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 streamdragon wrote:
Two weapon fighters get the shaft again I guess.

Because they were so downtrodden before? It would also effect Sword and Board guys as well.

 Ahtman wrote:

 streamdragon wrote:
Two weapon fighters get the shaft again I guess.

Because they were so downtrodden before? It would also effect Sword and Board guys as well.

Wait.. can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Have two weapon fighters ever been "not crap"? And yeah, Sword and Board would hurt as well.

I'm honestly not super surprised if things like scrolls and stuff don't count against the limit. Can't go limiting our casters now can we?

 streamdragon wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:

 streamdragon wrote:
Two weapon fighters get the shaft again I guess.

Because they were so downtrodden before? It would also effect Sword and Board guys as well.

Wait.. can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

What's weird is I was thinking the same thing.

 streamdragon wrote:
Have two weapon fighters ever been "not crap"?

Well with the mountain of feats in 3/3.5/PF you can easily make a dual wielding fighter, and 4E had a build based on it as well. Older iterations were not as condusive to it but I don't think they thought it was as cool as people later would, and mostly built the game around sword/board and two-handers. They also seemed to be obsessed with polearms.

From looking at the PDF of the basic rules, they have 15 or so magic items listed there and it lists which ones of them require attunement. They have both +1 Armor and +1 Weapon listed and neither say they require attunement, so maybe those type of items don't.

Jebus10000 wrote:
From looking at the PDF of the basic rules, they have 15 or so magic items listed there and it lists which ones of them require attunement. They have both +1 Armor and +1 Weapon listed and neither say they require attunement, so maybe those type of items don't.

Yup. Looks like attunement is mainly being limited to +2 or higher (although there's no +2 items in the list in the pdf, so that's conjecture) and primarily 'wearable' items (Gauntlets of Ogre Power require attunment, a bag of holding doesn't).

I'm more interested in what we're seeing for the 'Legendary' monsters: it looks like these are rules to make big, solo 'boss' monsters more viable, whereas in earlier editions fights with big solo 'boss' types could be highly dependent on initiative as a big monster would either go first and smash the party pretty badly or go late in the order and get stomped. Monsters tended to need allies, especially at higher levels when PC could pull out abilities to deny actions and such.

In 5e, Legendary monsters have a few interesting special abilities. It looks like 'Legendary X' may be a class of abilities that are one of the few things that require state-tracking for monsters outside the encounter. I.E. an Adult Red Dragon has a 'Legendary Resistance' that lets it decide to pass a failed save 3 times a day. it looks like outside of these abilities, monsters are being written to avoid the need to track ability usage. (There's a 'recharge' mechanic for certain abilitities, too. The Red Dragon has it for it's 18d6 breath attack!)

There's also Legendary Actions. These are special actions (the Adult Red can do three a turn) that it can do after an opponent's action. So if you attack a Red Dragon, it can choose to immediately attack back with it's tail, or blow two of the three on a wing-buffet that hits everyone nearby doing damage, knocking people down, and flying a bit away. That's every turn, and doesn't take away from it's normal action (which can be a pretty nasty claw/claw/bite routine).

There's also Lair Action, which are interesting. They're kind of pre-written ways to make an encounter interesting, and are more environmental effect. There's a suggestion of them being a kind of 'mythic' thing: the Red Dragon's lair might have magma eruptions, tremors, or volcanic gas while the leaked Sphinx gets wacky stuff like time distortions. These are 'environmental effects' and occur on a fixed initiative of 20.

There's also Regional Effects, which seem to play up the mythic idea. When a Big Bad Evil Guy sets up shop, he (or she) might blight the area by his mere existence if he's really nasty. (Note: There's nothing saying that really good critters won't have the opposite. If a particularly good creature lairs in an area, nearby farms might get boosted to 2x normal output or something.) These seem to be mostly atmospheric or could contribute to challenges reaching the lair (or maybe even provide clues?) and those described don't have mechanical effects. For the Adult Red Dragon, the region around its lair might have earthquakes, sulfer-tainted streams, or fiery fissures. This is noted as an effect of the Legendary creature, a these fade in 1d10 days after the creature is killed.

They're interesting. i would be interested in seeing a 'toolkit' to make it easier for a DM to give an evil warrior some Legendary Actions easily. I hope it makes fights interesting: I think this has been a historic problem with a lot of editions of D&D.

 Balance wrote:

In 5e, Legendary monsters have a few interesting special abilities. It looks like 'Legendary X' may be a class of abilities that are one of the few things that require state-tracking for monsters outside the encounter. I.E. an Adult Red Dragon has a 'Legendary Resistance' that lets it decide to pass a failed save 3 times a day. it looks like outside of these abilities, monsters are being written to avoid the need to track ability usage. (There's a 'recharge' mechanic for certain abilitities, too. The Red Dragon has it for it's 18d6 breath attack!)

I know that some monsters have a recharge for some attacks in 4th edition. I may have been doing the recharge wrong, but IIRC their ability should show recharge: + and would only recharge when the dice showed exactly what the ability called for.

 Balance wrote:

Jebus10000 wrote:
From looking at the PDF of the basic rules, they have 15 or so magic items listed there and it lists which ones of them require attunement. They have both +1 Armor and +1 Weapon listed and neither say they require attunement, so maybe those type of items don't.

Yup. Looks like attunement is mainly being limited to +2 or higher (although there's no +2 items in the list in the pdf, so that's conjecture) and primarily 'wearable' items (Gauntlets of Ogre Power require attunment, a bag of holding doesn't).

That could be. Sucks that the DM Guide isn't slated to come out until November...

As far as wearable items, maybe it depends on what slot it's occupying. The Boots of Striding and Springing and the Goggles of Night don't require attunement, but both the gauntlets and gloves do as well as all three of the rings they have listed.

 Balance wrote:
To my understanding, the attunement thing only applies to 'serious' magic items, not trivial stuff like potions, scrolls, or other low-level stuff. The expectation is it's to keep a character from carrying multiple magic weapons for different circumstances on top of magic armor, etc.

Three is enough for a weapon, armor, and one other major item per character.

This sounds about right I think.

Have to agree that three magic items is not too few. Folks should keep in mind that DMs can always make exceptions as they deem necessary.

The legendary monster stuff sounds ace.

I like the idea of of the Legendary Lairs and mechanically making the environment part of the challenge for more powerful creatures.

 Manchu wrote:
Have to agree that three magic items is not too few. Folks should keep in mind that DMs can always make exceptions as they deem necessary.

The legendary monster stuff sounds ace.

Not too thrilled with it as the ones who likely would need more magic items would be the melee/non-magical classes. So long as they can get rings of flight and it wouldn't count it'd be fine I think.

DM can always rule that they wouldn't count. Also rings of flight? That's pretty damned powerful...

 Melissia wrote:
DM can always rule that they wouldn't count. Also rings of flight? That's pretty damned powerful...

How many monsters fly/levitate/get out of melee range again?

It's just not D&D unless everyone gets to play a Green Lantern LOL.

Geeze, I feel I've missed out. I've never had a group with that. We had to rely on Wizards with that sphere fly thing.

 Melissia wrote:
Geeze, I feel I've missed out. I've never had a group with that. We had to rely on Wizards with that sphere fly thing.

That would be the issue really I suppose.

Wish I could try 5E though

It's free, what's stopping you?

Lack of a group.

You know it has got to be too early to start making spin offs, but I kind of think I want to do a battlestations/FTL thing. It wouldn't be too hard to do would it?

I picked up the PHB at GenCon and am still processing it. I'm still on the Cleric Class page and haven't read any of the magic, feats, combat, short/long rests, etc.

I do like the Cleric's divine magic mechanics. You pick a number of spells equal to your wisdom bonus and cleric level, and you can cast those in any combination up to your spells per day restriction, right? So a level 3 cleric with a 16 (+3 bonus) wisdom can pick 6 spells between first and second level. He can cast 4x level 1 spells and 2x level 2 spells as desired.

I also like how the spells scale. Using the example above, I can take a Cure Wounds spell, which only takes up one of my 6 slots, and use it as either a first level spell for 1d8+3 or a second level spell for 2d8+3 (if I recall the +1 per cleric level correctly). Obviously this method kicks spells like Magic Missile in the jimmy. Sure, it can still do 3d4+3, but only if you use a level 3 spot on it.

Still, I'm just starting to chew on this book. I am liking what I see. I certainly see why Humans would be very popular, too. The ability score bumps are very nice.

The human ability score thing is probably not as good as the variant where they get +1 to two abilities, a feat, and a skill proficiency.

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:
Lack of a group.

Are you in the wilderness somewhere? Go out and find a new group!

 Manchu wrote:
The human ability score thing is probably not as good as the variant where they get +1 to two abilities, a feat, and a skill proficiency.

I haven't really read through the feats yet, so I couldn't comment on that option.

There aren't many but they seem more flavorful than having a spare point added to a score you don't depend on. Plus having an additional skill proficiency is great.

Yeah, the proficiencies do seem hard to come by!

To me, they are a great opportunity to flesh out your character. That is what I really love about 5E chargen, as oppoed to optimising the build or whatevs.

 Manchu wrote:
To me, they are a great opportunity to flesh out your character. That is what I really love about 5E chargen, as oppoed to optimising the build or whatevs.

I feel like there's a lot of "lessons learned" from 3rd. I'm a little worried there isn't as much from 4th: if anything, an attitude of "if it was 4th, it was bad" that caused some good things to be passed over or re-implemented in a poor manner. (As a specific example, hit dice vs. healing surges. Not arguing the value of reducing the number of abilities that consumed healing surges and the availability therof, but as a system it worked well and gave related bits like the 'bloodied' status to key off of.)

I'm hopeful this edition is less about a 'build' vs. playing what is in front of you, though. Overall, I think that's at least possible.

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:
Lack of a group.

https://www.facebook.com/DungeonScape/
http://www.dnddungeonscape.com/
They have you in mind.

Dungeonscape (Codename:Morningstar) is the new online toolkit for DnD 5.

Welcome to Codename Morningstar - The Official Companion to the Dungeons and Dragons Tabletop RPG

It looks like you'll be able to use that an Teamspeak or something, and not have to be at your group.

Or I'm reading too much into it. It's what they were working on for 4th before they scrapped the idea.

I've got the PHB now and have been reading through it more thoroughly. My positive initial impressions are being reinforced for the most part. All the character classes have interesting sets of options that are presented in a clear and cohesive fashion. The numbers sprawl has been kept to a minimum though a few abilities did raise my eyebrow, mostly the double proficiency bonus on skills. I wish they kept the same level of conservatism with the non-combat portions of the game as they showed in the combat portions. That said it doesn't seem like it'd start to really start being degenerate until 9th level.

I like the layout and the approach they've taken to descrptions of races and backgrounds. The art is super-duper hit or miss for me, and more miss than hit: WTF is with your spine, Ms.Researcher? I do love the little sketches in the introduction and status effect sections though.I would have loved to see more stuff like that.

I definitely like how well-defined the are templates for everything. As I'm entering the planning stages for my own campaign it's a huge help. I very rarely run things purely vanilla and I'm finding it easy to add my custom content even without the benefit of table experience.

It'll probably be the better part of a month before I can actually get some play time but I'm more optimistic for this than I've been about else in the D&D space, though I'll admit that isn't a terribly high bar to pass.

 Skinnereal wrote:

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:
Lack of a group.

https://www.facebook.com/DungeonScape/
http://www.dnddungeonscape.com/
They have you in mind.

Dungeonscape (Codename:Morningstar) is the new online toolkit for DnD 5.

Welcome to Codename Morningstar - The Official Companion to the Dungeons and Dragons Tabletop RPG

It looks like you'll be able to use that an Teamspeak or something, and not have to be at your group.

Or I'm reading too much into it. It's what they were working on for 4th before they scrapped the idea.

Ooh that might work, I needed a new online program.