/5eg/ D&D 5e General

I'm making a race with a friend, one of the features would be like stonecunning but for jewelry/treasure. What we want is a feature that offers bonuses to appraisal, for example, group gets a golden ring and he inspects it, this character would be considered proficient with the skill and get double the proficiency bonus .
Now a few questions:
>is the history skill used to appraise objects?
>any other skill that would make sense to use when appraise?
>is letting them know if the object is magical or not (with a good enough roll) too powerful/abusable?
I also need a name that's not goldcunning.

Monster Manual pg. 259.

UA Gothic Heroes has stats for playable revenants. Talk to your DM about it.

Nice.

I think you just want wording like "When you make an Intelligence check to appraise the value of jewels and treasure, you add your proficiency bonus."

There's no appraise skill in 5e. It falls into the "other uses for Intelligence checks" on page 178.

Barbarian

Since there's no skill for it and it's just an Intelligence check normally, you don't need a one word name for the racial feature.

Eye for value
Discerning tastes
Jewish

Plane Shift: Innistrad is out. dragonmag.com/5.0/#!/article/106375/102161027

It's in the Mega as well.

god damnit, i wanted to avoid jews joke as much as possible but i kept getting tempted

>Is out
>Is shit
Well, what did I expect any better?

>Stensia Humans
>Your hit point maximum increases by 2,
and it increases by 2 every time you gain a level

So a Stensia human dragon sorcerer with the tough feat gets +5hp a level. Very nice

Kessig humans
>40ft movement speed
>ignore difficult terrain on dash
>don't provoke OAs if they attack a creature
Literally just variant humans with the Mobile feat, except you can get the mobile feat and stack it on top.

Nephalia humans
>variant humans with Skilled

Stensia humans
>variant human with Tough

Guys, I think I may have just broken Curse of Strahd.

...I as a Warlock Barrister in the service of the Infernal Courts of the Nine Hells have signed Irena as a Fiend Pact Warlock with a contract she didn't even read basically signing her soul and services as a newly minted Warlock to the Court of Asmodeus. Now this was all done on the up and up to keep her safe from Strahd...but how does this affect things and would this remove her soul/the soul of Tatiana Von Zarovich from the cycle of reincarnation. More than that the GM said her name shifted on paper from Irena Koylana is to Tatiana Von Zarovich...and I'm the only one in the party with this information.

I'm not at a loss of what to do next, but I've worked hard to get to this point and net this goal of a signing...and am curious what you anons would do in the adventure with that solitary info and position?

>Every province is like at 3-4 days on horseback so there's enough communication between them
>Humans evolved different as fuck in each province
The fuck? this is putting several races just for the sake of putting several races, fucking stupid

>Inquisitor background
Aw yeah nigguh! The wait was worth it! I'm not joking, it's pretty solid.

Your reasoning, good user?

You didn't break it, but telling you why would be spoilers and your DM clearly has some plans in the works.

THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT! WOTC CUSTOMER SUPPORT TOLD ME I COULD ONLY READ THE MAGAZINE ON THEIR SHITTY APP THAT WOULDN'T WORK ON MY PHONE WITHOUT CRAPPING OUT AND THAT I COULDN'T FUCKING BROWSE IT ON A WEB BROWSER JESUS FUCKING FUCK!

He does, I'm glad I did not, and succeed or fail/live or die/win or lose I am excited to see what happens next.

Mounted Combat feat.
It says it gives advantage on melee attacks. Does this include melee spell attacks? Such as vampiric touch?

It doesn't specific melee weapon attacks, so yes.

As far as I understand it: If you hit them with a melee attack, you get an advantage. regardless of what you hit them with.

Woho awesome! So getting this on my necromancer then :)

When you see "melee attack" without the words weapon or spell in between, it means both. The death domain cleric has a similar ability intended to function with either a weapon or spell.

YES YES YES. This is prime necromancer feat! So getting this next level!

>this is putting several races just for the sake of morons who doze off unless they have seven different race options to try to minmax with
FTFY.

Thanks :)

Convince your DM to let you find a version of Find Steed that summons a skeletal war horse and that works with whatever class combination you're doing.

Or just convince him to let you raise a skeletal warhorse

But you can put different races, see, vampires, werewolves and humans, making humans that shouldn't be different at all different makes no sense

I don't know why anyone would expect that many races from Innistrad anyway. Vampires could maybe work but it would be quite strange to have a party of humans and vampires together on Innistrad.

portrayal in OA, mostly. It had almost nothing to do with monk, but it had armor proficiencies, pseudo-rage, barbarian-like DR and it was focused on being tough melee fighter. IMO, it's more of a barbarian with spellcasting than paladin (who, especially in 5e, have more support abilities, auras, spells)

If I wanted to portray it as a character instead of homebrewing a subclass, I would make multiclassed frenzy barbarian with few levels of oath of devotion paladin

That's more realistic but Find Steed has some neat stuff to it besides just giving you a mount for a 2nd level slot.

Neat, thank you user.

You could be subtle about it.

Scent of the deal.

I'm having trouble challenging my party.

They're 12th level, druid, cleric, rogue, barbarian. They wreck shit up. Last session they took out two Remorhaz, which the CR calculator says should be somewhere above "deadly" for them in difficulty.

I know I need to put them in disadvantageous terrain and hit them with a bunch of fights in a row to drain their resources, but is there anything else I should be doing? What CR should I actually be throwing at them?

I love my friends, and I wish to express this love through torment and pain.

One or two creatures, even 'deadly' will probably not be too bad. Add more creatures that can't be easily AoE'd down.

Did you give them a lot of magic items or starting ability scores higher than the array or point buy? Either tends to push the party's effective level a bit higher.

Also realize the CR system was made for mouth-breathing retards. You probably want to use slightly lower CR creatures that you can use more of so that team monster doesn't automatically lose due to having less actions.

I just want to gove you one warning. No one likes to fight uphill through shit.

Unless the druid is Land and the Cleric is Light, they should have few AoE options, so swarming them with a bunch of enemies that may be weaker is probably the way to go. Also I'm seeing a lack of INT here, so psychic based enemies or buffed up intellect devourers or whatnot.

>Vampires could maybe work but it would be quite strange to have a party of humans and vampires together on Innistrad.
Stromkirk clan says hi
Lots of vampires in Eldritch Moon say hi

So is there a purpose to going swashbuckler now if kessigs are allowed?

If you really want to run a game against the Eldritch Moon timeframe, more power to you.

It's interesting to see twice as powerful features, it's very rare to have singular powerful features, only other one I can think of is flight. +2 HP per level, 40 ft. movespeed, 4 skills/tools. It's lazy and I don't like it at all, but at least it's interesting I guess. Also muh hoomans still too normal to have any base ASI

I do really like this way of dealing with different flavors of classes. Bounty hunter and now inquisitor, some people love making separate classes or at least archetypes but I feel this is all that's needed.

Kessigs are literally variant humans with the options already chosen. You could already do this. Play past level 3 and swashbuckler will have some unique stuff.

>Stensia humans
>>variant human with Tough
Except better because Tough is too shit to just have that, even though the +1 to all stats is deemed good enough.

I've been having trouble finding the balance there. A small number of tough monsters, they gang up on and wreck. A large number of weaker monsters, they AOE and wreck. What's the most inconvenient number of critters? Four moderately tough guys?

They rolled stats, a couple of them got good stat lines. More of the problem is that they've been playing surprisingly well, especially in terms of conserving resources and making allies. I had initially geared the campaign for first-timers (which they are!) and I've been having to ramp up the difficulty ever since. They do have some nice toys.

But from how I see it the kessigs have the mobile feat plus that spring attack which is in my opinion way too strong for a race feature.

Don't amp things up too high if the ease of encounters is due to good play. Stay within the bounds of the CR system and try to get creative with terrain or monster tactics. Try to use 4-5 monsters at a time that are close to the deadly curve and see how that works out. It should be a little tougher just because the fight is harder to control than 2 higher CR creatures.

Spring Attack is one of the abilities granted by Mobile. Swashbucklers are unique for Charisma to initiative, an extra way to Sneak Attack, and that persuasion thing.

Oh it looks like I am an idiot who doesn't read feats properly. Somehow I missed the last part of the feat.

You don't need to run a game during Eldritch Moon to have nicer vampires, like I said, Stromkirk clan are very nice with humans, they protect them and defend them, in exchange they suck their blood without killing them from time to time. They are still vampires, and still think they're better than humans, but they understand the symbiosis between both races

>Spring Attack

Good to know 5e brought back all the shitty feats from 3.5 that did nothing. Have fun getting penalized just to move around the battlefield.

The druid is Moon and the cleric is Knowledge. That's a surprising amount of AOE. They tend to blow high-level spell slots on AOE spells they can maintain for the whole fight; the druid loves using up-leveled Call Lightning for round after round. I've tried armies of low-CR critters, pairs of high-CR, squads of mid-CR, and armies led by high-CR generals.

The AOE damage isn't as much of a problem for me as the AOE crowd control, which the druid is great at. I swear, I love playing with this guy, but he blows my plans all to hell. With fucking Gust of Wind! And Control Water! And now he can turn into a goddam Air Elemental and just tornado all the minions all over the place. He's a menace!

Is not a feat, retardo, is just a race feature with the name of an old feat

Literally EVERYBODY has old spring attack as defaut (move between attacks) in 5e

I played Pod during Innistrad and the second set made me give up on MtG. I guess the Zendikar vampire stats are there for you to make PCs.

>Stensia Human
>Bear totem barbarian
>take Tough because it stacks with the race feature
>d12+6 hp per level
>resistance to everything but psychic
Wouldn't do much aside from tanking, but god damn could that son of a bitch tank. Get a life cleric behind him and he simply will not go down.

Zendikar vampire stats make no sense with the actual lore

They don't make sense in D&D either!

People who actually grasp tactics will blow 5e's CR apart. You'll just have to get creative with the situations around the fights. Set things up so there's objectives than just killing the other side.

Things have been easy for a while (despite my attempts to gradually up the difficulty.) I don't want people getting bored, I know these guys like a challenge. Also, the campaign is coming to an end, and I feel fine about making the final battles hard as hell.

4-5 mobs might be the right move, though. I haven't done as much of that.

>Gust of Wind

Reminds me of the time when Gust of Wind into Cloud of Daggers ruined the poor GMs carefully crafted end-of-arc boss fight.

The thing about Druids is that all their good shit is on concentration, so just keep hitting him and forcing those CON saves. My GM has yet to grasp this, so a simple Conjure Animals blow his encounters wide open.

When something is supposed to be important, you might give it some legendary or lair actions even if its stat block does not normally have them. Action economy grants a lot of power.

I generally do. Last session had a shitload of civilians on the battlefield; trying to save them is the only reason the party took damage at all.

Gradually ramp things up then. Treat them as a 13th or 14th level party for CR calculations and see what they can handle.

>LOL just change names dawgg

The absolute madman

Longer adventuring days. A lot of GMs will have the party face only one or two encounters between long rests, just because that seems to make sense when they're traveling overland. But with higher-level parties, if you want to put the fear of death in them you need to wear them down with fight after fight. They don't even have to be particularly hard fights. In fact, a few very easy encounters or traps can be just the thing to whittle away their hit points a bit and trick them into wasting spells. Supplement a lot of encounters with CR 1/4 archers who are spread out just enough to take another bite out of the party's health before going down. Make adventures have a time limit or other factors that keep them from resting. A party at 11th level or above can take on pretty much anything of any CR - if they're fresh. Do not let them enter a climactic battle while they're fresh.

So then the spring attack ability does nothing at all? LOL I bet it's like Quick Draw and does literally nothing.

Oh, wait, I can use the CR calculation backwards! I know what I threw at them, and I know how much difficulty they had, so I can use that to find their effective level and plan encounters from there!

Let's see, the two Remorhaz (with the 1.5 times multiplier for two enemies) divided by the four players comes out to 5,400 xp. And that fight was easy for them. But they had some fire support and it was the only fight so far that day, so let's call it medium. My party's effective level is....

Somewhere between 19 and 20. Hm.

It prevents opportunity attacks from anything you swing against. It's part of a feat that does 2 other things. All are tactically useful.

So guys I posted in the last thread about how there was this girl at my AL group who died but came back to life while playing Curse of Strahd. I was just curious if the Dark Gifts were exclusive to the Curse of Strahd game? I am asking because she might not do the Curse of Strahd campaign anymore because she doesn't really like her deformity. So she might join one of the other AL games they are running at the store with different adventures, which are not Curse of Strahd. So I was curious if I followed her and her character happened to die, would it be permanent, or would these "Dark Gifts" still be in effect?

>actually includes substitutions for Curse of Innistrahd
neat

Would it be horribly unbalancing to force Eldritch Knights to learn spells that are of a different school than those currently known (of that spell level)?
I really want to play a Loremaster type of character, but the EKs Evocation/Abjuration restriction is annoying as fuck.

5e is balanced against 6 encounters a day with 2 short rests. They will destroy the first encounter they come against when they have all their resources. Also you gave them support, so that wasn't really 4 players against the fight. It was 4 plus the supporters.

how about you stop being a major faggot?

>The thing about Druids is that all their good shit is on concentration, so just keep hitting him and forcing those CON saves.
Someday I will run a druid with war caster and resilient(con).

>Longer adventuring days.
This. Daily reminder that 5e was balanced around 6-8 encounters in an adventuring day. That's not so hard to achieve if you're doing a dungeon.

There's only one way to find out user. Kill yourself, and if you come back with gills or blindsight we'll know.

This is what I've been trying to do, but I have trouble coming up with logical ways to do it. With 12th-level characters, it's mostly

>use skills and a spell or two to sneak to the objective
>have one fight
>use spells to escape

They're rarely in a series of fights; once the alarm is raised, they're in one big fight.

Nah, I played an EK up to level 5 and was just meh in terms of power. I didn't get to where I could cast blur at level 7. I was pretty much saving my spells to use Shield and Chromatic Orb and nothing else.

I would say no but use caution cause it might be too powerful. But probably won't.

I plan campaigns by my factions. Factions have rival groups, so it's nearly impossible to befriend every faction without making an enemy. The factions don't all work together, so they won't all attack at the same time.

For what it's worth, one of the more recent episodes of Critical Role had a similar situation occur (party of 7 fights a big bad and a horde of Goliath barbarians) and they very nearly had a TPK in it.

It was only thanks to some lucky roles and a bit of roleplay that lead to them winning the fight without anyone dying.

Overall I think it was 7 vs. 20 or so, and even after the initial surprise round and dropping a few of them, most had like 10 hp or less at the end of the fight, and the party was mostly between levels 11-14.

So absolutely nothing it hurts, Zendikar had more stuff

>Would it be horribly unbalancing to force Eldritch Knights to learn spells that are of a different school than those currently known (of that spell level)?

Nope. My group opened up the whole wizard list to them and it's worked out perfectly fine.

And to clarify, the proposed change to EK would mean that they cannot know two spells from the same school and spell level. So, for example, a lvl 3 EK that knows Magic Missile (lvl1, E) would be unable to learn Chromatic Orb (lvl 1, E).

>That's not so hard to achieve if you're doing a dungeon.

I'm starting to see this as a major limitation of the system. I've had a couple of dungeons in the campaign, but also a bunch of politics and warfare and exploration and character-focused drama. But the game is only balanced for dungeons. There are only so many other situations I can force into a 6-encounters-per-day format. The PCs are too powerful if I try to do anything but dungeon crawl, and just dungeon crawling is boring.

Well, different system for the next game, and in the meantime I'll plan a 6-encounter dungeon for the finale of this campaign. Treating the party as level 15 or so should work.

I've wrestled with this problem. I've found that very often the solution is there if you look for it.

>My level 13 party is adventuring in the Shadowfell
>They decide to skip all the way through the city and the enemy stronghold to the objective room by casting Wind Walk
>Wind Walk doesn't make you invisible or impervious to damage, and it takes a while for you to solidify if you need to take action
>some enemy spellcasters notice the party and have Dispel Magic prepared
>It sticks for one party member
>now it's become a desperate rescue mission, even more difficult than if they'd just run the dungeon normally

Probably not. Eldritch knights can already pick up a handful of spells from whatever school they want, so anything gamebreaking they already have access to. Mainly that would serve to make them much better at utility

Seems pretty neat. Some good details and fluff. I wasn't expecting too much though. The Zendikar supplement felt cooler overall though

I run those kinds of games and don't have the same issues. All the players in the political games have their pawns, and the pawns don't always work together and they don't all strike the same way. You should have tried to kill them in their sleep at least once so far. Political backstabbing and treachery is a perfect excuse for them to constantly deal with assaults.

Wow why the hostility? I am just asking a simple question about the rules. And I don't want to kill myself in Curse of Strahd because I'm pretty sure even character suicide is against their shitty-ass rules, and why would I do that when I already know I'll just be revived by dark gifts?

I want to know if the OTHER adventures have similar rules, because I know AL is pussified to make it "easy" for new players, even though removing the risk of actual death destroys like 90% of the tension in the game.

I would consider a Cleric with the Arcane domain. At level 8 you'd add WIS modifier to your GFB/BB and you get much more potent spellcasting than an EK.
Only niggle is that you don't get proficiency in Greatswords.