5e highlights reel?

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codeGlaze
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5e highlights reel?

Post by codeGlaze »

So... I'm typically limited in the time I can devote to wading through or big threads, but I *AM* curious as to what has come out of the "5e DoA thread.

Would someone, or somepeoples, be willing to post the highlights-so-far (good/bad/other) here? (I've noticed Ogre is pretty good at that kind of thing... do you keep a cache at home or something?)
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Post by Voss »

Highlights...
hmmm.

-Caster Edition (again).

-Bards are full casters now, and can get spells from other classes

-Most 4e influences were largely purged... in favor of 1e/2e influences. This is a mixed bag.

-Race/Class combos are pretty much set in stone. If you see a hill dwarf wizard or a tiefling anything, the player is probably doing it wrong. Alternately the DM went for rolled stats and someone got lucky/cheated.

-light armor sucks.

Hmm. Basics.
Class list: Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, Warlock, Wizard. Fighter and Rogue have spellcasting subclass 'paths'. But while they suck less, they still kind of suck.

Race list: dwarf (mountain, hill), elf (high, wood, drow), halfling (stout, lightfoot), gnome (rock, forest), human (variant: less stat bonuses, but bonus feat and proficiency, and that feat can really matter), dragonborn, half-elf, half-orc, tiefling.

There are a shitton of spells (~365) in the PH alpha document that is floating around, and include a lot of the just wacky stuff that got hacked out of the game. Wizards, unsurprisingly, get the largest array of choices. Also, all the specializations are back (including necromancy), though there is no penalty or drawback to being a specialist (and you must be).

- hobgoblins are murder machines, and an absurd number of preview monsters steal some aspect of sneak attack (as a 3rd level rogue) for... reasons.


Oh. The gold economy is fucked, crafting is horrible, and you can break it in two with a couple spells (including a cantrip). As written, however, the gold economy and the magic item economy don't really interact much, so it may not be a huge deal. But then, the DMG is essentially a mystery as this point, so there is plenty of room for them to fuck up.
Last edited by Voss on Tue Aug 05, 2014 1:24 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Grek »

Advantage: This is a new concept thing for 5e. Essentially, instead of circumstance bonuses, the DM lets you roll twice and take the better result. Disadvantage is the same thing, but you take the worse result. You only get one bonus die at most, but people still like to claim this will lead to dicepools.

BaB/skills/spell DC scaling: No longer exist. Instead, you have a Proficiency Bonus that applies to everything you're proficient in, be it a tool, a skill, a weapon or a spellcasting focus.

Actions: Are called "Action" (basically standard), "Movement" (basically move), "Bonus Action" (basically swift) and "Fuck You, We're Not Naming It or Referring To It As An Action" (free action). This naming scheme is generally regarded as incredibly foolish.

Fighters and other Noncasters: Are "balanced" by giving them bonuses in the action economy. Seriously. The Fighter gets a power where they get to take an extra Action on their turn once per fight. The Rogue gets the ability to move/hide/disengage as a Bonus Action. Monks get a Ki Pool, which lets them (among other things) buy extra attacks.

Naked Oiled Barbarians: Are in. Yay. Barbarians get a class ability to add 8 + Con to their AC if they elect not to wear armour.

Spell Preparation: Has changed unrecognizably. Spellcasters are all either spontaneous off a fixed list chosen when you level up (Sorcerer, Bard, Warlock) or off a list you choose when you regain your spell slots (Wizard, Cleric, Druid).

Cantrips: Are now At-Will. You can spam freezing ray all day every day, happy birthday. Warlocks get extra cantrips and less spells; Sorcerers get less cantrips and more spells.

Rituals: Let spellcasters cast spells with the [Ritual] tag known to them (or, for Wizards and Warlocks/people with the Ritualist Feat, have written in their spellbook/ritual book) by spending 10 minutes instead of a spell slot.

Magic Items: Cannot be bought for gold, with the exception of potions and scrolls. Given that the gold economy is screwy (see Voss for details) this is a good thing.
Last edited by Grek on Tue Aug 05, 2014 1:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

You can make infinite copies of yourself via simulacrum with your full casting power.

Shapechange lets you once again dumpster dive through the monster manual.

Skills appear to be "argue with the DM over what I can do"

Pretty much every class gets spells, including fighter and rogue (I don't think monk does).

The abilities as saves thing is still screwy: nothing targets int, there are ~2 effects that target cha (magic jar, the necromancer's command undead)

There is an incredible amount of Mother May I, with abilities such as the wild mage's wild surge not triggering unless the DM decides to call for a roll to skills being MTP to every other background being "if your DM allows it..."

All I can think of off the top of my head.
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Post by Voss »

Grek wrote:Fighters and other Noncasters: Are "balanced" by giving them bonuses in the action economy. Seriously. The Fighter gets a power where they get to take an extra Action on their turn once per fight. The Rogue gets the ability to move/hide/disengage as a Bonus Action. Monks get a Ki Pool, which lets them (among other things) buy extra attacks.

Naked Oiled Barbarians: Are in. Yay. Barbarians get a class ability to add 8 + Con to their AC if they elect not to wear armour.
Eh? Do you have access to a real copy? The alpha doc puts naked barb AC at 10+dex mod+ con mod. 8+Con mod is literally unbelievably good, as it is better than fucking plate mail.

Also, the fighter thing isn't quite 1 per fight, given the way short rests work (which is an hour). Unless the DM is seriously jacking it to the idea that each room being its own isolated sound stage, it doesn't work anywhere near that neatly.
CapnG wrote:Pretty much every class gets spells, including fighter and rogue (I don't think monk does).
The elemental path monk can burn ki to throw specific spells around. Given the ki pool is = level starting at level 2, being able to spend 4 ki to cast fireball (once you can do this at all at level 11), I'm not terribly impressed.
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Post by Grek »

I'm misremembering the AC numbers off a very early playtest document there, where AC worked like 15 + Dex for wearing Plate or something like that. Instead of 10 + Armour + Dex or 10 + Con + Dex for barbs.

In short: My mistake! Whoops!
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Post by Voss »

No problem. The sheer quantity of random changes is very confusing, especially if you followed the play tests (The last minute short rest change being the biggest piece of ridiculousness I can think of), so getting all the crazy shit confused is to be expected at this stage.

I've been perusing the spells lately, and trying to follow all the twists there is maddening. Even without the playtest versions, they're essentially 2e versions of 3e spells (and yes, that is as weird as it sounds, given that the 2e versions preceded the 3e versions), and sometimes given another twist: occasionally a smack of extra 1e flavor, or a bizarre 5e twist. That they left the damn material component 'jokes' in for nostalgia is extra maddening, since the obvious intent is to either handwave material components with the spell component pouch or replace them entirely with spellcasting foci.
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Post by Dogbert »

Some sound like good news, some sound like bad news... still, considering how Mearls did things like "getting some dudes to do the underlying math of the game" barely a month before hitting the printer, then I'd say that, until I read the actual books, the jury is still out in pretty much anything.
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Post by Voss »

Dogbert wrote:Some sound like good news, some sound like bad news... still, considering how Mearls did things like "getting some dudes to do the underlying math of the game" barely a month before hitting the printer, then I'd say that, until I read the actual books, the jury is still out in pretty much anything.
The math is... exploitable. AC, for example is clearly aimed at the mid teens with a slow progression up to 20. If you bother to optimize even a little you can just jump to the high teens/low 20s and have a pile of temporary buffs that go even higher, more or less off RNG, at least for early monsters.

Saving throws on the other hand, are always going to be dangerous. If you really work at it (multi-classing, feats) you can have goodsaves against everything, but you have to sacrifice a lot to pull that off. And while there is an extreme frequency error in saves (Dex comes up a lot, Con and Wis fairly often, and the rest are extremely close to never) the occasional time the rare ones do come up can really fuck you proper.
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Post by Username17 »

The highlights so far are:
  • Skills are total Mother May I. Also, you don't know what the skill list even is, because most of the skills take the form of "tool proficiencies." So there's no skill that makes you good at card games, but if you look elsewhere you can find that you can be "proficient in playing cards" which is the same thing. There is no master list of what proficiencies are available, and no real guidelines as to what the vast majority of potential tool proficiencies do.
  • The DCs are still fucked.
  • All of the promises they've made over the years about the grand scheme of things are broken. Modularity is a joke, bounded accuracy is just for other people (holy shit, look at those Dragon numbers), the auto-success crap has simply been abandoned, and so on.
  • The five minute workday is in. Like whoa is the five minute workday in. High level wizards only get one spell of each spell level per day, so there's no point that you ever don't feel the draw of bed after one combat even if you're just being a blaster mage. But even the warrior types need an hour of rest between battles to refresh their bonus attacks and shit. Apparently the big problem with 4e was that people sometimes had more than one setpiece combat in a session.
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Post by MfA »

Is movement still an action? You can split up however you want including in between extra attacks right?
Last edited by MfA on Tue Aug 05, 2014 10:22 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Dean »

I think it's fair to include as a highlight that the game appears playable. Literally everything that has been said so far is true but I have been extremely impressed with how tolerable a product they have created. It's not good but it's completely passable and for Mike Mearls making something passable is a slam fucking dunk. I am, in all sincerity, extremely impressed with the mediocrity that 5e has achieved.
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Post by Longes »

Voss wrote:-Race/Class combos are pretty much set in stone. If you see a hill dwarf wizard or a tiefling anything, the player is probably doing it wrong. Alternately the DM went for rolled stats and someone got lucky/cheated.
Oh? What's wrong with tieflings?
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Post by Username17 »

Dean wrote:I think it's fair to include as a highlight that the game appears playable. Literally everything that has been said so far is true but I have been extremely impressed with how tolerable a product they have created. It's not good but it's completely passable and for Mike Mearls making something passable is a slam fucking dunk. I am, in all sincerity, extremely impressed with the mediocrity that 5e has achieved.
The thing is that while the core game is a kind of stupid "ask the DM if you can do something, and if he says yes, you can roll a d20" non-system, I don't see how it scales up at all. The AC munchkin that Voss talked about can bulldozer low level crap, but even the small dragon from the first adventure has a +15 attack bonus, and hits that AC of 22 on a 7+. Even at 1st level, a pile of Hobgoblins can just randomly blow up your party in two rounds with some good rolls, and the complete failure of the whole "bounded accuracy" thing means that boss monsters rapidly break the RNG and red mist anything that gets into their reach.

And the lack of scaling is kind of worse in the non-combat portions. Once you hit the stat max and get a proficiency bonus, that's it. You're never going to kick down an iron door or climb a wall of ice, because the maximum bonuses on these tasks are basically available to 1st level mundane characters.

5e is a 1st level D&D simulator, and not a terribly good one. It doesn't even attempt to simulate 5th level D&D or 15th level D&D.

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Post by TiaC »

Oh, you exaggerate. Your bonus on a non-combat task should increase by a whole +5 in 20 levels.
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Post by Voss »

Longes wrote:
Voss wrote:-Race/Class combos are pretty much set in stone. If you see a hill dwarf wizard or a tiefling anything, the player is probably doing it wrong. Alternately the DM went for rolled stats and someone got lucky/cheated.
Oh? What's wrong with tieflings?
Basically they don't fit anything. Now some people will tell you that their +2 charisma is perfectly fine for making paladins, sorcerers, bards or warlocks. But the simple fact is that 5e classes care about their primary stat first, Dex second (unless they can wear heavy armor, in which case they don't at all), Con third (HP is always good), and wisdom last (for perception checks). Whatever stats are leftover don't matter at all,which makes the +1 int utterly useless.

A tiefling paladin has no ability to push its strength (attacks) above 15 (i.e., to +3).
A sorcerer, bard or warlock has no ability to push its dex above 15. So weapon attacks and AC are stuck below even the most basic minimum threshold.

Add in spell like abilities that don't really matter and situational fire resistance, and you've got a race that isn't good at being any kind of adventurer.
MfA wrote:Is movement still an action? You can split up however you want including in between extra attacks right?
No, it isn't. On your turn you get your movement and your action. And thats it. Except you can also interact with one thing as a 'not an action,' but that doesn't include everything.

But yes, you can split move up. You can even split it before/after your single action. So jumping out of cover to get a clear shot to blast something and then running back is a thing you can do.
Last edited by Voss on Tue Aug 05, 2014 12:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

So. Once people get over the squee of 'they brought back basic-book monster summoning and classic magic missile!' it looks like 5E D&D is going to go down in flames. I mean, look, they fucked up the basic interface of the game. What the fuck is with that action economy shit?

Seriously, does this edition do anything better than another edition that would work as a talking point? Sure, it does certain things better than other editions, but it doesn't do anything better nor does it add any new ideas that people would think are cool. Hell, at least 4Erries could go to the mattresses with 'skill challenges, people stay on the RNG, no rocket launcher-tag, and they fixed the fighter!'

Also, how are the digital tools coming along? I've noticed people mewling about Silverlight here and there, but nothing definite. It's certainly nothing rising to the level of what DDI was supposed to be.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Tue Aug 05, 2014 12:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by FatR »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Hell, at least 4Erries could go to the mattresses with 'skill challenges, people stay on the RNG, no rocket launcher-tag, and they fixed the fighter!'
Those who ride 5E's hype train seem to put the main emphasis on "things are simplified and streamlined now".

Which was eminently used in marketing of every edition starting with 3.0.

OK, maybe Pathfinder did not claim to simplify shit.

And while I do strongly agree that 3.0 and derivatives are needlessly complex and overtly fiddly, simplification is only a virtue when you still offer the same basic functionality. Which 5E clearly doesn't.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

FatR wrote:Those who ride 5E's hype train seem to put the main emphasis on "things are simplified and streamlined now".
...and then things immediately implode once you come into contact with the proficiency system, action division system, and the advantage/disadvantage system. Like, not at a later date once you get a few levels in, but during the first campaign. So 'simplified and streamlined' is going only to last for a couple of months, then nothing.

You'll note that 4Erries stopped talking about the skill challenge system but a few months in, because it was obviously and immediately broken. The balanced party and everything staying on the RNG talking points were false as well, but it took a lot longer before we could reveal those talking points as false.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

FatR wrote: Those who ride 5E's hype train seem to put the main emphasis on "things are simplified and streamlined now".
Which was eminently used in marketing of every edition starting with 3.0. .
At the very start, we outlined the goals: to make it easier to find things, to make the rules easier to understand, to fix things that did not work,..

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Post by Rawbeard »

So what is wrong with having a dex of 15 instead of 16? Does that change fundamentally how the game works? Because otherwise the Tiefling angst is pretty fucking retarded.

Also you can just "roll" 18 primary and dex no problem, so herp derp, that's a shitty argument, but rolling as default and capped point buy are stupid enough for me to not care.

I for one laugh at drow. That shit is hilarious.
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Post by Laertes »

Rawbeard wrote:I for one laugh at drow. That shit is hilarious.
I'd like to hear this rant; not because I have an opinion of my own but because I like hearing people rant. What's hilarious about drow?
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Re: 5e highlights reel?

Post by OgreBattle »

codeGlaze wrote:(I've noticed Ogre is pretty good at that kind of thing... do you keep a cache at home or something?)
I take notes on good design practices.
Most of the writing I've got related to 5e are more "This is what it would be like if it wasn't bad" and not actually a part of the 5e rules set.
Last edited by OgreBattle on Tue Aug 05, 2014 7:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Voss »

Rawbeard wrote:So what is wrong with having a dex of 15 instead of 16? Does that change fundamentally how the game works? Because otherwise the Tiefling angst is pretty fucking retarded.
How the game works? No. But given how few choices you have, and how few bonuses you can accrue, once you're behind the stat game, you're underperforming for the entire scope of most campaigns. With most classes, you get stat improvements at 4, 8 and 12. At 8, your primary stat should be maxed. That gives you 12 to _start_ improving your defenses.

That 15 dex caps your defenses for most of the functional tiefling classes at...14 or 15. Which is a great place to get ganked (and outright murdered at low levels).

The big issue with character creation in 5e is you don't get much in the way of choices at all*, and if you do make a wrong choice (and there are plenty of traps), you are fucked forever.

*essentially, race/class/stats at level 1, path somewhere between 1 and 3 (depending on class), and what stat to increase (or to go with a feat) at 4, 8, 12, 16 & 19. (With some mild variation, primarily for mundane classes, like also 6th for fighter and 10th for rogue). Those are all the choices you are allowed to make for your character, ever, other than spell selection.

Choosing tiefling is deliberately choosing to jump into a trap at choice #1.
Also you can just "roll" 18 primary and dex no problem, so herp derp, that's a shitty argument, but rolling as default and capped point buy are stupid enough for me to not care.
I honestly don't care about rolled stats. It is so dysfunctional as to be completely meaningless.

I for one laugh at drow. That shit is hilarious.
Drow get useful class builds. They also get to hand out advantage to the party via faerie fire. The sunlight thing is an serious issue (assuming it stays), but for spell casting classes, easily ignored.
Last edited by Voss on Tue Aug 05, 2014 7:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Rawbeard »

how is not having 1 point of dex a trap? You repeat that over and over, but how does having ac 17 differ from ac 16 in a way that you can say "well, this race does not work for anyone ever"? And if you wear medium armor your dex of more than 14 doesn't matter anyway for that part of your defenses. So... wtf? in light and no armor you'll get curb stomped anyway, so again, why care?

I really don't get what the deal is with that. At all.
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