D&D 5E Something I would not like to see in 5e: The Tempest

[Andor]

I do not want a Tempest in 5e. Or a master of throwing, spear-chucker, combat bowler, or Caberdancer.

3e had a bad habit of proping up sub-optimal or poorly portrayed combat styles with prestige classes made to support them.

I have a few problems with this:

1) Pointless class proliferation.
2) The base combat system should contain enough modules/options/crunch to support a reasonable portrayal of a spear fighter vs a sword and board fighter vs dual-weilding dagger man.
3) The fighter class is the weapons maven, he should not need extra training to become competant with common weapon styles, or even exotic ones.
4) Not all fighting styles are equal. You could try dual wielding bowling balls on the battle field, I bet it would be hilarious when posted on youtube. Not all combat styles need to be of equal worth in the game.
5) Not all weapons are equal. Maces are better than clubs, that's why people paid smiths to make them, rather than just using handy tree roots. The bow is a better ranged weapon than the rock. The rock is not ineffective mind you, I would not want to catch a rock thrown by a major league pitcher. But an archer has got better range, better accuracy, possibly a higher rate of fire, and the arrow benefits from having pointy steel bits on to bring the pain. There should not be a "Devotee of the hurled shist" presitge class to try and make stone throwing the equal of archery.

 

[Sunseeker]

As players level up, I think there should be a natural progression towards specialization. Certainly there should be ways to be good without specializing, but even with vast customization tools, even if we put every "I hit things with big sticks" class into one Over-Class, the guy who does everything should still not be quite as good as the guy who decided to do one thing.

You shouldn't be able to build anything and expect to be the best. But if you can put the right features, talents and feats together to make a guy who dual-wields Heavy Flails and Whirlwind attacks every turn, you should be the best damn Whirlwinding Heavy Flailer to have ever been.

If there's going to be choices, they should be roughly equal. False choices for the purpose of forcing people to gain high system mastery is what cased the feat bloat of 3.X. Don't try to trick the gamers.

 

[Ahnehnois]

You're right about characters becoming too specialized and combat becoming too silly. And that a fighter should be able to use a variety of weapon. I don't think it was really prestige classes that were the problem, but a more generalized sense of chasing "kewl powerz" at the expense of plausibility and balance. The prestige classes are more a symptom. Some of the equipment itself is ludicrous, and there are plenty of other problematic rules in this arena.

 

[Kynn]

I thought this was going to be a Shakespeare thread, or at least a reference to last season of D&D Encounters.

 

[Savage Wombat]

When Prospero broke his staff, it should totally have done a retributive strike on the rest of the cast.

 

[Andor]

I thought this was going to be a Shakespeare thread, or at least a reference to last season of D&D Encounters.

Sorry to disappoint. Although why would I not want to see the tempest in 5e? A magic system that can handle Propero gaining his powers by stealing Ariel from Sycorax and binding Caliban would be pretty awesome.

Oh brave new sytem that has such classes in it!

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

5) Not all weapons are equal. Maces are better than clubs, that's why people paid smiths to make them, rather than just using handy tree roots. The bow is a better ranged weapon than the rock. The rock is not ineffective mind you, I would not want to catch a rock thrown by a major league pitcher. But an archer has got better range, better accuracy, possibly a higher rate of fire, and the arrow benefits from having pointy steel bits on to bring the pain. There should not be a "Devotee of the hurled shist" presitge class to try and make stone throwing the equal of archery.

While you make some excellent points, I'd like to point out a counterexample from 3.x: by the time the first guy became a competent stone thrower by taking some combination of weird PrCs, the second guy had become an awesome archer by taking one of the many PrCs just for archers.

This kind of thing drove me crazy during my 3.x years, because I'm a big fan of dual-wielding warriors. "I could throw together a bunch of multiclass and prestige levels to approximate my concept and not totally suck...or I could just grab a two-handed sword and power attack, and rock this house." *sigh*

 

[Klaus]

My problem with Tempset-like characters is that those always revolved around making as many attacks as possible in a given round, dragging out the combat. I'd prefer if such a character swiped the 4e Avenger schtick (two weapons means you roll two d20s and take the higher result).

 

[Sunseeker]

My problem with Tempset-like characters is that those always revolved around making as many attacks as possible in a given round, dragging out the combat. I'd prefer if such a character swiped the 4e Avenger schtick (two weapons means you roll two d20s and take the higher result).

Problem is: multiple attacks was how melee classes generated competitive damage at higher levels. I wouldn't be opposed to adding a die of damage to a weapon in replacement of allowing multiple attacks, but simply not having multiple attacks isn't a good solution.

Here's what I'm picturing: Maximum 2 attacks(one for each hand, or two for a single weapon). And something like a BAB where every 5-or-so levels you get to add an additional die of damage.
So with a Longsword:
lvl 1: 1d8
lvl6: 2d8
lvl11: 3d8
lvl16: 4d8
lvl20: 5d8.

Just some preliminary napkin math here, but this would keep melee characters in the game without allowing a million attacks per round, but still sustaining the approximate damage they would have done with those multiple attacks. That's a maximum of 80 damage per round at 20th level, which for 20th level I think is pretty reasonable.

 

[Piratecat]

I had a 3e Caliban -- err, lasher -- that's the most fun character I've ever played. Specialty classes per se don't really bother me.