D&D General The Monsters Know What They're Doing ... Are Unsure on 5e24

[GobHag]

The 2014 ones that are near identical or the newer ones?

Honestly, both. There's nothing eyecatching that makes me excited to use them from a medium glance.

 

[Minigiant]

I am this guy. Though I did read the DMG, multiple times.

In my book, streamlining this kind of things is 100 % beneficial to the game. I don't care for analyzing stat blocks and coming with supa dupa smart tactical moves, I'm not here for that. I'me here to help narrate a cool fight. Give me the numbers, I'll handle the words, thank you very much.

This rend is a bite. This rend is a claw. This rend is the dragon sitting its ass on your frail body.

Exactly

Especially since mechanically there is barely a difference. It's a moderate damage class with a high dage bite that is 33% a highly resisted damage type.

2014 was all looks.

 

[mamba]

Not to be overly flippant, but both are highly abstract mathematical models to use in a wargame scenario, that some flavor can be hung upon. That the 2024 version is a little more explicitly abstract is actually helpful in my book, but both are actually abstract.

oh yeah, of course they are, 2024 is too abstract and too ‘random’ for me however.

I can see the benefits too, a generic Rend lets you describe the fiction however you want, so is more flexible there, but at the price of a loss of detail.

A dragon with magic abilities just got one more of those and they called it Miasma, just more of the same.

I agree with those that say the changes are small and might not even justify buying the new books. The biggest change / reason to get them is probably the better organization and improved art. And yet they crossed a line for me that 2014 only treaded...

That I do not like the direction of the change does not help either, so 2024 just turned out to not be for me. I’ll take another look once 6e rolls around

 

[mamba]

According to wizards, The 2024 green dragon and many of the monsters were made that way because apparently some DMS were getting confused about using the attack patterns for creatures that have multiple attacks so what they did was make sure that every line of attack was a simple stream of damage that hit the damage threshold for its CR.

I agree with the goal, just not the execution. If you can have two claw attacks or one bite, make sure they both hit their CR instead of one being clearly inferior and only there for flavor (like the dagger attack on a mage)

 

[dave2008]

You've so extensively houseruled 5e that on more than one occasion I've seen you directly claim that 5e doesn't have a particular problem someone is venting about and defend that position for pages before finally admitting how you've houseruled some relevant aspect of the rules to avoid the problem in question. I don't even consider your heartbreaker edition to be 5e.

IDK. We have 1 page of houserules (which I have shared on these forums several times). That is the least amount of houserules we have had in any edition of D&D we have played (1e, 4e, & 5e). So, from our perspective, we are playing D&D more RAW now than ever!

To us, D&D = houserules and homebrew. I can't imagine playing D&D 100% RAW or playing and complaining about something when we can make an easy fix!

Also, what we are playing now is not my heartbreaker edition. I'm still working on that.

 

[mamba]

Miasma is a noxious vapor emanating from the body of the dragon. It's not hard to imagine such a feature from a creature who has a history of using a breath weapon that does poison damage.

except that it can appear up to 90 feet away in a location the dragon can see… if it were centered on the dragon I would not have an issue with it

 

[Bae'zel]

And unless you view Shadowrun as a "toolkit" to customize, you're pretty much stuck with urban fantasy cyberpunk. Where's my hard sci-fi planetary exploration setting for Shadowrun?

Is that supposed to be a "gotcha"?

Shadowrun is a much more narrow concept for a game than "fantasy" for D&D.

The AD&D 2e Ravenloft books had custom rules to curate the game to better "feel" like the setting the writers intended (banned spells, adjusted turning undead effects, etc).

So I stick with my previous statement that D&D has always been a toolkit for adjustment. I've mentioned some 3rd party companies who adjusted the rules to change the "feel" of the fantasy level. D&D did that too, officially for narrower concept settings like Ravenloft.

So I guess that "what is D&D" is entirely subjective. Hence why I disregard any comment of "this isn't D&D" when addressing custom rules adjustments onto the same framework. Adventures in Middle Earth, Brancalonia and Dark Souls WERE D&D to me. So is Obojima, Inferno and Apocalisse. Maybe not YOUR D&D.

 

[BenjaminPey]

except that it can appear up to 90 feet away in a location the dragon can see… if it were centered on the dragon I would not have an issue with it

I don't see the problem here. It's a miasma ball. Why should it differ from a fireball? Why is it more (or less) "realistic" or "believable "?

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Being perfectly frank?

The blogpost referenced by the OP, and several posters on this very forum, have sounded exactly the same to me.

Except they're 2014 fans pissing on 2024 as bad and wrong. Like I can literally return your bullets, point for point:

• Mechanics should never be a priority, and you are a thoughtless idiot (at least in this point) if you think it should
• Things don't have to function in an RPG, and you're thinking too hard if you think they should
• You just don't like it because it's different and you're a set in your ways grognard, rather than because of the actual effects it has on the play experience
• If you claim to understand the actual effects it has on the play experience and don't like them, you obviously are doing it wrong
• Etc

I didn't even need to change the third and fourth. They're literally the same point regardless of perspective. And yes, I 100% absolutely have seen people show nothing but venomous disdain for the very idea that caring about making a game that functions well as a game, because obviously anyone with a positive number of brain cells would only care about simulation.

We see the negativity that targets ourselves most. We do not see the negativity that targets those we disagree with.

It's not good when it's coming from the other side either.

I think the fundamental difference that is bothering me is that mingled in with the normal debate, when things move in a certain direction (which happened from 3e to 4e, and from 5e to 5.5e (though I obviously to a lesser extent)), there isn't just a preference battle, but a type of denial that the changes even happened. "I'm not seeing the problem, so it's not there."

I didn't see that when 5e 2014 was coming out. I did see (and participate in) offering advice on how to get more of what you want out of it if it veered too far from a preference for AD&D or 4e, but I didn't see prominent ongoing claims that 5e wasn't significantly different from what came before. It was acknowledged and discussed.

I should note that the statements of not seeing significant difference are more understandable now than they were in the 3e to 4e change due to being more subtle, and also acknowledge that it's possible I'm just not remembering such statements possibly appearing about the introduction of 5e. I'm also not denying that there are likely different hostile responses regarding changes in an opposite direction. There likely are, and they are likely different in character. Since that isn't the current design switch, discussion of it would better be explicitly framed as a discussion within a different context than added to the current topic.

I would love to have a dedicated discussion intended to illustrate the shifts and answer the questions of those who are honestly confused about the claims of a significant difference between 2014 5e and 2024 5e and want help to be able to see it, but I'm uncertain how to go about such a thing without heavy-handed discussion-specific moderation, because sometimes it's hard to see whether a comment is coming from a place of "I don't see a difference, but I believe there really is something there you are seeing that validly matters to you, and I would like you to help me understand how that all works," and "I don't see a real difference because there isn't one there, but I'd love to see you try to explain it so I can shoot holes in your reasoning rather than try to understand your delusion".

 

[mamba]

I don't see the problem here. It's a miasma ball. Why should it differ from a fireball? Why is it more (or less) "realistic" or "believable "?

yeah, as I said already, more magic that explains nothing