/5eg/ - 5th Edition D&D General

So one of my players wants to pact with a devil, and that's all well and good, but he is playing a fighter and has no interest in playing a warlock (mechanically at least).

I wanna give him something good for a fighter but I don't want to throw too much at them to prevent an I win button. What should I do?

For the record some NPCs in setting have done the same kind of thing.

Go watch it then you baka

Watch literally any 70s/80s fantasy film in the vein of Krull or Conan and do that, but also say "but the party got there on a spaceship".

Give him a power that fighters don't normally get, but create a downside to using it. Like Dark One's Blessing but he has to make will saves to resist being possessed or something.

DM here. Heavy crossbows only and you get disadvantage.

>he has to make will saves to resist being possessed or something.
That seems harsh.

Reposting from previous thread:
I'm homebrewing a system to try to make rigorous travel fun and interesting. I fully expect to eventually accept giving up on DnD and using something else, but for now I'm still trying to cram this into 5e.

The idea I'm toying with currently pertains to encumbrance. Nobody wants to track that, it's not fun and it's a giant pain.

My solution is to give characters "slots", and you can carry whatever you want so long as you have a slot available.

For example, you have an armor slot. Any one set of armor can fit there without penalty. Unarmored barbarians can use it for loot if they want. You also have an ammunition slot, which can hold a set number of any ammunition. You have a handful of weapon slots.

Beyond your normal equipment that you rarely change, you might have a food slot, a water slot, and then a handful of free slots for holding anything. Loot, more weapons, additional supplies, rope, whatever.

Encumbrance, then, is a price you pay to manifest additional free slots. If for some reason you decided to carry every martial weapon in the PHB and then stumble across a magical potion, you can either drop one or take on an additional level of encumbrance to pick it up.

Obviously, the specific balance re: number of slots of various types is still wide open, and I'd rework encumbrance penalties as well.

Rather, does this seem like potentially a fun mechanic? Something that would create meaningful choices without too much bookkeeping? Keep in mind this would be part of other systems, for a campaign based upon travel and survival and exploration, possibly even a hex crawl.

Shit, forgot to turn off my trip previously.

It's my favorite adaptation of what is my favorite book. Well, either that or Muppet Treasure Island.

Never, ever watch the BBC miniseries, it's shit.

>That seems harsh
Hey, he made a deal with a devil. Honestly, as a player and as a DM, I love powers with a drawback like that. There aren't enough of them in non-homebrew, in my opinion. The closest thing I can think of is Barbarian with Reckless Attack and needing to damage/take damage to maintain their rage. The possession shouldn't be permanent; he should at least get a save every subsequent turn to resist it, but if he's getting a power that fighters don't normally get without multiclassing, it needs to have a drawback. It doesn't even have to be Dark One's Blessing. You could make up a brand new fiendish-seeming power on your own.

nth for Power Word: Bill and Wew

I guess it's better then nothing

What's the swiming speed of a creature without swiming speed? What's a character's underwater movement?

IIRC it's half speed?

Assuming it's not something like a Golem that would just sink to the bottom and use it's normal movement, albeit maybe on Dangerous Terrain since it might be muddy down there.

>killing doggos

This is why all goblins should be exterminated

I like the sound of this. Take it up with your players, and if they're willing, go for it.

>Does your party attempt stealth at all?
The shadow monk casts pass without trace constantly so the party cruises by. DM also lets us stealth roll pretty much in plain sight so we're basically on easy mode

Always wanted to run a goblin campaign... How did yours go on the whole? Was it fun? were there any domesticated animals left?

Give him a magic item, or give him fabulous wealth, or pull some political strings to make him a lord.

Honestly, the existence of the warlock has severely limited people's understanding of what a Faustian bargain can be.

>The King asks what this group of murderhoboing mercenaries is named
>entire party: uhh, I dunno. we kind of just met a few days ago.
>Rogue takes paper and scribbles "those assholes", hands it back and says "might as well make it official"

At least the king has a sense of humor and gave us until the next meeting to have an actual name to put on paperwork, but goddamn I hate trying to think up a cheesy party nickname.

Disciples of Bob.

I don't know why a DM would ask for a party name unless the party were all bards or were opening their own adventuring guild

So I want my warlock to be the master of at-will abilities. My plan right now is to take eldritch blast, minor illusion, friends, and prestidigitation with my warlock cantrips, then take magic initiate as my human feat granting me control flames, guidance, and beast bond, make my patron Undying for spare the dying, take armor of shadows, ascendant step, beast speech, fiendish vigor, mask of many faces, misty visions, and whispers of the grave, and then take the pact of tome for shillelagh and two other cantrips. What other cantrips should I pick up?

That's what I said.

But evidently the king wants some branding to go with the propaganda that the kingdom isn't about to get fisted by a combination of Hobgoblins, Orcs, and Necromancers we've been killing.

Use this. I'd suggest making lvl 2 premades for the player characters

Then for the dogs use mastiff or wolf, for the big dog use dire wolf, and for the horse use draft horse or warhorse. I used the easier of those options and the difficulty was just right - they blazed through every encounter with stealth and lucky rolls but the final battle was extremely close

The drop off for the hook would suck

Give one of these extra traits for each player character:

Goblin Trait - Bouncy:
When taking fall damage,reduce the amount by 1d6 (So, if you falls 20 feet (2d6), you instead suffer 1d6 fall damage).

Goblin Trait - Pustular:
Your face is covered in unpleasant pimples and outright boils that have a tendency to pop at inopportune moments. Although this makes you particularly ugly, you’re also used to discomfort. You have advantage on saving throws against being diseased and poisoned.

Goblin Trait - Goblin Bravado:
When no other goblin is within 5 feet of this you, you receive +1 to attack rolls (but not damage rolls).

Goblin Trait - Foul belch:
Once per day as an action, you can force a particularly odious belch at a single opponent within 5 feet. The creature must make a DC 13 Constitution save or be poisoned for 1d6 rounds.

Goblin Trait - Dog-Sniff-Hate:
You gain advantage on Perception checks using smells to detect canines (dogs, wolves, etc.), and a +1 bonus on attack rolls against them.

Goblin Trait - Big-Headed:
You gain proficiency in the Perception skill. When squeezing through a space smaller than you, you use twice as much extra movement.

Goblin Trait - Rude Song:
You are proficient in the Performance skill. As an action, you can sing an insulting song, forcing enemies that can hear and understand you to make a Wisdom saving throw against your Charisma (Performance) check. Enemies that lose the contest have disadvantage on attack rolls until the start of your next turn.

The new rogue archetype "Scout" is pretty shit, right? Skirmisher is good but the ones in the PHB give you better stuff overall.

Am I missing something? I thought there'd be at least one interesting thing in there. Did I miss the theorycraft thread?

Why is there a rogue archetype called scout now when that was already an archetype for the fighter?

>Goblin Trait - Foul belch:
>Once per day as an action, you can force a particularly odious belch at a single opponent within 5 feet. The creature must make a DC 13 Constitution save or be poisoned for 1d6 rounds
No that's terrible, make that per shot rest and give it better damage as the levle increases

>P o i s o n e d
>• A poisoned creature has disadvantage on attack rolls and ability checks.

So basically

Don't take Friends. It's so bad

Other cantrips that might be worth taking are Shocking Grasp, Guidance, Resistance, GFB/Booming Blade, Light, and Mending

>sneeki breeki
So simple and silly, yet I smiled.

Its absolutely amazing.

>No that's terrible, make that per shot rest and give it better damage as the levle increases

Try this for inspiration.

Shocking Grasp is fucking awesome when you're a ranged caster in melee who doesn't want to be in melee.

>walk up and hit caster
>get zapped and he walks away
>walk up and hit him again

how about no disadvantage
you'd still have to roll, and I might not tell you if you hit when your roll is a close miss.

It works best if you have an actual adventuring party with you and can run behind the fighter, or if you have a friend who is pinned down by the same enemy and also wants to escape.

more often it's
>walk up and hit caster
>get zapped and he walks away
>can't follow because I'll eat an opportunity attack from one of his teammates who moved before i got my next turn

Heavy crossbow only, and kills the range. probably equal to a dagger or hand xbow.

No disadvantage but requires attack roll to hit a specific place.

You won't know if it'll pull/carry or not; unless you inspect it with another roll (maybe int/ investigate etc)

I play a Paladin. I let the other players stealth while I charge into danger like an idiot.

Is it just me or is spirit guardians OP? It seems to be just about the best aoe ive been able to find.

Anyone have experience with this? Is it easy to use? My group's been abusing a bit and carrying around lot of shit. I don't want to give them a Bag of Holding yet, too low level.

>not playing a Treachery Paladin and backstab poison smiting people

zap him too.

I'm a beginner DM going to run Out of the Abyss. I was just wondered what the recommended amount of players was, but I can't find it in the book. Does anyone have a recommended amount?

>not playing solo
Sorry I forgot I was surrounded by complete plebs.

4-5
If you decide to let the NPCs survive they can assist the party and get by with 3.

With the new Primeval Guardian option, how would you rule such a ranger sporting a large sized weapon? Double the weight and cost to obtain one? Triple? Would they be able to commission some city smith to make such a weapon? Would there be any downsides to carrying one besides not being able to use it out of tree form?

Also, because it doesn't seem to be stated in any one specific place, what are all of the rulings that relate to size? Right now I only know of weapon sizes, carrying capacity, and that you can't grapple something two sizes larger. Are there any others?

What are some good magic items for a lower-magic setting? Eg., a flaming sword or bag of holding would be out of place before level 10.

>not DMing an adventure and playing the whole 6 man party yourself
don't come back here again pleb

whats your fav sourcebook? mine is pic related.

This is more complicated than I was thinking, but it does give some ideas, thanks.

Warlock 3 to summon a fuckhuge greatsword at will.

Eagle eye or whatever it's called. Glasses that give Perception adv, on sight based checks. but home-brew and put a time limit on it. The player becomes Blinded if they use it for longer than XX minutes.

Boots of striding or whatever. Increases jump distance.

Wand of magic missile. make it less than 7 charge if you want.

You can find/come up with things like that. specific utility things. Cool but you probably wouldn't buy at a magic shop. DMG is filled with good ideas that you can bend to your own game.

Weapon size isn't even a PC rule. It's in the MM or DMG if it's anywhere. PCs only have the rule about weapons with the heavy property.

I might go with the boots, those sound good. The goggles too, but instead of goggles I might have it be a gem you hold.

What about things that might not have immediate boosting properties/combat applications? More like magical trinkets.

tome of weeaboo fighting magic

Reading through the amazing number of copypasted maneuvers in it really makes you appreciate the "at higher levels..." style of 5e.

I'd re-use my giant PC weapon rules: use my own NPC statblocks so I can balance around a target AC, then give it more damage, and less accuracy until the DPR is where I want it to be. Then make even more damaging versions as the mundane equivalent of +1/+2/+3 weapons.

Because of how accuracy and damage works they're better against lower AC, and worse against higher AC.

You make the +0 weapons things like an uprooted tree trunk, or an anchor, or a stone statue, boulders, a rowboat as a towershield etc.

I also gave my giant PCs less AC and more HP/DR too so they were worse against high damage low accuracy, and better against high accuracy low damage. This way they had even more strengths and weaknesses.

What? Friends with Master of Many faces is the bomb.

Admittedly it requires an invocation but if you're taking it anyway there is nothing like it.

really clean boots

Water slides straight off them, and they're never dirty. They ignore difficult terrain due to swamp, mud etc.

bracelets of companionship

A matching pair of bracelets that lets one wearer instantly and telepathically know when the other is in grave danger.

How about, when he dies his soul is claimed. No ressurection for him.

Like Suggested.
However, possession is too extreme, make it so he counts as a Devil for detection purposes and spells that hedge out such fiends.

You read the part where the target of Friends becomes hostile after 1 minute, right? That makes Friends completely useless. If your whole goal is to antagonize someone while disguised as someone else, you can do that easily without magic: just be a dick.

>Making enemy attacks miss and hit their allies instead
>Invulnerable, illusory clone you can cast through
>Teleporting behind people and Pssht, nothing personneling them
>Capstone turns you into an invisible rusemaster
This is some shonen villain shit and I am eating it up

>Been off and on working on a tree themed cleric/druid character
>UA literally lets you turn into a tree as a Ranger
Would a 3 level dip in Ranger be worth it for a Druid 1/Cleric?
Would the tree form work transferred to a Druid archetype instead of Shapeshifting?

I love these.

THAT GUY time

you might recognize parts of this from earlier postings of mine

>evil campaign
>kobold sorcerer (me), bugbear fighter, human cleric, wood elf ranger (cleric's wife IRL)
>campaign opens with us being smuggled onto a boat tasked with stealing intel,using a scroll to blow the entire boat up, and escape
>we manage to escape to a nearby shore close to the town where we're supposed to deliver the intel
>5 minutes after entering town, cleric tries to strangle a shopkeeper to death over a bowl full of unknown magic rings
>rest of the session is mostly spent watching as his character is drawn and quartered in the center of town
>after delivering the intel to the Commander in town, we receive a new quest to hunt down an enemy; in order to do so we need to raise enough money to purchase a scrying from a local greedy wizard
>Commander also introduces us to one of his agents: a tabaxi ranger (the new character he rerolled)
>before leaving town, tabaxi goes into the same shop his last character died trying to rob and just buys the rings. Only 5 gold each
>we leave to go kill some pesky gnolls in the forest that had a bounty on their heads
>after killing the gnolls, but before collecting the reward, tabaxi decides to pull out the rings and examine them
>arcana score so low, DM tells him he's convinced 2 of the rings are not magical
>puts the two rings on
>after putting on the first two, immediately starts putting on all the others
>our characters are all pretty worried about what could happen with all the rings but nothing terrible has occurred yet so we keep moving
>on our way back, we notice a large number of wood elves (the current main antagonist race of the campaign) marching toward town
>we arrive to find a large battle underway, and attempt to fight our way to the center of town where both the Commander and the Wizard are

Meh, I just let the moon druid at my table use two wild shapes to turn into plants within CR limit.

They're just a type of elemental as far as I'm concerned

>THAT GUY time
>evil campaign

Stopped reading

Anons? Long story short, I want to do a homebrew conversion of the Chitines from AD&D and 3.5, but I'm running into problems with their "create tools out of silk" racial power from those editions. Using the Lizardfolk's Cunning Artisan trait as a basis/comparison, how overpowered is this?

Silken Craft: A chitine can weave semi-solid objects out of its silk over prolonged periods of time.
* As part of a short rest, a chitine can produce one of the following items: club, dagger, greatclub, handaxe, shortsword, javelin, spear, whip.
* As part of a long rest, a chitine can produce one of the following items: longsword, bastard sword, morningstar, silken armor (treat as Hide Armor sized for a Small creature).
* A chitine can produce armor for larger creatures, but this requires either more time or more effort. By completely sacrificing the benefits of a long rest, a chitine can produce one Medium sized suit of silk armor, or two steps towards the completion of a larger suit. Otherwise, it takes one extra long rest per size category larger when weaving the suit.

Hey /5eg/ Im gonna play in a game soon.

Its fairly generic fantasy with witchwild caribbean as an area. I was thinking of playing a swashbucklervoodoo man.

Would the best bet be a sword pact warlock? Or is eldritch knight a better option?

Attempting to create a parkour gadgetmaster.

My idea is main Rogue - either Inquisitive or Thief and dip maybe 5 levels into Artificer for some cool "gadgets"

Is there a better way anons?

there can be THAT GUY's in evil campaigns too. being THAT GUY just means you're insufferable about whatever it is you're doing. evil campaigns can be done well.

How the hell do you produce solid objects out of silk? You should be limited to things like cloth or rope, maybe a flail if you can find a rock.

That's more appropriate to Devils anyway. Possession is more of a Demonic thing I think.

Valor Bard is a much better option for a charisma magic swashbuckler than any blade lock

Blade pact warlocks are really, really bad. Consider being an eldritch knight or arcane trickster, or maybe just being a fighter with the Magic initiate feat to cast Hex or Bless with.

Pure Artificer. The class was already made with Rogueteering in mind

But ask your DM to give you the Warlock Spell progression without Mistic Arcanum

Waiting for level 17 to get Fabricate is just cancer gameplay

Tome lock is better at melee than Bladelock with Shillelagh. You also just need Charisma so you don't have to gimp your Eldritch Blast.

Or at least get the half caster progression, with level 5 giving you teleportation circle, hallow and other such permanency or high cost material spells

Chitine lore since their first introduction; they can harden their silk with chemicals they produce until it becomes a slightly flexible stony substance. They've always been able to use it to build their lairs, swords and armor.

The ruling says PCs can use large weapons to get the bonus damage but have disadvantage because they are not large themselves. With Primeval Guardian you wouldn't have disadvantage when using a large weapon.

More importantly:
>which lasts until you end it as a bonus action or until you are incapacitated.
You can stay in that shit indefinitely. Sure, you only move 5 ft., but you can just get your party to buy a draft horse and pull you around on a cart until it's time to kick somebody's ass. Pretend to be a carved tree until it's time to give people the long wood of the law.

Also, how much HP does this let you gain? Does it stack?
>You gain a number of temporary hit points at the start of each of your turns. The number equals half your ranger level. When the form ends, you lose any temporary hit points you have from it.

(cont'd)
>first fight we get into
>tabaxi shoots arrows at our fighter and at the other ranger's pet, KOing both of them
>after finishing the enemies and reviving the fighter, rest of the party rushes him and holds him down
>try to pry the rings off his fingers
>only one of the ten will slide off
>pull out my dagger and start cutting off all the fingers that still have rings on them
>tabaxi sharpshooter character now unconscious with only 1 finger left
>I say we just leave him
>other party member stabs him in the heart to finish him
>while this was going on, battle still happening around us, tracked by the DM
>we return to where ranger's pet was KO'd to find it dead
>continue toward the middle of town
>goliath fallen paladin, his third character in two sessions, is inserted into the campaign fighting alongside the commander as we approach
>as we get there we end up in a fight with a powerful elven spellcaster (my character, who had taken no damage in the fights leading up to this, was KO'd by him)
>to recap: just barely reached the center of town, my character KO'd, fighter only has 1 potion's worth of HP after having been KO'd, ranger's pet dead
>sounds of battle can still be heard off in the distance
>paladin player asks if the DM can change his roll20 token RIGHT FUCKING NOW
>DM says no
>paladin player quits the campaign (which basically means we lose 2 players since his wife was one)

it's an Evil campaign in the sense that we work for the evil overlord and our missions are working against the good guys, not evil in the sense that we commit random slaughter

Temp HP doesn't stack. The level 7 feature was errata'd.