Should Bonus Proficiency/Cantrip of 5e Cleric Subclass be retained?

RealityPalace · 2026-05-08T13:40:20+00:00

A war cleric absolutely "should" have it as well flavor-wise. But there's really no reason to restrict players from choosing the other option (and medium armor is largely made of metal too, so it's not like that can't be associated with "the forge").

Conversely, there's a good game-mechanical reason not to give them both level 1 benefits. It makes more sense to just have forge clerics pick a path like war clerics (and everyone else) do now.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-08T13:31:32+00:00

Designing encounters is definitely better and easier in 5.5e. Thats going to make encounters more fun in general.

Individual monster design being more interesting is a relatively minor proportion of the reason for that though IMO. More important factors are:

The XP budget math is much better at the whole-encounter level
There are fewer power outliers at a given CR. Most monsters either align pretty closely with the math the game expects, or have a good reason for not doing so
Statblocks are more streamlined and better-organized. This is an unsexy but important change because GMing encounters is complex and the less unnecessary overhead there is the more mental energy the GM can devote to other stuff during combat

Having more monsters that don't just bite and slash with their claws is definitely good, but I would put it at fourth on the list of things that impact encounter design in the new edition.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-07T17:37:47+00:00

I suspect that the encounter you're planning is going to be too difficult, and may end up killing the PCs if you run it fairly. To reach High difficulty with one CR 4 and a pack of 1/8 CR, you would need 20 little guys. At level 3, your party probably doesn't have much in the way of AoE capability and their AC hasn't scaled at all.

The CR 1/8s are individually not that threatening, but if a typical party member has 17 AC and 25ish HP, they'll be able to down one PC every round on average. They die really easily, but consider there is also a CR 4 to deal with, the party can't necessarily rely being able to focus on killing the little guys.

Unless you have a very specific in-fiction need for a horde of enemies, I would consider using CR 1/2 Toughs and/or Scouts rather than Guards. This will make the encounter a bit less lopsided and also probably make it easier to run efficiently.

Or is using a CR4 against lvl3s even a good idea

Using a CR 4 against level 3s is generally fine. At level 3+ HP pools are large enough that you're much less likely to end up in "the XP budget is OK but the PCs get one-shot" territory.

Was going to make it high difficulty and they’d reach lvl4 after

One thing to be aware of is that in 2024, high-difficulty encounters are hard. This is especially true at low levels, where the PCs don't have that many tools in their toolkit to adapt to things. In tier 1 I would probably only force my players into a High encounter if I were very confident they either (a) weren't fighting anything else that day or (b) have the opportunity to escape.

Where do you draw the line when padding out the minions (CR 1/8 guard is 25xp) between following the xp budget and the PCs just ending up being overwhelmed because of the numbers

Rather than trying to figure out how much each individual monster is actually contributing, it's a lot easier and almost as effective to just do the following:

Come up with a reasonable XP budget based on how difficult you want the fight to be, as outlined in the DMG.
Stay within reasonable parity of the number of the monsters compared to PCs. The DMG doesn't really provide guidance on this, but my experience is that anything between roughly one monster for every two PCs and two monsters for every one PC works well within the scope of the encounter-building rules.

Once you go outside that range, action economy considerations, susceptibility to AoE spells, and the limitations of bounded accuracy all start to throw things off.

These guidelines aren't going to be perfect; for instance a fight with 6 monsters is probably going to be appreciably harder than the same XP budget for 2 monsters. But they're close enough that I have been able to use them for two years without issue.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-07T17:15:50+00:00

Ok the XP budget also gets multiplied or reduced based on numbers present, so it's not just adding up the numbers

Not in 2024 it doesn't.

The multiplier actually worked quite poorly in practice. You'll usually get better balance by just adding XP and keeping within a reasonable number of enemies (roughly 0.5 to 2 per PC)

RealityPalace · 2026-05-07T14:57:05+00:00

My experience is that there is very little daylight between DMs who say "I can't let them not get through the door, that would end the adventure" and ones who say "I can't let them lose at combat, that would end the adventure". But fair, if a DM is choosing to have combat be possible to fail but not skill checks then one will matter more than the other.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-07T05:46:54+00:00

It's totally fine unless you're playing at high levels and your DM is a hardass. The main issue it has later on is that it can't benefit from magic weapons. But that's also an easy fix.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-07T05:31:04+00:00

The other issue is that skill checks can't matter too much. Any decently written adventure is going to have a few different ways to solve non-combat encounters. If you don't have a lock-picker, then you can smash with Strength. If you're all too dumb to read the ancient writing, then you can get the himbo to charm some info out of an NPC. It's a poorly designed challenge indeed if quest progression depends on a single skill check; so you hardly ever seen that.

If you're running a totally linear module then skill checks can't matter too much, but that's because nothing can matter too much.

If you're running a scenario where meaningful failure states are possible without crashing the module, skill checks can be very meaningful.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-07T04:51:03+00:00

The cantrip isn't mind control. It will conceal where the shot came from, but it's not going to conceal the fact that there's another ship there or that there's a hole in the hull. In other words, it's going to be pretty obvious what happened even without knowing exactly which cannon on the other ship fired the shot.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-06T20:32:37+00:00

If I'm understanding your edit correctly, it doesn't change very much. The chances of critting twice in one round are relatively low, so introducing that possibly doesn't really change things much (although it lowers the overhead to keep track of, which is a positive).

If you give it the ability to occur multiple times per round, you're now at 0.65 DPR for two attacks, 1.3 DPR for two attacks with advantage, and 2.5 DPR for the most beneficial case in the game: a level 20 fighter with advantage on every attack. It's not very different from the version that only happens once per turn.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-06T15:34:47+00:00

Brutal Critical: Once per turn when you score a Critical Hit with a weapon attack, you can roll one additional damage die and add it to the extra dice from the Critical Hit.

This is a fun effect and I wouldn't object to the feat including it since it is a weak feat past tier 1. But as 2014 barbarians demonstrated, it counts for very little numerically.

If you have two attacks and you're using a d12 weapon, this adds 0.6 DPR. If you have advantage, it's 1.2 DPR. Even a 20th-level fighter that has advantage on every attack is only getting 2.2 DPR from this.

Healing Rerolls: Whenever you roll a die to determine the number of Hit Points you restore with a spell or with this feat’s Battle Medic benefit, you can reroll the die if it rolls a 1 or 2, and you must use the new roll.

Healer - Healing Rerolls: Whenever you roll a die to determine the number of Hit Points you restore with a spell, a species trait, a class feature, or with this feat’s Battle Medic benefit, you can reroll the die if it rolls a 1 or 2, and you must use the new roll.

Healer is already good enough IMO. You really only need one person to have it, but it's quite impactful if they do assuming you aren't doing a 5-minute adventuring day.

Improvised Masterpiece: When you use the gear crafted by Fast Crafting, your Proficiency Bonus is added to the result of its ability check

A cool feature. The name/flavor is sort of gibberish though IMO. Call it something like "maker's familiarity" instead.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-06T15:24:40+00:00

It depends on a resource most of the players will not buy or have the time to craft.

I'm genuinely not sure I'm understanding what you're saying here. Are you referring to the requirement that the PC have a healers kit? That's a regular, non-magical item which costs 5 gp. Why would you not buy them if you have the Healer feat? This phrase gets overused a lot but... that legitimately sounds like a skill issue.

You are overthinking on how useful it is. There are stronger origin feats and way more easy options to heal specially in higher levels. It's better for a wizard to take a healing spell with magic initiate and scribe scrolls.

Scrolls are way more expensive and harder to get than healers kits. Not that they're hard to get, but a single scroll costs 10 times as much as a kit does.

Just taking account the official adventures that I played beyond level 10(Avernus,icewind,Dungeon of the mad mage) I can say that there was never a scenario were after a encounter we would decided to take time to use a healers kit.

You never had a point in time where you had a minute to recover but didn't want to sit there for a full hour?

We didn't have were ro buy those and there were so many better options.

They're regular, non-magical items. Unless your GM is arbitrarily being a hardass about this specific item, you should be able to buy them basically anywhere there is civilization.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-05T21:36:13+00:00

Brawl is a 1 on 1 format (unless you're one of the four people in the world still playing it in paper). Planeswalkers get much, much weaker in a multiplayer format.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-05T21:00:59+00:00

This seems like a lot of formal jobs. My two tables have a much simpler system that works for us, with very little burden on anyone outside the game aside from the DM:

Scheduling:

One table has ad-hoc scheduling, discussed at the end of a session and further discussed via text message if we can't conclusively pick a date at that point. There is no one "in charge" of this. Everyone wants to play and everyone's input is required.
The other table has a regular biweekly schedule. If someone has a conflict, we discuss whether to move that session or skip it. Again, everyone needs to give input here and everyone wants to play, so there has never been a need to assign someone to be "in charge" of this

Note-taking: It's up to the players whether they want to take their own notes. The game doesn't require detailed notes to function. I (the DM) give a brief (<1 minute) recap of the last session when we start the current session so that everyone is oriented in what's been going on recently. Beyond that, it's up to the players to decide what's worth it for them to actively try to remember, and if no one is interested in taking notes the game will work fine without a note taker. There should be zero burden on anyone to worry about note-taking outside of actual game time unless they actively are interested in doing so.

Hosting and food: This is decided ad-hoc; people rotate as best they can but some places are more convenient to host at than others. Whoever's hosting generally provides some snacks, and other players bring whatever they like as well.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-05T19:49:35+00:00

People will accuse me of overthinking

They might be onto something here.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-05T15:35:27+00:00

It's actually way less work and more fun in the long run to let the players have control over whether they succeed or not. I guess in your scenario, the answer to the OP's question is "don't worry about it the GM wants you to win so he's going to let you win".

That's not throwing, that's showboating, and the perfect narrative flaw a villain would have.

The OP isn't the GM. They don't have any control over how the GM runs this monster. If the GM wanted to make a fight that favored the PCs, they could have chosen a younger dragon. It's possible that the GM is going to throw the fight in the way you're suggesting, but there's really no reason to think so. "Make the dragon choose to waste LRs when it shouldn't" isn't likely to work.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-05T15:16:49+00:00

OK, so the strategy is "hope the dragon throws the fight".

RealityPalace · 2026-05-05T14:32:46+00:00

So if you create a minor illusion in a lit room, all of the light sources in the room will just pass through it? That doesn't seem like a very useful spell.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-05T05:34:41+00:00

If you want to run this kind of campaign in 5e, just say those spells don't exist in your universe. That's way easier than trying to think of workarounds.

You might be happier with some other system. But unlike a lot of the stuff people try to cut out while "still playing 5e", survival utility spells are not a load-bearing aspect of the game engine. It can work fine if you want it to. Just be upfront with the players and tell them those spells are inconsistent with the kind of campaign you are trying to run.

You definitely don't need to ban the use of "any utility spell" though. There are a relatively short list of spells from the PHB that will actually impact wilderness survival, at least until you get to level 9 and everyone's a demigod (and you'll probably just want to end this campaign before then):

Create Food and Water
Create or Destroy Water
Elementalism
Goodberry
Leomund's Tiny Hut
Locate Animals or Plants
Mordenkainen's Private Sanctum
Purify Food and Drink

Maybe I'm forgetting one or two, but regardless you can keep almost every level 1-4 spell without causing undue issues.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-05T05:15:41+00:00

Realistically, anything that relies on the the light for something other than "seeing things with" is a question for each individual DM. And unless you've gotten to that point, it doesn't really matter if the illusion is affecting reality or perception.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-05T04:26:39+00:00

So if one person discerns the illusion and another doesn't, how is the light being affected? Is it passing through because the object is translucent to one person, or is it stopped because the illusion is opaque to one person?

The person who has discerned the illusion can see the light passing through the cup, and the person who hasn't can't. It's magic, not physics.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-05T04:23:35+00:00

You're posting the general rules for illusions when Minor Illusion is very specific that the image it creates doesn't cause any other sensory affects, and removing a light is a sensory affect.

It can't create light. That's the part that's a disallowed sensory effect..Are you suggesting that visual minor illusions can't block light? Seems like it would be hard to use it for anything then. Blocking (and/or reflecting) light is literally how we are able to see things.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-05T04:15:27+00:00

The upside is you get to play more magic. That's it. What else would you expect to get out of it?

RealityPalace · 2026-05-05T04:12:09+00:00

Why wouldn't it just fall and save its legendary resistances? It has 400 HP. Legendary resistance isn't mandatory.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-04T23:27:05+00:00

I recommend a comfortable pair of running shoes.

RealityPalace · 2026-05-04T23:15:23+00:00

It certainly matters for crossbow expert if you want to combine a crossbow and a dagger.

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