D&D 5E L&L for November 18

[Rydac]

http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20131118

Here's the link

 

[Plaguescarred]

Interesting to get some insight into the design process! I'm all for ranking system if it helps put things in perspective...

 

[1of3]

Spells trump Feats. That one I find interesting.

Insightful article overall.

 

[JamesonCourage]

As long as they don't get "class" confused with "spells", then I don't mind this too much. For example, "you need to be a Wizard to cast Invisibility, so the spell must be good!" would be bad. (I use Invisibility specifically because I know this isn't the case based on this article.)

I wish feats were higher, though. I'd like them ahead of both race and backgrounds, honestly. Sad to see them on the bottom.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

Hmmh, this sounds like a limited design space. Do you want to establish a new option as feat? Make sure that isn't none to good, cause a feat is at the bottom of the priority list. And if you later want to cover this via spell or class, these versions have to be better. Add in the bounded accuracy and it gets even narrower.

I'm really interested how the system develops after the first year.

 

[n00bdragon]

I have my reservations about spells not trumping other features simply because they tend to do so indirectly. Take for example the Solid Fog spell in 3e, a spell which ostensibly does no harm but can without a save more or less remove a large group of combatants from a fight. How do you equate that with a fighter's ability to remove a monster from the fight by chopping up all its hit points. Clearly, Solid Fog is unfairly powerful but exactly where you draw the line is a little more complicated than just saying "spells must be less powerful than class features".

 

[Falling Icicle]

The thing is, spells are class features. It's unfair for them to punish spellcasters because they get their class features in the form of spells instead of passive abilities.

 

[Falling Icicle]

I also find their rankings to be quite odd. Why should a feat be less powerful than a spell? Why is one's race more important than their background? Etc.

 

[n00bdragon]

But unlike other classes casters don't have their class features set in stone. They can mix and match from a humongous list of available class features (i.e. spells). So why should casters get to do everything better than you AND then swap that ability out for whatever other subject they want to trump today?

 

[dbm]

I think it is reasonable for spells to trump feats for two reasons:

• If you don't have the right spell tee'd up for your situation, then you can't use it - feats are always available
• Spells are limited in terms of the number of times you can use them, and the duration for each use - feats typically are not.

So spells burn brighter but shorter than feats; that seems reasonable to me.

The problem is not that spells can be better than feats; the problem is that games have evolved to the point where you only have a small number of encounters so the limits on spells no longer bite.

Don't get me wrong - I like games which are more varied than just dungeon delves, and in more social or urban environments you might only have one or two encounters before the party 'rest'. 13th Age has an interesting fix for this - players 'rest' when the GM says they can, not simply at the end of the day. So the GM can control the pacing and make sure those limits keep balance in place.