/5eg/ - Fifth Edition General - Everyone Apparently Bans Dragonborn Edition

>Unearthed Arcana: Greyhawk Initiative
media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/UAGreyhawkInitiative.pdf

>5etools:
astranauta.github.io/5etools.html

>/5eg/ Mega Trove:
mega.nz/#F!oHwklCYb!dg1-Wu9941X8XuBVJ_JgIQ!pXhhFYqS

>Resources Pastebin:
pastebin.com/X1TFNxck

>Previous thread:
Do you (or your DM) allow all UA, some UA, or no UA at all?
(Revised ranger doesn't count)

>Do you (or your DM) allow all UA, some UA, or no UA at all?

I take it on a case by case basis based on the campaign and the character concept a player presents to me, but I tell my players not to EXPECT that they'll be allowed and to have a plan for a PHB race/class/whatever if their UA idea doesn't fit with the game.

Mystic is always banned in all it's forms because fuck the psychic-pokemon "create an anime character" class.

>Do you (or your DM) allow all UA, some UA, or no UA at all?
I do not allow any UA. I prefer core only with some restrictions.

>Everyone Apparently Bans Dragonborn Edition
I don't see why. Dragonborn are cool dudes, and they're not even a particularly powerful race. Setting reasons I guess.

o shit they deleted the mega.nz folder

>Setting reasons I guess.
If you read the last thread, that's pretty much it.

Do you allow revised ranger? (The most recent one, not the one with fucking Ambuscade)

Here's a question, how would you build a Dex Paladin who refuses to wear armor, but have it still be a viable build?

Substituting the the Barbarian's Unarmored Defense for armor proficiency would be the ideal solution.
>DM vetoed it and I don't want to push it
So that leaves me with 3 options, all including take a lvl or 2 before paladin.
>1 lvl in barb for Unarmored defense
>1 lvl in monk, same as above
>2 lvls in warlock (hexblade) for the armor of shadows invocation
Am I missing anything?

Are there any that you shouldn't allow in their current state?

>Mystic
>Theurge
>Mystic
>Lore Wizard
>Mystic
>Mearl's Initiative Revisited
>Mystic

That about covers it.

I don't allow any UA content. Books only in my game. That includes the UA Ranger which is crazy overpowered especially in any Wilderness campaign.

I've played games with two players and they've loved playing their rangers , who have been highly effective members of the party.

Sadly wotc listens to white box forum whingers who likely don't even play D&D but instead just play out pretend fights on forums. Remember that 4E came into existence because of those very whingers and wotc created a game made up of fixes for things everybody on the forums who had never really played D&D hated about D&D and took out everything people happily playing, so not having enough time to complain on forums about non-existent problems like martial/caster imbalance in a co-op game, loved about D&D.

That game wasn't D&D at all but some weird heroic tactical miniature game and mostly attracted video game kiddies, and turned all the real fans who actually still wanted to play D&D away to Pathfinder for better or worse.

So think about that the next time you use UA content especially the broken ranger.

Why exactly is the new ranger broken? It looks like a ranger that's not worthless, but nowhere near as broken as some other existing classes *coughWizardscough*

interesting post

My policy on UA is "you have to ask me first so I can double check it for stupid brokenness, but generally I'll say yes."

>do not allow any UA
What about fixes like the revised ranger?
>some restrictions
Such as?

Comparing 4e to UA is completely moronic. The exact problem with 4e was a complete lack of transparency/playtesting, whilst UA is part of the philosophy that letting players see the content before it's released might be a good idea.

>UA

depends on the campaign Im running. Serious campaigns with a strict setting, I'll need to go case by case, and might disallow most. However, Im also running a more light-hearted one-session campaign where people jump in and out, and in that game anything except for UA multiclassing

Oath of Redemption from the Trio of Subclasses UA. No armor or shield, but 16+Dex AC

currently running SKT.

how would you guys recommend tying in Imyrith and Slarkrethel and dropping hints early on so that they dont just pop up as deus ex machina? That seems to be my only remaining problem with the story as a whole. I definitely want to increase Slarkrethel and the cult of the kraken's role because my warlock has a 'mystery patron' which is actually going to end up being Slarkrethel.

OK guys half elf (2) rouge 1 (4) lore bard 4 (4) knowledge cleric 1 (2) ranger 1 (1) + 2 skill proficiency's from background and 3 from the skilled feat= 18 skill proficiency's which is proficiency in every skill using only PHB stuff.

How quickly should i kill myself?

>Do you (or your DM) allow all UA, some UA, or no UA at all?

I allow my players (actually encourage them) to build the most powerful character they can. If a players goes for a less optimized character for roleplaying purposes, then I reward them with better gear and inspiration pts. So either way, everyone ends up being equal (ish), but my players know my games are 50/50 combat/rp.

Okay, so for some reason I've decided that I want to create or adapt low-magic versions of most of the D&D classes. Basically this means no spells at all. Problem: Wizard.

Solution: the 3rd party game Adventures in Middle Earth seems to have done a lot of the legwork on that front already: the Scholar class is directly inspired by Gandalf, Radagast, and so on.

Now, the Scholar as presented in Adventures in Middle-Earth is very much tied into the setting's distinct mechanics (Shadow, corruption, lore, etc). So this is an attempt to divorce it from that.

The problem is that it's perhaps kind of too tied into asking the DM for permission, but I wasn't sure how else to show low-key "magic".

Anyway, what do you think?

>Having to get skill proficiencies and roll to bypass obstacles
>Not just playing a wizard and having a spell for every obstacle in the game

>>Mystic
Not even after the revisions?

What I'm doing is to reveal the Hekaton plotline earlier. That way the players know that someone named Iymrith is messing with the court, and you can start dripping hints that strange cultists were seen on the island where the Queen was killed. They may not be able to investigate right away, but you can start the plot flowing.

Just wait for something to kill you.

You're a level 7 character who's highest class level is 4, that seems like it wouldn't survive combat encounters very well.

>Lore Wizard

So much this. It is baffling how absolutely out of whack the powerlevel of that class compared to any other wizard variant is.

Don't forget that it should be revealed...IN SONG!

Seriously I'm going t make STK: The Musical happen.

Reminder that Mystic is written so poorly that their claw attack has no action cost listed and is basically a free action RAW, letting you attack as many times as you have Psi-points to spend, their darkness "spell" has no duration listed and RAW lasts forever, their charm person doesn't alert the target even on a passed save, and about half the of their other abilities also apply secondary effects on passed saves. Also Psionic disciplines are specifically not spells, don't require components of any kind (meaning you can't disable a conscious mystic in any way), can't be counter-spelled or dispelled, and ignore all abilities relating to magic defense.

Mystics are fucking cancer.
And that's not even counting how half their shit reads like someone trying to shove their super original shonen anime character into DnD.

>Okay, so for some reason I've decided that I want to create or adapt low-magic versions of most of the D&D classes.

for what purpose

A character dies in your campaign, for one reason or another there's no way to resurrect him, do you.

>Make him re-roll at the same level
>Make him re-roll at level 1
>Make him re-roll at the same level but with penalties as if he'd been ressurected
>Make him re-roll at his last level but with any XP reset.
>Another option?

Also if you let players re-roll at the same.level how do you stop a player playing a fighter at the early levels to level up safely and easily then suiciding at an appropriate moment and re-rolling some high level wizard?

Yup and me and my wished up Simulacrum army have no place in our games for op shit like that which caps out the second you hit double digit levels

Lets be real, Lore Wizard was just Wizards of the Coast letting the smart wizard players know that Sorcerers are still for mentally inferior plebians who actually care about things like "fun" and "roleplaying". It's no coincidence that right after the Sorcerer UA dropped, we get a Wizard UA that includes a wizard with even better Meta-Magic than the sorcerer.

So, Wizards of the Coast set the new adventure in Chult because people are sick of the Sword Coast. Eventually, they're going to move onto other settings entirely.

So I have two questions.

1: Which setting do you want them to bring back first?
2: Which setting do you think they're most likely to bring back first?

ESPECIALLY after the revisions.

Re-roll at the same level, and since I use milestones like civilized people, nothing else is required.

>since I use milestones

.Another class is overpowered, so the overpowered class you're talking about it totally balanced and OK.

Even if this is bait, you're a fucking retard.

Did you know that wizards are also the superior clerics, because they are INTELLIGENT?

>Such as?
Certain race and class restrictions, alignment restrictions, and certain optional rules omitted.

UA is carefully allowed under condition i can tweak/nerf/ban them any time.

Dragonborns are still better core race than gnomes or tieflings, frankly, but i am still rather... unexcited about them.

I dunno, 'cause I want to? It's why I made a Beastmaster class.

Re-roll a new character with an amount of experience equal to the average experience of the surviving party members.

1. Spelljammer
2. Eberron, in order to show off their Mystic class once they get it up-and-running fully.

Copy-pasting this meme:

Just off the top of my head:

1. Simplicity. Psionics adds an entirely new, parallel set of magic to the system that all of 5e has used to date. Any players or DM that wants to use psionics has to learn an entirely new set of "spells", "casting" rules, and interactions with existing rules.

2. The new interactions conflict with (nerf) the existing balance/usefulness of several parts of the game including spells (Counterspell), at least one feat (Mage Slayer), and every rule or feature that triggers or interacts with "spells" (since Psionics is explicitly not spellcasting). This steps on the toes of those races, abilities, classes, and feats that interact with magic or the existing spellcasting system.

3. Expanding on 2, lack of interactivity. 5e combat (and even social encounters to a degree) are inherently about altering your behavior as a reaction to the the environment, the NPCs, and your party. Before Psionics, when a magic user tried to alter a social or combat situation with magic, everybody present had a chance to see it and could act accordingly. The only exception to this rule was a sorcerer investing build resources and class resource to Subtly cast a spell (and even in that case they still have to be touching a focus). Psionics gets to completely bypass this pillar of the game for free- no investment required. Every discipline or talent a Mystic uses gives no indication it is about to occur, no way to prevent it from being "cast", and little indication of who or what caused it. This near-immunity moves the game away from interactivity to a space where Mystics simply get to do magic while others must always try to cast

Chickn

Dragonborn's art from 4e was great

>milestones

That's fucking disgusting, dude. This is a blue board.

yeah, i am actually thinking of doing something similar. the party is doing the quest from lifferlas from goldenfields and they are going to seek a druid in the high forest. i think i am going to have him do some scrying and have some info on what is going on. i feel like introducing hekaton and neri can be done by the oracle, but rumblings of a spooky secret society and an evil dragon should be introduced somehow beforehand.

1. SPELLJAMMER
2. umm.... probably not spelljammer

Do people really not care for milestone level-ups?

Or if you were not a crack baby with severe autism you might be able to interpret the message.ystic is fine and doesn't break the game especially compared to most other core classes particularly at higher levels where they get jack shit. The wording problems may need to be cleaned up but really only for subhuman things such as you that aren't smart enough to figure out that the charm person ability works like charm person without it being spelled out word for word

Begin screeching below

How much does the alternate initiative UA fuck casters with that "you can only cast a cantrip if you're hit before your turn" thing?

Sounds kind of neat.

Revised Ranger, it's OP

Nah, it's just shitposting (probably from the same guy). Nobody fucking used exp anymore, especially given how it only encourages murderhoboing. Milestones are pretty much the norm around here. Gronards need not supply their input.

>milestones

...

>Mystic doesn't break the game.

Oh god, you're one of those people who's super attached to the idea of playing an anime character, huh? I have never encountered anyone who's bitched about mystics being banned who WASN'T a complete weeaboo.

In all seriousness, yes, I strongly dislike them, due to how innately arbitrary they are.

You never have to justify not using optional rules, but what race/class restrictions do you have? More importantly, why?
As far as alignment, do you just mean the typical "no evil"?

Surely you mean "artificer."

why is everyone on this board so ass blasted about milestones right now? I use it because it stops your players from asking how much xp they got every 2 seconds, it discourages murder-hoboing, and it gets the players minds off of xp and more into the story. they become more concerned with solving the story than running around killing everything.

So the trove's collection of maps for SKT are incomplete. Is there anywhere else I can get those maps? (Aside from purchasing them?)

>Remember that 4E came into existence because of those very whingers and wotc created a game made up of fixes for things everybody on the forums who had never really played D&D hated about D&D and took out everything people happily playing
t. someone who never played 4e. Ironic, isn't it?

Well, both psionics and artificing are a big thing in Eberron, and those are the two full classes that they've made, so Eberron seems pretty likely.

It's just people memeing about how anything geared toward "narrative" play is verboten.

Yet you say this shit on a Taiwanese Drag show message board

While at the same time ignoring any actual relevant point. Lemme guess your are one of the dumb fucks that also complained about the Gunsmith being OP too right?

I've used milestones since the days of 3.5. Less book-keeping and less incentive for players to murder everything.

EXP was a fucking nightmare, people gamed the system, forced constant adjustments to encounters when players levelled up and became stronger quicker than I anticipated, and generally served no purpose except giving players a videogamey "score" to wank over.

This. And grognards who think it's "railroading" if they can't kill their way into over-levelling the campaign arcs.

Yeah, but...it's just so God-damned arbitrary. It also means that I can't hand out XP rewards for roleplaying or resolving problems with things other than combat, or completing quests, or whatnot.

I'm not memeing, I'm being totally serious. I hate milestone leveling.

If you're just going to hand out exp over whimsy impulses like "roleplaying", how is that any different than milestones?

its actually the complete opposite of arbitrary. you use it to level the party when they hit a specific point, and no earlier, no later.

Is a wujen/wizard multiclass as ridiculously broken as I think it is?

Am I the only one that believes the Lore Master Wizard isn't really that bad? Lucky Diviner, that's real cheese.

>Have to wait till Lvl2 before being able to subout damage type
>Can only change save once per short rest
>Have to wait till lvl6 before getting inferior to sorcerer metamagic
>Wait till lvl10 to hotswap one spell per short rest

>grognards who think it's "railroading" if they can't kill their way into over-levelling the campaign arcs.
For grogs xp=gold

Xp rewards for roleplaying are counter-productive. All they do is give the players who already hog the spotlight an incentive to do it even more, and the less loud or less interested players get setbacks from which it's hard to overcome.

"Our party is gonna go out into the woods and kill boars until we're level 20."

is somehow less arbitrary than

"Hey guys, you finished your first real quest, great roleplaying and fights all around, I think that calls for everyone gaining a level."

"real d&d fans" don't play 3.pf

Mystic could be an OK class if someone put a leash on Mearls, actually spellchecked his work, and balanced the "cool" ideas against existing content.

But yeah, in it's current form, Mystic doesn't belong in the game. I'd say I;m hoping Version 4 gets it right, but after 3 failed versions already, maybe it's just better if they let the idea die, or at least give it break for awhile.

>It also means that I can't hand out XP rewards for roleplaying or resolving problems
dude, there's handful of other ways to reward players, Inspiration, Boons, loot, personal favors from NPCs, helpful companions, powerful familiars, a base of operations, etc.

>you use it to level the party when they hit a specific point

Yeah, but regardless of what happened in order to get there. The players could fail their way through the leg of the campaign, or succeed beyond their wildest dreams, and in either case the "reward" is the same.

Like, for example, in one 3.PF campaign I ran the players were supposed to go to a marsh and recruit the wild elves that lived there to help them defend a city that was going to come under attack by a massive army of goblinoids.

The players:
- Directly insulted the wild elves, to their faces.
- Failed to do any of the "side quests" (save the chieftain's son, for example)
- Failed to kill the black dragon that had been tormenting them (the "big thing" that they had to do in order to get the wild elves' aid) (I will grant that this was *initially* rigged as the black was a Xorvintaal dragon who had the come-back-to-life ability, but the players failed to kill it dead in the rematch, too)
- Failed to kill the black dragon's goblin rider who was a leader in the goblinoid army.

The one thing they were able to do was destroy a number of eggs for greenspawn razorfiends that were going to part of the army. That wasn't enough, and the wild elves told the players to fuck off and refused to help the city.

If I used milestone leveling, the players should have nevertheless gained a level even though they nearly completely fucked up this part of the story.

Players should not be rewarded for fucking up.

1. Eberron, just to get it over with
2. Eberron, because it's terrible.

So, the tomb of horrors is now in chult?

>Do you (or your DM) allow all UA, some UA, or no UA at all?
For me, all UA is allowed under the assumption that UA can be buffed or nerfed at any point in time.
My only exception, of course, is Lore Master. Mystic and Theurge can be worked around by simply asking my players to not be dickholes (aka Powergaming). You can't not be a dickkhole with Loremaster, it's baked into the archetype.

>Do you (or your DM) allow all UA, some UA, or no UA at all?
Depends.hta
Some UA, after FAQ, can be useful to portray archetypes that otherwise require interesting logical contortions to be viable (e.g. the unarmored non-shield-using frontline melee weapon user is replete in mythology and stories, if somewhat non-historical, but is a quite poor choice in core). So... maybe. Sometimes.

UA feats is a crock of shit that reveals such a misunderstanding of how arms worked that I wonder if the (very slight) improvement in historicity between 3.x/4e and 5e's equipment tables was unintentional.

>"Our party is gonna go out into the woods and kill boars until we're level 20."
No good DM would allow that. At least, not without serious consequences. You shouldn't treat your game too much like a video game where you/your players can fuck off on pointless sidequests forever while the antagonist just twiddles his thumbs and does nothing.

>The players could fail their way through the leg of the campaign, or succeed beyond their wildest dreams, and in either case the "reward" is the same.

I mean... I guess, if you're running a pre-written module straight from the book with no DM control at all. Otherwise a party that fucks up might reach that milestone, but they'll reach it poor, almost dead, having multiple enemies along the way, and generally in rough shape.

Meanwhile a party that plays well will all be healthy with no serious/permanent injuries, have allies who owe them favors, some good loot, and generally be in a good place to continue with the next part of the adventure. Level is not the only guage of "success" in an RP.

I feel even bad experience is experience and you can always learn from your failures.
Sure, characters don't deserve reward in game, but why not players? Are your players playing to "win" the game? That is not necessarily bad, mind you. I would prefer game that isn't so "task oriented", though.

No, the Tomb of Annihilation is.

>If I used milestone leveling, the players should have nevertheless gained a level even though they nearly completely fucked up this part of the story.
uh...no? Milestone isn't just "Yay you got to [AREA] you level up!" It's "You've completed this arc of the storyline, you level up!"
If they didn't complete the arc, they don't level up.

Well fuck, whats the difference?

one is scary, the other annihilates.

I guess we'll find out two months from now. I'd imagine that ToA is a little more fleshed out with characters, etc. and not just trap after trap after trap.

>It also means that I can't hand out XP rewards for roleplaying or resolving problems with things other than combat, or completing quests, or whatnot.
No, it means you don't HAVE TO do these things. The only motivation players have is completing the quest, whether or not it invovles fighting.

But whats acererak got to do with it

There is no "better" way to reward xp for players, it depends entirely on what kind you want, as xp acts as an incentive for players

The Tomb of Horrors was Acererak's final resting place, a place where he wanted to be left alone for all eternity so that his soul might wander the planes for all time. The Tomb of Annihilation was built after the Tomb of Horrors, as a sort of response to those that enter his tomb and disturb his rest. All he needed to do was to consume the soul of just one adventurer to return to his former power.The Tomb of Annihilation is built to house the Soulmonger, a necromantic device that prevents the dead from coming back.

>but why not players?

Because PLAYERS SHOULD NOT BE REWARDED FOR FUCKING UP. I didn't say characters, I said "players".

>Are your players playing to "win" the game?

It's not about winning or losing. It's about not rewarding players for their bad or stupid decisions.

>1. Simplicity. Psionics adds an entirely new, parallel set of magic to the system that all of 5e has used to date.
don't play with brainlets that can't handle literally one page of rules on how they work.

>The new interactions conflict with (nerf) the existing balance/usefulness of several parts of the game
Psionics and spells have had overlap where anti magic abilities work on them as an assumed rule since 3.0. It specifically says that psionics is not spellcasting, but it also explicit says it's "a special form of MAGIC", which implies that it's an alternate route to the same vauge ability, kinda like how pact magic or runes is distinct from actual spellcasting proper. I suppose that because of a lack of writing due to playtest it's not spelt out 100% that this is their intention, but if you play any version of D&D 100% RAW then you're a moron.

>lack of interactivity
Except as a counter to this psionic powers have a shitload more limitations than spells in either range, casting time or resources used and many of them don't scale at all

The only things the mystic needs is less disciplines they can obtain and some tweaking of numbers/writing on some of the specific abilities. The concept itself is fine

there are way too many things wrong with this. you are making milestone xp be arbitrary to fit your argument. it isnt 'the players will level up after they complete their next quest, regardless of the outcome'. in a situation like the one you described, a suitable milestone could be something like 'the players will level up once they recruit an ally, or they have no alternative but to fight the goblin army'. this gives the players other options, and makes the milestone meaningful.

also, this just sounds like a bad game on both sides of the table. your group clearly fucked everything up beyond repair which is a problem both in their play and your dming.

This. Depending on the type of game you're running, failure can be just as interesting as success.

What's Acererak got to do, got to do with it?

Surely there are less passive-aggressive ways to deal with stupid players than EXP-throttling?

You want XP to work as a "reward," a kind of classical conditioning, but XP doesn't work well in that capacity at all. There are a few reasons for this:

First, there's a long delay between the behavior and the reward. At the very least the players get XP at the end of the session so there's an hours-long delay. Often the DM calculates XP in between game sessions, because that's a lot of math to do right at the end of game night when everyone wants to go home, and so the delay is a week long or more. Anyone who's trained an animal knows that you have to catch the behavior right away and not try to do the training hours or days after the critical teachable moment.

Second, there's often not a clear connection between the behavior and the reward. The DM's expectations are often unclear, potential sidequests are poorly explained and not effectively communicated, and in any case the DM's judgment of what counts as good roleplaying is hopelessly subjective. Players will be rewarded (or not) without really knowing why.

Third, the players' interest in the reward is unreliable and often correlated to how likely they are to do the desired behavior anyway without training. The best reward is the kind that the target is going to be very interested in no matter what, and that's harder to figure out when the target is a human and can't just be thrown a treat. If there's a player who doesn't like to speak up and just enjoys spending time with friends, or if there's a player who simply doesn't take the game too seriously, the difference of a few hundred XP will not matter to them one way or the other. The reward of XP is not an effective motivator for these kinds of players, and these kinds of players are the ones you're trying to train to be different.

If you're going to treat your players like dogs, at least do it right.

sounds like you are playing against your players instead of playing with them. chill out and have some fun for fucks sake.

What would you play in game with no optional rules (MC, feats, Vhuman...) and splats/UA?

You know, I have to agree with him. Rewarding players for making stupid decisions only encourages them to continue to do so, rather than helping them integrate their characters into the shared experience.

I mean, I probably wouldn't be so black-and-white with the rewards as in "do x to get x amount of XP", and leave it more flexible than that, but if the players are clearly going off the rails and still expect to be rewarded for monstrously stupid behavior, that's another story.

How exactly does crossbow master work? Can I have a sword in one hand and a crossbow in another and still reload?

chalelagh paladin/warlock