D&D 5E People didn't like the Psionic Talent Die

[Undrave]

I think you've doubled up on your number of combinations, I had to use a calculator to do it for me (then I learned the math to better understand it) but 5 combinations of 7 is only 21 so it's even worse. Xanathar's has expanded it out to 9 cantrips for a total of 126 combinations.

Probably. I decided to calculate how many combination of 2 'leftovers' you could end up with so I just went 7 times 6. I was sure there was a better math for that but I didn't look into it that hard.

Pretty great cantrips, though.

That's not the problem though.

 

[Minigiant]

I don't care about the Sorcerer is better, I don't care that the Sorcerer has like 10 different at-will options at all times. What I care is that EVERY SINGLE Cleric and Bard has the same damn cantrip! There's no reason they couldn't have given them one other cantrip in the PHB. Heck, Clerics should get Produce Flame!

Hell yes.

I hate the response this problem often receive when discussed on forums: ''the clerics, bards and druids are more equipped to survive in melee than wizard, they do not rely as much on cantrip''. That's a big non-sense, they have, at base, medium armors and average weapons. If the cleric was supposed to use only rarely attack, why the hell does half of the subclasses have a feature that gives + mod to damage? Like, the designers knew that some subclasses of cleric were supposed to be more spellcasters than gish, but didn't think to give the cleric more than one offense cantrip?

Same with the PHB bard. They have lousy defenses, few offensive cantrip, no martial weapon training. At low level, they only have a few Inspiration per DAY and it only use a bonus action; what is the bard supposed to with its action during its turn? Spam vicious mockery again and again or plink away with a shortbow?

Niche protection and Archetype enforcement by the designers.
They wanted Clerics and Bardsto have less versatility in attacks.

I don't agree with it. I think having clerics being just full casters with a heavy domain tweak and bards being JOAT MON were mistakes to me.

I've said elsewhere than cleric domain and play-style should have been separate. Choosing between blasty cleric, tanky cleric, and smashy cleric should be separate from domain choice.

As for Bards, thy got shafted by being full casters. By being full casters with access to "divine" "primal" and "arcane" magic, they had to be nerfed in some way. Design team decided to make them really boring. Your cantrip,weapon, and armor choices would be few and you spell known would be few. You subclass could only fix one.

 

[Undrave]

Niche protection and Archetype enforcement by the designers.
They wanted Clerics and Bardsto have less versatility in attacks.

Which in turn meant less versatility in builds... nice job there...

 

[Parmandur]

That's not the problem though.

Sometimes, less is more.

Which in turn meant less versatility in builds... nice job there...

One of the best parts of 5E is the lack of oxygen for 3E-sttle "builds" being a thing.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

If you want to hold 3PP material to different standards that's up to you, but don't expect me not to point it out.

Yeah, speaking of condescending and worse than expected...

No one needs to use it, but valid reasons for doing so are necessary if you want to get on a public forum and say that all the hard work of the indie and 3PP presses to produce more material for 5E is unbalanced and tonally inconsistent.

Hyperbole, mea culpa. I was a little annoyed at the enormously insulting stance on the quality of other publishers. It's got nothing to do with my preferences either. I wasn't assuming people should by the same books I own, or use them the same way. All I said was that there is a wealth of good material out there for 5E, at which point you got all manky about how terrible it all is. With the unstated assumption that I must be some kind of moron for using it because it's obviously terrible. Jeeze. I don't think it would hurt to be a little more charitable than that. Especially when I doubt you've even read half the stuff I'm talking about. That's not a criticism of you buying habits, or what you choose to use in your own game, just of your willingness to criticize something you aren't familiar with, or at the least critique with an insultingly wide brush.

You read all that into me literally just telling you that not wanting to use 3pp is a perfectly valid stance, because, amongst other reasons, most of it isn’t consistent with official material, isn’t well balanced, doesn’t do what it says on the tin, or some combination thereof.

The fact you somehow squeezed a personal insult toward you into that is entirely on you. I neither said nor implied any such thing.

As for your part in the exchange, please don’t outright lie. You didn’t just state that there is a wealth of good material, you dismissed the preferences of anyone who doesn’t want to use those materials, as if the reasons weren’t well documented across the greater online TTRPG community.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

To each its own, I guess, but in my own experience running 5e since before official release, that's just wrong. I own the Monster Manual, Volo's, Mordenkainen's, the Creature Codex, and the Tome of Beasts, and I've found that the probability of a hard/deadly encounter actually being hard/deadly while using KP stuff is much higher, and let's not even discuss the fact that monsters have actual synergy between the different abilities in their stat blocks.

This piece of advice is written in a WotC book. A core book, really:


An Archmage who has identify but no shield on its spell list sits side by side with that advice.

The advice is right. It doesn’t change the monsters CR rating. I wouldn’t even agree that it should.

I’ve also used enemies from KP’s Tome of Beasts, and they’re more consistent with monster design than with PC option design, IMO. But of course, I didn’t mention monsters so I don’t know why your whole counterargument is focused on them exclusively.

Still, overall I’ve had a better time with wotc or homebrew than 3pp.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Putting out untested product is more silly than being a risk. Putting out the material to see what people actually want go pay money for is the best way to move the ball forwards in actual products.

Nice goalpost move.

Putting out "untested" products is not the same thing as "waiting for 70% approval from a specific group of nerds, and never doing anything they don't like, unless it's out of sheer incompetence". The idea that doing anything else is "silly" is ludicrous. If the industry had always operated this way, we'd never have had any innovative or mechanically daring products. There's an unimaginably vast space between this kind of extreme risk-avoidance, and the total "just sell whatever, make more stuff!" approach of say TSR.

The real issue here is that I'm right, and it makes you uncomfortable for some reason. Why not just admit that this particular process is completely risk-averse?

 

[FireLance]

This will be my last post on this issue in this thread as I don't want to derail it further.

Replace the d4 roll with CON mod instead? (min. 1)

I'm thinking roll 1 Hit Die, capped at 4 + Con mod. This way, a larger Hit Die means a better chance of getting the maximum hit points restored, and a Con bonus means potentially more hit points restored.

You could have them heal the same and grant the target the ability to spend a hit die to heal. Gives a good baseline heal while also restoring more hit points based on hit die spent.

This doesn't address the original issue that 1d8 points of healing means proportionately more to the wizard than to the barbarian.

 

[Morrus]

This is condescending and elitist trash

Don't insult other users. Your warnings are mounting up.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

The advice is right. It doesn’t change the monsters CR rating. I wouldn’t even agree that it should.

You're wrong according to their own rules on how to calculate CR. Replacing identify with shield in the archmage's list of prepared spells will, by itself, raise its CR by 1. As an 18th level spellcaster who will probably live for about 4-5 rounds, the archmage can cast shield "on cooldown", effectively going from AC 15 to 20 without losing anything with that. Funny enough, in the case of the druid, not even replacing animal messenger with flaming sphere is enough to make the CR higher than 1 (and it's 2, by the book). @Fenris-77 does have a point, WotC is rarely judged by the same standards that people use when judging third-party material.