Honestly, sometimes my least favorite part of 5e is when you make literally any slight criticism of it and then get an extremely disproportionate negative reaction. A while ago I pointed out that even when adjusted for inflation, 5e is the most expensive d&d to play (a completely neutral statement) and I got reactions like I was kicking a child.
Its Because Wizards cultivated a new batch of players who are perpetually simping for wizards They probably don't play magic so are yet to experience the terrible business practices
A couple of things I do: Getting knocked out gives a character a level of exhaustion. Recovering a level of exhaustion requires a CON save, with the DC based on your accommodations (suddenly shelling out for that comfortable inn instead of sleeping on the ground outside makes a difference). Long rests don't restore hit points. Characters regains half their hit dice, round up, after completing a long rest.
Just use the lingering Injuries system in the DMG. When you get knocked to 0HP roll on the table and get a permanent wound. It ranges from small scars to the loss of limbs. It is perfect for making 0HP a dreadful thing. It also makes boomeranging something you do not want.
Why not both? Maybe roll a dice when you go unconscious: odds lingering injury, evens 1 level of exhaustion. Getting back up means you’re still down with a clear mechanical disadvantage that takes time and resources to mitigate. Toss in Short Rest healing with a Healers Kit only AND hit dice back on a long rest but not all the HP. Maybe toss in the resurrection rules Matt Mercer uses when you’re raised from the dead so death isn’t a revolving door but a story moment with uncertainty built in. Last campaign I DMed in a home brew world the gods had abandoned so no clerics period. That and these rules made for a more dangerous and dynamic story. Players were more strategic and crafty. Choices had clear consequences. And we had a lot of fun. A clear upfront session zero was key so no one was surprised when Revivify was not an option.
I dislike the idea of letting the dice capriciously maim characters, plus every time you have to stop and roll on a table means slowing the game down. If your table is down for Lingering Injuries, go for it. I'm just not a fan, and exhaustion adds a simple means for reflecting the duress of getting knocked out and discouraging tubthumping.
It's not that big of a deal. The dice are what decides injuries to begin with. The death saving throws can decide whether you live or die. In looking to alter a system that is far too forgiving, maiming is still better than death. It works because it adds consequence to being "downed", which currently has none.
@@LordOz3 A level of exhaustion does nothing during a battle. It's disadvantage on ability checks if I'm not mistaken. That does not include attack rolls or saving throws. You get 3 death saves which is 3 rounds that an ally can pop you up with a single bonus action healing word from range. If you dislike dice, don't use them, and just gather round the table and do your collaborative story.
If you think D&D 5e is very "kitchen sink," don't even consider Pathfinder 1e (and, I'm sure, 2e eventually). It takes the concept of the kitchen sink and somehow managed to fit a kitchen sink inside if it. I say this as a 7 year player and GM of Pathfinder.
That's exactly what I thought too. One of the reasons I switched to DnD 5e was to have a more cohesive high fantasy setting with fewer options. Pathfinder's kitchen sink was just too much for me. I know you can limit your setting/player options and only include what you want in Pathfinder, but I'm also a sucker for the Forgotten Realms.
@@theprinceofawesomeness I actually enjoy it, as well, up to a point. The openness of being able to make almost any character imaginable within the rules is great - as long as players (including the GM) remember that its a *role* playing game, not a *roll* playing game. :)
That's part of the reason I love Pathfinder as a player. The sheer amount of options available makes each new character feeling unique, and the DM telling me that I can't use a specific thing isn't really an issue for me because there's so many other things to choose from.
Honestly, I'd rather the game "be easier" and scale it up versus being too hard. A lot of people in this thread have made some great suggestions on how to do that. In my situation, I'm introducing my family to DnD. I've played since 1e, but it's completely new to my wife and kids. During our first encounter with goblins, my wife got injured for more than half of her hit points. I told her about the death saves and it was like a relief to her. My kids also enjoyed the game and played well. All the systems act like a safety net for new players and it's those new players who are the lifeblood of your game. In any case, nice discussion material.
Scaling things up can make the game swing a lot though. Sometimes an encounter that should be difficult get just get stomped by players and other times they barely last one round. Scaling things down leads to better control. But maybe 5e was scaled down already from a more complicated system
I would rather orient everything according to the story I want to tell with my players. I am even actively homebrewing just to add to that story. My goal is not to go kitchen sink or too hard or easy.
Simply making a character take one level of exhaustion every time they drop to 0 hp and another level if the character fails 2 death saving throws, allowing only 1 hit die recovery per short rest, and not auto healing on a long rest, requiring hit die expenditure... helps make the game more like older versions and makes dropping to 0 hit points mean something.
I made DEATH Saves as soon as you hit zero. So you can end up failing twice before anyone can get to you. I also made it DC 12 Con roll. Your Death Saves linger until a long rest. Passing death saves removes a one failure. Every time you’re down, you gain an exhaustion.
My experience really is that death is as common or as rare as the DM wants it to be. I think if you want to increase your monster/npc player kill rate the most critical thing is not to shy away from delivering the killing blow to your PC just because there are other standing targets. Now I think most DMs reasonably rationalise that a monster will tend to lose interest if an attacker stops moving and there are others still attacking it, and an intelligent creature may prioritise putting down those still dealing damage to it to finishing off the unconscious creature, but ultimately the reason for doing this is because players don't like dying and the DM wants their players to have fun. But the clear result of this is that either you take down the whole party and TPK, or you're relying on unlucky rolls, which as you point out give a fair amount of time and leeway, to kill a player. If you want to up your kill rate, most monsters are going to be able to outright kill a downed character in 1 turn, and you shouldn't shy away from doing that. The theoretically optimal strategy is not always the narratively best, or even indeed the optimal one. If your bad guy takes a turn of damage in order to outright kill a player, that's going to send a message to the rest of the players, it's going to scare them and it's going to stop that character from coming back into the fight, permenantly. Even better he can have his minions do it and that makes those minions seem like more of a threat than they legitimately are. Think what happened to mollymauk. Matt may not have done that deliberately, he declared the double attack before molly did his thing that put him down, but the result is the same. 1 turn, 1 dead PC. I've never been a DM yet so take what I say with a pinch of salt, it's just something I've noted with how DMs tend to behave, they prioritise standing players because they aren't looking to kill their PCs. When the DM simply makes the baddies vindictive enough to just straight up murder you on the floor, as I hav witnessed once or twice in games, they often get their kills. No matter how much hp a character has, no matter how powerful their attacks, no matter how godlike they are, when they're lying helpless on the floor all it takes is 2 pokes from a goblin and they're dead.
I have it so that ever single encounter is at the decision of the players - no one wants to fight to the death - the players, NPC's or monsters, per se, so I leave them an out - a decision to be made, and if they decide, it was their decision to die. A, not the DM's fault. --Shit-- Dice Happens.
2: I do agree and I have a homebrew rule that you gain one point of exhaustion when you fall unconscious (from getting to 0 hit points). That way if the player is super uncareful he will be punished the rest of the day(s) depending on how many times he went down and after the third one the death saves start being with disadvantage.
For point 2 if you want a deadlier play the monster that way. When a PC is knocked unconscious have the monster continue to attack. RAW when an unconscious character is attacked it's an auto crit and they fail 2 death saves. Like Matt Colville says "the Earth Elemental Steps on your head to make sure your dead."
That. I came to the comments to say that. I not always do that, but when it makes sense, I make the baddies attack fallen characters. I also use the CR ressurrection rules.
I agree if you want a deadly encounter drop a PC and continue attacking downed characters and they will die...play this for monsters and say that the creature was predation💯
Sounds super duper unfun =/ We could carry this to dicky DM levels and have every encounter include a handful of wee monsters whose only mission is to dart in and finish off downed PCs (while barely adding any XP). How about a housecat that runs out from cover to rip out the throat of the fallen bard? An animated object that dances out to smack/fork/smother the comatose barbarian?
@@micahiwaasa9304 but if a DM wants to kill the party, he can easily do that anyways. This just gives an option to make the game a bit more dangerous when needed to create tension, or to make the players feel their charakters mortality.
I do agree that communication is key, and every system, no matter what, requires the group to talk a bit before playing, but I'm also a firm believer in trying to find a system that matches the kind of game you want to play and that you enjoy running. The less work you need to put into a system to make it work the way you want it to work, the better.
Thank you for this video! I must say, was not prepared for this level of honesty! I came into d&d when ad&d was on its tail end. Then 3rd edition came out, and not terribly long after, 3.5 and its many variants. When 3.0 came out, i really fell in love. So many options, variations, supplemental rules and ideas, campaign settings and alternative ideas... then 3.5 came out and just further streamlined it, while still being compatible with 3.0. So thats where i sit, and thats where i'll stay. Ive amassed a large collection of 3.0 and 3.5 books, and have continued to do so. Ive only recently completed ny quintessential set by mongoose, some 2 dozen booklets on specific races and classes, which really offer an in depth diversity to all the races and classes they address. I like the hardcore aura these versions have. Yeah, you may die. In fact, its a very real possibility. However, surviving and getting better has won the hearts of my players, and really sealed them into this game. Rewards have more impact when you almost lost it all on several occasions. What bothers me most about 5e besides the capitalist aspect is the racial acceptance. You wanna be a tiefling? Or a dragonborn? Not in my game bub!! I make new characters play a standard race/class combo or a few to understand the world and roles of those in it. If they can reach the level of the monstrous race/class combo they want with one or so standard characters, i find they understand the nuances of the world, and how and why monsters have the reputation they do. Sorry, but no christian kingdom society is going to be okay with a devil race of thieves doing what they do in town. But earn those levels the regular way and I will happily let you try! So to me, 5th edition is more like the liberal hippie approach to d&d whereas 3.0 and 3.5 are more like the cruel middle ages christian themed fantasy RPG i prefer. Im not christian or liberal or anything along those lines, but working within an imposing environment like that really brings a lot of challenges and territories where some things just dont fly. Thanks again for this video, it meant a lot to this ol' DM!!
Pathfinder 2 has a good fix for whack-a-mole situations, the Death Levels and Wounded Levels. Those can be easily added to 5e. Basically, the first time you are downed to 0HP it is the same as 5e, but each sequential K.O. increases your chance of instadeath. The Wounded LVL can be removed with Healing Kit uses and resting.
5E is unreal, the speed at which I can prep a session has gone waaay up. I have always had a gripe with the way D&D handles death. It is so hard to die in 5E, not that it should happen all the time, but there do need to be consequences. I have tried so many different things to remedy this and I find a lot of them work pretty well depending on the party. In my setting I've made diamonds very hard to come by, making the components for a resurrection a true treasure, and when the party finds one it's always a HUGE deal. My players don't reset their death saves when they go down. If you go down, fail once and then get brought back up, if you go down again on the same day you still have that 1 death saving throw failure. Also: I have never used the XP budget system. I think it's a great tool for new DMs however.
This, re: diamonds. I have the nobility in an area and the churches corner the entire market in diamonds. This is, after all, an immensely useful resource. You can't let just ANYONE have access to it.
great minds travel the same path. I do the same thing in my worlds. Diamonds are either very rare or are extremely controlled "substances" by the PTBs (powers that be) if not both
Just one problem: if diamonds are rare then they are also expensive, and resurrection spells require a certain cost of diamonds, meaning that resurrection becomes easier the rarer they are
You can go "old school" with the Hitpoints and follow the older D&D/AD&D nearly universal houserule method. Give the players 1 FULL Hit Die (ie 6 points for a Wizard, 10 points for a Fighter) for level 0 and then have them roll 1 HD for 1st Level. Add in the CON bonus JUST THIS ONCE and total the results. There is your 1st Level HP total! The character then adds a new rolled Hit Die at each new level until 10th Level. After 10th Level, they just add; +1 for Casters +2 for Clerics, Thieves, Bards +3 for Fighters and Monks +4 for Barbarians This will greatly reduce the number of HP at higher levels and the risk will be higher as a result.
True. Although HPs are bloody weird. A wizard who is 6 foot 5, and has an 18 con, should not have less ability to be struck than a 4 foot halfling barbarian. HP's don't even really represent anything. There's some fuzzy line between the weirdness of AC and HPs, and it's very weird/artificial. It's not cinematic, or narrative, or gritty, or heroic it's just odd. In real life a stab with a dagger kills a 7 foot tall brickhouse as well as it does a frail midget. And in movies, it's just who's important to the plot can get ten gunshot wounds before death (or magically avoid getting shot at all).
The fact that the best way to heal in 5e is waiting until a character is downed is just completely crappy >_< My problem as a player with 5e is that i dont care about my character if i never feel like I'm in danger... I never feel like I'm in danger. I also hate how the optimal way to play a shapeshifter is to stop shapeshifting at later levels -.- I love the D&D show dicing with death ( They use 2nd edition ) because life is easy to lose which makes them consider their actions carefully. Also as a newbie DM using XP pools and challenge ratings was pointless, there are so many more factors then the amount of players and their levels, like how much they minmaxed or what class they play and how well balanced that is, i quickly found out that "deadly" encounters were just pushovers for my players who all had D&Dbeyond legal characters. Edit: oh, i also hate the gold/magic item economy. 4e was my first time playing D&D and in 5e i just have no idea what to do with gold, i didn't as DM, and now that I'm a player my DM doesn't seem to know either, the guidelines for gold are to poorly defined. Most of the players i play with are convinced into D&D because they're digital gamers, and they just dont give a fudge about their new keep, they want loot, and loot is in super short supply in 5e.
@@AntTheBugcather true, but if you use feats it completely skews the CR of monsters in the MM since they are calculated without any of the optional rules in mind.
@@GrugTheJust there is nothing to disagree on. This was stated by Jeremy Crawford so it can not be argued with since they were the ones who designed it this way. 2 things that were not used in the creation of the CR for a creature was feats, and was pointed out that (great weapon master and such feats makes the CR of monsters go down) and also another was magical weapons since a big factor of higher CR creatures is their resistance to non magical damage. If you bypass the resistance and inflate the damage per round of the characters it significantly drops the CR of the creatures. Again, the creator of the edition stated that CR was factored WITHOUT any of the optional material.
When I want to roll a more specific setting, I just talk with my players... Like this : "I'm always the frigging DM and I want to DM a specific game, so EVERYONE WILL PLAY A GOBLING BECAUSE I WANT TO, if you don't want, how about you DM this time, huh!?"
Parties where everyone plays a certain class, race or both are actually really fun, and lends a great sense of unity to the group. I run a game of all Halfling Barbarians and it's great seeing all the different ways the players tried making diverse characters within those narrow restrictions.
The party i fear is the bard changeling party. Every check has advantage from help actions, healing word, and the choice of spell picks across all of magic. A dozen plus inspiration die per day at level one, then per short rest around 5.
@@WolforNuva Yeah, I love games like that. I’m running a game where everyone is playing nobles. It’s awesome seeing them try and live as adventurers away from the comforts of nobility. Really fun.
I play BX and 1st edition. 5th edition is just boring for me. I think SUCCESSFUL ADVENTURES on page 107 in the 1st edition PHB should be required reading for everyone that plays the game. 6 things I do not like about 5E. In no particular order. 1. Death Saves. I like at 0 your character is toast, unless there is money to pay for a res. 2. To many races. I like Gary's take on things where it should be more human focused. If you want to play a different race then there is going to be draw backs to playing them (level limits) 3. Long and short rests. I thought healing is what clerics were for. 4. Backgrounds Here is one. You are a nobody, and make your own story by playing the game. 5. Feats I thought that was what having a class was for. 6. Balanced encounters. That is what legs were made for. Running to fight another day has saved many character lives. Not heroic, but that is the type of game I like. Sometimes you can outrun things and sometimes you can't. When you can't then its time to make a new character. "Run first and ask questions later." 1st edition PHB page 109 It's funny how much the game has changed over time. It has gone from a very deadly game to one where the characters almost never die because it is all about the story.
The game needed to be more noob friendly specially now with the streaming era in the end they needed new players cause 4e sells were very low they needed the cash after they are own by hasbro after all
@@sebastian-dp9vq If 5th is good for you then that's all that matters. As long as your getting enjoyment out of the game and having fun while doing it then its a win.
If you want to have getting knocked down be meaningful: Change your tactics. Prone down means auto fail 2 death saves on melee attacks. In this world, if you brought someone down, you would stomp on their head to make sure they don't get back up again. If you can't take down characters when they play badly it is your dming style. Use terrain, traps and creative tactics to your advantage. Even goblins can tpk a party when played right in 5e. All making things more deadlier in 5e does is make someone have to be a cleric healbot instead of being able to have fun.
I mean, the party could also play safe and smart... especially since a cleric healbot is rarely needed, and hell some classes do the healing job better than all but the highest level of life clerics *looks at divine sorcerer shepherd Druid and celestial warlock*. Hell, avoiding and mitigating damage tends to do a LOT more for a party than healing, like area control spells that slow down and stop enemies, areas of damage that enemies need to avoid unless they wanna die, and good tactics that the party plans out beforehand. Sure prayer of healing from a life cleric is gonna be nice and heal some of the damage the fighter and wizard took, if they get a chance to rest that is, but isn’t it not only cooler but also more efficient to have the party trick the enemies into a spike growth patch of ground that quickly turns into a field of dead enemies?
It shortens the length of combat is something having deadlier mechanics in an rpg does - rules go both ways. It makes PC's avoid combat, run away sometimes, take it seriously. In a deadly mechanic - players are all alert, paying attention, feeling the tensio, every single combat - the combat is short, punchy, a few, to a half dozen turns, it's over. He's not saying make 5e more deadly, he's saying the system is borked for risk. Yes you can GM something deadly, but that's not the issue - the issue is ALL combat should be ACTUALLY a bit risky, rather than having tonnes of meaningless encounters and then throwing in a curve ball to keep players on their toes - that's mechanical, it's not a GM thing. That just illustrates the flawed thinking around modern D&D - the idea that the GM has to constantly constrain and moderate combat risk, scaling it up and down, to create a perfectly balanced sense of tension versus not actually dying. That's not a world, that's a linear arpg with the GM's hand on the difficulty slider. Think about for example, divinity original sin as a computer game - it doesn't railroad the combat - you fight something too powerful, you die, you want to avoid dying, you stick to easier targets and carefully manage your tactics. If things get dicey, you run. Fast. The game doesn't scale anything - the players choice does. I played a short run of the ultra deadly game harnmaster once. There was one combat, it was unavoidable, and everyone sighed relief when it was over. The rest of the game, was spent avoiding combat and problem solving/social. Was actually a lot of fun. Serious stakes. Now, that's too deadly for a regular game for me, but it was considerably more enjoyable than the perfectly pre-mixed 90% fodder fights 10% hard/risky fights of usual gaming sessions in D&D or pathfinder. Everything felt important. Three guards was like, IDK guys, let's see if we can sneak past them, scale the wall etc.
I have a couple tricks that help me deal with the "Kitchen Sink" aspect of the game when world-building. 1) Find out what your players want to play as early as possible when coming up with a setting for your next campaign. Since you're probably only going to have 3-6 players, there are only so many oddball races you can get, especially since variant humans are so strong that a lot of players pick them. Simply find ways to incorporate their specific race choices into the setting. You may even find it creatively stimulating to find a way to make them fit and give them a home in your setting. You can also involve your player in the creation of their race's niche in society, which might get them even more excited about their character and give you plenty of ways to involve their background in the campaign. 2) If a player picks something that is really incongruous with your setting's concept, ask them if they really wanted to play that race/class because of the concept, or if they just wanted its stat block. If it's just the stat block, re-flavor the race/class into something that fits better while keeping the character as it is mechanically. You might also find this creatively stimulating, and your player may enjoy having the freedom to come up with something completely new. If they really wanted it for concept reasons and not game mechanics, find out what about the concept drew them to that combo. Again, you can take this data to re-flavor the character in such a way that it fits in better while keeping the specific parts of the concept that they like about their character. Sure, it's a little more work, but I find that accomodating your players' characters into your setting usually leads to a better setting along with letting your players play the characters they want.
I think I have a good idea. Long rests should not be 7 days, as it sucks to have to wait a week to regain your spell slots. However, If you drop to one third your hp or less in a battle, your hp max decreases by your level+your prof. bonus+ however much damage you were below 1/3 hp for 1 week. I think this will solve a lot of problems.
Something i really dislike about 5e is how there is close to no customization, all characters are basically the same. Sure there are feats, but they are an optional rule and 90% of them suck so you don't get that many options to choose from even when available.
This is the reason why I’m planning to switch to Pathfinder 2e after the GMG is out. I want my players to have more options, as many of them love that. One player likes to make crazy hybrid builds, so it’ll make him incredibly happy.
Rafael Castor I’m happy to hear that! Pathfinder 2e is really cool. I hope that more people will give it a go. D&D 5e has a lot of things I’m not all too happy about and Pathfinder 2e seems to have gotten rid of those. It’s got me really excited.
Are you me? I've tried a few things for HP, resting and death. 1. Characters recover HP = Level * Con Mod per long rest. This calls back to 1e where a character recovered 1 HP per day. 2. All rest healing is done with hit die, but instead of getting half back per day, you just get all of them. Both work decently, however, I still feel like players don't always 'get' the hit dice mechanic. Currently, I'm working a new method that hopefully keeps things simple and streamlined yet turns up the danger and realism. HP & Wounds. HP is more like your energy, your ability to keep fighting. Wounds are the damage your body has taken. They are sort of a replacement for your Death Saves. 1. You can sustain a number of wounds = Con Mod. If your Mod is +2, you can have 2 wounds and keep fighting. A 3rd will kill you. 2. Each wound adds a level of exhaustion. 3. You get wounds 2 ways. When hit, you can opt to take a wound instead of losing HP (If you have 3 HP left, and are hit by an arrow, you might take a wound instead of dropping unconscious). Additionally, when an enemy crits you, you take the HP damage & the Wound damage. Enemies deal a number of wounds per attack based on their size: 1 for medium and smaller, 2 for Large & huge, 3 for gargantuan (these numbers can be tweaked, but I like the ever present danger it brings to big monsters). 4. You can recover a wound naturally by resting for a day, Alternatively, Cure Wounds can heal a Wound instead of HP. Finally, I'd make spellcasting cost HP. Currently, casting is way too simple, and I don't know anyone who tracks components (which isn't really fun). Instead, a spell costs 1 HP per level of the Spell slot. This solves the issue of players going 'Nova' when they only have 1 encounter in a day. It also makes sense now that HP is a measure of Energy and not strictly your health; casting spells wont kill you, but if you aren't careful you could drop unconscious.
As someone whos first impression of DnD was with 5th edition my opinion on your points: 1. Yeah its kinda stupid, but it doesnt really doesnt bother me and is understandable enough. 2. Im with you on this one, I feel like most of the battles were a character comes close to death, its nearly always also really close to a TPK. The only times a single character was close to dying were moments where he couldnt be stabilised, for example a character was stuck in a water elemental -> he was drowning -> he cant regain hitpoints, so they needed to kill the elemental before he fails 3 death saves. Because of that im using lingering injuries with a chance everytime someone drops to 0 so my players are more scared of it (my wizard recently lost a hand and is now desperatly looking for a high lvl cleric to restore it). 3. While it is weird, I think making it harder to recover HP in rests might just make healing magic much more needed. What i surely will try out is the gritty realism rule, because it also reduces the spell slots so I can span encounters over multiple days without it being to easy and my playersalways having all resources. 4. I know its unrealistic, but I´ve played a lot of game systems where your character gets weaker with lower hitpoints, my problem with this is it a. slows the game down because players always need to look up "how many hitpoints do i have left? how much harder does that make rolls for me?" and b. It makes comebacks harder. Making characters weaker if they loose hitpoints makes deathspirals more frequent and often it comes down to "who hurts the other side more quickly", and in my opinion nothing is cooler than my players making a comeback while on low health ( I know this is still possible with rules that weaken you if you have less hitpoints, but its just much more likely that you just die) 5. As someone who had no experience with DnD before 5th, I LOVE the xp budgets. While calculating it is stupid if you dont have an app or a website that does it for you (thanks kobold.club) It helped me balance encounters when I had no Idea how the game works (We didnt play a prewritten adventure). I know its not perfect but its super usefull for beginners. 6. I just love that theres a lot of fantasy in DnD, maybe its because a lot of other games I played were rather low-fantasy. But after fighting Bandits, Cultists, Guards and who knows what kind of "human-enemy nr. 24" I just love that I can put a lot of mystical creatures even against low lvl parties and keep them amazed by the giant mix of different fantasy styles. I totally understand your points, just wanted to tell you guys what I thought about them :)
Gotta agree with you on #5. I don't touch it at all anymore, but it was really useful when I was first starting out to help me understand how encounters are balanced and how to estimate the difficulty of a bunch of small enemies instead of one big one.
1) Semantics/shmemantics. Early gaming was full of weirdness. Tons of weird stuff survives to this day. 2) I prefer the 0-HP = seriously battered down and barely standing on your legs. Your HP are simply an indicator of how long you can give your full ability before exhaustion and injury set in. This has the advantage that players don't end up looking like walking scar tissue after 50 fights where every blow cuts and smashes up their bodies. 3) Rests are often tied to a situation. If you are in the middle of hostile territory and threats loom everywhere, good luck getting even a short rest. Generally in my games rests are pretty hard to do unless the party retreats to a safe area, which means they lose progress and/or momentum. 4) Been looking at combat systems for nearly four decades and they do tend to fall into fast/slow playing and deadly vs managed survival. Fast/slow play depends on all the factors. If you have a system with attacks/parries, armour bypass, damage reduction, critical hits and injuries you add a ton of dice to slow the flow of the game. Deadly combat means that a stray bullet or a single hit from a sword will kill you stone cold dead no matter how awesome your character is, while managed survival means you can survive any engagement barring outright stupidity and abysmal dice rolls. 5) I mostly wing it. Never had a complaint. At best I look at the monster stats and the player's XP table and get a ballpark figure to fits in the way I feel they should advance. 6) I play D&D because it is uniquely D&D. I don't like to play GoT or Lord of the Rings D&D and prefer bespoke game systems tailored to fit a world rather than try to get the world to fit the D&D memes and tropes to a particular world. Even adaptations like Lord of the Rings for 5e have tons of changes and is kinda interesting if your players are only ever used to D&D, but in an ideal world I'd rather use a different game system. I always compared OGL with a system in which every car, from a cheap runabout to a Rolls Royce or a Bugatti hypercar are all built on the same Ford T chassis, you can tweak it to death, a Ferrari on a proper chassis is always going to beat one on a jury rigged Ford T chassis.
I play pathfinder and you are right that #3 makes healing a must. Since Pathfinder healing is 1hp per 8hour rest and 2 per full day of rest (doubled if a heal check is preformed). So without a dedicated healer then any fight where an enemy gets a lucky crit then you are abandoning any urgent business.
I like your comments. They mostly mirror my own. I have just a few suggestions: 2 - My group has had a lot of discussions on this lately. My players do NOT feel like it isn't dangerous enough. Part of that is play style. For instance, my undead don't see with eyes. They sense life essences. So you've been knocked out, they don't notice until you are dead. Hmmm. Smarter monsters know it. One change we are talking about is to keep track of negative HPs. 2xCon in neg HP = death. This eliminates the 1 HP pops you back up. 3 - Some monsters realize the implications of letting the party rest. They get to rest too. That's time to get help as well. Thanks!
For #3, you can just have your monsters attack the downed players. Animals and beast IRL won't stop attacking just because you get knocked down, so just have the Monster unload all their attacks onto the downed player. If they already failed one save, the just straight up die.
Hi, ever tried „The dark eye“. That’s the favourite system over here in Germany and I think it solves your problems. But, as it is from Germany, it’s a little bit nitty gritty. But still the most played system here. So it Must make something right.
You know unlike many other channels, you are always talking more generally about RPGs and that's good. However main issue I have with D&D 5E is one other youtubers are also guilty of: always go for the lowest common denominator in a very lazy way. Some channels have been talking in circles about the same stuff for 5E for 3, 4, 5 years at this point and people keep hyping ridiculous projects like "5E classes for a cyberpunk setting!" Instead of investing time to buy one of the many wonderful settings build from the ground up to better represent those concepts. We're quickly moving back into the D20 era of the early 2000s of endless, awful supplements forcefully shoved into a D20 system even if they fit poorly and I am not sure the OGL is to blame but it is far more on all of us every time we hear people say "I *only want to play 5E* and buy those products" and capitulate instead of putting your foot down and saying "No, try something else, it won't physically hurt you top STOP GIVING MONEY to WotC"
I'll take this one step farther and recommend two systems to try; Mythras (The Design Mechanism). A Classless, skill-based, system that uses Percentile dice for a resolution system. It is based on a BRP model (Runequest, C-o-C) but modernized. Conan 2D20 (Modiphous Games). A success-based system (you roll multiple dice and each one can generate a success) that is basically "classless" but uses Archetypes to guide new players.
Sadly, that's where we are. Nu-gamers in gen-z and millenials visibly are starting to outgrow 5e, but don't know where to look but other settings with the same rules (one exception seems to be shadowrun). But it's time people started to rip that bandage off and learn new systems. It's sad to me that carbon 2185 is the highest selling product on drivethru. It's okay I guess, but it's got major flaws, and is even simpler than D&D. There's so much better stuff out there. You want sci-fi - try coriolis for eg (or actually anything from free league publishing). It's got a way richer setting, better rules, more flavour and it's more deeply supported. Most modern systems are as easy, or often easier than 5e to play once you learn them. It's usually some other d20 mechanic, or d6 v skill, or dicepool v skill or whatever + skill v difficulty - and a single mechanic for everything. No different than 5e, and often less checks. Transition really is just a bit of reading (often just a quick start) and that's it. Actually I think gaming (in the last few years), outside of the old names, has moved further along in streamlining than D&D has, whilst retaining complexity. Long gone is the days of success math, or multiple resolution systems. D&D is behind in that if anything. RPGs are moving fast now, there is so much new, cool stuff out there.
I feel your pain. All of it. The cocktail of flavors, the casual healing... What came to my mind is one system I've tried a couple of months ago - A Song Of Ice and Fire RPG. The mechanics complement the setting really well. Interesting thing that they've done with the hp is that you can "trade" damage points for "injuries" and "traumas". Anytime instead of taking 3 or so damage you can take an injury which decreases all of your abilitiy checks, the limit to the number of injuries being your stamina rating. It felt somewhat refreshing to play. And then you have to rest for a day AND have somebody make a medicine check, otherwise you keep being injured.
I’ve always considered the 8 hour rest as the time taken to bandage, cast healing etc. then rest and regain spells. If party has no healer then they expend potions on top of hit dice to heal
See here's the thing. Are session zeros for character creation and rules discussion or starting role play? Our dm seems to think we're ready to rp without characters. It's a little tricky to adlib while working out a character mechanically.
Completely agree. I used to play without a session 0 back in the days, but ever since we started to have one, even for games that were only meant to last for 1-3 actual play sessions, things have run so much more smoothly and generally been more fun.
So many of the issues people raise regarding D&D (death, degenerating strength with HP, human-centered play, the magic system… and so many others) are perfectly handled by Burning Wheel. I’ve never understood why it isn’t more popular, especially with fans of “grit”.
The thing about "grit" is, most people want it until they play it. Also it's really a vocal minority and mostly DnD DMs who complain, not the players. Furthermore not all of them have all these problems at the same time, if they have, they really should change the system they play. In short, it's not popular, because gritty realism isn't that popular (and yeah probably brand recognition, marketing etc.)
There’s luckily a ton of answers to a lot of these problems already in the game. First as you mentioned the healing the rest variants. The Gritty Realism Rest variant already curves much more than just hit point Recovery. Remember this also affects spell and ability recovery. If you haven’t used this rule yet you’ll be surprised by how much it does change EVERYTHING. As noted by other comments death is easy in 5e if you don’t pull your punches but ACCIDENTAL death is hard to have happen. If foes aren’t finishing off dying characters there’s usually a reason (either they need to deal with the immediate threat of another character or they don’t want them dead). Multi-Attack is a killer if the first blow knocks a character to 0 and many beasts get an extra attack as a bonus action if the target is prone (which 0 hp characters are). Just remember even one hit on a downed target makes the death save a single save or dye and two attacks kill them outright. Hit Points are just a problem with D&D and one of the mechanics WotC has figured out that if they remove it’s no longer “D&D” to too many people. There’s an easy answer with bringing back Bloodied from 4e. Not official but I’m going to be putting a video out soon that discusses this too. The XP budget system IS a joke and WotC knows it. This is why they have a MUCH better system in Xanathars guide, but like you said it’s also something that can just be ignored. Finally the kitchen sink issue. This is mostly a community problem not an actual system problem. It’s not AS focused as it could be but WotC official stance on 5e is PHB plus one for all their organized play and any campaign that has a players guide or players options assumes THAT is the “plus one” for that campaign. WotC also doesn’t like telling people how to have their fun but this limiting factor shows the limits within their own campaigns and the books openly tell DMs and the PLAYERS that it’s up to the DM what races are allowed. The problem comes from a community that refuses to listen or accept this just like multi classing being optional and not core. People assume if it was core in the Edition they came from or if it’s common at their table it’s core.
dnd 5e at level 1 is very deadly. if you're new to 5e those low levels can be tough to manage haha. an unlucky roll can often lead to a character death actually haha, especially if you aren't willing to baby them early. once you get deeper in levels an encounter having unlucky rolls or being tougher than you imagined usually just means that the party ends up spending more resources in a particular fight than you were expecting. but at level 1 and 2, it means they die haha. I usually start adventures at level 3 unless my players want that experience of being level 1 nobodies who could lose a fight to a serving girl at a tavern.
@sum body the first encounter i actually built myself, it was a lot of low-level undead in a crypt with a vampire spawn boss. The balance felt about right, the party could've done it easily if the one guy didn't abandon the rest of the party to go after promises of treasure, pulling the rest of the monsters in the process. Difficulty was spot on, but a bit long-winded
Eventually, you're going to have to start paying attention to the spells the spellcasters have. That's the main thing that can change the difficulty of most encounters with certain spells. Area of effect spells, chief among them Fireball, can take a group of enemies that by their numbers are an appropriate, or even lethal, challenge, and wipe out some or even all of them. (It kind of undermines the designer's goal of making lower level creatures be usable at higher levels in larger numbers). Other spells, like Banishment or Polymorph can take an entire big creature out of the fight, significantly dropping the enemies power and thus challenge. (Or at a higher spell slot, Banishment can banish extra creatures, making it even trickier to plan around, as you might want to them to fight a creature that is challenging enough with just one of them, but need to put 3 in because the wizard will, probably, use a 5th level spell slot and banish 2 of them ... but if the wizard decides to save his 5th level spell slot, and just Banish one of them, suddenly the fight is double what was going to be a decent challenge, and thus probably lethal. Honestly, with this comment I wanted to focus on advice for running the game and only address some of the issues with spells in DnD. But well, let's just say most spells in DnD tend to create problems for other elements of the game, such as the Challenge Rating system. DnD in all of it's editions, except maybe 4e, have never had a working CR system for encounter building, because of it's spells. Many of the spells, like Fireball, Banishment, or Polymorph, sometimes Hypnotic Pattern, swing the combat encounters too drastically. A working CR system would literally have to ask about the dozens of encounter changing spells in the game, as well as how high they can cast them, and how many of the spellcasters can cast them. And because these spells have a huge impact on the game, characters that have them, and thus the players that have them, get a disproportionate amount of control over the outcome of the game that non spellcasters, or even spellcasters without these spells. A 5th level wizard or sorceror, with Fireball, has an amount of damage output and ability to deal with a group of enemies that aren't even close to the other characters, whether their a 20th level fighter (Since fireball does 8d6 damage to everything it hits, if you hit 5, 10, or 20 enemies with it, you do 8d6 *5, 10, or 20, it's almost like doing 40, 80, or even 160d6 damage, in one round.) ...it also is way more powerful than say, a 5th level character with only 4 levels in wizard or sorceror. A 5th level wizard, rather than being %125 more powerful with their magic than a 4th level spellcaster, is kind of .. exponentially more powerful. Which makes multiclassing spellcasters less viable, or rather, it makes most players disincentivised from even considering multiclassing, since they usually have their minds set on reaching levels like level 5 to get Fireball as soon as possible. It makes not going straight to level 5 in spellcaster classes, and not taking these handful of kind of overpowered spells, feel like making a 'wrong' decision. To multiclass because of your character concept, or how they feel about what they want to learn, the things your characters are exploring as their story unfolds, can lead you to take options, like multiclassing, that effective nerf, or gimp your character when compared to a pure spellcaster build. Not that multiclassing should be as good as pure classes as far as how potent their spells are, I just think spellcasting power should be more linear, so multiclassing would have a less severe cost in power in exchange for that versality and getting the game options that more accurately reflect how we envision our characters and how they are turning out in the story. (Which is the main reason why many, like I, often multiclass, so our characters game features can more accurately reflect who they are...) I shouldn't have to feel like had a chance to be Superman, and became Robin instead because I 'poorly' chose to follow my character and not play a pure spellcaster.
I use the XP Budget, but I find that the deadly encounters tend to be more of a realistic attack. It just gives me an idea of how many creature to toss in (though I don’t always use it). I also don’t use the multiplier scale much on it, because multiple players balances out multiple enemies
For solving the rest problem, you can look it the 13th Age RPG way: accept that it's a game mechanic to keep the game going. So rather than long rest at night, that game lets you take a full heal after 4 normal combat encounters, or 3 hard combat encounters. Healing fully doesn't take any time, maybe 5 minutes, not 8 hours, as hit points are an abstraction anyways. Resting after a set amount of battles helps twofold: your players don't rest at any given moment, they know they have to press forward to earn their heal. And secondly, it gives the players a chance to pace out when to use their spells and limited abilities. Knowing there will be two battles after this, they won't use every spell in a single battle and ask the GM for a long rest because they're out of spell slots.
Check out Savage Worlds. The wound system there is pretty awesome, but would need tweaks to make the D&D classes feel right. Savage Worlds is classless, so everyone has 3 wounds. I would probably try to set wounds based on hit die size. I might have to toss together a quick and dirty "conversion" for this. Hmmm...
@@schwann145 Also known as Robert E. Howard's Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of, by Modiphius Entertainment. It's awesome and the pinnacle of sword & sorcery RPGs imho.
My house rule for the resting and HP recovery issue. I'm still working on refining this: Short rest: you can spend 1 hit die (or 1/2 proficiency bonus, round down) per hour of rest. Long rest: Is not just 8 hours, but requires a proper meal and full >6 hours of sleep. Gnawing on rations in a Leomund's Tiny hut is *not* restful. A night in an inn is. To rest in the wilds, you'd need to set up camp, light a fire, have someone cook a meal (probably requiring a proficiency), and then turn in for a full night of sleep. Standing watch or being woken up by an encounter interrupts this unless you're able to like, sit in a wagon and nap on the road. I find this also balances with spellcasters not needing a full week to recover spells.
If I'm bothered by any aspect of 5E is that there are so many player choices that it can be easy to get analysis paralysis. Regarding death, I think it is so dependent upon the experience level of the players at the table. When I DM I often get frustrated that the PCs nearly die in filler fights that are mainly there to drain a few resources and keep the dice rolling. For groups with experienced players, I think making truly deadly encounters is a skill that a DM has to learn. Armor class doesn't bother me, but hit points are a bit of a philosophical trap. I justify hit point regain in this way: hit points are not "health", but a measurement of a PCs ability to cope with physical and mental trauma. If you get sliced by a sword for 10 HP "damage", which gets recovered after a short rest, the cut might still be there, but it has been cleaned and bound, so it doesn't affect your ability to perform in combat. In essence, the physical trauma has been mitigated. If you don't get a chance to heal, the cut is still open and exposed. It hurts and it is distracting. You haven't dealt with the physical trauma, therefore the next time you get into a fight, you are that much closer to an enemy finally landing a killing blow. For the record, sometimes I describe a "hit" as missing the PC, but the strenuous move that was required to get out of the way was painful or exhausting, which is a sort of trauma that puts the character that much closer to receiving the killing blow. I don't know if I recommend this philosophical workaround, but it gives me an opportunity to describe a lot of stuff.
5e has nothing on Pathfinder for the amount of character choices being overwhelming. Its honestly kind of ridiculous. Couple that with the fact that Pathfinder is specifically geared towards power gaming, and it makes character creation a nightmare.
Yeah, the analysis paralysis thing! So true. I have a friend who plays a cleric and it seriously takes him about 5 minutes to decide every combat round what his action will be. And then we move on to bonus actions...
Michael Phillips I’ve played a couple clerics recently and had that problem as well. There are so many things that clerics can do, and depending on the DM you’re playing 4-dimensional chess trying to figure out what to do against them. The answer is usually to cast shield of faith and just wade in! /s
2.) Death - if a character falls down, and the PCs are fighting a semi intelligent creature, that creature will finish the victim to prevent others from bringing it back to life. Also in my setting, raise dead and other resurrection magic which is from the necromancy school is banned across the realms because necromancy is outlawed. Another cool thing to add is that for every failed death save, you get a permanent scar which makes it more difficult to engage with NPCs. 3.) Healing - we have a sort of a hybrid system where a short rest is 4 hours long, and a long rest requiers a few days. This means that you will not have a cleric to bail you out every single time and will force you to prepare for a dangerous dungeon 4.) HP - can't really fix this problem without making it too complicated, and I think most people would hesitate to fight in the 1st place if they knew that they will be less and less potent and that would suck out the fun out of most martial classes who have to fight on the front line 5.) Exp - I just give out levels when I find it appropriate, like after a huge quest has been completed or after say 5-6 sessions 6.) Customization is the key. I have just banned out a whole lot of problematic races, spells, magic items etc. but have expanded on the things which are allowed giving them more depth. When in doubt, depth > complexity. It's better to have 2 races with a detailed interaction and history and a long history than 25 stereotypical ones.
My hate is an expansion of your hate of armour class. I'd like to have seen 2 values. Dodge (ability to connect) and armour value (ability to resist damage) so there can be a difference in both describing how an attack hits (or what when it comes to cover) or how impactful it is when it does.
New Death Save rules: You get 1 roll on the start of your next turn. Let's hope someone can give you some first aid before then so you can make your save with advantage.
Actually, they call it Armor Class because that's the next best thing to defense class. They can't call it Defense Class because DC is needed elsewhere in the game, and it would be too confusing.
As a DM, one of the things I do (depending on the group) in 5E is limit short rests to 2 per day, long rests still recover half a character's hit dice, but characters only recover half their maximum hit points on a long rest. As for unconsciousness, my variant rule is a character can recover from unconsciousness a number of times equal to their CON modifier, after which a successful stabilization will result in them being Stable but they remain Unconscious. I require a medicine check to wake the character from this state, but if they do awaken before a long rest they gain a level of exhaustion and they can't recover hit points until they take a long rest. That's for my groups who like it more deadly anyway. I keep Matthew Mercer's Bonus Action rule for potion drinking, but even for my casual groups I decided that for a potion to work you have to be able to metabolize its liquid. If you try to feed a potion to an unconscious person, you will begin to drown them, and they immediately lose two death saving throws. All characters have to be awake to gain hit points from healing potions.
I love 5e, especially it's simplicity. But it's simple rules can often leave my players wanting more (mounted combat, grappling, etc). It becomes a balancing act to augment the core rules without getting overburdened and becoming unwieldy. Great vid
Ideally, I would like to teach 5e to new players and them move them to 3.5/PF after they've got the hang of it and are ready for more options. Maybe 5e should make a more advanced version for players who want that? But what to call it?
5e is rules light in a way I don't really like. It's not light in an intresting or easy to warp way so it just seems shallow in places i want some depth and way too complex in places I don't want
I think my favourite approach to point 4 is Fate 3.0's Stress and Consequences system. In Fate, there is no system of hit points. Instead, when you get hit by an attack, you have to 'buy off' the damage using stress, consequences, or both. Stress represents narrowly escaping damage, whether that's a lucky dodge or just taking a scratch rather than a larger hit. Expent stress is restored after combat ends and has no mechanical effect, but each character only has a certain amount they can spend. Consequences, on the other hand, represent meaningful setbacks, usually an injury or similar. They can buy off larger amounts of damage, but not only do they take notably longer to heal, but they can also be invoked against the character, reducing their effectiveness in combat.
I haven't seen the 5e version of Ravenloft, are there special rules for healing in that setting? If so, then it is not the 5e system that is lethal, it is the setting.
@@loka7783 no the rules for ravenloft are the same as any 5e adventure. 5e is absolutely dangerous if players play their characters even if it potentially gets them killed. In my multiple groups I've played with since 3.5 it has always been what would your character do. Not I dont want my character to die so I'm not going to do what he/she would normally do.
A great way to fix some of the death problems: (Making resting harder is a DM thing, my players hate how hard it can be to sleep or get a full nights sleep) Lingering injury everytime players drop to 0, roll 1d20 to determine it and the lingering injury requires a 6th level spell or higher to be healed. Ontop of this, make it so healing spells cannot set bones, and can only heal surface level wounds like flesh or muscle tissue. Healing spells cannot regenerate tissue, but act more like mending with re-sealing the flesh back together
It's less getting mad that other people like it and more that so many people will only play 5e because it's the only system they know and dont see the value of learning another system because they don't understand systems well enough to tell the difference
i think people get mad because the popularity of dnd 5e sorta prevents them from being able to find people to play the game system that they like instead. Its kinda like a gamer getting mad that all his friends spend all their time playing fortnite or apex instead of the game that they want. They probably have nothing against those games, but their popularity affects them in a very personal way.
On the DM side, don't forget that monsters are able to kill unconscious targets. People often forget or dismiss that, referencing real-life battle tactics. You can play it to the monster's Intelligence and knowledge of battle tactics, as well as knowledge of clerical magic. If it is known that there is a healer in the party, and it is known that they can instantly Cure Wounds or Healing Word an unconscious target so that player can stand up and fight at full strength again, it's a good tactic to go for the healer first. Gameplay Reminder: When dealing damage to an unconscious player, instead they gain a failed death save. - Constructs, bugs, elementals and zombies just keep attacking unconscious players. You can narrate a zombie's attack as if it is trying to eat your brain. - Goblins start stealing the loot from the unconscious player, then make their escape. - A random bandit would probably ignore the fallen. The trained soldier? Probably not. - Hobgoblins might strike once more at a fallen target before moving on to the next. When they realize there is a cleric using their healing magic, they WILL start killing characters and THEN will focus down on the healer in an intelligent manner. Hint: You can use multi-attacks to drain away failed death saves, or split your attacks up between fallen and conscious players.
My favorite RPG system is the World of Darkness games, also known as the White Wolf system, mostly because character creation and advancement are more involved than D&D due to the absence of levels and classes, it makes it easier to tailor your character the way want. My biggest problem with Experience Points in D&D is the fact that they don't really do anything beyond act as a sort of meter until you get to the next level, D&D's system known as the Level Up system is also greatly employed by MMORPGs, and I just have problem with the Level Up system which boils down to the fact you have these numbers that just tell you how close you are to the next level but still requires a bit of math you likely don't want to do. I much prefer WoD's Point Buy system, and other games that employ it as well, because it turns Experience Points into a player resource for advancing their character the way they want, it also means levels really don't matter and challenges can be applied for the difficulty to the players in more real feeling ways. The game also has offshoots, of sorts, for different sorts of character archetypes, just not in the way most people expect. There the classic World of Darkness, Changeling the Lost, Hunter the Vigil, Mage the Awakening, Promethean the Created, Geist the Sin-Eaters, and a few others. Each has a nice little spin on how things work. I also like the WoD setting of an Urban Fantasy Noir type setting.
If you don't like tracking xp there's the milestone system that basically translates to leveling up for story reasons (whenever the DM feels like it). It can sometimes be super arbitrary but it simplifies things and allows for styles of play that aren't kill everything that moves.
@@anthonynorman7545 Yes, and I make use of it in my D&D games. I was just pointing out my observations for the system when it uses Experience Points. And it's that I don't like tracking XP, even though it can be a headache at times, what I don't like XP in Level Up RPGs is the fact the points you earn aren't properly utilized as a resource
You may want to try the GURPS system. It addresses all the things you talked about and being a toolkit system, it has lots of avenues to adjust and tweak until you get exactly the gaming experience you want, in whatever genre you want. It became my go to system back in the early 90s and has remained it ever since. I play several other systems, but when it comes to GMing my games, I reach for my GURPS books.
@@N0-1_H3r3 Other than the desire for realism and low fantasy settings, why would you change systems when you understand the current one and it fulfills 80% of what you want from the game.
@@whiskeyhoundAt some point, houseruling D&D to do exactly what you want will take more time and effort than finding and learning a new system. I've never understood the "I've got D&D, I'll use it for everything" mindset: it feels like only watching one movie franchise or only listening to one musician. I own and know dozens of game systems, and use different ones for different settings, different genres, because system influences feel and playstyle, and contrary to popular belief, D&D cannot do everything.
@@N0-1_H3r3 True about D&D not doing everything, if I want a darker game, i'd pick up CoC or Warhammer fantasy, but for the majority of what I want to play/run, d&d covers that base pretty well with the amount of homebrewed stuff out there and previous editions to patch the game to suit my style of game.
@@N0-1_H3r3 to be fair, Dnd is very easy to houserule. The rules are bare bones and simple compared to other systems. people act like houseruling is the same as creating a new system from scratch. but the truth is, even extensive houseruling is very very easy and most often far easier than learning an entirely new system. I'm speaking from experience as I have learned many new systems believing them to be the solution to my problems only to find new, different problems in every one of them. I've even made my own frankenstein of an rpg system that just takes everything i like from dnd, shadowrun, world of darkness, FATE, dragon age, and a few others that escape my memory and mashes them together and you know what? even though I love that system as it is literally everything I ever wanted put together, I spent years putting it together and I pretty much only run it with 1 particular group because, end of the day, its just easier to use dnd 5e if I got a new group that already knows it and then explain some houserules to them, than teaching them a new system from scratch. TL:DR houseruling is really easy, and even extensive houseruling is not even close to the effort of making your entire table learn a new system. (strictly talking about effort here. learning new systems is very rewarding)
I say the way to increase death is either go full pack tactics and if someone goes down, every monster in the area runs towards them to makes sure their dead, you can make it so that they can only stabilize with the help of somebody else using their turn to make a Medicine Check to give them a successful save, and/or you can make it so that to restore them to full health, they must heal the total damage you actually took to get back up, or you can make them have negative health and it stacks so you can't easily be healed.
The problem with tying damage to HP is that if you start losing you will almost certainly keep losing. There’s not a very good chance of an underdog coming back from the brink of defeat or snatching victory from the jaws of death. Every fight will either be a complete blowout by whichever side deals damage first, or an incredibly long slog as both parties deal less and less damage every subsequent turn
Correct. 5E just doesn't seem lethal. But that's easily remedied by the DM and some adjustments. Also. The editing is better. Good job! Hope you get more subscribers!
I feel like its very lethal. Are DM's not letting npc's hit 0hp characters or something? A mele hit on a fallen guy is 2 failed death saves, so any damage from there is lethal, or a failed save. And don't tell me it is not a valid strategy for the enemy in a world where a simple heal rises them to full fighting condition over and over again. You want the enemy to stay dead.
@@micahiwaasa9304 True I guess. If a person is killed in my game (unless from getting one shot) there is a one minute "near death" state they are put into. This allows someone with a medkit to get 1 chance to preform a Medecin check to save the person. Normal healing dosen't work here, the damage is to sewere. The difficulty is against 15+1d6(rolled hidden by the DM from the players). This allows for a bit more targeting I think, from the enemy. I also roleplay different enemy tactics ofc, most dosen't target pc's like this, mostly experienced and clever foes would, or something like a ghoul.
@@Dragonspassage absolutely true. I just started a new game with players who have never played a "by the book" campaign. Level 3 start, PHB+1, with a focus on dungeon crawling and combat. Even rolled on the random dungeon table in DMG to brew up something unique. Within my first session, I had 2 character deaths on my hands, and an almost completely expended party. Out of a party of 4.
My biggest complaint and gripe you didn't even touch, not even with a 10 ft pole. Perception, investigation, and passive perception. The wording is so ambiguous that it makes it difficult to figure out when to use them. Like is it perception to find a trap if you don't know if it's there? Or is it investigation? And if it's perception then when do you use investigate? And don't get me started on passive perception. "Oh hey you are walking down a trail when your cleric sprouts an arrow", "How did I not see that ambush with my passive perception of 27?"
Perception is to notice things. Investingation is finding things and seeing how they work. Perception: that title is a different color than everything else. Investigation: do I think it's a trap and where would it be? I look at the wall to see holes for shooting arrows and the ceiling to see if something might fall. Perception: did you see/hear/smell that? awareness Investigation: now that you point it out I think it could be blank or we should look blank. Detective
Passive perception can get ridiculous, but one player can not be in surprise round while everyone else is. Sorry surprised condition not surprise round
Officially speaking, investigation is drawing conclusions from details and perception is noticing the details in the first place. So for instance, perception may find scratches on the ground, while investigation would tell you the scratches are the result of a secret door opening and closing and scraping the floor. Personally I've never been a big fan of perception as a skill in general though. I'd prefer if people just used a requisite environmental knowledge skill, like nature, streetwise, dungeoneering, etc.
For Death Saves, consider requiring a character to be stabilized before they can receive healing. This makes SpareDying, HealersKits, and MedicineChecks much more useful than they normally are due to not being able to cheese death with HealingWord alone. Some high level heal spells can also be given an auto stabilize effect to prevent them from feeling nerfed. You can take this a step further and treat stabilizing effects as just giving 1 or 2 successful death saves instead of fully stabilizing. This prevents a Cleric from casting SpareDying and HealingWord on their turn to fix up someone with no successful saves.
For me D&D is all about magic and options. I would have no desire to play D&D with low or no magic. I need to feel progression, that I am getting stronger and awarded for my adventures. If a DM was like there is "no magic in my world", or "magic is rare" it would instantly be a turn off for me and I would probably decide not to play. I don't want to play a role-playing game where its close to real world. I want to play in something that takes me out of reality. That is the whole purpose of it for me. However, that being said I definitely agree with you and want to feel stakes. I want all my combat encounters to be a chance for death, otherwise there is no risk and it would be boring. I want all Hard or Deadly encounters, I don't want them to all be TPKs, but I would be fine with a boss being TPK and the lead-ups being Hard and Deadly.
Thing is, you can't control whether or not a Deadly encounter ends in a TPK. A single crit from the monster and the whole encounter goes down in a death spiral. The more deadly encounters you run, the more chances of RNG-death you inject into the game. One of the games I played (from an official module too) almost ended when the characters got crit twice by plain ass bandits and died, I had to come up with a way to save them, lest the campaign was over then and there. They were 1 level higher than they should've been too... DnD 5e is extremely RNG heavy.
@@Ranziel1 Extremely RNG heavy? Well, it's a game were outcome is decided by dice. Also it's actually pretty solid and not overly random. But if you don't like randomness in your dice based game: Play a halfling diviner wizard with the lucky feat. Edit: I agree on the encounter thing though. The CR system is rather hit or miss. And at some days the players seem just to never roll above an 8.
For the deaths & unconsciousness, I use the Grievous Wounds system from Grim Hollow, that if you fall to 0, you roll on the Grievous Wounds table. Grievous Wounds are healed with a long rest (more on that), but every Grievous Wound you already have against you, you treat as a -1 to your roll. When you total below 2, you gain a Permanent Wound, which is a 1d6 table that has things like an ATM being cut off, losing an eye, or (if you roll a 1) outright dying. Permanent Wounds can only be "fixed" with a Regeneration spell. Sidenote that I also allow the use of prosthetics in my game, so if you can't use a Regeneration spell, you can see a local artificer about making you a prosthetic. Death saves are rolled by the player, but in secret, so only the player and I know the results. We do have a Paladin, a Ranger, and a Druid in my game, but I also allow them to use Healing Surge, since encounter CRs are consistently 2 about the APL (which is level 4, with six level 3 characters). Since I allow the use of Healing Surge, hit dice should be available less for rests, but even then, I only allow the use up to half during a quick rest. A Quick Rest is simply 30 minutes, and the only thing you get is the ability to catch your breath a bit (the use of half your hit dice). A Short Rest functions as advertised, but it's four to eight hours, and usually players will be camping when that happens. A Long Rest is the same, except extended to 24 hours, with the prerequisition that you *have* to be in a safe area to sleep and rest. A roadside camp does not count as such. A roadside tavern would, or a homestead, or a settlement. Ergo, players are required to seek out civilisation to get the benefits of a Long Rest. Fortunately, my group's Barbarian Warforged is a pathfinder who can find a settlement with a successful DC 15 Survival check, and I do populate my world with off-the-map little settlements with their own issues, thus opportunities for plot hooks and side quests.
Two of my favorite games: Savage Worlds and 7th Sea. Both have a dramatic feel and taking damage has a real effect on the game. Also, they handle the "kitchen sink" mentality really well. Especially Savage Worlds. "Oh, you found this really neat Edge? Too bad it is in another setting. We're using this setting where that doesn't exist." Other really good contenders for good dramatic systems are the Storyteller system from White Wolf/ Onyx Path and the Palladium System for those of you who want a lot of crunch. Of course, if you really want to play Math the game, crack open a copy of Hero System which can be a lot of fun if you are in the right mood.
Complacency cost my group of players their 1st character death last session. The are level 10 and been playing in my home brew campaign for about 2 years and not suffered a single PC death. (I’m a softie when it comes to playing the monsters in that I don’t attack unconscious characters unless there aren’t any sensible alternatives) so after a long fight with many swamp monsters the monk gets bitten by a pair of giant frogs and falls unconscious and nobody, not even me thinks much about it. Heck not even the monk player says anything to ask for aid from the other players. So it comes back round to the giant frogs turn and they both have the unconscious monk grappled and restrained and are fighting over his body and then And only then did it dawn on me and the other players including that short of som lucky dice rolling the monk was going to die. The dice weren’t lucky for the monk and a 10th level hero gets killed by a par of CR 1/4 monsters. What an ignominious end! There was shocked silence at the table as everyone realised that they could have on their turn saved the monk, but no characters die in D&D right? Playing again tomorrow for the first time since ‘the death’ and it will be interesting to see how the players approach has changed. I’m going to guess not a lot.
I get it that you don't want to kill their character as the caring human being. Yet as DM you are bringing to life this world. Monsters don't care if someone is not responsive, they'll just be 'nom nom nom'. Unless there is someone nearby threatening them. Make it immersive, a bunch of zombies isn't going for the next person, they'll even start feasting on the downed character while they are getting smashed by it's friends because 'brains!' Now that they are finally sorted close to their objective, why bother over physical attacks?
Gareth Hamilton- Yes you will notice as players stop to invest so much time and effort into their character. They will instead optimize the game piece. Load on as many potions they can get, min max the characters, min max the gear. This is a wonderful way to grow yourself a group of powergamer. They will learn stats and optimization is everything.
I played D&D once so far, and I was surprised my character didn't die. I played as a tabaxi wild magic sorcerer, the first attack the entire party took was a goblin hitting my tabaxi for 6 damage, and he had 5 max hp And finally at level 3, with 11 max hp, wild magic surge, three fireballs right into the cat. At the very least the DM was kind enough to let the paladin roll for religion, nat 20, and decided to let us survive with a lot of exhaustion At least for my DM every single battle is a hard choice, we won most battles, but some we outright ran away scared for our lives
I like the idea of concealed death saves. Not the DM rolling, but the player rolling and now showing to the party unless a PC makes a medicine check-then they can see how many fails/passes.
I could never understand why some are so stubborn in clinging to a D&D derived system for everything. Goes to show how powerful their comfort zone can be.
In regards to HP, I've always had the mental image that the penalties from the damage they've taken "balance out" with the bonuses from the desperate rush of adrenaline they're experiencing. They're hurt, but their body is pulling out all of it's reserves to survive. I'm contemplating adding a house rule similar to the D&D 4e "Bloodied" condition. By itself, it does nothing but track the severity of your injuries. But there would be options in the game where characters might, for example, gain bonuses against bloodied characters as they exploit their more desperate efforts.
I have two main frustrations: 1. I want more, and heavier setting books. Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide is really underwhelming, I'd like it to be twice as thick with more concrete information such as populations, factions export/import and various conflicts that are occurring. 2. A fighter/mage. Straight up a classical 2e fighter/mage. Not an eldritch knight* with only two spell schools, not a spellsinger with a single one handed weapon. I want something resembling proper spellcasting, being able to use any sword or polearm of my choice and not rely on gimmicks. The Pathfinder Eldritch Knight was perfect with its full BAB, 9 levels of casting, d10 hit die and several bonus feats. And then I would be satisfied. Maybe some more skills like engineering. The lowered power scale is excellent, the class design is good, the racial design is satisfactory and the feats as well as the backgrounds are strokes of pure genius.
I’d recommend Kobold Press’ Midguard Worldbook. It has 450+ pages on everything you mentioned and more. I have to say that I’m not a big fan of D&D 5e, so I have to disagree with you on it. But that’s just my opinion.
I live in Poland, and here Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is far more popular than any D&D edition. Some say it's because of easy to understand d% system (let's forget third edition, ok?). But I think it's because of the setting. Not as heroic as D&D. Darker. Chaos and its servants are always there, waiting for your soul. Traveling through the woods? Bandits are not what you should be afraid of. In fact... There's mod for WFRP created in Poland, called "Autumn Tale". Best way to describe it is "Polish WFRP players considered default setting as unrealistically optimistic, so they created their own". Autumn Tale is too much for me, but yeah... I love WFRP. Even though it's not perfect. (But hey, it's d%... Only your creativity can limit you).
*#1: AC.* This is literally a non-issue. If saying "Your Armor Class is what someone has to roll to hit you" is too much for you, then you've got bigger problems. I get where you're coming from with dodging factoring into it as well as how tough your armor is, but still. This is a nitpick at best, and it's a very simple concept to explain to a new player. Worst comes to worst, rename it "Defense". DM's perogative. *#2: 5th Edition isn't that deadly.* This is more of a "DM struggling with encounter difficulty" problem than a system problem. There is admittedly less risk with the damage gating of death saves, there's pros and cons to the negative CON score versus death saves. Neither is really perfect or better than the other necessarily. Level 1 characters though? SUPER deadly, all it takes a stray crit from a goblin to outright kill someone. Any character downed can be easily coup de grace'd by someone that has more than one melee attack (which, even starting at lower levels, virtually everything in existence has multiple attacks.) In my experience, deadliness tends to come from a combination of numbers and environmental hazards. Alternatively, if you want to switch to the "negative CON" score for death, it's super easy to do. *#3: Resting and Healing.* As you said, this comes down to DMs. If you give the party frequent opportunities to rest, then yeah- encounters become much easier to survive than if they're strapped for spells, resources, and aren't at peak performance. I really like the idea of requiring a Healer's Kit in order to use hit dice- I've always recognized that hit dice is essentially performing first aid on yourself, but really only makes sense if you have the medical supplies to do so. Could even make some use of that Medicine skill for once with that. *#4: HP.* So, Pathfinder does something similar to what you're talking about, or at least has some rules for doing so, if you so choose. I'm personally not a fan of it; in my opinion, it adds a lot of unnecessary micromanagement that I'd rather just not deal with. *#5: XP Budgets.* I've literally never even heard of this. Looks to be an optional rule. As far as I'm concerned, it can be completely ignored. *#6: Kitchen Sink Fantasy.* I would say Pathfinder is a far bigger offender of this than D&D ever has been. D&D has a lot of stuff, but not everything. Pathfinder LITERALLY has what feels like everything, it's honestly a bit silly. I get what you're saying though, but I feel this is a point where DMs need to communicate with their players. Tell them what kind of game you want to run before any characters are made. It's the DM's world, their rules, and their free time sacrificed for a few hours of fun for others, the player can compromise with that. Bit surprised you didn't mention anything about how some weapon types are stupid (halberds and glaives are mechanically the exact same thing, spears and tridents are the exact same thing with a weight and price difference, there's no reason to ever use a morningstar over another weapon that actually has traits, etc. This is something that actually irritates me a lot.) But the nice thing is 5e is easy to modify to fit your needs. Don't like death saves? Switch it out for another system. Resting and healing too easy? Make it harder. I appreciate that 5e gives you rule alternatives. It's not a perfect system, it never will be. But at the very least, it leaves things open enough that you can adjust easily if you so desire.
They really should have split the Halberd and Glaive into axe and sword categories for the purpose of feats and magic item enchantments. And they should have added trip and disarm properties to weapons to help balance stuff like the whip. Other than a mindflayer specific item in one adventure, the only magical property you can put on a whip is basic +1/+2/+3 because for some reason over half of the magic enchantments in the game are exclusively for swords. Which is ridiculous when you consider the whip does so little damage and has no benefit in doing the things you'd think you'd being doing with a whip, like disarming or tripping.
@@OmegaZyion Yeah, I'm not a fan of the amount of attention dedicated to swords and other weapon types are completely ignored. Magic whips, glaives, morning stars, and several others simply don't exist outside of +1 to 3 variants. Griffon's Saddlebag is doing God's work and fixing that though, he has a long list of good magic items that include those more forgotten types.
I actually had to bend the rules for one of my players to NOT die. She rolled abysmally on death saving throws and it wasn't even an epic potential death - just some minor scuffle where she got unlucky. So I let her reroll the dice, coughing dramatically and looking away as if to say "I didn't see that natural 1" and she rolled well enough to at least survive another round so her party could stabilise her.
11:00 If players don't like to 'feel restricted' they are more of the snowflake type player or not really flexible. DnD is a role-playing game, which means immersion. Your DM is determining the world your story is going to be told in and you can build off of that. It's not like DnD canon is your set of toys and the DM is taking away your toys.
There is game developed in the late 70's called Aftermath, it has some cool mechanics. Such as weapon defence ability, combat dodge ability, Su dual damage, critical damage with different effects. The healing/recovery rules are realistic too. Whilst it was a complex game and very deadly it was awesome to play I would recommend you check it out. It is available from Fantasy Games Unlimited. Its mechanics allow for everything from fireballs , 9mm to swords and stone axes. I feel may of the D20 system rules where refined from this system.
I wanted to add my thoughts to these arguments but you killed it.. all the things I dislike and have to micromanage were e articulated by you. Good video!
My issues with 5e: 1) The Adv./Dis. system. I get the simplicity of it, but it has 2 big issues. a) The benefit/penalty associated with Adv./Dis. varies greatly depending on your normal likelihood of success. If you need a 10/11, it is roughly equivalent to having a +/-5. If you need a 2 or a 20, it's like having a +/-1. Imagine a character trying to lift a heavy portcullis, but he needs a nat 20 to make the DC. Someone helps him, granting him advantage, but he STILL needs a nat 20, he just has 2 chances to do it. (In 3.5, the character would get a +2, if the ally could make a DC15 check to help.) What's sad is that the 8 STR halfling Wizard is just as much help as the 20 STR half orc barbarian in 5e. Another scenario, the expert swordsman has been blinded, and must now fight a commoner. The expert swordsman hits on a 2 normally. Disadvantage just means that he has to roll a 2 or better twice to hit the commoner. (In 3.5, the swordsman would have to roll a 2 or better, then make a DC11 flat check to see if they actually hit.) b) Since Adv./Dis/ doesn't stack, there is no incentive to work together to bring down the big monster. I think of the scene from Infinity War Part 1 where everyone is trying to pull the gauntlet off of Thanos, and thinking, "If this were 5e, they wouldn't even try to restrain him after Mantis starts messing with his mind, because he would already have Disadvantage." MAYBE you could rule that having Ironman help Spiderman pull on the Gauntlet gave Spiderman Advantage on the opposed STR roll, while Mantis' mind tricks gave Thanos Disadvantage, but literally everyone else wasn't helping AT ALL by 5e rules. The last issue I have with Adv./Dis. is that is makes homebrewing buff/debuff spells really hard. What can you do to someone besides grant them Adv./Dis. on some checks? Bless and Bane are cool in that they grant numerical changes, but the DMG really wants you to avoid doing that. 2) I feel like you shouldn't miss out on feats just because you want to multiclass, and I also think that you shouldn't have to choose between feats and stats. I have seen a lot of cool character concepts flounder because they need too many feats to realize their concept and then they don't have the stats to actually succeed at what they wanted their build to do. (I'm thinking of doing a homebrew rewrite where everyone gets ASI's based on CHARACTER LEVEL, and making some extra class abilities to go on ASI levels. ) 3) Bounded accuracy causes some weird stuff to happen. Stuff happened in a module and my group of 3 level 4s went up against a level 20 NPC... and won. The paladin died, but the other two managed to take the NPC down shortly afterward. (Paladin, sorcerer, wizard vs level 20 champion fighter.) I feel like they should have lost. Earlier, in the same module, there was an encounter with a level 16 character that was supposed to run away at half health (yes, the module expected a level 3 party to be able to take a level 16 to half health). Not only did they manage to take the guy to half health, he almost didn't get a chance to run away! This doesn't feel right.
You make some good points here. However, in regards to number 3: the 3 level 4 characters won because they had strength in numbers. This isn't an issue with bounded accuracy (it makes sense that even a relatively inexperienced warrior would hit a veteran soldier at least some of the time), but one could argue that this is an issue with the action economy in 5e. Either way, it's not unrealistic to imagine that a group of weaker adventurers could work together to take down a single veteran adventurer.
I can say for a fact that yes, one of the players in my group is an absolutely terrible case of "If it's in a book, I want to be able to use it" I can't pitch a mono-class or mono-race campaign because I have that one player who is all "if you want to run a human-based game, you should let us pick if we want to be half-species so that not everyone is the same" This frustrates me because sometimes I want to run a simple game where everyone is humans who haven't been exposed to extensive amounts of magical species or monsters and have the characters be surprised at running into something that would reasonably make someone in the middle ages [poop] their pants in terror when they see it. Heck, one of the games I want to try and run again is Warhammer 40k: Dark Heresy 2.0 and I'm hesitant about doing so because I would have to exclude my friend from the first several sessions due to him simply not liking the meat grinder style as an introduction because he feels it adds too much anxiety. But the reason I want to do it is so I can tell everyone to basically make 4 NPCs that they have to keep at least 1 of by the end of the fourth session and get everyone in the mindset of "This is meant to be a game about horror and madness where you feel like you're a tiny fish in a huge pond surrounded by big fish you never knew were there" Having these throw away characters helps everyone understand that their characters aren't meant to be heroes in that game, they're desperately trying not to become victims as they learn about the true horrors of the 41st millennium.
I been playing since 80 so the tradition stuff does not bother me. I currently only run Adventure League. I start in Sep 2016 and have killed 57 characters in 187 sessions. It took some time to get use to how player friendly the game is. But to make it a little more deadly. If a monster reduces a PC to zero, roll a d20 under or at their INT score attack the pc again. Some of my villains don't bluff, surrender or I stab the downed pc works.
One thing I dislike in a party is how normal everyone thinks it is for a Gnome, Tiefling, Aarakocra, Goliath, Human, and Loxodon traveling together. I'm not saying everyone has to play the same race but...
I think it's very easy to learn this as first rpg. Character creation is pretty easy and the rules of how the game works aren't pretty hard to understand. And must important: you can always make something out of your characters even if you misbuild in the beginning. Why d&d is simple you may ask. Well, everything happens at the same time. If you are fighting an villain, all of you are doing this. In Shadowrun, which I didn't play by myself but heard of, there are three "planes of existence" which happen simultaneously. The physical world, where time is normal, the world of the mind (i believe it's called like this), where time is slower, and the world of data and hacking, where everything happens faster, all somehow interacting with each other. Now consider the consequences if your action had three different effects instead of one like in d&d. Also imagine how hard it is to write a story/develop a session as a GM. In Shadowrun, magic works way harder than in d&d. Instead of using spell slots, you need to roll your maximum power potential, then your actual power output which may not be bigger than the power potential, and after that you need to make some kind of saving throw against your own spell to not harm yourself when the power leaves your body. If i scared you array from shadowrun, I heard it's story is AWESOME, and once you worked out how all the rules work, it's even cooler.
A few rules i do is: If a character Hit Points go past 0 out right, i kill that character off in a single blow. If however the HP lands on 0 after being hit, then i get the player to roll death saves. I think this way it adds a level of skill and tatics. Plus i always try and kill off at least one character in a campaign, to give the players a sense of reward doesnt come without loss. Long and Short Rest. I do use the system of 8 hours or 7 days, as i too like the realism. That being said i make sure players stock up on healing potions before adventures. I believe as well, that it makes players use a more tatical approach to everything , rather then just charging in and using up valuable time to rest.
I think 5e is great, compared to the other options available it's a great mix of all the things that make up a good RPG. Although, I don't think it's just you... 5th edition isn't very deadly. I've found the best way to remedy this is hand out exhaustion more or use 15, instead of 10, for the threshold to make death saving throws. You could even incorporate more rules from earlier editions if you felt it wasn't bad enough. On the other side, you can also just limit the resources in the game that are needed to bring someone back from the brink.
1. Completely redundant stats. 2. Pigeonholing skills into very broad categories. 3. Leveling up system. 4. Mechanics do not support roleplaying, only combat. 5. Long rest- puff all hp back. 6. There is no such thing as injury in mechanics. 7. CR calculus. 8. Very abstract combat. 9. Very long combat rounds (6 seconds). 10. System encourages minmaxing. That’s just straight out of my head without any pondering.
I think most of those apply to every single version of D&D ever, but some of those are just straight up not critiques. No injury mechanics is a good thing to streamline the game, minmaxing isn't a bad thing, and would you prefer all role playing games not to have level up systems? That seems very strange to me.
@@Gingrnut I lot of games don't have a leveling up system as you probably think of it. Some of us just want to play a fantasy character and don't get as much of a thrill from the leveling concept ( although I still enjoy it somewhat ). These " Skill Based " games such as GURPS and Runequest only give a few points to increase proficiencies with a few skills as opposed to the package deals of the " Level Based " games. For me, there came a point when I no longer cared about chasing the next level.
Gingrnut as Jay has stated many games don’t have a ‘levelling up’ systems (my system of choice is GURPS btw). I don’t like situations where from one lvl to next your character plays completely differently as you have in those level packages things affecting gameplay massively. Injuries don’t have to affect ‘streamlining’ (🤮). They give you possibilities to expand on roleplaying for example, but for this you would need a roleplaying game and not a rollplaying game. Imagine a character with a hook for a hand, or a Roger Two Pegs (double leg amputee) character. How different mechanics wise would he be from a perfectly healthy individual? 11. Falling damage and high level characters.
I am using it in a gameand it is great, I have to think every time I want to cast a spell whether it is worth it or if I should save it for later. I play a bugbear paladin btw
If you're planning on using something like that, I absolutely think that you should consider permitting classes with abilities that are restored by a long rest to recover these abilities on a short rest instead. A first level sorcerer essentially having only 2 first level spells for an *entire adventure* is really punishing for the class. I'm aware that you could play one of the short rest classes, and they can work quite well here, but ultimately this becomes very limiting for classes that rely heavily on resources they only regain after a long rest.
@@kevingriffith6011 As long as you can take long rests at points (e.g. in taverns) and you dont waste spells then its normally fine. The melee characters are actually the ones who suffer the most if you go too long without a long rest because their hp gets low.
@@wicrosoft8091 That also brings back the old school opportunity cost issues that made some spells never get used. Spells like Sending, a very valuable tool for story and RP purposes, suddenly become a huge risk because that's a Fireball you won't be able to cast until next week. I am pretty opposed to stripping PCs of options in general, because while sure they'll be wondering "is it worth it to use one of my spells now", and that can be fun, it also means that every turn will easily degrade to "I hit it, I cast Firebolt, I cast Toll the Dead"... and I really don't like combats that boil down to smashing stat blocks together without any interesting decisions to be made.
The hit dice reminds me of the first D&D edition, where your only real health points are your first dice. Then your pool actually represents your capacity to defend yourself. So you could say hit points are actually how much you can parry or the glancing blows you can take before you are exhausted and get truly hit. I usually run this version of the rules, as long as you run on hit dice, you’re only facing glancing blows and so on. When you are on your lvl 1 starting dice + constitution, you are on the « injury » risk. Losing one of these means serious injuries and loss of limbs, loss of stats (if concussed) and so on. In that system, stabbing a sleeping humanoid means an automatic crit on this very limited pool. Also, in case of non fatal or non crippling injuries, it takes a full week of complete rest to heal one of these points.
@@danieldurham5891 Yeah I dunno what I was smoking earlier. Not enough breakfast or something to feed proper nutrients to the brain pan. There's only one DM to every 2-4 players
If you like your game to be more gritty, look at the suggestions that the Dungeon Dudes made. One thing that I liked is that you gain a level of fatigue each team you are reduced to 0 HP. Which works better than the random lingering injuries table.
On the kitchen sink tab: I am DM, I run an exploration game and I have given my players a couple of races they could play and all the others are off limits. for now. untill they discover the new races they can't play as them and even their charakters have to die to play as the new races. problem is, they are too invested in their current charakters, a throwaway npc dies? let's have a wake for 3 days...
The way I as a DM combat not dying or being deadly is that you HAVE to make a medicine check with a raising DC based on how they got knocked out if they want to stabilize their ally. I found that healing an ally making saving throws was just too easy as any paladin, cleric, bard, or even druid could just simply bring em from death's door. Additionally, something that I've seen on critical role and had players think they could do is force-feed a dying ally a healing potion. Not in my games. How is your ally gonna get that down their throat without choking if they're knocked out?
Honestly, sometimes my least favorite part of 5e is when you make literally any slight criticism of it and then get an extremely disproportionate negative reaction. A while ago I pointed out that even when adjusted for inflation, 5e is the most expensive d&d to play (a completely neutral statement) and I got reactions like I was kicking a child.
That is more a complaint about the internet in general than 5E.
Woah, they think there's something wrong with kicking a child? Have they ever met one?
@@6MaxSix6 especially today the one things kids need most is a foot in their ass.
@@6MaxSix6 you certainly know the kids that don’t get a kick in the ass when they need one.
Its Because Wizards cultivated a new batch of players who are perpetually simping for wizards
They probably don't play magic so are yet to experience the terrible business practices
A couple of things I do:
Getting knocked out gives a character a level of exhaustion. Recovering a level of exhaustion requires a CON save, with the DC based on your accommodations (suddenly shelling out for that comfortable inn instead of sleeping on the ground outside makes a difference).
Long rests don't restore hit points. Characters regains half their hit dice, round up, after completing a long rest.
Just use the lingering Injuries system in the DMG. When you get knocked to 0HP roll on the table and get a permanent wound. It ranges from small scars to the loss of limbs. It is perfect for making 0HP a dreadful thing. It also makes boomeranging something you do not want.
Why not both? Maybe roll a dice when you go unconscious: odds lingering injury, evens 1 level of exhaustion. Getting back up means you’re still down with a clear mechanical disadvantage that takes time and resources to mitigate.
Toss in Short Rest healing with a Healers Kit only AND hit dice back on a long rest but not all the HP. Maybe toss in the resurrection rules Matt Mercer uses when you’re raised from the dead so death isn’t a revolving door but a story moment with uncertainty built in.
Last campaign I DMed in a home brew world the gods had abandoned so no clerics period. That and these rules made for a more dangerous and dynamic story. Players were more strategic and crafty. Choices had clear consequences. And we had a lot of fun. A clear upfront session zero was key so no one was surprised when Revivify was not an option.
I dislike the idea of letting the dice capriciously maim characters, plus every time you have to stop and roll on a table means slowing the game down.
If your table is down for Lingering Injuries, go for it. I'm just not a fan, and exhaustion adds a simple means for reflecting the duress of getting knocked out and discouraging tubthumping.
It's not that big of a deal. The dice are what decides injuries to begin with. The death saving throws can decide whether you live or die. In looking to alter a system that is far too forgiving, maiming is still better than death. It works because it adds consequence to being "downed", which currently has none.
@@LordOz3 A level of exhaustion does nothing during a battle. It's disadvantage on ability checks if I'm not mistaken. That does not include attack rolls or saving throws. You get 3 death saves which is 3 rounds that an ally can pop you up with a single bonus action healing word from range. If you dislike dice, don't use them, and just gather round the table and do your collaborative story.
If you think D&D 5e is very "kitchen sink," don't even consider Pathfinder 1e (and, I'm sure, 2e eventually). It takes the concept of the kitchen sink and somehow managed to fit a kitchen sink inside if it.
I say this as a 7 year player and GM of Pathfinder.
That's exactly what I thought too. One of the reasons I switched to DnD 5e was to have a more cohesive high fantasy setting with fewer options. Pathfinder's kitchen sink was just too much for me. I know you can limit your setting/player options and only include what you want in Pathfinder, but I'm also a sucker for the Forgotten Realms.
Yeah PF1 had a crazy amount of options. I mean you even had a wizard archetype that used scrolls like daggers and stabbed people with them in melee.
and i love it for that
@@theprinceofawesomeness I actually enjoy it, as well, up to a point. The openness of being able to make almost any character imaginable within the rules is great - as long as players (including the GM) remember that its a *role* playing game, not a *roll* playing game. :)
That's part of the reason I love Pathfinder as a player. The sheer amount of options available makes each new character feeling unique, and the DM telling me that I can't use a specific thing isn't really an issue for me because there's so many other things to choose from.
Honestly, I'd rather the game "be easier" and scale it up versus being too hard. A lot of people in this thread have made some great suggestions on how to do that. In my situation, I'm introducing my family to DnD. I've played since 1e, but it's completely new to my wife and kids.
During our first encounter with goblins, my wife got injured for more than half of her hit points. I told her about the death saves and it was like a relief to her. My kids also enjoyed the game and played well. All the systems act like a safety net for new players and it's those new players who are the lifeblood of your game.
In any case, nice discussion material.
Scaling things up can make the game swing a lot though. Sometimes an encounter that should be difficult get just get stomped by players and other times they barely last one round. Scaling things down leads to better control. But maybe 5e was scaled down already from a more complicated system
I never thought about it that way
I would rather orient everything according to the story I want to tell with my players. I am even actively homebrewing just to add to that story. My goal is not to go kitchen sink or too hard or easy.
I'm watching this while Nate works about 30 ft away in his office.... :P
Prove it. Take a pic of you smooching his scalp :}
@@wigginsnemisis Haha! I doubt he would allow it! :P
Ryan, get back to work! Said the man browsing UA-cam comments on the clock.
Lol
30ft is human movement speed. I suggest engaging in melee
Simply making a character take one level of exhaustion every time they drop to 0 hp and another level if the character fails 2 death saving throws, allowing only 1 hit die recovery per short rest, and not auto healing on a long rest, requiring hit die expenditure... helps make the game more like older versions and makes dropping to 0 hit points mean something.
Damn, that's such an easy and elegant idea!
Welp. My RAW game just became a homebrew game.Because this is going in...
I made DEATH Saves as soon as you hit zero. So you can end up failing twice before anyone can get to you. I also made it DC 12 Con roll. Your Death Saves linger until a long rest. Passing death saves removes a one failure. Every time you’re down, you gain an exhaustion.
I'd rather stab myself in the dick than play a game like that... I fucking hate death spiral systems.
@@Elamdri Why? What's wrong with having a realistic sense of danger? That only enhances immersion.
Tradition is important to some people. But hell, I still miss THAC0 so who am I to judge.
Do you miss the chart where those numbers are different based on what weapon you're using vs what type of armour you're trying to penetrate?
@@aralornwolf3140 We still use that chart in 1E.
@sum body I made a specialized character sheet that has it added in, so it works great. It gives weapons a lot of flavor. I really enjoy it.
I loved THAC0.
The kitchen sink is a mimic...
My experience really is that death is as common or as rare as the DM wants it to be. I think if you want to increase your monster/npc player kill rate the most critical thing is not to shy away from delivering the killing blow to your PC just because there are other standing targets. Now I think most DMs reasonably rationalise that a monster will tend to lose interest if an attacker stops moving and there are others still attacking it, and an intelligent creature may prioritise putting down those still dealing damage to it to finishing off the unconscious creature, but ultimately the reason for doing this is because players don't like dying and the DM wants their players to have fun. But the clear result of this is that either you take down the whole party and TPK, or you're relying on unlucky rolls, which as you point out give a fair amount of time and leeway, to kill a player.
If you want to up your kill rate, most monsters are going to be able to outright kill a downed character in 1 turn, and you shouldn't shy away from doing that. The theoretically optimal strategy is not always the narratively best, or even indeed the optimal one. If your bad guy takes a turn of damage in order to outright kill a player, that's going to send a message to the rest of the players, it's going to scare them and it's going to stop that character from coming back into the fight, permenantly. Even better he can have his minions do it and that makes those minions seem like more of a threat than they legitimately are.
Think what happened to mollymauk. Matt may not have done that deliberately, he declared the double attack before molly did his thing that put him down, but the result is the same. 1 turn, 1 dead PC. I've never been a DM yet so take what I say with a pinch of salt, it's just something I've noted with how DMs tend to behave, they prioritise standing players because they aren't looking to kill their PCs. When the DM simply makes the baddies vindictive enough to just straight up murder you on the floor, as I hav witnessed once or twice in games, they often get their kills. No matter how much hp a character has, no matter how powerful their attacks, no matter how godlike they are, when they're lying helpless on the floor all it takes is 2 pokes from a goblin and they're dead.
I have it so that ever single encounter is at the decision of the players - no one wants to fight to the death - the players, NPC's or monsters, per se, so I leave them an out - a decision to be made, and if they decide, it was their decision to die. A, not the DM's fault. --Shit-- Dice Happens.
This is why John Wick head shots even downed opponents!
or, just play another edition.
2: I do agree and I have a homebrew rule that you gain one point of exhaustion when you fall unconscious (from getting to 0 hit points). That way if the player is super uncareful he will be punished the rest of the day(s) depending on how many times he went down and after the third one the death saves start being with disadvantage.
For point 2 if you want a deadlier play the monster that way. When a PC is knocked unconscious have the monster continue to attack. RAW when an unconscious character is attacked it's an auto crit and they fail 2 death saves. Like Matt Colville says "the Earth Elemental Steps on your head to make sure your dead."
That. I came to the comments to say that.
I not always do that, but when it makes sense, I make the baddies attack fallen characters.
I also use the CR ressurrection rules.
Exactly. I have no issue making death more meaningful if I want to.
I agree if you want a deadly encounter drop a PC and continue attacking downed characters and they will die...play this for monsters and say that the creature was predation💯
Sounds super duper unfun =/
We could carry this to dicky DM levels and have every encounter include a handful of wee monsters whose only mission is to dart in and finish off downed PCs (while barely adding any XP).
How about a housecat that runs out from cover to rip out the throat of the fallen bard? An animated object that dances out to smack/fork/smother the comatose barbarian?
@@micahiwaasa9304 but if a DM wants to kill the party, he can easily do that anyways.
This just gives an option to make the game a bit more dangerous when needed to create tension, or to make the players feel their charakters mortality.
I feel like as long as the players and DM communicate and are on the same page, lots of these annoyances can be avoided
I was going to write a long comment, but you summed it up perfectly. Communication.
Agreed. 5e offers the tools to play the game with a rainbow of amazing colours. I like this edition.
Or just play a system without those issues.
I do agree that communication is key, and every system, no matter what, requires the group to talk a bit before playing, but I'm also a firm believer in trying to find a system that matches the kind of game you want to play and that you enjoy running. The less work you need to put into a system to make it work the way you want it to work, the better.
Thank you for this video! I must say, was not prepared for this level of honesty!
I came into d&d when ad&d was on its tail end. Then 3rd edition came out, and not terribly long after, 3.5 and its many variants.
When 3.0 came out, i really fell in love. So many options, variations, supplemental rules and ideas, campaign settings and alternative ideas... then 3.5 came out and just further streamlined it, while still being compatible with 3.0.
So thats where i sit, and thats where i'll stay. Ive amassed a large collection of 3.0 and 3.5 books, and have continued to do so. Ive only recently completed ny quintessential set by mongoose, some 2 dozen booklets on specific races and classes, which really offer an in depth diversity to all the races and classes they address.
I like the hardcore aura these versions have. Yeah, you may die. In fact, its a very real possibility. However, surviving and getting better has won the hearts of my players, and really sealed them into this game. Rewards have more impact when you almost lost it all on several occasions.
What bothers me most about 5e besides the capitalist aspect is the racial acceptance. You wanna be a tiefling? Or a dragonborn? Not in my game bub!! I make new characters play a standard race/class combo or a few to understand the world and roles of those in it. If they can reach the level of the monstrous race/class combo they want with one or so standard characters, i find they understand the nuances of the world, and how and why monsters have the reputation they do. Sorry, but no christian kingdom society is going to be okay with a devil race of thieves doing what they do in town. But earn those levels the regular way and I will happily let you try!
So to me, 5th edition is more like the liberal hippie approach to d&d whereas 3.0 and 3.5 are more like the cruel middle ages christian themed fantasy RPG i prefer. Im not christian or liberal or anything along those lines, but working within an imposing environment like that really brings a lot of challenges and territories where some things just dont fly.
Thanks again for this video, it meant a lot to this ol' DM!!
Pathfinder 2 has a good fix for whack-a-mole situations, the Death Levels and Wounded Levels. Those can be easily added to 5e. Basically, the first time you are downed to 0HP it is the same as 5e, but each sequential K.O. increases your chance of instadeath. The Wounded LVL can be removed with Healing Kit uses and resting.
@N L How so? I'm fairly unfamiliar with 2e
@N L Not sure how Spellcasting is related to Death/Wounded LVLs though :D :D :D
5E is unreal, the speed at which I can prep a session has gone waaay up. I have always had a gripe with the way D&D handles death. It is so hard to die in 5E, not that it should happen all the time, but there do need to be consequences. I have tried so many different things to remedy this and I find a lot of them work pretty well depending on the party.
In my setting I've made diamonds very hard to come by, making the components for a resurrection a true treasure, and when the party finds one it's always a HUGE deal.
My players don't reset their death saves when they go down. If you go down, fail once and then get brought back up, if you go down again on the same day you still have that 1 death saving throw failure.
Also: I have never used the XP budget system. I think it's a great tool for new DMs however.
Dungeon Dad I like your way on handling death and resurrection mechanics. I think I’m gonna pull this into my game.
This, re: diamonds. I have the nobility in an area and the churches corner the entire market in diamonds. This is, after all, an immensely useful resource. You can't let just ANYONE have access to it.
great minds travel the same path. I do the same thing in my worlds. Diamonds are either very rare or are extremely controlled "substances" by the PTBs (powers that be) if not both
Just one problem: if diamonds are rare then they are also expensive, and resurrection spells require a certain cost of diamonds, meaning that resurrection becomes easier the rarer they are
@@silentdrew7636 Don't bring real world economics in D&D, That WILL break any game,
You can go "old school" with the Hitpoints and follow the older D&D/AD&D nearly universal houserule method.
Give the players 1 FULL Hit Die (ie 6 points for a Wizard, 10 points for a Fighter) for level 0 and then have them roll 1 HD for 1st Level. Add in the CON bonus JUST THIS ONCE and total the results. There is your 1st Level HP total! The character then adds a new rolled Hit Die at each new level until 10th Level. After 10th Level, they just add;
+1 for Casters
+2 for Clerics, Thieves, Bards
+3 for Fighters and Monks
+4 for Barbarians
This will greatly reduce the number of HP at higher levels and the risk will be higher as a result.
True. Although HPs are bloody weird. A wizard who is 6 foot 5, and has an 18 con, should not have less ability to be struck than a 4 foot halfling barbarian. HP's don't even really represent anything. There's some fuzzy line between the weirdness of AC and HPs, and it's very weird/artificial. It's not cinematic, or narrative, or gritty, or heroic it's just odd. In real life a stab with a dagger kills a 7 foot tall brickhouse as well as it does a frail midget. And in movies, it's just who's important to the plot can get ten gunshot wounds before death (or magically avoid getting shot at all).
The fact that the best way to heal in 5e is waiting until a character is downed is just completely crappy >_<
My problem as a player with 5e is that i dont care about my character if i never feel like I'm in danger... I never feel like I'm in danger.
I also hate how the optimal way to play a shapeshifter is to stop shapeshifting at later levels -.-
I love the D&D show dicing with death ( They use 2nd edition ) because life is easy to lose which makes them consider their actions carefully.
Also as a newbie DM using XP pools and challenge ratings was pointless, there are so many more factors then the amount of players and their levels, like how much they minmaxed or what class they play and how well balanced that is, i quickly found out that "deadly" encounters were just pushovers for my players who all had D&Dbeyond legal characters.
Edit: oh, i also hate the gold/magic item economy. 4e was my first time playing D&D and in 5e i just have no idea what to do with gold, i didn't as DM, and now that I'm a player my DM doesn't seem to know either, the guidelines for gold are to poorly defined. Most of the players i play with are convinced into D&D because they're digital gamers, and they just dont give a fudge about their new keep, they want loot, and loot is in super short supply in 5e.
So how do you tackle the loot issue in your 5e campaigns?
D.M.: Feats are an optional rule so I'm not allowing anyone to use them.
Me : - RAGE FACE -
Without feats and/or MC makes characters feel samy imho
@@AntTheBugcather true, but if you use feats it completely skews the CR of monsters in the MM since they are calculated without any of the optional rules in mind.
Me: gives the players a free feat in character creation
@@mitchelltyner5670 disagree given the trade off of ability increase to offset the versatility of the feat.
@@GrugTheJust there is nothing to disagree on. This was stated by Jeremy Crawford so it can not be argued with since they were the ones who designed it this way. 2 things that were not used in the creation of the CR for a creature was feats, and was pointed out that (great weapon master and such feats makes the CR of monsters go down) and also another was magical weapons since a big factor of higher CR creatures is their resistance to non magical damage. If you bypass the resistance and inflate the damage per round of the characters it significantly drops the CR of the creatures. Again, the creator of the edition stated that CR was factored WITHOUT any of the optional material.
When I want to roll a more specific setting, I just talk with my players... Like this :
"I'm always the frigging DM and I want to DM a specific game, so EVERYONE WILL PLAY A GOBLING BECAUSE I WANT TO, if you don't want, how about you DM this time, huh!?"
@sum body look up the adventure "We be goblins"
Parties where everyone plays a certain class, race or both are actually really fun, and lends a great sense of unity to the group. I run a game of all Halfling Barbarians and it's great seeing all the different ways the players tried making diverse characters within those narrow restrictions.
The party i fear is the bard changeling party. Every check has advantage from help actions, healing word, and the choice of spell picks across all of magic. A dozen plus inspiration die per day at level one, then per short rest around 5.
@@WolforNuva Yeah, I love games like that. I’m running a game where everyone is playing nobles. It’s awesome seeing them try and live as adventurers away from the comforts of nobility. Really fun.
@@KennethSee Ah man that sounds really fun!
I play BX and 1st edition. 5th edition is just boring for me.
I think SUCCESSFUL ADVENTURES on page 107 in the 1st edition PHB should be required reading for everyone that plays the game.
6 things I do not like about 5E. In no particular order.
1. Death Saves.
I like at 0 your character is toast, unless there is money to pay for a res.
2. To many races.
I like Gary's take on things where it should be more human focused. If you want to play a different race then there is going to be draw backs to playing them (level limits)
3. Long and short rests.
I thought healing is what clerics were for.
4. Backgrounds
Here is one. You are a nobody, and make your own story by playing the game.
5. Feats
I thought that was what having a class was for.
6. Balanced encounters.
That is what legs were made for. Running to fight another day has saved many character lives. Not heroic, but that is the type of game I like. Sometimes you can outrun things and sometimes you can't. When you can't then its time to make a new character.
"Run first and ask questions later." 1st edition PHB page 109
It's funny how much the game has changed over time. It has gone from a very deadly game to one where the characters almost never die because it is all about the story.
As a grumpy old 1st edition AD&D player, I love this comment :-) Agree with everything here
The game needed to be more noob friendly specially now with the streaming era in the end they needed new players cause 4e sells were very low they needed the cash after they are own by hasbro after all
@@sebastian-dp9vq If 5th is good for you then that's all that matters. As long as your getting enjoyment out of the game and having fun while doing it then its a win.
@@Grumium101 i know im just saying why wizards change it i mean you gotta admit 5e is the most noob friendly
@@sebastian-dp9vq I know they have to make money, but if your going for noob friendly I would say B/X or BECMI is a lot easier by far.
If you want to have getting knocked down be meaningful: Change your tactics.
Prone down means auto fail 2 death saves on melee attacks. In this world, if you brought someone down, you would stomp on their head to make sure they don't get back up again.
If you can't take down characters when they play badly it is your dming style. Use terrain, traps and creative tactics to your advantage. Even goblins can tpk a party when played right in 5e.
All making things more deadlier in 5e does is make someone have to be a cleric healbot instead of being able to have fun.
I mean, the party could also play safe and smart... especially since a cleric healbot is rarely needed, and hell some classes do the healing job better than all but the highest level of life clerics *looks at divine sorcerer shepherd Druid and celestial warlock*. Hell, avoiding and mitigating damage tends to do a LOT more for a party than healing, like area control spells that slow down and stop enemies, areas of damage that enemies need to avoid unless they wanna die, and good tactics that the party plans out beforehand.
Sure prayer of healing from a life cleric is gonna be nice and heal some of the damage the fighter and wizard took, if they get a chance to rest that is, but isn’t it not only cooler but also more efficient to have the party trick the enemies into a spike growth patch of ground that quickly turns into a field of dead enemies?
It shortens the length of combat is something having deadlier mechanics in an rpg does - rules go both ways. It makes PC's avoid combat, run away sometimes, take it seriously. In a deadly mechanic - players are all alert, paying attention, feeling the tensio, every single combat - the combat is short, punchy, a few, to a half dozen turns, it's over.
He's not saying make 5e more deadly, he's saying the system is borked for risk. Yes you can GM something deadly, but that's not the issue - the issue is ALL combat should be ACTUALLY a bit risky, rather than having tonnes of meaningless encounters and then throwing in a curve ball to keep players on their toes - that's mechanical, it's not a GM thing.
That just illustrates the flawed thinking around modern D&D - the idea that the GM has to constantly constrain and moderate combat risk, scaling it up and down, to create a perfectly balanced sense of tension versus not actually dying. That's not a world, that's a linear arpg with the GM's hand on the difficulty slider.
Think about for example, divinity original sin as a computer game - it doesn't railroad the combat - you fight something too powerful, you die, you want to avoid dying, you stick to easier targets and carefully manage your tactics. If things get dicey, you run. Fast. The game doesn't scale anything - the players choice does.
I played a short run of the ultra deadly game harnmaster once. There was one combat, it was unavoidable, and everyone sighed relief when it was over. The rest of the game, was spent avoiding combat and problem solving/social. Was actually a lot of fun. Serious stakes. Now, that's too deadly for a regular game for me, but it was considerably more enjoyable than the perfectly pre-mixed 90% fodder fights 10% hard/risky fights of usual gaming sessions in D&D or pathfinder. Everything felt important. Three guards was like, IDK guys, let's see if we can sneak past them, scale the wall etc.
I have a couple tricks that help me deal with the "Kitchen Sink" aspect of the game when world-building.
1) Find out what your players want to play as early as possible when coming up with a setting for your next campaign. Since you're probably only going to have 3-6 players, there are only so many oddball races you can get, especially since variant humans are so strong that a lot of players pick them. Simply find ways to incorporate their specific race choices into the setting. You may even find it creatively stimulating to find a way to make them fit and give them a home in your setting. You can also involve your player in the creation of their race's niche in society, which might get them even more excited about their character and give you plenty of ways to involve their background in the campaign.
2) If a player picks something that is really incongruous with your setting's concept, ask them if they really wanted to play that race/class because of the concept, or if they just wanted its stat block. If it's just the stat block, re-flavor the race/class into something that fits better while keeping the character as it is mechanically. You might also find this creatively stimulating, and your player may enjoy having the freedom to come up with something completely new.
If they really wanted it for concept reasons and not game mechanics, find out what about the concept drew them to that combo. Again, you can take this data to re-flavor the character in such a way that it fits in better while keeping the specific parts of the concept that they like about their character.
Sure, it's a little more work, but I find that accomodating your players' characters into your setting usually leads to a better setting along with letting your players play the characters they want.
+1 for "It just don't seem right.".
I think I have a good idea. Long rests should not be 7 days, as it sucks to have to wait a week to regain your spell slots. However, If you drop to one third your hp or less in a battle, your hp max decreases by your level+your prof. bonus+ however much damage you were below 1/3 hp for 1 week. I think this will solve a lot of problems.
Something i really dislike about 5e is how there is close to no customization, all characters are basically the same. Sure there are feats, but they are an optional rule and 90% of them suck so you don't get that many options to choose from even when available.
This is the reason why I’m planning to switch to Pathfinder 2e after the GMG is out. I want my players to have more options, as many of them love that. One player likes to make crazy hybrid builds, so it’ll make him incredibly happy.
@@theatheistbear3117 I feel you man, i'm doing the exact same thing.
@@TA-by9wv I reckon you probably haven't play that many system's outside of 5e. But if you did, please let me know
Eddie Donovan You are aware that there is a Conan Tabletop Roleplaying game, right?
Rafael Castor I’m happy to hear that! Pathfinder 2e is really cool. I hope that more people will give it a go.
D&D 5e has a lot of things I’m not all too happy about and Pathfinder 2e seems to have gotten rid of those. It’s got me really excited.
Are you me?
I've tried a few things for HP, resting and death.
1. Characters recover HP = Level * Con Mod per long rest. This calls back to 1e where a character recovered 1 HP per day.
2. All rest healing is done with hit die, but instead of getting half back per day, you just get all of them.
Both work decently, however, I still feel like players don't always 'get' the hit dice mechanic.
Currently, I'm working a new method that hopefully keeps things simple and streamlined yet turns up the danger and realism.
HP & Wounds. HP is more like your energy, your ability to keep fighting. Wounds are the damage your body has taken. They are sort of a replacement for your Death Saves.
1. You can sustain a number of wounds = Con Mod. If your Mod is +2, you can have 2 wounds and keep fighting. A 3rd will kill you.
2. Each wound adds a level of exhaustion.
3. You get wounds 2 ways. When hit, you can opt to take a wound instead of losing HP (If you have 3 HP left, and are hit by an arrow, you might take a wound instead of dropping unconscious). Additionally, when an enemy crits you, you take the HP damage & the Wound damage. Enemies deal a number of wounds per attack based on their size: 1 for medium and smaller, 2 for Large & huge, 3 for gargantuan (these numbers can be tweaked, but I like the ever present danger it brings to big monsters).
4. You can recover a wound naturally by resting for a day, Alternatively, Cure Wounds can heal a Wound instead of HP.
Finally, I'd make spellcasting cost HP. Currently, casting is way too simple, and I don't know anyone who tracks components (which isn't really fun). Instead, a spell costs 1 HP per level of the Spell slot. This solves the issue of players going 'Nova' when they only have 1 encounter in a day. It also makes sense now that HP is a measure of Energy and not strictly your health; casting spells wont kill you, but if you aren't careful you could drop unconscious.
As someone whos first impression of DnD was with 5th edition my opinion on your points:
1. Yeah its kinda stupid, but it doesnt really doesnt bother me and is understandable enough.
2. Im with you on this one, I feel like most of the battles were a character comes close to death, its nearly always also really close to a TPK. The only times a single character was close to dying were moments where he couldnt be stabilised, for example a character was stuck in a water elemental -> he was drowning -> he cant regain hitpoints, so they needed to kill the elemental before he fails 3 death saves. Because of that im using lingering injuries with a chance everytime someone drops to 0 so my players are more scared of it (my wizard recently lost a hand and is now desperatly looking for a high lvl cleric to restore it).
3. While it is weird, I think making it harder to recover HP in rests might just make healing magic much more needed. What i surely will try out is the gritty realism rule, because it also reduces the spell slots so I can span encounters over multiple days without it being to easy and my playersalways having all resources.
4. I know its unrealistic, but I´ve played a lot of game systems where your character gets weaker with lower hitpoints, my problem with this is it a. slows the game down because players always need to look up "how many hitpoints do i have left? how much harder does that make rolls for me?" and b. It makes comebacks harder. Making characters weaker if they loose hitpoints makes deathspirals more frequent and often it comes down to "who hurts the other side more quickly", and in my opinion nothing is cooler than my players making a comeback while on low health ( I know this is still possible with rules that weaken you if you have less hitpoints, but its just much more likely that you just die)
5. As someone who had no experience with DnD before 5th, I LOVE the xp budgets. While calculating it is stupid if you dont have an app or a website that does it for you (thanks kobold.club) It helped me balance encounters when I had no Idea how the game works (We didnt play a prewritten adventure). I know its not perfect but its super usefull for beginners.
6. I just love that theres a lot of fantasy in DnD, maybe its because a lot of other games I played were rather low-fantasy. But after fighting Bandits, Cultists, Guards and who knows what kind of "human-enemy nr. 24" I just love that I can put a lot of mystical creatures even against low lvl parties and keep them amazed by the giant mix of different fantasy styles.
I totally understand your points, just wanted to tell you guys what I thought about them :)
Gotta agree with you on #5. I don't touch it at all anymore, but it was really useful when I was first starting out to help me understand how encounters are balanced and how to estimate the difficulty of a bunch of small enemies instead of one big one.
1) Semantics/shmemantics. Early gaming was full of weirdness. Tons of weird stuff survives to this day.
2) I prefer the 0-HP = seriously battered down and barely standing on your legs. Your HP are simply an indicator of how long you can give your full ability before exhaustion and injury set in. This has the advantage that players don't end up looking like walking scar tissue after 50 fights where every blow cuts and smashes up their bodies.
3) Rests are often tied to a situation. If you are in the middle of hostile territory and threats loom everywhere, good luck getting even a short rest. Generally in my games rests are pretty hard to do unless the party retreats to a safe area, which means they lose progress and/or momentum.
4) Been looking at combat systems for nearly four decades and they do tend to fall into fast/slow playing and deadly vs managed survival. Fast/slow play depends on all the factors. If you have a system with attacks/parries, armour bypass, damage reduction, critical hits and injuries you add a ton of dice to slow the flow of the game. Deadly combat means that a stray bullet or a single hit from a sword will kill you stone cold dead no matter how awesome your character is, while managed survival means you can survive any engagement barring outright stupidity and abysmal dice rolls.
5) I mostly wing it. Never had a complaint. At best I look at the monster stats and the player's XP table and get a ballpark figure to fits in the way I feel they should advance.
6) I play D&D because it is uniquely D&D. I don't like to play GoT or Lord of the Rings D&D and prefer bespoke game systems tailored to fit a world rather than try to get the world to fit the D&D memes and tropes to a particular world. Even adaptations like Lord of the Rings for 5e have tons of changes and is kinda interesting if your players are only ever used to D&D, but in an ideal world I'd rather use a different game system. I always compared OGL with a system in which every car, from a cheap runabout to a Rolls Royce or a Bugatti hypercar are all built on the same Ford T chassis, you can tweak it to death, a Ferrari on a proper chassis is always going to beat one on a jury rigged Ford T chassis.
I play pathfinder and you are right that #3 makes healing a must. Since Pathfinder healing is 1hp per 8hour rest and 2 per full day of rest (doubled if a heal check is preformed). So without a dedicated healer then any fight where an enemy gets a lucky crit then you are abandoning any urgent business.
I like your comments. They mostly mirror my own. I have just a few suggestions:
2 - My group has had a lot of discussions on this lately. My players do NOT feel like it isn't dangerous enough. Part of that is play style. For instance, my undead don't see with eyes. They sense life essences. So you've been knocked out, they don't notice until you are dead. Hmmm. Smarter monsters know it. One change we are talking about is to keep track of negative HPs. 2xCon in neg HP = death. This eliminates the 1 HP pops you back up.
3 - Some monsters realize the implications of letting the party rest. They get to rest too. That's time to get help as well.
Thanks!
For #3, you can just have your monsters attack the downed players. Animals and beast IRL won't stop attacking just because you get knocked down, so just have the Monster unload all their attacks onto the downed player. If they already failed one save, the just straight up die.
Hi, ever tried „The dark eye“. That’s the favourite system over here in Germany and I think it solves your problems.
But, as it is from Germany, it’s a little bit nitty gritty. But still the most played system here. So it Must make something right.
You know unlike many other channels, you are always talking more generally about RPGs and that's good.
However main issue I have with D&D 5E is one other youtubers are also guilty of: always go for the lowest common denominator in a very lazy way. Some channels have been talking in circles about the same stuff for 5E for 3, 4, 5 years at this point and people keep hyping ridiculous projects like "5E classes for a cyberpunk setting!" Instead of investing time to buy one of the many wonderful settings build from the ground up to better represent those concepts.
We're quickly moving back into the D20 era of the early 2000s of endless, awful supplements forcefully shoved into a D20 system even if they fit poorly and I am not sure the OGL is to blame but it is far more on all of us every time we hear people say "I *only want to play 5E* and buy those products" and capitulate instead of putting your foot down and saying "No, try something else, it won't physically hurt you top STOP GIVING MONEY to WotC"
Agreed.
Don't be afraid to leave your comfort zone, folks. You may enjoy it after getting past the mental block.
I'll take this one step farther and recommend two systems to try;
Mythras (The Design Mechanism). A Classless, skill-based, system that uses Percentile dice for a resolution system. It is based on a BRP model (Runequest, C-o-C) but modernized.
Conan 2D20 (Modiphous Games). A success-based system (you roll multiple dice and each one can generate a success) that is basically "classless" but uses Archetypes to guide new players.
@@swaghauler8334 Good suggestions!
There are quite a few quality RPGs out nowadays, covering a wide range of themes and styles. People should explore!
Sadly, that's where we are. Nu-gamers in gen-z and millenials visibly are starting to outgrow 5e, but don't know where to look but other settings with the same rules (one exception seems to be shadowrun). But it's time people started to rip that bandage off and learn new systems.
It's sad to me that carbon 2185 is the highest selling product on drivethru. It's okay I guess, but it's got major flaws, and is even simpler than D&D. There's so much better stuff out there. You want sci-fi - try coriolis for eg (or actually anything from free league publishing). It's got a way richer setting, better rules, more flavour and it's more deeply supported.
Most modern systems are as easy, or often easier than 5e to play once you learn them. It's usually some other d20 mechanic, or d6 v skill, or dicepool v skill or whatever + skill v difficulty - and a single mechanic for everything. No different than 5e, and often less checks. Transition really is just a bit of reading (often just a quick start) and that's it.
Actually I think gaming (in the last few years), outside of the old names, has moved further along in streamlining than D&D has, whilst retaining complexity.
Long gone is the days of success math, or multiple resolution systems. D&D is behind in that if anything.
RPGs are moving fast now, there is so much new, cool stuff out there.
I feel your pain. All of it. The cocktail of flavors, the casual healing... What came to my mind is one system I've tried a couple of months ago - A Song Of Ice and Fire RPG. The mechanics complement the setting really well. Interesting thing that they've done with the hp is that you can "trade" damage points for "injuries" and "traumas". Anytime instead of taking 3 or so damage you can take an injury which decreases all of your abilitiy checks, the limit to the number of injuries being your stamina rating. It felt somewhat refreshing to play. And then you have to rest for a day AND have somebody make a medicine check, otherwise you keep being injured.
I’ve always considered the 8 hour rest as the time taken to bandage, cast healing etc. then rest and regain spells. If party has no healer then they expend potions on top of hit dice to heal
All of these reasons are great and all the more reason why EVERYONE should have a session 0.
I had never heard or seen a session 0 despite being a part of several campaigns. I think I only just found out about them a year ago.
See here's the thing. Are session zeros for character creation and rules discussion or starting role play? Our dm seems to think we're ready to rp without characters. It's a little tricky to adlib while working out a character mechanically.
Session 0 is a must always
Completely agree. I used to play without a session 0 back in the days, but ever since we started to have one, even for games that were only meant to last for 1-3 actual play sessions, things have run so much more smoothly and generally been more fun.
If by "session 0" you mean 3.5!!
Is it Festivus time again? The airing of grievances!! LOL
A holiday for the rest of us!
When is feats of strength video?
My friends crackhead strip club dancer is bringing the pole! Someone should prolly wipe it down first...
Well you see barabarians have a high armor class because they're so buff that attacks just glace off of their skin
So many of the issues people raise regarding D&D (death, degenerating strength with HP, human-centered play, the magic system… and so many others) are perfectly handled by Burning Wheel. I’ve never understood why it isn’t more popular, especially with fans of “grit”.
The thing about "grit" is, most people want it until they play it. Also it's really a vocal minority and mostly DnD DMs who complain, not the players. Furthermore not all of them have all these problems at the same time, if they have, they really should change the system they play.
In short, it's not popular, because gritty realism isn't that popular (and yeah probably brand recognition, marketing etc.)
There’s luckily a ton of answers to a lot of these problems already in the game.
First as you mentioned the healing the rest variants. The Gritty Realism Rest variant already curves much more than just hit point Recovery. Remember this also affects spell and ability recovery. If you haven’t used this rule yet you’ll be surprised by how much it does change EVERYTHING.
As noted by other comments death is easy in 5e if you don’t pull your punches but ACCIDENTAL death is hard to have happen. If foes aren’t finishing off dying characters there’s usually a reason (either they need to deal with the immediate threat of another character or they don’t want them dead). Multi-Attack is a killer if the first blow knocks a character to 0 and many beasts get an extra attack as a bonus action if the target is prone (which 0 hp characters are). Just remember even one hit on a downed target makes the death save a single save or dye and two attacks kill them outright.
Hit Points are just a problem with D&D and one of the mechanics WotC has figured out that if they remove it’s no longer “D&D” to too many people. There’s an easy answer with bringing back Bloodied from 4e. Not official but I’m going to be putting a video out soon that discusses this too.
The XP budget system IS a joke and WotC knows it. This is why they have a MUCH better system in Xanathars guide, but like you said it’s also something that can just be ignored.
Finally the kitchen sink issue. This is mostly a community problem not an actual system problem. It’s not AS focused as it could be but WotC official stance on 5e is PHB plus one for all their organized play and any campaign that has a players guide or players options assumes THAT is the “plus one” for that campaign. WotC also doesn’t like telling people how to have their fun but this limiting factor shows the limits within their own campaigns and the books openly tell DMs and the PLAYERS that it’s up to the DM what races are allowed. The problem comes from a community that refuses to listen or accept this just like multi classing being optional and not core. People assume if it was core in the Edition they came from or if it’s common at their table it’s core.
When i've run 5e, i've had one character die in almost every session. with that being said, i'm still learning about encounter balance XD
dnd 5e at level 1 is very deadly. if you're new to 5e those low levels can be tough to manage haha. an unlucky roll can often lead to a character death actually haha, especially if you aren't willing to baby them early.
once you get deeper in levels an encounter having unlucky rolls or being tougher than you imagined usually just means that the party ends up spending more resources in a particular fight than you were expecting. but at level 1 and 2, it means they die haha.
I usually start adventures at level 3 unless my players want that experience of being level 1 nobodies who could lose a fight to a serving girl at a tavern.
@sum body the first encounter i actually built myself, it was a lot of low-level undead in a crypt with a vampire spawn boss. The balance felt about right, the party could've done it easily if the one guy didn't abandon the rest of the party to go after promises of treasure, pulling the rest of the monsters in the process. Difficulty was spot on, but a bit long-winded
Eventually, you're going to have to start paying attention to the spells the spellcasters have. That's the main thing that can change the difficulty of most encounters with certain spells. Area of effect spells, chief among them Fireball, can take a group of enemies that by their numbers are an appropriate, or even lethal, challenge, and wipe out some or even all of them. (It kind of undermines the designer's goal of making lower level creatures be usable at higher levels in larger numbers). Other spells, like Banishment or Polymorph can take an entire big creature out of the fight, significantly dropping the enemies power and thus challenge. (Or at a higher spell slot, Banishment can banish extra creatures, making it even trickier to plan around, as you might want to them to fight a creature that is challenging enough with just one of them, but need to put 3 in because the wizard will, probably, use a 5th level spell slot and banish 2 of them ... but if the wizard decides to save his 5th level spell slot, and just Banish one of them, suddenly the fight is double what was going to be a decent challenge, and thus probably lethal.
Honestly, with this comment I wanted to focus on advice for running the game and only address some of the issues with spells in DnD. But well, let's just say most spells in DnD tend to create problems for other elements of the game, such as the Challenge Rating system. DnD in all of it's editions, except maybe 4e, have never had a working CR system for encounter building, because of it's spells. Many of the spells, like Fireball, Banishment, or Polymorph, sometimes Hypnotic Pattern, swing the combat encounters too drastically. A working CR system would literally have to ask about the dozens of encounter changing spells in the game, as well as how high they can cast them, and how many of the spellcasters can cast them.
And because these spells have a huge impact on the game, characters that have them, and thus the players that have them, get a disproportionate amount of control over the outcome of the game that non spellcasters, or even spellcasters without these spells. A 5th level wizard or sorceror, with Fireball, has an amount of damage output and ability to deal with a group of enemies that aren't even close to the other characters, whether their a 20th level fighter (Since fireball does 8d6 damage to everything it hits, if you hit 5, 10, or 20 enemies with it, you do 8d6 *5, 10, or 20, it's almost like doing 40, 80, or even 160d6 damage, in one round.) ...it also is way more powerful than say, a 5th level character with only 4 levels in wizard or sorceror. A 5th level wizard, rather than being %125 more powerful with their magic than a 4th level spellcaster, is kind of .. exponentially more powerful. Which makes multiclassing spellcasters less viable, or rather, it makes most players disincentivised from even considering multiclassing, since they usually have their minds set on reaching levels like level 5 to get Fireball as soon as possible. It makes not going straight to level 5 in spellcaster classes, and not taking these handful of kind of overpowered spells, feel like making a 'wrong' decision. To multiclass because of your character concept, or how they feel about what they want to learn, the things your characters are exploring as their story unfolds, can lead you to take options, like multiclassing, that effective nerf, or gimp your character when compared to a pure spellcaster build. Not that multiclassing should be as good as pure classes as far as how potent their spells are, I just think spellcasting power should be more linear, so multiclassing would have a less severe cost in power in exchange for that versality and getting the game options that more accurately reflect how we envision our characters and how they are turning out in the story. (Which is the main reason why many, like I, often multiclass, so our characters game features can more accurately reflect who they are...)
I shouldn't have to feel like had a chance to be Superman, and became Robin instead because I 'poorly' chose to follow my character and not play a pure spellcaster.
Remind them that they can always run away. And let them. As DM, I don't take opportunity attacks, and I don't continue attacking downed characters.
@@timkramar9729 i try not to pull punches, but i will make sure to tell them what kind of experience i'm trying to create beforehand.
I use the XP Budget, but I find that the deadly encounters tend to be more of a realistic attack. It just gives me an idea of how many creature to toss in (though I don’t always use it). I also don’t use the multiplier scale much on it, because multiple players balances out multiple enemies
For solving the rest problem, you can look it the 13th Age RPG way: accept that it's a game mechanic to keep the game going. So rather than long rest at night, that game lets you take a full heal after 4 normal combat encounters, or 3 hard combat encounters. Healing fully doesn't take any time, maybe 5 minutes, not 8 hours, as hit points are an abstraction anyways.
Resting after a set amount of battles helps twofold: your players don't rest at any given moment, they know they have to press forward to earn their heal.
And secondly, it gives the players a chance to pace out when to use their spells and limited abilities. Knowing there will be two battles after this, they won't use every spell in a single battle and ask the GM for a long rest because they're out of spell slots.
Check out Savage Worlds. The wound system there is pretty awesome, but would need tweaks to make the D&D classes feel right. Savage Worlds is classless, so everyone has 3 wounds. I would probably try to set wounds based on hit die size. I might have to toss together a quick and dirty "conversion" for this. Hmmm...
After testing 2d20 Conan for some time now, coming back to D&D combat feels like having read Stephen King and going back to Goosebumps.
I'm familiar with 1d20 Conan, but what's 2d20 Conan?
@@schwann145 Also known as Robert E. Howard's Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of, by Modiphius Entertainment. It's awesome and the pinnacle of sword & sorcery RPGs imho.
My house rule for the resting and HP recovery issue. I'm still working on refining this:
Short rest: you can spend 1 hit die (or 1/2 proficiency bonus, round down) per hour of rest.
Long rest: Is not just 8 hours, but requires a proper meal and full >6 hours of sleep. Gnawing on rations in a Leomund's Tiny hut is *not* restful. A night in an inn is. To rest in the wilds, you'd need to set up camp, light a fire, have someone cook a meal (probably requiring a proficiency), and then turn in for a full night of sleep. Standing watch or being woken up by an encounter interrupts this unless you're able to like, sit in a wagon and nap on the road.
I find this also balances with spellcasters not needing a full week to recover spells.
If I'm bothered by any aspect of 5E is that there are so many player choices that it can be easy to get analysis paralysis.
Regarding death, I think it is so dependent upon the experience level of the players at the table. When I DM I often get frustrated that the PCs nearly die in filler fights that are mainly there to drain a few resources and keep the dice rolling. For groups with experienced players, I think making truly deadly encounters is a skill that a DM has to learn.
Armor class doesn't bother me, but hit points are a bit of a philosophical trap. I justify hit point regain in this way: hit points are not "health", but a measurement of a PCs ability to cope with physical and mental trauma. If you get sliced by a sword for 10 HP "damage", which gets recovered after a short rest, the cut might still be there, but it has been cleaned and bound, so it doesn't affect your ability to perform in combat. In essence, the physical trauma has been mitigated. If you don't get a chance to heal, the cut is still open and exposed. It hurts and it is distracting. You haven't dealt with the physical trauma, therefore the next time you get into a fight, you are that much closer to an enemy finally landing a killing blow. For the record, sometimes I describe a "hit" as missing the PC, but the strenuous move that was required to get out of the way was painful or exhausting, which is a sort of trauma that puts the character that much closer to receiving the killing blow. I don't know if I recommend this philosophical workaround, but it gives me an opportunity to describe a lot of stuff.
5e has nothing on Pathfinder for the amount of character choices being overwhelming. Its honestly kind of ridiculous. Couple that with the fact that Pathfinder is specifically geared towards power gaming, and it makes character creation a nightmare.
Yeah, the analysis paralysis thing! So true. I have a friend who plays a cleric and it seriously takes him about 5 minutes to decide every combat round what his action will be. And then we move on to bonus actions...
Camelslayer I’ve never played pathfinder, so I didn’t realize it was so overwhelming.
Michael Phillips I’ve played a couple clerics recently and had that problem as well. There are so many things that clerics can do, and depending on the DM you’re playing 4-dimensional chess trying to figure out what to do against them. The answer is usually to cast shield of faith and just wade in! /s
2.) Death - if a character falls down, and the PCs are fighting a semi intelligent creature, that creature will finish the victim to prevent others from bringing it back to life. Also in my setting, raise dead and other resurrection magic which is from the necromancy school is banned across the realms because necromancy is outlawed. Another cool thing to add is that for every failed death save, you get a permanent scar which makes it more difficult to engage with NPCs.
3.) Healing - we have a sort of a hybrid system where a short rest is 4 hours long, and a long rest requiers a few days. This means that you will not have a cleric to bail you out every single time and will force you to prepare for a dangerous dungeon
4.) HP - can't really fix this problem without making it too complicated, and I think most people would hesitate to fight in the 1st place if they knew that they will be less and less potent and that would suck out the fun out of most martial classes who have to fight on the front line
5.) Exp - I just give out levels when I find it appropriate, like after a huge quest has been completed or after say 5-6 sessions
6.) Customization is the key. I have just banned out a whole lot of problematic races, spells, magic items etc. but have expanded on the things which are allowed giving them more depth. When in doubt, depth > complexity. It's better to have 2 races with a detailed interaction and history and a long history than 25 stereotypical ones.
My hate is an expansion of your hate of armour class. I'd like to have seen 2 values. Dodge (ability to connect) and armour value (ability to resist damage) so there can be a difference in both describing how an attack hits (or what when it comes to cover) or how impactful it is when it does.
Mutants & Masterminds does this beautifully with Dodge/Parry and Toughness.
New Death Save rules: You get 1 roll on the start of your next turn. Let's hope someone can give you some first aid before then so you can make your save with advantage.
Actually, they call it Armor Class because that's the next best thing to defense class. They can't call it Defense Class because DC is needed elsewhere in the game, and it would be too confusing.
Nah. It’s probably tradition
As a DM, one of the things I do (depending on the group) in 5E is limit short rests to 2 per day, long rests still recover half a character's hit dice, but characters only recover half their maximum hit points on a long rest.
As for unconsciousness, my variant rule is a character can recover from unconsciousness a number of times equal to their CON modifier, after which a successful stabilization will result in them being Stable but they remain Unconscious. I require a medicine check to wake the character from this state, but if they do awaken before a long rest they gain a level of exhaustion and they can't recover hit points until they take a long rest.
That's for my groups who like it more deadly anyway.
I keep Matthew Mercer's Bonus Action rule for potion drinking, but even for my casual groups I decided that for a potion to work you have to be able to metabolize its liquid. If you try to feed a potion to an unconscious person, you will begin to drown them, and they immediately lose two death saving throws. All characters have to be awake to gain hit points from healing potions.
I love 5e, especially it's simplicity. But it's simple rules can often leave my players wanting more (mounted combat, grappling, etc). It becomes a balancing act to augment the core rules without getting overburdened and becoming unwieldy.
Great vid
Ideally, I would like to teach 5e to new players and them move them to 3.5/PF after they've got the hang of it and are ready for more options. Maybe 5e should make a more advanced version for players who want that? But what to call it?
@@dane3038 Well there kind of already is an advanced 5E, it's called Pathfinder 2nd edition.
5e is rules light in a way I don't really like. It's not light in an intresting or easy to warp way so it just seems shallow in places i want some depth and way too complex in places I don't want
I think my favourite approach to point 4 is Fate 3.0's Stress and Consequences system. In Fate, there is no system of hit points. Instead, when you get hit by an attack, you have to 'buy off' the damage using stress, consequences, or both. Stress represents narrowly escaping damage, whether that's a lucky dodge or just taking a scratch rather than a larger hit. Expent stress is restored after combat ends and has no mechanical effect, but each character only has a certain amount they can spend. Consequences, on the other hand, represent meaningful setbacks, usually an injury or similar. They can buy off larger amounts of damage, but not only do they take notably longer to heal, but they can also be invoked against the character, reducing their effectiveness in combat.
I've been running a 5e Ravenloft campaign for almost 2 years. 15 character deaths in that time which includes a TPK. 5e is plenty lethal.
Simon is out here icing fools.
@@Cody.Tafoya congrats. You actually made me lol with this comment.
Lol bro it's Ravenloft, of course it's gonna be darker and more lethal.
I haven't seen the 5e version of Ravenloft, are there special rules for healing in that setting? If so, then it is not the 5e system that is lethal, it is the setting.
@@loka7783 no the rules for ravenloft are the same as any 5e adventure. 5e is absolutely dangerous if players play their characters even if it potentially gets them killed.
In my multiple groups I've played with since 3.5 it has always been what would your character do. Not I dont want my character to die so I'm not going to do what he/she would normally do.
A great way to fix some of the death problems:
(Making resting harder is a DM thing, my players hate how hard it can be to sleep or get a full nights sleep)
Lingering injury everytime players drop to 0, roll 1d20 to determine it and the lingering injury requires a 6th level spell or higher to be healed. Ontop of this, make it so healing spells cannot set bones, and can only heal surface level wounds like flesh or muscle tissue.
Healing spells cannot regenerate tissue, but act more like mending with re-sealing the flesh back together
I don't like 5e, but I don't understand why anyone would ever get mad that somebody else does like it.
It's less getting mad that other people like it and more that so many people will only play 5e because it's the only system they know and dont see the value of learning another system because they don't understand systems well enough to tell the difference
i think people get mad because the popularity of dnd 5e sorta prevents them from being able to find people to play the game system that they like instead. Its kinda like a gamer getting mad that all his friends spend all their time playing fortnite or apex instead of the game that they want. They probably have nothing against those games, but their popularity affects them in a very personal way.
On the DM side, don't forget that monsters are able to kill unconscious targets. People often forget or dismiss that, referencing real-life battle tactics. You can play it to the monster's Intelligence and knowledge of battle tactics, as well as knowledge of clerical magic. If it is known that there is a healer in the party, and it is known that they can instantly Cure Wounds or Healing Word an unconscious target so that player can stand up and fight at full strength again, it's a good tactic to go for the healer first.
Gameplay Reminder: When dealing damage to an unconscious player, instead they gain a failed death save.
- Constructs, bugs, elementals and zombies just keep attacking unconscious players. You can narrate a zombie's attack as if it is trying to eat your brain.
- Goblins start stealing the loot from the unconscious player, then make their escape.
- A random bandit would probably ignore the fallen. The trained soldier? Probably not.
- Hobgoblins might strike once more at a fallen target before moving on to the next. When they realize there is a cleric using their healing magic, they WILL start killing characters and THEN will focus down on the healer in an intelligent manner.
Hint: You can use multi-attacks to drain away failed death saves, or split your attacks up between fallen and conscious players.
My favorite RPG system is the World of Darkness games, also known as the White Wolf system, mostly because character creation and advancement are more involved than D&D due to the absence of levels and classes, it makes it easier to tailor your character the way want. My biggest problem with Experience Points in D&D is the fact that they don't really do anything beyond act as a sort of meter until you get to the next level, D&D's system known as the Level Up system is also greatly employed by MMORPGs, and I just have problem with the Level Up system which boils down to the fact you have these numbers that just tell you how close you are to the next level but still requires a bit of math you likely don't want to do. I much prefer WoD's Point Buy system, and other games that employ it as well, because it turns Experience Points into a player resource for advancing their character the way they want, it also means levels really don't matter and challenges can be applied for the difficulty to the players in more real feeling ways.
The game also has offshoots, of sorts, for different sorts of character archetypes, just not in the way most people expect. There the classic World of Darkness, Changeling the Lost, Hunter the Vigil, Mage the Awakening, Promethean the Created, Geist the Sin-Eaters, and a few others. Each has a nice little spin on how things work. I also like the WoD setting of an Urban Fantasy Noir type setting.
If you don't like tracking xp there's the milestone system that basically translates to leveling up for story reasons (whenever the DM feels like it). It can sometimes be super arbitrary but it simplifies things and allows for styles of play that aren't kill everything that moves.
@@anthonynorman7545 Yes, and I make use of it in my D&D games. I was just pointing out my observations for the system when it uses Experience Points. And it's that I don't like tracking XP, even though it can be a headache at times, what I don't like XP in Level Up RPGs is the fact the points you earn aren't properly utilized as a resource
You may want to try the GURPS system. It addresses all the things you talked about and being a toolkit system, it has lots of avenues to adjust and tweak until you get exactly the gaming experience you want, in whatever genre you want. It became my go to system back in the early 90s and has remained it ever since. I play several other systems, but when it comes to GMing my games, I reach for my GURPS books.
Solution to your 6 dislikes to D&D 5E? Simple: "House Rules"
:-)
"Use a system that suits those desires"
@@N0-1_H3r3 Other than the desire for realism and low fantasy settings, why would you change systems when you understand the current one and it fulfills 80% of what you want from the game.
@@whiskeyhoundAt some point, houseruling D&D to do exactly what you want will take more time and effort than finding and learning a new system.
I've never understood the "I've got D&D, I'll use it for everything" mindset: it feels like only watching one movie franchise or only listening to one musician. I own and know dozens of game systems, and use different ones for different settings, different genres, because system influences feel and playstyle, and contrary to popular belief, D&D cannot do everything.
@@N0-1_H3r3 True about D&D not doing everything, if I want a darker game, i'd pick up CoC or Warhammer fantasy, but for the majority of what I want to play/run, d&d covers that base pretty well with the amount of homebrewed stuff out there and previous editions to patch the game to suit my style of game.
@@N0-1_H3r3 to be fair, Dnd is very easy to houserule. The rules are bare bones and simple compared to other systems. people act like houseruling is the same as creating a new system from scratch. but the truth is, even extensive houseruling is very very easy and most often far easier than learning an entirely new system.
I'm speaking from experience as I have learned many new systems believing them to be the solution to my problems only to find new, different problems in every one of them. I've even made my own frankenstein of an rpg system that just takes everything i like from dnd, shadowrun, world of darkness, FATE, dragon age, and a few others that escape my memory and mashes them together and you know what? even though I love that system as it is literally everything I ever wanted put together, I spent years putting it together and I pretty much only run it with 1 particular group because, end of the day, its just easier to use dnd 5e if I got a new group that already knows it and then explain some houserules to them, than teaching them a new system from scratch.
TL:DR houseruling is really easy, and even extensive houseruling is not even close to the effort of making your entire table learn a new system. (strictly talking about effort here. learning new systems is very rewarding)
I say the way to increase death is either go full pack tactics and if someone goes down, every monster in the area runs towards them to makes sure their dead, you can make it so that they can only stabilize with the help of somebody else using their turn to make a Medicine Check to give them a successful save, and/or you can make it so that to restore them to full health, they must heal the total damage you actually took to get back up, or you can make them have negative health and it stacks so you can't easily be healed.
Your first gripe goes back all the way to 1st edition. Gygax borrowed the idea from a naval battle game where the ships had armor class
The problem with tying damage to HP is that if you start losing you will almost certainly keep losing. There’s not a very good chance of an underdog coming back from the brink of defeat or snatching victory from the jaws of death. Every fight will either be a complete blowout by whichever side deals damage first, or an incredibly long slog as both parties deal less and less damage every subsequent turn
Correct. 5E just doesn't seem lethal. But that's easily remedied by the DM and some adjustments.
Also. The editing is better. Good job! Hope you get more subscribers!
Its usually because the DM doesn't follow the encounter building rules actually. 6 encounters a day makes a huge difference.
I feel like its very lethal. Are DM's not letting npc's hit 0hp characters or something? A mele hit on a fallen guy is 2 failed death saves, so any damage from there is lethal, or a failed save. And don't tell me it is not a valid strategy for the enemy in a world where a simple heal rises them to full fighting condition over and over again. You want the enemy to stay dead.
@@Brynhold It's no-man's-land. Not lethal enough or too lethal. (No player is exactly thrilled by having their downed PC executed.)
@@micahiwaasa9304 True I guess. If a person is killed in my game (unless from getting one shot) there is a one minute "near death" state they are put into. This allows someone with a medkit to get 1 chance to preform a Medecin check to save the person. Normal healing dosen't work here, the damage is to sewere. The difficulty is against 15+1d6(rolled hidden by the DM from the players).
This allows for a bit more targeting I think, from the enemy. I also roleplay different enemy tactics ofc, most dosen't target pc's like this, mostly experienced and clever foes would, or something like a ghoul.
@@Dragonspassage absolutely true. I just started a new game with players who have never played a "by the book" campaign. Level 3 start, PHB+1, with a focus on dungeon crawling and combat. Even rolled on the random dungeon table in DMG to brew up something unique. Within my first session, I had 2 character deaths on my hands, and an almost completely expended party. Out of a party of 4.
My biggest complaint and gripe you didn't even touch, not even with a 10 ft pole. Perception, investigation, and passive perception. The wording is so ambiguous that it makes it difficult to figure out when to use them. Like is it perception to find a trap if you don't know if it's there? Or is it investigation? And if it's perception then when do you use investigate?
And don't get me started on passive perception.
"Oh hey you are walking down a trail when your cleric sprouts an arrow",
"How did I not see that ambush with my passive perception of 27?"
Perception is to notice things. Investingation is finding things and seeing how they work.
Perception: that title is a different color than everything else.
Investigation: do I think it's a trap and where would it be? I look at the wall to see holes for shooting arrows and the ceiling to see if something might fall.
Perception: did you see/hear/smell that? awareness
Investigation: now that you point it out I think it could be blank or we should look blank. Detective
Passive perception can get ridiculous, but one player can not be in surprise round while everyone else is.
Sorry surprised condition not surprise round
Officially speaking, investigation is drawing conclusions from details and perception is noticing the details in the first place. So for instance, perception may find scratches on the ground, while investigation would tell you the scratches are the result of a secret door opening and closing and scraping the floor. Personally I've never been a big fan of perception as a skill in general though. I'd prefer if people just used a requisite environmental knowledge skill, like nature, streetwise, dungeoneering, etc.
Loving the Dan Mumford Star Wars artwork in the background.
For Death Saves, consider requiring a character to be stabilized before they can receive healing. This makes SpareDying, HealersKits, and MedicineChecks much more useful than they normally are due to not being able to cheese death with HealingWord alone. Some high level heal spells can also be given an auto stabilize effect to prevent them from feeling nerfed.
You can take this a step further and treat stabilizing effects as just giving 1 or 2 successful death saves instead of fully stabilizing. This prevents a Cleric from casting SpareDying and HealingWord on their turn to fix up someone with no successful saves.
For me D&D is all about magic and options. I would have no desire to play D&D with low or no magic. I need to feel progression, that I am getting stronger and awarded for my adventures. If a DM was like there is "no magic in my world", or "magic is rare" it would instantly be a turn off for me and I would probably decide not to play. I don't want to play a role-playing game where its close to real world. I want to play in something that takes me out of reality. That is the whole purpose of it for me.
However, that being said I definitely agree with you and want to feel stakes. I want all my combat encounters to be a chance for death, otherwise there is no risk and it would be boring. I want all Hard or Deadly encounters, I don't want them to all be TPKs, but I would be fine with a boss being TPK and the lead-ups being Hard and Deadly.
Thing is, you can't control whether or not a Deadly encounter ends in a TPK. A single crit from the monster and the whole encounter goes down in a death spiral. The more deadly encounters you run, the more chances of RNG-death you inject into the game. One of the games I played (from an official module too) almost ended when the characters got crit twice by plain ass bandits and died, I had to come up with a way to save them, lest the campaign was over then and there. They were 1 level higher than they should've been too... DnD 5e is extremely RNG heavy.
@@Ranziel1 Extremely RNG heavy? Well, it's a game were outcome is decided by dice.
Also it's actually pretty solid and not overly random. But if you don't like randomness in your dice based game: Play a halfling diviner wizard with the lucky feat.
Edit: I agree on the encounter thing though. The CR system is rather hit or miss. And at some days the players seem just to never roll above an 8.
For the deaths & unconsciousness, I use the Grievous Wounds system from Grim Hollow, that if you fall to 0, you roll on the Grievous Wounds table. Grievous Wounds are healed with a long rest (more on that), but every Grievous Wound you already have against you, you treat as a -1 to your roll. When you total below 2, you gain a Permanent Wound, which is a 1d6 table that has things like an ATM being cut off, losing an eye, or (if you roll a 1) outright dying. Permanent Wounds can only be "fixed" with a Regeneration spell. Sidenote that I also allow the use of prosthetics in my game, so if you can't use a Regeneration spell, you can see a local artificer about making you a prosthetic.
Death saves are rolled by the player, but in secret, so only the player and I know the results. We do have a Paladin, a Ranger, and a Druid in my game, but I also allow them to use Healing Surge, since encounter CRs are consistently 2 about the APL (which is level 4, with six level 3 characters).
Since I allow the use of Healing Surge, hit dice should be available less for rests, but even then, I only allow the use up to half during a quick rest. A Quick Rest is simply 30 minutes, and the only thing you get is the ability to catch your breath a bit (the use of half your hit dice). A Short Rest functions as advertised, but it's four to eight hours, and usually players will be camping when that happens.
A Long Rest is the same, except extended to 24 hours, with the prerequisition that you *have* to be in a safe area to sleep and rest. A roadside camp does not count as such. A roadside tavern would, or a homestead, or a settlement. Ergo, players are required to seek out civilisation to get the benefits of a Long Rest. Fortunately, my group's Barbarian Warforged is a pathfinder who can find a settlement with a successful DC 15 Survival check, and I do populate my world with off-the-map little settlements with their own issues, thus opportunities for plot hooks and side quests.
Counter Argument: Mr. Torgue in BL2. “Fantasyeee”
Two of my favorite games: Savage Worlds and 7th Sea. Both have a dramatic feel and taking damage has a real effect on the game. Also, they handle the "kitchen sink" mentality really well. Especially Savage Worlds. "Oh, you found this really neat Edge? Too bad it is in another setting. We're using this setting where that doesn't exist." Other really good contenders for good dramatic systems are the Storyteller system from White Wolf/ Onyx Path and the Palladium System for those of you who want a lot of crunch. Of course, if you really want to play Math the game, crack open a copy of Hero System which can be a lot of fun if you are in the right mood.
Complacency cost my group of players their 1st character death last session. The are level 10 and been playing in my home brew campaign for about 2 years and not suffered a single PC death. (I’m a softie when it comes to playing the monsters in that I don’t attack unconscious characters unless there aren’t any sensible alternatives) so after a long fight with many swamp monsters the monk gets bitten by a pair of giant frogs and falls unconscious and nobody, not even me thinks much about it. Heck not even the monk player says anything to ask for aid from the other players. So it comes back round to the giant frogs turn and they both have the unconscious monk grappled and restrained and are fighting over his body and then And only then did it dawn on me and the other players including that short of som lucky dice rolling the monk was going to die. The dice weren’t lucky for the monk and a 10th level hero gets killed by a par of CR 1/4 monsters. What an ignominious end! There was shocked silence at the table as everyone realised that they could have on their turn saved the monk, but no characters die in D&D right?
Playing again tomorrow for the first time since ‘the death’ and it will be interesting to see how the players approach has changed. I’m going to guess not a lot.
I get it that you don't want to kill their character as the caring human being. Yet as DM you are bringing to life this world. Monsters don't care if someone is not responsive, they'll just be 'nom nom nom'.
Unless there is someone nearby threatening them.
Make it immersive, a bunch of zombies isn't going for the next person, they'll even start feasting on the downed character while they are getting smashed by it's friends because 'brains!' Now that they are finally sorted close to their objective, why bother over physical attacks?
Gareth Hamilton- Yes you will notice as players stop to invest so much time and effort into their character. They will instead optimize the game piece. Load on as many potions they can get, min max the characters, min max the gear. This is a wonderful way to grow yourself a group of powergamer. They will learn stats and optimization is everything.
I played D&D once so far, and I was surprised my character didn't die. I played as a tabaxi wild magic sorcerer, the first attack the entire party took was a goblin hitting my tabaxi for 6 damage, and he had 5 max hp
And finally at level 3, with 11 max hp, wild magic surge, three fireballs right into the cat. At the very least the DM was kind enough to let the paladin roll for religion, nat 20, and decided to let us survive with a lot of exhaustion
At least for my DM every single battle is a hard choice, we won most battles, but some we outright ran away scared for our lives
i feel 5e could use more customization apart from multiclassing and feats
This THIS
I think this is a far huger problem than difficulty levels
I like the idea of concealed death saves. Not the DM rolling, but the player rolling and now showing to the party unless a PC makes a medicine check-then they can see how many fails/passes.
Interesting... just play another system like Runequest
I could never understand why some are so stubborn in clinging to a D&D derived system for everything.
Goes to show how powerful their comfort zone can be.
In regards to HP, I've always had the mental image that the penalties from the damage they've taken "balance out" with the bonuses from the desperate rush of adrenaline they're experiencing.
They're hurt, but their body is pulling out all of it's reserves to survive.
I'm contemplating adding a house rule similar to the D&D 4e "Bloodied" condition.
By itself, it does nothing but track the severity of your injuries.
But there would be options in the game where characters might, for example, gain bonuses against bloodied characters as they exploit their more desperate efforts.
Just apply DISADVANTAGE at the "Bloodied" threshold.
I have two main frustrations:
1. I want more, and heavier setting books. Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide is really underwhelming, I'd like it to be twice as thick with more concrete information such as populations, factions export/import and various conflicts that are occurring.
2. A fighter/mage. Straight up a classical 2e fighter/mage. Not an eldritch knight* with only two spell schools, not a spellsinger with a single one handed weapon. I want something resembling proper spellcasting, being able to use any sword or polearm of my choice and not rely on gimmicks. The Pathfinder Eldritch Knight was perfect with its full BAB, 9 levels of casting, d10 hit die and several bonus feats.
And then I would be satisfied. Maybe some more skills like engineering. The lowered power scale is excellent, the class design is good, the racial design is satisfactory and the feats as well as the backgrounds are strokes of pure genius.
I’d recommend Kobold Press’ Midguard Worldbook. It has 450+ pages on everything you mentioned and more.
I have to say that I’m not a big fan of D&D 5e, so I have to disagree with you on it. But that’s just my opinion.
I live in Poland, and here Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is far more popular than any D&D edition. Some say it's because of easy to understand d% system (let's forget third edition, ok?). But I think it's because of the setting.
Not as heroic as D&D. Darker. Chaos and its servants are always there, waiting for your soul. Traveling through the woods? Bandits are not what you should be afraid of.
In fact... There's mod for WFRP created in Poland, called "Autumn Tale". Best way to describe it is "Polish WFRP players considered default setting as unrealistically optimistic, so they created their own".
Autumn Tale is too much for me, but yeah... I love WFRP. Even though it's not perfect. (But hey, it's d%... Only your creativity can limit you).
*#1: AC.* This is literally a non-issue. If saying "Your Armor Class is what someone has to roll to hit you" is too much for you, then you've got bigger problems. I get where you're coming from with dodging factoring into it as well as how tough your armor is, but still. This is a nitpick at best, and it's a very simple concept to explain to a new player. Worst comes to worst, rename it "Defense". DM's perogative.
*#2: 5th Edition isn't that deadly.* This is more of a "DM struggling with encounter difficulty" problem than a system problem. There is admittedly less risk with the damage gating of death saves, there's pros and cons to the negative CON score versus death saves. Neither is really perfect or better than the other necessarily. Level 1 characters though? SUPER deadly, all it takes a stray crit from a goblin to outright kill someone. Any character downed can be easily coup de grace'd by someone that has more than one melee attack (which, even starting at lower levels, virtually everything in existence has multiple attacks.) In my experience, deadliness tends to come from a combination of numbers and environmental hazards. Alternatively, if you want to switch to the "negative CON" score for death, it's super easy to do.
*#3: Resting and Healing.* As you said, this comes down to DMs. If you give the party frequent opportunities to rest, then yeah- encounters become much easier to survive than if they're strapped for spells, resources, and aren't at peak performance. I really like the idea of requiring a Healer's Kit in order to use hit dice- I've always recognized that hit dice is essentially performing first aid on yourself, but really only makes sense if you have the medical supplies to do so. Could even make some use of that Medicine skill for once with that.
*#4: HP.* So, Pathfinder does something similar to what you're talking about, or at least has some rules for doing so, if you so choose. I'm personally not a fan of it; in my opinion, it adds a lot of unnecessary micromanagement that I'd rather just not deal with.
*#5: XP Budgets.* I've literally never even heard of this. Looks to be an optional rule. As far as I'm concerned, it can be completely ignored.
*#6: Kitchen Sink Fantasy.* I would say Pathfinder is a far bigger offender of this than D&D ever has been. D&D has a lot of stuff, but not everything. Pathfinder LITERALLY has what feels like everything, it's honestly a bit silly. I get what you're saying though, but I feel this is a point where DMs need to communicate with their players. Tell them what kind of game you want to run before any characters are made. It's the DM's world, their rules, and their free time sacrificed for a few hours of fun for others, the player can compromise with that.
Bit surprised you didn't mention anything about how some weapon types are stupid (halberds and glaives are mechanically the exact same thing, spears and tridents are the exact same thing with a weight and price difference, there's no reason to ever use a morningstar over another weapon that actually has traits, etc. This is something that actually irritates me a lot.) But the nice thing is 5e is easy to modify to fit your needs. Don't like death saves? Switch it out for another system. Resting and healing too easy? Make it harder. I appreciate that 5e gives you rule alternatives. It's not a perfect system, it never will be. But at the very least, it leaves things open enough that you can adjust easily if you so desire.
They really should have split the Halberd and Glaive into axe and sword categories for the purpose of feats and magic item enchantments. And they should have added trip and disarm properties to weapons to help balance stuff like the whip. Other than a mindflayer specific item in one adventure, the only magical property you can put on a whip is basic +1/+2/+3 because for some reason over half of the magic enchantments in the game are exclusively for swords. Which is ridiculous when you consider the whip does so little damage and has no benefit in doing the things you'd think you'd being doing with a whip, like disarming or tripping.
@@OmegaZyion Yeah, I'm not a fan of the amount of attention dedicated to swords and other weapon types are completely ignored. Magic whips, glaives, morning stars, and several others simply don't exist outside of +1 to 3 variants. Griffon's Saddlebag is doing God's work and fixing that though, he has a long list of good magic items that include those more forgotten types.
I actually had to bend the rules for one of my players to NOT die. She rolled abysmally on death saving throws and it wasn't even an epic potential death - just some minor scuffle where she got unlucky. So I let her reroll the dice, coughing dramatically and looking away as if to say "I didn't see that natural 1" and she rolled well enough to at least survive another round so her party could stabilise her.
11:00 If players don't like to 'feel restricted' they are more of the snowflake type player or not really flexible.
DnD is a role-playing game, which means immersion. Your DM is determining the world your story is going to be told in and you can build off of that. It's not like DnD canon is your set of toys and the DM is taking away your toys.
Joris Vander Cammen ”wow, you want to actually customise your character? God what a snowflake”
There is game developed in the late 70's called Aftermath, it has some cool mechanics. Such as weapon defence ability, combat dodge ability, Su dual damage, critical damage with different effects. The healing/recovery rules are realistic too. Whilst it was a complex game and very deadly it was awesome to play I would recommend you check it out. It is available from Fantasy Games Unlimited. Its mechanics allow for everything from fireballs , 9mm to swords and stone axes. I feel may of the D20 system rules where refined from this system.
I wanted to add my thoughts to these arguments but you killed it.. all the things I dislike and have to micromanage were e articulated by you. Good video!
My issues with 5e:
1) The Adv./Dis. system. I get the simplicity of it, but it has 2 big issues.
a) The benefit/penalty associated with Adv./Dis. varies greatly depending on your normal likelihood of success. If you need a 10/11, it is roughly equivalent to having a +/-5. If you need a 2 or a 20, it's like having a +/-1.
Imagine a character trying to lift a heavy portcullis, but he needs a nat 20 to make the DC. Someone helps him, granting him advantage, but he STILL needs a nat 20, he just has 2 chances to do it. (In 3.5, the character would get a +2, if the ally could make a DC15 check to help.) What's sad is that the 8 STR halfling Wizard is just as much help as the 20 STR half orc barbarian in 5e.
Another scenario, the expert swordsman has been blinded, and must now fight a commoner. The expert swordsman hits on a 2 normally. Disadvantage just means that he has to roll a 2 or better twice to hit the commoner. (In 3.5, the swordsman would have to roll a 2 or better, then make a DC11 flat check to see if they actually hit.)
b) Since Adv./Dis/ doesn't stack, there is no incentive to work together to bring down the big monster. I think of the scene from Infinity War Part 1 where everyone is trying to pull the gauntlet off of Thanos, and thinking, "If this were 5e, they wouldn't even try to restrain him after Mantis starts messing with his mind, because he would already have Disadvantage."
MAYBE you could rule that having Ironman help Spiderman pull on the Gauntlet gave Spiderman Advantage on the opposed STR roll, while Mantis' mind tricks gave Thanos Disadvantage, but literally everyone else wasn't helping AT ALL by 5e rules.
The last issue I have with Adv./Dis. is that is makes homebrewing buff/debuff spells really hard. What can you do to someone besides grant them Adv./Dis. on some checks? Bless and Bane are cool in that they grant numerical changes, but the DMG really wants you to avoid doing that.
2) I feel like you shouldn't miss out on feats just because you want to multiclass, and I also think that you shouldn't have to choose between feats and stats. I have seen a lot of cool character concepts flounder because they need too many feats to realize their concept and then they don't have the stats to actually succeed at what they wanted their build to do. (I'm thinking of doing a homebrew rewrite where everyone gets ASI's based on CHARACTER LEVEL, and making some extra class abilities to go on ASI levels. )
3) Bounded accuracy causes some weird stuff to happen. Stuff happened in a module and my group of 3 level 4s went up against a level 20 NPC... and won. The paladin died, but the other two managed to take the NPC down shortly afterward. (Paladin, sorcerer, wizard vs level 20 champion fighter.) I feel like they should have lost.
Earlier, in the same module, there was an encounter with a level 16 character that was supposed to run away at half health (yes, the module expected a level 3 party to be able to take a level 16 to half health). Not only did they manage to take the guy to half health, he almost didn't get a chance to run away!
This doesn't feel right.
You make some good points here. However, in regards to number 3: the 3 level 4 characters won because they had strength in numbers. This isn't an issue with bounded accuracy (it makes sense that even a relatively inexperienced warrior would hit a veteran soldier at least some of the time), but one could argue that this is an issue with the action economy in 5e. Either way, it's not unrealistic to imagine that a group of weaker adventurers could work together to take down a single veteran adventurer.
For the xps budget Kobold Fight Club helps keep my ideas in-check...
For sure! Great tool.
I can say for a fact that yes, one of the players in my group is an absolutely terrible case of "If it's in a book, I want to be able to use it"
I can't pitch a mono-class or mono-race campaign because I have that one player who is all "if you want to run a human-based game, you should let us pick if we want to be half-species so that not everyone is the same"
This frustrates me because sometimes I want to run a simple game where everyone is humans who haven't been exposed to extensive amounts of magical species or monsters and have the characters be surprised at running into something that would reasonably make someone in the middle ages [poop] their pants in terror when they see it.
Heck, one of the games I want to try and run again is Warhammer 40k: Dark Heresy 2.0 and I'm hesitant about doing so because I would have to exclude my friend from the first several sessions due to him simply not liking the meat grinder style as an introduction because he feels it adds too much anxiety. But the reason I want to do it is so I can tell everyone to basically make 4 NPCs that they have to keep at least 1 of by the end of the fourth session and get everyone in the mindset of "This is meant to be a game about horror and madness where you feel like you're a tiny fish in a huge pond surrounded by big fish you never knew were there" Having these throw away characters helps everyone understand that their characters aren't meant to be heroes in that game, they're desperately trying not to become victims as they learn about the true horrors of the 41st millennium.
Runequest, 2nd edition.
I been playing since 80 so the tradition stuff does not bother me. I currently only run Adventure League. I start in Sep 2016 and have killed 57 characters in 187 sessions. It took some time to get use to how player friendly the game is. But to make it a little more deadly. If a monster reduces a PC to zero, roll a d20 under or at their INT score attack the pc again. Some of my villains don't bluff, surrender or I stab the downed pc works.
"Armor class is tradition!"
Yeah? So was Thac0, but thankfully that was dropped too...
One thing I dislike in a party is how normal everyone thinks it is for a Gnome, Tiefling, Aarakocra, Goliath, Human, and Loxodon traveling together. I'm not saying everyone has to play the same race but...
5e is my first edition getting into dnd, I also don’t play it enough to have many things I don’t like.
Enjoy the hell out of it, it's honestly a great system for new and veteran players ;)
I think it's very easy to learn this as first rpg. Character creation is pretty easy and the rules of how the game works aren't pretty hard to understand. And must important: you can always make something out of your characters even if you misbuild in the beginning.
Why d&d is simple you may ask. Well, everything happens at the same time. If you are fighting an villain, all of you are doing this. In Shadowrun, which I didn't play by myself but heard of, there are three "planes of existence" which happen simultaneously. The physical world, where time is normal, the world of the mind (i believe it's called like this), where time is slower, and the world of data and hacking, where everything happens faster, all somehow interacting with each other. Now consider the consequences if your action had three different effects instead of one like in d&d. Also imagine how hard it is to write a story/develop a session as a GM. In Shadowrun, magic works way harder than in d&d. Instead of using spell slots, you need to roll your maximum power potential, then your actual power output which may not be bigger than the power potential, and after that you need to make some kind of saving throw against your own spell to not harm yourself when the power leaves your body.
If i scared you array from shadowrun, I heard it's story is AWESOME, and once you worked out how all the rules work, it's even cooler.
A few rules i do is:
If a character Hit Points go past 0 out right, i kill that character off in a single blow. If however the HP lands on 0 after being hit, then i get the player to roll death saves. I think this way it adds a level of skill and tatics. Plus i always try and kill off at least one character in a campaign, to give the players a sense of reward doesnt come without loss.
Long and Short Rest. I do use the system of 8 hours or 7 days, as i too like the realism. That being said i make sure players stock up on healing potions before adventures. I believe as well, that it makes players use a more tatical approach to everything , rather then just charging in and using up valuable time to rest.
I think 5e is great, compared to the other options available it's a great mix of all the things that make up a good RPG. Although, I don't think it's just you... 5th edition isn't very deadly.
I've found the best way to remedy this is hand out exhaustion more or use 15, instead of 10, for the threshold to make death saving throws. You could even incorporate more rules from earlier editions if you felt it wasn't bad enough. On the other side, you can also just limit the resources in the game that are needed to bring someone back from the brink.
Agreed
HP isn't actual wounds. It's exhaustion and vitality. You should be able to heal fast but have a much lower HP total and lingering wounds.
5:41 every 2 times knocked unconscious, player loses 1 permanent intelligence;) they will hit 0 eventually
brian anderson like Archer always says about unconsciousness “that’s like super bad for you”
1. Completely redundant stats.
2. Pigeonholing skills into very broad categories.
3. Leveling up system.
4. Mechanics do not support roleplaying, only combat.
5. Long rest- puff all hp back.
6. There is no such thing as injury in mechanics.
7. CR calculus.
8. Very abstract combat.
9. Very long combat rounds (6 seconds).
10. System encourages minmaxing.
That’s just straight out of my head without any pondering.
I think most of those apply to every single version of D&D ever, but some of those are just straight up not critiques. No injury mechanics is a good thing to streamline the game, minmaxing isn't a bad thing, and would you prefer all role playing games not to have level up systems? That seems very strange to me.
@@Gingrnut I lot of games don't have a leveling up system as you probably think of it. Some of us just want to play a fantasy character and don't get as much of a thrill from the leveling concept ( although I still enjoy it somewhat ). These " Skill Based " games such as GURPS and Runequest only give a few points to increase proficiencies with a few skills as opposed to the package deals of the " Level Based " games. For me, there came a point when I no longer cared about chasing the next level.
Gingrnut as Jay has stated many games don’t have a ‘levelling up’ systems (my system of choice is GURPS btw). I don’t like situations where from one lvl to next your character plays completely differently as you have in those level packages things affecting gameplay massively.
Injuries don’t have to affect ‘streamlining’ (🤮). They give you possibilities to expand on roleplaying for example, but for this you would need a roleplaying game and not a rollplaying game.
Imagine a character with a hook for a hand, or a Roger Two Pegs (double leg amputee) character. How different mechanics wise would he be from a perfectly healthy individual?
11. Falling damage and high level characters.
8 hours short rest, I always liked it...But never had the chance to use it in a game.
I am using it in a gameand it is great, I have to think every time I want to cast a spell whether it is worth it or if I should save it for later. I play a bugbear paladin btw
If you're planning on using something like that, I absolutely think that you should consider permitting classes with abilities that are restored by a long rest to recover these abilities on a short rest instead. A first level sorcerer essentially having only 2 first level spells for an *entire adventure* is really punishing for the class. I'm aware that you could play one of the short rest classes, and they can work quite well here, but ultimately this becomes very limiting for classes that rely heavily on resources they only regain after a long rest.
@@kevingriffith6011 As long as you can take long rests at points (e.g. in taverns) and you dont waste spells then its normally fine. The melee characters are actually the ones who suffer the most if you go too long without a long rest because their hp gets low.
@@wicrosoft8091 That also brings back the old school opportunity cost issues that made some spells never get used. Spells like Sending, a very valuable tool for story and RP purposes, suddenly become a huge risk because that's a Fireball you won't be able to cast until next week.
I am pretty opposed to stripping PCs of options in general, because while sure they'll be wondering "is it worth it to use one of my spells now", and that can be fun, it also means that every turn will easily degrade to "I hit it, I cast Firebolt, I cast Toll the Dead"... and I really don't like combats that boil down to smashing stat blocks together without any interesting decisions to be made.
The hit dice reminds me of the first D&D edition, where your only real health points are your first dice. Then your pool actually represents your capacity to defend yourself. So you could say hit points are actually how much you can parry or the glancing blows you can take before you are exhausted and get truly hit. I usually run this version of the rules, as long as you run on hit dice, you’re only facing glancing blows and so on. When you are on your lvl 1 starting dice + constitution, you are on the « injury » risk. Losing one of these means serious injuries and loss of limbs, loss of stats (if concussed) and so on. In that system, stabbing a sleeping humanoid means an automatic crit on this very limited pool.
Also, in case of non fatal or non crippling injuries, it takes a full week of complete rest to heal one of these points.
If your players cant accept limits then pick other players.
Might wanna rethink the elitism there. Its a lot easier for Players to go and find more compatible DM's than for DM's to find groups of players.
The funny thing is, I have heard the opposite. It is players looking for a dm than a dm looking for players
@@danieldurham5891 Yeah I dunno what I was smoking earlier. Not enough breakfast or something to feed proper nutrients to the brain pan. There's only one DM to every 2-4 players
If you like your game to be more gritty, look at the suggestions that the Dungeon Dudes made.
One thing that I liked is that you gain a level of fatigue each team you are reduced to 0 HP. Which works better than the random lingering injuries table.
Saw that they recently posted this, but have yet to watch it. Thanks!
On the kitchen sink tab: I am DM, I run an exploration game and I have given my players a couple of races they could play and all the others are off limits. for now. untill they discover the new races they can't play as them and even their charakters have to die to play as the new races. problem is, they are too invested in their current charakters, a throwaway npc dies? let's have a wake for 3 days...
😂
The way I as a DM combat not dying or being deadly is that you HAVE to make a medicine check with a raising DC based on how they got knocked out if they want to stabilize their ally. I found that healing an ally making saving throws was just too easy as any paladin, cleric, bard, or even druid could just simply bring em from death's door. Additionally, something that I've seen on critical role and had players think they could do is force-feed a dying ally a healing potion. Not in my games. How is your ally gonna get that down their throat without choking if they're knocked out?