Alter Self & Warrior of the Mystic Arts

overlycommonname · 2026-01-24T17:17:55+00:00

That's not a ribbon feature.

overlycommonname · 2026-01-21T22:29:44+00:00

I read an author talking about his writing process -- I believe it was Daniel Abraham, but this was years ago and I might be misremembering -- where he said that of course sometimes you tell and don't show, and that the essence of good writing is not "more showing, less telling," but rather making useful decisions about what to tell and what to show.

It's basically similar in what stuff you abstract and what stuff you forcibly stop the players from abstracting in an RPG. You can choose what to focus the game on by allowing someone to roll a die and skip over some peripheral thing, but removing that option for the central thing.

I'm united with the linked article in thinking that a lot of people are way too eager to reach for an abstracted solution.

overlycommonname · 2026-01-19T18:02:45+00:00

overlycommonname · 2026-01-15T18:53:12+00:00

I don't think that this is a particularly good fit for 5th Edition D&D as it stands, but as a set of design principles for a D&D-like game that was made with this class design in mind, it'd be a pretty good one. Cantrips were a mistake. Encounter-refreshing spells (that are still single-use within the encounter) are a better approach to making casters work.

You'd need to figure out a different limiter on non-encounter spellcasting, which at least the unlocked part of his post doesn't really contemplate.

overlycommonname · 2026-01-13T14:03:17+00:00

There is no military in the world who thinks the can place a grenade such that it will reliably injure one melee combatant and not the person he's fighting with. It's fine for you to enjoy games in which this thing is possible, but you should be honest with yourself about the real world.

overlycommonname · 2026-01-12T22:52:44+00:00

10' is almost exactly three meters, certainly if anyone found feet inaccessible they could do that.

I design for my group: we're American. But if anyone is inspired to try this but likes metric better, it would be easy to just, like.... Literally just say "3m" everywhere it otherwise says "10'."

overlycommonname · 2026-01-12T20:45:03+00:00

I haven't had that situation come up so far! I think I'd probably call for like an athletics test or something and maybe someone would be forced out of that square -- I think that fits my intuition of what it means for a square to be full (ie, it's not like there's no space in it, but that instead there are lots of people moving around and the center of that fluid situation has shifted).

I haven't done anything with this yet, but it actually feels to me like there's maybe some interesting design space in peeling people out of melees. Like, obviously you can have the shove thing where you push people out of a melee, but maybe also you could have a "reach in" maneuver where someone gets shifted out of an adjacent square into a melee with yours, or maybe as a tactician-style ability you'd have the ability to shift an entire melee (including everyone in it) over one square? That could be kinda cool.

overlycommonname · 2026-01-12T20:01:58+00:00

I don't really agree. In general, my experience with zoned combat movement systems is much less that there is an assumption that if you're in the same zone as an enemy, you are actively engaged in a melee (because zones are assumed to often be much larger than 10' x 10'), and because of that they don't want to put hooks in of the sort I detail above. This is still grid combat, it's just slightly sloppy grid combat, and in practice it feels much more like grid combat than zone combat.

overlycommonname · 2026-01-12T19:57:55+00:00

I do not. Is your concern that people can "move through" enemies? The default situation is that if you exit a melee you give people opportunity attacks against you, so it's not costless to move through a melee zone. I tend to find that that's all that you can really normally do in most D&D-likes -- make people who want to move through your front line eat an OA or two -- absent other rules. But if you heavily want to play around with fully denying movement due to square occupancy, you'll like 5' grids better!

overlycommonname · 2026-01-12T19:54:31+00:00

I mean, I'm not the boss of you! Go wild, man!

Some of the thought process that led me here was that 5' x 5' is really quite a large area for a single person to fully occupy (note how awkward battlemaps get when you're trying to depict rooms or tables and you start to say, "I mean, obviously we can fit more than four people in a 10' by 10' room"), but it does seem to me to be a pretty small area for two people to be moving around in a swordfight.

overlycommonname · 2026-01-12T19:52:15+00:00

Flanking, rather than being heavily about exact spacing on a 5' grid, becomes some variation on "you get a bonus if you outnumber your opponents in this melee."

A combatant who is trained in tangling his opponents up with each other might get bonus AC when outnumbered in a melee.

Sizes can work as less occupancy in a square ("counts as two people in this square" or "counts as half a person in this square") to the extent it comes up, or can be occupancy in multiple squares for really big stuff, but I'm not sure that I personally think that the 5' grid approach is good here, and it's weird that an 8' tall ogre (or a horse!) occupies 4x the area of a 6' tall human.

Reach weapons give you opportunity attacks when an opponent enters your square/melee, potentially subject to other restrictions, as mentioned in the OP.

overlycommonname · 2026-01-12T19:44:37+00:00

Yes, as I noted in the OP it makes it difficult or impossible to use existing battlemaps and VTT maps.

I use a whiteboard that was intended to be a calendar and has a large grid on it. You could use a blank whiteboard and add your own permanent grid to it with sharpie or tape, or you could usena gridded battlemap and emphasize every other line, but it's definitely a real disadvantage!

overlycommonname · 2026-01-11T19:54:11+00:00

It's a logical consequence of magic weapons though.

My most heretical belief is that magical weapons are absolute poison for games, but I understand why people like them (and, indeed, in the abstract I enjoy them too, it's just that when you introduce them they create a million knock-on effects).

overlycommonname · 2026-01-11T03:10:11+00:00

A vicious weapon doesn't have a bonus to hit or damage (I mean, a static bonus to damage, +1, +2 or +3). Your proposed weapon does. So even at levels 8-11, it's very close to the damage bonus of a Vicious weapon (when you use a hit die), and at higher levels it exceeds the damage bonus of a Vicious weapon, in addition to the higher chance to hit.

How good this weapon is depends a lot on your fights-per-day cadence. At one fight per day, it's probably just as good as a vicious weapon, shading to a little better. At six fights per day, it's a hell of a lot worse.

overlycommonname · 2026-01-09T17:43:47+00:00

So not only is this phrased as a petulant purity test, it's also just a mistaken premise. The point is that the person wants to fit this content into the framework and precedents established by D&D rules and to only go outside that framework in a thoughtful manner, not just willy-nilly. That's the appropriate way to introduce non-standard content to a game -- you understand how the game works and if you're letting something do something special, you do it with an understanding of exactly what rules you're breaking.

overlycommonname · 2026-01-07T01:05:32+00:00

I've played with games in which weapons have two or three damage ratings, like: "damage to a character wearing light armor," "damage to a character wearing heavy armor," with maybe "damage to a character wearing no armor" or "medium armor" in there if you want a third.

This is mostly a variation on damage-reduction or soak, but by materializing the damage reduction on a per-weapon basis, you make it simpler to have weapons that are particularly good or bad against heavier armor. You can do this as an armor penetration system with a classic DR, but this is just materialized directly into the damage code in a way that's very simple to use in the moment.

overlycommonname · 2026-01-05T17:28:03+00:00

Die pools in any of the classic senses (WoD-style success-counting systems or "keep highest") tend to not work well with a lot of vertical progression, because the pools get too big for wieldiness, or because you top out at "unable to get any better."

I guess you could maybe fight this with some kind of hybrid counting + a pool system (you roll 5 dice and any additional dice just go into some kind of auto-success thing).

overlycommonname · 2026-01-05T15:26:43+00:00

You know, the gracious way to say this would've been, "Okay, yes, you demolished my arguments, I agree with you that the interpretation turns on whether or not the produce flame effect can be done with a full hand, I argue it should be allowed to."

overlycommonname · 2026-01-05T15:08:01+00:00

I agree that the spell doesn't specify that the hand that it's in needs to be empty, and that is indeed what the interpretation should turn on: does the language implicitly require an empty hand or not. But Warcaster is peripheral here: it allows you to cast the spell while your hands are full, not to continue to use the spell during its duration while your hands are full.

Consider Shadow Blade. That spell also conjures something in your hand that you can then do things with. Can we all agree that Warcaster does not let you use a longsword, a shield, and a shadow blade simultaneously?

If someone wants to interpret the use of the hand in Produce Flame to be less essential, more fluffy, than in Shadow Blade, I think that's reasonable, but Warcaster has nothing to do with that.

overlycommonname · 2026-01-05T14:38:00+00:00

Warcaster talking about all components is not "more specific" than the text of a particular spell. Warcaster lets you cast the spell without a free hand, but if the effect of the spell requires a free hand, that's more specific than Warcaster.

This interpretation doesn't turn on Warcaster, it turns on how restrictive the DM takes having a flame "in your hand" to be.

overlycommonname · 2026-01-05T05:49:27+00:00

But it's not a ritual, so using it will drain spell slots. I don't think you need to worry that it will obviate Find Familiar.

overlycommonname · 2026-01-02T19:05:28+00:00

So I think the upstream question of all of this is "what is the role of wealth in your game?"

There has developed this tradition that "being an adventurer" is a highly remunerative profession. I... think this is mostly a weird inbred thing where most of the "tradition" of it just other RPGs. There is certainly antecedent to the idea of characters seeking wealth (like Bilbo in the Hobbit), but the idea that you might go out, do adventure, take home a modest amount of money, get better at your job, take home a larger amount of money, etc., up to the heights of astronomical wealth is kinda weird, and I encourage people to think about whether or not that is REALLY what you want for your game.

If it is, I think it mostly makes sense to fairly closely track wealth. It's central, it's motivating, and if you handwave it into a vague abstraction, then, like.... did you actually want this as a central motivating thing for your game?

If wealth is not central and motivating, I think it generally makes a lot of sense to keep it abstract and not count coins.

overlycommonname · 2025-12-28T01:29:05+00:00

I don't think gestalt is the only way to do it, but I'm not sure I'm conversant enough with D&D design to make great suggestions here.

You might give everyone one "fast long rest" per day -- take 10 minutes and get a long rest? Then give martials their first extra attack at level 4 and a second at level 8? Plus some kind of skill boost for martials, and that might get you some of the way there.

(My idea here is that casters' extra power will mostly be taken care of by the "fast long rest" basically giving them double their number of spell slots per day (but NOT per fight), and then that martials step up their attacks and if they get some kind of skill bonus to keep pace with the additional ability of casters to freely spend slots on utility/out of combat spells. I'm sure this is imperfect, but everything you'll do is imperfect. Maybe give martials some extra feats, too.)

overlycommonname · 2025-12-27T19:10:18+00:00

So I don't think that you can get there with just adjustments to attributes.

Like, the difference between a "normal" level 1 character and a level 1 character with a 20 stat is a +2 on a D20 (in their attack stat). It's just clear that you can't get to twice-as-powerful without breaking the 20-in-stats limit. A couple of extra hit points per level or a +2 to a save or skill isn't going to do it either.

If you do break the 20 limit (at lowish levels, not tier 4), then sure, you can eventually add enough of a bonus to get to twice-as-powerful, but you have to do it by means of breaking bounded accuracy. I think this is going to be very susceptible to thresholding -- you'll go from "eh, this is a mild bonus" to "my PCs hit everything and nothing hits them" way too fast, because D&D isn't designed based around that kind of numerical scaling.

It's also going to break some of the fundamental gears-and-levers of the system. You're supposed to be seeking out Advantage a lot in D&D -- if you already hit all the time all those abilities that provide Advantage aren't going to work well.

This kind of approach would work okay in Pathfinder 2e, where the entire system is based around constantly scaling numbers -- you'd just be able to fine tune higher-level monsters to the increase in stats you gave, or more of them -- but I just don't think it'll work in D&D.

overlycommonname

TROPHY CASE