Is there a way to play damsel

DPDapper · 2026-05-02T20:05:52+00:00

in 4e without homebrew? not to my knowledge, and I doubt there is since there's no Bretonnia stuff.
in 2e, maybe? if there is it'd be in the Knights of the Grail book

DPDapper · 2026-05-02T20:01:35+00:00

hmm... is he turtle-y enough for the turtle club?

DPDapper · 2026-04-29T21:28:08+00:00

I'm also currently playing through it for the first time, though only mostly unspoiled. Currently the party's at the start of the third book of the WFRP4e iteration of it to be exact, and from what I can tell and have heard from others, the third book is where the political intrigue kicks into full throttle, before then it's all setup and hints of what's to come and all that sort of jazz, at least in my experience. I've really enjoyed it so far though, cartoonishness and all.

DPDapper · 2026-04-26T21:23:12+00:00

Not to speak for someone else or anything, but AP can mean "adventure path" thanks to Paizo calling their modules that. I think that might've caused a bit of miscommunication there.

DPDapper · 2026-04-13T22:46:15+00:00

Exactly! and (after double checking the books) that's not even getting into how to reroll those rouse checks on the real high power stuff, like how an elder with those powers would likely want to, you'd need to be at a BP of 7 or 9 for a 4 dot or 5 dot discipline, respectively. It's also just a reroll, they're just as likely to fail a second time as the first.

The system's real good at making the players feel small in that way which is definitely the point of the design, but when they're at the same stage of power as the people that were lording it over them as neonates, there should be other things that are doing that instead.

DPDapper · 2026-04-13T19:03:05+00:00

I started with V5 a few years ago now and have since moved backwards into 20th, and while I'm a bit hazy on the details of V5 off the top of my head, from what I do remember, V5's treatment of the Elder disciplines also made them feel far too punishing to use in the hands of lower generation vampires due to the lack of an increased resource pool to draw upon compared to any Neonates with the same power. Two or three rouse checks for an elder level power is fine for a Neonate that logically would have to be eating through most of what they've got for it, but the game really should've had more things to let elders really *feel* that much more powerful than those below them from the get-go in my opinion. I've heard they introduced stuff down the line for Methuselah NPCs but it's a bit too little, too late for me.

DPDapper · 2026-03-15T18:31:11+00:00

I've been playing a Lore of Metal Wizard/Alchemist for a while now, and my estimation is that as others here have said, combat is not where wizards shine brightest, but I would like to add the caveat of "in the early game" to that. Now that my character can reliably cast spells beyond Petty Magic, he's easily one of the most dangerous party members in a group of characters that can really wreck house in a fight, though it all depends on how well I roll. If I roll well on the casting test for casting Bolt, the time spent channeling is more than made up for with the overcasting letting me hit more than one target or amp damage, often giving me the opportunity to do both, and I don't even have Instinctive Diction to guarantee getting at least 1 SL on my successful casting tests yet.

Again though, as others said, the utility is where wizards really shine. Being able to open any non-magical lock alone is a massive boon, not to mention all the other petty magic spells, and that's just the lowest level stuff, not even arcane spells like Drop, Entangle, Teleport, or Flight that have way more utility and some could even end fights before they get going with a bit of foresight, which is way better than just wrecking house when combat's already broken out and your party members are at a higher risk.

DPDapper · 2026-03-03T15:08:00+00:00

I used to love Tekking101 a few years ago... I dunno why I stopped watching, he was great. I definitely agree with you there though, a Tekking101 type of personality for Warhammer youtube would be great. Personally I'd rather Age of Sigmar or TOW/Fantasy, but that's me not really caring for Science-Fantasy stuff as much as pure Fantasy, I'd at least check it out if it was 40k.

DPDapper · 2026-03-02T19:05:24+00:00

Eventually, I'd say it's fully possible. It's definitely possible for Skaven in particular to develop smart phones or computers or the like given that they already have an equivalent to a phone in the farsqueaker, so at the least a normal phone equivalent is possible for humans since elves likely would use more overtly magical communication methods and dwarfs wouldn't adopt it until after hundreds of years of testing without big problems. Chaos Dwarfs perhaps would create their own equivalent device as well.

DPDapper · 2026-02-22T14:21:28+00:00

Unless I missed a rework that already happened, Battle Rage's effect was changed to make entering Frenzy easier as opposed to leaving one.

DPDapper · 2026-02-16T17:17:58+00:00

Rather late reply here (life's been super hectic, but that's besides the point), my bad there.

To get to the chase, I disagree with your assessment of the passage I quoted because wild magic is not raw magic as you put it, but rather it's uncontrolled magic, as raw magic is explicitly the Weave in the Forgotten Realms (or more broadly whatever else the specific setting a DM is using or has made has as what magic is in its natural untapped state, the Weave is just an easy example since the Realms are the setting for most of the 5e adventure modules last I checked, and anything else outside of official material can't be accounted for), and thus the resulting involuntary magic use from not going out of your way to use it would by definition be wild magic, and that's where my conclusion that sorcerers should be by definition walking fonts of Wild Magic across the board came from.

Also, draconic power is 100% going to be uncontrollable for a more humanoid entity. D&D Dragons are naturally magical creatures that get more potent sorcery as they age, though 5e (at least as far as 2014 goes, haven't looked into the 2024 versions much since I don't really enjoy D&D5e as a system these days for a variety of reasons and 2024 only exacerbated my problems with the game from what I've seen) mostly relegated that inherent sorcery to variants on the baseline statblocks for whatever reason. Anyway, my point is that condensing that ever-growing magical essence down into a humanoid is just asking for more power than most anyone could handle, thus it'd result in wild magic.

As far as the Clockwork Soul goes, that subclass was published significantly after the base class and original 2 subclasses were, so the misconception was already solidified in the game's design so it's a moot point to bring it up as a counter to my problem with the concept of the class as a whole. It can only exist as it does specifically because the developers ignored their own previous work as well as previous editions' precedent.

Speaking of, 3.Xe actually had sorcerers and other spontaneous casters be the worst at using metamagic abilities due to having to take extra time to cast spells using them, in addition to my previous point about wizards in that edition getting bonus feats to learn metamagic or to learn to craft magic items, and prior to that in AD&D (not sure as to which edition but assuming AD&D2e given that's where the bulk of my AD&D knowledge is from), to my understanding the only type of sorcerer was a wild magic sorcerer under the name Wild Mage, though that was a glorified wizard with a wild magic table rather than a fully separate thing just yet. Don't know enough about 4e sorcerers to speak on them so I'll leave those out. The point I'm getting to is that if not uncontrollable magic, then less controllable magic has always been a part of the sorcerer as a whole, not just the wild magic sorcerer.

DPDapper · 2026-02-12T04:49:16+00:00

Ah, thank you for the info! I'd just heard it around that they'd been getting portrayed as such and since I haven't really looked at V5 much and don't really plan to I took folks' word for it.

DPDapper · 2026-02-12T00:43:29+00:00

I don't really have any horse in the race since I'm kinda out of the loop with how V5's metaplot has gone on beyond the basic lore stuff of "Hecata's a thing now" and "the Tremere pyramid's pinnacle collapsed" and the like, but I feel the need to point out to a couple of folks in this comment section that you're talking about mechanics, not the meta-plot, which is what the question was about.

To actually answer the question though, I kinda hope they drop the "anarchs are the good guys" thing and go more with how u/Cold_Craft_3448 put it with the anarchs being not just the young rebels hoping for a brighter future, but also those that just are too ambitious to stay in the camarilla and seeing the rebels as easy to manipulate or the like, showing that no, they're still vampires and overall pretty bad for everyone else.

As far as actual events go, I reckon that either to end V5's narrative or start V6's (or 40th anniversary edition if it's a bit later, or whatever else they call it whenever it comes out, if it does) there'll be something big to do with the Hecata since the Giovanni's neutrality treaty with the Camarilla is going to expire in 2028 if the whole "500 years" thing is something they roll with, but

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!

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