> Are there any rules in the SRD which would actually contradict the published D&D 5E rules and make it difficult to play if some players used SRD rules and others used published 5E rules?
Errata seems entirely relevant if it results in contradictions/confusion between the SRD (translated or otherwise) and the published 5e books
In any case, the point is to compare the two; if the changes in errata and such are insignificant, that's worth noting too.
because the current answer is no longer accurate
There are inconsistencies/differences between the SRD and the published 5e rules now, even if fairly minor - it's something the group would need to be aware of
(I assume OP's particular situation has long been resolved, but it's relevant to note for future readers wondering about the SRD vs. published 5e rules for that or other reasons)
The basic rules exist and are up to date... but don't contain the same information as the SRD. Translations of the basic rules also can't be legally distributed by anyone besides WotC (barring an agreement with WotC), unlike the SRD which explicitly allows it.
But regardless of all that... The SRD exists. Some people use it as a reference (or use sites that reproduce the SRD's content, such as 5eSRD or similar). The current answer is wrong that there are no contradictions between the SRD and the published rules. That's the reason I started the bounty.
@Medix2 Yeah, honestly the link rot thing is less "nobody cares about ethics here" and more "everybody got tired of the handful of people screaming whenever ethics get mentioned." So a less nuanced justification was put at the front of the discussion because it's harder for the walruses to waste everyone's time attacking.
That's what happens when you're working on a site whose owners don't take ethical stances.
@AncientSwordRage Mnemomic is fascinating. Like, it's a great game. But it's also a glimpse into a largely new and unfamiliar way of thinking about TRPGs.
well hello everybody! i'm trying to find a good resource for 5e/campaign builiding in general on balancing the central story of a campaign vs letting players have choices. i have a campaign that i jsut started that has a general premise and and end goal for the players, but i want them to have to make decisions along the way
basically, if rail roading and sandboxing were on opposite sides of the spectrum, my intent is to aim towards the center, maybe just a touch leaning towards rail roading
What I've learned is to let players set (and later change) their own goals. I can set up the initial state of the world (though I prefer to collaborate with my players on that), and then the players figure out what they want to change about the world.
If I want to ensure something happens, I bake it into the world design: like, if I want them to eventually confront a particular NPC, I make sure that no matter where they go, they encounter evidence of that NPC.
@DForck42 I’m trying to do something similar as a gm in 2 campaigns and am a player in another campaign with a structure like that.
As a GM: in one, the overarching story is (Stop here if you are a player in either of the ARD library games, you know who you are) a mage destroying towns which should lead into a conflict between gods, and the eventual goal is to stop this conflict. Until then, they have a lot of freedom in what they do: I offer them rumors, goals, and hooks, then they choose what to follow or make their own way. The other one has a huge war looming that they want to stop, so the players do sabotage stuff to the evil empires but have a lot of freedom.
Full disclosure though, the last several years I've been strongly avoiding running games in a way where I think I know how they'll end--or how they'll begin, even! I've come to love collaborative play that starts at the very earliest parts of choosing a system and creating a setting.
I learned that you have to have a clear idea of what the end goal is, but give yourself enough freedom to let that change. Maybe the evil empire’s goal won’t change, but they can kill off the emperor and replace them with a person who actually knows what they’re doing; that may not be how you expect it to work out, but it’ll come to a good end if you run with it.
@DForck42 You may be interested in reading up on Dungeon World's system of Fronts. Basically, it's a way of keeping players moving toward some goal, by keeping track of what other forces in the game world are(n't) doing about it.
so for some background, i'm basically blatenly ripping off oblivion for my game. the gates to the three chaotic evil planes have been forced open and chaos has overtaken the material plane ... blah blah blah the players have been chosen to save the world
so the ultimate end goal is for them to close those three gates. however, they aren't nearly strong enough to do that at the moment, cause they're only level 5
Back in those days, I'd carefully develop characters and factions with motives and agendas of their own, and plans for achieving them, and backup plans.
Then I'd let the players loose into these carefully constructed webs of influences and plans, and watch them careen around making a mess of everything, and each character/faction would respond in character according to their goals and motives and whatever contingencies they might (or might not) have for what's going wrong.
The thing about creating characters with agendas they're pursuing, rather than plot points I'm trying to hit, is that I don't have to worry about contradicting anything that hasn't hit the table yet. All that's true is what everyone knows, and what the table hasn't seen is not yet true, only possible.
Just a gentle note: stars in chat should really be used for noteworthy things (significant or funny) - something you'd want someone to see in the sidebar and would still be interesting enough to check out a couple days later. Try not to use starring to "like" too many minor things. :)
For example: I once made a campaign where I knew the end would be a big confrontation with an ancient evil. So I sprinkled the world with ties to the evil: wherever the group went they would encounter evidence of the evil in the style of Dark Depths: every town, every faction, every dungeon, if you spent enough time with it then you'd discover harm the evil had caused, servants of the evil, resistance to the evil, or something like that.
So no matter what the PCs did, they got the attention of the evil and its servants, and disrupted or advanced the evil's plots. So that any choice the players made, got them entangled in the evil's story and justified the evil responding to them: retaliating, trying to recruit, etc.
So whatever game element the PCs pay attention to, it pays attention to them right back, creating a positive feedback loop wherein the things the players like stay in the front and my ideas that didn't get traction fall away.
@DForck42 I admit I'm amused that the star board currently has one pinned item, almost everything BESW said in the last half hour, and a request to not over-star things.
@DForck42 I'd suggest that "the PCs have been chosen to do the thing" is setting up player choices to go "off the rails," while "the PCs have chosen to do the thing" is setting up player choices to stay on the rails. Get player buy-in for the direction you want the story to go, and they'll collaborate to make sure you all get there.
I would frequently tell my players, during character creation, that every PC needed to be made with a reason to work with the party toward [common goal].
From experience I would advise against writing the campaign backwards, i.e. planning an endgame and then trying to write a story to lead up to it. Much better to focus on where the group is now, not where they might be in the distant future.
I'd like to chip in that most/all of this advice isn't mutually exclusive; it's additive (or even multiplicative).
Also, much of this will depend on your players. I once played in a game where the DM started with a structure in mind: found guild; build up guild; use guild to help solve city-threatening problem. This was too much structure for one player, who basically ended up quitting over feeling railroaded into a plot line where he felt the characters didn't really have choices, because the DM already knew the ending (they just supplied the dialog).
Getting initial buy in would have been immensely helpful in that situation.
Yeah, all of that. I've played with people who liked having me orchestrate the story for them, but generally even those people blossomed more when given more creative control outside the bodies of their characters.
@JoelHarmon i will say that i did pitch this campaign to my characters and they were all in for it, we even did a session 0
so i'm not so much worried about them ignoring the plot altogether but giving them breaks from the plot and having their choices matter in the over arching story
Well, the world-saving outcome isn't usually the real interest in a story anyway. What makes a story resonate tends to be the emotional stakes of people we care about.
"Will Luke Skywalker help his father find redemption?" is the question we care about at the end of Return of the Jedi. It's got nothing to do with whether the Death Star will blow up; Luke's so confident his friends can handle that, he ditches them entirely to try and save his dad's soul.
Fury Road asks whether Max Rockatansky will let himself commit to human companionship again--and the answer is "not yet, but he's getting closer."
(Max does very little in that film; in terms of physical agency the protagonist is clearly Imperator Furiosa. It's the question of Max's emotional agency that makes him the main character.)
So, you can have a story with a clearly pre-defined ending in terms of the major outcomes, but if the characters are invested in the world's details and want to accomplish things or save things in ways that are risked by the inevitable outcome, then it's a story about their attempt to accomplish the inevitable outcome without losing what they value.
D&D isn't really set up to give people a lot of help in defining why we should care about anybody (PC or NPC) in a fight, or the outcome of the fight, beyond "The PCs are our characters and we like to win and it's annoying to roll a new character if they die."
But that doesn't mean characters and outcomes in a D&D game can't be cared about--it just means the people at the table have to do all the work themselves without assistance from the system.
@DForck42 That's the brute force way to do it, yeah. There are... subtler... methods, but you've got the principle.
@MikeQ One really simple way to accelerate investment is for the players to make or choose parts of the world. We care more about stuff that we didn't just get handed to us, and when we make things we tend to make them things we care about.
That's a bit narrow, innit? "Good" players, by whichever definition, may still not care about something just because the DM wants them to care about it.
One thing to be really careful about, for example, is falling into the pattern of threatening everything players care about. It teaches them to stop caring.
2
A lot of "bad players" I've seen talked about on this site, turn out to be players who were taught bad habits by GMs and game systems which punished them every time they got invested in something.
That's one reason I liked Fate so much: the fate point system taught us a more healthy way to engage with risk, failure, and loss.
Hm, so I could definitely see how getting players to make parts of the world (either directly through worldbuilding, or indirectly through their character backstory) could get them invested.
Previously I'd tried the strategy of presenting a bunch of options for them, and asking them to choose. That did not work well.
But that's different from just writing people off as incorrigible, which I try not to do: just, some people aren't at a place in their lives where we're gonna be good for each other and I hope they find somebody else who can be good for them.
Especially with new players. In hindsight, I was probably considered a "problem player" in my early years of TTRPGs. So it wouldn't be quite fair to dismiss players outright for some behaviors that don't work at certain tables.
There are regulars in this room who I don't think would ever be a good fit for my table, or me for theirs. But so long as the people in their groups are safe and happy, I can't really criticize.
But yeah, a lot of my time in D&D was spent with me telling people, or being told by people, "No you can't do that" for reasons of... lore, or class balance, or level-gated access to features, or personal ideas about how a game should be, or no particular reason at all.
And I saw people, including myself, develop very toxic habits in response to that constant frustration. Ways to exercise some control in the face of being told "no," even when that control was at the expense of my own fun or the happiness of others.
When I started sitting at tables where more agency was given--for example, getting to choose what things I'm invested in would get risked--it was a revelation.
Making character choices (mechanical and role-play) that I didn't like, and made the game harder for other people to enjoy, because they gave me control in whatever area the GM/system allowed. Using my own persuasiveness and understanding of the GM and other players to manipulate the table without their consent. Denying myself things in the game that I'd enjoy, out of fear that it would be taken from me in ways that would invalidate me. Spending time and money on things I didn't like just because it would position me as an authority at the table.
OMH is the story of a player who felt that the GM broke the game's unspoken social contract about player agency, and instead of talking it out... he manipulated and exploited the GM's deeply-held values about how to run a game, in order to wrest control from not just the GM but everyone at the table.
(eg, he knew the GM respected detailed character development to the extent that it could take precedence over rules and balance: so he wrote an incomprehensible and impossibly long backstory in order to justify things which would never have been allowed. He wielded the GM's own values against him.)
I would like to create a bomb where a dangerous material is inside of an open bottle (using a mesh screen to keep the material from falling out), then throw the bottle at a creature, and use create or destroy water to create water inside of the bottle and make it explode.
There are many substance...
Hey everyone, I have a quick question about 5e. RAW, can an invisible creature (such as a pact of the chain's imp familiar) use the help action without giving away it's position?
According to the D&D 5th edition Player's Handbook, the description of the Help action in combat states (page 192; bolding made by me):
You can aid a friendly creature in attacking a creature within 5 feet of you. You feint, distract the target, or in some other way team up to make your ally’...
Follow up question, could the familiar use the help action and then back up? There's no requirement that you stay next to the target you're distracting?
If, say, a Fighter is engaged in melee with an orc, can the Cleric, starting 10' away from the Orc, move 5' toward the orc, Help the Fighter (to give him Advantage), then move away 25'? He would provoke an attack of opportunity, but would the Help action still work?
Put another way, do you have...
@Safdar Welcome to the den of RPG-people! So, you want to find an online gaming group, and you had read the old question about it. What are cou looking for?
@Trish Honestly, I am fine with any game. They just have to consider that I am completely new to this.. The most experience that I have is an hour long video where they broadcasted the beginning of descent to Avernus. Also medium of communication has to be englidh
@Trish helped out with a pretty great edit there..
@Safdar ok, so the first question you should ask yourself is: What kind of theme are you interested in, and are you looking for a "living world" thing (like a MUSH would offer) or are you into a tight knit group like you would find at a table?
@Trish A world would be better since that would mean more flexibility in timings and any rescheduling wouldn't cause major issues as in a tight knit group.
@Safdar a world, like a mush, is an entirely different style of play though. For example, my ay to day RPG-habits are Play-by-chat (or rather: telnet) in Mushes. Mushes have a rather low entry barrier generally, as you only need a telnet client and some writing skill. To find a MUSH, you'd use a site like mudconnect.com and look for a theme that interests you.
But you'd need to know what you look for in RPG there. Also, most mushes are mostly freeform or freeform with a sheet. Few implement the RPG rules directly in a tight way, but I have seen them. Exalted MUSH for example.
Hm, actually a good question.
A normal Tabletop or online group has a set GM and players. The GM decides what the world does, the players decide what their PCs do.
in a MUSH, every player can (and usually does) do some world stuff in their poses (that's what a textblock is called). Sometimes a player takes GM position for a scene, then other players usually ask them if they can do something. Generally, most MUSHes don't have set GMs
Armageddon is a MUD, that's a Multi User Dungeon. Those are more like an MMO, and in fact are the anchestor of Ultima Online, which is the anchestor or modern MMOs
@Trish not really. You need to dip your feet into the water before you can know whether you like it cold or not.. I am at that stage.. anything will do
different MU* (which is the term for MUD, MUSH, MUCK, MOO etc) use different backend engines. PennMUSH is one of those. They differ in syntax how to get things done.
According to the D&D 5th edition Player's Handbook, the description of the Help action in combat states (page 192; bolding made by me):
You can aid a friendly creature in attacking a creature within 5 feet of you. You feint, distract the target, or in some other way team up to make your ally’...
Is there a list of rules I need to follow here?
What are the site policies I need to know about?
