Rune Knight fighter is a strong contender. I’m not surprised it wasn’t included in BG3 but it rocks.
Giants barbarian is also cool once you’re at 10th+ because of Mighty Impel. Tossing enemies around the room (or just straight up into the air) every single turn is fun.
I don’t like things that only get cool at a high level because generally, 5e doesn’t seem to be designed particularly well for high level play (see also none of the official adventures going past level 12…) - I like classes to be fun, interesting, and flavourful from the get go, usually this is unfortunately only at about level 3, but it’s why I like Clerics as much, you get distinct stuff right away. I think they’re scrapping that and moving that to 3+ too with the next edition though unfortunately :S
Sad times were had at learning that the level cap is two levels before Wyll can learn the Hurl Through Hell technique that his patron puts him through
(Luckily for him he only got horns instead of taking 10d10 psychic damage)
Giants does get other stuff before then, but Mighty Impel is definitely the “coolest” feature to me, so yeah, it is a shame that it doesn’t come online sooner.
Rune Knight is solid from the get-go (well, from 3rd when you get it, at least).
Shadow Monk is another martial I’m a big fan of (and one they made better in BG3, imo - though they buffed monk across the board so all of their subclasses are better now).
wait does actual DND have like, experience and stuff?
does the DM say to each party member ‘good job, you gained 5 exp from this goblin kill.’
i thought it was just people making up rules as they go along their adventure journeys
You can do XP if you’re a sicko into that kind of thing, but most DMs do milestone levelling which is a fancy way of saying that after a good enough time they’ll say ‘ok you level up now’
It’s generally done after the fight rather than per kill but yes.
After doing milestone levelling for a while I’ve found it can lead to some game-attitudes I’m not the largest fan of so I just made my own simple exp system instead
https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/gIeNl4fv99xt
Tell me more.
I’ve only played the one campaign, which was milestone, but it feels like a really good system?
With WFRP and VtM, which both only use XP as they don’t have set levels at all (great!), I tend to reward XP after they solve a certain thing they wanted to solve, with additional xp for particular ‘good’ or clever acts, and xp for reaching specific goals they’ve set - far better than for killing stuff!
With these games I’m also not concerned with not everyone having the same amount of xp, so it feels fun to reward a bit of additional xp for something done particularly well or particularly good rp
Milestone’s definitely better for D&D, considering how much of a bother balancing combat encounters already is , and how much of the game’s weight is already on killing stuff
I’m being murdered by the weather
help
sounds like you’ve made an enemy of a druid
I didn’t do anything to deserve this ;_; its 31° and muggy
In a vaccuum, milestone has a soft encouragement to stay ‘on the rails’ for the ‘main quest’. While DMs can (and should) progress milestones based off of actual things accomplished, both sides can feel that they should only occur once you reach…well, a milestone.
If my story takes the party into the wicked woods of wickedness to defeat a vile fairy (redundant: all fairies are vile) but they get distracted by two sidequests to help out a lumberjack fell a big tree and to rescue a man from being eaten by man-eating spiders, do they milestone level after the sidequests? Just the main quest? What if they do one sidequest but not the other?
In one of my games the party has been travelling through the Mournland to get to a ruined city. The actual travel portion has taken a long time, and because it’s a dangerous wasteland of monsters they’ve had a fair few fights along the way, but actual accomplishment-wise they haven’t done much, so they’ve not levelled. It hurts the reward aspect, somewhat.
In short, it’s very “all or nothing” progression wise.
There’s also the lack of rewards in the short term. If a party fights an enemy that wouldn’t have any realistic loot to enjoy - beasts or aberrations, for example - then victory often just means not being dead, rather than any progression. That feels bad!
It looked like It was shaping up okay too.
You’ve been quite negative about 5e in many posts. Can you tell me briefly what you dislike about it? And what do you like about it, if anything? And if not 5e, then which edition you prefer?
I’ve only had 5e experience, so I have no frame of reference and am genuinely curious.
It’s a (relatively) crunchy, and very wordy system - the core concepts are easy to understand, but there’s so many statuses that all interact slightly differently with actions, and spells in particular, that make it dreadful to actually follow to the rules as written if that’s what you want to do (and that should not be a problem with a ruleset!!)
The core mechanic is one I’m not much enthused by: it’s a very binary pass or fail system, you either succeed or you don’t. A lot of other games have a “you do really well!”, “you succeed, but at a cost”, etc. or a degrees of success/failure system that feels much more gradient, without being even slightly more complex for it.
Various mechanics interact with this in a way that isn’t particularly exciting; armour doesn’t protect your character when they’re hit, it simply makes the binary success/fail chance enemies have to hit you more likely to be a fail, spells will either simply not work or do a bit of damage and have no further effects instead, etc.
I find that, especially, hampers a lot of the actual game. It tries to be a tactics game; yet its tactics revolve around a binary pass/fail check. It also tries to be a vehicle for dramatic storytelling, yet all of the social-related challenges you might face are, in fact, also just a pass/fail!
I personally find that a lot of the fun had with D&D5e is often despite the ruleset, rather than the ruleset enabling it. It’s a system with a medium amount of crunch that tries to be a lot of things, but due to its core mechanics being a hard pass/fail, kind of fails at being both a Tactical Battle Simulator™ and a Dramatic Storytelling Device™
I think that, despite not being as easy a system as people think it is (there’s a many games easier to understand!), 5e has a fantastic amount of resources available that help people get into it and learn the system, as well as the general ideas and concepts of the whole tabletop roleplaying game thing. There’s a lot of player classes that are pretty well designed and that are, more importantly, fun to play and good for inspiring the actual character! Warlocks, Clerics, and Paladins being as they are really want to make you think about your character and their connection with [source of their powers], and something like an Aberrant Mind Sorcerer is stupidly cool.
Any other game. I dab and walk off stage. But it mostly depends on what I want my game to be about.
I want to do something heist-y? Blades in the Dark.
Investigating mysterious stuff? Call of C’thulu, Delta Green, GUMSHOE engine/system-based RPGs
Sandworms? Dune
Powered by the Apocalypse-games (like the Avatar rpg, although I’ve never been much into Avatar) or something like Ironsworn for a narrative-driven “yes, and…” sort of game, where failing means “falling forward” rather than nothing happening, etc.
Warhammer Fantasy RP 2e/4e for investigation-y things in a medieval setting (Zweihander applies too, but I hate the author so grr). They’re systems that work well for investigation-based campaigns, but also social/court intrigue kind of things, or something combat-heavy, depending on the party’s made up of (I would go into battle with soldier, knight etc careers but probably not with my cobbler and tax collector…)
For heroic combat-isms and dungeoneering I really like something like Cubicle 7’s D6 system - it’s currently only in Age of Sigmar Soulbound, but they’re releasing it as its own thing, with their own setting, somewhere either this year or early next year.
5th edition Vampire the Masquerade is very setting-specific by default, but it’s great for personal horror and a lot of social encounters - its combat mechanics are shared with a social combat mechanic that feels really great to use for particularly dramatic social exchanges!
gee whiz that’s a big post, and that’s me being brief!!
tl;dr i think 5e’s core mechanics are pretty bad, and 5e tries to be many things at the same time, but it doesn’t do so particularly well when you’ve played games that focus on those specific things. Since the usual d&d campaign will primarily focus on one of these things, I find it far better to pick a system tailored to it!
I’m not saying people are having WrongFun, but I do think expanding one’s horizons allows for More Fun.
In the tabletop, the only way you can do this is like Adelaís said, with a lot of spell slots; or, you’re an evocation wizard, in which case you have a class feature where you can pick up to three friendly characters to not be affected by any spells of yours that can be (half) avoided with a stat check roll; one of which being fireball.
I think that something that vexes a lot of people is that D&D as a whole, not just 5e, is upheld as the end-all for all kind of RPGs, when plenty of other easily accessible RPGs have systems that are just as easy, or even easier to get into, and have a far better design (at least in certain aspects).
If people stopped praising 5e as much as they do (due to WoTC’s more than successful advertisement campaign this last half-a-decade), I think that a good 75% of all people being really stuck up with 5e would not be as ‘negative’ (for a lack of a better term) about it.
An example I can think of at the top of my head is how Vampire: The Masquerade’s system makes your character sheet a lot more free form and a lot more indepth, to the point where two vampires of the same level can be as varied as a realistically portrayed garbage man turned vampire with the exact stats you’d expect, and an ex-military vampire faction merc with the stats to match, and they’d both have a role to play when it came to combat and non-combat interactions.
On top of that, these RPGs’ companies are usually very publicly condemning past misdoings (see: White Wolf’s extensive icky history to the point where one of the main writers of the setting(s) was from a particular extreme ideology, only to pull it around in a complete 180º in 5e after kicking that person out) - which helps a lot with public image, unlike Wizards ‘Got unreleased cards a ton? Get ready to meet the Pinkertons’ of the Coast.
It’s certainly a good game, don’t get my wrong, but seeing plenty of people on the internet praise it as the end-all RPG system out there, especially after 5e and D&D NEXT’s streamlining, has put quite a few dents in quite a few people’s shoulders.
V5’s sheet especially is stupidly good, really easy to make yet you get a lot of depth re: your character from it, with the convictions and touchstones - and really easy to fill in, too!
TK Maxx doing Halloween stuff and I’m overjoyed.
I badly want to play baldur’s gate 3 but have to wait till the ps5 version comes out because my pc is a potato so old it’s grown roots. The wait kills my soul and peeves greatly. Why can’t they just be released at the same damn time.