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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
So after reading over the play-test, two of our players have dropped out, due to not wanting to get anywhere near this monstrosity, in their words.
So my chance to test this out may be postponed a few days.
More thoughts:
Spells. Relatively boring. Almost everything seems like a rehash.
Glad to see they retained Healing Word, to allow Clerics to do more than heal mindlessly.
Ray of Frost is ridiculously broken.
As is Searing Light.
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
Various preview material suggests that you'll get the option to multi-train skills as you level up, gaining better bonuses.
...and that is necessary, because at present there is too little variance between skill values, making the rolls on them too random.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Ziegander
Do you honestly believe that most monsters will just attack against AC or have abilities that are "easily" bypassed?
That's a very good question, actually. I believe Mike Mearls was the one who initially came up with the idea that equipment destroyed by a rust monster should automatically come back a few minutes later, because long-term consequences are Not Fun. Indeed, that is very much 4E's philosophy; I cannot tell from the playtest whether it also applies to 5E.
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
That sounds like Myths & Magic.
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Ziegander
If that is the case, then what the heck is the point of using ability scores as saving throws?
I'm not 100% on ability=saves either, but I understand why they're doing it. From 3.0 Con was tied to Fortitude, Dex was to Reflex, and Wis was to Will. They were not the exact same because what they were trying to match scaled so they had to scale. Since there appears to be less scaling in numbers in general theoretically Con+d20 would roughly equal 10+Int or whatever, now some modifiers would have to be in place to take into account what is focused more but in general that's the idea. So there's no reason for having a specific thing called Fort save when it's not matched against anything but an ability score so you get ability score = saves.
Now so far we need to keep a few things in mind. 1) Martial abilities have been promised to us, but not in this test. 2) So far the spells have followed the Fort/Ref/Will pattern without calling them that.
This leaves me to hope that when we get martial maneuvers they're read something like:
Knock Back
Make a melee attack roll opposed to the opponents Str Save. If your roll is successful the opponent moves back 5 feet.
Or whatever. So that way to defend against a mage you'll want Con, Dex, Wis saves. To defend against a martial you'll want AC, and maybe Str, Dex, and Int saves.
Mind you this is the optimistic view of it, something I feel dirty even saying. The pessimist in me says that martial maneuvers will be useless and spells will end up targeting every ability save.
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
The Charm Person spell is really, really overpowered. Essentially all 1st level characters can be affected without save, and at higher levels, all you have to do to hit an enemy with it with no chance of a save is to beat the living tar out of him. Sounds a bit odd to me.
Edit:
An example to make things clearer on how I see it being used:
Scenario #1:
Enemy NPC: I'll never give you the information!
Evil PC: Oh, don't worry. After we torture you enough, you'll give us the information....whether you want to or not.
An actually sort of badass usage I suppose, but most PCs aren't evil.
Scenario #2:
Neutral Important NPC: I won't help you!
A short butt-kicking and a Charm Person later.....
Neutral Important NPC: Of course I'll help you, new best friends!
Just......wrecks the storyline. And is just a little creepy.
Scenario #3:
Sheriff(Good NPC): We need you folk to find a way to deal with the evil bandit warlord that's plaguing the city!
Good PC: Don't worry! We'll beat the living tar out of him....
Sheriff: Good!
Good PC: Until he becomes our friend! Then he won't attack the city anymore.
Sheriff: WTF.
This scenario speaks for itself.
So, spells, especially this one, need some work.
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
Okay, I've read most of it now. Thoughts:
- I love the advantage/disadvantage mechanic. I'm reading it like it doesn't stack, so if two things give you an advantage at the same time you still only roll twice. I always hated situational bonuses in 3.5, this is much better.
- Anyone else notice how sleep can put creatures to sleep forever unless they ever take damage or someone wakes them up? No duration given.
- HP thresholds on spells (like sleep and charm) are weird. Not sure how that will play out.
- Also, I don't like the complete lack of format for spell descriptions. Stuff like range, targets, area of effect, saving throw etc. should be noted before the spell description for easy checking.
- I don't like the (lack of) skills. Hoping whoever said skills simply haven't been fully implemented yet is right.
- Observation: Wizard and cleric have different casting mechanisms. Wizard works like a 3.5 prepared caster mainly, cleric seems to work like a spontaneous caster, though it's noted that he prepares spells so I'm not sure.
- I'm thinking there will be a Complex Combat Actions module that's not included here, that will have stuff like Grapple, Bull Rush, Charging, penalties for being injured (blooded in 4E lingo) etc.
- The Adventuring Gear list is a copypasta of the one from the 3.5 PHB. It's a placeholder guys, of course it still has the ladder/pole loop. Don't worry about it.
- Do humans not have any racial bonuses or am I just not seeing them? I notice the human cleric happens to have an extra orison over the dwarf cleric. Is that it? How does this work for, say, fighters?
Aaand that's all I have for now.
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
I like it. Its not 4e and looks more similar to 3.5 but still I think its simple easy to read and looks like it'll be fun I dont see what everyone is complaining about. Sure there are no Skills but theirs a reason for that, theirs never been a set way to do skills so you can't unify people from various bases if you choose one of the many systems. Likely Skills will be a module released later maybe this summer that you can opt to use.
I dont like the lack of Character Creation or at least explanation of race bonuses though my friend and I are trying to reverse engineer a semi working model so we can have Elf Clerics and Human Wizards, and I'm not a fan of prewritten adventures so I'm happy theirs a bestiary, with Kobolds.
I'll either play this tomorrow night with my group or Tuesday and give a full opinion then
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
I don't know, I've been reading the PDF and. . . well, it seems to be pretty freaking sweet.
I mean, I'm not a great fan of D&D as a whole, so make of that what you want, but the mechanics sound solid and I could see myself actually enjoying this game. It's clear that this time around they built atop the past editions: 3.5, of course, but also a lot from proper AD&D and 4E. The good parts, I'd say. Also, thanks God they hammered in that HPs are an abstraction and kept the idea of short and long rest from 4E.
And if it crashes and burns, at least I'll still have the flames of a new, bitter edition war to keep me warm, so there's that.
Cheers!
EDIT: Oh yeah, skills. Man, how I hope they'll go with something along the lines of NWPs. I miss them.
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
Classes:
Wizard seemed...I don't even know. It didn't look underpowered. But it also didn't look fun, really.
Rogue can apparently hide behind anything that covers a quarter of his body. I hope I get rogue, so I can buy venetian blinds, put them over my face, and walk around hidden all the time.
Overall the classes just seem really plain. They work, but nothing strikes me as fun. Nothing says to me, "hey, look, you want to play this."
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
Quote:
Originally Posted by
DrBurr
I dont like the lack of Character Creation or at least explanation of race bonuses though my friend and I are trying to reverse engineer a semi working model so we can have Elf Clerics and Human Wizards, and I'm not a fan of prewritten adventures so I'm happy theirs a bestiary, with Kobolds.
This is really part of their test... it's not about "oh, here's D&D5e, go have fun!" It's "Here's some characters, here's some monsters, here's the situation you are in... how does this work for you? How do the mechanics feel? What's wrong with this? What's right with this?"
Character creation is later on, and then they'll have everyone rolling up tons of characters and listening to "this isn't intuitive, this is unbalanced..." and tweaking things over and over again.
I think, in the end, people keep forgetting that this isn't a product. It's the first draft of a set of rules, and are subject to massive, sweeping changes over the next few years as they approach having an actual releasable product.
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
Quote:
Originally Posted by
EatAtEmrakuls
Classes:
Wizard seemed...I don't even know. It didn't look underpowered. But it also didn't look fun, really.
Rogue can apparently hide behind anything that covers a quarter of his body. I hope I get rogue, so I can buy venetian blinds, put them over my face, and walk around hidden all the time.
Overall the classes just seem really plain. They work, but nothing strikes me as fun. Nothing says to me, "hey, look, you want to play this."
But I think what we're seeing is just the raw, basic form of the classes. The design team has promised us several layers of customizable complexity, but has also told us that we won't be getting them in the initial playtest.
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
There are certainly some errors. The rogue's dagger is doing as much damage as the shortsword.
It's also weird that unarmed strikes are just as good as a dagger, except for the fact that they can't be thrown.
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
The sword and board blog link isn't working. Can someone post / PM me a link to a download? (I promise, I signed up!)
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
Quote:
Originally Posted by
NMBLNG
The sword and board blog link isn't working. Can someone post / PM me a link to a download? (I promise, I signed up!)
If you're using chrome, try a different browser. Turns out that's the issue for a lot of people. (Or try replacing %21 with !).
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Ziegander
It's seriously going to make gameplay almost impossible without a daunting amount of effort on the part of the DM or without running pregenerating modules (which assumes that the module designers even know that there is a problem and try to mitigate it). Why? Because if save-or-dies and save-or-get-f***ed effects can target all six of the ability scores, then at nearly every turn at least one member of the party WILL face a monster that can severely screw that member over. That is, as I mentioned earlier, unless the DM (or module designer) goes to great lengths to pit his party against monsters that ONLY have attacks that target the party's strengths (which will be highly variable and thus almost impossible to do).
Agreed. 3E simplifying the saving throw system was a good feature. It was easy to figure out which save to use as opposed to 2E where it took a while to figure out if it was save vs death, vs spell, vs rod staff wand, or what. I did like 4E's improvement on it by allowing the better of two ability scores to be used as the modifier. That eased the burden of MAD and didn't inflate the importance of one ability score over another. If all ability scores matter for different things, then all classes are MAD and an 8 in a score will mean your character's death eventually. This is one instance I would like to see 4E's influence - the three standard saving throws and use the better of two ability scores for the modifier.
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
So to reiterate how stupid I think the armor rules are. Take a look at the dwarven fighter and notice that he decided to pay 25 gold for the benefit of -5 feet per round.
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
I absolutely hate their hit dice mechanic. It's like healing surges, except they're random, weaker, and you get fewer of them until much higher level. Basically just all around terrible because they wanted to make people who didn't want magical healing to rely on them happy.
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
So, what Tiers are the classes now?
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Dienekes
So to reiterate how stupid I think the armor rules are. Take a look at the dwarven fighter and notice that he decided to pay 25 gold for the benefit of -5 feet per round.
Dwarves don't take a speed penalty for wearing heavy armor. He still paid 25 GP for absolutely nothing, but it's not as bad as it seems. Presumably there'll be some feats and class features that'll require being in heavy armor to work, though with heavy armor being so ****ty compared to light armor they'd better be pretty amazing feats...
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Dienekes
So to reiterate how stupid I think the armor rules are. Take a look at the dwarven fighter and notice that he decided to pay 25 gold for the benefit of -5 feet per round.
No, dwarves have the ability of not getting their speed reduced by armor anyway. So his speed must have already been at -5. So he's paying 25 gp for ... absolutely nothing. Which is better than paying 25 gp for a disadvantage. :smalltongue:
EDIT: Ninja'd? Swordsage'd? Neither of those classes exist yet in this game ...
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
...
They took away ability damage/drain and negative levels.
Not playing this POS.
inb4copypasta of 4e
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
Quote:
Originally Posted by
navar100
So, what Tiers are the classes now?
I'd put Fighter and Rogue at T4 - while they can't do much except attack, we don't know that they're bad at this. The casters are T3 or possibly T2 - they don't seem to have anything gamebreaking (Charm and Ray of Frost excluded), can game the action economy somewhat, and have utility stuff. But of course, until we see the Monk, D&D's mage killer, the casters will seem really strong.
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Craft (Cheese)
Dwarves don't take a speed penalty for wearing heavy armor. He still paid 25 GP for absolutely nothing, but it's not as bad as it seems. Presumably there'll be some feats and class features that'll require being in heavy armor to work, though with heavy armor being so ****ty compared to light armor they'd better be pretty amazing feats...
Indeed, you're right. I just saw the 25 move speed and jumped to conclusions. Instead he paid 25 gold so that Shocking Grasp works more effectively on him, much better.
I still think the rules as presented are pretty dumb in this regard. Also with shields, I don't actually see a reason for getting a light shield. Unless you really, really don't have 10 gold on you.
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Thump
...
They took away ability damage/drain and negative levels.
I'd save judgement on that until we see the full 20 levels of play: Of course we're not going to see Enervation being used on level 3 characters...
@Draz: May I propose "Halfling'd" for the time being?
@Dienekes: Of course, though again, my presumption is they intend to have stuff that requires one option over the other and differentiate them that way, sortof like how different weapon groups were differentiated in 4E for the most part. Still terrible game design though. (If you're going to do something like require quarterstaffs for tripping, why not just bake tripping into the base mechanics of the quarterstaff instead of making it a feat elsewhere?)
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
It's okay the move speed won't matter anyway. What with Wizards being able to reduce your move speed to 0 with no saving throw as an at will ability.
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Seerow
It's okay the move speed won't matter anyway. What with Wizards being able to reduce your move speed to 0 with no saving throw as an at will ability.
Uhh, the wizard still has to succeed on an attack roll. Unless there's already some piece of cheese that lets you auto-succeed on every attack roll already that I missed.
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
This is a D&D web forum. There's more cheese here than there is in France.
That said, Ray of Frost will probably be amongst the first things they fix in the initial playtest errata.
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
Or you could use KTorrent
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Seerow
If you're using chrome, try a different browser. Turns out that's the issue for a lot of people. (Or try replacing %21 with !).
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Pyromancer999
The Charm Person spell is really, really overpowered. Essentially all 1st level characters can be affected without save, and at higher levels, all you have to do to hit an enemy with it with no chance of a save is to beat the living tar out of him. Sounds a bit odd to me.
Edit:
An example to make things clearer on how I see it being used:
Scenario #1:
Enemy NPC: I'll never give you the information!
Evil PC: Oh, don't worry. After we torture you enough, you'll give us the information....whether you want to or not.
An actually sort of badass usage I suppose, but most PCs aren't evil.
Scenario #2:
Neutral Important NPC: I won't help you!
A short butt-kicking and a Charm Person later.....
Neutral Important NPC: Of course I'll help you, new best friends!
Just......wrecks the storyline. And is just a little creepy.
Scenario #3:
Sheriff(Good NPC): We need you folk to find a way to deal with the evil bandit warlord that's plaguing the city!
Good PC: Don't worry! We'll beat the living tar out of him....
Sheriff: Good!
Good PC: Until he becomes our friend! Then he won't attack the city anymore.
Sheriff: WTF.
This scenario speaks for itself.
So, spells, especially this one, need some work.
Read it again. Even the first level elf wizard has 16 hp, not enough to auto-charm. Also, it just prevents the caster from being attacked, not allies. So you can charm, then you have a better chance to diplomance him.
Edit: Charmed is not dominated. Read the description under 'conditions.'
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Re: Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Thread #3
Did I skim over something?
There seems to be no Flat footed or Touch attack AC.
Or BAB. Then again the +hit for the Dwarf warrior is +6 (Str is only +3) so I doubt we are seeing everything.