/5eg/ - Fifth Edition General

I wish slow healing was the core rules and not a variant

Thank you! If I make the next thread, I'll put those in the OP.

What do you mean?

>Do people actually look for players / advertise their games there?
The lfg channel is moderately active. I've picked up some decent players there.

Link is in the OP, somehow for the first time in months. Who knew that tortles would be the thing that'd bring it back?

Oops, totally overlooked that one. I just copy/pasted my post from last thread. Thanks

I hate the idea that laying in a bed for 8 hours somehow fixes an axe wound to the collar bone

I would like to be able to stretch a series of encounters over the course of a week of travel rather than there being 8 encounters that just jump on the party in one day

I've come to agree with that. The slow natural healing variant is standard in all my games now.

Well for game design you sometimes have to decide between playability and realism. 5e chose playability.

Having a week of downtime sucks, especially if you're not the guy who was wounded.

The main problem with standard healing is that it assumes the 6-8 encounter adventuring day, which is rarely practical outside of dungeon delving. Slow healing enables for a more reasonable 6-8 encounters per week with the same balance.

6 to 8 per day is great, in certain settings

PC's are dungeon delving? Easy to do
PC's are on the edge of an untamed wilderness where danger is everywhere? Easy
PC's are in civilized lands BUT something big is going down that causes lots of trouble? Takes a bit of thinking but it can be done
PC's are going through civilized lands, and their only threats are few and far between? They will never feel threatened or in danger

I want the last one to have some sort of weight to it, and long rests healing to full instantly makes it impossible. I can scale a dungeon down to accommodate slow healing. I can lower encounters found in dangerous wilderness areas. I can scale plot encounters down as well. I cannot scale up the normal dangers of even a civilized land without making this place a world that the average person would never be able to survive in

How does exploration work in ToA?

It says right there in the book that until you actually run out of HP you're mostly just loosing combat stamina and getting glancing cuts at best, and when you finally run out you are taking a serious injury via a direct hit.
HP is only "meat points" for extremely large creatures now.

Not him, but at what size point would you say HP stops being about "dodging critical blows" and more "I can take this number of direct hits and survive".

HP has always been an abstraction that includes both stamina and physical damage.
The catch is that different forms of healing are described as treating exactly one of those, which creates dissonance fairly often. If hit points represent stamina, why does Cure Wounds replenish them? If hit points represent physical integrity, how do they return so quickly out of combat?
Slow rest rules sort of strike a balance, because resting can take care of both types of damage. Indeed, slow resting was the norm all the way until 4e.

Probably around Huge size and greater.
Large creatures like horses and ogres are big, but not so big that if you put three feet of steel through it it wouldn't poke open organs and come out the other side or would loose a disconcerting chunk of flesh if you hacked into with an axe.
Huge is when from a believabukit standpoint it's difficult to imagine your weapons even REACHING the vital spots of a creature or even simply not being large enough to pierce most vitals even if you get a solid shot in.
At that size point you're at "stab it in the feet until it starts bleeding into it's boots so much that it falls over and then go for the eyes and throat".

>If hit points represent stamina, why does Cure Wounds replenish them?
Same reason the system uses Vancian casting even though nearly everyone who reads fantasy anymore couldn't care less and doesn't even know who Jack Vance is; because that's what it's always been called in D&D, so that's what it's called in 5e D&D.
I assumed Cure Wounds and potions remove light-to-mild injuries caused by combat and restore fighting stamina, but I'm an old hand at D&D and system has always had so many holes and basic logic gaps in it that I'm used to falling back on "it's just a fuckin' game brah, leave it alone".

>It says right there in the book that until you actually run out of HP you're mostly just loosing combat stamina and getting glancing cuts at best
You say that like anyone follows that. I have not played in a single game where people actually followed that, across 5 different DM's and 4 different editions.

Let's say combat starts, fighter vs hobgoblin captain. The captain immediately crits round 1, dealing 20 damage to the 62 health fighter. The fighter then destroys the captain in combat, he rolls incredibly well and the captain misses every other attack, and the fighter ends the winner, at 42/62 hp

How dobyou describe this critical hit? It's a fucking crit, he landed a mighty blow, put all hisbforce behind it. But it's ok the fighter lays in bed for 8 hours and he's perfectly fine the next day

>You say that like anyone follows that. I have not played in a single game where people actually followed that, across 5 different DM's and 4 different editions.
Sorry, I guess?
Look, it's not a problem I've ever had and frankly when you start bitching about recovery times you might as well just point out that the entire HP system from top to bottom is stupid as fuck even with Slow healing rules attached man.

Never. Hp is an inseparable gestalt of those two concepts

Martial melee weapons

Falchion
1d8 slashing

Estoc
1d8 piercing, versatile (1d10)

Half-pike
As estoc.

Lucerne hammer
1d10 bludgeoning, heavy, reach, two-handed, special (polearm: features that work with glaives and halberds also work with the lucerne hammer)

Simple melee weapons

Scythe
1d6 slashing, versatile (1d8)

Khukri
As handaxe.

>New wealth by level system
>Ya start with gold equal to your level
>level 1 still gives starting gold
>can buy items with prices off San Magical Prices pdf homebrew found here: drive.google.com/file/d/0B8XAiXpOfz9cMWt1RTBicmpmUDg/view
>less than half can be on one item
>at least 10% must go to non-items such as property or hirelings or something

Yeah or ney?

Maybe to an inflexible dork.
I've been doing it for years and nobody's ever complained, and while it certainly makes no sense the downside with slow healing is that it actually STILL makes no fuckin' sense and you're still shrugging off combat injuries that would put you it literally for months and in many cases would leave you physically crippled for life in days with zero complications whatsoever.
Seriously, the amount of punishment a D&D hero would take even with slow healing in just three adventures is something along the lines of "do this one more time and your body will stop working due to stress you're putting in it in short periods of time". Our bodies are SHIT at healing damage, which is why we avoid getting hurt in the first place.

Yeah but this isn't real life. You can draw parallels but at the end of the day there's still living dead and niggas that can throw fireballs

That's kind of what I'm saying; I get that your incredibly arbitrary rules preferences are more preferable to my incredibly arbitrary rules preferences, but both are equally stupid and arbitrary.
We draw the line at different places here but in the end where the line is drawn is sort of equally irrelevant just due to how far out of reality you are already venturing.

Actually did the khukri-as-handaxe thing a few years ago when 5e came out.

Not him, but why would a knife be an axe?

I like those a lot.

I did something similar but used "war poles" (like spears and tridents specifically made for martial combat) as the 1d8/1d10 versatile weapon and the long two-handed-style flail as the 1d10 reach weapon. Your lucerne hammer idea is better though.

I also did a cutlass as a 1d8 slashing finesse weapon so one-handed dex peeps aren't restricted to just poking things with a rapier.

Khukri's have very thick blades and the heavy forward curve makes them more like an axe than a knife or even machete when it comes to use as a tool

Most khukri aren't knife-sized, they're more like machete-sized. And though the entire inner curve is indeed sharpened, pretty much of the killing power is in the heavier weighted tip of the blade, which means you use it in a functionally identical fashion to an axe of similar size as a close-ranged edged chopping weapon.

You can even throw it like a hand axe.

>I also did a cutlass as a 1d8 slashing finesse weapon so one-handed dex peeps aren't restricted to just poking things with a rapier.
Not him but I pretty much subbed rapiers, sabers, smallswords, basket-hilted swords, and pretty much any and all other one-handed blades from that period using rapier stats since half of the players think "has a basket hilt=rapier" anyway, you know?

Huh. Rad. No wonder the British Army loved/still loves those things.

You tend to gain a lot of respect for a weapon after it's been used a bunch to butcher you in close-combat after a few campaigns, and plenty of Indian rebels and such used them on British soldiers.

Is It ok to have the villain kill one of the party meembers' parents so he can be hated and shit? The PC didnt see his parents since childhood ir that helps

Yeah, I get you, but given its damage type people usually default to thinking "a rapier thrusts" and they wanna slash.

But what Großesmesser?

I know it ruins the surprise, but ask the PC. A lot of people would not be okay with that. In fact, the DM killing a PC's family because
>muh plot
is a minor meme here.

It's a bit cliched, but if your players are okay with it and so are you, why not? Classics are classics for a reason.
Aaah yes, the German Katana.
Basically a just longsword anyway, only with some extra style tossed in.

Well Wikipedia seems to describe em as german falchions so....................

You're not reading the whole article....or seeing the size difference.
Falchions are mostly one-handed (hence them being d8 weapons is spot-on), but messer and schwiesersable are larger blades that are more akin to old D&D bastard swords or new D&D longswords.

They could be use one-handed but they definitely had a grip made for two.

>schwiesersable
Buhwhatnow?

How would I make a viable whip wielding character?

Schweizersäbel, literally "Swiss saber".
Like the messer but even more stylin'.
Apparently one of the only rules is that schweizersäbel always had that hand-guard thing, but mostly was probably pretty similar to messers.

A lot of the curved blades you see in the Witcher games take some pretty obvious inspiration from both.

So I'm taking up the challenge of implementing Tome of Battle -type stuff in 5e for all those crying out for more weeaboo fightan magic - I'm not even a big fan myself, but it's an interesting challenge.

So my approach is Swordsage as a Fighter subclass with magical maneuvers as a primary feature. Some of their secondary features also key off INT. So how do you feel about making INT even more core to them by making the number of maneuver uses scale with INT modifier?

With the release of the Arcane Archer, things have changed a bit. The BM has four uses, which scales up at 7th and 15th to a maximum of six. The Arcane Archer (whose special moves are obviously more powerful than the BM's) have two uses, scaling up at 7th and 10th to a maximum of four. I'm trying to balance the Swordsage maneuvers so that they have less straight power than the BM's - instead of an effect + extra damage, they only add one of the two. But they also add more versatility and utility than the BM. So maybe I could do two uses scaling up to four? Or if I use INT mod (minimum 1), it would scale from 1 to 5 but with more MAD?

Further complicating things, the AA's other 7th level feature is also not an exploration/RP feature as the earlier Fighters have, so that justifies me giving them an additional little combat feature at 7th.

How do we fix Artificer ?

How does a Tortle react to Aremag, the island sized dragon turtle?

"whoa"

...

Ok so all the weapon talk of the moment made me check the weapon list...

Why the fuck is the pike the heaviest melee weapon? Isn't it just an extra long spear you can't throw? Glaives, halberds and lances are all less than half its weight... Only the maul comes close.

Probably same way we react to giant-sized humans when you think about it.
What creature DOESN'T have a gigantic version of itself in D&D?

Probably Battlemaster, Tunnel Fighter or Sentinel.
Just get a whip and a shield and prevent people from getting close or escaping

You wait for WOTC to purge spellcasting and magic-crafting from it and make it a pure inventor class.

SHEEEEIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTT

The weights on all D&D weapons and armor are generally pretty ridiculous.
Like a mace or axe weighing more then a sword; it actually was about the same weight most of the time, the difference was in the DISTRIBUTION of the weight and how maces and axes had it all on one end of the weapon while swords had it spread mostly across the whole thing.

Still same user, just wanted to add that I also gave the javelin the "finesse" property... Not for my players but for myself, because I liked the idea of tribal critters like kobolds and grungs using crude spear-like weapons without doing suck damage with em.
I also gave the sickle "finesse" because, well... it should, IMO.

a pure inventor without magic-crafting?
would that still be artificer?

Yeah I noticed that. I kinda doubt a battleaxe would weigh more than a lance...

Pikes actually WERE fairly heavy, anywhere between three to six kgs.
Mostly it was the length of 'em that caused it; you didn't use a pike for finesse or fancy maneuvers, and half of the time you didn't even use it to stab.
You just stood there and walked forward or weighted for horses to jump right onto the things.

No idea dude, I speak french so "artificer" entails "artifice" which refers to fireworks and other boomy things, so when I hear artificer I think of that more than I think of whatever Eberron thinks.
I just want a non-magic int class and considering the sub-classes are alchemist and gunsmith, what the fuck does magic have to do with it?

True.
I'm not saying "why are they heavy", I'm asking "why are they considerably heavier than similar weapons like glaives and halberd?".

Probably because the guy looked at it and said "wow that's big, must also be heavier".
There's a lot of weapon size=damage assumptions in D&D rather then weapon mass=damage it seems like, which is why cutlasses were d6 weapons in 3e despite basically weighing in as much as a regular sword.

Bump

Immense lust

Some issues/questions:
Falchion: why not just use a longsword without two-handing it?
Half-pike - why not just use regular pike stats and fluff it as not being obnoxiously long? Actual half-pikes are longer than halberds anyway.
Scythe - the only thing resembling a scythe that's ever been used in combat might as well use glaive stats. Anything that looks like a farming scythe is useless in battle.
Khukri - the same stats as a thrown weapon? Why is the khukri not simply a refluffed scimitar?
Estoc and lucerne hammer are cool, though.

>Why is the khukri not simply a refluffed scimitar?
Because you can throw a khukri quite effectively in the same manner as you can a throwing axe/tomahawk?

I was not aware of this. TIL.

you don't see what magic has to do with alchemy? :^)

im French too what are the odds

The gun is explicitly magical. Alchemy has never been anything other than magical, even if chemistry resulted from it.

I think a much better question is: how does a tortle react to regular turtles?

Not especially, alchemy, at least in the media I consumed, usually involved people using (pseudo)science to change the properties of thing... Which is kind of what it was, trying to use chemistry to turn lead into gold.

Yeah, the scythe I'm not very happy with, it's just the only thing I could think of for the "spear but slashy" slot.

Maybe some sort of sharp spade like the ones used by shaolin monks?

>how does a tortle react to regular turtles?
Probably the same way you'd react to a 5 year old down syndrome kid in a wheelchair who came up to you.

>Invisibility

Does this confer any kind of cover in your game? Can you be attacked whilst invisible? Is it disadvantage or are you simply gone?

They used to sometimes mount sickles and similar harvesting weapons on poles so you could use that, too.
No idea what the proper term for em is though.

If they know the space you're in (e.g. from hearing, or seeing splashes in the water, or right after seeing you disappear), or if they simply guess correctly where you're standing, they can attack but with disadvantage.

If an enemy knows that they are there by a means other than seeing them, such as hearing them (stealth vs perception), seeing them affect the world around them (footprints, bumping into things), or something like that, they can attack with disadvantage. If they don't know they're there why would they attack?

That's sort of what swords are for. Not everything needs a "simple weapons" option.

Calculated indifference?

Do you/have you tried to count your damage up? Do you find it's faster than subtracting?

Super quick noob question because I don't have my books on me.

If an AC is 18, and an 18 is rolled, does the attack hit? Or does it always need to be at least AC+1 to hit? I know it's a dumb question, sorry in advance.

The AC is the target number for the roll (similar to DCs and checks), so equalling the AC is enough to hit.

Ok, thank you. A player said that it's always AC+1, so I got unsure.

What if they disappeared mid combat?

>Hearing

Over a loud battle with sword clashing on armour, and spells exploding through the air.

How can you attack something with disadvantage if you can't see what you're attacking?

At best a player should point at a square on a map and make a guess the enemy is there.

Typically hitting the AC is a hit. Same as hitting the DC of a save.

U n s e e n A t t a c k e r s a n d T a r g e t s
Combatants often try to escape their foes’ notice
by hiding, casting the invisibility spell, or lurking
in darkness.
W hen you attack a target that you can’t see, you have
disadvantage on the attack roll. This is true whether
you’re guessing the target’s location or you’re targeting
a creature you can hear but not see. If the target isn’t in
the location you targeted, you automatically m iss, but
the DM typically just says that the attack m issed, not
whether you guessed the target’s location correctly.
W hen a creature can’t see you, you have advantage on
attack rolls against it.
If you are hidden—both unseen and unheard—when
you m ake an attack, you give away your location when
the attack hits or m isses.

I have a player who does this. It's probably easier but most people are used to subtracting.

Hey 5eg,
I'm DM'ing a session where the players are tracking down a monster (a rare gryphon, to be exact)- and the tracking rules in the DMG although clear are pretty simplistic. Are there any homebrew systems to help extend the process or make it more interesting beyond a couple of survival rolls or does anyone have any ideas on how to do so otherwise?

Level 20 characters start with 20 gold

>/5eg/ Official Discord
Kill yourself.

>the cleric doesn't realize Prayer of Healing takes 10 minutes to cast
Every time

Slow healing just means you need a cleric to heal. Or the healer feat. Or the fighter's second wind. It means regaining all your spells several times more often than your hp. It would make stretching an adventure over days even more novatastic.

Consider a level 11 barbarian, Con 16. Currently 1 hp 0 hd with max 115 hp and 11 hd. He regains 5 hd each long rest and needs 23 HD to reach full 'health', so 4.6 (really 5) days of rest.

Now look at a 14 con paladin in the same situation. Max hp 92. Because of lay on hands he'll reach full 'health' in three days and have 49 points of healing left over to help someone else. The fighter with second wind reaches 90% of full health in just two days, and max hp in one.

So use slow healing if you hate barbarians is what I'm saying.

>Long Rest: The character also regains spent Hit Dice, up to a number of dice equal to half of the character’s total number of them.

>Round Down: Whenever you divide a number in the game, round down if you end up with a fraction, even if the fraction is one-half or greater.

Level 1: 1 hit die/2 = 0.5 hit dice, 0 hit dice rounded

1st-level characters cannot regain hit dice.