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Sponk

@s-ponk

gay and stupid
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imlizy

i post about dnd 5e item balance a lot, mostly because i personally feel like cool, magic items are a huge draw of fantasy gaming for me, but it is crazy that the consensus from gms that i know regarding the archetypical Magic Flaming Sword, dnd's flame tongue, is "you are out of your mind if you give this to a player." because it is strong as all shit with 3d6 fire damage added to all attacks

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bnprime

dm's should. then just make the monsters 10hp stronger and then let the players have fun

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imlizy

if you have to change the rules to make the game good, it isn't a good game <3

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imlizy

okay real answer instead of flippant shorthand: broadly, on an encounter-by-encounter basis, it isn't -- i repurpose stat blocks all the time, it's inevitable as part of homebrewing any system. however, if you give somebody an overpowered magic item, and then, as this person's apparently suggested, increase every monster's hp by a flat amount to compensate for how strong the weapon you gave them is, you are fundamentally changing the rules of the game, moving the goalposts. sure, now they have a strong magic item, but now that everything is specifically built to withstand their attacks, how is that different from when they didn't have the weapon, other than that now they have to activate flame tongue to deal sufficient damage to enemies?

when i say something like "if you have to change the rules to make the game good, the game isn't good," i mean one of two things:

  • d&d 5e has terrible balancing. this is just true. and to be honest? who cares. we just have to accept it and move on. "sure, grandma, aboleths are totally strong enough to be cr 8. let's get you to bed." sometimes you'll have to think on your feet and change stuff on the fly to make an encounter as challenging as you intended it to be, and broadly i think that's okay.
  • d&d 5e has massive gaps and frequent conflicts in its ruleset. this is the bigger issue, and the one i usually refer to when i talk about this sort of thing. the game fundamentally places a lot more onus on the game master to just make up rules, because it doesn't really have much in the way of rules for non-combat gameplay, and occasionally rules will come into direct conflict with one another, which you'll see a lot in people asking d&d's game designers "how is this supposed to work? we've just been ruling it this way" on twitter. lol.

compare this to pathfinder 2e, a game that i think personally does everything d&d does, but generally better-executed and more clear. comparing the two systems on a commonly occurring situation, "players are trying to figure out if a guy is lying to them or not": in d&d 5e, the gm will likely make the players roll an insight check, invent a DC for this roll to have to meet in order to succeed, and decide how much information a player gets based on what they rolled, all on the fly. in pathfinder 2e, this is a codified action called "sense motive," every creature in the game has a deception DC to be used in situations like this, and there are rules to determine the amount of information gained depending on whether you failed, critically failed, succeeded, or critically succeeded (d&d 5e does not have increments of success and failure like this except for critical hits).

i am someone who loves to homebrew. i fuck around with rules relatively frequently, and in general i think that story, fun setpieces and player experience should generally supersede Rules (in cases where they arent literally arising from mechanics to begin with). i do wonky ad-hoc shit all the time as a gm. but i think that in general, there's a massive trend in 5e "fandom" to be like "if this rule sucks/doesn't exist/conflicts with other rules, just homebrew it!" and at that point, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. why am i even using a rulebook of any kind if i have to make up the fucking rules myself? i'm already writing a whole story here, dude.

tl;dr - on-the-fly, ad hoc encounter balancing isn't necessarily "changing the rules" or inherently bad/indicative of bad game design, but there are very real examples of bad game design in d&d 5e and people frequently respond to such criticisms with "just homebrew it," and i find that unproductive and frankly annoying especially in discussions about how it's funny that a rare magic item gives you infinite fire-based divine smites for free.

PS: flame tongue actually gives 2d6 fire damage, not 3d6. that's on me for misremembering oops

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wolfinmyribcage

Rule of Cool beats all as far as I'm concerned, regardless of system. If the players manage to get ahold of a flame tongue they should be allowed to feel like badasses and use it.

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imlizy

i don't think you understood anything i just said, my friend

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imlizy

also whatever game you're playing where the dm allows the players to *get* a flame tongue but not *use* it sounds way more annoying than whatever i've got going on.

#txt#very insightful and true#i dislike the massive oral tradition surrounding 5e#and i feel like wotc's actions recently have only been making it worse#odnd has kinda been a nightmare#im still very attached to 5e likely for nostalgia reasons but like#so many other systems have learned from 5es failings and become much better#and gain none of the attention in the long term#idk long tags ig#thanks lizy always love seeing your insights into things#dnd#5e
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One of my managers just asked the whole hospital to "pay good attention to those curves." You're damn right I will. o7

That's it that's the post

#pay attention to MY curves#txt
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autoexsanguine

media with healing magic really ought to get more in the weeds about it tbh

get kinda Icky and Medical about it, how does the healer stitch flesh and blood vessels and nerve endings back together, does it hurt when those nerves reconnect? is it euphoric? is it a little bit of both?

if the healer can manipulate the living body like that, what stops them doing it in reverse? can a sufficiently skilled healer yank the nerves out through a victim's pores?

if 'necromancy' exists as a concept in the setting: how is that any different? should it be? is schlorping a severed limb back onto its owner's body _really_ meaningfully different from resurrecting the whole body as some kind of undead creature?

can healing magic be used to do ~weird shit~ with the endocrine system of a person? could a healer just juice someone with a shitload of estrogen, for fun or pleasure?

#cos spoilers without context