GMforPowergamers
Legend
check out (my daily pitch for it this would seem) The Middle earth 5e book for a martial non magic bard....
edit: it's called Warden
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The VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
D&D (2024) Pie in the Sky 6E
- Thread starter Reynard
- Start date
edit: it's called Warden
The abolishment of ability scores. And I don't mean "get rid of the score and just use the modifier." I mean no score, no modifier, no nothing. Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma are excised from the game, root and branch. Everything is folded into a single proficiency bonus, and you either have it or don't.
BTW, while I hate plugging the book constantly, Adventures in Rokugan has a nonmagical support class, the Courtier, that can do some very warlordly things with nothing but the power of words!
Vaalingrade
Legend
We need someone to fail utterly at combat healing.
GMforPowergamers
Legend
Yeah I had a DM years ago (but still 5e... just early 5e) that narrated a fight with a 5th level barbarian (well raging and taking half damage) as slicing open his throat, and ripping out his tendons... and shoving the sword clean through his chest... So the fight ended and I the cleric asked "Who needs healing?" and the barbarian player laughed "It depends cause I would except I am still over 3/4 my hp... but boy that description sounded like it had me dead..." the DM got mad at us for 'not role playing how serious the damage was' from scimitars... so d6 maybe +1 or +2... to someone taking half damage, and got hit 3 or 4 times... even if we say 4 hits all for 7 damage (so 3 after half) that is 12hp... a 1st level barbarian is still up let alone a 5th level one.
That... I don't like.
Because those things give us a mechanical basis to have different kinds of characters who are better or worse at different things than their compatriots. Take, for example, avoiding damage by dodging rather than relying on heavy armor to resist incoming damage or parrying attacks that come at you. Even using magic to protect yourself from people attacking you.
With strength, dexterity, constitution, and casting attributes we can make those different descriptions have a mechanical weight in the game which can help to reinforce the identity of the characters. Legolas dodges, Gimli resists, Aragorn parries, Gandalf uses magic. Y'know?
... yeah. I felt kinda dirty using LotR as my example, but it's one everyone knows...
As a designer I want more levers to play with, to base mechanics off of, to make things more interesting. And while it is a tightrope walk between too few and too many, I think attributes being removed would absolutely be too few.
Oof, yeah, I feel that. I've played D&D for a very long time, and a lot of DM's seem to want to narrate every sword hit as being well, hit by a sword. I remember in my 2e days, my highest level character was a Fighter (Gladiator kit) and due to magic, he got a Con of 19. We would every so often switch off DM's in those days, so one day I was in a game run by the "grittier, more hardcore" DM.
We're being attacked by Orcs with spears, and he's decided (for whatever reason) that my character has offended the gods, and pretty soon I'm being attacked (somehow) by 10 of them in melee combat. Every hit (and weirdly, they sure hit a lot for being Orcs) was described as a near fatal blow.
A good ways through the fight, he decides to ask me how many hit points I have, and seemed very put out when I said "67, why do you ask?". He then asked to see my sheet, saw my maximum hit point total was over 100, and seemed upset for the rest of the adventure.
Afterwards, he got into an argument with the main DM about how he let the characters in his campaign get "super powered". Never no mind that his personal character was a high level Fighter with a 19 Strength wielding Blackrazor, lol.
Rhetorical question alert.
So a "critical hit" means your miss was really, really close and scared them out of twice as much vitality as a normal hit (aka normal miss that was close enough to effect things)? And all poisoned weapons actually involve skin passing gasses to explain how they work without actually hitting? And the sword of wounding keeps sucking vitality by making the target think it's being nearly missed again (like someone who saw a mosquito and now keeps imagining they're being bitten)?
End Alert Zone.
I don't know what I have a harder time imagining, hp damage being all wounds/injuries or never being wounds/injuries until the last one.
In any case, 6e specifying how damage should be narrated would sure deal with a number of regularly occurring thread topics! Or at least change the posts to being about how much folks hate the new damage narration rule! [I would have proposed one, here if there was one I knew of and liked
].
GMforPowergamers
Legend
I don't know what a good answer is. but in my Saturday game my artificer has about 100hps... if you hit him 6 times dead on with a spear or sword he should be SUPER dead... but 6 hits can be 6d8+6 (so 30ish damage) and that means I am somewhere aroung 70% fine... it just has to be hand waved sometimes
even an assassin assassinating me at this level with 1d4 hidden blade and 5d6 sneak attack +1 magic +4 dex and double dice is 2d4(6)+10d6(35)+5 damage... so 46 damage on average... not enough to have me at 1/2 hp let alone kill me
delericho
Legend
I'm actually pretty happy with the core of 5e, so I'd mostly be looking for small tweaks to that (but a lot of them). But where I think the game really needs an update is in the DMG and the MM.
For the MM, I'd mostly want to see the various monster tables taken out of the appendix in the DMG and reinserted here. I'd also want the "Monster Features" table from p280 of the DMG moved to the MM (and future monster books should include a similar table as standard).
The big thing, though, is that the monsters themselves need a thorough overhaul - too many of them are just big bags of hit points. And they should bring back the Minion/Elite/Solo split and the explicit monster roles from 4e. Oh, and get rid of all the fiddly little CRs, and instead give every monster a level range that they're considered appropriate against - so a goblin might be a "tier 1 minion" or whatever.
The DMG I would suggest needs a complete rewrite, and should be squarely aimed at DMs of middling ability - newbie DMs should be pointed to the Starter Set and/or tutorial videos on the website, while experienced DMs don't need the help so much. But for mid-level DMs they should aim to provide tools to reliable craft decent encounters/adventures/campaigns/settings in various styles.
So I'd start at the lowest level there: the encounter. This one basically follows the 4e model - an encounter has a number of slots, which are then filled with a set of monsters of an appropriate level. Add advice to include a mix of monster roles, on the use of minions, solos, etc, and adding terrain and situational effects, and you have something workable.
For adventures, I would suggest the system should build these in a similar way to PC construction - where PCs are built by making some big decisions (race, class, background) and then some customisations (skills, equipment), so adventures would have a setting (dungeon, urban, wilderness, planes), a types (treasure hunt, mystery, escape), and a level range.
For each of the settings you then have a bunch of sub-settings (so wilderness might be forest, or mountains, or jungle, or whatever). For each of these I would present a 2 or 4 page spread gathering together some dedicated rules, suggested terrain features, suggested monsters (doubling as a random encounter table), and so on.
That way, a mystery set on a river boat ("Death of the Nile") has some key similarities but also key differences to an escape set in a sinking ship ("The Poseidon Adventure"), and also some different key similarities and differences to a mystery set in an isolated mansion ("And Then There Were None").
Oh, and don't forget to include loads of example traps, plot complications, escalations, twists, and so on and so forth. These are basically equivalent to spells that the DM uses at various times, so they demand a significant page count be dedicated to them.
The repeat much the same structure for campaigns and settings.
(I would then finish up with a fairly long chapter on high-level adventures, on the grounds that this may well be the only support those will ever get, and then retain the DM's Workshop more or less as it is. Random treasure and the magic item descriptions would be moved to a very long appendix.)
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