D&D 5E Official D&D Basic Discussion Thread

[Nebulous]

I like how some spells do more damage/more effect/more targets/whatever when prepared at higher levels. Prevents us from having five separate cure spells, ten separate 'do damage to a guy with fire' spells, etc.

i am 100% sure those kinds of spells will soon follow in supplements

 

[Agamon]

Sidebar says no, as I read it, because it specifically says "I search the room for X period" is NOT okay.

Sidebar says you'd have to say something like "I'm searching the floor of the room" to even get the roll.

So no, not best of both worlds if you obey the sidebar. Best of both worlds if you ignore it entirely.

Damn.

And here I was really looking forward to playing this game. Ah well.

CURSE YOU, SIDEBAR!!!!!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Damn.

And here I was really looking forward to playing this game. Ah well.

CURSE YOU, SIDEBAR!!!!!

Ignore the sidebar in your game, but don't pretend to other players/DMs that it doesn't exist in the rules. This is a fixable problem - I came up with the fix you're using upthread. But it is a bizarre sidebar to put in, imo.

 

[Agamon]

Ignore the sidebar in your game, but don't pretend to other players/DMs that it doesn't exist in the rules. This is a fixable problem - I came up with the fix you're using upthread. But it is a bizarre sidebar to put in, imo.

side·bar
ˈsīdˌbär
noun NORTH AMERICAN

1) a secondary, additional, or incidental thing; a side issue.

2) a verrrrrry important thing!!!!

 

[Dausuul]

A more sane combo of 1 & 2 would be to allow players to OVERRIDE proceedings by saying "I search in X place", and finding it if they said the right thing (so they get to feel clever), but ALSO allowing them to say "My PC searches the room to the best of his ability" (or however one wants to put it), and rolling.

I agree. The rules should say how long it takes to search an area, then you can decide if you're willing to spend that much time or if you're going to pick and choose your targets to speed things up.

 

[Darth Quiris]

Oh my! The disclaimer on the front page! SO. MUCH. WIN!

Sorry, geekgasm there.

Back to your regularly scheduled thread,

Kannik

omg I would have totally missed that had you not mentioned it.

That's so funny. That disclaimer makes this edition an automatic win for me now.

 

[Universal_narration]

Anyone notice the concentration mechanic?

A lot of the good buff spells require concentration and you can't have two of them running at once. Not to mention each time you get damaged you have to make a CON save equal to half the damage or it no longer buffs. I didn't see the later playtest packets but it does seem interesting. So stuff like antimagic field you can punch the caster at it might suddenly just drop. Other stuff like dominate need it too, so if fighting multiple enemies and you have someone locked down due to that the enemies can focus the caster to free their friend.

Also one thing that got me giggling was the knock spell, anyone within 300 feet can hear it. I'm expecting all guards to be handed a note, "If you hear a loud knock from inside the premises, adventurers are about!".

Now I'm sure there will be a grappler archetype for fighter, and the dreaded spell in 3.5 against this type of fighter was freedom of movement due to not being able to be grappled. I wonder if that too will be a concentration spell, so a grappler can walk up to a wizard with it on punch him to dispel the freedom of movement then initiate a grapple.

Other interesting things with the fighter would be stuff like walking up to an enemy pushing him over then get advantage on your next set of attacks once you get extra attack (so 1-3 more). You don't need extra feats to do it just a good athletics (str check then).

 

[Keldryn]

As someone with some archaeological training, and a special interest in how people's bodies changed in different societies, I have to say, I am very very very very unconvinced that the average sort of people around in, say, medieval times, could, on the whole, lift more than the several inches taller, vastly better fed, people of today (and D&D people seem to be short - humans only go up to "just over 6' tall" ).

Fair enough. I was thinking in terms of how a man who performed hard physical labor every day from his early teens into adulthood would compare to a man who mostly drives everywhere and sits at a desk all day. A modern-day weightlifter would clearly outclass a medieval-era physical laborer. I was giving more weight (heh) to modern sendentariness than to modern nutrition.

I think it's probably easier and fairer to say this is just a strange simplification - especially as you can also only push-pull 300lbs, and I know from experience that I can't deadlift 300lbs, but I sure as hell can push something that weighs 300lbs (with a fair bit of swearing, admittedly).

Definitely one of those simplifications that makes the math easy but requires some suspension of disbelief if you think about it too much. Especially when the 5' tall, 100 lbs female elf with a 16 strength starts to test how much weight she can actually lift...


And yes, considering lifting the same as pushing and pulling an object on the ground is weird.

Mostly I'm just totally unfairly mocking amusing simplifications in D&D's rules. Man I am still vexed by "walking more than eight hours..." deal though jeez.

Yeah, it's silly, although it's quite similar to the 3.x rules. The Basic Rules leave out part of the description from 3e, however: "In a day of normal walking, a character walks for 8 hours. The rest of the daylight time is spent making and breaking camp, resting, and eating."


The whole Forced March situation (in either 5e or 3.x) really only makes sense to me when talking about longer time scales; if the PCs are on a forced march for a week, then yeah, the more than 8 hours of walking each day are likely to result in some debilitating exhaustion. Walking more than 8 hours for one or two days? Yeah, that's dumb.


Engaging in 3 or 4 life-or-death battles against half a dozen opponents in a single day would be more likely to be exhausting than walking for 10 hours.

 

[Kaodi]

I heard that it was a myth that people in the Middle Ages were much shorter; that that notion was falsely extrapolated from early Industrial Age height trends.

Anyway, I kind of like that there feels like there is a reason to roll 4d6 again.

Edit: STR 11, DEX 15, CON 13, INT 13, WIS 13, CHA 11 , though I guess that particular set could have been pretty much had with point buy, hehehe... Good candidate for human.

Edit 2: Though if I rolled for race too, say on a d8 where each is a subrace except for 7 and 8 which are both straight human.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

So, as I go through the rules and despite all of the posts here....

Did anything actually change from the October playtest? It seems like it's almost identical with no real changes.

So far, I've only noticed: One higher proficiency bonus, adding your wis or int modifier to your level to determine number of spells prepared, and a slight difference in the rogue and fighter class features.

Am I missing any significant changes?

From the posts in this thread, it sounds like the rules are a big deal. However, I've been playing pretty much this game for 9 months now.