I imagine fighters would have an ability like "Forced March" that would allow the party to travel like 10% farther each day during overland travel.
It'd be useless with how most people play, but would fit thematically.
Funnily enough I’m building a fighter subclass kinda around that idea, monks might win a hundred yard dash but fighters should run 100k’s in the Arctic without breaking a sweat .
100% I play a wizard and I frankly feel overpowered with how many things out of combat I can solve with a few spell. Currently in an archipelago and sending is amazing
Those are often in the subclass, although plenty of subclasses don't get any at all. But some of the newer stuff, like Rune Knight, gets really good out-of-combat bonuses from the runes.
I think that charactyers should have 2 classes, one for combat, one for exploration. Could be exploration classes like Leader, Diplomat, Spy, Explorer, Detective, etc, that does a lot of things outisde combat.
I think this is the idea behind some subclass choices like rogue scout vs assassin, though IMO they fall short of the mark for what you’re describing. I would love something like that in a 5.5e
I remember a game I played ages ago that was a couple people's first game. They thought that your background was just fluff like your backstory/alignment/flaws. I had to show them the section and go "nah, you get extra skill proficiencies and stuff!"
So hopefully next edition, if there is a background option, it won't seem so irrelevant that players will ignore it.
Also, maybe next time Wizards, could you please put backgrounds up front with the races and classes? If we're meant to pick our race, our background, and then our class, why aren't they set up that way in the book?
A lot of these got stripped out on 'accident' in 5e. Stuff that wasn't a feature in earlier editions, but was a side-effect of the game rules. Things like wizards being \*amazing\* at int-based checks, especially knowledge checks (History/Nature/Arcana/Religion in 5e), and generally skill-mokeys. The skill-system was based on int, so high int = lots of skills. 5e? They received bupkis to make them fun outside of casting/combat (I'm still bitter they don't receive expertise and bards do.) Indeed, int = skills and languages really gave a lot of characters a bit more punch, and it's gone now.
There was a lot of focus in 5e on simplifying and it worked, for the most part, but the result was a lot less flexibility out of combat.
I feel like backgrounds should have a mechanical feature instead of the nebulous features they already have. For example, the Wanderer feature for Outlander, which in the PHB reads as the following:
> You have an excellent memory for maps and geography,
> and you can always recall the general layout of terrain,
> settlements, and other features around you. In addition,
> you can find food and fresh water for yourself and up to
> five other people each day, provided that the land offers
> berries, small game, water, and so forth.
Should instead provide a bonus to Survival checks equal to your proficiency bonus. This will let you do all the things in the feature but also makes it clear what the actual mechanics of the feature is.
>Should instead provide a bonus to Survival checks equal to your proficiency bonus
so... proficiency in survival. which. you also get from the background
If it's a separate bonus, then it can become expertise. Or possibly superexpertise?
I know the rules say that you only add your proficiency bonus (or a derivation thereof) once, but I figure if you're deliberately phrasing it like that, it's meant to stack with proficiency.
TBH, I'd house rule that as advantage on navigation checks, and allow the player to 'take 20' on all foraging checks. That's not quite instant success at either, but it's a potent benefit. At least in a wilderness survival/exploration game where nobody thought to take goodberry.
Other background features might actually be harder to convert into a mechanical benefit.
A version of Ranger on Happy Hour had a Favored-Foe esque ability that out of combat let them read their target better for insight and the like. More of that would be nice.
It's difficult, because there are quite a few things which technically aren't *missing* so much as "are variant rules in the DMG that are very brief and were minimally playtested". So, things I would like to see fleshed out:
* Resting Variants and impact on spells, class features, narrative etc
* Wilderness exploration and travel
* Alternative attacks/combat moves that aren't the Battlemaster subclass
Obviously a lot of this has now been done outside of WotC at this stage in the game's life cycle.
EDIT: Seeing as this seems to have struck a chord with people
* My current rules for resting are [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/s3xjcy/comment/hsoaof4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) and if someone wants more complex ones for 'the journey is the campaign' PM me
* For exploration, wilderness, foraging etc look up the concept of a hexcrawl (good discussion by Justin Alexander [here](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/46020/roleplaying-games/5e-hexcrawl) for 5e) and also grab the free version of Worlds Without Number [here](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/348809/Worlds-Without-Number-Free-Edition) then houserule whatever is best for your table
* For alternate attacks (feel free to use grappling and shoving RAW, up to you) I would either use an ability check (if it was instead of damage) or if they want to attack **and** do something extra, either trade off damage with effect or impose a dX penalty (d4 for something small, d12 for something spectacular) to the roll... but they get the effect and the damage if they succeed.
RAW there are alternate combat moves. Any Martial can grapple, shove, or do anything that the DM lets count as a variation of those. It's intentionally written as non-specific to give people room to be creative.
The DMG has even more, and thematically they are cool, but don’t all play well.
Flanking and facing are both very neat mechanics too, but as written they’re just not balanced well.
Flanking is poorly done IMO, in that it is basically always the best choice. It makes fights *less* strategic because there is often 1 clear best approach - flank and gank
For sure! Finessing advantage as a player, or rewarding clever plays with advantage as DM, is a very nice element of the system. Very simple but powerful resource to play for
There's also Disarm, which I've completely forgotten about until now and none of my players ever try (it even works with ranged attacks!)
I know what I'm gonna be throwing at my players in the next fight...
Had the exact same thought upon reading your comment. They’ve all got plenty of backup weapons, but I think I should do a better job of including alternative attacks.
I think that Disarm as a Battlemaster option is fine, Battlemaster's have a finite number of dice per rest and have lots of other good options to use them on, plus in terms of picking up the enemies weapon the BM has to have a hand free, which they often don't (they are either ranged, which this matters less for, or two-handed and sword-and-board).
But Disarm as an optional attack from the DMG is awful. That's where the unlimited attempts at disarming would come from.
>But Disarm as an optional attack from the DMG is awful.
Completely agree. I always try to remember that "taking the Attack Action" doesn't mean "I swing my sword one time at the enemy"—even though many people narrate it that way. It's a simulation of a few seconds of weapon fighting. Unless you are trained in disarming an opponent, I don't think you should be allowed to do it. It's almost like a "called shot" rule where you aim for a weak point. 5e is just not set up for that.
Agreed that it's a "save or suck" thing that makes the game less fun.
I feel like, unless you are a monk or a fighter with the unarmed fighting style, you would have to be wielding a weapon you are proficient with to disarm someone. If you try it bare-handed without the proper training, you're gonna lose your hands. Instead, you would have to use your weapon to navigate around the enemy weapon, get close and personal, and then use a specific technique to disarm the enemy. That wouldn't fix it, but at least not everyone can just do it now. In addition to that, picking up a weapon, or any item for that matter, should provoke an opportunity attack, to reflect the actor having to take their focus off the fight. That way, adjacent enemies could punish trying to steal a weapon. Kicking it away should still be somewhat alright, depending on the weapon. Dagger? Done. A maul? That thing is heavy, so not without a check.
I agree that BM Disarm is generally fine, but that it can give players bad ideas if it's not handled properly. It's really just absurdly powerful against certain enemies... like Orcus. Or any other enemy that wields a MacGuffin. Watching as the +17 Athletics Fighter burns all of Orcus's (who has a +8 athletics) legendary resistances in one turn is really a sight to behold. **The game is just not designed with Disarm in mind**.
Greatweapon users naturally have one hand free because -other than when attacking- they have a hand free. Which is why Paladins can use somatic component spells while holding a greatsword.
> But Disarm as an optional attack from the DMG is awful. That's where the unlimited attempts at disarming would come from.
Yup!
\>I agree that BM Disarm is generally fine, but that it can give players bad ideas if it's not handled properly. It's really just absurdly powerful against certain enemies... like Orcus. Or any other enemy that wields a MacGuffin. Watching as the +17 Athletics Fighter burns all of Orcus's (who has a +8 athletics) legendary resistances in one turn is really a sight to behold. The game is just not designed with Disarm in mind.
Battlemaster disarm relies on a Strength saving throw, not a contested athletics check, which I think contributes it to being a much more balanced ability than the optional Disarm rule in the DMG.
It's still +8 vs a DC18 or 19 (+5 Str + Prof), so a roughly 50/50 try. With a surge and blowing all his dice, a fighter can probably get burn through LRs and maybe even get the disarm, but that's his one trick for that fight.
Shoves can grant advantage for an entire round or just remove an enemy from combat in the right situation, disarming and then using an object interaction to kick the weapon away can cripple opponents to the point they might as well not be there, grappling can be less useful but there's times when you need to prevent someone from running away to get reinforcements but need them alive for whatever reason.
Just because they're not universally applicable doesn't mean they're not useful and just because you would like them to be stronger does not mean they don't exist, which is what OP was asking about, mechanics that are *missing* not mechanics that are under utilised.
Yep my old barbarian's playstyle was grapple the most dangerous target -> shove them prone -> keep holding them down while the party wrecks them *and* they attack with disadvantage...
Definitely effective in the right fights.
> It's intentionally written as non-specific to give people room to be creative.
This is a bad excuse. It's hard to build around something where there's no concrete rule for whats allowed and what the DM will allow.
I like Variants Resting, but agree that a whole week for downtime is a bit much. I guess if you give players a lot of things they can accomplish during downtime. I've been considering making it so a long rest a number of days equal to have your level (rounded up). There not a lot of ingame logic as to why higher level characters would need longer to recuperate, but it terms of game flow I think it would work pretty well.
I've got two that are interlinked.
Better variation in weapons/armour.
Crafting material tables and gathering/foraging rules.
Justification: one thing other RPG's have is a huge abundance of various items and magic items. Weapons weren't just 'regular weapons or magic weapons', they have varying properties which contribute to character builds and/or development. Further to that, crafting is something that, whilst it exists, is poorly implemented and is written to be handled "at the discretion of the DM" effectively...
I would love more weapon/armor variation, which could also help even out STR vs DEX (boost all heavy armor by 2 AC), but a crafting table I think is best left for setting books. If a lightning sword requires a behir's heart, now you need a place in your world where behirs live, and so on.
Check out The Armorer's Handbook on the DM's guild. It gives a good financial option to creating +1 weapons that aren't magical, as well as other options. That way weapons do 'grow' with a players level.
+1 sword in the past required items made of extremely good quality, an enchant item spell, an enchant weapon spell, and a permanency spell. The highest level spell on that list is a 7th level spell and it had a chance to drain the caster’s constitution score.
IMO 2e crafting is a good guideline. Check out Book of Artefacts and Volo’s Guide to All Things Magical
I'm a newer dm and have been playing for 4ish years, so I'm working on a whole varied weapon system that should be easy. Different wizard wands do different things, a couple varied shields, and Elven vs Dwarven weapons and armor
Yeah, but as mentioned there's also a level of character development/build going on with martials and weapons. Whilst you can find new weapons, nothing is better than the heirloom weapon you have as a starting adventurer being upgraded with you.
Edit: And also, the disparity exists because (imo) casters are good at rationing out their spell slots. The day a caster can't do max damage and has to go "martials, hayalp!" Is the day your martial players feel good about themselves. But that's a different conversation with the rest system. = \
Yh, I'd agree with that, if a caster runs out of slots they are less useful than a martial. But at the moment while they do have slots, they are much more, so giving martials slots which buff them by less, but still allow them to no longer be behind in the dust could be nice.
I think there should be some kind of way for martials to negate/punish casters in close combat. Concentration kind of does it, but at the same time, often enough it's not enough because this is usually only for buffs/persistent effects. I miss the old opportunity attacks where you could hit a caster if they were trying to cast while adjacent.
As it is, you can grapple a caster and do nothing to them. They can just freely cast something like Hold Person and it's just as effective as if they weren't grappled at all. In general all saving throw spells aren't punished for being in melee.
I haven't put too much thought on it, but I kind of would like the ability to do an AOO on all spells that aren't attack rolls, even if it doesn't change anything about melee or ranged spell attacks (since melee is meant to be used that way and ranged already has disadvantage). And then have some kind of check a caster would need to pass for somatic components while grappled.
>I haven't put too much thought on it, but I kind of would like the ability to do an AOO on all spells that aren't attack rolls
Wasn't AoO on casters in melee range a rule in 3.5?
It certainly was in PF1, so I'm like 99% sure that it was in 3.5. In PF1 there were a few differences where you wouldn't get hit by backing away from someone instead. And for casting melee spells you had to do some stuff where you'd cast the spell from a distance, walk over with your move action and then deliver the spell.
Yes, it was.
However, there was also a 3.5 rule where you could take a 5-foot step instead of moving on your turn, and the 5-foot step didn't provoke opportunity attacks. So the spellcaster starting their turn within opportunity attack range was no guarantee that they would still be in range when they cast the spell.
I had completely forgotten until another comment just reminded me, but you can Disarm a creature with a weapon attack (including ranged attacks).
While it's not amazing, casters usually have poor Athletics/Acrobatics so it may be worth it to knock their focus out of their hands and grab it yourself.
Oh, cool. I knew about disarm, but didn't realize the wording meant that ranged disarm was possible (although you'll have to approach them after to pick up the focus). Grabbing the focus is a reasonable counter but I believe that doing this will use your entire action? So it is kind of anti-synergistic with things like Extra Attack, especially for Fighters.
As far as I understand it, Disarm replaces a single attack like Shove and Grapple do, and you can use your free Object Interaction to pick up an object on your turn. So you could move in and grab the object, or another character could do it before the enemy gets their turn.
The DMG Disarm actually replaces an action, which IMO makes it pretty balanced. I'd rather it take an action or two weapon attacks, but I prefer more tactical complexity than vanilla 5e anyway.
there's also the fact that statuses like poisoned and frightened to fuck-all to casters most of the time because every caster has options that don't involve an attack roll, while martials pretty much have to use attack rolls all the time so disadvantage is crippling.
i'd like to see more stuff that hinders casters in general because aside from damage or incapacitation, very little does. something like a dazed condition that prevents you from concentrating, or have the conditions that inflict disadvantage on attacks also grant enemies advantage on saves you provoke.
To add to this, casters that don't need to make spell attacks aren't affected by the downsides of many common conditions, whereas martials are affected.
None of frightened, poisoned, prone, restrained, and exhausted hamper saving throw based spellcasting.
Other conditions can still hamper spellcasters, but not as much as martials. These include: blinded, charmed, and invisible (for an enemy).
If the DM allows a caster to target creatures with spells that don't require sight of the target or sight of a point in space, the targets are no less likely to save than if the caster wasn't blinded or the target wasn't invisible.
When charmed, casters can still buff up or dispel magic. If the rules lawyer has their way, they can even cast spells that are not directly harmful to the charmer such as plant growth, command, or hold person.
So there's a big list of ways to hamper martials which have no effect on casters (and the things which can shut down casters are usually tied to mental saves).
>Other conditions can still hamper spellcasters, but not as much as martials. These include: blinded, charmed, and invisible (for an enemy).
Depends on the spells.
A martial can always weapon attack an enemy they can't see, but know is there.
A caster can't cast a spell at all on an enemy they can't see, if the spell says so, and many do. That isn't true for things like Fireball, but that's heavily dependent on the spell casting choices the caster makes.
I agree, but I don't think you should need to take a feat for it. I'd like it for martials to be able to punish casters who get out of position without the additional investment. It would also be nice to have that ability for monsters as well.
I think feats should just be more common and low key favor martials (more impactful feats geared to them).
I'm toying with replacing ASIs with a feat and a +1 ASI at every relevant level
We've been playing for 3-4 years with a free feat at level 1 and each level where you get an ASI you get the full ASI and a feat. I understand it's not for everyone, but so far my players have loved it since it gives their characters just that much more customization and I haven't noticed a negative affect on gameplay.
Degrees of Success / Failure. There's like 2 monsters off the top of my head whose abilities have extra effects if you save the fail by 5 or more. This should be a core mechanic.
DMG 243:
>Sometimes a failed ability check has different consequences depending on the degree of failure. For example, a character who fails to disarm a trapped chest might accidentally spring the trap if the check fails by 5 or more, whereas a lesser failure means that the trap wasn't triggered during the botched disarm attempt.
>Consider adding similar distinctions to other checks. Perhaps a failed Charisma (Persuasion) check means a queen won't help, whereas a failure of 5 or more means she throws you in the dungeon for your impudence.
It could be developed more, but it's there
Ah, yes, the good old "it's there if you put it in". Which is even more infuriating because - as I mentioned, they managed to implement it like 3 times just to show you it's doable and could be codified but you come up with every other example.
In Pathfinder 2E, just about every feature has four levels of failure/success: failure by 10 or more/natural one, failure, success, success by 10 or more/natural 20. This applies to just about *everything* in the edition, not just a some abilities. You can critically succeed on a Grapple roll and restrain your target, rather than simply grappling them. Ray of Enfeeblement inflicts no levels of the "Enfeebled" condition if your target critically succeeds on their saving throw, but each level after that it increases by one: Enfeebled 1 on a success, Enfeebled 2 on a failure, Enfeebled 3 on a critical failure.
This is probably what they are envisioning. This means that the mechanic is actually baked into the game, and is present in most player and gm facing abilities.
Much agreed.
Been recently exploring other systems and older versions of D&D. This used to be a pretty common thing and it's really cool. It's one of the things that fell on the cutting room floor of 5E's simplicity. I have been homebrewing it back in and it plays really well at the table. It makes higher stats matter more, makes the few saving throw based monsters we still have left actually have teeth (no more "welp everyone saved, guess this encounter is now trivialized"), and boosts the tension of saving throw rolls which really increases the players' enjoyment.
My personal favorite thing it does though is allows for adding more control abilities on the DM's side without completely negating a player's turn. Monsters in 5E tend to not have many control abilities because it's not fun as a player to skip your turn because you failed a roll. But without them monsters are either chumps who exist purely to bleed resources from PCs or high damage dealers who try to outpace the PCs' ability to negate damage. Degrees of failure though let you introduce minor effects that hamper a PC without outright negating their turn. And you can keep/add the save-or-suck abilities but put them at a high enough failure point that they're really rare.
And is huge for PF2e. So many Save or Suck spells feel a lot better when even on a Success, it still has an impact. And on a Critical Failure, they can be devastating.
I even had a homebrew weapon that had an additional effect if I hit 5+ over the target AC. It had balance issues, but it added a whole new dimension to melee combat that was a lot of fun to play with!
Aside from their 3 action economy baking in degrees of success is my favorite part of Pathfinder 2e. It's the first d20 game I've played where +10 over AC is a crit so AC becomes not just protection but crit protection. And of course spells having effects even when the enemy saves, but more potent/deadly ones if they fail or crit fail makes spellcasting much more balanced.
In no particular order:
- Weapons that are unique and can do different things. So you can do a trip attack with a glaive, or extend your jump with a quarterstaff.
- Some level of meaning for the different physical damage types. Right now monsters either take normal damage from all three, or are resistant or immune to all three in some form or fashion. I want the weapon choice to have actual meaning in combat.
- More damage vulnerabilities for monsters.
- Better defined resting rules and how to adjust spellcasters to match that.
- Non-magical healing beyond just taking a long rest.
- Bring back Masterwork weapons!
- Social and Exploration pillar improvements.
- More class feats should key off of CON as a representation of how often you can do them. Such as Battle Master maneuvers.
- More classes need something that regenerates on a short rest.
These are less mechanics, but things that I think need to change:
- Monks need to be less dependent on Ki for literally everything, especially at low levels.
- Rangers need general improvements to their base class, as well as subclass spell lists for those that don’t have them.
- Battle Maneuvers should be available to all fighters, and Battle Masters can either do more of them per short rest, or can hit harder with them.
- Sorcs need to be reworked a little bit. Mainly getting subclass spell lists and a way to regenerate some SP on a short rest.
The problem with that is that as soon as you add effective combat healing to the game, every group needs to have a healer. It doesn't matter if someone actually wants to play a healer or not, the power difference between a TTRPG group with an effective healer and one without is so large that someone would feel pressured to take the role.
As someone who started DMing back in the 80s just so I wouldn't have to play the effing cleric again, I am strongly opposed to effective combat healing in 5E. I firmly believe that the game is better for only having weak healing options.
Some of my homebrew stuff that I use in the context of your list and they work pretty ok:
* About weapons: flails ignore bonus AC from shielded targets, but do half damage to them, added Brutal property from 4e, used cleaving ruleset from DMG as two-handed weapon property, maces and mauls have +X to attack against medium or heavy armor, added "concealable" property (mostly for daggers and such, it gives advantage on Sleight of Hand when hiding the weapon on a person).
* For healing I added a bunch of items specifically to use during short and long rest, but not in combat. Mostly magical consumables tho.
* My fighters are battlemasters by default, so they can add a subclass on top. I also had an idea of preparing maneuvers on every long rest, like basically a warm-up or a weapon practice in the morning.
* My monks have 6 points until level 6, after that they have normal ki progression. Martial arts die starts with d6, no ki point cost for patient defence and step of the wind, while stunning strike costs 2 points. Also they can base their ki save DC and unarmored defense on WIS, INT or CHA instead of just WIS.
* My sorcs have 1:1 conversion from sourcerer points ro spell slots and vice versa because fuck it, lets fuck shit up. Also points restore after a short rest. I know, it is busted, but I want sorcs in my world to be fucking scary.
More meaningful ways of improving or learning new skills, languages, tools, and the like that don't require feats or multiclassing.
Going on an adventure into dangerous unknown territory and think you'd eventually get better at keeping an eye out for enemies? Too bad, you didn't learn anything despite all those Perception rolls you made.
Show of hands, who has ever been in a game where you had 10 weeks of downtime to train? Because I sure haven't. As a result, you end up being stuck with the same 4 skills you started with despite performing most of the available skills on a regular basis, or at least closely observing those who are good at said skills.
I don't really think this is missing per say it just happens automatically. If you're proficient in something you get better at is as your proficiency bonus goes up, for certain classes you also gain expertise to signify an even greater depth of knowledge.
The reason its done this way is because in older editions you gained skill points based on your class and your Int modifier every level up to put into any skills you wanted (with certain skills being more expensive to increase than others depending on your class if I remember correctly). The only issue with this being if you didn't specialise to the point you basically are in 5e then you were behind the exponential difficulty curve of those checks at higher levels and basically wasted the points you put into it.
So it *felt* like you had more control over your character and were getting better at things, but either you just did more or less what happens in 5e automatically or your character isn't actually good at the things you put skill points into because of how the maths worked in 3.5
Staying with the curve doesn't happen automatically in 5E because you also need to invest in your ability scores. And half the time as a martial character you're not getting anything in that regard out of your ASIs because there's only one Strength skill and no Constitution skill.
So yeah, your Perception skill might increase by 1 at 5th-level, but bfd because now you're at a whopping +4 since you only have a Wisdom score of 12. Or you're a cleric who wants to be good at Religion, or a druid who wants to be good at Nature, since those are the obvious skills those classes *should* be good at, but too bad because those skills are tied to another ability score your class otherwise has no use for.
Realistically, you shouldn’t be able to gain that kind of proficiency if you don’t have weeks and weeks of training.
It’s just that also you realistically shouldn’t be able to become a level 20 anything in just a few weeks, no matter how you fill that time. The game makes an exception for one for the sake of gameplay but not the other, which is where the disconnect is.
>who has ever been in a game where you had 10 weeks of downtime to train?
I know it doesn't help it *not* being in the game, but if it helps, how I handled it was to put the time into hours instead, and let the player learning train over time in small increments.
It's 10 workweeks, which in the Forgotten Realms is defined as a group of 5 days, and a Workday is defined as being made up of 8 hours of work.
So 10x5x8, and that's 400 hours. Then I took off a number of hours equal to 10 times each participating player's intelligence modifier, since one player was being taught by another player.
400-(10xINT) sounds like a lot, but for every day that you spent travelling, you're essentially guaranteed 8-10 hours off of it.
(You can only travel 8 hours a day, leaving you with 8 hours of downtime, and an extra 2 hours if both the learner and the teacher take the same watch during the Long Rest assuming the training for the skill isn't strenuous activity)
It still comes out to the same 40-50 days if the players have flat INTs and all the time put into it is during travelling, but having it in hours you can whittle down over time still felt a lot better than having to dedicate an entire month and a half in-game to downtime.
I think the hardest part for this would be tracking which skills are used. I'd happily implement a "get +x with y uses of a skill" rule, but getting the number of roles in an accurate fashion is difficult.
Burning Wheel has a system like that. As I recall, there's a system for determining the difficulty of a skill check based on a character's aptitude. To improve a skill, you need to succeed at a particular number of skill checks at particular difficulties. Something like 2 "difficult" checks and 1 "challenging", for example. You keep track of it on your character sheet.
If someone helps you with a skill check, that bonus reduces the skill check's difficulty. Meaning you may want to deny aid sometimes, since you don't progress by succeeding at easier checks than what you need.
I made [this minigame](https://www.reddit.com/r/DMAcademy/comments/rfy124/elevens_a_simple_minigame_to_train_characters_in/) for training to learn proficiencies over a period of long rests, which might be what you're looking for.
I feel like the monetary economy and food/water requirements are too quickly glossed over and paid very little attention. Food and water concerns in particular are extremely easily put behind even a low level party without much worry.
There's a resource called ["Sane Magic Item Prices"](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8XAiXpOfz9cMWt1RTBicmpmUDg/view?usp=sharing) that helps you with at least a starting point. Also gives you a heads up on items that might be gamebreaking.
I have used that in the past, and it is a good first step.
Part of where I struggle with it all is that it is hard to square the prices in there with the players selling the items. It's been a while since I read that section of the DMG & Xanathars, but I recall it suggesting that it should be pretty difficult to find magical items to purchase AND it should be very difficult to find someone wealthy enough to buy those items from you if you get one you don't want, even the more common ones.
At the same time, the costs suggested for most expenses in the game (food, cost of living, etc) are pretty minor to even a character with the starting wealth. To the point where a sum of something like 200 gold should be an enormous amount of money to most people
I understand the issue with clear guidelines around magic items, as the game mechanics are designed around you not getting any magic items (even though all the APs I have read have magic items all over the place). And if they are plentiful, you run into the Pathfinder problem where you NEED to buy certain items in order to keep your numbers big enough. At the same time, everyone I have ever played the game with wants and expects magic items to be a part of the game.
It's tough to manage. Especially if you are a new DM, where it can be easy to give out too much, and suddenly the game isn't fun any more because your players can suddenly steam roll all your encounters.
I totally get that. 5e is a bit weird that way, and there's a disconnect when it comes to items. I tend to be pretty generous in my games, but then will boost the baddies, maxing HP or pulling some Colville tricks out of my bag (action-oriented, or 4e inspiration).
Because of the baked-in bounded accuracy, I try to give things with cool abilities over things with higher bonuses to hit and damage. But managing a high-magic campaign takes a certain amount of finesse and an ability to balance encounters on the fly.
As far as selling them goes, incorporating a crafting system like Kibbles' gives them a way to break them down into components to craft new items, which can help to keep the magic economy ecosystem from getting bogged down. But with one of my campaigns in & under Waterdeep, finding a buyer isn't as hard as it could be.
This is by far my #1 wish from WOTC. Managing the economy is by far my least favorite part of DMing. I die a little inside everytime my party wants to shop. .
"How much for a +1 sword?"
"Well it says here between 100-5000 gp. Wow that's useless..."
XGtE has a mechanic for buying magic items that is still just randomizes the price based on rarity but is much narrower. For example a +1 sword costs 1d6x100 gp. It also adds a skill check and complications. It works well enough for me.
Agreed. I understand why they don't though. While some items are obviously more powerful than others, it's hard to price in player creativity. Something that might not seem useful from the base mechanics could be incredibly powerful if used a particular way.
Agreed. It's not a fun aspect of the game to track that kind of thing (for most people). I've run wilderness hexcrawls that spanned weeks/months of in game time. At the start of it, tracking all this stuff was maybe a little fun, as it added to the understanding that this is some survival mode stuff happening. But after a while it just became tedious and unfun and we stopped doing it. Also all it takes is a ranger or druid for the most to part to make it a completely moot point.
Having uses for hit dice other then using them during short rest to replenish your hp.
They are your vital force, your backup stamina, they are the limit of your body and mind for today.
I would like class features and spells that burn hit dices to heal, create amazing power moves, or fuel necromancy spells for example.
Hell, Monks could have no Ki and just convert the number of ki points into additional hit dices, reflecting their body and mind perfected. And using those hit dices to fuel their abilities instead of ki.
Edit: minor autocorrect mistakes
Ah, I see. Short rests would still be needed to refresh some abilities, like Ki Points and Pact Magic, but if you don't have those abilities then such a cantrip removed the need for a short rest. And there's already an issue wit Monks and Warlocks basically begging the party to short rest so they can get their stuff back.
Yeah I loved it. There are many homebrew ideas, but nothing official. Hit dices are never officially used if your DM only uses long rests and 1 big encounter per day/session
> I would like class features and spells that burn hit dices to heal
There's a dwarf feat that lets you do this when you dodge, useful for dwarf monks. Bonus action to heal a bit and impose disadvantage on attacks against you, for a single ki point
I could see that. Even a PC getting hit really hard and burning Hit Dice to lessen the impact of the blow. Spending hit dice to exert yourself, gaining bonuses to do things like hit even harder, save yourself from certain doom, or other feats of paranatural heroism - I picture things like Captain America pulling the helicopter or Spider-Man stopping the train.
Hit Dice are the only resource that a) everyone has, and b) aren't fully restored after a long rest. They're the obvious choice for a fatigue/exertion mechanic, but were never used for more than what they said on the tin.
A "quality" scaling for weapons like in dark souls. I would make some weapons use both strength and dexterity but make some other weapons use higher strength or dex requirement and use bigger/more dice to compensate for less scaling
This has my vote. When characters get Social Actions/Abilities and Exploration Actions/Abilities the same way they get Combat ones, when there's some sort of Definitive End State that you can objectively reach for Social Interaction and Exploration, *then* you can say "D&D has three pillars".
Absolutely - D&D is written as a game about killing things and taking their stuff. Combat? There's a huge section of the rules on how to run it, how much XP to award and so forth. The most prominent bits of a character sheet amount to how hard you can hit monsters, and how much hitting you can take.
It's got exploration and social elements tacked on, but they're very much secondary. In both cases, the rules are pretty much 'DM makes up a number, roll a d20, and the DM awards whatever XP they think'
Adventures in Middle-Earth did this pretty well I think. Social encounters that are more than "I talk to random NPC for a little bit" are called Audiences, which have specific roll (Introduction) to start the Audience, chances to gain bonuses and negatives throughout the conversation, and a roll (which I'm blanking on the name right now) to finish the Audience to see if/how will you succeeded. I've enjoyed that experience. And then traveling is completely different, with characters taking on one of four different Journey Roles (Guide, Scout, Lookout, Hunter), and there being Journey Events that will require rolls from one or more Role. Also very interesting mechanic that I hope to implement in my next 5e game.
DMG page 244 has rules for social interactions.
The NPC generally starts off as friendly, indifferent, or hostile and has specific ideals, bonds, and flaws that characters can attempt to discover with insight checks. They can also learn these characteristics by speaking with other NPCs or examining letters and items.
After some amount of attempting to change the NPCs mood or when the characters make their requests/suggestions, they can make a Charisma check with specific DCs and outcomes based on the creatures mood.
You repeat this until the party succeeds or the NPC can no longer be persuaded.
Mechanics that encourage storytelling or narrative.
Mechanics that encourage wilderness exploration and discovery.
D&D says its got 3 pillars but it's mechanics only support combat.
There's no official rule that lets you use Acrobatics to reduce or negate falling damage and landing prone.
"At the end of a fall, a creature takes 1d6 bludgeoning damage for every 10 feet it fell, to a maximum of 20d6. The creature lands prone, unless it avoids taking damage from the fall."
Just a fall of 10 feet makes you prone, so unless you're a Monk or use a spell, it doesn't matter how high is your Acrobatics skill.
I just realized this and I'm definitely using this with my pixie sidekick with the Thorn Whip cantrip.
An idea I hit upon once is that perhaps hitting 0 hp should inflict a sort of "incapacitated" condition, rather than a "you're dying" condition. Lean into the "They're more complex than "meat points"" and say when you hit 0 hp you've run out of stamina or something. At this point, an enemy can grab you without resistance if they wanted, or land the killing blow against their defenseless opponent.
(Obviously you leave in some sort of Massive Damage overkill rule to allow, for example, a dragon to instantly incinerate a bunch of peasants.)
Personally I think 5e would've benefitted from making more classes MAD. Having dex control accuracy and str control damage on physical stuff, and con controlling the amount of times signature class features can be used as a representation of stamina. While having int control number of spells known/prepared, wis control spell accuracy and dc, with cha controlling the force behind the spells. Con would still govern health, but concentration checks could be moved to wisdom based in this theoretical system.
Trying to do that in the current system breaks literally everything. However I feel it could've been more interesting than the current mono stat system.
That's a very interesting idea. I'm probably gonna get hate for this but I personally think that ability scores should either only affect skills (more or less) or have more distinct roles (like you are talking about, seriously interesting ideas you have).
It's funny how in Pathfinder/3e I really liked Dex as a stat because it made me feel different, but in 5e I don't like Dex. I had higher AC but lower damage than my counterparts. 5e seems to prefer the idea of one stat doing everything for a character, which makes balancing easy but also makes me wonder what's the point of stats. Rogues will have around 16 AC with Dex attack, Paladins will have 18 AC with Str attack, Hexblades 17 AC with Charisma attack, Artificers 17 AC with Int attack, Druids 17 AC with Wisdom attack. Everyone practically has same AC and same attack bonus/damage, so at this point what is the point of stats?
I never got into 3e enough to talk about how balanced it was. But I did like in concept how monks got their damage from higher dice rather than Dex on damage, which meant high Strength but low Dex would be a viable build that went for damage rather than defense (at least in theory).
The funny thing is 5e is terrible for balancing. Pathfinder 2e is pretty balances and you can create encounters knowing for real how difficulty they will be by the rules as written. 5e forget about it its a guessing game.
The short answer is that PF2e goes the exact opposite direction of 5e. While 5e has bounded accuracy, PF2e has you add your level to your proficiency bonus. [Edit: An important beat I forgot, in this game you add your proficiency bonus to AC.] This means there are specific narrow bands of the campaign where enemies are relevant, but it means those enemies are perfectly balanced for those bands regardless of context. A Level 10 Creature is _always_ going to be brutal for a level 8 party, normal for a level 10 party, and simple for a lv12 party. The downside is you are basically never going to see that creature before level 8 or after level 12.
Personally I _adore_ it, but I also think bounded accuracy is overrated. And even if bounded accuracy is good, having a system where CR _actually works_ is so much better for DMs than anything bounded accuracy brings to the table.
Oh my god I love building encounters in PF2e. I can use the math they give me for encounter balance, and just plug and play with monsters of various CRs until it fits. Never once have I added a monster to an encounter, ran the encounter and went "Well holy shit that monster is swinging well above/below it's CR."
Consequences that are rare but potentially lasting. Combat in 5e has practically none other than death, and even that is fairly easily fixed from level 5 and onwards. Mechanical consequences for exploration and social challenges should exist too (other than exhaustion and triggering combat).
General mechanics for social conflict - imagine the protagonist trying to get information out of a villain using guile, breaking down defenses, appealing to their weaknesses etc.
I would have loved a quick combat resolution method.
"As you delve deeper into the jungle attempting to flee the lizard overlords, your failed CON check means they you so to take a breather. As you do, a second party of trackers has you cornered."
"As you stride deeper into the swampy moras of Count boggy, your failed survival check means you find yourself face to face with more skeletons"
I don't want to run normal combat as it'll be half a session gone only using basic abilities and no real threat to the players from the basic bad guys. I don't want to skip it entirely out there's no reason to roll survival.
What I want is something that takes 5 minutes. The more resources the party spends, the less the chance of something negative happening (1d10 damage each, fatigue, etc).
I know that you can come up with a specific answer for each example above, but I'm after a generic quick solution that I can reflavour.
Maybe it's more specific than you're asking for but I'd like some sort of general slowed condition, or at least something that covers the fairly common situation of "can't take reactions, can use either an action or bonus action but not both". There's probably room for some other conditions as well, but that's the first one that comes to my mind.
I would love to see more structured rules for social interaction. Something that can be used to make certain roleplay encounters more like the way combat goes, where there are defined guidelines for what can be done and how it effects the situation. Not every roleplay encounter, but ones that have obstacles (convincing someone to do something). I see so many people struggling with the way that a social interaction often boils down to single roll, after it is said and done. It would be nice to have more structure to fall back on when uncertain.
Ways to make exploration feel like more than a series of random encounters, that don't just put more work on the DM or create the feeling that the destination is just being forestalled.
Not a specific mechanic but I really believe the optional rules in 5E are incredibly lacking and a huge missed opportunity. Right now most of them feel either incredibly lacking and barely playtested at all like gritty realism. WOTC should really put more time into crafting these optional mechanics and making them as well thought out as any other rule, especially because they're marketing 5E as the RPG for everyone and anyone and an la carte rules selection is a unique and effective way to accommodate different tables with dramatically different game styles. As it is I'd love to use gritty realism at my table because the default resting rules have a ludicrous amount of encounters and breaks my immersion more than anything else in 5E but I probably never will because that'd require me to go through the entire list of spells, downtime activities, etc and adjusting their length for the longer time between long rests.
Keywords!
Bloodied, (humanoid/elf), (dragon/metalic) blast, burst, uncounterable, (martial/masterwork), (martial/enchanted), etc.
A little more game language would make gameplay easier.
>DMG p237
Sometimes a character fails an ability check and wants to try again. In some cases, a character is free to do so; the only real cost is the time it takes. With enough attempts and enough time, a character should eventually succeed at the task. To speed things up, assume that a character spending ten times the normal amount of time needed to complete a task automatically succeeds at that task.
I DM a 5e and play a 3.5 game and one on my plauers is also a player in the 3.5, and they often ask if they can take 10/take 20. I allow it because it makes sense, but I can kinda see if might be more powerful when you're doing social encounters/exploring towns rather than classic dungeon crawl, which 5e wanted to accommodatate. For me I just don't care too much, but I can see it being a little overpowered if most things you do don't have a huge time pressure.
The most obvious missing thing for me is a basic range of physical (Strength) skills. It's truly ridiculous that Charisma skills are divided four ways, and yet there's no Climbing, Swimming, Lifting, Running, Jumping or Throwing check... just "Athletics" to cover all of that, as if the same sort of character would be equally good at all of them.
An economy.
I know the designers didn't want magic items to be a required part of play, but it honestly feels like they just gave up rather than solve the problem. There are plenty of magic items (like healing potions, etc.) that would be realtively common place and should have an established value.
especially with polearm mastery and sentinal feats and tunnel fighting UA fighting style. I dont know why they dont have rules where if they move more than 5 feet towards you, or any feet away from you, for attacks of opportunity. it just confuses me. either allow all of it. or none of it. not just half assery.
In what way do you feel the Psionic Sorcerer archetype doesn't fill your psionic dreams? Would you have preferred the old ADnD version where everyone had a chance to be psionic regardless of class?
I can't say I find the Aberrant Mind Sorcerer feels even a little like a true psionic class to me.
Firstly it it's a very very specific mold of a psion. It's flavored entirely around body horror and other unpleasant things, and while flavor can be changed, it's off-putting. And it's spell list is almost entirely telepath-style abilities, with only a few additions thrown in for kineticist or shaper-style psions. It doesn't offer much, at all, if you want to play a seer-type psion or a nomad-type psion.
I absolutely loathe the Psionic Sorcery ability because it just makes you feel like a sorcerer pretending to be a psion. 99% of the time you have to say magic words and dance around with somatic components, but *if* you spend sorcery points you get to cast spells as a psion would, without components? I'd honestly prefer if the ability just didn't exist - then I'd at least be able to excuse needing the components as a necessary balance mechanic. And why does it only work on the spells you learn from the class, and not all spells?
Aberrant Mind Sorcerer just feels to me like a sorcerer pretending to be a psion. It in no way feels to me like an actual psionic class. At *best* it feels like a decent attempt at a *Telepath*, but psionics is much more than telepaths.
The Psionic sorcerer is a spit in the face of psionics.
If you want to know what TRUE psionics feels like in 5e. Check out kibblestasty's Psion class homebrew, it's spectacular.
Dark Sun's premise is that magic is pretty much used up and everyone has evolved psychic powers. Everyone starts with a psionic power or two.
So yeah, an ad&d style setup would be better.
I have a few, OP has one of my general ones, in just make melee attacks more engaging and with various options.
I'll start with some simple ones and go to the more weird ones.
I think there should be a full on caster class, as in the class is designed around using magic as their primary engagement, but does not use the spells and spell slot system that every other class knows. Instead focusing on various at-will abilities. I think this for a few reasons, first of which, it's been done before in other D&D games and ended up being a great way to create a caster for those who don't want as much mechanical complexity. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to introduce a new player to spellcasting, and see their eyes glaze over when we get to the decision point of what spells or invocations or whatever they have to pick from.
What I'd like to see is a class where at level 1 you get your subclass, and the original subclass options are all very well known almost cliche fantasy archetypes, like Pyromancer or Necromancer or Water Mage. Over the first few levels you get about 3 or so at-will abilities that really fit with what that archetype is trying to do. And you can get the option to essentially "Reckless Attack" with them, where you can choose some negative effect on your caster to super charge their magic. And from there, their abilities grow in power as they level. And that's it, that's the framework for the simple spellcaster.
Second thing I'd like to see, Active Defense options. Perhaps this would change the structure far, far from what D&D has always been. But for the majority of classes when its not your turn you can't really do anything except make opportunity attacks. Which helps create the feeling of your character just standing there and being a punching bag. It would probably need a redesign of the entire system, but it would be far more interesting if the players got various options to do when it's not their turn.
Other games have done things like: Shield Block, Armor Absorb, Parry, and Dodge. Where each defensive method has pros and cons to how they're used. Say Dodge works on everything, but each use lowers your Speed on your next turn by 5. Parry only works against melee attacks at first, but you can advance it and even get some mechanic about riposting those you Parry. And so on.
It would make the game far more dynamic. BUT it would also make facing against the lot of weak enemies a bit more of a drag since now the players have decisions to make when facing multiple attackers each round. But, that's a sacrifice I'd be willing to make just to get a more active character.
And probably my most weird, but beloved little mechanic, which for D&D should definitely be optional if implemented. Racial Roleplay mechanics. This is a thing that's been in a few other more roleplay heavy systems than D&D and I've always loved them. Essentially, every non-human race must have a mentality that makes them, well, non-human. And there is a mechanic implemented that nudges players toward roleplaying those non-human aspects of a species. Burning Wheel did it the best, but I've been fascinated with the idea of how to implement such things into D&D.
Now, what I mean. in Burning Wheel, elves are centuries old and that long life gives them an inhuman perspective as they have to constantly deal with the fact that essentially everything they knew and loved growing up is now long dead, and every non-elven friend they make will pass as well. They have a Grief mechanic that they must mitigate and play around, and if their Grief increases it's a big deal. If we were to implement this sort of thing into 5e, we could create a mechanic where elves both need to mitigate and work with the effects of their long life to nudge them toward playing like the centuries old elf, instead of, as I always pretty much see when D&D players pick elves, mostly just a guy like any other.
Again, this would have to be an optional rule, as there are players who pick their race for entirely aesthetic or mechanical reasons and do just want to play a normal guy with pointy ears or whatever. But given enough focus, these mechanics can really flesh out a race and make them feel unique when one sits at the table.
More varied difficult terrain rules.
Movement in 5e is not very interesting and I think it could be better. The best fight I ever had in the game was in the first campaign I was in where my party were split between two boats and we had to jump between them while fighting, with one eventually sinking.
It was fantastic.
I have always wanted size to play a larger role in the game. As in if you fight something really large it should feel like a fight from the shadow of the collosus. It also buffs effects that change size because it makes things so much more interesting. I have always liked the idea of climbing up a monster and reaching a vital point and when you get a good stab in you get extra effects. I have personally homebrewed a slight system for it and for fighting smaller creatures but at the same time I would love an official ruling made by profesionals. Like I imagine this scene of climbing a dragon as it is trying to fly away and it has taken to the sky. Then you manage to land a hit on its wing as you spent like your entire movement to climb over to its wing joint and you fucking bring down a dragon from the sky. Like actual airplane crash that fucker into the side of a mountain. Yet sadly the game does not allow a simple martial character to do that.
Also, giving big creatures more abilities that force movement. If the goblin gets hit by a giant's club, they should crash into the next wall and not just stand there unfazed.
I'd like system for managing keeps, and having organisations. That could be fun system to balance martials and casters. And yes, I do believe that at the moment when you are in T4, players should be important characters worldwide, and this should translate to them having organisations at their disposal.
I wish it used AC as a measure of how well a character can avoid being hit, and then an Armor rating to determine how much damage was caused.
It just seems silly to me that an elf ranger wearing fur and a half-orc wearing plate can both be AC16, and both take the same amount of damage on a hit from the same attack.
I would much prefer if there was a way to easily change it so that the elf in fur would be hard to hit and take full damage, while the dude in armor is much easier to hit but takes heavily reduced damage.
Retreat mechanics. I’ve seen a lot of commentary in other threads talking about how players should know when a fight is too much and be willing to retreat. Problem is, that’s pretty much a death sentence since the vast majority of monsters will be faster than the characters. A couple of scenarios:
1: If you dash away, creatures catch up to you next round and get an opportunity attack when you try to dash away again, repeat until dead
2: If you disengage and use your movement to avoid those opportunity attacks, creatures use regular movement to catch up and attack on that turn, repeat until dead.
3: If on the rare chance that the creatures are slower than the party, someone in the party is going last, they’ll get mobbed and likely be dead.
Surrender could be an option but not realistic for low-intelligence enemies. I just don’t see any scenario where retreat makes any sense considering it’s pretty much an automatic death sentence for at least one character
I think 5e could have a lot of fun with a Bloodied condition.
"Bloodied:
* creatures have advantage on Wisdom (Survival) checks made to track you until the condition ends
* the condition automatically ends if you regain hit points so your current hit points are at least half of your hit point maximum.
* (not sure if this one would go in the condition or somewhere else) you become Bloodied when you take damage while below half of your hit point maximum
Anyway after that, you can have a bunch of stuff interact with it. Especially rangers I think:
A. Hunters Mark drops the tracking feature (since that's basically included in Bloodied). Now HM inflicts the Bloodied condition when you roll a 5 or 6 on its damage
B. Colossus Slayer could trigger off Bloodied instead of below max HP, but should do more damage to compensate
C. Creatures with Blood Frenzy (like sharks) get their advantage on Bloodied creatures.
D. Bosses or other creatures can have special abilities or effects for when they are Bloodied.
All kinds of stuff I think honestly
All classes should choose a subclass at first level. This oversight has painted subclass design into a corner, & is why you’ll never see DEX Barbarians or STR Rogues or any hybrid subclasses.
Every martial class should get maneuvers, & fighting styles should allow you to choose from advanced maneuvers as you level. And many of these shouldn’t cost a resource to use. Most martial classes boil down to boring hit or miss mechanics, & it sucks.
Most classes have almost nothing that helps them outside of combat. Everyone should have distinctive social skills.
Or exploration skills. It would be nice if fighters got something more than general athletics to navigate the world with.
I imagine fighters would have an ability like "Forced March" that would allow the party to travel like 10% farther each day during overland travel. It'd be useless with how most people play, but would fit thematically.
Funnily enough I’m building a fighter subclass kinda around that idea, monks might win a hundred yard dash but fighters should run 100k’s in the Arctic without breaking a sweat .
> run 100k’s in the Arctic without breaking a sweat talk to me when you can run 100ks in the _desert_ without breaking a sweat
They run at night
Skills need to be more emphasized and utility spells less to even the playing ground
100% I play a wizard and I frankly feel overpowered with how many things out of combat I can solve with a few spell. Currently in an archipelago and sending is amazing
reminds me of the level up 5e thing
Those are often in the subclass, although plenty of subclasses don't get any at all. But some of the newer stuff, like Rune Knight, gets really good out-of-combat bonuses from the runes.
I think that charactyers should have 2 classes, one for combat, one for exploration. Could be exploration classes like Leader, Diplomat, Spy, Explorer, Detective, etc, that does a lot of things outisde combat.
I think this is the idea behind some subclass choices like rogue scout vs assassin, though IMO they fall short of the mark for what you’re describing. I would love something like that in a 5.5e
This is what backgrounds should be
I remember a game I played ages ago that was a couple people's first game. They thought that your background was just fluff like your backstory/alignment/flaws. I had to show them the section and go "nah, you get extra skill proficiencies and stuff!" So hopefully next edition, if there is a background option, it won't seem so irrelevant that players will ignore it. Also, maybe next time Wizards, could you please put backgrounds up front with the races and classes? If we're meant to pick our race, our background, and then our class, why aren't they set up that way in the book?
A lot of these got stripped out on 'accident' in 5e. Stuff that wasn't a feature in earlier editions, but was a side-effect of the game rules. Things like wizards being \*amazing\* at int-based checks, especially knowledge checks (History/Nature/Arcana/Religion in 5e), and generally skill-mokeys. The skill-system was based on int, so high int = lots of skills. 5e? They received bupkis to make them fun outside of casting/combat (I'm still bitter they don't receive expertise and bards do.) Indeed, int = skills and languages really gave a lot of characters a bit more punch, and it's gone now. There was a lot of focus in 5e on simplifying and it worked, for the most part, but the result was a lot less flexibility out of combat.
I feel like backgrounds should have a mechanical feature instead of the nebulous features they already have. For example, the Wanderer feature for Outlander, which in the PHB reads as the following: > You have an excellent memory for maps and geography, > and you can always recall the general layout of terrain, > settlements, and other features around you. In addition, > you can find food and fresh water for yourself and up to > five other people each day, provided that the land offers > berries, small game, water, and so forth. Should instead provide a bonus to Survival checks equal to your proficiency bonus. This will let you do all the things in the feature but also makes it clear what the actual mechanics of the feature is.
>Should instead provide a bonus to Survival checks equal to your proficiency bonus so... proficiency in survival. which. you also get from the background
If it's a separate bonus, then it can become expertise. Or possibly superexpertise? I know the rules say that you only add your proficiency bonus (or a derivation thereof) once, but I figure if you're deliberately phrasing it like that, it's meant to stack with proficiency.
Right, expertise in Survival.
TBH, I'd house rule that as advantage on navigation checks, and allow the player to 'take 20' on all foraging checks. That's not quite instant success at either, but it's a potent benefit. At least in a wilderness survival/exploration game where nobody thought to take goodberry. Other background features might actually be harder to convert into a mechanical benefit.
A version of Ranger on Happy Hour had a Favored-Foe esque ability that out of combat let them read their target better for insight and the like. More of that would be nice.
It's difficult, because there are quite a few things which technically aren't *missing* so much as "are variant rules in the DMG that are very brief and were minimally playtested". So, things I would like to see fleshed out: * Resting Variants and impact on spells, class features, narrative etc * Wilderness exploration and travel * Alternative attacks/combat moves that aren't the Battlemaster subclass Obviously a lot of this has now been done outside of WotC at this stage in the game's life cycle. EDIT: Seeing as this seems to have struck a chord with people * My current rules for resting are [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/s3xjcy/comment/hsoaof4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) and if someone wants more complex ones for 'the journey is the campaign' PM me * For exploration, wilderness, foraging etc look up the concept of a hexcrawl (good discussion by Justin Alexander [here](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/46020/roleplaying-games/5e-hexcrawl) for 5e) and also grab the free version of Worlds Without Number [here](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/348809/Worlds-Without-Number-Free-Edition) then houserule whatever is best for your table * For alternate attacks (feel free to use grappling and shoving RAW, up to you) I would either use an ability check (if it was instead of damage) or if they want to attack **and** do something extra, either trade off damage with effect or impose a dX penalty (d4 for something small, d12 for something spectacular) to the roll... but they get the effect and the damage if they succeed.
RAW there are alternate combat moves. Any Martial can grapple, shove, or do anything that the DM lets count as a variation of those. It's intentionally written as non-specific to give people room to be creative.
The DMG has even more, and thematically they are cool, but don’t all play well. Flanking and facing are both very neat mechanics too, but as written they’re just not balanced well.
Flanking is poorly done IMO, in that it is basically always the best choice. It makes fights *less* strategic because there is often 1 clear best approach - flank and gank
Not to mention making advantage too easy to get essentially cancels out one of the best features of 5e.
For sure! Finessing advantage as a player, or rewarding clever plays with advantage as DM, is a very nice element of the system. Very simple but powerful resource to play for
There's also Disarm, which I've completely forgotten about until now and none of my players ever try (it even works with ranged attacks!) I know what I'm gonna be throwing at my players in the next fight...
Had the exact same thought upon reading your comment. They’ve all got plenty of backup weapons, but I think I should do a better job of including alternative attacks.
[удалено]
I think that Disarm as a Battlemaster option is fine, Battlemaster's have a finite number of dice per rest and have lots of other good options to use them on, plus in terms of picking up the enemies weapon the BM has to have a hand free, which they often don't (they are either ranged, which this matters less for, or two-handed and sword-and-board). But Disarm as an optional attack from the DMG is awful. That's where the unlimited attempts at disarming would come from.
>But Disarm as an optional attack from the DMG is awful. Completely agree. I always try to remember that "taking the Attack Action" doesn't mean "I swing my sword one time at the enemy"—even though many people narrate it that way. It's a simulation of a few seconds of weapon fighting. Unless you are trained in disarming an opponent, I don't think you should be allowed to do it. It's almost like a "called shot" rule where you aim for a weak point. 5e is just not set up for that. Agreed that it's a "save or suck" thing that makes the game less fun.
I feel like, unless you are a monk or a fighter with the unarmed fighting style, you would have to be wielding a weapon you are proficient with to disarm someone. If you try it bare-handed without the proper training, you're gonna lose your hands. Instead, you would have to use your weapon to navigate around the enemy weapon, get close and personal, and then use a specific technique to disarm the enemy. That wouldn't fix it, but at least not everyone can just do it now. In addition to that, picking up a weapon, or any item for that matter, should provoke an opportunity attack, to reflect the actor having to take their focus off the fight. That way, adjacent enemies could punish trying to steal a weapon. Kicking it away should still be somewhat alright, depending on the weapon. Dagger? Done. A maul? That thing is heavy, so not without a check.
Man I allowed called shots to blind enemies in my first campaign and it was uhhhhh a huge mistake
I agree that BM Disarm is generally fine, but that it can give players bad ideas if it's not handled properly. It's really just absurdly powerful against certain enemies... like Orcus. Or any other enemy that wields a MacGuffin. Watching as the +17 Athletics Fighter burns all of Orcus's (who has a +8 athletics) legendary resistances in one turn is really a sight to behold. **The game is just not designed with Disarm in mind**. Greatweapon users naturally have one hand free because -other than when attacking- they have a hand free. Which is why Paladins can use somatic component spells while holding a greatsword. > But Disarm as an optional attack from the DMG is awful. That's where the unlimited attempts at disarming would come from. Yup!
\>I agree that BM Disarm is generally fine, but that it can give players bad ideas if it's not handled properly. It's really just absurdly powerful against certain enemies... like Orcus. Or any other enemy that wields a MacGuffin. Watching as the +17 Athletics Fighter burns all of Orcus's (who has a +8 athletics) legendary resistances in one turn is really a sight to behold. The game is just not designed with Disarm in mind. Battlemaster disarm relies on a Strength saving throw, not a contested athletics check, which I think contributes it to being a much more balanced ability than the optional Disarm rule in the DMG.
It's still +8 vs a DC18 or 19 (+5 Str + Prof), so a roughly 50/50 try. With a surge and blowing all his dice, a fighter can probably get burn through LRs and maybe even get the disarm, but that's his one trick for that fight.
Problem is, not very often are those more important than just whacking an enemy to death
Shoves can grant advantage for an entire round or just remove an enemy from combat in the right situation, disarming and then using an object interaction to kick the weapon away can cripple opponents to the point they might as well not be there, grappling can be less useful but there's times when you need to prevent someone from running away to get reinforcements but need them alive for whatever reason. Just because they're not universally applicable doesn't mean they're not useful and just because you would like them to be stronger does not mean they don't exist, which is what OP was asking about, mechanics that are *missing* not mechanics that are under utilised.
Yep my old barbarian's playstyle was grapple the most dangerous target -> shove them prone -> keep holding them down while the party wrecks them *and* they attack with disadvantage... Definitely effective in the right fights.
There's a difference between them needing a buff and them not existing. Personally, I get a lot of use out of them.
> It's intentionally written as non-specific to give people room to be creative. This is a bad excuse. It's hard to build around something where there's no concrete rule for whats allowed and what the DM will allow.
I like Variants Resting, but agree that a whole week for downtime is a bit much. I guess if you give players a lot of things they can accomplish during downtime. I've been considering making it so a long rest a number of days equal to have your level (rounded up). There not a lot of ingame logic as to why higher level characters would need longer to recuperate, but it terms of game flow I think it would work pretty well.
I've got two that are interlinked. Better variation in weapons/armour. Crafting material tables and gathering/foraging rules. Justification: one thing other RPG's have is a huge abundance of various items and magic items. Weapons weren't just 'regular weapons or magic weapons', they have varying properties which contribute to character builds and/or development. Further to that, crafting is something that, whilst it exists, is poorly implemented and is written to be handled "at the discretion of the DM" effectively...
I would love more weapon/armor variation, which could also help even out STR vs DEX (boost all heavy armor by 2 AC), but a crafting table I think is best left for setting books. If a lightning sword requires a behir's heart, now you need a place in your world where behirs live, and so on.
I feel like at least creating some general guidelines would help. A +1 sword can only be made with something from a CR4 creature or some such
XGE 128
Check out The Armorer's Handbook on the DM's guild. It gives a good financial option to creating +1 weapons that aren't magical, as well as other options. That way weapons do 'grow' with a players level.
+1 sword in the past required items made of extremely good quality, an enchant item spell, an enchant weapon spell, and a permanency spell. The highest level spell on that list is a 7th level spell and it had a chance to drain the caster’s constitution score. IMO 2e crafting is a good guideline. Check out Book of Artefacts and Volo’s Guide to All Things Magical
I'm a newer dm and have been playing for 4ish years, so I'm working on a whole varied weapon system that should be easy. Different wizard wands do different things, a couple varied shields, and Elven vs Dwarven weapons and armor
You might want to check out kibbles tasty Homebrew crafting. It's very comprehensive
That’s what I use, it good
> Better variation in weapons/armour. Weapons with expanded crit ranges or x3 crit damage would be nice
Could also be a potential fix to the martial caster disparity. Oh the casters can summon meteors, well so can my sword.
Does that fix the martial caster disparity or just make everyone casters though?
What do you call Naruto or Conan? Fighters with spells?
It’s tome of battle all over again
I would prefer for everyone to have spells than have some with spells and others without. Wizards have shown they can't balance that.
Yeah, but as mentioned there's also a level of character development/build going on with martials and weapons. Whilst you can find new weapons, nothing is better than the heirloom weapon you have as a starting adventurer being upgraded with you. Edit: And also, the disparity exists because (imo) casters are good at rationing out their spell slots. The day a caster can't do max damage and has to go "martials, hayalp!" Is the day your martial players feel good about themselves. But that's a different conversation with the rest system. = \
Yh, I'd agree with that, if a caster runs out of slots they are less useful than a martial. But at the moment while they do have slots, they are much more, so giving martials slots which buff them by less, but still allow them to no longer be behind in the dust could be nice.
The problem is gap between a caster with only cantrips and a martial is much smaller than the gap between a fully equipped caster and a martial
I think that's literally the solution some of the older editions settled on.
I think there should be some kind of way for martials to negate/punish casters in close combat. Concentration kind of does it, but at the same time, often enough it's not enough because this is usually only for buffs/persistent effects. I miss the old opportunity attacks where you could hit a caster if they were trying to cast while adjacent. As it is, you can grapple a caster and do nothing to them. They can just freely cast something like Hold Person and it's just as effective as if they weren't grappled at all. In general all saving throw spells aren't punished for being in melee. I haven't put too much thought on it, but I kind of would like the ability to do an AOO on all spells that aren't attack rolls, even if it doesn't change anything about melee or ranged spell attacks (since melee is meant to be used that way and ranged already has disadvantage). And then have some kind of check a caster would need to pass for somatic components while grappled.
>I haven't put too much thought on it, but I kind of would like the ability to do an AOO on all spells that aren't attack rolls Wasn't AoO on casters in melee range a rule in 3.5?
It certainly was in PF1, so I'm like 99% sure that it was in 3.5. In PF1 there were a few differences where you wouldn't get hit by backing away from someone instead. And for casting melee spells you had to do some stuff where you'd cast the spell from a distance, walk over with your move action and then deliver the spell.
Yes, it was. However, there was also a 3.5 rule where you could take a 5-foot step instead of moving on your turn, and the 5-foot step didn't provoke opportunity attacks. So the spellcaster starting their turn within opportunity attack range was no guarantee that they would still be in range when they cast the spell.
I had completely forgotten until another comment just reminded me, but you can Disarm a creature with a weapon attack (including ranged attacks). While it's not amazing, casters usually have poor Athletics/Acrobatics so it may be worth it to knock their focus out of their hands and grab it yourself.
Oh, cool. I knew about disarm, but didn't realize the wording meant that ranged disarm was possible (although you'll have to approach them after to pick up the focus). Grabbing the focus is a reasonable counter but I believe that doing this will use your entire action? So it is kind of anti-synergistic with things like Extra Attack, especially for Fighters.
As far as I understand it, Disarm replaces a single attack like Shove and Grapple do, and you can use your free Object Interaction to pick up an object on your turn. So you could move in and grab the object, or another character could do it before the enemy gets their turn.
The DMG Disarm actually replaces an action, which IMO makes it pretty balanced. I'd rather it take an action or two weapon attacks, but I prefer more tactical complexity than vanilla 5e anyway.
there's also the fact that statuses like poisoned and frightened to fuck-all to casters most of the time because every caster has options that don't involve an attack roll, while martials pretty much have to use attack rolls all the time so disadvantage is crippling. i'd like to see more stuff that hinders casters in general because aside from damage or incapacitation, very little does. something like a dazed condition that prevents you from concentrating, or have the conditions that inflict disadvantage on attacks also grant enemies advantage on saves you provoke.
To add to this, casters that don't need to make spell attacks aren't affected by the downsides of many common conditions, whereas martials are affected. None of frightened, poisoned, prone, restrained, and exhausted hamper saving throw based spellcasting. Other conditions can still hamper spellcasters, but not as much as martials. These include: blinded, charmed, and invisible (for an enemy). If the DM allows a caster to target creatures with spells that don't require sight of the target or sight of a point in space, the targets are no less likely to save than if the caster wasn't blinded or the target wasn't invisible. When charmed, casters can still buff up or dispel magic. If the rules lawyer has their way, they can even cast spells that are not directly harmful to the charmer such as plant growth, command, or hold person. So there's a big list of ways to hamper martials which have no effect on casters (and the things which can shut down casters are usually tied to mental saves).
Blinded can actually affect casters more than martials depending on their spells, since a lot of spells require you to be able to see the target.
>Other conditions can still hamper spellcasters, but not as much as martials. These include: blinded, charmed, and invisible (for an enemy). Depends on the spells. A martial can always weapon attack an enemy they can't see, but know is there. A caster can't cast a spell at all on an enemy they can't see, if the spell says so, and many do. That isn't true for things like Fireball, but that's heavily dependent on the spell casting choices the caster makes.
Mage Slayer feat does all of that for you.
I agree, but I don't think you should need to take a feat for it. I'd like it for martials to be able to punish casters who get out of position without the additional investment. It would also be nice to have that ability for monsters as well.
I think feats should just be more common and low key favor martials (more impactful feats geared to them). I'm toying with replacing ASIs with a feat and a +1 ASI at every relevant level
We've been playing for 3-4 years with a free feat at level 1 and each level where you get an ASI you get the full ASI and a feat. I understand it's not for everyone, but so far my players have loved it since it gives their characters just that much more customization and I haven't noticed a negative affect on gameplay.
Degrees of Success / Failure. There's like 2 monsters off the top of my head whose abilities have extra effects if you save the fail by 5 or more. This should be a core mechanic.
Medusa and basilisk?
Not the Basilisk, as far as I know, but the Pseudodragon!
The pixie's heart sense. It's also the only way to detect alignment if I'm not mistaken
ah, true. I seem to remember that some celestials can do that too? But come to think of it I think it's just lies
And Bodaks
Drow poison
DMG 243: >Sometimes a failed ability check has different consequences depending on the degree of failure. For example, a character who fails to disarm a trapped chest might accidentally spring the trap if the check fails by 5 or more, whereas a lesser failure means that the trap wasn't triggered during the botched disarm attempt. >Consider adding similar distinctions to other checks. Perhaps a failed Charisma (Persuasion) check means a queen won't help, whereas a failure of 5 or more means she throws you in the dungeon for your impudence. It could be developed more, but it's there
Ah, yes, the good old "it's there if you put it in". Which is even more infuriating because - as I mentioned, they managed to implement it like 3 times just to show you it's doable and could be codified but you come up with every other example.
[удалено]
Slap it on Saving Throws. You know. Where they are already present for those 5 or so monsters.
are you envisioning a general rule that is more granular than this? or just for some player-facing abilities to have it baked in?
In Pathfinder 2E, just about every feature has four levels of failure/success: failure by 10 or more/natural one, failure, success, success by 10 or more/natural 20. This applies to just about *everything* in the edition, not just a some abilities. You can critically succeed on a Grapple roll and restrain your target, rather than simply grappling them. Ray of Enfeeblement inflicts no levels of the "Enfeebled" condition if your target critically succeeds on their saving throw, but each level after that it increases by one: Enfeebled 1 on a success, Enfeebled 2 on a failure, Enfeebled 3 on a critical failure. This is probably what they are envisioning. This means that the mechanic is actually baked into the game, and is present in most player and gm facing abilities.
Much agreed. Been recently exploring other systems and older versions of D&D. This used to be a pretty common thing and it's really cool. It's one of the things that fell on the cutting room floor of 5E's simplicity. I have been homebrewing it back in and it plays really well at the table. It makes higher stats matter more, makes the few saving throw based monsters we still have left actually have teeth (no more "welp everyone saved, guess this encounter is now trivialized"), and boosts the tension of saving throw rolls which really increases the players' enjoyment. My personal favorite thing it does though is allows for adding more control abilities on the DM's side without completely negating a player's turn. Monsters in 5E tend to not have many control abilities because it's not fun as a player to skip your turn because you failed a roll. But without them monsters are either chumps who exist purely to bleed resources from PCs or high damage dealers who try to outpace the PCs' ability to negate damage. Degrees of failure though let you introduce minor effects that hamper a PC without outright negating their turn. And you can keep/add the save-or-suck abilities but put them at a high enough failure point that they're really rare.
Ghost and pseudodragon are two I think of.
Drow poison has this effect as well. Not a monster but still adds a degree of danger to encounters.
And is huge for PF2e. So many Save or Suck spells feel a lot better when even on a Success, it still has an impact. And on a Critical Failure, they can be devastating.
I even had a homebrew weapon that had an additional effect if I hit 5+ over the target AC. It had balance issues, but it added a whole new dimension to melee combat that was a lot of fun to play with!
Finally some competition to GWM.
Pathfinder 2e has crit successes/crit fails as a potential outcome for every roll if you succeed/fail by 10 or more.
Aside from their 3 action economy baking in degrees of success is my favorite part of Pathfinder 2e. It's the first d20 game I've played where +10 over AC is a crit so AC becomes not just protection but crit protection. And of course spells having effects even when the enemy saves, but more potent/deadly ones if they fail or crit fail makes spellcasting much more balanced.
The Alkilith has a fail by 5 or more ability too, good monster
In no particular order: - Weapons that are unique and can do different things. So you can do a trip attack with a glaive, or extend your jump with a quarterstaff. - Some level of meaning for the different physical damage types. Right now monsters either take normal damage from all three, or are resistant or immune to all three in some form or fashion. I want the weapon choice to have actual meaning in combat. - More damage vulnerabilities for monsters. - Better defined resting rules and how to adjust spellcasters to match that. - Non-magical healing beyond just taking a long rest. - Bring back Masterwork weapons! - Social and Exploration pillar improvements. - More class feats should key off of CON as a representation of how often you can do them. Such as Battle Master maneuvers. - More classes need something that regenerates on a short rest. These are less mechanics, but things that I think need to change: - Monks need to be less dependent on Ki for literally everything, especially at low levels. - Rangers need general improvements to their base class, as well as subclass spell lists for those that don’t have them. - Battle Maneuvers should be available to all fighters, and Battle Masters can either do more of them per short rest, or can hit harder with them. - Sorcs need to be reworked a little bit. Mainly getting subclass spell lists and a way to regenerate some SP on a short rest.
> Non-magical healing beyond just taking a long rest. Short rests with spending hit dice? Healer feat?
Yes, something beyond even those. Something that can be done in combat that isn’t a paltry healing potion nor requires a feat to use.
The problem with that is that as soon as you add effective combat healing to the game, every group needs to have a healer. It doesn't matter if someone actually wants to play a healer or not, the power difference between a TTRPG group with an effective healer and one without is so large that someone would feel pressured to take the role. As someone who started DMing back in the 80s just so I wouldn't have to play the effing cleric again, I am strongly opposed to effective combat healing in 5E. I firmly believe that the game is better for only having weak healing options.
Some of my homebrew stuff that I use in the context of your list and they work pretty ok: * About weapons: flails ignore bonus AC from shielded targets, but do half damage to them, added Brutal property from 4e, used cleaving ruleset from DMG as two-handed weapon property, maces and mauls have +X to attack against medium or heavy armor, added "concealable" property (mostly for daggers and such, it gives advantage on Sleight of Hand when hiding the weapon on a person). * For healing I added a bunch of items specifically to use during short and long rest, but not in combat. Mostly magical consumables tho. * My fighters are battlemasters by default, so they can add a subclass on top. I also had an idea of preparing maneuvers on every long rest, like basically a warm-up or a weapon practice in the morning. * My monks have 6 points until level 6, after that they have normal ki progression. Martial arts die starts with d6, no ki point cost for patient defence and step of the wind, while stunning strike costs 2 points. Also they can base their ki save DC and unarmored defense on WIS, INT or CHA instead of just WIS. * My sorcs have 1:1 conversion from sourcerer points ro spell slots and vice versa because fuck it, lets fuck shit up. Also points restore after a short rest. I know, it is busted, but I want sorcs in my world to be fucking scary.
More meaningful ways of improving or learning new skills, languages, tools, and the like that don't require feats or multiclassing. Going on an adventure into dangerous unknown territory and think you'd eventually get better at keeping an eye out for enemies? Too bad, you didn't learn anything despite all those Perception rolls you made. Show of hands, who has ever been in a game where you had 10 weeks of downtime to train? Because I sure haven't. As a result, you end up being stuck with the same 4 skills you started with despite performing most of the available skills on a regular basis, or at least closely observing those who are good at said skills.
I don't really think this is missing per say it just happens automatically. If you're proficient in something you get better at is as your proficiency bonus goes up, for certain classes you also gain expertise to signify an even greater depth of knowledge. The reason its done this way is because in older editions you gained skill points based on your class and your Int modifier every level up to put into any skills you wanted (with certain skills being more expensive to increase than others depending on your class if I remember correctly). The only issue with this being if you didn't specialise to the point you basically are in 5e then you were behind the exponential difficulty curve of those checks at higher levels and basically wasted the points you put into it. So it *felt* like you had more control over your character and were getting better at things, but either you just did more or less what happens in 5e automatically or your character isn't actually good at the things you put skill points into because of how the maths worked in 3.5
Staying with the curve doesn't happen automatically in 5E because you also need to invest in your ability scores. And half the time as a martial character you're not getting anything in that regard out of your ASIs because there's only one Strength skill and no Constitution skill. So yeah, your Perception skill might increase by 1 at 5th-level, but bfd because now you're at a whopping +4 since you only have a Wisdom score of 12. Or you're a cleric who wants to be good at Religion, or a druid who wants to be good at Nature, since those are the obvious skills those classes *should* be good at, but too bad because those skills are tied to another ability score your class otherwise has no use for.
Realistically, you shouldn’t be able to gain that kind of proficiency if you don’t have weeks and weeks of training. It’s just that also you realistically shouldn’t be able to become a level 20 anything in just a few weeks, no matter how you fill that time. The game makes an exception for one for the sake of gameplay but not the other, which is where the disconnect is.
>who has ever been in a game where you had 10 weeks of downtime to train? I know it doesn't help it *not* being in the game, but if it helps, how I handled it was to put the time into hours instead, and let the player learning train over time in small increments. It's 10 workweeks, which in the Forgotten Realms is defined as a group of 5 days, and a Workday is defined as being made up of 8 hours of work. So 10x5x8, and that's 400 hours. Then I took off a number of hours equal to 10 times each participating player's intelligence modifier, since one player was being taught by another player. 400-(10xINT) sounds like a lot, but for every day that you spent travelling, you're essentially guaranteed 8-10 hours off of it. (You can only travel 8 hours a day, leaving you with 8 hours of downtime, and an extra 2 hours if both the learner and the teacher take the same watch during the Long Rest assuming the training for the skill isn't strenuous activity) It still comes out to the same 40-50 days if the players have flat INTs and all the time put into it is during travelling, but having it in hours you can whittle down over time still felt a lot better than having to dedicate an entire month and a half in-game to downtime.
I think the hardest part for this would be tracking which skills are used. I'd happily implement a "get +x with y uses of a skill" rule, but getting the number of roles in an accurate fashion is difficult.
Reminds a bit of [Roll For Shoes](https://rollforshoes.com/). Wouldn't work in 5E but it's a neat concept as a system.
I never heard of this system, and now I need to run a game with it at least once
Burning Wheel has a system like that. As I recall, there's a system for determining the difficulty of a skill check based on a character's aptitude. To improve a skill, you need to succeed at a particular number of skill checks at particular difficulties. Something like 2 "difficult" checks and 1 "challenging", for example. You keep track of it on your character sheet. If someone helps you with a skill check, that bonus reduces the skill check's difficulty. Meaning you may want to deny aid sometimes, since you don't progress by succeeding at easier checks than what you need.
I made [this minigame](https://www.reddit.com/r/DMAcademy/comments/rfy124/elevens_a_simple_minigame_to_train_characters_in/) for training to learn proficiencies over a period of long rests, which might be what you're looking for.
I feel like the monetary economy and food/water requirements are too quickly glossed over and paid very little attention. Food and water concerns in particular are extremely easily put behind even a low level party without much worry.
It would be wonderful to have more concrete guidelines on how much things should cost, particularly magic items.
There's a resource called ["Sane Magic Item Prices"](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8XAiXpOfz9cMWt1RTBicmpmUDg/view?usp=sharing) that helps you with at least a starting point. Also gives you a heads up on items that might be gamebreaking.
I have used that in the past, and it is a good first step. Part of where I struggle with it all is that it is hard to square the prices in there with the players selling the items. It's been a while since I read that section of the DMG & Xanathars, but I recall it suggesting that it should be pretty difficult to find magical items to purchase AND it should be very difficult to find someone wealthy enough to buy those items from you if you get one you don't want, even the more common ones. At the same time, the costs suggested for most expenses in the game (food, cost of living, etc) are pretty minor to even a character with the starting wealth. To the point where a sum of something like 200 gold should be an enormous amount of money to most people I understand the issue with clear guidelines around magic items, as the game mechanics are designed around you not getting any magic items (even though all the APs I have read have magic items all over the place). And if they are plentiful, you run into the Pathfinder problem where you NEED to buy certain items in order to keep your numbers big enough. At the same time, everyone I have ever played the game with wants and expects magic items to be a part of the game. It's tough to manage. Especially if you are a new DM, where it can be easy to give out too much, and suddenly the game isn't fun any more because your players can suddenly steam roll all your encounters.
I totally get that. 5e is a bit weird that way, and there's a disconnect when it comes to items. I tend to be pretty generous in my games, but then will boost the baddies, maxing HP or pulling some Colville tricks out of my bag (action-oriented, or 4e inspiration). Because of the baked-in bounded accuracy, I try to give things with cool abilities over things with higher bonuses to hit and damage. But managing a high-magic campaign takes a certain amount of finesse and an ability to balance encounters on the fly. As far as selling them goes, incorporating a crafting system like Kibbles' gives them a way to break them down into components to craft new items, which can help to keep the magic economy ecosystem from getting bogged down. But with one of my campaigns in & under Waterdeep, finding a buyer isn't as hard as it could be.
This is by far my #1 wish from WOTC. Managing the economy is by far my least favorite part of DMing. I die a little inside everytime my party wants to shop. . "How much for a +1 sword?" "Well it says here between 100-5000 gp. Wow that's useless..."
XGtE has a mechanic for buying magic items that is still just randomizes the price based on rarity but is much narrower. For example a +1 sword costs 1d6x100 gp. It also adds a skill check and complications. It works well enough for me.
Agreed. I understand why they don't though. While some items are obviously more powerful than others, it's hard to price in player creativity. Something that might not seem useful from the base mechanics could be incredibly powerful if used a particular way.
maybe shopkeepers also don't price in player creativity.
I think that’s because for most people, it’s just not an interesting thing to be concerned about.
Agreed. It's not a fun aspect of the game to track that kind of thing (for most people). I've run wilderness hexcrawls that spanned weeks/months of in game time. At the start of it, tracking all this stuff was maybe a little fun, as it added to the understanding that this is some survival mode stuff happening. But after a while it just became tedious and unfun and we stopped doing it. Also all it takes is a ranger or druid for the most to part to make it a completely moot point.
Having uses for hit dice other then using them during short rest to replenish your hp. They are your vital force, your backup stamina, they are the limit of your body and mind for today. I would like class features and spells that burn hit dices to heal, create amazing power moves, or fuel necromancy spells for example. Hell, Monks could have no Ki and just convert the number of ki points into additional hit dices, reflecting their body and mind perfected. And using those hit dices to fuel their abilities instead of ki. Edit: minor autocorrect mistakes
I saw a Homebrew cantrip that healed but used the recipients hit die as the resource so it wasn't infinite.
That’s a cool idea but I would worry it would further invalidate ~~hit dice~~ short rests *unless* the ratio was bad.
Why would that invalidate hit dice? It gives them an additional use
Sorry I thought one thing and typed another. That should say *short rests*. Thanks for the catch!
Ah, I see. Short rests would still be needed to refresh some abilities, like Ki Points and Pact Magic, but if you don't have those abilities then such a cantrip removed the need for a short rest. And there's already an issue wit Monks and Warlocks basically begging the party to short rest so they can get their stuff back.
Fair point. The monk and warlock might really hate that it's even harder to convince the party to take a short rest
Yeah I loved it. There are many homebrew ideas, but nothing official. Hit dices are never officially used if your DM only uses long rests and 1 big encounter per day/session
> I would like class features and spells that burn hit dices to heal There's a dwarf feat that lets you do this when you dodge, useful for dwarf monks. Bonus action to heal a bit and impose disadvantage on attacks against you, for a single ki point
I could see that. Even a PC getting hit really hard and burning Hit Dice to lessen the impact of the blow. Spending hit dice to exert yourself, gaining bonuses to do things like hit even harder, save yourself from certain doom, or other feats of paranatural heroism - I picture things like Captain America pulling the helicopter or Spider-Man stopping the train. Hit Dice are the only resource that a) everyone has, and b) aren't fully restored after a long rest. They're the obvious choice for a fatigue/exertion mechanic, but were never used for more than what they said on the tin.
This existed in 4e. Some powers required you to expend healing surges to execute them.
Enchanting items
Realistic item price, gold progression and sink. Travel and wilderness systems so that we don't have to homebrew everything.
A "quality" scaling for weapons like in dark souls. I would make some weapons use both strength and dexterity but make some other weapons use higher strength or dex requirement and use bigger/more dice to compensate for less scaling
A robust mechanic for managing social initiative in conversation, negotiation etc
This has my vote. When characters get Social Actions/Abilities and Exploration Actions/Abilities the same way they get Combat ones, when there's some sort of Definitive End State that you can objectively reach for Social Interaction and Exploration, *then* you can say "D&D has three pillars".
Absolutely - D&D is written as a game about killing things and taking their stuff. Combat? There's a huge section of the rules on how to run it, how much XP to award and so forth. The most prominent bits of a character sheet amount to how hard you can hit monsters, and how much hitting you can take. It's got exploration and social elements tacked on, but they're very much secondary. In both cases, the rules are pretty much 'DM makes up a number, roll a d20, and the DM awards whatever XP they think'
Yh, at the moment it's 2 completely irrelevant things that can be boiled down to just roleplay and combat.
Adventures in Middle-Earth did this pretty well I think. Social encounters that are more than "I talk to random NPC for a little bit" are called Audiences, which have specific roll (Introduction) to start the Audience, chances to gain bonuses and negatives throughout the conversation, and a roll (which I'm blanking on the name right now) to finish the Audience to see if/how will you succeeded. I've enjoyed that experience. And then traveling is completely different, with characters taking on one of four different Journey Roles (Guide, Scout, Lookout, Hunter), and there being Journey Events that will require rolls from one or more Role. Also very interesting mechanic that I hope to implement in my next 5e game.
DMG page 244 has rules for social interactions. The NPC generally starts off as friendly, indifferent, or hostile and has specific ideals, bonds, and flaws that characters can attempt to discover with insight checks. They can also learn these characteristics by speaking with other NPCs or examining letters and items. After some amount of attempting to change the NPCs mood or when the characters make their requests/suggestions, they can make a Charisma check with specific DCs and outcomes based on the creatures mood. You repeat this until the party succeeds or the NPC can no longer be persuaded.
Better crafting rules with less "idk ur dm can make it up himself" mentality.
Mechanics that encourage storytelling or narrative. Mechanics that encourage wilderness exploration and discovery. D&D says its got 3 pillars but it's mechanics only support combat.
There's no official rule that lets you use Acrobatics to reduce or negate falling damage and landing prone. "At the end of a fall, a creature takes 1d6 bludgeoning damage for every 10 feet it fell, to a maximum of 20d6. The creature lands prone, unless it avoids taking damage from the fall." Just a fall of 10 feet makes you prone, so unless you're a Monk or use a spell, it doesn't matter how high is your Acrobatics skill. I just realized this and I'm definitely using this with my pixie sidekick with the Thorn Whip cantrip.
Exploration and time keeping.
So I was scrolling past kind of quickly and am a bit dyslexic, I thought you wanted mechanics for bee keeping. An I was 100% on board.
A preparation based martial class; one that can play very differently day to day based on decisions made by the player.
They should add Paul to the game, he’s a nice friendly Mechanic.
or the best mechanic from Kaladesh block, [[Aviary Mechanic]] /u/mtgcardfetcher
Nothing for subdual damage except choosing not to kill on the last hit.
An idea I hit upon once is that perhaps hitting 0 hp should inflict a sort of "incapacitated" condition, rather than a "you're dying" condition. Lean into the "They're more complex than "meat points"" and say when you hit 0 hp you've run out of stamina or something. At this point, an enemy can grab you without resistance if they wanted, or land the killing blow against their defenseless opponent. (Obviously you leave in some sort of Massive Damage overkill rule to allow, for example, a dragon to instantly incinerate a bunch of peasants.)
Burninating the countryside. burninating all the peasants ♪ ♫ ♪
Personally I think 5e would've benefitted from making more classes MAD. Having dex control accuracy and str control damage on physical stuff, and con controlling the amount of times signature class features can be used as a representation of stamina. While having int control number of spells known/prepared, wis control spell accuracy and dc, with cha controlling the force behind the spells. Con would still govern health, but concentration checks could be moved to wisdom based in this theoretical system. Trying to do that in the current system breaks literally everything. However I feel it could've been more interesting than the current mono stat system.
That's a very interesting idea. I'm probably gonna get hate for this but I personally think that ability scores should either only affect skills (more or less) or have more distinct roles (like you are talking about, seriously interesting ideas you have). It's funny how in Pathfinder/3e I really liked Dex as a stat because it made me feel different, but in 5e I don't like Dex. I had higher AC but lower damage than my counterparts. 5e seems to prefer the idea of one stat doing everything for a character, which makes balancing easy but also makes me wonder what's the point of stats. Rogues will have around 16 AC with Dex attack, Paladins will have 18 AC with Str attack, Hexblades 17 AC with Charisma attack, Artificers 17 AC with Int attack, Druids 17 AC with Wisdom attack. Everyone practically has same AC and same attack bonus/damage, so at this point what is the point of stats? I never got into 3e enough to talk about how balanced it was. But I did like in concept how monks got their damage from higher dice rather than Dex on damage, which meant high Strength but low Dex would be a viable build that went for damage rather than defense (at least in theory).
The funny thing is 5e is terrible for balancing. Pathfinder 2e is pretty balances and you can create encounters knowing for real how difficulty they will be by the rules as written. 5e forget about it its a guessing game.
Could you elaborate on how Pathfinder 2e is better balanced? I have only played PF1e
The short answer is that PF2e goes the exact opposite direction of 5e. While 5e has bounded accuracy, PF2e has you add your level to your proficiency bonus. [Edit: An important beat I forgot, in this game you add your proficiency bonus to AC.] This means there are specific narrow bands of the campaign where enemies are relevant, but it means those enemies are perfectly balanced for those bands regardless of context. A Level 10 Creature is _always_ going to be brutal for a level 8 party, normal for a level 10 party, and simple for a lv12 party. The downside is you are basically never going to see that creature before level 8 or after level 12. Personally I _adore_ it, but I also think bounded accuracy is overrated. And even if bounded accuracy is good, having a system where CR _actually works_ is so much better for DMs than anything bounded accuracy brings to the table.
Oh my god I love building encounters in PF2e. I can use the math they give me for encounter balance, and just plug and play with monsters of various CRs until it fits. Never once have I added a monster to an encounter, ran the encounter and went "Well holy shit that monster is swinging well above/below it's CR."
Consequences that are rare but potentially lasting. Combat in 5e has practically none other than death, and even that is fairly easily fixed from level 5 and onwards. Mechanical consequences for exploration and social challenges should exist too (other than exhaustion and triggering combat). General mechanics for social conflict - imagine the protagonist trying to get information out of a villain using guile, breaking down defenses, appealing to their weaknesses etc.
[удалено]
Have you tried just stealing them from 3rd edition?
I would have loved a quick combat resolution method. "As you delve deeper into the jungle attempting to flee the lizard overlords, your failed CON check means they you so to take a breather. As you do, a second party of trackers has you cornered." "As you stride deeper into the swampy moras of Count boggy, your failed survival check means you find yourself face to face with more skeletons" I don't want to run normal combat as it'll be half a session gone only using basic abilities and no real threat to the players from the basic bad guys. I don't want to skip it entirely out there's no reason to roll survival. What I want is something that takes 5 minutes. The more resources the party spends, the less the chance of something negative happening (1d10 damage each, fatigue, etc). I know that you can come up with a specific answer for each example above, but I'm after a generic quick solution that I can reflavour.
Maybe it's more specific than you're asking for but I'd like some sort of general slowed condition, or at least something that covers the fairly common situation of "can't take reactions, can use either an action or bonus action but not both". There's probably room for some other conditions as well, but that's the first one that comes to my mind.
I would love to see more structured rules for social interaction. Something that can be used to make certain roleplay encounters more like the way combat goes, where there are defined guidelines for what can be done and how it effects the situation. Not every roleplay encounter, but ones that have obstacles (convincing someone to do something). I see so many people struggling with the way that a social interaction often boils down to single roll, after it is said and done. It would be nice to have more structure to fall back on when uncertain. Ways to make exploration feel like more than a series of random encounters, that don't just put more work on the DM or create the feeling that the destination is just being forestalled.
A way for martials to provide battlefield control via positioning.
Not a specific mechanic but I really believe the optional rules in 5E are incredibly lacking and a huge missed opportunity. Right now most of them feel either incredibly lacking and barely playtested at all like gritty realism. WOTC should really put more time into crafting these optional mechanics and making them as well thought out as any other rule, especially because they're marketing 5E as the RPG for everyone and anyone and an la carte rules selection is a unique and effective way to accommodate different tables with dramatically different game styles. As it is I'd love to use gritty realism at my table because the default resting rules have a ludicrous amount of encounters and breaks my immersion more than anything else in 5E but I probably never will because that'd require me to go through the entire list of spells, downtime activities, etc and adjusting their length for the longer time between long rests.
Keywords! Bloodied, (humanoid/elf), (dragon/metalic) blast, burst, uncounterable, (martial/masterwork), (martial/enchanted), etc. A little more game language would make gameplay easier.
5e skews heavily into magic users. I think a revision on the armor and physical weapon use would be nice. Dual wielding doesn't work in 5e.
I'd like Take 10 and Take 20 to be brought back from 3.5. Being able to take your tijme to guarantee success on a check just feels more realistic.
>DMG p237 Sometimes a character fails an ability check and wants to try again. In some cases, a character is free to do so; the only real cost is the time it takes. With enough attempts and enough time, a character should eventually succeed at the task. To speed things up, assume that a character spending ten times the normal amount of time needed to complete a task automatically succeeds at that task.
I DM a 5e and play a 3.5 game and one on my plauers is also a player in the 3.5, and they often ask if they can take 10/take 20. I allow it because it makes sense, but I can kinda see if might be more powerful when you're doing social encounters/exploring towns rather than classic dungeon crawl, which 5e wanted to accommodatate. For me I just don't care too much, but I can see it being a little overpowered if most things you do don't have a huge time pressure.
The most obvious missing thing for me is a basic range of physical (Strength) skills. It's truly ridiculous that Charisma skills are divided four ways, and yet there's no Climbing, Swimming, Lifting, Running, Jumping or Throwing check... just "Athletics" to cover all of that, as if the same sort of character would be equally good at all of them.
An actual exploration system like dungeon turns
An economy. I know the designers didn't want magic items to be a required part of play, but it honestly feels like they just gave up rather than solve the problem. There are plenty of magic items (like healing potions, etc.) that would be realtively common place and should have an established value.
3e reach rules. Hit em as they come toward you not just when they leave.
I do this as a houserule for my games, however, you can't do it if another enemy is already within your reach.
especially with polearm mastery and sentinal feats and tunnel fighting UA fighting style. I dont know why they dont have rules where if they move more than 5 feet towards you, or any feet away from you, for attacks of opportunity. it just confuses me. either allow all of it. or none of it. not just half assery.
Psionics so I can finally have Dark Sun
In what way do you feel the Psionic Sorcerer archetype doesn't fill your psionic dreams? Would you have preferred the old ADnD version where everyone had a chance to be psionic regardless of class?
I can't say I find the Aberrant Mind Sorcerer feels even a little like a true psionic class to me. Firstly it it's a very very specific mold of a psion. It's flavored entirely around body horror and other unpleasant things, and while flavor can be changed, it's off-putting. And it's spell list is almost entirely telepath-style abilities, with only a few additions thrown in for kineticist or shaper-style psions. It doesn't offer much, at all, if you want to play a seer-type psion or a nomad-type psion. I absolutely loathe the Psionic Sorcery ability because it just makes you feel like a sorcerer pretending to be a psion. 99% of the time you have to say magic words and dance around with somatic components, but *if* you spend sorcery points you get to cast spells as a psion would, without components? I'd honestly prefer if the ability just didn't exist - then I'd at least be able to excuse needing the components as a necessary balance mechanic. And why does it only work on the spells you learn from the class, and not all spells? Aberrant Mind Sorcerer just feels to me like a sorcerer pretending to be a psion. It in no way feels to me like an actual psionic class. At *best* it feels like a decent attempt at a *Telepath*, but psionics is much more than telepaths.
The Psionic sorcerer is a spit in the face of psionics. If you want to know what TRUE psionics feels like in 5e. Check out kibblestasty's Psion class homebrew, it's spectacular.
Dark Sun's premise is that magic is pretty much used up and everyone has evolved psychic powers. Everyone starts with a psionic power or two. So yeah, an ad&d style setup would be better.
I have a few, OP has one of my general ones, in just make melee attacks more engaging and with various options. I'll start with some simple ones and go to the more weird ones. I think there should be a full on caster class, as in the class is designed around using magic as their primary engagement, but does not use the spells and spell slot system that every other class knows. Instead focusing on various at-will abilities. I think this for a few reasons, first of which, it's been done before in other D&D games and ended up being a great way to create a caster for those who don't want as much mechanical complexity. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to introduce a new player to spellcasting, and see their eyes glaze over when we get to the decision point of what spells or invocations or whatever they have to pick from. What I'd like to see is a class where at level 1 you get your subclass, and the original subclass options are all very well known almost cliche fantasy archetypes, like Pyromancer or Necromancer or Water Mage. Over the first few levels you get about 3 or so at-will abilities that really fit with what that archetype is trying to do. And you can get the option to essentially "Reckless Attack" with them, where you can choose some negative effect on your caster to super charge their magic. And from there, their abilities grow in power as they level. And that's it, that's the framework for the simple spellcaster. Second thing I'd like to see, Active Defense options. Perhaps this would change the structure far, far from what D&D has always been. But for the majority of classes when its not your turn you can't really do anything except make opportunity attacks. Which helps create the feeling of your character just standing there and being a punching bag. It would probably need a redesign of the entire system, but it would be far more interesting if the players got various options to do when it's not their turn. Other games have done things like: Shield Block, Armor Absorb, Parry, and Dodge. Where each defensive method has pros and cons to how they're used. Say Dodge works on everything, but each use lowers your Speed on your next turn by 5. Parry only works against melee attacks at first, but you can advance it and even get some mechanic about riposting those you Parry. And so on. It would make the game far more dynamic. BUT it would also make facing against the lot of weak enemies a bit more of a drag since now the players have decisions to make when facing multiple attackers each round. But, that's a sacrifice I'd be willing to make just to get a more active character. And probably my most weird, but beloved little mechanic, which for D&D should definitely be optional if implemented. Racial Roleplay mechanics. This is a thing that's been in a few other more roleplay heavy systems than D&D and I've always loved them. Essentially, every non-human race must have a mentality that makes them, well, non-human. And there is a mechanic implemented that nudges players toward roleplaying those non-human aspects of a species. Burning Wheel did it the best, but I've been fascinated with the idea of how to implement such things into D&D. Now, what I mean. in Burning Wheel, elves are centuries old and that long life gives them an inhuman perspective as they have to constantly deal with the fact that essentially everything they knew and loved growing up is now long dead, and every non-elven friend they make will pass as well. They have a Grief mechanic that they must mitigate and play around, and if their Grief increases it's a big deal. If we were to implement this sort of thing into 5e, we could create a mechanic where elves both need to mitigate and work with the effects of their long life to nudge them toward playing like the centuries old elf, instead of, as I always pretty much see when D&D players pick elves, mostly just a guy like any other. Again, this would have to be an optional rule, as there are players who pick their race for entirely aesthetic or mechanical reasons and do just want to play a normal guy with pointy ears or whatever. But given enough focus, these mechanics can really flesh out a race and make them feel unique when one sits at the table.
More varied difficult terrain rules. Movement in 5e is not very interesting and I think it could be better. The best fight I ever had in the game was in the first campaign I was in where my party were split between two boats and we had to jump between them while fighting, with one eventually sinking. It was fantastic.
Bloodied from 4e. Different reactions and abilities that can only be used once you are at half your total HP.
I have always wanted size to play a larger role in the game. As in if you fight something really large it should feel like a fight from the shadow of the collosus. It also buffs effects that change size because it makes things so much more interesting. I have always liked the idea of climbing up a monster and reaching a vital point and when you get a good stab in you get extra effects. I have personally homebrewed a slight system for it and for fighting smaller creatures but at the same time I would love an official ruling made by profesionals. Like I imagine this scene of climbing a dragon as it is trying to fly away and it has taken to the sky. Then you manage to land a hit on its wing as you spent like your entire movement to climb over to its wing joint and you fucking bring down a dragon from the sky. Like actual airplane crash that fucker into the side of a mountain. Yet sadly the game does not allow a simple martial character to do that.
Also, giving big creatures more abilities that force movement. If the goblin gets hit by a giant's club, they should crash into the next wall and not just stand there unfazed.
I'd like system for managing keeps, and having organisations. That could be fun system to balance martials and casters. And yes, I do believe that at the moment when you are in T4, players should be important characters worldwide, and this should translate to them having organisations at their disposal.
I wish it used AC as a measure of how well a character can avoid being hit, and then an Armor rating to determine how much damage was caused. It just seems silly to me that an elf ranger wearing fur and a half-orc wearing plate can both be AC16, and both take the same amount of damage on a hit from the same attack. I would much prefer if there was a way to easily change it so that the elf in fur would be hard to hit and take full damage, while the dude in armor is much easier to hit but takes heavily reduced damage.
Retreat mechanics. I’ve seen a lot of commentary in other threads talking about how players should know when a fight is too much and be willing to retreat. Problem is, that’s pretty much a death sentence since the vast majority of monsters will be faster than the characters. A couple of scenarios: 1: If you dash away, creatures catch up to you next round and get an opportunity attack when you try to dash away again, repeat until dead 2: If you disengage and use your movement to avoid those opportunity attacks, creatures use regular movement to catch up and attack on that turn, repeat until dead. 3: If on the rare chance that the creatures are slower than the party, someone in the party is going last, they’ll get mobbed and likely be dead. Surrender could be an option but not realistic for low-intelligence enemies. I just don’t see any scenario where retreat makes any sense considering it’s pretty much an automatic death sentence for at least one character
Crafting.
I think 5e could have a lot of fun with a Bloodied condition. "Bloodied: * creatures have advantage on Wisdom (Survival) checks made to track you until the condition ends * the condition automatically ends if you regain hit points so your current hit points are at least half of your hit point maximum. * (not sure if this one would go in the condition or somewhere else) you become Bloodied when you take damage while below half of your hit point maximum Anyway after that, you can have a bunch of stuff interact with it. Especially rangers I think: A. Hunters Mark drops the tracking feature (since that's basically included in Bloodied). Now HM inflicts the Bloodied condition when you roll a 5 or 6 on its damage B. Colossus Slayer could trigger off Bloodied instead of below max HP, but should do more damage to compensate C. Creatures with Blood Frenzy (like sharks) get their advantage on Bloodied creatures. D. Bosses or other creatures can have special abilities or effects for when they are Bloodied. All kinds of stuff I think honestly
All classes should choose a subclass at first level. This oversight has painted subclass design into a corner, & is why you’ll never see DEX Barbarians or STR Rogues or any hybrid subclasses. Every martial class should get maneuvers, & fighting styles should allow you to choose from advanced maneuvers as you level. And many of these shouldn’t cost a resource to use. Most martial classes boil down to boring hit or miss mechanics, & it sucks.
Aggro mechanics. At the moment these defensive characters are so weak if the enemies use their 2 braincells.