I do things a little differently. I line all my dice up, display the one that let me down last session, and tell them “Say goodbye to your buddy. Guess he couldn’t make the grade.” Then I hide that die at the back of a cupboard and never bring it out again.
In my own homebrew Sword Coast canon, an entire black market network is run by changelings and their mimic masters. They're one of the reasons Xanathar is as paranoid as he is, especially after his spies confirmed their successful infiltration of Acq. Inc. at the exec level during a transplanar expedition.
At this point, the party is slipping into eldritch noir levels of conspiracy theories, and trust in reality itself is worth more than gold. 😶
I strongly recommend not multiclassing for flavor--the only good reason in 5e to multiclass is for mechanics (Flavor is free, Mechanics are expensive). PDK flavor is great, but the mechanics are awful--and while both Warlock and Sorcerer would give you some mechanical advantages, they won't offer quite enough to make PDK good.
What about just being a Valor or Swords bard, flavored as a PDK? Mechanically, a Bard can do just about everything that the PDK subclass offers but better and sooner, and both Swords and Valor get you extra attack at roughly the same pace. Unless you are dead-set on heavy armor, you shouldn't need any feats or MCs to make this work for you (and if you are so inclined, then Heavily Armored on Valor Bard works just fine to be Str-based instead of Dex-based). The only mechanical caveat with Valor bard is that you need a musical instrument to cast some of your bard spells--you can either stick to Verbal and Verbal+Somatic spells, or else grab a lute. Flavoring the bard magic as "woah, my words and music are suddenly making thing happen, rather than just being entertainment" fits pretty well with your Wild Magic Sorcerer idea. And lastly, Bards make amazing faces.
I’m running an Anything goes campaign soon and one of the recurring enemies will be a variation of a steel golem but one of the incarnations is 5 or 6 mimics forming up Voltron style into one enemy.
Yo this campaign sounds cool af. I purchased Eaters of The Dead on paperback a long time ago and it was one of the best books I've ever read. The film based on that book is absolute trash and still a great fucking film to watch.
Point 1: There's nothing inherently stopping you from starting with 13 warriors. They don't necessarily have to follow the player party. During part 1 your group of 13 warriors might split up to guard two or more parts of the town. This gives your player party one or two red shirts for that fight. It's probably more work for you to play those on top of the enemies but, you can...
Point 2: Nothing dictates that a "warrior" HAS to be a barbarian class melee fighter. If you say that your setting has all kinds of fighting styles and classes then it does.
Point 3: There's nothing saying that your players have to be ready for the adventure when it begins. Particularly if you fill the party up with higher level NPCs you could definitely give your players the same "arc" as the protagonist had. Starting inexperienced before growing into themselves and becoming an integral part of solving the problem. Might require some behind the scenes fudging of rolls until they catch.
Another idea would be to start ALL 13 characters somewhat underleveled and when a player character dies, they get one of the remaining ones to continue.
I kind of wish they'd just go for full 6e. I have a feeling that these new core books won't sell as well as they hope. Sure it might have a boost from the hard-core market immediately. But what incentive is there for the casual players to upgrade? They said themselves that the old core PHB will still be usable along side the new one. So really as long as the DM has the new book there is no reason for the existing players to upgrade.
I think they were totally going to and decided to back out last minute. It's gone from DnDnext to oneDND, and now it's called DnD 2024. At this point it's just a slight update
I play a relatively hardcore game. Where the players are right now fighting some mykonids and their trough spores mind controled villager minions. Somehow they droped a barrel of acid atop a myconid controller killing him so all 4 villagers survive. Me not having planed the pacifist approach say the stare blankly into nothingness. Welp the caracters stack the NPCs into a corner and move on.
Not really, when all the subclasses are just on a spectrum bleeeing into each other. None of them feel unique anymore, just a mash of x+y class. It just adds cruft, limits actual creative choice in character building, adds to dm workload, and makes everything feel samey. It’s like the custom stat benefits rule from Tasha’s. On its face, seems like a good idea. But now you just have every race being a reskin of each other. Kill the subclass. Embrace class differences. Let players make their characters unique based on the stories we make together, not trying to fit them into a predefined cookie cutter box.
It’s like the custom stat benefits rule from Tasha’s. On its face, seems like a good idea. But now you just have every race being a reskin of each other. Kill the subclass. Embrace class differences. Let players make their characters unique based on the stories we make together, not trying to fit them into a predefined cookie cutter box.
This is so bizarrely self-contradictory.
Force players to only play the nine classes with no subclasses or features, force species into hard-locked stat differences ... to avoid them being cookie-cutter? Like forcing anyone who wants to play a reasonably-optimized STR character to play a species with inherent STR bonus increases creativity somehow? As if using Tasha's rule to play an unconventional species as a STR class means that player somehow cannot possibly also give their character a unique and interesting story as well as a slightly unconventional class/species combo? Make it make sense.
If you think that having more tools to customize and differentiate species and classes reduces creativity, that's a you problem and not a rules problem.
Eh agree to disagree. You’re falling into the trap that 5e sets of assuming what is on the character sheet it’s all that’s available to the characters. By forcing players into subclasses that are all just cookie cutter perfectly balanced slight variations of each others, you’re encouraging players to stay entirely in their sheet and everyone basically does the same thing with different flavor, to fulfill ONLY the specific fantasies pre ordained by WOTC. To approach every problem by first looking to their sheet and trying to find the right number instead of creatively looking at the narrative we’re building together and finding a unique solution. It’s not a “me” problem to acknowledge that 5e subclasses and races are incredibly samey mechanically, and if you can’te see that I suggest you try to look past the matrix and pretty illustrations WOTC uses to distract from the fact, and look to the actual fundamentals of how the game works. Prof. Dungeonmaster I think has a great take on the subject: youtu.be/UwPnhr2b8VU**___**
Please, tell me what I think some more. It went so well here.
You’re falling into the trap that 5e sets of assuming what is on the character sheet it’s all that’s available to the characters. By forcing players into subclasses that are all just cookie cutter variations of each others, you’re encouraging players to stay entirely in their sheet. To approach every problem by first looking to their sheet and trying to find the right number instead of creatively looking at the narrative we’re building together and finding a unique solution.
None of this is true. It's a weird strawman that you've made up, that would make absolutely no sense to any real person's opinion - if you weren't trying to create a fictional scenario where having more diversity of choice and options was somehow bad.
It’s not a “me” problem to acknowledge that 5e subclasses and races are incredibly samey mechanically,
It's absolutely a 'you' problem to see a wide variety of options with very few mechanical constraints, and go "yeah, that limits creativity" - if you feel your creativity is somehow enhanced by having hard mechanical limits on which races and classes can do what tasks in a TTRPG ... you can still create that experience for yourself in 5E. Like, having more options doesn't prevent you from playing however confined and restricted you want - so making all of these points about me, about other people is just projecting your own limitations on the rest of the world and then criticizing them for a problem only you seem to have.
and if you can’te see past the matrix and pretty illustrations WOTC uses to distract from that, that’s a you problem, for not really getting how this game works at the fundamentals.
Like that. That's not my opinion, "pictures" aren't why I have my opinion or why I might have the opinion I don't, and I definitely understand the mechanics more than fine. You just made up an opinion for me, made up an explanation why I might have that fictional opinion, and then got snide with me about an entirely fictional scenario you put on me.
You can just not use Tashas if you want. Imagining that other people need hard-coded stat penalties just to "be creative" and that's somehow impossible in a system where you, or they, can still choose to have hard-coded stat penalties is just the wildest thing to pretend is 'wrong' with D&D.
Easily my favorite and longest played character was a goliath' but a terribly nontraditional one.
With the whole "survival of the fittest" mentality that they have I made one of those left behind. He had fallen down the side of a mountain while training with his clan' and was left behind. He fell all the way down it though' skittering to a stop as he crashed through the roof of a barn in the halfling settlement at the base of the mountain. The halflings didn't abandon him like his people did they cared for him and took care of him while he healed. He stayed with them embracing their much more casual lifestyle, until a mudslide washed through the town. He was the only one tall and strong enough to help save the halflings that were stranded and threatened by it. He came to the conclusion that not being the fittest among the goliaths didn't mean he wasn't worthy of still being a hero.
I played him as a mix of Don Quixote and The Tick. The halflings had read him all kind of hero stories about knights and honor while he was recovering from his fall. So he had adopted that code of conduct and chivalry, kept a journal detailing his heroic deeds, and never shrank away from a good cause, even if it was foolishly dangerous.
dnd
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.