/5eg/ - Fifth Edition General

It all started with a badly-timed bald joke, user.

The situation may grant advantage I guess. I wouldn't give someone bonus damage or advantage just because they can jump high though

Feats are (almost) all really fucking strong and I think variant is too good for anything level 1 and maybe even the variant ASIs. Should have to actually give something up/spend some hard PC currency to get them.

What feats are those may I ask? I'm pretty new and don't know the abbreviations yet.

magic initiate or whatever too, except that it doesn't make sense OUTSIDE a level-1 background feat position.

Sharpshooter, Great Weapon Master, Polearm Master

>What's your favorite plane of existence, barring the Material Plane?
zendikar

does 5e have a octogirl race?

So should poison really be considered evil and illegal in D&D ?

Just like magic or weapons it's a tool that can be used to kill someone in their sleep or cripple an orc chieftain that wants to wipe out a village, whether it's good or bad depends on the application.

>magic initiate or whatever too, except that it doesn't make sense OUTSIDE a level-1 background feat position.

???

DCs can be any number, but why do all examples use steps of 5, then?

DCs are usually only 'any number' when there are modifiers that give a more exact measurement i.e. spell save DCs where it becomes slightly better with each stat-up.

Using a system of fixed sets of 5 DCs makes things less arbitrary, a player can agree that if they beat DC 15 they've achieved a task of medium-hard difficulty so the only potential (even if unspoken) argument is 'Is this a medium-hard or a properly hard skill check?' rather than 'Whether I succeed or not depends on whether the DM feels like the DC being 13, 14, 15, 16, 17... Who the fuck knows, they're just going to pick a random number.' and the DM could justify it by 'Well, it's DC 10 base and then +2 for this and +3 for that and +2 for this so DC 17' but it's much better to just say 'No, it's DC 10 base but the guard is racist so it's +5 so it's DC 15 instead.'

There is no reason to use DCs inbetween factors of 5 other than in cases like spell save DCs and because you like really overcomplicating things in ways players will never understand and you get off to that somehow.

Sharpshooter, Great Weapon Master, Polearm Mastery, don't forget Crossbow Expert, either. All the good feats that make martials competitive with casters, basically. Hold off on allowing them until level 4.

magic initiate is stupid powerful, 2 free cantrips and a 1st level spell (w/ 1 dedicated spell slot per long rest).

Poison is an element of nature and even then what's poisonous to others is food to someone else. Poison has no alignment.

Characters who really want that feat can pay a fee and attend a school or have an apprenticeship with an NPC caster to get it. It doesn't have to be something they MUST have done before 1st level.

It's always been frowned upon for metagame reasons: because it would be a pain in the ass to have PCs constantly poisoning and re-poisoning their weapons, which they will do unless you give them a reason not to. They won't even have fun doing this, because it's not what the game is supposed to be about, but they will do it because it's optimal and there's no reason not to. It's the same reasons why poisons are traditionally so weak in D&D.

Pest control is vital so poisons are like knives in terms of toolness. Applying it to weapons has always been completely retarded outside the obvious payload-delivery types (blowguns, grenades, etc)

For some, it's like a dip in multiclass tier character direction though. Majorly painful to wedge in mid-campaign.

evil, no.

illegal, that depends. you compare it to weapons and magic, but both those things have been outlawed in many places IRL (or heavily restricted).

How about DMs want a little nuance with these numbers that ultimately mean nothing. Example: This lock is a particularly sturdy and well crafted one but still not quite master level, DC 17.

Another example: Jumping the chasm 10' would normally be a simple DC 10, however the goblins chucking javelins and rocks from behind you are making things slightly more difficult, DC 13.

Leaving everything arbitrarily be divisible by 5 at all times just gets boring for me, the DM and too predictable(=boring) to the players.

lemme go ahead and poison these grenades

>pre-refrigeration agrarian society
>banning poisons
That's how you get basement rats you know.

lol you know what i meant

>For some, it's like a dip in multiclass tier character direction though. Majorly painful to wedge in mid-campaign

then it must not be that important to the player.

Can a good alligned character steal? I'm making a rogue thief, but somehow I can't imagine a burglar with a conscience.
Should I just stick to looting old tombs perhaps...

thorn whip scales with level, shillelagh scales with WIS. Wildshape scales with class level.

In what way does this not scale?

A "good" character can do a lot to justify theft in their minds.

Ever heard of Robin Hood, the literal example of a chaotic good character?

Robin Hood stole and murdered people in the name of good

Consider the tax man potentially bad example

Isn't that more Lawful Neutral?

So all this talk of how many feats to cut. What about not playing with feats at all? I'm cutting some magical classes in my setting too before any martial get too triggered

Stealing from the rich is canon Good.

oh and druid can (more easily than other classes) use shields/weapons for foci so war caster isn't vital.

Maybe he genuinely cares for the betterment of society. He's taking that tax money to pay for a public orphanage and shit.

If you're doing that just cut all the combat feats, none of the flavor feats are OP and add a lot of...well character to PCs

>Feats are (almost) all really fucking strong
Yeah, they are so strong that half of them have to give an ASI to make up for how shi- I mean, how (((good))) they are. Athlete and Actor are jokes of feats, no one would give up an ASI for that shit. That's why they give +1 to Strength/Dexterity and +1 to Charisma, respectively. They aren't even real feats. The feat system in 5e is shite, meant to pander to grogs who don't want to deal with feats despite the fact that 5e is so much different from OSR that none of them are playing it anyway. They should have just nutted up and included feats in the fucking game. Wouldn't have been that hard. Shit like Blade Master and Fell-Handed are quite literally contradictions of 5th editions entire fucking design philosophy. What the fuck, Wizards? You say you want bounded accuracy and simplicity of mechanics, then you delete all the bonuses and replace things with advantage and disadvantage where a battlemaster's aid another maneuver is useless with the barbarian's reckless attack (whereas in older versions they would stack), then you go and contradict it by releasing a fucking Weapon Focus feat? How schizo and weak are you? What a joke. Just what a fucking joke. This edition is just as much of a mess as 3.5 was, there's just less of it. That's it. 5e is simpler, and only has two good ideas: proficiency, and size-based hit die type. That's it. Feats suck. Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter are the Power Attack of 5e, they are non-optional if you want to deal out damage as a martial. Grappler and Tavern Brawler are good for the latent homosexuals on Veeky Forums who want to make a dwarf fighter to strangle people to death. Cause that's not fucking gay at all. And Lightly Armored? Linguist? Come on, you aren't even trying, Wizards. Why not break with tradition and make major/minor feats, or do something like feat points, do something interesting for fuck sake.

>be dwarfen cleric riding a mule while our party gets attacked by wolves
>ride towards wolves with mace ready
>DM intervenes: you cant attack or cast spells while mounted
>okay.. I get off the mule and cast guidi-
>DM intervenes: dismounting counts as your action

What did he mean by this

>How about DMs want a little nuance with these numbers that ultimately mean nothing.
That what I mean about 'because you like really overcomplicating things in ways players will never understand'

Your players shouldn't give a fuck about the exact workings of the lock. They just want to know 'is it a hard lock or a medium lock'. Anything inbetween is pointless semantics and seems far too arbitrary.
'Well, I've decided that this civilization isn't good enough to use DC 20 locks in this place but they don't feel like being DC 15 either so I decided to put it in somewhere inbetween'
Your players won't complain because this whole thing is a minor issue, but considering you don't tell your players the DC usually, you want your players to be able to roughly guess the DC so that their success doesn't feel entirely arbitrary 'because the DM decided to represent a fluidity in lock difficulty'.

The goblins raise the difficulty to DC 15. You're not telling the players that, but you can say 'the difficulty is up one step'. This means that the players have more reason to actually get rid of the goblins than 'oh there's some small addition that you've no way of guessing'.

>Leaving everything arbitrarily be divisible by 5 at all times just gets boring for me, the DM and too predictable(=boring) to the players.
The players aren't here to have fun playing guessing games and you're not here to tell them 'you see a DC 15 lock' but 'You see an average lock'. So..

why the fuck can't you cast while mounted? You're sitting the fuck down, should be easier to cast.

>(((good)))
You're mixing up your memes, buddy. This should have multiple quote marks around it: """good"""
Parentheses is indicating it's Jewish, which makes little sense in this context.

So, there really is no point. It's already bad enough trying to guess whether the DM thinks something is medium or hard if they don't outright say it, without you putting on all sorts of minor modifiers that nobody has any way to guess the level of.

You want to give your players as much information as possible without overloading them with information and also with only telling them things they can acquire (and leaving some for rewarding players with information)
Setting DCs to weird numbers only obscures information from the players, and again, while this is a very small point that your players won't complain about it's not a good thing.

Your DM sounds like a fucking moron

t. never ridden a horse in their life

you're just riding them all wrong.

How about there are different DCs for the same reason there are different ACs and different ability bonuses. Check out how wood, stone, iron, steel, mithril, and adamantine all have different AC. This trap is DC 16 to disarm because it was made by a CR 5-8 creature with +3 Int. It's DC 18 to sneak past the Dire Wolf. It's granularity.

I mean, the PHB literally describes clerics casting spells from fucking pegasi. A mule shouldnt be too far fetched

Motherfucking Outlands, Including Spire and Sigil.

Your DM didn't read the fucking rulebook, that's what it means.

Can you elaborate? Maybe I don't understand the Outlands very well, but they don't seem particularly interesting to me.

Means your DM is a moron and needs to read the fucking book. There's a little section on mounted combat. Relevant highlights are: mounted combat is a thing; it costs movement to mount or dismount, but only one per turn.

>Once during oyur move, you can mount a creature that is withing 5 feet of you or dismount. Doing so costs an amount of movement equal to half your speed.
-PHB, Mounting and Dismounting, p. 198

Probably subtle hint from your DM, that he didn't read PHB. Pretty nice of him, giving you such obvious red flag, don't you think?

How the fuck do players work out that the lock was made by a CR5-8 creature with +3 int?
They don't. They 'might' be able to study a wolf and realize 'oh, it's about CR this and dexterity this' although obviously in-game you'd just have it as some books 'monster difficulty rating' and 'it's nimble'.

It honestly would be better if it was DC 15 to sneak past a dire wolf or DC 20, but the way it clashes with player mechanics (Possible proficiency+wisdom) gives you ground to show the calculations that make it DC 18 which makes it less arbitrary, at least.

I'd say ideally all monsters would have spell DCs that are multiples of 5, other things such as passive perceptions as multiples of 5 and so forth, but the monster manual is kinda at odds with the main game with all sorts of things such as NPCs having way more health and players running off of death saves instead.

They've all got their own internal systems that are consistent at much greater precision than your shit.

>much greater precision

Is dungeons and dragons a science?

No, it fucking isn't. This is why we removed shit like pathfinder feats for tiny boosts to things or 4e where there's so many numbers that you need an electronic thing to handle your numbers at high levels, because only the big boosts really matter and anything less is your DM being so pedantic it takes away from the experience.

This is such a disgustingly high level of metagaming that everybody involved should feel ashamed.

>Stealing from the wealthy to support the needy
is canon Good

There shouldn't be any metagaming, and that's why you do it like this.
'This task may be difficult' could imply it's a DC 15 or DC 20 task. Your players can guess that.
If it could be any number instead, for all the players know the DC is 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21... If they roll one of those numbers, it feels that their success is more 'because the DM allowed it' rather than 'The DM has some incredibly intricate mechanism behind the screen for calculating the exact DC of everything when it comes to stuff they made up on the fly like the lock of this house we suddenly decided to investigate'.

It's called taxes, user.

Thanks for the new copy pasta

>(((good)))

What do you think about a dex based Eldritch Knight, tg?

I'm running my first campaign for six friends this Sunday. Doing the 5e starter set stuff.

Please send help

That he could be Strength

Won't be hard.

About as good as a dex based fighter, really. Nothing wrong with it, great synergy with two levels of Bladesinger if you feel like making your spell progression needlessly confusing for the sake of the best AC in the game and never getting any feats ever.

>This is such a disgustingly high level of metagaming that everybody involved should feel ashamed.
If it helps you any, I'm the one that questioned "all DCs are divisible by 5" and I do feel a bit ashamed to be arguing about it. It's obviously just examples, so this other one must be trolling.

It's okay. They should probably multiclass into rogue at some point though.
Since GFB/BB makes less attacks the rapier isn't quite so bad because you're not going to use GWM with a GFB/BB attack. Then you can use a shield and stack up the AC as you expect from an EK.

Though shield+rapier prevents you from casting the shield spell. Better get war caster. That gives you booming blade reaction attacks at least.

Though it kinda has lack of synergy with shield master (worse athletics checks and already using your bonus action) which means.. Eh.

Overall it works, but don't expect anything grand.

>must be trolling
Once again, I don't see how obscuring information by making DCs more fluid and arbitrary improves the game in any way?

I'm new to D&D. I understand there are lots of different editions. Do people like playing 5e? Is it better than previous editions?

If you want to tell the players the DC, go ahead. You're the only one in charge of obscuring your information.

EKs implicitly can't use a spell focus can they?

Well the feats ARE good. if they weren't, no one would want to sink all that money into the 5e books, as well as the D&D dice bag, D&D miniatures, D&D spell cards, etc. I know a couple who plays at my local store who has all the D&D swag, must have sunk like 300 bucks into it. What a joke.

Read the rules and the adventure multiple times. Improvise when you have to, but if you actually read the books you'll be better-equipped to do it, and you'll have to do it less often.

5e is the biggest the game's ever been. People like it and it is better than previous editions in many ways.

There's a difference between 'Not telling your players the exact information but letting them guess' and 'Not telling your players the information but giving them no way to guess', and it's not 'That you tell all the players the exact DCs' because this is a roleplaying story game.

>DM reads 10 paragraphs of adventure book description in one go
Does the book actually insctruct you to do this? It's so hard to keep track of things.

I dunno if it's "biggest" cause d20 was open beyond straight up D&D but it's fuckin big. Generally good too.

I've been reading a lot, but I suppose I'm slightly intimidated that I have to DM for 6 people my first time. I sort of assumed some of them would be busy...

It'll be exciting, and hopefully I can keep the story moving.

Read the book. Get enough of a grasp on the characters that you know how they'd react to things happening that aren't given parameters by the book.

Try to make sure your friends understand that you are trying to present them with a story that has boundaries. If they want to go off and not follow the main quest, as new players are wont to do, allow them, but make sure they understand before the game starts that they're unlikely to find anything fantastic outside of Phandelver. I made that mistake and my players ended up flying around the sword coast doing all manner of nonsensical things, which would have been fine if I had any idea how to DM, but I didn't.

Don't be afraid to put your foot down sometimes

If the players seem like they have no idea what to do or where to go, throw them a bone. An NPC giving them a hint, or even just OOC reminding them of something they're forgetting.

The most important rule is have fun.

I think this only proves that good/evil axis of alignment is about intent, not consequences or intrinsic qualities of act itself.

Most non-adventurers are so inconsequential that they're ruled non-aligned. Their devotion to gods is for material and afterlife benefits not cause they're truly dedicated to causes. That's what adventurers and shit are for.

>Is it better than previous editions?
It's simpler than previous editions, which in Veeky Forums groupthink means it's good.

5e has a lot of good ideas. Proficiency brings all your numbers into a single bonus, even if it increases way too slowly for the sake of "bounded accuracy" which 5fags love to spout about without understand what the fuck it actually is. You get Dex to attack with light weapons instead of Str, which makes sense; but you get Dex to damage as well, which doesn't. Yeah a kobold stabs at you with a dagger he's good at hitting cause he's agile, but it takes special training to know where to hit. It's just 5e trying to pander to every kind of build with zero effort, because even something that vaguely resembles a feat tax is bad bad no no territory.

In 5e, everything is damage. Shit like the basilisk, cockatrice, bodak, and mind flayer might as well not exist, because the abilities that made them scary either require you to fail three saves in a row, or are just straight damage. Yeah that basilisk that you had to fight blind cause it'd turn you to stone if you met eyes with it? Nah it just deals petrification damage bro, you have 75 hit points cause you're a fantasy superhero in a world literally MADE OF MAGIC, so you'll be okay. Also all the cool spells are nerfed into oblivion to protect poor mr. fighter's precious fee-fees.

5e also makes sure all races get bonuses to their abilities, not penalties, because if any race is even 5% worse at their class feature then that's rayciss. How dare a dwarf bard not be as good as a human bard! They might as well just remove racial stat changes and give each race a little feature or ability, because at this point it's just a way of inflating stats, which now hard-cap at 20 (remember that bounded accuracy meme?) so it's really counterproductive to keep them in. But they are a sacred cow of D&D, and 5e is terrible at slaughtering those. But then again, 4e was happy to slaughter sacred cows, and it sucked.

Thank you. These posts are good. I want to give them freedom, but freedom within the frame of the campaign. I suppose I'll just have to try and see. I've read the free rulebook twice and I'm reading the campaign. I doubt we'll even get to finish the first dungeon.

The game has constantly been getting bigger since it was created. Increased cultural awareness (i.e. Stranger Things, Big Bang Theory, Critical Roll, anything with Felicia Day and Will Wheaton, as well as internet memes) are driving the inflation of the player base more than D&D 5e's rules. Sure 5e is easy to get into and has less complex rules, but that doesn't mean the game is good, necessarily.

Like all the editions, 5e had strengths and weaknesses. Its biggest strength is that it's beginner friendly, and likely is the best choice for a newbie such as yourself.

Downsides vary from lack of mechanical depth present in previous editions to some character concepts being completely impossible given the rules as written.

Try it. You'll have fun.

5e is very popular. Some people don't like that it doesn't have as many "splatbooks" (books of extra options for player characters) as previous editions.

4e is the most divisive edition. It was widely hated when it came out, and to this day only an angry, defensive minority like it. It was the most balanced, but it accomplished this by making every class exactly the same. It's very slow and video-gamey, and it's the one edition where minis and a grid are mandatory.

3e and 3.5 are also very divisive. They did well and they have a lot of people who look back on them fondly, but they had their problems. They had the most splatbooks and the most game-breaking interactions between splatbooks that were never made to be used together. Spellcasters, especially clerics and druids, were very overpowered, and doing damage was usually a waste of time when you had some kind of spell that would end the whole fight on its own.

Anything earlier than that can be lumped together into old-school D&D. It lasted a long time and it has a nice focus on doing as much as you can without rolling dice during play. It had the most randomness in character creation, and the dice could really screw you over or bless you with a super-being. As far as balance, everything was either powerful at low levels and unplayably weak at high levels, or vice-versa. Some people consider that balanced enough.

>Not telling your players the information but giving them no way to guess
No one is talking about this except you. If you think the DC is between medium and hard, it's not impossible to guess anyway. So I guess I should say that literally no one is talking about that.

I like 5e most. It is reasonably simple and... DnD-ish.

If you like truly epic stories and love grid based combat, check 4e, though.

Spotted the guy whose only experience with 4e was the session he made up in his head after reading posts on Veeky Forums about it.

...

It can still happen. I've had two players petrified and one guy get his brain eaten by an intellect devourer. He's now playing the intellect devourer and the other players still don't know.

>you get Dex to damage as well, which doesn't. Yeah a kobold stabs at you with a dagger he's good at hitting cause he's agile, but it takes special training to know where to hit.
I'm guessing "training to know where to hit" is part of strength, then?

It's not impossible to guess, but it's harder to guess, and there's no reason to make it harder to guess because you want players to be able to guess because if they can guess correctly it means the players have worked out information for themself.

Nobody talks about this sort of shit because it's a very minor point that usually won't be brought up because the difference between doing things in sets of 5 and doing things otherwise is quite minor, but sometimes even the minor things matter.

It's literally what proficiency is. Stop responding to this guy, it's obviously trolling