/5eg/ - Fifth Edition General

You have a free hand. So of course

+2 Wis

So I've just finished Phandelver with my group and decided to say that the Forge of Spells given some time and rituals can use it to craft magic items again. How do I give the players a forge that crafts magic items without breaking the game but while keeping it interesting?

I know there's magic item crafting rules in the DMG and I was thinking of just using those but only making the caster pay 1/3 of the cost. I was also thinking the Wizard could go on more quests to unlock its power. So for now it only forges common or uncommon items but can eventually go up to legendary. The next phase of the adventure will be a big hex sandbox over the sword coast and the mine will be the players base of operations.

Full cost, but make crafting take less time. Time is the big stalling factor in magic item creation. Making the items -cheaper- will get OP, making it so they can still spend the same to get items faster is more balanced.

To make things more balanced, allow them to sacrifice items to the forge to "build up charge" and produce other items. Magic in, magic out. Gives them a reason to go into ancient tombs and such, searching for treasure troves of magical items that may not be useful to them, but can at least be scrapped for good stuff.

I last played at 3.5 when my group was 16. They were all playing edgy characters that were OP as fuck custom characters. I'd like to try this again, 9 years later.

Any chance a 5e game does not turn them into edgelords?
Is it hard to learn, and how is it compared to 3.5e?

>Any chance a 5e game does not turn them into edgelords?
Depends on the players, not the game. But unless your DM encourages murderhoboing, it'll be fine... I think.

>Is it hard to learn, and how is it compared to 3.5e?
It's easier. How much is a bit hard for me to say since I almost went strait to 5e. But in general they took out a lot of the 'trap' options and they made it easy to learn the rules. It's the easiest D&D game to learn by far.

>Depends on the players, not the game.
Yeah, I'm gonna guess we all aged well enough since.
> It's the easiest D&D game to learn by far.
Excellent. Let me download some rule books. I'm sure I'll be back with plenty of questions.

You don't need healer, if you are already a cleric, that feat is more for groups, that lack healing.

Alert is interesting, but too often it fucks the DM's surprises up making the game a bit boring imo.

Warcaster is absolutely necessary, if your DM cares whether you can cast a spell without free hands or not, but the concentration advantage is always pretty good making it unbelievable good for frontline-clerics.

Don't know, which Domain you are, but warcaster should be the best for a cleric as long as +2 wis isn't for debate here.

>Is it hard to learn, and how is it compared to 3.5e?
Easier than 3.5, but if you remember how to play 3rd you'll be almost ready to go with 5th out of the box anyway.

I love both those ideas thanks!

How much shorter would be reasonable do you think? I'm thinking make it so 100GP of the item is made per day instead of 25 by RAW so an uncommon item is made in 5 days rather than 20?

Fuck off, frogposter.

arcana cleric. as backline as it gets. already have 20 wis, so i think im going with lucky. Warcaster would really only get me advantage with concentration and spellcasting as OAs.

Shitposting shitposts is still shitposting, user. Just ignore it.

On a similar note, how would it go with a bow?

My understanding is they're only 2h while firing, so if I just have it at hand in case of silence etc I should be fine to cast, but after using the bow I'll need to pick up my focus, yeah?

>To make things more balanced, allow them to sacrifice items to the forge to "build up charge" and produce other items.
I always thought 4e's residuum was a good idea, in moderation.

For general advice, I say if you quest for materials and magical processes the cost of creating the item should be significantly lower than buckling down and throwing money at it. Save some time too.

You should be able to stow your focus with your one free object interaction. Drawing arrows doesn't count against that.

And on top of that, you could just use a component pouch. The only downside is missing out on enchanted focuses.

Wasn't it confirmed awhile ago that Cleric and Paladin can cast spell while holding a shield.

sageadvice.eu/2014/11/26/holy-symbol-replace-somatic-components/

My group homebrews that you can play any race, and replace the normal ASI with +2 and +1 to any stat (except human/V.human and half-elf, though HE's can add their +2 to Charisma to something else).

Does anyone else do this? Seeing "Edgy Tiefling Sorcerer #201" or "Generic Half-Orc Barbarian #362" gets boring after a while.

I always thought your class should give you an attribute bonus to it's primary stat, and your race should give you flavorful abilities. It just seems to make more sense to me. As it stands, there is very little reason to go 'off type'.

If your Arcane Focus is a crystal, would it be feasibly small enough to attach to a necklace/bracelet?

Arcane focus crystal weighs a pound. That's a fairly noticable weight to be part of jewellery, though not impossible. Also they would still need a hand free to use the focus.

I get you on not wanting to see the same class/race combos over and over again. Though I will say that at the moment, I'm playing a non-optimized class/race combo, and I don't feel powerless. It's not like in the 3.x days where you really were setting yourself back if you tried playing a gnome fighter or half-orc bard. You're not doing it wrong if you don't start with an 18 in your main stat anymore.

No I like races having variety rather than being identical and in 5E there's no negative modifiers anyway so you're never going to be bad at anything just sometimes not as good.

Half-Orc Wizards are therefore pretty good fun to play and everything is a trope anyway and tropes are fun.

xth for 5e sorcerers are shit

>literally born from dragons
>cannot become a dragon

meanwhile

>read some books and shit
>oh look i concentrated for an hour and now i'm a dragon forever

like what is the reason the sorc spell list is so shit? you can't even say "muh twinned spell" for things like true poly since it doesn't even need conc. after an hour. they don't even get fucking shapechange or wall of force because fluff-wise, they're "too complicated" for a sorcerer to use and yet they get teleportation circle? W.A.T.

So I had a Warlock player who just hit Level 3. Instead of just giving him the Pact Boon right then and there, I decided to introduce it later.

His patron is the Great Old One and he left the speccific identity of his patron up to me. He chose the blade pact. What would be a good way to introduce the pact item thematically? What's an interesting way the pact boon would be delivered to them?

Not only that, but he includes his meme discord server too.

You really fucked up user.

Dreams are always good.

Where is the character and what are they doing?

Being smart is more powerful than being gifted (or strong) in nerd game. Water is wet.

Oh look at the time, we're in for a "why do sorcerers even exist" discussion. Sorcerers trade flexibility for more spell slots.

Any good reliably balanced 3pp resources?

Contacts him through a freaky dream. PC wakes up with the weapon in his hand and lodged in the head of some dude that was just about to kill him in his sleep.

PC wakes up one day with an unbearable itch on his main arm. The itch nearly drives him mad, to the point where he's considering cutting open his own arm along the itch to see what is causing it.

If he does so, he finds a needle buried under his newly opened veins. Upon being exposed to fresh air, the needle transforms into his favorite type of weapon, before vanishing, leaving the PC secure in the knowledge that the next time he summons the blade will involve much less of his blood, and much more of his foes'

He just hopped off a ship, about to spend the day on the continent's largest port. Lot of taverns, shipyards, brothels, ect. Skeevy place.

There hasn't been an OGL since 3e user. WotC has learned their lesson.

>more spell slots

what even is arcane/natural recovery?

I'm a guy coming from PF.
Since most of my group is generally tired of the minmax optimising woohoo the sessions of late has become we've been looking to 5e.

Is there any major differences to DM-ing attitude I should take note of? Like less gold rewards?

Also we have a guy who always plays a super specific build, like a siege mage with 20 familiars who fires siege weapons for him thus destroying the action economy along with my heart, which says he doesn't like 5e due to the lack of options for quirky builds. How do I convince him otherwise?

Also any great level 3~ APs?

So I have a problem with carrying capacity and the attribute cap.
Apparently the most you can carry, assuming you pass mortal limits and get a Str of 30, is 30x15 for a total of 450lbs. Lifting, you get a grand total of 900lbs.
Meet Pic related, Paul Anderson. He holds the world record for the heaviest thing ever lifted. Using a back lift, he lifted 6,270lbs. This means he beats nor only the mortal limit, but also the supernatural limit as well.
I guess he is secretly a god by 5e standards.

Don't convince him otherwise.
Don't even tell him you're playing.

Make feat that lets you carry what you deem necessary

...

Tell him that his super specific build isn't quirky after the Xth time running it, and at that point he's just a munchkin who can either get with the program or leave.

But it is possible to have a somewhat similar build.

IIRC the lifting and carrying thing is how much you can carry around all day everyday. For short bursts of strength, I would make you roll athletics.

No one uses the encumbrance rules, not even reality.

Oops, forgot the similar build:
Take Conjure Woodland Beings. Convince the DM that the caster gets to choose what is summoned. Summon 8 pixies.

>Roll20 5e campaign for IRL characters to go into the fantasy world
>The application requires you to make an "average midwestern person"
>90% of the characters are from Chicago

FIBs, the lot of them, I tell ya. Always driving through my town on the way to ruin Door County.

He first receives a vision of an undulating mass of chaos, then learns to summon it to his hand and later into useful weapons. Of course, with that fluff he might try to make non-weapons out of it but that'd hardly break anything.

Would you let a character use two "light armor" formulas to combine into a "medium" armor formula? Something like dragon sorcerer and barbarian unarmed defense for example.
Is it broken?

Yes. If they want better AC they can invest in a goddamn armor

Honestly, the blade pact should be non weapons anyways.

Let the warlocks summon pact thieves tools and be proficient in their use.

Let the warlocks summon pact Artisans tools and be proficient in their use.

Etc, etc. It gives the blade pact a kind of utility that the other pacts don't have, and brings it closer to their level.

The blade pact should let you cast spells at melee range, against a melee range target, without disadvantage. Fluff it as hitting them with the weapon after charging it with a spell. Maybe even let them use the weapon as the focus so they can have a shield too, to make up for the lack of medium armour prof.

But they invested character options in attaining medium like armor class while fluff wise being unarmored.
Say a player wants to make a lizard folk monk. How can you represent the natural armor of the lizard folk and the unarmored defence at the same time? Maybe 12+dex+wis?
Again I'm just trying to give him the equivalent of medium armor for his effort.

Still think it's funny that grabbing Crossbow Expert and Warcaster makes you a better melee lock than blade pact does.

Melee spell attacks already don't have disadvantage for close range. If you want to make ranged spell attacks against someone within 5 feet of you without disadvantage, that will result in never using your pact weapon again, since it removes the only weakness of Eldritch Blast.

There's a reason why some shit doesn't stack, user. The fact that you can only choose one method to calculate your AC places a limit on AC that is necessary for bounded accuracy to still be a thing.

What's wrong with that? They're all from the same city; that makes way more sense than having them be from hundreds of miles apart.

Did he walk around with it? Because your max lifting capacity represents the max you can walk around with at a speed of 5 ft. So unless he can make it a distance of 10 feet with that load in 6 seconds, it shouldn't count.

Why the fuck is Aventurers League such a goddam dumpster fire? 5e's got a much better rule set for public play but AL makes PFS look competent by comparison.

First and most refreshing: 5e changes it from "mother may I" and "you need a feat to do that" to "sure, roll ."

Also the game pretty much assumes you start at level 3 (first and second levels are for the first and second sessions to teach new players the game).

>Having medium or higher armor class breaks bounded accuracy and therefore the whole game.

And I feel like that's not a terrible thing. The damage of EB is generally regarded as 'fair', so there's no balance issue there - whereas trying to tack things onto the pact to make conventional melee attacks viable for the Bladelock will result in giving them a laundry list of bonuses, and they'll still be MAD and missing proficiencies in the end. I also feel like the magical nature of the weapon negates some of the flavour issues of attacking with CHA and a dagger 'dealing' d10s, but I admit it leaves the problem of a dagger doing the same as a greataxe. Perhaps different weapon forms could grant different bonuses? I seem to recall something like that in 4e. Either way, I do think that's the simplest solution for tuning up the Blade pact.

> Is there any major differences to DM-ing attitude I should take note of? Like less gold rewards?
There is probably going to be a lot less gold, but 5e is more loosey-goosey with material rewards. Much less of your character's power comes from equipment in 5e, and there's a lot less that you can buy with vast sums of gold unless you want to build a headquarters or something.
> he doesn't like 5e due to the lack of options for quirky builds. How do I convince him otherwise?
Tell him that's the point. If his goal is to hack to rules to prove what a special snowflake he is, gently guide him away from that goal and toward something more conducive to the rest of the table having fun. Maybe even have him try to explain a character concept for you without mentioning any game rules and then have you make the character for him.

>Also any great level 3~ APs?
If by AP you mean a long series of linked adventures that take players from low to high level, people seem to like Out of the Abyss and Curse of Strahd. If you just mean adventures, I like Palace of the Crowned Skull (in the megatrove)

Count the forge as a number helpers, increasing as it gets upgraded. Or do

If you're combining two things, it probably won't break the game on its own. But changing the rules in that way would allow you to combine every single thing that exists.

If Chicago is Midwestern, then fucking Ohio is midwestern too, which it fucking isn't

I can't find a single map of the Midwest that has a Chicago-sized hole in it. If you meant "rural Midwest," that's what you should have said.

The main problem with the blade pact is that it wants to be a bigger fraction of its class than other warlock pacts are.

Different classes allocate a different amount of space to their respective subclasses. Wizard subclasses are relatively small, while ranger subclasses are huge and define the majority of how the class plays. Warlock is the one class that gets two different kinds of subclass (patron and pact,) and by necessity both subclasses have to be pretty small. However, the Pact of the Blade is trying to completely reinvent how its class plays, transforming it from a Charisma based spellcaster who stays in the back and shoots excellent ranged spells to a Strength or Dexterity based melee fighter who stays in the front and swings swords. None of the core warlock features support this second style of play (Except for the Hex spell, sort of.) So the result is a spellcaster with a paper-thin veneer of fighting on top that people try to play as though it were a fighter.

Well, like I said, the carrying capacity is 450, i.e., 30str x 15. It then says you can push, drag or lift twice that number, for total of 900lbs. So with his lift of 6,270 divided by two, his carrying capacity is 3,135. Divided by 15 to find his strength score, his total strength is 209, more than 10 times the mortal limit.

In short, by every metric, carrying capacity and other weight limits fall apart looking at this guy. A normal human in a world with no magic to enhance his strength.

Are grapple builds viable in 5e?

There's a big difference between slowly carrying an object around while holding it off the ground and pushing or dragging it along the ground. The fact that both values are the same in 5e tells you that the encumbrance rules are heavily abstracted because nobody uses them anyway.

Interesting opinion. Care to elaborate? I play adventure league because my home group refused to play it, clinging to 3.5 instead. As far as I can tel AL does not really change any rules. The only notable rules AL has that the general 5e does not is no PvP and the ability to change your character's class and race around until level 5. I will admit the latter rule is a bit shitty but its not that bad.

Depends on the rest of the party. There's no "pinning" - you can shove a creature prone while you're grappling it, but in no case do you stop it from making attacks. You can hold a creature down so that it can't reach more fragile party members, and you can give your melee friends advantage against the target by keeping it prone, but you're giving up attacks that otherwise would have done damage, and a prone enemy is actually harder to hit with ranged attacks. So your party's rogue will like you, but your party's archer will not.

Really? I much prefer Adventurers League over PFS because of the lack of paperwork. All the goddamn paperwork and draconian rules regarding which adventures were legal to play in which areas were what scared me away from Living Greyhawk back in the day.

Yes, yes they are. There are many, many different ways of going about it though.

I'm not even talking encumbrance, or even just carrying it around. I am just talking how much you can lift, which is a separate set of rules. Without moving he can lift 6,270. It also stands to reason that, using bracing and friction, you could push that much weight.

We also ignore the encumbrance rule, but we take carrying capacity into account for gear and carrying people.

For me, I think the issue is how the weight calculation is done. In say Pathfinder, his strength is a reasonable 40.

I think I will just talk it over with the rest of the group and try and work out a homebrew rule for how to calculate how much you can lift.

Any ideas?

They can use their shield as a focus, but that only counts for spells that use material components. If a spell requires semantic without material then they need a free hand to cast (sans warcaster).
It's pretty comtrived in my opinion so I don't enforce it as such.

I'm trying to figure out what you are having such a big problem with. The only AL specific rules I can think of are reworking your character (both before level 5 and when new material comes out). And limiting you to only one splat book of your choice (there like... 1.5 splats, so this couldn't be it).

Other than that there are different rules for each seasons, like Curse of strahds dark powers res.

It sounds like you won't be satisfied until you've made a whole table with lifting and dragging capacity for each possible Strength score based on the statistical distribution of human lifting ability, with 0 being zero, 10.5 being the human average, and 20 being the human maximum. From there I guess you find the line of best fit and extrapolate for scores between 21 and 30.

What happened to the print buttons in the Homebrewery?

I suppose so. I'll probably make it so that the absolute max you can lift at 20 str is 6,270. and find what the human lifting average is world wide, and try and evenly distribute it, with a bit of escalation as you go higher.

I just find it odd that, in a game where you are exceptional, with each mortal limit being above what people can do in real life in some cases, for strength for some reason to be so laughably weak compared to real life examples, is a tad odd.

I don't even play fighters, more of a caster myself, I just found it unfair to other players.

That, and potion miscibility finally returning, and the potion of Storm Giants strength existing, there is a small chance one of the party could end up with that kind of strength permanently.

...

So you're saying they're more flexible than wizards? I can see that in some ways, but the better spells for the wizard is tough to argue against.

Are you/is your DM really playing with the optional potion miscibility rules? What have the results been so far?

Metamagic, and bloodlines. Just wait for the rediculous 3pp bloodlines, Wild Magic is already amazing if your GM allows a d20 roll after EVERY spell.

Barbarian UD is already equivalent to medium armor most of the time.

3pp?

Like ritual caster and magic initiate?

3rd party publisher.
I guess it would be called a splat book here

hahahaha.

Yeah, lots of other classes are great if you're allowed to break the rules, too.

You don't get to roll to see if you get a surge after you cast a cantrip, only a spell of 1st level or higher. This places a pretty hard limit on how many surges you can expect to receive.