D&D 5E I have the DMG!

[Tormyr]

I am pretty sure you will be able to see my point that characters with 21+ AC EVERY combat round are "too indistructible" (add in Haste and we are at AC 23). And thanks to mage armor the fighter NEVER will have more AC, actually never even the same. The fighter will have AC 18 or 20 (1H or 2H, and as 1H+Shield is boring to play probably AC 18). With the Spell Slots it is still playable, but with the Spellpoints - unless they have some special rule to prevent problems here, even I - who likes to use the Shield spell myselves ^^ - sees problems here.

The Paladin at my table has an AC of 21 at level 7. Before the player moved away, our War Cleric had an AC of 21 at level 3. It doesn't break the game. They are not too indestructible. They get hit less than others, but the majority of creatures hit them at least 25% of the time, and that is not accounting for save vs. spells. Our paladin almost died after taking a good fireball near the end of an adventuring day.

 

[jkat718]

I'm glad to see morale rules made it in there. I'm disappointed they didn't make the MM though.

Why would they be in the MM? The MM is for pure stats, not on running the game (which is what Morale is for). That's the role of the DMG. The MM is--supposedly--intended for use by both players and DMs, and players don't really care about Morale.

 

[Mistwell]

Make +3 items require two attunement slots. That will fix pretty much any issue.

Also someone upthread mentioned +X items didn't need attunement unless they had other powers, but I am pretty sure all +2 and +3 items do have other powers, and do require attunement. So you could have a +3 Shield of Snuffling, a +3 Armor of Loafing, and a +3 Ring of Protection...but now you can't have any magic weapon beyond a +1.

 

[pkt77242]

Not just difficulty, but class balance as well. If you're only having 1 or maybe 2 encounters per day, barbarians, wild shaping druids, and warlocks will outshine most other classes by a significant margin.

Agreed and I might add Wizard and Paladin to that list as well. I couldn't imagine being a 10th level wizard with only 1-2 encounters a day. A fireball for you, a fireball for you, a fireball for everyone.

Pretty much the same with the Paladin and smiting.

 

[jkat718]

I would say that is the issue, the game isn't balanced for 1 fight a day. I would think that if the DM is going to do that then they need to up the difficulty level because you are going to throw everything you have at it without having to worry more encounters later (or at most 2 in a day).
Nothing wrong with your play style the DM just needs to adjust the encounters to reflect that there is only 1 per day.

In the FreeMG*, there is a table for "Adjusted XP per Day," which I'm assuming MagicSN's DM is ignoring. If they are using those rules, then that single encounter should be Deadly regardless of level. Either way, only having a single encounter each day is going to break the game at least a little.

*aka the Basic Rules DMG

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

I remember in the Magic Items section of the playtest there were these awesome random tables you could roll on to make the less-interesting +X items more cool. You'd end up with stuff like, a +1 quarterstaff that magnifies your voice on command, but needs a drop of blood to function. Are there something like those tables in the DMG?

Which version of the playtest?

Better yet: link?

 

[Bluenose]

To clarify, because I realize this sounds a bit terse, I think it's worth examining whether the final system succeeds or fails, but trying to justify it in terms of how well we think it fits what the designers originally intended years ago early in the design process seems counterproductive.

I don't think it's possible to assess the game in any terms other than whether it does what the designers intended it to play like. It's not as if it's trying to emulate a particular style of fiction and can be assessed in terms of how closely it cleaves to that. It plays, and if that's the only measure of success or failure then it's a success (a few games don't manage that much). And judging it on whether people like it means it's both a success and failure at the same time, because it's rather easy to find people who both like and dislike it - and the indifferent, in which category I fall.

When it comes to magic items, it looks like 5e has designed a system where a party with minimal magic items (just +1 weapons to overcome resistance) can take on appropriate CR challenges from level 1 to 20. The DM can keep magic as rare as he wants without worrying that he's breaking the high-level math by not giving the party their wealth-by-level. At the same time, another group that get tons of magical items will certainly be more effective, but the +3 cap on numerical bonuses ensures that even those characters aren't head and shoulders above appropriate CR encounters, and the three-attunement limit ensures that they have interesting char-op tradeoffs to make when equipping their characters (which is the kind of stuff those groups often enjoy, IME).

One thing my group always does with a new edition is give it a road test. Play a few old modules with some of our old characters and see how it works out. And when we did that with 5e, it got really obvious with the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks module that the existing characters were curb-stomping situations which our expectations were would provide a difficult fight. So, this being anomalous, we tested it several more times with some different characters and parties. The results suggested that magic items actually made a rather large amount of difference to party capabilities, at least in the level 10-14 range. That a selection of a couple of +1 items in particular slots - armour and weapon for Fighters - was roughly equivalent to adding two levels to the character (because we also tried it with the same characters with inferior gear but at higher level). Bigger pluses also didn't give diminishing returns, with the exception that anyone relying on weapon attacks and lacking any magic weapon was at a severe disadvantage overall to even a +1 weapon.

 

[Tormyr]

Which version of the playtest?

Better yet: link?

September 2013 play test.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?381805-I-have-the-DMG!&p=6441217&viewfull=1#post6441217

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

*Cough* Rust Monster? *Cough*

Oh wait it says non magical metal. That's a change from 2nd.

RETCONNED!

(imc)

 

[Fralex]

Which version of the playtest?

Better yet: link?

While I doubt anyone important still cares whether three pages of an outdated version of a game get shared now, I'd still rather hold off on just posting the whole pdf online somewhere. However, two of the tables I modified and incorporated into a spell for the Artificer class I'm homebrewing. Just go here and look at the attached document to view them.