#table-top rpgs

[playfullygrownup]

Not all who roll a die are lost... er, lose their dice. Certainly not with a handsome LotR-tray with the Lonely Mountain printed on. By Franck at Style2Geek on Etsy.

[playfullygrownup]

A leather dice bag in the shape of a dragon's face. I can't even figure out how one might make one of these – just superb! By Mandy Brace at EmBraceLeather on Etsy.

[thrice-great-hermes]

I'm hammering out a campaign setting, and in the process I'm making little changes to the rules. The one that I'm discussing here is the [Power...

[weilongfu]

Finally read the free Basic Rules PDF for D&D NEXT/5E. 

There is more customization for your characters: backgrounds, builds (specializations, arcane traditions, etc. you can even pick different specs within races, omg what?), and gods (they also added gods from mythology which is nice). Multi-classing isn't relegated to feats but picking up levels in a class again, and the choice of spells (now having absorbed all the rituals again) appears fairly broad. All good things IMO. You are now closer to playing and building a character in a way that will actually feel like you want it to.

According to the website, there are plenty of classes and races to choose from, although I am slightly disappointed that my homeboys the Psions aren't in PHB1 (I will love you forever, Methyl). Still, that's plenty to go through and do, and a lot more than I expected for the first PHB for a new rules system.

Your standard melee and ranged attacks still all target AC. Great, clean, and simple. Cantrips are the ONLY spells that require attack rolls (to my current reading) so ok, whatever, and they hit AC too. That's alright. But now all the super awesome spells transfer the rolls to the defending target because now they to beat your save DC to avoid the attack. 

If you're going to keep the spell casting attack roll, why can't players just roll to attack with all their spells and then see if they succeed? Didn't we have defenses that did that already? Oh right, Fort, Will, and Reflex. Apparently that's too easy and we just have to make everyone work more. I kind of resent letting players sit there really smug as they cast a 5th level spell and I have to roll to beat them during a really shitty night of bad rolls. Then again, turnabout is fair play and any caster monsters I have will also have a silly save DC and my players will have to pray they can beat it. 

If I take a step back, I guess someone is rolling and someone just has a static number so anyway you look at it so nothing has really changed, but but it feels like a weird role reversal. Maybe I'd be more comfortable with it if I played older editions more than once (those groups kind of fell apart?).

I know my opinion means jack shit if you actually like this system. And let me say, my gripes sound petty and minor, especially to me. They really are "first impressions" though and I'm definitely keeping my mind open for reading the rest of the rules and options when the PHB comes out. Overall, I'll read it, play it, then come up with a final verdict as to whether or not I'll deal with it. But the Basic Rules have not sold me on this edition.

[iliveonmycdrive]

maskedsparrow replied to your post:That campaign ending tho … 

i would just like to say; i for one am happy that it didnt end worse

Yeah.

I just wanted everyone to have some sort of character arc and I kinda "wrote" myself into a corner. It's not like it's really over anyway, but still . . .

[iliveonmycdrive]

That campaign ending tho . . . 

[arkhamjones]

"MESON Cannon - Another experimental weapon, the MESON Cannon is a shoulder-fired weapon of incredible destructive power. It shoots MESONs, which are made up of two quarks – a quark and an antiquark. Since normal protons are made up of three quarks, the addition of a MESON into a normal proton causes the atom to begin exploding at close to the speed of light, leaving nothing but quarks." - Fallout PnP 2.0, pg 97.

I'm not entirely sure how this works, but it sounds cool.