Re: An Innocent Quest - OOC Chat
Druids are kinda notorious for hitting stupidly high acs between their wildshape, wild armor and spells.
Grab a full plate, grab a tower shield, grab a defense combat style and a +2 dex modifier, done.
Pathfinder the characters are more like the heroes of legend. Hercules, Gilgamesh, Achilles, Cu' Chulainn and so forth. There's so many ways to actually shape things if you're strong enough and capable enough. Frankly my biggest issue with 3.x is that the martials can't live up to that while the casters get to exceed it.
Unless you dig deep you can't build a legendary hero kinda martial artist. Sure, you can build someone that cuts things really hard, but it doesn't translate into random feats of impossibility compared to the average mortal.
In 5e you're more just some guy. You;re not that much more skilled, you're just more durable. Something that already happened in 3.x too, but it's about the only thing by design intent. You can take more hits than everyone else. It doesn't feel all that special. The sense of advancement in the world is lost. Combined with very few things to use gold you gather on (dmg implies buying a healing potion should be a quest) you run into a situation where gold is mostly just... Shiny rocks you barely need to track.
You do have some powers, so this is rather inaccurate and frankly, I find item and gold usage comes from DM interaction. Some campaigns are just a huge dungeon crawl, in which gold is the final goal now, most other campaigns should feature variable challenges in which a more controlled want meets needs economy creates a dynamic, I could see it entirely possible to create moral dilemmas around gold or rare items in Witcher game style, that said, it is a rather extreme loss of all magical equipment and in my experience most DM's just work around it to tell a better story... though, giving the magical gear in DM's hands makes it more special too.
Ultimately, a lot of the arguments are high vs low fantasy, which is utterly to the DM to determine and not an innate part of the system, yes it got a bit of a nudging towards low fantasy, but I don't feel it was all that extreme. You are still playing a high fantasy campaign here, just by having high stats, just look at how your fight fight went, trust me, Anastacia would have shredded ten times your number in commoners.
Plus for games of playing something more like the classic hero and being able to carve my way through hordes of enemies without a hint of issues I prefer Exalted 2e and Scion anyways
Fair point. Also, you presume everyone can play a caster to the extend that martial classes become irrelevant, most can't. I famously remember one powerbuilder bitching at their caster getting focused down and my response being 'wheres your anklet of translocation, oh you didn't start with one nor with defensive casting. humnn'
I prefer to not play as a Hercules or an Achilles. I like the idea of my character not being immune to the world. At the same time, 5e doesn't prevent the PCs doing cool things, and a good DM-Group relationship should power the PCs up appropriately.
This doesn't work though if you have a Gygaxian grognard approach to D&D.
Geesh, we're doing all the talks today. I find myself in between two camps here, in that I like doing heroic things, but I believe that doing heroic feats comes from great struggle. It's easy to be the hero.. its hard to not be the hero and still do good.
Perhaps thats what Blue means too, anyway.
Gygax was a genius. Fact that, over 40 years after, we still play a game with the name he chose for it on it should tip any D&D player off on that one. Geniuses can still be mad, of course. Frankly, it was different times, on the one hand, yes, you couldn't use some of Gygax methods anymore today, much as I like 'em, on the other, the spirit of what he did and how he did it is very much relevant, trust me, I read Master of the Game. On the other,.. third hand I think you'd not find yourself disagreeing with the man much, going just by what I've seen you do, and I mean that as praise.
Frankly, I'd put you closer to using Gygaxians classic.. deadly style than myself, at least at the point where you spawned a cr 3 creature on a lone lvl 3 character, because that was what was supposed to spawn there based on the normal rulebook and hoped for me to/used a creative approach to get out of the thingie. Not that I mind, it makes sense for the world to hold higher leveled monsters than you, but anyway, my point is, the Gygaxian style can work nicely too.. you just need to warn people.
To .. pull back the curtain a little, in part this is why I made Innocentquest, rather than presenting you with the usual 'characters grow and have an increasing impact on the world around them, stopping bad things and causing good things' I instead wanted to go with an alternate approach to give the characters meaning, impact and importance... through the villain.
