D&D 5E Mike Mearls' AMA Summary

[MechaTarrasque]

The Ranger is Batman?

I am confused. I feel like I'm reading one of those superhero fight arguments. "Sure, Batman would lose to that other Superhero straight up, but give him time to prepare ..."

"Prepared guy" could at least be something you could design mechanically ("is he prepared enough?" is a lot less subjective then "is he nature enough?"), and it would fit the old favored enemy bit (I know we are going to be fighting a lot of orcs, so I prepared by making them my favored enemy ). Plus, think of the bunker-dwelling survivalist ranger subclass.......

 

[SkidAce]

Lan-"can someone please tell me why [MENTION=7706]SkidAce[/MENTION] is running into the forest"-efan

To get away from the drui...oh. Yeah. Bad idea.

Ooops...

 

[Staffan]

The Ranger is Batman?

I am confused. I feel like I'm reading one of those superhero fight arguments. "Sure, Batman would lose to that other Superhero straight up, but give him time to prepare ..."

Pretty much, yes. Well, the Wizard is more Batman with their extremely versatile spell list, but the Ranger is (in my mind) a slightly more Batman-y dude than the fighter is.

 

[Satyrn]

Re: whether it should be Rangers or Druids that have animal companions as a thing: my preference is neither. Animal companions do nothing for me at all.

Maybe you should pick something other than a cat, then.

 

[Hussar]

Certainly!

Out of curiosity, are any of them new enough to have been made after the revised Ranger came out? That made a big difference in the group's I know.

Yup, 3 of them. 1 being the new beast master.

 

[Connorsrpg]

Funny how he mentions Fighter subclasses as bland. I agree totally. You can build fighter subclasses based upon mechanic or concept. I wrote several for both, but all the criticism was, "You can do that with Battlemaster - why not just add more maneuvers? Done." Totally missing the point WHY I built these subclasses differently in the 1st place. Whilst I agree with Mike on this one, we are fine b/c we have the 5 subclasses I wrote and make use of any UA stuff.

 

[MichaelSomething]

The easiest way to make a Druid that could make everyone happy is to start Druids with weak shapeshifting and have lots of spells empower said shape shifting. People who like old school Druids will keep them as it and people who want shape shifter Druids can just spend spells until they're happy.

 

[Lanliss]

The easiest way to make a Druid that could make everyone happy is to start Druids with weak shapeshifting and have lots of spells empower said shape shifting. People who like old school Druids will keep them as it and people who want shape shifter Druids can just spend spells until they're happy.

My homebrew druid is going to be split. Shapeshifting will only be for Moon Druid, while Land druids get more spell stuff to compensate.

Not sure what kind of stuff, maybe some sort of system similar to Metamagic, but different enough to not steal from Sorc. Maybe a limited set of choices tied to your land form. "As an arctic druid you can change any spell to deal Cold Damage.", "As a desert druid, you can cause your fire spells to deal extra damage as you imbue them with the heat of your homeland.". Still a lot of stuff I am throwing at the drawing board, plus some other ideas people threw in in my thread on the subject.

 

[Pauper]

Funny how anecdotal evidence varies so much. We've had 5 rangers played over the last three campaigns. One Beastmaster and 4 Hunters.

That might be an artifact of playing Adventurers League versus home-brew -- AL games seem to always have some proportion of power-gamers among the tables (at least, in my experience -- more anecdotal evidence coming up!), while home-games tend to either be all power-gamers or very few if any, since it's easier to restrict access to only those players you want at the table.

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Pauper

 

[Pauper]

The easiest way to make a Druid that could make everyone happy is to start Druids with weak shapeshifting and have lots of spells empower said shape shifting. People who like old school Druids will keep them as it and people who want shape shifter Druids can just spend spells until they're happy.

My problem with this idea is that you can't cast spells in Wild Shape -- so you either have to make the ability a 'burn a spell slot to do this' thing like healing in Wild Shape, or you have to have the druid stay in non-animal form for one or more rounds to 'buff up' before actually getting to Wild Shape.

(I suppose a third option would be to specifically design the spells to have all-day durations, so the druid expends them at the start of the day and gets their benefit all day long, but that creates other issues, such as allowing more powerful buff spells but limiting them by use of the Concentration mechanic. Just saying that this issue is not necessarily a simple one, with the current design of the class. If the class had been solely designed as a shapeshifting class, there would be fewer of these kinds of issues, but it's too late to close the gate to the animal pen now.)

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Pauper