Polishing a Turd: 5E Houserules?

[OgreBattle]

A Balor for example, can't do anything offensively other than melee attacking people (well exploding on them I guess

How about you just give your high level monsters up to 6 spells to cast from the cleric/wizard spell list and call it a day.

[Username17]

A Balor for example, can't do anything offensively other than melee attacking people (well exploding on them I guess

How about you just give your high level monsters up to 6 spells to cast from the cleric/wizard spell list and call it a day.

The issue is that spells by and large aren't powerful or interesting. The Pit Fiend can cast fireball whenever he wants and all it does is force the skeleton archers into skirmish formation. Fireballs aren't very big, don't go very far, and don't necessarily kill all the skeletons or conscripts under the template.

The issue is that there is literally nothing that characters can do that can't be done by twenty random hobos. Having high level domination is fine and all, but it doesn't seem to do anything that twenty guys at the pub couldn't do by crit fishing.

As Tussock pointed out, a dc of 20 is something that the gods sometimes fail at. And by sometimes, we mean pretty often. And yet, a score of mooks is more than likely to succeed at that same task. Either everything is possible to crowd sourcing or the highest tiers of monsters and demigods fail like all the time. It's a nullemma, a binary choice with no solutions.

-Username17

[virgil]

Have they made stats for the gods in 5E yet?

[nockermensch]

Have they made stats for the gods in 5E yet?

Not that I know. I'm eagerly waiting to see if they'll require dicepools to be hit.

[angelfromanotherpin]

They've statted Tiamat, who's explicitly a god.

[Insomniac]

If you use 3D6, you don't even need to change the DCs (well most of them are bullshit or unstated anyway, but the few that exist and make any sense you wouldn't need to change.)
http://topps.diku.dk/torbenm/troll.msp
3D6+1 beats 3D6 alone 55% of the time (~9% ties), which is a good baseline.
3D6+3 beats 3D6 alone 72% of the time (~5% ties).
3D6+5 beats 3D6 alone 85% of the time (~5% ties again).

1D20+1 beats 1D20 53% of the time (5% ties)
1D20+3 beats 1D20 62% of the time (4.5% ties)
1D20+5 beats 1D20 70% of the time (4% ties)

So switching to 3D6 would be *very roughly* equivalent to doubling all bonuses (a bit less), while pushing only a few very large modifiers entirely-off the existing (fairly narrow) RNG.

Almost looks like a playable game; and, in fact, I've been saying that D20 should've been 3D6 since about the time that it came out.

Making auto success be a 3 6s roll makes the odds of auto succeeding a bit farther than 200 to 1. You could also say that at a certain point, specialists cannot automatically fail even on a roll of 3 1s. It keeps the problem of 20 Jabronis being better than a 10th level Specialist problem at bay and the problem of the greatest, I don't know, flute player of all time failing to play a song 5 percent of the time.

3d6 is much better for bounded accuracy than d20 but d20 is the ultimate sacred cow so it isn't going anywhere.

[Koumei]

So there were five of us, and we sat down to play Talisman first and see what happened next. Five hours later, the game finally came to an end and we agreed it was time to go home. I shall spoiler my notes on that game.

FFG suck nuts and should be banned from writing rules forever.

Much like an MMO, the game starts fast and with players wandering around doing their own thing and it's fun, but then in late game it crawls to a slow grind as everyone gets ready for the mandatory PvP and it's boring and crap.

I played the Wizard, and ended up being the second strongest (behind the troll), until I stole his rune sword and killed him, and then won the game.

The game would be better being, at a minimum, Good vs Neutral vs Evil, as alignment-based teams (or Neutral can get fucked). Yes, seeing as I stepped upon the crown and the troll arrived 4 turns later and each of us eclipsed everyone else, that would have been a steamroller event, but the game would have finished an hour earlier, and it'd make a better play dynamic in general. You'd also need to change the non-Evil artefact weapon, as it's useless (+1 to combat, or +3 vs Dragons), whereas the non-Good one is awesome (+1 to combat, every time you win physical combat you gain a HP - gain, not recover). But replacing the dragon-slaying lance with a good PvP thing is a good idea anyway.

Even better would be a basic hack to make it cooperative. I put forward the idea of "If you run out of adventure cards, it means you dicked around for too long and the Lich King grabbed the crown, we're all dead. Victory occurs if some number of players make it to the crown before that can happen." and we might actually try that next time.

Anyway, next time we do this we'll try out Descent, and the host also bought a co-op tower defence board game which we'll give a try some time. So it might be ages before we play 5Ed, if ever.

I'm okay with that.

[Josh_Kablack]

FFG suck nuts and should be banned from writing rules forever.

That part is unfair. It may or may not be true, but it's unfair to hate on FFG for rules writing. You want to hate on them for rules revisions. The FFG version is the fucking (revised) Fourth edition and apparently the 13th different (although some are just international translations) publisher for the game.

Talisman should most properly be evaluated as the 1983 game it originated as and compared to the other overly-thematic, overly-long, overly-complex gamer games from that era.

[Smeelbo]

So there were five of us, and we sat down to play Talisman first and see what happened next. Five hours later, the game finally came to an end and we agreed it was time to go home.

I learned many years ago that friends don't let friends play Talisman.

Smeelbo

[Hicks]

My wife and I play talisman, as long as she gets the prophetess card .