Snoring Rock
Explorer
I suppose this is my on-going saga of discovery in 5thedition D&D. My group just started acampaign using the system. We are comingover from Castles and Crusades. I haveplayed AD&D, 3.x, Pathfinder and C&C. C&C is a great system that feels old-school but lacks a little love by its creators. The books are chockfull of every typo, spelling error, rules contradictions and/or errata possible.
Anyway, that is not the reason for this post. I am quite pleased with the simplicity built into the rules for 5th edition. Let’s take the missing ”read magic” spell as an example of down-sizing he rules. I saw that right away butfigured I would understand why later as we played. The party found a scroll in a treasure I had placed in the dungeon. It was wizard spell. There are no wizards in the party, just a cleric and warlock for casters. When it came time to use the scroll, all of the heads at the table popped down to read the PHB to see if a warlock could cast a spell off of a scroll writtenby a wizard.
It actually took us a while to figure it out. We had such a strong assumption engrained in us from past systems that we were sure there had to be a check or feat or some other mojo. It is too simple. Anyone who can read can attempt to read and cast the spell. It requires an intelligence check with a base 10 DC. Since only casers are more proficient with those checks, it appears thatit is a bit of a risk for non-casters to try. At low level, even casters can goof it up.
So each caster class has its own way of obtaining andcasting, but anyone can use a scroll. Gone are the days of keeping track of who wrote the scroll and if you havea treasure with specific type of spell, and it becoming useless to the party if they do not have the specific type of caster.
I like this system so far, of course the party just made I tto 2nd level. More to come…
Anyway, that is not the reason for this post. I am quite pleased with the simplicity built into the rules for 5th edition. Let’s take the missing ”read magic” spell as an example of down-sizing he rules. I saw that right away butfigured I would understand why later as we played. The party found a scroll in a treasure I had placed in the dungeon. It was wizard spell. There are no wizards in the party, just a cleric and warlock for casters. When it came time to use the scroll, all of the heads at the table popped down to read the PHB to see if a warlock could cast a spell off of a scroll writtenby a wizard.
It actually took us a while to figure it out. We had such a strong assumption engrained in us from past systems that we were sure there had to be a check or feat or some other mojo. It is too simple. Anyone who can read can attempt to read and cast the spell. It requires an intelligence check with a base 10 DC. Since only casers are more proficient with those checks, it appears thatit is a bit of a risk for non-casters to try. At low level, even casters can goof it up.
So each caster class has its own way of obtaining andcasting, but anyone can use a scroll. Gone are the days of keeping track of who wrote the scroll and if you havea treasure with specific type of spell, and it becoming useless to the party if they do not have the specific type of caster.
I like this system so far, of course the party just made I tto 2nd level. More to come…