D&D 5E D&D Next Q&A: Martial Healing, Fighter Utility, and Ranger Challenges

[Li Shenron]

The issue, IMO, is that basically all other classes do have non-combat abilities that go beyond simply having skills.

I see your point, but it's a non-issue for me.

 

[Frostmarrow]

Favored enemy sounds like a specialty rather than a class feature to me. I'd rather see the ranger have terrain options.

Favored Enemy could be tied to size. Some rangers have a to hit bonus against size small, others have an AC bonus against size medium, and still others have a damage bonus against size large.

I'm no fan of Favored Terrain. It's an applies-never-or-always condition, depending on campaign. I feel that rangers are survivors in any terrain and making them specialize makes them relatively less useful in some. I see Crocodile Dundee as the ranger ideal. He might be a fish out of water in New York City but his strategies are strangely ideal anyway.

 

[D'karr]

I'm no fan of Favored Terrain. It's an applies-never-or-always condition, depending on campaign.

This is the same reason I'm not a fan of Favored Enemy.

 

[DonAdam]

I'm no fan of Favored Terrain. It's an applies-never-or-always condition, depending on campaign.

Unless you make them mostly general, a la the favored enemies in the linked thread above. E.g.,

Forest:
+2 Stealth
Deal extra damage with ranged attacks when hidden
Ignore difficult terrain caused by plants

Mountains:
+2 Climb
Knock opponent back when attacking with advantage
Climb faster

You just have to pick abilities that are especially useful in a given terrain rather than ones that only function in that terrain.

 

[Frostmarrow]

Unless you make them mostly general, a la the favored enemies in the linked thread above. E.g.,

Forest:
+2 Stealth
Deal extra damage with ranged attacks when hidden
Ignore difficult terrain caused by plants

Mountains:
+2 Climb
Knock opponent back when attacking with advantage
Climb faster

You just have to pick abilities that are especially useful in a given terrain rather than ones that only function in that terrain.

Alright. I'll buy that.

 

[Ratskinner]

The abstraction of Hit Points has been a weakness D&D has had since the beginning. There are ways to do it better (as other systems have shown), but it would require changing HP. Why bother rocking the boat after this many editions? Besides, it wouldn't fit into the design goals for making the game feel more old-school. As such, the dichotomy between non-magical healing (rest, Warlords, what have you) and magical healing is not something that the team really needs to spend a lot of time on, in my opinion.

As someone who hates HP. I agree. If you're going to keep the energy bars above the characters' heads, just keep 'em and move on.

I'm interested to see what they want to do with Favored Enemies to make it somewhat broadly applicable. I'm hoping it is something along the lines of a string of feats/abilities versus static bonuses. Hard to say anything without seeing it.

Sounded like an "enemy-centric" fighting style. That is, one Ranger will be good at fighting singular huge opponents, another good at fighting lots of small swarmy opponents. I'm not sure that's going to fix any problems with it, but it does sound like its a little more generally applicable.

 

[Ratskinner]

Other classes already get some additional skills just from being part of *Class*; Rogues get four extra. The Fighter is the one that misses out entirely.

You mean like the Rogue misses out on all the extra Combat stuff the Fighter gets?

 

[I'm A Banana]

On martial healing, I sort of had a bit of an epiphany in this warlord thread: you can tie the HP recovery to a feature that is not necessarily obviously magical.

That is, the ability can be fluffed as either magical, or martial, depending on the player.

The Bard is kind of a perfect fit for this, as their magic is intended to be subtle and voice-related anyway. Make one of the uses of bardic "music" being recovering HP -- those who like inspirational healing just use it as inspiration, those who dislike inspirational healing make it more explicitly magical.

Aside from inspirational healing, the big source of martial healing in 4e was in two places: Second Wind and Healing Surges. It doesn't seem like there's a lot of opposition to a "Second Wind" style ability that each character could have, so lets say that's cool. Surges themselves don't need to take place, either -- one kind of rest heals you up to bloodied, another kind of rest can heal you the whole way, and you don't need to account for attrition because attrition will happen in between the rests if you want it.

 

[Bluenose]

You mean like the Rogue misses out on all the extra Combat stuff the Fighter gets?

Yes, the rogue having no mechanical ability at all in combat balances them with the fighter having no mechanical ability at all out of combat.

There may be a slight error in that analysis.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

I'm not sure why there is such a push for the Warlord to even be a class in 5E. Admittedly, my 4E play was limited to about 10 sessions, and nobody played a Warlord, but wasn't the Warlord class more of an extrapolation of possible tactics using the 4E rules rather than a full-fledged, historical or fictionally backed class? I guess I always assumed that the Warlord became a class just so that the movement/tactics in 4E could be used more efficiently. In 1E, wouldn't a Warlord just be a fighter with a high charisma?

As someone who only played one 4E campaign, I don't see that edition as adding any sacred cows. That's my bias. But, I recognize that to the 4E fan, the warlord is probably their biggest sacred cow. I find this unfortunate, because I like the idea of the broader fighter class that consumes the warlord. I feel that gives the fighter an identity that it has always been lacking.

And it occurs to me that this is probably exactly what's bothering 4E fans. It's not that ideas aren't being borrowed from 4E. It's that the designers are like me. They are treating 4E as an experiment full of neat ideas, but with nothing sacred.