/5eg/ D&D Fifth Edition General: It's Always Night Underground Edition

He has no business dming. Slap his shit.

Talented: Choose a single skill. You gain proficiency in that skill. If you are already proficient, you gain expertise in it, and you may add double your proficiency bonus when using that skill.
Gain +1 to the ability score associated with this skill.
You may take this feat multiple times, but not for a skill in which you already have expertise.

Deft Hand: You are finely practiced in the use of a particular set of equipment. Choose one Kit from the PHB, you may add double your proficiency bonus when using this Kit. Gain +1 to a single ability score.
Modification: Climber's Kit- Using this set of gear, you may roll to climb using your Dexterity modifier.
Second-Story Tools- These specialized Thieves' Tools allow you to use your Intelligence or Dexterity modifier to climb, in addition to any proficiency bonus from with Thieves' Tools. They are not easily concealable, and are recognized as contraband in most civilized settlements. Cost: 25gp.

The whole latter thing seems a bit too complex and more something the DM should personally go through with the player rather than be handed the rules by you.

But that's just my opinion.

IT'S BACK BABY

your dm needs a good slapping.

>Literally trying to kill innocents

I get the feeling we need to know a little more here. Or perhaps you needed to know a little more about these "innocents".

How the fuck do you figure?

I just intended to create a relatively simple system that aligned with the Works of Art in the Treasure lists, as a basic guideline. To give the players a sense of what the DC to Reward ratio was.
Most people's complaints about skills is that they don't have a basis for what's what DC.

Now the guy with Virtuosity knows that gaining Favor with the Pope by painting his chapel ceiling is DC 30.

Rereading the DMG option I just realized that all the players must spend their plot points for them to regain the point spent. It seems to be a nice mechanic to avoid abuse by one player while keeping everyone at the same footing.

Option 2 seems quite bad. Even tough it makes two players participate in the action it will probably lead to players trying to cancel each others ideas. The discussion sugested in option 1 seems better in the long run.

They were unnarmed people (non threatening looking women and men with commoner's clothing) in the middle of a street attacked by what looked like thugs/mercenaries/bandits

When the local authorities shrugged, you should have suspected something was up.
At the very least you should have used non-lethal force against everyone.

This is one reason I don't like alignments. This kind of situation would be much better off if both sides were just encouraged to think about what actually happened rather than worrying about what it means on an arbitrary morality grid.

I wish.

What's a good name for this Feat?

Increase your Dexterity score by 1 to a maximum of 20
Your unarmed strikes may use your Dexterity modifier as a bonus to hit and damage.
Your unarmed strikes gain a +1 bonus to hit rolls, and deal 1d4 base damage
You can use your bonus action to make an additional unarmed strike

Non lethal only works on melee attacks, ranged and spells are still always lethal.

Also why not suspect the authorities are actually evil too? they were being pretty cunt till that moment not letting us have our weapons and were escorting us outside the town (we unintendedly appeared in the middle of the city through a tunnel that's why we were be able to enter in the city while armed)

This too. I don't run my campaign with Alignments. It encourages players to be assholes and DM's to lay stupid alignment traps.

"Fuck monks, am I right?" would be a good name

Martial Arts.

'1 level monk dip: the feat'?

The monetary values seem to be a little off. The results for sucess are way too high (7,5 to 15 times the initial investiment) and should be more like the results for the other downtime activities.

Also, the "You gain expertise" part is unecessary. Expertise isn't a game mechanic, just happens to be the name of a class feature that lets you add double your proficientcy bonus on skill checks, what is already said in the feat description.

Otherwise, it seems to be a nice feat, especially because of the roleplaying effects.

All sound great.

>arbitrary morality grid
You can chalk up this "one reason you don't like alignments" to not understanding the alignment system. They are not arbitrary or subjective. Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos are elemental forces in most D&D settings the same way Fire and Earth are. They are an intrinsic part of the universe, and the exact extent to which any action is "Good" or "Chaotic" (if at all) has been codified by some godlike being or reality itself; it is immutable.

The problem is your GM also doesn't understand alignments. What you did was not Evil, merely Chaotic, and in no way would be enough to shift a party member, let alone the whole party, all the way to the right. Alignment shifts happen gradually, after many repeated actions that lean one way, without so many opposing actions to offset them.

That's actually better than martial arts, like way better, see how you don't have to attack first to get the bonus action also you get +1 to hit and +1 o Dex

>Also why not suspect the authorities are actually evil too?
If they are, then you have to realize that you are declaring war on the entire town/city/settlement's government.
Your alignment change leads me to believe that there was more to the story, (or you DM was being strangely cuntish).

Tavern Snorer

"Martial Arts"?

Are you evil if you help a kid lost get to his parents if later in life the kid kills his parents? fucking no, you only turn evil if you willingly do evil stuff, saving what it seems innocent people isn't evil

Monk's feature, did you ever play 5e?

>In which ways can players contribute to worldbuilding during play?

I actually ask my players for their input before I start the game. I've been with the same group for almost ten years now, so we all know each other and can play off one another really well.

Ah NM the 1st level monk ability.
So the +1 to hit needs to be dropped, and the shield, armor restriction added, so that it's a feat equivalent to that Monk ability?

I feel the Dex increase needs to stay, as it's a non-scaling version that doesn't allow for "monk weapons".

Just forgot that 1st level set had that particular name to it is all.

DMs are even worse than players at understanding the alignment system.
>hrm these guys are X alignment
>let me fuck with them / i don't want them to do some thing, so let me arrange events so acting like X won't accomplish that thing
>oh the party did Y
>they must be Y alignment now
Not how it fucking works.

Okay turbonerd, but what the DM thinks counts as elementally Evil often differs from DM to DM and definitely varies between DM and player. While people can almost always agree on whether something's made of rock, the same just cannot be said of Good or Chaos. It's not how morality works, either in fiction or reality.

Also, I would've bet money on someone replying to that post with "your DM just isn't using it right" as a response. Probably the most common defense for shoddy mechanics.

Be super passive aggresive and derail his campaign and go "LOL IT BECAUSE YOU MADE US CHOATIC EVIL NOW".

Kill evey named NPC that probably has a backstory DM put work into.

Care for random nameless hobo on the street.

D&D is all about teaching and training your DM. Use punishment and reward accordingly like when you are training dogs.

Just record alignment on your sheet as good and take actions as if you were good.

Problem solved.

The Alignment system as a hole is silly shit.
There's zero benefit to it's usage, the only in-game effect it really has is stuff like having magic items deal direct damage to you when you pick them up/try to use them. So dumb.

Eve if you drop shield and restrict armor is still better than taking 1 level in monk.
Your bonus action is non dependant on Attack Action, so you can move twice and attack as bonus action, which is better than Martial Arts's bonus action
Also you aren't forced to use monk weapons so you can Attack with a Greatsword and still get a bonus action with dex or str that deals 1d4+Str/Dex

This is way better than 1st level monk and probably better than monk if you go Barb with that feat as a punchy mcfist

The other problem is that DMs are very quick to apply alignment shifts OPPOSITE a character's alignment, but not towards it.

An NG Fighter, leaning LG, is almost never going to gain another Lawful or Good point even if that's all he fucking does all day, because the DM either doesn't notice when you're in agreement with your alignment or doesn't care that yes, that still awards points (albeit it at a slower rate the closer to each extreme it is). The moment said Fighter does anything remotely Chaotic or Evil, though, BOOM.

Seems like the DM would've still been a shit.

The DM sounds like he doesn't understand alignments or running the game at all.

Ah of course, it should be a bonus action available during the attack action.

Aspiring DM here. Our current DM is getting a little backlogged, and expressed a desire for someone else to run a game, alternating weekends so it would give time and space to develop the games.

So I've been toying around with some ideas and want ya'lls feedback on one. Our group really, really likes Catan. So, I figured I would have a section of my campaign be Catan-y, building up a region or such, and having to manage resources like setting up/ protecting lumber camps and the like. This won't be a huge part, and they might not even ever get to it, but I still want to do it. Has anyone done something like this before, how did it work out?

Also, I'm horribly dreadful at designing maps. Is there a good place out there to get a map commissioned?

>It's not how morality works, either in fiction or reality.
It is exactly how morality works in this particular fiction. Most D&D settings, including the current "default" of Forgotten Realms, have an objective morality that doesn't give a hot gay fuck about MUH SHADES OF GREY REALISM or how it's so en vogue now and merely an excuse for self-pitying, whinging edgefests.

If your party never has any dealings with celestial, demonic, or devilish beings, that's your DM's choice, but alignment is incredibly relevent there. The Gods of most settings are active and reciprocal, even to people who are not Clerics (or Paladins) of them. The extent to which alignment matters is up to your DM, and your table can choose to not use it at all, but that doesn't mean the whole system is a waste or doesn't make sense.

No, the alignment system is only shit if you're shit otherwise it's not bad.

Honestly, alignment is an easy ha ha ha no way to quickly catagorize characters into one of 9 categories, much like the whole Introvert-Extrovert sort of stuff. Except it's about morality instead.

It's very vague, but some people enjoy being able to put people in categories.

This can still be salvaged. You're all evil now. Kill or take over everything.
This is what your DM made.

This. If a Good god is literally killing innocents and gutting babies and drinking their blood those acts are Good and trying to stop them is Evil.

Also, if you, unknownly, help an Evil guy who seems to do Good stuff, you turn Evil even if you didn't know that Good stuff was helping a greater Evil.

>If your party never has any dealings with celestial, demonic, or devilish beings,

Noble angels don't necessarily need to have a rote personality or "mode" of goodness, and it's completely unnecessary to have a campaign where you have multiple breeds of horned, scaly underworld monsters who segregate themselves by their "style" of Evil to different planes of existence.

In fact, this trope only exists in D&D and games emulating it, it's not in fiction or myth.

In the Greek Myths, there are a lot of beings in Hades that have a wide variety of agendas and personalities.

You better be joking or talking like a shit DM, because this is completely wrong.

>You better be joking or talking like a shit DM
You'll never know

This is not how alignnents work or what they mean.
Stop being retarded.

Nah, D&D has objective morality, and those definitions are cross-setting.

We're playing a fantasy game where magic and angels are real and just about nothing works like reality. Why would we incorporate real world morality and our own boring, known mythologies into it?

"Real" Biblical angels are horrifying and inscrutable and can do all sorts of shit we'd call evil but it's OK because God says so. Doesn't work that way in, say, FR.

Hey, I got invited to a 5e oneshot, point buy, level 5. Haven't played 5e before and don't want to mess with long spell lists. Also going in blind to party comp. What should I play? Eldritch Knight? Cleric? What do you think?

Bard works in any party.
If you don't want a spell list, Fighter Battlemaster also works in any party.

This, God literally said to the jews to kill everything in the promised land, women, kids, even cattle. That's evil as fuck.

He also killed every human and animal but for 2 of each species and Noah's family just because some people in two cities were partying too hard.

Let's just take Demons as an example.
They run the gamut from Careful Schemers with loyal servitors like Grazz't, to raging savage beast like Yeenoghu, to monomaniacs bent on a very specific agenda like Orcus, to patrons of entire established societies like Lolth. And unknowable horrors like Jubilex.

Why should these Demons with wildly different styles, personalities and agendas be smacked with a single "alignment" when human's aren't.

Isn't it enough to say they are powerful, extraplanar and really dangerous to know let alone piss off?

What is a good all around non flying race/class combo for a party of unknowns that will do well in a utility role.

I am soo pumped for this class. Planning on giving my pally a good death and going with Mystic when the UA take 3 is released.

Hmm... without knowing party comp... I guess a Lore Bard would be the safest choice.

Cleric is fine too. They can be build in multiple way depending on domain.

>Doesn't work that way in, say, FR.
True, but you CAN have your celestials making choices that are indeed good, but may seem cruel to "lesser" beings. Such as eliminating a supernatural threat preemptively or making the punk-ass players do it

like the classic when this kid becomes of age he will become a conduit to a great evil. We must kill him to make sure it never happens.

You might not give a shit about shades of grey, but they certainly give a shit about you. If this supposed "objective" morality were written down in a set of tenets somewhere it would become rapidly obvious that there are deviations between book and player, and that the idea of the Player's Handbook being objectively correct about morality is pretty silly on the face of it.

This comparison with gods is also bunk, because you run into the same problems with what they want. Corellon likes to see the cause of elves advanced. Is that good, or evil? Could be both quite easily by the metrics an average player would use, because elven prosperity need not always come without cost to the wellbeing of other beings. What's actually going on is that Corellon has a set of values that he pursues and whether you call it good or neutral is a judgment on those values that holds no more relevant information than the values themselves already did.

> implying YHWH is good
Go play SMT game now.

>Why would we incorporate real world morality and our own boring, known mythologies into it?

No one is talking about incorporating real world mythologies, I am using one as an example of an underworld filled with everything from relatively benign or helpful entities to ones that are insanely hostile.

"Oh, we've crossed into the plane where everything down to the plants is Chaotically Evil, watch out!" is trite, cartoonishly simplistic and needlessly simplistic.

>Why would we incorporate real world morality

Might as well ask why we incorporate real world weapons like longswords.

And I really mean it. Ask yourself why it's necessary to have longswords instead of some fantastical weaponry that isn't even close to a real weapon.

Lucky Halfling Diviner.
Well... actually any Lucky Diviner would work... or Lore Bard

>"Oh, we've crossed into the plane where everything down to the plants is Chaotically Evil, watch out" is trite and cartoonish
nigga we have a plane where even the ground is made out of compressed fire
if you can't hack fantasy, why are you even playing in a setting like this

That's why the good lord invented Dark Sun.

Because longswords are cool. Not as cool as spears with red tassels, but pretty cool nonetheless.
Christian mythology isn't cool, unless you're Japanese.
Even Christians don't like Christian mythology. They barely read the interesting parts of the Bible and try to go to church as little as possible. Why import that into D&D if even the fans aren't crazy about it?

Alignments really only exist to perpetuate stereotypical behaviors based on known myths, legends and fictional characters.
And since developed characters have a lot of nuance, it's really hard to shoehorn individuals like Fafhrd or Elric or Boromir into an alignment; they react to things based on their own prejudices, fears and longings, and not according to an "Alignment".

love this shit

>nigga we have a plane where even the ground is made out of compressed fire

So we are constrained to mimic FR/Planescape eternally? Why?
Those settings have a lot of crap that is completely illogical or silly.

They've basically done everything but removed Alignment from 5e as anything but Roleplaying Training Wheels.
You can't detect it, and spells like Protection from X broadly work on large categories of beings like Fey or Elemental without regard to whether they are Seelie/Unseelie, Djinn or Efreet.
The classes don't have Alignment restrictions any longer as a rule, mechanically it only comes up with certain relics that punish specific alignments.

If you can't understand that CE can capture those types, then you're a literal retard.

And those things being completely illogical or silly is what's fun about them, AND the fact that the silliness is what's fun about it proves that alignment can't be taken seriously. A plane of Elemental Good is only a good idea for a game where it makes itself alien right away; or in other words, where it separates itself from the common day meaning of the word "good" as quickly and completely as possible, whether it's in the sense of the plane being horrifying or in the sense of it being some kind of magical cakeland farce.

Are you usually this fantastically useless and unpleasant to have in a conversation?
I ask in all seriousness.

Because I have no real desire to exchange shitposts with you.

>it's really hard to shoehorn individuals like Fafhrd or Elric or Boromir into an alignment
Wrong.
>they react to things based on their own prejudices, fears and longings, and not according to an "Alignment"
This is exactly what an "Alignment" is. It is an average of their reactions to date, based upon their own beliefs and the situations they've found themselves in, compared to the cosmic standard for determining alignments.

Stop falling for the trap of thinking that being of one given alignment means you can't act outside of it. A character may only be NG because he is constantly performing L(G) and C(G) acts in more or less equal measure.

A character can act consistently based upon a set of character traits and beliefs you draw up for him right off the bat, and shift around in alignments throughout the course of several books purely by the circumstances be finds himself in from chunk of chapters to the next. There is little opportunity for someone who's not into spooky demon magic to get up to Evil shenanigans when he's stuck in the woods and never interacts with another human, but when he gets into the city he's cutting purses and robbing stores left and right. His shift out of Neutral isn't an inconsistency in his character, merely a reflection of his having an abundance of opportunities to do Evil to which he's always been predisposed. If he obtains enough wealth to satisfy whatever benchmark he needs to feel good about himself and stops robbing and from then on only does Good and heroic things, he'd gradually shift back up.

Angels and other goodly specifically leave it up to the pcs, else the pcs would endlessly whine.

Stop being retarded and actually think about it. We know you want to spew shit but actually think about it for once.

Because all of them, regardless of their methods and powers, boil down to wanting rampant destruction on a widespread scale. They want upheaval of law and unlimited cruelty thus they are CE.
You seem to think that alignments are so limited they can only hold one archtype.

If you can't understand CE can cover a broad spectrum of personalities within itself, as with all alignments, then you're a retard.

That's kinda my point; if your running a setting that's a bit more ambiguous than sky castles filled with Super-noble angels, say you have an Asgard analogue, then what's the point of labeling Alignments? Really in either case?

The various supernatural denizens of Neo-Asgard are going to have varied moralities, and it's possible to get on the good/bad side of most of them without doing something "Evil".

So what you are saying is that Alignments are for cartoonish settings; and I don't disagree.

Also this They're not cardboard cutouts of each other.
You're the only one who seems to think they're so restrictive and confined to only expression of alignment.

>Roleplaying Training Wheels
Oddly enough it's the people who have no use for alignment that suck the most at roleplaying. They can handwave their own inconsistencies and imprint their own OOC biases and desires on a PC's actions without a lick of shame or self-reflection.

>The classes don't have Alignment restrictions any longer as a rule
This was almost always retarded. Besides the very few classes where power and features were contingent upon staying within the good graces of some entity (Paladin, Clerics) there should have been no restrictions on class. One can appreciate and work with the alignment system while recognizing that some parts of it are stupid. There's no reason that a Barbarian or Bard can't be Lawful, especially when fucking ROGUES can, and nothing is going to reach down from the heavens or wherever and slap the Rage out of Ragnarr for being insufficiently flaky/random/whimsical.

Neither Grazz't nor Lolth are looking for the Apocalypse, their main bents are not "destruction on a widespread scale".

I got into an alignment discussion with a friend from my group last night
It happened because he had a minor squabble with our cleric as to whether or not to slay a hag that had surrendered
Both characters are good, my friend being "Smite all the evil" and the cleric simply wanting to protect the weak
Both of these characters are good, but they conflict with each other none the less
Alignment is effectively useless for deciding when characters will and will not have conflicts or morality due to the nature of them being vague in many areas and very narrow in others

>Oddly enough it's the people who have no use for alignment that suck the most at roleplaying.

That's laughably untrue and pretty indicative of your being one of the local theorycrafters.

Definitely. I just kinda jumped in there, sorry.

>Both of these characters are heroic, but they conflict with each other none the less
Fix'd for accuracy, really.

Are you implying that one or both of them are not good?

>this shit has been around since at least AD&D and people still haven't figured it out
Don't make me go dig out a 3X sourcebook, now.

Lolth is all about chaos and wanting rampant destruction on a widespread scale. What she does with her mortal followers is pretty indicative of this.

Graz'zt is all about widespread fornication, the loosening of barriers and taking what he wants. He thinks restrictions are the worst sin. This can turn into rampant destruction. And doesn't preclude him from wanting it.