KurtDunniehue @ KurtDunniehue @ttrpg.network

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2 yr. ago

Truly what it would need to do is trigger when a creature moves within 5 ft of you or an ally.

The creatures will still melee attack prior to your reaction as is. It isn't avoidance of the initial attack, as monks can currently perform. It's only able to let you and an ally potentially avoid an attack of opportunity on your own turns.

The Unarmed Strike part of the subclass I think would be more for crowd control than damage. You can knock a bad guy prone thanks to having expertise in Athletics (hopefully they re-word this subclass and Martial Arts so the Shove/Grapple features of unarmed strikes can use DEX instead of STR for DCs in these two instances).

As you've pointed out, as written it doesn't work that way, and you wouldn't need to increase the damage die to get that effect. If that was the intent of the feature, WotC would put on a 'push' rider to the attack IMO.

For AC, you do also get access to either or all of Shield, Mage Armor, and Shield of Faith making you hard to hit even with a slightly lower DEX to focus on CHA first. The Monk through magic initiate or multiclass could get the same but not as easily as the Bard.

Unfortunately Mage Armor would overwrite the unarmored defense feature. Shield is the only thing that makes this class possibly have decent AC, but I am hoping and praying that it gets the nerf-stick in an upcoming UA.

But concentration spells should be avoided, unless you are putting it on a frontliner that has solid means of focusing all attack rolls onto themselves. Concentration is such a valuable resource that you can't spend it on yourself to protect just yourself IMO.

...Booming Blade...

Booming Blade and Green Flame Blade aren't on the spell lists for this playtest tho, which greatly reduce the capability of fullcasters' to spellblade it up.

But in general I see this Bard as you're depicting it, except as a support first and foremost that does not make proactive use of its unarmed attack. Because there isn't enough incentive to put yourself into danger unless you want to save on spell slots but still deal damage.

Not really this post is burying the lede.

A 5e fighter gets another feature called "action surge" which let's them perform another full attack action once per short rest. This means that each time they get another attack, their damage potential for a single round of combat goes up by two attacks. This makes them about the best focus-damage Nova builds.

Well, outside of conjure animals and paladins because WotC fucked up hard with them (but that is getting fixed in the 2024 revision).

edit: Besides I remember the dead levels of 3.5e.

Okay but compare that to 3/4 monks, who get to attack an enemy on their turn, and either push them far away at the end of their attacks or disengage for free, and then use their +15 feet of movement to position themselves further away, all before an enemy creature gets to have its turn. A well played elements monk can easily outage and kite enemies without ever putting themselves into attack range as well. A shadow monk can use darkness's full obscurement to simply walk away, or teleport far away.

The dance Bard has to get into melee range, then wait for another creature to have its full turn to do all the offensive things it wants to do, before ending its turn next to an ally, then they can move away.

It's not at all comparable. It's a good support ability for an ally, not a reliable mobility and disengage tool for the bard.

And so does the Dance Bard. Inspiring Movement does not trigger attacks of opportunity, so if an enemy ends next to one of your ally, you can move up to 15ft (halve movement) away from nearby opponents without getting attack. Your ally can then move up to 60ft (regardless of their own movement limitations) in response. It’s a bit clunky, but something that you can trigger relatively regularly.

This doesn't actually get YOU out of danger tho, it depends on another ally being in danger, and only after a creature was able to use its action. The ability clearly wants you to use it to swap with an ally who is in danger, and swat the offending creature. Most other monks gets to somewhat trivially prevent attacks of opportunity on their own turn, by shoving enemies away (Elements & Hand) and using their higher movement to get out of their movement range, or the ability to cover themselves with darkness to prevent enemies from being able to attack (Shadow). As a result, they can go in, attack, and move away to safety. Bards have to stand there to take it until an enemy triggers their Inspiring Movement, and they don't have higher movement speed of a Monk.

Level 5 - Bard can spend their spell slots to use Bardic Inspiration once per turn. This means a bard can get up 2 back per round from Font. (burn a spell slot on your turn to use a bardic inspiration, then on another player or opponent’s turn, burn another to gain a new one once you have used your prior).

That's a good point! I didn't clock that, mostly because I only built the Bard up to level 4 and I was looking over the subclass more than the main class. That would be a good exchange in the right situation. Cheers!

My mistake, I meant Deadly to Difficult.

Deadly is supposed to be used as a 'hey watch out buddy!' difficulty rating.

If Difficult is sufficiently dramatic, then it wouldn't really matter IMO. Although I wouldn't be against a 'beyond deadly' category being formalized.

Actually someone on the discord pointed something out that changed my position on this: There is language in the DMG about raising or lowering fight difficulties by full categories if resistance is or is not present.

I am aware of this language, it includes a lot of other general guidance as well, such as tactical advantages and damage being sustained each round by one side but not the other (it's actually a great way to alter difficulty on the fly without fudging!).

If we just keep that rule of thumb in mind, we can craft deadly encounters, and ratchet them down to 'hard' when the players are able to circumvent the damage resistances. If CR remains as useful as it has for me in the UA playtest, that might be enough to have dramatic and fulfilling combats.

Resistance and immunity to non magical B/P/S is kind of annoying to run. At a certain higer level it never matters since all characters will have at least one magic weapon and at lower levels no one will have it.

Well here's the weird thing, it does matter because all creatures with resistance to BSP are rated at having 2x the Effective HP of creatures that don't have it, in terms of CR calculation. So every time you pulled out a monster with resistance to BSP and it got trounced by the party who were kitted out to ignore that defense makes perfect sense. The CR system doesn't account for the fact that everyone is ignoring it.

I want to really give this a more thorough shot, by continuing my playtest and not giving anyone any magic items. I want to see how well CR performs with nothing but the baseline class features.

[5e] Astral Elf or Eladrin would be perfect to have all the teleportation the Ciri does, as their Fey Step or Astral Step will allow a lot of trivial, non-spellcasting 30 foot teleportations. And bonus: Ciri is part elf!

Additionally Relentless Hex will allow the character to teleport directly to their hexed opponent.

Medium armor is there to represent aesthetics as well. Additionally, Invocations can be learned for Planeshift, teleport, and other flavorful selections to represent Ciri's ability to traverse different worlds entirely. Additionally, turn by turn a hexblade can get by without using magical blasts, just using their sword and various things that boost the damage output.

And while the OneD&D UA for Warlock doesn't have the hexblade class yet, I feel like it would more easily represent Ciri's casual use of magic as well as the depths of magical ability she can sometimes call on.

Conjure animals works by throwing that spell card into the garbage as I put 'Summon Beast' in its place.

I think what you're largely missing is how the damage ceiling has come down due to the removal of many methods that optimizers would use to stack a lot of damage into a single turn.

Given that, the lack of damage increase is either fine, or only slightly sub-par.

On another note, I am mildly concerned that Weapon Mastery is being spread around so much. It is popular, but I felt it would be most appropriate as a feature that is strictly for Warrior Classes, and this makes the distinction of what is or isn't a Warrior fuzzy.

Not that this is a big problem, just mildly concerning.

I cannot wait to get my hands on the changes.

For roguess, I confidently predict that Sneak attack will become once-per-round in some way some how. Cunning Strike is likely a way to claw back some of the high end damage potential that is lost by performing what is now a Rules-As-Written Loophole on doublestacking sneak attacks by somehow triggering off-turn attacks using your reaction.

I predict that it will have the following options:

1. Just damage
2. Status effects
3. Mobility

And perhaps more. This will be the opt in complexity that is missing from the Rogue at the top end of Tier 2 and onwards, allowing people who just like their simple rogues to deal more damage, and for tactical masterminds to pull of clutch moves.

While this is all well and good, I think the OneD&D playtest provided a great fix on the biggest issue I've had with the mechanic: Remembering it exists.

Simply stating that on an unmodified 20 or 1 that Inspiration is granted is a fantastic way to remind the GM that they should give this out more often. It's gotten to the point that in cases where I would have previously given ad-hoc advantage, I now give inspiration where the player can make use of it if they feel like they want or not.

Also I have adopted those rules for both hero points in PF2e, and my regular D&D5e game. I mean both of them.

How it works....

A player rolls a Natural 1 - They get inspiration to use on a future roll. A player rolls a Natural 20 - They choose another player at the table who gets inspiration.

These two together more or less ensures that there's an amount of inspiration floating around all the time. But this also solves an issue where a hot-streak gets hotter, and someone with luck early on will get more of a spotlight later. By making success something that gives a boon to someone else, you build espirt de corps as everyone celebrates eachothers' successes more, and the spotlight be more likely to move to another player.

As I said before, this system works fantastic in both Pathfinder and D&D. The only downside is that it feels like PCs have an extra layer of plot armor, but that is mitigated by the fact that it wasn't my decision that I made capriciously. Also it makes math rocks a little more 'WEEE'!

It also allows WotC the ability to carefully calibrate damage outputs in a way that works with CR in a consistent way, and gives 3rd party developers or homebrewing DMs a consistent rubric to show what kind of boosts are acceptable within the game's math.

Honestly all they have to do is fix the outlier spells, and we're looking at another iteration of D&D with very well honed CR.

I think this mismatch will likely be fixed in OneD&D, as the Ancients Paladin is revised to have a more broadly applicable feature.

My suggested fix would be to make it resistance to all the common draconic damage types. Fire, Cold, Lightning, Poison, and Acid.

Does Neverwinter Nights count? It was sub-bar D&D online, with janky real time mechanics, built on 3.5e ruleset. If anyone else remembers the persistent server City of Arabel, it was like a smaller scale MMO set in the jewel of Cormyr. I have a lot of neat memories, but its fairly bittersweet because if you weren't in a particular playerbase clique, you were a de-facto NPC.

That was my inroad into D&D. I lovingly crafted busted builds that worked only because of quirks of the aforementioned jank.

Cheers! Thanks for the 'Lazy DM's Guide' books. They have been a gamechanger for my prep.

1on1 roleplaying has been a staple of my marriage since almost the very beginning! I cannot recommend it more to happy roleplaying couples, it's a fantastic group activity. The wife and I swap back and forth who is doing the DMing.

I also get to playtest new game systems during these games. We've done first played FFG's Star Wars, PF2e, and Worlds Without Number in a 1on1 context before doing anything at a larger table.