D&D 5E Are Aura's burdensome?

flamewizo

First Post
Sometimes it does challenge us as DM's but thats half the fun. As a DM your suppose to think on your feet and make it fun. With my games i've had to adapt my campaign as the way the game played, took me by surprise. I have also had overpowered creatures in play which may have been too strong but I adapted it to make it fun. It's the DM's job. Paladins are strong but so can other races be if given the right circumstances. I can understand adapting for a campaign's but it only take a lightbulb moment like auras are not useable in this room due to dark magic or something. So I completely disagree with saying you can not use the race.
DM is whining - I bought a Monster manual too it is only a guideline to aid the DM it's not the be all and end all of a campaign. If it is you need to be more inventive.
 

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Mallus

Legend
Are Auras burdensome? No. They're quite powerful, and handy to have in the party. But they can be solved easily by hitting the paladin(s) until they shut off.
 


Paladin auras are working as intended. Fights being easy is no problem at all. Makes the game faster. If you risk dying every encounter, you eventually die soon. The only challngkng encounters should be boss fights and it is no problem modifying them a bit to better challenge your PCs. Simply increasing their stats a bit should do the trick.
 




Paladins are one of the most powerful classes in the game and the saving throw aura is one of the abilities that makes them so.

The numbers also seem a holdover from 3rd editions bloated math insanity. Adding 5 to saves is just insane when monster DC's rarely crack 14. We wouldnt have a class that adds that much to armor, or attack values. Saves/Spell DC's are similarly bounded, and this just greatly skews them)

I'm DM'ing for a paladin (order of the ancients, so yay, he grants damage resistance in addition to the other OP'ness) who rolled an 18 strength and charisma (on 4d6 IN ORDER no less). I quickly put the kibosh on that, limiting the bonus to +2. Given I'm running a caster heavy campaign for adversaries, the alternative was giving all the bad guys the "Probably going to be killed by the PC's" feat that grants a +3 to spell DC's, but at the cost of probably being killed by the PC's. I did expand the radius as described below.

Since we mainly use theater of the mind, I tend to plot out larger battlefields in terms of "zones", roughly 30 feet across, so everyone can move between them as a movement. It's somewhat abstract, but I really dont feel like dealing with an extra 5' of movement here or there. I let the paladin aura affect the entire zone (so effectively a 15' radius). If we play to the point where he gets the expanded radius, he affects the adjacent zones as well.
 
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bgbarcus

Explorer
My group plays multiple parties all in the same campaign world and the same timeline. We've had two different paladins. Both of them are powerful melee fighters and have a major effect on defending their party members, especially with their auras. In several encounters the paladin auras have nerfed the monster's best attacks.

As the DM my response is, "that's really cool."

The paladins also tend to suck a lot of healing and one of them has been taken down to zero hit points more than the total of all the other party members. That's because the paladins are right up there in the front line taking the fight to the enemy. That is what paladins are expected to do. Taking away their aura is taking away a huge part of what makes a paladin so much fun.
 

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