So from my point of view, either the EK either wants to be casting spells that don't use his action, or are somehow a better use of his action than attacking.
The problem with this is, the wizard spell list is pretty short on spells that don't use his action, and with his restrictions on spell choice he can pretty much only get spells of either kind with his special unrestricted choices.
(With the exception of Shield.)
The second problem I have is also lack of synergy, in a different way - the wizard spell list doesn't really have much that works with being a fighter.
The Arcane Trickster gets illusions and enchantments, and that goes great with being a sneaky, skillful, talky kind of class.
But the abjuration and evocation lists are pretty short on things that directly help out a fighter.
The other problems are all more general to the whole "one-third-caster" thing and not really worth going into.
Firstly, I think choosing between casting and attacking is part of the value in being an EK, much like a trickster chooses between his spells or his weapon
@Nemenia It definitely should be, but in practice it's pretty hard for a spell to be a better use of an action than attacking. For example, compare a fireball (the best value blasting spell), to attacking.
And I, as well, agree that bladesingers are a brilliant class, my biggest problem is that they use wizard base stats, rather than warrior or even a medium class, because of how dangerous they are to play
The fireball deals an average of 28 damage on a failed save, or 14 on a successful save. The EK's 3 attacks altogether should deal 6d6 + 45 for an average of 66 damage.
And on top of that, the whole idea is when a fighter needs to do something BESIDES attacking, like ranged enemies, resistant monsters, difficult traps, is precisely why they have spell slots
It's a tool kit, that sacrifices some damag for variety and choice
@Nemenia Someone else is going to deal with the trap, you should have a magic weapon to deal with the resistant monsters - the ranged option is the only one that having magic really helps with.
I could maybe make a case for it if you were in a party without any full-casters, but that just seems silly.
The ranged option is a good point - Str-based builds definitely have problems there, and scorching ray does help with that.
@Nemenia True enough. Probably the worst part is that now that I think about it, if I was making a fighter I'd probably pick EK over the other options - as much as I don't find it adds much, the other choices add even less.
@Nemenia Yeah, we can definitely agree there. Battlemaster I sometimes look at and think it's the best of the fighter choices, sometimes I think it's ridiculous.
I do think they'd have been better off removing the damage from the special attacks and not having them as a limited resource.
Someone did a flowchart on the animals from 1-20, and there is a MAX of 2 good choices per CR
And I knowwww. But the partys druid constantly going "guys, can we just like, sit for an hour?" After every challenge (like a trap) or danger (like a fight) really kills the immersion
@Nemenia I'm not too fussed about that - from an optimization perspective, there's only ever going to be 1 best choice, so not having lots of trap options (something D&D gets a lot of complaints about) isn't really a bad thing.
@Nemenia Actually, moon druids have the toughest choice of anyone - do I wild shape, knowing that I then can't cast spells, or stay in my druid form so I can cast spells, even though I'm then getting hit on my real hit points and can't really attack?
They're completely modal.
I don't like this about them, but I appreciate it from the point of view of forcing meaningful choices.
You CAN always win, by burning both uses and healing, but then you need to nap for an hour all over again
Land druid is much more standard divine caster with a native feel and the option to use wildshape for utility, along with getting spell slots back on a short rest, dependant on his level
Moon druid isnt as bad as beast ranger, of course. It's not even the worst. It just needs more.. Flexibility
@Nemenia I think this is the first time I've ever heard anyone suggest that land druid is better than moon druid. I wouldn't have said domain spells and the small bit of spell recovery make up for the moon druid's advantages.
I agree that they aren't they big buster bruisers that moon druids can be, but they can still have just as much of an impact. They have decent damage, great control, and the most utility in the game
Two wildshapes relegated to utility because they cast spells
Loads of always prepared spells
Another cantrip
Immunity to poison, disease and charms
They can do it ALL
Moon druid sounds flashy, but falls off in alot of ways. It's a subclass based around a single ability
Ok, so the thing about that is - in early game D&D, there's not much difference between casters and fighters in terms of fighting ability, and casters have casting on top of that.
It's pretty unfair, but at level 1 the only major difference between a fighter using a crossbow and a wizard using a crossbow comes from their ability scores.
@Nemenia Of course! The problem is, there are infinite possible scenarios. All we can do is guess at what's going to be useful the majority of the time.
@Nemenia Variation takes more forms than I think you're thinking about. For example, a battle where the enemies are flying is going to be easier for the moon druid.
and when you have a moon druid in the party, that's no longer the case
because if you DONT give them rests
they cant do what their entire class is BASED on
and that hurts the player's fun and experience
like telling a wizard they cant cast spells
doesnt that make sense?
either you give everyone the ability to recharge their short rest abilities, and then either have them breeze through encounters or give them such challenging ones that they barely come out alive and need ANOTHER rest all over again,
@Nemenia Even if you cut short rests completely, that leaves moon druid and land druid pretty even. They have the same spellcasting, land druid just has a few more spells prepared.
You seem to be forgetting that moon druid is a full caster on top of their wild shape.
On the other hand, if a day drags on and you run out of spells, the land druid is screwed, but the moon druid still has something they can do.
I remember the sessions of AD&D 2e I played where my Wizard had three spells he could cast, and then he was done. One of those was invisibility, so really it'd be two spells, then casting invisibility and trying not to die horribly in one hit.
Oh, and his cat familiar would sneak around and attack or distract or steal things, but this was before I knew anything about the fact that a wizard's familiar was horribly weak and it dying would come at an immense personal cost to the wizard.
@Nemenia See, I can understand why it might seem this way, with 2 spells/day at level 1, but a burning hands is going to kill however many goblins or kobolds it hits, no questions asked.
@Nemenia Personally, I think it's better. It's crazy strong at early levels, and while it definitely falls off at later levels I don't think you can ever say it's definitively worse. Objectively speaking, it's better in some ways/situations, worse in others.
You have managed to convince me that it isn't definitively better than Land Druid, so don't think you haven't made an impact :P
You might be better off asking someone more experienced, but, from my point of view - it's definitely the best way to explore the Astral plane if that's something you want to do, since you can jump back to safety anytime.
It's probably the most efficient way to transport a group of creatures to another plane, since Gate involves leaving an open doorway to your own plane (not necessarily a good idea, depending on where you're going).
I mean, that's useful I guess, but unless you're fighting Githyanki or Xill, why bother going to the plane at all? And travel is good, but if you dont know the color of the plane you're looking for, that is an awful awful idea, lol
though i suppose by the time the wizard could cast 9th level spells, he should probably know the planes in the Astral sea by then
Interesting side trick - if you needed to wait a really long amount of time, leaving your body somewhere safe and lurking in the Astral plane means your body doesn't age or need food or water.
Ooh, here's a good one: Use Astral Projection, then go rob blind all the dumb wizards who thought Leomund's Secret Chest was a good way to protect their stuff.
@Nemenia Wait, why does that let them go to any spot? When they left, wouldn't they go back to where they were?
Also, I've played in a campaign where the GM did something similar. Having a safe place to rest makes a big impact on the game, particularly at low levels, so be careful.
@Nemenia Well, it makes the party really hard to ambush, it allows them to use up all their resources and then go "Ok, we'll lurk in our private demiplane until night-time then rest", it gives them a safe place to store stuff (including the wizard's spellbook), and injured party members can jump inside and wait for combat to be over.
@Nemenia D&D 4e has a ritual called Primal Grove, which creates a portal to a beautiful grove around, I think, 300 metres squared. The first usage creates the grove, future uses create a doorway to it. It makes an ideal meeting point, an ideal transport between places, an ideal place to store items, and one of our former moderators, Brian, noticed it stores a very large number of military-trained pixies who need to be taken somewhere else very discreetly.
D&D 4e rituals are something just about anyone can do. It takes a feat, but many magic-oriented classes get it automatically, and 4e character builds are not very feat-dependent so it's very worthwhile for just about any character to pick up as a feat if their player's interested.
@Nemenia 4e was weird, but things like Rituals were part of its strengths. Namely, it was part of the strength wherein all classes were more or less empowered as equals; they did away with the notion that wizards should start off less powerful and then eclipse the mundane classes later on to the point of making them irrelevant.
This meant lots and lots of encounter design problems and spotlight problems and general around-the-table happiness problems went away.
[shrug] Is it any less weird and arbitrary than only being able to cast X spells a day?
4e decided: wait, why can't the non-magical classes be extraordinary? Why can't they get awesome stuff? Why must they be shackled down by mundane logic when this is a ostensibly a game about being big damn fantasy heroes?
And so the non-magic users got their own flavour of being extraordinary, and ritual casting was created so that magic users weren't the only ones with access to unconventional solutions to problems.
D&D was wonderfully popular among the right crowd, and people who hated it had lots of disparate reasons - such as that it wasn't D&D 3.5e, or that it emphasized miniatures and a map, or that it did away with the idea of trying to be a great game for social encounters, or that it wasn't what Gygax wanted, or so on.
@Nemenia It is very hard to get any kind of statistics for this sort of thing. And very easy to mistake a prevalent attitude in a particular community for what everyone thinks.
D&D 4e was insanely unpopular among certain crowds. We do not have the oversight to be able to say who was the majority, and how unpopular it was. It was not, also, insanely popular for a reason. Just that people had their reasons for disliking it. Just like D&D 3e was insanely unpopular among some crowds. So was AD&D. So is D&D 5e.
@Nemenia Yep, and that's a common trap people in the RPG world, especially the D&D world, fall into: my circle's representative of the majority, surely!
By its nature, most of the people in the RPG sphere are cut off from each other, and many don't even interact with the online community or other communities.
D&D communities themselves is especially insular, because D&D players tend to be the kind to not explore much.
@Nemenia Most of the community is just, like, groups of five or six people who get together around a table some weekends for fun and get on with their lives after that, with no involvement in any community around it.
Because D&D is the most prominent rpg, the game that everyone who's interested in the hobby has heard of, has played computer adaptations, has read the novels of, whatever. If someone's looking to start playing, that's where they'll go. And as a direct result, it's much, much easier to find a group that is playing D&D than any other game.
And if they're not particularly dedicated to the hobby, they may not want to put time and money into learning another system.
Mm. BESW and trogdor and I have just gotten quite proficient at learning new RPGs, and that's not a common thing. Magician also does a lot of exploration.
Usually it's just "ehh, let's do it in D&D, we know that one."
Far too often, we see people pass through the chat complaining how they'd love to play a game they've heard of, but their group only plays D&D, so that's what they're stuck with.
And many years of D&D marketing have, as Magician mentioned, tried to convince everyone that D&D can do just about everything and is suitable for every kind of game from every genre, including mystery solving, social drama, lovecraftian horror, or even your Downton Abbey game.
And unless you've played a game made for mystery solving (Gumshoe), or made for lovecraftian horror (Cthulhu Dark), or Downton Abbey (not sure), D&D will seem like the best fit because you don't know what a good fit is.
So you can absolutely play an investigative game, or a horror game in D&D. You'll just be doing it beside D&D, that'll awkwardly sit there, waiting for you to be done with the silly things and get back to killing monsters.
Cthulhu Dark is this tiny game that fits on two sides of an A4 piece of paper.
The idea of it is to try to very truly capture what it feels like to be an investigator: someone in way over their heads, who probably cannot win, whose best hope is to delay the inevitable just a little bit longer. Someone in a situation that will probably be frightening and maddening, whose mind will be bent or broken or corrupted as they progress deeper and get closer to solving what's going on.
(I'll ask you to keep an open mind, and take it on my word that it does this very well, and the design decisions naturally lead to this kind of experience emerging.)
You create your character by naming them, and describing who they are and their profession to the people you're playing with. There, you're done, you've finished character creation.
Your character has one stat, which is their Insanity score. It starts at 1, and the maximum is 6, which means you can just represent it using a d6.
Anytime you want to do something, you have three d6 you can roll: one d6 if it's something an ordinary human is capable of, one d6 if it's within your character's profession, and one d6 if you're willing to risk your insanity to succeed.
The highest die shows how well you do. On a 1, you just barely succeed, on a 6, you do brilliantly.
(You'll only actually fail in Cthulhu Dark in the rare case you're opposed by someone.)
So, that Insanity score, right? When you succeed at anything, if that d6 you rolled to risk your sanity was the highest roll, your sanity is placed at risk. Roll a d6. If you get higher than your current Insanity, your Insanity goes up by one.
If you succeed on that roll, you hold it together. You're not okay, but you hold it together. If you fail on that roll and go more insane, you lose it. The player roleplays how their character responds in either case.
Likewise, if you ever see something very disturbing (like a brutalised corpse), you roll Insanity.
Your insanity will steadily - more slowly as time goes on - creep toward 6 over the course of the game. Once it hits 5, you unlock a new ability: anytime you destroy evidence about what you're investigating, your insanity goes down by 1, but you keep this ability around forever. Find a ritual circle? Destroy it. Find someone's journal? Burn it. Find the sacrificial chamber? Bar the door and say there wasn't anything down there, but hey, look over there!
There's another rule: if your character ever fights a creature, they die. They might succeed, but they are going to die in the process. Fighting lovecraftian monstrosities is not an option on the table.
Likewise, if you reach 6 insanity, your character goes nuts. They go loopy, they go off the deep end. You can have them stick around just a little bit longer, but at the very earliest opportunity, the player is encouraged to vividly portray them cracking and have them exit stage left.
@Nemenia Lovecraftian Horror is a very popular thing in our culture now, it's a big thing and it comes from a series of short stories in the early 1900s by HP Lovecraft. Yes, there's magic. Most investigators will have to roll only their Insanity dice to use it, because it's not within human capability or their profession (unless they happen to actually be a sorcerer).
Cthulhu Dark is not to be confused with Call of Cthulhu either, which is a d20 game wherein the monsters are actually statted and beaten. Cthulhu Dark isn't interested in such a story, and it's not very Lovecraft-ish to actually beat an elder god.
@Nemenia Nope! One of our games featured someone being a sorcerer. They could roll their profession dice. All in good fun.
i dunno. my biggest problem is i hate feeling like Im not in control. like some things cant be changed. like always dying to a monster seems lousy. or having your insanity go up just because of some nasty things
Heck, half the time the reason there's a cult summoning an elder god like Cthulhu is because they believe the elder god's visitation and the subsequent annihilation of all human life or immense suffering of the survivors is inevitable, and they just want to make sure they're absolutely definitely going to go out first and as painlessly as possible by being at ground zero.
Cthulhu Dark wonderfully conveys a very particular atmosphere fairly elegantly with a minimum number of mechanics: you're an amazingly competent bunch of investigators. You can do just about anything. Except it doesn't help, and all you can do is just barely defeat whatever it is, and only at great, immense, palpable personal cost.
D&D doesn't replicate this experience in any way.
If you chose to do that in D&D you'd have to ignore just about every mechanic and introduce a whole lot of new ones. Congratulations, you're not actually doing D&D now, you're doing your experimental system. If you do this enough, you'll eventually iterate upon... oh hey, you're now playing Cthulhu Dark, maybe, and you're not playing D&D at all.
