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

[Gingervitis]

I’ve had players like that roll up a character and then say they’re gay because they don’t like that a -cubus is trying to seduce them.

>not just adding a -cubus of the same gender

 

[40 Year Old Boomer]

>not just adding a -cubus of the same gender

You don't have to. The soul-draining rape demons don't care about your sexual orientation or consent.

 

[Adamska]

Except fighters. They're horseshit-free near as I can tell if you rock a traditional build. Its when you go Archery+Crossbow Expert+Sharpshooter that DM's start crying since at 6th level you can toss out 2 shots per turn out to 400 yards that ignore all but the heaviest cover with no range penalties, and with a +5 to hit plus whatever your Dex bonus is. If you choose Champion at 10th level you can snag Two-Weapon Fighting and dual-wield hand crossbows in melee like a Medieval version of Equilibrium.

Sadly, things aren't nearly as fun if you go down the strength route unless you go with polearms or dual-wielding, since the bog-standard great weapons don't get any unique feats in the way polearms do. Great Weapon Master also gives its benefits to polearms since they're Heavy, and Dual-Wielder lets you use a longsword in each hand with no downsides. Gone is Monkey Grip for greatsword and board fun.

(Really, Crossbow Expert and Sharpshooter are absolutely broken feats out there in 5e for anyone wanting a ranged martial.)

I was using horseshit to describe how people in this thread would flagellate themselves over simple features that aren't as broken as they're hallucinating it is due to how the game is designed. Everyone in 5e has broken horseshit abilities for the most part, so feeling bad doesn't make sense.

 

[The Ugly One]

Except fighters. They're horseshit-free near as I can tell if you rock a traditional build. Its when you go Archery+Crossbow Expert+Sharpshooter that DM's start crying since at 6th level you can toss out 2 shots per turn out to 400 yards that ignore all but the heaviest cover with no range penalties, and with a +5 to hit plus whatever your Dex bonus is. If you choose Champion at 10th level you can snag Two-Weapon Fighting and dual-wield hand crossbows in melee like a Medieval version of Equilibrium.

You can't dual-wield hand crossbows because of the Ammunition property. All the Loading property does is prevent you from multi-attacking; ignoring it doesn't mean arrows now leap from your quiver into your weapon. Fortunately for munchkins, the Crossbow Expert gives you 3 attacks/round with a single hand crossbow anyway. Whoever wrote this feat wasn't thinking too hard, but this is par for the course for D&D feats. It's funny how even with so few feats in 5e, there is a clear difference between the god-tier and garbage-tier feats. How out of control it gets then comes down to how many quivers your Fighter puts on his back before the DM has had enough.

 

[Corn Flakes]

You don't have to. The soul-draining rape demons don't care about your sexual orientation or consent.

Like magical mind-controlling demons care for sexual orientation or even attraction. It's not seduction, it's magic. The target could be an asexual eunuch and the Charm effect would still work just fine.

 

[Mr. Manchester]

1 - things are never as fun if you go down the Strength route in 5e. It was already bad in 3.5e but at least Weapon Finesse didn't allow you to add your Dex to damage so Dexterity was always more of a defensive thing. In 5e Dex just completely overshadows Strength at nearly everything.

The only thing I have found to do with a high strength score is to incorporate the weird grapple/shove rules into a build. You can crank up your athletics with some class that gives you expertise in a skill and then find another class ability that gives you the shove action as a bonus, or take that shield feat that lets you shove something that you attack. There's ways to always get advantage too, bulls strength, rage, enlarge, probably others.

Your first attack is a grapple which drops something's speed to 0, second attack is a shove action to knock them to the ground. Getting up takes half your movement, which is gone. At that point they have disadvantage on attacks and you have advantage. You also need a single free hand to grapple, which means you can drag the first grappled thing and take it on over to another guy and do it again. God help them if they ever introduce something with more arms.

Most monsters don't have the athletics skill and if they do you're still going to be miles ahead of them. It's a one trick pony but describing your cool wrestling moves is kind of cool and it's 5e so who really cares?

 

[EnemyStand]

The only thing I have found to do with a high strength score is to incorporate the weird grapple/shove rules into a build. You can crank up your athletics with some class that gives you expertise in a skill and then find another class ability that gives you the shove action as a bonus, or take that shield feat that lets you shove something that you attack. There's ways to always get advantage too, bulls strength, rage, enlarge, probably others.

Your first attack is a grapple which drops something's speed to 0, second attack is a shove action to knock them to the ground. Getting up takes half your movement, which is gone. At that point they have disadvantage on attacks and you have advantage. You also need a single free hand to grapple, which means you can drag the first grappled thing and drag it on over to another guy and do it again. God help them if they ever introduce something with multiple arms.

Most monsters don't have the athletics skill and if they do you're still going to be miles ahead of them. It's a one trick pony but describing your cool wrestling moves is kind of cool and it's 5e so who really cares?

I've done the whole Macho Man as an Ork Monk thing before, and it is glorious if you have the personality to pull it off.

Then I had to switch to a thief because the neighbors were whining about the noise I was making...normies really do ruin everything.

 

[Abella]

>not just adding a -cubus of the same gender

I’m not adding more monsters because someone wants to be a homosexual.

 

[Wormy]

I've done the whole Macho Man as an Ork Monk thing before, and it is glorious if you have the personality to pull it off.

Then I had to switch to a thief because the neighbors were whining about the noise I was making...normies really do ruin everything.

Elf boy! The apology you gave me was VERY WEAK! I was lookin good, yea, I was Nat 20's and death touching, but you had to come in with your spells and yer hot doggin!!

Makes me yearn for my Lawful Evil lizardfolk monk who made a point to eat every opponent he got into hand to claw with.

 

[Kyria the Great]

Does anyone know a system that could be akin towards higher fantasy yet higher lethality without more careful play? I was actually thinking along the lines of Final Fantasy tactics or Fire Emblem series as a great example of such.

 

[BiggerChungus]

This is a really fun system.

 

[Ghostse]

Does anyone know a system that could be akin towards higher fantasy yet higher lethality without more careful play? I was actually thinking along the lines of Final Fantasy tactics or Fire Emblem series as a great example of such.

Define "Careful play".

If you are looking for teambased tactical grid-combat, I am biased but my recommendation would be editing/streamlining 4e.

Limit everyone to pre-errata PHB1 and 2 only (ie fixed stat boosts for everyone except humans). If you want to go even further, limit classes to races listed in the class overview (IE only Elves, Dragonborn, Eladrin, Humans and Halflings can be rangers)

Drop dailies and feats (or do GM assigns feats), remove anything with "on-going" effects - both players and monsters. (I have some autism about doing this in a more mechanically sound way but will skip it because its long and spergy) Hell, just use the general template and make your own powers.
edit: Another thing, especially if you're going full FFT and each player is controlling a couple characters, is to take Utility powers and generally toss out (or nerf) anything that is daily usage and say "All Rogues have access to these utilities, but they can only use one per ecounter" - so a Lvl 2 rogue has access to all the rogue utilities but if they use tumble they can't use deft fingers until they complete a rest. IF they use an at-will like Great Leap, they can use it as many times that encounter as they want, but can't use anything else until they rest.
This makes character building go faster because players don't have to think about if they'll ever get to use that utility or not, and better than random assignment where a character might have a power slot taken by a useless ability.
Giving a one-a-day use utility would be great for custom character progression/quest rewards, but you need to be careful because players being players they will tend to never use it because they want to "save it".
You can do the same with encounters (Access to multiple, but only use one), but I wouldn't do it for At-Wills. It removes a human racial feature (3rd at will) and tends to give players "too much" choice on for combat actions.

Make the monsters do more consistent damage (aka if an attack is 5+3d6, change it to 8+2d6 or 12+1d6) and maybe drop damage as well. Take monster HP and drop it by about half, maybe even take it down to a quarter depending on how hard to you want fights to be.
Do a level cap at about 5 (require a special quest/ritual - basically divine intervention - for lvl 6). Track XP as normal and every time they 'level' give them a stat increase (i.e. when they XP to 6, give them a stat up whether or not they've done their lvl 6 quest. When they'd hit lvl 7, give them another, etc.)
edit: I've not had a party need this, but I was doing "Increase one stat by +1 and another by +1" for 6 and 7 and "Increase one stat by +2 and another by +1" for level 8 and above; no idea how balanced that'll end up. A better solution might be giving players additional point-buy points, but since they get a stat boost at lvl 4 its annoying to recalculate your skills unless you are doing ledger accounting/journaling for stats.

Toss out the official potion rules and values, make normal potions cheap and plentiful but keep to action economy. (or keep the costs and have the potion have multiple charges). And if you're just going to not care about campaign logistics all together, get rid of tracking Healing Surges; when enemies/traps/environment would suck healing surges instead have it reduce max HP by a fraction of their surge value (If an enemy attack says it drains 1 surge, have it instead reduce the max HP of a character by 1/2 or 1/4 of their surge value until next Long or Short rest)
Any skills that consume user Surges (Like Paladin powers) either reduce effectiveness or put an X per day/X per encounter on it.

This will turn CON into even more of a dumpstat that it already is, but you can offset that a bit by bringing back CON bonus per level, but you need to do more HP tweaking which I'm also not going to go into unless anyone really cares.

Focus on giving players items, give items charges or have players roll to see if the enchantment breaks after using it. (You can also use this to make 'Cursed' items that get better by breaking the cursed enchantment on them)

Also Maybe PF2? I can't say, I don't like the system.

 

[KlingonStare]

I'm curious - which edition of Traveller is good to start as a freshman in GMing? I heard that while the Mongoose 2e is pretty good, it is also horrendously edited and hard to get in terms of space combat. I heard good things about Mega Traveller, but the age may have put the system though the grinder of being little bit rusty mechanically.

 

[Hikaru86]

Define "Careful play".

If you are looking for teambased tactical grid-combat, I am biased but my recommendation would be editing/streamlining 4e.

Limit everyone to pre-errata PHB1 and 2 only (ie fixed stat boosts for everyone except humans). If you want to go even further, limit classes to races listed in the class overview (IE only Elves, Dragonborn, Eladrin, Humans and Halflings can be rangers)

Drop dailies and feats (or do GM assigns feats), remove anything with "on-going" effects - both players and monsters. (I have some autism about doing this in a more mechanically sound way but will skip it because its long and spergy) Hell, just use the general template and make your own powers.
edit: Another thing, especially if you're going full FFT and each player is controlling a couple characters, is to take Utility powers and generally toss out (or nerf) anything that is daily usage and say "All Rogues have access to these utilities, but they can only use one per ecounter" - so a Lvl 2 rogue has access to all the rogue utilities but if they use tumble they can't use deft fingers until they complete a rest. IF they use an at-will like Great Leap, they can use it as many times that encounter as they want, but can't use anything else until they rest.
This makes character building go faster because players don't have to think about if they'll ever get to use that utility or not, and better than random assignment where a character might have a power slot taken by a useless ability.
Giving a one-a-day use utility would be great for custom character progression/quest rewards, but you need to be careful because players being players they will tend to never use it because they want to "save it".
You can do the same with encounters (Access to multiple, but only use one), but I wouldn't do it for At-Wills. It removes a human racial feature (3rd at will) and tends to give players "too much" choice on for combat actions.

Make the monsters do more consistent damage (aka if an attack is 5+3d6, change it to 8+2d6 or 12+1d6) and maybe drop damage as well. Take monster HP and drop it by about half, maybe even take it down to a quarter depending on how hard to you want fights to be.
Do a level cap at about 5 (require a special quest/ritual - basically divine intervention - for lvl 6). Track XP as normal and every time they 'level' give them a stat increase (i.e. when they XP to 6, give them a stat up whether or not they've done their lvl 6 quest. When they'd hit lvl 7, give them another, etc.)
edit: I've not had a party need this, but I was doing "Increase one stat by +1 and another by +1" for 6 and 7 and "Increase one stat by +2 and another by +1" for level 8 and above; no idea how balanced that'll end up. A better solution might be giving players additional point-buy points, but since they get a stat boost at lvl 4 its annoying to recalculate your skills unless you are doing ledger accounting/journaling for stats.

Toss out the official potion rules and values, make normal potions cheap and plentiful but keep to action economy. (or keep the costs and have the potion have multiple charges). And if you're just going to not care about campaign logistics all together, get rid of tracking Healing Surges; when enemies/traps/environment would suck healing surges instead have it reduce max HP by a fraction of their surge value (If an enemy attack says it drains 1 surge, have it instead reduce the max HP of a character by 1/2 or 1/4 of their surge value until next Long or Short rest)
Any skills that consume user Surges (Like Paladin powers) either reduce effectiveness or put an X per day/X per encounter on it.

This will turn CON into even more of a dumpstat that it already is, but you can offset that a bit by bringing back CON bonus per level, but you need to do more HP tweaking which I'm also not going to go into unless anyone really cares.

Focus on giving players items, give items charges or have players roll to see if the enchantment breaks after using it. (You can also use this to make 'Cursed' items that get better by breaking the cursed enchantment on them)

Also Maybe PF2? I can't say, I don't like the system.

So... Gamma World 7e?

I remember someone made a hack using it as base for fantasy, but it in French. And there is 13th Age. But i do'nt think its close to your suggestions.

 

[Airbrushed Van Art]

Does anyone know a system that could be akin towards higher fantasy yet higher lethality without more careful play? I was actually thinking along the lines of Final Fantasy tactics or Fire Emblem series as a great example of such.

A lot of “OSR” games based on earlier versions of D&D were made with “high lethality” in mind, with high fantasy dungeons (to the point of being quite gonzo) while putting decision-making in the hands of the players rather than the characters.

Some do it better than others, but it’s one venue anyway.

Edit: if you want to veer away from D&D entirely (like I have), there’s always Mythras (based on a streamlined version of Runequest) with the Classic Fantasy rulebook. Extremely lethal combat where you have to be careful and smart about how you engage. Simply put, shields will save your life and big ass polearms are actually devastating. Nothing like having a PC Barbarian getting curb stomped by goons in a shieldwall formation and spears.

 

[Ghostse]

A lot of “OSR” games based on earlier versions of D&D were made with “high lethality” in mind, with high fantasy dungeons (to the point of being quite gonzo) while putting decision-making in the hands of the players rather than the characters.

Some do it better than others, but it’s one venue anyway.

Edit: if you want to veer away from D&D entirely (like I have), there’s always Mythras (based on a streamlined version of Runequest) with the Classic Fantasy rulebook. Extremely lethal combat where you have to be careful and smart about how you engage. Simply put, shields will save your life and big ass polearms are actually devastating. Nothing like having a PC Barbarian getting curb stomped by goons in a shieldwall formation and spears.

I wouldn't recommend OSR given @Kyria the Great was referencing Fire Emblem & FFT, which are crunchy games with exacting tactical placement of units.

OSR systems work best when you're abstracting tactical distances and placement (given that combat turns are often a minute), so i'd more inclined take a tactics-focus system and give the rule set an OSR streamlining than trying to bolt tactics to an OSR system. But that's just me.

 

[Abradolfus_Linclerson]

A question for veteran DMs/GMs/anyone else who bloody well feels like answering...

Got this idea for a grand campaign that's going to involve a major twist, to the tune of Quantum Leaping the party. Setting is heavily modded Spellslinger for anyone familiar with that 3.5 "Six-Shooters and Sorcery" module from eons ago. Timey wimey reincarnationy shizzle will be happening, hurling them back into a 'standard' DnD era as ancestral versions of who they're playing.

Beyond the risk of severe whiplash from the course change, I am concerned with how much I should let them know about this beforehand. What I want to do is pass out a bunch of pre-gen sheets for them at the end of the session where the Quantum Leap event occurs, based heavily upon the role they're already filling in the party (basically, take their Spellslinger character and convert it to standard 5E) and be like, "right, here's your new you; keep the old 'you' handy, but look over the new you and let me know what changes need made to make you happy." I figure this is a terrible idea and I should have them do it themselves, but that seems like it's ruining Christmas morning by telling the kids what presents they're getting.

Thoughts? (Beyond "WTF is wrong with you, do not do this you fucknut?!" I mean.)

 

[Fakenamemagoo]

A question for veteran DMs/GMs/anyone else who bloody well feels like answering...

Got this idea for a grand campaign that's going to involve a major twist, to the tune of Quantum Leaping the party. Setting is heavily modded Spellslinger for anyone familiar with that 3.5 "Six-Shooters and Sorcery" module from eons ago. Timey wimey reincarnationy shizzle will be happening, hurling them back into a 'standard' DnD era as ancestral versions of who they're playing.

Beyond the risk of severe whiplash from the course change, I am concerned with how much I should let them know about this beforehand. What I want to do is pass out a bunch of pre-gen sheets for them at the end of the session where the Quantum Leap event occurs, based heavily upon the role they're already filling in the party (basically, take their Spellslinger character and convert it to standard 5E) and be like, "right, here's your new you; keep the old 'you' handy, but look over the new you and let me know what changes need made to make you happy." I figure this is a terrible idea and I should have them do it themselves, but that seems like it's ruining Christmas morning by telling the kids what presents they're getting.

Thoughts? (Beyond "WTF is wrong with you, do not do this you fucknut?!" I mean.)

It's all about presentation. Don't hand out the pregen Char sheets at the end of the session. Give them an RP encounter that doesn't involve Dice Rolls/Stat usage to really drive home they are in different bodies/time. Then end the session. Let them stew in what just happened between sessions. Give out Char sheets at the beginning of the next session (if at all). Don't let them change anything, these are different bodies that they just started inhabiting. Tell your PCs if they don't like it, deal with it for now. Still let them know to keep their old sheets handy.

 

[Ghostse]

A question for veteran DMs/GMs/anyone else who bloody well feels like answering...

Got this idea for a grand campaign that's going to involve a major twist, to the tune of Quantum Leaping the party. Setting is heavily modded Spellslinger for anyone familiar with that 3.5 "Six-Shooters and Sorcery" module from eons ago. Timey wimey reincarnationy shizzle will be happening, hurling them back into a 'standard' DnD era as ancestral versions of who they're playing.

Beyond the risk of severe whiplash from the course change, I am concerned with how much I should let them know about this beforehand. What I want to do is pass out a bunch of pre-gen sheets for them at the end of the session where the Quantum Leap event occurs, based heavily upon the role they're already filling in the party (basically, take their Spellslinger character and convert it to standard 5E) and be like, "right, here's your new you; keep the old 'you' handy, but look over the new you and let me know what changes need made to make you happy." I figure this is a terrible idea and I should have them do it themselves, but that seems like it's ruining Christmas morning by telling the kids what presents they're getting.

Thoughts? (Beyond "WTF is wrong with you, do not do this you fucknut?!" I mean.)

Firstly, while you know your party, in a general sense I highly advise against doing this, especially in the manner your are planning. Quantum leaping into new characters in a new system always sounds fun as a DM plotting, but it never works out for the players (and often not for the DM as well). Time-wimey shit is even worse - it is either completely pointless railroading, or it is butterfly effect shit that feels like you've been railroaded into a scripted loss because you didn't get to build your character or pick the situation.
(granted being forced into the past by the big bad with the express goal of having you fuck up everything CAN work as a campaign hook, since the party tries to fix what they did, but again that's not everyone's cup of tea and the time shit should be wrapped up in 1-3 sessions - not something that goes on long enough try to learn a new system over)

Secondly, unless you are going to make this a serious long-term event, I advise really strongly against the time leap being into a new system. Again, this always SOUNDS great when you're sitting there at the planning table as something to really shake up the party, but it almost never works out unless you have a group who read new system books as masturbation material.

Thirdly, if they are leaping into the past, it should be like D&D 2e or 1e not 5e. But if you're doing a 3.5 derivative with gunpunk skinning, just have the fantasy past be vanilla 3.5 and move on. Don't make them learn a new system.

If you want to introduce player swap shenanigans, have them mind-swap with other beings from their time and system. Having the players swap with a rival party, and then having both groups now have to work together to fix it usually works well as a campaign arc if you want people to swap character sheets to keep things fresh.

The only time I've seen time shenigans work was when the party basically went to what was a VR historical reenactment themepark (only described with Fantasy terms, but everyone knew it was a VR Reenactment themepark) so they could experience historical events first hand (so that if they went off the script, their changes were limited to the VR session - go too far into the weeds the simulation crashes and boots them out, but they can just go back in and try again). The party needed to know where a lost historical artifact got off to, and using the Elf God's history machine they were able to figure out where it went as well as get an immersive and interactive backstory injection.


tl;dr WTF is wrong with you, do not do this you fucknut.

 

[40 Year Old Boomer]

A question for veteran DMs/GMs/anyone else who bloody well feels like answering...

Got this idea for a grand campaign that's going to involve a major twist, to the tune of Quantum Leaping the party. Setting is heavily modded Spellslinger for anyone familiar with that 3.5 "Six-Shooters and Sorcery" module from eons ago. Timey wimey reincarnationy shizzle will be happening, hurling them back into a 'standard' DnD era as ancestral versions of who they're playing.

Beyond the risk of severe whiplash from the course change, I am concerned with how much I should let them know about this beforehand. What I want to do is pass out a bunch of pre-gen sheets for them at the end of the session where the Quantum Leap event occurs, based heavily upon the role they're already filling in the party (basically, take their Spellslinger character and convert it to standard 5E) and be like, "right, here's your new you; keep the old 'you' handy, but look over the new you and let me know what changes need made to make you happy." I figure this is a terrible idea and I should have them do it themselves, but that seems like it's ruining Christmas morning by telling the kids what presents they're getting.

Thoughts? (Beyond "WTF is wrong with you, do not do this you fucknut?!" I mean.)

Doing this with D&D editions is a terrible idea. Bouncing between settings? Sure that'd be fun. Bouncing between systems is just going to be a fucking chore and a huge waste of time. You definintely need to talk to the players before hand about this or you'll likely have one or two spergouts.

All that said, it sounds like a fun campaign idea and one I've toyed with, only more Sliders than Quantum Leap.