The General D&D thread

I mean, they could still unify the devil design with the other lawful outsiders by giving them more prominent armour like the Descent Into Avernus concept art did. Even if they weren't robots, they'd still incorporate metal into their bodies.

I'm just glad they're doing more Celestials. They've gotten no emphasis on things for a long while.

Okay, I may be blind here, but there's no guideline on how to advance threats in CR in the 5th Ed Monster Manual, right? Is it in the DMG instead?

Man I miss how it was so easy to scale monster HD/CR in 3.5 now.

Just checked on it myself. Those rules are in Chapter 9 ("Dungeon Master's Workshop") of the DMG, under "Creating a Monster" (subsection "Modifying a Monster").

Thanks! I figured as much. I don't have the PD Fs saved on my phone on short notice, so I had to ask.

So is Planescape book "Eh what you would expect for desperate positive pr attempt" or surprisingly good?

I won't find out until the price drops to forty bucks or lower, and what few social media sites I visit aren't really talking about it yet. Well, other than the potential of the sensory stone, which records six seconds of sensations experienced by the bearer. As well as WotC knowing exactly what they were doing◊ with Shemeshka the Arcanaloth◊.

I did stumble upon this summary/review that's mostly positive, though it laments the absence of the old planar cant.

Well it gives us a lot of new Celestial creatures along with a whole bunch of other stuff (like a monster created by mindflayers that's entirely made out of brains, a demon elephant-creature, and plenty of celestials) and all of the different parts of Sigil and other planes also get segments.

One repeated warning I've seen is to not mistake the Planescape pack for a Manual of the Planes. The focus is on Sigil, the Outlands, and the portal towns, which are a way to dip your toes in the Outer Planes without taking the plunge. But if you're looking for information about what differentiates the four layers of Pandemonium, rules for how to scavenge war material from Thuldanin, or even the names of the Seven Mounting Heavens of Celestia... I mean, I guess the section for Excelsior might name the seven layers of Celestia, I dunno, I don't have the books yet...

Anyway, it's not a 5E Manual of the Planes. I would have liked one instead of a pre-made adventure that I'm never going to run, but then we wouldn't have had a foxy daemon lady to appease the furry segment of the fanbase.

Man, it's almost ten years since the 5E DMG came out, and 5.5E or 6E or whatever is on the horizon, and most of the Outer Planes are still nothing but a one-paragraph summary with a one-paragraph optional rule in that book's "Creating a Multiverse" chapter.

Thread hop.

Dungeons and Dragons is one of those things I've known about, but my encounters with it have been sparing.

I think I kinda played it once or twice in my youth, but never seriously got into it, and am mostly familiar with it through other media (the old cartoon, both the shitty movie and the recent good one, and stuff that's been inspired by it).

Anyway, I'm here now because of my fascination with the various magic using classes (and a post I put up in Marvel about how Dr Strange is a Wizard despite being sorcerer supreme, and Wanda is a Sorcerer despite being the Scarlet Witch).

Wizards do magic by studying. Sorcerers have the power naturally. Warlocks tap their power from outside sources (namely demons) and Clerics more or less do the same as Warlocks, only with Gods (I think).

Not clear how Druids do magic except it's related to nature. It's all got me really interested in the mechanics of it for some ideas I've been having lately so I wanted to know more.

Magic, as described circa 3rd Edition, can be divided into "arcane" and "divine" magic.

Arcane magic is wielded by the likes of wizards, sorcerers and warlocks. It's part of the world, existing something like background radiation, and can be accessed in various ways. Wizards learn the sequence of gestures, words of power, arcane foci and material components needed to tap into this background magical field and cast a spell, a scholarly, intellectual form of magic. Sorcerers, on the other hand, have a natural aptitude for magic (perhaps the result of a supernatural ancestor), and can cast spells without disciplined study, though their style of magic is highly individualistic - if wizards went to music school and learned how to read and play sheet music, sorcerers are self-taught saxophonists playing improv jazz. And warlocks have a patron who supplies them with power, the result of a pact they or an ancestor made with a supernatural being (stereotypically a fiend), granting them an easy grasp of a narrow set of magical abilities... though surely said entity didn't give them such power without asking for something in return? Continuing the musical allegory, maybe warlocks were loaned a MP3 player with a few tracks on it and now owe the owner a favor.

Divine magic is wielded by clerics, paladins, druids and rangers. It's about belief, whether in the righteousness of a deity, a philosophical cause, or even in the power of nature - and since belief in D&D shapes the multiverse, this allows such characters to cast spells and access other magical abilities. Devout divine spellcasters who worship a deity as the embodiment of their ideals will say that said deity grants them their powers in exchange for their service, but more agnostic (or even atheistic) divine casters can cast the same spells. This isn't farfetched in a setting where principles like law, chaos, good and evil are fundamental forces of the universe the same as air, earth, fire and water - less-devout divine spellcasters are tapping into those forces to power their spells, much like how arcane spellcasters tap into the magic pervading the world.

It's telling that all the (core) divine spellcasters of 3rd Edition base their spellcasting on their Wisdom score, which represents their willpower, common sense, intuition and perception of the world around them, allowing them to sense and tap into those metaphysical forces or form a connection with a higher power. Compare that with wizards who use Intelligence, aka book learning and reasoning, and sorcerers and warlocks who use Charisma, their force of personality and confidence.

Of course, that's just how one edition describes it. 4th Edition introduced "primal spirits," the "spiritual expression of the world itself" like the Great Bear and World Serpent, which power a whole family of "primal" character classes. And because I'm deeply prejudiced against and disdainful towards 4E, that's about all I can tell you.

5th Edition is happily vague about where druids' power comes from, mentioning that some worship nature-oriented deities, others revere nature in a more esoteric sense, and there are probably a few holding onto 4E's primal spirits. And then there is the fact that, as in 3rd Edition, a druid and a cleric can worship the same nature deity but have very different power sets. Which isn't much weirder than a cleric who reveres Boccob as the embodiment of arcane magic to cast their divine spells, when said deity's epithet is "the Uncaring" and he does nothing to cultivate worship.

How I interpret Druids in my own homebrew setting is that they're akin to Animistic Clerics.

One Dn D is going with Arcane/Divine/Primal as the 3 divisions of magic, for the record.

The post just below your covers the basics, but it is worth keeping in mind that only covers the most common forms of magic in a default setting: there are tons of extra systems with unique magic, such as binders and blade magic and truenamers, plus magic adjacent systems like psionics and soul melds.

In addition, many settings have their own systemic rules for magic: anything goes in Greyhawk, which was the default setting for 3rd Edition. Forgotten Realms has the Weave and Shadow Weave, basically a lattice and its negative imprint that controls the flow of magic via the gods. Dragonlance had, until the Age of Mortals, all magic directly flow from and controlled by the gods; who keep a tight grip on magic and its practitioners, able to deny spellcasting to anyone they choose.

Huh.

So Sorcerers are kinda like Mutants in a sense. Born with their powers but still having to train to use them.

Wizards are the guys who study and create their own tech, only with spells (so like say Iron Man).

Dr. Strange could also be a Warlock as well as a Wizard (he taps a lot of higher powers and forces for some of his spells), and dudes like Moon Knight also count (Avatar of a god).

Or at least that's how I liken it. It's all pretty fascinating. One day, I gotta properly dip into Dn D rather than just enjoying it from the outside (thank god for Order of the Stick and all), but this was informative.

Don't forget Bards y'all. I did.

Coming out of second edition straight to fifth, I remember being surprised after having played several games to find out that Bards are no longer "half" casters but full casters in 5e, with spells up to 9th. I thought I was unobservant until I told a friend about it and he too was surprised.

I mostly picture Bard's grasp of magic to be the intuitive, "music of the spheres" kind that could be academic, but they make work through similar force of will as the Sorcerer, but applying knowledge of harmonies and narratives, putting them somewhere in the middle.

To try and use add to the above musician metaphore (oh Bahamut this is going to get confusing)

• Wizards got their magic by going to music school.
• Sorcerers are self-taught and naturally talented instrumentalists.
• Warlocks are sufficiently good looking / charming that they made a deal with the owner of a recording studio and he/she/it/they auto-tunes the Warlock into being a good singer, but now owns them.
• Bards are that one person who practiced a lot of music but majored in programming (or accountancy, history, or all of the above as college electives), then got this huge insight into music theory from it, left academics, and with sheer charm and persistence made a name for themselves in the local music scene.

Edited by Earnest on Oct 27th 2023 at 10:18:03 AM

That fits well. The natural world is a place steeped in magic, mystery and a myriad of lesser and greater divine beings worthy of veneration... or who must be appeased or avoided.

I also like how 5E talks about druids as keeping up "the Old Ways," so you could portray them as ur-clerics, holy people carrying on traditions that predate civilization, permanent temples or scripture, when gods weren't distant beings ruling from Heaven, but great bestial things in the depths of the forest.

Of course it is. Well, it can do whatever it wants, I'll be elsewhere.

Man, 3E got crazy near the end, didn't it? So let's see...

Binders practice "pact magic," which sounds much like what warlocks get up to, except the relationship between the caster and patron is different, almost reversed. The vestiges contacted by binders are entities outside the normal conceptions of life and death, somewhere beyond the planar cosmology as we know it, and are able to grant spell-like abilities and other powers to mortals but cannot affect (or be affected by) the universe themselves. Vestiges are so desperate to vicariously live again by temporarily binding themselves to mortals that they never turn down a pact when offered one, instead whether a binder makes a "good" or "bad" pact depends upon whether they were able to keep their bound vestige(s) from exerting any influence over the binder's behavior. What's striking about pact magic is how easy it is, since all you need is enough occult knowledge to draw a vestige's seal to call them up, and the willingness to bind your soul to an alien entity. This makes wizards look down on binders for taking magical shortcuts, while most clerics outright despise binders for bowing to "false gods."

Shadowcasters study an esoteric brand of magic with deep ties to the Plane of Shadow, built around the principles of sympathy (manipulate someone's shadow, manipulate them), reflection (exploiting equal and opposite reactions), and the omnipresence of darkness. The "mysteries" of shadow magic they study are "thought patterns and formulae so alien that other spells seem simple in comparison," and follow specific paths of advancement. However, as the shadowcaster masters them, their mysteries go from being cast like spells to employed as spell-like abilities and finally become supernatural abilities, making them easier for the shadowcaster to use and harder for their opponents to counter.

Truenamers learn the source code of reality. By intensive study of perhaps the oldest form of magic, the fundamental language that governs the cosmos and defines everything in it, truenamers wield power over that which they can describe, simply by speaking this truespeech. By researching their personal truename, these scholars can make recitations that remind the universe how they are supposed to be, and can purge themselves of negative effects or bolster their defenses, while researching an enemy's truename gives a truenamer great power over them. Most famously, truenamers speak utterances that alter reality. The Lexicon of the Evolving Mind affects single creatures, and each utterance in it can uniquely be "reversed" to have an opposite effect - spoken one way, inertia surge allows an ally to enjoy freedom of movement, but reversed the same utterance will root an enemy in place. The Lexicon of the Crafted Tool affects items, while the Lexicon of the Perfected Map affects terrain. Unlike conventional spellcasters, who can only work so much magic each day, the main limit on truenamers is reality itself, which resists repeated attempts to change it - the more a given utterance is used by a truenamer within a 24-hour period, the more difficult it is to speak.

Meldshapers tap into incarnum, "an amorphous magical substance made up of the soul energies of all sentient creatures - living, dead and, it is theorized, those even not yet born." Shaping incarnum has no negative effects on the soul energy being manipulated, but meldshapers recognize that they are working with the essence of all beings, which tends to give them strong moral and ethical outlooks. Incarnates embody a particular alignment and fight like incarnum-wielding paladins, soulborn are essentially fighters who supplement their abilities with soulmelds rather than combat feats, and totemists are naturalistic meldshapers who emulate the abilities of magical beasts like bulettes, gorgons or displacer beasts. Meldshapers get their name from how they learn to work incarnum into semi-permanent magical effects called soulmelds, which are worn like (and take the equipment slots of) magic items. The effects of these soulmelds can differ based on which chakra they are bound to - keeneye lenses shaped normally grant keener vision, when bound to a meldshaper's brow chakra they also allow them to see invisible creatures, or if bound to their soul chakra they instead gain a true seeing effect. Soulmelds can also be enhanced by a meldshaper shifting their own incarnum energy - their personal essentia reserve - into or out of them as needed, moment by moment.

Martial adepts are followers of the Sublime Way, a fighting tradition that allows practitioners to adopt combat stances and unleash weapon maneuvers with extraordinary effects, some even blatantly supernatural. There is argument over how martial adepts are able to do this, whether they're channeling ki energy, or moving in the precise motions and adopting the proper mindset to tap into some cosmic principle of perfection (or perhaps their stances and strikes are somatic components of very strange spells, using their weapons as arcane foci?). Crusaders are martial adepts devoted to a particular deity or principle, swordsages are "blade wizards" who rely on their maneuvers to achieve victory, while warblades focus more on combat fundamentals bolstered with maneuvers and stances. Most martial adepts can draw from only some of disciplines from the Sublime Way - Desert Wind, Devoted Spirit, Diamond Mind, Iron Heart, Setting Sun, Shadow Hand, Stone Dragon, Tiger Claw, and White Raven - each with their own key skill and favored weapons, though the rare "masters of nine" are able to learn stances and maneuvers from all the disciplines.

Psionics is of course the power of the mind, manifested to supernatural effect. In some senses, psionics and magic are very different - a wizard needs to study their spellbook, then speak words of power, make the proper gesture, and expend a material component to cast a spell, while a psion simply concentrates for a moment, tapping into their mental power. But in other regards, psionics seem like another expression of magic, as powers can be grouped into six disciplines not unlike the eight schools of magic, are ranked by level, and the default assumption is that psionic effects are subject to spell resistance, dispelling and counterspelling, and antimagic areas just like conventional magic, and vice versa. Deciding otherwise, that magic and psionics are non-equivalent systems - so that dispel magic does nothing to an ongoing psionic effect, while something with high Power Resistance would have no extra defenses against magic - tends to mess with game balance, though it can be highly flavorful.

Bards clearly sedu- er, serenade the world's background magical field into producing spells for them.

That is a hilarious and wholly accurate way to describe a warlock.

More specifically how I like to do different divine casters is that essentially form different sub-orders of the religion.

So, for example, there's a god of technology in my setting. It has clerics that worship it directly in a manner resembling monotheism and building high-tech cathedrals to it. It also has monks that augment themselves cybernetically, seeing it as a model to follow. It also has druids which hang around the post-apocalyptic ruins of fallen advanced civilizations, tend to the needs of Horizon-esque robotic creatures, and make sure the technological secrets of them don't fall into the hands of bad guys.

Or on the flipside there's a goddess of undeath of sorts. Her paladins and clerics follow a sort of macabre version of Jim Jones cult, her monks become vampiric Long Death monks, and her druids roam haunted spooky forests to make sure they stay that way.

Helping a friend design a character for a one-shot, and he’s decided to play a Dwarven Monk. It’s a Level 6 character, and he’s stuck on what Monastic path to choose. I suggested Drunken Master as a joke; would that be too cliche?

In a sense it fits as Dwarves stereotypically like to drink a lot.

Having said that I'd argue another great fit might be the Kensai monk. Dwarves are also associated with forging, so a Dwarf that forged a special blade (such as a Katana or something) that they trained to fight with fits pretty well.

Or, you could go all-in on Dwarven weapon stereotypes and give the Kensei something like a warhammer or battleaxe as their melee weapon. As long as it doesn't have the "Heavy" (with the longbow being granted an exception here) or "Special" properties, you can pick it for your melee or ranged Kensei weapon.

Neverwinter Nights 2 had Khelgar Ironfist, a dwarven fighter who aspires to be a monk. Because a bunch of monks kicked his ass when he picked a fight with them and he wants to be able to beat people up with his bare hands too.

Of course, becoming a monk requires him to grow past his more stereotypical dwarven traits.

Bought Tyranny of Dragons today. Does anyone have any sources on how I would balance and change it to be better? I've heard a common criticism is that it's far too combat-heavy.

I would check this out and the related posts.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TyrannyOfDragons/comments/okpv5h/looking_to_improve_and_homebrew_tyranny_of/

Tyranny has a very bad reputation and from what I've read it's...mostly deserved. It can be fixed, it's just a matter of how much work you're willing to do.

I'm going to be injecting a one shot into my Witchlight campaign for spooky season that I got plenty of resources from Reddit. Basically I stumbled on a random Feywild encounter table that suggested buildings can just sort of...migrate in the Feywild. So I'm going to run Shemshine's Bedtime Rhyme and place it in a section of Zybilna's library that just upped and moved. I was able to find some very cool stuff including music files for the Rhyme itself which just goes to show that someone, somewhere has probably already done a lot of work on any adventure you might think of, you just have to find it.

Okay, so what I'm getting from this so far: Make it so the players can actually get some of the masks, expand on a chapter about getting the help of Metallic dragons...