Hey guys! As part of the story for my campaign, my dm gave my level 2 changeling rogue permanent first stage exhaustion. I've been trying to figure out ways to use that to my advantage, by already having disadvantage (for example, becoming proficient in plate mail because I already have disadvantage on stealth checks. What do you guys think? Any ideas?
Edit: it's permanently at LEAST level one exhaustion, although the dm doesn't incorporate exhaustion often.
I'm not sure there's a way to turn Exhaustion into an advantage, and disadvantage on all ability checks is a tough burden to bear for the entirety of your character's life. Like, if there was some sort of homebrewed ability or magic item or something that let you inflict the conditions you suffer from on others, I could see an angle there, kind of a Nurgle (warhammer) or Peryite (Elder scrolls) type of plague-based ability that makes others suffer what you carry but endure... but in the published rules? Nah man, exhaustion is just awful.
Hey guys! As part of the story for my campaign, my dm gave my level 2 changeling rogue permanent first stage exhaustion. I've been trying to figure out ways to use that to my advantage, by already having disadvantage (for example, becoming proficient in plate mail because I already have disadvantage on stealth checks. What do you guys think? Any ideas?
How permanent? Are you immune to your exhaustion increasing? If you're immune to higher levels of exhaustion now, you no longer have to long rest (the game enforces long rests by exhausting you if you don't take them), so you can abuse abilities that reset when you long rest, and you can abuse abilities that would exhaust you. No matter what, you do want to abandon rogue right now - being good at ability checks is fundamental to being a competent rogue, and you're now incapable of being worth a damn at ability checks (including initiative). An example of what you might be good at is being a Barbarian Berserker - their problem is their Rage exhausting them, but if you can't exhaust further, that's a non-issue. Depends on the wording of what happened to you.
If your exhaustion isn't permanently level 1, it just permanently is at least 1, there's no way to turn it into a strength. Figure out what classes you can multiclass into that incorporate as few ability checks as possible to be good, switch, and never look back.
To answer how it happened, basically, my character is a changeling rogue with a variant of DID. They have two unique personas that switch control every so often (same skills and abilities, opposite personalities) Nix, a sticky fingered, mischievous little girl, and Xin, a grim and quiet man. In the campaign, we get adopted by a patron god who holds our ideals, and they granted us simple powers (like, if the fire god is your patron, you have fire res) I asked I if I could have two, one for each, and only use the powers when I'm as the respective characters. He said sure, but at a penalty. (I didn't know what it'd be) For the rp, I said sure 😂
Ignore all of that about Sharpshooter and a Ballista, but yes, actually, you should consider the Lucky feat - it does indeed turn disadvantage into super-advantage 3/day. What are your God powers? Maybe there's something we can leverage there, but we'll also need some idea of how straight you're playing your mental disorder.
Which persona is in charge of handling which kinds of trauma, and who decides what kind of trauma is facing your character most sharply right now, you or your GM?
Do the personas share memory?
Have both personas been recruited to the adventuring party?
If both personas can be counted on to contribute to the party, they share memory, and you can usually be counted on to maintain a given persona for the duration of an entire combat, you may be able to come up with a way for each persona to have a credible way to contribute to said combat. There's basically no way, unless the God powers are ridiculously good, that you'll be able to, in general, succeed at initiative checks or any sort of skillcheck. Like I said, you want to abandon rogue as soon as you can. Ideally you can find a class both of your powers are good with, since your two personas will have to share class abilities.
That sounds like a really good idea. The DM is still working on the powers, so I'll update you when he shares them. To answer your questions, for the vast majority of the time Nix is in control, when I determine that's she's traumatized, Xin takes over. Occasionally, Xin takes over just cause, but rarely. They don't share memories, but communicate with each other via a journal of theirs, so they're knowledgeable on things, even of they don't remember them. The party knows and couldn't care less.
I would suggest something a bit more nuanced and tactical than exhaustion because that's pretty crippling across the board and I agree that your granted power is going to have to be really good to counter it.
It might be more interesting to split all your abilities into two categories and each persona has disadvantage on all rolls from one of the categories. It would help to differentiate them as well as alleviate your penalty a bit while still being noticeably inconvenient.
Acquiring Guidance can help mitigate the exhaustion ability. Bard's Jack of all trades can give a half proficiency bonus to initiative and anything else that you are not proficient with. Rogue's 11th level ability Reliable Talent can make any roll of 9 or lower treated as a 10. Several classes have abilities that add a second modifier to initiative, like Swashbuckler's Rakish Audacity. These are all ways that you can mitigate the disadvantage on your skill checks. You may also think of ways that you could gain advantage on skill checks to simply have a straight roll. Alternatively, you can help other characters to accomplish the tasks, giving them advantage on their rolls. Expertise can help overcome low rolls, especially if your DM doesn't subscribe to critical fails on non attack rolls.
There are enough things going for rogue outside of skills that you may not have to "abandon all hope ye who enter here", but you have to determine whether those benefits are enough for you. Likewise, are the workarounds above enough to let you enjoy that aspect and do they come at a low enough cost for you.
A dip into Trickery Cleric could net you medium armor, cleric goodness including guidance, and allows you to contribute to party stealth without needing very stealthy yourself. Knowledge Cleric grants you proficiency in two intelligence skills out of the 4 knowledge based ones and gives you expertise. Several cleric subclasses give heavy armor proficiency. Outside of Artificer, there is no other way to get heavy armor proficiency from a multiclass at level 2+. You would need a feat to be able to go from medium armor proficiency to heavy, and either another feat or a multiclass to get medium armor proficiency.
All of this is assuming that you gave been playing the campaign and are locked into your rogue levels. If that's not the case, there are many ways to be able to make things work.
Something that I would like if I was DM of your group, try to figure out a way to get the curse of exhaustion removed. You can work on that while doing whatever else your campaign might be doing.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of ways that you can be more direct in your combat phases (read without using hide to get advantage on your attacks). MCing into another class like fighter is one option. If you aren't level 3 yet, you can choose a rogue subclass that allows you to get sneak attack in ways other than the default methods: have advantage or attack a creature within 5 ft of a creature hostile to it. The aforementioned Swashbuckler allows you to also target a creature that is within 5 ft of you, there are no other creatures within 5 ft of you and you don't have disadvantage on the attack roll (which wouldn't be guaranteed by exhaustion until the third level of exhaustion). If you are using Tasha's, then Steady Aim is also available to grant you advantage on one attack that turn while using your bonus action and setting your speed to zero for the turn (you can't have moved previously to use it).
You'll almost assuredly want to be a ranged attacker most of the time, since you'd have disadvantage on skill checks to contest a grapple, or you'd want to find ways to increase your mobility to allow you to get in, attack, and get out. Cunning Action allows a bonus action disengage or dash, both helpful for a skirmisher style of fighting. Mobile Feat increases your speed and gives you a free disengage against creatures that you've attacked with a melee attack that round. Swashbuckler also allows for that disengage with a melee attack. Monk gives you more mobility and more attacks, but you'll want to check the features carefully to ensure that they'll work with your condition. Kensei is likely the best archer and Mercy makes a pretty good support monk, but I doubt recall if any of their features are hampered by disadvantaged skill checks.
Finally, roleplay. If your party is trying to stealth into an area in town, use your cursed clumsiness as a way to help the party succeed by ensuring that you are noticed and taking up the attention from guards and lookouts. Acquiring something like a Tankard of Sobriety to allow you to smell heavily of alcohol without actually being drunk. If someone catches you with something that you have that you shouldn't have, feign ignorance and show them your shaky fingers and your clumsy feet. "Do you honestly think that I would try to steal something in this condition?" You didn't realize that someone had placed something on your person ("Maybe I need corrective lenses" and "Wait! Where's my coinpurse?!?!"). Of course, moderation in all things here, since being consistently found with things that you shouldn't have won't work in your favor. Then again you are a shapeshifter. You can use that to cause a panic when people from all sorts of races are coming down with the same "malady".
Edit: Something else that you may want to consider is picking up abilities that impose status afflictions on enemies, such as poisoned, that also impose disadvantage on attacks and skill checks. This would negate the disadvantage that you have with exhaustion on contested rolls by also causing them to similarly be afflicted.
As a bonus, afflictions that solely affect your skill checks via disadvantage aren't as critical now, since you already have disadvantage on those skill checks. The Deafened isn't as critical to you and something like Warding Wind loses a lot of its downside, at least in regards to you. Unless you try to attack with a ranged weapon that is. This makes you immune to things that require you to hear them. You would need some type of telepathy to communicate with your party, such as the telepathic feat.
So, the DM bestowed us our powers, here's what we got
Our hexblade warlock- can cast three random know spells at three random targets (friendly or hostile) as an action. Usable twice per long rest.
Druid- can increase ac by three as a bonus action, which is permanent until she moves
Other Druid- can redirect any one attack per long rest at a target of their choice.
Artificer- fire res and his fire spells ignore fire res.
Cleric- chose two religions to follow, got unique punishment as well.
1st god: negate all effects of attack 2x per long rest
2nd god: cantrip that heals from a distance using your spell modifier
Penalty: when healing the cleric has a 1/6 chance to take 1d6 of damage
Rogue (me):
First god: advantage on stealth and acrobatics
Second god: advantage on sleight of hand and perception when looking for valuable items.
Penalty: permanent first level exhaustion is the new minimum.
So... For disadvantage on all checks, I'm rewarded by not having disadvantage on a few checks. He's mentioned the powers will get better as we level up, but I'm seeing some seriously boring powers and other seriously broken ones.
Well over all it looks you got completely shafted got worse off since the advantage and disadvantage would cancel out so you would have normal rolls for those 4 rolls and disadvantage for the rest
You got it in a nutshell. I'm gonna talk to the DM about either nerfing the penalty, increasing the power, or keeping both as is and than having the power become even better late game (like a reward for dealing with disadvantage for almost everything with no upside)
There's no sense of balance here at all. The cleric has two benefits, which is way better than you (you swap between two benefits, but by definition only have one at a time), but got a radically less bad penalty than you did. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Anyway, as to your original question... your second god's benefit would be nearly entirely useless even if it wasn't shut down by your penalty. Probably the second worst "gift" in the list, after the absolute garbage your hexlock got (if your hexlock ever actually uses that ability outside of utter desperation, they deserve to be kicked out of the party immediately). There's nothing clever to be done there.
Your first god's benefit would actually be legitimately good if it functioned, good enough to be on an uncommon magic item worth pursuing, for example. Problem remains that it doesn't, and you can't fix it - adv and disadv stacking means that you have absolutely no mechanic for getting up to advantage on stealth or acrobatics checks. For example, you could put on a cloak of the bat, and you wouldn't be any stealthier.
You've been rendered unplayable, basically. If your GM won't fix it, I would seriously just kill the character off and roll a new one. Not having any gifts or penalties would be strictly better than what you have.
A better way to solve this would be to give you the luck feat instead of the advantages on those skills. Since you are only lvl 2 and your DM plans to make it stronger, you could argue that you only get 2 luck points for now.
Another option would be to ask that you ALWAYS have advantage on those skills and that it never get’s canceled out by disadvantage/exhaustion.
Yikes. Maybe you can leverage your exhaustion in order to kill off your character faster.
Honestly, this DM should probably scale way back on the homebrew because they clearly don't have a good grasp on how to balance their content. Either they don't know how exhaustion works or they are intentionally screwing your character over. And the disparity will likely increase as you level up while they will probably need to counter the more powerful PCs with equally bad homebrewed monsters. This just does not sound like a game I'd want to play in.
Hey guys! As part of the story for my campaign, my dm gave my level 2 changeling rogue permanent first stage exhaustion. I've been trying to figure out ways to use that to my advantage, by already having disadvantage (for example, becoming proficient in plate mail because I already have disadvantage on stealth checks. What do you guys think? Any ideas?
Edit: it's permanently at LEAST level one exhaustion, although the dm doesn't incorporate exhaustion often.
I'm not sure there's a way to turn Exhaustion into an advantage, and disadvantage on all ability checks is a tough burden to bear for the entirety of your character's life. Like, if there was some sort of homebrewed ability or magic item or something that let you inflict the conditions you suffer from on others, I could see an angle there, kind of a Nurgle (warhammer) or Peryite (Elder scrolls) type of plague-based ability that makes others suffer what you carry but endure... but in the published rules? Nah man, exhaustion is just awful.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
How permanent? Are you immune to your exhaustion increasing? If you're immune to higher levels of exhaustion now, you no longer have to long rest (the game enforces long rests by exhausting you if you don't take them), so you can abuse abilities that reset when you long rest, and you can abuse abilities that would exhaust you. No matter what, you do want to abandon rogue right now - being good at ability checks is fundamental to being a competent rogue, and you're now incapable of being worth a damn at ability checks (including initiative). An example of what you might be good at is being a Barbarian Berserker - their problem is their Rage exhausting them, but if you can't exhaust further, that's a non-issue. Depends on the wording of what happened to you.
If your exhaustion isn't permanently level 1, it just permanently is at least 1, there's no way to turn it into a strength. Figure out what classes you can multiclass into that incorporate as few ability checks as possible to be good, switch, and never look back.
How did this happen?
Mystic v3 should be official, nuff said.
To answer how it happened, basically, my character is a changeling rogue with a variant of DID. They have two unique personas that switch control every so often (same skills and abilities, opposite personalities) Nix, a sticky fingered, mischievous little girl, and Xin, a grim and quiet man. In the campaign, we get adopted by a patron god who holds our ideals, and they granted us simple powers (like, if the fire god is your patron, you have fire res) I asked I if I could have two, one for each, and only use the powers when I'm as the respective characters. He said sure, but at a penalty. (I didn't know what it'd be) For the rp, I said sure 😂
Ignore all of that about Sharpshooter and a Ballista, but yes, actually, you should consider the Lucky feat - it does indeed turn disadvantage into super-advantage 3/day. What are your God powers? Maybe there's something we can leverage there, but we'll also need some idea of how straight you're playing your mental disorder.
If both personas can be counted on to contribute to the party, they share memory, and you can usually be counted on to maintain a given persona for the duration of an entire combat, you may be able to come up with a way for each persona to have a credible way to contribute to said combat. There's basically no way, unless the God powers are ridiculously good, that you'll be able to, in general, succeed at initiative checks or any sort of skillcheck. Like I said, you want to abandon rogue as soon as you can. Ideally you can find a class both of your powers are good with, since your two personas will have to share class abilities.
That sounds like a really good idea. The DM is still working on the powers, so I'll update you when he shares them. To answer your questions, for the vast majority of the time Nix is in control, when I determine that's she's traumatized, Xin takes over. Occasionally, Xin takes over just cause, but rarely. They don't share memories, but communicate with each other via a journal of theirs, so they're knowledgeable on things, even of they don't remember them. The party knows and couldn't care less.
I would suggest something a bit more nuanced and tactical than exhaustion because that's pretty crippling across the board and I agree that your granted power is going to have to be really good to counter it.
It might be more interesting to split all your abilities into two categories and each persona has disadvantage on all rolls from one of the categories. It would help to differentiate them as well as alleviate your penalty a bit while still being noticeably inconvenient.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Acquiring Guidance can help mitigate the exhaustion ability. Bard's Jack of all trades can give a half proficiency bonus to initiative and anything else that you are not proficient with. Rogue's 11th level ability Reliable Talent can make any roll of 9 or lower treated as a 10. Several classes have abilities that add a second modifier to initiative, like Swashbuckler's Rakish Audacity. These are all ways that you can mitigate the disadvantage on your skill checks. You may also think of ways that you could gain advantage on skill checks to simply have a straight roll. Alternatively, you can help other characters to accomplish the tasks, giving them advantage on their rolls. Expertise can help overcome low rolls, especially if your DM doesn't subscribe to critical fails on non attack rolls.
There are enough things going for rogue outside of skills that you may not have to "abandon all hope ye who enter here", but you have to determine whether those benefits are enough for you. Likewise, are the workarounds above enough to let you enjoy that aspect and do they come at a low enough cost for you.
A dip into Trickery Cleric could net you medium armor, cleric goodness including guidance, and allows you to contribute to party stealth without needing very stealthy yourself. Knowledge Cleric grants you proficiency in two intelligence skills out of the 4 knowledge based ones and gives you expertise. Several cleric subclasses give heavy armor proficiency. Outside of Artificer, there is no other way to get heavy armor proficiency from a multiclass at level 2+. You would need a feat to be able to go from medium armor proficiency to heavy, and either another feat or a multiclass to get medium armor proficiency.
All of this is assuming that you gave been playing the campaign and are locked into your rogue levels. If that's not the case, there are many ways to be able to make things work.
Something that I would like if I was DM of your group, try to figure out a way to get the curse of exhaustion removed. You can work on that while doing whatever else your campaign might be doing.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of ways that you can be more direct in your combat phases (read without using hide to get advantage on your attacks). MCing into another class like fighter is one option. If you aren't level 3 yet, you can choose a rogue subclass that allows you to get sneak attack in ways other than the default methods: have advantage or attack a creature within 5 ft of a creature hostile to it. The aforementioned Swashbuckler allows you to also target a creature that is within 5 ft of you, there are no other creatures within 5 ft of you and you don't have disadvantage on the attack roll (which wouldn't be guaranteed by exhaustion until the third level of exhaustion). If you are using Tasha's, then Steady Aim is also available to grant you advantage on one attack that turn while using your bonus action and setting your speed to zero for the turn (you can't have moved previously to use it).
You'll almost assuredly want to be a ranged attacker most of the time, since you'd have disadvantage on skill checks to contest a grapple, or you'd want to find ways to increase your mobility to allow you to get in, attack, and get out. Cunning Action allows a bonus action disengage or dash, both helpful for a skirmisher style of fighting. Mobile Feat increases your speed and gives you a free disengage against creatures that you've attacked with a melee attack that round. Swashbuckler also allows for that disengage with a melee attack. Monk gives you more mobility and more attacks, but you'll want to check the features carefully to ensure that they'll work with your condition. Kensei is likely the best archer and Mercy makes a pretty good support monk, but I doubt recall if any of their features are hampered by disadvantaged skill checks.
Finally, roleplay. If your party is trying to stealth into an area in town, use your cursed clumsiness as a way to help the party succeed by ensuring that you are noticed and taking up the attention from guards and lookouts. Acquiring something like a Tankard of Sobriety to allow you to smell heavily of alcohol without actually being drunk. If someone catches you with something that you have that you shouldn't have, feign ignorance and show them your shaky fingers and your clumsy feet. "Do you honestly think that I would try to steal something in this condition?" You didn't realize that someone had placed something on your person ("Maybe I need corrective lenses" and "Wait! Where's my coinpurse?!?!"). Of course, moderation in all things here, since being consistently found with things that you shouldn't have won't work in your favor. Then again you are a shapeshifter. You can use that to cause a panic when people from all sorts of races are coming down with the same "malady".
Edit: Something else that you may want to consider is picking up abilities that impose status afflictions on enemies, such as poisoned, that also impose disadvantage on attacks and skill checks. This would negate the disadvantage that you have with exhaustion on contested rolls by also causing them to similarly be afflicted.
As a bonus, afflictions that solely affect your skill checks via disadvantage aren't as critical now, since you already have disadvantage on those skill checks. The Deafened isn't as critical to you and something like Warding Wind loses a lot of its downside, at least in regards to you. Unless you try to attack with a ranged weapon that is. This makes you immune to things that require you to hear them. You would need some type of telepathy to communicate with your party, such as the telepathic feat.
So, the DM bestowed us our powers, here's what we got
Our hexblade warlock- can cast three random know spells at three random targets (friendly or hostile) as an action. Usable twice per long rest.
Druid- can increase ac by three as a bonus action, which is permanent until she moves
Other Druid- can redirect any one attack per long rest at a target of their choice.
Artificer- fire res and his fire spells ignore fire res.
Cleric- chose two religions to follow, got unique punishment as well.
1st god: negate all effects of attack 2x per long rest
2nd god: cantrip that heals from a distance using your spell modifier
Penalty: when healing the cleric has a 1/6 chance to take 1d6 of damage
Rogue (me):
First god: advantage on stealth and acrobatics
Second god: advantage on sleight of hand and perception when looking for valuable items.
Penalty: permanent first level exhaustion is the new minimum.
So... For disadvantage on all checks, I'm rewarded by not having disadvantage on a few checks. He's mentioned the powers will get better as we level up, but I'm seeing some seriously boring powers and other seriously broken ones.
Well over all it looks you got completely shafted got worse off since the advantage and disadvantage would cancel out so you would have normal rolls for those 4 rolls and disadvantage for the rest
You got it in a nutshell. I'm gonna talk to the DM about either nerfing the penalty, increasing the power, or keeping both as is and than having the power become even better late game (like a reward for dealing with disadvantage for almost everything with no upside)
There's no sense of balance here at all. The cleric has two benefits, which is way better than you (you swap between two benefits, but by definition only have one at a time), but got a radically less bad penalty than you did. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Anyway, as to your original question... your second god's benefit would be nearly entirely useless even if it wasn't shut down by your penalty. Probably the second worst "gift" in the list, after the absolute garbage your hexlock got (if your hexlock ever actually uses that ability outside of utter desperation, they deserve to be kicked out of the party immediately). There's nothing clever to be done there.
Your first god's benefit would actually be legitimately good if it functioned, good enough to be on an uncommon magic item worth pursuing, for example. Problem remains that it doesn't, and you can't fix it - adv and disadv stacking means that you have absolutely no mechanic for getting up to advantage on stealth or acrobatics checks. For example, you could put on a cloak of the bat, and you wouldn't be any stealthier.
You've been rendered unplayable, basically. If your GM won't fix it, I would seriously just kill the character off and roll a new one. Not having any gifts or penalties would be strictly better than what you have.
A better way to solve this would be to give you the luck feat instead of the advantages on those skills. Since you are only lvl 2 and your DM plans to make it stronger, you could argue that you only get 2 luck points for now.
Another option would be to ask that you ALWAYS have advantage on those skills and that it never get’s canceled out by disadvantage/exhaustion.
Attack: [roll]3d20dl2+6[/roll] Damage: [roll](if([roll:-1:critical], =0, 1d8, 2{1d8}.expand()))+4[/roll] Sneakattack: [roll](if([roll:-2:critical], =0, 2d6, 2{2d6}.expand()))[/roll]Yikes. Maybe you can leverage your exhaustion in order to kill off your character faster.
Honestly, this DM should probably scale way back on the homebrew because they clearly don't have a good grasp on how to balance their content. Either they don't know how exhaustion works or they are intentionally screwing your character over. And the disparity will likely increase as you level up while they will probably need to counter the more powerful PCs with equally bad homebrewed monsters. This just does not sound like a game I'd want to play in.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm