2) Magical Cunning - 1 Action (2 Recoveries at Level 7) - Rod Of The Pact Keeper is far superior than Magical Cunning, sorry I said it.
3) Eldritch Master - Give Warlock a Patron Transformation. A better form. Having only all your spell slots backs is far from cool and creative.
4) Pact of Blade (THIRSTING BLADE ) - Make it clear that's is level 5 Warlock for 2 attacks e level 11 for 3 attacks. More attacks don't stack.
Rod of the pact keeper hasn't gone away. This is like saying flame tongue sword is better than brutal critical. It is but that is such a weird statement.
The problem with the suggestion is that is just a sorc without meta magic and instead with invocations.
(At level 3 with tome the half caster with 2 slots of second level and 1 extra first from tome has 4 first and 2 second. The suggestion to trade first level slots for second.... that is just font of magic. We already have that class)
Is a cleric just a druid without wildshape, because they both have divine/primal order? Is a ranger just a rogue without sneak attack, because they both have expertise? :)
Yes, I'm using a silly counter-argument. Sorry about that! (She's lying!)
It's okay to have cross-class feature overlap, especially if those features aren't identical. Sorcerers juggle spell slots by means of their sorcery point pool. Lilith's Model propose the ability to cannibalise your own magic to fuel another class feature. We also see this with druid eating slots to get more wild shape. Or bards eating slots to gain more inspiration. The fact that this class feature also happen to involve magic doesn't make it completely analogous with sorcery, right?
And invocations are kind of a big deal, don't you think? That's some class-defining stuff right there. Even if one spellcasting-related feature might make you go "That reminds me of what sorcerers can do!", all you need to do is look at your big old pile of invocations and you'll be reminded of what class you are playing :)
But, hey, it's totally fine to disagree. That's how we get new ideas, yeah? :D
Alright. Hang on. That HAS been addressed. Multiple times. We can say that we want the core identity of a class to remain the same (ie the short rest mechanic) and also say that we needed more spells.
That's part of the issue. Pact Magic is not "the warlock's core identity." There are a significant number of warlock players - myself among them - who do not give a shit about Pact Magic and are into the class for Invocations. Give me boring old half-caster progression but also a big sizzling heap of improved and expanded Invocations and I'm happy as a kobold in a den. For some people, the short rest thing is "core identity." For others, the short rest thing is an ugly, unfun shackle that significantly hinders the class for no real reason and with no real justification. All it does is eat up a smegging shit-ton of the class's power budget for...basically nothing, since the nature of Pact Magic means players are simply not allowed to cast spells unless they are literally six seconds from death and have absolutely no other choice.
Th e idea was great, the balancing wasn’t. Add one more spell slot earlier. Get them to the 3 spells level around 7. That would solve a lot of the problems that have been raised.
you get to cast more spells. Using one out of combat is less risky. And it feels like the warlock we love. I can say the warlock needed more spell slots or more ability to cast spells and it not mean we need a full on rework.
How does this solve the fact that you cannot use Pact slots unless the world is literally on the brink of exploding? You get so incredibly few Pact slots in a day that spending one is equivalent to a wizard expending half their entire spell budget in a single moment. Almost nothing ever warrants that sort of expenditure, so the warlock simply never gets to cast leveled spells. At all. If you are not directly and immediately saving several lives from abrupt termination within the next six seconds, it's not worth casting a Pact spell and never will be. Any time you do so anyways, you are actively and profligately wasting that spellcasting and you bloody well always know it. That never feels good, knowing that simply using your resources is wasting your resources in almost all cases. Bolting one whole entire extra Pact slot per day onto the total halfway through most campaigns isn't really going to make that constant feeling of wasting your magic any better.
Genuinely, can we have a discussion on this. What is the problem with short rests when you don’t have a specific deadline? IE we know a cultist is doing a ritual. By the end of the day it’s done. Doomsday. We have that day to prepare and invade. You get past the first encounter and everyone’s bloodied. You have a few hours before the end. Why would it not make sense for you to spend the time to find a moment to bandage? I am not saying t stop time. I am saying barricade a door, create illusions, use resources to by the time. Hell if they just rested in the open the dm is absolutely fair game to interrupt.
I think this is where you and the rest of the community seem to differ. We are NOT advocating for just stopping time. We are not advocating for people to be able to take short tests at all times.
what we are saying is that they can fit into an adventuring day. There are times they should be disallowed, times they should have consequences, and times they should be easy to take. Your travelling, have a random encounter in the morning but know you may have more to do on the road. Why would you not pause and bandage? How would you know you won’t find more trouble. Most people would stop and do first aid if someone got injured, even in tense situations.
can’t we agree there there is a middle ground here. That players shouldn’t just be able to stop time and heal whenever. But that there should be times where short tests make sense, both narratively and mechanically?
If people want to bake one thousand three hundred and seventeen short rests into their game every single adventuring day, more power to 'em. if they want to make all short-rest resources into at-will resources instead, okay. That's their choice to make.
Classes should not be designed such that people who do not choose to do this are unable to effectively utilize the class. The warlock is designed in such a way that a lack of short rests dramatically hinders the class, in ways that simply are not true for any other class in the game. Even the monk, i.e. the martial version of "I need to sit down for an hour and powder my gonads after literally every single individual action I take", is not so crippled by lack of short rests as the warlock is. They get more ki, and while ki is critical to their kit it's not as critical. A monk can exist without ki more easily than a warlock can exist without Pact Magic slots, as evinced by the fact that nobody ever says "monks get so little ki they feel like they can't ever use their ki abilities, so they end up never spending their ki at all."
People say that all the damn time about warlocks and their Pact Magic, though. The answer is not to continue castigating and berating people who do not, for whichever reason, take frequent and gratuitous short rests in their game. The answer is to make the warlock less ******* cripplingly over-reliant on short rests, give them some god damned endurance for an adventuring day.
I don't like short rests, no. I consider them to be dodgy game design at best and an annoying, pacing-ruining, immersion-breaking crutch at worst. Sitting down to powder your gonads for an hour in-game, while above the table everyone immediately stops roleplaying and starts doing a bunch of janky hit-dice bookkeeping for the next ten minutes, immediately ruins whatever narrative momentum and tension you've built up as a DM.
Were you running a tense infiltration mission, pitting the players against a nervous, alert guard force and keeping everyone at the edge of their seat wondering if it was all going to snap? WHELP. Not anymore. Tension gone, pacing ruined, infiltration mission now wrecked.
Running a gruelling survival game against a harsh and uncaring world, where resources matter and every day is a struggle? WHELP. Not anymore. Tension gone, pacing ruined, survival challenges negated and avoided for another day.
Running a defense mission where the PCs have to aid the local villagers in repulsing waves of the shambling dead, the pressure building and building and challenging the players to make smarter and smarter use of limited resources? WHELP. Not anymore. Tension gone, pacing ruined, zombie survival challenge relegated to pointless side gig.
There isn't really one single tense, exciting, engaging narrative line I can imagine that isn't thoroughly ruined by cramming an hour-long gonad-powdering session and ten IRL minutes of janky short-rest bookkeeping into it. It's one reason our table's taken to our First Aid rules - rolling Healer rolls happens smoothly as part of the narrative, taking a few precious moments to treat the worst of someone's wounds in the handful of breaths between challenges. As opposed to "nah, we're done dealing with challenges for a while, we're sitting down to powder our gonads for an hour. Don't bug us, eh?" First Aid helps keep the pacing tight and the sessions memorable in a way short rests are fundamentally incapable of doing.
And I guarantee my table's not the only one that thinks so, no matter how often people disparage us on the Internet over it.
Fixed the typo that messed up the whole chart. I also added the Magic Cunning columns to avoid being accusations of misrepresenting data.
But yeah, I really don't see Magic Cunning being a good fix for issues people have with warlocks. It's makes short-restless play better but it potentially makes Warlocks stronger than fullcasters. The best solution is the give more pactslots up front, but only have a small number recover with a short rest.
The problem with the suggestion is that is just a sorc without meta magic and instead with invocations.
(At level 3 with tome the half caster with 2 slots of second level and 1 extra first from tome has 4 first and 2 second. The suggestion to trade first level slots for second.... that is just font of magic. We already have that class)
Is a cleric just a druid without wildshape, because they both have divine/primal order? Is a ranger just a rogue without sneak attack, because they both have expertise? :)
Yes, I'm using a silly counter-argument. Sorry about that! (She's lying!)
It's okay to have cross-class feature overlap, especially if those features aren't identical. Sorcerers juggle spell slots by means of their sorcery point pool. Lilith's Model propose the ability to cannibalise your own magic to fuel another class feature. We also see this with druid eating slots to get more wild shape. Or bards eating slots to gain more inspiration. The fact that this class feature also happen to involve magic doesn't make it completely analogous with sorcery, right?
And invocations are kind of a big deal, don't you think? That's some class-defining stuff right there. Even if one spellcasting-related feature might make you go "That reminds me of what sorcerers can do!", all you need to do is look at your big old pile of invocations and you'll be reminded of what class you are playing :)
But, hey, it's totally fine to disagree. That's how we get new ideas, yeah? :D
Just going to say absolutely to your last statement out the gate.
Followed by, if you want that risk reward playstyle of spell cannibalization you can do it with the sorc.
Druid and cleric are very similar, but the spell list is really the big difference as well as wild shape vs CD do very different things. But they do have similarities.
Alright. Hang on. That HAS been addressed. Multiple times. We can say that we want the core identity of a class to remain the same (ie the short rest mechanic) and also say that we needed more spells.
That's part of the issue. Pact Magic is not "the warlock's core identity." There are a significant number of warlock players - myself among them - who do not give a shit about Pact Magic and are into the class for Invocations. Give me boring old half-caster progression but also a big sizzling heap of improved and expanded Invocations and I'm happy as a kobold in a den. For some people, the short rest thing is "core identity." For others, the short rest thing is an ugly, unfun shackle that significantly hinders the class for no real reason and with no real justification. All it does is eat up a smegging shit-ton of the class's power budget for...basically nothing, since the nature of Pact Magic means players are simply not allowed to cast spells unless they are literally six seconds from death and have absolutely no other choice.
Th e idea was great, the balancing wasn’t. Add one more spell slot earlier. Get them to the 3 spells level around 7. That would solve a lot of the problems that have been raised.
you get to cast more spells. Using one out of combat is less risky. And it feels like the warlock we love. I can say the warlock needed more spell slots or more ability to cast spells and it not mean we need a full on rework.
How does this solve the fact that you cannot use Pact slots unless the world is literally on the brink of exploding? You get so incredibly few Pact slots in a day that spending one is equivalent to a wizard expending half their entire spell budget in a single moment. Almost nothing ever warrants that sort of expenditure, so the warlock simply never gets to cast leveled spells. At all. If you are not directly and immediately saving several lives from abrupt termination within the next six seconds, it's not worth casting a Pact spell and never will be. Any time you do so anyways, you are actively and profligately wasting that spellcasting and you bloody well always know it. That never feels good, knowing that simply using your resources is wasting your resources in almost all cases. Bolting one whole entire extra Pact slot per day onto the total halfway through most campaigns isn't really going to make that constant feeling of wasting your magic any better.
Genuinely, can we have a discussion on this. What is the problem with short rests when you don’t have a specific deadline? IE we know a cultist is doing a ritual. By the end of the day it’s done. Doomsday. We have that day to prepare and invade. You get past the first encounter and everyone’s bloodied. You have a few hours before the end. Why would it not make sense for you to spend the time to find a moment to bandage? I am not saying t stop time. I am saying barricade a door, create illusions, use resources to by the time. Hell if they just rested in the open the dm is absolutely fair game to interrupt.
I think this is where you and the rest of the community seem to differ. We are NOT advocating for just stopping time. We are not advocating for people to be able to take short tests at all times.
what we are saying is that they can fit into an adventuring day. There are times they should be disallowed, times they should have consequences, and times they should be easy to take. Your travelling, have a random encounter in the morning but know you may have more to do on the road. Why would you not pause and bandage? How would you know you won’t find more trouble. Most people would stop and do first aid if someone got injured, even in tense situations.
can’t we agree there there is a middle ground here. That players shouldn’t just be able to stop time and heal whenever. But that there should be times where short tests make sense, both narratively and mechanically?
If people want to bake one thousand three hundred and seventeen short rests into their game every single adventuring day, more power to 'em. if they want to make all short-rest resources into at-will resources instead, okay. That's their choice to make.
Classes should not be designed such that people who do not choose to do this are unable to effectively utilize the class. The warlock is designed in such a way that a lack of short rests dramatically hinders the class, in ways that simply are not true for any other class in the game. Even the monk, i.e. the martial version of "I need to sit down for an hour and powder my gonads after literally every single individual action I take", is not so crippled by lack of short rests as the warlock is. They get more ki, and while ki is critical to their kit it's not as critical. A monk can exist without ki more easily than a warlock can exist without Pact Magic slots, as evinced by the fact that nobody ever says "monks get so little ki they feel like they can't ever use their ki abilities, so they end up never spending their ki at all."
People say that all the damn time about warlocks and their Pact Magic, though. The answer is not to continue castigating and berating people who do not, for whichever reason, take frequent and gratuitous short rests in their game. The answer is to make the warlock less ******* cripplingly over-reliant on short rests, give them some god damned endurance for an adventuring day.
I don't like short rests, no. I consider them to be dodgy game design at best and an annoying, pacing-ruining, immersion-breaking crutch at worst. Sitting down to powder your gonads for an hour in-game, while above the table everyone immediately stops roleplaying and starts doing a bunch of janky hit-dice bookkeeping for the next ten minutes, immediately ruins whatever narrative momentum and tension you've built up as a DM.
Were you running a tense infiltration mission, pitting the players against a nervous, alert guard force and keeping everyone at the edge of their seat wondering if it was all going to snap? WHELP. Not anymore. Tension gone, pacing ruined, infiltration mission now wrecked.
Running a gruelling survival game against a harsh and uncaring world, where resources matter and every day is a struggle? WHELP. Not anymore. Tension gone, pacing ruined, survival challenges negated and avoided for another day.
Running a defense mission where the PCs have to aid the local villagers in repulsing waves of the shambling dead, the pressure building and building and challenging the players to make smarter and smarter use of limited resources? WHELP. Not anymore. Tension gone, pacing ruined, zombie survival challenge relegated to pointless side gig.
There isn't really one single tense, exciting, engaging narrative line I can imagine that isn't thoroughly ruined by cramming an hour-long gonad-powdering session and ten IRL minutes of janky short-rest bookkeeping into it. It's one reason our table's taken to our First Aid rules - rolling Healer rolls happens smoothly as part of the narrative, taking a few precious moments to treat the worst of someone's wounds in the handful of breaths between challenges. As opposed to "nah, we're done dealing with challenges for a while, we're sitting down to powder our gonads for an hour. Don't bug us, eh?" First Aid helps keep the pacing tight and the sessions memorable in a way short rests are fundamentally incapable of doing.
And I guarantee my table's not the only one that thinks so, no matter how often people disparage us on the Internet over it.
Why is a short rest in your game not 5 minutes of bandaging your wounds. Your players actively spend time out of combat recovering. That is all a short rest is. You are calling it pace killing while simultaneously doing it just not letting your team recover their resources for it. Do you just want to punish anyone who picks a class that has resource management different than your view?
The view on pact slots tells me that this type of resource management isnt for you and that is ok. Not every class is for everyone. Flavor is free.
Alright. Hang on. That HAS been addressed. Multiple times. We can say that we want the core identity of a class to remain the same (ie the short rest mechanic) and also say that we needed more spells.
That's part of the issue. Pact Magic is not "the warlock's core identity." There are a significant number of warlock players - myself among them - who do not give a shit about Pact Magic and are into the class for Invocations. Give me boring old half-caster progression but also a big sizzling heap of improved and expanded Invocations and I'm happy as a kobold in a den. For some people, the short rest thing is "core identity." For others, the short rest thing is an ugly, unfun shackle that significantly hinders the class for no real reason and with no real justification. All it does is eat up a smegging shit-ton of the class's power budget for...basically nothing, since the nature of Pact Magic means players are simply not allowed to cast spells unless they are literally six seconds from death and have absolutely no other choice.
Th e idea was great, the balancing wasn’t. Add one more spell slot earlier. Get them to the 3 spells level around 7. That would solve a lot of the problems that have been raised.
you get to cast more spells. Using one out of combat is less risky. And it feels like the warlock we love. I can say the warlock needed more spell slots or more ability to cast spells and it not mean we need a full on rework.
How does this solve the fact that you cannot use Pact slots unless the world is literally on the brink of exploding? You get so incredibly few Pact slots in a day that spending one is equivalent to a wizard expending half their entire spell budget in a single moment. Almost nothing ever warrants that sort of expenditure, so the warlock simply never gets to cast leveled spells. At all. If you are not directly and immediately saving several lives from abrupt termination within the next six seconds, it's not worth casting a Pact spell and never will be. Any time you do so anyways, you are actively and profligately wasting that spellcasting and you bloody well always know it. That never feels good, knowing that simply using your resources is wasting your resources in almost all cases. Bolting one whole entire extra Pact slot per day onto the total halfway through most campaigns isn't really going to make that constant feeling of wasting your magic any better.
Genuinely, can we have a discussion on this. What is the problem with short rests when you don’t have a specific deadline? IE we know a cultist is doing a ritual. By the end of the day it’s done. Doomsday. We have that day to prepare and invade. You get past the first encounter and everyone’s bloodied. You have a few hours before the end. Why would it not make sense for you to spend the time to find a moment to bandage? I am not saying t stop time. I am saying barricade a door, create illusions, use resources to by the time. Hell if they just rested in the open the dm is absolutely fair game to interrupt.
I think this is where you and the rest of the community seem to differ. We are NOT advocating for just stopping time. We are not advocating for people to be able to take short tests at all times.
what we are saying is that they can fit into an adventuring day. There are times they should be disallowed, times they should have consequences, and times they should be easy to take. Your travelling, have a random encounter in the morning but know you may have more to do on the road. Why would you not pause and bandage? How would you know you won’t find more trouble. Most people would stop and do first aid if someone got injured, even in tense situations.
can’t we agree there there is a middle ground here. That players shouldn’t just be able to stop time and heal whenever. But that there should be times where short tests make sense, both narratively and mechanically?
If people want to bake one thousand three hundred and seventeen short rests into their game every single adventuring day, more power to 'em. if they want to make all short-rest resources into at-will resources instead, okay. That's their choice to make.
Classes should not be designed such that people who do not choose to do this are unable to effectively utilize the class. The warlock is designed in such a way that a lack of short rests dramatically hinders the class, in ways that simply are not true for any other class in the game. Even the monk, i.e. the martial version of "I need to sit down for an hour and powder my gonads after literally every single individual action I take", is not so crippled by lack of short rests as the warlock is. They get more ki, and while ki is critical to their kit it's not as critical. A monk can exist without ki more easily than a warlock can exist without Pact Magic slots, as evinced by the fact that nobody ever says "monks get so little ki they feel like they can't ever use their ki abilities, so they end up never spending their ki at all."
People say that all the damn time about warlocks and their Pact Magic, though. The answer is not to continue castigating and berating people who do not, for whichever reason, take frequent and gratuitous short rests in their game. The answer is to make the warlock less ******* cripplingly over-reliant on short rests, give them some god damned endurance for an adventuring day.
I don't like short rests, no. I consider them to be dodgy game design at best and an annoying, pacing-ruining, immersion-breaking crutch at worst. Sitting down to powder your gonads for an hour in-game, while above the table everyone immediately stops roleplaying and starts doing a bunch of janky hit-dice bookkeeping for the next ten minutes, immediately ruins whatever narrative momentum and tension you've built up as a DM.
Were you running a tense infiltration mission, pitting the players against a nervous, alert guard force and keeping everyone at the edge of their seat wondering if it was all going to snap? WHELP. Not anymore. Tension gone, pacing ruined, infiltration mission now wrecked.
Running a gruelling survival game against a harsh and uncaring world, where resources matter and every day is a struggle? WHELP. Not anymore. Tension gone, pacing ruined, survival challenges negated and avoided for another day.
Running a defense mission where the PCs have to aid the local villagers in repulsing waves of the shambling dead, the pressure building and building and challenging the players to make smarter and smarter use of limited resources? WHELP. Not anymore. Tension gone, pacing ruined, zombie survival challenge relegated to pointless side gig.
There isn't really one single tense, exciting, engaging narrative line I can imagine that isn't thoroughly ruined by cramming an hour-long gonad-powdering session and ten IRL minutes of janky short-rest bookkeeping into it. It's one reason our table's taken to our First Aid rules - rolling Healer rolls happens smoothly as part of the narrative, taking a few precious moments to treat the worst of someone's wounds in the handful of breaths between challenges. As opposed to "nah, we're done dealing with challenges for a while, we're sitting down to powder our gonads for an hour. Don't bug us, eh?" First Aid helps keep the pacing tight and the sessions memorable in a way short rests are fundamentally incapable of doing.
And I guarantee my table's not the only one that thinks so, no matter how often people disparage us on the Internet over it.
Why is a short rest in your game not 5 minutes of bandaging your wounds. Your players actively spend time out of combat recovering. That is all a short rest is. You are calling it pace killing while simultaneously doing it just not letting your team recover their resources for it. Do you just want to punish anyone who picks a class that has resource management different than your view?
The view on pact slots tells me that this type of resource management isnt for you and that is ok. Not every class is for everyone. Flavor is free.
Obviously if you take even a 5 min break the BBEG wins and everyone in existence is either enslaved or killed and the players lose. Play any other way you are playing wrong.
That style of play is fine. They want everything to feel like an episode of 24, but I think that can already be done by using the gritty realism rules where long rests are a week and short are 8 hours. That way, when you start a series of fights over a number of days to track down the idol, or stop the ritual, or whatever, the wizard knows up front that if they nova everything day 1 they're weak days 2-7 whereas a warlock knows they'll be consistent in their power each day.
That style of play is fine. They want everything to feel like an episode of 24, but I think that can already be done by using the gritty realism rules where long rests are a week and short are 8 hours. That way, when you start a series of fights over a number of days to track down the idol, or stop the ritual, or whatever, the wizard knows up front that if they nova everything day 1 they're weak days 2-7 whereas a warlock knows they'll be consistent in their power each day.
It works either way. With few fights in a day 8 hour is short and 2 days is long. But even 24 had "breaks in the action" from a narrative stand point, and they didn't take an entire episode. Those are the 5 minute short rests. Every single movie, book, show, game has a break in the action. To let the character moments exist and to not overwhelm the reader/audience it is never 2 hours of continuous action.
Why is a short rest in your game not 5 minutes of bandaging your wounds. Your players actively spend time out of combat recovering. That is all a short rest is. You are calling it pace killing while simultaneously doing it just not letting your team recover their resources for it. Do you just want to punish anyone who picks a class that has resource management different than your view?
The view on pact slots tells me that this type of resource management isnt for you and that is ok. Not every class is for everyone. Flavor is free.
Because it's still ten minutes of tension-killing, pacing-destroying out-of-game todgery that utterly ruins the mood whenever it happens. Nothing throws players out of a session harder or faster than spending ten minutes doing a bunch of fiddly bookkeeping instead of playing D&D.
Why is a short rest in your game not 5 minutes of bandaging your wounds. Your players actively spend time out of combat recovering. That is all a short rest is. You are calling it pace killing while simultaneously doing it just not letting your team recover their resources for it. Do you just want to punish anyone who picks a class that has resource management different than your view?
The view on pact slots tells me that this type of resource management isnt for you and that is ok. Not every class is for everyone. Flavor is free.
Because it's still ten minutes of tension-killing, pacing-destroying out-of-game todgery that utterly ruins the mood whenever it happens. Nothing throws players out of a session harder or faster than spending ten minutes doing a bunch of fiddly bookkeeping instead of playing D&D.
What are you doing that makes it take 10 minutes? Roll a hit die, add your Con mod, jot down the number, repeat until you've got enough HP, and then write down new numbers in 0-2 of your features. Definitely not 10 minutes. Plus, I think I'll note that we're literally on the forums for a tool that lets you do it all in half a minute.
Does the mood die every time someone in your group makes an attack roll?
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Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny. Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
How I'm posting based on text formatting: Mod Hat Off - Mod Hat Also Off (I'm not a mod)
Why is a short rest in your game not 5 minutes of bandaging your wounds. Your players actively spend time out of combat recovering. That is all a short rest is. You are calling it pace killing while simultaneously doing it just not letting your team recover their resources for it. Do you just want to punish anyone who picks a class that has resource management different than your view?
The view on pact slots tells me that this type of resource management isnt for you and that is ok. Not every class is for everyone. Flavor is free.
Because it's still ten minutes of tension-killing, pacing-destroying out-of-game todgery that utterly ruins the mood whenever it happens. Nothing throws players out of a session harder or faster than spending ten minutes doing a bunch of fiddly bookkeeping instead of playing D&D.
Ok. You are doing some of that same book keeping when you use the healers kit to heal. You are using charges of a healers kit ( no differen tha keeping track of hit dice). Rolling to see how much health is recovered. Adding the total rolled to the amount if current health. This is 80% of the book keeping right here. The few abilities recovered are much easier to track the rest of that. Tracking healer kit charges, potions...... you are doing the same book keeping between fights minus letting people recover their abilities. At this point it is a difference of how you view doing the exact same thing because it's name is something you dont like.
Then there is the rest between sessions. I doubt the session lasts long enough for 8 fights.
Edit: hell every time someone casts a spell they are doing bookkeeping. You are doing it the whole game. I am genuinely very confused.
When a character uses a healer's kit to apply first aid to another character, that's an in-game, in-character interaction. "That looks rough; here, let me patch you up." "Thanks, it doesn't feel great, appreciate it." Obviously, casting a spell is an in-game, in-character action. Knocking one point off a healer's kit is a quick part of resolving an in-game, in-character interaction.
Short rests?
"A'ight, let's everybody stop playing D&D for however the booty buttcheeks long it takes y'all to fiddle with your dice towers enough to find some hit dice you can throw. This super tense stealth infiltration y'all are literally in the middle of? Naw, nobody cares anymore, mood's broke now that Short Rest has been invoked. Just do whatever I guess, and we'll figure out playing some more D&D when y'all are done, maybe."
When a character uses a healer's kit to apply first aid to another character, that's an in-game, in-character interaction. "That looks rough; here, let me patch you up." "Thanks, it doesn't feel great, appreciate it." Obviously, casting a spell is an in-game, in-character action. Knocking one point off a healer's kit is a quick part of resolving an in-game, in-character interaction.
Short rests?
"A'ight, let's everybody stop playing D&D for however the booty buttcheeks long it takes y'all to fiddle with your dice towers enough to find some hit dice you can throw. This super tense stealth infiltration y'all are literally in the middle of? Naw, nobody cares anymore, mood's broke now that Short Rest has been invoked. Just do whatever I guess, and we'll figure out playing some more D&D when y'all are done, maybe."
So you are capable of role playing the in game use of a healers kit but not the in game use of a short rest. That makes 0 sense.
Egads! Needing to roll a die with a specific number of sides? Multiple times? How very jarring! Can we get back to playing DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, where we do nothing of the sort?
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Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny. Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
How I'm posting based on text formatting: Mod Hat Off - Mod Hat Also Off (I'm not a mod)
When a character uses a healer's kit to apply first aid to another character, that's an in-game, in-character interaction. "That looks rough; here, let me patch you up." "Thanks, it doesn't feel great, appreciate it." Obviously, casting a spell is an in-game, in-character action. Knocking one point off a healer's kit is a quick part of resolving an in-game, in-character interaction.
Short rests?
"A'ight, let's everybody stop playing D&D for however the booty buttcheeks long it takes y'all to fiddle with your dice towers enough to find some hit dice you can throw. This super tense stealth infiltration y'all are literally in the middle of? Naw, nobody cares anymore, mood's broke now that Short Rest has been invoked. Just do whatever I guess, and we'll figure out playing some more D&D when y'all are done, maybe."
So you are bothered by the name, not the mechanic. The "you look rough their buddy let me patch you up" roll hit dice, recover health you get your abilities back as you take time patching up wounds and steeling your nerves for the battle ahead. It is literally the exact same thing. That healer kit interaction is a short rest. That is what a short rest is and represents. You have been doing it the whole time, just didn't let people recover abilities and called it something else.
Now, if it works for her and her groups, there is no problem, even though it seems illogical to most of us, just as she complains, only without recovering some traits.
Anyway, I come here to comment on my alternative so that the witcher is viable without having so little magic outside of certain invocations:
ALL short rest traits should be limited to just once per long rest.
Without removing the "MAGICAL CUNNING", all warlock subclasses should grant free casting, 1 time per long rest, of a spell from their subclass at EACH SPELL LEVEL LOWER THAN THE PACT SLOT LEVEL.
MAGICAL CUNNING: You can perform an esoteric rite for 1 minute, at the end of which you regain half of those spell slots (round up) and you regain one free use of a spent spell cast from your subclass. Once you use this feature, you can’t do so again until you finish a Long Rest. If you’ve run out of uses of this feature, you can spend as many uses of your hit dice as the level of your pact slots to reuse this feature before naturally regaining its availability.
ELDRITCH MASTER: Add: and you regain ALL FREE USES the free uses you would have spent casting a spell of your subclass.
This way "MAGICAL CUNNING" (It should also be like this with other traits that partially recharge some resources.) would NOT be tied to completely exhausting ALL pact spell slots, the basics, and would allow the trait to be reused more than once consuming hit dice. This, along with limiting all short rest traits from being used more than once per day, will reduce reliance on short rests. And along with greater participation in your patron's spells, the sorcerer will NOT be so limited in magic, maintaining pact magic.
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Fixing Warlock is easy:
1) EB scales with Warlock Levels Only.
2) Magical Cunning - 1 Action (2 Recoveries at Level 7) - Rod Of The Pact Keeper is far superior than Magical Cunning, sorry I said it.
3) Eldritch Master - Give Warlock a Patron Transformation. A better form. Having only all your spell slots backs is far from cool and creative.
4) Pact of Blade (THIRSTING BLADE ) - Make it clear that's is level 5 Warlock for 2 attacks e level 11 for 3 attacks. More attacks don't stack.
Rod of the pact keeper hasn't gone away. This is like saying flame tongue sword is better than brutal critical. It is but that is such a weird statement.
Is a cleric just a druid without wildshape, because they both have divine/primal order? Is a ranger just a rogue without sneak attack, because they both have expertise? :)
Yes, I'm using a silly counter-argument. Sorry about that! (She's lying!)
It's okay to have cross-class feature overlap, especially if those features aren't identical. Sorcerers juggle spell slots by means of their sorcery point pool. Lilith's Model propose the ability to cannibalise your own magic to fuel another class feature. We also see this with druid eating slots to get more wild shape. Or bards eating slots to gain more inspiration. The fact that this class feature also happen to involve magic doesn't make it completely analogous with sorcery, right?
And invocations are kind of a big deal, don't you think? That's some class-defining stuff right there. Even if one spellcasting-related feature might make you go "That reminds me of what sorcerers can do!", all you need to do is look at your big old pile of invocations and you'll be reminded of what class you are playing :)
But, hey, it's totally fine to disagree. That's how we get new ideas, yeah? :D
That's part of the issue. Pact Magic is not "the warlock's core identity." There are a significant number of warlock players - myself among them - who do not give a shit about Pact Magic and are into the class for Invocations. Give me boring old half-caster progression but also a big sizzling heap of improved and expanded Invocations and I'm happy as a kobold in a den. For some people, the short rest thing is "core identity." For others, the short rest thing is an ugly, unfun shackle that significantly hinders the class for no real reason and with no real justification. All it does is eat up a smegging shit-ton of the class's power budget for...basically nothing, since the nature of Pact Magic means players are simply not allowed to cast spells unless they are literally six seconds from death and have absolutely no other choice.
How does this solve the fact that you cannot use Pact slots unless the world is literally on the brink of exploding? You get so incredibly few Pact slots in a day that spending one is equivalent to a wizard expending half their entire spell budget in a single moment. Almost nothing ever warrants that sort of expenditure, so the warlock simply never gets to cast leveled spells. At all. If you are not directly and immediately saving several lives from abrupt termination within the next six seconds, it's not worth casting a Pact spell and never will be. Any time you do so anyways, you are actively and profligately wasting that spellcasting and you bloody well always know it. That never feels good, knowing that simply using your resources is wasting your resources in almost all cases. Bolting one whole entire extra Pact slot per day onto the total halfway through most campaigns isn't really going to make that constant feeling of wasting your magic any better.
If people want to bake one thousand three hundred and seventeen short rests into their game every single adventuring day, more power to 'em. if they want to make all short-rest resources into at-will resources instead, okay. That's their choice to make.
Classes should not be designed such that people who do not choose to do this are unable to effectively utilize the class. The warlock is designed in such a way that a lack of short rests dramatically hinders the class, in ways that simply are not true for any other class in the game. Even the monk, i.e. the martial version of "I need to sit down for an hour and powder my gonads after literally every single individual action I take", is not so crippled by lack of short rests as the warlock is. They get more ki, and while ki is critical to their kit it's not as critical. A monk can exist without ki more easily than a warlock can exist without Pact Magic slots, as evinced by the fact that nobody ever says "monks get so little ki they feel like they can't ever use their ki abilities, so they end up never spending their ki at all."
People say that all the damn time about warlocks and their Pact Magic, though. The answer is not to continue castigating and berating people who do not, for whichever reason, take frequent and gratuitous short rests in their game. The answer is to make the warlock less ******* cripplingly over-reliant on short rests, give them some god damned endurance for an adventuring day.
I don't like short rests, no. I consider them to be dodgy game design at best and an annoying, pacing-ruining, immersion-breaking crutch at worst. Sitting down to powder your gonads for an hour in-game, while above the table everyone immediately stops roleplaying and starts doing a bunch of janky hit-dice bookkeeping for the next ten minutes, immediately ruins whatever narrative momentum and tension you've built up as a DM.
Were you running a tense infiltration mission, pitting the players against a nervous, alert guard force and keeping everyone at the edge of their seat wondering if it was all going to snap? WHELP. Not anymore. Tension gone, pacing ruined, infiltration mission now wrecked.
Running a gruelling survival game against a harsh and uncaring world, where resources matter and every day is a struggle? WHELP. Not anymore. Tension gone, pacing ruined, survival challenges negated and avoided for another day.
Running a defense mission where the PCs have to aid the local villagers in repulsing waves of the shambling dead, the pressure building and building and challenging the players to make smarter and smarter use of limited resources? WHELP. Not anymore. Tension gone, pacing ruined, zombie survival challenge relegated to pointless side gig.
There isn't really one single tense, exciting, engaging narrative line I can imagine that isn't thoroughly ruined by cramming an hour-long gonad-powdering session and ten IRL minutes of janky short-rest bookkeeping into it. It's one reason our table's taken to our First Aid rules - rolling Healer rolls happens smoothly as part of the narrative, taking a few precious moments to treat the worst of someone's wounds in the handful of breaths between challenges. As opposed to "nah, we're done dealing with challenges for a while, we're sitting down to powder our gonads for an hour. Don't bug us, eh?" First Aid helps keep the pacing tight and the sessions memorable in a way short rests are fundamentally incapable of doing.
And I guarantee my table's not the only one that thinks so, no matter how often people disparage us on the Internet over it.
Please do not contact or message me.
You need to find Pact keeper ^^
Also, Pact of Blade Warlocks would have more freedom.
Fixed the typo that messed up the whole chart. I also added the Magic Cunning columns to avoid being accusations of misrepresenting data.
But yeah, I really don't see Magic Cunning being a good fix for issues people have with warlocks. It's makes short-restless play better but it potentially makes Warlocks stronger than fullcasters. The best solution is the give more pactslots up front, but only have a small number recover with a short rest.
Welcome to the D&D community everyone! Where strangers on the internet attack you for being a bad DM for every conceivable reason!
I really don't get why there's such a shortage of Dms.
Just going to say absolutely to your last statement out the gate.
Followed by, if you want that risk reward playstyle of spell cannibalization you can do it with the sorc.
Druid and cleric are very similar, but the spell list is really the big difference as well as wild shape vs CD do very different things. But they do have similarities.
Why is a short rest in your game not 5 minutes of bandaging your wounds. Your players actively spend time out of combat recovering. That is all a short rest is. You are calling it pace killing while simultaneously doing it just not letting your team recover their resources for it. Do you just want to punish anyone who picks a class that has resource management different than your view?
The view on pact slots tells me that this type of resource management isnt for you and that is ok. Not every class is for everyone. Flavor is free.
Obviously if you take even a 5 min break the BBEG wins and everyone in existence is either enslaved or killed and the players lose. Play any other way you are playing wrong.
That style of play is fine. They want everything to feel like an episode of 24, but I think that can already be done by using the gritty realism rules where long rests are a week and short are 8 hours. That way, when you start a series of fights over a number of days to track down the idol, or stop the ritual, or whatever, the wizard knows up front that if they nova everything day 1 they're weak days 2-7 whereas a warlock knows they'll be consistent in their power each day.
It works either way. With few fights in a day 8 hour is short and 2 days is long. But even 24 had "breaks in the action" from a narrative stand point, and they didn't take an entire episode. Those are the 5 minute short rests. Every single movie, book, show, game has a break in the action. To let the character moments exist and to not overwhelm the reader/audience it is never 2 hours of continuous action.
Because it's still ten minutes of tension-killing, pacing-destroying out-of-game todgery that utterly ruins the mood whenever it happens. Nothing throws players out of a session harder or faster than spending ten minutes doing a bunch of fiddly bookkeeping instead of playing D&D.
Please do not contact or message me.
What are you doing that makes it take 10 minutes? Roll a hit die, add your Con mod, jot down the number, repeat until you've got enough HP, and then write down new numbers in 0-2 of your features. Definitely not 10 minutes. Plus, I think I'll note that we're literally on the forums for a tool that lets you do it all in half a minute.
Does the mood die every time someone in your group makes an attack roll?
Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny.
Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
How I'm posting based on text formatting: Mod Hat Off - Mod Hat Also Off (I'm not a mod)
Ok. You are doing some of that same book keeping when you use the healers kit to heal. You are using charges of a healers kit ( no differen tha keeping track of hit dice). Rolling to see how much health is recovered. Adding the total rolled to the amount if current health. This is 80% of the book keeping right here. The few abilities recovered are much easier to track the rest of that. Tracking healer kit charges, potions...... you are doing the same book keeping between fights minus letting people recover their abilities. At this point it is a difference of how you view doing the exact same thing because it's name is something you dont like.
Then there is the rest between sessions. I doubt the session lasts long enough for 8 fights.
Edit: hell every time someone casts a spell they are doing bookkeeping. You are doing it the whole game. I am genuinely very confused.
When a character uses a healer's kit to apply first aid to another character, that's an in-game, in-character interaction. "That looks rough; here, let me patch you up." "Thanks, it doesn't feel great, appreciate it." Obviously, casting a spell is an in-game, in-character action. Knocking one point off a healer's kit is a quick part of resolving an in-game, in-character interaction.
Short rests?
"A'ight, let's everybody stop playing D&D for however the booty buttcheeks long it takes y'all to fiddle with your dice towers enough to find some hit dice you can throw. This super tense stealth infiltration y'all are literally in the middle of? Naw, nobody cares anymore, mood's broke now that Short Rest has been invoked. Just do whatever I guess, and we'll figure out playing some more D&D when y'all are done, maybe."
Please do not contact or message me.
So you are capable of role playing the in game use of a healers kit but not the in game use of a short rest. That makes 0 sense.
Egads! Needing to roll a die with a specific number of sides? Multiple times? How very jarring! Can we get back to playing DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, where we do nothing of the sort?
Look at what you've done. You spoiled it. You have nobody to blame but yourself. Go sit and think about your actions.
Don't be mean. Rudeness is a vicious cycle, and it has to stop somewhere. Exceptions for things that are funny.
Go to the current Competition of the Finest 'Brews! It's a cool place where cool people make cool things.
How I'm posting based on text formatting: Mod Hat Off - Mod Hat Also Off (I'm not a mod)
So you are bothered by the name, not the mechanic. The "you look rough their buddy let me patch you up" roll hit dice, recover health you get your abilities back as you take time patching up wounds and steeling your nerves for the battle ahead. It is literally the exact same thing. That healer kit interaction is a short rest. That is what a short rest is and represents. You have been doing it the whole time, just didn't let people recover abilities and called it something else.
Now, if it works for her and her groups, there is no problem, even though it seems illogical to most of us, just as she complains, only without recovering some traits.
Anyway, I come here to comment on my alternative so that the witcher is viable without having so little magic outside of certain invocations:
This way "MAGICAL CUNNING" (It should also be like this with other traits that partially recharge some resources.) would NOT be tied to completely exhausting ALL pact spell slots, the basics, and would allow the trait to be reused more than once consuming hit dice. This, along with limiting all short rest traits from being used more than once per day, will reduce reliance on short rests. And along with greater participation in your patron's spells, the sorcerer will NOT be so limited in magic, maintaining pact magic.