Part of the problem with the 'ranger' concept is that Aragorn is a military ranger: light infantry specializing in stealth and mobility.
The "loner in the forest" ranger shares some of the same talent pool but is completely different in tone and theme.
Aragorn's loner aspect isn't a quality of the military ranger; it makes him stand out as not doing his rangering job properly (because his noble blood makes him angsty).
So you wind up with a class that mashes together MIA spec-ops with such disparate sources as Natty Bumppo, Crocodile Dundee, Tarzan, and San.
I think Natty Bumppo and Tarzan are particularly cogent case studies, as they tend to showcase the "dances with wolves" problem with rangers.
@Axoren I'm a fan of "what if [trope] but also [unrelated cliché]" character/worldbuilding, but D&D struggles with rangers because they've stacked SO MANY unrelated tropes and cliches on top of each other that it's become its own thing without gaining a clear identity. Not that rangers are unique in this regard.
Note to self: if I ever write a system with classes, start every class by asking how their specialization ties them in bonds of reciprocity and obligation to a particular community.
A traveling librarian often turns their route into a community. They're also usually financed by a person or group which isn't on their route.
eg, the traveling librarians of Kentucky were originally funded by the Louisville Monday Afternoon Club (and then the Kentucky Federation of Women's Clubs), but due to lack of access to certain books, the people on a given route would often make books for each other by clipping articles out of magazines and writing down their own recipes and guides.
In the Staff of Magi's description, it is written:
Spell Absorption. While holding the staff, you have advantage on saving throws against spells. In addition, you can use your reaction when another creature casts a spell that targets only you. If you do, the staff absorbs the magic of the spell,...
@AncientSwordRage San, the titular Princess Mononoke, is a human woman who was literally raised by wolves. Spears and long daggers are her preferred weapons.
@AncientSwordRage B5 can be painfully slow, especially at first, as it stretches about 15 episodes-worth of really good content over 22-episode seasons Because Syndication. And the secondary characters tend to be much more interesting than the main characters. But it's got some GREAT secondary characters and the worldbuilding is often interesting. If you like DS9, give B5 a shot, it fills a very similar place in TV history.
@TheDragonOfFlame I was that GM. How would you suggest balancing an encounter so that someone who has a high chance of hitting and deals a large amount of damage, doesn't overshadow characters with moderate to low chances of hitting and low damage? If Troggy went first, he'd get to try and hit an enemy. Then his brother would take a turn and all the enemies would die.
If Troggy didn't get to go first, he would often not get a chance to go at all.
I could make enemies that were durable against his brother's attacks... but then Troggy could only hit them on a 20.
I could make enemies that Troggy could kill... but then his brother would be guaranteed to one-shot them.
We’re talking about characters with an effective 10 to 15 point difference in their to-hit, and at least 20 points difference on damage. And they were the same level.
This was an extreme case, and it stood out because it made me realize how much work I had been doing to customize encounters for no benefit, only to avoid a problem. I knew how to do this, I was good at it. But the tools weren’t enough.
My very first D&D game ended with a rogue and an NPC-class "expert" (nothing but skills and mediocre base numbers) and that was fine, we had a lot of fun. But there was a period in that last campaign where the only way to give Troggy and the sorcerer a chance for anything more than a participation trophy, was to make at least one enemy in every fight have a permanent freedom of movement effect.
There was another period where I couldn't figure out anything, because the sorcerer and the warlock were both targeting touch AC but the warlock's attacks were massive no-save damage and the sorcerer's attacks were base-level damage that often allowed a save for half.
And that dumped Troggy even further out in the cold because he was targeting normal AC with an even lower to-hit modifier, but it's very hard to get touch AC higher than normal AC, so I had to choose between the warlock and sorcerer hitting every time so Troggy would have a chance to hit, or Troggy never hitting anything so the warlock and sorcerer might miss.
This was the campaign which taught me how blessed 4e's standardization was, and set me up to whole-heartedly embrace abstract-universal systems like Fate.
but honestly I like other systems a lot better than D&D
XD
I like Golden Sky Stories and Fate and Lady Blackbird a lot
probably a couple others I'm forgetting in there
there are just a lot of systems that tell stories better than D&D tends to, or more accurately have a better support system and setting for telling stories
D&D tells stories fine but it makes you do a lot of the work and pretends it's helping more than it is XD
although I will admit for the tabletop combat element it does better than a lot of games, mostly talking about 4e in terms of personal preference
but I find I can satisfy that need with video games and such
whereas the story telling aspect is something I can only do all that satisfyingly with other people and other RPG systems just work better for me and my usual group/s
(also I just like trying new systems too much to get stuck only playing D&D especially since I've probably still spent more time on one edition or other of D&D than any other single system)
I’m cramming for finals, and to remember element properties for chemistry I’ve started phrasing them as Fate stunts
4
For instance: “Because [Fluorine] is a [halogen], it gets [stable] when [it gains one electron]” or “because [sodium] is [an alkali metal], it gets [reactive and explodes] when it [is dropped into water]”
I fully expect that I’m either wrong on fate stunts or on chemistry, but I hope not
Especially because chem is the class where the final matters the most — it’s something like 25 percent of the grade compared to 20% for everything else
I have a character who multiclassed from a Sorcerer into a Druid. She has the Subtle Spell metamagic, and has prepared the Purify Food and Drink spell via her druid spellcasting feature - this spell has the ritual tag. She is a guest at a feast, but some nefarious individuals are also present the...
@trogdor really? Wow. You and no one else I have ever met
@BardicWizard ha
@trogdor I have never played 4e but everyone I’ve heard talk about it says combat is ridiculously slow, character creation sucks, and the system was an all around disaster. (Though, Matt Colville liked it I just remembed, so you aren’t the only one)
@TheDragonOfFlame There are quite many of us here. Trog, BESW and myself all like 4e with some caveats. I prefer it a fair bit over 5e although I think it has legitimate issues, especially prior to overhauling of monster math in MM3.
In original DnD 4e combat was indeed rather slow, mainly because defenses, to-hit and HP scale with level, while damage doesn't (to nearly the same degree).
It wasn't too bad at low levels but at epic levels, you'd spend ages blasting away at Orcus' 1500 hit points.
With MM3, they did the math (THEY DID THE MONSTER MATH)
But anyway. 4e doesn't suck, it just became an acceptable target because it was rather different, which prompted angry reactions, and those turned into a feedback loop.
Assuming that Witch bolt is cast at 1st level and hits the target would the target take 2d12 damage in that turn because its the beginning of the spell's duration and
on each of your turns for the duration, you can use your action to deal 1d12 lightning damage to the target automatically.
or do...
I asked a similar question "How do the Haste spell and Turn Undead interact?". Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems that the answer there says that even haste's action is limited by Turn Undead, that Turn Undead controls not just your action but also haste's action as it is still an action.
I'm wonde...
I’m working on a project, and I need a good holiday and TTRPGs pun or caption. The project is a cross stitch chart with a d20 (the number facing up is 20) in a circle (which is patterned as either a ring or a wreath). I’m not sure what to do for a caption though. I had thought about “5 golden rolls” or “Deck the Halls with rolls of 20”, but I want to think about other options
It’s going to be part of a sampler for a family member and it’s going to be repeated at least three times, so I need at least one other caption
(the caption is going to be stitched in there too so it looks like a printed shirt or something)
@TheDragonOfFlame yeah I'm aware a lot of people hated it, some of them didn't even bother to play it at all
IMO character creation was rad XD yes combat took some time, guess which other editions I can say that about?
Both the other ones I've played is the answer
Though I have only played 5e for part of one campaign and the combat was a little faster in it than 3.5 and 4e but not by like, enough for me to be all that excited about it
And it was only at low levels which wasn't where 4e started actually taking long to end fights (4e did have an issue with that at higher levels)
But yeah anyway, I found at the time that there were plenty of people apparently ready and willing to condemn 4e as a system simply because it bothered to change the formula a little
Believe me when I say I am aware that it has plenty of detractors
@kviiri yeah there are legitimate reasons to dislike the system for sure, the problem mainly comes, at least for me, when someone took a glance at how different it looked from 3.5 and decided to hate if forever and be very vocal about it with people who played it and liked it :/
@Shalvenay i don’t know? They’re open enough to letting us do that (which I’ve been pushing for) but half the club still relies on various GMs to bring books
I mean another of my favorites is Wesley Crusher, who, having been long-term adjacent to Star Trek fandom, I knew to hate before ever seeing a whole episode or film of any Star Trek series. You know the annoying Mary Sue kid who the adults bash on because they're jealous of his prodigal skills, but who still saves the day always.
That indeed is the case but for no more than a handful of episodes, all part of the TNG's first season generally considered to be overall bad.
So unless you can give bardic inspiration to yourself then I doubt I’m ever going to be able to come up with something worth continuing
at least for this project
actually, this leads to an interesting question: what is bardic inspiration made of? Is it tangible? Is it edible? If it’s edible is it more like sugar or coffee?
@BardicWizard what I mean is that what people call lazy is going to be something like tiredness (physical/mental) or unmotivated (which will have reasons) or too anxious to start/continue
> Combatants who are unaware at the start of battle don’t get to act in the surprise round. Unaware combatants are flat-footed because they have not acted yet, so they lose any Dexterity bonus to AC. (Source)
@TheDragonOfFlame Yeah, 4e is my favorite version of D&D. That's damning with faint praise, and I still had to hack its math pretty aggressively to make the pacing work, but its lore was less toxic; its balance was more comprehensive; its approach to lore/crunch was more consistent; and it encouraged interesting tactical choices at every turn.
I left it mostly because of all the problems I have with any version of D&D, and playing such a well-put-together edition helped me see that my struggles with 3.5 weren't just down to the edition's flaws, but also I was dealing with qualities fundamental to the franchise itself.
It constantly bemuses me to see people in this chat talking about problems in 5e that 4e had already solved but apparently Wizards walked back.
A spellcaster uses Disguise Self to pass as a simple bodyguard. In particular, the quarterstaff that she uses as a spell focus, which normally looks like an obviously magical item (runes, faint lights, the works), is disguised to look like a simple martial weapon (the kind of quarterstaff that a ...
(And a lot of the better parts of 5e seem to be the bits of 4e that Wizards was able to disguise enough that the anti-4e crowd wouldn't reject 5e for containing.)
Combat was slow, yeah... but it was interesting so a fight taking an hour or more didn't matter because that's what the game was about; it's kinda like complaining that a movie takes 90 minutes to watch.
Character creation was terrible... if you didn't use the online tools, which removed the tedium and let you get straight to the really creative system mastery bits. Troggy made dozens of characters for fun between sessions just because he enjoyed the character-creation process so much.
The system had some major flaws, but they were mostly centered on the math not scaling with level. I used a couple fan hacks, which the online tools made easy to apply to all my monsters, and the players didn't have to change anything at all. Problem solved! Combat sped up, attacks didn't miss as often, damage was appropriately threatening, and skill challenges got more tactically interesting.
Was it still stuffed with bioessentialist, colonial, exotifying, murder-glorifying, ableist, sanist, objectifying, acceptable-targets nonsense? Absolutely, it's D&D. But that's not what critics of 4e have a problem with, because they prefer editions of D&D which do all of that even more.
How does being blinded affect a creature who is flying, such as an aarakocra? Would a blind aarakocra risk crashing into things if they tried to fly?
Assuming that Witch bolt is cast at 1st level and hits the target would the target take 2d12 damage in that turn because its the beginning of the spell's duration and
on each of your turns for the duration, you can use your action to deal 1d12 lightning damage to the target automatically.
or do...
