Trannies caused me to stop getting notifications from this thread for like a month
Any strong opinions on D&D 3.5 vs 5e, just from a rules perspective?
Most people already covered this but I'll toss in anyway.
5e is more balanced but soulless. 3.5 need homebrewed to shit or its caster supremacy and rocket-tag, but its also really flexible. 3.5 also has a ton of side books, and you need to go full Council of Trent to say what's in or out. (When I ran most of my 3.5 it was very simple: Only what's in the SRD is legal, because we didn't have $50 a person for PHBs. Anything else approved on a case-by-case basis)
I'd go 3.5 just on general principal and being more familiar with the system.
At this point, I'm asking if maybe we're actually the bad guys, but what the hell, the money's good.
The party are always the bad guys with the heinous shit they get up to for the entertainment of extra planar beings that control their lives
the players
They just usually, through no fault of their own, end up doing good with all their evil.
Is it possibly to make OSR (specifically old school essentials) less lethal?
Again most of this was covered but:
- Remove nearly every Save-vs-Death check. I replace most with 6d6 spread over 6 rounds for poison. You can adjust the Xd6 or number of rounds for higher/lower level spells/poisons.
- Max player hit dice.
- Add more Hirelings. Keep it lethal but just deepen the bench. I give players session tokens for good things and one of the things you can do with a session is declare "Wasn't me!" outside of combat (i.e. traps) where if you would trigger a trap, you can cash in your token and say hireling got hit instead.
- Don't have permadeath at 0 HP. One of my games was sort of Fantasy Stargate SG1, where the players ran guilds they managed. If a character dropped to zero HP, the adventurer's kit included a "trauma pack" and if applied quickly could stabilize a 0-HP character. When they got back to base, they rolled to see what happened. There was a small the character would still die (determined by how quickly the party got to them), and sometimes they'd make a full recovery given enough time, they might take a non-mechanical permanent injury, or they might take stat damage. They might be permanently crippled (no longer available for missions) but could serve as a "trainer" that would boost new recruit XP.
Honestly though you need to get your players used to death or just swap to something with more durable characters.
What are your honest opinions about 4e?
For the longest time I've had only heard bad things about it, but I have recently decided to run a 4e Dark Sun campaign for some internet friends and I'm really enjoying it so far. I absolutely love the way statblocks are done and the art of Wayne Reynolds has really grown on me.
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I love 4e. 4e has a lot of warts, and there is a bunch of stuff it doesn't do well.
4e has a very "Shut up and play" methodology vs. something like Pathfinder or even 3.5. There is not a lot of ways to just completely shut down enemies like in Pathfinder - but conversely, monsters can't shutdown players. (As I had to keep telling Pathfinder players: No, you can't disarm the orc. But remember they can't disarm you.)
4e does have space if you want to work in a disarm mechanic if you want.
While you can definitely RP in 4e, and an inability to do so just suggests a munchkin who wants to use Diplomancy to try to fuck with the DM instead of playing the game, the ability to have RP do much to help out in the adventure is somewhat limited. You need people who want to RP for RP's sake.
4e doesn't do overland "Hex exploration" very well at all - Everburning Torches aren't even considered magic items. It generally expects the players just arrive at the Dungeon/Temple/etc. Which on one hand is good for session planning, but sometimes unrewarding for players.
4e has the easiest to run module design I've ever experienced to the point swapping to anything else feels almost painful.
4e has a bad rep because Grogs were whining that their favorite builds and rule abuses were gone. 4e is a little spergy - words have very clear, solid meanings - though issues arrise when the writers forget this. But this also means there's much less space for debate (though players still will).
The biggest issues with 4e are:
1) You need books (or 100% legally acquired PDFs cough) to play and there is no SRD.
2) Combat gets sloggy. This isn't a problem with the important boss battles, but it is with the general mook encounters. As a DM, it limits your ability to
encourage players to move along, because a random encounter will pretty much be the session. Which will annoy me as the GM as much as the players.
There are ways to home brew around this (i.e. just abstract random encounters to suck healing surges) but nothing official.
3) Magic item dependence.
It does have its issues but most of its bad rap comes from people who haven't read a single sentence of the books. The way you are going about it of trying it yourself and deciding your own opinion is how I wish more people would do it.
4e also has a problem with experienced D&D players needing to unlearn what they learned from other editions. All the classes in 4e are great. Every one of them serves a purpose, has really neat things they can do. But 4e Bard is a healer who pumps out Temp HP, and not the Bard you see in any other edition.
But most people hated 4e because it was cool to hate on 4e, and it was taking cues from videogame design. But a lot of the outrage-generating things 4e did are standard now.
So... playing a minis game when you didn't intend to show up to play one. Again, there's a good reason that 4e did like shit to the point a 3.5 duplicate kicked its ass at the time. That style of play isn't that popular. People wanted to explore and dungeon delve, not just play Warhams fantasy with a bigger HD pool.
Pathfinder attracted a lot more people than it retained. A lot of people didn't want to buy new books or learn a new way of breaking down abilities.
Once 5e brought back vancian cast, Pathfinder 1e really only retained munchkins who could chain up pluses from obscure splats.
It's my first time playing DnD, how do you deal with a vindictive DM?
You figure out what you are doing to piss off the GM and stop doing that.
Serious answer: Your interpretation seems reasonable and correct, I think the GM is being overly restrictive. Sneak Attack on every AoO can get pretty fucking gnarly if the rogue gets into position where they can SA multiple enemies, but I guess my response as a GM would be to simply demonstrate for the rogue why being adjacent to a bunch of enemies is a very unwise idea when you are in just leather armor...
He's wrong, and you're right. Also, remember, you only get one reaction per round, so it's not a big deal. If you use it to get another Sneak Attack off, it means you can be walloped with no ability to use your Uncanny Dodge.
By the rules in the book,
@Kit Marz is right and the DM is wrong.
However rule zero says the DM is never wrong. (but in this case the DM should be choosing to be right in a different way)
Fine, I'll answer this one earnestly:
There has never been a huge success among sci-fi RPG because science fiction has never been as popular an RPG genre as fantasy to begin with.
There isn't a really success for Sci-Fi RPG because Sci-Fi has more guns, and the way the collective consciousness interpret guns in a very binary fashion - being shot is either very lethal (or at least debilitating), or its a complete miss.
