of the dwarven noble houses of Kraghammer. Perhaps there's an assassination plot in the works that a party of adventurers would need to thwart.
I'm going to be running a new campaign soon, and want to make some assets.
I'm pretty sure they'll both do hexes, but I'm less certain about Dungeondraft.
ED: I should say, I know Wonderdraft will do hexmaps; I'm not sure about Dungeondraft.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Personally that sounds like a bad decision, as now the barbarian's damage reduction is a lot less useful and magic items that grant force damage reduction are much more vital.
I do like how it is dumb from both directions. Several things are written such that "Force" damage is kind of special, Barbarian Rage being a huge one. Making such a massive change this late in an edition is weird. That really should be errata sort of thing.
I don't really care, but it also reverses like 40 years of D&D treating the "Force" damage type as a kind of special thing.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Or mix and match things from both sets of stat blocks.
Or just make new creatures entirely that if you squint just right look a lot like the creatures you used to know.
I'd want to see more of the book and the rules changes, but yeah, the change sounds unnecessary at best.
Sounds like their way of solving the high level monster cat scratch issue without actually solving the problem.
This book is what 5.5 in 2024 is going to be so, and I didn't think I'd say this, I'm not that interested
That creeping comforting dread when you realize that you've succumbed and become a gronard.
Yeah it's definitely fair to insult me because I don't like WOTC's design decisions, I've only been playing TTRPgs since 2017
My next campaign is going to be LevelUp's Advanced 5th Edition (yoinking and introducing WOTC subclasses as I see fit)
....it wasn't an insult.
I've been pretty vocal that D&D left me behind an edition ago. It happens to everybody eventually. Once you've realized it happened, you can just get on with accepting it.
sorry I think I misunderstood, I've only ever heard Grognard at the FLGS as an insult meaning "neckbeard" usually applied to "that guy" and also someone who is an old traditionalist (usually a conservative)
I guess it's not necessarily negative after a googling, my bad! we're good
Sorry, I don't make the rules
Well, at least they're clearly written with little room for interpretation.
I have regarded myself as a Grognard for a long time as I've never been a particular fan of 5th edition at any point.
Having to run 3-5 games of it every week in my store for most of 4 years was a definite challenge to my sanity, but nobody can say I didn't give it a fair go. I have basically no interest in 5.5, although I do like what they are doing with races some of their other decisions are frankly somewhat baffling. Then again, I found most of 5th editions decisions baffling and yet like Todd Howard says, "It just works".
It definitely needs a balancing passover but I'm confident in my homebrewing abilities to take care of it, it does resolve a lot of the problems I have with 5e
- They want the Name recognition of places like forgotten realms and people like Elminster.
- They want to be completely free to do whatever the hell they want in order to have broader and broader market appeal while avoiding offending anyone (other then people who have supported the game for decades and actually liked FR for it's lore I suppose)
And it just leads into really weird fucking shit that leaves people like me dealing with their weird ass decisions; things like Dragonbait being plunked down in chult for no reason or Jander Sunstar apparently being splintered into dozens of shards of himself (most of which seem to be assholes?) or How Doctor Mordenheim is apparently a girl now (and maybe lesbian?). Factor in how they're just trying to go "not all drow/orcs" without working with the viable tools that they actually had in the setting and you can see how Grognards like myself can be frustrated with how it feels like the company had a hostile takeover by a bunch of gorp eating hipsters.Which isn't to say that some of these ideas aren't without merit but rather that they're basically doing the writing equivalent of this:
A better approach for all of this would have been some combination of the following:
1. Create a new setting. Doing this would give people the freedom to re-interpret the races/sociopolitical nature of the various races to be whatever the fuck they want them to be; High elves that are gender fluid, berserker gnomes, Victorian Kobolds, Pacifistic orcs... whatever the fuck you want.
2. Create new races/characters. Instead of trying to hamfistedly try and change races in order to placate naysayers, why not just create new ones? MTG does this all the time and they've had no problem emulating that in their specific settings.
3. Wait for 6th edition. A lot of the frustration that me and other people have stems from the fact that they're trying to Retcon stuff that they themselves printed in this very edition ultimately undermining the setting and casting doubt on the worth of any other source material going forward since we can't know whether they'll waffle on that due to a sudden influx of players with differing values.
we're prepping for a game in ~3 months and the players are all absolutely thrilled to have character creation be so meaningful at low level, I have had to homebrew a few more heritages and I've more or less used the 5e race as a guide
Lore wise there are a few decisions I don't like, they literally didn't need to change drow for example, we have decades of stories about good drow and not so good drow communities that have branched off, but get next to zero mention in the PHB (Vhaerun and Eilistree), we get no lore about Many Arrows and how it's recovering after the last war, I want them to put the work in and create some damn lore
They don’t need to. Eberron got all of this right from its conception :P They should have just used it instead.
The decision to have no default setting at all I get and makes sense, but Really Hammering It Home in the middle of an edition does annoy me, they're literally republishing the core books with major changes "5.5" in 2024, so why all these changes now, IDGI
Which is again why I think this whole thing is so stupid: you have everything you need to "fix" this problem without having to go make-up gun on the whole damn thing.
It really feels like the people making these decisions have never actually looked at the game or the lore for FR (which even if you didn't have contact info for all of the thousands of creators over the years still has a wiki with over 40k pages) hence why I have so much contempt for the decision they are foisting on the rest of us.
A5E doesn't use expertise, if you have multiple sources of proficiency (and boy howdy are there a lot of ways to get these), you gain "expertise dice". One expertise in a skill is +1d4, 2 is +1d6, 3 is +1d8. You max out at 1d8, however Rogues can get 1d10 in a specialty if they really stack it. You also always get a number of "specializations" that are context specific up to your prof that are special about your character. For example, you can pick "pickpocketing" for sleight of hand. Every class gets "knacks" of varying levels of power, most of them let you get extra proficiencies or expertises
So if I build a skill monkey rogue I can be proficient in a shit load of skills
If I want to build the world's best pickpocket, I can do this at level 2:
Cultural Skill (Prof Sleight of hand)
Rogue Skill (1d4 expertise)
Skill Specialization: Pickpocketing (1d6 expertise when pickpocketing)
Rogue Knack: Sleight of Hand+Ability to set traps as an action and hide them (1d8 expertise when pickpocketing)
So at level 2 I would have Ability Score (+3), Prof (+2), expertise (+1d8) when pickpocketing, making me a hell of a pickpocket at level 2, but instead I could have gotten
Cultural Skill: Engineering (a new skill)
Rogue Skill: Acrobatics (rogues get 4 skills + thieves, forgers, disguise kit in a5e)
Skill Specialization: Engineering, repair
Rogue Knack: Perception+30ft darkvision
Expertise dice are untethered from Prof so it makes your character that can play the fuck out of their lute less of a clown at level 1
Part of the argument against having orcs and goblins and such as common enemies is that there are frequently good individuals, they reproduce, and they may be native to the area (and therefore attacking them is reminescent in some ways of colonialists demonizing and attacking native peoples). In contrast, low CR demons (manes, rutterkin, dretches, quasits, etc) are are pure evil without the civility that devils can have, don't reproduce, are invaders from the Abyss rather than natives of the world, and don't even really die when destroyed unless destroyed in the Abyss. Their presence in large numbers also increases the Abyss' link to a world, so wiping out incursions is also an imperative, and there are higher CR demons that can serve as bosses forcing lesser demons into servitude (though, being Chaotic, many of these demons would probably flee to go do their own thing, further making them a threat to the countryside even as the boss demon summons more minions from the Abyss).
Most of the time demon incursions could be more along the lines of pest infestations that usually don't progress into goristros and balors or whatever showing up. A few wandering dretches and manes and such in the area could be a sign that a temporary, unstable portal to the Abyss formed recently and dumped a bunch out somewhere close by. This could also attract mortal demon cultists and demonologists to the area who hope to re-open the portal and make it stable.
It's a shame they're MtG creatures, because the small cackler demons from Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica could really fill the evil goblin niche.
I could see these guys as replacements for the Pathfinder 1E style of goblin that sings gleefully about killing dogs and eating babies, but with the bonus of magic. They have the Mimicry trait to mimic sounds and voices, so they could lay ambushes by mimicking past victims' cries for help or whatever. They also have Tasha's Hideous Laughter once per day, which is also good for incapacitating victims and forcing them to laugh as they get chopped down.
The only thing is I have the suspicion that putting demons in the goblins' niche might somehow end up making people want to start portraying literal demons more sympathetically, decry making them mostly Chaotic Evil, and in the long run cacklers or dretches or manes or whatever will be humanized in much the way goblins have been and made a PC race.
orcs are a lot more established and WOTC is just uninterested in telling us what the only orc civilization is like
goblins almost exclusively live in the underdark and in general there seems to be far less of an issue with killing goblins, because they're almost always portrayed as comic relief and take up the role that droids do in star wars
I'm not sure if Cacklers can really take the place of goblins, because demons mean you need to go hunt them all down, every one, goblins you just need to foil whatever they're up to - I've never seen an official campaign where you go to the goblin's home and murder all the goblin babies in their goblin cribs
That sounds incredible, goddamn.
my favorite knack is one the cleric gets where you can use wisdom for intimidation as long as you are ranting about the end times being upon us
there's also like 144 battle maneuvers and all the martials get them (although only the fighter gets to choose from all 8 schools) that include some pretty great combinations
For example you can take a maneuver that lets you mount a larger creature against its will (think dragon's dogma climbing a boss) as a bonus action, and you can combine it with the mounted combat maneuver to sacrifice your mount as a reaction when you take damage, forcing whatever you're mounting to take the damage you would have taken and dismounting you, you can do some pretty epic shit as a martial
like one of the ranged maneuvers is you can just use a reaction to make an opposed ranged attack roll against another ranged attack you can see, if you exceed their roll, your projectile intercepts theirs and it doesnt hit, one of the paladin maneuvers lets you counterspell with your fist, etc
the fighter in my curse of strahd game used this on Sunday and he was just giggling like an idiot
Let's not pretend for a second that Forgotten Realms is not the default setting of 5E because it clearly is. Yes they wrote the core books from a neutral POV, but the vast majority of splats and damn near every adventure I can think of off the top of my head is Forgotten Realms.
The default setting is Forgotten Realms and they are trying to hammer FR into these new assumptions while ignoring existing lore, instead of building something new or using an established setting that already does what they want.
The upcoming book makes all the races setting neutral in prep for the 2024 pass where everything is made amorphous and setting neutral, so it's just basically going to be like:
Elf:
Elves have pointy ears, if you want
They have these stats, if you want, if not, pick what you want
They have these other traits, if you want, otherwise whatever
No Lore
That is what they are currently doing, trying to de-setting all the races, because few writers at WOTC these days like the forgotten realms and they no longer have a "lorekeeper" type person to contextualize things and keep anything consistent
Or more snarkily they're trying to make it so all settings are equally valid, they're trying to "coherent timeline for legend of zelda games" everything and in doing so are doing a disservice to every setting (based on the leaks from the book)
It's like the weirdest overreaction to your own decisions I've ever seen.
Like I think it's okay to have Eberron Goblins and FR Goblins be different things and the best part of it is if you wanted to use FR goblins in Eberron or vice versa, the printed material is right there, you just need to copy and paste
I would rather have 5 distinct varieties of a fictional thing and pick the one I want for a given campaign I'm running than one that's so bland I might as well homebrew it from the get go
*I'm not opposed to a different default setting, but that should come with either the total reprint or a new edition
Only like 6 videos and its had me laughing out loud every episode.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Plus having More Stuff to pick from means I have an excuse to order more books and get the dopamine rush from putting another thing on my shelves
When death takes me I prefer to have it be as a result of a cascade of my millions of D&D books collapsing on me, caving the floor in, and collapsing the building