Current status of the UA Revised Ranger
Does that Sourcebook exist yet? If not, have the devs given an update or told us their intentions?
The bolded question seems similar to the reason we frown on question about shopping recommendation: they get outdated quickly.
When this type of questi...
I think you can raise dead a person that's been turned into a zombie, after you kill the zombie (provided they're still within the window for raise dead).
But, can you cast regenerate on a zombie of a person that was missing body parts in order to regrow those parts, then kill the zombie, then raise dead the person with their body parts regenerated?
(Yes, You could just cast Resurrection on them to regrow bodyparts)
Basically if the person can't live without whatever's missing (heart, head, etc.) then raise dead/regenerate won't work, as the target couldn't be raised/would instantly die again. If theoretically a regenerating zombie would get a heart to grow back, you could do that, kill it, then raise dead.
Today, I started wondering why in 5e, the DMG calculates encounter difficulty as "adjusted XP" which is adjusted by the total number of enemies in the encounter, but doesn't award the adjusted value as XP to the players. Turns out we have a question for that already, from 2014: Why don't players ...
As in, I can absolutely imagine D&D players thinking of running a heist, looking at their Bluff score (or whatever 5e uses), imagining how many times they'd have to roll it, with each likely resulting in overall failure of the heist, and giving up.
@SPavel Yeah, but there is a sort of tendency among RPG people to favor DnD as the default anyway. Which is largely because of marketing and tradition, I guess
There are some potential tricky bits like "how to make vault-opening minigame interesting instead of just roll lock picking to see whether it goes South here".
It's fairly trivial to make it work as long as you realize that locking the plot behind a skill check is bad DMing, and that has less to do with heists than with being a good DM
@goodguy5 One of my usual lamentations about DnD 5e is that it focuses too much on telling what the GM could do instead of giving them an idea on what they should do.
Well, part of the issue is that different people have different methods.
While I'm pretty sure about how a game SHOULD work in a lot of aspects, that won't work for all groups.
And besides, I think that I would be a less good DM if I didn't have to struggle through murky game concepts and figure out that if you make an entire treasure room, hidden behind 3 perception checks, then you don't get to be annoyed if the party doesn't find it.
@goodguy5 This is one of those things where the burden of popularity is weighing DnD down. If they make a decision that "this is the kind of game we want to make", it's going to disappoint a non-trivial part of their player base.
The loudest complainers whined about balance, so they made a balanced game, then the loudest complainers whined that it wasn't D&D so they took 3.5 and made it as rules-light as possible
The current trend in RPG design is that games should be built toward certain specific narratives, should explain those narratives, and should provide philosophical guidance and mechanics which make those kinds of narratives naturally emerge. Fate, Blades in the Dark, Apocalypse World, Golden Sky Stories, Cthulhu Dark, and others are participating in that school of game design.
The basic idea being, "your DnD is not my DnD". Our current DnD party is composed of various earlier groups each of whom were playing the same game in very different manners and we occasionally have conflicts caused by that.
D&D 4e also participated in that school of game design. D&D 5e draws heavily from AD&D 2e and prior, which far predated this trend becoming mainstream, and so it just goes “here's some stuff, you figure out what you want to do with it” -- because not having that was among the major complaints against D&D 4e.
One of those conflicts being, how much combat there should be. This is one of those bits that keeps puzzling me.
Because it really seems to me that 5e is a combat game with non-combat frills, but the book also talks about two other "pillars of adventure" - social interaction and exploration - that are supposedly very important but only described rather briefly in the DMG.
@SPavel Exactly, but the book keeps talking about these other two "pillars" too, so apparently the designers wanted them to feature too. But their treatment is more or less "freeform it with some d20's thrown in".
@SPavel The thing that bugs me with "exploration" is, usually it boils down to "check everything for loot, take all the loot you can find, and there's no time limit". Except when there is a time limit.
D&D 4e was the edition they went “ok, look, this whole game's basically about combat, let's stop pretending otherwise, and just make it really awesome for combat, and fix a whole lot of problems that only existed because of attachments to things that don't matter as much as people getting to feel awesome in combat.”
@kviiri Right, in 5e "exploration" is the part in Elder Scrolls games where you scan the cursor over a person's house to see if any of their wooden plates and tin cups are worth more than 1 septim
@SPavel Yea, and it keeps bugging me. We almost died in CoS because we RP'ed an in-character urgency (where out-of-character, we suspected it wasn't real) and rushed a situation instead of searching every nook and cranny of the place we were in
because the non-combat pillars don't require a lot of rules adjudication.
Saturday, I started my game. There are missing townsfolk. "find out why".
The majority of the game was exploring town and talking to villagers. I think combat lasted ... 15 minutes? 25, maybe?
Should there be a more clear blurb on "tips for interacting with NPCs and finding clues and exploring"? yes. But it wouldn't be "rules for interacting with NPCs and finding clues and exploring"
@SPavel I cant actually - I think I can tell them apart but in truth i dont know which is the male and which the female. But I've taken to calling one Mama and one Papa
Yeah, related question: what is talking to NPCs supposed to be like? Because our game has had sessions full of talking to NPCs too, and they've been boring and terrible.
Because of those differences I mentioned earlier. There are different ways to do non-mechanical things. Largely infinitely. So it's hard to make a set of "rules" that cover something subjective.
The only part of the game that lends itself to "rules" are the parts with a heavy mechanical influence.... like combat.
@goodguy5 Ok, I might disagree with the first thing you said: non-combat thing requires a lot more adjudication from the GM than combat does, because the combat engine is fairly rigid. No need to make snap judgments there.
@SimonH. This is because, in the absence of a suggested way to model NPC interaction, the DM has to fall back on whatever writing and acting skills he happens to have, and most people are atrocious writers and actors
D&D provides rules for combat because conflict resolution needs rules, this is good and correct. But its classification of "social" and "exploration" as separate from conflict is used as a mandate to avoid creating rules for them.
Now the DM has no guidance for what constitutes an exploration conflict, and a seasoned band of outdoorsmen gets lost following a highway and ambushed by random animals
I was trying to signify the difference between "here are the mechanics of how you interact with villagers" (which doesn't make a lot of sense) and "here are ways you can interact with villagers" (which doesn't have a lot of mechanical restrictions)
@goodguy5 Why don't "here are the mechanics of how you interact with villagers" make sense? Several games do it, eg. Dungeon World has such.
For example, the Carousing move. When you return from adventuring, you can spend dosh to throw a huge feast, roll the dice and see what sort of adventure the celebration lands you in.
Assessments of "non-combat interactions with people doesn't need rules, just do some talking and maybe make some rolls" somehow don't also coexist with "combat interactions with enemies doesn't need rules, just describe some sword swishes and some heroic acrobatics and maybe make some rolls".
Rules can help create interesting outcomes and tension, and direct us helpfully through scenes in ways the game designers thinks the players would have fun playing.
Now that I mentioned DW, I think it isn't really that great. It does away with DnD's tactical combat system, which I consider charming, but keeps a lot of less interesting stuff.
Fate and Apocalypse World direct significant weight to social interactions because they're expected to be a significant part of the game worth that focus and those mechanics.
If you have a significant part of the game but don't direct any mechanical guidance towards it whatsoever... it's not much of an important part of the game.
Look. I'm coming off as a fanboy here, I think. I understand that D&D has problems with it's non combat elements. But that's the part I can most easily deal with and shore up.
Fate? I love fate, but I have no idea how to run combat.
@goodguy5 I think that's actually a thing of expectations. In my personal games, I think I'd like DnD a lot more if everyone wasn't trying to run it as a non-combat game when it clearly is one (hence the love for 4e)
@SirCinnamon The poor thing looks like it's hot in there :<
It is an industry titan. It clearly has no problems producing tons of content. It would be very helpful for them to design mechanics for this area they claim to be a major pillar of this game, but they leave it to the players to figure out. It really shouldn't be that way.
I'm not expecting it to be flawless and need zero shoring up. I'm expecting it to have some mechanical support for a couple of areas it claims to be a major part of the game.
D&D 4e solved this by dropping the illusion that those parts were all that important. It was honest and up-front: "this game is about heroic combat. We'll support you in those parts. The rest are up to you."
Fate requires plenty of thoughtful usage from the players and there's tons it can't do. It's pretty up-front about all of that, and doesn't do things like claim to be an excellent tactical combat engine (something it has almost zero mechanical support for).
@goodguy5 I'd recommend Masters of Umdaar, which does laser fantasy (like He-Man or Thundercats) and can get kinda correspondingly cheesy (it has laser wolves. they are wolves that have lasers.)
In MoU you play as, basically, action archeologists digging for ancient powerful artifacts for various motives.
@BESW I think @Shalvenay has a worthy entry for that contest (one page dungeon). We should encourage him to submit it. (the one I have yet to try and run with my group due to RL stuff ....)
@nitsua60 Yes, and some of us have just over half of a novel on our hard drive and then the mother board gets eaten by the power supply and then it all gets eaten ... happened a decade ago, and here I was an early proponent of "back up everything you do once a week" but that didn't get backed up ... arrrrrrrrgh
The missus is still mad about the pictures and videos that weren't backed up.
@Yuuki It's as Shakespeare put it: the play's the thing. one of the things that I admire in the efforts at Game Design are those who strive for effective "rules light" games. It is a worthy goal.
We played quite a bit of "settlers of Catan" with my daughter and son in law over easter. Not a lot of rules, but very well put together. As a party game, however, it is limited to 4 people. :(
Elevator pitch is that it is a combination of 20 questions and Werewolf (or similar hidden role games). But somehow it manages to be more fun by far than either. I wasn't sold on it, but it was cheap and I kept hearing great things about it from people who share my tastes. Once I got it it almost instantly became our most played game ever. Each game takes only 10-15 minutes.
As far as how useful mage hand is, without the Arcane Trickster's enhanced version, I prefer to think of it as "mage mitten". If you could do it with heavy winter mittens on, mage hand can probably manage it.
@goodguy5 My brother saved my cleric's life in our second dungeon in 5e by using mage hand to move a lever that ended up causing a cave in ... right where my character had been standing before my brother's wizard said "step back, I'll move it with my mage hand."
@goodguy5 Probably, but I have not put enough thought into it to come up with something. I'll check some GiTP discussions and see what people came up with.
Are we 100% sure that's not an alien spacecraft attempting to land?
@goodguy5 The problem with Charger is that it used to be an action in 3.5e so it just feels underpowered.
There's been a couple times in this campaign where I decided I would bull-rush/charge someone only to remember that it wasn't really a thing I could do in 5e.
I think one thing to go a long way is to separate out the bonus action attack and the charger benefit.
"if you dash, you can attack as a bonus action" and "if you move at least 10 feet directly towards an opponent, your attack(s) deal an extra 5 damage or push the target 10 feet" or whatever.
yea, my impulse is two benefits 1. If you dash, you can use your bonus action to make an attack 2. If you move more than 10 feet towards an enemy before you attack, gain advantage.
I saw someone arguing that charger was good because it can drop CR 2 enemies in one hit.
"dude. great weapon master, rage, dueling and charger. that's a minimum of 20 damage!"
@goodguy5 So as long as you have a specific fighting style, a particular class feature, and another feat, you can one-shot CR2 enemies. And that's worth a feat.
Some people charge to do extra damage, but I personally tend to charge when one of my party members are out of position and I need to be somewhere and provide some kind of defense rather than outright killing. So I'd prefer a knockback or knock-prone feature over advantage on attack rolls.