Bits & Mortar is currently inoperational due to the hosting provider screwing up a recent upgrade, which removed our access to our own database. I'm doing what I can to figure that out. It may take several days.
@nitsua60 I don't have the right to include anyone else in my commitment to an immediate and non-judgemental approach. You're free to include yourself and anyone else you know is willing!
Fair point! I'll put myself into that message and invite @doppelgreener to take a look at the last few messages and, at their leisure, consider also editing.
I'm seriously considering setting up a low-grade traps dungeon as my original scheme was just too large to be playable. But I'm not sure how to handle somebody wasting a critical scroll.
Broadly speaking, I'd suggest trading out wild shape for existing features from other classes rather than inventing new ones, because it's simpler and easier to evaluate.
Or that.
I know in 3.5 there were a lot of class-feature-trading options including trading out wild shape for monk defensive/movement features, or barbarian features.
@kviiri I once ran an all-cleric-all-the-time campaign in 3.5, because the customization available to clerics made them able to replace every other class in both flavor and mechanical roles.
So if you have a player who wants to play "a druid", it's important to make a distinction between whether they mean "the bundle of mechanics that DnD calls a druid" or something more approximate of the usual definition of the word, which may or may not be anything like the mechanics associated.
Calling on creatures for help, rather than turning into one
but the way I did it was too op
He got himself an elemental and then used moonbeam for everything else. I gave him two concentration slots
it was usually around 70 damage per turn, while monks were dealing around 35
I was thinking of nerfing it to... If he uses a conjuration spell that needs concentration (most do) Then he can spend his wild magic use to keep the concentration going even when he fails his con save
> Wild Power. Instead of Wild Shape, starting at level 2 you gain 2 charges per day of Wild Power, and an additional charge day at each level when you would have gained a new Wild Shape feature. You can spend a charge of Wild Power on your turn as a bonus action to swap out your conjured creature for another creature on the same list. You can also spend a charge of Wild Power immediately after failing a concentration roll to sustain a conjured creature, to treat the roll as a success.
Now your conjured spells are more versatile and durable while still having a limited utility per day.
> Wildest Power. At level 20, you automatically succeed at concentration checks to sustain conjured creatures.
....hm. Do 5e druids have spontaneous summoning like 3.5 druids did? Because if not that would be a very cool thing to grant.
(Spontaneous summoning is where you never have to prepare spells to conjure creatures, because you can always lose a prepared spell to cast a conjure spell of the same level or less as if that was what you'd prepared in that slot.)
Could just grant the ability to cast conjure spells for free each day, up to the number of times you would've been able to use Wild Shape, and with the equivalent power level advancement becoming available as you level up (conjure animal, conjure fey, etc). And make those specific uses of conjuration immune to failure by concentration check.
BAM now you have the druid's wild shape utility without turning into an animal.
In other news: we have the parliamentary election upcoming next month, so people are discussing the elections and VAAs. Of the two most popular VAAs, the main criticism against one is that "it recommends based on party, not the candidate" and against the other that "it recommends based on the candidate alone, not the party". People are hard to please.
@BESW On a remotely related note, do you have any experience with getting people to self-organize to work on topics they are not familiar with yet (in my case in the domain of sustainability) and what methods to use to start and accompany that process?
@Anaphory Kinda, but the voting method is D'Hondt where seats are assigned based on a function of votes on the candidate and their whole party / block. So a single popular candidate can drag along several less popular ones, if they get a lot of votes
@Anaphory Specifically I have training and experience in a global community empowerment and activation process that's been carefully developed and tested for at least 30 years to get neighbourhood communities trained in identifying their local needs and empower them to find practical solutions.
@BESW I (vaguely) know that and I'm interested in that as well (though I still haven't looked into the community here in the region). I'm thinking on a much smaller scale.
I'm organizing a week-long educational spring camp in two weeks, and much of the time will be courses on various topics of sustainability run by other people. But we set aside an hour every day for people to mix and engage in topics that are bigger than the individual specific course topics, and I'm looking for methods to get that engagement going. I found ‘agile’ stuff like Open Space, World Café and things like that, but I'm still looking for useful things to consider.
@Anaphory If you want to have a ridiculously complex and fantastic election system in a game, check out how the Doge of Venice was elected en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge?wprov=sfla1
The 2019 sage advice compendium has released, and it includes a change to what is considered "official rulings."
Previously, Jeremy Crawford had the capacity to make official rulings over twitter. This is no longer the case. As stated in the updated compendium:
Official rulings on how to int...
I suspect that for the next month or two at least any answer which cites a D&D dev's Twitter activity will get hit with a couple downvotes no matter what context the answer gives them.
But we've gone from an environment where Crawford was explicitly official (but we didn't know what to make of his apparent contradictions over time) and Mearls was apparently just wet sausage as far as his opinions mattered, to neither of their rulings being official and just being their private opinions.
D&D's development structure means no one person really has much claim of ownership over any of it, so their personal say isn't necessarily indicative of any sort of universal truth.
For a while that was not true, but we've gone back to that being true.
I think with a lot of these things, "figure it out at your table" is the closest to an official answer, which then leads to: should we close all of these questions (or answer with 'there is no answer'!), or provide guidance on reasons tables should pick a particular approach?
We should not close those questions, especially because we only know they're in this situation after they get answered, indicating there probably isn't an inherent problem with the question. And someone could always ride by with "actually [obscure quote] clarifies this completely..."
This will probably be a fairly contested question since the text could be read either way, and the more literal interpretation makes the feature abysmally terrible ("something of some kind is somewhere near you!") so it seems like the less literal interpretation must be the right one ("there's a dragon somewhere near you!") but, again, the more effective interpretation is a bit less literal.
@doppelgreener Arguably, if you're gonna go literal, it only tells you anything if there are aberrations, celestials, dragons, elementals, fey, fiends, AND undead present.
Like, if there are all of those but no celestials, sorry.
That'd be a power straight out of Mystery Men. "I can detect danger nearby, ranging from anything up to a force that could destroy reality, down to minor threats like safety violations!" "Fred I think you just have anxiety, not a superpower."
Also I just realized that the favored terrain wording is also awful. Like, let's say you are in gigantic forest and have favored terrain of swamp. One mile radius. Now, you find a small swamp within the forest — ahah! I can tell that there was a dragon or fairy behind that hill we went past a couple of hours ago.
@mattdm either that or in that mountain range up ahead. Or possibly over west where there might be a mindflayer in a village. Or possibly right in that clearing over there. Although it might be a faerie.
I thought deliberately leaving mechanics vague and letting GMs sort it out narratively, so players can't anticipate what effect their choices will have, is part of 5e's stated design goals?
@nitsua60 You are a player of Bridge, do I recall correctly? We were out having fun with a friend of mine and investigated the collection of miscellaneous books in a local pub. It included a "comprehensive guide", dated 1944, to a Finnish card game of Russian roots, called "Skruuvi", which at a quick glance feels like Bridge except the rules are also complex, not just the metagame!
I had never heard of the game before but apparently it's what the good ol' boys' clubs used to play around then.
@Anaphory ow
I couldn't really understand much of the different terms in Skruuvi, but I came to understand the bidding subgame includes not only choosing trick count and trump suit, but the game mode to be played, which includes two different kinds of misere, plus some more interesting deviations like "Bolshevik" where I gather one person tries to avoid taking any tricks while the rest co-operate against them.
It's like Action 52 of card games
That said, I don't really know if having more subgames guarantees a fun time
@kviiri In this description, the actual play rules are just 123 words. Half of which are about who has the first turn, which depends on the auction and other pre-game stuff, which is the other 5 pages of rules.
I am reminded of Terry Pratchett's Cripple Mr. Onion, but that's just because that's a reference to Bridge, right?
@NuloenTheSeeker Here's an idea for you that may be more within 5e's mechanical framework
As an action, spend 1 use of Wild Shape to cast Conjure Animals. You summon 1 beast this way, and its max CR is the max CR you can achieve with Wild Shape.
Or even simpler: As an action, spend 1 use of Wild Shape to cast Conjure Animals as if you used the highest possible spell slot you can cast.
@MikeQ in one campaign, we basically have our main characters, and then we have an all-halfling group that we occasionally play for one-shots in the same setting.
in the next two sessions, both groups are teaming up and working together to create a distraction team and an infiltration team, so each player has to decide which team to play their halfling on and which to play their main character on. there's 1 main character druid, one halfling druid, and one NPC druid... we briefly considered having all 3 druids in one team but decided to take pity on the DM
The 2019 sage advice compendium has released, and it includes a change to what is considered "official rulings."
Previously, Jeremy Crawford had the capacity to make official rulings over twitter. This is no longer the case. As stated in the updated compendium:
Official rulings on how to int...
