I'm not calling for a whole rewrite.
Im saying after multiclassing and feats, there wasn't really any big popular crunchy variant rules.
D&D General Mike Mearls says control spells are ruining 5th Edition
- Thread starter THEMNGMNT
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Im saying after multiclassing and feats, there wasn't really any big popular crunchy variant rules.
Not a Decepticon
Hero
The crunchy variant rules that are popular are mostly 3rd party material, like Strongholds & Followers
Kannik
Legend
Hmm, re: control spells and the legendary resistance workaround, one way that has worked well for my campaigns (and not using legendary resistance) is to design and treat “solo” creatures as multiple separate creatures with a shared HP pool. That way, they act multiple times per round on different initiative counts (often I will also parcel out abilities to each initiative count entity or otherwise give each of them at least slightly different but thematically linked abilities) and they also get multiple chances per round to save against effects placed upon them:
Stuns and hard control effects are applied to the creatures’ next initiative count entity, shutting it down for at least one round without becoming a complete shut down of the creature. Which leaves this still a very worthwhile tactic for the PCs, just as it would be in a non-solo fight to shut down an individual creature out of a group*, as it knocks out out 25% or 33% of the solo’s actions for at least a round.
Other soft controls (such as movement, weakened, etc) I generally let affect all initiative entities of the creature, but there they can attempt their saves saves at the end of every one of their turns in the init order. And/or sometimes, depending on the creature, I will give them the ability to downgrade the effect at the end of one or each of their turns. Again, the idea that it’s still worthwhile for the PCs to do and it hinders the creature but doesn’t completely shut everything down.
At certain HP points one of the creatures’ initiative entities gets taken out (usually in a pre-determined and specified order), whittling down the creature and it's abilities as the encounter progresses. It doesn't need to be an even split either; so if a creature has 400 HP and four initiative entities, perhaps the first entity is taken out at 250 HP remaining, the second is taken out at 100 HP remaining, and the creature dies at 0 HP.
* Really, this whole idea is just leveraging what's been noted above, that standard combat routines work well enough outside of the edge case of a “solo” boss, and so this is keeping with those routines just rejiggered a bit to represent a single powerful entity.
Stuns and hard control effects are applied to the creatures’ next initiative count entity, shutting it down for at least one round without becoming a complete shut down of the creature. Which leaves this still a very worthwhile tactic for the PCs, just as it would be in a non-solo fight to shut down an individual creature out of a group*, as it knocks out out 25% or 33% of the solo’s actions for at least a round.
Other soft controls (such as movement, weakened, etc) I generally let affect all initiative entities of the creature, but there they can attempt their saves saves at the end of every one of their turns in the init order. And/or sometimes, depending on the creature, I will give them the ability to downgrade the effect at the end of one or each of their turns. Again, the idea that it’s still worthwhile for the PCs to do and it hinders the creature but doesn’t completely shut everything down.
At certain HP points one of the creatures’ initiative entities gets taken out (usually in a pre-determined and specified order), whittling down the creature and it's abilities as the encounter progresses. It doesn't need to be an even split either; so if a creature has 400 HP and four initiative entities, perhaps the first entity is taken out at 250 HP remaining, the second is taken out at 100 HP remaining, and the creature dies at 0 HP.
* Really, this whole idea is just leveraging what's been noted above, that standard combat routines work well enough outside of the edge case of a “solo” boss, and so this is keeping with those routines just rejiggered a bit to represent a single powerful entity.
Mostly material external from core game loops.
5e was designed with gaps so if people wanted dynamic boss fight, you could implant Cinematic combat rules and Boss trait variant rules.
But no 3PP ever did as anything but a full rewrite.
Agreed, wotc has done awful with 5e variant rules, I quoted you by accident & meant to quote the post you were responding to.
WOTC was awful with it because they expected 3PPs and DMs to do it.
Same with Bosses and the Legendary Resistance kludge. WOTC expected 3PPs and DMs to fix it.
Earlier on Mearls mentioned how wotc/ttrpg games (?) aren't really embracing gradual evolution over whole edition changes but failure to provide optional) variant rules for completely undeveloped 5e rules subsystems prevents 3pp from filling that void.
I think wotc themselves caused that by not providing enough scaffolding for 3pp to target so consumers would see it as interoperable though. Take some low hanging example like anything related to wilderness survival. Sure it might not take much to push the almost useless do nearly anything overly condensed 5e skill check out of the way enough to make room for a more developed set of rules but ....
- Meaningful survival focus requires well developed inventory and carrying capacity subsystems and 5e didn't even include container rules. Sure you have container capacity... But no body slots for where those containers are worn to limit their use to an expected baseline capability before needing a cart or something and your building on top of quicksand where the gm needs to argue with players about why they can't wear multiple backpacks even if Bob is doing it while physically wearing four (back chest left shoulder right shoulder. The hypothetical 3pp needs to rewrite this or assume full carrying capacity is available. This could have been an eratra or upsupported errata PDF
- Even if you fix the container problem you hit the over simplified linear carrying capacity so you don't need someone strong to carry the heavy stuff and their gear and it becomes almost impossible for a survival replacement to even use how much the party can carry individually as an important factor to ike food water tools and so on. Once again this could have been erratta or upsupported optional off.
- All of the skills are so over condensed that the party can probably say "oh I'm proficient too can I try?" And face roll through anything that might require the inventory consuming specialized tools so you have a party who can probably carry all the tools at no meaningful cost and force success by too many people being proficient at the tiny number of relevant skills because they could all take any skill.
- So by now the 3pp has literally created a full set of rules for containers carrying capacity and maybe skills but still hasn't gotten to even starting the survival focused stuff they wanted to build.
I've been standing in my kitchen making coffee while typing this out and that was all the time it took to show that a set of rules dialing up the importance of wilderness survival is impossible without a near total rewrite on a scale that the ISS community would call a whole new competing project just to begin. Presumably even more problems of missing mechanical hooks in the existing rules support would come up while creating that hypothetical survival focused thing and one or more other whole sections of the rules would need to be rewritten.
It worked in 3.5 because that hypothetical 3pp had a solid rules foundation with plenty of mecha hooks to attach a few small tweaks and the d20 rules meant anything that needed to really get involved also replaced the classes, d20 deadlands is a good example IMO
