The General D&D thread

Sounds like a waste of time to me :P

Oh, you munchkin you...

never change! Xd

I like my roleplaying with my roleplaying, and my mechanics and combat with my mechanics and combat, thanks :P

Never buy Nobilis, then.

Fortunately this thread is about Dungeons and Dragons :P

This post doubles as a Raise Dead spell and a question:

Are Elves overdone? In fourth edition alone, you've got Elves, Drow, and Eladrin, not to mention Dusk Elves if you count bloodline feats.

Since other races have the same ability bonuses (Gnomes=Eladrin, Halflings=Drow, and Shifters=Elves) as the Elven races, would it be a huge dick move on my part to cut them out of my setting in favour of something less... Tolkeinian?

No. It is never a dick move to prohibit races or even classes from your game if you feel their addition does not add anything to the game.

DAGGA!

I would recommend that if someone wants to use the mechanics of an eladrin but reflavor them as a human being with "magical powers of transposition" (or whatever), that you'd allow it. After all, we know for a fact that there aren't any balance issues involved (well, no more so than normal 4th edition), so it's not an unfair advantage.

I tend to prefer games that are 100% human-or near to it. Most often I ban halflings. Oh how I hatez teh hobbitzez.

IMO Halflings need more love. They're always just kinda... there. They need moar flavr!

a legitimate way to take a race out of the game: make them extinct, and have the rest of society reeling from the aftermath of it. maybe make it a sort of "final solution" that the orcs did as a holy crusade agianst their god's rival.

It's not a dick move so long as your tell your players as part of your campaign pitch. If you leave it out of the campaign description and only tell them later, yeah, that's a problem.

Never feel obligated to give players something just because it's in a manual (though I recommend generally informing them of prohibited options ahead of time), in the same way you wouldn't just let someone play the king of a nation with all the resources thereof.

@Dyna: No Orcs either. I recently realized that half of the races in D&D (monster and PC alike) are ridiculously redundant. Why do you need Goblins, Orcs, and Trolls when they're basically the exact same thing? Same thing with Goblins (the little buggers) and Kobolds. And Demons and Devils and Yugoloth.

So, I'm shredding most of them for this setting. The only sentient races in the natural world are: Humans, Dragonborn, Halflings, Dwarves, Tieflings, Gnomes, Goliaths, Shifters, Genasi, Kalashtar, Warforged, Changelings, Githzerai, Githyanki, Minotaurs, Shardminds, Wilden, Thri-kreen, Muls and Kobolds.. There is one singular race of elves in the Feywild, and all the fiends are combined into one coalition that spans the Astral plane. (Ancient history: Demons and Devils finally got over their quarrels and realized they could kill the gods. They managed to kill off most of them, but there were lasting consequences including planar travel being almost impossible.) The other races on the natural plane simply died out from lack of available resources; evolution didn't favour them, so they got screwed.)

you. get. my. POINT!

also, evolution existing alongside ex-gods? interesting.

edited 28th Mar '11 3:44:09 PM by Dynamod

And I've got a little TIP for you?

I dont get it? `~`

Yeah. The gods sort of looked at the Prime Material Plane one millenium and saw sentient life, and the general consensus at this point was "What the fuck is this?" Most of them wanted to do something to interfere, but Ioun got them to sign a non-disruption clause on directly messing with the PMP. The same treaty was later also applied to the Feywild, which was originally created by Corellon Larethian, Lolth, Sehanine, and Avandra as a personal domain but which eventually devloped its own life. At this point, the gods (and fiends, because of the blocks the gods had put on the planes) were stuck in the Astral plane.

As for how the gods got there... well, that's part of The Twist.

Everyone remember the elaborate encounter I described before with the poison and the dying and shit?

Party just trainwrecked through it in two rounds -_-

Note to self: Never DM for another DM's campaign. It's a surefire way of pissing people off and getting pissed off when no one respects your authority. Also limits how much you can control game balance.

Though, the fact that the party was essentially three strikers, a controller whose primary feature was to add damage to everyone's attacks, and a leader who grants bonus attacks, MAY have something to do with it -_-

edited 28th Mar '11 7:33:28 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

@Diamonnes: Well, options are never a bad thing. There's nothing really wrong with having goblins and orcs and trolls and kobolds, just so you can use them if you want, but as has been mentioned, no one's forcing you to use them in your campaign. That said, I find it amusing that you apparently dislike the difference similarities between a lot of different races, but still use githyanki and githzerai (which literally are the same race). To each his own, I guess.

edited 29th Mar '11 5:59:31 AM by NativeJovian

I myself think there are simply too many races available for use, and only populate my world with races from phb1, and mm1. the players in my games are free to pick an alternative race, but I tell them beforehand that they will very unlikely find another of their kind, unless it's critical to the plot.

and @ Tomu: I'm hoping to start a game in the future in which no one is the leading DM, as everyone takes turns doing it, everyone shares the burden. (this of course means everyone is a DMPC too... we'll have to see.)

edited 29th Mar '11 7:45:52 AM by Dynamod

If there's one thing i want people to stop using, it's this.

edited 29th Mar '11 8:00:25 AM by EgregiousEric

Well, if you throw game balance to the wind, rotating D Ms might work. But I'm very sensitive to game balance issues, so as a DM, realizing that I had absolutely no control over game balance because the rules for development were set by an entirely separate entity... yuck.

I am tempted to start my own 4th edition blog. Would anyone on here read it? Or would I be ranting to myself again.

you could always post it right here, you know ~

unless you wanted to make an official DND blog. sounds kind of like a "lets play" sort of thing from my shoes.

anyways, as they say, knock a stone bridge...

Nah, this is more a nitpicky I hate 4th editions rules almost as much as I hate every other game system out there kind of blog, that tries to pinpoint the "failings" of the system and "correct" them, as if I have some kind of masterful insight no one else in the world does.

There's always pathfinder...