5th Edition Is A Mess

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5th Edition Is A Mess

Post by Username17 »

So I am actually in a game of 5th edition D&D. Because I've been in a Scottish border town working with cancer patients and I will take my escapism where I can get it. Anyway, 5th edition is basically a mess and I decided I should talk about it a bit.

What Are My Options?

The layout of the 5th edition PHB is a war crime. For setting reasons I decided to play a Dwarf Druid. Being a Druid tells you to select 2 skills off a list. Forty pages later you get two skills chosen for you by selecting a background, which then means that you have to go back and reselect your class skills because there is inevitably going to be some overlap.

But it's not just that information is presented out of order in the book (although it really is), it's also that it asks you to make a lot of choices that don't make any difference now but may come to reward or punish you later. So as a Druid you get to select your home terrain at level one in your character background and what that actually does is determine what bonus spells you get at level three. And if you're still playing at 11th level or whatever, it also locks you into a bonus spell progression the entire time. So like with 3rd edition Clerics being asked to choose domains based on bonus spells they'll get at every level but only starting with the bonus spells for first level, except you don't even get any bonus spells at first level. You're just being asked to make choices that are completely without consequence at the time but may come to punish you later, and it is a lot of reading to figure out which choices are good. Not something that you are likely to be able to do while borrowing a book at a game.

What Can I Do?

Remember how I said my character had skills? I genuinely don't know what they do. No one else knows what they do either. The skill descriptions are like one or two sentences and absolutely don't tell you when you can roll them or what the DCs for doing anything with them might be. I took the "Medicine" skill because I figured that I would be asked to do healing duty and Druids really don't get that many spells. But um... there is actually nothing I can find that indicates that the Medicine skill helps with injuries in any way. The only things mentioned in the skill description are diagnosing illnesses (which in a world of binary healing spells and curse removal is comepletely useless) and stabilizing dying characters (which can be done much better with a healing spell that also gets them up the following turn). So the skill seemingly does nothing?

With nothing to actually engage with proactively, character actions are pretty much left to engaging the "thumbs" ability. Your character can do sort of physical stuff that they could plausibly do because they have opposable thumbs. And when it comes to do a thing, mostly the DM just sort of makes something up. "Roll Athletics" or "Roll Persuasion" the DM might say. And the thing is... it doesn't usually matter much what the DM calls for because the RNG is incredibly swingy. A person who "has" a skill gets a total of +2 for that choice, and being a specialist in that stat with a decent roll gives you +4 for a total modifier of +6 on a d20. On the flip side, if you have a dump stat and didn't invest in the skill at all, you still roll at -1. Now a d20 + 6 rolls higher than a d20 - 1 309/400 rolls. That means that almost one time in four the specialist isn't doing better than the character who is supposed to be bad at the task.

And you really see this in play. With four players at the table, a character being "good" or "bad" at a task on their character sheet has very little predictive power about what they are going to achieve on any particular roll. When it comes to scouting or climbing or something where everyone rolls, the star or the biggest loser might as well be assigned by drawn straws. Indeed, almost 35% of the time when four players roll the die, one or more of them is coming up with a natural one or natural twenty. Critical success or failure is happening on more than one roll in three and on-sheet character competence is lost in stastical noise. My character is "the stealthy guy" because I keep rolling high on those rolls, but really I just have a Dex of 14 and no Stealth proficiency. There's no particular reason why I wouldn't revert to the mean and start getting medium or even the lowest stealth checks in the party moving forward.

How does that work?

Finding rules in 5th edition is, as mentioned earlier, very difficult. We set a dude on fire and several people ran through the indices and flipped through the PHB and the DMG and we simply could not find the rules for being on fire. We eventually just used the 3rd edition rules of taking 1d6 per round because at least we could find and remember those.

The spells meanwhile are about the lowest information density of any edition of the game. There's a fair amount of text in each one, but figuring out what they actually do is kind of a chore. There's no standard template or anything, so figuring out what you have to roll (or if you have to roll) is pretty diffuclt and the actual effects of any spell are not described in any particular detail.

---

TL;DR: 5th edition D&D is like if someone transcribed someone talking about D&D for 300 pages rather than actually an edition of D&D that someone had written for a purpose.

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Post by Username17 »

So I gotta talk about the giant morass of word salad that is Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws. During character generation, you are expected to choose a series of roleplaying prompts from a number of lists. These lists are subdivided by character background, and some of those sublists are further subdivided into alignments. So the actual presented ideals for your character might literally just be to choose from two that you are presented with. There's nothing stopping you from choosing ones from elsewhere in the book or writing in your own, but those are on different lists on different pages and in addition to being hard to find a lot of them are surprisingly specific.

Basically what we have here is the old Vampire Nature and Demeanor thing, where you get some roleplaying prompts and are expected to get a modest advantage when other people notice you playing them up. Not a bad idea, but Nature and Demeanor is fucking 25 years old at this point, and this implementation is worse in a bunch of key ways.

The first and most obvious way it's worse is the lack of key wording. If you were to be playing a "Dreamer" or a "Conformist" or whatever in Vampire, you could say a word, and people with knowledge of that part of the system would be able to know what it meant. Fuck, even just people familiar with your character could be reminded of a key fact about your character with a simple interjection. And that means that discussing this shit, and most importantly discussing whether or not these bonuses are supposed to trigger takes a reasonable amount of time. Conversely, the 5e version are full sentences with dependent clauses. My character no-shit has the flaw "I let my need to win arguments overshadow friendships and harmony." which is kind of thing that Vampire would have gotten over and done with by using a one-word nature like "Competitor" and then discussing whether it should trigger or not in a certain scenario would be easy instead of hard. Since the most common thing about these fucking things is that you might want to gently remind the DM that one is relevant about you in the current circumstance, having a short hand method to refer to them is really useful and it just fucking doesn't make sense to go backwards like this.

The next issue is the seeming lack of any kind of master list. The book feeds you a few snippets you might want, but if you don't then it's pretty hard to track that shit down. As previously mentioned there isn't any keywording, so there's no way to quickly sift through this shit, but also it's dolloped in drips and drabs around the book. To get that argumentative thing, I ended up having to grab one off the Hermit list even though I am not a Hermit, because none of the ones in my actual background seemed like they applied.

The even nexter issue is the total lack of attempt to make any of these things be in any way general in application. Each of these sentences is intended to apply to a rather specific character rather than be something that might apply to lots of different characters in potentially interesting ways. That hits in two ways, the most blatant of which is the thing where the ideals are divided up by alignment in addition to background, which gives us the "option" to select "I'm a predator, and the other ships on the sea are my prey." So obviously, you're basically never going to take that, because it's a bizarre evil pirate thingy that is going to apply to pretty much zero starting D&D characters. But it's way beyond even that, because these things are written based on a pretty narrow interpretation of each background and often just don't fucking apply. I chose "Folk Hero" (which is the "Ranger Background" because getting more Ranger goods is pretty similar to getting more Druid goods), and one of the first choices you're supposed to make is what your heroic deed is supposed to be. I chose the natural disaster one, and then the further selections are all based on the assumption that I chose the fighting a local tyrant one. But I didn't, so much of the pre-selected list is fucking gibberish.

And of course there's the problem that it's wildly inconsistent in tone. We get grade B melodrama and straight up comic relief in pretty close proximity. It's the Kender problem all over again, where it's entirely possible to come out of character generation with a totally serious character and equally possible to end up as a character who is "easily distracted by the promise of information." or some fucking thing.

But the biggest problem is that Dungeons & Dragons doesn't really have an easy time slotting in prompts like this. In Vampire, you had Willpower refresh, and you get something similar with Fate points or whatever, but all most editions of D&D have to throw around are XP boosts, and those don't work out well. Now, 5th edition D&D gives you Inspiration that you can refresh, but it also only gives you one point of it - which means that it doesn't act like a pool and spends most of the game being something you couldn't recharge even if you wanted to.

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Post by virgil »

I can tell you from my time searching through the DMG, they have NO rules for skills. The section for skills is a qualitative list of stuff like "DC 20 is for hard tasks" - while at no point does it even hint at what might be considered a hard task.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Do you let the folks you're DnDing with know this, or do you make a bluff check and carry on
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Post by Voss »

Heh.

There are a shitload of problems (especially with reference), but character creation is complicated by having the example of character creation in the wrong fucking order. I have no idea why they suggest 1. race, 2. class, 3. stats, 4. background, equipment. Especially with the stat dependency they have, but personally I'd leave equipment as last, and work backwards from 4.

For your specific problems, i have a few things to make them worse.

Buy a healing kit: it makes medicine checks to stabilize completely unnecessary. And unlike many things, it isn't a tool.

As a druid, you already have the 'master healer' ability (such as it is). Herbalism kit proficiency (you'll still need to buy one) lets you make potions of healing. The rules for making shit are presumably somewhere.

Backgrounds and skills: this actually makes selecting class and then background somewhat functional, but it feels like an exploit. Hiding on page 125, under the proficiencies section of backgrounds, if you would gain the same proficiency from two different sources, you can choose a different proficiency of the same kind (skill or tool) instead.

So it's totally how you pick up perception* and lockpicks regardless of your class/background combination. But you still need a lot of system mastery to know how to exploit this effectively (where classes and skills overlap), and what is useful. And often 'be an orphan' is honestly just the better choice. But anyway, for druid, choosing the hermit background effectively lets you have the free choice of any skills and any one tool.

*though I suppose this only matters if the DM likes to ambush a lot (though it does have the advantage of being a skill with a functional DC: the other party's hide check... though I have to admit I'm actually just assuming it works that way)
Last edited by Voss on Sat Dec 24, 2016 6:46 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: 5th Edition Is A Mess

Post by czernebog »

FrankTrollman wrote: Finding rules in 5th edition is, as mentioned earlier, very difficult. We set a dude on fire and several people ran through the indices and flipped through the PHB and the DMG and we simply could not find the rules for being on fire. We eventually just used the 3rd edition rules of taking 1d6 per round because at least we could find and remember those.
The enterprising souls behind d20srd.org recently started hosting a catalog of 5e rules. It looks like they are still a work in progress, but if the current site is anything to go by, there are no rules in 5e that mention being "on fire". This can be contrasted with the rules in 3.5, even if they are hidden under environmental hazards instead of status conditions.

The appropriate phrase for 5e might be "catches fire," and the fire elemental monster entry describes what that means if the fire is caused by its special ability (1d10 fire damage until doused by someone taking an action). Barbed devils can also cause things to catch fire, but no actual mechanical consequence is listed.
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Post by Username17 »

OgreBattle wrote:Do you let the folks you're DnDing with know this, or do you make a bluff check and carry on
Bluff checks. One of the other players tells me stuff about how to min/max in 5th edition and I try to look interested.

Apparently the real route to ultimate power at low levels is to take the Circle of the Moon. This gives you access to a higher CR cap on creatures to wildshape into, and since the CR system in 5th edition is fundamentally nonsense, you are able to transform into monsters that can pretty much solo the whole party at second level. If the game goes on long enough, this stops being good and I am going to leave town before it would matter so this is obviously what I "should" be doing.

I will not do this because I have no intention of trying to push things like that and also because doing that would require dumpster diving the monster manual and I would rather stab myself repeatedly in the dick.

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Post by DSMatticus »

5e optimization is a boring clusterfuck.

Clerics and druids can invest some of their magic juice in being a fighter and still have magic juice left over to do things other than hit people in the face. This is a thing from level 1 until level 20. If they invest enough magic juice into being a fighter they can even break the RNG, making the fighter entirely obsolete. We've been here before, thanks.

But other than the fact that clerics and druids are still just (better) fighters with magic, the most broken thing you can possibly do is to overwhelm the limits of the action economy, and casters are the only ones who get to write that ability on their character sheet. 90% of the time if you can drop a metaphorical bag of housecats on someone, you win. It doesn't take a lot of animate undead castings to match a fighter's DPS with magic juice left to spare on top of that. There are a lot of summon spells that just let you drop lots of little things on people, at which point they die. That's about as fun as... well... does killing people with a bag of housecats sound particularly fun? Not really.

5e is also full of absurdly steep breakpoints baked into the classes themselves, and if you want to optimize a martial the question is "how many different breakpoints from how many different classes can I hit on a budget of X levels?" The answer to that question is highly dependent on the value of X, and a single level can take you from lowest DPS to highest. The suck now for power later trade-offs are huge, they're just hidden behind a massive wall of complexity the likes of which make AD&D dual-classing seem preferable. Fuck that noise.
Last edited by DSMatticus on Sun Dec 25, 2016 12:09 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

FrankTrollman wrote:
OgreBattle wrote:Do you let the folks you're DnDing with know this, or do you make a bluff check and carry on
I will not do this because I have no intention of trying to push things like that and also because doing that would require dumpster diving the monster manual and I would rather stab myself repeatedly in the dick.

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Do I recall you recently mentioning blood in your urine? If it's not too personal, is it related to experimenting with 5e?
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Post by Voss »

FrankTrollman wrote:
OgreBattle wrote:Do you let the folks you're DnDing with know this, or do you make a bluff check and carry on
Bluff checks. One of the other players tells me stuff about how to min/max in 5th edition and I try to look interested.

Apparently the real route to ultimate power at low levels is to take the Circle of the Moon. This gives you access to a higher CR cap on creatures to wildshape into, and since the CR system in 5th edition is fundamentally nonsense, you are able to transform into monsters that can pretty much solo the whole party at second level. If the game goes on long enough, this stops being good and I am going to leave town before it would matter so this is obviously what I "should" be doing.
The other player is on crack. That higher CR cap is functionally garbage.
Yes, at 2nd level you can change into a CR 1 critter (instead of waiting until level 8, and I'm not even fucking kidding)
At level 6 you can hit CR 2
At 9, CR 3
At 18th fucking level you can do CR 6 shapes.

CR 1 is basically a tiger. Which does have really good hp for a 2nd level character (37), but has an utter shit AC (12), and has... 2 attacks at +5, dealing all of 1d10+3 and d8+3, and a chance to knock people down (DC 13) if you move and attack. The HP is extra good because of the fucking stupid way shapechange works.
[Brown bear is also an option, for better claw damage (2d6+4), but drop 3 hp and a point of AC and the knock down... so yeah, you won't do that]

Now, that isn't terrible at level 2, especially since it's functionally temporary hit points. Now, keep doing it at levels 3, 4 and 5 and it isn't so hot.

At level 6... uh... Polar Bear, I guess.
42 hp, 12 AC and two attacks at +7, for 1d8+5 and 2d6+5. Congrats, four whole levels later, you get 5 more hp, and a minor bump in dpr.

Or Rhino. AC 11, 45 hp, 1 attack +7, 2d8+5, +2d8 extra if you move 20' in a straight line, and DC 15 str or be prone.

Third option is saber-toothed tiger. Again, more hp (52), because, apparently, tigers, but otherwise just a minor damage bump. And still a 12 fucking AC.

At 9th level you can be a giant scorpion, and get 3 attacks... at +4 (and damage per hit also goes down), still have 52 hp, and make it to a heady AC 15. The poison is pretty good (4d10), but all of DC 12.

Seriously Moon wild shape is effective at level 2, and not entirely shit at level 3. After that it is a joke.


And you give up extra spells per day for this (natural recovery), and extra spells known that don't require memorization AND some of which wander off the good shit portion of the wizard list. Invisibility and haste (Grass), web, stinking cloud (underdark), slow (arctic), blur, silence (Desert, the spellcaster assassin, since silence has no save).


This page has the animals of 5e. At CR 7, I think the Giant Ape is the pinnacle of animal options... but you can't ever be one. Elephants come online at level 12. 76 hp, and yes, still AC 12.

http://www.5esrd.com/gamemastering/mons ... onsters-a/

The site purports to be the 5e SRD, but... well. I'm not entirely convinced that is really a thing.
Last edited by Voss on Sun Dec 25, 2016 4:13 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: 5th Edition Is A Mess

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czernebog wrote: The enterprising souls behind d20srd.org recently started hosting a catalog of 5e rules. It looks like they are still a work in progress, but if the current site is anything to go by, there are no rules in 5e that mention being "on fire". This can be contrasted with the rules in 3.5, even if they are hidden under environmental hazards instead of status conditions.

The appropriate phrase for 5e might be "catches fire," and the fire elemental monster entry describes what that means if the fire is caused by its special ability (1d10 fire damage until doused by someone taking an action). Barbed devils can also cause things to catch fire, but no actual mechanical consequence is listed.
Is this common where they reference things that don't exist?

If so, I wonder if most of the devs just remember the 3E rules and use those. If that's the case, do they realize they're freeballing it, or have they remembered the 3E rules for so long that they assumed that the rules got put into the game?

Maybe the whole thing with 5E is everyone sort of assumed someone else was going to flesh it all out, and it never got done. That makes 5E the Kitty Genovese edition of D&D.
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Post by Ice9 »

A number of 5E fans consider it a "feature". Like, apparently having rules for being on fire sucked, because it was so slow to look them up, and it got in the way of DM dick waving intelligent DM adjudication. So the new situation where the DM is just supposed to ass-pull something is a big improvement.

And also, whenever this is brought up, someone will say "Well it's impossible to have rules for every possible thing that could happen, the book would be a foot thick!" Which I don't find terribly convincing for something like "being on fire", which happens a lot in most D&D campaigns, but that will be the argument made anyway.

Oh, and Frank's example would be taken as proof of how 5E is great, because they were able to decide on something and use that, as opposed to ... stopping the game and everyone going home, I guess? Which is 100% of what a game could possibly deliver and expecting anything more is ridiculous. :bored:
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Post by Whipstitch »

That, and a shit ton of rules get mind caulked with declarations of "It is known" even though the the rulings they're talking about is often just shit from 3rd edition that jolly well could have been fucking kept. It's god damned annoying.
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Post by Dogbert »

5E encourages players and DMs to "come up with their own backgrounds." Thus, I refuse on principle to sit at any table that won't let make "Murderhobo: Proficient in Thieves' Tools, Stealth, Perception, (feature depending on class)" as a background for my char.
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Post by Roog »

Dogbert wrote:5E encourages players and DMs to "come up with their own backgrounds." Thus, I refuse on principle to sit at any table that won't let make "Murderhobo: Proficient in Thieves' Tools, Stealth, Perception, (feature depending on class)" as a background for my char.
If I was to GM a 5e game, that would not be acceptable.

You would need to pick an additional tool proficiency or language.
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Post by Username17 »

5th edition is pretty much literally the game where you roll a d20, and you fail amusingly or dangerously on a 1, critically succeed on a 20, regular fail on a 2-6, regular succeed on a 15-19, and argue your case on numbers in between. You know, exactly like an edition of D&D that wasn't written down at all and didn't have character sheets, except that it's a thousand pages long.

Where that changes somewhat is combat. That involves squares and attack and damage rolls and shit. As far as that goes, 5th edition combat seems to be just like 3rd edition combat except shit is a bit less tactical and a bit more vague and unknowable. Like, there aren't any rules for 5' steps and the attacks of opportunity are super vaguely defined.

But honestly the weirdest part is hit points. I don't think any edition of D&D has ever had hit points feel less like people were actually being hit with axes and crossbow bolts. You don't get any hit points back for people bandaging your wounds, but you do get hit points back for eating a sandwich. Damage comes and goes so quickly relative to your hit point totals that you never really get a chance to think of your character as being wounded. They are either unconscious or pretty much fine. And if you end up with some hit point loss at the end of a battle it's a short rest and a jar of pickles to get them back.

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Post by Ghremdal »

5th ed is what you get when you take 3rd and 4th edition, combine the worst parts of both call it a appeal to old school and fail to index anything.

My group was keen on trying it, and the first breakpoint cae when in the second session we found a magic scroll. The game ground to halt for a hour while we tried to determine who can cast the spell from it.

My personal favorite example for how little thought was put into the rules is the potion of elemental resistance where you roll a d10 to determine what resistance it gives WHEN YOU DRINK THE POTION!
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Post by zugschef »

Ghremdal wrote:My personal favorite example for how little thought was put into the rules is the potion of elemental resistance where you roll a d10 to determine what resistance it gives WHEN YOU DRINK THE POTION!
Hilarious :D
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Post by Shrieking Banshee »

Also every monster for the apropriate CR is desighned to do enough damage to knockout a single avarage player PC per round.
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Post by Voss »

Shrieking Banshee wrote:Also every monster for the apropriate CR is desighned to do enough damage to knockout a single avarage player PC per round.
I don't know why you believe this, but no. Many monsters couldn't knock out burnt toast. Others are hyper-overpowered, and neither situation has any connection to their CR.

It helps that AC, HP and attack bonuses and damage aren't tied to CR in any functional way.

When it doubt, murder the party with hobgoblins, who punch way above their 1/2 CR. Hobbos should give players nightmares way into 5-6th level. All they need is a mook to get adjacent to a party member, and then call in the double damage archery.

5e D&D: where shooting into combat is not only not penalized, but it hurts the target more (assuming you have the correct class or race abilities and a ridiculous suspension of disbelief)
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Post by Koumei »

I'm kind of jealous. About the most I can do in regards to "playing as myself" in a game is to play a lesbian with strong beliefs about people doing things to strengthen their society and valuing justice/revenge/retribution/re-balance, maybe having the background thing of "body is gradually falling apart" (though for the character it's a driving thing and not "therefore no point trying").

Frank can straight-up play an argumentative asshole with medical training who actually did disaster relief, and I'm pretty sure that's Frank playing as Frank. The Druid powers at this point are a side-note, that basic description could work as a decent heroic character in their own right.

Edit: oh right, as for actual 5E experience, the point of the thread, I was equally disappointed. I ended up writing up a non-caster for a game (that never went ahead) just to save myself the hassle of reading through spell descriptions when selecting them and then basically having to do so again, at the table, for every casting when it came to "Wait how many does it affect?" or "What is rolled there?" I made a halfling barbarian, which is suboptimal, but not in a way where you really notice it. The difference between that and doing it properly with a weapon-focusing (Correct Race) Fighter or Barbarian was maybe 2 or 3 points of attack bonus on a d20 and I think even less in damage.
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Post by Dogbert »

Another thing to do in 5E: Set "murderhobo" on all ideals, bond, and flaw and pretty much have permanent Inspiration on all checks.
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Post by Voss »

Koumei wrote:" I made a halfling barbarian, which is suboptimal, but not in a way where you really notice it. The difference between that and doing it properly with a weapon-focusing (Correct Race) Fighter or Barbarian was maybe 2 or 3 points of attack bonus on a d20 and I think even less in damage.
Should be 1, in terms of strength (assuming point buy), and the damage bonus would be the same. 5e is pretty lacking in terms of inputs, and stacking bonuses like 1.5 str bonus to two handed weapons don't exist.

On the other hand, halflings are stuck with shittier weapons (short), and barbarian rage damage bonus and reckless attack just don't work with finesse weapons, so they get pretty shit on. Finesse barbarians would be interesting, but you basically lose use of your class features because fuck you. Though you still get the defensive benefits, and just be a wilderness warrior with a high naked AC, a giant pile of HP and inexplicably a rapier and shield.
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Post by Shrieking Banshee »

I guess my party has been having bad luck. The GM just tries to follow CR guidelines and it can always one shot a PC.
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Post by Username17 »

Koumei wrote:Frank can straight-up play an argumentative asshole with medical training who actually did disaster relief, and I'm pretty sure that's Frank playing as Frank. The Druid powers at this point are a side-note, that basic description could work as a decent heroic character in their own right.
The Druid powers are pretty underwhelming. I might genuinely just be more competent than my character despite having rolled good stats. 5e characters are bumblefucks.
Shrieking Banshee wrote:I guess my party has been having bad luck. The GM just tries to follow CR guidelines and it can always one shot a PC.
Well, there's a lot of weird shit like the CR 2 Sea Hag opening up combat by making one character make a Wisdom Save DC 11 (otherwise known as the Fighter flipping a damn coin) or going directly to zero hit points. But in general, the game starts off with a weird rocket launcher tag scenario at first level where PCs ad monsters go down constantly but PCs get back up and monsters stay down - but at higher levels it shifts to Padded Sumo. And pretty rapidly too. The aforementioned CR 2 Sea Hag has to start punching after her initial gaze attack works or doesn't, and her attacks do 2d6+3. The CR 3 Green Hag does 2d8+4 - only 30% more damage. And the CR 5 Night Hag... still does 2d8+4, for 0% more damage.

Most other progressions are similar. The CR 5 Hill Giant does 3d8+5 with a club and the CR 9 Cloud Giant does 3d8+8 with a morningstar. If you can weather the storm of the Hill Giant, the Cloud Giant's attacks are like "lol, what?" four levels later.
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