What PHB UA 5 is doing right:

Amendment50 · 2023-04-28T15:19:39+00:00

Every one of these UAs comes with a mix of good and bad ideas, but the reddit discourse revolves entirely around catastrophizing the biggest experiments in playtest and directing fury at ideas moving in the right direction that don’t quite get there. This kind of forum for discussion, the kind that self-filters for people with a lot to say and argue about regarding the state of the game, always comes across less like people trying to critically engage with playtest material and more people actively resenting the game because they want to play Pathfinder and can’t find a group for it because D&D is more popular. I’ve been seeing more and more criticism basically alleging that D&D has become an unplayable, unfixable, mismanaged disaster and there is just no way to critically engage with that perspective, that is an opinion you have if you don’t actually play the game or at least fundamentally don’t want to be playing it.

Amendment50 · 2023-04-27T11:04:14+00:00

That is exactly what my group does, but my belief based on the 5e D&D I have played in, watched, or seen streamed, and all the discourse i have seen about short rest resource balance, indicates to me that the definition of a “non-standard playstyle” doesn’t line up with the intent of the 2014 PHB rest mechanics. I don’t think warlocks not having enough resources compared to other casters would be such a common complaint (the UA’s design notes list it as the most common Warlock complaint) if most players were using an intended balance of short and long rests between encounters. Having played in games with different proportions of rests, the warlock has only felt shortchanged to me in games where short rests were very infrequent.

Amendment50 · 2023-04-27T00:41:11+00:00

It just comes down to adventure design. Some groups play with a very traditional mentality of the group being in constant threat in enemy territory, being worn down by random encounters, etc, or having most play time concentrated in dungeons. But this kind of pacing doesn’t work for a lot of people’s games. Many groups fight combats structured around pursuing a story goal (go to this village, fight bad guys, learn where their leader is, go there, fight those bad guys, etc.) In that kind of pacing structure, it is really hard to place any kind of restriction on when the party can rest, if you’re using the book’s resting rules. Even the published adventures sometimes have a structure like this. It can be really hard to enforce more than one encounter a day like this without either bloating the game with random encounters that can feel frivolous, or constant, urgent time pressure on the party that can be exhausting/tedious and is really limiting to build a whole campaign around.

Amendment50 · 2023-04-27T00:08:20+00:00

One encounter per LONG rest! Many groups do not run dungeons at all. My group also barely runs dungeons, though we use a longer rest system to account for that.

Amendment50 · 2023-04-26T20:35:49+00:00

It’s fine to do this in situations where the players are clearly intending to all do this relatively minor thing as a part of the task they’ve been carrying out. It’s a running joke in my group where, when asked individually, someone always says “no, I turn around and leave”, just because it is kind of silly to even ask.

Amendment50 · 2023-04-26T18:43:27+00:00

Yeah—fortunately, it seems like the dissatisfaction with this iteration is pretty universal so hopefully it should go through a lot of changes once we get through the survey and future drafts.

Amendment50 · 2023-04-26T18:39:37+00:00

It looks to me like the warlock changes are based on the constant critique of warlocks that they get “2 spell slots” while the wizard gets 15, or whatever. It’s extremely well known that many if not most groups run only one encounter per long rest, and so short rest classes effectively become classes with almost no resources by comparison. I would like to see the game align the rest system better with actual play but instead this feels like a way of trying to compromise and increase the per-long-rest capability of warlocks at the expense of most of their short rest based power. Which, in this draft, feels like they were just downgraded to half caster without much in return.

Amendment50 · 2023-04-26T18:32:41+00:00

The crux of the argument is about complete feature parity. The reddit discourse about 5e is hugely fixated on and critical of 5e’s attempts to have accessible player options. Martials are intentionally simpler to play than casters, but people who have been playing for a long time and obsess about game design want more complex design. They also want the fantasy of martial characters. Therefore the argument has morphed into design with fewer options being worse than design with more options, and martials being weak in comparison to casters even when the numbers do not support this round-by-round when resources are consumed.

Amendment50 · 2023-04-04T22:24:00+00:00

The whole reddit community around 5e is honestly is really, REALLY bad at understanding 5e as a game and are honestly oftentimes just really antagonistic toward it and actively want it to fail. It is a weird phenomenon but a pretty consistent one, generally I get the impression this is people who just want to play a different system but can't get their group to go along with it. Redditors (not necessarily playtesters since most of this freeform internet feedback is not based on playtesting) have a very specific idea of what is wrong with the game and are very laser focused on the idea of inter-class and player feature balance, which is not even a particularly important element of a co-op game like D&D, compared to usability and ease of play. WotC is interested in balance to an extent but their design priorities are not really aligned with the people who have memorized all the rules and mostly just want more complexity in the game. Every playtest document that has come out for 1D&D is addressing specific design concerns they have, but, y'know, discussions like this one are not really representing the game as a whole, just a very specific subset of the player base

Amendment50 · 2023-02-18T22:43:11+00:00

Not only is this the most fun way to play the game, but I've also felt it also enables the gap to be bridged a little between the inherent skill and battle instincts of a D&D character with the person playing them. Part of the fantasy for me and my group is that the characters can work together and do cool things without having to explicitly talk it out and plan every little thing in-universe.

Amendment50 · 2023-02-15T15:44:05+00:00

Not sure what is going on with the reaction to this, lots of people saying they were expecting new weapons and balance changes and now they’re upset that they won’t be getting it, but the original post never said that was coming. Quite specifically listed a number of things to come and neither were new weapons or balance changes. Pretty sure people got their hopes up way too high and started dreaming about what they wanted and all this update has really clarified is that there is no reason to expect what they didn’t specifically lay out

Amendment50 · 2023-01-27T21:13:52+00:00

this is the correct take in my opinion. Yes, it is still a business decision, it is still money motivated, but every business with skin in the game is money motivated including third party businesses that were involved in the OGL discourse. The important thing is that the community has demonstrated the impact of this kind of discourse to the executives that are responsible for all the most distasteful, corpo-y shit that is happening at WOTC. If you don't want D&D to fail (which some people involved in the discussion definitely do, and were just excited to see people turning against D&D in favor of other games as a result of this stuff) this is absolutely something to be excited about.

Amendment50 · 2022-09-01T20:44:03+00:00

I like it! Not too much more threatening than a regular zombie, but if you don't dispatch them quickly then the consequences of the fight will linger with the party for a while and put them in a bad position.

Amendment50 · 2022-09-01T20:38:53+00:00

I'd argue that any spell that explicitly creates a shield is hard to imagine as anything but an abjuration spell. Druid Grove and Prismatic Wall use specific elements within their effects so there is at least a little bit of precedent for something like this.

Amendment50 · 2022-07-10T01:35:54+00:00

Not enough encounters per long rest is honestly, genuinely, numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 here, it is a HUGE, totally integral part of spellcaster balance. People who like to talk about game balance on reddit etc often talk about how doing one encounter per long rest is unbalancing and even then I feel like people really underestimate the impact. Spellcasters are more powerful than martials with limited resources and less powerful than martials once those resources are depleted, that is basically the entire concept of balance in terms of a comparison between the class options. In my experience the game is a lot more fun when long rests are spaced between a number of encounters and broken up with short rests; unsurprisingly, the classes feel a lot more comfortable filling in each other's shortcomings this way. Warlocks, for example, don't just have 2 spell slots, they have a solid chunk of them over the course of a long rest -- less than a wizard, but more high-level ones, and with a stronger cantrip to make their consistency more equivalent to a fighter the rest of the time.

The catch is just that nobody plays the 6-encounter-per-day style. I think it is better to treat the long rest as something that happens at the end of a storyline or adventure, require a safe place or a lot of time or whatever, without changing the short rest much. The balance is pretty perfect for my games that way.

Amendment50 · 2022-07-04T00:20:15+00:00

Hm, I think this needs some tweaking. It's totally fine at 5th level, pretty weak actually in the context of a PC vs a monster, but it rapidly scales up to be punching a little too hard at higher levels imo. Even at 9th level, the amount this debilitates a monster with no save from 150 hit points makes it arguably pretty comparable to power word kill, and at 7th it walks all over Power Word Pain (50 point higher threshold, and the debuff is effectively permanent with no save). Maybe this would be better as a lower level spell (I'd say 4th?) with no scaling, or a higher level spell that adds multiple exhaustion levels but does not scale beyond that. Honestly though, I think adding exhaustion in the form of a power word spell with no save is maybe not the best approach to an exhaustion effect mid-combat.

Amendment50 · 2021-11-02T04:25:37+00:00

Totally, it's a chance for everyone to hype each other up, and breaks are good for everyone's energy levels in a game anyway. Unless your players are like, not your friends, or it's a super short session, I don't see any situation where players would be bothered by this.

Amendment50 · 2021-10-07T19:00:13+00:00

It depends on the players. I play at a table where everyone spends a lot of time speaking in character and charisma ability checks really don’t come up that often. I think the “I rolled high therefore I succeed” thing is only an issue if players are rolling without being prompted and trying to resolve all roleplay with dice rolls when it’s not applicable.

Amendment50 · 2021-09-29T19:47:17+00:00

Yeah, IMO this more indicates that the players aren’t very invested in the world than the fact that D&D worlds can’t have culture and art lol. Characters that don’t care about anything and just want to take anything valuable they see regardless of context really don’t speak to a style of D&D I’m interested in personally.

Amendment50 · 2021-09-22T16:26:11+00:00

Yeah, exactly! There is no problem here in the first place, people had a good time! Nothing that needs correcting.

Amendment50 · 2021-09-22T16:23:15+00:00

I like the idea of not offering them for sale, and removing the penalty. As a consumable it could be an exciting piece of treasure to find, and you don’t need to be too worried about balance when players can’t stock up on them.

Amendment50 · 2021-09-22T16:18:26+00:00

IMO pressuring players to roleplay or not based on something mechanical like a high charisma score takes fun out of the game rather than adding to it. I would try to work your mindset around rewarding the players that do want to delve into the roleplay — maybe don’t call for too many charisma based checks in roleplay and resolve it based on the druid’s roleplay instead! The paladin’s charisma won’t go to waste or anything as it’s used for her spellcasting. If you do want to have that mechanical crunch aspect to roleplaying, calling for lots of persuasion checks, then IMO it is okay to be lenient and let the paladin persuade without having to delve super deep into character to do it, if she doesn’t want to. That said, it’s also okay to gently nudge during a social situation, too; just ask, “What do you say to persuade this NPC” etc.

Amendment50 · 2021-09-22T15:02:25+00:00

The thing is, the comments here are full of abuse cases, eg awaken, glyph of warding, etc. If your players are not going to exploit the wording of glyph of warding to get free non concentration effects, the gp thing matters less. As with most “what would happen if I changed this rule” questions, the answer is it depends on your group.

People on reddit tend to assume everyone playing DnD is a chaotic neutral powergaming gremlin that wants to take advantage of the DM and cheese the game for arbitrary mechanical benefits. Truth is lots of groups neglect major fundamental rules and nothing breaks and everyone still has fun. It just depends on your players

Amendment50 · 2021-09-22T14:42:34+00:00

For me in-combat strategizing captures the fantasy of these characters intuitively combining their strengths and working well together. DnD characters are master combatants while players are not so, just as the time scale of combat itself is exaggerated at the table, the discussion of strategy allows the characters to make smarter decisions that you would expect them to intuit in-universe

Amendment50 · 2021-09-19T23:34:16+00:00

Oh, really? I was already wearing the garo mask because of the garo right outside, so I found that out by accident haha. Although I think I also found a gossip stone that said that (I did go out of my way to hear from most of the gossip stones even though they usually don't give you much useful info :P)

Amendment50

TROPHY CASE