/5eg/ - Fifth Edition General:

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>alien in appearance
This should have never stopped being a thing, nor the dwarven and halfling equivalents.

Dipping 6 levels in paladin is my fetish.

Anyone got some interesting ideas for unique planes?

that's not a dip, that's a swim

Plane?

I'll give you some of the worst stuff
>every character but mine and one other was evil, dm kept insisting the campaign is neutrally aligned and the alignments of the party are irrelevant despite constant conflict
>later on, one of the evil players told me that his character was planning to kill mine
>we started off in the Undertale city, our party met king Asgore after we helped fight off an undead siege on the city
>dm flat out says that the pc that fucks all of the Undertale characters first gets a special boon
>the chaotic stupid homebrew witcher fucks Asgore
>dm later gets mad despite actively encouraging us to do this
>the setting is plagued by this black stuff that looks like the symbiote from the Marvel comics, it's kind of cool at first
>we temporarily team up with a member of the magic council to destroy some of the black stuff
>we stumble upon a group of druids trying to summon a nature dragon so it can destroy the black stuff
>the magic council guy fucks up their ritual, this makes the dragon get summoned as a dracolich
>Undertale city gets destroyed by the dracolich
>we start doing some fiend hunting stuff via a list we find in a cabin
>one of them is literally Sephiroth, who is apparently already dead because his name is crossed off
>we hunt one of the fiends down, it's Matador from SMT
>apparently whenever a fiend dies in this setting a fallen angel shows up to kill whoever killed the fiend
>the fallen angel attacks us as we're waking up
>it redirects all physical damage, so my fighter and the witcher are useless
>our only sources of non-physical damage at this point are the homebrew non-spellcaster necromancer that only deals necrotic damage and the newcomer druid that joined the game mid fight, so none of us even know him
>this is a "boss monster" so they aren't doing enough damage
cont.

More alien, not so much that they're literally Ayys but more alien.

I wasn't even alive in 1982.
But the Wizards D&D team have been trying to upsize their team, especially with the recent hire.

Our group have been quite happy with the products released and the system in general, brah.

>How do we make elves more interesting?
By playing them like actual people.
The classic Elf stereotypes should be a reflection of their culture, but every single elf individually would still be different.

the plane of cats

That's a guaranteed way to make any race a reskinned human, in practice.

Excellent taste, next game I'm playing a Hexblade starting of with a small dip of 6 levels of Paladin.

Does it? I don't think that recognizing that each individual dog or cat has its own likes, dislikes and hobbies outside of its inborn biological urges make them reskinned humans. It's just recognizing that their sentient beings with individuality.

A villain is resurrecting the party, so they can do her bidding - but with a catch. Just to remind them who they owe, and that they're on the clock, the PCs are becoming more and more undead with each day, unless they...

Unless they do what? I'm planning to rip off spirit eater curse from NWN2.

>alien in morality. They're descendants of natives from a completely different plane of existence.

Thing is, depending on how the timeline works (and often elves are the oldest humanoid race) elves DESCENDED from extra-planar creatures, but they've been naturalized to the plane for multiple eons now, ancient times even by elven standards.

They're going to have either shaped morality among other races or adopted bits of it unless they went ultra-isolationist from the get-go.

Which admittedly does not work with how elves came to be in my own setting as the whole reason their fey ancestors entered the material plane was "I was curious" on a massive scale.

Appearance, though, I can go with.

While not used in my current game (I was trying to stick a bit close to vanilla) I have a setting where elves are taller than humans on average, but proportionally thin with arms and legs of equal length to one another giving them a kind of simian appearance. Their ears are also covered in fur as you near the tips and can swivel freely, and they have antlers resulting elven men and women being sometimes called 'bucks' and 'does'. (Generally lots of ungulate terminology comes up because they used to look like bipedal, winged elks made of plants) They also have hands with only four long, slender fingers. (their gods claiming "pinkies are hard to make and useless anyway")

You made a gish origin for Sorcerers? I kinda like it, but I'm afraid I haven't played 5e enough to spot possible balance issues.

>How do we make elves more interesting?
Make them Tolkieny again. Raise them up to near divine levels and take them away from PC-level mundanity.

Posting from the new thread just to call you a massive fag
What's the appeal at all? Just play a HUMAN with wanderlust, and make them from somewhere weird or sheltered if you wanna play fish out of water

Then you won't be able to have them as PC's.
It's fucking bad enough that you have variant Tieflings with flight from lvl 1.

>running doesn't work, it just comes out of the ground from under us whenever we get out of sight
>after the party gets killed we wake up in a dungeon
>we get greeted by a wizard that says he resurrected us so we can help him kill more fiends or some shit
>the dm essentially tpk'd us so he could railroad us into being subservient to this guy that none of us even knew about
>dm also says that this was his way of teaching us that magic is super important and we're munchkins for not wanting to actively build a functional team and blah blah blah
>whatever, I guess I can change classes
>shoot him a message and ask if i can remake my fighter into a warlock
>after some uneventful questing, we decide to go to a different city
>we're currently in a shitty swamp town that we can't even buy basic equipment from unless the dm's random inventory generator didn't generate what we want
>if we want something from the smith here, we had to wait for him to make it at a rate of 5 gp/day
>after some shopping, we decide to leave the city the next morning so we can go back to the swamp town and figure out what's going on with my character
>the city gets destroyed by zombies overnight
>there is no indication this would happen, we wake up to people being eaten at the inn we're staying at
>after fighting our way to the prison to save one of our party members that got arrested, we get attacked by a paladin that's been hunting my character
>he's hunting my character after i rolled a LEL NAT 1 on a persuasion check trying to convince him that i didn't know the necromancer of the party committed genocide
>the fighter shoves an arm covered in the black stuff into his mouth
>he immediately morphs into a black stuff monster that has +20 to hit and deals 8d6 damage per attack, with a 3 hit multiattack
>we're only level 6
>after we get away we start criticizing the dm's shitty game, particularly the monster that could have instakilled us
>he has a meltdown and refuses to continue the game

>Then you won't be able to have them as PC's.
And?

Only if you forget or don't take into account the physical/biological differences between elves and humans

>PCs with flight from level 1

Actually, bit of a question: how big of a gamebreaker is a player having flight?

I mostly ask because I notice Volo's guide gives Kobolds as PCs, and I noticed Winged-Kobolds in the monster Manual aren't considered that much of a bigger threat than regular ones and besides flight really have no other abilities of their regular kin.

Four-Elements Monk Tabaxi picture is unrelated

Are you one of those "Human Fighters only" people?

>How do we make elves more interesting?
Dwemer from TES

While I think that playing what that user wants to play is going to be impossible to balance, the appeal is that you get to try to fill in the shoes of something entirely different in physique, mentality and experiences and try to view and live as they do. The same reason someone might want to play a TTRPG to begin with.
Yes, you could play a human with roughly analogous experiences, but that's no better an argument than saying that you shouldn't play a culturally African or European monk because you could play an Asian monk instead.
There are entirely valid reasons to reject that idea (it makes the game too difficult to balance around, it doesn't fit the setting), but saying you shouldn't play it because you can play a human is entirely arbitrary in a roleplaying game, of all things.

shit, I left something out
>we get to the new city and my warlock's eyes start bulging out like a snail's
>this gives me -2 charisma

Not at all. I just think it'd be cool to make elves something special. And give incentive to play half-elves.

half-elves are already the best PHB race

Furries are the absolute worst

Oh, I know. But no one I know ever plays one, aside from me on occasion.

>How do we make elves more interesting?
I've made mine into the horrifying sidhe lords and ladies of myth and lore, the ones who are alien and have inscrutable ends, the ones who first inspired the abduction stories.
Definitely going for a Changeling the Lost vibe.

Kinda what I made my Wood Elves like (to make them more distinct from High Elves)

thanks
my question was for some help around balancing the idea, I was disappointed to see answers that had nothing to do with that

Played alongside an aquatic Half-Elf Ranger, and a bat-shit insane Half-Elf Warlock before on separate occasions
Both enjoyable in their own way

I made my wood elves creepy conspiracy theorists/objects of conspiracy theory.

make them alien from other dimensions who are ubermensch 7ft tall super muscular and super dextrous and intelligent but shit constitution so weakness to poison, weakness to all elements and maybe a penalty in hp gained.

>entire session party is freaking out about how we'll deal with a beholder
>at our level we can maybe get one of us to survive if the rest of us distract it by dying
>get a few hints that it might be willing to talk to us or is something weaker
>it's the only way out since large parts of the dungeon got blocked off
>social character tries to talk to it with barbarian as backup
>it ignores them
>it bops them on the head for one damage
>guy keeps trying to talk to it, maybe it's just retarded
>nature check, it's some kind of mushroom
>barb herds it into the middle of the group and yells at us to kill it
>guy shoots it
>it explodes
This is a fun game.

Blame SCAG for the flight.
It's fucking ridiculous and shouldn't have ever been a thing. In fact, no race should get flight for free.

Pretty much! If you do by any chance play it, please let me know what you think, It's heavily built off of community feedback and having anyone actually get some play time with it would be a great boon to learning if its got any glaring issues.

Lost more players this way

Have they released an official Shaman class for 5e yet? It's always been my favorite. I know Druid is thematically similar, but I like the mysticism/spirit animal stuff of shaman a lot more

pic unrelated

I did it
I'm no longer a forever DM
I CAN PLAY

Now the question is: How can I break the next DM's game with Wizard?

>he got gas spore'd

by playing a wizard

druid in xge gets totems.
just do that subclass

You better get ready to have those DM shackles slapped back on.

Halfling diviner with lucky

>reddit.com/r/UnearthedArcana/comments/7usq27/arcane_conduit_a_sorcerer_origin_for_all_of_your/
You can give me feedback there as I will respond to it ASAP. Or post here and I might find it.
Forgot to post the brew so others are not confused.

Don't worry I won't post it after this!I

You could not be a shit and just be a wizard; also reminder that wizards are only broken as DM let them be by shoving spell scrolls down their throats

You mean The Sheppard?

When I was a DM for four straight years I didn't need to give anyone any scrolls for them to break literally anything I could realistically throw at them.

Magic in 5e is a fucking joke.

Magic in 5e is realistically the best it's ever been balance-wise for the last 15 years or so.
You should've seen 3rd and 3.5.

>Maxed AC of 15
Were you hitting them?

I can't confirm I'll get the occasion to try it, but if it happens I'll try to let you know

Lets say I'm a Fighter and I come to character creation. My character was visited by an angel who saved my daughter and in return the price that was paid was a pledge to the cause of Lawful Good. Would it be unwelcome in today's D&D to pledge an allegiance to one of the alignments? Not as a "this is how my character acts" sort of way but in a very literal "I have planted my flag in the cosmic struggle" sort of way. How often does this actual come up in games now?

>During session when the PC's are very lucky, do outrageous shit, outsmart the DM, enemies get very unlucky, or the PC's otherwise perform exceptionally well the DM will pout, whine, groan, and generally act upset about the events unfolding
>After the game will insist he's happy and excited about the stuff the PC's are doing despite being upset when it happens

Any other players or DM's have any experience with the DM being like this? Is he just being pissy in the moment because he's just very into playing the enemy or are we gonna have a problem soon

Not very until you make a commitment like that.

>break literally anything I could realistically throw at the
I never really would like to see how this happens. How is it they break encounters?

How do you deal with a DM who stonewalls any dialog or interaction the bard tries to make, but lets the 10 cha halfling fighter talk to anyone and get any information without calling for checks?
I get told all the time that I'm not making enough rolls to talk to anyone, but in roleplay every npc is unwilling to talk or not at all helpful (ignoring questions, walking away, trying to pick at phrasing to trap me into starting a fight). It's super demoralizing to play a character that is pretty much only good at socialization and be shut down at every turn, while the fighter is allowed to run amuck and do any socialization or information gathering at will with no resistance.
Am I just lacking in force of personality here? I'm trying to roleplay how my character would actually interact with the situations, but it feels like the dm wants me to be throwing my +10 persuasion and bluff at the problem rather than actually talking.

Probably don't want to break the next DM as he's just gonna say he's not enjoying it and you'll be back DMing before you know it.

Incorrect.

examples?

My DM is kinda like that.
He's a pretty okay DM but can be INCREDIBLY stubborn about certain things.

So you're a fighter following the devotion paladin oaths? Seems fine to me.

Hello Trump, how are putting forth examples to back up your claim actually going for you?

>how big of a gamebreaker is a player having flight?
It ruins many cool encounters, obstacles and problems that can be trivially overcome with flight.

I can understand being upset when you're very unlucky, it doesn't feel good to have your big encounter be nothing but your enemies rolling 1's and 2's all game

Thanks, user!

This, but unironically and with less of the racist stuff that kinda permeates the magisters

I've done this as a DM before and it didn't turn into anything. I know you want DM's to be mature and impartial and flawless. However in my case I was just a little upset because as a DM you want to make encounters special to the players. Sometimes you spend a lot of time on an NPC or encounter you think will be cool and it gets completely bypassed. Unlike a video game where the game devs can test it and rebalance it and try again to get the feel they want DM's have to live with the initial reactions. He might not be angry at you for being clever, he might know he needs to let go and just move on, but you can't help but blame yourself for blowing it. You failed as the DM to create the encounter and make it work.

Sometimes the buttmad shows through, don't worry about it too much unless its a consistent problem and it influences further sessions negatively. DM's aren't flawless.

Has anyone found a decent homebrew or hack to run ships and ship combat in 5e? Pre-gunpowder ship rules if possible. Been craving a sailing game and trying to hack a system myself is proving difficult. I'm trying to keep to simple as possible, but I'm not sure where that line is.

>Fly is a 3rd level spell
>requires concentration
>lasts up to 10 minutes
>Aarakocra get flight at level 1
>no concentration, lasts forever
Imagine if a race got infinite free casts of Fireball, Animate Dead, Dispel Magic, Counterspell, Haste, etc. You'd be stupid to not play them.

>Am DM
>Am like this
Believe me, it's just us getting behind our own characters.
We're still not trying to fight the party, just when you're acting behind consistent amount of "antagonists" in a... literary(?) sense, (like Man vs. Nature, Society, ect) you get annoyed at "you" the antagonist being thwarted I guess?

And then once you step back out of the game and into a different mindset, you can work with the players again and your previous "antagonism" is just an assumed character for effect.
Pic very related.

As a DM I tend to go into full groan mode when circumstances or luck swings either way in a retarded fashion, like a recent session where I rolled 4 crits in a row for the mobs the PCs were fighting and on the other end of the spectrum when I had a neat non combat thing planned out and completely forgot to account for the wizard having just learned fly so they bypassed it in seconds. It's all part of the fun to see my plans thwarted or go radically better than expected because of stupid shit, but in the moment you're gonna react in a "oh for fuck sake" manner even if not even 30 seconds later you're finding it actually pretty funny.

I have no idea where else to ask this dumbass question: would the appropriate form of the surname "Blixt" be "Blixtsson" or "Blixsson" if my male character is going for a 'Nordic theme'? Or, hell, is it neither? Someone here has to know, because my clueless ass doesn't.

Creating a tempest cleric from the Moonshae Isles, and I assume the Northlanders that live there are based off of the Nordic countries.

Is it possible to homebrew a balanced playable Mind Flayer?

A better comparison might be 3rd level shadow blade since it's concentration. Imagine 3d8 psychic damage weapon that works with any skill that'll last you the entirety of combat

best archetype for Rogue? All the ones in the PHB seem pretty lackluster

AT > Scout > Thief = Mastermind > Inquisitive = Assassin

I like the arcane trickster, and there's some homebrew that are more about rogue/sorcerer than the rogue/wizard of the AT, iirc.

S W A S H B U C K L E R

Yes, but no one who would homebrew a playable mind flayer would be able to do so.

Take the Upside Down from stranger things but make it the opposite i.e. its heavenly not hell but all the creatures think you're evil cuz you're from the shitfaggot mortal plane. Also they're elitist dicks in general.

Just kill some gods or something.

I love Swashbucklers (Multiclass into Battle Master Fighter you will feel amazing) and Arcane Tricksters they are tied for my favorite Rogue subclass.

>best archetype for Rogue?
Hexblade

huh, fair enough I suppose.

Since my players have been in a dungeon lately where the highest ceilings are maybe some thirty feet, it hasn't occurred to me.

Still, there must be something you can do... The real issue would be that it splits the party too much.

Neither of those sound Nordic.

I just want to play something that doesn't have a human face, and the beast races don't appeal to me.