After a bunch of years (heck, it probably approaches “decades” by now) away from the gaming table, I recently decided to try and join an RPG group. Fortunately, there is a gaming store near me with an associated MeetUp group so I was able to see what’s going on and send out a few feelers. After a couple discouraging days of no responses (didn’t take it personally but wanted to get the ball rolling) a new campaign popped up that I jumped on and one of the guys I messaged last week just wrote back seemingly excited for a new player. So I guess I’m in two groups. Luckily, the first one is only for 2-3 weeks (has a set module he’s doing) so I won’t have to juggle long. Plus, each evening is only 2-3 hours – no all night/weekend marathon sessions for me.
Picked up a copy of the 5e PHB. Man, things have changed. Last edition I seriously played was 1st with a dabble into the 2e source books when they started pushing those. I have to say, at a glance it looks as though difficulty was reduced with all races getting bonuses (and no penalties) and the generic looking stat generation. No having to deal with a 6 in Dexterity (and no thrill of rolling an 18 either). Between that and the opening of all classes for all races, it’s certainly a shift. I’m keeping an open mind despite my initial impressions and, of course, the DM counts for a whole lot more of the game than how you determined your Charisma score.
At least one of the games is running per Adventurer’s League rules with the DCI tracking and all that jazz. Think the other is a bit more casual.
Thinking about taking advantage of the new lax rules and making an half-elven paladin of Lliira for the new campaign. Do priests/paladins still have to hold the same alignment as their patron deity? NG almost makes more sense than CG for a paladin but I can do CG easily enough. I do like that there’s more paladin options now than pure cranky Holy McEvilsmiter – Oath of the Ancients looks promising.
Any additional resources worth checking out? Tips, stories or general commentary welcome. This almost feels like more of a MPSIMS post but I know it’d just get bounced back here anyway
Paladins in 5e aren’t required to have any deity whatsoever. If you do choose a deity, it’s really not going to matter all that much what alignment you take. Alignment has virtually no mechanical effect whatsoever in 5e (the only place where I think it might matter is some magical items require a good or evil alignment? Don’t quote me on that). Alignment has really only been maintained as a roleplaying aid for players. If you’re unsure how your character would react to a certain situation, then it can be nice to have a framework to focus your decision making.
Wow, you really have been away for a while if “any class being any race” is what looks new to you. Not only will people not consider you to be “taking advantage of the rules” by playing an elf paladin, most likely nobody will even notice.
And there are almost no rules concerning alignment at all, any more, in 5th edition. By the rules, you can be a chaotic neutral paladin of devotion who worships a lawful evil deity (though you’d probably want to have one heck of a backstory to justify that one!). There aren’t even any spells like Detect Evil any more: What the equivalent spells do now is basically just detect supernatural beings.
“Taking advantage” just meant “I might as well go for it”, not that I was doing anything nominally wrong or unorthodox.
Yeah, like I said, the last edition I actually played for any length was the old 1st ed AD&D. And what’s up with this higher number AC being better thing? Get off my lawn!
That was one of the more sensible changes from 2nd to 3rd. Any roll to determine success or failure of something (attack, skill use, saving throw, whatever), you roll a d20, add all of your bonuses, and compare it to a difficulty class (DC) that determines how hard it is. So now you always want to roll high, and higher is better for all of your rolls.
My first d20 is horribly biased. The one and only time it ever rolled a 20 in an actual game situation (i.e., not when I was just doing tons of rolls to test it), my brief moment of elation was quickly eclipsed by the realization that it was a nonweapon proficiency check, one of the cases (back in the day) when you wanted to roll low.
Back in the day you still wanted to roll high on attack rolls. As AC went down, the difficulty (and thus number needed on your d20) went up.
However, yeah, stat rolls you wanted low since you were rolling against your stat score. If you were making a Strength check, roll a d20 and get your STR score or lower to succeed.
Unfortunately, I took one good look at 5e and had no interest.
Seriously, I’ve heard the “we want to make goblins still be a threat at 20th level” before and I think it’s a bunch of shit. I want my epic 20th level character to wade through goblins like they were tissue paper.
The big problem for me was compressing BAB to the 2-6 range.
Yeah, limiting proficiency bonus to a max of +6 was part of their goal of “bounded accuracy”, and it works pretty well at achieving that goal. I still haven’t figured out why they had that goal in the first place, though. I like it when my characters, after a lot of hard work and practice, eventually get really good at doing what they do. There should be some things that are near-effortless for the experienced veteran, that are impossible for the green layman.
Parts seem more complex but I haven’t played yet so it may just be an issue of unfamiliarity. We had a thread once upon a time where some posters were talking about how super difficult it was to play a 1st ed campaign but I was just thinking “I don’t remember it being all that hard”.
The game does seem much more homogenized now and races/classes less ‘special’ in what they bring to the party. Again, trying to refrain from a real judgment call until I’ve actually seen it in action.
I think, at a glance, I may have preferred 3.5e but 5e is what the kids are playing these days so if I want to sit at the table my options are to play 5e or run my own campaigns. Once upon a time (months ago) when I was still toying with the idea of playing again I saw a guy on MeetUp started a 1st ed campaign. Would have been fun to join but he filled up in a snap.
5e is most all that I know. I did play part of a campaign with (I think) 4e and it was ridiculously complicated to set up characters.
My impression as a relative newb is that 5e is a lot more user-friendly than previous editions. We signed up for D&D Encounters at our local gaming store, which is the official Wizards ‘‘get your feet wet’’ short campaign style of D&D. It was fun, but there would be like 50 people in a room (all divided into different groups) and it was a bit much for my introverted self. So the people I most gravitated toward playing with formed a group of our own. Now we have them over to my house every Monday night for a 4-hour run. I believe there are 9 of us (when we all show up.) It’s a great way to make friends.
I started as a Dragonborn Paladin, because Paladins are my style, but the campaign was interrupted and we started a new one, in which I am a Tiefling Sorcerer.
I think it’s pretty cool. The people you are playing with really make all the difference.
Which edition is the most complicated depends on what you consider complicated. The real difference is how much is settled in the rules vs. how much is left up to the DM. Either approach can be considered complicated: The former means that the rulebooks are longer, but the latter means that the DM frequently has to make a decision on the spot on how to handle something, and not only can that be difficult in itself, but what the DM comes up with might well be more complicated than what a professional rule-designer would do.
3rd and 4th had very extensive rules. 5th is more DM-heavy, though I think it might still be a bit less than 1st was. 2nd had a lot of optional rules, but most of them were so widely used that they might as well have just been considered standard rules.
I think we have a good DM. He’s good enough that I can never tell when something is a part of his plan and when he’s improvising, though he has often commented in the aftermath of sessions that they didn’t go as planned. Perhaps 5e puts a higher burden on him than the rest of us, but I haven’t felt that complexity because I have never DMed and really know nothing about how it works.
I think 5e is good for people new to D&D. In the case of D&D Encounters, new players are paired up with an experienced DM. I don’t know if 5e was designed with accessibility in mind, but that seems to be the upshot.
So true. II used to play in a group of folks who were really fun, except the brother of one guy, who thought it was hilarious to make pedophile characters and the like, and was just creepy and gross and awful to play with. My current group? No creepy awful gross people. I love it!
We play Pathfinder, which is great if you love spreadsheets. Which I do, and I’ve got a separate one for my character and for our party loot. In any given round, my attack roll might receive any or all of the following modifications (with a separate button for each on the character sheet). First number is attack roll, second is damage roll:
-Power Attack (-3/+9)
-Rage (+2/+3, additional -2 on armor class)
-Cat’s Grace (+2 AC, +2 attacks of opportunity/round)
-Haste (+1/+0, extra attack)
-Bless (+1/+1)
-Battle Spirit (+2/+2)
-Enlarge (+0/+2, use totally different dice for the weapon, additional -2 AC)
-Buddy hit that person with a charge (+1/+0)
-My 1/day ability to add elemental damage (+0/+1d6)
It’s kind of insane to keep track of. Sometimes I wish we were playing 5E.
The bounded accuracy thing is to help D&D span levels a little bit better. One of the problems with every previous edition is that at low levels, the die roll was way more important that your bonus, but at high levels, often the die roll itself was almost window dressing because your bonus was so damn big. It’s an effort to keep the amount of “swinginess” a little more constant. It also has the beneficial effect of reducing the amount of power creep and feat bloat that the game is susceptible to.
On the one hand, it’s a goal I endorse, but on the other hand, D&D is so much ABOUT those huge power swings that I’m not sure how good an idea it is.
It’s not really MORE complex than AD&D1, it’s just differently complex. AD&D1 had all kinds of crazy B.S. rules for random stuff and none of them worked remotely the same way, and lots of people ignored huge swaths of them anyway (Raise your hand if you ignored Weapon Speed Factor). Newer editions are more standardized, but include more “toys” instead.
Huh. I never felt there was much “special” about races even back in 1e. Heck, in basic D&D, races were just other classes. (“I am Elf, professionally.”) It’s true that the paladin, druid and ranger aren’t the hilariously overpowered classes they used to be, but that’s more that other classes suck less. (Lookin’ at you, FIGHTER.)
5E is definitely designed to be a more forgiving game, and it has been doing a good job of bringing in new blood.
True that. I remember somewhere seeing a Gygaxian table (I think it was actually created by Gygax himself) to roll on for a random prostitute, with results such as “slatternly whore” or “high-society escort”. Never mind that you’d almost never have any situation where both of those would be realistic possibilities, and that you’d be much better served with a “slums” encounter table that included the whore, a variety of pickpockets, a beggar, and a stray dog, plus a “noble ball” encounter table that included the escort, a debutante princess, a pair of feuding nobles, and a rich, upwardly mobile merchant.
1st ed also had the never used table for how a select weapon got bonuses or penalties against select armors. So a dagger took a penalty to hit against plate armor but a bec-de-corbin (designed to pierce armor) gained a bonus.
Of course, when I contacted my DM-to-be to ask if he was using the simple or advanced encumbrance rules (do I need to carry 20# of rations?), he wrote back to say that he disregarded encumbrance entirely. So I guess selectively ignoring rules is still in style.
“Special” really referred to classes and races as a whole and, in terms of races to the class restrictions. So you had your elf mages and dwarf fighters and halfling thieves but under the current system a dwarf wizard or gnome barbarian isn’t any more remarkable than a human one. That’s not a reflection on ability; that comes from anyone potentially buying and taking proficiency in thieves tools instead of it being a select class skill (for example). Really, out of all the classes rogues seemed the most watered down since anyone can pick locks, hide, climb, etc these days. I’ll say again for the record that I’m just having initial impressions having not actually played the system yet.
Tomorrow Sweetgum, the halfling ranger, gets to set out into the world in Campaign A. He’s on a ‘quest’ after accidentally killing the mayor’s award-winning goat (he mistook its rustling in the bushes for a gnoll sneaking up on the mayor’s home) and suddenly realizing that his deity was calling him away to atone somewhere out of town. “So sorry about that, words can’t express… so sorry in fact that I need to leave now.”
Encumbrance is one of those rules that is often best ignored in favor of common sense, but D&D feels it NEEDS to have rules for this stuff. But yes, the hobby a whole has a mysterious aversion to actually playing the game written in the books. This probably stems from the fact that once upon a time, if you tried to do that, you’d never get anything done because AD&D1 was such a mess.
I’m not sure that’s true, since most people will select a race that benefits their class selection. So gnome wizards will be markedly more common than Dwarf wizards.
Sure, anyone COULD - but not easily. You have to spend a valuable feat or multiclass level to do that, so you’d be watering down your “main” abilities to do so. Much like anyone could CHOOSE to take a level of rogue in 3rd edition, or whatever. And if you’re not proficient in Thieves’ Tools, you CAN’T pick locks. And I’d argue it’s pretty silly not to let everyone climb or hide. Rogues are just much BETTER at those things. No one complains that fighters are watered down because anyone can use a weapon, right?
Also, intriguingly, this is D&D getting back to its ultimate roots, because rogues were a relatively late introduction to the game and people were expected to find traps by describing how they looked for them.
That was sortof my point. He’s arguing that this “waters down” rogues. I’m arguing that A) It doesn’t and B) Doing it any other way would not make sense.
