A question I'm kind of curious about - what's the farthest anyone's gotten through HotDQ? For example, my group is up to (but hasn't started) episode 3.
There are a number of class features that provide benefits to 'spells'. For example, the Eldritch Knight's attacks can give an enemy disadvantage on saving throws from the EK's spells.
Do cantrips count as spells for the purposes of such features?
Obviously, in previous editions when cantrips w...
@Miniman about 90% of the time, I can recall the rule or something close to it from memory, usually write answer, and edit in a rules cite if it's an easy one. Sometimes my answer will change slightly, I usually get the crux of it from memory but miss a pertinent detail or two
@waxeagle Yeah, I haven't bothered joining SO. It's only let me down for questions so obscure I don't think they'd be worth asking. RPG it's still fairly doable to find new questions.
(just a note, voting is super rare on SO, and your assn bonus affords you that priv, I highly recommend getting an acct just to upvote posts you find helpful)
@Lord_Gareth Well, yes, but that question would have been too general, and a lot of the answers would have said how much more powerful full casters are. This is not something I was interested in.
@Miniman Part of his point in asking that - part of any beef with the monk's power level - is that you can evaluate whether a class is any good all you like, but it doesn't have magic so it sucks and a single magic user in the party can probably solve the encounter, turn to the {martial class of choice}, and go "Oh, you're still here"
(This question is a comparison to 3.x, though things might have been different in 4e)
In 3.5e there is a large power and capability gap between fighters and wizards that fighters couldn't hope to close, even in their nominal area of excellence. Is this problem still around?
I really, really dislike the fact that there are multiple questions about 5e which can be phrased as "is X still a problem?", but only if we forget about 4e's existence, as X was a solved problem there.
@Magician 4e is the odd member of the family that many people didn't like. One might argue that the backlash against 4e is part of why there's a 5e that claims to throw back to 'classic' D&D
@Miniman As a concept? No. As 5e's version of making non-caster classes play 'Mother May I?' to get narrative power and then bragging it up like it's a feature and not a quality inherent to a social roleplaying experience? Yes I object.
@Magician 4e did have a ton of really good innovations, and it always amuses me to see how many of them were parallel-invented by Legend's design team - such as consistent keywording, for example
@Lord_Gareth Such a useful feature. In one of the previewed 5e monsters, a paragraph of rules text is given to what parses to "5 ongoing fire damage, save ends".
@Magician Legend is downright obsessive about it. If you see a phrase in [brackets], it has a glossary definition that never changes. There is no, "[Burning], except..." in Legend. They instead have abilities that trigger based on those conditions.
Such as, "[Burning] creatures within X squares of you may not put themselves out"
@Magician The developer of Dominion once made a comment on rules complexity in card games: the possible number of cards is proportionate to the size of the rules box on the card multiplied by the complexity of the rules.
This encourages games like Dominion and Magic to have keywords to describe things, because they absolutely need them.
I recall, in the late days of 3.5, reading through the Spell Compendium and being horrified at about 4 different spells that all do essentially the same thing, set their targets on fire, but in entirely different ways. There's no need for that.
It would be helpful for RPG authors to consider themselves to need them too, so that they can explain in five words and a number what it would otherwise take a paragraph to describe. And when it takes a paragraph to describe a very common effect, there's going to be slight variances each time that effect is described, leading to confusion and odd exceptions.
@doppelgreener Aye, having keywords offloads cognitive load to learning how they work once. You don't need to then parse rules text each time looking for subtle differences, and wonder if the subtle differences were meant to be there at all, or if it's an outdated phrasing or designer's mistake.
@Miniman The base fallacious statement is, "X is a solvable, and is thus not a problem." It is held to be fallacious because requiring a solution makes it inherently a problem. It gets brought up in discussions about RPG systems because of the statement that often gets made along the lines of, "Rule X is easily houseruled, so it's not an issue." Yes it is. It's an issue with the base system.
A lot of the defenses brought up to justify 3.PF are full of Oberoni
@Miniman That exact case hasn't happened to my knowledge, it was hyperbole. For a concrete example, consider Medusa's Petrifying Gaze, which is not a gaze attack and appears to be entirely its own thing. It does not require gazing nor eye contact.
Anyway @Miniman, that's what I'm talking about. During the previews and then again through the basic rulesets, 5e leans on the GM, placing an expectation of power in their hands kinda died with 2e and is now rising, lich-like, from the tomb of lazy and crappy design
Meanwhile, the rest of the world has moved on to the very reasonable idea that the GM is a specialized kind of player
@Lord_Gareth Looking at the creature’s image (such as in a mirror or as part of an illusion) does not subject the viewer to a gaze attack. So, can you cover a creature with an illusion of itself, to disable its gaze attack?
@Lord_Gareth which is funny when you consider games like Skyrim, which at first glance are brimming with life and playability. Except then you actually track down the specific people playing them, and it turns out a large portion of the players have modded the game to the point it's not recognisably the game they first purchased anymore.
@doppelgreener Indeed. This kinda also relates to the frequent discussion around here that it's better to find a system that does what you want rather than try to make System X fit HoleA
@Lord_Gareth Very much this. Too much of 5e is entirely in the hands of the GM with zero guidelines or reasons to choose either way. Up to class features!
@Magician Indeed. And there's bad information just...all around. I've read those damn goblins, those things are murder machines that punch well above their CR by combining stealth and extra actions.
And 5e's idea of a CR-appropriate encounter is vastly and inexplicably rigged to outscale PCs of that level
@Miniman You can delay my unending fury but you cannot escape it. The echoes of my hate reverberate off of the walls of the pitiful material universe, which quivers in terror.
[Sighs] I expected more participation from him while he was present. I am now sad.
well, that upsets the math in terms of beating the invisible guy sooner, but... at the cost of... death... unless you happen to also be immune to fire damage.
@doppelgreener The immune combo is the kind of thing you can factor. I've sat back to watch Rule of Cool do balance math for Legend and create deliberate combos
i totally concede it's easy enough to go: "this goblin probably won't be seen in this round. it will deal something like this much damage this round, this much damage on the next round, the wizard will die the one after that."
and i suppose if you pick up those combos, you can also reason what the wizard will do?
@doppelgreener I wish I was permitted to save logs for their Manyspell Magus discussion, the feat that lets you convert high-circle spells into multiple low-circle ones.
It was art in motion
Well, art and swearing, lots and lots of swearing.
Like, there's a ton of calculating done in my design work to make sure scaling & stacking stay within a certain range of normal values for level, both vs. other PCs and vs. stock bestiary monsters
At least in part because PC classes can be antagonists too
My eldest daughter is nine, the same age I was when I got into the hobby. With the new edition of D&D out, it seems like too much of a fun co-incidence to give her her first taste of role playing with the starter set.
I have no doubt that if I give her a pregen character, run the game and take c...
@Lord_Gareth I've done enough math with 5e at this point to believe it's more carefully balanced than people give it credit for being. I'd be happy to walk through the starter adventure from a straight up skirmish math perspective. (I've done the first encounter twice from specific POVs).
@waxeagle Does the game bother telling anyone this? Because as far as I'm aware, a CR X encounter is supposed to be appropriate for level X Pcs. Which it is not.
@Lord_Gareth A CR 1 creature is supposed to be a moderate challenge for a party of 4 PCs. That's the guidance
A L1 PC, based on some NPCs we've seen so far would have a CR of about 1/4, that makes sense to me.
what I know, my 3 L2 PCs surprised a CR 1 wiz and dropped him before he got an action off
(note that monster construction/math rules aren't out yet, we have some very basic encounter construction guidance in the DM part of BD&D, but we don't have much in the way of that stuff yet)
There are a number of class features that provide benefits to 'spells'. For example, the Eldritch Knight's attacks can give an enemy disadvantage on saving throws from the EK's spells.
Do cantrips count as spells for the purposes of such features?
Obviously, in previous editions when cantrips w...
(This question is a comparison to 3.x, though things might have been different in 4e)
In 3.5e there is a large power and capability gap between fighters and wizards that fighters couldn't hope to close, even in their nominal area of excellence. Is this problem still around?
Warlocks have only 5th level spell slots, but a spell list up until 9th level.
What is the reason for that?
How can they cast 9th level spells?
