D&D General The Beautiful Mess of 5e

[bedir than]

The Crips and the Bloods. It's been a weird few years.

Gnomes v. Halflings was right there and you missed it.

 

[bedir than]

That

• They (and the playerbase) currently do plug and play from 5e adjacent systems which is also a great thing for the playerbase;
• The D&D player base is primarily split in 2 and I would imagine it be quite concerning for WotC;
• That the entire history of the game, particularly adventures of any edition are very easy to integrate;
• The Twilight Cleric is ridiculous and the Light Cleric did not need Fireball;
• They did not integrate 5e systems purposefully so (HD comes to mind); as well as
• Mearls admitting the 5e Fireball is not great given the hit points of monsters (which is something that was intuitive to me early on), and that some other math in the game needs work...

These are personally my biggest take-aways as they serve as confirmations of my own thoughts.

I think the plug and play throughout 5e ecosystem being popular in this panel's audience is self-selecting. it's a panel on the full ecosystem with people who advocate for mix and matching. That audience was always going to be people who do it or think about doing it

 

[Charlaquin]

His main argument is that after seeing the game in action blast spells, particularly AOEs, are underpowered in general and that fireball is closer to where they ought to be. That's not the stance they had when designing 5.0, but over time at least Mearls has come to that conclusion. Part of the reason they got it wrong is, I believe, that they hadn't accounted for how many hit points 5e monsters have, so they didn't really realize that you had to go down to like CR 1 monsters for a fireball to actually start clearing out monsters and thereby reduce the incoming damage from them.

Oh! Ok, so he’s not saying that they didn’t intentionally overtune blast spells, but rather that their initial math probably lowballed blast spells too much, and so what they thought of as overtuning them at the time turns out in hindsight to have put their damage right about where it should be.

That makes WAY more sense to me.

 

[Charlaquin]

They did not integrate 5e systems purposefully so (HD comes to mind); as well as

Would you be able to elaborate on that a bit more? I don’t quite understand what this means.

 

[mamba]

What are the camps?

I assume 5.0 vs 5.5, will know more after I walked the dogs

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Oh! Ok, so he’s not saying that they didn’t intentionally overtune blast spells, but rather that their initial math probably lowballed blast spells too much, and so what they thought of as overtuning them at the time turns out in hindsight to have put their damage right about where it should be.

That makes WAY more sense to me.

I have a player that loves fireball, always plays wizards in a group that tend to be caster heavy and in my experience over the last 10 years is that bast spells in general are less effective to spells that attack the action economy like hypnotic pattern and similar spells.

 

[TwoSix]

What are the camps?

Socs and Greasers. Stay gold, Ponyboy.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I have a player that loves fireball, always plays wizards in a group that tend to be caster heavy and in my experience over the last 10 years is that bast spells in general are less effective to spells that attack the action economy like hypnotic pattern and similar spells.

The Wizard-as-Batman meme build in 3E was seen as massively overpowered for a reason.

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

The Crips and the Bloods.

 

[Teemu]

His main argument is that after seeing the game in action blast spells, particularly AOEs, are underpowered in general and that fireball is closer to where they ought to be. That's not the stance they had when designing 5.0, but over time at least Mearls has come to that conclusion. Part of the reason they got it wrong is, I believe, that they hadn't accounted for how many hit points 5e monsters have, so they didn't really realize that you had to go down to like CR 1 monsters for a fireball to actually start clearing out monsters and thereby reduce the incoming damage from them.

It is kind of funny that the exact same lesson was learned during 3.5. And 4e. And now again with 5e.