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is there a page about the races? i heard they were trying to steer the stats away from race science esque stuff
Dumbed down but there's still enough to satisfy most people; lots of us houserule in favourite bits from older editions. Pathfinder 2 seems a lot closer to a cool middle ground but stealing the best parts of it and 3.5 to add to 5e makes it a lot better. It's a really good chasis for adding to and the shitloads of free content online makes it much better.
Didn't 5e have that thing where they made feats an optional rule? I know there was a huge outcry about that early on. Did the company back down?
I've been playing 5e regularly for years now. The more I play it, the more I hate it. There are some aspects that are streamlined (positive) but so many more that are dumbed down (negative). The system feels incoherent in a lot of ways. It's like they decided to streamline it to an extreme degree, but didn't have the balls to actually follow through with all that entailed. So you end up with this weirdly bloated system that has all kinds of baggage from previous editions masquerading as a sleek streamlined system.
For example, they kind of got rid of the idea of "skill monkeys" as part of 5e's core design. The idea was for every character, regardless of class, to have skill strengths and weaknesses. Your fighter can be the guy who knows about magic, or about lockpicking, and be the best in the party at that. Which is cool. It's a great idea. But it's not true. For some reason, rogues and bards are still skill monkeys, because they get features which push their modifiers in certain skills of their choosing up to significantly beyond the limit any fighter could ever achieve. So if the bard decides to be an arcana guy, there is nothing your fighter can do to match him. It's just weird and contradictory. Why even try to even out the skill system at that point?
And then they get abilities which let them basically be as good as you ... at every skill. Regardless of training in it. Like, fuck it, forget about that idea of everyone being able to contribute to skill checks. Rogues do everything.
Another example is feats. In 5e, feats are literally an optional rule. They're tacked on, like an afterthought. The only time you can take them, according to this optional rule, is when you would otherwise get an ability score increase. And ability score increases are really fucking good. And most feats are not really fucking good. So this means that 99% of the feats are a complete waste of time, no point ever taking them, unlikely to ever see them. And then there are the few feats that are completely broken and there's no reason you'd ever not take them. There just wasn't any thought put into it.
My son took Observant and I never realised before how much I rely on stealth and ambush to get a leg up on my players.
It sounds like your son took Observant in real life if he's adapting to your strategies like that.
I was just asking about feats elsewhere. Anyway, these feat problems you describe, are they problems in the corebooks or is this just normal RPG power bloat? For increasing your ability scores vs feats, don't you have a max ability score you can reach in 5e? There was a lot of talk about "Bounded Accuracy" early on, did WotC actually have the discipline to keep to that or did they slowly power creep in order to sell supplements? I haven't followed 5e since very early on so I haven't been paying attention to how it developed.
As someone whos experience with tabletop games is 5e. pf2e, and a little shadowrun, its fine. How good it is depends on what you want from a system. From what I can tell they've streamlined quite a bit from old systems and meshed concepts from 3e and 4e, but certain aspects are really dumbed down to a bad degree.
For example, theres not really much you can do in the way of 'builds' in 5e. You choose a class, race, and subclass (at level 3 for most classes), but after that you only really get one ability score increase every 4 class levels, and if you want feats you have to trade your ASI for it, meaning a lot of classes play pretty much the same.
Martial classes are also pretty meh, not getting to do much in combat other than doing a basic attack, and most weapons being exactly the same except for damage type (and damage type barely matters in 5th edition, which is a pretty bad problem).
All my bitching aside, 5e is the most popular tabletop system atm, meaning its the easiest ones to find games for, and because character creation is so simple it only takes about 4 minutes to make something usable for a campaign, so there are some upsides.
I really don't like 5e but it's an ok starting point for some one who's never played PnP before. I ran a short campaign for a group that hadno experience and then switched to pathfinder 2 as soon as we finished. It seemed to work pretty well.
Was it streamlined or dumbed-down?
Yes.
When it first came out I was in love with it for how much more streamlined it was. Character creation is such a breeze, and some of the choices you make are more flavorful than mechanical, the system gets out of your way for the most part while providing a basic framework and it's really accessible.
At the same time I've come to appreciate how much fun I've had delving into the complexities of Pathfinder and discovering weird obscure quirks and exploits. There's definitely less of that in 5e, but character creation often used to involve basically an entire session, especially with new players, and now it's much more convenient.
It's kind of a question of what you want out of a system. If your group is full of math nerds, they may not be as into 5e. But if you have people who like to act and draw character art and stuff, they'll probably appreciate it more. I also would rather DM in 5e bc there's less to organize and keep track of and the random dungeon generator is fun and easy to use.
I just got a pdf of the book a few days ago. I liked some parts, but I couldn't help but feel like some parts were sloppy, and some choices for the class variant features were super questionable.
(All this stuff should be available on 5e.tools btw, if anyone wants the new stuff without shelling out a shit ton of dough).
Nothing super duper broken like the hexblade was, but some of the weirder choices ive seen are
-Removing shield from the armorer spell list and fireball from the wildfire druid spell list
-making favored foe use concentration (like half of the rangers spell list is concentration already, they don't need more)
-taking away all forms of spell versatility from UA, and instead giving cantrip versatility to wizards, the one class that did NOT need to become more versatile
-giving the two new sorcerer subclasses expanded spell lists, but not giving any of the older subclasses expanded spell lists, making the old ones weaker than the new
A few other random issues being the lack of any new exclusive spells for the artificer or sorcerer, the two classes with the least amount of unique spells, very few class unique magic items (and the majority of the ones there are only for wizard), and the whole battlemaster build section being incredibly lazy and poorly written (at least two of the 'builds' they had as examples on there had weapon master as a suggested feat, a feat that is completely worthless on FIGHTER).
Also don't feel bad about not knowing. Its still fun to discuss this stuff with people.
The new sorcerer subclasses are actually the perfect power level for sorcerer subclasses, they just should have brought the old ones up to par with it. I'm not exactly sure why.
o7 comrade. My roommate already bought it so I don't have any questions for myself, but what's your favourite thing from it so far?
Yeah those locales and magical effects looked pretty cool; i don't want to be too heavy handed with them since I run an eberron game where magical spots are absolutely huge and everywhere so I already had some rules for it, but it gives me a lot of cool less lethal options.
I'm really excited for some of the tweaks that made it in from the class features UA like all the new ranger options; everyone in my group loves playing rangers even if we end up as the least useful party member we always have a blast with the flavour and options and the changes just look incredible for dragging it towards a more usable class
The magic items and puzzles also look great but I refrained from browsing them too much so I wouldn't be spoiled by them if they came up in another dm's game since ive already planned out a handful of items for my current party.
Question for ya — I just started dming for the first time with my friends, and we’re all new to dnd. I’ve gotten a pretty good handle on aspects of it via the PHB and DM Guide. I’m starting to read Curse of Strahd and we’ll start that up here soon. Did we jump in right before we should have? Should I buy this book and ignore some things I’ve learned from the ones I just bought, or does it really matter?
If you guys are all just starting out then I think you're fine. These rules are all additional, I wouldn't say you are missing out on anything by not playing with these rules. Since you're the DM maybe you can present these rules to your players at a later date when everyone is comfortable. Most of these rules are character-creation side anyways.
Ah that’s great to hear, thanks comrade. I’ll have to check this new stuff out sometime soon. Do you DM by chance? If so I was also wondering to myself what’s the best way of going through reading Strahd to prepare the story for the group? It seems like there are just so so many small details within each different area on a really granular level to all keep track of, and I can already imagine probably disrupting the flow of scenes because I need to reference things. If maybe there’s a certain mindset or style of notes/system of things to call out that I should keep in mind, or just any advice at all, that’d be super helpful!
I do DM, though I don't often run premade campaigns. My notes for when I do though are to make sure you have the broad strokes of each area. I like to give the campaign a read through like a novel before taking a second pass at it, going through and noting which parts are plot critical. (Often times a lot of it isn't in the official lore quests, it largely is atmospheric details which you can set however you want.) If you are using maps and miniatures then you should make sure that all the plot critical elements are on the maps.
Gotcha that’s interesting, I hadn’t planned on using maps and miniatures. Seems a little daunting at the moment haha
I don't blame you, especially when working off of a rigid story parsing which details are and aren't important becomes a pain in the ass. Some people do find they help though, maybe next time you do an episodic or one-shot you can give them a try.
Awesome, doing it this way. Thanks for this and your other note on room descriptions. Really appreciate it
HEY GUYS WANNA JOIN OUR CHAPO DND CAMPAIGN? it's in 3.5e and in a western marches style. Western March style of D&D is different then the traditional style of play where you have a dedicated group with a single DM. There are multiple DMs and players have a more active role in deciding which adventures they would like to participate in. Typically they are in a shared world where many adventures can happen simultaneously and players from different groups might encounter each other. Click here to join our discord and know more, we are all very friendly. We are already a dozen or so active people and a couple of dms.
