Southeast Jerome's page

The only class that feels incomplete is the Sorcerer. First thing, I'd add a generic, versatile bloodline, like the Arcane BL in pathfinder, as a Sorcerer option. Draconic and Wild Magic are both good bloodlines to include, but they're both very specific. In general, I'd also like all the classes to have at least three unique paths, one generic and two specialized.

Overall, my hope is that new standalone classes are kept to a minimum and that they put new options into existing classes whenever possible. Using Pathfinder as an example, most of the standalone PF classes are either already essentially covered by a 5E archetype (Hunter, Skald, Warpriest, etc.), or could be easily adapted and slotted into existing 5E classes as new archetypes, without building a whole new class (Bloodrager -> Barbarian path, Shaman -> Cleric domain or Druid circle, Swashbuckler -> Rogue archetype, Samurai -> Paladin oath or Fighter archetype, etc.).

The Man Upstairs: You know the rules, this isn't a toy!
Finn: Um... it kind of is.
The Man Upstairs: No, actually it's a highly sophisticated inter-locking brick system.
Finn: But we bought it at the toy store.
The Man Upstairs: We did, but the way I'm using it makes it an adult thing.
Finn: The box for this one said "Ages 8 to 14"!
The Man Upstairs: That's a suggestion. They have to put that on there.

If a 12 year old wants to spend time socializing with grown ups, that's a good thing to be encouraged. He might even need some hand-holding, just like you would with an apprentice in real life. Historically, 12 years old is when a "child" would go to work with a master to learn a profession. Work that into the story. If your friends are willing to quit a game that's about killing goblins because a kid wants to learn and without giving him a chance, they're not acting like adults.

If you go by the "what does it break" test then the barb10/clr1 above doing 4d6 as their only action for the round in my opinion is fine. Their weapon attacks will rarely do less than this.

I am playing a game where the rogue took magic initiate. We scale using the total of all levels. His cantrips are an ok option, not overpowering.

I agree with this. I don't think either version of the cantrip rule breaks anything, because, like you said, even fully powered cantrips are not overwhelmingly powerful at higher levels. I think my main issue with the rule has more to do with "does this ability make sense within the game world?" It makes sense in-game that a wizard could take a level of fighter and be able to wear armor, or that a fighter could take a level in cleric and be able to stabilize and heal. However, a 10th level Wizard can't take one level of Rogue and immediately get to deal a 5d6 sneak attack, so I'd probably house-rule that a 10th level fighter that takes one level in Wizard can only do 1d8 instead of 3d8 with his ray of frost.

WotC has been releasing DMG previews, and the section on firearms seems to be right on point:

http://media.wizards.com/2014/images/dnd/articles/firearms_p1.jpg

Ultimately up to the DM, but the section on proficiency says that players should be able to acquire firearms proficiency during downtime using the PHB downtime rules, provided they have enough ammunition. This would suggest that the downtime rules permit you to get proficiency in anything you want as long as you have the time and resources to do so. Compared to firearms, getting shield proficiency this way would be pretty trivial. So there you go.

My thought regarding the feat comparison would probably be to shift things in the other direction. If a feat that just gives Shield Proficiency seems lackluster (and I agree it does), the solution in my mind would be to add more abilities to the feat, to bring it up to par. Designing a custom Shield feat for non-armored characters would let it be a character designing element.

Whereas trying to create a trade-off to acquire the proficiency via other elements of the system seems dangerous, if only because the same logic could be extended to other feat elements. Why not trade in skills for an armor proficiency? Or for +1 to a stat? Those are also 'partial' elements that come from feats, after all.

All that said, I don't think it will break the system to come up with a way to harvest skills for other bonuses, or create a custom background that goes a little farther afield in the benefits it gives. But it does seem like the sort of thing that can imbalance the system, and would need to be handled with care.

The more I look at the various armor feat chains, the less I'm inclined to mess around with any individual feat. Each armor feat has different value to different classes, but the value for each feat lines up pretty well . Moderately Armored is very valuable for casters, since they don't have to worry as much about being stealthy, but the light armor proficiency prerequisite ensures that casters have to take Lightly Armored, which is still pretty good, first. This way, the really valuable feat (+2 from a shield and and another +2 or +3 from medium armor depending on how stealthy the caster wants to be) is delayed at least until level 4 for humans and level 8 for everyone else.

Same with the Moderately Armored -> Medium Armor Master progression for Rogues. Medium armor is not that valuable for high dex characters, but shield proficiency gives the rogue +2 AC for his first feat. Breastplate is also an (expensive) option to squeeze out another +1 over studded leather (as long as dex is below 18), which is nice. Medium Armor Master is far better, though, letting you use +3 of your dex bonus instead of +2, and removing the disadvantage penalty from scale mail and half-plate (max AC of 20 with shield). Here again, the real value comes two feats in, and the each class's first feat in the chain has a roughly equal benefit for the class that's taking it. I'm not a huge fan of feat chains, but I have to admit the armor progression is pretty well thought out and balanced across the different classes.

TheRavyn wrote:

bugleyman wrote:

D&D 5E really needs a "delay" action.

.

Looks like this is now covered by "Ready" (Basic Rules pdf p72)

Dunno. It seems like that replaces the "ready" action in Pathfinder (or 3.5, etc.), but there doesn't seem to be a "hold all of my actions and decide to jump in later" option.

I didn't realize there wasn't a rule for delay, and I don't think my DM realized that either. In my last game, I just said "I delay" and it worked exactly how you'd expect, with my jumping in at a later initiative count and staying there for the rest of the combat.

DungeonMastering.com wrote:

De nada. Luckily, someone already did the heavy math for us: http://andrewgelman.com/2014/07/12/dnd-5e-advantage-disadvantage-probabilit y/

I looked at that and maybe I didn't look close enough, but did it include the process by which those numbers were calculated. that's what I'd like to learn more about.

TL;DR:

PA=1-(1-(21-x)/20)^2
x is the target number on a d20 roll
PA is the probability of meeting that number on at least one of two d20 rolls

PD=((21-x)/20)^2
PD is the probability of meeting that number on two consecutive d20 rolls

Longer version:

1) calculate probability of hitting a target number - for d20 it's easy, 5% for every number under 20.

PN=(21-x)/20
x is your target number (on the die, not necessarily the DC)
PN is the probability of hitting or exceeding X on one d20 roll

2) Disadvantage is easier to calculate. Since you have to take the lower number, it means you have to meet or exceed X on both rolls.

PD=PN^2=((21-x)/20)^2
PD is the probability of succeeding on two consecutive d20 rolls

3) Advantage is trickier, but still straightforward. Since you have to only make your number on one of two rolls, the other way to look at it is to figure out what the probability of failing an advantage roll for a given number is.

PNf=1-PN
PNf is the probability of failing on a d20 roll

PAf=PNf^2=(1-PN)^2=(1-(21-x)/20)^2
PAf is the probability of failing two consecutive d20 rolls

PA=1-PAf=1-(1-(21-x)/20)^2
PA is the probability of succeeding on at least one of two d20 rolls

(And now we've reached the limits of what I remember from college statistics) :)

For more dice, just change the exponent to the number of dice you're using. "^3", "^4" and so on. Each extra die gives you diminishing returns, but the jump from 2 to 3 dice is still significant. If I were houseruling it, I'd probably allow for stacking up to 2 advantage dice (3 dice total) to see how it works, but that's probably the limit before the complexity overtakes the benefit. I have an excel sheet that I've been playing around with - I'll post on google when I get a chance.

Poog want kill the bad things. Poog not care about others with him, they be dumb and took Poogs win. Stopped Poog being best. Poog not best of course, Zargonel best. But Poog still pretty good. Not big fan of loosing.

Screw those guys. They all nearly dead anyway from lots-legs-kill-goblin-babies-many. Poog just channel to try kill bad thing. Stop bad thing and win! Yes. This plan is good.

But Poog forgot to look up. Friend goblins got channeled. Poog think this funny, Friend goblins fall to ground twitching. Then not twitching Dumb ugly goblins.

That's ok. Poog leave now, Poog no have to win. Poog run off into forest, find Poogself a new tribe. Poog was bored of this place anyway. Too much bad stuff try to kill Poog.

Poog meet Birdcrunchers. Ogre kill Birdcruncher chief. Birdcrunchers pick new chief. Kill stirges, be chief. Reta and Chuffy hit stirges. Poog channel. Hurt friends, Poog chief. Poog happy.

Chief Poog have to kill Ogre now? This not part of deal.

Poog miss Squealy Nord.

-Max and one of the Wild Things

-Tip and Jack Pumpkinhead from the second Oz book

-Donnie Darko and Frank the Bunny

-Jack and Tyler Durden (always finishing each others sentences and punching each other)

-The Family of Blood and the Scarecrows from Doctor Who

-Norman Bates and Mother

-Pamela Voorhees and Jason

-Haley Joel Osment and Bruce Willis (doesn't realize he's an eidolon, thinks he's part of the party)

-Geppetto and Pinocchio (Geppetto treats his eidolon like a real boy)

I have a concept kicking around based on Elsa from Frozen. She's either a winter witch or a boreal sorcerer, but she has a couple levels of summoner. Her Eidolon is Olaf, the snowman who loves warm hugs. He uses his carrot nose as a gore attack.

Beyond low levels, this could go a couple ways. You could either concentrate on witch/sorcerer levels, and just keep Olaf around for flavor and comic relief, or you could add some more levels of summoner and evolve him into Marshmallow, the big guardian snowman who guards Elsa's castle.

The same thing happened to Pathfinder once they started releasing new material. So it's not just a problem that will happen to 5E.

So I ask the question again if the next edition will not change anything or very little how does one go about selling it. I mean why would myself or others buy the same thing twice. Which keeps getting ignored by the don't change anything group.

If the new 1.5e core rulebook were demonstrably better, i.e., better organized and indexed, and easier to use at the table, then I think plenty of existing players, myself included, would happily purchase it, even if there were no new rules.

Just as importantly, if they could also make the intro to the game less intimidating and confusing for new players, perhaps by integrating some material from the Beginner Box and this fall's Strategy Guide, I think the game would be able to compete for new players much more effectively. As it is, the core rulebook is very intimidating and confusing to someone new to RPGs, and the same ruleset with a better layout would be an easier sell and would grow the player base.

Just for clarifications sake, I'm all for a revised edition that cleans up present rules issues, re-organizes the core rule book and gives us a decent index.

I'm not for completely changing the rule system into something else entirely. Whether it be making it a rules light system and getting rid of the myriad of options that Pathfinder at present has or making it a completely different kind of game in pursuit of that goal.

I would love to see a revised core rulebook that does a little of both. I'm in total agreement that better organization and consolidation of the existing rules would go a long way, and would also make the CRB much more appealing to new players. The strategy guide HC will help this issue a bit with it's step-by-step character creation sections, but that should really be in the core rulebook, so that you can tell a new player "buy this one book, which will walk you through how to play, and is all you need to keep playing forever."

One think that 5E has done that I really like is to make many of the complex features like feats and multiclassing optional, and also building in tradeoffs, like forcing a decision between a powerful feat or a straight ability score bump. If paizo were to emulate this in the next CRB, this would go a long way toward making both camps happy. The first third of the book could be a very streamlined core ruleset that has all the core classes and races but which is only a bit more complex than the BB ruleset. The middle section would include all the other optional features that could be swapped out for different levels of complexity, building toward the classic ruleset of the original CRB.

aetherwisp wrote:

Just throwing this out there: I think it's undesirable for Pathfinder players and GMs to try to match the fictional countries of Golarion to Earth cultures and locations.

Unless it's Japan, Russia, revolutionary France, China, India, South Africa, Scandanavia, the Byzantine empire, or Arabia.

Don't forget Egypt, Australia, the US, Spain, pre-columbian North America, Barbary coast, Aztec empire, and any number of locales from elsewhere in fiction, like Westeros, Atlantis, Middle Earth, etc.

I do roll my eyes sometimes that the comparisons are often a bit too on the nose. On the other hand, two of my favorite not-so-inside jokes in Golarion mythos are that Absalom is led by Lord Gyr of House Gixx, and that Galt is an objectivist dystopia. On balance, I like that the campaign setting can use familiar reference points as shorthand for newer players and as inspiration for GMs without being tied down by them.

I'm really looking forward to this book. As a newer player, the CRB is incredibly useful, but also incredibly daunting.

My fix has been to invest in hero lab, because it includes prompts for when I make mistakes, and also lets me know if I've forgotten something when leveling up. I then go back through the CRB to confirm the rules to make sure I understand why everything adds up the way it does. Unfortunately, however, this was next to impossible with the CRB alone, and even the "getting started" chapter has some big gaps in information.

My other fix is to keep my characters really simple for now while I learn the rules. I have been learning a ton playing PFS scenarios, but since I'm usually playing with much more experienced players who don't know me very well, I wanted to have a reasonably useful character so I wouldn't drag down the group and draw eye-rolls from the rest of my party. The optimization guides floating around are useful in that regard, even if you're not interested in power gaming.

This book looks like it will fix both of my problems with the CRB. If it's modeled after the Beginner's Box books, I suspect I'll be able to read it cover to cover and come away with a much better understanding of many game mechanics that are tough to figure out from the CRB.

One thing I'd love to see down the road (assuming the Strategy Guide accomplishes its goal) is a PFRPG "Starter Set" modeled after the Beginner Box. I would box up the CRB, the Strategy Guide and Bestiary 1, and also include a nice set of dice, a flip mat and some pawns like the Beginner Box. Retail it for $100, and sell it as the next step up from the beginner box. Having a product that says "This box is everything you need to play Pathfinder" would be a great way to introduce new players to the full game, in the same way the Beginners' box is a great intro for younger players.