/5eg/ - Fifth Edition General

Moth Origin Sorcerer

>Basketball
Here we go, Unearthed Arcana: Sports

DMs, did you ever redeem DnD (or tabletop RPGs in general) in the eyes of a player who had a previous bad experience with it?

I unknowingly had a player who didn't like his previous DnD experience back in his high school a decade ago but he joined our table (his brother being part of it) and rolled a Light Cleric. Firstly, I noticed he was rather out of it, just going through the motions but then as I was getting a feel of what he liked (which was combat) I started designing more combat-based encounters for him and the party enjoying the times as well. Then he started getting all warmed up to the NPCs, the story (it was a tournament arc so there was a lot of interaction and combat to be had) and all was well for us.

Sadly, he had to leave since he had work at the other side of the country but according to his brother, he passed on a message that DnD was something he didn't like but thought of giving a second chance when he heard his bro was enjoying it. His words was "Thank your DM, he made me love it again" I'm not the best DM in the world but I felt that was one of my personal achievements that I'll carry with me forever in my DM career. Got any inspiring tales, lads?

I posted in the last thread, but I need help coming up with a custom pantheon. Any advice would be cool!

Right now I'm thinking about maybe a hard 12-13, race neutral but aspected so that each race has one to lean on, like Orcs worshiping the god of war and Elves worshiping the goddess of the hunt.

I want to use the Tarokka cards from Curse of Strahd in my adventures.

I want to let the players take the cards and I would create the adventure based on the cards they have drawn.

The Tarokka system of Curse of Strahd is very specific, any ideas of how to use it in a generic way that would fit any adventure?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candy_cap
Food and Provisions time!

MEARLS GIVE US ACTUAL RULES FOR TOOLS AND KITS ALREADY

Just do a regular tarot reading. It will however require you to take an express course at fortune telling.

No. Here's Pointbuy Revised

Or just make it up on the spot. Anybody who questions you on the accuracy of fortune telling done by random drawing is just being a tool

Why does it even take them a month to write the UAs? I can understand it if it's something substantial and crunch heavy like the downtime rules, but I refuse to believe it takes professional game designers a month to make a couple of races and a random table

>Draw Death
>The party's enemy is a skeleton

Bureaucracy, I guess

Here is your list of threadly reminders:

>Front-liners aren't a thing, only retards
>If you're a level 20 wizard and you lose to anything, you're a fucking idiot.
>READ THE FUCKING PHB
>1 level dips of cleric as a wizard is cancer, fuck off
>Moon druid's wildshape is retarded
>Polymorph should be made warlock-invocation-only
>The death save system is cancer but all the healers insist you keep it so the entire party is dependent on their healslutting
>Yuan-ti pureblood race is a fucking stupid design, fuck you
>Your DM can and will get one of the rules wrong and then refuse to use the rule properly after learning of it even though the original rule makes way more sense
>Rolling for stats is cancer
>Rolling for health is mini-cancer

Read up on Appendix E in CoS, rather than the section early in the book. It gives you a more verbose vague description of what cards mean.

>Swords: This suit symbolizes aggression and violence. It is the suit of warriors, be they paladins, soldiers, mercenaries, or gladiators. It also symbolizes the power of governments and leaders, whether noble of corrupt.

>Mists: Something unexpected or mysterious that can't be avoided; a great quest or journey that will try one's spirit.
>Tempter: One who has been compromised or led astray by temptation or foolishness; one who tempts others for evil ends.
etc.

They exist already. Look at PHB 187, under Crafting.

>>The death save system is cancer but all the healers insist you keep it so the entire party is dependent on their healslutting
What do you think should replace it?

In my last campaign I had two sides of the Pantheon: Law and Chaos. Law was led by Bahamut while Chaos by Tiamat. Not the most creative thing but it gave me a good idea where to put it and it also made sense with the world my players and I were playing in. Under each of Law and Chaos had their own gods and such. That said, that's the DM notes take on it, in-world, the flavor lore is that the NPCs of my campaign world see the Law and Chaos in many different ways setting up multiple religions in the world that express their own beliefs in my world's pantheon.

-One believes that the Pantheon is just one and has many facets (or aspects) that resembles His/Her personalities (Tiamat being His/Her chaotic side, Bahamut being His/Her lawful side, Loki being His/Her more mischievous side, etc.)
-Another believes what my DM notes have, that there is truly two pantheons but then it splinters into mini followers who believe in the other minor deities within the Law and Chaos Deities. Like some believe in the Chaos Deities while others are leaning on the Law Deities. That said, that won't stop someone in my world to forgo those gods and just believe in the Minor Gods under Tiamat and Bahamuts leadership.
-Some believe that the pantheon of the world exist within nature and represent the natural wonders. Chaos controls the weather, Law controls the circle of life of fauna, etc. and such. I have more detail to this but I'm just typing at the top of my head
-Can't have deities without eldritch horrors so there's also the cultish side where they discard the Pantheon and believe the gods of the Far Realm where NotCthulhu and Yogg-Saron ripoff roam the dark beyond.

That's all I can remember when I wrote that shit years ago. Also I had a more sinister angle that these deities have to achieve a quota of believers or banished into a dimension betwixt reality and dreams. It's like a pocket dimension where chained sleeping gods hang upside down in nothingness.

>not rolling for stats

When I made my pantheon, I ensured that there were 3 gods in each alignment, so as to give a good breadth of options for players to choose from. Although on that note, another important idea is is that you'll want to make sure that your pantheon has deities that are NOT necessarily the sort that adventurers would worship - gods of hearth and home, fishing, or the seasons, for example. It makes the pantheon feel more "real".

A good starting point is, of course, an actual real-world pantheon. When I put together a Mesopotamian pantheon a year ago, this is what I ended up with:

- Enlil (NG), god of storms, breath, and distance
- Asag (CE), god of destruction
- Anu (LN), god of the sky, lord of constellations
- Dahak (NE), god of monsters
- Enbilulu (N), god of rivers and canals
- Enki (CN), god of mischief and magic
- Ereshkigal (LN), goddess of the underworld
- Ishtar (N), goddess of fertility, love, and war
- Lilitu (NE), goddess of temptation
- Nanna (NG), god of the moon
- Nanshe (NG), goddess of social justice, prophecy, and fishing
- Nergal (LE), god of plague and the destructive sun
- Ningal (N), goddess of livestock
- Ninlil (NG), goddess of the air
- Ninhursag (NG), goddess of earth and mountains
- Shamash (LG), god of the sun, law, and justice

How about a wizard dip as cleric?

With a familiar, I can heal everywhere, and send in high level touch spells on fly by. Shield also is awesome for keeping concentration up.

Well, they're also presumably busy with other things.

Gosh, i hate how Merals floods his twitter with his fucking political opinions, ugh.

On hitting 0 HP, lose max HP instead.
This makes characters no longer glass cannons and balances it in line with monsters and perhaps even makes PvP a little more fair.
You still want to give some incentive to use healing word and susch other spells, so I'd propose that instead of going down something else happens while you're at 0 HP, such as rolling death saves and losing a small portion of health if you fail a death save, something like that - a bleed-out effect. Alternatively, maybe a 'you can take an action, bonus action or use your movement, but not all of these things'.

Going down at 0 basically means:
1. You no longer have any power to do anything. You're at the whims of everybody else, and that's no fun.
2. The DM can either choose to have a monster attack you resulting in almost gauranteed permanent character death or have the monster not attack you resulting in character death being very unlikely. This is far too arbitrary a way to determine death in harder-core games.
3. The 0 HP -> 1 HP -> 0 HP -> 1 HP dance.

I want to give my games an 80s cartoon vibe by implementing music like
youtube.com/watch?v=e3llzt8Bi98

You guys got any soundtracks recommendations in this style? I'm already including Fist of the North Star and Jaspion, but I don't really know much else or where to download it

>one PC gets 3 8's, a 10, 11, and 12
>another gets 4 18's, a 16, and a 14 for their dumpstat

Remind me again how playing The Adventures of Saitama and Worthless Fuckface is fun, again.

That's more acceptable. You could have just picked ritual caster instead, though.
For a wizard, you're getting +8 AC (Wizard with no armour and 14 dex -> plate armour + shield) with only stealth disadvantage being the downside alongside healing spells to get allies up and a level one domain feature, etc etc.
Instead, you should gain one 'tier' of armour with every level of a class, so the wizard needs 3 levels of cleric to get plate armour.

Well, okay, maybe in campaigns where characters die frequently, where balance isn't a concern or a very short campaign/ one shot.

I'd argue that death saves make dedicated healers LESS relevant. If 0 hp means dead, there's more pressure to keep everyone fresh, whereas death saves give 3 turns minimum until someone finally dies

>>Front-liners aren't a thing, only retards
>>Polymorph should be made warlock-invocation-only
Could you elaborate?

Because shitting your pants because Timmy got a +2 to hit over you is for autistic cucks who don't understand probability

>look up 80s mecha or shounen cartoons
>google "NAMEHERE OST torrent" or punch "NAMEHERE OST" into youtube and download individual songs

lol why are you sad fags so dependent on these twats for gameplay?

Reminder that point buy is for minmaxing tryhards and rolling is for lolsorandumb retards.
Standard Array is the perfect way to make a character.

But you fail a death save when you take damage
Two if you get critted

>look, I'm sorry you're stuck playing Worthless Fuckface for three months of this campaign
>but listen, it's not your fault you suck
>you're just an autistic cuck who doesn't understand probability

Sounds like you've got a solid understanding of this "fun" thing, m8.

The deal of the suggestion I made is that 0 HP doesn't mean dead, you have a secondary HP buffer (lose max HP)
Of course, you really don't want to lose max HP until your next long rest so there's an incentive to keep people topped up but it's nowhere near as heavy as 'if you hit 0 HP, you might potentially die soon and otherwise you can't do anything at all'. If someone hits 0 HP but doesn't go down, they can at least retreat and defend themself and maybe make a last-ditch effort to pitch in a spell.
Basically, in all games I've seen with difficult fights it's the norm to expect people to go down to 0, go down and then wait for healing so they can get up and fight again.
If people did just die at 0, healing wouldn't help. Healing in combat is too ineffective, you'd be much better off stunning/destroying the target.

Polymorph is generally accepted to be a really powerful spell. It's basically a better druid wildshape you can cast on anyone in the party. Alternatively you can make an enemy worthless if they fail their save.
Generally, ranged combat is superior to melee combat, as most damage is dealt in melee and you sometimes actually could have avoided damage by not wandering into melee. Also, flying targets and so forth. People think they're acting as a 'front line' by charging forward but very little stops the enemies from just walking past you. You can maybe stop one enemy if you have a feat. What matters more is control spells such as thorn growth.

Nah, I got a bunch of new spells. Now I have an array of 14 or so spells available for casting every day, rather than just 8. Besides, I don't miss out on spell slots nor an ASI this way.

>4E removes a lot of skills and says "just roleplay this shit nerds"
>everyone goes nuts because it's killing roleplay
>5E introduces numbers again
>everyone wants more tables because they can't roleplay
maybe man is the real monster

It's good that the internet is still a place for people of taste and character.

Oh, also, another good and even simpler alternative is 'you gain a level of exhaustion when you go down'.

It's not just +2 to fucking hit.
It's +2 to damage as well.
These multiply together, and that can actually be a 50% increase in overall damage, as well as increased success in various things such as dex saves, initiative, stealth, etc.

>4 18's
If this ever happens, call the game off to tell that player to go buy a lottery ticket.

Doesn't change that rolling for stats is terrible in 5e. Go and compare what stats did in pre-3e editions to what they do now

You wa shock obviously. Merciless soldier.
Jojo probably has some decent tracks to choose from.
Baccano might nab you something worthwhile, but it's set a bit earlier and less cartoony.
And don't forget to hit up disney tracks.

Haven't seen 4 18's before, but I've definitely seen 3 18's, backed up by a 16, 14, and 10.

Fucker played a wizard and put one of the 18's in Strength, just because he could.

You can't prepare all 6 of the wizard's spells to cast each day unless you have 20 intelligence. And you don't need to, anyway, but I guess you're probably considering 'ritual casting' to be 'available for casting'
Thing is, with ritual caster, you could have easily more than those 6 spells, even level 2 and 3 spells like leomund's tiny hut.
The only real useful things you're probably getting out of a one level dip there is shield, and maybe 'disguise self' or something for utility. Also I guess arcane recovery is an extra level 1 spell slot every day. Personally I'd rather have faster access to some of the cool high level cleric spells and features and have a ritual book for wizard rituals instead of a one level dip.

I FUCKING CALLED IT!

>This makes characters no longer glass cannons

Since when are characters glass canons? From levels 1-14, I only dropped to 0 hit points 8 times. I know this because each time I did, I gave my character a scar appropriate to how she fell to 0, so I can just check my character sheet.

She was a thief, so d8 hit die, and we were playing through HotDQ/RoT, so presumably the monster encounters are more-or-less balanced.

It sounds to me - and don't take this the wrong way, because I'm saying it with love and affection - but it sounds to me like you're a pussy who doesn't want his pwecious chawacter to get huwt in the big scawy dungeon.

>4 18's
>implying this is possible while rolling 3d4+4 like a non-idiot

>Reminder that point buy is for people that think Baldurs Gate was the pinnnacle of D&D
>Rolling is for grognard retards.
>Standard Array is the perfect way for the entire party to be equally unique individuals, like goths

It doesn't. There's a reason why the UA isn't normally released until after 12pm pacific time on mondays.

>a paladin (Bahamut, Oath of the Ancients) and a cleric (Tempus, War Domain) fight and defeat a man who attacks them
>the man is unconscious, not dead
>soon after, they learn the unconscious man is a psychopathic killer who worships a vampire but is not one himself

>paladin wants to just slit the man's throat and be done with it
>cleric wants to bash the man's brains in AND behead him
>paladin thinks this is gruesome and unnecessary
>cleric doesn't want to take any chances

Who's right?

yes it's Rahadin from CoS if you're curious

>Since when are characters glass canons?
Well, i died twice last session

I left my party for a year for travel, so my PC went on a journey too. I even wrote postcards in his name to the other players, it was fun.

Storywise, it was fitting to take a dip into another class.

That aside, I didn't want to miss out on shield, grease, and fog cloud. Imagine mixing grease with spirit guardians.

>tfw my Barbarian would decapitate, dismember, burn the body, mix the ashes into separate concrete blocks, and throw them into a river

Re-read your PHB. If you don't like the idea of rolling for stats, then you can take the Default Array.

You're the one who chose to roll for stats. You rolls your dice, you takes your chances.

Jesus, between you and the guy above who doesn't want his pwecious chawacter huwt in the dungeon, I feel like I'm surrounded by whiny toddlers.

REMINDER: Next monday is Columbus Day. So don't expect your UA then, either.

That's on you and your own incompetent ass.

Now, now, I'm sure his ass is very competent.

The cleric's method would do more to prevent the man from returning as a vampire himself.

>You're the one who chose to roll for stats. You rolls your dice, you takes your chances.

>implying it's not the DM that makes that choice
>implying that some DMs aren't idiots about rolling for stats

Inb4 "You can just not play D&D, that'd be way better than having any kind of problem with it."

THEY CAN'T KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT

Oh, please, his ass has never been able to get it's shit together.

Hardly.

This is being a 'glass cannon' relative to monsters.
Monsters all have a lot more HP than adventurers - you can't design an enemy based on the usual character creation method because they will be a glass cannon. The players wil kill them far too quickly, but in return they tend to do much more damage than a regular monster by dropping fireballs, smites or whatever the heck.

This isn't about making it harder or easier for players to die, it's about making players less dependent on healing, having more freedom of choice when they lose health and consistency with the monster manual so that players don't oddly have far less health than NPCs 'because they can keep getting up from 0 HP again I guess'

One campaign I'm in right now I've never actually gone down at all, even when everybody else does. I'm not even particularly tanky, I'm just careful, and I can afford to be since the character's more flexible than 'gotta run up into melee and smash shit'.

Well, I'll say it isn't a terrible choice. I think it's stronger to be more dedicated to your role but it can be quite fun to multiclass casters a bit.
As long as you don't do obnoxious shit like cleric1/wizardX.

It's entirely possible to get a few shitty rolls, but you can still assign your stats as you wish.

If by some twist of fate you wind up with something like 8,8,9,10,10,12 definitely ask for a chance to re-roll.

So if I single-handedly dropped a creature to 0 HP with a Sword of Wounding can the creature be healed back to 1 HP or even stabilized?

Most likely!

My point is that it's the player's job to keep their character alive. Sometimes they fail at this. It might be because of bad rolls, but more often than not I find it's because of stupid decisions on the part of players. Regardless, c'est la vie. The latter is a learning experience, and the former is part of the game.

People need to stop bitching because their pwecious chawacters get huwt.

let's change the topic

variant human is a crutch and if you play one you're a filthy munchkin

>stupid decisions on the part of players

If the DM says something to the effect of "Are you sure?" or "Well, you can certainly try..." it might be a good idea to rethink your course of action.

But magic initiate is fun though

>you can't design an enemy based on the usual character creation method because they will be a glass cannon

What, the enemy doesn't have friends? What moron fights alone?

Variant Human is so commonly played that it might as well just be assumed to be the Standard Human.

You offer players a noticeable boost at first level, and they're going to take it.

I've found myself wanting to rewrite all of the races to bring them a bit closer in line with one another. My current draft has them as totally generic race-archetypes that can be refluffed as the DM or even players wish.

...

I updated my minor magical items based on your feedback. What do you guys think?

Also, any ideas for other minor items you'd like to see formatted into a card?

There's no reason to play default human over, say, half-elf.

Eh, healers bouncing people up multiple times sounds like a silly thing, yes. But they still have to spend half their movement to get up from being prone and have to pick up whatever it was holding. (Assuming something else didn't pick it up already.)
And everybody seems to forget that anyone can use an action to stabilize them with a medicine check.

youtu.be/nZznOH4-njM
I hope they didn't nerf my favourite forge domain

How does this sound for a houserule:
All races can swap a single mental stat bonus for another, or a single physical stat for another. (ex. +2 str can be +2 con, but not int).
I like the idea of giving people more flexibility when making characters and not feeling forced to pick a speficic class/race.

>implying it's not the DM that makes that choice

According to the PHB, it's not (SEE my post on the subject, where I helpfully included the relevant section).

In any event, one character I'd actually love to play some day is Don Quixote, so starting with abysmally low stats is actually conducive to this.

Howsabout you drop racial stats entirely and either give everyone a larger point buy pool and +1 in a stat of choice, or keep their point buy the same and say here's any +2 / +1 you want.
make sure you tweak racial features to apply to all classes. orc savage attacks does nothing if you're a caster, for instance

Ran a game with a guy who absolutely hated 5e, because he was there for the disastrous open playtest. Used the opening starter set including the adventure.

Now, I need to tell you, I ran it fucking horribly, I fucked up in a lot of little small ways. But I was told he had a good time.

Hey may have just been talking with kid gloves because he's a foreverDM and this was his chance to finally play a PC for a bit.

>"Hey user, in the game I'm running we're rolling for stats. It's 4d6 drop the lowest, pretty normal stuff."
>YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO, THE PHB SAYS THAT'S *MY* CHOICE

Between that and the Veeky Forums-dick reference, I'm sure you're positively oodles of fun at a table.

I also thought of playing the Don, but it wouldn't work well in a world where giants and dragons and magical helmets are actually commonly accepted parts of life. Rather than living in his own world, he'd just be mildly delusional at most.

Anyway, what class would you slot him in?

>If I write in BIG LETTERS and make another person sound HYSTERICAL, it automatically means they're WRONG

dnd.wizards.com/articles/news/dms-guild-adept-news

Who's getting the goods?

A Bard who never casts.
When Don Quixote dies, you unzip the costume and reveal you were actually Cervantes playing a part the entire time in order to win a bet with a devil who has imprisoned your soul.

Don Quixote is not that elitary a reference. He's not referencing obscure Russian novels or quoting latin. Everyone knows who Don Quixote is, he's as much part of common culture as the Three Musketeers or Sherlock

Well yeah. Are you new to the internet or something?

The opposite happened to me. Not right away, but I was getting in so many shitty/just not my style groups that I stopped playing for months.

Question: why would a dwarf chick shave her armpits and beard but not trim her eyebrows? Wouldn't you go all or nothing?

...

While I wouldn't say he's obscure, the world is full of dumb people who couldn't mention one Musketeer or even what nation they're from or fighting in. Sherlock's the only one to have reached complete cultural saturation, and even then there'll be adult twits who don't know it.