Rage Thread

What are you pissed off about Veeky Forums?

I'm frustrated with 5e's death rate. I love the system, and am willing to overlook most of its flaws, but it still suffers from the "How do I give a sense of danger to my players." Death saves basically mean you're unlikely to die before someone stabilizes you, and the only way to bypass it is cheap methods like the Disintegration spell. Even in a campaign where we removed all resurrection spells, it still doesn't have the grittiness I'm looking for.

i put in massive damage rules. if a player takes more than half their total health in one hit, con save or die. killed 5 or 6 characters with that.

I thought enemies could attack a downed player to add a failure to their death saves. They could potentially die before another ally gets a turn to heal or stabilize them.

True, but this is generally considered a dick move unless enemies have a legitimate reason to do so, such as starving wolves going after food. The problem lies with fighting more sentient monsters.

Yeah, I typically have intelligent foes not attack a downed person... until they see them get healed up at least once. It makes sense to switch to fighting the things that can still fight back... until you realize if you don't finish them off that they just keep coming. I also have intelligent foes agro toward healers once they start posing a problem. Another alternative is binding a downed player so they can't help if healed. This can leave the party grossly outnumbered after one is downed, making a very clear point that people falling in combat at all could easily lead to a party wipe if not handled carefully.

I'm pissed off about some of 5e rules. Specifically, skills and tools.

> You are given a gigantic list of different skills and tools your character might be proficient in
> No guidelines or rules about using them

>unironically wanting your players to die

I'm glad I'm not in your games

I find a lot of the character concepts and things you can do in Pathfinder cool. I love the Kineticist, and all the occult classes and the breadth of options and customization.

But when I play it the sterility of the DMs leaches engagement and players begin to view their characters as number piles.

Death rate is one thing: Death threat is another.
When a downed character is attacked, it's a sign the enemy is Evil and means business.
I wish I could enjoy the versatility of a lot of d20 games without having to deal with the number-crunching, powergaming, or worrying about being useful to the party.

It is really frustrating. I don't get why anyone encourages parties to be the most efficient and best, because then fights grow stale and the DM has to get cheap to get some actual knocks in. You'd think it'd be better if everyone agreed that they could make their characters a little subpar, as long as they were still somehow useful. That way you could play a monk instead of the surprisingly more effective punching/grappling ranger.

Pathfinder is a tremendously crunchy system, it shouldn't come as a surprise that it would attract those that are more into crunch than fluff. I've played a few games of it myself, and I've found that the biggest problems with the game come from individuals who try to run/play it without acknowledging this fact, and individuals who simply don't understand the crunch (i.e. wizard doing stupid shit is fine because magic, but barbarian doing 6 shitzillion damage is overpowered).

I am fucking pissed at players that only play one game.
Our local gaming club has more than 200 people but our monthly gaming meet ups are dying because only one mediocre game is being played, AC. some german game that's literally only played in our fucking region

All of our GMs leave because their games don't find any players
Every player of different systems rather plays with his usual group instead of going there to mix it up, because if they want to play any other game, they'll only play with their usual group anyways.

Our monthly meet up, that was supposed to meet new players and try out new games has become a monthly meet up of AC-faggots.

You could always remove death saves, or change up the mechanic however you want. I think there's some good easy ways to fix this, you just need to do it yourself so it fits your level of grittiness.

I'm the forever DM. Not by choice, mind you. I don't particularly like DMing, and would much rather play.

But Every. Single. One. of the other people in my gaming group cannot DM for shit. Every few months, one of them steps up to try, and if we're lucky, it's hilariously bad. More often, it's just bland and terribly boring, and it will putter around for 1-4 sessions, before I'm asked back in the saddle again.

Dude I know the pain. Bland and terribly boring is hell

How long it takes for the DM to make a goddamn map!

IT'S JUST A MAP PIECE PICTURES TOGETHER DON'T FUCKING SHOW ME YOUR MEAGER PROGRESS

Low death rate in fantasy is fucking right.
It is difficult to kill human. Even chopping head off means that he will live for some time, hear stab is the same.
Anything that does not blows your brain will allow you to live for some time.

Now we have a cleric that have healing magic that should be able to mend nearly all possible injuries.
So why should PCs die?
>You get sword through the chest you died!
>But why?
>Because!
When after getting sworded man dies from blood loss. If you can get magic help you should be okay.

5e isn't the number-crunchy meatgrinder play-style of old

it's more focused on characters and rp. Hence why it's harder for someone's character to die.

if you want the old meatgrindy "gritty" playstyle, go play an older edition or play pf or something

Having enemies attacking downed characters gets around it. Actually attacking downed characters is kind of a DM style thing though, and my limited experience tells me most don't really do it. I don't normally myself, but I think I'm going to start a game soon and tell players I'm going to be doing just that
Or they're intelligent enough to know that the downed character could be put back in the fight and want to insure he doesn't

But user, I want to be able to die

I want to be able to fail a combat with more consequences than just losing a bit of stuff the opponent looted or failing some stupid quest, I want to face dire consequences of mistakes.

I know this isn't a popular opinion, but hear me out:

I don't like 5e's oath system for paladins. I understand it gives them more mechanical variety, and you can make a paladin that's chaotic or neutral or even evil, depending on the oath. But I feel like the alignment restrictions of old could have been easily worked around with some talking with the GM and a little homebrewing. It's not as if no one ever played a Chaotic Monk or a Lawful Barbarian.

But most importantly, even if I was stuck with Lawful Good - which is mostly general goodness, beyond a strong moral code or a respect for established institutions of law or order - all I would really have to do with my paladin is establish what tenants of a god they might follow. This gave me a lot of good roleplaying opportunities, because I could define my paladin based on how they worshiped their deity and what aspects of them they focused on. And all this freedom to define my character, within some restrictions, only came at the cost of maybe two or three tenants I had to follow.

Now, I really only have three choices, with a facade of different alignment twists to make them feel unique, when a Lawful Neutral Oath of Vengeance Paladin isn't much different from a Lawful Evil one. Some of the tenants of the oaths are rather loose, but most are more restrictive and clearly worded, and no matter what I do I do have five tenants that I have to follow no matter what, no matter how much wiggle room they give me. Aside from DM fiat, I can't ignore a tenant. And if I were to put the worship of a god on top of that, I would have to add even more rules and restrictions on what I would be allowed to do, which makes wanting to worship a deity feel disheartening.

So I feel 5e's new system, while mechanically more agreeable, only really gives the illusion of freedom to paladins in terms of more alignments and what rules they have to follow. In its own way, it is actually far more restrictive than what I was able to do before.

It sounds like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is what you're looking for

Use negative hp. Divide negative HP total in half, and consult the dark heresy critical damage tables for the result. It's brutal, and results in plenty of death and disfigurement. Makes things feel more gritty, while also opening the door to great heroism from wounded characters.

Dark Heresy crit tables are fun in their own context, but making every encounter look like a scene from Kill Bill might not really fit perfectly for a DnD game

I disagree. I think having a clear code written out helps a lot with a the paladin thing, and makes for more interesting decisions rather than ones that hinge on interpretations of an alignment. I still think there's plenty of freedom in how you interpret the vow. I don't think many DM's would really put up a fight for a differently worded vow as long as it wasn't "Kill shit and take its stuff".

I'm assuming you're comparing them to the 3.5 paladin though, so I might be off base if you're talking about something else. I don't really know how PF or 4e treats them

PF isn't very different from 3.5; 4e treats them more like clerics in a way - your alignment is that of your god, and you're serving them a bit more directly than just generally fighting for goodness.

I get that there's going to be differences of opinion, and I respect yours. But I think if you're going to actually establish a vow and its tenants as a strong part of what makes the 5e paladin, changing that can get in the way of things. An Oath of Ancients paladin shouldn't be playing them exactly like a traditional LG paladin. And honestly I was already making decisions not just based on alignment before the Oaths - I was basing choices off of how my characters interpreted the will of their god and what tenants they had set for themselves.

Tell your DM.

I somewhat agree.It's not so much the tenets that are my problem, however, but rather the Oaths.In my mind, no two Paladins oaths should be the same. They might all be lawful and good, but how they go about being that varies with the individual and their deity; a Paladin of the Goddess of Fertility will have a much different worldview than a Paladin of the God of Knowledge in terms of chastity, for example. With the three Oaths being so mechanically important the only way to make an old-school deity following Paladin is to take the Oath of Devotion, and that places limits on how far from the stereotype you can take him.

In short, by giving just three options for Oaths they ended up actually limiting your choices of RP to those three styles, as opposed to letting you personalise your character's beliefs.

Have you considered not playing D&D?

Really? I thought I just couldn't find them...

>Have you considered playing TSR D&D?

FTFY.

>I wish I could enjoy the versatility of a lot of d20 games without having to deal with the number-crunching, powergaming, or worrying about being useful to the party.


This can more or less be achieved by themed games, and/or a great DM. Character creation can stay a lot of work, but focusing on one aspect for a campaign can cut out a lot of power gaming and choice fatigue before its begun. Had a pretty great pathfinder game recently where we all played heroically styled martial characters. Simple combat, easy character creation no real possibility for anyone to power game enough for it to matter, etc.


Kinda depends on the level of micromanagement you consider "number crunchy." I mean really for most cases dnd involves rolling a die and adding a number between 1 and 20 or so to it. Not exactly the most challenging thing. Really the pain in the ass stuff comes in if you play some kind of minion themed character, a complicated caster that chooses spells daily, that kind of shit.

Wounds, optional feature in DMG.

Try using the critical injury table. It pissed off a flake generator so it must be doing something right

Players who don't learn the mechanics or show up to games. Why show interest at all if you're gonna flake and play Hearthstone or Warframe all night? Why even show up when you don't even know the mechanics of your character?

>it still doesn't have the grittiness I'm looking for.
It's not a gritty system. If you want that you should look elsewhere.

Our IRC group gets into dumb arguments in ooc that go nowhere

Go die in a Fire mr. SomeoneWorksHardToGiveMeFreeEntertainmentButHeDoesNotWorkHardEnough

Also go tell your GM that some guy on Veeky Forums said his map is beautiful.

I dunno, I play at my FLGS with my dad and a couple of regulars. One of the regulars has the RL same name as my dad and plays the same class, its fuckin weird. But I digress, that guy and my father seem to have some sort of death race every time we play as to who can get do bleeding out first. Its really nice to have the 2-3 turns to heal em back to minimum 1 HP when your the only cleric. I feel that I should mention that were all level 2 creeping up on lv 3. It has become a running gag to the point that our DM calls us collectively as the Chumbawamba group.

Shit, OT,
Uhh... Groups that run 3.5 with every splatbook known to man.

>Uhh... Groups that run 3.5 with every splatbook known to man.

But running 3.5e with all the splatbooks will, on average, give you a more balanced game than core-only.

Hell, the game is more balance if you ban all the core classes. Run Bo9S + Complete only.

Oh, and add in the PHB2 as well.