I'm not sure I'm following exactly what the user is saying. I think they negotiated with their GM that they could have Instrument (Voice) proficiency in exchange for the use of Bardic Inspiration, Countercharm and Song of Rest, even as they seem fully aware that proficiency bonus won't stack...
I think there's 2 issues - one that controls how OP reacts to your answer, and one that controls how everyone else does.
For everyone else, the question (on a cursory reading) looks like "What's the point of being proficient in an instrument if it's always a Performance check anyway?" - which is a really good question, and your answer doesn't really address it.
For the OP, I honestly can't tell what they're asking, and I'm not at all sure they really know either.
@kviiri Absolutely. And I'm happy to admit, when I looked at the question (way back when it was posted), I didn't really read it properly, just saw someone asking about Performance vs instrument proficiency, assumed it was that question which I've often wondered about, upvoted and moved on.
> Proficiency with a tool allows you to add your proficiency bonus to any ability check you make using that tool.
Maybe the point is that instrument proficiency lets you add your bonus even if you aren't proficient in Perform, so toll profs are like a subset of skills.
I didn't add it, since the character in question is proficient in Performance already.
That's something that, subjectively, might need a bit of arm-twisting to get across to one's GM I think... I would guess at least my GM would raise an eyebrow if I insisted I'd get instrument proficiency for rolling a skill other than Performance.
But by the rules: if one plays an instrument they're proficient with, they gain the bonus on any roll as long as it involves playing music, and nothing says music is always Performance in nature :)
@kviiri I actually meant the other way round - "I'm not proficient in Performance, but it doesn't matter cos I'm proficient in my instrument, so I get proficiency in Performance checks with it anyway".
We've had some discussions regarding the different paradigms of skill checks in different games among our RP group. I guess dilemmas like "I play music so it's perform, but I do it as a part of my disguise, so which do I roll?" aren't as often a part of DnD.
In Apocalypse World, it's usually the goal that matters, not the action itself: forcing someone to do something with a violent threat is rolled as Go Aggro if one is intent on carrying out the violence if declined, and Seduce/Manipulate if they're just bluffing.
@BESW speaking of that heat, i found out last week my cafe is serving cold brew coffee on ice. so good for days like today. i've been looking into starting to brew it at home.
@godskook My party secured a dragon egg, and sold it to a buyer who isn't the best person to keep it from becoming a power-hungry tyrant. I was planning on having a dragon boss eventually, and the egg quest gave the dragon a nice, ironic origin story... except by the time the players reach the dragon, a young Dragon won't be level-appropriate anymore, and a wyrmling most certainly isn't.
grumble grumble Told a guy on the Ronin Army site that I'd try to help him build his character. I'm trying to be helpful, linking to the online SRD as I encounter things, but it's like pulling teeth with him picking items off of the page with no actual comprehension of what's legal or not, like trying to buy two ranks of Grappling Finesse despite it not being a ranked Advantage and the text indicating that grabs would use his 0 Dexterity score instead of his 8 Strength.
@FuzzyBoots, maybe you should explain to him what the implications of his stats are on what kind of character he can build. Especially since grappling is often-enough a Str-based thing that this is a legit confusion point.
Like....generally, in 3.5, Str-based characters are aggressive frontliners, often dip Barbarian and Fighter, and prefer THF or Sword/Board. Dex-based characters are skirmishers and ranged attackers, preferring TWF, throwing or archery. Con-based characters are tanks, and prefer to have classes that bolster their defense. However, everyone has a strong Con because duh. Int-based characters are sneaky, coniving and knowledgable, making good Rogues, Factotums, Wizards and Psions.
Wisdom-based characters tend to devote themselves to self-study stereotypes, like monks, clergy and nature-lovers. Finally, Charisma-based characters tend to be leaders or vagabonds, but regardless, people who's personality is suited to forming a cult of personality around.
I dunno, my feeling is that D&D as it currently is is already balanced around the assumption that players will have more than 10 CON no matter what they're playing.
Well it feels strange from a character building perspective to have to work in "oh, my wizard goes to the gym two days every week so he doesn't have the terrible CON you'd expect from being a bookworm stuck in the library at uni for four years".
If anything, D&D doesn't reflect how relatively easy it is to get into a semi-decent shape, you are largely stuck with what you start with. All the running away from orcs should do wonders.
@godskook I personally feel that Quidditch having such an out-sized effect on the outcome of the House Cup is the perfect allegory for how college sports is distorting the budgets of universities.
@godskook ^_^ I completely forgot to mention... Mutants and Masterminds 3E. But yeah, I'm trying to explain things as best I can, but I just feel like he's expecting me to do all of the heavy lifting while he provides "ideas".
@Yuuki, as a fat person who grew up hating sports, I think they play a very important role in society, and should be a strong part of universities, from a PURELY educational perspective.
@godskook There's a difference between "should be a strong part of universities" and "my former uni fired a good number of liberal arts professors so it could give the head football coach a million dollar (maybe plus) raise".
@Yuuki, that's a fairly context-less anecdote, given how little I know of even what college you are talking about. SO many justifications I could insert that'd make it perfectly reasonable.
@Yuuki if you just want to reduce the need for decent Con in castery types, you could simply increase their hit dice/hit points per level/whatever 5e does. It's a straight up buff, but it's reducing a weakness which is less unbalancing than increasing a strength.
@Yuuki, simply put, I'm not someone who takes "Sports < Liberal Arts" as a self-evident truth in every anecdote I hear. I'd have to know MUCH more about the situation, including if those teachers were ACTUALLY fired in order to give the Coach his raise, or if its just a coincidence of timing.
@godskook I get where you're coming from and it makes sense if you're talking about a smaller college with a likelier smaller sports budgets. These things happen and sports programs have several unseen or at the very least not obvious benefits.
But without self-identifying, this was at a major public university with an already superb football program that was already paying its coach an outsized amount in comparison to his peers.
@Yuuki Mechanically, I predict it will play exactly the same as a character with vanilla hit point/hit dice and an average con mod, except you'll roll worse on con saves/checks
@Yuuki, even at a big school, if you have a professor who's not providing value, but your coach is bringing x100 his salary, its a perfectly justified trade-off.
@Yuuki The potential danger there, of course, is not so much the increased hit points as being able to put more points into Int, which does increase the power of the character.
With a class as single attribute dependent as most casters seem to be, taking a negative CON doesn't seem like it'd provide any sort of compensation any which way.
@Yuuki, another solution, instead of nerfing Con's generalistic value is to prop-up other stats as being valuable-enough to justify more varied distributions.
I'll point out, however, that you don't have to express the character's personality through the character sheet. That's a trap that 3.5 players often fall into. The system both rewards optimized characters and offers craft(basketweaving).
Eh, ideas are cheap. Everyone has them. Actually getting them into something workable is the difficult part in my mind.
And stats are bought by the player (M&M is a point-based system where the same points are used for Abilities, Advantages (basically Feats), Skills, Defenses, and Powers). So he could choose to put points in his Dexterity. I floated the option.
@Magician, 3.5 stats are not removed from our reality. They dramatically affect what kind of character you have. If you have 6 Con, your negative mod is going to make you sickly, and you'll constantly fall to things that'd only wound a tougher man.
The point is, if you only want slightly below average con to roleplay a thematic type of character, or a personality and not feel punished for it, then you could just roleplay that character type with average or slightly above average con and explain away somehow why the mechanics aren't affected
If you want the mechanics of choosing con as a dump stat to be more attractive, then you and your DM have some more work to do to try and find a way to do that.
@FuzzyBoots, admittedly, I'm a 3.5-snob, and in that system, matching a lot of ideas that I've seen with a reasonably-powerful build isn't that hard. Might be harder when you have far more choices to make.
Only people I struggle building characters for in rapid time are the type that get hung-up on class-names(objecting to Unarmed Swordsages when they wanted to play Monks).
@godskook You swear an oath and your power comes from your devotion to that oath. That oath isn't necessarily religious in nature. In fact, Batman is a pretty common example for an Oath of Vengeance Paladin.
So you follow a code and ostensibly there are rules to that code, all of which vary depending on which oath you take.
So....if that's the case, were you getting hungup on class-names by wanting to change it when there wasn't a need? Or was your DM trying to impose things that weren't in the rules?
Well, I didn't want to change anything. Or at least I didn't think I was changing anything. A spellsword bodyguard who's devoted to the royalty he's protecting seems to fit into how Paladins are described in 5e.
But the DM was insistent on Paladins worshiping a deity and basically being a cleric.
@godskook We get a bit of that in M&M too. Powers are built off of a bunch of core effects that have specific mechanical uses lightly flavored by Descriptors (basically whether an attack is Darkness, Bludgeoning, Magic, etc).
Two of the common problems are a) confusing the effect name for what the effect actually does and b) trying to get additional powers as side effects of their descriptor (the game has a simple method for letting people do that, but it has a cost to it in Fatigue, which some people object to).
Anybody with 5e experience, do you know if GMPC/DMPC was redefined in 5e to mean "built as a player character" and/or "has advancement" rather than the usual 3.5 definition of being a character played by the DM who hogs the spotlight usually reserved for PCs?
This is my first time GMing. I am unsure as to whether the other NPCs could be leveling up with the PCs. I do not see any rules for it, but it doesn't make a great deal of sense of them not to if they are participating in defense, etc.
How do other people handle this?
@Adam, the answer on that's making a weird claim then.
@Yuuki, there's definitely a community consensus on what it means for 3.5, with a little bit of play on the "are GMPCs always bad" front between speakers, but its mostly nuances that are natural for terms not yet in dictionaries.
Yeah, I don't like that answer very much. As far as I know, DMPC/GMPC is a social term, not a game term. At least as far is 5e is concerned. And the idea that monsters can't have levels is unsteady I think
I recently collected together our various faq-tagged meta questions in the FAQ Index for Role-playing Games Stack Exchange, as inspired by the network-wide FAQ on MSE.
Naturally, this raises the question: How do we add new questions to the FAQ index?
The MSE FAQ has a section at the end definin...
@Adam whether monsters can have levels or not in 5e is a matter of DM discretion. the DMG does allow for it in the monster creation materials there, and it can be useful from a DMing standpoint, albeit not easy to calculate a CR for.
This is my first time GMing. I am unsure as to whether the other NPCs could be leveling up with the PCs. I do not see any rules for it, but it doesn't make a great deal of sense of them not to if they are participating in defense, etc.
How do other people handle this?
I recently collected together our various faq-tagged meta questions in the FAQ Index for Role-playing Games Stack Exchange, as inspired by the network-wide FAQ on MSE.
Naturally, this raises the question: How do we add new questions to the FAQ index?
The MSE FAQ has a section at the end definin...
