Saturday, August 2, 2014
Friday, August 1, 2014
Spellslingers of Gor aka How the Frak Does Magic Work in 5e?
I've had quite a few experienced D&D players ask me about how magic works in the newest edition of Dungeons and Dragons - especially after reading the explanation in the Basic book. Complete newbies seem to get it right off the bat. I think the problem is that the new system doesn't, on the surface of things, appear much different than many of the ways magic once worked, but the few differences turn everything on its head. So I'll try to make it simple.
There are some terms to define. I'm making up some of these terms, btw, for clarity. Note, these are only for the classes mentioned in the Basic book, as other types of casters will appear in the PHB, which may have different mechanics.
Available Spells
Prepared Spells
Spell Levels
Spell Slots
Spell Slot Levels
Cantrips
Rituals
Domain Spells
First, forget everything you know about spells. Okay? Good. Now we are ready . . .
Available Spells are the spells that the caster can access. It's like Agent Kay's armory in Men In Black - a room full of guns. Wizards have the spells in their spellbook. Clerics have, well, they have access to every spell of their level.
Okay, so a spellslinger has a big room of guns. But she only has a limited amount of holsters on her belt. Each morning, she's got to pick the guns she'll be carrying that day. These are called Prepared Spells. Each gun is a different type of spell. One gun may launch a fireball, another gun may heal someone. It's pointless to have two guns of the same type.
Each spell has a different size, or Spell Level. This is separate from any class level that the caster might have. Detect Magic is a first level spell, while Fireball is a third level spell. It's how much gunpowder that's required to make the gun fire.
Okay, so how does this spellslinger fire her gun? Spell Slots. Each morning, she gets a limited amount of spell slots, which act like bullets. She puts the bullet in the gun just before she fires it.
Each bullet has a size. These are Spell Slot Levels. She might get three first level spell slots and one second level spell slot a day. Think of this, not as a caliber, or width, of a bullet, but how long the bullet is - i.e., how much gunpowder is sitting behind the projectile.
The spell slot must be the same size as the spell's level or bigger.
If you try to fire a gun without enough gunpowder, it's just going to be a flash in the pan. You can, however, use a bigger spell slot to kick off the spell. Depending on the spell, it could have an additional effect - like doing more damage or healing more hit points.
So that's the basics. There are some special instances:
Cantrips: These are tiny little guns that use a solar panel to fire endlessly. They are 'At-Will' spells that allow you to clean tables or singe people's eyebrows off.
Rituals: Some guns can be cast without a bullet. If you've got a spell listed as a ritual, and ten spare minutes, you can cast away at no extra charge.
Domain Spells: Depending on a clerics chosen divine domain, they get some spells that are automatically prepared - forever. It's like having a gun super-glued to your belt that doesn't count against the total allowed prepared spells for that day. Pretty nifty.
Once players have these concepts down, they seem to be able to digest the rest of the magic rules without issue. The mechanic works well, giving the player more options and cutting down on the angst of morning spell picking, without turning spellcasters into infinite magic regurgitation machines.
If for some reason the above didn't make sense, please let me know and I'll try to clarify it. :)
- Ark
There are some terms to define. I'm making up some of these terms, btw, for clarity. Note, these are only for the classes mentioned in the Basic book, as other types of casters will appear in the PHB, which may have different mechanics.
Available Spells
Prepared Spells
Spell Levels
Spell Slots
Spell Slot Levels
Cantrips
Rituals
Domain Spells
First, forget everything you know about spells. Okay? Good. Now we are ready . . .
Available Spells are the spells that the caster can access. It's like Agent Kay's armory in Men In Black - a room full of guns. Wizards have the spells in their spellbook. Clerics have, well, they have access to every spell of their level.
Okay, so a spellslinger has a big room of guns. But she only has a limited amount of holsters on her belt. Each morning, she's got to pick the guns she'll be carrying that day. These are called Prepared Spells. Each gun is a different type of spell. One gun may launch a fireball, another gun may heal someone. It's pointless to have two guns of the same type.
Each spell has a different size, or Spell Level. This is separate from any class level that the caster might have. Detect Magic is a first level spell, while Fireball is a third level spell. It's how much gunpowder that's required to make the gun fire.
Okay, so how does this spellslinger fire her gun? Spell Slots. Each morning, she gets a limited amount of spell slots, which act like bullets. She puts the bullet in the gun just before she fires it.
Each bullet has a size. These are Spell Slot Levels. She might get three first level spell slots and one second level spell slot a day. Think of this, not as a caliber, or width, of a bullet, but how long the bullet is - i.e., how much gunpowder is sitting behind the projectile.
The spell slot must be the same size as the spell's level or bigger.
If you try to fire a gun without enough gunpowder, it's just going to be a flash in the pan. You can, however, use a bigger spell slot to kick off the spell. Depending on the spell, it could have an additional effect - like doing more damage or healing more hit points.
So that's the basics. There are some special instances:
Cantrips: These are tiny little guns that use a solar panel to fire endlessly. They are 'At-Will' spells that allow you to clean tables or singe people's eyebrows off.
Rituals: Some guns can be cast without a bullet. If you've got a spell listed as a ritual, and ten spare minutes, you can cast away at no extra charge.
Domain Spells: Depending on a clerics chosen divine domain, they get some spells that are automatically prepared - forever. It's like having a gun super-glued to your belt that doesn't count against the total allowed prepared spells for that day. Pretty nifty.
Once players have these concepts down, they seem to be able to digest the rest of the magic rules without issue. The mechanic works well, giving the player more options and cutting down on the angst of morning spell picking, without turning spellcasters into infinite magic regurgitation machines.
If for some reason the above didn't make sense, please let me know and I'll try to clarify it. :)
- Ark
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons is Weird
The new D&D is weird. It's this Frankenstein's monster of old games. When you peer into it, there bits and pieces from past D&Ds scattered around.
I'm sitting here with rulebooks piled up on my desk - everything from Moldvay to Pathfinder, trying to figure out what makes 5e tick, and why it ticks in the way it does.
For anyone who's played a bit of D&D over the past 40 years, the archaeology can be confusing. Some things are so similar to our favorite versions of D&D, and some things are not. It can look broken and strange at times, and I've found myself having to tilt my head and squint my eyes to figure some things out.
At 5e's core is the d20 system task resolution developed for the third edition of D&D. When I first saw the d20 system years ago, I was very enthusiastic. In practice, however, it became a real scaling nightmare since character levels weighed heavily in 3.0/3.5/Pathfinder/4e.
Fifth edition flattens the curve considerably into something that very closely resembles the advancements back in the pre-d20 days:
| Level | Proficiency Bonus |
| 1-4 | +2 |
| 5-8 | +3 |
| 9-12 | +4 |
| 13-16 | +5 |
| 17-20 | +6 |
And those bonuses only go toward combat and skills the character is proficient in, which is largely determined by class. So the ability stats actually mean a lot more to a player, since they follow the standard d20 progression:
| Ability Score | Bonus |
| 3 | -4 |
| 4 | -3 |
| 5 | -3 |
| 6 | -2 |
| 7 | -2 |
| 8 | -1 |
| 9 | -1 |
| 10 | 0 |
| 11 | 0 |
| 12 | +1 |
| 13 | +1 |
| 14 | +2 |
| 15 | +2 |
| 16 | +3 |
| 17 | +3 |
| 18 | +4 |
If you are not rolling, the standard set of scores are 15,14,13,12,10, and 8. But even if you use the point buy method, you can't get a score above 15. Racial bonuses could get a starting character up to 17 - but that is it. In fact, 20 in the maximum for any stat.
What this means in practical terms is that when fighting a goblin, it's a tough fight at 1st. It's still not an easy fight at 2nd, and even at 3rd level it's something to think about. In the game we are currently playing, my fighter has been on her ass, unconscious, in every game session at some point.
So it's a new mechanic (d20) that replicates the feel of an old mechanic (THAC0 and the old charts.) It plays nice and clean, so clean that you may not notice how different it is.
Then you get to the weapons. Sure, they look almost identical to the weapons of old. Heck, a dagger still does d4. But then you start noticing that most weapons have something special about them - properties that haven't quite appeared the same way in past games. The three big one are finesse, thrown, and versatile.
With finesse I'm not talking about a feat. Finesse is a quality of a melee weapon where you can add your dexterity bonus, rather than your strength bonus, to hit and damage rolls. Again, I'm not talking about a feat. It's an intrinsic quality of certain weapons, such as a dagger, a scimitar, a short sword, a rapier, and a whip.
Yeah - that one little change is huge when you think about it.
The thrown property is basically finesse in reverse. With some ranged weapons, like axes and spears, you can add your strength bonuses, rather than your dexterity bonuses. Booyah.
Versatile is a property that allows you to two-hand a weapon and make it spit out more damage. The d6 of a quarterstaff pops up to d8 if you use both hands. Yeah - that makes it as effective as a long sword with one hand. 4e had a mechanism that added +1 damage when wielding a versatile weapon, but I like the dice upgrade better.
The list goes on. One of the big ones, the advantage/disadvantage mechanic, I've talked about before. It's very simple and very powerful. A player can choose to take an average hp gain, rather than rolling each level. The 4e based death and dying mechanic is balanced by a new insta-death feature. And so on.
I think the main thing I've noticed is that those of us who have played previous versions of D&D have a hard time figuring out all of the repercussions of a bunch of little rule changes, tweaks, and a handful of big new mechanics. It takes sitting down and actually playing to see if it's something you'd like.
Like I've said before, I'm quite happy with 5e so far. Those two years of play testing - both in public and private, really paid off for WOTC.
(They just released sub-class descriptions for the upcoming players handbook. I'm excited and horrified WTF all at the same time. Some WEIRD shit that did not expect is coming up. Fun times . . .)
- Ark
Monday, July 28, 2014
Sunday, July 27, 2014
The New D&D
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| From dahli-lama.deviantart.com |
I can't really review the Starter Set because, strangely enough, I am not the DM this time around. We've got a mix of people playing - grognards and complete D&D newbs, old and young, girls and boys. There are six of us, and the basic set only had five prebuilts - so we whipped up a totally random character for player #6 out of the Basic Set. I mean, compltely random - even race and class. So he's a halfling stout soldier wizard. Yeah. Hilarious, but surprisingly effective.
We did a lot of things randmly - like roll height and weight out of the Basic Set. I had picked the human noble fighter - the tank of the group, and decided to run it as a woman. Well, due to the luck of the dice, she ended up being 4'11''. Since her weapon is a two handed axe, she gives of the feeling of a tall dwarven warrior.
After a few weeks of play - I'm really impressed with the Starter Set, the Basic Rules, and D&D 5e in general. The race/subrace/class/backgroud combo gives an immediate sense of who the characters are. For a 'role' player like me it gives plenty of meat to sink my acting chops into, while not being in the way of people who just want to dive into a whole-sale slaughter-fest.
The D&D newbs of the group are enjoying it, as well as us old jaded types. My son Kenny said that it really has an old school feel. It does - and I think it has just enough differences to keep me on my toes and interested. Funny, it's even got me interested in good old fashioned dungeon crawls again - something that I had become bored with by 1982.
The mechanics are quite slick. I love the advantage/disadvantage mechanism that tosses out so many of those little tiny plus/minus rules that we tend to forget about and leaves you with one big whammy of a bonus/nonbonus. In every fight, with every swing of the axe, I'm thinking about how I can get an advantage out of my attack - from launching myself in a high-jump off the helmet of a downed ally, to hocking a big, fat, sticky loogie in the face of a bugbear who is staring me down. Yeah, I'm driving the DM crazy with descriptive plays for advantage, but it's fun. :)
I think one of the bigger problems with the game is the new spells mechanics for prepared spells and spell slots. The mechanic is actually just fine - I like it - but players seem to get confused about how it works. Well, old players. New players seem to get the hang of it quickly enough. It's something us grognards need to read over very carefully, and I think they could have spelled it out more clearly in the rules.
Another issue I see if the level progression. It rockets players up quickly in levels at first, then slows down considerably. For a player's first game, or games by people who don't have a lot of time, I think it's fine. But for a group who plays with one another on a regular basis, I think it might feel a bit wierd having characters get proficient so quickly. I don't know though - that is somethign to test in the future.
So, the group is really pumped by D&D. We've got some brand new players who have a really good taste in thier mouth from this edition - which is exactly what I had hoped this version would do. And I am jazzed about dungeon crawling with my 4'11' tank girl.
In less than a month, the Player's Handbook will be out, and we're all excited to see it come. I still dread the min-max fest that will go on with a heap-load of backgrounds, specializations, and feats, but I'm crossing my fingers it won't get too annoying. Besides, I can always sit back and play a character that plays almost exactly like a character from 1981 while someone else goes and plays a character out of, oh, a deck of Magic: The Gathering. :)
- Ark
Saturday, July 26, 2014
Friday, July 25, 2014
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Monday, July 21, 2014
Sunday, July 20, 2014
Saturday, July 19, 2014
Friday, July 18, 2014
Happy Birthday!
It's my son - Kenny's - 14th birthday today. It's hard to believe. I swear I saw him being born a week ago. And just yesterday dropped him off at his first day of pre-school. And only a few minutes ago, he started playing D&D. This is all way too fast.
I need to slow down that clock somehow . . . but anyway . . .
He's an awesome guy. I am very proud of him, so I made him this card! Happy Birthday Kenny!
- Ark
I need to slow down that clock somehow . . . but anyway . . .
He's an awesome guy. I am very proud of him, so I made him this card! Happy Birthday Kenny!
- Ark
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