FearfulSalad @ FearfulSalad @ttrpg.network

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Joined

2 yr. ago

I think some of WotC's design philosophy with 5.5 is about encouraging faster progression so that more groups do get to 20.

However, their focus on revamping the PHB, rather than the DMG, leaves the onus for balance on the DM, which has IMO always been the limiting factor. Designing encounters for level 17 players is wildly different from level 16 players. If capstones come at 18 and represent anything close to the power jump that 9th level spells provide, that's two back-to-back power jumps in very close succession. IMO that would actually drive more DMs to end at 17, rather than 18, or even sooner to avoid reaching those T4 power jumps at all. If they delay their BBEG encounter until those powerups, they have little to no experience with their group's new abilities to accurately balance on the knife's edge of very deadly, and risk either a TPK or a floppy conclusion if they miscalculate. "Easier to balance in T3, and end there" is, I believe, still the status quo.

Now, if after the PHB rewrite they make it easier for DMs to balance T4 encounters in a DMG rewrite, thst might change things. In that case, spreading the power jumps out still makes sense to me.

Right, which maintains a disproportionate onus on the DM to intervene on every turn (both the monsters' and the PC's turns). Deferring success or failure to a bot (avrae) given a shared understanding of the rules allows the players to own their own narration (e.g. I decide how badly I faceplant after failing to jump the obstacle, rather than the DM doing it), and reduces the time commitment that DMing otherwise takes. The DM is already necessary during social and exploration pillars, where the go-then-roll is often required just b/c the check to make is not obvious (unless the DM makes prodigious use of spoiler text and passive skills). Roll-then-go in combat however is, IMO, superior for speed and player engagement.

Reactions need special care in roll-then-go, with strategies being necessary like declaring them ahead of time, retconning, or, my favorite, narrating what actually happened (e.g. to show how the pre-reaction narration was a fork in reality that didn't happen the way it looked).

It depends on your medium of play, the members of the table, on how much trust there is, and on how crunchy the entire experience is allowed to feel. These days most of my D&D is in play-by-post discord servers, and I tend to stick to ones that are roll-then-go. It lets the player run the mechanics of their actions through avrae and find out successes and failures, and then describe how they do what they do. There is a strong onus on everyone understanding the game mechanics, and only engaging the DM in "can I?" Questions when pushing the envelope with improvised actions. The result is a faster (IMO) game with better writing (which starts to read like collaborative storytelling, especially if everyone uses a literary style).

In a go-then-roll world, the burden falls on the DM to "ratify" each character's intended actions. "

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Oh, certainly! But then, I would avoid coming up with a policy at all until the amount of content reaches critical mass. If you're not ready for whatever will be the right policy, why bother enacting one that you know you'll have to walk back or ammend later?

RE Battlemaps: strongly opposed to allowing them. Lemmy.world already has a battlemaps community. Ttrpg.network is welcome to make such a community too, I suppose. That content works for many more ttrpgs than dnd, so putting it in its own space makes more sense than allowing it in here.

RE artwork, if someone wants to post a hand-drawn scene of their group's epic win/loss against the bbeg, that's cool. I think we like seeing dnd success stories from folks, and a picture can be worth a thousand words. But, if that person is open for commissions, I would strongly prefer not to know about it.

IMO advertising needs to be segregated to opt-in communities kept exclusively for that purpose, much like LFG posts get their own space to mot pollute the general discussion.

(Similarly, links out to other sites that have comment sections, like youtube, should IMO be required to have actual supporting text content worthy of discussion, as without it they are just more advertising. That's outside the scope of the original discussion tho.)

Edit: RE homebrew--IMO it too should be sequestered, as it represents a divergence from everyone else's frame of reference.

All of the above. It's AI generated, which, while interesting, is black-mirroresque after the past few years where people have put real effort in holding sessions and recording them for podcasts. It also features some really annoying voices, several of whom are in politics--it's unsurprising that the community doesn't want those voices to have airspace here. It's also not good. Much of the banter is weak (or only "funny" by being offensive, which is also weak) and the DM exposition is bland. And it's a link out, rather than a conversation--youtube has a comment section to discuss the video, making it being linked here nothing more than advertising. Advertising, while necessary for businesses, is absolutely horrible to the individuals bombarded with it who did not sign up for it. It's one thing to have a bespoke community to serve as a link aggregator that people can opt into, but the downvotes here serve as a critique of this type of content moving forward. At least, that's some reasons why I would downvote this.

I strongly recommend not multiclassing for flavor--the only good reason in 5e to multiclass is for mechanics (Flavor is free, Mechanics are expensive). PDK flavor is great, but the mechanics are awful--and while both Warlock and Sorcerer would give you some mechanical advantages, they won't offer quite enough to make PDK good.

What about just being a Valor or Swords bard, flavored as a PDK? Mechanically, a Bard can do just about everything that the PDK subclass offers but better and sooner, and both Swords and Valor get you extra attack at roughly the same pace. Unless you are dead-set on heavy armor, you shouldn't need any feats or MCs to make this work for you (and if you are so inclined, then Heavily Armored on Valor Bard works just fine to be Str-based instead of Dex-based). The only mechanical caveat with Valor bard is that you need a musical instrument to cast some of your bard spells--you can either stick to Verbal and Verbal+Somatic spells, or else grab a lute. Flavoring the bard magic as "woah, my words and music are suddenly making thing happen, rather than just being entertainment" fits pretty well with your Wild Magic Sorcerer idea. And lastly, Bards make amazing faces.