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Dungeons and Dragons Megathread

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I'd heard that as well, on reddit, and was surprised that no one has mentioned it on SV. The clothing designs have a real strong "19th century Mexico" vibe. That's going to get real uncomfortable real fast if they're still going to use them as mostly villains.

Like, are they a "good guy" player race now? Or are they showing us art of whole orc family right before having us kill a bunch of them as some sort of Gygaxian "nits make lice" statement?

(Also, they're a light gray now instead of green? I'm not sure that helps anything.)
 
Drascin said:
Orcs in third edition when I started were already grey. Have D&D orcs ever BEEN green? Those are Warhammer and Warcraft.
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2nd Edition;
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3rd Edition;
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Note how even in the same game there is a bit of variance in skin color among Orcs.
And this one is from Sword Coast Legends, just to round it out;
 
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Yeah, the orc in the 3E Monster Manual is green, but it's a very pale, grayish green.

And Krusk, the half-orc barbarian in the Player's Handbook, is basically gray.

So it's never really been consistent.

Whereas Pathfinder orcs have always been very clearly a vibrant green.
 
And importantly, despite the picture shown above, the third edition monster manual very explicitly describes orcs as "grey-skinned humanoids" - I just went to check the manual in my shelf. So Krusk in the PHB is supposed to be the correct one.
 
Between Paizo and WotC, dragons are getting some serious facelifts this year and I am hear for it. I am a big fan of making different dragons actually feel different. Special shoutout to the fortune dragon from pathfinder cuz god damn is that a cool visual:

 
Oh yeah, the new dragons that Pathfinder created to replace the OGL ones are pretty interesting. An Adamantine dragon with earth powers, a celestial dragon with holy powers, a fiendish dragon with unholy powers, the cash-obsessed Fortune dragon, the future-seeing Omen Dragon, an illusion dragon....
 
Pathfinder has gone with theming its dragons after their traditions of magic:
  • Divine (Empyreal, Diabolic)
  • Arcane (Fortune, Mirage)
  • Occult (Omen, Conspirator)
  • Primal (Adamantine, Horned)
And there are indications of more on the way - adamantine dragons are indicated to be one of several types of 'skymetal dragons' (other skymetals for candidacy being abysium, djezet, noqual, siccatite, inubrix, and orichalcum*), and the blurb for empyreal dragons says that there are dragons associated with all three major celestial planes and empyreals are only one of them.

*an orichalcum dragon is something that doesn't really bear thinking about
 
Yeah, the struggle of finding people to play is real. I had an in-person Band of Blades game going, but some IRL drama pretty much removed one member of the group. I need a replacement, but I pretty much tapped out my network of close-by friends to put together the group in the first place. The idea of putting up, like, a recruitment ad in an LGS doesn't spark joy for me because there are reasons some people in our hobby have the stigma they do. >.<
 
SerGregness said:
Yeah, the struggle of finding people to play is real. I had an in-person Band of Blades game going, but some IRL drama pretty much removed one member of the group. I need a replacement, but I pretty much tapped out my network of close-by friends to put together the group in the first place. The idea of putting up, like, a recruitment ad in an LGS doesn't spark joy for me because there are reasons some people in our hobby have the stigma they do. >.<
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if you want to reach a little wider number of potential people than your LGS, hopefully going outside that self-selected crowd, you could maybe see if your local library does public ads, or a bulletin board or something?
 
Design philosophy stuff I'm thinking about:
Make equivalencies in effect values clear. 10 feet movement ~= 1d6 (3.5) damage, so for the same approximate expense you can do ~3d6 damage or move someone 30 ft. or knock 30 ft. off of someone's speed for a turn. One Action ~= 30 ft. movement, 3d6 damage, etcetera... and vice versa. But conversions are restricted by character class.
Balance everyone's growth around Sneak Attack, i.e. "five feet" per level?
 
To have "boss monsters" be viable they must either be able to deny players the ability to act, whether by stun or similar mechanics or by dealing so much damage that turns must be spent keeping some party members alive. or they must have more actions per turn, in the vein of how in the JP release of FFIV, they got a turn for each character in your party.

As an example, in 2e AD&D the dragon, in a single turn can bite or breath to the front, claw twice to the front or the sides, strike twice with wings to the front or sides, kick to the rear, and strike with it's tail to the side or rear, all of which can target different party members, and all of which except for the bite and claws carry status effects that cost at least one turn worth of actions if they connect, whether due to stunning or to knockdown.
 
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Arawn_Emrys said:
To have "boss monsters" be viable they must either be able to deny players the ability to act, whether by stun or similar mechanics or by dealing so much damage that turns must be spent keeping some party members alive. or they must have more actions per turn, in the vein of how in the JP release of FFIV, they got a turn for each character in your party.

As an example, in 2e AD&D the dragon, in a single turn can bite or breath to the front, claw twice to the front or the sides, strike twice with wings to the front or sides, kick to the rear, and strike with it's tail to the side or rear, all of which can target different party members, and all of which except for the bite and claws carry status effects that cost at least one turn worth of actions if they connect, whether due to stunning or to knockdown.
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I would say that any mechanic that requires one or more players to act as in-combat healbots is bad legacy code - being the designated healer just isn't very fun, especially when you're in a situation where your ability to act is constrained and that healing is the only thing you can do for several real-world minutes. Entirely taking away a player's ability to interact with the game is also bad, see my previous rant (and how PF2 does it better).

I agree more with the principle of giving the boss monster more economy of action - more turns, and/or more ability to act off-turn via reactions and such - and would add that they should have some degree of inherent resistance to (at least some varieties of) save-or-suck.

PF2 has the latter - certain spells and abilities (anything that could end a fight if it goes off perfectly) are tagged as 'Incapacitation,' which has a rule around it that enemies of a higher level than the spell or user (which most boss monsters are - they tend to be 1-3 levels above the party level) get to treat the effect as one degree better for them than normal. So a critical failure on a check turns into a regular failure, and the creature is not instantly KO'd.
 
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In my experience, the best way to keep PCs from ganging up on bosses to kill them too quickly is to give them an entourage. I found when running Star Wars that putting even a few CL 1 stormtroopers that would get killed in one hit around the boss would draw some of the players' attention and let the fight go on longer, as well as letting them use a wider variety of their abilities. I think that was advice given in the core rulebook as well.

If you can't find a reason why the boss would have minions, then they can have summons, or constructs, or traps, or environmental hazards. But try to avoid sending them into fight alone.

Besides, if the boss has minions, then the players can still be "overcoming greater numbers" instead of having them all ganging up on one guy. One feels more heroic than the other.

This is advice that I see given a lot of PF2E as well. People used to D&D where Challenge Rating is arbitrary and meaningless don't realize that encounter design in PF2E actually means what it says and level differences actually matter a lot would throw a Player Level + 4 creature at their players without realizing that when the book says that this is an Extreme Encounter, they mean that it has a good chance to kill PCs or even TPK. Whereas a PL+2 boss plus a couple of PL-2 minions does a better job of providing a threatening encounter that's still manageable.

Another approach is one I used when was a running a PF1E Mythic game. Even though there were only two PCs, a samurai and a ninja, they had an absolutely massive damage output and the bosses in the AP I was running were dying too fast, so I would start adding extra hit points, hundreds of them, to keep the fights going longer.
 
my suggestion is to take a page from lancer and add objectives that aren't just "kill enemies"

Protect a VIP, escort something across a map, avoid detection that occurs under specific criteria, navigate a complex space to reach a specific location.

this also allows you to have enemies the players probably can't beat on the field. their job becomes circumventing those to achieve the objective, instead of going "maximum kill"
 
Chloe Sullivan said:
my suggestion is to take a page from lancer and add objectives that aren't just "kill enemies"

Protect a VIP, escort something across a map, avoid detection that occurs under specific criteria, navigate a complex space to reach a specific location.

this also allows you to have enemies the players probably can't beat on the field. their job becomes circumventing those to achieve the objective, instead of going "maximum kill"
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Can also do it like Spectaculars does and have both sides of the fight playing an objective, and the winner is whoever reaches their objective first (or total knockout I suppose, if you want to be boring).
 
So word is that the 5.5 PHB removes half-elves and half-orcs from the game in some kind of misguided "anti-racism" effort that reads more like anti-miscegenation. They aren't even relegated to a sidebar on mixed species, they're just gone. And they supposedly haven't put in the effort to pull apart species and culture, either, so they don't even get points that way.
 
Not to defend WotC, (Pathfinder 2e is better) but are you sure it was an anti-rascism thing? What I heard is that with stuff like Aasimar and Orcs added as core races they were cut to save space.
 
Queshire said:
Not to defend WotC, (Pathfinder 2e is better) but are you sure it was an anti-rascism thing? What I heard is that with stuff like Aasimar and Orcs added as core races they were cut to save space.
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Because Jeremy Crawford said at a convention a year ago that he felt half races were inherently racist.

Apparently there are rules for being a half race included though. You pick one of your parents, use the stats for that race and make up whatever you want for appearance and other characteristics. Which is just garbage.

Setting aside how this screws over settings that give half-elves and half-orcs their own space and identity like Eberron (though I'm pretty sure it'll be addressed in Frontiers of Eberron, a book Keith Baker will be releasing on DMG this month) and is a fundamentally lacking mechanical design...

I hate this. Half-elves were the first race I properly vibed with in D&D because of the whole 'not fitting in either world you're meant to belong to' thing. And with them removed that list is reduced to warforged, which is not a comparison I enjoy thinking about.

And it may be uncharitable but given everything I've seen from WotC for both D&D and Magic, I have to wonder how many people on the development team aren't just straight, white males.
 
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