Granular selection of weapon proficiencies don’t do much because all it means is you stick to one weapon.
Secondly…how does character differentiation hurt roleplaying? It gives your vision of the character mechanical weight in the game. And gives the game more varied texture by having players not all feel the same.
Magic items suck as a way to differentiate characters because you as a player have no control of what you get.
Since we’re talking about character differentiation here, a player who specializes in crossbows would probably play differently than the two-handed sword specialist. That is all I meant.
It sometimes leads to making choices from a list rather than thinking creatively. Good role players won’t fall into this trap, but they also don’t need those mechanics in a role-playing sense. I’m not saying it is a bad thing to have that level of mechanical customization, just that the old refrain of “all first edition fighters are the same” is exaggerated.
No, you don’t get to choose them exactly, but they are some of the funnest tools to utilize in D&D and the weird variety of utility items is one of the game’s strengths. One of our players gets a ton of use out of his decanter of endless water for example. That combined with his boots of levitation and rings of free action and featherfall give him a variety of tactical options beyond just swinging his sword at the enemy, such as the time he tackled a wizard on the roof of a tower and sent both plunging over the side, the wizard crashing to his death while the player feather falled to the ground below.
but if you took two random mid-level 1e fighters & gave them the same weapons and armour, they’d be nigh-indistinguishable in combat.
Not necessarily if they are played by different players. Yes, the characters’ capabilities are the same, but the same is true of third edition and later if the characters had the same feats.
My point is only that I could roll three different fighters in three different campaigns and not play them identically. Over time they could diverge quite a bit.
My intent isn’t to criticize modern D&D, only defend the old game.
Would the game do anything to support you playing them differently or is it all basically improv choices outside the rules?
I think I’ve maxed out what I can get away with in doing female character voices. I tried doing a Brooyln accent the other day and it was Dr. Girlfriend to a T, so
If anyone can think of any others that don’t involve just trying to pitch up the voice, I’m all ears:
Tried doing Tracer but holy shit is it hard. Considering trying a Janine from Ghostbusters?
These aren’t really accents, more like ways of talking (?)
To me that statement is almost a contradiction! I’m mostly talking about improv choices, but I don’t think of that as something not supported by the rules. I mean, technically maybe they aren’t supported by the rules, but I’ve never played in a first edition game that didn’t have house rules to some extent, so I have a hard time even considering the idea of people playing a game and not house ruling all sorts of situations that arise naturally during the game.
And also, related to my earlier point, over time tactical options change as magical items are acquired or lost(happens almost as much as the acquisition in my experience!).
Bounded accuracy makes ASIs both valuable and somewhat necessary, if you still want to endorse the old “leveling up” fantasy which D&D certainly does. ASIs + increased proficiency bonuses are pretty much the only way to get more powerful at a thing you can already do, as opposed to becoming more powerful by becoming more versatile and having more different things you can do (which is what happens as you get new class abilities and access to new spells). It’s true that going from a +3 to a +4 is a 5% difference, which sounds small, but put differently that means 1 out of every 20 times you roll, you now succeed where you would have failed! Depending on how often you roll, that can have a noticeable impact on the flow of your game.
The easy answer though is that ASIs are definitely boring and that’s why you should play with feats.
I have a creaky voice I use as a generic old woman, possibly a witch voice because its pretty easy and its fun to say “unguent” in that voice
the big difference from 3.PF which had smaller ASIs is that 3.PF gave you a 1 point ASI every 4 levels but also ten billion feats to choose from every couple of levels on top of the ASI.
the unbounded math meant that everyone was going to end up with like a +10 in each essential class stat by the time they hit level 20
unless they visited the charop boards in which case cleric and druid would end up with +infinity in everything and wizards would just become gods
Marsha from Spaced
Ed Wynn
I agree that the mechanics aren’t as important as other things for differentiating characters. I’m unable to find a D&D system that i really like, so i’m trying to work out which things i don’t like about 5e (which i play the most atm).
I think i would like 5e more if it used mechanics to differentiate characters less. Sometimes it seems like they think of a cool character idea and then end up making it into a class subtype or a race when it doesn’t really need to be (eg. 5e Kenku being unable to talk without reproducing heard sounds - fine as a character idea, annoying as a fixed rule for the whole race).
I do think mechanics are important for how one approaches the game tho’. I’ve played about 30 characters in the last 10 years and it gets hard to come up with new ideas. I feel like every character needs a gimmick (in the wrestling sense) and sometimes i find one by looking at the rules and seeing if there’s something interesting (eg. some Warlocks can summon a sprite using Find Familiar, what if the sprite was in charge? why is the sprite in charge? why is the sprite so mean to everyone? etc.).
Also mechanics allow you to assess risk. Being able to guage your competency is useful both for roleplaying and deciding which mechanic-based actions to take.
(Something i like about 5e is that the rules allow you to do rote tasks without making checks. It was very annoying to get caught in a skill-check swamp in 3.5 (eventually someone rolls low and starts sinking).)
Buddha only got 1d8 hp damn
I fought using D&D Beyond because physical character sheets are so charming to me but now that not one but two of my DMs have cajoled me enough I’ve started using it. And damn, yeah, it’s pretty convenient.
Just noting here that I play in two weekly campaigns (both 5e because hey, that’s what they like), one I run for the kids in our group and the other I run for the grownups.
It’s pretty fun, right now the kids are on the lam trying to help a pregnant noblelady escape from the forces of a usurper king intent on killing off all potential legitimate heirs. They’re also carrying a secret package for a druid (that they haven’t even looked into).
The adults are in the Frog Demon section of the Hot Hell (as opposed to the Cold Hell), trying to find a staff.
If only y’all had any idea where the bozos were at now
(Yes I will be working on this after this weekend when I have to go to North Carolina fucking AGAIN I promise)
i never heard of eberron before last ngiht but
i wanna play a scrappy street orphan shadarkai in this setting wtf