Recent content by whydirt

Fireball is a Wizard spell and Flame Strike is a Cleric spell.

Why not? That's at least long enough to last through two battles, even assuming some rest/exploration time in between.

I can't believe that people actually like the spell descriptions in the playtest doc. All the important information is buried in a heap of prose. It might make it more enjoyable to read when you're not playing, but it's horrible for referencing in-game and that's more important to me.

Nope. Ambush gives you advantage just by starting your turn hidden, even if you come into view before attacking. It's a small, but important difference.

My understanding is that Themes are just packaged groups of Feats for people who don't want to pick them individually. I think they'll work great for people who aren't interested in getting into character generation as a mini-game.

Not to be a jerk, but is there any reason this couldn't go in the general D&D Next playtest discussion thread?

Alignment seems like the poster child for being an optional modular mechanic. WotC is welcome to put the traditional 9-point system, OD&D's Law vs. Chaos, or d20 Modern's allegiances system in, but I see no reason why any of them should be baked into the core game.

Again, I'm open to any and all alignment systems being included, but please don't make them part of the core game. Bring them in as one of the modules so people can decide how much they want alignment to matter in their games. Heck, you could even tailor alignment mechanics to each setting.

Again, the comments about randomized classes came from other posters making jokes about the leaks and are not part of the playtest information. We've already heard directly from WotC that certain classes will be labled as common, rare, etc.

That line about random classes was a joke.

Ideally, alignment would be one of the optional rules modules that WotC keeps talking about. The options could include the classic 9 alignments, just Law vs. Chaos or Good vs. Evil, or something like the d20 Modern allegiances system. Just keep it out of the core game.

What does a L20 adventurer tier spellcaster look like?

What does that mean, exactly? The main differences between the two seem to be race-as-class and lots of exception-based fiddly tables.

The problem is that most of those drawbacks you listed were super easy for mages to mitigate or ignore, especially at high levels.

You could always steal from the "weapon breakage" rule from Dark Sun and tweak it for ammo usage. Any time a PC rolls a natural 1 on an attack, they can get a free reroll at the cost of using up their ammo. You might need to tweak this a bit, but it would add the ability to run out of ammo in...