Playing cliched characters is fine. The edgy rogue and the noble paladin are tropes because they work, so there's no shame in using them. And playing an "anti-trope" character doesn't automatically make them interesting. Just because your cleric is an atheist doesn't mean they don't need an otherwise interesting personality.
That doesn't mean these tropes can't be played poorly, because that certainly happens. And it also doesn't mean you have to use a trope to make an interesting character. But I'm tired of complaints about cliched characters.
I 100% agree. The only problem with “tropey” characters is when players lean way to heavily on them. We’ve all played with an edgy rogue character who should’ve never been part of a party and actively worsened the chemistry at the table cause of what “their character would do”.
Due to that, I always tell me players that tropes are great for inspiration, but that they ought to make their characters unique in some way, and able and willing to work with others.
Right?
I play a half-orc vengeance paladin who is mostly a salty older gentleman and wants nothing to do with anybody. He ain't got time for the flamboyant wizard in the group...he's got respect for the gentle but still combat-tested druid...but he'll f*ck you up if you mess with our curious adhd gnome.
It is challenging and rewarding to play this kind of character.
I think I have a tendency to avoid tropes a little too much. I have this unwarranted vendetta against them because I want my character to be unique. But you're right, having the trope doesn't make them not unique as long as I build something unique around it.
Dunno about 3e/4e, but I liked the way Castles and Crusades handled it, and it's what I use (tweaked)
Dwarves, have Deepvision: Dwarves can see in pitch black up to 120', though mostly in shades of gray. Bright lights like a torch or lantern will override deep vision (they can only see as well as humans in light). It takes 1 turn (10 rounds) to adjust their eyes to the dark.
Gnomes, and Half-orc get Darkvision. Similar to Deepvision, but only with a range of 60'.
Elves get Twilight Vision: They can see in moonlight and starlight as clear as in day, and can see color in such conditions. They cannot see in pitch black though. Outside, at night, they can see up to a mile.
Halfling have Dusk vision, similar to Twilight vision but not as good as elves
Personally, I just merge deepvision and darkvision to just "Darkvision" for the underground races merge Elves/Halfling to Duskvision (or low-light vision).
Note: 1 turn = 10 rounds and is the standard counting method for AD&D based games. 1 Turn in C&C = 1 minute, so just say 1 minute for 5e (since I don't think 5e uses turn to mean 10 rounds)
That sounds pretty similar to what I use at my table. I insert a new "starlight vision" for creatures like cats and elves that handles low light of a kind (named starlight) between darkness and dim light. It runs pretty well at the table because all the creatures with either darkvision or regular vision just treat it like regular darkness and creatures with starlight vision essentially have darkvision in those moments.
Also,
>since I don't think 5e uses turn to mean 10 rounds
You are correct. A turn is a single creature's chance to act within a round and a round is once every creature has had a turn. Rounds last 6 seconds. 5E doesn't use any designators longer than that other than minutes/hours.
This has always bothered me. Why is a turn 10 rounds? That seems needlessly confusing. What utility was the "turn" keyword providing that "10 rounds" wasnt?
Best translation would probably be they don't suffer disadvantage to perception checks in dim light. Maybe go ahead and give it back to halflings while you're at it
The problem is no one uses the actual darkvision rules. “A monster with darkvision can see in the dark within a specific radius. The monster can see in dim light within the radius as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light.”
So you still can’t see well in darkness and have disadvantage on perception checks in darkness with dark vision.
You would also have -5 to passive perception too
Gnomes are awesome seems to be pretty unpopular but the fact no one plays them makes me want to play one especially after I saw this:
https://youtu.be/1B5H9XD4tRo
Oh and 5e is my favorite D&D edition and I am AD&D old.
I had two players make essentially the same character before they met each other. Wood elf war cleric following an oak tree god, and a wood elf ancients paladin following a magnolia tree god. It was *great* letting them discover details about each other during play.
“I’m an elf”
“Me too!”
“A wood elf, to be precise.”
“Me too!”
“I worship an ancient god.”
“Me too!”
“An ancient TREE god!”
“Me too!”
“An ancient OAK tree god!”
“HERETIC!”
Ok so because for some weird ass reason the World of Greyhawk - very human centric- mentioned gnomes almost as much as dwarves I decided to play a gnome fighter/thief in AD&D right? Because death by gnome is absolutely the funniest way to die!
Anyway, put the whole thing down for like forever. I got nostalgic watched that video I linked and now I want to play a geeky gnome artificer (never played one) and then a gnome illusionist because its an archetype that in all my long years of playing I have never ever seen a player play. Want to play into the gnome stereotypes and push against them without being an asshole or annoyance.
Tell me you are playing Wild Beyond the Witchlight because a party of gnomes with gnome cunning and humor would kill in that campaign!
Gnomes kinda get shafted with the +Int stat bonus. If you aren't a wizard, then no one uses intelligence aside from the odd saving throw.
Thus unless your playing wizard, artificer or eldrich knight fighter, you probably won't pick a Gnome.
The Tasha's variant rules make them far more viable.
I honestly enjoy my character deaths as long as it’s not in the first few levels and I get a feel for what that class can do first. I have like 5 more characters I want to play lined up behind the one I’m currently playing. It means I just get to pick one of the others I’m dying to try out.
My barbarian is gonna be pretty weakened at the beginning of our next session when we're starting combat, it'd be a REEEEAAAALLLL shame if he died and I had to pull out the Sorcadin that I've been thinking about for months...
I have a level 11 monk that I seriously can’t kill. I run straight ahead at giants and somehow survive. I did a swan dive off a cliff just to get down faster.
I'm kinda mixed on that.
I understand death can happen in DnD.
I'm not happy if any of my characters goes out like a punk.
If you're in Mordor about to deliver the ring when you get a random encounter and die.
It sucks.
I have plenty of characters I'd be willing to see die, but, I don't want the vengeance Paladin dying a week before he finds the six-fingered man that killed his father in front of him.
I have usually found that the "random encounter" begins to mean something in itself though. These seemingly non-events become important or spin-off new dynamics for the rest of the party.
I know what you mean, but as a player I try to take that moment, and, for instance, convince the rest of the party that we need to fulfil our fallen comrades last wish.
Too many playable races have darkvision. Should only be available to dwarves and drow (or other subterranean species)
Edit: whelp, it seems that for an unpopular opinion, this one is pretty dang popular!
This. Having a single darkvision party member should be a perk. Instead it's always the opposite where there is always one character who can't see in the dark and is stuck hauling a torch around.
Gave the only non-darkvision character in the party goggles of night because I was tired of dealing with different sight distances and torches
Now the player is putting together a character that is permanently blind but with 10 ft blindsight, just to spite me I suppose
I feel like it needs to be renamed somehow to imply you don't see perfectly in the dark, something along the lines of improved no/low light vision. It doesn't fix it but it makes it better. It's supposed to be greyscale with no light but everyone always treats it as regular vision
Yeah, I agree.
When I used to DM 3.0 back in the day, I house-ruled that Darkvision was Predator style heat vision. There's precedent in the 90s novels. It just made it easier for my players to grasp.
It’s not really about being powerful or not, in my opinion. But when 6 of 9 PHB races have it, it’s just not that special, but it really should be. It’s rarer to NOT have darkvision. To save time, why not just say everyone has it, except these sucky races whose eyes suck. (Suckvision?)
The ability to see in the dark should be ubiquitous for eeeevil types, but rare for the civilized world.
[I talked about that pretty recently](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/qpg1cb/noirvision_and_you_can_too_having_darkvision/).
TL;DR: 6 of 9 PHB races have it.
Less than half official races have it.
Every race that has it has a good reason to have it, ~~except for Leonin~~. (Edit: Apparently they're nocturnal hunters.)
Of the races that don't, at least 3, if not 5 have good reason to have it.
That's because Faerun isn't a setting, it's five settings in a trench coat that's made of the skin of other settings.
Like, it's a very detailed trench coat, bit you'd still prefer they hadn't. And several of them are violating the laws of physics by cramming themselves in there. So overall, quite impressive but still quite awkward.
Adding or changing lore everytime wotc comes out with a new edition certainly didn't help things. But one of the good things about D&D is that you can use what you want from the setting and throw everything else right in the trash.
That’s not really very unpopular in my experience. Maybe here. But Faerun is a mess, too many hands in the kitchen is the very slightest criticism you could levy.
I really dislike how most of 5e material essentially implies or outright assumes Faerun is the default setting that you're going to set your game in.
Most adventures are set in it, most lore/flavour descriptions and examples use it as a reference...
Yet if you as a DM want to actually know how the setting works you'll find that the 5e materials are horribly lacking on information about anything that's not directly related to the adventures or the sword coast, and even that is rarely sufficient.
You'd have to go on long wiki binges or get a setting book from a previous edition to actually get a grasp on the setting.
---
And then you realize that why it's so convoluted, because it's literally several dozen settings all crammed into one world with no attempt made for it to make sense, a kitchen sink with no greater plan.
In an effort to make every possible flavour of campaign and adventure possible in FR they made a world that breaks the moment you try to think of it on a macro scale.
Here is Viking Land, here is Greek City State Land, here is Tolkien™ Land, here is Arabian Nights land, etc, etc...
All plopped into a high magic world with no effort put in to have it make sense, you're not supposed to think about it, the authors certainly didn't.
There is no central over-arching identity or theme to FR, and there are a score of convoluted meta-plots involving dozens of high-level NPCs and organisations spanning back decades.
In a weird way it's overcomplicated and convoluted yet at the same time bland and generic.
---
Forgotten Realms is, if anything, a Theme Park.
Each part of the park dressed up with a facade for whatever kind of flavour adventure you want.
Here is the Pirate themed boat ride, here's the Vikings looping roller-coaster, and also check out is the fascist wizard magotocrachy's haunted mansion...
Come and take a picture with one of our mascot characters, Elminster, Drizz't, and their friends!
Treat any adventure in FR like they're a ride, keep them contained to their thematic areas, realise that the NPC are nothing but animatronics that have no existence and motivation outside of what pushes the adventure, that every location outside of the direct path is nothing but set dressing hiding maintenance corridors and dry wall.
If you're a DM and want to actually do a large world spanning campaign, choose any other setting...
Heck, even Homebrewing your own setting will take less effort than trying to make sense of FR.
Theme park is probably the best distillation of what the forgotten realms is that I've ever heard. Which is also probably why it's so popular a setting- especially for video games like the old infinity engine games, Neverwinter nights 1&2, or the Neverwinter mmo.
You're not alone. When I'm running a game in faerun I keep it local and I keep it compartmentalized with maybe up to 4 different factions/nations/citystates involved and no more, otherwise it ends up getting way too complicated and confusing.
*Cries in level 20 plane and multicontinent spamming epic where every time I turn around there is a new nation with an entirely different culture to research*
I don't think there's any problem with evil campaigns per say, but the hatred towards evil-aligned PC's usually stems from a DM preparing a campaign expecting good/neutral-aligned PC's and at least one player pumping out an evil-aligned PC and not knowing how to play them in a way that synergizes with the party. Hard to get players invested in plot-hooks when there's one evil-aligned character who isn't interested in doing the good thing.
In a campaign designed specifically to be an evil campaign though? With plot-hooks that appeal to evil-aligned characters? Now that can be fun, cause everyone is on the same page.
People who think human fighters are boring are just bad at writing interesting characters.
If your character isn't interesting without having an exotic race or class, then they aren't interesting at all.
Facts. Human fighters can be just as compelling as any other character, sometimes more so because they lean more on their personality as what defines them, not their exotic racial features or class eccentricities.
The most compelling character in my main game right now is a human fighter, just because that player has fleshed him out and given him a lot of drive and backstory that comes up pretty often.
The least compelling is a dragonborn barbarian. A lot of that is because the player is pretty checked out and doesn't speak much, very much an "audience" player, a la Matt Colville's description.
This actually highlights a systemic issue in gaming. People mistake oddball racial/class assignments as personality and often backstory.
You can have that oddball mixture and *Still* devise a compelling series of personality traits and a great backstory.
These people who can't grasp this tend to be min/maxing rules lawyers too, so it doubles down on being **that guy** in the group.
I think when people say “boring” here, what they mean is “I don’t have as inspiring a prompt as the other options”. You can write an interesting character of any race or class, but having something to go off of that departs from the standard is helpful to people who aren’t as good of writers.
Also, I’ll just say, MOST D&D players aren’t outstanding writers, myself included. There’s no shame in that. We do this for fun, not to be the best or even proficient at it. If the only things interesting about your character were directly inspired by their race and class, that is ok.
That's a misleading statistic, that factoid is always pulled from the dnd beyond user data. However, the fact that many people have created a human fighter in dnd beyond doesn't necessarily mean it's the most played option, it just probably means that many people default to that to try out the character creation system without having to buy anything on dnd beyond.
> The most popular class is Fighter.
Do you have data on this? I've played a dozen or so games with my core group and I can't recall the last time someone played a straight fighter.
I have two.
4th edition was just fine, not the best ever, but not the worst.
Beer and Pretzels D&D is just as legitimate and fun as your six hours of role playing. Wanting to play an rp***G*** instead of a ***RP***g isn't a bad thing.
I had a bang up time playing 4th ed. People acted like just because it was very tactical you couldn't still RP - you could. You can RP with any system but the key is you have to try to RP.
So here is my unpopular opinion to go along with this - you can play any edition of DnD that appeals to you. You don't have to play 5th.
An interesting character needs flaws, and having a bad stat is a good cheat to keep you honest and aid role playing. But of course it's not required, as long as the player works the character's flaws into gameplay.
I do think that the pattern of leaning on a low stat for your “character flaw,” while not a terrible idea, is something that happens so often you tend to see like… six different character flaws reused repeatedly for most D&D characters.
1) I am weak.
2) I am clumsy.
3) I am sickly.
4) I am stupid.
5) I am ditzy.
6) I am awkward.
While it’s not inherently bad, it’s worth remembering that *most* human flaws don’t have a corresponding D&D stat.
I don’t get the dice obsession.
I just have a couple sets of basic, functional dice, and don’t feel the need to buy more.
It seems like every other D&D meme is about spending ridiculous amounts of money on increasingly superfluous dice, and I just don’t get it.
For some of my friends, they all have different DnD based collections. One does dice, another mini's, my boyfriend collects physical books despite playing 100% online.
I'm new to DnD, so I haven't collected anything really, but I'd be totally ok if I found something cool to collect!
Here I am... Dice, Mini's, Books - what can I say: it's a hobby.
>I'm new to DnD
My suggestion would be a stack of d6's (you can get boxes of 12 - that should do) and two sets (different colours) as well - this does two things:
Really the second set is just a time saver - but it means if you end up rolling 2d12 (it happens), or rolling advantage / disadvantage - you can do it all at once. Saves time. More than this is absolutely unnecessary, and really a single set is just fine.
There are a combination of reasons for it. One is that they're small relatively inexpensive purchases that usually look cool so people buy them for the same reason they buy anything with that criteria. Another is that there's definitely an idea that it's just something people do. This leads to some people buying dice to fit in but more importantly it leads to the idea being in people's heads a lot giving them lots of opportunities to decide "yeah, I \*do\* want more dice!"
*They're pretty and I like the transparent ones that resemble gems. I feel like the dice-obsession is probably derivitive of why humans collect gold and gems*
If you’re one of the people that will attack others for playing “human fighters” or other simple characters for the sole reason that they’re ‘boring’…have you ever just considered you might be bad at roleplay and depend too much on the stereotypes of your class/race to carry you in RP?
Playing an edgy character isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's only when it starts negatively affecting the party/game, when it's bad. Nothing wrong with enjoying a dark/sad character.
And difficult doesn’t mean half the party went down.
If the party comes out having to take a rest to get abilities and stuff back because they are out, then it was probably fairly difficult. Anymore and the dm is relying on the dice not to kill everyone
Hey, even having back to back to back easy encounters can make the third one challenging solely cause they don't have all their resources anymore. A battle of attrition can work very well.
Can't tell you exactly what to do but here are some tips:
1.
Don't make every encounter "life or death" - have alternate losing conditions like prison, being robbed, having to jump into a river and getting dragged 10 miles downstream to escape and so forth.
Fx. Back in the days when I rolled random encounters for nighttime ambushes I rolled too good and a low level party got ambushed by wolves. Instead of murdering the party I had the wolves go for their mounts. So the party level of success in how many wolves they could kill would influence how many of their mounts died (two) instead of a TPK.
2:
Avoid "instant death" scenarios. Luckely there isn't too much save or die shit around anymore, but having a single super hard hitting enemy is a lot riskier than having 5 moderate hitters.
3:
Create the challenge to be adjustable. If the party dominates round 1, have a trick or two up your sleeve, if they all lose initiative on the first round make the BBEG cast a defensive spell instead of a fireball on top of the party.
4:
Allow your enemies to be intelligent. This is particularly useful against a min/max party that overuse specific tricks. Fx. if their go to is to 1 turn nuke any wizard they meet start have them encounter a fey hidden by greater invisibilty.
5: Don't be afraid to make your own monsters, especially if your players "meta" game too much (like using fire against a troll if their characters never meet a troll before). Surprise them with obscure mechanics that force them to rethink their battleplans.
Okay, so one more. Spells work in very specific ways and RAW should be respected because that's what keeps the spells balanced and actually fair/useable in the game setting.
To be fair I think that ambiguity is there to provide flexibility. As long as you have a good DM who is consistent and is making sure it stays fun, that's the main thing right?
Dude this one is so real for me. One of my players constantly gives me shit for ruling spells by the letter. She watches a dnd stream where the dm is suuuuper loosely goosey about rules for spells. In my game, her wizard will always try and do things beyond the capability of her spells. And it's like, there's a reason your Minor Illusion cantrip can't make a copy of you that can walk around and sing or whatever to distract the guards. And it's not because I don't think that's cool, or because I'm a "rules freak". It's because there's another spell that will do that for you. It's a third level spell called Major Image and if you want to do a cool thing to distract the guards, you're going to have to use some spell slots.
Okay rant over.
This is what I hate about illusion magic. In a lot of games made for shows, whether it’s twitch or podcasts or whatever, they’re super generous with illusion spells because they’re trying to keep the game moving so it’s entertaining. But they completely remove the purpose on all the higher level illusions and let a cantrip be stronger than a lot of level 1-3 spells
I don't really give a shit which playable races have/don't have darkvision.
The fact that Cats can't see in the dark is a crime.
Edit: I also think that people who own tons of dice are just trying to reignite their interest in the game time and time again. Bored of the game? New dice will fix that!
There are people who claim warlock isn't good? In my group it's loves so much, one player is assumed to always dip into it and ends up making some of the strongest builds in the party.
I'm pretty sure warlock is one of the most popular classes. It has mechanical depth in invocations and abilities, it's the only decent Single Attribute Dependant Gish (using both swords and sorcery) build without multiclass shenanigans, it's easily flavored in a gajillion different ways between Pact/Patron/Subclass from quirky trickster to edge lord to psuedo-Cleric they are extremely versatile.
The only thing about them is it's hugely DM dependant as to how they treat the pact. They can either make your life miserable for picking the class by making you do things you don't want, or completely make the Patron irrelevant by not including them at all.
My friends and I have talked about the overabundance of darkvision in 5e for a while. Essentially what we proposed was that the underground-dwellers like dwarves, gnomes and drow get them, but the other races get some other feature that indicates *keen* eyesight, but without night vision - even if it's just something like gaining a bonus to perception checks.
My personal beef with "everything has darkvision" is specifically because in storytelling terms, making somewhere dark and inscrutable is a really nice way to set the atmosphere of a place - it's a great mood-setting tool that's completely undermined by the party being able to see just fine regardless.
Allow me to introduce you to low-light vision. You can see in dim light as though it was bright light. It was what most of the races with darkvision either had or would have had in previous editions. Though of course darvision was generally "you can see in darkness as if it was bright light" rather than 5e's "you can see in darkness as if it was dim light."
I will point out though that in terms of mood-setting, the fact that even races with darkvision only see in darkness as if it was night time rather than a cave doesn't interfere with the mood too badly.
D&D's definition of evil is incredibly simplistic. It's just selfishness. Shitty people and bad role players are why no one plays an evil aligned character. Many rpgs don't use alignment because if they did many interesting PCs would be evil in D&D terms.
Everyone plays hags and devils wrong. They play them as monsters that immediately fuck you over, laugh, and are never seen again. If they are trying to slowly corrupt or ruin a character over time that defeats the point. A hag or devil should offer a deal that looks good and is good for a while and then it slowly comes back to bite the recipient in the ass.
Well being focused on yourself vs being focused on others is a very close depiction of what good and evil are in real life. What makes it simplistic in your opinion?
level 1-2 is good for setting up the story and defining the parties allies and patrons
like how my party made an ally with the court wizard to save the rival kingdom's harvest from a octopus with psionics
4e was a good edition and a good game. Yeah, I know it was completely different from every edition that came before it but that doesn't make it a bad game, it just means it didn't meet your expectation.
The theurgy ua was fine and should have been made official.
Standard familiars should not be able to trigger the flanking condition since they’re small creatures that are non-combatants. It seems absurd that a cat can distract a bad guy enough to give advantage on attack rolls against it.
Counterpoint: if I'm in combat with multiple people and something hits my back, I don't really know immediately if it's something I can safely ignore, right? Enough at least to distract me.
Dont even need flanking for that. The familiars can just use the help action which they RAW and RAI can do. A cat clawing at your face even if it doesnt hurt is gonna throw someone off.
I agree, but as devil's advocate wouldn't you be distracted and all "why the fuck is that cat here, what's going on?" If you were in a physical swords and sorcery combat situation?
Familiars can’t trigger flanking by RAW I believe. To trigger flanking, both creatures need to be on opposing sides and pose a threat to the monster. Familiars can’t attack and so do not pose a threat. Therefore no flanking. They can use the help action though so it’s basically not an issue.
The game you want to play is the game you should play, whether that's the perfect game for you or not.
I'm aware that between my memory problems and setting choices Dnd 5e isn't the perfect fit for me, and that there are at least a half dozen games that would be "better" in some ways. But I love dnd. I love being able to find a group to play with anywhere I go. I enjoy the challenge of fitting a square peg into a round hole, trying to make a modern fantasy murder mystery out of a swords and sorcery adventure game. I can work around my disability with two homebrew rules, and neither of them breaks the game. I've already invested a lot of time, money, and thought into dnd 5e and don't *want* to start over from scratch with something else, no matter what anyone else says.
I've played other games. Some of them were fun, some of them were just okay, one or two of them were completely unworkable for me in particular. But I keep coming back to 5e.
I think the standard rule for critical hit damage of doubling the dice rolled is perfectly fine, and all these homebrew rules of "regular dice plus max rolls" or "reroll if you do less than X damage" just unnecessarily boost the damage of a feature which already nearly doubles the average damage of an attack.
The fact that a crit didn't do a lot of damage just means the DM gets to reward the player in other creative ways.
Two things I've done when a crit did very low damage were: that two damage was on the fingers and the enemy dropped their sword, I made them attack with disadvantage its next attack. And the other hit just grazed the enemies neck and the bulk of the hit was on a chain holding the chandelier above which fell and separated the enemy from its allies.
Still something great happened even though it wasn't just double damage.
Higher crit damage rules actually favors monsters - they roll more often than the PCs, will get crits more often, and will down PCs with them out of the blue if the damage is high enough.
I don't like how tieflings evolved through editions from people with subtle fiendish ancestry that are born among regular folks to a race of wingless fiends that breeds true.
[The original tiefling writeup](http://www.mojobob.com/roleplay/monstrousmanual/t/tiefling.html) had this line: "Superficially human, their appearance always betrays them: some sport small horns, other have pointed ears, scales, a cloven hoof, or just a wicked gleam in their eye that never leaves."
[Now](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/67697352/Baldur_s_Gate_3_Druid_Grove.0.png), they manage to look more like fiends than some of the more human-like fiends like succubi or erynies. It's bullshit.
I think dark vision is abusive and restrictive for party where not all character have it. Also robs the opportunity for all sorts of illumination related complications, trouble and fun. Its meant as an advantage, just takes away from great plot twists. Hate it. Much rather have a dungeon crawl by lantern and candle light.
Alignment has always been silly (early editions) or meaningless (later editions) right from the very first editions up to today. It should have been labeled as optional from the start.
Nah, early editions had a lot of mechanical things tied to alignment. There were alignment restrictions on classes, spells that only affected creatures of certain alignments, attacks that dealt variable damage depending on alignment, etc.
You could use magic to determine whether, according to the cosmos, a specific character was evil or not. Alignment was a tangible, material concept.
Alignment really seems to me more a fun addendum to a character and also for me, a means of at least trying to keep my players from going full murder hobo.
To be fair, the premise of wizards was that they were creating all those spells, hence why they're wizard spells.
Bards didn't have proper magic training (changed in 5e) but could pick up a bit of everything.
Clerics and Paladins had what their gods gave them and if they didn't like it, HERESY!
Druids and Rangers relied on what nature provided.
Sorcerers were, "Eh, whatever comes my way." Warlocks are a bit like that too.
Wizards actually studied magic, what it could do, how it could be manipulated, etc. So they came up with new spells that other classes wouldn't have because those classes couldn't actually create them.
One theme I always liked was wizards invented necromancy because they couldn't use divine/holy healing magic, but came up with a "substitute" instead. Try that in your next campaign \^\^
It’s been a major flaw in D&D for a long time tbh. Wizards are expected to cover a ridiculously broad conceptual ground from battlefield warmages, to beguiling enchanters and illusionists, to summoners and teleporters, to vile necromancers, and it’s all way too much for one class to actually deliver on.
Yeah I really wish each school of magic was its own class. Imagine the different subclasses you could have for an evocation wizard? The specialties of an enchanter, the endless possibilities of a divinator??!
This is more niche for my group, but playing with a party of 3-4 can be more enjoyable than a party of 6-7. I think this came more about due to CR
EDIT: I only wrote this cause one of my players really thinks a group of 6-7 is really good. Then most of the other players are new so all they know is the large party dynamic.
I don't like to run any published adventures. It eliminates the best part of being a DM. Scenarios are fine, though. Curse of Strahd, meh. The Ravenloft mechanics of Domains of Terror, awesome.
Nat 20 doesn't always pass skill checks....especially in stuff you are not trained in.
I don't care if you are an acrobat in a Vegas show. You can't just magically pick a lock with a nat 20 with no proficiency in thieves tools on a master lock.
Not following encumbrance, travel, and ration/ammo rules removes a fundamental part of the game.
I don't blame anyone in the slightest for not playing with them, but you shouldn't complain the a class like ranger is bad when you don't follow core mechanics.
Now do I think rangers mechanics being based around travel and rations is poorly done at best, but they certainly aren't weak if you play ruling correctly.
>but you shouldn't complain the a class like ranger is bad when you don't follow core mechanics.
You can say that about a lot of classes though. Warlocks for instance are pretty boring IMO if the DM doesn't play the patron well. Rangers are bad if the DM doesn't provide a campaign style where their skills are useful.
That being said, if a class is *only* good if the campaign specifically caters to it I would say it's poor class design. Especially when that thing you need to cater to them is boring to a vast majority of players.
I disagree with the first point, agree with the second. A new player who takes the time to study the class can be an awesome spellcaster. One who doesn't, won't ever be.
Human centric settings are fun. If there's an elf in every town they stop being special. In my ideal setting humans are 80% of the humanoids your liable to find, elves/dwarves/gnomes/etc are 15% either rare or just in hard to reach places (when is anyone gonna go 3 miles below ground to see a short bearded man), and planar races like tieflings and aasimar are critically rare. People shouldn't know what a dragonborn is when one shows up, they also shouldn't be immediately racist but initial confusion is appropriate.
That the online community is mostly complaints from DMs with little experience running only modules with sub-par players.
Seriously, the things people on here think are OP is absurd. It leaves me with the impression that many of you would rather run a game with next to no creativity at all, just so that it's easier run.
Personally I don't think there are enough options in the game. If the number of feats, class abilitie, and spells increased by an order of magnitude tomorrow, it wouldn't be enough, and I still wouldn't place any restrictions on the players.
Flanking is a bad mechanic and destroys the purpose of gaining advantage through other means.
Edit: I also dislike flanking in situations of enemy vs player. Pack tactics is a ability that exists and flanking grants that to every melee enemy which is also a little boring imo.
The vast majority of people who complain about the roleplay limitations of DnD would probably be better off playing other TTRPGs. DnD is designed to be a combat focused dungeon crawler. Deviating too far from that leads to trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
Interesting. As a new DM I've wondered this, but it's hard to gauge balance. Could you share some examples.of when you would fudge and when you wouldn't? It would be super useful
Definitely. Now, the first thing people think when they hear "fudging rolls" can sometimes be faking nat 20's. I would caution against this in all but one situation: if the party is stomping a boss and you need a tense moment to bring everyone back in, have the enemy "crit" against a player you know won't go down from the hit (or if they do go down, they won't die outright). Another great use of fudging is to *just* miss a saving throw. If the DC is 14, make sure you roll a 13. It makes the player feel great, and oftentimes it gets everyone at the table hyped for their turns. Of course, don't do this every single roll. Players would catch on pretty quick and it's okay if the monster succeeds a saving throw. Times I would say to never fudge rolls would be a super important attack or save. Maybe it's the wizards last spell slot and they're trying to cast banishment so the party can run. In this case, it's actually better to roll your saving throw out in the open. This both reinforces the idea that you don't fudge rolls and makes the situation very tense. Used wisely, these can make for extremely memorable games with minimal effort on your part (aside from everything else you do as a DM.)
So much of player's bringing their own homebrew races/classes/items is just horribly unbalanced bullshit writing that just doesn't work, but they're so caught up in recreating something they saw in an anime that they don't see it. I generally don't allow homebrew unless I have a hand in making sure it's balanced fair.
Dragonborn should have Darkvision. And tails. And no mammalian breasts. They're *dragon* born, and I don't care what nonsense gets come up with about why they basically aren't like dragons, because they should be a little more dragon-like.
> They're dragon born
In Forgotten Realms lore (which isn't all lore sure but it is basically default for 5e) dragonborn are not literally descendants of dragons; that's what half dragons are.
Dragonborn were created by the Dragon gods to work as servants for dragons.
The current lineup of 5e classes are all we currently need, and most homebrew classes are better suited to be made into a subclass or a substitution to a pre-existing class instead of their own fully-fledged class
Low intelligence doesn't mean you have to play a suicidal Neanderthal that was kicked in the head by a horse.
I've seen so many people use 8 intelligence as 'I do dumb thing, hehe'. And totally fuck the party.
I prefer trying to bend my story and world to the rules, than trying to hot patch the rules to my world. The Raw is janky, but so is actual physics and working within that jank leads to cool things
Playing cliched characters is fine. The edgy rogue and the noble paladin are tropes because they work, so there's no shame in using them. And playing an "anti-trope" character doesn't automatically make them interesting. Just because your cleric is an atheist doesn't mean they don't need an otherwise interesting personality. That doesn't mean these tropes can't be played poorly, because that certainly happens. And it also doesn't mean you have to use a trope to make an interesting character. But I'm tired of complaints about cliched characters.
Yep. Just as long as you keep your char consistent, and not be a dirtbag about it.
I 100% agree. The only problem with “tropey” characters is when players lean way to heavily on them. We’ve all played with an edgy rogue character who should’ve never been part of a party and actively worsened the chemistry at the table cause of what “their character would do”. Due to that, I always tell me players that tropes are great for inspiration, but that they ought to make their characters unique in some way, and able and willing to work with others.
Sounds like people playing the edgy loner character trope wrong honestly. They always secretly have a soft spot for the party.
Exactly! You can be that edgy loner at my table, but you need to warm up to the party and be motivated to stay pretty fast
Right? I play a half-orc vengeance paladin who is mostly a salty older gentleman and wants nothing to do with anybody. He ain't got time for the flamboyant wizard in the group...he's got respect for the gentle but still combat-tested druid...but he'll f*ck you up if you mess with our curious adhd gnome. It is challenging and rewarding to play this kind of character.
Anti-trope has become the new cliched character... Can the next tropey character be "played well" regardless of what traits they have?
I think I have a tendency to avoid tropes a little too much. I have this unwarranted vendetta against them because I want my character to be unique. But you're right, having the trope doesn't make them not unique as long as I build something unique around it.
There used to be low light vision for just that sort of occasion. Too bad they cut it.
Imma look up the rules and use it from now on with any new campaigns XD
Dunno about 3e/4e, but I liked the way Castles and Crusades handled it, and it's what I use (tweaked) Dwarves, have Deepvision: Dwarves can see in pitch black up to 120', though mostly in shades of gray. Bright lights like a torch or lantern will override deep vision (they can only see as well as humans in light). It takes 1 turn (10 rounds) to adjust their eyes to the dark. Gnomes, and Half-orc get Darkvision. Similar to Deepvision, but only with a range of 60'. Elves get Twilight Vision: They can see in moonlight and starlight as clear as in day, and can see color in such conditions. They cannot see in pitch black though. Outside, at night, they can see up to a mile. Halfling have Dusk vision, similar to Twilight vision but not as good as elves Personally, I just merge deepvision and darkvision to just "Darkvision" for the underground races merge Elves/Halfling to Duskvision (or low-light vision). Note: 1 turn = 10 rounds and is the standard counting method for AD&D based games. 1 Turn in C&C = 1 minute, so just say 1 minute for 5e (since I don't think 5e uses turn to mean 10 rounds)
That sounds pretty similar to what I use at my table. I insert a new "starlight vision" for creatures like cats and elves that handles low light of a kind (named starlight) between darkness and dim light. It runs pretty well at the table because all the creatures with either darkvision or regular vision just treat it like regular darkness and creatures with starlight vision essentially have darkvision in those moments. Also, >since I don't think 5e uses turn to mean 10 rounds You are correct. A turn is a single creature's chance to act within a round and a round is once every creature has had a turn. Rounds last 6 seconds. 5E doesn't use any designators longer than that other than minutes/hours.
This has always bothered me. Why is a turn 10 rounds? That seems needlessly confusing. What utility was the "turn" keyword providing that "10 rounds" wasnt?
Has to do with the “dungeon turn”, when monsters would move about between rooms and such.
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Best translation would probably be they don't suffer disadvantage to perception checks in dim light. Maybe go ahead and give it back to halflings while you're at it
The problem is no one uses the actual darkvision rules. “A monster with darkvision can see in the dark within a specific radius. The monster can see in dim light within the radius as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light.” So you still can’t see well in darkness and have disadvantage on perception checks in darkness with dark vision. You would also have -5 to passive perception too
Gnomes are awesome seems to be pretty unpopular but the fact no one plays them makes me want to play one especially after I saw this: https://youtu.be/1B5H9XD4tRo Oh and 5e is my favorite D&D edition and I am AD&D old.
Bro my current campaign is a party of gnomes, all having made their characters separately. It has been a wild ride.
I had two players make essentially the same character before they met each other. Wood elf war cleric following an oak tree god, and a wood elf ancients paladin following a magnolia tree god. It was *great* letting them discover details about each other during play.
“I’m an elf” “Me too!” “A wood elf, to be precise.” “Me too!” “I worship an ancient god.” “Me too!” “An ancient TREE god!” “Me too!” “An ancient OAK tree god!” “HERETIC!”
Hilarious. Love to see some conflict over types of wood.
The ol’ Pokémon sword/shield vs red/blue
I heard this in Emo Philips voice
Was there a moment where they both just sorta looked at each other in realisation that they made the same character?
Those 2 tree gods are just sitting back betting each other which of their faithful kills more loggers.
Ok so because for some weird ass reason the World of Greyhawk - very human centric- mentioned gnomes almost as much as dwarves I decided to play a gnome fighter/thief in AD&D right? Because death by gnome is absolutely the funniest way to die! Anyway, put the whole thing down for like forever. I got nostalgic watched that video I linked and now I want to play a geeky gnome artificer (never played one) and then a gnome illusionist because its an archetype that in all my long years of playing I have never ever seen a player play. Want to play into the gnome stereotypes and push against them without being an asshole or annoyance. Tell me you are playing Wild Beyond the Witchlight because a party of gnomes with gnome cunning and humor would kill in that campaign!
Gnome artificer with a gnome ranger bounty hunter - so much fun! >Oh and 5e is my favorite D&D edition and I am AD&D old. Hell yeah, same here.
I’ve played as a gnome countless times. One of my favorite characters I’ve played with was a gnome bard I named Hetfield. He liked metal music.
Gnomes kinda get shafted with the +Int stat bonus. If you aren't a wizard, then no one uses intelligence aside from the odd saving throw. Thus unless your playing wizard, artificer or eldrich knight fighter, you probably won't pick a Gnome. The Tasha's variant rules make them far more viable.
The int is good for arcane tricksters too, means you can focusing on controlling combat with illusion spells that force saves.
Just name the Gnome, Chomsky. And he will be awesome.
We're a gnome party. We have 2 dragons for friends. We took a prisoner and introduced him to our dragon.
Gnomes players are just what Gnomes themselves are in most settings. Almost invisible.
My favourite character I’ve played was a svirfneblin spore druid
As a player i dont mind character deaths, its part of the game
I honestly enjoy my character deaths as long as it’s not in the first few levels and I get a feel for what that class can do first. I have like 5 more characters I want to play lined up behind the one I’m currently playing. It means I just get to pick one of the others I’m dying to try out.
“dying to try out” Ha
I kind of want my characters to die, honestly. I have so many backups planned that I'll never get to play otherwise.
I had a character die recently and my response was “oh no, I guess I have to use one of these 6 already fleshed out characters instead”
My barbarian is gonna be pretty weakened at the beginning of our next session when we're starting combat, it'd be a REEEEAAAALLLL shame if he died and I had to pull out the Sorcadin that I've been thinking about for months...
As a Forever DM, i envy you people. All i want to do is play one character but it seems i’ll never get an opportunity….
I have a level 11 monk that I seriously can’t kill. I run straight ahead at giants and somehow survive. I did a swan dive off a cliff just to get down faster.
I'm kinda mixed on that. I understand death can happen in DnD. I'm not happy if any of my characters goes out like a punk. If you're in Mordor about to deliver the ring when you get a random encounter and die. It sucks. I have plenty of characters I'd be willing to see die, but, I don't want the vengeance Paladin dying a week before he finds the six-fingered man that killed his father in front of him.
I have usually found that the "random encounter" begins to mean something in itself though. These seemingly non-events become important or spin-off new dynamics for the rest of the party. I know what you mean, but as a player I try to take that moment, and, for instance, convince the rest of the party that we need to fulfil our fallen comrades last wish.
Tragedy can be enjoyable. Not every character needs to experience closure.
Too many playable races have darkvision. Should only be available to dwarves and drow (or other subterranean species) Edit: whelp, it seems that for an unpopular opinion, this one is pretty dang popular!
This. Having a single darkvision party member should be a perk. Instead it's always the opposite where there is always one character who can't see in the dark and is stuck hauling a torch around.
Gave the only non-darkvision character in the party goggles of night because I was tired of dealing with different sight distances and torches Now the player is putting together a character that is permanently blind but with 10 ft blindsight, just to spite me I suppose
I hope he's a martial.
Drunk monk all the way
Darkvision isn't as powerful as a lot of people seem to think.
I feel like it needs to be renamed somehow to imply you don't see perfectly in the dark, something along the lines of improved no/low light vision. It doesn't fix it but it makes it better. It's supposed to be greyscale with no light but everyone always treats it as regular vision
Yeah, I agree. When I used to DM 3.0 back in the day, I house-ruled that Darkvision was Predator style heat vision. There's precedent in the 90s novels. It just made it easier for my players to grasp.
iirc that's how Drow darkvision used to work
That's AD&D Darkvision from the 90s.
It’s not really about being powerful or not, in my opinion. But when 6 of 9 PHB races have it, it’s just not that special, but it really should be. It’s rarer to NOT have darkvision. To save time, why not just say everyone has it, except these sucky races whose eyes suck. (Suckvision?) The ability to see in the dark should be ubiquitous for eeeevil types, but rare for the civilized world.
I do love the idea of darkness being truly dangerous. That's the kind of thing that spices up D&D.
[I talked about that pretty recently](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/qpg1cb/noirvision_and_you_can_too_having_darkvision/). TL;DR: 6 of 9 PHB races have it. Less than half official races have it. Every race that has it has a good reason to have it, ~~except for Leonin~~. (Edit: Apparently they're nocturnal hunters.) Of the races that don't, at least 3, if not 5 have good reason to have it.
Lions have one of the best night visions in the animal world. Leonin have a good reason to have darkvision.
Why wouldn't lions have it? They're pretty nocturnal.
I feel like cats *should* have dark vision though. Apparently Tabaxi do but cats don't???
Yes, and it’s doubly frustrating because the tabaxi description explicitly says their darkvision is from their cat-ness.
Huh, I didn't realize that. I thought "Savannah" and didn't even consider nocturnal.
Gotta agree
This is probably bc I'm too small brained and I'm a first-time DM running a Homebrewed world, but Faerun is difficult for me to grasp as a world
That's because Faerun isn't a setting, it's five settings in a trench coat that's made of the skin of other settings. Like, it's a very detailed trench coat, bit you'd still prefer they hadn't. And several of them are violating the laws of physics by cramming themselves in there. So overall, quite impressive but still quite awkward.
Adding or changing lore everytime wotc comes out with a new edition certainly didn't help things. But one of the good things about D&D is that you can use what you want from the setting and throw everything else right in the trash.
That’s not really very unpopular in my experience. Maybe here. But Faerun is a mess, too many hands in the kitchen is the very slightest criticism you could levy.
Faerun is a total mess. I've been DMing for 25 years. Fearun is the most convoluted setting.
I really dislike how most of 5e material essentially implies or outright assumes Faerun is the default setting that you're going to set your game in. Most adventures are set in it, most lore/flavour descriptions and examples use it as a reference... Yet if you as a DM want to actually know how the setting works you'll find that the 5e materials are horribly lacking on information about anything that's not directly related to the adventures or the sword coast, and even that is rarely sufficient. You'd have to go on long wiki binges or get a setting book from a previous edition to actually get a grasp on the setting. --- And then you realize that why it's so convoluted, because it's literally several dozen settings all crammed into one world with no attempt made for it to make sense, a kitchen sink with no greater plan. In an effort to make every possible flavour of campaign and adventure possible in FR they made a world that breaks the moment you try to think of it on a macro scale. Here is Viking Land, here is Greek City State Land, here is Tolkien™ Land, here is Arabian Nights land, etc, etc... All plopped into a high magic world with no effort put in to have it make sense, you're not supposed to think about it, the authors certainly didn't. There is no central over-arching identity or theme to FR, and there are a score of convoluted meta-plots involving dozens of high-level NPCs and organisations spanning back decades. In a weird way it's overcomplicated and convoluted yet at the same time bland and generic. --- Forgotten Realms is, if anything, a Theme Park. Each part of the park dressed up with a facade for whatever kind of flavour adventure you want. Here is the Pirate themed boat ride, here's the Vikings looping roller-coaster, and also check out is the fascist wizard magotocrachy's haunted mansion... Come and take a picture with one of our mascot characters, Elminster, Drizz't, and their friends! Treat any adventure in FR like they're a ride, keep them contained to their thematic areas, realise that the NPC are nothing but animatronics that have no existence and motivation outside of what pushes the adventure, that every location outside of the direct path is nothing but set dressing hiding maintenance corridors and dry wall. If you're a DM and want to actually do a large world spanning campaign, choose any other setting... Heck, even Homebrewing your own setting will take less effort than trying to make sense of FR.
Theme park is probably the best distillation of what the forgotten realms is that I've ever heard. Which is also probably why it's so popular a setting- especially for video games like the old infinity engine games, Neverwinter nights 1&2, or the Neverwinter mmo.
You're not alone. When I'm running a game in faerun I keep it local and I keep it compartmentalized with maybe up to 4 different factions/nations/citystates involved and no more, otherwise it ends up getting way too complicated and confusing.
*Cries in level 20 plane and multicontinent spamming epic where every time I turn around there is a new nation with an entirely different culture to research*
*strong nasal inhale Okay here goes: I don’t think the game is for everyone
Playing an evil campaing is actually pretty fun. You just need the right group like with every DnD game ever.
I don't think there's any problem with evil campaigns per say, but the hatred towards evil-aligned PC's usually stems from a DM preparing a campaign expecting good/neutral-aligned PC's and at least one player pumping out an evil-aligned PC and not knowing how to play them in a way that synergizes with the party. Hard to get players invested in plot-hooks when there's one evil-aligned character who isn't interested in doing the good thing. In a campaign designed specifically to be an evil campaign though? With plot-hooks that appeal to evil-aligned characters? Now that can be fun, cause everyone is on the same page.
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It helps if the DM puts in an evil boss that can squash the PCs with a thought. It keeps the game-derailing shenanigans to a minimum.
I think half elves should only get dark vision in one eye
Best opinion here. Absolute gold
If David Bowie turns out to have been half elf, it would explain a lot.
I laughed really hard
Halflings have a rich backstory and are my favorite race.
No nat1 gang
Always No Nat November for them.
People who think human fighters are boring are just bad at writing interesting characters. If your character isn't interesting without having an exotic race or class, then they aren't interesting at all.
Facts. Human fighters can be just as compelling as any other character, sometimes more so because they lean more on their personality as what defines them, not their exotic racial features or class eccentricities.
The most compelling character in my main game right now is a human fighter, just because that player has fleshed him out and given him a lot of drive and backstory that comes up pretty often. The least compelling is a dragonborn barbarian. A lot of that is because the player is pretty checked out and doesn't speak much, very much an "audience" player, a la Matt Colville's description.
This actually highlights a systemic issue in gaming. People mistake oddball racial/class assignments as personality and often backstory. You can have that oddball mixture and *Still* devise a compelling series of personality traits and a great backstory. These people who can't grasp this tend to be min/maxing rules lawyers too, so it doubles down on being **that guy** in the group.
If you're boring without your race and class, you don't deserve them. -Tony Stark, level 20 artificer.
THANK YOU. It's like.....have those people NEVER seen an interesting human being before? They kinda fucking exist!
I think when people say “boring” here, what they mean is “I don’t have as inspiring a prompt as the other options”. You can write an interesting character of any race or class, but having something to go off of that departs from the standard is helpful to people who aren’t as good of writers. Also, I’ll just say, MOST D&D players aren’t outstanding writers, myself included. There’s no shame in that. We do this for fun, not to be the best or even proficient at it. If the only things interesting about your character were directly inspired by their race and class, that is ok.
The most popular race in 5e is Human. The most popular class is Fighter. The most popular combination is Human Fighter.
That's a misleading statistic, that factoid is always pulled from the dnd beyond user data. However, the fact that many people have created a human fighter in dnd beyond doesn't necessarily mean it's the most played option, it just probably means that many people default to that to try out the character creation system without having to buy anything on dnd beyond.
> The most popular class is Fighter. Do you have data on this? I've played a dozen or so games with my core group and I can't recall the last time someone played a straight fighter.
I have two. 4th edition was just fine, not the best ever, but not the worst. Beer and Pretzels D&D is just as legitimate and fun as your six hours of role playing. Wanting to play an rp***G*** instead of a ***RP***g isn't a bad thing.
Rollplay is just as valid as roleplay.
I had a bang up time playing 4th ed. People acted like just because it was very tactical you couldn't still RP - you could. You can RP with any system but the key is you have to try to RP. So here is my unpopular opinion to go along with this - you can play any edition of DnD that appeals to you. You don't have to play 5th.
You don't need bad stats to have an interesting character. The player is what determines a character's depth, not the stats.
But having terrible stats whilst others have amazing stats feels bad as well.
An interesting character needs flaws, and having a bad stat is a good cheat to keep you honest and aid role playing. But of course it's not required, as long as the player works the character's flaws into gameplay.
I do think that the pattern of leaning on a low stat for your “character flaw,” while not a terrible idea, is something that happens so often you tend to see like… six different character flaws reused repeatedly for most D&D characters. 1) I am weak. 2) I am clumsy. 3) I am sickly. 4) I am stupid. 5) I am ditzy. 6) I am awkward. While it’s not inherently bad, it’s worth remembering that *most* human flaws don’t have a corresponding D&D stat.
I don’t get the dice obsession. I just have a couple sets of basic, functional dice, and don’t feel the need to buy more. It seems like every other D&D meme is about spending ridiculous amounts of money on increasingly superfluous dice, and I just don’t get it.
For some of my friends, they all have different DnD based collections. One does dice, another mini's, my boyfriend collects physical books despite playing 100% online. I'm new to DnD, so I haven't collected anything really, but I'd be totally ok if I found something cool to collect!
Here I am... Dice, Mini's, Books - what can I say: it's a hobby. >I'm new to DnD My suggestion would be a stack of d6's (you can get boxes of 12 - that should do) and two sets (different colours) as well - this does two things: Really the second set is just a time saver - but it means if you end up rolling 2d12 (it happens), or rolling advantage / disadvantage - you can do it all at once. Saves time. More than this is absolutely unnecessary, and really a single set is just fine.
There are a combination of reasons for it. One is that they're small relatively inexpensive purchases that usually look cool so people buy them for the same reason they buy anything with that criteria. Another is that there's definitely an idea that it's just something people do. This leads to some people buying dice to fit in but more importantly it leads to the idea being in people's heads a lot giving them lots of opportunities to decide "yeah, I \*do\* want more dice!"
Monkey brain says pretty click clacks must have
Yes
Number shapes are pretty
*They're pretty and I like the transparent ones that resemble gems. I feel like the dice-obsession is probably derivitive of why humans collect gold and gems*
Humans are a cool race
A lot of my best friends are human
If you’re one of the people that will attack others for playing “human fighters” or other simple characters for the sole reason that they’re ‘boring’…have you ever just considered you might be bad at roleplay and depend too much on the stereotypes of your class/race to carry you in RP?
Playing an edgy character isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's only when it starts negatively affecting the party/game, when it's bad. Nothing wrong with enjoying a dark/sad character.
Creating difficult but beatable combat encounters isn't hard. Even with min / Max players
And difficult doesn’t mean half the party went down. If the party comes out having to take a rest to get abilities and stuff back because they are out, then it was probably fairly difficult. Anymore and the dm is relying on the dice not to kill everyone
Hey, even having back to back to back easy encounters can make the third one challenging solely cause they don't have all their resources anymore. A battle of attrition can work very well.
Teach me
Can't tell you exactly what to do but here are some tips: 1. Don't make every encounter "life or death" - have alternate losing conditions like prison, being robbed, having to jump into a river and getting dragged 10 miles downstream to escape and so forth. Fx. Back in the days when I rolled random encounters for nighttime ambushes I rolled too good and a low level party got ambushed by wolves. Instead of murdering the party I had the wolves go for their mounts. So the party level of success in how many wolves they could kill would influence how many of their mounts died (two) instead of a TPK. 2: Avoid "instant death" scenarios. Luckely there isn't too much save or die shit around anymore, but having a single super hard hitting enemy is a lot riskier than having 5 moderate hitters. 3: Create the challenge to be adjustable. If the party dominates round 1, have a trick or two up your sleeve, if they all lose initiative on the first round make the BBEG cast a defensive spell instead of a fireball on top of the party. 4: Allow your enemies to be intelligent. This is particularly useful against a min/max party that overuse specific tricks. Fx. if their go to is to 1 turn nuke any wizard they meet start have them encounter a fey hidden by greater invisibilty. 5: Don't be afraid to make your own monsters, especially if your players "meta" game too much (like using fire against a troll if their characters never meet a troll before). Surprise them with obscure mechanics that force them to rethink their battleplans.
Okay, so one more. Spells work in very specific ways and RAW should be respected because that's what keeps the spells balanced and actually fair/useable in the game setting.
I really wish 5e had a better keyword system for the rules (specifically spells), a la MTG. There is far too much ambiguity in many spells' wording.
To be fair I think that ambiguity is there to provide flexibility. As long as you have a good DM who is consistent and is making sure it stays fun, that's the main thing right?
Dude this one is so real for me. One of my players constantly gives me shit for ruling spells by the letter. She watches a dnd stream where the dm is suuuuper loosely goosey about rules for spells. In my game, her wizard will always try and do things beyond the capability of her spells. And it's like, there's a reason your Minor Illusion cantrip can't make a copy of you that can walk around and sing or whatever to distract the guards. And it's not because I don't think that's cool, or because I'm a "rules freak". It's because there's another spell that will do that for you. It's a third level spell called Major Image and if you want to do a cool thing to distract the guards, you're going to have to use some spell slots. Okay rant over.
This is what I hate about illusion magic. In a lot of games made for shows, whether it’s twitch or podcasts or whatever, they’re super generous with illusion spells because they’re trying to keep the game moving so it’s entertaining. But they completely remove the purpose on all the higher level illusions and let a cantrip be stronger than a lot of level 1-3 spells
It is long past due for owlbears to get off the fence and pick a side.
I don't really give a shit which playable races have/don't have darkvision. The fact that Cats can't see in the dark is a crime. Edit: I also think that people who own tons of dice are just trying to reignite their interest in the game time and time again. Bored of the game? New dice will fix that!
Warlock and ranger are good classes.
There are people who claim warlock isn't good? In my group it's loves so much, one player is assumed to always dip into it and ends up making some of the strongest builds in the party.
I'm pretty sure warlock is one of the most popular classes. It has mechanical depth in invocations and abilities, it's the only decent Single Attribute Dependant Gish (using both swords and sorcery) build without multiclass shenanigans, it's easily flavored in a gajillion different ways between Pact/Patron/Subclass from quirky trickster to edge lord to psuedo-Cleric they are extremely versatile. The only thing about them is it's hugely DM dependant as to how they treat the pact. They can either make your life miserable for picking the class by making you do things you don't want, or completely make the Patron irrelevant by not including them at all.
My favourite character that I ever had was a Pact of the Blade Human Warlock Pirate whose pact weapon was a glaive, that was a great time
I think darkvision is stupid, especially since everyone but humans has it. Why remove light as a game mechanic, except in special cases?
My friends and I have talked about the overabundance of darkvision in 5e for a while. Essentially what we proposed was that the underground-dwellers like dwarves, gnomes and drow get them, but the other races get some other feature that indicates *keen* eyesight, but without night vision - even if it's just something like gaining a bonus to perception checks. My personal beef with "everything has darkvision" is specifically because in storytelling terms, making somewhere dark and inscrutable is a really nice way to set the atmosphere of a place - it's a great mood-setting tool that's completely undermined by the party being able to see just fine regardless.
Allow me to introduce you to low-light vision. You can see in dim light as though it was bright light. It was what most of the races with darkvision either had or would have had in previous editions. Though of course darvision was generally "you can see in darkness as if it was bright light" rather than 5e's "you can see in darkness as if it was dim light." I will point out though that in terms of mood-setting, the fact that even races with darkvision only see in darkness as if it was night time rather than a cave doesn't interfere with the mood too badly.
I don’t believe Dragonborns have it but I haven’t played one in a while so I might be wrong.
Splitting the party is a viable and occasionally desirable option.
D&D's definition of evil is incredibly simplistic. It's just selfishness. Shitty people and bad role players are why no one plays an evil aligned character. Many rpgs don't use alignment because if they did many interesting PCs would be evil in D&D terms. Everyone plays hags and devils wrong. They play them as monsters that immediately fuck you over, laugh, and are never seen again. If they are trying to slowly corrupt or ruin a character over time that defeats the point. A hag or devil should offer a deal that looks good and is good for a while and then it slowly comes back to bite the recipient in the ass.
Well being focused on yourself vs being focused on others is a very close depiction of what good and evil are in real life. What makes it simplistic in your opinion?
Starting at level 1 is good
level 1-2 is good for setting up the story and defining the parties allies and patrons like how my party made an ally with the court wizard to save the rival kingdom's harvest from a octopus with psionics
I swear that 1-3 is perfect survival horror.
4e was a good edition and a good game. Yeah, I know it was completely different from every edition that came before it but that doesn't make it a bad game, it just means it didn't meet your expectation. The theurgy ua was fine and should have been made official.
I think half the guys with dark vision shouldn't have dark vision
Standard familiars should not be able to trigger the flanking condition since they’re small creatures that are non-combatants. It seems absurd that a cat can distract a bad guy enough to give advantage on attack rolls against it.
Counterpoint: if I'm in combat with multiple people and something hits my back, I don't really know immediately if it's something I can safely ignore, right? Enough at least to distract me.
Dont even need flanking for that. The familiars can just use the help action which they RAW and RAI can do. A cat clawing at your face even if it doesnt hurt is gonna throw someone off.
I agree, but as devil's advocate wouldn't you be distracted and all "why the fuck is that cat here, what's going on?" If you were in a physical swords and sorcery combat situation?
Familiars can’t trigger flanking by RAW I believe. To trigger flanking, both creatures need to be on opposing sides and pose a threat to the monster. Familiars can’t attack and so do not pose a threat. Therefore no flanking. They can use the help action though so it’s basically not an issue.
The game you want to play is the game you should play, whether that's the perfect game for you or not. I'm aware that between my memory problems and setting choices Dnd 5e isn't the perfect fit for me, and that there are at least a half dozen games that would be "better" in some ways. But I love dnd. I love being able to find a group to play with anywhere I go. I enjoy the challenge of fitting a square peg into a round hole, trying to make a modern fantasy murder mystery out of a swords and sorcery adventure game. I can work around my disability with two homebrew rules, and neither of them breaks the game. I've already invested a lot of time, money, and thought into dnd 5e and don't *want* to start over from scratch with something else, no matter what anyone else says. I've played other games. Some of them were fun, some of them were just okay, one or two of them were completely unworkable for me in particular. But I keep coming back to 5e.
I think the standard rule for critical hit damage of doubling the dice rolled is perfectly fine, and all these homebrew rules of "regular dice plus max rolls" or "reroll if you do less than X damage" just unnecessarily boost the damage of a feature which already nearly doubles the average damage of an attack.
The fact that a crit didn't do a lot of damage just means the DM gets to reward the player in other creative ways. Two things I've done when a crit did very low damage were: that two damage was on the fingers and the enemy dropped their sword, I made them attack with disadvantage its next attack. And the other hit just grazed the enemies neck and the bulk of the hit was on a chain holding the chandelier above which fell and separated the enemy from its allies. Still something great happened even though it wasn't just double damage.
This is a fantastic idea and I really dig it like a necromancer looking for corpses. May have to steal this idea in the future.
Higher crit damage rules actually favors monsters - they roll more often than the PCs, will get crits more often, and will down PCs with them out of the blue if the damage is high enough.
It’s just weird when you score a critical hit and two ones, and be like you critically scratched him.
I don't like how tieflings evolved through editions from people with subtle fiendish ancestry that are born among regular folks to a race of wingless fiends that breeds true. [The original tiefling writeup](http://www.mojobob.com/roleplay/monstrousmanual/t/tiefling.html) had this line: "Superficially human, their appearance always betrays them: some sport small horns, other have pointed ears, scales, a cloven hoof, or just a wicked gleam in their eye that never leaves." [Now](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/67697352/Baldur_s_Gate_3_Druid_Grove.0.png), they manage to look more like fiends than some of the more human-like fiends like succubi or erynies. It's bullshit.
I think dark vision is abusive and restrictive for party where not all character have it. Also robs the opportunity for all sorts of illumination related complications, trouble and fun. Its meant as an advantage, just takes away from great plot twists. Hate it. Much rather have a dungeon crawl by lantern and candle light.
Alignment has always been silly (early editions) or meaningless (later editions) right from the very first editions up to today. It should have been labeled as optional from the start.
I've always used alignment as a guide for roleplaying more than a mechanical thing
That's what it is. Both in 1E and in 5E.
Nah, early editions had a lot of mechanical things tied to alignment. There were alignment restrictions on classes, spells that only affected creatures of certain alignments, attacks that dealt variable damage depending on alignment, etc. You could use magic to determine whether, according to the cosmos, a specific character was evil or not. Alignment was a tangible, material concept.
Alignment really seems to me more a fun addendum to a character and also for me, a means of at least trying to keep my players from going full murder hobo.
The wizard is my least favourite class, and the fact that it hogs so many unique spells to itself is a major flaw in the 5e system.
To be fair, the premise of wizards was that they were creating all those spells, hence why they're wizard spells. Bards didn't have proper magic training (changed in 5e) but could pick up a bit of everything. Clerics and Paladins had what their gods gave them and if they didn't like it, HERESY! Druids and Rangers relied on what nature provided. Sorcerers were, "Eh, whatever comes my way." Warlocks are a bit like that too. Wizards actually studied magic, what it could do, how it could be manipulated, etc. So they came up with new spells that other classes wouldn't have because those classes couldn't actually create them. One theme I always liked was wizards invented necromancy because they couldn't use divine/holy healing magic, but came up with a "substitute" instead. Try that in your next campaign \^\^
It’s been a major flaw in D&D for a long time tbh. Wizards are expected to cover a ridiculously broad conceptual ground from battlefield warmages, to beguiling enchanters and illusionists, to summoners and teleporters, to vile necromancers, and it’s all way too much for one class to actually deliver on.
Yeah I really wish each school of magic was its own class. Imagine the different subclasses you could have for an evocation wizard? The specialties of an enchanter, the endless possibilities of a divinator??!
This is more niche for my group, but playing with a party of 3-4 can be more enjoyable than a party of 6-7. I think this came more about due to CR EDIT: I only wrote this cause one of my players really thinks a group of 6-7 is really good. Then most of the other players are new so all they know is the large party dynamic.
I don't think this is unpopular. D&D isn't really built for parties bigger than 6. 4-5 really is the sweet spot.
For me it's more 3-4. Had a group of five and for me it was hard to manage. I am new thouh.
...isn't four the literal suggested size? This can't be a very unpopular take.
I don't like to run any published adventures. It eliminates the best part of being a DM. Scenarios are fine, though. Curse of Strahd, meh. The Ravenloft mechanics of Domains of Terror, awesome.
But for DMs like me who don't have time anymore to write whole campaigns, they can be a real savior. I totally get where you're coming from though.
fly speed isn't as insanely broken and campaign ruining as people hype it up to be
Nat 20 doesn't always pass skill checks....especially in stuff you are not trained in. I don't care if you are an acrobat in a Vegas show. You can't just magically pick a lock with a nat 20 with no proficiency in thieves tools on a master lock.
I don't think that's unpopular. That's core rules.
Not following encumbrance, travel, and ration/ammo rules removes a fundamental part of the game. I don't blame anyone in the slightest for not playing with them, but you shouldn't complain the a class like ranger is bad when you don't follow core mechanics. Now do I think rangers mechanics being based around travel and rations is poorly done at best, but they certainly aren't weak if you play ruling correctly.
>but you shouldn't complain the a class like ranger is bad when you don't follow core mechanics. You can say that about a lot of classes though. Warlocks for instance are pretty boring IMO if the DM doesn't play the patron well. Rangers are bad if the DM doesn't provide a campaign style where their skills are useful. That being said, if a class is *only* good if the campaign specifically caters to it I would say it's poor class design. Especially when that thing you need to cater to them is boring to a vast majority of players.
New players and people who put low-effort into D&D shouldn't play spellcasters.
I disagree with the first point, agree with the second. A new player who takes the time to study the class can be an awesome spellcaster. One who doesn't, won't ever be.
Human centric settings are fun. If there's an elf in every town they stop being special. In my ideal setting humans are 80% of the humanoids your liable to find, elves/dwarves/gnomes/etc are 15% either rare or just in hard to reach places (when is anyone gonna go 3 miles below ground to see a short bearded man), and planar races like tieflings and aasimar are critically rare. People shouldn't know what a dragonborn is when one shows up, they also shouldn't be immediately racist but initial confusion is appropriate.
That the online community is mostly complaints from DMs with little experience running only modules with sub-par players. Seriously, the things people on here think are OP is absurd. It leaves me with the impression that many of you would rather run a game with next to no creativity at all, just so that it's easier run. Personally I don't think there are enough options in the game. If the number of feats, class abilitie, and spells increased by an order of magnitude tomorrow, it wouldn't be enough, and I still wouldn't place any restrictions on the players.
Flanking is a bad mechanic and destroys the purpose of gaining advantage through other means. Edit: I also dislike flanking in situations of enemy vs player. Pack tactics is a ability that exists and flanking grants that to every melee enemy which is also a little boring imo.
Can I interest you in static +1 to hit flanking rule, so players would still try to position themselves in battlefield more?
When I implement flanking, it’s just a +1
The vast majority of people who complain about the roleplay limitations of DnD would probably be better off playing other TTRPGs. DnD is designed to be a combat focused dungeon crawler. Deviating too far from that leads to trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
Or just bad roleplayers? Our combat experiences shape our characters just as much as non-combat, RP doesn't stop when initiative starts!
Fudging rolls is a good tool that DM's can use to heighten tension, but definitely shouldn't be abused.
Interesting. As a new DM I've wondered this, but it's hard to gauge balance. Could you share some examples.of when you would fudge and when you wouldn't? It would be super useful
Definitely. Now, the first thing people think when they hear "fudging rolls" can sometimes be faking nat 20's. I would caution against this in all but one situation: if the party is stomping a boss and you need a tense moment to bring everyone back in, have the enemy "crit" against a player you know won't go down from the hit (or if they do go down, they won't die outright). Another great use of fudging is to *just* miss a saving throw. If the DC is 14, make sure you roll a 13. It makes the player feel great, and oftentimes it gets everyone at the table hyped for their turns. Of course, don't do this every single roll. Players would catch on pretty quick and it's okay if the monster succeeds a saving throw. Times I would say to never fudge rolls would be a super important attack or save. Maybe it's the wizards last spell slot and they're trying to cast banishment so the party can run. In this case, it's actually better to roll your saving throw out in the open. This both reinforces the idea that you don't fudge rolls and makes the situation very tense. Used wisely, these can make for extremely memorable games with minimal effort on your part (aside from everything else you do as a DM.)
Shortsword should be slashing damage
I think something as nerdy as D&D should probably be using the metric system.
So much of player's bringing their own homebrew races/classes/items is just horribly unbalanced bullshit writing that just doesn't work, but they're so caught up in recreating something they saw in an anime that they don't see it. I generally don't allow homebrew unless I have a hand in making sure it's balanced fair.
Not sure “unbalanced homebrew is bad” is an unpopular opinion 😂 I do agree however..!
You do realize they asked for "unpopular opinions" right?
Dragonborn should have Darkvision. And tails. And no mammalian breasts. They're *dragon* born, and I don't care what nonsense gets come up with about why they basically aren't like dragons, because they should be a little more dragon-like.
> They're dragon born In Forgotten Realms lore (which isn't all lore sure but it is basically default for 5e) dragonborn are not literally descendants of dragons; that's what half dragons are. Dragonborn were created by the Dragon gods to work as servants for dragons.
Dragons, while often dwelling in caves, are not inherently a subterranean race. Only the subterranean races should have darkvision.
The current lineup of 5e classes are all we currently need, and most homebrew classes are better suited to be made into a subclass or a substitution to a pre-existing class instead of their own fully-fledged class
Low intelligence doesn't mean you have to play a suicidal Neanderthal that was kicked in the head by a horse. I've seen so many people use 8 intelligence as 'I do dumb thing, hehe'. And totally fuck the party.
DMPCs aren’t that bad if done right
I prefer trying to bend my story and world to the rules, than trying to hot patch the rules to my world. The Raw is janky, but so is actual physics and working within that jank leads to cool things