Best Version of DnD?

[Doug Sundseth]

48 minutes ago, TheAuldGrump said:

CC3 is a lot easier to learn than CC2 was, with at least some curve. (CC2 had more of a learning cliff... and many fell off of it.)

 

 

Good to know. I bought 2 and decided not to go down that hole again with 3. I might take another look.

 

OTOH, I've been watching Questing Beast's mapping videos, and I quite like what he's able to do quickly with a pen. I've even been able to pick up the techniques quickly enough that I don't feel like a fool, which is a major feat for me in an artistic project. 

[Unruly]

I dunno, I've got CC3/3+, and even with the hand-holding guidance of their Tome of Ultimate Mapping I've had a hard time grasping how to do certain things. I was able to make a passable overland map, but it still took some effort to figure out what I was doing.

 

It probably doesn't help that they didn't update the Tome for the new version, so some of the commands were different from what was listed.

[Dilvish the Deliverer]

I've thought about picking up one of these mapping programs and then setting Awesome Wife loose on it.  I figure she might be able to do something cool with it as her first degree was in cartography.

[BlazingTornado]

On the now-outdated topic of initiatives.

I like a realistic approach but I feel that'd make combat flow less and make sessions have less RP and plot progression.

 

On CC3:

I've not tried it but if it's that hard to figure, is it worth the price tag I've seen on it?

 

On D&D Last Saskatchewan Pirate Edition:
D&D Beyond (pay app that gives you digital access to all the stuff in the books you already paid for)'s Youtube channel has been having chats with Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford, short vids that briefly discuss the new class archetypes available in their upcoming splatbook, Xanathar's Guide To Everything. Here's the list of all the new stuff we're getting:

Rogue:
-Inquisitive

-Scout

 

Fighter:
-Cavalier

-Samurai

-Arcane Archer

 

Ranger:
-Horizon Walker

-Monster Slayer

 

Cleric:
-Grave Domain

-Forge Domain

 

Sorcerer:
-Shadow

-Divine Soul

 

Bard:
-College of Whispers

-College of Glamour

 

Druid:

-Circle of Dreams

 

Warlock:

-Celestial Patron

 

Phew. I'd say it's getting bloated but having never played older editions I have no idea if it ever got that excessive with classes and/or subclasses.

 

 

 

On my game:

Oof. Talk about everything going bad. Long story short, Little Miss Chaotic had to miss the game so her character remained missing and unconscious for much of the game. Party got lured in by an evil cult posing as a benevolent church, cleric got body-swapped with an evil doll (and he's the only one with the spells to undo that stuff) and the two remaining members are now about to initiate a fight with some of the cultists...

[BlazingTornado]

Oh and I almost forgot the funniest part of the game...

 

At some point the cleric's player was looking over his spell list to see if he had anything that could help locate Little Miss Chaotic's character.

And he stops at Sending. "Sending? What's that?", he says.

I inquire. "Wait, you have Sending?".

"Yeah."
"And you didn't have it prepared?"
"No, I have it prepared."
And I orcquing LOSE IT. I am laughing uncontrollably as the poor player tries his darndest to read out the spell's description to the other players.

 

Why did I lose it?
Because the cleric always wanted the means to reach his girlfriend (Little Miss Chaotic's last character), and also needed to get in touch with an old friend from his church to fill in the temple duties in this city, and ended up sending out a courier.

And he had Sending. He had Sending, prepared each day, for two whole levels.

Edited October 15, 2017 by BlazingTornado

[Unruly]

CC3 is definitely worth it if you can get past the learning curve. It's some seriously powerful software. It's a lot like Photoshop in that regard. You can mess around with it for a few hours and get a "map" made by following a tutorial, or you can actually spend a few weeks learning how to use it and make something amazing. I will say that their pricing can be ridiculous at times, but so is Photoshop's if you want the full deal. Whether it pays for itself depends on how you use it.

 

For 5e starting to look bloated, I don't think that's anywhere near what 3.x had. And unlike 3.x, those are all still built around the basic classes in the player's handbook rather than straight new classes, so aside from a handful of new special abilities they're going to work pretty much exactly like the PHB classes already do. After all, they're going to share something like 70% of their info. And it's also got nothing on Pathfinder. Pathfinder is currently up to something like 35-40 official base/core classes, each of which has its own entire rules writeup and at least one archetype. And that's not to mention all the prestige classes or the optional variants of the core classes that are in Pathfinder Unchained...

 

I'm still waiting on 5e Psionics to hit a book though. I'd heard good things about the Unearthed Arcana playtest, and there was talk of doing a second that went to level 10, but that's been like 2 years ago now.

[TheAuldGrump]

You Tube has many, many tutorials for CC3.

 

In a weird way, what causes a lot of problems for folks using CC3 is that it is not a paint program - it is a CAD program.

 

So a lot of things that people already know how to do... don't work, and terms that mean one thing in a paint program mean something entirely different in CC3.

 

But it can do some amazing things - I have been using it for more than ten years now.

 

It is easily worth the money.

 

That said... ... ... giving a copy to a nine year old, no matter how gifted, seems like a recipe for disappointment. Though Matt has said that it is mostly so she can use the maps that other people have done - so, I have pointed him in the direction of the free map viewer.

 

Does anybody know of a good, easy to use, tile based mapper, these days?

 

If DungeonCrafter was still around, it would be easy.

 

The Auld Grump

[TheAuldGrump]

Anyone have any experience with Mapforge?

 

Being hailed as a successor to DunDjinni (which I also have not much used).

 

Might be easier for Sam than CC3+....

 

The Auld Grump

[BlazingTornado]

Matt Colville used something called Hexographer to build a worldmap with input from Twitch, dunno if that's along the lines of what you need.

[Mad Jack]

On 10/10/2017 at 10:10 PM, Unruly said:

 

But I have to say, I looked at all the different magic items listed in the DMG and I'm going to be stealing a bunch of them for my future 5e games. I like all the different magic weapons and stuff that seems to have disappeared from 3e onward. Some of them seem really basic, but they've got style. Like the weapons that don't act magical unless they're actually thrown, or the ones that have massive bonuses against various enemies, like shapeshifters, but not against others. And then there's the "sharpness" weapons that on a crit take a random limb, which was removed in favor of just having vorpal weapons in 3e and up.

 

There's really a veritable goldmine of ideas that I was too dense and unimaginative to think up on my own stored in the old books.

 

 One of the things that was nice (sometimes) about the older systems is that it was only the DM who limited you as to the number of magic items you had - there were literally books full of magical items that didn't do jack squat to directly increase your character's general power level, but could be really fun to have. On the other hand, the reason they started writing about level-appropriate magic items is because sometimes you got something that, when used in a manner other than intended, could totally break an adventure.

I'm sure you've heard me discussing using Daern's Instant Fortress as a hand grenade before, and the Decanter of Endless Water was just stupid broken - as written, you could literally flood an entire dungeon with it if you had the time.

 

 

19 hours ago, BlazingTornado said:

 

On D&D Last Saskatchewan Pirate Edition:
D&D Beyond (pay app that gives you digital access to all the stuff in the books you already paid for)'s Youtube channel has been having chats with Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford, short vids that briefly discuss the new class archetypes available in their upcoming splatbook, Xanathar's Guide To Everything. Here's the list of all the new stuff we're getting:

....

.....

Phew. I'd say it's getting bloated but having never played older editions I have no idea if it ever got that excessive with classes and/or subclasses.

 

 By the end of 3.5, there were half a dozen of those books (The Complete series: Complete Adventurer, Complete Arcane, etc.) each filled with about that many new core classes and/or Prestige classes as well as several pages of new feats... And then you add in the Races of series, and the Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords...

 

And as mentioned, Pathfinder has embraced bloat as a full-time religion.

 

 

 

[Unruly]

Yea. From what I understand even 2e got pretty bad after a while with all the various class kits or whatever.

 

But at least with 5e they seem to be keeping it relatively simple with the new stuff for classes. They're not introducing wholly new classes with all sorts of new mechanics for people to familiarize themselves with, they're just taking existing classes and, typically, letting them borrow something from another class. Like how the Eldritch Knight Fighter borrows spellcasting from wizards but is otherwise the same as any other fighter, or how the Lore College Bard just gets to pick a few extra spells from other class lists. From what I've seen of the stuff they've added post-PHB they've generally followed that pattern.

 

At least until they bring back Psionics and all the whining and moaning it will bring to the game. I won't be whining and moaning, because I'm a fan, but there's a lot of people who can't get over how they worked in 1e/2e, and so they never even gave 3.x a chance.

[BlazingTornado]

The Psionics as shown in Unearthed Arcana was a bit much IMO.

 

It was like an entirely new class system in and of itself with way too many mechanics and enough subclasses that you could have an entire party of psionics and you'd have all the traditional roles filled... It was a bloat in and of itself.

The psionics used for the Gith race in Unearthed Arcana and for most psionic creatures in the monster manual is a lot more manageable.

[Unruly]

Which version of the Unearthed Arcana are you talking about, though? There were the first 2 from a couple years ago, which I knew about and which only took it so far as levels 5 and 10 respectively, and then there's the 3rd one from this year, which I just saw, that introduced it as a whole 20 levels. I'll admit, I don't really remember much from reading the first two pieces of playtest material because I didn't get to use it and I don't find there's any point in trying to judge it as a flat reading.

 

I am going to read the stuff from back in March though. I want to see what it's shaping into. And where you may have a problem with it being its own set of mechanics, I see that as something that's required to make it truly feel different from the existing magic. Besides, it's currently in the playtest stages, with no word on an actual release yet. I was sort of hoping that Xanathar's Guide would touch on it, but I wasn't holding my breath. But seeing that they had playtest documents of all 20 levels for the mystic gives me hope that in the next couple years my wish will come true. Maybe they'll even give Dark Sun a new treatment in the same vein as what they did for Ravenloft with Curse of Strahd...

[TheAuldGrump]

Quick question - do most people use dice for determining attribute scores, or do they use the points system?

 

As a GM, I go with points - which sticks with me as a habit when generating characters for play. (Worse, I tend to go with the standard scores of 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8. The same stats are used for the Pathfinder Iconics.)

 

Megan prefers dice - which means that we have a weird little process. Megan tells me what she wants her character to do, with feats and etc. then  I make it happen with points buy, then she rolls dice and changes the numbers. (I have a better memory of what feats, archetypes, and traits are out there.)

 

So, if Megan comes to me with an idea for a half orc bloodraging pirate, I make it happen, then Megan goes and changes a lot of the numbers, we check it to make sure it is still valid (feats with prerequisites are the thing that we run into most).

 

For the record - you will never find me complaining about archetypes in Pathfinder - they are, for me, the point where Pathfinder broke off from 3.5 and became its own game. And I like them a lot better than all the new base classes and prestige classes that WotC developed during 3e and 3.5.

 

The Auld Grump

[Doug Sundseth]

Points for me, always. Dice either mean that character power levels vary wildly (which isn't much fun for the guy who rolls all 10s and 11s) or that everyone rolls until they're overpowered. Neither of those is much fun for me. (If you like that, great. I hope you find/found a group that agrees with you.)

 

And I'm that guy that buys all the splat books, because juggling options is fun.

 

"You did what now?"