What Went Wrong, (5e)

Honestly, the monks damage scaling is stupid itself.

Just have the monk start at a d8 and stay there. Rather than this 'Yay, I upgraded from d4 to d6. This is not a completely negligible increase at all!'

Make a non-monk have a d4 finesse unarmed and call it fine. It won't break the game to allow the fighter to actually punch out a guard during a prison escape. Oh no, it's a dagger you can't throw! The horror!

>That pic is real
>When he put level 1's against a fucking Dragolich

OP here. I have some personal examples.

I don't like how the proficiency system is irrelevant for the first 10 levels in comparison to the bonus from attribute.

I don't like how limited martials still are.

I don't like the shitty guidelines for how much equipment higher level characters get, and how it doesn't at all match up with what a character built at level 1 would have.

I don't like how the game heavily incentives you to generally not take any feats before level 8, or how there's a handful of feats that make a handful of combat styles worlds better than everything else.

I don't like how there is basically fuck all for skill dc guidelines beyond some vague shitty buzzwords.

I don't like that there's fuck all for combat maneuver rules.

And I don't like the straightjacketed subclass system and would have preferred the classes just be built to give you lots of choices at each level, much like pathfinder qinggong monk.

> Only one INT-based caster, combined with VERY few things that aid in having a high INT score, means that unless you're a Wizard or some min-max multiclass thing, there's no real reason to get it above a 10 outside of character background or training in the various knowledge scores.

I miss 4e's defences there. So you didn't have this 'Weak save' (Str, Int, Cha) and 'Strong Save' (Con, Wis, Dex) nonsense.

Many steps back from 4e, but a few steps forward.

The bounded accuracy thing is a good idea, but it just does not work well with such low bonus numbers and a d20, and the heroic scale 5e pretends to have.

Assimar equivalents or celestial blooded heros are hardly uncommon in fantasy stories or mythology. I have known idea why you would consider options like the Firbolg, Dragonborn, or any other "special snowflake" races inherently bad, I'm mean sure I could see crap players being encouraged to make their race their whole character but that's more a problem with the players not the game.
Everything else I can't really comment on.

Good list. Mostly agree.

>And I don't like the straightjacketed subclass system and would have preferred the classes just be built to give you lots of choices at each level, much like pathfinder qinggong monk.

Or, you know. 4e. Where literally all but about 2 (shitty essentials) classes work that way.

That part of 4e was good.

But i didnt like the "even low level pcs are superheroes" power level, how you have to build everything relative to the pcs rather than the pcs existing relative to the rest of the world, the tiny number of powers available in a given turn, the fact that your powers don't scale and you have to forget them for new powers, the arbitrariness of basically everything being 1/time period, all the individual resource tracking (5es at least a little better in that regard, but still far from ideal), or 4es very limited multiclass rules.

I also didn't like how almost all the utility magic was made into slow as fuck rituals, and that it couldn't do a decent job running FR or Planescape, because it was just a completely different gamethat didn't really resemble d&d and was basically just it's own thing.

Played it at release, and played it again shortly after essentials came out. Got about a year and a half of weekly campaigns, combined, but I haven't played it since like 2011 at this point.

But in short, even though I have a lot of annoyances and disappointments regarding 5e, I still prefer it to both 4e and pathfinder.

It's not 4e.

That's its best feature.

Its an honest attempt to fix d&d rather than the unrelated game with d&d branding that was 4e.

>But i didnt like the "even low level pcs are superheroes" power level

They really aren't and there are level 0 rules where they absolutely aren't.

> how you have to build everything relative to the pcs rather than the pcs existing relative to the rest of the world,

You don't HAVE to, it's just recommended and supported, since it makes a certain amount of sense for the more focused experience 4e is going for.

>the tiny number of powers available in a given turn

Option paralysis is one of the worst things about 4e. You have upwards of 10-14 powers available, on top of generic/improvised actions, using APs, etc. And most of them aren't even traps, most of the time. How the hell is that tiny?

>the fact that your powers don't scale and you have to forget them for new powers

Yepp, this one's bullshit

> the arbitrariness of basically everything being 1/time period

I mean... okay? You know 5e inherited this, right?

> all the individual resource tracking (5es at least a little better in that regard, but still far from ideal),

How is 5e not worse? It returned to slots +different number of /encounter /day abilities.

>or 4es very limited multiclass rules.

It's up for taste, but I can't think of anything you could reasonably have a problem with in actual play using hybriding+multiclass feats, or by just being a bard.

>I also didn't like how almost all the utility magic was made into slow as fuck rituals

Sure

>and that it couldn't do a decent job running FR or Planescape, because it was just a completely different gamethat didn't really resemble d&d and was basically just it's own thing.

FR, I'll give you, FR is its own beast, but it runs Planescape pretty well.

>Played it at release, and played it again shortly after essentials came out. Got about a year and a half of weekly campaigns, combined, but I haven't played it since like 2011 at this point.

I don't understand how you can get so many things wrong then.

Honestly, I really liked rituals because they were not tied to spellcasters. Anyone could learn to be good at rituals and it gave the knowledge skills more purpose.

Later on they actually introduced Standard Action options for rituals (There was one that made a portal between two nearby locations. If you did it as a standard action it only lasted a single turn rather than a good hour).

Rituals I'd call 'Good ideas but underdeveloped'. Which is why I really loathe the 5e rituals just being 'X spell doesn't take a wizard (As 90% of them are wizard spells) spell slot if he's got some time on his hands'

I'll agree on the power scaling. I'd have liked all powers to work like how 4e did At-Wills. You have a heroic power? It will list how it upgrades at paragon and epic. Bam, done AND the writers don't need to write as many powers.

4e was an honest attempt at fixing D&D.... the 3.5th edition in fact.

5e is some streamlining and nostalgia for everyone.

Memory is an imperfect thing, and it's been almost 7 years.

But:
>"Low level isn't superheroes"
The minion rules are what I'm referring to here. And things don't run so well if you try to run 4e without minions.

You don't have 10-14 options until late game. At the low levels you have very few. 10 options sounds reasonable for level 6 or so, after which point option acquisition could slow down.

1/time period isn't really inherited by 5e. Instead of every ability having individual tracking, more things use shared resource pools.

And in the case of your spell slot example, I can use the Spellpoint subsystem and then all of the spells use a single unified resource pool.

But even though you will have multiple resource pools in 5e (Bad), the number of resources to track is smaller than tracking each individual item individually. I don't have to track each power, just whether or not I still have ki points, or what have you.

Ideally, everything would run off of a single, unified MP pool, or everything would run on a strain type system like shadowrun or ghosts of Albion.

>4e multiclassing can handle whatever.
It can't handle changing careers at an arbitrary level due to ingame events.

And my other issues with it are just about personal preferences that lean more towards classless point buy.

4e was an attempt to fix 3.5 by building an entire game around aspects of 3.5 that many disliked, in a way that was no longer recognizably related to AD&D 1&2 or its settings.

The whole thing is built around the mechanics I hated most in 3e, from bo9s, and the individual resource tracking I hated along with it.

It also moves up to a very diablo power level where you're killing mooks by the dozen, which is simply not the kind of game I want to run, basically ever.

>"The Ranger"
kek

In all honesty, I think 5e is a step back from a lot of what made 4e good, and I think of 4e as the best edition of D&D so far. Glossing over minutia like the fluff complaints, I think my biggest issue is just how *low powered* everything feels in 5e compared to 4e.

Like, let's talk about Dragonborn.

In 4e, you know what you got? +2 Charisma, +2 to your choice of Con or Strength, +2s to History and Intimidate, Dragonborn Fury (+1 to attack rolls vs. Bloodied foes), Draconic Heritage (+Con bonus extra Healing Surges), and Dragon Breath racial power.

And don't forget that in 4e, a Short Rest was a 5 minute interval, not a freaking hour.

What do you get in 5e? +2 Strength, +1 Cha, Dragon Breath, Damage Resistance.

Even just in terms of amount of stuff, the 5e Dragonborn is a lot weaker. But it gets worse; in 4e, because every class could build from one of at least three stats, Dragonborn had at least one "in-stat" for Clerics, Fighters, Paladins, Rangers, Rogues, Warlocks, Warlords, Barbarians, Bards, Druids, Invokers, Shamans, Sorcerers, Wardens, Ardents, Battleminds, Monks, Psions, Runepriests and Seekers.

What classes do they synch up with in 5e? You tell me.

And to add insult to injury, Mike Mearls has freaking tweeted that he doesn't think Dragonborn are underpowered at all, because, and I quote:

"They might not come with as many total abilities but it's hard to argue with breathing fire."

They had some interesting and fun idea's in the open development process, and then listened to whining 3aboo's and threw them all out for the incredibly bland final product that we see on shelves today.

Short bullet-point edition:
>It's far too dumbed down, making for a far less interesting gameplay than both in 3.x and 4e.
>It's stupendously low-power compared to literally any edition of AD&D and D&D before it - you feel like a janitor instead of a proper hero
>It's designed by the humongous cock-breathing faggot known as Mike Mearls

>The minion rules are what I'm referring to here. And things don't run so well if you try to run 4e without minions.
You can go through paragon without ever touching minions. Heck, half the minions in paragon tend to be things like giant rats and blind subterranian liazrds; things that are absolutely sensible to be oneshot without being a superhero. I'm not even sure how killing a kobold with one stab is somehow superheroic.

The game works perfectly without minions, and I'm not sure why you claim it doesn't.

>You don't have 10-14 options until late game. At the low levels you have very few. 10 options sounds reasonable for level 6 or so, after which point option acquisition could slow down.

You easily have 10 options by mid paragon.

I agree that you should probably start with more powers, but first 3 levels are trainingwheels basically. This is also a lot worse in 5e.

>resource stuff

Look, you are entitled to your opinion, but the fact that you prefer managing a mana pool instead of "have I used this in this encounter/day yes/no" as simpler is fucking insane to me.

>It can't handle changing careers at an arbitrary level due to ingame events.

Depends on how impactful it is. If you just want to start picking shit from another class, multiclass feats cover it. If it's "I want ALL the abilities from this other class!" well, only rebuilding will cover that regardless of edition.

Also, it won't cripple your character like suddenly starting to take wizard levels on a fighter in 5e or 3.5.

...

Heck, this can be covered very well in 4e with a feat + choosing the right paragon path.

>And my other issues with it are just about personal preferences that lean more towards classless point buy.

Makes sense.

>Ideally, everything would run off of a single, unified MP pool, or everything would run on a strain type system like shadowrun or ghosts of Albion.

That Psionic classes moved towards that. They had more at-will powers and encounter-recharging Power Points. You spent power points to upgrade your at-wills into bigger versions rather than having separate powers.

>It can't handle changing careers at an arbitrary level due to ingame events.

I think part of it is 'What do people want out of Multiclassing' as there is a pretty wide variety of options. 4e Multiclassing works very well for 'I would like some X in my Y'. It doesn't really work so well for 'I want to evenly spit X and Y'.

Retraining into a Hybrid helps a BIT there but Hybrids (And especially Paragon Multiclassing, which was supposed to give what you are talking about there) were rather underbaked.

I rather liked 4e multiclassing as it let you add some iconic stuff from another class into your character without worrying about 'Will this scale worth a damn' or 'Will it prevent my main class working right'.

Which I think is a lot of my issues with 5e. 4e had what were (In my opinion) some really good ideas they were starting to play with in interesting ways (Psionic and Primal Characters were going into some weird but fun areas) and then it all sort of...ended. 5e basically discarded all of it entirely and mostly tries to pretend 4e never happened rather than being a place for the new ideas to finally get to their full potential.

Minions were something I really loved. Mind you, I come from a background of 7th Sea where I originally saw a similar idea. They allowed for groups of weak enemies without them having attack and defence scores low enough to only be hitting on 19-20.

5e is just a newfagbait and casualized shit

im sticking to 3.5 until everyone i care for dies.

>AND the writers don't need to write as many powers.

But that would be boring since many nerds enjoy the powers treadmill.
Fire getting stronger on its own isn't as attractive as Fire Bolt < Greater Fire Bolt < Hellfire Blast

Off the top of my head, some changes that would've made 5e better...

#1: Come up with better race balancing mechanics. Seriously, I like the sub-race system as a concept, but the balance for 5e races is all over the place, and mostly it's because WoTC can't seem to figure out what racial features are actually "worth" because they're not using a formula like they did in the last edition. Seriously, in what fucking universe are you living where Powerful Build is anything more than flavor text!?

#2: Give us more mana! One of the biggest issues with the Sorcerer and the Way of 4 Elements Monk is that we're supposed to rely on our mana sub-system a lot to have fun, but we don't get enough mojo to really do so.

#3: Short Rests stay at 5 minutes, not 1 fucking hour!

#4: Sorcerers get bonus spells based on their Origin.

#5: Try to retain at least some of 4e's procedure of individualizing each caster class' spell-list. 5e says they want to avoid making new full classes as much as possible, so it's not like it'd be that much work. The damn Bladesinger stinks because all it's got to work with Wizard spells, made for long-range combat, and none of the close to medium range spells the Swordmage had in 4e.

#6: Try to keep martials interesting. We've gone backwards from "martials have fun stuff to do each round and can do utility stuff in and out of combat" to "martials park their asses at the front of the party and hit stuff". What's so wrong with letting the archery ranger having "I shoot a barrage of arrows into the wall to make an impromptu ladder for my allies" baked into the class mechanics?

#7: Stuck to the Points of Light/Nentir Vale stuff. It was the first time we had fluff that was built from the ground up to be exciting and not just an amalgamation of random junk left over from Basic with retcons building it higher and higher.

Yeah. I liked the 4e psionic classes.

Id have liked the game a lot more if the whole game used that framework instead of almost everything using aedu 1/x resource tracking.

>it's not so good at "evenly split x/y"
Agreed.

And hybrids were rather underwhelming.

>i liked that multiclassing never resulted in screwing up your primary progression.
Fair. That part was a definite improvement.

Speak for yourself. I want differences in kind. I don't want to have to choose between "this is a new power" and "scale up the power you've been using so it doesn't suck".

>where is powerful build anything more than flavor text?
In 3.5 there's a massive jump in weapon damage from medium to large, and using large weapons is what powerful build did. It let you have some stupidly powerful greatswords and the like.

But yeah. Some definite good points.

Except I have 0 interest in nentirvale.

I love 5e as a whole, but have a few problems with it.
>Incredibly slow content release pace, somewhat explained by the fact that WoTC team is about five guys
>Forget ranger - this one was actually fixed, and forget monk - it's only one bad subclass, the rest of it is good. Warlock is the true atrocity - it's wonky spell recovery system means that for the first ten levels or so half the spells you'll cast will be Hex. Warlock is the Fighter of casters.
>Speaking of fighters, there were mistakes in their design too. Being boring and making four attacks should have been champion's schtick. Battlemaster should be making one-two attacks, but resemble a Tome of Battle class much more, when so far it's like a cheap knockoff. It's like WoTC took one step forward and two steps back.
NOBODY LIKES SUPERIORITY DICE, MEARLS, STOP MAKING SUBCLASSES THAT HAVE THEM
>There were many awesome video games with DnD license in the past, but I don't really want to play them, because they're based on old systems I don't like, like Neverwinter Nights 2. Where's my 5e based vidya? Where?! Well, I suppose it's much more expensive to make a video game now.

>And hybrids were rather underwhelming.
Not if you knew what you were doing desu.
Some of the coolest builds I've seen were jank hybrids.

>#1: Come up with better race balancing mechanics.

I really liked 4e's system there. It gave a decent framework for making new races

>Primary +2 to a stat.
>Choice of +2 to a second stat from 2 options.
>Common + 1 other language.
>+2 to 2 skills
>Encounter power
>1-2 minor combat shinnies.
>A non-combat shiny.

>#5: Try to retain at least some of 4e's procedure of individualizing each caster class' spell-list.

God yes. 5e's sorcery spell list is a fucking joke. It's the wizard spell list with less options. There is no spells that go 'I am a sorcerer'.

They could easily invent a few generic spells for each level that most classes get and then a few spells for each class. Give the sorcerer spells a wizard doesn't know even if they share a good bit of the list.

>And hybrids were rather underwhelming.

Agreed. They suffered heavily from a lot of stuff that 4e suffered from. 'We are working with a new system and doing new things' so they made misteps. So Hybrids tended to either be underwhelming or utterly fantastic (I'm looking at you, Warlock/Swordmage)

They were a major step up from the predecessor, Paragon Multiclassing but not quite there.

Hybrids and multiclass feats are like 10 times better than level by level multiclassing. Any problem they had was in execution (costing too many feats, the hybrid parts being unevenly designed), not in the concept.

>Neverwinter Nights 2.

I hate that more than NWN1 and I hate that too despite the fantastic community modules and story because the gameplay sucks ass due to real-time and diablo style instead of ToEE style.
Camera is shit, 3D style is flat and somewhat uglier than NWN1. Quite long loading times between screens despite crap models. Effects is lackluster.

And yes, I prefer a 5e video game if I have to pick between 3.5 and 5th, if just for no boring bothersome essential pre-combat buffing every short while.

Yeah, sorry, I should have specified the 5e version of Powerful Build, which only lets you count as 1 size larger to determine your capacity to:
Push
Pull
Drag
Lift
Carry

Because... well, let's be honest; how often is "I can push a bigger block of stone" going to be a game-changing racial trait? By what twisted logic does that compete with "I can spew a 15ft cone of acid damage once every short rest"?

Exactly! They played around with the formula a little between the various races - Vrykolas had that unique trait of losing Healing Surges when Bloodied, Changelings could Change Shape at will and so could Hengeyokai - but, really, it worked fucking wonders. Not every race was brilliant, but when's the last time that you saw an actively weak 4e race? Seriously, compare the 4e Kobold to the 5e Kobold on 1d4chan, and tell me which looks more fun to play.

As for spells... gods, I could rant for hours about that. But no, rather than accept that the Pathfinder Crowd wasn't going to come back, we had to junk what was really taking off as its own edition for Comfy AD&D Nostalgia Edition, with the spell-list reverting almost perfectly back to the original Wizard spell-list from 2e and 3e.

>Hybrids and multiclass feats are like 10 times better than level by level multiclassing. Any problem they had was in execution (costing too many feats, the hybrid parts being unevenly designed), not in the concept.
Yeah, I agree.

Videogames are cheaper to make now due to standardized engines saving a lot of work from having to be done over and over again.

>By what twisted logic does that compete with "I can spew a 15ft cone of acid damage once every short rest"?

At least you aren't being an idiot when you push something, usually, and it makes you better at it. Breath attack scales so terribly for a standard that it's not worth doing at all after the first few levels.

>Videogames are cheaper to make now

Artist salaries are far bigger than before.

>Making an RPG in current year
>Not expensive
user, who's gonna voice all those characters? Text to speech device? You gotta hire stars, and stars don't come cheap. Why do you think TORtanic was so stupidly expensive to make?

If Hybrids had ended up being a bit more generally functional (As opposed to a few really good builds and a heap of cruddy ones) the multiclassing issues I feel would have been less of a problem. As someone who wants to be a full on Fighter/Wizard could hybrid the pair.

That and I think making Retraining more prominent/simpler to allow for someone to have downtime and retrain into a hybrid.

Yeah, 4e's worst races tended to be the ones where they sorta phoned it in (Generally skimping on the extra minor shinies) but most of them were at least functional.

1/encounter as a minor action really made the 4e Dragonborn breath shine. It wasn't the highest damage but it was an extra thing you did and it gave everyone some minion clearing.

Haha. I forgot about the rampant voice acting. I guess it's just shifted around what work is done.

There's less time spent programming than there used to be. That was my main point.

Have they? I hadn't heard that. What's the reason for the artist wage hike? Is there a shortage I hadn't heard of?

>Videogames are cheaper to make now

Not if you want to make a game that isn't a text browser game.
Unique 3D models are very expensive and cost more than a few thousand dollars just for the model alone, without any animations, which cost even more..

>pal/sorc/warloc
>broken
kek, it still deal less damage than EB Turret lock, you're out of ASIs and you need high stats. So broken

>Incredibly slow content release pace, somewhat explained by the fact that WoTC team is about five guys

This one is really inexcusable. 5e is the best selling edition to date and WotC/Hasbro can't give them a bigger team? We're officially 3 years into the official release and 4(?) years past playtest and all there is to show for it outside of adventures is one real supplement.

There are indie publishers who operate on 1/10,000th of WotC's budget and manage to put out 2-10x more content. This is a "shoot yourself in the foot" level business decision. A game with a budget like this should be getting quarterly releases at least, they don't have to go full Paizo and release 5 published books per month.

Content drought WILL be the death of 5e and I'm already seeing interest wane with longtime players of the system and start reverting back to 3.PF. It's sad to see the potential 5e has get wasted.

Just go for the pixel aesthetic, then cheat with simple 3d models (like, say, Dead Cells does it).

>As someone who wants to be a full on Fighter/Wizard could hybrid the pair.

Eh, it's not actually a terrible hybrid, I think (genasi musclewizards could go well with fighter maybe?) but I'm not sure why you wouldn't just go with a class that does that out of the box.

Sorclock doubles up EB turret.

user, it's a d&d game.

We don't need closeup high poly models like in an FPS, we just need diablo 3/torchlight 2 type models that read well from a small scale.

Reminder that you're making an RPG. Reminder that your competition is, say, Witcher 3 - definitely not Pillars of Etenity or Tyranny, because those are niche games not made for wide audience.

>What's the reason for the artist wage hike? Is there a shortage I hadn't heard of?

Adjustment of salary because of the Internet, social media and sites like deviant art and pinterest which make competent artists and managers realize just how valuable their skills are and adjust the pricing of contracts appropriately, which priced them out of the range of optimistic indie idiots who think he can score talented artists for the cheap on the Internet

>Eh, it's not actually a terrible hybrid, I think (genasi musclewizards could go well with fighter maybe?)

Yeah, it was more of a general example of a classic D&D thing than a specific example of two that don't line up. 4e Hybrids were very uneven in design and quite fiddly, which hurt them.

I know a lot of players who left 5e to go back to pf because of the lack of content.

I held off on playing 5e for 2 years because there wasn't enough content for me to consider it worth my time, and what convinced me was the UA content and oota

It's just boring.

3.PF is a horrible mess but at least it's still sort of fun to play, with a lot of character options and spells and shit to choose from, and zany schemes to get into - mostly everything is possible by the system.

4e was reviled for a while but it's actually a pretty good system for tactical fantasy combat, and does that stuff well enough.

AD&D is all sorts of a mess rules-wise, very little of it makes sense by modern reckoning, but put together it all still works quite well and actually makes for a reasonably balanced game that's a lot of fun.

B/X is the most focused of D&Ds, and as a consequence the most balanced and the most solid: I find very little fault in it.

But 5e? 5e is more a product than a game. It tries to take everything people like from all these things, tries to please everyone, and as a result it just makes for a completely bland tasteless mess. It has absolutely no identity of its own. It works decently as a game, but there's very little fun to be had in it that any earlier edition couldn't do much better.

Then why you say the melee pal/sorc/warlock is broken when not only full EB warlock ia better but also the one you posted? And on top of that, Battlemaster deals more damage per encounter than all of them

Dexterity is overpowered. I don't understand how do you even fuck up this hard at game design, to be honest. Strength is completely useless for everything except two-handed fighter and monk, and neither is good. Finesse weapons were a mistake.

Lots of stuff is poorly defined, I'm looking at you Primeval Instincts. An example of it being used would have been nice.

Player characters do too little damage to monsters in order to be more balanced against each other. This makes it more viable to have them fight NPCs rather than monsters so that every combat is not a huge ten turn headache of HP bloat in which attack rolls are so statistics that you might as well remove rolling to hit completely and just nerf the damage by equal amount.

Hunter would have been fine if Mark of the Hunter scaled at least like a shitty smite or had more powerful version of itself, Monk would have been fine if he had it the same.

The beastmaster and no-summoning is in fact just an effect of the game by large reducing player agency. The idea is good but it's executed too harshly.

And now we play "Spot the 4rrie".

>Str
>Monk
wut?
Also what about Barb? or Pal?

Holy shit, you have no idea about anything, do you.

I'm not the guy who you originally replied to, and I understood it as "warlock/paladin" and "warlock/sorcerer".

>And on top of that, Battlemaster deals more damage per encounter than all of them

Only on short encounters and with magic weapons IIRC. Sorclock deals the same or better damage over 4 turns.

It's a d&d game. Your competition need not be witcher 3. If you want to go low budget, pillars and tyrant and torchlight are the way to do that.

If you think you can compete with witcher 3, well, you're probably wrong. Almost nobody can make those expensive games and not make them shit. Bethesda makes them passable, and cdpr makes them good. Bioware has been shit since after me1. And obsidian is making isometrics now.

So go with the isometrics and make a bunch of them.

Fighter can afford the feats that you actually need to go two-handed more easily.

1d6 finesse weapons are just the best melee option in the game if you can't do 1d8 ones. You could upgrade them to a rapier, but that's actually a waste.

It might be more that weapons are just shit. Spears are not a thing.

>I know a lot of players who left 5e to go back to pf because of the lack of content.

5e is rather on a shoestring budget after all that went to the shitter with marketing, murder-suicides and unexpected competition from 4e's run.

It's sorta why the UA content has been big for it. It's something they can whip up with an intern or over a lunch break and don't need to commission a heap of art/pay printing costs.

Does it really count if people are saying 'I like 4e'? That's like playing 'spot the redneck' and pointing at the guy with a 'my cousin has a purty mouth' t-shirt. They are not really trying to hide being a 4e fan.

>Indie idiots.
Oh. You're talking about amateur artists. I thought you were saying professional illustrators and AAA 3d modelers have jumped up in price significantly.

Sorlock deals 80 damage or so on average, Battlemaster deals 150+ first turn without counting magic items, 100 second turn

Dex weapons make for very good low-investment weapons. Raise your defence stat and you'll also get better with the dex weapon.

Str weapons (And Str armour) cap out better though. Full plate blows away 20 dex and 2 handed weapons murder dex weapons with all the support they get.

And again, you're wrong. You think Hasbro will let a license go to waste with some isometric indie-tier shit that looks like it was made fifteen years ago? No. Of course not.
>But Pillars and Tyranny
Pillars was made to make money on nostalgia. It worked, sort of, while Tyranny flopped.

>AAA 3d modelers have jumped up in price significantly.
Those charged tens of thousands for a model though and they usually do a set.

Sorclock does 8(d10+d6+5 ~ 14) at bare minimum with Hex. That's 112.

And then fighter goes down to about 60-70 for turns 3-4.

As said, it evens out.

Those are generally paid salary, not commissioned piece work.

You pay them by the year.

And Diablo 3? I mentioned it for a reason.

There are isometric games that aren't designed to play like Baldur's Gate.

Depends. They sometime do side jobs if the contract permitted.

Why did they remove superiority dice for all martials?
Why do martials get jacksquad to compensate for cantrip utility.

Sure. They can.

But wotc isn't going to give the d&d license to some indie developer working from his basement. They'll give it to a development studio. Who have their own artists, etc.

And those artists will be paid salary, not by the model. And it wont come out to anywhere close to 10k a model.

>Why do martials get jacksquad to compensate for cantrip utility.

I think the idea is that Strength and Dexterity have a lot of mundane uses without any cantrips to begin with.

They sorta... undershot it, but it's not a bad idea.

Give the 4e license to Firaxis already so they can make the game they always wanted to make.

>It worked, sort of, while Tyranny flopped.
This is the message every AAA game development going to take to heart.
Nostalgia sell but 2D RPG on its own don't. Hopefully, Beamdog listen to it too before they get crushed by reality.

Well, I was going on reply chain from someone who said video game development is cheap.
Obviously it's not.

>Give the 4e license to Firaxis already

They are already making XCOM 3. Besides, making RPG isn't their forte and it shows. Strategy is.

Oh yeah, seriously, you get more damage with Breath Weapon in 5e than in 4e and it's still pathetic by comparison, as I mentioned up in Tell me about it. I think 4e's Minotaur was usually considered one of the worst in the game prior to Essentials, and even then it wasn't so much "bad" as "no real benefits if you weren't a melee fighter".

Plus, we had Paragon Paths and Feats to try and buff up many of our races, and they could be some pretty awesome things. Remember that feat where a dragonborn could basically turn their breath weapon into a fireball-style ranged explosion?

>Remember that feat where a dragonborn could basically turn their breath weapon into a fireball-style ranged explosion?

Hurl breath. It gives me a really cool mental image.

>Remember that feat where a dragonborn could basically turn their breath weapon into a fireball-style ranged explosion?

I preferred the one that removed ally damage and gave them an accuracy buff for a turn as the flames of your breath ignite the hearts of your allies (Or whatever analogy you wanna use for your particular element).

>>D20 is just a garbage way-too-swingy resolution mechanic overall.
oh go fuck yourself whiner

Str has single skill you are right on dex.

But I can (and normally will) have good/high dex on any char since godstat

I agree Firaxis need to improve their RPG mechanics which is pretty lacking in their XCOM series despite how we are supposed to care a lot about the squad members.

>Str has single skill

That skill has a very wide range of applications, and you also use it for things that it doesn't cover; breaking, lifting, etc.

If the game was designed a bit differently, I'd roll CON into STR probably to be on par with DEX on the combat side.

Don't forget jumping

The new expansion seems to amp that up, with more random upgrades and even bonds forming between team members.

Jumping is covered by athletics, isn't it?

Don't remember though, but your jump distance is your str score

>Finesse weapons were a mistake.

Rapiers were a mistake. As long as the trade off was lower damage die it would be fine. A Rapier having the same damage die as a Longsword is bullshit.

That was me.

I didn't say it was cheap, I just said it can be significantly cheaper than it used to be, in response to the guy who said it's way more expensive now.

Eh. Not that guy, but he's got a point.

Its incredibly swingy compared to other games, due to the large size of the dice and the small size of the modifiers.

I really wish the ways of +1 damage dice from 1e didn't disappear, back when weapons could deal 1d4+1, 2d4+1, 1d6+1

5e is meant to be lower powered though, that's its entire premise. You seem have a fundamental misunderstanding of what's it's meant to bring forward as a game.

Yeah, the problem is the modifier size compared to the die size.

SW SAGA had the right modifiers for a d20 imo.

But it's only low powered for half the cast. The other still gets to Wish and Simulacra and whatever they want, basically.

Isometric arpgs are still selling, aren't they? Diablo, torchlight, etc? It's not like tyranny is the only game style with that kind of graphics.

5e is several times less lower powered than 3.PF at low levels. It takes at least 7 levels in 3.PF to reach the power of a 3rd level 5e character.

Not much. There are some fiddly bits and some classes should have been playtested more. It'll be interesting to see how it moves forward with Beyond as a digital release platform and Mearls' idea of backwards-compatible updates instead of any more edition-rebooting down the line.

If things go well it could easily be the basis for D&D for the next 20 years. But if it starts losing steam they might strongarm someone else in and ruin any sustainable long-term plans the edition has.