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I'm amused to note that you complained about having to roll to hit with the wizard, but you're figuring your lv. 1 fighter DPR assuming you hit twice per round, every round. You're right about class balance being off at level one though. As a wizard that makes for a rough session or two, for...

Dice don't make good stories. They're lumps of plastic with numbers stamped on. They're tools. Expecting the dice to make a good story is about as productive as expecting your hammer to make a piece of furniture. Your most important task as a DM is to produce the interesting and awesome...

Menacing might be a better choice. Give a dwarf polearm master menacing attack and the Sentinel feat, and he's able to hit a target from outside normal reach with an attack that keeps it from closing on him, keeps it from moving to another target and imposes disadvantage no matter who it attacks.

If he's starting them at 1st level, that's not going to make character generation any quicker. It also has the potential to bog down combat later in the game, as the best feats tend to excuse the heroes from unfavorable conditions, hazards and restrictions you'd otherwise have to track...

For the trick arrows, you could take the Martial Adept feat and fluff the maneuvers as a supply of special arrowheads that, due to mechanical and storage concerns, you have to assemble in limited quantities during downtime. Not all of the maneuvers will translate, but you don't get all the...

Oh, hey, I missed the campaign update on pg. 2! My bad. Docking your players levels for dying creates a death spiral. It's bad juju for a variety of other reasons, and shouldn't be done in a campaign where there's any mistrust between the characters (or worse, the players) or where you're...

Rolling tends to make for a more entertaining Session Zero, but I think point buy gives everyone a sense of agency and fair play in the long term. To that end, I do rolled stats for one shots and point buy for campaigns.

There's also a maneuver for disarming that the NPC monk could pick up with a feat or by dipping 3 levels into fighter and taking the Battle Master path. The dip would give the monk Action Surge, which, if it succeeded in taking the staff, it could use for a bonus action to break the staff over...

When a BM fighter uses a feat to gain more maneuvers, the dice are all the same size and go into the same pool. If I had to rule on it, I'd use the feat description for guidance. Less bookkeeping, more fun.

I feel like the goal post has shifted again. Now we're comparing a lv. 17 rogue vs. a lv. 17 ranger versus a party of orcs in the woods? We've come a long way from the assertion I challenged, that a ranger using HIPS and vanish to pull off an ambush was "game breaking." But sure, in the...

We were talking about a variety of ranger abilities being used to set up an ambush, unleash a series of attacks over one turn and disappear, as opposed to any one ranger ability. The goal post had to shift quite a lot for the ranger to deal a load of damage even if all the conditions of the...

Classes? No. Levels? No. Some classes represent specific orders or organizations; others represent a fantasy archetype with a suite of abilities that aren't named powers in the game world (or even necessarily quantifiable there). Fighters aren't all "fighters," rogues aren't all "rogues."...

If you use your bonus action to cast Lighting Arrow, you don't get to vanish after the shot. You're also using a lv. 17 character with a ton of setup in a specific situation to pull off a trick that's done better by a lv. 14 character in any environment without all the setup costs. If your...

That pretty much sums up the ranger's problems. His strengths are so situational he might never get to pull off his best tricks in a campaign, even with a DM helping set the stage for them. The best way to build a ranger in this system is to ignore the class itself. If you want a good...

Lighting arrow's duration is one minute. You have to be hidden for at least one minute to perform the ambush. You can't use both. Even if that combo did work, wouldn't you have to be lv. 17 to use it? You could use Hunter's Mark to squeeze out a little more damage, and the right hunter...

These aren't "shenanigans;" he's playing the archetype as it was intended to be played. OoV is built for players who want to explore the archetype of the zealot. Doing questionable things in service to a "greater good" that's not necessarily even good is par for the course. As for...

Game breaking? How much damage can you possibly do? If you're in a natural environment and you lure your target into attack range and you've been hidden there for a minute and you win the surprise check, you get two, maybe three attacks with advantage? Let's say you're an archer with...

steeldragons wut r u druing steeldragons stahp

I'd be bothered if a 5th level spellcaster could challenge a whole party of 4th level characters all by itself. I like Atomicpope's idea of a harpy druid using her spells to pin the party down while a big mess of birds tears them apart. Maybe throw in some bigger birds to help distract the...

I like how they did the saber battles in the second Star Wars trilogy. You know how the jedi and sith combatants are going at it hammer and tongs with the sabers, but every now and then one of them will take a hand off their weapon to force push the other combatant or some piece of battlefield...