/5eg/ - Fifth Edition General

Trying to think of fun cleric concepts.

Would a Cleric of the Arcane Domain stack up at all to a fighter? Primarily through using Magic Initiate to gain Shillelagh and only boosting Wis and Spiritual Weapon. As far as I can tell, that'd result in 2d8+6 at 5th level. That's halfway respectable right?

Paladins should be oath-dependent.
The tennets should be the ones that determine their restrictions.

Going with booming blade and PAM is much better.

>tfw all I've ever played is FR and Ravenloft so I'd be fine with anything

Enlighten us, what does alignment actually add to the game?

it lets the dm know if you should be kicked from the group if you're any of the following without the rest of the group being on board with your autism

>lawful evil
>neutral evil
>chaotic evil
>chaotic neutral

If they're not even high tech, isn't there some sort of drawback, such as percepetion disadvantage?
Seems silly to have a racial drawback and then to negate it entirely with no issues unless 'someone ties to blind you' in which case you've probably just protected your eyes by wearing glasses and that's another positive

That is to say, good sunglasses aren't just 'dark pieces of glass'.

Good sunglasses are made out of polarizers that are orientated specifically to tune out glare from certain sources, as light reflected off of the ground has a different polarization to light from the sun. Good sunglasses can, at best, allow in maybe 85% reflecting off of surfaces but only perhaps 50% directly from the sky in good conditions, at an estimate, and you could always reduce both those percentages.

Cancels out your darkvision and makes everything dim light instead?

The glasses can break or get knocked off, lost, stolen, etc

Are you telling me you don't want to see THIS in your campaign?

I think I'm playing my alignment okay.

Lawful neutral totally good with leaving captured villagers on a boat because 'we have nothing to do with them'.

I'm trying to think of more fun ways to do LN. I remember that the Duke mentioned his taxes went up. Should I offer myself as an investigatory to help the city lower its taxes?

There's two sorts of alignment.

Subjective (5e's core) and Objective (Setting specific, though there is this in FR)

Subjective just gives a quick and easy description of your character's moral disposition. If they're selfish or not, and how they are with societies.

Objective is 'God is watching you masturbate'. The DM can punish you for things nobody actually sees you doing, and doesn't have to send magical detectives after you every time you kill something, and can just say 'Yeah, the paladin can just SENSE the aura of evil around you.' It's a bit of a lazy approach, but it can make it so that there isn't some optimal personality of 'Will stab people in the back when they can 100% get away with it and murder people yet still be a completely and utterly mentally sound character when talking to people without even a hint of evil, and do good deeds' ... Which is bad roleplaying, but eh, I was just showing the extreme.

You'd be jumping through a lot of hoops to do something that you're never going to be best at anyway. What's the point?

But they function just as fine as any other drow without the glasses.

>Trying to think of fun cleric concepts.

I could, but they would be for 3.5, which actually had character options.

strawpoll.com/rb3aag1

New poll, vote for which setting you want brought to 5e.

@52859232
No (you) for you 4ree shitposter

Just play a cleric of Lliira or Sharess. They are fun

It's a meme you dip

It was. But no one played alignments right to begin with. Everyone wants their shitty holy warrior that acts like a violent hobo anyway, so give it to them; drop the alignment, drop the oaths, drop the tenets, and let this class pull holy magic out of its asshole like a fucking Sorcerer while it goes around smiting peasants for spare change.

Your lame and back-asswards attempts at justifying your shitty murderbanditry is just slowing down the game, Jeff. None of us are going to kick you out of the group or the party, so let's just get to the dungeon as quickly as possible.

What do you guys think of a cleric who would get one language, int/wis/cha skill, or item proficiency every long rest and can use a bonus action to increase damage against undead by 1d4 radiant for a number of minutes equal to your wis mod which is used in increments of a minute. I think it might be a bit strong, maybe swap the proficiency for spare the dying at a bonus action.

Also what do you think of a warlock patron that gives access to sacred flame, divine favor, and guiding bolt as well as adding radiant damage equal to either cha, wis, or int (knowledge based patron) to attacks against undead.

>only two votes for Mystara
Hey, fuck all y'all except one.

I'm surprised your caregivers let you use the internet, let alone a computer. Seems kind of risky for someone with your level of dysfunction.

> A forced meme
>Because an autist will shit up the thread arguing about how there isn't enough math and examples of DCs on everything

Shitposting is still shitposting

...

moldvay's D&D is pretty amazing tho

The lack of alignment mechanical interaction goes beyond paladins, it's just that paladins are such an egregiously bad example of how to handle alignments in almost every way that it is the most obvious.

And oath of devotion is mechanically superior in most ways to oath of vengeance. On top of that the three subclasses UA has the oath of redemption which makes Lawful Stupid viable as a paladin concept.

New (to the hobby) player here, I wanted to play a Paladin for years so I'm loving Devotion to bits even though my character is NG. Alignment doesn't feel like it should cause problems there, so it's good.
Ancients is cool, too, but I wonder what it is that drives so many people to admittedly edgier options, besides BIG DEEPS. Vengeance seems to be very popular.
According to these threads, though, players in this edition either make their characters overbearing in regards to the Oath, give them moral myopia, or just... don't pay it a lot of mind? Which really confuses me; if you just want to kill shit good, why would you play a class that is all about the roleplaying baggage it brings?

It's mechanically good, and that's understandable, but I'm a bit baffled by what people seem to say is something common. What kind of person would want to play a roleplaying game and not put effort into the actual roleplaying? I'm specifically wondering about the kind of horror stories people here bring up sometimes.

FR in 5e removed objective morality by order of Ao, the podcast talked about it a while ago. Clerics, Paladins, etc have no idea what is granting their magic anymore.

Well, paladins and Clerics should follow objective alignment, since by oath their morality is tied to their patron/deity rather than the law (apart from oath of the crown shut up), but for everyone else subjective morality can suffice.

>paladins are such an egregiously bad example of how to handle alignments in almost every way that it is the most obvious
Wrong, idiot. That would be Bards and Barbarians. Paladins got their magic from a fucking GOD taking a special interest in them and imbuing them with all sorts of sweet shit, and if you do anything to piss them off--including anything bad--your Paladin License gets fucking R E V O K E D. Clerics aren't even held to a standard that high.

If we're going to let Paladins be powered by good feelings instead of a specific divine entity, we might as well all play BECMI because that's what Mentzer did to Clerics.
>hello priest, who do you serve
>UH, WAR
>which war god?
>JUST WAR

Oaths are how Paladins should always have been run.

Making it alignment-based was ridiculous, and making it deity-based was really limiting for people who wanted to play Paladins in any setting where the gods aren't literally proven to be there.

>Ao did shit in a podcast
Which podcast? Why isn't this in a book?

>moldvay
What's that?

So you're saying all these objectivemorality guys complaining that people have been using good = selfless evil = selfish and that 'Lawful good doesn't mean nice, but neutral good means nice!' are actually wrong about 5e's main setting being objective morality?

>I wanted to play a Paladin for years so I'm loving Devotion to bits even though my character is NG.

I see no problem with this, mostly because if the laws are unjust or cruel a paladin shouldn't be obligated to follow them.

>Ancients is cool, too, but I wonder what it is that drives so many people to admittedly edgier options, besides BIG DEEPS. Vengeance seems to be very popular.

From what I've seen and had to deal with a s a forever DM is they feel it gives them free reign to deus vult. Even if the thing they attack doesn't ping as evil, then bitch at me when after a warning IC they loose their powers or are forced to become an oath breaker. There's always an option of redemption but not following your oaths leads to consequences.

This is all based off my personal experience as a forever DM so I was asking to see if others had run into the same things or if it was just bad players.

I love Mystara but it's easy enough to create based off of the current rules. Dark Sun would need a lot more work.

>deity-based
when were they deity-based?

If there's no gods in your setting the class works just fine running off alignment. All the alignment restriction was is a broad oath you can't argue your way out of.
People like oaths now because they can screech at the DM about how X or Y is technically in keeping with one of their tenets based on some tortured moral non-logic. Why even have 'em?

A guy who revised the rules of D&D for its successive boxed sets. Moldvay's interpretation is between Holmes' and Mentzer's

Didn't 3.5 have options for them to be diety-based? With their whole "portfolio," system.

I just remember someone running a game but he said that deities weren't proven to be there, and as such he respectfully asked that no one play a cleric or paladin since he wanted us to be a bit distant from the whole "god-given magic," concept.

One of the players was pretty upset about it, but kept it to himself.

I'm just glad I don't play 3.5 anymore.

Well, in FR, Paladins were given their "Calling" by Gods like a light switch being flipped in their heads. You could say your Paladin was "of Chauntea", Sune, Torm, Kossuth, or Helm, the same way a Cleric would. They might have belonged to knightly orders on top of that, but those were almost always an order associated with the broader church of a given God.

>you don't like D&D 5e which is just the most masterfully-crafted D&D edition, using amazing new mechanics like Background that have totally never been used before in every RPG in the past 20 years, bounded accuracy done over-the-top to try to recreate AD&D to pander to grognards who don't even look at Dungeons and Dragons anymore, and make the worst. ability. score. improvement. system. ever., then you are mentally ill.

>Oaths are how Paladins should always have been run.

>t. edgelord who wants to play a CE """""paladin'""""" because he is a special snowflake who doesn't play by anyone else's rules

ASIs are just a feature, not something your character is entitled to, otherwise it's not really any different to proficiency bonus. I don't know why everybody needs their attribute scores to grow all the time if they decide ASIs are too boring and want some fun feat instead.

>god-given magic
>as opposed to all that arcane magic that 24yo wizards are tooooooootally studying for in-between all the stupid bullshit they do
bullshit
at least godmagic makes sense
>be a cleric
>do some good deeds, earn XP for quest completion
>god rewards you with more power whether or not you were casting magic or just beating shit with a mace
>be a wizard
>do some good deeds, earn XP for quest completion
>the only thing you cast that whole time was CROSSBOW BOLT but you still gained a new spell level

How do I Battlerager? Or is irredeemable as an Archetype?

this

I'm glad to see that there's a consensus on which setting is the best

>I'm the only person who voted for Birthright

It's like you faggots don't enjoy fun.

Exactly. And Paladins of Grummsh will rape, pillage and slain absolutely everyone, including their own clergy.

Eberron?

/5eg/ what is your favorite and least favorite class to play

>ASIs are just a feature, not something your character is entitled to,

That's not even close to the point. The point is that you start out with scores between 15 and 8, array-wise, then get +2 from your race then +2 every few levels up til 20th, but ability scores hard cap at 20.

It's like setting out a stepstool and jumping off of it in a low ceilinged room. Then moving your stepstool and jumping again. Also all characters end up with the same fucking stats by the end, which reduces this game's character customization even more.

>inb4 "wahhh if you don't like 5e don't play it"

3rd Ed sucks and no one wants to play it, and Pathinfinder is even worse.

What's funny is that I can understand and see the point behind your critique, but either pre- or post-Oath, I pretty much always played Paladins as good-guy fantasy cops/investigators just trying to make the lives of people around them a little more bearable by getting rid of the bad monsters and rehabilitating what cultists he could arrest.

Mystic
Bard

Then play a Lawful Good paladin like they have been for years. Just because your DM is a shit who comes up with random reasons to "make" you fall, doesn't mean the Paladin is a flawed concept.

>Most
Rogue
>Least
Druid

>favorite
Bard

>least favorite
Wizard

You misunderstand me.

Before Oaths, I played Lawful Good Paladins. Post-Oaths, I am going to use an Oath that's basically the same thing (I haven't played a 5e game yet, unfortunately).

But just because that's how I play Paladins doesn't mean that's how everyone needs to play Paladins. Different strokes for different folks, dude. If it's not destroying your game, then let people play the way they want to play.

>Which is bad roleplaying, but eh, I was just showing the extreme.
Sounds like a personal problem.

War is a valid concept for a cleric to serve. They'd probably still know the name of their local war god, as well as any nearby equivalents. And paladins do get power from their feelings, though 4E's version of an investment of power was ok too. 4E's fallen paladins kept their powers as they could not be revoked, but would make a dire enemy of the church that invested them in the first place.

Objective-morality-user has always been wrong, subjectively.

>I'm just glad I don't play 3.5 anymore.
A perfectly reasonable response.

You don't have to like every bit of 5E, but you are obviously mentally ill.

The ability scores cap so you don't have to keep raising the one score, and can branch out into other abilities at higher levels. The range is small so you can also get away with branching out into other abilities at lower levels.

To play? Favorite is Druid and least is probably Paladin.

I enjoy the type of spells Druids gain access to and they've been my favorite class since 2e. Nature magic guy is fun and Ranger is my second favorite.

Paladins are just literally unplayable to me. Everything about their flavor, abilities and spells is unappealing. I don't like playing burst damage characters that much anyway though.

At what level should I let my PCs get mechs if I'm trying to gun for a Dragonmech game? I'm so far letting large and bigger monsters start awakening and attacking several villages, and soon cities.

Paladins had to be LG, which means the only Gods who could raise them up were within "one step" of the alignment (LG, LN, and NG) with a few exceptions (Sune: CG, Kossuth: TN but since he had three aspects you were of the NG one).

So, the problem is just you don't like the value the numbers are at.

Considering you need at least 2 ASIs to get one stat to 20 and many people tend to detour for feats, even at level 11 (which most campaigns have ended by this point) not everybody has 20 in a stat, and at level 7 nobody has 20 in a stat.

Just because you can't have a massive ASI means jack shit. Everything else had their attribute scores lowered too so it's more meaningful rather than just big numbers everywhere.

Everybody starting limited by 15 in the non-rolling-variants (the best variants) is a good point, but honestly the only way to counteract this would be to let people sacrifice stats for feats at level 1 so they don't start with 15 before racials anyway.
And even then, you have humans who'll start with at most 16 in a stat and then other races who'll start with at most 17 in a stat and then sometimes you'll get fuckers who just have 14 or 15 in the stats because they're up to some fuckery.

I want a gladiator setting. Tell me what to vote for if I want to be a gladiator

Dark Sun.

There's literally nothing wrong with people deciding to play the mechanically much weaker semi-paladins rather than the Oath of Devotion, which is mechanically by far the best.

There is also the fact that many DMs are punitive and cruel about the Oath of Devotion, or rather, classic paladins as well, however.

Important to remember that Anti-paladins have been a thing since 1e with the Githyanki Knights.

As old as Gish.

That would be Dark Sun, mostly.

>Different strokes for different folks, dude.

Yeah, totally dude! Let's just make wizards prepare spells by sucking their dicks! It's not the kind of character that I would play, but it's not up to ME what they put in the book, which should be made for EVERYONE'S enjoyment.

Dark Sun

>people never roll for stats
>the game wants low numbers but gives more ASI points in total than any previous edition
>most campaigns end before hitting double-digit levels, therefore the game doesn't have to work past level 10

n-thing Dark Sun.

It was actually a class back in 2e days, with it's own "Complete book of"

Why Gruumsh the god of destruction, mayhem and strife lacks the power to imbue one of his worshippers with, you know, powers to cause destruction, mayhem and strife? Only like two, maybe three deities were ever Lawful Good to start with. Why Corellon or Pelor can have paladins, if they both aren't even lawful?

Page 99.

>stop liking what i don't like

>Personal problem
It's a valid, general point.

Without objective morality and letting people play whatever they want, the objectively most munchkinned out and 'best' character is the character that does all the evil things when nobody is looking because there will be no consequences unless the DM really gets off of their ass.

For example, you're out in the middle of nowhere with your friend, alone, and they have lots of magical loot. Soon after this you two will part ways and return to where you came from, but nobody knows where you lot are or expects you back at any time, and unless the DM is being an absolute dick nobody's constantly scrying on you.

So you stab them in the back and take all their magical loot they got from the last dungeon.
Nobody else knows they got all that magical loot from the last dungeon unless they got on their sending stone and told everybody about it and then sent detectives out to find out why this person now has those items and that person is missing (Buried in the dirt somewhere).
And, okay, if they roleplayed their character well this wouldn't be a problem, because such a character would let evidence slip that they're the sort of person who'd do that to their friend. But they're not officially required to do that at all.

But as long as you don't play with certain sorts of players this is not often really a proper problem, and most things can be punished by society without god staring at everybody 24/7.

What does an optimized cleric look like?

A wizard

Cleric is probably one of the most boring things to optimize. Everything's just generally okay, there's no outstandingly 'the best' options except for UA bullshit like forge.

...

I have a druid 10 sorcerer 1, how do I optimize my spells to fight dragons

There are still magical ways to track down a missing person, if anyone cared, and there's really no way for anyone to know if a human is evil or not by scanning them anymore, and even if there were (sprites), there's no telling why that human is evil, so it doesn't have any meaning.

Finally, there is no natural punishment in life for "being evil". That's why good and lawful people have to act and make laws. In death, your punishment is going to a place where everyone is just like you and have been doing it much longer than you have.

Because Paladins don't cause destruction, mayhem, and strife. If you want to be an anti-Paladin, there's... Anti-Paladins, and Blackguards.

>Only like two, maybe three deities were ever Lawful Good to start with
Nigga I just explained the one step rule.

>druid 10 sorcerer 1
>being a munchkin

What exactly on page 99 are you referring to?

>if the book doesn't let me play something I like that directly contradicts what that entire class is about, pissing off an entire fanbase, then I am going to whine and scream autistically on Veeky Forums and post on my tumblr about how the game is oppressing me.

Homebrew it. Isn't that the fucking rallying cry of this edition? You want to do some retarded shit in your basement with other faggots who are on board with it, go ahead. But the game shouldn't be pandering to your crap. Mearls should not have been allowed to take the reigns of 5e and I seriously hope he gets a brain melanoma soon, so that someone competent can take over.

No rule is safe from the Golden Rule. So, your rule, is no rule at all. Tell me why a deity of awfulness wouldn't imbue a champion with his awfulness juice? Oh yeah, he totally would.

5e just combines them into the same base class. Paladin and Anti-Paladin.

I'm planning to take more faggot. I just prioritized Druid