What unpopular opinions do you hold about D&D...

What unpopular opinions do you hold about D&D? What things would you change about it without starting from scratch with it?

>Druids are a mistake and rarely fit any setting they're in, let alone their own party. They have no place in a band of adventurers.
>Bards are a meme and are used as a catalyst to just dick around and should be banned from campaigns if the DM ever hopes for it to be taken seriously
>Gnomes do have enough of a thematic separation from dwarves and halflings, their big issue is purely aesthetic - this would be fixed by keeping them mechanically the same but turning them into goblins or a similar small race
>Half-Orcs should've already been replaced by Hobgoblins by now
>Half-Elves should've been refluffed into a new race by now
>Alchemists/Artificers should've been among the core classes, at least as a wizard school
>Wood Elves should have little horns by default

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D&D is not a RPG

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Gnome issue was fixed in 4e though. They were full-on Fae Gnomes with black bug eyes. They just decided to go back to making them fatter slightly taller halflings with goatees in 5e.

Humans
Dwarves
Gnomes
Half elves
Half orcs

Hitpoints are a dumb idea that need to go away forever.

I have literally never read the fluff from any edition Player's Handbook. I fucking know what Paladins and Elves are and I'll remake it all in my own setting anyway.

I thought this was the norm?

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Yeah, people get hung up on the lore so often for some reason

Full plate should be available to appropriate level 1 characters as part of their starting package

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Psionics don't fucking belong in the game

I prefer race as class.

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1) D&D has no design goal and that sure as fuck shows in its most popular iterations (3.5, 5e and to a bit of an extent 2e). It's a game that sells itself as "fantasy" but there's no delineation as to what kind of fantasy that is and due to mixed perception it causes a lot of unnecessary conflict between dirt peasants in grimdark game of thrones grognards and high-flying kung fu fantasy superheroes players. It originally had a pretty okay premise of just being a game of dungeon crawling, resource management, exploration, etc but as time went on it lost even that nugget of a design philosophy and became a bizarre mish-mash of concepts and ideas that attempt to do nothing more than serve a vague notion of what "D&D" is rather than making an actual game.

2) 4e is probably the best recent edition because it actually has a stated design goal that it accomplished. It also got unnecessarily criticized for doing things D&D had been doing things for aeons. Applying mechanics with little fluff justification for them.

Only a complete moron would actually think Randalf the Imperilous has magical powers except he can only call upon this particularly powerful ability 3 times per day for raisins. And that this limitation applies both to him, who gets his power from studying, from Grondor who gets his power cause his great great grandad fucked a dragon and from Thellasvin who gets his power from a freaking Deity. The only reason people accepted this abstraction for magic and not martial ability is cause they assumed that abstraction made sense in 3.5 and did a series of mental gymnastics to justify it.

Also I continue to fail to see how "Fighters have daily powers" means you can't roleplay or that a game no longer counts as a roleplaying game.

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D&d ruined dragons

>Druid/cleric lists should be put as alternative choices for the wizard class, while the classes themselves should disappear. Clerics in armor are shit, they're just paladins of different alignments. the role of absolute healslut should then go to the paladin, making them the healer and tank with occasional evil smiting; the role of the wilderness guy should fall on the ranger, eliminating its fighter role.
>fighters should get increased damage with all weapons like monks do; monks should just be a different type of fighter.
>artificer or alchemist should have been a class from the beginning.
>sorcerer should simply be 'superpower/psychic/mutant class' or become a set of feats that anyone can get.
>blades dealing higher crits is a shit idea. weapons with sharp heads like pickaxes would be better.
>scythes were a mistake
>shortswords just don't offer anything to combat more than a slightly larger damage than daggers.

>AC is a bad mechanic and should have been dropped two editions ago
>Wisdom as a stat makes no goddamn sense and should be divided into Perception and Willpower
>Clerics and paladins are too alike and either should be folded into a single class (cleric, with paladin archetype) or made more different from one another
>the arcane/divine magic divide is silly
>early firearms should be part of the core rules
>the whole chromatic/metallic dragon types are dumb as hell
>vancian casting needs to be replaced by a better mechanic

>>fighters should get increased damage with all weapons like monks do; monks should just be a different type of fighter.
Fucking this.
>>scythes were a mistake
And this.

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Wizards should not be able to learn spells except from scrolls.
All races should be either a +2 to one ability and -2 to another, or have no modifiers (like human).
Most skills and skill checks are cancer and turn the game into a comedy fest when "heroic" adventurers repeatedly fail at basic tasks.
In fact, skill checks should honestly just be removed.
Power attack is overpowered in 3.5 and even Pathfinder.
Martial attack bonus is way too high in 3.5 and Pathfinder.
AC bonus should scale somewhat with level.
HP bloat in D&D has gotten fucking insane.
A character shouldn't get more than 1 or 2 magic items during a campaign.
Rangers should be slightly worse than fighters in 5e, they should get extra attack at 5th and 15th level.
Rangers shouldn't cast spells.
Animal companion should be an optional class feature for rangers.
Full plate should not be something a low-level character has.
The game should incentivize wearing lighter armor as well as heavier armor.
Dex-to-damage should require a feat or perk of some kind.
You should not have more than the seven core races available in a game.
Most characters in a party should be from one or two races.
Wizards should get 2 sets of spells: a daily set and an at-will set (like 3.5).
A natural 20 should be an automatic hit, and allow your damage dice to "explode" for that hit only.
Dagger, shortsword, longsword, and greatsword should deal d4, d6, d8, and d10 damage respectively.
Longbow should deal d10 by default.
Stealth should be advantage to hit and automatic double dice of damage (plus sneak attack for rogues).
All classes should max their first hit die, even NPC classes in Pathfinder, or NPCs in D&D. A 1 HD orc should have 8+Con mod hp. This is especially true in 5e.

Parties should have a limit on raw casters like wizards, sorcerers, clerics, etc.

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>The only reason people accepted this abstraction for magic and not martial ability is cause they assumed that abstraction made sense in 3.5 and did a series of mental gymnastics to justify it.
No, it's because how the magic system in D&D has worked since the little brown books came out you fucking faggot. A wizard knows he has X spells per day. According to 4e fags a fighter does not, it's just a series of conveniences. No, it's not an abstraction, it's bullshit made to justify applying D&D's shitty magic system to every class, and create unnecessary bookkeeping for no benefit. 4e is crap, martial powers are dissociated mechanics, and dissociated mechanic is not a "buzzword" or whatever other crap you 4e fucks use to try to dismiss it. Stop making up shit, you have tried to show other examples of dissociated mechanics in D&D and have been BTFO every time when you have been shown that those mechanics have relation to the in-game world, whereas fighter dailies don't. Get over it, martialcuck. And stop thinking this is a caster-supremacy shill tactic, or that people "just don't understand narrative abstraction" because they do, they just think it's bullshit, and they think 4e is bullshit as well. Have fun with orcs who fall off of a building and die instantly because they only have 1hp.

I guess I can play along.

So first off, Bards. I have always hated how they are designed, both thematically and in practice. I would strip them of all magic, and I would give them buffs in other areas. First off, skills, pretty much giving them every skill as trained or class skill or whatever, based on edition. I would make it so that a bard will always have more skills and a higher max rank in each skill than any other class. Second, I would return to/buff the older version of Inspire Courage, letting them be masters of group buffs. In this way they can passively grant constant buffs to everyone in the party. And lastly, I would implement some of the ideas from the old Duelist prestige class, giving them bonuses to defense based on intelligence, and to attack modifiers based on charisma while using a light melee weapon.

I also hate the way rangers are designed. They are usually built as these hybrid dual wielder/archer/tracker/baby druid clusterfucks who somehow end up worse at all their potential roles than other classes. I would turn them into a dedicated archery focused class, like the way they were in 4e or how Hunters work in WoW. Build them to specialize in stealth and tracking, long range damage, and kiting with the use of a pet.

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>All classes should max their first hit die, even NPC classes in Pathfinder, or NPCs in D&D. A 1 HD orc should have 8+Con mod hp. This is especially true in 5e.

that's... how it is though? they literally tell you to do that.

Yeah I feel that way a lot. When people complain about, "I don't like how this detail works in this setting", I always ask myself, who the fuck uses prepublished settings?

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It's shit and holds both roleplaying and fantasy back.

>

That is indeed a list of insults you have flung at me and then insinuated is an argument that you are winning.

I believe I had a friend who attempted a similar tactic in 5th grade. So I will respond in kind!

Your mother's a whore and she never loved you user.

>All classes should max their first hit die, even NPC classes in Pathfinder, or NPCs in D&D. A 1 HD orc should have 8+Con mod hp. This is especially true in 5e.
that's how it works user

>power attack is overpowered in 3.5
Is that a typo or are you genuinely retarded?

I don't think he's ever actually played DnD

>I always ask myself, who the fuck uses prepublished settings?

I do sometimes, often because my players are familiar with it and it gives me plenty of names, locations and events to draw from as necessary. But I scrap or alter anything I don't want and still tend to make a lot of the details my own (Yes, this desert is now guarded by thri-keen nomads that protect a hidden golem city)

>he can only call upon this particularly powerful ability 3 times per day for raisins

Stupid spell component requirements.

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Oh yea speaking of stupid spell components.

Read thoughts requires a copper piece...

CAUSE PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS.

YEA THAT'S A FUCKING PHRASE THAT'D BE COMMONLY USED IN CORLONIA THE FAR FIELD.

BY ALL RACES WHO PRACTICE MAGIC OF THE LAND.

I read the rest of the list and came to the same conclusion.

Also one spell I'm pretty sure requires your 'caster level in silver pins' meaning I guess caster level is literally a quantifiable measure in the game that wizards know and can count to?

I guess DBZ style scouters exist but for wizards?

It makes 2-handed fighting the only viable option for dealing damage.
Same in 5e.
2-handed big swingy retard faggot mode is the only way to play an effective martial in D&D thanks to gay-ass power attack.

NPC classes don't. You end up with commoners in 3.5 who have 2 hp and get taken out by rats. A human warrior should have 8 hp base and a human commoner should have 4 hp base. Yes that means a 1st level wizard has hp equal to a commoner (no I don't subscribe to the d6 hit die for wizards, I'm sick of wizards in Pathfinder that have 80 fucking hp before level 10).

Been playing the game for 10 years, stop thinking everything is martials v.s. casters. It's childish, tribalist, simplistic, and fucking stupid.

>Players should not be able to play wizards
>Stats should be rolled 3d6 down the line
>Any edition of D&D past 2e is garbage
>Bards should be a prestige class like they originally were
>Characters should expect to lose body parts regularly
>DMs should never fudge rolls

I'd just remove material components for most spells entirely, and focus on the verbal and movement components instead.

Maybe because I don't like the idea of casters having to lug around a bag full of random shit just to cast a couple spells.

I like 3.5, especially core 3.5. I like playing the way the core books intended. I think fighters and rogues are okay classes and druids/wizards are overhyped. I love elves. I hate tieflings, dragonborn, furries, and the assorted dark edgelord races. I hate warlocks, DFA's, I hate the fluff of ToB and I hate it's mechanical implementation. I don't like fuckhuge dragons. I like gritty, detailed dungeoncrawls and hate narrative, rule-of-cool, 4 well-balanced encounters a part of every breakfast. I like using all the rules in the books (like how 5% of all encounters should be against things that are 6 levels higher than the PC's). I would not get along with practically everybody on the internet who is in to Veeky Forums stuff.

>Druids
pick an animal companion or wild shape, not both; rangers should get full animal companions and should be the best trackers, not druids
>Bards
like rangers and paladins, really ought to be a prestige class if anything
but they are the perfect face class and are legit useful to any group
>Gnomes
fuck halflings, take hobbits and blend them with gnomes
>half-races
yeah, shouldn't really be a playable "race"; should be humans/elves/dwarves/gnomes/orcs
>alchemists/artificers
make it one class and I agree; if I could add one class to core it would be this

The way to fix magic is to limit the best spells of each school to specialists of those schools (and limit clerics/druids to only their domain spells, but give them 5 domains over 15 levels), switch to spells known for every class and a spell point system, and group up all spells that are similar to each other, then tone down magic item availability so that you cant just UMD whatever spell you want from a bought scroll/wand/whatever.

I have made houserules for a lot of things. I redid armor and races, added a huge number of little edits and clarifications, did some rebalancing on classes and feats, etc, but overall I try to keep close to core, at least in spirit.

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D&D's settings are always shit as a result of having to extrapolate the shoddy rules of the system into a gameworld.
The games have completely fucked generic monsters because of how ingrained they are in people's minds (Dragons having to be intelligent spellcasting hoarders, liches always super wizards who sought undeath, etc)
They should really cut down the races to Humans, Half-Elves, Orcs, and Halflings
The class-paths system is just a watered down version of Pathfinders class-archetypes, and it shows a lack of commitment, they should either just do away with hard classes as a whole and make it a 'buy perks' system with certain starting paths giving certain bonuses (or better/worse access), or they should make solidly built classes and give options elsewhere, not "you can be a paladin except you're a druidic paladin!" or "you can be a fighter except you're a wizardly fighter!" shit.
If they insist on keeping classes, they should either make Sorc special or just fold it into Wizard as a "Mage" class that picks Int or Cha at level 1.
Likewise monk should just be an optional set of bonuses a fighter can get.
And bards or rogues/thieves should be folded into one another.
Warlocks and Rangers can fuck off.
Divine casters should always have to follow a rigid code of some kind, and arcane casters should be required to quest for spells instead of auto-learning.
HP should be more limited or replaced with another damage system.
Remove dexterity to damage in all counts since it just makes the best ability score even better.
That or go full warhammer there and make your attacks not at all reliant on your main ability scores but rather a different stat altogether.
MP system should be the default, and you can even have special talents for non-casters that use MP (or FP if you insist to call it something else).

I agree with you on pretty much everything you said. except 3.5 warlocks and hexblades are cool.

Play Mutants and Masterminds. You'd enjoy it. Blue Rose works on a similar system, but then you'd have to play Blue Rose.

are you retarded? I'm saying you obviously don't play because your point about hit dice is entirely false, are you stupid?

What do you have against rangers faggot?

>I'm saying you obviously don't play because your point about hit dice is entirely false,
Perhaps if you READ MY ORIGINAL FUCKING POST I MENTIONED NPC CLASSES
THESE, IN 3.5, DO NOT GET MAX HP AT 1ST LEVEL BY DEFAULT.
OPEN THE GODDAMN FUCKING 3.5 MONSTER MANUAL AND LOOK AT THE ORC OR ELF SECTION
WHAT DO YOU SEE
A d8 HIT DIE +1 FOR CON THAT GIVES 5 HIT POINTS
BECAUSE THAT IS AN NPC CLASS NOT A PC CLASS
I AM SAYING THOSE CLASSES SHOULD GET MAX HP AT FIRST LEVEL.
I AM SAYING IT SHOULD BE A GENERAL RULE BOTH TO SIMPLIFY THE GAME AND TO MAKE NPC MOOKS NOT DIE TO CATS AND RATS

Holy shit this thread has derailed and it hasn't even been 40 fucking posts

If you're reading this post, now is the best time to abandon thread. It's just gonna get worse and worse below here.

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shh baby it's ok. Nappy time is soon , mommy will get you your tendies while you play with your internet friends.

Most criticisms of D&D aren't valid and most ideas to "improve" D&D dont

They're just a fighter who uses bows/dual-wielding and lighter armor.

/thread

that said, I also like various aspects of fantasycraft

I'm toying around with a blend of 3.5, FC, a fallout style action point sytem, and a big healthy dose of my own shit. If I have one criticism of D&D 3.5, it's that it tries to be different things for different people; like it's clear to me the designers all had different ideas about how things should be. Still, I think it's a great game if the players and DM are on the same page (but they never are, and so it's almost never a good game in practice).

>animal companions should be optional
They are optional, if you don't want to use them then don't.
>game should incentivise light armor
They do, higher max dex bonus
>rangers shouldn't cast spells
There's variations for both paladins and rangers that don't cast spells in the DMs handbook.
>ac should scale with character level
Buy better armor, magic items, spells and use combat expertise as a feat.

DND shouldn't EVER be assumed as a good starting RPGs for newbies.

Sorcerer is just a wizard without a spellbook.
Monk is just a fighter without sword or armor.
Bard is just a singing rogue without sneak attack and spells.
Paladin is just a cleric with less spells and better attack.
Barbarian is just fighter but with rage and lighter armor.
I could go on.

>Class B is just Class A without a core part of their archetype

fuck right off

>I just realized I am an illiterate retard who jumps to conclusions so I'm gonna make a meme joke instead.

>buying more magic items when I specifically said the game should have fewer of them because the glut of magic items ruins any sense of being special they might have
>variant rangers in DMs handbook that don't actually exist
>the max dex of an armor plus the armor bonus it provides are completely uneven, and more so when you factor in mithral in 3.5 giving even better max dex
>purposely punishing yourself by not taking a class feature for thematic reasons that is a major power of your class
Also:
>combat expertise
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

This I actually agree with.

The thing is: most "problems" people have with D&D come either from an autistic hatred of vague fluff things which you can't really argue for or against.

OR they're just plain misinterpretations of why those mechanics are the way they are.

Like d20 static bell-curve. it's like that cause you're not actually suppose to roll all that much. D&D is (was) a survival dungeon crawler. You're suppose to find ways around encounters or situations that don't require rolling. Rolling is a last-minute desperate measure you rely on when you've run out of "safe" alternatives and need to actually put your neck on the line.

Vancian spellcasting is like that cause AGAIN it's a dungeon crawler. You're only suppose to be able to cast spells a certain number of times per day. The wizard needs to be able to apply his magic judiciously and the Cleric's magic was meant to be the ONLY means of healing. So if you're running low on HP and the cleric only has 1 more use of "cure wounds" then you have a difficult choice: keep going and risk death. Or have the Cleric cast the spell but know he won't have anything left going forward.

Rolling abilities was like that cause characters were meant to be simplistic. You roll your abilities, get a class power and that was it.

So many 'problems' with D&D are really just signs that people don't understand what kind of game it started out as and want it to do things that it wasn't designed to do. But they need to have those features anyway cause they're sacred cows.

It's no different than what you said about rangers, fuck-ass.
Spellbook is hardly a core part of a wizard's archetype.
Sorcerer is just a different flavor of wizard. If you want to get rid of ranger for being too similar to fighter, then you have no reason to want sorcerer to stay. Ranger and fighter are even more different than sorcerer and wizard anyway, they play COMPLETELY differently and have completely different abilities. I will admit that rangers have been hot trash in 3.5 and 5e and even 1e and 2e to an extent, they were only good in 4e and 4th was a hot trash shitload of an edition, like warm diarrhea seeping out of a baby's diaper, so I can see people hating rangers. But your reason for hating them is fuckin bullshit.

Whys that?

I'm not the ranger guy fuckface, I'm pointing out that you're saying one class is the same as another class if you add the entire point of the class being there and remove the parts of the other class that make it unique.

and the wizard was built around the idea of having a spellbook, you absolute idiot.

sorcerers are naturally gifted magic users, less spells but can change them

wizards are learned magic users, with more spells but less versatility in using those spells.

>3.5th edition
>be 5th level fighter with greatsword
>use power attack as full round action at -5 to hit
>miss
>well that's my turn finished

Or

>get two attacks as standard action
>one at +5bab another at +1bab
>one misses the other hits
>still have another action to do whatever

It becomes even more useless at higher levels but your retarded reasoning thinks otherwise.

im seharvepernfan on giantitp
I dont ever really do anything, but if i ever run another game, I'd like to send you an invite

If you read page 5, the hp entry only lists an average number of hp per hit dice for a creature.

Not so much a rule as you interpreting a layout choice as a hill to die on.

But then again, you had to read the first five pages of the monster manual to know this so there is little surprise in your frustration.

>What is Shock Trooper
>What is Combat Brute

By 7-9th level a two handed fighter with haste and imp. crit/keen weapon is going to be fucking mulching anything you put in front of them. In terms of straight up combat there's no other fighting style that even competes.

the first example would still have a move action; you're probably thinking of pathfinder

>Gnomes should be the fae/magical counterpart to the hobbits homely/pastoral, not this magitech crap.
>Firbolgs are aesthetically displeasing to me, and I feel their image from volo ruins them.
>Goliaths are a limp dick race that have no real lore in 5e.
>Too many elves.
>Hobgoblins, goblins, and bugbears are garbage.
>Let's explore other settings besides Faerun, or at the very least, give us something old but converted to 5e.
>Genderfluid elves. Just because there is a LORE reason doesn't mean it needs to be brought into 5e. Fucking hell.
>Half-whatever shouldn't be core, it should've been expansion books.

That's about it. My main gripes are with the aesthetic and lore of the realms in general and some minor nitpicking. In actuality I doubt people would think these are unpopular.

>Gnome issue was fixed in 4e though. They were full-on Fae Gnomes with black bug eyes.
This can be a problem for a setting that doesn't want to include fae elements. One of the reasons I'm not big about supernatural origin player races being a default choice from the pbh is they make big assumptions about the cosmology of a homebrew setting.

Same reason I'm not a big fan of dragonborn, they can grind against the intended tone of a homebrew setting, and its frustrating having to ban options from the pbh.

>variant rangers that don't exist
Pic related faggot, stop being an edgelord.

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>its frustrating having to ban options from the pbh.

not if you're not, y'know, a coward.

this image should be considered automatic spam at this point

1) 900+ pages as the core

2) Competitve (now this is't a problem per se, mind you, or it least i shouldn't. But it's the source of the autism in how rpgs in general are played, like a bizzarre and not particulary funny combat simulator)

3) GMs absolute rule

4) High prep, low improvisation (see 2. Not a problem per se but not the best thing to show newbies the potential of the hobby)

5) Very low emphasis on fiction, in more than one sense

I'd add that in general the same old sterotypes of dwarves and elves and shit isn't very attractive nowdays, but your mileage may vary.

you shouldn't argue with trolls, generally speaking

>Have three classes: Warrior, Mage, and Specialist
>You can choose to be purely one class or do a half-and-half of two classes.
>Classes give you some initial benefits and give your character a core mechanical idea, but mostly are just to determine feat selection
>Class features become feats
>Either have a dedicated Attack stat which can be applied to different things depending on class or simply let players choose what their primary stat is at character creation
>No races or backgrounds, instead, there is a list of innate bonuses you can pick at character creation. Whether your character gets +2 and good eyesight because he's an elf or because he's a skinny human that ate a lot of carrots as a kid is a matter of fluff left in the hands of the players.

>>Have three classes: Warrior, Mage, and Socialist

Played a fighter using two handed weapons for one campaign and used improved crit, dm allowed a few feats outside the standard players guides and turned him into a near unstoppable monter in combat.

>enemies are the bourgeois
>main antagonist is capitalism

The only core race that should banned is human.

Fighter and Samurai should be banned.

Anyone who uses the rules to tell a story that does not have player involvement should be publically exiled from any and every game table.

>What unpopular opinions do you hold about D&D?
If Alignments were played completely straight they would be pretty cool. Strictly following your given alignment like some cosmic imperative will make people act really alien and weird and I'd like to explore that in a setting. Like, human beings are driven by some sort of ideal that's inherent to the universe. Of course, for this to work, alignment switching without magic is not allowed. I'd want everyone in the world to be chained into their strange alignment philosophy and way of life.

Alignments are so cool. They're one of the unique things about D&D.

but I play d&d for escapism

>warrior socialist fights to redistribute magic items to the common folk
>ends up having his soul torn out by a peasant that got his hands on a powerful necromancers staff

Pretty much. Once you can get four attacks per turn thanks to haste + hitting lvl 10 and have a crit threat range of 16-20 you're pretty much guaranteed to always hit, and if your Str is let's say 24 due to enhancements you're looking at 2d6+11+weapon enhancements, x2 if crit is applicable + whatever you power attacked for. I had one player reach level 11 with this build and in 3-4 rounds he'd do close to if not over 100 points of damage. It got to the point I pretty much could not have anything fight the PCs in melee on level ground unless I was prepared to kiss it goodbye in about 4 turns. Which made life miserable for the fighter because suddenly everything was kiting him and unless he got a dimension door taxi he could never reach the enemy.

did the other PC's cast freedom of movement on him all the time or what?

We ran a game with a frenzied beserker once. With the last cleave that let you move and cleave after a death, we saw a 8000 damage round. It was fucking glorious.

Haste and Dimension Door courtesy of the party's Bard. Admittedly the fighter would have been a lot less effective without this Gnome Bard there to buff him.

>Party works best with teamwork
Game working as intended

Material components are a great part of low-fantasy settings and I'm glad they haven't been dropped in favor of high-magic fuckery.

Race as class with everyone getting enough options to play various archetypes or combinations of archetypes.

Druids can easily fit into a party as long as theres some wilderness presence in the game.
Bards require a competent roleplayer to be interesting but when done well thet're awesome.
I'd rather turn gnomes into halfling subraces.
Hobgoblins seem to have a more or less fixed personality, which makes them less than ideal for PCs.
Half elves fit a niche that a new race probably couldn't.
Horns are cool I guess.

>Hobgoblins seem to have a more or less fixed personality

no more than elves or dwarves

getting rid of hitdie and not having hitpoints balanced around it was a mistake. It made encounter building and wrapping one's head around enemy scaling far easier instead of whatever the fuck logic they use for determining an enemies health in 5e. like in earlier editions a gnoll was 1 hit die +1 which means its health ranged from 1-9 and it got a +1 to its attacks and used the saves of a level 1 fighter. If you wanted to make a tougher gnoll that was like a boss gnoll you just made him 5 hitdie which was 5d8+5 health, had +5 to hit and the saves of a level 5 fighter. Nowadays a standard gnoll has 5d8 health at a challenge rating of 1/2 while a gnoll packlord has 9d8+9 hitpoints and a challeng rating of 2. There isn't really a defined pattern that I can hook my brain around for encounter building which means either I find something in the book or I tweak around the stats of something and hope I don't make a fucking murder machine because I won't know until I see it in action.

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There is this whole thing where you can ignore what you don't like and insert what you do. It's called being a DM.

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how did the fighter not get Improved Grab'd to death?

There was a monk, duskblade and usually an enlarged cleric in melee next to her.

I started DMing because I thought it was the case but a lot of things are so tied to their original implications or how they work that I'd have to modify way too many things in order to make them work like I want. I COULD narrate and introduce races and whatnot beforehand with many changes to their lore and role in the world, but to change races into something else, set up restrictions, and specially mechanical changes, is to make a whole ordeal to take in and that most importantly players may not like or accept. I've had those in the past, in which players get pissy because they wanted to play x or y banned race/class and the group ends up falling out because of it.

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There's nothing stopping elves or dwarves from diverging from the norm. Hobgoblins as a race are more restricted Due to their connect to a deity.
But I guess that could be easily fixed.

Sounds more like your problem is yielding to the whims of players. If they don't want to play your game they can find another one or run their own.

>Hobgoblins as a race are more restricted Due to their connect to a deity.
hm?

>Being worried about players
DMs will always and forever be more valuable than players. Without you no one can play. You can afford to be picky.

>There's nothing stopping elves or dwarves from diverging from the norm. Hobgoblins as a race are more restricted Due to their connect to a deity.

no more than elves and Corey or dwarves and Muradin or whoever their main god is

>to make a whole ordeal to take in and that most importantly players may not like or accept. I've had those in the past, in which players get pissy because they wanted to play x or y banned race/class and the group ends up falling out because of it.
>"It seems you don't like my game ideas; what time are you running your game, then?"

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>players get pissy because they wanted to play x or y banned race/class and the group ends up falling out because of it.

nothing of value was lost

Hobgoblins have shifted around a fair amount over the years, though. The only real constant is being bigger, more serious Goblins. Even in 5E, their mechanics are mostly just having a "tough alien warrior" style martial pride. Given the number of inherent spells getting tossed around PC races now, that's nothing.