@SevenSidedDie Oh - yeah, I don't think those are dupes personally. One's more "how do I keep chases interesting" and one's "what are rules for chases/vehicle combat."
quick question about an old post (rpg.stackexchange.com/a/19558/30299): That answer claims that a Wizard must specialize in Abjuration to qualify for Incantatrix. I thought they just couldn't have Abjuration banned. Is that a rule I missed, or a mistake in the answer?
@mxyzplk Fair point. And on further reflection, my answer to the older one wasn't a great fit, but I think it actually answers this question more-properly. So I've gone ahead and tweaked it an iota to post as an answer on the new one.
But it feels a bit unseemly to have posted the same answer twice, to two near-duplicate questions. Anyone should feel free to take a look and ping me if you think there's some different way I should have handled it. (old question, new question)
@A_S00 Always gotta remember: the Stack is an emergent phenomenon, built of thousands of users expressing many thousands of interpretations of how to build it.
@nitsua60 In this case happily apparently the official rules also allow for a fun chase. I think the new question is a little less about "chases" and more about vehicles in combat - cover, etc - which you can say 'they abstract that into chase rules' but I think he's expecting more like "you get X points of cover and the wagon takes 50 hp to destroy".
so that answer's good but with maybe a bit more of that of a frame challenge saying "don't need that"
Okay, room, I'll be writing a oneshot soon, hoping to highlight the best points of 5e. So what do you think are the parts of 5e that deserve top-billing? Ping me with your thoughts =)
I like the part where they successfully came through with the early design idea for a modular game of plug-and-play subsystems around a bare-bones core, so each group could play the combination of D&D mechanics they best prefer. ...Wait.
@A_S00 Note that while kryan thinks it should have been a comment, you've also got confirmation from BESW in chat, plus three upvotes, telling you that you did the right thing. You can add me to that list, for what it's worth.
@doppelgreener thanks for refreshing those [faq-proposal]s - I turned most of them into FAQs because they had a clear runaway answer and had gone cold. Declined one because it was too weak. We leave them as proposals for an arbitrarily long time so everyone gets to see them and then we forget to go back and convert them!
the problem is, core D&D players are too rules-anal for something like that to work. And it's weird, because like the OSR folks (LotFP is a good example) has kinda thrown up their hands on rules depth and just said "you know... an ogre. Use whatever stats from whatever version floats your boat."
The primary product D&D offers is legacy. It's why 4e was unpopular and why 5e is the way it is. The modular salad bar approach would've let Wizards and their audience have their cake and eat it too.
@mxyzplk Have you played LotFP? I bought it in a bundle 'cause it looked like a good price for a bunch of stuff for a game I've at least heard of, but haven't even cracked it open yet. What's the two-sentence pitch?
@BESW How much do you think they're going to make selling a book (Tales from the Yawning Portal) that presents no new adventures, most of which are "converted" from systems wherefrom a selling point of 5e was that conversion wouldn't be needed?
I'd say that I like 1. The backgrounds. Good amount of fluff, small bonus, comes with four good RP hooks. 2. The archetypes. Fighter, party of four, can give you a decent amount of variety 3. The class flexibility. Lacking in 3.5, but showed up in 4, I like that 5 kept the ability of non-casting classes to do more supernatural seeming things. 4. The naming. I really like that they officially kept to the naming scheme and called it 5, rather than something stupid and non-sequential, like "next". Wait....
@nitsua60 A lot less than if they'd used a title without "yawn" in it.
Seriously though imagine if they could've republished all their old adventures unmodified as ebooks (no overhead for system conversion) and just said "Hey, use [x] plugins and this adventure works in 5e!"
There are old D&D adventures I'd like to experience but don't want to learn a whole new system for.
@nitsua60 the pitch is basically "here's some rules if for some reason you're brain damaged and don't have any other edition of D&D. Now here's some crazy adventures"
Since this is an entirely imaginary and almost certainly logistically impossible modular system we're talking about, I will assume it's Anselm's system "that than which nothing greater can be conceived" which has plugins for seamless integration with products from earlier editions.
@BESW I don't know if that's sarcastic, but I really think the Starter Set did a good job. It hands you five character sheets, with descriptions on the back of each as to what'll happen at the first three level-ups; a rulebook that covers skills/abilities, combat, adventuring, and (level 1-2) spells; and an adventure that's copiously annotated for the GM's reference. ("The goblins might surprise your characters. Remember, surprise rules are on p.9.")
The equipment lists are scoped to just what'd be available in the town/environs of the adventure. There's not even plate mail listed on the armor->AC table, 'cause they won't be able to buy/find it.
@BESW That's fair. And know that I'm comparing this to TSR's other attempts to make D&D approachable, so that's the bar this Starter Set is clearing by a mile. =)
also, @nitsua60, thinking on it I don't believe you can objectively say what parts of 5e are good or bad, just the ones you like. So it may be more constructive to ask what kind of games your one-shot group likes, then ask how 5e best supports those.
Since it's not possible to cover all aspects of the system in a one-shot, you're cherry picking something. In a way, this approach is also showcasing the DMG rules about customizing the game to the player preferences
If it's what I think it is, the one-shot is part of a whistle-stop tour of various systems for people who don't yet have a solid sense of exactly what kind of games they like.
This is bringing the group to the system, not the system to the group. I get where you're coming from, and normally I'd be right there with you, but the situation is atypical.
My lack of context is what led me to qualify the suggestion with "it may be...". Even if the players have never touched an RPG, you should be able to get a general idea if you either know them, or have a conversation (explicitly or implicitly) about Angry's 8 kinds of fun
or go over that page of the DMG with them, to see what direction they'd like to head in
so if we're assuming you can't know anything about the party before hand, then I'd have to fall back to the best points being entirely subjective
@nitsua60 There are a few particular innovations in LotFP: no monster lists (“every monster is unique! here are rules for creating them”), a simplified yet usable encumbrance system. The rest is pretty much a standard OSR-style BECMI variation, but with a bunch more polemical writing about the right way to run games than the average OSR game.
Though, simplified and more usable encumbrance systems had already started to become common in the OSR, so it was only just barely an innovation at the time.
Restoring HP in place of Wounds/Vitality is a step in the right direction for Saga, but the d20 System engine is still there; I'd probably use Faith Corps instead, if I ever wanted to run a Star Wars game.
It's just a jest anyway. Yeah, I dislike the underlying d20 (honestly, sick of the whole binary hit logic), but some of its ideas are neat. Like the five-class system.
...And systems which don't spend the lion's share of their energy on combat mechanics for games based on franchises which focus mostly on character drama.
@Frezak Their breeding time has all the termites swarm at once, wherever they can find space. It's a little annoying for folks in concrete houses, but wooden houses can become unliveable for a night or two.
@mxyzplk I'm glad it was that useful. :) On my mind was it was going to be less burdensome to process if all the proposals were actually FAQ proposals.
@BESW [BESW casts 7th level spell Sick Burn and crits]
@nitsua60 I like how they did away with the bugajillion modifiers to come up with Advantage and Disadvantage. I like their bounded accuracy- it creates a more down-to-earth game that I really enjoy running and playing.
@nitsua60 also second joel harmon on the backgrounds, but I can't see it being used in a one-shot? Also second the archetype flex, the idea of a 4-fighter party sounds awesome for a one shot! (everyone shares features, so new players can teach each other. Like, they all know what Second wind does)
@daze413 Isn't bounded accuracy basically just 4E's 1/2level thing? WHich really only serves to lock you to a very narrow band of creature levels that would be actually worth your time?
Bounded accuracy is a major feature of the new system. It promises that bonuses to rolls won't grow too much throughout a character's career. And indeed, a first-level fighter would have an apex skill of about +5 (Strength +3, proficiency +2), whereas a twentieth-level fighter would have the same...
Yeah, 4E gives you half your level to your skills, attack rolls and defences (non-armour defences being save-equivalents). In my experience, this lets characters progress in all areas without having to focus overmuch, but in practice it means that any enemy more that a few levels above or below your own end sup either a trivial waste of time, or twice as hard to hit as anything else, and twice as accurate, therefore pretty deadly.
Instead of using level to determine difficulty, 4e uses level to determine the kinds of features a creature might have. Difficulty is determined by the minion/standard/elite/solo paradigm.
The same monster encountered multiple times would ideally always be roughly the level of the party at the time of each encounter, but might start out as a solo against a level 5 party and wind up as a minion against a level 15 party.
It took some getting used to, but I enjoyed being able to field two dozen orcs who were credibly hard-to-hit and credibly damaging without swamping the party. Made 'em feel properly epic.
@BESW I've had a lot of fun messing with creature design in 4E, though, because the math is so damn clear. And having Conditions rather than a few hundred spells effects lets me just make up a whole set of decent, interesting encounters without access to any material.
Hmm. If you were to ask that question, I'd leave a comment something like, "Please [edit] your question to tell us what problem that behaviour is causing. Are the players dissatisfied? Are the PCs outleveling the pre-made adventure you're using? Something else?"
@Frezak Oh, yeah. I loved custom monster design in 4e.
I stopped using solos almost entirely, and instead made big bosses who were groups of standards and elites for each body part.
(A dragon would be like, five Standard monsters: Head, Tail, Wings, Body, Claws. Each with their own turns, unique attacks and abilities, and all moving together.)
I started using ... 1/2 Standards. Just abunch of slightly weaker standard class creatures, but with half HP and with twice as many fielded. Because minions just go splat, tend to rarely be a threat, and there's no other way to outnumber the party, really.
@BESW I'm going to do something similar with a... disembodied gobling head mounted on a body made of siege engines. Break the ram-fist? The flamethrower arm? The Ballistas? The Feet of Stomping?!
And then there was fun stuff like the mind flayer who could use his opportunity action to teleport adjacent to anyone who took psychic damage... and had a priest friend with an aura that dealt psychic damage at the start of each enemy's turn.
It actually made the encounter easier, because the mind flayer was always in hitting distance of you at the start of your turn. But oh boy did it make the mind flayer a presence in the fight.
Instead of lurking at the back letting the minions do the work, he was always in your face at the start of your turn.
I had ridiculous fun just using these... I think they're stock creatures. Foulspawn wretches? THey can teleport at will, when they die they can teleport an ally to where they died, and when they hit with a claw they can teleport an ally in. So it was a weird teleporting conga line. Just minions, but no way to get AOES because everyone was covered in the little buggers! Not that dangerous a fight, but memorable for weird mechanics.
I had ones that left the square they died in all slippery.
And ones that pulled or pushed everyone a few squares when they died.
Then there was the "I heal my master with my death!" minions. Those you had to not kill, but keep away from the master so he couldn't shank 'em to top off.
If you got within swinging range of him, he'd knock you three to twelve squares back (even if he missed you), and probably make you prone and slowed as well as marked.
Also just had a doctor's appointment where I was told that despite the two identical long lasting quite troublesome coughs I've had in only three months, there was nothing unusual about my lungs and nothing to worry about.
I'm not sure that makes me entirely not-worried, mind.
@BESW On this: I have mixed feelings of yes and no. Yes because it espouses some good advice, no because it deals with a specific situation that is outside the norm of merely advising on how to back up an answer: specifically it's dealing with "your answer isn't helpful because there's no actionable advice in it", the vanilla scenario is "your advice isn't helpful because there's no experience backing it up".
If it were dealing with the vanilla scenario, totally hands down yes.
Maybe there's value in an FAQ handling that other scenario, but probably under a different title.
There have been many occasions of "don't mix up 'player' and 'character'" in a question title, but I've for the first time encountered an answer that appears to have taken the entire OOC group player dynamic as an IC party character dynamic and is trying to solve only the ingame problem. :(
Floods are bad :( I think we will have another big flood in the spring. Last time we had i it (and damage from river was a pretty bad) was around 7 years ago. Now they say there are ice blocking upstream. That's bad sign.
@BESW @JoelHarmon it is this. So while I agree with you that the "usual" approach would be to craft the game to the group, the explicit intent of this one is to say "here are things this system is good at." So I'd like to assemble my list of what are inherent strengths of the system to showcase.
