Yes. Well, no. Well, sorta.
Rather than making races illegal, I defined what races were available in my last campaign because it was supposed to take place in a part of the world that had very specific limitations.
Primarily, there are no reptilian races in the area. This is because I want them to form their own empire elsewhere in the world, and I want that to be the second area of the campaign we play in with everyone playing a reptilian character.
IIRC the forge is like $15/month or something, which makes sense since I pay around that for my server on AWS, and I turn it off when it’s not in use.
Don’t forget owlbear rodeo.
Not every consequence should be negative, but not all should be positive, either. There should be a mix of the two.
My suggestion is to literally ask them which story threads they would like to resolve poorly. Take their answer, pair it down to something managable and focus on that. Make the outcomes bittersweet because they asked you to.
Then, take one of the threads you wanted them to pick that they didn’t (because they will always do that) and resolve it yourself in a bad way.
On the flip side, ask them which threads they think probably ended up fine. Pick one or two of those and let them self-resolve better than fine because of the PCs’ actions. And turn those into a resource that the PCs can tap when things get serious later.
No matter what fork you take, you run into ogres.
Even if it is immediately a false choice, the point of the fork in the road isn’t necessarily one of immediacy.
A poor DM will run the same exact campaign no matter what fork you take.
A good DM will still have the choice you make have impact, even if the immediate result no matter which way you go is a pair of ogres.
Maybe, if you go left you choose to save the prince rather than the princess. Yes, no matter which way you went you were going to encounter the ogres and it’s only the hostage that’s different. However, if the one you don’t save gets killed by the Basilisk-knight, that means you got to make a choice that impacts the campaign.
It just didn’t put you into conflict with the knight that the DM hasn’t written up yet. That’s next week.
Training wheels are useful tool for beginner cyclists, but not useful for advanced cyclists. Likewise, quantum ogres are a useful tool for beginner DMs, but not for seasoned DMs.
I hard disagree. Quantum baddies are useful no matter how seasoned a DM you are.
Quantum enemies are a technique you can use to help preserve the prep work you do as DM, and doubling the prep you do isn’t a mark of experience. Use it when appropriate, and avoid using when the story says you must.
Don’t discount Monks!
That’s how bad monks are. I forgot they even existed :D
But seriously, they’ve been getting some good changes in the UAs, and with WotC being a bit more generous with things like expertise it makes being useful a lot easier when you’ve got a lot of random weird shit you can do, like a monk can.
Honestly, Monks are so close to being a top tier class. All they really need is for WotC to pull their heads out of their collective asses and make short rests not a fucking tooth-pulling exercise in frustration for your average group.
If it were me I’d bring back the concept of 10-minute “exploration turns”. You use one exploration turn to do something like pick a lock, break down a door, climb your speed x 5 in relatively safe conditions without a check, attempt to disarm a trap, attempt to climb a slippery or dangerous surface, examine a magic item (arcana check to figure out something basic), make a general knowledge check about a subject (would have to define a distinct difference between using knowledge checks in combat and using them outside of combat), etc…
…but, most importantly, you would use an exploration turn to try and take a short rest. Take one short rest action and you can spend one hit dice per three levels (rounding up). Take a second in a row and you can spend one hit dice per three levels. Take three of them back-to-back and you can spend another one hit dice per three levels, and any short rest recharges trigger. Your short rest is now done. You can gain the recharge benefit of the third rest action twice per long rest.
…and while that was going on the rest of the party was able to fuck around and do stuff. Which means the monk who gassed themselves in the last combat can take three rest actions to get back their ki while the rogue searches a room, disarms a trap guarding a hidden chest, and then picks the lock on the chest.
The martial/caster disparity is the (IMO, proven and obvious) idea that martial characters lack gameplay options compared to their caster counterparts, and that this problem only ever gets worse with level.
Also, “martial” in this case specifically refers to Fighters, Barbarians, and Rogues.
IMO, it does exist, but it’s not as “end of the world”-bad as some people make it out to be. Basically, rogues are fine because they get a crap-ton of skills that can be put to good use as long as the rogue player makes their character with even a little long-term thought. Rogues that have problems tend to focus in things like stealth, and other physical skills that casters can use spells to imitate or replace. Rogues that pick up and spend expertise in one or two soft skills (some kind of knowledge skill, insight, investigation, etc…) will never find themselves with nothing to do and will always have a niche where they can make the full casters go “holy shit!” from time to time.
Fighters and Barbarians actually have problems because they seem to have been made more with dungeoncrawling in mind, to the detrement of anything non-dungeon related. They generally lack useful soft skills, and don’t stack stats that will make using them useful because they generally don’t have ways to make a high int or wisdom terribly useful.
Fighters and Barbarians compound the skill problem by not gaining useful/impactful abilities in T3 or T4. When full casters are busy choosing and enjoying the most powerful spells in the game, fighters get another use of indomitable (which never, ever fucking works, IME), a second action surge per short rest WAY too late for it to really matter, and a 4th attack they will probably never, ever actually get because it’s at 20th level for some stupid, fucking reason (as opposed to level 17 where ALL casters, even the half-casters, get their 4th cantrip damage die).
Barbarians get even less than fighters due to most of their class budget being tied up in a massive passive ability: Brutal Critical. So all they ever get to do is crit-fish, which they’ve all been doing since level 1 anyway.
The disparity is choice and impact. Because of their lack of choices, it can seem difficult to have an impact on the game, mechanically. A good DM can make up for this in a variety of ways, but when you’re just looking at the rules or white-rooming a character, the problem does tend to become a bit obvious…if overblown.
Generally, the fix is simply to give fighters and barbarians more class abilities that involve getting to make interesting choices during play.
I know this has been pointed out, but…
He has no experiance in ever fighting anyone or anything
Nooooope! He can fight. You’re an adventurer. Maybe you come from humble roots, but you are now a roaming mercenary who fights for money (and maybe a few other things). Make sure you can work with the rest of the party. Make sure you bring value to the group both in and out of a fight.
As for the character concept…
in a world with bards, there had to be critics too, right? So this character had a weekly column in some newsletters published from town to town (is that a thing?) and developed a reputation for being a snob. He barely ever hands out a score higher than 6 out of 10.
His only real talent seems to be intuitive analysis and articulate critique - skills that have helped him at what he does…
College of Eloquence Bard. Just don’t play him elequent. Instead, use his great powers for “evil” (not literal evil). To tear down the art of others and crush the confidence of his enemies into dust.
When Giants attack, he makes them feel small.
When Gods rage, he gives a solid, “meh…6/10. I’ve seen better.”
When Barbarians rampage, he makes them cry…
“It stinks!”
“Post names and addresses of jurors” is a really wordy way of saying “terrorism”. Because that’s what this is. Someone, or a small group, is trying to use fear to affect the decision making of our society.
That is textbook terrorism.
We need to start calling this shit what it is.
You do understand that the choice you are essentially voting for, if you don’t vote, is a fundamentalist dictatorship that will tell you how to live your life, and imprison you if you don’t obey, while taking your freedoms and wealth anyway even if you do. Yes?
Apathy is fine as long as both parties believe in running a democracy. The gop no longer does.
Oh wow…2 background and 7 feats. I am impressed /s
Fuck you WotC. This is even more half-assed than Spelljammer.
Resist the urge to preorder. The book isn’t going to give you enough information about Sigil to run anything. If you want to spend your money well go into the DM’s Guild and pick up the 2nd edition PDFs of “The Cage” and the planescape boxed set instead.
So, it’s going to be utter shit just like Spelljammer? Got it.
Pass.
Once again, they refuse to learn the important lesson: When you make a book for everyone, you make it for no-one.
They make great one-shots, but horrible, friendship-destroying campaigns unless you have players who absolutely understand how much PVP is about to inevitably happen.
WotC as usual threw the baby out with the bathwater and decided it meant that prestige classes are a dud of an idea entirely.
That’s because they were.
With subclasses, prestige classes become redundant on top of fighting for levels you need to unlock higher level abilities.
If you want things like prestige classes and multiclassing to not fight single-class characters at the design level you need to push single-class abilities away from the high levels of the class, which just leaves them empty and boring. At which point, why bother playing at high levels? Why bother single-classing ever?
You just end up removing choice by turning what should be a valid decision into a false-choice that does nothing but penalize you.
3rd edition, for example, should have cut the base classes off at level 5 or 10. The way the game was designed, there was no need for them past that point since everyone ended up taking either alternative base-class levels or prestige class levels.
With subclasses, you either need to embrace dipping and only define the base classes to level 15, getting rid of EVERYTHING that comes out in levels 16-20 (which kills a sacred cow and will make some people, like me, very un-happy), or you need to retire multiclassing, or at least try to balance it.
That means no more subclassing at 1st level and, preferably, standardizing subclass ability levels. Why people are against that I have no idea. Who cares if everyone gets their 2nd subclass ability at level 7 regardless of class?
Honestly, the only reason I can think of to want them at different levels is purely for power-gaming. The ability to plan out “a build” that is hands-down better than other builds because you get to squeeze in one more ability than other builds.
Seriously, what are the other reasons? The valid reasons?
How often are you making new characters that “playing a class start to feel same-y”?
I typically only get to make a new character once every few months, and pretty much never more than three times a year (unless I get really unlucky…or I’m playing CP2020). What are you doing different?
The deficiency is in the monster building rules in the DMG. They haven’t been updated in almost ten years and it shows. For example, like you say, Druids and Clerics are ridiculously good classes, but they look “fine” because they’re not top damage dealers.
Those rules haven’t been updated for us since 2014. Meanwhile, WotC devs say that they’ve been regularly updating the tools they use to create new monsters and now, for example, take crowd control effects into account by translating the value of a CC into “effective damage” under the theory that “1 damage out” is roughly the equivalent to “1 damage in”.
…we didn’t get any of those improvements over the last 10 years. We’re still using rules set down in 2014 to make monsters.
That all sounds like way too much work. You’re basically re-designing the entire game at this point.
IMO, your time would be better spent finding a system that already does all that. They do exist!
I would suggest maybe taking a look at 13th age, or some of the renaissance games like WWN and the like.