/5eg/ - Fifth Edition General

When did DnD became a realistic medieval warfare simulation system?
>puny creatures and their 1d6+1 attacks
Goblins have +4 to hit and 1d6+4 damage with their bows. Lower levels is where HAM is actually useful for survival. It doesn't matter how "balanced" it is on higher levels because it's not a matter of life and death anymore. It becomes just a quality of life upgrade.

My retainers are a little bit too edgy knight-in-training tiefling and a dutiful half-elven maid.

Thank God someone finally fucking said it.

I hate how HAM, GWM and SS break the 5e convention of using floating modifiers. Fortunately they're easy enough to homebrew fix: HAM uses your proficiency mod for the DR, and GWM/SS drop your proficiency mod on the attack roll but add double your proficiency to the damage.

Barbarians have the potential to be cooler. But to answer your question, the best is a 3/17 Champion/Bear Totem combination.

A long-suffering elf of meager means but decent competency who works for me because I provide steady employment despite my adventuring.
I call him "Perceval", but that's not his name, nor will my knight ever call him anything other then Perceval, which has been the name of literally every squire he's had since he got knighted, just as every horse he's ever had is named Valiant.

My knight's a bit of a tit, to be fair.

No, not really. I don't see how they're more ridiculous than anything else in d&d.

>ask an incredulous "Are you fucking kidding me?" question fairly early in the previous thread

>spark a full thread argument about the subject

I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I had fucking no idea this was something so contentious.

>Goblins have +4 to hit and 1d6+4 damage with their bows.
1d6+2 with their bows. You don't add proficiency to damage.

>Yikyak
Am I the only one who expected a knickknack paddywack give a dog a bone reference here? Possibly dogbolds?

Yeah you're right, it's been a while.

Is a Duergar Monster Hunter a good idea? Seems like he'd be hard to hit with Saves against most of the more debilitating abilities.

The general idea is a Duergar who roams around hunting creatures that mostly live in cities and in caves. Uses his Invisibility to hide from them and Enlarging to deal with big creatures.

I was just trying to think of kobold names. I do have a campaign setting where the continents are name Ne'er, Fa'ar, We'ever and Ya'ar.

The players have only been to We'ever and Ne'er so far so they don't know to be mad at me yet.

>Ne'er, Fa'ar, We'ever and Ya'ar

Unfortunately, yes. They were designed for the complicated build that makes PHB Beastmaster Rangers viable but involves so much finicky bullshit that no one actually wants to play one. Outside that, they're pretty useless.

>those names
Look at you go you fucking baller.

Currently playing through LMOP, but my party beat the living shit out of Venomfang when we got to Thundertree, we took him down below half HP and forced him to flee in under two rounds of combat, and the only hit he got in was a single claw attack on me.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that our party was larger than seems to be the norm (six of us, plus Reidoth helping as an NPC). We got really unlucky on rolls, but we managed to deal ~50 damage to him with a combination of Reidoth casting Moonbeam, our Paladin getting a lucky Thunder Smite-powered halberd attack in, some chip damage from me (fighter) and the monk, and then a final attack where I stuck my rapier into a space between his belly scales and Reidoth casted Heat Metal to cause the sword to burn him horribly from the inside out.

No wonder the faggot ran, we had him on the ropes.

>When a player doesn't show up for the session because he tried to kill himself

It was caused either by his depression or my DM skills I reckon.

I thought no one would mention it, but yeah, they're pretty dumb.

Maybe you depressed him with your DMing

Also a distinct possibility.

If you see this in hospital or whatever H K, feel free to tell them it was my DMing. No one wants to play without you here so we're gonna put off the games until you're back.

Does anyone have good Mystic builds for a party that's already highly specialised on melee combat? Got a Fighter and a Beastmaster, one GWM and the other Shield Master. So anything that can support them would be ideal.

What's the best Cleric domain and why is it Arcana?

Yeah, but they are scared shitless of pistols, and want to fill the same single handed trigger pull aesthetic.
So pistol bows it is.

>the best is a 3/17
>level 20

You misspelled 'Life.' If you're looking to be the best healer, Life makes your heals better. If you're looking to deal anything else, Life makes your heals better so you have more time to spend on other things.

An orc spawn lass no one wanted to take in.
She pretends to be a male because it's easier than dealing with the annoyance of correcting people who don't care anyway.
The temple that provided for her after her mother died in child birth basically didn't have room for her anymore (and she was a distraction to one of the priests, DM didn't give more details on what kind of distraction) so they foisted her onto my character during a visit for confession and guidance.
So far she's proven strong and cunning, if taciturn and a bit moody. It could be her age or heritage.

>healing at all

Okay, so in Thay the Red Wizards control the country and are basically an Evil Wizard Alliance, right?
What's this I heard about them being magical arms dealers or something?

Gee, I sure am happy that I get +3HP from Healing Word. All it costed was interesting options, a good Channel Divinity and a spellist that includes things not on the Cleric list.

Life's good, it's not the best though. If you're the only person in your party with any form of healing then it's probably the best.

Light, their Channel Divinity AoE doesn't break the Sanctuary + Spirit Guardians combo. They can also give attacks that make it past their Sanctuary disadvantage.

agreed, brother! many people should enjoy the life cleric path for life

repost, but i need some recommendations on a martial build in a four player party starting at level 1 with at least one wizard and one psion; probably want to be tanky, most likely a half-orc

Magic initiate fighter. Gotta love your heavy armor and shield spell.

It was a change during 3e that actually a lot of people liked, unlike most major Faerun changes during 3e.
Basically Thay is this alliegence of generic dickbag wizard tyrants who gave repeatedly tried and failed to counter the Eastern section of Faerun with magic and enslaved monsters and demons and basically anything else they could use because like most evil organizations they basically are riven with nasty infighting and ambitious plots because every single one of them thinks they're the greatest potential wizard-tyrant ever. You saw them all over Faerun enacting plots that supposedly would help them conquer Faerun but they were kind of poster boys for high Int, low Wis behavior in their total lack of common sense and their inability to get over themselves.

During 3e one of their leaders had the bright idea to actually make use of the fact that they had more wizards then anyone other then Halruua and they started becoming magical arms dealers, flooding the rest of Faerun with mass-made cheap magical items while selling monsters and magically "improved" monstrous troops to the rest of Faerun from these enclaves where Thayan laws applied. Not a lot of people trusted them, but many western Faerunian nations and cities had zero experience with the conquering side of Thay and so just let them in because why not, cheap magic items are great.

What's funny is that there was a LOT of argument about it in Thay itself despite how fantastically wealthy and ridiculously successful it was; a bunch just wanted to go back to being Sauron-wannabes and others thought that MAYBE controlling the magic item trade in Faerun was smarter and more effective long-term then loosing yet another war to their three neighboring nations for the umpteenth time (Rasheman, Mulhorond, Aglarond) despite logically being able to beat all three.

Why could they never beat those countries?

For a few moments back in 3e, Thay threatened to be something other than improbable cardboard cut out evil wizard land.
This was met with mixed responses as many gamers hate any depth more than smitable hp sack worth XP, yet still desire Magi-marts.

Primeval Guardian Ranger who's sworn to kill other Orcs. Was exiled from his tribe for being weak and raised by Dryads who found his ugliness interesting, they trained him to be a guardian of the forests.

Ancestor Barbarian, his tattoos made out of his father's blood leak off his body into those he attacks and force them to fight him. Hopes to find someone who can really beat him in combat to bare a child with so they can carry on the tradition of the blood tattoos.

Fighter Knight who was captured by an order of Knights as a kid, forced to be a sparing partner with young squires. One day as a teenager he used his years of training in combat to kill all the squires he was put against with a wooden sword, then managed to escape. Spent years roaming around trying to find someone willing to take on a Half-Orc Knight.

Because they're the Bad Guys.
Specifically decadent racist mageocracy bad guys.
They trade off with the zhents on being the designated evil shit bagland where PCs are supposed to either join the resistance or just enjoy killing everyone.

>Halruua
Best country coming through.

Mulhorond was a bronze-age nation until maybe late 2e and the rest of 3e, so technologically it was stagnant. That said, it had as many priests as Thay did wizards and they were led by Incarnates of their actual gods, which dramatically evened the playing field.
Aglarond was heavily militarized (militia service and training was mandatory), and it was on a narrow peninsula that effectively bottlenecked Thayan attacks, limiting their ability to fight back. It was also sort of led by the Simbul, who was one of the Seven Sisters and who loved to Greater Teleport into the middle of invading Thayan armies and unleash tiny magical apocalypses that fucked up their formations and command structures something fierce.
Rasheman was even MORE frustrating to them because they were basically Slavic Conan land filled with berserkers and Kievan Rus-style warriors led by a few extremely powerful spellcasters who STILL managed to beat them simply because the terrain was so unforgiving and because the Thayans could literally not stop screwing each other over.
The Zhentarim were funny, because they came off as being FILLED with lunatics who nonetheless worked with a few stable people who managed to keep everything functional.
I think one plot point in 3e was that one of the primary "underling" guys who's job was making everything run smoothly while his megalomaniac bosses killed each other was finally just DONE with their shit and left the group.
He'd actually fit in with the much more practical mafia-style Zhentarim in 5e really well.

Speaking of the Zhentarim, I wonder if any of Manshoon's clones are still kicking around somewhere?
I actually liked him for being the embodiment of Evil Wizard Shenanigans.
Also his hat was cool. Mask. Gorget-thing. Whatever.

5e Zhent is basically the new 3e Thay.
He's basically a video game enemy.
First you fight him as a boss, but later, his clones start showing up everywhere as tough but regular fights.

>He's basically a video game enemy.
First you fight him as a boss, but later, his clones start showing up everywhere as tough but regular fights.
He really DID have some of the most ill-advised plans ever.

>evil wizard leader
>Has a second-command who serves as the highest priest of the god of ambition and domination.
>Predictably he betrays him, comes to assassinate Manshoon.
>Turns out when he gets killed his soul ends up on one of his dozens of stasis clones
>Turns out that that plan has one major hiccup; when Manshoon first transferred into the clones they all woke up at once
>Turns out they all have his powers and personality.
>Turns out they all think they're the real deal as they wake up and are filled with a psychopathic urge to kill each other.
>They have a massive wizard-fight that blows up half of Zhentil Keep and forces Fzoul to bail just due to the sheer arcane firepower being thrown around.

I remember one of his clones went and got turned into a vampire and took over the Night Masks.
It's like he's literally incapable of having ideas that aren't 100% crazy or something. He's the sort of wizard that thinks fusing an owl with a bear and then giving it an insane hatred for all life is a GOOD idea.

He was the reason the Zhentarim couldn't have nice things.
Or rather, an avatar of the prevailing derp that kept them a non-threat that invariably solved itself given enough time.

>tfw deciding which one of the various Gunslinger homebrews on DM's Guild to use.

Hand Crossbows are the most powerful ranged weapon, HTH.

I'm making a very off-the-cuff surrealist tower that's sort of a dream sequence that's popped into the real world, but it's mostly just someone's house that's gone haywire.

So far I've got a room where everything is massive and the party are the size of mice, and one where the kitchen table and the dreamer's dog are on the ceiling.

Doesn't have to have loot or surprises or anything, it's just a fun destination.

Anyone got any ideas I can chuck in? Anything surreal but relevant is welcome.

I want to play a GOO warlock as a subtle nod to my old character who willingly sacrificed his soul for the greater good. Is the warlock any good? What pact is best?

Otherwise I could go eldritch knight as well.

A room with a slowly rotating skull. It does nothing else

I dig it. Into the tower it goes!

barbarians are kinda weird now. i always envision them as getting shot full of arrows and javelins until theyre a pin cusion because of their physical damage resistance

Statues that dance around the room, throw in a Mimic.

Is the expanded spell list spells you would always get in addition to the spells your class chassis gets or do you have to choose from them?

>What pact is best?
At what?

All the doors/hatches/chests/cupboards open the wrong way.
Any wrong way, and it's never the same way as last.

Also, books are full of gibberish, blurred text, or words changes if you read twice, NPC's speak with the voices of people the party knows, or is unintelligible rumble/mumble.
One of the rooms is slow motion, in another people can float as long as they focus completely on it.

homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/

Anyone here know how to change the color of text? Plan on making a white background, but I want to change the color of the brown headers from the #### markups to be blue or green.

Baby Beholder called Dizzy.

He found it one day, decided to raise him to be good and reject the evil of his race with the old "Religious shame" training.

So far it's worked, he uses his magic to fill out his costume and pretends his single eyeball is a head.

So basically there's a holier than thou cock of a knight followed around by Octodad: the next generation and ocassionally smacking him with the flat of his sword if he does something vaguely evil or even threatening.

He's pretty useful in combat though, our DM scaled him as a CR 7 beholder and all his abilities do half the damage of a normal beholder, but he never uses them unless Brunswick, the knight, is unconscious or elsewhere.

He's also good at carrying things because he can just use telepathy to make it float instead of carrying it himself.

That was my 3rd ever campaign, and he ended up becoming a character in the 4th campaign as a beholder that became the head of a paladin order after Brunswick died in the underdark fighting Dizzy's original father.

Weird surrealist weapons (just an outline, blocks of color floating above an empty hilt, a rolled up painting of a sword) that deal 1d100 - 40 damage on hit, and yes if they get a negative number the enemy heals for that much.

It's rare for a "powerlevel" feat to scale so that it stays equally relevant, let alone get significantly better (which I think is unheard of?).
Simply nerfing something like GWM down to a -5 for a +5 still makes the power attack better in almost every circumstance, and actually still implies a scaling, as you typically end up having more to-hit compared to enemy AC at higher levels (making it rarer and rarer for the power attack to be a bad deal.)

Besides, what's the point in altering GWM so it's not a flat number just so that you can refer to a variable? If anything, that's more complex and a worse user experience.

Beholders are born as adults.

you got a source for that?

So I hate points buy as it lets everyone perfectly tailor their characters to have no weaknesses and be special snowflakes.

Just using standard array makes everyone identical.

Random rolling of stats always causes issues with some players being gimped and others being overpowered so doesn't work either.

How would you feel if your character was generated by randomly picking one of the 60 or so valid combinations for point buy?

This method means that nobody is underpowered or overpowered as every combination is identical in terms of points but there's a broad range and variety of stat combinations. Some will of course be a bit more optimal than others but that's a far cry from the wild swings if random rolling or the identical adventurer territory of picking your points buy.

They are literally dreamed into existence by their 'parent' beholder.

goblins are the only acceptable monster companions?

Just use point buy at 30 or 32 instead of 27.

so then could a beholder birth a beholder that artificially looks like a baby beholder but is in fact an adult?

either way I didn't know this at the time, so it worked for the info we had.

That still let's players choose their stats which isn't fun as it creates traps for new players and allows munchkins to min max.

>So I hate points buy as it lets everyone perfectly tailor their characters to have no weaknesses and be special snowflakes.
At the cost of being bad at their main stats. So why?
Most people will put weaknesses down because they want to actually have a couple of +3s.

And not everybody needs a weak stat. Not to mention, weaknesses don't have to be represented in attribute scores.

You've still gimped some players with those stat arrays, because a monk wants X but this other player wants Y. I mean, sure, it works, but it has the same inherent properties of rolling for stats, even if it's on a very minor scale and you could just point buy.

Let them do so with a slightly expanded selection to give them more options.

Stop trying to micromanage them.

>creates traps for new players
If you're a fucking idiot, maybe
>allows munchkins to min max.
Munchkins, being allowed to minmax? Impossible! Nobody could ever do that!
Oh, wait, they can min max no matter what you do. Roll for stats? They can pick the class that's most suited to their stats. Roll for array? Again, they can know how to make the most of their array while newbies will fall into traps because they don't realize that monk really badly needs stats and therefore if they have 15, 14, 14 they should go wood elf rather than, say, half-elf, whereas if they could point buy their stats the half-elf would give them two 16s still.

Yes, and promptly kill it.

Isn't newbies falling into stat traps part of the fun

To be fair, no matter what system you use, the munchkins can abuse it and the newbies can fall into traps.

Point buy at 30 or 32 is fine.

Gives you slightly more wiggle-room to diversify stats but not enough to be gamebreaking.

Standard Array is fine, too, though. I usually just use it instead.

well i guess his daddy was too busy to murder him that day then.

If you just want something that's kind of generally pretty good, but also very clearly isn't cheese, just go Fiend.
Fiend has fireball and dark one's luck, and the rest is good too but seriously what more do you really need?

High WIS wizard makes sense for most people when they first start try D&D, you know.

And it's still possible as long as they also take high int. It makes sense a wizard can be wise.

With 30/32 point buy they can still get good stats on dex and con if they wish as well.

With my set-up, passive perception is calculated from both int and wis so having both is good in that regard, it gives them a wide range of skills (wizards are good non-combatants) and if they did dump dex and con a load I'd give them something to compensate slightly for it.

If they refuse to conform to the meta, they just end up filling a different role where they're very cautious in battle but end up being a bit better out of combat than usual.

hand crossbows exist in real life though??

Does a Half Elf Cleric with knowledge domain work as the base for a good support character?

Rest of the party will likely be a monster hunter ranger, some sort or charOP melee character and with all likelihood a Warlock or Sorc.

So do people with Downes.

They never beat Aglarond largely because the Simbul, one of the Seven Sisters and canonically more powerful than Elminster (but less experienced/skilled) liked to ambush and obliterate Red Wizards she thought were threatening her kingdom.

So most Red Wizards didn't have the balls to try, and even the really big ones like Szass Tam were wary of it because the problem with the Chosen of Mystra is that you're rarely engaging just one of them. If you fight one, you'd better expect to have to deal with at least one or two more before the fight is over, since they're smart enough to work together.

Admittedly, Mystra told the Simbul to stop casually obliterating Red Wizards, and even approved of the magical arms dealing Thay was engaging in (it spreads magic around), so she had to take a lighter touch eventually.

No, because the point of the Manshoon Wars were that ALL the clones woke up at once. They murdered themselves down to 3-4, one by the time of the Sundering books, and that last one actually wound up a Chosen of Mystra, at least for a while. He still has silver fire, anyway, even though Mystra revoked the title.

>>Turns out that that plan has one major hiccup; when Manshoon first transferred into the clones they all woke up at once
That wasn't the problem.

Normally only one clone wakes up at a time, and they were triggered to only wake up when the previous one was dead.

The problem was that when one of the clones was made into a vampire while still in stasis, the spell collapsed on itself, so it kept going "is clone X alive, no, wake up next one, is clone X alive, no, wake up next one, is clone X alive, no, wake up next one" because clone X was a vampire and by definition dead. And wound up accidentally triggering EVERY clone at once in the most hilarious chain-looped resurrection fuckup of the 2e/3e era FR setting.

There's also the 3E Lords of Madness version.

If I'm playing a monk, I get to add my DEX to attacks instead of STR. Does this mean if I go to shove/trip someone I can use DEX? Or is shoving prone always STR?

i am making a satyr monk who has joined a mercenary group.

what could be my backstory?
i am thinking of something on the lines of " i was an orphan raised by a kung-fu monastery but as i grew up my satyr nature took over and i wanted to see more of the world and fuck bitches, so following the counsil of the head monk ( or whatever a monastery leader is called") i decided to get out and join a mercenary group".

but i am so shitty at inventing stories and i already had to scratch several backstories and give up playing with that DM because he tought my backstory were stupid or didn't fit his world.

Shove/Grapple is an Athletics(Strength) check.

Monks don't get Expertise so it's not worth attempting even if your DM houserules otherwise.

well, satyrs are supposed to embody benign chaos, and monk is the epitome of discipline and order, so it'll be pretty difficult to explain, but something less cliche than "Orphan" would be better for it. Maybe he's a monk because he likes fighting, and learning to fight properly can aid in his trickery, then once he knows how to fight he decides to test out his newfound skills on the road, so joins some travelling mercs as they pass through the edge of the faewild.