I mean, if you want the 5 colors in humanoid form, the nexus might have stats for the Noble Draconians, which were made with Chromatic Eggs instead of Metallic, those were a thing in 3rd I think.
Well, you know that I'm a big proponent of Tome of Battle/Path of War for exactly that reason.
I didn't take to 4E, but not for the reasons that the grognards hated it. I was all for giving martials cool powers, adding level to AC and damage instead of being dependent on magic items, and if anything I feel like they didn't move far enough away from the per-day magic system. But coming right off of Saga Edition where each class was infinitely customizable, character creation options and customization felt very... limited. And what really killed it for us was when we tried to play the introductory adventure module, and the combat was just a slog. They fucked up the math, and the most basic monsters had better attack, AC and HP than a 1st level Fighter. The only edge we had were our encounter powers and healing surges. We were just getting constantly beat on, going down, getting back up and going down again. It didn't feel heroic, and it was exhausting and frustrating. Just a miserable time.
But more recently, after seeing 5E, I've started to feel like 4E didn't get a fair shake. At least it tried to do new things, fix problems and bring the game into the 21st century. 5E went backwards and not only brought back the problems of the older editions, but doubled down on them and made them worse, and then also added in the problems of 4E while discarding all the parts of 4E that were actually good ideas.
Huh, didn't know that, thanks for pointing me in the right direction, I'll be sure to check the dragonlance nexus out.
True and I know that, but maybe it might be possible to homebrew a material plane version of them? Sort of like a prototype that tiamat discarded perhaps?
I mean, if you want the 5 colors in humanoid form, the nexus might have stats for the Noble Draconians, which were made with Chromatic Eggs instead of Metallic, those were a thing in 3rd I think.
Well, you know that I'm a big proponent of Tome of Battle/Path of War for exactly that reason.
I didn't take to 4E, but not for the reasons that the grognards hated it. I was all for giving martials cool powers, adding level to AC and damage instead of being dependent on magic items, and if anything I feel like they didn't move far enough away from the per-day magic system. But coming right off of Saga Edition where each class was infinitely customizable, character creation options and customization felt very... limited. And what really killed it for us was when we tried to play the introductory adventure module, and the combat was just a slog. They fucked up the math, and the most basic monsters had better attack, AC and HP than a 1st level Fighter. The only edge we had were our encounter powers and healing surges. We were just getting constantly beat on, going down, getting back up and going down again. It didn't feel heroic, and it was exhausting and frustrating. Just a miserable time.
But more recently, after seeing 5E, I've started to feel like 4E didn't get a fair shake. At least it tried to do new things, fix problems and bring the game into the 21st century. 5E went backwards and not only brought back the problems of the older editions, but doubled down on them and made them worse, and then also added in the problems of 4E while discarding all the parts of 4E that were actually good ideas.
To be Frank I hated 4e mostly because of the changes to FR lore. I'm a big fan of how in depth and detailed it was in 2e, and then 4e comes along and says "all those people are dead, there's new countries retconned in so we can stuff the Ebberron races into the setting, and we removed those old ones that got a bunch of focus in the 2e grey box's timeline for the starting year. The Gods and Planes are all different, and it's been 100 years. Fuck you."
The mechanical change that made me angriest was Wizard losing the ability to learn new spells as they go from scrolls and enemy spellbooks. That was the main motivation for them to be in the damn dungeon to begin with, otherwise why no stay safe in the tower?
I mean, if you want the 5 colors in humanoid form, the nexus might have stats for the Noble Draconians, which were made with Chromatic Eggs instead of Metallic, those were a thing in 3rd I think.
To be Frank I hated 4e mostly because of the changes to FR lore. I'm a big fan of how in depth and detailed it was in 2e, and then 4e comes along and says "all those people are dead, there's new countries retconned in so we can stuff the Ebberron races into the setting, and we removed those old ones that got a bunch of focus in the 2e grey box's timeline for the starting year. The Gods and Planes are all different, and it's been 100 years. Fuck you."
I really wish they'd taken that Abeir-Toril idea of 'world ruled by the gods and with the standard PHB races suddenly collides over with another world ruled by primordials and aberrations, full of dragonborn, shifters and other unusual races' and turned it into a whole setting instead of squishing it into Forgotten Realms.
It feels like an amazing set up that never got touched again because 5e has a hazy retcon that I don't think ever got properly explained.
I really wish they'd taken that Abeir-Toril idea of 'world ruled by the gods and with the standard PHB races suddenly collides over with another world ruled by primordials and aberrations, full of dragonborn, shifters and other unusual races' and turned it into a whole setting instead of squishing it into Forgotten Realms.
It feels like an amazing set up that never got touched again because 5e has a hazy retcon that I don't think ever got properly explained.
From what I can recall, something like that was a common reaction at the time on the FR section of the WotC forums - the changes and retcons were so wide and encompassing that it was like a new setting, so it'd have been better if it had been done as an actual new setting (for obvious reasons, the community there skewed heavily towards people who broadly liked FR as it was even if they might not like everything about it).
I mean, if you want the 5 colors in humanoid form, the nexus might have stats for the Noble Draconians, which were made with Chromatic Eggs instead of Metallic, those were a thing in 3rd I think.
Just did and I have their stats written on a sheet of paper and I also made a photo of them on my phone so if I lose them I can always check and see what they have.
True and I know that, but maybe it might be possible to homebrew a material plane version of them? Sort of like a prototype that tiamat discarded perhaps?
Probably, either way I have stuff figured out and saved so I'm good in that front.
Also oh my god there are so many good pdfs that people have made for 5e holy shit, I want to play them all. Although I haven't seen anything for rare or artefact weapons.
This isn't terribly helpful to you, @Sindri the loyal, but in 3.5 they did introduce the idea that a small percentage of kobolds would be born with distinctly draconic features, for which they were called "dragonwrought".
While calling them 'wyvern-kobolds' is rather harsh, that comment did remind me of this specific bit of 3.5 lore, since dragonwrought kobolds could pick up a set of usable wings at 3rd level.
However, this fan wiki was the only thing I could find as far as a 5e conversion for them:
Dragonwrought Kobold Ability Score Increase. Your Constitution score increases by 1. Flight. You have a flying speed of 30 feet. To use this speed, you can't be wearing medium or heavy armor. You cannot fly higher than 10 feet, if you start your turn above this height you begin falling. Gliding. Your falling speed is 60 feet per round and you take no falling damage. This ability is stopped if you are knocked prone, have your speed reduced to 0, or are otherwise deprived of the ability to move. Magical Sleep Resistance. Magic cannot put you to sleep.
The hamstrung 'flight' ability is an adaptation of 3.5 cruft; Dragon Wings, the feat that dragonwrought kobolds could pick at 3rd level (the normal rule was that you could only take the feat at 1st level), specifically gave you a glide speed rather than a fly speed. What surprises me is that this is actually worse than the 3.5 feat it's adapting:
You have wings that aid your jumps, granting a +10 racial bonus on Jump checks. In addition, you can use your wings to glide, negating damage from a fall from any height and allowing 20 feet of forward travel for every 5 feet of descent. You glide at a speed of 30 feet with average maneuverability. Even if your maneuverability improves, you can't hover while gliding.
You can't glide while carrying a medium or heavy load. If you become unconscious or helpless while in midair, your wings naturally unfurl, and powerful ligaments stiffen them. You descend in a tight corkscrew and take only 1d6 points of falling damage, no matter what the actual distance of the fall.
My off-the-cuff assessment would be to have the 5e version give some kind of bonus for Acrobatics, since you could feasibly use your wings to help balance and even to course-correct in midair. The idea that you only get to move 30 feet forward for every 60 feet you drop is just :-/, but I'm not confident in my ability to come up with a good alternative without sitting down and properly thinking about it for a while*.
It's definitely shedding a number of benefits from the original 3.5 version of being dragonwrought:
Your type is dragon rather than humanoid, and you lose the dragonblood subtype. You retain all your other subtypes and your kobold racial traits. Your scales become tinted with a color that matches that of your draconic heritage. As a dragon, you are immune to magic sleep and paralysis effects. You have darkvision out to 60 feet and low-light vision. You gain a +2 racial bonus on the skill indicated for your draconic heritage on the table on page 103.
3.5e made use of feats very differently from 5e, and a lot of the post-chargen perks of being dragonwrought were predicated on that, in the form of fulfilling the prereqs for other feats you could take later.**
Moving on from that, I would personally want to keep the part where your PC's type changes to Dragon, if only because it gives you that proper sense of you're-a-goddamn-dragon. (The homebrewer might have been worried about how that would interact with the increased type specificity for the hold/charm/dominate spells?)
The +2 skill bonus is very much a 3.X-ism, and might be best left out entirely, since the obvious 5e equivalent would be giving you proficiency with a skill, and that could be a bit much on top of the other benefits.
Among other things, I'd need to go check how a glide speed works in 3.5, since I don't remember the specifics. Going entirely off of the section I quoted, it could be interpreted as meaning you have partial control over your rate of descent - you can trade in 5' of altitude for 20' of forward movement, so your 30' glide speed means you either move 30' forward & 5' down with your move for the round, or you can Dash in order to move 60' forward & 15' down, but you'll always be dropping at least 5' each round.
Let me stress this again: the above is the product of my current sleepy brain, and is not intended as credible advice on what to do here. Please consult someone more awake before applying any element of the above to your campaign.
To try and summarize it for someone with no 3.5 experience, you had the potential to use feats to customize your character, similar to subclasses in 5e, but without much guidance, let alone a nice condensed set of level-by-level effects. On the one hand, that made it possible to 'bend' a character concept in interesting ways. On the other, the lack of explanation meant that utility was functionally paywalled unless and until you spent enough time poring over the books and trawling forums.
The dragonwrought Kobold was mostly known for Sparking 1 bajillion forum arguments over whether DW kobolds count as "true Dragons" and can benefit from the dragon-specific options provided in some 3.5 Splatbooks.
In particular, there were a set of quasi-templates you could add to Draconic sorcerous spellcasting, one of which was +2 effective sorcerer level for your spellcasting.
If you allowed it to apply to Dragonwrought Kobolds, they became the only non-3pp PC option for taking enough Swiftblade (a prestige class focused on the haste spell) levels to get the massive action economy boost and still have 9th level spells by level 20.
(Pathfinder, not to be outdone in nonsense, eventually released a feat that let you "buyback" lost spellcasting levels from prestige classes, which is just bonkers.)
Should point out that "winged kobolds" are a canon thing. They're called Urd. They were in the MM for 2e. They tend to be less lawful than normal kobolds and back when you could have it be a thing tended to be less intelligent too.
Should point out that "winged kobolds" are a canon thing. They're called Urd. They were in the MM for 2e. They tend to be less lawful than normal kobolds and back when you could have it be a thing tended to be less intelligent too.
I remember their favorite tactic being the standard "fly up too high to be seen, with the heaviest rock you can carry, and drop it on the squishiest-looking target".
Helpful but aren't those already in 5e as a option or at least a encounter? Never personally seen a urd but they are talked in the kobold section so yeah, they are a thing already, still cool though, I like kobolds already.
A lot of contemporary D&D's issues with Martials stem from the fact that 3rd Edition was a mess, 3.5 tried to change the base expectations / play styles of a D&D campaign while remaining recognizable to older D&D players, 4E was generally fine but the community rioted for reasons both related and poorly timed coincidentally, and 5E brought back a bunch of earlier things (admittedly tweaked so that the 5E PHB base is at least better than the 3E and 3.5 PHB base) with even more chronological / ideological drift from 2E.
4E and PF2E (if from different angles) were each willing to take a hatchet to the systems and underlying premises which works to their strengths significantly. 5E… has brought Martials generally in line, but drifts away as people try to sneak in bullshit for casters in bits and pieces (allowing for changing out spell damage types, playing with Concentration, increasing ranges, Short/Long Rest interactions, etc).
2E did a ton to keep Martials in line. Lots of proficiencies, good saves, relatively fast EXP progression, Expertise / Mastery, bound Hit Dice across the board (not just for PCs), Followers + Henchmen, Exceptional Str & Con giving them higher ceilings in the same bound 3-18 base range, an entirely different armor system, etcetera. But almost none of these apply (or, worse, actively break down the flow of gameplay / game design) post-2E. 2E is a mess that works in it's contained bubble but violently shudders apart if you poke it wrong and 3.5/5E put little thought into the strange noises.
Okay, since we don't need edition war no. 420579592938479820, I'm just going to head this off.
1) The claims that "2e was balanced actually" are debatable, but for the sake of (not having) argument, let's take that as a given.
2) The issue is that the soft balance of AD&D involved stuff like henchmen and land/strongholds that aren't even part of the game, or are very restricted or siloed off in later editions.
3) This is because later editions have different focuses and in many ways aren't even the same genre. Whether you think this is good or bad, it's a fact. The latter editions using the 2e paradigm was never a realistic scenario, so please avoid even the appearance of advocating for that - it's not so much wrong as just nonsensical and a waste of everyone's time.
That digression over,
No, 3e+'s issues with martials did not stem from 2e outside of the obvious issue with legacy code. They stemmed from bad design, lack of playtesting, and a refusal to consider second order implications. In other words, the devs did a bad job - or perhaps more accurately, only did about 30% of their job.
Meanwhile, as a grapple-fighter in PF2 I was able to go 1v2 against a pair of gunslinger npcs and come out feeling like a badass so I'm pretty content with the martial design.
As it bears repeating over and over and over again: The issue with Martials vs. Casters isn't exclusively combat performance. It's in the ability to affect the plot in other ways.
With homebrew, or 3rd-party material, or pitting the right builds against each other, or maybe even natively in the right editions, martial characters can easily fight just as well as casters, at any level. Sure, a 3.5 CoDzilla will kick a 3.5 Fighters ass all day long, but a 5E Battlemaster Fighter or (insert clever martial build here) can do a good job keeping pace with casters.
What they can't do is whip up a Fly spell to catch up with that fleeing airship, or easily scry out an enemies location (martial scouting pales in comparison), or cure various ailments, or magically gather all sorts of information, or breathe all day long under water, or easily travel to another plane, or any number of other things.
Heck, just take Baldurs Gate 3 - which notably cuts out many utility spells and only goes to 12th level too.
Casters get massive skill enhancers such as Friends, Guidance, and Enhance Ability. They get to play around with Minor Illusion to distract enemies, or make for easy pickpocketing. They get to use Darkness to enable various thefts or other shenanigans. Mage Hands can be abused in various ways. Misty Step can bypass all sorts of obstacles.
And Speak with Animals, Speak with Dead, and Detect Thoughts are unique ways to gather information that casters have way easier access to (there's potions and various other ways, but still).
It's why I am generally in favour of giving Martials an equal utility suite as Casters.
Yes, that means giving them magic, because otherwise they just don't compare. They'll still fight differently - we're just talking out of combat here.
Incidentally, Pathfinder 2E doesn't do this, but somewhat enables this with the Free Archetype optional rule.
Apologies. Seeing as how the intent of that post kind of flew entirely over the head and is clearly aggravating I'll just remove it outright so the prior discussion may resume.
Personally I think with the right race combo martials can be really good, sure they re some busted race combos floating about in unearthed arcana, same with classes but hey, casters can generally be a little stronger then martials but can they have infinite +1 attacks like the fighter gets? I don't think so.
As it bears repeating over and over and over again: The issue with Martials vs. Casters isn't exclusively combat performance. It's in the ability to affect the plot in other ways.
With homebrew, or 3rd-party material, or pitting the right builds against each other, or maybe even natively in the right editions, martial characters can easily fight just as well as casters, at any level. Sure, a 3.5 CoDzilla will kick a 3.5 Fighters ass all day long, but a 5E Battlemaster Fighter or (insert clever martial build here) can do a good job keeping pace with casters.
What they can't do is whip up a Fly spell to catch up with that fleeing airship, or easily scry out an enemies location (martial scouting pales in comparison), or cure various ailments, or magically gather all sorts of information, or breathe all day long under water, or easily travel to another plane, or any number of other things.
Heck, just take Baldurs Gate 3 - which notably cuts out many utility spells and only goes to 12th level too.
Casters get massive skill enhancers such as Friends, Guidance, and Enhance Ability. They get to play around with Minor Illusion to distract enemies, or make for easy pickpocketing. They get to use Darkness to enable various thefts or other shenanigans. Mage Hands can be abused in various ways. Misty Step can bypass all sorts of obstacles.
And Speak with Animals, Speak with Dead, and Detect Thoughts are unique ways to gather information that casters have way easier access to (there's potions and various other ways, but still).
It's why I am generally in favour of giving Martials an equal utility suite as Casters.
Yes, that means giving them magic, because otherwise they just don't compare. They'll still fight differently - we're just talking out of combat here.
Incidentally, Pathfinder 2E doesn't do this, but somewhat enables this with the Free Archetype optional rule.
bring back Legacies and Inheritors from Mystara, or if not direct magic then there's so many options. Use Ki, hell, 2e's Ninja Handbook had rules for letting anyone infuse their attacks with Ki. Use Psionics. Grant them Divine Favor. Have them subconsciously tap into heroic legends/narrative causality/the gestalt conciousness ideal of heroes and pull power from there as they work their way towards becoming legends themselves. There's plenty of ways to add some utility abilities to martial types that would also add some nice flavor.
Also uh, a question, but i dont exactly have the book or pdf on me but what exactky does the drakewarden subclass get? I know it's related to dragons but my memory escapes me.
5E… has brought Martials generally in line, but drifts away as people try to sneak in bullshit for casters in bits and pieces (allowing for changing out spell damage types, playing with Concentration, increasing ranges, Short/Long Rest interactions, etc).
I've seen people say things like this about 5e, but I don't think that I agree. It's true that there has been some power creep over the course of the edition which has benefited casters, but that's mostly in the form of things like racial flight options, the Fey Touched and Telekinetic feats, and a few specific subclasses like Twilight Clerics. But most of the components that make casters strong in 5e were all available right from day one, and pretty much all the most broken spells are from the PHB. Casters have certainly acquired more spell options with new material, but in a lot of cases it's actually been less powerful than what was available from the start. To elaborate, I think it's important to clarify the ways that casters are disproportionately strong in 5e, which I think fall into a few specific areas.
Defense. This is mostly a product of the way that the proficiency and multiclassing rules intersect with bounded accuracy. It's very easy for a caster to pick up at least medium armor and shield proficiency and then grab the Shield spell, which allows them to stack AC higher than almost any martial. Another component of this is that there are a lot of potent spells that can repeatedly deliver strong effects without requiring an action, which leaves casters free to dodge, whereas martial characters almost always have to use their action to attack if they want to meaningfully contribute to combat. This is all from the PHB.
Default kills. Once casters get to higher levels, there are spells that can win encounters outright without requiring any kind of roll at all. Forcecage is easily the best of these, and it's right in the PHB.
Summoning and other forms of minion creation. This is one area in particular in which the PHB spells are way stronger than the newer material. As a consequence of bounded accuracy, large numbers of weak attackers can still be relevant even at higher levels, and a lot of the PHB spells can completely shatter the action economy by putting down huge numbers of attackers.
Downtime spells. There are a lot of spells that either have long casting times or long durations, which can result in massive power spikes whenever casters get downtime between adventuring, and sometimes even if they just have spell slots left over at the end of a day. The worst offenders are probably Simulacrum and Planar Binding, which are both in the PHB. I've talked extensively about how broken Simulacrum is, but Planar Binding might actually be even more insane because there is no limit to the number of creatures you can bind. Even just getting ten minutes before a fight to cast a ritual can sometimes make a huge difference. Very few martials have any equivalent at all.
Noncombat utility. This one is pretty self-explanatory. Casters simply have far more tools to engage with challenges outside of combat, and they always have. This is probably the area in which casters have grown the most in power, because the new options have added greater versatility and these spells generally aren't fighting for space with staple combat choices, so there's a lot of room to make picks that fit the needs of your campaign.
Meanwhile, as a grapple-fighter in PF2 I was able to go 1v2 against a pair of gunslinger npcs and come out feeling like a badass so I'm pretty content with the martial design.
Yeah, PF2E martials are really good. Fighter is widely thought to be the strongest class in combat. Their better weapon proficiency lets then hit and crit more often, so they dish out tons of damage. Martials can also use their class feats and weapon critical mastery effects to do battlefield control and debuffs: attacks that move enemies, knock them prone, grab them or otherwise make them flatfooted. And they all have a pretty good amount of skills to give them out-of-combat utility (and even in-combat utility, since skills have clearly-defined uses instead of a vague couple sentences like 5E... Deception to feint, Acrobatics to tumble through enemy squares). It's actually not hard to make a rogue that's trained in every skill, and other martials will still have a pretty broad spread. They all have expert Perception to let them avoid ambushes instead of stumbling around oblivious and since Perception is used for initiative, they're more likely to go first. And there are no bad saves, so they always have a decent chance to resist spells and powers.
It also helps that all the save-or-lose spells have been nerfed so that you're only totally taken out if you critically fail, with a normal failure just inflicting a lasting debuff... but a success also usually still inflicts a minor debuff for a single round, so while spellcasters can no longer just trivialize encounters (or force a player to sit out of the whole thing twiddling their thumbs), but you'll almost always get at least some result from casting it.
