general
Saturday, December 18, 2021
What's really funny is all the shit ActiBlizz is doing to make WoW as sterile as possible(besides, yknow, nonstop race war, civil war, genocide, anything besides high-scale physical violence), yet in FFXIV, you have multiple main scenario quests that mention rape or attempted rape, and half the arcanist class quest line is about rescuing an arcanist who has been kidnapped and is about to be forced into sex trafficking.
But maybe, just maybe, instead of doing all this fucking bullshit, WotC could just do what pretty much every OSR game that has law/chaos and good/evil axes does: Flat out say, "Alignment is both objective and subjective in this game - there is objective alignment, which is used for magical abilities based on alignment, and subjective alignment, which is your character's tendencies in acting, not their entire personality. You can be a good character that has to do something evil and vice versa, but a Beholder is evil so a paladin can do big dam with Smite Evil against it."
"Clone is no longer restricted to medium size–allowing halflings and gnomes to immortalize themselves forever as flesh pods waiting to be made into people."
This errata I'm fine with, because it's actual mechanical errata, not removal of lore, integral game systems, or trying to make the game puerile(outside of the fact that a fuckton of the game is about killing shit in most campaigns)
make homebrew, kill all the midgets
Real talk about midgets for a second? In the... 17-18 years of running homebrew adventures, I've never built a consistent campaign setting, just generic fantasy setting with random locations with names that are not recorded (unless that adventure is made into a module for distribution), I'm just now working on building a consistent campaign setting with its own lore and allows for adventures from the lowest tier of high fantasy to the most epic tier
Like, looking at shit mechanically in books, Stout halflings get a constitution bonus, are resistant to poison damage, have saving throws against being poisoned. "Why should that be?" asks my brain. The solution it gave? "Stout halflings tend to live in jungles & swamps, are more tribal than their Lightfoot cousins, so they've become hardier and resistant to poison."
This is way late, so TL;DR I talk about the official main d&d world.
I don't really have opinions on the lore changes, because like fire said earlier, I mostly Homebrew shit. I do know a lot about the core settings though. The Sword Coast Adventure Guide is used for pickup games, and contains a set of standard information for people to go off of, that way a character made for SCAG can fit into any play session without having to clear it through the DM. The core books(players, DM, and monsters) for 5e expect you to play in the forgotten realms on the planet of Toril. That's where you find Fearun, Neverwinter, the sword coast, and a lot of the major pop culture stuff for d&d like the cult of the dragons.
They got rid of racial stat penalties in 4e or 5e(I don't remember much about 4e, because I preferred playing MMOs on a computer, not at the tabletop), so the only limit small races have, really, is they can't use "heavy" and "two-handed" weapons, though I believe in 5e they can use one-handed weapons(that aren't light or finesse weapons) as versatile.
Replying to Gent #gent_. Fighters outclass them as bowmen and melee men and rogues outclass them in sneaky shit
In combat, yes, they're outclassed in every aspect, but not all D&D games are focused around combat. Thing is, rangers kinda suck in every aspect in 5e. Combat, skills, archetypes, anything that would make them unique, are just kinda crap.
Replying to sudo TPK #sylfar In combat, yes, they're outclassed in every aspect, but not all D&D games are focused around combat. Thing is, rangers kinda suck in every aspect in 5e. Combat, skills, archetypes, anything that would make them unique, are just kinda crap.
Favored enemy is just so limiting as a gimmick, the animal companion is the only selling point, which Druid can do in a much more fun way
I wish monks where better, Sometimes you just want to punch shit as a character
I'd still say monk > ranger
for the most part 4e and 5e aren't like 3.5/pathfinder where you need to limit available source books
partly because there are so fucking many official 3.5/pathfinder books
Replying to Madjick #harrybutimnot Like Ranger would be badass in a death of magic setting with a lot of woodland travel and requirements for food and water.
Sorry, there's a lot of chat going on that I'm trying to process all at once. I meant that, at level 1, yeah, monk sucks, but if you're starting at a higher level in a campaign(I don't know about you, but I find it very difficult to run a single campaign all the way from level 1 to 20), monk can be very good.
Replying to Gent #gent_. Druid is a better nature boy, fighter is a better combat boy, rogue is a better stealth boy
Facts. That's why I had to specify no magic and I had to put them in their environment. The class blows but in the right campaign they'd be great. A fighter would be useless in strixhaven for example
isn't monk like... good levels 5-10
Just be 4e and everyone is both martial but mostly magical
Replying to Kampfgruppe Kofewalt #zingly Just be 4e and everyone is both martial but mostly magical
If they had used 4e design for a D&D MMO, rather than what they use for Stormreach, that actually might be a pretty decent game. If you sped up the combat a bit, it might even be fun as a board game. But it doesn't feel like D&D.