/5eg/ - Fifth Edition General

>Get rid of resource management and focus on at-will consistent power, as opposed to casters' limited bursts.
CHAMPION ALREADY EXISTS, THREABOO SHIT

Do the opposite of this. The basic fighter chassis is already a good at-will basis. What fighters need is the ability to do more unique tricks that affect how the game is played round to round.

anyone here play with the Incarnate: Last of the Lacers sourcebook? My group is interested in Avatar, but looking at the book the stuff seems sorta weak. Does it work well during play at least?

So, I'm also kind of obligated to say what I'd do to fix it.

So, firstly, I'd fix the resource. It's twice a short rest, which is most of the time. And I guess that's okay, but it just feels like unnecessary paperwork.

Let them activate bladesong as part of casting a spell or something, so they aren't always using bladesong but they are when they need to.
Ditch the whole AC fiasco. Bring song of defense down to level 3, and also give some sort of buff to BB/GFB damage or something like that.

Level 6 should then have an actually interesting feature because you don't really need it now. Maybe give them access to a unique couple of melee cantrips.

Level 10 can be some other thing, too.
Then level 14 can be some other thing.

And maybe it'll be a bit riskier because you have to spend spell slots to survive in melee, but hopefully the melee damage makes up for it and the other features are interesting.

Trying to figure out an order of the immortal mystic melee build.
Need str to hit things, need con to not die, need int for powers and wis would be nice to have above 10 for saves as would be dex. Cha is luckily not needed.
I'm getting real MAD over here.
Heavy armor is better than light/medium right? Plate offers better AC than leather shit and no need to invest in dex.

>19 str 17 con 18 cha
>200 hp boss
Man, I'm glad I'm not at your shitty table.

16/12/14/14/10/8

>GWM on vengeance
GWM should be used on devotion if at all, because you have sacred weapon.
Otherwise, pick up PAM you goddamn scrub. Especially at level 11+.

Then, if you encounter enemies that basically fuck the heck out of everything in melee, you can walk up and dodge or something.

Heck, you could even go quarterstaff+shield+defense fighting style for up to 21 AC with PAM.

Smite on crits. If you have PAM, you'll make 2-3 attacks before level 5 and 3-4 attacks afterwards, giving you plenty of chances for crits.

Also I'm playing someone with a -1 dex mod and I hardly go last all the time.

Once you get aura of protection, things get better.

Overall it just sounds like you're unlucky and don't have teammates making full use of you, or you have antisynergy with a team (The rest of the team are 'shoot then run away types' and you're a 'run up and hit things' type and all that means is you walk up and die while nobody else can ever be hit anyway)

also
>rolling for stats
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

>Want to make an homage to Argynvost
>Decide to go with a draconic sorcerer
>90% of all spells are fire damage

Welp, then, I guess not

shoulda been a lore wizard

Welcome to the weeb life. It's time to cringe the fuck out of yourselves.

I mean, maximum of 16 attacks in one turn? What kind of fucking bullshit is this?

I didn't want to roll stats either. But the GM insisted, and my dice didn't let me down.

And that situation was up to level 4. When we hit level 5, I left.

>Meanwhile, lore wizard is laughing their ass off as they cast with whatever element your draconic sorcerer needed

strawpoll.me/12466636

People actually like that gimmicky Totem Warrior garbage?

>200 hp boss
Is that bad?
Two weeks ago I threw a ~500 hp boss at my party as a climax of a long quest. They were level 6. The fight took three or four hours.

Talk to your DM to do basically a Fire sorc only you replace all Fire damage with Cold

I'm sure there's something to be said about game balance and number of creatures with cold vs fire resistance, but fuck it, it's a game.

>rolld 8d6 for Coldball

Also, silver dragons have paralyzing breath and regional effects that fuck with the weather, don't be afraid to be taking those

>Is that bad?
>The fight took three or four hours.

Kill yourself.

Its the better of the two PHB subclasses, seems reasonable it would do well in such a poll.

>Bosses that are basically just meatbags, but immune to everything but hitting them hard

This is an incredibly lame way to play.

In 5e, bosses should be supported by minions who help keep the boss safe even if, say, a 'hold person' spell manages to get through to the boss and the boss is paralyzed. The minions then have a way of keeping the heroes away from the boss to get their autocrits, and the heroes can try to find a way to overcome that. Or the minions simply attack the caster to break their concentration, and the heroes try to defend the caster.

5e becomes incredibly lame when it turns into 'Okay, I walk up and attack, because everything else won't work' for the next few hours, because it's designed around more dynamic combat where even bosses are somewhat more vulnerable.

Making a boss have high HP is just a really lame way of saying you lack creativity in 5e.

Bear gives maximum tankyness, Eagle gives fun utility and Wolf gives you pack tactics.

What's there not to like?

That last feature is really poorly worded. Should just say you get disadvantage on the attack. Also the max number of attacks would be 8 unless I'm missing something.

Being tough to kill was pretty much the only thing the boss had going for him. He didn't even hit particularly hard, just steady stream of damage on the whole party for the entire fight.
Attrition was the word of the day.
Also, the boss had around 250 max health, the party just fucked up trying to prevent his automatic resurrection back to half hp TWICE.

Action surge, that's what.

The reason I say 2d20 instead of disadvantage is because advantage and disadvantage cancel each other out. It is supposed to disregard advantage altogether, because otherwise the second attack would pretty much be a freebie.

Berzerker is a nice idea poorly executed.
Zealot is some meta fuckery with your barbarian killing themself a lot and everybody else dragging them back to be revived again, which can be easily limited by the DM saying 'lol, no clerics in this town.'
Battlerager is 'Okay, you have bonus action attacks but you're not berzerker.'
Storm herald.. I mean, I think it might have had something going for it? I just don't remember it being too interesting, but maybe it isn't so bad.
Ancestral guardian I don't remember being too bad but there's probably something wrong. Eh, whatever. It's probably just not strong enough.
Wolf barbarian is strong enough to make barbarian on par with paladin played in the right party.
Bear barbarian is just a nice comforting 'you don't die much' which works well for barbarogues. Honestly a bit boring, but hey, some people like an easy character.
Eagle leaves much to be desired.

Wolf is best.

hey 5eiggers you ready for UA: "Designing an Encounter" tomorrow or some other stupidly inane bullshit that's not Mystic??? I SURE AM.

>He has a feature to heal him back to half HP again
>On a meatbag of a boss

I mean, that's fine if it's not on a horrendous meatbag attritionboss.

It'd be cooler on a boss that has, say, limited spells, so they come back and each time it's not like you're starting from square 1 again, and both sides are slowly losing their resources, and the boss's tricks they tried last time don't really work (They had traps and such prepared, but the party knows how to avoid them)

So even if the party fights the boss a second time, the party can feel good because it'll be a 'Okay, we lost hard in that first round, but even though the boss is back again we know what we're doing and we're going to ace this' as they dance around traps, stop the minions from getting in before the boss even calls them and breaks their concentration on that one spell they knew fucked them up the last time, and so forth.

Okay, here's the rough draft.

I tried to shift away from short/long rest features, because those annoy me as much as they annoy the autist from the last thread. Instead, a lot of features recover after a ten minute rest out of combat, and superiority dice recover every turn.

I tried to give the champion fighter options, while still keeping it mostly the retard class. You can just use your improved crit every turn and attack. It's not much more mentally taxing than the normal champion is, but there are additional options available.

I tried to remove what I think are arbitrary limits on creativity. Things like the eldritch knight only getting abjuration or evocation, or only being able to bond 2 weapons. I cut a few maneuvers, and modified others. In general, maneuvers shouldn't increase damage directly, like they do in the PHB. The champion is an exception to this, it gets one maneuver that does increase damage.

Finally, there are no eldritch knight maneuvers. If you think of any, please tell me.

unfourtunately taking three or four hours is standard more often than not at our games

And there's a battle like that every other week too.

I don't even care about Mystic, but I just want something to scrutinize, really.

Some thoughts I just had:

Should eldritch knight maneuvers key off intelligence? That could be added to the bonded weapons feature.

If you simply must play sorcerer...

Sorc caps at 15 spells known

>>Cantrips
>Gust (wings)
>Minor Ilusion
>Ray of Frost
>Shape Water
>Thunderclap
>Mending (Or Frostbite)

st Level
>Chromatic Orb
>Detect Magic
>Disguise Self
>Ice Knife

nd Level
>Hold Person
>Snilloc's Snowball Swarm

rd Level
>Sleet Storm

th Level
>Ice Storm

th Level
>Hold Monster
>Cone of Cold

th Level
>Investiture of Ice

Here's where things get weird, but then again, they may stop mattering, because
>implying adventures go up to level 13

th Level
>Plane Shift

th Level
>Earthquake

th Level
>Wish

Sadly, draconic sorcerers don't get true polymorph, enabling them to transform into a real dragon

>dead level spells
r u a necromancer?

I reworded it to make it spell disadvantage. Better?

My d&d group is so bad we made a list of bad things we do and put them on a bingo sheet.

Really, so do I. I want to scrutinize something that was produced in an official capacity and feel like I'm contributing to the future of a product I may want to buy and a brand I wish to support.

Yeah I think so.
I might change it to say "you may hit twice with an attack if you forgo any advantage you have and make the attack with disadvantage" though.
Opening with "you may forgo advantage" is a little strange, usually "forgo" is used when you ignore something you don't want.

Without knowing what sort of foes you faced at what level I can't comment.

>Firstly, what the fuck is '2 times a short rest for a minute'?

Wild shape?

Hmm, I'll see what I can do. No other comments on the whole archetype?

I tried to make it as obnoxiously weeb as I could without making it absolutely broken.

So pretty much, dip into life cleric if you want to stand even the slightest chance of survival? Okay.

What happens when someone gets a Bingo?

ooh I get it, you played a fucking vengeance paladin

Care to share?

Critical Strikes seems awkwardly worded. What about
"After declaring an attack but before making an attack roll, you may expend your superiority die by rolling it. If the attack is successful you may add the result of your superiority die to the damage for that attack. If the attack is successful and the result of the superiority die roll is an 8, the attack is considered a critical hit."

This gets rid of the awkward "Roll the die." sentence, which is implied anyway. There's no need to state that the superiority die gets added to the critical hit twice, because it's explicitly a damage roll and thus follows the rules for critical hits in the PHB. It also clarifies a confusing use-case where an attack might have missed but the superiority die was an 8 (if the attack is considered a critical hit, does that imply it hits automatically, even if the to-hit roll was a 1?).

Fuck wildshape, too, while we're at it.

So pretty much, ban that.

You're one short. May I suggest Featherfall, as to simulate the silver dragon regional effect of slowing down the fall of anyone in a mile of its lair?

Also, I could swear there was a Wall of Ice

Maybe a bit one note. I think it's pretty good. Dealing damage when you sheathe kinda makes me want to puke so I guess mission accomplished.

>a confusing use-case where an attack might have missed but the superiority die was an 8 (if the attack is considered a critical hit, does that imply it hits automatically, even if the to-hit roll was a 1?)

That's good advice, and I'll implement your wording as best I can. However, this use-case was intentional. I like the idea of the critical strikes maneuver sometimes saving a failed attack. Do you feel that that is imbalanced?

Yes I did. I said so. It didn't look half bad.

Yeah, it's pretty single-minded as it has zero utility outside of combat, and really hinges on the one character archetype. But not much less one-note than Champion, to be honest. And it's all about "Mastering the inner bureido" so having out-of-combat utility would be weird, I suppose.

>Dealing damage when you sheathe kinda makes me want to puke so I guess mission accomplished.
All according to keikaku*.

Keikaku means plan

Ah ok. Next time, check out devotion or oathbreaker, if allowed.

Want to share the sheet?

Oh shit. It works.

Thanks

Let me guess. Druids?

Why is it that if you use action surge you can cast two spells in a turn but that doesn't work otherwise?

Because specific rules trump general rules.

Looks good. So basically, an archetype all about using a one handed sword, probably a rapier primarily, but a long sword if you happen to find a magical one. Delayed Strike might compensate a little for the lesser feat based damage potential... hmmm.

IIRC, it's because the only limitation on spells cast per turn is in the bonus action section, which says if you cast a spell with a casting time of a bonus action, you can't cast another spell except for a cantrip with a casting time of one action.

If you have an action surge, you can cast two action long spells, because they have no such rule.

it's weird and counter intuitive.

Just had my first player death.

>Party journeying out to swamp to collect valuable ingredients for potion
>Attacked by cultists as they walk down road
>Realise how most of the fights the party have had so far have been quite easy, the wizards in particular sucked
>Two wizards, each have 1 cast of fireball and level 3 magic missile
>They each murder a PC, almost killing a third

Gotta say, fireball is pretty misleading for a level 3 spell. They're all level 8 so I thought they'd be able to take it,

>200 HP boss
>getting dropped constantly at level 4
>has almost max str, con, and cha with GWM
>using the wrong channel divinity with vengeance paladin

Sounds like a ripe mess at both ends of the situation. The DM most of been throwing overpowered encounters at you, and you most of not been rolling well. Or you were just not playing paladin right. Possibly both.

More stuff:
- At level 7 I can push a Huge creature 15' with a hand crossbow? I know there's a fine line between suspension of disbelief and cool shit, but this is one of those things that treads close to the line. On the other hand, I am now literally David.
- Maybe I'm doing the math wrong, but at level 15 my critical hit chance goes from 17.5% to 30%? Up from the 5% chance that a non-fighter has. Why not just leave the die roll as a d8 and make the Critical Strikes feature trigger on a 7-8 instead? The extra 1 point of damage on average is massively underwhelming compared to a 6x greater chance of getting a crit than anyone else.
- I just realized that you never explicitly state that a superiority die is a d8 by default. Might want to do that - also, what about just making it a d10, making Critical Strikes work on the roll of a 10, and Superior Critical Strikes on a 9-10? More average damage, slightly lower chance of a critical.
- The EK is missing 2nd level spell slots from levels 7-10, which I'm assuming is an accident. If it's not, why mess with the EK's spell progression so badly? There's a unified advancement for 1/3rd casters

Critical strikes still seems weird. The crit chance gets huge, and having it trigger when you get an extra MAX_DAMAGE roll means that the crits will do more damage on average than they would otherwise. I know single-target big damage is the champion's whole schtick, but this potentially becomes absurd.

That doesn't really sound RAI.

Direct damage spells are super effective vs PCs and not so great for PCs.

How did the fireball fucking kill a level 8 PC? Max damage is 48, so it would only kill someone if they had 24 or so max hp.

They all have around 55 hp, first one did about 15 damage and the second did 32. I forgot to mention that they were being shot by archers at the same time but they did a minimal amount of damage. They mostly just cast silence on the warlock and bard to stop them casting.

>shoving attacks
This is one that concerns me as well. The most obvious fix is to make shoving/tripping maneuvers only work with melee weapons, which definitely helps with verisimilitude. But it also seems to punish ranged fighters. Thoughts/another solution?

>crit chance
The vanilla feature gives you double crit chance on all attacks, and this feature gives you 6x crit chance on one attack. I'm not sure if you were accounting for that in your math. If you weren't, does that change your opinion on the balance of it?

>what the superiority dice should be
Good catch, I'll fix it. D10s could work too. But going back to the above: does it only being on one attack change things?

>EK spell progression
oops, that's a major oversight. Thanks for catching it.

>he isn't one with the spirits
>he cannot see with the eyes of Eagle
>or run with the speed of Jaguar
>he cannot commune with the ancestors
>he cannot use the herbs to journey in to the spirit world
Its a fun archetype dude, no longer do I need to multiclass barbarian/sorcerer to do shaman stuff.

Sounds like "tales from encounters above Deadly"

Indeed. I feel bad and I probably should've balanced it slightly more. It wasn't even supposed to be a deadly fight. Poor gming on my part I think

Id check the pdf share thread and see if maybe its in the archive, if not im sure posting the request there would net more replies

So what all did this encounter have? Two level 8 wizards, two archers who could cast Silence?

Savage Attacker seems preeeeetty shit. Would it be too much to give it a +1 Strength bonus and make it apply on every attack?

The wizards weren't level 8, the only remarkable thing about them was that they could cast fireball. They had like 20 hp and 13 ac each.

Anyway, the encounter was 2 wizards, 2 archers each with 25 hp and 4 bog standard fighters each with 30hp who could only swing shortswords, two of them were also hypnotic patterned by the bard for a while until he was silenced.

Yes, I'd focus on playing out the enounters in your head before you throw them in.

If you have two wizards with fireball, it's a very much no fun allowed 'Okay, wizards appear, and unless you have counterspell they both fireball your entire party. Have fun losing all your HP.'

Then, imagine having casting that instead perhaps have mini-fireballs every turn. 'Okay, wizards appear, and unless you have counterspell they both fireball your whole party, but the damage isn't too severe.'
and then the party knows to split up next time to avoid area effect damage, and they mitigate the further threat or they fail to split up and suffer because of it. And perhaps they feel the casters are the biggest threat and off them first.

Making it apply to every attack means too much rolling, but +1 strength bonus isn't bad at all.

With about 3 attacks against a reasonable AC target, it gives you about +3 damage per round. Assuming you don't have reaction attacks, including crits, including-
Holy fuck I am not going through every modifier you have to consider to calculate savage attacker's exact value.

>having encounters without risk of death
>ever

Might as well go fight on foam swords and nerf guns IRL, it's more exciting.

Mini fireball sounds like a good idea. I might use that next time.

Nice strawman

Until the bard went down, I mean to say.

What if your party decided to attack some normal person that was bound and gagged for whatever reason?

That's not an encounter. The consequences - the investigation and possible arrest followed by a possible trial followed by a posdible execution - are.

if we get bingo we get deprived of yummy snacks
my friend has the list, but most of them are along the lines of "we started playing hours after we were supposed to", "I roll persuasion to persuade them" and "I roll [blank] to know literally everything"

You'll wanna keep in mind action economy compounded by monsters with unbalanced levels of offense.

I've avoided many caster foes for most of my DMing because of how hard it is to not kill people, though a strongly anti caster party could be cool (oath of the ancients is a must, obviously).

You're right, I guess I was forgetting that a Champion only ever gets one superiority die. That makes the impact of Critical Strikes much lower than I thought it was.

At the same time though, tying the critical hit effect to the superiority die roll makes the math weird, especially if it saves the attack. If the superiority-die-crit is also a de facto hit, then it also triples the chance of getting a guaranteed hit (instead of auto-hitting/criting on a 20, it's auto-hitting and criting on a 20 or an 8).

I would keep the die as a d8, but break Critical Strikes into two maneuvers. Something like "Precise Attack" that grants +2 or +4 to hit and the die roll to the damage; and "Critical Strikes" that adds the roll to damage, but also explicitly changes the crit range for the attack to 18-20, with Superior Critical Strikes increasing the range to 15-20. Precise Attack then loses the crit chance, but then synergizes well with GWM/SS for guaranteed damage. This way you could also increase the superiority die type as the champion levels, without having to adjust the math.

>Remarkable Athlete/pushing/shoving/grappling
You're also grappling an adult dragon. What about, "When attempting to push, shove or grapple a creature, you impose disadvantage on any ability check to resist your attempt" instead? That keeps the target range within the realm of the believable, but also illustrates that you're damn good at it by 7th level.

>The basic fighter chassis is already a good at-will basis
What at will abilities can basic fighters use?

Is PHB Hunter Ranger actually worthwhile at all? All the shit I hear about Ranger is mostly limited to Beast Master.

Sorry, replied to myself.

Good stuff. I'm gonna go run my weekly game and afterwards I'll get back to adjustments.

What's the earliest you would expect a party to be able to take on, say, 4 hobgoblin devastators and a hobgoblin warlord on a werewolf, assuming the PCs know what to expect in a general sense?

For those unfamiliar, devastators are level 9 evoker types whose understanding of magic is limited to purely destructive attack spells.

Attack. Shove.

Yes, its pretty good as an alternative to the more straightforward battlemaster archer.