- Joined
- May 25, 2024
Well technically speaking as @Mr. Manchester said, they aren't based on class levels, and can be introduced whenever you want.
Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)
- Thread starter Surtur
- Start date
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2020
Pathfinder
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2020
A mortal attempting descension in such a way is the hook for an entire campaign, not a blurb in a source book.
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2014
Also the matter that at least in 3.5 there's a decent batch of prestige classes that actually do that as the capstone. It's a good template, which is why a lot of them aren't that good hilariously.
- Joined
- Oct 10, 2014
I think I liked the grapple rules a little better in 3.5. Large gave you a +4 bonus per category instead a +1. Made you want to have giants grab people more.
Overall I like Pathfinder better though, closed up a lot of fucked up spells from 3.5. Polymorph was ridiculous.
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
Favorite D&D depends on what I'm playing.
4e until the end of the run was great from books to modules for just "Just shut the fuck up and play" when I just want to run an adventure. Easy to balance, easy for new people to manage their abilities, no vancian magic horse shit. No bullshit grapple, players can't just cheese combat. And 4e modules are super easy to run. And minions.
Worst part of 4e is its basically bounce from encounter to encounter with a little roleplay in between. Economy is all sorts of broken. And the math is so formulatic its a little soulless. And encounters can drag.
But if I just want to do a one-shot to run a mini-campaign for a couple of months, 4e.
3.5 SRD is what I fall back to a lot for general game design because that's what I cut my teeth on. The SRD RAW is fine with a few rough spots, but mainly the extra content make it broken. Also grapple flow chart.
If I'm doing a custom campaign, 3.5. But that's changing.
B/X is new all-around favorite since I got OSR pilled. Combat is fast, 1-minute rounds make complex actions easier to handwave away, lvl 1 or lvl 10 combat is still dangerous, and it makes stuff like travel between places matter.
New favorite for oneshots. Once I find a group of regular players this might take over my campaign go-to.
4e until the end of the run was great from books to modules for just "Just shut the fuck up and play" when I just want to run an adventure. Easy to balance, easy for new people to manage their abilities, no vancian magic horse shit. No bullshit grapple, players can't just cheese combat. And 4e modules are super easy to run. And minions.
Worst part of 4e is its basically bounce from encounter to encounter with a little roleplay in between. Economy is all sorts of broken. And the math is so formulatic its a little soulless. And encounters can drag.
But if I just want to do a one-shot to run a mini-campaign for a couple of months, 4e.
3.5 SRD is what I fall back to a lot for general game design because that's what I cut my teeth on. The SRD RAW is fine with a few rough spots, but mainly the extra content make it broken. Also grapple flow chart.
If I'm doing a custom campaign, 3.5. But that's changing.
B/X is new all-around favorite since I got OSR pilled. Combat is fast, 1-minute rounds make complex actions easier to handwave away, lvl 1 or lvl 10 combat is still dangerous, and it makes stuff like travel between places matter.
New favorite for oneshots. Once I find a group of regular players this might take over my campaign go-to.
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2024
Question playing a Sorc in 3.5 just got to level four at the end of this session. What level spell should I pick
Cantrips
Detect magic
Prestidigitation
Mage hand
Fleeting flame
Silent portal
Mending
1st Level
Shield
Fist of Stone (We have a Monk he loves me because of this spell alone)
Grease
2st Level
Web for the classic grease web combo.
Mirror Image or Protection from Arrows for more survivability
Scare seems pretty useful
Aganazzar’s Scorcher just so I can do damage maybe
Cantrips
Detect magic
Prestidigitation
Mage hand
Fleeting flame
Silent portal
Mending
1st Level
Shield
Fist of Stone (We have a Monk he loves me because of this spell alone)
Grease
2st Level
Web for the classic grease web combo.
Mirror Image or Protection from Arrows for more survivability
Scare seems pretty useful
Aganazzar’s Scorcher just so I can do damage maybe
- Joined
- Oct 31, 2021
What you want for that in particular are the apotheosis occult rituals. The chain goes attract patron> fleshgraft blessing > half fiend template > ascension to fiend. It involves a lot of human sacrifice and some amount of questing. You might have to sacrifice the high priest of a good religion, or raid one of their prisons to bust a devil out.
- Joined
- Oct 10, 2014
Your monk will really love you if you pick up mage armor. Doesn't screw up his monk AC. At some point you'll want magic missile because it's just that good. Silent image is good utility because it'll stay up as long as you keep concentrating, I'm fond of making a big wall of opaque shadow to block line of sight for a round and if you want to be a dick about it send "shadow spikes" through your party members so they automatically disbelieve your illusion and can see through it.
At 4th level web is usually the first thing I think of but don't sleep on glitterdust. Blinds in an area, solves any problem with something turning invisible. Scare has a limit of 6HD, so it'll become useless pretty fast. If you're fighting hoards of things all the time it isn't bad but you're not going to take out some big monster with it.
Honorable mention for control undead. Unintelligent undead does not get a save on it, so if you're fighting some idiot that likes to make big giant skeletons you can checkmate him pretty quick. More of something a wizard would keep in his back pocket though.
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2014
A spell that also scales well in damage, if you also play with damage dealing, is Kelgore's Firebolt. You always get at worst half damage barring feats the target has due to it being save or suck, and it can do up to 5d6 damage scaling. It's a good toolkit damage dealer up until the midgame.
After that, Mage Armor in general. It's a damn useful spell no matter who you cast it on. That improved AC is useful not just to your monk buddy, but yourself too as need be.
Knock, bolstering spells like Bull's Strength, and others are also available to you. Numbing Sphere can be fun, since you can control its movements and cripple an enemy's dexterity if they get sucked up into the frozone.
After that, Mage Armor in general. It's a damn useful spell no matter who you cast it on. That improved AC is useful not just to your monk buddy, but yourself too as need be.
Knock, bolstering spells like Bull's Strength, and others are also available to you. Numbing Sphere can be fun, since you can control its movements and cripple an enemy's dexterity if they get sucked up into the frozone.
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2024
Interesting I should have picked mage armor instead forgot it was not just personal. Might switch shield for mage armor though I do kind feel like I am doing nothing most of the time in fights if we have the time to prebuff I throw out a grease maybe though most of the time I am shooting the crossbow and missing most of the time.
Other players say it's fine and the control and support is making their lives easier, but the thought of not really killing anything does make you feel useless.
Other players say it's fine and the control and support is making their lives easier, but the thought of not really killing anything does make you feel useless.
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2020
Buffing and battlefield control is way more powerful in 3.x than it is in 5e. I'm seconding glitterdust, it's a fucking amazing spell.
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2022
Quick question; does anyone here know much about d20 Modern? I was trying to look a bit more into the setting, to get some ideas for characters; was looking for some ideas on firearms, in particular, which classes using what. Haven't found much so far, only thing I've found yet is this article from 2015 which has some very... odd rules on guns:
(I can get why Druids wouldn't like guns - hippies and all that - but why Sorcerer? Why does Rogue is forced to use only longarms or sidearms; why not both? You guys have any thoughts?)
Anyone got any suggestions on d20 Modern?
(I can get why Druids wouldn't like guns - hippies and all that - but why Sorcerer? Why does Rogue is forced to use only longarms or sidearms; why not both? You guys have any thoughts?)
Anyone got any suggestions on d20 Modern?
- Joined
- Oct 10, 2014
To piggyback off of @40 Year Old Boomer it's probably the best role you can play as a caster. Sorcerers take a little bit longer to go fully online just because of the limited spells you can cast but once you hit 6th you'll have most of your bases covered to do something good every round. Using glitterdust as an example, a blinded enemy just has a straight up 50% chance to miss against your monk friend who already probably has a solid AC which is also because of you. That enemy is also flat footed so your monk, who suffers from a lower base attack bonus is more likely to hit with that flurry of blows he might have trouble hitting with. Just ask yourself, "Who really won the fight here?"
I wouldn't take it this level but levitate is really good utility. It's not as good as it is in 5e (you can cast it on enemies and just remove them from combat) but unlike fly you can cast it at close range on objects. At 5th level you can lift 500 lbs so you can lift a lot of shit that's causing problems. As a sorcerer you can hit the whole party with it too, invest in some ropes and grappling hooks and you can solve a lot of "how do we get us from here to there" puzzles that are trouble for lower level parties. I've seen rivers kill multiple PCs more than once.
Invisibility isn't bad either. As a wizard I'd hunt for a scroll of it but I'd have better things to do with my spell slots unless I had a specific need for it, as a sorcerer you have enough spell slots to hit the whole party with it. Normally, even for very stealthy characters, sneaking off on your own seems like a good idea when it's a really fucking bad idea. Waltzing the entire party past every enemy and getting right next to what would have normally been the final boss is another story. Surprise round, everyone's flat footed, enemy wizard is flanked and can't five-foot, etc.
In both of those examples just keep in mind what you can do that no other class in the core rules can do: shit out the same spell over and over again. Use that.
Still voting magic missile for your damage spell because shadows suck ass.
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- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
Magic missile has always been the GOAT low level character spell, and also has the advantage of just getting better at higher level.
Fireball can be pretty great, too, but I was always super autistic about knowing the exact dimension of every room and hallway, so if you just went around randomly chucking fireballs at everything you could easily kill your whole party. I would warn, but my mechanic was a fireball was a hemisphere of the circumference specified, but if there wasn't space available, it would come right back at you in the hallway, and potentially also wreck other shit than just the party.
So above ground you could eyeball and know exactly how big it was going to be. Underground, though? You'd best know what you're chucking that thing into.
derpherp2
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2020
Just realized from all this talk 5E warlock is like PF2 Kineticist but all the slots are literally the same, eldritch invocations, spells, but at least eldritch blast is free.
Only difference is kineticist is a tanky motherfucker compared to warlock's CHA-based skill monke.
As in a Kineticist, by circumstance, has A LOT more HP than a barbarian, and with the right elemental build, be tankier than a paladin. Also brap cannon
Only difference is kineticist is a tanky motherfucker compared to warlock's CHA-based skill monke.
As in a Kineticist, by circumstance, has A LOT more HP than a barbarian, and with the right elemental build, be tankier than a paladin. Also brap cannon
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2024
I usually go with Haste, slow or hold person if we are fighting a lot of humanoids for my first level 3. Haste just makes your frontline just better and slow is good for both offense and defense. A held person is just dead the fighter is going to kill them they are not getting the chance to break out next turn.
- Joined
- Jul 6, 2016
Yeah, there's a health splash of 3.5 warlock in there too where you are changing the properties of your blasts on the fly and it's much more complicated and build your own class-esque than the 5e version (which are features imo)
The bad part about how it's designed is that none of your blasts are strikes for whatever reason which is an explicit PF2 keyword meme assigned to most attack roll actions so blasts interact badly with most of the rest of the game. Like if you get attack of opportunity somehow you can't use a blast to react with.
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
It's a toss-up between 5e and BECMI. I ran 5e for almost its entire life, and I only had a couple only major frustrations with it:
- HP and damage pools are way too large
- Players level up too fast (easy to fix, I just used AD&D's XP system)
- Too many widgets on the sheet by level 8 or so, slowing down the game as players try to decide what to do.
If your game is game is boring if players aren't not choosing a new character widget every two to three sessions, then the problem isn't the rule set, the problem is that your game master is boring and runs boring games with boring adventures. There are RPG system where the only "powers" you ever get is that your chance to succeed on a task goes up or down. I credit the OSR movement for clarifying to me that if that's how your game is, your players aren't actually engaged with the adventure, they're just playing with their character sheet.
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2018
My big frustration with 5e was that the game makes it too hard for the players to die and the challenge rating system isn’t reflective of anything real. I solved this by throwing death saves out the window and making it so that you died after going to negative nine plus con modifier HP.