D&D5 chatty thread

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Brock Savage said:
One important thing to note is that Long Rests only restore 1/2 of a character's Hit Dice. This can make adventuring day after day dangerous since Hit Dice should be the primary means of hit point recovery. My players didn't realize that and it bit them in the ass during an expedition.
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That Hit Die Restoration Rate actually is a Primary Pacing Mechanism, as Estar/RobertConley pointed out years ago on another forum. :thumbsup: Want to make things easier? Increase Long Rest Hit Dice Recovery Rate (3/4 HD pool, Full HD pool). Want things harder, or tax more resources? Decrease Long Rest Hit Dice Recovery Rate (1/4 HD pool, 1 HD/LR). When Long Rest Full HP Restore is removed that Hit Dice Pool as HP Resource finally comes into the strategic forefront.

And players banking spell slots throughout the adventure day to mitigate healing rates is a good thing. Means they are pro-actively managing resources themselves, leaving the GM free to sprinkle more wonder onto the world. It still taxes their resources and keeps them mentally engaged to save an ace up one's sleeve before bed. :smile:
 
Negative conditions such as poison and disease should be fairly common tier 1 dungeon hazards that eat up party resources. For example, crappy CR 1/8 diseased giant rats and CR 1/4 giant centipedes punch above way their weight and force clerics into a difficult decision regarding their valuable level 2 spell slots. Like, if I was on player side I would fear those creatures and they have crap for treasure too so just avoid them. Restorative potions are an option if you allow it but at the very least they cost a lot of gold which is yet another factor in the resource management game.
 
There's also exhaustion to throw a spanner in the works. I'm still somewhat undecided about the best way to use it, and feel it may need some tweaking but there's a lot of potential there.

It's really hard to get rid of. It takes a long rest just to remove one level, so 2 or 3 is going to knock you out for a while and magic doesn't do anything until you get level 5 spells. It can be a good way of representing a whole lot of things such as wounds, the effect of poison etc.
 
Mankcam said:
Yep its all about the pacing of Short Rests and Long Rests.

Going by the RAW the game play experience evokes a highly cinematic pulp fantasy flavour, with the higher level characters bordering on low-tiered Super Powers. It's not like 4E, but it's still pretty rocking with higher level characters. Which is pretty cool if that is what you are after.

Not sure that hits the spot for me however, so I knew tweaking the Rests would be pivotal to everything else.

If you slow the pacing down with Rests, even the higher leveled characters need to prioritise when to enact their Feats, and also need to be wary of slower Hit Point recovery

Even high leveled magic-users need to prioritise their magic use, due to slower recovery, and tend to use Cantrips much more for everyday castings.

I tried running D&D 5E with Short Rests being more-or-less overnight (in game time), and Long Rests being a game time week.

That worked pretty well to portray a more low-fantasy level approach, which suits how I like it.

The player-characters tend to be more reserved about combat, and often seek non-combative means to solve challenges, as they know HP recovery is quite conservative (and they really value anything that assists this, such as environment or magical healing).

However I'm not sure how this would go with any of the published D&D 5E campaigns, it would depend which one (Obviously a dungeon crawl like Waterdeep Dungeon Of The Mad Mage may easily end up being a TPK, so that would not be a great fit).

Anyway, it's amazing how pacing the Rests can really change the flavour of things in D&D.
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Pretty much.

I don't understand how wilderness travel and exploration can actually be a thing if you let long rests work over a night's rest - to the extent that it puzzles me these days why people even try.

I remember playing 4E Dark Sun where the GM upped the challenge level so that we had the weird situation where the supposedly random encounters we had going from A to B were actually the toughest and longest fights of the whole campaign.

And then of course you get into a fight that nearly kills you and then trek three days through the desert to arrive at your destination in as good a condition as you left.

And urban adventures! How do people handle 6-8 combats in a day in an urban setting? Alright, some of them may not be combats - but there can only be so many traps, or buildings on fire, and uses of disguise self and invisibity* as well! Whichever way you skin it, the scale doesn't really make sense.

* and there's a good point there too I think, if you make these kinds of utility spells more precious resources by making resting harder, than you can keep going with low level type adventures for longer into the life of the game.
 
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TJS said:
There's also exhaustion to throw a spanner in the works. I'm still somewhat undecided about the best way to use it, and feel it may need some tweaking but there's a lot of potential there.

It's really hard to get rid of. It takes a long rest just to remove one level, so 2 or 3 is going to knock you out for a while and magic doesn't do anything until you get level 5 spells. It can be a good way of representing a whole lot of things such as wounds, the effect of poison etc.
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Exhaustion is great and honestly the developers should have made more use of it. I use it to simulate all sorts of things, mostly wounds but also things like radiation poisoning. Once a player goes down to 0 hit points they are wounded i.e. they get a level of exhaustion. It eliminates the annoying "down again up again" bounce and I believe it is a common houserule.
 
While we are discussing 5e tips I will say that monsters with advantage will fuck up Tier 1 PCs. Giant rats are no fun. Tribal Warriors are pretty good too, I give 'em proficiency in Stealth and a Thug as a leader. Reskin 'em as ape-men with handaxes & spears and voila..

Intelligent enemies will take advantage of full cover. Casters and sharpshooters have to see their targets. Intelligent enemies will pop out of full cover, shoot or cast their spell, then go back into full cover. Only way to really counter that is to ready an action.

You can pretty much turn anything in the MM undead by applying a template. In fact you really don't need to go thru the hassle of creating a monster from scratch, I have made all kinds of strange creatures through reimagining or tweaking the stat blocks from official material.
 
Has anyone ever tried to tie combat to mental fatigue? Like the more combats you do the more your mental health is affected? More stress, more exhaustion levels, etc.
 
Brock Savage said:
...In fact you really don't need to go thru the hassle of creating a monster from scratch, I have made all kinds of strange creatures through reimagining or tweaking the stat blocks from official material.
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Truth!

I once reskinned an Abholeth as a giant demon tree and changed its powers from water-based to tree root and earth-based. It was amazing.

I also used two giant subterranean lizards as a huge amphisbaena. Epic fight.

You don’t really need other monster manuals, honestly. Just a few clever ideas.
 
Endless Flight said:
Has anyone ever tried to tie combat to mental fatigue? Like the more combats you do the more your mental health is affected? More stress, more exhaustion levels, etc.
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Not in D&D, but I expect you could hack Free League's stress mechanic to represent that, at least the stress part.
 
Endless Flight said:
Has anyone ever tried to tie combat to mental fatigue? Like the more combats you do the more your mental health is affected? More stress, more exhaustion levels, etc.
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Not exactly, but I'm considering trialling a rule where you can get the benefits of a short rest in a few minutes (slap a quick bandage on, slug down some whisky for the pain etc) but you take a level of exhaustion if you do.

You would only get to do this once before per long rest, however.

I've also considered using Exhaustion as negative hit dice - you'd be able to keep healing with no Hit Dice, but for every die you roll you take a level of exhaustion.
 
Now that I'm thinking about it you could tie HD healing to a stress mechanic, which could output as exhaustion, amongst other things. That's a pretty keen idea.
 
I love the potential inside many of 5e sub-systems: Hit Die Pool, Exhaustion, Backgrounds, Archetypes, ASI/Feats, etc. :thumbsup: But altogether it feels like a messy packaged deal, like "Stone Soup" (throw a stone into a boiling cauldron, plus scraps contributed from everyone in the neighborhood, and eat the result).:thumbsdown: Serviceable, but uninspired. :smile: I like to think of it like a creative set of anything -- colors, spices, tools -- useful, but they need a guided hand with a plan.:grin: So keep those creative ideas alive and share them!

Endless Flight said:
Has anyone ever tried to tie combat to mental fatigue? Like the more combats you do the more your mental health is affected? More stress, more exhaustion levels, etc.
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Y'know, in part that can be interpreted as Hit Points, and especially the Fighter's Second Wind. Fighter being used to violence can shake it off with a few rests, whereas most others have to dig into their natural reserves (Hit Dice Pool).

Tagged with Swoon Causes Exhaustion (HP at 0 gives +1 Exhaustion) and you have a very powerful incentive to have Healer feat, Healing magic, and lots of 'Second Wind' Fighters. In fact, if you reskin Healing Magic or Healer Feat Healing Kit Uses as Rationalizations or Psychotherapy you could twist 5e into a Call of Cthulhu modern take where Exhaustion is the Real Wounds and Hit Points is the vacillating Sanity. AND you can keep Death Saves as a rationale for Death by Shock!

Healing Kits are Smelling Salts & First Aid (avoiding death by shock). Healer feat turns Healing Kit into Psychotherapy. Healing Magic becomes faith healing (maybe nod to 4e that it allows a PC to tap their Hit Dice Pool w/o a Short Rest). Temp HP becomes overconfidence. Second Wind becomes professional familiarity with violence (callousness?). And everyone only really has 6 wounds before they are 'dead' dead, meaning no meatball surgery yo-yoing, and topping off HP/Sanity becomes good practice.

For as much as I have problems with WotC design, and 5e, there is quite a bit of fun toys in its LEGO box to tinker with. :dice:
 
One issue I have with the exhaustion rules is that they're a little too severe at the early levels. They do tend to provoke the response of "Oh shit we're exhausted better find somewhere to rest right now" - Rather "than this is getting serious we should probably start thinking about resting soon". This of course does make them good for representing wounds, but a little less so for their intended purpose.

They're also somewhat disconnected from each other and the transitions are a bit abrupt.

I'd be tempted to make them something simpler such as -1 max Hp per character level per level of exhaustion and -1 speed.
 
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TJS TJS I agree that Exhaustion is severe and shouldn't be applied carelessly. When players get level 1 Exhaustion it's like "oh fuck shit's getting serious" and that's usually where it ends in my games. Level 2 is quite punishing and anyone with level 3 should stop adventuring. It's not a condition that a GM can casually inflict upon on a character like poison or disease; Exhaustion is more like a severe consequence for something that went horribly wrong. Starvation, wounds, radiation poisoning that sort of thing.
 
Yes. That's true, but that's fairly limited, and I think you can do more with the basic idea. Plus you could still cover the really bad stuff by occasionally giving out 2 levels of exhaustion.
 
Exhaustion could be more gradual. Effects like:
  • restricting actions and bonus reactions
  • Disadvantage to Initiative rolls
  • Movement penalties
  • Reduced carry weight
  • Minimizing hit die rolls
I also like the idea of Exhaustion degrees as they are in other games, with adjectives:
  • Upset
  • Angry
  • Tired
  • Fearful
  • Sick
  • Hungry and Thirsty
Something like that... and certain tool proficiencies can alleviate them during a Rest (cooking kit for Hunger, musical instrument for Upset, medicine kit or herbalism kit for Sick etc...).

So the point would be to add purpose and theme not just mechanical penalties...
 
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I'm really wanting to run a 5E game in some sort of English Civil War/30 years war but in fantasy world setting. I am tinkering with firearms rules, I'm going to need 10-20 rounds to reload to get the proper feel of exchange of fire (much higher damage than listed) before wading into melee.
 
Nerag said:
I'm really wanting to run a 5E game in some sort of English Civil War/30 years war but in fantasy world setting. I am tinkering with firearms rules, I'm going to need 10-20 rounds to reload to get the proper feel of exchange of fire (much higher damage than listed) before wading into melee.
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I find that firearms in that kind of setting work great if you bake in a few things to make them more desirable than crossbows and bows:

- rifles (muskets) perhaps being considered simple weapons due to their common use in rural environments for hunting (conversely, bows and crossbows being less common)

- the sound of black powder weapons can trigger morale checks in certain circumstances

- some armor may be less effective against them

- they can all be be used as clubs, or have blades attached to muskets to double as spears

- let characters with soldier backgrounds have slightly quicker reloading speeds due to routine muscle memory drilled into them
 
Necrozius said:
I find that firearms in that kind of setting work great if you bake in a few things to make them more desirable than crossbows and bows:

- rifles (muskets) perhaps being considered simple weapons due to their common use in rural environments for hunting (conversely, bows and crossbows being less common)

- the sound of black powder weapons can trigger morale checks in certain circumstances

- some armor may be less effective against them

- they can all be be used as clubs, or have blades attached to muskets to double as spears

- let characters with soldier backgrounds have slightly quicker reloading speeds due to routine muscle memory drilled into them
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Yeah I'm flipping between making a ranged saving throw to just making it a standard attack.
 
Nerag said:
Yeah I'm flipping between making a ranged saving throw to just making it a standard attack.
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That's a pretty badass idea, actually. Cover grants a bonus to saving throws, so this works splendidly.

Has anyone tried this? Did it work well?
 
You could add a fighting style that improves firearms and/or a feat.
 
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Nerag said:
I'm really wanting to run a 5E game in some sort of English Civil War/30 years war but in fantasy world setting. I am tinkering with firearms rules, I'm going to need 10-20 rounds to reload to get the proper feel of exchange of fire (much higher damage than listed) before wading into melee.
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Depending how realistic you want your game to be, an individual firearm wasn't that effective as an actual weapon until the invention of rifling; their main values were that they were easy to train someone on (A few days, compared to the years required for a good bowman), so you could have big enough blocks of them they were bound to hit something, and the noise and smoke had one hell of a terrifying effect. I'd definitely leave them as Martial weapons, to enable a distinction between someone who's just been trained to use one (Who is basically relying on fear and dumb luck) and someone who's had the experience to actually be dangerous with them.
 
So after running a long campaign through default "everything but the kitchen sink" Forgotten Realms fantasy with 5e, I've realized that I don't like it.

I like the core of 5e's system, but I can no longer stand a great deal of the fantasy tropes that the game assumes.

Adventures in Middle Earth taught me that it is indeed wholly possible to tweak the dials of the 5e chassis for something a bit more "low-magic". I intend to proceed in that way going forward.

The default assumptions of 5e, with its many Star Trek alien races, super hero classes and trivialization of magic and magic items are not for me. I actively dislike them. The Druid, Bard and Warlock classes in particular are offensive to my expectations of those concepts.

Luckily, as stated earlier, the 5e chassis is robust and flexible. My next campaign will definitely be saying goodbye to a lot of things and be very distinct from what people expect from the D&D experience.

Hardly any house rules have to be used at all, funny enough. It's all in the DMG (the dials, I mean). For example, I vehemently argue that you don't need to have pew-pew spells in 5e if you change the base assumption about what encounters are, and how XP is earned. I played a Warlock once without a single attack spell (well, not entirely true, I used Thorn whip but only with the DM's permission that it would be mostly used to mess around with positioning and doing cool stunts, not to deal damage). It was an awesome time.

Anyway, that's that. I know already some folks who are more interested in characterization and mood over KEWL POWERS and will be onboard. So there's that!
 
Well, for many years, this is why people jumped ship from D&D (some of us didn't start with D&D in the first place).

However I think that 5E's core mainframe has just the right amount of structure that allows you to dial up and dial down according to setting needs.

(Obviously B/X can do this as well, given the current creative output of the OSR)

Creating your own thing is one of the joys of this hobby. Good luck with your homebrew setting, or adapting a more mature setting for your game :thumbsup:
 
I've been searching the web for articles and theory on crafting a campaign setting with limits on caster classes.

There's a common argument out there that this is a HUGE NO NO. That the game was crafted and balanced around all the casters and high magic saturation.

I think that's a bullshit argument. THere's never been a solid bit of evidence that this is really the case. D&D has always been a toolkit. Always. The game designers said so.

Your fucking game won't break if you state that your campaign world doesn't have Warlocks and Monks. What the hell?
 
Necrozius Necrozius I am utterly baffled why someone would say that. I get people who prefer D&D with every race, class, archetype and option in play but to say that's the one true way to play is nuts.

Paradoxically, I find that including all options is very limiting. So many interesting ideas are off the table if you have to include everything. Or you gotta awkwardly shoehorn things into the setting like elves and dwarfs were in Primeval Thule.
 
I've seem the attitude expressed at both Enworld and Rpgnet that the GM should allow everything and is in fact being unreasonable if they say no you can't play a Warforged Druid. I've always found it very odd, but it's not uncommon on internet forums.

It's probably an extension of the usual false dichotomy that plagues online discussion. Either everything goes, or the GM is a dictarorial tyrant. No reasonable middle ground allowed.

It often seems to come from people who have their own weird limitations on what they will play - like only Dragonborn, or something like that, and feel personally aggrieved that someone, somewhere might be running a game where their favourite thing is not allowed.

It also, I think, grew out of the "everything is core" philosophy that 4E promoted, despite the efforts of Mearls (to his credit) to expressly put more power back in the GM's hands in 5E.
 
D&D works just fine with limited or even no caster classes. Anyone who says different is selling something. I'm pretty permissive as a DM when playing bog standard D&D, but if I'm running something themed, or more genre, I'll restrict whatever the hell I want to in order to make that work. Anyone who doesn't like like can find another game. Fuck 'em.
 
Of course there are only 4 non caster classes (if we exclude the monk) and three out of those four have subclasses that are casters.

I'm not saying it won't work, but it would seem pretty limited.

I would really like to see something like Iron Heroes for 5e
 
You can run a great game with just fighters and rogues if you want to. Even more so if you dip into multiple books looking for subclasses to expand the range. The mechanics of class and subclass are not what limits character creation anyway.
 
Since it came up in this thread I've been noodling around with a stress mechanic for D&D. Honestly it's kinda messy. However, I did have one idea to bounce off the thread. I quite like the supply die mechanic, as used in some OSR games, along with the encumbrance systems that tend to go with that mechanic. One idea that occurred to me for stress consequences is to reduce a supply die by one, or even several by one. You miscounted, or forgot, or whatever. You need to highlight resource management to make that work, but I like it.
 
Fenris-77 said:
Since it came up in this thread I've been noodling around with a stress mechanic for D&D. Honestly it's kinda messy. However, I did have one idea to bounce off the thread. I quite like the supply die mechanic, as used in some OSR games, along with the encumbrance systems that tend to go with that mechanic. One idea that occurred to me for stress consequences is to reduce a supply die by one, or even several by one. You miscounted, or forgot, or whatever. You need to highlight resource management to make that work, but I like it.
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This guy might have what you are looking for. I have used a few of his hacks like encumbrance and my players like it but have not tried his stress mechanics.
 
Brock Savage said:
This guy might have what you are looking for. I have used a few of his hacks like encumbrance and my players like it but have not tried his stress mechanics.
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Cool, thanks for the linky. From the index he seems to have a lot of the same interests I do as far as hacking 5E goes.
 
I've considered porting the resting mechanics from Numenera in. First short rest takes 10 seconds, second takes 10 minutes, third takes 1 hour, 4th time you rest you have to do a long rest.

It would benefit short rest characters greatly in games where you end up with 1 or 2 fights in a game, as it would let you short rest as a turn in combat the first time. (it does step on the second wind mechanic from fighter but it's still a bonus action so better), and it makes pacing your day more important as the farther and farther you go, the longer you have to rest until you can get a real night's sleep.
 
I like that quite a bit, perhaps not exactly as is, but I like the scaling idea lot. You'd need to do something to prevent abuse by short rest classes, but it's a keen idea.

Edit: to tie the rest types together, perhaps after the second SR the eventual LR will need to be longer than normal? IDK, just spitballing.
 
EmperorNorton said:
I've considered porting the resting mechanics from Numenera in. First short rest takes 10 seconds, second takes 10 minutes, third takes 1 hour, 4th time you rest you have to do a long rest.

It would benefit short rest characters greatly in games where you end up with 1 or 2 fights in a game, as it would let you short rest as a turn in combat the first time. (it does step on the second wind mechanic from fighter but it's still a bonus action so better), and it makes pacing your day more important as the farther and farther you go, the longer you have to rest until you can get a real night's sleep.
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I'd considered that too, but I figured that while that feels more realistic, it also goes against the way games often run. It's often easier to take longer rests earlier on, while it's more likely you're going to want to take the shorter rest later on the day, to push on to a final battle.

So then I flirted with having the different lengths but letting the players choose the order, but I decided that was just overcomplicating things.

In the end I decdied that it's probably easier to just give the players one short rest a day that takes a trivial amount of time (say 5-10 minutes) and they insert it when they need.
 
It easier but its fucking short rest classes. You need 2 SRs however that works, just to keep class balance. I mostly just handwave the time for the SRs and move on.
 
Yes. If I was running dungeon crawls I would just say you get 2 short rests a day. They take a trivial amount of non combat time but you only get 2 and then you're done.
 
I've long sense made short rests way shorter even without using that concept. Like 10 minutes. It's just easier to handle in play.

Also if you wanted it to be more flexible in when you take your short rest, just add an ability of "Take a short rest as a single action, this ability refreshes on a long rest" to all characters.
 
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