5e highlights reel?

[Voss]

My PH finally arrived (Amazon deep discount strikes again). I'm amazed (well, amazed, but not surprised) at how wildly inconsistent things are. A bunch of spells from even the beta version were hacked out with a axe (including, notably, Divine Power), and the number of options that just suck ass is really high.

In particular, they really struggle with level appropriate abilities. Hold person is a second level spell. But spell monks have to wait till 6th, and spell thieves get it at 7th. And everything get worse from there: spell monks get fly at 11th, and wall of stone at 17th, which is fuck all crazy.

Moon (wild shape focus) druids are really good from level 2-4, then increasingly start dribbling out their ears in animal form. Chain warlocks get a fairly nice pet in the imp (which is flat out better than the quasit) or sprite (which is better than the pseudodragon).... but they don't scale. Ever. The semi decent poisonous invisible dude at level 3 is completely irrelevant by level 5 (when cantrips scale), except maybe a couple spying duties.
And I can't even fucking fathom the invocations that give you a once per day spell that also burns a spell slot when you use it. If you wanted those specific spells, you should have picked another class. Give yourself temporary hit points for free instead.


And wow... clerics. Um, their spell list is really kind of bad. Healing and minimal support exists, but save or lose spells have largely been removed (well, Contagion excepted, which druids also get), and their damage spells are a terrible joke. Conjure Celestial is at 7th, but summons a CR 4, while Conjure Elemental is at 5th for Druids and Wizards and summons a CR 5.

I could go on, but for the 'optimization free' edition, this has a fuckload of traps and a desperate need to optimize just to survive the damage output and insanely high hit points of monsters.

Also half-elf master race. Or gnomes for wizards (+2 int and advantage on all mental saves vs spells? Really?). Or if you want an actual option for character building at level 1, skill/feat humans. Sharpshooting and archer fighting style is pretty damn solid, as you're at -3 to hit for +10 damage, and ignore shitloads of cover and long range.

[Insomniac]

Healing has really been watered down.

Limiting animals to that low of a CR means the druid is pretty gimped.

[infected slut princess]

LOL! 5e's PHB has "Appendix E" which is like the old Appendix N. For inspirational reading. Okay, that's a nice idea.

BUT WTF IS THIS...?

Robert Jordan? "Eye of teh World" and the rest of the Wheel of Time series? Oh yeah, how inspiring. I've always wanted to play an RPG where nothing cool ever happens and all the women are bitchy nags who tug their braids and smooth their skirts while griping about wool-headed men. FUCK ROBERT JORDAN AND FUCK THE WHEEL OF TIME! Fuck, I'd rather play 4e! Well no actually that's not true, I would rather die than play 4e.

[Seerow]

LOL! 5e's PHB has "Appendix E" which is like the old Appendix N. For inspirational reading. Okay, that's a nice idea.

BUT WTF IS THIS...?

Robert Jordan? "Eye of teh World" and the rest of the Wheel of Time series? Oh yeah, how inspiring. I've always wanted to play an RPG where nothing cool ever happens and all the women are bitchy nags who tug their braids and smooth their skirts while griping about wool-headed men. FUCK ROBERT JORDAN AND FUCK THE WHEEL OF TIME! Fuck, I'd rather play 4e! Well no actually that's not true, I would rather die than play 4e.

I dunno, when I think Wheel of Time I think about entire cities being destroyed so hard they actually stopped existing days ago.

I think about a single epic caster standing single handedly against an army 100,000 strong, and slaughtering them.

I think about awesome matrix-style battles taking place in the World of Dreams.

I think about hours long rituals taking place to change the very foundation of how magic works while a battle takes place raging around them.

I think about a handful of mundane heroes going into an alternate dimension made up of hostile beings to save a friend, and escaping by the skin of their teeth through a combination of luck and wits.


I can go on, but Wheel of Time really does manage to hit the high notes of what an epic campaign should look like, far moreso than anything in D&D 4e or 5e ever did. It takes a while to get there, but you're dealing with heroes leveling up from plucky sheepherders to epic heroes, that takes a while. There's a lot of filler in between, and yes there are very wide gulfs in opinion as to how much those add or detract from the series... but to say Wheel of Time is a series where literally nothing ever happens is ludicrous.

[jadagul]

LOL! 5e's PHB has "Appendix E" which is like the old Appendix N. For inspirational reading. Okay, that's a nice idea.

BUT WTF IS THIS...?

Robert Jordan? "Eye of teh World" and the rest of the Wheel of Time series? Oh yeah, how inspiring. I've always wanted to play an RPG where nothing cool ever happens and all the women are bitchy nags who tug their braids and smooth their skirts while griping about wool-headed men. FUCK ROBERT JORDAN AND FUCK THE WHEEL OF TIME! Fuck, I'd rather play 4e! Well no actually that's not true, I would rather die than play 4e.

I dunno, when I think Wheel of Time I think about entire cities being destroyed so hard they actually stopped existing days ago.

I think about a single epic caster standing single handedly against an army 100,000 strong, and slaughtering them.

I think about awesome matrix-style battles taking place in the World of Dreams.

I think about hours long rituals taking place to change the very foundation of how magic works while a battle takes place raging around them.

I think about a handful of mundane heroes going into an alternate dimension made up of hostile beings to save a friend, and escaping by the skin of their teeth through a combination of luck and wits.


I can go on, but Wheel of Time really does manage to hit the high notes of what an epic campaign should look like, far moreso than anything in D&D 4e or 5e ever did. It takes a while to get there, but you're dealing with heroes leveling up from plucky sheepherders to epic heroes, that takes a while. There's a lot of filler in between, and yes there are very wide gulfs in opinion as to how much those add or detract from the series... but to say Wheel of Time is a series where literally nothing ever happens is ludicrous.

One thing I really like about WoT viewed as a whole is that it's a setting that transitions from being a low-level setting to being a high-level setting. The first book includes two of the four or five highest-level characters in the setting as part of the party; they find fighting a hundred orcs to be a real challenge and "get to this other city" is a major quest.

But for a number of reasons, the level of the setting increases over the series (which is what the series is about, really); the turning point is probably when there's a three-way battle scene where each side has armed troops but the relevant factors are the magic-users on each side (30, 100, 300, for each side), and the battle is resolved when a different army of about 400 magic users (and no regular soldiers at all) teleports in and wipes the opposition off the map.

The entire second half of the series is driven by everyone getting access to teleportation effects (and working with or around or against high-level divination effects). And the final battle seriously grapples with what the world, and war, look like when your armies are on the order of a million and each side has multiple magic-users who are worth tens of thousands of men each, and hundreds who are worth thousands of men each.

[Silent Wayfarer]

Wasn't the endgame of WOT basically Rand and the Dark One creating universes at each other?

[Amalie Gaston]

LOL! 5e's PHB has "Appendix E" which is like the old Appendix N. For inspirational reading. Okay, that's a nice idea.

BUT WTF IS THIS...?

Robert Jordan? "Eye of teh World" and the rest of the Wheel of Time series? Oh yeah, how inspiring. I've always wanted to play an RPG where nothing cool ever happens and all the women are bitchy nags who tug their braids and smooth their skirts while griping about wool-headed men. FUCK ROBERT JORDAN AND FUCK THE WHEEL OF TIME! Fuck, I'd rather play 4e! Well no actually that's not true, I would rather die than play 4e.

I think you might be interested in this rpg.

[jadagul]

Wasn't the endgame of WOT basically Rand and the Dark One creating universes at each other?

Rand was pretty explicitly over the level cap; I was thinking more about the rest of the endgame, where you had the massive armies clashing with each other. Rand's battle with the Dark One is high-level, I suppose, but a bit...metaphysical...to be used in a D&D game.

[Emerald]

I can go on, but Wheel of Time really does manage to hit the high notes of what an epic campaign should look like, far moreso than anything in D&D 4e or 5e ever did. It takes a while to get there, but you're dealing with heroes leveling up from plucky sheepherders to epic heroes, that takes a while.

Seconded. If you think of each of the 14 books as covering two levels each, the timeline fits pretty darn well to a (non-wish-economy, Prime-focused) D&D campaign: plucky heroes with swords and cantrips in book 1, everyone taking the first few level of signature PrCs by book 3, common teleportation by book 5, Leadership and Landlord abuse by book 7, spamming wish at plot-based casting penalties by book 9, treating ten thousand orcs and a tower full of mid- to high-level clerics as speedbumps by 11, epic spellcasting ritual abuse by book 13, and "Okay Rand, since you have a +204 Channeling modifier and can crush anything with stats, even all my overpowered homebrewed NPCs, let's resolve the final boss battle by MTP" for the finale.

[Maxus]

That god-damned Rand, such a munchkin.

[infected slut princess]

Okay you guys all need to shut the hell up or you might fool some poor sucker into thinking Wheel of Time is awesome. Then they might proceed to read it based on this deception. According to the Geneva Convention this is a CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY.

Wheel of Time is shit. I mean yeah, in theory Wheel of Time sounds cool. But in theory, 4e also sounded like a fun game to play.

All the cool stuff people are talking about? Yeah, that's about 20 pages (probably less) for every 1000 page of absolutely horrible, mind-numbing shit. So about 2% goodness value. The other 98%? Wretched characters wasting everyone's time with petty crap. Robert Jordan is a horrible storyteller. He wrote some of the most fucking boring fantasy fiction ever in the history of humanity. In fact, over 9000 deaths have been directly caused by the sheer boredom of reading Wheel of Time books.

And it's important to have cool female characters. Wheel of Time has the worst female characters of all time. They are wretched bitches, and if you met them in real life, you would immediately commit suicide just so you could eliminate the possibility of ever having to interact with them again. And yet like 75% of Wheel of Time is chapter after chapter of sanity-destroying boring crap where wretched nagging bitches pull their braids, smooth their skirts, and curse men for being dumb. FUCK WHEEL OF TIME AND FUCK ANYONE WHO SAYS IT DOESN'T SUCK.

[PhoneLobster]

Wheel of Time has the worst female characters of all time.

I'm not sure about that, you might be right, the series is totally a contender, the take away from it being every woman in that universe is an incompetent bitch be crazy nag beast the like of which the worlds most avid misogynists would dismiss as unfair unrealistic strawwomen.

BUT even within the fantasy epic genre Jordan was competing with Terry Goodkind and in Terry Goodkind's universe every female character ever was a magically powered sado-masochistic nun. As you can actually sit down and start counting the factions and sub factions of sado-masochistic magically powered nuns in his world and come up with numbers significantly greater than the "well I guess you could get away with one..." very quickly. I mean really, there were the mother confessors, there was bondage spider sorceress or whatever she was, there were the pain dildo amazons, there were the wizard enslaving nuns, the "dark sister" break away faction of the wizard enslaving nuns, there were the break away break away faction of dark sister wizard enslavers who got enslaved by COMMUNISTS...

(and in later books they even teleported around the world by having dangerous rough magic sex with an interdimensional sadomasochistic killer prostitute monster enslaved/created/murdered by ancient wizards).

[Seerow]

I'm not sure about that, you might be right, the series is totally a contender, the take away from it being every woman in that universe is an incompetent bitch be crazy nag beast the like of which the worlds most avid misogynists would dismiss as unfair unrealistic strawwomen.

Not every woman is that bad. There are a handful of decent ones. Unfortunately every one that seems to get a significant amount of screen time fits the description pretty well (it's particularly bad at the start of the series. In the later books it starts getting toned back, especially when Sanderson takes over).

Either way, whatever other complaints someone may have about the series, every positive point mentioned all still stand. The series gets slow at points and some storylines get dragged out waaay longer than they should have, but it also has high points that make it one of the best examples of epic level high fantasy out there, and is worth reading for that alone.

[Korwin]

And it's important to have cool female characters. Wheel of Time has the worst female characters of all time. They are wretched bitches, and if you met them in real life, you would immediately commit suicide just so you could eliminate the possibility of ever having to interact with them again. And yet like 75% of Wheel of Time is chapter after chapter of sanity-destroying boring crap where wretched nagging bitches pull their braids, smooth their skirts, and curse men for being dumb. FUCK WHEEL OF TIME AND FUCK ANYONE WHO SAYS IT DOESN'T SUCK.

I always thougt the strange personalities of the females of WoT had something to do with the fact, that females where the major power in the land and only defense against the mad men.

Every small girl could get in theory get the power to spank you, as soon as she got into puperty (boys to, but those where killed). So naturaly they are pushier than in real life.

[Foxwarrior]

A 600 page Wheel of Time Abridged novel would probably be wonderful.

And Korwin: It's more 'petty' than 'pushy' that's the problem.

[PhoneLobster]

I always thougt the strange personalities of the females of WoT had something to do with the fact, that females where the major power in the land and only defense against the mad men.

And what did they do with that power? They dithered about and achieved nothing, they wandered bickering in the wilderness for years, they were subverted and tricked by the evil forces repeatedly, time and again they behaved more like THEY were the insane ones, and time and again "crazy" Mary Sue Rand was right and they were wrong in every single thing they ever did in a way that read like a petulant child saying "Rand is right and the smelly girls were wrong nyahnyahnyah" for about 400,000 words at a time.

Female characters in the series only ever achieved things by becoming part of Rands subservient and obedient Harem, and even the two wise "mentor" females pretty much fitted that role.

Time and again this needs pointing out. You can't just put a female character in a position of power and call it a good depiction. They need to be competent with that power, or at the very least not drooling easily distracted border line evil bimbos with it. Because the part of the depiction that is offensive (and also eventually just plain god damn tedious) is the bit where their actions paint them as misogynistic fantasies gone wild.

And it only got worse as the series went on... up until I don't know a book or two before the new guy took over when I stopped reading because fuck it seemed like incompetent women bitching and scheming at each other over totally petty matters while evil flourished under their ignorant upturned noses was all the books were even about or had been about for as far back in the series as I could even remember.

[Korwin]

Ah yes, can't argue about the incompetence of most females in WoT.

Thinking about it, its more like I thought:

1. after thousands of years with females on top of the food chain there should be differences
   
   and then
2. I took every difference/inconsistency about females and justified it by point 1

Edit: Still liked WoT on the whole

[Maxus]

This has made me seek out Wheel of Time Abridged. Again.

http://softandonly.com/tag/isams-wheel- ... -summaries

[FatR]

I always thougt the strange personalities of the females of WoT had something to do with the fact, that females where the major power in the land and only defense against the mad men.

That was the obviously implied justification.

But it did not solve the following problems:

-The most prominent females were petty control freaks, the typical cases, if you excuse my armchair psychology, of overbearing, bitchy attitudes used to hide deep-seated insecurities. That actually could be justified for a few females of Rand's entourage, after the start of book 3 or so, when they realized and even were practically demonstrated, that Rand is both much more powerful than them and might be getting unhindged already. But not for such a large percentage of the cast everywhere. When Min "I just really want to fuck Rand after meeting him for, like, a day" Farshaw comes as an example of a sensible, well-adjusted female compared to the rest of the cast, you might have a problem.

-They were never ever called out for their attitude; and every male character who was supposed to be morally decent treated them like fragile glass dolls, even when a figurative and possibly literal bitchslap would have greatly benefitted both parties - and, more importantly, the readers, sparing them more plot derailment; and considered themselves responsible for every problem and non-problem (Rand's reaction after Min finally manages to rape him is pretty characteristic here).


But anyway, the main problem was not even that, but Jordan's inability (or deliberate refusal) to manage his word count, so eventually we started getting whole books of nothing fucking happening. I heard things got much better under Sanderson, but never managed to muster enough willpower to start reading the series again.

[Korwin]

But anyway, the main problem was not even that, but Jordan's inability (or deliberate refusal) to manage his word count, so eventually we started getting whole books of nothing fucking happening. I heard things got much better under Sanderson, but never managed to muster enough willpower to start reading the series again.

Fully agree to the first and yes, he managed better to the Sanderson part.

[hogarth]

I think about a handful of mundane heroes going into an alternate dimension made up of hostile beings to save a friend, and escaping by the skin of their teeth through a combination of luck and wits.

Hold on -- this is a terrible thing to want in your RPGs. If your GM thinks it's cool to require luck in order to survive encounters, then that means that you'll end up losing most of the time (when your luck is poor-to-average).

[angelfromanotherpin]

Unless the luck is built in systematically – Edge and whatnot.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Hold on -- this is a terrible thing to want in your RPGs. If your GM thinks it's cool to require luck in order to survive encounters, then that means that you'll end up losing most of the time (when your luck is poor-to-average).

You could design your game to fail forward. For example, imagine a game where the RNG is intentionally seeded so that you fail on level-appropriate encounters in an average-case condition. However, the players are also expected to sacrifice resources (health, aspects, items, status effects, etc.) in order to convert the loss into a win or even a draw.

This would require an extremely radical rethinking of how most games are structured but it has been done before. I.E. Mouseguard and Torchbearer.

[Ferret]

Also half-elf master race. Or gnomes for wizards (+2 int and advantage on all mental saves vs spells? Really?). Or if you want an actual option for character building at level 1, skill/feat humans. Sharpshooting and archer fighting style is pretty damn solid, as you're at -3 to hit for +10 damage, and ignore shitloads of cover and long range.

I've seen lots of nominations for Master Race, but Half elf? Really? +2 CHA/+1 any two, darkvision, charm/sleep advantage, two skills and a language?

Totally with you on Skill/Feat humans, though. They're pretty ballin'.

[NineInchNall]

The most prominent females were petty control freaks, the typical cases, if you excuse my armchair psychology, of overbearing, bitchy attitudes used to hide deep-seated insecurities.

Similar things could be said of nearly every major character in the series, regardless of gender. Insecurity and unwillingness to talk openly are pretty much the driving forces of the plot. You don't need to engage in armchair psychology: it's explicit.

But anyway, the main problem was not even that, but Jordan's inability (or deliberate refusal) to manage his word count, so eventually we started getting whole books of nothing fucking happening. I heard things got much better under Sanderson, but never managed to muster enough willpower to start reading the series again.

I'm not sure which books you're talking about where nothing happened. Even the book that had the worst fan reaction, The Path of Daggers, had its fair share of important events and big action scenes.