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Dungeons and Dragons Megathread

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Nikkolas said:
I didn't mention Khorne or Nurgle as I'm uncertain about them. I honestly don't know much about Khorne beyond the basics since he bores me.

I think Nurgle is pretty Neutral, though.
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There is actually a Demon Lord of Misery and Despair. His name is Phraxus. The problem is that there's so many Lords that only a few get any real screen time. You won't see the Queen of Chaos in many adventures, and it'd be really hard to get one involving Malcanthet that wouldn't get the parents up in arms again, hell, there's a separate Demon Lord for lesbian succubi. There's even a demon lord of malicious ignorance and anti-intellectualism.
 
Arawn_Emrys said:
There is actually a Demon Lord of Misery and Despair. His name is Phraxus. The problem is that there's so many Lords that only a few get any real screen time. You won't see the Queen of Chaos in many adventures, and it'd be really hard to get one involving Malcanthet that wouldn't get the parents up in arms again, hell, there's a separate Demon Lord for lesbian succubi. There's even a demon lord of malicious ignorance and anti-intellectualism.
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You called for me? That said I have forgotten the name of my second favourite Demon Queen ...
 
Arawn_Emrys said:
....you don't think Khorne is chaotic?

And Slaanesh is very broad and badly defined. D&D gods and demon lords have much more specifically defined areas of interest. They are supreme within that "Portfolio", and anything outside that is secondary at best.
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Khorne is also the patron of warriors, discipline and honour. It's part of the reason why he hates magic and mages.
He definitely has lawful aspects from that angle.
 
Strunkriidiisk said:
Fuck that, this is 5e. Permanent ability damage is one thing I'm glad 5e left behind.
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I honestly think they need to bring back all the permanent stuff. Permanent aging from Haste and Wish, permanent changes to ability scores from Books and various other sources, magic locations or complex Elixirs like in the old Volo's Guide to All Things Magical that permanently grant both active and passive abilities. Stuff that makes a given character unique compared to other characters of the same class, level, and starting ability scores.
 
Arawn_Emrys said:
I honestly think they need to bring back all the permanent stuff. Permanent aging from Haste and Wish, permanent changes to ability scores from Books and various other sources, magic locations or complex Elixirs like in the old Volo's Guide to All Things Magical that permanently grant both active and passive abilities. Stuff that makes a given character unique compared to other characters of the same class, level, and starting ability scores.
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The tightly limited game engines of 4/5e are not friendly to giving people free templates (what you are talking about is essentially a LA+0 template in 3.5 terms) - It blows up the math if they add numbers in any way.


I don't know what your problem is, honestly. If you want everyone in 5e to have unique powers, have everyone play the casting archetype of their class and pick different spells

wow, everyone is different now. Amazing!



The best approach if you want everyone to have unique powers is to just do what 4e did and get rid of the caster/martial divide and the frankly shitty legacy code of "spells". - Everyone has powers, with differing mechanics but roughly equal power and breadth - flavor them however you like

Boom, done. It's more balanced and more "unique"



dpara said:
Arguably the imbalance of 3.5 has it's own charm, e.g. a beginner needs to understand/apply a lot less "lines of rules" to play a fighter compared to any other class.
I may even go so far as to say that D&D is so popular because it's imbalanced, the realizations as you learn the system and go "ohoho so that's possible" are pretty addicting.
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we usually use terms like "optimization" or "dollcrafting" to reflect that the difference between a character crafted with High System Mastery is much more potent that one crafted with low understanding of mechanics.

this adds a "skill cap" to the game, and as you say, it can be fun, but it's kinda a headache for the DM, since it makes it much harder to gauge difficulty and provided an appropriate challenge that is neither cakewalk nor TPK.

(also you're wrong in your example - the 3e fighter is extremely frustrating and unrewarding to play as a newbie who doesn't know what feats to pick. The barbarian is a good newbie class, ditto a "blaster caster" - fighter is actually hard to use well.)

it takes a special kind of spreadsheet nerd to like designing battlemechs character builds, but the simpler game engines of 4/5e are probably going to be easier and more appealing for many.
 
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Chloe Sullivan said:
The best approach if you want everyone to have unique powers is to just do what 4e did and get rid of the caster/martial divide and the frankly shitty legacy code of "spells". - Everyone has powers, with mechanics but roughly equal power and breadth - flavor them however you like

Boom, done. It's more balanced and more "unique"
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IMO having the primary difference between classes be the flavor text of their powers makes them more similar, not more "unique." You're welcome to have your own opinion on how to make characters unique, but please understand that they are your opinions, not facts.
 
PhoenixMercurous said:
IMO having the primary difference between classes be the flavor text of their powers makes them more similar, not more "unique." You're welcome to have your own opinion on how to make characters unique, but please understand that they are your opinions, not facts.
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I specified "different mechanics" in my statement

please don't strawman.

Edit: Apparently the shitty browser deleted that word - still, the intent was clearly evident from context


Also, like differin D&D's mechanics is actually pretty limited in core books.

40% of spells in 3e were variations on "deal damage in an area of this shape"

even a good quarter of feats boil down to "you deal more damage in X circumstance"

For actual unique mechanics, try AMS.
 
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Chloe Sullivan said:
I specified "different mechanics" in my statement

please don't strawman.

Edit: Apparently the shitty browser deleted that word - still, the intent was clearly evident from context


Also, like differin D&D's mechanics is actually pretty limited in core books.

40% of spells in 3e were variations on "deal damage in an area of this shape"

even a good quarter of feats boil down to "you deal more damage in X circumstance"

For actual unique mechanics, try AMS.
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No, the intent wasn't all that clear, to me at least. I'm a bit distracted, so maybe it was clear to most other people.

As I recall, 4e classes abilities have similar mechanics, at least more similar than PF1E (the only version I'm familiar with at the moment). All the classes have at will, encounter, and daily powers and gain the same number of abilities at the same time, as I recall. There are some differences in what the abilities do, but I was under the impression the differences were often about what role a class was meant to fill. I've only read the 4e core books though, do any of the additional books change that?

I'm not going to go count how many feats & spells are about direct damage of various flavors, especially for a specific set of books for a version I haven't played in over a decade.

What's AMS? I've never heard of a TTRPG with that acronym.
 
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LordInsane said:
That'd be as it isn't a TTRPG but a term for a category of additions to, for the most part, D&D: Alternate Magic Systems. Things that are magic but do not belong to the normal spells paradigm, such things as Incarnum or Spheres of Power.
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Ah, thank you. Looks like PF1E has similar additions, though they're called variant magic rules, probably for copyright reasons.
 
AmineHsu said:
Google provides no results, weirdly.
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Xinivrae, listed as Patron of Succubi and the seduction of women. Noted specifically as female. Dragon Magazine 353, the regular column called "Demonomicon of Yggwilv", which is where we get most of the obscure ones from. (Yggwilv was a powerful sorceress in Greyhawk who was on-again-off-again with Graz'zt, their son was the evil god Iuz the Old)

This is opposed to Malcanthet, the general ruler of succubi and patron of hedonism, and Graz'zt who just fucked a lot of succubi, and women, and men, and monsters, but happened to keep a legion of succubi lancers.
 
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KingseekerFreyr said:
Is there a male/gay equivalent to Xinivrae?
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There doesn't seem to be. I'll note that she's the only one with a listed preference and that the remaining demon lords tend to be pretty pansexual. In particular Pazuzu, Graz'zt,
, and Socothbenoth if you want males with a seducer aspect.

(Malcanthet may also have devoured any such beings. She's always trying to kill all the other lust-based demon lords to gain unopposed control of the succubi and incubi)
 
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Honestly, my own main thought on fixing Martials isn't about handing them an alternate magic system, but instead making subsystems for strictly-"mundane" action that offers more feature-completeness, while still being a stickler for kind of effect. So a 400 ft. move speed might happen, but abruptly being on the opposite side of a fully-enclosed fortified area wouldn't.

My main idea, outside rejiggering Tome of Battle to be more grounded in kind as mentioned above, has been a stamina subsystem, built around a somewhat more simulationist exhaustion mechanic as an encounter-level resource and scaling by expense widgets. Not formally per encounter like ToB, but rather a per-round partial recovery that takes 5-50 rounds to refill (30 seconds to 5 minutes), depending on class and trending down with level.

Relative weaknesses being proper healing and mobility, on account of those being the hardest to avoid easy campaign-buggering as almost-at-will. Lots of damage mitigation as "tanking" stuff, alongside flyer-whacking and wall-jumping to meet basic needs, but outright bulk healing and strategic-level mobility are too breakable on encounter-level resources.
 
PhoenixMercurous said:
No, the intent wasn't all that clear, to me at least. I'm a bit distracted, so maybe it was clear to most other people.
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Ok fine. just don't be condescending next time.

I said 4e does the right thing by eliminating the "caster/martial divide" and giving every class powers.

i didn't say to use 4e style powers, I'm not a fan of them. By bringing up "breadth" at all, that is pretty much implied.

(I prefer either Psionics or Spheres as the basis for a magic system. Akasha is fun too but lacks flex.)



When it comes to having unique powers, the best way to do that, IMO, is to have a large set of components you can assemble into a signature move by combining several - everyone gets to LEGO a cool power move out of the toolset. This is what Spheres does.

PF goes entirely the wrong way in locking options behind other choices that you don't necessarily want with them. Having your character feel unique is great and a vehicle for creativity. Having your character have to fit a mold someone else imagined and wrote into the rules does the opposite of help this.



archetypes in 5e give more variation without needing to write a whole new class, sure.

archetypes in PF started as a codification (rather than fix) of the Dragon Shaman problem, and thus was rightly described earlier as in inferior copy of 3.5's alternate class feature implementation. This ended up being a not-bad thing because archetypes gave 3pp a easy way to backfix bad paizo class design - but that's 3pp turning Paizo's shit into gold. It still started as shit.
 
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