Since the 5th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons has been released, it has received overall positive feedback from most users. However a common criticism is that the Ranger class feels inferior to the other classes in both mechanics for combat, and mechanical support for role play. So we will just go through and look at the changes and I'll give my thoughts.
Overall I will say I think it is a solid rework, and is much more playable especially when it comes to the Beast Conclave. It probably only needs a few more small tweaks before made official but even then I think those would come down to personal opinion.
Base Ranger Class Changes
Favored Enemy - Finally they gave this ability some teeth, yes it is super circumstantial on when the benefit occurs. That has been a general complaint about favored enemy, yet I see the benefit here almost more in flavor. Also its creating a case where the mechanics are helping to support the role play of the character. The Ranger should be able to do more damage against enemies they have been hunting and fighting for a long time. Does it fix the overall strength of the class no, and I think that is why maybe there is some disappointment at this ability, but I think its a total success in mechanics supporting the fiction. Also I think the overall strength of the class gets addressed in other areas.
Natural Explorer - Another example of ability that used to not support the fiction of the class and does now. Before you had to pick a specific terrain to be good in, but it made no sense for a range to be good at traveling through the woods and then being inept as the other classes once they are in the grasslands? Also the Outlander background which any class can take felt almost as useful as this class ability. Also the adding of advantage on inattentive rolls and having advantage on creatures who haven't acted yet makes range a decent 2 level multi-class. Where as before multi-classing into ranger just didn't make much sense for mechanical reasons.
Primeval Awareness - My biggest gripe with this ability was that Paladins have a similar ability called Divine Sense. However for Rangers they initially decided to make it require one of their limited spell slots. Now I realize they did not want you to be able to spam the ability, however it was never something that was that game breaking. So I'm glad to see its now more readily available for players to be able to lean into this ability more. Mechanically it is still fairly the same but, the added interaction with beasts is a nice touch again more opportunity for mechanics to support the fiction of the class.
Greater Favored Enemy - A common sense ability here lets the ability stay relevant, and allows the character to have played the campaign and to pick an enemy that fits the setting the DM has laid out for the players.
Fleet of Foot -Not much to say here other than its good for melee rangers, to not always be following behind monks, rogues, and barbarians, trying to play catch up.
Hide in Plain Sight - Another ability that feels like it fits the ranger well, and its not often that players get to set up ambushes for enemies anyway. So I don't think it would be something that gets abused often. I would almost think it would be okay to give this ability to the Ranger a little earlier but its better than not at all.
Vanish - On the first read I hated this ability because it feels like this should have been included with fleet of foot. Since Rogues get cunning action at level 2 letting them use a bonus action to dash, hide, or disengage. However not being able to be track except by magical means I think is the meat here so that a Range could do the thing where they just disappear around a corner. Still think its a little weak as a level 14 ability.
Feral Senses - This is a fine ability, but not many characters will make it to level 18 and so the usefulness of it seems a bit too little too late.
Foe Slayer - Again not many players will ever make it to this ability, but its fine for level 20 to tack on more damage to go after that Tarrasque!
Ranger Conclaves
Beast Conclave - This was definitely the one that needed the biggest rework. At most time your animal companion was a minor help at best, and a constant inconvenience at its worst. The beast did not scale and Wizards seem so worried about the beast being over powered at lower levels that they limited it greatly, and it did not scale well.
Animal Companion - The most standout thing here to me is the ability to bring you animal companion back. Instead of having a factory of animal companions that you take with you to die, you can finally role play a ranger with a strong tie to their animal companion and it nor be a burden on the player and is supported by the mechanics of the game.
Companions Bond - At first glance this looks like a nerf, the animal doesn't get multi-attack and the ranger doesn't get extra attack. However the beast finally gets upgrades to be more survivable and to scale as you level up, and it get its own turn and actions. Wizards identified that to make your animal do anything it felt like your actual character was getting half a turn. It fits thematically and if you really want extra attack you can multi-class into fighter or barbarian for 5 levels. Also I really like that your roll for a personality trait and a flaw for the animal companion it really drives home how they are thinking of the companion in this rework.
Coordinated Attack - Here is where you kind of get extra attack except you are giving it to your animal companion. This is pretty strong at level 5 if you are a two weapon fighting Ranger between you and your beast your getting 4 attacks in a round.
Beast's Defense - Good ability increases the companion's survivability, its doubtful your companion will get many magical items that effect it so it needs abilities like this to keep up.
Storm of Claws and Fangs - Circumstantial when you can use this to good effect, but cool that you can use it. Also I like the fictional flavor of an animal being surround or backed in a corner just lashing out everything surrounding it.
Superior Beast's Defense - Again more survivability here to dela with the escalating amounts of damage monsters can dole out.
This incarnation of the conclave seems much funner to play, and I like that they took the time to not just improve the combat mechanics of it but make the mechanics support the fiction of the class. This was definitely the archetype that needed it the most.
Hunter Conclave - The hunter conclaves remains mainly unchanged, except for adding extra attack for the class here. This was already the more playable archetype for the Ranger. So it's good they didn't tinker with it too much and just improved it with the changes in the base part of the class.
Deep Stalker Conclave - This was originally put out in an earlier Unearthed Arcana release, and they have refined it and put a new version of it here to go with the rework of the class. I'm assuming the inspiration from this comes form the Drizzt books, and I think they pull it off. All the abilities really play into moving in the shadows, and surprise attacking enemies and getting away. Iron Mind in particular is a stay out of my head mind flayor buff and fits this conclave well. I like that hey also added extra known spells as that also felt like a limiter on the class. I hope they add that to the other conclaves for the final release. For example Hunter conclave would get hunters mark for as a free known spell, and Beast conclave could get cure wounds or maybe speak with animals.
I know the players I DM for are excited to actually try this new Ranger or to try to multi-class into it. I hope they do I think this iteration of the class will work out much better, and am interested to see what the changes bring to the table.
Thursday, September 29, 2016
Friday, September 23, 2016
D&D 5E Bachelor Party Adventure
Here is the link to the adventure I wrote up as well as the character sheets:
The Bachelor's Party Adventure
Character Sheets
Recently I got to run a short D&D one-shot adventure for my friend's bachelor party. I was excited to do this but instantly had a few concerns. First I would be running for 10-13 players, and I didn't know each players experience with tabletop rpgs. Second was I knew it needed to be relatively short two hours or less so we would have time to do some other things that evening.
The first thing I did was take care of the characters. I wanted everyone to be able to see everything about their characters on one sheet of paper. So I thought instead of doing full on class characters, I would use characters based on NPC stat blocks. RPGTinker is an awesome site that lets you make custom versions of these and scale how powerful they are quickly. I made a bunch of 4 hit dice ones to match minis I already had. I made about 13 characters I will include with the adventure that you can just print off and hand to your players if you dont want to make your own. One fun thing we did is I laid all the sheets out with, the corresponding mini, and let the "bachelor" pick everyone's character for them.
Then I surfed the internet for bachelor party adventures. Well the internet had forsaken me I found a lot of stories about adventures run at bachelor parties but not something I could just run. This is what inspired me to save my notes, and them up so you can run this yourself if you have a bachelor/bachelorette party coming up.
So I started to put one together myself first thing I did was look for great D&D puzzles. I found one here I liked a lot and took it for my first encounter. I thought it was a good idea to combine combat and puzzles since I would only have time for 3 main encounters to happen. So I went with that Vatruvian Man combat puzzle for the first encounter, for the 2nd encounter I wanted another combat/puzzle. My friend getting married has math and statistical degrees so I wanted to poke at that a little bit and created the Sanctum of Numoku. Basically it is a cavern with a portal, that can be turned on by putting in the right glyphs into a 9x9 grid. The grid itself is actually just a Sudoku puzzle, which I handed out copies for people to try and figure out. I got the Sudoku puzzles here. While this is going on Orcs are falling from portals in the ceiling while they are trying to solve it. There is a joke on the internet I saw somewhere about orcs just waiting in line to go through a portal to fight so this is making of that.
For the last encounter they get to their goal to find it under attack, by monsters way more powerful than they can handle. Adult Red Dragon, Frost Giant that sort of thing. Throughout the adventure players have been getting scrolls from a crazed wandering merchant. The scrolls are filled with super powerful spells, and legendary weapons to give the players the ability to beat these creatures. For a bit of fun to activate these scrolls the player had to read the arcane words upon it. For our arcane words it was 3 Cards Against Humanity cards and created some great foul mouthed gross hilarity. However even with these scrolls it was pretty assured many deaths would occur in this encounter but that's okay for the "bachelor" was given the "Ring of Binding" earlier in the adventure. The ring has some circumstantial abilities to poke fun at marriage and wedding tropes, but also an ability to bring allies back to life. I added this for 2 specific reasons.
1. Increase the importance of the player who the bachelor party was for.
2. Its no fun to be dead and watch every one keep playing. Its a one-shot and is meant to be quick fun so keeping everyone involved as much as possible is important.
So please download it give it a try, change it to fit your group of players. Most importantly have fun with it it is a "party" after all.
The Bachelor's Party Adventure
Character Sheets
Recently I got to run a short D&D one-shot adventure for my friend's bachelor party. I was excited to do this but instantly had a few concerns. First I would be running for 10-13 players, and I didn't know each players experience with tabletop rpgs. Second was I knew it needed to be relatively short two hours or less so we would have time to do some other things that evening.
The first thing I did was take care of the characters. I wanted everyone to be able to see everything about their characters on one sheet of paper. So I thought instead of doing full on class characters, I would use characters based on NPC stat blocks. RPGTinker is an awesome site that lets you make custom versions of these and scale how powerful they are quickly. I made a bunch of 4 hit dice ones to match minis I already had. I made about 13 characters I will include with the adventure that you can just print off and hand to your players if you dont want to make your own. One fun thing we did is I laid all the sheets out with, the corresponding mini, and let the "bachelor" pick everyone's character for them.
Then I surfed the internet for bachelor party adventures. Well the internet had forsaken me I found a lot of stories about adventures run at bachelor parties but not something I could just run. This is what inspired me to save my notes, and them up so you can run this yourself if you have a bachelor/bachelorette party coming up.
So I started to put one together myself first thing I did was look for great D&D puzzles. I found one here I liked a lot and took it for my first encounter. I thought it was a good idea to combine combat and puzzles since I would only have time for 3 main encounters to happen. So I went with that Vatruvian Man combat puzzle for the first encounter, for the 2nd encounter I wanted another combat/puzzle. My friend getting married has math and statistical degrees so I wanted to poke at that a little bit and created the Sanctum of Numoku. Basically it is a cavern with a portal, that can be turned on by putting in the right glyphs into a 9x9 grid. The grid itself is actually just a Sudoku puzzle, which I handed out copies for people to try and figure out. I got the Sudoku puzzles here. While this is going on Orcs are falling from portals in the ceiling while they are trying to solve it. There is a joke on the internet I saw somewhere about orcs just waiting in line to go through a portal to fight so this is making of that.
For the last encounter they get to their goal to find it under attack, by monsters way more powerful than they can handle. Adult Red Dragon, Frost Giant that sort of thing. Throughout the adventure players have been getting scrolls from a crazed wandering merchant. The scrolls are filled with super powerful spells, and legendary weapons to give the players the ability to beat these creatures. For a bit of fun to activate these scrolls the player had to read the arcane words upon it. For our arcane words it was 3 Cards Against Humanity cards and created some great foul mouthed gross hilarity. However even with these scrolls it was pretty assured many deaths would occur in this encounter but that's okay for the "bachelor" was given the "Ring of Binding" earlier in the adventure. The ring has some circumstantial abilities to poke fun at marriage and wedding tropes, but also an ability to bring allies back to life. I added this for 2 specific reasons.
1. Increase the importance of the player who the bachelor party was for.
2. Its no fun to be dead and watch every one keep playing. Its a one-shot and is meant to be quick fun so keeping everyone involved as much as possible is important.
So please download it give it a try, change it to fit your group of players. Most importantly have fun with it it is a "party" after all.
Saturday, September 17, 2016
Making - Cloud Strife in 5E
So I have a quirky habit in that when I get a chance to play in a TTRPG, I tend to not be that original when first making my character. I think it stems from pouring all of that into when I am game mastering to try and make original cool NPCs for players to interact with. So when I am making a character to be a player I tend to base their look and in game mechanics on an existing character. Whether it be from video games, anime, books, movies, etc... I enjoy trying to figure out ways to make these characters work in a system. I also see quite a few threads on Reddit by people asking for help trying to do the same thing with various characters. So I thought I would make this an ongoing series of posts about the characters I have come up with. By no means am I saying that the way I make the character is the definitive way, its just the approach I took.
"Stay where you belong; in my memories!" - Cloud Strife
So to kick things off I wanted to do one of my favorite characters. from one of my favorite RPG's. So we are making Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy 7. So to me he seems a fairly obvious candidate for a Great Weapon Fighter. The other 2 things I need to decide are background and race.
Race
Lets start with race so Cloud is obviously pretty strong to be able to lug around the huge Buster Sword, but he is also pretty acrobatic so I want him to have a decent dexterity score as well. So to get some versatility with our Stat Scores I am going to go half- sun elf. The Sword Coast Adventurers guide introduced making your half-elf be a specific type, and we are going to do that to swap the skill versatility for the free cantrip from sun-elf. For the cantrip I am going with firebolt, to have a nice long distance ranged attack.
Choice: Half-Sun Elf , free cantrip = firebolt.
Background
I tend to do the background selection before I fill out what you get from your class that way when you pick your skill proficiency your not picking ones your getting for free from your background. For background it is pretty straight forward here to take Soldier. In the game Cloud is from a military organization called SOLDIER. However two honorable mentions here are the Inheritor background and you could make the item you receive the Buster Sword.
Choice: Soldier Honorable Mention: Inheritor
Class
So for class Cloud is pretty archetypal of the Fighter class, and is pretty straight forward to build. So when building these characters I am going to use the standard array of 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8. If you play in a group that rolls stats you might be able to make some other cool things work.
Choice: Fighter
So I am going to place those number as follows:
STR: 15 DEX: 14 CON:12 INT: 13 WIS: 10 CHA:8
We are going to then apply are two +1 to stats to STR and INT and then we get the +2 to CHA it then looks like this.
Stats: STR: 16 DEX: 14 CON:12 INT: 14 WIS: 10 CHA:10
For skills we are getting athletics and intimidation from the Soldier background. So were going to take acrobatics for all the flips, and the second was tough and I think any of them is a decent choice but went with investigation since your trying to track down the bad guy and figure out their plans.
Skills: Acrobatics & Investigation Honorable Mention: any of the other choices
For equipment we are going to take the following.
Equipment: Chainmail
Greatsword & a Rapier (no reason for the Rapier, so pick what you like)
2 Handaxes
Explorers Pack
Fighting Style: Great Weapon Fighting using a great sword you will get a lot of use out of this since your damage dice are 2d6.
That is it for the level one choices, so from here I will just list out things of note for subsequent levels I will typically not list out all the way to level 20 since most campaigns end before then, so we want to achieve the main part of our build long before that.
Level 2: Nothing here except for Action Surge this will serve as our "Limit Break" so when you describe what you are doing flavor it up and make it sound cool!
Level 3: So I debated on the Martial Archetype a bit between Champion and Eldritch Knight, but ended up falling on the Champion side of the fence. Since in the film Advent Children he doesn't use a lot of magic also most of their magic comes from materia they place in their weapons and armor. So I think just getting magic weapons and armor fills that role nicely. So I went with Champion because Cloud is a heavy hitter and improved critical will hopefully help us crit more often.
Martial Archetype - Champion
Level 4: This is your first Ability Score Improvement of ASI. However we are going to take our first feat here instead! Taking Great Weapon Master will help you start to mow through the lower AC fluff that get thrown into fights, and you will quickly be starting to buff your + to attack to help offset the -5.
Feat: Great Weapon Master
Level 5: Extra Attack you will really be able to start laying the hurt down in a fight with the two attacks, and you get the bump in proficiency bonus.
Level 6: The cool thing about fighter is you get way more ASI levels, so now we are going to bump up strength to 18, for a +4.
ASI: +2 STR
Level 7: Remarkable Athlete from Champion
Level 8: Another ASI we are going to put 2 more into STR to get us to the max of 20 for the +5.
ASI: +2 STR
Level 9: Indomitable and an increase in proficiency bonus. Should be at a +9 to hit now with out any magical bonuses, so still at least a +4 when making a Great Weapon Master Strike.
Level 10: You get to take another fighting style my thought here is to take defense to increase your AC by 1 as AC is always hard to come by. However if you want to maybe move into some dual wielding occasionally to mimic Clouds Fusion Sword fighting style two weapon fighitng is also an okay option.
Fighting Style: Defense Honorable Mention: Two Weapon Fighting
From here on out its however you want to flavor your character from here. You could continue to buff your stats and take more feats as fighter. Magic Initiate can be good for some more magic options, as well as Heavy Armor Master to help mitigate a little bit of damage.
You could also multi-class here a bit Paladin for Divine Smite to add some more punch when you hit, or critical which you should be hopefully doing a lot with improved critical. A 3 level dip in Barbarian is also good if you want to forgo armor, and the Rage/Reckless Attack/Action Surge can make your "Limit Breaks really pack a punch" and the Bear Totem path offers alot of damage reduction as well.
Well I hope you enjoyed the build, and if you didn't totally agree with it that's okay make it your own. Hopefully it at least gets your gears turning to do your own!
Thursday, September 15, 2016
Rolling a New Blog
Hey everyone, Randy here and welcome to the blog. I wanted a place to just blurt out my thoughts on tabletop rpgs, and board games. These thoughts will mainly be about 5th edition D&D to start, but will branch out as we start getting into a rhythm here. These thoughts will mainly be about adventures I play in, thoughts about the classes, game balance, party dynamics, maybe some random tables, and character concepts.
So who I am? I am a half Korean/Caucasian American living in the Midwest. I grew up loving board games, and have been fortunate enough to have video games in my life since a young age. I love rpgs, and am an aspiring game developer and designer, both video and tabletop. For now I am a multimedia designer/animator/developer , which is so close yet so far from what I would love to be doing but is pretty good for now.
I run a bunch of 5E D&D games for my friends throughout the week, and make way too many characters that I probably wont have the opportunity to play but I am always hopeful :)
I have also become a collector of board games, huge Final Fantasy fan (please XV don't suck) , and I am a host on the Roll For Topic podcast. On Roll For Topic I created topic tables to roll on, that create random topics for us to to talk about. The topics cover pop culture an media, tabletop, video games, books, movies, and so on. If you would like to listen you can find the cast on iTunes and Google Play, or you can listen here.
Okay well that is it for now hopefully you will be reading a lot more from me soon!
So who I am? I am a half Korean/Caucasian American living in the Midwest. I grew up loving board games, and have been fortunate enough to have video games in my life since a young age. I love rpgs, and am an aspiring game developer and designer, both video and tabletop. For now I am a multimedia designer/animator/developer , which is so close yet so far from what I would love to be doing but is pretty good for now.
I run a bunch of 5E D&D games for my friends throughout the week, and make way too many characters that I probably wont have the opportunity to play but I am always hopeful :)
I have also become a collector of board games, huge Final Fantasy fan (please XV don't suck) , and I am a host on the Roll For Topic podcast. On Roll For Topic I created topic tables to roll on, that create random topics for us to to talk about. The topics cover pop culture an media, tabletop, video games, books, movies, and so on. If you would like to listen you can find the cast on iTunes and Google Play, or you can listen here.
Okay well that is it for now hopefully you will be reading a lot more from me soon!
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