D&D 5e general /5eg/

That's a patron, not a build.

It's a start.

So I went to the event and actually got to play for a bit. I tagged along with the party as Gart the guard to lead the party to a cavern and help them save some civilians.

I think I'm going to join this group at the store again soon. What sort of stuff should I get besides dice?

He might be talking about paragon paths, a thing from 4e. Once you hit level 11, you picked a specialisation associated with one aspect of your character. Usually it was your class, but it could be your race, what god you worshipped, or what theme you took. In the context of 5e, a racial paragon path would be a class-agnostic archetype. I don't think it would work for 5e because you get archetype features at different levels depending on class. The closest you get is Bladesinger being associated with elves and Battlerager being associated with dwarves.

maybe taking a level in Warlock could help

Also, do it in Glovia's music hall. That's like, your place of power

Hey /5eg/, can I get a bit of feedback on this archetype? My DM was willing to let me make an archetype to gain the right feel rather than me having to multiclass.

If a druid wants a themed build, is there any way to buff up specific wild shape forms naturally? Or are you stuck with default animal stats forever?

Could a total newb get a game going with the free pdf's or would the starter set be a good buy for the premade story and characters to keep things simple? I wanna try tabletop roleplaying with some friends (none of us with experience) soonish but live outside the US so with shipping it's not an impulse buy.

>Defensive Sniper
Devil's Sight + Darkness

>Binder
Minions of Chaos + Chains of Carceri

>Punishment
Flame Shield + Armor of Agathys + Hellish Rebuke

>The Threefold Pact
Book of Ancient Secrets + Booming Blade + Shillelagh + Find Familiar

Clerics get less good at Wisdom checks and saves. Sorcerers get better at them. Vow of chastity becomes a real challenge for more Clerics. Sorcerers get laid a lot less often.

You can level up the animal a little health wise if it makes sense. They have concentration spells to make forms a bit more dangerous in animal form, or pull up their AC briefly.

Just try to keep the long run in mind, and look at forms they can get later on to make sure you keep things balanced. A themed build might not be able to work forever unless you want to let them look into getting some custom expensive magical armour to put on top of their animal form.

Yes. That's precisely what those are for. Please follow up with any specific questions about how to do stuff, several us are happy to help.

GM fiat can fix and buff anything

>The Threefold Pact
I keep hearing people say that this makes the other two pacts obsolete. How true is that? Are the perks that the other two pacts not enough to keep them better than a tomelock with this build?

>being that lawful
Just pirate 'em straight outta the trove in OP

not really obsolete, no, but you can certainly minimize the majority of your pact losses through them, in a way making one of the other pacts can't

So assuming I would like to look at every official D&D setting ever, of which there appear to have been around 20, and distilled them down to where I took the top 5 most interesting aspects of each and then blended them into a new setting, how crazy and unplayable do you think the setting would be?

Hey, im running death house for my party and plan on leading into curse of strahd. Two questions:

1. Any suggestions for music to play for atmosphere?

2. The party (drow lore bard, half-giant brawler, human evoker) is level 3, how much should i tweak the combat encounters to give them a reasonable challenge?

Beyond that any advice is gladly acceptes

Try to get this in last thread but then it got archived.
What superstitions do you throw in your games or have had to deal with?

DMG has a thing for small bodies of water being portals to another plane, so I have a thing where people are genuinely afraid of puddles and whatnot that form on certain days. So raining seasons are an ill omen.

In a sea-fairing campaign? Sharks.

The Seeker is a terrific pact for some fun stuff, especially in melee. You have a shield at 1st level, but then you get a mini time stop ability at 6th level. It's actually a really fun pact to play as a Tomelock with a staff.

I like borrowing the superstition that dead bodies not buried at dawn become undead. Someone dies, you throw a wake featuring weekend at bernie's fun, and then bury them at dawn so they're safe traveling to the next life.

Crossposting

>warlock
>melee
PLEASE LET GOD SMITE ALL BLADELOCK PLAYERS

>>roll for stats
>>my numbers are high enough to do it
>>DM offers an earth elemental patron
>>playing in Zendikar
>>playing a Kor Geomancer
>two spell slots, has a red mana crystal in his sword and a white mana implement
>>starts in an hour

I'm kinda pumped, I'll let you know how it goes

If you roll good stats, use them on a class that's *actually good* as a gish. Play a valor bard. Play a paladin. Even a damn EK or arcane trickster makes a better fucking gish.

WHATEVER IGNORE ME BRO - GOD'S GOT MY BACK EVENTUALLY

I literally said tomelock you faggot

>>>eldritch knight
>>ok
Heh ok. They can't shapeshift their weapon at will and can run out of spells

I gave you the benefit of the doubt, separating the ideas in each sentence.
Instead, you've confirmed an even worse case scenario:
>tome lock
>melee
Just end it senpai.

>changing melee weapon types
>anything more than a worthless ribbon
>warlocks
>can't run out of spells
Welcome to D&D! Is this your first edition?

So... refluffing Kor Geomancer into a Bladelock? Or going for the Oath of Vengeance Paladin route?

Kor get acrobatics & athletics for free and a climb speed. I took the false life invocation. My AC is 17 at level 3. I have thundering smite (although I'm considering using greenflame blade, opinions?) My spells are saveless buff spells (and I didn't take armor of agathys thanks) I think I'll be fine.

You literally have no idea what you are talking about. What *cantrip* might be useful to a warlock in melee?

He didn't say what is fun at high level, he said what is fun - and Greenflame + Shillelagh is fun.

I once had a player express to me that he wanted a dire chicken mount. I was prepared to give it to him. Too bad the campaign didn't make it far due to schedule conflict.

If you wanna spend zero on getting into DnD, the OP links have the starter set rulebook and the starter set adventure to go with it. Just buy a set of RPG dice (set of 6 that have the iconic d20, d4, d6, d8, d10, d12. Some sets come with a 7th percentile dice aka the d100) and print out character sheets for everyone (if you are gunning for full starter/basic experience, check out the Starter Set pre-made characters in Wizard's site which is available for download) and get rolling. As said the Starter Set has a rulebook that defines the need to know basics for newbies and the adventure module that goes with it is a well-designed adventure that perfectly draws new players into the DnD experience since each encounter introduces a lot of aspects of DnD to new players. It is like one big tutorial adventure. The starter set comes with starter pre-made characters that fill the big 4 core classes (1 melee focused Fighter, 1 ranged focus Fighter, 1 Cleric, 1 Rogue and 1 Wizard) that make up a balanced party giving you an optimized group that can tackle the adventure's challenges.

After the Starter Set, and wanna go beyond the basics, you can read up on the Player's Handbook which expands on the Starter Set rulebook. If you wanna take a role of the Dungeon Master, the Monster Manual and Dungeon Master's Guide are your best tools.

Ahhh, I get it. This guys a theory crafter who is obsessed with level 20 builds instead of what people actually play

Have fun building the best character ever and never getting invited to play :)

You will be fine - that's not what I take issue with. I take issue with people being intentionally suboptimal, because I'm a min-max'ing freak.
IGNORE ME - GOD WILL SMITE YOU EVENTUALLY

If you intentionally join a melee as a warlock, you're playing your class wrong.
But that's OK! You can suck dick as much as you'd like! It's your character bro! ^_^

>1

Forgo use of music and try to take advantage of sound. A creak of a door or footsteps that the party doesn't make is far more effective than playing music. In fact use music scarcely and use it during big occasions to make music matter.

>2

Haven't read up on Death House yet but won't it still he a challenge for a level 3 as well? I heard horror stories already regarding that place with TPKs.

I don't even play Warlocks and I think the bizarre revulsion Bladelocks inspire in some people is kind of mildly cunty.

Seriously; it's not a good class.
So the fuck what? Literally, how does it even matter to you? Go play your own game and ban them if you care THAT much. Go write angry messages on the WotC forums so they'll revamp or ban it. Go do ANYTHING AT ALL productive about it, rather then just pissing and moaning like a bitch when someone else enjoys the type of fun you don't like other people to have.
Why don't you go ACTUALLY PLAY your own game for once for fuck's sake?

Seriously, I've never even CONSIDERED playing a Warlock and the argument annoys me because it's like five people tops saying the same fucking shit thread after thread and it is officially boring as fuck.

And it's the best way to play Elric

>>sexier thighs than Conan

how the fuck would one go about opening up a potion store with permanent / semi Permanent ( 1 year+ potions)?

What pairs up well with a troll (dungeon boss)? Thinking of trash mons that lead up to it. They may or may not be allies to the troll. Something stronger than hobgoblins, I guess.

I am planning to have a Beholder in there somewhere as well in the dungeon.

I.....huh. I guess so, actually.
I never figured a Pact Weapon could in fact be the entity you are making a pact WITH, but I suppose you could fluff it that way.

bump

I really need more ideas to make this ritual happen more easily.

>TOMElock with these melee cantrips
>WAA WAAAAH KILL BLADELOCK PLAYERS
>TOMElock
Kill yourself

>tomelock
>melee
laughinganimegirls.jpg

Statme.jpg

Has anyone DMed any of the published adventures? If so, how are they to run?

Curse of Strahd is literally the only good one, and Hoard of the Dragon Queen is illegible railroading. Abyss has some useful stats which i've cribbed though

They are good to run. Lost Mines, Out of the Abyss and Curse Of Strahd are fun to DM for. Curse of Strahd in particular is required DMing/playing esp for those who did not experience the original AD&D module.

All of them but HotDQ range from okay to great. Lost Mine of Phandelver is a great intro campaign, Princes of the Apocalypse is a bit of a mess but has a lot of material to work with, same with Out of the Abyss, and SKT looks to be pretty good as well. HotDQ is the only one that stands out as actually bad.

stirges which make their nests in the troll's flesh

>mastermind level 10

that's literally all. the mastermind class is really great and you should look into it

I have 15,000 gold to waste (well, I should keep some for rezzes, but whatever), but can't buy magic items. Should I just buy a warhorse with plate barding?

Not one jumping into the arguments, but it's mainly a difference of people who like to powerlevel, and people who've played Bladelock and felt bad.
Bladelock just loses it's stride and it's a game. Once you see a dip in your capabilities as a party member, it's gonna start to suck.
That's all fine and good though, if you don't care about the numbers and just think thematically about it, it's a fucking roleplaying game for a reason, but there's slightly better alternatives that can be thematically whatever you want.

Get dice or free dice roller app

Get free basic rules of Wizard of the Coast Website

Get two PWYW(free) one shot adventures off DMs Guild that are designed for use with the basic free rules.

The adventures are called "A Most Potent Brew" and "Horror at Havel's Cross"

Hey, a friend of mine is running a 'raid' style game to test out some Monsters combinations for his other high powered game. I'm supposed to make the strongest character I can, and I decided to make a Barbarian since I've only ever done sneaky rogues and spell casters.

We're allowed 1 very rare, 1 rare, and 1 uncommon magical item and 1000gp worth of equipment and that's it. So any advice on how to make the best death machine out of that?

Oh, and it's lvl 20 and he is going to try very hard to kill us all. We've got some support, and some other martial, but this guy is probably going to be either the heaviest hitter or the heaviest hit.

get as many hunting traps as possible.

if you're going to go to a high level game, consider having all the players just be battlemaster fighters and go in like a tactical squad

There are blogs and guides out there for HotDQ to address its inherent problems for DMs. Kobold Press was contracted to make that book and they were doing it blind and on a tight schedule. Get the Errata, find the blogs and guides and fix the adventure while you prepare the sessions. Kobold press even released an add on adventure for it later. It is railroady but it can be a decnt campaign for newish players coming off LMoP. The DM just needs to do a little more prep work with it.

In order of playability for the published adventures
LMoP>SKT>CoS>PotA>OotA>HotDQ/RoT

They all can be played, but the further down the line one goes the harder it is from having to juggle too many things at once to becoming a massive railroad or requiring the players to do something they may not (specifically in OotA once they are out of the Underdark the game takes a big leap of "they need to go to Gauntlegrym. Oh, they want to just go home? Too bad, they need to go there to continue the adventure").

If you can, look up the Sean McGovern's guides to the adventures. They have proven invaluable to me for my adventures. Link to his sales page on DMs Guild -
dmsguild.com/browse.php?author=Sean McGovern

HotDQ requires intense system knowledge for a DM to run, but is okay - much like every Paizo published adventure. Most of the problems are from it being complete before the core books were, causing obvious issues. Rise of Tiamat is better, less linear, and encourages roleplay even though it is still glued to factions. I recommend just starting at level 8-9, running the last chapter of HotDQ and capturing the dragon mask, and then diving into RoT.

Princes of the Apoclypse I'm not too familiar with, but it's got some cool stuff in it.

Out of the Abyss is pretty glorious to run as DM, you can easily convert the sandbox into fronts (or whatever you want to call the generic DW GM advice that's repeated in many, many games) which is my preferred style of format for DMing. I can lay out a few paths for the party and they take one and run with it with the ultimate goal of returning to the surface.

Curse of Strahd is probably the best published adventure out there right now. It's I6 expanded, a "perfect" sandbox in that the players have a clear final goal from the beginning and no defined path to get ther but they cannot just walk away, and is extremely customizable to taste. It's pretty brutal up front and really highlights the "village hero to regional/national hero" arc extremely well.

>combat
>combat
>combat
Bladelocks still get EB+CHA without sacrificing a lot and eventually don't do a lot with the weapon. It's pretty solid early in the game.

Giant warthogs
Rhinos
Cockatrices
Giant frogs
Mounted lizards

So I'm planning on opening up a morally ambiguous option for the players to get a "home base" of sorts. This would include a once/5 day ritual allowing the party to open a portal and return to it, the portal will be 2-way and will persist for a set amount of time. This base will also be able to house NPCs should they so choose but they're going to have to figure that out on their own.

Just looking for some input or advice. Is this idea completely retarded? This campaign is going to be extremely long and spread out across many continents. I just want the players to have a place to call home.

The rogue archetype?

Also I feel like just going rogue kinda undersells Legendary Soldier status.

People who play bladelocks - in spite of the objective fact that they are completely and utterly suboptimal - tend to be the kind of people who think pic related is an amazing character concept.

I don't maintain you can't play a bladelock and enjoy it. I don't maintain you can't play a bladelock and not die. I don't maintain you can't play a bladelock and roleplay it in a not-cringeworthy fashion.
I maintain it's weak as an option (because it objectively is) and that most of the people who have strong desires to play bladelocks are manchildren.

When did a Legendary Soldier class get published?

That's what I said. You literally pointed out what I said. It has it's stride, but it loses it. It doesn't compare later on.
My thing is, I've seen it before and it definitely happens elsewhere, but falling behind your party, and not feeling up to their par, ruins a chunk of the game.
Also, I at least don't find it fun blasting the same spell constantly.

rogues might look weak compared to some other PC classes but in a real world context, compared to ordinary soldiers, a high level rogue is still horrifically deadly.

if that doesn't catch your fancy, maybe you could stat him as a ranger. if you're okay with a little magic, it's better damage than a rogue, but more sneaky than a fighter. i haven't played that specific MGS game but doesn't he have a wolf pet or something? could be a beastmaster.

>high level tomelock
Blasting the same spell over and over, get rituals.

>high level chainlock
Blasting the same spell over and over, has a familiar

>high level bladelock
Blasting the same spell over and over, never loses their sweet magic staff

But that looks kinda cool, though.

Yeah, I've already experience with two separate players who poke holes in your theory. Manchildren will play shit characters regardless of class; even good classes with lots of limitations out on them to prevent them from ruining it they will still turn to complete shit.

And again, I don't care if someone plays any kind of Warlock or not. I DO care that I've heard this exact argument with the exact talking points on these threads a thousand fucking times and there is literally not a single thing you could say that has no already been said.
When you could literally type up and post an entire post on the consistency and frequency of bubbly goblin farts and how they represent their lack of a calcium-rich diet or something equally inane and retarded and it would STILL be a superior topic if only because it's actually something new instead of something you don't even have the dubious honor of being a hundredth person to retread the subject of, it's time to drop it once and for all.

You've made up your mind and you're neither interesting enough, clever enough or compelling enough to change someone's mind over the internet over a subject if they disagree with you.
Anything other activity past that point on the subject matter is literally whining like a child over shit you can't control and refuse to actually do anything productive or meaningful about.

Now can we shut the fuck up about it already?
I'd enjoy hearing about stuff that happened in ACTUAL games you ACTUALLY played rather then more of this horseshit. Maybe interesting ways you've used classic monsters or 3e monsters you've tried to port to 5e. Anything at all, really.

Jesus, what crawled up your ass?

I'm just fucking tired of hearing about it.
It is unproductive and boring as hell, and EVERYONE who's been on /5eg/ for more then a single thread has heard the argument at LEAST twice, quite possibly more.

I have no idea what you are talking about. Please explain it to me like I'm a 5 year old.

tl;dr
It's a boring subject and you can't win the argument.
Talk about something interesting instead.

>I've already anecdote

Pffff.

A racial paragon class was a three-level base class that could only be taken by members of that race, because it relied on/enhanced their natural abilities in some way.

For example, the Drow paragon class gave them extra uses of their SLAs, improved their darkvision range, reduced their Light Blindness to Light Sensitivity, and gave them +2 Dex.

5e would probably be better off with racial paragon FEATS. You know, like we already have for the svirfnebli.

D&D material, you fuckwits. Post some god damn adventurer pictures at least.

Victorian Era is okay, steampunk is not :^)

That's not a cat girl.

ice queen a cute

...

Is that Princess Carolyn?

It literally does.

Being the guy who isn't naturally strong but makes a deal for a sick magic sword and super powers appears to edgelords everywhere, and edgy shit is awesome. I don't get why kids these days hate it.

On another note: can the pact weapon be a ghostly laser blade like the Spectral Soul Reaver?

Am I being too harsh on this new group concerning travel encounters?

I ran Lost Mines with some friends who are new to DnD and they have been enjoying it. After Goblin Arrows and forgoing the the Cragmaw Hideout, I allowed a quick travel to Phandalin and they dicked around and got the quests from NPCs. After that, I dropped a cartographer NPC who was passing by and sold them a map of the overworld (the one in the module) and introduced them to traveling around the overworld map.

I felt that the modules RAW of having 1 encounter a day was rather light so I decided to tweak it and roll for every hex (still using the d20 17-20 rule it had before rolling d12 for the encounter table.) Thing is, it was a blood travel. The rolls were always >17 and they got orcs right outside of Phandalin, Stirges the next, then hobgoblins and then ghouls right after. It was when they got back to the Goblin Hideout they were barely surviving.

They are paranoid as fuck now and have survived a long rest. I think I broke something at the end of the session (they just made parley with Yeemik for Sildar's life.)

No, that's a cat

I'm reminded of something I liked from late cycle 3.5, notable in the Dragon Born, Hellbred, and the flying bastards from Races of the Wild.

We see a bit of it in 5E, races that have more abilities they gain at higher levels beneath 10, but only really applied to Tieflings.

I suppose race related feats in limited volume might work quite well.

Overpowered as shit m8.

How many Abilities in 5th give a you flat bonus to hit let alone in large freaking area?

What non combat shit did you not give yourself?

You have a damage buff with your rage/capstone. You have defensive shit with resistance to melee, and disadvantage to attackers.You have a fucking flat hit buff which is rare as shit in this edition, which has an area effect greater than a fireballs radius.

Seriously tone this shit down.