The General D&D thread

If we're talking about scythes like a Dark Souls sort of scythe, I'd probably make those the same as polearms: two-handed weapons with (maybe) reach. If you want one-handed you could reflavor a longsword as a khopesh, though that's more of a sickle than a scythe.

Sickles have their own stats, and they're Strength-based weapons.

Either a greataxe or Polearm can work for scythe stats, depending on how you view the reach of it.

Yeah, but sickles suck monkey butt, and nothing in the rules say I can't reflavor a longsword as a really long khopesh.

5E's weapon rules are pretty bad yeah. It's part of why the reputation of it simplifying complex rules and getting rid of the cruft doesn't sit right with me.

imo scythe is definitely either a reflavored greatsword or greataxe as it's strength, heavy, two handed, and no reach. but for a warlock flavor weapon, as already said, hexblade is the right choice for making it using charisma instead of strength because i imagine the scythe was given to the adventurer. otherwise grim reaper style scythes are not good for battle.

if we're talking about actual battle scythes, they are just glaives. historically, peasants drafted into war but not given any equipment would retrofit their farming scythes by rotating the blade 90 degrees.

Speaking of weapons, is it just me or should the Flail have Reach? ...Granted, real life Flails were dinky little things, but I keep getting it into my head that, since this D&D campaigns are typically in fantasy worlds and all, they'd be more like the huge Epic Flails you see in video games.

I had the idea once to give a character a 'Big Flail', which statistically is the same as a Glaive except with Bludgeoning damage instead of Slashing (I'm not even sure if that makes a difference or if it's just flavour. Are there enemies that are weak to Bludgeoning but not Piercing or Slashing, or vice versa?)

Edited by PresidentStalkeyes on Feb 27th 2019 at 3:41:28 PM

Skeletons are weak to bludgeon damage.

Also another thing that's mildly annoying about 5e. All/most high level monsters have resistance to non-whatever bludgeoning piercing and slashing so your DM pretty much has to give the fighter/barb/whatever a magic weapon or they become much less effective. Also thanks for help with the scythe

EDIT: hyperbole corrected

Edited by Skunkbrains on Feb 27th 2019 at 1:20:28 AM

Flails actually didn't exist in real life IIRC.

My understanding is that's meant to be a sort of 'level cap' for stronger monsters. Though I personally think it's fine that martial classes need magic weapons to be useful at higher levels.

Some doubt that flails existed, but I think the more common consensus is just that they were fairly rare.

Anyway, I really disagree that martials should need magic weapons to keep up. 5E explicitly claims not to need magic items for players to keep up, so that should actually be true if they want to claim that. Further, there is nowhere in the books that advise DMs that martials will need such weapons or at what level to grant them, or even pointing out that they shouldn't use such enemies too often if they're not giving out such weapons.

It really sucked playing multiple adventures as a barbarian against nonmagical resistant/immune enemies because my DM thought me asking to find a magic weapon was powergaming.

Magic users don't have to deal with that.

Re: Flails: They certainly exist in the real world, but none of the ones we have that are more than a few decades old look like they were intended to be used on a battlefield- they're all showpieces intended to look impressive hanging on a wall. The theory goes that they were originally a fiction created by medieval illustrationists, and the physically weapons were created afterwards because they make for a really cool image, but they were rarely, if ever, used in battle, because in practice they're just a mace except worse in every way.

Re: Magic items: Yeah, they kind of fucked up there. Earlier addition had the explicit assumption that martials would pick magic weapons relatively quickly, so it was okay that high-end monsters were designed with that assumption in mind. But then 5e made a big deal out of claiming that magic items were no longer a guarantee, but forgot to actually reflect that in monster design. Despite the fact that magic items fuck up the class design; they make the Monk and to a lesser extent the Rogue fall behind in damage output, and let the Fighter and Paladin pump up their AC well beyond what the system says is supposed to be the max.

Edited by Gilphon on Feb 27th 2019 at 5:25:54 AM

Monks can have magic weapons if you reskin them to be appropriately themed. I gave my party's monk some magical handwraps last session.

Further, Monks and Moon Druids have abilities to allow their attacks to be considered magical to substitute for the lack of magical weapons, showing that gaining access to magical damage is part of intended progression.

So everyone ends up getting the short straw in this paradigm - Fighters, Barbs and Rogues lose out if they don't get magic items, Monks and Droods lose out if those classes DO.

Yeah you can create magic handwraps or some druid item that breaks the rules of wildshape, but those are such an Obvious Rule Patch that it weakens the fantasy. That and it's generally not good to put onus on the DM to fix these shortcomings

Regarding monks and power levels with magic items: My party is currently getting things with power word kill (with a special DC rule) thrown at us since our monk has been able to kill young dragons and such with little/no help from the rest of our party. What accursed beasts are the Dm throwing at you to the point where a class that can do (according to my friend) an average of 100+ damage a round if you add some levels of other class in?

EDIT:Context my friend is a level 7 character with at least one level in warlock.

Edited by Skunkbrains on Feb 27th 2019 at 7:04:57 AM

I cannot imagine how Warlock levels could possibly help a Monk's damage output; the two classes have pretty mutually exclusive attack engines. Walk me through what a typical turn looks like from this character.

Like, they only way I can think of to make them work in tandem in Hexblade- Hexblade's curse+Hex+Flurry of Blows could add up quickly; but all of those ask for your bonus action so you'd need two rounds of setup before you reach your full potential, and you're blowing through enough resources in the process that you probably can't do it consistently.

Edited by Gilphon on Feb 27th 2019 at 10:28:07 AM

My DM favors using one "boss" monster and some medium strength minions for encounters so I guess that's why since he always goes first and just UNLOADS EVERYTHING unto the big guy. I guess he would not be as powerful in a more standard game since he also has the problem where his Wis is 20 and Charisma is like a 5 so hes really weak in some areas and social interaction. Still tho the general rule of thumb was that if our guy went first the biggest enemy would either be downed immediately or it would be halfway to death. He's also planning to multiclass to rouge for the Assassin subclass (which gives advantage on all attacks against a creature who has not moved that combat) since his intive is really good.

Edited by Skunkbrains on Feb 27th 2019 at 10:41:20 AM

Charisma 5 is not great for a warlock. Also one level of warlock isn’t super great. Two levels are borderline broken due to invocations, but not one.

I can tell you warlock/rogue synergizes really fucking well, especially when you play a social assassin, but also popping out of invisibility and asking the DM “would you say that the boss is surprised?” and getting an auto crit

Your DM must be running young dragons very wrong for a level 7 monk to pose a threat to them. They've got more HP, more damaging attacks, a powerful breath weapon and unlimited flight.

Using PW:K as an example is a bit of a weird boast because it only really shows that creature has 9th level slots. That can happen at CR 12, the only thing that would make it special is PW:K itself and your DM has explicitly taken away the best part about that spell (the no save effect). The idea that anything less than this wouldn't be able to challenge that party is pretty silly, as there are much better things to challenge a party than throwing a single insta-kill spell at them.

And an average of 100+ damage in a turn? Your friend is having your leg. Even if all their attacks would hit (hit rate is about 60-65% against appropriate CR monsters) that would be difficult to believe for maximum damage. Without any more details about it, that sounds completely fabricated.

As Gilphon already said, there isn't a whole lot that Warlock even adds to Monk. Hex/Hexblade's Curse/both does have synergy to adding damage to every one of the Monk's hits, but that's a 2-3 turn set up that can't be maintained. Also, if said Monk has less than 13 Charisma, than they wouldn't even be eligible for a multiclass in Warlock. The whole point of those multiclass requirements is to prevent dipping in a class purely to add highly synergistic features.

Assuming that point about low Charisma is true, the Monk isn't even following the normal rules for their build, so I have no idea what else the Monk/your DM might be diverging from the rules on which could be benefiting them.

Also, this has absolutely nothing to do with the point about magic weapons as you've only compared the Monk to monsters, not other martials with magical weapons.

This reminds me of a convo I read recently discussing how to make a purely martial opponent seem threatening without just giving them spells or magic weapons - and the best answers seemed to boil down to 'give them the ability to use tactics, because the players will be too used to being the only ones that can do tactics'. :V

You know, I'm tempted to wonder how martials like Barbarians would work if all martials got Superiority dice and maneuvers like battlemasters. Wouldn't solve the 'need magic weapons' problem, but it would make some things a bit more interactive, and make them a bit more like casters during combat with their Martial Spell Slots.

Just going to point out that monks can use magic weapons. All simple weapons plus shortswords are monk weapons, which means they can be used in conjunction with their Martial Arts feature, and use the same damage die as their unarmed attack.

The new Artificer comes out today, right? What time?

This was actually a thing in the D&D Next playtest, all classes had manoeuvres and 'martial dice' which refreshed every round.

I'm very sad that it got cut, but apparently the playtest feedback was that people were happier the more simple martial characters were.

Which seems dumb to me considering that you could just ignore the manoeuvres and spend your martial dice on adding damage to your attacks, making it completely optional.

Ok, they finally made it:

https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/unearthed-arcana/artificer-revisited

So the new UA Artificer has actually come out! And it's way different from what I was anticipating. I'd experiment with it, but the character I made was basically focused on the Thunder Cannon, and since that got thrown out I have no choice but to stick with the old Artificer. Such is life, I s'pose. :V

I'd always intended her to be more of a ranged damage dealer that can pick locks, sneak around and put spells into objects for the other party members on the side; definitely leaning more towards the Thief end of the class trifecta than the Mage end. You think it'd be worth my while to ask for permission to use some of the spells from the new list? I'm also considering replacing the Mechanical Servant feature with a different feature from someone else's Homebrew.

Edited by PresidentStalkeyes on Feb 28th 2019 at 11:15:19 AM