/5eg/ - Fifth Edition General:

You Sorc for Absorb Elements, maybe Mage Armor, SCAG cantrips, and proficiency on Con Saves.
You go Hexblade 1 for Charisma swords, medium Armor proficiency, Eldritch Blast and a couple of l1 spell slots on a short rest, for healing words or Armors of Agathys and Shield
Finally you go full Swords Bard to be the ultimate Gishfag.
Grab War Caster, do Dissonant Whispers, strike a Booming Blade using your Charisma for the attack roll and while you are at it, Plant a flourish on it

>How important is optimization to you?
I've found that choosing flavorful options that make sense as a concept rarely tend to bite you in the ass unless specific circumstances come up. For example, my current Half Elf Sorcerer who almost exclusively deals fire damage because he thinks being a Dragon Sorcerer means he's half dragon. He's not exactly built to lose (I took things like Shield and Counterspell) but he's hardly optimized. Hell, my current metamagics are Heightend, Subtle, and Distant.

Making an optimised build is the first thing I do. Then I figure out what kind of character would have a build like that. Then I adjust the build to get closer to the character concept, usually making it weaker in the process.

You can slap another Warlock level on it sometime after level 10 if you're *sure* you'll never make it to 20

Sorcerer's biggest problem in my opinion is that they don't have access to enough spells at one time. Hell, even Warlocks learn more spells than Sorcerers do. It's nice to see Sorcerers get more spells on their list (Divine Soul is especially refreshing) but it doesn't change the fact that they just aren't made versatile enough through their metamagics. What we needed was a Sorcerer that gained more Spell Points per level and had more Metamagic options, or just had more spells known.
Also wizards got pretty much every good spell. Again. Why the FUCK do wizards get Steel Wind Strike? You can't even get that spell as an Eldritch Knight or a Hexblade.

For what purpose?
Paladin has multiclass affinity with bard (shillelagh), warlock (Shillelagh/hexblade) and sorcerer (Metamagic) as well as each of those contributing spell slots for smites,
Sorcerer only really works when you get a lot of levels in it for more metamagic points n' shit though just a few sort of works
Warlock only really needs a two level dip usually and mostly provides eldritch blast ability
Bard doesn't really have any reason to multiclass out but can take up warlock for eldritch blast ability

So right now you have
Sorcerer (Wants to be the main focus) / Warlock (Wants a dip) / Bard (wants to be the main focus)
So I would choose either sorcerer or bard, not both. Two level dip of warlock to go with it.
If you really want to tri-class, fighter/sorcerer/warlock makes sense. Otherwise, sorcerer/warlock2 or bard/warlock2 is what you shold be doing.

So that EK and AT can cast it via scroll or ring of Spell Storing

Having more spells known to me felt like it distracted from the design concept of sorcerer, it was supposed to be the specialist caster, who had few tricks but could use them in more ways than any other caster, everything else I agree with.

I disagree. A single level of Sorcerer is plenty rewarding.
Especially now with Absorb Elements out there (also is Zephyr Strike a Sorcerer spell?)
You can grab some cool mobility from Storm Sorcerer over there, or some choice moves from Divine. Pick out Healing Word and it opens up a known spell slot from the Bard at higher levels.

Zephyr is ranger only.

This is true, b ut
Sorcerers should basically be more 'handicraft magic' while wizards should be 'ancient and heavily refined precise magic to make, say, a servant that goes and does all your shit for you'

That doesn't mean that sorcerers need less spells known. It means that sorcerers should be able to twist magic however they want, which can be modelled as 'you know all fire-related spells' for a high level fire sorcerer. That might result in a lot of spells known, but they wouldn't be very versatile.

The alternative is to give them more metamagic to change up spells, or just let them free-form their spells like 'I want to cast a fireball but instead of the usual fireball I want to make it do less damage but cover a larger area' and the DM okays that. But that's too arbitrary. The final idea is more like wild magic sorcery where you have a 'haywire' table where either all magic has a chance to go wrong and sorcerers have more control over it or where sorcerers are the only one to have this table and it's all (usually) beneficial stuff like double effect radius or more damage or regaining a lower level spell slot or the effect repeating or whatever. It still wouldn't make them competitive with wizards in serious games, but versatility will always trump everything else in serious games.

No the Wizard gets it too

Wait is zephyr strike not a garbage spell?

And what are you getting that you couldn't have just gotten from another class like wizard (which would give you some rituals to use as well) or cleric (Pick a domain with the shield spell, there 'might' still be one that does that, and you also then have healing word and all that, and also heavy armour and shields) or whatever else.
I don't feel the low level sorcerer benefits are really worth it outside of the shadow sorcerer cheese that's now gone now that they made it once a long rest. The rest of the shadow sorcerer benefit with casting darkness you can see through now requires at least three levels.
So you might as well take three levels so you get free devil's sight alongside having repelling blast and agonizing blast. And then, you might as well keep taking more levels in sorcerer since you're two away from level 3 spells, and then keep going because you're too late to invest in bard to get high level bard spells and be a proper bard and someone else can fulfill that role instead while you be the blasterfag.

bladesingers, maybe

You can cast it as a bonus action, and for a minute you can zip zoop around without taking opportunity attacks. Then you can give yourself advantage and 1d8 bonus damage for an attack, followed by a 30 feet movement boost for that turn.
For a single spell slot that seems pretty decent to me.

Do you like the Wild Mage variant in the PHB? Thinking about playing one, but the Wild Surge mechanic seems a little... gimmicky?

I know you're memeing but they don't.

What are the best spell options for a level 1 wizard?

We're talking about dipping, so:
>You get Charisma synergy
>Proficiency in Con Saves for Con spells
>You get Origin perks, such as Storm Mobility, or Divine spell selection and save bonus.

I tend to play character concepts. As long as I have my primary stat and/or secondary stats at 14 at character creation, I shouldn't be pulling the team down by much.

I really like the concept of wild magic, but I have huge problems with the way the subclass is designed in the PHB. If you read both the wild magic surge and tides of chaos features, you can see that they both rely on the DM to activate them or use them to their full potential. If you're going to play one make sure you and your dm have a clear understanding of how and when your features are going to activate.

>Tenser's transformation gives you heavy armor proficiency
For what purpose? The spell only lasts 10 minutes, which is how long it takes to don heavy armor. If you already have heavy armor on, you can't cast the spell unless you've already got proficiency. You can't Contingency it, because it's level 6. So is it just a thematic choice?

Wild Mage from the 2E Tome of Magic was pretty neat.

You could cast Animate Objects on a suit of Armor and have it Tony Stark you first

It is super fucking gimmicky. Still, it's got some real punch in exchange for the risk of calamitous failure.

I'd agree with that, if wotc wasn't obsessed with having wizards only clearly defined design niche be "does arcane magic" meaning that in order for sorcerer to have any good metamagics it must have a poor amount of spells known, else wizards versatility becomes obsolete.

Anyone here ever use their characters from a previous campaign as the villains in a new one?

My friends and I started a new campaign a year ago with the original intention to play as fairly neutral "do no harm" swords for hire, but I went back to my university out of state and by the time I came back they'd progressed into "murder hobo" territory.

Around that time we decided that if we got our characters to level 20 we'd go full evil overlords and set ourselves up as the big bads for our "good guy campaign". So now we're all making sure to punctuate certain moments in our adventuring with evil acts to set up the backgrounds for our good characters. For instance my treasure-obsessed rogue just butchered a small village and martial arts dojo for not revealing the location of a sacred temple up in the mountains which sets the stage for my Drunken Fist Monk character I intend to play.

I think it's pretty cool thematically, and a concept that I encounter people wanting to play fairly often. I appreciate that it's in the book, even if it is kind of gimmicky.
This, I tried playing it one time and my DM just plain kept forgetting that he was supposed to call for rolls. I wish it was a d% that you rolled as a player with no input from the DM.

That is something I wondered about too. Why not make it a roll for every spell you cast? I can see that from a story telling perspective there might be situations where it's more likely to happen than other times, but from a game mechanic perspective that seems tedious to have the DM tell me every time I have to use it.

ToC is the same thing, but maybe even worse.

Moderately, I need to feel effective and have some options. But ultimately I don't have a problem playing lesser powered characters. Like my GOO-lock.

Do you think it would be bad, if you just straight up rolled for a Wild Surge every time you cast a spell?

Seems like such a way easier solution, even though it's a 5 % chance on every spell then.

>You get con save proficiency
You also get -1 max health compared to starting with a level in bard or warlock if you do that. Also starting in bard means you can choose all the best skills without having to ask for broken skills in background.
While cleric and wizard aren't charisma-based, you don't need any more than 13 int or wis, and wis isn't the best stat to dump. With wizard, you don't care about your intellect modifier at all really (You'll prepare spells that don't need int like shield and mage armor or absorb elements and the rest will be rituals) whereas with cleric, while it matters a bit more, healing word doesn't need to heal any more than 1 HP (because very few things do exactly 1 HP damage to down players at 1 HP but many will take a player down from, say, 7 HP) and while your spells prepared are more limited than wizard's, you're getting heavy armour and shields regardless. Or medium armour.
The origin perks are weak. A single level of wizard gives an extra slot and the spells known to use mage armour as well as the ritual spells and whatever, but that's weak. You don't dip wizard. You don't dip sorcerer. You take more levels, because the more levels you have the sooner you'll reach powerful high level spells, or features such as portent or metamagic.
Origin features pale in comparison to high level spells and other things you'll get by not procrastinating for tiny ribbon features.

Do constructs count as living beings for the purposes of being targeted for magic and magical effects?

Also
>Tenser's Transformation
>Yes hello I'd like to be an objectively better 10th level Fighter for 10 minutes
I thought we left this shit back in 3.5 for a reason

Have a rules question, can a character who is afraid of a creature misty step/blink/dimension door/etc. towards a spot near a creature they are afraid of or does that count as "willing movement" towards that creature?

Bladesingers definitely according to twitter.

They are creatures if that is what you mean.

Sounds like willingly moving closer to me.

>5 % chance on every spell
That's why I said roll d%, you could lower it to 1% instead. Though looking at the Wild Magic Surge table, most of the results are neutral or beneficial, and most of the bad results are negligible at worst. I don't think it would be a bad thing to roll more frequently.

>You also get -1 max health compared to starting with a level in bard or warlock if you do that
It's called "concentration checks"

So I had an idea for 5e Lite or something to that effect, condensing the level range as well as changing up the classes to fix various issues I have with 5e that also aren't fixed with other systems like 4e. Basically:
>There are only 10 levels
>Casters are mostly the same while martials get all their cool shit at a condensed rate
>They also get new out of combat options with "techniques" to mitigate the other side of caster supremacy (the first being high-level shenanigans)
>Balanced for 5 min short rests and 2-4 battles per long rest, instead of the insane 6-8 combats that shifts the focus from battle-to-battle survival, to resource management
>Feats in addition to ASIs for more customization, and more abilities in general to make all characters fun to play with multiple abilities to affect the state of the game both in and out of combat
>All classes are rebalanced with the changes in mind, trying to prevent straight up bad classes like phb ranger and unfair power spikes like level 2 moon druid

Is this a good idea? 99% of it would be on the player side changing class mechanics, not touching the fundamental systems or monsters or anything. "Lite" is probably garbage-tier naming.

Does the dueling fighting style work with thrown weapons?

Yes

Yes for melee thrown weapons.

Yes, but you can just get the resilient(con) feat later anyway, as mentioned there's the slightest penalty to your HP and hopefully you shouldn't be making a lot of con saves anyway.
I can't remember the last time I actually lost concentration on a spell despite having played a few spellcasters for quite a long time.
Not that con save to start with isn't good, but it definitely isn't worth a dip into sorcerer, I'd say.

I don't usually give a lot of thought to optimization. I'm more interested in creating a character who's fun to roleplay.

Did you keep full spell casting progressions and xp gained the same, if so I don't really see any reason to play most casters that aren't wizards, as you'll have garbage damage for most of the campaign and won't even that much out of combat utility.

I like being good at the role I'm supposed to be doing. So I'll optimize for that role, especially if it's flavourful. Say, picking a powerful archetype, though I wouldn't pick it if it wasn't fun.
But then to counteract it I'll be unoptimized in some other area, such as having purposefully low con.

If I played a sorcerer, I'd make sure to capitalize on the things sorcerer is good at.

Adding on to this user's question - do you actually need any more than 2 levels in warlock to make eb spam work? I think that's all you need to get eb, the +cha damage on it and the pushback.
I'm currently a sorc3, planning on going sorc3warlock2 for quick eb spam and then go back to sorc levels, picking only cc/buff sorc spells. I'm struggling to find a reason to get any more in warlock unless i plan to be a melee and need extra attacks and improved pact weapon.

You do lose out on casting hex for longer than a few minutes.

You're changing the system with too much homebrew for it to be possible unless you've got a knowledgable team and a fanbase willing to playtest your shit.

Just never play past level 10, make it so casters can't learn level 6+ spells and probably multiclass or only bother messing with the rules when someone plays an obviously broken thing and they know what they're doing. Unless you have experirenced players, the game works fine anyway.

Nah, 2 dip is the best return everyone gets because of how hilariously frontloaded warlocks are.

I wouldn't say hex is really a big deal at all. Higher level hex doesn't really matter much since combats are short.

Only if you want a third modification to eldritch blast, and it's a good one, such as devil's sight if you have a shadow monk or someone else with devil's sight to cast darkness for you, or that invocation that slows hit enemies by 10ft.

There's no reason to get 3 levels of warlock unless your team desperately needs the guidance spell for some reason or some other cantrip or you plan on abusing familiars to all hell. Otherwise, you'd do best keeping those level 1 slots and instead levelling the real caster tree with metamagic points faster.

So how can you make a halfway decent Sword Bard?

I would guess one level in Hexblade is pretty much a given.
Dueling or Two-Weapon-Fighting? I know generally duelwielding is bad, but what other good options do Sword Bards have for their bonus action?
What spells would you recommend?

How so? You can use spell slots you get from other classes to cast Hex and make it last longer. Melee classes wouldn't get spell slots, but who multiclasses for EB spam as a martial?

2-4 battles per long rest means you can throw around a fair amount of spells, I have thought of increasing spell slots but I'm not sure. Extra attack and 3rd level spells balance out, then 4th level spells add some utility mostly as the martials get advanced techniques for utility, and 5th level spells are the final most powerful spells and this is where martials would get one of the weapon feats (PAM/GWM/SS/XBX etc., some balance adjustments and you can't take those as feats). Otherwise they all gain their capstone-type features at 10 and other higher-level features at level 6. What I meant with unchanged was that there are no further changes except getting features early.

XP varies so much already with some preferring to level up once every 3rd session with milestones and others doing exploration- and combat-based XP to level up once every 10th session after a lot has happened. In my experience, I like leveling up once I'm used to the features I possess, like if I gain action surge and nothing else it's probably just going to be 1-2 more battles before I want more features and options, while if I gain an archetype or another level of spellcasting that can keep me occupied a lot longer. I.e. I would leave it as-is.

I don't have a big problem with the balance of the game, as long as it's kept to lower levels as you say. My problem is more that martials and even casters lack (1) options to customize their character in chargen, (2) combat options whether it's resource-based or not, and (3) out of combat options. A lot of cool higher level features are essentially wasted because if you get that high, they're overshadowed by OP spells and the game falling apart, or you never get that high. Using 90% existing class material it shouldn't be as hard to balance as a completely new system or anything, the fundamentals are all there, but I do realize it could become a balancing nightmare for just one person.

Paladins I guess because Hexblade makes them sad? No clue really.

So my DM is running a campaign starting at level 10, and let us roll for stats.

I got retarded rolls, with:
13 STR, 15 Dex, 14 Con, 15 Wis, 17 Int, 15 Cha

What would be the most ridiculous thing possible with this? Wizard is obviously something, with the ridiculous Int.

just go wizard.

Is this before ASIs and racial bonuses? If you don't want to go for the obvious wizard you could make a baller dex eldritch knight.

Hey guys, I'm a big fan of the Spell Viewer application in the resources link. I was wondering if anyone has any idea about it being updated for the spells in Xanathar's Guide? You can create your own spells in the app but every time I try to the entire thing crashes.

What are questions and things I should know about my DMs setting before making my character?

EK might do as it pairs with their bonus action attack. Then they multiclass rogue too for:
>EB attack
>Bonus action attack with sneak attack

desu hexblade 2/swashbuckler x would be fun.

So when I get a critical hit, I roll the damage dice twice, and then I add the modifers after, but only once.

So for instance a critical Longsword attack: 2x d8 + 3(strength) + 2(proficency) ?

does the piercing thorns ability from primeval guardian work kinda like sneak attack, where i can get it on my turn and on opportunity attacks later in the same round?

This is before ASIs and Racials, yeah. He said no Gnomes in this campaign so I won't get a free +2 Int there anyway.

I don't know what race I even want right now. Eldritch Knight might be fun, though i wish they got more spells sooner.

What are most of my race like? What are most of my class like? Where are we starting? Are there any changes made to classes or races that i should know about? How much does my character know about the world?
In no particular order.

you dont add proficiency to damage unless you have some feature that causes that

Generally:
What is joe farmer's opinion on magic users?
Are you using any rules for firearms?
What are the most common races?
Are you playing in an archipelago or one big landmass?

You don't add proficiency to damage unless you have a class feature that lets you.

>bit of culture for the race you pick
>how other races view your race
>prejudices that might exist against your character's race/job/class/abilities/spells
>brief history of country you live in
>law/political structure of your country
>popular religious beliefs in your country
>famous people/nobles you might have heard of
>well known institutions like colleges or temples
>recent events that you might have caught wind of
Generally what I try to cover

Right, my bad. But the modifiers, in this case Strength, are only added once, not for each dice?

yes

That's correct.

Importance of stealth if stealthy. How acceptable is magic(low magic, high, tech), how races will be treated (tieflings) and the like. How powergamer focused it will be, more a question for the group and rules on multiclassing.

>Picking race and class before knowing about the setting

Absolutely retarded.

>Not 5 levels of hexblade for extra attack

so I'm building a warlock for the first time, and I'm wondering, is Hex a must-have spell? Do I NEED this spell to keep up in terms of damage dealt compared to other classes?

3 class multiclass characters: cheese or legit.

>pick a race/class you want to play for mechanics/default fluff
>check with the DM to see what his changes are now that you have it singled down to a few questions instead of "Tell me everything"
>if you don't like it, change it
Wow that was fucking hard

No, hardly, but theorycrafters love it for calculating damage. It does damage scaling with how many EB attacks you have but at higher levels you should be using your spell slots for other things anyway.

Not really, it's a quasi-trap option most of the time. It's certainly good but limited slots really can fuck you over.

I'm a huge believer in Redemption as a personal moral value in my life (go to AA meetings every month, got a job back in the family business) but I'm also a very private person

I got a spot in a great game with a lot of my close friends who don't know about my life's dark side (save for the DM) and it just happens that the composition is perfect for a Redemption Paladin

Whatsnangood name for one that is both subtle but thematic? It's a Nordic esque Viking setting

Almost always it's just someone being idiotic so who cares it's probably suboptimal

try to make them explain it though

Thanks for the input. We're starting off at level 1, and I'm going with the Archfey patron so I know the extra damage would probably help, but I'm always a little leery of dealing with concentration spells.

There's no reason to multiclass more than 2 classes other than cheese. Anything more is sticking more hands than you've got in too many cookie jars to justify with roleplay. It's like being a Half-Elf Half-Dragon Planetouched.

Touch spells of XGTE:

Beast Bond
Ceremony
Create Homunculus
Dragon's Breath
Druid Grove
Flame Arrows
Holy Weapon
Magic Stone
Skill Empowerment
Snare
Tiny Servant

Any of these particularly useful to cast through a familiar?

i could see it if you're dipping for heavy armor or some shit, and want to be a sorlock

Eh, even with only EB and agonizing blast you'll do above average. Warlocks aren't powerhouses to begin with anyway, but they are absolutely consistent with their DPR anyway.