Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?
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@kelly said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
@scottalanmiller said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
I think that I just want to move to Pathfinder.
Pathfinder is basically D&D without traditions that tie you to bad ideas.
I mean it's 100% tradition though. It's a straight copy of the OGL 3.5 rules that they've been, slowly, adding to over the years. Even Starfinder, their Science Fiction version, is basically a reskinned 3.5. While that's not necessarily a bad thing there was a lot of room to improve on the 3.5 ruleset.
I enjoy Pathfinder, I've run it at a few cons, but it's just as clunky and crunchy as 3.5 was, even more so as they have tried to add mechanics on top of it with simplifying the base game.
5e, while not perfect, does improve on the game quite a bit. It's not as jarring as the 3.5->4 edition switch was, and kind of combines the best of both worlds between those two rule sets. My big complaint (and I'll mimic @JaredBusch here) was that they don't put out nearly enough supplements for it. They have moved away from the individual campaign books and moved to online distribution with DMGuild.
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Actually my biggest complaint with 5e is how magic items have been scaled back. This is a continuation from the abomination that was 4e.
I run high magic campaigns because I want the wonderous to happen. I don't want the same boring adventure story every time.
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@coliver said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
@kelly said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
@scottalanmiller said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
I think that I just want to move to Pathfinder.
Pathfinder is basically D&D without traditions that tie you to bad ideas.
I mean it's 100% tradition though. It's a straight copy of the OGL 3.5 rules that they've been, slowly, adding to over the years.
That's what I want. Exactly. I don't want big changes. It's a rule engine, I don't want that changing other than tweaks that are tested over a long period of time. I want changes to be in the story, not in the engine.
In real life, we don't change physics to tell different stories, we write good stories.
That's fundamentally why I detest super hero genre - they tell terrible stories and try to make it interesting by changing physics instead.
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I wasn't playing D&D during 3.5 or 4e, but I have been playing my current 5e campaign for about a year and a half I think. I've heard that a lot of math is needed in pathfinder and 3.5 respectively. I like the roleplaying aspect of it but combat can be boring depending on what your party chooses to do. We have a Bard who made his character a crowd control machine and he trivializes combat sometimes. It ends up taking us an hour or two to resolve a big battle that we had no chance of losing.
I also played a Deathwatch campaign, which I absolutely hated. Spacemarines just don't have a lot of wiggle room for a lot of roleplaying (especially compared to something mostly open like D&D) because ultimately, you're a space marine.
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I've never actually played any pen n paper games...
I guess I should probably give it a try but I feel that making an investment to purchase a book etc would be wasted.
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@wirestyle22 said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
We have a Bard who made his character a crowd control machine and he trivializes combat sometimes. It ends up taking us an hour or two to resolve a big battle that we had no chance of losing.
That means you have a bad DM.
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@jaredbusch said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
@wirestyle22 said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
We have a Bard who made his character a crowd control machine and he trivializes combat sometimes. It ends up taking us an hour or two to resolve a big battle that we had no chance of losing.
That means you have a bad DM.
It's kind of a hard thing to fix from what I'm seeing. Sometimes his CC fails and other times it's OP. What do you think he could do better?
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@wirestyle22 said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
@jaredbusch said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
@wirestyle22 said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
We have a Bard who made his character a crowd control machine and he trivializes combat sometimes. It ends up taking us an hour or two to resolve a big battle that we had no chance of losing.
That means you have a bad DM.
It's kind of a hard thing to fix from what I'm seeing. Sometimes his CC fails and other times it's OP. What do you think he could do better?
Kill off the bard or force a random class reroll
I honestly have no clue, am just being sarcastic.
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@wirestyle22 said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
@jaredbusch said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
@wirestyle22 said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
We have a Bard who made his character a crowd control machine and he trivializes combat sometimes. It ends up taking us an hour or two to resolve a big battle that we had no chance of losing.
That means you have a bad DM.
It's kind of a hard thing to fix from what I'm seeing. Sometimes his CC fails and other times it's OP. What do you think he could do better?
That's easy, introduce a single monster at a higher CR that has advantage on Charisma or Wisdom saves.
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@coliver said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
@wirestyle22 said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
@jaredbusch said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
@wirestyle22 said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
We have a Bard who made his character a crowd control machine and he trivializes combat sometimes. It ends up taking us an hour or two to resolve a big battle that we had no chance of losing.
That means you have a bad DM.
It's kind of a hard thing to fix from what I'm seeing. Sometimes his CC fails and other times it's OP. What do you think he could do better?
That's easy, introduce a single monster at a higher CR that has advantage on Charisma or Wisdom saves.
This guy happens to be the only person attempting to min/max his character so the rest of us are pretty underpowered, myself most of all right now. We've fought things that have advantage on CHA + WIS and it's still just chance. Hypnotic Pattern is pretty damn strong.
He could add in creatures with immunity to charm but I just don't think specifically trying to counter certain spells in the party is necessarily the right way to go either. It's like taking a spell away from him. Not really a solution for the rest of the campaign.
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On a side note, this is a pretty hilarious post: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/8r0z4u/how_edgy_is_your_resident_edgelord/
"I was reading char resumes for a game I was going to run. Came across one, his character duel weilded katanas which were made from his parents spines, because he had killed his parents while possessed by a darkness demon. The demon was now his slave though as he overwhelmed it with his own inner darkness which was greater than any fiend of the hells. Also he had a demon eye and a devil wing.
Rejected faster than you can teleport behind me and say “nothing personnel kid.”
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@wirestyle22 said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
Hypnotic Pattern is pretty damn strong.
I can't count the number of monsters immune to charm.....
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@wirestyle22 said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
He could add in creatures with immunity to charm but I just don't think specifically trying to counter certain spells in the party is necessarily the right way to go either. It's like taking a spell away from him. Not really a solution for the rest of the campaign.
This is the right way to do it. It will force the player to think on their feet and use tools in their arsenal that they haven't touched yet because one of them was so effective. It can lead to dramatic tension and make battles more rewarding.
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@wirestyle22 said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
He could add in creatures with immunity to charm but I just don't think specifically trying to counter certain spells in the party is necessarily the right way to go either. It's like taking a spell away from him. Not really a solution for the rest of the campaign.
This is not correct. The DMs job is to challenge the players. Every single campaign will have some player come to the fore with some skill or ability that is overwhelming.
A good DM will counter it so that the payer has to use other tools and not just rely on their one trick pony.
That doens't mean taking it away. It means thinking for yourself. A DM that cannot think for theirself and change something about the encounters to handle something as simple as a 3rd level illusion needs to hang it up.
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Bards have access to a lot of crowd control. He has fear, hideous laughter, crown of madness, sleep, etc. Luckily sleep doesn't scale well and crown of madness/hypnotic pattern are charms but yeah. If you have to counter hypnotic pattern with all charm immune creatures then that seems like a balance problem.
Hypnotic pattern doesn't have any saves past the first wisdom saving throw. That's 10 turns of CC. Yeah, the enemies allies can wake them up for an action but that is still a tax that a lot of the time can leave them both next to each other or waste two turns of movement and taking attacks of opportunity which can be a strategy in itself. We have been fighting some low intelligence creatures too and they likely wouldn't even realize that from an RP perspective
It just seems to me that the spell itself has balance problems and immunity is your only option to balance it?
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@wirestyle22 said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
It just seems to me that the spell itself has balance problems and immunity is your only option to balance it?
Nope it also needs materials to cast "Glowing incense/crystal vial of glowing material" this is supposed to be fairly expensive and rare outside of a big city unless the Bard can craft it themselves.
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@coliver said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
@wirestyle22 said in Pen and Paper RPGs - What's your favorite?:
It just seems to me that the spell itself has balance problems and immunity is your only option to balance it?
Nope it also needs materials to cast "Glowing incense/crystal vial of glowing material" this is supposed to be fairly expensive and rare outside of a big city unless the Bard can craft it themselves.
Yeah, my DM and each player are keeping track of that stuff. Perhaps we've been given too much access to gold.
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Creatures also need to be able to see the pattern, if they are anywhere with in the 30 foot bubble and have something blocking their view, even partially, then it has no effect.
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I would also house rule this potentially so they get a disadvantaged wisdom save each round.
This also is a concentration spell, meaning the Bard can't do anything else while casting this and as soon as he is done the creatures wake up.
