Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

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The Ugly One said:
A goblin in AD&D has 1-1 HD, and will almost certainly die if a Fighter with 18 STR hits him with a two-handed sword. Goblins have never been interesting.
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Yeah, no shit a low-level monster is going to die in 1 hit no matter what.

My point is that the 20th level fighter should get more out of that kill. Transfer the overkill damage to another enemy, get a free attack on an adjacent monster (which only Great Weapon Mastery gives you in 5e), disintegrate it into a shower of gore that demoralizes all other enemies in melee range, something that allows you to get better results out of a single action. Because 5e has made it extremely clear that the Action Economy is king, therefore characters get more powerful not simply by getting more HP, but by being able to do more with any given action.
 
"Action Economy" was so thoroughly the meta of 3.PF, Paizo made Pathfinder 2e combat explicitly revolve around the "3 Action System" so much so that you can't fucking hold something in combat without it costing an action. High level 3.PF play becomes rocket tag, because full-attack actions and pre-buffs and stuff are so hyper optimized, the combat has two or three turns that each take like a half hour, then combat is over.
 
Corn Flakes said:
Yeah, no shit a low-level monster is going to die in 1 hit no matter what.

My point is that the 20th level fighter should get more out of that kill. Transfer the overkill damage to another enemy, get a free attack on an adjacent monster (which only Great Weapon Mastery gives you in 5e), disintegrate it into a shower of gore that demoralizes all other enemies in melee range, something that allows you to get better results out of a single action. Because 5e has made it extremely clear that the Action Economy is king, therefore characters get more powerful not simply by getting more HP, but by being able to do more with any given action.
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Overkill Damage and Meat Chunk Explosion aren't in classic D&D, either. I don't know where you're getting this idea that fighters used to have all sorts of awesome action coolguy bonus stuff happen when they fought weak monsters until 5e came along and took away your fun. There were cleaves only if you fought 1-HD monsters, and that was it. You got bupkis for 1+1 and above, so basically anything tougher than a hobgoblin.
 
The Ugly One said:
Overkill Damage and Meat Chunk Explosion aren't in classic D&D, either. I don't know where you're getting this idea that fighters used to have all sorts of awesome action coolguy bonus stuff happen when they fought weak monsters until 5e came along and took away your fun. There were cleaves only if you fought 1-HD monsters, and that was it. You got bupkis for 1+1 and above, so basically anything tougher than a hobgoblin.
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Where are you getting this idea that I think fighters had the things I suggested before?

I'm saying that since 5e ripped so much stuff out and made the system feel bland, they should have added more things to compensate for it. And I don't mean just straight porting things from 3e. This isn't "boo hoo 3e was best I want it back", I'm pointing out WotC were lazy and didn't add any worthwhile systems to flesh out the skeleton they made for 5e. Which is one of the reasons this edition feels so hollow and everybody has to homebrew so much just to keep things interesting.
 
I like lower level campaigns because you can use lower CR enemies like goblinoids and animals for encounters.
 
Corn Flakes said:
Yeah, no shit a low-level monster is going to die in 1 hit no matter what.

My point is that the 20th level fighter should get more out of that kill. Transfer the overkill damage to another enemy, get a free attack on an adjacent monster (which only Great Weapon Mastery gives you in 5e), disintegrate it into a shower of gore that demoralizes all other enemies in melee range, something that allows you to get better results out of a single action. Because 5e has made it extremely clear that the Action Economy is king, therefore characters get more powerful not simply by getting more HP, but by being able to do more with any given action.
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I think there's a good SlyFlourish post about something similar that I liked wherein he recommends doing kind of pooled damage for mass fights against weaker enemies so that when someone does X damage you take that number and apply it as if the PC was somehow attacking multiple enemies simultaneously, distributing the numbers out until you don't have sufficient amount of finish one off.

Feels way better than just overkilling one fucking skeleton or goblin.
 
Wallace said:
I liked E6/P6 back in the day.
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Which ones were those?

Brain Problems said:
SlyFlourish
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He does some good stuff. His module was good too, though the obvious wokeshit was a downer, it was trivial to remove. I wonder why he never made any more.

On that subject. How many good campaigns/settings do you think a writer has in them? SlyFlourish was just mentioned, but the writers I like (or liked) seem to make a good module or two, then either stop writing or release mediocre to bad stuff after that.

The Barrowmaze guy made Highfell, and that seemed cool, but Caverns seemed kind of bland and I heard he was making a dwarf themed megadungeon. The lack of videos and reviews on any of his work other than Barrowmaze seems to speak to a lack of interest across the board.
I was a big fan of GelatinousCubism who made a couple of good modules, but he most recent one (Scourge of the Northlands) seemed to be in development hell for a while, and when it did release it felt incomplete. There wasn't even a proper goal from what I could tell.
Has Keith Baker done anything of note that wasn't Eberron?
 
Wallace said:
E6 is D&D 3.5, but progression stops at level 6. Level 6 is about the level when power creep sets in, particularly for casters. It keeps the game lower powered and less complicated.

P6 is the same, but with Pathfinder.
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Funnily enough I've never seen games last too long once the cap is reached in E6. It's funny, but that's just what happened whenever I played in them.
 
The party I DM is going to fight a Aboleth soon. There’s a decent enough chance all three PCs get enslaved or that they just straight lose. I’m thinking about doing a timeskip if that happens where they spend a long time as its thralls. When they come to the island they’ve been working to save from pirates would now be under the Aboleths control. If you were playing and this happened would you think it’s cool or bullshit?
 
Dante Alighieri said:
I wouldn't take control of the player characters without the players consent. I'd just have them be thralls and see where things go from there.
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I was actually thinking they’d have complete memory loss of the time under its control. Having them roleplay it might be better, but with my party I’m unsure.
 
Big Green said:
I was actually thinking they’d have complete memory loss of the time under its control. Having them roleplay it might be better, but with my party I’m unsure.
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You should just ask them what they'd like more if it does happen. "You're enthralled, would you like to roleplay it out or have a timeskip?"
 
Dante Alighieri said:
You should just ask them what they'd like more if it does happen. "You're enthralled, would you like to roleplay it out or have a timeskip?"
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I think it would depend more on what the enthrallment entailed. I mean if you're just going to pick cotton for a decade before being rescued, what's to roleplay? If you're going to go on adventures doing shit diametrically opposite to what your character would normally do, this could get fun.
 
Corn Flakes said:
Where are you getting this idea that I think fighters had the things I suggested before?
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Because you said the core mechanics of 5e are bad, and your cited example is how nothing cool happens when you kill a goblin at high level. Same as if you said, "The core mechanics of 5e are bad, like rolling to hit and getting more hit points when you level up."

Corn Flakes said:
I'm saying that since 5e ripped so much stuff out and made the system feel bland
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What did they take away from Fighters? IME, 5e Fighters are far more fun to play than 3.5 Fighters because they ditched the whole concept of needing to stack up feats just to not be a useless sack of shit. You really want to go back to having to take feat just so you can take more than 5-foot step before your full attack? Having to spend a feat before you can knock someone down without drawing an opportunity attack?

Character builds are less complex, but the 3.5 system broke the game in un-fixable ways. I'm not one of the people who thinks 3.5's feat & MC system was in any way an improvement over AD&D, and I have banned multiclassing in my 5e games since the edition came out.

Corn Flakes said:
, they should have added more things to compensate for it. And I don't mean just straight porting things from 3e. This isn't "boo hoo 3e was best I want it back", I'm pointing out WotC were lazy and didn't add any worthwhile systems to flesh out the skeleton they made for 5e. Which is one of the reasons this edition feels so hollow and everybody has to homebrew so much just to keep things interesting.
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Lack of unnecessary complexity in a design isn't laziness.
 
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AnOminous said:
I think it would depend more on what the enthrallment entailed. I mean if you're just going to pick cotton for a decade before being rescued, what's to roleplay? If you're going to go on adventures doing shit diametrically opposite to what your character would normally do, this could get fun.
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Yeah for sure.
 
Dante Alighieri said:
Yeah for sure.
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Reminds me of when a CoC campaign ended, basically because a party member lost his mind and did the "cast random spell" I had for that decided Call Azathoth was a good idea. This basically destroyed the world. I suggested continuing the campaign as an "Old Ones have taken over and the tattered remnants of humanity are desperately trying to survive" and everyone was basically "lmao no fuck you faggot."
 
Big Green said:
I was actually thinking they’d have complete memory loss of the time under its control. Having them roleplay it might be better, but with my party I’m unsure.
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The last 5e campaign I played in we lost to an aboleth. We just treated it as a TPK and rolled new characters. Eventually we had to face off against our old PCs which had been enslaved.
 
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