/5eg/ - Fifth Edition General

you know it's weird times when your receptionist who looks like Santa's wife mentions she played a Halfling back in college.

I agree but these aren't your slightly nerdy met-at-an-event normies, these are straight up WORK normies

the worst kind
approach with caution

>How did you defeat your campaign's BBEG?

His name is Finch and we still haven't defeated him yet.

I have yet to finish a campaign

What are some good 5e urban adventures to read through to get an idea on how to run adventures in a city? I'm great at doing dungeon crawls, exploration, or survival stuff, but I've never really done urban campaigns.

Expertise with attacks is retardedly powerful. The fuck were you thinking?

It's not expertise, it's proficiency even if you don't gain proficiency from your class, and proficiency with thrown improvised weapons even if you don't have anything that gives improvised weapon proficiency.

There aren't any, really. 5e adventures thus far have been really far-spanning with little focus on individual locales.

As written, it's proficiency twice if you're proficient.

Proficiency bonus can't be added more than once to a check, per 5e's rules.

It thought anything that allows expertise or double proficiency has to say so specifically, like the dwarven racial history checks or the skill feats.

The wording was chosen, because unlike the Elven weapon training for instance, monkey men aren't proficient in all weapons with the thrown property. They are only proficient in attacks that involve throwing. So, attacking in melee with a handaxe doesn't count.

If I have an item that lets me cast a leveled spell as a bonus-action, am I still limited by the general spellcasting rules of only being able to cast a Cantrip as an action in that same turn, or could I use the item to cast the bonus-action spell and then use my action to cast another leveled spell from a spell slot?

What do y'all think about the Twilight druid?

Player of mine wants it. Obvsly no múlticlassing

>am I still limited by the general spellcasting rules of only being able to cast a Cantrip as an action in that same turn

yes

Let them take a level of arcana cleric

>"swords, sorcery, and science" fantasy world where you can plow through a primeval desert on a boxy speeder-tank, blast liches with laser beams, and invade the lair of a cyborg dragon king
Sounds stupid

Fair enough.

Reminder if you play a 'hurr I'm dumb' one-dimensional barbarian at anything but a children's party you should kill yourself.

I played a barbarian that was like Terry from Brooklyn nine-nine.

>your fun is wrong

It's just fine for a beer and pretzels style game.

My current character is a barbarian wielding two flails with 13 Intelligence and 8 Wisdom.

The rationale is that it takes a lot of physics and geometric know-how to dual wield such cumbersome weapons as flails, and very little Wisdom to not think it's a terrible idea.

who gos to children's parties to play DnD?

What kinds of children's parties host DnD games?

Should I trade my cloak of protection for the party warlock's whistle, that can cast animate dead once per day? I'm a level 4 necromancer wizard with 11 ac without the cloak

>Arcana tomorrow
Who's hype for UA: Food and Provisions?

Tomorrow's the 31st, are we actually getting the new UA then?

Honestly, for ease of play, you're best off using an older ruleset, like B/X. Most people are going to be majorly turned off by the prospect of D&D as a team-building exercise itself. Jumping-the-shark-though-you-are-not-a-tv-show levels of being turned off. So it'll likely be simpler if, instead of expecting them to pick up the rules, you use an edition that barely has rules

Oh, but adapt the AC to ascending. Descending AC is the normie's bane

Odd question for you guys

I gave my players a lot of money (~2000po). It might have been a fuck up, but I mainly followed the book while doing so.

What's a good thing for the adventurers to spend their fortune on? I know there's like
- upkeep (DMG)
- cost of life (PHB)
- components for writing in the spellbook (PHB)

But that's not nearly enough... And I don't want to put super magic items in the shops as well...
It seems like that's one shortcoming of 5e...

Let them spend it on fun things.
Not fun combat things, but at least one of your players is sure to have an idea like "FLYING SHIP" that you can let them buy.

>~2000po
You mean pp (platinum)?
> I don't want to put super magic items in the shops
If it's a high magic game, why not? If it's a low magic game, just put lesser magic items in shops for vastly inflated prices.

Where can I find homebrew that's solid and cohesive? We're playing a game where everyone is homebrew classes and races, but it's all off danddwiki so it's hard to find anything that isn't either poorly written or straight up broken.

Gurbintroll games has rules for running a domain. Let them buy an old castle and become the free republic of derptopia.

Let them buy a ship.

Become part-owners in a gladiatorial stable.

>We're playing a game where everyone is homebrew classes and races, but it's all off danddwiki
You should probably just abandon ship right now, your DM is clearly retarded if he allows the players to even look at that site

Good evening, reddit

It's 3pm you mong

Sounds amazing. Do it, I would play...

So basically:
- ask your players
- weak magic items
- give them a keep

Afraid my players arent the most imaginative and I'm not sure how they'll react to getting a keep. They're still quite new...
But thanks!

How would you design the underground / sewers of an 80s style sword and planet / he man style metropolis? And I mean Full on synthwave 80s with swords wizards lazers and dinosaurs.

Looking for descriptions and monsters mostly

Legitimate question: is -Int supposed to be actually being dumb (as in if you're sub 10 int you are mentally retarded) or could it just belie a lack of formal education? Arcana, History, Nature, and Religion are all things a character would logically learn in a classroom environment, and Investigation comes with the critical thinking skills that academia tries to build.

Both work.
Low intelligence just generally means the character is bad at academic and thinky things.
Maybe that's because they're dumb.
Maybe that's because they never learned anything from school, or never went.
Maybe that's because they jump blindly to the first conclusion and never reconsider it even in the face of obvious contradictions.
Maybe that's because they have functionally no creativity or inspiration.

What do you mean?

RAW:

>Intelligence measures mental acuity, accuracy of recall, and the ability to reason. An Intelligence check com es into play when you need to draw on logic, education, memory, or deductive reasoning.
>Wisdom reflects how attuned you are to the world around you and represents perceptiveness and intuition. A Wisdom check might reflect an effort to read body language, understand someone’s feelings, notice things about the environment, or care for an injured person.

So I guess a simplification would be Intelligence is what you know, Wisdom is what you understand. "Formal education" doesn't necessarily exclude the importance of Wisdom. Wisdom, to me, reads as the more empathetic skill.

I know what a nuclear Druid is user..

I always thought common human populace have stats assigned by 3d6 roll without any modifier. Thus Intelligence 10 is average.

PCs often have higher average stats, but that is because they are exceptional heroes.
See Commoner in Monster Manual - they have 10 everywhere.

If you have 8 Int, you might not be very good with math and abstract thinking, but you are still able to function without trouble.

If you have Int 6, you might be dumb, but certainly not retarded.

Anyone have experience using Side Initiative style combat? I'm looking up a way for my players to have more tactical / creative options in combat (as well as my monsters), but also speed things up in combat.

>The world I have in mind for this is a He-man esque, "swords, sorcery, and science" fantasy world where you can plow through a primeval desert on a boxy speeder-tank, blast liches with laser beams, and invade the lair of a cyborg dragon king.

This would likely be incredibly overwhelming for new players. When normies think D&D they're thinking LoTR and WoW style fantasy. You want to meet that expectation because it will make them feel like they know what's going on.

My advice? Scrap the setting, make premade character sheets of standard fantasy archetypes. Make them very recognizeable - you're literally going for conan.barbarian, legolas.ranger, gimli.fighter, gandalf.wizard. You could even pare it down to how the Starter Set does it and just give them Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, and Rogue, maybe throwing in Ranger and Barbarian because those are simple enough to explain. Have multiples of every sheet ready, write out exactly what their spells do, play on a grid to help them visualize what's going on. The less searching through the PHB your newbies have to do the better. Bring plenty of dice.

A simple "noble's son has been kidnapped by goblins" style minimalist hook will suffice. Keep it simple! You can always expand on simple, it's much harder to the other way.

10 is average for adventurer types, literacy is not average (usually)

Control Water
>Until the spell ends, you control any freestanding water inside an area you choose that is a cube up to 100 feet on a side. You can choose from any of the following effects when you cast this spell. As an action on your turn, you can repeat the same effect or choose a different one.

When I choose to repeat the same effect as an action, can I also choose a different 10 foot cube area to affect, or does every effect I choose within 10 minutes have to happen within the same initial cube?

For instance, imagine I'm trying to part a path through a body of water that is 200 feet wide and less than 100 feet deep, could I slide the affected cube along as an action on my turn, or would I need multiple casts?

>10 is average for adventurer types
12 is average for adventurers. 10 is average for a commoner.

Best way to speed up combat imo is to have badly injured characters drop prone after taking a hard melee hit. I feel it's realistic and flavorful, and getting more PCs/NPCs advantage will mean more hits, which makes combat faster. I have players make CON saves to stay on their feet, whereas for monsters I just fudge around depending on how this fight needs to go to keep the story moving.

>If you have 8 Int, you might not be very good with math and abstract thinking, but you are still able to function without trouble.
I'm stealing this. Barbarians shouldn't be braindead because they're at 8 int, they just didn't learn their multiplication tables at Barbarian school.

Might replace the lantern and adjust a few other things, but this is my kobold artificer alchemist

Looks good, I like the details on the mask and clothes

When I was 13 one of my friends had a huge dnd game as his birthday party. His dad wrote the adventure and DMed the game for us.

What are some valuable trade goods a place found in a desert environment might have? Not gold though

Why does /5eg/ have such a hateboner for warlock mechanics?

>not gold
Copper, tin, silver, aluminum
Maybe some dyes or rare spices?
Aloe

...

>3d6 roll
>3 or less
>or less

What kind of place?
An oasis would have food and water, and would likely serve as a trading hub, allowing for all sorts of goods to be coming in and out.
Tombs and pyramids would have ancient treasures and artifacts.
Near a river you'd find more agriculture.
A desert mine would have some mix of ores, probably. If you want to get fancy you could have fossils or ancient bones buried into the sandstone deep under the desert.
A personal favorite of mine is to have dragons hibernating under the desert sands. They go there when injured to rest underground, because the heat of the desert keeps them warm and the isolation keeps them safe. Until the PC's caravan loses a wheel at the entrance to the dragon's cave...

Couldn't say-I haven't really looked at warlock, so I'm not even sure what mechanics there are to hate.

same cube, multiple casts

Depends on the DM. I say go for it, burn your slots now, cry later.

Because they are described as "seekers of the knowledge that lies hidden in the fabric of the multiverse" and they play like a ranged magical fighter most of the time.

So if you were to use this on ship that was still moving, for example, the effected area would zip behind you as the ship passed it?

that sounds pretty damn terrible not gonna lie

I'd say that 'formal education' would likely be proficiency in history/nature/etc.
Education would likely boost your int score, however.

If you have low int, you can justify it in these ways:

>Actually mostly normal but has really bad memory
>Naive to the world they're currently in (Brought in from another world)
>Bad at math/logical thinking
>They're young so not awfully smart yet
>They have a good memory but their ability to recall memories is limited

Obsidian? Garnet? Gypsum? Depends what would be considered "valuable" in your world. Are gems valuable because they're used by wizards for magic and shit, for example?

It has the right idea.
It's fine to sometimes have an enemy lose a limb, fall prone, become frightened and flee from battle, so forth and so forth. But for players I wouldn't do anything unless a monster can knock them prone more naturally.

The best way to encourage this is to populate the fighting environment with things they can interact with and to make enemies more dynamic (I.e. t hey run under certain conditions or a leader directs them and their attacks or they have some sort of gimmick such as having a formation and the party has to break the formation)

Not that guy, but how is that a problem with the class? Players are free to choose which invocations they feel like taking. I played a game from 1 to 6 level with out agonizing blast and used the free invocations for misty visions. It made my character feel like more than a laser cannon without hampering my damage too much.

Older editions use a system where a lower AC is better, and which requires some charts or addition/substraction (THAC0) to work, which is substantially harder than the modern system and looks intimidating to newbies. Some retroclones like Lamentations of the Flame Princess use Ascending AC IIRC

Yes

Is there a guide or just some guidelines for converting monsters from 3.5 to 5e?

I have been reading some Sword Sorcery d20 stuff recently and I wouldn't mind taking some of that stuff in my 5e campaigns.

Their spells-per-rest are absolute trash so they have to fall back on their other features, but their other features are just "cantrip for damage".
They're basically archer fighters, except with fewer options in a normal adventuring day.

Yes

Thank you!

>Education would likely boost your int score, however.
Same way learning to fight would probably boost your strength and constitution. Makes sense.

>I played a game from 1 to 6 level with out agonizing blast
> without hampering my damage too much.

I am sorry, user, but i don't believe you. Blasting for 1d10 or 1d10+3 is hell of a difference.

Have you ever actually played one? None of what you said is true. These are all just antiwarlock memes that people spew.

I've played two.
Both times I had to do two thirds or three fourths of the encounters on cantrips alone, because one spell per short is fucking nothing.

This is WotC's official one. Remember that 5e is all about brevity of mechanics--grab the most important shit and drop 3.5e's shit baggage.

Don't believe me, but it's still true. I focused more on utility from invocations than tagging on more damage. The party did fine and I still was able to contribute in battle and out of it.

I don't know why that's so unbelievable, but whatever.

>playing at level 1

It sounds like you made some poor spell choices then, chief.

sounds like you want something like: "You gain proficiency in all thrown weapons (including improvised) if you don't have it already."

The game should be functional at all levels, and first time DMs always ALWAYS start at level one. So yes, a class that has a horrible level 1 is an issue.
Even past that, two per short is still garbage since it's your only interesting option.

Warlocks are no worse at level 1 than any other class

Most wizards do the same. Low level spell slots for every early spellcaster lead to heavy cantrip use.

Honestly 1-4 you should be fine without agonizing blast as a crossbow can do just as well, though you'll be fucked over by magical resistance.

The deal is that any utility you can do a wizard can probably do just as well, usually, but I guess a wizard doesn't have many extra spell slots over you at that point.

>only interesting option
Are you forgetting about the invocations, pacts, and patrons too? If you think spells are the most interesting part of the warlock than you're missing out on a lot of fun, friendo.

Why do fighters get so little skill proficiencies? 2 is so little, even with backgrounds