dave2008
Legend
Sure! Just realize that most of this sheet has more to do with our homebrew rules. Here you go!
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D&D 5E Some Gems I Have Forgotten In The DMG
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dave2008
Legend
There is an issue in that you only get 1 reaction. IRRC, reactions were unlimited in 4e, and that made the fighter very sticky. Ideally I would see the fighter with striker and defender subclasses that could be further augmented with fighting styles and feats. Maybe a defender fighter gets extra reactions that can only be used on OA.
MNblockhead
A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
Its a big community. There is always someone (usually several someones) with strong opinions and who seem overly invested in their vision of a game, or who just enjoy being snarky. I think it is human nature to feel those comments as more impactful than they probably are. Like you I've learned to selectively "miss" such posts if they are overly mean spirited or are taking the thread in a direction I'm not interested in. I will say, however, that ENWorld is overall quite civil compared to many other forums. The result of clear and consistent moderation.
MNblockhead
A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
Sure, but can be useful for those who make up their own adventures or run a more improvisational style game, but who don't want to make up their own tables or make up things on the fly.
Swarmkeeper
Hero
I'm having a hard time parsing this. You "attempted" to play with a dozen - what does "attempted to play with" mean? You joined for a session and didn't come back? Played a few sessions then decided it didn't jive with your style? Showed up for 5 minutes, realized it wasn't going to work, and walked out? Did none of these dozen-ish DMs give you a general overview of what was and what wasn't included in their campaigns before having you even sit down at the table?
I honestly don't recall anyone getting super testy specifically on the subject of feats here on ENWorld. Perhaps you mean DMs getting super testy about player assumptions in general? That seems to ring a bell.
IMO and IME, most assumptions can be taken care of with a solid session zero and/or a solid, concise 1 or 2 page overview of the campaign rules. Any DM getting super testy needs to take it down a notch or three and simply make sure the players are informed before sitting down to play. Importantly, a DM should work with players to make sure their characters meet the guidelines that have been established for the campaign (something that would have been a nice gem to include in the DMG, apparently, but at least it is in Tasha's).
Beyond that, stuff will of course naturally come up during game play that might be cause for disagreement. As a DM, if this happens, I make a ruling in the heat of the moment so we can move forward with the game and, between sessions, we discuss how it will be handled going forward, if necessary.
And...? Did any of the DMs you encountered have any suggestions for fixes when you told them you were fully open to the idea of doing so? Or is it that none of the DMs you encountered wanted to deal with a homebrew PC at all in their campaign? If it is the latter, do you believe that makes them unreasonable DMs?
Tales and Chronicles
Jewel of the North, formerly know as vincegetorix
As I'm always looking to buff the FS, I think that giving part of the Sentinel feat as a FS would be decent, maybe to replace the pretty bad Protection FS?
Tales and Chronicles
Jewel of the North, formerly know as vincegetorix
Sure. Ideally, if WotC wasnt all set on their classic ''trilogy'' of books, I'd go for something like:
Book of challenges
- Monster Manual per type
- Non-monster challenges (traps, enviromental effects)
- Designing your own monsters and challenges, NPC traits and motivations
- Dealing with monsters without violence/social interaction rules
- Exploration/travel rules
- Encounter design
- XP (variant: 3 pillars Xp)
Book of Delvers
- How to play, ability scores and how to use them
- Creating a character: classes and races
- Spellcastig
- Variants: Spellpoints, scrolls/potions mishaps. harder identification
- Variant: Feats, multiclassing
- Damage, Dying, Healing (variant healing, meat grinder mode etc)
- Actions (variant: improvising action, marking, disarming etc)
- How to roleplay
- Downtime activities
- Exploration rules-lite (roles and their effect)
- Equipment
- Retainer and Loyalty
- Magic Items
Book of Worldbuilding
- Creating your world
- The Planes
- Pantheon
- Creating your own magic items
- Dials: all variants seen the DMG (speed factor, proficiency die, etc)
- Domain management
- Tables for everything and nothing
teitan
Legend
But that’s the point, it’s the DMs game. The whole design philosophy was on the table before the game launched that they would be providing a core game and then bells and whistles that can be turned off and on so that the game could be played how the individual table wants to play it. You want to play with all those options turned on then by all means do so, nothing is stopping you from doing that but don’t sit in judgement of people who choose not to or tables that say “well that’s an optional rule and we don’t use it”. That’s precisely what you did. You just “badwrongfunned” people for not playing how you want to and looked down your nose at them. If you aren’t having these conversations with the DM beforehand then you need to start doing that. The one instance in my story, flanking, was an oversight that he had been missed in the discussion of what dials were active and we used that moment to decide if we were going to use flanking or not as a group. We did not.
The only rules you need to play are the Basic D&D rules. Not even the three core rule books are needed.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Even before the pandemic, I almost exclusively played online. This means applying for games. DMs present their pitches (or, rarely, players present theirs and hope a DM likes it enough to pick it up). I filtered through a much, much larger number than that dozen I quoted, skipping over any that were either (a) clearly not for me, so there was no point in applying to begin with, or (b) clearly not interested in what I was looking for. I also did what I could to select game pitches that were compatible with the fluff and crunch of my choices for race, background, class, etc.*
That still left quite a few games, where I would ask up front if the DM was open to testing content I had designed, explicitly saying that I would welcome changes (even, if truly necessary, some before play even got started, though the goal was to try the thing as close to what I wrote, since I can't truly call it "balanced" unless I test it). Having already preselected against those who would oppose such things on principle, most (though not all) did not reject it out of hand, but several said something like "let me think about it" and then came back a day or two later with some variation on "no, sorry, no homebrew I didn't write." Among the dozen or so that remained, only two or three actually demonstrated that they had read my work (one asked if I was willing to drop a ribbon-y feature that they felt could be unbalanced for their specific campaign, since it was focused on jungle exploration; another said they liked one of the optional homebrew spells at the end of the document and appreciated the effort I put into selecting art and proofreading it, but had no further criticism). Zero of the dozen-ish DMs that got to this point of sounded like they'd want the kind of play I look for, had a compatible pitch, (allegedly) open to homebrew, and (claimed to have) actually read and approved it, actually did so; I was accepted into none of their games.
And, like I said, this was already after filtering through many, many more games that were either clearly not a good fit, explicitly rejecting things I wanted (e.g. "no feats," which is way commonll, much to my chagrin), or not even willing to consider homebrew content of any kind unless it came from the DM herself.
*If you consider it relevant, I was intending to play a silver dragonborn dragon sorcerer, gold bloodline, with some kind of "comes from old-money families but didn't inherit any of it" background, inspired by a couple cool images I saw online. My homebrew, a Silver Pyromancer PrC, explicitly forbids multiclassing to or from Warlock, for both thematic and balance reasons, so my interest was to play a pure Sorcerer other than those five levels.
Perhaps it is the fog of memory, but I distinctly remember some folks in the "exotic races" thread (for example) using some rather...strident...language for any player who has the temerity to want to play a non-"core four" race. I won't name names for the sake of not stirring up old drama. But there were some folks who got stern mod responses for it. That, to me, speaks of a testiness that goes well beyond simple stuff.
Okay. Now how do we refactor this for the online group search, since as noted, that's basically always how I have had to look for games even before the pandemic, but now most folks have to look for games this way.
TBH this at least sounds irrelevant to what I'm talking about, so I don't have much to say about it.
One. Out of several dozen games I examined and about a dozen games I applied for, exactly one had constructive criticism, and that one was only to avoid a potentially theme-disruptive ribbon feature. At 5th level, meaning character level 10 at the lowest, my Silver Pyromancer gets a ribbon feature, immunity to disease. That DM thought that this ribbon might be actually powerful or unbalanced in a game focused on jungle exploration, and thus asked if I was okay with removing it. Seeing as it's mostly a fluff feature, I was comfortable doing so; it is of course sad to drop a ribbon, but I had no desire to disrupt a campaign premise.
In every case, including that one, I was clear that adjustments the DM considered appropriate were cool, but that starting out more or less as I wrote it would be nice so I could get good playtest info. I worked pretty hard to keep the features in line with, but distinct from, the features of official classes, races, feats, etc. I'm confident it is already pretty well-balanced, but confirmation is always a nice addition on top of such confidence...and if that confidence proves wrong, I want to fix it, not dig in my heels. I genuinely believe in serious playtesting.
Well, as stated, I did everything I could to filter out DMs who wouldn't be interested from the word "go." Hence why I spent several months trying to find a game and applied to such a large number of them (mostly on GitP and Myth-Weavers). Even with those efforts, I came up completely empty-handed. This wasn't a casual effort, I was really sincere about trying to find a game that would work and had plenty of respectful conversations about it. Ultimately it never worked out. That it failed to do so despite the amount of time and effort I put in is what led me to conclude that yes, my initial perception (based on forum discussions like this) was on fact pretty accurate. 5e DMs are overall very traditionalist, often extremely so, and will rather pointedly refuse or ignore most "optional" rules, unless they personally deeply love those rules (most of them being of the "make days deadlier, rests harder and less frequent, and resources generally restricted" variety). Good luck even getting them to use "official" third-party content (as in, published by a professional company like Drop Dead Studios or Goodman Games), let alone player written homebrew...but they'll be totally cool introducing their own homebrew, occasionally without even drawing attention to it until it becomes relevant.
In case anyone actually cares what homebrew I wanted to test, here it is. (Hopefully the images load correctly; they were very slow to load on my phone.) As stated in the opening section, it is directly inspired by the Silver Pyromancer PrC from (3rd edition) Eberron. I am relatively proud of it, in the sense that I think I did a good job making it, covered both the thematic and mechanical bases that I should have, and that it only really needs small tweaks or adjustments to be a solid, focused but not overpowered, option for players to use. The spells are mostly of my own design, though some are inspired by actual spells from 3.5e. (I also neglected to include the Artificer as an explicit "you can do this if you like" option, but in theory they qualify eventually, once they get 3rd level spells. Not that I think very many people willingly play 5e's Artificer...)
Like I said. A disdain for "optional" rules is a gamer culture element I have detected in 5e DMs. Is that not what this statement is?
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