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

[Henri Barbusse]

First, what games do crafting well? I've largely ignored crafting outside of McGyver like characters. The main problem seems to be that crafting is just a slower, cheaper way to get items from the shop. It's never really come up in a game I've run. Even my PF2 game has a trained crafter that hasn't tried to craft anything.

Ars Magica. Crafting magical items is only a little bit more complex than creating spells and crafting mundane items can be generally solved by hiring someone to do it for you. (And a regular mage covenant will probably employ a scribe, bookbinder and an illuminator at the very least.)

Crafting magic items costs vis (basically magic in physical form that can be used for enchanting and ritual magic or for studying a magic form or technique once you've ran out of books) and, most importantly, time. Time spent crafting magic items is time not spent studying or researching spells or similar, so it has a pretty big cost. However, even if you're not in the crafting mystery cult, it's always useful and after a certain point, it's the most cost-effective way of improving your lab. (Basically, if you can justify to other players how the magic item helps you in the lab, you get a +1 to a specific lab stat for every 5 levels of effect the item has. So a plant wizard could enchant a sunflower to track the movement of a specific star instead of the sun to get a bonus. Or you can create a glowing rock to light up your lab instead of candles and lamps to increase your lab safety.)

 

[The Ugly One]

First, what games do crafting well?

ACKS does okay. Magic items are extremely expensive to create. ACKS II tightens up the system a bit.

 

[BlazikenLover]

5e can be fun. In one-shots and occasional short campaigns, mostly. The two groups I belong to played long campaigns in 5e and we all found out it wears out its welcome pretty quickly unless you homebrew a lot.

It's a solid skeleton for a system, but Wizards of the Coast, either through laziness, incompetence or a misguided attempt at "streamlining", refused to actually put some meat on those bones. The game needed a better stat balance (Dexterity should not be the end-all-be-all stat, Intelligence shouldn't be the universal dump stat), an actual skill system (with the ability to learn new skills), saving throws and resistances that matter, actual choices while leveling up instead of just "you get X ability at Y" level, and so on and so forth. You can make it work, but you'd have to add so much complexity yourself that you might as well just play another system at that point.

I agree with both points: in long campaigns it becomes frustrating how your character does mostly the same past level 6 with a few exceptions, this is also why I think Warlock is such a good class: you get options and there is a lot of variety from one warlock to the next.
Regarding the second point: HOLY FUCK IT IS SO FRUSTRATING since not only they seemed to have given up on adding meaningful rules or subsystems to the game after xanathar's guide to everything (a mediocre attempt but a genuine attempt at least). Stuff from Unearthed Arcana such as their half dozen ranger fixes and the Mystic class gave me hope but then they walked back on those ideas and ended up releasing optional rules for all classes and very VERY mediocre psychic subclasses.
Overall new content became worse after 2018 or so, be it players options or adventure books, and it is VERY irritating since NO lessons were learned after years of continued development and content, adventure books actually managed to become worse overtime. One D&D or whatever they are calling it now was the last straw for me, they had the chance to fix some of the fundamental flaws of the system with a 5.5e update and yet they didn't. I have been told that it is a good update and that "it does indeed fix those issues!" But am not convinced after reading the playtests (whose rules and design philosophy seemed to change on a whim).

 

[Judge Dredd]

HOLY FUCK IT IS SO FRUSTRATING since not only they seemed to have given up on adding meaningful rules or subsystems to the game after xanathar's guide to everything (a mediocre attempt but a genuine attempt at least). Stuff from Unearthed Arcana such as their half dozen ranger fixes and the Mystic class gave me hope but then they walked back on those ideas and ended up releasing optional rules for all classes and very VERY mediocre psychic subclasses.

The most damning aspect of this is how much BG3 improved things. I've not played it myself, but the amount of fixes people insist on backporting to real 5e is insane. I might have mentioned before, but if they released a 5.5 which was 5e plus 90% of the changes from BG3, it would be a massive hit. It wouldn't fix everything, but it would be a solid start.

 

[strawberry15]

what is your favorite version of dnd?

I personally dm AD&D 2e because i like its settings. but i found many aspects of AD&D 1st edition superior.
but nowadays most people have been corrupted by the shittyness of 5e so i use 4e for them which is in all aspects superior to 5e.

Ars Magica. Crafting magical items is only a little bit more complex than creating spells and crafting mundane items can be generally solved by hiring someone to do it for you. (And a regular mage covenant will probably employ a scribe, bookbinder and an illuminator at the very least.)

Crafting magic items costs vis (basically magic in physical form that can be used for enchanting and ritual magic or for studying a magic form or technique once you've ran out of books) and, most importantly, time. Time spent crafting magic items is time not spent studying or researching spells or similar, so it has a pretty big cost. However, even if you're not in the crafting mystery cult, it's always useful and after a certain point, it's the most cost-effective way of improving your lab. (Basically, if you can justify to other players how the magic item helps you in the lab, you get a +1 to a specific lab stat for every 5 levels of effect the item has. So a plant wizard could enchant a sunflower to track the movement of a specific star instead of the sun to get a bonus. Or you can create a glowing rock to light up your lab instead of candles and lamps to increase your lab safety.)

Ars magica crafting is great. it is a great game with great supplements. and it is anti-woke because of its definitive look at sex lol.

 

[Mr. Manchester]

The most damning aspect of this is how much BG3 improved things. I've not played it myself, but the amount of fixes people insist on backporting to real 5e is insane. I might have mentioned before, but if they released a 5.5 which was 5e plus 90% of the changes from BG3, it would be a massive hit. It wouldn't fix everything, but it would be a solid start.

I haven't looked into 5.5 a lot but BG3 is leaps and bounds ahead of basic 5e. There's parts in that game where they toss the rules out the window and just do something cool instead. One of the things I know they added to 5.5 was weapon mastery feats, which lets you use little powers when you're holding a certain type of weapon. So you can cleave if you have a great axe and are a class that can use the weapon right, for example. I think that also comes from Midgard which is the Kobold Press setting and a buddy of mine told me Hasbro hired the guy that designed it.

I'm sure Larian took inspiration from it because it did make 5e a lot more fun, gave people nice little options. That being said I haven't played in a regular 5e in years because my main group does other shit, but it helped a lot. If Hasbro is smart (they're not) they'd look into as many 3rd party publishers as possible and steal everything they can. If they were nice and smart (they're not) they'd give those companies a little shoutout and tell people to buy their modules.

 

[The Rockafire Explosion]

This is why you gatekeep

 

[AnOminous]

I agree with both points: in long campaigns it becomes frustrating how your character does mostly the same past level 6 with a few exceptions, this is also why I think Warlock is such a good class: you get options and there is a lot of variety from one warlock to the next.

This is any past 2e shit. Oh you hit this level you get this thing, it's exactly the same thing, every fucking character gets exactly the same thing.

That's just some gay bullshit.

 

[Irish Turtle]

I really wish dnd had a way to make your charecter ascend to becoming a devil or demon and gave you that kind of statblock, creating this kinda stuff for dnd is litterally free it costs some paper to print but can make wizards a ton of money.

 

[strawberry15]

I really wish dnd had a way to make your charecter ascend to becoming a devil or demon and gave you that kind of statblock, creating this kinda stuff for dnd is litterally free it costs some paper to print but can make wizards a ton of money.

But why though?

 

[Atypical Dog]

This is any past 2e shit. Oh you hit this level you get this thing, it's exactly the same thing, every fucking character gets exactly the same thing.

That's just some gay bullshit.

Bring back lackeys as class features. Me and my company roll up to meet my party after a few months off to manage our fiefs and bang our wives and roll up with a small army to fight the orc horde with. GM slaps down an old map of a real life location and says "they're coming from the east board edge, you're coming from the west, you know what to do".

Full circle back to wargame.

2. DnD 5e
I don't hate 5e or even Critical Roll like most here. What bothers me about the 5e fandom is they hate the game, they hate the rules, they hate the company that makes it. Will they play anything else? Nope. They keep trying to twist 5e into something it's not. As a tweet I keep losing says. If video games operated on the same logic as 5e players, they would want to play Half-Life, but refuse to play HL, HL2, Ep2, Alyx, or Black Mesa. Instead they'd mod Skyrim to replace all the Drauger with Combine. The fact these make up a large portion of RPG players frustrates me.

Being a skeleton of a system it's easy to hang a lot of things off of 5e? Is it the best way to do any one thing, no. It's the best way to do everything on average. Unfortunately people don't play the average game - they play the one they're in.

It's a solid skeleton for a system, but Wizards of the Coast, either through laziness, incompetence or a misguided attempt at "streamlining", refused to actually put some meat on those bones. The game needed a better stat balance (Dexterity should not be the end-all-be-all stat, Intelligence shouldn't be the universal dump stat), an actual skill system (with the ability to learn new skills), saving throws and resistances that matter, actual choices while leveling up instead of just "you get X ability at Y" level, and so on and so forth. You can make it work, but you'd have to add so much complexity yourself that you might as well just play another system at that point.

Just look at how much more tendons and cartilage they put on the bone with the new D&D One. Dare I say there may even be some meat on the bone, with how much was added to classes.

But all the meat is on the skull area and when it comes to systems other than combat it's still basically the same product. I think the CharOp channels and CharOp culture kind of drowned out the focus on softer systems and more variable outcomes. Kind of veering off-topic though.

Spoiler: Continued Spergery

Since 4e (and I will admit to liking 4e's power system and everything) and probably 3e/3.5e (though I wasn't around for those so can't comment), D&D has firmly rejected being a game as a simulation and has moved firmly into game as a fun abstraction. Only vestiges like occasional spell interactions or the length of time needed to don/doff armor remain, but the game is explicitly a game now.

Contrast when I see 2e and older books there are things like crafting tables, % chance tables, misfire tables, things about the rate of appearance of magic talent, and so on. Fighters get lackeys as a class feature because you need lackeys. Handedness is a much bigger deal rather than being waved away by character options that let you bypass requirements like having to have an arcane focus/magic symbol in the manner of the warlock pact weapon or the eldritch knight. It feels like the designers were explicitly thinking of a world, rather than just making a fun game.

The system I've played the most is FFG's 40k offering, Only War, and that game is hella strict in that regard. A lot of the tabletop math maths out (Deathwatch is older). Lasguns hurt as much as the wargame says (not much against armored targets, lethal vs. exposed targets), and so do Plasma Guns (hurt everybody, including yourself). That means, in turn, that I the GM don't have to do the work of making every goblin or bugbear have rules - I just use the same schmucks with different situations with different weapons, which immediately creates a very different kind of combat. That kind of ludonarrative consonance is something D&D, I feel, has thrown away.

I sometimes think that this problem could easily be solved by the GM having a small grab bag of features/mini-mechanics/prestige classes that they can throw at the player in the vein of the PF2 Free Archetype rule. Or at least, goofy magic items that fulfill the same role. Adding options to fuck with established playstyles.

 

[King Dead]

I really wish dnd had a way to make your charecter ascend to becoming a devil or demon and gave you that kind of statblock, creating this kinda stuff for dnd is litterally free it costs some paper to print but can make wizards a ton of money.

They kind of did, way back when, for Basic D&D:

The problem with this, and the reason they'd never do something similar officially for 5e or any hypothetical future system, is there's really no market for it.

For one, most games don't make it very far; 10th level is about as far as most 5e games get if you're lucky, assuming they don't fizzle out earlier. Getting to level 20 is nigh impossible, due to player boredom, scheduling problems, or any other number of reasons. Creating rules for play even farther than that would go unused by practically every table unless you jumped right to Immortal levels, and at that point, you might as well just be playing another game.

For another, there's the issue of what kind of stories you can tell with such overpowered characters. Obviously there's nothing in the mortal realms that can stop you, so you're only going to be dealing with gods or other beings of that level of power. And in the end, it's probably going to feel a lot like your normal games, only with bigger damage numbers. You might be able to find a creative DM that could come up with interesting scenarios, but most will probably shrug and throw a star-sized dragon at you. (This issue of scale is also why I find Marvel's multiverse shit so tiresome; humans really can't wrap their mind around "this bad guy is gonna destroy a bajillion universes!" so the stakes ironically don't feel important.)

As is, 5e has a couple options for what you're asking:

• Use True Polymorph or Shapechange to transform into something powerful and gain its stat block. The former needs to be cast by someone else, but it can be made permanent (barring a ninth-level dispel) if they concentrate for an hour. The latter only lasts for an hour and has to be cast by you, but you also get to keep all your normal class abilities.
• Keep playing past level 20 and get Epic Boons from your DM for every 30k XP. Immortality will stop that pesky aging thing, and you can get a bunch of other fun things like extra spellcasting, every skill proficiency, truesight, and so on. Or you can keep giving yourself ability score increases up to 30.
• Wish. Odds are good that your DM will fuck with you if you try and wish supreme power for yourself, and no matter how clever you think you can word it, they will likely find some loophole to ruin your good time.
  • A better alternative is to abuse the Wish+Simulacrum interaction to safely and repeatedly cast Wish even for outcomes that could remove your ability to cast it. Then you can use your own wishes for spell duplication and slowly but surely build up an entire fiefdom that's borderline unconquerable while stashing some clone bodies away just in case you do get offed.

Beyond that, you'll have to look for homebrew, but I doubt you're going to find a lot of options. And if you do, they'll likely be either wildly imbalanced or not fun to play, possibly both. Stick to low levels, that's what everyone else does.

 

[The Ugly One]

This is any past 2e shit. Oh you hit this level you get this thing, it's exactly the same thing, every fucking character gets exactly the same thing.

That's just some gay bullshit.

As opposed to AD&D 1e, where your THAC0 goes down and that's it. I genuinely don't know what you're on about. Come to think of it, none of the TTRPGs I like have widget trees like you see in Diablo and most video games.

 

[strawberry15]

As opposed to AD&D 1e, where your THAC0 goes down and that's it. I genuinely don't know what you're on about. Come to think of it, none of the TTRPGs I like have widget trees like you see in Diablo and most video games.

Thac0 was in 2e, the to hit matrixes were with 1e. tbh they all are the same in a way but there is that. someone should just open adnd game here we roll 3d6's for our stats like a true man.

 

[Lucky Coin]

ACKS does okay. Magic items are extremely expensive to create. ACKS II tightens up the system a bit.

ACKS is the system that has fleshed out domain level play rules, right? I've always wanted to run a domain level game because they seem interesting but I've never met anyone who has actually played at domain level.

 

[The Ugly One]

Thac0 was in 2e, the to hit matrixes were with 1e.

They're the same thing. 1e character sheets had you write down your THAC from 0 to 9. By and large, very little changed on this sheet as you leveled up except THAC, save, and HP at prescribed intervals.

ACKS is the system that has fleshed out domain level play rules, right? I've always wanted to run a domain level game because they seem interesting but I've never met anyone who has actually played at domain level.

ACKS fleshes out economics, population, henchmen, base construction, and more. The econ stuff is detailed enough to change the game without being cumbersome to run. Basically, each town has a class, and the class affects the availability of goods. You won't be buying plate armor or fencing a magical amulet in a fishing village. It affects the game nontrivially, because your party actually does need to travel major cities to get things done.

 

[Irish Turtle]

But why though?

more options for higher levels

 

[LovisXVI]

I really wish dnd had a way to make your charecter ascend to becoming a devil or demon and gave you that kind of statblock, creating this kinda stuff for dnd is litterally free it costs some paper to print but can make wizards a ton of money.

Well Pathfinder does have Mythic stuff, which is more or less what you are talking about. Generally if you are into builds and whatnot PF1 hews closer to that sort of thing.

 

[Irish Turtle]

Well Pathfinder does have Mythic stuff, which is more or less what you are talking about. Generally if you are into builds and whatnot PF1 hews closer to that sort of thing.

thanks for telling me, my orginal idea with ascending to devil status for some charecters was to have a way to implement my strong charecters in lore for example I want my evil fiend warlock to have a way to ascend to replace her father as an archdevil. One flaw of dnd is that its kinda limiting on what you can do in high levels.

 

[Mr. Manchester]

Well Pathfinder does have Mythic stuff, which is more or less what you are talking about. Generally if you are into builds and whatnot PF1 hews closer to that sort of thing.

I've dipped my toe into the mythic rules a little bit and they feel as powerful as they should be. Big thing with pf1e is getting powers that let you break rules. Even mythic rank one breaks a lot of fucking rules.

It's definately paizo's version of the epic level handbook except you can toss mythic ranks on a 1 hit die kobold if you wanted. I think I like it best as a temporary boost when running. The evil wizard finishes his dark ritual and gains a power boost for the final fight or whatever.

It's also a nice answer to characters that have... over engineered themselves.