D&D 5e has failed

[Prak]

Because Death is bad and totally not a natural part of life, mkay?

[Koumei]

And casting a euthanize spell is much more evil than bashing someone's head in with a rock until their brain oozes out, like most adventurers are doing!

(Yes, I'm sure there is in fact no euthanize spell, and the Death domain is entirely shit.)

[Lago PARANOIA]

So according to the 5E DMG, the death domain is evil, but torturing can be done in the name of good. Makes sense to me.

[violence in the media]

So according to the 5E DMG, the death domain is evil, but torturing can be done in the name of good. Makes sense to me.

Was this game written by the CIA?

[fectin]

The thing to remember is that 3e is the edition where they deliberately tried to make Diablo-style items. Diablo 2 items don't do interesting things for the most part as a design choice because it's a lot easier to program that way.

To test this theory, I am about to grab the nearest book and look through the items.

Okay. The closest books were core and monster manuals, so I had to go to the bookshelf. The closest one there was Frostburn:
A dozen news weapons. Most are piles of stats, but the harpoon adds effects.
Gear is piles of stats plus a funny tent.
Alchemical items are largely piles of stats, plus chalk, a powder that melts snow, and a powder that creates a small terrain effect.
Materials include blue ice, which is the basis of many exploits, Rimefire ice, which is like wood, and Stygian ice, which is a pile of stats with nice fluff.
Magic Items:
- A gem that radiates either happy or sad, and can be destroyed for a random permanent stat bonus
- Various figurines of Animal Buddy
- Various items that cast spells on command
- A chunk of magic ice, constantly surrounded by snow, that slowly turns a 15-mile radius to permanent winter
- a mantle that hides your alignment and deity
- a ring that lets you turn into a half-dragon
- an alternate potion form
- a vial of making ice slippery

Overall, I'd say more pile-of-stats items than I realized, but it's not really overwhelming.

[Prak]

What are the exploits based on blue steel? Looks like cold mithral to me.

[Username17]

Overall, I'd say more pile-of-stats items than I realized, but it's not really overwhelming.

You also picked up Frostburn, which is widely regarded as being one of the best 3.5 books in terms of coming up with new out-of-the-box content. It's the best of the "It's [Blank] Outside" books and those in turn are probably the most flavorful and interesting of the book series that 3.5 delivered for expansion content. Way ahead of, for example, the Races of Short series.

Now read through the Magic Item Compendium and just cry.

-Username17

[Emerald]

Now read through the Magic Item Compendium and just cry.

-Username17

To be fair to the MIC, that's the book whose reason for existence is one part "oops, we just realized no one's buying the vastly overpriced junk in the DMG, let's make a book of nothing but cheap items instead of errata-ing the DMG prices" and one part "let's see if the players will fall in love with our proto-4e scheme of making every item a boring swift-action daily-charged piece of crap." With those design goals, how could it possibly be anything but terrible?

A better comparison is to It's Wet Outside and It's Hot Outside. The former adds one non-pile-of-stats armor (living coral with paralyzing polyps), D&D equivalents to scuba gear and life preservers, and two stylish hats with no mechanical effect on top of a dozen or so pile-of-stats weapons and armor and a handful of skill bonus items. For magical stuff, it has riverine (the shapable wall of force material), armor that lets you survive at the bottom of the ocean, a shirt that turns you into a mini sailboat, a ring that lets aquatic creatures go on land, a nifty captain's hat and coat with minor buffing abilities, magic sails, several figurines of Animal Buddy, a dragon figurehead that eats enemies and makes your ship immune to one energy type, a helm that plane shifts a ship once per day, and wheels that turn land vehicles into water vehicles.

The latter, in terms of mundane gear, adds pile-of-stats weapon and armor, a random assortment of desert survival gear like sunscreen and tents, and a few uninspiring mounts and vehicles; it also adds shapesand, a mentally-shapable substance that can replace pretty much any nonconsumable mundane gear you need, which is cool but doesn't quite make up for the shortage of other interesting mundane equipment. Magic-wise, it has a ring that turns you into a sand elemental, a bottle of endless sand, more figurines of Animal Buddy, a folding sand boat, a telescope that you can use to teleport yourself or things you see, and some instant construction items (a lava tunnel, a fountain, and a well).

I'd say both Stormwrack and Sandstorm are comparable to Frostburn in terms of number of interesting/useful items and ratio of interesting items to pile-of-stats items; I don't have Cityscape or Dungeonscape on hand but I imagine they have a good bunch of interesting items as well, and I recall most of the Complete books having at least a handful of interesting items. There are certainly lots of pile-of-stats items in 3e, but I think dismissing 3e items as "Diablo-style" is overstating things.

[K]

Frostburn, Stormwrack, and Sandstorm are actually the worst books to look at for magic items because they follow the 2e style of magic items a lot more closely than the majority of 3e material. (Remember, 2e is the edition where a fighter with a Vorpal Sword was actually as valuable as a Wizard in battle and the edition where he might even have some crazy nonsense like Rings of Invisibility or a Cloak of the Bat because he couldn't sell them for something else.)

The DnD material that you actually look at is adventures and PC gear. Both NPCs and PCs in 3e are almost entirely combinations of +stat gear for the simple reason that no one could afford to not use +stat gear. At best, characters in 3e might rock a few scrolls or potions because they didn't contribute significantly toward the next +1 on an Amulet of Natural Armor or a sword.

This means that 3e is about +stat gear with the option for DMs to occasionally toss in stuff like the odd Apparatus of Qwalish-type magguffin for a specific adventure or a Cloak of the Montebank for a villain "fuck you" to the players.

[Eikre]

To be fair to the MIC, that's the book whose reason for existence is one part "oops, we just realized no one's buying the vastly overpriced junk in the DMG, let's make a book of nothing but cheap items instead of errata-ing the DMG prices" and one part "let's see if the players will fall in love with our proto-4e scheme of making every item a boring swift-action daily-charged piece of crap." With those design goals, how could it possibly be anything but terrible?

I've got a soft spot for the MIC. Unlike the other splats which we now recognize specifically as test balloons, MIC seems more like an incremental attempt to retrospectively make good on some of the conceits introduced and subsequently failed way back when 3E was first published.

In 2000, it was pretty clear that they want you to care about the opportunity cost of filling a magic item slot, and that they wanted the logarithmic wealth-by-level to give you a sense of progress by giving you only enough purchasing power to buy one or two of the many over-leveled treasures you wanted, but always with enough left over from those purchases that you could buy many of the more moderately priced treasures that you used to covet, illustrating how you'd moved beyond the scarcity of that marketplace.

But of course, in 2000, you don't care about cape slots, because there's only one cape that matters, and you don't care about having four times as much money as yesterday or a quarter of the wealth of tomorrow, because all the level-appropriate trinkets are an entire order of financial magnitude removed from that range.

If they were in a mood to, they could have scrapped the underlying concept completely and published something weird that didn't really look like the edition they already had, as a means of test-ballooning for the new edition. That's probably how Weapons of Legacy was written. They didn't do that, though, they just try to get the concept behind the edition they already have done as well as it can be done. And they revisit the 2000 zeitgeist so hard that Diablo II set items end up being part of the package like seven years after that kind of thing blows anybody's minds. But it's an honest work that really tries to make 3.5 a little more complete, rather than just just tacking more shit on, and given that it's one of the capstone works of the edition, I really appreciate that.

[fectin]

I really despise both MiC and SpC, but that may be personal quirk.

The Outside books tend to be blander than the Completes anyway. Complete Scoundrel (again, first I found) has many ways to hide potions, options for bypassing immunities for fighters (ghostblight, etc.), and druid armor. The magic weapons are at least oddball stat bonuses, and there's a cheap magic trick ring. Wondrous are largely more PoS, but do include the snakeflute, the hat that replaces fort saves with concentration checks, jumping caltrops, Dr. Who-style lie-paper, a secret possum pouch, rope that turns hard, sandals of not-quite-spider-climb, spool of endless rope, and vials of dead-person breath.

That's a pretty decent spread for a splat.

[Amalie Gaston]

Cleric Death domain is an evil-only PC option in DMG, requiring explicit GM's approval. Kelemvor and Wee Jas are both Lawful Neutral. Bite my shiny metal ass, 5e.

The DMG doesn't seem to agree with itself on whether the Death domain is evil-only. On the one hand, it says

The Death Domain is an additional domain choice for evil clerics, and the Oathbreaker offers an alternative path for paladins who fall from grace. A player can choose one of these options with the your [sic] approval.

On the other hand, while the rules for Oathbreaker explicitly say a paladin must be 3rd level and evil to become an Oathbreaker, there is no such text for the Death domain. They even mention Wee Jas as a possible deity. Presumably a LN cleric of the LN deity can have the deity's domain. Further, in the DMG's sample pantheon on page 14, the LN deity the Raven Queen has the Death domain. In the deity appendix of the PHB, the LN deities Kelemvor, Wee Jas, and Anubis all have the Death domain. Hell, the CG deity Nephthys has (only) the death domain. Presumably she doesn't have only evil clerics...

[mean_liar]

Codename: Morningstar has moved to target Pathfinder as its undergirding system. LOL 5e.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tr ... r?ref=card

[Previn]

Codename: Morningstar has moved to target Pathfinder as its undergirding system. LOL 5e.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tr ... r?ref=card

They want half a million?

[Omegonthesane]

Codename: Morningstar has moved to target Pathfinder as its undergirding system. LOL 5e.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tr ... r?ref=card

They want half a million?

By my reckoning that makes 500,000 suckers willing to invest the money they'd have spent on another pizza at their next game. Assuming I've done my currency conversion correctly and the US isn't amazingly less expensive than the UK.

[Omegonthesane]

Codename: Morningstar has moved to target Pathfinder as its undergirding system. LOL 5e.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tr ... r?ref=card

They want half a million?

By my reckoning that makes 50,000 suckers willing to invest the money they'd have spent on another pizza at their next game. Assuming I've done my currency conversion correctly and the US isn't amazingly less expensive than the UK.

The first 643 suckers have raised more than $6,430 as well.

[MfA]

On the one hand I like the concept of the Forge, a community site where you can easily share/download maps/encounters/adventures/modules which you can drop into your campaign should really be part of every VTT.

On the other I can't help but think they are another one of those IT failures WotC is so talented at finding.

[Lago PARANOIA]

They want half of a million dollars after bungling their last project?

Don't get me wrong, I've seen Internet posters say that WotC's bad project management was to blame instead of the company (since the iOS version gets more praise than the desktop version) but vaporware is vaporware. When a project goes under, the client almost never gets the blame unless the failure was egregious.

[Orca]

By my reckoning that makes 50,000 suckers willing to invest the money they'd have spent on another pizza at their next game. Assuming I've done my currency conversion correctly and the US isn't amazingly less expensive than the UK.

The first 643 suckers have raised more than $6,430 as well.

I'd assume that some of the first pledged money is the equivalent of a busker putting money in their instrument case before starting playing - people in their team putting up the company's money to make it look like it's doing well.

[Hadanelith]

While possible, that is directly against Kickstarter's terms of service.

[Ghremdal]

The kickstarter looks dead in the water though. 40k raised, 390k left to go, and 20 days left.

[erik]

The kickstarter looks dead in the water though. 40k raised, 390k left to go, and 20 days left.

Erfworld's creator is pimping that kickstarter but looks like to no avail. Just check out the comments below the pimping post.

[ACOS]

The kickstarter looks dead in the water though. 40k raised, 390k left to go, and 20 days left.

Yeah, they had a strong start the first couple of days; but that dried up real quick.

Erfworld's creator is pimping that kickstarter but looks like to no avail. Just check out the comments below the pimping post.

It's also "cloud" based, so you never have any control over your stuff, you're a slave to your internet connection, your purchase is only good as long as the company is solvent and never takes down their servers, etc.

This sentiment really stood out to me as a major factor. At least, it would certainly be a deal-breaker for me (if I cared about pathfinder) - especially with it being a start-up and all; if it were from an established company with foreseeable stability, that may be a different story.

[Ghremdal]

I read the pitch, and watched the video and I still have no idea what they are selling. I mean I get what they are getting at but it seems like vaporware to me.

I get the same vibe from them as I do from enthusiastic, but slightly crazy inventors who approach me claiming they broke the conservation of energy principle and if I could just help them hammer out a few equations and we will both be rich.

Maybe its not all WotC's fault for not being able to provide digital tools.

[ishy]

Maybe it is just me being paranoid, but I got the vibe trapdoor never planned on delivering for wotc in the first place.
That they only used wotc for name recognition.