The General D&D thread

As far as I see, given that tool proficiencies are something you can just buy for gold and downtime, their purpose is to be specific subsets of things that you do not want to waste a full Skill proficiency on.

And so in that vein, Performance skill covers everything performance related, and using an instrument, any instrument, is merely fluff that doesn't matter to mechanics. Meanwhile having an instrument proficiency means you have picked up just that, and being a performer isn't a very big and significant part of your character.

I.e. Bard picks up Performance and does everything with it, without any secondary demands or requirements, Fighter that in her youth joined travelling circus picks up one instrument, but she was a brawler, not a player.

edited 5th Jul '17 2:26:43 PM by Adannor

The irony of course, is that bards don't get Performance automatically.

Plus, there's still the matter of Entertainer which gives performance AND Musical instrument proficiencies.

I'm really thinking Performance wasn't intended to cover music (Or at least music including instruments, I suppose Acapella would be Performance) originally.

No that it matters much since ultimately Performance is the least game impacting skill in the system. Not even any of the bard's abilities actually require a performance or instrument roll.

edited 5th Jul '17 4:14:58 PM by Ghilz

I wouldn't be surprised if we as a thread were putting more collective thought into Performance-instrument proficiency redundancy than they did, given that that might be what occurred to them first.

i care but i'm restless, i'm here but i'm really gone, i'm wrong and i'm sorry, baby

It's actually become a problem in my campaign lately!

One solution: not all tasks are modeled by a single skill check. It may be that delivering on a performance is predicated upon a successful tool check, for instance.

The playtest (and the variant rule regarding proficiencies) made the overlapping cases make a lot more sense, since the assumption in the playtest (at one point) was that skills do not map to specific ability scores, rather what you would do is, when the DM called for a specific ability check, you could say "I have [some proficiency] can I add that bonus?" And the DM would say yes or no or suggest alternate proficiencies that might apply.

Still my preferred way of adjudicating skill checks.

And three instruments, so you can either be omnidisciplinary or have only those.

But yeah, there is also a definite feel of it not having been very well-considered.

Overall, when the player wishes to use Performance in a general situation, they would be able to fluff it applying even without any instruments, or with any instrument they do possess. It is only a GM-enforced scenarios of "you must use this specific instrument" that could possibly cause the requirement to fail.

edited 5th Jul '17 11:50:48 PM by Adannor

I use performance as the skill check when trying to act as someone else in a broad sense (like liking like a guard from afar). I also use it if entertainer characters want to get a discount on the rooms. Also used if anyone wants to vcreate a distraction. the possibilities are endless

"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter

Welcome to 5th edition. Where the game's poorly thought-out, and logic regarding classes doesn't matter.

And you don't even need a divine or primal caster (or PokeMart membership discount) in the party to stay alive, and you can even lose your footing for half a second without being trip-juggled and blended, and you actually have choices that don't existentially punish you for taking them, etc.

edited 6th Jul '17 7:23:49 AM by Knowlessman

i care but i'm restless, i'm here but i'm really gone, i'm wrong and i'm sorry, baby

Wait. People have issues with their parties staying alive?

Ah yes. Because everyone plays Dungeons and Optimization.

Sure you do. It's called playing 5th edition . Or not playing a caster, 'cause hey everyone, guess who's still the king of the game?

edited 6th Jul '17 7:46:44 AM by BlackSunNocturne

It makes no sense for casters not to be the strongest characters, because ain't no way even the most adept swordsman can compete with someone conjuring lightning from thin air. Well, from a roleplaying perspective anyway. From a game mechanics perspective, sure you can strive for balance, but that doesn't make it a desirable goal when building a tabletop RPG.

edited 6th Jul '17 7:49:43 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Martials in my party would dearly dispute this fact.
Enemies so far tend to be quite outpacing the sustained regular output in terms of damage, and have more health. So without alpha-strike capacity of my cleric, things would be quite more deadly. (Losing our sorcerer to RL scheduling left a noticeable impact as well.)

Magical healing is worthless though.

...Before you added that edit, it seemed like sarcastic rehashing of the bullshit, but are you godufckingdamned serious?

edited 6th Jul '17 7:50:47 AM by Adannor

I think if someone tries to play an instrument they aren't proficient in they just roll with disadvantage. A bard should have high CHA anyway, that plus a proficiency in Performance will help against the disadvantage. A bard should only be carrying the instruments they're proficient in anyway, same reason rogues don't tend to walk around with a warhammer.

edited 6th Jul '17 7:59:20 AM by Ulysses21

Avatar from here.

Rolling with disadvantage is a more serious drawback than losing proficiency bonus.

Game balance vs. verisimilitude: my chain lightning vs. your katana. Sorry, dude, but if casters don't win that one, then you've got a very real thematic problem. Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards has been a common complaint against D&D since the beginning, and various systems have tried to address it, but I'm going to side with Vaarsuvius when it comes to Who Would Win. Fun doesn't require MMO-style obsession over gameplay balance. There are certainly other ways to address the problem, but not if you're going to keep D&D true to its roots.

edited 6th Jul '17 9:01:13 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Are you fucking high? Seriously?

Wow.

"My wizard needs to be the most powerful otherwise it's NOT D&D. Fuck other players having fun or the ability to contribute"

o_O

Plus your chain lightning vs Katana example is flawed anyway. How many time can you do chain lightning in a fight compared to how many time can one swing one's Katana.

edited 6th Jul '17 9:08:50 AM by Ghilz

Well, sure, that's the main balancing factor. Wizards can blow shit up but they have limited resources, whereas katana-swinging is effectively unlimited. I'm fine with that.

Edit: Look, I've played lots of TTRPGs, lots of single-player computer RPGs (Japanese and Western), and even a few MMORPGs. All of those games develop core fantasies based around their class structure (assuming they have one). D&D's core fantasy is swords vs. sorcery: meat shields vs. glass cannons, however you want to phrase it.

Warriors can raise armies, conquer kingdoms, all of that stuff, but whenever there is an existential threat to the world, there's always a wizard or cleric behind it. Why? Because magic lets you rain meteors from the sky, reverse gravity, resurrect the dead, control minds, and turn people to stone.

What keeps magic users from owning the place is their relative rarity in most settings. It takes a lot of time and effort to become powerful enough to do that kind of thing, and for every aspiring world-dominating mage, there are a dozen fighters eager to cut him apart before he's gotten strong enough to master polymorph and a dozen rogues eager to steal his spellbooks.

edited 6th Jul '17 9:41:02 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I don't know but I like 5e over anything that the older editions have. Mainly I thought that the character creation system was better because it was way easier/fun to do.

You gotta start somewhere.

Here's my katana.

Quite simply, if one PC option can flatten mountains, so should other PC options.
Fighter isn't a shmuck with a pointy stick no more than a wizard is a powerless peddler of natural remedies.
If wizard gets to be Merlin, barbarian gets to be Heracles. (and inb4 half-divinity, being half-demon is where Merlin gets his mojo too.)

edited 6th Jul '17 9:44:55 AM by Adannor

Well, if you want high-level warriors to be able to cut buildings down with their swords, sure. Go for it. One of the valid complaints about the Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards progression of old school D&D is that fighters basically get better at swinging their swords (or whatever) as they level up, gaining no dramatic new abilities or becoming grotesquely superhuman, whereas wizards and clerics go from shooting magic missiles to rewriting reality.

edited 6th Jul '17 9:51:17 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Gotta say, what I am noticing so far is how... boring the late game seems to be. Most of the end game abilities or class features across the board seem boring, and rather limited. Sort of feel the game would benefits from Prestige Classes. The early levels for every class are cool, with new levels unlocking entire new feature that radically change your character. 10 and up (and 15 and up in particular) seems to mostly be "pick something you already do, do it a bit more).

edited 6th Jul '17 10:28:16 AM by Ghilz

The thing that's supposed to balance wizards against warriors, namely the former's limited resources, is screwed by the very premise of Vancian casting. Having spell slots reset on a daily basis is absurd— phenomenal cosmic power should be offset by having to work for it, and that would do a lot to justify warriors whose swords can't run out of batteries in the same way. To some extent, and the game has always been bad about communicating this as a problem, much less coaching new D Ms on how to avoid it, if you set up the game such that the five-minute workday is possible. or ignore spell components altogether or make them too easy to procure, then yeah, casters are going to walk all over everyone.

But then you get into situations where the wizards and clerics become little more than gaudily-dressed lodestones once the "workday" has dragged on long enough that they're out of spells, and that's no fun at all for the people playing them*. I understand, at least in this context, why 4E went with the idea of powers that can be used at will, per-encounter, daily, and so on: nobody's ever left completely out of things to do, but everybody runs out of resources sooner or later.

*Technically the fighters run out of resources eventually too: those being their hit points. This is one reason why self-healing for all classes is kind of problematic if you also retain a Vancian system for spellcasters. I favor balancing this sort of thing out with a fatigue or energy system, where using special attacks and casting spells draws from a finite, but self-replenishing resource, forcing breaks between combats and leading to dramatic battles of attrition.

edited 6th Jul '17 11:29:01 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

While I accept y’all’s ability to derive enjoyment out of crunching math and arguing over who has the biggest sword, I much prefer telling a fun story with my friends without dealing with lawyers

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