The Gaming Den

So I finally ended up actually playing in a 5E campaign. How is this thing so poorly organized? The Wizard says it starts with an Arcane Focus (no reference to what this is), the index says Arcane Focus -> see Spell Focus, then Spell Focus -> see Chapter 5, and Chapter 5 says Spell Focus -> See Chapter 10, which finally has the rules.

Also my character is the only one with any non-combat abilities worth noting and his familiar is more useful than the entire party (including the wizard himself). Everyone's combat abilities are almost identical except the monk who's strictly better than the paladin.

What are these rules even supposed to be accomplishing?

If your Monk is strictly better than your Paladin, either your Paladin is playing wrong or your GM relies heavily on playing paper against the Paladin's rock. Or maybe you're just playing before his smiting powers come online.

It's first level, which I'd naively think is the most likely to be balanced of any level. It's also entirely possible that the paladin is playing wrong though.

Yea I have no idea what 1st level 5e wizards are supposed to contribute in combat other than cantrips, the 1st level list has been so carefully pruned of useful offensive effects.

It's basically pathfinder where there are less good spells but you end up just taking the three that don't suck. Hypnotic Pattern, away!

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Yea I have no idea what 1st level 5e wizards are supposed to contribute in combat other than cantrips, the 1st level list has been so carefully pruned of useful offensive effects.

It's basically pathfinder where there are less good spells but you end up just taking the three that don't suck. Hypnotic Pattern, away!

You pray your GM picked kobolds instead of one of the random low level monsters with weirdly inflated hitpoints and spam sleep, pretty much.

Like in 3e, 5e's 1st and 2nd levels are best suited for people who have no idea how "roll a d20 and add a bonus to see if you hit the goblin" works and will need some time to wrap their heads around it before getting real class features. Generally speaking, you should start at 3rd level.

So far as I can tell, 5e is for the most part equally broken at all levels, because its CR system is completely fucked so there's no telling what the balance point of any given level is even supposed to be. The one stand-out broken build, though, is the skeleton lord necromancer, who reaches maximum brokenness somewhere around 11th level.

Things in 5e are so swingy that characters being MVP is more a result of statistical aberrations than it is of actual numbers on the character sheet. I played a bit where my Druid was the undisputed stealth MVP because I just rolled the highest four times in a row. Druids don't have any special stealth abilities, I just rolled high and managed to be the best scout.

I could easily see a Monk shitting all over a Paladin at low levels. Combat is very random and the difference between the most relevant combat package and the least relevant combat package is not very large. Significantly smaller than the variance produced by the RNG.

-Username17

We've had a bit of that already too. Which is to be expected when you're using a system that thinks the difference between a +3 and a +2 on a d20 is supposed to differentiate anything.

The monk/paladin comment was from comparing the numbers on their sheets though, not outcomes. After checking, it seems the paladin's numbers ended up as bad as they are by choosing to use a war hammer in two hands. So they ended up with lower AC and lower expected damage.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Yea I have no idea what 1st level 5e wizards are supposed to contribute in combat other than cantrips

Firebolt isn't that much worse than what anyone else is doing. And there are decent battlefield control spells.

Well does anybody think that D&D 5e could at least make for good V A P O R W A V E ?

Shrieking Banshee wrote:Well does anybody think that D&D 5e could at least make for good V A P O R W A V E ?

been there, done that

nockermensch wrote:

Shrieking Banshee wrote:Well does anybody think that D&D 5e could at least make for good V A P O R W A V E ?

been there, done that

I assumed so but this thread is massive.

P.S: Frank, I'm quoting those lists on a future comic. I hope you don't mind.

For any in doubt, that necromancer thing is real. I suggested a friend who's playing some kind of persistent world 5e game play a necromancer offhand and he accidentally fought 1 v 4 with the rest of his party and it ended up being a draw simply because he hid and refused to actually participate in the actual fight. Though the most telling part to me is that no one questioned why he was able to do that at around 8th level. He didn't even really seem to grasp how odd it was until I said something after he told me the story.

I think that the people who have taken to 5e are mostly ok with how it plays and believe that this kind of shit is completely acceptable.

Dean wrote:Not to mention the actual sourcebooks that are created are clearly made of 1 years worth of lunch articles apiece and as such are as broad and vague as possible because they don't have any theme. If you take out the proper nouns from the last 3 sourcebooks released their titles are "Adventurers Guide" "Guide to Everything" and "Guide to Monsters". That is 3 guides to
1: adventurers
2: monsters, and
3: everything.

If that was someones first draft I would call it insultingly generic and unimaginative, nevermind the actual sourcebooks that have gone to print.

Slight slight deviation from the pattern here but still pretty close...

4. [tome of] foes
https://io9.gizmodo.com/get-a-downright ... 1825959601

Yeah, they are continuing the pattern of 2 books per year, one is an adventure pile, and the other is a "loose collection of essays" pile. The loose collection of essays book is the one that has any rules in it, but those rules are also just random scribblings on a broad range of topics.

The Infernal Cults thing being previewed is truly impressive in a way. Not in the sense that it's in any way good, but in the sense of "That's all you're making for the year?"

• Those are obviously straight powerups, not charging anything for them is clearly wrong and failing to come up with any kind of system to pay for these abilities is insane.
• The signature spells are mostly meaningless in the sense that they are optional tradeouts for spells on the spell lists of people who already have spells and thus probably already have at least some of these spells. Having that fill 3 lines of text per cult is obscene.
• The descriptions of the cult goals and the descriptions of typical cult members are both too telegraphic to actually do anything with. Geryon cults want to destroy their opposition... uh huh. But why are they opposed to any group in the first place? What are they actually trying to do that would bring them into conflict that would cause them to have adversaries that they wanted to destroy? What the actual fuck? The typical membership starts with "Bandits" and "Bandit Captains." Bandit Captains are Bandits you fucking assholes!
• The book manages to lay out less than 3 cults per page, which considering that this is a hardbound book means that you could get a 350 word essay on each cult and still have art. But they don't do that. Some of it is a space filling format, but mostly it's just that the pages have a lot of fucking white space on them. On the first sample page, fully a third of the fucking page is just blank white space. That's not me taking a dig about how some fucking poem about sheep in DaVinci Forward Regular is basically White Space, I mean in addition to that is also has actual fucking nothing in it at all white space.

-Username17

"Bandit" and "bandit captain" refers to specific stat blocks at the end of the Monster Manual. The "typical members" isn't fluff, it's a function call to existing stat blocks that GMs can use to populate the cult.

The spells are even worse than they look at first glance, though. Baalzebul, Fierna, and Dispater all have purely Wizard spells, which means if you're a Wizard you benefit from those extra spells only to the extent that you do not have to go to the trouble of adding them to your spellbook from other sources. Not only that, but each of those three draws from a specific wizard school (illusion, enchantment, and divination, respectively) which means that if you are not only a Wizard but specifically the kind of Wizard who is most in theme for these cults, odds are spectacular that you were going to learn those spells anyway. And if you joined the cult after hitting fifth level, you probably already had those spells. Which just makes it all the more clear that this was clearly intended as an exclusively NPC-facing option, built for people whose entire stat block was created knowing in advance they would be level 5+, no less and no more, when they saw actual play.

This reminded me of a Skyrim Mod: Organized Bandits in Skyrim which adds several bandit gangs into the game. While the purpose of this is to add a little variety, it comes with a book that containts bit of lore for each gang that tells you about their traits, motivations and so forth. like "These guys are rogue ice mages out to gain power" or "This gang is made of fallen aristocrats obsessed with retaining their former status and wealth" or "these guys are an extension of an order of assassins from another country"

It's just few goddamn sentences, but still way better than this at telling you what they're about, and this is a mod for Skyrim, where most people probably don't care who their face-stabbing.

Chamomile wrote:"Bandit" and "bandit captain" refers to specific stat blocks at the end of the Monster Manual. The "typical members" isn't fluff, it's a function call to existing stat blocks that GMs can use to populate the cult.

You're right. However, that makes it even worse. I mean first of all there's the really obvious thing where not all of the cults bother to list any monsters. The cult of Baazebul is just "any monster or NPC" which what the actual fuck?! But then when you think about it, having gone to all the trouble to select some specific monsters out of the monster manual for (several of) the cults, why the fuckity fucksticks didn't they draw up nominally level appropriate encounters for any level of encounter? The first two suggestions for cultists of Fierna are Acolyte and Archmage. The Archmage is an 18th level wizard and the Acolyte is an apprentice level Cleric. What the shit? What is the encounter you're supposed to make out of those building blocks?

-Username17

All the powers are NPC only despite a warlock who serves demons being in the PHB.

Uhhhhhh....

I get that letting PCs have it would be Elder Evils style bullshit power creep, but maybe this would be a time for some more feats or some shit so you can get players to buy this book?