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Sharpshooter/Great Weapon Master and Why They Are Broken 101.
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<blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6936279" data-attributes="member: 6787650"><p>You can also go the other direction: allow challenges which don't rely on attrition at all, which are interesting even when everybody is at full resources. Say you discover that there's a crashed beholder tyrant ship in the hills nearby the player characters' stronghold, and dozens of bickering beholders have gone their separate ways and are each trying to collect an army and establish a little fiefdom. Some of them have recruited local goblin tribes, others have inherited a bunch of peasants, others may have taken control of the ship's aberration footsoldiers, some of them may kept their heads cool enough to remain with each other, and maybe the smartest and quickest of them is embedded right in the stronghold's own underworld... and almost all of the beholders are converging on the stronghold as the logical seat of their new empire.</p><p></p><p>There's no time limit on this quest, so players are free to five-minute-work-day each beholder they manage to uncover and then take a long rest... but if they do, there will be consequences as the other beholders continue to usurp control. (A group of warlocks and moon druids could of course five-minute-work-day each beholder with fewer or perhaps no consequences, since they take only an hour to recover.) Even if they do five-minute-work-day, though, they will be constrained within the scope of that conflict by action economy, concentration economy, available information, terrain, and enemy actions. Sure, they don't have to worry about spell slot economy or action surge economy or rage economy, but it's still going to be an interesting encounter!</p><p></p><p>Does that mean I'm giving up on the D&D tradition of Vancian magic? Not really. I still think Vancian magic is an interesting feature of a fantasy world. But I think the game can be more interesting and more like a good fantasy story if you don't build <em>all</em> of your adventures and encounters around implausibly-segmented grindy attrition trying to deplete that Vancian magic*. Maybe have a kidnapping or other reactive event with a hard time limit once in a while (20% of adventures?), for variety, but the rest of the time pacing should be more realistic.</p><p></p><p>I do wish WotC weren't so obsessed with applying Vancian paradigms to non-magical phenomena like Battlemaster combat maneuvers--but I think we've had that discussion before.</p><p></p><p>* Remember that the historic D&D tradition is not about trying to deplete <em>daily</em> resources per se, since having most intrinsic abilities recharge on a per-day basis is a WotCism. Old-school dungeon crawling had multiple resources with different paradigms; some recharged over time, others with gold or going back to town; running out of torches could be as serious as running out of spells; and taking an eight-hour nap definitely did not qualify as a factory-reset of your PC's HP/spells/abilities. So attrition is actually even less effective in 5E than it was historically.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="FormerlyHemlock, post: 6936279, member: 6787650"] You can also go the other direction: allow challenges which don't rely on attrition at all, which are interesting even when everybody is at full resources. Say you discover that there's a crashed beholder tyrant ship in the hills nearby the player characters' stronghold, and dozens of bickering beholders have gone their separate ways and are each trying to collect an army and establish a little fiefdom. Some of them have recruited local goblin tribes, others have inherited a bunch of peasants, others may have taken control of the ship's aberration footsoldiers, some of them may kept their heads cool enough to remain with each other, and maybe the smartest and quickest of them is embedded right in the stronghold's own underworld... and almost all of the beholders are converging on the stronghold as the logical seat of their new empire. There's no time limit on this quest, so players are free to five-minute-work-day each beholder they manage to uncover and then take a long rest... but if they do, there will be consequences as the other beholders continue to usurp control. (A group of warlocks and moon druids could of course five-minute-work-day each beholder with fewer or perhaps no consequences, since they take only an hour to recover.) Even if they do five-minute-work-day, though, they will be constrained within the scope of that conflict by action economy, concentration economy, available information, terrain, and enemy actions. Sure, they don't have to worry about spell slot economy or action surge economy or rage economy, but it's still going to be an interesting encounter! Does that mean I'm giving up on the D&D tradition of Vancian magic? Not really. I still think Vancian magic is an interesting feature of a fantasy world. But I think the game can be more interesting and more like a good fantasy story if you don't build [I]all[/I] of your adventures and encounters around implausibly-segmented grindy attrition trying to deplete that Vancian magic*. Maybe have a kidnapping or other reactive event with a hard time limit once in a while (20% of adventures?), for variety, but the rest of the time pacing should be more realistic. I do wish WotC weren't so obsessed with applying Vancian paradigms to non-magical phenomena like Battlemaster combat maneuvers--but I think we've had that discussion before. * Remember that the historic D&D tradition is not about trying to deplete [I]daily[/I] resources per se, since having most intrinsic abilities recharge on a per-day basis is a WotCism. Old-school dungeon crawling had multiple resources with different paradigms; some recharged over time, others with gold or going back to town; running out of torches could be as serious as running out of spells; and taking an eight-hour nap definitely did not qualify as a factory-reset of your PC's HP/spells/abilities. So attrition is actually even less effective in 5E than it was historically. [/QUOTE]
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