The General D&D thread

So about that crazy Beholder crime boss with a pet goldfish whom he is insanely attached to...

It's funny enough on its own. It's even better when you remember that Beholders are normally very good at noticing tiny differences in everything due to their multiple eyes. That the Xanathar doesn't notice that his beloved Sylgar looks different every few weeks or so (his minions replace "Sylgar" every time it dies so that their boss doesn't go on a rampage) even though by all accounts he should is just hilarious.

Last session, my GM learned never to plot a boss fight to take an hour when there's a barbarian in the party.

Because he will crit. And it will be HILARIOUS.

I found there are several ways to get 210 ft darkvision. Don't know if that's of any use to anyone but here it is.

You will need

• Drow or Duergar character (120ft darkvision)
• 3rd level ranger - gloom stalker (+30ft darkvision)
• goggles of night (+60 ft darkvision)

If you don't want to play a underdark race

• Shadow sorcerer + race darkvision or devils sight (warlock) + race darkvision.
• 3rd level ranger - gloom stalker (+30ft darkvision)
• goggles of night (+60 ft darkvision)

probably other ways but the gloom stalker part requiring your race to have darkvision limits things.

Edited by MCE on Jan 27th 2019 at 11:03:47 AM

Interesting, though I do wonder how that would ever be useful, given that your average battle-mat is probably much smaller than that.

So I've started running Shadow over the Moonsea for my Shadowrun group because one of the players is absent for a few weeks. First time DMing, I think it went well so far.

The players balked at first when the quest-giver said he couldn't pay them, said they would look into it a bit and decide if they would take the job... and a few hours later they're going straight to the mysterious village without even going back to him to say they accept

Hey, I'll be playing a loxodon in Protag's upcoming campaign, and I keep pendulum swinging on whether to make them a druid or a barbarian. So since I need a tie breaker, what would people here say is the more mechanically strong choice for that race?

I think you'd be better off as a druid. Druids can take advantage of the Wis increase and the natural armor feature, while barbarians don't really benefit from them.

Speaking of, by the way, I'm looking for a few more players for my campaign. It'll probably be on Roll 20 at 5:00 on sundays (pacific time), starting in two or three weeks or so.

The premise is that there will be two parties playing back-to-back each week. One will be evil, the other will be good. They'll be each other's main antagonists, essentially.

Would anyone be interested in joining? I'm looking for one or two more players, especially for the good team.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Feb 1st 2019 at 12:14:02 PM

What does your party need more? A physical tank / damage dealer, or a healer / utility spellcaster / crowd controller?

From what I know so far, the only other confirmed character so far are monk and a rogue, so until more players join the good party of Protag's aforementioned Pv P campaign, either would fill a vacant gap in the party composition as it stands right now.

May as well throw this in: I currently have a spot open in my Roll20 campaign, as well. DnD 5e, we also use Discord, new players welcome (nigh preferred), homebrew setting (of the low-effort Forgotten Realms except not variety), I will consider and/or recommend homebrew content, Saturdays at 7 PM EST.

Main party is currently around level 12, but we are getting ready to do a kind of filler mini-arc in the setting at level 1 for a breather (TBH the mini-arc was partly to break in a couple new players who ended up not being able to join), so new player(s) would start at 1. PM me if interested.

Edited by Knowlessman on Feb 1st 2019 at 8:37:05 AM

Damn. If I hadn't just started my next module of CPA, I'd be all over that.

Update on my loxodon character. The build I'm thinking of right now is a Circle of the Shepherd druid with the Uthgardt Tribe Member background from SCAG.

One of my friends can now do an average of over 1200 damage if hiss attacks hit on turn one so now my DM keeps throwing things with Power word: KILL at the party. Tips?

Also Whys does everyone say the 5e version of ranger sucks? It always seemed fine to me.

I think it's Beast Mastery in particular. My understanding is the animal companion uses up the Ranger's actions while being overall weaker.

Ranger in general has problems with its identity and many of it's abilities being situational/not providing much combat benefit relative to other martials and having worse spellcasting than the Paladin. It also has some action economy problems with it's bonus action.

When you stack the two half-casters, Paladin and Ranger next to each other it's clear that the Paladin has a large number of advantages and just works a lot cleaner.

And Beastmaster is very poor all around. It has even worse action economy - you need to sacrifice actions to get the companion to even do anything, and that's usually worse than just taking your action - said companion has low AC and health so your entire subclass can be taken out of commission by accident, and it doesn't provide a lot of benefits even when it's alive.

The revised beast master ranger released as an Unearthed Arcana article seems to be fine, though.

Speaking as one who's played a few Rangers, the Ranger is something of a generalist, which is a mixed blessing. It can sneak around, fight, heal, and cast spells that do damage. It can be competent at anything it needs to be.

From an individual standpoint this shouldn't be too big a deal. In practice, however, it's underpowered from a "Party Composition" standpoint. Specialization is usually encouraged in D&D, because most of an individual PC's weaknesses can be heavily mitigated by having another PC who is good at what they're weak at. Being a squishy wizard is much less of an issue when there's a tough fighter in the party, for example.

Having said that, I will say that Rangers are much better in survival-focused campaigns. Possibly broken, even-though to be fair that's probably just goodberry (which I'd say is the ultimate example of a spell that's useless until it's gamebreaking).

They also are great in solo campaigns, and are also pretty flavorful for it too (the Ranger being a loner just makes sense IMO).

Also worth noting is that Rangers are viable, just the weakest class in the game.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Feb 4th 2019 at 5:15:03 AM

Could use input on a few homebrew items. These will be acquired at level 5, as gifts from the vampire Strahd.

For the wizard:

For the rogue, in a batch of twenty:

For the cleric:

For the monk:

So finally watching Critical Role, per my roommate's demands.

It's very entertaining but extremely depressing to see how fundamentally fucking terrible I am at D&D, in front of the screen and behind.

Don't forget, the Critical Role cast are literally professionals with years upon years of acting and improv experience. It's really not fair to you to compare yourself to them.

Also its incorrect to say you are terrible at D&D because you play it differently.

Each table and player and GM have their own different styles :P Some groups absolutely fricking hate it if you try to describe everything immersively and some groups absolutely fricking hate it if you play loose with rules.

Its kinda sad that Mercer had to point it out to someone that their style is just their style and not how every game is supposed to be played.(someone asked him what to do since players in his group were always complaining about how game was different from Critical Role and trying to bring in expies of P Cs from critical role)

(Plus its kinda plagiarism if you try to copy other people's styles :D Just saying)

Edited by SpookyMask on Feb 5th 2019 at 8:15:02 PM

Speaking of Dnd podcasts does anyone know if Dragons in places is returning or not? I also like the unexpectables.

Are there any 5e podcasts with an evil monster party?

Here's and interesting theory, what if humans are actually the oldest race in D&D, it's just nobody remembers that? What if every other race of people are actually altered humans? Dwarves are humans altered by earth magic, elves, gnomes and halflings are humans altered by the feywild and so on. Its why you can have hybrids at all, they have common ancestors.

I mean it all depends on your universe but that sounds like a cool concept for a brutal civil war campaign.