Essentials : What to Use and What to Lose? Can of Worms

doctorbadwolf said:

@Garthanos: great observations. In my worlds, Odin and Lugh are definately separate beings, but they also definitely get along. I've toyed with the idea of Lugh being the same being as one of Odin's brothers, though, along with either Thoth, or maybe finding a SE Asian or Indiginous American deity for he third brother.

Click to expand...

Odin certainly has distinctions that make him an interesting character in his own right. His great rune spear is Lightning much like Lugh, his enemies are Giants just like Lughs, He is the inventor of runes (poetic spells which connect him to that Lugh is a Bard thing) he is known to disguise in human form but not so much personal transformations, his ravens are thought and memory which could be implemented as a Telepathy or just an animal messenger ritual ... but I am thinking Memory might grant something along the long distance warlording buff like when the thrush told Bard about smaugs vulnerability (I know I just did a myth jump). His sword is the ultimate tacticians weapon and it is said that he who wields it will never loose a fight that he 'could' win. His are the hounds of war. His steed is 8 legged death (4 men carrying a coffin).

There is some reasons to treat both Odin and Lugh as Warlords or Bards but Odin really makes the Warlord angle hit home on many fronts.

Odins seeing the future he cast his eye in to the well of time and it is resentful and only sends him visions of dark happenings.

The Aesir and Tuatha have members of other races including half giants in their midst who have joined them at high hero/god champion level they are capability based "pantheons" not racially exclusive. The Aesir also have very powerful Vanir among them who are full on FAE.

Odin gets mixed up with Christ in some later stories unfortunately which obscures things...

Anyway

By the way I recommend reading the Norse Eddas.

Garthanos said:

By the way I recommend reading the Norse Eddas.

Click to expand...

Seconded. And the Havamal. And the various Sagas.

AND the epic of Gilgamesh for arguably the first recorded heroic fantasy LOL.

OK this is more readable than the tablets...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_the_King

one of the elements I recall was the reworking of wizard spells to have damage on a miss....
I actually like the idea that encounter and daily powers all have some form of miss effect.

A fix for the boost to wizards might be looking at everyone elsese abilities and boost them a tad to have reliability or damage or effect on a miss for these types of powers.

Garthanos said:

one of the elements I recall was the reworking of wizard spells to have damage on a miss....
I actually like the idea that encounter and daily powers all have some form of miss effect.

Click to expand...

I like the line being at daily, because you can get to use an Encounter several times in a give day... but, sure, as a general rule, yeah - as 'wizards must be just better than everyone else,' no so much. ;P

Garthanos said:

one of the elements I recall was the reworking of wizard spells to have damage on a miss....
I actually like the idea that encounter and daily powers all have some form of miss effect.

A fix for the boost to wizards might be looking at everyone elsese abilities and boost them a tad to have reliability or damage or effect on a miss for these types of powers.

Click to expand...

Too much work, the better method would have been adding the miss effects by reducing the hit effects. It doesn't have to be much but just adding for the sake of adding was stupid.

Power Attack/Backstab was a good idea that didn't go anywhere. The concept of a power that you activate on a hit could have gone so much further.

I liked Thieves. Actually exploring the uses of the move action was groundbreaking. Then again, one of the few things 5e did right was to remove the move action.

Marshall said:

It doesn't have to be much but just adding for the sake of adding was stupid.

Click to expand...

The "reason" generally supposed is kowtowing to "magi supremacy" LOL,

yes giving a trade meta ability enabling effects on a miss would have been easier and applicable across board.

It think there was a desire to emphasized mobility and position in 4e ..(I am guessing 5e is more stand there and hit it with my sword )

Garthanos said:

It think there was a desire to emphasized mobility and position in 4e ..(I am guessing 5e is more stand there and hit it with my sword )

Click to expand...

4e was trying to get away from 3.5's 'static combat' phenom, caused by the need to take only a 5' step to make a full attack (or to avoid AoOs). 5e doesn't have any of 4e's mobility emphasis, but it does also try to avoid static combat, by making AoOs less of a thing (they consume your one-and-only 'Reaction' for the round, and they're not nearly as easy to provoke), and by removing the full-attack requirement - so you can move every round, most of the time, there's just not a lot of point to doing it. Also, 5e maintains a polite fiction that it defaults to 'theatre of the mind' (that you don't need minis or a map to figure out who gets hit by that back-to-perfectly-circular fireball), so you movement is generally in the form "I run up to the nearest one."

In summary:

3.5: "I 5' step and full-attack/cast"
4e: "I move into flank, attack, slide the target so my next ally in initiative order can get into position to flank him, shift, attack again, slide that target, and take a bow, then for my minor action..."
5e: "I move to the nearest enemy and attack until he's dead, then move to the next guy... then...
...screw it, I'm rolling up a caster."

Tony Vargas said:

5e: "I move to the nearest enemy and attack until he's dead, then move to the next guy... then...
...screw it, I'm rolling up a caster."

Click to expand...

Right. If there's something weird about 5e is that Casters are basically super-charged 4e Wizards - who can throw down 4e Dailies every round of every combat by a certain point. Except:
They find it more difficult to initiative optimize. So Variant Human is awesome for the Alert feat as that's the one big easy way to do it without being a Bard.
Saves are screwy, so every monster eventually loses out on some saving throw unless they get a special on that.
And they can move, cast, and move. Say behind cover.
They can almost spam at-will until running out of their biggest slot.

And if you look at the 5e boards, instead of it being blindingly obvious, there's a debate.