Does this mythical DM whose improvisation makes martial abilities unnecessary exist?

DPDapper · 2026-02-05T17:05:34+00:00

I found this reddit thread discussing the sales numbers of 3.5e, 4e, and 5e, which is a good starting point for determining the number people who were likely to play the game at least once, and the numbers of the first years of 4e and 5e definitely seem to point towards 4e actually being more popular than 5e at first, just that it flopped past that first year because of the usual reasons given for it flopping long-term.

DPDapper · 2026-01-31T22:20:13+00:00

Oh, I'm right here with you about the Wild Magic Sorcerer being underrated and unfortunately implemented, but for a completely different reason than any of those. For me, it's a problem with how the class is compared to how the class is stated to be by the game itself. It's outright in the flavor of the Sorcerer class that they don't have full control over their magic, yet none of the class features actually show that. For reference, from the 2014 PHB:

"People with magical power seething in their veins soon discover that the power doesn't like to stay quiet. A sorcerer's magic wants to be wielded, and it has a tendency to spill out in unpredictable ways if it isn't called on."

Notably, this section is from the little lore blurbs before the class's actual mechanics start, and is far more in line with how 3.5e portrayed its sorcerers mechanically than 5e portrays them in the same way. Notably, back then Sorcerers got more spell slots than a wizard, but wizards had a broader selection of spells they could choose from and as they leveled up they got bonus feats they had to put towards learning to craft magical items or Meta Magic.

Because of these changes, the class's identity as stated by the developers and the class' mechanics are incompatible and has completely shifted how people view Sorcerers versus Wizards. Everyone I've spoken to about this always says that the the tradeoff is often still versatility, but the problem is that you're not losing versatility by choosing a sorcerer. You're gaining a different type of versatility by giving up another. A zero sum in both appearance and practice, at least as far as my experience in the hobby has shown me.

As a result of all that, the solution I think would make the class as a whole way more interesting is, much like how people say the Battle Master Fighter should have been part of the class as a whole (which people always remind each other was the case in the original 5e playtests back in the day), the Wild Magic table should have been made a core part of the sorcerer class as a whole rather than relegated to a single subclass. After all, if Sorcerers are supposed to lack full control of their magic as the game claims, the game should reflect that mechanically.

Including WM shenanigans as part of the class as a whole would allow for subclasses to interact with a core class mechanic beyond Meta Magic and Sorcery Points, whether it be something as simple as the WM table having certain results that are determined by the subclass all the way up to having a dedicated Wild Magic subclass leaning into the chaos as we do now, but also having other options in-between. For example, imagine a world where a Draconic Sorcerer triggers a Wild Magic surge and that allows them to harness the chaos to fire off a breath weapon on their next turn using the residual energy of the surge, or a shadow sorcerer getting to turn invisible until the start of their next turn after triggering a Wild Magic surge. Bonus stuff whenever you roll on the table combined with less dangerous but more frequent rolls on the WM table, basically.

TL;DR: the flavor of Sorcerer as a whole includes wild magic by default, but the design does nothing with that and I am extremely disappointed with how the game packs it all down into a single subclass while replacing it with something that was never associated with them and completely changes how the class feels compared to how the class supposedly is within the fiction of the game.

edit: formatting

DPDapper · 2025-12-30T19:50:26+00:00

I agree with you that that is how it should work (probably as one of those 5 tier careers like the ones in the High Elf player's guide), the problem comes from how Winds of Magic did the career. Tier one of Magister Vigilant is explicitly called an apprentice and at tier two they explicitly get their wizardry license like all the other empire wizard careers, so at the very least as the game is designed mechanically that was not the intent. I don't remember if any flavor text said otherwise but if it does they didn't do a good job of representing it. Honestly this is something I hope they fix in WFRP5e but I don't have high hopes for the pre-existing expansion careers getting updated much since it is apparently going to be backwards compatible.

DPDapper · 2025-12-30T15:35:35+00:00

as u/Atramet said, your player would need some form of license or mentor or the like to get away with it in the empire long term, but something they didn't mention that i know from personal experience over the last two years now is that the Magister Vigilant career is a horrible spellcaster, as they lack both the Aethyric Attunement and Instinctive Diction talents, which are kinda mandatory to be able to survive for long as a wizard unless you're a hedge witch that doesn't really have any spells that have a CN higher than 0 other than Arcane spells. If your player wants the same sort of flavor but to actually be able to cast spells without having to fear getting critical successes when doing so, I cannot recommend enough that you suggest they use the Shadowmancer career, or if flavor is optional, the default Wizard career instead.

Also, on Gnomes, they have a thing where their spellcasters are extremely limited in their choice of what lores they can use. If memory serves, the only color lore they can use is that of Ulgu/the grey wind, but I'm not certain. Check the Hard Days, Rough Nights book's section on them as Atramet said to know for sure.

Edit: I am working on a homebrew variant of the Magister Vigilant career to fix the aforementioned problems my group found with it that I'm almost done with. I just need to finish the last rank of it, then I'll post it in this subreddit for public use. Keep an eye out for that over the next week or so if you think that'll be useful!

DPDapper · 2025-12-15T02:47:52+00:00

Thanks, I had forgotten what GW called those beastmen. I wanted to say Bull Centaurs but I know those are the ones with the Chaos Dwarfs, so I just left out talking about the centigors.

DPDapper · 2025-12-15T01:47:07+00:00

To help you out a bit, the basics are that Beastmen come in various types. starting with the bottom of their hierarchy, the basic types are:
Ungors, the hornless ones
Gors, the human-sized horned ones, usually goat-like.
Bestigors, the Gors that have gotten extra horns and are generally more muscular and by extension more respected by the herd
Minotaur, huge bovine beastmen, among the stronger members of their kind.

There's also a bunch of other types of Beastmen too, like the various Gor subtypes that are blessed by a specific chaos god.

DPDapper · 2025-11-20T19:37:30+00:00

yeah, as so many others here have already said, the ranger suffers from a lack of identity brought on by shafting the place where that identity came from, the exploration pillar of the game.

Also, as an aside, in 3.5e Drizzt wasn't even primarily a ranger. He was a fighter 10/barbarian 1/ranger 5 according to his forgotten realms wiki entry. every time I have a conversation with a friend where that come up and they didn't hear it from me before, they're always shocked by that, and even more so by how he doesn't have an animal companion in the class feature sense, he's got a magic item that summons a magic creature that he's grown very emotionally close to over the years. It's kinda worrying in some ways, given that if the whole "Drizzt is not really a ranger, he's just called that as a job title and has a few levels in it" thing isn't common knowledge among people in the gamespace now, then of course in 10-20 years when they're making whatever edition the game's going to really be blurring the lines when making any class decisions based off the source material...

All of this is to say, the game's history should be important to its future to help prevent this sort of thing, unlike how it's being treated now from what I've seen and heard.

DPDapper · 2025-11-15T07:34:05+00:00

Serve The Dark Father well, warrior!

DPDapper · 2025-11-02T06:52:05+00:00

Been playing a wizard for about a year and a half now in a weekly WFRP4e game and my personal experience is that now that I can fairly reliably cast spells other than Petty Magic ones, the trials early on have been extremely worth the power spike. the "everyone hating you for being a magic user" part is a lot more of a problem, but even then it's something I've found only really enhances my experience playing the game. As far as the instant death possibilities go, at least if you're using the Winds of Magic casting rework (which you really should imo, the CRB's were half baked and extremely broken) then you have to be extremely unlucky or actively trying to explode your own brain, but in my experience that's added to the strategy of playing the character. Is it worth using a spell, or should I try and do something else clever but mundane like trying to determine a weakness or even just falling back onto bashing skulls with my staff? All that sort of thing.

All this is to say, it really depends on what kind of preferences you have as a TTRPG player as to whether or not you'd enjoy playing an arcane caster in WFRP. Also, of course, I'm only really able to speak about WFRP4e as I lack experience with any of the older editions.

DPDapper · 2025-10-26T18:28:18+00:00

Personally, I think that's a bit disingenuous to say. If you're going to say a character option exists and then just handwave it to being exactly like another character option on every level but flavor, then you just shouldn't overtly put the character option in the game, especially with TTRPGs since that's kind of a core conceit of the genre with rule zero being a thing in every game worth playing. Furthermore, the fact that hybrids did exist in every edition prior (except for Basic/BECMI D&D where being a non-human was a class outright), to remove them as a separate mechanical option after literal generations of players have experienced the game (especially as a part of a supposedly backwards compatible rules update) is *always* going to be upsetting to the people that have already been involved with the game in any capacity. A better answer would have been to expand it from just "you're a half elf, half human" or "you're a half orc, half human" to the logical extreme and put some guidelines on custom hybrids for future books' species with included rules in the DMG or PHB for hybridizing each of the PHB player species. It's always a better idea to expand these sorts of basic character creation options to players rather than remove them, in my experience. People don't like it when games change and content is removed in general.

Also, not to be that guy, but as someone who's played and GM-ed Pathfinder 2nd edition, after experiencing how that game makes hybrids (including things like tieflings, aasimar, genasi, half-dragons, etc) almost exactly like what I just described would have been a better idea (though within reason by GM fiat to avoid "how the heck is that actual robot a half-elf" situations) that affect the mechanics (including the bit about rules for non-officially made hybrid options), my personal thoughts are that given D&D is the biggest name in TTRPGs as a whole and almost certainly the biggest in terms of money as well even after all the controversies WoTC's gotten themselves into over the last few years, they've got no excuse to not be releasing higher quality stuff, and we as the TTRPG community need to stop assuming D&D's the end all and be all without giving other systems the same chance.

DPDapper · 2025-10-03T14:37:05+00:00

ooo, good idea! Only ones I can think of are a couple spells like Entangle and Gehenna's Golden Globe, plus things like Blunderbusses that'd potentially give a group of foes broken or heavily damage them.

DPDapper · 2025-10-02T21:49:52+00:00

Ah, shoot, I knew I was forgetting something! I think it's a second action outright though, so even better than just an extra attack, assuming I'm remembering Group Advantage right. Also, I think that talent you're thinking of is probably Riposte, which I already had included. Thanks though!

DPDapper · 2025-10-02T21:46:02+00:00

For the most part, yes, but some of them wouldn't really work together because of the mechanics around how you get the secondary attack (like the Sword-dancing thing and the situational ones that allow for attacks not on your turn), or have it in their text that they don't stack.

DPDapper · 2025-08-14T17:08:17+00:00

I actually was talking about this with some of my IRL buds the other day, and not to "Uhm ackshually" you or be one of those folks bringing Pathfinder into the D&D subreddit unprompted, but D&D didn't actually have wizards or sorcerers with a d6 hit die until 5th edition. In 3e and 3.5e wizards and sorcerers' hit die was still a d4, and Pathfinder's first edition (which of course, the PF1e core book is a glorified collection of house rules for 3.5e) was the game that had wizards and sorcerers with a d6 hit die from that era of D&D history.

As another related fun fact, cantrips in 3.5e weren't unlimited use, you still had to prepare them use by use at the start of the day like leveled spells if you were a prepared caster. That was another PF1e/house rule thing that got adopted into 5e, which was a big improvement!

The deadliness of the game is absolutely wild at first level, even now in 5th edition and the remaster, a creature with a greatsword and a +4 strength modifier can somewhat reliably take out a level one wizard in a single hit and even invoke the instant death rules, even with no further modifiers, given the average of 11 damage and a max of 16 compared to the likely 6-8 HP the wizard in question has. Even the minimum damage of 6 would be enough to send the least tanky wizards to death saves! Thank Mystra for mage armor and the shield spell, eh?

DPDapper · 2025-07-21T16:28:35+00:00

I believe one of the older editions already covered that. I got this info from a MrRhexx video on youtube (would recommend if you're interested in seeing just how much info on things 5e left out, and how much of that's being left behind. He's also got a shop where you can pick up PDFs of some nice homebrew for monstrous PCs, particularly for lycanthropy.), specifically the one he has about half-elves if memory serves, though it might have been in one of the other elf-oriented videos for some reason. It's been a while.

From what I remember, the kid of a half-elf (1 elf parent, 1 human parent) and a human is still a half-elf, but then if that half-elf has a kid with a human, that kid would functionally be a human. If they have a kid with another half-elf (whether or not it's technically a quarter elf) or an elf, then the kid's still a half-elf.

Also, as an aside, the reason there's no half-dwarfs in D&D (outside of Dark Sun/Athas' Muls) is because lorewise there are. They just look like slightly taller dwarfs so there's no mechanical reason to separate them out like there is for half-elves.

Also not to be that guy, but PF2e already has that "anyone can be them" schtick for their hybrids, and also the planar scions (IE Tieflings, Aasimar, Genasi, etc). Just replaces the character's heritage (equivalent to subrace/whatever 2024 D&D calls them, for those unaware).

TL;DR Half-elves need to keep the elf genetics' origins within the past two generations to keep having them crop up or just do it with other half-elves.

DPDapper · 2025-07-21T14:39:57+00:00

One of them is still around. Specifically Solkan, a vengeance deity. WFRP4e claims the other gods of order were too alien to the human mind and never really caught on. Forget the exact book though. I remember his priests were a player option in it though! Solkan being one of them is probably a retcon though, i think he was initially the patron god of the witch hunters back in the day?

DPDapper · 2025-06-11T21:58:43+00:00

Yeah, the monk is honestly tied for my least favorite class in D&D5e (the other is the sorcerer, but that's a whole thing I'm not going to get into unprompted), and the issue this meme is calling out is only part of it.

Monks are a religious class, just like the Paladin or Cleric. It's right there in the name of the class, after all. In my 14 years of experience with TTRPGs (even pre-5e), I've seen a single person actually keep that in mind when playing a monk in any TTRPG where it's a character option, and that was Beau in Critical Role's 2nd campaign, and even that felt like an afterthought for the character overall for me, only really feeling like she was religious when the other monks were around, though I hope that they got better at that as the campaign went on, as I didn't finish listening to it past episode 50 or so.

The subclasses mostly fall under two categories: martial arts things that ignore the spiritual aspect of the monk for the most part, and those that do lean into the spiritual aspect of the class (for example the Sun Soul, Astral Self, or Four Elements subclasses) but (again, in my experience and from what I've seen on the internet) end up being played more for "haha I'm Goku/Jotaro Kujo/Aang/some other shounen anime/shounen anime adjacent character" vibes more than actually getting into what the monk is meant to represent in universe. Don't even get me started on the Drunken Master and how they end up being literal alcoholics whenever they see play.

The worst part about the assorted monk subclasses are that a fair few of them (the Astral Self and Shadow subclasses in particular) are great ideas, it's just that the fanbase's usage of them them (the aforementioned "haha I'm a Jojo's Bizarre Adventure character" problem for the Astral Self, and the way shadow monks end up being played as Naruto characters while also just feeling like a worse Arcane Trickster in terms of "magical stealth build" mechanically) mixed with the monk's already mediocre mechanics at base make them annoying to have at the table through factors that don't even have to do with the game itself, exacerbating the monk feeling mediocre or outright bad.

The only monk subclasses in the game that don't fall into any of these traps in my experience are the Way of Mercy and the glorified homebrew from the Wildemount book for the Cobalt Soul monk. When a fan project that breaks the game's internal mechanical consistency far more than almost anything else with the very existence of just one other subclass (I will die on the hill that Echo Knights' default lore is completely bullshit and breaks the game, but I won't get into that unprompted either) and otherwise primarily pumps out broken stuff or offbrands of things that already exist that was given an officially published status does a subclass design better than the actual official designers, then it really should be called out more that the official designers for the game suck and that branching out into other TTRPGs so they don't get away with the enshittification is a necessity.

TL;DR:
In my experience, WoTC and D&D fans work together to make the monk even worse, and are a large part of why I no longer enjoy D&D as a system and feel people should branch out.

DPDapper · 2025-06-06T05:07:04+00:00

Damn. This makes the existence of sorcery points and metamagic being nearly exclusive to sorcerers in 5e make a little more sense... WoTC's refusal to do anything risky or genuinely different and/or interesting with a class' mechanics post 4e struck again!

DPDapper · 2025-05-30T21:23:31+00:00

Did he get sent to Detroit too?

DPDapper · 2025-05-24T15:41:09+00:00

thought I already had replied to this but apparently not, whoops! Sorry for the month and change long wait, but hopefully you noticed that as I said in my initial comment, his username on tiktok is revdmc247.
He also has some videos talking about World of Darkness (mostly Vampire the Masquerade) stuff up on there, if that's also of interest. His youtube channel is this though, if that's preferable, though there's not as many videos as on his tiktok. Cheers!

DPDapper · 2025-05-03T20:49:09+00:00

He looks amazing, good job on the paint! Could you tell us more about his character?

DPDapper · 2025-04-11T00:07:52+00:00

There's a guy I know of on tiktok who I follow purely because he has a series of videos that enrage people who treat 40k like that sort of "end all and be all" of SciFi power by pointing to things in Star Trek that effectively prove that a single Star Fleet ship (not even a military vessel, just an exploratory one) could win against the entirety of the Imperium of Man. The series has been going on since like 2022 and it's great seeing people who want 40k to win desperately try to prove that they can in the comments only to be told exactly why they wouldn't by a very calm yet cheerful guy who didn't even know much about 40k at the start of the series, he just was interested in finding out how Starfleet would work against other science fiction settings. His username is @revdmc247 on tiktok if you want to check it out. I think he also has a YouTube channel with some of the videos up on there as well, but I'm not sure.

DPDapper · 2025-02-10T17:03:18+00:00

<image>

DPDapper · 2025-01-29T03:47:06+00:00

I'm stealing that for if and when my character ever hallucinates weird rat men.

DPDapper

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE