D&D 4E Advice Wanted: 4e fan trying 5e

[garnuk]

So much to say.. But I'll keep it brief.

One Valor bard I have had a lot of fun playing is a bard with low charisma (12). (High Con (16) and high Str (18) instead)
I pulled this off by choosing spells that aren't significantly tied to my Spellcasting stat ( such as sleep, herosim, healing word, etc)
My Bard was a dwarf, but it works just as well with a dragonborn. Melee combat, with the occasional boring speech to put everyone to sleep. Really, very effective. The bard won't at all get in the way of the other bard at the party.

However, I'll second the suggestion to do your Devotional Paladin. Two paladins in the party doesn't hurt.

Also, grappling rules are in the basic combat section, as alternatives to the Attack action. Grappling only really does one thing, which is allow you to drag a person across the battle field, or reduce their movement to 0. shoving can move them 5 feet or force them prone. Depending on the DM you can also use other contests to cause other types of conditions.

 

[Melhaic]

Why do you feel like you need your class to have special out of combat abilities to be involved and useful? A little creativity/resourcefulness goes a long way toward making classes like the fighter or rogue shine. Being the Man with the Plan (MacGuyver!) is more complex and engaging than reading off an ability from your character sheet...

 

[Mistwell]

Devotional Paladin. Barring that, I'd go Hunter Ranger. They're fun. They have some cool moving parts. They're not plain vanilla. Who cares if they are a tad underpowered, I'd try it anyway.

 

[pukunui]

I wasn't aware that there were any reasons at all to grapple/grab things, almost nobody talks about it. The few opinions I've seen were decidedly mixed (one person was defending it in the abstract, a few others were...less enthused) and...I honestly don't remember seeing anything about it in the rules, anywhere. Not saying it's not there, just that whatever is there completely escaped my notice.

The gist of it is this: If you're grappled and prone, you can't stand up. (Because standing up requires that you use half your movement, but if you're grappled, your movement is 0.)

On top of that, if you're prone, you have disadvantage on your attacks, while enemies within 5 feet of you have advantage on theirs. Since both grappling and shoving are classed as "special melee attacks", you can grapple someone and knock them prone (or vice versa) on the same round if you're able to make more than one attack on your turn. Since very few monsters and NPCs in the MM have proficiency in either Athletics or Acrobatics, a character with a decent Strength and Expertise in Athletics will almost always succeed.

It's not quite as cheesy as the 3.5's tripping shenanigans, but it's still a powerful maneuver. For instance, in the 5e game I'm playing in, one of the other PCs is a fighter/rogue/wizard whose main gimmick is to use enlarge to make himself Large so he can grapple + prone up to Huge-size creatures. They almost always fail, much to the DM's frustration.

You don't even need the Grappler feat to make this to work, either. That's just icing on the cake.

I've noticed the frequent Valor Bard suggestions. Since it's very likely that another player will have a Bard as well, I'm hesitant (probably a lingering DW influence: it explicitly recommends avoiding doubled-up classes because they will be too similar). For those suggesting it, how would you recommend building to avoid excessive/obvious overlap? Would you bother doing anything at all, or is it a non-issue?

I think two bards would work fine. First off, there are two subclasses for bard, so if each of you were to take a different one, that would give you some points of difference. However, even if you both took the College of Valor, there'd still be plenty of room for you to be unique. And regardless of subclass, you'd be doubling the amount of Bardic Inspiration being handed out to the party.

I'd also go so far as to say that the bard's spell list is robust enough that you could both pick different spells and thus not have much, if any, overlap there either.

That's the case with most classes, though. Even two devotion paladins can be fairly different. One might be sword-and-board, while the other uses a heavy weapon. One might focus on buffing the party, while the other focuses on smite spells. And so on.

 

[TwoSix]

Favored Soul Sorcerer, perhaps? A lot more spells to cast, and a bit of paladin flavor? Or Paladin 2/FS Sorcerer X for lots of extra smites?

 

[meomwt]

A Moon Circle Druid can call on some fairly nifty Wild Shapes early on: Bear and Tiger at L3, for instance, can fairly well tank as hard as a fighter (we recently had one join the party and is shining). Druid spells have a good mix of utility, buff and offence. And the other wild shapes available, even at low level, can help out with scouting, getting into places you shouldn't, creeping up on the bad guys and surprising them, and so on (e.g. crawl up a wall into a high window in spider form, then shape out and cast spells, or re-shape into Bear form).

 

[MoonSong]

Alright. My personal taste in games is something I haven't even remotely kept secret--I'm a huge fan of 4e, and I found the 5e playtest profoundly disappointing. However, someone in a skype chat floated a trial balloon for interest in playing a 5e game, and there was fair interest. Since I know the system relatively well, haven't actually played after release, and saw that there might not be quite enough people to make a full group, I figured--hey, why not, I'll try to give it a shot. Maybe I'll end up pleasantly surprised.

The problem is, I'm not entirely sure what to play, class-wise. One of the other players has already got the exact class/subclass pair I'd usually use (Devotion Paladin) because I love Paladins. The next thing I'd like to play straight-up doesn't exist in 5e (Brawling Fighter)--or would be really underpowered and would probably sour my experience of the system, which I'd honestly like to avoid. And...unfortunately, the third thing I'd want to play doesn't exist either, namely Warlord. And no, I do not consider the Battlemaster, no matter what maneuvers or feats it has, to be a "Warlord." I strongly suspect my opinion on that front won't change.

Well, you could change your opinion about a warlord not existing. If you can convince your DM to allow En5ider material consider the Noble class in the latest article, basically a warlord by any other name.

 

[MechaPilot]

Multiclass monk with fighter to make a brawler character?

I feel like it would be a shame to bring multiclassing into the equation.

If a player came to me and wanted to play a brawler fighter at my table, I'd work with her on adjusting some of the class features. Giving the fighter an unarmed strike damage that doesn't escalate with level would be a good start and would roughly be equivalent to just using a melee weapon, which the fighter could already do.

If the player wanted an unarmored character, trading the fighter's armor proficiencies for the Monk's Unarored Defense feature seems like an adequate trade-off.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Alright--I figure all you good people deserve an update on this. After discussing things with the group, the guy considering Bard decided to play a Tempest Cleric instead, so now I have no issues with playing a Valor Bard. With that in mind, I'll be making a thread for actual build advice in the appropriate forum. Thank you, all, for your suggestions!

 

[JiffyPopTart]

I'm just a little late with this reply...but if you decide on the bard some of this suggestion would apply...

If you are going to dip your toe into playing 5e after swimming in the 4e pool for so long I would suggest you pick a class that best shows off the differences between the two systems....

And to me the biggest difference is the re-opening of spell descriptions for creative and non-codified interpretation.

So I would have suggested a wizard with lots of non-codified spells (illusions are the classic, but also grease is a personal favorite) and embrace the GM-calls-on-the-fly change from how a 5e versus a 4e battle is handled.