TRPG General Chat

12:51 AM

3

Q: Can scrolls be read using Blindsense?

Can a character that is naturally blind but has blindsense read a scroll or a magic book to learn a spell? What about if you cast Read Magic?

Axoren

2:35 AM

5e Punch Wizard. Has anyone made one?

Hot RPG Questions

5:35 AM

4

Q: Does Tempestuous Magic break a grapple?

A Storm Sorcerer's Tempestuous Magic allows: Starting at 1st level, you can use a bonus action on your turn to cause whirling gusts of elemental air to briefly surround you, immediately before or after you cast a spell of 1st level or higher. Doing so allows you to fly up to 10 feet without prov...

dnd-5e class-feature sorcerer grapple

BESW

5:49 AM

That's about 13.6 punches.

3

Hot RPG Questions

6:52 AM

4

Q: Does standing up from being prone in difficult terrain consume all of your movement?

The rules for Difficult Terrain stipulate: You move at half speed in difficult terrain— moving 1 foot in Difficult Terrain costs 2 feet of speed while rules for standing up from prone: Standing up takes more effort; doing so costs an amount of movement equal to half your speed. Is the act of ...

dnd-5e movement prone terrain

Feeds

7:04 AM

Needles & Nilbogs: Rock This Dance

posted on September 22, 2022 by Bardic Wizard

Happy Thursday! I swear I’m not dead, yet. Just busy. Anyways, it’s almost Homecoming (actually, today is day 4 of hoco spirit week) and I’d like to share a thing I wrote. It is a gaming thing. I have been alluding to it on and off since June. It’s about homecoming. Specifically, it’s a game about having fun with your friends at homecoming and then realizing there’s an eldritch bein…

Matthieu

7:36 AM

@BESW took a second for my brain to register that you made that joke, good one though

unsure if I'm glad or not that I got it

AncientSwordRage

9:36 AM

@BESW what if it's scientific notification?

BESW

10:08 AM

@AncientSwordRage DMG p5. "The rules don't account for every possible situation that might arise during a typical D&D session. For example, a player might want his or her character to use scientific notation for their punches. How you determine the outcome of this action is up to you."

4

AncientSwordRage

@BESW good answer

Trish

@ThomasMarkov Are you familiar with Jacobellis v. Ohio :: 378 U.S. 184 (1964)? "I know it when I see it?" I might not be the best at 5E and I dislike a lot of its design decisions (especially the lazy approach it has with demanding you to balance things but not giving you something to hold onto that makes something balanced, but I believe that our "is this homebrew balanced?" attitude appears often akin to the test..

or rather the low qualities are.

Thomas Markov

2:24 PM

@Trish My formula for homebrew review answers has been reduced to something like "Check for obviously broken things. If found explain how to fix them, else tell them to play test".

Trish

@ThomasMarkov well, I might not know when somethign is balanced but I see it when it is not.

Thomas Markov

I've come to feel that shoving traits into a spreadsheet calculator is no better than a cursory sanity check that anyone with experience with the game could do at a glance.

Trish

(like that one answer today...)

Thomas Markov

@Trish Yeah. That's my first step - if nothing is obviously borked, youre ready to play test.

Axoren

5:06 PM

@BESW I had to disappear last night after asking that question, but glad to read some banger starred messages as soon as I returned.

@Trish @ThomasMarkov I don't usually chime into those posts with answers or comments, but a big thing I look for when forming my own opinion is if other classes or build-styles are invalidated by a homebrew with no inherent trade-off. For example, someone making a strictly-better Fighter or Wizard that can do even more of everything. Or, if even the homebrew itself is just thing-that-exists but strictly worse. I often see subclasses that are more of an attempt reskin of existing content.

Even without looking at how strong something is objectively, you can tell whether or not it fits well within the system based on how it compares to other classes.

What 5e really lacks is a way to give you that reskin potential without making you go the homebrew route. If I want to use my blood as a spellcasting focus because I'm making a really edgy vampire-themed Sorcerer, why can't I just say that's how I'm doing it? Why do I need to use a Bloodmage Subclass that looks an awful lot like Wild Magic?

Trish

@Axoren That's also an easy standard. my litmus is actually more like "If it is considerably longer than a published canon class, something is off. If it is shorter, and just references other class abilities, then it warrants checking if the levels match up with other classes. Which for myself sums up as "I know a bad class when I see one: it's either too wordy, or it is not wordy enough without pointing to established good material.

I mean, a balanced homebrew rogue wizard might not need to invent any new abilities. It might just take the material of a wizard/rogue of level 10 and then put every of those feats on the 20 levels in a creative manner. That's not a good build, but it is clearly the same level as a Rogue 10/wizard 10, but it might be strictly better at some points in some regards.

Axoren

The second we start looking at the numbers, it gets tough. In terms of damage, you have two metrics: Averages and Maximums. A character with a lot of burst potential will be able to kill things well above their level occasionally by leveraging resources to deal a lot of damage right now. A character with consistent average damage will be able to kill things at their level fairly consistently over the course of a longer period. How much burst potential should a character have?

I don't think there are good ways to decide how to trade Burst for Sustain within 5e. Even by the book, there are radically different scenarios in which both shine. Random encounters during travel? Burst is king. Trudging through a dungeon with numerous back-to-back encounters? Sustain is king. Running a module? Really depends which. Homebrew campaign? DM's influence on the content has significant impact on what wins out.

Trish

5:22 PM

What really bothers me with 5e is the lack of something I learned to love in TDE 4: The game had hundreds of professions (jobs, not classes) that would shape your adventurer's starting skillset. And it had the very rules that generated those professions included, allowing to build you own that were balanced to others. And it also had the rules used to make races and cultures.

Axoren

@Trish It's probably been talked about a bunch in here, but I've been gone a while. What's TDE?

Trish

TDE 4 is also extremely skill focussed and level-free

Axoren

This is what shows up on Google: acedepot.com/resources/acedepot/product/large/…

Trish

@Axoren TDE is the german Flagship RPG: The Dark Eye, aka Das Schwarze Auge

Axoren

Does it have an official English translation?

Trish

5:24 PM

google.com/search?q=TDE+rpg

yep

some of 4th edition has, I think 5th too

Axoren

My table has been wanting to adapt Shadow of the Demon Lord because we really like the build customization

You could be a Druid, Rogue, Necromancer.

There's 4096 Multiclass Combinations in SotDL

Trish

5th edition TDE isn't very liked in my circles, but it is acknowledged that it did away with some of the 4th editions problems and overhead, still 4th edition was... super german. The english translations suffered heavily under the death of FanPro.

If you want to know abotut the final days of FanPro: rpg.stackexchange.com/a/109159/30306

End of 2006 / Early 2007 - Fast Forward Enterprises (FanPro GmbH's warehouse and shipping partner) goes bankrupt. As it vanishes with a lot of funds from FanPro GmbH, it has, in turn, to siphon funds from FanPro LLC to stay afloat. Over the months this becomes unsupportable, and starting April 2007 FanPro GmbH sells off the IP & licenses they own (for example the Dark Eye, but not Shadowrun) in a pitch to raise enough money to stay afloat longer.

February to April 2007 - WizKids doesn't renew the bundle of licenses FanPro LLC and FanPro GmbH held, but negotiates with InMediaRes Productions…

With the death of PanPro, all rights to TDE were bought by Ulysses Spiele.

Hot RPG Questions

2

Q: Is this Cambion race balanced?

A Cambion is a half-fiend - an offspring of the lilitu or lilu demons (known commonly as incubi and succubi respectively) and a mortal. Beings with hollow souls and endless desire for pleasure, cambions aren't inherently evil, but they are drawn to the side of Chaos. They're a race generally tail...

dnd-5e balance homebrew-review races

Thomas Markov

6:40 PM

@Someone_Evil If you have a second, can you look into something for me?

Someone_Evil

If it's not too involved at least

Thomas Markov

Is there anything you can see that I wouldnt be able to that would explain why this user only has 1 rep?

Someone_Evil

Yes there is

Thomas Markov

Okay then

@Someone_Evil Ah, I know what happened.

Axoren

@ThomasMarkov Long ago, he made a dark bargain with the Demon of Downvotes and is required to pay the downvote toll at least once a day for 2 years?

@Trish I'm looking into TDE as I have time today. It looks like there's a Steam game. Is it characteristic of the TTRPG? Or is it more like it's own standalone entry just set in the setting?

Trish

6:53 PM

@Axoren there's a series of adaptations of the aventuria world, but NOTHING of the rules, and the plots are breaching what you generally would expect to play in most of the official campaigns.

so... standalone set in the world, though I believe two of them are like... followups or something.

The Oracle

8:23 PM

0

Q: Why was my homebrew-review question downvoted even though I followed the criteria?

I don't mean to sound indignant or anything, but I must admit, I'm at a loss as to why this happened. Just yesterday, I posted a homebrew-review question asking about whether an artifact I had created was balanced. At time of writing this meta question, it currently has a score of -2 and a balanc...

discussion down-votes

Joel Harmon

9:03 PM

@Axoren IIRC, 5e had some short but strong statements on allowing reskinning. Tasha's has a sidebar on changing the looks of spells (within some limits, like clearly still being that spell), and DMG had some as well, though the specific thing that comes to mind for me is something from 3.5, as I recall.

Joshua

10:32 PM

Think carefully before letting Frank Abagnale anywhere near a green lantern ring.

Transcript for