The General D&D thread

You know what'd be great?

A bard who's a blatant copy of Robert Johnson.

Would this character multiclass warlock at all?

Maybe.

Maybe he'd be rumored to have done so.

I had a gnome bard once who was the DND version of an Intrepid Reporter. He joined the party to chronicle their heroic deeds and considered himself an observer rather than a full fledged team member (though of course he pulled his weight, in combat and out). His Perform skill was oratory, so he basically used the Rousing Speech rather than Magic Music, and during downtime he would find himself the town square and share news of the places they'd been (and stories of the party's latest triumphs) town crier style.

That actually sounds pretty awesome.

...I think I just now realized why the Bard class was invented. Apart from support or standing in for another class, it's an opportunity for player-controlled advertising for the party within the gameworld.

EDIT: And diplomat, I suppose. And possibly party "face."

edited 3rd Aug '14 12:29:30 AM by Knowlessman

ok guys, im going to read one of the d&d novels, ¿can you tell one? i meant one book i can read without know to much about forgotten realms or something like that

I've had that too in an Eberron game. Guy was a reporter for the Korranberg Chronicles.

Well, most of the Forgotten Realms novels are more character driven than world driven, so just pick a series of books that is the first book in said series.

I enjoyed the Plague of Spells book series by ... Bruce Cordell? I forget.

It's easier to not worry about the setting when, well, they're kind of destroying it.

Ha! Makes sense; in Eberron, you could play Intrepid Reporter completely straight. Eberron's awesome like that.

Actually, I've done the "character as Intrepid Reporter" thing more than once. In a Planescape campaign, I had an Anarchist-aligned psion/rogue whose whole raison d'etre was infiltration, information gathering, and propaganda. He would sneak into other factions, steal inside information, and then broadcast it to the masses in the most unflattering light possible. His entire build revolved around using a combination of mundane and psionic means to be really really good at a) passing himself off at someone else, b) getting information out of people while passing himself off as someone he wasn't, and c) running the hell away when he inevitably pushed his luck and got caught. He was a side character for that campaign, so thankfully he didn't really have to worry about proper combat.

Actually, it was his speed that was the most ridiculous thing about him — if he had time to buff himself, he could move 475 feet per round in a straight line ^note 40' base speed as a Xeph, with a racial ability to increase that by 30' three times a day, another 10' bonus from Speed of Thought as long as he was psionically focused, plus 15' from the Skate power, and x5 everything from the Run feat. That's north of 50 miles per hour. Oh, and he could run up walls and on ceilings (as long as he began and ended each round on the floor) with the Up the Walls feat.

It'd be interesting to have a Rita sheet Seeker who runs into the characters on occasion putting the worst possible spin on everything they do.

'HERO'S OR OUTLAWS? ADVENTURERS RANSACK DEFENSELESS GOBLIN VILLAGE' type things.

I think I'm gonna throw that in my campaign

She'll have the life expectancy of a mayfly.

edited 3rd Aug '14 1:17:42 PM by Knowlessman

Oh yea. My group's highly in experienced and includes one member who makes rolls to punch Joe in the face on a regular basis.

I've got a ridiculously OP paladin order in the primary city to get the group back in line when I need to so she might be based right there

edited 3rd Aug '14 2:15:10 PM by joesolo

The book Sharn City of Towers in Eberron has an NPC who just does that. A playwright who uses the party's adventures to write comedic plays that either makes them look like assholes or like buffoons. And of course, he's so well known you can't just go murdering him :)

I haven't played D&D in forever, but one of my favorite things to do was to stick Great Cleave onto my fighters.

One of the things that was nice about 3E was that the game rules technically "allowed" for, say, a 20th level fighter to take Power Attack and Great Cleave, and just annihilate a huge swarm of orcs single handedly.

4E handles orcs like minions, which just isn't the same, and 5E just doesn't give high level characters that much of a power differential over low level characters so a 20th level character trying something like that would probably be killed.

Then what the heck is the point of being 20th level?

So they are stepping down from the idea of epic characters being basically gods? Well, I suppose I can't say I hate the thought that much. I do hope they can still make you feel powerful by that time, though.

Well, I mean, you do deal MORE damage. But it's just not a 20 to 1 ratio. It's more like 6 or 7 to 1, and that's split over multiple attacks. Since it's split over multiple attacks, even a mechanic like Great Cleave wouldn't let you annihilate an entire horde of orcs.

Basically, the max damage you can deal is 1W+7 plus whatever magic item bonuses are. I haven't seen any magic item rules, but I'm guessing they're not going to be adding a lot to attack bonus, due to bounded accuracy rules. So any monster with 15 HP or more likely isn't going down in one shot. So even if you get 5 attacks per round at 20th level, the maximum number of enemies you can drop is 5.

Obviously, wizards can annihilate huge swathes of orcs by casting Meteor Swarm (Meteor Swarm covers 4 separate non-overlapping 40' radius and deals 20d6 damage per target, so if you assume one orc per 25 square feet, that's 804 orcs), but it's definitely not the same as 3E, where you can literally slash an infinite number of orcs as long as you don't fumble and can deal enough damage to kill one in a single hit, and you can "shift" (5' step) between attacks.

My biggest objection to 5E is that everyone just feels so damned fragile.

edited 4th Aug '14 6:50:11 AM by TheyCallMeTomu

You just want more efficient mass orc slaughter.

edited 4th Aug '14 7:05:30 AM by Fighteer

Actually they don't. It actually take a lot of effort to kill someone by stabbings (Partially because swords are low velocity weapon, meaning a sword can only damage tissue it touches, unlike a bullet whose kinetic force allows it damage tissue it never touched). People in medieval warfare died because medical care was inexistant or worse, so those wounds would infect and gangrene and worst. Which in a world where injuries can be recovered by magic or sheer heroic willpower (The short rest recovery thing 5E and 4E has)... well sword stabs aren't that bad. There's a reason you'll find reports of people who took 20 to 50 stab wounds before going down.

In fact, diseases killed more victims in war than combat did, and that remained true until World War 1 (which was itself legendary for how disease-ridden a war it was), where combat victims "finally" outnumbered disease victims.

TLDR: Killing a human is a lot harder than movies make it seem.

edited 4th Aug '14 7:14:58 AM by CobraPrime

Swords aren't how characters are fragile (HP does scale after all), saving throws are.

For instance, a 20th level wizard is *exactly* as vulnerable to attacks as a 1st level wizard. He can be petrified by a medusa (for instance) with no greater difficulty at 20th level than 1st level, because said wizard is not proficient in any saves except intelligence saves (nope, not even wisdom-aka "willpower" saves), meaning that he does not add any form of level up bonus to his defenses in any way shape or form.

What this does is turn 5E into the same old Initiative Is All There Is Lets Play Badmiton With WM Ds game 3E was, except now even low level monsters can play.

It feels like it defeats the purpose of playing epic level to have epic level characters be so squishy.

edited 4th Aug '14 7:22:09 AM by TheyCallMeTomu

Yeah. Wizards ARE proficient in Wisdom saves. Every class gets 2 saves. One form the useful list (Con, dex, Wis) and one from the useless list (STR, CHA, INT) that has nothing to save against.

I do get what you mean though. The fact that only the fighter (Who has the ability to max out three attributes) is the only one that can have "good" numbers for all three of the useful saves and that other characters are pretty much doomed if the DM doesn't put the thing they are very specifically strong against, no matter the level, sort of sucks. On the other hand, its not necessarily a bad thing. You should fear a cockatrice at level 1 as much as level 20. I don't consider being turned to stone something you just learn to shrug off.

edited 4th Aug '14 7:26:13 AM by CobraPrime

Oh okay, wizards were updated in basic, I musta been looking at an older rules set.

That's good.

Two retorts. 1.) Uhhh, proficiency bonus doesn't make you immune, it just lowers your chance of failure by 30%. 2.) That's at 17th !@#$ing level for crying out loud. These are epic characters. They're basically superhuman.

All I'm saying is, if we're going to HAVE epic rules, then we should make epic characters feel epic. If you don't like epic level characters being epic, then don't play using epic rules.

edited 4th Aug '14 7:30:00 AM by TheyCallMeTomu

1) Nor should it? Also, Proficiency bonuses increase per level, so it's not a flat 30%

2) 20 isn't epic. Epic starts at 21. It always has. In 2nd, 3.5, 4e, and most likely 5th. As the rules we've seen cover only level 1 to 20, you can't complain that they are having epic rules and it doesn't feel epic because WE HAVE NOT SEEN the epic rules. The rules released so far cover pre-epic. The rules never even once use the word epic.

2.2) It seems pretty clear that 5E's design philosophy is that 20th level characters aren't as superhuman as they were in earlier edition. They've been amazingly forthcoming about this (Attribute caps at 20 to begin with). So the complaint is that... they are doing the thing they said they'd do?

edited 4th Aug '14 7:36:46 AM by CobraPrime