Are there any rules you think we should steal from older editions for our current games? Thanks so much to OnlyCrits for sponsoring this video! Visit www.onlycrits.com/supergeekmike and take advantage of their Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals!
5:41 Hard Disagre here. Everyone at our table helps with pointing out rule mistakes. Nothing wrong with speaking up when someone makes an honest mistake. If anything, saying nothing when another player makes a mistake that's in the parties favor is borderline cheating. The DM has alot going on, they shouldn't be the soul person responsible for trying to have a fair game.
I'm with you. I almost shouted "NO" aloud when he said that. As a GM, I have so much taking up my attention that having other players helping out with rules corrections is always appreciated, as long as its polite. As a player, it is something that will bother me so I will say something. And if I get something wrong, I would hope someone would correct me. I don't want to reinforce the wrong thing in my brain, and later if I learn I've been doing something wrong in my favor, I feel awful.
Exactly, as a player, sometimes I remember a rule better than other people at the table so I'll ask the DM about it, something like "wait, doesn't this work like that?" and if the DM is knowingly breaking a rule, they'll just tell me as much, if not, they either correct themselves/the other player or stick to the "mistake", it's not backseat DMing to ask this kind of thing
I concur with your assessment of crits. My group has always split the difference and had the player roll for damage once and add that to the max possible damage of the attack. They always feel juicy! lol
I did crits that way for a bit, but I found the group punched way above their level (*especially* using attack cantrips) and also PCs tended to go down out of nowhere. We switched back to rolling the damage dice twice
There are other options by the way, in my table we run crits in one of three ways depending on who's DMing that specific campaign: we have the version Mike described, but there's also the options of just maxing one die instead of all of them, and the way I run it is a bit weird, you basically roll for damage twice, pick the higher result, double it, then add modifiers
If you're interested in creating evolving NPC statblocks, a good place to look is the way rival party members work in Call of the Netherdeep. They are meant to scale along with the players, but also be easy to run for the DM.
As someone who tends to be good at learning games, and preferring to go closer to RAW when running what I try and do is only 'help the GM' when they're looking up the rules (or if it's a learning game where all of us are playing the game for the first time for something like a TTRPG book club where we're all trying to figure out what the game actually is). If the GM wants to know what the rules are, I can often help them with that. If they want to make a ruling, awesome. I might ask after the game if they wanted to know what the rules actually say about a subject if it didn't feel like a deliberate houserule, while emphasizing that if I have zero problems with it, but the vibe for that doesn't always feel right, particularly in online games.
After doing some maths, I realized that rolling damage twice for crits has an average damage of about the max damage of a normal roll. The same is true for doubling the results on the dice. Assuming max damage and adding a normal damage roll results in about 1.5 times the normal max damage. It would be more balanced to assume average damage and add a normal damage roll, for a total of about the normal max damage. My calculation assumes the average damage to be half of the max damage, but the difference to the real average is negligible.
Your pause at the end got me lol seems to me prioritizing realism and 'strategy' are opposite things in the case of diagonal movement? Like for fair and strategy purposes, yeah move every square but it's realism that makes me WANT to use diagonal so people don't have to run 10 feet just to get 5 feet away from where they were just because its easier to contrive everyone as moving like a chess horse for some reason. I guess the problem is that it's weird and unrealistic for short distances NOT to use diagonals, but then the farther you go you really start making that distance stretch. It's just that as far as obstacles and stuff, having to move in straight lines like a robot is the unrealistic version.
I'm not sure I understand the comment about diagonal movement (4:00), though this might be my lack of DnD 5e rules knowledge (I'm a pathfinder player). Pathfinder allows diagonal movement, with every second diagonal move counting double. This is a rough approximation of pythagoras, ensuring that diagonal movement doesn't move you further than moving orthagonally. Using a rule like this, I'm not sure why diagonal movement would be an issue. Is this not a common solution in DnD 5e?
In 2014 5e, there were two versions of diagonal movement rules: a simpler one where each 5 foot square costs 5 feet, and a more “realistic” one like the one you describe. Both of these were included as variant rules, meaning technically you can say diagonal movement isn’t allowed in your games.
Are there any rules you think we should steal from older editions for our current games?
Thanks so much to OnlyCrits for sponsoring this video! Visit www.onlycrits.com/supergeekmike and take advantage of their Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals!
5:41 Hard Disagre here.
Everyone at our table helps with pointing out rule mistakes. Nothing wrong with speaking up when someone makes an honest mistake. If anything, saying nothing when another player makes a mistake that's in the parties favor is borderline cheating. The DM has alot going on, they shouldn't be the soul person responsible for trying to have a fair game.
Disagree. There is. Party's. A lot. Sole.
I'm with you. I almost shouted "NO" aloud when he said that. As a GM, I have so much taking up my attention that having other players helping out with rules corrections is always appreciated, as long as its polite. As a player, it is something that will bother me so I will say something. And if I get something wrong, I would hope someone would correct me. I don't want to reinforce the wrong thing in my brain, and later if I learn I've been doing something wrong in my favor, I feel awful.
Exactly, as a player, sometimes I remember a rule better than other people at the table so I'll ask the DM about it, something like "wait, doesn't this work like that?" and if the DM is knowingly breaking a rule, they'll just tell me as much, if not, they either correct themselves/the other player or stick to the "mistake", it's not backseat DMing to ask this kind of thing
I concur with your assessment of crits. My group has always split the difference and had the player roll for damage once and add that to the max possible damage of the attack.
They always feel juicy! lol
Always a good moment refreshing my youtube feed and seeing a new supergeek post
I did crits that way for a bit, but I found the group punched way above their level (*especially* using attack cantrips) and also PCs tended to go down out of nowhere. We switched back to rolling the damage dice twice
There are other options by the way, in my table we run crits in one of three ways depending on who's DMing that specific campaign: we have the version Mike described, but there's also the options of just maxing one die instead of all of them, and the way I run it is a bit weird, you basically roll for damage twice, pick the higher result, double it, then add modifiers
Your critical hit house rule is how we decided to do ours years ago and it's great!
If you're interested in creating evolving NPC statblocks, a good place to look is the way rival party members work in Call of the Netherdeep. They are meant to scale along with the players, but also be easy to run for the DM.
10:17 This is exactly how my current DM handles crits so it's probably a common house rule.
As someone who tends to be good at learning games, and preferring to go closer to RAW when running what I try and do is only 'help the GM' when they're looking up the rules (or if it's a learning game where all of us are playing the game for the first time for something like a TTRPG book club where we're all trying to figure out what the game actually is). If the GM wants to know what the rules are, I can often help them with that. If they want to make a ruling, awesome. I might ask after the game if they wanted to know what the rules actually say about a subject if it didn't feel like a deliberate houserule, while emphasizing that if I have zero problems with it, but the vibe for that doesn't always feel right, particularly in online games.
After doing some maths, I realized that rolling damage twice for crits has an average damage of about the max damage of a normal roll. The same is true for doubling the results on the dice. Assuming max damage and adding a normal damage roll results in about 1.5 times the normal max damage. It would be more balanced to assume average damage and add a normal damage roll, for a total of about the normal max damage.
My calculation assumes the average damage to be half of the max damage, but the difference to the real average is negligible.
The background music is giving Pokemon Sword&Shield vibes (running around in the open area looking for raids), love it
I saw rolling with difficulty doing crits that way and I'm trying it in my campaign
That's how I am diong crits too, Mike. Deal max damage on the dice & roll your dice and add the two totals together.
yaytrons for the patrons!
Your pause at the end got me lol
seems to me prioritizing realism and 'strategy' are opposite things in the case of diagonal movement? Like for fair and strategy purposes, yeah move every square but it's realism that makes me WANT to use diagonal so people don't have to run 10 feet just to get 5 feet away from where they were just because its easier to contrive everyone as moving like a chess horse for some reason. I guess the problem is that it's weird and unrealistic for short distances NOT to use diagonals, but then the farther you go you really start making that distance stretch. It's just that as far as obstacles and stuff, having to move in straight lines like a robot is the unrealistic version.
I'm not sure I understand the comment about diagonal movement (4:00), though this might be my lack of DnD 5e rules knowledge (I'm a pathfinder player). Pathfinder allows diagonal movement, with every second diagonal move counting double. This is a rough approximation of pythagoras, ensuring that diagonal movement doesn't move you further than moving orthagonally. Using a rule like this, I'm not sure why diagonal movement would be an issue. Is this not a common solution in DnD 5e?
In 2014 5e, there were two versions of diagonal movement rules: a simpler one where each 5 foot square costs 5 feet, and a more “realistic” one like the one you describe. Both of these were included as variant rules, meaning technically you can say diagonal movement isn’t allowed in your games.
Pleeeease do these on a second channel. It's great content but a killer for your success in the algorithm.
still waiting for more spicy videos of you in boudoir videos