Search results

From what I've read, this sounds like a sort of Gumshoe style mechanic. Characters can spend skill points over the course of the day, making it a resource to be drawn on, but also conserved. Fiddling and piddling over the balance aside, it seems like an interesting and valid houserule. (Not that...

Broken is a subjective word that I honestly don't worry about too much. I think more in terms of work I need to do as a DM. High stats introduce all sorts of changes, but the one I was trying to highlight here is the way some classes, out of the box, do a better job at leveraging high scores in...

All reasonable answers! To be clear, this conversation is partially in response to Saelorn's assertion that meta-gaming is antithetical to role-playing and that we should remove all meta-gaming from our RPGs. Some, including me, suggested that the DM, at the very least, would be metagaming to...

What if your 7th level party decided to spend a number of sessions in a designated "level 1" part of the dungeon, because there was something there that interested the players or the characters? Would you run them through a dungeon full of groups of 1d4 kobolds and crude snares and pit traps, or...

It doesn't necessarily break the game, but it can skew the balance in a way that requires the DM to adjust other factors to compensate. For instance, in the above example, a level 8 Barbarian in a loin cloth has equal AC to a level 8 Fighter with Defensive fighting style, due to a combination of...

I think this is a good illustration of how super high ability scores can break the balance of the 5e. Imagine a Barbarian with the ability array listed up top. 20 STR. 19 DEX. 20 CON. That character would have an Unarmored AC of 19, the same as a Fighter in plate with Defensive Fighting Style...

Both approaches are valid, and I think every roleplayer should try taking both approaches at least once. Personally, I like to randomize some elements early on, and then figure out how to build a coherent character around that. It is important for me to have a character that I want to play if I...

Good to know. Yeah, I just fired up the website on my phone and tried to browse the basic rules and it is not bad. Better than trying to read the Basic Rules PDF on my phone, which is what I usually do when needing to quickly look something up when I don't have my books on hand. If only it had...

Oofta and lkj, do you work from a laptop at the table? Or are you pulling out a tablet or phone to do reference lookups? My laptop died this spring. I need to keep an up-to-date desktop at home for work, so I've been seeing how long I can go with just using the smart phone for all my mobile...

I would differentiate between "creative trick" and "simple exploit." If the players figure out a way to maximize their effectiveness within the rules system, they deserve to have that work both ways. But if it's a unique, one-off creative idea that is about maximizing the fiction, that deserves...

Do you use it this way at the table, or just as reference when you are prepping for your session? I looked at the monster creator — it seemed like a cool way to create a monster using the Wizards design layout, but it still requires you to do all the legwork of how changes to various values...

Are any of you using D&D Beyond specifically to enhance your pencil and paper, in person, tabletop games? If so, how are you using it? I revisited the site recently and setup a free account. It seems like a decent character builder, coupled with a reference tool, but I'm wondering if there are...

The numbers here are crazy, but it's also reasonable to believe that a sword-and-board champion fighter with defensive fighting style would not have the same damage output as a Barbarian, an Archer, a Ranger and a Rogue, especially if the length of the adventuring day isn't forcing the ranger...

The brown bear also only gets +1 on top of strength modifier for its attack bonus. Seems like an example of 5e monster/NPC rules being "kinda" the same as PC rules. The table on 274 of the DMG lists appropriate attack bonuses for challenge rating. And then 4 pages on how modifying everything...

Setting: Usually my own, though I did run a few adventures in Glantri of the Known World as an outro from X2. Adventures: I enjoy running published adventures and I also enjoy creating my own. Maybe 60/40 homebrew? Most of the adventures I run were also not published for 5e, so I convert the...

Do you find people who actually live up to this grim roleplay purity standard at the table?

Shidaku, I'm sorry, I did not mean to insult you with pedantics about definitions of murderhobo-ery. Somebody upthread made a comment about "it's not murder if it's done lawfully," but I don't know that that person was you. Still my reaction to that may have slightly colored my response. I...

But in a world without absolute racial alignments, we might look at somebody who spends all their free time immersing themselves in a world with absolute alignments where killing monsters isn't murder as, maybe, just a little weird. Like, we create these fantasy worlds and then go and inhabit...

The term "murderhobo" is a commentary on D&D and how some play it, not a commentary on murder. A mercenary character could be a murderhobo, if adventures basically took the form of, "You have just been hired to go to this place and kill all the people/monsters in it. They are bad, it's fine. Ok...

Yeah, if the DM doesn't want to run a game of GTA, it's not a winning situation. Verisimilitude is great, but it's also important to maintain genre consistency. genresimilitude. Players, over the course of a game, or maybe based on preconceptions, have an idea of how their actions impact the...