I have begun working on a home brew class for D&D 5e and I plan ask a critique question on rpg.se once I'm finished. I figured it would be better to ask this meta question now, than at the end of the process so I can use any advise given here to take notes as I write. Unfortunately, this means ...
"A grotesque apparition appears in the cave, stumping toward you, supporting its withered legs with a long, black cane. It looks like a huge peanut, dried and splintered, its shell cracked. Its twisted limbs and deformed face make a mockery of the top hat and monocle it wears. 'Ah, father, so good to see you,' it hisses, as your grip on reality slips a bit." Yeah, checks out.
I have stuff in my notes about adamantine's durability and ability to autocrit against structures and objects (5e), reduce critical hits to normal ones (5e) and act as a virtually indestructible material in general across editions.
I also have something in my notes about adamantite, a material ...
if you want a thematic summary of 5e subclasses, here is one: https://www.subclassguide.com It describes the general theme/lore behind each subclass, and categorizes them (with filters) by source.
@V2Blast alright here. wondering how busy those two Discord servers you mentioned were, because boy, things sure are quiet at the moment, but I'm not sure if I want another busy Discord floating about to keep up on either XD
@Shalvenay The Tabletop Gaming server is mostly quiet with occasional bursts of activity. The /r/dndnext server is reasonably active, as is the Wholesome Adventuring Funville server, though you don't really need to "keep up" on any of them any more than you want to :)
Tabletop Gaming server is a general server for talking about RPGs and various aspects thereof. There are a few dedicated channels for a few specific popular RPG systems (Call of Cthulhu, D&D, OSR, Pathfinder, PbtA, Warhammer), as well as a general RPG discussion channel (for everything else). Plus an off-topic channel, stories channel, game art channel, and a few channels for GM topics and a few for a few specific popular RPG podcasts. It's surprisingly quiet for having... 838 members?
That's probably the main one I mentioned earlier here where we were hoping to get some people running new systems and such to hopefully make the server a bit more active
Wholesome Adventuring Funville server is a friendly community where people hang out and chat, discuss D&D or other RPGs, get feedback on homebrew, play video games with each other, etc. Anyone who wants to DM can run their own game there (we have quite a few), and new games get posted pretty regularly - mostly D&D 5e, but there are some in other systems.
That one I helped start :)
It's fairly active, but you can always disable notifications except on mentions and mute the channels you don't care about.
@BESW Huh, one of those is not like the others. (Apocalypse World, which is often described as very FATE-adjacent.) Why did that one join the list of big/popular and generally 'traditional' games?
This is misleading. What we should be saying is that a "natural 20" should actually be a "vanilla 20". Like "vanilla Minecraft", in that it is not modified
@vicky_molokh As a GM it mechanizes what I do naturally, adding layers of complexity to accomplish little; as a player it's frustrating for a variety of reasons centering around a lack of informed agency. Overall it treats its randomization in ways I don't like.
I don't seen PbtA as Fate-like in any particularly significant way; they're similar mostly in terms of what they're both unlike.
@BESW I've seen people repeatedly say that PbtA teaches people how to properly GM FATE (which personally I find a highly unfortunate situation if it is true, since a game should contain its own tutorial and not borrow one from another game).
I never tried it and barely skimmed one of the books, so I'm only noting second-hand accounts.
Also, consider that PbtA is among the most popular non-"traditional" game on the site in terms of questions asked; I don't need to ignore tags that don't show up very often.
PbtA is, in many ways, valuable as a teaching system for GMs locked into other forms of play. Fate is designed for groups that aren't so firmly locked in. Fate explains its expected playstyle; PbtA enforces its expected playstyle.
Their styles are not identical, but are more similar to each other than D&D-like assumptions about GM practices. And once PbtA has helped a group jump out of its established routine, other playstyles become easier to pick up.
@V2Blast (Except aren't there Critical Role minor characaters (NPCs?) who make appearances in Waterdeep:Dragon Heist? I don't know CR at all, but when I was reading some descriptions some of my players were all "oh, that's Blah diBlah from CR!")
@nitsua60 I know Matt Mercer himself is in the art for the Yawning Portal in W:DH, but I don't know of any CR characters.
I haven't played W:DH myself anyway :P
that art does come with a legend in the appendix listing all the NPCs and characters that appear
one of them is Joe Manganiello's character Arkhan the Cruel
He's played him in the streamed campaign Force Grey, then Critical Role, and now he's actually becoming canon because he'll appear in the Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus adventure
Also interesting that they've so fractured their marketing/presence that an interested daily user/consumer of their product (o/) can not even know what-all they're making.
(I stopped trying to keep up with UA years ago--now I mostly become tangentially aware when one of the students brings a thing I've never heard of to the school's game night.)
Okay--I gotta get back to bed. It's the dead of night in my time zone. Night (again), all!
Mercer's homebrews in general don't seem to follow some of the design philosophies of 5e.
there was some discussion about this in the /r/dndnext discord earlier...
Quoting some others:
"blood hunter suffers the same problem all of mercer's homebrew does [...] blood hunter basically punishes the player (HP reduction, loss of control in 1 subclass) for wanting to be what amounts to a specialized ranger in flavor. the subclasses are not balanced well between each other and are filled with a lot of weird incidental bonuses that 5e largely moved away from on purpose or the hack job that is like 1/3rd pact magic. it's workable in that numerically it isn't going to break the game, but it's not made in a mindset that is compatible with the conventions of the system. it's a hack…
"the other problem with blood hunter (well mercer content in general but we'll use this specific as an example) is just overall feature bloat in general. fighter chassis of subclass progression with multiple gains per feature instead of just one or a scaling of earlier features is very common, especially in lycan. and almost all of it is purely combat related. you get way more than other classes get at a similar level and then are strapped with ways to kill yourself or screw up your party as a "balance." except if the DM ever exercises things like the lycan's silvered weapon vulnerabilit…
"basically you have to remember that mercer's content is all balanced around the fact that he is already hyper-tuning his game to his players in terms of his encounter design. it is not made for a game that is otherwise following RAW, it is made to be specific to his DMing style and accounts for his house rules and the type of game his players are playing where magic items tend to be more plentiful and the party is already more powerful than 5e RAW would expect. in addition to him coming from pathfinder and designing things that are much more in tune with pathfinder convention than 5e conv…
(I guess that's all actually one user's assessment)
A different user's assessment: "Gunslinger is better than battlemaster base But battlemaster with CBE+SS is better than gunslinger Blood Hunter is better than ranger But still just a [bad] fighter, pretty much It's simultaneously overpowered and underpowered because it refuses to follow 5e design"
@Ben In the series, magical creatures are magical because they're born with an understand of an element. The only example of someone learning it as an adult involved a vision during a near-death experience after spending a whole season trying to gain the understanding.
But in D&D... it's probably a lot less dire.
I'd be inclined to frame it as a kind of persuasiveness, since sorcerers are charisma-based; you understand the element enough that you know how to sweet-talk it into doing what you want.
The reincarnate spell states that you lose racial traits, but do feats and skill proficiencies count as racial traits? For example, would a half-elf lose the skills they had when the character was created if they were reincarnated as a dragonborn?
I am pretty new to playing D&D and our DM does not use figures with a grid, so we kind of use our imagination. According to the official D&D rules, are we doing it wrong?
We have poorly-conducting floors where I work and I regularly get charged, and get shocks when I touch metal railings or such. I've started offloading my charge on railings intentionally to avoid bigger shocks (even if they're seldom painful)
@V2Blast so have you actually seen that happen (refering to New players especially might not be familiar with the differences between AL and other play, so it's certainly possible. – V2Blast 1 min ago)? Like an AL tag correctly getting added to an AL question where the querent didn't specify that it was an AL game somewhere in the question?
About that coffee in D&D question; this sort of adjudication help is one of the most useful parts of the RPG Stack Exchange for a DM. There can be some sorta limit, lest the site becomes a katamari of the cross product of [all items on the entire planet] × [all other items on the entire planet] and their interaction; which is why general principles is better than specific items.
Some knobs available when making rules for specific drugs is HP gain, HP loss, temp HP, max HP, advantage, disadvantage, stat boost, saves. In general, a good principle is to have very few rules; then when you and your own group need a specific rule, you make a rule and record it.
For coffee specifically, our group uses the flaw & inspiration system to model characters desiring coffee, making decisions in order to get coffee, and performing worse without coffee
Modelling drugs in 5e is difficult. I now have (I think) 6 pages with tables for different drugs and keeping track of overlapping effects and interaction is actual spreadsheet hell.
I have a Chessex battlemap and it's been working great. Sometimes, though, I want to prepare maps in advance to save time during the session. However, I know that marker left on the mat for too long it will become permanent.
If I prepare my map 6-7 hours before using it, will it stain? How long ...
@Akixkisu Hmm. Hard to say, I've never kept count. Generally I only flag a question or answer if it's not something that's easily fixed (and obviously something that falls under one of the reasons to flag, e.g. a close reason for a question or a spam answer/total non-answer). And of course, I flag comments that have already been acted on and integrated into the question/answer as "no longer needed".
It's avocado season, so we're experimenting with using mashed avocado as a replacement for shortening and egg in baking. Mechanically it's working very well! Taste-wise, I think it doesn't work in things that are supposed to be only mildly sweet. Non-sweet things like bread work okay, and really sweet things like brownies work well.
@Shalvenay For a lot of baking you can use most any fruit puree, but avocado's oil makes it especially well-suited for substitution without adjustment.
I have begun working on a home brew class for D&D 5e and I plan ask a critique question on rpg.se once I'm finished. I figured it would be better to ask this meta question now, than at the end of the process so I can use any advise given here to take notes as I write. Unfortunately, this means ...
I have stuff in my notes about adamantine's durability and ability to autocrit against structures and objects (5e), reduce critical hits to normal ones (5e) and act as a virtually indestructible material in general across editions.
I also have something in my notes about adamantite, a material ...
The reincarnate spell states that you lose racial traits, but do feats and skill proficiencies count as racial traits? For example, would a half-elf lose the skills they had when the character was created if they were reincarnated as a dragonborn?
I am pretty new to playing D&D and our DM does not use figures with a grid, so we kind of use our imagination. According to the official D&D rules, are we doing it wrong?
