Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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Anymore, I think it’s more of an issue for the DM when most of the party doesn’t have darkvision and suddenly they all have to stop and figure out what they’ll do for a light source since no one brought torches.
One of my campaign parties is 2 humans, 1 halfling, and a Kalashtar. Casting Light on rocks each hour doesn't exactly mean there's an issue.
I might be a bit late to the discussion, but I’m personally not a big fan of the new 5.5 update. Even though 5e and 5.5 are technically cross‑compatible, our group found that—much like the jump from 3.0 to 3.5—you still need to adjust quite a lot to keep things balanced. For now, we’ve decided to continue playing 5e. Maybe in the future we’ll try a full 5.5 campaign to give it a chance but most of our group has switched to PF2E instead.
There's NO ways to cheese Pathfinder 2e & make it unbalanced, mind you. No ways at all.
Jokes aside, as long as you don't yuck someone else's yum(With only 1 clear exception), play what you want. I've become a LOT more open to Pathfinder, & Paizo, as of late, because I feel that treating corporate competitiveness akin to sports rivalries' worst traits just isn't worth it. Hence why I became a fan of the Magus, and Spellstrikes in particular as a mechanic.
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
Agreed, this is why a lot of other forums have a thread necromancy prohibition or lock threads past a certain age. It forces anyone who wants to stir the pot to actually come up with a discussion topic of their own.
I personally prefer the 5e version for the simple fact that there's an extreme wealth of content available for it both of official content and also third party. While you can still use that in 5.5e, some of the new content doesn't quite fit as nicely backwards as the old stuff can just be ported into the 5.5e.
That said, the 5.5e DMG is absolutely superior to the 5e DMG, and the Ravenloft book for 5.5e is better for running actual games in other Domans of Dread as it FINALLY has stat blocks for all those Darklords it talks about, where the 5e Van Richten's Guide just goes into a really good job of building dark lore about each one but fails to deliver a way to consistently use the Darklords. HOWEVER the 5e version has far darker lore for the Domains of Dread, where the 5.5e one has generally more whimsical one (or removes the possible inter-marriage of siblings as seen with the Darklord Duchess Saidra which now was a vaguely cursed version of Cinderella instead of Masque of the Red Death). Both have decent guides to building a Darklord and their Domain of Dread, but the 5.5e version has a nicely interactive method that uses the Tarokka deck (though I prefer the CoS deck to the new one for graphics) to help generate them quickly with inspiration seeds via card draws.
I do like that in 5.5e a lot of the commonly used "house rules" were made official to really improve QoL, but other changes such as making Smite a spell instead of an ability (which means it can be Counterspelled) are something I'm very against. I also don't like that some of the spells were changed to lose the flavor that could give you the essense of the magic.
But these are my own opinions and therefore are for me and from me and do not reflect the opinions and views of the community as a whole.
Considering Counterspell also doesn’t eat the target’s slot anymore, I wouldn’t say Smite got particularly nerfed in any aspect aside from no longer being able to just dump 4-6 in the first two turns to melt a target’s HP.
The big problem is action economy competition for bonus actions.
Paladins don’t have that many recurring Bonus Actions, imo. If they want to dual wield they can take Nick, and if they’re using other spells instead they’re also using up slots, so one should already be factoring that into their assessment of the trade-offs.
Bonus actions don't need to be recurring to be an issue -- there's lay on hands and a fair amount of channel divinity fighting for your bonus action, even if you don't do something like take polearm mastery.
Polearm mastery is an anticombo for Paladins. And it already was, because all the smites took bonus actions to begin with.
Yes, I know Divine Smite didn't. That was a design issue all its own. It had the effect of privileging that smite over all the others, especially with the awkward pre-casting mechanic. Making them all spells is a straight-up improvement in the way the class plays, and it toning down their ability to nuke enemies out of existence is also not a bad thing.
Anyway, having several abilities that use your bonus action isn't bad design, unless there's overcompetition, and smites, lay on hands, and channel divinity are all sometimes foods.
I was responding to the statement that it's not a significant nerf. The smallest nerf that would accomplish the original objective (reduce paladin alpha strike) would be to add 'once per turn' to divine smite, with no other change.
Whether this is a deserved nerf is a separate question. Personally, I always considered the most broken thing about paladins to be aura of protection, not divine smite.
I still personally don't like it. It's just one of my personal pet peeves for 5.5 system.
If you came in after 5.5 existed, and do not know 5.0, then yes.
5.5 it is a better system hands down.
I for one like the fact that there is at least one Str-based martial out there that has a reason to avoid the tired PAM+GWM routine. It means my knight in shining armor might (gasp) actually want to use a sword and shield!
If you're going to use a shield, might as well go rapier and shield and be a dex fighter. It's really only those two feats that make strength viable.