ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/11958148

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Edit: It seems I never spelled out what my issue with 5e was. My grievance is that as a player the game doesn't empower me to do what I feel is the core fantasy of most classes. I can't fault the DMs for forgetting to include spell scrolls as loot or not do overland travel or whatever, they are small easy-to-forget things. It just gets frustrating when I ask the DM to give out a certain kind of loot or let me interact with other druids to do Druid things and then they (understandably) forget.

A while back, I got into a heated argument with a friend about 5e; I wanted to play a new system becuase I was getting tired of how generic 5e is, but my friend insisted that i could hombrew 5e to create any style of play i wanted. This was back in 2017 and we have not been friends for a while now, but I've been pondering how to homebrew 5e into a shape that encourages a specific style of play.

My main issue with 5e after all this time is that I don't feel like the classes actually encourage you to behave like your class. Druid is personally my favorite class because it's the exception (i liek da aminals) but every other class is at best somewhat samey and at worst actively frustrating (looking at you, PHB ranger).

Here's my thoughts about what I think the core fantasy of each class SHOULD be. Lmk what you think. I want to know if I am really off-base with these.

Bard: I think you play a Bard to be a drama queen and an artist.

Barbarian: s t r o n k

Cleric: The main appeal of being a cleric, for me, is promoting a god, proselytizing, doing outreach, building a temple, and most importantly asking the DM very specific questions about their setting and making them very happy. It's all about that faith babyyyy.

Druid: i liek da aminals. (fr, the actual appeal for me is similar to cleric but with Druid stuff)

Fighter: the only reason for me to play Fighter is the Battlemaster Archetype, so I can play 5e like the wargame it sometimes seems like it wants to be. I also like the Champion for the expanded crit range, but if you like being stronk like bull you could just play barbarian? (Starting to think that Barbarian should have been a Fighter subclass).

Monk: wuxia/xianxia. Kinda out of place, but I can dig it. They should have leaned more into that.

Paladin: The only class that I think was incredibly damaged by WotC's decision to make alignment not matter mechanically. IMHO, the concept of Oaths should have been more fleshed out, and there should have been consequences for breaking your oath included in the rules.

Ranger: the one time I played a ranger, I worked with the dm to homebrew some cool stuff for traveling so I could be the ultimate master of the wilderness. (We then went into a dungeon and spent the rest of the mini-campaign there.) I think a better ranger would have more cool stuff for traveling, and maybe let you make more animal friends.

Rogue: Stabby glass cannon skill monkey. 5e's rogue knows what it wants to be and it is very good at being its best self. I have never played a rogue, but I totally get the appeal. IMHO, best class in the game. I think the only way to improve the rogue would be to make skills better.

Sorceror: I have mixed feelings about the Sorceror. I like sorcery points, and I like being able to do more with a limited spell list. That said, if I want to play as a magical boy who casts spells as easily as breathing, I think there should be a way to slam together a spell-like effect on the spot with nothing but your Wits.

Warlock: My favorite misfit child. As a DM, I love how I can use this class to yank a player around my cool setting under the threat of [REDACTED]. However, I have noticed multiple players seem thrown off by this. As a player, I love using my Warlock pact to exploit the hell out of the setting for my own game, but the way it's spellcasting works runs completely counter to how every other class works. Ultimately, could be a better power fantasy, all things considered.

Wizard: I have a bone to pick with this class. Yes, this class offers a path to ultimate power. However, the main way you do this is by shoving spell scrolls into your spellbook like a kid on Halloween grabbing fistfuls of candy from a bowl labeled "Please Take 1". This means going into dungeons to find them, and hopefully also the gold to copy them into your spellbook. However, every DM I have played with seems to forget that spell scrolls, especially Cantrip spell scrolls, are a thing that exist and can be found as loot. More importantly, we rarely even go into the dungeons that these scrolls are in! In my opinion, the best way to make wizards playable is to make 2 changes to all or most of the other classes:

1. Give the other classes abilities that similarly depend on the Dungeon. Maybe give them stuff to spend copious amounts of money on?

2. Give some of the other spellcasters spellbooks so more people are hungry for scrolls. (Bard could definitely use a spellbook, since they are kinda like music wizards.) Then, all you would need to do is give the wizard some tiny boons to their spellbook usage to make it slightly more efficient than the other classes.

Artificer: Inventing stuff is cool! I just wish that WotC wasn't so scared of giving players the freedom to customize stuff. Maybe in another timeline we could have gotten an Artificer that functions like the PF1 Summoner. Also, guns. Not sure why they are so afraid of guns. Any table that bans Artificer is also going to ban guns, and any table that really wants guns will also really want Artificer. The venn diagram of Artificer enthusiasts and people who want guns in D&D is a circle.

Here's my thoughts on what I would need to do to make 5e conform to a style of play I like:

1. Cull the redundant classes so my work is a bit easier. Barbarian and Paladin become Fighter subclasses. Druid becomes a Cleric subclass. Eliminate Sorceror, Monk, Warlock, and Artificer until I know what to do with them. This leaves Bard, Cleric, Fighter, Ranger, Rogue, and Wizard.
2. Rework the lower levels to incentivise the core fantasy of each class.
3. At higher levels, give each class ludicrously expensive stuff to buy so they still want to go into the dungeons and get loot. Move the currency system to be based around copper pieces so I can more easily deploy the overcomplicated currency systems that make me happy.
4. Make skills a little more fun to work with. For example, maybe whenever you use a skill successfully yoh can increase your proficiency with that skill by 1?
5. Circle back to Sorceror, Warlock, Monk, and Artificer. Make new classes to replace them. Artificer gets a whole framework for fully custom inventions. Monk gets proper cultivation genre mechanics, diving deep into eastern alchemy on top of the standard martial arts flair. Sorceror has spellcasting, but also gets a toolkit for slapping together spell effects on the fly. Warlock gets a full point-buy system with their pact boons. I do not think this is very doable, though.

Lmk if I am completely off-base.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2757154

tag thyself

just hanging out in Kḧzk, exporting my precious ores

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2757154

tag thyself

just hanging out in Kḧzk, exporting my precious ores

My normal DM is taking a little hiatus at the end of the summer, and has offered to let me run a game during that time. I, as a rule, let players choose what we are doing. The 2 campaigns I have prepped are most accurately described as this:

1. A Hunter: the Reckoning game set in my hometown. The party is playing as normal people with normal lives who hunt the things that lurk in the night on their off time. There is a turf war between angels and demons brewing downtown, Amazon is trapping and brainwashing werewolves in the national park, and the local Autism Mom group has recently started to try and cure their children through more sadistic means than normal. In the background, the secret alien invasion is about to get much worse, and the New World Order has sold us out. Have fun!

2. DnD as I wish I could play it. Open world, homebrew setting that I ran a 5e campaign in during Covid, using Knave. If you want cool abilities, you get those by finding magic items in the dungeons. Outside of that, tell me what interests you and we will do that. You want to do cleric stuff? A local priory has lost their sacred relic. Want political intrigue? The Marquis just to the north has a reputation of being horrific to his peasants, so get evidence, kidnap him, and drag him before the king to face judgement. There's a big world to explore.

Now, the thing that frustrates me is I have, on average, one sentence to convince each of my burned-out 20-something friends to do each game. If I send them anything longer than that, they will not read it. So, "monster hunting in the rust belt" is competing against "Open world where you can do whatever you want". I dont think that is fair.

I miss dungeon-crawls. But it's so hard to pitch them! Like, when I play a wizard, I want to go into dungeons, find spell scrolls for the DM's cool homebrew spells, copy them into my spellbook, and become the most versatile mage in the world; but when we play, we never even set foot in a dungeon because none of the other classes yearn for the mines at all! It just doesn't seem fair to me that the option I think is just as cool as Alien Invasion in Conspiracy Clown World, and the option I prefer, won't seem as cool to my players.

Edit:

Just to clarify, I am also excited to run Conspiracy Clown World. It was listed first because when I first heard I might get a shot to run something, that's what I started working on first. My reticence to run it, though, mainly stems from 2 problems that I think only I am having:

First, our current campaign is a morally grey, politically complex, character-driven campaign. The good guys are not winning, and that's 100% our fault; i might even go so far as to call it grimdark. Conspiracy Clown World, despite taking place in a giant funhouse painted to look like the real world, will be a morally grey, politically complex, character driven campaign in a grimdark setting with no good guys. It's more of the same. Maybe they will find it to be a pallette cleanser, but probably not me.

Second, I know from experience that I am going to feel like if I don't run Conspiracy Clown World for at least a year, I will not feel like the campaign has properly run its course. I don't think Dungeon World will be like that.

These are, from my perspective, selfish concerns. If the players want to hunt monsters in Conspiracy Clown World, thats what they are getting.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/13942739

Sometimes I look back on my life and wonder exactly how much of my life and current personality is purely due to the autism.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/21181822

Writers of Lemmy, how do you do outining?

I normally just do a big text document, but I'm starting to think thats not the best method for me. It can be overwhelming to keep nice and linear over time.

I normally just do a big text document, but I'm starting to think thats not the best method for me. It can be overwhelming to keep nice and linear over time.

Leave a comment if Voyager is the best

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/12540154

rule

[alt: "you wouldn't download a car" edited to say "you woulge"]

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2609634

Hmmmm… I don’t remember that Beatles song

When I was a kid, like a real little kid, I remember having this one song I liked a lot about a guy trying to deal with getting wedgies at school. I remember almost nothing about it now, other than the guy eventually finds that Fruit of the Loom brand underwear has stretchy enough elastic to make the wedges painless. (This song is the reason I kept bugging my parents to get me Fruit of the Loom brand underwear instead of other brands.)

Now I can't seem to find the song. The only reason I know it existed is because my parents also remember my weird brand loyalty to Fruit of the Loom because of that song. Can any of you guys help me find the underwear song that defined my childhood?